"That is all about to change now"
Really? "320x240 16-bit color display, 3.5MB of flash ROM, and 21KB of RAM" I think my Mac SE had better specs than that. I think a gameboy might. This is not impressive, and I'm sure it will still cost too much. $100-$150? Not likely.
TI will sell a lot of these, I'm sure, but overall their success has nothing to do with the technical specifications of their device. It has to do with clever marketing.
Note to students: Buy the minimum calculator that the teacher requires (if they do require anything). Get a computer with some good plotting software if you need to graph functions to help you understand complicated new ideas. You could probably use the computer for other things too...
It isn't the AC to DC conversion that is releasing the heat. It is the high voltage to low voltage conversion taking the 120 volts AC down to probably 14 volts AC or so (using a transformer, as you pointed out).
Distributing DC has its merits, but your example isn't one. High frequency (400 Hz or so) might make more sense for this, since switching power supplies would be simpler.
1: SWR caused by mismatched antennas (and influenced by the area around the antennas) causes the RF front-end a lot more stress and can lead to breakdown. The front-end on these wifi cards is about as cheap as it gets.
2: Bad or cheap components. As others have pointed out, bad caps can cause major problems and do plague modern electronics. Your RF bias circuits could swing all over the place if the caps are going bad. Or the heatsinking in the power supply. There are lots of potential failure points in circuit components.
3: SNR: Some other folks pointed out that as the wifi band gets crowded, it's harder to get a good signal. When you buy a new router, perhaps it has more intelligent rate algorithms and interference mitigation techniques?
Really though, ask yourself why *anything* electronic needs replacement. There are usually a number of believable answers.
PS: As someone who works a lot on wifi drivers, antennas, and systems, I use an RT-N56U at home and it works quite well. Ugly but great.
I don't think he's serious about the windows on an aircraft, and anyone who does needs his head examined.
Having said that, I'm not hiring him to be in charge of aircraft design. Nor am I hiring a religious leader. (Noted because I think mormonism is pretty odd too.)
We're considering him for a president. I'd rather debate on his policy, record, etc. And I'm not claiming to agree with all of it or think highly of him on these merits, but this is the domain we need to be in, not the "batshit crazy."
It's easy to attack and make fun of these guys -- nearly all past and present political figures. I enjoy it too. But I don't make decisions based on it.
Alright, so let's say the example in the video took place today:
Company 1 in Europe has an idea for a part and contacts Company 2 in America to produce it:
1) Company 1 googles and finds the name of a company in America to produce the part. They call the American company and it takes two hours to wade through the phone system menus and leave several voice mails and wait for a reply.
2) Company 1 can't give any details without a signed NDA, and because of requirements from the company's lawyers, the NDA has to be faxed over, signed, and faxed back.
3) Once they agree to work together, company 1 wants to send company 2 a copy of the design. 3a) The email bounces because it was typed wrong due to international spelling differences 3b) Once the email stops bouncing, it is picked up by a spam filter and nobody ever sees it 3c) Since the email had a large attachment, microsoft exchange choked and the server admin had to come in on the weekend and rebuild the databases 3d) After that, Company 1 decides to just put the file on an internal FTP server. 3e) Company 2 isn't able to use FTP in windows without downloading a program from the internet, which involves getting permission from the IT department, registering the program with the developer, convincing the anti-virus software to allow the ftp program to run, etc etc 3f) The server at Company 1, an older machine not frequently used, isn't firewalled correctly by an unintelligent cisco firewall product, and fails to correctly open the reverse datastream. The files never arrive, as the connections hang. 3g) Company 1 gives up and uses Dropbox. 3h) The files arrive at Company 2, but they are also intercepted by some Russian and Chinese hackers that easily evesdropped into their dropbox using a script inserted several months ago to look for interesting keywords.
4) Many months pass, and finally the prototypes are shipped over to Europe, where it is discovered, the Americans did not convert metric units to English units correctly for each portion of the project, and nothing screws together.
5) The hacked data is leaked to the highest paying competitor.
The other futuristic situation, about the doctor, is equally obnoxious these days if you factor in HIPPA, incompatible data formats, and even lower IT standards.
Let's face it, this started off as a great idea and became something quite different.
Check it out, yes, the digital time-axis is discrete. As is the "y-axis" which I assume to mean amplitude.
The fact that you would even mention stair steps shows how fundamentally off your concept of digital audio is. Here's the deal. Take a Fourier transform of one of those "steps". You'll note these are sharp rectangular shapes. The fundamental frequency of one stair step is that of the sine wave it sort of approximates, with a period of two samples. Gee, what frequency is that? Oh, right, Nyquist. You won't create a step with a longer (lower-frequency) step than this -- the steps exist only on the small differences between each *adjacent* sample. Now, there are other harmonics. Recall your Fourier transform pairs, something like a rectangle should be sinc-like. But the harmonics are *greater* than the Nyquist.
So basically, the effects of these "stair steps" are all at or above the Nyquist, and are filtered out by anti-aliasing filters. The author is correct that the original wave is reconstructed.
Now, your point about the FFT. Do you know what an FFT is? The ear does not perform a fast Fourier transform with order nlog(n). As several have pointed out, the eardrum does not vibrate over about 20khz or so. So, even if the ear implements a butterfly FT, I highly doubt it notices the anti-aliasing filtering taking place around 22 KHz. Especially with the up-sampling and digital-domain filtering that actually takes place.
The author's description of bit depth and dynamic range is correct. More digital 'bits' per sample does lead to greater differences and granularity between the loudest and quietest sounds that may be recorded on a PCM stream.
I wouldn't say the author doesn't understand PCM. I'd say you don't.
I am completely aware that 192 KHz/24 bit is alive and well. I saw many a studio "upgrade" to the latest Protools HD. And I happen to use 88.2k/24 for a lot of the work I do.
I too cannot hear to 20k. My hearing tops out at 19 KHz, and that's just fine with me. It shouldn't be surprising that our test gear can "see" up past 20 KHz though. My Tektronics scope from the 80s will go way up to 100 MHz. But that isn't the point, is it? Point is, we can't hear up there. But the gear that can does sell, because people like bigger numbers.
I would totally advocate switching to 24 bits over 16. But higher sample rates really present diminishing returns. Not only do we not hear up there, we certainly don't hear much detail in the +10K range.
Your points about processing are totally valid, and I do the same with my photos.
What sort of "smearing" are you talking about? From analyzing your comment, I think you are saying that the time of arrival to the ears is quantitized to, at minimum, 1/Fmax, where Fmax = 1/Fs.
Here's the thing. BOTH left and right signals are quantitized into equal chronological 'bins'. You aren't erroring any more to one side than the other. Secondly, the frequencies where this kind of error would be noticeable -- if it occurred -- would be in the +15 KHz range. At this frequency, every millimeter of material in your surroundings has an effect on the perceived sound. Unless you have a perfect setup in every way, this is not a big deal.
I'll tell you where the sample rate will matter. In both ADCs and DACs, there are anti-aliasing filters designed to make sure frequencies greater than the Nyquist are not recorded, and are filtered out of the resulting reproduction signal. Filters can't just cut everything after some given frequency though. They have to do this gradually. Too fast a cut and you create ripple in the pass-band and ripple after the cutoff. Two gentle and you allow for some aliasing, or you filter out some of the desirable high frequency content that is just below the Nyquist. Solution? Sample at a ridiculous rate, like 100KHz, and filter gently. Your ripples will be outside the audible range, and you'll be able to cut it much more gently.
Having said that, with good filtering the ripples are still pretty minimal, way above the 'content' of the program, and with today's distortion aka mastering, and your home equipment or even so-called audiophile equipment, a few db here and there around 19 KHz isn't going to be noticeable. This ripple almost certainly existed in the analog equipment (microphones, rooms, etc) involved in the original recording, and nobody cried about that.
As a former audio engineer with some ranking success, I can tell you that it's true -- delivering high-sample rate audio as an end format is really pointless. It hardly makes sense in a studio, and definitely is illogical for the distribution of a final mix.
However, there is an increase in quality using 24 bit. Most people just assume increasing the bit depth is the same as increasing the sample rate, but this is incorrect and short-sided. With higher bit depths, you can get your analog components operating a little further away from the noise floor. This also makes dithering much less noticeable (the noise you hear when you crank the volume up as a song fades out). Why? There are more "levels" for each sample to be recorded into. It's like going from 16 to 24 bit color. You would notice this.
For the 192 KHz fans out there, there is direct and proven mathematical reasoning for why 44 KHz audio is plenty. That, and your equipment probably can't produce it. Your converters probably suck at this frequency, and your ears definitely can't vibrate that quickly. More samples doesn't "smooth out" the waveform.
I can't wait for a system where each application automatically takes up the entire screen!
Just imagine, reading facebook.com on my 30 inch screen, FULLY MAXIMIZED, so that no other applications can distract me. Or, if I decide to code, EACH terminal could span the entire desktop. No longer will I have to struggle with seeing two things at once -- from now on, it's peace of mind with GNOME 3.
Thankfully I can now give gvim the space it has always deserved -- a fully uncluttered 2560 x 1600 space. And when I decide to listen to music, my music app can take up the entire space too! Imagine, seeing nothing but whitespace. Thank goodness someone thought of this. I can finally relax and do what I've always wanted to do: use my computer, one app at a time, in FULL SCREEN!
If you think about it, this is almost as good as DOS. No more annoying window title bars and multi-app desktop usage. No more extra buttons and widgets. Just one thing and one thing only -- what you're going to work on. I can't wait to develop kernel drivers and work on my apps this way. The fact that when I currently work I can actually see (and be distracted by) about three to four windows at a time is just devastating. I have to (currently) *navigate* to each and every window, and precariously drag the window across my entire desktop to achieve this effect, only to remain haunted by menu bars, title bars, and application switchers.
If only they could put a stop to all those pesky background processes and really get it down to just one single process. Then all the processes on my computer wouldn't have to compete for computer resources. Just like DOS, I'm telling you, I can't wait, we're getting back to the single-purpose one-thing-at-a-time operating system!
Obligatory slashdot sayings: I for one welcome our maximized-app overlords! In Soviet-Russia, window manager maximizes YOU! One app to rule them all! It was as if millions of apps suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, replaced with calming whitespace.
Why not a kindle or nook? Because they suck at reading PDFs. Yes, they can technically show a PDF on the screen. But unless that PDF is formatted for a small screen size, the experience is going to be awful. The more expensive devices (iPad, color-screen-glossy nook-kindle-whatever, $400+) have solved this with better multi-touch zoom and pan options, but then you're going to pick the iPad if they're in the same price arena. Just go on youtube and look for "kindle touch pdf reading" and you'll see how awful it is.
For someone trying to study, you need the ability to quickly browse material and annotate, and the cheaper devices don't offer this in any reasonable way.
So why not a netbook? Sure, a netbook can display PDFs quickly. But if your input is limited to mouse and keyboard, you're ten times less likely to annotate. Which is the function you would normally perform on a real paper textbook. So the iPad and other stylus-bearing devices come out on top, due to their size, advanced software, and input methods.
Here's the problem: You can block "Lightspeed" from deploying devices known to cause harmful interference to GPS signals. Big deal. What you can't do is make it "illegal" to jam GPS. Well, you can make it illegal, but it's a matter of enforcement. Expecting it to work 100%, especially in a battle field, is stupid. Your enemy will build GPS jammers by the dozen and hide them all over the place once they realize this is how you guide your missiles.
All I'm saying, is that this is a symptom of a larger problem: depending on easily jammed GPS.
I realize the military will just triangulate and find the jammers. But a jammer just has to hide their equipment in nearby hospitals and grocery stores, and use intelligent timing and antenna arrangements.... they can make triangulation a very difficult and time-consuming operation. And once the devices are found and destroyed, it's another $15 to deploy another one somewhere else.
I think it's a good idea to try and prevent what you can, such as by not certifying equipment that causes harmful interference. But let's not think this is the real problem with GPS...
It's not surprising that an RF signal can be interfered with remotely. Whether the signal was for a baby monitor, an emergency room health computer system, remote aircraft control, etc, people will always be astonished that they were susceptible to interference.
But honestly, it's an RF signal. Blocking the signal is about the same for any given service. Some are a little more robust than others, but it's the same mathematical game.
Let's get over the sensationalism and realize the real problem: We had false expectations of GPS and therefore should not have depended on this technology in defense systems.
Adblock plus in google chrome works fine for me -- but I don't think most people make decisions based on adblocking extensions, so this is not a reason for market dominance.
What can I say, this is the result of the wrong focus. Software engineers made decisions about the direction this company went, and drove it into the ground.
It began as a beautiful thing, something that was needed in a world of terrible browsers. Netscape was over-bloated, IE was, well, IE. Firefox took it by storm because it provided what wasn't available. It was fast, slick, and most of all, capable. I remember being one of the first to compile Mozilla on Mac OS X as a mach-o binary, so I've been there and I remember watching it as it grew up, matured, and then began complaining about the neighbors.
These days, it's an enormous pig of an application. The folks running the show at FF continue to drive focus into stupid areas. There have been massive UI shifts that alienate users. The version number thing is just stupid, everyone knows that. Why did they do it? To compete with Chrome -- can you believe that? They thought Chrome's success was because of version numbers?! Oh wait, let's add bing as a default search engine. That ought to help. How about we get some more broken-UI themes while we're at it. Firefox, your browser, your way. How about we move the tabs over here, do this with the menu bar.. that should help us compete with Chrome. Right...
So I hope it dies. And I hope it dies fast, rather than dragging everyone down, kicking and screaming. "Waaa, competitors, we want your money." Good luck with that. Get real, Chrome has shown innovation far above and beyond the old Mozilla codebase. Firefox is practically windows in this sense -- old code, old technology, new "looks", stupid versioning (NT, 98, 2000 ME, XP, V, 7, 8... excuse me if I got it out of order as I really don't use windows any more than is necessary, which is essentially zero). And stupid management.
To the FF developers that wrote good awesome code, please find a project more deserving of your talent, and let this one die. Software has to evolve with the trends and overall fitness of the software to the environment. In this case, it's time to embrace the new species.
Depending on how large your dataset is, you may have luck using Matlab (or the opensource gnu octave). These programs will let you do *whatever* you want with the data (plotting, correlation, fft, etc).
With at least Matlab, there are some MySQL plugins available that will let you get data out of your database and into arrays rather quickly. And of course, both matlab and gnu octave let you import csv and plaintext datafiles.
Here is the matlab plugin I have used very successfully (and it's open source. No idea if it would work with octave): http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~almgren/mysql/
You will need some background with math, statistics, and programming to effectively do this. If you don't have the skills, learn them or pay up for some overpriced commercial product...
While I can't comment on the latest GNOME and KDE interfaces, I can say that when Apple gave us Aqua and Mac OS X, it was a real breath of fresh air. With a few exceptions, every version has added new and useful features to the GUI that make my work more productive.
When I try and use a windows pc with 7 or vista, it is really painful. I still can't get over how they botched the task bar. So I will agree with y'all there that windows has taken a turn for the worst. The PC next to me has an icon in the task bar for firefox. Every time I click it I get a new window with an identical firefox icon in the taskbar. It's just maddening. I'm sure I can right-click and choose properties and click some other tab and then click options and then turn it off and press apply... but it's a shame to have to tweak something so obvious.
As for linux, I used to like xfce and blackbox. When I'm using linux as a desktop, I have totally different expectations. I don't expect drag-and-drop to work, I don't need a "Finder", and I usually am only interested in one or two specialized applications.
Overall, I believe the GUI should stay out of the way of the user. Think of a typical work day -- you're using applications. Concepts like the "taskbar" (or whatever it's called in KDE and GNOME) really are not programs the user uses except as a utility to switch applications and windows. Thus, they ought not be so prominently visible. Except when you need them. Hence auto-hide, which I find doesn't always work out on windows. Heck, for some users all they need is a giant "the internet" button.
I appreciate Apple's Mac OS X interface because it manages to stay out of the way and yet be incredibly useful and (excuse the use of this word if you develop AI) thoughtful.
Since the devices would likely be donated anyway (the same folks don't typically carry any sort of currency), I think it's reasonable to assume the final product will include a daytime solar cell and a battery. My guess is the device doesn't use much current so the solar cell and battery need-not be the expensive type we typically associated with these devices in home-power applications.
See, this is what matters. I agree, it's not a surprise that keeping the TV on all day is detrimental to developing minds. Common sense? That sounds fine.
So why do we need a "huge grain" of salt? Your quantities are very confusing.
Some friends of ours once called us over because they claimed their TV, radio, and wifi were not working well at their house, and their neighbors agreed that this was also affecting them lately.
I went over with my analyzer and field strength meters, only to discover that their amplified TV antenna's power cord fell out, causing almost total loss to the digital converter box. The other "problems" quickly disappeared as well.... hmm...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
"That is all about to change now" Really? "320x240 16-bit color display, 3.5MB of flash ROM, and 21KB of RAM" I think my Mac SE had better specs than that. I think a gameboy might. This is not impressive, and I'm sure it will still cost too much. $100-$150? Not likely. TI will sell a lot of these, I'm sure, but overall their success has nothing to do with the technical specifications of their device. It has to do with clever marketing. Note to students: Buy the minimum calculator that the teacher requires (if they do require anything). Get a computer with some good plotting software if you need to graph functions to help you understand complicated new ideas. You could probably use the computer for other things too...
It isn't the AC to DC conversion that is releasing the heat. It is the high voltage to low voltage conversion taking the 120 volts AC down to probably 14 volts AC or so (using a transformer, as you pointed out). Distributing DC has its merits, but your example isn't one. High frequency (400 Hz or so) might make more sense for this, since switching power supplies would be simpler.
But of course, if we grow humans in an artificial womb, they wouldn't really alive until we take them out at the end of the 9-month procedure, right?
1: SWR caused by mismatched antennas (and influenced by the area around the antennas) causes the RF front-end a lot more stress and can lead to breakdown. The front-end on these wifi cards is about as cheap as it gets.
2: Bad or cheap components. As others have pointed out, bad caps can cause major problems and do plague modern electronics. Your RF bias circuits could swing all over the place if the caps are going bad. Or the heatsinking in the power supply. There are lots of potential failure points in circuit components.
3: SNR: Some other folks pointed out that as the wifi band gets crowded, it's harder to get a good signal. When you buy a new router, perhaps it has more intelligent rate algorithms and interference mitigation techniques?
Really though, ask yourself why *anything* electronic needs replacement. There are usually a number of believable answers.
PS: As someone who works a lot on wifi drivers, antennas, and systems, I use an RT-N56U at home and it works quite well. Ugly but great.
I don't think he's serious about the windows on an aircraft, and anyone who does needs his head examined.
Having said that, I'm not hiring him to be in charge of aircraft design. Nor am I hiring a religious leader. (Noted because I think mormonism is pretty odd too.)
We're considering him for a president. I'd rather debate on his policy, record, etc. And I'm not claiming to agree with all of it or think highly of him on these merits, but this is the domain we need to be in, not the "batshit crazy."
It's easy to attack and make fun of these guys -- nearly all past and present political figures. I enjoy it too. But I don't make decisions based on it.
...given his legacy with windows.
Alright, so let's say the example in the video took place today:
Company 1 in Europe has an idea for a part and contacts Company 2 in America to produce it:
1) Company 1 googles and finds the name of a company in America to produce the part. They call the American company and it takes two hours to wade through the phone system menus and leave several voice mails and wait for a reply.
2) Company 1 can't give any details without a signed NDA, and because of requirements from the company's lawyers, the NDA has to be faxed over, signed, and faxed back.
3) Once they agree to work together, company 1 wants to send company 2 a copy of the design.
3a) The email bounces because it was typed wrong due to international spelling differences
3b) Once the email stops bouncing, it is picked up by a spam filter and nobody ever sees it
3c) Since the email had a large attachment, microsoft exchange choked and the server admin had to come in on the weekend and rebuild the databases
3d) After that, Company 1 decides to just put the file on an internal FTP server.
3e) Company 2 isn't able to use FTP in windows without downloading a program from the internet, which involves getting permission from the IT department, registering the program with the developer, convincing the anti-virus software to allow the ftp program to run, etc etc
3f) The server at Company 1, an older machine not frequently used, isn't firewalled correctly by an unintelligent cisco firewall product, and fails to correctly open the reverse datastream. The files never arrive, as the connections hang.
3g) Company 1 gives up and uses Dropbox.
3h) The files arrive at Company 2, but they are also intercepted by some Russian and Chinese hackers that easily evesdropped into their dropbox using a script inserted several months ago to look for interesting keywords.
4) Many months pass, and finally the prototypes are shipped over to Europe, where it is discovered, the Americans did not convert metric units to English units correctly for each portion of the project, and nothing screws together.
5) The hacked data is leaked to the highest paying competitor.
The other futuristic situation, about the doctor, is equally obnoxious these days if you factor in HIPPA, incompatible data formats, and even lower IT standards.
Let's face it, this started off as a great idea and became something quite different.
I am so glad you wrote this, Rimbo.
Check it out, yes, the digital time-axis is discrete. As is the "y-axis" which I assume to mean amplitude.
The fact that you would even mention stair steps shows how fundamentally off your concept of digital audio is. Here's the deal. Take a Fourier transform of one of those "steps". You'll note these are sharp rectangular shapes. The fundamental frequency of one stair step is that of the sine wave it sort of approximates, with a period of two samples. Gee, what frequency is that? Oh, right, Nyquist. You won't create a step with a longer (lower-frequency) step than this -- the steps exist only on the small differences between each *adjacent* sample. Now, there are other harmonics. Recall your Fourier transform pairs, something like a rectangle should be sinc-like. But the harmonics are *greater* than the Nyquist.
So basically, the effects of these "stair steps" are all at or above the Nyquist, and are filtered out by anti-aliasing filters. The author is correct that the original wave is reconstructed.
Now, your point about the FFT. Do you know what an FFT is? The ear does not perform a fast Fourier transform with order nlog(n). As several have pointed out, the eardrum does not vibrate over about 20khz or so. So, even if the ear implements a butterfly FT, I highly doubt it notices the anti-aliasing filtering taking place around 22 KHz. Especially with the up-sampling and digital-domain filtering that actually takes place.
The author's description of bit depth and dynamic range is correct. More digital 'bits' per sample does lead to greater differences and granularity between the loudest and quietest sounds that may be recorded on a PCM stream.
I wouldn't say the author doesn't understand PCM. I'd say you don't.
I am completely aware that 192 KHz/24 bit is alive and well. I saw many a studio "upgrade" to the latest Protools HD. And I happen to use 88.2k/24 for a lot of the work I do.
I too cannot hear to 20k. My hearing tops out at 19 KHz, and that's just fine with me. It shouldn't be surprising that our test gear can "see" up past 20 KHz though. My Tektronics scope from the 80s will go way up to 100 MHz. But that isn't the point, is it? Point is, we can't hear up there. But the gear that can does sell, because people like bigger numbers.
I would totally advocate switching to 24 bits over 16. But higher sample rates really present diminishing returns. Not only do we not hear up there, we certainly don't hear much detail in the +10K range.
Your points about processing are totally valid, and I do the same with my photos.
Thanks for the info, that's good to know.
What sort of "smearing" are you talking about? From analyzing your comment, I think you are saying that the time of arrival to the ears is quantitized to, at minimum, 1/Fmax, where Fmax = 1/Fs.
Here's the thing. BOTH left and right signals are quantitized into equal chronological 'bins'. You aren't erroring any more to one side than the other. Secondly, the frequencies where this kind of error would be noticeable -- if it occurred -- would be in the +15 KHz range. At this frequency, every millimeter of material in your surroundings has an effect on the perceived sound. Unless you have a perfect setup in every way, this is not a big deal.
I'll tell you where the sample rate will matter. In both ADCs and DACs, there are anti-aliasing filters designed to make sure frequencies greater than the Nyquist are not recorded, and are filtered out of the resulting reproduction signal. Filters can't just cut everything after some given frequency though. They have to do this gradually. Too fast a cut and you create ripple in the pass-band and ripple after the cutoff. Two gentle and you allow for some aliasing, or you filter out some of the desirable high frequency content that is just below the Nyquist. Solution? Sample at a ridiculous rate, like 100KHz, and filter gently. Your ripples will be outside the audible range, and you'll be able to cut it much more gently.
Having said that, with good filtering the ripples are still pretty minimal, way above the 'content' of the program, and with today's distortion aka mastering, and your home equipment or even so-called audiophile equipment, a few db here and there around 19 KHz isn't going to be noticeable. This ripple almost certainly existed in the analog equipment (microphones, rooms, etc) involved in the original recording, and nobody cried about that.
As a former audio engineer with some ranking success, I can tell you that it's true -- delivering high-sample rate audio as an end format is really pointless. It hardly makes sense in a studio, and definitely is illogical for the distribution of a final mix.
However, there is an increase in quality using 24 bit. Most people just assume increasing the bit depth is the same as increasing the sample rate, but this is incorrect and short-sided. With higher bit depths, you can get your analog components operating a little further away from the noise floor. This also makes dithering much less noticeable (the noise you hear when you crank the volume up as a song fades out). Why? There are more "levels" for each sample to be recorded into. It's like going from 16 to 24 bit color. You would notice this.
For the 192 KHz fans out there, there is direct and proven mathematical reasoning for why 44 KHz audio is plenty. That, and your equipment probably can't produce it. Your converters probably suck at this frequency, and your ears definitely can't vibrate that quickly. More samples doesn't "smooth out" the waveform.
You hit the nail on the head man.
I can't wait for a system where each application automatically takes up the entire screen!
Just imagine, reading facebook.com on my 30 inch screen, FULLY MAXIMIZED, so that no other applications can distract me. Or, if I decide to code, EACH terminal could span the entire desktop. No longer will I have to struggle with seeing two things at once -- from now on, it's peace of mind with GNOME 3.
Thankfully I can now give gvim the space it has always deserved -- a fully uncluttered 2560 x 1600 space. And when I decide to listen to music, my music app can take up the entire space too! Imagine, seeing nothing but whitespace. Thank goodness someone thought of this. I can finally relax and do what I've always wanted to do: use my computer, one app at a time, in FULL SCREEN!
If you think about it, this is almost as good as DOS. No more annoying window title bars and multi-app desktop usage. No more extra buttons and widgets. Just one thing and one thing only -- what you're going to work on. I can't wait to develop kernel drivers and work on my apps this way. The fact that when I currently work I can actually see (and be distracted by) about three to four windows at a time is just devastating. I have to (currently) *navigate* to each and every window, and precariously drag the window across my entire desktop to achieve this effect, only to remain haunted by menu bars, title bars, and application switchers.
If only they could put a stop to all those pesky background processes and really get it down to just one single process. Then all the processes on my computer wouldn't have to compete for computer resources. Just like DOS, I'm telling you, I can't wait, we're getting back to the single-purpose one-thing-at-a-time operating system!
Obligatory slashdot sayings:
I for one welcome our maximized-app overlords!
In Soviet-Russia, window manager maximizes YOU!
One app to rule them all!
It was as if millions of apps suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, replaced with calming whitespace.
Couldn't they just compile the 32 bit version with gcc on windows, and accept that it may not be quite as optimally built?
Why not a kindle or nook? Because they suck at reading PDFs. Yes, they can technically show a PDF on the screen. But unless that PDF is formatted for a small screen size, the experience is going to be awful. The more expensive devices (iPad, color-screen-glossy nook-kindle-whatever, $400+) have solved this with better multi-touch zoom and pan options, but then you're going to pick the iPad if they're in the same price arena. Just go on youtube and look for "kindle touch pdf reading" and you'll see how awful it is.
For someone trying to study, you need the ability to quickly browse material and annotate, and the cheaper devices don't offer this in any reasonable way.
So why not a netbook? Sure, a netbook can display PDFs quickly. But if your input is limited to mouse and keyboard, you're ten times less likely to annotate. Which is the function you would normally perform on a real paper textbook. So the iPad and other stylus-bearing devices come out on top, due to their size, advanced software, and input methods.
Here's the problem: You can block "Lightspeed" from deploying devices known to cause harmful interference to GPS signals. Big deal. What you can't do is make it "illegal" to jam GPS. Well, you can make it illegal, but it's a matter of enforcement. Expecting it to work 100%, especially in a battle field, is stupid. Your enemy will build GPS jammers by the dozen and hide them all over the place once they realize this is how you guide your missiles.
All I'm saying, is that this is a symptom of a larger problem: depending on easily jammed GPS.
I realize the military will just triangulate and find the jammers. But a jammer just has to hide their equipment in nearby hospitals and grocery stores, and use intelligent timing and antenna arrangements.... they can make triangulation a very difficult and time-consuming operation. And once the devices are found and destroyed, it's another $15 to deploy another one somewhere else.
I think it's a good idea to try and prevent what you can, such as by not certifying equipment that causes harmful interference. But let's not think this is the real problem with GPS...
It's not surprising that an RF signal can be interfered with remotely. Whether the signal was for a baby monitor, an emergency room health computer system, remote aircraft control, etc, people will always be astonished that they were susceptible to interference.
But honestly, it's an RF signal. Blocking the signal is about the same for any given service. Some are a little more robust than others, but it's the same mathematical game.
Let's get over the sensationalism and realize the real problem: We had false expectations of GPS and therefore should not have depended on this technology in defense systems.
Adblock plus in google chrome works fine for me -- but I don't think most people make decisions based on adblocking extensions, so this is not a reason for market dominance.
What can I say, this is the result of the wrong focus. Software engineers made decisions about the direction this company went, and drove it into the ground.
It began as a beautiful thing, something that was needed in a world of terrible browsers. Netscape was over-bloated, IE was, well, IE. Firefox took it by storm because it provided what wasn't available. It was fast, slick, and most of all, capable. I remember being one of the first to compile Mozilla on Mac OS X as a mach-o binary, so I've been there and I remember watching it as it grew up, matured, and then began complaining about the neighbors.
These days, it's an enormous pig of an application. The folks running the show at FF continue to drive focus into stupid areas. There have been massive UI shifts that alienate users. The version number thing is just stupid, everyone knows that. Why did they do it? To compete with Chrome -- can you believe that? They thought Chrome's success was because of version numbers?! Oh wait, let's add bing as a default search engine. That ought to help. How about we get some more broken-UI themes while we're at it. Firefox, your browser, your way. How about we move the tabs over here, do this with the menu bar.. that should help us compete with Chrome. Right...
So I hope it dies. And I hope it dies fast, rather than dragging everyone down, kicking and screaming. "Waaa, competitors, we want your money." Good luck with that. Get real, Chrome has shown innovation far above and beyond the old Mozilla codebase. Firefox is practically windows in this sense -- old code, old technology, new "looks", stupid versioning (NT, 98, 2000 ME, XP, V, 7, 8... excuse me if I got it out of order as I really don't use windows any more than is necessary, which is essentially zero). And stupid management.
To the FF developers that wrote good awesome code, please find a project more deserving of your talent, and let this one die. Software has to evolve with the trends and overall fitness of the software to the environment. In this case, it's time to embrace the new species.
Depending on how large your dataset is, you may have luck using Matlab (or the opensource gnu octave). These programs will let you do *whatever* you want with the data (plotting, correlation, fft, etc).
With at least Matlab, there are some MySQL plugins available that will let you get data out of your database and into arrays rather quickly. And of course, both matlab and gnu octave let you import csv and plaintext datafiles.
Here is the matlab plugin I have used very successfully (and it's open source. No idea if it would work with octave):
http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~almgren/mysql/
You will need some background with math, statistics, and programming to effectively do this. If you don't have the skills, learn them or pay up for some overpriced commercial product...
While I can't comment on the latest GNOME and KDE interfaces, I can say that when Apple gave us Aqua and Mac OS X, it was a real breath of fresh air. With a few exceptions, every version has added new and useful features to the GUI that make my work more productive.
When I try and use a windows pc with 7 or vista, it is really painful. I still can't get over how they botched the task bar. So I will agree with y'all there that windows has taken a turn for the worst. The PC next to me has an icon in the task bar for firefox. Every time I click it I get a new window with an identical firefox icon in the taskbar. It's just maddening. I'm sure I can right-click and choose properties and click some other tab and then click options and then turn it off and press apply... but it's a shame to have to tweak something so obvious.
As for linux, I used to like xfce and blackbox. When I'm using linux as a desktop, I have totally different expectations. I don't expect drag-and-drop to work, I don't need a "Finder", and I usually am only interested in one or two specialized applications.
Overall, I believe the GUI should stay out of the way of the user. Think of a typical work day -- you're using applications. Concepts like the "taskbar" (or whatever it's called in KDE and GNOME) really are not programs the user uses except as a utility to switch applications and windows. Thus, they ought not be so prominently visible. Except when you need them. Hence auto-hide, which I find doesn't always work out on windows. Heck, for some users all they need is a giant "the internet" button.
I appreciate Apple's Mac OS X interface because it manages to stay out of the way and yet be incredibly useful and (excuse the use of this word if you develop AI) thoughtful.
Since the devices would likely be donated anyway (the same folks don't typically carry any sort of currency), I think it's reasonable to assume the final product will include a daytime solar cell and a battery. My guess is the device doesn't use much current so the solar cell and battery need-not be the expensive type we typically associated with these devices in home-power applications.
Is it a "boat-load" or a "bit"?
See, this is what matters. I agree, it's not a surprise that keeping the TV on all day is detrimental to developing minds. Common sense? That sounds fine.
So why do we need a "huge grain" of salt? Your quantities are very confusing.
I agree.
Some friends of ours once called us over because they claimed their TV, radio, and wifi were not working well at their house, and their neighbors agreed that this was also affecting them lately.
I went over with my analyzer and field strength meters, only to discover that their amplified TV antenna's power cord fell out, causing almost total loss to the digital converter box. The other "problems" quickly disappeared as well.... hmm... ;-)