The primary reason that theatre sound is so good isn't because of 13 (or 16 or 19, or whatever they move to) speakers, it's because there is acoustic modelling done on the room. This allows them to make sure that the sound reflections are controlled (ie. you aren't in a box, you're out on a battlefield/whatever), hence all the dampening materials & acoustic cavities on the walls.
Translate this into a standard room in a house, and all you can do is hope to cover reflections (yeah, right) and hope things sound ok. Realistically we're not that good at pinpointing the locations of noises, 14 speakers seems like a bit of overkill, especially if you're doing one bass track.
Looking at the propogation of sound waves and sound reflections, in a small room there is no way you could pick out 13 speakers, most days 5 may be pushing it (aside from the fact that the centre channel is often used to boost character voices).
Hmmm, stereo manufacturers must be seeing the their 7.1 system sales tapering off.
This case actually has a couple of interesting points (as seen upthread), the kids are under 18, nad unable to enter into a legally binding contract, if the parents had agreed to the terms of service, they may be in trouble. This of course assumes that the parents in any way granted permission for the school to give their children laptops, access to school resources, etc.
Also, as pointed out up-thread, illegal access of computers, and specifically the law they are possibly being charged under, would be very hard to apply in all but a few specific situations, assuming that no files were removed, no financial transation was impacted, and no physical damage was done.
Hmmm, interesting, but did they actually do any of these?
(1) Doubtful, they may have added information to their own laptops, but I doubt they would have removed any, especially with the security so easily beaten. That is unless someone got the bright idea to format his "friend's" laptop. (2) Once again unlikely, if so, it would have been caught by the helpdesk. (3) A re-iteration of point one for all intents and purposes. (4) Really unlikely, had anything financial been altered, you can be sure that would be at the head of the story, with the value inflated tenfold. (5) Physical injury of a laptop through the network.... yeah sure, keep dreaming.
Nice to see people wave laws around as threats, hmm I wonder if the kids parents have ever heard of a little term called bartery, the nice police officer was nice enough to supply his name.
Ah well, once again, litigation and charges are not all the answers, why not take the simple solution and give the kids detention (and possibly hire them to *properly* secure the network), and fire the IT staff.
*Ding* *ding* *ding* We have a winner, give it two years and not only will McAfee have an RSS plug-in, but I'll be wondering why the fsck my RSS reader is grabbing 60 meg videos every time I turn around.
Text is a beautiful thing, and a great communication medium, quit taking the simple, elegant, and functional and "extending" it into garbage.
Hmmm, "embrace and extend" sounds entirely too gentle and involved, somehow given Microsoft's current involvement with RSS (read, pretty much nil). I think "trample" is the more appropriate description.
I think the parent has hit the idea on the head, don't run a pay per song service over P2P, run a subscription/"all you can eat" service over P2P. This way incentives can even be thrown in to have servers push popular content on your machine (as opposed to only offering what you've bought).
This way the content provider can pro-actively spread load across the network and improve d/l speeds, and people get rewarded based on u/l bandwidth supplied and storage space supplied. The only downside is the monthly bill will fluctuate, but at least it will shrink, not grow.
The real benefit I see with the "all you can eat" strategies (at least from the consumer prospective, not necessarily the record company) is that it allows, and possibly encourages people to explore new music, and hopefully break the top 40 stranglehold on music we currently have.
As has been pointed out in parent and elsewhere, websites cost money to run and maintain, which requires revenue. I'm more than willing to have a reasonable number of banner/text ads on free sites I read, and even click through if it looks interesting (if it appeals to me, why not learn more?).
As things get worse with the banner/text ad business (AdBlock, hired click-throughs, whatever else), its value is going to drop as advertisers see less and less return, and people will have to look elsewhere to generate revenue for their sites. You know what this probably means? Pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, and ever more annoying forms of advertising designed to catch your attention. I personally would rather avoid the great cat and mouse game between advertisers and ad-blockers, and stick with something nice and simple that works for both sides without irritating the crap out of me.
You don't want the ads? Don't visit the site, or chip in and help the site run with less/no ad revenue.
So true, however, as stated up-thread, Microsoft got an amazing coder/project manager from Open Source, because he lost his shirt starting Gentooo.
Personally I side with Daniel completely (ok, here goes the karma), he's gotten himself in with a suceessful company hopefully with a career path, and he is still the founder of Gentoo.
I hope Gentoo succeds beyond all expectations, and I know Daniel will appreciate it. I also hope that Daniel earns the life he deserves as an extremely intelligent person and leader, and if Microsoft helps in this, all the better.
I tend to take the broader view, yes there are people who will excel regardless; however, they are few and far between. If I want someone in the trenches, who remembers what's been done before, and re-creates it without error (and maybe a minor improvement), techies are the way to go. A good techie is great at tactical work, dealing with the details and getting things right.
Once you've been though University, you should be a thinker, and someone that considers the strategic view, Ican tolerate minor implementation mistakes (if I let you near it), as long as you're doing it to advance the company/project as a whole, not just doing it 'cause it needed done.
The collelary of all this: Bad Techs kill themselves off, bad Engineers kill Techies. Therefore you can tell the smart techies 'cause they ignore the Engineers (until proven competant).
It's interesting, IBM actually received the bulk of our laptop orders, and *all* off the field and upper management orders. They were reliable, solid (well, bullet-proof really) machines that really seemed to rival Apple in the "just works" category.
We know we paid a premium to buy IBM as opposed to Dell or someone, but the difference was worth it, especially when having to replace *another* LCD screen on a Dell that fell apart being hauled too and from the office. I can only imagine how often our field laptops would have required repair/replacement, we looked at going with Toughbooks once, but the additional cost wasn't justified with what the Thinkpads were capable of.
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The primary reason that theatre sound is so good isn't because of 13 (or 16 or 19, or whatever they move to) speakers, it's because there is acoustic modelling done on the room. This allows them to make sure that the sound reflections are controlled (ie. you aren't in a box, you're out on a battlefield/whatever), hence all the dampening materials & acoustic cavities on the walls. Translate this into a standard room in a house, and all you can do is hope to cover reflections (yeah, right) and hope things sound ok. Realistically we're not that good at pinpointing the locations of noises, 14 speakers seems like a bit of overkill, especially if you're doing one bass track. Looking at the propogation of sound waves and sound reflections, in a small room there is no way you could pick out 13 speakers, most days 5 may be pushing it (aside from the fact that the centre channel is often used to boost character voices). Hmmm, stereo manufacturers must be seeing the their 7.1 system sales tapering off.
This case actually has a couple of interesting points (as seen upthread), the kids are under 18, nad unable to enter into a legally binding contract, if the parents had agreed to the terms of service, they may be in trouble. This of course assumes that the parents in any way granted permission for the school to give their children laptops, access to school resources, etc. Also, as pointed out up-thread, illegal access of computers, and specifically the law they are possibly being charged under, would be very hard to apply in all but a few specific situations, assuming that no files were removed, no financial transation was impacted, and no physical damage was done.
Hmmm, interesting, but did they actually do any of these?
(1) Doubtful, they may have added information to their own laptops, but I doubt they would have removed any, especially with the security so easily beaten. That is unless someone got the bright idea to format his "friend's" laptop.
(2) Once again unlikely, if so, it would have been caught by the helpdesk.
(3) A re-iteration of point one for all intents and purposes.
(4) Really unlikely, had anything financial been altered, you can be sure that would be at the head of the story, with the value inflated tenfold.
(5) Physical injury of a laptop through the network.... yeah sure, keep dreaming.
Nice to see people wave laws around as threats, hmm I wonder if the kids parents have ever heard of a little term called bartery, the nice police officer was nice enough to supply his name.
Ah well, once again, litigation and charges are not all the answers, why not take the simple solution and give the kids detention (and possibly hire them to *properly* secure the network), and fire the IT staff.
*Ding* *ding* *ding* We have a winner, give it two years and not only will McAfee have an RSS plug-in, but I'll be wondering why the fsck my RSS reader is grabbing 60 meg videos every time I turn around. Text is a beautiful thing, and a great communication medium, quit taking the simple, elegant, and functional and "extending" it into garbage.
Hmmm, "embrace and extend" sounds entirely too gentle and involved, somehow given Microsoft's current involvement with RSS (read, pretty much nil). I think "trample" is the more appropriate description.
I think the parent has hit the idea on the head, don't run a pay per song service over P2P, run a subscription/"all you can eat" service over P2P. This way incentives can even be thrown in to have servers push popular content on your machine (as opposed to only offering what you've bought). This way the content provider can pro-actively spread load across the network and improve d/l speeds, and people get rewarded based on u/l bandwidth supplied and storage space supplied. The only downside is the monthly bill will fluctuate, but at least it will shrink, not grow. The real benefit I see with the "all you can eat" strategies (at least from the consumer prospective, not necessarily the record company) is that it allows, and possibly encourages people to explore new music, and hopefully break the top 40 stranglehold on music we currently have.
As has been pointed out in parent and elsewhere, websites cost money to run and maintain, which requires revenue. I'm more than willing to have a reasonable number of banner/text ads on free sites I read, and even click through if it looks interesting (if it appeals to me, why not learn more?). As things get worse with the banner/text ad business (AdBlock, hired click-throughs, whatever else), its value is going to drop as advertisers see less and less return, and people will have to look elsewhere to generate revenue for their sites. You know what this probably means? Pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, and ever more annoying forms of advertising designed to catch your attention. I personally would rather avoid the great cat and mouse game between advertisers and ad-blockers, and stick with something nice and simple that works for both sides without irritating the crap out of me. You don't want the ads? Don't visit the site, or chip in and help the site run with less/no ad revenue.
So true, however, as stated up-thread, Microsoft got an amazing coder/project manager from Open Source, because he lost his shirt starting Gentooo. Personally I side with Daniel completely (ok, here goes the karma), he's gotten himself in with a suceessful company hopefully with a career path, and he is still the founder of Gentoo. I hope Gentoo succeds beyond all expectations, and I know Daniel will appreciate it. I also hope that Daniel earns the life he deserves as an extremely intelligent person and leader, and if Microsoft helps in this, all the better.
I tend to take the broader view, yes there are people who will excel regardless; however, they are few and far between. If I want someone in the trenches, who remembers what's been done before, and re-creates it without error (and maybe a minor improvement), techies are the way to go. A good techie is great at tactical work, dealing with the details and getting things right. Once you've been though University, you should be a thinker, and someone that considers the strategic view, Ican tolerate minor implementation mistakes (if I let you near it), as long as you're doing it to advance the company/project as a whole, not just doing it 'cause it needed done. The collelary of all this: Bad Techs kill themselves off, bad Engineers kill Techies. Therefore you can tell the smart techies 'cause they ignore the Engineers (until proven competant).
It's interesting, IBM actually received the bulk of our laptop orders, and *all* off the field and upper management orders. They were reliable, solid (well, bullet-proof really) machines that really seemed to rival Apple in the "just works" category. We know we paid a premium to buy IBM as opposed to Dell or someone, but the difference was worth it, especially when having to replace *another* LCD screen on a Dell that fell apart being hauled too and from the office. I can only imagine how often our field laptops would have required repair/replacement, we looked at going with Toughbooks once, but the additional cost wasn't justified with what the Thinkpads were capable of.