I'm amazed that, these days, people still use remotes. Really, there just doesn't seem to be much need.
The only things that need to be far away in the modern livingroom are speakers and televisions. In a typical home theater, televisions don't do very much but get turned on and off, and maybe have an input switched. Speakers don't have any adjustments to make, regularly.
The rest of the gear, invariably, has a dizzying array of functional buttons and knobs and lights, and would have been markedly cheaper without it. But people foolishly, almost as a rule, place it as far away from themselves as possible and try as hard as they can to forget that those buttons even exist.
It is a basic principle of ergonomics that if something is too far away to be easily reached, you simply reposition it so that it can be reached more easily.
I mean: Isn't this just fucking obvious? Apparently not.
So, here's a brief rundown of how my livingroom is arranged:
All of the commonly-tweaked gear (source equipment, preamp, related paraphenalia) that I use goes in a cabinet in the corner between two comfortable couches, near to where I like to sit to watch movies, listen to music, and generally consume. It is very nice-looking gear, and I've spent a lot of time and effort getting it all together. There are thus no doors (glass, or otherwise) to segregate it from the world.
Infrequently-tweaked gear (crossover, amplifiers, compressors - that sort of thing) is all bolted into a small rack that is mostly hidden in another corner of the room, where it fits in nicely next to the bass guitar rig.
Thus, the only thing I use a remote for is to switch the TV on and off, but I usually just do that on my way into and out of the room.
To play a DVD, I just lean over a bit, put a movie in, and push play. To adjust the volume, I just twist the volume knob appropriately. To skip the previews, I just nudge the FF button a couple of times.
To listen to the radio, I just dial up the appropriate input and select a station on the tuner.
Channel-surfing the TV in my house just involves nudging the channel buttons on the VCR, which is also right at-hand.
So on, so forth. At no time does my ass ever leave what it considers to be the most comfortable spot in the house.
Time saved by not having to hunt for the fucking remotes has been absolutely tremendous. And the whole system is so easy that my 4-year-old can (and does) use it.
Until my CD player (which is really a DVD player, recently), Winamp, XMMS, Nero, iRiver portable, and/or madplay understand (and comply with) this sort of thing, it just won't matter.
And since that's so unlikely that we might as well say that it will never happen, the only use for the warble-tone watermark is just that: Irrevocable watermarking of illicitly-traded MP3s, with the vaguely-purposeful hope of easily identifying the source material.
There just isn't any R or M in this quasi-incarnation of DRM.
Sometime in about the past week, the entirety of the Fifth Third Bank website changed. Looks like they decided to roll out all a whole new look-and-feel, while mucking up the login procedures again.
So as long as you're boosting your employer, I'll knock 'em down a bit:
Why the fuck would you change something broad like the entire user interface during the busiest time of the year? And what's the gig with the tiny fonts?
But that's not all, no sir: Dispite all of its newness, the new website still fails to let me transfer funds between my accounts. And I can only presume that still nobody has any clue why. Everyone I talk to at that god-forsaken bank suggests that it should work fine, that the accounts are "connected," and so on.
But in the dropdown list, there's only ever one account present. Tried Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox under several different Linux distributions, several versions of IE under several versions of Windows, each at several different venues with several different ISPs.
In each case, the HTML with which to render multiple accounts in a dropdown is absolutely absent. Your shit is broken, and has been for years.
And also: Your people stink. They botched my first checking account before I even had a chance to use it, and they lost the flood insurance renewal that I hand-delivered to them instead of paying it like they were supposed to. And then they sent me a nastygram a few weeks later, proclaiming that they were going to sell me some different insurance of their choosing if I failed to jump through several itemized hoops.
The people are so bad, in fact, that the only reason I continue to do my banking business with them is that they were the only place stupid enough to give someone like me (negative credit, negative income, no trade lines, so on, so forth) enough money that I could buy a house.
A reliable datacenter does not a good company make.
In my studio, the only noise problems we ever had were the sounds of a road a block away being picked up by the microphones when enormous amounts of gain were in use. In other words, it was electrically very quiet.
We only used incandescant lighting. There were several switchable lighting circuits in each room with only a couple of smallish fixtures on each one; "mood" was controlled simply by turning lights on and off. Some of the lights were purposefully colored, but most where whatever we could find cheap at Wal-Mart. Wattages varied.
Grounding was sensible and straightforward from the start. We never encountered hum.
In the beginning, we were using common rheostat dimmers in a few spots, but quickly found that it was a big pain in the ass. They'd cause the lights themselves to audibily sing at most dim levels, and were thus absolutely no fun to use. All of these got replaced with 50-cent on/off switches.
In most sessions, the only time there was more than a couple of hundred Watts of lighting in use was when people were moving gear around, or cleaning. Generally speaking, the musicians sounded better with only a few lights turned on.
I can't imagine attempting to intentionally use anything electrically noisey in a studio enviroment.
Shielding and proper grounding can eliminate a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the air. Ferrite chokes might help a little on the AC lines going to both your lighting and your gear.
But even if you're using big, spendy ferroresonant transformers (think Best FerrUPS), an on-line UPS (so that your gear is running from its own inverter), or a motor-generator (look, ma, a flywheel!) you're just treating the symptoms, not the problem.
In doing so, you'll -still- have EMI floating around, plus at least one more accoustically noisey apparatus to keep away from the microphones.
And every guitarist who walks through the door with an instrument using single-coil pickups will be pulling his hair out as he tries to figure out why his rig is suddenly noisey as hell, while it was perfectly quiet before he left home. And then you'll both spend a lot of time trying to make it quiet before you can even think about laying down any tracks.
Both you and he have better things to worry about than whether or not his guitar rig is wired "correctly" (whatever that is), or if your fancy dimmable fluorescent fixture is on the fritz again, or if maybe his amp got damaged in transport, or if maybe there's a bad wire somewhere, or...
These discussions should never have to happen - he's there to play music, and you're there to record it. Anything that complicates that arrangement is something which will, in some way, stifle the creative process and will result in a recording which could've been better.
Therefore, the solution to your problem is to remove the problem. Simplify things. Move the CF lights to your home's livingspace (away from the studio), and trash the dimmable fluorescents. Develop a creative lighting system which allows you to flip a few switches to make things look and feel good, instead of developing a complicated system to let you survive with noisey light fixtures.
If you're unwilling to do this, be prepared to spend more time/money fixing things that shouldn't have been broken to begin with than you'll ever save on your electric bill by using more efficient lighting.
When my daughter was extremely little like that, I lived in an apartment. A passworded screensaver was more than adequate to keep the machines running.
Back then, I worried a lot more about the racks of PA gear that I call a stereo. There were way too many interesting button and knob combinations, many of which could easily have led to expensive fireworks or an eviction in a big hurry.
The solution to that issue was just to show her how to use it. She's been operating it since she was 2, without a single episode of badness.
Is there a quadraphonic or 5.1 player for OGG Vorbis?
Is there even a standard mapping for which of those channels is supposed to go to which speaker if such a player did exist?
And if they're independant channels, wouldn't the filesize increase more-or-less linearly with the number of channels? And if that's the case, isn't that a rather foolish approach, given that there's almost always significant redundant audio information shared between multiple audio channels in modern recorded music?
IT isn't going "out of business," it's just bound to get smaller and more efficient.
This has happened before, with all sorts of industries. The most dramatic example I can think of at the moment is farming: It takes a very small fraction of the manpower required to farm 2,000 acres today, compared to what it required 50 or 100 years ago. This downsizing is a direct result of more efficient methods and machines, all chosen by the farmers themselves in order to better compete with other farmers.
One of the responsibilities at my day job is to play sysadmin.
There seems to be two different classes of admins (or employees, in general). One likes to make stuff look hard, with the mantra "Never let them see how easy this really is." They slack, and often refuse to learn new things. The other class just wants to get stuff done quickly, but correctly, so they can move on to better things, and not have to keep fixing/repeating the same shit over and over. They don't care if it looks easy or not - they're trying to get stuff done.
I enjoy minimizing my effort (and everyone else's) by producing more efficient methods for doing stuff.
I don't see it as working myself out of a job, but rather the opposite. The more I reduce the time that I need to spend dicking with sysadmin things, the more time I have to implement new technology to improve workflow, reduce resource consumption, and otherwise make everyone else's job easier by exploiting existing technology. And by making their jobs easier, I save the company money by reducing the need to hire new employees to keep up with increased workload.
Like a farmer buying a newfangled combine, I use technology in order to make more money with the same number of (or fewer) people. And like the combine itself, I might even displace a few less-useful employees by making the work easy enough that they're no longer needed.
I'm OK with that. I'm not a fucking charity, and I have no interest in subsidizing comparitively less useful employees with my paycheck.
And speaking of paychecks... All of this increased efficiency and eliminated redundancy equates rather directly to the company having more money with which to pay me. This dramatically increases the odds of well-timed, impromptu meetings with the boss that start out like "How about a raise" working favorably.
Now, in the unlikely event that I make the company's computers and employees work so well together that I'm no longer required on a daily basis, then I'll just trade my hourly job for a mutually-favorable consulting contract.
This, in turn, would free up time to work with other businesses on similar terms, and/or my own personal endeavors.
I'm OK with that, too. A lot of other folks would rather fuck the dog all day and just try to avoid being fired, and I see it as my duty to help show them the door. If that shrinks IT, so be it - there's plenty of room in the welfare line for the relatively incompetent.
(And if you anyone reading this happens to be one of those lazy motherfuckers: Fuck you for eating my paycheck, making my utilities cost more than they should, and keeping my taxes high. I hope you die in the quickest way possible so that my Porsche fund can be furthered more expediently.)
I find that setting things up properly can make a world of difference.
First, some background: Most CRT products are set up out of the box in what could only be described as "torch mode." The color temperature is set so high that the thing appears blueish in almost all lighting, and the contrast at such a setting that most shades of grey are pushed up the gamut until they're all white.
They're configured this way not as an engineering decision to improve visual quality, but as a marketing decision to sell more monitors. The brighter and bluer the monitor is on the shelf at the store, the more likely it is to sell. *sigh*
When in torch mode, other visual abberations become apparant as the power supply is stressed trying to burn your retinas into submission. Heat output increases, and the lifespan of the unit decreases dramatically.
So, crank it all down. When making these adjustments, it is important to be using whatever your typical ambient lighting is, with the unit good and warmed up, since that's what you'll be seeing most of the time...
The contrast control (which would be better labeled as "brightness") should be adjusted so that the monitor appears neither too bright (whatever that is, subjectively), and so that shades of grey are actually grey. The only thing that should appear white is, well, white (#FFFFFF).
The brightness control (which would be better labeled as "black level") should be adjusted so that only the color black (#000000) is black. Dark greys should be visible, but a screen full of black should look like the monitor is switched off. And, again, this needs to be done with the lights adjusted however they normally are.
After that, it's time to make it not appear blue.
Most modern monitors allow you to adjust the color temperature, either by presets or by manipulating RGB values manually. This is, essentially, defining the color of white.
Others may disagree, but I like to set mine up to appear the same as a regular sheet of typing paper under the incandescent lighting that I use in the computer room. On my new(ish) 19" Viewsonic, this was achieved pretty closely by picking its 6500k setting.
Oh, and then, make sure your refresh rate is cranked up high enough that you don't notice flickering, but not so high as to make the images blurry. This is also to say that the -ideal- refresh rate is not always the fastest one.
Do note that by the time you're all done with these steps, you monitor will probably appear much darker than it did before. This is normal, and you'll quickly adjust. Your monitor is now working in its normal operating range, whereas it was previously being catastrophically overdriven. If it's unacceptably dark, it's either time for a new one or a trip to the service shop for adjustment (tubes do wear out, after all) or time to reevaluate your ambient lighting.
You've obviously not thought very hard about these problems. These folks are in about the same boat as conventional arcades. Here we go:
Arcade games are expensive. According to Froogle, they seem to cost between $5,000 and $20,000, each.
Let's pick a nice middle-of-the-road number, and figure $8,000 each for a machine which takes up a lot of floor space, is a maintenance nightmare, and only plays one modern game.
Meanwhile, your retail prices for an Alienware box and the unlikely Sony projector cost a total of $6,800. Add $300 for six (or so) retail-priced software packages, for $7,100 total hardware cost.
This $7,100 gaming machine can play six different titles, has an enormous screen, can play any existing software title for an extra ~$50, and is easily maintained by minimum-wage flunkies. It is conveniently also $900 cheaper than an arcade machine that does none of these things.
The recurring business expenses are probably very similar. Insurance is similar. Wages, per machine, will be similar. They'll be using cheap warehouse space, while arcades typically consume expensive mall realestate - almost certainly saving money, per machine. Advertising is the same. So on, so forth.
It's the same bag - it's just sold at $5 hourly increments, instead of 25-cent game continues.
As for the software expense, it's just absolutely fucking cheap. $10-20k every few months for 300 brand-new huge-screened arcade games to draw in customers with? Sign me up.
The sheep that are Ebay will be more than happy to consume the year-old Alienware boxes for way more than they're worth, making upgrades and fresh hardware relatively inexpensive.
It's hard work, for sure. It's risky and probably slim-margin - arcades seem to be a very failure-prone industry. Nobody said it was easy to run a successful gaming business.
But it's not impossible. This has all been done before.
I conveniently ignored that market segment in order to simplify my argument, but you're correct.
The only people I know (who aren't pathetic morons that needlessly spend money on expensive gear, and then wonder why they have nothing to eat) who actually do use Minidisc are musicians.
OTOH, of those musicians, the one who uses MD the most sees it as a performance aid, not a recording device. He's got a higher-end (Tascam, I think) rackmount model that he gigs with, and uses to queue backing tracks. He uses a simple pedalboard wired to the unit's PS/2 keyboard jack so that he doesn't have to turn away from the crowd or take his hands off of the guitar to make it work.
It seems to work pretty well for him.
The last live recording I did, personally, was at a 2-day outdoor festival. I used a laptop, some cheap Soundblaster USB audio kit, and a program called mp3directcut. The Soundblaster device is just 2-track, but it clipped smoothly and made a great-sounding recording. The laptop was also serving triple-duty offloading the photographers' flash memory cards, and keeping a current radar picture up via cellular modem.
At the start of each day, I just pressed record, checked levels (once), and let it roll. It's hard to run out of tape when you're spooling MP3s onto a 60gig drive...
No problems to report, despite the fact that it was running XP. I had half a mind to leave the laptop behind and use something different for recording (what, like I need to troubleshoot Windows while trying to work a monitor mix, FOH, and fight power problems), but I'm glad I didn't. It saved a lot of asses, and a lot of gear, when several angry storm cells converged overhead and formed a tornado just down the road. Keeping the radar on-screen gave us just enough warning to tarp the speakers and let people know that it was about to get ugly. (From blue sky to inches of rain, killer wind and hail in five minutes.)
Minidisc is a sham. $7 for a proprietary, hard-to-find disc, that can only be used on proprietary, expensive players, which only holds a gigabyte, and comes with built-in SCMS DRM? Absurd.
Add to that the inherent incompatibility of the format: If you want to cut an MD for a friend (assuming you can even find a friend with an MD player), you first need to establish if their machine will play the LP ATRAC format, if they can play the Hi-MD discs, and so on. After that, you plug in your expensive DRM-crippling player with a USB port, and, since MD is inherently slow, start the long process of transcoding to ATRAC and copying music over.
As another poster noted, it's cheaper to get a hard-drive based iRiver player.
I've been feeding CD-Rs to my IMP-350 for years. The discs are oftentimes free, or at least less than twenty-five cents, and they hold 700 megabytes. I can make a disc full of music in a couple of minutes under Linux, or by dragging-and-dropping in Windows Explorer. No transcoding, no extra software, no DRM to piss people off with.
And if I want to grab a stack of CDs off of the rack before heading out of town, I can do that without having to spend an afternoon ripping and encoding. It is a CD player, after all.
And if someone shows interest in the music I'm listening to, I can just give them the disc. They're essentially free, after all.
Since MP3 CD-Rs are universal, that person is sure to be able to play it. It works in home DVD players, in portable CD players, in everyone's PC, and they even play in the car.
MD was stillborn over a decade ago. The promise of prerecorded discs has long since vanished. The blanks never have gotten cheap. And so, like all other magneto-optical formats ever produced, MD will forever reign in the "neat, but really fucking expensive" category. The only reason it is still around is that nobody has bothered to build a coffin for it yet.
But since you asked for it, here's your Minidisc review:
The MZNH600D. Despite its unpronouncible name, this is a really neat looking unit. It doesn't skip. And it runs on a single AA battery for the rest of your fucking life.
But that's not all - get ready to increase your media costs by 20 times, and kill yourself and your music while transcoding to ATRAC, because that's what you've gotta do just to make one lousy disc.
And don't bother sharing that disc with your friends, because they can't play it. Oh, and SCMS ensures that you can't copy it, either.
At least it's small, and you'll save money on batteries.
Right. Sarcasm must be absent in whatever your native country is, but I'll bite anyway:
Somehow, I doubt that Vonage is likely to be very willing to support me when I can't call out from Kphone on my Gentoo machine. So I, along with the rest of the world who would rather talk on the phone instead of spend all day trying to make the bloody thing work, will either be using one of their hardware ATAs, or whatever software they supply.
It's a magic black box that just works. I'm OK with that.
But if we're doing black box telephony, does it really fucking matter what protocols are being used? It might as well be Skype. Or SIP. Or IAX. Or PGPPhone. Or multiplexed DSL. Or IP-over-railroad-telegraph.
What difference does it make? They all suck ass once one varies from the prescribed method.
Protocols won't matter, until we get one that's as simple to implement as plugging in a phone, lifting the handset, and dialing a number.
You're only trying to go -across the street-?
on
WiFi Bridging?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"Across the street" means to me that you're only going a couple of hundred feet, at most, and that you've got a rather clear line of sight. With 20 feet of RG-58 and a 14dB antenna, your total antenna+feedline gain is something near 9dB.
And 9dB of gain should sure as fuck get you across any street I've ever seen.
Obviously, then, you're doing something wrong.
And since you never mentioned it, I'll surmise it: Your antennas are all indoors, aren't they?
Solution:
Punch a hole in each wall[1]. If it's like most metal buildings, a regular twist bit in a drill will chomp through it in seconds. If it's thicker than that, you'll want to enlist the help of that friend of yours who already has an acetylene tank. If you don't have a friend like that, now is the perfect opportunity to recruit one.
Once you get your holes, run your cabling through them. And then place both antennas outside.
Yes, the USB adaptor should be outside, too. Use a butter tub (Wal-Mart, dairy section, ~$1.50) and whatever sort of fluid adhesive substance you find appropriate or happen to have on hand. Make a hole with a pen knife to poke the USB connector through.
Done.
[1]: If you cannot do this for political or aesthetic reason, just order DSL for the remote location, find yourself some comfortable VPN software, and stop wasting time trying to microwave things through grounded metal structures. Thank you.
The world would be far better off if everyone installed Linux on a spare computer so they could run Asterisk. You then just need to buy a bunch of hardware, and then either spend a few hundred dollars each on WiFi phones, or spend tens of hours recabling your house.
Oh, and then you get to configure the mess, after learning all about such eccentricities as G.711, G.723.1, GSM, IAX, and SIP, SCCP, plus a whole lot of other defacto telephony standards and Ways Of Doing Things that were obviously developed in a cave.
Once you solve the echo problem, all you gotta do is make DUNDi work, and you can finally call other people Just Like You. Or, you can sign up with any of dozens of shady small VOIP telephone companies and pay a few tenths of a cent per minute to talk to regular people via a SIP, IAX, h.323, or MGCP connection.
Sweet.
Alternatively, one could always download and install Skype. I understand that it does work fairly well, and is easy for mere mortals to use. It seems that Siemens now has an easy way for you to use their handsets with it. Neat.
Sure. But what you don't realize is that many PC gamers don't upgrade their computers but every few years, and get along just fine when they buy a new game. Oh, sure, Doom 3 doesn't look quite as cool as it could if you'd just spent a grand on CPU and video upgrades, but it still plays the same that old box and probably does look a bit better than, say, Halflife does on the same hardware.
The spastic upgrade cycle with which some people suffer is driven by the percieved need to run their games at an antialiased 1920x1440 at triple-digit framerates, with textures such that one sees individual hairs on the face of the scruff-covered warmongers as they rocket-jump all over the screen. If one does not suffer from this affliction toward high-endedness, computer upgrades really aren't much of a problem.
PC gamers used to be happy with 640x480 - even 320x200. How things have changed. Upgrades are addictive and irrational, like high-end audio (where most are probably satisfied with a boombox) or finicky imported sports cars (where most are happy with a Taurus).
But if you sit the upgrade cycle out for a couple of years, your new games will still work just fine. They just won't be as pretty.
Console gamers have no such expectations. They operate with a TV. In the US, that TV uses NTSC video. It is universally-agreed that NTSC is a completely suckass way to display video, and implicit that it hides any flaws that would be garish and iresome on a reasonable VGA monitor. The console only ever has to output a low-resolution, interlaced signal, and never at more than 60FPS.
They're completely different mindsets, markets, and expectations.
I'd sure hate to have to pitch the entire motherboard every time a new game comes out.
Right. So picture this:
You've got a motherboard with good onboard video, sound, and gigabit ethernet. Sometime Later, you decide that the onboard [pick one] is obsolete.
You've got two choices:
a) Add a PCI Express/AGP device that better suits your current needs, just like you've been doing since the beginning of time
b) Replace the motherboard, which is oh-so-woefully painful in this time where everything but the front-panel buttons are self-configuring. It might cost a little more, and require the removal of an extra half-dozen or so screws. But you get to upgrade everything else at the same time, too, which generally opens possibilities for CPU and RAM upgrades that you wouldn't have had with your old motherboard. It's not hard to do, either.
Gone are the days where one had to calculate the correct CHS translation for your new-fangled IDE hard drive, let alone the hell which was frequent in the days of MFM and RLL drives. CD-ROM drives are just as easy. CPUs self-configure, RAM identifies itself.
And if everything else is integrated, you don't have anything else to worry about at all. You're all done. Push the power button and enjoy.
It hasn't been difficult to swap out a motherboard for a number of years. Get with it already.
Since ~1996, I've generally only bought the cheapest RAM I could find, usually whatever Memory Man has for cheap under their house brand.
I slam it into the cheapest motherboards I can find. (This, invariably, also works well.)
I've never had a RAM failure. I've thrown away good, working, stable Pentium-class machines with 8-year-old, cheap-shit RAM.
A long time ago, I even used SIMM stackers to load up 16 mismatched, cheap-shit 30-pin modules into four 72-pin sockets on an Intel FX-chipset motherboard. It was a rock-solid stable machine for a couple of years, before it graduated to some real (cheap) 72-pin EDO. It still worked fine when it met the dumpster a few months ago.
I've spent the past 10 years wondering what the rest of the world has been doing wrong WRT memory, trying to figure out why people are always so willing to needlessly piss away their money.
Interesting information, but I believe it to be baseless: We're not flying jet fighters, but instead tooling around on the highway in cars. Cars that don't travel at Mach.2. I've seen NASCAR cars hit birds at without shattering their polycarbonate windshields (though the bird itself does, plainly, explode), and those are generally going Way More Faster than passenger cars are even capable of.
So let us apply some basic science, because I find the practicality of your assertion about razors vs. plastic to be totally fucked.
I hypothesize is that the edge of polycarbonate which has been broken by impact at low velocity is not as able to cause skin lacerations as a sharp knife, let alone a proper razor or a chunk of glass.
Let us examine this theory by comparing the effects of dragging broken polycarbonate against human skin (my left hand), vs. the effects of dragging a sharp knife across similar skin (on my right hand). My scrotum will be used as a control group, in order to prevent a nasty accident.
The first component of the experiment will be a ~4-year-old CD-R (consisting of polycarbonate, magic dye, aluminum, laquer) that has been thrown against the floor of my garage, rather hard. I estimate its impact velocity to have been a few tens of miles per hour. The CD broke into numerous bits of varying sizes. One of the more managable bits was chosen for the experiment.
The other component of the experiment will be an easy-open Kershaw pocketknife with an (originally rather scary) factory edge, similar to that pictured at http://www.theknifestore.com/kershaw1660st.html . The knife is a couple of weeks old, and has been numerous times for cutting/stripping copper wires and opening various packages. It is thus probably rather dull compared to a razor, but still quite sharp.
On with it: I took the managable bit of polycarbonate, and dug one of its more flat sides into the back of my left hand. Nothing happened. Repeated sawing motions with significant appilied pressure resulted in further occurances nothing. Dragging a pointed portion of the polycarbonate resulted in a very light, superficial abbrasion which seemed to disappear by itself after rubbing my hands together lightly.
My scrotum was unaffected by this experiment.
In contrast with this, I used the Kershaw pocketknife on the same portion of my opposite hand. Anything more than slight pressure resulted in light, bleeding lacerations, whether using the flat portion of the blade or any of its numerous points.
My scrotum was also unaffected by this experiment.
It is thus proven a pocketknife is more capabable of cutting human skin than polycarbonate. It would seem implicit that a razor or broken safety glass would produce even more-extreme results, but I was unable to find a willing test subject.
The whole point of tempered automotive glass is to minimize injury to the heads of the passengers. Windshields use multiple layers of glass with a plastic film in between, to keep broken bits from flying into the vehicle's occupants. Side and rear windows are designed to break into small enough peices that lacerations are minimized, and lack stabilizing layers.
Contrast this with a plastic window. Most plastics are not very sharp when broken. The windows can be designed to bend outward easily. And they don't weigh anywhere near as much as glass, lessening the problems of momentum.
And since plastic doesn't have the inherent problem of normal glass (big, heavy, jugular-slicing chunks of razor-sharp material being flung about at incredible speeds), it doesn't need to have the same safeguards. To state otherwise is an example of FUD.
The safety problem, then, is easy to quantify:
Using your head at a velocity of 60MPH, does it hurt more to hit a 40lb glass windshield which will shatter (but maintain its mass and inertia) on impact, or to hit a 10-pound shatterproof plastic window which is flexibile enough to absorb your forward energy, and will remove itself outward from the vehicle on impact?
I don't have the solution to that problem, but I'd say that it's close.
On with the anecdotes:
Plastics (Lexan, in particular) have been used in race car windows for a Really Long Time Now. And since dead/blinded drivers can't win races, the people involved in selecting said windows have a rather vested interest in making sure that they're safe. So far, they've done just fine.
I'm guessing that if the automobile industry is keen enough on saving weight and materials that they're seriously discussing increasing voltage to reduce the weight of electrical wiring, that they'd really appreciate windows that aren't as heavy as the glass that they've been using forever.
If only Lexan didn't scratch so easily, I'm sure they'd jump all over it.
Oh, wait, I almost forgot. Lexan == polycarbonate == the stuff CDs are made of. Didn't TDK recently develop a coating to solve that problem?
I'd like to add that ghosting is usually due to bad or damaged cabling, and that all high-frequency analog signals (including those used by LCD monitors with VGA inputs) are susceptible to it.
It's easy to demonstrate, too: Just take a length of VGA cable, and bend it in half, hard, as if you were a secretary busily rearranging "all those ugly wires". After that, bundle it up with a bread tie, and place the corner of your desk on it.
Or just pretend you're a gamer, strung out from seventeen consecutive hours of cheap beer, bad coffee, and Counterstrike. You're loading the PC into the car, and slam the trunklid on the monitor cable, crimping it something nasty.
Ghosting? You betcha. We expect these cables to run up to about 350MHz. If you thought Ethernet over Cat5 was finicky, you haven't pissed off a VGA cable lately.
[/me patiently awaits the return of monitors with replacable, BNC-equipped cables...]
Also included in the Linux kernel source code is a very fine software RAID 5 implementation. It always works.
In fact, it works SO WELL that of all the postings here, nobody has managed to cite a single problem with it.
As an aside, I'm curious:
Was it fun rebuilding your array and reloading your data every time you switched RAID controllers, while trying to find one that actually works? (heh, heh)
Do yourself a favor: Next time, forget hardware RAID under Linux unless you've got a good reason not to. Pocket the savings (not buying a 3Ware Escalade affords a lot of beer), or spend it on more CPU and RAM.
$450, and the only[1] advantage you've stated is that it doesn't have "big CPU overhead." At best, this statement is misleading.
It has been the case for years now that software RAID requires very little CPU. Meanwhile, $450 buys a fuckton of Intel/AMD CPU, and that fuckton will always be bigger than the shovelfull of CPU provided on a RAID card.
After that, it's just math - and simple math, at that. (Calculating parity is not difficult, mmkay?)
Thus, spending the money on a faster processor will, AFAICT, always yield higher total system performance than using hardware RAID.
Why would it be more advantageous to spend $450 on a proprietary RAID adapter, than to invest the same amount of money in CPU power and get a faster system?
[1] I'm not aware of any present limitations in Linux's handling of software RAID that would preclude the use of a redundant boot partition. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been using one here for some time now.
This conversation is similar to any conversation I try to have with someone who is sure that America is Always Right.
This begs the question: Who is America? Choose just one:
Fox News
CNN
President x
President x's cabinet
Those fucking Republicans
Those fucking Democrats
Those fucking Greens
("The People" is not an allowed option. They ceased to matter long ago, when they largely stopped thinking for themselves and began to openly invite others to make their opinions for them)
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I'm amazed that, these days, people still use remotes. Really, there just doesn't seem to be much need.
The only things that need to be far away in the modern livingroom are speakers and televisions. In a typical home theater, televisions don't do very much but get turned on and off, and maybe have an input switched. Speakers don't have any adjustments to make, regularly.
The rest of the gear, invariably, has a dizzying array of functional buttons and knobs and lights, and would have been markedly cheaper without it. But people foolishly, almost as a rule, place it as far away from themselves as possible and try as hard as they can to forget that those buttons even exist.
It is a basic principle of ergonomics that if something is too far away to be easily reached, you simply reposition it so that it can be reached more easily.
I mean: Isn't this just fucking obvious? Apparently not.
So, here's a brief rundown of how my livingroom is arranged:
All of the commonly-tweaked gear (source equipment, preamp, related paraphenalia) that I use goes in a cabinet in the corner between two comfortable couches, near to where I like to sit to watch movies, listen to music, and generally consume. It is very nice-looking gear, and I've spent a lot of time and effort getting it all together. There are thus no doors (glass, or otherwise) to segregate it from the world.
Infrequently-tweaked gear (crossover, amplifiers, compressors - that sort of thing) is all bolted into a small rack that is mostly hidden in another corner of the room, where it fits in nicely next to the bass guitar rig.
Thus, the only thing I use a remote for is to switch the TV on and off, but I usually just do that on my way into and out of the room.
To play a DVD, I just lean over a bit, put a movie in, and push play. To adjust the volume, I just twist the volume knob appropriately. To skip the previews, I just nudge the FF button a couple of times.
To listen to the radio, I just dial up the appropriate input and select a station on the tuner.
Channel-surfing the TV in my house just involves nudging the channel buttons on the VCR, which is also right at-hand.
So on, so forth. At no time does my ass ever leave what it considers to be the most comfortable spot in the house.
Time saved by not having to hunt for the fucking remotes has been absolutely tremendous. And the whole system is so easy that my 4-year-old can (and does) use it.
Who needs a remote?
Until my CD player (which is really a DVD player, recently), Winamp, XMMS, Nero, iRiver portable, and/or madplay understand (and comply with) this sort of thing, it just won't matter.
And since that's so unlikely that we might as well say that it will never happen, the only use for the warble-tone watermark is just that: Irrevocable watermarking of illicitly-traded MP3s, with the vaguely-purposeful hope of easily identifying the source material.
There just isn't any R or M in this quasi-incarnation of DRM.
BFD.
Peak season freeze?
Sometime in about the past week, the entirety of the Fifth Third Bank website changed. Looks like they decided to roll out all a whole new look-and-feel, while mucking up the login procedures again.
So as long as you're boosting your employer, I'll knock 'em down a bit:
Why the fuck would you change something broad like the entire user interface during the busiest time of the year? And what's the gig with the tiny fonts?
But that's not all, no sir: Dispite all of its newness, the new website still fails to let me transfer funds between my accounts. And I can only presume that still nobody has any clue why. Everyone I talk to at that god-forsaken bank suggests that it should work fine, that the accounts are "connected," and so on.
But in the dropdown list, there's only ever one account present. Tried Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox under several different Linux distributions, several versions of IE under several versions of Windows, each at several different venues with several different ISPs.
In each case, the HTML with which to render multiple accounts in a dropdown is absolutely absent. Your shit is broken, and has been for years.
And also: Your people stink. They botched my first checking account before I even had a chance to use it, and they lost the flood insurance renewal that I hand-delivered to them instead of paying it like they were supposed to. And then they sent me a nastygram a few weeks later, proclaiming that they were going to sell me some different insurance of their choosing if I failed to jump through several itemized hoops.
The people are so bad, in fact, that the only reason I continue to do my banking business with them is that they were the only place stupid enough to give someone like me (negative credit, negative income, no trade lines, so on, so forth) enough money that I could buy a house.
A reliable datacenter does not a good company make.
Beware.
In my studio, the only noise problems we ever had were the sounds of a road a block away being picked up by the microphones when enormous amounts of gain were in use. In other words, it was electrically very quiet.
We only used incandescant lighting. There were several switchable lighting circuits in each room with only a couple of smallish fixtures on each one; "mood" was controlled simply by turning lights on and off. Some of the lights were purposefully colored, but most where whatever we could find cheap at Wal-Mart. Wattages varied.
Grounding was sensible and straightforward from the start. We never encountered hum.
In the beginning, we were using common rheostat dimmers in a few spots, but quickly found that it was a big pain in the ass. They'd cause the lights themselves to audibily sing at most dim levels, and were thus absolutely no fun to use. All of these got replaced with 50-cent on/off switches.
In most sessions, the only time there was more than a couple of hundred Watts of lighting in use was when people were moving gear around, or cleaning. Generally speaking, the musicians sounded better with only a few lights turned on.
I can't imagine attempting to intentionally use anything electrically noisey in a studio enviroment.
Shielding and proper grounding can eliminate a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the air. Ferrite chokes might help a little on the AC lines going to both your lighting and your gear.
But even if you're using big, spendy ferroresonant transformers (think Best FerrUPS), an on-line UPS (so that your gear is running from its own inverter), or a motor-generator (look, ma, a flywheel!) you're just treating the symptoms, not the problem.
In doing so, you'll -still- have EMI floating around, plus at least one more accoustically noisey apparatus to keep away from the microphones.
And every guitarist who walks through the door with an instrument using single-coil pickups will be pulling his hair out as he tries to figure out why his rig is suddenly noisey as hell, while it was perfectly quiet before he left home. And then you'll both spend a lot of time trying to make it quiet before you can even think about laying down any tracks.
Both you and he have better things to worry about than whether or not his guitar rig is wired "correctly" (whatever that is), or if your fancy dimmable fluorescent fixture is on the fritz again, or if maybe his amp got damaged in transport, or if maybe there's a bad wire somewhere, or...
These discussions should never have to happen - he's there to play music, and you're there to record it. Anything that complicates that arrangement is something which will, in some way, stifle the creative process and will result in a recording which could've been better.
Therefore, the solution to your problem is to remove the problem. Simplify things. Move the CF lights to your home's livingspace (away from the studio), and trash the dimmable fluorescents. Develop a creative lighting system which allows you to flip a few switches to make things look and feel good, instead of developing a complicated system to let you survive with noisey light fixtures.
If you're unwilling to do this, be prepared to spend more time/money fixing things that shouldn't have been broken to begin with than you'll ever save on your electric bill by using more efficient lighting.
When my daughter was extremely little like that, I lived in an apartment. A passworded screensaver was more than adequate to keep the machines running.
Back then, I worried a lot more about the racks of PA gear that I call a stereo. There were way too many interesting button and knob combinations, many of which could easily have led to expensive fireworks or an eviction in a big hurry.
The solution to that issue was just to show her how to use it. She's been operating it since she was 2, without a single episode of badness.
Interesting.
Is there a quadraphonic or 5.1 player for OGG Vorbis?
Is there even a standard mapping for which of those channels is supposed to go to which speaker if such a player did exist?
And if they're independant channels, wouldn't the filesize increase more-or-less linearly with the number of channels? And if that's the case, isn't that a rather foolish approach, given that there's almost always significant redundant audio information shared between multiple audio channels in modern recorded music?
Enlighten me.
IT isn't going "out of business," it's just bound to get smaller and more efficient.
This has happened before, with all sorts of industries. The most dramatic example I can think of at the moment is farming: It takes a very small fraction of the manpower required to farm 2,000 acres today, compared to what it required 50 or 100 years ago. This downsizing is a direct result of more efficient methods and machines, all chosen by the farmers themselves in order to better compete with other farmers.
One of the responsibilities at my day job is to play sysadmin.
There seems to be two different classes of admins (or employees, in general). One likes to make stuff look hard, with the mantra "Never let them see how easy this really is." They slack, and often refuse to learn new things. The other class just wants to get stuff done quickly, but correctly, so they can move on to better things, and not have to keep fixing/repeating the same shit over and over. They don't care if it looks easy or not - they're trying to get stuff done.
I enjoy minimizing my effort (and everyone else's) by producing more efficient methods for doing stuff.
I don't see it as working myself out of a job, but rather the opposite. The more I reduce the time that I need to spend dicking with sysadmin things, the more time I have to implement new technology to improve workflow, reduce resource consumption, and otherwise make everyone else's job easier by exploiting existing technology. And by making their jobs easier, I save the company money by reducing the need to hire new employees to keep up with increased workload.
Like a farmer buying a newfangled combine, I use technology in order to make more money with the same number of (or fewer) people. And like the combine itself, I might even displace a few less-useful employees by making the work easy enough that they're no longer needed.
I'm OK with that. I'm not a fucking charity, and I have no interest in subsidizing comparitively less useful employees with my paycheck.
And speaking of paychecks... All of this increased efficiency and eliminated redundancy equates rather directly to the company having more money with which to pay me. This dramatically increases the odds of well-timed, impromptu meetings with the boss that start out like "How about a raise" working favorably.
Now, in the unlikely event that I make the company's computers and employees work so well together that I'm no longer required on a daily basis, then I'll just trade my hourly job for a mutually-favorable consulting contract.
This, in turn, would free up time to work with other businesses on similar terms, and/or my own personal endeavors.
I'm OK with that, too. A lot of other folks would rather fuck the dog all day and just try to avoid being fired, and I see it as my duty to help show them the door. If that shrinks IT, so be it - there's plenty of room in the welfare line for the relatively incompetent.
(And if you anyone reading this happens to be one of those lazy motherfuckers: Fuck you for eating my paycheck, making my utilities cost more than they should, and keeping my taxes high. I hope you die in the quickest way possible so that my Porsche fund can be furthered more expediently.)
I find that setting things up properly can make a world of difference.
First, some background: Most CRT products are set up out of the box in what could only be described as "torch mode." The color temperature is set so high that the thing appears blueish in almost all lighting, and the contrast at such a setting that most shades of grey are pushed up the gamut until they're all white.
They're configured this way not as an engineering decision to improve visual quality, but as a marketing decision to sell more monitors. The brighter and bluer the monitor is on the shelf at the store, the more likely it is to sell. *sigh*
When in torch mode, other visual abberations become apparant as the power supply is stressed trying to burn your retinas into submission. Heat output increases, and the lifespan of the unit decreases dramatically.
So, crank it all down. When making these adjustments, it is important to be using whatever your typical ambient lighting is, with the unit good and warmed up, since that's what you'll be seeing most of the time...
The contrast control (which would be better labeled as "brightness") should be adjusted so that the monitor appears neither too bright (whatever that is, subjectively), and so that shades of grey are actually grey. The only thing that should appear white is, well, white (#FFFFFF).
The brightness control (which would be better labeled as "black level") should be adjusted so that only the color black (#000000) is black. Dark greys should be visible, but a screen full of black should look like the monitor is switched off. And, again, this needs to be done with the lights adjusted however they normally are.
After that, it's time to make it not appear blue.
Most modern monitors allow you to adjust the color temperature, either by presets or by manipulating RGB values manually. This is, essentially, defining the color of white.
Others may disagree, but I like to set mine up to appear the same as a regular sheet of typing paper under the incandescent lighting that I use in the computer room. On my new(ish) 19" Viewsonic, this was achieved pretty closely by picking its 6500k setting.
Oh, and then, make sure your refresh rate is cranked up high enough that you don't notice flickering, but not so high as to make the images blurry. This is also to say that the -ideal- refresh rate is not always the fastest one.
Do note that by the time you're all done with these steps, you monitor will probably appear much darker than it did before. This is normal, and you'll quickly adjust. Your monitor is now working in its normal operating range, whereas it was previously being catastrophically overdriven. If it's unacceptably dark, it's either time for a new one or a trip to the service shop for adjustment (tubes do wear out, after all) or time to reevaluate your ambient lighting.
You've obviously not thought very hard about these problems. These folks are in about the same boat as conventional arcades. Here we go:
Arcade games are expensive. According to Froogle, they seem to cost between $5,000 and $20,000, each.
Let's pick a nice middle-of-the-road number, and figure $8,000 each for a machine which takes up a lot of floor space, is a maintenance nightmare, and only plays one modern game.
Meanwhile, your retail prices for an Alienware box and the unlikely Sony projector cost a total of $6,800. Add $300 for six (or so) retail-priced software packages, for $7,100 total hardware cost.
This $7,100 gaming machine can play six different titles, has an enormous screen, can play any existing software title for an extra ~$50, and is easily maintained by minimum-wage flunkies. It is conveniently also $900 cheaper than an arcade machine that does none of these things.
The recurring business expenses are probably very similar. Insurance is similar. Wages, per machine, will be similar. They'll be using cheap warehouse space, while arcades typically consume expensive mall realestate - almost certainly saving money, per machine. Advertising is the same. So on, so forth.
It's the same bag - it's just sold at $5 hourly increments, instead of 25-cent game continues.
As for the software expense, it's just absolutely fucking cheap. $10-20k every few months for 300 brand-new huge-screened arcade games to draw in customers with? Sign me up.
The sheep that are Ebay will be more than happy to consume the year-old Alienware boxes for way more than they're worth, making upgrades and fresh hardware relatively inexpensive.
It's hard work, for sure. It's risky and probably slim-margin - arcades seem to be a very failure-prone industry. Nobody said it was easy to run a successful gaming business.
But it's not impossible. This has all been done before.
I conveniently ignored that market segment in order to simplify my argument, but you're correct.
:)
The only people I know (who aren't pathetic morons that needlessly spend money on expensive gear, and then wonder why they have nothing to eat) who actually do use Minidisc are musicians.
OTOH, of those musicians, the one who uses MD the most sees it as a performance aid, not a recording device. He's got a higher-end (Tascam, I think) rackmount model that he gigs with, and uses to queue backing tracks. He uses a simple pedalboard wired to the unit's PS/2 keyboard jack so that he doesn't have to turn away from the crowd or take his hands off of the guitar to make it work.
It seems to work pretty well for him.
The last live recording I did, personally, was at a 2-day outdoor festival. I used a laptop, some cheap Soundblaster USB audio kit, and a program called mp3directcut. The Soundblaster device is just 2-track, but it clipped smoothly and made a great-sounding recording. The laptop was also serving triple-duty offloading the photographers' flash memory cards, and keeping a current radar picture up via cellular modem.
At the start of each day, I just pressed record, checked levels (once), and let it roll. It's hard to run out of tape when you're spooling MP3s onto a 60gig drive...
No problems to report, despite the fact that it was running XP. I had half a mind to leave the laptop behind and use something different for recording (what, like I need to troubleshoot Windows while trying to work a monitor mix, FOH, and fight power problems), but I'm glad I didn't. It saved a lot of asses, and a lot of gear, when several angry storm cells converged overhead and formed a tornado just down the road. Keeping the radar on-screen gave us just enough warning to tarp the speakers and let people know that it was about to get ugly. (From blue sky to inches of rain, killer wind and hail in five minutes.)
Minidisc players just don't do that stuff.
Minidisc is a sham. $7 for a proprietary, hard-to-find disc, that can only be used on proprietary, expensive players, which only holds a gigabyte, and comes with built-in SCMS DRM? Absurd.
Add to that the inherent incompatibility of the format: If you want to cut an MD for a friend (assuming you can even find a friend with an MD player), you first need to establish if their machine will play the LP ATRAC format, if they can play the Hi-MD discs, and so on. After that, you plug in your expensive DRM-crippling player with a USB port, and, since MD is inherently slow, start the long process of transcoding to ATRAC and copying music over.
As another poster noted, it's cheaper to get a hard-drive based iRiver player.
I've been feeding CD-Rs to my IMP-350 for years. The discs are oftentimes free, or at least less than twenty-five cents, and they hold 700 megabytes. I can make a disc full of music in a couple of minutes under Linux, or by dragging-and-dropping in Windows Explorer. No transcoding, no extra software, no DRM to piss people off with.
And if I want to grab a stack of CDs off of the rack before heading out of town, I can do that without having to spend an afternoon ripping and encoding. It is a CD player, after all.
And if someone shows interest in the music I'm listening to, I can just give them the disc. They're essentially free, after all.
Since MP3 CD-Rs are universal, that person is sure to be able to play it. It works in home DVD players, in portable CD players, in everyone's PC, and they even play in the car.
MD was stillborn over a decade ago. The promise of prerecorded discs has long since vanished. The blanks never have gotten cheap. And so, like all other magneto-optical formats ever produced, MD will forever reign in the "neat, but really fucking expensive" category. The only reason it is still around is that nobody has bothered to build a coffin for it yet.
But since you asked for it, here's your Minidisc review:
The MZNH600D. Despite its unpronouncible name, this is a really neat looking unit. It doesn't skip. And it runs on a single AA battery for the rest of your fucking life.
But that's not all - get ready to increase your media costs by 20 times, and kill yourself and your music while transcoding to ATRAC, because that's what you've gotta do just to make one lousy disc.
And don't bother sharing that disc with your friends, because they can't play it. Oh, and SCMS ensures that you can't copy it, either.
At least it's small, and you'll save money on batteries.
RIP.
Right. Sarcasm must be absent in whatever your native country is, but I'll bite anyway:
Somehow, I doubt that Vonage is likely to be very willing to support me when I can't call out from Kphone on my Gentoo machine. So I, along with the rest of the world who would rather talk on the phone instead of spend all day trying to make the bloody thing work, will either be using one of their hardware ATAs, or whatever software they supply.
It's a magic black box that just works. I'm OK with that.
But if we're doing black box telephony, does it really fucking matter what protocols are being used? It might as well be Skype. Or SIP. Or IAX. Or PGPPhone. Or multiplexed DSL. Or IP-over-railroad-telegraph.
What difference does it make? They all suck ass once one varies from the prescribed method.
Protocols won't matter, until we get one that's as simple to implement as plugging in a phone, lifting the handset, and dialing a number.
"Across the street" means to me that you're only going a couple of hundred feet, at most, and that you've got a rather clear line of sight. With 20 feet of RG-58 and a 14dB antenna, your total antenna+feedline gain is something near 9dB.
And 9dB of gain should sure as fuck get you across any street I've ever seen.
Obviously, then, you're doing something wrong.
And since you never mentioned it, I'll surmise it: Your antennas are all indoors, aren't they?
Solution:
Punch a hole in each wall[1]. If it's like most metal buildings, a regular twist bit in a drill will chomp through it in seconds. If it's thicker than that, you'll want to enlist the help of that friend of yours who already has an acetylene tank. If you don't have a friend like that, now is the perfect opportunity to recruit one.
Once you get your holes, run your cabling through them. And then place both antennas outside.
Yes, the USB adaptor should be outside, too. Use a butter tub (Wal-Mart, dairy section, ~$1.50) and whatever sort of fluid adhesive substance you find appropriate or happen to have on hand. Make a hole with a pen knife to poke the USB connector through.
Done.
[1]: If you cannot do this for political or aesthetic reason, just order DSL for the remote location, find yourself some comfortable VPN software, and stop wasting time trying to microwave things through grounded metal structures. Thank you.
Right.
The world would be far better off if everyone installed Linux on a spare computer so they could run Asterisk. You then just need to buy a bunch of hardware, and then either spend a few hundred dollars each on WiFi phones, or spend tens of hours recabling your house.
Oh, and then you get to configure the mess, after learning all about such eccentricities as G.711, G.723.1, GSM, IAX, and SIP, SCCP, plus a whole lot of other defacto telephony standards and Ways Of Doing Things that were obviously developed in a cave.
Once you solve the echo problem, all you gotta do is make DUNDi work, and you can finally call other people Just Like You. Or, you can sign up with any of dozens of shady small VOIP telephone companies and pay a few tenths of a cent per minute to talk to regular people via a SIP, IAX, h.323, or MGCP connection.
Sweet.
Alternatively, one could always download and install Skype. I understand that it does work fairly well, and is easy for mere mortals to use. It seems that Siemens now has an easy way for you to use their handsets with it. Neat.
-1 Redundant on a FP.
Troll, overrated, or flamebait would have been accurate mods. However, redundancy is impossible with a sampleset of only 1.
Thank you for not ruining my expectation of meaningless moderation.
On with the next test: Where, oh where, will this post land?
*queue chorus of "Told you so...*
Never put all of your eggs in one basket. Never count your chickens before they've hatched.
So on, and so forth.
Sure. But what you don't realize is that many PC gamers don't upgrade their computers but every few years, and get along just fine when they buy a new game. Oh, sure, Doom 3 doesn't look quite as cool as it could if you'd just spent a grand on CPU and video upgrades, but it still plays the same that old box and probably does look a bit better than, say, Halflife does on the same hardware.
The spastic upgrade cycle with which some people suffer is driven by the percieved need to run their games at an antialiased 1920x1440 at triple-digit framerates, with textures such that one sees individual hairs on the face of the scruff-covered warmongers as they rocket-jump all over the screen. If one does not suffer from this affliction toward high-endedness, computer upgrades really aren't much of a problem.
PC gamers used to be happy with 640x480 - even 320x200. How things have changed. Upgrades are addictive and irrational, like high-end audio (where most are probably satisfied with a boombox) or finicky imported sports cars (where most are happy with a Taurus).
But if you sit the upgrade cycle out for a couple of years, your new games will still work just fine. They just won't be as pretty.
Console gamers have no such expectations. They operate with a TV. In the US, that TV uses NTSC video. It is universally-agreed that NTSC is a completely suckass way to display video, and implicit that it hides any flaws that would be garish and iresome on a reasonable VGA monitor. The console only ever has to output a low-resolution, interlaced signal, and never at more than 60FPS.
They're completely different mindsets, markets, and expectations.
I'd sure hate to have to pitch the entire motherboard every time a new game comes out.
Right. So picture this:
You've got a motherboard with good onboard video, sound, and gigabit ethernet. Sometime Later, you decide that the onboard [pick one] is obsolete.
You've got two choices:
a) Add a PCI Express/AGP device that better suits your current needs, just like you've been doing since the beginning of time
b) Replace the motherboard, which is oh-so-woefully painful in this time where everything but the front-panel buttons are self-configuring. It might cost a little more, and require the removal of an extra half-dozen or so screws. But you get to upgrade everything else at the same time, too, which generally opens possibilities for CPU and RAM upgrades that you wouldn't have had with your old motherboard. It's not hard to do, either.
Gone are the days where one had to calculate the correct CHS translation for your new-fangled IDE hard drive, let alone the hell which was frequent in the days of MFM and RLL drives. CD-ROM drives are just as easy. CPUs self-configure, RAM identifies itself.
And if everything else is integrated, you don't have anything else to worry about at all. You're all done. Push the power button and enjoy.
It hasn't been difficult to swap out a motherboard for a number of years. Get with it already.
Since ~1996, I've generally only bought the cheapest RAM I could find, usually whatever Memory Man has for cheap under their house brand.
I slam it into the cheapest motherboards I can find. (This, invariably, also works well.)
I've never had a RAM failure. I've thrown away good, working, stable Pentium-class machines with 8-year-old, cheap-shit RAM.
A long time ago, I even used SIMM stackers to load up 16 mismatched, cheap-shit 30-pin modules into four 72-pin sockets on an Intel FX-chipset motherboard. It was a rock-solid stable machine for a couple of years, before it graduated to some real (cheap) 72-pin EDO. It still worked fine when it met the dumpster a few months ago.
I've spent the past 10 years wondering what the rest of the world has been doing wrong WRT memory, trying to figure out why people are always so willing to needlessly piss away their money.
Interesting information, but I believe it to be baseless: We're not flying jet fighters, but instead tooling around on the highway in cars. Cars that don't travel at Mach .2. I've seen NASCAR cars hit birds at without shattering their polycarbonate windshields (though the bird itself does, plainly, explode), and those are generally going Way More Faster than passenger cars are even capable of.
So let us apply some basic science, because I find the practicality of your assertion about razors vs. plastic to be totally fucked.
I hypothesize is that the edge of polycarbonate which has been broken by impact at low velocity is not as able to cause skin lacerations as a sharp knife, let alone a proper razor or a chunk of glass.
Let us examine this theory by comparing the effects of dragging broken polycarbonate against human skin (my left hand), vs. the effects of dragging a sharp knife across similar skin (on my right hand). My scrotum will be used as a control group, in order to prevent a nasty accident.
The first component of the experiment will be a ~4-year-old CD-R (consisting of polycarbonate, magic dye, aluminum, laquer) that has been thrown against the floor of my garage, rather hard. I estimate its impact velocity to have been a few tens of miles per hour. The CD broke into numerous bits of varying sizes. One of the more managable bits was chosen for the experiment.
The other component of the experiment will be an easy-open Kershaw pocketknife with an (originally rather scary) factory edge, similar to that pictured at http://www.theknifestore.com/kershaw1660st.html . The knife is a couple of weeks old, and has been numerous times for cutting/stripping copper wires and opening various packages. It is thus probably rather dull compared to a razor, but still quite sharp.
On with it: I took the managable bit of polycarbonate, and dug one of its more flat sides into the back of my left hand. Nothing happened. Repeated sawing motions with significant appilied pressure resulted in further occurances nothing. Dragging a pointed portion of the polycarbonate resulted in a very light, superficial abbrasion which seemed to disappear by itself after rubbing my hands together lightly.
My scrotum was unaffected by this experiment.
In contrast with this, I used the Kershaw pocketknife on the same portion of my opposite hand. Anything more than slight pressure resulted in light, bleeding lacerations, whether using the flat portion of the blade or any of its numerous points.
My scrotum was also unaffected by this experiment.
It is thus proven a pocketknife is more capabable of cutting human skin than polycarbonate. It would seem implicit that a razor or broken safety glass would produce even more-extreme results, but I was unable to find a willing test subject.
Re: Automotive windows
The whole point of tempered automotive glass is to minimize injury to the heads of the passengers. Windshields use multiple layers of glass with a plastic film in between, to keep broken bits from flying into the vehicle's occupants. Side and rear windows are designed to break into small enough peices that lacerations are minimized, and lack stabilizing layers.
Contrast this with a plastic window. Most plastics are not very sharp when broken. The windows can be designed to bend outward easily. And they don't weigh anywhere near as much as glass, lessening the problems of momentum.
And since plastic doesn't have the inherent problem of normal glass (big, heavy, jugular-slicing chunks of razor-sharp material being flung about at incredible speeds), it doesn't need to have the same safeguards. To state otherwise is an example of FUD.
The safety problem, then, is easy to quantify:
Using your head at a velocity of 60MPH, does it hurt more to hit a 40lb glass windshield which will shatter (but maintain its mass and inertia) on impact, or to hit a 10-pound shatterproof plastic window which is flexibile enough to absorb your forward energy, and will remove itself outward from the vehicle on impact?
I don't have the solution to that problem, but I'd say that it's close.
On with the anecdotes:
Plastics (Lexan, in particular) have been used in race car windows for a Really Long Time Now. And since dead/blinded drivers can't win races, the people involved in selecting said windows have a rather vested interest in making sure that they're safe. So far, they've done just fine.
I'm guessing that if the automobile industry is keen enough on saving weight and materials that they're seriously discussing increasing voltage to reduce the weight of electrical wiring, that they'd really appreciate windows that aren't as heavy as the glass that they've been using forever.
If only Lexan didn't scratch so easily, I'm sure they'd jump all over it.
Oh, wait, I almost forgot. Lexan == polycarbonate == the stuff CDs are made of. Didn't TDK recently develop a coating to solve that problem?
Good points.
I'd like to add that ghosting is usually due to bad or damaged cabling, and that all high-frequency analog signals (including those used by LCD monitors with VGA inputs) are susceptible to it.
It's easy to demonstrate, too: Just take a length of VGA cable, and bend it in half, hard, as if you were a secretary busily rearranging "all those ugly wires". After that, bundle it up with a bread tie, and place the corner of your desk on it.
Or just pretend you're a gamer, strung out from seventeen consecutive hours of cheap beer, bad coffee, and Counterstrike. You're loading the PC into the car, and slam the trunklid on the monitor cable, crimping it something nasty.
Ghosting? You betcha. We expect these cables to run up to about 350MHz. If you thought Ethernet over Cat5 was finicky, you haven't pissed off a VGA cable lately.
[/me patiently awaits the return of monitors with replacable, BNC-equipped cables...]
Also included in the Linux kernel source code is a very fine software RAID 5 implementation. It always works.
In fact, it works SO WELL that of all the postings here, nobody has managed to cite a single problem with it.
As an aside, I'm curious:
Was it fun rebuilding your array and reloading your data every time you switched RAID controllers, while trying to find one that actually works? (heh, heh)
Do yourself a favor: Next time, forget hardware RAID under Linux unless you've got a good reason not to. Pocket the savings (not buying a 3Ware Escalade affords a lot of beer), or spend it on more CPU and RAM.
$450, and the only[1] advantage you've stated is that it doesn't have "big CPU overhead." At best, this statement is misleading.
It has been the case for years now that software RAID requires very little CPU. Meanwhile, $450 buys a fuckton of Intel/AMD CPU, and that fuckton will always be bigger than the shovelfull of CPU provided on a RAID card.
After that, it's just math - and simple math, at that. (Calculating parity is not difficult, mmkay?)
Thus, spending the money on a faster processor will, AFAICT, always yield higher total system performance than using hardware RAID.
Why would it be more advantageous to spend $450 on a proprietary RAID adapter, than to invest the same amount of money in CPU power and get a faster system?
[1] I'm not aware of any present limitations in Linux's handling of software RAID that would preclude the use of a redundant boot partition. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been using one here for some time now.
This begs the question: Who is America? Choose just one:
Fox News
CNN
President x
President x's cabinet
Those fucking Republicans
Those fucking Democrats
Those fucking Greens
("The People" is not an allowed option. They ceased to matter long ago, when they largely stopped thinking for themselves and began to openly invite others to make their opinions for them)