Last year, I went through Four Corners - for those of you not up on your US geography, Four Corners is the point at which Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah all meet, being the only place in the US where 4 states meet.
I was struck by the arbitrariness of this location - it was nothing but a meeting of fictional lines on a map. There was no magical property of this location - c was still 3E8 m/sec (to 1 significant digit), 9.8 m/sec^2 acceleration, no majestic peaks, poles, or pyramids rising from the ground. Save for a decision made by a bunch of beaurcrats there was nothing special about this location.
This article strikes me the same way. Due to a complete non-event (the changing of a line on a map), people's lives are going through upheaval.
So we are able to more accurately define these imaginary lines. Why do we need to change the location of the border - why not just more accurately define existing practice. Look at a map of Kansas - the state USED to be a simple rectangle, until somebody decided to use the river to define the northeast corner. Now we have the silliness of "Kansas City, Mo!"
How do you verify that I have indeed clicked-through the wrapper? I've oft seen people on/. saying "I didn't get the click-through because (insert complicated avoidance proceedure here) so it doesn't apply to me." What if I have a child click through?
In short, how do you have a legally binding contract in the absence of a bidirectional communication that "... the party of the first part, being legally able to enter into a contract and freely entering into the contract, and the party of the second part, being legally able..." zzzzzzzz-snork! (Sorry, nodded off there...)
I question whether click-wrap really improves the strength of the contract or not. I'd like to hear from a professional on this matter, however (Dr. Hawk? You reading this?)
...due to their misleading Sims compatibility claims....
Rob, would you please clarify and expand upon that statement? To me, it seems just a bit inflammatory to make a statement like that without some backup as to why you feel that way.
That's not changing the IMEI, that's changing the MIN (mobile identifier number). The IMEI is the phone's serial number, the MIN is the number you dial.
I know these things, because I HAVE just such a shielded room and private cell network where I work.
Likening sharing of bandwidth to either sharing of cable TV or to sharing of electricity is inaccurate.
Consider sharing Cable TV. Once the wire hits my house, it is easy for me to share with my neighbor - I simply put a distribution amp in the line, and he now has signal. There is no additional drain on the cable TV's resources and no (technological) way the cable company can restrict this. As a result, my neighbor has no reason to buy cable, and I have just cost the cable company a customer. In the limit, the cable company has one customer who shares with the rest of the town, and the cable company goes broke.
Now, sharing electricity. The electric company charges by the kW/hr, and aside from a relatively small non-usage related service fee the more joules I use the more I pay. If I run a line over to my neighbor, the electric company WILL make more money since my bill goes up. Thus, from a purely profit driven standpoint they lose nothing by this.
Now, consider Internet connectivity. Few ISPs really charge you based on usage - I have a 384kbps DSL connection, but my ISP probably doesn't plan on me using 100% of that all the time. As such, if I give extra capacity to my neighbor, my neighbor loses any incentive to purchase a connection of his own, and the ISP loses money. Additionally, unlike cable TV, I am increasing the load on my ISP, so the arguement "But I'm not HURTING anybody" really doesn't wash - I am sucking down more bandwidth and loading their system down. But unlike the electric company, it is harder for the ISP to charge on a resources-used basis.
Now, some ISPs actually DO plan on you using 100% of your allotted bandwidth - this is usually the case for business-grade SLAs like those on T-1 type connections. In such a case, you are back to the idea of "You bought it, it's yours" - share all you want, we make money no matter what. In such cases, the ISP is not likely to care about sharing.
In the normal case, however, the ISP is very much going to care, and sharing will be forbidden.
Then, you have the weird cases where the ISP actively promotes wireless sharing because they sell that service too.
OK, while I agree with the CONTENT of the article, the way it was written was just a bit biased. I get very nervous when folks start throwing around words like "infofascism" - while it may sound good, and it may have a grain of truth, it is a word designed to appeal to the emotions, not to truth - a word designed to push emotional buttons and short-circuit rational thought.
An otherwised unbiased and uninformed person will be inflamed by the article, one way or the other. But I fear that most people have a contrarian streak in them, and that most people's gut reaction to this article will be to dismiss it, since it is so blatently biased.
First of all, I trust any website that displays the TRUSTe logo approximately as far as I can urinate into a strong Kansas wind - all TRUSTe says is "we have a policy", that policy might be "We sell your address to everybody with five cents" and you can still get a TRUSTe logo. Additionally, TRUSTe is unwilling to revoke a logo once given, so it is essentially meaningless.
Second, the stated goal of the NYT registration is to garner better demographics for their advertising - in other words, by looking at the data they have on me, they try to ram the ads down my throat that have the highest chance of making buy something - something I in all probability wasn't planning on buying. I dislike such things - why should I support them?
Again, I don't wish to tell others how to go about their lives - but I choose to neither help nor hinder this sort of "targeted advertising", and I'd like to be able to configure/. to reflect my desires.
1) Slashdot won't sell my e-mail address. NYT will. 2) Being a registered/. user provides me with significant benefits (increased posting level, accumulation of karma, a journal area, friend/foe tracking) above and beyond simple access. Obviously, you can read everything on/. as an AC, unlike NYT.
I agree that there are other sites that prevent any access to their content without registration - and ideally they would ALL be grouped under the same preference item.
I'm not lazy at all. I simply have no desire to support the idiotic practice of web publishers trying to mine my information in return for content. If the content is truly free, then it is free. If the cost of the content is "We sell your contact info, and you get the unholy excrement spammed out of your email account", then the price is too high - I refuse to pay. And since I also prefer not to lie, I choose not to enter garbage, but rather simply not go to the site.
And unlike the many folks who will bitch every time a NYT story is submitted, I simply asked for the ability to make my own choice about whether I would see such stories. I don't ask that others be prevented from seeing them - I don't berate the story poster for linking to NYT. I simply ask that the same sort of choice that I can make for Katz, MS or YRO stories be extended to NYT registration required stories.
And I think the moderation history on my previous comment is itself hilarious. While I can whole-heartedly support the "Off-topic" mods, the Redundant moderation is quite amusing - were there any other posts expressing my sentiment? And the less said about those metamoderations posing as moderations (overrated and underrated) the better.
I would like to ask if it would be possible to have a preference option that says "No stories with a New York Times link" in them - I refuse to register, I refuse to play games to work around registering, and therefor any/. story where the bulk of the information is on a NYT-hosted page is useless to me, unless/until somebody posts the article contents. And since I'd like not to encourage karma-whoring and copyright violation, I'd sooner just remove such stories.
Correct - what I was alluding to was being able to hear the original ultrasound before the mixing, so as to better locate the speakers.
And I'm not sure if the bat boxes do a single-sideband on the signal - I think they just do a straight mix of a bandwidth limited input - the mike responds to 20kHz->40 kHz, and then you mix with 20 kHz, yeilding 0->20 kHz and 40->60 kHz. Who cares about the high-side signals?
You got a few things right, but a few things wrong.
First, beat frequencies are quite real - there is no "tricking" your brain into hearing something that isn't there - the signal is there.
Specifically, whenever you feed 2 signals f1 and f2 into a system with any non-linearities, you will get four frequencies out - the original f1 and f2, and two new frequencies (f2-f1) and (f1+f2). So, if I feed 51kHz and 50 kHz into a system, you will get 1 kHz, 50 kHz, 51 kHz, and 101 kHz. This is the same principle that all modern radio receivers work on - it is called heterodyning, and a modern radio is a superheterodyne receiver.
Now, in terms of propagation, low frequency sound does better than high frequencies - hence why thunder goes "CRACK" when it is close and "rummmblee" when it is far away - all the high frequencies have been attenuated by the air. Also, this is one of the reasons why all you hear of the assholes with the ThunderThump 3000 car stereos is the low frequencies - what little high frequencies they produce are attenuated by the car's body and the distance.
However, to get any directionality from a sound transducer, it must be large with respect to the sound frequency. The problem is that the bulk of the frequencies humans hear have very long wavelengths - it is possible to make a directional beam of 20 Hz sound, but you would need a speaker system the size of a football field. Somewhat impractical if you want them all over the place, pumping out your "BUY ME NOW" message.
However, by translating the frequencies up to 50 kHz, you reduce the wavelengths down to the point where the speaker needn't be much larger than a paperback to get the directional gain you want. So, you upconvert the signals to ultrasonic frequencies, and you use the fact that just hitting a surface acts as a nonlinear mixing element.
However, I have always wondered how much of the signal is going into the (f2-f1) component, and how much of the power is in the other three frequencies you cannot hear? What kind of damage will this energy do over the long run?
Not to mention that, with the steady erosion of the respect of the right of people to be left alone, how will this be abused? Will we see "reality TV" shows freaking people out? (say, by beaming "LOOK OUT! HE'S GOT A GUN" to one person in a crowd). Let alone the targeted advertisments ("Hey lard butt! Yeah, YOU. Get your fat ass into Fred's Gym, across the street. NOW!")
Personally, if this sort of thing gets deployed in public places, I want to start carrying one of the boxes you used to downmix bat echolocation down to audible, locate the speakers, and use my Leatherman on them... Or my Browning...
I must respectfully disagree with you - this guy needs to get these guys fired NOW, while at the same time explaining to his bosses that the schedule IS going to suffer in the short run.
I had exactly this situation myself - I had a programmer who was totally incompetent. Unfortunately, his job title put him squarely in my critical path. I had MANY discussions with management about this, and every time it boiled down to "well, something is better than nothing, isn't it?"
Wrong.
We downsized, and he went. Now, I have a competent person filling the role. Guess what? We are having to rip out all the code the moron did, and re-write it. Because we were paying the moron's salary, we couldn't hire a good programmer to replace him. Because we wouldn't admit he wasn't up to snuff, we didn't schedule correctly. Because he didn't identify flaws in purchased code, now we have to live with them, because the service contract has lapsed.
Joshamania is correct in that firing these people will slip your schedule, and that hiring new guys will slip your schedule. However, your schedule is going to slip, period - take a deep breath and get over it now. You can take a single slippage, or you can continue to hemmorage time through these bleeding assholes (now there's a vivid image, if I do say so myself!).
Suck it up, fire the guys who cannot/will not get the job done, and get people who can. You cannot afford to pay someone who isn't pulling their weight.
Re:Shuttlecom have a fascination with Javascript
on
Shuttle SS51 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2
I'd thought about the SPDIF hacks on the AWE64 (why the designers felt the wavetable deserved digital and the PCM didn't is beyond me...), but for some of the things I do, I want the device to act just like/dev/dsp...
I guess when I rebuild the server next, I'll have to try to use a system that has built-in digital audio out... My server currently has three NICs, a SCSI, a second IDE card, and is FULL!
No, they will name themselves the Artificial Intelligences of America Association, or AIAA. Then they will either begin suing all of us meat, or suing the [MP|RI]AA....
Don't give out somebody's (email|phone/pager number|address) without their EXPRESS permission.
If you think George needs my email address, then YOU ask GEORGE for his address and (with George's permission) mail me, asking me to please send George my address. Same thing with phone numbers - get George's number & permission, then phone me!
Just think what would happen if people followed this simple rule:
1) Companies would no longer sell your email to spammers - instead, if Company A thought you might want to hear from Company B, they would send you a mail asking you to contact B if you wanted to. 2) No junk like 123Greetings. 3) No telemarketers.
Of course, this is little more than a specialization of the Golden Rule, and look how many people follow that....
Yeah, make LOTS of friends in the sysadmin community - post their email address to a spam address harvester like 123Greeting, and make sure they get as much spam as possible! After all, what better way to show you admin you care than by causing his mail queue to fill up with crap so he cannot see the important stuff.
Any lusr on one of my systems that did this would find his entire account sent to/dev/null, his chair wired to the 440V plant feed, his car's gas tank full of polystyrene, and graffitti with his home phone number scrawled on the bathrooms of the local bars.
Then I would get mean....
Re:Shuttlecom have a fascination with Javascript
on
Shuttle SS51 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2
Acutally, I have looked long and hard for what I want:
The Radio Shack solution isn't - I want to be able to switch under electronic control, not manual. If I have to run downstairs to the server room every time I want to change from video to MP3 I could just as easily pull cables by hand.
The MidiMan CO-2 looks interesting, but I still would have to get SPDIF out on my sound server, which is currently running a SB64. If I have to buy a new card, I can buy one that has co-ax SPDIF on it, so the MidiMan doesn't solve my problem.
The Audio Alchemy seems to run about $100 - once again, rather pricy considering the BOM in such a unit. Having quality DACs does drive the price up, but that is why I'd rather have a unit that just had digital output - it should be cheaper.
The Edirol is also too expensive (see previous paragraph, as well as previous post in this thread).
So far, I've not found anything that fits my needs. What is maddening to me is that a device that fits my needs needn't be expensive - a single chip solution is easily achievable. However, I guess there is just not the market to drive the development of such a device.
Thanks for the leads, though - they were at least worth checking out.
Re:Shuttlecom have a fascination with Javascript
on
Shuttle SS51 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2
Let's see - pay $110 for a device that is basically nothing more than a single-chip USB interface and a couple of optical drivers?
That's my problem - I have a pretty good idea what the Bill Of Materials on something like this is, and the price is just too steep.
I realize they aren't getting the volumes that, say, a joystick might get, but COME ON!
Slashdot Mirror
Given your sig, be careful not to move too far north.... ;)
I bemoan the fact that fools have caused a good city to be divided for no reason.
I bemoan the fact that the bulk of Kansas City is not in Kansas.
But the actual CITY I like.
No, I use a more visible landmark, like Meteor Crator.
Last year, I went through Four Corners - for those of you not up on your US geography, Four Corners is the point at which Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah all meet, being the only place in the US where 4 states meet.
I was struck by the arbitrariness of this location - it was nothing but a meeting of fictional lines on a map. There was no magical property of this location - c was still 3E8 m/sec (to 1 significant digit), 9.8 m/sec^2 acceleration, no majestic peaks, poles, or pyramids rising from the ground. Save for a decision made by a bunch of beaurcrats there was nothing special about this location.
This article strikes me the same way. Due to a complete non-event (the changing of a line on a map), people's lives are going through upheaval.
So we are able to more accurately define these imaginary lines. Why do we need to change the location of the border - why not just more accurately define existing practice. Look at a map of Kansas - the state USED to be a simple rectangle, until somebody decided to use the river to define the northeast corner. Now we have the silliness of "Kansas City, Mo!"
It just seems so wasteful!
I'm suspicious of this, and here's why:
/. saying "I didn't get the click-through because (insert complicated avoidance proceedure here) so it doesn't apply to me." What if I have a child click through?
How do you verify that I have indeed clicked-through the wrapper? I've oft seen people on
In short, how do you have a legally binding contract in the absence of a bidirectional communication that "... the party of the first part, being legally able to enter into a contract and freely entering into the contract, and the party of the second part, being legally able..." zzzzzzzz-snork! (Sorry, nodded off there...)
I question whether click-wrap really improves the strength of the contract or not. I'd like to hear from a professional on this matter, however (Dr. Hawk? You reading this?)
"We want to to scale back their power, and give it all to US "!
That's not changing the IMEI, that's changing the MIN (mobile identifier number). The IMEI is the phone's serial number, the MIN is the number you dial.
I know these things, because I HAVE just such a shielded room and private cell network where I work.
Likening sharing of bandwidth to either sharing of cable TV or to sharing of electricity is inaccurate.
Consider sharing Cable TV. Once the wire hits my house, it is easy for me to share with my neighbor - I simply put a distribution amp in the line, and he now has signal. There is no additional drain on the cable TV's resources and no (technological) way the cable company can restrict this. As a result, my neighbor has no reason to buy cable, and I have just cost the cable company a customer. In the limit, the cable company has one customer who shares with the rest of the town, and the cable company goes broke.
Now, sharing electricity. The electric company charges by the kW/hr, and aside from a relatively small non-usage related service fee the more joules I use the more I pay. If I run a line over to my neighbor, the electric company WILL make more money since my bill goes up. Thus, from a purely profit driven standpoint they lose nothing by this.
Now, consider Internet connectivity. Few ISPs really charge you based on usage - I have a 384kbps DSL connection, but my ISP probably doesn't plan on me using 100% of that all the time. As such, if I give extra capacity to my neighbor, my neighbor loses any incentive to purchase a connection of his own, and the ISP loses money. Additionally, unlike cable TV, I am increasing the load on my ISP, so the arguement "But I'm not HURTING anybody" really doesn't wash - I am sucking down more bandwidth and loading their system down. But unlike the electric company, it is harder for the ISP to charge on a resources-used basis.
Now, some ISPs actually DO plan on you using 100% of your allotted bandwidth - this is usually the case for business-grade SLAs like those on T-1 type connections. In such a case, you are back to the idea of "You bought it, it's yours" - share all you want, we make money no matter what. In such cases, the ISP is not likely to care about sharing.
In the normal case, however, the ISP is very much going to care, and sharing will be forbidden.
Then, you have the weird cases where the ISP actively promotes wireless sharing because they sell that service too.
OK, while I agree with the CONTENT of the article, the way it was written was just a bit biased. I get very nervous when folks start throwing around words like "infofascism" - while it may sound good, and it may have a grain of truth, it is a word designed to appeal to the emotions, not to truth - a word designed to push emotional buttons and short-circuit rational thought.
An otherwised unbiased and uninformed person will be inflamed by the article, one way or the other. But I fear that most people have a contrarian streak in them, and that most people's gut reaction to this article will be to dismiss it, since it is so blatently biased.
First of all, I trust any website that displays the TRUSTe logo approximately as far as I can urinate into a strong Kansas wind - all TRUSTe says is "we have a policy", that policy might be "We sell your address to everybody with five cents" and you can still get a TRUSTe logo. Additionally, TRUSTe is unwilling to revoke a logo once given, so it is essentially meaningless.
/. to reflect my desires.
Second, the stated goal of the NYT registration is to garner better demographics for their advertising - in other words, by looking at the data they have on me, they try to ram the ads down my throat that have the highest chance of making buy something - something I in all probability wasn't planning on buying. I dislike such things - why should I support them?
Again, I don't wish to tell others how to go about their lives - but I choose to neither help nor hinder this sort of "targeted advertising", and I'd like to be able to configure
What part of "prefer not to lie" did you not understand?
True, but:
/. user provides me with significant benefits (increased posting level, accumulation of karma, a journal area, friend/foe tracking) above and beyond simple access. Obviously, you can read everything on /. as an AC, unlike NYT.
1) Slashdot won't sell my e-mail address. NYT will.
2) Being a registered
I agree that there are other sites that prevent any access to their content without registration - and ideally they would ALL be grouped under the same preference item.
I'm not lazy at all. I simply have no desire to support the idiotic practice of web publishers trying to mine my information in return for content. If the content is truly free, then it is free. If the cost of the content is "We sell your contact info, and you get the unholy excrement spammed out of your email account", then the price is too high - I refuse to pay. And since I also prefer not to lie, I choose not to enter garbage, but rather simply not go to the site.
And unlike the many folks who will bitch every time a NYT story is submitted, I simply asked for the ability to make my own choice about whether I would see such stories. I don't ask that others be prevented from seeing them - I don't berate the story poster for linking to NYT. I simply ask that the same sort of choice that I can make for Katz, MS or YRO stories be extended to NYT registration required stories.
And I think the moderation history on my previous comment is itself hilarious. While I can whole-heartedly support the "Off-topic" mods, the Redundant moderation is quite amusing - were there any other posts expressing my sentiment? And the less said about those metamoderations posing as moderations (overrated and underrated) the better.
I would like to ask if it would be possible to have a preference option that says "No stories with a New York Times link" in them - I refuse to register, I refuse to play games to work around registering, and therefor any /. story where the bulk of the information is on a NYT-hosted page is useless to me, unless/until somebody posts the article contents. And since I'd like not to encourage karma-whoring and copyright violation, I'd sooner just remove such stories.
(but not from Bill's humidor...)
Correct - what I was alluding to was being able to hear the original ultrasound before the mixing, so as to better locate the speakers.
And I'm not sure if the bat boxes do a single-sideband on the signal - I think they just do a straight mix of a bandwidth limited input - the mike responds to 20kHz->40 kHz, and then you mix with 20 kHz, yeilding 0->20 kHz and 40->60 kHz. Who cares about the high-side signals?
You got a few things right, but a few things wrong.
First, beat frequencies are quite real - there is no "tricking" your brain into hearing something that isn't there - the signal is there.
Specifically, whenever you feed 2 signals f1 and f2 into a system with any non-linearities, you will get four frequencies out - the original f1 and f2, and two new frequencies (f2-f1) and (f1+f2). So, if I feed 51kHz and 50 kHz into a system, you will get 1 kHz, 50 kHz, 51 kHz, and 101 kHz. This is the same principle that all modern radio receivers work on - it is called heterodyning, and a modern radio is a superheterodyne receiver.
Now, in terms of propagation, low frequency sound does better than high frequencies - hence why thunder goes "CRACK" when it is close and "rummmblee" when it is far away - all the high frequencies have been attenuated by the air. Also, this is one of the reasons why all you hear of the assholes with the ThunderThump 3000 car stereos is the low frequencies - what little high frequencies they produce are attenuated by the car's body and the distance.
However, to get any directionality from a sound transducer, it must be large with respect to the sound frequency. The problem is that the bulk of the frequencies humans hear have very long wavelengths - it is possible to make a directional beam of 20 Hz sound, but you would need a speaker system the size of a football field. Somewhat impractical if you want them all over the place, pumping out your "BUY ME NOW" message.
However, by translating the frequencies up to 50 kHz, you reduce the wavelengths down to the point where the speaker needn't be much larger than a paperback to get the directional gain you want. So, you upconvert the signals to ultrasonic frequencies, and you use the fact that just hitting a surface acts as a nonlinear mixing element.
However, I have always wondered how much of the signal is going into the (f2-f1) component, and how much of the power is in the other three frequencies you cannot hear? What kind of damage will this energy do over the long run?
Not to mention that, with the steady erosion of the respect of the right of people to be left alone, how will this be abused? Will we see "reality TV" shows freaking people out? (say, by beaming "LOOK OUT! HE'S GOT A GUN" to one person in a crowd). Let alone the targeted advertisments ("Hey lard butt! Yeah, YOU. Get your fat ass into Fred's Gym, across the street. NOW!")
Personally, if this sort of thing gets deployed in public places, I want to start carrying one of the boxes you used to downmix bat echolocation down to audible, locate the speakers, and use my Leatherman on them... Or my Browning...
How about using a hash of the IP's of the Code Red hits your server takes? (he says with tougue firmly in cheek)...
I must respectfully disagree with you - this guy needs to get these guys fired NOW, while at the same time explaining to his bosses that the schedule IS going to suffer in the short run.
I had exactly this situation myself - I had a programmer who was totally incompetent. Unfortunately, his job title put him squarely in my critical path. I had MANY discussions with management about this, and every time it boiled down to "well, something is better than nothing, isn't it?"
Wrong.
We downsized, and he went. Now, I have a competent person filling the role. Guess what? We are having to rip out all the code the moron did, and re-write it. Because we were paying the moron's salary, we couldn't hire a good programmer to replace him. Because we wouldn't admit he wasn't up to snuff, we didn't schedule correctly. Because he didn't identify flaws in purchased code, now we have to live with them, because the service contract has lapsed.
Joshamania is correct in that firing these people will slip your schedule, and that hiring new guys will slip your schedule. However, your schedule is going to slip, period - take a deep breath and get over it now. You can take a single slippage, or you can continue to hemmorage time through these bleeding assholes (now there's a vivid image, if I do say so myself!).
Suck it up, fire the guys who cannot/will not get the job done, and get people who can. You cannot afford to pay someone who isn't pulling their weight.
I'd thought about the SPDIF hacks on the AWE64 (why the designers felt the wavetable deserved digital and the PCM didn't is beyond me...), but for some of the things I do, I want the device to act just like /dev/dsp...
I guess when I rebuild the server next, I'll have to try to use a system that has built-in digital audio out... My server currently has three NICs, a SCSI, a second IDE card, and is FULL!
No, they will name themselves the Artificial Intelligences of America Association, or AIAA. Then they will either begin suing all of us meat, or suing the [MP|RI]AA....
OK, I will.
One simple rule that would make EVERYBODY happy:
Don't give out somebody's (email|phone/pager number|address) without their EXPRESS permission.
If you think George needs my email address, then YOU ask GEORGE for his address and (with George's permission) mail me, asking me to please send George my address. Same thing with phone numbers - get George's number & permission, then phone me!
Just think what would happen if people followed this simple rule:
1) Companies would no longer sell your email to spammers - instead, if Company A thought you might want to hear from Company B, they would send you a mail asking you to contact B if you wanted to.
2) No junk like 123Greetings.
3) No telemarketers.
Of course, this is little more than a specialization of the Golden Rule, and look how many people follow that....
Yeah, make LOTS of friends in the sysadmin community - post their email address to a spam address harvester like 123Greeting, and make sure they get as much spam as possible! After all, what better way to show you admin you care than by causing his mail queue to fill up with crap so he cannot see the important stuff.
/dev/null, his chair wired to the 440V plant feed, his car's gas tank full of polystyrene, and graffitti with his home phone number scrawled on the bathrooms of the local bars.
Any lusr on one of my systems that did this would find his entire account sent to
Then I would get mean....
Acutally, I have looked long and hard for what I want:
The Radio Shack solution isn't - I want to be able to switch under electronic control, not manual. If I have to run downstairs to the server room every time I want to change from video to MP3 I could just as easily pull cables by hand.
The MidiMan CO-2 looks interesting, but I still would have to get SPDIF out on my sound server, which is currently running a SB64. If I have to buy a new card, I can buy one that has co-ax SPDIF on it, so the MidiMan doesn't solve my problem.
The Audio Alchemy seems to run about $100 - once again, rather pricy considering the BOM in such a unit. Having quality DACs does drive the price up, but that is why I'd rather have a unit that just had digital output - it should be cheaper.
The Edirol is also too expensive (see previous paragraph, as well as previous post in this thread).
So far, I've not found anything that fits my needs. What is maddening to me is that a device that fits my needs needn't be expensive - a single chip solution is easily achievable. However, I guess there is just not the market to drive the development of such a device.
Thanks for the leads, though - they were at least worth checking out.
Let's see - pay $110 for a device that is basically nothing more than a single-chip USB interface and a couple of optical drivers?
That's my problem - I have a pretty good idea what the Bill Of Materials on something like this is, and the price is just too steep.
I realize they aren't getting the volumes that, say, a joystick might get, but COME ON!