In Canada supreme court officials are appointed by the goverment, similarily to the U.S.. The goverment is full of politicians, just like in the U.S.. Where things differ is that campaign contributions to politicians is capped, so CRIA and other lobby groups can't funnel millions of dollars of money into our politicians pockets. ("no strings attached" of course)
Now, it is rather difficult to get rid of a supreme court official once appointed. However it is also true that, just like in the U.S., in Canada these judicials do have some ties of patronage to their apointers. They've gotten to their lofty positions by keeping the right people happy, and they're not about to change. (Not with a nice appointment to the Senate dangling in front of them like a fat juicy carrot anyways...) What is different is that their appointers (the politicians) aren't nearly as motivated to pressure them into making an "industry-friendly" ruling.
Ergo, we might actually see some honest law-making.
Why is it that every time a Chinese company does something the slashdot article begins with "China does Blah-blah-blah... plop."
You know, there are over a billion people in China. I'm sure many of them even have some small ammount of autonomy from the evil borg communist collective that americans seem to think dominates them all. Is this just simple racism or is it some kind of fear complex?
It's only a matter of time before they install these suckers at airports to search for suspected terrorists. A false positive is gonna suck. They'll confiscate your obviously forged passport, search every body cavity you have plus a few that didn't exist before, and finally ship you off for an all expense paid Cuban vacation!
1. That's 5 hours max. In practice it is typically a fair bit less. 2. Compare that to a centrino based laptop. There is some major ownage happening here.
Honestly, how much of Apple's user base cares about security issues? Apple does cater to a couple small industry niches, but the lion's share of their buisness comes from the crowd that wants a slick-looking conversation piece that matches the color of their iPod. While the minority of mac-fanatics who read sites like slashdot will probably get razzed a bit over this, it's not going to impact Mac's sales much, if at all. Hopefully they'll act responsibly and get a fix out soon, but honestly, they probably don't really *need* to.
P.S. Don't get me wrong... I'm not a mac-hater. In fact, if they'd just increase the battery performance of their notebooks a tad I'd be all over them. You have to make a lot of compromises when trying to run Linux on a laptop that you don't have to make with an apple laptop.
That is a debatable point since the ammount of actual role playing going on in MMORPG's like Everquest is actually quite minimal. In truth, the whole MMORPG paradigm is just not suited to telling an involving story. It is especially unsuited to telling a story where the player gets to play someone particularily interesting as opposed to yet another "adventurer" out to whack a few snakes and move on to higher levels and bigger snakes.
MMORPG's are certainly highly addictive, but so far, have not really progressed much beyond being a skinner's box wraped up in some fantasy and garnished with ample opportunity for socialization. (not entirely a bad thing) Single player RPG's, on the other hand, are a lot like interactive novels. Games like NWN that provide robust development tools to end-users are essentially interactive novels which encourage fan-fiction.
MMORPG's and games like NWN both have their distinctive niches and, while they may be based around the same sort of fantasy universes, are completely different animals which are both unlikely to go extinct anytime soon.
Pimp/Bitch is actually a bit of an improvement, since it implies that the controlling device is actually providing an interface to the services of the controlled device. (This is not implied by Master/Slave unfortunately)
I'm not in L.A. (thank the powers that be), but I strongly recommend we move to this new terminology nationally for the sake of clarity and political correctness.
American corn subsidies were actually one of the root causes of the Zapatista revolt. A large portion of the population in Chiapas, one of the more impoverished Mexican states, subsided on corn sales. They are completely unsubsidized of course. With their marginal land (the best was swallowed up by Haciendas long ago) and primitive machinery they would have a tough time competing with Iowa corn farmers. With the massive goverment subsidies that U.S. farmers receive it's not even a contest. The Zapatista revolt happened very shortly after the Mexico-U.S. free trade pact came into effect, not suprisingly. Govermnent subsidized corn from the U.S. effectively destroyed the livelihoods of a whole section of the Mexican population.
The Zapatista revolt is one of the root causes of the anti-globalization movement, even if many protesters seem to be pretty clueless about what they're protesting.
Actually, the U.S. is very protectionist. From a Canadian perspective, our soft-wood lumber exports to the U.S. were recently slapped with a massive tarrif for no other reason than that they were substantially cheaper than american soft-wood. Despite a WTO ruling in Canada's favour, (i.e. that the tarrifs are illegal) those tarrifs are still in place.
Another good example was the recent BSE scare in Alberta. It was discovered that one cow had the disease, and after a massive investigation that was double and triple checked by officials from the U.S. and other countries, no other infected animals were found. However, the U.S. was very quick to slap a ban on all Canadian imports, effectively crippling the export-reliant Alberta beef industry. The export bans stayed in effect a lot longer than necessary because american beef producers were having a field-day!
Might I also point out the recent deliberate manipulation of the American dollar by the Bush administration. Bush wanted greenback lower in order to drive up foreign investment. Remember, dollars invested in America to produce goods could have gone elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with this however. It's the same sort of cut-throat economic warfare that all nations engage in to some extent or another. If America is really serious about bringing jobs home from foreign job centers then that is going to mean an even lower dollar. You can't expect a buisness to create American jobs out of the goodness of their hearts. Would you invest in a company that was making huge profits or one that was creating local jobs and losing money because of it? Think about your bank account before you answer that. If Americans want jobs, they have to perform services at competitive rates. It's that simple. Don't whine when someone else out-competes you. This is free-market enterprise.
Asynchronous Logic (i.e. no clock) has many of the same benefits, as well as potentially increasing the speed of processors significantly.
A rather large portion of the heat genreated by a processor is just from the clock signal propagating to every bloody logic gate in the mess including the parts not in use. With asynchronous logic, if a part isn't in use, it gets no current. Of course, clock signals have been used for the last half century for a reason. Clock signals are used to time signals so that you don't have 3 digits of a number showing up before the rest, etc. With asynchronous logic you have to worry about path lengths down to the picometer so you don't need the clock to act like a traffic warden. The biggest holdup to asynchronous logic has been the immense design difficulty involved, but that is changing as new design tools are developed.
Anyways, the big reason why Asynchronous logic is going to arrive on the processor scene long before reversable logic is that it already has. Intel and other manufacturers are already incorporating asynchronous logic into their designs, and plan to increase the ammount used as time goes by. The different manufacturing techniques required are slowly being phased in. Reversible computing, on the other hand, has virtually no chance of showing up within the decade.
My point is that the article linked made no allowance for the increasing use of asynchronous logic. It's going to have a significant impact on heat dissipation in the neBuew years.
That's a nice writeup of an old idea, with lots of pretty pictures. It was a good approach a couple years ago when all hard-drives generated a fair bit of noise. Some drives made today (e.g. Seagate Barracuda IV's and V's (but not the SATA version unfortunately)) are effectively noiseless once placed inside a case that is more than two feet from your ears. (You're not going to hear them over your PSU unless it uses a fanless design such as those from TKPower) The Barracuda's aren't the fastest drives on the market, but if you really need the speed set up a RAID.
The key to making a quiet machine on the cheap is component selection. Don't buy noisy parts and spend money and effort to quiet them down when quiet parts are available. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so to speak.
iTunes is definately a step forward for the average user. You know, the sort who still thinks Bose speakers are decent. The iPod, however, as recently posted, is one of the nicest portable jukeboxes out there from an audiophile standpoint. Even if you don't chuck those mac-buds and get a nice pair of grado's, chances are you will be able to appreciate the difference between uncompressed wav's (which the iPod can play!) over 128kBps AAC files. (what iTunes sells)
Unfortunately, that's all iTunes sells. Sure, those files are just fine for playing on the bus or in a noisy crowd, but under ideal listening circumstances they fall short of what the iPod is capable of delivering. And for what kind of savings over a CD? If it's a crappy CD full of filler you might save a bit by buying only the good tracks on iTunes. However, if it's a good CD with 15+ good tracks you won't save a cent.
Apple, however, knows who it's target demographic is. From the iTunes website: "If you've ever been frustrated by Compact Disc packaging -- rip-stop shrink-wrap, that nasty top cap of seriously adhesive plastic -- welcome to the age of digital music. No broken fingernails, no tape sticking on your fingers. Just good clean music, delivered straight to iTunes."
Yes, if you are the sort who frequently frustrated by plastic wrap you too can benefit from iTunes! Personally, I'd be a bit insulted by the assumption that I don't know how to use a utility blade, but millions of happy iTune users can't be wrong!
Finally, just a caveat emptor about the iPod... It is a sexiliy designed and well supported device that delivers excellent sound quality. Unfortunatly, it's not very durable. The hold button is it's achilles heal. Sneeze on it wrong and it'll stop working. Then you'll have to send it in to apple for servicing if you don't want to pop the cover yourself. Do that after your warranty is up and it'll cost $400! (apple's standard non-warranty service charge) The ear-buds aren't exactly high-quality either. They don't sound too bad, but their build quality is so pathetic that apple will send you another pair, no questions asked, if you tell them the wire casing has separated from the wire. (a very common occurence) They won't even ask you to send them the old pair. Thirdly, the carrying case which apple includes with the 20GB and 30GB models has a spiffy little apple logo that will scratch the heck out of any iPod unwittingly inserted into the case. What the hell were those macheads smoking? Bottom line, get decent headphones and a good third-party vendor's carrying case that provides ample protection for the iPod's hold button. Strongly consider paying the extra for extended warranty service because it will be cheaper to buy a new iPod if you have to get service after the 1-year standard warranty is up!
Yes, it's already happening. The chinese goverment now allows capitalist buisnesses and they're springing up like mad to take advantage of cheap labor costs that allow them to make a killing in exports. Not all of the "made in china" goods out there are junk either.
Take the audiophile loudspeaker market for example. www.av123.com is a U.S. firm which markets chinese made audiophile speakers (by a capitalist chinese company) that apparantly do quite well against the likes of Linn, B&W, Paradigm, etc.. (Don't even talk to me about Bose!) Some other american companies (whose names I will not mention here so as to avoid a flame war) import chinese speakers that sell for $100-200 in the asian market, rebadge them, and sell them in the U.S. for several thousand dollars. It is a common practice for the american company to ink an agreement with the chinese company barring them from exporting speakers directly to the U.S. except through them. That way U.S. citizens can't go to the source and pay cost. This has ruffled a lot of audiophile feathers, but is it really a scam if they are of equal quality to domestic speakers of the same price?
I suggest you take an inventory of the items in your home and compare how many were made in china to how many were made in the U.S.. You might be surprised.
China is actually coming along nicely in a lot of ways. It's beginning to embrace capitalism. Socialism is a nice idea, but greed breeds innovation better. As China's economy heats up it's people are going to come into closer contact with the rest of the world and mainstream world ideas. The communist regime might not be overthrown, but its a safe bet they're going to gradually become more and more moderate. With China's vast natural resources and immense population their economy could easily dwarf that of the U.S. within a couple decades. Say what you will, 1 billion+ is a heckuva tax base!
Keep in mind that skilled labour costs in China are a fraction of what they are in the U.S.. The resources of China's space program could easily dwarf those of NASA long before their economy grows larger than that of the U.S.. (This assumes both nations spend a similar proportion of their GDP on their space programs. China may well value it higher and spend even more...) As has been said, they don't exactly have to reinvent every wheel that has led NASA to it's current cutting-edge 1970's shuttle program either. There are plenty of capitalists, many of them in the U.S., who would only be too glad to do a little Cantonese consulting.
This isn't necessarily how things will happen. However, if the Chinese don't do anything stupid their economic and technological superiority is functionally inevitable provided U.S. citizens don't start multiplying like mosquitoes. It's a simple matter of statistics unless you subscribe to some sort of white supremast movment and belive that Chinese minds are inherently inferior.
Personally, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to start early on those Cantonese lessons.:D
Intel has been working on a rather exciting little piece of technology called the Personal Server. I'll leave it up to those who are interested to do the research. It suffices to say that it could be a big thing a couple years down the road. I know I want one! They primarily use bluetooth because it uses substantially less power than 802.11, which is a very nice thing for a portable device. An 802.11 addon can be used, but obviously you wouldn't want to use it unless you had to.
Regardless of how the personal server does, Bluetooth's power consumption merits alone will guarantee its existence for now. 802.11 isn't going to kill bluetooth, but another protocol could easily kill them both within 10 years...
And in other news... Microsoft has announced that in order to be MS-compliant, all keyboards manufactured starting in 2004 must lack a shift key. When asked how this move would affect grammar, Microsoft reps replied that they are deeply concerned about their users and wish to assure the public that 3 months will be more than enough time for all major grammar guides and dictionaries to be modified to suit America's new uncapitalized language. Steve Balmer had this to say, "It's good for RIAA. It's good for us. It's good for Webster's. Heck, it's not like any of the kids online use them these days anyhow."
Let me guess... You just upgraded to a G5 running BSD-based OS X from an older mac running an older version of MacOS. Congradulations! You are now using a mordern operating system capable of basic multi-tasking!
Just don't ask how long Linux or even Microsoft users have been able to do the same thing. It will probably depress you.
He tested the transfer rates of the HD that apple is putting in their G5 computers. It's pretty nice apparantly. It beat the Seagate in my AMD 1800+ by a whole second on the initial load of Photoshop! (The AMD beat the G5 by a 25% when loading from RAM though...)
I should cobble together a G3 with a SCSI RAMdisk and let him load Photoshop on it a few times. With luck, he'll trade me his G5 for it!
Small independant labels that give their artists good royalties are nothing new. However, such a label coming up with an online music service that is actually *good* is new!
Let's compare this service to iTunes, the most popular current service.
Price: iTunes - $0.99 per song Magnatune - $5.00 an album If it's a good album without crappy filler then Magnatune is the big winner here. Classical fans get a great deal, but pop fans may not, depending on the band. Overall, I'd give the edge to Magnatune, but not a big one.
Format: iTunes - AAC with some annoying DRM Magnatune - Uncompressed WAV's!!! Absolutely no contest here. Finally an online music store has listened to audiophiles! They'd be smart to use a lossless compression format to save on their bandwidth costs though...
Ethics: iTunes - Apple takes it's (big) cut and then the Artist's (frequently RIAA affiliated) label takes most of the rest. Magnatune - The artist gets 50%!!! Again, no contest. Instead of feeling guilty about fueling a powermad monster when you buy music you can feel good about supporting the people who actually made it!
Selection: iTunes: Lots Magnatune: Not a lot iTunes is the clear winner here.
To sum up, you get more for your money with magnatunes, including peace of mind. You just can't get many albums there... yet. If magnatune manages to get off the ground that may change, but they have a long road ahead of them. Their biggest challenge is getting more content. In my opinion they need to forge alliances with other like-minded independant labels. There are a lot out there, but many use mail-order as their only form of distribution! Magnatunes needs to get these labels on board pronto.
Actually, artists are frequently as dumb as rocks. While smart individuals may exist, as a population they have the collective IQ of a slightly moldy mango. This is why record companies find it so easy to sign them onto expoitative contracts which give it to them hard and raw in every orifice. Most artists just want to make music, not study law.
In any case, it is flat out wrong to state that this model of record company cannot give an artist the same opporunity for success as a major record label. It is certainly true that such a label won't be able to finance the mega-buck music video and media promotion that top pop tarts like Britney Speares have gotten. At least, not at first. (That may come later) However, *very* few artists signed to record labels get that treatment. Most get shelved, with their contract actively preventing them from seeking opportunities elsewhere rather than helping them.
If a service such as this were to really take off it could be an excellent way for unknown artits to find an audience. By making their entire catalogue available for sampling, artists who would otherwise not even be popular enough to be pirated would have their body of work available and easily accessable with little risk to samplers. It's a long shot, but those odds are a heck of a lot better than an artist who gets one CD pressing (and a fat bill for it) from their record label which is immediately shipped to a warehouse instead of stores. In the latter case, live performances are the only way they have to generate interest.
Now here's the kicker: An artist has to be an entire order of magnitude more popular with a major record label than they do with this service to make the same cash. The kind of artist who scrapes maybe 30K a year out of a record contract with a major label could be living very comfortably with 50% royalties instead of 5%. Even Steve Tyler could do that math.
Of course, for all this to work people actually have to check out the service. If you love music, think of it as a duty to listen to every bloody track this label has available until you find something you like. Then *BUY* it. We're voting with our wallets here, and if nobody heads to the polls these guys will die out, and that would be a shame.
P.S. These guys even have WAV's available when you buy. That flat-out *OWNS* any other music vendor out there. The lack of lossless online music vendors has been something that has kept the audiophile community at arms length from online music purchases. This site could change that. However, it would be smart for them to adopt some form of lossless compression to make their bandwidth costs more bearable. Speaking of bandwidth, I don't think they were planning on being slashdotted! There are rough seas ahead, but I sure hope they can stay afloat!
Pinging www.verisignsucksmonkeyass.net [64.94.110.11] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. What, are you blind? Let me spell it out for you. R-E-Q-U-E-S-T-SPACE-T-I-M-E-D-SPACE-O-U-T-CA RRIAGE -RETURN Let me spell something else out. M-O-R-O-N
This led me to conclude that either Verisign has self-DOS'd their own ad site into oblivion with their wildcards or that my ISP has blocked Verisign's ad site.
The latter implies intellegence and consideration on the part of my ISP (Shaw), so is therefore highly improbable.
So what can I conclude? I really shouldn't modify shell utilities while drunk. I'm probably lucky it didn't tokenize the entered domain and pop up the first 500 google matches. I could be eye-ball deep in monkey ass porn.
This is one helluva of a way to drum up traffic, so I'd be curious to know what kind of steroid-pumped uber-server and fat petabyte pipe they plan to run their site on. Personally, I suspect the ad page will be taken down by Verisign themselves when they smell smoke coming from the server room and see their sysadmin's running around naked on the front lawn while tearing out their hair and screaming "SWEET MOTHER OF SMEGMA, MAKE THEM STOP!!!".
Slashdot Mirror
...is currently taking a long hard look at just how much he's paying you.
Not necessarily...
In Canada supreme court officials are appointed by the goverment, similarily to the U.S.. The goverment is full of politicians, just like in the U.S.. Where things differ is that campaign contributions to politicians is capped, so CRIA and other lobby groups can't funnel millions of dollars of money into our politicians pockets. ("no strings attached" of course)
Now, it is rather difficult to get rid of a supreme court official once appointed. However it is also true that, just like in the U.S., in Canada these judicials do have some ties of patronage to their apointers. They've gotten to their lofty positions by keeping the right people happy, and they're not about to change. (Not with a nice appointment to the Senate dangling in front of them like a fat juicy carrot anyways...) What is different is that their appointers (the politicians) aren't nearly as motivated to pressure them into making an "industry-friendly" ruling.
Ergo, we might actually see some honest law-making.
Then again, we are talking about lawyers here.
Why is it that every time a Chinese company does something the slashdot article begins with "China does Blah-blah-blah... plop."
You know, there are over a billion people in China. I'm sure many of them even have some small ammount of autonomy from the evil borg communist collective that americans seem to think dominates them all. Is this just simple racism or is it some kind of fear complex?
It's only a matter of time before they install these suckers at airports to search for suspected terrorists. A false positive is gonna suck. They'll confiscate your obviously forged passport, search every body cavity you have plus a few that didn't exist before, and finally ship you off for an all expense paid Cuban vacation!
1. That's 5 hours max. In practice it is typically a fair bit less.
2. Compare that to a centrino based laptop. There is some major ownage happening here.
Honestly, how much of Apple's user base cares about security issues? Apple does cater to a couple small industry niches, but the lion's share of their buisness comes from the crowd that wants a slick-looking conversation piece that matches the color of their iPod. While the minority of mac-fanatics who read sites like slashdot will probably get razzed a bit over this, it's not going to impact Mac's sales much, if at all. Hopefully they'll act responsibly and get a fix out soon, but honestly, they probably don't really *need* to.
P.S. Don't get me wrong... I'm not a mac-hater. In fact, if they'd just increase the battery performance of their notebooks a tad I'd be all over them. You have to make a lot of compromises when trying to run Linux on a laptop that you don't have to make with an apple laptop.
That is a debatable point since the ammount of actual role playing going on in MMORPG's like Everquest is actually quite minimal. In truth, the whole MMORPG paradigm is just not suited to telling an involving story. It is especially unsuited to telling a story where the player gets to play someone particularily interesting as opposed to yet another "adventurer" out to whack a few snakes and move on to higher levels and bigger snakes.
MMORPG's are certainly highly addictive, but so far, have not really progressed much beyond being a skinner's box wraped up in some fantasy and garnished with ample opportunity for socialization. (not entirely a bad thing) Single player RPG's, on the other hand, are a lot like interactive novels. Games like NWN that provide robust development tools to end-users are essentially interactive novels which encourage fan-fiction.
MMORPG's and games like NWN both have their distinctive niches and, while they may be based around the same sort of fantasy universes, are completely different animals which are both unlikely to go extinct anytime soon.
Good lord. I think I got stupider just reading that.
(Yes, I know stupider is not a word you bloody grammar nazi's.)
Pimp/Bitch is actually a bit of an improvement, since it implies that the controlling device is actually providing an interface to the services of the controlled device. (This is not implied by Master/Slave unfortunately)
I'm not in L.A. (thank the powers that be), but I strongly recommend we move to this new terminology nationally for the sake of clarity and political correctness.
American corn subsidies were actually one of the root causes of the Zapatista revolt. A large portion of the population in Chiapas, one of the more impoverished Mexican states, subsided on corn sales. They are completely unsubsidized of course. With their marginal land (the best was swallowed up by Haciendas long ago) and primitive machinery they would have a tough time competing with Iowa corn farmers. With the massive goverment subsidies that U.S. farmers receive it's not even a contest. The Zapatista revolt happened very shortly after the Mexico-U.S. free trade pact came into effect, not suprisingly. Govermnent subsidized corn from the U.S. effectively destroyed the livelihoods of a whole section of the Mexican population.
The Zapatista revolt is one of the root causes of the anti-globalization movement, even if many protesters seem to be pretty clueless about what they're protesting.
Actually, the U.S. is very protectionist. From a Canadian perspective, our soft-wood lumber exports to the U.S. were recently slapped with a massive tarrif for no other reason than that they were substantially cheaper than american soft-wood. Despite a WTO ruling in Canada's favour, (i.e. that the tarrifs are illegal) those tarrifs are still in place.
Another good example was the recent BSE scare in Alberta. It was discovered that one cow had the disease, and after a massive investigation that was double and triple checked by officials from the U.S. and other countries, no other infected animals were found. However, the U.S. was very quick to slap a ban on all Canadian imports, effectively crippling the export-reliant Alberta beef industry. The export bans stayed in effect a lot longer than necessary because american beef producers were having a field-day!
Might I also point out the recent deliberate manipulation of the American dollar by the Bush administration. Bush wanted greenback lower in order to drive up foreign investment. Remember, dollars invested in America to produce goods could have gone elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with this however. It's the same sort of cut-throat economic warfare that all nations engage in to some extent or another. If America is really serious about bringing jobs home from foreign job centers then that is going to mean an even lower dollar. You can't expect a buisness to create American jobs out of the goodness of their hearts. Would you invest in a company that was making huge profits or one that was creating local jobs and losing money because of it? Think about your bank account before you answer that. If Americans want jobs, they have to perform services at competitive rates. It's that simple. Don't whine when someone else out-competes you. This is free-market enterprise.
Asynchronous Logic (i.e. no clock) has many of the same benefits, as well as potentially increasing the speed of processors significantly.
A rather large portion of the heat genreated by a processor is just from the clock signal propagating to every bloody logic gate in the mess including the parts not in use. With asynchronous logic, if a part isn't in use, it gets no current. Of course, clock signals have been used for the last half century for a reason. Clock signals are used to time signals so that you don't have 3 digits of a number showing up before the rest, etc. With asynchronous logic you have to worry about path lengths down to the picometer so you don't need the clock to act like a traffic warden. The biggest holdup to asynchronous logic has been the immense design difficulty involved, but that is changing as new design tools are developed.
Anyways, the big reason why Asynchronous logic is going to arrive on the processor scene long before reversable logic is that it already has. Intel and other manufacturers are already incorporating asynchronous logic into their designs, and plan to increase the ammount used as time goes by. The different manufacturing techniques required are slowly being phased in. Reversible computing, on the other hand, has virtually no chance of showing up within the decade.
My point is that the article linked made no allowance for the increasing use of asynchronous logic. It's going to have a significant impact on heat dissipation in the neBuew years.
That's a nice writeup of an old idea, with lots of pretty pictures. It was a good approach a couple years ago when all hard-drives generated a fair bit of noise. Some drives made today (e.g. Seagate Barracuda IV's and V's (but not the SATA version unfortunately)) are effectively noiseless once placed inside a case that is more than two feet from your ears. (You're not going to hear them over your PSU unless it uses a fanless design such as those from TKPower) The Barracuda's aren't the fastest drives on the market, but if you really need the speed set up a RAID.
The key to making a quiet machine on the cheap is component selection. Don't buy noisy parts and spend money and effort to quiet them down when quiet parts are available. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so to speak.
iTunes is definately a step forward for the average user. You know, the sort who still thinks Bose speakers are decent. The iPod, however, as recently posted, is one of the nicest portable jukeboxes out there from an audiophile standpoint. Even if you don't chuck those mac-buds and get a nice pair of grado's, chances are you will be able to appreciate the difference between uncompressed wav's (which the iPod can play!) over 128kBps AAC files. (what iTunes sells)
Unfortunately, that's all iTunes sells. Sure, those files are just fine for playing on the bus or in a noisy crowd, but under ideal listening circumstances they fall short of what the iPod is capable of delivering. And for what kind of savings over a CD? If it's a crappy CD full of filler you might save a bit by buying only the good tracks on iTunes. However, if it's a good CD with 15+ good tracks you won't save a cent.
Apple, however, knows who it's target demographic is. From the iTunes website:
"If you've ever been frustrated by Compact Disc packaging -- rip-stop shrink-wrap, that nasty top cap of seriously adhesive plastic -- welcome to the age of digital music. No broken fingernails, no tape sticking on your fingers. Just good clean music, delivered straight to iTunes."
Yes, if you are the sort who frequently frustrated by plastic wrap you too can benefit from iTunes! Personally, I'd be a bit insulted by the assumption that I don't know how to use a utility blade, but millions of happy iTune users can't be wrong!
Finally, just a caveat emptor about the iPod... It is a sexiliy designed and well supported device that delivers excellent sound quality. Unfortunatly, it's not very durable. The hold button is it's achilles heal. Sneeze on it wrong and it'll stop working. Then you'll have to send it in to apple for servicing if you don't want to pop the cover yourself. Do that after your warranty is up and it'll cost $400! (apple's standard non-warranty service charge) The ear-buds aren't exactly high-quality either. They don't sound too bad, but their build quality is so pathetic that apple will send you another pair, no questions asked, if you tell them the wire casing has separated from the wire. (a very common occurence) They won't even ask you to send them the old pair. Thirdly, the carrying case which apple includes with the 20GB and 30GB models has a spiffy little apple logo that will scratch the heck out of any iPod unwittingly inserted into the case. What the hell were those macheads smoking? Bottom line, get decent headphones and a good third-party vendor's carrying case that provides ample protection for the iPod's hold button. Strongly consider paying the extra for extended warranty service because it will be cheaper to buy a new iPod if you have to get service after the 1-year standard warranty is up!
Yes, it's already happening. The chinese goverment now allows capitalist buisnesses and they're springing up like mad to take advantage of cheap labor costs that allow them to make a killing in exports. Not all of the "made in china" goods out there are junk either.
Take the audiophile loudspeaker market for example. www.av123.com is a U.S. firm which markets chinese made audiophile speakers (by a capitalist chinese company) that apparantly do quite well against the likes of Linn, B&W, Paradigm, etc.. (Don't even talk to me about Bose!) Some other american companies (whose names I will not mention here so as to avoid a flame war) import chinese speakers that sell for $100-200 in the asian market, rebadge them, and sell them in the U.S. for several thousand dollars. It is a common practice for the american company to ink an agreement with the chinese company barring them from exporting speakers directly to the U.S. except through them. That way U.S. citizens can't go to the source and pay cost. This has ruffled a lot of audiophile feathers, but is it really a scam if they are of equal quality to domestic speakers of the same price?
I suggest you take an inventory of the items in your home and compare how many were made in china to how many were made in the U.S.. You might be surprised.
China is actually coming along nicely in a lot of ways. It's beginning to embrace capitalism. Socialism is a nice idea, but greed breeds innovation better. As China's economy heats up it's people are going to come into closer contact with the rest of the world and mainstream world ideas. The communist regime might not be overthrown, but its a safe bet they're going to gradually become more and more moderate. With China's vast natural resources and immense population their economy could easily dwarf that of the U.S. within a couple decades. Say what you will, 1 billion+ is a heckuva tax base!
:D
Keep in mind that skilled labour costs in China are a fraction of what they are in the U.S.. The resources of China's space program could easily dwarf those of NASA long before their economy grows larger than that of the U.S.. (This assumes both nations spend a similar proportion of their GDP on their space programs. China may well value it higher and spend even more...) As has been said, they don't exactly have to reinvent every wheel that has led NASA to it's current cutting-edge 1970's shuttle program either. There are plenty of capitalists, many of them in the U.S., who would only be too glad to do a little Cantonese consulting.
This isn't necessarily how things will happen. However, if the Chinese don't do anything stupid their economic and technological superiority is functionally inevitable provided U.S. citizens don't start multiplying like mosquitoes. It's a simple matter of statistics unless you subscribe to some sort of white supremast movment and belive that Chinese minds are inherently inferior.
Personally, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to start early on those Cantonese lessons.
Intel has been working on a rather exciting little piece of technology called the Personal Server. I'll leave it up to those who are interested to do the research. It suffices to say that it could be a big thing a couple years down the road. I know I want one! They primarily use bluetooth because it uses substantially less power than 802.11, which is a very nice thing for a portable device. An 802.11 addon can be used, but obviously you wouldn't want to use it unless you had to.
Regardless of how the personal server does, Bluetooth's power consumption merits alone will guarantee its existence for now. 802.11 isn't going to kill bluetooth, but another protocol could easily kill them both within 10 years...
Or failing that, to all the paranoid daddyo's here who need to stop being so square.
And in other news... Microsoft has announced that in order to be MS-compliant, all keyboards manufactured starting in 2004 must lack a shift key. When asked how this move would affect grammar, Microsoft reps replied that they are deeply concerned about their users and wish to assure the public that 3 months will be more than enough time for all major grammar guides and dictionaries to be modified to suit America's new uncapitalized language. Steve Balmer had this to say, "It's good for RIAA. It's good for us. It's good for Webster's. Heck, it's not like any of the kids online use them these days anyhow."
Let me guess... You just upgraded to a G5 running BSD-based OS X from an older mac running an older version of MacOS. Congradulations! You are now using a mordern operating system capable of basic multi-tasking!
Just don't ask how long Linux or even Microsoft users have been able to do the same thing. It will probably depress you.
He tested the transfer rates of the HD that apple is putting in their G5 computers. It's pretty nice apparantly. It beat the Seagate in my AMD 1800+ by a whole second on the initial load of Photoshop! (The AMD beat the G5 by a 25% when loading from RAM though...)
I should cobble together a G3 with a SCSI RAMdisk and let him load Photoshop on it a few times. With luck, he'll trade me his G5 for it!
Small independant labels that give their artists good royalties are nothing new. However, such a label coming up with an online music service that is actually *good* is new!
Let's compare this service to iTunes, the most popular current service.
Price:
iTunes - $0.99 per song
Magnatune - $5.00 an album
If it's a good album without crappy filler then Magnatune is the big winner here. Classical fans get a great deal, but pop fans may not, depending on the band. Overall, I'd give the edge to Magnatune, but not a big one.
Format:
iTunes - AAC with some annoying DRM
Magnatune - Uncompressed WAV's!!!
Absolutely no contest here. Finally an online music store has listened to audiophiles! They'd be smart to use a lossless compression format to save on their bandwidth costs though...
Ethics:
iTunes - Apple takes it's (big) cut and then the Artist's (frequently RIAA affiliated) label takes most of the rest.
Magnatune - The artist gets 50%!!!
Again, no contest. Instead of feeling guilty about fueling a powermad monster when you buy music you can feel good about supporting the people who actually made it!
Selection:
iTunes: Lots
Magnatune: Not a lot
iTunes is the clear winner here.
To sum up, you get more for your money with magnatunes, including peace of mind. You just can't get many albums there... yet. If magnatune manages to get off the ground that may change, but they have a long road ahead of them. Their biggest challenge is getting more content. In my opinion they need to forge alliances with other like-minded independant labels. There are a lot out there, but many use mail-order as their only form of distribution! Magnatunes needs to get these labels on board pronto.
Actually, artists are frequently as dumb as rocks. While smart individuals may exist, as a population they have the collective IQ of a slightly moldy mango. This is why record companies find it so easy to sign them onto expoitative contracts which give it to them hard and raw in every orifice. Most artists just want to make music, not study law.
In any case, it is flat out wrong to state that this model of record company cannot give an artist the same opporunity for success as a major record label. It is certainly true that such a label won't be able to finance the mega-buck music video and media promotion that top pop tarts like Britney Speares have gotten. At least, not at first. (That may come later) However, *very* few artists signed to record labels get that treatment. Most get shelved, with their contract actively preventing them from seeking opportunities elsewhere rather than helping them.
If a service such as this were to really take off it could be an excellent way for unknown artits to find an audience. By making their entire catalogue available for sampling, artists who would otherwise not even be popular enough to be pirated would have their body of work available and easily accessable with little risk to samplers. It's a long shot, but those odds are a heck of a lot better than an artist who gets one CD pressing (and a fat bill for it) from their record label which is immediately shipped to a warehouse instead of stores. In the latter case, live performances are the only way they have to generate interest.
Now here's the kicker: An artist has to be an entire order of magnitude more popular with a major record label than they do with this service to make the same cash. The kind of artist who scrapes maybe 30K a year out of a record contract with a major label could be living very comfortably with 50% royalties instead of 5%. Even Steve Tyler could do that math.
Of course, for all this to work people actually have to check out the service. If you love music, think of it as a duty to listen to every bloody track this label has available until you find something you like. Then *BUY* it. We're voting with our wallets here, and if nobody heads to the polls these guys will die out, and that would be a shame.
P.S. These guys even have WAV's available when you buy. That flat-out *OWNS* any other music vendor out there. The lack of lossless online music vendors has been something that has kept the audiophile community at arms length from online music purchases. This site could change that. However, it would be smart for them to adopt some form of lossless compression to make their bandwidth costs more bearable. Speaking of bandwidth, I don't think they were planning on being slashdotted! There are rough seas ahead, but I sure hope they can stay afloat!
I typed the following.
A RRIAGE -RETURN
ping www.verisignsucksmonkeyass.net
and got the following:
Pinging www.verisignsucksmonkeyass.net [64.94.110.11] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
What, are you blind?
Let me spell it out for you.
R-E-Q-U-E-S-T-SPACE-T-I-M-E-D-SPACE-O-U-T-C
Let me spell something else out. M-O-R-O-N
This led me to conclude that either Verisign has self-DOS'd their own ad site into oblivion with their wildcards or that my ISP has blocked Verisign's ad site.
The latter implies intellegence and consideration on the part of my ISP (Shaw), so is therefore highly improbable.
So what can I conclude? I really shouldn't modify shell utilities while drunk. I'm probably lucky it didn't tokenize the entered domain and pop up the first 500 google matches. I could be eye-ball deep in monkey ass porn.
This is one helluva of a way to drum up traffic, so I'd be curious to know what kind of steroid-pumped uber-server and fat petabyte pipe they plan to run their site on. Personally, I suspect the ad page will be taken down by Verisign themselves when they smell smoke coming from the server room and see their sysadmin's running around naked on the front lawn while tearing out their hair and screaming "SWEET MOTHER OF SMEGMA, MAKE THEM STOP!!!".