If anything, it helps civil liberties. If all ISPs blocked child porn, then nobody could accuse you of downloading it. Think about it: in today's society, the easiest way to get rid of someone is to frame them using either illegal drugs or child porn. Both crimes require only possession, and possession is trivial to prove.
I think Google could easily switch to this model and then all the "fraud" clicks would mean nothing.
Does the word "innovation" mean anything to you? One of the main reasons Google is successful is because of their advertising model - it's very cheap and effective. You are suggesting they dump their successful model for one that is proven to not work?
I know, but they are still diesel trains. Just like a hybrid car is still powered by gas. However, they don't get all the benefits of being electric (such as regenerative braking).
Well, you wrote several paragraphs, and said nothing. The point is, the world operates in a very logical manner. Car companies don't suppress technology that can make them a hell of a lot of money. It doesn't make sense to "question" random things without any reason to do so.
Well, you don't use hexedit, you use IDA. Of course, it's still a pain in the ass because even a 20kb long program is a major bitch to disassemble, especially if it's written in c++ and has hooks into the windows api.
You can generate electricity from many sources: hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, and so on. You can generate gasoline from one source: refined petroleum, which will likely run out in the near future. Efficiency is a purely academic exercise. The real problems are cost and sustainability, and that's where gasoline fails miserably.
If your trains are powered by diesel, they are hopelessly outdated. One of the big benefits of trains is that they can easily be powered by electricity. Electric trains are very efficient -- for instance, they can easily employ things like recuperative braking (injecting energy back into the power rail when slowing down).
The technology exists to make automobiles many times more efficient. It is obvious that there are many factors that are not allowing these "ideas" to be used.
Put down the crack pipe, man. If an auto company could make their cars any more efficient, they most certainly would. It's a rather competitive industry, and fuel economy is a major selling point. Why the hell would a car maker not want to put the technology in their cars?
But some use only local feedback, and some a combination of both methods (I recall the SWTP "Universal Tiger" being one of these).
Local feedback is almost always present in even the most basic transistor circuit, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is necessary to compensate for variations in transistor parameters. Global feedback is a whole different can of worms. I agree, there are solid-state amplifier topologies that are competitive with tubes (and often surpass them). However, the typical class AB amplifier based on the Lin topology is not one of them.
The big sonic variables are the electromechanical elements: loudspeakers, microphones, and their interactions with the environment you put them in.
I couldn't agree more. Speakers, the listening room, and a good recording are very important variables in terms of sound quality. But an amplifier is not a place to cut corners, either.
Ummm.. Can you explain how this is NOT a hoax? You do realize that to manufacture something like this, hundreds of millions of dollars are needed? Do you see even a basic "for investors" page on that site? Do you think a legitimate company would accept Paypal on their website, and charge $100 for pre-orders?
How does this shit make the front page? The company doesn't even accept credit cards, for fuck's sake! Seriously, would a company capable of making a PDA use Paypal?
Well, I want to see what you will say if you ever get cancer, AIDS, or some other disease which is incurable and which renders you incapable of having a job. You do realize that no job = no money = no healthcare with the current system?
Audiophile single ended tube amps do not have any form of global negative feedback. True, some push-pull designs do have it. These are generally not high-end audiophile amplifiers.
As mentioned, tubes do, it's just local rather than global
I know, I was a little sloppy with wording. Local negative feedback does not cause any of the problems that global negative feedback presents. The main issue is that some of the low-order distortion from the output gets fed back into the input, gets distorted again (due to the limited speed of the amplifier), and becomes high-order distortion. This does not happen to the same extent with local feedback.
Wrong again. Tube amps do produce high order harmonics
In a recent issue of AudioXpress, there was a paper from someone who did some distortion analysis on about 20 different amplifiers. Transistor amplifiers had fairly "rough" distortion graphs, and distortion levels were almost the same up to about the 8th or 9th harmonic. Tube amplifiers had much higher levels of 2nd and 3rd harmonic, but didn't have almost anything past that.
I would rather have 200 Watts at 0.002% THD solid state than 10 Watts at 5% THD tube (similar price range), since the former tells me whats actually being recorded.
Well, that's where your goals diverge with those of audiophiles, most of whom want to listen to music the way it is supposed to sound live. After all, if your system makes a recorded tuba instrument like a real one, who cares what THD numbers it has?
These are a series of articles written by Douglas Self (an engineer who worked for SoundCraft), published in Electronics and Wireless World over the last three decades.
Well, he is the father of the 1970s thought movement I was referring to. I do not happen to agree with his reasoning. The goal of audio reproduction is not to please a distortion analyzer, it is to please a human.
Measuring THD to determine sound quality is like looking at file size to determine the quality of a compressed sound file. Objectively, you lose more information if you compress a CD to a 192Kbps MP3 (100MB of raw audio -> about 8 MB) than if you resample it to, say, 22KHz (100MB -> 50MB). After all, the 22KHz recording is still 100% accurate, we just lose an octave or two; in comparison, the MP3 file is much less accurate. Nobody would use MP3s to store, say, a signal recorded from a nerve (which happens to be in the audio region). But the MP3 file will most certainly sound better than the resampled file. Why? Because humans don't perceive everything in a sound file the same way. Sound reproduction is not about accuracy, it's about human perception.
That the microphones are severely overloading the transister preamps and that the tube types handle this overload much more gracefully and distort much less under these conditions
I have not read the article, but that sounds pretty silly. That problem is (and always was) easily solved by simply having sufficiently high power supply voltages.
A properly designed amplifier should not clip under normal operating conditions. Today, there are many solid-state designs with soft clipping. This is not a relevant characteristic anymore.
First, you don't need to emulate tube distortion with DSP silliness, unless it's a guitar amplifier or something. Distortion of any kind is not desirable in a hi-fi amplifier -- after all, accuracy is one of the goals.
Second, class A amps with zero negative feedback distort just as much (if not more) as tube amps. They also cost just as much (if not more). Keep in mind that a 100W class A amp has to continuously dissipate at least two kilowatts of power -- the efficiency is usually between 5 and 20 percent. That takes lots of output devices, expensive heatsinks and transformers, and the cost becomes very expensive.
I am not talking about quantization products, I am talking about amplifier distortion. Any audio amplifier produces distortion along with the amplified signal. If you look at the spectrum of, say, a pure 1000Hz sine wave that has been run through an amplifier, you will also see 2000Hz, 3000Hz, 4000Hz, and so on (in considerably smaller amounts, of course). These are very much audible, and they are impossible to filter out.
The standard test for total harmonic distortion (THD) involves subtracting the input of an amplifier from the output, and measuring the amplitude of the leftovers (distortion and noise). Unfortunately, this test is nearly useless for comparing different amplifiers because it does not show which harmonics are present.
Virtually all bipolar/mosfet amplifiers are class B (or AB). They all have pretty similar distortion profiles. Class D amps don't have negative feedback, but have other fundamental shortcomings (they need extremely fast transistors and very expensive filtering to achieve high quality). Class A transistor amplifiers are an audiophile option, but they have extremely low efficiency and need large expensive heatsinks and a large number of output devices.
As for your second question: the problem with global negative feedback is that the output of the amplifier pretty much gets fed back into the input. This (in theory) cancels out any distortion. In practice, due to the finite speed of the amplifier, it reduces some types of distortion and introduces other, more nasty types (high order harmonics). It's the high order harmonics that are a problem, not the negative feedback.
It seems like you have listened to the 1970s-era solid-state proponents a bit too much. The "nice sounding distortion" myth is just that.
The issue brought up in the article is no longer a concern. There are transistor amplifiers with soft clipping, and clipping shouldn't happen in normal situations anyway.
However, high-quality tube amplifiers have one characteristic that class B transistor amplifiers do not: zero negative feedback. Transistor amplifiers need large amounts of negative feedback to obtain low distortion. Tubes don't need it. That means you have virtually no high-order distortion harmonics in a tube amplifier, while transistor amplifier distortion is mostly high-order.
It has been shown that high-order harmonics sound very nasty, even in tiny amounts. It has also been shown that the human ear produces its own low-order distortion, so low-order harmonics do not sound objectionable to us. Now put two and two together. Tube amplifiers may not have very good distortion numbers, but the type of distortion they produce is not as objectionable to a human. It's not that 2nd harmonic distortion sounds good -- it doesn't. It just doesn't sound as bad.
This could possibly happen, but only if it's an AM station. And even then, the transmitter would have to be rather close to where you were. I'd say it was a coincidence.
it's an unjustifiably suspicious private security guard trying to falsely detain someone on flimsy grounds
Having your shopping cart looked over is the same as being falsely detained? That's a new one.
As far as it "being necessary to prevent shoplifting," I'm sure that if you spend a few minutes thinking about it, there are much more unobtrusive means at merchants' disposal to do so.
If there are, then why are they doing it? Besides, even if they use other means, people like you will whine just as much.
It's unfortunate that you don't think this is worth fighting over. Perhaps if things get worse, you'll come around.
IF things get worse, it might make sense to fight over them. As of right now, you are more than welcome to avoid stores whose policies you do not agree with.
For not following a policy that you never agreed to and the store hasn't even formally informed you of?
They also haven't formally informed you about the necessity to pay at the register. So what?
Fighting the assumption that you are a criminal is valid.
Try that with a cop who pulls you over. Or with an airport security guard. See how far you get with that one.
Of course, it has been shown that eye contact upon entering the store is more effective in preventing shop lifting than the limited searches at the end.
Shown by whom? That's bullshit and you know it. Most stores have anti-shoplifting systems these days. The only way to bypass them is to get the cashier to help. That's why they check your bags when you leave. What is there not to understand?
Ah, the good old "slippery slope" fallacy. The thing is, checking your bags when you exit is a perfectly reasonable way to prevent shoplifting. What if you know the cashier and he/she decided to not scan some of your items? It's not like they ask you to empty your pockets or anything. Unfortunately, shoplifting is much more common than you think, so these measures are necessary to keep prices down.
Besides, if you practice civil disobedience, be prepared to go to jail. Unfortunately, this particular issue is not something worth fighting over.
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, it helps civil liberties. If all ISPs blocked child porn, then nobody could accuse you of downloading it. Think about it: in today's society, the easiest way to get rid of someone is to frame them using either illegal drugs or child porn. Both crimes require only possession, and possession is trivial to prove.
I think Google could easily switch to this model and then all the "fraud" clicks would mean nothing.
Does the word "innovation" mean anything to you? One of the main reasons Google is successful is because of their advertising model - it's very cheap and effective. You are suggesting they dump their successful model for one that is proven to not work?
I know, but they are still diesel trains. Just like a hybrid car is still powered by gas. However, they don't get all the benefits of being electric (such as regenerative braking).
Well, you wrote several paragraphs, and said nothing. The point is, the world operates in a very logical manner. Car companies don't suppress technology that can make them a hell of a lot of money. It doesn't make sense to "question" random things without any reason to do so.
It's the same with fuel economy.
Of course. That's why they are shipping hybrids that cost quite a bit more and offer no advantages other than fuel economy.
fuel economy is low on the list of a consumer's buying criteria.
Bullshit. See above.
Well, you don't use hexedit, you use IDA. Of course, it's still a pain in the ass because even a 20kb long program is a major bitch to disassemble, especially if it's written in c++ and has hooks into the windows api.
You can generate electricity from many sources: hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, and so on. You can generate gasoline from one source: refined petroleum, which will likely run out in the near future. Efficiency is a purely academic exercise. The real problems are cost and sustainability, and that's where gasoline fails miserably.
If your trains are powered by diesel, they are hopelessly outdated. One of the big benefits of trains is that they can easily be powered by electricity. Electric trains are very efficient -- for instance, they can easily employ things like recuperative braking (injecting energy back into the power rail when slowing down).
The technology exists to make automobiles many times more efficient. It is obvious that there are many factors that are not allowing these "ideas" to be used.
Put down the crack pipe, man. If an auto company could make their cars any more efficient, they most certainly would. It's a rather competitive industry, and fuel economy is a major selling point. Why the hell would a car maker not want to put the technology in their cars?
But some use only local feedback, and some a combination of both methods (I recall the SWTP "Universal Tiger" being one of these).
Local feedback is almost always present in even the most basic transistor circuit, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is necessary to compensate for variations in transistor parameters. Global feedback is a whole different can of worms. I agree, there are solid-state amplifier topologies that are competitive with tubes (and often surpass them). However, the typical class AB amplifier based on the Lin topology is not one of them.
The big sonic variables are the electromechanical elements: loudspeakers, microphones, and their interactions with the environment you put them in.
I couldn't agree more. Speakers, the listening room, and a good recording are very important variables in terms of sound quality. But an amplifier is not a place to cut corners, either.
Ummm.. Can you explain how this is NOT a hoax? You do realize that to manufacture something like this, hundreds of millions of dollars are needed? Do you see even a basic "for investors" page on that site? Do you think a legitimate company would accept Paypal on their website, and charge $100 for pre-orders?
How does this shit make the front page? The company doesn't even accept credit cards, for fuck's sake! Seriously, would a company capable of making a PDA use Paypal?
Well, I want to see what you will say if you ever get cancer, AIDS, or some other disease which is incurable and which renders you incapable of having a job. You do realize that no job = no money = no healthcare with the current system?
Tube amplifiers do indeed use negative feedback
Audiophile single ended tube amps do not have any form of global negative feedback. True, some push-pull designs do have it. These are generally not high-end audiophile amplifiers.
As mentioned, tubes do, it's just local rather than global
I know, I was a little sloppy with wording. Local negative feedback does not cause any of the problems that global negative feedback presents. The main issue is that some of the low-order distortion from the output gets fed back into the input, gets distorted again (due to the limited speed of the amplifier), and becomes high-order distortion. This does not happen to the same extent with local feedback.
Wrong again. Tube amps do produce high order harmonics
In a recent issue of AudioXpress, there was a paper from someone who did some distortion analysis on about 20 different amplifiers. Transistor amplifiers had fairly "rough" distortion graphs, and distortion levels were almost the same up to about the 8th or 9th harmonic. Tube amplifiers had much higher levels of 2nd and 3rd harmonic, but didn't have almost anything past that.
I would rather have 200 Watts at 0.002% THD solid state than 10 Watts at 5% THD tube (similar price range), since the former tells me whats actually being recorded.
Well, that's where your goals diverge with those of audiophiles, most of whom want to listen to music the way it is supposed to sound live. After all, if your system makes a recorded tuba instrument like a real one, who cares what THD numbers it has?
These are a series of articles written by Douglas Self (an engineer who worked for SoundCraft), published in Electronics and Wireless World over the last three decades.
Well, he is the father of the 1970s thought movement I was referring to. I do not happen to agree with his reasoning. The goal of audio reproduction is not to please a distortion analyzer, it is to please a human.
Measuring THD to determine sound quality is like looking at file size to determine the quality of a compressed sound file. Objectively, you lose more information if you compress a CD to a 192Kbps MP3 (100MB of raw audio -> about 8 MB) than if you resample it to, say, 22KHz (100MB -> 50MB). After all, the 22KHz recording is still 100% accurate, we just lose an octave or two; in comparison, the MP3 file is much less accurate. Nobody would use MP3s to store, say, a signal recorded from a nerve (which happens to be in the audio region). But the MP3 file will most certainly sound better than the resampled file. Why? Because humans don't perceive everything in a sound file the same way. Sound reproduction is not about accuracy, it's about human perception.
That the microphones are severely overloading the transister preamps and that the tube types handle this overload much more gracefully and distort much less under these conditions
I have not read the article, but that sounds pretty silly. That problem is (and always was) easily solved by simply having sufficiently high power supply voltages.
A properly designed amplifier should not clip under normal operating conditions. Today, there are many solid-state designs with soft clipping. This is not a relevant characteristic anymore.
First, you don't need to emulate tube distortion with DSP silliness, unless it's a guitar amplifier or something. Distortion of any kind is not desirable in a hi-fi amplifier -- after all, accuracy is one of the goals.
Second, class A amps with zero negative feedback distort just as much (if not more) as tube amps. They also cost just as much (if not more). Keep in mind that a 100W class A amp has to continuously dissipate at least two kilowatts of power -- the efficiency is usually between 5 and 20 percent. That takes lots of output devices, expensive heatsinks and transformers, and the cost becomes very expensive.
I am not talking about quantization products, I am talking about amplifier distortion. Any audio amplifier produces distortion along with the amplified signal. If you look at the spectrum of, say, a pure 1000Hz sine wave that has been run through an amplifier, you will also see 2000Hz, 3000Hz, 4000Hz, and so on (in considerably smaller amounts, of course). These are very much audible, and they are impossible to filter out.
The standard test for total harmonic distortion (THD) involves subtracting the input of an amplifier from the output, and measuring the amplitude of the leftovers (distortion and noise). Unfortunately, this test is nearly useless for comparing different amplifiers because it does not show which harmonics are present.
Virtually all bipolar/mosfet amplifiers are class B (or AB). They all have pretty similar distortion profiles. Class D amps don't have negative feedback, but have other fundamental shortcomings (they need extremely fast transistors and very expensive filtering to achieve high quality). Class A transistor amplifiers are an audiophile option, but they have extremely low efficiency and need large expensive heatsinks and a large number of output devices.
As for your second question: the problem with global negative feedback is that the output of the amplifier pretty much gets fed back into the input. This (in theory) cancels out any distortion. In practice, due to the finite speed of the amplifier, it reduces some types of distortion and introduces other, more nasty types (high order harmonics). It's the high order harmonics that are a problem, not the negative feedback.
It seems like you have listened to the 1970s-era solid-state proponents a bit too much. The "nice sounding distortion" myth is just that.
The issue brought up in the article is no longer a concern. There are transistor amplifiers with soft clipping, and clipping shouldn't happen in normal situations anyway.
However, high-quality tube amplifiers have one characteristic that class B transistor amplifiers do not: zero negative feedback. Transistor amplifiers need large amounts of negative feedback to obtain low distortion. Tubes don't need it. That means you have virtually no high-order distortion harmonics in a tube amplifier, while transistor amplifier distortion is mostly high-order.
It has been shown that high-order harmonics sound very nasty, even in tiny amounts. It has also been shown that the human ear produces its own low-order distortion, so low-order harmonics do not sound objectionable to us. Now put two and two together. Tube amplifiers may not have very good distortion numbers, but the type of distortion they produce is not as objectionable to a human. It's not that 2nd harmonic distortion sounds good -- it doesn't. It just doesn't sound as bad.
This could possibly happen, but only if it's an AM station. And even then, the transmitter would have to be rather close to where you were. I'd say it was a coincidence.
far below the necssary $100k necessary for FBI involvement
Actually, the trigger is only $5,000. I agree with what you said, though.
it's an unjustifiably suspicious private security guard trying to falsely detain someone on flimsy grounds
Having your shopping cart looked over is the same as being falsely detained? That's a new one.
As far as it "being necessary to prevent shoplifting," I'm sure that if you spend a few minutes thinking about it, there are much more unobtrusive means at merchants' disposal to do so.
If there are, then why are they doing it? Besides, even if they use other means, people like you will whine just as much.
It's unfortunate that you don't think this is worth fighting over. Perhaps if things get worse, you'll come around.
IF things get worse, it might make sense to fight over them. As of right now, you are more than welcome to avoid stores whose policies you do not agree with.
For not following a policy that you never agreed to and the store hasn't even formally informed you of?
They also haven't formally informed you about the necessity to pay at the register. So what?
Fighting the assumption that you are a criminal is valid.
Try that with a cop who pulls you over. Or with an airport security guard. See how far you get with that one.
Of course, it has been shown that eye contact upon entering the store is more effective in preventing shop lifting than the limited searches at the end.
Shown by whom? That's bullshit and you know it. Most stores have anti-shoplifting systems these days. The only way to bypass them is to get the cashier to help. That's why they check your bags when you leave. What is there not to understand?
Ah, the good old "slippery slope" fallacy. The thing is, checking your bags when you exit is a perfectly reasonable way to prevent shoplifting. What if you know the cashier and he/she decided to not scan some of your items? It's not like they ask you to empty your pockets or anything. Unfortunately, shoplifting is much more common than you think, so these measures are necessary to keep prices down.
Besides, if you practice civil disobedience, be prepared to go to jail. Unfortunately, this particular issue is not something worth fighting over.
I have always refused such requests (politely), just on principle
You know what this type of thing is called? Being an idiot.