And I don't mind it, but why are vital things like a second decoder not in the spec to make it at least upgradeable. Or even just disabled until a special disc is put in to flash the firmware to activate it ?
The article mentions that there isn't enough RAM for a paticular decoder to operate. There isn't a single software upgrade that can get past the lack of the physical memory. The boards in most of the players isn't laid out where memory can be just plugged in. A small run to produce new boards and the labor cost of a recall for a board swap is cost prohibitive. The early production run did not have the 2nd decoder built-in because the spec was probably still being finalized. There were no discs out at that time to even verify the decoder would work if it was installed at that time.
This is much like the early days of UHF TV (I'm old enough to remember) when the FCC mandated 82 channel reception. Many sets shipped with UHF tuners that didn't function. Several years later, the failure was noticed when the first UHF sets went live.
This is why I didn't buy a flatscreen with a tuner before the local broadcasters were on the air. I waited until after the signal was established.
If the company was ethical, they should have a trade-in program instead of expecting the end user to bite the entire cost of replacement.
And the articles don't give enough details to judge much.
No but the video and voice dialog show flaws in measurements. In video 4 he reads the system RPM often mentioning speeds in the neighborhood of 40-50 RPM. Anyone paying attention will realize that is less than one revolution per second. Watch the video and tell me again that is less than one revolution per second.
I liked the writers embellishment. I never laughed so hard in my life. I'm glad you posted earlier that you enjoyed the roasting on Slashdot. You gotta admit, it was very funny.
Welcome to Slashdot where the line between humor and flame is very small and many fail to see it. Your son is welcome too. Keep up the good work. I would hate to see the damage the RIAA would do without you. Thanks. Give'em hell.
These cables are subject to coral, rocks, currents and shifting water... is it any wonder they wear through with the constant rubbing up against rocks and whatnot?
WTF??? Check a map. All areas of the cuts except one are in the end of a body of water with nowhere for the water to flow to/from. These areas are high current locations like the great lakes in the US.. Stagnant. You may get choppy seas from wind, but there isn't much flow to speak of. Coral reefs don't grow in stagnant water. I have not seen any travel brochures for great dive sites in the area.
The comments I have found on diving in the area seem to be along the lines of this post. "Hi Folks
Have dove the Med on a number occasions and in different locals such as Cyprus,Italy, and Greece. I think the only highlight of diving the Med is artifact diving. Water clarity and marine life was nowhere near what I expected in fact down right dismal. This I believe is attributed to the European method of sewage non-treatment and overfishing practices. Have dove the Adriatic as well, Croatia down to Albania and found much the same conditions, albeit the marine life was more abundant. The Med/Adriatic would not be my choice for a diving holiday, but if there for business purposes water is water:), Oh yeah not mention the permits you require to dive Greece:(."
Most scientists reject things greater than 2.5 standard deviations away.
Unless the cause is understood. For example, a few floods here and there are way out of the standard deviation for normal rainfall. Detroit has exceeded their snow removal budget this year several times over. Storm conditions are understood and can cause rainfall and snowbanks outside the 2.5 standard deviation. There is a standard for normal weather. The insurance industry has to deal with the outliers.
Lock-in is anything that creates barriers to moving to a competitor.
Often lock-in is the driving force to open standards and the proprietary vendors have to change or die. The most recent example of this that I can point to is the theatrical lighting industry. Martin, Strand, MSI, and other inteligent lighting manufactures all had their own standard for running lighting. Touring companies found it difficult to interface with all the lighting systems. A committie was formed to produce a standard that wasn't any of the already established standards to avoid any patent and royalty bias toward any one manufacture.
The birth of the DMX-512 standard came out. Now it is almost impossible to sell any lighting system that doesn't support the standard.
http://www.usitt.org/standards/DMX512.html "This standard is intended to provide for interoperability at both communication and mechanical levels with controllers made by different manufacturers."
Almost everything now uses the new standard from Drama, Dance, and Club Nightlife. If you buy an intelligeht moving light, It's almost guaranteed to use the DMX-512 signal, even if the connector isn't the standard 5 pin XLR. An exception to the DMX standard is the one for architectural using multiple wall stations for building lights. Even these control systems often output DMX-512 signals to use standard dimmers.
In some specialty fields some still try with something other than the standard. As an example the animated Christmas lights often use the Lights-o-Rama system which is incompatible with everything else.
It is a cheaper alternative with a lower cost per dimmer, but it is limited to dimmers only. It won't run all the disco and concert moving color changing lights. And of course you can only use their software and interface to run the dimmers.
Microsoft gets to deduct that taxable employee income from its own taxable corporate income, and that's where Microsoft got a tax-free $3.1 billion in cash in fiscal 1999: "Stock option income tax benefits."
On the other hand, without the deductions, the option program probably would not exist. I get to claim about $30,000 in options on my taxes this year. The employees are more likely than Microsoft to not spend it out of state.
f taxation and cost of doing business were the deciding factor of where a company locates, Silicon Valley would not exist, and the World Trade Center would be in rural Idaho.
With the internet economy, The building elsewhere is in full swing. Intel has headquarters in Silicon Valley, but the fabs are located in places like the farm land on the outskirts of Hillsboro Oregon. The Campuses of Ronler Acres, Cornell Oaks, and Jones Farm are all named after the farm they were built on. The town has now grown up around the campuses so it no longer looks like farmland. Other locations include Arizona and New Mexico. This is not typical Silicon Valley addresses. If one state has rising taxes, the decision to build is based on the best option. No single state can squeeze Intel without feeling the reduction and dead growth in that state. Taxes are constantly on the negotiation table. I am sure the same applies to Microsoft except they are more centrally located and therefore has less leverage at the tax table.
Absolutely not, they already pay WA state taxes, the article is misleading. MS does pay WA taxes, and presumably quite a bit. They pay property taxes on the land they occupy and sales tax on anything that is purchased for the business.
A common mistake of liberal government is the zero sum economy. The socialist angle of tax the rich because they can afford it is a big mistake. They often look at the golden goose and think their cup is half empty and start looking for ways to get their cup full.
This has been tried in the past with a luxury tax on the manufacture of yachts. The result is the US manufactured yachts were then overpriced and the consumers bought competitive products overseas and registered them in Panama, Bahamas, etc. The US yacht manufacture is now out of business.
Wake up. Going after Microsoft for taxes will likely result in re-location of their headquarters. Now instead of a glass half full, you get no glass at all. They are already smelling the grass on the other side of the fence. How is this a win? At a half billion/year, It wouldn't take too much imagination for the bean counters to up and re-locate.
If $$$ were king, they would figure out what the consumer wants and provide huge archives of back catalog at cheap prices and people would flock to the offerings for stuff their 30 to 60 Gig media players. How many people hit the national average and only buy 2 CD's per year? Their fight to keep the ASP high has killed the sales as much as anything. There is competition for the entertainment dollar. An upgrade to broadband, better car, bigger house, new flat screen, etc are replacing the CD's as a consumer choice item.
Wold you buy more than $25 worth of music in a year if it was 5-10 cents/track?
A large predatory animal can be quite dangerous once wounded (by lack of CD sales) and will attack anything
By the same token, when a large predatory animal starts being a threat where they were a member of society, they find the community no longer will do business with him and only has a party when he is dead.
He hasn't yet figured this out to fix lagging CD sales. Some of the labels are figuring it out. The RIAA radar is a hint for some.
Being listed here is a bad dent in sales. Failing to display the Compact Disc tm logo is another dent in sales as without it, DRM and copy protection problems are likely. A high price is also a factor as is participation in the loudness war. A few are getting it.
You forget that Detroit at least has the bad habit of wiring up almost everything with the same wire gauge. The 15A fuse connected to the fuel pump, the 10A fuse that runs the signals, and the 5A fuse for the radio are probably all connected to the same wire gauge.
Don't make safety assumptions. The price of copper is way up. It may be cost effective to stock more than one wire size. It's not a gamble I want to do with a new car. I'll check first.
You will find that the current rating for 14 AWG cables (you probably wouldn't use anything smaller) is typically 18A. Granted there are some derating factors, but you'd be unlucky to have thermal overload on a 14AWG cable from a 10A fuse.
Dude, if all you worry about is thermal overload and such, you have totally missed the point.
Here is a short example... Assume a 12 volt supply. After all that is what the discussion is all about. Now again lets assume a 100 foot extension cord. Again, no problem. That's 14 AWG wire with a 200 foot round trip. Put a 10 amp load on it so we don't overheat the wire. After all overheating is the worry in your example. Pray tell, how many volts will you get to the load with a 10 Amp draw.. The heat isn't the problem. The voltage drop is the problem.
A loss of 5 volts on a 120 volt line is less than a 5% drop. A 5 volt drop in a 12 volt line is a major brownout of about 40% which is unacceptable even though the 10 amp current in the wire is the same. Feed your 12 volt laptop 12 minus 5 or 7 volts and see how well it does.
Back to the math. That 200 feet of wire has a resistance of.00297 ohms per foot or.594 ohms. At 10 amps, a safe current for a 14 guage wire, the voltage drop is 5.94 volts or just about half if you round off the 5.94 volts to 6. You could safely connect the 100 foot extension cord to a 6 volt deep cycle golf cart battery and put a dead short on the end and not overheat the wire, or blow a 15 amp fuse. The current draw would be just over 10 amps.
At 12 volts a shorted 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord would be 12 / 0.594 or only 20.2 amps. Needless to say you would never consider using a 100 foot extension cord for an 18 amp load as you would only deliver a couple volts at that current. The rest of the power would be used for heating the wire.
Anyone doing the math for a DC data center has to deal with this real math to power the load. DC distribution is not done at 12 volt. It still is delivered at a much higher voltage and is still dropped at the load with a switched mode power supply. The DC to DC supplies are more efficient than AC to DC supplies in all the computers and much more efficient than distributing 12 volts to the floor.
Wouldn't one or two transformers with several standardized DC-out jacks be at least as efficient than 6 separate transformers? It sure would save plastic casing and cables and a lot of frustration on my part.
The short answer is yes. The music industry has already taken that path. The computer industry is kind of taking that path by combining a router with a network switch with a cable/DSL modem.
The music industry has powered backplanes for guitar stompboxes which tosses out the tangle of wall warts.
In my car I tossed the 12V "cigarette lighter" from the dash to the truck. I also increased its power from a small 5A fuse to a 10A fuse, so I can run a reasonably sized 120V inverter (also in the trunk) to power a few devices on-the-go.
Drawing twice the power than the wire was fused for is a good way to need another car soon. Unless you also upgraded the wire, I wouldn't recommend changing the fuse size.
I have a reasonably sized inverter in my trunk also, next to the battery. 1KW will power most anything except hair dryers you care to bring along.
At home, we have a DC run throughout the house wherever we upgraded our power,
This is not a good idea. Volts X Amps = Watts in DC circuits. To run a 100 watt laptop cross the house on 12 volts with less than 10% voltage drop requires a huge wire. Do the math.
Don't forget a 50 foot cord is a 100 foot DC path.
To cut your loss in the wire by 100 as in a 10$ loss is now a 0.1% loss, go from 12 volts to 120 volts. That is the simple reason for the big inverter in the trunk. I can run a 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord and have less than 1% voltage drop in the cord to a 100 Watt laptop.
From the page "14AWG =.00297 ohms / foot". Doing the math, a 100 foot 14 gauge extension cord is 200 feet of wire with a resistance of.00297 ohms per foot. 0.00297 X 200 = 0.594 ohms. To get 100 Watts at the far end of the wire at 12 volts, you need to deliver 8 and 1/3 amps. That amprage going on that almost.6 ohm wire will have a voltage loss of 0.594 X 8.3333 or 4.9499 volts. To get 12 volts out, you need to put in 12 + 4.9499 volts. Volts X Amps in the wire is the power lost.. Let's see, lost 4.94 volts along 200 feet while carying 8.3333 amps. That's 41 Watts. In short to drive a 100 watt load, you toss out almost 1/3rd of your power in the wire.
Now using the same cord and laptop but now using 120 volts. Instead of needing 8.3333 amps for the 100 watts, we now need 1/10 of that or 0.8333 amps. Our voltage loss is now 1/10th what it was or 0.49499 volts at 1/10th the current. We now lose 1/100th the power in the wire we were before while still delivering 100 watts to the laptop. Now the wire has a loss of 0.41 Watts. I don't need to boost anything to make up for it.
I'm shocked that more devices aren't standardizing on DC. 18V, 5A+, not a big deal -- but so many devices could use it (charging tools, video games, cell phones, even some computer monitors). Simple, without needed ANOTHER heat-generating and wasting transformer. My laptop is DC, too, yet I need the darned transformer throughout the house.
Do the math and you won't be shocked at all. I would rather lose 5 watts in a laptop power supply than 40 watts in the 50 foot wire from the battery fuse box to the laptop.
I've standardized on 120 VAC for almost everything. As a bonus, I don't have to buy special 12 volt CF bulbs at $15 each. I can use the buck a bulb ones instead. It's all about saving money. A 1 KW inverter is chaep and can be located very close to the battery to keep loss minimum in the low voltage wire.
After all, if they don't find something to pin on you, you might very well be able to sue them for the (rather high) costs you had to incur. Ask Sterling Ball about that.
I wonder if they have any idea of the chilling effects is for their actions. I haven't had a BSA action, but I have seen several of the high profile cases. I have been a little careless with licenses in the past as I would try to learn to operate some expensive software. This pratice has ended. It is a legal liability to do so.
The end result is I have no training on many programs. It's hard to sell me a program that I know nothing about, and would have a steep learning curve. I have learned the alternatives instead.
The chilling effects are directly the reason I moved to Ubuntu, and now Ubuntu Studio. I have just started doing Digital Audio Workstation stuff. Cubebase and Garage Band are a couple of programs I have heard of.. I use Audacity and Ardour instead as they run just fine on Linux. They don't come with the license risk. It does make hardware selection a little more difficult, but there is plenty of control surface and capture items well suited for the job.
I get along fine with Gimp. I would be totaly lost in Photoshop as I have never used it.
I have pretty much cleaned out all the high risk software from my stuff. Is this really what the BSA members wanted?
It looks like someone either forgot to pay that judge off!
More important is the fact someone didn't do their homework. The PDF is dated this year! It admits using Media Sentry. Isn't the legal status of using an unlicensed investigator already in question? This case could have been thrown back with so much holes exposed it could get laughed out of court. They even seem to get away with calling the infringement copyright piracy. Wow. At least they have toned it down and didn't call it outright theft. Dudes.. It's copyright infringement.
They will continue to complain until they get their $1.00/song. A blank CD can easly hold 12 albums. They would shoot for about $120 per blank CD. Even then I doubt they would be happy. People put the music on flash players and hard disks.
Well, of course I could do that... if I wanted to sound like crap.
Are you trolling? I'll bite. A decade ago a couple grand would get you a nice PC with a P4 processor. Now a grand will get you a nice Core 2 Duo laptop with a lightscribe DVD writer and wireless built-in.
Audio gear, has taken the same road. Open Source Software has make big inroads into the field. You can through huge amounts of money to get >100 db SN and flat response from 20HZ to 30 KHZ, but that stuff can be found in the lower price points. Big steps have recently been taken in low latency high bitrate high resolution recording. The price on the stuff has followed the price curve of digital watches and digital calculators. (I used to have a $150 calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, divide and had a percent key. It also had a max life of about 6 hours on 4 AA batteries.) Today, I am unafraid to replace that old calculator with a sub $10 calculator and call it an upgrade. Audio recording has taken the same path. It is entirely true there is a lot of pro-sumer gear out there with high noise levels and THD + Noise levels that are over 0.05%. Check the specs. The cheap Berhinger you mentioned is spec'ed pretty flat to 200KHZ, This is something a Marshall or Peavy amp of a decade ago could never claim.
Checked the specs on any of the cheap power amps lately? SN ratios of over 100 DB and THD under 0.005% is common. Between the HI-FI systems of the 1970's and now, It was very common stuff was spec'ed at peak power ratings instead of true RMS watts. Noise levels from cheap semiconductors were high. THD specs of over 0.01% were commonplace.
Low noise semiconductors have taken large leaps in the recent years. The tech was led by the need for high gain LNB front ends for satellite TV. 110 degree C band LNB's gave way to 35 degree KU band LNB's. The transistor tech trickled down into consumer electronics. Low noise pre-amps are flat and low noise as well as much cheaper than high end from several years ago.
As an example. I have an original Yamaha DX7 synth. This was pro gear. I plug it into my cheap pro-sumer mixer, and it is very plain to tell the system noise is from the pro gear, not the cheap mixer. I have one of the sound like crap ones you mentioned. It's an order of magnitude better than the older pro gear I plugged into it.
Check the specs. If you don't believe them, take lab measurements. I do. You can do a lot with a budget. Remember a CD is only 16 bit 44.1 KHZ samples. Recording and mixing at 96 KHZ and 24 bit fixed or 32 bit floating is plenty for making a pro CD.
You are right on the mechanical items.. Microphones and speakers are all over the map in quality. Get something good for pro work. Don't spend tons of money where it makes little difference. Audible hiss, response and distortion is not a big part of much of the current gen of semi-pro sound gear. The effects processor in many sub $300 and some sub $200 mixers is 24 bit. It beats the 10-16 bit processors of yesterday hands down.
A TASCAM 8-channel USB interface is going to sound like a TASCAM 8-channel USB interface... ie: crap. As always check the reviews. Some of these interfaces have no pre-processing so cymbals and snares are good for creating aliasing. This does sound like crap. If run on Vista, clock jitter is also a major problem. Run it on a real-time kernal such as Ubuntu Studio and filter your harmonic rich content prior to capture and your recordings will improve drastically. A pro sound engineer that doesn't know the basics of digital recording and blame it all on the gear bother me. They spend way too much and still lack the basics to get a good capture.
Any good DAW sound engineer should know the basics of aliasing. If they don't, they will have lots of stuff with weird artifacts in the recording that sound like crap. Know your sample rate. Use a proper 12db/octive low pass filter in the insert jack. The filter must be ahead of the A/D conversion. This is not something to fix post process. Many pro sound engineers simply don't understand this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing
There is enough money left over for a good multi-track digital audio workstation to plug them into. http://www.zzounds.com/item--TASUS1641 It has 16 channels to record the entire band for post production mixdown.
I don't have idea what would happen with music copied in from iTunes next to music copied in from a third party app - maybe it's all good, I don't know.
It works fine. We have put some MP3's on an iPod and backed up the entire iPod to hard disk under Linux. I guess the only thing you don't get backed up is the keys, but that iPod has never had DRM tracks, so it's a moot point.
Pick your fav program here. Some are multi-platform.
Call it Flamebait if you will for what I'm about to say (which this isn't, BTW): if these guys aren't stupid, then my first suspicion is that they're a stalking horse for the record industry to prove that DRM is ok, and that the record company's version of what DRM is ok on an iPod isn't subject to Apple's dictates. Failing that, then they actually believe you can have your DRM and eat it, too.
I've been trying to figure out the tech end. Someone with an iPod and iTunes care to help me out? I don't have iTunes on my Linux machine, so I can't veify anything. Doesn't iTunes permit downloading to the player and deleting songs off a player, but not copying stuff back off the player? Isn't that why 3rd party apps are popular? I'm thinking that the service may download DRM content from the website with advertisements, but export it directly onto a portable player with either Windows DRM, or a DRM free MP3 on an iPod hoping you don't notice that 3rd party software can move the unprotected tunes back off the iPod.
The software for talking to iPods for Linux work just fine for transferring data both ways.
Can someone verify the official iTunes software? This should keep the songs out of trouble with Apple.
This is just a theory. Feel free to shoot it full of holes.
Some fake sites are smart enough to do a man in the middle attack. If your login to the real site fails, the error is bounced. I have seen this on several sites I have tried to poison.
I haven't tried entering real info, so I don't know if the site simply bounces everything, or if it really logs into the real site to verify username/password.
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And I don't mind it, but why are vital things like a second decoder not in the spec to make it at least upgradeable. Or even just disabled until a special disc is put in to flash the firmware to activate it ?
The article mentions that there isn't enough RAM for a paticular decoder to operate. There isn't a single software upgrade that can get past the lack of the physical memory. The boards in most of the players isn't laid out where memory can be just plugged in. A small run to produce new boards and the labor cost of a recall for a board swap is cost prohibitive. The early production run did not have the 2nd decoder built-in because the spec was probably still being finalized. There were no discs out at that time to even verify the decoder would work if it was installed at that time.
This is much like the early days of UHF TV (I'm old enough to remember) when the FCC mandated 82 channel reception. Many sets shipped with UHF tuners that didn't function. Several years later, the failure was noticed when the first UHF sets went live.
This is why I didn't buy a flatscreen with a tuner before the local broadcasters were on the air. I waited until after the signal was established.
If the company was ethical, they should have a trade-in program instead of expecting the end user to bite the entire cost of replacement.
And the articles don't give enough details to judge much.
No but the video and voice dialog show flaws in measurements. In video 4 he reads the system RPM often mentioning speeds in the neighborhood of 40-50 RPM. Anyone paying attention will realize that is less than one revolution per second. Watch the video and tell me again that is less than one revolution per second.
No, that is not what he said.
I liked the writers embellishment. I never laughed so hard in my life. I'm glad you posted earlier that you enjoyed the roasting on Slashdot. You gotta admit, it was very funny.
Welcome to Slashdot where the line between humor and flame is very small and many fail to see it. Your son is welcome too. Keep up the good work. I would hate to see the damage the RIAA would do without you. Thanks. Give'em hell.
These cables are subject to coral, rocks, currents and shifting water... is it any wonder they wear through with the constant rubbing up against rocks and whatnot?
:), Oh yeah not mention the permits you require to dive Greece :(."
WTF??? Check a map. All areas of the cuts except one are in the end of a body of water with nowhere for the water to flow to/from. These areas are high current locations like the great lakes in the US.. Stagnant. You may get choppy seas from wind, but there isn't much flow to speak of. Coral reefs don't grow in stagnant water. I have not seen any travel brochures for great dive sites in the area.
The comments I have found on diving in the area seem to be along the lines of this post.
"Hi Folks
Have dove the Med on a number occasions and in different locals such as Cyprus,Italy, and Greece. I think the only highlight of diving the Med is artifact diving. Water clarity and marine life was nowhere near what I expected in fact down right dismal. This I believe is attributed to the European method of sewage non-treatment and overfishing practices. Have dove the Adriatic as well, Croatia down to Albania and found much the same conditions, albeit the marine life was more abundant. The Med/Adriatic would not be my choice for a diving holiday, but if there for business purposes water is water
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-90.html In short, the Western Med is OK close to the open sea, but the East end is a dead sewer. There is no coral, poor visibility and few fish.
Most scientists reject things greater than 2.5 standard deviations away.
Unless the cause is understood. For example, a few floods here and there are way out of the standard deviation for normal rainfall. Detroit has exceeded their snow removal budget this year several times over. Storm conditions are understood and can cause rainfall and snowbanks outside the 2.5 standard deviation. There is a standard for normal weather. The insurance industry has to deal with the outliers.
Lock-in is anything that creates barriers to moving to a competitor.
Often lock-in is the driving force to open standards and the proprietary vendors have to change or die. The most recent example of this that I can point to is the theatrical lighting industry. Martin, Strand, MSI, and other inteligent lighting manufactures all had their own standard for running lighting. Touring companies found it difficult to interface with all the lighting systems. A committie was formed to produce a standard that wasn't any of the already established standards to avoid any patent and royalty bias toward any one manufacture.
The birth of the DMX-512 standard came out. Now it is almost impossible to sell any lighting system that doesn't support the standard.
http://www.usitt.org/standards/DMX512.html
"This standard is intended to provide for interoperability at both communication and mechanical levels with controllers made by different manufacturers."
Almost everything now uses the new standard from Drama, Dance, and Club Nightlife. If you buy an intelligeht moving light, It's almost guaranteed to use the DMX-512 signal, even if the connector isn't the standard 5 pin XLR. An exception to the DMX standard is the one for architectural using multiple wall stations for building lights. Even these control systems often output DMX-512 signals to use standard dimmers.
In some specialty fields some still try with something other than the standard. As an example the animated Christmas lights often use the Lights-o-Rama system which is incompatible with everything else.
http://www.lightorama.com/
It is a cheaper alternative with a lower cost per dimmer, but it is limited to dimmers only. It won't run all the disco and concert moving color changing lights. And of course you can only use their software and interface to run the dimmers.
Five fourths to four. WTF is that?
It is exactly 5/4:4 Read it again.
Microsoft gets to deduct that taxable employee income from its own taxable corporate income, and that's where Microsoft got a tax-free $3.1 billion in cash in fiscal 1999: "Stock option income tax benefits."
On the other hand, without the deductions, the option program probably would not exist. I get to claim about $30,000 in options on my taxes this year. The employees are more likely than Microsoft to not spend it out of state.
f taxation and cost of doing business were the deciding factor of where a company locates, Silicon Valley would not exist, and the World Trade Center would be in rural Idaho.
With the internet economy, The building elsewhere is in full swing. Intel has headquarters in Silicon Valley, but the fabs are located in places like the farm land on the outskirts of Hillsboro Oregon. The Campuses of Ronler Acres, Cornell Oaks, and Jones Farm are all named after the farm they were built on. The town has now grown up around the campuses so it no longer looks like farmland. Other locations include Arizona and New Mexico. This is not typical Silicon Valley addresses. If one state has rising taxes, the decision to build is based on the best option. No single state can squeeze Intel without feeling the reduction and dead growth in that state. Taxes are constantly on the negotiation table. I am sure the same applies to Microsoft except they are more centrally located and therefore has less leverage at the tax table.
Absolutely not, they already pay WA state taxes, the article is misleading. MS does pay WA taxes, and presumably quite a bit. They pay property taxes on the land they occupy and sales tax on anything that is purchased for the business.
A common mistake of liberal government is the zero sum economy. The socialist angle of tax the rich because they can afford it is a big mistake. They often look at the golden goose and think their cup is half empty and start looking for ways to get their cup full.
This has been tried in the past with a luxury tax on the manufacture of yachts. The result is the US manufactured yachts were then overpriced and the consumers bought competitive products overseas and registered them in Panama, Bahamas, etc. The US yacht manufacture is now out of business.
Wake up. Going after Microsoft for taxes will likely result in re-location of their headquarters. Now instead of a glass half full, you get no glass at all. They are already smelling the grass on the other side of the fence. How is this a win? At a half billion/year, It wouldn't take too much imagination for the bean counters to up and re-locate.
If $$$ were king, they would figure out what the consumer wants and provide huge archives of back catalog at cheap prices and people would flock to the offerings for stuff their 30 to 60 Gig media players. How many people hit the national average and only buy 2 CD's per year? Their fight to keep the ASP high has killed the sales as much as anything. There is competition for the entertainment dollar. An upgrade to broadband, better car, bigger house, new flat screen, etc are replacing the CD's as a consumer choice item.
Wold you buy more than $25 worth of music in a year if it was 5-10 cents/track?
A large predatory animal can be quite dangerous once wounded (by lack of CD sales) and will attack anything
By the same token, when a large predatory animal starts being a threat where they were a member of society, they find the community no longer will do business with him and only has a party when he is dead.
He hasn't yet figured this out to fix lagging CD sales. Some of the labels are figuring it out. The RIAA radar is a hint for some.
http://www.riaaradar.com/
Being listed here is a bad dent in sales. Failing to display the Compact Disc tm logo is another dent in sales as without it, DRM and copy protection problems are likely. A high price is also a factor as is participation in the loudness war. A few are getting it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7t40xBpqfE
You forget that Detroit at least has the bad habit of wiring up almost everything with the same wire gauge. The 15A fuse connected to the fuel pump, the 10A fuse that runs the signals, and the 5A fuse for the radio are probably all connected to the same wire gauge.
Don't make safety assumptions. The price of copper is way up. It may be cost effective to stock more than one wire size. It's not a gamble I want to do with a new car. I'll check first.
You will find that the current rating for 14 AWG cables (you probably wouldn't use anything smaller) is typically 18A. Granted there are some derating factors, but you'd be unlucky to have thermal overload on a 14AWG cable from a 10A fuse.
.00297 ohms per foot or .594 ohms. At 10 amps, a safe current for a 14 guage wire, the voltage drop is 5.94 volts or just about half if you round off the 5.94 volts to 6. You could safely connect the 100 foot extension cord to a 6 volt deep cycle golf cart battery and put a dead short on the end and not overheat the wire, or blow a 15 amp fuse. The current draw would be just over 10 amps.
Dude, if all you worry about is thermal overload and such, you have totally missed the point.
Here is a short example... Assume a 12 volt supply. After all that is what the discussion is all about. Now again lets assume a 100 foot extension cord. Again, no problem. That's 14 AWG wire with a 200 foot round trip. Put a 10 amp load on it so we don't overheat the wire. After all overheating is the worry in your example. Pray tell, how many volts will you get to the load with a 10 Amp draw.. The heat isn't the problem. The voltage drop is the problem.
A loss of 5 volts on a 120 volt line is less than a 5% drop. A 5 volt drop in a 12 volt line is a major brownout of about 40% which is unacceptable even though the 10 amp current in the wire is the same. Feed your 12 volt laptop 12 minus 5 or 7 volts and see how well it does.
Back to the math. That 200 feet of wire has a resistance of
At 12 volts a shorted 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord would be 12 / 0.594 or only 20.2 amps. Needless to say you would never consider using a 100 foot extension cord for an 18 amp load as you would only deliver a couple volts at that current. The rest of the power would be used for heating the wire.
Anyone doing the math for a DC data center has to deal with this real math to power the load. DC distribution is not done at 12 volt. It still is delivered at a much higher voltage and is still dropped at the load with a switched mode power supply. The DC to DC supplies are more efficient than AC to DC supplies in all the computers and much more efficient than distributing 12 volts to the floor.
Here is an article on using 48 volts and the problems of going more than 35-50 feet.
http://powerquality.com/mag/power_data_center_power/
http://www.leonardo-energy.org/drupal/node/2239
Often Data Centers use 72 volts to 350 volts.
http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=955&Itemid=99999999
575 volts is proposed here;
http://www.edn.com/blog/1470000147/post/1670020967.html
Wouldn't one or two transformers with several standardized DC-out jacks be at least as efficient than 6 separate transformers? It sure would save plastic casing and cables and a lot of frustration on my part.
The short answer is yes. The music industry has already taken that path. The computer industry is kind of taking that path by combining a router with a network switch with a cable/DSL modem.
The music industry has powered backplanes for guitar stompboxes which tosses out the tangle of wall warts.
Here is an example. A pedal board with 8 DC jacks for effects boxes.
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/SKB-PS45-Professional-Pedalboard?sku=544735
and an example of modem combined with switch, router and wireless;
http://www.superwarehouse.com/D-Link_Wireless_G_ADSL_Router_Modem/DSL-G604T/p/1488204
In my car I tossed the 12V "cigarette lighter" from the dash to the truck. I also increased its power from a small 5A fuse to a 10A fuse, so I can run a reasonably sized 120V inverter (also in the trunk) to power a few devices on-the-go.
.00297 ohms / foot". Doing the math, a 100 foot 14 gauge extension cord is 200 feet of wire with a resistance of .00297 ohms per foot. 0.00297 X 200 = 0.594 ohms. To get 100 Watts at the far end of the wire at 12 volts, you need to deliver 8 and 1/3 amps. That amprage going on that almost .6 ohm wire will have a voltage loss of 0.594 X 8.3333 or 4.9499 volts. To get 12 volts out, you need to put in 12 + 4.9499 volts. Volts X Amps in the wire is the power lost.. Let's see, lost 4.94 volts along 200 feet while carying 8.3333 amps. That's 41 Watts. In short to drive a 100 watt load, you toss out almost 1/3rd of your power in the wire.
Drawing twice the power than the wire was fused for is a good way to need another car soon. Unless you also upgraded the wire, I wouldn't recommend changing the fuse size.
I have a reasonably sized inverter in my trunk also, next to the battery. 1KW will power most anything except hair dryers you care to bring along.
At home, we have a DC run throughout the house wherever we upgraded our power,
This is not a good idea. Volts X Amps = Watts in DC circuits. To run a 100 watt laptop cross the house on 12 volts with less than 10% voltage drop requires a huge wire. Do the math.
http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=6346
Don't forget a 50 foot cord is a 100 foot DC path.
To cut your loss in the wire by 100 as in a 10$ loss is now a 0.1% loss, go from 12 volts to 120 volts. That is the simple reason for the big inverter in the trunk. I can run a 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord and have less than 1% voltage drop in the cord to a 100 Watt laptop.
From the page "14AWG =
Now using the same cord and laptop but now using 120 volts. Instead of needing 8.3333 amps for the 100 watts, we now need 1/10 of that or 0.8333 amps. Our voltage loss is now 1/10th what it was or 0.49499 volts at 1/10th the current. We now lose 1/100th the power in the wire we were before while still delivering 100 watts to the laptop. Now the wire has a loss of 0.41 Watts. I don't need to boost anything to make up for it.
I'm shocked that more devices aren't standardizing on DC. 18V, 5A+, not a big deal -- but so many devices could use it (charging tools, video games, cell phones, even some computer monitors). Simple, without needed ANOTHER heat-generating and wasting transformer. My laptop is DC, too, yet I need the darned transformer throughout the house.
Do the math and you won't be shocked at all. I would rather lose 5 watts in a laptop power supply than 40 watts in the 50 foot wire from the battery fuse box to the laptop.
I've standardized on 120 VAC for almost everything. As a bonus, I don't have to buy special 12 volt CF bulbs at $15 each. I can use the buck a bulb ones instead. It's all about saving money. A 1 KW inverter is chaep and can be located very close to the battery to keep loss minimum in the low voltage wire.
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11234952&search=inverter&Mo=13&cm_re=1_en-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&lang=en-US&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Sp=S&N=5000043&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=Text_Search&Dr=P_CatalogNam
After all, if they don't find something to pin on you, you might very well be able to sue them for the (rather high) costs you had to incur. Ask Sterling Ball about that.
I wonder if they have any idea of the chilling effects is for their actions. I haven't had a BSA action, but I have seen several of the high profile cases. I have been a little careless with licenses in the past as I would try to learn to operate some expensive software. This pratice has ended. It is a legal liability to do so.
The end result is I have no training on many programs. It's hard to sell me a program that I know nothing about, and would have a steep learning curve. I have learned the alternatives instead.
The chilling effects are directly the reason I moved to Ubuntu, and now Ubuntu Studio. I have just started doing Digital Audio Workstation stuff. Cubebase and Garage Band are a couple of programs I have heard of.. I use Audacity and Ardour instead as they run just fine on Linux. They don't come with the license risk. It does make hardware selection a little more difficult, but there is plenty of control surface and capture items well suited for the job.
I get along fine with Gimp. I would be totaly lost in Photoshop as I have never used it.
I have pretty much cleaned out all the high risk software from my stuff. Is this really what the BSA members wanted?
It looks like someone either forgot to pay that judge off!
More important is the fact someone didn't do their homework. The PDF is dated this year! It admits using Media Sentry. Isn't the legal status of using an unlicensed investigator already in question? This case could have been thrown back with so much holes exposed it could get laughed out of court. They even seem to get away with calling the infringement copyright piracy. Wow. At least they have toned it down and didn't call it outright theft. Dudes.. It's copyright infringement.
And the RIAA would still be complaining.
They will continue to complain until they get their $1.00/song. A blank CD can easly hold 12 albums. They would shoot for about $120 per blank CD. Even then I doubt they would be happy. People put the music on flash players and hard disks.
If you don't run your own DNS, OpenDNS [opendns.com] allows you to block specific domains as well.
So does a good hosts file.
Well, of course I could do that... if I wanted to sound like crap.
Are you trolling? I'll bite. A decade ago a couple grand would get you a nice PC with a P4 processor. Now a grand will get you a nice Core 2 Duo laptop with a lightscribe DVD writer and wireless built-in.
Audio gear, has taken the same road. Open Source Software has make big inroads into the field. You can through huge amounts of money to get >100 db SN and flat response from 20HZ to 30 KHZ, but that stuff can be found in the lower price points. Big steps have recently been taken in low latency high bitrate high resolution recording. The price on the stuff has followed the price curve of digital watches and digital calculators. (I used to have a $150 calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, divide and had a percent key. It also had a max life of about 6 hours on 4 AA batteries.) Today, I am unafraid to replace that old calculator with a sub $10 calculator and call it an upgrade. Audio recording has taken the same path. It is entirely true there is a lot of pro-sumer gear out there with high noise levels and THD + Noise levels that are over 0.05%. Check the specs. The cheap Berhinger you mentioned is spec'ed pretty flat to 200KHZ, This is something a Marshall or Peavy amp of a decade ago could never claim.
Checked the specs on any of the cheap power amps lately?
SN ratios of over 100 DB and THD under 0.005% is common. Between the HI-FI systems of the 1970's and now, It was very common stuff was spec'ed at peak power ratings instead of true RMS watts. Noise levels from cheap semiconductors were high. THD specs of over 0.01% were commonplace.
Low noise semiconductors have taken large leaps in the recent years. The tech was led by the need for high gain LNB front ends for satellite TV. 110 degree C band LNB's gave way to 35 degree KU band LNB's. The transistor tech trickled down into consumer electronics. Low noise pre-amps are flat and low noise as well as much cheaper than high end from several years ago.
As an example. I have an original Yamaha DX7 synth. This was pro gear. I plug it into my cheap pro-sumer mixer, and it is very plain to tell the system noise is from the pro gear, not the cheap mixer. I have one of the sound like crap ones you mentioned. It's an order of magnitude better than the older pro gear I plugged into it.
Check the specs. If you don't believe them, take lab measurements. I do. You can do a lot with a budget. Remember a CD is only 16 bit 44.1 KHZ samples. Recording and mixing at 96 KHZ and 24 bit fixed or 32 bit floating is plenty for making a pro CD.
You are right on the mechanical items.. Microphones and speakers are all over the map in quality. Get something good for pro work. Don't spend tons of money where it makes little difference. Audible hiss, response and distortion is not a big part of much of the current gen of semi-pro sound gear. The effects processor in many sub $300 and some sub $200 mixers is 24 bit. It beats the 10-16 bit processors of yesterday hands down.
A TASCAM 8-channel USB interface is going to sound like a TASCAM 8-channel USB interface... ie: crap.
As always check the reviews. Some of these interfaces have no pre-processing so cymbals and snares are good for creating aliasing. This does sound like crap. If run on Vista, clock jitter is also a major problem. Run it on a real-time kernal such as Ubuntu Studio and filter your harmonic rich content prior to capture and your recordings will improve drastically. A pro sound engineer that doesn't know the basics of digital recording and blame it all on the gear bother me. They spend way too much and still lack the basics to get a good capture.
Any good DAW sound engineer should know the basics of aliasing. If they don't, they will have lots of stuff with weird artifacts in the recording that sound like crap. Know your sample rate. Use a proper 12db/octive low pass filter in the insert jack. The filter must be ahead of the A/D conversion. This is not something to fix post process. Many pro sound engineers simply don't understand this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing
Miking drums, alone, is a good $1000 enterprise.
Not anymore.
http://www.musicstudiodirect.com/products/5207/7kit+Drum+Mic+Set/
http://www.instrumentpro.com/P-SAM8KIT?source=froogle
http://www.zzounds.com/item--MUPDRUMPAK
There is enough money left over for a good multi-track digital audio workstation to plug them into.
http://www.zzounds.com/item--TASUS1641
It has 16 channels to record the entire band for post production mixdown.
I don't have idea what would happen with music copied in from iTunes next to music copied in from a third party app - maybe it's all good, I don't know.
It works fine. We have put some MP3's on an iPod and backed up the entire iPod to hard disk under Linux. I guess the only thing you don't get backed up is the keys, but that iPod has never had DRM tracks, so it's a moot point.
Pick your fav program here. Some are multi-platform.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/managing_your_ipod_without_itunes
Call it Flamebait if you will for what I'm about to say (which this isn't, BTW): if these guys aren't stupid, then my first suspicion is that they're a stalking horse for the record industry to prove that DRM is ok, and that the record company's version of what DRM is ok on an iPod isn't subject to Apple's dictates. Failing that, then they actually believe you can have your DRM and eat it, too.
I've been trying to figure out the tech end. Someone with an iPod and iTunes care to help me out? I don't have iTunes on my Linux machine, so I can't veify anything. Doesn't iTunes permit downloading to the player and deleting songs off a player, but not copying stuff back off the player? Isn't that why 3rd party apps are popular? I'm thinking that the service may download DRM content from the website with advertisements, but export it directly onto a portable player with either Windows DRM, or a DRM free MP3 on an iPod hoping you don't notice that 3rd party software can move the unprotected tunes back off the iPod.
The software for talking to iPods for Linux work just fine for transferring data both ways.
Can someone verify the official iTunes software? This should keep the songs out of trouble with Apple.
This is just a theory. Feel free to shoot it full of holes.
Some fake sites are smart enough to do a man in the middle attack. If your login to the real site fails, the error is bounced. I have seen this on several sites I have tried to poison.
I haven't tried entering real info, so I don't know if the site simply bounces everything, or if it really logs into the real site to verify username/password.