I suspect they would sound even better with less hiss if I got an Audigy
That is the sad part. You would not near less hiss with a better sound card. Your current sound card is already better then your speakers. Ask anyone who knows audio. If you are going to spend money you should spend it one the speakers first.
I have a 2 decent bookshelf speakers (jbl) and 2 cheap mini speakers (jvc) driven by a pathetic 60w amp connected to an sb live!value. I don't hear any hiss. The hiss you hear is from the extra cheap electronics used in the amplifiers. With "only" 60w I can still crank the volume past the unconfortable range.
THX certification on computer speakers is a joke. "500w" speaker systems that only draw enough current for 35watts is a bigger joke.
I picked picked up my gear from yard sales on the cheap. If yard sales aren't an option start searching google for "speaker kit." Many are decent quality and don't require much more then a bit of glue to assemble. The amp is going to be the hardest part to get on the cheap. Look for clearout sales at BestCry and the like. Last year's Sony with 4x55w will be more then loud enough.
I agree that sound in games is vastly underated. Part of the problem is that "computer speakers" are garbage. Even the high end "500watts" 5.1 systems are not worth listening too. This limits the usefullness of consumer 24/96 audio.
The organization I current work for and its 1000+ employee use more then just 4 OSs. Off the top of my head there is: WindowsNT, Windows2k, the Solaris servers, the IBM AIX CAD workstations, the SGI IRIX tape library, the squid proxy cluster running some linux, the old IBM OS/390 document server, the procurement and budget software runs on IBM MVS/AS400 something, Cisco PIX, various Cisco IOS, and whatever the firewalls run on. There is probably some older machines that has been long forgotten by all but the two people who use them. I have done work for several companies of this size and larger. All have had a large mix of operating systmes. Admittedly these guys are an older company so this example is a little extreme. They have had more time to accumulate systems.
It is too bad that you trolled as an AC. I would have liked to know how you acquired your vast knowledge of "work" that deemed 4 OSs to be too many. I suspect I already know the answer. And no/. and your high school computer lab don't count as real experience.
Both 2 and 4 stroke engines require a certain ammount of backpressure. However 4 strokes can deal with more restriction. I should have have written that 2 strokes prefer a less restricted exhuast. You example illustrates this perfectly. As the other poster wrote a 2 stroke runs best with a tuned exhaust that has been made to produce just the right ammount of backpressure. Often this does not include a muffler that does much to dampen the sound.
2 strokes are a dieing breed. There will probably always be some on the race track. New EPA legislation has been worded such that it basically bans new 2 stroke dirtbikes (and snowmobiles??) in the US. As a result most dirt bike racing will switch to 4 strokes.
You might be able to stuff a Mazda Wankle engine in there, but wouldn't that be over kill? As in "kill the driver?" It would be easier (and safer) to strap on a motorcycle engine in the 100cc range. I learnt how to ride on a 125cc 4 stroke Yamaha that had plenty of power to get into trouble. You nearest motorcycle junk dealer should have no limit of little 2 and 4 stroke motors.
I run Debian, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. Debian is not even close to the simplicity of OpenBSD. In particular Debian suffers from a lack of a true default (complete) install. OpenBSD's default install is "everything you want in a *nix and nothing more." FreeBSD has a few more nice to have features. By comparision Debian is quite complex. Debian's philosophy of choice, choice, and more choice has its place (and is the reason I use it). However a side effect is that the Debian team won't come out and package up a default system that is well integrated and contains the basic unix tools and servers. OpenBSD has a smaller footprint then Debian for the same basic functionality because OpenBSD does not have all the support files Debian needs to seemlessly work with any of the 56 mailservers packaged in debs.
All three systems are equally easy to administer due to ports and apt-get. I do find that Debian is easier to keep current as apt-get/dpkg does a better job of upgradeing from one version to the next. Some admin basic admin tasks are easier under OpenBSD/FreeBSD as there is just less cruff to deal with. I prefer *BSD on my servers as I can "install and forget." I prefer Debian/testing on my workstations as it combines a good mix of current software and stability.
If you like Gentoo (which I also use) switch to FreeBSD. The packages in FreeBSD ports are better then Gentoo's ebuilds. FreeBSD aims for stability. Gentoo has a tendancy to apply too many bleeding edge patches. FreeBSD does have a completely different way of manageing the source, so it will take some getting used to.
Modern two smokes run fairly clean. Oil is injected instead of mixed with the fuel in the gas tank. A well designed naturally carburated engine will expell most of the exhaust gasses. Larger 2strokes will use a supercharger to get the same effect. A 4 stroke will still be cleaner then a 2 stroke though. 2 strokes also tend to be louder as you need an unrestricted exhaust.
While two strokes are inefficient, pound for pound a 2stroke engine will be more powerfull then a 4 stroke engine (the common type). A 2 stroke cylinder has a power stroke every revolution of the crankshaft. A 4 stroke only has a power stroke every second revolution.
Grand Prix motorcycle racing until last year was all 2 stroke engines. What used to be the class of 500cc motorcycles is now the MotoGP class which allows 1000cc 4 strokes to compete with 500cc 2 strokes. Dirt bike racing is still dominated by the 2strokes, but that is changeing as manufacturers introduce new 4 strokes. From a racing technology point of few it has only been very recently that a 4 stroke engine has been able to compete with a 2 stroke engine that is half the size.
$2200/year compared to your time to reinstall is pretty cheap isn't it.
I dont' know why people are getting all hot under the collar over this. Red Hat's bussiness model is to provide support for servers and workstations running Red Hat Linux. If you don't like this bussiness model switch to another distro like Debian and its years long distrobution cycle.
The words college and university are to some extent regionalisms. To some people the words are practically interchangeable. To others college implies "trade school" where specific trades are taught such as secretarial skills, engine repair, carpentry, and system administration.
Many CS and engineering programs have gone down the slippery path of Trade School were specifics are taught instead of general concepts. This has been discussed many many times on slashdot.
Isn't HDTV happening because of the FCC? The incumbent broadcasters had no interest in switching to DTV untill forced to. If the FCC unregulate radio spectrum you would very quickly be unable to recieve anything.
Is this a problem with the FM signal, or with the basic design of receivers??
Both. But receivers are mostly responsible.
Big transmitters do not produce perfect signals. The transmitters often produce side bands (offset frequencies) that are much lower in power. There are specific standards stateing how much noise is acceptable.
The standards are set so that most recievers should have no trouble discriminateing the correct signal. But cheap recievers are everywhere. Some of the problems are poor design. Others are from useing cheap parts. In some cases a really good reciever with high quality parts will find all the low power side channels and apear to be of poor quality. But the high quality reciever will be able to pick off each signal perfectly.
Ofcourse the cost of the reciever does not indicate quality. My supposed to be good quality Sony reciever could not recieve two low power stations. The signal would be swamped by one of the large high power stations. The low power stations would not be heard at all. The reciever would tune to the high power stations instead. My, at the time, 10 year old cheap JVC "boom box" on the other hand could recieve both stations although with a bit of noise. In this case the JVC's old anolog reciever was superior. The Sony (proudly) used an all digital reciever.
I have never admined MS VPNs. My statement above is based purely on what my colleagues tell me. None of my colleagues are currently recommending the MS solution. All prefer one of the many Firewall + VPN solutions from Cisco, Borderware, et al. I think part of this is Microsoft's poor security record in general, and the original vulnerability with MS PPTP in particular. I suspect another reason is the lack of integrated firewall + VPN from MS.
The lack of harware crypto does limit the VPN in theory but most software solutions seem to be able to saturate a 100mbit/s ethernet given enough CPU.
I will have to go and poll my colleagues and maybe set up MS VPN myself to get you a better answer then that.
VPNs don't allow you to check your e-mail from a web terminal in an airport or a coffee shop.
Exactly. And that is a good thing. From a security point of view allowing email to be read anywhere is a risk. The user has no idea how secure the web terminal is. It could have been installed by a malicious party hopeing to collect credit card numbers and username/password pairs.
Ofcourse MS is pushing OWA over SSL. MS does not have a good VPN product.
I have used both Outlook and OWA. I did not like OWA. I found that OWA was slow. Meeting reminders did not work. Autosave was tempremental. I lost a few emails when OWA lost its connection to the server (the fault of my ISP). In short useing real Outlook was better.
There are also security risks with OWA. Unless you outfit every user's browser with a SSL cert then a user can use any web browser to read their email. Before you know it you have your users checking their coporate email from Internet cafes and other insecure places. Furthure an attacker would like nothing better to do then start guessing at passwords and reading coporate email.
If you are going to manage SSL certs you might as well go whole hog and run a VPN. A VPN provides both security and an additional ammount of control to system administrators.
As others have written accessing the intranet is more then just access to email. VPNs also allow users to access file servers, and company internal webservers.
VPNs work and provide your users with more then just email. OWA over SSL is a hack.
Eric S. Raymond has written one of the better Python advocacy articles. His experiences with Python are similar to Frater's. Python has replaced C as my general purpose language of choice.
KDE and Gnome: racing to mediocraty. Which project will get there first?
Gnome and KDE both promissed to make the *nix destop more useable with exciting easy to use new features. But instead of useability we just have prettier versions of the same old. Judgeing from the responses in the article neither project is really interested in useability.
Instead of modding this comment, and its parent down, reply and prove us wrong.
Your problem could be disk related. Do you have CFLAGS set with -pipe in/etc/make.conf ?
You also could be running into problems with the 'nice -5'. Xmms may be preempting important kernel processes. I would drop it.
Infact Xmms is useing less then 0.1% of the cpu as per top. (Xmms v1.2.7, Alsa 0.9 plugin libALSA.so, standard "Analyzer" visualization, PIII 1GHz.) For the record I have no trouble with compiling and xmms on my laptop which has sucky disk i/o. I usually don't renice either process. (sometimes I remember to nice emerge to 10.) The only trouble I run into is with emerge sync which hard on the disk.
The 32bit addressing of the 386 was put to serious use long before windows95. Early Sun workstations were 386s. OS/2 and WinNT 3.51 both benefitted from a 32bit address space. Quaterdeck's DESQView, and QEMM386 required 386s. Even under MSDOS there was that ugly task switcher that required 386s. And don't forget the games that loaded the DOS extenders. The 32bit addressing of the 386 was required for both office and home applications long before windows95.
Let's not forget the excellent Motorola 68K chips either. The 32bit addressing 68020 was introduced in 1984. It was used in many *nix workstations.
In 1985 Intel said the same thing they are saying now: This new CPU is for servers, you don't need it in workstations. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.
The first problem is that Australia is much much bigger then Denmark. The second (and bigger) problem is that for two smaller ISPs to peer they usually must buy a link from the monopoly Telstra at a cost where basically the two smaller companies would pay for every bit twice.
We are starting to see some exchange points similar to DIX in Canada. Finally. We used to have similar problems to you where traffic going to your next door neighbour could travel a thousand kms, across timezones, and through the US.
Basic, Expert, Companion, and Master are the same game but for different character levels. D&D and AD&D are related but diffrent systems. Basic (red box) D&D and AD&D came out at about the same time. Have a look at a time line.
Slashdot Mirror
Rsync can also be used to make some very nice incremental "snapshot" backups.
I suspect they would sound even better with less hiss if I got an Audigy
That is the sad part. You would not near less hiss with a better sound card. Your current sound card is already better then your speakers. Ask anyone who knows audio. If you are going to spend money you should spend it one the speakers first.
I have a 2 decent bookshelf speakers (jbl) and 2 cheap mini speakers (jvc) driven by a pathetic 60w amp connected to an sb live!value. I don't hear any hiss. The hiss you hear is from the extra cheap electronics used in the amplifiers. With "only" 60w I can still crank the volume past the unconfortable range.
THX certification on computer speakers is a joke. "500w" speaker systems that only draw enough current for 35watts is a bigger joke.
I picked picked up my gear from yard sales on the cheap. If yard sales aren't an option start searching google for "speaker kit." Many are decent quality and don't require much more then a bit of glue to assemble. The amp is going to be the hardest part to get on the cheap. Look for clearout sales at BestCry and the like. Last year's Sony with 4x55w will be more then loud enough.
I agree that sound in games is vastly underated. Part of the problem is that "computer speakers" are garbage. Even the high end "500watts" 5.1 systems are not worth listening too. This limits the usefullness of consumer 24/96 audio.
The organization I current work for and its 1000+ employee use more then just 4 OSs. Off the top of my head there is: WindowsNT, Windows2k, the Solaris servers, the IBM AIX CAD workstations, the SGI IRIX tape library, the squid proxy cluster running some linux, the old IBM OS/390 document server, the procurement and budget software runs on IBM MVS/AS400 something, Cisco PIX, various Cisco IOS, and whatever the firewalls run on. There is probably some older machines that has been long forgotten by all but the two people who use them. I have done work for several companies of this size and larger. All have had a large mix of operating systmes. Admittedly these guys are an older company so this example is a little extreme. They have had more time to accumulate systems.
/. and your high school computer lab don't count as real experience.
It is too bad that you trolled as an AC. I would have liked to know how you acquired your vast knowledge of "work" that deemed 4 OSs to be too many. I suspect I already know the answer. And no
Both 2 and 4 stroke engines require a certain ammount of backpressure. However 4 strokes can deal with more restriction. I should have have written that 2 strokes prefer a less restricted exhuast. You example illustrates this perfectly. As the other poster wrote a 2 stroke runs best with a tuned exhaust that has been made to produce just the right ammount of backpressure. Often this does not include a muffler that does much to dampen the sound.
2 strokes are a dieing breed. There will probably always be some on the race track. New EPA legislation has been worded such that it basically bans new 2 stroke dirtbikes (and snowmobiles??) in the US. As a result most dirt bike racing will switch to 4 strokes.
You might be able to stuff a Mazda Wankle engine in there, but wouldn't that be over kill? As in "kill the driver?" It would be easier (and safer) to strap on a motorcycle engine in the 100cc range. I learnt how to ride on a 125cc 4 stroke Yamaha that had plenty of power to get into trouble. You nearest motorcycle junk dealer should have no limit of little 2 and 4 stroke motors.
I run Debian, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. Debian is not even close to the simplicity of OpenBSD. In particular Debian suffers from a lack of a true default (complete) install. OpenBSD's default install is "everything you want in a *nix and nothing more." FreeBSD has a few more nice to have features. By comparision Debian is quite complex. Debian's philosophy of choice, choice, and more choice has its place (and is the reason I use it). However a side effect is that the Debian team won't come out and package up a default system that is well integrated and contains the basic unix tools and servers. OpenBSD has a smaller footprint then Debian for the same basic functionality because OpenBSD does not have all the support files Debian needs to seemlessly work with any of the 56 mailservers packaged in debs.
All three systems are equally easy to administer due to ports and apt-get. I do find that Debian is easier to keep current as apt-get/dpkg does a better job of upgradeing from one version to the next. Some admin basic admin tasks are easier under OpenBSD/FreeBSD as there is just less cruff to deal with. I prefer *BSD on my servers as I can "install and forget." I prefer Debian/testing on my workstations as it combines a good mix of current software and stability.
If you like Gentoo (which I also use) switch to FreeBSD. The packages in FreeBSD ports are better then Gentoo's ebuilds. FreeBSD aims for stability. Gentoo has a tendancy to apply too many bleeding edge patches. FreeBSD does have a completely different way of manageing the source, so it will take some getting used to.
Modern two smokes run fairly clean. Oil is injected instead of mixed with the fuel in the gas tank. A well designed naturally carburated engine will expell most of the exhaust gasses. Larger 2strokes will use a supercharger to get the same effect. A 4 stroke will still be cleaner then a 2 stroke though. 2 strokes also tend to be louder as you need an unrestricted exhaust.
While two strokes are inefficient, pound for pound a 2stroke engine will be more powerfull then a 4 stroke engine (the common type). A 2 stroke cylinder has a power stroke every revolution of the crankshaft. A 4 stroke only has a power stroke every second revolution.
Grand Prix motorcycle racing until last year was all 2 stroke engines. What used to be the class of 500cc motorcycles is now the MotoGP class which allows 1000cc 4 strokes to compete with 500cc 2 strokes. Dirt bike racing is still dominated by the 2strokes, but that is changeing as manufacturers introduce new 4 strokes. From a racing technology point of few it has only been very recently that a 4 stroke engine has been able to compete with a 2 stroke engine that is half the size.
$2200/year compared to your time to reinstall is pretty cheap isn't it.
I dont' know why people are getting all hot under the collar over this. Red Hat's bussiness model is to provide support for servers and workstations running Red Hat Linux. If you don't like this bussiness model switch to another distro like Debian and its years long distrobution cycle.
He's referring to "in the English language in general"
Exactly. Sorry if that was not clear.
The words college and university are to some extent regionalisms. To some people the words are practically interchangeable. To others college implies "trade school" where specific trades are taught such as secretarial skills, engine repair, carpentry, and system administration.
Many CS and engineering programs have gone down the slippery path of Trade School were specifics are taught instead of general concepts. This has been discussed many many times on slashdot.
Isn't HDTV happening because of the FCC? The incumbent broadcasters had no interest in switching to DTV untill forced to. If the FCC unregulate radio spectrum you would very quickly be unable to recieve anything.
Is this a problem with the FM signal, or with the basic design of receivers??
Both. But receivers are mostly responsible.
Big transmitters do not produce perfect signals. The transmitters often produce side bands (offset frequencies) that are much lower in power. There are specific standards stateing how much noise is acceptable.
The standards are set so that most recievers should have no trouble discriminateing the correct signal. But cheap recievers are everywhere. Some of the problems are poor design. Others are from useing cheap parts. In some cases a really good reciever with high quality parts will find all the low power side channels and apear to be of poor quality. But the high quality reciever will be able to pick off each signal perfectly.
Ofcourse the cost of the reciever does not indicate quality. My supposed to be good quality Sony reciever could not recieve two low power stations. The signal would be swamped by one of the large high power stations. The low power stations would not be heard at all. The reciever would tune to the high power stations instead. My, at the time, 10 year old cheap JVC "boom box" on the other hand could recieve both stations although with a bit of noise. In this case the JVC's old anolog reciever was superior. The Sony (proudly) used an all digital reciever.
I have never admined MS VPNs. My statement above is based purely on what my colleagues tell me. None of my colleagues are currently recommending the MS solution. All prefer one of the many Firewall + VPN solutions from Cisco, Borderware, et al. I think part of this is Microsoft's poor security record in general, and the original vulnerability with MS PPTP in particular. I suspect another reason is the lack of integrated firewall + VPN from MS.
The lack of harware crypto does limit the VPN in theory but most software solutions seem to be able to saturate a 100mbit/s ethernet given enough CPU.
I will have to go and poll my colleagues and maybe set up MS VPN myself to get you a better answer then that.
VPNs don't allow you to check your e-mail from a web terminal in an airport or a coffee shop.
Exactly. And that is a good thing. From a security point of view allowing email to be read anywhere is a risk. The user has no idea how secure the web terminal is. It could have been installed by a malicious party hopeing to collect credit card numbers and username/password pairs.
Ofcourse MS is pushing OWA over SSL. MS does not have a good VPN product.
I have used both Outlook and OWA. I did not like OWA. I found that OWA was slow. Meeting reminders did not work. Autosave was tempremental. I lost a few emails when OWA lost its connection to the server (the fault of my ISP). In short useing real Outlook was better.
There are also security risks with OWA. Unless you outfit every user's browser with a SSL cert then a user can use any web browser to read their email. Before you know it you have your users checking their coporate email from Internet cafes and other insecure places. Furthure an attacker would like nothing better to do then start guessing at passwords and reading coporate email.
If you are going to manage SSL certs you might as well go whole hog and run a VPN. A VPN provides both security and an additional ammount of control to system administrators.
As others have written accessing the intranet is more then just access to email. VPNs also allow users to access file servers, and company internal webservers.
VPNs work and provide your users with more then just email. OWA over SSL is a hack.
Eric S. Raymond has written one of the better Python advocacy articles. His experiences with Python are similar to Frater's. Python has replaced C as my general purpose language of choice.
KDE and Gnome: racing to mediocraty. Which project will get there first?
Gnome and KDE both promissed to make the *nix destop more useable with exciting easy to use new features. But instead of useability we just have prettier versions of the same old. Judgeing from the responses in the article neither project is really interested in useability.
Instead of modding this comment, and its parent down, reply and prove us wrong.
You should read the linked article. The update does seem to be the root of the problem.
At any rate the tech was incorrect. A year old battery should not need replaceing. A 5 year old battery after heavy use may need replaceing.
the electric2optical circuts is adding a lot of latency
Is less then 1 clock pulse really a lot of latency? Ofcourse there is also latency in every electrical circuits as well.
The real problem with fiber is the cost. For short distances electric signals over coppper are cheaper.
Your problem could be disk related. Do you have CFLAGS set with -pipe in /etc/make.conf ?
You also could be running into problems with the 'nice -5'. Xmms may be preempting important kernel processes. I would drop it.
Infact Xmms is useing less then 0.1% of the cpu as per top. (Xmms v1.2.7, Alsa 0.9 plugin libALSA.so, standard "Analyzer" visualization, PIII 1GHz.) For the record I have no trouble with compiling and xmms on my laptop which has sucky disk i/o. I usually don't renice either process. (sometimes I remember to nice emerge to 10.) The only trouble I run into is with emerge sync which hard on the disk.
As far as I know, there never was a Linux kernel 0.7
You are correct.
FILE -> SAVE AS -> RTF.
But then even that is not sure fire so best to save it as text and the import it.
The 32bit addressing of the 386 was put to serious use long before windows95. Early Sun workstations were 386s. OS/2 and WinNT 3.51 both benefitted from a 32bit address space. Quaterdeck's DESQView, and QEMM386 required 386s. Even under MSDOS there was that ugly task switcher that required 386s. And don't forget the games that loaded the DOS extenders. The 32bit addressing of the 386 was required for both office and home applications long before windows95.
Let's not forget the excellent Motorola 68K chips either. The 32bit addressing 68020 was introduced in 1984. It was used in many *nix workstations.
In 1985 Intel said the same thing they are saying now: This new CPU is for servers, you don't need it in workstations. They were wrong then. They are wrong now.
The first problem is that Australia is much much bigger then Denmark. The second (and bigger) problem is that for two smaller ISPs to peer they usually must buy a link from the monopoly Telstra at a cost where basically the two smaller companies would pay for every bit twice.
We are starting to see some exchange points similar to DIX in Canada. Finally. We used to have similar problems to you where traffic going to your next door neighbour could travel a thousand kms, across timezones, and through the US.
There are about 4 versions of D&D
D&D v1 (chainmail supplement)
D&D v2 (Basic, Expert, etc)
AD&D v1
AD&D v2
D&D v3
There will also be a D&D v3.5 later this year.