I have just decided to like you. Zmodem was, and is, an awesome inline transfer protocol. I wish it supported hierarchical structures (i.e. folders), but, like you, I use it with SecureCRT. You don't, by some chance, work for NYISO, do you?
I loved those machines. Over the years, I had an A500, an A2000 and an A1200. I had also gutted an IBM PS/2 tower to use as a SCSI HDD tower, which I had connected at different times to the 2000 and the 1200.
I had the 2000 decked out with two SCSI controllers (one was on a processor accelerator card -- 68030/68883 16MHz) and I had, between the two busses, four HDD's, a zip drive, and an Irwin tape drive. It was configured such that I could not only boot from HDD, but also from zip or tape.
Ultimately, I had a 14.4kb/s modem attached to the 2000, and I did a sort of batch download of usenet from my ISP (I had a shell account) by tarring up all of the messages and using ZMODEM to send them to my Amiga. With modem compression enabled, I saw transfer speeds as high as 3890 chars/sec. (forgot to mention, I had an aftermarket serial board with a max. throughput of 115.2kb/s, which my modem could talk to)
True plug and play. These machines were sweet for their time.
This must be a some strange artifact of multiplexes that I don't quite understand. When I managed a small theater years ago, the concession folks were very adept at making just enough popcorn so it was always fresh and hot. Heat lamps always on, turn it over quickly, toss it when it's nasty, and freshen it by mixing in a fresh batch.
Oh, and don't forget the "topping" that they use. The counter clerks sometimes call it "butter", but you look around and you will see all the signs very carefully avoid using the word "butter" to describe this crap. Usually it is billed as "golden flavoured topping". Golden flavoured? Just what, exactly does "golden" taste like? Just give me the popcorn with salt, rather than drown it in that crap, thank you very much.
I will, however, give props to our local art house, the Spectrum 8 theatres in Albany. It's the only theatre I know of that serves its popcorn with real butter. They also serve other good things, besides the usual popcorn, nachos and candy, such as fresh baked goods.
About the freshness of popcorn, I always take a taste of the popcorn while waiting for the counter staff to come back with my change. If it isn't right, I let them know, and they are usually very good about fixing it at the theatre I go to most (Loew's, Rotterdam Square, Rotterdam NY). Occasionally, I have run into a problem with this at a Regal cinema, but if you start giving the people in line behind you the idea that the popcorn isn't worth the money they are about to spend on it, the management will take care of the problem:)
If you want to never be able to watch a film in peace again look out for the change over dots at the top right corner of the film. One at the start and end of every real. I can't Ignore the things now I noticed them:(
Yep, I've known about those all my adult life and a good chunk of my childhood. My mom's uncle Tommy used to be a projectionist at a drive-in theatre in Florida. Being a fellow technophile, he and I bonded relatively well and early.
My wife, on the other hand, was completely unaware of them until they were pointed out in the move Fight Club, in which one of the characters worked nights as a projectionist.
I've known about the "Cigarette burns" long enough that they don't call my attention much any more. However, you will notice that there is always a hard cut scene change just after one of these bad boys appears on the screen, and that the audio cuts a moment later (more noticeable if the audio is analogue). You will also notice that the wider the aspect ratio of the film, the more distorted the shape of the dot, because the dot is round on the film, and the wider aspect ratios are achieved by using lenses that have different X than Y focal lengths. The aspect ratio of the film itself is about 4X3 (Just a touch narrower, if I recall correctly).
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
A high MTBF is fine and dandy, but only an estimate. The length of the warranty, on the other hand, is the drive manufacturer putting their money where their mouth is. I consider a longer warranty to indicate that a company is more willing to take a risk on their drive than a company issuing a shorter warranty.
The review isn't clear, but does this drive have both interfaces, or is it available in two flavours?
The impression I got is that it is available in two flavours. The reson I got this impression is that if you look at the closeup photo showing the connection end of the drive (on page 2, IIRC), you will see that it has SATA, but no PATA connections. It's right around the paragraph about the traditional power connector still being there.
1994 the market brought forth the evolution of the digital phone era which was then quickly followed up in 1995 with digital spread spectrum (DSS). These innovations were designed to increase security by eliminating potential eavesdropping (e.g. listening to your neighbors conversations) and to increase the effective range of the phone (e.g. spreading the transmission in 360-degrees so there were no dead spots). And finally, in 1998 the FCC opened up the frequency range of 2.4 GHz (and added 5.8 GHz in 2003).
Once I got to that point, it was clear to me that the author has no idea what he is talking about. He does not understand radio technology, period.
The ipod is not, has never been, and appears that it will never be, a 'common' piece of household technology. It's a toy that appeals to less than 4% of the population. The vast majority of Americans do not own an ipod and never will; they simply don't give a shit about it.
Question (and I'm not asking this to be a smartass): When referring to an iPod, do you mean specifically an Apple iPod, being the specifically-branded music player, or are you referring to music players in general, which would include such things as my lowly Ilo and the Phillips MP3 player I had before it?
The reason I ask the question is because asking about iPods vs. music players in general is like asking about Sony Wegas vs. TVs in general. To compare stats on only the iPod to stats on all DVD players and all VCR's is to compare apples (no pun intended) to oranges.
The experience with Time-Warner is consistently good from my personal experience and those I have heard from others.
No port restrictions. They do get a tad uppity if they find you have port 25 open, but that's about it. For $45/mo, I get 3Mb down/384kb up, for $90/mo, I could up that to 6Mb/768kb. Transfer speeds seem to be very consistent, despite being shared bandwidth, leading me to believe that they are not overselling their network. Customer service is also very good.
A friend who has Verizon DSL tells me that his bandwidth is heavily variable depending on weather. Sometimes it zips along, sometimes, he says, dialup would be faster. Most of the time, it is somewhere in between. None of the time is it as fast as TW Cable.
Re:LP's ??? You must be kidding..
on
10 Technologies MIA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The first will be tolerable, the second will drive you to murder.
It will drive you to mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-mu *click* r-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de....
:-)
Seriously, though, the big thing that CD's did is equalize the market.
A cheap CD player will do almost as good of a job at playing a CD as an expensive one will do. The incentive for going to a $1000 CD player versus a $30 CD player is a very small gain in sound quality. CD players also, essentially, require no maintenance, whereas you need to periodically change the stylus in a turntable.
As for high-quality outputs, even if you have a $23 DVD player from Wal*Mart that you want to play CD's on, it will have an S/PDIF output on it.
On the other hand, the granparent post said that LP's sound bad. No, they don't. LP's played on a cheap turntable sound bad.
Play an LP on a feather-weight, belt-drive turntable with a straight tonearm and a stylus long overdue for replacement, and it will sound like crap.
Play it on a direct-drive turntable with a heavy platter and an S-arm and a properly aligned, properly-maintained stylus, and it will sound quite good.
Play it on a direct-drive turntable with good weight and good shock isolation and linear tracking, and it will sound fantastic.
It will never sound like a CD. Only CD's sound like CD's. Whether you find you like the sound of vinyl better or worse than that of CD is subject to your listening tastes. I reject, however, the assertion that LP's sound bad.
Incidentally, I use the second option listed above. I have a very good Technics S-arm turntable that is about 20 years old. I do have to periodically replace the stylus, something that is often missed by folks who don't understand vinyl. Even so, it sounds great despite its age.
I think you would be very hard-pressed to find a 20-year-old CD player that still works, never mind works well. Also, if my turntable breaks, I can fix it, as I have done on one occasion. With a CD player, you replace it and the old one goes to the landfill.
Wouldn't Nextel have some interest in keeping the iDen network going instead of paying royalties over CDMA? Or is the cost of continuing to build out the iDen network more than the royalties? Or am I misunderstanding the whole thing?
1. Are they not paying royalties on iDEN? CDMA is a more open standard, simply because more than one manufacturer is able to make equipment. All iDEN equipment is Motorola, because Motorola owns iDEN and won't make it available to anyone else.
2. The iDEN network is saturated. It needs to be built out, especially if you are going to add users.
3. The iDEN network is causing interference to other users of the band it is on, therefore it cannot be built out.
4. CDMA, as implemented by Sprint, has better voice quality than iDEN. This is due to a higher bitrate (13kb/s vs. 8kb/s).
5. CDMA, in the scope of a single cell, is less spectrally efficient than iDEN, but in the scope of a network is more spectrally efficient, because all cells in a CDMA network can use the same carrier frequency at the same time, vs. iDEN, which needs a separate carrier frequency for every 3 phone calls or every 6 PTT calls.
6. Ready Link (Sprints PTT service) sounds better than Direct Connect (Nextel's PTT service). Presumably this is for the same reason as the better phone call quality.
7. iDEN operates in the clear; CDMA is encrypted.
The only thing that Nextel's iDEN network has in its favour is that it is operated on a lower frequency with better propagation characteristics. Nextel operates on 800 MHz, where Sprint operates on 1900 MHz, which is more succeptible to interference from reflections and has greater line-of-sight issues.
It would have made sense for Sprint and Verizon to merge.
From a technical standpoint, this is true. However, as luck would have it, I bet if Verizon and Sprint merged, you'd get Sprint's terrible coverage combined with Verizon's terrible customer service!
We don't get Time Warner here, and the telcos suck in the people service arena as badly as the cable co.
Yes, I realise that being in TW territory is a geographical advantage in this case.
I just got better service from the dsl people than I did from the cable people. We didn't get it from the V company you mentioned above (presuming you mean Verizon, and they SUCK!) we had it through Covad.
Secret's out! Yes, Verizon was involved. Of course, the part I didn't share before is that I was not trying to get Verizon DSL, but Telocity (which has since been swallowed up by DirecTV) because Telocity was about the only ISP I could find that would not run screaming when I said "Linux" to them on the phone.
Verizon, however, kept buggering up the provisioning. Now I don't care who you try to get DSL from, you are at the mercy of the IBOC. For this reason, I very strongly belive that the IBOC's should be forbidden from selling DSL, because I find it awfully convenient that they couldn't provision a competitor's product correctly.
Interesting part is that this all happened five years ago, and I am still sore about it. I still have hanging in my cubicle at work a souvenir of the time.... I made my statement about VZ by building a tin-can phone, emblazoning it with VZ's logo and hanging it in my cubicle.
My personal favorite in recent months has been speakeasy... they cost a few dollars more, but damn do they deliver:)
I dunno. Maybe I might give DSL another shot, but right at the moment, I don't need to. Road Runner has been awesome to me since 2000, with actually less downtime than my wireline telephone (although more, shorter actual outages). The only reason I stick with VZ for telephone service is that they are cheaper than the competitors, and with a competitor, if something goes awry, you are still at VZ's mercy.
39.99+all sorts of fees = 54.00 / mo cable does NOT allow me to run ANY servers, and block most of the default service ports for unix... (most still allow windows, but I'm not about to buy IIS to run a simple site on that huge clunking POS).
Of course if I manage to get around it by shifting ports around, they threaten to cut off my service if I do not disconnect the server within 5 days of being notified. (if it happens a second time, they DO cut off the service as they have done to me before)
This is completely opposite my experience.
My experience is that cable delivers the goods, and the local telco (which is a large, national telco that begins with a V) cannot extract their collective crania from their collective recta long enough to provision DSL for me. I waited --get this-- five months while they dicked around trying to set me up.
When finally I'd decided I had had enough, I called up the cable company, who promised me service in five days. The service was on in four.
As for fees surcharges, etc., the cable company prices their service at $44.95, and the bill I get says $44.95 in the amount due box every month. I do not purchase any service from them except internet (I get TV by satellite).
My phone bill, on the other hand, for wireline service, is priced at $15/mo for service and $15/mo for unlimited long distance. Do you think my phone bill is therefore $30? No, of course not! It's more typically $48.
Back to the cable co, while theoretically, they have the right to block me from running a server, they do not. I do know that they have raised hell with people for running mail servers (because of spam issues), but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been shut down for running a web server. This is with Time-Warner, who I am naming because I have been very pleased with thier service.
Odd payment structure if incoming calls are taken from your free minutes allowance. Do both parties lose minutes then?
Well, if it is a mobile-mobile call, maybe.
Basically, what is different here is in the way mobiles are perceived on our side of the pond versus yours.
When mobiles were introduced here, the idea was that it was a luxury for the owner of the mobile. As such, the cost of having that luxury was assigned to the owner of the mobile. It has pretty much stayed that way ever since.
However, it has had an interesting side-effect that, to the best of my knowledge, is not echoed in Europe. That side-effect is that airtime is cheap here.
Looking at it from a market perspective, if the caller always pays, as in Europe, then the owner of the cell phone is not heavily impacted by the cost of his service. He can seek out a wireline phone if he needs to call someone, but can still be reached at any time. He has no reason to care about the price of the service.
Likewise, the caller can have no impact on the price of the service, because the caller is not the customer of the service provider.
As implemented in the U.S., where the phone owner pays for airtime on all calls, both inbound and outbound, the owner of the phone has both incentive and position to demand lower prices from the provider.
As for the question of both parties losing minutes, it depends on the specific contracts. In the base case, yes, both parties lose minutes. In the case that the two parties are using different providers, yes, both parties lose minutes.
However, some providers offer what is called a family plan, wherein you can call other users on your account at no charge to the account for either phone. I could, for example, call my wife or my mother, both of whom are on my account, and not affect my balance of free minutes or incur any charge.
Further, some providers (such as mine) offer plans where you can call any phone that is serviced by that same provider at no charge. Verizon calls this service option "In" and Sprint calls it "Free PCS to PCS calling". With this, I can call my father-in-law, some of my friends, etc. at no charge.
Last, but not least, how cheap is the airtime? My current contract comes with 2000 free minutes, free pcs to pcs calling, no charge for long distance calls, no charge for roaming in the US, 30 cents/minute for roaming in Canada, mid-speed internet access for one phone and the base price is $88/month for two phones. I spend another $40 on top of that to add one phone and internet access for the other two phones.
In the end, I pay about $150/month after taxes etc.
For comparison, if I had three wireline phones, at $45/month each (which includes unlimited long distance and all taxes, but not call id, voicemail, call waiting or 3-way calling, all of which are on my cell phones), and three Internet accounts at $12/month each, it would be $171/month. Since I don't use the full 2000 minutes, I consider this to be a bargain.
My math might be completely wrong, given I don't have a clue how to calculate kilowatt hours. Is it just kW * hours_used_daily?:)
Close. It is kw * hours_used. The "daily" part is only valid if (as in your case) you are talking about the amount of energy used over the course of a day.
Electricity here is $.15/kWh, which would put this box's operation at $180/day. In some places, electricity is as low as $.04/kWh, which would put the energy cost of these boxes at only $48/day.
Well, it's likely that I would be a farmer, because that is what my most recent ancestors did, going back about 3 centuries.
On the other hand, I didn't take up farming, even though it was an option. I have a penchant for bows and arrows, so I might have become a fletcher.
Otherwise, I might have been a blacksmith or a tinsmith. Tinsmithing is probably relevant in the geek crowd anyway, because, like hardware hacking, tinsmithing involves soldering.
My brother-in-law, who is also a computer geek, has shown some skill at manufacturing musical instruments, mostly flutes and fifes of various types and sizes. This works well because his wife (my sister) plays flutes and fifes of various types and sizes.
If your boss wants 1% of your work week to go to sysadminning, then on Monday Morning, spend exactly 24 minutes (1% of 40 hours) on sysadminning, and then go back to programming for the rest of the week. If he asks why XYZ is not done, explain that you have already utilized your full allotment of time for sysadminning.
When I encode a 128kbps MP3 and the source is good quality acoustic music, it's pretty obvious to me where the term "lossy" comes from. The warmness of the guitars tends to leave and, in general, the "edginess" of the original piece is replaced by something I can only describe as "smoothness".
It's rolling off some of the treble, by the sound of it.
When I listen to a 128kbps audio stream, I get something a little different. The music sound metallic, almost like it was run through the voice box of one of those old-style Cylon warriors (but not so severe)
That sounds to me like the MP3 encoder software that was used to produce the result is of poor quality. In my last post, I took a specific stab at BladeEnc, which I used for a (very) short period of time. It truly saps all the life out of the music you run through it, even at 192kb/s. Most annoying, however, is that it tends to turn cymbal crashes into beeps that match the cymbal in pitch, but don't sound like cymbals.
LAME, on the other hand, is just awesome. Subjectively, I would rather listen to a 96kb/s stream from LAME than a 192kb/s stream from Blade.
There is also a natural tendency of MP3's, when using fixed bitrates, to flange in response to the complexity of the overall audio. In other words, the frequency response will get momentarily narrower when the audio gets momentarily more complex. LAME deals with this problem by applying a low-pass filter to the inbound audio, the low-pass frequency being set to what is anticipated to be the worst-case scenario for the bitrate you have selected. Off the top of my head, I know that it selects 500Hz for 8kb/s/channel (could be used as an LFE channel, but not much more), 3500Hz for 16kb/s/channel, 5000Hz for 24kb/s/channel, 7500Hz for 32kb/s/channel, 15kHz for 64kb/s/channel, 20kHz for 80kb/s/channel and 21kHz for 96kb/s/channel. (read kb/s/channel as kilobits per second per channel, e.g. the 21kHz filter is applied at 96kb/s mono or 192kb/s stereo) You can override the filter frequency, or even shut the filter off, if you feel you need to do so, but it produces some very nice results, on the whole.
However, when I listen to relatively low quality analog recordings, like radio on relatively cheap speakers or an audio cassette, even on a relatively good system, I don't get those problems. True, my dynamic range may be off, but the music displays the same liveliness that it did, well, live. I may have significant noise, but I hear the nuances one would expect from an acoustic guitar and standard drum set.
In many cases, the recording engineers will have tweaked the dynamic range to maximum effect with the end medium. In order to get a better performance from a casette or vinyl, they will compress the dynamic range some. In some cases (many albums from the mid-80's), they overdo it, and in some cases (many albums from the early 80's), they underdo it.
This is the reason I say tapes and MP3s are equivalent. I may get all the bass and treble anyone could hope for from an MP3, but it won't give me the warm sound I'm used to hearing, at least not at a mid to low bit rate. Sure, I won't have any noise, but the MP3 has also cropped out the natural acoustic "noise" of the environment.
What you are saying here is certainly valid.
I think it is a matter of personal preference. I'm the kind who is driven crazy by noise, to the point that I will sometimes apply a multiband gate or multiband expander to ditch the noise. MP3 does a lot of the noise-ditching for me.
As for Casette vs. MP3 @ 128, I'll pick the casette, IF: The casette is CrO2 or metal, recorded at a proper level (RMS should be right at 0dB for CrO2, maybe a tad hotter for metal, maybe a tad colder if there are many high peaks), and treated with Dolby HX pro, and either Dolby C (or at least Dolby B) or dbx. If dbx is used, you can leave off the Dolby HX Pro and I will probably still be happy with it. If it is a ferrous tape, or lacki
That said, I don't think any American administration has taken energy seriously.
I disagree. I think the Carter administration took it seriously; probably more seriously than the Bush administration does. The reason it may seem otherwise is that Jimmy Carter was not very good at motivating people to action, a fact that is demonstrated by listening to some of his later speeches, where he was practically begging the public to work with him.
<Soapbox>
It is too bad, really. Carter saw peak oil coming and tried to warn and prepare us. Had he been a more charismatic leader, I think we could have been made less dependent on foreign oil, which would have made it pointless to fiddle in middle eastern politics; we would not have built up Saddam, who would not have invaded Kuwait, which we would not have had to rescue, thus pissing off certain Saudis, some of whom subsequently drove airplanes through the World Trade Center and Pentagon, through which action the President was able to cancel several constitutional provisions of rights, and cow the Congress into giving him the power to declare war, which he has since done way too much of.
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Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT
I have just decided to like you. Zmodem was, and is, an awesome inline transfer protocol. I wish it supported hierarchical structures (i.e. folders), but, like you, I use it with SecureCRT. You don't, by some chance, work for NYISO, do you?
Amiga forever and ever, and some days more!
I loved those machines. Over the years, I had an A500, an A2000 and an A1200. I had also gutted an IBM PS/2 tower to use as a SCSI HDD tower, which I had connected at different times to the 2000 and the 1200.
I had the 2000 decked out with two SCSI controllers (one was on a processor accelerator card -- 68030/68883 16MHz) and I had, between the two busses, four HDD's, a zip drive, and an Irwin tape drive. It was configured such that I could not only boot from HDD, but also from zip or tape.
Ultimately, I had a 14.4kb/s modem attached to the 2000, and I did a sort of batch download of usenet from my ISP (I had a shell account) by tarring up all of the messages and using ZMODEM to send them to my Amiga. With modem compression enabled, I saw transfer speeds as high as 3890 chars/sec. (forgot to mention, I had an aftermarket serial board with a max. throughput of 115.2kb/s, which my modem could talk to)
True plug and play. These machines were sweet for their time.
This must be a some strange artifact of multiplexes that I don't quite understand. When I managed a small theater years ago, the concession folks were very adept at making just enough popcorn so it was always fresh and hot. Heat lamps always on, turn it over quickly, toss it when it's nasty, and freshen it by mixing in a fresh batch.
Oh, and don't forget the "topping" that they use. The counter clerks sometimes call it "butter", but you look around and you will see all the signs very carefully avoid using the word "butter" to describe this crap. Usually it is billed as "golden flavoured topping". Golden flavoured? Just what, exactly does "golden" taste like? Just give me the popcorn with salt, rather than drown it in that crap, thank you very much.
I will, however, give props to our local art house, the Spectrum 8 theatres in Albany. It's the only theatre I know of that serves its popcorn with real butter. They also serve other good things, besides the usual popcorn, nachos and candy, such as fresh baked goods.
About the freshness of popcorn, I always take a taste of the popcorn while waiting for the counter staff to come back with my change. If it isn't right, I let them know, and they are usually very good about fixing it at the theatre I go to most (Loew's, Rotterdam Square, Rotterdam NY). Occasionally, I have run into a problem with this at a Regal cinema, but if you start giving the people in line behind you the idea that the popcorn isn't worth the money they are about to spend on it, the management will take care of the problem :)
Signature says:
If you want to never be able to watch a film in peace again look out for the change over dots at the top right corner of the film. One at the start and end of every real. I can't Ignore the things now I noticed them :(
Yep, I've known about those all my adult life and a good chunk of my childhood. My mom's uncle Tommy used to be a projectionist at a drive-in theatre in Florida. Being a fellow technophile, he and I bonded relatively well and early.
My wife, on the other hand, was completely unaware of them until they were pointed out in the move Fight Club, in which one of the characters worked nights as a projectionist.
I've known about the "Cigarette burns" long enough that they don't call my attention much any more. However, you will notice that there is always a hard cut scene change just after one of these bad boys appears on the screen, and that the audio cuts a moment later (more noticeable if the audio is analogue). You will also notice that the wider the aspect ratio of the film, the more distorted the shape of the dot, because the dot is round on the film, and the wider aspect ratios are achieved by using lenses that have different X than Y focal lengths. The aspect ratio of the film itself is about 4X3 (Just a touch narrower, if I recall correctly).
How 'bout:
/etc/rc.d/coffee restart
How is this not simply syntax highlighting applied to the English language?!?
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
A high MTBF is fine and dandy, but only an estimate. The length of the warranty, on the other hand, is the drive manufacturer putting their money where their mouth is. I consider a longer warranty to indicate that a company is more willing to take a risk on their drive than a company issuing a shorter warranty.
The review isn't clear, but does this drive have both interfaces, or is it available in two flavours?
The impression I got is that it is available in two flavours. The reson I got this impression is that if you look at the closeup photo showing the connection end of the drive (on page 2, IIRC), you will see that it has SATA, but no PATA connections. It's right around the paragraph about the traditional power connector still being there.
Maybe you could just use the excess energy to pump water uphill, and then let it run back downhill through a dam during the night.
Something like this? This is the Blenheim-Gilboa Pump Storage Facility, which has been serving New York State since the 60's.
since when does the FCC generate revenue?
Since they charge $85 for a GMRS licence, $300+ for a business band licence, thousands for cellular licences, and hold spectrum auctions.
I was able to read as far as this paragraph:
1994 the market brought forth the evolution of the digital phone era which was then quickly followed up in 1995 with digital spread spectrum (DSS). These innovations were designed to increase security by eliminating potential eavesdropping (e.g. listening to your neighbors conversations) and to increase the effective range of the phone (e.g. spreading the transmission in 360-degrees so there were no dead spots). And finally, in 1998 the FCC opened up the frequency range of 2.4 GHz (and added 5.8 GHz in 2003).
Once I got to that point, it was clear to me that the author has no idea what he is talking about. He does not understand radio technology, period.
The ipod is not, has never been, and appears that it will never be, a 'common' piece of household technology. It's a toy that appeals to less than 4% of the population. The vast majority of Americans do not own an ipod and never will; they simply don't give a shit about it.
Question (and I'm not asking this to be a smartass): When referring to an iPod, do you mean specifically an Apple iPod, being the specifically-branded music player, or are you referring to music players in general, which would include such things as my lowly Ilo and the Phillips MP3 player I had before it?
The reason I ask the question is because asking about iPods vs. music players in general is like asking about Sony Wegas vs. TVs in general. To compare stats on only the iPod to stats on all DVD players and all VCR's is to compare apples (no pun intended) to oranges.
The experience with Time-Warner is consistently good from my personal experience and those I have heard from others.
No port restrictions. They do get a tad uppity if they find you have port 25 open, but that's about it. For $45/mo, I get 3Mb down/384kb up, for $90/mo, I could up that to 6Mb/768kb. Transfer speeds seem to be very consistent, despite being shared bandwidth, leading me to believe that they are not overselling their network. Customer service is also very good.
A friend who has Verizon DSL tells me that his bandwidth is heavily variable depending on weather. Sometimes it zips along, sometimes, he says, dialup would be faster. Most of the time, it is somewhere in between. None of the time is it as fast as TW Cable.
The first will be tolerable, the second will drive you to murder.
It will drive you to mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-mu *click* r-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de....
:-)
Seriously, though, the big thing that CD's did is equalize the market.
A cheap CD player will do almost as good of a job at playing a CD as an expensive one will do. The incentive for going to a $1000 CD player versus a $30 CD player is a very small gain in sound quality. CD players also, essentially, require no maintenance, whereas you need to periodically change the stylus in a turntable.
As for high-quality outputs, even if you have a $23 DVD player from Wal*Mart that you want to play CD's on, it will have an S/PDIF output on it.
On the other hand, the granparent post said that LP's sound bad. No, they don't. LP's played on a cheap turntable sound bad.
Play an LP on a feather-weight, belt-drive turntable with a straight tonearm and a stylus long overdue for replacement, and it will sound like crap.
Play it on a direct-drive turntable with a heavy platter and an S-arm and a properly aligned, properly-maintained stylus, and it will sound quite good.
Play it on a direct-drive turntable with good weight and good shock isolation and linear tracking, and it will sound fantastic.
It will never sound like a CD. Only CD's sound like CD's. Whether you find you like the sound of vinyl better or worse than that of CD is subject to your listening tastes. I reject, however, the assertion that LP's sound bad.
Incidentally, I use the second option listed above. I have a very good Technics S-arm turntable that is about 20 years old. I do have to periodically replace the stylus, something that is often missed by folks who don't understand vinyl. Even so, it sounds great despite its age.
I think you would be very hard-pressed to find a 20-year-old CD player that still works, never mind works well. Also, if my turntable breaks, I can fix it, as I have done on one occasion. With a CD player, you replace it and the old one goes to the landfill.
Wouldn't Nextel have some interest in keeping the iDen network going instead of paying royalties over CDMA? Or is the cost of continuing to build out the iDen network more than the royalties? Or am I misunderstanding the whole thing?
1. Are they not paying royalties on iDEN? CDMA is a more open standard, simply because more than one manufacturer is able to make equipment. All iDEN equipment is Motorola, because Motorola owns iDEN and won't make it available to anyone else.
2. The iDEN network is saturated. It needs to be built out, especially if you are going to add users.
3. The iDEN network is causing interference to other users of the band it is on, therefore it cannot be built out.
4. CDMA, as implemented by Sprint, has better voice quality than iDEN. This is due to a higher bitrate (13kb/s vs. 8kb/s).
5. CDMA, in the scope of a single cell, is less spectrally efficient than iDEN, but in the scope of a network is more spectrally efficient, because all cells in a CDMA network can use the same carrier frequency at the same time, vs. iDEN, which needs a separate carrier frequency for every 3 phone calls or every 6 PTT calls.
6. Ready Link (Sprints PTT service) sounds better than Direct Connect (Nextel's PTT service). Presumably this is for the same reason as the better phone call quality.
7. iDEN operates in the clear; CDMA is encrypted.
The only thing that Nextel's iDEN network has in its favour is that it is operated on a lower frequency with better propagation characteristics. Nextel operates on 800 MHz, where Sprint operates on 1900 MHz, which is more succeptible to interference from reflections and has greater line-of-sight issues.
It would have made sense for Sprint and Verizon to merge.
From a technical standpoint, this is true. However, as luck would have it, I bet if Verizon and Sprint merged, you'd get Sprint's terrible coverage combined with Verizon's terrible customer service!
We don't get Time Warner here, and the telcos suck in the people service arena as badly as the cable co.
Yes, I realise that being in TW territory is a geographical advantage in this case.
I just got better service from the dsl people than I did from the cable people. We didn't get it from the V company you mentioned above (presuming you mean Verizon, and they SUCK!) we had it through Covad.
Secret's out! Yes, Verizon was involved. Of course, the part I didn't share before is that I was not trying to get Verizon DSL, but Telocity (which has since been swallowed up by DirecTV) because Telocity was about the only ISP I could find that would not run screaming when I said "Linux" to them on the phone.
Verizon, however, kept buggering up the provisioning. Now I don't care who you try to get DSL from, you are at the mercy of the IBOC. For this reason, I very strongly belive that the IBOC's should be forbidden from selling DSL, because I find it awfully convenient that they couldn't provision a competitor's product correctly.
Interesting part is that this all happened five years ago, and I am still sore about it. I still have hanging in my cubicle at work a souvenir of the time.... I made my statement about VZ by building a tin-can phone, emblazoning it with VZ's logo and hanging it in my cubicle.
My personal favorite in recent months has been speakeasy... they cost a few dollars more, but damn do they deliver :)
I dunno. Maybe I might give DSL another shot, but right at the moment, I don't need to. Road Runner has been awesome to me since 2000, with actually less downtime than my wireline telephone (although more, shorter actual outages). The only reason I stick with VZ for telephone service is that they are cheaper than the competitors, and with a competitor, if something goes awry, you are still at VZ's mercy.
39.99+all sorts of fees = 54.00 / mo cable does NOT allow me to run ANY servers, and block most of the default service ports for unix... (most still allow windows, but I'm not about to buy IIS to run a simple site on that huge clunking POS).
Of course if I manage to get around it by shifting ports around, they threaten to cut off my service if I do not disconnect the server within 5 days of being notified. (if it happens a second time, they DO cut off the service as they have done to me before)
This is completely opposite my experience.
My experience is that cable delivers the goods, and the local telco (which is a large, national telco that begins with a V) cannot extract their collective crania from their collective recta long enough to provision DSL for me. I waited --get this-- five months while they dicked around trying to set me up.
When finally I'd decided I had had enough, I called up the cable company, who promised me service in five days. The service was on in four.
As for fees surcharges, etc., the cable company prices their service at $44.95, and the bill I get says $44.95 in the amount due box every month. I do not purchase any service from them except internet (I get TV by satellite).
My phone bill, on the other hand, for wireline service, is priced at $15/mo for service and $15/mo for unlimited long distance. Do you think my phone bill is therefore $30? No, of course not! It's more typically $48.
Back to the cable co, while theoretically, they have the right to block me from running a server, they do not. I do know that they have raised hell with people for running mail servers (because of spam issues), but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been shut down for running a web server. This is with Time-Warner, who I am naming because I have been very pleased with thier service.
All Your Bass Are Belong To Us -- Diffusion vs. Mr. Dog (MP3 format)
Odd payment structure if incoming calls are taken from your free minutes allowance. Do both parties lose minutes then?
Well, if it is a mobile-mobile call, maybe.
Basically, what is different here is in the way mobiles are perceived on our side of the pond versus yours.
When mobiles were introduced here, the idea was that it was a luxury for the owner of the mobile. As such, the cost of having that luxury was assigned to the owner of the mobile. It has pretty much stayed that way ever since.
However, it has had an interesting side-effect that, to the best of my knowledge, is not echoed in Europe. That side-effect is that airtime is cheap here.
Looking at it from a market perspective, if the caller always pays, as in Europe, then the owner of the cell phone is not heavily impacted by the cost of his service. He can seek out a wireline phone if he needs to call someone, but can still be reached at any time. He has no reason to care about the price of the service.
Likewise, the caller can have no impact on the price of the service, because the caller is not the customer of the service provider.
As implemented in the U.S., where the phone owner pays for airtime on all calls, both inbound and outbound, the owner of the phone has both incentive and position to demand lower prices from the provider.
As for the question of both parties losing minutes, it depends on the specific contracts. In the base case, yes, both parties lose minutes. In the case that the two parties are using different providers, yes, both parties lose minutes.
However, some providers offer what is called a family plan, wherein you can call other users on your account at no charge to the account for either phone. I could, for example, call my wife or my mother, both of whom are on my account, and not affect my balance of free minutes or incur any charge.
Further, some providers (such as mine) offer plans where you can call any phone that is serviced by that same provider at no charge. Verizon calls this service option "In" and Sprint calls it "Free PCS to PCS calling". With this, I can call my father-in-law, some of my friends, etc. at no charge.
Last, but not least, how cheap is the airtime? My current contract comes with 2000 free minutes, free pcs to pcs calling, no charge for long distance calls, no charge for roaming in the US, 30 cents/minute for roaming in Canada, mid-speed internet access for one phone and the base price is $88/month for two phones. I spend another $40 on top of that to add one phone and internet access for the other two phones.
In the end, I pay about $150/month after taxes etc.
For comparison, if I had three wireline phones, at $45/month each (which includes unlimited long distance and all taxes, but not call id, voicemail, call waiting or 3-way calling, all of which are on my cell phones), and three Internet accounts at $12/month each, it would be $171/month. Since I don't use the full 2000 minutes, I consider this to be a bargain.
My math might be completely wrong, given I don't have a clue how to calculate kilowatt hours. Is it just kW * hours_used_daily? :)
Close. It is kw * hours_used. The "daily" part is only valid if (as in your case) you are talking about the amount of energy used over the course of a day.
Electricity here is $.15/kWh, which would put this box's operation at $180/day. In some places, electricity is as low as $.04/kWh, which would put the energy cost of these boxes at only $48/day.
Well, it's likely that I would be a farmer, because that is what my most recent ancestors did, going back about 3 centuries.
On the other hand, I didn't take up farming, even though it was an option. I have a penchant for bows and arrows, so I might have become a fletcher.
Otherwise, I might have been a blacksmith or a tinsmith. Tinsmithing is probably relevant in the geek crowd anyway, because, like hardware hacking, tinsmithing involves soldering.
My brother-in-law, who is also a computer geek, has shown some skill at manufacturing musical instruments, mostly flutes and fifes of various types and sizes. This works well because his wife (my sister) plays flutes and fifes of various types and sizes.
If your boss wants 1% of your work week to go to sysadminning, then on Monday Morning, spend exactly 24 minutes (1% of 40 hours) on sysadminning, and then go back to programming for the rest of the week. If he asks why XYZ is not done, explain that you have already utilized your full allotment of time for sysadminning.
When I encode a 128kbps MP3 and the source is good quality acoustic music, it's pretty obvious to me where the term "lossy" comes from. The warmness of the guitars tends to leave and, in general, the "edginess" of the original piece is replaced by something I can only describe as "smoothness".
It's rolling off some of the treble, by the sound of it.
When I listen to a 128kbps audio stream, I get something a little different. The music sound metallic, almost like it was run through the voice box of one of those old-style Cylon warriors (but not so severe)
That sounds to me like the MP3 encoder software that was used to produce the result is of poor quality. In my last post, I took a specific stab at BladeEnc, which I used for a (very) short period of time. It truly saps all the life out of the music you run through it, even at 192kb/s. Most annoying, however, is that it tends to turn cymbal crashes into beeps that match the cymbal in pitch, but don't sound like cymbals.
LAME, on the other hand, is just awesome. Subjectively, I would rather listen to a 96kb/s stream from LAME than a 192kb/s stream from Blade.
There is also a natural tendency of MP3's, when using fixed bitrates, to flange in response to the complexity of the overall audio. In other words, the frequency response will get momentarily narrower when the audio gets momentarily more complex. LAME deals with this problem by applying a low-pass filter to the inbound audio, the low-pass frequency being set to what is anticipated to be the worst-case scenario for the bitrate you have selected. Off the top of my head, I know that it selects 500Hz for 8kb/s/channel (could be used as an LFE channel, but not much more), 3500Hz for 16kb/s/channel, 5000Hz for 24kb/s/channel, 7500Hz for 32kb/s/channel, 15kHz for 64kb/s/channel, 20kHz for 80kb/s/channel and 21kHz for 96kb/s/channel. (read kb/s/channel as kilobits per second per channel, e.g. the 21kHz filter is applied at 96kb/s mono or 192kb/s stereo) You can override the filter frequency, or even shut the filter off, if you feel you need to do so, but it produces some very nice results, on the whole.
However, when I listen to relatively low quality analog recordings, like radio on relatively cheap speakers or an audio cassette, even on a relatively good system, I don't get those problems. True, my dynamic range may be off, but the music displays the same liveliness that it did, well, live. I may have significant noise, but I hear the nuances one would expect from an acoustic guitar and standard drum set.
In many cases, the recording engineers will have tweaked the dynamic range to maximum effect with the end medium. In order to get a better performance from a casette or vinyl, they will compress the dynamic range some. In some cases (many albums from the mid-80's), they overdo it, and in some cases (many albums from the early 80's), they underdo it.
This is the reason I say tapes and MP3s are equivalent. I may get all the bass and treble anyone could hope for from an MP3, but it won't give me the warm sound I'm used to hearing, at least not at a mid to low bit rate. Sure, I won't have any noise, but the MP3 has also cropped out the natural acoustic "noise" of the environment.
What you are saying here is certainly valid.
I think it is a matter of personal preference. I'm the kind who is driven crazy by noise, to the point that I will sometimes apply a multiband gate or multiband expander to ditch the noise. MP3 does a lot of the noise-ditching for me.
As for Casette vs. MP3 @ 128, I'll pick the casette, IF: The casette is CrO2 or metal, recorded at a proper level (RMS should be right at 0dB for CrO2, maybe a tad hotter for metal, maybe a tad colder if there are many high peaks), and treated with Dolby HX pro, and either Dolby C (or at least Dolby B) or dbx. If dbx is used, you can leave off the Dolby HX Pro and I will probably still be happy with it. If it is a ferrous tape, or lacki
That said, I don't think any American administration has taken energy seriously.
I disagree. I think the Carter administration took it seriously; probably more seriously than the Bush administration does. The reason it may seem otherwise is that Jimmy Carter was not very good at motivating people to action, a fact that is demonstrated by listening to some of his later speeches, where he was practically begging the public to work with him.
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It is too bad, really. Carter saw peak oil coming and tried to warn and prepare us. Had he been a more charismatic leader, I think we could have been made less dependent on foreign oil, which would have made it pointless to fiddle in middle eastern politics; we would not have built up Saddam, who would not have invaded Kuwait, which we would not have had to rescue, thus pissing off certain Saudis, some of whom subsequently drove airplanes through the World Trade Center and Pentagon, through which action the President was able to cancel several constitutional provisions of rights, and cow the Congress into giving him the power to declare war, which he has since done way too much of.
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