NAS drives may actually be slightly different, but a large portion of stuff hitting the market now is just marketing.
Really? A surveillance drive? How about the WD Red vs Red Pro with a staggering change in warranty and some garbage statistic like support for being in a system with 8 drives or more. So the Purple surveillance drive is the black drive with slightly lower power usage? Wait and "all frame" to minimise errors in saving video? If a HDD has an error in saving anything it's going back to the vendor.
Is optical audio dying? I have to ask, was it ever alive?
I have an extension to that: Should it have ever been alive?
The standard which had limited distance, limited performance (20bit max vs 24bit standard for AES3 using S/PDIF), implemented with cheap plastic cables, using cheap LED based transmitters, and even cheaper receivers all to carry a signal that also is used to clock the digital parts of downstream equipment meaning the quality of the signal was important, rather than just the ability to send a 1 and 0.
It should have never existed. The AES3 standard was far superior. The cost to implement was equal (buffered driver + BNC vs dedicated powered transmitter / receiver electronics), and if it was isolation you wanted a cheap pulse transformer should have been the choice.
It was conceived at a time of an ideal future where our entire lives would be dominated by light for everything. I often wonder how we got to 1000baseTX networking at a time where people were saying we'll never get beyond 10mbps without fibre.
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that: 1. Grounding between digital and analogue are isolated somewhere in the equipment. Often they are not leading to noise coupling or better still that wonderful ground loop hum appearing directly on the analogue output. 2. The clock source of the digital components is derived via a PLL locked to the source signal. This jitters the clock and decimates the performance of the DACs, again this is both measurable and audible on the output.
Mind you Toslink is not known for its quality in the latter department. The ideal scenario involved using coax or the professional AES3 equivalent interface and transformer isolating it in the equipment itself. However in cheaper consumer gear it was often the case where simply the act of plugging in something like a computer via coax could cause a measurable effect on the DAC output, even if it wasn't the source selected... to say nothing of the quality of the recovered clock from a PC.
you need runs of at least several tens of metres before the signal quality loss from electric signals
Wow false. The standard itself lists a max distance of 10m, both for optical and coax. For anything larger the cables are too lossy and the noise starts becoming a problem and you should use an AES3 interface instead which has both buffered and isolated I/O, optional balanced signalling and a far higher signal voltage.
Erm the coax connector is digital, in fact the exact same digital data as optical.
Coax noise affecting the digital signal? Not Gonna happen.
Sorry but you're quite wrong about this. The signal may be exactly the same but the parent was talking about isolation and interference. Groundloops induce noise on signals, especially if the source is something like a PC. Having the cable connected vs disconnected is clearly measurable on the DAC / Receiver. In once case I even had a cheap receiver that woud lose lock on another signal if certain sources were connected via coax.
This *shouldn't* be a problem as any receiver worth its salt should be isolating the coax inputs via a pulse transformer, but outside of high-end DACs that practice was rare. Most receivers took grounds from the coax and connected them directly to the digital grounds of their DACs.
Why does it matter for a digital signal? Well in most cases the receiver would recover the clock via a PLL locked to the the incoming signal, so any deviation from perfect on the incoming signal at best could produce a measurable penalty on the analogue output, if the grounding wasn't setup perfectly it could introduce noise from the source, and at worst it could cause locking problems.
The same applies to electromagnetic interference which is why the professional AES3 implementation is typically done via buffered outputs, balanced signalling (XLR connectors), and transformer isolated, even though it is still carrying the same S/PDIF signal.
Digital optical is utterly inferior to HDMI Audio. It only supports 2 channels uncompressed, anything other than that. 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 is compressed.
More so than you are letting on with that information. For many people the desire to carry Dolby TrueHD or some other stuff like that is not interesting. But even then the digital optical is inferior to any other interface. Put a scope on a typical TOSLINK input and you'll see nasty looking barely square waves. This wouldn't be significant if equipment didn't then use the edges of these to derive the clock signal causing it to jitter back and forth.
The only benefit it provided over its cabled brethren was isolation but that can also be achieved with a simple and far better performing pulse transformer.
The standard never got a foothold in professional audio.
Kodi is the name given to a black box that people buy. It's the name that flashes up on bootup. All your talk of extensible blah addon blah is meaningless.
Oh she's always been. Fortunately she just went overseas and can't figure out how to work Skype on her laptop so I'm free of that horror show for a while.
Oh... Just noticed the exclamation mark.... A movie called Mother!... okay carry on.
Oh yes Google search is the only benefit we have received. To say nothing of:
Competition in the mobile smartphone marketplace Mapping Navigation Realtime traffic analysis of cities Competition in the tablet marketplace Competition in the cheap laptop marketplace Competition in the browser market place, something which Google specifically emphasised the move towards standards compliance as well as kicked off the race for faster Javascript interpretation. Before Google our email inboxes were small, Speaking of email and standards, it was Google that was a big driver for email security, DKIM as well as a myriad of new ways of fighting spam both in email form and in the form of a CAPTCHA that worked. Google were the ones who created an office suite in a browser suitable enough that I don't even recommend people install LibreOffice anymore unless they actually need a standalone offline browser.
I'm tired, it's 11pm and I'm off to bed, and I still rattled this list off the top of my head of how Google has ENORMOUSLY improved our lives. I'm sure I could think of others if my brain was actually engaged./Post brought to you on the browser that kicked off the internet speed war. You can thank Google that my reply renders so fast on your screen.
You preface your post with "becoming" implying an ever increasing change, but all your examples detail an ~5-10 year status quo. 3
Google has always tracked visitors.
Android has always always been beholden to the vendor (not the carrier, that is something that seems uniquely American at this point, and side note that Google has put effort into separating the security update process from the core features specifically to make it easier for vendors to provide security updates).
How can you deliver a computer to a customer when you know what you are delivering is spyware?
Because users don't care, and certain level of implicit spying is trusted by users until the result of said spying actually has a negative impact on them?
You talk of abuse, but I can't help feel that our lives have been nothing but improved by these companies. If I'm being abused, I certainly don't feel it.
Yes my Linux OS isn't open source either because I have a binary Nvidia driver and run Chrome as the browser.
Please learn the difference between the OS specifically advertised with tie-ins to a specific service that companies are shipping on mobile phones, and the Open Source project that has given rise to a number of spin-off tablets by third parties is actively in development with the source code freely available and distributed under an approved license.
It will make your comment sound less like the ramblings of someone who's brain is on hiatus.
As it is, everybody was chintzy all the way around at the expense of the safety of the flying public.
At some point I would hope that people stop throwing money at the already ludicrously safe experience of travelling via aircraft and instead spend those savings on maybe making my car drive to the airport safer given I'm far more likely to die there on the road than in a aircraft crash.
And that goes double, triple and then some for driving or just living in a city like Kuala Lumpur.
I do. I also do other risky things like drive a car to work, and go scuba diving. The trick is that I manage the risk.
Would I chew gum found in the street? Well maybe if I ran a lab that was capable of testing for dangerous organsims, but then it would likely still taste like shit. At least a USB stick is useful.
You're making a lot of assumptions about the actions of plugging in a USB stick.
It's like saying that given the odds of people dying in a car accident only an idiot would get in a car. You ignore many variables, many risks, many controls, and by simplifying such a complex action into a single accusative soundbite your original submission had every reason to be edited and have that line removed.
Everyone who uses encryption uses it in a way that would be considered paranoid by normal people.
You have a dim view of normal people. There are plenty of normal people who consider encryption in its most basic form as meaning "not wanting others to see my personal files". That isn't paranoid behavior and few would consider it as such.
But then when you start talking about layering encryption, embedding hidden volumes in primary volumes for plausible deniability, using software that intentionally doesn't change the last modified date of encrypted archives to hide actions, you'll quickly get considered paranoid by normal people and nerds alike.
Irreversible actions here are based on a system level not based on someone looking over your screen. It is reversible in that you can quickly close the window and get right back to where you were with no change at all on your system.
Now I'm going to click preview, re-read what I wrote, and then confirm my post because Slashdot doesn't let me edit or delete.
Not only that, but being blocked in the UK means there's very little point in providing links in the first place, not just based on local traffic rankings.
If a firewall manufacturer didn't let you block arbitrary ports, would you be ok with it?
Depends on the manufacturer. There isn't a single computer user anywhere in the world that hasn't placed some kind of "trust" in others when it comes to operating their incredibly complex machines. In this I include the likes of RMS who I will tell you right now has put a lot of faith in the trust that others made software and hardware he uses that isn't nefarious.
The only thing that is variable is the amount of trust, and that is typically based on past performance and trust worthy actions. Hurrah Purism increased their trustworthiness factor by using coreboot to disable something in the CPU which (personally) I didn't consider untrustworthy. But you know what, given my skill level at auditing them, I'm just going to have to take their word for it that they did what they did and haven't dropped another bomb in there somewhere.
Just like how I take Mozilla's word that the browser I'm currently using matches the code they put on their site, and how much faith (not trust, but faith) I put into the general process that is Open Source's "many eyes" principle.
To get back to your question: Yes I'm okay with it. I have no trust in my firewall. The black boxes that connect our networks together rank among the lowest of the equipment I trust. It's marginally above the Chinese IoT garbage. What I do trust is that port scanning from outside shows that ports appear to be blocked and that defence in depth means that if you have access to my network you have additional hurdles to get by.
And Speaking of hurdles, the amount needed to actually get in is one of the reasons I don't really give a shit if IME is actually a backdoor even if I didn't trust Intel in its designed purpose and even if I didn't in the past actually specifically part with extra money to buy server motherboards that actually include the features in question.
Does it matter? Up until about 30 years ago data wasn't even a thing and the world made plenty of good and bad decisions anyway.
So you admit that in the past we made bad decisions, you don't know if those ratios have changed, and you question if it matters?
The answer to your own question is a quite resounding maybe. Given also how decision that pits the majority of a nation against its government invariably lead to severe conflict I would also say, yes, yes it does matter.
How about declared dead after they couldn't find the plane for over 9 months and no one had established contact?
This article is a load of crap. It's an example of how these data models have failed to achieve anything useful. Firstly after almost 2 years they announced that they were looking in the wrong place: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/... and also that they were confident that after spending $200m the plane was not in the search area they established. https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Slashdot Mirror
No it doesn't. It says you submitted it.
NAS drives may actually be slightly different, but a large portion of stuff hitting the market now is just marketing.
Really? A surveillance drive? How about the WD Red vs Red Pro with a staggering change in warranty and some garbage statistic like support for being in a system with 8 drives or more. So the Purple surveillance drive is the black drive with slightly lower power usage? Wait and "all frame" to minimise errors in saving video? If a HDD has an error in saving anything it's going back to the vendor.
Is optical audio dying? I have to ask, was it ever alive?
I have an extension to that: Should it have ever been alive?
The standard which had limited distance, limited performance (20bit max vs 24bit standard for AES3 using S/PDIF), implemented with cheap plastic cables, using cheap LED based transmitters, and even cheaper receivers all to carry a signal that also is used to clock the digital parts of downstream equipment meaning the quality of the signal was important, rather than just the ability to send a 1 and 0.
It should have never existed. The AES3 standard was far superior. The cost to implement was equal (buffered driver + BNC vs dedicated powered transmitter / receiver electronics), and if it was isolation you wanted a cheap pulse transformer should have been the choice.
It was conceived at a time of an ideal future where our entire lives would be dominated by light for everything. I often wonder how we got to 1000baseTX networking at a time where people were saying we'll never get beyond 10mbps without fibre.
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that:
1. Grounding between digital and analogue are isolated somewhere in the equipment. Often they are not leading to noise coupling or better still that wonderful ground loop hum appearing directly on the analogue output.
2. The clock source of the digital components is derived via a PLL locked to the source signal. This jitters the clock and decimates the performance of the DACs, again this is both measurable and audible on the output.
Mind you Toslink is not known for its quality in the latter department. The ideal scenario involved using coax or the professional AES3 equivalent interface and transformer isolating it in the equipment itself. However in cheaper consumer gear it was often the case where simply the act of plugging in something like a computer via coax could cause a measurable effect on the DAC output, even if it wasn't the source selected ... to say nothing of the quality of the recovered clock from a PC.
you need runs of at least several tens of metres before the signal quality loss from electric signals
Wow false. The standard itself lists a max distance of 10m, both for optical and coax. For anything larger the cables are too lossy and the noise starts becoming a problem and you should use an AES3 interface instead which has both buffered and isolated I/O, optional balanced signalling and a far higher signal voltage.
Erm the coax connector is digital, in fact the exact same digital data as optical.
Coax noise affecting the digital signal? Not Gonna happen.
Sorry but you're quite wrong about this. The signal may be exactly the same but the parent was talking about isolation and interference. Groundloops induce noise on signals, especially if the source is something like a PC. Having the cable connected vs disconnected is clearly measurable on the DAC / Receiver. In once case I even had a cheap receiver that woud lose lock on another signal if certain sources were connected via coax.
This *shouldn't* be a problem as any receiver worth its salt should be isolating the coax inputs via a pulse transformer, but outside of high-end DACs that practice was rare. Most receivers took grounds from the coax and connected them directly to the digital grounds of their DACs.
Why does it matter for a digital signal? Well in most cases the receiver would recover the clock via a PLL locked to the the incoming signal, so any deviation from perfect on the incoming signal at best could produce a measurable penalty on the analogue output, if the grounding wasn't setup perfectly it could introduce noise from the source, and at worst it could cause locking problems.
The same applies to electromagnetic interference which is why the professional AES3 implementation is typically done via buffered outputs, balanced signalling (XLR connectors), and transformer isolated, even though it is still carrying the same S/PDIF signal.
Digital optical is utterly inferior to HDMI Audio. It only supports 2 channels uncompressed, anything other than that. 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 is compressed.
More so than you are letting on with that information. For many people the desire to carry Dolby TrueHD or some other stuff like that is not interesting. But even then the digital optical is inferior to any other interface. Put a scope on a typical TOSLINK input and you'll see nasty looking barely square waves. This wouldn't be significant if equipment didn't then use the edges of these to derive the clock signal causing it to jitter back and forth.
The only benefit it provided over its cabled brethren was isolation but that can also be achieved with a simple and far better performing pulse transformer.
The standard never got a foothold in professional audio.
Except that there is so little variation that it is still a bigger problem.
Authors may know, the general public doesn't which is kind of the point. As far as everyone is concerned Kodi is now considered a pirate box.
I would LOVE to have a Netflix plugin that works with Kodi
There already is one in the nightly. Expect a proper working plugin with the next major release version.
Kodi is an extensible media player.
Kodi is the name given to a black box that people buy. It's the name that flashes up on bootup. All your talk of extensible blah addon blah is meaningless.
Oh she's always been. Fortunately she just went overseas and can't figure out how to work Skype on her laptop so I'm free of that horror show for a while.
Oh ... Just noticed the exclamation mark. ... A movie called Mother!... okay carry on.
Oh yes Google search is the only benefit we have received. To say nothing of:
Competition in the mobile smartphone marketplace
Mapping
Navigation
Realtime traffic analysis of cities
Competition in the tablet marketplace
Competition in the cheap laptop marketplace
Competition in the browser market place, something which Google specifically emphasised the move towards standards compliance as well as kicked off the race for faster Javascript interpretation.
Before Google our email inboxes were small,
Speaking of email and standards, it was Google that was a big driver for email security, DKIM as well as a myriad of new ways of fighting spam both in email form and in the form of a CAPTCHA that worked.
Google were the ones who created an office suite in a browser suitable enough that I don't even recommend people install LibreOffice anymore unless they actually need a standalone offline browser.
I'm tired, it's 11pm and I'm off to bed, and I still rattled this list off the top of my head of how Google has ENORMOUSLY improved our lives. I'm sure I could think of others if my brain was actually engaged. /Post brought to you on the browser that kicked off the internet speed war. You can thank Google that my reply renders so fast on your screen.
Most people figure they already have that covered by using a password
You're right. Especially for things like USB sticks where ones with built in password protection are already seeing a rise in popularity.
Google is becoming more and more abusive
You preface your post with "becoming" implying an ever increasing change, but all your examples detail an ~5-10 year status quo. 3
Google has always tracked visitors.
Android has always always been beholden to the vendor (not the carrier, that is something that seems uniquely American at this point, and side note that Google has put effort into separating the security update process from the core features specifically to make it easier for vendors to provide security updates).
How can you deliver a computer to a customer when you know what you are delivering is spyware?
Because users don't care, and certain level of implicit spying is trusted by users until the result of said spying actually has a negative impact on them?
You talk of abuse, but I can't help feel that our lives have been nothing but improved by these companies. If I'm being abused, I certainly don't feel it.
Yes my Linux OS isn't open source either because I have a binary Nvidia driver and run Chrome as the browser.
Please learn the difference between the OS specifically advertised with tie-ins to a specific service that companies are shipping on mobile phones, and the Open Source project that has given rise to a number of spin-off tablets by third parties is actively in development with the source code freely available and distributed under an approved license.
It will make your comment sound less like the ramblings of someone who's brain is on hiatus.
Requiring a password and requiring confirmation for an action that has no lasting effect are not the same thing.
As it is, everybody was chintzy all the way around at the expense of the safety of the flying public.
At some point I would hope that people stop throwing money at the already ludicrously safe experience of travelling via aircraft and instead spend those savings on maybe making my car drive to the airport safer given I'm far more likely to die there on the road than in a aircraft crash.
And that goes double, triple and then some for driving or just living in a city like Kuala Lumpur.
I do. I also do other risky things like drive a car to work, and go scuba diving. The trick is that I manage the risk.
Would I chew gum found in the street? Well maybe if I ran a lab that was capable of testing for dangerous organsims, but then it would likely still taste like shit. At least a USB stick is useful.
You're making a lot of assumptions about the actions of plugging in a USB stick.
It's like saying that given the odds of people dying in a car accident only an idiot would get in a car. You ignore many variables, many risks, many controls, and by simplifying such a complex action into a single accusative soundbite your original submission had every reason to be edited and have that line removed.
Everyone who uses encryption uses it in a way that would be considered paranoid by normal people.
You have a dim view of normal people. There are plenty of normal people who consider encryption in its most basic form as meaning "not wanting others to see my personal files". That isn't paranoid behavior and few would consider it as such.
But then when you start talking about layering encryption, embedding hidden volumes in primary volumes for plausible deniability, using software that intentionally doesn't change the last modified date of encrypted archives to hide actions, you'll quickly get considered paranoid by normal people and nerds alike.
if someone is watching your screen
Irreversible actions here are based on a system level not based on someone looking over your screen. It is reversible in that you can quickly close the window and get right back to where you were with no change at all on your system.
Now I'm going to click preview, re-read what I wrote, and then confirm my post because Slashdot doesn't let me edit or delete.
Not only that, but being blocked in the UK means there's very little point in providing links in the first place, not just based on local traffic rankings.
If a firewall manufacturer didn't let you block arbitrary ports, would you be ok with it?
Depends on the manufacturer. There isn't a single computer user anywhere in the world that hasn't placed some kind of "trust" in others when it comes to operating their incredibly complex machines. In this I include the likes of RMS who I will tell you right now has put a lot of faith in the trust that others made software and hardware he uses that isn't nefarious.
The only thing that is variable is the amount of trust, and that is typically based on past performance and trust worthy actions. Hurrah Purism increased their trustworthiness factor by using coreboot to disable something in the CPU which (personally) I didn't consider untrustworthy. But you know what, given my skill level at auditing them, I'm just going to have to take their word for it that they did what they did and haven't dropped another bomb in there somewhere.
Just like how I take Mozilla's word that the browser I'm currently using matches the code they put on their site, and how much faith (not trust, but faith) I put into the general process that is Open Source's "many eyes" principle.
To get back to your question:
Yes I'm okay with it. I have no trust in my firewall. The black boxes that connect our networks together rank among the lowest of the equipment I trust. It's marginally above the Chinese IoT garbage. What I do trust is that port scanning from outside shows that ports appear to be blocked and that defence in depth means that if you have access to my network you have additional hurdles to get by.
And Speaking of hurdles, the amount needed to actually get in is one of the reasons I don't really give a shit if IME is actually a backdoor even if I didn't trust Intel in its designed purpose and even if I didn't in the past actually specifically part with extra money to buy server motherboards that actually include the features in question.
Does it matter? Up until about 30 years ago data wasn't even a thing and the world made plenty of good and bad decisions anyway.
So you admit that in the past we made bad decisions, you don't know if those ratios have changed, and you question if it matters?
The answer to your own question is a quite resounding maybe. Given also how decision that pits the majority of a nation against its government invariably lead to severe conflict I would also say, yes, yes it does matter.
How about declared dead after they couldn't find the plane for over 9 months and no one had established contact?
This article is a load of crap. It's an example of how these data models have failed to achieve anything useful. Firstly after almost 2 years they announced that they were looking in the wrong place: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/... and also that they were confident that after spending $200m the plane was not in the search area they established. https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Good work big data!