The addition of digital outputs makes this (at last) a reasonable competitor to the AudioTron.
Because they are trying to keep the price down, both SlimDevices and Turtle Beach used cheap DACs for the D->A conversion. Thus, the analog sound coming from them was pretty bad -- OK for background music but no better. And I'm no audiophile...this quality problem has been oticeable to lots of people.
The AudioTron has always had a digital out, whereas SLiMP3 did not. That means one could use the nice, high-quality DACs in a medium or high end receiver/amp, and get decent sound. That's why I bought two AudioTrons rather than these.
Now, I would probably get these instead. Ignoring the fact that Turtle Beach is due for a new device soon, we have the following differences:
AudioTron: + No server software, works with NAS devices + Typical audio component form factor + HPNA for those without any kind of LAN
Squeezebox + Additional flexibility in Perl server + Better web interface, integration + Both kinds of digital output + 802.11b free instead of $50 add-on
You must not be talking about the AudioTron. It too relies on external storage of the MP3's.
SLiMP3 and AudioTron are the only two (out of about half a dozen) makes of these devices that have made the vital realization that it is stupid to try to store the files locally on a hard drive.
We agree, I think, that the current system of patents and marketing is (pun intended) sick. However...
Although you claim it, I don't think all that many medical breakthroughs come from outside the U.S. You have to go to 1991 to find a Nobel medical prize untainted by American researchers.
Consider for example the field of birth-control research, which American researchers won't touch due to political and legal liabilities. Though there is some talk of a male contraceptive these days, the only real advance to reach the public was RU486 (from France) nearly a quarter century ago. In fairness, I must concede that because of American squeamishness, the U.K. is easily leading the field in stem cell research and its relatives.
That said, America's lead in basic medical research is probably mostly due to the fact that its research universities are more desirable (and open) to top-notch researchers. Drug research, though, including expensive assays and clinical trials, are a private preserve.
I've come to consider the US healthcare system as a net winner for the world versus Canadian- or European-style socialized (I use the term loosely) medicine.
Because it is an almost entirely private system, there is huge money to be made from those who can afford good health care. This creates competition, as well as R&D. That R&D creates better and better health care, not just for Americans, but also for the rest of the world. Without US research, for example, there wouldn't be any MRI machines. Probably even X-ray machines would be significantly less common.
Thus, the parts of the world that get some Western medical treatment are subsidized by America's insured. Of course, the insured consider the cost worth paying, so I don't think they are getting screwed -- for them it's all the better if, in addition to their money helping themselves, it also helps others.
So despite the fact that the insured are paying, the losers are America's uninsured, who would (in a socialized system) have that money directed to them rather than nebulous advancement of medical knowledge.
Now, I think that more efficient ways must be found to direct money to R&D while avoiding bloated pharamceutical advertising and management budgets. But I also think it would be a net loss for humanity if the USA adopted one of the existing systems.
On firewire drives, this is not a BIOS issue, but it is on ATA drives hooked up to many motherboards. The story with such drives is that only the DDR RAM and later Macs support drives larger than 137GB.
BTW 137GB refers to ~137 x 10^12 bytes. The drive shows up in Disk Utility as 128GB.
Market makers don't get a guaranteed profit. The way they work is that you can go and ask for a market in, say, SCO, without saying whether you want to buy or sell. They are then required to give you a market for a minimum number of shares (maybe 10 or so).
If the market is quite liquid, they can immediately find someone to reverse the transaction on. If the market is not liquid, it could be a long time before they get out. During the time they own the transaction, they have the same up-down risk as you or me. With nonzero probability, the market-maker will go bankrupt.
Thus, that bid-ask spread they charge is not pure profit. It must make up for the volatility in earnings arising from imperfect liquidity of the market.
Incidentally, "guaranteed" profits can be had by holding something like Treasuries. The rub, of course, is that there's no profit margin in that.
America has huge income inequality. Some of it is certainly due to disgusting CEO salaries and the like, but I have more of a problem with reducing inheritance tax than I do with large salaries (which are basically the shareholders' problem)
Here's an interesting quote on income disparity in America versus the rest of the world BTW
Seen from an international perspective, America certainly looks an unequal country, but in a way that many of those optimistic Americans might be proud of (see chart). According to the EPI, admittedly using figures from the late 1990s, the gap between the top and bottom tenth of earners in America is wider than that in almost any other rich country. Even so, America's poorest are (in real purchasing-power terms) only a tiny bit worse-off than their peers in Sweden, Finland and Denmark; and they are better-off than those in Britain and Australia.
The relative inequality in America comes from the people at the top doing unusually well. The top 10% of Americans are nearly twice as well off as the top 10% of Nordic households. They are also much further away from the mean.
That's from http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id =2041155 which may not be free.
My grandpa drove a mid-size sedan when he was raising his 6 kids, so you can't use the "I need it to ferry around my kids" excuse.
You clearly don't have children. I hate SUV's but I can't let this sort of idiocy pass.
In your grandpa's day, seat belts were an oddity, and car seats probably didn't even exist. It was just fine to leave your kids in the house alone. And when it was time to go on a family trip, your grandpa whistled everybody into the car and they took off.
These days, if you drive with improperly restrained children you can (depending on the state) go to jail. And that's a good thing.
I defy you to show me a mid-size sedan with seven legal seats. Wagons and minivans, sure. But you probably have to go full-size just to get six!
I think it was in "I'm Gonna Get You Sucka" that you see the protagonist (Keenan Ivory Williams IIRC) walking down the street to some funky music. The camera pans out, and you see the band following him.
It's hilarious -- just as good as the band scenes in "Something About Mary".
A somewhat less influential, but closely related effect, is "bullet tracking". This is where the camera follows behind the bullet along it's path to collision (probably at about 1/20 actual bullet speed).
I first saw it as "arrow tracking" in that horrible Robin Hood movie. It was definitely the best part of the movie. Since then, I think "Three Kings" used it best.
Perhaps it's not even a digital effect, though. Remember the opening sequence to Naked Gun?
Most slashdotters are too young to remember, but Former President Carter also uses that annoying pronunciation. And he has an advanced degree in nuclear physics (as well as having been a submarine guy)!
What I would really like to see is for AFS to get easy to implement. By easy to implement, I mean, shall we say, "worth the effort for my 5-machine home network runninn W2K, OSX and Linux".
And, for those folks who think it's reasonable not to put a front brake on a fixed gear bike, well, they generally either go too slow or don't know enough about the physics of cycling. Sheldon put it better than I can:
Some fixed-gear riders ride on the road without brakes. This is a bad idea. I know, I've tried it. If you do it, and have any sense of self-preservation at all, it will cause you to go much slower than you otherwise could, everytime you go through an intersection, or pass a driveway. The need for constant extra vigilance takes a great deal of the fun out of cycling.
You really should have a front brake. A front brake, all by itself, will stop a bicycle as fast as it is possible to stop. This is true because when you are applying the front brake to the maximum, there is no weight on the rear wheel, so it has no traction.
One of the wonderful things about fixed-gear riding is that the direct feel you get for rear-wheel traction teaches you exactly how hard you can apply the front brake without quite lifting the wheel off of the ground.
This is a very valuable lesson for any cyclist who likes to go fast; it could save your life.
There is really no need for a rear brake on a fixed-gear bicycle. By applying back-pressure on the pedals, you can supply all the braking that the rear wheel really needs. In fact, it is fairly easy to lock up the rear wheel and make it skid, unless you are running a rather high gear.
Some fixed-gear fans make a point of not using their brake except in an emergency. I am not sure that this is a good idea. Heavy duty resisting is widely reputed to be bad for your legs, and to be counterproductive for building up muscles and coordination for forward pedaling.
This is a lot like car drivers who use their transmission and clutch to slow down, even though the car has a special set of parts made for the exact purpose of slowing down. Brake shoes are cheaper to replace when they wear out than clutches are.
Aside from Chicago, other posts have listed (re Cmdr Taco) Holland, Michigan, and (re Cedar Point rollercoasters) Sandusky, Ohio.
In any of these locations, you can take in a very strange sight -- namely one of the Great Lakes. Freshwater lakes (very fine for swimming) where it is easily possible to sail over the horizon out of sight of land in any direction. I imagine the experience would be especially interesting to someone from Dry Country.
That it was not the spawn of the whale, according to vulger conceit or nominal appellation, philosophers have always doubted, not easily conceiving the seminal humour of animals should be inflammable, or of a floating nature.
This sentence is not constructed by modern standards, and I believe you have misread the quote. The whole point is that natural philosophers realized such inflammable, floating stuff could not be sperm.
I know a fellow who drove a forklift, loading trucks for an industrial shipping company (who mostly deals with, say, furniture, machinery, and partially finished widgets.
Most of this stuff comes on pallets, usually with a frame around the contents. It gets taken off of one semi, moved around, and put on another semi to its final destination. These pallets (of somewhat nonstandard sizes) needed to be packed into a given number of semis headed for a particular destination.
The pallets always managed to fit into the semis available. Sometimes he had to drive the forklift faster than others. But they always fit.
Slashdot Mirror
>That's a plane every 10 minutes. You try to sleep with that.
Have you ever seen the Blues Brothers? Then the solution should be obvious...campaign for more airplanes!
Jake:
How often does the train go by?
Elwood:
So often, you won't even notice.
Noise pollution from traffic causes sleep-deprevation
/me heads of for a depraved little nap....
You almost, but not quite, gave us the delicious malaprop of sleep depravation.
The addition of digital outputs makes this (at last) a reasonable competitor to the AudioTron.
Because they are trying to keep the price down, both SlimDevices and Turtle Beach used cheap DACs for the D->A conversion. Thus, the analog sound coming from them was pretty bad -- OK for background music but no better. And I'm no audiophile...this quality problem has been oticeable to lots of people.
The AudioTron has always had a digital out, whereas SLiMP3 did not. That means one could use the nice, high-quality DACs in a medium or high end receiver/amp, and get decent sound. That's why I bought two AudioTrons rather than these.
Now, I would probably get these instead. Ignoring the fact that Turtle Beach is due for a new device soon, we have the following differences:
AudioTron:
+ No server software, works with NAS devices
+ Typical audio component form factor
+ HPNA for those without any kind of LAN
Squeezebox
+ Additional flexibility in Perl server
+ Better web interface, integration
+ Both kinds of digital output
+ 802.11b free instead of $50 add-on
You must not be talking about the AudioTron. It too relies on external storage of the MP3's.
SLiMP3 and AudioTron are the only two (out of about half a dozen) makes of these devices that have made the vital realization that it is stupid to try to store the files locally on a hard drive.
That's why people apply for patents....to get those fat license fees!
(ducks)
Thanks!!...is that for all iPod models or just certain ones?
We agree, I think, that the current system of patents and marketing is (pun intended) sick. However...
Although you claim it, I don't think all that many medical breakthroughs come from outside the U.S. You have to go to 1991 to find a Nobel medical prize untainted by American researchers.
Consider for example the field of birth-control research, which American researchers won't touch due to political and legal liabilities. Though there is some talk of a male contraceptive these days, the only real advance to reach the public was RU486 (from France) nearly a quarter century ago. In fairness, I must concede that because of American squeamishness, the U.K. is easily leading the field in stem cell research and its relatives.
That said, America's lead in basic medical research is probably mostly due to the fact that its research universities are more desirable (and open) to top-notch researchers. Drug research, though, including expensive assays and clinical trials, are a private preserve.
I've come to consider the US healthcare system as a net winner for the world versus Canadian- or European-style socialized (I use the term loosely) medicine.
Because it is an almost entirely private system, there is huge money to be made from those who can afford good health care. This creates competition, as well as R&D. That R&D creates better and better health care, not just for Americans, but also for the rest of the world. Without US research, for example, there wouldn't be any MRI machines. Probably even X-ray machines would be significantly less common.
Thus, the parts of the world that get some Western medical treatment are subsidized by America's insured. Of course, the insured consider the cost worth paying, so I don't think they are getting screwed -- for them it's all the better if, in addition to their money helping themselves, it also helps others.
So despite the fact that the insured are paying, the losers are America's uninsured, who would (in a socialized system) have that money directed to them rather than nebulous advancement of medical knowledge.
Now, I think that more efficient ways must be found to direct money to R&D while avoiding bloated pharamceutical advertising and management budgets. But I also think it would be a net loss for humanity if the USA adopted one of the existing systems.
Besides, Slashdot's traditional atrocious spelling and usage require him to write that he is waiting with baited breath.
Must smell like fish.
Well, we can eke out a little more time by using our bits more efficiently in a dozenal system.
BTW, some folks are already thinking about Y10K. See the Long Now.
On firewire drives, this is not a BIOS issue, but it is on ATA drives hooked up to many motherboards. The story with such drives is that only the DDR RAM and later Macs support drives larger than 137GB.
BTW 137GB refers to ~137 x 10^12 bytes. The drive shows up in Disk Utility as 128GB.
All right -- I would love to be living that lifestyle, but not if I have to do the research! Do you mind if I live off of yous?
Where do you live? What phone do you have, and from what cellular provider? What's a bluetooth car kit and where did you get one?
Market makers don't get a guaranteed profit. The way they work is that you can go and ask for a market in, say, SCO, without saying whether you want to buy or sell. They are then required to give you a market for a minimum number of shares (maybe 10 or so).
If the market is quite liquid, they can immediately find someone to reverse the transaction on. If the market is not liquid, it could be a long time before they get out. During the time they own the transaction, they have the same up-down risk as you or me. With nonzero probability, the market-maker will go bankrupt.
Thus, that bid-ask spread they charge is not pure profit. It must make up for the volatility in earnings arising from imperfect liquidity of the market.
Incidentally, "guaranteed" profits can be had by holding something like Treasuries. The rub, of course, is that there's no profit margin in that.
America has huge income inequality. Some of it is certainly due to disgusting CEO salaries and the like, but I have more of a problem with reducing inheritance tax than I do with large salaries (which are basically the shareholders' problem)
d =2041155 which may not be free.
Here's an interesting quote on income disparity in America versus the rest of the world BTW
Seen from an international perspective, America certainly looks an unequal country, but in a way that many of those optimistic Americans might be proud of (see chart). According to the EPI, admittedly using figures from the late 1990s, the gap between the top and bottom tenth of earners in America is wider than that in almost any other rich country. Even so, America's poorest are (in real purchasing-power terms) only a tiny bit worse-off than their peers in Sweden, Finland and Denmark; and they are better-off than those in Britain and Australia.
The relative inequality in America comes from the people at the top doing unusually well. The top 10% of Americans are nearly twice as well off as the top 10% of Nordic households. They are also much further away from the mean.
That's from http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_i
My grandpa drove a mid-size sedan when he was raising his 6 kids, so you can't use the "I need it to ferry around my kids" excuse.
You clearly don't have children. I hate SUV's but I can't let this sort of idiocy pass.
In your grandpa's day, seat belts were an oddity, and car seats probably didn't even exist. It was just fine to leave your kids in the house alone. And when it was time to go on a family trip, your grandpa whistled everybody into the car and they took off.
These days, if you drive with improperly restrained children you can (depending on the state) go to jail. And that's a good thing.
I defy you to show me a mid-size sedan with seven legal seats. Wagons and minivans, sure. But you probably have to go full-size just to get six!
I think it was in "I'm Gonna Get You Sucka" that you see the protagonist (Keenan Ivory Williams IIRC) walking down the street to some funky music. The camera pans out, and you see the band following him.
It's hilarious -- just as good as the band scenes in "Something About Mary".
A somewhat less influential, but closely related effect, is "bullet tracking". This is where the camera follows behind the bullet along it's path to collision (probably at about 1/20 actual bullet speed).
I first saw it as "arrow tracking" in that horrible Robin Hood movie. It was definitely the best part of the movie. Since then, I think "Three Kings" used it best.
Perhaps it's not even a digital effect, though. Remember the opening sequence to Naked Gun?
Most slashdotters are too young to remember, but Former President Carter also uses that annoying pronunciation. And he has an advanced degree in nuclear physics (as well as having been a submarine guy)!
What I would really like to see is for AFS to get easy to implement. By easy to implement, I mean, shall we say, "worth the effort for my 5-machine home network runninn W2K, OSX and Linux".
And, for those folks who think it's reasonable not to put a front brake on a fixed gear bike, well, they generally either go too slow or don't know enough about the physics of cycling. Sheldon put it better than I can:
Some fixed-gear riders ride on the road without brakes. This is a bad idea. I know, I've tried it. If you do it, and have any sense of self-preservation at all, it will cause you to go much slower than you otherwise could, everytime you go through an intersection, or pass a driveway. The need for constant extra vigilance takes a great deal of the fun out of cycling.
You really should have a front brake. A front brake, all by itself, will stop a bicycle as fast as it is possible to stop. This is true because when you are applying the front brake to the maximum, there is no weight on the rear wheel, so it has no traction.
One of the wonderful things about fixed-gear riding is that the direct feel you get for rear-wheel traction teaches you exactly how hard you can apply the front brake without quite lifting the wheel off of the ground.
This is a very valuable lesson for any cyclist who likes to go fast; it could save your life.
There is really no need for a rear brake on a fixed-gear bicycle. By applying back-pressure on the pedals, you can supply all the braking that the rear wheel really needs. In fact, it is fairly easy to lock up the rear wheel and make it skid, unless you are running a rather high gear.
Some fixed-gear fans make a point of not using their brake except in an emergency. I am not sure that this is a good idea. Heavy duty resisting is widely reputed to be bad for your legs, and to be counterproductive for building up muscles and coordination for forward pedaling.
This is a lot like car drivers who use their transmission and clutch to slow down, even though the car has a special set of parts made for the exact purpose of slowing down. Brake shoes are cheaper to replace when they wear out than clutches are.
Pi isn't a complex number (at least not one with an imaginary part).
Sure it is! It has an imaginary part of magnitude P, and a real part of magnitude zero.
Aside from Chicago, other posts have listed (re Cmdr Taco) Holland, Michigan, and (re Cedar Point rollercoasters) Sandusky, Ohio.
In any of these locations, you can take in a very strange sight -- namely one of the Great Lakes. Freshwater lakes (very fine for swimming) where it is easily possible to sail over the horizon out of sight of land in any direction. I imagine the experience would be especially interesting to someone from Dry Country.
That it was not the spawn of the whale, according to vulger conceit or nominal appellation, philosophers have always doubted, not easily conceiving the seminal humour of animals should be inflammable, or of a floating nature.
This sentence is not constructed by modern standards, and I believe you have misread the quote. The whole point is that natural philosophers realized such inflammable, floating stuff could not be sperm.
I know a fellow who drove a forklift, loading trucks for an industrial shipping company (who mostly deals with, say, furniture, machinery, and partially finished widgets.
Most of this stuff comes on pallets, usually with a frame around the contents. It gets taken off of one semi, moved around, and put on another semi to its final destination. These pallets (of somewhat nonstandard sizes) needed to be packed into a given number of semis headed for a particular destination.
The pallets always managed to fit into the semis available. Sometimes he had to drive the forklift faster than others. But they always fit.
so incredibly automatic that it's nearly automatic
As, apparently, is my phrasing. A few bugs to work out there....