Many of the earlier SB cards were known for a fixed clock, regardless of what the software was set for. This limited clock rate was the issue of many complaints of those looking for full 20-20K without artifacts. Once this reputation was cast, the line was considered as consumer grade and not better. Same applied to bit depth. The driver would accept many settings beyond the 16 bit DAC. Other cards had higher clocks and bits, and testing for the card performance showed the true limits.

Link below shows some of the real testing on this card beyond just golden ears. Look at the frequency output of noise and note what is NOT reproduced. Then scroll down a look at the extended frequency response of the cards in the test. SB hit a wall way before the competition.

http://www.clarisonus.com/Rese...

It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.

Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.

Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.

As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...

Onboard D/A for WAV, MP3, Movies, etc are generally good enough if the noise level is low enough. The biggest difference is in the on board synth. Playing games uses MIDI and the sound card produces the sounds. There are 2 versions. Hardware and software.

Hardware had an on board synth. It can be as simple as an 8 bit video game or as complex as full wavetable sampled sounds. An onboard hardware synth will sound the same on Linux or Windows. If the wavetable synth is XG compatible or similar, the sound is great. If a cheap synth is used it will sound like a casio entry level keyboard or 8 bit videogame.

Some cards use soft synth's with soundfonts. These can be very good sounding with inexpensive hardware as the synth runs in the OS and just sends the bitstream to the card for repoduction. This uses some system resources and requires installing the proper driver to include the synth and soundfont. This can mean great game sound in WIndows, but no sound or missing sound in Linux for games, unless you load a soft synth on Linux, install a soundfont, and enable it through Jack. While the combo does sound great, it is a resource drain.

Now, which is better? Mixed bag here. Some on board sound come in either variety. Same with add on boards.

A crash is almost not possible unless the drone is way above the chopper and gets pulled down in the wash. A chopper chasing a drone will catch it in the down draft and get tossed under it. The police chopper was in no real danger if they had a visual on it.

They track you using your credit card. The cards are because people want them these days. Albertsons finally knuckled under and started offering them. Not because they needed them for tracking, like I said they already did that, but because customers whined they weren't getting a "good deal". So they raised their prices, and introduced a card.

It doesn't take in to account the net speeds that people have. So you might well have a provider who has no problem doing HD video from Youtube all day every day, on lines that can handle it. However they sell slower lines and some customers have that, so that skews things.

Like say a phone company offers ADSL and IDSL for customers who are way out in the boonies, but VDSL for people in the city. Well those slow connections will bring down their stats, even if their network is quite fast and makes them look bad, despite them actually being the only option for some people.

A somewhat similar deal with cable companies can be people using old hardware. DOCSIS 2 cable modems only use one channel per segment, and those can get saturated these days. Well cable providers tend to be DOCSIS 3 to deal with that... but not everyone has a new modem. The cable company can recommend they get one, but if it is your equipment they can't make you (I guess other than cutting you off but they don't wanna do that).

I second that on the courts. I had to drop off a document for a child case. I stopped at the metal detector and told security I was here to drop of a document, not visit offices, so I had not emptied my pockets. Please call the office of ... to come pick up the document. They objected. I said they can scan the manilla envelope. They complied. I made it clear I had no intention of wasting time for a drop off. It would be much faster for them to step out of the office and accept the delivery.

Slashdot needs to knock it off with these "Child genius is going to totally upstage all those stupid companies and make something amazing!" stories they run some time. The thing is, they are essentially never true and we as geeks should know better.

Smart kids often have the problem of thinking they know everything. They have the brains to be well above their peers at pretty much everything, and so have a confidence in their knowledge and intelligence, but lack the experience to understand the limitations of both in the larger world. Hence they'll think that they have found an "obvious" solution to a problem in the world that nobody else has managed to think of. I'm sure most of us felt like that at one time or another as children.

However, it turns out that smart kids become smart adults, and those smart adults get job making the thing we use, solving the problems we have, and so on. So, usually if there's something that hasn't been solved, the reason is that there is NOT a simple solution. There isn't something that a kid will just say "Oh look, here's a better way to do it." Rather it is a complex problem and thus the solutions are complex.

So Slashdot needs to quit with stories on shit like this unless there' something to back it up. A printer actually gets released based on this kids design? Ok that's a story. Some kid says he can do way better than anyone else? That's not a story. That is, to quote the Reapers, "A confidence borne of ignorance." It's not news.

Other missing option.. I sell consumer fireworks. Had a $10K day today.

It's noise is annoying, but for some, it's 10% of the annual income in just a few days.

I've had mixed results with LED bulbs. They fall into 3 catagories.

1 Poor lumen maintenance.
They dim over time by a large amount. Most often seen in Christmas Lights. My daughter took a string of blue LED's and used them as a nightlight in her room. about 1/2 were totally dead in 6 months. The remainer were all over the map in brighness, but all were much dimmer compaired to a string stored for Christmas used for comparison. Failure rate of decreased brightness by 1/2 percieved brightness in 6 months is 100%. A couple of other low wattage night light bulbs in bathrooms did the same.

2 Infant Mortality
I have had an infant mortality rate on LED bulbs slightly higher than with CFL's. Both are higher failures than traditional name brand incandesceant.

3 Perform well.
Recently I have had more bulbs in this catagory from the name brands. Cheap import bulbs still suffer from the above two. To save energy where the energy cost is the highest, I have them in my Motorhome. To save bulbs where short cycling kill the other types, I have them in bathrooms and utility rooms. With some name brand bulbs, they are slowly creeping into the living areas that have lights on for long periods of time where failures were common. I always write the date installed on the bulbs I use to keep track of their life.

Rumour has it - I don't know how true this is so take it with all the salt you think it needs - that Microsoft built a thumping great process around the idea of listening to their beta testers.

Huge. Vast. Really clever. And it only worked if you were testing on a computer that was connected to the Internet.

You think Metro is bad normally, think how much fun it'd be on a non-Internet connected PC.

It can be 64-bit only without ditching 32-bit support; 64 bit Windows runs 32 bit applications just fine.

No, really. So a big problem these days is people damaging their hearing from listening at excessive volumes on their portable devices. This is a real issue and is going to have some nasty effects as people age.

Part of the problem is just people wanting to listen too loud, but part of the problem is shitty earbuds. If you have shitty earbuds, that don't seal off outside noise well, don't sound good, and have poor power handling, it is more likely you drive them too loud to compensate. Also, the poor power handling means that when you do drive them, they start to clip and distort, which raises high frequency harmonics, which causes more damage.

Given what a big presence Apple has in the portable music market, their shitty earbuds are a real issue. It would go a ways to helping the situation if they'd include some earbuds that weren't worthless. They don't need to be great, just not worthless, properly designed.

There is lots on there. A big bit of content that'll do 60fps no problem is video games. Lots of channels that feature games in various forms. So they'll be able to show content at 60fps no issue.

Also many AVCHD cameras do 60fps these days. It is part of the AVCHD 2.0 spec, but some like Panasonic did it before the spec update. So a lot of individuals have cameras that'll shoot 60fps no issue, and if Youtube will take it, they can upload it as is.

We get to have cheat codes whenever we want and you can go shove your DLC up your ass. Just fire up a memory editor/debugger, CheatEngine being a free purpose designed one, and you are good to go.

The whole "selling cheat codes" thing is just so scummy. Particularly since I think it can lead to the "pay2win" mentality of "Maybe we should make this harder, so people need to give us money for cheats!"