The 128 Mp3 preference probably comes from a simpler signal that is easier for your ears to process, in such noise-heavy music as Rock.
I don't think it's as simple as that; the vast majority of my music collection is from various sub-genres of metal; thrash, death, black and so on. I want to hear the cymbals and the guitar distortion as it was on the original recording, not a highly synthetic reproduction.
However, if I'd never heard the CDs, and instead had downloaded all the music I'd ever heard as 128kbps MP3s, I doubt I'd care, and might not even notice if someone played me the CD original (or even find something I disliked about the CD originals).
Before I got my first MP3 player, I did some experiments to see how low I could go, and determined that 192-256kbps (256kbps was a hardware limit of my first player) VBR was sufficient to make it virtually indistinguishable (for me) to the original CD. Going as low as 128kbps seemed to introduce what I'd describe as 'spangliness' (rather than sizzle!) to cymbals; they'd degrade from a high energy crash into a series of quiet bleeps, which I found very unnatural. My 192-256kbps default has been acceptable for all my rips, with the exception of a recording of Holst's Planets Suite, which I found had its string section similarly distorted.
Your old players might have just needed a new Pick-Up Head (PUH); I've replaced one in a 1994-vintage Aiwa MIDI twice, the second time a DIY job and it was pretty easy. Only one bit of soldering to remove the anti-static protection and a little bit of disassembly and reassembly. Cost of a new PUH is about £11.
Yow! Games for the Atari 800 were expensive! In the 80s, I had a Spectrum - the standard price was about GBP5-6 in the early 80s, rising to GBP8-9 in the late 80s. There were also budget titles from GBP1.99-2.99 and premium titles at GBP9.95-14.99.
Actually, there's a more salient point there - older networked multiplayer games tend not to actually get many players. I recently installed my copy of Unreal Tournament on my new machine and went online only to find mostly empty servers. Even when I bought it (budget re-release, and used even) they used to be rammed.
I've got a 440BX Asus P2B machine that went from a PII-266 in 1998, to a Celeron 500 in about 2000, and a PIII-450 in about 2003. I've also got a i845PE Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra which went from a Celeron 1.7GHz in 2002 to a P4 2.53GHz in 2008. On the other hand, I've had two machines that I've never upgraded the CPU on because the upgrade path disappeared, or simply wasn't economic.
The Celeron on the other hand can't cope as well with this cache loss though since it has to access memory over the FSB which was also crippled from 800Mhz to 533Mhz. This on an architecture like Netburst that was already STARVED for FSB and memory bandwidth and depended much more on it's larger L2 cache for performance.
'Crippled' isn't really an appropriate word for the FSB on the Celeron, as it implies it's been reduced from the 'un-crippled' speed on the P4s on which it was based. In fact, Celerons are usually based upon older revisions of Intel's contemporaneous flagship consumer processors. P4s started off at 400MHz, and so did the Celeron. P4s get upgraded to 533MHz and later 800MHz, and so do Celerons eventually. The P4 2.40B with its 533MHz FSB was regarded as a reasonable buy at the time, so why would the same bus speed on a budget processor be regarded as 'crippled'? Only if you compare it with the leading-edge consumer processors, but that's not the Celeron's target market and would be like saying a Ford Mondeo is crippled because it's not a Ferrari.
Duron and Sempron were great chips that performed very well for their prices and even overclocked well if you wanted. Celeron has never been worth buying since the 300A.
Depends what your priorities are. I've never had much luck with stability/compatibility from AMD motherboards and their third party (SiS, VIA) chipsets, so I prefer using Asus or Gigabyte-designed Intel motherboards. That necessitates using an Intel CPU. If I need the performance, I'll whatever's in the price/performance sweet spot in their consumer range, if not, a Celeron will make it go until the decent stuff shows up on eBay or the pulls bin at a computer fair for £5-10. Similarly, if one has bought an early-model P4, then a new Celeron might even be a performance upgrade, and without buying a new motherboard (RAM, graphics card, case...)
The first clause of your sentence may be true, but it doesn't imply the second. I've had a happy multi-tuner MythTV/firewall/DHCP/Privoxy/DNS box running off a 1.7GHz Celeron for a couple of years, and it was a scratch machine for about four years before that. The availability of the Celeron allowed me to buy a board with a cheap good-enough CPU, rather than having to spend far more than necessary on the CPU. Eventually, when I wanted transcoding for DVD recording to go quicker, I picked up a used P4 2.53GHz from eBay for about 20 quid that just dropped in.
Bugs that randomly result in lost progress; crashes, getting trapped in scenery, etc.
Having to 'earn' saves. If I'm playing a game on my own system, in my own time, I should be able to save when I like. Maybe earnt saves are acceptable for younger gamers, but when you're an adult, you can't necessarily commit to spending upwards of 30 minutes in one chunk on a game without an opportunity to save.
If the game has a single track, then not making it clear where the current barrier to be overcome is located. Leave it to me to figure out how, but at least let me know that I'm banging my head against the right brick wall.
Making me repeat far too much tedious stuff in order to get to the point where I failed last time.
Not allowing me to skip tutorials/intro/cutscenes.
Inappropriate or clumsy use of 3D when 2D (or constrained 3D, at least) might well have made things more fun.
To get back on-topic, reviews which reveal solutions to puzzles, or story endings.:-)
No, you don't, apparently. Most distros ship pretty secure installations of the components (e.g. Apache for the sake of this discussion) they supply. Red Hat/FC/CentOS include SELinux policies to try to prevent those components from doing things they probably shouldn't as a belt-and-braces measure. SuSE includes AppArmor, which I guess works in similar ways. If/when they screw up, they release a fix in a timely manner. There's no accounting for the user/admin downloading some random piece of crap that says in the first line of the README "First, disable SELinux as this web app Foo is incompatible with it". Most distros have a fair quality filter. If something's not already in the distro, there are probably some pretty good reasons for it, and if the user doesn't bother to research those and take responsibility for any problems they introduce by using it, then that's their fault.
It's not like this is double standards on my part; I don't blame Windows for the fact it has users who tend to click on links in emails and IM messages purportedly sent by friends and who blindly click 'Allow' to every UAC request they get and so on.
I wrote that already, but in a less dismissive and excusing way. If the user needs to know all sorts of secret "in-the-know" unix crap to run a webserver that's secure, then small businesses and personal users should use Windows Server, which will probably be more secure out of the box, with graphical tools and wizards to help you configure it... since so many people aren't smart enough to use linux, it seems.
The best path to secure systems is have competent admins and let them use the tools they're most familiar with. I used to support an enterprise firewall product that ran on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. If a customer rang up and wanted to know which was "most secure", I'd tell them - "the one you're most familiar with". Now, performance metrics are another matter...
Remember that the majority of successfully hacked webservers are linux systems running apache, so it's difficult to tell whether the systems are more dangerous due to malicious intent or the more commonplace incompetence that riddles free code in general.
Or, howabout, they're running web applications (e.g. bulletin boards written in PHP) that have a poor security track record, and are often administered by people who don't have a decent amount of sysadmin experience? Nothing to do with Apache, the Linux kernel, or anything else that gets included in a standard Enterprise distro, but merely the stuff the user/admin installs afterwards, and doesn't bother to harden appropriately.
You're right that personal responsibility was a large part of Thatcherism, but at least as important was backing for big business (as long as it was privately held). As for civil liberties, well, for some classes of citizen, maybe, but I'm sure there are some people over the water in Northern Ireland who'd beg to differ...
Those would traditionally be the comparisons between UK and US political parties, however, Blair and 9/11 happened, and things have gotten kinda mixed up ever since. Traditionally, Labour had policies more similar to those of a Green or Socialist-and-proud US party. At least whilst out of power, anyway.
I don't think anyone would propose that a government just take a random FOSS project from freshmeat.net and put it into production, least of all with anything resembling sensitive data.
However, both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server have both achieved Common Criteria EAL4+ assurance, making them equivalent to Solaris, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP in the eyes of the evaluation bodies and therefore suitable for many roles within government IT systems.
This Seagate KB article says it's normal for drives with 32MB buffers to show up as 0MB, because the current ATA standard can't report more than 32767.5MB of buffer.
The update is on a bootable FreeDOS CD image. I'm not sure if you can persuade an x86 Mac to boot DOS natively, but at least you don't have to use Windows.
IIUC when the drives powers up it has a 1 in 320 chance of being at log #320, thus a 1 in 320 chance of failing.
I don't think it's as easily quantifiable as that; it also depends on the tester used during production (some make p=0), and how many logs have been recorded since the last power cycle.
I don't think I've ever seen a hardware firmware protection mechanism, but I agree that it should be commonplace these days. I lost a Lite-On DVD-Rom drive after a rogue program (buggy, rather than malicious, I think) lashed out and flipped one particular bit in all 16 bit words of the firmware, causing it to forget how to do pretty much everything.
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The 128 Mp3 preference probably comes from a simpler signal that is easier for your ears to process, in such noise-heavy music as Rock.
I don't think it's as simple as that; the vast majority of my music collection is from various sub-genres of metal; thrash, death, black and so on. I want to hear the cymbals and the guitar distortion as it was on the original recording, not a highly synthetic reproduction.
However, if I'd never heard the CDs, and instead had downloaded all the music I'd ever heard as 128kbps MP3s, I doubt I'd care, and might not even notice if someone played me the CD original (or even find something I disliked about the CD originals).
Before I got my first MP3 player, I did some experiments to see how low I could go, and determined that 192-256kbps (256kbps was a hardware limit of my first player) VBR was sufficient to make it virtually indistinguishable (for me) to the original CD. Going as low as 128kbps seemed to introduce what I'd describe as 'spangliness' (rather than sizzle!) to cymbals; they'd degrade from a high energy crash into a series of quiet bleeps, which I found very unnatural. My 192-256kbps default has been acceptable for all my rips, with the exception of a recording of Holst's Planets Suite, which I found had its string section similarly distorted.
Your old players might have just needed a new Pick-Up Head (PUH); I've replaced one in a 1994-vintage Aiwa MIDI twice, the second time a DIY job and it was pretty easy. Only one bit of soldering to remove the anti-static protection and a little bit of disassembly and reassembly. Cost of a new PUH is about £11.
Yow! Games for the Atari 800 were expensive! In the 80s, I had a Spectrum - the standard price was about GBP5-6 in the early 80s, rising to GBP8-9 in the late 80s. There were also budget titles from GBP1.99-2.99 and premium titles at GBP9.95-14.99.
Actually, there's a more salient point there - older networked multiplayer games tend not to actually get many players. I recently installed my copy of Unreal Tournament on my new machine and went online only to find mostly empty servers. Even when I bought it (budget re-release, and used even) they used to be rammed.
I've had mixed luck with CPU-only upgrades.
I've got a 440BX Asus P2B machine that went from a PII-266 in 1998, to a Celeron 500 in about 2000, and a PIII-450 in about 2003. I've also got a i845PE Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra which went from a Celeron 1.7GHz in 2002 to a P4 2.53GHz in 2008. On the other hand, I've had two machines that I've never upgraded the CPU on because the upgrade path disappeared, or simply wasn't economic.
The Celeron on the other hand can't cope as well with this cache loss though since it has to access memory over the FSB which was also crippled from 800Mhz to 533Mhz. This on an architecture like Netburst that was already STARVED for FSB and memory bandwidth and depended much more on it's larger L2 cache for performance.
'Crippled' isn't really an appropriate word for the FSB on the Celeron, as it implies it's been reduced from the 'un-crippled' speed on the P4s on which it was based. In fact, Celerons are usually based upon older revisions of Intel's contemporaneous flagship consumer processors. P4s started off at 400MHz, and so did the Celeron. P4s get upgraded to 533MHz and later 800MHz, and so do Celerons eventually. The P4 2.40B with its 533MHz FSB was regarded as a reasonable buy at the time, so why would the same bus speed on a budget processor be regarded as 'crippled'? Only if you compare it with the leading-edge consumer processors, but that's not the Celeron's target market and would be like saying a Ford Mondeo is crippled because it's not a Ferrari.
Duron and Sempron were great chips that performed very well for their prices and even overclocked well if you wanted. Celeron has never been worth buying since the 300A.
Depends what your priorities are. I've never had much luck with stability/compatibility from AMD motherboards and their third party (SiS, VIA) chipsets, so I prefer using Asus or Gigabyte-designed Intel motherboards. That necessitates using an Intel CPU. If I need the performance, I'll whatever's in the price/performance sweet spot in their consumer range, if not, a Celeron will make it go until the decent stuff shows up on eBay or the pulls bin at a computer fair for £5-10. Similarly, if one has bought an early-model P4, then a new Celeron might even be a performance upgrade, and without buying a new motherboard (RAM, graphics card, case...)
The first clause of your sentence may be true, but it doesn't imply the second. I've had a happy multi-tuner MythTV/firewall/DHCP/Privoxy/DNS box running off a 1.7GHz Celeron for a couple of years, and it was a scratch machine for about four years before that. The availability of the Celeron allowed me to buy a board with a cheap good-enough CPU, rather than having to spend far more than necessary on the CPU. Eventually, when I wanted transcoding for DVD recording to go quicker, I picked up a used P4 2.53GHz from eBay for about 20 quid that just dropped in.
...but in roughly descending order
You could always modify a USB cable such that it only carries the ground and +5V lines.
If you think USB is scary for the host, check out Firewire's ability to automatically DMA into the host's address space: http://md.hudora.de/presentations/#firewire-pacsec
Okay, it's less secure. I get it.
No, you don't, apparently. Most distros ship pretty secure installations of the components (e.g. Apache for the sake of this discussion) they supply. Red Hat/FC/CentOS include SELinux policies to try to prevent those components from doing things they probably shouldn't as a belt-and-braces measure. SuSE includes AppArmor, which I guess works in similar ways. If/when they screw up, they release a fix in a timely manner. There's no accounting for the user/admin downloading some random piece of crap that says in the first line of the README "First, disable SELinux as this web app Foo is incompatible with it". Most distros have a fair quality filter. If something's not already in the distro, there are probably some pretty good reasons for it, and if the user doesn't bother to research those and take responsibility for any problems they introduce by using it, then that's their fault.
It's not like this is double standards on my part; I don't blame Windows for the fact it has users who tend to click on links in emails and IM messages purportedly sent by friends and who blindly click 'Allow' to every UAC request they get and so on.
I wrote that already, but in a less dismissive and excusing way. If the user needs to know all sorts of secret "in-the-know" unix crap to run a webserver that's secure, then small businesses and personal users should use Windows Server, which will probably be more secure out of the box, with graphical tools and wizards to help you configure it... since so many people aren't smart enough to use linux, it seems.
The best path to secure systems is have competent admins and let them use the tools they're most familiar with. I used to support an enterprise firewall product that ran on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. If a customer rang up and wanted to know which was "most secure", I'd tell them - "the one you're most familiar with". Now, performance metrics are another matter...
I was talking about things like internment, wiretapping and censoring the voices of Sinn Fein spokespeople on media broadcasts.
Remember that the majority of successfully hacked webservers are linux systems running apache, so it's difficult to tell whether the systems are more dangerous due to malicious intent or the more commonplace incompetence that riddles free code in general.
Or, howabout, they're running web applications (e.g. bulletin boards written in PHP) that have a poor security track record, and are often administered by people who don't have a decent amount of sysadmin experience? Nothing to do with Apache, the Linux kernel, or anything else that gets included in a standard Enterprise distro, but merely the stuff the user/admin installs afterwards, and doesn't bother to harden appropriately.
George Bush, twice, nuff said. Followed Blair, twice (ish, anyway - Bush's second term started before Blair's third), nuff said. :-)
You're right that personal responsibility was a large part of Thatcherism, but at least as important was backing for big business (as long as it was privately held). As for civil liberties, well, for some classes of citizen, maybe, but I'm sure there are some people over the water in Northern Ireland who'd beg to differ...
Those would traditionally be the comparisons between UK and US political parties, however, Blair and 9/11 happened, and things have gotten kinda mixed up ever since. Traditionally, Labour had policies more similar to those of a Green or Socialist-and-proud US party. At least whilst out of power, anyway.
It does make me feel like I'm living in Bizarro World when the Tories are defending civil liberties and promoting the use of FOSS, however...
I don't think anyone would propose that a government just take a random FOSS project from freshmeat.net and put it into production, least of all with anything resembling sensitive data.
However, both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server have both achieved Common Criteria EAL4+ assurance, making them equivalent to Solaris, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP in the eyes of the evaluation bodies and therefore suitable for many roles within government IT systems.
This Seagate KB article says it's normal for drives with 32MB buffers to show up as 0MB, because the current ATA standard can't report more than 32767.5MB of buffer.
Sorry, I meant to link to this article
Seagate's knowledge base article says it's affected and that you should email in if you're running older than SN06.
The update is on a bootable FreeDOS CD image. I'm not sure if you can persuade an x86 Mac to boot DOS natively, but at least you don't have to use Windows.
FYI, SD1B appears to work fine on my two ST31000333AS drives (P/N 9FZ136-300).
I don't think it's as easily quantifiable as that; it also depends on the tester used during production (some make p=0), and how many logs have been recorded since the last power cycle.
I don't think I've ever seen a hardware firmware protection mechanism, but I agree that it should be commonplace these days. I lost a Lite-On DVD-Rom drive after a rogue program (buggy, rather than malicious, I think) lashed out and flipped one particular bit in all 16 bit words of the firmware, causing it to forget how to do pretty much everything.