And what's more - almost all records were mastered (two generations!) from analog tape, where the magnetic particles and the tape speed physics interact to give you quantized audio with random thermal noise inserted - in short - a fairly lumpy recording environment that in many cases can not reproduce frequencies anywhere near as well as a redbook audio CD, yet the fanatics seem to assume that the resulting vinyl record has infinite bandwidth. Only the direct recording to record disk avoids tape, (but the direct to disk crowd already knew that).
Having said that - it was fun to dig out some old records and play some of the less scratched ones for my teenagers last year - they were very surprised at how good they sound (and I have a cheap consumer grade turnable). They totally expected records to completely suck!:)
One of the main problems with the "how many bits and what sampling frequency is good enough" debate is that so many people do not understand the point of a Double Blind AB test, so they blow $800 on new speaker cables with ceramic floor stands and they are very emotionally motivated to prove that they haven't been suckered. The mind is a very poor scientific instrument.
All of this is slightly off topic - the point is the online market (itunes etc) only sells you lossy compressed audio, converted from redbook CD's, so it's of no interest to someone who prefers the best quality source they can get, be it a plain CD audio, or the newer DVD-Audio and SACD formats.
Storage is no longer an issue, but download bandwidth is the problem.
Or perhaps as a lesson to the Music industry: "See, our DRM infected music player failed miserably! Now leave us alone and let us build products without all those nasty restrictions!"
First narrow the list of patent threats to patents that actually should be valid, and that there is no prior art for. Isn't the bulk of linux a direct clone of the operation of Unix, which AT&T gave away years ago? All the X window stuff ought to be safe as well.
If you strip out Mono, and perhaps the Samba tools, really, how much is new in linux that could violate a valid patent?
I personally have no need for anything like Mono, and if there are good quality Windows NFS clients, we can start to remove the SMB protocol from linux systems, linux ought to be clear of MS patent threats.
Course there's always the dumb patents (like MS patenting skype last week) that could be an issue.
Where a million neutrinos per cubic inch race through your body at light speed - auuug! Ouch!!! Oh, and stay away from the cat litter - it's radioactive enough to set off the detectors at the US border!
What these people really need is a giant cooler to take them down as close to absolute zero to slow down their own eventual radioactive decay..
That was called "Framemaker" and it's languishing a slow and painful death at Adobe Systems. It was incredibly stable (on a Sun workstation mind you), you could easily do multiple volume documents, with hundreds of pages each no problem, had working (and easy) real template support back in the 80's, had a usable basic set of drawing tools (not as fancy as Open Office Draw), oh, and paragraph numbering always worked just right.
It does not trouble MS at all.
Open Office draw alone beats the tar out of Word's drawing tools, that's why Microsoft bought Visio (and Visio subsequently got far more unstable - big surprise).
I used to believe that technical excellence would always win, but that was before Beta vs VHS.
It's the potential linux customer - The PHB hears that IT wants to put in a linux file server, and either puts a stop to it "Cause I heard Microsoft will sue linux users" or forces them to use Suse/Novell "Cause I heard Microsoft will sue Linux users except for Suse/Novell customers".
For Novell, they just lost the support of all the Anything But Microsoft crowd (of which I am one btw), loosing potential market share.
Well, I suppose if you don't understand how a (working) set of noise canceling headphones DOES stop any acoustic energy from reaching your ears (otherwise you'd hear something), I can understand why you also don't follow the analogy. Who said the friend wouldn't brace himself and lean into the push, thereby avoiding pushing on you? I'll try again: If the friend doesn't push back, you feel the energy of the unwanted push. If the friend does push the opponent (while bracing himself so you don't get touched) then you feel nothing.
Except that you would HEAR this (and you don't hear any spikes). I tried a friend's Bose canceling headphones and they worked amazingly well. No loud spikes or beat frequencies.
Rubbish - if you can't hear it, then the canceling has worked - it CANCELED the energy of the sound. If someone goes to give you a hard shove, and your friend pushes back with the exact same energy at the exact same time (with a slight delay due to reaction time), you don't get shoved. By your logic the energy of your friend's shove is somehow going to push on you.
It would be incredibly stupid to craft a multicore OS in this way. There's no reason that the OS couldn't query how many active cores are available, then just assign tasks to the least busy core out of a pool of available cores. That way, nothing needs to change in software when the latest 42 core Chip becomes available.
It's analogous to modern memory management - you buy more ram for the PC, you don't have to recompile your applications to use it. Ask google if they have to recompile their apps every time they add a new PC to their grid..
Of course, Sony seems to have done a number of dumb moves lately, so it wouldn't be out of character to blow it again..
I would assume most environmentalists are proponents of birth control.
1: Climate warmer: fact. 2: Did humans cause it? Pretty much fact outside of the anti-science oil baron propaganda-ized population 3. Can we fix it? Don't know, but not if we waste all our time arguing over 1 and 2!
Yahbut: all the ice cubes on the planet are not uniformly mixed together with all the rest of the water, else the whole planet would be uniformly 0 degrees C.
The trouble is that world weather is complex and counter intuitive. One of the predictions of a massive ice melt of Northeastern Canada and Greenland is that it could stop the atlantic warm/cold current cycle in its tracks, giving Europe a localized ice age. This would be caused by global warming. Just watch the Warmers of Mass Denial pounce on this if/when it happens!
You're confusing egotist with scientist. Religeons claim to have all the answers. Science only claims to be looking for the answers, and doesn't expect anyone to take those answers on faith. Anyone who claims they have all the answers is not a scientist.
Once in a while my 11G access point screws up, and windows dutifully connects to my neighbor's open access point, and I didn't discover it until I went to look at my samba shares on my network server - hey, where the hell is it? Oh, I'm not connected to my own AP... Doh! Imagine a neighbor who knows next to nothing about wireless lans, they seriously may not realize that their own AP needs a reboot...
I mucked about with a Mandrake system, and those guys seem bent on hiding crud all over the place, and using proprietary gui tools to manage etc, even installs of common open source apps have been reconfigured (I call it obfusticated) and install in non standard directories so that you pretty much have to pay them the annual fee to get access to the mandrake updates. All the power to them, but obfusticating other people's free software and then charging money to untangle it for you isn't something I want to support.
I've been using slack on my laptop for a couple years, and on home servers for many more. I started out in the workforce first using Suns (and an account on a Vax Unix box, serial terminal - yes there were cars then, just watch the Flintstones!) and then later on using Sun's around the time they switched from BSD to SysV. Once you learn how these things are configured, it is not at all difficult to find your way around the scripts and make adjustments, and (one thing linux/unix has going for it) THINGS DON'T MOVE AROUND WHEN YOU ARE NOT LOOKING like they do under Windows. (I.E. the wife's XP home laptop suddenly decided there are "not enough resources" to load the device driver for her wireless belkin pcmcia card, Code 12, WTF!). Gui based wizards can be great as long as they don't randomly break software. Why would anyone enable automatic updates??? Would you want Toyota to open up the hood of your car every night and modify your engine with buggy new features? If a system is running stable and is doing everything you want why would you risk breaking it nightly?
Slack feels comfortable to me, but I did have to spend too much work getting the laptop resources running manually, which is why I am going to give Ubuntu a shot for the laptop. As long as the gui tools A: Actually Work (which is rare for gui tools) and the resulting config is still visible ascii scripts in/etc/rc.something_or_other I will be happy with that.
It is my belief that a single lightning strike would cut the cable, (and of course the end of the tether would go flinging off into space with all aboard) (waaahhhhh!). It may be (and I hope so) that the lightning issue can be engineered around somehow, but the idea of placing it in a zone where there is less lightning seems rather silly to me. The tether itself will likely increase the chance of a lightning strike:
The cable will be continually wet, gathering ice at above alpine levels, which of course will have to be continuously melted, running down making a good enough connection to umm.. Earth, which means that any electrical potential in the neighborhood will likely flash over to the tether once it is within reach.
Some massive research into dissipating the charge in the tether's neighborhood down to a safe level is required, and since the power is there, might as well harvest it with the same tether! Any decendents of Ben Franklin up to the challenge??
Just before it reaches ground, the step leader induces a huge electric potential (some 10 million volts), enough to bring up surges of positive charge from sharp objects or irregularities near the ground. Once the impulses meet--a few tens of meters above earth--the connection is established and the return stroke zips upward at a rate much faster than the stepped leader's descent. It is this return stroke that produces the visible flash as it heats surrounding air to 30,000 degrees C (54,000 degrees F), which in turn creates the shock wave we hear as thunder.
I claim using a space elevator as a power generator, assuming it lasts long enough to plug in an extension cord...
Ah well, it's not that bad, so you won't be able to pirate Britney Spears's comeback CD in a couple years.
Buy a guitar, read a book, go to a coffee shop and hang out with freinds etc. Many people commenting in this topic have realized that all this DRM crap is waking us up to the fact that we don't need any of these products at all. Want to screw up my television watching habits with DRM? Fine, I'll turn the stupid thing off and take the dog to the park for a walk!
Which is why documentation programs (Word, Open Office etc) need to start supporting standard (real actually working non proprietary networked) version control software. I set up a copy of "Twiki" at work to allow our engineering dept. to share documents, it at least uses RCS, but it's hard to convince people of the advantages of this approach over the flood of word docs in email and in non secured windows shares. ("Where did all my edits go?".. "Oh sorry about that, I copied my version into x:/corporate/documents, since mine is more up to date...")
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and have a couple work on a spell checker..
I sense a great disturbance on the net - it's as if 280 million adware infected PC's were suddenly shut off!
r ket_estimate/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/02/adware_ma
And what's more - almost all records were mastered (two generations!) from analog tape, where the magnetic particles and the tape speed physics interact to give you quantized audio with random thermal noise inserted - in short - a fairly lumpy recording environment that in many cases can not reproduce frequencies anywhere near as well as a redbook audio CD, yet the fanatics seem to assume that the resulting vinyl record has infinite bandwidth. Only the direct recording to record disk avoids tape, (but the direct to disk crowd already knew that).
:)
Having said that - it was fun to dig out some old records and play some of the less scratched ones for my teenagers last year - they were very surprised at how good they sound (and I have a cheap consumer grade turnable). They totally expected records to completely suck!
One of the main problems with the "how many bits and what sampling frequency is good enough" debate is that so many people do not understand the point of a Double Blind AB test,
so they blow $800 on new speaker cables with ceramic floor stands and they are very emotionally motivated to prove that they haven't been suckered. The mind is a very poor scientific instrument.
All of this is slightly off topic - the point is the online market (itunes etc) only sells you lossy compressed audio, converted from redbook CD's, so it's of no interest to someone who prefers the best quality source they can get, be it a plain CD audio, or the newer DVD-Audio and SACD formats.
Storage is no longer an issue, but download bandwidth is the problem.
You can even download maintenance manual pdf's for free that show you where those 100 little screws go back in!
Hey Fujitsu, I will never buy a laptop from you based on this!
Or perhaps as a lesson to the Music industry:
"See, our DRM infected music player failed miserably! Now leave us alone and let us build products without all those nasty restrictions!"
First narrow the list of patent threats to patents that actually should be valid, and that there is no prior art for.
Isn't the bulk of linux a direct clone of the operation of Unix, which AT&T gave away years ago? All the X window stuff ought to be safe as well.
If you strip out Mono, and perhaps the Samba tools, really, how much is new in linux that could violate a valid patent?
I personally have no need for anything like Mono, and if there are good quality Windows NFS clients, we can start to remove the SMB protocol from linux systems, linux ought to be clear of MS patent threats.
Course there's always the dumb patents (like MS patenting skype last week) that could be an issue.
Where a million neutrinos per cubic inch race through your body at light speed - auuug! Ouch!!!
Oh, and stay away from the cat litter - it's radioactive enough to set off the detectors at the US border!
What these people really need is a giant cooler to take them down as close to absolute zero to slow down their own eventual radioactive decay..
That was called "Framemaker" and it's languishing a slow and painful death at Adobe Systems.
It was incredibly stable (on a Sun workstation mind you), you could easily do multiple volume documents, with hundreds of pages each no problem,
had working (and easy) real template support back in the 80's, had a usable basic set of drawing tools (not as fancy as Open Office Draw),
oh, and paragraph numbering always worked just right.
It does not trouble MS at all.
Open Office draw alone beats the tar out of Word's drawing tools, that's why Microsoft bought Visio (and Visio subsequently got far more unstable - big surprise).
I used to believe that technical excellence would always win, but that was before Beta vs VHS.
It's the potential linux customer - The PHB hears that IT wants to put in a linux file server, and either puts a stop to it "Cause I heard Microsoft will sue linux users" or forces them to use Suse/Novell "Cause I heard Microsoft will sue Linux users except for Suse/Novell customers".
For Novell, they just lost the support of all the Anything But Microsoft crowd (of which I am one btw), loosing potential market share.
It's MS Fud at it's finest.
Well, I suppose if you don't understand how a (working) set of noise canceling headphones DOES stop any acoustic energy from reaching your ears (otherwise you'd hear something), I can understand why you also don't follow the analogy.
Who said the friend wouldn't brace himself and lean into the push, thereby avoiding pushing on you?
I'll try again:
If the friend doesn't push back, you feel the energy of the unwanted push. If the friend does push the opponent (while bracing himself so you don't get touched) then you feel nothing.
Sigh..
Except that you would HEAR this (and you don't hear any spikes). I tried a friend's Bose canceling headphones and they worked amazingly well. No loud spikes or beat frequencies.
Rubbish - if you can't hear it, then the canceling has worked - it CANCELED the energy of the sound.
If someone goes to give you a hard shove, and your friend pushes back with the exact same energy at the exact same time (with a slight delay due to reaction time), you don't get shoved.
By your logic the energy of your friend's shove is somehow going to push on you.
Take some basic physics classes.
It would be incredibly stupid to craft a multicore OS in this way. There's no reason that the OS couldn't query how many active cores are available,
then just assign tasks to the least busy core out of a pool of available cores. That way, nothing needs to change in software when the latest 42 core Chip becomes available.
It's analogous to modern memory management - you buy more ram for the PC, you don't have to recompile your applications to use it.
Ask google if they have to recompile their apps every time they add a new PC to their grid..
Of course, Sony seems to have done a number of dumb moves lately, so it wouldn't be out of character to blow it again..
I would assume most environmentalists are proponents of birth control.
/ 19/1819257
1: Climate warmer: fact.
2: Did humans cause it? Pretty much fact outside of the anti-science oil baron propaganda-ized population
3. Can we fix it? Don't know, but not if we waste all our time arguing over 1 and 2!
(what the heck is Philip Morris doing funding anti warming propaganda? Nobody said cigarettes were to blame!)
The philip morris thing:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09
Yahbut: all the ice cubes on the planet are not uniformly mixed together with all the rest of the water, else the whole planet would be uniformly 0 degrees C.
6 27_050627_oceancurrent.html
The trouble is that world weather is complex and counter intuitive. One of the predictions of a massive ice melt of Northeastern Canada and Greenland is that it could stop the atlantic warm/cold current cycle in its tracks, giving Europe a localized ice age. This would be caused by global warming. Just watch the Warmers of Mass Denial pounce on this if/when it happens!
National Geographic story on this:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0
You're confusing egotist with scientist.
Religeons claim to have all the answers. Science only claims to be looking for the answers, and doesn't expect anyone to take those answers on faith.
Anyone who claims they have all the answers is not a scientist.
This already happens all the time, no guarantee that anything you find on the web will be there tomorrow, whether it's free information or paid.
Once in a while my 11G access point screws up, and windows dutifully connects to my neighbor's open access point, and I didn't discover it until I went to look at my samba shares on my network server - hey, where the hell is it? Oh, I'm not connected to my own AP... Doh!
Imagine a neighbor who knows next to nothing about wireless lans, they seriously may not realize that their own AP needs a reboot...
I mucked about with a Mandrake system, and those guys seem bent on hiding crud all over the place, and using proprietary gui tools to manage etc, even installs of common open source apps have been reconfigured (I call it obfusticated) and install in non standard directories so that you pretty much have to pay them the annual fee to get access to the mandrake updates.
/etc/rc.something_or_other I will be happy with that.
All the power to them, but obfusticating other people's free software and then charging money to untangle it for you isn't something I want to support.
I've been using slack on my laptop for a couple years, and on home servers for many more. I started out in the workforce first using Suns (and an account on a Vax Unix box, serial terminal - yes there were cars then, just watch the Flintstones!) and then later on using Sun's around the time they switched from BSD to SysV.
Once you learn how these things are configured, it is not at all difficult to find your way around the scripts and make adjustments, and (one thing linux/unix has going for it) THINGS DON'T MOVE AROUND WHEN YOU ARE NOT LOOKING like they do under Windows. (I.E. the wife's XP home laptop suddenly decided there are "not enough resources" to load the device driver for her wireless belkin pcmcia card, Code 12, WTF!). Gui based wizards can be great as long as they don't randomly break software. Why would anyone enable automatic updates??? Would you want Toyota to open up the hood of your car every night and modify your engine with buggy new features? If a system is running stable and is doing everything you want why would you risk breaking it nightly?
Slack feels comfortable to me, but I did have to spend too much work getting the laptop resources running manually, which is why I am going to give Ubuntu a shot for the laptop.
As long as the gui tools A: Actually Work (which is rare for gui tools) and the resulting config is still visible ascii scripts in
It is my belief that a single lightning strike would cut the cable, (and of course the end of the tether would go flinging off into space with all aboard) (waaahhhhh!).
It may be (and I hope so) that the lightning issue can be engineered around somehow, but the idea of placing it in a zone where there is less lightning seems rather silly to me. The tether itself will likely increase the chance of a lightning strike:
The cable will be continually wet, gathering ice at above alpine levels, which of course will have to be continuously melted, running down making a good enough connection to umm.. Earth, which means that any electrical potential in the neighborhood will likely flash over to the tether once it is within reach.
Some massive research into dissipating the charge in the tether's neighborhood down to a safe level is required, and since the power is there, might as well harvest it with the same tether! Any decendents of Ben Franklin up to the challenge??
Cheers,
Gord Wait
If they're worried about corrosion, what about a nice dose of lightning?
n ing/faq.html
From this page:
http://www.ucar.edu/communications/infopack/light
This extract:
Just before it reaches ground, the step leader induces a huge electric potential (some 10 million volts), enough to bring up surges of positive charge from sharp objects or irregularities near the ground. Once the impulses meet--a few tens of meters above earth--the connection is established and the return stroke zips upward at a rate much faster than the stepped leader's descent. It is this return stroke that produces the visible flash as it heats surrounding air to 30,000 degrees C (54,000 degrees F), which in turn creates the shock wave we hear as thunder.
I claim using a space elevator as a power generator, assuming it lasts long enough to plug in an extension cord...
Looks like your shift key doesn't work tho... :)
Ah well, it's not that bad, so you won't be able to pirate Britney Spears's comeback CD in a couple years.
Buy a guitar, read a book, go to a coffee shop and hang out with freinds etc.
Many people commenting in this topic have realized that all this DRM crap is waking us up to the fact that we don't need any of these products at all.
Want to screw up my television watching habits with DRM? Fine, I'll turn the stupid thing off and take the dog to the park for a walk!
Which is why documentation programs (Word, Open Office etc) need to start supporting standard (real actually working non proprietary networked) version control software.
I set up a copy of "Twiki" at work to allow our engineering dept. to share documents, it at least uses RCS, but it's hard to convince people of the advantages of this approach over the flood of word docs in email and in non secured windows shares. ("Where did all my edits go?".. "Oh sorry about that, I copied my version into x:/corporate/documents, since mine is more up to date...")
Sounds like a classic denial of service attack to me.