They have computers. I get email from them about once a week for assistance with some financial transaction or other. What they lack is good banks. The checks they send seem to always have problems. I now insist they send money using Western Union from now on.
Most wireless sensors do not have a receiver. They have no way be asked to respond to a poll. This is for cost and battery life. Wireless sensors with a small self contained battery simply do not have the space or power to run a full time receiver.
Sensors with receivers simply are not for the home market, but are only for high value inventory protection such as museums and other hard to wire large locations where power besides a small battery is connected to the sensor. These sensors cost the same as many small home alarm systems.
Sorry. I'll try to be more clear. If I take a wireless sensor for your alarm and remove the logic but keep the transmitter and transmit garbage, I can mask the real sensor signal while I walk into your house without the alarm box noticing. When your real sensor was supposed to call home to say I'm OK, one or 2 missed reports doesn't cause an alarm. By the time the noise causes enough lost reports, I'll be long gone as the reports not caused by door opening are only a few a day. All that is needed is for preventing the main panel from hearing the door sensor when I open the door. The missing report won't be noticed for up to over an hour.
Buying a monitoring contract is much cheaper than buying an alarm bundled with a contract.
Monitoring is about $10/month. When bundled with a alarm package, monitoring is often $45/month. It's much cheaper to self install and buy monitoring, even though you pay more for the alarm. The first year of monitoring will pay the difference.
A challenge response requires the remote sensor to have an active receiver.. not pratical on a coin battery.
The spoofing is taken care of just fine in most alarms. The reports are scheduled and arrive like clockwork. A few way off time reports is a problem even if the code is a recognized one. That is all that is required. Only the right report at the expected time is valid. The report times on most alarms is varied so clocks near the same report times don't overlap multiple times, so one missed report from self jamming by other sensors nearby is not a fault. Repeated missed reports is a trouble code.
This would take forever. The devices to save battery life only transmit a short packet every half hour or so. It varies to prevent repeated collisions with other sensors. 1 missed packet isn't reported as a fault. A series (varies by brand but usualy 3) of missed reports becomes a fault. This fault generation can take hours, plenty of time to raid and be gone again. Use wired for the perimiter.
If you really installed them, you would know for a fact to conserve battery life, they have a long check-in interval for monitored sensors. By the time I opened the door and brought in my tool caddy, etc, I would have had plenty of time to find valuables, disconnect the main box, and leave. Do your homework. A missed signal will take a while to become a trouble report. My alarm's wireless has long check-in's and 3 have to be missed to be a trouble report. For this reason the perimiter is WIRED, not wireless. The frequency of operation is well known by brand, so wireless portion is only used on interiour sensors such as the medicine cabinet (foster kids) and shop cabinets.
The level of security varies by the installed system vunerabilities. Wireless is a weak spot that won't detect short term interferance as an attack. Primary entry points should be wired.
We have Offoce 2000 at work. Does Office 2007 do anything Office 2003 doesn't? Or even anything Office 2000 doesn't? What makes it worth the extra Five hundred dollars per license????
That is exactly why I switched from the Microsoft platform at home. I have my desktop, laptop, the wife the same, and had various foster kids circulate through. The product simply isn't priced for the home family. Old versions were simply installed on every machine in the house from the one purchased copy. New versions cost more and are less useful with the anti-piracy stuff, so even the first copy is no longer purchased. Maybe they make up for the loss of me buying a copy by those who do buy 2 or more copies who didn't before.
The alternatives are rapidly replacing the Microsoft OS and productivity system of choice. My dad bought a Mac as many have. Many others have installed Ubuntu with it's default office suite. It's legal, cuts piracy, and isn't good for Microsoft.
Microsoft is losing pirates. They are losing them to the alternatives and in doing so, are losing control of the platform.
which means various ways of bricking the player and/or its drive.
Companies should focus on what people want, not retaining the ablilty to destroy someting I bouught simply because I used it in a mannor, or someone else used the same model in a mannor they didn't approve.
I avoid buying products with remote destruct devices embeded in them.
I'm not even sure it's possible to change the DRM affecting a given (published) Blu-Ray disc -- after all, whatever they do, you still have the physical disc, which is still (as far as I know) entirely read-only.
Search the forums.. In theory, the disk is read only. In truth, the disk and unique keys which can be disabled in the player simply by playing another movie that has a key update table which bans the movie. To play that movie again, you will need an older player that has never played a newer disk which would have updated the list of banned keys.
"Low latency satellite bandwidth at USD 500 a Mbps or less by 2010"
Due to speed, time, distance physics, geostationary is high latency simply due to the speed of light and the distance out to the geostationary belt.
Because they're approximately 5 times closer to the earth than geo-satellites, the latency is reduced by approximately five times. It's a constellation of satellites?
That leaves low earth orbit. Low earth orbit means dopplar shift and high power or real time tracking.
n other words, they didn't sue the companies and owners, they are doing a "civil forfeiture" type of case. Nobody affected by this case was notified or served process.
I think it would be fitting if one of the domain owners from another country found the state of Kentucky guilty of the theft of the domains and as a penalty Kentucky had to forfeit this domain name. http://kentucky.gov/
The deal is they can't stand the competition. From the news article..
"Unlicensed Internet gambling significantly undermines and threatens horseracing, Kentucky's signature industry and a key tourism industry, by creating unregulated and untaxed competition; "
Follow the money. It has nothing to do with protecting the citizens of the state, but everything to do with protecting the gambling revenue of the state from competition. The unregulated and untaxed competition is the issue.
What the hell is so fundamentally wrong with gambling?
This is not the issue. The state has horse racing. The issue is someone else is gambling outside of the state control and is in competition with it.
Personally my biggest issue with gambling is I am not the house. After taking a stastics class I learned to never gamble against the house. Over time it is always a loss. I've done a lot better in the stock market. Many people forget buy low sell high. I sold 30K of stock last fall at $26 a share. It's now $18.75. I hope the market goes up and down a few more times before I retire. Remember, buy low.
Is this the case? My phone has a sliding lens cover,
That is the exception. Here is a page of camera phone reviews. Take a look and identify the ones with a lens cover of any type and the typical reviews of the photos. Camera phones in the US are generally known for their quality as OK for snaps, but not for good photos.
Te reviews are not pretty. Out of a full page of reviews, only 2 are OK. I'll stick with a real camera for photography. For those who don't read the reviews, here is a list of clips from the reviews.
Here the full screen comes into its own allowing for good steady alignment of photos without having to squint at a tiny image. It is a shame, in this regard, that the pixelage hasn't been boosted to 5 with a more comprehensive lens arrangement.
it's a shame the camera doesn't produce better pictures.
Stills are limited to 1.3 megapixels which really is low for any mobile, and for Sony Ericsson, which produces some of the best cameraphones out there, is shameful.
Samsung still seems to be skimping on camera lenses, at least for their American phones. The pictures we took with the Samsung Instinct's 2-megapixel sensor were pitiful.
The main camera is also very impressive. It's a 5-megapixel model
It might be telling that Nokia doesn't include a dedicate camera button, and instead the camera feature is buried under three menu layers. But pictures were actually not bad.
Image quality on the 2-megapixel camera was dismal.
Disappointingly, the LED photo light only worked okay for close up shots and didn't perform well at over a couple of metres, which meant photos of mates in dark pubs and clubs didn't come out well."
Broadly speaking, we saw desaturated colours, consistently soft focus, and the "hot" areas of our images flaring.
The auto-focus works well for the most part, though it sometimes struggled with close-up shots and is quite slow to settle. Colour reproduction was passable,
Let's start with the five-megapixel camera. Despite its multiple-pixel capability, compared with the Samsung G800, the Soul's camera features appear a tad lacking.
Most of all, though, we'd like to see great-looking pictures, but the pics we got from the Samsung P520 Armani were as disappointing as any average, budget Samsung phone.
It's obvious what we need: something that gives you the freedom you need, on an open platform,
Not really. Often phone users simply don't use the camera simply because the phone is handled a lot and there is no protection for the lens, so camera phone photos are taken through glass with finger prints, lint, smudges, scratches, etc. Other than being handy for a cute baby snapshot or beer party shots, they are not much use for quality photos. Add to the fact that many carriers want to force you to send the photos on a limited data plan, and then you have to go online to get them. I use the camera with a card. I shoot, plug the card into a reader, or the one at the local drug store, and I have the photos. My camera covers the lens so it's rarely full of dirt, scratches, etc. Other than being in easy reach most of the time, a cell phone camera has little else going for it.
Well, I was factoring in stuff like buying a laptop from scratch. And then there's price. Low quality mics often result in low quality sound. A good set of drum mics with stands alone are going to run you, cheapest, $300.
There's ways you can cut corners, I'm sure, but $5,000 was a rough estimate anyways. d:
I find most bands worth recording and are getting real gigs have sound gear. With their gear, you capture the true sound of the band. With some bands, the easy way to get them to do a proper recording with limited quality equipment, is to record the entire band and use that as your click track for the individual sessions with the performers. That way the best condenser microphone can be used for all the vocals one at a time, etc. I use an inexpensive mixer with only 4 mic inputs, so I do this as normal practice. With 2 good microphones and recording each piece as a separate track, you can do excellent studio recordings with full separation for the final mix. Plan on spending a full day to record and re-record each track for just a couple songs. When done properly, you become the band's hero. I use this mixer simply because I am on a severe budget. http://www.behringer.com/1204FX/index.cfm?lang=ENG With 2 decent microphones and then using a couple from the band, I can get couple decent tracks laid down at a time. I often use the mixer to create my stereo wet tracks from my single tracks. It has very usable FX. The FX in Audacity work well also. I hope to start using Ardour soon, but I am having trouble with Jack. I'll get that straightened out later. Audacity is simpler for beginners.
For about $5,000 you can buy a complete set of recording equipment - the necessary laptop, software, mics, etc. to go with your instruments. If you want to do it on the cheap, well... that's why recording studios exist.
5 Grand isn't needed. Using a laptop, free software (Ubuntu Studio) an inexpensive interface, small mixer, & mics can be done for about half that. It works fine for the band I record. Many small bands already have most of the supplies already such as a laptop, mixer and microphones. If these already exist, then free software and an under $300 interface will work nicely.
Cheap is the under $30 Berhinger which does CD or DAT sample rates and bits. In Linux Ubuntu Studio it it truly plug an play as a USB input/output device. Open Audacity and select the USB audio for the source and hit record. http://www.zzounds.com/item--BEHUCA202
Don't record off a Sound Blaster compatible card except for maybe webcasts and other lower quality work. The hardware has a fixed bitrate, regardless of what you set in software.
The next step up in hardware will give you 96K 24 bit recordings.
Many studios are finding competion from the inexpensive gear that just works.
My setup excluding the already purchased computer cost under $500 for the mixer, a couple mics, and the interface. I have the ability to record 4 tracks at once and and layer over 30 tracks for post processing and adding wet tracks.
A typical session is recording the 4 drun tracks to a click track which are then played back while recording the back-up vocals, bass, keyboard and lead guitar. These are synced (remove latency) and then the lead vocal is recorded while the prior 8 tracks are played back. This is followed with adding wet tracks with EQ, effects, delay, reverb, etc. prior to the final mixdown for the CD. Under $200 4 channel interface able to do 96K 24 bit recording is here; http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&m=Y&IC=PRI1394&A=RetrieveSku&Q=
Who will have enought money to buy one blu-ray player, 40" LCD TV and 5.1 sound?
And who will pay extra for a movie that won't play on their laptop, in the car DVD for the kids on trips, at your friend's house, portable DVD player, etc.?
Pay more, does less. Has trouble selling. It took them this long to figure that one out? All they had to do was go back to Laserdisk. It was high quality, cost more, and couldn't record. This is just a new high resolution expensive format that does less. They were expecting better sales than laser disk? They are selling to the same small bunch that bought laser disks.
The only reason loudspeaker arrays are used, is volume. Multiple parallel drivers can produce more volume than a single driver.
Partly right. An array extends the frequency range down. An array of close spaced 6 inch drivers can replace a subwoofer as well as cover the normal range. An array can create a flatter wavefront, so they can produce narrower pattern to reduce feedback while running at high volume. This narrower pattern in large arrays has to be compensated for because the pattern becomes too narrow. This is why large arrays are curved, not flat. A large flat array can be used in an outdoor setting to project most of the power in a long narrow pattern such is common in many outdoor concerts at a waterfront for example.
If you want to play with software that shows the relation of speakers in an array and how they change the sound field, there is free software from Yamaha that can be used to learn this stuff. Pro audio was my specialty for a long time.
A single speaker in a box is much less directional than an array of speakers phased in boxes to create a unified steerable wavefront.
"The Yamaha Sound System Simulator is free software that can be downloaded from this web site."
"Simulation begins when you select the speaker array. You can change several conditions for the speaker array in real-time as you view the simulation result to optimize the sound field design."
Normaly I don't plug a manufacture, but the software is free to play with.
Disclaimer, I have no relation to Yamaha except I own some of their products.
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format
The memory is only 1 Gig in size. This was designed for iPods and cell phones which are often used at work, in transportation, and other noisy environments and on equipment with out amps with only.1% THD or worse quality. 24 bit is lost in these invironments. There are very few golden ears listening to a nano that could even tell the difference between a CD quality lossless 44.1K sampled 16 Bit or 24 bit recording. Few can notice the change when the program is recorded in 48K or 96K 24 bit.
DVD audio is included in many DVD players. You missed the target. No one adopted the high priced format for music, especially when they crippled the standard CD layer to poor quality. The high quality was encrypted and the CD quality was vastly substandard. This format was stillborn for anyone wishing to buy music to rip to an iPod.
but it might take off if you made it easily playable.
Point well taken. Since they did the oposite and added DRM (copy protection) to the high quality and distorted the standard CD layer, it wasn't worth the extra price.
I might even pay a slight premium.
Funny how the industry thinks they know what the consumer wants, but doesn't ship what they ask for. The request is simple.. Quality for an affordable price. In other words, value.
I don't want a memory stick containing lossy 320kbit songs,
You got that right, especialy at full retal prices for both the music and the memory.
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Would they get the message if higher education simply left the state?
Other states would have an interest in retaining higher education and may reject these terms that may do away with higher education campuses.
Care to do all your higher education online after the campuses become concert venues?
Nigerians have computers?
They have computers. I get email from them about once a week for assistance with some financial transaction or other. What they lack is good banks. The checks they send seem to always have problems. I now insist they send money using Western Union from now on.
Most wireless sensors do not have a receiver. They have no way be asked to respond to a poll. This is for cost and battery life. Wireless sensors with a small self contained battery simply do not have the space or power to run a full time receiver.
Sensors with receivers simply are not for the home market, but are only for high value inventory protection such as museums and other hard to wire large locations where power besides a small battery is connected to the sensor. These sensors cost the same as many small home alarm systems.
Sorry. I'll try to be more clear. If I take a wireless sensor for your alarm and remove the logic but keep the transmitter and transmit garbage, I can mask the real sensor signal while I walk into your house without the alarm box noticing. When your real sensor was supposed to call home to say I'm OK, one or 2 missed reports doesn't cause an alarm. By the time the noise causes enough lost reports, I'll be long gone as the reports not caused by door opening are only a few a day. All that is needed is for preventing the main panel from hearing the door sensor when I open the door. The missing report won't be noticed for up to over an hour.
Buying a monitoring contract is much cheaper than buying an alarm bundled with a contract.
Monitoring is about $10/month. When bundled with a alarm package, monitoring is often $45/month. It's much cheaper to self install and buy monitoring, even though you pay more for the alarm. The first year of monitoring will pay the difference.
A challenge response requires the remote sensor to have an active receiver.. not pratical on a coin battery.
The spoofing is taken care of just fine in most alarms. The reports are scheduled and arrive like clockwork. A few way off time reports is a problem even if the code is a recognized one. That is all that is required. Only the right report at the expected time is valid. The report times on most alarms is varied so clocks near the same report times don't overlap multiple times, so one missed report from self jamming by other sensors nearby is not a fault. Repeated missed reports is a trouble code.
This would take forever. The devices to save battery life only transmit a short packet every half hour or so. It varies to prevent repeated collisions with other sensors. 1 missed packet isn't reported as a fault. A series (varies by brand but usualy 3) of missed reports becomes a fault. This fault generation can take hours, plenty of time to raid and be gone again. Use wired for the perimiter.
If you really installed them, you would know for a fact to conserve battery life, they have a long check-in interval for monitored sensors. By the time I opened the door and brought in my tool caddy, etc, I would have had plenty of time to find valuables, disconnect the main box, and leave. Do your homework. A missed signal will take a while to become a trouble report. My alarm's wireless has long check-in's and 3 have to be missed to be a trouble report. For this reason the perimiter is WIRED, not wireless. The frequency of operation is well known by brand, so wireless portion is only used on interiour sensors such as the medicine cabinet (foster kids) and shop cabinets.
The level of security varies by the installed system vunerabilities. Wireless is a weak spot that won't detect short term interferance as an attack. Primary entry points should be wired.
The rendering for the movie Monsters Inc is a great example. That movie made how much?
We have Offoce 2000 at work. Does Office 2007 do anything Office 2003 doesn't? Or even anything Office 2000 doesn't? What makes it worth the extra Five hundred dollars per license????
That is exactly why I switched from the Microsoft platform at home. I have my desktop, laptop, the wife the same, and had various foster kids circulate through. The product simply isn't priced for the home family. Old versions were simply installed on every machine in the house from the one purchased copy. New versions cost more and are less useful with the anti-piracy stuff, so even the first copy is no longer purchased. Maybe they make up for the loss of me buying a copy by those who do buy 2 or more copies who didn't before.
The alternatives are rapidly replacing the Microsoft OS and productivity system of choice. My dad bought a Mac as many have. Many others have installed Ubuntu with it's default office suite. It's legal, cuts piracy, and isn't good for Microsoft.
Microsoft is losing pirates. They are losing them to the alternatives and in doing so, are losing control of the platform.
which means various ways of bricking the player and/or its drive.
Companies should focus on what people want, not retaining the ablilty to destroy someting I bouught simply because I used it in a mannor, or someone else used the same model in a mannor they didn't approve.
I avoid buying products with remote destruct devices embeded in them.
I'm not even sure it's possible to change the DRM affecting a given (published) Blu-Ray disc -- after all, whatever they do, you still have the physical disc, which is still (as far as I know) entirely read-only.
Search the forums.. In theory, the disk is read only. In truth, the disk and unique keys which can be disabled in the player simply by playing another movie that has a key update table which bans the movie. To play that movie again, you will need an older player that has never played a newer disk which would have updated the list of banned keys.
Wow! It's like you're psychic!
Shhh. It's an insult to all those who didn't read the article like the one I replied to.
"Low latency satellite bandwidth at USD 500 a Mbps or less by 2010"
Due to speed, time, distance physics, geostationary is high latency simply due to the speed of light and the distance out to the geostationary belt.
Because they're approximately 5 times closer to the earth than geo-satellites, the latency is reduced by approximately five times. It's a constellation of satellites?
That leaves low earth orbit. Low earth orbit means dopplar shift and high power or real time tracking.
Maybe for businesses..
Or maybe ISP's who then run WiMax.
n other words, they didn't sue the companies and owners, they are doing a "civil forfeiture" type of case. Nobody affected by this case was notified or served process.
I think it would be fitting if one of the domain owners from another country found the state of Kentucky guilty of the theft of the domains and as a penalty Kentucky had to forfeit this domain name. http://kentucky.gov/
Seriously what is the issue here?
The deal is they can't stand the competition. From the news article..
"Unlicensed Internet gambling significantly undermines and threatens horseracing, Kentucky's signature industry and a key tourism industry, by creating unregulated and untaxed competition; "
Follow the money. It has nothing to do with protecting the citizens of the state, but everything to do with protecting the gambling revenue of the state from competition. The unregulated and untaxed competition is the issue.
What the hell is so fundamentally wrong with gambling?
This is not the issue. The state has horse racing. The issue is someone else is gambling outside of the state control and is in competition with it.
Personally my biggest issue with gambling is I am not the house. After taking a stastics class I learned to never gamble against the house. Over time it is always a loss. I've done a lot better in the stock market. Many people forget buy low sell high. I sold 30K of stock last fall at $26 a share. It's now $18.75. I hope the market goes up and down a few more times before I retire. Remember, buy low.
Is this the case? My phone has a sliding lens cover,
That is the exception. Here is a page of camera phone reviews. Take a look and identify the ones with a lens cover of any type and the typical reviews of the photos. Camera phones in the US are generally known for their quality as OK for snaps, but not for good photos.
http://www.livingroom.org.au/cameraphone/
Te reviews are not pretty. Out of a full page of reviews, only 2 are OK. I'll stick with a real camera for photography. For those who don't read the reviews, here is a list of clips from the reviews.
Here the full screen comes into its own allowing for good steady alignment of photos without having to squint at a tiny image. It is a shame, in this regard, that the pixelage hasn't been boosted to 5 with a more comprehensive lens arrangement.
it's a shame the camera doesn't produce better pictures.
Stills are limited to 1.3 megapixels which really is low for any mobile, and for Sony Ericsson, which produces some of the best cameraphones out there, is shameful.
Samsung still seems to be skimping on camera lenses, at least for their American phones. The pictures we took with the Samsung Instinct's 2-megapixel sensor were pitiful.
The main camera is also very impressive. It's a 5-megapixel model
It might be telling that Nokia doesn't include a dedicate camera button, and instead the camera feature is buried under three menu layers. But pictures were actually not bad.
Image quality on the 2-megapixel camera was dismal.
Disappointingly, the LED photo light only worked okay for close up shots and didn't perform well at over a couple of metres, which meant photos of mates in dark pubs and clubs didn't come out well."
Broadly speaking, we saw desaturated colours, consistently soft focus, and the "hot" areas of our images flaring.
The auto-focus works well for the most part, though it sometimes struggled with close-up shots and is quite slow to settle. Colour reproduction was passable,
Let's start with the five-megapixel camera. Despite its multiple-pixel capability, compared with the Samsung G800, the Soul's camera features appear a tad lacking.
Most of all, though, we'd like to see great-looking pictures, but the pics we got from the Samsung P520 Armani were as disappointing as any average, budget Samsung phone.
It's obvious what we need: something that gives you the freedom you need, on an open platform,
Not really. Often phone users simply don't use the camera simply because the phone is handled a lot and there is no protection for the lens, so camera phone photos are taken through glass with finger prints, lint, smudges, scratches, etc. Other than being handy for a cute baby snapshot or beer party shots, they are not much use for quality photos. Add to the fact that many carriers want to force you to send the photos on a limited data plan, and then you have to go online to get them. I use the camera with a card. I shoot, plug the card into a reader, or the one at the local drug store, and I have the photos. My camera covers the lens so it's rarely full of dirt, scratches, etc. Other than being in easy reach most of the time, a cell phone camera has little else going for it.
Well, I was factoring in stuff like buying a laptop from scratch. And then there's price. Low quality mics often result in low quality sound. A good set of drum mics with stands alone are going to run you, cheapest, $300.
There's ways you can cut corners, I'm sure, but $5,000 was a rough estimate anyways. d:
I find most bands worth recording and are getting real gigs have sound gear. With their gear, you capture the true sound of the band. With some bands, the easy way to get them to do a proper recording with limited quality equipment, is to record the entire band and use that as your click track for the individual sessions with the performers. That way the best condenser microphone can be used for all the vocals one at a time, etc. I use an inexpensive mixer with only 4 mic inputs, so I do this as normal practice. With 2 good microphones and recording each piece as a separate track, you can do excellent studio recordings with full separation for the final mix. Plan on spending a full day to record and re-record each track for just a couple songs. When done properly, you become the band's hero.
I use this mixer simply because I am on a severe budget.
http://www.behringer.com/1204FX/index.cfm?lang=ENG
With 2 decent microphones and then using a couple from the band, I can get couple decent tracks laid down at a time.
I often use the mixer to create my stereo wet tracks from my single tracks. It has very usable FX. The FX in Audacity work well also. I hope to start using Ardour soon, but I am having trouble with Jack. I'll get that straightened out later. Audacity is simpler for beginners.
For about $5,000 you can buy a complete set of recording equipment - the necessary laptop, software, mics, etc. to go with your instruments. If you want to do it on the cheap, well... that's why recording studios exist.
5 Grand isn't needed. Using a laptop, free software (Ubuntu Studio) an inexpensive interface, small mixer, & mics can be done for about half that. It works fine for the band I record. Many small bands already have most of the supplies already such as a laptop, mixer and microphones. If these already exist, then free software and an under $300 interface will work nicely.
Cheap is the under $30 Berhinger which does CD or DAT sample rates and bits. In Linux Ubuntu Studio it it truly plug an play as a USB input/output device. Open Audacity and select the USB audio for the source and hit record.
http://www.zzounds.com/item--BEHUCA202
Don't record off a Sound Blaster compatible card except for maybe webcasts and other lower quality work. The hardware has a fixed bitrate, regardless of what you set in software.
The next step up in hardware will give you 96K 24 bit recordings.
Many studios are finding competion from the inexpensive gear that just works.
My setup excluding the already purchased computer cost under $500 for the mixer, a couple mics, and the interface. I have the ability to record 4 tracks at once and and layer over 30 tracks for post processing and adding wet tracks.
A typical session is recording the 4 drun tracks to a click track which are then played back while recording the back-up vocals, bass, keyboard and lead guitar. These are synced (remove latency) and then the lead vocal is recorded while the prior 8 tracks are played back. This is followed with adding wet tracks with EQ, effects, delay, reverb, etc. prior to the final mixdown for the CD.
Under $200 4 channel interface able to do 96K 24 bit recording is here;
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&m=Y&IC=PRI1394&A=RetrieveSku&Q=
For a little more money, recording 8 tracks at once is the studio standard for PC based recording studios, but mics, mixer, and interface will run over $500 for that set-up.
http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/product/Echo-AudioFire8-8-Channel-FireWire-Audio-Interface?sku=247003
The cost of the set-up is less than a typical studio session. This recording in your own studio is common now that the high cost has been eliminated.
Who will have enought money to buy one blu-ray player, 40" LCD TV and 5.1 sound?
And who will pay extra for a movie that won't play on their laptop, in the car DVD for the kids on trips, at your friend's house, portable DVD player, etc.?
Pay more, does less. Has trouble selling. It took them this long to figure that one out? All they had to do was go back to Laserdisk. It was high quality, cost more, and couldn't record. This is just a new high resolution expensive format that does less. They were expecting better sales than laser disk? They are selling to the same small bunch that bought laser disks.
Can anyone say DRM?
That's secondary to the primary reason.. High prices and limited selection.
DVD is good enough, plays everywhere.
Blu-Ray, costs more and works only on the expensive player in the living room.
DRM and the possiblilty that your movie in the future will be revoked is of interest to only a few.
we all know it'll only catch on if the porn industry start distributing on microSD as well.
Have you heard much of the new music that comes with warning lables on the cover? Much is soft audio porn already.
The only reason loudspeaker arrays are used, is volume. Multiple parallel drivers can produce more volume than a single driver.
Partly right. An array extends the frequency range down. An array of close spaced 6 inch drivers can replace a subwoofer as well as cover the normal range. An array can create a flatter wavefront, so they can produce narrower pattern to reduce feedback while running at high volume. This narrower pattern in large arrays has to be compensated for because the pattern becomes too narrow. This is why large arrays are curved, not flat. A large flat array can be used in an outdoor setting to project most of the power in a long narrow pattern such is common in many outdoor concerts at a waterfront for example.
If you want to play with software that shows the relation of speakers in an array and how they change the sound field, there is free software from Yamaha that can be used to learn this stuff. Pro audio was my specialty for a long time.
A single speaker in a box is much less directional than an array of speakers phased in boxes to create a unified steerable wavefront.
http://www.yamahaproaudio.com/downloads/firm_soft/ys3/index.html
"The Yamaha Sound System Simulator is free software that can be downloaded from this web site."
"Simulation begins when you select the speaker array. You can change several conditions for the speaker array in real-time as you view the simulation result to optimize the sound field design."
Normaly I don't plug a manufacture, but the software is free to play with.
Disclaimer, I have no relation to Yamaha except I own some of their products.
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format
The memory is only 1 Gig in size. This was designed for iPods and cell phones which are often used at work, in transportation, and other noisy environments and on equipment with out amps with only .1% THD or worse quality. 24 bit is lost in these invironments. There are very few golden ears listening to a nano that could even tell the difference between a CD quality lossless 44.1K sampled 16 Bit or 24 bit recording. Few can notice the change when the program is recorded in 48K or 96K 24 bit.
DVD audio is included in many DVD players. You missed the target. No one adopted the high priced format for music, especially when they crippled the standard CD layer to poor quality. The high quality was encrypted and the CD quality was vastly substandard. This format was stillborn for anyone wishing to buy music to rip to an iPod.
but it might take off if you made it easily playable.
Point well taken. Since they did the oposite and added DRM (copy protection) to the high quality and distorted the standard CD layer, it wasn't worth the extra price.
I might even pay a slight premium.
Funny how the industry thinks they know what the consumer wants, but doesn't ship what they ask for. The request is simple.. Quality for an affordable price. In other words, value.
I don't want a memory stick containing lossy 320kbit songs,
You got that right, especialy at full retal prices for both the music and the memory.