And then when the kids get out into the big bad world and realise that most companies are using this completely different OS called Windows, that'll set them in good stead for getting a job.
Oh no! Companies aren't using DOS, WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3 like we had when I was in high school... What will I do?
First of all, our education system is not set up to provide training for a job. Second, students shouldn't be learning 'how to use MS Word' or 'how to use MS Excel.' They should be learning 'how to use a word processor' or 'how to use a spreadsheet.'
You linux freaks are willing to gamble with kids' futures just to get more people using your wanky OS.
Is that like those crazy Apple freaks? When I was in school Macs outnumbered the DOS machines by about 2 to 1. Is Apple still in the game in our schools?
Actually, GPL and any other open source license I know of. But the real issues are: will anybody step up to the plate? Will the development keep the same pace?
Does it really need to keep the same pace? Do new features need to be implemented, or is it alright if the community is only able to step up to provide bug fixes? I would assume the latter would be fine for just about everyone and would require much fewer man hours. I would imagine the community around pretty much every major open source software package could scrounge up enough people to handle that kind of work load.
I'm sick of people telling me i shouldn't smoke and then getting offended when i say and you shouldn't be eating that pie fattie.
I don't normally eat pie... I am not a fan of desert in general, most of the time... But when I eat desert I try to keep the food to myself. I try to keep my food out of other people's mouths and off of their clothing. If you decide not to have any cake at a birthday party do you and your clothes end up smelling like chocolate cake when you get home?
Personally, I don't care who smokes. As long as they keep the stink away from me:p.
So you are saying that an Apple/Sun merger is the same thing as Apple using Sparc chips? Does this mean Apple ended up mergin with IBM and are now merging with Intel?
There may be a lot of dupes but you seem to have jumped the gun on this one:p.
It sounds like your friend is advocating a type of security through obscurity to me.
There really isn't any obscurity involved. All other things being equal, the difference between always on broadband and sometimes on dialup is the amount of time an attacker has to attempt an attack. Less time and less bandwidth equals less attacks.
I helps, but it seems too much like throwing the baby out with the bath water to me.
And when this happens, the FIRST thing you do is change the documentation to reflect that. If you don't, you aren't doing your job.
I Am A Useless Programmer, but...:p
I would imagine it is very easy to either not update documentation/comments, or to update them incorrectly. It would be much harder to make that mistake with automated testing. Comments don't fail, tests do:).
But if your workplace is that sloppy, agile methods will be even worse-if you have devs who are so incompetent that they can't update plain text, I shudder to think of what their code looks like.
Everyone makes mistakes. If you make a mistake in your code it will be caught by the compiler, the test suite, or possibly by noticing incorrect output. If you make your error is in your comment it won't be caught until someone notices the discrepency.
I prefer any system that is able to check itself for errors. I don't think comments are useless, I am just not sure how much they should be trusted:).
I don't ever remember hand scanners ever being a more cost efficient solution. I bought my first flatbed scanner in '95 for just over $100. My assumption had always been that hand scanners died out because they were unweildy half-assed solutions.
You don't remember, because 95 is too recent:). I bought my first flatbed 1-2 years after you for $60. IIRC, when I started high school (91-92?), flatbed scanners were $300 and hand scanners were $50-75 or so. Those numbers are only from memory, and are probably not terribly accurate.:)
I haven't found a way to rotate 37" widescreen monitors, and I'd really like to move up to 50" at some point. Does anyone know of a mount that lets you rotate large widesceen LCD monitors? One that doesn't attach to the wall so you can use it in an apartment?:(
What kind of resolution do your 37 inch displays run at? To be usable as a computer monitor I would hope they run at at least 2560x1600, like the 30 inchers they are talking about. Maybe I could survive at 1920x1080 (non interlaced:p)... I doubt it, though.
So in this situaion, Windows systems updated with the most recent patch are more secure than machines running WINE.
Possibly in theory, but not likely in practice. I would bet that most people who have Wine installed don't actually even use it. The rest of the people that do use it likely only use it for a handful of specific programs.
If all 2 gigs of texture memory is brought to bear, that guarantees a LONG initial loading time.
I know very little about how SLI actually works, but... Wouldn't each GPU need a copy of each texture in local RAM? If so, this rig would be limited to 512 MB of textures.:)
The last job I had involved uploading a lot of high resolution images. It was faily painful to wait 15 minutes to upload a single image, and then get back "X needs to be just a tad more blue", spend 1 minute tweaking the image, and then send it back.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to send lower resolution/quality copies during your tweaking process? I assume this wouldn't work in all circumstances, but it might save you 15 minutes in the case of "X needs to be just a tad more blue."
Sometimes you just have to find ways to work around the limitations...
On tape, this is not an issue. Serious tape libraries are automated. An arm manually loads in and extracts tapes used in backup.
This is all fine, until you need one more tape than your library holds:).
Mind you, I'm also assuming that any one really worrying about this is going to be "serious". LTO tapes (great for long term backup) hold 400GB (LTO3). Transfer speed is about 20MB/s (yes, megabytes).
So, to improve your overall throughput your compression needs to get anything slightly better than a 1:1 ratio and it needs to run faster than 20 MB/sec.
Tapes cost ~$100 each.
Assuming you fill each tape and your compression only buys you 20%, you already pretty good savings in money.
Also, from my experience with compression, no compression algorithms (or computer hardware) can compress raw data fast enough to keep that rate up. It's going to stay a save money on tape/storage costs for the forseable future as far as I can tell.
I haven't been in the backup game for quite a few years (when I left, 100 MB LTO was pretty new). Depending on how compressable the data was, we used to get a big gain in throughput by compressing the data. I don't have any solid numbers, only my memory. However, I can do a quick test here on my desktop (Athlon MP 1700).
I happen to have a bzip2ed cpio of my laptop's home directory sitting here. It should contain a pretty good mix of file types. I just uncompressed it, and it is about 750 MB (370 MB bzip2ed). "gzip -1" can compress the file down to 406 MB (54%) at a rate of 9.8 MB/sec. Redirecting to/dev/null improves that to 11.2 MB/sec. My machine is already over 3 years old, I would hope a modern server could at least double my throughput.
There are faster compressors available that do not don't compress nearly as well. I was able to get 21 MB/sec to/dev/null using lzop (filesize 432 MB, 57%). There is probably something faster, but if you could pipe your backups through lzop you might be able to increase your backup speeds by 50% or more (or less, depending on your data of course).
I am also cheating a bit. I am working with a single large file. I am assuming tape backup speeds have increased about linearly with hard disk speeds and seek times. If they have, your backups will slow to a crawl if you are backing up small files. I want to say that the 7200 RPM SCSI drives that were on most of our file server might have had an average seek time of 9ms (does that sound right?). That pretty much means that you lose 9 ms every time the backup process seeks to open a new file. It is amazing how much this screw up your throughput, even if the tape is 1/10th the speed of the disks...
No, not 'me'. I'm just a random/.er who jumped into your thread here. Ask the OP, not me.
Sorry, I was apparently paying very little attention:p
That's just because you've never spent any time in the desert. Try Arizona, where 130F degrees is common. In case you're wondering, people don't walk around with blocks of ice on their heads. I can assure you, anyone can get along just fine at 95F degrees.
No, they don't walk around with blocks of ice on their heads. The sane ones do exactly what I would be doing... Staying where it is air conditioned:p.
Not speaking for the OP, but yes... Your body tempurature is lower than ambient only because of your sweat, which is how your body lowers its tempurature. The clothing worn by nomads and the like serves both to insulate you from heated air and sunlight, as well as to make better use of your own sweat.
I understand the purpose of sweat. What I am curious about is whether or not this clothing helps nearly as much at 95 degrees as it does over 100 degrees. I would also assume that they wouldn't make good use of sweat with any amount of body armor underneath:).
The US military's hot-weather camos actually are designed with that latter purpose in-mind, but require much more sweat for the same effect, thereby requiring much more water intake, and therefore more energy and body heat to accomplish the same thing. It was generally considered an equally functional solution assuming unlimited water, but considering the necessity of refridgerated vests, it seems that assumption wasn't quite correct.
I would assume that sweat evaporates rather quickly inside one of these humvees. Desert whould be low humidity and AC does a very good job of drying out the air as well.
If they did, they would be much COOLER. If you read the article, you'd know standard air conditioning is already used, and gets up to 95F degrees at most. Outside tempuratures are much higer.
I am sorry. I assumed you meant that they should wear native clothing and use no form of climate control whatsoever. You made it sound as if that was all they needed.
If you can handle outside tempuratures for long periods of time, you can handle sitting in a humvee.
I don't think 95 degrees is cool enough for any kind of clothing. What are the qualities of this clothing you are proposing that would help keep a soldier in a 95 degree humvee cool? I assume (hope?) that not a lot of sunlight actually hits the occupants of an armored vehicle (windows aren't as sturdy as steel:p).
Are you sure that this clothing helps at all when the ambient temperature isn't higher than your body temperature? Does it still provide any advantages when absorbing heat from sunlight isn't much of an issue? How well does it work when you have to wear body armor underneath?
I am very ignorant of what to wear in a hot climate. Where I grew up it gets pretty cold in the winter and not particularly not in the summer. I don't enjoy anything over 90 degrees:p.
Do what they do to deal with the heat. Instead of $5000 air conditioned suits, consider wearing a shawez kameez or other clothing that has been developed by the locals over a thousand years to deal with the climate.
Yeah, because the natives drive around in heavily armored humvees all day long, right? Personally, I know that sitting in a slow moving car, with the windows down, in the Texas sun in the middle of the summer is quite hot. What is it going to be like if you raise the temperature and decrease the ventilation?
I use this timesheet program on my Palm Pilot. The main screen has clock in and out buttons, and a drop down to select the current task that you are working on. It can report your time in a number of useful ways, and it can export to CSV.
We set up a squid cache on an old workstation. We were pulling about 10GB/month with our 2mbs cable modem. Not a huge amount, but after installing the cache, and running our 75 users through it, we took it down to 3GB a month. Just part of being good Net citizens.
I would hope they already have a local proxy server if they are serving "thousands" of users with a 2 megabit link. It would probably be a small expense to set up a remote proxy server at a colo facility somewhere and point their local proxy through it. At the very least you would get the benefit of compressing everything but the images (without needing the target web server to support it).
I did a quick 30-second search, and I didn't find any info about Squid recompressing images. I wouldn't imagine it would be terribly difficult to add this ability to Squid, probably using ImageMagick.
If most of the HTML pages they are currently pulling down are not gzipped, they could probably cut the HTML traffic to 1/3 of what it is today. The amount of traffic they could save with recompressed jpeg files is questionable. It depends how much quality they are willing to sacrifice. I wouldn't be surprised if you could cut your jpeg bandwidth in half without dropping the quality level to unreasonable levels. Unreasonable is probably a subjective term, but it I were sharing 2 megabit with a thousand other people I'd be happier with the speedup:).
We've had zero successful break-ins since the new policy was implemented a few years ago. Before that, I'm told that we were hacked at least once every 6 months, always because of a cracked password.
A long, long time ago I worked for a rather large company. I believe passwords expired every 90 days. When users repeatedly had password issues, the helpdesk would usually suggest to them to pick a word and put a 1 after it. Then, next time they needed to change their password, they could increment the number.
At another company, passwords had to be 5 characters long... Large groups of people got in the habit of using month-year (dec05) for their passwords. I think passwords expired every 3-6 months or so, but your odd of walking into a random cube and logging in were rather high. Even if you required stronger passwords, people can still come up with a matching scheme.
Those experiences tell me that, in practice, it would be better to require a strong password that never expires. It is hard to both choose and remember a new password every 30-90 days. It is significantly easier to choose a single strong password one time.
Well, by the time it hits anywhere that is relatively public, it's encrypted in some fashion. Since most places need to be able to do a password recovery, it has to be in something more open than md5. People get all pissy when they can't get their password back when they forget it.
Why not just reset their password to something random, like everyone else? You aren't doing anyone any favors by storing their passwords as plain text.
I never mentioned whether anyone could hear the difference. I'm reasonably sure I would be able to hear the difference. The problem is that most of us don't really care about the difference:). There are no obvious clicks, pops, and static like we had with tapes, so I am quite happy:).
That's because CRT monitors aren't very good at doing 30fps motion. A CRT monitor is a point of light being scanned rapidly across a screen, not a full image.
The reason video looks just fine at 30 frames per second (or less, movies are only 24) and 3D computer games generally look terrible at the same rate is motion blur. A camera records the blur, games are a series of clean still images. Freeze frame a rapidly moving scene in a movie and you can see it very well.
Running a 3D game at over 30 frames per second gives the same effect as motion blur. Five or six years ago I remember reading that video cards would star incorporating hardware accelerated motion blur into future graphics cards. It seems the manufacturers decided to have a FPS race instead:).
Who said CDs were perfect? Only the marketing men. Nobody who knows anything about signal processing would say that CDs were perfect.
Don't most people think they are more than good enough? Most people I know think 128kbps MP3s sound just fine, myself included.:)
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And then when the kids get out into the big bad world and realise that most companies are using this completely different OS called Windows, that'll set them in good stead for getting a job.
Oh no! Companies aren't using DOS, WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3 like we had when I was in high school... What will I do?
First of all, our education system is not set up to provide training for a job. Second, students shouldn't be learning 'how to use MS Word' or 'how to use MS Excel.' They should be learning 'how to use a word processor' or 'how to use a spreadsheet.'
You linux freaks are willing to gamble with kids' futures just to get more people using your wanky OS.
Is that like those crazy Apple freaks? When I was in school Macs outnumbered the DOS machines by about 2 to 1. Is Apple still in the game in our schools?
Man, I love UID wars.
That's not fair... I actually thought my id was a little higher than his when I posted.
Now you're just envious of my UID ;p
I know I sure am!
Actually, GPL and any other open source license I know of. But the real issues are: will anybody step up to the plate? Will the development keep the same pace?
Does it really need to keep the same pace? Do new features need to be implemented, or is it alright if the community is only able to step up to provide bug fixes? I would assume the latter would be fine for just about everyone and would require much fewer man hours. I would imagine the community around pretty much every major open source software package could scrounge up enough people to handle that kind of work load.
I'm sick of people telling me i shouldn't smoke and then getting offended when i say and you shouldn't be eating that pie fattie.
I don't normally eat pie... I am not a fan of desert in general, most of the time... But when I eat desert I try to keep the food to myself. I try to keep my food out of other people's mouths and off of their clothing. If you decide not to have any cake at a birthday party do you and your clothes end up smelling like chocolate cake when you get home?
Personally, I don't care who smokes. As long as they keep the stink away from me :p.
So you are saying that an Apple/Sun merger is the same thing as Apple using Sparc chips? Does this mean Apple ended up mergin with IBM and are now merging with Intel?
There may be a lot of dupes but you seem to have jumped the gun on this one :p.
As a result the building tended to sway horribly in winds and the temperature inside was almost impossible to control.
Sounds like at least half myth to me. Why would the building sway any less if it were facing the other direction?
It sounds like your friend is advocating a type of security through obscurity to me.
There really isn't any obscurity involved. All other things being equal, the difference between always on broadband and sometimes on dialup is the amount of time an attacker has to attempt an attack. Less time and less bandwidth equals less attacks.
I helps, but it seems too much like throwing the baby out with the bath water to me.
And when this happens, the FIRST thing you do is change the documentation to reflect that. If you don't, you aren't doing your job.
I Am A Useless Programmer, but... :p
I would imagine it is very easy to either not update documentation/comments, or to update them incorrectly. It would be much harder to make that mistake with automated testing. Comments don't fail, tests do :).
But if your workplace is that sloppy, agile methods will be even worse-if you have devs who are so incompetent that they can't update plain text, I shudder to think of what their code looks like.
Everyone makes mistakes. If you make a mistake in your code it will be caught by the compiler, the test suite, or possibly by noticing incorrect output. If you make your error is in your comment it won't be caught until someone notices the discrepency.
I prefer any system that is able to check itself for errors. I don't think comments are useless, I am just not sure how much they should be trusted :).
These cards are the bane of support people. When you yank a failing card and realise you can't call TAC, the customer is screwed.
Why pay for support and wait for a replacement parts when you can just buy your own spares for a fraction of the cost? :p
I don't ever remember hand scanners ever being a more cost efficient solution. I bought my first flatbed scanner in '95 for just over $100. My assumption had always been that hand scanners died out because they were unweildy half-assed solutions.
You don't remember, because 95 is too recent :). I bought my first flatbed 1-2 years after you for $60. IIRC, when I started high school (91-92?), flatbed scanners were $300 and hand scanners were $50-75 or so. Those numbers are only from memory, and are probably not terribly accurate. :)
I haven't found a way to rotate 37" widescreen monitors, and I'd really like to move up to 50" at some point. Does anyone know of a mount that lets you rotate large widesceen LCD monitors? One that doesn't attach to the wall so you can use it in an apartment? :(
What kind of resolution do your 37 inch displays run at? To be usable as a computer monitor I would hope they run at at least 2560x1600, like the 30 inchers they are talking about. Maybe I could survive at 1920x1080 (non interlaced :p)... I doubt it, though.
So in this situaion, Windows systems updated with the most recent patch are more secure than machines running WINE.
Possibly in theory, but not likely in practice. I would bet that most people who have Wine installed don't actually even use it. The rest of the people that do use it likely only use it for a handful of specific programs.
If all 2 gigs of texture memory is brought to bear, that guarantees a LONG initial loading time.
I know very little about how SLI actually works, but... Wouldn't each GPU need a copy of each texture in local RAM? If so, this rig would be limited to 512 MB of textures. :)
The last job I had involved uploading a lot of high resolution images. It was faily painful to wait 15 minutes to upload a single image, and then get back "X needs to be just a tad more blue", spend 1 minute tweaking the image, and then send it back.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to send lower resolution/quality copies during your tweaking process? I assume this wouldn't work in all circumstances, but it might save you 15 minutes in the case of "X needs to be just a tad more blue."
Sometimes you just have to find ways to work around the limitations...
On tape, this is not an issue. Serious tape libraries are automated. An arm manually loads in and extracts tapes used in backup.
This is all fine, until you need one more tape than your library holds :).
Mind you, I'm also assuming that any one really worrying about this is going to be "serious". LTO tapes (great for long term backup) hold 400GB (LTO3). Transfer speed is about 20MB/s (yes, megabytes).
So, to improve your overall throughput your compression needs to get anything slightly better than a 1:1 ratio and it needs to run faster than 20 MB/sec.
Tapes cost ~$100 each.
Assuming you fill each tape and your compression only buys you 20%, you already pretty good savings in money.
Also, from my experience with compression, no compression algorithms (or computer hardware) can compress raw data fast enough to keep that rate up. It's going to stay a save money on tape/storage costs for the forseable future as far as I can tell.
I haven't been in the backup game for quite a few years (when I left, 100 MB LTO was pretty new). Depending on how compressable the data was, we used to get a big gain in throughput by compressing the data. I don't have any solid numbers, only my memory. However, I can do a quick test here on my desktop (Athlon MP 1700).
I happen to have a bzip2ed cpio of my laptop's home directory sitting here. It should contain a pretty good mix of file types. I just uncompressed it, and it is about 750 MB (370 MB bzip2ed). "gzip -1" can compress the file down to 406 MB (54%) at a rate of 9.8 MB/sec. Redirecting to /dev/null improves that to 11.2 MB/sec. My machine is already over 3 years old, I would hope a modern server could at least double my throughput.
There are faster compressors available that do not don't compress nearly as well. I was able to get 21 MB/sec to /dev/null using lzop (filesize 432 MB, 57%). There is probably something faster, but if you could pipe your backups through lzop you might be able to increase your backup speeds by 50% or more (or less, depending on your data of course).
I am also cheating a bit. I am working with a single large file. I am assuming tape backup speeds have increased about linearly with hard disk speeds and seek times. If they have, your backups will slow to a crawl if you are backing up small files. I want to say that the 7200 RPM SCSI drives that were on most of our file server might have had an average seek time of 9ms (does that sound right?). That pretty much means that you lose 9 ms every time the backup process seeks to open a new file. It is amazing how much this screw up your throughput, even if the tape is 1/10th the speed of the disks...
No, not 'me'. I'm just a random /.er who jumped into your thread here. Ask the OP, not me.
Sorry, I was apparently paying very little attention :p
That's just because you've never spent any time in the desert. Try Arizona, where 130F degrees is common. In case you're wondering, people don't walk around with blocks of ice on their heads. I can assure you, anyone can get along just fine at 95F degrees.
No, they don't walk around with blocks of ice on their heads. The sane ones do exactly what I would be doing... Staying where it is air conditioned :p.
Not speaking for the OP, but yes... Your body tempurature is lower than ambient only because of your sweat, which is how your body lowers its tempurature. The clothing worn by nomads and the like serves both to insulate you from heated air and sunlight, as well as to make better use of your own sweat.
I understand the purpose of sweat. What I am curious about is whether or not this clothing helps nearly as much at 95 degrees as it does over 100 degrees. I would also assume that they wouldn't make good use of sweat with any amount of body armor underneath :).
The US military's hot-weather camos actually are designed with that latter purpose in-mind, but require much more sweat for the same effect, thereby requiring much more water intake, and therefore more energy and body heat to accomplish the same thing. It was generally considered an equally functional solution assuming unlimited water, but considering the necessity of refridgerated vests, it seems that assumption wasn't quite correct.
I would assume that sweat evaporates rather quickly inside one of these humvees. Desert whould be low humidity and AC does a very good job of drying out the air as well.
If they did, they would be much COOLER. If you read the article, you'd know standard air conditioning is already used, and gets up to 95F degrees at most. Outside tempuratures are much higer.
I am sorry. I assumed you meant that they should wear native clothing and use no form of climate control whatsoever. You made it sound as if that was all they needed.
If you can handle outside tempuratures for long periods of time, you can handle sitting in a humvee.
I don't think 95 degrees is cool enough for any kind of clothing. What are the qualities of this clothing you are proposing that would help keep a soldier in a 95 degree humvee cool? I assume (hope?) that not a lot of sunlight actually hits the occupants of an armored vehicle (windows aren't as sturdy as steel :p).
Are you sure that this clothing helps at all when the ambient temperature isn't higher than your body temperature? Does it still provide any advantages when absorbing heat from sunlight isn't much of an issue? How well does it work when you have to wear body armor underneath?
I am very ignorant of what to wear in a hot climate. Where I grew up it gets pretty cold in the winter and not particularly not in the summer. I don't enjoy anything over 90 degrees :p.
Do what they do to deal with the heat. Instead of $5000 air conditioned suits, consider wearing a shawez kameez or other clothing that has been developed by the locals over a thousand years to deal with the climate.
Yeah, because the natives drive around in heavily armored humvees all day long, right? Personally, I know that sitting in a slow moving car, with the windows down, in the Texas sun in the middle of the summer is quite hot. What is it going to be like if you raise the temperature and decrease the ventilation?
I believe they will require some active cooling.
I use this timesheet program on my Palm Pilot. The main screen has clock in and out buttons, and a drop down to select the current task that you are working on. It can report your time in a number of useful ways, and it can export to CSV.
We set up a squid cache on an old workstation. We were pulling about 10GB/month with our 2mbs cable modem. Not a huge amount, but after installing the cache, and running our 75 users through it, we took it down to 3GB a month. Just part of being good Net citizens.
I would hope they already have a local proxy server if they are serving "thousands" of users with a 2 megabit link. It would probably be a small expense to set up a remote proxy server at a colo facility somewhere and point their local proxy through it. At the very least you would get the benefit of compressing everything but the images (without needing the target web server to support it).
I did a quick 30-second search, and I didn't find any info about Squid recompressing images. I wouldn't imagine it would be terribly difficult to add this ability to Squid, probably using ImageMagick.
If most of the HTML pages they are currently pulling down are not gzipped, they could probably cut the HTML traffic to 1/3 of what it is today. The amount of traffic they could save with recompressed jpeg files is questionable. It depends how much quality they are willing to sacrifice. I wouldn't be surprised if you could cut your jpeg bandwidth in half without dropping the quality level to unreasonable levels. Unreasonable is probably a subjective term, but it I were sharing 2 megabit with a thousand other people I'd be happier with the speedup :).
We've had zero successful break-ins since the new policy was implemented a few years ago. Before that, I'm told that we were hacked at least once every 6 months, always because of a cracked password.
A long, long time ago I worked for a rather large company. I believe passwords expired every 90 days. When users repeatedly had password issues, the helpdesk would usually suggest to them to pick a word and put a 1 after it. Then, next time they needed to change their password, they could increment the number.
At another company, passwords had to be 5 characters long... Large groups of people got in the habit of using month-year (dec05) for their passwords. I think passwords expired every 3-6 months or so, but your odd of walking into a random cube and logging in were rather high. Even if you required stronger passwords, people can still come up with a matching scheme.
Those experiences tell me that, in practice, it would be better to require a strong password that never expires. It is hard to both choose and remember a new password every 30-90 days. It is significantly easier to choose a single strong password one time.
Well, by the time it hits anywhere that is relatively public, it's encrypted in some fashion. Since most places need to be able to do a password recovery, it has to be in something more open than md5. People get all pissy when they can't get their password back when they forget it.
Why not just reset their password to something random, like everyone else? You aren't doing anyone any favors by storing their passwords as plain text.
and pretty much anybody can hear the difference
I never mentioned whether anyone could hear the difference. I'm reasonably sure I would be able to hear the difference. The problem is that most of us don't really care about the difference :). There are no obvious clicks, pops, and static like we had with tapes, so I am quite happy :).
That's because CRT monitors aren't very good at doing 30fps motion. A CRT monitor is a point of light being scanned rapidly across a screen, not a full image.
The reason video looks just fine at 30 frames per second (or less, movies are only 24) and 3D computer games generally look terrible at the same rate is motion blur. A camera records the blur, games are a series of clean still images. Freeze frame a rapidly moving scene in a movie and you can see it very well.
Running a 3D game at over 30 frames per second gives the same effect as motion blur. Five or six years ago I remember reading that video cards would star incorporating hardware accelerated motion blur into future graphics cards. It seems the manufacturers decided to have a FPS race instead :).
Who said CDs were perfect? Only the marketing men. Nobody who knows anything about signal processing would say that CDs were perfect.
Don't most people think they are more than good enough? Most people I know think 128kbps MP3s sound just fine, myself included. :)