...people who have made a choice to react in one way to the information the flag is supposed to communicate are perfectly justified in ignoring it when it is sent by that browser, since in that case it no longer communicates the same information.
Say what? Do you really believe that even a small majority of web users want to be tracked, if they're made aware of the situation and given a choice? If you DO believe that, read no further - we have nothing to discuss.
However, if you understand that most users WOULDN'T want to be tracked, then having DNT enabled by default communicates the relevant information more accurately. For the vast majority of computer users who have no clue whatsoever about web tracking, (much less DNT), having DNT turned ON reflects the decision they would make if they were informed and aware of their choice. As for Apache's vow to ignore DNT flags coming from IE10, their hissy fit is neither Microsoft's fault nor Microsoft's responsibility.
The ad industry wonks and corporate turd suckers know they've already lost the battle when it comes to tracking those of us who are technically savvy - we will always be on the bleeding edge of doing everything possible to keep their noses out of our business. They're just trying their damnedest to keep their grip on the people who don't know better, and they're pissed off that Microsoft is proactively protecting the privacy of IE10 users, who arguably represent one of the biggest 'don't know better' constituencies. Kudos to Microsoft - and as for the companies *concerned* about "'the harm to consumers that Microsoft's decision could create", fuck'em all. This ruckus is just confirmation that they'll use any excuse to throw us all under a bus in the name of profit.
You should consider the $14000 + the cost of the original honda civic as the total cost of the finished vehicle. Then compare that cost to a similar quality gas guzzler. The real savings will be found in the difference between those two prices, not in the original cost of the conversion.
When doing a cost analysis, don't forget to deduct the cost of oil changes, filter replacements, and exhaust system repairs/replacements for the life of the electric car. Discount the cost of brake jobs as well, if the car uses regenerative braking. In Ontario, Canada, (and possibly other jurisdictions as well), you can also deduct the cost of emissions testing every two years. And then there's the cost difference between fixing the things that typically go wrong with an I/C engine in the course of a decade or so, and fixing the problems that crop up with an electric motor and controller.
As usual, this is a more complex question than it first appears to be.
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment, or forsee a need for 10GbE to the desktop, why bother?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody", right?
It's axiomatic that the pulling of cable is typically much more expensive than the cable itself, so when you have the opportunity to do so, future-proof as much as possible. Pull the fastest backbones you can, and if the budget allows, pull a couple of different types.
FTA: “We own it, we manage it, we upgrade it—you pay a monthly fee for what you use,” Ellison said.
Gee, Larry, by "it" are you referring to your cloud platform, or to my data?
I've heard of paying a 'fee' for the return of a hostage, but asking people to voluntarily hand over both the hostage AND the ransom money up front? You've got some big balls there Mr. E!
You'll need to find some clear viscoelastic adhesive in tape or sheet form - something similar to the stuff used to stick credit cards to the paper info sheets they're affixed to when they're mailed out. Then have a sheet of glass cut to the size of a window pane. Cover the window pane with the viscoelastic layer, (complete coverage with no gaps is required), and then apply the sheet of glass.(Clear sheet plastic may also work, but AFAIK optimum results are obtained when the constraining layers have similar properties). You may want to attach pull-tabs of fibreglas tape at the edges of the glass to make it easier to remove them if necessary.
The experiment shouldn't cost too much to try on one window. It should be immediately obvious whether or not it's worth doing the rest of the windows. After treatment you won't be able to see clearly through the windows, but at least they'll still allow the light in.
I started with Ubuntu about 5 years ago, but there were some packages that weren't up-to-date enough for me. So I moved to Debian Testing, and have remained there ever since.
Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across.
I miss Windows Explorer - I still haven't found a decent full-featured file manager for Linux, and I've tried most of them. And GUI-based configuration is lacking in Linux. And the mimetypes mess still pisses me off. I'm long past the point where I want to spend time doing stuff TO my computer - I just want to do stuff WITH it
That said, I've recently had to use Windows 7 on my girlfriend's computer, and it makes me tear my hair out. Slow, bloated, prettified, and obtrusive. If Windows was free and Debian with XFCE cost money, I'd buy Debian with XFCE and toss Windows out the window.
Have you ever taken a CFL apart? I have. There's an astonishing amount of electronics in that small base; it's required to transform line voltage into a potential sufficiently high to ionize the gas in the fluorescent tube. How much energy goes into the manufacture of these electronic components? How much of the electronics is either re-used or recovered as raw material when these bulbs are 'recycled', as opposed to the materials, (and the energy that went into their manufacture), being disposed of in landfills? I have been unable to find answers to these questions, and I think they're important. There's a lot more 'stuff', in a CFL, with a much wider range of chemical compositions, than in an incandescent bulb, so it's harder and more energy-intensive to fully recycle.
Then there are the special interests of the various stakeholders and their lobbyists - for a discussion of this, see http://ceolas.net/#li1ax . Does anyone really believe that 'saving energy' is a primary, or even an important, motivation for the manufacturers and patent holders of CFLs? Given that, what might they be hiding, and how much spin has been applied to the figures the provide vis-a-vis total energy savings?
If the powers that be were really serious about saving energy and the environment by encouraging CFL use, they would mandate two things: 1) A a high minimum standard of longevity for the electronics in the bases of CFLs, and 2) A means of replacing the tube only when it burns out, so the most complex and least homogeneous part of the bulb, (the base with its electronic circuitry), can be re-used numerous times. But guess what? That reduces the profit margins and raises both the cost and the price, making the whole proposition both less economically attractive and less politically palatable. If 'energy saving' was the true motive behind this legislation, these things would have been incorporated into CFL design by now.
The problems of the EMI and RFI that CFLs generate, and their crappy power factor, are points for further investigation for those interested. As are the problems with LED lights and their greater negative effects on melatonin production, with the accompanying decrease in health for those exposed to them.
This whole topic is a lot more complex and nuanced than most people realize, and I suggest that anyone reading this might want to do a little digging before giving in to a knee-jerk reaction of either "But, but... the environment!" or "But, but... I like the old ones!"
I have been thinking long and hard about this and I can only come to this conclusion. It is a nice feature. It needs tweaks, so results for photoshop don't pop up, or if they do it should explain it's not compatible with Linux. But what it needs more than anything, which is something Canonical keep missing out of all of their super new features is a simple tickbox for on or off.
If I use the tickbox you are suggesting to turn the feature off, will the system still be tracking my queries for use the next time I turn the feature on? I'm not suggesting that Ubuntu would do that *now*, but it strikes me as a slippery slope kind of thing, and they could easily justify it to themselves in the future, especially under pressure from their corporate partners.
One thing that I also think is important to remember, is that we are a set of pretty clued up power users and as such we will see problems and we will jump to justify why something is a bad idea.
I think that's really where a lot of the pushback is coming from. The typical "clued up power user" is only too aware of how such mechanisms can be used to destroy privacy, if not now, then in the future, and possibly surreptitiously. Giving big commercial entities a priveleged entry point into a free OS like Linux sets a dangerous precedent. At best it's crapware; at worst, it risks making Linux more like Windows and Mac in ways that most of us probably don't want. Corporations already have more advantages, rights, and power than any sensible society would give them. Do we really want to risk giving them yet another doorway into our lives, via an OS which was founded on the antithesis of that principal?
'Cultural sensitivities' notwithstanding, it seems to me that there's a fairly clear line between speech which is harmful and speech which is just annoying. If my speech purposely incites others to cause harm, then perhaps that speech should be proscribed. If my speech simply expresses an opinion, or makes fun of a person, a group, a religion, etc., then the person, group, or religion just needs to develop a thicker skin and/or turn a deaf ear to what I'm saying.
So to all of you fundamentalists of any stripe who have your knickers in a twist over people dissing your sacred whatever, GET OVER IT AND GET YOUR SHITTY LITTLE SENSE OF 'SACRED' ENTITLEMENT THE FUCK OUT OF MY FACE! No, the world does not owe you special treatment no matter how hard you pray, nor how fervently and sacredly and preciously you believe in your prophet, your god, your saviour, or your belly button lint. Grow up, and stop turning minor insults into end-of-the-world scenarios. Your fanaticism causes nothing but harm, and I am utterly sick of it.
A quote from the Sydney Morning Herald piece puts it best: ''Human rights are not about protecting religions; human rights are to protect humans." Personally, the closest I come to religion is to say 'Amen to that!'
I don't know what country you're from, Russia maybe, but I assume English is not your native language. In English, sentences end with a single dot, called a period.
Those three dots at the end of the sentence to which you are referring are called an ellipsis, you dolt. Look it up on Wikipedia, if you can figure out how to do so.
So, with a 45kHz carrier, vinyl is theoretically limited to 22.5kHz; anything more, and you get aliasing between the 45kHz signal and the baseband. But analog filters for playback have finite roll-off, so you have to back off some on the vinyl, and analog filters for recording also have finite roll-off, so you have to back off some more -- 12kHz sounds about right.
Disclaimer: I'm not an "audiophile"; I'm an electrical engineer.
Correction: "So, with a 45kHz carrier, vinyl encoded using CD-4 quadraphonic encoding is theoretically limited to 22.5kHz." For normal stereo audio, vinyl is indeed capable of reproduction up to and beyond 45 kHz, albeit with possibly inconsistent amplitude from pressing to pressing.
Disclaimer: I am an "audiophile", and I'm also an electronics technologist with more than 30 years of experience designing, building, and repairing analog, digital, and RF equipment.
Don't forget to add lots of harmonics to make it sound like tubes were involved. It's not High Fidelity without the characteristic tube distortions.
Enough of this 'lots of harmonics from tubes' BS. From a comment I posted in May of this year:
"By the way, in the 'tubes vs transistors' debate, good triodes have the advantage of being more intrinsically linear than transistors. This means that they require less negative feedback to tame their distortion, and often sound wonderful with NO negative feedback. The THD figures of amps built this way are often quite poor, but look at their spectra and you'll see predominantly second- and third-order, with a smooth and rapid falloff of higher order harmonics. Occasionally solid-state amps can give this kind of performance, but tubes have an easier time of it. Designing a good-sounding, (as opposed to good-measuring), audio amp, requires a lot of skill, and a lot of knowledge about distortion mechanisms and how to counter them. Unfortunately the prevailing practice in HiFi is to add more gain, throw most of it away with additional NFB, get a nice low THD figure, and call the job done. Amps designed this way generally sound like shit, if not initially, then after 20 minutes or so of listening, at which time listening fatigue sets in."
Solid-state amps, (most of which require lots of negative feedback to get anything close to a listenable output), and poorly-designed tube amps, (primarily pentode-based), are the ones that tend to have "lots of harmonics". Good triode amps have some second harmonic, a little bit of third harmonic, and not much at all in the way of higher-order harmonics. Although their THD figures may be higher, the amps sound better because they don't have the higher-order harmonics characteristic of high-negative-feedback designs.
THD is a very poor metric for audio amplifier performance. This was widely recognized in the 1940's - audio engineers such as the BBC's D.E.L. Shorter proposed calculating THD by weighting harmonics by the square, or even the cube, of their order, based on the recognition that higher-order distortion is more audible and more objectionable. But marketing forces won out, and now we have a THD metric that is very poorly correlated with actual listening preferences.
I think a lot of this talk about tube distortions comes from the guitar world, where amplifiers are designed to distort in controlled ways in order to impart a characteristic sound. Designing guitar amps and designing audio amps for home listening are very different disciplines.
Wrong, vinyl has a lower frequency cutoff (around 12kHz)
Totally false. In the quadraphonic era, the CD4 encoding system encoded the extra two channels in carrier signals that were recorded at 45 kHz. So note that not only were ultrasonic signals RECORDED on vinyl, they were also RECOVERED by the stylus and cartridge, allowing the decoder to do its job of recovering 4 audio channels.
So in reality, vinyl has a much higher frequency limit than CD audio, which is intrinsically limited to 22.05 kHz, (the Nyquist frequency), by 'virtue' of the 44.1 kHz sampling frequency.
I just don't "get" the point of cloud apps. For occasional collaberative stuff, sure its useful to do the real-time-sharing stuff that Google allows, but for the vast majority of work I don't need that and I specifically don't want to be prevented from doing work in situations where I don't have a reliable internet connection
Personally, I agree with you one hundred percent.
Unfortunately, that thinking probably makes both of us dinosaurs. The evolving paradigm in computing is that there is no such thing as 'don't have a reliable internet connection'. Mobile Computing and The Cloud are fuelling each other's ubiquity - and our mobile devices will soon be the modern equivalent of VT100 terminals. Governments and their corporate overlords are drooling over the prospect of having near-instantaneous access to and control over everyone's everything. Cloud computing represents nothing less than a quantum leap in the concentration of power over average citizens' lives; therefore, (short of revolution), it will become overwhelmingly predominant in the next decade or so.
"Dice has been talking about building content and user engagement to be top of mind and more integral to professionals doing work, and if you think about SourceForge and Slashdot, it’s about user engagement to help you do your job... We don’t want to change the experience today. What will happen over time is that the Dice.com site is will operate more seamlessly connected to these sites. But the sites themselves will keep their look and feel and will run on their own... That absolutely includes editorial independence. We think that’s really key. We don’t profess to add much from an editorial standpoint. We will give the user bases on our sites and those the ability to interact with each other. Our goal here is to make them part of the overall tech and engineering experience at the company."
Translation: 'We are Borg. You will be assimilated.'
I'm sitting in a conference room right now next to a gentleman from Dice, and he's just been curious what people are saying; hasn't suggested any comments or messaging at all.... my initial impression is positive. I'm thrilled at the possibility of getting a bigger investment into Slashdot, both from an engineering perspective and an editorial perspective.
Translation: "The walls have ears, and I haven't yet figured out my bailout strategy."
I will never understand how the political and moneyed classes in the USA managed to convince the working man in that country that unions are the spawn of Satan.
It wasn't necessarily the political and moneyed classes that did it. I too see the necessity of unions, but I hope never to have to belong to one. Why? As a contractor who sometimes does work in factories and mines, I have seen first hand the greed, pettiness, laziness, and sense of entitlement that union shops often breed. When one union member files a grievance because an outside contractor is holding a nut into which another union member is turning a bolt, because 'a union employee should be doing that work', (even though there was no union employee immediately available to hold the nut), then unionism is going too far. When work is halted because a light bulb is burned out, (and we're talking about the screw-in kind, within easy reach), because changing the bulb is 'an electrician's job' and the electrician doesn't show up for an hour, the union isn't doing itself any favours. And when union employees *regularly* take 45 minutes to do an easy job that only requires 5 or 10 minutes even for an inexperienced person, then the union is shooting itself in the foot. In too many union shops, demonstrating efficiency, initiative, and overall competence is enough for an employee to be shunned, threatened, or even physically harmed, by his or her 'brothers' and 'sisters' - never mind the union grievance process.
Politically I am fairly far left of centre; I despise the power that corporations have and the abuses they commit, and I'm all for strict government regulation whose invasiveness increases with the size and power of the corporation. For that reason I am in favour of unions. But I also believe in an honest day's work for a day's pay, and I believe that I should be free to work as efficiently and intelligently as I can, without fear of union reprisals, whether official or unofficial. For that reason, I hate unions that abuse the power they have.
In many cases unions are their own worst enemies, pure and simple
voted today, in favor of extending the FISA Amendments Act
What government, once having acquired a type of power over its citizens, ever relinquishes it without a fight? Income tax, The Patriot Act, and on and on and on - it's all about concentration and maintenance of power, and has been for millenia. Nothing to see here, move along.
However, it may be important to keep in mind that this is a hallmark of human societal hierarchies. Then we can set aside our righteous moral indignation and keep our eyes on the prize, which is the construction of a functioning, fair, free, inclusive society that endures in spite of our natural tendencies to destroy it. We've been close on several occasions, but it keeps slipping away from us because we become complacent. What was that about bread and circuses?
All the locks in the world won't keep crooks out of your house if you don't use the locks. Your house may LOOK invulnerable, but one day sonbody's gonna try the door, find it open, and steal you blind.
The same principle applies here - using obvious and predictable 'random' code generation, and relying on people not knowing that's what you're doing, only works for so long.
And arrogant people, (and companies, and banks), who crow about how secure their systems are, are just asking for it. Serves the fuckers right; but it's too bad that credit card holders are paying the price for their creditors' arrogance.
With all major parties on board, web monitoring of all Australians appears to be inevitable.
If they're all in favour of something so draconian and so anti-freedom, are they really different parties at all? And do they really have any interest in the well being of their constituents?
Meanwhile, Apple was granted a number of new patents on Tuesday... For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
Gee, a feature so obvious and so simple that nobody except corporate 'we own everything' bastards would even think of patenting it. And the best part for Apple is, the technology already exists - it'll probably take about a day's work to make this happen, and then they'll have a monopoly on an absurdly simple and easy 'technological advancement'.
Why do we continue to accept such an obviously and fatally broken patent system? Yeah, I know 'bread and circuses' is the correct answer, and it pisses me off.
Slashdot Mirror
...people who have made a choice to react in one way to the information the flag is supposed to communicate are perfectly justified in ignoring it when it is sent by that browser, since in that case it no longer communicates the same information.
Say what? Do you really believe that even a small majority of web users want to be tracked, if they're made aware of the situation and given a choice? If you DO believe that, read no further - we have nothing to discuss.
However, if you understand that most users WOULDN'T want to be tracked, then having DNT enabled by default communicates the relevant information more accurately. For the vast majority of computer users who have no clue whatsoever about web tracking, (much less DNT), having DNT turned ON reflects the decision they would make if they were informed and aware of their choice. As for Apache's vow to ignore DNT flags coming from IE10, their hissy fit is neither Microsoft's fault nor Microsoft's responsibility.
The ad industry wonks and corporate turd suckers know they've already lost the battle when it comes to tracking those of us who are technically savvy - we will always be on the bleeding edge of doing everything possible to keep their noses out of our business. They're just trying their damnedest to keep their grip on the people who don't know better, and they're pissed off that Microsoft is proactively protecting the privacy of IE10 users, who arguably represent one of the biggest 'don't know better' constituencies. Kudos to Microsoft - and as for the companies *concerned* about "'the harm to consumers that Microsoft's decision could create", fuck'em all. This ruckus is just confirmation that they'll use any excuse to throw us all under a bus in the name of profit.
You should consider the $14000 + the cost of the original honda civic as the total cost of the finished vehicle. Then compare that cost to a similar quality gas guzzler. The real savings will be found in the difference between those two prices, not in the original cost of the conversion.
When doing a cost analysis, don't forget to deduct the cost of oil changes, filter replacements, and exhaust system repairs/replacements for the life of the electric car. Discount the cost of brake jobs as well, if the car uses regenerative braking. In Ontario, Canada, (and possibly other jurisdictions as well), you can also deduct the cost of emissions testing every two years. And then there's the cost difference between fixing the things that typically go wrong with an I/C engine in the course of a decade or so, and fixing the problems that crop up with an electric motor and controller.
As usual, this is a more complex question than it first appears to be.
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment, or forsee a need for 10GbE to the desktop, why bother?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody", right?
It's axiomatic that the pulling of cable is typically much more expensive than the cable itself, so when you have the opportunity to do so, future-proof as much as possible. Pull the fastest backbones you can, and if the budget allows, pull a couple of different types.
FTA: “We own it, we manage it, we upgrade it—you pay a monthly fee for what you use,” Ellison said.
Gee, Larry, by "it" are you referring to your cloud platform, or to my data?
I've heard of paying a 'fee' for the return of a hostage, but asking people to voluntarily hand over both the hostage AND the ransom money up front? You've got some big balls there Mr. E!
then you may want to experiment with constrained layer damping
You'll need to find some clear viscoelastic adhesive in tape or sheet form - something similar to the stuff used to stick credit cards to the paper info sheets they're affixed to when they're mailed out. Then have a sheet of glass cut to the size of a window pane. Cover the window pane with the viscoelastic layer, (complete coverage with no gaps is required), and then apply the sheet of glass.(Clear sheet plastic may also work, but AFAIK optimum results are obtained when the constraining layers have similar properties). You may want to attach pull-tabs of fibreglas tape at the edges of the glass to make it easier to remove them if necessary.
The experiment shouldn't cost too much to try on one window. It should be immediately obvious whether or not it's worth doing the rest of the windows. After treatment you won't be able to see clearly through the windows, but at least they'll still allow the light in.
Can't be much more than a decade away, at this rate...
1) WikiLeaks is an enemy of the United States.
2) WikiLeaks works to foster and encourage openness and transparency.
3) Does the United States consider openness and transparency its enemies?
I started with Ubuntu about 5 years ago, but there were some packages that weren't up-to-date enough for me. So I moved to Debian Testing, and have remained there ever since.
Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across.
I miss Windows Explorer - I still haven't found a decent full-featured file manager for Linux, and I've tried most of them. And GUI-based configuration is lacking in Linux. And the mimetypes mess still pisses me off. I'm long past the point where I want to spend time doing stuff TO my computer - I just want to do stuff WITH it
That said, I've recently had to use Windows 7 on my girlfriend's computer, and it makes me tear my hair out. Slow, bloated, prettified, and obtrusive. If Windows was free and Debian with XFCE cost money, I'd buy Debian with XFCE and toss Windows out the window.
Have you ever taken a CFL apart? I have. There's an astonishing amount of electronics in that small base; it's required to transform line voltage into a potential sufficiently high to ionize the gas in the fluorescent tube. How much energy goes into the manufacture of these electronic components? How much of the electronics is either re-used or recovered as raw material when these bulbs are 'recycled', as opposed to the materials, (and the energy that went into their manufacture), being disposed of in landfills? I have been unable to find answers to these questions, and I think they're important. There's a lot more 'stuff', in a CFL, with a much wider range of chemical compositions, than in an incandescent bulb, so it's harder and more energy-intensive to fully recycle.
Then there are the special interests of the various stakeholders and their lobbyists - for a discussion of this, see http://ceolas.net/#li1ax . Does anyone really believe that 'saving energy' is a primary, or even an important, motivation for the manufacturers and patent holders of CFLs? Given that, what might they be hiding, and how much spin has been applied to the figures the provide vis-a-vis total energy savings?
If the powers that be were really serious about saving energy and the environment by encouraging CFL use, they would mandate two things: 1) A a high minimum standard of longevity for the electronics in the bases of CFLs, and 2) A means of replacing the tube only when it burns out, so the most complex and least homogeneous part of the bulb, (the base with its electronic circuitry), can be re-used numerous times. But guess what? That reduces the profit margins and raises both the cost and the price, making the whole proposition both less economically attractive and less politically palatable. If 'energy saving' was the true motive behind this legislation, these things would have been incorporated into CFL design by now.
The problems of the EMI and RFI that CFLs generate, and their crappy power factor, are points for further investigation for those interested. As are the problems with LED lights and their greater negative effects on melatonin production, with the accompanying decrease in health for those exposed to them.
This whole topic is a lot more complex and nuanced than most people realize, and I suggest that anyone reading this might want to do a little digging before giving in to a knee-jerk reaction of either "But, but... the environment!" or "But, but... I like the old ones!"
I have been thinking long and hard about this and I can only come to this conclusion. It is a nice feature. It needs tweaks, so results for photoshop don't pop up, or if they do it should explain it's not compatible with Linux. But what it needs more than anything, which is something Canonical keep missing out of all of their super new features is a simple tickbox for on or off.
If I use the tickbox you are suggesting to turn the feature off, will the system still be tracking my queries for use the next time I turn the feature on? I'm not suggesting that Ubuntu would do that *now*, but it strikes me as a slippery slope kind of thing, and they could easily justify it to themselves in the future, especially under pressure from their corporate partners.
One thing that I also think is important to remember, is that we are a set of pretty clued up power users and as such we will see problems and we will jump to justify why something is a bad idea.
I think that's really where a lot of the pushback is coming from. The typical "clued up power user" is only too aware of how such mechanisms can be used to destroy privacy, if not now, then in the future, and possibly surreptitiously. Giving big commercial entities a priveleged entry point into a free OS like Linux sets a dangerous precedent. At best it's crapware; at worst, it risks making Linux more like Windows and Mac in ways that most of us probably don't want. Corporations already have more advantages, rights, and power than any sensible society would give them. Do we really want to risk giving them yet another doorway into our lives, via an OS which was founded on the antithesis of that principal?
'Cultural sensitivities' notwithstanding, it seems to me that there's a fairly clear line between speech which is harmful and speech which is just annoying. If my speech purposely incites others to cause harm, then perhaps that speech should be proscribed. If my speech simply expresses an opinion, or makes fun of a person, a group, a religion, etc., then the person, group, or religion just needs to develop a thicker skin and/or turn a deaf ear to what I'm saying.
So to all of you fundamentalists of any stripe who have your knickers in a twist over people dissing your sacred whatever, GET OVER IT AND GET YOUR SHITTY LITTLE SENSE OF 'SACRED' ENTITLEMENT THE FUCK OUT OF MY FACE! No, the world does not owe you special treatment no matter how hard you pray, nor how fervently and sacredly and preciously you believe in your prophet, your god, your saviour, or your belly button lint. Grow up, and stop turning minor insults into end-of-the-world scenarios. Your fanaticism causes nothing but harm, and I am utterly sick of it.
A quote from the Sydney Morning Herald piece puts it best: ''Human rights are not about protecting religions; human rights are to protect humans." Personally, the closest I come to religion is to say 'Amen to that!'
I don't know what country you're from, Russia maybe, but I assume English is not your native language. In English, sentences end with a single dot, called a period.
Those three dots at the end of the sentence to which you are referring are called an ellipsis, you dolt. Look it up on Wikipedia, if you can figure out how to do so.
So, with a 45kHz carrier, vinyl is theoretically limited to 22.5kHz; anything more, and you get aliasing between the 45kHz signal and the baseband. But analog filters for playback have finite roll-off, so you have to back off some on the vinyl, and analog filters for recording also have finite roll-off, so you have to back off some more -- 12kHz sounds about right.
Disclaimer: I'm not an "audiophile"; I'm an electrical engineer.
Correction: "So, with a 45kHz carrier, vinyl encoded using CD-4 quadraphonic encoding is theoretically limited to 22.5kHz." For normal stereo audio, vinyl is indeed capable of reproduction up to and beyond 45 kHz, albeit with possibly inconsistent amplitude from pressing to pressing.
Disclaimer: I am an "audiophile", and I'm also an electronics technologist with more than 30 years of experience designing, building, and repairing analog, digital, and RF equipment.
Don't forget to add lots of harmonics to make it sound like tubes were involved. It's not High Fidelity without the characteristic tube distortions.
Enough of this 'lots of harmonics from tubes' BS. From a comment I posted in May of this year:
"By the way, in the 'tubes vs transistors' debate, good triodes have the advantage of being more intrinsically linear than transistors. This means that they require less negative feedback to tame their distortion, and often sound wonderful with NO negative feedback. The THD figures of amps built this way are often quite poor, but look at their spectra and you'll see predominantly second- and third-order, with a smooth and rapid falloff of higher order harmonics. Occasionally solid-state amps can give this kind of performance, but tubes have an easier time of it. Designing a good-sounding, (as opposed to good-measuring), audio amp, requires a lot of skill, and a lot of knowledge about distortion mechanisms and how to counter them. Unfortunately the prevailing practice in HiFi is to add more gain, throw most of it away with additional NFB, get a nice low THD figure, and call the job done. Amps designed this way generally sound like shit, if not initially, then after 20 minutes or so of listening, at which time listening fatigue sets in."
Solid-state amps, (most of which require lots of negative feedback to get anything close to a listenable output), and poorly-designed tube amps, (primarily pentode-based), are the ones that tend to have "lots of harmonics". Good triode amps have some second harmonic, a little bit of third harmonic, and not much at all in the way of higher-order harmonics. Although their THD figures may be higher, the amps sound better because they don't have the higher-order harmonics characteristic of high-negative-feedback designs.
THD is a very poor metric for audio amplifier performance. This was widely recognized in the 1940's - audio engineers such as the BBC's D.E.L. Shorter proposed calculating THD by weighting harmonics by the square, or even the cube, of their order, based on the recognition that higher-order distortion is more audible and more objectionable. But marketing forces won out, and now we have a THD metric that is very poorly correlated with actual listening preferences.
I think a lot of this talk about tube distortions comes from the guitar world, where amplifiers are designed to distort in controlled ways in order to impart a characteristic sound. Designing guitar amps and designing audio amps for home listening are very different disciplines.
Wrong, vinyl has a lower frequency cutoff (around 12kHz)
Totally false. In the quadraphonic era, the CD4 encoding system encoded the extra two channels in carrier signals that were recorded at 45 kHz. So note that not only were ultrasonic signals RECORDED on vinyl, they were also RECOVERED by the stylus and cartridge, allowing the decoder to do its job of recovering 4 audio channels.
So in reality, vinyl has a much higher frequency limit than CD audio, which is intrinsically limited to 22.05 kHz, (the Nyquist frequency), by 'virtue' of the 44.1 kHz sampling frequency.
...you're a tool if you think solid beer isn't available in can form.
It's only solid if it's frozen. I prefer my beer in a liquid state, thanks.
I just don't "get" the point of cloud apps. For occasional collaberative stuff, sure its useful to do the real-time-sharing stuff that Google allows, but for the vast majority of work I don't need that and I specifically don't want to be prevented from doing work in situations where I don't have a reliable internet connection
Personally, I agree with you one hundred percent.
Unfortunately, that thinking probably makes both of us dinosaurs. The evolving paradigm in computing is that there is no such thing as 'don't have a reliable internet connection'. Mobile Computing and The Cloud are fuelling each other's ubiquity - and our mobile devices will soon be the modern equivalent of VT100 terminals. Governments and their corporate overlords are drooling over the prospect of having near-instantaneous access to and control over everyone's everything. Cloud computing represents nothing less than a quantum leap in the concentration of power over average citizens' lives; therefore, (short of revolution), it will become overwhelmingly predominant in the next decade or so.
From the news piece on TechCrunch:
"Dice has been talking about building content and user engagement to be top of mind and more integral to professionals doing work, and if you think about SourceForge and Slashdot, it’s about user engagement to help you do your job... We don’t want to change the experience today. What will happen over time is that the Dice.com site is will operate more seamlessly connected to these sites. But the sites themselves will keep their look and feel and will run on their own... That absolutely includes editorial independence. We think that’s really key. We don’t profess to add much from an editorial standpoint. We will give the user bases on our sites and those the ability to interact with each other. Our goal here is to make them part of the overall tech and engineering experience at the company."
Translation: 'We are Borg. You will be assimilated.'
Damn. I'm gonna miss this place.
I'm sitting in a conference room right now next to a gentleman from Dice, and he's just been curious what people are saying; hasn't suggested any comments or messaging at all.... my initial impression is positive. I'm thrilled at the possibility of getting a bigger investment into Slashdot, both from an engineering perspective and an editorial perspective.
Translation: "The walls have ears, and I haven't yet figured out my bailout strategy."
Somebody please mod parent up as insightful - I can't do it because I'm part of the discussion.
Thanks!
I will never understand how the political and moneyed classes in the USA managed to convince the working man in that country that unions are the spawn of Satan.
It wasn't necessarily the political and moneyed classes that did it. I too see the necessity of unions, but I hope never to have to belong to one. Why? As a contractor who sometimes does work in factories and mines, I have seen first hand the greed, pettiness, laziness, and sense of entitlement that union shops often breed. When one union member files a grievance because an outside contractor is holding a nut into which another union member is turning a bolt, because 'a union employee should be doing that work', (even though there was no union employee immediately available to hold the nut), then unionism is going too far. When work is halted because a light bulb is burned out, (and we're talking about the screw-in kind, within easy reach), because changing the bulb is 'an electrician's job' and the electrician doesn't show up for an hour, the union isn't doing itself any favours. And when union employees *regularly* take 45 minutes to do an easy job that only requires 5 or 10 minutes even for an inexperienced person, then the union is shooting itself in the foot. In too many union shops, demonstrating efficiency, initiative, and overall competence is enough for an employee to be shunned, threatened, or even physically harmed, by his or her 'brothers' and 'sisters' - never mind the union grievance process.
Politically I am fairly far left of centre; I despise the power that corporations have and the abuses they commit, and I'm all for strict government regulation whose invasiveness increases with the size and power of the corporation. For that reason I am in favour of unions. But I also believe in an honest day's work for a day's pay, and I believe that I should be free to work as efficiently and intelligently as I can, without fear of union reprisals, whether official or unofficial. For that reason, I hate unions that abuse the power they have.
In many cases unions are their own worst enemies, pure and simple
voted today, in favor of extending the FISA Amendments Act
What government, once having acquired a type of power over its citizens, ever relinquishes it without a fight? Income tax, The Patriot Act, and on and on and on - it's all about concentration and maintenance of power, and has been for millenia. Nothing to see here, move along.
However, it may be important to keep in mind that this is a hallmark of human societal hierarchies. Then we can set aside our righteous moral indignation and keep our eyes on the prize, which is the construction of a functioning, fair, free, inclusive society that endures in spite of our natural tendencies to destroy it. We've been close on several occasions, but it keeps slipping away from us because we become complacent. What was that about bread and circuses?
All the locks in the world won't keep crooks out of your house if you don't use the locks. Your house may LOOK invulnerable, but one day sonbody's gonna try the door, find it open, and steal you blind.
The same principle applies here - using obvious and predictable 'random' code generation, and relying on people not knowing that's what you're doing, only works for so long.
And arrogant people, (and companies, and banks), who crow about how secure their systems are, are just asking for it. Serves the fuckers right; but it's too bad that credit card holders are paying the price for their creditors' arrogance.
With all major parties on board, web monitoring of all Australians appears to be inevitable.
If they're all in favour of something so draconian and so anti-freedom, are they really different parties at all? And do they really have any interest in the well being of their constituents?
Meanwhile, Apple was granted a number of new patents on Tuesday... For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
Gee, a feature so obvious and so simple that nobody except corporate 'we own everything' bastards would even think of patenting it. And the best part for Apple is, the technology already exists - it'll probably take about a day's work to make this happen, and then they'll have a monopoly on an absurdly simple and easy 'technological advancement'.
Why do we continue to accept such an obviously and fatally broken patent system? Yeah, I know 'bread and circuses' is the correct answer, and it pisses me off.