I built a silent PC for my living room and here is how I reduced noise: 1. My PSU fan is silent. But I mean Silent. You don't hear it unless you stick you ear to it!! 2. I underclocked my CPU. Celeron 533@266, so no fan is needed. 3. I use a laptop HDD, which is very silent 4. I use a DVD-ROM drive that can be told not to spin over a certain speed. I use the "eject" command on linux to set it to whatever I want. 6X is totally silent.
I agree with the parent post. I think DVD is all about "owning" a movie while VOD is all about renting. Some people will always want to "own" their favorite movie.
Still, VOD is going to share the space for sure, but definitely not replace. It's probably the end of Blockbuster more than the end of DVD.
2: How do you prevent company A from sending spam with http links to company B's website, just to shut them down. 3: How do you make sure the HTTP link is correct and represent the website of the spammer. Kind of the same issue actually...
Any ideas ?
I could very well implement something like that in the near future is I find answer to these issues...
You don't need to find who is behind the scene. Here are the steps to punish spammers without knowing them:
1. Write a small program that every user can run at home, on the seti model. Let's call it spammerSucker. 2. Identify an email as spam (this part is easy) 3. Find the website of the spammer (The email is generally full of http links) 4. Add the URL in the centralized DB of spammerSucker. 5. In minutes, millons of DSL/Cable users running spammerSucker are downloading every byte out of their server, initiating millions of sockets per second. 6. Their server is "slashdotted", and no one can access it.
Such a campaign would just result in destroying your website when you send a spam and so would make it a lot more dangerous for a company to send spam.
The danger is actually in step 2, because you don't want to blinbly suck any website...
No. Best implies better than the rest. Great is just implying some quality.
they could have easily built a DRM/encrypted wrapper around Ogg
Problem is they don't have control of Ogg. They don't know where it's going to go and it is still not in a final+stable release. In fact, developpers could just drop it tomorrow.
This is just so untrue. When I am compressing a music at 16kbps, I expect a large part of the spectrum to disappear, right? I can easily write a codec that will try and maintain the closest spectrum possible, but then I'm going to miss precision in my low-freq where stuff are audible.
My point is that I prefer a codec that remove some frequencies and achieve a far better quality in the low freqs than a codec that will stick with the entire spectrum and have less bits to allocate to the more audible frequencies.
The ultimate quality test can be only a listening test. It's the whole point!!!
The idea of MP3 encoding *is* to remove frequencies that are _not audible_. So you can't blame the codec for doing it's job!!!
Another difference is that if I can just barely perceive a difference with my current stereo, I don't want to throw all my music to the trash can when I'm going to get rich and buy a nice stereo.
The problem in your test is that if you know which file you're listening at, you're just not fair in your comparison and by listening several times, your brain just makes you hear stuff that is just not there.
A test was made where people would listen to two WAV file, one supposedely was an MP3 (that was expanded to a WAV). 25% of the people could hear a difference between the two WAV files where they were actually the same...
More than crappy, I'd say that the current productions are way over-engineered. Tons of filters are applied to the music so that most of the tiny details that a high-end stereo system can render are just absent while tons of artifacts are added along in the process....
Sad but true.
I once gave CS lessons to an old audiophile man that ended up telling me that CD was crappy. I asked him what he meant and he showed me the brand new CD he just bought about a very famous recording of some classical music (I can't remember what it was). He made me listen to a specific part and then showed me a tape (yes, audio tape) of the same recording he bought 20 years ago on LP (he recorded that on tape with a *very* expensive tape recorder). The difference was just stunning!
Then I just told him: "Let's see if CD is that crappy" and we ended up recording 5mins of the tape on his PC and then burned a CD-R with the new WAV.
The result was just the same as the cassette, and way better than the CD.
Very sad story but unfortunately true. The brand new CD reedition of this concert was just way worse than the same old LP version!
Probably because that would justify a lower price than the equivalent on a good old CD. That would just boost their media presence (at least for a while) and rejuvenate their image as "innovators", but people caring for quality would still have to buy the CD.
I don't know how my statement "runs completely contrary to the spirit of that engineering design goal for MP3 audio"...
I was just saying that the psychoacoustic models used in MP3 compression removes supposedly unaudible frequencies. But if you boost the low (or high) frequencies through a trebble/bass button, those frequencies are going to become all of a sudden audible, but they're not here in the MP3 file (or worse, instead there is some artifacts)!!!
That's all I'm saying, and I don't think I'm wrong with this.
Now I also wanted to reply to your other statements:
would you rather listen to an uncompressed CD or DVD-A or SACD on your high end home stereo, or an MP3 compressed copy of the original source material
I may be a special case;-) but my "high end" home stereo is not often used in the optimum environment, giving that I have kids and that I rarely do nothing but litening to music. I use it more for ambient music and to watch tv/dvds.
Another thing is that I am tired of having TONS of CDs in my bookshelves. They are now in my garage and I ripped everything in 256kbps MP3s that I burned on DVD-ROMs. A DVD-ROM can accomodate roughly 40 audio CDs at this bitrate and I just need 6 to hold my entire collection. That's another win!! (though as I said, that's my personal needs)
I'm just waiting for the next generation of Shitloadofdata-ROM where I can put ALL of my MP3s as well as all of my movies so I have everything in one disk;-)
Your statement is just... empty. What are you comparing exactly ? MD with MP3s... what MP3s? Which bitrate, which encoder....
I defy anyone to discern a 256kbps MP3 encoded with LAME from the original or even to tell there is a difference. Of course you need a true blind test for that.
Now on the other hand, lossless compression would be better to download these files, I totally agree with that. MP3 is good for *listening* only. Even a basic filter as a High/Low button or a band equalizer can make diffences audible.
You miss the point. A 1x DVD burned burns at the same rate as a 10x CD burner. Now you have 4x DVD burners which are the equivalent of 40x CD burners (in terms of MB/s), which doesn't exist. Period.
And don't be mistaken between a 40X burner and a 40X MAX burner.
DVD burners are faster and always will be since the spinning speed of current CD burners reached a maximum. DVD has a greater density so we can burn faster at the same speed. (5.8 times faster actually).
That's funny because I've always considered broadband better not essentially for speed.
Speed is good, but having a connection full-time that doesn't _use_ your phone line (ie: You can still pas a phone call or receive) is more important to me.
Ok, now you can probably anwer another of my question: Where is the limit?
Let's take an example to illustrate my point. I see a man beating his wife to death through the window. If I take a gun and shoot him dead, I'll be jailed for a very good reason: It's not for me to take this decision. A decision taken in the heat of the moment is never fair. That's why we have this thing called "Justice", to study the case in a cold room, when everyone is calm, by third party people that are not emotionally involved.
The US went to war alone against one of the country they believe is responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They are certainly biaised, and didn't ask the permission for it, bypassing the "international justice" that the UN is supposed to represent.
Now I don't say the action of the US is bad, misleading or anything else. I'm saying that by doing what they did - going without the consent or even without caring about the UN - the US are clearly stating: "We do what we want because we're the strongest country on earth". And maybe this time it was legitimate, maybe the second time or the nth time it'll be less obvious, but everyone will get used to it...
"Cretin-in-chief?" Fuck you. Too many people better than you have fought to give you the liberty to make smart-assed remarks like that. How dare you be so disrespectful.
Do I have to say that with the patriot act they kind of removed this liberty. Do you remind the police force being allowed to: - Enter your house without a warrant - Tapping you phone without a court order - Putting you to jail for potentially eternity without even talking to justice, a lawyer or a phone call
Of course they have to suspect you of terrorism for that to happen, but they don't have to justify this suspicion to anyone, do they ?
You know, I don't support the war. But that's not so because I believe Saddam to be an angel. It's just that the arrogant asshole that you call "president" is really getting on my nerves.
The last thing he did was pretty funny. He now blames Russia to have sold weapons to Irak (which everyone denies but that's not the point), because it violates one of the UN resolutions. But he's gone to war against the UN. So what's the deal. "I don't give a shit about UN, but please you respect it's resolutions"... is that it ?
Then I just say: Fuck you. And it's too sad that only the French president (otherwise not that great) was the only one saying it loud when everyone was silently shutting their mouth. They may not have the power to oppose military force to the US, but at least they say what they think.
From the article, the thing works only if the phone is turned on. So that means two things:
1. Good side: it is not to track your kids, but to allow them to alert if something goes wrong. They just turn the phone on and woops, the parents are alerted and know where the kid is. 2. Downside: The kid can't make a phone call without notifying his parent of where he is...
Man, X sucks, that's no news. Any X developer (not a programmer that program X but a programmer that program for X) knows that. It's not that the system is bad, it's just that there is no standard. Thus it is a nightmare to program and use.
The only technical answer to that would be a Gnome or KDE (or anything else) assuming that this one would take 100% of the market and therefore set a _standard_ in there. But then it would be like MS, it would have a monopoly and that is just not acceptable...
But back to the point: X sucks, has always sucked, will always suck. If you can set enough layers on top o fit to mask it entirely, then you may have something that doesn't suck, but is that really worth it?
Ask anyone under 30 right now how to write a paper, email someone or use a search engine.
I actually think you miss the point. My father in law is (was) an executive in a big Insurance company and he is from a CS background. He spent 1 year in Stanford boulding a Pascal compiler 30 years ago. (I won't discuss the perenity of this kind of work just right now;-) He had no problems with computers by then...
Now when he became an executive, the problem was reversed bacause for 20 years he didn't have time (and I guess he was not willing) to maintain his knowledge. If you want to keep fluent with your OS (whatever flavor the os could be), what you have to do can be summarized in one word: practice. This is not difficult, it just take _time_, and that's exactly what the executives are missing. And through this point of view, Windows wins big time.
My point is that the 30-years old you'e talking about will have plenty of time to forget everything he knows about Windows XYZ or Linux X.Y.Z when he'll become executive/high manager (unless he's a nerd like me and then he'll never become one of them)
I don't get this while thing. How this "CDR-ROM" is different from a good old CDR with one session burned. Nobody can erase the session and you still can write some more....
Slashdot Mirror
I built a silent PC for my living room and here is how I reduced noise:
1. My PSU fan is silent. But I mean Silent. You don't hear it unless you stick you ear to it!!
2. I underclocked my CPU. Celeron 533@266, so no fan is needed.
3. I use a laptop HDD, which is very silent
4. I use a DVD-ROM drive that can be told not to spin over a certain speed. I use the "eject" command on linux to set it to whatever I want. 6X is totally silent.
That's it!
I agree with the parent post. I think DVD is all about "owning" a movie while VOD is all about renting. Some people will always want to "own" their favorite movie.
Still, VOD is going to share the space for sure, but definitely not replace. It's probably the end of Blockbuster more than the end of DVD.
Ok, danger is in step 2 and 3:
2: How do you prevent company A from sending spam with http links to company B's website, just to shut them down.
3: How do you make sure the HTTP link is correct and represent the website of the spammer. Kind of the same issue actually...
Any ideas ?
I could very well implement something like that in the near future is I find answer to these issues...
You don't need to find who is behind the scene. Here are the steps to punish spammers without knowing them:
1. Write a small program that every user can run at home, on the seti model. Let's call it spammerSucker.
2. Identify an email as spam (this part is easy)
3. Find the website of the spammer (The email is generally full of http links)
4. Add the URL in the centralized DB of spammerSucker.
5. In minutes, millons of DSL/Cable users running spammerSucker are downloading every byte out of their server, initiating millions of sockets per second.
6. Their server is "slashdotted", and no one can access it.
Such a campaign would just result in destroying your website when you send a spam and so would make it a lot more dangerous for a company to send spam.
The danger is actually in step 2, because you don't want to blinbly suck any website...
"great" implies better than the rest
No. Best implies better than the rest. Great is just implying some quality.
they could have easily built a DRM/encrypted wrapper around Ogg
Problem is they don't have control of Ogg. They don't know where it's going to go and it is still not in a final+stable release. In fact, developpers could just drop it tomorrow.
This is just so untrue. When I am compressing a music at 16kbps, I expect a large part of the spectrum to disappear, right? I can easily write a codec that will try and maintain the closest spectrum possible, but then I'm going to miss precision in my low-freq where stuff are audible.
My point is that I prefer a codec that remove some frequencies and achieve a far better quality in the low freqs than a codec that will stick with the entire spectrum and have less bits to allocate to the more audible frequencies.
The ultimate quality test can be only a listening test. It's the whole point!!!
The idea of MP3 encoding *is* to remove frequencies that are _not audible_. So you can't blame the codec for doing it's job!!!
Another difference is that if I can just barely perceive a difference with my current stereo, I don't want to throw all my music to the trash can when I'm going to get rich and buy a nice stereo.
The problem in your test is that if you know which file you're listening at, you're just not fair in your comparison and by listening several times, your brain just makes you hear stuff that is just not there.
A test was made where people would listen to two WAV file, one supposedely was an MP3 (that was expanded to a WAV). 25% of the people could hear a difference between the two WAV files where they were actually the same...
More than crappy, I'd say that the current productions are way over-engineered. Tons of filters are applied to the music so that most of the tiny details that a high-end stereo system can render are just absent while tons of artifacts are added along in the process....
Sad but true.
I once gave CS lessons to an old audiophile man that ended up telling me that CD was crappy. I asked him what he meant and he showed me the brand new CD he just bought about a very famous recording of some classical music (I can't remember what it was). He made me listen to a specific part and then showed me a tape (yes, audio tape) of the same recording he bought 20 years ago on LP (he recorded that on tape with a *very* expensive tape recorder). The difference was just stunning!
Then I just told him: "Let's see if CD is that crappy" and we ended up recording 5mins of the tape on his PC and then burned a CD-R with the new WAV.
The result was just the same as the cassette, and way better than the CD.
Very sad story but unfortunately true. The brand new CD reedition of this concert was just way worse than the same old LP version!
Probably because that would justify a lower price than the equivalent on a good old CD. That would just boost their media presence (at least for a while) and rejuvenate their image as "innovators", but people caring for quality would still have to buy the CD.
I don't know how my statement "runs completely contrary to the spirit of that engineering design goal for MP3 audio"...
;-) but my "high end" home stereo is not often used in the optimum environment, giving that I have kids and that I rarely do nothing but litening to music. I use it more for ambient music and to watch tv/dvds.
;-)
I was just saying that the psychoacoustic models used in MP3 compression removes supposedly unaudible frequencies. But if you boost the low (or high) frequencies through a trebble/bass button, those frequencies are going to become all of a sudden audible, but they're not here in the MP3 file (or worse, instead there is some artifacts)!!!
That's all I'm saying, and I don't think I'm wrong with this.
Now I also wanted to reply to your other statements:
would you rather listen to an uncompressed CD or DVD-A or SACD on your high end home stereo, or an MP3 compressed copy of the original source material
I may be a special case
Another thing is that I am tired of having TONS of CDs in my bookshelves. They are now in my garage and I ripped everything in 256kbps MP3s that I burned on DVD-ROMs. A DVD-ROM can accomodate roughly 40 audio CDs at this bitrate and I just need 6 to hold my entire collection. That's another win!! (though as I said, that's my personal needs)
I'm just waiting for the next generation of Shitloadofdata-ROM where I can put ALL of my MP3s as well as all of my movies so I have everything in one disk
Your statement is just... empty. What are you comparing exactly ? MD with MP3s... what MP3s? Which bitrate, which encoder....
I defy anyone to discern a 256kbps MP3 encoded with LAME from the original or even to tell there is a difference. Of course you need a true blind test for that.
Now on the other hand, lossless compression would be better to download these files, I totally agree with that. MP3 is good for *listening* only. Even a basic filter as a High/Low button or a band equalizer can make diffences audible.
You miss the point. A 1x DVD burned burns at the same rate as a 10x CD burner. Now you have 4x DVD burners which are the equivalent of 40x CD burners (in terms of MB/s), which doesn't exist. Period.
And don't be mistaken between a 40X burner and a 40X MAX burner.
DVD burners are faster and always will be since the spinning speed of current CD burners reached a maximum. DVD has a greater density so we can burn faster at the same speed. (5.8 times faster actually).
That's funny because I've always considered broadband better not essentially for speed.
Speed is good, but having a connection full-time that doesn't _use_ your phone line (ie: You can still pas a phone call or receive) is more important to me.
Ok, now you can probably anwer another of my question: Where is the limit?
Let's take an example to illustrate my point. I see a man beating his wife to death through the window. If I take a gun and shoot him dead, I'll be jailed for a very good reason: It's not for me to take this decision. A decision taken in the heat of the moment is never fair. That's why we have this thing called "Justice", to study the case in a cold room, when everyone is calm, by third party people that are not emotionally involved.
The US went to war alone against one of the country they believe is responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They are certainly biaised, and didn't ask the permission for it, bypassing the "international justice" that the UN is supposed to represent.
Now I don't say the action of the US is bad, misleading or anything else. I'm saying that by doing what they did - going without the consent or even without caring about the UN - the US are clearly stating: "We do what we want because we're the strongest country on earth". And maybe this time it was legitimate, maybe the second time or the nth time it'll be less obvious, but everyone will get used to it...
"Cretin-in-chief?" Fuck you. Too many people better than you have fought to give you the liberty to make smart-assed remarks like that. How dare you be so disrespectful.
:
Do I have to say that with the patriot act they kind of removed this liberty. Do you remind the police force being allowed to
- Enter your house without a warrant
- Tapping you phone without a court order
- Putting you to jail for potentially eternity without even talking to justice, a lawyer or a phone call
Of course they have to suspect you of terrorism for that to happen, but they don't have to justify this suspicion to anyone, do they ?
This is the open door to a lot of crap!!!!!!
You know, I don't support the war. But that's not so because I believe Saddam to be an angel. It's just that the arrogant asshole that you call "president" is really getting on my nerves.
The last thing he did was pretty funny. He now blames Russia to have sold weapons to Irak (which everyone denies but that's not the point), because it violates one of the UN resolutions. But he's gone to war against the UN. So what's the deal. "I don't give a shit about UN, but please you respect it's resolutions"... is that it ?
Then I just say: Fuck you. And it's too sad that only the French president (otherwise not that great) was the only one saying it loud when everyone was silently shutting their mouth. They may not have the power to oppose military force to the US, but at least they say what they think.
Technically, they still can. Now legally they can't.
Anyway, why would thay do such a stupid thing ?
Allright, allright, you're pickier than I am!!!
and I need some sleep!
Really because I'm picky: Japanese didn't attack Europe, Germans and Italians did.
From the article, the thing works only if the phone is turned on. So that means two things:
1. Good side: it is not to track your kids, but to allow them to alert if something goes wrong. They just turn the phone on and woops, the parents are alerted and know where the kid is.
2. Downside: The kid can't make a phone call without notifying his parent of where he is...
Well, then AIX will do it!!
They can't claim it's not unix, it's what's the case is based on!!!
And I remember using an AIX on a 386 5 years ago!!!
Man, X sucks, that's no news. Any X developer (not a programmer that program X but a programmer that program for X) knows that. It's not that the system is bad, it's just that there is no standard. Thus it is a nightmare to program and use.
The only technical answer to that would be a Gnome or KDE (or anything else) assuming that this one would take 100% of the market and therefore set a _standard_ in there. But then it would be like MS, it would have a monopoly and that is just not acceptable...
But back to the point: X sucks, has always sucked, will always suck. If you can set enough layers on top o fit to mask it entirely, then you may have something that doesn't suck, but is that really worth it?
Ask anyone under 30 right now how to write a paper, email someone or use a search engine.
;-) He had no problems with computers by then...
I actually think you miss the point. My father in law is (was) an executive in a big Insurance company and he is from a CS background. He spent 1 year in Stanford boulding a Pascal compiler 30 years ago. (I won't discuss the perenity of this kind of work just right now
Now when he became an executive, the problem was reversed bacause for 20 years he didn't have time (and I guess he was not willing) to maintain his knowledge. If you want to keep fluent with your OS (whatever flavor the os could be), what you have to do can be summarized in one word: practice. This is not difficult, it just take _time_, and that's exactly what the executives are missing. And through this point of view, Windows wins big time.
My point is that the 30-years old you'e talking about will have plenty of time to forget everything he knows about Windows XYZ or Linux X.Y.Z when he'll become executive/high manager (unless he's a nerd like me and then he'll never become one of them)
I don't get this while thing. How this "CDR-ROM" is different from a good old CDR with one session burned. Nobody can erase the session and you still can write some more....