Given the level of competence that most Slashdot posters exhibit regarding just about anything else of import, I'm not too surprised at the level of ignorance that seems to be spewing forth regarding war in Iraq.
I'm talking both sides, mind you, pro-war and anti-war. Having spent my share of time up close and personal with the "shock and awe" of combat, I can say from first hand experience that war is extraordinarily serious business, business that requires extremely careful consideration before action.
And having seen, again first hand, the results of a tyrannical maniac, I have a very good understanding of the necessity of fighting from time to time.
However, I'm not going to weigh in on the pros or cons of this war in this forum simply because there are an appalling number of blithering idiots who don't seem to have a basic understanding of international (or national) political and military relationships and necessities.
Instead, I'd suggest that just about every person participating in Slashdot discussions do some studying on the real-world political and social situations that exist around us. Instead of spouting off the typical line of what we should do, perhaps it's better to consider what we can do. There is a significant difference, particularly when viewed in a global context.
Perhaps, then, a few pro-war activists will find that there is less of a need to fight and a few anti-war activists will find that sometimes it's necessary to shoot now and then.
At the company where I work, R&D spending is driven by what will generate revenue for the company. It hasn't always been like that, but I don't think that anybody can argue too much that if you're burning through substantially more money in a quarter than you're making, it makes sense to target the R&D dollars at areas that will help the bottom line.
With that as an example, I think that it's a little shortsighted to look at dollars to dollars and say that the US is coming up short. Maybe it is, but the article doesn't provide the evidence. A better measure of the balance of R&D budgeting is more qualitative than quantitative. What is coming out of R&D? Are we developing products and ideas that have any kind of a chance at hitting the market and actually making a profit? Don't jeer at the search for profitability...where do you think the R&D bucks come from?
I can only speak from my experience at the high tech company where I work, but R&D expenditures are a significant amount of total revenues. Perhaps other companies have different views, but for us, even in a tough time, R&D is the lifeblood of what we do. It's just that when money is as tight as it is now, the spending becomes much more focused.
Using Huawei Technologies as an example of the threat to American tech dominance is certainly a red herring. If Tarsala counts blatent copying of product and documentation as a positive result of R&D spending, then his perception of R&D is simply wrong. Honda didn't copy the CVCC from Ford or General Motors...they created it on their own.
Representative republic is redundant. A republic is a government where elected officials create the laws. It is by definition representative.
We are a representative democracy. A democracy is a government where the ultimate power resides with the people. A direct democracy is a government where all policy decisions are voted on by the general populous. A representative democracy is a republic.
I have to disagree. The US government is most certainly a republic. In fact, the Constitution guarantees "to every state in this Union a Republican form of government."
The founders of our government were very particular in the form of government that they created. If you read James Madison's Essay 10 in The Federalist Papers, you'll see exactly what his feelings were on democracy, representative or direct. Those feelings are well expressed in the Constitution.
You mentioned that a democracy is a government where the ultimate power resides with the people. That is not correct...for a democracy or a republic (although it is more correct for a republic than a democracy). I know that what you mean is the concept of "majority rule". On a local level, this is probably correct, particularly regarding the initiative process, but at a federal level (which is what this thread is discussing), your definition of a republic (a government where elected officials create the laws) applies.
If the US's government was truely a representative democracy, then our elected representatives would have to vote based on the will of the majority of their constituency. While this probably happens most of the time because our elected officials' political philosophies tend to reflect the majority of their constituenies, I think you'll find plenty of cases where it doesn't happen. And there's no rule that says it must.
It's interesting to note, also, that the notion of the US as a democracy did not come into being until around the time of the Great Depression. Prior to that, nobody had any question regarding the type of government that we have.
Finally, I'll point out the dictionary definition of a republic: "A government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law."
Thus, the voting citizens of the nation posess the supreme power and the executive and legislative branches are responsible to them.
"The shuttle was built as a space truck, and then the International Space Station was built to give it something to do."
An interesting quote. Except that Columbia was the only Shuttle not capable of docking with the space station.
Spacehab contracted to provide two payload bay modules for Columbia that would enable it to, in effect, dock with the ISS and deliver supplies and equipment. While Columbia did not have an actual dock on the shuttle itself like the other shuttles, Spacehab's LSM basically does the same thing.
So I guess you're both right, although the point is obviously moot.
"Say what? Air is an electrical insulator, and only to relatively low voltages. Vide, e.g., lightning. It is most assuredly not a thermal insulator. Put your hand near a cold window in Winter and see how much insulation you get." ...
"If it's an insulator, why does it get hot?" ...
"The fact is that trapped air is a good insulator relative to flowing air and to solid objects like lumber."
Good grief, make up your mind! The fact is that air is a very good thermal insulator, one of the best, because, like almost all gases, it has a very low coefficient of thermal inertia. That means that for a given volume of air, it will conduct less heat (energy) over a given period of time. One of the reasons is that the molecules of air are less dense than, say, a given volume of steel.
Why does the air get hot? Simple...you've got a limited volume inside the case and a number of components that are emitting a (relatively) stupendous amount of heat. The small volume of air in the case will most definitely heat up.
Although the fans in the aluminum case will transfer some small amount of the heat to the case, you'll actually find that because the coefficients of thermal inertia are so mismatched between air and metal that very little thermal transfer is taking place between, say, the CPU and the case. That's because the metal can conduct the heat much faster than the air can deliver it.
The real problem is getting the hot air inside the case out of the case. I design memory modules, and part of the work is doing thermal analyses of them. Our models (which reflect reality pretty closely) show that the material of the case is not particularly important when it comes to managing thermal issues within the case. What is far more important is getting the hot air out of the case as quickly as possible...and that's because the air itself simply will not conduct the heat to another location effectively. Why? Because it's an insulator!
Incidentally, air is quite a good electrical insulator, too, unless it is ionized by a fairly high voltage.
"Why is there always somebody who has to argue with the obvious?"
In lit-crit circles, it is often said that a poet's best work is his earliest (think Coleridge or Bob Dylan)... while novelists take time to mature (Dickens, P.K. Dick, or Kim Stanley Robinson). I think Gibson's a poet -- people read him (at least I do) for the descriptions, the images, the language, not the story.
I'd dispute lumping Dickens in with the rest. In fact, his novels were tremendously popular, to the point of being serialized as he finished the chapters. Although we regard his work as classic nowadays, he was the 19th century equivalent of one of today's blockbuster authors.
I suspect that 100 years from now Tom Clancy, et al, will not be held in quite the high esteem.
Well, maybe not quite. More like he got to the end and, well, it just sort of ended.
I thought it was a good book. It's not a classic, but it's not The Lost World. And it probably won't make as terrible a movie as Congo. It was a nice break from more plot heavy books: kind of techno-mindlessness and a leads to b leads to c.
Like I said, though, it just kind of came to a rather disorganized end. I'm ok with stories that don't wrap everything up, but this one just kind of petered out.
I work for a very large semiconductor company. The last time (and only time) that there were any layoffs here was in the mid 1980's.
Obviously things are pretty tough in this industry right now, so there is definitely no hiring going on here. That means that if somebody quits, the rest of us have to pick up the slack. I'm not complaining, mind you, because, as LiamRandall said, I'm also happy to have a job.
I think that the interesting thing about this company is that when times are flush, they don't hire willy-nilly. Every proposed position is scrutinized to make sure that a new hire is really needed. Generally, that means that even in good times the rate of hiring is not all that high, yet this is an 18,000 employee company. The executives here make no bones about the fact that they are managing the company looking ahead 5 to 10 years, not one or two quarters. That also means that they recognize that the high tech industry runs in cycles and to lay off employees means playing catch-up in terms of training and hiring when the low cycle ends.
So, for the near term, as the tech economy slumps, we work harder to deal with attrition, but when the economy recovers (as it will), we'll be a step ahead of other companies that have to scramble to hire and train new employees. The obvious consequence is that the stock price takes a beating because it appears that we aren't being as "proactive" as other short-term managed companies in reducing costs.
Because it's easier to send out a memo and infringe on students' rights, than it is to configure a network properly.
Uhhh...and exactly which rights were infringed upon? The right to connect to the Internet? That's a privilege. Regardless of how unfair you think the actions of the university were, the residents are obliged to follow its terms of service.
Still, I'm with you that it's easier to send the memo, but nobody's rights were abridged.
You can see more about this on Kentron's web site. They developed the technology, then released it, royalty free, to manufacturers.
Given the memory manufacturers' resistance to DDR400 and the achingly slow progress that DDR2 is taking (the module standard isn't even final yet), this technology has a pretty good potential to reach production.
But we all know that electrons have properties of particles as well as waves. So that makes me wonder if all electrons travel at the same speed, or are they traveling in a range of speeds, with the average electron going at the nominal speed for a given medium? In other words, are some going slower and some going faster? And if so, is it possible that some are actually going much closer to the speed of light than others?
Don't get quantum mechanics and electrical transmission mixed up. It sure seems like electrons are spouting out of the wire at some crazy speed, but what you're seeing is the interaction of electrons on each other (to put it really simplistically). Think of it like a hose that's full of water, but with the valve shut off. When you open the valve, water rushes out, not because it traveled really quickly from one end to the other, but because the water at the valve end pushed until the water at the open end came out. It's the same thing with a wire. The electrons themselves move quite slowly, maybe a little faster than you can walk (in something like the copper wire in your house). In fact, if you equate electrical current to the flow of water in the hose and electrical voltage to the pressue of the water, you have a pretty accurate analogy!
When the scientists talked about transmitting peaks of waveforms at four times the speed of light, it wasn't anything new. The group velocity of a set of signals can easily exceed the speed of light, but the caveat that was included in the text of the article was spot on the money. Although the interference signals were traveling very, very fast, no useful information was available from them. Thus, in and of themselves, the interference patterns have no value, and again, that's not news.
On the other hand, increasing transmission speeds in computers, whose signals typicall travel at around.5c, by 50% would be a big gain. The time that it takes a signal to get from, say, the input of a chipset's driver to its output is on the order of 2ns. In an area where every picosecond counts, a significant reduction in propagation time is priceless!
"The New York Times (Free Blah-di-blah) is reporting that Epic Records, in an effort to prevent reviewers from creating mp3s or even playing the preview CD in anything they don't control, is not disseminating the new Pearl Jam and Tori Amos CDs inside Sony Walkman players that are glued shut. Oh yeah... the headphones are glued to the players too, to prevent any authorized output. A low-tech answer to a high-tech issue."
I think I read somewhere that they're also not going to seal them in a block of concrete and embed the headphones in plutonium to prevent authorized output. At least that's what I think it said...
So, does everybody have to sign away their rights to MS just because MS might think they have a related patent?
Of course not. The obvious answer is that the OpenGL ARB researches Microsoft's patent claims and determines for themselves if there is an infringement. If they feel that there is none, then they proceed (and possibly end up in court defending their decision). If they find that there is an infringement, then they either work around it, accept a licensing agreement or give up.
Sheesh...you know that, Bruce. And it didn't take a ton of reading to see that it is possible that members may already have licensing agreements with Microsoft...in fact, you effectively pointed that out in an earlier post.
Back in the day, my Dad got a degree in civil engineering. He was allowed to use a slide rule for many of his classes, even in high school. His dad thought this was inherently bad because it defeated the idea of learning to do the math by hand. Naturally, geometry, trigonometry and calculus didn't lend themselves (graphically) to a slide rule, but he could perform arithmetic calculations like a maniac.
When I went to high school, slide rules were out and calculators were pretty damn expensive, so in high school, everything was done by hand. I can do arithmetic calculations in my head like a maniac.
After about 18 years, I went back to college and got my electrical engineering degree. Not only were calculators cheap, but computers were cheap, too. I took Trig, three semesters of calculus, one of differential equations and one of statistics. I used the calculator and computer in each one.
Did it help? Damn straight! Did it hurt? No.
Here's what I think: the mathematical fundamentals that I learned were aided by the electronic tools. Sure, any monkey can poke the keys on a calculator or type in a Mathematica or Maple function, but, fundamentally, the student must have some degree of knowledge of the basics of what he's doing to know that the answer that comes out of the box is the one he wants. I don't know how many times I poked the buttons and watched the calculator or computer toss out the wrong answer because I typed something wrong. But I knew that the answer was wrong because my knowledge of math was such that I could estimate to a reasonable degree what the answer should be.
I do have to admit, though, that the string and two nail method of drawing an ellipse does drive home the idea of visualizing how the ellipse works (major and minor axes), but I'm most definitely a cheerleader for using calculators and computers to overcome the mundane mechanics of math. Not only that, but modern calculators like my TI-92 Plus do a great job of graphically modeling things like surface integrals. Computer programs do it even better. Tools like that allow students to progress many times further in their math "careers" than they might have if they didn't have those resources.
Fundamentally, though, and I suppose this is what you meant by the calculators and geometry comment, it's vital that a well developed, solid knowledge base is developed in the basics so that the resources become tools and not crutches.
The CD low pass filter is usually NOT at 20000 Hz because it would have to be extremely steep (very expensive to make). What they do, instead is oversample (eg 8x) and filter with an el-cheapo filter. Oversampling moves aliasing artifacts into very high frequencies where the quality of the filter won't matter much.
The point that everyone seems to miss is that the effect of oversampling and digital filtering the resulting signal is to create a brick wall filter at around 20KHz. The ringing is there...even on an extraordinarily high quality CD player like the Musical Fidelity NuVista 3D ($5000!).
Some recent cd players can also UPsample to 24-bit and they seem to do a good job, too.
The benefit of upsampling is a reduction in the actual noise floor. 16 bit sampling provides a theoretical noise floor that is quite low, but in practice, the best you can expect is somewhere around -100dB (quiet, indeed). Upsampling, interpolating and dithering provide an even better noise floor.
Incidentally, a couple of replies back, somebody talked about oversampling and referred to "interpolating". It ain't the same thing. Upsampling is not oversampling.
You just interpolate the signal up to a nice high sampling rate (say, 264.6 KHz), use a digital filter that gives you a very sharp slope and no phase shift, and then at the analogue output stage you can use a very gently sloping analogue filter with minimal phase shift to get rid of the remaining very high harmonics.
You just do that? I guess that you could match the price of one of Sony's least expensive SACD players using that technique, but the compromises that you'd have to make in component quality would most definitely affect the sound quality. Sorry...the sound of a $250 CD player simply does not match that of a $250 SACD player.
This artical is funny I worked for IBM in the DRAM final Test and we had 40 2.5 million dollar Teradyne Testers to test the chips and this company uses old 486s and Computers running Quake 3. No wonder why we at IBM got out of DRAM.
Did they fire you for being an id10t? IBM used Teradyne testers to test the DRAM because they were manufacturing chips not modules. Besides, the Teradynes have a very high throughput and allow a great deal of control over the testing environment. Somehow I don't think that throwing a module into a computer and running Quake 3 for a while gives much of an opportunity for quantity or quality of testing.
Chrisd's right on about the power supply, valves have pretty demanding power requirements, and the voltage is much higher (300+ volts is typical) than what's normally present in a PC.
It really wouldn't be much of a problem to step up the voltage to 180v-300v. Obviously there wouldn't be a tremendous amount of current, but since this tube is designed to drive the output of a preamplifier, little current is required.
Also, most tube amps require output transformers, which is noticably absent from the photo.
There are scads of output transformerless (OTL) amps on the market. They're designed to drive low impedance loads. Even so, this is a preamplifer, so it will be driving a relatively high impedance, thus no output transformer is required.
Thirdly, there's only one tube! Presumably, if they are really after the audiophile market, it would at least be a stereo amplifier.
This is a dual triode tube, perfectly suited for stereo. As I recall, it would work great as a common-cathode amplifier.
Not to say anything about the noise problems present near high speed digital circuits.
That's where I'd be concerned. I think that this is really nothing more than a gimmick. I suppose they can say that it's aimed at audiophiles, but in reality I think that its true market will be for the case modding crowd to take advantage of the "gee whiz" factor.
This is bunk.
Never underestimate the power of a marketing department.
sorry, but unless they have mixers, microphones, and other equipment that is before the encoder (and the encoder it's self) that will pick up and handle above 44Khz (Note: they DON'T) it's worthless. Let alone the fact that your speakers CANT reproduce anything above 30Khz equals abilities that mean nothing and offer nothing...
Anyone can polish a turd... and SACD is a turd polisher.
I'm not sure what you mean by "above 44Khz". The absolute limit of CD audio is 22KHz as shown by the sampling theorem that basically states that the sampling rate must be a minimum of twice the maximum frequency sampled. Besides, the goal of high fidelity audio is the faithful reproduction of the original sound. In the frequency domain, that translates into flat response between 20Hz and 20KHz with a smooth rolloff above and below. CD audio does not do that.
A huge problem that plagues CD audio (from the audiophile point of view) is the "brick wall" filter that is employed at 20KHz. This low pass filter is so sharp that it can cause some pretty nasty artifacts if it's implemented improperly (for which you should read "cheaply").
Your point about "mixers, microphones, and other equipment" would be well taken except that Sony's Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recording system doesn't allow for post-recording mixing at all. So, what you record is what you get. Obviously, then, the quality of the recording stream should be correspondingly high. I think that you'd be quite surprised at just how high the standards for DSD recording equipment are.
A significant advantage of SACD over CD is that because of the 1 bit sampling and the dithering that follows, quantization noise is moved way up in the spectrum, well beyond the range of audibility. Further, the noise floor of SACD is substantially lower than that of 16 bit CD. The frustrating part of CD audio is that although it should provide a theoretical 16 bit dynamic range, due to quantization and other digital artifacts, even the best players are limited to perhaps 12 or 13 bits. Sure, you might dismiss that as a mere detail, but it is quite audible.
I've got a Sony SACD player. I've also got a nice Rega turntable and a Musical Fidelity CD player. A well cared for LP certainly outperforms a CD and is on a par with the SACD player. Obviously it's difficult to keep an LP in excellent condition over time, which is why I have a very large CD collection. But, quite frankly, the 30 or so SACDs that I have most definitely sound better than the CDs that they replaced...and I'm no golden-eared audiophile.
I'll certainly agree that my speakers won't reproduce anything above 30KHz, but that's not the point of SACD. The point is that the dynamic range is substantially greater and the digital artifacts that are the domain of multibit sampling (and relatively low sampling rates) are essentially eliminated. Frequency response is not the issue here.
I suppose that the case of SACD being a "turd polisher" could be made if you wanted to stick one in your average boom box and claim superior sound. But then again, I guess you could say that in that regard, CD is just a turd polisher compared to cassettes.
We all know the DMCA is illegal and unconstitutional. But "precedence" trumps the constitution. Once a bad law gets on the books, and business depends on it, it's going to stay there no matter how wrong, or illegal that law is.
The court's decision is chock full of some very significant ideas and quotes from previous cases, many of which directly apply to another free speech issue - the DMCA.
For example: "Without the right to receive information and ideas, the protection of speech under the United States and Colorado Constitutions would be meaningless."
Or: "Everyone must be permitted to discover and consider the full range of expression and ideas available in our 'marketplace of ideas.'"
Footnote 14 in the text of the decision is an absolutely brilliant quotation of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis regarding the "freedom to think as you will and speak as you think".
The decision is well worth reading. It's not in some sort of complex legalese. Far from it, it is very clearly stated.
Slashdot Mirror
And the winner for the shortest time to post a dupe?
Taco! -- 5 minutes.
I'm talking both sides, mind you, pro-war and anti-war. Having spent my share of time up close and personal with the "shock and awe" of combat, I can say from first hand experience that war is extraordinarily serious business, business that requires extremely careful consideration before action.
And having seen, again first hand, the results of a tyrannical maniac, I have a very good understanding of the necessity of fighting from time to time.
However, I'm not going to weigh in on the pros or cons of this war in this forum simply because there are an appalling number of blithering idiots who don't seem to have a basic understanding of international (or national) political and military relationships and necessities.
Instead, I'd suggest that just about every person participating in Slashdot discussions do some studying on the real-world political and social situations that exist around us. Instead of spouting off the typical line of what we should do, perhaps it's better to consider what we can do. There is a significant difference, particularly when viewed in a global context.
Perhaps, then, a few pro-war activists will find that there is less of a need to fight and a few anti-war activists will find that sometimes it's necessary to shoot now and then.
-h-
With that as an example, I think that it's a little shortsighted to look at dollars to dollars and say that the US is coming up short. Maybe it is, but the article doesn't provide the evidence. A better measure of the balance of R&D budgeting is more qualitative than quantitative. What is coming out of R&D? Are we developing products and ideas that have any kind of a chance at hitting the market and actually making a profit? Don't jeer at the search for profitability...where do you think the R&D bucks come from?
I can only speak from my experience at the high tech company where I work, but R&D expenditures are a significant amount of total revenues. Perhaps other companies have different views, but for us, even in a tough time, R&D is the lifeblood of what we do. It's just that when money is as tight as it is now, the spending becomes much more focused.
Using Huawei Technologies as an example of the threat to American tech dominance is certainly a red herring. If Tarsala counts blatent copying of product and documentation as a positive result of R&D spending, then his perception of R&D is simply wrong. Honda didn't copy the CVCC from Ford or General Motors...they created it on their own.
-h-
We are a representative democracy. A democracy is a government where the ultimate power resides with the people. A direct democracy is a government where all policy decisions are voted on by the general populous. A representative democracy is a republic.
I have to disagree. The US government is most certainly a republic. In fact, the Constitution guarantees "to every state in this Union a Republican form of government."
The founders of our government were very particular in the form of government that they created. If you read James Madison's Essay 10 in The Federalist Papers, you'll see exactly what his feelings were on democracy, representative or direct. Those feelings are well expressed in the Constitution.
You mentioned that a democracy is a government where the ultimate power resides with the people. That is not correct...for a democracy or a republic (although it is more correct for a republic than a democracy). I know that what you mean is the concept of "majority rule". On a local level, this is probably correct, particularly regarding the initiative process, but at a federal level (which is what this thread is discussing), your definition of a republic (a government where elected officials create the laws) applies.
If the US's government was truely a representative democracy, then our elected representatives would have to vote based on the will of the majority of their constituency. While this probably happens most of the time because our elected officials' political philosophies tend to reflect the majority of their constituenies, I think you'll find plenty of cases where it doesn't happen. And there's no rule that says it must.
It's interesting to note, also, that the notion of the US as a democracy did not come into being until around the time of the Great Depression. Prior to that, nobody had any question regarding the type of government that we have.
Finally, I'll point out the dictionary definition of a republic: "A government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law."
Thus, the voting citizens of the nation posess the supreme power and the executive and legislative branches are responsible to them.
-h-
An interesting quote. Except that Columbia was the only Shuttle not capable of docking with the space station.
Spacehab contracted to provide two payload bay modules for Columbia that would enable it to, in effect, dock with the ISS and deliver supplies and equipment. While Columbia did not have an actual dock on the shuttle itself like the other shuttles, Spacehab's LSM basically does the same thing.
So I guess you're both right, although the point is obviously moot.
-h-
"If it's an insulator, why does it get hot?"
"The fact is that trapped air is a good insulator relative to flowing air and to solid objects like lumber."
Good grief, make up your mind! The fact is that air is a very good thermal insulator, one of the best, because, like almost all gases, it has a very low coefficient of thermal inertia. That means that for a given volume of air, it will conduct less heat (energy) over a given period of time. One of the reasons is that the molecules of air are less dense than, say, a given volume of steel.
Why does the air get hot? Simple...you've got a limited volume inside the case and a number of components that are emitting a (relatively) stupendous amount of heat. The small volume of air in the case will most definitely heat up.
Although the fans in the aluminum case will transfer some small amount of the heat to the case, you'll actually find that because the coefficients of thermal inertia are so mismatched between air and metal that very little thermal transfer is taking place between, say, the CPU and the case. That's because the metal can conduct the heat much faster than the air can deliver it.
The real problem is getting the hot air inside the case out of the case. I design memory modules, and part of the work is doing thermal analyses of them. Our models (which reflect reality pretty closely) show that the material of the case is not particularly important when it comes to managing thermal issues within the case. What is far more important is getting the hot air out of the case as quickly as possible...and that's because the air itself simply will not conduct the heat to another location effectively. Why? Because it's an insulator!
Incidentally, air is quite a good electrical insulator, too, unless it is ionized by a fairly high voltage.
"Why is there always somebody who has to argue with the obvious?"
Indeed!
-h-
I'd dispute lumping Dickens in with the rest. In fact, his novels were tremendously popular, to the point of being serialized as he finished the chapters. Although we regard his work as classic nowadays, he was the 19th century equivalent of one of today's blockbuster authors.
I suspect that 100 years from now Tom Clancy, et al, will not be held in quite the high esteem.
-h-
I thought it was a good book. It's not a classic, but it's not The Lost World. And it probably won't make as terrible a movie as Congo. It was a nice break from more plot heavy books: kind of techno-mindlessness and a leads to b leads to c.
Like I said, though, it just kind of came to a rather disorganized end. I'm ok with stories that don't wrap everything up, but this one just kind of petered out.
-h-
Obviously things are pretty tough in this industry right now, so there is definitely no hiring going on here. That means that if somebody quits, the rest of us have to pick up the slack. I'm not complaining, mind you, because, as LiamRandall said, I'm also happy to have a job.
I think that the interesting thing about this company is that when times are flush, they don't hire willy-nilly. Every proposed position is scrutinized to make sure that a new hire is really needed. Generally, that means that even in good times the rate of hiring is not all that high, yet this is an 18,000 employee company. The executives here make no bones about the fact that they are managing the company looking ahead 5 to 10 years, not one or two quarters. That also means that they recognize that the high tech industry runs in cycles and to lay off employees means playing catch-up in terms of training and hiring when the low cycle ends.
So, for the near term, as the tech economy slumps, we work harder to deal with attrition, but when the economy recovers (as it will), we'll be a step ahead of other companies that have to scramble to hire and train new employees. The obvious consequence is that the stock price takes a beating because it appears that we aren't being as "proactive" as other short-term managed companies in reducing costs.
-h-
Uhhh...and exactly which rights were infringed upon? The right to connect to the Internet? That's a privilege. Regardless of how unfair you think the actions of the university were, the residents are obliged to follow its terms of service.
Still, I'm with you that it's easier to send the memo, but nobody's rights were abridged.
-h-
Given the memory manufacturers' resistance to DDR400 and the achingly slow progress that DDR2 is taking (the module standard isn't even final yet), this technology has a pretty good potential to reach production.
-h-
Don't get quantum mechanics and electrical transmission mixed up. It sure seems like electrons are spouting out of the wire at some crazy speed, but what you're seeing is the interaction of electrons on each other (to put it really simplistically). Think of it like a hose that's full of water, but with the valve shut off. When you open the valve, water rushes out, not because it traveled really quickly from one end to the other, but because the water at the valve end pushed until the water at the open end came out. It's the same thing with a wire. The electrons themselves move quite slowly, maybe a little faster than you can walk (in something like the copper wire in your house). In fact, if you equate electrical current to the flow of water in the hose and electrical voltage to the pressue of the water, you have a pretty accurate analogy!
-h-
The group velocity is the speed at which the information travels. Obviously that's the thing that we'd dearly love to increase.
-h-
On the other hand, increasing transmission speeds in computers, whose signals typicall travel at around
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I think I read somewhere that they're also not going to seal them in a block of concrete and embed the headphones in plutonium to prevent authorized output. At least that's what I think it said...
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Since the average
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Of course not. The obvious answer is that the OpenGL ARB researches Microsoft's patent claims and determines for themselves if there is an infringement. If they feel that there is none, then they proceed (and possibly end up in court defending their decision). If they find that there is an infringement, then they either work around it, accept a licensing agreement or give up.
Sheesh...you know that, Bruce. And it didn't take a ton of reading to see that it is possible that members may already have licensing agreements with Microsoft...in fact, you effectively pointed that out in an earlier post.
Back in the day, my Dad got a degree in civil engineering. He was allowed to use a slide rule for many of his classes, even in high school. His dad thought this was inherently bad because it defeated the idea of learning to do the math by hand. Naturally, geometry, trigonometry and calculus didn't lend themselves (graphically) to a slide rule, but he could perform arithmetic calculations like a maniac.
When I went to high school, slide rules were out and calculators were pretty damn expensive, so in high school, everything was done by hand. I can do arithmetic calculations in my head like a maniac.
After about 18 years, I went back to college and got my electrical engineering degree. Not only were calculators cheap, but computers were cheap, too. I took Trig, three semesters of calculus, one of differential equations and one of statistics. I used the calculator and computer in each one.
Did it help? Damn straight! Did it hurt? No.
Here's what I think: the mathematical fundamentals that I learned were aided by the electronic tools. Sure, any monkey can poke the keys on a calculator or type in a Mathematica or Maple function, but, fundamentally, the student must have some degree of knowledge of the basics of what he's doing to know that the answer that comes out of the box is the one he wants. I don't know how many times I poked the buttons and watched the calculator or computer toss out the wrong answer because I typed something wrong. But I knew that the answer was wrong because my knowledge of math was such that I could estimate to a reasonable degree what the answer should be.
I do have to admit, though, that the string and two nail method of drawing an ellipse does drive home the idea of visualizing how the ellipse works (major and minor axes), but I'm most definitely a cheerleader for using calculators and computers to overcome the mundane mechanics of math. Not only that, but modern calculators like my TI-92 Plus do a great job of graphically modeling things like surface integrals. Computer programs do it even better. Tools like that allow students to progress many times further in their math "careers" than they might have if they didn't have those resources.
Fundamentally, though, and I suppose this is what you meant by the calculators and geometry comment, it's vital that a well developed, solid knowledge base is developed in the basics so that the resources become tools and not crutches.
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20000 Hz because it would have to be extremely
steep (very expensive to make). What they do,
instead is oversample (eg 8x) and filter with
an el-cheapo filter. Oversampling moves aliasing
artifacts into very high frequencies where the
quality of the filter won't matter much.
The point that everyone seems to miss is that the effect of oversampling and digital filtering the resulting signal is to create a brick wall filter at around 20KHz. The ringing is there...even on an extraordinarily high quality CD player like the Musical Fidelity NuVista 3D ($5000!).
Some recent cd players can also UPsample to
24-bit and they seem to do a good job, too.
The benefit of upsampling is a reduction in the actual noise floor. 16 bit sampling provides a theoretical noise floor that is quite low, but in practice, the best you can expect is somewhere around -100dB (quiet, indeed). Upsampling, interpolating and dithering provide an even better noise floor.
Incidentally, a couple of replies back, somebody talked about oversampling and referred to "interpolating". It ain't the same thing. Upsampling is not oversampling.
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You just do that? I guess that you could match the price of one of Sony's least expensive SACD players using that technique, but the compromises that you'd have to make in component quality would most definitely affect the sound quality. Sorry...the sound of a $250 CD player simply does not match that of a $250 SACD player.
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Did they fire you for being an id10t? IBM used Teradyne testers to test the DRAM because they were manufacturing chips not modules. Besides, the Teradynes have a very high throughput and allow a great deal of control over the testing environment. Somehow I don't think that throwing a module into a computer and running Quake 3 for a while gives much of an opportunity for quantity or quality of testing.
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It really wouldn't be much of a problem to step up the voltage to 180v-300v. Obviously there wouldn't be a tremendous amount of current, but since this tube is designed to drive the output of a preamplifier, little current is required.
Also, most tube amps require output transformers, which is noticably absent from the photo.
There are scads of output transformerless (OTL) amps on the market. They're designed to drive low impedance loads. Even so, this is a preamplifer, so it will be driving a relatively high impedance, thus no output transformer is required.
Thirdly, there's only one tube! Presumably, if they are really after the audiophile market, it would at least be a stereo amplifier.
This is a dual triode tube, perfectly suited for stereo. As I recall, it would work great as a common-cathode amplifier.
Not to say anything about the noise problems present near high speed digital circuits.
That's where I'd be concerned. I think that this is really nothing more than a gimmick. I suppose they can say that it's aimed at audiophiles, but in reality I think that its true market will be for the case modding crowd to take advantage of the "gee whiz" factor.
This is bunk.
Never underestimate the power of a marketing department.
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Anyone can polish a turd... and SACD is a turd polisher.
I'm not sure what you mean by "above 44Khz". The absolute limit of CD audio is 22KHz as shown by the sampling theorem that basically states that the sampling rate must be a minimum of twice the maximum frequency sampled. Besides, the goal of high fidelity audio is the faithful reproduction of the original sound. In the frequency domain, that translates into flat response between 20Hz and 20KHz with a smooth rolloff above and below. CD audio does not do that.
A huge problem that plagues CD audio (from the audiophile point of view) is the "brick wall" filter that is employed at 20KHz. This low pass filter is so sharp that it can cause some pretty nasty artifacts if it's implemented improperly (for which you should read "cheaply").
Your point about "mixers, microphones, and other equipment" would be well taken except that Sony's Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recording system doesn't allow for post-recording mixing at all. So, what you record is what you get. Obviously, then, the quality of the recording stream should be correspondingly high. I think that you'd be quite surprised at just how high the standards for DSD recording equipment are.
A significant advantage of SACD over CD is that because of the 1 bit sampling and the dithering that follows, quantization noise is moved way up in the spectrum, well beyond the range of audibility. Further, the noise floor of SACD is substantially lower than that of 16 bit CD. The frustrating part of CD audio is that although it should provide a theoretical 16 bit dynamic range, due to quantization and other digital artifacts, even the best players are limited to perhaps 12 or 13 bits. Sure, you might dismiss that as a mere detail, but it is quite audible.
I've got a Sony SACD player. I've also got a nice Rega turntable and a Musical Fidelity CD player. A well cared for LP certainly outperforms a CD and is on a par with the SACD player. Obviously it's difficult to keep an LP in excellent condition over time, which is why I have a very large CD collection. But, quite frankly, the 30 or so SACDs that I have most definitely sound better than the CDs that they replaced...and I'm no golden-eared audiophile.
I'll certainly agree that my speakers won't reproduce anything above 30KHz, but that's not the point of SACD. The point is that the dynamic range is substantially greater and the digital artifacts that are the domain of multibit sampling (and relatively low sampling rates) are essentially eliminated. Frequency response is not the issue here.
I suppose that the case of SACD being a "turd polisher" could be made if you wanted to stick one in your average boom box and claim superior sound. But then again, I guess you could say that in that regard, CD is just a turd polisher compared to cassettes.
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1. Prohibition
2. Slavery
3. Poll Taxes
4. Segregation
I could go on and on...if you're going to be cynical, at least be good at it!
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The court's decision is chock full of some very significant ideas and quotes from previous cases, many of which directly apply to another free speech issue - the DMCA.
For example: "Without the right to receive information and ideas, the protection of speech under the United States and Colorado Constitutions would be meaningless."
Or: "Everyone must be permitted to discover and consider the full range of expression and ideas available in our 'marketplace of ideas.'"
Footnote 14 in the text of the decision is an absolutely brilliant quotation of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis regarding the "freedom to think as you will and speak as you think".
The decision is well worth reading. It's not in some sort of complex legalese. Far from it, it is very clearly stated.
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