A lot of people in this thread yakkity yak about blind tests, and the answer in my case is "yes". My friends and I love to sit around on a weekend conducting controlled tests. We conduct controlled tests of cables, components, and source formats. In some cases we detect differences, in others we don't. In our tests the listener has consistently preferred CD to MP3. Further, in tests using ONLY CDs, the listener has indicated no preference. We are using a cheapo JVC DVD player that handles MP3 CDs.
For this test we encoded using lame and iTunes (fraunhoffer). If there are better encoders I'm all ears.
As for your other swipes, as with most personal attacks, they are all false. I haven't spent a lot of money on audio equipment because I mainly build it myself. A few hundred dollars will build what sells for thousands.
Also I don't hear above 19khz, but 44khz recordings audibly distort signals well below the Nyquist frequency. This distortion is in the form of phase errors. For a lot of consumer playback gear, the result is that, at 22khz, the signal is 90 degrees out-of-phase. Blech. A 96khz recording has loads of headroom.
Yeah, I'm not convinced about SACD either, but I think that 24/96 is a big win. The main problem I have is that Sony's SACD players don't let the digital stream out of the box, and even if they did the DSD parts from big names like Burr-Brown and Crystal aren't mature. I have a handful of 24/96 source material and it sounds great. I cannot say whether the difference is due to better recording techniques or better playback techniques, but they sound uniformly awesome. The higher sonic frequencies are REALLY THERE, which is something I rarely found with 16/44 material.
Oh yeah: MP3 sucks ass unless you like voices oscillating across the image.
MP3 and Vorbis both make a hash out of "real" music. Show me an MP3 of a Sergei Nakariakov cadenza that sounds as good as the CD and I'll give you $1000 cash money. LAME makes complex music sound like line noise. iTunes makes orchestras move around from left to right. Vorbis induces all sorts of audible spatial problems. Uncompressed music has none of these problems.
At any rate, audiophilia has moved beyond the CD to 24-bit/96KHz audio on DVDs or other media. The results, to my ear, are great.
Yeah you might say that Viewsonic's LCDs are not up to scratch. Take a side-by-side comparison between them and a Samsung screen. I don't know who makes the actual LCD, but Samsung's monitors look vastly better than Viewsonic's.
Of course, you'll pay real money for the Samsung, but I don't know anyone else selling a 24" LCD monitor these days.
Two things the linux 1394 driver doesn't mix well with right now: non-i386 architectures, and systems with multiple CPUs. Also the 1394 storage code is very immature. I'd wait a while before going with 1394 storage on linux.
Check out storagereview's latest review of 20 drives. Given 10,000 i/o operations per second, all SCSI drives used ~20 percent CPU, while all IDE drives used ~40 percent CPU. The CPU was an Intel Pentium 4 2GHz.
You got it backwards. FC is dead because u160 lvd scsi killed it. FC switches are $$$ per port. Their speed advantage over older scsi implementations is gone. For specialized storage requirements FC is still there but scsi is the only thing going in mainstream server storage and iSCSI sill likely kill the remaining FC market.
Anyway your 'IDE is fast enough' point is stupid. IDE is only fast enough if you like waiting around for a long time while your drive runs. High-end SCSI disks eclipse high-end IDE disks by a very large margin. The best SCSI disk is more than twice as fast as the best IDE disk. Yeah they are pretty expensive. Most IDE disks are not "fast enough". The consumer market is way past Windows productivity applications. That's the corporate market. The consumer market wants to rip CDs to MP3, cut DVDs from their digital camcorders, and manipulate large digital photographs.
No this is hopefully NOT where it (CPU cooling technology) will end up. Ideally, it will end up with CPUs that consume less power and give off less heat, can withstand higher core temperatures, and can more efficiently transfer heat outside the core. Slapping a vapor refrigerator onto the CPU is the opposite of elegance.
HP of today reminds me of DEC and Lucent. None of these companies seem to be able to market and profit from the fruits of their massive engineering talent. None can dispute the quality of the hardware and software in HP's calculators, but HP are not able to turn it into a long-term successful business unit. HP have spun of most of their best products into the mismanaged and unable to execute Agilent. Note the parallel with Lucent. I don't know why these companies let their best products go adrift but I find it depressing.
Good job, drone. Your $1.50 contribution to the Prosecution of Computer Programmers Fund will not be forgotten. Another mindless entertainment/contribution opportunity will follow soon.
Furthering your point, all of weather.com's data for North America comes from the National Weather Service. weather.com exists only to interdict between people and the weather data they already paid for with taxes. I think that is an example of commercial interests fucking up the internet yet again.
Re:It's great to have sites like this
on
The Guts Of An iPod
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't really want to replace the entire operating system in my iPod, but I *would* like to get Ogg Vorbis playback support. Does anyone know how this thing boots; from a ROM or from the hard disk or both?
You won't be forced to watch anything if you play DVDs with a computer running Linux. In fact most Linux DVD players aren't even capable of playing the stupid FBI and Interpol warnings. That's part of what the Free in Free Software means: your software isn't supposed to force you to do anything.
A laptop computer, if you have one, makes a fine DVD player. The best solution is to just not watch DVDs altogether. Usually the money from your DVD purchase is being used to prosecute some innocent people somewhere, or bribe national legislatures.
Televisions network execs clearly forgot that braodcast television is a priviledge provided them by the people via the government. Their broadcast spectrum is not a right, it is a priviledge granted on the condition that the broadcaster will add some value to it. Ditto for cable television: cable plants are mainly installed (in the US) in cities where the government protects, licenses, and regulates the natural monopoly.
Which bring me to my next point: if a television network is going to beam this shit into my home via a publically regulated electromagnetic spectrum, where do they get off telling me what I can do with the signal?
Nice try. HTML doesn't support events in a vacuum. The events are tied to a logic implementation that necessarily includes an embedded language like JavaScript. HTML intrinsic events cannot do anything without an embedded language to deal with them.
In any case, it isn't 1999 anymore:) HTML intrinsic events are the past and DOM 2 Events are the present and future.
Yeah it has improved a great deal. I now get battery lifetimes equal to what I get in OS 9. Sleep works fine by just shutting the lid. or using the snooze command.
Maybe so, I wouldn't know. But in general, OS X supports a lot more Apple hardware than Linux. For example, XFree86 4.1 is still unaccelerated for a lot of video cards in Apple systems, Firewire device support in Linux is flaky, and sound doesn't work under Linux in many systems (particularly laptops).
I disagree with this pretty strongly. Linux PPC runs on essentially any Apple PCI PowerPC machine ever made. MacOS X runs only on recent G3 and G4 models. It doesn't even fully support the DVD decoding hardware in older G3 laptops. It doesn't support the original PowerBook G3 at allApple's new OS doesn't support hardware they were shipping only 18 months ago. Now that's service with a smile! (Reference: System Requirements for MacOS X 10.1)
XFree86 is accelerated for Mach 64, Rage 128, and Radeon which covers all the Macs I care about. 2d drawing, video scaling, colorspace conversion, and 3d OpenGL are all supported. Sound works on everything that OS X supports except the newest iBook.
BS. I've got an iBook with YDL 2.0 and it doesn't even support suspend/sleep mode, nor does it dim the display. It can spin down the disk and blank the display, but that's it.
YDL is the worst Linux PPC distribution you can buy. Get Debian/PPC and install a BenH kernel which supports power management on PowerBooks (and iMacs, Cubes, etc.) Linux powers off my PCMCIA cards when the PowerBook sleeps, where MacOS X does not. If I put my PowerBook to sleep under MacOS X 10.1, my battery will be drained by morning. With Linux it sleeps as long as MacOS 9 does.
BS again. I just watched a DVD on my TV this past weekend driven by the AV connector on my iBook, in OS 10.1. Further, I'd like to know what version of Linux for PPC supports video out on my iBook.
Well that's great for the iBook, but on the PowerBook neither the TV nor the external monitor can play movies, and you also can't play movies on the LCD with a TV or monitor attached. Linux does this just fine. I use VideoLAN which has Altivec acceleration, and incidentally also has an embryonic MacOS X port. Read the Apple Technical Note 60895 "DVD Player 3.0 Does Not Work With External Monitor Connected to PowerBook"
Like what? Are you going to provide any examples, or are you just making stuff up?
Hear me now or hear me later: OS X is *loaded* with local root exploits. Here's one article.
5. How about timely support for future hardware you're likely to buy?
How about support for hardware I just bought a few months ago? Oh wait, that might cut into Steve's personal slush fund.
Linux can run all MacOS 9 software using Mac-on-Linux, which is the functional equivalent of "Classic" which MacOS X uses to run the same applications. Linux PPC supports an aweful lot of PCMCIA cards on the powerbook that OS X doesn't. Linux PPC has better power management than OS X (yes I'm serious). Linux can play DVD movies on the external monitor of a powerbook, but OS X cannot. Linux has a journalling filesystem and OS X doesn't. OS X is loaded with local root vulnerabilities, and probably a lot of undiscovered remote vulnerabilities as well.
This is completely false. The range of 802.11a at full rate (54 Mbps) is quite short, yes. But, 802.11a can achieve 11 Mbps at longer range than 802.11b, and it can reach 1 Mbps at quite long range. Thus it is correct to say that 802.11a actually has better range than 802.11b.
Why do you kiddies keep beating this particular drum. Your heat sink should never fall off! Why is it falling off? Because you don't know how to properly build a computer? Than buy a Dell and don't sweat it.
For your convenience, here is a list of other things you should avoid buying because they have "fatal flaws":
Internal combustion engines (can seize if their oil pan suddnely falls off)
Airplanes (can crash if their engines suddenly fall off)
Nuclear power plants (may malfunction if all coolant pumps fail)
I learned something neat from reading this announcement. LyX existed already at the time of the announcement, which means LyX is now at least five years old as well. Dang, I didn't know that. LyX is my most-used X application and I think it belongs on every X desktop. The timing explains why LyX uses XForms instead of GTK or QT.
Great, now you have a netbooting PC that gets music from the network and has no fans. Hrmm, that sounds a lot like the Audiotron unit mentioned in this article.
Execept, I almost gaurantee that a p90, mainboard, 8MB RAM, network card, ir port, remote control, and soundcard with digital output is going to set you back at least the same amount of money, more even when you factor in the time you spent dicking with it.
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A lot of people in this thread yakkity yak about blind tests, and the answer in my case is "yes". My friends and I love to sit around on a weekend conducting controlled tests. We conduct controlled tests of cables, components, and source formats. In some cases we detect differences, in others we don't. In our tests the listener has consistently preferred CD to MP3. Further, in tests using ONLY CDs, the listener has indicated no preference. We are using a cheapo JVC DVD player that handles MP3 CDs. For this test we encoded using lame and iTunes (fraunhoffer). If there are better encoders I'm all ears. As for your other swipes, as with most personal attacks, they are all false. I haven't spent a lot of money on audio equipment because I mainly build it myself. A few hundred dollars will build what sells for thousands. Also I don't hear above 19khz, but 44khz recordings audibly distort signals well below the Nyquist frequency. This distortion is in the form of phase errors. For a lot of consumer playback gear, the result is that, at 22khz, the signal is 90 degrees out-of-phase. Blech. A 96khz recording has loads of headroom.
Oh yeah: MP3 sucks ass unless you like voices oscillating across the image.
At any rate, audiophilia has moved beyond the CD to 24-bit/96KHz audio on DVDs or other media. The results, to my ear, are great.
Of course, you'll pay real money for the Samsung, but I don't know anyone else selling a 24" LCD monitor these days.
Two things the linux 1394 driver doesn't mix well with right now: non-i386 architectures, and systems with multiple CPUs. Also the 1394 storage code is very immature. I'd wait a while before going with 1394 storage on linux.
Check out storagereview's latest review of 20 drives. Given 10,000 i/o operations per second, all SCSI drives used ~20 percent CPU, while all IDE drives used ~40 percent CPU. The CPU was an Intel Pentium 4 2GHz.
Anyway your 'IDE is fast enough' point is stupid. IDE is only fast enough if you like waiting around for a long time while your drive runs. High-end SCSI disks eclipse high-end IDE disks by a very large margin. The best SCSI disk is more than twice as fast as the best IDE disk. Yeah they are pretty expensive. Most IDE disks are not "fast enough". The consumer market is way past Windows productivity applications. That's the corporate market. The consumer market wants to rip CDs to MP3, cut DVDs from their digital camcorders, and manipulate large digital photographs.
No this is hopefully NOT where it (CPU cooling technology) will end up. Ideally, it will end up with CPUs that consume less power and give off less heat, can withstand higher core temperatures, and can more efficiently transfer heat outside the core. Slapping a vapor refrigerator onto the CPU is the opposite of elegance.
HP of today reminds me of DEC and Lucent. None of these companies seem to be able to market and profit from the fruits of their massive engineering talent. None can dispute the quality of the hardware and software in HP's calculators, but HP are not able to turn it into a long-term successful business unit. HP have spun of most of their best products into the mismanaged and unable to execute Agilent. Note the parallel with Lucent. I don't know why these companies let their best products go adrift but I find it depressing.
Good job, drone. Your $1.50 contribution to the Prosecution of Computer Programmers Fund will not be forgotten. Another mindless entertainment/contribution opportunity will follow soon.
Furthering your point, all of weather.com's data for North America comes from the National Weather Service. weather.com exists only to interdict between people and the weather data they already paid for with taxes. I think that is an example of commercial interests fucking up the internet yet again.
I don't really want to replace the entire operating system in my iPod, but I *would* like to get Ogg Vorbis playback support. Does anyone know how this thing boots; from a ROM or from the hard disk or both?
A laptop computer, if you have one, makes a fine DVD player. The best solution is to just not watch DVDs altogether. Usually the money from your DVD purchase is being used to prosecute some innocent people somewhere, or bribe national legislatures.
Which bring me to my next point: if a television network is going to beam this shit into my home via a publically regulated electromagnetic spectrum, where do they get off telling me what I can do with the signal?
You could also play all your old DOS games under OS/2, but that didn't make OS/2 a big hit.
In any case, it isn't 1999 anymore :) HTML intrinsic events are the past and DOM 2 Events are the present and future.
Yeah it has improved a great deal. I now get battery lifetimes equal to what I get in OS 9. Sleep works fine by just shutting the lid. or using the snooze command.
I disagree with this pretty strongly. Linux PPC runs on essentially any Apple PCI PowerPC machine ever made. MacOS X runs only on recent G3 and G4 models. It doesn't even fully support the DVD decoding hardware in older G3 laptops. It doesn't support the original PowerBook G3 at allApple's new OS doesn't support hardware they were shipping only 18 months ago. Now that's service with a smile! (Reference: System Requirements for MacOS X 10.1)
XFree86 is accelerated for Mach 64, Rage 128, and Radeon which covers all the Macs I care about. 2d drawing, video scaling, colorspace conversion, and 3d OpenGL are all supported. Sound works on everything that OS X supports except the newest iBook.
YDL is the worst Linux PPC distribution you can buy. Get Debian/PPC and install a BenH kernel which supports power management on PowerBooks (and iMacs, Cubes, etc.) Linux powers off my PCMCIA cards when the PowerBook sleeps, where MacOS X does not. If I put my PowerBook to sleep under MacOS X 10.1, my battery will be drained by morning. With Linux it sleeps as long as MacOS 9 does.
Well that's great for the iBook, but on the PowerBook neither the TV nor the external monitor can play movies, and you also can't play movies on the LCD with a TV or monitor attached. Linux does this just fine. I use VideoLAN which has Altivec acceleration, and incidentally also has an embryonic MacOS X port. Read the Apple Technical Note 60895 "DVD Player 3.0 Does Not Work With External Monitor Connected to PowerBook"
Hear me now or hear me later: OS X is *loaded* with local root exploits. Here's one article.
How about support for hardware I just bought a few months ago? Oh wait, that might cut into Steve's personal slush fund.
Honsetly OS X hasn't got that much going for it.
This is completely false. The range of 802.11a at full rate (54 Mbps) is quite short, yes. But, 802.11a can achieve 11 Mbps at longer range than 802.11b, and it can reach 1 Mbps at quite long range. Thus it is correct to say that 802.11a actually has better range than 802.11b.
You are perfectly free to not attach a phone to that line.
For your convenience, here is a list of other things you should avoid buying because they have "fatal flaws":
I learned something neat from reading this announcement. LyX existed already at the time of the announcement, which means LyX is now at least five years old as well. Dang, I didn't know that. LyX is my most-used X application and I think it belongs on every X desktop. The timing explains why LyX uses XForms instead of GTK or QT.
Execept, I almost gaurantee that a p90, mainboard, 8MB RAM, network card, ir port, remote control, and soundcard with digital output is going to set you back at least the same amount of money, more even when you factor in the time you spent dicking with it.
If you can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD you must be a stump.