Are you saying that a real human never hits a blank spot? That you couldn't be put in a situation or asked a question which leaves you at a loss? Does that mean that "the charade is over" and you will tear your face off to reveal PC boards underneath?
I'm assuming the speed of sound "c" is relatively constant.
To reproduce sound down to wavelength L, a round horn should have at least diameter L/PI, which is c/(f * PI) where f is the frequency corresponding to L. C is roughly 1100 ft/s, so a horn subwoofer going down to 40 hz should have a mouth diameter of almost nine feet. This can be reduced by putting the speaker on the ground, near a wall, etc. But it points to why a no-compromises horn subwoofer is rarely built. A designer might design the horn to a higher cutoff frequency and use a different mechanism, like a tuned port, for the last half octave or so.
Another example, although this time "c" won't rear its head directly. A constant directivity horn has a width in inches of x, a design angle of theta in degrees, and a break frequency f - below f, the horn starts to lose pattern control and widen out. They are related by f = (10^6) / (theta * x). So a 100 degree horn 10 inches wide could preserve pattern control down to 1 khz. To preserve that control down to 500 hz, you'd need a 20" width. While c isn't in the equation (which is empirically derived) it's in the background - all length dimensions in audio equations come from it.
Now imagine a small PA speaker with a 12" woofer and a 90x40 high frequency horn, 12" wide by 4" high. The crossover frequency is 1600 hz. Horizontally, this horn is big enough to maintain control down to the xo frequency. But vertically, it loses control at 6250 hz! By the time it reaches the xo, it's basically omnidirectional. Why didn't the designers make it taller? Well if they made it 16" tall, adding a full foot to the height of this small speaker, most customers would find it unwieldy.
Imagine a 6 cubic foot speaker enclosure. It could be a home subwoofer, going down to 30 hz. Or it could be a small PA speaker, going down to 60 hz. But the home speaker works hard to hit its max output of 108 dB. The PA speaker is hardwly working at that output level - it can play at 126 dB, even if it's a cheaper product sold to musicians. If it's pro grade, it could play at 130 dB. There's a tradeoff between bass depth and loudness/quality.
Thanks. I think I share your horror at the arbitrary nature of the DMCA. Lately I have stepped back from sheer outrage to wonder how we can change things. The world we live in today is largely shaped by activist groups who clearly articulated their platform in a way legislators and the public could understand. So far, we haven't started to do that. We don't even have a platform - just a series of negative reactions to the other side's platform.
If you look at the money politicans receive (on opensecrets.org) the amounts are laughably small. And yet we aren't able to scrape up these contributions, and present a coherent case to our legislators. When congress passed the DMCA, I doubt that any of them even knew there was another side to the story. And how often do we read on slashdot about harmful legislation just passed or about to be passed? Shouldn't we find out further in advance? We need our NRA, our PETA, our Christian Coalition.
Thanks. As a boy, I worked for local sound companies, studied the important papers in audio engineering, and built my own speakers and horns. Then I studied EE, and worked in the sound contracting industry on theme park attractions, sports facilities and other stuff. I went from technician to engineering manager in eight years at various companies. Then I left to become a programmer.
Few people in the sound industry know much about acoustics or speaker design. They specify, buy and install black boxes. The best educational resource is the JAES - Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. I no longer remember how I figured out which papers were important. I spent days in the AES library in New York poring through old issues and xeroxing anything that looked interesting.
My background makes me skeptical of audio consumer products and of wild claims. Whenever I see a/. or wired story hyping some audio "technology" I feel disgusted - I was very cheered to see how skeptical the/. reaction to this story was. The problem is, people are used to awesome technological advances, but there really aren't any technological advances in loudspeakers. Correcting a speaker with a DSP is a cool innovation, but for decades we've had only incremental improvements in actual speakers. Speaker designs live at a balance point between cost, size, the speed of sound (remember c = f * wavelength), and properties of materials. These things don't change much, although the introduction of titanium diaphrams and neodymium magnets had some impact on pro sound.
I could jabber on about this topic forever (funny how the stuff you're not working on is always fascinating...). Feel free to ask any questions.
That's pretty naive. Whenever a corporation or government invests in an application, they are locked in. They face a nontrivial cost to migrate to a different application. It's true even for word processors and other desktop software, but it's especially true for accounting systems, payroll systems, and other enterprise software. The threat of lockin is very real and is a major factor in IT management decisions. Almost every large IT department is maintaing some aging crappy applications that they'd like to be rid of, but the switching costs are prohibitively high.
I get concerned when I see clauses such as those above when there is no corresponding clause for justifying Open source choice over proprietary.
Lots of agencies and corporations have rules that sole-source contracts (contracts not let through competitive bidding) must be justified. And no, they don't have rules requiring justification of competitive bidding - it's assumed to be the default. Does that concern you also?
The impact of DMCA on DeCSS and censorware are valid concerns. However, they have nothing to do with the topic of my post. I was responding to this:
So, anyone who really tries to understand the products their friends, family, or customers use is a black-hat, even though they are just trying to find security holes or hidden features.
That statement is just not true. Read Bugtraq for several days. You will see many researchers doing exactly that - probing commercial software products for bugs and hidden features. That activity is not banned by DMCA. I think you'll agree that if they had the ability, software companies would shut down the full-disclosure world.
Again, I'm not defending the DMCA. But it is not affecting the heart of the computer security community. You can set up Microsoft Exchange on your computer, probe it extensively for vulnerabilities, and publish a report showing a new vulnerability to the world. And the DMCA has nothing to say about it. But if you distribute a script to automate conversion of Apple's protected AAC files into MP3s, you're breaking the DMCA. While I'd like both those activities to be legal, the first one is far more important and integral to the security community.
I though the image example was pretty far-fetched. You could write similar scenarios about almost every law. We've been living under the DMCA for several years now. Why do we have to imagine a nightmare scenario? Why don't we already have nightmare scenarios happening? Because if you examine actual DMCA cases, they are not as simple and innocent as your scenario. The defendants set out quite deliberately to break the security of a copyright protection system. They weren't just using standard tools in a standard way.
I noticed that you closed your post on a note of despair. Things aren't as bad as you think. You are more likely to be killed by terrorists than to be arrested under the DMCA. The internet allows us to focus in on a Dmitri Sklyarov and feel his pain, while not realizing that every day Dmitri is in jail thousands are dying from car accidents, cancer, brutal dictatorships.
The feeling that the government is holding its mailed fist over the heads of computer users, ready to smash us at any second, is understandable, but is not supported by the numbers.
I'm also not convinced that equal distribution is a good thing.
Since I can't view the website, I don't know what, if anything, they're offering. But given a room with some reflections, speakers with a constant coverage angle and constant directivity can sound less colored by the room. This doesn't mean 360 degree coverage is a good idea - it will decrease the ratio of direct to reflected sound. However all practical speakers become 360 degree radiators below a certain frequency. So the question is, how should the speaker behave at the frequencies where directional control is possible?
In a typical multiway home speaker, each driver has a wide coverage angle near the bottom of its frequency range, narrowing to a small angle near the top of its range. Therefore the walls and ceiling receive a very uneven frequency response, which they pass on to the listeners. If you compensate this with equalization, life still isn't perfect because the direct sounds seem quite different in localization and character from the reflected sounds.
A typical small PA speaker will go from 360 degree radiation at low frequencies to 90 degrees at the top of the LF driver's range. Then we cross over to a HF horn carefully designed to match the LF coverage, at least horizontally. The HF horn will preserve a roughly 90x40 degree coverage to the top of its range. Thus the room reflections will be much less peaky and colored sounding. But there will be anomalies - for example, at the crossover point the woofer and horn will conspire to throw a narrow beam of sound in the vertical plane.
Going to a 360 degree design is one way to eliminate all these issues. It's not necessarily a horrible idea. It would probably work best with very dry recordings - recordings without much room sound or electronic reverb. It will inevitably blur transients - a "click" is going to sound fatter and fuller if reinforced by a substantial reflection from the wall behind the speaker.
Exactly. However, it doesn't mean they aren't good speakers. It just means that marketing departments don't aim at techies. The "ALT" buzzword rubs me the wrong way because "accoustic lens" actually means something - an array of parallel plates mounted in front of an exponential horn to diffuse sound. They lost relevance in the mid-70's when the constant-directivity horn was developed. There are still audiophiles using, and swearing by, accoustic lenses. Since I can't view the website, I don't know if B&O has resurrected this antique technology, but I doubt it. More likely their marketers didn't bother asking an audio engineer if the term was already taken.
In all fairness, there's a legitimate marketing reason for assigning names to "technologies", however trivial those technologies might appear to an engineer. Let's say this speaker takes off, and the manufacturer wants to make a smaller, cheaper one with some of the same ideas. They can say "the model 5000 has ALT and ABC". This helps them rub off some magic from the flagship product to something more affordable. I still don't like it, though.
I think the biggest thing you could do to eliminate the boxy low frequency resonances is get rid of the parallel walls and floor/ceiling. I realize this isn't easy. Could you built a stout partition running diagonally through the room and put the drummer in one triangle? Or you could cover two walls and the ceiling with randomly sized protrusions - maybe hand-carved foam with a skin of concrete. They need to be pretty rigid. The problem with that second idea is that it will only spread the resonance a bit, not get rid of it. Imagine a distribution curve of room widths. It will go from a single sharp peak to a fairly narrow hump. Actually this might work pretty well - one project I worked on had a tunnel with nonuniform (organic) roughly textured concrete walls. It was very accoustically dead - did not sound like a concrete tunnel at all.
Maybe cut off 3 corners of the room with diagonal partitions, choosing the dimensions for diversity of resonances? But then you approach a cylinder, which is even worse, because from the center of the room you see a relatively constant distance to the walls.
I'm sure you already know that the hard flat surfaces need soft stuff on top to avoid high frequency reflections - but that's the easy part.
The technique you're referring to is called impressioning, and is taught in locksmith schools. It's generally considered the crowning achievement of a locksmith.
This is not true. You are absolutely free to examine and reverse engineer software products in order to find security holes. What the DMCA prohibits is traficking in circumvention devices. Very few security advisories have anything to do with copy protection. While I think the DMCA is a bad law, you are exaggerating its scope. If I'm wrong, please tell me what "in-depth" activities that really should be legal have been outlawed as "computer terrorism".
You sound a bit young. May I assume that you have never had the responsibility of hiring someone? Whether you're spending your own money (your life savings) or your employer's, you are responsible for spending it wisely, in a way that will benefit the employer. Showing "guts" by placing yourself or your employer in legal/financial jeopardy is not the recipe for a long career or a profitable business. I'm not necessarily agreeing with the previous poster that the liability is significant - but if it is, a manager who ignores it to avoid looking like a pussy is not doing a good job.
Again, I suspect this is an age difference. As you get older, you discover that many seemingly unpleasant and pointless aspects of life exist for a reason.
So why don't you start a company and hire only convicts? They'd be cheap, right, being part of a permanent underclass. And they have something positive to contribute, right? You should enjoy a competitive advantage that would lead to great wealth.
Maybe you know something that today's businessmen don't. Or maybe not.
I'm surprised that you cite Java as an example of a terse language. I think it's insanely verbose. Can you give an example of Java that is more compact than the equivalent C or Perl?
I guess you haven't seen how it works in practice. The outsourcing company will place one or more people in the client building to handle meetings and customer requirements. The admins in India will access the machines via VPN. If substantial hands-on work is required, some "remote hands" techs will be stationed on-site. Compucom, for example, offers this level of tech. They make a lot less than a sysadmin. If you want that job, you can probably have it, but you might not like it.
You're probably right that the site you describe will be one of the last to switch, if ever. But don't underestimate the Indian outsource shops.
As for the incredibly demanding customers, generally IT outsourcing is accompanied by a lowering of expectactions. Sometimes the provider will only provide a limited menu of hardware, software and services at prices negotiated in the master agreement. I read that this is how the EDS-Navy contract is structured, and that users are limited to a narrow spectrum of software.
Being arrested and held for six weeks without charges isn't really in the same league as vanishing without a trace and showing up a decade later in a mass grave with signs of being tortured to death. Which is what's normally meant by "disappeared". How many people have been held six weeks without charges in the US in the last 20 years? I doubt anyone here knows. I think it's pretty common, though. It's just rare that the prisoner has a group of friends to put up a nationwide stink about it.
Once again we find ourselves reacting in surprise. Rosen has proposed copyright legislation for Iraq. What is "our" position, then, the position of computer users? Where's our model copyright legislation?
As long as we have no coherent positive idea, but only criticisms, we're bound to lose. Lots of you will blame the campaign contributions of the ??AA, and the "corruption" of elected officials. But imagine that you get to meet with General Garner and Hilary Rosen to discuss Iraq's copyright law. Hilary has a model piece of legislation, and the ability to relate it to international treaties and the laws of various countries, and to discuss how legislative choices will impact Iraq's economy and trading ability. You have a reflexive dislike for all intellectual property and not much more. Garner will hear from one side a detailed, thoroughly researched proposal that's in harmony with the trend of prosperous nations. From the other, he'll hear idealistic complaining, but nothing concrete or useful. Who will win? Who will persuade Garner to adopt his vision of copyright?
This is our challenge. On every front, our adversaries are defining the future they want, buttressing it with legal, moral and economic arguments and presenting it to decision-makers. We simply complain online and at most write reactive letters to the decision-makers when the ball is already rolling. Can we rise to the challenge and start defining a credible vision of the future that can be embraced by the non-geeks?
Good luck trying to make that point here. Slashdot seems to be afflicted with a kind of binary thinking, where generalizations cannot be accepted unless they're 100% true. The good slashdotter strives to make his brain like a computer - smoke pours out if something's illogical.
If you say that dogs are bigger than cats, you're wrong, 100% wrong, because somewhere, somewhen, there might be once cat that's bigger than one dog.
It goes deeper than idle chit-chat on the internet - one reason Microsoft captured hearts and minds is their ability to understand and run with the fuzzy linkages. For example, if you just requested a page from a web site, you're probably going to request some images to go with that page. (Slashdotter objects: "What if the page has no images?") Microsoft is good at optimizing for the common case, for the most likely outcome, while the classic geek mentality is to dwell on the most unlikely corner cases.
This question is addressed to CEO Darl McBride and SCOSource VP Chris Sontag, although it applies to the whole management team. What are your plans after the death of SCO? Won't you constitute a liability to any company you work for in the future, due to the association of your names with this lawsuit?
If you manage to get a ruling that seriously harms Linux, it will negatively impact tens of thousands of people worldwide. What effect do you think this will have on your personal life, and how will you cope with it?
They'll find something else to complain about. Between now and then, Bush can be counted on to:
Mispronounce a foreign name.
Offend the Arab world with some innocent piece of insensitivity.
Visibly hand rebuilding contracts to friends.
Maybe the left will get lucky and he'll buy an anatomically correct doll. Popping one "grievance" off the stack merely makes room for the next.
In fact, isn't "W" much like Quayle?
Back to your question: I wondered the same thing during the Monica scandal - all these Clinton supporters swore angrily that Clinton had not had sex with "that woman." I wondered how they could be so sure, and how they would apologize if they turned out wrong.
1: No torture (yet) is officially sanctioned in the US.
Google for "torture lite". While it doesn't compare to the actions of truly repressive regimes, I think the US has taken one more step down a slippery slope.
It made sense to charge users of touch-tone. The availability of touch-tone was a result of ongoing and expensive R&D. I realize that from a simplistic perspective "it doesn't cost them anything" to turn on touch-tone on one line. But it cost a lot to develop and field the technology, and it was fair for early adopters to help defray the cost.
As for Ringer Equivalence Numbers, they were intended to let the phone company continue to keep accurate records of the electrical characteristics of each subscriber line. Prior to the breakup, the number of feet of wire and number of ringers was noted on the "line card" - originally a piece of linen, and later a computer record. This was invaluable in troubleshooting line faults. Both ringers and line length contribute to line capacitance. Since some customer-provided equipment had less than a full "ringer's worth" of capacitance, it was labeled with the "ringer equivalence number" - typically 1 or a fraction. The theory was that the subscriber would report this number to the phone company, who could continue to maintain an accurate line card.
After the breakup, the whole thing seems to have been discarded. I think we generally accept a lower standard of troubleshooting and repair from the phone company now.
X can't even blit a window around the screen at full speed.
It can for me, both at home and at work. The home machine is 233 Mhz. As long as the apps are solid - xterm, rxvt, xfig - I can drag an opaque window around rapidly with no artifacts at all. Now put Gnumeric in the background and suddenly there's a nasty "catchup" effect. At work (fast machine) this effect is barely there - at home it's horrible. And Mozilla and friends seem especially bad in that way.
If you can't drag an opaque window in real time, something's wrong, and it's not X. Maybe the window manager? (I use fluxbox). Maybe the apps in the background that don't redraw properly?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying that a real human never hits a blank spot? That you couldn't be put in a situation or asked a question which leaves you at a loss? Does that mean that "the charade is over" and you will tear your face off to reveal PC boards underneath?
I'm assuming the speed of sound "c" is relatively constant.
To reproduce sound down to wavelength L, a round horn should have at least diameter L/PI, which is c/(f * PI) where f is the frequency corresponding to L. C is roughly 1100 ft/s, so a horn subwoofer going down to 40 hz should have a mouth diameter of almost nine feet. This can be reduced by putting the speaker on the ground, near a wall, etc. But it points to why a no-compromises horn subwoofer is rarely built. A designer might design the horn to a higher cutoff frequency and use a different mechanism, like a tuned port, for the last half octave or so.
Another example, although this time "c" won't rear its head directly. A constant directivity horn has a width in inches of x, a design angle of theta in degrees, and a break frequency f - below f, the horn starts to lose pattern control and widen out. They are related by f = (10^6) / (theta * x). So a 100 degree horn 10 inches wide could preserve pattern control down to 1 khz. To preserve that control down to 500 hz, you'd need a 20" width. While c isn't in the equation (which is empirically derived) it's in the background - all length dimensions in audio equations come from it.
Now imagine a small PA speaker with a 12" woofer and a 90x40 high frequency horn, 12" wide by 4" high. The crossover frequency is 1600 hz. Horizontally, this horn is big enough to maintain control down to the xo frequency. But vertically, it loses control at 6250 hz! By the time it reaches the xo, it's basically omnidirectional. Why didn't the designers make it taller? Well if they made it 16" tall, adding a full foot to the height of this small speaker, most customers would find it unwieldy.
Imagine a 6 cubic foot speaker enclosure. It could be a home subwoofer, going down to 30 hz. Or it could be a small PA speaker, going down to 60 hz. But the home speaker works hard to hit its max output of 108 dB. The PA speaker is hardwly working at that output level - it can play at 126 dB, even if it's a cheaper product sold to musicians. If it's pro grade, it could play at 130 dB. There's a tradeoff between bass depth and loudness/quality.
I hope this makes some sense.
Thanks. I think I share your horror at the arbitrary nature of the DMCA. Lately I have stepped back from sheer outrage to wonder how we can change things. The world we live in today is largely shaped by activist groups who clearly articulated their platform in a way legislators and the public could understand. So far, we haven't started to do that. We don't even have a platform - just a series of negative reactions to the other side's platform.
If you look at the money politicans receive (on opensecrets.org) the amounts are laughably small. And yet we aren't able to scrape up these contributions, and present a coherent case to our legislators. When congress passed the DMCA, I doubt that any of them even knew there was another side to the story. And how often do we read on slashdot about harmful legislation just passed or about to be passed? Shouldn't we find out further in advance? We need our NRA, our PETA, our Christian Coalition.
Thanks. As a boy, I worked for local sound companies, studied the important papers in audio engineering, and built my own speakers and horns. Then I studied EE, and worked in the sound contracting industry on theme park attractions, sports facilities and other stuff. I went from technician to engineering manager in eight years at various companies. Then I left to become a programmer.
/. or wired story hyping some audio "technology" I feel disgusted - I was very cheered to see how skeptical the /. reaction to this story was. The problem is, people are used to awesome technological advances, but there really aren't any technological advances in loudspeakers. Correcting a speaker with a DSP is a cool innovation, but for decades we've had only incremental improvements in actual speakers. Speaker designs live at a balance point between cost, size, the speed of sound (remember c = f * wavelength), and properties of materials. These things don't change much, although the introduction of titanium diaphrams and neodymium magnets had some impact on pro sound.
Few people in the sound industry know much about acoustics or speaker design. They specify, buy and install black boxes. The best educational resource is the JAES - Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. I no longer remember how I figured out which papers were important. I spent days in the AES library in New York poring through old issues and xeroxing anything that looked interesting.
My background makes me skeptical of audio consumer products and of wild claims. Whenever I see a
I could jabber on about this topic forever (funny how the stuff you're not working on is always fascinating...). Feel free to ask any questions.
That's pretty naive. Whenever a corporation or government invests in an application, they are locked in. They face a nontrivial cost to migrate to a different application. It's true even for word processors and other desktop software, but it's especially true for accounting systems, payroll systems, and other enterprise software. The threat of lockin is very real and is a major factor in IT management decisions. Almost every large IT department is maintaing some aging crappy applications that they'd like to be rid of, but the switching costs are prohibitively high.
Lots of agencies and corporations have rules that sole-source contracts (contracts not let through competitive bidding) must be justified. And no, they don't have rules requiring justification of competitive bidding - it's assumed to be the default. Does that concern you also?
That statement is just not true. Read Bugtraq for several days. You will see many researchers doing exactly that - probing commercial software products for bugs and hidden features. That activity is not banned by DMCA. I think you'll agree that if they had the ability, software companies would shut down the full-disclosure world.
Again, I'm not defending the DMCA. But it is not affecting the heart of the computer security community. You can set up Microsoft Exchange on your computer, probe it extensively for vulnerabilities, and publish a report showing a new vulnerability to the world. And the DMCA has nothing to say about it. But if you distribute a script to automate conversion of Apple's protected AAC files into MP3s, you're breaking the DMCA. While I'd like both those activities to be legal, the first one is far more important and integral to the security community.
I though the image example was pretty far-fetched. You could write similar scenarios about almost every law. We've been living under the DMCA for several years now. Why do we have to imagine a nightmare scenario? Why don't we already have nightmare scenarios happening? Because if you examine actual DMCA cases, they are not as simple and innocent as your scenario. The defendants set out quite deliberately to break the security of a copyright protection system. They weren't just using standard tools in a standard way.
I noticed that you closed your post on a note of despair. Things aren't as bad as you think. You are more likely to be killed by terrorists than to be arrested under the DMCA. The internet allows us to focus in on a Dmitri Sklyarov and feel his pain, while not realizing that every day Dmitri is in jail thousands are dying from car accidents, cancer, brutal dictatorships.
The feeling that the government is holding its mailed fist over the heads of computer users, ready to smash us at any second, is understandable, but is not supported by the numbers.
Wow. That is truly impressive.
Since I can't view the website, I don't know what, if anything, they're offering. But given a room with some reflections, speakers with a constant coverage angle and constant directivity can sound less colored by the room. This doesn't mean 360 degree coverage is a good idea - it will decrease the ratio of direct to reflected sound. However all practical speakers become 360 degree radiators below a certain frequency. So the question is, how should the speaker behave at the frequencies where directional control is possible?
In a typical multiway home speaker, each driver has a wide coverage angle near the bottom of its frequency range, narrowing to a small angle near the top of its range. Therefore the walls and ceiling receive a very uneven frequency response, which they pass on to the listeners. If you compensate this with equalization, life still isn't perfect because the direct sounds seem quite different in localization and character from the reflected sounds.
A typical small PA speaker will go from 360 degree radiation at low frequencies to 90 degrees at the top of the LF driver's range. Then we cross over to a HF horn carefully designed to match the LF coverage, at least horizontally. The HF horn will preserve a roughly 90x40 degree coverage to the top of its range. Thus the room reflections will be much less peaky and colored sounding. But there will be anomalies - for example, at the crossover point the woofer and horn will conspire to throw a narrow beam of sound in the vertical plane.
Going to a 360 degree design is one way to eliminate all these issues. It's not necessarily a horrible idea. It would probably work best with very dry recordings - recordings without much room sound or electronic reverb. It will inevitably blur transients - a "click" is going to sound fatter and fuller if reinforced by a substantial reflection from the wall behind the speaker.
Exactly. However, it doesn't mean they aren't good speakers. It just means that marketing departments don't aim at techies. The "ALT" buzzword rubs me the wrong way because "accoustic lens" actually means something - an array of parallel plates mounted in front of an exponential horn to diffuse sound. They lost relevance in the mid-70's when the constant-directivity horn was developed. There are still audiophiles using, and swearing by, accoustic lenses. Since I can't view the website, I don't know if B&O has resurrected this antique technology, but I doubt it. More likely their marketers didn't bother asking an audio engineer if the term was already taken.
In all fairness, there's a legitimate marketing reason for assigning names to "technologies", however trivial those technologies might appear to an engineer. Let's say this speaker takes off, and the manufacturer wants to make a smaller, cheaper one with some of the same ideas. They can say "the model 5000 has ALT and ABC". This helps them rub off some magic from the flagship product to something more affordable. I still don't like it, though.
I think the biggest thing you could do to eliminate the boxy low frequency resonances is get rid of the parallel walls and floor/ceiling. I realize this isn't easy. Could you built a stout partition running diagonally through the room and put the drummer in one triangle? Or you could cover two walls and the ceiling with randomly sized protrusions - maybe hand-carved foam with a skin of concrete. They need to be pretty rigid. The problem with that second idea is that it will only spread the resonance a bit, not get rid of it. Imagine a distribution curve of room widths. It will go from a single sharp peak to a fairly narrow hump. Actually this might work pretty well - one project I worked on had a tunnel with nonuniform (organic) roughly textured concrete walls. It was very accoustically dead - did not sound like a concrete tunnel at all.
Maybe cut off 3 corners of the room with diagonal partitions, choosing the dimensions for diversity of resonances? But then you approach a cylinder, which is even worse, because from the center of the room you see a relatively constant distance to the walls.
I'm sure you already know that the hard flat surfaces need soft stuff on top to avoid high frequency reflections - but that's the easy part.
The technique you're referring to is called impressioning, and is taught in locksmith schools. It's generally considered the crowning achievement of a locksmith.
This is not true. You are absolutely free to examine and reverse engineer software products in order to find security holes. What the DMCA prohibits is traficking in circumvention devices. Very few security advisories have anything to do with copy protection. While I think the DMCA is a bad law, you are exaggerating its scope. If I'm wrong, please tell me what "in-depth" activities that really should be legal have been outlawed as "computer terrorism".
You sound a bit young. May I assume that you have never had the responsibility of hiring someone? Whether you're spending your own money (your life savings) or your employer's, you are responsible for spending it wisely, in a way that will benefit the employer. Showing "guts" by placing yourself or your employer in legal/financial jeopardy is not the recipe for a long career or a profitable business. I'm not necessarily agreeing with the previous poster that the liability is significant - but if it is, a manager who ignores it to avoid looking like a pussy is not doing a good job.
Again, I suspect this is an age difference. As you get older, you discover that many seemingly unpleasant and pointless aspects of life exist for a reason.
So why don't you start a company and hire only convicts? They'd be cheap, right, being part of a permanent underclass. And they have something positive to contribute, right? You should enjoy a competitive advantage that would lead to great wealth.
Maybe you know something that today's businessmen don't. Or maybe not.
I'm surprised that you cite Java as an example of a terse language. I think it's insanely verbose. Can you give an example of Java that is more compact than the equivalent C or Perl?
I guess you haven't seen how it works in practice. The outsourcing company will place one or more people in the client building to handle meetings and customer requirements. The admins in India will access the machines via VPN. If substantial hands-on work is required, some "remote hands" techs will be stationed on-site. Compucom, for example, offers this level of tech. They make a lot less than a sysadmin. If you want that job, you can probably have it, but you might not like it.
You're probably right that the site you describe will be one of the last to switch, if ever. But don't underestimate the Indian outsource shops.
As for the incredibly demanding customers, generally IT outsourcing is accompanied by a lowering of expectactions. Sometimes the provider will only provide a limited menu of hardware, software and services at prices negotiated in the master agreement. I read that this is how the EDS-Navy contract is structured, and that users are limited to a narrow spectrum of software.
Being arrested and held for six weeks without charges isn't really in the same league as vanishing without a trace and showing up a decade later in a mass grave with signs of being tortured to death. Which is what's normally meant by "disappeared". How many people have been held six weeks without charges in the US in the last 20 years? I doubt anyone here knows. I think it's pretty common, though. It's just rare that the prisoner has a group of friends to put up a nationwide stink about it.
Once again we find ourselves reacting in surprise. Rosen has proposed copyright legislation for Iraq. What is "our" position, then, the position of computer users? Where's our model copyright legislation?
As long as we have no coherent positive idea, but only criticisms, we're bound to lose. Lots of you will blame the campaign contributions of the ??AA, and the "corruption" of elected officials. But imagine that you get to meet with General Garner and Hilary Rosen to discuss Iraq's copyright law. Hilary has a model piece of legislation, and the ability to relate it to international treaties and the laws of various countries, and to discuss how legislative choices will impact Iraq's economy and trading ability. You have a reflexive dislike for all intellectual property and not much more. Garner will hear from one side a detailed, thoroughly researched proposal that's in harmony with the trend of prosperous nations. From the other, he'll hear idealistic complaining, but nothing concrete or useful. Who will win? Who will persuade Garner to adopt his vision of copyright?
This is our challenge. On every front, our adversaries are defining the future they want, buttressing it with legal, moral and economic arguments and presenting it to decision-makers. We simply complain online and at most write reactive letters to the decision-makers when the ball is already rolling. Can we rise to the challenge and start defining a credible vision of the future that can be embraced by the non-geeks?
Good luck trying to make that point here. Slashdot seems to be afflicted with a kind of binary thinking, where generalizations cannot be accepted unless they're 100% true. The good slashdotter strives to make his brain like a computer - smoke pours out if something's illogical.
If you say that dogs are bigger than cats, you're wrong, 100% wrong, because somewhere, somewhen, there might be once cat that's bigger than one dog.
It goes deeper than idle chit-chat on the internet - one reason Microsoft captured hearts and minds is their ability to understand and run with the fuzzy linkages. For example, if you just requested a page from a web site, you're probably going to request some images to go with that page. (Slashdotter objects: "What if the page has no images?") Microsoft is good at optimizing for the common case, for the most likely outcome, while the classic geek mentality is to dwell on the most unlikely corner cases.
This question is addressed to CEO Darl McBride and SCOSource VP Chris Sontag, although it applies to the whole management team. What are your plans after the death of SCO? Won't you constitute a liability to any company you work for in the future, due to the association of your names with this lawsuit?
If you manage to get a ruling that seriously harms Linux, it will negatively impact tens of thousands of people worldwide. What effect do you think this will have on your personal life, and how will you cope with it?
- Mispronounce a foreign name.
- Offend the Arab world with some innocent piece of insensitivity.
- Visibly hand rebuilding contracts to friends.
Maybe the left will get lucky and he'll buy an anatomically correct doll. Popping one "grievance" off the stack merely makes room for the next.In fact, isn't "W" much like Quayle?
Back to your question: I wondered the same thing during the Monica scandal - all these Clinton supporters swore angrily that Clinton had not had sex with "that woman." I wondered how they could be so sure, and how they would apologize if they turned out wrong.
Google for "torture lite". While it doesn't compare to the actions of truly repressive regimes, I think the US has taken one more step down a slippery slope.
It made sense to charge users of touch-tone. The availability of touch-tone was a result of ongoing and expensive R&D. I realize that from a simplistic perspective "it doesn't cost them anything" to turn on touch-tone on one line. But it cost a lot to develop and field the technology, and it was fair for early adopters to help defray the cost.
As for Ringer Equivalence Numbers, they were intended to let the phone company continue to keep accurate records of the electrical characteristics of each subscriber line. Prior to the breakup, the number of feet of wire and number of ringers was noted on the "line card" - originally a piece of linen, and later a computer record. This was invaluable in troubleshooting line faults. Both ringers and line length contribute to line capacitance. Since some customer-provided equipment had less than a full "ringer's worth" of capacitance, it was labeled with the "ringer equivalence number" - typically 1 or a fraction. The theory was that the subscriber would report this number to the phone company, who could continue to maintain an accurate line card.
After the breakup, the whole thing seems to have been discarded. I think we generally accept a lower standard of troubleshooting and repair from the phone company now.
If you can't drag an opaque window in real time, something's wrong, and it's not X. Maybe the window manager? (I use fluxbox). Maybe the apps in the background that don't redraw properly?