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User: wulfhound

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Comments · 127

  1. Re:Vote on Defending Against Surveillance? · · Score: 1

    Amen!! I get the feeling we're being governed by the kind of corporate middle managers (Bush, Blair...) who might make VP, but never CEO or Chairman. The interesting question is, who really /does/ hold all the power now? Ignoring all the idiot conspiracies about giant green lizards -- there seems to be a huge accumulation of wealth and power going up the chain, but where does it actually end up?

  2. Re:earlier on Austrian Town Sees the Light · · Score: 2, Informative

    There was certainly a project along those lines planned for a remote part of Siberia, using a large space-based mirror.

  3. Re:Potential Problem on Austrian Town Sees the Light · · Score: 4, Informative

    A glass pyramid /is/ installed next to the most famous French art gallery of all, the Louvre. It serves as an entranceway and atrium roof to some of the underground part of the gallery.

  4. Re:Too much work on Scientists Grow Blood Vessels Using Skin Cells · · Score: 1

    mmm, sausages.

  5. Re:Meat factories on Scientists Grow Blood Vessels Using Skin Cells · · Score: 1

    Certainly should taste as good as the bad end of the real thing -- can't imagine synthe-chicken tasting worse than intensively-reared, factory farmed meat.

    I really can't see it competing with organic free range, or better yet, wild-caught meat; but if it means we can keep on fattening the proles on cheap meat while reducing animal cruelty, that's got to be a good thing.

  6. Re:Get rid of the stem cell controversy? on Scientists Grow Blood Vessels Using Skin Cells · · Score: 1

    ... and the whole fight over abortion is in any case just a front for the fight over sexual morality (at least on the "anti" side).

  7. Re:Takes out the mystery? on Scientists Grow Blood Vessels Using Skin Cells · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If 'brain death' is the accepted measure for death, surely 'brain life' should be the accepted measure for life? A blastocyst doesn't even have nerve cells, never mind a brain.

  8. Re:Takes out the mystery? on Scientists Grow Blood Vessels Using Skin Cells · · Score: 1

    Brilliant - wishing I had some mod points right now.

  9. Re:Did You Know? on NASA Scraps Shuttle And Returns to Rockets · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No kidding.

    Combined spend on the shuttles and the space station:- around $250bn

    US _annual_ defence budget: $417bn in 2003, and increasing.

  10. Re:my take on the new PowerMacs on Apple Unveils New Pro Products · · Score: 2, Informative

    Firewire is fine for bandwidth, but PCI and presumably PCIe beat it somewhat for latency.

    There's a lot of PCI cards still in use for pro-audio work -- all the "big" Pro Tools systems run off PCI, for a start -- not to mention accelerators like UAD-1, Powercore etc.. if Magma (or somebody) don't come out with a PCIe-to-PCI bridge and external enclosure, these things won't fly for pro audio.

  11. Re:Er? on RTLinux Boasts Single-Digit uSec Responsiveness · · Score: 1

    I should just point out that these kind of ultra low latency designs for audio DSP essentially require an unbuffered, 1-sample audio signal graph. Which is likely to be horrifically inefficient on desktop CPUs compared to the 64-1024-sample buffered graphs in common use. Meaning you'll need 3x as fast a CPU to get the same track and plug-in counts as before.

  12. Re:Power concerns on Intel Reveals Next-Gen CPUs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As an aside, there is an argument that, for reasons of safety, you only want to go so far with power density. A fully charged Li-Ion battery already packs a pretty large amount of chemical energy in a small space -- laptops catching fire is fortunately a rare occurence, but not a pleasant one. Go too far with chemical energy density, and essentially everybody is carrying potential bombs around.

  13. Re:RIP Bob on Synthesizer Pioneer Bob Moog Dies · · Score: 1

    Generally the Yamaha DX-series (particularly the DX-1 and the hugely popular DX-7) from about '83 are considered the first digital synthesizers, tho there are various hybrids (microprocessor controlled analog synths with some digital components to the oscillators and envelope generators) and lab prototypes (first digital synth prototypes probably existed around 1974) before that.

  14. Anyone remember... on Nerdcore Rap In The Press · · Score: 1

    ... the Radium Rap? Must have been from 1998 or so, celebrating the exploits of software crackers Radium. If anybody's still got an mp3 of that...

  15. Re:9 track tapes on Help Solve the Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly · · Score: 1

    No kidding. Ever tried to lift one of those damn things?

  16. 9 track tapes on Help Solve the Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone care to shed any further light on what format these tapes are in, how many there are and in what condition?

    I had a summer job a decade ago ripping 9-track tapes (geophys data) to CD-R (back when CD-Rs were $20 each and a burner was $5k!), pretty sure the people I did it for still have the gear. Planetary guys - I couldn't see a contact address on your page!

  17. Nothing new..? on Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs · · Score: 1

    I've heard it said that the original BSOD, in the early days of Windows, was in fact red - however, the marketing people asked that it be toned down so as not to alarm people "unnecessarily". Can anyone substantiate this?

  18. Re:Hardware Wars on DC Power distribution - Nix the Transformers? · · Score: 1

    Have to say, seems like a good idea... cheap, common plugs/sockets for some fairly decent DC voltage (16V?) for hi-fi, entertainment, halogen/LED lighting, other consumer electronics;
    expensive, high-safety sockets (like the ones they use here in the UK, or even more so) for high-power stuff like washing machines, vacuum cleaners, aircon. Could build some feedback in to the standard (like USB does) allowing devices to regulate their own power to some extent and so cut energy wastage.

    However, that said, these devices are going to need to supply a lot of current, and so have a low internal resistance. They'd be safer than 110v AC, for sure (or the even-more-lethal 240v AC used in Europe), but certainly not as safe as alkaline batteries.

  19. Re:TV Tax on United Kingdom Leads the World in TV Downloads · · Score: 1

    Not only that, but your basic British TV package gives you only 5 channels, and compared to US TV, much less of the programming is the sort of big-budget, lightweight drama and sit-com series that most consider "entertainment".

    Yes, lots of people have cable, satellite or digital - but for the same money, you can get broadband instead.

  20. Re:Resolution on Patients get Solar Implants in Eyes · · Score: 2, Insightful

    70x70 is enough vision to be useful - more than enough to see doorways, furniture and suchlike, and not far off what you'd need to read large print (street signs and suchlike).

  21. Re:Altivec on Grand Unified Theory of SIMD · · Score: 1

    Yes it does.. it's a G4, all G4s have Altivec.

  22. Re:No MIDI Support? on Design Your Own Audio Controller · · Score: 1

    OSC is a successor to MIDI (providing higher resolution datatypes, and avoiding a lot of the stupidity that's engineered in to MIDI as a side-effect of having been designed as a 7-bit, 38kbaud protocol).

    Bridging it back to MIDI in software is pretty trivial - if it takes off, you will most likely see limited OSC support in all the big sequencers fairly rapidly. However, because many of them use MIDI as their native event protocol, full OSC support will take much longer.

    A few big apps already support it - most notably, Reaktor.

  23. Re:Good idea that should be expanded on Design Your Own Audio Controller · · Score: 1

    Dynamic boards are nothing new... audio software has had them for the best part of a decade. What's new is the touchscreen interface... although it has been done before (MIDI editor/librarian/synth-remote-controllers running on PDAs or tablets), this looks like it will do it much better (larger form factor, great screen, great looks, multi-point touch sensing).

  24. Re:Infomercial on Design Your Own Audio Controller · · Score: 1

    FWIW, the Lemur has been creating a buzz on geek-musician community boards for the best part of a week already, quite without marketing help. The guys (and very few girls) this thing is aimed at are excited about it on its own merits - assuming it works as advertised, of course - although most are put off by the price, supposedly in the $1000-$2000 range.

  25. Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule on Cherry OS Claims Mac OS X Capability For x86 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... except that modern superscalar CPUs (certainly x86, and possibly newer PPCs also) don't work like that - the registers you write to in machine code are virtual, and are mapped on to a larger hidden register file in realtime by the CPU. In any case a sure-fire L1 cache hit has negligible latency compared to, well, pretty much anything else on an Intel cpu.