But with Hurt, I might submit that the performance and recording of it was likely very spontaneous. Spontaneous music is often the best kind, but it also means that there's unlikely to be a skilled lackey to set levels to avoid clipping -- or, if there is a lackey present, he may never get a chance.
It'd be nice to ask Cash to play it again, just like that (only this time with the gear better-adjusted), but sometimes it's better to live with whatever you happen to be able to record. Sometimes, it's all you get, ever.
And so sometimes as a listener, you have to listen to the music instead of the technical details of the recording process. Sometimes, it's important to look past the distortion.
Sometimes, there just ain't no good recording available of a good performance.
Not if the original was 16-bit 44.1KHz stereo PCM.
Some music has never, ever passed through an analog waveform as part of the end-to-end recording/playback process, until the eventual listener plays it on CD. It's admittedly rare to find digitally-produced music which passes through a completely digital production chain before being pressed into a CD, but it's certainly not impossible.
That said, I've done enough recording that I'm comfortable saying this: 96/196KHz sampling rates don't matter to the end user. 24-bit audio doesn't matter to the end user. The high-bitrate stuff is handy when working with raw tracks in a production environment, as it allows more headroom in recording, and more flexibility in post-production without quantization artifacts.
But at the end of all that, the resultant CD works just fine once the tracks are mixed down. As an altruist, I'd like to see higher fidelity in common use, but as an engineer and careful listener, I just don't care.
I live in a small town in (mostly) rural Ohio. We used to have an excellent local record store, with good prices, an awesome selection, and good people.
Nowadays, we don't. How much music have I subsequently bought from Amazon? None.
Instead, I just drive north a bit, to an even smaller town that has exactly the same sort of record store that we used to. I give them my money, they give me CDs, and they get to stay afloat.
Last weekend, I was in Columbus, OH, and dropped about $100 at a local music shop downtown. I bought all kinds of good stuff, some of which I've wanted for many years.
What I don't understand are people who appear to lament the absence of a local music vendor, and then hand their money to Amazon instead of at least trying to buy the stuff locally.
I didn't know that it was completely integrated-ish -- I thought it was just for email. I don't know why anyone would ever want such a thing, but if it works for you then rock on, I guess.
In any case, please ignore the previous tirade. It is, I've just learned, without any basis in reality.
No more invasive than an inductive loop in the pavement. The cameras, and the computers behind them, simply see what cars are up to and adjust the traffic lights to suit (with various levels of success).
The function, in the instance I mentioned, is that vehicles are allowed through an intersection without stopping, as long as traffic permits. I think I spelled this out fairly clearly.
Meanwhile, the City of which I speak does not have the infrastructure (either wired, or wireless) to backhaul video to a central spot, nor does it have the funds to procure such a system*.
*: I know this, because I work with them on their IT needs, and I personally engineered their most recent high-speed wireless network, which they are both completely happy with and which is not used for traffic lights at all**. So, if they wanted to expand, I'd at the top of the list of people to know about it***.
**: The City also does maintain a 900MHz ISM-band system for synchronizing lights, but it is nowhere near fast enough to relay imagery of either cars or regular traffic.
***: Remember, this is fucking Ohio: Farm country. We're even more technologically-backward than West Virginia.
[So: Go away, strange and demented conspiracy-theorist troll. You have no business here.]
How about "it's easy, if you accept Google as your one true email provider"?
The default Gmail client works great, and you're required (at least on my D1) to set it up at first boot.
So, if you're stupidly and boneheadedly stuck on only using the default apps and services, this will work fine. Just forward all of your email to your new Gmail account, configure it appropriately, and you'll be golden. Integrated inbox? Check!
OTOH, IMAP and POP3 are both things which are inherently third-party on such devices. That the default non-Gmail mail client sucks (especially the one modified by Motorola, who seem to make wonderful hardware but fail miserably on the software side for now) isn't so much the issue. Rather, the problem is that you're not doing things in the (default!) Google Way.
(And, yes, both mentalities are absurd -- both yours, and my own devil's advocacy above. So please just install and use K9, exactly as you would install and use Thunderbird on a Windows XP machine instead of suffer the indignity of Outlook Express. And then simply be done, and try to enjoy and use the thing you've bought, you fucking pedant.)
In terms of "average users," average iPhone folks understand the App Store just fine. And, I believe, average Android users understand the Marketplace just fine as well. Which is quite good enough*.
Blackberry, meanwhile, came from a feature-limited world originating in it-just-works 2-way alphanumeric paging. The devices, historically, have not been all that flexible, so it was much more important that the default apps behave sanely.
Welcome to 2011, where that's no longer the case. Your Android phone, unlike an old Blackberry, is literally a pocket computer, and it will run whatever software you ask it to, just like any other modern computer...and it follows that the default software sometimes sucks.
*shrug*
*: Last I looked, and it's been awhile, the best way to integrate an iOS device with Gmail was to use Microsoft Exchange as a protocol selection. Yep: To get an Apple device to talk to Google most effectively, one needed to use a largely-undocumented Microsoft protocol. Huzzah!, or sth.
This is why it's important to have dogs: A quiet intruder won't wake me up, but a dog certainly will.
Preferably, good personable dogs who are friendly to their owners, big enough to make a difference, and nervous enough to try. They don't need to be vicious or ever attack anyone, they just need to put on a good show.
I dare anyone to try to regain initiative after my 100lb doberman wakes up. She's as gentle as a butterfly, really, but the giant snarling and barking beast will serve to give me plenty of warning to prepare, while also being adequately distracting to any possible intruders to buy at least a few seconds.
And a few seconds is all we're talking about here. I don't own a gun (though I'd like to, and eventually will when I find the money to buy something that suits me), but that doesn't mean that I'm unarmed. It doesn't take much of the doberman's distinctive unfamiliar-person-bark for me to wake up, become alert, and prepare.
And nevermind the deterrence factor: A house with one or more good-sized dogs will be far less of a target, than the one down the block which has no dogs at all.
We have, in my small town, one (1) intersection which works exactly as you describe. The default state of the light is green for the main drag, but if you approach on a side street at a reasonable speed the light will turn green before you get to the intersection (as long as there's no other traffic). These side-streets aren't ever particularly busy, so the light then (quite reasonably) goes back to default a few seconds after you've cleared it.
It uses cameras to detect traffic using some computer-vision wizardry*, which is increasingly common around here (NW Ohio).
We used to have an exchange with I75 which when exiting the interstate would consistently have a green light waiting for you at the top of the exit ramp. This was done using conventional inductive loops. They ruined that 10 years or so ago, while also deleting the dedicated right-turn-with-yield lanes. The interchange now consistently makes folks wait, no matter what direction they're going. I guess that's progress.
*: So far, that's the only thing the cameras are being used for. There's a lot of noise recently about installing some red light cameras here, but honestly, if every intersection behaved as sanely as described above there would hardly ever be a reason to run a red light, including inattentiveness. Make the yellow a bit longer to eliminate instances where people can't stop in time, whether due to weather or bad/inherently lousy brakes or whatever, and things would be far safer than a red light camera could ever make them.
And it would follow that some ABS systems are malfunctional.
I've driven a fair variety of vehicles in my short life, and I prefer ABS in all conditions.
If I were on a track, racing against cars, I might not want ABS. But on a street, where a kid can run out in front of the car, the driver (or more importantly: the kid) doesn't have time to think about threshold braking and avoidance: All the driver has time for is a fraction of a second to observe the kid, a fraction of a second to mash the brake pedal, and a fraction of a second to observe the relative trajectories of the car and the kid and apply appropriate measures to the steering wheel. ABS helps all of these things, and in turn, helps the kid survive.
If you haven't yet encountered a scenario such as this, then you've not been driving long enough to be qualified to preach about vehicular safety. So until you properly understand the subject, please shut the fuck up.
any service he likes will be ok because he likes it and uses it for other things.
any service he doesn't like will be not ok because he doesn't like it and doesn't use it for anything himself hence (at least from his point of view)nobody is using it legitimately or the people who do use it legitimately don't count for one concocted reason or another.
As Czar of the Intarwebs, on this day I declare that the above conceptual logical fallacy described in quotation above shall henceforth be known as a HungryHobo, and shall forever be referenced as such, in perpetuity.
Thank you, HungryHobo, for your contribution. May you be blessed.
I'm not sure if I should feel happy or sad that I haven't used Linux on the desktop for a few years now, after about a decade of just-about exclusive use.
Playing Netflix with some VMWare goodness sounds like fun, but I can just view it natively with 7 or the PS3.
I take it that you're a Linux user, primarily, and that's cool and all...but for me, the plate has turned. It used to be that the best and most reliable way to rip a CD, for instance, was with cdparanoia on Linux. But that hasn't been developed for years, allowing EAC to do a better job (potentially) under Windows.
And then there's video codecs. It used to be that it was a pain in the dick to use various video codecs under Windows, whereas mplayer made it easy, but the k-lite codec pack has fixed that.
And video acceleration has always been better with Windows, for the most part. I know, it's all courtesy of closed-source drivers that may or may not support my stuff in the future, but so what? The OSS community has abandoned me on my own (previously-well-supported) video hardware enough times that I don't care anymore. The simple fact is that when hardware gets old or unusual, folks stop updating support for it -- whether commercially or pro-bono.
Linux has EXT3/4, which is OK, but as cool as ReiserFS is I don't dare touch it with a 10-foot pole since the one man with a good understanding of it began to rot in prison (THAT sure was a fun thing to explain to the boss when it became time to migrate the mail server to a new filesystem). Meanwhile, NTFS seems to have grown up just fine with limited or zero compatibility issues, either backward or forward. (And honestly, I'd prefer OS/2's HPFS on either platform for general use, but the years have made that pointless.) And ZFS isn't useful eitherwhere.
Linux sound support sucks. I paid for a proper DSP on my sound card, and I intend to use it. With a Creative Labs card under Windows 7, I can use the stock drivers to apply some carefully-adjusted parametric EQ that makes my old and crappy Realistic(R) speakers sound perfectly fine. And with a Creative Labs card under XP or 2k, I can do a whole shitload more with the (free!) KX Audio drivers: Before I moved, I had a box dedicated to this. It ran a 2.1 audio system, or a 2.0 audio system alongside a 2-way bass guitar rig, and I could switch between configurations easily with mouse clicks and without cable-swapping, and it was all processed in hardware. Linux? There's a stub or two, here or there, but nobody's ever really bothered to develop anything hardware-based kit that is actually usable. Everything else Linux is completely CPU-based, and therefore sucks.
Hell: I paid 4front Technologies for their Linux sound drivers, with addons, back in the day. And I still get better support from free (as in beer) Windows drivers. I want to believe. I just don't.
Linux still supports more networking gear than Windows does, and does a few more special tricks with them (especially with regard to multiple IPs per MAC, VLAN, and various multiple-SSID WLAN fun, along with fornications thereof) but I'm not doing that with Linux. So, I don't miss it with Windows.
(This post brought to you by Sobieski Vodka. Ignore the plastic jug and the low price, it's a lovely and clean adult beverage, made from a particular Polish rye and distilled not so much, but it's good.)
Or on the vinyl. Or on the ceramic tile, in the dry Ohio winter with radiant floor heating. Or...
ESD is always a bit of a concern. But it's so easy to eliminate that concern that it's not worth worrying about where or when it is likely to be a larger a problem.
When I bought my current house, it had an old-school fuse panel. No earth ground, no nothing. But at some point in the last decade or so, someone had upgraded the furnace to a reasonably-nice 90+ high-efficiency unit.
When this was installed, the contractor put in a very small subpanel with exactly 1 breaker, just for the furnace. This fed some Romex that headed over to the furnace, by itself, and then through a fuse with a switch, mounted on the furnace chassis (I haven't yet learned why this extra fuse is common practice, but it seems that it sometimes is).
So far, so good, right? But then, someone ruined all that when they decided that the furnace should be grounded properly. How did they do this, you ask? Obviously, the "right way" (or at least the easy and not completely improper way) to do that in a house without an existing electrical ground would be to just ground the chassis.
Instead, they disconnected(!) the neutral line inside the furnace and tied it with a length of 10-gauge green wire to the cold water pipe coming into the house. So that, literally, the neutral return to the transformer on the pole outside was through a hundred feet of earth, with only one (1) wire connected between the furnace to the subpanel.
I discovered this when I was doing some plumbing and had to loosen the ground clamp that they used. Sparks appeared between the clamp and the copper pipe and the furnace quit running. The WTF? emanating from that moment has not faded in the years that have passed.
Amusingly, in all of that fuckery, there was still nothing to ground the furnace chassis, since they had deftly avoided the ground stud which was right fucking there inside the furnace. Most amusing, however, was the inspection sticker from the local Health Department declaring the installation to be A-OK.
(It's obviously not wired like that anymore, and no, I didn't have my changes inspected.)
If you're interested, I've also got a story about the "properly-inspected" water heater at my previous house...
I find that the PS3 works wonderfully for Netflix. I like it better than the Silverlight viewer on a PC.
Buy yourself one that's old-and-busted from Ebay, if you're feeling cheap and don't have any desire to play Blu-Ray movies -- the hardware is pretty solid, but the Blu-Ray lasers died young in a lot of older units, which brings the market price down for those which are useful as HTPCs. And they're far quieter than the 360's default drone, unless provoked by a hot room in the summer, and even then it's not so bad.
PSN is free, Netflix is a free download, and it just works. Up until Christmas (when my lovely wife got me a new PS3 that had a working blue laser diode), I was doing just this, while also PS3MediaServer on another box on the network for other media (uTorrent + RSS feeds).
I also had a decent (and quiet!) Dell D620 laptop next to the TV for a long time as an HTPC, but I gave up on that because I couldn't find a combination of OS and software that I liked at all, especially when using an infrared remote, while the PS3 was simply very easy and (again) just worked. I don't mind hacking on stuff, in fact I enjoy it, but I want the results to be somehow better than the easy alternative, and they weren't.
Except, of course, we're talking about OnLive. Woops. I guess I skipped right past that bit, since it seemed like such a sham.;)
Reason it's a pain in the ass? My HTPC uses VGA, because my TV has one VGA and one HDMI port and the PS3 got the HDMI port.
Eh? If it's that much of a pain in the ass, why aren't you doing something about it?
Just get get an HDMI switch, optionally with something like this, and call it done.
I've been following the progress on the newest PS3 fun fairly closely for a few days, now, since I've got an old PS3 with a bad blu-ray laser that came available for hacking on when the wife bought me a new Slim for Christmas. And all I can say is this: Getting MythTV ported, in particular, isn't a going to be a simple matter of recompiling it, signing it, and using it: There's hardly any dev tools, the GPU is undocumented, the multi-core Cell processor is a wicked beast of a thing that most folks don't have any experience optimizing for, and the single PPC core that sits next to it isn't particularly fast.
It will be awhile before you get what you want. It's certainly a realistic expectation to think that a proper, simple, and clean port of MythTV (or XBMC or whatever) will happen, but not today. And not next week. And probably not next month.
I mean, FFS: Right now, writing "Hello World!" to a text file on a thumb drive is still a neat trick on an unmodded PS3. There's much progress to be made.
So, give up for now, buy the HDMI switch (you'll probably use it eventually anyway even when MythTV happens on the PS3) and a couple of $4 cable to tie it all into the TV, and call it done for the time being. You can always dump the switch on Ebay if/when you decide you don't want it anymore, and an extra cable or two are always handy to have.:)
If I recall right, it's not possible to "ignore" HDCP, and have a usable output.
The bits are encrypted on the wire. You can ignore an HDCP-encoded DVI signal all day long, but you'll not get a picture from it unless you have something capable of decoding HDCP.
I prefer to dispatch my incriminating hard drives in a thermite reaction, and then dispose of the slag in the nearest abandoned quarry -- possibly after using a couple of flower pots to cast a little ingot from the remains of the device.
(Queue adolf, 21054's addition to FBI watchlist in 3..2..1...)
Around pools: Yes, we do (or at least we're supposed to). They're a fairly modern invention, of course -- I'm sure there's a few ancient swimming pool arrangements which have never been updated, either because the owners don't know, don't care, or nobody's ever been by to service things and try to update the wiring because the old equipment is still working just fine.
We also use them for kitchens (except for the fridge) and bathrooms and hot tubs anywhere else moisture is expected to be present. But we don't do that to every circuit, by any means, though perhaps we should.
(I use a GFCI circuit when troubleshooting electronics and motherboards. I can't say that it's added any safety to the equation, though it did once help pin down a faulty PSU which was causing (of all things) the Ethernet connection to behave strangely. That's the only time it has ever tripped.)
And, of course, any of this is easy to bypass for someone who's up to no good.
I agree that albums can yield a greater experience but how is buying a single different than listening to a single on the radio?
Also can't a single be a "preview" of some kind, inspiring the listener to *eventually* buy the album?
Singles usually come with one or more other tracks that may or may not be available elsewhere, as well as original cover art. The industrial/techno crowd used to revolve around singles (which often contained remixes that would not be found on an album), for instance, along with a number of other genres.
When I instruct the lay person in the art of installing RAM (right after the "I'd be happy to do this for you, but it's cheaper to do it yourself and it's bloody simple" speech), I include an instruction to keep oneself grounded during the operation. It just takes a second, and so far, every single user-installed RAM upgrade I've recommended (and I've recommended RAM upgrades for nearly every single personal computer that I've touched) has gone just fine.
Folks don't want to screw up their computer. And they understand ESD quite well enough by default -- after all, they've spent their whole lives getting zapped by metal bannisters and such from time to time. They just need a little bit of a clue to help them to tie the concepts together.
My six-year-old Dell laptop can deliver 2560x1440 to an external display just fine, provided that the display has a VGA input. It's got nothing to do with how "powerful" the card is.
Single-link DVI and HDMI are generally limited to 1920x1200, whereas DisplayPort simply has more bandwidth available -- a lot more, in fact.
But being equipped with a DisplayPort connector doesn't mean that it's a powerful card -- it just means that it's got a DisplayPort connector. These are neither particularly new, at this point, nor particularly interesting (unless you're in an Apple universe where connectors change in incompatible fashions all the time*).
*: My PC has two dual-link DVI outputs, and can also deliver video over component, composite, or S-Video without hackery. I can plug DVI, HDMI, or VGA displays in with ease, using cheap and completely passive adapters, and drive whatever sort of display at native resolution. This connectivity is perfectly sufficient in my world, and isn't uncommon.
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Agreed.
But with Hurt, I might submit that the performance and recording of it was likely very spontaneous. Spontaneous music is often the best kind, but it also means that there's unlikely to be a skilled lackey to set levels to avoid clipping -- or, if there is a lackey present, he may never get a chance.
It'd be nice to ask Cash to play it again, just like that (only this time with the gear better-adjusted), but sometimes it's better to live with whatever you happen to be able to record. Sometimes, it's all you get, ever.
And so sometimes as a listener, you have to listen to the music instead of the technical details of the recording process. Sometimes, it's important to look past the distortion.
Sometimes, there just ain't no good recording available of a good performance.
I'm just sayin'.
Not if the original was 16-bit 44.1KHz stereo PCM.
Some music has never, ever passed through an analog waveform as part of the end-to-end recording/playback process, until the eventual listener plays it on CD. It's admittedly rare to find digitally-produced music which passes through a completely digital production chain before being pressed into a CD, but it's certainly not impossible.
That said, I've done enough recording that I'm comfortable saying this: 96/196KHz sampling rates don't matter to the end user. 24-bit audio doesn't matter to the end user. The high-bitrate stuff is handy when working with raw tracks in a production environment, as it allows more headroom in recording, and more flexibility in post-production without quantization artifacts.
But at the end of all that, the resultant CD works just fine once the tracks are mixed down. As an altruist, I'd like to see higher fidelity in common use, but as an engineer and careful listener, I just don't care.
That's interesting.
I live in a small town in (mostly) rural Ohio. We used to have an excellent local record store, with good prices, an awesome selection, and good people.
Nowadays, we don't. How much music have I subsequently bought from Amazon? None.
Instead, I just drive north a bit, to an even smaller town that has exactly the same sort of record store that we used to. I give them my money, they give me CDs, and they get to stay afloat.
Last weekend, I was in Columbus, OH, and dropped about $100 at a local music shop downtown. I bought all kinds of good stuff, some of which I've wanted for many years.
What I don't understand are people who appear to lament the absence of a local music vendor, and then hand their money to Amazon instead of at least trying to buy the stuff locally.
That just seems bizarre to me, somehow.
chink
-noun
1. a crack, cleft, or fissure: a chink in a wall.
Oh.
I didn't know that it was completely integrated-ish -- I thought it was just for email. I don't know why anyone would ever want such a thing, but if it works for you then rock on, I guess.
In any case, please ignore the previous tirade. It is, I've just learned, without any basis in reality.
Apologies for the imputation.
No more invasive than an inductive loop in the pavement. The cameras, and the computers behind them, simply see what cars are up to and adjust the traffic lights to suit (with various levels of success).
The function, in the instance I mentioned, is that vehicles are allowed through an intersection without stopping, as long as traffic permits. I think I spelled this out fairly clearly.
Meanwhile, the City of which I speak does not have the infrastructure (either wired, or wireless) to backhaul video to a central spot, nor does it have the funds to procure such a system*.
*: I know this, because I work with them on their IT needs, and I personally engineered their most recent high-speed wireless network, which they are both completely happy with and which is not used for traffic lights at all**. So, if they wanted to expand, I'd at the top of the list of people to know about it***.
**: The City also does maintain a 900MHz ISM-band system for synchronizing lights, but it is nowhere near fast enough to relay imagery of either cars or regular traffic.
***: Remember, this is fucking Ohio: Farm country. We're even more technologically-backward than West Virginia.
[So: Go away, strange and demented conspiracy-theorist troll. You have no business here.]
How about "it's easy, if you accept Google as your one true email provider"?
The default Gmail client works great, and you're required (at least on my D1) to set it up at first boot.
So, if you're stupidly and boneheadedly stuck on only using the default apps and services, this will work fine. Just forward all of your email to your new Gmail account, configure it appropriately, and you'll be golden. Integrated inbox? Check!
OTOH, IMAP and POP3 are both things which are inherently third-party on such devices. That the default non-Gmail mail client sucks (especially the one modified by Motorola, who seem to make wonderful hardware but fail miserably on the software side for now) isn't so much the issue. Rather, the problem is that you're not doing things in the (default!) Google Way.
(And, yes, both mentalities are absurd -- both yours, and my own devil's advocacy above. So please just install and use K9, exactly as you would install and use Thunderbird on a Windows XP machine instead of suffer the indignity of Outlook Express. And then simply be done, and try to enjoy and use the thing you've bought, you fucking pedant.)
In terms of "average users," average iPhone folks understand the App Store just fine. And, I believe, average Android users understand the Marketplace just fine as well. Which is quite good enough*.
Blackberry, meanwhile, came from a feature-limited world originating in it-just-works 2-way alphanumeric paging. The devices, historically, have not been all that flexible, so it was much more important that the default apps behave sanely.
Welcome to 2011, where that's no longer the case. Your Android phone, unlike an old Blackberry, is literally a pocket computer, and it will run whatever software you ask it to, just like any other modern computer...and it follows that the default software sometimes sucks.
*shrug*
*: Last I looked, and it's been awhile, the best way to integrate an iOS device with Gmail was to use Microsoft Exchange as a protocol selection. Yep: To get an Apple device to talk to Google most effectively, one needed to use a largely-undocumented Microsoft protocol. Huzzah!, or sth.
This is why it's important to have dogs: A quiet intruder won't wake me up, but a dog certainly will.
Preferably, good personable dogs who are friendly to their owners, big enough to make a difference, and nervous enough to try. They don't need to be vicious or ever attack anyone, they just need to put on a good show.
I dare anyone to try to regain initiative after my 100lb doberman wakes up. She's as gentle as a butterfly, really, but the giant snarling and barking beast will serve to give me plenty of warning to prepare, while also being adequately distracting to any possible intruders to buy at least a few seconds.
And a few seconds is all we're talking about here. I don't own a gun (though I'd like to, and eventually will when I find the money to buy something that suits me), but that doesn't mean that I'm unarmed. It doesn't take much of the doberman's distinctive unfamiliar-person-bark for me to wake up, become alert, and prepare.
And nevermind the deterrence factor: A house with one or more good-sized dogs will be far less of a target, than the one down the block which has no dogs at all.
We have, in my small town, one (1) intersection which works exactly as you describe. The default state of the light is green for the main drag, but if you approach on a side street at a reasonable speed the light will turn green before you get to the intersection (as long as there's no other traffic). These side-streets aren't ever particularly busy, so the light then (quite reasonably) goes back to default a few seconds after you've cleared it.
It uses cameras to detect traffic using some computer-vision wizardry*, which is increasingly common around here (NW Ohio).
We used to have an exchange with I75 which when exiting the interstate would consistently have a green light waiting for you at the top of the exit ramp. This was done using conventional inductive loops. They ruined that 10 years or so ago, while also deleting the dedicated right-turn-with-yield lanes. The interchange now consistently makes folks wait, no matter what direction they're going. I guess that's progress.
*: So far, that's the only thing the cameras are being used for. There's a lot of noise recently about installing some red light cameras here, but honestly, if every intersection behaved as sanely as described above there would hardly ever be a reason to run a red light, including inattentiveness. Make the yellow a bit longer to eliminate instances where people can't stop in time, whether due to weather or bad/inherently lousy brakes or whatever, and things would be far safer than a red light camera could ever make them.
And it would follow that some ABS systems are malfunctional.
I've driven a fair variety of vehicles in my short life, and I prefer ABS in all conditions.
If I were on a track, racing against cars, I might not want ABS. But on a street, where a kid can run out in front of the car, the driver (or more importantly: the kid) doesn't have time to think about threshold braking and avoidance: All the driver has time for is a fraction of a second to observe the kid, a fraction of a second to mash the brake pedal, and a fraction of a second to observe the relative trajectories of the car and the kid and apply appropriate measures to the steering wheel. ABS helps all of these things, and in turn, helps the kid survive.
If you haven't yet encountered a scenario such as this, then you've not been driving long enough to be qualified to preach about vehicular safety. So until you properly understand the subject, please shut the fuck up.
Cheers.
As Czar of the Intarwebs, on this day I declare that the above conceptual logical fallacy described in quotation above shall henceforth be known as a HungryHobo, and shall forever be referenced as such, in perpetuity.
Thank you, HungryHobo, for your contribution. May you be blessed.
I'm not sure if I should feel happy or sad that I haven't used Linux on the desktop for a few years now, after about a decade of just-about exclusive use.
Playing Netflix with some VMWare goodness sounds like fun, but I can just view it natively with 7 or the PS3.
I take it that you're a Linux user, primarily, and that's cool and all...but for me, the plate has turned. It used to be that the best and most reliable way to rip a CD, for instance, was with cdparanoia on Linux. But that hasn't been developed for years, allowing EAC to do a better job (potentially) under Windows.
And then there's video codecs. It used to be that it was a pain in the dick to use various video codecs under Windows, whereas mplayer made it easy, but the k-lite codec pack has fixed that.
And video acceleration has always been better with Windows, for the most part. I know, it's all courtesy of closed-source drivers that may or may not support my stuff in the future, but so what? The OSS community has abandoned me on my own (previously-well-supported) video hardware enough times that I don't care anymore. The simple fact is that when hardware gets old or unusual, folks stop updating support for it -- whether commercially or pro-bono.
Linux has EXT3/4, which is OK, but as cool as ReiserFS is I don't dare touch it with a 10-foot pole since the one man with a good understanding of it began to rot in prison (THAT sure was a fun thing to explain to the boss when it became time to migrate the mail server to a new filesystem). Meanwhile, NTFS seems to have grown up just fine with limited or zero compatibility issues, either backward or forward. (And honestly, I'd prefer OS/2's HPFS on either platform for general use, but the years have made that pointless.) And ZFS isn't useful eitherwhere.
Linux sound support sucks. I paid for a proper DSP on my sound card, and I intend to use it. With a Creative Labs card under Windows 7, I can use the stock drivers to apply some carefully-adjusted parametric EQ that makes my old and crappy Realistic(R) speakers sound perfectly fine. And with a Creative Labs card under XP or 2k, I can do a whole shitload more with the (free!) KX Audio drivers: Before I moved, I had a box dedicated to this. It ran a 2.1 audio system, or a 2.0 audio system alongside a 2-way bass guitar rig, and I could switch between configurations easily with mouse clicks and without cable-swapping, and it was all processed in hardware. Linux? There's a stub or two, here or there, but nobody's ever really bothered to develop anything hardware-based kit that is actually usable. Everything else Linux is completely CPU-based, and therefore sucks.
Hell: I paid 4front Technologies for their Linux sound drivers, with addons, back in the day. And I still get better support from free (as in beer) Windows drivers. I want to believe. I just don't.
Linux still supports more networking gear than Windows does, and does a few more special tricks with them (especially with regard to multiple IPs per MAC, VLAN, and various multiple-SSID WLAN fun, along with fornications thereof) but I'm not doing that with Linux. So, I don't miss it with Windows.
(This post brought to you by Sobieski Vodka. Ignore the plastic jug and the low price, it's a lovely and clean adult beverage, made from a particular Polish rye and distilled not so much, but it's good.)
Or on the vinyl. Or on the ceramic tile, in the dry Ohio winter with radiant floor heating. Or...
ESD is always a bit of a concern. But it's so easy to eliminate that concern that it's not worth worrying about where or when it is likely to be a larger a problem.
Yes, there is always incompetence to consider.
When I bought my current house, it had an old-school fuse panel. No earth ground, no nothing. But at some point in the last decade or so, someone had upgraded the furnace to a reasonably-nice 90+ high-efficiency unit.
When this was installed, the contractor put in a very small subpanel with exactly 1 breaker, just for the furnace. This fed some Romex that headed over to the furnace, by itself, and then through a fuse with a switch, mounted on the furnace chassis (I haven't yet learned why this extra fuse is common practice, but it seems that it sometimes is).
So far, so good, right? But then, someone ruined all that when they decided that the furnace should be grounded properly. How did they do this, you ask? Obviously, the "right way" (or at least the easy and not completely improper way) to do that in a house without an existing electrical ground would be to just ground the chassis.
Instead, they disconnected(!) the neutral line inside the furnace and tied it with a length of 10-gauge green wire to the cold water pipe coming into the house. So that, literally, the neutral return to the transformer on the pole outside was through a hundred feet of earth, with only one (1) wire connected between the furnace to the subpanel.
I discovered this when I was doing some plumbing and had to loosen the ground clamp that they used. Sparks appeared between the clamp and the copper pipe and the furnace quit running. The WTF? emanating from that moment has not faded in the years that have passed.
Amusingly, in all of that fuckery, there was still nothing to ground the furnace chassis, since they had deftly avoided the ground stud which was right fucking there inside the furnace. Most amusing, however, was the inspection sticker from the local Health Department declaring the installation to be A-OK.
(It's obviously not wired like that anymore, and no, I didn't have my changes inspected.)
If you're interested, I've also got a story about the "properly-inspected" water heater at my previous house...
I find that the PS3 works wonderfully for Netflix. I like it better than the Silverlight viewer on a PC.
Buy yourself one that's old-and-busted from Ebay, if you're feeling cheap and don't have any desire to play Blu-Ray movies -- the hardware is pretty solid, but the Blu-Ray lasers died young in a lot of older units, which brings the market price down for those which are useful as HTPCs. And they're far quieter than the 360's default drone, unless provoked by a hot room in the summer, and even then it's not so bad.
PSN is free, Netflix is a free download, and it just works. Up until Christmas (when my lovely wife got me a new PS3 that had a working blue laser diode), I was doing just this, while also PS3MediaServer on another box on the network for other media (uTorrent + RSS feeds).
I also had a decent (and quiet!) Dell D620 laptop next to the TV for a long time as an HTPC, but I gave up on that because I couldn't find a combination of OS and software that I liked at all, especially when using an infrared remote, while the PS3 was simply very easy and (again) just worked. I don't mind hacking on stuff, in fact I enjoy it, but I want the results to be somehow better than the easy alternative, and they weren't.
Except, of course, we're talking about OnLive. Woops. I guess I skipped right past that bit, since it seemed like such a sham. ;)
Reason it's a pain in the ass? My HTPC uses VGA, because my TV has one VGA and one HDMI port and the PS3 got the HDMI port.
Eh? If it's that much of a pain in the ass, why aren't you doing something about it?
Just get get an HDMI switch, optionally with something like this, and call it done.
I've been following the progress on the newest PS3 fun fairly closely for a few days, now, since I've got an old PS3 with a bad blu-ray laser that came available for hacking on when the wife bought me a new Slim for Christmas. And all I can say is this: Getting MythTV ported, in particular, isn't a going to be a simple matter of recompiling it, signing it, and using it: There's hardly any dev tools, the GPU is undocumented, the multi-core Cell processor is a wicked beast of a thing that most folks don't have any experience optimizing for, and the single PPC core that sits next to it isn't particularly fast.
It will be awhile before you get what you want. It's certainly a realistic expectation to think that a proper, simple, and clean port of MythTV (or XBMC or whatever) will happen, but not today. And not next week. And probably not next month.
I mean, FFS: Right now, writing "Hello World!" to a text file on a thumb drive is still a neat trick on an unmodded PS3. There's much progress to be made.
So, give up for now, buy the HDMI switch (you'll probably use it eventually anyway even when MythTV happens on the PS3) and a couple of $4 cable to tie it all into the TV, and call it done for the time being. You can always dump the switch on Ebay if/when you decide you don't want it anymore, and an extra cable or two are always handy to have. :)
If I recall right, it's not possible to "ignore" HDCP, and have a usable output.
The bits are encrypted on the wire. You can ignore an HDCP-encoded DVI signal all day long, but you'll not get a picture from it unless you have something capable of decoding HDCP.
I prefer to dispatch my incriminating hard drives in a thermite reaction, and then dispose of the slag in the nearest abandoned quarry -- possibly after using a couple of flower pots to cast a little ingot from the remains of the device.
(Queue adolf, 21054's addition to FBI watchlist in 3..2..1...)
Around pools: Yes, we do (or at least we're supposed to). They're a fairly modern invention, of course -- I'm sure there's a few ancient swimming pool arrangements which have never been updated, either because the owners don't know, don't care, or nobody's ever been by to service things and try to update the wiring because the old equipment is still working just fine.
We also use them for kitchens (except for the fridge) and bathrooms and hot tubs anywhere else moisture is expected to be present. But we don't do that to every circuit, by any means, though perhaps we should.
(I use a GFCI circuit when troubleshooting electronics and motherboards. I can't say that it's added any safety to the equation, though it did once help pin down a faulty PSU which was causing (of all things) the Ethernet connection to behave strangely. That's the only time it has ever tripped.)
And, of course, any of this is easy to bypass for someone who's up to no good.
But it was double-deleted!. That's impossible!
(Hint: *smirk*, for the sarcasm-impaired)
That sure is a great example of Thinking Different. I'm appalled at the complexity of your solution.
At the same time, it isn't too far-fetched and might actually be useful. Thanks.
Singles usually come with one or more other tracks that may or may not be available elsewhere, as well as original cover art. The industrial/techno crowd used to revolve around singles (which often contained remixes that would not be found on an album), for instance, along with a number of other genres.
Oh. Wait. You meant single downloads.
*head in hands*
Kids, these days.
When I instruct the lay person in the art of installing RAM (right after the "I'd be happy to do this for you, but it's cheaper to do it yourself and it's bloody simple" speech), I include an instruction to keep oneself grounded during the operation. It just takes a second, and so far, every single user-installed RAM upgrade I've recommended (and I've recommended RAM upgrades for nearly every single personal computer that I've touched) has gone just fine.
Folks don't want to screw up their computer. And they understand ESD quite well enough by default -- after all, they've spent their whole lives getting zapped by metal bannisters and such from time to time. They just need a little bit of a clue to help them to tie the concepts together.
Thanks, AC.
I find your commentary strange and otherworldly.
My six-year-old Dell laptop can deliver 2560x1440 to an external display just fine, provided that the display has a VGA input. It's got nothing to do with how "powerful" the card is.
Single-link DVI and HDMI are generally limited to 1920x1200, whereas DisplayPort simply has more bandwidth available -- a lot more, in fact.
But being equipped with a DisplayPort connector doesn't mean that it's a powerful card -- it just means that it's got a DisplayPort connector. These are neither particularly new, at this point, nor particularly interesting (unless you're in an Apple universe where connectors change in incompatible fashions all the time*).
*: My PC has two dual-link DVI outputs, and can also deliver video over component, composite, or S-Video without hackery. I can plug DVI, HDMI, or VGA displays in with ease, using cheap and completely passive adapters, and drive whatever sort of display at native resolution. This connectivity is perfectly sufficient in my world, and isn't uncommon.
The Apple world sounds a whole lot more confusing for something that's supposed to be simpler. And nevermind this other abomination.