How do you respond? It's pretty simple. I would start by either writing a letter to the director of IT or by meeting him or her in person (schedule an appointment). Usually, these types of things are simply a misunderstanding. Of course, if you are using said BitTorrent copy to pirate stuff, you are probably not getting much sympathy. But if you explain why you need BitTorrent access, I'm sure the IT people will not object. Keep in mind that they are concerned about getting sued for copyright violations, so give them a reason to believe that you will not be breaking copyright laws.
I would suggest getting accepted to college, and THEN taking a semester or two off. Most colleges will let you do that without a problem. Many scholarships and things like that are only available if you go to college directly from high school. If it's a highly selective school, they sometimes give preference to HS students. Of course, it all depends on your particular situation.
the majority of millionaires are the result of fiscal conservative living, not raking in cash hand over fist.
Riiiiight. You have to be a moron to believe that (of course, who else reads books like that?). If you, on average, earn $45K a year _after taxes_ (this is well above the average), you will make only $1.8 million over 40 years. If you live like a bum your entire life, you might have a million to retire with, but that's not my definition of a millionnaire.
Most millionaires, in fact, rake in cash hand over fist. They generally have huge business income and/or investment income.
Yeah, but at least Mozilla fixes the holes before they start to be actively exploited. Microsoft seems to fix holes only when everyone is already using them to install spyware.
This is the price for a 1000 foot spool. Decent quality coax cable isn't that much more. Obviously, audio cable costs more because they don't make millions of feet a year. Think about how much Cat5 it takes to wire up an average office building. However, if you are willing to make your own cables, you can get good quality cable for less than a dollar a foot.
The audio isn't going to 'sound better' if you buy more expensive digital cables.
I agree -- given that the cable is of decent quality. I was mostly commenting on people hooking up SPDIF using ordinary audio cables. It might work somewhat, but you will probably have some issues.
but a $75 Monster cable doesn't give you much over the $10-$20 'high end' at Wal-Mart.
I'm not too sure if I trust the "high-end" at Wal-mart much (I've seen many shoddy cables disguised as high-end), but I agree that Monster is rather overpriced. There are numerous companies online that have very inexpensive cables that are of good quality (such as PartsExpress.com).
Most SPDIF cables are used to send AC3 or Coherent Acoustics (DTS) signals to the decoder.
I don't own anything that can decode AC3 or DTS, so I use SPDIF. Those standards are probaly better than SPDIF, so the jitter thing probably does not apply.
I have yet to hear it, even on horribly crappy cables. Show me an actual double-blind test that indicates jitter is a bat porblem,
Take a cheap cable. Hook up one end to the signal source, hook a 75 ohm resistor to the other end. Hook up a scope across the resistor. Look at the fucked-up waveform. Explain how exactly you can recover a stable clock from a distorted, jumpy signal.
I've done this, and there is a huge difference. You don't need some kind of super-high-end cable -- just a proper 75 ohm one with decent ends. I don't really care if the degradation in quality is audible, because I'd rather not have degraded quality if I can avoid it without spending a lot of money. Cables are cheap upgrades.
Remember, when you watch a DVD, HDTV, digital cable, or DBS, you are looking at a *lossy compressed* signal. The digital compression artifacts are *far* more intrusive than anything you're likely to notice from not having "premium" cables.
So you are saying that the quality of a DVD cannot possibly be made worse? Think about the problems bad cables will introduce. Ringing in the cable from mismatched impedances shows up as fuzzy edges; if the problem is really bad, you'll see ghosting. High contrast areas will look less sharp. Colors might be distorted slightly. This stuff is easily noticeable on a decent-quality TV. Of course, if you don't care about image quality, this is the wrong thread. Also, nobody is saying you need to hook up your $50 Apex TV with high-end cables.
That's a bullshit statement. You have no evidence to back it up, but you provide a blanket statement that has no real meaning.
How do you know what evidence I have? Just so you know, I've taken apart numerous expensive-looking cables from Radio Shack, Wally world, and so on. Sure, they have gold plated pins and a really thick cable jacket, but they aren't well-made where it counts. I've yet to see a soldered connection, generous thickness wire, or decent shielding in a discount-store cable, and I've taken apart a few dozen of them.
Cat5 is fairly high-grade cable, as a matter of fact -- it's made from oxygen-free copper, and the impedances and crosstalk are tightly controlled. USB is less stringent due to its short maximum length (but it still requires an exact impedance match for USB2). Besides, look at how much a decent quality patch cable costs at a store.
All I am saying is that to get decent quality audio/video you need properly engineered cables. Monster cable is properly engineered; cheap Wal-mart cable generally isn't. If you are willing to look, you will find many properly engineered cables for about half the price of Monster cable. There is no excuse to hook up a $1500 TV with a 50 cent S-Video cord from Wal-mart.
Yes, and PLLs do very little against jitter, especially against low-frequency jitter. Look at some of the graphs for a DIR1703 (a SPDIF receiver with a PLL reclocker). In fact, a PLL would introduce quite a bit of its own jitter.
Actually, shielding speaker cable might be more important than most people think. Keep in mind that almost all audio amplifiers have a negative feedback loop. The speaker cable picks up stray RF, it gets fed back to the input and gets amplified. I can't imagine it doing much good to your sound, since amplifiers aren't terribly great at those frequencies. Of course, the right place to take care of it would be inside the amp, but nobody ever does.
You can't run a DAC off its own clock because you can't make two clocks with exactly the same period. The DAC buffer would either overflow or underrun because it would be playing either too quickly or too slowly. The only way you could bypass this problem would be to generate the master clock in the DAC and feed it to the source, but I've never seen this done in any consumer-grade equipment.
If there is significant jitter in the system clock, it will significantly distort the waveform -- definitely enough to hear it. And it doesn't even require very much jitter.
I agree, whoever you are referring to is probably full of shit. There are some circumstances when burning at a higher speed will degrade quality, but it should be easily noticeable (clicks and pops). I suppose some really badly designed CD player could have excessive jitter on the SPDIF output from badly recorded discs, but it didn't sound like they were using SPDIF.
The problems arise when you want to convert your bitstream into an analog signal. Noise in your system can cause both bit inaccuracy and clock jitter. This will cause distortion. Remember, buddy: they don't teach you everything in Digital Logic 101.
Let's clear up a few myths. First, there is no such thing as a digital signal. It's an analog signal which encodes digital information. Wrong impedances can cause bad things to happen (such as some of the bits getting corrupted). Depending on the protocol used, this can be very significant.
SPDIF is a horrible protocol that is sensitive to cables and almost anything else. Though it's nominally a digital signal, it's multiplexed with the system clock (which is as analog as it gets). If your cable distorts the signal (it almost certainly does), the system clock will be jittery and this will cause distortion. On a decent system, this can be audible.
Analog signals are a whole different ballgame. If you don't think cables can make a difference, pick up an electromagnetics book. Anything from Wal-mart is probably suboptimal -- even if it looks well-made, it probably isn't.
For example, the skin effect can affect the quality of analog signals being transmitted across a stereo cable. . . in the megahertz range.
Wrong. Skin effect applies to any non-DC signal. It will cause a significant roll-off at frequencies as low as 100KHz. It doesn't matter much for signals in the audio band, though.
Recording and video studios don't tend to use Monster Cable.
From what I've heard, many recording engineers are more obsessive about cable quality than the most rabid audiophile. Studios don't use Monster cable because it's not good enough for their needs. When you have miles of cable carrying sensitive signals, it better be the best damn cable you can get your paws on. You can bet your ass they don't use anything cheap.
The wire you find inside your speakers look a whole lot more like cheap $3 a spool bargain bin wire than they do Monster Cable.
Maybe if you have bargain bin speakers. Besides, wire parameters are strongly dependent on length. The 6 inches of wire inside the speaker are not going to make much of a difference compared to the 15 feet of wire connecting it to the amplifier.
You might have a point about speaker cables. However, don't assume that the effect of impurities in the cable is negligible. Oxidation can cause nasty things to happen to your signals, and a cheap cable will not have oxygen-free copper.
You are 100% wrong when it comes to low-level signals. There, minor differences in cables will have significant effects. Too much capacitance will cause a significant roll-off for high frequencies; skin effect can do the same thing. Poor quality or improperly designed shielding will increase noise. Poor impedance matching will degrade video quality by several orders of magnitude. Low-quality connectors, cable, or termination will cause significant nonlinearities (oxides act as semiconductors, by the way). I've seen cheap cables detect AM radio -- that should tell you something about their behavior as ideal conductors!
Yeah, like it's really hard for a cashier (for example) to write down the card information and watch you enter the PIN. It's not very hard to program your own ATM cards, you know.
The email address provided in the SMTP transaction, or the message headers, should ABSOLUTELY NOT be considered valid unless, and until, the IP is verified as designated by the domain of the RHS of that email address.
Why the hell is that? My email account is on a completely different network than my SMTP server (work email + ISP-provided SMTP server). This is perfectly legitimate and quite common. Besides, I don't see the problem with someone getting backscatter. You will get it anyway, for instance with bounced emails due to invalid addresses and so on. Set up a filter and the problem is gone.
Read what I said. IF you dispute the charge after it has been made and the credit card slip does not have your signature on it, it's the store's problem. Signatures are more reliable than PINs in proving identity, since they are basically a biometric identifier.
This is actually a lot less secure. This scheme is used for debit cards here in the US, and nobody really likes it. It's really easy to watch someone enter a 4 digit pin, and there is no paper trail. If someone has your card number and your PIN, your money is gone.
With a credit card, if the cashier doesn't bother to verify the signature, it will be the store's loss should the credit card holder dispute the charge. And signatures are very difficult to fake well enough that an expert can't tell the difference.
Actually, this is a big advantage for corporate desktops. By doing a few simple things, you can guarantee that users will not be able to fuck things up. On Windows, you have to work hard to lock everything down. On Linux, you just don't give them the root password.
Besides, maybe you should try something other than Slackware. For instance, to install something on Mandrake or Red hat you just double click the RPM file. Couldn't be easier.
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How do you respond? It's pretty simple. I would start by either writing a letter to the director of IT or by meeting him or her in person (schedule an appointment). Usually, these types of things are simply a misunderstanding. Of course, if you are using said BitTorrent copy to pirate stuff, you are probably not getting much sympathy. But if you explain why you need BitTorrent access, I'm sure the IT people will not object. Keep in mind that they are concerned about getting sued for copyright violations, so give them a reason to believe that you will not be breaking copyright laws.
I would suggest getting accepted to college, and THEN taking a semester or two off. Most colleges will let you do that without a problem. Many scholarships and things like that are only available if you go to college directly from high school. If it's a highly selective school, they sometimes give preference to HS students. Of course, it all depends on your particular situation.
the majority of millionaires are the result of fiscal conservative living, not raking in cash hand over fist.
Riiiiight. You have to be a moron to believe that (of course, who else reads books like that?). If you, on average, earn $45K a year _after taxes_ (this is well above the average), you will make only $1.8 million over 40 years. If you live like a bum your entire life, you might have a million to retire with, but that's not my definition of a millionnaire.
Most millionaires, in fact, rake in cash hand over fist. They generally have huge business income and/or investment income.
I should hope that someone who makes $160K can afford a $100 dinner once in a while. Otherwise, they are just being a cheapskate.
Yeah, but at least Mozilla fixes the holes before they start to be actively exploited. Microsoft seems to fix holes only when everyone is already using them to install spyware.
Cat5 is $0.10/ft
This is the price for a 1000 foot spool. Decent quality coax cable isn't that much more. Obviously, audio cable costs more because they don't make millions of feet a year. Think about how much Cat5 it takes to wire up an average office building. However, if you are willing to make your own cables, you can get good quality cable for less than a dollar a foot.
The audio isn't going to 'sound better' if you buy more expensive digital cables.
I agree -- given that the cable is of decent quality. I was mostly commenting on people hooking up SPDIF using ordinary audio cables. It might work somewhat, but you will probably have some issues.
but a $75 Monster cable doesn't give you much over the $10-$20 'high end' at Wal-Mart.
I'm not too sure if I trust the "high-end" at Wal-mart much (I've seen many shoddy cables disguised as high-end), but I agree that Monster is rather overpriced. There are numerous companies online that have very inexpensive cables that are of good quality (such as PartsExpress.com).
Most SPDIF cables are used to send AC3 or Coherent Acoustics (DTS) signals to the decoder.
I don't own anything that can decode AC3 or DTS, so I use SPDIF. Those standards are probaly better than SPDIF, so the jitter thing probably does not apply.
I have yet to hear it, even on horribly crappy cables. Show me an actual double-blind test that indicates jitter is a bat porblem,
Take a cheap cable. Hook up one end to the signal source, hook a 75 ohm resistor to the other end. Hook up a scope across the resistor. Look at the fucked-up waveform. Explain how exactly you can recover a stable clock from a distorted, jumpy signal.
I've done this, and there is a huge difference. You don't need some kind of super-high-end cable -- just a proper 75 ohm one with decent ends. I don't really care if the degradation in quality is audible, because I'd rather not have degraded quality if I can avoid it without spending a lot of money. Cables are cheap upgrades.
Remember, when you watch a DVD, HDTV, digital cable, or DBS, you are looking at a *lossy compressed* signal. The digital compression artifacts are *far* more intrusive than anything you're likely to notice from not having "premium" cables.
So you are saying that the quality of a DVD cannot possibly be made worse? Think about the problems bad cables will introduce. Ringing in the cable from mismatched impedances shows up as fuzzy edges; if the problem is really bad, you'll see ghosting. High contrast areas will look less sharp. Colors might be distorted slightly. This stuff is easily noticeable on a decent-quality TV. Of course, if you don't care about image quality, this is the wrong thread. Also, nobody is saying you need to hook up your $50 Apex TV with high-end cables.
That's a bullshit statement. You have no evidence to back it up, but you provide a blanket statement that has no real meaning.
How do you know what evidence I have? Just so you know, I've taken apart numerous expensive-looking cables from Radio Shack, Wally world, and so on. Sure, they have gold plated pins and a really thick cable jacket, but they aren't well-made where it counts. I've yet to see a soldered connection, generous thickness wire, or decent shielding in a discount-store cable, and I've taken apart a few dozen of them.
Cat5 is fairly high-grade cable, as a matter of fact -- it's made from oxygen-free copper, and the impedances and crosstalk are tightly controlled. USB is less stringent due to its short maximum length (but it still requires an exact impedance match for USB2). Besides, look at how much a decent quality patch cable costs at a store.
All I am saying is that to get decent quality audio/video you need properly engineered cables. Monster cable is properly engineered; cheap Wal-mart cable generally isn't. If you are willing to look, you will find many properly engineered cables for about half the price of Monster cable. There is no excuse to hook up a $1500 TV with a 50 cent S-Video cord from Wal-mart.
Yes, and PLLs do very little against jitter, especially against low-frequency jitter. Look at some of the graphs for a DIR1703 (a SPDIF receiver with a PLL reclocker). In fact, a PLL would introduce quite a bit of its own jitter.
Actually, shielding speaker cable might be more important than most people think. Keep in mind that almost all audio amplifiers have a negative feedback loop. The speaker cable picks up stray RF, it gets fed back to the input and gets amplified. I can't imagine it doing much good to your sound, since amplifiers aren't terribly great at those frequencies. Of course, the right place to take care of it would be inside the amp, but nobody ever does.
You can't run a DAC off its own clock because you can't make two clocks with exactly the same period. The DAC buffer would either overflow or underrun because it would be playing either too quickly or too slowly. The only way you could bypass this problem would be to generate the master clock in the DAC and feed it to the source, but I've never seen this done in any consumer-grade equipment.
If there is significant jitter in the system clock, it will significantly distort the waveform -- definitely enough to hear it. And it doesn't even require very much jitter.
I agree, whoever you are referring to is probably full of shit. There are some circumstances when burning at a higher speed will degrade quality, but it should be easily noticeable (clicks and pops). I suppose some really badly designed CD player could have excessive jitter on the SPDIF output from badly recorded discs, but it didn't sound like they were using SPDIF.
The problems arise when you want to convert your bitstream into an analog signal. Noise in your system can cause both bit inaccuracy and clock jitter. This will cause distortion. Remember, buddy: they don't teach you everything in Digital Logic 101.
It's possible to get a programmer and program the card number onto the magstripe of a different card. The information from the front is all you need.
Well, yes, but then you will never find out that you can't get to 911 from your Vonage phone.
Let's clear up a few myths. First, there is no such thing as a digital signal. It's an analog signal which encodes digital information. Wrong impedances can cause bad things to happen (such as some of the bits getting corrupted). Depending on the protocol used, this can be very significant.
SPDIF is a horrible protocol that is sensitive to cables and almost anything else. Though it's nominally a digital signal, it's multiplexed with the system clock (which is as analog as it gets). If your cable distorts the signal (it almost certainly does), the system clock will be jittery and this will cause distortion. On a decent system, this can be audible.
Analog signals are a whole different ballgame. If you don't think cables can make a difference, pick up an electromagnetics book. Anything from Wal-mart is probably suboptimal -- even if it looks well-made, it probably isn't.
For example, the skin effect can affect the quality of analog signals being transmitted across a stereo cable. . . in the megahertz range.
Wrong. Skin effect applies to any non-DC signal. It will cause a significant roll-off at frequencies as low as 100KHz. It doesn't matter much for signals in the audio band, though.
Recording and video studios don't tend to use Monster Cable.
From what I've heard, many recording engineers are more obsessive about cable quality than the most rabid audiophile. Studios don't use Monster cable because it's not good enough for their needs. When you have miles of cable carrying sensitive signals, it better be the best damn cable you can get your paws on. You can bet your ass they don't use anything cheap.
The wire you find inside your speakers look a whole lot more like cheap $3 a spool bargain bin wire than they do Monster Cable.
Maybe if you have bargain bin speakers. Besides, wire parameters are strongly dependent on length. The 6 inches of wire inside the speaker are not going to make much of a difference compared to the 15 feet of wire connecting it to the amplifier.
You might have a point about speaker cables. However, don't assume that the effect of impurities in the cable is negligible. Oxidation can cause nasty things to happen to your signals, and a cheap cable will not have oxygen-free copper.
You are 100% wrong when it comes to low-level signals. There, minor differences in cables will have significant effects. Too much capacitance will cause a significant roll-off for high frequencies; skin effect can do the same thing. Poor quality or improperly designed shielding will increase noise. Poor impedance matching will degrade video quality by several orders of magnitude. Low-quality connectors, cable, or termination will cause significant nonlinearities (oxides act as semiconductors, by the way). I've seen cheap cables detect AM radio -- that should tell you something about their behavior as ideal conductors!
"Practicing" dialing 911 is also known as a "prank" and is a serious crime.
Yeah, like it's really hard for a cashier (for example) to write down the card information and watch you enter the PIN. It's not very hard to program your own ATM cards, you know.
The email address provided in the SMTP transaction, or the message headers, should ABSOLUTELY NOT be considered valid unless, and until, the IP is verified as designated by the domain of the RHS of that email address.
Why the hell is that? My email account is on a completely different network than my SMTP server (work email + ISP-provided SMTP server). This is perfectly legitimate and quite common. Besides, I don't see the problem with someone getting backscatter. You will get it anyway, for instance with bounced emails due to invalid addresses and so on. Set up a filter and the problem is gone.
Read what I said. IF you dispute the charge after it has been made and the credit card slip does not have your signature on it, it's the store's problem. Signatures are more reliable than PINs in proving identity, since they are basically a biometric identifier.
This is actually a lot less secure. This scheme is used for debit cards here in the US, and nobody really likes it. It's really easy to watch someone enter a 4 digit pin, and there is no paper trail. If someone has your card number and your PIN, your money is gone.
With a credit card, if the cashier doesn't bother to verify the signature, it will be the store's loss should the credit card holder dispute the charge. And signatures are very difficult to fake well enough that an expert can't tell the difference.
Most court cases could be decided in about half an hour if the court system didn't take its sweet time about everything.
Actually, this is a big advantage for corporate desktops. By doing a few simple things, you can guarantee that users will not be able to fuck things up. On Windows, you have to work hard to lock everything down. On Linux, you just don't give them the root password.
Besides, maybe you should try something other than Slackware. For instance, to install something on Mandrake or Red hat you just double click the RPM file. Couldn't be easier.