This is rather like flash, but for video content rather than animated vector graphics. Maybe not even that. More like a video file + markup much like something which could be played in a specialised player, but superimposing links? Doesn't seem that revolutionary to me, the DVD format already allows for something like this - albeit in a more rigid form.
However, the reason this is particularly interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that
Provides loads of possibilities for pr0n jokes
Screenshot will probably be more exciting for MacOS fans than pr0n itself, look at that lovely Aqua...
Actually, it will happen with the same frequency but you will get more money, since you have set a precedent.
This is the reason corporate economics is so screwed. You deliberately set out to cost the company more money than necessary, and believe in some false economic model. This is why bosses don't trust employees, and why budgets are so shrouded in mystery.
If you save money, you might just get a reduction in the time taken for the upgrade cycle to come full circle. You may not. However, the wasteful attitude that you display in this thread just shows how "detached" people are, and the mistrust between bosses and employees cuts both ways, since neither are following the same models.
For sure, bosses are often greedy, and so employees will seek to get as much as they can from them ("they'll never give us anything anyway") but this attitude is so deeply ingrained that entire government departments work by these rules - that a budget allocated and not entirely spent must be reduced in the next cycle. I hate this, and anyone who just accepts it is just showing that you cannot complain about the system, at all... because you are letting it control you.
When money is available, you buy the top-of-the-line computer. You may be using it for the next ten years.
That is short sighted. Paying an extra $300 just for a little more speed, in the long run, just means that the budget to upgrade is higher than it could have been, so it will happen more infrequently, without other external economic influences of course.
4. voting my small number of shares of Adobe stock against the board of directors and all of their recomendations.
This is an important point. Further down the thread you have been mocked for having stock in Adobe and all that, but....
If you disagree with a company's policy in certain areas, but it's a profitable company, buying shares is a good plan. Especially if you can get above the minimum shareholding in order to attend annual general meetings, etc (often this limit is very low). You then get to put questions to the board. Being a shareholder gives you good leverage in a company, or at least more leverage than just being Joe Public. Also, you maybe get dividends and stuff;-)
Greenpeace and others have possibly adopted this tactic, if memory serves, in order to legitimately attend and table questions at multinational company meetings. I generally agree with this, because at the end of the day, corporations are becoming bigger than governments... scary though it may seem, maybe only way to beat the system is to join it and fight from the inside. Like all these people who don't vote, and then complain when the candidate they *thought* would win does not - they have not played the system and have no excuse. Apathy and opinionated chatter is not getting us anywhere. Power to the people can only happen if people use the avenues and channels of democracy as they stand.
I think that the "right" to download is a difficult issue. Basically, we don't have that right. I don't think I have either, and I rarely download. However, I have downloaded a lot of stuff I own on vinyl, cassette and old scratched CDs... I don't consider that to be theft.
Now, I also don't like record companies. But I would not share files just for that.
What it really comes down to is that I have evidently ended up downloading stuff I don't own, but at the time I could not find said material available in a format that I could easily purchase (one track available only on a compilation box set - do I have to buy the whole thing?) and indeed a lot of other stuff I was downloading whilst in Morocco, where you CANNOT legally buy non pirated music or videos anyway - even the local hypermarket stopped stocking DVDs when DivX rips and VCDs started being available in local markets.
The record industry just doesn't get any sympathy, and it's easy to see why. People have always bootlegged, copied CDs and Vinyl to cassettes, etc - the problem is just that it's easy to do in less than real time (compiling a CD doesn't take as long or longer than listening to the sum of the tracks any more) so the industry is panicking a bit more.
But I think most would agree - the thing to do is to fix the supply chain problem, and make music more available - I would happily pay *artists* directly, cutting out the middleman, if I could; lots of local bands are allowing just that by selling homebrew CDs at gigs and so on.
Well let's just say that the implications are both more severe, especially from a moral perspective. Taking a life is not like taking theoretical money from the pocket of some big corporation (the record label) who may never have had your money anyway...
People went out of their way to buy it. Supply and demand rules the market. Always has, always will.
Now, trying to stop filesharing and levying a tax on blank CDRoms is a terrible double standard. If the tax is made to give copyright owners their dues, then I should be able to pay that tax on my blanks and copy what I want, because the dues are being collected indirectly anyway. If I want just to copy my OWN material I am still paying the tax so I am accumulating quite a bit of "right" to copy more music.
Then, they make copying music and downloading etc illegal - but by the same system they are admitting that everyone does it. Pretty stupid IMHO.
Murder is a ridiculous comparison. Murder requires premeditation, physical contact, and a clear knowledge of the implications of one's acts. Hardly on a par with listening to a couple of bootlegged MP3s, friend.
Methinks that the conference's local profile might benefit from a name change.
Only if there was an equivalent Irish desktop effort called leprechaun, which would have a themed GUI-nness and WhIsky-Fi networking, shamrocks for the icons and dialogue boxes with [ Awright ] [ Nah Thanks ], [ Bugger it ] as the options.
You're slightly confusing the RIAA equalization with elliptical filtering like on Neumann lathes- the RIAA equalization curve is more about attentuating surface noise. The elliptical filtering reduces out-of-phase bass content for the reason you mention.
I have read from several sources, and the logic seems right to me, that RIAA equalisation helps amplitude issues. Maybe you're right about surface noise, do you have any references? I'd be keen to read up on that.
No no- rumble and noise isn't warmth, not even slightly.
Another post in this thread seems to disagree, having played an identical CD track twice, in a blind test, adding vinyl noise (just a sample of hiss, cracks, pops and hum) to the track. Warmth is a subjective thing.
From personal experience, having ripped several of my old Beatles LPs and some classic Manitas de Plata and such, the "warmth" is somewhat conveyed on my ripped vinyl CDs. I just remove big clicks and pops and maximise volume, doing no noise reduction. They sound different than some of the remastered CDs I have of certain tracks on the albums, for sure.
As for "digital flaws" and all that, really we're reaching into good and bad DtoA territory. But I agree that digital this that and the other doesn't a great sound make. Adding excessive compression in all the latest pop rubbish, and you end up with CDs that sound just awful.
The best thing about good analogue recordings is the 'air' around the instruments. The soi-disant clean sound of solo string instruments on many CDs bears little resemblance to the sound of a real instrument in a real space.
Interesting point... in fact, it's probably the noise in the recording that helps. Some of the noise that is maybe removed or lost in recordings is breathing sounds and natural air movement, and also just plain hiss can add to a recording of stringed instruments by interacting with the harmonics and all that
...although I do have solid state electronics in the system... which old wind up 78rpm players didn't have. I bet some people claimed they sounded better than the newer 33rpm records with electric motors and all that, too.
It is unlikely that such a claim would be made.
Yeah good point. I was being a bit sarcastic, but I'm sure there were some people who just preferred the ritual of windup and the horn and all that... just out of habit. I should not, however, have used the word "sounded better" in that phrase.
One of the reasons that LPs have a different sound is to do with the mastering process. The lower frequencies (bass) cannot be mastered at full volume and cut onto a record, because they'd cause the grooves to be too wide and literally make the needle jump out of the groove. So, the bass frequencies are attenuated or reduced in order to get "as much sound" in the grooves as possible (referred to as pre-emphasis). Then, the levels are all set to as high as they will go while bearing in mind that a groove will be wider as amplitude increases, so if a side of a record is going to be over 20 minutes or so long, then the grooves need to be narrower to fit all the tracks on one side, so the levels are adjusted accordingly.
Now, the equalisation curve was specified by our good friends, the RIAA... all amplifiers that have a "Phono" input use an RIAA EQ curve in the pre-amp stage to boost/reduce the frequencies to get back to a flat response that should sound like the studio mix off the (pre vinyl mastering) master tape.
Often these days all mastering is done at a flat EQ curve, because CDs can handle this, and then mastering happens *again* for the vinyl stage. It used to be the other way round, so early CDs were replaced with "digitally remastered" cuts - Brothers in Arms, Pink Floyd catalogue, that sort of stuff - and had a sound that was more faithful to the original, pristine LPs without sounding "tinny" like the first released CDs.
Digital to Analogue converters and preamps are so good these days that there is little difference between vinyl and CD. A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc).
What I like about LPs is the bigger artwork, the physical effort required to play a recording, and the soothing 33 and one third RPM of the disc as it spins on my old JVC turntable. Also, records which are well kept - as they generally are in my collection - sound pretty good too. However, they're not *better* than CDs. Just different. Old analogue stuff has afficionados everywhere, but please stop bleating that it's because it's better. It's just different.
One interesting argument though - a big thing in digital audio is to keep a fully digital path all the way to the very last, then have a top D to A converter right in the amp and straight to the speakers, some people even sending a digital feed to speakers which have reference D to A converters or even some system to use the digital signal to generate an analogue wave which goes beyond normal D to A electronics (can't remember too much about that, Google around if you feel so inclined). With my vinyl setup, however, I have a signal path that is fully analogue, and no need of a DtoA stage at all;-) - although I do have solid state electronics in the system... which old wind up 78rpm players didn't have. I bet some people claimed they sounded better than the newer 33rpm records with electric motors and all that, too.
You find one fault in the post, and suddenly you think it should not have been moderated the way it was. Well, that's your right I suppose. I could care less one way or the other about the moderation. However, your attitude I find a little impolite.
Nevertheless, you make an interesting point. There is clustering available, but it sounds to me a lot more like high availability than parallel processing clustering. I bet few sites worldwide actually deployed it as a parallel computing resource. In any case, it doesn't make sense to use a GUI based OS with a lot of extra "baggage" in order to do the kind of supercomputing style clustering - where parallel processing and high calculation speed is the goal, rather than high availability - which is the context of the article.
Thanks for pointing the link out though. Can't wait to install an NT based cluster;-)
But that doesn't mean they have to push Windows solutions, since they're really more into a full on research program looking at computing theory, a level up from the "let's bash MS about their desktop and server dominance strategies" - both these guys have long histories in the Internet and networking and clustering, worked on PDP-10s and their ancestors, etc.
From the MS site, the Bay Area Research Center is "... a small Microsoft Research group located in the San Francisco Bay Area. We've been working on two large projects with other universities, companies, other Microsoft Research groups, and with Microsoft product groups in Redmond and Cupertino. These projects are Scalable Servers and Media Presence. "
I can't see scalability involving commodity hardware with MS OSes. In spite of Microsoft's desktop domination strategies, and small business server dominance (arguably, at least for the moment) they know they won't be taken seriously about clustering Windows 2003 server, purely because there is no design AFAIK in the kernel for operating in clusters in the first place. This is supercomputing using commodity hardware, not supercrashing using commodity OSes. Linux is perfectly situated to be recommended by anyone because it is not a competitors product, per se.
The homepages of the two men can be seen here, if anyone is interested in some of the more interesting history of the two. Little of it has to do with Microsoft propaganda and the marketing machine:-
I said the comfort zone was dependent on content. Until you can name content that requires more than a constant 512kbps and will be cheaply available to all, the comfort zone will not move. I didn't say it would never move.
I shouldn't have to pay extra because he chose to use a cell phone instead of a land-line. (The way I get around this at the moment is just to refuse to call people in Europe unless they give me a landline number to call.)
There are two ways to look at this. On one hand, you are quite correct. If your correspondant has chosen a cell phone over a land line, and you want to call them to chat, be friendly, or do business, then they should be making an effort to be reachable cheaply.
On the other hand, if the cell phone is imposed on that person by their boss, to be contacted at all hours, then that person should not end up in a situation where it is costing them money to be called by business contacts with support problems, or to be bugged about a server at 11pm. Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot.
Granted, the company in this case might cover the phone expenses, but I know of more than one company that has defaulted on expenses and left employees liable. I can also think of a myriad of other situations where the reluctant cellphone owner would object to paying to put up with crap on his phone, etc...
Putting the payment onus on the caller is the best of two poor situations. What is most disgusting is to pay a premium to call cellphones, especially when most of that premium is going to pay back ridiculous "windfall taxes" - government license tenders for millions of dollars. We can't even put most of the blame on service providers, but rather on state departments and national government.
If somebody wants to be contacted cheaply - they are a business, a tradesman, etc... there are solutions and they are generally adopted. Otherwise, why shouldn't the caller pay if they expect to get a response at all hours, wherever their correspondant may be, perhaps even abroad...
There's what I might call a "comfort zone" beyond which any faster is indeed irrelevant. An old survey set it at something like 256kbps, it's maybe still that for most web surfing.
Tolerances will vary depending on content - but unless you're a hardcore MPEG/DivX downloader then higher than 512 is not particularly different *today* until multimedia content producers force higher bandwidth, and this is not worth it for most, until enough people have very high speed access and the infrastructure to handle it also.
Do your research. I did not say Americans were stupid, and yet you insult Europeans by calling them stupid. I was just urging consumers in the US to look at other economic models...
Anyway, there are unlimited plans for around 50 in most European countries as it happens. There are also unlimited plans for local/national calls and Internet available from around 50 month, including high speed ADSL or Cable connections.
I think the caller picking up the tab to disturb me on my portable phone is more just. I don't like getting disturbed on it anyway.
Just because some things (like free local calls) are taken for granted, doesn't mean that this is really the best economic model for the telcos. Look at Haiti (who continue to have free local calls, because they used the US model as a starting point) - they have enormous problems now because there would be a revolution if the telco starting charging for local calls. But they really do need to charge for local because telephony is a big mess and unsustainable with "free calls" to the Internet and then hackers... etc
Check out the bigger picture before insulting a whole continent. And don't take anything that could be misconstrued as anti-American as being a direct attack, perhaps it is just constructive criticism.
How does a country where the per capita annual income is $390-$420 (depending on whose number you use) expect people other than the elite to afford mobile phone service, even if the handsets and service charges are heavily subsidized?
Well the US happens to be the exception in the mobile phone market. You have to PAY to accept calls that people are making to you. Ridiculous. The European market would never accept that, the only time they pay to be called is when they're roaming.
Now, in Tunisia a group did a study for mobile phones, used the same logic, and now the country is lumbering with way below needed capacity of GSM service, and over 6 months waiting lists for activation, last time I checked. Mobile phones become a real status symbol in the developing world, and also allow someone (with prepaid schemes, especially) to be contacted from outside their country by relatives in the diaspora. This is why mobiles are popular. The market is much more open if you have the caller pick up the tab for calling the phone.
You guys in the US should revolt. It is disgusting that both caller and receiver should have to pay for a conversation.
Re:Ants are attracted to electricity
on
Ant Farm PC
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· Score: 1
So don't be suprised if your power supply starts smoking one day.
I remember my cousin calling me once, a long long time ago, screaming "My ZX81 power supply is smoking"... and thinking... how can an inanimate object draw on a cigarette?
Your post just gave me a wacky flashback, my friend.
13.1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
A pretty strange beast... that suddenly demands:-
13.16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
13.17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
13.18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
I can't read anything into that chapter... doesn't make any sense to me.
Many people collect, and they're in a different category. However, I was providing a counter argument to the first post, rather than an all-round argument. Clearly, DVDs are bought both to collect but also on impulse, especially for those in higher income brackets.
Yes! No one ever bought a movie to watch it once and let it collect dust afterwards.
This is a misnomer. The DVD medium lends itself to kneejerk buying : it's a movie your friends may have raved about, it has special features. You buy it because it's about 10-15 bucks, and then you watch it once, don't enjoy it, and indeed it does gather dust. Or, you're a business traveller and you want something to watch on the plane, you impulse buy a DVD that looks OK at the airport in 5 minutes as you rush to get to the gate, to watch on your laptop. You never watch it again.
I have done all of this. Half my DVD collection is unlikely to be watched again. Indeed, I would never have bought VHS tapes the same way, because I never had a portable VCR... but I have a laptop with DVD, a PC with DVD, and a home DVD player. Add to that quality, nicer form factor, special features that may make the DVD as a whole more valuable than just as a movie. And of course let us not forget that we can watch a particular scene and freeze it really well, just to see if there was indeed a hint of beaver in that sex scene;-)
Add in special features and extra content, and you have DVDs that you might buy (especially if you have a reasonable income) on a whim.
Now, the scary thing with mp3 / DivX (why have I seen no articles about DivX and mpeg traders?) is that there are students being taken to court, fined and jailed. Students don't have much of a disposable income, and are bound to be ahead on the technology curve. I don't understand why they're being persecuted, because they are the ULTIMATE consumers of the future. Sure, I've downloaded the odd movie, but I'm in an income bracket now where a couple of DVDs per month is going to be par for the course for a long time. A lot of my friends, graduated say over 5 years ago, also have big DVD collections.
Banks, restaurants, brandnames for clothes, dead tree publishers... these have all been known to give students breaks in order to keep them when their income starts coming in. This is the mistake the record industry is making, because they are missing the whole point. Students have always bootlegged, borrowed and stolen music. I can't quite understand it. The regular consumers are NOT doing this. It really screws with my mind to see this kind of intellectual property fascism. Consumerism is not the be all and end all of the whole world economy, let's hope that sooner or later a bit of clemency starts to happen especially, I have to say, in the US (by virtue of its being the biggest, most hardcore consumer economy in the whole world).
Slashdot Mirror
There is some truth in your comment... just not enough of a hint of irony in there for me to have got it... I'm a bit slow sometimes.
This is rather like flash, but for video content rather than animated vector graphics. Maybe not even that. More like a video file + markup much like something which could be played in a specialised player, but superimposing links? Doesn't seem that revolutionary to me, the DVD format already allows for something like this - albeit in a more rigid form.
However, the reason this is particularly interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that
This is the reason corporate economics is so screwed. You deliberately set out to cost the company more money than necessary, and believe in some false economic model. This is why bosses don't trust employees, and why budgets are so shrouded in mystery.
If you save money, you might just get a reduction in the time taken for the upgrade cycle to come full circle. You may not. However, the wasteful attitude that you display in this thread just shows how "detached" people are, and the mistrust between bosses and employees cuts both ways, since neither are following the same models.
For sure, bosses are often greedy, and so employees will seek to get as much as they can from them ("they'll never give us anything anyway") but this attitude is so deeply ingrained that entire government departments work by these rules - that a budget allocated and not entirely spent must be reduced in the next cycle. I hate this, and anyone who just accepts it is just showing that you cannot complain about the system, at all... because you are letting it control you.
That is short sighted. Paying an extra $300 just for a little more speed, in the long run, just means that the budget to upgrade is higher than it could have been, so it will happen more infrequently, without other external economic influences of course.
This is an important point. Further down the thread you have been mocked for having stock in Adobe and all that, but....
If you disagree with a company's policy in certain areas, but it's a profitable company, buying shares is a good plan. Especially if you can get above the minimum shareholding in order to attend annual general meetings, etc (often this limit is very low). You then get to put questions to the board. Being a shareholder gives you good leverage in a company, or at least more leverage than just being Joe Public. Also, you maybe get dividends and stuff ;-)
Greenpeace and others have possibly adopted this tactic, if memory serves, in order to legitimately attend and table questions at multinational company meetings. I generally agree with this, because at the end of the day, corporations are becoming bigger than governments... scary though it may seem, maybe only way to beat the system is to join it and fight from the inside. Like all these people who don't vote, and then complain when the candidate they *thought* would win does not - they have not played the system and have no excuse. Apathy and opinionated chatter is not getting us anywhere. Power to the people can only happen if people use the avenues and channels of democracy as they stand.
I think that the "right" to download is a difficult issue. Basically, we don't have that right. I don't think I have either, and I rarely download. However, I have downloaded a lot of stuff I own on vinyl, cassette and old scratched CDs... I don't consider that to be theft.
Now, I also don't like record companies. But I would not share files just for that.
What it really comes down to is that I have evidently ended up downloading stuff I don't own, but at the time I could not find said material available in a format that I could easily purchase (one track available only on a compilation box set - do I have to buy the whole thing?) and indeed a lot of other stuff I was downloading whilst in Morocco, where you CANNOT legally buy non pirated music or videos anyway - even the local hypermarket stopped stocking DVDs when DivX rips and VCDs started being available in local markets.
The record industry just doesn't get any sympathy, and it's easy to see why. People have always bootlegged, copied CDs and Vinyl to cassettes, etc - the problem is just that it's easy to do in less than real time (compiling a CD doesn't take as long or longer than listening to the sum of the tracks any more) so the industry is panicking a bit more.
But I think most would agree - the thing to do is to fix the supply chain problem, and make music more available - I would happily pay *artists* directly, cutting out the middleman, if I could; lots of local bands are allowing just that by selling homebrew CDs at gigs and so on.
Good point though
People went out of their way to buy it. Supply and demand rules the market. Always has, always will.
Now, trying to stop filesharing and levying a tax on blank CDRoms is a terrible double standard. If the tax is made to give copyright owners their dues, then I should be able to pay that tax on my blanks and copy what I want, because the dues are being collected indirectly anyway. If I want just to copy my OWN material I am still paying the tax so I am accumulating quite a bit of "right" to copy more music.
Then, they make copying music and downloading etc illegal - but by the same system they are admitting that everyone does it. Pretty stupid IMHO.
Murder is a ridiculous comparison. Murder requires premeditation, physical contact, and a clear knowledge of the implications of one's acts. Hardly on a par with listening to a couple of bootlegged MP3s, friend.
Only if there was an equivalent Irish desktop effort called leprechaun, which would have a themed GUI-nness and WhIsky-Fi networking, shamrocks for the icons and dialogue boxes with [ Awright ] [ Nah Thanks ], [ Bugger it ] as the options.
I have read from several sources, and the logic seems right to me, that RIAA equalisation helps amplitude issues. Maybe you're right about surface noise, do you have any references? I'd be keen to read up on that.
No no- rumble and noise isn't warmth, not even slightly.
Another post in this thread seems to disagree, having played an identical CD track twice, in a blind test, adding vinyl noise (just a sample of hiss, cracks, pops and hum) to the track. Warmth is a subjective thing.
From personal experience, having ripped several of my old Beatles LPs and some classic Manitas de Plata and such, the "warmth" is somewhat conveyed on my ripped vinyl CDs. I just remove big clicks and pops and maximise volume, doing no noise reduction. They sound different than some of the remastered CDs I have of certain tracks on the albums, for sure.
As for "digital flaws" and all that, really we're reaching into good and bad DtoA territory. But I agree that digital this that and the other doesn't a great sound make. Adding excessive compression in all the latest pop rubbish, and you end up with CDs that sound just awful.
Interesting point... in fact, it's probably the noise in the recording that helps. Some of the noise that is maybe removed or lost in recordings is breathing sounds and natural air movement, and also just plain hiss can add to a recording of stringed instruments by interacting with the harmonics and all that
Yeah good point. I was being a bit sarcastic, but I'm sure there were some people who just preferred the ritual of windup and the horn and all that... just out of habit. I should not, however, have used the word "sounded better" in that phrase.
There ya go... see my post further up for more info
Now, the equalisation curve was specified by our good friends, the RIAA... all amplifiers that have a "Phono" input use an RIAA EQ curve in the pre-amp stage to boost/reduce the frequencies to get back to a flat response that should sound like the studio mix off the (pre vinyl mastering) master tape.
Often these days all mastering is done at a flat EQ curve, because CDs can handle this, and then mastering happens *again* for the vinyl stage. It used to be the other way round, so early CDs were replaced with "digitally remastered" cuts - Brothers in Arms, Pink Floyd catalogue, that sort of stuff - and had a sound that was more faithful to the original, pristine LPs without sounding "tinny" like the first released CDs.
Digital to Analogue converters and preamps are so good these days that there is little difference between vinyl and CD. A lot of the "warmth" that supposed audiophiles go on about is probably "rumble" anyway (that is, the 50 or 60Hz drone that comes from the platter's electric motor and is passed to the needle, and other artifacts created by the rotation of the record in slightly less than perfect circles, etc).
What I like about LPs is the bigger artwork, the physical effort required to play a recording, and the soothing 33 and one third RPM of the disc as it spins on my old JVC turntable. Also, records which are well kept - as they generally are in my collection - sound pretty good too. However, they're not *better* than CDs. Just different. Old analogue stuff has afficionados everywhere, but please stop bleating that it's because it's better. It's just different.
One interesting argument though - a big thing in digital audio is to keep a fully digital path all the way to the very last, then have a top D to A converter right in the amp and straight to the speakers, some people even sending a digital feed to speakers which have reference D to A converters or even some system to use the digital signal to generate an analogue wave which goes beyond normal D to A electronics (can't remember too much about that, Google around if you feel so inclined). With my vinyl setup, however, I have a signal path that is fully analogue, and no need of a DtoA stage at all ;-) - although I do have solid state electronics in the system... which old wind up 78rpm players didn't have. I bet some people claimed they sounded better than the newer 33rpm records with electric motors and all that, too.
Nevertheless, you make an interesting point. There is clustering available, but it sounds to me a lot more like high availability than parallel processing clustering. I bet few sites worldwide actually deployed it as a parallel computing resource. In any case, it doesn't make sense to use a GUI based OS with a lot of extra "baggage" in order to do the kind of supercomputing style clustering - where parallel processing and high calculation speed is the goal, rather than high availability - which is the context of the article.
Thanks for pointing the link out though. Can't wait to install an NT based cluster ;-)
From the MS site, the Bay Area Research Center is "... a small Microsoft Research group located in the San Francisco Bay Area. We've been working on two large projects with other universities, companies, other Microsoft Research groups, and with Microsoft product groups in Redmond and Cupertino. These projects are Scalable Servers and Media Presence. "
I can't see scalability involving commodity hardware with MS OSes. In spite of Microsoft's desktop domination strategies, and small business server dominance (arguably, at least for the moment) they know they won't be taken seriously about clustering Windows 2003 server, purely because there is no design AFAIK in the kernel for operating in clusters in the first place. This is supercomputing using commodity hardware, not supercrashing using commodity OSes. Linux is perfectly situated to be recommended by anyone because it is not a competitors product, per se.
The homepages of the two men can be seen here, if anyone is interested in some of the more interesting history of the two. Little of it has to do with Microsoft propaganda and the marketing machine:-
Gordon Bell
Jim Gray
You should have been modded up rather than the original post.
I said the comfort zone was dependent on content. Until you can name content that requires more than a constant 512kbps and will be cheaply available to all, the comfort zone will not move. I didn't say it would never move.
I shouldn't have to pay extra because he chose to use a cell phone instead of a land-line. (The way I get around this at the moment is just to refuse to call people in Europe unless they give me a landline number to call.)
There are two ways to look at this. On one hand, you are quite correct. If your correspondant has chosen a cell phone over a land line, and you want to call them to chat, be friendly, or do business, then they should be making an effort to be reachable cheaply.
On the other hand, if the cell phone is imposed on that person by their boss, to be contacted at all hours, then that person should not end up in a situation where it is costing them money to be called by business contacts with support problems, or to be bugged about a server at 11pm. Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot.
Granted, the company in this case might cover the phone expenses, but I know of more than one company that has defaulted on expenses and left employees liable. I can also think of a myriad of other situations where the reluctant cellphone owner would object to paying to put up with crap on his phone, etc...
Putting the payment onus on the caller is the best of two poor situations. What is most disgusting is to pay a premium to call cellphones, especially when most of that premium is going to pay back ridiculous "windfall taxes" - government license tenders for millions of dollars. We can't even put most of the blame on service providers, but rather on state departments and national government.
If somebody wants to be contacted cheaply - they are a business, a tradesman, etc... there are solutions and they are generally adopted. Otherwise, why shouldn't the caller pay if they expect to get a response at all hours, wherever their correspondant may be, perhaps even abroad...
Tolerances will vary depending on content - but unless you're a hardcore MPEG/DivX downloader then higher than 512 is not particularly different *today* until multimedia content producers force higher bandwidth, and this is not worth it for most, until enough people have very high speed access and the infrastructure to handle it also.
Anyway, there are unlimited plans for around 50 in most European countries as it happens. There are also unlimited plans for local/national calls and Internet available from around 50 month, including high speed ADSL or Cable connections.
I think the caller picking up the tab to disturb me on my portable phone is more just. I don't like getting disturbed on it anyway.
Just because some things (like free local calls) are taken for granted, doesn't mean that this is really the best economic model for the telcos. Look at Haiti (who continue to have free local calls, because they used the US model as a starting point) - they have enormous problems now because there would be a revolution if the telco starting charging for local calls. But they really do need to charge for local because telephony is a big mess and unsustainable with "free calls" to the Internet and then hackers... etc
Check out the bigger picture before insulting a whole continent. And don't take anything that could be misconstrued as anti-American as being a direct attack, perhaps it is just constructive criticism.
Well the US happens to be the exception in the mobile phone market. You have to PAY to accept calls that people are making to you. Ridiculous. The European market would never accept that, the only time they pay to be called is when they're roaming.
Now, in Tunisia a group did a study for mobile phones, used the same logic, and now the country is lumbering with way below needed capacity of GSM service, and over 6 months waiting lists for activation, last time I checked. Mobile phones become a real status symbol in the developing world, and also allow someone (with prepaid schemes, especially) to be contacted from outside their country by relatives in the diaspora. This is why mobiles are popular. The market is much more open if you have the caller pick up the tab for calling the phone.
You guys in the US should revolt. It is disgusting that both caller and receiver should have to pay for a conversation.
I remember my cousin calling me once, a long long time ago, screaming "My ZX81 power supply is smoking"... and thinking... how can an inanimate object draw on a cigarette?
Your post just gave me a wacky flashback, my friend.
Some quotes about that:
... doesn't make any sense to me.
13.1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
A pretty strange beast... that suddenly demands:-
13.16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
13.17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
13.18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
I can't read anything into that chapter
Thanks for the reply.
This is a misnomer. The DVD medium lends itself to kneejerk buying : it's a movie your friends may have raved about, it has special features. You buy it because it's about 10-15 bucks, and then you watch it once, don't enjoy it, and indeed it does gather dust. Or, you're a business traveller and you want something to watch on the plane, you impulse buy a DVD that looks OK at the airport in 5 minutes as you rush to get to the gate, to watch on your laptop. You never watch it again.
I have done all of this. Half my DVD collection is unlikely to be watched again. Indeed, I would never have bought VHS tapes the same way, because I never had a portable VCR... but I have a laptop with DVD, a PC with DVD, and a home DVD player. Add to that quality, nicer form factor, special features that may make the DVD as a whole more valuable than just as a movie. And of course let us not forget that we can watch a particular scene and freeze it really well, just to see if there was indeed a hint of beaver in that sex scene ;-)
Add in special features and extra content, and you have DVDs that you might buy (especially if you have a reasonable income) on a whim.
Now, the scary thing with mp3 / DivX (why have I seen no articles about DivX and mpeg traders?) is that there are students being taken to court, fined and jailed. Students don't have much of a disposable income, and are bound to be ahead on the technology curve. I don't understand why they're being persecuted, because they are the ULTIMATE consumers of the future. Sure, I've downloaded the odd movie, but I'm in an income bracket now where a couple of DVDs per month is going to be par for the course for a long time. A lot of my friends, graduated say over 5 years ago, also have big DVD collections.
Banks, restaurants, brandnames for clothes, dead tree publishers... these have all been known to give students breaks in order to keep them when their income starts coming in. This is the mistake the record industry is making, because they are missing the whole point. Students have always bootlegged, borrowed and stolen music. I can't quite understand it. The regular consumers are NOT doing this. It really screws with my mind to see this kind of intellectual property fascism. Consumerism is not the be all and end all of the whole world economy, let's hope that sooner or later a bit of clemency starts to happen especially, I have to say, in the US (by virtue of its being the biggest, most hardcore consumer economy in the whole world).