Some ludicrously overpriced cable aimed at the mass market is stranded, with Monster being the biggest offender by volume. But most of the really expensive speaker cable is solid core instead of stranded, with the core size limited only by how flexible the cable needs to be. The stuff I like uses a number of 14 AWG wires that total to match 12 AWG. I've tried using twisted pairs of 12 AWG copper instead, just basic power cable from Home Depot, but I can barely route the stuff. I like the cables (and amplifiers) I use to be mechanically sound and measure perfectly, priority #1, so I never have to include them in troubleshooting why something sounds bad. Multi-component systems are hard to optimize, and making individual parts as perfect as is practical lowers the complexity. That doesn't lead me to $1000 speaker cables, but I'm not getting $5 ones either.

When audio changes are big enough to show on a scope, normally the only reason someone bothered to isolate them out is because they were audible. Some of what audiophiles complain about here is real albeit misunderstood. Let's say you start with low-feedback amplifiers with a low damping factor, which some people think are good things. That gives you an amp that's more prone to oscillation than is has to be. If you then combine that with a high capacitance cable, next thing you know there's a perfect storm of bad design that really does sound different. What's supposed to be ultrasonic junk moves into audible. And some idiots will think that because it's different, it's better, so next thing you know every part of people's system is tweaked for more of that junk.

There is a side of the market that demands the best engineered products for the price point at every step of the chain too though. I read audio reviews starting with the bench plots.

The example they show takes a snapshot of 25 books at once, looking at the spines on a shelf, and then claims to identify all of them by doing OCR on the spine text combined with a database lookup. If that works, it will be quite a bit faster than anything that requires scanning individual books.

That's the theory, anyway. Looking at the reviews, it doesn't actually work well enough yet to bother.

Oxygen-free copper is very a much a real thing, and it does matter for some applications. The only part that's hard to support is whether those differences are audible in home audio. All other things being equal between two cables, it shouldn't matter. (All other things are usually not equal)

Inductance and capacitance impact total impedance, and it is possible to find bad combinations where that turns into an easily measurable problem with the cable. See high cap wire section of "Speaker Wire: A History" for how that comes out on a scope. It's very easy to find cases where the wire doesn't matter too. One of the funny things about objective audio testing is that people usually find what they set out to, because it's so easy to set up tests to give the results you want. That doesn't disprove there are no edge cases where those things do matter. Audible amplifier feedback and oscillation is a real thing.

Serious corrosion does happen in old audio cables, with them turning a lovely puke green eventually. I have some systems going back to the 80's here, and that copper is totally grody, fer sure! Preventing that is mainly about the jacket and termination though. Just using high quality copper doesn't make it go away.

That coat hanger wire vs. Monster Cable test used Martin Logan SL3 speakers, which was such a weird choice I have to throw the whole thing out as a waste of time. Those are electrostatic panels with a traditional woofer. Electrostatics have very different electrical properties than regular speakers. You can't really extrapolate from that exotic test to the rest of the market, where people are mainly using traditional cone and dome speakers. Car anology: you can observe that changing gas for a Tesla electric vehicle doesn't impact its performance, but that doesn't prove gas quality is irrelevant to regular engines.

That's not how it works. The way you spot a bottlenecks in performance work is that if you change anything else, there is zero impact on the resulting system speed. Conversely, if you alter something and the system really does get faster, you must have just hit one of the bottlenecks.

Given that, the way high detail performance goes from 83 to 86 FPS as RAM speed increases means that RAM speed must have been a bottleneck. If speed had been strictly limited by the video card instead, speeding up the memory would have given zero total system speed increase. It's not hard to get RAM fast enough to no longer be the bottleneck, but you can't just throw junk memory at this game without that turning into a limiter.

Yes, it does.

Wait, did you mean they have extra laws about exotic pornography? Uhh, never mind what I just said.

The test numbers in section 6.3 show that ECC mitigates most of the errors, as the bulk of them are single bit ones. And if you're on a system that's prone to this problem, the odds are you will see a warning about that ECC correction kicking in long before you'll hit one of the uncorrectable multi-bit errors.

I'm also bothered by people who put the word audiophiles in scare quotes for no good reason. P.S. Not all audiophiles are opposed to blind testing; some people like expensive audio toys that are objectively better too.

Memory speed can technically still be the bottleneck on large memory footprint games like BF4; see the bit-tech review for some numbers on that. The people chasing after PC gaming benchmarks reflexively use the fastest memory around though, and if you do that it's less likely for memory to dictate the speed limits.

Read Before you initiate a “docker pull”. Note that it contains warnings about almost everything supposedly discovered by this researcher, and it came out before it. That's why no one in Docker land is even taking this seriously. People who are surprised by this aren't aware of what's going on with Docker by definition, because if they were they'd know this is old news.

Docker 1.X is a first release with lots of known limitations--this is one of them--plus the inevitable security issues of any new software. No one with any sense is putting it into production yet.

It's right in the article: "RPX is sort of the 'good version of Intellectual Ventures.'...it's making sure that basically anyone can license these patents under FRAND (fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory) rates."

Dude, the whole "never get fired for buying Microsoft" thing is over. I work on large government contracts for a living now, and ever since Oracle's GSA contract was canceled, we can't expand fast enough to convert people over to PostgreSQL on Linux. The whole US government is Open Source First now, following the OS stack adoption of most fast growing companies today. It's only the tired old companies who still trot out their old Microsoft servers for everything, and who wants to work for them?

The Microsoft FUD anecdotes had a good run, but we're already at the point where innovative companies consider their software part of the same legacy mess as Cobol.

Yes, the #1 killer of Paleolithic people over 30 was failing to outrun the velociraptors.

“Smoking takes ten years off your life. Well it’s the ten worst years, isn’t it folks? It’s the ones at the end! It’s the wheelchair, kidney dialysis, adult diaper years. You can have those years! We don’t want ‘em, alright?” - Dennis Leary

Alzheimer's at 90 so you can't run your island nation anymore? Liked that story better when it was it Roy Bates on Sealand.