We're using beta.dcti.org to avoid confusion with our production network. We want to make sure everyone realizes that this is only a betatest, and that all the blocks done by the beta clients will eventually be discarded.
RC5 and distributed.net are run *on* FreeBSD
on
Which BSD?
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The FreeBSD folks want to get real work done. Early on, that resulted in an Intel focus, as that was the only affordable platform available. Now the Alpha is included, and hopefully more soon. When they day is done though they are interested in bang-for-the buck, not on RC5 or quake, but applications like web, ftp, and news. Bread and butter network stuff, rooted deep in the Unix world.
This isn't terribly relivant to which BSD is better, but since you brought RC5 up I thought I'd throw this in. Almost all of the distributed.net 'staff' have at least one box that runs FreeBSD, and for many of us, it is almost the only OS that we use. Many of our public boxes run it (web, many of the proxies, etc.), and all of the private boxes we depend on do.
Why? Well, certainly, there is an issue of familiarity. Several staff members are very familiar with FreeBSD; one of them is even on the FreeBSD team. But, most of them are also familiar with Linux, and they all prefer FreeBSD. I don't want to start another holy war, but I'd say that the biggest reasons why they prefer FreeBSD are stability, security, easy upgradeability (cvsup), and software distribution (ports). Some of it is also personal preference, and what you're used to. In fact, the stats box, which originally ran Red Hat, has been so heavily hacked that it could almost qualify as it's own OS (we call it dbnug BSDux release 1.0 (Bovinator) internally }:8) ). The only reason there's a linux kernel on the box is because of the Sybase Licensing.
As for the rest of us who aren't quite as 'in the know' (like me), we've just kinda followed along since it's easy for us to ask questions about FreeBSD.;) Seriously though, many of us (myself included) have tried both Linux (various distros) and FreeBSD, and most of us prefer FreeBSD.
Decibel! distributed.net Human Interface decibel@distributed.net
True, but on a busy subnet, I'd really prefer not having to do that, since as someone else pointed out it normally puts the NIC in promiscuous mode. If you could tell the NIC to respond to more than one MAC though....
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but you'd probably find the answer if you'd read the farking article. They state that you can assign a fixed IP to a machine. If you're reffering to how do packets get back to your machine (ie, when you request a web page), then it works the same way as today; you send your address as part of the request.
An Internet device that is intended to be a target of communication initiated by other devices must have a unique IP address that is stable over a relatively long period of time, just like anyone wishing to receive telephone calls must have a unique and stable telephone number, and anyone wishing to receive postal mail delivery must have a unique and stable postal address. The presence of unique, factory-assigned serial numbers on common LAN adapters, such as Ethernet adaptors, makes it possible to reliably generate unique, stable IPv6 addresses for such devices, without requiring either manual configuration or separate address-assignment servers.
This is a neat feature, but my question is this: what happens if the NIC that you were using dies? Can you continue to use the same serial # based address with a new NIC?
This is a very interesting and well-thought-out idea. It's good that you considered the possibility of bias on the part of the authors of the comments too. I think that most slashdot readers would agree that many people who post to slashdot tend to be either pro-Linux or anti-Microsoft. While these people certainly have the right to their opinion, the less bias there is in an Open Analysis process, the better. Arguably, with the large number of people who could contribute, this shouldn't be too great a problem, but I do fear that the slashdot community as a whole tends to be baised for Linux and against MS. If left unchecked, this bias could taint the results of Open Analysis.
One other thing to consider is that many of the people making decisions about IT purchases and procedures for companies (I think this is who you were targeting) are probably more comfortable with a hardcopy magazine than just looking at a website. Maybe the 'output' of the Open Analysis could be sold to print magazines, as you mention. Maybe the 'output' could become a magazine in it's own right.
There's a major, major factor that you're missing. Until the early/mid eighties, there were very few tools for engineers to use. Everything was done on paper, the only real 'tools' were calculators, lookup tables, and (in the real early days) slide-rules. Because of this, companies employed *scores* of engineers. My dad has told me stories from one of the engineering departments he worked in. There was row after row of engineers with their desks/drafting boards. My dad worked in a group that designed in-house test equipment... that group alone had around 20 engineers. Contrast that with the situation today: he has one other engineer working for him (admittedly, they're horribly short-staffed). I design engine computers for one of the Big Three (I'm actually employed by Motorola), and we have about 5 engineers on two different product teams.
Ironically, what changed much of that is what (indirectly) created the current IT shortage: the computer. Instead of manually changing a paper schematic, it's now done electronically. Design tools are much better, you can simulate your design without building it, etc., etc.
Another major factor in the reduction of engineering force is what today's technology is capable of. My dad designed a 6502 based embedded system in the mid 80s... he put over a man year into it. I've designed an engine computer that has approximately the same functionality (though, a lot more horsepower obviously) using a PowerPC derivative, and I've got maybe 2 man months into the actual design (if even that much). Most of this is because most of what I need is already in the micro I'm using... my dad had to use discrete circuits all over the place.
So, how does this tie into IT and programming?
Ask yourself this; how good are the tools you're using? Are they really all that good, compared to what they potential might be? Of course it's difficult to answer such a forward looking question, but I think that the tools will continue to get better... *much* better. Technology will probably keep improving too. 5 years ago, the idea of doing a time-critical embedded system using C code was revolutionary, if not unheard of. But this is exactly what our customer will be using on this PowerPC engine computer. Of course, there are countless other examples.
BTW, I find it interesting that after the 'layoff culture' of the 80s that it's now very difficult to find engineers. It will be interesting to see how any IT trends affect engineering trends.
RC5 is an encryption algorithm from RSA Labs. A RC5 'key' is a specific decryption code that might decrypt an encrypted message. RSA is sponsoring a contest to see if anyone can crack a message encrypted with RC5.
The reason this is even mentioned is because there is a group that is working on this contest using a 'brute force' attack. distributed.net has a client you can download that will allow you to participate in this contest, along with thousands of other people.
This client is designed to use all CPU time that would otherwise be 'wasted'. People tend to use it as a benchmark, even though it's not very representative of actual computing power, since it uses a small number of instructions repeatedly.
One of the biggest complaints I've seen about L0pht and other such groups is that they release both 'good' and 'bad' information. I completely agree that both sets of info need to be released (many software vendors won't lift a finger if all they see is an advisory), but I wonder if it would be better to release the details on the 'sploit like a week after they release the details on how to patch it.
Only answer I can think of is they feel that would push them towards the realm of white-hat, which they don't want to do.
This appeared as a side-bar to an article about circuits designed using genetic algorithms. Unfortunately, the article isn't available online, but you can see the references here. The article itself reported on using FPGAs to evolve an electronic circuit.
While I agree that it would be interesting to see what such an animal would look like alive, I can't help but think that the last thing we need to be doing is re-introducing extinct species (which, arguably, are extinct for a good reason) when we can't 'take care of' the animals that already exist on this planet. How many endangered species are there that would not be endangered if not for the actions of man? Instead of trying to clone extinct species (which most likely went extinct due to natural selection), we should worry about preserving what we've already got, and more importantly, work to ensure that the growth of our species doesn't happen at the expense of other species.
Then again, it would be really cool to be the only guy on the block with a wooly mamoth! Hrm... wonder if the village has any laws about that....
...can be found at the bottom of the 2600 page mentioned above. http://www.2600.com/2600new/092099-mai l.html has some of the mail that was sent to webmaster@dotcomnow.com... very humorous stuff there.:)
You've made a good point that many people always seem to forget. Like it or not, as soon as a distructive technology is created/discovered, the cat's out of the bag. The only thing that matters then is whether more good, moral people have that technology, or more bad, evil people have the technology.
Crypto isn't a distructive technology, but it is a defensive one. Offensive technologies (such as guns and other weapons) often become defensive technologies in the right hands.
One of the biggest problems here is that I sure as hell wouldn't trust the government with my keys. If they want evidence that I've encrypted de-crypted, how about slapping me with a court order to decrypt it? That way, I still know that my keys are safe. (Yes, I know there's holes in that proposal too, but it's far better than key escrow imho).
The install is still the same (as of 3.0 anyway). It is a little confusing at first, but after a little use it's not that bad.
I don't know of a downloadable ISO, but if you can, I'd suggest you download a 'local mirror' to a local machine and do an FTP install off of there. It's relatively fast to do installs then (even if it takes you multiple attempts, like it did the first time I installed it.) Expect to use about 300 meg or so; you don't need the entire distribution tree either. Specifically, only get sys from the/src tree. You can also get by without/ports,/packages, and/proflibs. After you get the box up and running, you can grab these online (assuming the box has net access).
Dunno about the Be filesystem drivers, but I kinda doubt it.
As I understand it, the problem here is that you can't seperate the RSA code from the rest of the BIND code and redistribute it; you can only use it with BIND.
So what?
Is it so horrible that a company is giving away something that they developed, but that they don't want people spreading it around other than for the purpose they envisioned it for? They don't even say that you can't modify it, only that they retain the rights to incorporate your modifications.
RSA's solution works, and it is free to use, even if it's not as free as some would like. I fully support open source and free software, but I also respect that some people or companies want to retain some forms of control.
Is this a special case because it involved a piece of software that is crucial to the operation of the internet? I don't know. If it becomes a real issue in the future, then a solution can be found, but it seems that people are only making a stink about it right now because it's not 100% absolutely, completely free for everyone to use however they want. In other words, open source zealotry.
I'm sorry if I sound negative about this, but I get frustrated when people get upset about a piece of free software because it's not licensed exactly the way they want. To quote an American expression, 'Why look a gift horse in the mouth?'
Instead of trying to re-invent something that works and is free to use, why not just move on and tackle other issues?
If you're interested in testing the 6 degrees...
on
Web: 19 Clicks Wide
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· Score: 1
... check out http://www.sixdegrees.com, they're actually trying to link people through their relationships to see if everyone really is related to everyone else by 6 degrees or less. I've actually run into people I know personally just by looking through my different 'degrees'... that's quite a weird experience.
Couldn't the perl scripts just connect directly to the database server? If they can, that should be much faster than serving the data out of the database machine via NFS, or any other filesystem.
It seems our government doesn't have the market on stupidity cornered quite yet.
This legislation is like requireing you to avert your eyes while watching an R rated movie. It's very un-enforcable (though make note that it's something they can use as an excuse to lock people up... 'He didn't have NetNanny! He's a HARD CORE CRIMINAL!!'), and a major infringement on basic human rites.
Such a sad day and age we live in where governments can pass this kind of crap.
distributed.net would love to tackle some more scientific projects, unfortunatly, our current network isn't readily adaptable to most of these endeavors. We are having a tough enough time setting things up for OGR, let alone a project that would require moving large amounts of data around. }:8(
BUT, we are always looking for future projects! }:8) So, if you are involved with a scientific endeavor that you think a network of 70,000+ machines could do useful work on, please feel free to contact me directly at decibel@distributed.net. (Please, only contact me if you have direct contact with a project.)
Certainly a true statement. Of course, this reminds me of my theory about that "girls don't care about important things." When was the last time you heard a girl say, "Sure, the iMac has nice colors, but this Dell has 256 MB of RAM!" or "I just brought my Conrad-Johnson amp home; I found the bass on the Krell to be too muddy."?:)
For God's sake, should you ever find a supply of these women, let me know!!!:)
Also, fwiw, I think that there are quite a number of audiophiles who might be interested in this kind of equipment for convenience sake; notably, audiophiles that tend to leave music playing in the background when they're not doing some serious listening. Of course, when the urge to really *listen* to some music comes, off go the digitally compressed tunes, and out comes the vinyl, or HDCD, or 30IPS tape, or what have you.
BTW, I would guess that much of the degradation you see in sound qualities for MP3s is due to loss of timing information. This is why it's quite easy to tell the difference between CD and analog on a good system. I wonder if anyone has taken any measurements.
Now if only they'd gone with the Sony system instead of AC3 for DVDs... maybe we would have found out how good music that's been lossily compressed could sound:/
Certainly a true statement. Of course, this reminds me of my theory about that "girls don't care about important things." When was the last time you heard a girl say, "Sure, the iMac has nice colors, but this Dell has 256 MB of RAM!" or "I just brought my Conrad-Johnson amp home; I found the bass on the Krell to be too muddy."?:)
For God's sake, should you ever find a supply of these women, let me know!!!:)
Also, fwiw, I think that there are quite a number of audiophiles who might beinterested in this kind of equipment for convienience sake; notably, audiophiles that tend to leave music playing in the backgroud when they're not doing some serious listening. Of course, when the urge to really *listen* to some music comes, off go the digitally compressed tunes, and out comes the vinyl, or HDCD, or 30IPS tape, or what have you.
BTW, I would guess that much of the degridation you see in sound qualities for MP3s is due to loss of timing information. This is why it's quite easy to tell the difference between CD and analog on a good system. I wonder if anyone has taken any measurements.
Now if only they'd gone with the Sony system instead of AC3 for DVDs... maybe we would have found out how good music that's been lossily compressed could sound:/
Certainly a true statement. Of course, this reminds me of my theory about that "girls don't care about important things." When was the last time you heard a girl say, "Sure, the iMac has nice colors, but this Dell has 256 MB of RAM!" or "I just brought my Conrad-Johnson amp home; I found the bass on the Krell to be too muddy."?:)
For God's sake, should you ever find a supply of these women, let me know!!!:)
Also, fwiw, I think that there are quite a number of audiophiles who might beinterested in this kind of equipment for convienience sake; notably, audiophiles that tend to leave music playing in the backgroud when they're not doing some serious listening. Of course, when the urge to really *listen* to some music comes, off go the digitally compressed tunes, and out comes the vinyl, or HDCD, or 30IPS tape, or what have you.
BTW, I would guess that much of the degridation you see in sound qualities for MP3s is due to loss of timing information. This is why it's quite easy to tell the difference between CD and analog on a good system. I wonder if anyone has taken any measurements.
Now if only they'd gone with the Sony system instead of AC3 for DVDs... maybe we would have found out how good music that's been lossily compressed could sound:/
Slashdot Mirror
We're using beta.dcti.org to avoid confusion with our production network. We want to make sure everyone realizes that this is only a betatest, and that all the blocks done by the beta clients will eventually be discarded.
This isn't terribly relivant to which BSD is better, but since you brought RC5 up I thought I'd throw this in. Almost all of the distributed.net 'staff' have at least one box that runs FreeBSD, and for many of us, it is almost the only OS that we use. Many of our public boxes run it (web, many of the proxies, etc.), and all of the private boxes we depend on do.
Why? Well, certainly, there is an issue of familiarity. Several staff members are very familiar with FreeBSD; one of them is even on the FreeBSD team. But, most of them are also familiar with Linux, and they all prefer FreeBSD. I don't want to start another holy war, but I'd say that the biggest reasons why they prefer FreeBSD are stability, security, easy upgradeability (cvsup), and software distribution (ports). Some of it is also personal preference, and what you're used to. In fact, the stats box, which originally ran Red Hat, has been so heavily hacked that it could almost qualify as it's own OS (we call it dbnug BSDux release 1.0 (Bovinator) internally }:8) ). The only reason there's a linux kernel on the box is because of the Sybase Licensing.
As for the rest of us who aren't quite as 'in the know' (like me), we've just kinda followed along since it's easy for us to ask questions about FreeBSD. ;) Seriously though, many of us (myself included) have tried both Linux (various distros) and FreeBSD, and most of us prefer FreeBSD.
Decibel!
distributed.net Human Interface
decibel@distributed.net
True, but on a busy subnet, I'd really prefer not having to do that, since as someone else pointed out it normally puts the NIC in promiscuous mode. If you could tell the NIC to respond to more than one MAC though....
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but you'd probably find the answer if you'd read the farking article. They state that you can assign a fixed IP to a machine. If you're reffering to how do packets get back to your machine (ie, when you request a web page), then it works the same way as today; you send your address as part of the request.
An Internet device that is intended to be a target of communication initiated by other devices must have a unique IP address that is stable over a relatively long period of time, just like anyone wishing to receive telephone calls must have a unique and stable telephone number, and anyone wishing to receive postal mail delivery must have a unique and stable postal address. The presence of unique, factory-assigned serial numbers on common LAN adapters, such as Ethernet adaptors, makes it possible to reliably generate unique, stable IPv6 addresses for such devices, without requiring either manual configuration or separate address-assignment servers.
This is a neat feature, but my question is this: what happens if the NIC that you were using dies? Can you continue to use the same serial # based address with a new NIC?
This is a very interesting and well-thought-out idea. It's good that you considered the possibility of bias on the part of the authors of the comments too. I think that most slashdot readers would agree that many people who post to slashdot tend to be either pro-Linux or anti-Microsoft. While these people certainly have the right to their opinion, the less bias there is in an Open Analysis process, the better. Arguably, with the large number of people who could contribute, this shouldn't be too great a problem, but I do fear that the slashdot community as a whole tends to be baised for Linux and against MS. If left unchecked, this bias could taint the results of Open Analysis.
One other thing to consider is that many of the people making decisions about IT purchases and procedures for companies (I think this is who you were targeting) are probably more comfortable with a hardcopy magazine than just looking at a website. Maybe the 'output' of the Open Analysis could be sold to print magazines, as you mention. Maybe the 'output' could become a magazine in it's own right.
I didn't see it in the article, or is it a reference to an urban legend that I (*gasp!*) haven't heard?
There's a major, major factor that you're missing. Until the early/mid eighties, there were very few tools for engineers to use. Everything was done on paper, the only real 'tools' were calculators, lookup tables, and (in the real early days) slide-rules. Because of this, companies employed *scores* of engineers. My dad has told me stories from one of the engineering departments he worked in. There was row after row of engineers with their desks/drafting boards. My dad worked in a group that designed in-house test equipment... that group alone had around 20 engineers. Contrast that with the situation today: he has one other engineer working for him (admittedly, they're horribly short-staffed). I design engine computers for one of the Big Three (I'm actually employed by Motorola), and we have about 5 engineers on two different product teams.
Ironically, what changed much of that is what (indirectly) created the current IT shortage: the computer. Instead of manually changing a paper schematic, it's now done electronically. Design tools are much better, you can simulate your design without building it, etc., etc.
Another major factor in the reduction of engineering force is what today's technology is capable of. My dad designed a 6502 based embedded system in the mid 80s... he put over a man year into it. I've designed an engine computer that has approximately the same functionality (though, a lot more horsepower obviously) using a PowerPC derivative, and I've got maybe 2 man months into the actual design (if even that much). Most of this is because most of what I need is already in the micro I'm using... my dad had to use discrete circuits all over the place.
So, how does this tie into IT and programming?
Ask yourself this; how good are the tools you're using? Are they really all that good, compared to what they potential might be? Of course it's difficult to answer such a forward looking question, but I think that the tools will continue to get better... *much* better. Technology will probably keep improving too. 5 years ago, the idea of doing a time-critical embedded system using C code was revolutionary, if not unheard of. But this is exactly what our customer will be using on this PowerPC engine computer. Of course, there are countless other examples.
BTW, I find it interesting that after the 'layoff culture' of the 80s that it's now very difficult to find engineers. It will be interesting to see how any IT trends affect engineering trends.
RC5 is an encryption algorithm from RSA Labs. A RC5 'key' is a specific decryption code that might decrypt an encrypted message. RSA is sponsoring a contest to see if anyone can crack a message encrypted with RC5.
The reason this is even mentioned is because there is a group that is working on this contest using a 'brute force' attack. distributed.net has a client you can download that will allow you to participate in this contest, along with thousands of other people.
This client is designed to use all CPU time that would otherwise be 'wasted'. People tend to use it as a benchmark, even though it's not very representative of actual computing power, since it uses a small number of instructions repeatedly.
If you have more questions, feel free to email me at decibel@distributed.net
dB!
distributed.net Human Interface
Did you read my comment? I said how about releasing the exploit *after* the patch.
One of the biggest complaints I've seen about L0pht and other such groups is that they release both 'good' and 'bad' information. I completely agree that both sets of info need to be released (many software vendors won't lift a finger if all they see is an advisory), but I wonder if it would be better to release the details on the 'sploit like a week after they release the details on how to patch it.
Only answer I can think of is they feel that would push them towards the realm of white-hat, which they don't want to do.
This appeared as a side-bar to an article about circuits designed using genetic algorithms. Unfortunately, the article isn't available online, but you can see the references here. The article itself reported on using FPGAs to evolve an electronic circuit.
While I agree that it would be interesting to see what such an animal would look like alive, I can't help but think that the last thing we need to be doing is re-introducing extinct species (which, arguably, are extinct for a good reason) when we can't 'take care of' the animals that already exist on this planet. How many endangered species are there that would not be endangered if not for the actions of man? Instead of trying to clone extinct species (which most likely went extinct due to natural selection), we should worry about preserving what we've already got, and more importantly, work to ensure that the growth of our species doesn't happen at the expense of other species.
Then again, it would be really cool to be the only guy on the block with a wooly mamoth! Hrm... wonder if the village has any laws about that....
...can be found at the bottom of the 2600 page mentioned above. http://www.2600.com/2600new/092099-mai l.html has some of the mail that was sent to webmaster@dotcomnow.com... very humorous stuff there. :)
You've made a good point that many people always seem to forget. Like it or not, as soon as a distructive technology is created/discovered, the cat's out of the bag. The only thing that matters then is whether more good, moral people have that technology, or more bad, evil people have the technology.
Crypto isn't a distructive technology, but it is a defensive one. Offensive technologies (such as guns and other weapons) often become defensive technologies in the right hands.
One of the biggest problems here is that I sure as hell wouldn't trust the government with my keys. If they want evidence that I've encrypted de-crypted, how about slapping me with a court order to decrypt it? That way, I still know that my keys are safe. (Yes, I know there's holes in that proposal too, but it's far better than key escrow imho).
The install is still the same (as of 3.0 anyway). It is a little confusing at first, but after a little use it's not that bad.
/src tree. You can also get by without /ports, /packages, and /proflibs. After you get the box up and running, you can grab these online (assuming the box has net access).
I don't know of a downloadable ISO, but if you can, I'd suggest you download a 'local mirror' to a local machine and do an FTP install off of there. It's relatively fast to do installs then (even if it takes you multiple attempts, like it did the first time I installed it.) Expect to use about 300 meg or so; you don't need the entire distribution tree either. Specifically, only get sys from the
Dunno about the Be filesystem drivers, but I kinda doubt it.
As I understand it, the problem here is that you can't seperate the RSA code from the rest of the BIND code and redistribute it; you can only use it with BIND.
So what?
Is it so horrible that a company is giving away something that they developed, but that they don't want people spreading it around other than for the purpose they envisioned it for? They don't even say that you can't modify it, only that they retain the rights to incorporate your modifications.
RSA's solution works, and it is free to use, even if it's not as free as some would like. I fully support open source and free software, but I also respect that some people or companies want to retain some forms of control.
Is this a special case because it involved a piece of software that is crucial to the operation of the internet? I don't know. If it becomes a real issue in the future, then a solution can be found, but it seems that people are only making a stink about it right now because it's not 100% absolutely, completely free for everyone to use however they want. In other words, open source zealotry.
I'm sorry if I sound negative about this, but I get frustrated when people get upset about a piece of free software because it's not licensed exactly the way they want. To quote an American expression, 'Why look a gift horse in the mouth?'
Instead of trying to re-invent something that works and is free to use, why not just move on and tackle other issues?
... check out http://www.sixdegrees.com, they're actually trying to link people through their relationships to see if everyone really is related to everyone else by 6 degrees or less. I've actually run into people I know personally just by looking through my different 'degrees'... that's quite a weird experience.
Couldn't the perl scripts just connect directly to the database server? If they can, that should be much faster than serving the data out of the database machine via NFS, or any other filesystem.
It seems our government doesn't have the market on stupidity cornered quite yet.
This legislation is like requireing you to avert your eyes while watching an R rated movie. It's very un-enforcable (though make note that it's something they can use as an excuse to lock people up... 'He didn't have NetNanny! He's a HARD CORE CRIMINAL!!'), and a major infringement on basic human rites.
Such a sad day and age we live in where governments can pass this kind of crap.
distributed.net would love to tackle some more scientific projects, unfortunatly, our current network isn't readily adaptable to most of these endeavors. We are having a tough enough time setting things up for OGR, let alone a project that would require moving large amounts of data around. }:8(
BUT, we are always looking for future projects! }:8) So, if you are involved with a scientific endeavor that you think a network of 70,000+ machines could do useful work on, please feel free to contact me directly at decibel@distributed.net. (Please, only contact me if you have direct contact with a project.)
Mooo!
dB!
...does the song mention slashdot?! :)
Certainly a true statement. Of course, this reminds me of my theory about that "girls don't care about important things." When was the last time you heard a girl say, "Sure, the iMac has nice colors, but this Dell has 256 MB of RAM!" or "I just brought my Conrad-Johnson amp home; I found the bass on the Krell to be too muddy."? :)
For God's sake, should you ever find a supply of these women, let me know!!! :)
Also, fwiw, I think that there are quite a number of audiophiles who might be interested in this kind of equipment for convenience sake; notably, audiophiles that tend to leave music playing in the background when they're not doing some serious listening. Of course, when the urge to really *listen* to some music comes, off go the digitally compressed tunes, and out comes the vinyl, or HDCD, or 30IPS tape, or what have you.
BTW, I would guess that much of the degradation you see in sound qualities for MP3s is due to loss of timing information. This is why it's quite easy to tell the difference between CD and analog on a good system. I wonder if anyone has taken any measurements.
Now if only they'd gone with the Sony system instead of AC3 for DVDs... maybe we would have found out how good music that's been lossily compressed could sound :/
Certainly a true statement. Of course, this reminds me of my theory about that "girls don't care about important things." When was the last time you heard a girl say, "Sure, the iMac has nice colors, but this Dell has 256 MB of RAM!" or "I just brought my Conrad-Johnson amp home; I found the bass on the Krell to be too muddy."? :)
For God's sake, should you ever find a supply of these women, let me know!!! :)
Also, fwiw, I think that there are quite a number of audiophiles who might beinterested in this kind of equipment for convienience sake; notably, audiophiles that tend to leave music playing in the backgroud when they're not doing some serious listening. Of course, when the urge to really *listen* to some music comes, off go the digitally compressed tunes, and out comes the vinyl, or HDCD, or 30IPS tape, or what have you.
BTW, I would guess that much of the degridation you see in sound qualities for MP3s is due to loss of timing information. This is why it's quite easy to tell the difference between CD and analog on a good system. I wonder if anyone has taken any measurements.
Now if only they'd gone with the Sony system instead of AC3 for DVDs... maybe we would have found out how good music that's been lossily compressed could sound :/
Certainly a true statement. Of course, this reminds me of my theory about that "girls don't care about important things." When was the last time you heard a girl say, :)
"Sure, the iMac has nice colors, but this Dell has 256 MB of RAM!" or "I just brought my Conrad-Johnson amp home; I found the bass on the Krell to be too
muddy."?
For God's sake, should you ever find a supply of these women, let me know!!! :)
Also, fwiw, I think that there are quite a number of audiophiles who might beinterested in this kind of equipment for convienience sake; notably, audiophiles that tend to leave music playing in the backgroud when they're not doing some serious listening. Of course, when the urge to really *listen* to some music comes, off go the digitally compressed tunes, and out comes the vinyl, or HDCD, or 30IPS tape, or what have you.
BTW, I would guess that much of the degridation you see in sound qualities for MP3s is due to loss of timing information. This is why it's quite easy to tell the difference between CD and analog on a good system. I wonder if anyone has taken any measurements.
Now if only they'd gone with the Sony system instead of AC3 for DVDs... maybe we would have found out how good music that's been lossily compressed could sound :/