It seems to me that the main customers of the service in question are parents who are too damn lazy to do their jobs. If a movie has objectionable content, just don't watch it. The TV set is not a babysitter, and children under the age of 8 don't need to see more than 20-30 minutes of TV per day (more has a negative impact on brain formation because the scenes change much faster than real life), and children under the age of two shouldn't see any television at all. Sticking kids in front of the TV all the time teaches them to be more sedentary, decreases attention span, and increases probability of a learning disability.
I'm not just talking out of my ass here either, I have an eight-year-old half brother who already has major problems with learning, hyperactivity, attention span, attitude, shitting his pants, and diet because his mother is content to plop him in front of Cartoon Network or an R-rated movie at any time, and he spends hours a day watching. On the other hand, my three-year-old son is allowed to watch one 20-minute episode of The Simpsons per day with all of the commercials removed, and I watch it with him to ensure that everything that happens on the screen is explained in context. During the summer, he hardly ever gets to watch because he is usually playing outside, he sees TV maybe once or twice a week.
Ah, that hoary old "the pot is stronger these days" myth again.
Try and wrap your melons around this for a second folks, it's a plant, and plants do not evolve in any substantially noticeable fashion in forty years. Pot today is just as potent as it was back in the sixties, it's just that there's more of the high-quality stuff around than there used to be, mostly due to advances in cultivation and breeding techniques.
A lot of older smokers will claim that pot today is stronger than it was when they were kids, and to them, it is. The reason is rooted in human physiology, not plant biology. As you age, your brain becomes more easily influenced by psychoactive chemicals because it is not producing it's own chemicals at the same rate it was able to blast out when the body was only twenty.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who buys their recreational substances off the street is taking a pretty serious chance, no matter what the substance or the time period. Buy from friends, grow/make your own, or do without.
And as long as the vast majority of the workforce in this country is massively addicted to stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, sugar, ginseng, etc.) it seems to be unbelievably hypocritical of 'grown-up America' to be scolding kids for jacking themselves up on a stronger stimulant in school; especially so given the fact that the kids are doing so in order to join the same stimulant-addled workforce.
Then end of an empire is never pretty, just look what happened to Rome, France, and Great Britain.
Now it's happening here. Debt is a staggering 6% of GDP, the citizenry is increasingly becoming uneducated and anti-intellectual, production of finished goods and raw materials are moving offshore, and the rights and freedoms that used to be the rallying cry of our nation are eroding one by one. We're sliding ever faster towards a fascist system of government, where large corporations and a single powerful semi-dictatorial government figure control everything in the country, for the benefit of those few corporate elites and to the detriment of everyone else. Much like the Roman Empire which slid from a representative republic to a monarchy to a dictatorship to a pile of ruins, the American Empire is unmistakably on the downslope of history now.
In my opinion, it can't happen soon enough. The collapse of the American Empire will end all the debates about using forceful interventions in foreign countries, we won't have the coin for it. We also won't have enough coin to fund these massively intrusive government programs, or the hugely bloated, corporate-welfare laden half-trillion a year "defense" outlay. Hopefully we will finally be able to pass clean-money laws, and get some people into office who are truly interested in the public good instead of the source of their next big fat corporate campaign contribution.
Re:I hope it does mean a new space race
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US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You have fundamentally misconstrued what the "space race" of the late 50s to early 70s was about. It was, in fact, all about destruction and wealth.
The space race was merely a way to put a pretty public face on the development of rockets powerful enough to boost nuclear weapons into a ballistic arc from which they could strike other continents, otherwise known as ICBMs. As with all "epic" war programs, this one primarily enriched the defense contractors involved, although it did actually create several usable weapons systems, unlike bigger boondoggles such as the Star Wars missile defense system.
The space race was ignited by Cold War hysteria on both sides, and perpetuated by politicians and defense contractors. The purpose of the space race was not to land on the moon, or orbit the first human, or any other such milestone. It was a way for the Soviets and Americans to very publicly show off the lift capacity of their rockets, demonstrating exactly how many megatons of destruction they would be capable of raining down on the other. American politicians had the added benefit of being able to bring jobs and prestigious facilities to their districts (ever wonder why most of NASA's major facilities are in the south? That's where the powerful politicians of the day hailed from.)
I live in one of these so-called "dangerous places", the San Francisco Bay Area, and have for my whole life. I've seen a big quake in action, up close and personal, back in 1989 (Loma Prieta). Although it took as long as ten years for full repairs to be completed on every structure damaged in the quake, life was largely back to normal about a month or so after it hit.
Of course, Loma Prieta is not the only big quake to have struck the area, there was the famous quake in 1906 that caused a fire so large it almost destroyed San Francisco. If the people back then had listened to naysayers like you instead of making risk-taking into a way of life, the Bay Area would be a very different place today. The Silicon Valley would likely never have come into existance, and you might well have typed your message on a fine IBM electric typewriter. Intel Corp. may have never invented the 4004 microprocessor. Compaq may have never reverse-engineered the IBM-PC. Apple wouldn't exist. Nor would Sun, Creative Labs, BSD-Unix, or AMD. Do I really have to keep going?
The unique culture that exists in the San Francisco Bay Area helped encourage many people to take some big risks that have changed the face of our planet and the lives of everybody on/. And yet we still have to listen to people tell us that our home is too dangerous, and we should leave. The tax argument isn't even a valid point in this instance, as California pays more federal taxes than the feds give back, so nobody else in the country is subsidising our choice of location.
Incorrect. MP3 compression affects all parts of the audible frequency spectrum. If you are careful when you encode them, and you set the quality settings to high enough values, you will get compressed audio that sounds good on consumer-level equipment, but I gaurantee you that if you put that MP3 on a pair of $50K-a-pop Meyer studio mains, you [b]will[/b] hear the difference between the compressed MP3 and the uncompressed PCM audio (.wav) I know this for a fact, because I have performed this comparison more than once.
Just because your MP3s sound good to you with your settings on your audio equipment do not mean that they have not lost any audio quality, it merely means that you cannot hear the lost quality. If you want to reduce file size and retain full quality, you either need to use lossless compression, or a packing scheme such as shorten (.shn)
You should have cheked the specs before you ranted. The Intel mac minis both have two DIMM slots already, and the DDR2 memory must be installed in pairs, so the price on a 2GB DDR2 module is irrelevant, as the 2GB configuration is using a pair of 1GB modules.
Also, I think if you make the machine large enoguh to accomodate a 3.5" HDD and a full-sized video card, you'll end up with a toaster-sized machine similar to the SFF PCs currently on the market. Part of the appeal of the mini is the fact that it's roughly the size of five CD jewel cases stacked up...anyone can free up that much desk space.
But the X makes it more extreme! Clearly the ATI X1900 XTX is the most EXTREME video card I could possibly have, because it has more Xs than any other card.
The way forward from here is plenty clear...next we'll have the X2000 SXTXX, then the even more EXTREME X2500XXXX XTXXSXXX, then the stage will finally be set for the arrival of total gaming nirvana...
The ATI X5XXX XXXXXTXXXXXXXXX, which will achieve triple the framerate of the previous generation, emit pleasing bursts of air freshener from the exhaust fan to cover the smell of geek, cost more than a McLaren F1, and most importantly it will totally rock your face with its EXTREMEness, because it will have more Xs than any other card.
Don't forget about the gigantic subsidies to large corn growers like Monsanto that help to make high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as cheap as it is.
Of course, no one factors in the health costs of HFCS, which causes accelerated obesity and all the corollary problems that come with obesity. The reason why HFCS is so much worse than sugar from a health stanpoint is that HFCS is approximately 60% fructose and 40% glucose, as opposed the the normal 50/50 mix you find in natural sugars which the human body is designed to handle. Putting HFCS in a human body is like putting diesel fuel into a gasoline engine...the fuel will burn, but the results will not be good.
After you factor in the percentages of record sales taken by the label(s), the engineer(s), the producer(s), the band's manager, and the fact that any remaining proceeds are obligated to pay back the record company's loan to the band to make the album, you'll see why very few artists ever make a dime from album sales. There are a few exceptions, but they are people like Eminem or Paul McCartney who sell millions upon millions of albums. The record saled from the few successful artists need to pay for the record company's investments in bands that flopped and could not repay their album loans.
Most bands make their money through touring and collecting concert and merchandise revenues, and it's been that way for a long time. The big record labels are foundering because they insist on trying to maintain this model and pump up the profits on record sales, instead of realizing that advances in digital technology mean that music is much easier to record and distribute, lowering the bar for entry as both an artist and as a listener.
So no, the artists really have no stake in this, except for the very small number that produce, record, release, and distribute all their own work. This is all about profit margins for the record companies.
"The difference between Delay's corruption and that of African nations is that in Africa people DIE because of that corruption. "
Oh really? So you're saying that Tom DeLay's corrupt political money machine has nothing to do with the fact that the GOP holds a majority in the House of Representatives? And I'm absolutely positive that the GOP majority has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the federal minumum wage has not gone up since 1997, even though inflation has, effectively slashing the paychecks of the poorest workers. And that desperate poverty definitely has nothing at all to do with the fact that we are 47th in the world in per-capita infant mortality rates. Babies are more likely to die if they're born in the USA than if they're born in Malaysia. Americans pay six times more than Europeans do for health care, and we get less for it.
But this fall we'll get $70 billion more in tax cuts for the super-wealthy thanks to that GOP majority, and since everyone knows that rich people love to go around buying health insurance, food, and medical supplies for throngs of poor people, maybe we can start to make a dent in the little problem of so many babies dying.
And Tom DeLay's corrupt, strong-arm, money politics is totally unrelated to all of this death.
Captain America was created around 1940, and his first arch-nemesis was Agent Axis. In the context of a global struggle with two sides, and he on the losing/underdog side, he makes sense as a character (the Axis sure seemed destined to win in 1940). Without it, he looks kinda like any old doofus wrapped in a flag.
Which is probably the reason his popularity peaked at the end of WW2.
That reminds me of a fun trick I learned seven years ago, when pagers were still popular.
You simply wait until two people you know with pagers are in the same toom together (preferrably with a group), then leave the room and page each of them with the other's pager number.
Then you go back into the room, wait for the pages to arrive, and see how long it takes them (and how many rounds of pager tag) to sort out what just happened.
Actually, it's a lot more likely that the government has the NSA working on China's (and everyone else's) servers.
The CIA doesn't have anything you wouldn't expect to see on their Scientists, Engineers & Technology career fields page. Pretty standard IT stuff you'd likely see at any large organization.
But only when notebook manufacturers start building their machines to be fully compatible.
Laptops are the 'killer app' for GUI-driven computing, period. In much the same way that DVD-Audio discs will not take off until people can play them in their cars, desktop Linux will not hit big until it can be run easily on laptops, lots of them.
Currently, there are two main problems with Linux on the laptop.
Winmodems. These horrible half-assed pieces of crap are worthless. Until there are real modems included with laptops, it's going to be extremely hard to get them working under Linux, if it's even possible.
Differentiated System Description Tables. Known as the DSDT for short, this file provides a complete heirarchical listing of every single ACPI-capable device in the system. Every single hardware manufacturer makes their mainboards and laptops to meet the specifications of the Microsoft compiler. Unfortunately, it is typical of MS products and is extremely error-tolerant. Linux uses Intel's much more exacting compiler. The result of this is that DSDTs will work in Windows, but usually not in Linux. This is the root of most ACPI-related Linux problems. Fixing it requires building Intel's compiler from source code, disassembling a copy of the system's DSDT, recompiling it, and checking for errors/warnings on the compiler's output. Then you get to go to the line numbers indicated and re-code the DSDT until it compiles without errors. I'm just getting started in programming land, so I'm not even positve what language they're in (I think it's C), but suffice to say it's a royal pain in the ass and far beyond the abilities of most users.
So if you want to see Linux make a play on the desktop, pester hardware manufacturers to make their gear so it will actually work under non-MS operating systems.
I have an Intel D845PEBT2 desktop board that allows up to a 4% overclock in the BIOS. The feature is labelled something like 'Stability Test', but it bumps up the FSB and memory speeds.
I bought it back in late 2002. Here's a link from Tom's just in case you're the skeptical type.
Look, before you climb up on your soapbox to browbeat people, make sure you have the facts.
Analog indeed cannot have a noise floor of 0dB. But neither can digital. Know why? Because microphones and preamps are not digital. Hell, there's even a very expensive plugin whose entire purpose is to create specific distortion created by certain microphones (Antares Microphone Modeller)
And although you can try and perfectly record the noise imparted by the analog sections of the signal chain with the fanciest Apogee A/D converter you can find, you won't get it quite right, and more importantly the average listener doesn't care, so it's a waste of resources to do it. As you already pointed out, they're not going to hear the difference on their $19 crap-box stereo, or their crummy mono clock radio.
As far as your claim that real studios don't use analog, it's just flat-out wrong. Those big-ass Neve and SSL large-format analog boards sure do seem to be a hell of a lot more popular than Studer's offerings, or Mackie's, or Yamaha's. A number of studios still have their twenty-four track (not sixteen) one-inch machines, and bounce things from console to tape to ProTools or Radar or whatever.
Let's not forget that digital has been on the pro recording scene for over 25 years...it's not exactly new, and engineers treat it the same way they treat every new technology. They shun it and dig themselves deeper into their rut, refusing to change one bit.
A new generation of folks who have grown up around computers and digital gear are responsible for driving the investment of the audio industry into digital gear. Every single engineer I know over the age of 45 insists that analog is superior, mostly because that's the way they've always done things.
Neither is really superior, they both have their advantages. A gigantic analog setup sure does give that 'studio' flavor to a recording, not to mention how cool you feel because you know what all those knobs and buttons actually do. Digital puts the tools into everyone's hands so you don't need a deep-pocketed record company to record an album.
I say use whatever you can get your grubby little mitts on to make the best recording you can make, and let the dweebs who want to carp about class A gear and the quality of their oxy-free cables have it out. Give the babies their bottles.
There's one thing that really bugs me about all the China-bashing that seems to be so popular in the capital these days...
China holds close to $700 billion of US govt. debt in T-bills
Originally, the purpose of this buying behaviour was to manipulate the fluctuation of the yuan, which until yesterday was pegged to the dollar. The unintended effect was that the US government started to spend like drunken sailors, financing all sorts of things with deficit spending. With the yuan now floating in relation to a basket of currencies instead of pegged to the dollar, the impetus to continue buying dollars to manipulate the yuan is greatly weakened.
Generally, when you owe a bank a lot of money, you don't run into the bank screaming about how evil they are, piss on the rug, and then set some trash cans on fire. It tends to make the bankers rather unwilling to keep underwriting your debt.
Okay, I'm getting pretty sick of hearing this whole "OSS doesn't innovate" line, cuz it just isn't true.
Example:
Timemachine is a small JACK application that records the previous 10s of audio from any JACK input. There is absolutely nothing like this in any commerical audio software AFAIK, and certainly nothing with the cross-app flexibility of a JACK-based application.
By far, the most common 'in-defense-of-windoze' post runs along the lines of "it sucks out of the box, but once you add SP2 with that spiffy software firewall, it's neat"
There are two main things wrong with that assertion.
1) Software firewalls are the crappiest kind of protection you could have. Even the best software firewall will never be as good as the cheapest standalone unit, merely because it is integrated into the host system and therefore intrinsically shares the host's faults/vulnerabilities, whatever they may be.
2) I have seen and heard reports of major SP2 malfunctions...like losing all ability to communicate using http and ftp, or not being able to read non-DNS'ed web adresses (entering IP adress instead of name results in no connection), or just flat-out refusing to burn data CDs, no matter the program. Since SP2 can't be uninstalled, this turns these minor problems into major problems requiring a system reinstall without SP2. And if you're unlucky enough to own a new copy of XP with SP2 integrated, then you're totally screwed.
SP2 may be the worst software release from Redmond since they dropped that big steaming turd that was WinME. If all the claims of Windows' new-found security and stability rest entirely on SP2...
Let's just say I'm not planning to move back to Windows anytime soon.
Well, as a trained audio engineer, I have to say this article is interesting, but mostly garbage.
Screwing around with the power supply is just stupid, a decent Tripp-lite conditioner or a UPS would handle line noise much better, simpler, and more safely..
Replacing the op-amps with better ones is probably the best tip in the whole article, and the only thing that is likely to have a serious impact on the sound. Replacing caps and other components in the signal path will have some effect.
The jacks have to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
All this 'gold-plated, super oxy-free' stuff is pure hokum. Sure, the cables might conceivably make a difference when you're using an Apogee converter to run audio from your RME Hammerfall through your $50K amp to your $250K mastering monitors.
But on a consumer-level system with unbalanced jacks? Please.
Unbalanced cable can only be run for 3 feet without serious risk of RFI and EMI corrupting the signal. You can run balanced cable 1000 feet before you face similar risks.
Pro recording and audio environments use almost entirely balnced gear, because it provides the signal quality necessary for major recording projects. For cable, it's plain old Mogami or Belkin. We break out the fancy-looking gold-braided super cable when we get a cranky performer who insists that our gear is simply not capturing his muse, because he always delivers perfect performances. Slap those into the mic chain, and watch them listen to the playbacks, nod knowingly, and say "Yeah...it sounds right now"
Nothing has acutally changed, but it sure makes some people feel better, and the same thing is at work in the audiophile arena.
Sure, different compositions of metals have different abilities to conduct signal, but once you get to a certain level of qaulity (which all basic cables meet), it doesn't matter too much.
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It seems to me that the main customers of the service in question are parents who are too damn lazy to do their jobs. If a movie has objectionable content, just don't watch it. The TV set is not a babysitter, and children under the age of 8 don't need to see more than 20-30 minutes of TV per day (more has a negative impact on brain formation because the scenes change much faster than real life), and children under the age of two shouldn't see any television at all. Sticking kids in front of the TV all the time teaches them to be more sedentary, decreases attention span, and increases probability of a learning disability.
I'm not just talking out of my ass here either, I have an eight-year-old half brother who already has major problems with learning, hyperactivity, attention span, attitude, shitting his pants, and diet because his mother is content to plop him in front of Cartoon Network or an R-rated movie at any time, and he spends hours a day watching. On the other hand, my three-year-old son is allowed to watch one 20-minute episode of The Simpsons per day with all of the commercials removed, and I watch it with him to ensure that everything that happens on the screen is explained in context. During the summer, he hardly ever gets to watch because he is usually playing outside, he sees TV maybe once or twice a week.
Try and wrap your melons around this for a second folks, it's a plant, and plants do not evolve in any substantially noticeable fashion in forty years. Pot today is just as potent as it was back in the sixties, it's just that there's more of the high-quality stuff around than there used to be, mostly due to advances in cultivation and breeding techniques.
A lot of older smokers will claim that pot today is stronger than it was when they were kids, and to them, it is. The reason is rooted in human physiology, not plant biology. As you age, your brain becomes more easily influenced by psychoactive chemicals because it is not producing it's own chemicals at the same rate it was able to blast out when the body was only twenty.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who buys their recreational substances off the street is taking a pretty serious chance, no matter what the substance or the time period. Buy from friends, grow/make your own, or do without.
And as long as the vast majority of the workforce in this country is massively addicted to stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, sugar, ginseng, etc.) it seems to be unbelievably hypocritical of 'grown-up America' to be scolding kids for jacking themselves up on a stronger stimulant in school; especially so given the fact that the kids are doing so in order to join the same stimulant-addled workforce.
Now it's happening here. Debt is a staggering 6% of GDP, the citizenry is increasingly becoming uneducated and anti-intellectual, production of finished goods and raw materials are moving offshore, and the rights and freedoms that used to be the rallying cry of our nation are eroding one by one. We're sliding ever faster towards a fascist system of government, where large corporations and a single powerful semi-dictatorial government figure control everything in the country, for the benefit of those few corporate elites and to the detriment of everyone else. Much like the Roman Empire which slid from a representative republic to a monarchy to a dictatorship to a pile of ruins, the American Empire is unmistakably on the downslope of history now.
In my opinion, it can't happen soon enough. The collapse of the American Empire will end all the debates about using forceful interventions in foreign countries, we won't have the coin for it. We also won't have enough coin to fund these massively intrusive government programs, or the hugely bloated, corporate-welfare laden half-trillion a year "defense" outlay. Hopefully we will finally be able to pass clean-money laws, and get some people into office who are truly interested in the public good instead of the source of their next big fat corporate campaign contribution.
The space race was merely a way to put a pretty public face on the development of rockets powerful enough to boost nuclear weapons into a ballistic arc from which they could strike other continents, otherwise known as ICBMs. As with all "epic" war programs, this one primarily enriched the defense contractors involved, although it did actually create several usable weapons systems, unlike bigger boondoggles such as the Star Wars missile defense system.
The space race was ignited by Cold War hysteria on both sides, and perpetuated by politicians and defense contractors. The purpose of the space race was not to land on the moon, or orbit the first human, or any other such milestone. It was a way for the Soviets and Americans to very publicly show off the lift capacity of their rockets, demonstrating exactly how many megatons of destruction they would be capable of raining down on the other. American politicians had the added benefit of being able to bring jobs and prestigious facilities to their districts (ever wonder why most of NASA's major facilities are in the south? That's where the powerful politicians of the day hailed from.)
I live in one of these so-called "dangerous places", the San Francisco Bay Area, and have for my whole life. I've seen a big quake in action, up close and personal, back in 1989 (Loma Prieta). Although it took as long as ten years for full repairs to be completed on every structure damaged in the quake, life was largely back to normal about a month or so after it hit.
Of course, Loma Prieta is not the only big quake to have struck the area, there was the famous quake in 1906 that caused a fire so large it almost destroyed San Francisco. If the people back then had listened to naysayers like you instead of making risk-taking into a way of life, the Bay Area would be a very different place today. The Silicon Valley would likely never have come into existance, and you might well have typed your message on a fine IBM electric typewriter. Intel Corp. may have never invented the 4004 microprocessor. Compaq may have never reverse-engineered the IBM-PC. Apple wouldn't exist. Nor would Sun, Creative Labs, BSD-Unix, or AMD. Do I really have to keep going?
The unique culture that exists in the San Francisco Bay Area helped encourage many people to take some big risks that have changed the face of our planet and the lives of everybody on /. And yet we still have to listen to people tell us that our home is too dangerous, and we should leave. The tax argument isn't even a valid point in this instance, as California pays more federal taxes than the feds give back, so nobody else in the country is subsidising our choice of location.
Just because your MP3s sound good to you with your settings on your audio equipment do not mean that they have not lost any audio quality, it merely means that you cannot hear the lost quality. If you want to reduce file size and retain full quality, you either need to use lossless compression, or a packing scheme such as shorten (.shn)
Also, I think if you make the machine large enoguh to accomodate a 3.5" HDD and a full-sized video card, you'll end up with a toaster-sized machine similar to the SFF PCs currently on the market. Part of the appeal of the mini is the fact that it's roughly the size of five CD jewel cases stacked up...anyone can free up that much desk space.
Really? You can put 500 songs on a CD-R at 5MB each? Where, pray tell, have you found these magical CDs with 2500MB or more of storage space?
The way forward from here is plenty clear...next we'll have the X2000 SXTXX, then the even more EXTREME X2500XXXX XTXXSXXX, then the stage will finally be set for the arrival of total gaming nirvana...
The ATI X5XXX XXXXXTXXXXXXXXX, which will achieve triple the framerate of the previous generation, emit pleasing bursts of air freshener from the exhaust fan to cover the smell of geek, cost more than a McLaren F1, and most importantly it will totally rock your face with its EXTREMEness, because it will have more Xs than any other card.
Of course, no one factors in the health costs of HFCS, which causes accelerated obesity and all the corollary problems that come with obesity. The reason why HFCS is so much worse than sugar from a health stanpoint is that HFCS is approximately 60% fructose and 40% glucose, as opposed the the normal 50/50 mix you find in natural sugars which the human body is designed to handle. Putting HFCS in a human body is like putting diesel fuel into a gasoline engine...the fuel will burn, but the results will not be good.
After you factor in the percentages of record sales taken by the label(s), the engineer(s), the producer(s), the band's manager, and the fact that any remaining proceeds are obligated to pay back the record company's loan to the band to make the album, you'll see why very few artists ever make a dime from album sales. There are a few exceptions, but they are people like Eminem or Paul McCartney who sell millions upon millions of albums. The record saled from the few successful artists need to pay for the record company's investments in bands that flopped and could not repay their album loans.
Most bands make their money through touring and collecting concert and merchandise revenues, and it's been that way for a long time. The big record labels are foundering because they insist on trying to maintain this model and pump up the profits on record sales, instead of realizing that advances in digital technology mean that music is much easier to record and distribute, lowering the bar for entry as both an artist and as a listener.
So no, the artists really have no stake in this, except for the very small number that produce, record, release, and distribute all their own work. This is all about profit margins for the record companies.
Oh really? So you're saying that Tom DeLay's corrupt political money machine has nothing to do with the fact that the GOP holds a majority in the House of Representatives? And I'm absolutely positive that the GOP majority has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the federal minumum wage has not gone up since 1997, even though inflation has, effectively slashing the paychecks of the poorest workers. And that desperate poverty definitely has nothing at all to do with the fact that we are 47th in the world in per-capita infant mortality rates. Babies are more likely to die if they're born in the USA than if they're born in Malaysia. Americans pay six times more than Europeans do for health care, and we get less for it.
But this fall we'll get $70 billion more in tax cuts for the super-wealthy thanks to that GOP majority, and since everyone knows that rich people love to go around buying health insurance, food, and medical supplies for throngs of poor people, maybe we can start to make a dent in the little problem of so many babies dying.
And Tom DeLay's corrupt, strong-arm, money politics is totally unrelated to all of this death.
Which is probably the reason his popularity peaked at the end of WW2.
You simply wait until two people you know with pagers are in the same toom together (preferrably with a group), then leave the room and page each of them with the other's pager number.
Then you go back into the room, wait for the pages to arrive, and see how long it takes them (and how many rounds of pager tag) to sort out what just happened.
The hard part is not laughing
The CIA doesn't have anything you wouldn't expect to see on their Scientists, Engineers & Technology career fields page. Pretty standard IT stuff you'd likely see at any large organization.
The NSA, on the other hand, has some very interesting listings under the Computer Science section of their career fields page. They look suspiciously like pleasant euphemisms for very devious behaviour.
- Information Systems Security
- Vulnerability Discovery
I don't know about you, but that sure sounds like "protecting ours" and "breaking into theirs" to me...Laptops are the 'killer app' for GUI-driven computing, period. In much the same way that DVD-Audio discs will not take off until people can play them in their cars, desktop Linux will not hit big until it can be run easily on laptops, lots of them.
Currently, there are two main problems with Linux on the laptop.
So if you want to see Linux make a play on the desktop, pester hardware manufacturers to make their gear so it will actually work under non-MS operating systems.
I have an Intel D845PEBT2 desktop board that allows up to a 4% overclock in the BIOS. The feature is labelled something like 'Stability Test', but it bumps up the FSB and memory speeds.
I bought it back in late 2002. Here's a link from Tom's just in case you're the skeptical type.
Look, before you climb up on your soapbox to browbeat people, make sure you have the facts.
Analog indeed cannot have a noise floor of 0dB. But neither can digital. Know why? Because microphones and preamps are not digital. Hell, there's even a very expensive plugin whose entire purpose is to create specific distortion created by certain microphones (Antares Microphone Modeller)
And although you can try and perfectly record the noise imparted by the analog sections of the signal chain with the fanciest Apogee A/D converter you can find, you won't get it quite right, and more importantly the average listener doesn't care, so it's a waste of resources to do it. As you already pointed out, they're not going to hear the difference on their $19 crap-box stereo, or their crummy mono clock radio.
As far as your claim that real studios don't use analog, it's just flat-out wrong. Those big-ass Neve and SSL large-format analog boards sure do seem to be a hell of a lot more popular than Studer's offerings, or Mackie's, or Yamaha's. A number of studios still have their twenty-four track (not sixteen) one-inch machines, and bounce things from console to tape to ProTools or Radar or whatever.
Let's not forget that digital has been on the pro recording scene for over 25 years...it's not exactly new, and engineers treat it the same way they treat every new technology. They shun it and dig themselves deeper into their rut, refusing to change one bit.
A new generation of folks who have grown up around computers and digital gear are responsible for driving the investment of the audio industry into digital gear. Every single engineer I know over the age of 45 insists that analog is superior, mostly because that's the way they've always done things.
Neither is really superior, they both have their advantages. A gigantic analog setup sure does give that 'studio' flavor to a recording, not to mention how cool you feel because you know what all those knobs and buttons actually do. Digital puts the tools into everyone's hands so you don't need a deep-pocketed record company to record an album.
I say use whatever you can get your grubby little mitts on to make the best recording you can make, and let the dweebs who want to carp about class A gear and the quality of their oxy-free cables have it out. Give the babies their bottles.
China holds close to $700 billion of US govt. debt in T-bills
Originally, the purpose of this buying behaviour was to manipulate the fluctuation of the yuan, which until yesterday was pegged to the dollar. The unintended effect was that the US government started to spend like drunken sailors, financing all sorts of things with deficit spending. With the yuan now floating in relation to a basket of currencies instead of pegged to the dollar, the impetus to continue buying dollars to manipulate the yuan is greatly weakened.
Generally, when you owe a bank a lot of money, you don't run into the bank screaming about how evil they are, piss on the rug, and then set some trash cans on fire. It tends to make the bankers rather unwilling to keep underwriting your debt.
Nice reference though.
Example:
Timemachine is a small JACK application that records the previous 10s of audio from any JACK input. There is absolutely nothing like this in any commerical audio software AFAIK, and certainly nothing with the cross-app flexibility of a JACK-based application.
There are two main things wrong with that assertion.
1) Software firewalls are the crappiest kind of protection you could have. Even the best software firewall will never be as good as the cheapest standalone unit, merely because it is integrated into the host system and therefore intrinsically shares the host's faults/vulnerabilities, whatever they may be.
2) I have seen and heard reports of major SP2 malfunctions...like losing all ability to communicate using http and ftp, or not being able to read non-DNS'ed web adresses (entering IP adress instead of name results in no connection), or just flat-out refusing to burn data CDs, no matter the program. Since SP2 can't be uninstalled, this turns these minor problems into major problems requiring a system reinstall without SP2. And if you're unlucky enough to own a new copy of XP with SP2 integrated, then you're totally screwed.
SP2 may be the worst software release from Redmond since they dropped that big steaming turd that was WinME. If all the claims of Windows' new-found security and stability rest entirely on SP2...
Let's just say I'm not planning to move back to Windows anytime soon.
Belden, of course. Multipair cable, specifically.
Canare makes good stuff too...most any reputable cable manufaturer does.
Monster Cable is...well...like Windows, a demonstration of the power of marketing.
Screwing around with the power supply is just stupid, a decent Tripp-lite conditioner or a UPS would handle line noise much better, simpler, and more safely..
Replacing the op-amps with better ones is probably the best tip in the whole article, and the only thing that is likely to have a serious impact on the sound. Replacing caps and other components in the signal path will have some effect.
The jacks have to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
All this 'gold-plated, super oxy-free' stuff is pure hokum. Sure, the cables might conceivably make a difference when you're using an Apogee converter to run audio from your RME Hammerfall through your $50K amp to your $250K mastering monitors.
But on a consumer-level system with unbalanced jacks? Please.
Unbalanced cable can only be run for 3 feet without serious risk of RFI and EMI corrupting the signal. You can run balanced cable 1000 feet before you face similar risks.
Pro recording and audio environments use almost entirely balnced gear, because it provides the signal quality necessary for major recording projects. For cable, it's plain old Mogami or Belkin. We break out the fancy-looking gold-braided super cable when we get a cranky performer who insists that our gear is simply not capturing his muse, because he always delivers perfect performances. Slap those into the mic chain, and watch them listen to the playbacks, nod knowingly, and say "Yeah...it sounds right now"
Nothing has acutally changed, but it sure makes some people feel better, and the same thing is at work in the audiophile arena.
Sure, different compositions of metals have different abilities to conduct signal, but once you get to a certain level of qaulity (which all basic cables meet), it doesn't matter too much.