You said that the Corvette had "Ledwinka's backbone chassis". Not a "Ledwinka-inspired chassis".
You should choose your words more carefully. Obviously, the C5 is based on other designs, just like every other modern car. Recognizing that hardly makes you clever.
If you wish to do more in depth research on this you'll have to rely on these things called "books."
Case in point. You learn just a little bit about something, and you think it gives you the right to belittle others. The C5 does not use a double overhead cam engine, for example, and lots of important changes have been made to automotive design since the 1920's. A good example would be crash safety. Another would be the rotary engine.
Ever seen an iPod? Ever touched one, or watched someone use one?
Ever see the ORIGINAL ipods? Maybe you aren't as familiar with the item being discussed as you think.
It's a touch-pad, built in a circular form, and touching it acts to scroll it. That's what's patented, not a freakin' scroll wheel.
Do you have a reference for this? You don't seem to be aware of the different ipod models, so I'm not going to just assume you have all the relevant patents memorized.
I would be willing ot bet that the important distiction is that pong (IIRC) used a knob while the iPod actualy uses a wheel.
My point was that the ipod's wheel design is simply an incremental change from other devices. You can't take an idea that's already out there in the marketplace, change one little thing, and patent it.
(Well you can, but the patent will be tossed out if it's ever challenged)
Too bad the average sustained transfer rates for USB 2.0 are far lower than those of FireWire, despite the peak rate being higher.
Too bad that doesn't matter since your mp3 player isn't going to hit the bandwidth cap of either medium. Firewire is overkill for an mp3 player. It does not make sense.
I'll take the USB2 device. It will interface with just about every PC you'll find these days, unlike firewire.
Of course, if you want to be l33t, maybe you can get someone to design you an ipod with a fibre-channel interface.
There's also the way it scrolls through long lists quickly, and the way it interacts with the other buttons, that make it such a great and unique piece of interface design.
Hmmm.... just like to jog dial on countless other electronic devices?
Sure the wheel is a good idea, but it's hardly original. And it's not really a major innovation either, more of an evolution. Ever heard of Pong?
IMO, the US patent system has basically desceneded into little more than a registry service. By submitting a patent you're declaring, "I had this idea on this date." There doesn't really seem to be all that much checking going on to see if the idea is actually patentable in the first place.
I see things like this "scroll wheel" patent as an example of the ridiculous things that get rubber stamped at the patent office. It's not as if Apple invented the scroll wheel/jog dial. They've been avaible on VCR's, DAT's, etc for quite a long time. That leaves two things their patent could cover:
1) Using a scroll wheel with *gasp* mp3s.
2) The specfic details of how their scroll wheel interface works.
(1) would be a junk patent. (2) would either be so broad it was a junk patent, or so specfic as to be worthless.
if you have the smallest crack in your house, then air will be allowed to escape. this means that you do not have a closed system. assuming that air is an ideal (or even a van der Waals) gas, if it heats up, it expands.
It's possible to heat the house with a candle then, it would just have to be airtight.
The question is, would the house warm up before you ran out of oxygen?
The hard filtering work (cutting off everything beyond 22 kHz and not touching anything below 20 kHz) on the playback side is done by a digital filter on a 176 (4k oversampling) to 705 kHz (16x oversampling) PCM stream. A digital filter can easily satisfy the high requirements that are needed. The imperfect analog filter that follows after the DAC needs to satisfy only very modest requirements.
Thanks for clearing this up.
You are oversampling by 4-16 and keeping 16 bits of resolution? Then you're digitally filtering it and running it out a D/A convertor that can handle 176-705KHz?
Yeah, I pretty much agree with everything you were saying, but I do have to tak issue with this:
I find it hard to believe that one can hear someone whispering at 5 feet while standing next to a tractor or a passing truck.
The problem with this comparison is that it both events are always happening at the same time. Unless you're going to manually adjust your volume knob for the ppp and FFF sections of the piece, then that 92dB is all the dynamic range you get for an entire symphony. It's already been established that loud sounds have a "masking effect" both in time and frequency, this is what things like mp3 enconding capitalize on. This issue is that this masking effect doesn't last the length of a 74 minute CD.
I still don't think that it makes sense to use 196 kHz as a sample rate for a transport medium. If you want more realistic sound, then spend the space on surround encoding.
I'll agree with this. I think 24 bit/96 KHz, is most likely the limit of human hearing.
My main point is just that there is room for improvement over standard 16 bit/44 KHz sampling.
Yeah, I've seen, I've carried, etc, etc. It's not heavy. Unless you're driving a stripped Lotus Elise specifically for the savings of every ounce, it's unnoticeable and insignificant, especially for fuel economy.
Actually, the power windows in my RX-7 are just about as light as the manual setup. They used a special design to save weight. It's some sort of worm gear in a tube design.
The (still digital) signal is now a "smooth line" through the supplied data points at 44 kHz. This signal is converted to a voltage by the true (non-signal-processing part of the) DAC. The part of the spectrum below 20 kHz will be exactly the same independent on whether the original input to the DAC was 44, 96, or 192 kHz. (Note: 1-bit DA convertors use a slightly different approach, but with the same result).
What you seem to have forgotten is that there is still another filter after the D/A convertor.
Without any filtering the analog for a 5KHz sinewave output would look like a staircase. (Resulting in higher frequency noise.) In order to be able to record and playback matching 5KHz sinewaves, you need filters at both the A/D side and the D/A side.
If you downsample the signal to 44KHZ, your filter requirements on the playback side increase. I'll grant that people don't worry about this so much because speakers act as low pass filters themselves, but the effect on say a 1KHz sinwave, should be detectable.
Note that 92 dB is quite loud: about 4 W power to a typical 87 dB/W loudspeaker at 1 m distance.
92 dB isn't very loud at all. And pretty much anyone who cares about what sampling frequency they're using is going to have more than a 4 watt amplifier. The audio system you just described is that of a $40 boombox, and a human can hear much more than 92 dB of dynamic range. While this may not be a big deal for pop music, classical tends to vary much more in amplitude throught to course of a single piece. (FFF => mF => pp, etc.)
If you want to blast Wagner through my system, with a 175 W amplifier and 96 dB @ 1 W 1M speakers, 24 bits is a much more sensible number.
Now if you want to do some DSP on the playback side (Winamp or XMMS's built-in EQ for example) , 32 bit sounds good because all those rounding errors in your math remain inaudible.
What is retarded is your belief that you, as an EE, are of a higher order of magnitude than that of a Ph.D. professor.
"What is retarded is your belief" that I think EE is somehow above physics. EE wouldn't exist without the hard work of a lot of physicists. Now let me explain why I said he was "definately a physics teacher, not an EE".
Scientists deal with theory, engineers deal with application.
It's that simple. His post showed that he had never actually tried to implement A/D conversion. I wasn't saying engineers > scientists, I was saying the engineers have a different knowedge set than scientists.
And I don't see why you had to throw the whole PHD thing in there. There are PHD physicists and there are PHD EE's. In neither case does having a PHD mean that you are better/smarter than everyone else.
Telling a slashdotter that 1 TB = 10^12 bytes is like telling a French winemaker about an American champagne.
Both terms have already been defined by the people who invented them.
I'm not going to start talking about tebibytes any sooner than you're going to get the producers of Dom Perignon to put "champagne from champagne" on the label.
All this tebibyte business is flat out silly. Would you really accept it if someone tried to tell you 1 byte = 10 bits?
Does that explain the stupidity of this whole tebibyte business for you?
Right or wrong, being quick to "name a price" is taken as evidence that you're trying to blackmail the company. In this case, Microsoft may be abusing the legal system in prosecuting a minor; hopefully the courts will take that into account.
But the thing is, he's wasn't "quick to name a price". He only named a price after Microsoft named one.
There's no blackmailing involved here, and the domain name includes his own frickin name (which he has automatic trademark rights to BTW).
On a side note: if you want to set up a satire site or do any other activity that walks the line, make sure you've got your ducks in a row legally.
And if you want to set up a site that uses your own frickin name, you should need to do no such thing. If MS wanted to be able to stop even vauguely similar forms of their tradmark from being used, they should have chosen a better trademark, like teflon or klenex.
Here's an analogous situation. There's a company out there named goodchair. They make chairs. There's a guy out there named Goody. He decides to register goodychair.com. He does not make or sell chairs.
The site he registered is a combination of his own name and a dictionary word, but goodchairs tries to take his domain name anyways.
Well, that's exactly what a trademark is supposed to protect against; someone else using your brand-name for their own purposes.
And he's not using "Microsoft". You can get a trademark on your specfic brand name, but if you choose something as generic as "Microsoft" it's your own fault, you don't get the right to prevent anyone else from using the name XXXXsoft.
The only reason microsoft has a chance here is because of their immense wealth. It doesn't really have to do with the validity of their case.
Also, you haven't acknowledged that individuals automatically have trademark rights to their own name.
Sure mikerowesoft sounds a lot like microsoft, but:
1. He's not selling software.
2. It's MS's own fault for choosing such ridiculous trademarks. (Windows is a good example.)
If MS really wanted to be able to protect their trademark, they should have chosen a name like teflon or kleenex. The name Microsoft, isn't very far from just naming themselves "computersoftware".
Don't make them an offer. It seems that the big catch here is that Mike made a $10,000 offer to Microsoft ('s lawyers?), and that single act essentially made their case that it was a bad-faith registration.
Wow, there are already 3 or more +5 comments regurgitating this crap from the article. I don't buy this for a minute. Everyone has their price, and it shouldn't be an act of "bad faith" to name it.
Take slashdot for example. I doubt I could buy the domain for $10, but I bet valinux would be perfectly happy to sell it to me for 1 billion dollars. That's the reality of the situation. I fail to see how stating that reality is an act of "bad faith".
The only reason arguments like this work is because the other side doesn't have the resouces to fight them. It has basically nothing to do with the validity of the actual claim.
Obviously your own personal observations, which I'm sure you record religiously every time you go shopping for electronics, are more valid than a telephone survey done by a professional market research firm with a sample size of 1,002. It's probably also more accurate since your observations would be generally limited to a single community or urban area, while their survey was diluted by conducting a nationwide sample.
Riigghht....let's throw common sense out the window because of some nebulous survey. We have been given ALL the important details about this survey. Clearly the use of the word "professional" means that it is 100% accurate and above question.
What probably *is* revealing about your post is that maybe women aren't buying electronics in the same places you are.
How dare I question this survey, obviously the problem is that I happen to shop in the "men only" section of the mall.
Look, if you're pissed off because you get treated like a dimwit when you go to buy a DVD player, that's understandable. If you think "Stores that specialize in electronics still are somewhat "hostile" environments for women." I suppose I can see that too. But that fact that you think this does not mean that women buy more "tech" products than men.
See the thing is, you've been manipulated. That CNN article tells you everthing you've been wanting to hear. It makes you feel important, validated. Who cares if the information is actually accurate?
I suggest you go read my car example again. Someone could easily write a similar article replacing "tech" with "sports cars" and you'd eat it right up.
Then, when I started talking about how obviously this information is wrong, you'd respond saying that women just happen to drive their sports cars on different roads than me. (It doesn't matter if a broad sampling of posters from across the country agree that the survey is wrong, you'd still want to believe it.)
None of these responses really makes any serious attempt to address the issues behind the story. Instead, they appear to regard the story as an attack on their technical savvy, and by association an attack on their manliness. This may explain why so many responses proceed to trash either the figures quoted, or women themselves. Is it any wonder why so many men on/. complain about not getting laid?
Did you ever stop to think that maybe all the responses are of a tongue-in-cheek tone, because everyone sees this story as a load of b.s. ?
They are obviously using a very skewed definition of "tech". Here's a question to illustrate:
How many women do you know that have bought themselves a reciever and a pair of speakers?
To me, that's tech.
This is like a survey coming out and saying that "women buy more sports cars than men". It's obviously not true. We all drive around everyday, and we would notice if this was the case. Here at slashdot, we all shop for electronics regularly, and we would notice if women were the majority of people buying the "tech" items in stores.
Now if you want to manipulate the definition of "tech" or "sports car" I'm sure you can come up with whatever ratio you want.
Now I'm not saying that no women go out and buy themselves nice stereos, just that the majority of people who buy them aren't women. Nor am I saying that women deserve to be talked down to when they shop, or that no products should be designed with them in mind. I'm just saying that these survey results sound like b.s. and one might care to note the lack of detail in the article. If you want to convince me that the majority of Corvettes were sold to women last year, I'd like some hard data, not just hearsay.
I bought some high end sony headphones, pitty the cable that was attached to them was as cheap as a $5 headphone, since after a while of bending the wires break and you loose connection, so much for 'high quality sony' they are loosing it, now their connector adaptors too are 'custom plugs' too.
Get some Sennheisers. The cord on my HD495's is kevlar reinforced.
32 bit cards can have a dynamic range ratio of 144 db.
Actually, the rule of thumb is about 6 db per bit. (I could look up the real formula if you're interested.)
That means 24bit give you about 144db and 32 bits give you a would-kill-you-if-you-used-all-of-it 196 db of signal to noise ratio. The only real reason to use 32 bits instead of 24 is for speed (computers are more likely to be addressed in blocks of 32 bits) and for DSP applications, where that 10 band eq winamp gives you results in some calculation error in the bottom few bits.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this another one of IBM's joke patents like their:
"Method of Bra Size Determination by Direct Measurement of the Breast" patent?
I find it hard to believe that anyone would take either patent seriously.
it's simple history.
You said that the Corvette had "Ledwinka's backbone chassis". Not a "Ledwinka-inspired chassis".
You should choose your words more carefully. Obviously, the C5 is based on other designs, just like every other modern car. Recognizing that hardly makes you clever.
If you wish to do more in depth research on this you'll have to rely on these things called "books."
Case in point. You learn just a little bit about something, and you think it gives you the right to belittle others. The C5 does not use a double overhead cam engine, for example, and lots of important changes have been made to automotive design since the 1920's. A good example would be crash safety. Another would be the rotary engine.
but rip all the plastic off the latest Corvette and what do you find?
Yep, that's right. Ledwinka's backbone chassis.
How about a link to back this up?
I smell BS.
Ever seen an iPod? Ever touched one, or watched someone use one?
Ever see the ORIGINAL ipods? Maybe you aren't as familiar with the item being discussed as you think.
It's a touch-pad, built in a circular form, and touching it acts to scroll it. That's what's patented, not a freakin' scroll wheel.
Do you have a reference for this? You don't seem to be aware of the different ipod models, so I'm not going to just assume you have all the relevant patents memorized.
I would be willing ot bet that the important distiction is that pong (IIRC) used a knob while the iPod actualy uses a wheel.
My point was that the ipod's wheel design is simply an incremental change from other devices. You can't take an idea that's already out there in the marketplace, change one little thing, and patent it.
(Well you can, but the patent will be tossed out if it's ever challenged)
Too bad the average sustained transfer rates for USB 2.0 are far lower than those of FireWire, despite the peak rate being higher.
Too bad that doesn't matter since your mp3 player isn't going to hit the bandwidth cap of either medium. Firewire is overkill for an mp3 player. It does not make sense.
I'll take the USB2 device. It will interface with just about every PC you'll find these days, unlike firewire.
Of course, if you want to be l33t, maybe you can get someone to design you an ipod with a fibre-channel interface.
There's also the way it scrolls through long lists quickly, and the way it interacts with the other buttons, that make it such a great and unique piece of interface design.
Hmmm.... just like to jog dial on countless other electronic devices?
Sure the wheel is a good idea, but it's hardly original. And it's not really a major innovation either, more of an evolution. Ever heard of Pong?
IMO, the US patent system has basically desceneded into little more than a registry service. By submitting a patent you're declaring, "I had this idea on this date." There doesn't really seem to be all that much checking going on to see if the idea is actually patentable in the first place.
I see things like this "scroll wheel" patent as an example of the ridiculous things that get rubber stamped at the patent office. It's not as if Apple invented the scroll wheel/jog dial. They've been avaible on VCR's, DAT's, etc for quite a long time. That leaves two things their patent could cover:
1) Using a scroll wheel with *gasp* mp3s.
2) The specfic details of how their scroll wheel interface works.
(1) would be a junk patent. (2) would either be so broad it was a junk patent, or so specfic as to be worthless.
if you have the smallest crack in your house, then air will be allowed to escape. this means that you do not have a closed system. assuming that air is an ideal (or even a van der Waals) gas, if it heats up, it expands.
It's possible to heat the house with a candle then, it would just have to be airtight.
The question is, would the house warm up before you ran out of oxygen?
I suggest you fax that to him :)
Anyone have their fax number?
:)
I just couldn't help it
Don't everyone go faxing them your opinon on this subject all at once now.
The hard filtering work (cutting off everything beyond 22 kHz and not touching anything below 20 kHz) on the playback side is done by a digital filter on a 176 (4k oversampling) to 705 kHz (16x oversampling) PCM stream. A digital filter can easily satisfy the high requirements that are needed. The imperfect analog filter that follows after the DAC needs to satisfy only very modest requirements.
Thanks for clearing this up.
You are oversampling by 4-16 and keeping 16 bits of resolution? Then you're digitally filtering it and running it out a D/A convertor that can handle 176-705KHz?
Yeah, I pretty much agree with everything you were saying, but I do have to tak issue with this:
I find it hard to believe that one can hear someone whispering at 5 feet while standing next to a tractor or a passing truck.
The problem with this comparison is that it both events are always happening at the same time. Unless you're going to manually adjust your volume knob for the ppp and FFF sections of the piece, then that 92dB is all the dynamic range you get for an entire symphony. It's already been established that loud sounds have a "masking effect" both in time and frequency, this is what things like mp3 enconding capitalize on. This issue is that this masking effect doesn't last the length of a 74 minute CD.
I still don't think that it makes sense to use 196 kHz as a sample rate for a transport medium. If you want more realistic sound, then spend the space on surround encoding.
I'll agree with this. I think 24 bit/96 KHz, is most likely the limit of human hearing.
My main point is just that there is room for improvement over standard 16 bit/44 KHz sampling.
Yeah, I've seen, I've carried, etc, etc. It's not heavy. Unless you're driving a stripped Lotus Elise specifically for the savings of every ounce, it's unnoticeable and insignificant, especially for fuel economy.
Actually, the power windows in my RX-7 are just about as light as the manual setup. They used a special design to save weight. It's some sort of worm gear in a tube design.
The (still digital) signal is now a "smooth line" through the supplied data points at 44 kHz. This signal is converted to a voltage by the true (non-signal-processing part of the) DAC. The part of the spectrum below 20 kHz will be exactly the same independent on whether the original input to the DAC was 44, 96, or 192 kHz. (Note: 1-bit DA convertors use a slightly different approach, but with the same result).
What you seem to have forgotten is that there is still another filter after the D/A convertor.
Without any filtering the analog for a 5KHz sinewave output would look like a staircase. (Resulting in higher frequency noise.) In order to be able to record and playback matching 5KHz sinewaves, you need filters at both the A/D side and the D/A side.
If you downsample the signal to 44KHZ, your filter requirements on the playback side increase. I'll grant that people don't worry about this so much because speakers act as low pass filters themselves, but the effect on say a 1KHz sinwave, should be detectable.
Note that 92 dB is quite loud: about 4 W power to a typical 87 dB/W loudspeaker at 1 m distance.
92 dB isn't very loud at all. And pretty much anyone who cares about what sampling frequency they're using is going to have more than a 4 watt amplifier. The audio system you just described is that of a $40 boombox, and a human can hear much more than 92 dB of dynamic range. While this may not be a big deal for pop music, classical tends to vary much more in amplitude throught to course of a single piece. (FFF => mF => pp, etc.)
If you want to blast Wagner through my system, with a 175 W amplifier and 96 dB @ 1 W 1M speakers, 24 bits is a much more sensible number.
Now if you want to do some DSP on the playback side (Winamp or XMMS's built-in EQ for example) , 32 bit sounds good because all those rounding errors in your math remain inaudible.
What is retarded is your belief that you, as an EE, are of a higher order of magnitude than that of a Ph.D. professor.
"What is retarded is your belief" that I think EE is somehow above physics. EE wouldn't exist without the hard work of a lot of physicists. Now let me explain why I said he was "definately a physics teacher, not an EE".
Scientists deal with theory, engineers deal with application.
It's that simple. His post showed that he had never actually tried to implement A/D conversion. I wasn't saying engineers > scientists, I was saying the engineers have a different knowedge set than scientists.
And I don't see why you had to throw the whole PHD thing in there. There are PHD physicists and there are PHD EE's. In neither case does having a PHD mean that you are better/smarter than everyone else.
Telling a slashdotter that 1 TB = 10^12 bytes is like telling a French winemaker about an American champagne.
Both terms have already been defined by the people who invented them.
I'm not going to start talking about tebibytes any sooner than you're going to get the producers of Dom Perignon to put "champagne from champagne" on the label.
All this tebibyte business is flat out silly. Would you really accept it if someone tried to tell you 1 byte = 10 bits?
Does that explain the stupidity of this whole tebibyte business for you?
Right or wrong, being quick to "name a price" is taken as evidence that you're trying to blackmail the company. In this case, Microsoft may be abusing the legal system in prosecuting a minor; hopefully the courts will take that into account.
But the thing is, he's wasn't "quick to name a price". He only named a price after Microsoft named one.
There's no blackmailing involved here, and the domain name includes his own frickin name (which he has automatic trademark rights to BTW).
On a side note: if you want to set up a satire site or do any other activity that walks the line, make sure you've got your ducks in a row legally.
And if you want to set up a site that uses your own frickin name, you should need to do no such thing. If MS wanted to be able to stop even vauguely similar forms of their tradmark from being used, they should have chosen a better trademark, like teflon or klenex.
Here's an analogous situation. There's a company out there named goodchair. They make chairs. There's a guy out there named Goody. He decides to register goodychair.com. He does not make or sell chairs.
The site he registered is a combination of his own name and a dictionary word, but goodchairs tries to take his domain name anyways.
Well, that's exactly what a trademark is supposed to protect against; someone else using your brand-name for their own purposes.
And he's not using "Microsoft". You can get a trademark on your specfic brand name, but if you choose something as generic as "Microsoft" it's your own fault, you don't get the right to prevent anyone else from using the name XXXXsoft.
The only reason microsoft has a chance here is because of their immense wealth. It doesn't really have to do with the validity of their case.
Also, you haven't acknowledged that individuals automatically have trademark rights to their own name.
Sure mikerowesoft sounds a lot like microsoft, but:
1. He's not selling software. 2. It's MS's own fault for choosing such ridiculous trademarks. (Windows is a good example.)
If MS really wanted to be able to protect their trademark, they should have chosen a name like teflon or kleenex. The name Microsoft, isn't very far from just naming themselves "computersoftware".
Don't make them an offer. It seems that the big catch here is that Mike made a $10,000 offer to Microsoft ('s lawyers?), and that single act essentially made their case that it was a bad-faith registration.
Wow, there are already 3 or more +5 comments regurgitating this crap from the article. I don't buy this for a minute. Everyone has their price, and it shouldn't be an act of "bad faith" to name it.
Take slashdot for example. I doubt I could buy the domain for $10, but I bet valinux would be perfectly happy to sell it to me for 1 billion dollars. That's the reality of the situation. I fail to see how stating that reality is an act of "bad faith".
The only reason arguments like this work is because the other side doesn't have the resouces to fight them. It has basically nothing to do with the validity of the actual claim.
In a nutshell, for 150,000,000 you need a sample of about a 1000 people to get a representative result.
That's only if you have 100% confidence in those 1000 results, a pretty bad assumption to make.
And only if those 1000 samples are truely random, also quite questionable.
Obviously your own personal observations, which I'm sure you record religiously every time you go shopping for electronics, are more valid than a telephone survey done by a professional market research firm with a sample size of 1,002. It's probably also more accurate since your observations would be generally limited to a single community or urban area, while their survey was diluted by conducting a nationwide sample.
Riigghht....let's throw common sense out the window because of some nebulous survey. We have been given ALL the important details about this survey. Clearly the use of the word "professional" means that it is 100% accurate and above question.
What probably *is* revealing about your post is that maybe women aren't buying electronics in the same places you are.
How dare I question this survey, obviously the problem is that I happen to shop in the "men only" section of the mall.
Look, if you're pissed off because you get treated like a dimwit when you go to buy a DVD player, that's understandable. If you think "Stores that specialize in electronics still are somewhat "hostile" environments for women." I suppose I can see that too. But that fact that you think this does not mean that women buy more "tech" products than men.
See the thing is, you've been manipulated. That CNN article tells you everthing you've been wanting to hear. It makes you feel important, validated. Who cares if the information is actually accurate?
I suggest you go read my car example again. Someone could easily write a similar article replacing "tech" with "sports cars" and you'd eat it right up.
Then, when I started talking about how obviously this information is wrong, you'd respond saying that women just happen to drive their sports cars on different roads than me. (It doesn't matter if a broad sampling of posters from across the country agree that the survey is wrong, you'd still want to believe it.)
None of these responses really makes any serious attempt to address the issues behind the story. Instead, they appear to regard the story as an attack on their technical savvy, and by association an attack on their manliness. This may explain why so many responses proceed to trash either the figures quoted, or women themselves. Is it any wonder why so many men on /. complain about not getting laid?
Did you ever stop to think that maybe all the responses are of a tongue-in-cheek tone, because everyone sees this story as a load of b.s. ?
They are obviously using a very skewed definition of "tech". Here's a question to illustrate:
How many women do you know that have bought themselves a reciever and a pair of speakers?
To me, that's tech.
This is like a survey coming out and saying that "women buy more sports cars than men". It's obviously not true. We all drive around everyday, and we would notice if this was the case. Here at slashdot, we all shop for electronics regularly, and we would notice if women were the majority of people buying the "tech" items in stores.
Now if you want to manipulate the definition of "tech" or "sports car" I'm sure you can come up with whatever ratio you want.
Now I'm not saying that no women go out and buy themselves nice stereos, just that the majority of people who buy them aren't women. Nor am I saying that women deserve to be talked down to when they shop, or that no products should be designed with them in mind. I'm just saying that these survey results sound like b.s. and one might care to note the lack of detail in the article. If you want to convince me that the majority of Corvettes were sold to women last year, I'd like some hard data, not just hearsay.
I bought some high end sony headphones, pitty the cable that was attached to them was as cheap as a $5 headphone, since after a while of bending the wires break and you loose connection, so much for 'high quality sony' they are loosing it, now their connector adaptors too are 'custom plugs' too.
Get some Sennheisers. The cord on my HD495's is kevlar reinforced.
32 bit cards can have a dynamic range ratio of 144 db.
Actually, the rule of thumb is about 6 db per bit. (I could look up the real formula if you're interested.)
That means 24bit give you about 144db and 32 bits give you a would-kill-you-if-you-used-all-of-it 196 db of signal to noise ratio. The only real reason to use 32 bits instead of 24 is for speed (computers are more likely to be addressed in blocks of 32 bits) and for DSP applications, where that 10 band eq winamp gives you results in some calculation error in the bottom few bits.