Does anyone really think that this will change
the alleged minds of doubters?
What if the telescope shows no vehicles? Will this change the minds of the "believers"?
Before some excitable person starts attacking me, I haven't read the arguments of the "doubters" and I'm not especially doubtful of the moon landing. It's just interesting that it's such an article of faith. Generally, I'm more inclined to doubt than to faith.
Personally I think getting hung up on specifics is silly, Linux and FreeBSD are both UNIX and I think an install of either over a non-UNIX os is a great victory. I've gotten to love UNIX no matter what version.
Me too. It just bothers me when people advocate FreeBSD over Linux to prove how elite they are. Of course I think I understand where they're coming from. I just installed Redhat 7.3 and was annoyed that vi is colorizing, warping inside the file, and other weird behaviors. One more "Linuxism" I have to shut off. The BSD's are very "pure" and retro - I'm sure some BSD maintainer took care that vi would act exactly like it should. So it's tempting to bash "Linux" (which means kernel + popular distros) for rushing madly into the future.
But the other thing: if Microsoft buries us, it will be mostly because we couldn't see the issues clearly. We made better and better mail servers, and the corporate world moved to Exchange. Some admins are still baffled by that, pointing out that Exchange is a poor mail server. But to management, that wasn't the issue - Exchange has the groupware functions they want. I think Microsoft is pointing the same artillery at Apache - they can't make a better web server, but they might redefine the playing field so our current idea of a web server is obsolete. Anyhow, to defeat them at this game requires wading into the sewage, ala Samba and Mono. And yes, Samba runs on *BSD. But this narrowness of thinking "we have everything we need - web/mail/dns..." worries me.
Visual C++ is just peachy for writing Windows/MFC/RAD code, but for anything else, the numerous UNIX tools are far better.
OK, how do we reconcile that with this comment from the article:
2) The development platform, specifically Visual Studio, is a major advantage. Even before the conversion to Windows was contemplated, Hotmail developers used Visual Studio on NT4 to develop and debug their code. The code was eventually recompiled for UNIX when the first level of testing was complete. There is nothing approaching the power of Visual Studio on any UNIX, let alone the free ones, with the possible exception of the Java development tools.
Were the original, non-Microsoft hotmail developers dumb? Did they have inadequate understanding of Unix tools? Or did Visual Studio actually do a good job for the kind of code they were writing?
It doesn't make sense for them to be thinking internally about the burden of licenses for their own installations.
From the paper:
The conversion of the Hotmail web servers to Windows is an ongoing project with several rationales. The team was hoping for better utilization of the existing hardware resources. The superior development and internationalization tools are important. A Microsoft property should eat its own dogfood.
Finally, we wished to use the conversion experience as a model for other UNIX conversions that we hope to carry out in the future.
(emphasis mine.) And:
Although there were no costs to the Hotmail project, as a Microsoft department, the team did consider the software costs in order to make the conversion a useful model for future customers.
And:
Another major issue is the potential cost. Although Hotmail uses Microsoft software without license fees, we must consider this project as a model for real customers.
So it's not accurate to say the server room is running bsd. Maybe at a few pure-internet companies, or running a little utility DNS/cache/whatever box, but not running the key apps in the corporate world.
And Moridineas responded by listing six pure-internet companies that might be using BSD. Even though these pure-internet companies are not relevant to the issue, let's have a look:
According to netcraft, The site ftp.cdrom.com is running Apache on Solaris 9.. Of course, this oversimplifies things - Hotmail, for instance, has more than one tier to its architecture. Just because the internet-facing boxes run a particular OS doesn't tell you anything about the inner boxes.
Anyhow, the difference in our perspectives is that Moridineas is focusing on internet-connected boxes, where FreeBSD is much better represented than in the corporate data center. To return to the main point, there is a myth that Linux gets all the press while FreeBSD quietly does all the work. If it was ever true, it's not any more. Here's what I mean:
I'm sure there are more, and this isn't even getting into the internal server rooms of companies, hard to say there.
This implies that FreeBSD would be more present in the internal server rooms of companies. It's not. As I pointed out, the apps that take up most of the floor space in those rooms are usually not supported on FreeBSD. The corporate data center is generally ruled by Win2k and Solaris, with HP, IBM, etc if the company leans that way.
Linux has a lot of corporate backing and is very "loud" and attention grabbing. In the meanwhile, the server room is running bsd;)
Maybe at some ISPs. From of what I've seen at corporate environments, BSD is only used unwittingly in appliances. Linux is making some inroads against commercial Unix and Windows.
The servers apps most people run has nothing to do with the OS. Samba, Bind, Netatalk, Squid, Apache, IP NAT+firewall etc, ssh, ftp, sendmail and variants of these programs...
That's certainly the kind of view that would validate BSD. If you asked an IT director what important apps are running on his servers, he wouldn't mention any of those. He might mention PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle, Oracle Financials, Microsoft Exchange, ClearCase, Siebel CRM. The programs you mentioned are more like minor supporting utilities - you choose a platform for SAP, and just assume that ftp is available for it.
A lot of this key software is becoming available for Linux. You might be able to get it to run on FreeBSD. But would you want to? Would you seriously put Oracle on a platform Oracle doesn't support? In fact, most companies are scared to move these key apps to Linux, even when the vendor supports it 100%.
So it's not accurate to say the server room is running bsd. Maybe at a few pure-internet companies, or running a little utility DNS/cache/whatever box, but not running the key apps in the corporate world.
The only way we're ever going to stop spam is by stopping the spammers from sending it in the first place.
First, I don't think we are ever going to stop spam. At least, until email changes radically - to some palladium-infested thing, for instance. But to reduce spam to acceptable proportions, put pressure on all points of the spam food chain:
Companies that pay for spam - identify, complain, boycott.
Spammers themselves - sue, prosecute, notify their new ISPs when they hop.
ISP's that send spam or host spam web sites - blacklist.
Open relays and proxies - blacklist. Also, simulate with honeypots.
Victim MTAs and MUAs - incorporate tighter filtering.
End users - educate. If 5% of spam recipients complained to the right parties, spam would not be practical.
And in fact, all of these things are happening. The multipronged effort is more successful than any one prong could be.
I've seen plenty of claims like yours posted on NANAE. Most of the time the claimant is wrong - there is still an ongoing spam problem from the listed IPs. So without knowing more about your particular situation, the balance of probability is that you are incorrect, and there is good reason to list your IPs. Often enough, however, the claimant is right and SPEWS neglected to unlist them. In those cases, SPEWS reacts quickly, usually moving to a level 2 listing.
Here's my point: I've yet to see a single case where the IP was listed in error and SPEWS didn't immediately fix the problem.
Also, the attitude of anti-spammers on NANAE doesn't really matter. No matter how much venom they hurl at you, if they can't produce objective reasons to keep you listed SPEWS will delist. My observation is that SPEWS is not looking for a "vote" from the community - they are looking only for evidence of spam support. I've seen IP's delisted while the NANAE regulars are still out for blood.
Swing performs like a dog because it was written with pure-Java widgets
Does that mean SWT is not pure Java? So is a JAVA/SWT app cross platform? Can it be run on a machine without any special preparation like installing a library? Can a web applet be written with SWT?
You really think this professional mail abuser publicized an address she uses much? And you don't think she has adequate precautions against inbound mail abuse?
I assume that any email address she actually cares about is kept well insulated from her spamming business. And her ex-husband will probably grind this publicized account through some scripts to discard the automated abuse and find the one or two messages from potential spam sponsors, which was probably her goal in cooperating with the WSJ.
SPEWS is lame. They do not even follow their own policies (specifically, that they will remove listings after spammers are terminated. 6+ months now, still listed. And they say you can't contact them...
Why should SPEWS remove a listing immediately upon removal of the spammers? The "policy" you seem to be thinking of is:
...if spam or spam involvement (hosting spammers, selling spamware) from your IP address/range ceases, it will drop out of the list in time.
"In time" does not mean immediately. How many months did you harbor spammers? More to the point, what's the relevant IP address or range? Without specifics, your complaint rings hollow.
(and posting to NANAE is _not_ an option)
Of course. The NANAE regulars have seen every flavor of spammer lying and evasion. You're looking for a naive audience that might give you some sympathy.
SPEWS has made themselves completely irrelevant in my eyes.
SPEWS wasn't made to please spam hosters. It was made to keep your spammy network away from my inbox.
Again, if you think you have a legitimate complaint, post the IP range in question.
I don't think it's inevitable. 802.11 is basically spread spectrum, right? This system probably keys the SS from a totally different algorithm. So it will probably look like widespread RF noise. Unless they chose to preserve some channel discovery mechanism from civilian 802.11.
According to the press release, this equipment allows a network of nodes (not just 2) to communicate, prevents traffic analysis (presumably it always maxes out the channel) and does not yield information about source and destination addresses.
How would you accomplish that with protocol-level encryption?
...is that there is a company, Placette Audio, which makes a pre-amp that will reproduce your SACD signal without any PCM filtering...
Actually it's not a pre-amp. Just a passive volume control. You can make the same thing out of a log, stereo potentiometer and a stereo RCA cord, cut in half. Probably less than $10. It doesn't need precision resistors, as the Placette unit is alleged to have. Just to be clear, precision resistors in this application accomplish nothing unless you want a specific, numerically specified degree of attenuation, and are willing to go without continous adjustment. And you don't. You want to adjust the volume control for comfort, not for, let's say, 20.5 dB below max output.
Also, I'm not sure why the author has confidence in his amp(s) and speakers to reproduce 100 KHz.
SACD is better precisely because it eliminates this kludge! Instead the bitstream is recorded, in its native format, directly onto the disc and, conversely, is output in its native format during playback.
First, I wasn't advocating PCM per se, just objecting to the claim that it's an "electronic fiddle". But I'm really suspicious of this "nativist" claim to superiority. If the signal went through a digital delay or reverb, or a mixing console, or Pro Tools, it was PCM at one point. If the signal was born inside a computer, it's natively PCM.
The timing/phase argument is the best one I've heard, but still presents problems. If your ears are 6" apart, 44.1 KHz sampling should yield a 6" location error at 17.25 feet. In other words, an object 17.25 feet away could appear 6" to the left or right of its true location. Can you locate sound sources with this degree of precision? The phase error may already be beyond my perceptual limits.
And there's at least a third possibility: pattern-based QoS that doesn't care about either ports or content. I bet P2P usage has a distinctive "signature" in time. Geeks always underestimate fuzzy techniques like this and bring up edge cases that confuse them, but I think that realistically P2P can be cleanly cut out from the rest of IP traffic with minimal collateral damage. Without looking at either ports or content.
But I gotta ask, whats the point? Why would I want a new format to play the new noise that is passing for music? Except for compilations, I havent bought any "new" music since 1992.
I see this type of comment a lot. It's roughly true of me as well. Still don't know how much it's:
Getting older. Maybe after 30 one can't fall in love with new music.
Failure of commercial radio. Maybe if I took the time to scour the net for good music I'd find it.
Music really has become very bad in the last decade. (I suspect this one.)
Personally, I experienced the change as an abrupt delta. One day the alternative stations were overflowing with great synthpop tunes - the next, they started playing boring cookie-cutter guitar music.
I think the last record that truly amazed me was 808 State, 90. I'd like to find more music like that, but I find the electronic music scene really confusing and full of repetitive thumping noises. Any ideas?
To meet these seemingly contradictory requirements, part of the signal had to be eliminated, but without degrading the sound so much that it became unacceptable to the public. Enter PCM. This ingenious electronic fiddle truncated the original bandwidth from 100,000 to 20,000 hertz, since humans cannot normally hear frequencies above 15,000 hertz, and "sampled," or took a digital snapshot, of the remaining information 44,000 times a second. This doctored data was repackaged into 16-bit packets capable of playing back a symphony in 74 minutes or less.
First of all, PCM wasn't invented for CDs. It dates back at least to World War II, when the British PM and US President were linked by an encrypted digital phone line. This was covered on Slashdot.
Second, PCM is not an "ingenious electronic fiddle". It is the most obvious, straightforward way of digitally encoding an analog signal. In other words, "sample at a fixed interval and record the intensity as an integer from 0 to N". If the CD creators were looking for a "fiddle" to fit more sound in less space, they could have looked at delta encoding or other schemes that have less quantifiable performance limits than PCM. Of encodings, PCM is least deserving to be called a fiddle.
I don't know where this person got the idea that the "original bandwidth" is 100 KHz. The bandwidth of an accoustic instrument is theoretically infinite, but the upper limit of human hearing is roughly 20 KHz. Kids can hear higher - I think I was tested at 24 KHz when I was young, and middle-aged folks have usually decreased to ~ 15. The bandwidth of the original recording/mastering chain was probably 20 KHz.
He conflates PCM with 16 bit/44.1, and makes it sound like a horrible Procrustean truncation of the signal. This is nonsense. 16 bits allows 96 decibels of dynamic range. It's incredibly unlikely that a home playback setup allows this. Realistically, you might have 50 dB dynamic range between background noise and the level where the neighbors call the police. And if you enjoy listening to stuff above 20k, ask your owner for a new rawhide chew toy. You'll like it more than a SACD.
Oh, and before people start flaming, I *do* enjoy rock music, but it's a horrible format for testing a sound system or determining audio fidelity.
I disagree. There are many dimensions to audio fidelity, and different genres of music can stress different dimensions. I've seen small speakers that sound great with chamber music but awful playing back rock. Most common defect: uniting the kick drum and bass into one sticky ball of thud. Move to a larger speaker of the same quality level and chamber music may sound exactly the same while in rock, the kick and bass are clearly articulated and independent. Meanwhile, there is probably a parallel case - two speakers that sound equally excellent for rock, but sound different to chamber music.
The most important criteria for a disc used for system testing? It has to be well engineered, and you have to be deeply familiar with it on a variety of systems. This gives the "DSP" part of your brain a strong baseline to measure against.
Maybe the short answer is "you get what you measure". If you like rock, better use rock for at least part of the evaluation process.
They simply intended the.1 channel to be a discrete encoding of the bass audio with which you could do as you please. I still disagree with you though, sending the bass to a speaker designed for it will improve bass response and improve the audio quality IF PROPERLY TUNED.
I know nothing of SACD, but responding to your comment: There is no reason for low frequency signals to be separated on the recording medium. They are better separated by an active crossover in the playback path. This allows the crossover frequency to be chosen to match the capabilities of the subwoofer(s) and mains.
Certainly slashdot prefers Apple to Microsoft. MacOS X is pretty amazing - a consumer-ready Unix OS. Everyone, Windows-user or Unix-user or computer illiterate drools over a TiBook running OSX. (Lots of us have second thoughts about slowness, cost, compatibility and freedom.) I don't care how many machines Dell sells; I've never seen their products elicit Apple-scale reactions. At least for now, Apple is producing much more interesting and admirable products than Microsoft. TiBook, IPOD, OSX, Airport versus what, MSN and XDOCS (which were front page stories anyway)?
Apple's products are interesting in themselves - Microsoft's and Dell's products are interesting only from a business perspective. Dell figured out how to overcharge lazy people for a generic PC - that probably makes them fascinating to MBA's.
This would allow you to run all this off of one computer - thus saving costs. Anything out there like this? Obviously it has many parallels to mainframe computering - network appliances etc... but I am specifically talking about running a standard PC with multiple monitors and mice and keyboards - not some crippled specially designed hardware.
Maxspeed makes this terminal which extends keyboard, video, mouse and I/O from a base PC. You run CAT5 from the terminal to the PC and plug it into a special card in the PC. There are cards with 4 ports and cards with two ports. It works well for souped-up point of sale applications - one PC at the front of a small store can handle several terminals.
Just to be clear, this is not TCP/IP. It is keyboard, video and mouse signals multiplexed on cat5. If using a GUI, you run a separate X Server per terminal on the PC. They are very Linux friendly - I used them with Red Hat.
That sounds good, but will the software scale for resolution differences? Given the march of progress the (new) mac is likely to have higher resolution than the (old) PC - does that mean a black border around the picture, or scaling?
Slashdot Mirror
What if the telescope shows no vehicles? Will this change the minds of the "believers"?
Before some excitable person starts attacking me, I haven't read the arguments of the "doubters" and I'm not especially doubtful of the moon landing. It's just interesting that it's such an article of faith. Generally, I'm more inclined to doubt than to faith.
Me too. It just bothers me when people advocate FreeBSD over Linux to prove how elite they are. Of course I think I understand where they're coming from. I just installed Redhat 7.3 and was annoyed that vi is colorizing, warping inside the file, and other weird behaviors. One more "Linuxism" I have to shut off. The BSD's are very "pure" and retro - I'm sure some BSD maintainer took care that vi would act exactly like it should. So it's tempting to bash "Linux" (which means kernel + popular distros) for rushing madly into the future.
But the other thing: if Microsoft buries us, it will be mostly because we couldn't see the issues clearly. We made better and better mail servers, and the corporate world moved to Exchange. Some admins are still baffled by that, pointing out that Exchange is a poor mail server. But to management, that wasn't the issue - Exchange has the groupware functions they want. I think Microsoft is pointing the same artillery at Apache - they can't make a better web server, but they might redefine the playing field so our current idea of a web server is obsolete. Anyhow, to defeat them at this game requires wading into the sewage, ala Samba and Mono.
And yes, Samba runs on *BSD. But this narrowness of thinking "we have everything we need - web/mail/dns..." worries me.
Pretty close. It actually meant that you eat Alpo. The point being to demonstrate your confidence in the dogfood's quality.
OK, how do we reconcile that with this comment from the article:
Were the original, non-Microsoft hotmail developers dumb? Did they have inadequate understanding of Unix tools? Or did Visual Studio actually do a good job for the kind of code they were writing?
From the paper:(emphasis mine.)
And:
And:
And Moridineas responded by listing six pure-internet companies that might be using BSD. Even though these pure-internet companies are not relevant to the issue, let's have a look:
According to netcraft, The site www.mp3.com is running Apache/1.3.12m1 (Unix) yasl/2.25
sw/1.7 mod_rdbcookie/1.2 mod_oas/4.65m mod_mp3idver/0.12 rwh/1.1 bw/3.37 rewrite/3.3 include/3.6 on Linux.
According to netcraft, The site www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000..
According to netcraft, The site ftp.cdrom.com is running Apache on Solaris 9..
Of course, this oversimplifies things - Hotmail, for instance, has more than one tier to its architecture. Just because the internet-facing boxes run a particular OS doesn't tell you anything about the inner boxes.
Anyhow, the difference in our perspectives is that Moridineas is focusing on internet-connected boxes, where FreeBSD is much better represented than in the corporate data center. To return to the main point, there is a myth that Linux gets all the press while FreeBSD quietly does all the work. If it was ever true, it's not any more. Here's what I mean:
This implies that FreeBSD would be more present in the internal server rooms of companies. It's not. As I pointed out, the apps that take up most of the floor space in those rooms are usually not supported on FreeBSD. The corporate data center is generally ruled by Win2k and Solaris, with HP, IBM, etc if the company leans that way.
Maybe at some ISPs. From of what I've seen at corporate environments, BSD is only used unwittingly in appliances. Linux is making some inroads against commercial Unix and Windows.
That's certainly the kind of view that would validate BSD. If you asked an IT director what important apps are running on his servers, he wouldn't mention any of those. He might mention PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle, Oracle Financials, Microsoft Exchange, ClearCase, Siebel CRM. The programs you mentioned are more like minor supporting utilities - you choose a platform for SAP, and just assume that ftp is available for it.
A lot of this key software is becoming available for Linux. You might be able to get it to run on FreeBSD. But would you want to? Would you seriously put Oracle on a platform Oracle doesn't support? In fact, most companies are scared to move these key apps to Linux, even when the vendor supports it 100%.
So it's not accurate to say the server room is running bsd. Maybe at a few pure-internet companies, or running a little utility DNS/cache/whatever box, but not running the key apps in the corporate world.
First, I don't think we are ever going to stop spam. At least, until email changes radically - to some palladium-infested thing, for instance. But to reduce spam to acceptable proportions, put pressure on all points of the spam food chain:
And in fact, all of these things are happening. The multipronged effort is more successful than any one prong could be.
I've seen plenty of claims like yours posted on NANAE. Most of the time the claimant is wrong - there is still an ongoing spam problem from the listed IPs. So without knowing more about your particular situation, the balance of probability is that you are incorrect, and there is good reason to list your IPs. Often enough, however, the claimant is right and SPEWS neglected to unlist them. In those cases, SPEWS reacts quickly, usually moving to a level 2 listing.
Here's my point: I've yet to see a single case where the IP was listed in error and SPEWS didn't immediately fix the problem.
Also, the attitude of anti-spammers on NANAE doesn't really matter. No matter how much venom they hurl at you, if they can't produce objective reasons to keep you listed SPEWS will delist. My observation is that SPEWS is not looking for a "vote" from the community - they are looking only for evidence of spam support. I've seen IP's delisted while the NANAE regulars are still out for blood.
Does that mean SWT is not pure Java? So is a JAVA/SWT app cross platform? Can it be run on a machine without any special preparation like installing a library? Can a web applet be written with SWT?
You really think this professional mail abuser publicized an address she uses much? And you don't think she has adequate precautions against inbound mail abuse?
I assume that any email address she actually cares about is kept well insulated from her spamming business. And her ex-husband will probably grind this publicized account through some scripts to discard the automated abuse and find the one or two messages from potential spam sponsors, which was probably her goal in cooperating with the WSJ.
Why should SPEWS remove a listing immediately upon removal of the spammers? The "policy" you seem to be thinking of is:
"In time" does not mean immediately. How many months did you harbor spammers? More to the point, what's the relevant IP address or range? Without specifics, your complaint rings hollow.
Of course. The NANAE regulars have seen every flavor of spammer lying and evasion. You're looking for a naive audience that might give you some sympathy.
SPEWS wasn't made to please spam hosters. It was made to keep your spammy network away from my inbox.
Again, if you think you have a legitimate complaint, post the IP range in question.
I don't think it's inevitable. 802.11 is basically spread spectrum, right? This system probably keys the SS from a totally different algorithm. So it will probably look like widespread RF noise. Unless they chose to preserve some channel discovery mechanism from civilian 802.11.
According to the press release, this equipment allows a network of nodes (not just 2) to communicate, prevents traffic analysis (presumably it always maxes out the channel) and does not yield information about source and destination addresses.
How would you accomplish that with protocol-level encryption?
Actually it's not a pre-amp. Just a passive volume control. You can make the same thing out of a log, stereo potentiometer and a stereo RCA cord, cut in half. Probably less than $10. It doesn't need precision resistors, as the Placette unit is alleged to have. Just to be clear, precision resistors in this application accomplish nothing unless you want a specific, numerically specified degree of attenuation, and are willing to go without continous adjustment. And you don't. You want to adjust the volume control for comfort, not for, let's say, 20.5 dB below max output.
Also, I'm not sure why the author has confidence in his amp(s) and speakers to reproduce 100 KHz.
First, I wasn't advocating PCM per se, just objecting to the claim that it's an "electronic fiddle". But I'm really suspicious of this "nativist" claim to superiority. If the signal went through a digital delay or reverb, or a mixing console, or Pro Tools, it was PCM at one point. If the signal was born inside a computer, it's natively PCM.
The timing/phase argument is the best one I've heard, but still presents problems. If your ears are 6" apart, 44.1 KHz sampling should yield a 6" location error at 17.25 feet. In other words, an object 17.25 feet away could appear 6" to the left or right of its true location. Can you locate sound sources with this degree of precision? The phase error may already be beyond my perceptual limits.
And there's at least a third possibility: pattern-based QoS that doesn't care about either ports or content. I bet P2P usage has a distinctive "signature" in time. Geeks always underestimate fuzzy techniques like this and bring up edge cases that confuse them, but I think that realistically P2P can be cleanly cut out from the rest of IP traffic with minimal collateral damage. Without looking at either ports or content.
I see this type of comment a lot. It's roughly true of me as well. Still don't know how much it's:
Personally, I experienced the change as an abrupt delta. One day the alternative stations were overflowing with great synthpop tunes - the next, they started playing boring cookie-cutter guitar music.
I think the last record that truly amazed me was 808 State, 90. I'd like to find more music like that, but I find the electronic music scene really confusing and full of repetitive thumping noises. Any ideas?
First of all, PCM wasn't invented for CDs. It dates back at least to World War II, when the British PM and US President were linked by an encrypted digital phone line. This was covered on Slashdot.
Second, PCM is not an "ingenious electronic fiddle". It is the most obvious, straightforward way of digitally encoding an analog signal. In other words, "sample at a fixed interval and record the intensity as an integer from 0 to N". If the CD creators were looking for a "fiddle" to fit more sound in less space, they could have looked at delta encoding or other schemes that have less quantifiable performance limits than PCM. Of encodings, PCM is least deserving to be called a fiddle.
I don't know where this person got the idea that the "original bandwidth" is 100 KHz. The bandwidth of an accoustic instrument is theoretically infinite, but the upper limit of human hearing is roughly 20 KHz. Kids can hear higher - I think I was tested at 24 KHz when I was young, and middle-aged folks have usually decreased to ~ 15. The bandwidth of the original recording/mastering chain was probably 20 KHz.
He conflates PCM with 16 bit/44.1, and makes it sound like a horrible Procrustean truncation of the signal. This is nonsense. 16 bits allows 96 decibels of dynamic range. It's incredibly unlikely that a home playback setup allows this. Realistically, you might have 50 dB dynamic range between background noise and the level where the neighbors call the police. And if you enjoy listening to stuff above 20k, ask your owner for a new rawhide chew toy. You'll like it more than a SACD.
I disagree. There are many dimensions to audio fidelity, and different genres of music can stress different dimensions. I've seen small speakers that sound great with chamber music but awful playing back rock. Most common defect: uniting the kick drum and bass into one sticky ball of thud. Move to a larger speaker of the same quality level and chamber music may sound exactly the same while in rock, the kick and bass are clearly articulated and independent. Meanwhile, there is probably a parallel case - two speakers that sound equally excellent for rock, but sound different to chamber music.
The most important criteria for a disc used for system testing? It has to be well engineered, and you have to be deeply familiar with it on a variety of systems. This gives the "DSP" part of your brain a strong baseline to measure against.
Maybe the short answer is "you get what you measure". If you like rock, better use rock for at least part of the evaluation process.
I know nothing of SACD, but responding to your comment: There is no reason for low frequency signals to be separated on the recording medium. They are better separated by an active crossover in the playback path. This allows the crossover frequency to be chosen to match the capabilities of the subwoofer(s) and mains.
Certainly slashdot prefers Apple to Microsoft. MacOS X is pretty amazing - a consumer-ready Unix OS. Everyone, Windows-user or Unix-user or computer illiterate drools over a TiBook running OSX. (Lots of us have second thoughts about slowness, cost, compatibility and freedom.) I don't care how many machines Dell sells; I've never seen their products elicit Apple-scale reactions. At least for now, Apple is producing much more interesting and admirable products than Microsoft. TiBook, IPOD, OSX, Airport versus what, MSN and XDOCS (which were front page stories anyway)?
Apple's products are interesting in themselves - Microsoft's and Dell's products are interesting only from a business perspective. Dell figured out how to overcharge lazy people for a generic PC - that probably makes them fascinating to MBA's.
Maxspeed makes this terminal which extends keyboard, video, mouse and I/O from a base PC. You run CAT5 from the terminal to the PC and plug it into a special card in the PC. There are cards with 4 ports and cards with two ports. It works well for souped-up point of sale applications - one PC at the front of a small store can handle several terminals.
Just to be clear, this is not TCP/IP. It is keyboard, video and mouse signals multiplexed on cat5. If using a GUI, you run a separate X Server per terminal on the PC. They are very Linux friendly - I used them with Red Hat.
That sounds good, but will the software scale for resolution differences? Given the march of progress the (new) mac is likely to have higher resolution than the (old) PC - does that mean a black border around the picture, or scaling?
In that case, you should be able to name at least one Democrat who voted against the DMCA or the CTEA.