Managing bandwidth is not a bad idea. Bandwidth free-for-alls with no QoS or other means of controlling throughput have the effect of making a connection (be it v.90 or OC-192) increasingly useless as usage increases.
Right now, the answer most people give is to invest in more bandwidth. So, you supplement your existing connection with another one just like it. Problem is, an underutilized (and thus, usable) T1 is, well, underutilized. Upon seeing this newfound wealth of fat-pipedness, you push more through it, the network saturates, and you invest in more bandwidth [rinse, repeat]. This cycle is fine, until one reaches the point that additional bandwidth is not affordable, or is simply unavailable (the entire population of the world does not reside in San Jose). So, the present situation is that eventually most organizations will run out of bandwidth and not be able to aquire more. They're left with three options: Live with saturated, almost unusable links, start murdering TCP connections that appear of a shady or gluttonous nature, or accept that the line is saturated and take appropriate measures to make it at least feel speedy (which is quite enough for most instances).
There's no reason why a saturated T1 needs to be unusable. Folks run rc5des and seti@home, 24/7 with no percieved sluggishness from their system, yet these programs occupy every spare clock cycle they can grab. If the same ideology as nice(1) were applied to a network connection, nobody would have anything to worry about in terms of bandwidth.
Suppose you've got a network - it doesn't matter how fast it is. You've got people using it - it doesn't matter how many. They're doing one of four things with it, and it doesn't matter how much of any of them that they do.
These four things can be surmised as follows, in order of decreasing priority:
Nothing. This is what most computers do, most of the time, and the same applies to bandwidth usage. Nothing gets the best priority, because it's the least expensive.
Telnet and other protocols/things which require low latency, but not a lot of bandwidth. HTTP GETs would perhaps fall into this category, for instance.
Games and streaming media which require low latency and a fair amount of bandwidth. Quake, Realaudio, et all. It'd be nice from the PHB standpoint to say that Halflife and Art Bell are not important, but they're a decisive part of what the Internet/is/ for a large percentage of the wired community, and they're (for the most part) simply unusable without two scoops of bandwidth and a low-latency connection.
HTTP/FTP/NNTP/Napster/GnuTella/other bandwidth-mongers. Some may argue that HTTP needs to be of relatively high priority, but that's just not the case when there's legitimate companies delivering files of tens of megabytes in size using the protocol. Or, suppose HTTP is given higher priority than FTP; FTP will slowly be displaced by HTTP to an even greater extent than it already has, and so any such change will be self-defeating. Further, all of these should be of lower priority than streaming media, because you can still *accomplish* web browsing on an overladden link, which is not the case with Realaudio.
It could be argued that there should be a fifth layer of stuff, for Napster, Gnutella, et all, but I'm not sure if that's the case. If Napster packets were dropped to the lowest priority, people would just use FTP (or HTTP) to steal songs instead, and the prioritization would be once again self-defeating. Already, GNUtella gateways exist which will deliver files from the network, directly to your web browser via standard HTTP.
I want bandwidth management for myself. I've got a slow connection at home (2x28.8 modems hung from a FreeBSD box doing multilink PPP), and every fucking file I download hoses everything else that I want to do. If I could just prioritize incoming packets, I'd be more-or-less happy with my slice of bandwidth. I don't care how long a download takes, I care how long it makes my connection useless for telnet, streamed media, Quake and IRC. Folks say IPv6 will fix this, but others seem to be in no hurry to implement it on any scale (and without scale, it's worthless).
Are there any IPv4 packet prioritization programs which work well enough on incoming data that a saturated modem connection will be usable for things other than 8,000-millisecond pings?
Moreover, it sounds like a BBE unit. The folks at Barcus-Berry Electronics have been making magic boxes which claim to replace missing harmonics for years (if not decades). They're everywhere, these days, including inside Sony Wega TVs, and some JVC car stereos (which explains Kenwood's interest).
I actually own one of their older units. It has three buttons, a knob, and a power switch. To use it, you send a signal through it, twist the knob until things sound bright and shiney, and back down a bit. Sound non-technical? It is.
There isn't much to be seen *inside* the box, either. Aside from stuff which is standard fare in just about all audio processing equipment (trim pots, a couple op-amps, power supply, some relays...), there's only two devices which stand out. These are really large-looking devices in a bastardized DIP package, emblazoned with the BBE logo. Just looking at them, they seem to radiate magic.
But this is all off-topic, and pointless unless I give some subjective evaluation of what the magic does for music. So, here goes. The effect on music is that it tends to sound a little livelier. Cymbols tend to have a little more detail, snares tend to jump out a little more. Bass sounds fatter, with more percieved string noise. It seems to have very little effect on a clean electric guitar, but can make a distorted guitar almost overbearing.
The effects are dynamic, and this can be heard when listening to a slightly noisey FM radio station. The noise will tend to breath (get louder/softer, and/or change in character) along with the dynamics of what's going on. This is most noticable (and annoying, once it is noticed) on spoken word.
That all said, I use it somewhat frequently. I've got a number of recordings which seem to lack life, and the BBE seems to provide some (even if it's a creative, or even destructive, process instead of restorative). It also does a bang-up job of fixing vocals that are turned to mud by a poor PA system, in a live enviroment, and has some usefulness in the studio.
I tend not to use it on MP3s that are heavily artifacted, as it just tends to enhance the artifacts more than the missing high-frequency components.
Given the apparent lack of details about the Kenwood Supreme Drive thing, one can only be lead to assume that they use a similar process to the BBE to "restore" (ie, create) lost harmonic information. If so, it'll be a useful thing. But, it will not be all things to all people, and no signal processor (no matter how many buzzwords you associate it with) will ever be.
(as an aside: Most FM radio stations process everything until it's just gelatinous muck, lacking absolutely any dynamic content, and with the spectral content smoothed out so that no song sounds and better or worse than any other - instead, they all sound bad. The MBAs who play general manager say it's good thing, because a) it makes their signal as loud as (or louder than) the competitor across town and b) they think the consistantly-mediocre quality will entice listeners to stick around longer than they would if they could hear the true nature of a recording. Frankly, it just makes me flip the dial to NPR or one of the local college stations, as they suffer from none of the hideous all-things-to-all-people processing that the 50,000-Watt buggers do. It's unfortunate that people feel the need to have "digital" radio, when standard analog FM could sound almost perfect (and certainly better than MP3) if they'd just stop fucking with it.).
Instagone, or almost any other dollar store miracle cleaner will remove tobacco residue (which is mostly tar, not nicotine).
Windex does OK, but not great.
Only problem is that some of the residue will remain in tiny little pores in the plastic, and any attempts to remove the final yellow sheen it provides will be futile without the use of abrasives.
Alas, this problem may not even be tobacco-related, as it affects things even in strictly non-smoking enviroments. (Ever see an Apple II in a school? Ever note the color? It didn't come out of the box that way...)
Some time ago, I had in-house an ATX machine that I was preparing to be a Linux-based web-serving box for a local ISP.
It was a reasonablely tame machine. Pentium II 266 or thereabouts, some sort of fast Seagate SCSI drive (just one), and a PCI ethernet controller.
I left it in the soft-off state overnight. The next morning, my girlfriend woke me up, saying "Hey, your computer is on fire."
Seems that some motherboard/power supply/accessory combinations either lack sufficient cooling or draw too much power while suspended for it to be done safely.
So, the moral of this story is to turn *off* ATX computers, or leave them on all the time. This means hitting the rear-panel power switch, unplugging it, or otherwise physically removing all power from it. The front panel switch does *not* do this -- sure, the fans and disks all spin down, but the machine can (and does) still draw current in that zero-cooling enviroment.
I was lucky in that the power supply was the only component release its magic smoke, and not the entire house.
iMacs run hot, just as TVs run hot, monitors run hot, and most other vacuum tubes run hot. This says nothing about how warm the computer itself (which is placed below the CRT inside the box) runs. Gravity being what it is, heat rises and creates convection currents, and (in the case of an iMac) the chimney effect. Cool air comes in the bottom, warm/hot air exits the top. Just like it might if there were a fan in place, without a fan.
Incidentally, this is also a main reason why the primary cooling fan in a vertically-inclined computer exhausts air from near the top of the case, while cool air enters at the bottom (certain ATX 1.0-compliant power supplies excepted, due to stupidity on intel's part).
That all said, I'll attempt to identify some potential trouble-spots and some possible solutions for them:
The computer, as a whole. Heat reduction, damping and isolation are key (in that order).
Reduce heat by taking out everything that makes heat that you can get by without, and reduce cooling capacity accordingly.
To isolate it, move the box far away, and/or put obstacles between it and you. The Other Side of the Desk is a good option, or in a closet if permissable. The only reason you might need to fiddle with it with any frequency these days is to access the CD-ROM drive, and probably only then if you're a gamer, or you listen to audio CDs with the computer. If the latter, simply plonk out $50 (or less) on a cheap portable player and a patch cord from Radio Shack, and you'll probably enjoy superior sound at the same time. If you're a gamer, learn to deal with it, or crack your software to not require CDs to play, or invest in a multi-disc changer (which is handy, anyhow).
For damping, use Dynamat, which is an asphalt-based adhesive-backed compound which seeks to add non-resonant mass in quantities suitable for sound deadening purposes on light-guage sheet metal. Typically, it comes in a roll, sold by the square foot, and appplication is just peel-and-stick. It's a little pricey for what it is, and there are knock-off brands which probably work just as well for less money. It's important to note, however, that the adhesives used in Dynamat don't degrade with heat, and will probably stay attached until well after you're dead and buried, which is good. Buy it at your local car audio shop (don't worry, they all know what it is) or online at Crutchfield or Parts Express.
The purpose of this is to keep sound inside the computer, inside the computer, and/or kill it as it tries to leave, by making the large, expansive steel panels that comprise the cover of a computer much less prone to resonance. (Note to the more hardcore hardware hacks: This will require that you find, and replace, the top cover for your case.) Carpet pad, or wool carpet, or open-cell foam, or accoustic tiles, or anything else of that variety will not have an appeciable effect. These products all have their place, which is typically to provide a cushy surface to walk on, or a good accoustic enviroment - not sound isolation (the two are mutually exclusive). If your computer has its back to the wall, you might try placing some Sonex or Studiofoam on said wall to absorb some of the sonic reflection, but don't count on it being any tremendous benefit unless you've already done something about the sound travelling through the sides of the case.
Enclosing the case is probably not an option, though some here have suggested it. In enclosing it, you'll be eliminating your access to it. And also eliminating any external airflow. Add airflow, and you either a) create a path for internal noise to get out, or b) adding additional noise by throwing even more fans at it.
CD-ROM drives. The cheaper, the noisier (or so it seems). A LiteOn 32x ATAPI I have sounds like a jet turbine; in contrast, a 32x Plextor is more-or-less silent (but the newer 40x models seem to be louder). Solution: Buy a CD-ROM drive based on noise output, instead of data output and price. (Note that this will involve leaving the house, and possibly being social.)
Hard drives. Sure, you can put them in a Quietdrive box, which is just sorbothane (or neoprene) rubber, wrapped in open-cell foam and shoved into a plastic box with zero airflow, and they'll be quiet (and hot, dispite the marketing department's claims otherwise). In this case, however, more traditional methods may be best: Move the drives further away from your ears, and you'll hear them less. Use LVD SCSI, if needed for distance (and enjoy a performance boost, to boot). Else, you can try applying Dynamat to the surfaces that the drives mount to, trimming around all the holes. Do *not* put Dynamat or any other poor thermal conductor directly on a hard drive (even substances with "good" thermal transmission characteristics may block breather holes on the top of the drive, which is a no-no). Or, try to find a quiet hard drive. Not that this is any easy task. I used to think that IBM's 9ES series of 7200RPM drives were quiet, until I recently bought and installed a more recent revision and noticed that it was no longer the case (that installation, sadly, was in a recording studio). On the other hand, they're particularly cool-running drives, which alleviates some cooling needs. One other possibility is that Quantum (IIRC) claims to have a line of quiet IDE drives.
But, take all noise ratings with a grain or salt (or 20). They're usually expressed in terms of dBA, which is fine. However, they disclose zero details as to the measurement enviroment, distance from the measuring device, mounting to resonant surfaces (such as a computer's case), or any other factors which will have tremendous impact on such figures. If you want to get particularly anal about it, go to Radio Shack and get an SPL meter. The analog version goes on sale twice a year for something like $30. It will tell you exactly how loud something is at a given point. So, establish your a test procedure, and begin measurement. (If this seems like a silly thing to do, you're right.)
CPU fan. Personally, I don't see the big deal here, as long as you use your ears when selecting one (or trust the marketing folks). PC Power and Cooling is well known for their quiet, long-lasting, and effective fans. Alternatively, I've got a Cooler Master on a K6-2 which does the trick, making negligable noise. In contrast, a Global Win fan that lives on another K6-2 here out-whines the cheap Japanese hard drive, the LiteOn CD-ROM, Mitsumi CD-R, and ball-bearing power supply fan combined. Luckily, the DFI motherboard offers some sort of fan-control that speeds up the fan (in Windows) when there's significant CPU activity and slows down when there's not, but it still screeches like a banshee even when kicked down to low idle.
Rule of thumb seems to be that the bigger the heatsink, the higher the output of the fan which is attached to it. It doesn't need to be that way, but it is (*sigh*). In truth, the larger, or more dissipative the heatsink, the less air you need to have flowing over it. And, after you hit a certain point on size, you need no fan at all. CPUs these days can run *hot*, all day, every day, and continue to run at peak (rated) performance. You probably will need a fan if you're overclocking, but that's the price you pay.
In a normal system, the only things left are the one or two fans left on the case. If you have two of them, try disabling one. It costs nothing and doesn't hurt to try. Feel the top of the case periodically, both before and after the change, to get a rough idea of how it affects the internal temperature and plug it back in if you deem it too hot. If you need something even quieter, or require more than one fan for proper cooling, you can buy lower-output fans from Mouser Electronics, or a silent (but fan-cooled) power supply from PC Power and Cooling.
This can't work. Existing utilities to convert PS to HTML are text-only. That is, ASCII text, not graphical representations of text. And even if it did work, it would be a horrendous bother, with manual cutting and pasting of images. But I digress...
Feeding such a program a Postscript file which contains nothing other than an image will not produce the desired output (if any output at all).
It doesn't matter how many times you convert from one overlapping format to another; OCR systems don't just materialize out of the ether, someone has to write them. And so far, those who have done so don't see the need to give them away.
The author of the linked article is obviously inadept at grasping the reality of what he was witnessing.
The 802.11 cards and Siemens phone system are frequency-hopping. By switching frequencies often, they reduce overall interference at the expense of a little bandwidth (there's plenty of room at 2.4GHz for these things to co-exist). Some types of frequency-hopping "spread spectrum" devices will dynamically learn trouble-spots and avoid them, bringing bandwidth back up to a point approaching ideal (unless that entire block of spectrum is completely hosed).
So, the phone system and wirelss LAN should work fine together. There will be a slight (measurable, but imperceptable) decrease in bandwidth for the LAN while phones are in use. The phones, if they're poorly designed and/or the CODEC is intolerant of errors, may suffer an occasional (and very brief) dropouts; due to the real-time streamed nature of the device, retransmissions aren't possible as they are with 802.11. I don't suspect these dropouts would be overly bothersome, or even noticable in most instances.
Interestingly, the X10 video-sender box was the last thing he threw away. Oddly enough, that's the device which should have gone away *first*. It's cheap - too cheap to use any of the present-day bandwidth-reducing digital coolness of most other 2.4GHz devices. So, it spews forth broadband analog video - likely using *more* bandwidth than a TV station to avoid expensive modulation/demodulation parts - destroying the 2.4GHz for the rest of the household toys. Remember the remark above about the spectrum being completely hosed? This is probably a better example of an RF monster than anything else available to a consumer today.
Had he turned off the bargain-bin X10 stuff first, I strongly suspect he would have had no further difficulty (and would continue to enjoy the hideously-cool phone system).
That all said, I really don't see the need for moving to 2.4GHZ for *everything*. It offers more bandwidth for a given slice of spectrum, which is nice - and really not needed for things like telephones. I prefer to get my cancer from tobacco, standing too close to the microwave, and hanging out by 600,000 volt transmission lines - not talking on the phone.
Alternatively, there's a program called mpd which does the multilink PPP thing fairly well, along with demand-dialing of links. It can be found in the FreeBSD ports collection.
I've been using it with a pair of 28.8 modems on a slow 8-meg 486 for a month or so, since I've moved away from civilization (well, close enough - I had 128k ISDN). My only complaint is that the thresholds for bringing up/tearing down connections are somewhat inflexible, and the default modem scripts are the horribly complex, all-things-to-all-people type that even AOL doesn't use.
If rubber bandwidth/line usage is not a concern, the standard userland PPP daemon (ppp) will probably work fine, and much more easily.
For all-in-one hardware solutions, as others have said, DSL modems and a dry pair would probably be optimal.
Or, VersaNet makes a box which contains two or four 56k modems and some routing hardware (http://www.versa-net.com), which also has some niceties like STAC compression that just don't exist in the world of free software. A pair of these, connecting to eachother at 4x33.6k would approach the speed of 2B ISDN, which isn't bad.
3com makes a similar beast as well, but having had insurmountable trouble with their ISDN OfficeConnect product and returning it at a loss, I can't recommend any of 3com/USR's small dialup routers.
I haven't been able to find a well-maintained pinball machine of any variety (let alone a good one) near here for some years.
Recently (a few days ago) I happened across a game called Roll 'Em Up (http://www.medialab.lostboys.nl/rollemup), a single-machine pinball simulator. The physics are a little wacky in places, but it's mildly fun to play. It exists for Windows, BeOS, MacOS, and Linux (all binary).
Anyone know of any other reasonably good pinball games, perhaps with some sort of swank OpenGL hack?
An automatic, thumbnailing Usenet binary decoder. Something that grabs the first x bytes of an image, and produces a thumbnail of x quality.
For wireless access devices without sufficient CPU/RAM to decode the images themselves, as a proxy filter. As the display is of highly limited resolution, it's silly to send huge images across such an expensive link. While it's currently possible (see freshmeat.net) to obtain image downsampling and/or quality reduction in a proxy, it amounts to much wasted bandwidth as bits are literally tossed away at the proxy. JPEG 2000 (that name must die) would alleviate the bandwidth crunch at the head end, by requiring the proxy to only aquire a small portion of the original image to possibly resample and transmit via whatever proprietary means to the wireless web browser.
Stock photography CD-ROMs (and websites) would benefit from the format, as well. Even with really-fast CD-ROM drives, PhotoCDs are expensive (time-wise) to preview and select from. Thumbnails could instead be generated arbitrarily, and on the fly. This also eliminates the tangle of often-nasty software (or inherently inefficient HTML) that often accompanies digital stock photography.
Once in awhile, standards are good. Particularly the openly-adoptable sort. Before GIF, we had PCX, a slew of more-proprietary formats, and very few images being shared. After GIF, anyone could get images from anyone else, and there was much rejoicing (and sending about of pictures and graphs and data and...).
Then, along came JPEG. It took some time to be adopted, namely because of people viewing them with fixed 8-bit palettes under Windows. I recall many a flamewar in the BBS age about this topic. The Windows folk didn't like the way JPEGs looked, all grainy and ugly and, well, dithered. In the other corner, I had a Diamond Speedstar 24x, displaying 24-bit color in cshow under MS-DOS, and there simply was no comparison.
Eventually, mass market display technology grew up a bit, and more people were able to see thousands of colors at once instead of 256. At exactly the same time as this was happening, GIFs began to fall by the wayside, and JPEG grew to become king of the interchange formats.
A couple of years after that, The Powers That Be at Unisys struck down with great fury and vengeance, which more-or-less signed the death certificate for GIFs in common historical usage, though GIF web-button-diddies persist.
At this point, there were two competing formats on the web, both with drastically different claims to fame. GIFs are big, but lossless, transparent, animated, and patented. JPEGs are small and have more colors, but are lossy, opaque, static, and free.
Realizing that something must be done, the Something Must Be Done crowd chimed in and proposed PNG, the bastard sibling of GIF. Alpha channel blending, progressive display, 24-bit lossless color, and patent free. All good, all fine, except nobody cares about lossless compression in web pages (save screenshots, drawings) or porn.
Thus, years later, PNG is 'out there.' It's not in widespread use because the files are too large, and it doesn't offer any compelling improvements in bandwidth- or storage-limited enviroments (and no, the available alpha channel doesn't make up for that in everyday use). Besides, a number of browsers *still in common use* just don't support PNG, and never will. (WebExplorer, anyone?)
Reducing the palette size of a PNG file is silly, too. It amounts to lossy compression of a particularly nasty sort. I don't know about you, but I can *see* the difference between 16- and 24-bit color on most images (web page graphics and other cartoons excluded, of course). A photograph of a sunset should have a smooth gradient from baby blue sky to the angry red of the sun (or whatever colors it is that evening), not something that has defined color regions like a paint-by-number.
Eight years ago, I picked up a SoundBlaster 1.5. Back then, sound files of even the 11KHz mono 8-bit format recorded by the SoundBlaster were considered huge. Creative Lab's answer? The VOC format, which allowed truncation of the files down to 6, 4, or 2 bits per sample. Viola! Small files, and shitty quality.
In another historical (or current, depending on how long you've been around) example, MPEG (and other perceptual) encoding of audio was shown to be dramatically better than truncation. I'll spare the details here since everyone here knows them, but time and time again, perceptual encoding (irrespective of medium or technique) has been shown to be superior to truncation or throwing away of data.
And before anyone says "But, PNG is *dithered* down to a reduced color depth, which makes it OK," I'll have to disagree. Sony has a dithering process by which they record sound at 20 bits per sample, and reduce it to 16 for use in CD players. The remaining 4 bits are dithered into the LSB, which does allow some percieved hearing of sounds below the normal threshhold of a CD. Does this make 20-bit digital audio come out of an off-the-shelf CD player? No. Is it a little better than normal 16-bit PCM? Probably. Is it better than a hypothetical 20-bit MPEG stream at the same bitrate (172kBps)? Fuck no. And in the specific case of dithering a digitized visual image, it is almost always blatantly obvious that dithering has been applied. Have you ever tried to scale a dithered image, or print one using halftones? Ever see what the current crop of so-so monitors does to a dithered image (can we say Moire patterns, boys and girls)? etc. etc.
Simply because JPEG 2000 does all of the things that PNG does, and all of the things JPEG does, does not make it unuseful. It should show to offer substantially improved usability over either format. Whether or not one considers this usability to be important or not is dictated by the limitations of that person's creativity.
Because in the real-world economics of the situation, the sockets to contain said "unused" SIMMs would be more costly than the SIMMs themselves. Rcycling the sockets is probably too costly to be considerered, as well. Why would anyone want to spend many days aquiring the RAM in the first place?
Further, who wants to use mis-matched, questionable SIMMs on a production system of sufficient importance to warrant such an apparatus? One would be foolish to use anything but new, reasonable quality parts.
According to memman.com: Cost of 256 megs of 30-pin 4-meg SIMMs: logic parity: $832 true parity: $1152 (note that this requires 64 units, which is substantial real estate)
For 72-pin SIMMs of 32 megabytes (almost any type): $776 (eight units required, which is do-able space-wise)
And a single 256-meg PC100 DIMM? $244, $283 for parity. (one unit required, which is small enough to not matter)
Say again, which is cheaper?
Personally, I fail to see the importance of products like this, at all. Unlike flash-based systems, RAM is not reliable. It is likely less expensive and dramatically faster to find a fast, expensive motherboard with a sufficient number of DIMM sockets to handle the task at hand, and populate it full. Use a certain large percentage of that RAM as a RAM disk which is restored at every bootup.
Re:Why designed for one platform
on
AtheOS
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· Score: 1
Heh. Well, one must realize that this AtheOS project appears to be in a fairly early stage of development. For example, hard disk access is done with BIOS code.
Claiming that because the first release is Pentium-only means that it is unportable is foolish, at best. Linux, and most (all?) of the free BSDs were also intitially geared toward intel platforms. Things have to start somewhere...
Besides, if you don't like the hardware support, change it around until you do, or organize others to do it for you. Else, find an P5+ box or a different hack of an operating system (there seems to be no shortage of either these days).
Rude or not, anything else is just plain un-American (apologies to the overseas-folk).
Suppose someone wants new clothes; they go to the store, put some on, walk around in them a bit, and perhaps consult with whatever entourage they may have with them. After that, they remove said clothes, whereupon they are either purchased or replaced on the rack.
Perhaps someone is in the market for a new stereo component. They head over to the local audio salon (or Best Buy, or whatever), and once there, they'll listen to a few of them, compare them with others, punch buttons, gaze at the displays, and perhaps buy one (or not). The audio salon may even allow you to take your chosen component home, such that you may see how well it sounds in conjunction with the rest of your equipment.
When I go to buy a car, I walk around it, I kick the tires, peer into the trunk, pop the hood and marvel at the unmaintanability of the engine, sit down in the seat, start it up, and take it for a drive. I may be gone for hours, if I'm feeling discerning or I particularly like the car. When I return, the dealer may offer to lend it overnight.
In the above instances, I'm always given as much oppertunity as I feel I need to make an informed purchasing decision. Same goes for buying a dog. Or an aquarium. Or a house, boat, mattress, carpet, paint, magazine, book, step ladder, air nailer, computer, TV, motorcycle, front end loader, or any number of other real things.
When I'm browsing the selection at the corner music store, I typically have no idea what most of what's there sounds like. Numerous names recognizably stand out, but I typically haven't heard anything that hasn't been played by the local radio stations (all of which are owned by Clear Channel).
Often, I find that the "hits" are not my favorite songs on a given album. Often, there's only one or two songs on a disc which are worth owning (Godsmack comes to mind immediately).
I've never heard any selections of my more-liked CDs being played on-air. Ever. I suppose that somewhere, there's a college station that has played something from Pigface's album Fook, but it wasn't here. Besides, it's on an independant label, with independant distribution, so it is often difficult to come by. How did I discover it? A lengthy thread in alt.music.nin, back in 93 or 94 - several people spoke highly of it, so I took a chance and bought it. I probably would've discovered it *much* more easily, and been *much* more willing to fork out dollar for it had I been able to listen to it first and make an informed decision (I'm not a gambler, and $17 amounts to a large-enough chunk of my day that I prefer not to toss it into the wind to see if it comes back).
Point is, I like mp3. Following the mainstreaming of electronically shared music, every album I've bought without listening to it first would likely be more at home in a blazing inferno than in my CD rack. Further, every album which I've bought after listening to it in its entirety (or at least significant random chunks) in mp3 format has been a keeper. My music-buying habits haven't really increased or decreased overall since the advent of mp3, but they're certainly a lot more reasonable.
And I do believe that this is a primary reason that RIAA is pissed. Suddenly, there have been giant holes beaten into the sides of their marketing machine. It was tired before, but now it belches blue smoke and makes noises like an '87 Yugo. While a number of people here know how to replace it (produce music people actually like, and let the masses sort it out), RIAA is bent on fixing it.
Trouble is, nobody makes parts for it anymore, and even if they did, they all require non-existant proprietary tooling to install. Not only that, but RIAA doesn't know where any of them go. It's such a compounded issue that it would take an act of Congress to restore and preserve its proper working order.
Are there no religions which recognize gods (note the capitalization) of a sexual nature? (And, no, neither Bob nor Ron Jeremy are applicable.)
Or is sex an unnatural act?
Or is there only one "God"?
Not that any of this matters. You seem to be afraid of blasphemy (whatever that means) of some organized sort. It is a statistical certainty that others disagree with your definition of blasphemy, even to the point of deducing you as the blasphemer. Which party is right, and justified in their use of.god, and which party is wrong and unjustified" I always like to think of myself as being correct in every context, too, but whenever I get to feeling that way, some Christian or another comes along and disagrees with me. Feh.
Welcome to the real world, where freedom still reigns and some folks are still able to draw their own conclusions. Even about God (or gods), and where He/She/It/they may shove it (or not). Enjoy it while it lasts, as I assure you that the alternative is markedly inferior.
We need to remember that netpliance probably has a staff with plenty of geeks just like us. They're not corpratist, they not looking to get rich by raping hackers, they're not making toxic chemicals or crack cocaine. They will simply be out of business if they sell $400 boxes for $99.
I agree completely. So, why does Netpliance not sell $400 boxes for the more sane price of $400, contract-free and not filled with epoxy? Or even $500, with a tidy profit?
For the layfolk to whom these are originally intended to be sold, $99 and a service contract of X years would work fine.
Right now, with demand being what it is, I can understand their stance. When supply catches up (and it must, else this all becomes a non-issue), not selling more-expensive multi-use boxen is foolish and laughable.
There exists a prime market for small, low-cost, reliable computers. The I-Opener is solid state, with no moving parts (aside from the easily replaced keyboard).
At a factory near here, they once had text-based terminals running over serial lines to (presumably) some sort of UNIX host, which were scattered about the plant, even on the production floor, for data entry and reporting and whatever else they needed them to do. Recently, the serial lines were replaced with Cat5, and the terminals turned into tiny little WinCE boxes with either bulky CRT monitors or hideously expensive flat panels. The requisite wire-mess doubled from three (keyboard, power, data) to six (keyboard, mouse, video, two for power, and ethernet), bringing with it all the joy of flakiness as the cabling degrades over time.
Given the specific nature of the business (baking cookies), the software is undoubtedly custom, and thus could be built to run on any of the multitudes of real multiuser operating systems existing today, perhaps even on the legacy hardware they already had. X11 would flow over the network instead of whatever bit of proprietarity the WinCE things talk. And at the end of the wire, would be an I-Opener, booting some free (or low-cost), stable operating system (or just a light-weight X server) from flash. Money would be saved, things would work in a stable fashion, and there would be much rejoicing.
I don't see this falling to the same pitfalls as other so-called thin-clients due to the following differences that I percieve. Firstly, it can be inexpensive (traditional thin clients didn't really help out the initital investment cost). It is flexibile (flash). It can run standards-based protocols, such that The Guru In The Back can run the same applications in the same fashion on a desktop PC. Applications run on a central host, rather than at the individual workstations. And finally, it's *plenty* fast enough to display all manner of business graphics, and likely will continue to be until the next big paradigm shift in display technology.
The author of the article to which we're all replying states that if Netpliance were to go this route, they would be eaten by a large company with razor-thin profit margins. However, given the demand for these devices, Netpliance becoming a serious player themselves is almost inevitable.
So, perhaps if they're as smart as they think they are, they should look at a bit of diversification. Adding 10/100 ethernet, socketing the flash, and swapping pins on the IDE header shouldn't take too much time or money to implement, and the rest of the box is already built. They may consider themselves to be a service-oriented company, but the name Netpliance speaks otherwise.
Get the $200 MediaGX box mentioned yesterday, a cheap used VGA monitor from a local shop (or just use the TV it will likely be located near), an ISA NIC and a hard drive (or use the 16meg flash). End result will approach $500, time included (unless you're a consultant), and be infinitely customizable.
Or, buy an I-Opener for $300 (if they ever come to their senses), and add a cheap, small drive to boot from (or again just use the existing flash). Add parallel or USB NIC. Or just run PLIP (cheap).
Or, look around on Ebay for a swank-looking rackmount Pentium-class computer. Add whatever is needed.
I'm not sure how you arrive at your $500 figure for a board and CPU. Last computer show I went to, a vendor was selling bare P100 chips for $20, and chips-on-motherboards for $25. Sure, MicroATX and other small-form motherboards are not cheap, but $480? Please.
The Audiotron *is* pretty, though. And it's fairly small (but I can build one smaller). Convenience? What's convenient about yet-another network interface, *and* a Windows box, just to listen to MP3s? Methinks I'd rather save a few bucks (or spend a few more), and avoid needing to have Windows running whenever I played music in the other room. It will take a little more work to do it myself, but much less so than the otherwise-requisite Redmond timebomb long-term.
b) allowed/allows copying *back* to any computer without generational loss
c) did/does not limit such copying by means of SCMS, like MiniDisc, consumer DAT, DCC, or consumer standalone audio CD recorders as government-mandated on these items
d) did/does not include a tax on the media and/or player, to be collected by the Federal government and handed to RIAA (as all of the aforementioned formats do).
Diamond won that case by persuading a judge to believe that the Rio is solely intended as a playback device, not a digital audio recorder as RIAA would like to have proven.
SCMS exists as a tradeoff between consumers and the hardware folks, and the recording industry. It limits digital copies to the second generation (you can make a copy of an original, but it won't let you copy a copy). It is required by law on digital audio recorders (or at least those that talk SP/DIF, else some other system is required). Anecdotally, if copyright law were worded as to banish all fair-use duplication, SCMS would not be around. Instead, devices with digital IO would not exist today.
And I'm not joking in the slightest. If I'm doing something I believe to be legal and someone has a problem with it, I consider it their responsibility to let me know. Like speeding in a car. When one gets pulled over, discussions ensue. At times, the driver is not aware that he is speeding. I was stopped for going 55mph in a 45 zone, that I honestly thought was 55. The officer was very understanding, and issued a written warning. Guess what? I don't drive 55 through that area any longer, now that I've been made aware of the laws in place by the organization they concern most.
So, allow me to reiterate. I've stated my intent and some past doings in a public forum, which is most assuredly being watched by the powers that be. If RIAA doesn't like my behavior, they should let me know.
I own a rather nice Plextor CD-R, and a similarly nice Plextor CD-ROM. Using cdparanoia and cdrdao (both GPL), I can make as many copies of audio compact discs as I like. These duplicates will have significant error reduction applied to them, and the end result is a very good restoration that surpasses the quality of the original (often scratched) disc.
These copies are legal, bitwise-perfect or not, for my own use (I believe we all agree on this point, RIAA included).
I can also, legally, charge money for such duplication for the benefit of others. Suppose a friend has a disc which skips irrevocably at 5 minutes, 13 seconds. No law says that I cannot copy said disc for said friend, as a service, while charging whatever I like for said service and materials, be it 50 cents to cover my cost on the medium, or $600. Assuming that I report all income to the IRS, and abide by any applicable state/local sales tax laws, and do not retain unlicensed material, I can do whatever I want, including the pasting of paid advertising on the halls leading to the room with the CD-R drive in an attempt to generate cash flow.
Now, suppose someone asks me to dupe a scratched CD that I am already licensed to posess (in other words, I left the house one day, went to the music store, and bought a copy). Said scratched CD is so badly mangled, that even after stepping the Plextor reader down to 1x, cdparanoia can't do a thing for it. I walk across the room, pull my copy off of the shelf, and dupe it. Money changes hands, customer walks away with a perfect reproduction of the disc he once enjoyed, and his original licensed recording.
I did this just the other day, in fact. Some years ago, I bought a CD by a band named Prick after seeing them open for David Bowie (Look! Marketing worked!). A couple months after that, it fell off of the desk, caseless. In looking around to find it, I rolled a chair over it. For some reason, the now-smashed CD didn't play very well. When my girlfriend's birthday came up a week ago, one of the things I got for her was a Prick CD. A few days after that, I borrowed it and made a copy for myself to replace the one that I smashed. Made a nice color label for it, too, scanned from her copy and printed in crayon on an Alps. No animals were harmed in this process, no banks were robbed, the sky didn't turn red and nor did the seas boil. Is RIAA pissed? Interscope/Nothing Records? Is it either unfair or unjust for me to commit this action? I own a license for myself to own and make personal use of not a tangible item, but the music in question. If they disagree with my tactics in data restoration, I implore them to ask/subpeona Rob Malda/Slashdot/Andover/whoever the responsible party is for my email address and contact me. I will interpret any failure to do this as implied permission to continue.
[Careful readers will note that this practise deals neither with the Internet, nor distribution. I should point out that, as noted in an above post, RIAA vs. MP3.com doesn't, either.]
Yes. Let Malda and the rest of what is Slashdot expand the breadth to be inclusive of all things general and bland. Let it be lacking in direction, and focused on nothing. Let it be just like CNN.
Perhaps that's a little too broad. How about an all-encompasing computer-oriented news page like the almost forgotten c|net?
Er. That's not much better, it seems. What sayeth of something that deals almost entirely with open source-related news? No, wait, you're already here.
Unfortunate though it may (or may not) be, Linux has the most attention these days. Not just in the media, but in the minds of users. You want more BSD news? Submit more of it. Or start getting your fix from a BSD-specific page.
Point is, if you don't like Slashdot, try to change it. If you can't change it, find somewhere else. If you can't find somewhere else, grab the code and create something more to your liking. If you can't do that, hire someone who can. If you can't afford to, perhaps your desired news isn't as important to the world as you might think.
As an aside, I really don't see your reason for concern. Slashdot never claimed to be business-oriented. And if there's a real-world computer issue that involves money, there's someone out there attached to it like a leech, sucking it for all the juicy bits it has, and printing them. Try PC Week if you want to see what "real-world" business uses today. Me, I want to know what they'll be using tomorrow.
Actually... All hand-held (digital, analog, whatever) cellular phones are limited (in the US) by the FCC to 600mW of output, due to concerns over the potential for Bad Things to happen when a significant portion of the radiated energy passes directly through the user's head before it goes anywhere useful.
The only way to get around this restriction is to use a genuine wired-in-place car phone, or a somewhat messy contraption which acts as a cradle for a handheld, and includes a 3 Watt amp (which is the maximum legal power).
Besides, power has nothing to do with how good a 'digital' call sounds, but rather the CODECs used, how forgiving they are of errors in the bitstream, and the bitrate at which they operate (which is often dynamically adjusted depending on system load). Take a poor-sounding 600mW phone, and boost it to three Watts. It will continue to sound horrible.
It's a possibility. However, finding a good place to mount a 10" LCD with really narrow viewing angles would at least be less than fun, approaching the point of impossibility.
Better to get drop $20 on a used Pentium board/chip, locate a small amount of RAM, and go from there. Total cost is a little more, but it's much easier to deal with in terms of installation.
Or, did you not notice that the i-opener's flat panel display also houses the guts of the machine? Try to sever the two; I dare you.
...that's why domains are supposed to have working, geographically-diverse secondary and tertiary name servers. Given this, people should never have any real trouble resolving any DNS query for your domain. Thus, MX records can and will work in the context the poster was referring to.
Whoever moderated up the above post should be publicly flogged. That said:
Back in the day, the only readily available digital tape recorder was an old (nowadays) Sony unit that used video tape. The format they chose was 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo linear PCM, because it was convenient. It happened to coincide with the capabilities of the video recorder they built the beast on (head switching, and whatnot), and it didn't sound terrible, on paper or in practice. The Nyquist frequency is 22.05KHz, plenty far above the range of almost any adult's hearing, with dynamic range of 96dB, which is vastly more than is easily discernable above the normal ambient noise of the average household without immediate pain and deafness.
Some time after that, Sony and Philips came up with a grand idea: make shiney discs with digital audio, sell them for twice as much, and make everyone buy new equipment and music to take advantage of it. Make it in such a way that a plant can be converted from pressing vinyl to stamping CDs relatively cheaply so that it's somewhat convenient for them to produce.
Sounds good, right? Sure! But they needed temporary medium on which to master the discs; 600 meg hard drives were scarce. Thus, they decided that the easiest way (for them, and the studios) to do what they wanted was to use the aforementioned Sony deck, which was considered the standard (proprietary) format for digital masters for a number of years.
Besides, even if they did want to, there just wouldn't be room on a CD to put 74 minutes of 24-bit 196KHz audio. The capacity of a CD is limited by the wavelength of the infrared lasers used, the available tracking mechanisms, and size constrants (all of which, again, are based on convenience).
It'd be nice if CDs sounded better, but it's a damned miracle that the format took off at all, let alone as well as it did. And if it were any less convenient to implement, it probably wouldn't have.
So, we're left with an imperfect universal format. Which is OK - if perfectionists were always succesful, we'd all live in a perfect world. Thing is, George Lucas has enough money that he doesn't need to care about whether or not he succeeds, which gives him the benefit of being a perfectionistic prick to the grave, who probably just wants to wait until the HDTV mess is sorted out before he does any new digital releases.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, the answer most people give is to invest in more bandwidth. So, you supplement your existing connection with another one just like it. Problem is, an underutilized (and thus, usable) T1 is, well, underutilized. Upon seeing this newfound wealth of fat-pipedness, you push more through it, the network saturates, and you invest in more bandwidth [rinse, repeat]. This cycle is fine, until one reaches the point that additional bandwidth is not affordable, or is simply unavailable (the entire population of the world does not reside in San Jose). So, the present situation is that eventually most organizations will run out of bandwidth and not be able to aquire more. They're left with three options: Live with saturated, almost unusable links, start murdering TCP connections that appear of a shady or gluttonous nature, or accept that the line is saturated and take appropriate measures to make it at least feel speedy (which is quite enough for most instances).
There's no reason why a saturated T1 needs to be unusable. Folks run rc5des and seti@home, 24/7 with no percieved sluggishness from their system, yet these programs occupy every spare clock cycle they can grab. If the same ideology as nice(1) were applied to a network connection, nobody would have anything to worry about in terms of bandwidth.
Suppose you've got a network - it doesn't matter how fast it is. You've got people using it - it doesn't matter how many. They're doing one of four things with it, and it doesn't matter how much of any of them that they do.
These four things can be surmised as follows, in order of decreasing priority:
Nothing. This is what most computers do, most of the time, and the same applies to bandwidth usage. Nothing gets the best priority, because it's the least expensive.
Telnet and other protocols/things which require low latency, but not a lot of bandwidth. HTTP GETs would perhaps fall into this category, for instance.
Games and streaming media which require low latency and a fair amount of bandwidth. Quake, Realaudio, et all. It'd be nice from the PHB standpoint to say that Halflife and Art Bell are not important, but they're a decisive part of what the Internet /is/ for a large percentage of the wired community, and they're (for the most part) simply unusable without two scoops of bandwidth and a low-latency connection.
HTTP/FTP/NNTP/Napster/GnuTella/other bandwidth-mongers. Some may argue that HTTP needs to be of relatively high priority, but that's just not the case when there's legitimate companies delivering files of tens of megabytes in size using the protocol. Or, suppose HTTP is given higher priority than FTP; FTP will slowly be displaced by HTTP to an even greater extent than it already has, and so any such change will be self-defeating. Further, all of these should be of lower priority than streaming media, because you can still *accomplish* web browsing on an overladden link, which is not the case with Realaudio.
It could be argued that there should be a fifth layer of stuff, for Napster, Gnutella, et all, but I'm not sure if that's the case. If Napster packets were dropped to the lowest priority, people would just use FTP (or HTTP) to steal songs instead, and the prioritization would be once again self-defeating. Already, GNUtella gateways exist which will deliver files from the network, directly to your web browser via standard HTTP.
I want bandwidth management for myself. I've got a slow connection at home (2x28.8 modems hung from a FreeBSD box doing multilink PPP), and every fucking file I download hoses everything else that I want to do. If I could just prioritize incoming packets, I'd be more-or-less happy with my slice of bandwidth. I don't care how long a download takes, I care how long it makes my connection useless for telnet, streamed media, Quake and IRC. Folks say IPv6 will fix this, but others seem to be in no hurry to implement it on any scale (and without scale, it's worthless).
Are there any IPv4 packet prioritization programs which work well enough on incoming data that a saturated modem connection will be usable for things other than 8,000-millisecond pings?
I actually own one of their older units. It has three buttons, a knob, and a power switch. To use it, you send a signal through it, twist the knob until things sound bright and shiney, and back down a bit. Sound non-technical? It is.
There isn't much to be seen *inside* the box, either. Aside from stuff which is standard fare in just about all audio processing equipment (trim pots, a couple op-amps, power supply, some relays...), there's only two devices which stand out. These are really large-looking devices in a bastardized DIP package, emblazoned with the BBE logo. Just looking at them, they seem to radiate magic.
But this is all off-topic, and pointless unless I give some subjective evaluation of what the magic does for music.
So, here goes. The effect on music is that it tends to sound a little livelier. Cymbols tend to have a little more detail, snares tend to jump out a little more. Bass sounds fatter, with more percieved string noise. It seems to have very little effect on a clean electric guitar, but can make a distorted guitar almost overbearing.
The effects are dynamic, and this can be heard when listening to a slightly noisey FM radio station. The noise will tend to breath (get louder/softer, and/or change in character) along with the dynamics of what's going on. This is most noticable (and annoying, once it is noticed) on spoken word.
That all said, I use it somewhat frequently. I've got a number of recordings which seem to lack life, and the BBE seems to provide some (even if it's a creative, or even destructive, process instead of restorative). It also does a bang-up job of fixing vocals that are turned to mud by a poor PA system, in a live enviroment, and has some usefulness in the studio.
I tend not to use it on MP3s that are heavily artifacted, as it just tends to enhance the artifacts more than the missing high-frequency components.
Given the apparent lack of details about the Kenwood Supreme Drive thing, one can only be lead to assume that they use a similar process to the BBE to "restore" (ie, create) lost harmonic information. If so, it'll be a useful thing. But, it will not be all things to all people, and no signal processor (no matter how many buzzwords you associate it with) will ever be.
(as an aside: Most FM radio stations process everything until it's just gelatinous muck, lacking absolutely any dynamic content, and with the spectral content smoothed out so that no song sounds and better or worse than any other - instead, they all sound bad. The MBAs who play general manager say it's good thing, because a) it makes their signal as loud as (or louder than) the competitor across town and b) they think the consistantly-mediocre quality will entice listeners to stick around longer than they would if they could hear the true nature of a recording. Frankly, it just makes me flip the dial to NPR or one of the local college stations, as they suffer from none of the hideous all-things-to-all-people processing that the 50,000-Watt buggers do.
It's unfortunate that people feel the need to have "digital" radio, when standard analog FM could sound almost perfect (and certainly better than MP3) if they'd just stop fucking with it.).
Instagone, or almost any other dollar store miracle cleaner will remove tobacco residue (which is mostly tar, not nicotine).
Windex does OK, but not great.
Only problem is that some of the residue will remain in tiny little pores in the plastic, and any attempts to remove the final yellow sheen it provides will be futile without the use of abrasives.
Alas, this problem may not even be tobacco-related, as it affects things even in strictly non-smoking enviroments. (Ever see an Apple II in a school? Ever note the color? It didn't come out of the box that way...)
Some time ago, I had in-house an ATX machine that I was preparing to be a Linux-based web-serving box for a local ISP.
It was a reasonablely tame machine. Pentium II 266 or thereabouts, some sort of fast Seagate SCSI drive (just one), and a PCI ethernet controller.
I left it in the soft-off state overnight. The next morning, my girlfriend woke me up, saying "Hey, your computer is on fire."
Seems that some motherboard/power supply/accessory combinations either lack sufficient cooling or draw too much power while suspended for it to be done safely.
So, the moral of this story is to turn *off* ATX computers, or leave them on all the time. This means hitting the rear-panel power switch, unplugging it, or otherwise physically removing all power from it. The front panel switch does *not* do this -- sure, the fans and disks all spin down, but the machine can (and does) still draw current in that zero-cooling enviroment.
I was lucky in that the power supply was the only component release its magic smoke, and not the entire house.
iMacs run hot, just as TVs run hot, monitors run hot, and most other vacuum tubes run hot. This says nothing about how warm the computer itself (which is placed below the CRT inside the box) runs. Gravity being what it is, heat rises and creates convection currents, and (in the case of an iMac) the chimney effect. Cool air comes in the bottom, warm/hot air exits the top. Just like it might if there were a fan in place, without a fan.
Incidentally, this is also a main reason why the primary cooling fan in a vertically-inclined computer exhausts air from near the top of the case, while cool air enters at the bottom (certain ATX 1.0-compliant power supplies excepted, due to stupidity on intel's part).
That all said, I'll attempt to identify some potential trouble-spots and some possible solutions for them:
The computer, as a whole. Heat reduction, damping and isolation are key (in that order).
Reduce heat by taking out everything that makes heat that you can get by without, and reduce cooling capacity accordingly.
To isolate it, move the box far away, and/or put obstacles between it and you. The Other Side of the Desk is a good option, or in a closet if permissable. The only reason you might need to fiddle with it with any frequency these days is to access the CD-ROM drive, and probably only then if you're a gamer, or you listen to audio CDs with the computer. If the latter, simply plonk out $50 (or less) on a cheap portable player and a patch cord from Radio Shack, and you'll probably enjoy superior sound at the same time. If you're a gamer, learn to deal with it, or crack your software to not require CDs to play, or invest in a multi-disc changer (which is handy, anyhow).
For damping, use Dynamat, which is an asphalt-based adhesive-backed compound which seeks to add non-resonant mass in quantities suitable for sound deadening purposes on light-guage sheet metal. Typically, it comes in a roll, sold by the square foot, and appplication is just peel-and-stick. It's a little pricey for what it is, and there are knock-off brands which probably work just as well for less money. It's important to note, however, that the adhesives used in Dynamat don't degrade with heat, and will probably stay attached until well after you're dead and buried, which is good. Buy it at your local car audio shop (don't worry, they all know what it is) or online at Crutchfield or Parts Express.
The purpose of this is to keep sound inside the computer, inside the computer, and/or kill it as it tries to leave, by making the large, expansive steel panels that comprise the cover of a computer much less prone to resonance. (Note to the more hardcore hardware hacks: This will require that you find, and replace, the top cover for your case.) Carpet pad, or wool carpet, or open-cell foam, or accoustic tiles, or anything else of that variety will not have an appeciable effect. These products all have their place, which is typically to provide a cushy surface to walk on, or a good accoustic enviroment - not sound isolation (the two are mutually exclusive). If your computer has its back to the wall, you might try placing some Sonex or Studiofoam on said wall to absorb some of the sonic reflection, but don't count on it being any tremendous benefit unless you've already done something about the sound travelling through the sides of the case.
Enclosing the case is probably not an option, though some here have suggested it. In enclosing it, you'll be eliminating your access to it. And also eliminating any external airflow. Add airflow, and you either a) create a path for internal noise to get out, or b) adding additional noise by throwing even more fans at it.
CD-ROM drives. The cheaper, the noisier (or so it seems). A LiteOn 32x ATAPI I have sounds like a jet turbine; in contrast, a 32x Plextor is more-or-less silent (but the newer 40x models seem to be louder). Solution: Buy a CD-ROM drive based on noise output, instead of data output and price. (Note that this will involve leaving the house, and possibly being social.)
Hard drives. Sure, you can put them in a Quietdrive box, which is just sorbothane (or neoprene) rubber, wrapped in open-cell foam and shoved into a plastic box with zero airflow, and they'll be quiet (and hot, dispite the marketing department's claims otherwise). In this case, however, more traditional methods may be best: Move the drives further away from your ears, and you'll hear them less. Use LVD SCSI, if needed for distance (and enjoy a performance boost, to boot). Else, you can try applying Dynamat to the surfaces that the drives mount to, trimming around all the holes. Do *not* put Dynamat or any other poor thermal conductor directly on a hard drive (even substances with "good" thermal transmission characteristics may block breather holes on the top of the drive, which is a no-no). Or, try to find a quiet hard drive. Not that this is any easy task. I used to think that IBM's 9ES series of 7200RPM drives were quiet, until I recently bought and installed a more recent revision and noticed that it was no longer the case (that installation, sadly, was in a recording studio). On the other hand, they're particularly cool-running drives, which alleviates some cooling needs. One other possibility is that Quantum (IIRC) claims to have a line of quiet IDE drives.
But, take all noise ratings with a grain or salt (or 20). They're usually expressed in terms of dBA, which is fine. However, they disclose zero details as to the measurement enviroment, distance from the measuring device, mounting to resonant surfaces (such as a computer's case), or any other factors which will have tremendous impact on such figures. If you want to get particularly anal about it, go to Radio Shack and get an SPL meter. The analog version goes on sale twice a year for something like $30. It will tell you exactly how loud something is at a given point. So, establish your a test procedure, and begin measurement. (If this seems like a silly thing to do, you're right.)
CPU fan. Personally, I don't see the big deal here, as long as you use your ears when selecting one (or trust the marketing folks). PC Power and Cooling is well known for their quiet, long-lasting, and effective fans. Alternatively, I've got a Cooler Master on a K6-2 which does the trick, making negligable noise. In contrast, a Global Win fan that lives on another K6-2 here out-whines the cheap Japanese hard drive, the LiteOn CD-ROM, Mitsumi CD-R, and ball-bearing power supply fan combined. Luckily, the DFI motherboard offers some sort of fan-control that speeds up the fan (in Windows) when there's significant CPU activity and slows down when there's not, but it still screeches like a banshee even when kicked down to low idle.
Rule of thumb seems to be that the bigger the heatsink, the higher the output of the fan which is attached to it. It doesn't need to be that way, but it is (*sigh*). In truth, the larger, or more dissipative the heatsink, the less air you need to have flowing over it. And, after you hit a certain point on size, you need no fan at all. CPUs these days can run *hot*, all day, every day, and continue to run at peak (rated) performance. You probably will need a fan if you're overclocking, but that's the price you pay.
In a normal system, the only things left are the one or two fans left on the case. If you have two of them, try disabling one. It costs nothing and doesn't hurt to try. Feel the top of the case periodically, both before and after the change, to get a rough idea of how it affects the internal temperature and plug it back in if you deem it too hot. If you need something even quieter, or require more than one fan for proper cooling, you can buy lower-output fans from Mouser Electronics, or a silent (but fan-cooled) power supply from PC Power and Cooling.
This can't work. Existing utilities to convert PS to HTML are text-only. That is, ASCII text, not graphical representations of text. And even if it did work, it would be a horrendous bother, with manual cutting and pasting of images. But I digress...
Feeding such a program a Postscript file which contains nothing other than an image will not produce the desired output (if any output at all).
It doesn't matter how many times you convert from one overlapping format to another; OCR systems don't just materialize out of the ether, someone has to write them. And so far, those who have done so don't see the need to give them away.
The author of the linked article is obviously inadept at grasping the reality of what he was witnessing.
The 802.11 cards and Siemens phone system are frequency-hopping. By switching frequencies often, they reduce overall interference at the expense of a little bandwidth (there's plenty of room at 2.4GHz for these things to co-exist). Some types of frequency-hopping "spread spectrum" devices will dynamically learn trouble-spots and avoid them, bringing bandwidth back up to a point approaching ideal (unless that entire block of spectrum is completely hosed).
So, the phone system and wirelss LAN should work fine together. There will be a slight (measurable, but imperceptable) decrease in bandwidth for the LAN while phones are in use. The phones, if they're poorly designed and/or the CODEC is intolerant of errors, may suffer an occasional (and very brief) dropouts; due to the real-time streamed nature of the device, retransmissions aren't possible as they are with 802.11. I don't suspect these dropouts would be overly bothersome, or even noticable in most instances.
Interestingly, the X10 video-sender box was the last thing he threw away. Oddly enough, that's the device which should have gone away *first*. It's cheap - too cheap to use any of the present-day bandwidth-reducing digital coolness of most other 2.4GHz devices. So, it spews forth broadband analog video - likely using *more* bandwidth than a TV station to avoid expensive modulation/demodulation parts - destroying the 2.4GHz for the rest of the household toys. Remember the remark above about the spectrum being completely hosed? This is probably a better example of an RF monster than anything else available to a consumer today.
Had he turned off the bargain-bin X10 stuff first, I strongly suspect he would have had no further difficulty (and would continue to enjoy the hideously-cool phone system).
That all said, I really don't see the need for moving to 2.4GHZ for *everything*. It offers more bandwidth for a given slice of spectrum, which is nice - and really not needed for things like telephones. I prefer to get my cancer from tobacco, standing too close to the microwave, and hanging out by 600,000 volt transmission lines - not talking on the phone.
Alternatively, there's a program called mpd which does the multilink PPP thing fairly well, along with demand-dialing of links. It can be found in the FreeBSD ports collection.
I've been using it with a pair of 28.8 modems on a slow 8-meg 486 for a month or so, since I've moved away from civilization (well, close enough - I had 128k ISDN). My only complaint is that the thresholds for bringing up/tearing down connections are somewhat inflexible, and the default modem scripts are the horribly complex, all-things-to-all-people type that even AOL doesn't use.
If rubber bandwidth/line usage is not a concern, the standard userland PPP daemon (ppp) will probably work fine, and much more easily.
For all-in-one hardware solutions, as others have said, DSL modems and a dry pair would probably be optimal.
Or, VersaNet makes a box which contains two or four 56k modems and some routing hardware (http://www.versa-net.com), which also has some niceties like STAC compression that just don't exist in the world of free software. A pair of these, connecting to eachother at 4x33.6k would approach the speed of 2B ISDN, which isn't bad.
3com makes a similar beast as well, but having had insurmountable trouble with their ISDN OfficeConnect product and returning it at a loss, I can't recommend any of 3com/USR's small dialup routers.
I haven't been able to find a well-maintained pinball machine of any variety (let alone a good one) near here for some years.
Recently (a few days ago) I happened across a game called Roll 'Em Up (http://www.medialab.lostboys.nl/rollemup), a single-machine pinball simulator. The physics are a little wacky in places, but it's mildly fun to play. It exists for Windows, BeOS, MacOS, and Linux (all binary).
Anyone know of any other reasonably good pinball games, perhaps with some sort of swank OpenGL hack?
Uses for JPEG 2000:
An automatic, thumbnailing Usenet binary decoder. Something that grabs the first x bytes of an image, and produces a thumbnail of x quality.
For wireless access devices without sufficient CPU/RAM to decode the images themselves, as a proxy filter. As the display is of highly limited resolution, it's silly to send huge images across such an expensive link. While it's currently possible (see freshmeat.net) to obtain image downsampling and/or quality reduction in a proxy, it amounts to much wasted bandwidth as bits are literally tossed away at the proxy. JPEG 2000 (that name must die) would alleviate the bandwidth crunch at the head end, by requiring the proxy to only aquire a small portion of the original image to possibly resample and transmit via whatever proprietary means to the wireless web browser.
Stock photography CD-ROMs (and websites) would benefit from the format, as well. Even with really-fast CD-ROM drives, PhotoCDs are expensive (time-wise) to preview and select from. Thumbnails could instead be generated arbitrarily, and on the fly. This also eliminates the tangle of often-nasty software (or inherently inefficient HTML) that often accompanies digital stock photography.
Once in awhile, standards are good. Particularly the openly-adoptable sort. Before GIF, we had PCX, a slew of more-proprietary formats, and very few images being shared. After GIF, anyone could get images from anyone else, and there was much rejoicing (and sending about of pictures and graphs and data and...).
Then, along came JPEG. It took some time to be adopted, namely because of people viewing them with fixed 8-bit palettes under Windows. I recall many a flamewar in the BBS age about this topic. The Windows folk didn't like the way JPEGs looked, all grainy and ugly and, well, dithered. In the other corner, I had a Diamond Speedstar 24x, displaying 24-bit color in cshow under MS-DOS, and there simply was no comparison.
Eventually, mass market display technology grew up a bit, and more people were able to see thousands of colors at once instead of 256. At exactly the same time as this was happening, GIFs began to fall by the wayside, and JPEG grew to become king of the interchange formats.
A couple of years after that, The Powers That Be at Unisys struck down with great fury and vengeance, which more-or-less signed the death certificate for GIFs in common historical usage, though GIF web-button-diddies persist.
At this point, there were two competing formats on the web, both with drastically different claims to fame. GIFs are big, but lossless, transparent, animated, and patented. JPEGs are small and have more colors, but are lossy, opaque, static, and free.
Realizing that something must be done, the Something Must Be Done crowd chimed in and proposed PNG, the bastard sibling of GIF. Alpha channel blending, progressive display, 24-bit lossless color, and patent free. All good, all fine, except nobody cares about lossless compression in web pages (save screenshots, drawings) or porn.
Thus, years later, PNG is 'out there.' It's not in widespread use because the files are too large, and it doesn't offer any compelling improvements in bandwidth- or storage-limited enviroments (and no, the available alpha channel doesn't make up for that in everyday use). Besides, a number of browsers *still in common use* just don't support PNG, and never will. (WebExplorer, anyone?)
Reducing the palette size of a PNG file is silly, too. It amounts to lossy compression of a particularly nasty sort. I don't know about you, but I can *see* the difference between 16- and 24-bit color on most images (web page graphics and other cartoons excluded, of course). A photograph of a sunset should have a smooth gradient from baby blue sky to the angry red of the sun (or whatever colors it is that evening), not something that has defined color regions like a paint-by-number.
Eight years ago, I picked up a SoundBlaster 1.5. Back then, sound files of even the 11KHz mono 8-bit format recorded by the SoundBlaster were considered huge. Creative Lab's answer? The VOC format, which allowed truncation of the files down to 6, 4, or 2 bits per sample. Viola! Small files, and shitty quality.
In another historical (or current, depending on how long you've been around) example, MPEG (and other perceptual) encoding of audio was shown to be dramatically better than truncation. I'll spare the details here since everyone here knows them, but time and time again, perceptual encoding (irrespective of medium or technique) has been shown to be superior to truncation or throwing away of data.
And before anyone says "But, PNG is *dithered* down to a reduced color depth, which makes it OK," I'll have to disagree. Sony has a dithering process by which they record sound at 20 bits per sample, and reduce it to 16 for use in CD players. The remaining 4 bits are dithered into the LSB, which does allow some percieved hearing of sounds below the normal threshhold of a CD. Does this make 20-bit digital audio come out of an off-the-shelf CD player? No. Is it a little better than normal 16-bit PCM? Probably. Is it better than a hypothetical 20-bit MPEG stream at the same bitrate (172kBps)? Fuck no. And in the specific case of dithering a digitized visual image, it is almost always blatantly obvious that dithering has been applied. Have you ever tried to scale a dithered image, or print one using halftones? Ever see what the current crop of so-so monitors does to a dithered image (can we say Moire patterns, boys and girls)? etc. etc.
Simply because JPEG 2000 does all of the things that PNG does, and all of the things JPEG does, does not make it unuseful. It should show to offer substantially improved usability over either format. Whether or not one considers this usability to be important or not is dictated by the limitations of that person's creativity.
Because in the real-world economics of the situation, the sockets to contain said "unused" SIMMs would be more costly than the SIMMs themselves. Rcycling the sockets is probably too costly to be considerered, as well. Why would anyone want to spend many days aquiring the RAM in the first place?
Further, who wants to use mis-matched, questionable SIMMs on a production system of sufficient importance to warrant such an apparatus? One would be foolish to use anything but new, reasonable quality parts.
According to memman.com:
Cost of 256 megs of 30-pin 4-meg SIMMs:
logic parity: $832
true parity: $1152
(note that this requires 64 units, which is substantial real estate)
For 72-pin SIMMs of 32 megabytes (almost any type): $776
(eight units required, which is do-able space-wise)
And a single 256-meg PC100 DIMM? $244, $283 for parity.
(one unit required, which is small enough to not matter)
Say again, which is cheaper?
Personally, I fail to see the importance of products like this, at all. Unlike flash-based systems, RAM is not reliable. It is likely less expensive and dramatically faster to find a fast, expensive motherboard with a sufficient number of DIMM sockets to handle the task at hand, and populate it full. Use a certain large percentage of that RAM as a RAM disk which is restored at every bootup.
Heh. Well, one must realize that this AtheOS project appears to be in a fairly early stage of development. For example, hard disk access is done with BIOS code.
Claiming that because the first release is Pentium-only means that it is unportable is foolish, at best. Linux, and most (all?) of the free BSDs were also intitially geared toward intel platforms. Things have to start somewhere...
Besides, if you don't like the hardware support, change it around until you do, or organize others to do it for you. Else, find an P5+ box or a different hack of an operating system (there seems to be no shortage of either these days).
Rude or not, anything else is just plain un-American (apologies to the overseas-folk).
Suppose someone wants new clothes; they go to the store, put some on, walk around in them a bit, and perhaps consult with whatever entourage they may have with them. After that, they remove said clothes, whereupon they are either purchased or replaced on the rack.
Perhaps someone is in the market for a new stereo component. They head over to the local audio salon (or Best Buy, or whatever), and once there, they'll listen to a few of them, compare them with others, punch buttons, gaze at the displays, and perhaps buy one (or not). The audio salon may even allow you to take your chosen component home, such that you may see how well it sounds in conjunction with the rest of your equipment.
When I go to buy a car, I walk around it, I kick the tires, peer into the trunk, pop the hood and marvel at the unmaintanability of the engine, sit down in the seat, start it up, and take it for a drive. I may be gone for hours, if I'm feeling discerning or I particularly like the car. When I return, the dealer may offer to lend it overnight.
In the above instances, I'm always given as much oppertunity as I feel I need to make an informed purchasing decision. Same goes for buying a dog. Or an aquarium. Or a house, boat, mattress, carpet, paint, magazine, book, step ladder, air nailer, computer, TV, motorcycle, front end loader, or any number of other real things.
When I'm browsing the selection at the corner music store, I typically have no idea what most of what's there sounds like. Numerous names recognizably stand out, but I typically haven't heard anything that hasn't been played by the local radio stations (all of which are owned by Clear Channel).
Often, I find that the "hits" are not my favorite songs on a given album. Often, there's only one or two songs on a disc which are worth owning (Godsmack comes to mind immediately).
I've never heard any selections of my more-liked CDs being played on-air. Ever. I suppose that somewhere, there's a college station that has played something from Pigface's album Fook, but it wasn't here. Besides, it's on an independant label, with independant distribution, so it is often difficult to come by. How did I discover it? A lengthy thread in alt.music.nin, back in 93 or 94 - several people spoke highly of it, so I took a chance and bought it. I probably would've discovered it *much* more easily, and been *much* more willing to fork out dollar for it had I been able to listen to it first and make an informed decision (I'm not a gambler, and $17 amounts to a large-enough chunk of my day that I prefer not to toss it into the wind to see if it comes back).
Point is, I like mp3. Following the mainstreaming of electronically shared music, every album I've bought without listening to it first would likely be more at home in a blazing inferno than in my CD rack. Further, every album which I've bought after listening to it in its entirety (or at least significant random chunks) in mp3 format has been a keeper. My music-buying habits haven't really increased or decreased overall since the advent of mp3, but they're certainly a lot more reasonable.
And I do believe that this is a primary reason that RIAA is pissed. Suddenly, there have been giant holes beaten into the sides of their marketing machine. It was tired before, but now it belches blue smoke and makes noises like an '87 Yugo. While a number of people here know how to replace it (produce music people actually like, and let the masses sort it out), RIAA is bent on fixing it.
Trouble is, nobody makes parts for it anymore, and even if they did, they all require non-existant proprietary tooling to install. Not only that, but RIAA doesn't know where any of them go. It's such a compounded issue that it would take an act of Congress to restore and preserve its proper working order.
And that's just what they've done.
Or is sex an unnatural act?
Or is there only one "God"?
Not that any of this matters. You seem to be afraid of blasphemy (whatever that means) of some organized sort. It is a statistical certainty that others disagree with your definition of blasphemy, even to the point of deducing you as the blasphemer. Which party is right, and justified in their use of .god, and which party is wrong and unjustified" I always like to think of myself as being correct in every context, too, but whenever I get to feeling that way, some Christian or another comes along and disagrees with me. Feh.
Welcome to the real world, where freedom still reigns and some folks are still able to draw their own conclusions. Even about God (or gods), and where He/She/It/they may shove it (or not). Enjoy it while it lasts, as I assure you that the alternative is markedly inferior.
I agree completely. So, why does Netpliance not sell $400 boxes for the more sane price of $400, contract-free and not filled with epoxy? Or even $500, with a tidy profit?
For the layfolk to whom these are originally intended to be sold, $99 and a service contract of X years would work fine.
Right now, with demand being what it is, I can understand their stance. When supply catches up (and it must, else this all becomes a non-issue), not selling more-expensive multi-use boxen is foolish and laughable.
There exists a prime market for small, low-cost, reliable computers. The I-Opener is solid state, with no moving parts (aside from the easily replaced keyboard).
At a factory near here, they once had text-based terminals running over serial lines to (presumably) some sort of UNIX host, which were scattered about the plant, even on the production floor, for data entry and reporting and whatever else they needed them to do. Recently, the serial lines were replaced with Cat5, and the terminals turned into tiny little WinCE boxes with either bulky CRT monitors or hideously expensive flat panels. The requisite wire-mess doubled from three (keyboard, power, data) to six (keyboard, mouse, video, two for power, and ethernet), bringing with it all the joy of flakiness as the cabling degrades over time.
Given the specific nature of the business (baking cookies), the software is undoubtedly custom, and thus could be built to run on any of the multitudes of real multiuser operating systems existing today, perhaps even on the legacy hardware they already had. X11 would flow over the network instead of whatever bit of proprietarity the WinCE things talk. And at the end of the wire, would be an I-Opener, booting some free (or low-cost), stable operating system (or just a light-weight X server) from flash. Money would be saved, things would work in a stable fashion, and there would be much rejoicing.
I don't see this falling to the same pitfalls as other so-called thin-clients due to the following differences that I percieve. Firstly, it can be inexpensive (traditional thin clients didn't really help out the initital investment cost). It is flexibile (flash). It can run standards-based protocols, such that The Guru In The Back can run the same applications in the same fashion on a desktop PC. Applications run on a central host, rather than at the individual workstations. And finally, it's *plenty* fast enough to display all manner of business graphics, and likely will continue to be until the next big paradigm shift in display technology.
The author of the article to which we're all replying states that if Netpliance were to go this route, they would be eaten by a large company with razor-thin profit margins. However, given the demand for these devices, Netpliance becoming a serious player themselves is almost inevitable.
So, perhaps if they're as smart as they think they are, they should look at a bit of diversification. Adding 10/100 ethernet, socketing the flash, and swapping pins on the IDE header shouldn't take too much time or money to implement, and the rest of the box is already built. They may consider themselves to be a service-oriented company, but the name Netpliance speaks otherwise.
Say what?
Get the $200 MediaGX box mentioned yesterday, a cheap used VGA monitor from a local shop (or just use the TV it will likely be located near), an ISA NIC and a hard drive (or use the 16meg flash). End result will approach $500, time included (unless you're a consultant), and be infinitely customizable.
Or, buy an I-Opener for $300 (if they ever come to their senses), and add a cheap, small drive to boot from (or again just use the existing flash). Add parallel or USB NIC. Or just run PLIP (cheap).
Or, look around on Ebay for a swank-looking rackmount Pentium-class computer. Add whatever is needed.
I'm not sure how you arrive at your $500 figure for a board and CPU. Last computer show I went to, a vendor was selling bare P100 chips for $20, and chips-on-motherboards for $25. Sure, MicroATX and other small-form motherboards are not cheap, but $480? Please.
The Audiotron *is* pretty, though. And it's fairly small (but I can build one smaller). Convenience? What's convenient about yet-another network interface, *and* a Windows box, just to listen to MP3s? Methinks I'd rather save a few bucks (or spend a few more), and avoid needing to have Windows running whenever I played music in the other room. It will take a little more work to do it myself, but much less so than the otherwise-requisite Redmond timebomb long-term.
RIAA's beef with the RIO was that it was:
a) digital
b) allowed/allows copying *back* to any computer without generational loss
c) did/does not limit such copying by means of SCMS, like MiniDisc, consumer DAT, DCC, or consumer standalone audio CD recorders as government-mandated on these items
d) did/does not include a tax on the media and/or player, to be collected by the Federal government and handed to RIAA (as all of the aforementioned formats do).
Diamond won that case by persuading a judge to believe that the Rio is solely intended as a playback device, not a digital audio recorder as RIAA would like to have proven.
SCMS exists as a tradeoff between consumers and the hardware folks, and the recording industry. It limits digital copies to the second generation (you can make a copy of an original, but it won't let you copy a copy). It is required by law on digital audio recorders (or at least those that talk SP/DIF, else some other system is required). Anecdotally, if copyright law were worded as to banish all fair-use duplication, SCMS would not be around. Instead, devices with digital IO would not exist today.
And I'm not joking in the slightest. If I'm doing something I believe to be legal and someone has a problem with it, I consider it their responsibility to let me know. Like speeding in a car. When one gets pulled over, discussions ensue. At times, the driver is not aware that he is speeding. I was stopped for going 55mph in a 45 zone, that I honestly thought was 55. The officer was very understanding, and issued a written warning. Guess what? I don't drive 55 through that area any longer, now that I've been made aware of the laws in place by the organization they concern most.
So, allow me to reiterate. I've stated my intent and some past doings in a public forum, which is most assuredly being watched by the powers that be. If RIAA doesn't like my behavior, they should let me know.
I disagree with the poster's point.
I own a rather nice Plextor CD-R, and a similarly nice Plextor CD-ROM. Using cdparanoia and cdrdao (both GPL), I can make as many copies of audio compact discs as I like. These duplicates will have significant error reduction applied to them, and the end result is a very good restoration that surpasses the quality of the original (often scratched) disc.
These copies are legal, bitwise-perfect or not, for my own use (I believe we all agree on this point, RIAA included).
I can also, legally, charge money for such duplication for the benefit of others. Suppose a friend has a disc which skips irrevocably at 5 minutes, 13 seconds. No law says that I cannot copy said disc for said friend, as a service, while charging whatever I like for said service and materials, be it 50 cents to cover my cost on the medium, or $600. Assuming that I report all income to the IRS, and abide by any applicable state/local sales tax laws, and do not retain unlicensed material, I can do whatever I want, including the pasting of paid advertising on the halls leading to the room with the CD-R drive in an attempt to generate cash flow.
Now, suppose someone asks me to dupe a scratched CD that I am already licensed to posess (in other words, I left the house one day, went to the music store, and bought a copy). Said scratched CD is so badly mangled, that even after stepping the Plextor reader down to 1x, cdparanoia can't do a thing for it. I walk across the room, pull my copy off of the shelf, and dupe it. Money changes hands, customer walks away with a perfect reproduction of the disc he once enjoyed, and his original licensed recording.
I did this just the other day, in fact. Some years ago, I bought a CD by a band named Prick after seeing them open for David Bowie (Look! Marketing worked!). A couple months after that, it fell off of the desk, caseless. In looking around to find it, I rolled a chair over it. For some reason, the now-smashed CD didn't play very well. When my girlfriend's birthday came up a week ago, one of the things I got for her was a Prick CD. A few days after that, I borrowed it and made a copy for myself to replace the one that I smashed. Made a nice color label for it, too, scanned from her copy and printed in crayon on an Alps. No animals were harmed in this process, no banks were robbed, the sky didn't turn red and nor did the seas boil. Is RIAA pissed? Interscope/Nothing Records? Is it either unfair or unjust for me to commit this action? I own a license for myself to own and make personal use of not a tangible item, but the music in question. If they disagree with my tactics in data restoration, I implore them to ask/subpeona Rob Malda/Slashdot/Andover/whoever the responsible party is for my email address and contact me. I will interpret any failure to do this as implied permission to continue.
[Careful readers will note that this practise deals neither with the Internet, nor distribution. I should point out that, as noted in an above post, RIAA vs. MP3.com doesn't, either.]
Perhaps that's a little too broad. How about an all-encompasing computer-oriented news page like the almost forgotten c|net?
Er. That's not much better, it seems. What sayeth of something that deals almost entirely with open source-related news? No, wait, you're already here.
Unfortunate though it may (or may not) be, Linux has the most attention these days. Not just in the media, but in the minds of users. You want more BSD news? Submit more of it. Or start getting your fix from a BSD-specific page.
Point is, if you don't like Slashdot, try to change it. If you can't change it, find somewhere else. If you can't find somewhere else, grab the code and create something more to your liking. If you can't do that, hire someone who can. If you can't afford to, perhaps your desired news isn't as important to the world as you might think.
As an aside, I really don't see your reason for concern. Slashdot never claimed to be business-oriented. And if there's a real-world computer issue that involves money, there's someone out there attached to it like a leech, sucking it for all the juicy bits it has, and printing them. Try PC Week if you want to see what "real-world" business uses today. Me, I want to know what they'll be using tomorrow.
Actually... All hand-held (digital, analog, whatever) cellular phones are limited (in the US) by the FCC to 600mW of output, due to concerns over the potential for Bad Things to happen when a significant portion of the radiated energy passes directly through the user's head before it goes anywhere useful.
The only way to get around this restriction is to use a genuine wired-in-place car phone, or a somewhat messy contraption which acts as a cradle for a handheld, and includes a 3 Watt amp (which is the maximum legal power).
Besides, power has nothing to do with how good a 'digital' call sounds, but rather the CODECs used, how forgiving they are of errors in the bitstream, and the bitrate at which they operate (which is often dynamically adjusted depending on system load). Take a poor-sounding 600mW phone, and boost it to three Watts. It will continue to sound horrible.
It's a possibility. However, finding a good place to mount a 10" LCD with really narrow viewing angles would at least be less than fun, approaching the point of impossibility.
Better to get drop $20 on a used Pentium board/chip, locate a small amount of RAM, and go from there. Total cost is a little more, but it's much easier to deal with in terms of installation.
Or, did you not notice that the i-opener's flat panel display also houses the guts of the machine? Try to sever the two; I dare you.
adolf
...that's why domains are supposed to have working, geographically-diverse secondary and tertiary name servers. Given this, people should never have any real trouble resolving any DNS query for your domain. Thus, MX records can and will work in the context the poster was referring to.
Whoever moderated up the above post should be publicly flogged. That said:
Back in the day, the only readily available digital tape recorder was an old (nowadays) Sony unit that used video tape. The format they chose was 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo linear PCM, because it was convenient. It happened to coincide with the capabilities of the video recorder they built the beast on (head switching, and whatnot), and it didn't sound terrible, on paper or in practice. The Nyquist frequency is 22.05KHz, plenty far above the range of almost any adult's hearing, with dynamic range of 96dB, which is vastly more than is easily discernable above the normal ambient noise of the average household without immediate pain and deafness.
Some time after that, Sony and Philips came up with a grand idea: make shiney discs with digital audio, sell them for twice as much, and make everyone buy new equipment and music to take advantage of it. Make it in such a way that a plant can be converted from pressing vinyl to stamping CDs relatively cheaply so that it's somewhat convenient for them to produce.
Sounds good, right? Sure! But they needed temporary medium on which to master the discs; 600 meg hard drives were scarce. Thus, they decided that the easiest way (for them, and the studios) to do what they wanted was to use the aforementioned Sony deck, which was considered the standard (proprietary) format for digital masters for a number of years.
Besides, even if they did want to, there just wouldn't be room on a CD to put 74 minutes of 24-bit 196KHz audio. The capacity of a CD is limited by the wavelength of the infrared lasers used, the available tracking mechanisms, and size constrants (all of which, again, are based on convenience).
It'd be nice if CDs sounded better, but it's a damned miracle that the format took off at all, let alone as well as it did. And if it were any less convenient to implement, it probably wouldn't have.
So, we're left with an imperfect universal format. Which is OK - if perfectionists were always succesful, we'd all live in a perfect world. Thing is, George Lucas has enough money that he doesn't need to care about whether or not he succeeds, which gives him the benefit of being a perfectionistic prick to the grave, who probably just wants to wait until the HDTV mess is sorted out before he does any new digital releases.
Bruce, while I typically agree with your ideology, I take issue with the message you attempt to convey in your above comment:
In America, at least, everything depends on taxes. Thus, what you wish for is impossible.
I heard it as the same idea, different phrase:
"Out of sight, out of mind" [English-Russian-English] = "Invisible; insane"