All these informed-sounding folks, living in some perfect netherworld that doesn't really exist. *sigh*
If I have a recording that is too quiet (for whatever reason), it is reasonable to be able to turn it up so that it's not too quiet anymore.
Not every recording is stuffed all the way up to the max at 0dB. Some are far quieter, whether on purpose or on accident. If I have a recording which peaks at -20dB, then I ought to be able to apply at LEAST 20dB of gain to it without jumping through hoops.
This is not an uncommon problem, and the best (simplest) solution is just to turn it up -- however that's done. It's been awhile since I've done any serious audio in Linux, but if PulseAudio or ALSA or whatever combination thereof requires me to buy extra hardware (WTF?) to achieve this very simple and obvious function, then it is very broken[1] indeed.
And before anyone replies and says "Oh noes! If we give the users gain, they might makes teh Distortions!!!!" This is broken in the "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that" sense. It's REALLY fucking stupid that the same operating system which allows you to do "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda" without prompting WILL NOT PROVIDE MEANINGFUL AUDIO GAIN.
Note to mods: There is no "-1, Disagree" moderation on Slashdot. So, just because you disagree with it, doesn't mean that you should pick some other random negative moderation instead. I'm not trolling; I'm stating a very real opinion, and presenting it as such in a very concise way.
Yet, the comment is currently marked as -1, Troll.
Sometimes, I think the mods here are as bigoted as anyone else on Slashdot, only more cowardly.
Or is it a permissions thing that the update was installed by the Administrator account and limited users were not allowed to delete the files/registry keys
This, for the most part, is what happened.
I wrote about this back in the beginning of June. Firefox has more than one place where it looks for extensions to load, and one of them is system-wide. Users of Firefox (by Mozilla's choosing) are not allowed to uninstall system-wide plugins, and that's where Microsoft decided to install it.
Why did Microsoft do it this way? Malice? Arrogance? Naah. Probably just because it's easier to install one extension one time in one place, than to try to sort out how to install it into all Firefox users' extensions folders as needed.
The "uninstall" button was greyed out simply because that's how Firefox works. ("Disable" worked fine, though.)
One of the first things MSFT did after folks noticed this somewhat-guffaw, was to move the extension into the per-user extension folder where people can uninstall it for themselves from within Firefox.
Relax, meme. Everything works fine. Not that it particularly has to, though: There isn't much that goes on in this particular small business which requires Teh Intarweb, anyway.
Assuming otherwise without further information is the mark of a real asshole. And just because it's a popular assumption over the past few days (Danger/Sidekick/T-Mobile/Microsoft) doesn't mean that it's universally true.
The speakers and mic will deal with higher frequencies (30-40KHz) just fine, it'll just be attenuated more both going out and coming back in (which can be resolved by just turning things up a bit more, and killing the battery a little quicker).
A better question is: How will the electronics handle it? Even if the laptop has a codec capable of, say, 96KHz sampling, that doesn't mean that the rest of the audio path (particularly in a laptop) is in any way capable of passing such frequencies. It's very likely, in fact, that the engineer responsible for that part of the machine has intentionally low-pass filtered the analog electronics to only operate within normal hearing range.
We usually just use a Roadrunner account for the main office, just like all the other small business out there. It's faster and cheaper than a T1, and has better reliability than the PRI that handles our phones. (We also have a freebie account with a local WISP that we do some business with for manual fail-over, but we haven't had to use it in years.)
If I hire an electrician, I expect his house to have proper wiring. If I hire a BICSI-certified cable monkey, I expect him to have Cat5 jacks in every room of his house. If I hire a mechanic, I expect his car to be in good working order. If I hire a bodyman, I expect that his car will be free of rust and dents. If I hire a detailer, I expect that his car will be immaculate inside and out. If I hire a carpenter, I expect that his house will be in tip-top structural shape. If I hire a mason, I expect that the foundation (and walls, where applicable) of their house will be in solid order. If I hire a telephone guy, I expect that the phones at his house work efficiently for the members of his household. If I hire a networking guy, I expect that he's got a well-secured NFS or SMB server running the show at his premises, with a good and working backup system in place. If I hire someone to put electronics into cars, I expect that their own cars have all kinds of gee-wizardtry installed.
Why should my expectations be any different when I hire a programmer?
I don't, personally (in-the-face) know any proper open-source hackers. I do know a few programmers, though, who work professionally in their field. And when the latter group isn't coding for a 40-hour week, they're not at all opposed to coding to make their own life easier. (I don't know if they're particularly opposed to open-source or not, but somehow I suspect that they just can't be bothered with the extra work of maintaining publicly-available packages when all they want is a widget to help them in their own daily life.)
This guy, though: He's like a professional, career-oriented brick mason, who sits around watching his 150-year-old red brick house crumble around him, while loudly proclaiming "I don't do masonry in my free time. So suck it, fellas!"
It's illogical, and it's stupid. And Timothy is banking on the fact that we will notice and commence with a myriad of banter (read: pageviews) about the topic.
Everyone who replied to this (including me!) has been played. Congrats, Timmy.
Well...maybe. As a consumer, I don't care if it takes a few days to get my data back.
If my house burns down and I lose a terabyte of pr0n, I'll have enough other problems to worry about while I wait for a download to finish up or for a metaphorical station wagon full of tapes to arrive.
Meanwhile, though, S3's storage is pretty expensive for that sort of data on a consumer level, at $150 per month for 1TB of storage. For those prices, on any sort of lengthy term, I can easily justify the time and expense of putting together my own network backup solution (parking a cheap NAS box over at a friend's house, for instance), and still have enough cash left over to build a second one so that the same friend can back his stuff up to a NAS box at my house.
RAM is easy to test using basic troubleshooting techniques: Remove some of it, see if the problem recurs. Replace some of it with good spares, see if the problem recurs. Etc, so on. memtest86 also does a decent job of finding bad modules if left to run long enough, but since it runs in isolation from the rest of the computer it will not detect certain corner cases of bad RAM.
Power supplies are similarly easy: Swap it out for a known good supply, and see if the problem recurs.
I've never had a CPU fail, so I'm afraid that I've never had to develop any particular troubleshooting techniques for them. Even when the heatsink has fallen completely off, in my experience, the CPU is just fine.
As for the rest of a highly integrated system: It doesn't do any good at all to figure out exactly which components in particular on an integrated motherboard are being problematic, as there's no practical way to replace them without tossing the whole board.
And in fact, every single motherboard problem I've experienced in the past 5 or 10 years has been easy to identify: Bad electrolytic capacitors. And they're easy to spot, since by the time they've drifted far enough out of spec to cause frequent-enough problems that folks start looking for a fix, the caps are all swollen and/or leaking goop.
So have a good look around the motherboard. If any caps are swollen or leaking, replace the whole board[1]. And consider replacing the power supply at the same time, as well, since it might be a contributing factor in the failure of the motherboard's caps (and is stuffed full of its own set of aging and possibly failing capacitors).
[1]: Yes, I know. It's easy and cheap to replace some or all of the electrolytic capacitors on a board if you're good at working on multi-layer PCBs. But most people aren't, and if they need to pay someone else to do it, it's going to be costly to the point where it becomes far more practical to simply buy a new board with a warranty.
Maybe. The loose neutral issue is a real, serious problem, as you've seen. It is something that I troubleshot and fixed myself in my current house, blessedly before anything expensive happened.
Brownouts can also be caused by one or both hot wires being bad (resistive) somewhere along the way. The symptoms are different from a loose neutral connection in that the lights on other circuits don't brighten at the same time as the brownout occurs.
As someone who is somewhat involved with actually using some (12MHz) of that recently-auctioned 700MHz spectrum, please allow me to say the following:
It's not vast. And it's not pretty. In fact, it's generally useless for common Internet access on any sort of grand scale:
700MHz is cool because people can use it at long distances from the central tower without much concern about their own antenna orientation. But once folks actually start to populate the network and, you know, use it, it gets hairy.
The correct answer, of course, is to ratchet down power and use more (and perhaps smaller) towers. But by the time you increase density enough that it becomes useful for any sort of popular usage, you've got so many towers/picocells/whatever that a mesh of bog-standard 802.11G starts looking far more practical.
Here in the States, we used to have federally-funded public television and radio services. It wasn't a line-item tax, and it wasn't optional -- it was just paid for out of the general fund (which, in turn, is fueled mostly by income taxes).
A decade or so ago, the public services were pretty much de-funded and left to fight on their own. We seem to get about the same amount of programming as we used to, but now it comes along with a lot more stuff that resembles advertisement, and far more frequent beg-a-thons where they'll interrupt the program at some great length to solicit donations.
I, for one, far preferred the publicly-funded way over this new(ish) begging-to-stay-on-the-air methodology.
This article cannot be left to stand with out a link to one of the most entertaining essays I've ever read. Now, unfortunately, it's not an MIT essay (instead, it's for NYU), but it's at least hosted at MIT, and therefore I feel that it is contextually meaningful.
As long as we're lamenting the long-gone days of high-DPI displays:
My 4.5 year old Dell Inspiron 6000d with its 15.4" WUXGA+ display does 1920x1200 just fine, thanks.
And I just parked a 19" Viewsonic Trinitron by the dumpster after it developed a power supply problem. That thing managed ungodly resolutions at sane refresh rates, but it ain't shit compared to the 20" 1600x1200 IPS LCD in front of me in terms of total usability. The Trinitron tube, at high resolutions, had some real convergence issues which could only be partly compensated for -- the LCD is tits perfect from corner to corner, and the color is absolutely superb.
Hrm. My 52" Samsung does just fine with these "on demand" tasks, coupled with a PS3 and a spare core on my Q6600. A little pricey, and a lot wasteful, for sure. But then, I'm a lot more comfortable on my couch with a beer and a smoke than in front of my PC when it comes to consuming passive entertainment. And it lets me watch with my friends and family, as well.
Hrm. I'm still on my first Dell Inspiron 6000. Got it about 4.5 years ago. It's a daily-use, on the road, 8 to 12-hour-per-day machine, and has spent its time outside in the elements (from freezing drizzle to baking sun, -15F to +110F), in smoke-filled plastics factories, and so on.
The hard drive died after I used it most days one particularly cold winter outside aiming cameras on top of a ladder, with a lot of back-and-forth between cold and warm, but that was reasonable enough. The display hinges need their screws tightened periodically, but that's easy enough too (and something that Dell has fixed on later models).
Haven't had much of an issue with the 15" WUXGA+ LCD. And even though the whole thing should be completely worn out by now, it's still a nice enough machine that I'm in no particularly great hurry to get rid of it.
(I'm not exactly sure how this fits into the context of finding a new laptop, but it is what it is . ..)
Wake me up when I can head down to the market and buy a widget made with nanotubes. Because until then, it's all smoke, mirrors, grants, and lab reports.
Slashdot Mirror
All these informed-sounding folks, living in some perfect netherworld that doesn't really exist. *sigh*
If I have a recording that is too quiet (for whatever reason), it is reasonable to be able to turn it up so that it's not too quiet anymore.
Not every recording is stuffed all the way up to the max at 0dB. Some are far quieter, whether on purpose or on accident. If I have a recording which peaks at -20dB, then I ought to be able to apply at LEAST 20dB of gain to it without jumping through hoops.
This is not an uncommon problem, and the best (simplest) solution is just to turn it up -- however that's done. It's been awhile since I've done any serious audio in Linux, but if PulseAudio or ALSA or whatever combination thereof requires me to buy extra hardware (WTF?) to achieve this very simple and obvious function, then it is very broken[1] indeed.
And before anyone replies and says "Oh noes! If we give the users gain, they might makes teh Distortions!!!!" This is broken in the "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that" sense. It's REALLY fucking stupid that the same operating system which allows you to do "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda" without prompting WILL NOT PROVIDE MEANINGFUL AUDIO GAIN.
Note to mods: There is no "-1, Disagree" moderation on Slashdot. So, just because you disagree with it, doesn't mean that you should pick some other random negative moderation instead. I'm not trolling; I'm stating a very real opinion, and presenting it as such in a very concise way.
Yet, the comment is currently marked as -1, Troll.
Sometimes, I think the mods here are as bigoted as anyone else on Slashdot, only more cowardly.
As an American, I don't give a fuck about "human civilization."
Instead, I care about what's good for the US.
This, for the most part, is what happened.
I wrote about this back in the beginning of June. Firefox has more than one place where it looks for extensions to load, and one of them is system-wide. Users of Firefox (by Mozilla's choosing) are not allowed to uninstall system-wide plugins, and that's where Microsoft decided to install it.
Why did Microsoft do it this way? Malice? Arrogance? Naah. Probably just because it's easier to install one extension one time in one place, than to try to sort out how to install it into all Firefox users' extensions folders as needed.
The "uninstall" button was greyed out simply because that's how Firefox works. ("Disable" worked fine, though.)
One of the first things MSFT did after folks noticed this somewhat-guffaw, was to move the extension into the per-user extension folder where people can uninstall it for themselves from within Firefox.
I think you're wrong.
It doesn't matter if they changed it.
If you provide binaries, you must also offer to provide source. End of story.
Go read the license if you don't understand it (it really is pretty plain).
Relax, meme. Everything works fine. Not that it particularly has to, though: There isn't much that goes on in this particular small business which requires Teh Intarweb, anyway.
Assuming otherwise without further information is the mark of a real asshole. And just because it's a popular assumption over the past few days (Danger/Sidekick/T-Mobile/Microsoft) doesn't mean that it's universally true.
Now get back under your rock, #669689.
The speakers and mic will deal with higher frequencies (30-40KHz) just fine, it'll just be attenuated more both going out and coming back in (which can be resolved by just turning things up a bit more, and killing the battery a little quicker).
A better question is: How will the electronics handle it? Even if the laptop has a codec capable of, say, 96KHz sampling, that doesn't mean that the rest of the audio path (particularly in a laptop) is in any way capable of passing such frequencies. It's very likely, in fact, that the engineer responsible for that part of the machine has intentionally low-pass filtered the analog electronics to only operate within normal hearing range.
All of them?
Um, yeah: Whatever you say, kid.
We usually just use a Roadrunner account for the main office, just like all the other small business out there. It's faster and cheaper than a T1, and has better reliability than the PRI that handles our phones. (We also have a freebie account with a local WISP that we do some business with for manual fail-over, but we haven't had to use it in years.)
I support of your comment:
If I hire an electrician, I expect his house to have proper wiring. If I hire a BICSI-certified cable monkey, I expect him to have Cat5 jacks in every room of his house. If I hire a mechanic, I expect his car to be in good working order. If I hire a bodyman, I expect that his car will be free of rust and dents. If I hire a detailer, I expect that his car will be immaculate inside and out. If I hire a carpenter, I expect that his house will be in tip-top structural shape. If I hire a mason, I expect that the foundation (and walls, where applicable) of their house will be in solid order. If I hire a telephone guy, I expect that the phones at his house work efficiently for the members of his household. If I hire a networking guy, I expect that he's got a well-secured NFS or SMB server running the show at his premises, with a good and working backup system in place. If I hire someone to put electronics into cars, I expect that their own cars have all kinds of gee-wizardtry installed.
Why should my expectations be any different when I hire a programmer?
It gets posted because it is inflammatory.
I don't, personally (in-the-face) know any proper open-source hackers. I do know a few programmers, though, who work professionally in their field. And when the latter group isn't coding for a 40-hour week, they're not at all opposed to coding to make their own life easier. (I don't know if they're particularly opposed to open-source or not, but somehow I suspect that they just can't be bothered with the extra work of maintaining publicly-available packages when all they want is a widget to help them in their own daily life.)
This guy, though: He's like a professional, career-oriented brick mason, who sits around watching his 150-year-old red brick house crumble around him, while loudly proclaiming "I don't do masonry in my free time. So suck it, fellas!"
It's illogical, and it's stupid. And Timothy is banking on the fact that we will notice and commence with a myriad of banter (read: pageviews) about the topic.
Everyone who replied to this (including me!) has been played. Congrats, Timmy.
Well...maybe. As a consumer, I don't care if it takes a few days to get my data back.
If my house burns down and I lose a terabyte of pr0n, I'll have enough other problems to worry about while I wait for a download to finish up or for a metaphorical station wagon full of tapes to arrive.
Meanwhile, though, S3's storage is pretty expensive for that sort of data on a consumer level, at $150 per month for 1TB of storage. For those prices, on any sort of lengthy term, I can easily justify the time and expense of putting together my own network backup solution (parking a cheap NAS box over at a friend's house, for instance), and still have enough cash left over to build a second one so that the same friend can back his stuff up to a NAS box at my house.
RAM is easy to test using basic troubleshooting techniques: Remove some of it, see if the problem recurs. Replace some of it with good spares, see if the problem recurs. Etc, so on. memtest86 also does a decent job of finding bad modules if left to run long enough, but since it runs in isolation from the rest of the computer it will not detect certain corner cases of bad RAM.
Power supplies are similarly easy: Swap it out for a known good supply, and see if the problem recurs.
I've never had a CPU fail, so I'm afraid that I've never had to develop any particular troubleshooting techniques for them. Even when the heatsink has fallen completely off, in my experience, the CPU is just fine.
As for the rest of a highly integrated system: It doesn't do any good at all to figure out exactly which components in particular on an integrated motherboard are being problematic, as there's no practical way to replace them without tossing the whole board.
And in fact, every single motherboard problem I've experienced in the past 5 or 10 years has been easy to identify: Bad electrolytic capacitors. And they're easy to spot, since by the time they've drifted far enough out of spec to cause frequent-enough problems that folks start looking for a fix, the caps are all swollen and/or leaking goop.
So have a good look around the motherboard. If any caps are swollen or leaking, replace the whole board[1]. And consider replacing the power supply at the same time, as well, since it might be a contributing factor in the failure of the motherboard's caps (and is stuffed full of its own set of aging and possibly failing capacitors).
[1]: Yes, I know. It's easy and cheap to replace some or all of the electrolytic capacitors on a board if you're good at working on multi-layer PCBs. But most people aren't, and if they need to pay someone else to do it, it's going to be costly to the point where it becomes far more practical to simply buy a new board with a warranty.
Maybe. The loose neutral issue is a real, serious problem, as you've seen. It is something that I troubleshot and fixed myself in my current house, blessedly before anything expensive happened.
Brownouts can also be caused by one or both hot wires being bad (resistive) somewhere along the way. The symptoms are different from a loose neutral connection in that the lights on other circuits don't brighten at the same time as the brownout occurs.
So let's cut to the chase: The movie was pretty fucking good. Is the book any better?
As someone who is somewhat involved with actually using some (12MHz) of that recently-auctioned 700MHz spectrum, please allow me to say the following:
It's not vast. And it's not pretty. In fact, it's generally useless for common Internet access on any sort of grand scale:
700MHz is cool because people can use it at long distances from the central tower without much concern about their own antenna orientation. But once folks actually start to populate the network and, you know, use it, it gets hairy.
The correct answer, of course, is to ratchet down power and use more (and perhaps smaller) towers. But by the time you increase density enough that it becomes useful for any sort of popular usage, you've got so many towers/picocells/whatever that a mesh of bog-standard 802.11G starts looking far more practical.
*sigh*
Interesting rant.
Here in the States, we used to have federally-funded public television and radio services. It wasn't a line-item tax, and it wasn't optional -- it was just paid for out of the general fund (which, in turn, is fueled mostly by income taxes).
A decade or so ago, the public services were pretty much de-funded and left to fight on their own. We seem to get about the same amount of programming as we used to, but now it comes along with a lot more stuff that resembles advertisement, and far more frequent beg-a-thons where they'll interrupt the program at some great length to solicit donations.
I, for one, far preferred the publicly-funded way over this new(ish) begging-to-stay-on-the-air methodology.
This article cannot be left to stand with out a link to one of the most entertaining essays I've ever read. Now, unfortunately, it's not an MIT essay (instead, it's for NYU), but it's at least hosted at MIT, and therefore I feel that it is contextually meaningful.
I'll third the motion: Thanks.
It's seldom a shame that posts can't be modded past 5, but reading this makes me wish it were possible.
As long as we're lamenting the long-gone days of high-DPI displays:
My 4.5 year old Dell Inspiron 6000d with its 15.4" WUXGA+ display does 1920x1200 just fine, thanks.
And I just parked a 19" Viewsonic Trinitron by the dumpster after it developed a power supply problem. That thing managed ungodly resolutions at sane refresh rates, but it ain't shit compared to the 20" 1600x1200 IPS LCD in front of me in terms of total usability. The Trinitron tube, at high resolutions, had some real convergence issues which could only be partly compensated for -- the LCD is tits perfect from corner to corner, and the color is absolutely superb.
Hrm. My 52" Samsung does just fine with these "on demand" tasks, coupled with a PS3 and a spare core on my Q6600. A little pricey, and a lot wasteful, for sure. But then, I'm a lot more comfortable on my couch with a beer and a smoke than in front of my PC when it comes to consuming passive entertainment. And it lets me watch with my friends and family, as well.
To each his own, I guess.
But then I'd miss the grandness of the announcement that nanotubes have, you know, become useful.
I know very well where I am, #14640. I've been reading articles about nanotubes on Slashdot for as long as there has been a Slashdot.
It's simply been long enough that such articles are positively boring. It's like reading about Duke Nukem Forever.
Hrm. I'm still on my first Dell Inspiron 6000. Got it about 4.5 years ago. It's a daily-use, on the road, 8 to 12-hour-per-day machine, and has spent its time outside in the elements (from freezing drizzle to baking sun, -15F to +110F), in smoke-filled plastics factories, and so on.
The hard drive died after I used it most days one particularly cold winter outside aiming cameras on top of a ladder, with a lot of back-and-forth between cold and warm, but that was reasonable enough. The display hinges need their screws tightened periodically, but that's easy enough too (and something that Dell has fixed on later models).
Haven't had much of an issue with the 15" WUXGA+ LCD. And even though the whole thing should be completely worn out by now, it's still a nice enough machine that I'm in no particularly great hurry to get rid of it.
(I'm not exactly sure how this fits into the context of finding a new laptop, but it is what it is . . .)
blah.
Wake me up when I can head down to the market and buy a widget made with nanotubes. Because until then, it's all smoke, mirrors, grants, and lab reports.