The Xbox 360 red ring of death (RRoD) fiasco had a very high failure rate (relatively speaking) at a very high cost to Microsoft ($1B USD) and they originally denied any manufacturing/design flaw. The 3 year replacement program was only established about 1.5 years after release, when they finally acknowledged the problem.

You are perhaps an unlucky outlier of hardware failures (perhaps you should be checking your gaming environment) but attempting to paint the Xbox 360 failure rate as comparable to the failure rate of other consoles is ignorance, and Microsoft's "better" service of those failures is a direct result of the high failure rate coupled with a massive PR hit.

That's a pretty ignorant extension of trust, in my opinion. (Which you've qualified with 'most'.) But I am pretty sure you understand some other issues well enough to evaluate candidates such as their positions on abortion, terrorism, same-sex marriage, etc.

In addition to social issues, hard science doesn't cover economic issues very easily. I don't think it is responsible at all to ignore issues just because you can't fully understand them. You should make an effort to understand. A President who throws a bunch of money at NASA and the NSF but can't figure out the economic feasibility of health care reform or conversely believes the death penalty should be applied to all felonies because it makes economic sense isn't going to be so great.

Yeah, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand is excellent but was the hardest for me to get through, out of the works I've read. The combinations of Babel-17 and Empire Star are great and I would recommend them. Dahlgren is his most popular work but a little harder to get through.

Well, your opinion would be in direct opposition to the processes employed by NASA to reach insanely high code quality. I found an article from 1996: The Write the Right Stuff. Although they do agree creativity is stifled, it does indeed result in better software.

And I, as a professional programmer, think there are certain _must_ practices. If you fail to do these things, you aren't doing a good job and you aren't acting as a professional (e.g. documentation, source code management, testing). For small trival activities these aren't necessary any more than a builder needs a blueprint or safety specifications for a dog house. But if you're building an office building you better include the necessary processes and cut out the "creativity" that might kill someone.

I do think there are two pressures that negate acceptance of the sort of process that NASA uses to produce such great software. The first is that it can be boring. Most people do not like their jobs to be boring, even if told that it's important. Other industries have regulations that require engineers to do boring work. Software developers are not subject to any such requirement unless the company mandates it (e.g. ISO9001). The second is that, unlike NASA, most software companies are competing for customers at a cost of time and money. And customers generally accept "good enough" software as long as it is cheap and available. Cutting corners to meet those demands is an obvious result, just like teachers cut corners to meet test requirements or banks cut corners to meet earnings expectations.

So I expect your opinion, produced from the varied experience in the tech sector you cited, is that the process gets in the way of you shipping and generating a profit. That's a valid argument. It is also valid to argue that many agile processes will not produce better software, when employed by some people. However I do not agree that a manager is unprofessional to mandate a process and fire employees who do not comply.

Samuel R. Delany is highly acclaimed but I think out of reach for most readers. His prose is dense and complicated, requiring serious concentration to consume. The themes are complex and subtle despite having obvious presentation, and can make readers uncomfortable. His are the types of books English teachers have a field day with, typically to the dismay of students. Also unlike most they are written as and read like contemporary fiction rather than science-fiction. (I feel like William Gibson's newer works are like this as well, but annoyingly so.)

80Hz is the cutoff point of directionality for the majority of people. So while many cheap subwoofers are limited in flat response to 100Hz-200Hz (and slightly lower than 100Hz due to room gain) typical mid-range subwoofers are more likely to aim for 40Hz-120Hz before dropping off in frequency response, and higher-end ones 20Hz-120Hz or even lower.

I'm pretty sure the wavelength is only related to the frequency of the movement, irrespective of a sealed or passive/ported design. However, SPL is related to volume of air displaced. For that, you can increase volume of displacement by increasing the diameter and/or increasing the excursion. I do think the former is a little easier to do.

By extension, plagiarism is okay and the GPL is not. There is no requirement to provide credit where credit is due (because it is not due).

No, enforcement is outside the moral argument. All of the debate around this topic is really around what is "right" or "okay" to do. Obviously enforcing through pain of death that the crappy painting I made can only be viewed by people of mixed race and an annual income over $500K who also bark like a dog on national television would not be acceptable, legally or morally.

The point is that the owner of copyright should be free to dictate the terms under which others can access that content. There's no ethical or moral argument that really holds water to contradict that. If the copyright owner is charging too much or inconvenient, you can surely argue it is too expensive or not a good value but you cannot argue any of those reasons makes you exempt from the owner's terms. This is the view our society has agreed upon and in reality we all like that view because each of us wants to have a say in what happens with what we create/produce, even if that say is that what I've produced as an individual should be freely available to everyone.

The only moral exception to this is for survival. No one would dispute moral violation of accessibility terms when it comes to medicines or food or even property (e.g. living under the city bridge) although that does not preclude legal punishment.

The title is misleading if the actual goal of this is to apply an apodizing filter. I suspect the reason it's called "Advanced 96K Upsampling" is because that's much easier to get people to buy into that than a "Apodizing Filter" sticker.

The article explains how the audible benefit comes from the application of the Meridian apodizing filter, which changes the analog signal reproduced from digital data by reducing the pre-ringing. IIRC the trade-off is that post-ringing increases. The claimed benefit is that since the ringing now occurs after the "real" music of larger amplitude and as a result the ringing is masked or could be considered like an acoustic echo that naturally occurs.

The 96K upsampling is just a side-effect of wanting the extra samples when you are applying the filter.

Here's a decent summary of what is supposed to happen to the analog audio signal as a result of the filter application: Technical analysis of the Meridian Apodizing filter.

That being said, from what I've read over the past few years I think people are kind of mixed on whether or not the filter makes things better, worse, or just different but not better.

Remember that people that work in the movie industry will get free screeners or other promotional chances to view a movie before it comes out in the U.S.

Also, 428 ratings on Netflix is likely to correspond to much more than 428/# subscribers-percentage of people that have already seen it, because many people don't rate.

On Netflix, I'm not surprised to see thousands to ratings on some titles before they come out in the U.S. Usually the low hundreds pre-release indicates a smaller audience when it does come out.