They sound every bit the same as any other competent preamp or power amp.
I will concede that there may be a slight sonic difference in the performance of their DACs, but most likely one that is completely inaudible compared to something like a $30 FiiO D3.
24bit doesn't provide that. Or to put it another way, 16bit provides that exactly as well as 24bit does.
All 24bit buys your is more range between the quietest possible sound and the loudest possible sound that can be recorded, it doesn't add anything "between" the levels, if that's what you're seeking. In fact, there is nothing "lost between the levels" as some people claim, because the sound output is a mathematical recreation with pretty much infinite possible levels within the sample rate and dynamic range the format allows. http://xiph.org/video/vid2.sht... explains all this extremely well.
24bit (and 32bit float) only matter during the recording and mastering process, where you want as much headroom as possible to prevent clipped samples. Once everything is nice and properly mixed and mastered, even the most dynamic soundtracks and music fit easily within the 16bit.
I'd say the perfect format would be 48kHz/24bit. 48kHz to have plenty of room for a nice frequency cutoff, and 24-bit for music with a high dynamic range, like film scores and orchestral.
44.1kHz leaves plenty of room for a decent frequency cutoff, especially with modern active and digital low pass filters. However, I will concede that 48kHz is a "nicer" ratio and makes it easier to work together with pro audio, which always works in 48, 96, 192kHz instead of 44.1, 88.2, 176.4kHz. The CD should have been 48kHz from the beginning, like DAT, which the pros used back then.
And where would you ever need even the base 144dB dynamic range of 24bit audio for playback? Keep in mind that the threshold of pain is somewhere around 120dB, so a 24bit recording could potentially capture both the sound of a lightbulb humming and a gunshot that would literally tear your eardrum, in the same track. But you've never heard a lightbulb hum, because even the softest ambient noise drowns it out.
16bit audio has a base dynamic range of 96dB. This increases to over 110dB when using proper noise shaped dither. You really, honestly, truthfully will never need more than that for audio playback. Even extremely well-mastered orchestral music "only" has a dynamic range of 40-50dB.
Yeah well, there is a lot of crap in audiophilia but there is equally a lot of crap rejecting it blindly. In theory a dirt cheap cd or blu ray player and an expensive one have very similar paper specifications for audio. That is what scientific measurements would tell you.
However if you listen on a good system the sound quality difference between the cheap and the expensive player is immediately obvious, without needing to be an audiophile maniac.
Similarly I compared a few D/A convertors, as I had a few sources with only optical out (such as an Apple TV, and a blu-ray player with only hdmi and optical) and an old but good analogue-only amp. Well, there was a subtle difference between the models up to say $800. I could always pick the same one which was a bit better than the other 2 I compared against. Not much difference but it was there.
The only reason you could pick between them was because you already knew which one was playing. Try a true double blind ABX test, you will be surprised at the results.
A high-class hifi system set up against a cheap Sony DVD player (boo!) and a Behringer amplifier (hiss!), using cheap-ass cables (the horror!), all placed on a rickety chair (madness!). And yet, even seasoned audiophiles were not able to hear a lick of difference.
Audiophilia is bullshit, pure and simple. If fidelity truly was the only goal, everyone would be using a set of Adam A7X or S1X monitors and a digital source. But audiophilia is a rich man's disease where the only objective is to outspend the other suckers.
Then we had CD's quality is better then tape, but not quite up to the record.
That is bullshit on a huge scale.
The CD can do everything that even a pristine record can do, and more. You can perfectly replicate the sound of a record using a CD, but you cannot perfectly replicate the sound of CD using a record. That makes CD the clearly superior format. CDs are cheaper to produce, more portable, do not degrade with repeated playback, can replicate any frequency from 0-22kHz with instant impulse response and more than enough dynamic range to reach from 0dB to the threshold of pain on the same track.
Records have only one advantage, and that is more space for artwork on the cover. On every single parameter apart from that, the record is an inferior and useless format. Just let it die, already.
More like "purveyors of bullshit". One of their shared key design parameters is "Pace, Rhythm and Timing" (abbreviated "PRaT") and they apply this to amplifiers, DACs, digital music storage etc. etc.
If you think your amplifier influences the "Pace, Rhythm and Timing" of your music, you need a straightjacket.
I have my mom and dad listed as "mom" and "dad", both with multiple phone numbers. I figure if anyone needs to call someone in case of an emergency, "mom" and "dad" are good choices. Of course, most phones these days are locked with a PIN or pattern code, so good luck actually getting to the contact list.
My dad has a bunch of cards for various tasks, including credit cards, fuel station cards, access cards for the various company locations he needs to access and so on. I think he has at least 15 different cards either on him or in his work vehicle at all times, and they all have unique PINs.
So, being a guy who's worked with electronics for nearly 40 years, he puts the PINs right on the cards, in the format of resistor color codes. For instance, 1234 becomes "BRREORYE". Perfectly indecipherable to anyone who isn't into electronics, and still indecipherable to most electronics people if they don't know the secret.
The main reason I don't have a PC near the TV is if it has to have the grunt to play new 3D games (or even h264 when it came out) then it has to be relatively expensive and have plenty of cooling.
Manufacturers of SteamOS PCs claim to have solved the cost and cooling problems. This preview of iBuyPower's Steam Machine guesses a price on par with that of the Xbox One.
Cooling doesn't have to be noisy. To be fair, my dual-core 3.2GHz Phenom II, GTX460 isn't the latest and greatest, but the TDP is up there and requires a decent amount of cooling. According to the sound meter on my phone (which is probably inaccurate), the noise level is 2-3dBA above ambient noise, sitting at my desk right next to the PC. Hard drive search noise is subjectively the most apparent, and it's still very mild due to vibration-damped mounting and could be solved completely by either using quiet laptop drives or SSDs. Heck, I'm even using the stock AMD CPU cooler, which is surprisingly quiet when you let the motherboard control its speed.
I make do with a well-designed case and some very quiet fans running at reduced voltage. Antec make some really nice cases for quiet computing, with layered panels, vibration-damped hard drive mounting etc., and I've found that BeQuiet! makes some of the best quiet fans that still provide good airflow.
Building a quiet yet decently-powered computer is not hard, you just have to start with the right components, and the case+fans+PSU are the most important by far. The case needs to be steel, relatively heavy to dampen vibrations, have multi-layered panels and soft rubber feet. It also needs to have space for large fans, the bigger the better. 120mm or even 140mm are prefereable, since they can still deliver good airflow when running at 7v instead of 12v for reduced noise. It also matters a lot to have the inside of the case as free of clutter as possible, the time taken to properly route cables really pays off in the end.
It's usually made out of wood. Sawdust is still wood.
(Seriously though, you can buy plenty of solid wood furniture at IKEA if you're so inclined. Laminate and particle board stuff is labeled as such, so if you buy it thinking that it's solid wood, I'm inclined to say it's your own fault.)
Are you telling me that the $6, ~6.5lbs side table I just bought isn't solid wood? The nerve!
I don't know which CD version of the album you've heard, but the one I own sounds great, good dynamics, all of that richly layered signature Boston sound is intact. According to Allmusic.com, there have been 14 different CD releases of that album. I'm away on vacation at the moment, so I can't tell you which one I have.
Some of the best-sounding albums I own on CD were originally recorded on analog media. Like for instance Boston's first album, or basically anything produced by Alan Parsons back in the Pink Floyd and The Alan Parsons Project days. They sound great on LP, they sound great on CD, they sound great as FLAC files on my PC. The reasons is that the people doing the recording, mixing and mastering knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the benefits and drawbacks of the whichever medium they were targeting, and tweaked the mixes, levels and equalizing to suit.
You simply cannot just throw a spot-on mix made for LP on a CD and expect anything but a mediocre result, and vice versa. The basic reason for this is a vinyl is honestly pretty crappy. Low frequencies a noisy because of the RIAA equalization needed, high frequencies roll off around 12-15kHz at the most. And that's before you get into the massive problems with dust, scratches and wear and tear. Thus the mastering needs to work around these issues, and by the time the the CD was coming onto the market, LP mastering was pretty damn good, so people just threw those same masters directly to CD, with mediocre results because the medium was completely different. Some techs even forgot to apply RIAA equalization to their masters, leading to extremely tinny and weak-sounding CD releases, creating the idiotic audiophile myth that all CDs sound bad "because they're digital". Absolute bullshit, a CD will give back exactly what you put into it, every damn time.
Vice versa, some modern LP releases have been lazily created from straight made-for-CD mixes, without compensating for the drawbacks of vinyl. The end result is a shitty, often severely overdriven and distorted sound. Luckily, some modern vinyl releases are seriously great. Blackwater Park by Opeth sounds amazing on vinyl, and there is a definite charm to peeling an LP out of its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, giving it a quick wipe with the carbon fiber brush and carefully dropping the needle into the groove yourself. Another example is Californication by RHCP, where the CD sounds like absolut shit due to the techs turning everything to 11 like a pack of shit-flinging monkeys, but the LP sounds great because you simply cannot overdrive an LP like that without destroying everything, so they were forced to make a better mix.
For some albums, I listen exclusively to good FLAC rips of the vinyl edition, because of the massive difference in mastering quality. Sure, the noise floor is much higher and there is some definite high-frequency roll-off, but I much prefer that to the "everything louder than everything else" approach that a lot of CDs have been mastered to. I could burn one of those vinyl FLAC rips to a CD and play it back to you on my inexpensive CD player, and your would swear I was playing an LP. Why they couldn't just put those well-crafted mixes on CD in the first place, I have no idea.
So what you're saying is that if music is catchy, is easy to sing-a-long to or has a nice danceable rhythm, which in turn causes it to become popular, it is automatically crap?
Fairphone manages to do pretty well on specs for €325 per phone, with an initial production run of 25,000 phones, while using ethically-sourced minerals, recycled plastics, reasonable wages and working conditions and so on:
Admittedly there's no 4G, it hasn't actually shipped yet (they should start shipping out in December) and it's running Android, so the software development costs are lower. But building a decent phone at those sorts of prices is definitely possible, even for relatively small production runs. I'm waiting patiently for my Fairphone, but I'll definitely be following Jolla closely. From their press releases and general design ideas, it seems like they've managed to retain some of the brilliance that Nokia used to have.
And you think this person should be grateful for the meagre scraps they receive in return for their back-breaking labour, because they could have gotten nothing instead? Is "struggling to pay for food, let alone housing or clothes, every single day of the year" equal to "gainfully employed" in your mind?
Screw that, let's pay those people a decent wage and work decent hours by local standards instead. Stop exploiting them. Help them get on their feet and move forwards instead of keeping them stuck in squalid no-hope lives, just because we rich, fat, lazy westerners want the latest gadgets as cheaply as possible.
Luckily, enterprises such as Fairphone are trying to make a difference, by supporting better working conditions, using only ethically-sourced minerals and recycled plastics, and by being 100% open with cost breakdowns down to the last cent of exactly where the money you pay for your phone is going. A percentage of that money goes directly to improving working conditions for the miners and assembly workers, as well as locally establishing responsible recycling and e-waste management.
Google, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC etc. etc. can't match that, because they've grown fat and lazy and far too focused on their own greed.
Just disable automatic updates in the Play Store. That way, it will just notify you that updates are ready for some of your apps, letting you choose when to install them.
Absolutely, and I hate it so much. Try finding a tablet with a user-replaceable battery, it's nearly impossible. My Asus Transformer Infinity is still a pretty beefy tablet, with a great screen on it. Am I just supposed to throw it away when the battery dies, or send it to Asus so they can replace the battery for a ~$100 fee? When the time comes, I'll definitely try to replace it according to ifixit.com's guide, but it's still a major hassle.
Which is exactly why my next phone is going to be a Fairphone. Everything about it is designed to be as long-lived as possible. User-replaceable battery and the whole phone is made to be serviced by a savvy user with a standard micro screwdriver set. And it's made with conflict-free minerals by decently-paid workers, which is pretty cool too.
Then there is Denmark, but they are really too insignificant to even bother talking about.
Oh yeah, apart from magnetic storage (the wire recorder or "telegraphone", precursor to all magnetic storage media), the loudspeaker, the dry cell battery, the colostomy bag, LEGO, Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis (one of the most important brewer's yeasts in the world), disulfiram (antabus), the electric drum motor, the concept of an ombudsman, amusement parks (Bakken and Tivoli), Skype, Kazaa, C++, Femi-X (female viagra), the O-ring, the pH scale, the typewriter (called the "writing ball"), the endoscope and a ton of other stuff.
Oh yeah, and Maersk, the largest shipping company in the world.
It's a relatively short game, but it's full of wonderful things to discover, and the narrator is absolutely superb. Seriously, he's up there with GlaDOS for sheer quality and entertainment value.
Slashdot Mirror
They sound every bit the same as any other competent preamp or power amp.
I will concede that there may be a slight sonic difference in the performance of their DACs, but most likely one that is completely inaudible compared to something like a $30 FiiO D3.
24bit doesn't provide that. Or to put it another way, 16bit provides that exactly as well as 24bit does.
All 24bit buys your is more range between the quietest possible sound and the loudest possible sound that can be recorded, it doesn't add anything "between" the levels, if that's what you're seeking. In fact, there is nothing "lost between the levels" as some people claim, because the sound output is a mathematical recreation with pretty much infinite possible levels within the sample rate and dynamic range the format allows. http://xiph.org/video/vid2.sht... explains all this extremely well.
24bit (and 32bit float) only matter during the recording and mastering process, where you want as much headroom as possible to prevent clipped samples. Once everything is nice and properly mixed and mastered, even the most dynamic soundtracks and music fit easily within the 16bit.
I'd say the perfect format would be 48kHz/24bit. 48kHz to have plenty of room for a nice frequency cutoff, and 24-bit for music with a high dynamic range, like film scores and orchestral.
44.1kHz leaves plenty of room for a decent frequency cutoff, especially with modern active and digital low pass filters. However, I will concede that 48kHz is a "nicer" ratio and makes it easier to work together with pro audio, which always works in 48, 96, 192kHz instead of 44.1, 88.2, 176.4kHz. The CD should have been 48kHz from the beginning, like DAT, which the pros used back then.
And where would you ever need even the base 144dB dynamic range of 24bit audio for playback? Keep in mind that the threshold of pain is somewhere around 120dB, so a 24bit recording could potentially capture both the sound of a lightbulb humming and a gunshot that would literally tear your eardrum, in the same track. But you've never heard a lightbulb hum, because even the softest ambient noise drowns it out.
16bit audio has a base dynamic range of 96dB. This increases to over 110dB when using proper noise shaped dither. You really, honestly, truthfully will never need more than that for audio playback. Even extremely well-mastered orchestral music "only" has a dynamic range of 40-50dB.
Yeah well, there is a lot of crap in audiophilia but there is equally a lot of crap rejecting it blindly.
In theory a dirt cheap cd or blu ray player and an expensive one have very similar paper specifications for audio. That is what scientific measurements would tell you.
However if you listen on a good system the sound quality difference between the cheap and the expensive player is immediately obvious, without needing to be an audiophile maniac.
Similarly I compared a few D/A convertors, as I had a few sources with only optical out (such as an Apple TV, and a blu-ray player with only hdmi and optical) and an old but good analogue-only amp. Well, there was a subtle difference between the models up to say $800. I could always pick the same one which was a bit better than the other 2 I compared against. Not much difference but it was there.
The only reason you could pick between them was because you already knew which one was playing. Try a true double blind ABX test, you will be surprised at the results.
Here's an example: http://matrixhifi.com/ENG_ppec...
A high-class hifi system set up against a cheap Sony DVD player (boo!) and a Behringer amplifier (hiss!), using cheap-ass cables (the horror!), all placed on a rickety chair (madness!). And yet, even seasoned audiophiles were not able to hear a lick of difference.
Audiophilia is bullshit, pure and simple. If fidelity truly was the only goal, everyone would be using a set of Adam A7X or S1X monitors and a digital source. But audiophilia is a rich man's disease where the only objective is to outspend the other suckers.
Then we had CD's quality is better then tape, but not quite up to the record.
That is bullshit on a huge scale.
The CD can do everything that even a pristine record can do, and more. You can perfectly replicate the sound of a record using a CD, but you cannot perfectly replicate the sound of CD using a record. That makes CD the clearly superior format. CDs are cheaper to produce, more portable, do not degrade with repeated playback, can replicate any frequency from 0-22kHz with instant impulse response and more than enough dynamic range to reach from 0dB to the threshold of pain on the same track.
Records have only one advantage, and that is more space for artwork on the cover. On every single parameter apart from that, the record is an inferior and useless format. Just let it die, already.
Linn and Naim (... very good hifi producers)
More like "purveyors of bullshit". One of their shared key design parameters is "Pace, Rhythm and Timing" (abbreviated "PRaT") and they apply this to amplifiers, DACs, digital music storage etc. etc.
If you think your amplifier influences the "Pace, Rhythm and Timing" of your music, you need a straightjacket.
It will be us. Humanity will end itself in a final explosion of greed, short-sightedness and warmongering.
"ICE" can be ambiguous.
I have my mom and dad listed as "mom" and "dad", both with multiple phone numbers. I figure if anyone needs to call someone in case of an emergency, "mom" and "dad" are good choices. Of course, most phones these days are locked with a PIN or pattern code, so good luck actually getting to the contact list.
My dad has a bunch of cards for various tasks, including credit cards, fuel station cards, access cards for the various company locations he needs to access and so on. I think he has at least 15 different cards either on him or in his work vehicle at all times, and they all have unique PINs.
So, being a guy who's worked with electronics for nearly 40 years, he puts the PINs right on the cards, in the format of resistor color codes. For instance, 1234 becomes "BRREORYE". Perfectly indecipherable to anyone who isn't into electronics, and still indecipherable to most electronics people if they don't know the secret.
There isn't a good looking proportional font.
Dude, Helvetica.
The main reason I don't have a PC near the TV is if it has to have the grunt to play new 3D games (or even h264 when it came out) then it has to be relatively expensive and have plenty of cooling.
Manufacturers of SteamOS PCs claim to have solved the cost and cooling problems. This preview of iBuyPower's Steam Machine guesses a price on par with that of the Xbox One.
Cooling doesn't have to be noisy. To be fair, my dual-core 3.2GHz Phenom II, GTX460 isn't the latest and greatest, but the TDP is up there and requires a decent amount of cooling. According to the sound meter on my phone (which is probably inaccurate), the noise level is 2-3dBA above ambient noise, sitting at my desk right next to the PC. Hard drive search noise is subjectively the most apparent, and it's still very mild due to vibration-damped mounting and could be solved completely by either using quiet laptop drives or SSDs. Heck, I'm even using the stock AMD CPU cooler, which is surprisingly quiet when you let the motherboard control its speed.
I make do with a well-designed case and some very quiet fans running at reduced voltage. Antec make some really nice cases for quiet computing, with layered panels, vibration-damped hard drive mounting etc., and I've found that BeQuiet! makes some of the best quiet fans that still provide good airflow.
Building a quiet yet decently-powered computer is not hard, you just have to start with the right components, and the case+fans+PSU are the most important by far. The case needs to be steel, relatively heavy to dampen vibrations, have multi-layered panels and soft rubber feet. It also needs to have space for large fans, the bigger the better. 120mm or even 140mm are prefereable, since they can still deliver good airflow when running at 7v instead of 12v for reduced noise. It also matters a lot to have the inside of the case as free of clutter as possible, the time taken to properly route cables really pays off in the end.
It's usually made out of wood. Sawdust is still wood.
(Seriously though, you can buy plenty of solid wood furniture at IKEA if you're so inclined. Laminate and particle board stuff is labeled as such, so if you buy it thinking that it's solid wood, I'm inclined to say it's your own fault.)
Are you telling me that the $6, ~6.5lbs side table I just bought isn't solid wood? The nerve!
Riced up hipster case? It's black, rectangular and has no bling aside from the manufacturer's logo.
I think perhaps you have no fucking clue what "riced up" means.
I don't know which CD version of the album you've heard, but the one I own sounds great, good dynamics, all of that richly layered signature Boston sound is intact. According to Allmusic.com, there have been 14 different CD releases of that album. I'm away on vacation at the moment, so I can't tell you which one I have.
It's a lot more complex than that.
Some of the best-sounding albums I own on CD were originally recorded on analog media. Like for instance Boston's first album, or basically anything produced by Alan Parsons back in the Pink Floyd and The Alan Parsons Project days. They sound great on LP, they sound great on CD, they sound great as FLAC files on my PC. The reasons is that the people doing the recording, mixing and mastering knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the benefits and drawbacks of the whichever medium they were targeting, and tweaked the mixes, levels and equalizing to suit.
You simply cannot just throw a spot-on mix made for LP on a CD and expect anything but a mediocre result, and vice versa. The basic reason for this is a vinyl is honestly pretty crappy. Low frequencies a noisy because of the RIAA equalization needed, high frequencies roll off around 12-15kHz at the most. And that's before you get into the massive problems with dust, scratches and wear and tear. Thus the mastering needs to work around these issues, and by the time the the CD was coming onto the market, LP mastering was pretty damn good, so people just threw those same masters directly to CD, with mediocre results because the medium was completely different. Some techs even forgot to apply RIAA equalization to their masters, leading to extremely tinny and weak-sounding CD releases, creating the idiotic audiophile myth that all CDs sound bad "because they're digital". Absolute bullshit, a CD will give back exactly what you put into it, every damn time.
Vice versa, some modern LP releases have been lazily created from straight made-for-CD mixes, without compensating for the drawbacks of vinyl. The end result is a shitty, often severely overdriven and distorted sound. Luckily, some modern vinyl releases are seriously great. Blackwater Park by Opeth sounds amazing on vinyl, and there is a definite charm to peeling an LP out of its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, giving it a quick wipe with the carbon fiber brush and carefully dropping the needle into the groove yourself. Another example is Californication by RHCP, where the CD sounds like absolut shit due to the techs turning everything to 11 like a pack of shit-flinging monkeys, but the LP sounds great because you simply cannot overdrive an LP like that without destroying everything, so they were forced to make a better mix.
For some albums, I listen exclusively to good FLAC rips of the vinyl edition, because of the massive difference in mastering quality. Sure, the noise floor is much higher and there is some definite high-frequency roll-off, but I much prefer that to the "everything louder than everything else" approach that a lot of CDs have been mastered to. I could burn one of those vinyl FLAC rips to a CD and play it back to you on my inexpensive CD player, and your would swear I was playing an LP. Why they couldn't just put those well-crafted mixes on CD in the first place, I have no idea.
So what you're saying is that if music is catchy, is easy to sing-a-long to or has a nice danceable rhythm, which in turn causes it to become popular, it is automatically crap?
What a sad sad life you must lead.
I'm pretty certain that by "effective" they mean "something that is in effect", not "something that is very good at its function".
Fairphone manages to do pretty well on specs for €325 per phone, with an initial production run of 25,000 phones, while using ethically-sourced minerals, recycled plastics, reasonable wages and working conditions and so on:
http://buy-a-phone-start-a-movement.fairphone.com/en/specs/
Admittedly there's no 4G, it hasn't actually shipped yet (they should start shipping out in December) and it's running Android, so the software development costs are lower. But building a decent phone at those sorts of prices is definitely possible, even for relatively small production runs. I'm waiting patiently for my Fairphone, but I'll definitely be following Jolla closely. From their press releases and general design ideas, it seems like they've managed to retain some of the brilliance that Nokia used to have.
And you think this person should be grateful for the meagre scraps they receive in return for their back-breaking labour, because they could have gotten nothing instead? Is "struggling to pay for food, let alone housing or clothes, every single day of the year" equal to "gainfully employed" in your mind?
Screw that, let's pay those people a decent wage and work decent hours by local standards instead. Stop exploiting them. Help them get on their feet and move forwards instead of keeping them stuck in squalid no-hope lives, just because we rich, fat, lazy westerners want the latest gadgets as cheaply as possible.
Luckily, enterprises such as Fairphone are trying to make a difference, by supporting better working conditions, using only ethically-sourced minerals and recycled plastics, and by being 100% open with cost breakdowns down to the last cent of exactly where the money you pay for your phone is going. A percentage of that money goes directly to improving working conditions for the miners and assembly workers, as well as locally establishing responsible recycling and e-waste management.
Google, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC etc. etc. can't match that, because they've grown fat and lazy and far too focused on their own greed.
Just disable automatic updates in the Play Store. That way, it will just notify you that updates are ready for some of your apps, letting you choose when to install them.
Absolutely, and I hate it so much. Try finding a tablet with a user-replaceable battery, it's nearly impossible. My Asus Transformer Infinity is still a pretty beefy tablet, with a great screen on it. Am I just supposed to throw it away when the battery dies, or send it to Asus so they can replace the battery for a ~$100 fee? When the time comes, I'll definitely try to replace it according to ifixit.com's guide, but it's still a major hassle.
Which is exactly why my next phone is going to be a Fairphone. Everything about it is designed to be as long-lived as possible. User-replaceable battery and the whole phone is made to be serviced by a savvy user with a standard micro screwdriver set. And it's made with conflict-free minerals by decently-paid workers, which is pretty cool too.
Then there is Denmark, but they are really too insignificant to even bother talking about.
Oh yeah, apart from magnetic storage (the wire recorder or "telegraphone", precursor to all magnetic storage media), the loudspeaker, the dry cell battery, the colostomy bag, LEGO, Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis (one of the most important brewer's yeasts in the world), disulfiram (antabus), the electric drum motor, the concept of an ombudsman, amusement parks (Bakken and Tivoli), Skype, Kazaa, C++, Femi-X (female viagra), the O-ring, the pH scale, the typewriter (called the "writing ball"), the endoscope and a ton of other stuff.
Oh yeah, and Maersk, the largest shipping company in the world.
"Insignificant"? Not really.
No, he meant "fuel cell".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tank#Racing_fuel_cell
I'll second that notion.
The Stanley Parable is the closest thing to art I've ever witnessed in a computer game.
The Stanley Parable is quite good, as well.
It's a relatively short game, but it's full of wonderful things to discover, and the narrator is absolutely superb. Seriously, he's up there with GlaDOS for sheer quality and entertainment value.