yeah. It's not really a good thing that I expected have to do it by hand. I think in a way it's because the basics are the same on any Linux distro, but the gui tools are often different, so I stuck to what I knew. I agree there is still quite a gulf between hardware that has drivers for Linux, and hardware that will either just work out of the box or has a simple gui to set it up that is included in the popular distros. Most of my hardware is getting so old that it falls into the 'works out of the box' category.:)
It looks like a clash between old and new Linux. I used to use Slackware or Gentoo as they worked.
I put Suse on my computer to see what it was like, and the sound was not working. My first reaction was to open a console and lsmod, then cat/proc/asound/cards etc. The card was there, but the modules were loading in the wrong order, so the motherboard soundcard was loading first and being used by default. So, I started to edit/etc/modprobe.conf
My friend, who does not use Linux, was watching me do this and I explained what I was doing. He said 'Why not look in the menu?'
In the menu there was a way to set up the sound card in Yast and select the default. For some reason, my technical long term Linux user brain never even considered this as a first and obvious thing to do. I think I probably acted like this guy did, instead seeing how the distro was designed to be used, or reading any documentation, I just assumed I knew best and was going to fix it by brute force.
I think it's perhaps a throwback to when the autoconfig stuff was a bit dodgy on Linux and I really did not trust it much, so even if it was there I'd ignore it, and it got to be a habit. Nowadays I use Ubuntu and am happier to let the distro take care of configuration and the little details.
No, it does not have the LEDs. I used a desk lamp which worked pretty well, and you can change the angle of illumination to create shadows and emphasise features. The LEDs would be less hassle for quick use though, and they are nice and bright and well positioned for top down illumination.
It works with Linux so obsolete Windows drivers are not a problem. I actually hacked the driver to change the way the automatic gain control works so it would not keep ramping the gain and exposure time up and down so quickly. Surprisingly easy even though I am no programmer!
I suppose it's not very black and white nowadays anyway. Musicians recording together in a studio will have their own home setups too, and will create parts and bring them to the studio. Or vice versa where you do the drums and guitars in a studio and then take the multitrack home to do overdubs and mix.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the market for most of the music people make on $500 computers gets really saturated... I think there is perhaps one more revolution left in pop music, perhaps the next will be anti sequencing and a return to performance? All you need for that is a decent stereo pair and something that sounds nice to record.
I've done quite well out the hip hop stuff I've made with a computer and a rapper, so I can't complain. But I agree it's still players and performace based stuff where the music get really exciting.
but it looks the same as my web cam when I screw the lens out really far. I've done this and the close up pics I get are as high magnification and in focus as the ones taken with this microscope. I know this as many of the pictures linked to in the article are of the same things I looked at, like coins, hair on your arm etc.
I kinda expected more if the optics were designed specifically for a microscope.
I didn't say anything about fidelity. Todays cheap digital stuff blows away most classic studio tape machines.
A studio is a place where people can get together and perform, and make a nice recording of it.
You cannot reproduce that on a $500 computer, as the people will not fit inside the computer.
While emulating the of sound and music of old records with musicians playing together, you might consider what it is about those performances that make it worth emulating.
"I can do the job of what used to be a $1M+ recording studio/pressing plant on a $500 PC"
No you can't. A sound proofed and treated room with facilities for recording a band is not the same as your bedroom. If you mean "I can make electronic music on my computer that I think could sell" then I agree. If you mean that a $500 PC gives you the same facilities as a $1M recording studio then you are insane. Even a few pairs of decent headphones cost more than that.
In the 15th century, key signatures had not been invented yet. Accidentals were sometimes written, sometimes not. So, without explicit accidentals, to tell what the notes were meant to be they either knew the likely mode, or just guessed them, which is known as 'musica ficta'. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_ficta
The good thing about modes is that any arrangement of notes from the mode will sound pretty much like music.
In this case, of finding modal music in the 'last supper', it would be hard to make it anything but musical, especially if you finagle the accidentals, timing and direction it so you have more chances to make it work.
However, in defense of this research, there were a lot of complicated harmonic rules that sacred music would be expected to adhere to, and by following these rules it may be possible to get more informed guesses.
For a recording studio nowadays, even a small one, the costs of the recording equipment are the smallest part of the investment. Proper sound proofing and treatment of a single room will cost more than the computer, monitoring and mics.
Also, if you are doing this legally, getting the premises to health and safety standards is a big issue. That can mean making new exits and putting in staircases for fire reasons, new lighting, making sure doors don't obstruct each other etc.
Do not get into the studio business if you think you will be spending your money on recording equipment. Do not imagine that you can easily mix to a standard to compete in the marketplace with indifferent monitoring in an untreated room.
The other big problem is that now the band are their own producers and engineers. It's hard to be a creative and expressive musician while also being a great engineer.
"Nowadays a somewhat-pro sound guy with a used Macintosh, the right software, and a small sound board, could do the whole shebang in a room lined with the appropriate sound-deadening material. Like a spare bedroom rigged for just that purpose."
In theory yes. In practice it's much harder.
Firstly, this assumes you have no neighbors. Sound treatment is not the same as soundproofing. The only way to effectively soundproof a room is to isolate the room from the building, ie a suspended 'room within a room'. This is expensive.
Secondly, dead rooms only give you one sound, that of a dead room. This was popular in the 70's but nowadays people like their live rooms a little more live.
Thirdly, a band cannot record live in a spare bedroom. There may not be enough space for everyone in there. Also, the amount of spill from amps to drums etc will make it hard to get a punchy compressed modern sound. Unless people are going to be using amp simulators and headphones. This is killing the vibe and limiting your options before you start. The performance is so very important. With amp closets or acoustic partitions you can do better, but you need more space.
Fourth, your control room needs to be acoustically treated too. Mixing becomes quite hard if the bass end is up and down due to standing waves when you move your head a little, and room resonances.
Fifth, air conditioning, power conditioning, lighting etc. It's no fun spending many hours is a dead dark sealed box breathing each other's fumes with hum on everything from bad grounding and power adapters all over the floor. Consider safety too, the live room should be on another circuit from the control room with RCD breakers.
"Or you could just check into a local studio, where the prices would be hella reasonable compared to some Sony/EMI/Whoever-owned studio."
Yes, you can do this. You have to consider how many great sounding big selling albums have come out of your local studio though. It can actually be a lot cheaper to spend a week putting down an album in a large expensive studio than to spend months dealing with the limitations of recording in someones garage, and the inexperience of the engineer who's just got his first mixing desk.
I'd like to think that a guy who can build a computer from TTL understands them at a basic enough level to design one from almost anything.
Even a computer built from relays is still very useful if the alternative is pen and paper. I've sometimes wondered how far back in history you'd have to go before the technology was incapable of making a reliable relay and a battery. Not such an easy thing, but in some ways easier than a mechanical computer like Babbage's difference engine. (The fine tolerances required for the machined parts gave Babbage so much trouble.)
Perhaps two hundred years ago, maybe more.
I suppose the technologically hardest part is drawing the fine copper wire. For the rest, people have been using molds with molten metal for millennia. Chemical batteries are not too hard to make if you have enough amphora.:)
The beeb mostly uses Linux servers running Red Hat.
That's why they generally use rtsp (for realplayer) to stream video rather than a MS Windows specific codec.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4606719.stm "The BBC News website - under the bonnet" "The servers themselves are running Apache web server software on either the Linux or Solaris operating system."
I can sympathize with this. The movies are the stars after all, the commentary does not have much value on it's own.
Some of them are pretty good too, like 'The brain that wouldn't die'. Others, like 'The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?' are piss takes to start with.
I'd rather see the original first, then watch the MST3K version.
Aliasing noise is not related to sample rate or bit depth.
A properly dithered 8bit 7KHz recording will have a high noise floor, and be severely band limited, but will not have aliasing artifacts. The noise floor is 'white' noise, and not related to the signal.
The glitchy sound you associate with low bandwidth recordings is due to not dithering properly, data compression, or as using it as an effect etc.
Have a play with some audio editing software some day. It's interesting how good the audio sounds at 12bit 35Khz or so. Modern records often have so little dynamic range that you could use 14bit and no one would notice.:)
Anyway, 192Khz converters are very cheap nowadays. I think about £2.50 or so.
It's the analog side and the clocking that makes the difference.
16bit 44.1Khz is fine for listening if the conversion to analog is adequate.
It does seem an expensive and complicated was to power a bus.
I don't understand why they don't use flywheels anymore.
There were buses in the 1940's that used flywheels for energy storage, charged in 30 seconds and could do regenerative braking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
I bet modern flywheel storage, with magnetic bearings and more efficient conversion to electric power, would be comparable or better than batteries and cheaper too. No nasty waste to dispose of either.
Try it. It's not easy to make it clip intentionally, but there are limits to how much gain reduction even very clever limiters like L2/L3 can do without flat lining. You will hear the bass end drop out as L2 tries to redistribute energy before it clips really hard, but it will clip, and you will see consecutive samples with the same value. Despite having a simple interface, there's a lot going on in these plugins.
"Most limiting is done with outboard analog gear."
I agree analog limiters are used extensively as well, but they cannot provide the clean brickwall limiting (if that's not a contradiction in terms.:) that digital look ahead limiters can. The conventional analog limiters are used for their sound, the fast digital ones because they don't have a 'sound', even when working quite hard. I would imagine it's common to use both, with the digital as a peak stop at the end of the chain.
It was only when the fast digital limiters appeared that CDs started to get really loud.
"I find most of todays music unlistenable above the loudness level of a relaxed conversation. I skipped the last two Prince albums, of whom I have been a fan for almost 20 years, because they sound ugly and distorted. You can turn up his older albums and enjoy. You cannot do the same with todays material. Same goes for most other records."
This is true.:( I hope we will see a renaissance of more conservative masters once record companies realize there is a market for them. Digital distribution makes this possible as they won't have the cost of two different pressings of the same album.
"What's different now that the video shows is the peaks are not getting clipped anymore, instead they reach 0.0 db but the entire mix is digitally volume maximized so almost every single peak is that loud."
No, they are getting clipped. Have a closer look for flat topped peaks. The damage is being done by look ahead limiters like Waves L2, which are the last process in the mastering chain. These limiters work on psychoacoustic principles, employing some of the temporal masking ideas used in lossy audio compression to make the artifacts of very fast peak limiting as inaudible as possible. It's known that humans cannot hear short periods of clipping distortion (less than 2ms or so), so these limiters allow that to happen, clamp down a millisecond later, and increase the subjective loudness of the signal without losing 'punch'. As this kind of limiter incorporates a delay line in the audio output path, but not the side chain, it's always looking a few milliseconds ahead and so knows how to react to a peak in advance.
The problem is that if you push a limiter of this kind really hard, it cannot keep it's artifacts inaudible, the clipped periods get longer, and the music starts to sound harsh and tiring.
It's a shame as they a beautifully clean limiters if used correctly, you can knock 4-6db of pop material without the kind of artifacts a traditional analog limiter would produce.
Well, why the fuck not?
Mini XLR connecters are small enough to fit into any laptop, and still 10 times as robust as 3.5mm jack sockets.
Virtually all modern preamps are just an opamp in a design copied from the manufacturers datasheet, no matter what claims for XDR this and SUPERPRE that. They don't cost nuthin.
There is no reason that we cannot have decent audio quality with XLR ins on laptops, other than that the universe hates me.
It's possible that the chip is designed to fail under certain circumstances to prevent reverse engineering.
I know there are crypto chips that can destroy themselves using chemical agents stored inside the packaging. It's not easy to find out much detail about them for some reason.
Nah. I have been around most of the world with my trusty CF27 toughbook and never had a problem. It looks even more agricultural than the more recent one you pictured. Never had a problem.
In hong kong, forgot about it (heavy jetlag) and left it on the X-ray machine while going through customs. Went back half an hour later and picked it up. All they asked me to do was identify it and it was fine.
I guess if I went to the states it could be more difficult, as they get spooked quite easily over there.
One reason I prefer adventures is that most 3D first person games are in incredibly restricted in the way the player interacts with the world around them.
In a text adventure you can smell, turn, press, rub, squeeze, push, eat, drink, examine, feel, rotate, bury, steal objects.
In an FPS game you can shoot, activate or sometimes take objects, which is quite limiting for interesting puzzles, or at least those that involve more subtle interaction with the game world.
There was a FPS games ages ago (pre 3d accelerators) , set on an island with dinosaurs, where the player could pick up and manipulate objects as if they were held in their hand. Very ambitious, and unfortunately very annoying to control as well. Anyone remember what it was called?
"Even now, OLED has done little in the market, and finding a decent OLED-based product (phone, GPS, whatever) in a market full of LCD-based products can prove difficult."
I'm not sure OLED is still expensive or rare. Google for OLED MP4, and you will find that it's quite hard to find a portable mp3/mp4 player *without* an OLED display. Most of these players are less than £15.
Perhaps it's still expensive to make them more than 1.5 inch or so in size.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah. It's not really a good thing that I expected have to do it by hand. :)
I think in a way it's because the basics are the same on any Linux distro, but the gui tools are often different, so I stuck to what I knew.
I agree there is still quite a gulf between hardware that has drivers for Linux, and hardware that will either just work out of the box or has a simple gui to set it up that is included in the popular distros.
Most of my hardware is getting so old that it falls into the 'works out of the box' category.
It looks like a clash between old and new Linux.
/proc/asound/cards etc. /etc/modprobe.conf
I used to use Slackware or Gentoo as they worked.
I put Suse on my computer to see what it was like, and the sound was not working.
My first reaction was to open a console and lsmod, then cat
The card was there, but the modules were loading in the wrong order, so the motherboard soundcard was loading first and being used by default. So, I started to edit
My friend, who does not use Linux, was watching me do this and I explained what I was doing.
He said 'Why not look in the menu?'
In the menu there was a way to set up the sound card in Yast and select the default.
For some reason, my technical long term Linux user brain never even considered this as a first and obvious thing to do. I think I probably acted like this guy did, instead seeing how the distro was designed to be used, or reading any documentation, I just assumed I knew best and was going to fix it by brute force.
I think it's perhaps a throwback to when the autoconfig stuff was a bit dodgy on Linux and I really did not trust it much, so even if it was there I'd ignore it, and it got to be a habit. Nowadays I use Ubuntu and am happier to let the distro take care of configuration and the little details.
No, it does not have the LEDs. I used a desk lamp which worked pretty well, and you can change the angle of illumination to create shadows and emphasise features. The LEDs would be less hassle for quick use though, and they are nice and bright and well positioned for top down illumination.
It works with Linux so obsolete Windows drivers are not a problem. I actually hacked the driver to change the way the automatic gain control works so it would not keep ramping the gain and exposure time up and down so quickly. Surprisingly easy even though I am no programmer!
I see your point now.
I suppose it's not very black and white nowadays anyway. Musicians recording together in a studio will have their own home setups too, and will create parts and bring them to the studio. Or vice versa where you do the drums and guitars in a studio and then take the multitrack home to do overdubs and mix.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the market for most of the music people make on $500 computers gets really saturated... I think there is perhaps one more revolution left in pop music, perhaps the next will be anti sequencing and a return to performance? All you need for that is a decent stereo pair and something that sounds nice to record.
I've done quite well out the hip hop stuff I've made with a computer and a rapper, so I can't complain. But I agree it's still players and performace based stuff where the music get really exciting.
but it looks the same as my web cam when I screw the lens out really far.
I've done this and the close up pics I get are as high magnification and in focus as the ones taken with this microscope.
I know this as many of the pictures linked to in the article are of the same things I looked at, like coins, hair on your arm etc.
I kinda expected more if the optics were designed specifically for a microscope.
I didn't say anything about fidelity. Todays cheap digital stuff blows away most classic studio tape machines.
A studio is a place where people can get together and perform, and make a nice recording of it.
You cannot reproduce that on a $500 computer, as the people will not fit inside the computer.
While emulating the of sound and music of old records with musicians playing together, you might consider what it is about those performances that make it worth emulating.
"I can do the job of what used to be a $1M+ recording studio/pressing plant on a $500 PC"
No you can't.
A sound proofed and treated room with facilities for recording a band is not the same as your bedroom.
If you mean "I can make electronic music on my computer that I think could sell" then I agree.
If you mean that a $500 PC gives you the same facilities as a $1M recording studio then you are insane. Even a few pairs of decent headphones cost more than that.
In the 15th century, key signatures had not been invented yet.
Accidentals were sometimes written, sometimes not.
So, without explicit accidentals, to tell what the notes were meant to be they either knew the likely mode, or just guessed them, which is known as 'musica ficta'.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_ficta
The good thing about modes is that any arrangement of notes from the mode will sound pretty much like music.
In this case, of finding modal music in the 'last supper', it would be hard to make it anything but musical, especially if you finagle the accidentals, timing and direction it so you have more chances to make it work.
However, in defense of this research, there were a lot of complicated harmonic rules that sacred music would be expected to adhere to, and by following these rules it may be possible to get more informed guesses.
For a recording studio nowadays, even a small one, the costs of the recording equipment are the smallest part of the investment.
Proper sound proofing and treatment of a single room will cost more than the computer, monitoring and mics.
Also, if you are doing this legally, getting the premises to health and safety standards is a big issue.
That can mean making new exits and putting in staircases for fire reasons, new lighting, making sure doors don't obstruct each other etc.
Do not get into the studio business if you think you will be spending your money on recording equipment.
Do not imagine that you can easily mix to a standard to compete in the marketplace with indifferent monitoring in an untreated room.
The other big problem is that now the band are their own producers and engineers. It's hard to be a creative and expressive musician while also being a great engineer.
"Nowadays a somewhat-pro sound guy with a used Macintosh, the right software, and a small sound board, could do the whole shebang in a room lined with the appropriate sound-deadening material. Like a spare bedroom rigged for just that purpose."
In theory yes. In practice it's much harder.
Firstly, this assumes you have no neighbors. Sound treatment is not the same as soundproofing.
The only way to effectively soundproof a room is to isolate the room from the building, ie a suspended 'room within a room'. This is expensive.
Secondly, dead rooms only give you one sound, that of a dead room. This was popular in the 70's but nowadays people like their live rooms a little more live.
Thirdly, a band cannot record live in a spare bedroom. There may not be enough space for everyone in there.
Also, the amount of spill from amps to drums etc will make it hard to get a punchy compressed modern sound. Unless people are going to be using amp simulators and headphones. This is killing the vibe and limiting your options before you start. The performance is so very important. With amp closets or acoustic partitions you can do better, but you need more space.
Fourth, your control room needs to be acoustically treated too. Mixing becomes quite hard if the bass end is up and down due to standing waves when you move your head a little, and room resonances.
Fifth, air conditioning, power conditioning, lighting etc. It's no fun spending many hours is a dead dark sealed box breathing each other's fumes with hum on everything from bad grounding and power adapters all over the floor. Consider safety too, the live room should be on another circuit from the control room with RCD breakers.
"Or you could just check into a local studio, where the prices would be hella reasonable compared to some Sony/EMI/Whoever-owned studio."
Yes, you can do this. You have to consider how many great sounding big selling albums have come out of your local studio though. It can actually be a lot cheaper to spend a week putting down an album in a large expensive studio than to spend months dealing with the limitations of recording in someones garage, and the inexperience of the engineer who's just got his first mixing desk.
I'd like to think that a guy who can build a computer from TTL understands them at a basic enough level to design one from almost anything.
:)
Even a computer built from relays is still very useful if the alternative is pen and paper.
I've sometimes wondered how far back in history you'd have to go before the technology was incapable of making a reliable relay and a battery. Not such an easy thing, but in some ways easier than a mechanical computer like Babbage's difference engine. (The fine tolerances required for the machined parts gave Babbage so much trouble.)
Perhaps two hundred years ago, maybe more.
I suppose the technologically hardest part is drawing the fine copper wire. For the rest, people have been using molds with molten metal for millennia. Chemical batteries are not too hard to make if you have enough amphora.
The beeb mostly uses Linux servers running Red Hat.
That's why they generally use rtsp (for realplayer) to stream video rather than a MS Windows specific codec.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4606719.stm
"The BBC News website - under the bonnet"
"The servers themselves are running Apache web server software on either the Linux or Solaris operating system."
You have this in reverse.
Making the videos only work in Windows specific media players is more effort than using a common freely available codec.
At an extreme, having a single page with links to the videos in mpeg format would have taken one person a day to set up.
They may have their reasons, but technically the simplest solution is often... the simplest one.
I can sympathize with this. The movies are the stars after all, the commentary does not have much value on it's own.
Some of them are pretty good too, like 'The brain that wouldn't die'. Others, like 'The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?' are piss takes to start with.
I'd rather see the original first, then watch the MST3K version.
Aliasing noise is not related to sample rate or bit depth. A properly dithered 8bit 7KHz recording will have a high noise floor, and be severely band limited, but will not have aliasing artifacts. The noise floor is 'white' noise, and not related to the signal. The glitchy sound you associate with low bandwidth recordings is due to not dithering properly, data compression, or as using it as an effect etc. Have a play with some audio editing software some day. It's interesting how good the audio sounds at 12bit 35Khz or so. Modern records often have so little dynamic range that you could use 14bit and no one would notice. :)
Anyway, 192Khz converters are very cheap nowadays. I think about £2.50 or so.
It's the analog side and the clocking that makes the difference.
16bit 44.1Khz is fine for listening if the conversion to analog is adequate.
It does seem an expensive and complicated was to power a bus. I don't understand why they don't use flywheels anymore. There were buses in the 1940's that used flywheels for energy storage, charged in 30 seconds and could do regenerative braking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus I bet modern flywheel storage, with magnetic bearings and more efficient conversion to electric power, would be comparable or better than batteries and cheaper too. No nasty waste to dispose of either.
"The L2 does not clip the material."
:) that digital look ahead limiters can.
:(
Try it. It's not easy to make it clip intentionally, but there are limits to how much gain reduction even very clever limiters like L2/L3 can do without flat lining.
You will hear the bass end drop out as L2 tries to redistribute energy before it clips really hard, but it will clip, and you will see consecutive samples with the same value.
Despite having a simple interface, there's a lot going on in these plugins.
"Most limiting is done with outboard analog gear."
I agree analog limiters are used extensively as well, but they cannot provide the clean brickwall limiting (if that's not a contradiction in terms.
The conventional analog limiters are used for their sound, the fast digital ones because they don't have a 'sound', even when working quite hard. I would imagine it's common to use both, with the digital as a peak stop at the end of the chain.
It was only when the fast digital limiters appeared that CDs started to get really loud.
"I find most of todays music unlistenable above the loudness level of a relaxed conversation. I skipped the last two Prince albums, of whom I have been a fan for almost 20 years, because they sound ugly and distorted. You can turn up his older albums and enjoy. You cannot do the same with todays material. Same goes for most other records."
This is true.
I hope we will see a renaissance of more conservative masters once record companies realize there is a market for them. Digital distribution makes this possible as they won't have the cost of two different pressings of the same album.
"What's different now that the video shows is the peaks are not getting clipped anymore, instead they reach 0.0 db but the entire mix is digitally volume maximized so almost every single peak is that loud."
No, they are getting clipped. Have a closer look for flat topped peaks.
The damage is being done by look ahead limiters like Waves L2, which are the last process in the mastering chain.
These limiters work on psychoacoustic principles, employing some of the temporal masking ideas used in lossy audio compression to make the artifacts of very fast peak limiting as inaudible as possible.
It's known that humans cannot hear short periods of clipping distortion (less than 2ms or so), so these limiters allow that to happen, clamp down a millisecond later, and increase the subjective loudness of the signal without losing 'punch'. As this kind of limiter incorporates a delay line in the audio output path, but not the side chain, it's always looking a few milliseconds ahead and so knows how to react to a peak in advance.
The problem is that if you push a limiter of this kind really hard, it cannot keep it's artifacts inaudible, the clipped periods get longer, and the music starts to sound harsh and tiring.
It's a shame as they a beautifully clean limiters if used correctly, you can knock 4-6db of pop material without the kind of artifacts a traditional analog limiter would produce.
Well, why the fuck not? Mini XLR connecters are small enough to fit into any laptop, and still 10 times as robust as 3.5mm jack sockets. Virtually all modern preamps are just an opamp in a design copied from the manufacturers datasheet, no matter what claims for XDR this and SUPERPRE that. They don't cost nuthin. There is no reason that we cannot have decent audio quality with XLR ins on laptops, other than that the universe hates me.
It's possible that the chip is designed to fail under certain circumstances to prevent reverse engineering.
I know there are crypto chips that can destroy themselves using chemical agents stored inside the packaging. It's not easy to find out much detail about them for some reason.
Nah.
I have been around most of the world with my trusty CF27 toughbook and never had a problem. It looks even more agricultural than the more recent one you pictured. Never had a problem.
In hong kong, forgot about it (heavy jetlag) and left it on the X-ray machine while going through customs. Went back half an hour later and picked it up. All they asked me to do was identify it and it was fine.
I guess if I went to the states it could be more difficult, as they get spooked quite easily over there.
That's the one. Ta.
It seems a community has sprung up doing many mods and improvements too.
One reason I prefer adventures is that most 3D first person games are in incredibly restricted in the way the player interacts with the world around them.
In a text adventure you can smell, turn, press, rub, squeeze, push, eat, drink, examine, feel, rotate, bury, steal objects.
In an FPS game you can shoot, activate or sometimes take objects, which is quite limiting for interesting puzzles, or at least those that involve more subtle interaction with the game world.
There was a FPS games ages ago (pre 3d accelerators) , set on an island with dinosaurs, where the player could pick up and manipulate objects as if they were held in their hand. Very ambitious, and unfortunately very annoying to control as well. Anyone remember what it was called?
"Even now, OLED has done little in the market, and finding a decent OLED-based product (phone, GPS, whatever) in a market full of LCD-based products can prove difficult."
I'm not sure OLED is still expensive or rare.
Google for OLED MP4, and you will find that it's quite hard to find a portable mp3/mp4 player *without* an OLED display. Most of these players are less than £15.
Perhaps it's still expensive to make them more than 1.5 inch or so in size.
The best way to get cool colors with linux is to use the new relocatable kernel, and load it into shared video memory.