Thanks for the info. I would mod this up if I had the points.
I've used my iPod heavily with 32-ohm Grado 'phones, which have much larger transducers and sit much further from my ears, and found it to produce more than enough power at about the same volume levels.
However, what I don't know is if the iPod is actually trying to output a set voltage depending on the 'volume' setting, into whatever load is attached: meaning that its battery life should be substantially lower with the Grados than the earbuds. I've never really measured, though.
Efficiency and impedance are not related. You can have high efficiency, low impedance phones (Grados, for instance) and also high impedance, low efficiency ones. Of course, as I noted in an earlier post, to get the same power out of a high impedance set, you have to drive it at a higher voltage. In a battery powered appliance, this is often a problem, which is why there are outboard amplifiers to drive high impedance headphones from the iPod.
Well, sort of. But what you're forgetting in this analysis is that, given 'phones of similar efficiency, you have to have similar amounts of POWER in order to produce similar volume levels.
So a higher-impedience set of phones would require a higher voltage in order to produce a similar power output than a low-imepedence set.
This is why if you read high-end audio forums, you'll often hear people characterizing high-impedence phones as 'hard to drive.' Except there, 'high impedance' means more like 300-ohms and up...32 would be very low.
I think the standard method is to sum the forces produced by the repeated pounding of one's head against the keyboard. The standard for calibration is Mac OS 8 on a Classic II.
I think you meant $8.65 an hour. At $865.00 an hour, I don't think they'd have any trouble signing folks up.:)
As someone who just recently got out of the college-student labor pool, $8.65/hr is pretty decent. Where I worked, students only got paid $6.25/hr, and that was considered pretty decent for work during the year. Over the summer you can expect to make more, but I never got more than about $10-12, and the upper end was by doing some rather miserable jobs.
Eight bucks an hour and the ability to work on your own schedule, on a project you actually enjoy, doing something interesting and perhaps even fun? That sounds like a damn fine way to spend a summer to me.
The point of this is to get people into the OSS fold who might otherwise just go down the all-proprietary path. A semi-commercial programmer who currently does some OSS programming doesn't need the help as much, they're already among the converted.
Also, $4500 is a lot more money in relative terms to a college student than it is to someone who's gotten their first 'real' paycheck, so perhaps Google thinks they'll get more effort out of their money by buying from the cheap labor market that students effectively are.
I've always thought that Google would be a great company to take the "Google Answers" concept of micro-payments paid in return for small tasks done on commission, to programming. Imagine instead of trolling the search engines and coming back with information, you had a site where people who had some annoying bug in an OSS program that they hated, or wanted some particular tweak or even a script written, could post a description of the change they desired along with a bid...then programmers could accept the task anonymously and get paid upon its completion. More complex tasks would go to more experienced programmers for a higher fee, and smaller ones to script kiddies just looking to make some pizza/beer bucks, according to market forces. You could even come up with a trust model for the programmers and the 'patrons' commissioning the code...and if you mandated that all the resultant code was GPLed, the benefit to the community might be huge.
I think the demand for an open market for small coding projects like that is huge, and to my knowledge there's nothing that quite fits it currently.
On one hand, I really like the concept--that they keep Linux available on a wide range of architectures, and perhaps more importantly, they keep a very stable version of it widely available. So if I ever came across an old UltraSparc or something, I'd just be a download away from having a working OS on it. (In theory.) Or if I want an absolutely-stable but not cutting-edge OS for a router or embedded system, I know exactly where to go also.
But this all occurs at the cost of development on the main-line branches: the Intel/AMD and perhaps PPC architectures with high demand are 'subsidizing' mostly inactive minor architectures. The question is whether the fringe benefits of those minor platforms--including the simple fact of being able to say that Linux supports them--is worth this diverted effort.
This is very true. I've long felt that Apple's DRM implementation was somewhat halfhearted. Especially when you consider the features in iTunes circa v4.0... where you could share your songs over the internet. They plug stuff up when it gets cracked or when the RIAA makes a huge stink about it, but they're really not in the media-protection business. They want to sell computers, and people don't buy computers for the awesomely-restrictive DRM.
Why don't they just mandate that a small thermite charge must be attached to each of your drives, and connected to your WAN port for remote detonation. It would have much the same effect and probably be faster and less expensive.
Because if very few people can use it, then there's a disincentive for content-creators to ever do it again. Versus if it's even possible for you to use it, then they'll be able to point to a vast theoretical userbase when justifying using the format in the future.
It's kind of like why I refuse to install Windows Media Player, even though it's available for my computer: I don't want to download it, or have it on my computer where somebody might see it, lest they think that WMV is an acceptable format to send things to me in.
This would be true, except that they're being given a monopoly over parts of the public spectrum, and thus have a certain responsibility to the public in return. Simply because if they weren't broadcasting their crap out over vast portions of the EM spectrum, we could be doing more interesting things with it.
Furthermore, what they've been asking for is a government mandate to essentially go in to consumers' television sets and control how they will work. There is no choice here: if you buy a television, it's going to comply with their rules. As a consumer you won't have the option of getting a flag-ignorant receiver if the studios have their way.
Personally, my feeing on the issue is that anyone ought to be able to do anything they want with signals that are broadcast to them on their property. If the broadcast TV and satellite providers decide to shower me with their transmissions, then I ought to be able to do whatever I want with the incoming signal. The fact that I'm not allowed to is ridiculous. IMO, the whole problem we're having today can be traced back to the 80s, when the satellite TV providers made "stealing" their transmissions illegal: as if sticking up a satellite dish and decoding incoming signals was comparable to crawling up the power pole in front of your house and splicing in an illegal piece of coax to the cable TV feed. It's not.
You can only do this if you have an Administrator password.
This isn't exactly like having root access, but it's pretty close. It allows you to sudo -s and become root whenever you want, but remain a regular user the rest of the time.
If you go into the System folder and start deleting (or moving, renaming, whatever) things, you're immediately required to authenticate and become root in order to do it. No password, no deleting.
Although I'm not too familiar, I imagine that someone with root/administrator access on a Windows box can similarly screw things up with a few well-chosen deletions. Let's face it: any modern computer has to store critical files somewhere on the drive, and any decent operating system is going to have a way to let superusers modify them. If you let idiot users become root or Administrators, they're going to screw things up.
Actually, as much as I love Apple, they aren't the biggest consumer of PowerPC chips -- just the most high-profile. This is from a few years ago, but I read a magazine article that said there are several times more PowerPCs used in embedded applications than Apple consumes.
This helps to explain why if you go to Motorola's semiconductor website ('Freescale Semiconductor' these days) there's a lot more information about embedded applications than there is about PC usage. You practically have to go digging to find the new low-power G4 processors.
And you wonder why IBM is dumping employees there as fast as they can and probably taking the jobs elsewhere.
If the Europeans want to become the 'boutique store' of human resources on the world market, they're going to realize that they're not going to hang on to market share. There are lots of countries out there willing to work for less and become the mass market version of same.
What the employees think they're going to get by striking is beyond me. One day they'll strike and nobody will notice: then they'll just have proved how redundant they really are.
Furthermore, the only contracts companies recognize are the ones that are printed on paper and signed. If you think IBM entered into some sort of social contract to employ huge numbers of Europeans, that's fine, but don't expect IBM to agree with you.
Not true. You have to consider how much profit it's bringing in, versus the value of its assets if you were just to liquidate the unit and invest the cash it would produce.
If some business unit only produces $500k a year in clean profit, it might still get canned if it was sitting on $5M of assets: salaries, real estate, salable equipment, etc. If the company thinks they can do better than 10% ROI somewhere else, the logical decision is to liquidate the unit and invest the cash elsewhere. It's called opportunity cost.
Caveat: Back when the stock market was really good and you could easily earn more than that just by putting your money into other companies' stocks, there was a lot of this going on: unfortunately many companies found out that selling off core businesses to pump money into short-term high-yield endeavors wasn't a good strategy when the bubble burst. I know personally at least one very old (100+ years) company that met its end this way due to mismanagement and short-sightedness.
This only makes sense if the employees that are being laid off are also potential customers of the company, or at least live in the same area and contribute somehow back into sales.
I have to imagine that part of the reasoning behind these layoffs--the strategy, as opposed to the tactics, if you will--is that IBM is anticipating that their services will be consumed more in the Asia than in Europe. So who cares whether the layoffs put Europe's economy into the toilet: the business is all heading East.
By unloading all these employees in Europe, IBM can rehire new people from within developing markets. Aside from the obvious cost advantage (they probably work for less, pay less in corporate taxes, and pay out in a currency that's advantageous with regards to the USD), they already have a cultural familiarity with the market and help IBM lose the 'alien invader' image. Plus, they get to score points with some Asian government by bringing in tech-sector jobs.
Re:Reduce expenses by cutting executive salaries?
on
IBM Europe Workers Strike
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· Score: 3, Interesting
And you're still mystified as to why IBM is cutting 10,000-plus jobs in Europe, while still actively hiring in the U.S....?
I'm not. The writing's on the wall. If you have to fire one employee, given a choice of one who will only work 35 hours a week and 10 or 11 months a year and has a union that demands raises annually regardless of individual performance, versus someone who'll work 45-50+ hours a week without being asked, 50 weeks a year, and only expects a performance based bonus if anything...it's hardly even a choice. An executive wouldn't be doing due diligence to the shareholders to hang on to the former employee at the expense of the latter one.
The Europeans have priced themselves into obsolescence as workers.
I'll admit, some of the cryptographic and network theory discussed in the proceedings on the Cornell site, but it looks pretty solid. I'd be interested in how the OpenID people respond to the radically different design direction the Cornell group took (for good reasons, it seems) while essentially solving the same problem.
What I like about the Cornell system is that Goal #2, which would be right after "Provide a single sign-on abstraction", is "enable applications to tolerate failed and compromised authentication servers." The idea of compromised authentication servers doesn't seem to enter into the OpenID framework. Maybe I'm missing their solution somehow.
What they should do is take a cue from the military. Instead of making it into a cute-sounding word, leave it as an all-capitalized, jargon-laden acronym. Then it sounds much more technical and less cute and fuzzy, and thus has a much better chance of getting past a bunch of bureaucrats. Trust me, it works like a charm.
I'd also drop the second 'O', so the final name would just be MODLE, which can easily be pronounced like "model," and unlike "Moodle," you don't sound retarded, or lend yourself to cow jokes at the water cooler. (It also looks vaguely like some French world, which might appeal to intellectuals in higher education.)
No, I understand what you mean. In theory you can have a 555 run as slowly as you want. But in practical terms it's dictated by the leakage current through your capacitor: at a certain point, the charging current in is going to equal the leakage current out, and the timer will never trigger. If you had a lot of really good, low-leakage capacitors sitting around, then I guess fine--I'm not saying it wouldn't work. I don't have caps like that sitting around, but I do have piles of counter ICs, so I'd run the 555 faster and divide it to produce the rate I want.
Just depends what you have at your disposal, and which tradeoffs you want to make. I'd always rather use one common IC than one possibly hard-to-find capacitor that I'd have to order.
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Thanks for the info. I would mod this up if I had the points.
I've used my iPod heavily with 32-ohm Grado 'phones, which have much larger transducers and sit much further from my ears, and found it to produce more than enough power at about the same volume levels.
However, what I don't know is if the iPod is actually trying to output a set voltage depending on the 'volume' setting, into whatever load is attached: meaning that its battery life should be substantially lower with the Grados than the earbuds. I've never really measured, though.
Efficiency and impedance are not related. You can have high efficiency, low impedance phones (Grados, for instance) and also high impedance, low efficiency ones. Of course, as I noted in an earlier post, to get the same power out of a high impedance set, you have to drive it at a higher voltage. In a battery powered appliance, this is often a problem, which is why there are outboard amplifiers to drive high impedance headphones from the iPod.
Well, sort of. But what you're forgetting in this analysis is that, given 'phones of similar efficiency, you have to have similar amounts of POWER in order to produce similar volume levels.
So a higher-impedience set of phones would require a higher voltage in order to produce a similar power output than a low-imepedence set.
This is why if you read high-end audio forums, you'll often hear people characterizing high-impedence phones as 'hard to drive.' Except there, 'high impedance' means more like 300-ohms and up...32 would be very low.
I think the standard method is to sum the forces produced by the repeated pounding of one's head against the keyboard. The standard for calibration is Mac OS 8 on a Classic II.
I think you meant $8.65 an hour. At $865.00 an hour, I don't think they'd have any trouble signing folks up. :)
As someone who just recently got out of the college-student labor pool, $8.65/hr is pretty decent. Where I worked, students only got paid $6.25/hr, and that was considered pretty decent for work during the year. Over the summer you can expect to make more, but I never got more than about $10-12, and the upper end was by doing some rather miserable jobs.
Eight bucks an hour and the ability to work on your own schedule, on a project you actually enjoy, doing something interesting and perhaps even fun? That sounds like a damn fine way to spend a summer to me.
The point of this is to get people into the OSS fold who might otherwise just go down the all-proprietary path. A semi-commercial programmer who currently does some OSS programming doesn't need the help as much, they're already among the converted.
Also, $4500 is a lot more money in relative terms to a college student than it is to someone who's gotten their first 'real' paycheck, so perhaps Google thinks they'll get more effort out of their money by buying from the cheap labor market that students effectively are.
I've always thought that Google would be a great company to take the "Google Answers" concept of micro-payments paid in return for small tasks done on commission, to programming. Imagine instead of trolling the search engines and coming back with information, you had a site where people who had some annoying bug in an OSS program that they hated, or wanted some particular tweak or even a script written, could post a description of the change they desired along with a bid...then programmers could accept the task anonymously and get paid upon its completion. More complex tasks would go to more experienced programmers for a higher fee, and smaller ones to script kiddies just looking to make some pizza/beer bucks, according to market forces. You could even come up with a trust model for the programmers and the 'patrons' commissioning the code...and if you mandated that all the resultant code was GPLed, the benefit to the community might be huge.
I think the demand for an open market for small coding projects like that is huge, and to my knowledge there's nothing that quite fits it currently.
That's what the stipend is for. :-)
I'm really torn about what to think of Debian.
On one hand, I really like the concept--that they keep Linux available on a wide range of architectures, and perhaps more importantly, they keep a very stable version of it widely available. So if I ever came across an old UltraSparc or something, I'd just be a download away from having a working OS on it. (In theory.) Or if I want an absolutely-stable but not cutting-edge OS for a router or embedded system, I know exactly where to go also.
But this all occurs at the cost of development on the main-line branches: the Intel/AMD and perhaps PPC architectures with high demand are 'subsidizing' mostly inactive minor architectures. The question is whether the fringe benefits of those minor platforms--including the simple fact of being able to say that Linux supports them--is worth this diverted effort.
No, you have to add your wife's name once.
Your wives, on the other hand, would need to be added separately.
1982?
Is that like, "1984, Episode 1"?
Please, tell me where I can get a copy. I always did want to read the backstory on how Big Brother came to power and became all evil.
This is very true. I've long felt that Apple's DRM implementation was somewhat halfhearted. Especially when you consider the features in iTunes circa v4.0 ... where you could share your songs over the internet. They plug stuff up when it gets cracked or when the RIAA makes a huge stink about it, but they're really not in the media-protection business. They want to sell computers, and people don't buy computers for the awesomely-restrictive DRM.
Why don't they just mandate that a small thermite charge must be attached to each of your drives, and connected to your WAN port for remote detonation. It would have much the same effect and probably be faster and less expensive.
Yes.
Because if very few people can use it, then there's a disincentive for content-creators to ever do it again. Versus if it's even possible for you to use it, then they'll be able to point to a vast theoretical userbase when justifying using the format in the future.
It's kind of like why I refuse to install Windows Media Player, even though it's available for my computer: I don't want to download it, or have it on my computer where somebody might see it, lest they think that WMV is an acceptable format to send things to me in.
5) Pull the CD out of your drive, and put it back under the glass of scotch/soda/coffee/etc where it belongs.
Software like that has no place in my computer.
Furthermore, what they've been asking for is a government mandate to essentially go in to consumers' television sets and control how they will work. There is no choice here: if you buy a television, it's going to comply with their rules. As a consumer you won't have the option of getting a flag-ignorant receiver if the studios have their way.
Personally, my feeing on the issue is that anyone ought to be able to do anything they want with signals that are broadcast to them on their property. If the broadcast TV and satellite providers decide to shower me with their transmissions, then I ought to be able to do whatever I want with the incoming signal. The fact that I'm not allowed to is ridiculous. IMO, the whole problem we're having today can be traced back to the 80s, when the satellite TV providers made "stealing" their transmissions illegal: as if sticking up a satellite dish and decoding incoming signals was comparable to crawling up the power pole in front of your house and splicing in an illegal piece of coax to the cable TV feed. It's not.
This isn't exactly like having root access, but it's pretty close. It allows you to sudo -s and become root whenever you want, but remain a regular user the rest of the time.
If you go into the System folder and start deleting (or moving, renaming, whatever) things, you're immediately required to authenticate and become root in order to do it. No password, no deleting.
Although I'm not too familiar, I imagine that someone with root/administrator access on a Windows box can similarly screw things up with a few well-chosen deletions. Let's face it: any modern computer has to store critical files somewhere on the drive, and any decent operating system is going to have a way to let superusers modify them. If you let idiot users become root or Administrators, they're going to screw things up.
Stupidity is platform-independent, I'm afraid.
This helps to explain why if you go to Motorola's semiconductor website ('Freescale Semiconductor' these days) there's a lot more information about embedded applications than there is about PC usage. You practically have to go digging to find the new low-power G4 processors.
And you wonder why IBM is dumping employees there as fast as they can and probably taking the jobs elsewhere.
If the Europeans want to become the 'boutique store' of human resources on the world market, they're going to realize that they're not going to hang on to market share. There are lots of countries out there willing to work for less and become the mass market version of same.
What the employees think they're going to get by striking is beyond me. One day they'll strike and nobody will notice: then they'll just have proved how redundant they really are.
Furthermore, the only contracts companies recognize are the ones that are printed on paper and signed. If you think IBM entered into some sort of social contract to employ huge numbers of Europeans, that's fine, but don't expect IBM to agree with you.
If some business unit only produces $500k a year in clean profit, it might still get canned if it was sitting on $5M of assets: salaries, real estate, salable equipment, etc. If the company thinks they can do better than 10% ROI somewhere else, the logical decision is to liquidate the unit and invest the cash elsewhere. It's called opportunity cost.
Caveat: Back when the stock market was really good and you could easily earn more than that just by putting your money into other companies' stocks, there was a lot of this going on: unfortunately many companies found out that selling off core businesses to pump money into short-term high-yield endeavors wasn't a good strategy when the bubble burst. I know personally at least one very old (100+ years) company that met its end this way due to mismanagement and short-sightedness.
It should be noted that at the moment anyway, Google is privately held. The IPO isn't until mid-August.
I have to imagine that part of the reasoning behind these layoffs--the strategy, as opposed to the tactics, if you will--is that IBM is anticipating that their services will be consumed more in the Asia than in Europe. So who cares whether the layoffs put Europe's economy into the toilet: the business is all heading East.
By unloading all these employees in Europe, IBM can rehire new people from within developing markets. Aside from the obvious cost advantage (they probably work for less, pay less in corporate taxes, and pay out in a currency that's advantageous with regards to the USD), they already have a cultural familiarity with the market and help IBM lose the 'alien invader' image. Plus, they get to score points with some Asian government by bringing in tech-sector jobs.
I'm not. The writing's on the wall. If you have to fire one employee, given a choice of one who will only work 35 hours a week and 10 or 11 months a year and has a union that demands raises annually regardless of individual performance, versus someone who'll work 45-50+ hours a week without being asked, 50 weeks a year, and only expects a performance based bonus if anything...it's hardly even a choice. An executive wouldn't be doing due diligence to the shareholders to hang on to the former employee at the expense of the latter one.
The Europeans have priced themselves into obsolescence as workers.
I'll admit, some of the cryptographic and network theory discussed in the proceedings on the Cornell site, but it looks pretty solid. I'd be interested in how the OpenID people respond to the radically different design direction the Cornell group took (for good reasons, it seems) while essentially solving the same problem.
What I like about the Cornell system is that Goal #2, which would be right after "Provide a single sign-on abstraction", is "enable applications to tolerate failed and compromised authentication servers." The idea of compromised authentication servers doesn't seem to enter into the OpenID framework. Maybe I'm missing their solution somehow.
I'd also drop the second 'O', so the final name would just be MODLE, which can easily be pronounced like "model," and unlike "Moodle," you don't sound retarded, or lend yourself to cow jokes at the water cooler. (It also looks vaguely like some French world, which might appeal to intellectuals in higher education.)
Just depends what you have at your disposal, and which tradeoffs you want to make. I'd always rather use one common IC than one possibly hard-to-find capacitor that I'd have to order.