Just plug the Record player into the back of the computer (mic port, line in) and record a.wav file. Make sure you use 44.1khz, but Records arn't sterio so you can you can record in mono (the mp3s will take up 1/2 the space).
LP's are stereo; one channel comes from vertical movement of the stylus, and the other from horizontal.
The method you describe for sampling LP's is horribly inadequate for most discerning ears. Most sound cards have hopeless A/D converters, and computer cases are incredibly bad sources of EMF and EMI radiation. A better way would be to use an external A/D converter, and connect that to a soundcard with SP/DIF or AES/EBU inputs. Or use something like a Hoontech card that has external analog stages (the card itself is just a data pump).
Of course, given the choice, my preferred setup would be a Linn LP-12, connected to a tube pre-amp, connected to an Apogee PSX-100, connected to a digital sound card. But we all have our biases;-)
LPs do sound better than CDs if the quality of the hardware is good. [...] The reason for this is that CDs, being binary, can't reproduce as well all of the gradients in a musical tone.
But the real question is, is the sound actually better (ie, closer to the source), or just more appealing to the ear?
I often hear people claim that analog media outperform digital for reasons like "a binary signal cannot possibly reproduce all the gradients in a musical tone", usually these are people that have not encountered Fourier Waveform Analysis and Nyquist's theorem (which states that if you want to exactly reproduce a signal of bandwidth H, you only need 2H samples per second).
Let's face it - digital mastering levels (24-bit, 96kHz) give a theretical S/N ratio of 144dB (using Shannon's equation), and faithful reproduction of sound up until 48kHz. You are telling me your ears are more accurate than that? Wait, let me put that in perspective - noise from a Harrier Jet engine at 1 metre is roughly 140dBW/m^2, and a silent room is usually around 20-30dbW/m^2. (For those curious, the figures for CDs are 96.3dB and 22kHz).
The same thing can be experienced when dealing with tube based amps vs solid state amps. I've actually heard this one firsthand. The tube amps have a better sound.
The phenomenon you describe is due to the fact that when tubes distort, the sound is nicer than that from a bipolar amplifier. This is because the distortion harmonics are greater on even harmonics rather than odd harmonics. For various psychoacoustic reasons, that sounds "better". MOSFET based amplifiers also have even harmonics when they distort, but are more difficult to get as linear as a tube. But they do make a top class bass amplifier.
For a soft sound, I like to mount my CD player on sorbethane. For a sharper sound, I use metallic spikes. Mounting it on a Rimu table I found gave a solid sound. My favourite is folded hundred dollar notes under each foot, which gives a very rich sound. And don't forget to circle the edges of the CD with a green pen to dull the internal reflections from the laser!
ATRAC encoding (used on MiniDiscs) sounds a helluva lot better than any other lossy audio compression I've heard, I wonder why they didn't review that?
In fact, on my system at home (Cyrus Amp Pair, Apogee DA-1000E, obscenely thick cabling, and home-assembled ear-tuned speakers), I find it hard to discern between the MiniDisc and the original! (Ok, this is definitely flamebait in the audiophile crowd but I can probably get away with it on/.)
Why in the world would you want to GPL someone's BSD code?
For the same reasons you use the GPL in the first place!
What can you not do with the GPL that you can with the BSD? You can't not give someone the source to the program if they ask for it and you have given them the compiled form.
Now, a better question: Why would anyone want to use the BSD license for their code instead of the GPL? So other people can make changes, and not give them back?
Resist it - Get a Sun Layout keyboard for your PC!
on
Changing the Keyboard
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· Score: 1
I have a Sun layout keyboard on my work and home PC's. For those that haven't used one of those before, they have an extra 11 function keys down the left hand side (with labels like "Front", "Cut", "Help", etc - VERY useful to bind to functions like "bring window to front" etc), and four extra keys in the top right hand corner. Add to that a real Meta key, compose and Alt Graph, and that's a real hacker's keyboard.
The Sun brand keyboards have a different connector than PC's, which gives you two options; either build a converter, or buy an NCD Sun Layout keyboard (X-terminals have standard PS/2 connectors). Part number for that is "N-123 Unix" (or choose an international version).
If you go with the NCD keyboard, they don't support the clunky protocol that most keyboards use and use the pure PS/2 protocol - so you will have to do some heavy key remapping.
Under Linux 2.0 and current versions of XFree86 you can get all keys except F9 and F10 working. Mail me (see home page for address) to get a copy of keymaps for this.
The Linux Input Driver patch to 2.3.12 will make all the keys available, but is not currently at a production stability level.
Every day it gets clearer and clearer that yesteryear's methods of democracy just don't cut it these days. Individuals don't get a chance to have their say; they are invariably dictated by a group of essentially greedy and corrupt "leaders".
This "Ask Slashdot" broaches a subject that every Free Software advocate must have felt before.
What is the only technology that can bring it down? Communication. Currently manisfested as the internet.
In an ideal democracy, every person gets the right to have their say on every matter. Soon the network infrastructure will be there to enable this.
Here are the first steps:
Some kind group sets up a forum through which people can delegate selected signing authority. A convenient method for allowing them to vote on critical matters. Set your opinions on subjects, then leave it. This group regularly sends in automatically generated petitions to parliament.
This group gains enough reputation to make it to the mainstream press. Word is spread of the true democracy.
The numbers get large enough that the government is pressured into making the technology available to the greater populous of the world with Taxpayer money.
Power to the people!
Ok, this is pretty idealist, and there are obvious steps missing. There are also big, open ended questions - do you really want people who know squat about a subject having a vote that casts as strongly as a world class authority? Still, it can't be worse than the current situation.
DSL is broadband ATM over the phone line. ATM operates at ISO layer 2, the data link layer. So the same security issues apply as would apply to an untrusted ethernet connection.
When you turn your DSL router on (or load the DSL driver for an internal DSL modem), the ATM connection is established to the TelCo's ATM switch. This basically involves an ATM synchronisation, which due to the nature of ATM may take a while (there is only one framing bit between each 53-byte cell!).
The Layer 3 (IP) connection is then set up over this ATM connection. This may be connection based or packet based, but is almost always connection based. Additionally, the actual routing of your IP that you "use" might be tunnelled over this link to your ISP.
In short, what all this means is that whether or not someone on the same subnet as you can get to your machine is dependant upon how the TelCo has set up their ATM switches and routers.
I have an xDSL connection to my TelCo (NZ Telecom), and the Nokia M10 router I have uses NAT and a tunnelled connection to the ISP (XTRA, a tightly coupled company) PPP server. My machine talks to a NAT interface 192.168.1.254/24, which gets translated to the external address (hydro.gen.nz), encapsulated over the IP link to the ISP (which uses the address range 172.30.254.1/16 to 172.30.1.1/16), which in turn is encapsulated over ATM and sent to the TelCo.
The router, by default, refuses all inbound connections, but incoming holes can be defined. I also use Linux 2.0 IP filtering and masquerading to provide IP service to the internal machines.
So in order to get to a port that I have not explicitly defined a rule for from outside (the M10 calls these "pinholes"), two layers must be breached - the Nokia M10 IP NAT and the Linux IP filtering. This gives a double layer of protection (two IP stacks from different vendors), at the expense of losing the ability to use call-back protocols that the M10 does not know about (like some IRC commands and ICQ, but standard mode FTP does work.).
I recommend this setup, as it delivers a very high level of security. If you don't allow any holes through the M10 and also filter incoming connections on the Linux box, the system is virtually inpenetrable.
25,000 users. Give each one a 10MB mailbox. That's 250GB of disk. With, say, 10,000rpm 9.1GB disks that's about 27 disks (_before_ adding redundancy). The internal disks in the Ex500 series machines are fibre channel.
Assume we're going to have an average of 2,500 users on at once, each using, say 4MB of RAM. Approximate this to 8GB RAM, or about a gigabyte per processor. Note we're now utilising a 64-bit address space. Good-bye, Intel.
Lots of spindles = fast. 10,000rpm = fast. Fibre channel = fast. Most of the user's requests will be coming out of RAM once they are logged in. I don't think the disk subsystem will be much of a bottleneck in this system:-) Network, possibly. CPU, almost certainly.
You might be able to get away with fewer CPU's if you were to get an external disk controller for the mirroring etc, but I've always been a fan of doing it in software and just buying more CPU (and avoid RAID 5 at all costs).
Linux or *BSD may be able to run on this sort of machine, but will not perform as well as Solaris (yet - we'll see how SGI's efforts help).
Handling a 25,000 active user base on one machine might be a problem for intel machines, and (dare I say it), most Open Source OS's.
Solaris will do this, but you will probably need to run it on a _big_ box, like a Sun Ex500 class machine with about 8 or more processors. And get their SIMS product, too, it's pretty well optimised for the high end. Other high end commercial unixes like AIX and IRIX will no doubt scale this far as well.
If you are able to go distributed (ie, the organisation is easily divisible geographically), then something like Linux or FreeBSD with qmail or smail will probably cut it.
Beware that exchange servers offer a fairly high level of integration with Outlook, which a product based on open standards will not be able to deliver.
CIDR avoids this by assigning IP addresses geographically. ie, you can then determine whether a packet should be sent north, south, east, west, up, down...
As it only runs on a very select list of hardware.
And last time I checked, a single user Solaris x86 licence cost about NZ$1,150 for the desktop and NZ$1,800 for the server.
About the only reason I can see for using it, is if you already have lots of SPARC servers and want a homogeneous operating environment for your support staff, and can't afford Ultra 5's.
I guess this means those people can use Netscape and Applixware:)
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LP's are stereo; one channel comes from vertical movement of the stylus, and the other from horizontal.
The method you describe for sampling LP's is horribly inadequate for most discerning ears. Most sound cards have hopeless A/D converters, and computer cases are incredibly bad sources of EMF and EMI radiation. A better way would be to use an external A/D converter, and connect that to a soundcard with SP/DIF or AES/EBU inputs. Or use something like a Hoontech card that has external analog stages (the card itself is just a data pump).
Of course, given the choice, my preferred setup would be a Linn LP-12, connected to a tube pre-amp, connected to an Apogee PSX-100, connected to a digital sound card. But we all have our biases ;-)
But the real question is, is the sound actually better (ie, closer to the source), or just more appealing to the ear?
I often hear people claim that analog media outperform digital for reasons like "a binary signal cannot possibly reproduce all the gradients in a musical tone", usually these are people that have not encountered Fourier Waveform Analysis and Nyquist's theorem (which states that if you want to exactly reproduce a signal of bandwidth H, you only need 2H samples per second).
Let's face it - digital mastering levels (24-bit, 96kHz) give a theretical S/N ratio of 144dB (using Shannon's equation), and faithful reproduction of sound up until 48kHz. You are telling me your ears are more accurate than that? Wait, let me put that in perspective - noise from a Harrier Jet engine at 1 metre is roughly 140dBW/m^2, and a silent room is usually around 20-30dbW/m^2. (For those curious, the figures for CDs are 96.3dB and 22kHz).
The phenomenon you describe is due to the fact that when tubes distort, the sound is nicer than that from a bipolar amplifier. This is because the distortion harmonics are greater on even harmonics rather than odd harmonics. For various psychoacoustic reasons, that sounds "better". MOSFET based amplifiers also have even harmonics when they distort, but are more difficult to get as linear as a tube. But they do make a top class bass amplifier.
For a soft sound, I like to mount my CD player on sorbethane. For a sharper sound, I use metallic spikes. Mounting it on a Rimu table I found gave a solid sound. My favourite is folded hundred dollar notes under each foot, which gives a very rich sound. And don't forget to circle the edges of the CD with a green pen to dull the internal reflections from the laser!
ATRAC encoding (used on MiniDiscs) sounds a helluva lot better than any other lossy audio compression I've heard, I wonder why they didn't review that?
In fact, on my system at home (Cyrus Amp Pair, Apogee DA-1000E, obscenely thick cabling, and home-assembled ear-tuned speakers), I find it hard to discern between the MiniDisc and the original! (Ok, this is definitely flamebait in the audiophile crowd but I can probably get away with it on /.)
Anyone have an email address to send requests for the port?
For the same reasons you use the GPL in the first place!
What can you not do with the GPL that you can with the BSD? You can't not give someone the source to the program if they ask for it and you have given them the compiled form.
Now, a better question: Why would anyone want to use the BSD license for their code instead of the GPL? So other people can make changes, and not give them back?
It just doesn't make sense.
Well, its been enough to make me leave Unisys!
:-P
I have a Sun layout keyboard on my work and home PC's. For those that haven't used one of those before, they have an extra 11 function keys down the left hand side (with labels like "Front", "Cut", "Help", etc - VERY useful to bind to functions like "bring window to front" etc), and four extra keys in the top right hand corner. Add to that a real Meta key, compose and Alt Graph, and that's a real hacker's keyboard.
The Sun brand keyboards have a different connector than PC's, which gives you two options; either build a converter, or buy an NCD Sun Layout keyboard (X-terminals have standard PS/2 connectors). Part number for that is "N-123 Unix" (or choose an international version).
If you go with the NCD keyboard, they don't support the clunky protocol that most keyboards use and use the pure PS/2 protocol - so you will have to do some heavy key remapping.
Under Linux 2.0 and current versions of XFree86 you can get all keys except F9 and F10 working. Mail me (see home page for address) to get a copy of keymaps for this.
The Linux Input Driver patch to 2.3.12 will make all the keys available, but is not currently at a production stability level.
Every day it gets clearer and clearer that yesteryear's methods of democracy just don't cut it these days. Individuals don't get a chance to have their say; they are invariably dictated by a group of essentially greedy and corrupt "leaders".
This "Ask Slashdot" broaches a subject that every Free Software advocate must have felt before.
What is the only technology that can bring it down? Communication. Currently manisfested as the internet.
In an ideal democracy, every person gets the right to have their say on every matter. Soon the network infrastructure will be there to enable this.
Here are the first steps:
Ok, this is pretty idealist, and there are obvious steps missing. There are also big, open ended questions - do you really want people who know squat about a subject having a vote that casts as strongly as a world class authority? Still, it can't be worse than the current situation.
DSL is broadband ATM over the phone line. ATM operates at ISO layer 2, the data link layer. So the same security issues apply as would apply to an untrusted ethernet connection.
When you turn your DSL router on (or load the DSL driver for an internal DSL modem), the ATM connection is established to the TelCo's ATM switch. This basically involves an ATM synchronisation, which due to the nature of ATM may take a while (there is only one framing bit between each 53-byte cell!).
The Layer 3 (IP) connection is then set up over this ATM connection. This may be connection based or packet based, but is almost always connection based. Additionally, the actual routing of your IP that you "use" might be tunnelled over this link to your ISP.
In short, what all this means is that whether or not someone on the same subnet as you can get to your machine is dependant upon how the TelCo has set up their ATM switches and routers.
I have an xDSL connection to my TelCo (NZ Telecom), and the Nokia M10 router I have uses NAT and a tunnelled connection to the ISP (XTRA, a tightly coupled company) PPP server. My machine talks to a NAT interface 192.168.1.254/24, which gets translated to the external address (hydro.gen.nz), encapsulated over the IP link to the ISP (which uses the address range 172.30.254.1/16 to 172.30.1.1/16), which in turn is encapsulated over ATM and sent to the TelCo.
The router, by default, refuses all inbound connections, but incoming holes can be defined. I also use Linux 2.0 IP filtering and masquerading to provide IP service to the internal machines.
So in order to get to a port that I have not explicitly defined a rule for from outside (the M10 calls these "pinholes"), two layers must be breached - the Nokia M10 IP NAT and the Linux IP filtering. This gives a double layer of protection (two IP stacks from different vendors), at the expense of losing the ability to use call-back protocols that the M10 does not know about (like some IRC commands and ICQ, but standard mode FTP does work.).
I recommend this setup, as it delivers a very high level of security. If you don't allow any holes through the M10 and also filter incoming connections on the Linux box, the system is virtually inpenetrable.
Let's do some quick numbers.
:-) Network, possibly. CPU, almost certainly.
25,000 users. Give each one a 10MB mailbox. That's 250GB of disk. With, say, 10,000rpm 9.1GB disks that's about 27 disks (_before_ adding redundancy). The internal disks in the Ex500 series machines are fibre channel.
Assume we're going to have an average of 2,500 users on at once, each using, say 4MB of RAM. Approximate this to 8GB RAM, or about a gigabyte per processor. Note we're now utilising a 64-bit address space. Good-bye, Intel.
Lots of spindles = fast. 10,000rpm = fast. Fibre channel = fast. Most of the user's requests will be coming out of RAM once they are logged in. I don't think the disk subsystem will be much of a bottleneck in this system
You might be able to get away with fewer CPU's if you were to get an external disk controller for the mirroring etc, but I've always been a fan of doing it in software and just buying more CPU (and avoid RAID 5 at all costs).
Linux or *BSD may be able to run on this sort of machine, but will not perform as well as Solaris (yet - we'll see how SGI's efforts help).
Handling a 25,000 active user base on one machine might be a problem for intel machines, and (dare I say it), most Open Source OS's.
Solaris will do this, but you will probably need to run it on a _big_ box, like a Sun Ex500 class machine with about 8 or more processors. And get their SIMS product, too, it's pretty well optimised for the high end. Other high end commercial unixes like AIX and IRIX will no doubt scale this far as well.
If you are able to go distributed (ie, the organisation is easily divisible geographically), then something like Linux or FreeBSD with qmail or smail will probably cut it.
Beware that exchange servers offer a fairly high level of integration with Outlook, which a product based on open standards will not be able to deliver.
It makes me laugh to see this article appearing on the same page as this Ask /.
Although, I presume no-one's ported it to Linux yet.
It's a bit of a worry when the backup license costs more than a DLT7000 tape drive.
Those who care know where to find out. This isn't Freshmeat. Let's try to avoid newbies flooding the lists and usenet groups.
CIDR avoids this by assigning IP addresses geographically. ie, you can then determine whether a packet should be sent north, south, east, west, up, down...
As it only runs on a very select list of hardware.
:)
And last time I checked, a single user Solaris x86 licence cost about NZ$1,150 for the desktop and NZ$1,800 for the server.
About the only reason I can see for using it, is if you already have lots of SPARC servers and want a homogeneous operating environment for your support staff, and can't afford Ultra 5's.
I guess this means those people can use Netscape and Applixware