Lots of cars actually have dual-clutch gearboxes these days, mostly as an option. From cars like the Ferrari F12 and the GTR and M5 you mentioned. The problem is that noone can agree on a unified name, so you have Ford's Powershift, Porsche's PDK, Alfa Romeo's TCT, VW/Audi/Skoda/Seat's DSG, Renault's DCT and so on an so forth.
Dual-clutch gearboxes are slowly replacing traditional torque converter automatics, mostly because they're significantly more efficient and can shift faster. That said, torque converter automatics still have their place in high-torque applications (the old twin-turbo Mercedes/AMG V12s in particular would shred lesser gearboxes), and I hear the ZF 8-speed used by BMW etc. is a very nice gearbox indeed.
The Honda NC700 can be had with a dual clutch gearbox, but I honestly think I would feel a lack of control with no clutch. You use the clutch a lot more on a bike that you do in a car, after all.
That occured to me after I posted, but even then, nano-scale materials are still very capable of doing irreversible damage. All-out panic is of course wrong, but we need to be aware of the possible dangers.
That depends on a lot of factors. Do you know why asbestos causes cancer? The fibers are fine enough that they will physically damage your DNA. I see very little reason why carbon nanotubes shouldn't be capable of the same thing.
Also, in the new version it's no longer possible to use a master password... if you want to use sync all your password will be in plaintext (well, obfuscated) in FF's password file. Any malicious or vulnerable application can get access to ALL your passwords. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
Doesn't sound like an improvement to me...
This is a HUGE, MAJOR fuckup.
Really, they shouldn't have rolled out the new sync without having some kind of solution to this. I have hundreds of randomly-generated passwords for various sites and because I use multiple computers, I rely on Firefox to sync them. I have a secure master password set on all of these computers, but now that sync refuses to work properly, I'll either have to disable my master password (not gonna happen), rely on a third-party piece of software such as KeePass or literally copy down all of my passwords to paper and carry them around with me.
This is absolutely ridiculous, and almost as insane as the Pidgin developers' insistence on saving all account passwords in a plain-text XML file "because anything else is just security by obscurity".
One really major pain in the ass that has been introduced in this version is the "feature" that disables password syncing if you have a master password set. This has been in the Android version for a while, and now it's been put in the desktop version, too.
WHY?!
I use randomly-generated passwords for most of the sites I visit, for security. I literally have hundreds of these passwords, and they're all saved in Firefox' password manager, protected with a master password. Previously, I could sync these between my various computers with no trouble at all. They all had a master password set. But now I have to remove a layer of security in order to sync my passwords? It's either that, or manually write down and copy them, which is obviously less secure.
I simply cannot fathom the thought process that led to this decision.
Often, you have to 'like' their pages on Facebook in order to participate in contests and the like. People love the possibility of getting free stuff, so they happily click 'like' to enter the contest, and then forget about it moments later.
Somebody obviously saw this as a sneaky way of possibly getting their customers to actively sign away their right to sue.
The unrestricted parts of the autobahn have a advisory speed limit of 130km/h. If you are involved in an accident while travelling faster than that, it greatly increases your risk of being found at fault, depending on how fast your were going.
Going 200+km/h (125mph) basically guarantees that you will be found 100% at fault.
Thank you for playing, but you are wrong. Do not assume that you know even the slightest thing about me or my personal life.
For what it's worth, we split up amiably and she wanted to go back to her family at the other end of the country. We met fairly young, so we were actually both surprised that it had lasted as long as it did, we're still good friends and talk regularly.
She's also given up on being an interpretor. Now she works at a hospital, so perhaps she got sick of the bullshit Deaf attitude as well.
My ex-girlfriend is a certified sign language interpretor. Becoming one obviously requires you to immerse yourself in Deaf culture, and all of the teachers at the schools are deaf. I have met a lot of them, and while they are extremely friendly people, they are also staunchly conservative when it comes to things like cochlear implants and what they see as the erosion of Deaf culture. They truly do not see being deaf as a handicap, some of them even consider the ability to hear an unnecessary burden, as bizarre as that seems. An enormous amount of misinformation around implants is also constantly spread around the Deaf community, probably in a desperate attempt to keep people deaf.
Nothing quite like it exists among the blind, because being deaf is an enormous burden, and a much larger handicap. Deafness causes linguistic isolation, unlike being blind, which still allows you to communicate effectively with non-handicapped people.
The Deaf community needs to wise up and accept that being deaf is a handicap. We have the tools and technology to mitigate and almost eliminate this handicap.
There is a reason we don't see "Blind culture" or "Wheelchair-bound culture" or "Scoliosis culture" or whatever, and it's because creating an insular, conservative and backwards culture based on a handicap, and then claiming that particular handicap makes you superior to everyone else, is a monumentally stupid idea.
A lot of newer motherboards actually have hardware serial and parallel ports again. I've been looking at LGA 1150 motherboards, and I would estimate that at least half of them have those ports.
I tried KDE for a few weeks, it claims to be ultimately configurable. But you can't even do simple stuff like assign the meta key as a shortcut, or have a menu to the left of screen that works well. KDE is too much like the familiar but difficult Windows desktop paradigm.
Super/Meta is a modifier key. You wouldn't assign a shortcut directly to Ctrl or Alt, would you? If you truly want to use Super/Meta as a single-key shortcut, ksuperkey does what you want.
I've been using my main panel on the left ever since I got my 2560x1440 monitor. I assume that's what you meant by "menu to the left of screen". It works perfectly fine, BTW. Just drag the panel there and resize it a bit.
You are completely wrong about digital audio. There are no square waves, the sample points are infinitely small in time and are used to reconstruct the original analog sound wave mathematically.
Looking at their website, they certainly pile on the audiophile bullshit claims. They also make fancy-pants cables, which sell for €375 for a set of 1 meter balanced XLR cables! If that's not a major red flag, I don't know what is.
I think I'll stick with companies like Adam, EVE, KRK, M-Audio, Behringer, ATC, PMC, Genelec and a host of other real audiophilia-free pro audio companies.
I also agree that the way forward is towards active bi/tri-amped speakers, ideally with dsp processing both the speaker response and doing proper room adjustment. Genelec is one of the brands that offer this, at a hefty price. I use bi-amped KRK monitors in my computer room. Fun to do occasional home movie edits on, and a true pleasure for listening.
Mine are Adam A5Xs supported by a decent active hifi sub. Best setup I've ever had. Genelecs are very nice, I know that one of the national TV stations in my country use Genelecs exclusively everywhere in their production chain. I've heard that EVE makes awesome monitors as well, with built-in DSP (they're former Adam people, hence the name).
Well ok yeah, theoretically a record can have frequency response up to and over 50kHz, but in practice it's extremely wear-sensitive and even a pristine record is nowhere near linear above even 12-15kHz. To replicate a quadraphonic record on a CD, the best solution would be to do some tricks with matrix encoding and phase shifting to pack a surround sound signal into two audio channels. This is in fact exactly how Dolby Pro Logic works.
And I agree 100% that mastering is generally shit these days. I am actually listening to Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie right now, and even though the music is loud and angry and peaks near 0dBFS on a couple of tracks, there are plenty of dynamics and no clipping at all. Even just looking as the waveform shows that it it not brickwalled in any way, you can see the dynamics! Everything sounds good at low volumes and bloody amazing when played loud, and Skin's voice is so goddamned amazing, both in her singing ability, but also in the quality of the recording. Comparing it to basically any similar rock record released in the last couple of years shows just how shitty mastering has gotten since 1999.
Your premise is flawed, there is no such thing as a decent hifi dealer. They all push ridiculously priced cables and bullshit audiophilia.
Regardless, what you're describing is not a double blind test. The salesperson knows which amplifier is playing, and has a vested interest in selling you a new piece of equipment. I have personally seen salespeople adjust the volume slightly when changing between two different piece of equipment in a listening test. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book, as we tend to hear a slight (less than 1dB) increase in volume as an increase in sound quality. When challenged, they either vehemently deny doing it, or claim that they were "matching the levels", as if that was possible by ear only.
Please define "a good CD player", as even my old Pioneer PD-306 sounded absolutely 100% identical when playing through the analog output and when switched to the TOSLINK output through an external DAC. And that was a pretty standard black-with-gold-lettering mid-90s consumer CD player, nothing special at all.
Your talk of finding a "good for music" preamp is similarly silly. As long as the preamp is linear 20Hz-20kHz and has low distortion plus a decent SNR, you're golden. I'll admit that I'm guilty of overspending a bit for my preamp, a NAD C165BEE. Unfortunately preamps seems to be ridiculously priced everywhere, even more expensive than the integrated amps from the same manufacturers, probably for stupid audiophile reasons. But since I'm using active speakers and I figure I'll never have to buy another preamp ever, I can live with that.
Besides, all this amplifier talk is irrelevant, the time has passed for passive speakers. My current setup each speaker has an active crossover and 2x50W of amplification, tailored specifically for the cabinets and driver units, and it sounds better than any amp+passive speaker setup I have ever heard. Nothing else has come even close for vocals and detail.
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Lots of cars actually have dual-clutch gearboxes these days, mostly as an option. From cars like the Ferrari F12 and the GTR and M5 you mentioned. The problem is that noone can agree on a unified name, so you have Ford's Powershift, Porsche's PDK, Alfa Romeo's TCT, VW/Audi/Skoda/Seat's DSG, Renault's DCT and so on an so forth.
Dual-clutch gearboxes are slowly replacing traditional torque converter automatics, mostly because they're significantly more efficient and can shift faster. That said, torque converter automatics still have their place in high-torque applications (the old twin-turbo Mercedes/AMG V12s in particular would shred lesser gearboxes), and I hear the ZF 8-speed used by BMW etc. is a very nice gearbox indeed.
The Honda NC700 can be had with a dual clutch gearbox, but I honestly think I would feel a lack of control with no clutch. You use the clutch a lot more on a bike that you do in a car, after all.
That occured to me after I posted, but even then, nano-scale materials are still very capable of doing irreversible damage. All-out panic is of course wrong, but we need to be aware of the possible dangers.
That depends on a lot of factors. Do you know why asbestos causes cancer? The fibers are fine enough that they will physically damage your DNA. I see very little reason why carbon nanotubes shouldn't be capable of the same thing.
Also, in the new version it's no longer possible to use a master password... if you want to use sync all your password will be in plaintext (well, obfuscated) in FF's password file. Any malicious or vulnerable application can get access to ALL your passwords. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
Doesn't sound like an improvement to me...
This is a HUGE, MAJOR fuckup.
Really, they shouldn't have rolled out the new sync without having some kind of solution to this. I have hundreds of randomly-generated passwords for various sites and because I use multiple computers, I rely on Firefox to sync them. I have a secure master password set on all of these computers, but now that sync refuses to work properly, I'll either have to disable my master password (not gonna happen), rely on a third-party piece of software such as KeePass or literally copy down all of my passwords to paper and carry them around with me.
This is absolutely ridiculous, and almost as insane as the Pidgin developers' insistence on saving all account passwords in a plain-text XML file "because anything else is just security by obscurity".
One really major pain in the ass that has been introduced in this version is the "feature" that disables password syncing if you have a master password set. This has been in the Android version for a while, and now it's been put in the desktop version, too.
WHY?!
I use randomly-generated passwords for most of the sites I visit, for security. I literally have hundreds of these passwords, and they're all saved in Firefox' password manager, protected with a master password. Previously, I could sync these between my various computers with no trouble at all. They all had a master password set. But now I have to remove a layer of security in order to sync my passwords? It's either that, or manually write down and copy them, which is obviously less secure.
I simply cannot fathom the thought process that led to this decision.
It's called Replaygain and it can be disabled if you don't like it.
Eedjit.
How would he know the axe? He was dead at the time.
Often, you have to 'like' their pages on Facebook in order to participate in contests and the like. People love the possibility of getting free stuff, so they happily click 'like' to enter the contest, and then forget about it moments later.
Somebody obviously saw this as a sneaky way of possibly getting their customers to actively sign away their right to sue.
The unrestricted parts of the autobahn have a advisory speed limit of 130km/h. If you are involved in an accident while travelling faster than that, it greatly increases your risk of being found at fault, depending on how fast your were going.
Going 200+km/h (125mph) basically guarantees that you will be found 100% at fault.
Thank you for playing, but you are wrong. Do not assume that you know even the slightest thing about me or my personal life.
For what it's worth, we split up amiably and she wanted to go back to her family at the other end of the country. We met fairly young, so we were actually both surprised that it had lasted as long as it did, we're still good friends and talk regularly.
She's also given up on being an interpretor. Now she works at a hospital, so perhaps she got sick of the bullshit Deaf attitude as well.
You're just a traitor to Epileptic culture!
*Goes to party*
*Has seizure*
*Gets pissed off at people trying to help, for "trying to deny my culture*
My ex-girlfriend is a certified sign language interpretor. Becoming one obviously requires you to immerse yourself in Deaf culture, and all of the teachers at the schools are deaf. I have met a lot of them, and while they are extremely friendly people, they are also staunchly conservative when it comes to things like cochlear implants and what they see as the erosion of Deaf culture. They truly do not see being deaf as a handicap, some of them even consider the ability to hear an unnecessary burden, as bizarre as that seems. An enormous amount of misinformation around implants is also constantly spread around the Deaf community, probably in a desperate attempt to keep people deaf.
Nothing quite like it exists among the blind, because being deaf is an enormous burden, and a much larger handicap. Deafness causes linguistic isolation, unlike being blind, which still allows you to communicate effectively with non-handicapped people.
The Deaf community needs to wise up and accept that being deaf is a handicap. We have the tools and technology to mitigate and almost eliminate this handicap.
There is a reason we don't see "Blind culture" or "Wheelchair-bound culture" or "Scoliosis culture" or whatever, and it's because creating an insular, conservative and backwards culture based on a handicap, and then claiming that particular handicap makes you superior to everyone else, is a monumentally stupid idea.
A lot of newer motherboards actually have hardware serial and parallel ports again. I've been looking at LGA 1150 motherboards, and I would estimate that at least half of them have those ports.
Mr. Krabbs is voiced by the same guy who played the Kurgan in Highlander. Awesome actor, BTW.
I tried KDE for a few weeks, it claims to be ultimately configurable. But you can't even do simple stuff like assign the meta key as a shortcut, or have a menu to the left of screen that works well. KDE is too much like the familiar but difficult Windows desktop paradigm.
Super/Meta is a modifier key. You wouldn't assign a shortcut directly to Ctrl or Alt, would you? If you truly want to use Super/Meta as a single-key shortcut, ksuperkey does what you want.
I've been using my main panel on the left ever since I got my 2560x1440 monitor. I assume that's what you meant by "menu to the left of screen". It works perfectly fine, BTW. Just drag the panel there and resize it a bit.
And you regularly do this on public roads?
A lot of non-US keyboards have the semicolon key in a different location. For instance, on my (Danish) keyboard, semicolon is typed using shift-comma.
Bram chose HJKL because they're always on the same place on every standard keyboard, apart from Dvorak (but Dvorak sucks anyway).
You are completely wrong about digital audio. There are no square waves, the sample points are infinitely small in time and are used to reconstruct the original analog sound wave mathematically.
Watch this and learn: http://xiph.org/video/vid2.sht...
Looking at their website, they certainly pile on the audiophile bullshit claims. They also make fancy-pants cables, which sell for €375 for a set of 1 meter balanced XLR cables! If that's not a major red flag, I don't know what is.
I think I'll stick with companies like Adam, EVE, KRK, M-Audio, Behringer, ATC, PMC, Genelec and a host of other real audiophilia-free pro audio companies.
The highend monitor setup you mention sounds a lot like maybe an ATC or PMC setup. Seriously nice stuff.
I also agree that the way forward is towards active bi/tri-amped speakers, ideally with dsp processing both the speaker response and doing proper room adjustment. Genelec is one of the brands that offer this, at a hefty price. I use bi-amped KRK monitors in my computer room. Fun to do occasional home movie edits on, and a true pleasure for listening.
Mine are Adam A5Xs supported by a decent active hifi sub. Best setup I've ever had. Genelecs are very nice, I know that one of the national TV stations in my country use Genelecs exclusively everywhere in their production chain. I've heard that EVE makes awesome monitors as well, with built-in DSP (they're former Adam people, hence the name).
Well ok yeah, theoretically a record can have frequency response up to and over 50kHz, but in practice it's extremely wear-sensitive and even a pristine record is nowhere near linear above even 12-15kHz. To replicate a quadraphonic record on a CD, the best solution would be to do some tricks with matrix encoding and phase shifting to pack a surround sound signal into two audio channels. This is in fact exactly how Dolby Pro Logic works.
And I agree 100% that mastering is generally shit these days. I am actually listening to Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie right now, and even though the music is loud and angry and peaks near 0dBFS on a couple of tracks, there are plenty of dynamics and no clipping at all. Even just looking as the waveform shows that it it not brickwalled in any way, you can see the dynamics! Everything sounds good at low volumes and bloody amazing when played loud, and Skin's voice is so goddamned amazing, both in her singing ability, but also in the quality of the recording. Comparing it to basically any similar rock record released in the last couple of years shows just how shitty mastering has gotten since 1999.
Your premise is flawed, there is no such thing as a decent hifi dealer. They all push ridiculously priced cables and bullshit audiophilia.
Regardless, what you're describing is not a double blind test. The salesperson knows which amplifier is playing, and has a vested interest in selling you a new piece of equipment. I have personally seen salespeople adjust the volume slightly when changing between two different piece of equipment in a listening test. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book, as we tend to hear a slight (less than 1dB) increase in volume as an increase in sound quality. When challenged, they either vehemently deny doing it, or claim that they were "matching the levels", as if that was possible by ear only.
Please define "a good CD player", as even my old Pioneer PD-306 sounded absolutely 100% identical when playing through the analog output and when switched to the TOSLINK output through an external DAC. And that was a pretty standard black-with-gold-lettering mid-90s consumer CD player, nothing special at all.
Your talk of finding a "good for music" preamp is similarly silly. As long as the preamp is linear 20Hz-20kHz and has low distortion plus a decent SNR, you're golden. I'll admit that I'm guilty of overspending a bit for my preamp, a NAD C165BEE. Unfortunately preamps seems to be ridiculously priced everywhere, even more expensive than the integrated amps from the same manufacturers, probably for stupid audiophile reasons. But since I'm using active speakers and I figure I'll never have to buy another preamp ever, I can live with that.
Besides, all this amplifier talk is irrelevant, the time has passed for passive speakers. My current setup each speaker has an active crossover and 2x50W of amplification, tailored specifically for the cabinets and driver units, and it sounds better than any amp+passive speaker setup I have ever heard. Nothing else has come even close for vocals and detail.
Would you be able to back up your perception of this difference with a double blind ABX test?