A lack, maybe not, but they don't support everything, and for most people they won't be willing to buy a new card for Linux compatability.
Also, as another poster here said: we really do want manufacturer drivers, so we have a throat to slit when it fails to work, or when there's some obscure conflict.
I'd worry about the Waves authorization method breaking; last set I used was still dongle-authorized, I don't know if its changed since then, but its probably something equally noxious.
First, you need good A/Ds if you have *any* external instrumentation. If you're using hardware effects (and pros do) you'll need good D/As as well. I have *severe* doubts that the free plugins available will necessarily sound as good as some of the really nice ones from people like Waves or Universal Audio, and many still won't use those plugins, preferring to use outboard hardware (how much is an LA-1 going for these days? Anyone? Bueller?) And those plugins go for damn near as much as the hardware they replace. You can count on a couple grand here; even if you wind up using RNC's for all your compressors, they're still gonna cost you a couple hundred per, and you need more than one if you're doing multitrack.
Many studios provide some instruments to customers; that cost isn't going to change.
You'll need outboard compressors, and outboard mixing, in order to do real multi-tracking (especially of vocals), because you'll have serious dynamic range issues trying to track them without at least a little bit of compression available. You could, I suppose, go straight into pre-amped A/D inputs, but then again, that hardware isn't cheap either.
Good monitoring hardware is important, and you'll need to spend around $1000, minimum, to achieve acceptable results. Most studios will spend more, acquiring multiple pairs of monitors in different price ranges, as well as some typical "home" speakers for final checkout.
And of course, we're forgetting the most expensive, most often forgotten, and in many ways most important part of a studio - the room itself. It can cost a metric ass-tonne in order to properly treat a room, and god forbid you have to knock down/rebuild/move walls to make it sound-tight and to eliminate nasty room modes.
Sure, if you want to do a computer-only studio, which is pretty much useful only for totally synthetic music (you've pretty much limited yourself to non-vocal electronic music with no real instruments and no outboard anything), you could use a Linux solution with spare hardware, but most of that sort of studio wind up spending a bunch on their computer because *everything* has to happen inside of their computer and they don't have enough processing for it all to happen at once.
$50,000 is a reasonable figure for a low-to-mid end studio; of that, exactly how much is the OS, computer software that could be replaced with Free, and computer hardware (not audio hardware) cost? About $5,000, tops.
A band who books a decent tour will play almost every night.
Now, for an example, I've played more than a few small shows. Generally, 15-30 people would show up, pay a door charge of $4-$8, to see 3 or 4 bands. The bands usually get about $20-$50 apiece, depending on attendance, price, if they're out of towners (get an extra cut for gas) and if they're headlining. That's because most clubs don't take a big cut of the door, because they don't make their money on the door - they make their money on selling $4 beers and $7 booze. Small touring bands usually rely on a friend or a fan to give them a free place to crash, so their basic expenses are food and travel.
If you're a band who's known enough to draw more people and to headline shows, it *is* possible to make a living touring. Not a good living, and not a living I personally would want to have, but you can live off it.
And small bands don't pay people to set their shit up, they just carry it their own damn selves.
Mach 1 = exactly the speed of sound in the medium of travel. Always.
This is useful because the way the medium flows changes significantly at the speed of sound - you have subsonic flow (what airliners fly in), transonic flow (what no one flies in because its ugly), and supersonic flow (what jet fighters fly in). There's also hypersonic flow, but its not as well defined a transition, and has a lot in common with supersonic flow.
Anyway. Mach numbers are useful because they're a similarity number; so much of flight is dependent on the aerodynamic properties of the flow, and equal Mach numbers implies equal aerodynamic flow properties, even if the actual atmosphere is different.
A jet pilot at 10km will produce a sonic boom at > Mach 1. A jet pilot at sea level will produce a sonic boom at > Mach 1. Any object at any altitude will produce a sonic boom if its moving faster than Mach 1. That's why the Mach number is useful.
What about those of us who don't like the available multi-protocol clients? What about those of us who don't want to have multiple accounts, but would occasionally see a use in having an account with another service?
Really, there *is* incentive to allow this - the theoretical reason for IM to be free is that the ads in the official clients support it monetarily. Official clients are not multi-protocol. Right now, AOL loses money (ad views) when someone wants to be able to message both AOL and MSN at the same time, because they stop using the official client. If they implemented a gateway, most people wouldn't feel particularly inclined to grab a multi-protocol client, and many would stick with the official client. (Note: many meaning many IM users, not many/.ers - this is a very different crowd from that majority).
Eventually inter-network communication is going to happen. The resistance is just silly at this point.
The French were just an easy example; however, when your own press says your intelligence agency routinely eavesdrops on business conversations and distributes data to recipients including both government agencies and French companies, it's a pretty good bet they do in fact commit industrial espionage. The French do it. The Germans do it. The Israelis, South Koreans, Japanese, all of them do it. The US probably does it too.
Business travelers talk business in the air. There have been a lot of cases of industrial espionage, either accused or proven, where the assumption is government agencies were involved (Boeing winglet design stolen for Aerospatiale, Tu-144 copying Concorde, French black-bag and bugging jobs against IBM's euro offices). It is documented.
I have nothing against the French. But I admit my country's faults when they're legit - do you?
(oh, and fuck you. I'm a liberal anti-Bush voter from an urban area who uses mass transportation, can't stand SUVs, believes in strong privacy rights, human rights, and civil rights. I can't possibly watch Fox News because I don't have cable TV. Don't ad hominem me just because your country happens to be one of the prime examples of governmental espionage feeding business intel to corporate interests.)
I hope your governments will protect your privacy, but I don't care if mine does in order to protect me - I care if they break *my* privacy, but not that of a non-citizen. I assume most of the world is the same way - I certainly don't hear a whole lot of French people complaining about the well-documented practice of French airlines assisting French corporations in industrial espionage.
Yes, but nobody in financials gives a shit about P/S, because P/S can be huge while a company is tanking.
P/E is the ratio people actually use. While grandparent may have correctly stated what he was talking about (P/S ratio), his attribution that RH's is good is a loaf of crap.
I think he'd be in the clear, as he obviously did not write the compliant site with the intent of blackmail/extortion (the issue you're thinking of).
However, I don't believe its illegal anyway to say "You're committing an illegal act; I can sell you a way to be legal." Even if you're the one reporting the illegal act. Blackmail implies "Pay me money or I'll tell about action A" - if he tells first, whether or not he gets money, its good evidence that his intent is not to blackmail but to correct the problem.
IANAL, and the preceding is sure as hell not legal advice.
It's silly, but yes, if a blind person wants to go to the movies we let them.
The problem is that in the UK, it is LAW that websites be accessible... just like in the US its law that buildings be accessible. Is it silly that swimming pools have to be accessible for quadriplegics? Sure. But they have to be anyway.
You're still talking about swapping out hundreds of pounds of batteries; even if they're designed for the swap I don't really see that happening all that easily. Lith-ion batteries have approached 150 WH/kg energy density in test batteries. Assuming we want to drive the same range as a full tank of gas (call it 300 miles), and using the figure of 160 WH/mi (which is correct for an electrified Geo Metro), you wind up with the requirement for 300 kg of battery. Using lead-acid batteries like most EVs currently do, you'd wind up with 900kg. Swapping out 700 pounds of equipment that frequently is a non-starter.
Also, charge-discharge cycles - batteries fail after a few thousand, flywheels see no degradation after hundreds of thousands.
The last point I would make is related to this image. You need to worry about energy storage and power storage. Batteries are okay at energy storage, but miserable at power storage.
Flywheels do have problems (eddy induction, vacuum containment, magnetic bearings not being perfect, etc) but are certainly likely to be as reasonable an option for ZEV as batteries are.
I know this is hard to believe, but we have these EXTREMELY efficient devices for turning rotational motion into electrical energy. They're called electrical generators. They're an electrical motor run in reverse.
Flywheel -> generator yields electrical energy at ~90% efficiency. Electrical -> motor yields car motion at ~90% efficiency.
Companies would be much more likely to invest in satellites if its potential operational life of 20+ years instead of 12 if everything goes alright.
Actually, probably not; it's like computers. A 12 year old satellite is already obsolote; why would they bother trying to fix it when they could stash it into an inactive orbit and launch a new one?
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According to ALSA's own page, they don't support my professional sound card.
A lack, maybe not, but they don't support everything, and for most people they won't be willing to buy a new card for Linux compatability.
Also, as another poster here said: we really do want manufacturer drivers, so we have a throat to slit when it fails to work, or when there's some obscure conflict.
I'd worry about the Waves authorization method breaking; last set I used was still dongle-authorized, I don't know if its changed since then, but its probably something equally noxious.
Your impression is wrong.
First, you need good A/Ds if you have *any* external instrumentation. If you're using hardware effects (and pros do) you'll need good D/As as well. I have *severe* doubts that the free plugins available will necessarily sound as good as some of the really nice ones from people like Waves or Universal Audio, and many still won't use those plugins, preferring to use outboard hardware (how much is an LA-1 going for these days? Anyone? Bueller?) And those plugins go for damn near as much as the hardware they replace. You can count on a couple grand here; even if you wind up using RNC's for all your compressors, they're still gonna cost you a couple hundred per, and you need more than one if you're doing multitrack.
Many studios provide some instruments to customers; that cost isn't going to change.
You'll need outboard compressors, and outboard mixing, in order to do real multi-tracking (especially of vocals), because you'll have serious dynamic range issues trying to track them without at least a little bit of compression available. You could, I suppose, go straight into pre-amped A/D inputs, but then again, that hardware isn't cheap either.
Good monitoring hardware is important, and you'll need to spend around $1000, minimum, to achieve acceptable results. Most studios will spend more, acquiring multiple pairs of monitors in different price ranges, as well as some typical "home" speakers for final checkout.
And of course, we're forgetting the most expensive, most often forgotten, and in many ways most important part of a studio - the room itself. It can cost a metric ass-tonne in order to properly treat a room, and god forbid you have to knock down/rebuild/move walls to make it sound-tight and to eliminate nasty room modes.
Sure, if you want to do a computer-only studio, which is pretty much useful only for totally synthetic music (you've pretty much limited yourself to non-vocal electronic music with no real instruments and no outboard anything), you could use a Linux solution with spare hardware, but most of that sort of studio wind up spending a bunch on their computer because *everything* has to happen inside of their computer and they don't have enough processing for it all to happen at once.
$50,000 is a reasonable figure for a low-to-mid end studio; of that, exactly how much is the OS, computer software that could be replaced with Free, and computer hardware (not audio hardware) cost? About $5,000, tops.
If you do that, then why do you need the kind of timing ST owners blather on about? There are outboard sequencers that would do you just fine.
I'm gonna guess that it means building an RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) using 1/4 the plutonium used in current designs.
A band who books a decent tour will play almost every night.
Now, for an example, I've played more than a few small shows. Generally, 15-30 people would show up, pay a door charge of $4-$8, to see 3 or 4 bands. The bands usually get about $20-$50 apiece, depending on attendance, price, if they're out of towners (get an extra cut for gas) and if they're headlining. That's because most clubs don't take a big cut of the door, because they don't make their money on the door - they make their money on selling $4 beers and $7 booze. Small touring bands usually rely on a friend or a fan to give them a free place to crash, so their basic expenses are food and travel.
If you're a band who's known enough to draw more people and to headline shows, it *is* possible to make a living touring. Not a good living, and not a living I personally would want to have, but you can live off it.
And small bands don't pay people to set their shit up, they just carry it their own damn selves.
Recording labels, not recording studios. There is a big difference between the two.
Mach 1 = exactly the speed of sound in the medium of travel. Always.
This is useful because the way the medium flows changes significantly at the speed of sound - you have subsonic flow (what airliners fly in), transonic flow (what no one flies in because its ugly), and supersonic flow (what jet fighters fly in). There's also hypersonic flow, but its not as well defined a transition, and has a lot in common with supersonic flow.
Anyway. Mach numbers are useful because they're a similarity number; so much of flight is dependent on the aerodynamic properties of the flow, and equal Mach numbers implies equal aerodynamic flow properties, even if the actual atmosphere is different.
A jet pilot at 10km will produce a sonic boom at > Mach 1. A jet pilot at sea level will produce a sonic boom at > Mach 1. Any object at any altitude will produce a sonic boom if its moving faster than Mach 1. That's why the Mach number is useful.
What about those of us who don't like the available multi-protocol clients? What about those of us who don't want to have multiple accounts, but would occasionally see a use in having an account with another service?
/.ers - this is a very different crowd from that majority).
Really, there *is* incentive to allow this - the theoretical reason for IM to be free is that the ads in the official clients support it monetarily. Official clients are not multi-protocol. Right now, AOL loses money (ad views) when someone wants to be able to message both AOL and MSN at the same time, because they stop using the official client. If they implemented a gateway, most people wouldn't feel particularly inclined to grab a multi-protocol client, and many would stick with the official client. (Note: many meaning many IM users, not many
Eventually inter-network communication is going to happen. The resistance is just silly at this point.
The point is that the holy grail is just that: an AIM user sending a Yahoo user a message without having to get a Yahoo account.
Kinda the same way a Cingular user can text message a Verizon user without buying a Verizon phone.
The French were just an easy example; however, when your own press says your intelligence agency routinely eavesdrops on business conversations and distributes data to recipients including both government agencies and French companies, it's a pretty good bet they do in fact commit industrial espionage. The French do it. The Germans do it. The Israelis, South Koreans, Japanese, all of them do it. The US probably does it too.
Business travelers talk business in the air. There have been a lot of cases of industrial espionage, either accused or proven, where the assumption is government agencies were involved (Boeing winglet design stolen for Aerospatiale, Tu-144 copying Concorde, French black-bag and bugging jobs against IBM's euro offices). It is documented.
I have nothing against the French. But I admit my country's faults when they're legit - do you?
(oh, and fuck you. I'm a liberal anti-Bush voter from an urban area who uses mass transportation, can't stand SUVs, believes in strong privacy rights, human rights, and civil rights. I can't possibly watch Fox News because I don't have cable TV. Don't ad hominem me just because your country happens to be one of the prime examples of governmental espionage feeding business intel to corporate interests.)
Honestly, yeah.
I hope your governments will protect your privacy, but I don't care if mine does in order to protect me - I care if they break *my* privacy, but not that of a non-citizen. I assume most of the world is the same way - I certainly don't hear a whole lot of French people complaining about the well-documented practice of French airlines assisting French corporations in industrial espionage.
You're completely right, and I'm on crack. Japanese crack, at that.
Probably not, considering that the G5 is based on the Power4 architecture.
Just a minor issue:
Motorola didn't kill PPC. They killed desktop PPC. They still make a crapload of embedded-class PPCs, and make them reasonably well.
General Public Lawsuits. ;)
Yes, but nobody in financials gives a shit about P/S, because P/S can be huge while a company is tanking.
P/E is the ratio people actually use. While grandparent may have correctly stated what he was talking about (P/S ratio), his attribution that RH's is good is a loaf of crap.
I think he'd be in the clear, as he obviously did not write the compliant site with the intent of blackmail/extortion (the issue you're thinking of).
However, I don't believe its illegal anyway to say "You're committing an illegal act; I can sell you a way to be legal." Even if you're the one reporting the illegal act. Blackmail implies "Pay me money or I'll tell about action A" - if he tells first, whether or not he gets money, its good evidence that his intent is not to blackmail but to correct the problem.
IANAL, and the preceding is sure as hell not legal advice.
It's silly, but yes, if a blind person wants to go to the movies we let them.
The problem is that in the UK, it is LAW that websites be accessible... just like in the US its law that buildings be accessible. Is it silly that swimming pools have to be accessible for quadriplegics? Sure. But they have to be anyway.
DMCA, not DCMA.
I can safely expect my violin not to emit strange odors, not to grope me, and not to make me taste onions when I play it.
I can't safely expect my chess program not to annoy me with music.
You're still talking about swapping out hundreds of pounds of batteries; even if they're designed for the swap I don't really see that happening all that easily. Lith-ion batteries have approached 150 WH/kg energy density in test batteries. Assuming we want to drive the same range as a full tank of gas (call it 300 miles), and using the figure of 160 WH/mi (which is correct for an electrified Geo Metro), you wind up with the requirement for 300 kg of battery. Using lead-acid batteries like most EVs currently do, you'd wind up with 900kg. Swapping out 700 pounds of equipment that frequently is a non-starter.
Also, charge-discharge cycles - batteries fail after a few thousand, flywheels see no degradation after hundreds of thousands.
The last point I would make is related to this image. You need to worry about energy storage and power storage. Batteries are okay at energy storage, but miserable at power storage.
Flywheels do have problems (eddy induction, vacuum containment, magnetic bearings not being perfect, etc) but are certainly likely to be as reasonable an option for ZEV as batteries are.
I know this is hard to believe, but we have these EXTREMELY efficient devices for turning rotational motion into electrical energy. They're called electrical generators. They're an electrical motor run in reverse.
Flywheel -> generator yields electrical energy at ~90% efficiency.
Electrical -> motor yields car motion at ~90% efficiency.
Yielding a drive efficiency of ~80%.
Both of those would be very impressive, but I suspect you meant to say 100km and 600km.
Anyway. Sub orbital is a lot easier than orbital flight, is the real answer.
Actually, probably not; it's like computers. A 12 year old satellite is already obsolote; why would they bother trying to fix it when they could stash it into an inactive orbit and launch a new one?