You don't test frequency response by simply generating a 10K tone, you need a full spectrum analisys, stop posting as something you arent to give you credit. In what world would a single frequency judge the entire frequency range response! Common, at least try to steal decent info from google before comming to say crap.
He didn't say that it was frequency response. There is more to audio quality than frequency response. The test he described is measure of distortion, which is arguably more important than flat frequency response. Uneven frequency response can be corrected (within limits) by equalization, but that doesn't help distortion.
What I would like to see is simply, a digital VCR.That is a box with Tivo like features in terms of pausing live TV, but otherwise can act just like a VCR that happens to store recordings on the HD. I don't care about "season pass" style features, or at least could do without.
If this is all you want, you can probably have it now. Most cable companies are now offering such a product. They generally don't have the fancy TiVo features like being able to track a show if it changes time, automatically resolve conflicts with a preference order, or automatically record shows with a particular title, keyword, actor, or director.
But if all you want is to "record to hard disk whatever is on channel 5 from 9:00 to 10:00," almost every cable company will happily rent you a box to do this for a few extra bucks a month.
Anyway, my conversation with my boss got me thinking...what happens when the CableCard slot shorts out or fails after the first year of warranty coverage?
This is basically equivalent to, "What if the tuner on my TV craps out after the warranty runs out?" The answer is the same: Pay to get it fixed, or buy/rent a set-top box/tuner that sends it's signal to your TV via a video port. Only now you'll have a choice of set-top boxes: the one the cable company provides, or competing cable-card equipped set-top boxes.
I really don't care for PPV and on-demand programming. I don't use them with my TiVo now; why would I want to use a CableCard in my TV that bypasses my recorders so I can only watch that content live?
For you, CableCard will provide access to cable HD programming and (with the 2.0 standard) multiple tuners (so that you can record two shows at once), both of which are not technically possible with an outboard TiVo controlling a cable box. A cable-card 2.0 equipped TiVo will be able to compete feature-for-feature with cable boxes. Consumers will save money by being able to opt out of monthly cable box/PVR and remote rental fees, which will likely make the monthly TiVo fee considerably more palatable.
Note that existing cable boxes already can audit what you are watching if they choose. CableCard doesn't give any new capabilities to the cable companies; it simply makes those features accessible to 3rd party vendors such as TiVo (who, like your cable company, already knows as much about your viewing habits as your user agreement permits).
I think this is only another example in a long line of encryption that was quite secure when envisioned, but then as computers became more and more powerful, became less and less secure. Eventually, we will have quantum computers capable of brute-forcing even quantum encryption...
Barring the discovery of fundamental new physics, there is no brute-force attack on quantum encryption. In principle, it is a version of the one-time pad, the only encryption scheme that is immune to any kind of brute force attack. What quantum encryption solves is the secure key delivery problem, which is what has always limited the practicality of one-time-pads.
Re:How Apple can dominate the academic market
on
Mac mini Dissection
·
· Score: 1
An iPod Photo, coupled with the right software, can apparently do trick #1.
I gather that this software converts a presentation into an iPod slideshow. This can also be done manually. But this isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being able to put my presentation on my iPod as easily as I now put music on it, and having it play with all effects intact.
I read the article, and was surprised to discover what are basically the conventional explanations of aging. Neither are the possible solutions particularly revolutionary, although I have some doubts as to whether de Grey's proposed approaches are the most likely to yield results. None are easy or likely to come about in the next few years.
How Apple can dominate the academic market
on
Mac mini Dissection
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
1. Produce an iPod that runs Keynote and outputs video to a projector. 2. Incorporate an integrated reference/bibliography manager into Pages.
Actually, the substance of the Factcheck article is that there is no definitive proof that Dubya was AWOL. I agree with that; hence my phrasing: "I believe that Dubya was AWOL."
The story wasn't fake. One piece of evidence was not corroborated (never proven false by the way) and the right wing spin machine went into overdrive to "discredit" the story.
Fact is, Dubya was AWOL, and no one had the guts to say it loud enough.
Give me a break! I believe that Dubya was AWOL, but that doesn't make a clumsy and obvious fraud look any more believable to me. Even older versions of Word and Times New Roman do not reproduce the perfect match to the character spacing and relative line lengths that you get if you type the memo text into the current version of Word, using defaults for everything (I've tried it). And we are supposed to believe that some mythical proportional spacing typewriter from the '70's that nobody has actually managed to identify just happens to match the way that Word spaces characters today?
If you believe that, I have a URL that you should visit to verify all of your bank accounts and credit card numbers....
When the Social Security system "buys" a treasury bill, another branch of the government is on the receiving end. This branch spends the money on services or whatever, because it is running a deficit budget. So the money is gone. It can only be paid back by collecting future taxes, and/or by selling assets.
Well, yes. And when I buy a T-Bill personally, the government is borrowing from me so that it can run a deficit budget. Come to think of it, since the Social Security system is funded in part by my money, when Social Security buys a T-Bill, the government is also borrowing from me.
So what is the difference? Are you suggesting that the government should or will default on its debts? Are you saying that those of us who have invested our money in US Government securities are insolvent?
Yes, running a big deficit as the current administration has chosen to do, is unwise, and will run up taxes or require sale of assets in the future. But unless the US goes bankrupt and collapses, the government still has to repay its debts, and the people, institutions, and government departments that hold those debts are sitting on genuine assets.
America lucked out - baby boomers' fertility rates reached replacement (2.1 babies) and we have a lot of immigrants. That's why Social Security is safe in America (and Canada).
So by "lucked out," you mean that things have worked out pretty much as projected, so that the system has remained essentially solvent? Some might call that careful planning.
Most men, as well as most women, lack natural ability in math and science. So does it really matter whether there is a biological, as well as a social component, to the observation that the small minority of one sex that is particularly talented at these things seems a bit smaller than the small minority of the other sex that is particularly talented?
What troubles me most about the outcry is not so much that it dismisses out of hand something that is certainly a reasonable hypothesis, even if it turns out to be wrong, but rather the implication that it matters whether or not it is true. The attitude seems to be, "let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known."
The reporting of the issue reinforces this perception. Look at the summary in the OP. "Women lack natural ability at math." Well, certainly there are some women who do not lack natural ability at math. For the vast majority of men on the planet, it is possible to find quite a few women who are better at math than they are. So stated as an absolute generalization, it is obviously false. But that was not the hypothesis, which was merely that there is a biological component to the distribution of mathematical and scientific aptitude.
So let us be politically incorrect and suppose that it is true. Does this justify denying any individual woman a promotion or assigning her a lower salary? No, because anybody who is doing math or science is by definition not average, and probably pretty far out on the tail of the statistical distribution, so whether men or women on average are better at math/science is irrelevant--the only appropriate question is how good that particular individual is.
So I suppose that there is some small risk that Dr. Summers' comments might discourage some young woman from pursuing a career in math or science (although I suspect that most young woman with real aptitude would know instantly that such a remark does not apply to them). But far more damaging is the implication raised by the protests that if such a biological bias actually did exist, it would some how excuse or justify discrimination against women in these professions.
Nobody's gonna piss them off. DTV is just going to turn around and offer them a better* DVR for pennies or even for free.
Keep in mind that all of those existing SD DirecTiVo units are only costing DirecTV $1/month (and DirecTV charges customers $5/month). DirecTV hasn't bothered to switch out UltimateTV owners, so why would they switch SD DirecTiVo owners?
But there is much more to it than replacing Tivo. The new DVR will also introduce DirecTV's MPEG-4 capability and become the "standard DirecTV reciever" that everybody gets. You won't be able to buy a plain non-DVR box. DirecTV NEEDS to move to MPEG-4 NOW. They are out of bandwidth and have no room for the must-carry HD that will hit them hard starting in 2006.
The only MPEG-4 that they are adding in 2006 is HD locals. They plan to switch other HD channels to MPEG-4 sometime in the more distant future. No mention of switching SD channels to MPEG-4, and it probably doesn't make much sense. The potential bandwidth savings are less for SD, and the cost much greater, because they'd have to replace all of those thousands of SD receivers. HD is less problematic, because the market penetration is lower. The one case where they may need to offer a replacement or upgrade is the new HD DirecTiVo units. They have not yet announced what they plan to do here. It is a small enough number of units that they could probably afford to replace them if necessary. In any case, it won't be an issue for a few years. The HD DirecTiVo units get HD locals over the air, so most won't miss not having access to the new local HD MPEG-4 stations (which will also require an additional dish). So it won't be an issue for a few years, anyway.
Personally, if DirecTV drops TiVo altogether, I'll drop DirecTV. I switched from cable to DirecTV specifically for TiVo. If they abandon TiVo, I'll go back to cable. And with the CableCard HD TiVo DVRs coming out in a year or so, I'll probably be able to do so without losing features--presumably, I'd gain the TiVo enhancements like HMO that DirecTV has been so slow in rolling out.
TiVo should just get out of the hardware business completely. They've never done very well at it -- their product isn't terribly reliable
It is the reliability that has really sold me. It's one of those "It just works" products. No glitches, no crashes, even handles power failures gracefully.
I was at CES. DirecTV is dropping TiVo for their own new custom-built upcoming DVRs. From what I understand DirecTV currently provides some life support for TiVo in the form of a rather inexpensive licensing/subscription fee for each user--but that will go away.
Unlikely. DirecTV has their problems, but one thing they are very good at is maintaining support. They are still supporting Ultimate TV DirecTV units which have been out of production for years. And there are a lot of those DirecTiVo DVRs out there. Pissing all of those customers off would be suicide.
Tivo is toast. It's a great product without question. The issue is that all the major cable companies (Comcast, Cox, etc.) are building those capabilities into the set top box.
I switched from Comcast to satellite to get high definition dual tuner TiVo service. I may consider switching back to cable once the CableCard TiVos become available next year, because DirecTV has lagged in supporting recent TiVo features.
It seems to me that TiVo has a major window of opportunity here. Once the CableCard 2.0 standard is available, TiVo will be able to offer all of the features of a high-definition cable box + DVR, and TiVo's monthly fee is not that different from what the cable companies are charging. They will even be able to compete with cable PPV by offering internet rental of Netflix titles direct to the user's HD.
And since cable users don't own their cable boxes, they have no financial commitment, and can potentially be wooed to TiVo. I don't think TiVo will take over the cable box market from the cable companies, but they could well establish themselves as the videophile cable box. This seems to me a better gamble than trying to make a life as indentured servant to Comcast, pulling in just pennies a month per box.
Nobody needs an mp3 player. People want music players to be able to satisfy their esthetic tastes in music. So why shouldn't they also want to satisfy their esthetic tastes in design?
So your girlfriend is shallow and obsessed with beauty, even for products that are supposed to spend 99% of their time hidden away in your pocket and doing what they are supposed to be doing: playing music.
Since when is an appreciation of beauty "shallow"? It seems to me that somebody who appreciates both beauty and function has greater depth than somebody who only cares only about function and lacks a sense of esthetics.
Since iTunes came out, I've started buying a lot more CDs. The ability to have the same music in multiple places adds value to the CD. Pretty much everything I have I've ripped myself. In general, I don't bother with online music. I'd much rather have the CD as a backup, or to re-rip at higher quality when I have more storage, and if I buy it used, it's usually as cheaper or cheaper than online. As for pirated mp3's, who want's to bother with a copy ripped at unknown quality? I might accept an mp3 of a group I don't know, but if I like them, I'll order the CD.
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You don't test frequency response by simply generating a 10K tone, you need a full spectrum analisys, stop posting as something you arent to give you credit. In what world would a single frequency judge the entire frequency range response! Common, at least try to steal decent info from google before comming to say crap.
He didn't say that it was frequency response. There is more to audio quality than frequency response. The test he described is measure of distortion, which is arguably more important than flat frequency response. Uneven frequency response can be corrected (within limits) by equalization, but that doesn't help distortion.
what does the "dead-flat frequency response" entail? i.e. why are flat frequency responses desired?
It means that the relative loudness of the highs and lows is exactly the same as what was recorded.
What I would like to see is simply, a digital VCR.That is a box with Tivo like features in terms of pausing live TV, but otherwise can act just like a VCR that happens to store recordings on the HD. I don't care about "season pass" style features, or at least could do without.
If this is all you want, you can probably have it now. Most cable companies are now offering such a product. They generally don't have the fancy TiVo features like being able to track a show if it changes time, automatically resolve conflicts with a preference order, or automatically record shows with a particular title, keyword, actor, or director.
But if all you want is to "record to hard disk whatever is on channel 5 from 9:00 to 10:00," almost every cable company will happily rent you a box to do this for a few extra bucks a month.
Anyway, my conversation with my boss got me thinking...what happens when the CableCard slot shorts out or fails after the first year of warranty coverage?
This is basically equivalent to, "What if the tuner on my TV craps out after the warranty runs out?" The answer is the same: Pay to get it fixed, or buy/rent a set-top box/tuner that sends it's signal to your TV via a video port. Only now you'll have a choice of set-top boxes: the one the cable company provides, or competing cable-card equipped set-top boxes.
I really don't care for PPV and on-demand programming. I don't use them with my TiVo now; why would I want to use a CableCard in my TV that bypasses my recorders so I can only watch that content live?
For you, CableCard will provide access to cable HD programming and (with the 2.0 standard) multiple tuners (so that you can record two shows at once), both of which are not technically possible with an outboard TiVo controlling a cable box. A cable-card 2.0 equipped TiVo will be able to compete feature-for-feature with cable boxes. Consumers will save money by being able to opt out of monthly cable box/PVR and remote rental fees, which will likely make the monthly TiVo fee considerably more palatable.
Note that existing cable boxes already can audit what you are watching if they choose. CableCard doesn't give any new capabilities to the cable companies; it simply makes those features accessible to 3rd party vendors such as TiVo (who, like your cable company, already knows as much about your viewing habits as your user agreement permits).
I think this is only another example in a long line of encryption that was quite secure when envisioned, but then as computers became more and more powerful, became less and less secure. Eventually, we will have quantum computers capable of brute-forcing even quantum encryption...
Barring the discovery of fundamental new physics, there is no brute-force attack on quantum encryption. In principle, it is a version of the one-time pad, the only encryption scheme that is immune to any kind of brute force attack. What quantum encryption solves is the secure key delivery problem, which is what has always limited the practicality of one-time-pads.
An iPod Photo, coupled with the right software, can apparently do trick #1.
I gather that this software converts a presentation into an iPod slideshow. This can also be done manually. But this isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being able to put my presentation on my iPod as easily as I now put music on it, and having it play with all effects intact.
I read the article, and was surprised to discover what are basically the conventional explanations of aging. Neither are the possible solutions particularly revolutionary, although I have some doubts as to whether de Grey's proposed approaches are the most likely to yield results. None are easy or likely to come about in the next few years.
1. Produce an iPod that runs Keynote and outputs video to a projector.
2. Incorporate an integrated reference/bibliography manager into Pages.
The Mac Mini is a short Mac cube with its slot-loading DVD on the side instead of the top.
Compare the Mac Mini with Hoojum [hoojum.com] products. Coincidence? Engaged made made the same comparison
The Hoojum looks more like the Mac Cube than the Mini looks like the Hoojum.
IN ADDITION USERS ARE ALLOWED TO OPEN THE BOX
Of course, if you stopped shouting long enough to RTFA, you'd have seen how to pop the box open in 30 seconds with a putty knife.
That's assuming that the size is an advantage for this crowd, when most users would rather have the slots and an accessible case.
Don't kid yourself, the size is more of a justifcation for a crippled low-end Mac than a feature.
And indeed, if you merely scan through the other posts, you will find a lot of people who see the small size as an advantage.
Dubya wasn't AWOL:
http://www.factcheck.org/article140.html
Actually, the substance of the Factcheck article is that there is no definitive proof that Dubya was AWOL. I agree with that; hence my phrasing: "I believe that Dubya was AWOL."
The story wasn't fake. One piece of evidence was not corroborated (never proven false by the way) and the right wing spin machine went into overdrive to "discredit" the story.
Fact is, Dubya was AWOL, and no one had the guts to say it loud enough.
Give me a break! I believe that Dubya was AWOL, but that doesn't make a clumsy and obvious fraud look any more believable to me. Even older versions of Word and Times New Roman do not reproduce the perfect match to the character spacing and relative line lengths that you get if you type the memo text into the current version of Word, using defaults for everything (I've tried it). And we are supposed to believe that some mythical proportional spacing typewriter from the '70's that nobody has actually managed to identify just happens to match the way that Word spaces characters today?
If you believe that, I have a URL that you should visit to verify all of your bank accounts and credit card numbers....
When the Social Security system "buys" a treasury bill, another branch of the government is on the receiving end. This branch spends the money on services or whatever, because it is running a deficit budget. So the money is gone. It can only be paid back by collecting future taxes, and/or by selling assets.
Well, yes. And when I buy a T-Bill personally, the government is borrowing from me so that it can run a deficit budget. Come to think of it, since the Social Security system is funded in part by my money, when Social Security buys a T-Bill, the government is also borrowing from me.
So what is the difference? Are you suggesting that the government should or will default on its debts? Are you saying that those of us who have invested our money in US Government securities are insolvent?
Yes, running a big deficit as the current administration has chosen to do, is unwise, and will run up taxes or require sale of assets in the future. But unless the US goes bankrupt and collapses, the government still has to repay its debts, and the people, institutions, and government departments that hold those debts are sitting on genuine assets.
America lucked out - baby boomers' fertility rates reached replacement (2.1 babies) and we have a lot of immigrants. That's why Social Security is safe in America (and Canada).
So by "lucked out," you mean that things have worked out pretty much as projected, so that the system has remained essentially solvent? Some might call that careful planning.
Most men, as well as most women, lack natural ability in math and science. So does it really matter whether there is a biological, as well as a social component, to the observation that the small minority of one sex that is particularly talented at these things seems a bit smaller than the small minority of the other sex that is particularly talented?
What troubles me most about the outcry is not so much that it dismisses out of hand something that is certainly a reasonable hypothesis, even if it turns out to be wrong, but rather the implication that it matters whether or not it is true. The attitude seems to be, "let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known."
The reporting of the issue reinforces this perception. Look at the summary in the OP. "Women lack natural ability at math." Well, certainly there are some women who do not lack natural ability at math. For the vast majority of men on the planet, it is possible to find quite a few women who are better at math than they are. So stated as an absolute generalization, it is obviously false. But that was not the hypothesis, which was merely that there is a biological component to the distribution of mathematical and scientific aptitude.
So let us be politically incorrect and suppose that it is true. Does this justify denying any individual woman a promotion or assigning her a lower salary? No, because anybody who is doing math or science is by definition not average, and probably pretty far out on the tail of the statistical distribution, so whether men or women on average are better at math/science is irrelevant--the only appropriate question is how good that particular individual is.
So I suppose that there is some small risk that Dr. Summers' comments might discourage some young woman from pursuing a career in math or science (although I suspect that most young woman with real aptitude would know instantly that such a remark does not apply to them). But far more damaging is the implication raised by the protests that if such a biological bias actually did exist, it would some how excuse or justify discrimination against women in these professions.
Nobody's gonna piss them off. DTV is just going to turn around and offer them a better* DVR for pennies or even for free.
Keep in mind that all of those existing SD DirecTiVo units are only costing DirecTV $1/month (and DirecTV charges customers $5/month). DirecTV hasn't bothered to switch out UltimateTV owners, so why would they switch SD DirecTiVo owners?
But there is much more to it than replacing Tivo. The new DVR will also introduce DirecTV's MPEG-4 capability and become the "standard DirecTV reciever" that everybody gets. You won't be able to buy a plain non-DVR box. DirecTV NEEDS to move to MPEG-4 NOW. They are out of bandwidth and have no room for the must-carry HD that will hit them hard starting in 2006.
The only MPEG-4 that they are adding in 2006 is HD locals. They plan to switch other HD channels to MPEG-4 sometime in the more distant future. No mention of switching SD channels to MPEG-4, and it probably doesn't make much sense. The potential bandwidth savings are less for SD, and the cost much greater, because they'd have to replace all of those thousands of SD receivers. HD is less problematic, because the market penetration is lower. The one case where they may need to offer a replacement or upgrade is the new HD DirecTiVo units. They have not yet announced what they plan to do here. It is a small enough number of units that they could probably afford to replace them if necessary. In any case, it won't be an issue for a few years. The HD DirecTiVo units get HD locals over the air, so most won't miss not having access to the new local HD MPEG-4 stations (which will also require an additional dish). So it won't be an issue for a few years, anyway.
Personally, if DirecTV drops TiVo altogether, I'll drop DirecTV. I switched from cable to DirecTV specifically for TiVo. If they abandon TiVo, I'll go back to cable. And with the CableCard HD TiVo DVRs coming out in a year or so, I'll probably be able to do so without losing features--presumably, I'd gain the TiVo enhancements like HMO that DirecTV has been so slow in rolling out.
TiVo should just get out of the hardware business completely. They've never done very well at it -- their product isn't terribly reliable
It is the reliability that has really sold me. It's one of those "It just works" products. No glitches, no crashes, even handles power failures gracefully.
I was at CES. DirecTV is dropping TiVo for their own new custom-built upcoming DVRs. From what I understand DirecTV currently provides some life support for TiVo in the form of a rather inexpensive licensing/subscription fee for each user--but that will go away.
Unlikely. DirecTV has their problems, but one thing they are very good at is maintaining support. They are still supporting Ultimate TV DirecTV units which have been out of production for years. And there are a lot of those DirecTiVo DVRs out there. Pissing all of those customers off would be suicide.
Tivo is toast. It's a great product without question. The issue is that all the major cable companies (Comcast, Cox, etc.) are building those capabilities into the set top box.
I switched from Comcast to satellite to get high definition dual tuner TiVo service. I may consider switching back to cable once the CableCard TiVos become available next year, because DirecTV has lagged in supporting recent TiVo features.
It seems to me that TiVo has a major window of opportunity here. Once the CableCard 2.0 standard is available, TiVo will be able to offer all of the features of a high-definition cable box + DVR, and TiVo's monthly fee is not that different from what the cable companies are charging. They will even be able to compete with cable PPV by offering internet rental of Netflix titles direct to the user's HD.
And since cable users don't own their cable boxes, they have no financial commitment, and can potentially be wooed to TiVo. I don't think TiVo will take over the cable box market from the cable companies, but they could well establish themselves as the videophile cable box. This seems to me a better gamble than trying to make a life as indentured servant to Comcast, pulling in just pennies a month per box.
If what you need is a function, that is dumb.
Nobody needs an mp3 player. People want music players to be able to satisfy their esthetic tastes in music. So why shouldn't they also want to satisfy their esthetic tastes in design?
So your girlfriend is shallow and obsessed with beauty, even for products that are supposed to spend 99% of their time hidden away in your pocket and doing what they are supposed to be doing: playing music.
Since when is an appreciation of beauty "shallow"? It seems to me that somebody who appreciates both beauty and function has greater depth than somebody who only cares only about function and lacks a sense of esthetics.
Since iTunes came out, I've started buying a lot more CDs. The ability to have the same music in multiple places adds value to the CD. Pretty much everything I have I've ripped myself. In general, I don't bother with online music. I'd much rather have the CD as a backup, or to re-rip at higher quality when I have more storage, and if I buy it used, it's usually as cheaper or cheaper than online. As for pirated mp3's, who want's to bother with a copy ripped at unknown quality? I might accept an mp3 of a group I don't know, but if I like them, I'll order the CD.