Comment Re:conflict (Score 2) 78
IMO the worst is trying to drag up a fight that was silly 100 years ago. It's ok to think that both Edison and Tesla were great men.....because they were. You don't have to choose sides.
There are any number of proposals out there to replace or augment CA certificates for SSL purposes (the EFF has Sovereign Keys, there is the DANE proposal to store certificates in DNS with DNSSEC security and there are other proposals out there designed to make it much harder for these kinds of "bogus certificate" type attacks)
Why aren't any of these proposals actually gaining any traction?
To be exact, the half-life of cesium-137 is 30.17 years. I was responding to someone worried about geological time frames. Certainly cesium waste / fuel should be stored safely for several years while it decays. In 90 years, 88% of the radioactivity is gone. That's something to pay attention to. It's not the "thousands of years" that the greenies used to claim, until most of them realized that "no nuclear" means "more coal".
Why didn't I think of that.... penal colony for illegal immigrants involving long term imprisonment and hard labor.
Instead of returning them home, send them on a one-way trip to mars or the moon.
It looks like every world cup but perhaps a couple has had a different stitch pattern on the ball.
No, it doesn't. They were all somewhat different up until the Telstar introduced the 32-panel, pentagon-and-hexagon stitching pattern, but it appears to me that remained unchanged for almost 40 years, from 1970 to 2006. The balls in between appear to have the same stitching pattern, just different printed designs.
I dunno.. my LEAF's maintenance schedule for the first 150K miles is pretty much "rotate tires, every 7500 miles, check brakes every 15,000". Checking the brakes, of course, involves checking the brake fluid levels, so there is a fluid. At 150K miles you do have to replace the oil used to cool the battery charger.
But, in general, EVs are very close to maintenance-free.
I liked Dr Sbaitso, talking parrots and realtime voice changing software included with various incarnations of sound blaster. It was all a lot of fun.
Yet my last memories of SB was going thru driver hell as creative was seemingly incapable of producing a driver not constantly subject to crashing and burning on multi-processor systems.
Today sound comes from motherboard to stereo receiver via optical SPDIF. Are bits pushed from sound blaster over SPDIF better in some way than bits pushed from generic audio codecs? Or is it as provably worthless as those $3000 HDMI cables?
Whatever special audio processing SB is doing in that custom ASIC of theirs is it really something a modern CPU/GPU lacks overhead to implement?
In support of sound blaster I could see driving headphones/desktop speakers directly benefit from a high quality sound card... although personally I will never be picky enough to care.
ASIO is very awesome and my mobo sucks at microphone input. Even worse line in is not isolated causing noise from computer to feedback into connected radio's and players.
If a cheap synth is used it will sound like a casio entry level keyboard or 8 bit videogame.
Ironic that I was reading this while listening to an NSF file, which is music designed for playback through an 8-bit soft synth.
A USB audio interface also lies outside the electrically noisy interior of a PC chassis.
Strong caution with USB audio. There is a metric buttload of cheap USB adapters, While they technically work, they typically lack analog filtering that gets rid of higher harmonics. If you look at the output on an oscilloscope, instead of a smooth wave, you see the actual steps. Better audio hardware should have filters to smooth this stuff out.
Another MAJOR thing is inducing noise into the output. This is not just for USB cards, but all audio solutions. You need some pretty good filtering between the digital and analog power domains -- yet another area where cheap sound can skimp. Hey, let's shave $0.05 off by dropping this capacitor and inductor!
The original article really touches on two separate areas:
1) Audio processing
2) Higher quality audio circuitry
SoundBlaster (and other gaming-oriented cards) typically do both. However, do you really NEED both? The audio processing stuff is supposed to provide an API that games can use to make thing sound more realistic, or offload audio processing from software to hardware, or both. It can typically decode various dolby flavors, and do some other fancy DSP-ish type stuff. Do you really NEED all of that? If so, then maybe a gaming card is for you.
However, what if you want the best sound possible, the lowest noise possible, and don't really game or use the various audio enhancements? You just want a plain-vanilla sound card, but with the highest quality audio. Where to do? Skip the computer store, but go to your local MUSIC store (not the ones that sell CD's, the ones that sell GUITARS). Those cards skip all of the DSP bells and whistles, but have the best-quality DACs and filtering that you can find. You can find some really good USB solutions that will blow on-board audio out of the water for about $100 or so. Of course, you can go crazy and spend $500 or more if you want. If it is good enough for a music producer to use in a studio (who makes his or her living off of the sound), it is probably good enough for YOUR music and movies.
One thing that always annoyed me was on board devices going south and not enough expansion slots to add a card in.
USB theoretically has 127 slots to add a card in, if you buy a lot of 7-port hubs. A USB audio interface also lies outside the electrically noisy interior of a PC chassis.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
