You forget (or perhaps never knew) that the RIAA curve exists to make things better, not worse.
Vinyl can be very noisy, and the special EQ makes it much less so. It also reduces the affects of scratches and dust, which are very real things out here in the non-vacuous world.
It makes the noise characteristics of vinyl records better match our ears' own frequency-dependent sensitivity, such that we hear more music and less noise.
The tradeoff? A slight (insignificant) error between the cutting and playback curves, and some (also insignificant) distortion from the simple passive R/C filters that comprise a typical RIAA EQ, along with a small (sometimes significant) increase in noise from the bearings in the turntable.
My friend, there are far better things to worry about than this if you're at all interested in improving your listening experience.
The cheap-shit CCD in my $6 optical mouse seems to do quite well enough at what it is intended to do that I simply cannot assume that it is impossible to build a CCD suitable for reading vinyl records when given a substantially larger budget. Reading a vinyl groove to a specified resolution is a process composed of difficult but obvious and finite problems, and therefore the hardware to do so must be possible to produce at some point.
Also, in this age of very inexpensive and vast storage, there is no particularly pressing need to have the device operate in real-time, which would permit the software side of things to spend more time dealing with surface contamination or damage.
There's still a lot of material out there that only exists on vinyl and acetate platters. The easier it is to transfer and archive that material, the more likely it is that someone at some point might actually take the time to do it.
(I write this as EAC patiently rips a slightly-abused, 15-year-old CD at a leisurely 0.5x, carefully producing verified accurate data without any help from me. But my CD collection is relatively small and mostly replaceable. The world's analog recordings are a different story...)
In order for that to happen, the item must first have been something other than obscure.
The last time I heard mention of Turbolinux, every distribution was obscure (and most of them still are). That Turbolinux continues to remain obscure while others have become somewhat more common does not mean that it's sliding anywhere, but is instead only an indication that it turned stagnant a long time go.
The only gear I'm personally aware of that has an isolated coaxial digital input is an old Audio Alchemy DAC (model DDE 1.1, IIRC). The example of this that I have in my living room made explicit mention of this on its instruction sheet.
But, I'm not so sure that one could not just simply use a suitable 75-Ohm transformer to break S/PDIF grounds. Seems that just about anything from the conventional broadcast video world would work fine, where such devices are somewhat common.
I've seen my share of spectacular ground faults, but only after the fact. It seems that there's a failure mode in common-use surge suppression use, by which the MOVs see high voltage and short to ground, but not all of them, everywhere, at the same time. And, of course, that ground has non-zero impedance. Combine this with a long-ish grounded signal wire, connected to some other random pile of gear with its own array of MOVs at different points, and ground loops that didn't exist at all a moment ago suddenly appear with tens of thousands of volts of potential.
(Sometimes I wonder if they ever fixed that place so that all of the audio gear and most of the computers didn't blow up once every year or so...)
Naturally, none of the current copper standards except ethernet and Midi provide ground isolation
As long as we're being pedantic, I'd like to point out that IEC 60958 (aka coaxial S/PDIF) is supposed to be ground-isolated at the receiver side.
Never mind the fact that almost nothing is built that way. I only point this out because you were seriously discussing the relative merits of balanced speaker cables, and felt a powerful desire to feed your bizarre lunacy.
Since July of last year I have basically cut out the mass media from my life. I sold my TV, gave away my DVD player, and donated my CDs and DVDs to a charity auction. For entertainment, I've taken up a number of sports, including basketball and skiing. I also now listen to local bands live at pubs and restaurants, rather than listening to the radio or CDs. I never had any gaming consoles to begin with, and I uninstalled and gave away the few computer games I do have. I do rely on the BBC for news, but even that's become limited these days.
I'm glad I made that decision. All this new crap involving DRM and frivolous from the entertainment industry just goes to show you how full of horseshit they are. I'm very pleased that my money does not go to them. They don't deserve it. Not only that, but now that I play sports rather than just watching them on TV, I've become much more fit and far healthier. Getting away from the mainstream media was one of the best things I've ever done.
Look: Either you're just one person who trolling over and over again, or you're different people who together are in some sort of pervasive neo-Luddite Jehovah's Witness-esque organization, spewing forth senseless propaganda at every opportunity.
In the former case, I'd like to request that you at least try to keep your story consistent, as it makes it more challenging to get to +5. In the latter case, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I used to suffer from this same problem with my Zire 71. I found myself using it less and less as the noise became more and more bothersome. And then, one day, the display went all wonky and intermittent in an unrelated case of a bad internal connection.
Palm fixed the connection under warranty, apparently by replacing the entire front half of the unit.
Ever since then (it's been about 3 years), it has been totally silent. So, clearly, not -every- unit has this problem, and it can be fixed.
My Vista machine is an Inspiron 6000 laptop with a 15.4" display running at 1920x1200. The pixels on this machine are so bloody small that the effects of ClearType are completely without negative effect, at least to my eyes (about 20/25 corrected, but I've got better-than-usual color perception). The text on this machine is both liquid smooth and razor sharp, and feels nearly like looking at print from a magazine. (Buying this high-resolution (140dpi) display was, absolutely, worth every cent -- it is a joy to use.)
Occasionally, I plug a 19" Viewsonic VG930m 19" LCD into its VGA output, as a second head at 1280x1024. And while text is has noticeable fuzz, I still prefer it with ClearType.
It is probably worth mentioning that I've tweaked the settings for ClearType to be a bit more toward my own preference. It's not hard to do with Vista; just type "cleartype" into the OS's help system and read a few paragraphs down. It's probably worth setting it up in at least two stages: First, configure it to what immediately appears to be the best fashion. And then after a few hours (or days), adjust it again while taking into account the likes/dislikes that you've learned by using it.
My Ubuntu box is another story. The same Viewsonic monitor plugged into my desktop Ubuntu machine with DVI is an abomination with subpixel rendering enabled, using any combination of available settings. Plainly visible rainbow patterns around text, combined with bad contrast between different letters conspire to make for a very unpleasant and distracting time. On this box, I prefer to use old-fashioned greyscale antialiasing (which conveniently agrees better with the 19" CRT that is also attached).
I should know, later tonight, how Ubuntu's subpixel text looks at 140dpi, now that 7.10 brings the promise of finally supporting all of the hardware on this 2-year-old laptop, but I'm not holding my breath on that particular feature.:-/
The cost of a quality musical instrument, as a tangible thing, might not be going down. But we're not talking about Strats or Steinways; we're talking about recording, specifically the processing end of it.
To that end, let's take amplifiers, which are the near-universal processing and monitoring side of the electric guitar. These are definitely getting cheaper. A Marshall stack is always going to be expensive, for a variety of reasons, but other amplifiers from companies like Line 6 and Roland keep bringing down the cost of quality amplification and effects. (Line 6's processor modules are also available as software plugins with no hardware dependancy, which can reduce or eliminate the need to have separate amplifiers/cabinets for each guitarist, as far as the recording process goes.)
Synthesizers are cheap, and getting cheaper. They consist largely or entirely of software, lately, and there's even a few free open-source packages that don't suck.
Commercial multi-track software recorders like Adobe Audition (formally the much more reasonably-priced Cool Edit Pro), and of course open-source products like Audacity and Ardour, allow more possibilities for recording, post-processing, editing, and mixing than were ever dreamed possible with analog gear. Multiple-input sound cards from companies like RME and M-Audio keep dropping in price and gaining new features.
It is quite possible, and has been for some years, to produce extremely professional recordings with nothing more than a few good microphones, a decent outboard A/D device, a few selections of totally free software, good engineering practices (!), a spare bedroom, a revealing home stereo (or maybe just some quality headphones) for monitoring, and the instruments that the musicians already own. Oh, and a little bit of talent from everyone involved doesn't hurt, either...
So, in reply to you, UncleTogie: Good instruments have always been expensive, and will probably only become more so as the cost of raw materials continues to escalate. But gone are the days when the only way to cut an album was to rent time in a recording studio stuffed with gear, and so the cost of cutting an album is indeed dramatically lower than it has been in the past.
And in reply to GP: Because computers are, by any estimate, quite cheap and getting cheaper by the second, it is simply not very hard to produce "heavily-processed" music without a "proper" studio. These days, they're even fairly quiet, which again lessens the cost of recording -- there's just no great need to physically isolate a modern, quiet, cheap Dell machine from the recording space. This makes the whole process a lot cheaper in terms of real estate, dedication, and cabling. Even my 2-year-old laptop is able to run for extended periods with the fan completely disabled, its Hitachi hard drive is practically silent, and it is more than fast enough to enable nearly any manner of "professional" recording thanks to the virtues of USB 2.0 and Firewire.
Nine Inch Nails' most recent album was largely recorded in hotel rooms and tour buses, for example, using the same software and technology that is available to anyone else. And while the expensive Protools rig that Reznor finished the album with is sure to enable a smoother and more productive workflow than anything being produced in Audacity, that doesn't mean that a competent engineer cannot accomplish similar results with far less.
Back on topic, these lower barriers to entry all conspire to mean that a recording contract continues to be less and less useful to a musician or band which seeks to make money selling the products of their creativity, but that by no means is any indicator that quality must suffer in exchange.
Nor should they have to. And those same ignorant people will also never be aware that a new set of "standard web fonts" exists, so they'll never be affected by it.
Vista turns on ClearType by default on suitable displays, and tends to automatically set the resolution sanely so that ClearType actually works. Since this is also the only OS which has these fonts by default, I expect that this situation is plenty good enough.
I often am tasked in working with some of the systems in (small) 911 dispatch centers, which often lets me see rather more than I'd like of what holds them together.
First off, the infrastructure is horrible, almost as a rule[1]. Take the messiest, most confusing, and disgusting wiring closet you've ever seen, and add another layer of funk and wayward cross-connects and a nameless PC under the floor, and you'll have yourself a fairly typical-looking E911 telephone system.
And, generally speaking, the network isn't in much better shape. The tools to secure and lock things down ceased being new long, long ago, but just aren't generally in use. And every system that the dispatchers see (including those that operate the fucking radios) runs Windows, and if it is anything based on HTML, it also has a dependency on Internet Explorer.
It goes downhill from here in all of the obvious directions.
[1]: Of notable contrast to this is the 911 center in the county where I live, where I had to request a hole in the firewall in order to make NTP work on some new equipment. Things there are generally pretty tidy and well-kept... However, nothing at all prevented me from plugging my laptop into an available Ethernet port on the wall, getting a DHCP address on the same subnet as the rest of the building, and then doing some random web browsing and DNS lookups. This was very convenient for me because it let me finish the job a little quicker, and I did have permission for it. However, it only takes one compromised or malicious PC, along with one motivated person, to bring down the whole house of cards with even this small amount of implicit trust. Just a cursory Google search shows that there are lots of ways for one to whatever one wishes with a network like this.
Can't use compatibility mode here, you MUST upgrade to version 2007 or newer if you have Vista ($500-++?? for multiuser versions).
Must?
Quickbooks 2005 has been running just fine on Vista, at least for me. I just installed it from the CD like I would anything else, applied updates like I would anything else, and it's been running just fine, just like everything else.
I'd like to point out that I've had Ubuntu blow itself up more times than I have any other OS.
The system completely shits itself every time there is an update to the kernel (it seemms incapable of managing to run LILO by itself) or to the nVidia binary drivers (which also requires a magic incantation to make X live again).
In fact, other than once instance of OS/2 Warp badly damaging itself as the power failed during a chkdsk operation twelve bloody years ago, I don't think I've ever seen a non-Linux-based operating system completely hose itself, unaided, and become unusable.
This includes Windows of all incarnations after version 3, except for NT.
Honestly, sir. Your unending, rigidly-biased McCarthy-esque front-page banter is tiresome and uninteresting, and in no way promotes productive discourse.
Instead, it serves only give you the appearance of being callous and bigoted. And while you may, in fact, be callous and bigoted, the front page of Slashdot is no place in which to display such commentary.
Slashdot, at its tenth year, remains the pinnacle of dispersion for all news matters relating to open source technology, and continues to grow broader in scope of audience by the moment as more and more people become interested this very important concept.
Yet, it is as if you seek to squander that fame, and use it as a means to broadcast your own fallacious shallowness. This quite plainly reflects poorly upon Slashdot as a business unit, but also more significantly upon its own readership. It is nothing but detrimental to the idea of open-source software, and indeed is an affront toward its widespread acceptance.
Please, stop. Every time you say something so thoughtless and misguided, as is occurrent of regular frequency, we all lose a little more credibility.
It will help loosen carriers' control by forcing them to accept Google's software in its entirety.
I mean, one can only assume that Google would require the carriers to offer either all of the features of their application suite, or none at all. And once one or two national carriers (or a handful of regional ones) start adopting this software, the rest will be compelled to make a decision:
Play ball with Google and adjust business models accordingly. This is obviously a somewhat frightening concept for companies like Verizon which are deeply entrenched in selling individual services for exorbitant sums, and it will likely be an expensive task to perform.
or...
Distance themselves from the household name of Google, stubbornly maintain the status quo, and fade into obscurity as an increasingly-clued consumer populace flocks toward their Google-embracing competition. And where the former choice was merely frightening and expensive, this one will be downright terrifying and death-bringing.
Of course we have file servers, a mail server, and a Linux box that exists just to experiment with.
But they're all just PCs, procured through the same channels as any other PC, just like most of the other "file servers" in the world these days. Therefore, they're included in any statistics about the number of PCs in the world.
For larger installations, the study makes a separate case for datacenter power consumption.
TFA states that 25% of the power consumed by computers goes toward powering local networking hardware, which is factored at about 20% of the total consumption of the Internet.
This means that a typical small office with 20 computers has local networking hardware consuming the equivalent of 5 PCs.
Sources cited in TFA state that each PC uses an average of (588kW/365.25/24*1000) = 67 Watts, which seems reasonable enough. But that (67*5) means that 335 Watts worth of network infrastructure gear are present in a 20-PC office, which is absurd.
I know that Cisco has been known to make some hot switches, but for fuck's sake. At my place of employ (a not-atypical 20-ish PC small office), we've just got a passively-cooled 24-port 3com switch which doesn't even get warm to the touch, two Linksys WRT54GL routers, and a cable modem.
High estimates for this scenario might be 15 Watts for the switch and 12 Watts for each of the other devices, for a total of 51 Watts for the entire network, or about 4% of that which is used by the PCs.
By these estimates, my own home network has a slightly worse ratio, at about 6%.
But even if we figure that everyone else in the world has a vastly more complicated routing and switching fabric than I portray here, I simply cannot envision this figure being beyond about 8% on average -- a far lower figure than the author's stated 25%.
This means that the total consumption of the Internet in the United States, as corrected, stands at about 8%, down from 9.4%. (Not much different expressed that way, until you realize that 1.4% of the total US electricity consumption really is a huge figure.)
If anyone else has any additional corrections to make, please do so. Your contribution helps keep the teh Intarwebs green.
I think people are just getting tired of it all, thinking that there should be better solutions by now. It was excusable when desktop PC were still considered novel and new. Now people want to be able to take the technology for granted, and Microsoft isn't doing a good job of filling that desire.
Indeed. Just like how American automobiles became boring many decades ago. There's no longer any need to play with clever arrangements for the gearshift, the position of the pedals, the turn signals, or the headlight switch. There's just nothing left about the user interface that needs changing. Now that the thing is popular, the concept is final, and people take it for granted.
Boy, am I sure glad to learn that the computer became a solved problem years ago, with the popular release of Windows XP.
The only thing wrong with Joint Stereo (and mid-side encoding) is that of history: Back in the day, the guy who put together BladeEnc had an outspoken, irrational fear of the concept, and refused to support it in his MP3 encoder. This, in turn, caused a whole lot of bad-sounding, high-ish bitrate BladeEnc-encoded independent stereo MP3s to enter the mix (back before RIAA started suing their customers), as people used that blithering idiot's codec.
Boy, am I glad that BladeEnc is essentially dead.
Mid-side stereo works just fine. As you say, it is a fairly common minimalist recording technique, but it's also the means by which stereo FM radio operates. And if any golden ears reading this still aren't convinced: Even vinyl LPs use mid-side for stereo encoding.
Back before I had broadband, and way before the recently-popular concept of podcasting, I used a FreeBSD machine with cron and a dedicated external tuner to record NPR radio programs to MP3, with LAME set up to encode everything in mid-side. The results were positively awesome, yet small enough that a few weeks' worth of the shows I cared about could be archived to CD-R without too much pain. (An obvious improvement to the technique would have been to modify both LAME and the tuner so as to keep the analog signal chain entirely in mid-side stereo from the transmitter on out, but I lost interest.)
Just because CDs and cassettes almost uniquely (in terms of consumer audio formats) use totally independent channels for stereo sound doesn't mean that it's a good model for efficiency. If it were, we wouldn't be here discussing Amazon's new MP3 service, now would we?:)
Slashdot Mirror
You forget (or perhaps never knew) that the RIAA curve exists to make things better, not worse.
Vinyl can be very noisy, and the special EQ makes it much less so. It also reduces the affects of scratches and dust, which are very real things out here in the non-vacuous world.
It makes the noise characteristics of vinyl records better match our ears' own frequency-dependent sensitivity, such that we hear more music and less noise.
The tradeoff? A slight (insignificant) error between the cutting and playback curves, and some (also insignificant) distortion from the simple passive R/C filters that comprise a typical RIAA EQ, along with a small (sometimes significant) increase in noise from the bearings in the turntable.
My friend, there are far better things to worry about than this if you're at all interested in improving your listening experience.
Must it be so?
The cheap-shit CCD in my $6 optical mouse seems to do quite well enough at what it is intended to do that I simply cannot assume that it is impossible to build a CCD suitable for reading vinyl records when given a substantially larger budget. Reading a vinyl groove to a specified resolution is a process composed of difficult but obvious and finite problems, and therefore the hardware to do so must be possible to produce at some point.
Also, in this age of very inexpensive and vast storage, there is no particularly pressing need to have the device operate in real-time, which would permit the software side of things to spend more time dealing with surface contamination or damage.
There's still a lot of material out there that only exists on vinyl and acetate platters. The easier it is to transfer and archive that material, the more likely it is that someone at some point might actually take the time to do it.
(I write this as EAC patiently rips a slightly-abused, 15-year-old CD at a leisurely 0.5x, carefully producing verified accurate data without any help from me. But my CD collection is relatively small and mostly replaceable. The world's analog recordings are a different story...)
What is this, FOX News or something?
No, I'm afraid that this is something far more sinister: It, my friend, is Slashdot.
Sliding into obscurity?
In order for that to happen, the item must first have been something other than obscure.
The last time I heard mention of Turbolinux, every distribution was obscure (and most of them still are). That Turbolinux continues to remain obscure while others have become somewhat more common does not mean that it's sliding anywhere, but is instead only an indication that it turned stagnant a long time go.
Ah, ok. Then, perhaps you're not crazy... :)
The only gear I'm personally aware of that has an isolated coaxial digital input is an old Audio Alchemy DAC (model DDE 1.1, IIRC). The example of this that I have in my living room made explicit mention of this on its instruction sheet.
But, I'm not so sure that one could not just simply use a suitable 75-Ohm transformer to break S/PDIF grounds. Seems that just about anything from the conventional broadcast video world would work fine, where such devices are somewhat common.
I've seen my share of spectacular ground faults, but only after the fact. It seems that there's a failure mode in common-use surge suppression use, by which the MOVs see high voltage and short to ground, but not all of them, everywhere, at the same time. And, of course, that ground has non-zero impedance. Combine this with a long-ish grounded signal wire, connected to some other random pile of gear with its own array of MOVs at different points, and ground loops that didn't exist at all a moment ago suddenly appear with tens of thousands of volts of potential.
(Sometimes I wonder if they ever fixed that place so that all of the audio gear and most of the computers didn't blow up once every year or so...)
Naturally, none of the current copper standards except ethernet and Midi provide ground isolation
As long as we're being pedantic, I'd like to point out that IEC 60958 (aka coaxial S/PDIF) is supposed to be ground-isolated at the receiver side.
Never mind the fact that almost nothing is built that way. I only point this out because you were seriously discussing the relative merits of balanced speaker cables, and felt a powerful desire to feed your bizarre lunacy.
A better answer would be to stop giving everyone personal computers if they're not supposed to be, well, personalizing them.
Not to be too fucking obvious, here.
Now, instead of RIAA, I have to worry about the Secret Service and the NSA when I'm browsing pirate bay looking for some mus
*bright flash of concussion grenade*
$#(FRe2%DEK#NO CARRIER
From here:
Since July of last year I have basically cut out the mass media from my life. I sold my TV, gave away my DVD player, and donated my CDs and DVDs to a charity auction. For entertainment, I've taken up a number of sports, including basketball and skiing. I also now listen to local bands live at pubs and restaurants, rather than listening to the radio or CDs. I never had any gaming consoles to begin with, and I uninstalled and gave away the few computer games I do have. I do rely on the BBC for news, but even that's become limited these days.
I'm glad I made that decision. All this new crap involving DRM and frivolous from the entertainment industry just goes to show you how full of horseshit they are. I'm very pleased that my money does not go to them. They don't deserve it. Not only that, but now that I play sports rather than just watching them on TV, I've become much more fit and far healthier. Getting away from the mainstream media was one of the best things I've ever done.
Look: Either you're just one person who trolling over and over again, or you're different people who together are in some sort of pervasive neo-Luddite Jehovah's Witness-esque organization, spewing forth senseless propaganda at every opportunity.
In the former case, I'd like to request that you at least try to keep your story consistent, as it makes it more challenging to get to +5. In the latter case, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I used to suffer from this same problem with my Zire 71. I found myself using it less and less as the noise became more and more bothersome. And then, one day, the display went all wonky and intermittent in an unrelated case of a bad internal connection.
Palm fixed the connection under warranty, apparently by replacing the entire front half of the unit.
Ever since then (it's been about 3 years), it has been totally silent. So, clearly, not -every- unit has this problem, and it can be fixed.
Not me (but you knew that was coming...).
:-/
My Vista machine is an Inspiron 6000 laptop with a 15.4" display running at 1920x1200. The pixels on this machine are so bloody small that the effects of ClearType are completely without negative effect, at least to my eyes (about 20/25 corrected, but I've got better-than-usual color perception). The text on this machine is both liquid smooth and razor sharp, and feels nearly like looking at print from a magazine. (Buying this high-resolution (140dpi) display was, absolutely, worth every cent -- it is a joy to use.)
Occasionally, I plug a 19" Viewsonic VG930m 19" LCD into its VGA output, as a second head at 1280x1024. And while text is has noticeable fuzz, I still prefer it with ClearType.
It is probably worth mentioning that I've tweaked the settings for ClearType to be a bit more toward my own preference. It's not hard to do with Vista; just type "cleartype" into the OS's help system and read a few paragraphs down. It's probably worth setting it up in at least two stages: First, configure it to what immediately appears to be the best fashion. And then after a few hours (or days), adjust it again while taking into account the likes/dislikes that you've learned by using it.
My Ubuntu box is another story. The same Viewsonic monitor plugged into my desktop Ubuntu machine with DVI is an abomination with subpixel rendering enabled, using any combination of available settings. Plainly visible rainbow patterns around text, combined with bad contrast between different letters conspire to make for a very unpleasant and distracting time. On this box, I prefer to use old-fashioned greyscale antialiasing (which conveniently agrees better with the 19" CRT that is also attached).
I should know, later tonight, how Ubuntu's subpixel text looks at 140dpi, now that 7.10 brings the promise of finally supporting all of the hardware on this 2-year-old laptop, but I'm not holding my breath on that particular feature.
The cost of a quality musical instrument, as a tangible thing, might not be going down. But we're not talking about Strats or Steinways; we're talking about recording, specifically the processing end of it.
To that end, let's take amplifiers, which are the near-universal processing and monitoring side of the electric guitar. These are definitely getting cheaper. A Marshall stack is always going to be expensive, for a variety of reasons, but other amplifiers from companies like Line 6 and Roland keep bringing down the cost of quality amplification and effects. (Line 6's processor modules are also available as software plugins with no hardware dependancy, which can reduce or eliminate the need to have separate amplifiers/cabinets for each guitarist, as far as the recording process goes.)
Synthesizers are cheap, and getting cheaper. They consist largely or entirely of software, lately, and there's even a few free open-source packages that don't suck.
Commercial multi-track software recorders like Adobe Audition (formally the much more reasonably-priced Cool Edit Pro), and of course open-source products like Audacity and Ardour, allow more possibilities for recording, post-processing, editing, and mixing than were ever dreamed possible with analog gear. Multiple-input sound cards from companies like RME and M-Audio keep dropping in price and gaining new features.
It is quite possible, and has been for some years, to produce extremely professional recordings with nothing more than a few good microphones, a decent outboard A/D device, a few selections of totally free software, good engineering practices (!), a spare bedroom, a revealing home stereo (or maybe just some quality headphones) for monitoring, and the instruments that the musicians already own. Oh, and a little bit of talent from everyone involved doesn't hurt, either...
So, in reply to you, UncleTogie: Good instruments have always been expensive, and will probably only become more so as the cost of raw materials continues to escalate. But gone are the days when the only way to cut an album was to rent time in a recording studio stuffed with gear, and so the cost of cutting an album is indeed dramatically lower than it has been in the past.
And in reply to GP: Because computers are, by any estimate, quite cheap and getting cheaper by the second, it is simply not very hard to produce "heavily-processed" music without a "proper" studio. These days, they're even fairly quiet, which again lessens the cost of recording -- there's just no great need to physically isolate a modern, quiet, cheap Dell machine from the recording space. This makes the whole process a lot cheaper in terms of real estate, dedication, and cabling. Even my 2-year-old laptop is able to run for extended periods with the fan completely disabled, its Hitachi hard drive is practically silent, and it is more than fast enough to enable nearly any manner of "professional" recording thanks to the virtues of USB 2.0 and Firewire.
Nine Inch Nails' most recent album was largely recorded in hotel rooms and tour buses, for example, using the same software and technology that is available to anyone else. And while the expensive Protools rig that Reznor finished the album with is sure to enable a smoother and more productive workflow than anything being produced in Audacity, that doesn't mean that a competent engineer cannot accomplish similar results with far less.
Back on topic, these lower barriers to entry all conspire to mean that a recording contract continues to be less and less useful to a musician or band which seeks to make money selling the products of their creativity, but that by no means is any indicator that quality must suffer in exchange.
Nor should they have to. And those same ignorant people will also never be aware that a new set of "standard web fonts" exists, so they'll never be affected by it.
Vista turns on ClearType by default on suitable displays, and tends to automatically set the resolution sanely so that ClearType actually works. Since this is also the only OS which has these fonts by default, I expect that this situation is plenty good enough.
It's just the way it is.
I often am tasked in working with some of the systems in (small) 911 dispatch centers, which often lets me see rather more than I'd like of what holds them together.
First off, the infrastructure is horrible, almost as a rule[1]. Take the messiest, most confusing, and disgusting wiring closet you've ever seen, and add another layer of funk and wayward cross-connects and a nameless PC under the floor, and you'll have yourself a fairly typical-looking E911 telephone system.
And, generally speaking, the network isn't in much better shape. The tools to secure and lock things down ceased being new long, long ago, but just aren't generally in use. And every system that the dispatchers see (including those that operate the fucking radios) runs Windows, and if it is anything based on HTML, it also has a dependency on Internet Explorer.
It goes downhill from here in all of the obvious directions.
[1]: Of notable contrast to this is the 911 center in the county where I live, where I had to request a hole in the firewall in order to make NTP work on some new equipment. Things there are generally pretty tidy and well-kept... However, nothing at all prevented me from plugging my laptop into an available Ethernet port on the wall, getting a DHCP address on the same subnet as the rest of the building, and then doing some random web browsing and DNS lookups. This was very convenient for me because it let me finish the job a little quicker, and I did have permission for it. However, it only takes one compromised or malicious PC, along with one motivated person, to bring down the whole house of cards with even this small amount of implicit trust. Just a cursory Google search shows that there are lots of ways for one to whatever one wishes with a network like this.
Can't use compatibility mode here, you MUST upgrade to version 2007 or newer if you have Vista ($500-++?? for multiuser versions).
Must?
Quickbooks 2005 has been running just fine on Vista, at least for me. I just installed it from the CD like I would anything else, applied updates like I would anything else, and it's been running just fine, just like everything else.
Am I missing something?
I'd like to point out that I've had Ubuntu blow itself up more times than I have any other OS.
The system completely shits itself every time there is an update to the kernel (it seemms incapable of managing to run LILO by itself) or to the nVidia binary drivers (which also requires a magic incantation to make X live again).
In fact, other than once instance of OS/2 Warp badly damaging itself as the power failed during a chkdsk operation twelve bloody years ago, I don't think I've ever seen a non-Linux-based operating system completely hose itself, unaided, and become unusable.
This includes Windows of all incarnations after version 3, except for NT.
YMMV.
"Microsoftie"?
Honestly, sir. Your unending, rigidly-biased McCarthy-esque front-page banter is tiresome and uninteresting, and in no way promotes productive discourse.
Instead, it serves only give you the appearance of being callous and bigoted. And while you may, in fact, be callous and bigoted, the front page of Slashdot is no place in which to display such commentary.
Slashdot, at its tenth year, remains the pinnacle of dispersion for all news matters relating to open source technology, and continues to grow broader in scope of audience by the moment as more and more people become interested this very important concept.
Yet, it is as if you seek to squander that fame, and use it as a means to broadcast your own fallacious shallowness. This quite plainly reflects poorly upon Slashdot as a business unit, but also more significantly upon its own readership. It is nothing but detrimental to the idea of open-source software, and indeed is an affront toward its widespread acceptance.
Please, stop. Every time you say something so thoughtless and misguided, as is occurrent of regular frequency, we all lose a little more credibility.
You are doing us all a tremendous disservice.
It will help loosen carriers' control by forcing them to accept Google's software in its entirety.
I mean, one can only assume that Google would require the carriers to offer either all of the features of their application suite, or none at all. And once one or two national carriers (or a handful of regional ones) start adopting this software, the rest will be compelled to make a decision:
Play ball with Google and adjust business models accordingly. This is obviously a somewhat frightening concept for companies like Verizon which are deeply entrenched in selling individual services for exorbitant sums, and it will likely be an expensive task to perform.
or...
Distance themselves from the household name of Google, stubbornly maintain the status quo, and fade into obscurity as an increasingly-clued consumer populace flocks toward their Google-embracing competition. And where the former choice was merely frightening and expensive, this one will be downright terrifying and death-bringing.
Somewhat uniquely so, even.
Of course we have file servers, a mail server, and a Linux box that exists just to experiment with.
But they're all just PCs, procured through the same channels as any other PC, just like most of the other "file servers" in the world these days. Therefore, they're included in any statistics about the number of PCs in the world.
For larger installations, the study makes a separate case for datacenter power consumption.
TFA states that 25% of the power consumed by computers goes toward powering local networking hardware, which is factored at about 20% of the total consumption of the Internet.
This means that a typical small office with 20 computers has local networking hardware consuming the equivalent of 5 PCs.
Sources cited in TFA state that each PC uses an average of (588kW/365.25/24*1000) = 67 Watts, which seems reasonable enough. But that (67*5) means that 335 Watts worth of network infrastructure gear are present in a 20-PC office, which is absurd.
I know that Cisco has been known to make some hot switches, but for fuck's sake. At my place of employ (a not-atypical 20-ish PC small office), we've just got a passively-cooled 24-port 3com switch which doesn't even get warm to the touch, two Linksys WRT54GL routers, and a cable modem.
High estimates for this scenario might be 15 Watts for the switch and 12 Watts for each of the other devices, for a total of 51 Watts for the entire network, or about 4% of that which is used by the PCs.
By these estimates, my own home network has a slightly worse ratio, at about 6%.
But even if we figure that everyone else in the world has a vastly more complicated routing and switching fabric than I portray here, I simply cannot envision this figure being beyond about 8% on average -- a far lower figure than the author's stated 25%.
This means that the total consumption of the Internet in the United States, as corrected, stands at about 8%, down from 9.4%. (Not much different expressed that way, until you realize that 1.4% of the total US electricity consumption really is a huge figure.)
If anyone else has any additional corrections to make, please do so. Your contribution helps keep the teh Intarwebs green.
Coralized link for those who wish to read TFA.
A 550 watt PSU won't even adequately power a SLI/Crossfire setup.
Ok, point taken.
So, the underutilized red sports car analog now officially belongs to the 1+ KW SLI camp.
Non-SLI 550-Watt single-GPU rigs have accordingly been demoted to being the analog of the underutilized blue sports car.
Thanks for the tip!
I think people are just getting tired of it all, thinking that there should be better solutions by now. It was excusable when desktop PC were still considered novel and new. Now people want to be able to take the technology for granted, and Microsoft isn't doing a good job of filling that desire.
Indeed. Just like how American automobiles became boring many decades ago. There's no longer any need to play with clever arrangements for the gearshift, the position of the pedals, the turn signals, or the headlight switch. There's just nothing left about the user interface that needs changing. Now that the thing is popular, the concept is final, and people take it for granted.
Boy, am I sure glad to learn that the computer became a solved problem years ago, with the popular release of Windows XP.
I guess we can all go home now.
Agreed.
:)
The only thing wrong with Joint Stereo (and mid-side encoding) is that of history: Back in the day, the guy who put together BladeEnc had an outspoken, irrational fear of the concept, and refused to support it in his MP3 encoder. This, in turn, caused a whole lot of bad-sounding, high-ish bitrate BladeEnc-encoded independent stereo MP3s to enter the mix (back before RIAA started suing their customers), as people used that blithering idiot's codec.
Boy, am I glad that BladeEnc is essentially dead.
Mid-side stereo works just fine. As you say, it is a fairly common minimalist recording technique, but it's also the means by which stereo FM radio operates. And if any golden ears reading this still aren't convinced: Even vinyl LPs use mid-side for stereo encoding.
Back before I had broadband, and way before the recently-popular concept of podcasting, I used a FreeBSD machine with cron and a dedicated external tuner to record NPR radio programs to MP3, with LAME set up to encode everything in mid-side. The results were positively awesome, yet small enough that a few weeks' worth of the shows I cared about could be archived to CD-R without too much pain. (An obvious improvement to the technique would have been to modify both LAME and the tuner so as to keep the analog signal chain entirely in mid-side stereo from the transmitter on out, but I lost interest.)
Just because CDs and cassettes almost uniquely (in terms of consumer audio formats) use totally independent channels for stereo sound doesn't mean that it's a good model for efficiency. If it were, we wouldn't be here discussing Amazon's new MP3 service, now would we?