The color NTSC standard is -already- an ugly hack, layered on top of the old B&W spec. Why anyone would want to perpetuate this 60-year-old mistake is beyond me.
Besides, the broadcasters will never go for it. Sure, they're dragging their feet right now with implementing HDTV. But once it is done, they can use their allocated (FREE!) spectrum to simutaneously broadcast -four- seperate programs at once. This new format does not appear to have any such functionality, which spells a huge loss in earnings potential for any station manager.
Also, it's broken. The analog signal portion of the signal will be at an aspect ratio of 16x9 (hence the reference to letterboxed video), which is fine I suppose, except that reruns of I Love Lucy and other ancient (and not so ancient) programs will be letterboxed top, bottom, and sides. Expect a 20" analog TV to look like a ~15-16" (anyone care to do the math and figure it out?) set, with a lumenescent grey border. Or cropped video, top-and-bottom, in order to fill out the sides.
This may make people more interested in an HDTV set (their analog pictures will all shrink), but at the cost of reduced picture quality once they do.
The hardware folks won't like it. They say it'll require a 'small software change' to existing HDTV sets, but Toshiba and Philips read that as 'Christ, now we need to send tens of thousands of service techs out to plug new ROMs into 300-pound TVs.'
Do we really need to stay backward-compatible with a 1950 B&W RCA console, when just like with initial large cable TV systems, and now digital cable, an inexpensive set-top box will do the trick justfine for the naysayers and owners of such antiquated equipment?
Forget for a moment that such a box doesn't yet exist. We've got 5 years to get one there, and at the present rate of advancement of digital technology (particularly in the fields of DSP and codecs), some Korean bastard will have them on shelves for less than $50 well before any broadcaster switches entirely over to HDTV.
--
Adolf Osborne
Where there's a need, there's a greedy Korean with 10,000 small-fingered slaves ready to solder together a solution.
Seen recently on a sidepanel at Software Etc
on
The Modem Lives On
·
· Score: 4
Minimum Product Requirements:
500MHz Pentium III, or similar
520MB Free Hard Disk Space
OpenGL 3D Accelerator
Broadband Internet Access NOTE: If cable or DSL is not available in your area, Mindfuck Software recommends our partners at Century 21 Realestate and monster.com to aid in your relocation. This may seem harsh, but it really is better for society for you to move away from your almost-paid-for 2-story house on 3 acres of land, and into a 2-bedroom apartment with crackhead neighbors who throw eachother into the wall at odd hours to the incessant beat of stompin'-loud Kid Rock. You won't regret it, and your LPB gaming peers will thank you.
We hope you enjoy the game, and wish you well for your adventures in the ghetto.
Obviously, you've never used a Sunon fan. I got one in the power supply of the XT I purchased in 1987. It has been spinning more-or-less continuously since that time, without episode.
Not all fans are that good. My last (and I do mean -last-) purchase of a pre-made PC included PSU and CPU fans which each died within two months of use.
I have no doubt that a 7-year-old is capable of designing and building a fan which does in fact work. I have a great deal of doubt that such an apparatus would continue to work 14 years later.
There are at least a few things about metallurgy, magnetics, lubrication and airflow which are neither obvious nor easy to understand, but are certainly required for engineering an efficient, well-designed, and long-lasting fan.
Those who believe anything different are those who are entirely responsible for the fact that most fans sold as computer parts today are complete shit.
There -was- an interruption in service. Upon waking last Sunday, I found two of my DirecTV recievers (both Sony SAT-B1) non-functional, with a notice on-screen to contact Customer Service (extension 721, IIRC). While calling did clear the problem up, it was somewhat disconcerting to have the system in such a half-broken state.
I pay for TV, like a good boy, but that doesn't seem to matter.
Interestingly, the third reciever (a SAT-A1) survived the hit without episode.
Not to sound pragmatic, but with any luck the new 'mp3' format will fizzle and die.
I don't -want- to see hear bad they can make things sound at 64kbps. And further, I don't care about bandwidth or disk usage, even though I'm behind a 28.8 modem.
I -do- want high-quality downloadable (freely or not) music. By high-quality, I mean indistinguishable from a CD to my own ears (LAME at ~220Kbps average VBR does this for me).
Storage is stupid-cheap these days. Bandwidth is slowly spreading out into much more diverse, and usually competitive, markets.
The focus should not be to make the files smaller (Realaudio G2, anyone?), but to make the quality better. The data distribution and storage capabilities of the Internet at large are progessing leaps and bounds ahead of the state of human hearing (which is actually moving BACKWARDS due to higher levels of everyday ambient noise) - once the epitome of perceptually perfect encoding is deemed possible for the masses, I'll settle for smaller files that reach the same end. Until that point is reached: Fuck off, Fraunhoffer.
And, dispite my freedom-esque views on life, I'd like to see high-quality encoding forced forced upon the populace, as the most infuriating members don't seem to mind even 96Kbps joint stereo mp3s either due to the fact that they are deaf, use equipment that is absolute shit, or just have never heard anything better.
It's for their own good, really - most illicit MP3s come from teens-to-20somthings who don't have to the cash to spend on quality (as in, "you can't buy this at Circuit City") audio equipment, but who (given the forward momentum of consumer electronics) will, at some point, be disappointed with the sound quality of the typical 128KBPS MP3 (of which they will have amassed several tens of gigabytes by such a point).
You idiots who bought a Diamond Rio (or similar) with only 64 megs, being pissed that you can only get an hour's worth of still half-assed-sounding music on the device, are no exception. You should have realized that flash memory is hideously expensive -before- you made such a purchase.
Feel free to moderate this down as flamebait. It's not like karma doesn't grow on trees.
Following the philosophy of 'less is more,' those interested in a clean digital output might be interested in the Zoltrix Nightingale. It's a rather inexpensive card ($12) with an RCA coaxial digital output, with an optional optical output board (costs another couple of dollars) - check Pricewatch for availability.
This card is based on the CMI 8738 chip, which is blessedly stupid enough to be absolutely incapable of doing any of the horrid resampling which is irrevocably commonplace on most consumer sound cards (Yamaha XG and SBLive! come to mind as two which resample -everything- to 48KHz).
Good support with OSS/Pay under most/all x86 unices, better support with the 2.4 Linux kernel, and great support with ALSA. There's also OS/2 drivers, though I can't vouch for the quality of them.
The only downside of this wonderously cheap gem is its inability to feed non-44.1/48KHz signals to its digital output, but I don't find that to be any hinderance.
Bonuses include quad analog output for games, the ability to spit AC3 (Dolby Digital) data to the digital output for DVDs, digital pass-through with SCMS stripper for Minidisc freaks, and 24-bit capable digital IO (that's in, and out, both coaxial and optical).
It should be mentioned that Midiman/M-Audio sells a supposedly pro-oriented card (the DiO-2448) using this -same- chip at $149 list, and it doesn't have anywhere near as much I/O flexibility as the Zoltrix does, or any extra hardware to improve the digital IO, though I suspect the analog section to be somewhat better designed [and for this application, who cares - spend the difference on some new music].
[ObOntopic]
I've got one tied in with TOSLINK to an Audio Alchemy DDE v1.1 DAC, which is in turn connected to a Rotel RTC-940 preamp and Ashly FET-1000 poweramp. For some dull-sounding recordings, I'll switch in a BBE 200R to add a bit of sparkle (most newer recordings needn't be fucked with, though).
Speakers are a pair of two-ways and stereo subs (of my own design), which I'd rate as somewhat above Circuit City quality, and somewhat below what your typical audio salon might sell alongside a Krell amp.;)
The combination of shit sound card and mid-fi DAC sounds a bit better (in terms of transparency, bass, and real detail, but I've got to listen fairly intently to tell) than my Carver TL-3300 CD player, which uses a pair of 18-bit Burr-Brown DACs and isn't any particular slouch in any aspect.
I'd expect similar results (relatively speaking, as with all other things audio) using a reciever with a digital input.
Plastic olycarbonate, the material from which CDs are made, does not darken or yellow.
Further, even if it did, it would do so in a fashion which is consistant across the disc, and would pose no more a problem than it does with binary CD-Rs right now. The different dyes and reflective surfaces of which show great variances in reflectivity and other characteristics between brands, not to mention variances of output power, frequency, divergence, and other thinks laser due to aging and manufacturing tolerance of the laser diode. The reader has some automagic circuitry (think AGC) and error correction to determine which bit is which, and these parts are at play continuously every time you read a CD.
So, even if the disc were soiled sufficiently that subtracting 1 from every 4-bit 'byte' would correct the reading process, this correction would happen automatically, as it is already done with current binary CD players (cheap Aiwa portables and 40x Plextors alike), and I don't suspect that they'll thow it out.
I suspect that the implementation of such a feature would be enourmously difficult, and not for technical reasons, but sociological.
It stands to scrutiny that much of the wired world is quite braindead. The arcanity of entering trailing / (let alone an actual filename) of an HTTP URL has been deemed too intense for the masses. The "http://" prefix is also too complicated.
Nevermind the fact that URLs were supposed to make things easier for the populace to understand. There simply aren't enough protocols in common use for to bother distinguishing which one is wanted. People, even geeks, don't even browse FTP servers much these days, which places the URL one step further toward complete disuse.
People, nowadays, just enter "cnn.com" into the top of the window, if they even know how; I suspect a great many hits to http://cnn.com/ are the results of people entering it into the search box of their respective default page (either MSN or Netcenter).
In any case, that HTTP is wanted is assumed by the browser software, while the trailing slash is filled in by the web server. And the entered text, "cnn.com", is mostly understandable to most drones, though the majority would probably prefer that the.com suffix be dropped as well.
In this state of affairs, expecting the general populace to be able to handle a new protocol (and the dread:// they remember being spoken in radio ads in 1995), let alone something as nonsensical and impronouncible as a Freenet key, is certainly futile, not to mention of limited use for even clued masses.
"Ok. That program I was talking about is at eff-nee-ee-tee-colon-slash-slash-eff-cee-pee-capit al-gee-small-zee-wye-oh-arr-..."
From what I've been able to see so far, this -is- an attempt to make Linux better.
Remember, Linux is just a kernel. No more, no less. It's all the GNU, X and other tools that make the UNIX-like userland experience what it is, and they can all pretty much run just as well with other kernels.
As I read this article (at +2, no parent -- seems reasonable in most discussions), I'm distraught by the number of posts being displayed by Bruce Perens. Sure, he's (appearently) a smart guy who knows at least enough about the subject to author the article, but why are 10 out of 22 >+2 posts from him?
Counting the article itself as 1, that's -half- of the displayed posts, which is just silly.
Either the moderators are favoring Bruce's commentary (which is typically useful, informative, and insightful -- though not without context), or Bruce is using his +1 bonus on every post (which is -not- needed on a three-line message, no matter what it contains).
As it is, some of Bruce's replies are without displayed parent posts, and in (at least) one instance he appears to have replied to himself (which means there's at least two <+2 posts which need attention).
Spam is bad, to some people. To some others, it is ok. And still others appreciate it.
Pornography is bad, to some people. To some others, it is ok. And still others appreciate it.
DeCSS is bad, to some people. To some others, it is ok. And still others appreciate it.
We here at slashdot tend to view a given subject only from the perspective which best serves our own interests. We are as selfish, prejudice, maliciously reactionary, and sublimely manipulative as any of the MPAA, the spamware folks, or the extremist portion of the Christian Right.
Rather than attempt to remain reasonable and retain even a hint of impartiality, we react viciously to anything deemed to be infringing upon on our rights, with absolute disregard to the rights of any others who might be in the way.
We do this as we sit high upon our assumed intellectual high horse/flimsy house of cards, shouting banters about freedom, goodness, and The Right Thing To Do; cries which typically fall upon deaf ears.
Witness our views on DeCSS, Censorware, Spamware, MP3 encoders, MP3s themselves, the iOpener, or TiVo's 'exploitation' of the Linux kernel, and try to visualize the other parties' justification (which, in these cases, is -always- legitimate) for whatever it is that they have done to offend the horrid, arrogant, nonsensical beast that is slashdot. In other words, put yourself in their shoes.
Those who are unwilling to do so are simply afraid of finding that said shoe fits their own foot perfectly, and that they'd hence not be able to remove it from their mouth. This is an obviously unacceptable outcome, given the clear superiority of the average slashdot user (let alone the top 5 percent).
With such bigotry abounding en masse, it's no wonder they can't hear us.
Choose your enemies carefully, because that is who you will become. --Lao Tzu
I'm the proud keeper of a Figure 8 pufferfish (Tetraodon biocellatus) and can testify that it does seem awfully human. It eats at inconvenient times, and is quite particular about what it eats. If not fed at the time that it expects to eat, it will throw a tantrum and swim around madly, teeth gnashing at anything that moves (including its reflection) until it finally calms down enough to recognize that, yes, there is food to be found. After eating a bit, it calms down markedly.
It is also rather hard-set into its sleeping patterns. Should the light be on when it is normally dark, it will be awake and very cranky, sometimes including a tantrum of the aforementioned sort, or it may just sit on the substrate and sulk until the light goes away.
It is wasteful. It understands that food is not in short supply, and will sometimes play with a bit for several minutes before spitting it out, swimming under a rock, and pouting.
All in all, the fish reminds me a great deal of my 2-month-old daughter, except that she isn't quite as mobile (nor anywhere near as old).
[ Note: this particular fish is not Fugu ocellatus and therefore may be of sufficiently different genetic makeup that it is not applicable to this discussion. However, this other link suggests that in terms of sushi, Fugu refers to anything from the pufferfish family. ]
By making some deals with my ISP in exchange for various services, I'm able to park boxes at justabout any of their facilities. The following may not apply to anyone else, but It Works For Me.
What happens when your power goes out? [...]
When the power goes out for longer than the UPS can stay up (45 minutes), another box handles incoming mail. This box is some distance away (~35 miles), and has completely different (not just seperate) connectivity. This is stupid-easy to do, given multiple hosts and access to your own DNS records. Additionally, many people are willing to trade secondary MX entries for mutual benefit in the event of a failure of some sort at either end.
When a hard drive crashes, a DAT backup will restore the system.
When a building burns down, the tape that was thoughtfully stored off-site weekly is brought in. Note, that if your HOUSE burns down, email will be the least of your concerns.
When the backup machine goes up in flames at the same time as the primary, I'll have to punt, which is fine - how many layers of redundancy might a "large national ISP" have, anyway?
Machines break. All you can do is slap another diverse failover system in, and hope that it doesn't break at the same time the primary system does.
It is worth mentioning that the "butt-cheap" $109 Midiman DIO2448 card uses the exact same monolithic chipset as the dirt-cheap $20 Zoltrix cards being sold by the neighborhood discount whore. The $209 2496 card is also based around the same chip, but adds couple of presumably decent Crystal DACs which are probably good enough on their own for non-critical listening.
I have no doubt that the Midiman's analog signal path is much cleaner than that of the Zoltrix. However, those who are just looking for an SP/DIF output are probably better off with the Zoltrix card, while putting the ~$90(!) difference toward, say, a Midiman external DAC (all of which are excellent).
No word yet as to how well the digital output on the Zoltrix card works with OSS, specifically, but the same can be said of the Midiman variant. Should be about the same, though, given that there's only really one chip on either board.:)
Personally, I just want support for the Lexicon core2. 4 in/8 out+8 channels of ADAT IO+SP/DIF, all at once, and at 48KHz, 24-bit. I use one for mixdowns with an ADAT in the studio and have yet to be disappointed with it. Sadly, I'm forced to do this under Windows.:-/
I use mpg123 0.59r to play VBR MP3s all the time. The only difficulty comes from some that I've created using LAME with tweaked-out options, which generates 'free-form' MP3 that mpg123 chokes on.
The CVS version supposedly fixes this, but I've not tried it.
Warning: This post may (at the present time, or some future point) voilate the DMCA.
It's easy to record SDMI-protected music, even with 'digital' speakers that use bullet-proof encryption, and tamper-resistant enclosures.
All speakers, even 'digital' ones, at some point produce an analog signal.
All speakers of the dynamic type (read: cheap, common) have fly leads heading to the voice coil, which sit directly beneath the cone, that carry this analog signal.
Tools required:
1 beer, any size
1 printed copy of the SDMI spec
1 printed copy of the DMCA
1 drill
1 large drill bit
1 sharp knife
2 alligator clip-equipped wires, per speaker
1 suitable connector, per speaker
Determine where the driver/cone (whichever you want to call it) is located inside the speaker enclosure. Drill through speaker grill in the approximate center of te driver. Having done this, the dustcap of the driver should be visible, and perhaps the fly leads as well.
If you can see the end of the fly leads (they look like two small bumps, encased in goop), skip this paragraph. Else, cut away the dustcap using your knife to expose the flyleads.
Now, also using the knife, scrape off the glue which entombs the fly lead ends until you find substantial bare metal.
Attach one alligator-equipped wire to each lead. Consider one lead to be positive, the other negative (it is beyond the scope of this document to describe methods for determine which is which), and connect (via the suitable connector) to the desired non-SDMI-compliant audio recording device's analog input. Optionally, use a resistor or potentiometer in series with this circuit for level control.
Push play and record at the same time, and have a beer while the song transfers.
When done transferring, use the consumed beer to piss all over the printed SDMI and DMCA papers.
I'm somewhat fuzzy with the the notion of true random numbers, so this may be wildly inaccurate.
That said, it occurs to me that the largest problem with finding a random number of a given size is finding a source of randomness to extrapolate from.
Why spend $100 (or hours/days of design and construction) on a device that generates chaos, when almost everyone reading this already has the required hardware: a sound card.
Simply play some music/radio broadcast/radio noise into your sound card's input, and sample it. Give the resultant bitstram a few twists (based on other, random samplings), and the end result should be genuinely random numbers of arbitrary size, for zero cost.
If there's holes in this idea, I'd be interested to know about them. Failing that, I dare someone to code it.
[And before anyone says "Music is not random," I challenge them first to find anything of harmonic or even sinusoidal nature in Ministry's album, Filth Pig.]
I like this 2- 4- 6-head paradigm espoused above. It's simple, concise, and understandable by mere mortals.
'Tis a shame that it's fundamentally incorrect -- at least, as far as NTSC goes. (PAL should be much the same on the VHS front.)
2-head VCRs are optimized for high-speed playback and recording - that is, two hours of video on a two hour ("T-120") tape. I don't recall why two heads are used - perhaps one for playback, and another for record, or to put luminance and chroma on seperate parts of the tape. Whatever the case, 2-head VHS looks as good with SP mode as anything else.
A fairly recent (say, less than 15 years old) 2-head VHS deck *can* record/play in other modes, but shoddily. The reason is that the heads in all VHS decks are spinning at high speed, while the tape moves at a relatively slow speed. Unlike analog audio cassettes (which use fixed heads), VHS uses a (helical scan?) spinning head, operating diagonally to the medium, in order to achieve the bandwidth required for video signals.
Obviously, you want to use as much of the magnetic media as possible, so the width of these diagonal scans is rather important. If you slow the tape down (say, because you want to get all of Titanic on one tape), they'll get closer together, and perhaps interact with eachother, causing obvious visual distortion that we all immediately identify with as a "shitty VCR." This is why nobody seems to like 2-head VCRs - not because their purchased video library (which is all produced in SP/2-hour mode) looks bad (indeed, it's just as good as a four-head deck, all else being the same), but because the stuff they tape themselves/"borrow" from friends is not quite up-to-par. (Side note: Ever notice that your 2-head VHS[C] camcorder only works at high speed? Ever wonder why?)
4-head VHS VCRs were introduced to allow people to record six hours of video on a T-120 tape, and do so with markedely higher quality. That's all, no mystery and no magic. Only pair of heads are ever used at once - those which are appropriate for the selected speed.
Playback/record quality of 6-hour tapes will be better on a 4-head deck, as opposed to one with 2 heads. Playback/record of 2-hour tapes will be identical between 2- and 4-head units (assuming the associated electronics are up to snuff).
6-head VCRs? Feh. Sounds more like a marketing ploy by JVC than anything else, unless it optimizes things for half (as well as 1/3 and full) speed tape travel. Or, I might be a bit behind the times, but this is all *really* old technology.
Of course, all of this negativity begs the question: What is "VHS Quality"? The answer is clear. If the end result looks like something that would make even a 1970s videophile grimmace and vomit repeatedly when compared to Beta, it's probably bad enough to be considered VHS quality.
Is that retort rather too subjective for the question at hand? Probably. But, the phrase "VHS quality" in reference to anything digital is highly subjective as well.
From the objective standpoint, consumer-grade digital video stuff tends to have nasty encoding artifacts of all kinds, including the holy grail of DVD. These artifacts are of such dramatically different nature from those introduced by VHS as to render *any* comparison completely invalid.
I haven't roofed a cubicle (and have never had the pleasure of living in one), but JWZhas.
Remember about fire safety, particularly with the use of incandescent lighting. I'd think that having burning bits of cloth raining from above would be a rather unpleasant experience.
Once upon a time, I had ISDN and was more-or-less happy with it. The telco got the line in fairly quickly, and also waived the installation charge as part of some promotion. It was reliable, it had low latency, and file transfers happened quickly enough not to piss me off. If ISDN is possible where you are, give it a shot.
When moving from that somewhat-industrious area to a 2-acre plot in the middle of a corn field, I asked the new phone company for ISDN, and they laughed at me. I then asked for four POTS lines, and they scratched their heads, referred to their books (yes, real dead trees), referred to eachother, and decided that it was possible.
Using MLPPP and three 28.8 modems (along with three of those POTS lines and three dialins at my ISP), I'm able to pull down ~6.5-7k/second. It's not awesomely fast, or cheap, but it works.:P
Any ISP which can provide 128k or 112k ISDN access (which most 56k providers can, whether they admit it or not) supports MLPPP.
Software for the other end of the wire(s) is readily available. Windows 98 does it out-of-box, it is integral to the 2.4 Linux kernel, and it is also available in FreeBSD's userland PPP driver.
Myself, I'm using mpd (from the ports collection) in conjunction with natd under FreeBSD. This allows me to have one always-on link, while the other two dial on demand in response to bandwidth requirements. AFAIK, this is the only freely-available way to accomplish the dial-on-demand bit.
When it works (which it usually does, but nowhere near as consistantly as ISDN with a dedicated router), it works well.
Additionally, in some areas, one-way cable modem access is available cheap, over microwave cable networks such as WatchTV. One such provider, at http://www.im3.com, offers 128-768Kbps downstreams for $40-70/month - including the equipment. (and, in checking this, it seems that they've just crept a little closer to serving my area - not that I'm holding my breathe.)
There remain unanswered issues about such services, in that they only claim to support Windows 9x and MacOS, and details of the actual hardware and protocols used are lacking (at best).
Yet-another alternative: a friend of mine at my ISP (you didn't think I *paid* for those three logins, did you?) has just completed training on Breezecom's 802.11 wireless ethernet stuffs. According to him, speeds of 3Mbps are possible at distances of up to 25 miles, given the right antennae and a line-of-sight.
Find a *nix-using friend with cable in the nearest city, and offer to pay part of the cable bill in exchange for a tower in his back yard (or a pole on the house) and a chunk of his (or hers! the mind boggles) bandwidth, and you're all set.
Or, haggle with a small, local ISP over pricing for such a service. You'd be amazed at how the little jobs operate, if you've never had a peek inside. They've got the bandwidth, and they're flexible enough to let things like this happen without huge amounts of money changing hands.
There's plenty of options for consumer-grade bandwidth in rural areas, it's just that most of them are neither cheap, nor easy.
[ In a somewhat-offtopic note, I was once involved in a project to share a T1 with a tiny ISP down the block from where I was working at the time. It involved asking the landowners in between for permission to string a wire, drilling a couple of holes in some masonry, and hanging Cat5 above a parking lot. It worked well, and was highly cost-effective ($20 in networking stuff, plus $40/mo) until (sadly) a lightning hit destroyed both the remote ISP, most of another ISP which had since moved into our building (which we were also leeching from), a good portion of a high-end audio shop (us), while the MOVs inside the APC Surgearrests at either end of the wire simply exploded. Needless to say, that link isn't in operation anymore, but it was fun while it lasted (note to self: next time, bury the cable). ]
Sorry, but AOL CDs won't damage speakers. Or phones. Or anything else (except the minds of youth everywhere).
There's nothing particularly damaging about an ISO-9660 CD, except for the fact that they tend to generate high-frequency audio when treated as Red Book.
These high-frequency noises will tend to be quite loud, but no louder than the maximum level of a normal CD. They will be routed (by way of the crossover) to your tweeters.
The only problem here is that most tweeters can only dissipate a few (less than 10) Watts of energy -- but most will safely handle 1 Watt, all day. How loud is a single Watt?
If we assume the speakers in question have a sensetivity of 88dB @ 1 Watt, 1 meter from the radiating surface (a fairly common median spec, for home audio), and that you've got two of them (stereo), we're up to 91dB at 1 meter of distance from the speakers.
Now, sound at STP in an anechoic free-field enviroment is absorbed and diffused by air at the rate of 6dB for every doubling of distance.
But, standard homes aren't anechoic - the reverberations will tend to reinforce the original waveform, so the transmission loss will not quite be 6dB.
So, if you're six feet away, you'll be hearing AOL 5.0 at at *least* 85dB -- which most people would consider quite loud enough to turn down immediately (even to the point of tripping over the desk in an attempt to get to the volume knob), given the nature of the noise and the human ear's increased high-frequency sensitivity.
At the same time, this brief stint of horribly loud AOL 5.0 being played through your speakers will be at the reasonably safe level of 1 Watt.
Even if we assume that the volume knob is initially turned up to a point at which more than 1 Watt is generated, it wouldn't much matter. We, as humans, tend to have fairly fast reflexes (and tend to get faster as percieved amplitude of sudden sound increases), you'll get off your ass turn it down long before anything bad happens to your speakers.
Incidentally, those loudspeakers which operate full range (ie, without a tweeter, such as about all Bose ilk) will be largely absolutely immune to things like this.
And, at any rate, most CD players simply mute the output when asked to play a data track. I have the (perhaps unfortunate) privelege of owning one that doesn't, but it predates CD-ROM.
The first premise thus disproven, I shall henceforth move on:
The digital switches that just about all telephone companies use these days (and certainly all of the telemarketers) will filter sounds not within the 300-3,000Hz POTS standard. There are further (hardware-based) limitations on minimum and maximum amplitude.
So, a good chunk of that lovely high-freq AOL 5.0 will be thrown out, and there are hard liminitations on just how loud the final signal can be. I don't have precise numbers, as I'm not a telco person (and I don't want to be one), but I'd say that it's a safe assumption that reaching any of these limits will not harm any telephone equipment, as these limitations are reached regularly even in normal speech.
End result? You, shouting over the phone, will cause as much damage (ie, none) to the telemarker's equipment as AOL 5.0, and will probably be much more effective at souring the poor glutton's mood.
So, just yell at them. Call them names. Make fun of their mother. Just don't threaten them, and legally, all's well. If enough people did this, they'll quit their job for something less tiring.
And if enough of them quit, labor prices for telemarketers will go up to the point that it would no longer be a profitable enterprise, and the responsible companies would be forced onto some new frontier such as spam and/or chapter 11.
All of the corn in the US will only provide enough ethanol for 4% of the gasoline demand?
I guess the stickers on the gas pumps in Ohio are wrong then - they say that the gas is 10% ethanol. IIRC, similar requirements exist in most other 'corn belt' states.
I somehow doubt that such a significant percentage (I might guess 25%) of the corn crop will go up in flames as people drive their beloved SUVs.
If I'm not mistaken, some (all?) NetApps filers support an archival system similar to this, but I've only experienced it with a shell account at a former ISP .
Here's how it worked, roughly, and from memory of many years ago [before I turned into a stereotypical unix geek, and everything was still somewhat mystical to me]:
In everyone's home directory were a variety of.snapshot-* directories, which automagically stored archives of various timespans of files which had been deleted or modified. IIRC (once again, it's been awhile), these archives were on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. So, if your.newsrc were to get hosed, you could just go back a day and retreive it. Or, suppose an untested change to your procmail configs starts sending everything to/dev/null, and you don't notice for several days because you don't get much mail - just go back a week and snag the old, working copy. Only changed/deleted files showed up in the snapshot directories, so it was fairly space-efficient.
The system seemed to work pretty well, though I only made use of it a few times. I've got no idea if this is a standard NetApps-specific thing, or supplied by some third-party daemon, and I've certainly never noticed anything of this sort for Linux or the BSDs.
If anyone has any specifics about this sort of thing, I'd love to see them.
[Ob-OnTopic: Since this already exists, Dumpster and Landfill icons already have the needed back-end support, though possibly only on a very sheltered platform...]
This is what Multilink PPP is for. Instead of having a mess of redundant links, with some hideously complex routing daemon to sort through the wreckage, you get a mess of redundant links all acting as one.
This is fairly standard stuff, and is supported by any ISP who is able to provide 128k (dual-channel) ISDN access (which the includes the vast majority of all providers, whether they admit it, or not).
Using MPPP, latency actually goes *down*. Instead of sending a 1500 byte packet, and having to wait for the entire thing to be sent in a serial fashion (one byte at a time), it gets split up into much smaller packets which are each sent in parallel. So, if you've got two active links running at the same speed, each one will transfer 750 bytes of that 1500 byte packet. With four links up, that drops to 375, and so on.
This packet-splitting happens with anything that IP can encapsulate (or, I suppose, anything that PPP can), and so would work fine for online games.
That said, latency would perhaps still be too high - transmission delays, telco delays, and such - but that's because of the physical medium (a cell phone and the requisite network), *not* the increasingly-efficient network stack.
That's funny-- I mean, humorous-- er, rather, incorrect.
A woofer is more massive than a tweeter, obviously. However, it does not take any longer to "react" to signal changes, at appropriate frequencies than a tweeter does at appropriate frequencies.
The "it has more mass, thus it must be slower" comparison is not the same for an oscillating body as it is for, say, an empty pickup truck vs. the same truck loaded with stone. Remember, the woofer is moving back and forth up to a few thousand times a second. The higher in frequency it is asked to do this, the more quickly it must accelerate. At some point, a woofer does become inefficient at producing higher frequencies, and that is when the crossover and purpose-designed tweeter come into play.
So, a woofer is "slower" than a tweeter, in part because it has more mass. This "slowness" turns up in the frequency domain as high-end rolloff - not in the time domain as a delay.
The only reason for sloped/stepped cabinet fronts is that the voice coil of a woofer is (typically) recessed to a much greater extent than that of a tweeter, and thus the originating point of low-frequency sound is further away from one's ears. You've probably noticed that most speakers (even those of exceptionally high quality) do not utilize this "time-alignment" scheme. I could venture some theories as to why this is the case, but it is most assuredly not because the cabinetry would be expensive. (If in doubt, head down to your neighborhood car audio shop, and gawk at the sheer number of boxes with sloped fronts for very few dollars. You might also ask them for the difference in cost between one with a sloped front, and one without.)
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo.
The color NTSC standard is -already- an ugly hack, layered on top of the old B&W spec. Why anyone would want to perpetuate this 60-year-old mistake is beyond me.
Besides, the broadcasters will never go for it. Sure, they're dragging their feet right now with implementing HDTV. But once it is done, they can use their allocated (FREE!) spectrum to simutaneously broadcast -four- seperate programs at once. This new format does not appear to have any such functionality, which spells a huge loss in earnings potential for any station manager.
Also, it's broken. The analog signal portion of the signal will be at an aspect ratio of 16x9 (hence the reference to letterboxed video), which is fine I suppose, except that reruns of I Love Lucy and other ancient (and not so ancient) programs will be letterboxed top, bottom, and sides. Expect a 20" analog TV to look like a ~15-16" (anyone care to do the math and figure it out?) set, with a lumenescent grey border. Or cropped video, top-and-bottom, in order to fill out the sides.
This may make people more interested in an HDTV set (their analog pictures will all shrink), but at the cost of reduced picture quality once they do.
The hardware folks won't like it. They say it'll require a 'small software change' to existing HDTV sets, but Toshiba and Philips read that as 'Christ, now we need to send tens of thousands of service techs out to plug new ROMs into 300-pound TVs.'
Do we really need to stay backward-compatible with a 1950 B&W RCA console, when just like with initial large cable TV systems, and now digital cable, an inexpensive set-top box will do the trick justfine for the naysayers and owners of such antiquated equipment?
Forget for a moment that such a box doesn't yet exist. We've got 5 years to get one there, and at the present rate of advancement of digital technology (particularly in the fields of DSP and codecs), some Korean bastard will have them on shelves for less than $50 well before any broadcaster switches entirely over to HDTV.
--
Adolf Osborne
Where there's a need, there's a greedy Korean with 10,000 small-fingered slaves ready to solder together a solution.
500MHz Pentium III, or similar
520MB Free Hard Disk Space
OpenGL 3D Accelerator
Broadband Internet Access
NOTE: If cable or DSL is not available in your area, Mindfuck Software recommends our partners at Century 21 Realestate and monster.com to aid in your relocation. This may seem harsh, but it really is better for society for you to move away from your almost-paid-for 2-story house on 3 acres of land, and into a 2-bedroom apartment with crackhead neighbors who throw eachother into the wall at odd hours to the incessant beat of stompin'-loud Kid Rock. You won't regret it, and your LPB gaming peers will thank you.
We hope you enjoy the game, and wish you well for your adventures in the ghetto.
Obviously, you've never used a Sunon fan. I got one in the power supply of the XT I purchased in 1987. It has been spinning more-or-less continuously since that time, without episode.
Not all fans are that good. My last (and I do mean -last-) purchase of a pre-made PC included PSU and CPU fans which each died within two months of use.
I have no doubt that a 7-year-old is capable of designing and building a fan which does in fact work. I have a great deal of doubt that such an apparatus would continue to work 14 years later.
There are at least a few things about metallurgy, magnetics, lubrication and airflow which are neither obvious nor easy to understand, but are certainly required for engineering an efficient, well-designed, and long-lasting fan.
Those who believe anything different are those who are entirely responsible for the fact that most fans sold as computer parts today are complete shit.
There -was- an interruption in service. Upon waking last Sunday, I found two of my DirecTV recievers (both Sony SAT-B1) non-functional, with a notice on-screen to contact Customer Service (extension 721, IIRC). While calling did clear the problem up, it was somewhat disconcerting to have the system in such a half-broken state. I pay for TV, like a good boy, but that doesn't seem to matter. Interestingly, the third reciever (a SAT-A1) survived the hit without episode.
Not to sound pragmatic, but with any luck the new 'mp3' format will fizzle and die.
I don't -want- to see hear bad they can make things sound at 64kbps. And further, I don't care about bandwidth or disk usage, even though I'm behind a 28.8 modem.
I -do- want high-quality downloadable (freely or not) music. By high-quality, I mean indistinguishable from a CD to my own ears (LAME at ~220Kbps average VBR does this for me).
Storage is stupid-cheap these days. Bandwidth is slowly spreading out into much more diverse, and usually competitive, markets.
The focus should not be to make the files smaller (Realaudio G2, anyone?), but to make the quality better. The data distribution and storage capabilities of the Internet at large are progessing leaps and bounds ahead of the state of human hearing (which is actually moving BACKWARDS due to higher levels of everyday ambient noise) - once the epitome of perceptually perfect encoding is deemed possible for the masses, I'll settle for smaller files that reach the same end. Until that point is reached: Fuck off, Fraunhoffer.
And, dispite my freedom-esque views on life, I'd like to see high-quality encoding forced forced upon the populace, as the most infuriating members don't seem to mind even 96Kbps joint stereo mp3s either due to the fact that they are deaf, use equipment that is absolute shit, or just have never heard anything better.
It's for their own good, really - most illicit MP3s come from teens-to-20somthings who don't have to the cash to spend on quality (as in, "you can't buy this at Circuit City") audio equipment, but who (given the forward momentum of consumer electronics) will, at some point, be disappointed with the sound quality of the typical 128KBPS MP3 (of which they will have amassed several tens of gigabytes by such a point).
You idiots who bought a Diamond Rio (or similar) with only 64 megs, being pissed that you can only get an hour's worth of still half-assed-sounding music on the device, are no exception. You should have realized that flash memory is hideously expensive -before- you made such a purchase.
Feel free to moderate this down as flamebait. It's not like karma doesn't grow on trees.
Following the philosophy of 'less is more,' those interested in a clean digital output might be interested in the Zoltrix Nightingale. It's a rather inexpensive card ($12) with an RCA coaxial digital output, with an optional optical output board (costs another couple of dollars) - check Pricewatch for availability.
;)
This card is based on the CMI 8738 chip, which is blessedly stupid enough to be absolutely incapable of doing any of the horrid resampling which is irrevocably commonplace on most consumer sound cards (Yamaha XG and SBLive! come to mind as two which resample -everything- to 48KHz).
Good support with OSS/Pay under most/all x86 unices, better support with the 2.4 Linux kernel, and great support with ALSA. There's also OS/2 drivers, though I can't vouch for the quality of them.
The only downside of this wonderously cheap gem is its inability to feed non-44.1/48KHz signals to its digital output, but I don't find that to be any hinderance.
Bonuses include quad analog output for games, the ability to spit AC3 (Dolby Digital) data to the digital output for DVDs, digital pass-through with SCMS stripper for Minidisc freaks, and 24-bit capable digital IO (that's in, and out, both coaxial and optical).
It should be mentioned that Midiman/M-Audio sells a supposedly pro-oriented card (the DiO-2448) using this -same- chip at $149 list, and it doesn't have anywhere near as much I/O flexibility as the Zoltrix does, or any extra hardware to improve the digital IO, though I suspect the analog section to be somewhat better designed [and for this application, who cares - spend the difference on some new music].
[ObOntopic]
I've got one tied in with TOSLINK to an Audio Alchemy DDE v1.1 DAC, which is in turn connected to a Rotel RTC-940 preamp and Ashly FET-1000 poweramp. For some dull-sounding recordings, I'll switch in a BBE 200R to add a bit of sparkle (most newer recordings needn't be fucked with, though).
Speakers are a pair of two-ways and stereo subs (of my own design), which I'd rate as somewhat above Circuit City quality, and somewhat below what your typical audio salon might sell alongside a Krell amp.
The combination of shit sound card and mid-fi DAC sounds a bit better (in terms of transparency, bass, and real detail, but I've got to listen fairly intently to tell) than my Carver TL-3300 CD player, which uses a pair of 18-bit Burr-Brown DACs and isn't any particular slouch in any aspect.
I'd expect similar results (relatively speaking, as with all other things audio) using a reciever with a digital input.
Good luck.
Plastic olycarbonate, the material from which CDs are made, does not darken or yellow.
Further, even if it did, it would do so in a fashion which is consistant across the disc, and would pose no more a problem than it does with binary CD-Rs right now. The different dyes and reflective surfaces of which show great variances in reflectivity and other characteristics between brands, not to mention variances of output power, frequency, divergence, and other thinks laser due to aging and manufacturing tolerance of the laser diode. The reader has some automagic circuitry (think AGC) and error correction to determine which bit is which, and these parts are at play continuously every time you read a CD.
So, even if the disc were soiled sufficiently that subtracting 1 from every 4-bit 'byte' would correct the reading process, this correction would happen automatically, as it is already done with current binary CD players (cheap Aiwa portables and 40x Plextors alike), and I don't suspect that they'll thow it out.
I suspect that the implementation of such a feature would be enourmously difficult, and not for technical reasons, but sociological.
.com suffix be dropped as well.
:// they remember being spoken in radio ads in 1995), let alone something as nonsensical and impronouncible as a Freenet key, is certainly futile, not to mention of limited use for even clued masses.
t al-gee-small-zee-wye-oh-arr-..."
It stands to scrutiny that much of the wired world is quite braindead. The arcanity of entering trailing / (let alone an actual filename) of an HTTP URL has been deemed too intense for the masses. The "http://" prefix is also too complicated.
Nevermind the fact that URLs were supposed to make things easier for the populace to understand. There simply aren't enough protocols in common use for to bother distinguishing which one is wanted. People, even geeks, don't even browse FTP servers much these days, which places the URL one step further toward complete disuse.
People, nowadays, just enter "cnn.com" into the top of the window, if they even know how; I suspect a great many hits to http://cnn.com/ are the results of people entering it into the search box of their respective default page (either MSN or Netcenter).
In any case, that HTTP is wanted is assumed by the browser software, while the trailing slash is filled in by the web server. And the entered text, "cnn.com", is mostly understandable to most drones, though the majority would probably prefer that the
In this state of affairs, expecting the general populace to be able to handle a new protocol (and the dread
"Ok. That program I was talking about is at eff-nee-ee-tee-colon-slash-slash-eff-cee-pee-capi
Yeah, right.
From what I've been able to see so far, this -is- an attempt to make Linux better.
Remember, Linux is just a kernel. No more, no less. It's all the GNU, X and other tools that make the UNIX-like userland experience what it is, and they can all pretty much run just as well with other kernels.
There is life beyond 1972-vintage UNIX (I hope).
As I read this article (at +2, no parent -- seems reasonable in most discussions), I'm distraught by the number of posts being displayed by Bruce Perens. Sure, he's (appearently) a smart guy who knows at least enough about the subject to author the article, but why are 10 out of 22 >+2 posts from him?
Counting the article itself as 1, that's -half- of the displayed posts, which is just silly.
Either the moderators are favoring Bruce's commentary (which is typically useful, informative, and insightful -- though not without context), or Bruce is using his +1 bonus on every post (which is -not- needed on a three-line message, no matter what it contains).
As it is, some of Bruce's replies are without displayed parent posts, and in (at least) one instance he appears to have replied to himself (which means there's at least two <+2 posts which need attention).
Just a random musing...
Spam is bad, to some people. To some others, it is ok. And still others appreciate it.
Pornography is bad, to some people. To some others, it is ok. And still others appreciate it.
DeCSS is bad, to some people. To some others, it is ok. And still others appreciate it.
We here at slashdot tend to view a given subject only from the perspective which best serves our own interests. We are as selfish, prejudice, maliciously reactionary, and sublimely manipulative as any of the MPAA, the spamware folks, or the extremist portion of the Christian Right.
Rather than attempt to remain reasonable and retain even a hint of impartiality, we react viciously to anything deemed to be infringing upon on our rights, with absolute disregard to the rights of any others who might be in the way.
We do this as we sit high upon our assumed intellectual high horse/flimsy house of cards, shouting banters about freedom, goodness, and The Right Thing To Do; cries which typically fall upon deaf ears.
Witness our views on DeCSS, Censorware, Spamware, MP3 encoders, MP3s themselves, the iOpener, or TiVo's 'exploitation' of the Linux kernel, and try to visualize the other parties' justification (which, in these cases, is -always- legitimate) for whatever it is that they have done to offend the horrid, arrogant, nonsensical beast that is slashdot. In other words, put yourself in their shoes.
Those who are unwilling to do so are simply afraid of finding that said shoe fits their own foot perfectly, and that they'd hence not be able to remove it from their mouth. This is an obviously unacceptable outcome, given the clear superiority of the average slashdot user (let alone the top 5 percent).
With such bigotry abounding en masse, it's no wonder they can't hear us.
Choose your enemies carefully, because that is who you will become. --Lao Tzu
I'm the proud keeper of a Figure 8 pufferfish (Tetraodon biocellatus) and can testify that it does seem awfully human. It eats at inconvenient times, and is quite particular about what it eats. If not fed at the time that it expects to eat, it will throw a tantrum and swim around madly, teeth gnashing at anything that moves (including its reflection) until it finally calms down enough to recognize that, yes, there is food to be found. After eating a bit, it calms down markedly.
It is also rather hard-set into its sleeping patterns. Should the light be on when it is normally dark, it will be awake and very cranky, sometimes including a tantrum of the aforementioned sort, or it may just sit on the substrate and sulk until the light goes away.
It is wasteful. It understands that food is not in short supply, and will sometimes play with a bit for several minutes before spitting it out, swimming under a rock, and pouting.
All in all, the fish reminds me a great deal of my 2-month-old daughter, except that she isn't quite as mobile (nor anywhere near as old).
[ Note: this particular fish is not Fugu ocellatus and therefore may be of sufficiently different genetic makeup that it is not applicable to this discussion. However, this other link suggests that in terms of sushi, Fugu refers to anything from the pufferfish family. ]
What happens when your power goes out? [...]
When the power goes out for longer than the UPS can stay up (45 minutes), another box handles incoming mail. This box is some distance away (~35 miles), and has completely different (not just seperate) connectivity. This is stupid-easy to do, given multiple hosts and access to your own DNS records. Additionally, many people are willing to trade secondary MX entries for mutual benefit in the event of a failure of some sort at either end.
When a hard drive crashes, a DAT backup will restore the system.
When a building burns down, the tape that was thoughtfully stored off-site weekly is brought in. Note, that if your HOUSE burns down, email will be the least of your concerns.
When the backup machine goes up in flames at the same time as the primary, I'll have to punt, which is fine - how many layers of redundancy might a "large national ISP" have, anyway?
Machines break. All you can do is slap another diverse failover system in, and hope that it doesn't break at the same time the primary system does.
It is worth mentioning that the "butt-cheap" $109 Midiman DIO2448 card uses the exact same monolithic chipset as the dirt-cheap $20 Zoltrix cards being sold by the neighborhood discount whore. The $209 2496 card is also based around the same chip, but adds couple of presumably decent Crystal DACs which are probably good enough on their own for non-critical listening.
:)
:-/
I have no doubt that the Midiman's analog signal path is much cleaner than that of the Zoltrix. However, those who are just looking for an SP/DIF output are probably better off with the Zoltrix card, while putting the ~$90(!) difference toward, say, a Midiman external DAC (all of which are excellent).
No word yet as to how well the digital output on the Zoltrix card works with OSS, specifically, but the same can be said of the Midiman variant. Should be about the same, though, given that there's only really one chip on either board.
Personally, I just want support for the Lexicon core2. 4 in/8 out+8 channels of ADAT IO+SP/DIF, all at once, and at 48KHz, 24-bit. I use one for mixdowns with an ADAT in the studio and have yet to be disappointed with it. Sadly, I'm forced to do this under Windows.
I use mpg123 0.59r to play VBR MP3s all the time. The only difficulty comes from some that I've created using LAME with tweaked-out options, which generates 'free-form' MP3 that mpg123 chokes on.
The CVS version supposedly fixes this, but I've not tried it.
Warning: This post may (at the present time, or some future point) voilate the DMCA.
It's easy to record SDMI-protected music, even with 'digital' speakers that use bullet-proof encryption, and tamper-resistant enclosures.
All speakers, even 'digital' ones, at some point produce an analog signal.
All speakers of the dynamic type (read: cheap, common) have fly leads heading to the voice coil, which sit directly beneath the cone, that carry this analog signal.
Tools required:
1 beer, any size
1 printed copy of the SDMI spec
1 printed copy of the DMCA
1 drill
1 large drill bit
1 sharp knife
2 alligator clip-equipped wires, per speaker
1 suitable connector, per speaker
Optional: Variable potentiometer, and/or large-value resistor
Instructions:
Determine where the driver/cone (whichever you want to call it) is located inside the speaker enclosure. Drill through speaker grill in the approximate center of te driver. Having done this, the dustcap of the driver should be visible, and perhaps the fly leads as well.
If you can see the end of the fly leads (they look like two small bumps, encased in goop), skip this paragraph. Else, cut away the dustcap using your knife to expose the flyleads.
Now, also using the knife, scrape off the glue which entombs the fly lead ends until you find substantial bare metal.
Attach one alligator-equipped wire to each lead. Consider one lead to be positive, the other negative (it is beyond the scope of this document to describe methods for determine which is which), and connect (via the suitable connector) to the desired non-SDMI-compliant audio recording device's analog input. Optionally, use a resistor or potentiometer in series with this circuit for level control.
Push play and record at the same time, and have a beer while the song transfers.
When done transferring, use the consumed beer to piss all over the printed SDMI and DMCA papers.
I'm somewhat fuzzy with the the notion of true random numbers, so this may be wildly inaccurate.
That said, it occurs to me that the largest problem with finding a random number of a given size is finding a source of randomness to extrapolate from.
Why spend $100 (or hours/days of design and construction) on a device that generates chaos, when almost everyone reading this already has the required hardware: a sound card.
Simply play some music/radio broadcast/radio noise into your sound card's input, and sample it. Give the resultant bitstram a few twists (based on other, random samplings), and the end result should be genuinely random numbers of arbitrary size, for zero cost.
If there's holes in this idea, I'd be interested to know about them. Failing that, I dare someone to code it.
[And before anyone says "Music is not random," I challenge them first to find anything of harmonic or even sinusoidal nature in Ministry's album, Filth Pig.]
I like this 2- 4- 6-head paradigm espoused above. It's simple, concise, and understandable by mere mortals.
'Tis a shame that it's fundamentally incorrect -- at least, as far as NTSC goes. (PAL should be much the same on the VHS front.)
2-head VCRs are optimized for high-speed playback and recording - that is, two hours of video on a two hour ("T-120") tape. I don't recall why two heads are used - perhaps one for playback, and another for record, or to put luminance and chroma on seperate parts of the tape. Whatever the case, 2-head VHS looks as good with SP mode as anything else.
A fairly recent (say, less than 15 years old) 2-head VHS deck *can* record/play in other modes, but shoddily. The reason is that the heads in all VHS decks are spinning at high speed, while the tape moves at a relatively slow speed. Unlike analog audio cassettes (which use fixed heads), VHS uses a (helical scan?) spinning head, operating diagonally to the medium, in order to achieve the bandwidth required for video signals.
Obviously, you want to use as much of the magnetic media as possible, so the width of these diagonal scans is rather important. If you slow the tape down (say, because you want to get all of Titanic on one tape), they'll get closer together, and perhaps interact with eachother, causing obvious visual distortion that we all immediately identify with as a "shitty VCR." This is why nobody seems to like 2-head VCRs - not because their purchased video library (which is all produced in SP/2-hour mode) looks bad (indeed, it's just as good as a four-head deck, all else being the same), but because the stuff they tape themselves/"borrow" from friends is not quite up-to-par. (Side note: Ever notice that your 2-head VHS[C] camcorder only works at high speed? Ever wonder why?)
4-head VHS VCRs were introduced to allow people to record six hours of video on a T-120 tape, and do so with markedely higher quality. That's all, no mystery and no magic. Only pair of heads are ever used at once - those which are appropriate for the selected speed.
Playback/record quality of 6-hour tapes will be better on a 4-head deck, as opposed to one with 2 heads. Playback/record of 2-hour tapes will be identical between 2- and 4-head units (assuming the associated electronics are up to snuff).
6-head VCRs? Feh. Sounds more like a marketing ploy by JVC than anything else, unless it optimizes things for half (as well as 1/3 and full) speed tape travel. Or, I might be a bit behind the times, but this is all *really* old technology.
Of course, all of this negativity begs the question: What is "VHS Quality"? The answer is clear. If the end result looks like something that would make even a 1970s videophile grimmace and vomit repeatedly when compared to Beta, it's probably bad enough to be considered VHS quality.
Is that retort rather too subjective for the question at hand? Probably. But, the phrase "VHS quality" in reference to anything digital is highly subjective as well.
From the objective standpoint, consumer-grade digital video stuff tends to have nasty encoding artifacts of all kinds, including the holy grail of DVD. These artifacts are of such dramatically different nature from those introduced by VHS as to render *any* comparison completely invalid.
I haven't roofed a cubicle (and have never had the pleasure of living in one), but JWZ has. Remember about fire safety, particularly with the use of incandescent lighting. I'd think that having burning bits of cloth raining from above would be a rather unpleasant experience.
Once upon a time, I had ISDN and was more-or-less happy with it. The telco got the line in fairly quickly, and also waived the installation charge as part of some promotion. It was reliable, it had low latency, and file transfers happened quickly enough not to piss me off. If ISDN is possible where you are, give it a shot.
:P
When moving from that somewhat-industrious area to a 2-acre plot in the middle of a corn field, I asked the new phone company for ISDN, and they laughed at me. I then asked for four POTS lines, and they scratched their heads, referred to their books (yes, real dead trees), referred to eachother, and decided that it was possible.
Using MLPPP and three 28.8 modems (along with three of those POTS lines and three dialins at my ISP), I'm able to pull down ~6.5-7k/second. It's not awesomely fast, or cheap, but it works.
Any ISP which can provide 128k or 112k ISDN access (which most 56k providers can, whether they admit it or not) supports MLPPP.
Software for the other end of the wire(s) is readily available. Windows 98 does it out-of-box, it is integral to the 2.4 Linux kernel, and it is also available in FreeBSD's userland PPP driver.
Myself, I'm using mpd (from the ports collection) in conjunction with natd under FreeBSD. This allows me to have one always-on link, while the other two dial on demand in response to bandwidth requirements. AFAIK, this is the only freely-available way to accomplish the dial-on-demand bit.
When it works (which it usually does, but nowhere near as consistantly as ISDN with a dedicated router), it works well.
Additionally, in some areas, one-way cable modem access is available cheap, over microwave cable networks such as WatchTV. One such provider, at http://www.im3.com, offers 128-768Kbps downstreams for $40-70/month - including the equipment. (and, in checking this, it seems that they've just crept a little closer to serving my area - not that I'm holding my breathe.)
There remain unanswered issues about such services, in that they only claim to support Windows 9x and MacOS, and details of the actual hardware and protocols used are lacking (at best).
Yet-another alternative: a friend of mine at my ISP (you didn't think I *paid* for those three logins, did you?) has just completed training on Breezecom's 802.11 wireless ethernet stuffs. According to him, speeds of 3Mbps are possible at distances of up to 25 miles, given the right antennae and a line-of-sight.
Find a *nix-using friend with cable in the nearest city, and offer to pay part of the cable bill in exchange for a tower in his back yard (or a pole on the house) and a chunk of his (or hers! the mind boggles) bandwidth, and you're all set.
Or, haggle with a small, local ISP over pricing for such a service. You'd be amazed at how the little jobs operate, if you've never had a peek inside. They've got the bandwidth, and they're flexible enough to let things like this happen without huge amounts of money changing hands.
There's plenty of options for consumer-grade bandwidth in rural areas, it's just that most of them are neither cheap, nor easy.
[ In a somewhat-offtopic note, I was once involved in a project to share a T1 with a tiny ISP down the block from where I was working at the time. It involved asking the landowners in between for permission to string a wire, drilling a couple of holes in some masonry, and hanging Cat5 above a parking lot. It worked well, and was highly cost-effective ($20 in networking stuff, plus $40/mo) until (sadly) a lightning hit destroyed both the remote ISP, most of another ISP which had since moved into our building (which we were also leeching from), a good portion of a high-end audio shop (us), while the MOVs inside the APC Surgearrests at either end of the wire simply exploded. Needless to say, that link isn't in operation anymore, but it was fun while it lasted (note to self: next time, bury the cable). ]
(Score:-1, OffTopic)
Sorry, but AOL CDs won't damage speakers. Or phones. Or anything else (except the minds of youth everywhere).
There's nothing particularly damaging about an ISO-9660 CD, except for the fact that they tend to generate high-frequency audio when treated as Red Book.
These high-frequency noises will tend to be quite loud, but no louder than the maximum level of a normal CD. They will be routed (by way of the crossover) to your tweeters.
The only problem here is that most tweeters can only dissipate a few (less than 10) Watts of energy -- but most will safely handle 1 Watt, all day. How loud is a single Watt?
If we assume the speakers in question have a sensetivity of 88dB @ 1 Watt, 1 meter from the radiating surface (a fairly common median spec, for home audio), and that you've got two of them (stereo), we're up to 91dB at 1 meter of distance from the speakers.
Now, sound at STP in an anechoic free-field enviroment is absorbed and diffused by air at the rate of 6dB for every doubling of distance.
But, standard homes aren't anechoic - the reverberations will tend to reinforce the original waveform, so the transmission loss will not quite be 6dB.
So, if you're six feet away, you'll be hearing AOL 5.0 at at *least* 85dB -- which most people would consider quite loud enough to turn down immediately (even to the point of tripping over the desk in an attempt to get to the volume knob), given the nature of the noise and the human ear's increased high-frequency sensitivity.
At the same time, this brief stint of horribly loud AOL 5.0 being played through your speakers will be at the reasonably safe level of 1 Watt.
Even if we assume that the volume knob is initially turned up to a point at which more than 1 Watt is generated, it wouldn't much matter. We, as humans, tend to have fairly fast reflexes (and tend to get faster as percieved amplitude of sudden sound increases), you'll get off your ass turn it down long before anything bad happens to your speakers.
Incidentally, those loudspeakers which operate full range (ie, without a tweeter, such as about all Bose ilk) will be largely absolutely immune to things like this.
And, at any rate, most CD players simply mute the output when asked to play a data track. I have the (perhaps unfortunate) privelege of owning one that doesn't, but it predates CD-ROM.
The first premise thus disproven, I shall henceforth move on:
The digital switches that just about all telephone companies use these days (and certainly all of the telemarketers) will filter sounds not within the 300-3,000Hz POTS standard. There are further (hardware-based) limitations on minimum and maximum amplitude.
So, a good chunk of that lovely high-freq AOL 5.0 will be thrown out, and there are hard liminitations on just how loud the final signal can be. I don't have precise numbers, as I'm not a telco person (and I don't want to be one), but I'd say that it's a safe assumption that reaching any of these limits will not harm any telephone equipment, as these limitations are reached regularly even in normal speech.
End result? You, shouting over the phone, will cause as much damage (ie, none) to the telemarker's equipment as AOL 5.0, and will probably be much more effective at souring the poor glutton's mood.
So, just yell at them. Call them names. Make fun of their mother. Just don't threaten them, and legally, all's well. If enough people did this, they'll quit their job for something less tiring.
And if enough of them quit, labor prices for telemarketers will go up to the point that it would no longer be a profitable enterprise, and the responsible companies would be forced onto some new frontier such as spam and/or chapter 11.
'Tis a shame that class action never works.
All of the corn in the US will only provide enough ethanol for 4% of the gasoline demand?
I guess the stickers on the gas pumps in Ohio are wrong then - they say that the gas is 10% ethanol.
IIRC, similar requirements exist in most other 'corn belt' states.
I somehow doubt that such a significant percentage (I might guess 25%) of the corn crop will go up in flames as people drive their beloved SUVs.
Here's how it worked, roughly, and from memory of many years ago [before I turned into a stereotypical unix geek, and everything was still somewhat mystical to me]:
In everyone's home directory were a variety of .snapshot-* directories, which automagically stored archives of various timespans of files which had been deleted or modified. IIRC (once again, it's been awhile), these archives were on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. So, if your .newsrc were to get hosed, you could just go back a day and retreive it. Or, suppose an untested change to your procmail configs starts sending everything to /dev/null, and you don't notice for several days because you don't get much mail - just go back a week and snag the old, working copy. Only changed/deleted files showed up in the snapshot directories, so it was fairly space-efficient.
The system seemed to work pretty well, though I only made use of it a few times. I've got no idea if this is a standard NetApps-specific thing, or supplied by some third-party daemon, and I've certainly never noticed anything of this sort for Linux or the BSDs.
If anyone has any specifics about this sort of thing, I'd love to see them.
[Ob-OnTopic: Since this already exists, Dumpster and Landfill icons already have the needed back-end support, though possibly only on a very sheltered platform...]
This is what Multilink PPP is for. Instead of having a mess of redundant links, with some hideously complex routing daemon to sort through the wreckage, you get a mess of redundant links all acting as one.
This is fairly standard stuff, and is supported by any ISP who is able to provide 128k (dual-channel) ISDN access (which the includes the vast majority of all providers, whether they admit it, or not).
Using MPPP, latency actually goes *down*. Instead of sending a 1500 byte packet, and having to wait for the entire thing to be sent in a serial fashion (one byte at a time), it gets split up into much smaller packets which are each sent in parallel. So, if you've got two active links running at the same speed, each one will transfer 750 bytes of that 1500 byte packet. With four links up, that drops to 375, and so on.
This packet-splitting happens with anything that IP can encapsulate (or, I suppose, anything that PPP can), and so would work fine for online games.
That said, latency would perhaps still be too high - transmission delays, telco delays, and such - but that's because of the physical medium (a cell phone and the requisite network), *not* the increasingly-efficient network stack.
A woofer is more massive than a tweeter, obviously. However, it does not take any longer to "react" to signal changes, at appropriate frequencies than a tweeter does at appropriate frequencies.
The "it has more mass, thus it must be slower" comparison is not the same for an oscillating body as it is for, say, an empty pickup truck vs. the same truck loaded with stone. Remember, the woofer is moving back and forth up to a few thousand times a second. The higher in frequency it is asked to do this, the more quickly it must accelerate. At some point, a woofer does become inefficient at producing higher frequencies, and that is when the crossover and purpose-designed tweeter come into play.
So, a woofer is "slower" than a tweeter, in part because it has more mass. This "slowness" turns up in the frequency domain as high-end rolloff - not in the time domain as a delay.
The only reason for sloped/stepped cabinet fronts is that the voice coil of a woofer is (typically) recessed to a much greater extent than that of a tweeter, and thus the originating point of low-frequency sound is further away from one's ears. You've probably noticed that most speakers (even those of exceptionally high quality) do not utilize this "time-alignment" scheme. I could venture some theories as to why this is the case, but it is most assuredly not because the cabinetry would be expensive. (If in doubt, head down to your neighborhood car audio shop, and gawk at the sheer number of boxes with sloped fronts for very few dollars. You might also ask them for the difference in cost between one with a sloped front, and one without.)