Not only that, but think about tasks like turning on the lights. You can't do that right now, can you? Well, if you had a smarter speaker, you could just tell it to turn on the lights for you, and poof, they'd be on.
X10 doesn't need to talk to the mothership in the cloud. You control it all from within your house. It even works when internet is down.
Why, exactly, do home control need to talk outside the home?
There's something to be said for not getting out of my nice warm bed to shut off the lights in the rest of my house. Or, for that matter, telling the house to turn up the heat.
I have one that does that. "Darling, can you turn the lights out when you come to bed? And perhaps turn the heat up a bit?"
It wouldn't be a stretch to think that sales would be bolstered by 2.5% (1/40th the number of Switches that have already been sold) by this news, thanks to people like us.
Oh, that would be a HUGE stretch. People buy the Switch to easily play games. You and people like you aren't even a blip on the radar compared to all the parents who buy a Switch for their kids, or teens who buy it to play specific games.
And if you think they'll still play games with Linux, consider that Steam, which has a client especially for Linux and more than 3000 games for Linux only has 0.41% users with Linux according to the latest survey. That's the market share when actively trying to get Linux users.
Sure, it's a hugely dick move by Microsoft, but all users know they are opting into an unusually weird set of nasty dick moves, whenever they buy anything that has Microsoft software.
It's the American way: If someone is being a dick to you, be a bigger dick to them. Bonus points if done in a way that gets you 15 minutes of fame and makes lawyers rich.
It depends on the subject. While descriptive text almost always helps, talking about music (without actually allowing the reader to hear any) is like dancing about architecture.
Explanatory text without the music would be immensely more useful than the music without explanatory text.
And as a lifelong hobby musician and composer, I find text far more useful. I can recreate the music from text, but a recording doesn't tell much of the story. Who wrote it, when, for whom - what preceded it, what followed it, was it rearranged for the recording that's presented?
Descriptive text also teaches people a bit about music, if they are interested, much like a food recipe teach people about food.
An encyclopedia entry is there to teach people, not to entertain them. There's nothing that prevents Wikipedia to have a link to YouTube for those who want multimedia.
Oh and Finland is listed as supporting it too. Point is you shouldn't need to introduce a country specific solution to a general problem.
Yes, you should. Because different countries have different requirements and legislation. Giving up location without consent can be a problem in some countries. Example time: If I call emergency services to tell them that my cousin called me and was going to commit suicide, or I called from a meth lab to say that a crazy with a gun is on the way to kill his wife, there are places where demanding or obtaining my location is a breach of privacy laws. In other countries, registering access points in databases may be illegal, so using that to obtain greater accuracy is then also illegal. Remember the Google Street View fiasco, where Google thought that just because something was broadcasting into public air space, data collection was also legal in all jurisdiction? Then there are military requirements.
Does running Linux on top instead of below mean that you want to boot into Linux instead of running it in an emulator?
It's sad that you have to ask, but top/bottom and low/high is undergoing a change to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant. This might be a battle that's already lost, but I hope not.
I'm old school, so when I say low level or bottom, I mean fundamental, close to the hardware, and requiring a heck of a lot more understanding than high level or top level, which is abstracted and simplified. But when a young manager hears "low level", he or she thinks it means low understanding and detail level, and thinks that "high level" means high understanding and detail level. I even had one manager suggest that we "dive down to the top level". The mind boggles.
It's not just about how picky people are if there aren't enough women to go around. If there are 150 hetero males for every 100 hetero women, there will be 50 males that can't get any women no matter whether they drop all requirements to zero.
And to make it worse, women are even more picky. If you're neither tall nor powerful, most women just won't be interested, and would rather be alone.
(a) without the consent of another person, he applies force intentionally to that other person, directly or indirectly;
(b) he attempts or threatens, by an act or a gesture, to apply force to another person, if he has, or causes that other person to believe on reasonable grounds that he has, present ability to effect his purpose; or
(c) while openly wearing or carrying a weapon or an imitation thereof, he accosts or impedes another person or begs.
By that measure, a poor man sitting outside a comic convention in a makeshift costume with a cardboard sword and paper cup for alms is committing assault.
No, apart from that gaffe, the above is not specific, it's deliberately vague, like "directly or indirectly". That covers situations where you tell your attack gorilla to go after someone, without having to specifically mention either gorillas or "commanding an agent through verbal means or hand signalling", like a specific law might have said.
It's more that Steam hasn't changed much over the years. It cannot run on a modern Linux pure 64-bit pure system, only on those that have a 32-bit compatibility layer. And part of that problem comes from Microsoft Windows - instead of actually porting the games, the developers run them in Windows compatibility providers like Wine, and inherit the 32-bit requirements that way.
I don't even know if they support Linux, but I imagine the selection is pretty slim.
There are more than 3,000 games for Linux on Steam now. That said, very few of them are big titles, and a lot of them are Chinese/Japanese visual novels and girl-girl romance games, it seems. Also, Steam only supports Ubuntu with 32-bit. You can get it to work, of sorts, with some other linux distributions with 32-bit support, but then you're on your own, and some titles might not work, or might stop working when you update your OS.
Mine bitcoin and search for aliens or fight cancer at the same time...
Why?
If we found radio signals that likely were caused by extrasolar life, what then? New religions and prophets claiming to talk to the aliens, and jingoists calling for arming ourselves to the teeth, not understanding nor wanting to understand the distances involved?
And a cure for cancer? It's a good sentiment, but we may have difficulties affording that. Imagine the resulting population explosion, and having to take care of people who will still pick up non-terminal ailments. There will just be more elderly people who will pick up these ailments. If we were to expect 30 years in a nursing home versus 5, what would that do to society? Fewer people dying is not necessarily a good thing for society, just for individuals. If anything, I think we need more culling, not more cuddling. We're not meant to live forever. Evolution cannot reward the successful if there are no unsuccessful. And unless we go away and leave the world to the new generations, we end up fighting our own offspring for resources.
I assume that you don't own anything with oiled wood if you think that everything marks it. Personally I've never re-oiled any of the nice shiny furniture I have in my house and nothing I place on it seems to leech out the colour either.
If it's shiny furniture, it's not oiled. It could be shellac, but that gets marks even easier, so my bet is that it isn't. Chances are that you have urethane finishes, which do not get stains and stays shiny. But also doesn't get the deep glow.
The cool thing is, this has an "always analyzing" "MiniDSP" PEQ-type bit built-in; so there is actually at least SOME possibility that the Apple engineers got it right; and if that's the case, as much as we ALL like to think we have "golden ears", and that we can out-EQ some dumb-ass software running in a Microcontroller, FFS, no matter HOW many discrete amplifiers and microphones they throw at it, the truth is, at this point, maybe we can, and maybe we can't.
Yeah, but thing is that its microphone is not anywhere near where your ears are, so it will auto-EQ based on where it is, not where you are. My Sony ES receiver at least lets me hook up mics where my ears usually are, and it sends full spectrum noise through the speakers and auto-calibrates both EQ and individual speaker volumes for that listening position.
I don't claim to have golden ears - on the contrary, age has made my hearing less than perfect. Which is why when I want to really enjoy music, good headphones and a pre-amp with a good equalizer is king. That way, I can compensate for the dip I have in my hearing at the frequencies of my ex-wife's voice...
This is not SETI@Home, but SETI proper, where they need graphics cards to quickly analyze data, not wait for weeks or months. SETI@Home is high bandwidth, but terrible latency.
Yes, bouncing sound off walls is never going to give a neutral sound - at least not for more than a tiny single listening spot at specific frequencies. Having direct line speakers makes it a heck of a lot easier to get good EQ, but even then there are caveats, like the distance for the bass and treble elements.
For what it is, I'm sure the HomePod is very good. But I would save the superlatives and not claim that it matches direct line high quality speakers with a good equalizer. For things like a concerto with organs or timpani, it's just not going to do the same, even if it's going to work fine for swaying to Ed Swift or Taylor Sheeran.
That's not deep bass, it's thumping mid-range bass in the 90-200 Hz range, typically around 120 Hz, because that sounds the "thumpiest".
Modern electronic music doesn't use deep bass, because modern stereo systems cannot reproduce the tones, nor do they move enough air to make them sound the right volume, and something that sounds weird on a typical car stereo or BT speaker because the bass is missing isn't good for sales. Instead, mid-range bass is boosted in volume. Many cannot tell the difference.
Look at the image. There's a +10 dB for most of the bass range, and a -15 dB dip at around 93 Hz. That's not consistent with "All the way from 40Hz to 20,000Hz it's +- 3dB". Judging by the graph, that's only true for the 1500-7000 Hz range.
My guess is that by "all the way", he means "the average for the range", and not "on every point on the range". If so, that's very misleading - it apparently misled you.
You need only have experienced one person driving through town blairing rap / hip hop to realize how absurd your claim is that today's music lacks bass.
That's not deep bass, it's loud midrange bass. Most modern music including hip-hop has thumping bass in the 90-200 Hz range, and almost never below 60 Hz. It's electronic bass, designed to sound loud, and not real bass instruments that are deep but far less loud (due to the Fletcher-Munson effect).
For demanding that a halfway decent system lives up to the DIN HiFi norm of the early 70s, with 31.5-16kHz frequency response with +- 4dB for midrange and less than -10dB falloff on the high end and -8 dB falloff on the low end? That's hardly much to ask - pretty much any speakers from the 70s and early 80s qualified; even the crappiest ones that only did 50-12.5 kHz managed to stay within those limits.
The trash they make today, not so much. These days, you'll be hard pressed to find something that is even audible down to 50 Hz. The days of high fidelity are over. Both in music production and music systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but think about tasks like turning on the lights. You can't do that right now, can you? Well, if you had a smarter speaker, you could just tell it to turn on the lights for you, and poof, they'd be on.
X10 doesn't need to talk to the mothership in the cloud. You control it all from within your house. It even works when internet is down.
Why, exactly, do home control need to talk outside the home?
There's something to be said for not getting out of my nice warm bed to shut off the lights in the rest of my house. Or, for that matter, telling the house to turn up the heat.
I have one that does that. "Darling, can you turn the lights out when you come to bed? And perhaps turn the heat up a bit?"
It wouldn't be a stretch to think that sales would be bolstered by 2.5% (1/40th the number of Switches that have already been sold) by this news, thanks to people like us.
Oh, that would be a HUGE stretch. People buy the Switch to easily play games. You and people like you aren't even a blip on the radar compared to all the parents who buy a Switch for their kids, or teens who buy it to play specific games.
And if you think they'll still play games with Linux, consider that Steam, which has a client especially for Linux and more than 3000 games for Linux only has 0.41% users with Linux according to the latest survey. That's the market share when actively trying to get Linux users.
I wish the U.S. had a functional government. Microsoft is EXTRAORDINARILY ABUSIVE, in my opinion, and nothing has been done to stop the abuse.
People have voted for Microsoft with their wallets. Caveat emptor.
Sure, it's a hugely dick move by Microsoft, but all users know they are opting into an unusually weird set of nasty dick moves, whenever they buy anything that has Microsoft software.
It's the American way: If someone is being a dick to you, be a bigger dick to them. Bonus points if done in a way that gets you 15 minutes of fame and makes lawyers rich.
It depends on the subject. While descriptive text almost always helps, talking about music (without actually allowing the reader to hear any) is like dancing about architecture.
Explanatory text without the music would be immensely more useful than the music without explanatory text.
And as a lifelong hobby musician and composer, I find text far more useful. I can recreate the music from text, but a recording doesn't tell much of the story. Who wrote it, when, for whom - what preceded it, what followed it, was it rearranged for the recording that's presented?
Descriptive text also teaches people a bit about music, if they are interested, much like a food recipe teach people about food.
An encyclopedia entry is there to teach people, not to entertain them.
There's nothing that prevents Wikipedia to have a link to YouTube for those who want multimedia.
Wikipedia is still a wall of text with a few static images, just like it was in 2001.
Good! Text has, by far, the highest content-to-bit ratio. It should be encouraged, and not be replaced with prolefeed.
Oh and Finland is listed as supporting it too. Point is you shouldn't need to introduce a country specific solution to a general problem.
Yes, you should. Because different countries have different requirements and legislation. Giving up location without consent can be a problem in some countries. Example time: If I call emergency services to tell them that my cousin called me and was going to commit suicide, or I called from a meth lab to say that a crazy with a gun is on the way to kill his wife, there are places where demanding or obtaining my location is a breach of privacy laws.
In other countries, registering access points in databases may be illegal, so using that to obtain greater accuracy is then also illegal. Remember the Google Street View fiasco, where Google thought that just because something was broadcasting into public air space, data collection was also legal in all jurisdiction?
Then there are military requirements.
One-size-fits-all never does.
Does running Linux on top instead of below mean that you want to boot into Linux instead of running it in an emulator?
It's sad that you have to ask, but top/bottom and low/high is undergoing a change to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant. This might be a battle that's already lost, but I hope not.
I'm old school, so when I say low level or bottom, I mean fundamental, close to the hardware, and requiring a heck of a lot more understanding than high level or top level, which is abstracted and simplified.
But when a young manager hears "low level", he or she thinks it means low understanding and detail level, and thinks that "high level" means high understanding and detail level. I even had one manager suggest that we "dive down to the top level". The mind boggles.
Android devices have advanced location services for 112 calls. There's no need for Finland to bake their own.
So they should only endorse Android phones?
I'm sure Google would be fine with that...
Log in to your Google account use the timeline feature in maps and then select clear history.
It's not hard.
How does that work if you don't have and don't want a Google account? They still collect the data, but you have to sign in to get rid of it...
It's not just about how picky people are if there aren't enough women to go around. If there are 150 hetero males for every 100 hetero women, there will be 50 males that can't get any women no matter whether they drop all requirements to zero.
And to make it worse, women are even more picky. If you're neither tall nor powerful, most women just won't be interested, and would rather be alone.
265 (1) A person commits an assault when
(a) without the consent of another person, he applies force intentionally to that other person, directly or indirectly;
(b) he attempts or threatens, by an act or a gesture, to apply force to another person, if he has, or causes that other person to believe on reasonable grounds that he has, present ability to effect his purpose; or
(c) while openly wearing or carrying a weapon or an imitation thereof, he accosts or impedes another person or begs.
By that measure, a poor man sitting outside a comic convention in a makeshift costume with a cardboard sword and paper cup for alms is committing assault.
No, apart from that gaffe, the above is not specific, it's deliberately vague, like "directly or indirectly". That covers situations where you tell your attack gorilla to go after someone, without having to specifically mention either gorillas or "commanding an agent through verbal means or hand signalling", like a specific law might have said.
I see Linux hasn't changed much over the years.
It's more that Steam hasn't changed much over the years. It cannot run on a modern Linux pure 64-bit pure system, only on those that have a 32-bit compatibility layer. And part of that problem comes from Microsoft Windows - instead of actually porting the games, the developers run them in Windows compatibility providers like Wine, and inherit the 32-bit requirements that way.
I don't even know if they support Linux, but I imagine the selection is pretty slim.
There are more than 3,000 games for Linux on Steam now.
That said, very few of them are big titles, and a lot of them are Chinese/Japanese visual novels and girl-girl romance games, it seems.
Also, Steam only supports Ubuntu with 32-bit. You can get it to work, of sorts, with some other linux distributions with 32-bit support, but then you're on your own, and some titles might not work, or might stop working when you update your OS.
Mine bitcoin and search for aliens or fight cancer at the same time...
Why?
If we found radio signals that likely were caused by extrasolar life, what then? New religions and prophets claiming to talk to the aliens, and jingoists calling for arming ourselves to the teeth, not understanding nor wanting to understand the distances involved?
And a cure for cancer? It's a good sentiment, but we may have difficulties affording that. Imagine the resulting population explosion, and having to take care of people who will still pick up non-terminal ailments. There will just be more elderly people who will pick up these ailments. If we were to expect 30 years in a nursing home versus 5, what would that do to society? Fewer people dying is not necessarily a good thing for society, just for individuals.
If anything, I think we need more culling, not more cuddling. We're not meant to live forever. Evolution cannot reward the successful if there are no unsuccessful. And unless we go away and leave the world to the new generations, we end up fighting our own offspring for resources.
I assume that you don't own anything with oiled wood if you think that everything marks it. Personally I've never re-oiled any of the nice shiny furniture I have in my house and nothing I place on it seems to leech out the colour either.
If it's shiny furniture, it's not oiled.
It could be shellac, but that gets marks even easier, so my bet is that it isn't. Chances are that you have urethane finishes, which do not get stains and stays shiny. But also doesn't get the deep glow.
The cool thing is, this has an "always analyzing" "MiniDSP" PEQ-type bit built-in; so there is actually at least SOME possibility that the Apple engineers got it right; and if that's the case, as much as we ALL like to think we have "golden ears", and that we can out-EQ some dumb-ass software running in a Microcontroller, FFS, no matter HOW many discrete amplifiers and microphones they throw at it, the truth is, at this point, maybe we can, and maybe we can't.
Yeah, but thing is that its microphone is not anywhere near where your ears are, so it will auto-EQ based on where it is, not where you are.
My Sony ES receiver at least lets me hook up mics where my ears usually are, and it sends full spectrum noise through the speakers and auto-calibrates both EQ and individual speaker volumes for that listening position.
I don't claim to have golden ears - on the contrary, age has made my hearing less than perfect. Which is why when I want to really enjoy music, good headphones and a pre-amp with a good equalizer is king. That way, I can compensate for the dip I have in my hearing at the frequencies of my ex-wife's voice...
This is not SETI@Home, but SETI proper, where they need graphics cards to quickly analyze data, not wait for weeks or months. SETI@Home is high bandwidth, but terrible latency.
Yes, bouncing sound off walls is never going to give a neutral sound - at least not for more than a tiny single listening spot at specific frequencies.
Having direct line speakers makes it a heck of a lot easier to get good EQ, but even then there are caveats, like the distance for the bass and treble elements.
For what it is, I'm sure the HomePod is very good. But I would save the superlatives and not claim that it matches direct line high quality speakers with a good equalizer. For things like a concerto with organs or timpani, it's just not going to do the same, even if it's going to work fine for swaying to Ed Swift or Taylor Sheeran.
Not familiar with dubstep, I take it?
That's not deep bass, it's thumping mid-range bass in the 90-200 Hz range, typically around 120 Hz, because that sounds the "thumpiest".
Modern electronic music doesn't use deep bass, because modern stereo systems cannot reproduce the tones, nor do they move enough air to make them sound the right volume, and something that sounds weird on a typical car stereo or BT speaker because the bass is missing isn't good for sales. Instead, mid-range bass is boosted in volume. Many cannot tell the difference.
Here's a good resource for checking your sound system for its bass capabilities.
How do you know your phone or laptop don't send everything they hear to the mothership?
For the laptop, a flush 3.5mm dummy plug in the mic port, which disconnects the internal mic. :)
For the phone, I don't use one
Look at the image. There's a +10 dB for most of the bass range, and a -15 dB dip at around 93 Hz. That's not consistent with "All the way from 40Hz to 20,000Hz it's +- 3dB".
Judging by the graph, that's only true for the 1500-7000 Hz range.
My guess is that by "all the way", he means "the average for the range", and not "on every point on the range". If so, that's very misleading - it apparently misled you.
You need only have experienced one person driving through town blairing rap / hip hop to realize how absurd your claim is that today's music lacks bass.
That's not deep bass, it's loud midrange bass. Most modern music including hip-hop has thumping bass in the 90-200 Hz range, and almost never below 60 Hz. It's electronic bass, designed to sound loud, and not real bass instruments that are deep but far less loud (due to the Fletcher-Munson effect).
You're insane.
For demanding that a halfway decent system lives up to the DIN HiFi norm of the early 70s, with 31.5-16kHz frequency response with +- 4dB for midrange and less than -10dB falloff on the high end and -8 dB falloff on the low end? That's hardly much to ask - pretty much any speakers from the 70s and early 80s qualified; even the crappiest ones that only did 50-12.5 kHz managed to stay within those limits.
The trash they make today, not so much. These days, you'll be hard pressed to find something that is even audible down to 50 Hz. The days of high fidelity are over. Both in music production and music systems.