Unless you hit "Skip Bagging", that is. Which I always do for _all_ the items because the scales are very screwy. Nobody seems to care. Of course, there is usually a cashier who sees everything you are buying anyway.
Germany can have strict requirements for cars and driver's licenses because they have an excellent public transit system and a car is a luxury. In the US, a car is a basic necessity. Thus, we have to let pretty much everyone drive pretty much anything, since cars are usually the only possible mode of transport. Of course, with less-skilled drivers, you have to set the speed limits reasonably low to keep accidents down.
Re:I wouldn't buy a car with this system
on
High-Tech RepoMan
·
· Score: 1
My point is, you can usually get a used car from a private individual for less than the monthly payment on the overpriced pieces of shit bad credit dealers sell, and in better condition. Usually, the bad-credit cars are completely shot, require $500/month in repairs, and are sold for 2x-3x their actual value. Buying them kind of implies complete inability to manage money (or deal with the lack thereof).
Even an early-90s American car (worth $250-$500) with 160k miles on it can be kept in running condition for ~$50 a month if you know anything about cars and the previous owner remembered to change the oil once in a while. This is significantly cheaper than a high interest loan on a $2000 car that you bought for $8000.
Doesn't sound like it. Just because they wrote something vague on the sticker doesn't mean that it's a contract. Their actual policy probably says that store credit will be granted and does not provide for repair or replacement. That's exactly what they did, so there is likely no legal case here.
Re:I wouldn't buy a car with this system
on
High-Tech RepoMan
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Uh, dude, this system is for white trash with such awful credit that they can't even get a loan from a loan shark car place. This is usually the people with multiple repossessions and bad debts. I don't think anyone who is not white trash needs to worry about this system.
I also don't think anyone will be bypassing it -- it's mainly there because it's cheaper than repoing the car, and people who buy cars from those places aren't smart enough to disable it (and probably can't afford to pay someone to do it for them).
I don't even know if they need to get that high-tech. Generally, it's enough to know that suspicious person A sent a message to suspicious person B. The contents can be recovered by searching the place or just monitoring A & B's daily activities. Traffic analysis is a powerful technique.
No, the caller of your module creates a bug when they fail to free the object that you have clearly defined in the interface to be their responsibility.
OK, so what if I want to give the same object to 2 different modules? These things aren't always trivial. What if an exception occurs somewhere and you don't have a chance to clean up properly? Memory leaks are not usually caused by sloppy programming. Allocating and deallocating memory properly can get very complicated, and most truly complicated programs have to use smartpointers and other primitive forms of GC to manage memory.
Are you saying that leaks are not a form of sloppy programming?
Leaks are bugs. Once you lose a pointer to an allocated object, you can't free the memory anymore. If you delete an object that is still in use, you will cause the program to crash. Keeping objects around for longer than you need them is inefficient, but it is not a bug, and will not generally cause the program to behave incorrectly. Any decent profiler should be able to show you how much memory each part of your program uses, so these inefficiencies are easy to correct.
dd won't do it, unless the drives are identical. Ghost can move drives even if you are moving an NTFS partition from, say, a 20 gig to a 160 gig. I don't think there is any other program which can do that, open source or otherwise.
Well, a truly good system will do both. You definitely don't want to get stuck listening to just one song. I would say a better system would require more than one song to figure out your taste better, as well as combine feedback from multiple users. As it is, it seems like Pandora is great for finding something that sounds damn near identical. Not the best system, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient than downloading random MP3s and figuring out which ones you like and what the pattern might be.
Are you joking? A large fraction of bugs in software are due to mismanaged memory. This is one of the main reasons Java apps have much, much better reliability than C++ ones. Without a garbage collector, many types of (perfectly legitimate) structures become very difficult to use. When you create objects in one module and give them to someone else, you create bugs. Then you have to come up with some kind of reference counting system anyway.
Yes, garbage collected programs have leaks too, they're just nastier, because they don't look like bugs because a reference is persisting somewhere.
That's not a leak, it's sloppy programming. Are you saying it is better to leave stray pointers around and potentially crash the program or corrupt data?
But: unlike most people I don't think politicians are evil assholes, suck-ups or idiots.
That's because you live in Norway. Try living here to the US sometime, you'll change your opinion very quickly, since it's precisely the type of politicians we seem to get.
Uh, dude, it's pretty f'ing hard to make a package that can tolerate being shipped thousands of miles with a 0% failure rate. Not to mention, the unit has just been put into production. Most of the possible failure mechanisms have not been identified yet, so it's hard to design tests for them. Maybe the console will overheat after 5 hours if a heatsink was not properly assembled -- how would you do production line testing for that? Once they get some feedback from the warranty claims, the reliability will improve.
Why would two mediocre amplifiers sound mediocre in exactly the same way?
Because they use an identical topology, which pretty much determines what the distortion will look like, and the experiment closely matches THD, noise, and IMD. Chances are, both amps use the same type of devices (BJT vs MOSFET) and the same exact amplifier circuit. If you want to hear something different, compare a single ended class A topology to a class AB, a push-pull class A, and maybe even a class D. Not to mention BJTs vs MOSFETs vs tubes.
OK, that's quite a bit more convincing. Still, I would say that amplifier distortion is not exactly negligible. Speakers are fairly simple and their distortion mechanisms do not involve feedback loops, so the distortion spectrum is probably predominantly second harmonic. Solid-state amplifiers have most of their harmonics at the far end of the spectrum, somewhere around 5th harmonic and up. This is due to the global negative feedback loop that all of them use.
It has been shown many times that low-order harmonics are not as noticeable as high-order harmonics -- most likely, the ear also produces the same artifacts. A poor quality amplifier may very well be the weakest link in an audio system, even if the speakers produce more distortion.
The distortion introduced in turning electrical currents into sound waves dwarfs anything modern electronics will do to the signal.
Do you have any numbers or did you pull this out of your ass? What's a typical THD value of a speaker? Is this for $40 speakers, $500 speakers, $40000 speakers?
I would say that the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a 192 kbps mp3 and the original 1.4 Mbps (700 kbps with lossless FLAC compression) proves that the human ear is quite unsophisticated.
If you can't tell a 192kBps MP3 from the original, you are either deaf or have horrible speakers. I agree with the premise, since most people have horrible speakers hooked up to their PC.
If you can reliably hear the difference between two amplifiers that are matched in properties that are trivial to measure
Sure, two mediocre amplifiers will sound... mediocre. I doubt there is such thing as a high-fidelity car amplifier. The circuits are usually full of compromises to get them to run off of 12V.
You measure THD with a tone generator and a 24-bit ADC which can easily measure THD down to -122dB.
Actually, you measure THD with a tone generator, a filter, and a voltmeter. Do you even have a EE background? Any ADC will have THD+N much greater than a halfway decent amplifier. Also, which ADC chip are you talking about? I have yet to find one with such incredible parameters.
Second, THD is a primitive measurement. It is simply the percentage of all harmonics in a signal. That's kind of like measuring the quality of drinking water just by looking at the proportion of the contaminants. 0.1% of calcium ions is a hell of a lot better than 0.1% of arsenic ions. Similarly, 0.1% even, low-order harmonics sounds better than 0.1% high order harmonics. THD does not even take this into account.
Finally, THD is a measurement of only one frequency. It does not take time-domain distortion or phase distortion or the dynamic characteristics into account. The amplifier might have a horrible slew rate and be completely unusable for audio, yet have an excellent THD number at 1kHz. The truth is, there is no easy way to characterize a nonlinear system.
Test equipment is 100s of times better than your ears.
Really? So, what listens to the music, test equipment or your ears? What kind of test equipment are you referring to -- spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, distortion meters, or something else?
The random noise and non-linearities in an ear are just incredible
That's irrelevant. Nonlinearities generally don't "mask" each other. You are arguing that it is impossible to tell a recording from the original sound, which is obviously not the case.
The human ability to hear is incredibly imperfect. Anybody who thinks that electronic equipment's ability to reproduce audio hasn't already surpassed our ability to hear that audio has more in common with audiophiles than they might like to admit.
Are you saying that it's hard to tell a recorded instrument from a live instrument? Try recording, say, a piano so that it sounds like you are standing next to one. You are underestimating our hearing.
You can die for your country, buy guns, and operate deadly machinery (vehicles) before you can drink a beer
Unfortunately, people of college age are generally not responsible enough to have both the privilege of drinking beer and operating deadly machinery, because they are rather prone to do both at the same time.
Actually, you can't measure any fidelity-related parameter in audio systems with an oscilloscope (or any other cheap, readily-available instrument). Distortion, for instance. Anyone can easily hear 1% THD, on any system. You'll see visible distortion on the scope only when it's at about 10% (when you get visible clipping). In fact, most digital scopes use 8-bit ADCs -- try listening to music on an ancient 8-bit soundblaster.
A very precise spectrum analyzer designed for low frequencies would be much more useful, but you likely won't find one even in a well-equipped lab; a really good one might be _very_ expensive ($50k to millions of dollars).
Quality is very difficult to measure, simply because the ear is a hell of a lot more sophisticated and sensitive to nonlinearities than any man-made instrument. I think listening to a system is much more useful than trying to measure it with cheap, primitive instruments (like THD meters or oscilloscopes). You can have two systems that measure the same THD but sound drastically different, simply because THD is a simplistic measurement.
I hate audiophile snake oil ($500 power cables, $20k "interconnects", and magic boxes) as much as you do, but don't assume you can measure everything. Nobody knows how to quantify, for instance, the taste of something. There same applies to audio.
We don't buy AMD because they're "better" than Intel - a clock is a clock
So, if you make a 286 and clock it at 10GHz, do you think performance will be the same as a 4GHz Pentium 4? Take a processor architecture class or something before spewing garbage like that.
This will never work. It's a simple question of mathematics. The wired equivalent of a large-scale mesh network would be an Ethernet network with a few million users plugged into a single hub. You don't see this arrangement used a whole lot, do you?
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You can't buy an item without weighing it.
Unless you hit "Skip Bagging", that is. Which I always do for _all_ the items because the scales are very screwy. Nobody seems to care. Of course, there is usually a cashier who sees everything you are buying anyway.
Germany can have strict requirements for cars and driver's licenses because they have an excellent public transit system and a car is a luxury. In the US, a car is a basic necessity. Thus, we have to let pretty much everyone drive pretty much anything, since cars are usually the only possible mode of transport. Of course, with less-skilled drivers, you have to set the speed limits reasonably low to keep accidents down.
My point is, you can usually get a used car from a private individual for less than the monthly payment on the overpriced pieces of shit bad credit dealers sell, and in better condition. Usually, the bad-credit cars are completely shot, require $500/month in repairs, and are sold for 2x-3x their actual value. Buying them kind of implies complete inability to manage money (or deal with the lack thereof).
Even an early-90s American car (worth $250-$500) with 160k miles on it can be kept in running condition for ~$50 a month if you know anything about cars and the previous owner remembered to change the oil once in a while. This is significantly cheaper than a high interest loan on a $2000 car that you bought for $8000.
Doesn't sound like it. Just because they wrote something vague on the sticker doesn't mean that it's a contract. Their actual policy probably says that store credit will be granted and does not provide for repair or replacement. That's exactly what they did, so there is likely no legal case here.
Uh, dude, this system is for white trash with such awful credit that they can't even get a loan from a loan shark car place. This is usually the people with multiple repossessions and bad debts. I don't think anyone who is not white trash needs to worry about this system.
I also don't think anyone will be bypassing it -- it's mainly there because it's cheaper than repoing the car, and people who buy cars from those places aren't smart enough to disable it (and probably can't afford to pay someone to do it for them).
I don't even know if they need to get that high-tech. Generally, it's enough to know that suspicious person A sent a message to suspicious person B. The contents can be recovered by searching the place or just monitoring A & B's daily activities. Traffic analysis is a powerful technique.
You just end up with a unused, unpartitioned space on the destination drive.
Why would you want that? Generally, people want one big partition, not a bunch of smaller ones.
No, the caller of your module creates a bug when they fail to free the object that you have clearly defined in the interface to be their responsibility.
OK, so what if I want to give the same object to 2 different modules? These things aren't always trivial. What if an exception occurs somewhere and you don't have a chance to clean up properly? Memory leaks are not usually caused by sloppy programming. Allocating and deallocating memory properly can get very complicated, and most truly complicated programs have to use smartpointers and other primitive forms of GC to manage memory.
Are you saying that leaks are not a form of sloppy programming?
Leaks are bugs. Once you lose a pointer to an allocated object, you can't free the memory anymore. If you delete an object that is still in use, you will cause the program to crash. Keeping objects around for longer than you need them is inefficient, but it is not a bug, and will not generally cause the program to behave incorrectly. Any decent profiler should be able to show you how much memory each part of your program uses, so these inefficiencies are easy to correct.
dd won't do it, unless the drives are identical. Ghost can move drives even if you are moving an NTFS partition from, say, a 20 gig to a 160 gig. I don't think there is any other program which can do that, open source or otherwise.
Well, a truly good system will do both. You definitely don't want to get stuck listening to just one song. I would say a better system would require more than one song to figure out your taste better, as well as combine feedback from multiple users. As it is, it seems like Pandora is great for finding something that sounds damn near identical. Not the best system, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient than downloading random MP3s and figuring out which ones you like and what the pattern might be.
Are you joking? A large fraction of bugs in software are due to mismanaged memory. This is one of the main reasons Java apps have much, much better reliability than C++ ones. Without a garbage collector, many types of (perfectly legitimate) structures become very difficult to use. When you create objects in one module and give them to someone else, you create bugs. Then you have to come up with some kind of reference counting system anyway.
Yes, garbage collected programs have leaks too, they're just nastier, because they don't look like bugs because a reference is persisting somewhere.
That's not a leak, it's sloppy programming. Are you saying it is better to leave stray pointers around and potentially crash the program or corrupt data?
To move hard drives, use Norton Ghost. Chances are, your IT department already has a few copies of that utility.
But: unlike most people I don't think politicians are evil assholes, suck-ups or idiots.
That's because you live in Norway. Try living here to the US sometime, you'll change your opinion very quickly, since it's precisely the type of politicians we seem to get.
Wow. Here in the US, a 300-amp breaker panel is typical for a house. That's about 30kW max.
Uh, dude, it's pretty f'ing hard to make a package that can tolerate being shipped thousands of miles with a 0% failure rate. Not to mention, the unit has just been put into production. Most of the possible failure mechanisms have not been identified yet, so it's hard to design tests for them. Maybe the console will overheat after 5 hours if a heatsink was not properly assembled -- how would you do production line testing for that? Once they get some feedback from the warranty claims, the reliability will improve.
Why would two mediocre amplifiers sound mediocre in exactly the same way?
Because they use an identical topology, which pretty much determines what the distortion will look like, and the experiment closely matches THD, noise, and IMD. Chances are, both amps use the same type of devices (BJT vs MOSFET) and the same exact amplifier circuit. If you want to hear something different, compare a single ended class A topology to a class AB, a push-pull class A, and maybe even a class D. Not to mention BJTs vs MOSFETs vs tubes.
OK, that's quite a bit more convincing. Still, I would say that amplifier distortion is not exactly negligible. Speakers are fairly simple and their distortion mechanisms do not involve feedback loops, so the distortion spectrum is probably predominantly second harmonic. Solid-state amplifiers have most of their harmonics at the far end of the spectrum, somewhere around 5th harmonic and up. This is due to the global negative feedback loop that all of them use.
It has been shown many times that low-order harmonics are not as noticeable as high-order harmonics -- most likely, the ear also produces the same artifacts. A poor quality amplifier may very well be the weakest link in an audio system, even if the speakers produce more distortion.
The distortion introduced in turning electrical currents into sound waves dwarfs anything modern electronics will do to the signal.
Do you have any numbers or did you pull this out of your ass? What's a typical THD value of a speaker? Is this for $40 speakers, $500 speakers, $40000 speakers?
I would say that the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a 192 kbps mp3 and the original 1.4 Mbps (700 kbps with lossless FLAC compression) proves that the human ear is quite unsophisticated.
If you can't tell a 192kBps MP3 from the original, you are either deaf or have horrible speakers. I agree with the premise, since most people have horrible speakers hooked up to their PC.
If you can reliably hear the difference between two amplifiers that are matched in properties that are trivial to measure
Sure, two mediocre amplifiers will sound... mediocre. I doubt there is such thing as a high-fidelity car amplifier. The circuits are usually full of compromises to get them to run off of 12V.
You measure THD with a tone generator and a 24-bit ADC which can easily measure THD down to -122dB.
Actually, you measure THD with a tone generator, a filter, and a voltmeter. Do you even have a EE background? Any ADC will have THD+N much greater than a halfway decent amplifier. Also, which ADC chip are you talking about? I have yet to find one with such incredible parameters.
Second, THD is a primitive measurement. It is simply the percentage of all harmonics in a signal. That's kind of like measuring the quality of drinking water just by looking at the proportion of the contaminants. 0.1% of calcium ions is a hell of a lot better than 0.1% of arsenic ions. Similarly, 0.1% even, low-order harmonics sounds better than 0.1% high order harmonics. THD does not even take this into account.
Finally, THD is a measurement of only one frequency. It does not take time-domain distortion or phase distortion or the dynamic characteristics into account. The amplifier might have a horrible slew rate and be completely unusable for audio, yet have an excellent THD number at 1kHz. The truth is, there is no easy way to characterize a nonlinear system.
Test equipment is 100s of times better than your ears.
Really? So, what listens to the music, test equipment or your ears? What kind of test equipment are you referring to -- spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, distortion meters, or something else?
The random noise and non-linearities in an ear are just incredible
That's irrelevant. Nonlinearities generally don't "mask" each other. You are arguing that it is impossible to tell a recording from the original sound, which is obviously not the case.
The human ability to hear is incredibly imperfect. Anybody who thinks that electronic equipment's ability to reproduce audio hasn't already surpassed our ability to hear that audio has more in common with audiophiles than they might like to admit.
Are you saying that it's hard to tell a recorded instrument from a live instrument? Try recording, say, a piano so that it sounds like you are standing next to one. You are underestimating our hearing.
You can die for your country, buy guns, and operate deadly machinery (vehicles) before you can drink a beer
Unfortunately, people of college age are generally not responsible enough to have both the privilege of drinking beer and operating deadly machinery, because they are rather prone to do both at the same time.
Actually, you can't measure any fidelity-related parameter in audio systems with an oscilloscope (or any other cheap, readily-available instrument). Distortion, for instance. Anyone can easily hear 1% THD, on any system. You'll see visible distortion on the scope only when it's at about 10% (when you get visible clipping). In fact, most digital scopes use 8-bit ADCs -- try listening to music on an ancient 8-bit soundblaster.
A very precise spectrum analyzer designed for low frequencies would be much more useful, but you likely won't find one even in a well-equipped lab; a really good one might be _very_ expensive ($50k to millions of dollars).
Quality is very difficult to measure, simply because the ear is a hell of a lot more sophisticated and sensitive to nonlinearities than any man-made instrument. I think listening to a system is much more useful than trying to measure it with cheap, primitive instruments (like THD meters or oscilloscopes). You can have two systems that measure the same THD but sound drastically different, simply because THD is a simplistic measurement.
I hate audiophile snake oil ($500 power cables, $20k "interconnects", and magic boxes) as much as you do, but don't assume you can measure everything. Nobody knows how to quantify, for instance, the taste of something. There same applies to audio.
We don't buy AMD because they're "better" than Intel - a clock is a clock
So, if you make a 286 and clock it at 10GHz, do you think performance will be the same as a 4GHz Pentium 4? Take a processor architecture class or something before spewing garbage like that.
the main reason AMD doesn't sell well is crappy marketing
Or perhaps because Dell doesn't offer AMD? You do realize that Dell has by far the largest market share?
This will never work. It's a simple question of mathematics. The wired equivalent of a large-scale mesh network would be an Ethernet network with a few million users plugged into a single hub. You don't see this arrangement used a whole lot, do you?