Well, that's like talking about a reproduction of a Picasso vs. a genuine Picasso. The reproduction might be close/identical to the original, so it's really about the same thing. In any case, this is irrelevant in this case, since CDs are mass-produced rather than individually painted. Not to mention, you could have a perfectly genuine physical disc, certificate and all, and yet still have an illegal unlicensed copy (like if you buy an OEM license separately from a machine).
I wouldn't exactly call them junk, a lot of companies and universities use them. Not to mention, all Dell or HP does is assemble other manufacturers' parts. The engineering that goes into those servers is minimal. As far as support: that's something that has to be balanced with price. Quite often, you can tolerate slightly less-expedient support if you save a bunch of money on the machines. It doesn't matter whether it takes them a day or a week to replace a failed machine -- if your server fails, you need to have a hot backup anyway, the company can't spend a day or two without a phone system. If you need a machine that never fails, you don't want to go with either Dell or HP, you probably want a nice big Sun box. Anyway, I just don't see anything wrong with using Dell.
Not to mention, have you looked at the code? It's some of the most hideous code you could think of. In fact, it's hard to think of a worse way to structure a program. It spawns a thread for everything, has random undocumented mutexes, absolutely bizarre ways of passing data (necessary because the switching core is primitive and does not have all the necessary capabilities). The architecture itself is some kind of pseudo-OOP thing implemented in C, with hacks on top to add random features. "Big ball of mud" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Not to mention, you can learn a lot by seeing what kind of questions the candidate asks (and fails to ask). A mediocre programmer that is not reluctant to ask a few questions is far better than a more competent programmer who takes things literally and does not make the effort to identify requirements and look at the problem from a broader perspective. Companies generally look for team players: if you have trouble with something, you go ask someone to help instead of wasting time. They also look for good communication skills: if you don't understand the requirements, you need to take the effort to ask the right questions. Even the best programmer is not worth hiring if he cannot communicate and ends up building the wrong thing.
Uh, no. The standard library and the OS API are not external libraries -- that would generally be considered part of the development environment. You cannot even talk to the network chip from Windows or Linux without using the appropriate API. They were probably referring to not using some kind of "sockets for dummies"/"webserver in a box"-type library. In any case, this is the kind of question that you should ask to clarify to avoid looking really stupid.
Uhh... It is a 3-4 hour job, probably less if you are any good. I remember making something like that in less than two hours in a comp sci class. In fact, this is the perfect job interview question because it directly tests your ability to do the job. I wouldn't say you are a talented candidate if you couldn't even solve a fairly trivial programming assignment given 4 days to do it, AND you didn't mention to the recruiter that you wouldn't be able to do anything that weekend due to your schedule. Generally, people ask about the recruiting process in detail and make plans ahead of time. It's called professionalism.
You must be the only person on this planet who hasn't heard of cash registers and credit cards... Not to mention, what about sales tax? $1.08 isn't any easier to pay than $1.07.
You are looking in the wrong place. Best Buy is incredibly overpriced. Just to compare, Sam's club sells a 32" LCD HDTV with a tuner for $700. The CRT is the ripoff here.
Satellite "broadband" is about as fast as ISDN, and is completely unacceptable for gaming due to latency and bandwidth limitations. In fact, you are probably better-off with dialup.
Uh, dude, plasmas have the same "resampling" problem. You might want to look at higher-quality HDTVs, the digital stuff has been getting much better lately.
Well, the cheapest and easiest way would be to find some old drives and use the faceplates from those. The manufacturers often use the same mechanical design for 5-10 years.
They are not hermetically sealed, but they are sealed against dust, so yeah, opening it will fuck it up pretty fast. But it will run for 20-30 minutes before it craps out.
I think it said in the summary the gas would be burned and turned into electricity in a gas turbine. Less pollution than a coal plant, not using fossil fuels, removing trash from landfills. Not bad.
I've never seen cast aluminum used for the cover. Usually, it's a relatively flat piece of stamped metal. It has filters and stuff built in, so you can't just replace it, but it's just a cheap piece of stamped aluminum. Anyway, the reason the manufacturer won't accept faceplates for warranty claims is due to several reasons: - they can't verify the drive has actually failed - they can't verify the drive wasn't physically damaged - they can't refurbish the defective drive Most drives you send in are actually rebuilt or reformatted. The warranty replacement drive you receive is someone else's failed drive. Because most manufacturers don't perform proper verification, it's not uncommon to get a defective or about-to-fail replacement. I would never use a warranty replacement drive for even a semi-important application, and certainly not in a server.
I think Merrill Lynch is full of shit. There is no way in hell the blu-ray drive costs that much. I doubt the bill-of-materials cost is more than $50, since it's roughly the same thing as a regular CD/DVD drive. The vast majority of the cost is probably due to yield problems with their custom chips.
Uh, you always need oxygen-free copper, for any cable. Even your vacuum cleaner cord is made with oxygen-free cable. All copper used for any cable is generally oxygen-free. As in, free of corrosion. If it wasn't, it would not pass the regulatory requirements and would not work well for the application.
For digital cables, it's far more important that they have proper construction to preserve impedance, good-quality low-loss dielectric, and good-quality termination. Generally, you have to pay quite a bit for a well-made cable. While Monster cable does like to use snake oil bullshit in their marketing, their cables are generally of far better quality than cheapo ones sold in electronics stores. Obviously, they aren't the only manufacturer of quality cables, it's just that the Circuit City/Best Buy selection includes either cheap, low-quality cables or highly overpriced ones. It is generally better to go with the overpriced ones.
Also, SPDIF is far less sensitive to the quality of the cable than HDMI. SPDIF uses manchester coding, which is really inefficient bandwidth-wise but very resilient and can tolerate very poor-quality links. HDMI is almost the complete opposite: there is very little slack. If the cable is even slightly out of spec, you will have problems. This is especially obvious on long runs.
Uh, dude, lots of people created better software than Jorg's. There are tons of commercial packages for Windows that work just as well, if not better. It's not like cdrtools is amazingly good or novel in some aspect of burning CDs. The question you are really asking is why there are no open-source programs equivalent to cdrtools. The answer is, again, quite simple: because cdrtools exists and works fine, and it is definitely a challenging task that does not warrant duplication of effort. This does not mean Jorg is the only person who was capable of creating cdrtools, and does not excuse Jorg for acting like a complete asshat.
With Apache, the situation is different. Apache has always been under the Apache license. They did not change licenses just to be assholes. Everyone who created stuff for Apache knew about the license and chose appropriate licenses for his module.
As far as Sun: it is perfectly natural to be distrustful of them. They live on selling software and hardware, and rely on lock-in to ensure sales. They do not want to be replaced with Linux and commodity Dell boxes. It is pretty obvious that free software isn't all that good for them. Just because they contribute here and there does not mean the free software community should trust them. They have tons of patents, and could easily pull an SCO if they felt like it.
Or you can just avoid the whole problem and buy a laser. Refill toner costs next to nothing on eBay, and you can refill one cartridge at least 5 times. Oh, and it doesn't dry out, either.
The amount of mercury in the bulbs is trivial. They are not even considered hazardous waste, and can be disposed in the trash just like regular bulbs. The environmental impact is less than that of regular bulbs, given that one fluorescent will outlast about 20 incandescents in its lifetime.
Doesn't sound like either of those is a Microsoft problem. You should probably take the issue up with the firewire card manufacturer. Linux has much more serious problems with some of its drivers. Try unplugging a mounted USB drive and see what happens. Last time I tried it, it permanently locked up the USB subsystem, which nothing would cure short of a reboot. Not to mention hibernation support, which is still horrible and usually doesn't work. I like Linux myself, but I am of the firm belief that people living in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks.
Not to mention, just how the fuck are you going to set that fucker up with a 128-bit WEP key? Type that in using the scrollpad? That would take what, like, an hour? What if your college uses a crazy setup with MAC address registration that you have to perform with a web browser on top of windows domain authentication with your normal credentials using CHAP? Peer-to-peer wireless is completely pointless, for the reasons you mentioned. Basically, Microsoft is making a crappy PDA with no touchscreen. Nobody will want to buy it, not even the hardcore nerds. This is what happens when you let engineers and marketing guys design a product -- they cram every single goddamn feature in there because "wouldn't it be cool" and ignore the cost-benefit ratio of those features.
Actually, I work with mixed-signal stuff where I work, including DACs/ADCs, filters, amps, and so on. I do some FPGA stuff here and there, but my main interest is analog. I am by no means an expert, but I work with analog experts on a day-to-day basis. And yes, I've read Jim's book, it is quite excellent.
As far as Sandisk: they are not a no-name brand, but they are mainly known as a manufacturer of solid-state storage (aka digital chips). Analog is not their expertise, and they are pushing the player on the basis of features, not sound quality. That tells me the sound quality is "good enough", rather than "excellent". Yeah, this is a heuristic, but a pretty damn good one.
As far as integrating the DAC with the headphone amp: it's an excellent way to improve sound quality while reducing costs. Modern DACs are made on a very high-performance process. A substantial part of the cost of the chip is the package. All other things being equal, a two-chip solution is going to be more expensive than a single-chip solution. To maintain low cost, lower-performance components will be chosen. If the headphone amp is integrated into the DAC, you can take advantage of the high-performance process for next to nothing. Performance isn't significantly reduced over a two-chip solution, since the DAC is largely an analog circuit. In any case, if you don't believe me, look at the specs of the chip Apple uses in the iPods: WM8971. This chip has amazing performance given its power consumption.
As I said, I am not an Apple fanboy. I just strongly believe in evaluating products based on their performance. It's hard to dispute the iPod's superiority over all of its competitors when it comes to the quality of the user interface, the software, and the hardware itself. In fact, I am tempted to plug it in to the Audio Precision system at work and see how well it really performs compared to my friend's iRiver player (sorry, don't know anyone with a sandisk player). Any serious discussion of sound quality is rather meaningless without at least a THD+N measurement.
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Well, that's like talking about a reproduction of a Picasso vs. a genuine Picasso. The reproduction might be close/identical to the original, so it's really about the same thing. In any case, this is irrelevant in this case, since CDs are mass-produced rather than individually painted. Not to mention, you could have a perfectly genuine physical disc, certificate and all, and yet still have an illegal unlicensed copy (like if you buy an OEM license separately from a machine).
I wouldn't exactly call them junk, a lot of companies and universities use them. Not to mention, all Dell or HP does is assemble other manufacturers' parts. The engineering that goes into those servers is minimal.
As far as support: that's something that has to be balanced with price. Quite often, you can tolerate slightly less-expedient support if you save a bunch of money on the machines. It doesn't matter whether it takes them a day or a week to replace a failed machine -- if your server fails, you need to have a hot backup anyway, the company can't spend a day or two without a phone system. If you need a machine that never fails, you don't want to go with either Dell or HP, you probably want a nice big Sun box. Anyway, I just don't see anything wrong with using Dell.
Not to mention, have you looked at the code? It's some of the most hideous code you could think of. In fact, it's hard to think of a worse way to structure a program. It spawns a thread for everything, has random undocumented mutexes, absolutely bizarre ways of passing data (necessary because the switching core is primitive and does not have all the necessary capabilities). The architecture itself is some kind of pseudo-OOP thing implemented in C, with hacks on top to add random features. "Big ball of mud" doesn't even begin to describe it.
What the hell is wrong with Dell servers? They are the #1 vendor, for a good reason. Who exactly makes better servers?
Not to mention, you can learn a lot by seeing what kind of questions the candidate asks (and fails to ask). A mediocre programmer that is not reluctant to ask a few questions is far better than a more competent programmer who takes things literally and does not make the effort to identify requirements and look at the problem from a broader perspective. Companies generally look for team players: if you have trouble with something, you go ask someone to help instead of wasting time. They also look for good communication skills: if you don't understand the requirements, you need to take the effort to ask the right questions. Even the best programmer is not worth hiring if he cannot communicate and ends up building the wrong thing.
Uh, no. The standard library and the OS API are not external libraries -- that would generally be considered part of the development environment. You cannot even talk to the network chip from Windows or Linux without using the appropriate API. They were probably referring to not using some kind of "sockets for dummies"/"webserver in a box"-type library. In any case, this is the kind of question that you should ask to clarify to avoid looking really stupid.
Uhh... It is a 3-4 hour job, probably less if you are any good. I remember making something like that in less than two hours in a comp sci class. In fact, this is the perfect job interview question because it directly tests your ability to do the job. I wouldn't say you are a talented candidate if you couldn't even solve a fairly trivial programming assignment given 4 days to do it, AND you didn't mention to the recruiter that you wouldn't be able to do anything that weekend due to your schedule. Generally, people ask about the recruiting process in detail and make plans ahead of time. It's called professionalism.
You must be the only person on this planet who hasn't heard of cash registers and credit cards... Not to mention, what about sales tax? $1.08 isn't any easier to pay than $1.07.
You are looking in the wrong place. Best Buy is incredibly overpriced. Just to compare, Sam's club sells a 32" LCD HDTV with a tuner for $700. The CRT is the ripoff here.
You can put together a pretty decent gaming machine for right around $600-$900. About $2000 cheaper than the PS3 solution...
Satellite "broadband" is about as fast as ISDN, and is completely unacceptable for gaming due to latency and bandwidth limitations. In fact, you are probably better-off with dialup.
Uh, dude, plasmas have the same "resampling" problem. You might want to look at higher-quality HDTVs, the digital stuff has been getting much better lately.
Well, the cheapest and easiest way would be to find some old drives and use the faceplates from those. The manufacturers often use the same mechanical design for 5-10 years.
They are not hermetically sealed, but they are sealed against dust, so yeah, opening it will fuck it up pretty fast. But it will run for 20-30 minutes before it craps out.
I think it said in the summary the gas would be burned and turned into electricity in a gas turbine. Less pollution than a coal plant, not using fossil fuels, removing trash from landfills. Not bad.
I've never seen cast aluminum used for the cover. Usually, it's a relatively flat piece of stamped metal. It has filters and stuff built in, so you can't just replace it, but it's just a cheap piece of stamped aluminum. Anyway, the reason the manufacturer won't accept faceplates for warranty claims is due to several reasons:
- they can't verify the drive has actually failed
- they can't verify the drive wasn't physically damaged
- they can't refurbish the defective drive
Most drives you send in are actually rebuilt or reformatted. The warranty replacement drive you receive is someone else's failed drive. Because most manufacturers don't perform proper verification, it's not uncommon to get a defective or about-to-fail replacement. I would never use a warranty replacement drive for even a semi-important application, and certainly not in a server.
I think Merrill Lynch is full of shit. There is no way in hell the blu-ray drive costs that much. I doubt the bill-of-materials cost is more than $50, since it's roughly the same thing as a regular CD/DVD drive. The vast majority of the cost is probably due to yield problems with their custom chips.
Uh, you always need oxygen-free copper, for any cable. Even your vacuum cleaner cord is made with oxygen-free cable. All copper used for any cable is generally oxygen-free. As in, free of corrosion. If it wasn't, it would not pass the regulatory requirements and would not work well for the application.
For digital cables, it's far more important that they have proper construction to preserve impedance, good-quality low-loss dielectric, and good-quality termination. Generally, you have to pay quite a bit for a well-made cable. While Monster cable does like to use snake oil bullshit in their marketing, their cables are generally of far better quality than cheapo ones sold in electronics stores. Obviously, they aren't the only manufacturer of quality cables, it's just that the Circuit City/Best Buy selection includes either cheap, low-quality cables or highly overpriced ones. It is generally better to go with the overpriced ones.
Also, SPDIF is far less sensitive to the quality of the cable than HDMI. SPDIF uses manchester coding, which is really inefficient bandwidth-wise but very resilient and can tolerate very poor-quality links. HDMI is almost the complete opposite: there is very little slack. If the cable is even slightly out of spec, you will have problems. This is especially obvious on long runs.
Uh, dude, lots of people created better software than Jorg's. There are tons of commercial packages for Windows that work just as well, if not better. It's not like cdrtools is amazingly good or novel in some aspect of burning CDs. The question you are really asking is why there are no open-source programs equivalent to cdrtools. The answer is, again, quite simple: because cdrtools exists and works fine, and it is definitely a challenging task that does not warrant duplication of effort. This does not mean Jorg is the only person who was capable of creating cdrtools, and does not excuse Jorg for acting like a complete asshat.
With Apache, the situation is different. Apache has always been under the Apache license. They did not change licenses just to be assholes. Everyone who created stuff for Apache knew about the license and chose appropriate licenses for his module.
As far as Sun: it is perfectly natural to be distrustful of them. They live on selling software and hardware, and rely on lock-in to ensure sales. They do not want to be replaced with Linux and commodity Dell boxes. It is pretty obvious that free software isn't all that good for them. Just because they contribute here and there does not mean the free software community should trust them. They have tons of patents, and could easily pull an SCO if they felt like it.
Or you can just avoid the whole problem and buy a laser. Refill toner costs next to nothing on eBay, and you can refill one cartridge at least 5 times. Oh, and it doesn't dry out, either.
The amount of mercury in the bulbs is trivial. They are not even considered hazardous waste, and can be disposed in the trash just like regular bulbs. The environmental impact is less than that of regular bulbs, given that one fluorescent will outlast about 20 incandescents in its lifetime.
Doesn't sound like either of those is a Microsoft problem. You should probably take the issue up with the firewire card manufacturer. Linux has much more serious problems with some of its drivers. Try unplugging a mounted USB drive and see what happens. Last time I tried it, it permanently locked up the USB subsystem, which nothing would cure short of a reboot. Not to mention hibernation support, which is still horrible and usually doesn't work. I like Linux myself, but I am of the firm belief that people living in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks.
Not to mention, just how the fuck are you going to set that fucker up with a 128-bit WEP key? Type that in using the scrollpad? That would take what, like, an hour? What if your college uses a crazy setup with MAC address registration that you have to perform with a web browser on top of windows domain authentication with your normal credentials using CHAP? Peer-to-peer wireless is completely pointless, for the reasons you mentioned. Basically, Microsoft is making a crappy PDA with no touchscreen. Nobody will want to buy it, not even the hardcore nerds. This is what happens when you let engineers and marketing guys design a product -- they cram every single goddamn feature in there because "wouldn't it be cool" and ignore the cost-benefit ratio of those features.
You either have a failing piece of hardware (memory/HDD) or a bad driver. I have never seen XP crash. Now, viruses are a different story...
Actually, I work with mixed-signal stuff where I work, including DACs/ADCs, filters, amps, and so on. I do some FPGA stuff here and there, but my main interest is analog. I am by no means an expert, but I work with analog experts on a day-to-day basis. And yes, I've read Jim's book, it is quite excellent.
As far as Sandisk: they are not a no-name brand, but they are mainly known as a manufacturer of solid-state storage (aka digital chips). Analog is not their expertise, and they are pushing the player on the basis of features, not sound quality. That tells me the sound quality is "good enough", rather than "excellent". Yeah, this is a heuristic, but a pretty damn good one.
As far as integrating the DAC with the headphone amp: it's an excellent way to improve sound quality while reducing costs. Modern DACs are made on a very high-performance process. A substantial part of the cost of the chip is the package. All other things being equal, a two-chip solution is going to be more expensive than a single-chip solution. To maintain low cost, lower-performance components will be chosen. If the headphone amp is integrated into the DAC, you can take advantage of the high-performance process for next to nothing. Performance isn't significantly reduced over a two-chip solution, since the DAC is largely an analog circuit. In any case, if you don't believe me, look at the specs of the chip Apple uses in the iPods: WM8971. This chip has amazing performance given its power consumption.
As I said, I am not an Apple fanboy. I just strongly believe in evaluating products based on their performance. It's hard to dispute the iPod's superiority over all of its competitors when it comes to the quality of the user interface, the software, and the hardware itself. In fact, I am tempted to plug it in to the Audio Precision system at work and see how well it really performs compared to my friend's iRiver player (sorry, don't know anyone with a sandisk player). Any serious discussion of sound quality is rather meaningless without at least a THD+N measurement.