as suggested in another comment, contact the manufacturer of the speakers and see if they 1) still exit , 2) offer a repair service. If you've enjoyed them that much for so long it might very well be worth it to send them for repair. obviously out of warrenty, but if its just the surround they might charge to much.
and btw, 2,467,000,000 * 4 != 9,868,000,000,000 (trillion) , but 9,868,000,000 (9.8 billion) Which is probably incorrect seeing as its unlikly that they spend the same amount each quarter.
I'd hate to say it causs i'll get +flamebait, but it is probably because of less than optimum linux based application performance. I have a XP 2500 w/dual channel memory and i've encoded the entire Star Trek TNG to DiVX 5 using the Gordian Knot suite. each video took around an hour from DVD rip to completed AVI. that all included two pass encoding and a seperate audio encoding.
Encoding a Full DVD takes considerably less than 5 hours, probably more like 2 using GordianKnot.
you say " there is no reason for McDonalds to not use the hand/fingerprint data in some other way, if they wanted to, for example checking for criminal records, "
I dont know how it is up in canada, but here in the U.S. Employers have a RIGHT to know the criminal background of the prospective employee. HOWEVER, Employers do NOT have the right to discriminate against the persons previous criminal activity unless it is a threat to their workplace (you dont want a convicted bank robber working as a teller for First USA do you? )
Employers can use your S.S. number your drivers license number or hell, even your first and last name (OMG Personal data!!) to check your criminal background records.
Also, i would like you to find where in Canadian law (or U.S. law eve) it says that the Employee has less rights than the Employer.
This isnt new, I changed 3 of my dedicated servers (2 debian 1 redhat) to Gentoo using a doc thats almost 2 years old that was based of a "how to remote install BSD"
you can do this with any system that lets you bootstrap the OS from the harddrive (i.e. gentoos stage tarballs).
Well, to automate something like this, you'd have to build/contract a machine to attach the device from the line to the computers USB (located near the line of course) ports then you could write software that detects the USB device and automaticly formats it.
Now we have some new costs involved. 1) you still have to have people to run the machine and maintain it. that's not costly but experianced techs can run up to 100k a year. 2) you will slow the overall process down. why? you have to wait for the machine to move the USB device or the USB outlet into position and wait for windows to regonize it (couple seconds or more) and then format. with manual labor you can have a bucket of USB devices that need to be formated. you wont slow the line down and decrease production. 3) the machine itself could cost hundreds of thousands in R&D plus prototyping and actuall machining of the device.
You're are right taht you could automate the software part of this pretty easily, but to automate a completed USB keychain device attached to the computer automaticly would be quite a costly project. Hiring a bunch of low-cost labor would be far more effective, but then we're back to my first post. Is all that worth it to save a quarter?
ya, you can sell unformated USB keychain storage devices without any FAT fee's. But i highly doubt that a manufactur would pay people to sit in front of a box and format the USB devices before packaging and shipping just to save a quarter.
Think about it for one second, would you want to be the guy that has to plug hundreds of thousands of USB keychain devices and format them, 8 hours a day over the course of a year?
In fact, it probably would cost more. to get good production you'd have to have way more than 10 people, you certianly couldnt pay anyone less than 25k a year to do that horrible job. so you'd sink more than 250k.year just trying to save a quarter.
I work at a printing plant (currently the number one company in the world w00t). We use advantech panel computers w/touch screen displays at the back of the press and soon in the color booth. They get abused with ink, oil, and various solvents and after a year still have NO "dead spots" on the screen where it doesnt work. Using your finger the mouse cursor does jump around a bit but i always use the back end of a pen or another plastic tool to move the mouse/icons around.
wtf? There is a market for "sensors" and other types of data-logging, but the market this guy refers to there is none. as other posts mention, there is no market because this is an illogical idea.
1) There probably is 0 market for this device.. no wait, 1 person market.
2) you couldnt hope to get something like this without spending lots of money (well more than $10)
3) if you have any EE experiance or even PIC programming experiance, you could whip one up yourself using some schematics found here, http://www.commlinx.com.au/schematics.htm and learn some basic RS-232 programming, then get yourself a serial to USB converter (around 40$) or just use the standard serial port instead.
"I can tell where sound is coming from by the difference in time it takes the sound to reach both ears. If the sound is coming from one speaker, there is no way to make it take a different length of time to reach one ear vs. the other"
Obviously you've never heard of the concept called Time-delay.
Its a good thing my head unit has that too, there is almost 20 inches difference between the left and right speakers. with no delay, the right side is so much louder (not louder in reality, but louder because the sound reaches my ear first).
I set the delay at 1.4ms and bam, almost perfect soundstaging:D
My sony 5.1 home reciver has time delay built into each channel also. this helps place the speakers into exactly where they should be.
Until you actually listen to these systems, don't say that they don't do any good. Although you probably experience time-shifted audio every time you go to the theaters..
sit in a room (blindfolded) one thats pretty quiet or that has lots of fabric on walls or windows (this will help deaden the sound and be quieter)
get a freind to stand in various places in the room, clap his hands wistle or make some single sound.
you WILL be able to tell what part of the room he is in. front right, front left, rear right, rear left front center, or directly behind you.
The brain and your ears process the levels of the sound received at each ear and determine what ear the sound was the loudest and that's where the sound originated.
If you cannot process this information, you have a defect or are deaf.
You also say that "Even that won't work if you're wearing headphones" , which i assume you're talking about surround sound.
This is obvious as to why it wont work. Both channels of audio are reaching your ears at the same time.
"And since when you're watching telly, you are looking at the picture, your brain is getting enough clues from the visuals to work out where the sound should be coming from" Ya this is sort of correct. your eyes can see the plane flying to you and you can hear it getting "closer" because the audio gets louder. when the plane flys off screen, the audio weakens but what happens? your mind doesnt think that ' oh now its behind me the sound must be coming from there ', if that was true there would NOT be 5.1 or even 4 channel audio.
What your brain eyes and ears NEED to think that the plane has flown past and behind you is a properly setup and tuned surround system.
I would also dare to say that you've never been to a good theater. all modern and many older theaters have awesome Dolby Digital or THX certified sound systems that can place audio exactly where it is sopposed to be. Where the directory intended it to be.
...in linux, except that in kernel 2.7, some wacked out kernel devs would start forcing the need to write code to make the wrapper for windows vxd|dll driver files effectively broken.
Yes, it IS copyrighted material. printed documents, especially magazines, are copyrighted materials unless they specificly state that you can re-distribute the data.
i print up dozens of magazines that have data as such (we recently printed a manufactuers directory for a medical product magazine) and all of them specificly say that reproduction of that material is NOT legal without permission of the publisher.
I still dont see why because it is online it should be exempt from the copyright laws.
Sorry, but i dont see how this bill is really anything new or how it is 'hurting' our freedom?
lets take this example from the article.
"In one instance, a Minnesota magazine publisher had no legal recourse when its entire directory of local schools was copied and redistributed. In other cases, pornographic Web site operators have copied real-estate listings and lawyers' directories to lure unwitting visitors, he said. "
This is online, and apparently it is totally Legal and O.K. to do that. But why? Many years ago (5) i wanted to take the entire compiled Car Stereo and Electronics componant directory (like, 300-400 pages), turn it into a database where people can search for things online. Now i knew that to just go and do that was illegal because i would of been publishing copyrighted information without the authors consent (which i actually did get an Ok to do this).
The directory was compiled and created from public information (calling the manu. and getting specs and prices), but because I did not or take part in creating the directory itself.
The Information contained in the directory is not copyrighted, but the entire directory in itself is whats copyrighted.
If I spent xx time creating a listing of schools in the area, and someone else came along and copied that listing exactly how i had created, i would be pretty upset.
This has nothing to do with 'OMG RIAA SUCKS' or 'USA IS BOUGHT BY CORPORATIONS OMG IM MOVING TO CANADA'. The companies that create products, provide services and distribute invaluable information and other data have EVERY SAME right that the people of this country do.
powernotebook laptop $1800
And the powernotebook laptop has a 17" wide screen formated LCD !!!
Hell, with some of the awesome case-mod painting tutorials, i'll be able to do the alienware pretty paint job myself!
On crashes where the system hangs, the error is trapped. older nVidia drivers had some bugs in them that would causs Windows XP to be un-responsive and you would have to manually restart the computer.
When you logged back in and looked at the event viewer, you will see an entry saying something along the lines of, "Windows has recovered from a system hang due to driver failure ". I had this problem a few times.
If you had full system reporting on, it would upload a bug report (NOT automaticly, but you select whether to upload it or not), and then it would redirect you to a MS bug report page (again, A USER CHOICE). if you did make it that far, you get a bug id number and you can track progress on that bug.
Later on the nvidia hang was fixed.
Now to anyone who is going to say 'haha drivers shouldnt lock up windows', obviously dont have an nvidia card in Linux. it is widely known that the nvidia drivers CAN and DO lock up XFree86 which causses the system to be unresponsive (can not switch vt's ) and requires a manual reboot.
Slashdot Mirror
as suggested in another comment, contact the manufacturer of the speakers and see if they 1) still exit , 2) offer a repair service. If you've enjoyed them that much for so long it might very well be worth it to send them for repair. obviously out of warrenty, but if its just the surround they might charge to much.
I would be interested in why Slackware would be a faster distro then Gentoo, when you compile both from sources.
The only relevant things i can see that would make a difference would be the kernel version + any options, gcc version and the compiler options.
If you mean faster as in "install it and lets get it up and going" , then yes, lots of distro's are faster than gentoo in that respect.
But that is not at all what Gentoo is about.
$300? for Windows Xp ?
c ription=37-102-143&depa=6
c ription=12-102-104&depa=0
you need to find a different store.
Newegg has it for $139.00
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?des
i can hear it now "but but you gotta buy it with hardware !!"
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?des
"You can use this item to satisfy any Product that has *Must be Purchased with Hardware!!* Requirement.
Free with any Microsoft Software Purchase "
what the hell is 2 467 000 000 ?
and btw, 2,467,000,000 * 4 != 9,868,000,000,000 (trillion) , but 9,868,000,000 (9.8 billion) Which is probably incorrect seeing as its unlikly that they spend the same amount each quarter.
I'd hate to say it causs i'll get +flamebait, but it is probably because of less than optimum linux based application performance. I have a XP 2500 w/dual channel memory and i've encoded the entire Star Trek TNG to DiVX 5 using the Gordian Knot suite. each video took around an hour from DVD rip to completed AVI. that all included two pass encoding and a seperate audio encoding.
Encoding a Full DVD takes considerably less than 5 hours, probably more like 2 using GordianKnot.
check out the last thing on this page,
http://www.aerogel.com/technology2.htm
So, are you telling me that you'd sit there and scale dead fish 8 hours a day 5 days a week because the manager was nice to you?
There are many many many more reasons for a high rate of turnover than 'the boss is a dick'
you say " there is no reason for McDonalds to not use the hand/fingerprint data in some other way, if they wanted to, for example checking for criminal records, "
I dont know how it is up in canada, but here in the U.S. Employers have a RIGHT to know the criminal background of the prospective employee. HOWEVER, Employers do NOT have the right to discriminate against the persons previous criminal activity unless it is a threat to their workplace (you dont want a convicted bank robber working as a teller for First USA do you? )
Employers can use your S.S. number your drivers license number or hell, even your first and last name (OMG Personal data!!) to check your criminal background records.
Also, i would like you to find where in Canadian law (or U.S. law eve) it says that the Employee has less rights than the Employer.
This isnt new, I changed 3 of my dedicated servers (2 debian 1 redhat) to Gentoo using a doc thats almost 2 years old that was based of a "how to remote install BSD"
you can do this with any system that lets you bootstrap the OS from the harddrive (i.e. gentoos stage tarballs).
Well, to automate something like this, you'd have to build/contract a machine to attach the device from the line to the computers USB (located near the line of course) ports then you could write software that detects the USB device and automaticly formats it.
Now we have some new costs involved.
1) you still have to have people to run the machine and maintain it. that's not costly but experianced techs can run up to 100k a year.
2) you will slow the overall process down. why? you have to wait for the machine to move the USB device or the USB outlet into position and wait for windows to regonize it (couple seconds or more) and then format. with manual labor you can have a bucket of USB devices that need to be formated. you wont slow the line down and decrease production.
3) the machine itself could cost hundreds of thousands in R&D plus prototyping and actuall machining of the device.
You're are right taht you could automate the software part of this pretty easily, but to automate a completed USB keychain device attached to the computer automaticly would be quite a costly project. Hiring a bunch of low-cost labor would be far more effective, but then we're back to my first post. Is all that worth it to save a quarter?
ya, you can sell unformated USB keychain storage devices without any FAT fee's. But i highly doubt that a manufactur would pay people to sit in front of a box and format the USB devices before packaging and shipping just to save a quarter.
Think about it for one second, would you want to be the guy that has to plug hundreds of thousands of USB keychain devices and format them, 8 hours a day over the course of a year?
In fact, it probably would cost more. to get good production you'd have to have way more than 10 people, you certianly couldnt pay anyone less than 25k a year to do that horrible job. so you'd sink more than 250k.year just trying to save a quarter.
I work at a printing plant (currently the number one company in the world w00t). We use advantech panel computers w/touch screen displays at the back of the press and soon in the color booth. They get abused with ink, oil, and various solvents and after a year still have NO "dead spots" on the screen where it doesnt work. Using your finger the mouse cursor does jump around a bit but i always use the back end of a pen or another plastic tool to move the mouse/icons around.
http://www.advantech.com/ACG/
wtf? There is a market for "sensors" and other types of data-logging, but the market this guy refers to there is none. as other posts mention, there is no market because this is an illogical idea.
1) There probably is 0 market for this device.. no wait, 1 person market.
2) you couldnt hope to get something like this without spending lots of money (well more than $10)
3) if you have any EE experiance or even PIC programming experiance, you could whip one up yourself using some schematics found here, http://www.commlinx.com.au/schematics.htm and learn some basic RS-232 programming, then get yourself a serial to USB converter (around 40$) or just use the standard serial port instead.
Obviously you've never heard of the concept called Time-delay.
Its a good thing my head unit has that too, there is almost 20 inches difference between the left and right speakers. with no delay, the right side is so much louder (not louder in reality, but louder because the sound reaches my ear first).
I set the delay at 1.4ms and bam, almost perfect soundstaging :D
My sony 5.1 home reciver has time delay built into each channel also. this helps place the speakers into exactly where they should be.
Until you actually listen to these systems, don't say that they don't do any good. Although you probably experience time-shifted audio every time you go to the theaters..
here, lets try this.
sit in a room (blindfolded) one thats pretty quiet or that has lots of fabric on walls or windows (this will help deaden the sound and be quieter)
get a freind to stand in various places in the room, clap his hands wistle or make some single sound.
you WILL be able to tell what part of the room he is in. front right, front left, rear right, rear left front center, or directly behind you.
The brain and your ears process the levels of the sound received at each ear and determine what ear the sound was the loudest and that's where the sound originated.
If you cannot process this information, you have a defect or are deaf.
You also say that "Even that won't work if you're wearing headphones" , which i assume you're talking about surround sound.
This is obvious as to why it wont work. Both channels of audio are reaching your ears at the same time.
"And since when you're watching telly, you are looking at the picture, your brain is getting enough clues from the visuals to work out where the sound should be coming from" Ya this is sort of correct. your eyes can see the plane flying to you and you can hear it getting "closer" because the audio gets louder. when the plane flys off screen, the audio weakens but what happens? your mind doesnt think that ' oh now its behind me the sound must be coming from there ', if that was true there would NOT be 5.1 or even 4 channel audio.
What your brain eyes and ears NEED to think that the plane has flown past and behind you is a properly setup and tuned surround system.
I would also dare to say that you've never been to a good theater. all modern and many older theaters have awesome Dolby Digital or THX certified sound systems that can place audio exactly where it is sopposed to be. Where the directory intended it to be.
oh ya, that'll work real good.
"There are even bands from Canada that don't make it to the U.S. "
Ya, and look how bad the bands are that do come from Canada !
...in linux, except that in kernel 2.7, some wacked out kernel devs would start forcing the need to write code to make the wrapper for windows vxd|dll driver files effectively broken.
is being 15 minutes early.
simple as that.
http://www.linuxguru.be/
Yes, it IS copyrighted material. printed documents, especially magazines, are copyrighted materials unless they specificly state that you can re-distribute the data.
i print up dozens of magazines that have data as such (we recently printed a manufactuers directory for a medical product magazine) and all of them specificly say that reproduction of that material is NOT legal without permission of the publisher.
I still dont see why because it is online it should be exempt from the copyright laws.
lets take this example from the article.
"In one instance, a Minnesota magazine publisher had no legal recourse when its entire directory of local schools was copied and redistributed. In other cases, pornographic Web site operators have copied real-estate listings and lawyers' directories to lure unwitting visitors, he said. " This is online, and apparently it is totally Legal and O.K. to do that. But why? Many years ago (5) i wanted to take the entire compiled Car Stereo and Electronics componant directory (like, 300-400 pages), turn it into a database where people can search for things online. Now i knew that to just go and do that was illegal because i would of been publishing copyrighted information without the authors consent (which i actually did get an Ok to do this).
The directory was compiled and created from public information (calling the manu. and getting specs and prices), but because I did not or take part in creating the directory itself.
The Information contained in the directory is not copyrighted, but the entire directory in itself is whats copyrighted.
If I spent xx time creating a listing of schools in the area, and someone else came along and copied that listing exactly how i had created, i would be pretty upset.
This has nothing to do with 'OMG RIAA SUCKS' or 'USA IS BOUGHT BY CORPORATIONS OMG IM MOVING TO CANADA'. The companies that create products, provide services and distribute invaluable information and other data have EVERY SAME right that the people of this country do.
alienware laptop $3100
powernotebook laptop $1800
And the powernotebook laptop has a 17" wide screen formated LCD !!!
Hell, with some of the awesome case-mod painting tutorials, i'll be able to do the alienware pretty paint job myself!
On crashes where the system hangs, the error is trapped. older nVidia drivers had some bugs in them that would causs Windows XP to be un-responsive and you would have to manually restart the computer.
.
When you logged back in and looked at the event viewer, you will see an entry saying something along the lines of, "Windows has recovered from a system hang due to driver failure ". I had this problem a few times
If you had full system reporting on, it would upload a bug report (NOT automaticly, but you select whether to upload it or not), and then it would redirect you to a MS bug report page (again, A USER CHOICE). if you did make it that far, you get a bug id number and you can track progress on that bug.
Later on the nvidia hang was fixed.
Now to anyone who is going to say 'haha drivers shouldnt lock up windows', obviously dont have an nvidia card in Linux. it is widely known that the nvidia drivers CAN and DO lock up XFree86 which causses the system to be unresponsive (can not switch vt's ) and requires a manual reboot.