I'm genuinely curious -- I use an OS X box at home (an old 400MHz one, still runs the latest system) and it handles everything I throw at it in terms of average tasks while still remaining rock solid. In all honesty if you told me to do something right now that would make the machine crash, I'm not sure what I'd be able to do.
The only times I've been able to throw a wrench in it were when I've been playing with really buggy pre-beta software. Using regular production apps I can't remember the last time I took the OS down.
If your system was seriously as unstable as you say, I'd seriously question whether there might have been some sort of hardware failure (bad RAM?) going on. OS X is by no means a speed demon (those tests of DB performance just confirmed what I'd always suspected), but that's the first time I've heard someone who's comments I otherwise agreed with call it unstable.
I agree with you in spirit; the problem I have is that Wikipedia recently had a fundraising drive where they accepted donations. Although they certainly didn't say "we're never going to have ads," I think -- given that they were ad free and asking for donations -- a lot of people may have given them money while under the impression that they were contributing to an ad-free site (or to keep it that way).
For the Wikimedia Foundation to have taken people's money so freely and then to start putting up ads isn't going to win them many friends with the community they've spawned, and perhaps most especially among the people who just donated.
At the very least it's going to make a lot of people more reluctant to give money to similar causes in the future, because they'll feel like I do now: I didn't donate anything other than my time (although I was considering it), but if it's true that they're going to an ad-supported business model then I'm just glad I didn't cut that check, since clearly they don't need my money.
It's not that I don't think Wikipedia is a good service -- I do, or even that the Wikimedia Foundation isn't within their rights to put up ads -- they are. What I'm not comfortable with is that they asked for donations from individuals without exhausting the other options first. In my mind, asking your users for cash ought to be an option of last (not first) resort, and that they did ask for donations should have meant that they had either taken the idea of advertising completely off the table as unacceptable, or already pursued it as far as it could go.
It's the difference between somebody asking me for money when they're truly destitute and desperate, or asking me for money and then waiting to see how much I cough up before they decide whether to get a job.
Hopefully there's more to the story that I just haven't found out yet, but right now I think that their timing really stinks, and that a lot of other people will probably agree.
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As I see it, the problem isn't that you're letting people put links onto your page as much as the way the search engines work right now provides an incentive for people to want to put spam links onto any page they can find.
Allowing backlinks seems to me a pretty logical and reasonable thing to do, and were there not the search engine crawlers using links to rank pages, then there wouldn't be much reason for people to abuse them. At least not en masse as they do now; certainly there would still be people finding ways to do malicious things to each other, but I don't think backlinks are inherently more helpful to them than any other medium.
I guess it's pretty much a moot point since it doesn't look like Google is going to go away tomorrow, so any system that includes backlinks will have to deal with the spectre of spammers and corrupt webadmins trying to raise their results ranking, but if you're looking for a place to point fingers in an academic sense as to who's 'responsible' for link spam, it should be with Google and other link-based search engines first, and the concept of backlinks second.
(I say this as a fan of Google both as a search engine and a company, by the way.)
I think people are getting too wound-up on the Copyright aspect of this idea. Granted it's not their fault, since Nelson hits it pretty hard (in deference to his aging-hippie / utopian regular audience, I assume) in the quoted article.
However what Nelson is proposing isn't really throwing away nearly as much copyright law as people are making it out to be: really it's just a system for dynamically quoting pieces of other documents inline into your own, without actually copying anything. It's just deep linking, but to text instead of to images.
The 'ownership' of the quoted information doesn't change, since if the author/owner of the quoted work removes their page from the network then the link will break and the quoted text disappears; the assemblage of information is being done (at least based on my understanding) by the client, on the fly, based on instructions and links in the primary document being read.
I'm pretty sure a system like this wouldn't really upset any settled law, or even create that many new cases versus what you can do with regular HTML style hypertext. If you didn't want to participate and allow people to link to your stuff, it would be pretty easy to block.
Anyway, I just think people are concentrating too hard on the 'free love and no copyright' aspect, and that a good first step for Nelson to take if he seriously ever wants this to get off the ground is to drop that line and instead play up what such a system really would be: dynamic, inline deep linking. There's no license being imposed (or necessary to the functioning of the system) at any point.
What confused me for a moment -- and I say this as a reasonably well-read native speaker of American English -- was the use of the word 'knights' as a verb in the past tense. (As opposed to the more common usage as a plural noun.) I had to go back over the sentence a few times in order to figure out what had actually been meant, and that there weren't any missing words or something that was throwing me off.
Anyway, my point was just that as an opening sentence, there were several things working together to make it fairly awkward.
Does anyone else find it slightly amusing that Wikipedia stamps a big warning across the page as soon as it gets Slashdotted? Complete with a warning to look out for trolls? I'm sure it's not new, but I guess I've just always ignored it in the past.
It's brilliant. Maybe we should include one at the top of every/. article from now on.
On a sidenote, wouldn't it make sense to link to the static version of a Wikipedia entry page, rather than the top / dynamic one? I guess it would detract from the whole editable purpose of Wikipedia, but in terms of providing a reference -- which is what this article is using it for -- it seems like it would be safer to link against a static page of a specific revision, and then let people see the newest version if they wanted to.
Of course if they did that, we'd never get to see their 'Do Not Feed The Trolls' warning.
Well, the current/. article isn't really about the device itself, it's actually about the unveiling of a new working reconstruction of the device, based on X-ray imagery of the original.
So while I'm sure most of the discussion will be about the ancient invention, the article does have a (albeit thin) excuse for its own existence on the front page today: the particular event of the unveiling of the reconstruction. That's the "news," the rest is just background, and as you've pointed out, has already been reported.
You deserve to be modded up. Sadly, you probably won't be, because you're not slagging the U.S., Microsoft, or SCO...
Anyway, I digress. I just thought you made a good point. People love to invent grand conspiracy theories, especially when they can feature The Man forcing All Those Little People to change their clocks back from DST a month later. It's oppression! It's cultural genocide! It's an obvious plot by Halliburton to... do something! Evil!
I think the tinfoil has gone to their heads.
For the record, I think Daylight Saving Time (no 'S' on saving, by the way) is a pretty slick idea, and a good manipulation of the fact that time is inherently arbitrary anyway. So why not make it work for us, or at least a little bit in our advantage, if we can? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Basically what's going on is that Apple has a royalty program called "Made for iPod" which includes several things, the biggest of which is tech specs on the Dock Connector and the right to use a "Made for iPod" logo, and probably the Apple logo and color scheme and whatnot on your product's box. Also, you get a guarantee of future compatibility with models not yet released, if you stick to their specs.
In return for this, they want 10% or so of the wholesale price of your device, or so says the CNet article. I have heard in the past that this is negotiable, a few years ago I read something about some 3rd-party product that struck a deal with Apple to sell it exclusively through the Apple Store for a certain amount of time instead of paying a royalty. (I think this might have been Griffin, but I'm not sure.)
There's no way that Apple can prevent you from making an iPod accessory if you don't pay them -- at least as long as you don't try to use the Dock Connector, which is probably patented six ways from Sunday, or use any of their trademarked names or logos or color schemes -- but they have this whole "Made for iPod" program in the same way that MS has those "Designed for Microsoft Windows" sticker programs. If you want the Dock Connector specs, rights to the name, and a guarantee of forward compatibility when we release our new iPods at Christmas, this is what it's going to cost.
Absolutely kick-ass would be a sort of "auto" input level monitoring and adjustment. Tricky... maybe it could be helped along with an "about this loud" button. Something you push to tell it "this is about how loud the signal is gonna be for the most part", and it ajusts the trim to put the level meters in a good spot for it... with plenty of signal, but enough headroom that a mild volume increase (or louder "impact") isn't going to send it into the red. And have it "spring to" that setting.
That sounds an awful lot like Automatic Gain Control or Automatic Level Control to me. Except that rather than setting the 'median' level yourself, with ALC/AGC it uses a sort of time-average, compressing louder sounds and boosting soft ones.
It's a good concept in certain situations, like in a conference room where some people are a lot closer to the mic than others, but for music recording it sucks terribly. However that hasn't stopped manufacturers from occasionally selling a product that "features" AGC and doesn't have any way to defeat it.
If you're recording to a 24-bit format that has well over 100dB of dynamic range, there's no reason why you can't just turn your levels down a little so you have some headroom. It's not cassette tape: you don't need to compress the hell out of it (and you can always do that in post afterwards). As long as you're above the noise floor of your equipment and not peaking, you can fix the relative perceived volume level later.
I'm not saying that some sort of 'soft clipping' wouldn't be useful to deal with loud transient sounds, but building in compression or automatic gain control to a device is just asking for the designers to leave those manual controls off, and really stick you with something that's not as useful as it should be.
This made me think of a project I heard of a few years back, to make a "bit bucket" type of digital recorder. Basically it was going to be a device that would record the incoming data stream from a FireWire input, up to a maximum sustained rate of 30Mb/s or something. I think it was actually going to use SVHS tape as a storage medium, with some sort of modified helical scan recording system. (I think this was a DVHS prototype, now that I think about it.)
Anyway, I always thought it was a neat idea. There's no reason why a storage medium ought to care about what you're recording, whether it's audio or video or encrypted plans for the secret submarine, whatever. They're just bits. Assuming they're in some sort of standardized stream, and not coming in too fast for the physical device you want to store them on, you ought to be able to write them down and then play them back out again.
DVHS never really took off and now looks basically moribund (good riddance to DTheater or whatever their DRM format was), but the whole concept of a content-agnostic storage device still seems like a good one. To a computer it would seem like an old-style linear access tape drive (no problem to Linux, although I'm not sure what Windows thinks of devices like that). It would obviously be a natural choice for video or audio.
Given the size of today's hard drives, it wouldn't even have to be a tape-based solution: use a single disk for compressed video streams, or connect it to a RAID array if you want to capture higher data rates.
Anyway, it seems like there's a definite market for a general purpose storage device of sorts. Something that you could connect to a datastream and would just sense the rate and start recording, without caring too much if it's video or audio or whatever. Unfortunately the market doesn't look like it's going to fill that demand (at least with anything that i've seen reasonably priced) anytime soon.
You get the opportunity to buy, at a price they set, a device which might have more useful functions to you than it otherwise would.
So, from a totally self-interested perspective, the only reason you would want to help is if you think you might buy one someday. If that doesn't describe you, then you can feel free to move along.
I'm not sure whether I'd be up for buying one or not, frankly; I'm contributing though for two reasons 1) because I enjoy participating in the discussion, and 2) because if my suggestions caused them to release a product that is more useful to me, and I end up buying that product, then I win just as much as they do.
They're basically asking for people's opinions and suggestions. I'd also point out that given how freely people give those around here, their market value is essentially zero, so the lack of compensation isn't exactly Neuros screwing anybody.
Personally I would have left color screen off, since I think it's unnecessary. It's an audio recorder: why the heck does it need a color screen?
And more to the point, what more interesting/useful things can you do with the money that you'd save by going to a monochrome display, for the same overall cost? A lot, I bet, since those screens aren't exactly a dime a dozen right now.
I would much rather have them give me a B&W screen and a bunch of external LED-based peak-reading levels displays, instead of a color one and trying to cram the level meters on-screen somewhere.
Actually the really important feature that few manufacturers bother to include, but which I can't imagine actually raises the cost of production very much, is an external word-clock input. In terms of digital equipment it's the single thing that you can do to increase audio quality by decreasing jitter errors (assuming you're doing the obvious things already like using the maximum bit depth and sample rate, not compressing anything), and all it requires is to string some coax cable from your clock source (usually whatever lies at the center of your equipment, unless you have a dedicated word clock) to the various components. But it's a feature that only gets included on either the outrageously priced audiophile gear or on studio stuff.
Sure, probably not that many people would use it right away, but it's something that's only going to get more important in the future as people move towards systems -- both strictly audio and home theatre -- which have lots of digital equipment and multiple stages of processing.
It just seems shortsighted of the equipment manufacturers not to put clock outputs on big items like integrated amp/receivers and inputs and passthrus on source components.
I think a fair number of "audiophiles" are starting to come around in this regard. I think the knee-jerk anti-digital feelings are a result of feeling burned from the first few generations of digital equipment (including audio CD), which really were a step down from the vinyl that music lovers were used to, and who thought they were getting an upgrade in quality.
But we do have digital technology that will surpass vinyl in an ABX test, it's just not commonly used (yet). The iPod -- which a lot of audiophiles find acceptable when filled with uncompressed AIFF or WAVs -- maxes out at 16-bit 48kHz. So I think when consumer devices start getting to even higher resolutions you'll start to see some of the analog resistance fall away in favor of the portability and convenience that digital media offers.
Personally, I love vinyl. It sounds great, better than almost anything else I've heard, at least for the first few times you play a record. But man is it a bear to maintain. You have to keep the records clean and dust-free, cartridges need regular replacement (and you haven't had fun until you've aligned a cartridge), and the equipment is increasingly expensive. Plus the records themselves are consumable.
There's a certain point where the sound superiority of vinyl becomes less-than-worthwhile when compared to the convenience of competing formats. The general public found that point years ago with CDs. I found it with my iPod and uncompressed audio combined with a good set of headphones. I think as the quality of digital audio improves and becomes more widely available, you'll find more people who make the switch.
There will always be people to whom the extra time and effort of vinyl is justified by its unique listening experience (to them). Hopefully they'll always be enough to keep a few audiophile pressing companies in business. But we're pretty close to eliminating the gap for all but the last 1% of even the "one percent" that the audiophile market represents.
Okay, it's not analog, it's digital but the sample rate is just so unimaginably high that the 'samples' are individual physical quanta. Better now?
I think that's getting a little pedantic.
Although I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a "physicist," since that's not what I do as my occupation (although it is my training), I'll offer my completely biased opinion that the issue being discussed in that register article is completely irrelvant to issues of audio quality and "analog versus digital" as we perceive it.
From a realistic audio- or electrical-engineering perspective it's ridiculous to say that the two are the same. It's also probably incorrect for anyone to flat-out say that one sounds inherently better than the other, so if that was the point you were trying to make then I'll agree with you. But that article from the Register just isn't relevant.
Yes, I second this. MIDI-in, or any other kind of "pro" features, would only be worth anything if they came after having a high quality and easy to access audio inputs.
For me that screams balanced inputs. What would really be nice would be dual XLR (D3F) connectors with switchable phantom power, but I understand that probably drives up the price a lot and isn't useful to a lot of average consumers. (Essentially what you'd have then is this device, which costs a bundle and for good reason.) So I would settle easily for just having balanced line-level inputs, no ALC/AGC and defeatable compression, and use outboard mic pres if I ever wanted a totally portable setup.
If you could have those inputs, you'd really have a useful portable studio tool that you could start adding goodies onto (like MIDI) to do cool stuff with.
But if the only input is through one 1/8" unbalanced stereo jack, count me out.
Although I'm aware it doesn't satisfy your requirements, I thought that I would point out the Olympus digital recorders as others may find them suitable.
I can't speak about their newer ones, but I have a rather old (16MB I think) one and it works well with my Mac. Unfortunately it uses a rather strange proprietary codec, but the software will convert it out to an uncompressed AIFF or WAV file, which is how I archive everything.
It is irritating though given their large potential capacity these days that they stick with the obscure format instead of something more open. I don't think it's because of any attempt to create a Microsoft-style "lock-in" because the bundled software will happily export the files to a more standard type; therefore I think the explanation must be a more technical one owing to the very small amounts of processing power and capacity on the older models.
Actually I think it's interesting that you brought this up. I've read in several places that 10,000 years from now, not much of our cities will probably remain (especially if we nuke ourselves, which was the dominant theory when most of what I read was written I think) but the Interstate Highway system will be there for hundreds of generations to come. Obviously at ground level it will eventually get overgrown and might not be easily distinguishable, but from an aircraft or satellite the right-of-ways and grades will be pretty unmistakably artificial.
How this relates to the clock project I'm not sure: maybe they should bring an Interstate out there shaped like a big arrow so that aliens or humans returning to Earth in a few millenia will know where to look...:)
If it's open to the public then it'll only last until some nut-job with an axe to grind against concept of time itself decides to blow it up.
Hope they invest in a 10,000-year explosives detector and defense mechanism, too.
If this thing is even half as monumental as he hopes it'll be, someone will want to destroy it, just to get their face on TV for a few minutes if nothing else.
In the article they discussed a bunch of methods that might be used, but overall it didn't sound like they had decided on which one they're going to use in the final version yet, other than having a list of possibilities that ought to work. They did say though that the plan is to have some sort of constant power source that drives the automatic timekeeping parts of the clock, but then have the display driven by the actions of human viewers. Honestly that sounds very cool: it would keep time by itself from some sort of natural power source (or a variety of them, one assumes) but then when you walk into the altar / viewing room / whatever it would use your weight or heat to activate the display mechanism.
The comment about the memory metal that's heated by the sun was not suggested in the article as a power source, but as a calibration / reset mechanism to keep the clock in sync to local solar time.
I think this is a great project and I wish them all the best of luck -- however I do wonder if they're overbuilding it just a bit. It seems like you could do much the same thing by hollowing out a big chamber and drilling a hole in a wall, and then tracing patterns on the interior that would give the time and date as a function of the sun's image's movement. It's my understanding that some Egyptian monuments and tombs were built like that, and they currently have a pretty good track record in terms of longevity.
But hey, that wouldn't be nearly as cool as a gigantic mechano-digital clock buried in a bunker in a hill somewhere.
If this thing gets built and I ever have any reason to be in the general area, I'd go and see it.
Actually that's not a half-bad idea. They might need to do some sort of advertising campaign to show that they're "marketing" themselves under the new name, and I suppose it could all be for nought if the UK courts (and I have no idea what sort of criteria they use) decide that the issue is still close enough to confuse consumers. But it would certainly be a start, and a better solution from a user's perspective than changing one's email address.
Took me a few minutes of Googling, but the only thing I could turn up is that it was literally a network that was constructed for the 1992 Interop networking trade show.
According to this site, "the Interop Network consisted of approximately 33 miles of Unshielded Twisted Pair, one mile of Shielded Twisted Pair, four miles of Fiber Optic cable, and three T1 links to the Internet via regional carriers. In addition there are three separate off-floor terminal clusters." It's fate is described at the end of the article: "Built by 40 professionals in less than one week, the network was disassembled at the end of the show."
Why the heck are they still listed as owning an entire Class A allocation? No idea. The best theory I can come up with is that whoever got ahold of the allocation in preparation for the show held on to it afterwards and either Wikipedia is using some very old information, or they never bothered to change the name on the allocation afterwards to reflect whatever it's (not) being used for now.
I've seen some pretty startling graphs showing the utilization of address space as measured by packets flowing through major Internet Exchange Points, and the Class A space is largely a wasteland. I don't know whether that's indicative of the fact that the addresses actually are not being used, or that they're just being used on private or semi-private networks (e.g. Defense Department or Military networks) which don't send or receive much traffic on the public net. Either way, it's a lot of globally routable addresses not being used.
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What were you doing that crashed OS X?
I'm genuinely curious -- I use an OS X box at home (an old 400MHz one, still runs the latest system) and it handles everything I throw at it in terms of average tasks while still remaining rock solid. In all honesty if you told me to do something right now that would make the machine crash, I'm not sure what I'd be able to do.
The only times I've been able to throw a wrench in it were when I've been playing with really buggy pre-beta software. Using regular production apps I can't remember the last time I took the OS down.
If your system was seriously as unstable as you say, I'd seriously question whether there might have been some sort of hardware failure (bad RAM?) going on. OS X is by no means a speed demon (those tests of DB performance just confirmed what I'd always suspected), but that's the first time I've heard someone who's comments I otherwise agreed with call it unstable.
I agree with you in spirit; the problem I have is that Wikipedia recently had a fundraising drive where they accepted donations. Although they certainly didn't say "we're never going to have ads," I think -- given that they were ad free and asking for donations -- a lot of people may have given them money while under the impression that they were contributing to an ad-free site (or to keep it that way).
For the Wikimedia Foundation to have taken people's money so freely and then to start putting up ads isn't going to win them many friends with the community they've spawned, and perhaps most especially among the people who just donated.
At the very least it's going to make a lot of people more reluctant to give money to similar causes in the future, because they'll feel like I do now: I didn't donate anything other than my time (although I was considering it), but if it's true that they're going to an ad-supported business model then I'm just glad I didn't cut that check, since clearly they don't need my money.
It's not that I don't think Wikipedia is a good service -- I do, or even that the Wikimedia Foundation isn't within their rights to put up ads -- they are. What I'm not comfortable with is that they asked for donations from individuals without exhausting the other options first. In my mind, asking your users for cash ought to be an option of last (not first) resort, and that they did ask for donations should have meant that they had either taken the idea of advertising completely off the table as unacceptable, or already pursued it as far as it could go.
It's the difference between somebody asking me for money when they're truly destitute and desperate, or asking me for money and then waiting to see how much I cough up before they decide whether to get a job.
Hopefully there's more to the story that I just haven't found out yet, but right now I think that their timing really stinks, and that a lot of other people will probably agree.
As I see it, the problem isn't that you're letting people put links onto your page as much as the way the search engines work right now provides an incentive for people to want to put spam links onto any page they can find.
Allowing backlinks seems to me a pretty logical and reasonable thing to do, and were there not the search engine crawlers using links to rank pages, then there wouldn't be much reason for people to abuse them. At least not en masse as they do now; certainly there would still be people finding ways to do malicious things to each other, but I don't think backlinks are inherently more helpful to them than any other medium.
I guess it's pretty much a moot point since it doesn't look like Google is going to go away tomorrow, so any system that includes backlinks will have to deal with the spectre of spammers and corrupt webadmins trying to raise their results ranking, but if you're looking for a place to point fingers in an academic sense as to who's 'responsible' for link spam, it should be with Google and other link-based search engines first, and the concept of backlinks second.
(I say this as a fan of Google both as a search engine and a company, by the way.)
I think people are getting too wound-up on the Copyright aspect of this idea. Granted it's not their fault, since Nelson hits it pretty hard (in deference to his aging-hippie / utopian regular audience, I assume) in the quoted article.
However what Nelson is proposing isn't really throwing away nearly as much copyright law as people are making it out to be: really it's just a system for dynamically quoting pieces of other documents inline into your own, without actually copying anything. It's just deep linking, but to text instead of to images.
The 'ownership' of the quoted information doesn't change, since if the author/owner of the quoted work removes their page from the network then the link will break and the quoted text disappears; the assemblage of information is being done (at least based on my understanding) by the client, on the fly, based on instructions and links in the primary document being read.
I'm pretty sure a system like this wouldn't really upset any settled law, or even create that many new cases versus what you can do with regular HTML style hypertext. If you didn't want to participate and allow people to link to your stuff, it would be pretty easy to block.
Anyway, I just think people are concentrating too hard on the 'free love and no copyright' aspect, and that a good first step for Nelson to take if he seriously ever wants this to get off the ground is to drop that line and instead play up what such a system really would be: dynamic, inline deep linking. There's no license being imposed (or necessary to the functioning of the system) at any point.
What confused me for a moment -- and I say this as a reasonably well-read native speaker of American English -- was the use of the word 'knights' as a verb in the past tense. (As opposed to the more common usage as a plural noun.) I had to go back over the sentence a few times in order to figure out what had actually been meant, and that there weren't any missing words or something that was throwing me off.
Anyway, my point was just that as an opening sentence, there were several things working together to make it fairly awkward.
Does anyone else find it slightly amusing that Wikipedia stamps a big warning across the page as soon as it gets Slashdotted? Complete with a warning to look out for trolls? I'm sure it's not new, but I guess I've just always ignored it in the past.
/. article from now on.
It's brilliant. Maybe we should include one at the top of every
On a sidenote, wouldn't it make sense to link to the static version of a Wikipedia entry page, rather than the top / dynamic one? I guess it would detract from the whole editable purpose of Wikipedia, but in terms of providing a reference -- which is what this article is using it for -- it seems like it would be safer to link against a static page of a specific revision, and then let people see the newest version if they wanted to.
Of course if they did that, we'd never get to see their 'Do Not Feed The Trolls' warning.
Well, until they get around to implementing that "-1, Stupid" flag, I guess we're stuck with either that or "Offtopic."
And to someone who's meta-moderating later and won't know that the post was a FP, "Redundant" seems more believable.
Well, the current /. article isn't really about the device itself, it's actually about the unveiling of a new working reconstruction of the device, based on X-ray imagery of the original.
So while I'm sure most of the discussion will be about the ancient invention, the article does have a (albeit thin) excuse for its own existence on the front page today: the particular event of the unveiling of the reconstruction. That's the "news," the rest is just background, and as you've pointed out, has already been reported.
You deserve to be modded up. Sadly, you probably won't be, because you're not slagging the U.S., Microsoft, or SCO...
... do something! Evil!
Anyway, I digress. I just thought you made a good point. People love to invent grand conspiracy theories, especially when they can feature The Man forcing All Those Little People to change their clocks back from DST a month later. It's oppression! It's cultural genocide! It's an obvious plot by Halliburton to
I think the tinfoil has gone to their heads.
For the record, I think Daylight Saving Time (no 'S' on saving, by the way) is a pretty slick idea, and a good manipulation of the fact that time is inherently arbitrary anyway. So why not make it work for us, or at least a little bit in our advantage, if we can? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Basically what's going on is that Apple has a royalty program called "Made for iPod" which includes several things, the biggest of which is tech specs on the Dock Connector and the right to use a "Made for iPod" logo, and probably the Apple logo and color scheme and whatnot on your product's box. Also, you get a guarantee of future compatibility with models not yet released, if you stick to their specs.
In return for this, they want 10% or so of the wholesale price of your device, or so says the CNet article. I have heard in the past that this is negotiable, a few years ago I read something about some 3rd-party product that struck a deal with Apple to sell it exclusively through the Apple Store for a certain amount of time instead of paying a royalty. (I think this might have been Griffin, but I'm not sure.)
There's no way that Apple can prevent you from making an iPod accessory if you don't pay them -- at least as long as you don't try to use the Dock Connector, which is probably patented six ways from Sunday, or use any of their trademarked names or logos or color schemes -- but they have this whole "Made for iPod" program in the same way that MS has those "Designed for Microsoft Windows" sticker programs. If you want the Dock Connector specs, rights to the name, and a guarantee of forward compatibility when we release our new iPods at Christmas, this is what it's going to cost.
That sounds an awful lot like Automatic Gain Control or Automatic Level Control to me. Except that rather than setting the 'median' level yourself, with ALC/AGC it uses a sort of time-average, compressing louder sounds and boosting soft ones.
It's a good concept in certain situations, like in a conference room where some people are a lot closer to the mic than others, but for music recording it sucks terribly. However that hasn't stopped manufacturers from occasionally selling a product that "features" AGC and doesn't have any way to defeat it.
If you're recording to a 24-bit format that has well over 100dB of dynamic range, there's no reason why you can't just turn your levels down a little so you have some headroom. It's not cassette tape: you don't need to compress the hell out of it (and you can always do that in post afterwards). As long as you're above the noise floor of your equipment and not peaking, you can fix the relative perceived volume level later.
I'm not saying that some sort of 'soft clipping' wouldn't be useful to deal with loud transient sounds, but building in compression or automatic gain control to a device is just asking for the designers to leave those manual controls off, and really stick you with something that's not as useful as it should be.
This made me think of a project I heard of a few years back, to make a "bit bucket" type of digital recorder. Basically it was going to be a device that would record the incoming data stream from a FireWire input, up to a maximum sustained rate of 30Mb/s or something. I think it was actually going to use SVHS tape as a storage medium, with some sort of modified helical scan recording system. (I think this was a DVHS prototype, now that I think about it.)
Anyway, I always thought it was a neat idea. There's no reason why a storage medium ought to care about what you're recording, whether it's audio or video or encrypted plans for the secret submarine, whatever. They're just bits. Assuming they're in some sort of standardized stream, and not coming in too fast for the physical device you want to store them on, you ought to be able to write them down and then play them back out again.
DVHS never really took off and now looks basically moribund (good riddance to DTheater or whatever their DRM format was), but the whole concept of a content-agnostic storage device still seems like a good one. To a computer it would seem like an old-style linear access tape drive (no problem to Linux, although I'm not sure what Windows thinks of devices like that). It would obviously be a natural choice for video or audio.
Given the size of today's hard drives, it wouldn't even have to be a tape-based solution: use a single disk for compressed video streams, or connect it to a RAID array if you want to capture higher data rates.
Anyway, it seems like there's a definite market for a general purpose storage device of sorts. Something that you could connect to a datastream and would just sense the rate and start recording, without caring too much if it's video or audio or whatever. Unfortunately the market doesn't look like it's going to fill that demand (at least with anything that i've seen reasonably priced) anytime soon.
You get the opportunity to buy, at a price they set, a device which might have more useful functions to you than it otherwise would.
So, from a totally self-interested perspective, the only reason you would want to help is if you think you might buy one someday. If that doesn't describe you, then you can feel free to move along.
I'm not sure whether I'd be up for buying one or not, frankly; I'm contributing though for two reasons 1) because I enjoy participating in the discussion, and 2) because if my suggestions caused them to release a product that is more useful to me, and I end up buying that product, then I win just as much as they do.
They're basically asking for people's opinions and suggestions. I'd also point out that given how freely people give those around here, their market value is essentially zero, so the lack of compensation isn't exactly Neuros screwing anybody.
Personally I would have left color screen off, since I think it's unnecessary. It's an audio recorder: why the heck does it need a color screen?
And more to the point, what more interesting/useful things can you do with the money that you'd save by going to a monochrome display, for the same overall cost? A lot, I bet, since those screens aren't exactly a dime a dozen right now.
I would much rather have them give me a B&W screen and a bunch of external LED-based peak-reading levels displays, instead of a color one and trying to cram the level meters on-screen somewhere.
Actually the really important feature that few manufacturers bother to include, but which I can't imagine actually raises the cost of production very much, is an external word-clock input. In terms of digital equipment it's the single thing that you can do to increase audio quality by decreasing jitter errors (assuming you're doing the obvious things already like using the maximum bit depth and sample rate, not compressing anything), and all it requires is to string some coax cable from your clock source (usually whatever lies at the center of your equipment, unless you have a dedicated word clock) to the various components. But it's a feature that only gets included on either the outrageously priced audiophile gear or on studio stuff.
Sure, probably not that many people would use it right away, but it's something that's only going to get more important in the future as people move towards systems -- both strictly audio and home theatre -- which have lots of digital equipment and multiple stages of processing.
It just seems shortsighted of the equipment manufacturers not to put clock outputs on big items like integrated amp/receivers and inputs and passthrus on source components.
I think a fair number of "audiophiles" are starting to come around in this regard. I think the knee-jerk anti-digital feelings are a result of feeling burned from the first few generations of digital equipment (including audio CD), which really were a step down from the vinyl that music lovers were used to, and who thought they were getting an upgrade in quality.
But we do have digital technology that will surpass vinyl in an ABX test, it's just not commonly used (yet). The iPod -- which a lot of audiophiles find acceptable when filled with uncompressed AIFF or WAVs -- maxes out at 16-bit 48kHz. So I think when consumer devices start getting to even higher resolutions you'll start to see some of the analog resistance fall away in favor of the portability and convenience that digital media offers.
Personally, I love vinyl. It sounds great, better than almost anything else I've heard, at least for the first few times you play a record. But man is it a bear to maintain. You have to keep the records clean and dust-free, cartridges need regular replacement (and you haven't had fun until you've aligned a cartridge), and the equipment is increasingly expensive. Plus the records themselves are consumable.
There's a certain point where the sound superiority of vinyl becomes less-than-worthwhile when compared to the convenience of competing formats. The general public found that point years ago with CDs. I found it with my iPod and uncompressed audio combined with a good set of headphones. I think as the quality of digital audio improves and becomes more widely available, you'll find more people who make the switch.
There will always be people to whom the extra time and effort of vinyl is justified by its unique listening experience (to them). Hopefully they'll always be enough to keep a few audiophile pressing companies in business. But we're pretty close to eliminating the gap for all but the last 1% of even the "one percent" that the audiophile market represents.
Okay, it's not analog, it's digital but the sample rate is just so unimaginably high that the 'samples' are individual physical quanta. Better now?
I think that's getting a little pedantic.
Although I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a "physicist," since that's not what I do as my occupation (although it is my training), I'll offer my completely biased opinion that the issue being discussed in that register article is completely irrelvant to issues of audio quality and "analog versus digital" as we perceive it.
From a realistic audio- or electrical-engineering perspective it's ridiculous to say that the two are the same. It's also probably incorrect for anyone to flat-out say that one sounds inherently better than the other, so if that was the point you were trying to make then I'll agree with you. But that article from the Register just isn't relevant.
Yes, I second this. MIDI-in, or any other kind of "pro" features, would only be worth anything if they came after having a high quality and easy to access audio inputs.
For me that screams balanced inputs. What would really be nice would be dual XLR (D3F) connectors with switchable phantom power, but I understand that probably drives up the price a lot and isn't useful to a lot of average consumers. (Essentially what you'd have then is this device, which costs a bundle and for good reason.) So I would settle easily for just having balanced line-level inputs, no ALC/AGC and defeatable compression, and use outboard mic pres if I ever wanted a totally portable setup.
If you could have those inputs, you'd really have a useful portable studio tool that you could start adding goodies onto (like MIDI) to do cool stuff with.
But if the only input is through one 1/8" unbalanced stereo jack, count me out.
Although I'm aware it doesn't satisfy your requirements, I thought that I would point out the Olympus digital recorders as others may find them suitable.
I can't speak about their newer ones, but I have a rather old (16MB I think) one and it works well with my Mac. Unfortunately it uses a rather strange proprietary codec, but the software will convert it out to an uncompressed AIFF or WAV file, which is how I archive everything.
It is irritating though given their large potential capacity these days that they stick with the obscure format instead of something more open. I don't think it's because of any attempt to create a Microsoft-style "lock-in" because the bundled software will happily export the files to a more standard type; therefore I think the explanation must be a more technical one owing to the very small amounts of processing power and capacity on the older models.
Actually I think it's interesting that you brought this up. I've read in several places that 10,000 years from now, not much of our cities will probably remain (especially if we nuke ourselves, which was the dominant theory when most of what I read was written I think) but the Interstate Highway system will be there for hundreds of generations to come. Obviously at ground level it will eventually get overgrown and might not be easily distinguishable, but from an aircraft or satellite the right-of-ways and grades will be pretty unmistakably artificial.
:)
How this relates to the clock project I'm not sure: maybe they should bring an Interstate out there shaped like a big arrow so that aliens or humans returning to Earth in a few millenia will know where to look...
If it's open to the public then it'll only last until some nut-job with an axe to grind against concept of time itself decides to blow it up.
Hope they invest in a 10,000-year explosives detector and defense mechanism, too.
If this thing is even half as monumental as he hopes it'll be, someone will want to destroy it, just to get their face on TV for a few minutes if nothing else.
In the article they discussed a bunch of methods that might be used, but overall it didn't sound like they had decided on which one they're going to use in the final version yet, other than having a list of possibilities that ought to work. They did say though that the plan is to have some sort of constant power source that drives the automatic timekeeping parts of the clock, but then have the display driven by the actions of human viewers. Honestly that sounds very cool: it would keep time by itself from some sort of natural power source (or a variety of them, one assumes) but then when you walk into the altar / viewing room / whatever it would use your weight or heat to activate the display mechanism.
The comment about the memory metal that's heated by the sun was not suggested in the article as a power source, but as a calibration / reset mechanism to keep the clock in sync to local solar time.
I think this is a great project and I wish them all the best of luck -- however I do wonder if they're overbuilding it just a bit. It seems like you could do much the same thing by hollowing out a big chamber and drilling a hole in a wall, and then tracing patterns on the interior that would give the time and date as a function of the sun's image's movement. It's my understanding that some Egyptian monuments and tombs were built like that, and they currently have a pretty good track record in terms of longevity.
But hey, that wouldn't be nearly as cool as a gigantic mechano-digital clock buried in a bunker in a hill somewhere.
If this thing gets built and I ever have any reason to be in the general area, I'd go and see it.
Actually that's not a half-bad idea. They might need to do some sort of advertising campaign to show that they're "marketing" themselves under the new name, and I suppose it could all be for nought if the UK courts (and I have no idea what sort of criteria they use) decide that the issue is still close enough to confuse consumers. But it would certainly be a start, and a better solution from a user's perspective than changing one's email address.
Who the hell is Interop Show Network?
Took me a few minutes of Googling, but the only thing I could turn up is that it was literally a network that was constructed for the 1992 Interop networking trade show.
According to this site, "the Interop Network consisted of approximately 33 miles of Unshielded Twisted Pair, one mile of Shielded Twisted Pair, four miles of Fiber Optic cable, and three T1 links to the Internet via regional carriers. In addition there are three separate off-floor terminal clusters." It's fate is described at the end of the article: "Built by 40 professionals in less than one week, the network was disassembled at the end of the show."
Why the heck are they still listed as owning an entire Class A allocation? No idea. The best theory I can come up with is that whoever got ahold of the allocation in preparation for the show held on to it afterwards and either Wikipedia is using some very old information, or they never bothered to change the name on the allocation afterwards to reflect whatever it's (not) being used for now.
I've seen some pretty startling graphs showing the utilization of address space as measured by packets flowing through major Internet Exchange Points, and the Class A space is largely a wasteland. I don't know whether that's indicative of the fact that the addresses actually are not being used, or that they're just being used on private or semi-private networks (e.g. Defense Department or Military networks) which don't send or receive much traffic on the public net. Either way, it's a lot of globally routable addresses not being used.