Oh, in case you haven't heard, there's a living deity that goes by the name of the Dalai Lama. He used to live in Tibet before it got conquered by the Chinese. His opinion on the subject of abortion is that it should be considered. It is not, by itself, bad. Sounds to me like this particular "LORD" (sorry for shouting, everyone).
Perhaps you're confusing vegans with vegetarians. Many, if not most, vegetarians in the US do it for health reasons. Due to the reverence of cows in Hinduism, many Hindus do not eat meat. Also, many Buddhists don't believe in taking the life of any animal. So, vegetarianism does, indeed, please many peoples' lord.
Look, don't judge me based upon your preconceived notions. Your lord is not the only lord for which people have belief.
It's not that I would rather have my kid killed than raped. It's the thought that the rape of my kid will inflict generations of people--my kid's wife, their kids, and perhaps their kids' kids. That's the case with sex crimes. They suck. Particularly when they're done to the young.
And, in case you're wondering, I have been the victim of a sex crime, when I was 12. It sucks. It has taken years to be functional in relationships (I'm 30 now). And I know there are ways that I will be messed up for life. And I'm one of the lucky ones. My case was a fairly mild one, as far as sex crimes are concerned. On top of that, I have a wonderful, loving family, and I was very emotionally strong and mature when the event happened.
The cynical among us would tell me, "then why don't you kill yourself". Well, that would be adding one bad thing to another. It wouldn't make it right. I can say that I think the punishment for this crime should be at least as great--no, in fact, greater--than the punishment for murder. Of course, I also don't believe in the death penalty. But, that's neither here nor there.
I stand by my original statement. As far as crimes go, sex crimes are more reprehensible, IMHO, than murder.
I just have to take issue with one of your statements. "But pedophilia is by no means worse than murder." I cannot disagree with this more.
With murder, the act is over and done with. The damage is done, and no more damage is incurred. With pedophilia, the crime continues to inflict pain and damage, often for generations. Victims of pedophilia (or, for that matter, just about all sex crimes) are significantly more likely to have disfunctional sex lives and relationships for the remainder of their lives. This means that not only does the victim get punished, but that victim's lovers, and children, and so on. It is a pain that continues to inflict long after the initial damage is done.
That said, I applaud the work of the satirist. There is a level of witch hunts going on for all sorts of crimes, including pedophilia, rape, and drugs. All that it takes in today's world to absolutely ruin a person's life is to accuse that person of one of these crimes.
Except that the JVM currently runs on most platforms. Gnome, to my knowledge, is Unixen-only, with some parts of GTK ported to Windows. As such, the JVM can be viewed as something that breaks a desktop dependancy.
Hold on a second. The architecture Swing uses *is* good. The performance, pre-v1.4, did suck, but that was because Swing was pure-Java. In v1.4, Swing finally utilizes native code to handle optimizations for elements like scrolling. Consequently, jdk1.4 feels much faster, subjectively matching the speed of native GUIs.
Mouse wheel support? It's in there. Check v1.4 of the JDK.
Accessibility (support for the disabled, but in a PC way)? It's in there. Check out the Java Accessibility API.
I'm afraid I don't have any information on how one can utilize the native OS theme for colors and such. Do you have a reference to a bug/feature request in Sun's bug tracker on this one? It may be in v1.4, but I simply don't know. I'd bet it's not, though.
My point is just that you should really give v1.4 a chance. It's quite nice, despite changing a few of the APIs such that many v1.3 programs must be ported (very few changed, but just enough that it's not a simple copy-and-run for programs like Forte).
There are a whole slew of JAX-? APIs coming doing the pike. These cover a whole gamut of functionality. However, only JAX-P is included in J2EE. XML and XSL processing do not constitute, in my opinion, a rich set of APIs for XML.
.NET is better equated to Sun ONE. Sun ONE provided Java, SOAP/UDDI/WSDL, and a platform for delivering web services, with strong support for XML. Java, by itself, has limited support for XML (JAXP is the only XML API included in JDK1.4) and does not have any built-in support for SOAP et al. Java is *not* a platform for delivering web services, which is the stated goal of.NET.
Sun ONE, of course, brings these capabilities to Java. Comparing Java to.NET is not a valid comparison. Comparing Java to C#/IL/CLR is much more valid. Comparing Sun ONE to.NET is also valid. But compring Java to.NET is, indeed, comparing apples to oranges.
By the way, both Sun and IBM have bought in to the idea of web services enough to make web services a central part of their plans for the future of their companies. Maybe the idea of web services is fundamentally flawed. I don't think so, however. Web services are a natural progression of component-based software development. First we had monolithic applications. Then we had 3rd party APIs. Then we had object oriented class libraries. A natural progression is web services. Whereas OO libraries help programmers reuse code, web services allow corporations to easily integrate 3rd party services into part of a larger, single system. This is not easily doable with existing OO technologies (I'm thinking here of DCOM/CORBA/RMI/EJB/sockets--you can do it, but it's a royal pain in the butt).
The M1-A1 Abrahms tank is the one with depleted uranium core armor. It is manufactured only in the US. The M-1A Abrahms tank does not have the depleted uranium core armor. It is manufactured in numerous places, including Egypt and Turkey. I used to live in Egypt, where my father worked with General Dynamics on a contract supporting Egypt's M-1A tank facility.
Hmm...the A1-Abrahms tank is also made in Turkey and Egypt. I don't think the location of the factory has *anything* to do with the general quality of engineering or manufacturing from the country.
As for the Canada comment, I think that sarcasm is hard to portray in prose. Give him a break...and learn a sense of humor.
As for the space walks, bravo! Jim Reilly was my physics tutor in university, and there isn't a nicer and more capable man on the planet (or in space;-)
Pick up JDKv1.4beta. I think you'll change your mind. Sun has finally taken advantage of hardware acceleration for things like scrolling. So apps now feel like they're native speed.
I agree wholeheartedly with you for pre-v1.4 stuff, though. Performance is lousy. But Java, as a language, is the Right Mix when it comes to object orientation, ease of use, rich library, well designed GUI (yes, I said it was well designed...not fast...but plz. check v1.4 for speed), and capabilities for RAD development. It rocks on the server, and I think it will soon be acceptable for internal application development (i.e. RAD dev).
Hey, I'm a Java guy, and I've learned a lot about performance. Java can be made to perform. Especially server-side. But Java pre-v1.4 has some known problems with Swing. Namely, it doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration for simple items like scrolling and popping up windows. If you have a reasonably large list displayed in a pulldown menu, you can get unreasonably long pauses when drawing the menu. Or scrolling.
Now, JDK v1.4 fixes these problems. It's still in beta, but check it out. For client-side applications, performance feels, subjectively, native speed now.
I think Java is viable for client-side programs now. But lets not confuse.NET and Java..NET equates more easily to Sun ONE. That is, Java + SOAP/WSDL/UDDI + XML + J2EE..NET has an architecture that can be compelling for many network applications (for instance, where speed is not as necessary as reliability, recoverability, and logged transactions). The CLI is a very nice method for cross-language development. A common object model across languages is a Good Thing.
I welcome this. I will remain a J2EE programmer (check out JBoss--the best app server available, and it's Open Source, and Resin, for which a soon-to-be announced JVM integration with JBoss is coming soon). I will likely develop for Sun ONE. And I will likely integrate.NET components as SOAP services. Openness is good. And the.NET architecture is well done, as well. Don't discount Microsoft--this one is so good that IBM and Sun have adopted major pieces of it, as well.
I guess I don't understand what you're saying about it augmenting the analog filter with a digital one. There's no digital filtering going on at all. Just interpolation. Interpolation != filtering.
No, it's not like "augementing your analog filter with a digital one". Digital filters can help with the rolloff. But they don't help the aliasing aspect. Furthermore, digital filters still have problems--they affect one of the three basic side effects of filters (analog typically affect two). Those effects are 1) linear phase, 2) linear response, and 3) perfect "brick-wall" step function.
Basically, the best approach, given these problems, is to simply oversample the frequency, interpolate the signal, and move the filtering to the supersonic frepquencies. The goal is not to introduce more signal than you put in. The goal is to reproduce the input signal as closely as possible in real world conditions. Nyquist theory is fantastic, and the results are wonderful, but the implementation using a 16-bit signal (96dB theoretical S/N ratio, while humans are capable of detecting noise at -120dB) and a 44.1kHz sample rate (because of the filtering effects mentioned) require oversampling.
Our mobile phones have the same area code as our local numbers. We don't have separate area codes for mobile phones. Thus, billing (and educating the consumer that they're calling a mobile phone and not a land line) becomes exceedingly difficult.
Woah. Your statement about the Americans & Europeans is quite a broad statement. I think you misunderstand the politics behind the US mobile market. Our fucked up system is the result of a system that came *after* GSM. Yes, our digital systems were developed after GSM. Motorola lobbied Congress hard for the US to adopt their proprietary system so that they would have a lock on handset sales (Nokia still won out in the end). Since Motorola is a *big* defense contractor, and since the US was trying to protect the strategically important defense contractors from going belly up in a market of enormous cuts in defense spending, the government adopted Motorola's specs. It's pure politics, which are as fucked up in the US as they are anywhere.
As for "just about every standard", I hope you're talking about phones. I can recite dozens of superious US proprietary standards in areas other than phones. With phones, however, I'll concede your point.
One of the neat things about LEDs are that they produce only one frequency. Exactly one. Pretty cool. Even cheap ones. And LEDs are used as the source for lasers in CD players. Do a spectrum analysis on a cheap laser, and you'll see what I mean. Other frequencies are effectively below the noise floor, and are probably the result of ambient light. Guess what? Those green pens don't do shit.
Also, you may want to bring your theoretical Nyquist understanding into the real world. The problem comes from the fact that the output of a DAC is a step function. It must then be filtered to retrieve the same signal as the original input. This is the last part of of the theorem. Well, guess what. If we had perfect brick wall fitlers (we don't), and if there weren't problems with aliasing with real filters (there are), you would be correct in saying oversampling isn't necessary. But it is.
Oversampling allows the filter to be moved from 22.05 kHz to, for instance, 178 kHz. This moves the aliasing effects and the filter rolloff into the supersonic frequencies. And, voila, the output signal is a closer match to the input signal.
You know, all those companies investing untold millions into oversampling DACs aren't wasting their money. Oversampling does make sense.
The output from the DAC will be a step signal. That is, it needs to be filtered to return it to the original analog signal. This filter works great if you can build a perfect brick wall filter (actually, not quite...but for the sake of argument, it's pretty close--you'll still get aliasing effects). So, what you normally do is simply interpolate the signal, then put the filter at something like 192kHz. That way, these aliasing effects and the effects from a real-world filter (attenuation, etc) occur outside the audible range.
And as for your snotty remark, I don't care how stupid you are, or how little you know about the topic, you still need oversampling and interpolation to higher bits in order to retrieve the same signal you put in.
Yes, yes, The audio industry is ripe with sham artists. Check out, for instance, the guys selling those green hilighter pens for $20 a piece. They claim it absorbs extraneous frequencies from the laser, refining the sound. But, wait. Doesn't a laser, by definition, produce one, and only one, frequency? Why yes! So, in fact, these green highlighters don't do shit!
Well, one thing to correct you one, though. You generally want to oversample the output from your CD player. This goes by to Nyquist theory. Since you have to filter the output from a digital signal to recreate the analog signal, and since filters introduce all sorts of problems if the filter frequency is remotely close to the audible range (as is the case with a CD, but not the case with DVD's audio), you typically oversample the 44.1kHz signal. This effectively moves the filter frequency higher, so that it doesn't interfere with the audible range. When you oversample, you effectively interpolating. In order not to lose accuracy, you must increase the resolution (16 bits -> 24 bits). So, having a 24 bit, 356kHz DAC is entirely reasonable, even if the input source is only 16 bits and 44.1 kHz.
Re:super sounding gear that isn't that expensive
on
Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 2
Then there are those unique little gems that don't fit well into these categories. I'm thinking of names like Rotel and NAD. Or, on the mid-tier end, Magnepan.
For Rotel & NAD, they're priced like Chevy, Ford, Honda, and Toyota, but they have a fit and finish that puts them squarely in the Lexus, Infinity, and Volvo range. I'm thinking here of maybe a Volvo when they were first trying to break into the US market. Priced like a Ford, but built like a Lexus.
As for Magnepan, it's priced like a Lexus, Infinity, or Volvo, but some of their gear produces, IMHO, the best sound available at any price. I've heard a number of $100,000 gear, with >$20,000 speakers, but I've never heard any speakers outperform the Magnepan 1.6 speakers (about $1500). Now, to get that level of performance, you need to match it with expensive electronics. But, for $1500, they are an absolute steal. If you're looking for an analogy, I'd put Maggies in the realm of TVR, the British sports car company. Priced like a Japanese sports car, performs like a Ferrari.
This is a very good analogy. Furthermore, I would generally agree with your rankings, too.
It's a result of free local calls for land-line connections. In the US, local calls are entirely free. As a result, the phone companies had no infrastructure to bill for local calls to mobile phones. As a result, in order for the mobile phone operators to make money, they had to bill the receiver rather than the caller.
This is the single biggest reason why mobile phone usage in the US is far lower than in Europe, as a percentage of the total market. In fact, mobile phone usage in the US is even lower than many developing nations. Of course, it's also the single biggest reason why Internet usage in the US is far higher than every other nation. Free local calls results in no incremental costs for Internet usage, which in turn leads to people surfing for pr0n for hours on end.
It may seem stupid when it comes to mobile phones, but it also has its strong points in other areas.
He's right, you know. The problem is that a single provider, say Vodaphone, for instance, must route all their WAP traffic through a single WAP gateway. This results in scalability problems. It's inherent to WAP. WAP could never scale, and as a result, WAP sucks.
As far as all the protocols are concerned, they're really not that hard to pick up. And the imode stuff is doing it again, although this time they're sticking a little closer to existing protocols. The protocols aren't that bad, though. It's really the problems inherent with the stupid gateway that Nokia had offered up when WAP was invented.
Why did they do it? Well, Nokia wanted to have control over the process. Control==capability to bill more for it separately==more money. It was a stupid decision. But, alas, stupid decisions are often made by industry leaders trying to extend their dominance to another market.
Depending upon the final destination, there are numerous restrictions on APO packages (letters get through fine, but not packages). Some places have 1 lb. restrictions. Other places cannot take packages larger than a certain size.
Unfortunately, short of the vendor knowing details about the military's mail delivery (that is, after it reaches New York), the vendor cannot know what the restrictions are. In these cases, the vendor simply refuses to ship to APO addresses.
I am very familiar with this. My parents lived in Saudi Arabia for 9 years, and I had to deal with the Post Office not even knowing what can be sent. There was more than a few times that I had packages returned to me after a week or more, as they were refused at the APO site in New York.
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Whose lord? Yours? Not mine. Sorry.
Oh, in case you haven't heard, there's a living deity that goes by the name of the Dalai Lama. He used to live in Tibet before it got conquered by the Chinese. His opinion on the subject of abortion is that it should be considered. It is not, by itself, bad. Sounds to me like this particular "LORD" (sorry for shouting, everyone).
Perhaps you're confusing vegans with vegetarians. Many, if not most, vegetarians in the US do it for health reasons. Due to the reverence of cows in Hinduism, many Hindus do not eat meat. Also, many Buddhists don't believe in taking the life of any animal. So, vegetarianism does, indeed, please many peoples' lord.
Look, don't judge me based upon your preconceived notions. Your lord is not the only lord for which people have belief.
The Empire Strikes Back? Hello?
It's not that I would rather have my kid killed than raped. It's the thought that the rape of my kid will inflict generations of people--my kid's wife, their kids, and perhaps their kids' kids. That's the case with sex crimes. They suck. Particularly when they're done to the young.
And, in case you're wondering, I have been the victim of a sex crime, when I was 12. It sucks. It has taken years to be functional in relationships (I'm 30 now). And I know there are ways that I will be messed up for life. And I'm one of the lucky ones. My case was a fairly mild one, as far as sex crimes are concerned. On top of that, I have a wonderful, loving family, and I was very emotionally strong and mature when the event happened.
The cynical among us would tell me, "then why don't you kill yourself". Well, that would be adding one bad thing to another. It wouldn't make it right. I can say that I think the punishment for this crime should be at least as great--no, in fact, greater--than the punishment for murder. Of course, I also don't believe in the death penalty. But, that's neither here nor there.
I stand by my original statement. As far as crimes go, sex crimes are more reprehensible, IMHO, than murder.
I just have to take issue with one of your statements. "But pedophilia is by no means worse than murder." I cannot disagree with this more.
With murder, the act is over and done with. The damage is done, and no more damage is incurred. With pedophilia, the crime continues to inflict pain and damage, often for generations. Victims of pedophilia (or, for that matter, just about all sex crimes) are significantly more likely to have disfunctional sex lives and relationships for the remainder of their lives. This means that not only does the victim get punished, but that victim's lovers, and children, and so on. It is a pain that continues to inflict long after the initial damage is done.
That said, I applaud the work of the satirist. There is a level of witch hunts going on for all sorts of crimes, including pedophilia, rape, and drugs. All that it takes in today's world to absolutely ruin a person's life is to accuse that person of one of these crimes.
Except that the JVM currently runs on most platforms. Gnome, to my knowledge, is Unixen-only, with some parts of GTK ported to Windows. As such, the JVM can be viewed as something that breaks a desktop dependancy.
Mouse wheel support? It's in there. Check v1.4 of the JDK.
Accessibility (support for the disabled, but in a PC way)? It's in there. Check out the Java Accessibility API.
I'm afraid I don't have any information on how one can utilize the native OS theme for colors and such. Do you have a reference to a bug/feature request in Sun's bug tracker on this one? It may be in v1.4, but I simply don't know. I'd bet it's not, though.
My point is just that you should really give v1.4 a chance. It's quite nice, despite changing a few of the APIs such that many v1.3 programs must be ported (very few changed, but just enough that it's not a simple copy-and-run for programs like Forte).
There are a whole slew of JAX-? APIs coming doing the pike. These cover a whole gamut of functionality. However, only JAX-P is included in J2EE. XML and XSL processing do not constitute, in my opinion, a rich set of APIs for XML.
.NET is better equated to Sun ONE. Sun ONE provided Java, SOAP/UDDI/WSDL, and a platform for delivering web services, with strong support for XML. Java, by itself, has limited support for XML (JAXP is the only XML API included in JDK1.4) and does not have any built-in support for SOAP et al. Java is *not* a platform for delivering web services, which is the stated goal of .NET.
.NET is not a valid comparison. Comparing Java to C#/IL/CLR is much more valid. Comparing Sun ONE to .NET is also valid. But compring Java to .NET is, indeed, comparing apples to oranges.
Sun ONE, of course, brings these capabilities to Java. Comparing Java to
By the way, both Sun and IBM have bought in to the idea of web services enough to make web services a central part of their plans for the future of their companies. Maybe the idea of web services is fundamentally flawed. I don't think so, however. Web services are a natural progression of component-based software development. First we had monolithic applications. Then we had 3rd party APIs. Then we had object oriented class libraries. A natural progression is web services. Whereas OO libraries help programmers reuse code, web services allow corporations to easily integrate 3rd party services into part of a larger, single system. This is not easily doable with existing OO technologies (I'm thinking here of DCOM/CORBA/RMI/EJB/sockets--you can do it, but it's a royal pain in the butt).
The M1-A1 Abrahms tank is the one with depleted uranium core armor. It is manufactured only in the US. The M-1A Abrahms tank does not have the depleted uranium core armor. It is manufactured in numerous places, including Egypt and Turkey. I used to live in Egypt, where my father worked with General Dynamics on a contract supporting Egypt's M-1A tank facility.
Basketball...a sport Canada has dominated ever since its invention....tee hee...
Blame Canada!
Hmm...the A1-Abrahms tank is also made in Turkey and Egypt. I don't think the location of the factory has *anything* to do with the general quality of engineering or manufacturing from the country.
;-)
As for the Canada comment, I think that sarcasm is hard to portray in prose. Give him a break...and learn a sense of humor.
As for the space walks, bravo! Jim Reilly was my physics tutor in university, and there isn't a nicer and more capable man on the planet (or in space
Pick up JDKv1.4beta. I think you'll change your mind. Sun has finally taken advantage of hardware acceleration for things like scrolling. So apps now feel like they're native speed.
I agree wholeheartedly with you for pre-v1.4 stuff, though. Performance is lousy. But Java, as a language, is the Right Mix when it comes to object orientation, ease of use, rich library, well designed GUI (yes, I said it was well designed...not fast...but plz. check v1.4 for speed), and capabilities for RAD development. It rocks on the server, and I think it will soon be acceptable for internal application development (i.e. RAD dev).
Hey, I'm a Java guy, and I've learned a lot about performance. Java can be made to perform. Especially server-side. But Java pre-v1.4 has some known problems with Swing. Namely, it doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration for simple items like scrolling and popping up windows. If you have a reasonably large list displayed in a pulldown menu, you can get unreasonably long pauses when drawing the menu. Or scrolling.
.NET and Java. .NET equates more easily to Sun ONE. That is, Java + SOAP/WSDL/UDDI + XML + J2EE. .NET has an architecture that can be compelling for many network applications (for instance, where speed is not as necessary as reliability, recoverability, and logged transactions). The CLI is a very nice method for cross-language development. A common object model across languages is a Good Thing.
.NET components as SOAP services. Openness is good. And the .NET architecture is well done, as well. Don't discount Microsoft--this one is so good that IBM and Sun have adopted major pieces of it, as well.
Now, JDK v1.4 fixes these problems. It's still in beta, but check it out. For client-side applications, performance feels, subjectively, native speed now.
I think Java is viable for client-side programs now. But lets not confuse
I welcome this. I will remain a J2EE programmer (check out JBoss--the best app server available, and it's Open Source, and Resin, for which a soon-to-be announced JVM integration with JBoss is coming soon). I will likely develop for Sun ONE. And I will likely integrate
I guess I don't understand what you're saying about it augmenting the analog filter with a digital one. There's no digital filtering going on at all. Just interpolation. Interpolation != filtering.
Ooops...forgot the obligatory link.
No, it's not like "augementing your analog filter with a digital one". Digital filters can help with the rolloff. But they don't help the aliasing aspect. Furthermore, digital filters still have problems--they affect one of the three basic side effects of filters (analog typically affect two). Those effects are 1) linear phase, 2) linear response, and 3) perfect "brick-wall" step function.
Basically, the best approach, given these problems, is to simply oversample the frequency, interpolate the signal, and move the filtering to the supersonic frepquencies. The goal is not to introduce more signal than you put in. The goal is to reproduce the input signal as closely as possible in real world conditions. Nyquist theory is fantastic, and the results are wonderful, but the implementation using a 16-bit signal (96dB theoretical S/N ratio, while humans are capable of detecting noise at -120dB) and a 44.1kHz sample rate (because of the filtering effects mentioned) require oversampling.
Our mobile phones have the same area code as our local numbers. We don't have separate area codes for mobile phones. Thus, billing (and educating the consumer that they're calling a mobile phone and not a land line) becomes exceedingly difficult.
Woah. Your statement about the Americans & Europeans is quite a broad statement. I think you misunderstand the politics behind the US mobile market. Our fucked up system is the result of a system that came *after* GSM. Yes, our digital systems were developed after GSM. Motorola lobbied Congress hard for the US to adopt their proprietary system so that they would have a lock on handset sales (Nokia still won out in the end). Since Motorola is a *big* defense contractor, and since the US was trying to protect the strategically important defense contractors from going belly up in a market of enormous cuts in defense spending, the government adopted Motorola's specs. It's pure politics, which are as fucked up in the US as they are anywhere.
As for "just about every standard", I hope you're talking about phones. I can recite dozens of superious US proprietary standards in areas other than phones. With phones, however, I'll concede your point.
BTW, WAP was designed by Nokia. In Finland.
One of the neat things about LEDs are that they produce only one frequency. Exactly one. Pretty cool. Even cheap ones. And LEDs are used as the source for lasers in CD players. Do a spectrum analysis on a cheap laser, and you'll see what I mean. Other frequencies are effectively below the noise floor, and are probably the result of ambient light. Guess what? Those green pens don't do shit.
Also, you may want to bring your theoretical Nyquist understanding into the real world. The problem comes from the fact that the output of a DAC is a step function. It must then be filtered to retrieve the same signal as the original input. This is the last part of of the theorem. Well, guess what. If we had perfect brick wall fitlers (we don't), and if there weren't problems with aliasing with real filters (there are), you would be correct in saying oversampling isn't necessary. But it is.
Oversampling allows the filter to be moved from 22.05 kHz to, for instance, 178 kHz. This moves the aliasing effects and the filter rolloff into the supersonic frequencies. And, voila, the output signal is a closer match to the input signal.
You know, all those companies investing untold millions into oversampling DACs aren't wasting their money. Oversampling does make sense.
The output from the DAC will be a step signal. That is, it needs to be filtered to return it to the original analog signal. This filter works great if you can build a perfect brick wall filter (actually, not quite...but for the sake of argument, it's pretty close--you'll still get aliasing effects). So, what you normally do is simply interpolate the signal, then put the filter at something like 192kHz. That way, these aliasing effects and the effects from a real-world filter (attenuation, etc) occur outside the audible range.
And as for your snotty remark, I don't care how stupid you are, or how little you know about the topic, you still need oversampling and interpolation to higher bits in order to retrieve the same signal you put in.
and yet, the LED that acts as a source produces but one frequency.
Yes, yes, The audio industry is ripe with sham artists. Check out, for instance, the guys selling those green hilighter pens for $20 a piece. They claim it absorbs extraneous frequencies from the laser, refining the sound. But, wait. Doesn't a laser, by definition, produce one, and only one, frequency? Why yes! So, in fact, these green highlighters don't do shit!
Well, one thing to correct you one, though. You generally want to oversample the output from your CD player. This goes by to Nyquist theory. Since you have to filter the output from a digital signal to recreate the analog signal, and since filters introduce all sorts of problems if the filter frequency is remotely close to the audible range (as is the case with a CD, but not the case with DVD's audio), you typically oversample the 44.1kHz signal. This effectively moves the filter frequency higher, so that it doesn't interfere with the audible range. When you oversample, you effectively interpolating. In order not to lose accuracy, you must increase the resolution (16 bits -> 24 bits). So, having a 24 bit, 356kHz DAC is entirely reasonable, even if the input source is only 16 bits and 44.1 kHz.
Then there are those unique little gems that don't fit well into these categories. I'm thinking of names like Rotel and NAD. Or, on the mid-tier end, Magnepan.
For Rotel & NAD, they're priced like Chevy, Ford, Honda, and Toyota, but they have a fit and finish that puts them squarely in the Lexus, Infinity, and Volvo range. I'm thinking here of maybe a Volvo when they were first trying to break into the US market. Priced like a Ford, but built like a Lexus.
As for Magnepan, it's priced like a Lexus, Infinity, or Volvo, but some of their gear produces, IMHO, the best sound available at any price. I've heard a number of $100,000 gear, with >$20,000 speakers, but I've never heard any speakers outperform the Magnepan 1.6 speakers (about $1500). Now, to get that level of performance, you need to match it with expensive electronics. But, for $1500, they are an absolute steal. If you're looking for an analogy, I'd put Maggies in the realm of TVR, the British sports car company. Priced like a Japanese sports car, performs like a Ferrari.
This is a very good analogy. Furthermore, I would generally agree with your rankings, too.
It's a result of free local calls for land-line connections. In the US, local calls are entirely free. As a result, the phone companies had no infrastructure to bill for local calls to mobile phones. As a result, in order for the mobile phone operators to make money, they had to bill the receiver rather than the caller.
This is the single biggest reason why mobile phone usage in the US is far lower than in Europe, as a percentage of the total market. In fact, mobile phone usage in the US is even lower than many developing nations. Of course, it's also the single biggest reason why Internet usage in the US is far higher than every other nation. Free local calls results in no incremental costs for Internet usage, which in turn leads to people surfing for pr0n for hours on end.
It may seem stupid when it comes to mobile phones, but it also has its strong points in other areas.
He's right, you know. The problem is that a single provider, say Vodaphone, for instance, must route all their WAP traffic through a single WAP gateway. This results in scalability problems. It's inherent to WAP. WAP could never scale, and as a result, WAP sucks.
As far as all the protocols are concerned, they're really not that hard to pick up. And the imode stuff is doing it again, although this time they're sticking a little closer to existing protocols. The protocols aren't that bad, though. It's really the problems inherent with the stupid gateway that Nokia had offered up when WAP was invented.
Why did they do it? Well, Nokia wanted to have control over the process. Control==capability to bill more for it separately==more money. It was a stupid decision. But, alas, stupid decisions are often made by industry leaders trying to extend their dominance to another market.
Depending upon the final destination, there are numerous restrictions on APO packages (letters get through fine, but not packages). Some places have 1 lb. restrictions. Other places cannot take packages larger than a certain size.
Unfortunately, short of the vendor knowing details about the military's mail delivery (that is, after it reaches New York), the vendor cannot know what the restrictions are. In these cases, the vendor simply refuses to ship to APO addresses.
I am very familiar with this. My parents lived in Saudi Arabia for 9 years, and I had to deal with the Post Office not even knowing what can be sent. There was more than a few times that I had packages returned to me after a week or more, as they were refused at the APO site in New York.
There are other considerations besides cost!