Indeed, this test shows the SB X-Fi is rigorously perfect for sound output to human ears. The "A/D Converter Frequency Response" section shows that you should choose a different card if you want to use it as a ghetto oscilloscope.
Creative Labs has that reputation, and they were dicks in general but funnily I had some real "audiophile" sound with Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy 1 cards.
Creative drivers were shit and I was even once stranded - I needed to download a CD image from unofficial source to get sound under Windows, whereas finding and using the DOS driver took me minutes (!). But a russian guy made a great driver that always worked and is perfect if you only care about getting an output (so no EAX gaming shit) and even the latency is low I think. It's still here http://www.kxproject.com/ One weird property of Live/Audigy cards is the output for rear speakers has better DAC and signal path, rated at 107dB signal/noise. The driver swaps front and rear speaker output by default. Sound quality was really fscking perfect as far as any regular usage is concerned. Now I have a Xonar DX which is much better (116dB SNR) but it feels like just the same and my sound is worse because I'm using it in a smaller, worse room.
So, to get cheap ass audiophile sound, old Live! and Audigy 1 are or were great. I would buy them for a pittance. Killed a great many of them though, they're easy to kill when you put them in another PC (be very careful and always fasten the screw even if you're thinking of running it temporarily unscrewed while setting up your PC hardware)
The transition from ISA to PCI killed it. Even Sound Blaster 128 (a.k.a Ensoniq cards) didn't support OPL2/OPL3 modes, which peeved me. By the way the emulation from Dosbox is not ideal, be it quality or the high CPU use, but it does the job (the PC speaker emulation is worse lol)
Xonar DSX is an affordable card with that real time encoding you want/need (has DTS Interactive, not Dolby digital live but I suppose either will work). More than $30 and it has the DACs as well, but you won't find a sound card without DACs except maybe USB to S/PDIF adapters which won't have the feature.
Using analog cables isn't that dirty : it may look messy but that's all. Modern sound cards will easily be as good as your receiver, or even outmatch it. (while the DSX's DACs should be a fair bit worse, but likely good enough most times). In fairness, at that level the quality is so high that it doesn't matter anyone, everything sounds the same - if sounds volumes are adjusted to be the same - and a good DAC's job is to sound entirely neutral so you can't tell a good DAC from another one. Speakers and room accoustics (and the files, CD or game you're playing) is a ton more important.
I'm not aware of asymetric Ethernet standard, for instance. Fiber to the home is basically last mile Ethernet, and in some markets where residential ISP just sell DSL service without bothering to limit speeds (and where caps are unheard of) you are really able to get a symmetric connection. Other providers may artifically limit the connection to an asymmetrical one like 100/10, 100/30 or 100/50.
.. there's shit tons of fiber where I live, only it's under the streets but doesn't reach premises. No incentive or obligation to hook it up to cramped four-story 19th century buildings, where most of the flats are rented. Simply put no one will pay for doing whatever complicated digging and stuff to do in the building just so I can upgrade speed. And oh, you often have a succession of building less than five meter wide, in a one-way street.
Regular DSL speed is high. VDSL is perfectly useless : needs to be less than 1km away from the central. The DSL qualifies as "high bandwith" and is nice, only the upload speed is 1Mbps. That's frustrating and slow, but upgrading such connections is considered a low priority. Not enough flats in the building makes it low priority for fiber deployment as well. Whatever, I'd be happy with anything that increases the upload speed by 100x.
One little thing I wonder about.. will services/daemons eventually be as easy to disable, enable etc. as under Windows 2000/XP? It's a bit hilarious that almost fifteen years ago any kid could deal with that by mousing around but for me (user, perhaps basic sysadmin of debian/buntu systems) dealing with/etc/rc?.d and inetd / xinetd is very hard. I don't remember if I was even able to prevent a dhcpd from starting** and the day I needed something added there, I added some crap in one of the rc.d/ but it did nothing.
It's just like an instance of that overused webcomic where a guy boasts he can use 4096 CPU, but playing a flash video is too hard.
** you can always apt-get remove or apt-get install a deamon, and everything is dealt with to perfection in just a few seconds. wow! I can do the complex thing quickly, it's the simple thing that would take me a month to learn properly.
Hoping it goes through.. I can simply use Mint 17 Mate as an "LTS" but why not have a try at stuff from the other side of the fence, for once. And btw not only old 32bit PC still are working and usable.. with e.g. 3GB memory or even 4GB, using 32bit OS instead of 64bit OS can be slightly useful. Firefox is nerfed at 2GB instead of consuming all memory + swap.
It's now possible to get a 24" 1920x1200 for 200 euros - and that's an IPS one with low power use due to the LED lighting. The 60Hz refresh still sucks, but given that I have trouble understanding the "monitors were better in the 90s" crowd. I STILL use a CRT mind you (and need to get a better one. Had a great 80 pound, > 200 watt bastard but it sort of dropped dead from one day to the other)
Yes. I hyped myself about capacitors good enough to replace batteries, and graphene is good for that use. No idea if the substitute is any useful there.
Global warming is something of a "meta lie" then. See, you get just enough people saying it's a lie and it becomes "a number of people" and suddenly a critical mass of people are making or supporting the claim and the lie about it being a lie becomes "truth".
What about distributing three tablets per person (!) : one with schedule, one with RFI log, one with submittal log - and then handle the minutes and issues whichever way.
The tablets (hopefully thin and nice to handle) would actually be e-ink readers, or have high res monochrome LCD or just regular displays showing static mostly black and white content, but whatever let's ignore the technical aspects of the tablets. What matters is the content, and the tablets are "disposable" and meaningless - the people who distributed them will collect them back at the end anyway. When you're given the tablet, it's just programmed to show you the 150 page monster, certified to be up to date (just because there's a date, revision number, checksum etc. on the first page)
So : no distracting OS and icons and myriad stuff and uses on the tablets, no need to deal with networking and acquiring the document from whatever servers and systems and making sure it's the right version, everything works immediately for every one.
I will admit the idea is from a certain series with starships and captains, where they deal with their "tablets" without giving a damn about them. It's just a screen with data downloaded for reading only and they hand them to each other freely, as if they were a piece of paper or a CD-R. You could even quite litteraly "print" to the tablets. Print your huge reference document to a special "network printer" and you get a stack of 30 baked tablets for the attendants.
The reason is not technical as far as I know. I remember reading that Slashdot tried it a billion years ago, even - but I'm not sure about that. If you give every possible Unicode character available to anyone you get svatiskas, unwarranted impersonations by abusing nearly identical characters, and at the least Unicode goatse.
Thanks. Sure, if usual contraception means are still available that's somewhat good enough. Some "abortifacients" might prevent teen pregnancies still.
I mean, on this site people used to rant that in good old days every computer user was a programmer or at the very least had easy access to programming tools (by e.g. turning the computer on), such as Commodore 64 with all its PEEKs and POKEs (thick paper manual included), or how you would write an assembler from machine language when you didn't run out of bits, Hypercard on the Macintosh, the oft ridiculed Qbasic, and other examples.
Some of these were good, some of these sucked but at least noobs and unsupecting users could get some results, even if just toying around. If we get one new "default" coding platform, isn't that a good thing? (Google developed a similar thing, too) No, a python shell in every Ubuntu/Mint/Debian isn't the same, nor coding stdio.h applications in the console. You could as well say Windows comes with development tools because there's the Windows Scripting Host. Coding some web stuff in notepad is doable, but do you really want to do that? About the browser itself, it is too late. Back in the days of Firefox 3.0 and Chrome 1, the browser-as-a-platform was already there and the good old days of static HTML and.wmv or realplayer streaming were behind us. And I would hate to go back to FF 3.0 : it was slower and crashed more and leaked more, as amazing as that reads.
You gotta start from somewhere. In the 90s if you did not know bettter (and likely had no internet access) you ended up playing with QBASIC, old Visual Basic and such. And fuck, yes a "webapp" is confusing, what with needing to learn like five language to create simple crap (PHP [or other], Javascript, HTML, CSS and whatever, not to mention the kilometer long config file if you install Apache) Add paying for a server and a domain name.. that shit costs recurrent cash to pay by debit card or paypal? Fuck it. On the other hand a little "web" IDE that's either bundled or easily accessible from most PC I find myself on and that is just made for the purpose (rather than an Eclipse clone or than just a text editor), maybe that'll encourage some people who will be perfectly capable of writing simple and useful or funny stuff but didn't want to touch all that shit with a pole yet.
but the employee is shafted, even if he/she thinks the embryo has less value than a dog's life. And it's hardly the employer's business anyway, since the employer (usually) is not competent in medical issues and is not a health insurer.
Rather than employers playing God with their employees over life-and-death issues, if they're not satisfied with the insurance they buy for their employees why not have them hand out $20K for the employee to buy his/her own insurance. That's fairer. Employers shouldn't impose their immoral, decadent lifestyle choices on their employees (putting magical concepts aboce the value of an actual person's life)
I thought the problem of the 2010 ruling is that "constitutional right" give them unlimited propaganda power, i.e. there's in effect no ceiling on campaign contributions anymore and what's more the corporations are used to funnel unlimited anonymous political contributions.
So nothing stops a corporation from spending $400 million a year on nazi propaganda in order to overthrow the government, for instance (not that they'd want or need to do that, at least not in the US sigh..)
Bingo, the required account just makes me avoid it. I've never even thought of ownership issues till just now : so if you buy games on it, they'll be tied to your account and another user of the computer can't use them?, unless you share that hotmail/outlook/microsoft account which was meant for you to receive e-mail.. so you must make a sham one, but keep track of it and tell the other users to not use it in other contexts or lock it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, this test shows the SB X-Fi is rigorously perfect for sound output to human ears. The "A/D Converter Frequency Response" section shows that you should choose a different card if you want to use it as a ghetto oscilloscope.
Creative Labs has that reputation, and they were dicks in general but funnily I had some real "audiophile" sound with Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy 1 cards.
Creative drivers were shit and I was even once stranded - I needed to download a CD image from unofficial source to get sound under Windows, whereas finding and using the DOS driver took me minutes (!). But a russian guy made a great driver that always worked and is perfect if you only care about getting an output (so no EAX gaming shit) and even the latency is low I think. It's still here http://www.kxproject.com/
One weird property of Live/Audigy cards is the output for rear speakers has better DAC and signal path, rated at 107dB signal/noise. The driver swaps front and rear speaker output by default. Sound quality was really fscking perfect as far as any regular usage is concerned. Now I have a Xonar DX which is much better (116dB SNR) but it feels like just the same and my sound is worse because I'm using it in a smaller, worse room.
So, to get cheap ass audiophile sound, old Live! and Audigy 1 are or were great. I would buy them for a pittance. Killed a great many of them though, they're easy to kill when you put them in another PC (be very careful and always fasten the screw even if you're thinking of running it temporarily unscrewed while setting up your PC hardware)
The transition from ISA to PCI killed it. Even Sound Blaster 128 (a.k.a Ensoniq cards) didn't support OPL2/OPL3 modes, which peeved me.
By the way the emulation from Dosbox is not ideal, be it quality or the high CPU use, but it does the job (the PC speaker emulation is worse lol)
Xonar DSX is an affordable card with that real time encoding you want/need (has DTS Interactive, not Dolby digital live but I suppose either will work). More than $30 and it has the DACs as well, but you won't find a sound card without DACs except maybe USB to S/PDIF adapters which won't have the feature.
Using analog cables isn't that dirty : it may look messy but that's all. Modern sound cards will easily be as good as your receiver, or even outmatch it. (while the DSX's DACs should be a fair bit worse, but likely good enough most times). In fairness, at that level the quality is so high that it doesn't matter anyone, everything sounds the same - if sounds volumes are adjusted to be the same - and a good DAC's job is to sound entirely neutral so you can't tell a good DAC from another one. Speakers and room accoustics (and the files, CD or game you're playing) is a ton more important.
Oh right, it's the Celeron J1900 (sold on standalone ITX boards) that was quad core.
What's more Virtualbox is made by the same vendor that makes Solaris and using it is a piece of cake..
Its page implicitly but strongly says it's for people who register as a CUDA developer.
The one with quad core 22nm Atom (named Celeron N2820 or N2830) should be great and is cheap and low power. Dangerously cheap too!
Probably higher perf/watt than cell phone and tablet ARM.
I'm not aware of asymetric Ethernet standard, for instance. Fiber to the home is basically last mile Ethernet, and in some markets where residential ISP just sell DSL service without bothering to limit speeds (and where caps are unheard of) you are really able to get a symmetric connection. Other providers may artifically limit the connection to an asymmetrical one like 100/10, 100/30 or 100/50.
.. there's shit tons of fiber where I live, only it's under the streets but doesn't reach premises. No incentive or obligation to hook it up to cramped four-story 19th century buildings, where most of the flats are rented.
Simply put no one will pay for doing whatever complicated digging and stuff to do in the building just so I can upgrade speed. And oh, you often have a succession of building less than five meter wide, in a one-way street.
Regular DSL speed is high. VDSL is perfectly useless : needs to be less than 1km away from the central.
The DSL qualifies as "high bandwith" and is nice, only the upload speed is 1Mbps. That's frustrating and slow, but upgrading such connections is considered a low priority. Not enough flats in the building makes it low priority for fiber deployment as well.
Whatever, I'd be happy with anything that increases the upload speed by 100x.
That makes Android java apps non native on their own platform.
I think a 16:10 display is sweet for video. More surface for 4:3 content and still very good for 1.85 content.
One little thing I wonder about.. will services/daemons eventually be as easy to disable, enable etc. as under Windows 2000/XP? It's a bit hilarious that almost fifteen years ago any kid could deal with that by mousing around but for me (user, perhaps basic sysadmin of debian/buntu systems) dealing with /etc/rc?.d and inetd / xinetd is very hard. I don't remember if I was even able to prevent a dhcpd from starting** and the day I needed something added there, I added some crap in one of the rc.d/ but it did nothing.
It's just like an instance of that overused webcomic where a guy boasts he can use 4096 CPU, but playing a flash video is too hard.
** you can always apt-get remove or apt-get install a deamon, and everything is dealt with to perfection in just a few seconds. wow! I can do the complex thing quickly, it's the simple thing that would take me a month to learn properly.
Hoping it goes through.. I can simply use Mint 17 Mate as an "LTS" but why not have a try at stuff from the other side of the fence, for once. And btw not only old 32bit PC still are working and usable.. with e.g. 3GB memory or even 4GB, using 32bit OS instead of 64bit OS can be slightly useful. Firefox is nerfed at 2GB instead of consuming all memory + swap.
It's now possible to get a 24" 1920x1200 for 200 euros - and that's an IPS one with low power use due to the LED lighting. The 60Hz refresh still sucks, but given that I have trouble understanding the "monitors were better in the 90s" crowd. I STILL use a CRT mind you (and need to get a better one. Had a great 80 pound, > 200 watt bastard but it sort of dropped dead from one day to the other)
Yes. I hyped myself about capacitors good enough to replace batteries, and graphene is good for that use. No idea if the substitute is any useful there.
Global warming is something of a "meta lie" then. See, you get just enough people saying it's a lie and it becomes "a number of people" and suddenly a critical mass of people are making or supporting the claim and the lie about it being a lie becomes "truth".
What about distributing three tablets per person (!) : one with schedule, one with RFI log, one with submittal log - and then handle the minutes and issues whichever way.
The tablets (hopefully thin and nice to handle) would actually be e-ink readers, or have high res monochrome LCD or just regular displays showing static mostly black and white content, but whatever let's ignore the technical aspects of the tablets. What matters is the content, and the tablets are "disposable" and meaningless - the people who distributed them will collect them back at the end anyway. When you're given the tablet, it's just programmed to show you the 150 page monster, certified to be up to date (just because there's a date, revision number, checksum etc. on the first page)
So : no distracting OS and icons and myriad stuff and uses on the tablets, no need to deal with networking and acquiring the document from whatever servers and systems and making sure it's the right version, everything works immediately for every one.
I will admit the idea is from a certain series with starships and captains, where they deal with their "tablets" without giving a damn about them. It's just a screen with data downloaded for reading only and they hand them to each other freely, as if they were a piece of paper or a CD-R.
You could even quite litteraly "print" to the tablets. Print your huge reference document to a special "network printer" and you get a stack of 30 baked tablets for the attendants.
The reason is not technical as far as I know.
I remember reading that Slashdot tried it a billion years ago, even - but I'm not sure about that.
If you give every possible Unicode character available to anyone you get svatiskas, unwarranted impersonations by abusing nearly identical characters, and at the least Unicode goatse.
Thanks.
Sure, if usual contraception means are still available that's somewhat good enough.
Some "abortifacients" might prevent teen pregnancies still.
I mean, on this site people used to rant that in good old days every computer user was a programmer or at the very least had easy access to programming tools (by e.g. turning the computer on), such as Commodore 64 with all its PEEKs and POKEs (thick paper manual included), or how you would write an assembler from machine language when you didn't run out of bits, Hypercard on the Macintosh, the oft ridiculed Qbasic, and other examples.
Some of these were good, some of these sucked but at least noobs and unsupecting users could get some results, even if just toying around. .wmv or realplayer streaming were behind us. And I would hate to go back to FF 3.0 : it was slower and crashed more and leaked more, as amazing as that reads.
If we get one new "default" coding platform, isn't that a good thing? (Google developed a similar thing, too)
No, a python shell in every Ubuntu/Mint/Debian isn't the same, nor coding stdio.h applications in the console. You could as well say Windows comes with development tools because there's the Windows Scripting Host.
Coding some web stuff in notepad is doable, but do you really want to do that?
About the browser itself, it is too late. Back in the days of Firefox 3.0 and Chrome 1, the browser-as-a-platform was already there and the good old days of static HTML and
You gotta start from somewhere. In the 90s if you did not know bettter (and likely had no internet access) you ended up playing with QBASIC, old Visual Basic and such. And fuck, yes a "webapp" is confusing, what with needing to learn like five language to create simple crap (PHP [or other], Javascript, HTML, CSS and whatever, not to mention the kilometer long config file if you install Apache)
Add paying for a server and a domain name.. that shit costs recurrent cash to pay by debit card or paypal? Fuck it.
On the other hand a little "web" IDE that's either bundled or easily accessible from most PC I find myself on and that is just made for the purpose (rather than an Eclipse clone or than just a text editor), maybe that'll encourage some people who will be perfectly capable of writing simple and useful or funny stuff but didn't want to touch all that shit with a pole yet.
but the employee is shafted, even if he/she thinks the embryo has less value than a dog's life.
And it's hardly the employer's business anyway, since the employer (usually) is not competent in medical issues and is not a health insurer.
Rather than employers playing God with their employees over life-and-death issues, if they're not satisfied with the insurance they buy for their employees why not have them hand out $20K for the employee to buy his/her own insurance. That's fairer.
Employers shouldn't impose their immoral, decadent lifestyle choices on their employees (putting magical concepts aboce the value of an actual person's life)
I thought the problem of the 2010 ruling is that "constitutional right" give them unlimited propaganda power, i.e. there's in effect no ceiling on campaign contributions anymore and what's more the corporations are used to funnel unlimited anonymous political contributions.
So nothing stops a corporation from spending $400 million a year on nazi propaganda in order to overthrow the government, for instance (not that they'd want or need to do that, at least not in the US sigh..)
Bingo, the required account just makes me avoid it. I've never even thought of ownership issues till just now : so if you buy games on it, they'll be tied to your account and another user of the computer can't use them?, unless you share that hotmail/outlook/microsoft account which was meant for you to receive e-mail.. so you must make a sham one, but keep track of it and tell the other users to not use it in other contexts or lock it.