Nice plan, but it won't work because CD-Audio is too error-prone to have a high confidence of getting the same bitstream twice off different copies of the same CD, or indeed off the same CD played in a different player.
Re:Yeah, but the systems are pretty had to find
on
Athlon MP Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
I bought my dual Athlon desktopn from http://dnuk.com/ - very nice it is too! I'm not sure what they can do about overseas though.
What is wrong with Bose is that the treble is screechy and harsh, the midrange is flat and lifeless, and the bass is flabby and distorted (and doesn't go veyr low in any case). Unless you are stone deaf you will be able to hear the crapness of a Bose system the instant you get the chance to compare it with some decent hardware.
But hey, you asked the question, right? I personally use my normal stereo amps and speakers for the front left and right. They are a Musical Fidelity X-P100 preamp, Musical Fidelity X-AS100 power amp (2 channels, 100Watts/channel), and Ruark Talisman II speakers. That's all British kit, and it cost ~$4000.
For the Processor and the remaining 3 channels of amplification I use a Yamaha DSP-A5 (~$450). This is simply a great machine: it does everything you could want and does it *well*, with great effects steering, lots of power, superb clarity, and loads of fun geeky settings to tweak (i.e. individual delay and level controls for each speaker, etc).
For the centre speaker, a Tannoy mXc1 (~$175), and for the rears some cute bipolars from Eltax (~$250). I really recommend bipolar rear speakers for convincing surrond effects.
And finally the sub. I run a sub for stereo anyway, and it's a REL Q100E. Really, nobody but REL makes subs quite right, so just get one of theirs, even if they are pricey - mine is next to the bottom of the range and it's ~$800, but it's worth every penny. For movies the LFE output goes to the L+R front channels and the sub takes care of the really low end. I can do this because the Ruarks are quite happy to receive the signal as they go down to ~40Hz themselves.
So there you have it. That's my take on a moderately decent hi fi with budget surround sound added in.
There's a fairly intelligent discussion of this at http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm, but do bear in mind that there may be more in the manner of the processing than the volume of it...
1. Is *very* easy (I won't go whoring by reposting the link in the parent)
2. Gives you a real feeling of well being
3. Gets you a cool t-shirt if you give $65 or more when you join
4. Is very *effective*
So do it. I did, and I'm told I'm a better person now;-)
Ah, but is this such a bad thing? Here in the UK the process you describe is pretty much how we have arrived at most of our law, as we have no written constitution (or at least no ultimate arbiters of such) in the US sense.
The various interpretations of a law by individual courts in particular cases set precedents of argument and conclusion, which future jurists are semi-officially bound to pay attention to in so far as they represent considered interpretations of the intent of Parliament.
What is good about this is that nobody even pretends (well, except politicians...) that laws are rigid things. I for one feel that this is for the best.
And while others may not have picked up on your nice example, I like it. How's this though for some programmatic, self referential language (direct borrowing from Quine & Hofstadter btw)?
"Yields falsehood when appended to its quotation." yields falsehood when appended to its quotation.
So, does it yield falsehood (i.e. is it false) or not? Is it a program, a logical statement, or speech? Or something else?
I would *love* to see a court try to deal with these issues! I think what we will find is that the courts will become ever more concerned with intent and context, where before they were concerned with facts, and that this is one of the looming dangers we should be keenly aware of.
That's an interesting idea that I haven't heard before. Do you have any explanation as to why? Not that I doubt you, just that it would be nice to know.
I had thought the difference was more along the lines of "disc" being an abstract noun meaning a flat, circular shape, and "disk" generally being used for physical objects that are disc shaped. Of course the distinction is so pointless that one (looks like disc at this time) will just be dropped.
So when I relocate and get a new number, or when the telco changes it for me (3 times in the last 5 years I think for some parts of the UK), what then?
The whole idea is so ludicrously crap it's actually quite funny! It's really just another dereference on top of DNS, so where we now have DNS->IP, one of these addresses is NUMBER->DNS->IP. Now how pointless is that?
As be-fan says, if you want to compile the kernel on rh7 you don't use the gcc snapshot, you use the provided egcs. But that isn't the point anyway...
The point is that if you want to run the same piece of software (say Apache) on a variety of boxes then the GNU/OSS/etc model is to recompile the source code on each different box.
Even if the operating environment is the same on two boxes you still might want to do this, e.g. the same Linux install on a single vs. a dual cpu system. Or how about the exact same Linux distro on a 486/66 versus an Athlon/1GHz? Sure you want the same Apache binary there? Really sure?
It is just fundamentally cool that when I have a box with loads of RAM I can unroll loops to my heart's content and generate a fast but huge binary, and when things are tight I can choose to have the _exact_ same bit of software running in 2/3 the space.
It'd be a shame if people started thinking of binary distributions as in any way natural on Linux.
I think we all need to stop to remember why we love GNU/Linux/*BSD/GPL/OSS in the first place.
So what if the compliler produces incompatible binaries? They made a tradeoff for other benefits, and because the kernel and apps we all use almost exclusively have available source code we can just recompile, right?
Got a Debian machine and need to use that prog you built on RH7? *RECOMPILE IT*
It's not quite that simple unfortunately. Last time I voted in a UK general election (1997) I had 6 choices, and I made my X, and it was easy.
But in the US your vote for president is just one of an astounding number of votes you can cast, from the proverbial dogcatcher upwards. Consequently US ballot papers are lengthy, complex, and often confusing - even for intelligent, literate, educated people.
The problem is not really technological, it's ergonomic. Forget all the grand schemes for PKI/Smartcard/bioimplant auto-wireless megainstantvoting (TM), and just put in a nice simple kiosk with a touchscreen. No net connection or other fluff is needed, just simple hardcopy recording of votes.
It amazes me how far away from the real issue the debate has moved. What is that issue? How to ensure that every voter is presented with clear and unambiguous choices, so that they are sure to be satisfied in their own minds that they voted the way they intended, and that that vote will be counted. That is all.
OK, Cantametrix has 12 references to other people talking about 'Music DNA (TM)', but *no* information about it on its own site.
Their online presentation is simply about yet another stunningly crude music genre classification technique.
Now usually if someone has something of substance to say, they are happy to back it up, no?
My reading is this:
1. Cantametrix is a company with not particularly special technology looking to up its profile.
2. The SDMI competition and the Napster / Bertelsmann agreement mean that music copyright issues are particularly newsworthy at the moment.
3. Cantametrix has *privately* spread around the idea that its technology could be used to help enforce copyrights.
4. Note that they make no formal claim for themselves claim beyond "For labels and artists, CantaMetrix fingerprinting technology can be a valuable component in the song identification process."
Therefore, this is PR fluff. Ignore with confidence.
Is it common practice? It's absolutely *standard* practice. Whenever there is even the faintest shadow of a doubt about the motivations for a dismissal (as there clearly were in your case, as you could point to others who had not been dismissed despite behaving similarly to you) then any normal company would offer you money in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
I myself was made redundant (willingly I must say) during a merger, while contract staff were retained in roles I could have performed. I happily took a year's wages to go quietly - after all I'd only been working there a year!
I thought that it was proven that if there is a polynomial time solution for one problem in NP then there is one for *all* problems in NP? Why should this be different for quantum computing based solutions?
Yup, you said it. Thing is, we're unlikely to see 266MHz FSBs on sale to joe public RSN, since that gear (as a whole package, CPU, mobo, RAM) will cost *lots* more than the standard stuff.
Well clockspeed might be everything for desktops, but these is not going to have the same price advantage over Intel as the current crop. If clockspeed was everything, then where would Sun be? Until last month the fastest UltraSparc II was 450MHz, but a fully loaded Sun 420R (4x$50MHz USII, 4MB level II cache each, 4GB RAM, 160MB/sec SCSI, ludicrous memory and IO bandwidth (64bit 66MHz PCI, 288 bit wide memory bus, etc etc), whups all kind of ass at the low (yes low) end of servers. It's a *lot* more expensive than a Quad Xeon, but boy does it get through more work in the real world.
You know how much the charge is, you choose to pay it or not depending on whether *you* think it's good value. How on earth can they 'overcharge' unless someone inserted an inalienable right to multiplayer online gaming for less than $5/month into the universal declaration of human rights?
The mathematics of infinities (both countable and uncountable) is odd, but the short answer is "the same amount". Think of it this way - there are the same number of odd integers as there are integers as a whole (ha! bad pun!), because every integer (odd or even) can be mapped onto an odd integer by multiplying it by two and adding one. So 1 -> 3, 2->5, 3->7 etc, and we have a one-to-one correspondence between integers and odd integers, so there are the same amount of each.
Of course, the article doesn;t specify the type of infinity involved...
I'm reading at +2, so maybe this is in no way original...
Key points: 1 - It is alleged that Rambus failed to comply with the JEDEC rules (id est; sat on a patent without revealing an interest) that it had agreed to.
2 - It is alleged that there is prior art for the key patents that Rambus holds. nota bene; not all the patents, just the key ones vis a vis competition in the DRAM manufacturing industry.
Now (1) implies - should they in fact have been disingenuous - that regardless of whether they _mentioned_ their IPR claim(s) at the time or not, it is void by virtue of their *explicit* agreement to the terms of the joint standardisation effort. This is not a monopoly/trust issue. If they were not bound to mention then what they bring up now then all power to them. That is called being clever (geek respect for brainpower, geek disrespect for sneakiness and failure to give dues to peers, such has the libertarian/communitarian axis ever been stressed)
So, (2). Not at all a follow on from (1). Establishment is a question of mostly fact with a salt of interpretation.
In reality an antitrust suit will live by the argument that standards promote competition, and that by _appearing_ to support a standard and then undermining it Rambus is being anticompetitive. This is like beds (bear with me). It is a *good* thing that every fitted queen size sheet fits every queen size mattress; this allows us to buy our sheets and mattresses from different manufacturers with ease.
So Rambus is trying to say "pay us for the privilege of a standard bed size". And this is where they may get caught by anti-trust legislation. Remember, Sherman is not about details of what you did, but about *effects*, and that is the beauty of it.
My bet is that they quietly license some tech for less than they could get if they enforced the patents, because it saves everyone time, and in semiconductors time is even more valuable then money...
I'm afraid the only way to deal with this is to be harsh. It's utter rubbish. The whole point of lossy compression is that it removes elements bof the audio signal that are 'masked' by others, such that their absence is minimally noticeable. Once these elements are gone, they're gone for good.
Apart from the fact that the Excite article is embarassingly technically inaccurate, e.g. "Supreme Drive takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental'", it's obviously just a rehashed press release.
All they can do is add distortion - now that distorion may in fact have a 'natural' or pleasing sound to it, just ask anyone who prefers valve (vacuum tube in the US) hi-fi amplifiers, by virtue of being mostly even order, but it's distortion none the less.
Ugh, I hate technobabble, especially of the purposefully misleading kind. Anyone who understands the technology and claims this is meaningful is media whoring.
Um, in Europe and Japan you can't move for minidisc players, both home (great for editing compilations etc), and portable. While I can't think of *anyone* I know who has a portable cassette player, some have portable CD players, but most everyone has an MD portable.
1. Modern outers are in fact generally split into control and forwarding planes. All 'routing' takes place in the silicon of the forwarding plane (just a layer 3 switch), and the job of the control plane is to deal with routing updates etc and populate the forwarding plane with the necessary information as and when that info changes.
2. The speed of light is 300,000km/sec, so it'll *always* be 40ms RTT between London and New York even if you could fire a laser through a perfect vacuum between them, let alone at the lower speeds in fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice plan, but it won't work because CD-Audio is too error-prone to have a high confidence of getting the same bitstream twice off different copies of the same CD, or indeed off the same CD played in a different player.
I bought my dual Athlon desktopn from http://dnuk.com/ - very nice it is too! I'm not sure what they can do about overseas though.
What is wrong with Bose is that the treble is screechy and harsh, the midrange is flat and lifeless, and the bass is flabby and distorted (and doesn't go veyr low in any case). Unless you are stone deaf you will be able to hear the crapness of a Bose system the instant you get the chance to compare it with some decent hardware.
But hey, you asked the question, right? I personally use my normal stereo amps and speakers for the front left and right. They are a Musical Fidelity X-P100 preamp, Musical Fidelity X-AS100 power amp (2 channels, 100Watts/channel), and Ruark Talisman II speakers. That's all British kit, and it cost ~$4000.
For the Processor and the remaining 3 channels of amplification I use a Yamaha DSP-A5 (~$450). This is simply a great machine: it does everything you could want and does it *well*, with great effects steering, lots of power, superb clarity, and loads of fun geeky settings to tweak (i.e. individual delay and level controls for each speaker, etc).
For the centre speaker, a Tannoy mXc1 (~$175), and for the rears some cute bipolars from Eltax (~$250). I really recommend bipolar rear speakers for convincing surrond effects.
And finally the sub. I run a sub for stereo anyway, and it's a REL Q100E. Really, nobody but REL makes subs quite right, so just get one of theirs, even if they are pricey - mine is next to the bottom of the range and it's ~$800, but it's worth every penny. For movies the LFE output goes to the L+R front channels and the sub takes care of the really low end. I can do this because the Ruarks are quite happy to receive the signal as they go down to ~40Hz themselves.
So there you have it. That's my take on a moderately decent hi fi with budget surround sound added in.
There's a fairly intelligent discussion of this at http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm, but do bear in mind that there may be more in the manner of the processing than the volume of it...
1. Is *very* easy (I won't go whoring by reposting the link in the parent)
;-)
2. Gives you a real feeling of well being
3. Gets you a cool t-shirt if you give $65 or more when you join
4. Is very *effective*
So do it. I did, and I'm told I'm a better person now
Ah, but is this such a bad thing? Here in the UK the process you describe is pretty much how we have arrived at most of our law, as we have no written constitution (or at least no ultimate arbiters of such) in the US sense.
The various interpretations of a law by individual courts in particular cases set precedents of argument and conclusion, which future jurists are semi-officially bound to pay attention to in so far as they represent considered interpretations of the intent of Parliament.
What is good about this is that nobody even pretends (well, except politicians...) that laws are rigid things. I for one feel that this is for the best.
And while others may not have picked up on your nice example, I like it. How's this though for some programmatic, self referential language (direct borrowing from Quine & Hofstadter btw)?
"Yields falsehood when appended to its quotation." yields falsehood when appended to its quotation.
So, does it yield falsehood (i.e. is it false) or not? Is it a program, a logical statement, or speech? Or something else?
I would *love* to see a court try to deal with these issues! I think what we will find is that the courts will become ever more concerned with intent and context, where before they were concerned with facts, and that this is one of the looming dangers we should be keenly aware of.
That's an interesting idea that I haven't heard before. Do you have any explanation as to why? Not that I doubt you, just that it would be nice to know.
I had thought the difference was more along the lines of "disc" being an abstract noun meaning a flat, circular shape, and "disk" generally being used for physical objects that are disc shaped. Of course the distinction is so pointless that one (looks like disc at this time) will just be dropped.
So when I relocate and get a new number, or when the telco changes it for me (3 times in the last 5 years I think for some parts of the UK), what then?
The whole idea is so ludicrously crap it's actually quite funny! It's really just another dereference on top of DNS, so where we now have DNS->IP, one of these addresses is NUMBER->DNS->IP. Now how pointless is that?
As be-fan says, if you want to compile the kernel on rh7 you don't use the gcc snapshot, you use the provided egcs. But that isn't the point anyway...
The point is that if you want to run the same piece of software (say Apache) on a variety of boxes then the GNU/OSS/etc model is to recompile the source code on each different box.
Even if the operating environment is the same on two boxes you still might want to do this, e.g. the same Linux install on a single vs. a dual cpu system. Or how about the exact same Linux distro on a 486/66 versus an Athlon/1GHz? Sure you want the same Apache binary there? Really sure?
It is just fundamentally cool that when I have a box with loads of RAM I can unroll loops to my heart's content and generate a fast but huge binary, and when things are tight I can choose to have the _exact_ same bit of software running in 2/3 the space.
It'd be a shame if people started thinking of binary distributions as in any way natural on Linux.
I think we all need to stop to remember why we love GNU/Linux/*BSD/GPL/OSS in the first place.
So what if the compliler produces incompatible binaries? They made a tradeoff for other benefits, and because the kernel and apps we all use almost exclusively have available source code we can just recompile, right?
Got a Debian machine and need to use that prog you built on RH7? *RECOMPILE IT*
M
It's not quite that simple unfortunately. Last time I voted in a UK general election (1997) I had 6 choices, and I made my X, and it was easy.
But in the US your vote for president is just one of an astounding number of votes you can cast, from the proverbial dogcatcher upwards. Consequently US ballot papers are lengthy, complex, and often confusing - even for intelligent, literate, educated people.
The problem is not really technological, it's ergonomic. Forget all the grand schemes for PKI/Smartcard/bioimplant auto-wireless megainstantvoting (TM), and just put in a nice simple kiosk with a touchscreen. No net connection or other fluff is needed, just simple hardcopy recording of votes.
It amazes me how far away from the real issue the debate has moved. What is that issue? How to ensure that every voter is presented with clear and unambiguous choices, so that they are sure to be satisfied in their own minds that they voted the way they intended, and that that vote will be counted. That is all.
OK, Cantametrix has 12 references to other people talking about 'Music DNA (TM)', but *no* information about it on its own site.
Their online presentation is simply about yet another stunningly crude music genre classification technique.
Now usually if someone has something of substance to say, they are happy to back it up, no?
My reading is this:
1. Cantametrix is a company with not particularly special technology looking to up its profile.
2. The SDMI competition and the Napster / Bertelsmann agreement mean that music copyright issues are particularly newsworthy at the moment.
3. Cantametrix has *privately* spread around the idea that its technology could be used to help enforce copyrights.
4. Note that they make no formal claim for themselves claim beyond "For labels and artists, CantaMetrix fingerprinting technology can be a valuable component in the song identification process."
Therefore, this is PR fluff. Ignore with confidence.
Is it common practice? It's absolutely *standard* practice. Whenever there is even the faintest shadow of a doubt about the motivations for a dismissal (as there clearly were in your case, as you could point to others who had not been dismissed despite behaving similarly to you) then any normal company would offer you money in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
I myself was made redundant (willingly I must say) during a merger, while contract staff were retained in roles I could have performed. I happily took a year's wages to go quietly - after all I'd only been working there a year!
2 for the price of one, don't knock it.
I thought that it was proven that if there is a polynomial time solution for one problem in NP then there is one for *all* problems in NP? Why should this be different for quantum computing based solutions?
Yup, you said it. Thing is, we're unlikely to see 266MHz FSBs on sale to joe public RSN, since that gear (as a whole package, CPU, mobo, RAM) will cost *lots* more than the standard stuff.
Well clockspeed might be everything for desktops, but these is not going to have the same price advantage over Intel as the current crop. If clockspeed was everything, then where would Sun be? Until last month the fastest UltraSparc II was 450MHz, but a fully loaded Sun 420R (4x$50MHz USII, 4MB level II cache each, 4GB RAM, 160MB/sec SCSI, ludicrous memory and IO bandwidth (64bit 66MHz PCI, 288 bit wide memory bus, etc etc), whups all kind of ass at the low (yes low) end of servers. It's a *lot* more expensive than a Quad Xeon, but boy does it get through more work in the real world.
You know how much the charge is, you choose to pay it or not depending on whether *you* think it's good value. How on earth can they 'overcharge' unless someone inserted an inalienable right to multiplayer online gaming for less than $5/month into the universal declaration of human rights?
The mathematics of infinities (both countable and uncountable) is odd, but the short answer is "the same amount". Think of it this way - there are the same number of odd integers as there are integers as a whole (ha! bad pun!), because every integer (odd or even) can be mapped onto an odd integer by multiplying it by two and adding one. So 1 -> 3, 2->5, 3->7 etc, and we have a one-to-one correspondence between integers and odd integers, so there are the same amount of each.
Of course, the article doesn;t specify the type of infinity involved...
I'm reading at +2, so maybe this is in no way original...
Key points:
1 - It is alleged that Rambus failed to comply with the JEDEC rules (id est; sat on a patent without revealing an interest) that it had agreed to.
2 - It is alleged that there is prior art for the key patents that Rambus holds. nota bene; not all the patents, just the key ones vis a vis competition in the DRAM manufacturing industry.
Now (1) implies - should they in fact have been disingenuous - that regardless of whether they _mentioned_ their IPR claim(s) at the time or not, it is void by virtue of their *explicit* agreement to the terms of the joint standardisation effort. This is not a monopoly/trust issue. If they were not bound to mention then what they bring up now then all power to them. That is called being clever (geek respect for brainpower, geek disrespect for sneakiness and failure to give dues to peers, such has the libertarian/communitarian axis ever been stressed)
So, (2). Not at all a follow on from (1). Establishment is a question of mostly fact with a salt of interpretation.
In reality an antitrust suit will live by the argument that standards promote competition, and that by _appearing_ to support a standard and then undermining it Rambus is being anticompetitive. This is like beds (bear with me). It is a *good* thing that every fitted queen size sheet fits every queen size mattress; this allows us to buy our sheets and mattresses from different manufacturers with ease.
So Rambus is trying to say "pay us for the privilege of a standard bed size". And this is where they may get caught by anti-trust legislation. Remember, Sherman is not about details of what you did, but about *effects*, and that is the beauty of it.
My bet is that they quietly license some tech for less than they could get if they enforced the patents, because it saves everyone time, and in semiconductors time is even more valuable then money...
M
I'm afraid the only way to deal with this is to be harsh. It's utter rubbish. The whole point of lossy compression is that it removes elements bof the audio signal that are 'masked' by others, such that their absence is minimally noticeable. Once these elements are gone, they're gone for good.
Apart from the fact that the Excite article is embarassingly technically inaccurate, e.g. "Supreme Drive takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental'", it's obviously just a rehashed press release.
All they can do is add distortion - now that distorion may in fact have a 'natural' or pleasing sound to it, just ask anyone who prefers valve (vacuum tube in the US) hi-fi amplifiers, by virtue of being mostly even order, but it's distortion none the less.
Ugh, I hate technobabble, especially of the purposefully misleading kind. Anyone who understands the technology and claims this is meaningful is media whoring.
Told you it would be harsh.
Um, in Europe and Japan you can't move for minidisc players, both home (great for editing compilations etc), and portable. While I can't think of *anyone* I know who has a portable cassette player, some have portable CD players, but most everyone has an MD portable.
Sorry, I have to correct you on both points:
1. Modern outers are in fact generally split into control and forwarding planes. All 'routing' takes place in the silicon of the forwarding plane (just a layer 3 switch), and the job of the control plane is to deal with routing updates etc and populate the forwarding plane with the necessary information as and when that info changes.
2. The speed of light is 300,000km/sec, so it'll *always* be 40ms RTT between London and New York even if you could fire a laser through a perfect vacuum between them, let alone at the lower speeds in fiber.
M
Good point. It's pretty much all we've got to go on for the mo' though, so until more emerges...