I'm like you. It's like "What's there to talk about? I use it to switch between usually a maximum of 3 windows. Sometimes I use it to switch to window 6 out of 21 windows, because I'm too lazy to go to the mouse and click on the application."
What are they gonna do? Here's an idea. Assign a new key where I get to type my window number on the numeric pad. Example. I want to jump to the 6th window, press Alt-tilde (or back tick, since tilde is the uppercase) and type 6 on the numeric pad, release alt-tilde and voila. But even that's pretty useless, because who remembers the window numbers when you're running 21 windows?
Get in front of him, lift your foot off the gas pedal, and slow down to the minimum speed for the highway. Distance control will slow him and alert him to wake up, no? AND make sure you don't videotape the whole thing and post it to FB.
Y'all missed the point of my post. I was saying that for every piece of plastic in the packaging you DON'T see, there's a hell of a lot of shit that happens at the factory that would have you cringing. The plastic in the packaging is the LEAST of your problems.
lol. That's not what the end consumer sees! They see plastic in the packaging and they freak out (the kooky ones, anyways). "OMG! Why don't they use paper to deliver their product?"
Reminds me of when I signed up for a trial week of Hulu, not knowing anything about it other than that it was a competitor to NetFlix. First day, when I saw a commercial in the the middle of a show, my jaw dropped nearly to the floor. I didn't need the next six days to try it out. Cancelled it on the first day during the trial period.
If I'm paying for a service, I'd expect it to not have any commercials. Like another poster said above, I wouldn't even use the service if they paid me $5 or $10 per month. That's how much I hate commercials.
Which brings me to my beef with commercials. There are people who commercials work on. Then there are people who see commercials as a nuisance, since not matter how much they'd try to sell me something, I wouldn't be interested in buying it. It's like walking into a car dealership so you can test drive a car to compare it to other cars you're going to test drive. Some people buckle to the pressure sales. Me? There's no way you can convince me on the spot that I should buy that car. I would be taking my time and doing my homework. By the time I walk into a dealership and ask to buy a car, they wouldn't have to convince me at all, because I've already done my homework.
Commercials are the same way. I'm not going to buy a Sony stereo because I saw it in a commercial. I'm not going to fly United because I like George Gershwin. For people like me, a service that would be commercial free is the best bet for the streaming companies to keep us as customers.
There is a trove of sites with hard data that would disagree with you. Here's a very good write up by a very respected amplifier designer, Nelson Pass. Read paragraphs 4 and 5. Mind you, he's in the camp that you and I are, in that in short distances, it really doesn't matter if you use twisted pair, zip cord, hanger wire, Monster, or any other cable. But when it comes to speaker cables, length matters, and the shorter, the better.
Jesus, we're not trying to run a PA system, DJ, or run a rock concert here. Who needs 14,000W in a home audio setup? The example you gave completely doesn't apply to the argument you're trying to refute.
Let me elaborate.
I will not argue most of your points in your first paragraph. Class D amps ARE lighter (I said that up above already), run cooler, and waste less electricity than a class AB of the same power output. NONE of those are any concern to a person interested in a high fidelity sound system. You mentioned "3 standard 80mm fans" in the amp you gave an example of. An audiophile would cringe at the thought of having a fan in their system, let alone 3 small sized fans which would certainly be audible. I suppose the amp could be smart and turn them on only when the temperature goes up, but if you look at all the amps which were marketed to home audio before 2000, none of them had a fan and they were all class A or AB. When I'm critically listening in my setup, I turn the HVAC system in my house off because I don't want it to come on when I'm listening.
Which brings us to the price. The amp you referenced is over $5000. Granted it's that much because it is 14000 watts, but like I said, you would still pay a lot for a good class D amp, where you can pick up a really good class AB amp for a very reasonable price.
Finally, there's no mention of sound quality at all in your statements. I'm not arguing that a class D amp would not be a great amp for a DJ. I think it would, specifically for the characteristics you mentioned above. I just don't believe it stands up to the linearity of a class AB amp when it comes to amplifying its input signal without distorting it. I know a couple of posts above someone linked a tiny web page that tried to do ABX testing between two class D and AB amps. His result sums up everything I've been saying throughout my posts. "as far as I can hear, [the class D amp] sounds the same". If that's what makes him happy, then by all means he should stick with that. But a more objective test would have been to hook up the output both amps to an oscilloscope and raise the frequency, where the class AB is supposed to continue to shine when the class D is supposed to falter.
I am not saying that there aren't good class D amps out there for a home audio setup. I'm just saying that a real good (used) class AB amp is still cheaper and probably sounds better.
I can't attest to use of amplifiers in scientific instrumentation, but performance is not everything, specially when it comes to audio applications. Yes, it's great that most class D amps reach 90% or higher efficiency, but that comes at a price.
Class D amps achieve their efficiency by turning the transistors completely off when not in use, as opposed to class AB which one of the transistor sets are on at all times or class A where the output transistors are on all the time. The switching off of the transistors is controlled via Pulse Width Modulation. This is the same concept used in most power supplies today, from PCs to phone chargers to LED bulb replacements for incandescent bulbs. This control can be via a digital circuit or an analog circuit. The digitally controlled circuit introduces too much error and distortion to be usable in audio applications. The analog controlled class D amps have historically been pretty hard to design correctly. They have complicated circuits and have mostly been non-linear in their reproduction of 20-20K Hz spectrum, something audiophiles strive really hard to achieve. I realize there have been new advents in overcoming these issues, but these usually come at a high price. A well-designed class D amp costs many times that of a well-designed class AB amp. Just look at the class D amps that are on the market and targeted to audiophiles. By comparison, I can pick up a used Aragon 4004 MKII for $500-$600 on ebay and be done with my amplifier needs, although my own amp is an ATI 1502 which can be had for even cheaper. These class AB amps provide completely linear audio amplification of their input signal at a fraction of the price of a comparable (in terms of quality) class D amp.
I'm talking about buying a receiver that says it is 100 wpc (7 or 9 of them), but weighs only 25 pounds. The transformer for a class AB receiver of that size alone would be 40 pounds. Operating a receiver in class D (even if it's part-time) so that you can undersize the shit out of everything automatically disqualifies it as being a HiFi receiver.
With the right equipment you can absolutely hear the difference. Oxygen-free thick copper cabling made a HUGE difference on my home system.
What gauge were your oxygenated copper wires before and how long for each speaker, and how loud do you normally listen? Unless you were using 18 gauge and your distance was most than 3 feet, there wouldn't be any difference. Of course (see my post elsewhere in this thread) the only thing that matters is that YOU had the perception that it made your system sound better, which leads to your better enjoying your system.
While that may be true, in my experience most people don't care about the loss in the lossy compression, because they don't listen on anything that can portray the difference anyways. This more and more people are buying high-end HiFi equipment, while may be true, is not due to their interest in high fidelity music. After all, "Kanye's" music is crap to begin with. It may have to do with population growth, the price of electronics having come down, etc.
Not sure what they mean by HiFi equipment anyways. The most important pieces of an audio setup are the source material and the speakers. Everything in between does a descent job of handling the signal in most cases. But you can't buy a Sony A/V receiver and call it HiFi. I don't see ANY of my friends spending anywhere near what I paid for my audio setup, which is actually very modest and all second/third hand to begin with. Like I said, the most important parts for me were the speakers, and my NHT 3.3s cost $1200/$2000 I spent on my setup (excluding the source materials). You can get a very descent DAC to piggy back on top of a Raspberry PI for a complete setup of
My friends, however, don't do any critical listening to begin with. As such, a bluetooth speaker at home does just fine for them. If they want to sit and listen to something, they'll most likely do it on their 5.1 A/V receiver that has little satellites and a subwoofer. At that point, playing a lossless FLAC vs. playing a 192Kbs MP3 doesn't make a difference to them.
At the end of it all, though, is whether you get enjoyment out of whatever you have in front of you, whether it'd be your car, your spouse, your job, or your stereo. If your car drives fine for you, then that's all that matters. If the music coming out of your stereo sounds good to you, that's all that's needed. After all, some other person will look at my audio setup and laugh, because they believe they have higher quality audio coming out of their speakers than I do, and that's fine, because that's what makes them happy, and my setup is what makes me happy.
You're talking about the advent of 33 1/3 records after 45, which allowed much longer songs to be played without stop. Yeah, it's funny that we're going back.
It seems to be the same thing that happens when some people drive- it is as if their brains fail to compute that those other cars around them are not just stupid machines in your way, but vehicles being driven by people. People who have thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, hopes, goals, deadlines, frustrations, just like your own and yet with different viewpoints and realities.
I agree with your points regarding posting on the Internet, but driving and cars are completely different beasts, governed by laws, not to mention that a driver's failure to drive correctly and obeying the laws puts everyone else in jeopardy. (Almost) Everyone speeds, it's just a matter of how much they speed. In the state I live in, they determined that the left left in a highway, barring heavy traffic, is intended for passing, regardless of whether you're going the speed limit, below it, or above it. You CANNOT block the left lane of a highway (be a lane hugger). Yet, I continually see people (mind you, on their cell phones), driving 5 miles above the speed limit while everyone passes them on the right.
Feelings have nothing to do with it. I doubt the driver who has to slow down and wait for traffic on the right to clear so that he can pass the douche bag in the left lane has any sympathy for the said person, and rightly so.
Mom and Pop stores are the LEAST of the problem. In Miami, at least, "Mom and Pop" neighborhood stores were using computers with cash register software and digital signature capture for credit card purchases YEARS before big companies like Walmart, Publix, and Blockbuster were.
Why? A big company like Walmart, Publix, and Blockbuster has to make large-scale IT decisions that are nationwide in scope, require months of research and bureaucracy, and take lots of time to deploy. A small business owner says "fuck it", he's making one decision for himself, and if spending an extra $250 or so means he won't have to screw with paper receipts anymore when the credit card company does a chargeback on him, he'll spend it in an instant because it makes his life immeasurably easier. It's a lot easier for ten thousand small businesses to make ten thousand individually small decisions than it is for one very large company to make a very big decision that affects ten thousand locations.
Yeah, except the large companies are already doing shit like this. Every time I go to Home Depot, they ask me if I'd like an email receipt. Walmart doesn't (well, I don't shop there, but I've heard) ask because it'd just slow their process of making more money.
And I don't buy your argument re: mom and pop shops being able to do this without any extra overhead (or as little as $250) because they already use computers to run their cash register. You're thinking of a "boutique" with millennial owners. When I go to the store in my town that repairs stained glass, they don't even use a register. They have carbon-copy paper receipts.
The money "Walmart, Publix, Blockbuster" has to spend in order adhere to a law like this is miniscule as a percentage of their operating cost as it would be for a mom and pop shop. I don't know how you could argue that.
RTFA - paper receipts will still be legal, just not given by default. If you don't have a smartphone but have an e-receipt, you could probably still print it out (with some sort of QR code for authentication) to make a return.
And what about the burden it puts on small mom and pop shops, to have to send a digital receipt AND keep an electronic copy of the receipt (along with the backups, maintenance, etc of the data)? This is an extremely bad idea.
Right! You can setup a Linux box to look just like Windows XP. There's NO training to be done really. The shit is pretty intuitive when it works, and it works nearly 100% of the time. If she's a non-techie, the times shit doesn't work she'll have to call someone anyways. What are you gonna have her do? Take a Windows notebook to BestBuy and ask for help when something doesn't work? She'll be calling you anyways.
I use DuckDuckGo by default on all my browsers. When I can't find something I'm looking for (not that often at home, but sometime often at work as a programmer) I just go to google.com and search there.
Slashdot Mirror
Is doesn't matter if it's good for them or not. They're slave to us!
I'm like you. It's like "What's there to talk about? I use it to switch between usually a maximum of 3 windows. Sometimes I use it to switch to window 6 out of 21 windows, because I'm too lazy to go to the mouse and click on the application."
What are they gonna do? Here's an idea. Assign a new key where I get to type my window number on the numeric pad. Example. I want to jump to the 6th window, press Alt-tilde (or back tick, since tilde is the uppercase) and type 6 on the numeric pad, release alt-tilde and voila. But even that's pretty useless, because who remembers the window numbers when you're running 21 windows?
Get in front of him, lift your foot off the gas pedal, and slow down to the minimum speed for the highway. Distance control will slow him and alert him to wake up, no? AND make sure you don't videotape the whole thing and post it to FB.
Windows NT 3.51 was the first truly good Microsoft OS.
There. FTFY.
Y'all missed the point of my post. I was saying that for every piece of plastic in the packaging you DON'T see, there's a hell of a lot of shit that happens at the factory that would have you cringing. The plastic in the packaging is the LEAST of your problems.
lol. That's not what the end consumer sees! They see plastic in the packaging and they freak out (the kooky ones, anyways). "OMG! Why don't they use paper to deliver their product?"
Reminds me of when I signed up for a trial week of Hulu, not knowing anything about it other than that it was a competitor to NetFlix. First day, when I saw a commercial in the the middle of a show, my jaw dropped nearly to the floor. I didn't need the next six days to try it out. Cancelled it on the first day during the trial period.
If I'm paying for a service, I'd expect it to not have any commercials. Like another poster said above, I wouldn't even use the service if they paid me $5 or $10 per month. That's how much I hate commercials.
Which brings me to my beef with commercials. There are people who commercials work on. Then there are people who see commercials as a nuisance, since not matter how much they'd try to sell me something, I wouldn't be interested in buying it. It's like walking into a car dealership so you can test drive a car to compare it to other cars you're going to test drive. Some people buckle to the pressure sales. Me? There's no way you can convince me on the spot that I should buy that car. I would be taking my time and doing my homework. By the time I walk into a dealership and ask to buy a car, they wouldn't have to convince me at all, because I've already done my homework.
Commercials are the same way. I'm not going to buy a Sony stereo because I saw it in a commercial. I'm not going to fly United because I like George Gershwin. For people like me, a service that would be commercial free is the best bet for the streaming companies to keep us as customers.
Obviously you've never used an ad blocker on YouTube, because I concur with the above poster. I don't have any ads on my YouTube.
I feel I should've clarified what I meant by "short distances". I actually meant lengths of 3-5 feet with a properly sized (12-14 gauge) conductor.
There is a trove of sites with hard data that would disagree with you. Here's a very good write up by a very respected amplifier designer, Nelson Pass. Read paragraphs 4 and 5. Mind you, he's in the camp that you and I are, in that in short distances, it really doesn't matter if you use twisted pair, zip cord, hanger wire, Monster, or any other cable. But when it comes to speaker cables, length matters, and the shorter, the better.
Jesus, we're not trying to run a PA system, DJ, or run a rock concert here. Who needs 14,000W in a home audio setup? The example you gave completely doesn't apply to the argument you're trying to refute.
Let me elaborate.
I will not argue most of your points in your first paragraph. Class D amps ARE lighter (I said that up above already), run cooler, and waste less electricity than a class AB of the same power output. NONE of those are any concern to a person interested in a high fidelity sound system. You mentioned "3 standard 80mm fans" in the amp you gave an example of. An audiophile would cringe at the thought of having a fan in their system, let alone 3 small sized fans which would certainly be audible. I suppose the amp could be smart and turn them on only when the temperature goes up, but if you look at all the amps which were marketed to home audio before 2000, none of them had a fan and they were all class A or AB. When I'm critically listening in my setup, I turn the HVAC system in my house off because I don't want it to come on when I'm listening.
Which brings us to the price. The amp you referenced is over $5000. Granted it's that much because it is 14000 watts, but like I said, you would still pay a lot for a good class D amp, where you can pick up a really good class AB amp for a very reasonable price.
Finally, there's no mention of sound quality at all in your statements. I'm not arguing that a class D amp would not be a great amp for a DJ. I think it would, specifically for the characteristics you mentioned above. I just don't believe it stands up to the linearity of a class AB amp when it comes to amplifying its input signal without distorting it. I know a couple of posts above someone linked a tiny web page that tried to do ABX testing between two class D and AB amps. His result sums up everything I've been saying throughout my posts. "as far as I can hear, [the class D amp] sounds the same". If that's what makes him happy, then by all means he should stick with that. But a more objective test would have been to hook up the output both amps to an oscilloscope and raise the frequency, where the class AB is supposed to continue to shine when the class D is supposed to falter.
I am not saying that there aren't good class D amps out there for a home audio setup. I'm just saying that a real good (used) class AB amp is still cheaper and probably sounds better.
I can't attest to use of amplifiers in scientific instrumentation, but performance is not everything, specially when it comes to audio applications. Yes, it's great that most class D amps reach 90% or higher efficiency, but that comes at a price.
Class D amps achieve their efficiency by turning the transistors completely off when not in use, as opposed to class AB which one of the transistor sets are on at all times or class A where the output transistors are on all the time. The switching off of the transistors is controlled via Pulse Width Modulation. This is the same concept used in most power supplies today, from PCs to phone chargers to LED bulb replacements for incandescent bulbs. This control can be via a digital circuit or an analog circuit. The digitally controlled circuit introduces too much error and distortion to be usable in audio applications. The analog controlled class D amps have historically been pretty hard to design correctly. They have complicated circuits and have mostly been non-linear in their reproduction of 20-20K Hz spectrum, something audiophiles strive really hard to achieve. I realize there have been new advents in overcoming these issues, but these usually come at a high price. A well-designed class D amp costs many times that of a well-designed class AB amp. Just look at the class D amps that are on the market and targeted to audiophiles. By comparison, I can pick up a used Aragon 4004 MKII for $500-$600 on ebay and be done with my amplifier needs, although my own amp is an ATI 1502 which can be had for even cheaper. These class AB amps provide completely linear audio amplification of their input signal at a fraction of the price of a comparable (in terms of quality) class D amp.
I'm talking about buying a receiver that says it is 100 wpc (7 or 9 of them), but weighs only 25 pounds. The transformer for a class AB receiver of that size alone would be 40 pounds. Operating a receiver in class D (even if it's part-time) so that you can undersize the shit out of everything automatically disqualifies it as being a HiFi receiver.
With the right equipment you can absolutely hear the difference. Oxygen-free thick copper cabling made a HUGE difference on my home system.
What gauge were your oxygenated copper wires before and how long for each speaker, and how loud do you normally listen? Unless you were using 18 gauge and your distance was most than 3 feet, there wouldn't be any difference. Of course (see my post elsewhere in this thread) the only thing that matters is that YOU had the perception that it made your system sound better, which leads to your better enjoying your system.
While that may be true, in my experience most people don't care about the loss in the lossy compression, because they don't listen on anything that can portray the difference anyways. This more and more people are buying high-end HiFi equipment, while may be true, is not due to their interest in high fidelity music. After all, "Kanye's" music is crap to begin with. It may have to do with population growth, the price of electronics having come down, etc.
Not sure what they mean by HiFi equipment anyways. The most important pieces of an audio setup are the source material and the speakers. Everything in between does a descent job of handling the signal in most cases. But you can't buy a Sony A/V receiver and call it HiFi. I don't see ANY of my friends spending anywhere near what I paid for my audio setup, which is actually very modest and all second/third hand to begin with. Like I said, the most important parts for me were the speakers, and my NHT 3.3s cost $1200/$2000 I spent on my setup (excluding the source materials). You can get a very descent DAC to piggy back on top of a Raspberry PI for a complete setup of
My friends, however, don't do any critical listening to begin with. As such, a bluetooth speaker at home does just fine for them. If they want to sit and listen to something, they'll most likely do it on their 5.1 A/V receiver that has little satellites and a subwoofer. At that point, playing a lossless FLAC vs. playing a 192Kbs MP3 doesn't make a difference to them.
At the end of it all, though, is whether you get enjoyment out of whatever you have in front of you, whether it'd be your car, your spouse, your job, or your stereo. If your car drives fine for you, then that's all that matters. If the music coming out of your stereo sounds good to you, that's all that's needed. After all, some other person will look at my audio setup and laugh, because they believe they have higher quality audio coming out of their speakers than I do, and that's fine, because that's what makes them happy, and my setup is what makes me happy.
This is a sack of baldfaced lies and really cheeses me off. I'm going to grab my coat hanger and hook up my audio system. That'll calm me down.
Are you referencing using your coat hanger as speaker wire? Because it'll do just fine, for short distances of
You're talking about the advent of 33 1/3 records after 45, which allowed much longer songs to be played without stop. Yeah, it's funny that we're going back.
It seems to be the same thing that happens when some people drive- it is as if their brains fail to compute that those other cars around them are not just stupid machines in your way, but vehicles being driven by people. People who have thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, hopes, goals, deadlines, frustrations, just like your own and yet with different viewpoints and realities.
I agree with your points regarding posting on the Internet, but driving and cars are completely different beasts, governed by laws, not to mention that a driver's failure to drive correctly and obeying the laws puts everyone else in jeopardy. (Almost) Everyone speeds, it's just a matter of how much they speed. In the state I live in, they determined that the left left in a highway, barring heavy traffic, is intended for passing, regardless of whether you're going the speed limit, below it, or above it. You CANNOT block the left lane of a highway (be a lane hugger). Yet, I continually see people (mind you, on their cell phones), driving 5 miles above the speed limit while everyone passes them on the right.
Feelings have nothing to do with it. I doubt the driver who has to slow down and wait for traffic on the right to clear so that he can pass the douche bag in the left lane has any sympathy for the said person, and rightly so.
When I read the start of your comment, "Emacs", I thought you were offering an obvious alternative to MongoDB!
Mom and Pop stores are the LEAST of the problem. In Miami, at least, "Mom and Pop" neighborhood stores were using computers with cash register software and digital signature capture for credit card purchases YEARS before big companies like Walmart, Publix, and Blockbuster were.
Why? A big company like Walmart, Publix, and Blockbuster has to make large-scale IT decisions that are nationwide in scope, require months of research and bureaucracy, and take lots of time to deploy. A small business owner says "fuck it", he's making one decision for himself, and if spending an extra $250 or so means he won't have to screw with paper receipts anymore when the credit card company does a chargeback on him, he'll spend it in an instant because it makes his life immeasurably easier. It's a lot easier for ten thousand small businesses to make ten thousand individually small decisions than it is for one very large company to make a very big decision that affects ten thousand locations.
Yeah, except the large companies are already doing shit like this. Every time I go to Home Depot, they ask me if I'd like an email receipt. Walmart doesn't (well, I don't shop there, but I've heard) ask because it'd just slow their process of making more money.
And I don't buy your argument re: mom and pop shops being able to do this without any extra overhead (or as little as $250) because they already use computers to run their cash register. You're thinking of a "boutique" with millennial owners. When I go to the store in my town that repairs stained glass, they don't even use a register. They have carbon-copy paper receipts.
The money "Walmart, Publix, Blockbuster" has to spend in order adhere to a law like this is miniscule as a percentage of their operating cost as it would be for a mom and pop shop. I don't know how you could argue that.
Wow! So intelligent. Why don't you try and argue his points?
RTFA - paper receipts will still be legal, just not given by default. If you don't have a smartphone but have an e-receipt, you could probably still print it out (with some sort of QR code for authentication) to make a return.
And what about the burden it puts on small mom and pop shops, to have to send a digital receipt AND keep an electronic copy of the receipt (along with the backups, maintenance, etc of the data)? This is an extremely bad idea.
10% of 50K/yr. 5K/year for say 45 years. 225K
If I worked for more than 3 years at a constant pay, I'd have to just shoot myself.
Except, of course, if it was lucrative to begin with and I'd be nuts to muddy the water, ie. if I flipped burgers and they'd pay me 400K/year.
Even then, I'd have to shoot myself after a year out of boredom.
Right! You can setup a Linux box to look just like Windows XP. There's NO training to be done really. The shit is pretty intuitive when it works, and it works nearly 100% of the time. If she's a non-techie, the times shit doesn't work she'll have to call someone anyways. What are you gonna have her do? Take a Windows notebook to BestBuy and ask for help when something doesn't work? She'll be calling you anyways.
I use DuckDuckGo by default on all my browsers. When I can't find something I'm looking for (not that often at home, but sometime often at work as a programmer) I just go to google.com and search there.