SPDIF is designed for 75 ohm video cables, so your cable should work perfectly. Jitter isn't "crap", it's there. If you don't care whether your THD is 0.01% or 0.1%, you don't need to worry about it -- and most people don't need to worry about such differences. If you want to get the best possible audio quality, you do need to consider jitter. It's not just some mythical audiophile invention, almost any datasheet for a DAC chip will have a jitter/THD graph.
In any case, I would be more worried about the soundcard doing nasty crap to the signal. Many cards are known for resampling everything to 48KHz, thus lowering the quality by an order of magnitude. They most likely to this because they can get away with a standard crystal and don't need a PLL.
What skillsets? Win2K is not all that different from WinNT 4.0 if you think about it. Yeah, they added a few things and rebadged it, but it's very similar under the hood.
I wouldn't worry about lack of Linux adoption due to FUD. Linux will win solely by virtue of its price if it actually becomes a good replacement for Windows. Think about it: if your business spends millions of dollars a year on Windows, a competitor who uses Linux will have a big advantage. It doesn't matter how much propaganda MS puts out, the issue will work itself out.
Right now, Linux offers some advantages and has big disadvantages -- such as the lack of Windows compatibility. It would simply be impossible to replace it at my job, for instance, because many corporate applications that I use are only available for Windows (one is an ActiveX application, by the way). Obviously, Linux is not an option here.
The real danger from Microsoft is software, file format, protocol and especially hardware lock-in. Microsoft has enough power to make that happen. Of course, all of this borders on unfair competition, so they will have some legal obstacles in that arena.
Blackboard is very primitive. I'm surprised they can actually sell it considering that it does not have many capabilities. At my school, hardly anybody uses it because one would have to restructure grading and so on around its very basic capabilities. It doesn't allow automatically dropped grades, and so on.
I'd say the main problem with free alternatives is really stupid project names. Moodle? WTF? People need to realize that the name is even more critical than features or capabilities. Having a bad name will get you nowhere. It needs to be simple, non-offensive, non-weird, and describe the product. I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a name like "Moodle" on university publications.
They really believe that colorful flashing crap helps sales.
That wouldn't be because colorful flashing crap DOES help sales, would it? What is a better sales pitch, some plain text "come check us out" blurb, or a nice colorful picture of something? It may not be true for you, but it is true for 95% of any mass-market audience.
Hardware manufacturers are in China. They don't have much of an influence on US policies. Microsoft, Apple, and Intel don't manufacture TVs or VCRs, and ultimately don't care all that much.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
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Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 1
Which one of his points do you actually disagree with? I thought his points fairly well reasoned. Maybe you are too brainwashed and/or closed-minded?
Re:Cool ads, but I don't think they promote Firefo
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Firefox Promo Videos
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Looks like you don't know much about marketing. You don't want to give the viewer much clue as to what something does. If you say up front "It's a web browser", people will think "oh ok i already have one, goodbye". If you make them think "what the hell is firefox?", they will click on the link and read the sales pitch on firefox.org (and quite likely download and try it). Much more effective.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Read The Farking License. It doesn't say "preferred form for the original developer". It says "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". As in, ASCII source code. What they are saying is that you can't comply with the GPL by, say, releasing code only as a PDF file, or only as a hardcopy, or without the appropriate makefiles. Nowhere does it say you even _have_ to release a patch.
Personally, I consider a multimeter to be as basic a tool as a screwdriver, so I kind of assumed you already had one. If not, you can find them for $10-$15 and they are a good investment. You can use one for checking various voltages (outlets, adapters, polarity, etc), as well as resistance and continuity. If you do any work around the house, it's hard to do without one.
Well, it depends. The only really good way to cover your tracks is to make it look like the failure was caused by something else (such as bad hardware). The problem is, they can take you to court without much evidence. The feds have a 90-95% conviction rate, so you better have a pretty damn good lawyer, which is quite expensive. Once you are in court, you've pretty much lost -- whether you get convicted or not. As you've pointed out, it's unlikely to improve your relationship with your current employer.
You don't seem to get it. A disgruntled sysadmin leaves. 3 days later something strange happens to the server. The FBI is contacted. They ask "did you have any disgruntled employees leave lately?". The boss says "yes". It doesn't take much investigation to put the two together. Disgruntled sysadmin ends up in federal court and goes to jail.
You need to chill out. First, a short circuit won't cause a fire, it will just trip the breaker. Second, this type of thing is very easy to check with an ohmmeter. Third, it is not that likely that the recalled cable is actually defective -- chances are, they recalled 10,000 cables to get 100 defective ones.
Yeah, like you won't be the first suspect in any subsequent investigation. You could get several years in jail if you fuck up their network. Don't do it.
I routinely see websites exploit a fully-patched IE -- either due to some unpatched vulnerability or due to the ease of tricking the user with IE. I have yet to see a single website successfully exploit firefox. Of course, that doesn't excuse your sysadmin's incompetence, but I would say even Firefox 1.0 is a hell of a lot less vulnerable than the latest MSIE.
that would help competitive PRIVATE INDUSTRY get into space to do all that exploring.
Yeah, because private companies can make money from pixie dust and love to spend it on projects with zero ROI. Or are you suggesting we give private companies taxpayer money?
Looks like you don't understand how DDOSs work. They get a whole lot of hijacked computers with DDOS trojans installed on them. MSIE makes this quite easy. Then they launch a DDOS at a website. You can't "block" the packets on the server because by the time your server gets them it's too late -- they have already clogged up your pipe. In fact, the traffic will probably overwhelm your ISP unless they are very large. The only place to block them would be on the ISPs main router, and that's pretty hard to do given that there could be thousands of different bots and they aren't that terribly different from ordinary users (other than the amount of traffic they generate).
You do have a point about the software not being intended for their needs. Of course, I'm sure the vendor made quite a few changes as they grew, because there is simply no way a program can scale that well.
However, this is simply an example of the sloppiness of the software development process in general. In my opinion, any mission-critical software package should come with a full disclosure of its limitations. This shouldn't be something that's left to some codemonkey who did the database layout. This is one of the main parameters of such a system -- what kind of transaction volume it can handle. It should be carefully documented and explained. If it was, it wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
By your argument, repealing laws against murder would also result in greater freedom. Yeah, sure, code is not the same as murder, but it's the same logic and hopefully you can see its absurdity.
That's exactly the same reasoning that leads to problems like this. We've all heard that 640k should be enough for everybody. A good rule for counters and bit values is to go several orders of magnitude above what you think will be the maximum possible value for that counter.
One or two changes per flight is unlikely, but possible. Yeah, it's insanely high. Yeah, such a thing might only occur once every 15 years. However, the value should have been a 32-bit unsigned integer instead of a 16-bit signed integer, because a thousand of changes in a month is well within the domain of possible values. Also, these types of limits should be conspicuously published in a specifications sheet, just like every other industry does.
Also, what's your proof that a god does not exist.
You can't prove that something doesn't exist; therefore, the burden of proof is on you, to prove that god DOES exist. So far, nobody has been able to accomplish that, or even show evidence that supports the hypothesis that god exists.
First, it can only be called a theory in the most colloquial sense. Unlike the theory of evolution, ID is not a theory in the scientific sense. Theories have to be supported by hard evidence. Don't put ID on an equal footing with scientific theories, because it isn't one of them.
Second, the theory of evolution does not have "holes" or "flaws" as fundies might want you to think. We might not know everything as precisely as we would like, but there is no evidence which contradicts it.
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SPDIF is designed for 75 ohm video cables, so your cable should work perfectly. Jitter isn't "crap", it's there. If you don't care whether your THD is 0.01% or 0.1%, you don't need to worry about it -- and most people don't need to worry about such differences. If you want to get the best possible audio quality, you do need to consider jitter. It's not just some mythical audiophile invention, almost any datasheet for a DAC chip will have a jitter/THD graph.
In any case, I would be more worried about the soundcard doing nasty crap to the signal. Many cards are known for resampling everything to 48KHz, thus lowering the quality by an order of magnitude. They most likely to this because they can get away with a standard crystal and don't need a PLL.
What skillsets? Win2K is not all that different from WinNT 4.0 if you think about it. Yeah, they added a few things and rebadged it, but it's very similar under the hood.
Google doesn't have to get past armies of bureaucrats and various officials. If it did, it would also be a stupid name.
I wouldn't worry about lack of Linux adoption due to FUD. Linux will win solely by virtue of its price if it actually becomes a good replacement for Windows. Think about it: if your business spends millions of dollars a year on Windows, a competitor who uses Linux will have a big advantage. It doesn't matter how much propaganda MS puts out, the issue will work itself out.
Right now, Linux offers some advantages and has big disadvantages -- such as the lack of Windows compatibility. It would simply be impossible to replace it at my job, for instance, because many corporate applications that I use are only available for Windows (one is an ActiveX application, by the way). Obviously, Linux is not an option here.
The real danger from Microsoft is software, file format, protocol and especially hardware lock-in. Microsoft has enough power to make that happen. Of course, all of this borders on unfair competition, so they will have some legal obstacles in that arena.
Blackboard is very primitive. I'm surprised they can actually sell it considering that it does not have many capabilities. At my school, hardly anybody uses it because one would have to restructure grading and so on around its very basic capabilities. It doesn't allow automatically dropped grades, and so on.
I'd say the main problem with free alternatives is really stupid project names. Moodle? WTF? People need to realize that the name is even more critical than features or capabilities. Having a bad name will get you nowhere. It needs to be simple, non-offensive, non-weird, and describe the product. I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a name like "Moodle" on university publications.
They really believe that colorful flashing crap helps sales.
That wouldn't be because colorful flashing crap DOES help sales, would it? What is a better sales pitch, some plain text "come check us out" blurb, or a nice colorful picture of something? It may not be true for you, but it is true for 95% of any mass-market audience.
Hardware manufacturers are in China. They don't have much of an influence on US policies. Microsoft, Apple, and Intel don't manufacture TVs or VCRs, and ultimately don't care all that much.
Which one of his points do you actually disagree with? I thought his points fairly well reasoned. Maybe you are too brainwashed and/or closed-minded?
Looks like you don't know much about marketing. You don't want to give the viewer much clue as to what something does. If you say up front "It's a web browser", people will think "oh ok i already have one, goodbye". If you make them think "what the hell is firefox?", they will click on the link and read the sales pitch on firefox.org (and quite likely download and try it). Much more effective.
Read The Farking License. It doesn't say "preferred form for the original developer". It says "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". As in, ASCII source code. What they are saying is that you can't comply with the GPL by, say, releasing code only as a PDF file, or only as a hardcopy, or without the appropriate makefiles. Nowhere does it say you even _have_ to release a patch.
Personally, I consider a multimeter to be as basic a tool as a screwdriver, so I kind of assumed you already had one. If not, you can find them for $10-$15 and they are a good investment. You can use one for checking various voltages (outlets, adapters, polarity, etc), as well as resistance and continuity. If you do any work around the house, it's hard to do without one.
Well, it depends. The only really good way to cover your tracks is to make it look like the failure was caused by something else (such as bad hardware). The problem is, they can take you to court without much evidence. The feds have a 90-95% conviction rate, so you better have a pretty damn good lawyer, which is quite expensive. Once you are in court, you've pretty much lost -- whether you get convicted or not. As you've pointed out, it's unlikely to improve your relationship with your current employer.
You don't seem to get it. A disgruntled sysadmin leaves. 3 days later something strange happens to the server. The FBI is contacted. They ask "did you have any disgruntled employees leave lately?". The boss says "yes". It doesn't take much investigation to put the two together. Disgruntled sysadmin ends up in federal court and goes to jail.
You need to chill out. First, a short circuit won't cause a fire, it will just trip the breaker. Second, this type of thing is very easy to check with an ohmmeter. Third, it is not that likely that the recalled cable is actually defective -- chances are, they recalled 10,000 cables to get 100 defective ones.
Yeah, like you won't be the first suspect in any subsequent investigation. You could get several years in jail if you fuck up their network. Don't do it.
I routinely see websites exploit a fully-patched IE -- either due to some unpatched vulnerability or due to the ease of tricking the user with IE. I have yet to see a single website successfully exploit firefox. Of course, that doesn't excuse your sysadmin's incompetence, but I would say even Firefox 1.0 is a hell of a lot less vulnerable than the latest MSIE.
that would help competitive PRIVATE INDUSTRY get into space to do all that exploring.
Yeah, because private companies can make money from pixie dust and love to spend it on projects with zero ROI. Or are you suggesting we give private companies taxpayer money?
My comparison is not ridiculous; your logic is.
Looks like you don't understand how DDOSs work. They get a whole lot of hijacked computers with DDOS trojans installed on them. MSIE makes this quite easy. Then they launch a DDOS at a website. You can't "block" the packets on the server because by the time your server gets them it's too late -- they have already clogged up your pipe. In fact, the traffic will probably overwhelm your ISP unless they are very large. The only place to block them would be on the ISPs main router, and that's pretty hard to do given that there could be thousands of different bots and they aren't that terribly different from ordinary users (other than the amount of traffic they generate).
You do have a point about the software not being intended for their needs. Of course, I'm sure the vendor made quite a few changes as they grew, because there is simply no way a program can scale that well.
However, this is simply an example of the sloppiness of the software development process in general. In my opinion, any mission-critical software package should come with a full disclosure of its limitations. This shouldn't be something that's left to some codemonkey who did the database layout. This is one of the main parameters of such a system -- what kind of transaction volume it can handle. It should be carefully documented and explained. If it was, it wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
By your argument, repealing laws against murder would also result in greater freedom. Yeah, sure, code is not the same as murder, but it's the same logic and hopefully you can see its absurdity.
That's exactly the same reasoning that leads to problems like this. We've all heard that 640k should be enough for everybody. A good rule for counters and bit values is to go several orders of magnitude above what you think will be the maximum possible value for that counter.
One or two changes per flight is unlikely, but possible. Yeah, it's insanely high. Yeah, such a thing might only occur once every 15 years. However, the value should have been a 32-bit unsigned integer instead of a 16-bit signed integer, because a thousand of changes in a month is well within the domain of possible values. Also, these types of limits should be conspicuously published in a specifications sheet, just like every other industry does.
Also, what's your proof that a god does not exist.
You can't prove that something doesn't exist; therefore, the burden of proof is on you, to prove that god DOES exist. So far, nobody has been able to accomplish that, or even show evidence that supports the hypothesis that god exists.
First, it can only be called a theory in the most colloquial sense. Unlike the theory of evolution, ID is not a theory in the scientific sense. Theories have to be supported by hard evidence. Don't put ID on an equal footing with scientific theories, because it isn't one of them.
Second, the theory of evolution does not have "holes" or "flaws" as fundies might want you to think. We might not know everything as precisely as we would like, but there is no evidence which contradicts it.
Replace "faith" with "stupidity" and you will be right on.