Frankly I've been playing music on my PC since the late 90s and I have to say i don't get why anybody would WANT to play a CD or LP more than the once it takes to rip 'em. I mean with all my tunes on my hard drive I can have a kicking back mix, a "wake my dead ass up" mix, hell I can set it to random and hear something I may have completely forgotten I have, its just so much nicer than playing a single disc at a time or even using a disc changer.
Now I'm starting to do the same to my movie collection, found some killer freeware that loads all the info into WMC, artwork, synopsis, all that jazz, and its just so nice to be able to just spin through my movie collection with just a flick of the wrist and have it all ready to go, just so much more convenient.
Maybe when the prices come down to pre-flood levels i'll agree with ya, but so far the only drives I'm seeing close to pre-flood prices are the Seagates which frankly are a game of hardware roulette thanks to bad ARM controllers and shitty firmware.
I mean if ALL you do is music? Then sure, why not. but I have music AND movies AND games AND software and all that adds up pretty damned quickly. You seen how much space a single game takes lately? Jesus Tap Dancing Christ these downloads are getting HUGE, its gotten to the point i fully expect to shell out a good $20-$30 more for my Internet every time that Steam has a sale thanks to my going over the cap.
So until I can snatch a 1TB for $37 or a 2TB for $65 like I was doing pre-flood I'll rip my CDs into 320k MP3 and then just put the CD up in case i need to rip to lossless later.
Now THAT I would jump on in a heartbeat, the reason I don't have to advertise anymore is my customers have spread the word that you get a system from me and the thing 1.-Lasts a good long time and 2.- Has plenty of upgrade paths, so that would be right up their alley.
The problem is you have the king of commodity OSes trying their damnedest to kill off anything commodity because Steve "I work at Cupertino herpa derp" Ballmer thinks he can throw a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and its NEVER gonna happen. it took 10+ years for Steve Jobs to convince the world that Apple was an upscale brand and with Ballmer shitting money chasing one fad after another they can't afford to sit a decade out.
But ya know what pisses me off the most? Before Win 8 came and shit all over the UI there was nothing wrong with the desktop and in fact that was the reason WHY desktop sales have slowed down, it has finally become a rock solid reliable machine! Hell the LOW END builds I sell are Athlon triples with 4GB of RAM, these are powerful enough I have an engineer customer doing his robotics models on one and is VERY happy with its performance so he simply sees no need to replace, not that he would have to as I make sure that all my systems can take a bare minimum of a quad and most can go hexacore or octocore and 8-32GB of RAM limits so plenty of upgrade room.
Frankly it wouldn't be hard at all to make a tablet or smartphone that was easily fixable and used commodity parts but the problem is companies like Apple and MSFT have gotten spoiled on those 2-3 year upgrade cycles and don't want to face the fact that most people? just don't need that much power. It is THIS reason why I hate the rise of the game console so damned much, because its becoming obvious that when they can't force the user to buy because the hardware is better (which like X86 before it ARM is about to slam into the thermal wall too) they are gonna force them with software. "Oh you want to run the latest browser? Sorry but that requires Win 9 or iPad 7 so you'll just have to buy a new system" because they can simply change the APIs enough that new software won't run on the older units and that's that and it fricking stinks. this isn't like before where Intel and AMD were making such leaps in design that a 3 year old PC was several times slower than the latest model, nope this is all about greed and keeping wall street happy by making sure there is turnover whether its needed or not.
This is why I think the future is gonna suck, they are gonna get it set up so by the time a device is out of contract you'll have to throw it away, not because it won't have the power to run what you want but because corporate won't LET it run what you want. And for all those that went "Poo poo, M$ is evil, Apple is good" take a good damned look because you are gonna get to see what an Apple led future looks like and its gonna blow worse chunks than before, mark my words.
That is the weird thing...its totally random. One time it might last 2 weeks, the next 2 days, and he isn't doing anything different. As far as boards go nope, first board was an Asus OEM I had pulled out of a good working HP, second board new Intel, third either Asus or Gigabyte, so no commonality there, and I'm afraid I don't have a kill-a-watt ATM because some asshat must have slipped it in their pocket and walked out the door of the shop because damned if i could find the thing last time I looked.
As for PSU we are on the third, because naturally that was the first thing I thought of, first was a no name OEM, second was an Antec, third was a coolermaster. These weren't high dollar because the guy is a minimum wage worker so I have to stay within his budget but I have used these units before with no worries, hell the Antec actually came out of my own gaming PC, I let him have it cheap as I was planning on going CFire and the Antec only had a single PCIe cable. But here is the bitch...the PSUs? Seem to be fine. i plugged in a power piggie P4 I had lying in the back and left it running on the Antec for a couple of hours...purred like a kitten. Can't find any damage at all which you'd think if he was getting enough of a spike to roast the board it would kill the PSU wouldn't you?
Like I said I told him call an electrician because frankly I'm all out of ideas, I hate to have to keep having the guy buy more boards only to have them fry, hell I'm not even charging him labor anymore because I feel sorry for the run of bad luck the guy has been having but I've got boxes that have been in the field for years without a single glitch, this last time before handing it to him I ran stress tests for hours and left the system running 3 days...no worries, no heat issues, nothing. So its gotta be something to do with him or his environment its the what that has me stumped.
Dude the guy is a mechanic in a local shop...you price gaming laptops lately? No way in hell he can afford that, hell the only reason he has a laptop is because I found him a netbook cheap on Craigslist. he just doesn't make that kind of money so its a non starter since the main thing he wants the PC for is to play his flight sims. I'd say the minimum laptop that would run what he wants to play would be a good $600+ which is just waaaay out of his league.
So while its nice you have that kind of money I try my damnedest to serve everybody, rich and poor, young and old, hell i even keep a couple of late model P4s in the shop for those that can't afford any better so I can't just tell the guy "LOL make more monies LOL" and blow him off, hence why I'm trying to find somebody here that can give me an idea I haven't thought of.
Uhhh...what EXACTLY does that have to do whether you can hear a difference or not? If the discussion would have been over the merits of selling lossless tracks? i would have agreed 100% that its better to get the lossless track and then compress it yourself for whatever you need but that wasn't the topic, the topic was whether these audiophiles can actually tell a difference sound wise.
As I said I sat in a very nice studio with reference monitors that cost more than most will spend on their entire system and i honestly could not tell a difference so purely on basis of sound there is no difference between 44.1k and 192k, what format you want as far as for re-encoding and whatnot is an entirely different matter.
I think the problem is people listen to crap once, think "oh well if X is crap then X-Z is crap" and there ya go. I mean sure you listen to a 128k MP3 and its gonna suck on decent phones, but just because 128k sucks on decent phones doesn't mean 256K and up is gonna suck, its really apples to oranges.
Personally I think they all have their place, i use low bitrate in my truck because all the background noise means 128k will do just fine there whereas in my apt I prefer 320k, its all about the right format for the right place.
Well to be really REALLY fair I have noticed it also matter if the original music was recorded in analog or digital, as I've taken some tracks we've cut in a classic studio with the analog 8-track and its really fricking hard to get those to sound really..."right" for want of a better term as its really hard to describe, when it is compared to digital.
The closest I can get to describing it is this and sorry if you aren't a musician but they'll know of which I speak...you know how you have that great old tube amp for the guitar and it has that nice warm fat feel to it? Notice how the same amp when modeled digitally doesn't doesn't quite have the warmth? Its kinda...artificial sounding? That was the trouble we had, the tapes sounded nice and warm but trying to get that to switch over to digital was fucking hard, frankly it was easier to just cut the tracks again in a digital studio than it was to get the analog tapes to really convert well.
Sorry if I'm not describing it correctly but music is one of those things where my terminology often fails me, its so hard to describe feelings and emotions and music for me is an emotional expression so I end up having to try to describe how I felt as I listened or played and my vocabulary fails me, the analog was a little fuzzy but it was warm and lived in feeling while trying to convert that to digital something was lost in translation, no other way I know how to say it. the same tracks recorded natively in digital sounded great, analog sounded great, but putting the two together was just something we never could get to work.
You are 100% correct, I have sat in a $100k studio with $5k reference monitors and heard my tracks played back at both 192k and at 44.1k and honestly? Couldn't tell the difference, i really couldn't. And while my midrange hearing may not be the greatest I'm picky as hell when it comes to low end and that is usually the first thing that goes when you compress but standard 44.1k? Couldn't tell the difference which if there was gonna be a difference i would have heard it on that system, it was top notch. I'm sure many here can bring citations showing double blind tests which i have no doubt show its all placebo, because if I can't hear it in a nice studio with the actual live instrument right beside it i doubt seriously anybody is gonna hear a difference with home gear, even high end home gear.
It wasn't some ultra gamer PSU but it wasn't shitty, a nice midrange Coolermaster and the one before that an Antec, both appear to be working fine still its JUST the boards, but it doesn't seem to matter who the board is by or what CPU I put in it because within a month the board gets cooked...somehow. Honestly I still can't find a mark on the board, whatever its doing doesn't leave any physical damage I can see, but the board won't come on at all, its like there is no power to the board, its a puzzler.
Not this guy, hell he apologizes for having to call me, its like he's embarrassed like he is doing something but doesn't know what because he isn't the most computer literate guy but he never does anything that I don't tell him to do, if I say do something he does and if i say don't he don't, so that isn't it.
As far as parts not bad? As far as I can tell the CPUs aren't bad, i yanked 'em out of the board and put them in another which I later sold, worked just fine, RAM checks, the graphics card used to be mine and i put it back in my old system to see if it has issues, it works fine, the ONLY thing I can tell you for certain is bad is the boards but damned if I can figure out WHY they are bad, not a mark on 'em. When we changed the board and CPU last we went ahead and changed the PSU but I have the PSU here in the shop and I plugged it into a spare board I had lying around and it seems to be working just fine so whatever it is only seems to cook the boards. As far as what UPS I had him get something similar to this one, like I said the guy doesn't make a whole lot of money so I had to get something he could afford.
I told him to call an electrician and have the lines checked but since its ONLY the desktop being cooked I'm probably reaching but I'm all out of ideas. the guy is a mechanic at a shop so its not like he can afford one of those industrial UPS units or a gamer laptop but so far the laptop has been perfectly fine ONLY the desktop is affected...I'm stumped.
I haven't changed the cables but the monitor is less than a year old and he doesn't have any pets or kids or anything that one would expect to damage such things and when i went out there I wired it myself and took a damned good look at all the cables and they all look new, nothing out of the ordinary that I can find.
That is why this is such a puzzler, normally I can trace back the damage and go "Aha, it is this that caused it!" but I can't even tell you WHY the boards no longer work, they just don't. No burnt smell, no burnt traces, no blown caps, I've gone over his last board in the shop with a fine tooth comb and if you just were handed it you'd swear it was a new board, i can't find a single mark or blemish it just will NOT do anything, its like its not getting power which of course made me think PSU but we are on our third PSU now and still nothing...I'm stumped, I told him to call an electrician and have the wiring checked but since he is ONLY blowing the desktop I'm probably grabbing at straws here, but I'm out of ideas.
No printer, nothing plugged in but a single USB flight stick and a standard PS2 mouse and keyboard, that's it. His Internet is a little Modem to the local WISP but its the same one that he uses on his laptop so if it was that it would do the same to the laptop but the laptop is fine, power supply is new and I usually figure a good 150w over what they need so they have room to grow, in this case the PSU calc said 230w so I went with a 450w and this is the second PSU, both different brands so that ain't it, no bugs, no metal or anything like that, the system is sitting on a plain glass table and he is only touching plastic so no way he is somehow conducting, and this is the second case he has had so its not the case and its not heat as the desktop and laptop are in the same room and he has his desktop farther away from the wall than I do mine and his was a dual core to my hexacore...
Damned if I know which is why I didn't care about getting modded offtopic because I am running out of ideas. The last time I had a real head stumper i posted here and somebody pointed out something I had thought of, that someone had hacked the firmware on the router to allow him access to the system so I'm hoping somebody again will think of something I haven't but its not any of the usual suspects as literally there isn't anything in common, I've changed every damned part at least once and still had it blow. I went over the last board with a magnifying glass and I can't see any obvious damage, I was hoping that would give me a clue, but there isn't anything, it just no longer works. So I'm seriously stumped here.
Yep, this is actually the THIRD power supply because I thought that was what was going bad...nope, still blows. In no particular order I've changed PSU, RAM, boards twice, two different CPUs, and 2 cases...nada. I can't for the life of me figure out what is causing this, I can't find a single mark on the boards but they are totally dead, they won't even come on like they would with a fried northbridge, just nothing.
UPS is brand new and checks, power supply was brand new...fucking every damned thing was brand new which is what makes it such a head scratcher. And that is the weird thing...I can't find a mark on the boards, no burnt traces, no blown caps, they just don't work anymore, damned if I can figure out why. I have his previous board sitting here in the shop and the CPU will fire just fine in another board but no CPU will fire with that board, its just dead. It doesn't fire up but give you no output like a cooked northbridge, it just doesn't do anything.
The tower was on a glass table and before that a wood table so no joy there, house was recently built so I thought wiring, hence UPS, but whatever its doing is ONLY cooking the desktops, a laptop in a plain jane power strip is totally fine. No bugs, I've seen roaches cook a system before so I thought of that but there isn't any signs of any kinds of bugs, and I've been to his place to do service calls so i would have noticed.
This is really got me bashing my head againt the wall, hell I'm not even charging the guy labor anymore because he's a nice guy and i don't want to have to keep handing the guy bills when i can't say WTF is causing this but I'm seriously running out of ideas. I've never seen a case where a board will blow after replacing everything under the sun, and I DO mean everything, this is the second case, third PSU, third board and CPU, second RAM, I'm running out of parts to change out here and the damned thing just keeps blowing up.
Sadly Crosshair it won't, if you looked at Dell's actual performance they had been doing BETTER than before the downturn for the past 2 years but because they are not a hip trendy company that attracts speculators their stock stayed in the dumps. I'm sure I gave you that video on what is wrong with the stock market, so much money being poured into the system has distorted the market so badly actual performance means nothing anymore, its all about catching the speculators eye with short term jumps.
I mean does anybody REALLY think Apple stock is worth its current price? that when the main products have become saturated and the only thing they have in the pipe is a fricking "iWatch" that they are gonna have another iPad on their hands? of course not but all those speculators that go "Wow Apple devices are expensive so they MUST be good" cause lots of short surges in the stock which cause speculators to herd like lemmings. You just have too much money chasing too little real value so thing gets cock eyed.
But dell is a perfect example of what to do, they ignored the street and had already gotten back up to pre downturn levels. Sales up, costs down, profits up, who in the hell cares what the street thinks if all of that is true about your company? What MSFT SHOULD be doing is taking a page from IBM and offering services and support in addition to the software. Companies don't want to give up XP? Fine if enough companies pay support contracts we'll keep supporting it...BAM! Big influx of money as companies with thousands of XP units would rather pay a support contract than deal with the mess of changing out that many units. People like Win 7 over 8? Fine and dandy, sell them channels for their WMC that let their PC become the center of entertainment by making deals with the big producers..BAM! Another big influx of cash.
Frankly it would not be hard AT ALL to have MSFT making good consistent money right now but because Ballmer is a marketing droid he ONLY cares about what the street thinks while ignoring the fact the speculators will NEVER think of MSFT as a trendy brand, its just not gonna happen. he thinks he can slap a coat of paint and turn Pinto into Porsche and that shit just ain't happening, all he is doing is bleeding customers to the competition.
Bullshit its become a status thing. Hell my fricking dad asked about getting an iPhone, he can't even work the stuff he has on his Android phone and frankly hates smartphones so why would he want an iPhone? Because the other big wigs has one so he has the urge to keep up with the Joneses, that's all. I saw a girl struggling like hell to juggle her purse and a shopping cart because she was using a damned iPad for a fricking grocery list. The dirty look when I said "Trying to justify shelling out all that money huh?" told me all I needed to know, she had no real use for the thing, it was ALL about status but now that she had the thing she couldn't think of enough ways to be seen with it to justify the expense.
That is one thing I always gave Jobs credit for, he could take what should be a boring device and make it into a Rolex watch, something that the wealthy have and the poor want, even if they have no fucking real use for the thing and something half the price would do just as well...like a Rolex watch actually. Its all about the illusion of status and classism, of making those around think you are better than you are, and it fricking stinks. Its no different than those $300 Jordan sneakers, is there any. single. thing. that makes a Jordan somehow "better" other than the price tag? Nope made in the same Chinese sweatshops where you get cheaper sneakers from but BECAUSE it costs $300 it is therefor better. It reminds me of the hostage situation on Robocop "I want a 6000 SUX that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage" because in the commercials built into Robocop the fact you could afford to drive such a gas hog was its entire appeal, it showed money meant nothing to you which is why all the execs in that movie were in 6000 SUXs.
It is like I have always said, a popular black market is proof "You are doing it wrong". Either your prices are too high, you are too restrictive, something, because if you were making your customers happy then the black market wouldn't be popular. Look at how swapping MP3s was once big but now services like Spotify and YouTube have killed a good chunk of that, there really is no reason to bother with P2P when you can have just about any single in return for putting up with a couple of ads.So I really wouldn't blame the people of Australia from just going P2P as its obvious the market isn't serving their needs.
This is gonna be OT but fuck it, there are still some geeks here and I have come across a real head scratcher...here is the sitch, got a customer, mid 50s, plays flight sims and surfs, that's it, but somehow he keeps blowing up computers. for some reason he doesn't blow up laptops JUST desktops, and I can't for the life of me figure out HOW he is doing it. Tried putting it on a UPS in case the power was bad? No good, still blew. I have replaced damned near every part in that machine with new parts, new parts that would still be going if it were anybody else, new CPU, new board, new RAM, the only parts I haven't replaced yet is the case and the GPU but I know the GPU is good as it was mine and I baby my gear and never had a single glitch and the case belonged to my oldest boy who gamed on it for ages without a single hiccup.
So I don't get it, how in the fuck can one old guy keep blowing fucking boards like that? Is it possible to have something wrong with a line that can get past a UPS? Correct me if I'm wrong but I was always told a UPS has the PC run off the battery so that any surges or sags wouldn't affect the PC. And the real stumper is the laptop...why isn't it frying? Its an old Atom netbook so its not like this thing is quality but whatever is causing this has affected it not at all, its ONLY the desktops that blow up. I just can't seem to figure this one out as it doesn't seem to matter where the parts come from, whether they are new or used, it always ends with the system just shutting smooth off and never firing up again. Real head scratcher. I have taken his CPUs and slapped them in another board and had them fire right up so I'm pretty sure he is somehow frying out the boards (although I can't find any obvious damage like blown caps) but I just can't figure out HOW, how can one old guy playing 7 year old flight sims blow up a motherboard protected by a UPS?
FUCK THAT. Seriously fuck that bullshit. You ever try to get parts for any of that shit? Can't do it, doesn't matter if the fucking thing is $700 they expect you to throw it away. there is exactly one dude in town that will deal with that shit and when i asked him how he leads me out back and he has like a 4 car fucking garage filled with NOTHING but dead mobile devices for parts...fuck that, fuck that locked down fucking garbage, I'll go back to playing behind God damned chicken wire before I be a party to that customer fucking horseshit.
And I knew people that switched to windows precisely because Apple burned them on backwards compatibility. back in the day you did NOT do DTP or graphics on anything but a Mac and I had some friends that had invested heavily in Mac software. when Apple left them high and dry? Boy were they pissed off.
Now sadly we are seeing the same shit with MSFT, windows 8 bombs so what is the word on Windows Blue? "More touch integration!" yeah because every PC has a touchscreen now...facepalm. I swear if they don't fire that fucking sweaty chimp in 5 years MSFT is gonna be RIM, a company that USED to be huge but now only has legacy customers and even they are looking at exit strategies.
Yep, with my ex's workplace they found a way to fire the bitch but quick, as the experienced staff was leaving in fucking DROVES. Nothing kills a business quicker than a member of the PC police. Sure enough they get rid of the bitch and what do you know? the owner is able to get back a good 90% of the staff that had left "for various reasons". yeah the various reasons was the bitch making the office into a damned tomb.
Which is frankly bumming me the hell out, this is the first time since i got into tech in the late 70s that I have thought the future is actually gonna be shittier than what we have now. before things always got better, systems got faster, prices went lower, the generations were just better and better...now? Its fucking game consoles man, that is ALL it is, fucking locked down game consoles in phone or tablet or whatever form and the public eats that shit up because it means they don't have to think because there is no thought involved with a game console, mommy corp takes care of everything so don't you worry your pretty little head none. They'll tell you what to buy, when to buy a new one, it'll all be controlled and as user friendly as a TV remote and just as worthless for anything not approved by corporate.
Its fucking depressing man, you got Google building DBs on everybody that would make the Stasi jealous, you got Apple seeing how locked down they can make a device and still get the public to buy, and you got MSFT being Apple's bitch and copying every bad feature of Apple without any good, the whole thing fucking stinks.
This is why I was against DMCA and am against six strikes on the ISP side because there is no penalty no matter how bullshit the claims are as long as you own the copyrights and trademarks.
You could put out a review saying "This product sucks and here is why" and the way the rules are set up now the owners of that product line could get it yanked from the web and possibly lose you your net connection depending on how many bullshit strikes you have already gotten, which if you are reviewing anything its really not hard to rack 'em up, look at how several got their YouTube channels banned for talking about a 20 year old fricking game series after Sega spammed DMCA notices to anybody that dared speak about it, and it wasn't a product they sell anymore or even bad reviews!
The entire system is tilted so damned far in favor of those with copyrights its not even funny, as TFA shows you can use DMCA to get rid of anything you don't like and there is zero penalty for filing blatantly false claims, any way you slice it that is fucked up.
Exactly, the woman was one of those "politically correct or die!" ultra radicals that frankly make a workplace into a shithole. My ex had one of those at her work and man they just could not wait to find an excuse to fire the bitch, they went from having a fun working environment where everybody cracked jokes and had a good time to a place that was like working in a mortuary. She even tried to get my ex labeled as racist for telling an Indian joke...and she is a fricking Navajo! When people would confuse her with Mexican and start speaking Spanish at her she'd go "Me no Mexican, me Indian, me kind scalp your kind" which always got a laugh and diffused what could have been embarrassing situation for the person that made an assumption based on skin color but nope, can't have that when little miss cob up her ass was around.
So I'm sorry for the guys but after reading her comments I say good riddance to Ms PC Police, I hope she has trouble finding work because I've dealt with them before and if you want to take all the joy and happiness out of a workplace? just hire one of these little politically correct types and watch the mood deflate like air out of a balloon, they really need to lighten the fuck up.
Same damned thing happened with MSFT, they USED to put out relatively consistent products, now its just rehashing what Apple does even when it makes no damned sense, like putting an iPad style UI on a desktop which even Apple doesn't do.
I personally call this "the curse of PPT math" as that is what seems to be the culprit, a company comes along, builds a base, people start becoming loyal to the product....then here come the beancounters. They start cranking out PPTs and Excel sheets and saying things like "Well if you look at the stock price its obvious we need to do" or "If you look at our competitor's quarterly earnings and stock price then its obvious we need to do"...fuck you you beancounting little shits, unless you are a financial services company on K street you should NOT be focused on pleasing fucking Wall Street, you should be focused on pleasing YOUR CUSTOMERS and making top notch products. do THAT and watch your company grow, don't? You become another risk averse money hungry dinosaur ripe for getting your throat cut by a new company that focuses on listening to the customer instead of Wall Street.
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Frankly I've been playing music on my PC since the late 90s and I have to say i don't get why anybody would WANT to play a CD or LP more than the once it takes to rip 'em. I mean with all my tunes on my hard drive I can have a kicking back mix, a "wake my dead ass up" mix, hell I can set it to random and hear something I may have completely forgotten I have, its just so much nicer than playing a single disc at a time or even using a disc changer.
Now I'm starting to do the same to my movie collection, found some killer freeware that loads all the info into WMC, artwork, synopsis, all that jazz, and its just so nice to be able to just spin through my movie collection with just a flick of the wrist and have it all ready to go, just so much more convenient.
Maybe when the prices come down to pre-flood levels i'll agree with ya, but so far the only drives I'm seeing close to pre-flood prices are the Seagates which frankly are a game of hardware roulette thanks to bad ARM controllers and shitty firmware.
I mean if ALL you do is music? Then sure, why not. but I have music AND movies AND games AND software and all that adds up pretty damned quickly. You seen how much space a single game takes lately? Jesus Tap Dancing Christ these downloads are getting HUGE, its gotten to the point i fully expect to shell out a good $20-$30 more for my Internet every time that Steam has a sale thanks to my going over the cap.
So until I can snatch a 1TB for $37 or a 2TB for $65 like I was doing pre-flood I'll rip my CDs into 320k MP3 and then just put the CD up in case i need to rip to lossless later.
Now THAT I would jump on in a heartbeat, the reason I don't have to advertise anymore is my customers have spread the word that you get a system from me and the thing 1.-Lasts a good long time and 2.- Has plenty of upgrade paths, so that would be right up their alley.
The problem is you have the king of commodity OSes trying their damnedest to kill off anything commodity because Steve "I work at Cupertino herpa derp" Ballmer thinks he can throw a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and its NEVER gonna happen. it took 10+ years for Steve Jobs to convince the world that Apple was an upscale brand and with Ballmer shitting money chasing one fad after another they can't afford to sit a decade out.
But ya know what pisses me off the most? Before Win 8 came and shit all over the UI there was nothing wrong with the desktop and in fact that was the reason WHY desktop sales have slowed down, it has finally become a rock solid reliable machine! Hell the LOW END builds I sell are Athlon triples with 4GB of RAM, these are powerful enough I have an engineer customer doing his robotics models on one and is VERY happy with its performance so he simply sees no need to replace, not that he would have to as I make sure that all my systems can take a bare minimum of a quad and most can go hexacore or octocore and 8-32GB of RAM limits so plenty of upgrade room.
Frankly it wouldn't be hard at all to make a tablet or smartphone that was easily fixable and used commodity parts but the problem is companies like Apple and MSFT have gotten spoiled on those 2-3 year upgrade cycles and don't want to face the fact that most people? just don't need that much power. It is THIS reason why I hate the rise of the game console so damned much, because its becoming obvious that when they can't force the user to buy because the hardware is better (which like X86 before it ARM is about to slam into the thermal wall too) they are gonna force them with software. "Oh you want to run the latest browser? Sorry but that requires Win 9 or iPad 7 so you'll just have to buy a new system" because they can simply change the APIs enough that new software won't run on the older units and that's that and it fricking stinks. this isn't like before where Intel and AMD were making such leaps in design that a 3 year old PC was several times slower than the latest model, nope this is all about greed and keeping wall street happy by making sure there is turnover whether its needed or not.
This is why I think the future is gonna suck, they are gonna get it set up so by the time a device is out of contract you'll have to throw it away, not because it won't have the power to run what you want but because corporate won't LET it run what you want. And for all those that went "Poo poo, M$ is evil, Apple is good" take a good damned look because you are gonna get to see what an Apple led future looks like and its gonna blow worse chunks than before, mark my words.
That is the weird thing...its totally random. One time it might last 2 weeks, the next 2 days, and he isn't doing anything different. As far as boards go nope, first board was an Asus OEM I had pulled out of a good working HP, second board new Intel, third either Asus or Gigabyte, so no commonality there, and I'm afraid I don't have a kill-a-watt ATM because some asshat must have slipped it in their pocket and walked out the door of the shop because damned if i could find the thing last time I looked.
As for PSU we are on the third, because naturally that was the first thing I thought of, first was a no name OEM, second was an Antec, third was a coolermaster. These weren't high dollar because the guy is a minimum wage worker so I have to stay within his budget but I have used these units before with no worries, hell the Antec actually came out of my own gaming PC, I let him have it cheap as I was planning on going CFire and the Antec only had a single PCIe cable. But here is the bitch...the PSUs? Seem to be fine. i plugged in a power piggie P4 I had lying in the back and left it running on the Antec for a couple of hours...purred like a kitten. Can't find any damage at all which you'd think if he was getting enough of a spike to roast the board it would kill the PSU wouldn't you?
Like I said I told him call an electrician because frankly I'm all out of ideas, I hate to have to keep having the guy buy more boards only to have them fry, hell I'm not even charging him labor anymore because I feel sorry for the run of bad luck the guy has been having but I've got boxes that have been in the field for years without a single glitch, this last time before handing it to him I ran stress tests for hours and left the system running 3 days...no worries, no heat issues, nothing. So its gotta be something to do with him or his environment its the what that has me stumped.
Dude the guy is a mechanic in a local shop...you price gaming laptops lately? No way in hell he can afford that, hell the only reason he has a laptop is because I found him a netbook cheap on Craigslist. he just doesn't make that kind of money so its a non starter since the main thing he wants the PC for is to play his flight sims. I'd say the minimum laptop that would run what he wants to play would be a good $600+ which is just waaaay out of his league.
So while its nice you have that kind of money I try my damnedest to serve everybody, rich and poor, young and old, hell i even keep a couple of late model P4s in the shop for those that can't afford any better so I can't just tell the guy "LOL make more monies LOL" and blow him off, hence why I'm trying to find somebody here that can give me an idea I haven't thought of.
Uhhh...what EXACTLY does that have to do whether you can hear a difference or not? If the discussion would have been over the merits of selling lossless tracks? i would have agreed 100% that its better to get the lossless track and then compress it yourself for whatever you need but that wasn't the topic, the topic was whether these audiophiles can actually tell a difference sound wise.
As I said I sat in a very nice studio with reference monitors that cost more than most will spend on their entire system and i honestly could not tell a difference so purely on basis of sound there is no difference between 44.1k and 192k, what format you want as far as for re-encoding and whatnot is an entirely different matter.
I think the problem is people listen to crap once, think "oh well if X is crap then X-Z is crap" and there ya go. I mean sure you listen to a 128k MP3 and its gonna suck on decent phones, but just because 128k sucks on decent phones doesn't mean 256K and up is gonna suck, its really apples to oranges.
Personally I think they all have their place, i use low bitrate in my truck because all the background noise means 128k will do just fine there whereas in my apt I prefer 320k, its all about the right format for the right place.
Well to be really REALLY fair I have noticed it also matter if the original music was recorded in analog or digital, as I've taken some tracks we've cut in a classic studio with the analog 8-track and its really fricking hard to get those to sound really..."right" for want of a better term as its really hard to describe, when it is compared to digital.
The closest I can get to describing it is this and sorry if you aren't a musician but they'll know of which I speak...you know how you have that great old tube amp for the guitar and it has that nice warm fat feel to it? Notice how the same amp when modeled digitally doesn't doesn't quite have the warmth? Its kinda...artificial sounding? That was the trouble we had, the tapes sounded nice and warm but trying to get that to switch over to digital was fucking hard, frankly it was easier to just cut the tracks again in a digital studio than it was to get the analog tapes to really convert well.
Sorry if I'm not describing it correctly but music is one of those things where my terminology often fails me, its so hard to describe feelings and emotions and music for me is an emotional expression so I end up having to try to describe how I felt as I listened or played and my vocabulary fails me, the analog was a little fuzzy but it was warm and lived in feeling while trying to convert that to digital something was lost in translation, no other way I know how to say it. the same tracks recorded natively in digital sounded great, analog sounded great, but putting the two together was just something we never could get to work.
You are 100% correct, I have sat in a $100k studio with $5k reference monitors and heard my tracks played back at both 192k and at 44.1k and honestly? Couldn't tell the difference, i really couldn't. And while my midrange hearing may not be the greatest I'm picky as hell when it comes to low end and that is usually the first thing that goes when you compress but standard 44.1k? Couldn't tell the difference which if there was gonna be a difference i would have heard it on that system, it was top notch. I'm sure many here can bring citations showing double blind tests which i have no doubt show its all placebo, because if I can't hear it in a nice studio with the actual live instrument right beside it i doubt seriously anybody is gonna hear a difference with home gear, even high end home gear.
It wasn't some ultra gamer PSU but it wasn't shitty, a nice midrange Coolermaster and the one before that an Antec, both appear to be working fine still its JUST the boards, but it doesn't seem to matter who the board is by or what CPU I put in it because within a month the board gets cooked...somehow. Honestly I still can't find a mark on the board, whatever its doing doesn't leave any physical damage I can see, but the board won't come on at all, its like there is no power to the board, its a puzzler.
Not this guy, hell he apologizes for having to call me, its like he's embarrassed like he is doing something but doesn't know what because he isn't the most computer literate guy but he never does anything that I don't tell him to do, if I say do something he does and if i say don't he don't, so that isn't it.
As far as parts not bad? As far as I can tell the CPUs aren't bad, i yanked 'em out of the board and put them in another which I later sold, worked just fine, RAM checks, the graphics card used to be mine and i put it back in my old system to see if it has issues, it works fine, the ONLY thing I can tell you for certain is bad is the boards but damned if I can figure out WHY they are bad, not a mark on 'em. When we changed the board and CPU last we went ahead and changed the PSU but I have the PSU here in the shop and I plugged it into a spare board I had lying around and it seems to be working just fine so whatever it is only seems to cook the boards. As far as what UPS I had him get something similar to this one, like I said the guy doesn't make a whole lot of money so I had to get something he could afford.
I told him to call an electrician and have the lines checked but since its ONLY the desktop being cooked I'm probably reaching but I'm all out of ideas. the guy is a mechanic at a shop so its not like he can afford one of those industrial UPS units or a gamer laptop but so far the laptop has been perfectly fine ONLY the desktop is affected...I'm stumped.
I haven't changed the cables but the monitor is less than a year old and he doesn't have any pets or kids or anything that one would expect to damage such things and when i went out there I wired it myself and took a damned good look at all the cables and they all look new, nothing out of the ordinary that I can find.
That is why this is such a puzzler, normally I can trace back the damage and go "Aha, it is this that caused it!" but I can't even tell you WHY the boards no longer work, they just don't. No burnt smell, no burnt traces, no blown caps, I've gone over his last board in the shop with a fine tooth comb and if you just were handed it you'd swear it was a new board, i can't find a single mark or blemish it just will NOT do anything, its like its not getting power which of course made me think PSU but we are on our third PSU now and still nothing...I'm stumped, I told him to call an electrician and have the wiring checked but since he is ONLY blowing the desktop I'm probably grabbing at straws here, but I'm out of ideas.
No printer, nothing plugged in but a single USB flight stick and a standard PS2 mouse and keyboard, that's it. His Internet is a little Modem to the local WISP but its the same one that he uses on his laptop so if it was that it would do the same to the laptop but the laptop is fine, power supply is new and I usually figure a good 150w over what they need so they have room to grow, in this case the PSU calc said 230w so I went with a 450w and this is the second PSU, both different brands so that ain't it, no bugs, no metal or anything like that, the system is sitting on a plain glass table and he is only touching plastic so no way he is somehow conducting, and this is the second case he has had so its not the case and its not heat as the desktop and laptop are in the same room and he has his desktop farther away from the wall than I do mine and his was a dual core to my hexacore...
Damned if I know which is why I didn't care about getting modded offtopic because I am running out of ideas. The last time I had a real head stumper i posted here and somebody pointed out something I had thought of, that someone had hacked the firmware on the router to allow him access to the system so I'm hoping somebody again will think of something I haven't but its not any of the usual suspects as literally there isn't anything in common, I've changed every damned part at least once and still had it blow. I went over the last board with a magnifying glass and I can't see any obvious damage, I was hoping that would give me a clue, but there isn't anything, it just no longer works. So I'm seriously stumped here.
Yep, this is actually the THIRD power supply because I thought that was what was going bad...nope, still blows. In no particular order I've changed PSU, RAM, boards twice, two different CPUs, and 2 cases...nada. I can't for the life of me figure out what is causing this, I can't find a single mark on the boards but they are totally dead, they won't even come on like they would with a fried northbridge, just nothing.
UPS is brand new and checks, power supply was brand new...fucking every damned thing was brand new which is what makes it such a head scratcher. And that is the weird thing...I can't find a mark on the boards, no burnt traces, no blown caps, they just don't work anymore, damned if I can figure out why. I have his previous board sitting here in the shop and the CPU will fire just fine in another board but no CPU will fire with that board, its just dead. It doesn't fire up but give you no output like a cooked northbridge, it just doesn't do anything.
The tower was on a glass table and before that a wood table so no joy there, house was recently built so I thought wiring, hence UPS, but whatever its doing is ONLY cooking the desktops, a laptop in a plain jane power strip is totally fine. No bugs, I've seen roaches cook a system before so I thought of that but there isn't any signs of any kinds of bugs, and I've been to his place to do service calls so i would have noticed.
This is really got me bashing my head againt the wall, hell I'm not even charging the guy labor anymore because he's a nice guy and i don't want to have to keep handing the guy bills when i can't say WTF is causing this but I'm seriously running out of ideas. I've never seen a case where a board will blow after replacing everything under the sun, and I DO mean everything, this is the second case, third PSU, third board and CPU, second RAM, I'm running out of parts to change out here and the damned thing just keeps blowing up.
Sadly Crosshair it won't, if you looked at Dell's actual performance they had been doing BETTER than before the downturn for the past 2 years but because they are not a hip trendy company that attracts speculators their stock stayed in the dumps. I'm sure I gave you that video on what is wrong with the stock market, so much money being poured into the system has distorted the market so badly actual performance means nothing anymore, its all about catching the speculators eye with short term jumps.
I mean does anybody REALLY think Apple stock is worth its current price? that when the main products have become saturated and the only thing they have in the pipe is a fricking "iWatch" that they are gonna have another iPad on their hands? of course not but all those speculators that go "Wow Apple devices are expensive so they MUST be good" cause lots of short surges in the stock which cause speculators to herd like lemmings. You just have too much money chasing too little real value so thing gets cock eyed.
But dell is a perfect example of what to do, they ignored the street and had already gotten back up to pre downturn levels. Sales up, costs down, profits up, who in the hell cares what the street thinks if all of that is true about your company? What MSFT SHOULD be doing is taking a page from IBM and offering services and support in addition to the software. Companies don't want to give up XP? Fine if enough companies pay support contracts we'll keep supporting it...BAM! Big influx of money as companies with thousands of XP units would rather pay a support contract than deal with the mess of changing out that many units. People like Win 7 over 8? Fine and dandy, sell them channels for their WMC that let their PC become the center of entertainment by making deals with the big producers..BAM! Another big influx of cash.
Frankly it would not be hard AT ALL to have MSFT making good consistent money right now but because Ballmer is a marketing droid he ONLY cares about what the street thinks while ignoring the fact the speculators will NEVER think of MSFT as a trendy brand, its just not gonna happen. he thinks he can slap a coat of paint and turn Pinto into Porsche and that shit just ain't happening, all he is doing is bleeding customers to the competition.
Bullshit its become a status thing. Hell my fricking dad asked about getting an iPhone, he can't even work the stuff he has on his Android phone and frankly hates smartphones so why would he want an iPhone? Because the other big wigs has one so he has the urge to keep up with the Joneses, that's all. I saw a girl struggling like hell to juggle her purse and a shopping cart because she was using a damned iPad for a fricking grocery list. The dirty look when I said "Trying to justify shelling out all that money huh?" told me all I needed to know, she had no real use for the thing, it was ALL about status but now that she had the thing she couldn't think of enough ways to be seen with it to justify the expense.
That is one thing I always gave Jobs credit for, he could take what should be a boring device and make it into a Rolex watch, something that the wealthy have and the poor want, even if they have no fucking real use for the thing and something half the price would do just as well...like a Rolex watch actually. Its all about the illusion of status and classism, of making those around think you are better than you are, and it fricking stinks. Its no different than those $300 Jordan sneakers, is there any. single. thing. that makes a Jordan somehow "better" other than the price tag? Nope made in the same Chinese sweatshops where you get cheaper sneakers from but BECAUSE it costs $300 it is therefor better. It reminds me of the hostage situation on Robocop "I want a 6000 SUX that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage" because in the commercials built into Robocop the fact you could afford to drive such a gas hog was its entire appeal, it showed money meant nothing to you which is why all the execs in that movie were in 6000 SUXs.
It is like I have always said, a popular black market is proof "You are doing it wrong". Either your prices are too high, you are too restrictive, something, because if you were making your customers happy then the black market wouldn't be popular. Look at how swapping MP3s was once big but now services like Spotify and YouTube have killed a good chunk of that, there really is no reason to bother with P2P when you can have just about any single in return for putting up with a couple of ads.So I really wouldn't blame the people of Australia from just going P2P as its obvious the market isn't serving their needs.
This is gonna be OT but fuck it, there are still some geeks here and I have come across a real head scratcher...here is the sitch, got a customer, mid 50s, plays flight sims and surfs, that's it, but somehow he keeps blowing up computers. for some reason he doesn't blow up laptops JUST desktops, and I can't for the life of me figure out HOW he is doing it. Tried putting it on a UPS in case the power was bad? No good, still blew. I have replaced damned near every part in that machine with new parts, new parts that would still be going if it were anybody else, new CPU, new board, new RAM, the only parts I haven't replaced yet is the case and the GPU but I know the GPU is good as it was mine and I baby my gear and never had a single glitch and the case belonged to my oldest boy who gamed on it for ages without a single hiccup.
So I don't get it, how in the fuck can one old guy keep blowing fucking boards like that? Is it possible to have something wrong with a line that can get past a UPS? Correct me if I'm wrong but I was always told a UPS has the PC run off the battery so that any surges or sags wouldn't affect the PC. And the real stumper is the laptop...why isn't it frying? Its an old Atom netbook so its not like this thing is quality but whatever is causing this has affected it not at all, its ONLY the desktops that blow up. I just can't seem to figure this one out as it doesn't seem to matter where the parts come from, whether they are new or used, it always ends with the system just shutting smooth off and never firing up again. Real head scratcher. I have taken his CPUs and slapped them in another board and had them fire right up so I'm pretty sure he is somehow frying out the boards (although I can't find any obvious damage like blown caps) but I just can't figure out HOW, how can one old guy playing 7 year old flight sims blow up a motherboard protected by a UPS?
FUCK THAT. Seriously fuck that bullshit. You ever try to get parts for any of that shit? Can't do it, doesn't matter if the fucking thing is $700 they expect you to throw it away. there is exactly one dude in town that will deal with that shit and when i asked him how he leads me out back and he has like a 4 car fucking garage filled with NOTHING but dead mobile devices for parts...fuck that, fuck that locked down fucking garbage, I'll go back to playing behind God damned chicken wire before I be a party to that customer fucking horseshit.
And I knew people that switched to windows precisely because Apple burned them on backwards compatibility. back in the day you did NOT do DTP or graphics on anything but a Mac and I had some friends that had invested heavily in Mac software. when Apple left them high and dry? Boy were they pissed off.
Now sadly we are seeing the same shit with MSFT, windows 8 bombs so what is the word on Windows Blue? "More touch integration!" yeah because every PC has a touchscreen now...facepalm. I swear if they don't fire that fucking sweaty chimp in 5 years MSFT is gonna be RIM, a company that USED to be huge but now only has legacy customers and even they are looking at exit strategies.
Yep, with my ex's workplace they found a way to fire the bitch but quick, as the experienced staff was leaving in fucking DROVES. Nothing kills a business quicker than a member of the PC police. Sure enough they get rid of the bitch and what do you know? the owner is able to get back a good 90% of the staff that had left "for various reasons". yeah the various reasons was the bitch making the office into a damned tomb.
Which is frankly bumming me the hell out, this is the first time since i got into tech in the late 70s that I have thought the future is actually gonna be shittier than what we have now. before things always got better, systems got faster, prices went lower, the generations were just better and better...now? Its fucking game consoles man, that is ALL it is, fucking locked down game consoles in phone or tablet or whatever form and the public eats that shit up because it means they don't have to think because there is no thought involved with a game console, mommy corp takes care of everything so don't you worry your pretty little head none. They'll tell you what to buy, when to buy a new one, it'll all be controlled and as user friendly as a TV remote and just as worthless for anything not approved by corporate.
Its fucking depressing man, you got Google building DBs on everybody that would make the Stasi jealous, you got Apple seeing how locked down they can make a device and still get the public to buy, and you got MSFT being Apple's bitch and copying every bad feature of Apple without any good, the whole thing fucking stinks.
This is why I was against DMCA and am against six strikes on the ISP side because there is no penalty no matter how bullshit the claims are as long as you own the copyrights and trademarks.
You could put out a review saying "This product sucks and here is why" and the way the rules are set up now the owners of that product line could get it yanked from the web and possibly lose you your net connection depending on how many bullshit strikes you have already gotten, which if you are reviewing anything its really not hard to rack 'em up, look at how several got their YouTube channels banned for talking about a 20 year old fricking game series after Sega spammed DMCA notices to anybody that dared speak about it, and it wasn't a product they sell anymore or even bad reviews!
The entire system is tilted so damned far in favor of those with copyrights its not even funny, as TFA shows you can use DMCA to get rid of anything you don't like and there is zero penalty for filing blatantly false claims, any way you slice it that is fucked up.
Exactly, the woman was one of those "politically correct or die!" ultra radicals that frankly make a workplace into a shithole. My ex had one of those at her work and man they just could not wait to find an excuse to fire the bitch, they went from having a fun working environment where everybody cracked jokes and had a good time to a place that was like working in a mortuary. She even tried to get my ex labeled as racist for telling an Indian joke...and she is a fricking Navajo! When people would confuse her with Mexican and start speaking Spanish at her she'd go "Me no Mexican, me Indian, me kind scalp your kind" which always got a laugh and diffused what could have been embarrassing situation for the person that made an assumption based on skin color but nope, can't have that when little miss cob up her ass was around.
So I'm sorry for the guys but after reading her comments I say good riddance to Ms PC Police, I hope she has trouble finding work because I've dealt with them before and if you want to take all the joy and happiness out of a workplace? just hire one of these little politically correct types and watch the mood deflate like air out of a balloon, they really need to lighten the fuck up.
Same damned thing happened with MSFT, they USED to put out relatively consistent products, now its just rehashing what Apple does even when it makes no damned sense, like putting an iPad style UI on a desktop which even Apple doesn't do.
I personally call this "the curse of PPT math" as that is what seems to be the culprit, a company comes along, builds a base, people start becoming loyal to the product....then here come the beancounters. They start cranking out PPTs and Excel sheets and saying things like "Well if you look at the stock price its obvious we need to do" or "If you look at our competitor's quarterly earnings and stock price then its obvious we need to do"...fuck you you beancounting little shits, unless you are a financial services company on K street you should NOT be focused on pleasing fucking Wall Street, you should be focused on pleasing YOUR CUSTOMERS and making top notch products. do THAT and watch your company grow, don't? You become another risk averse money hungry dinosaur ripe for getting your throat cut by a new company that focuses on listening to the customer instead of Wall Street.