And most homes are acoustically terrible, too. Even the audiophiles I know couldn't convince their spouses to let them plaster their living rooms with diffusers, broadband absorbers and bass traps instead of pictures of the family, home furnishings, etc.. So you're going to have standing waves, comb filtering, flutter echo, etc etc.

(Unless Russ Berger designed the living room.)

Math! It still works, provided the summed frequency doesn't exceed the nyquist limit.

Very few things in nature or music require the full spectrum of dynamic range. Going from the threshold of hearing to the threshold of pain is something that just doesn't happen very often. Even the most dynamic classical music has a far, far narrow dynamic range. 16 bits can encompass the dynamic range of just about everything we hear (and most stuff is recorded at 24 these days, so there's no audible loss during processing and engineering).

I want to see how you could produce a stairstep-pattern in a speaker. It'd require your tweeter to actually teleport between states.

What I believe you're referring to is aliasing noise. It's not the stairstep, it's just noise caused by conversion or other signal processing. And that WAS an issue with older DACs, and was sometimes within the audible spectrum.

All old DACs don't stair-step either, they just have limited frequency domains and/or dynamic ranges. Stair-stepping is a pernicious myth. Nyquist-Shannon theory says otherwise.

A lot of the "warmth" of vinyl comes from the limitations of the format - bass basically needs to be in mono to keep the needle in the groove, there's an effective limit to the high frequencies that can be reproduced, and there's a limit to the dynamic range reproducible by vinyl. I mean *theoretically* it's all infinitely analog and so forth but in practical purposes there's a crapton of compression and equalization done to keep the needle doing what it's supposed to and to keep the cutting lathe from slicing right through the acetate.

My plain-old 5 seemed a little sluggish for like a day afterwards, but I assume that was because all my auto-udating apps were auto-updating and pulling down a crapton of data. So far I haven't really seen much of a difference, except in a few older esoteric apps I occasionally use that have crashed on me. I'm keeping an eye on that. I was worried for that first day, but it hasn't really made a difference. It's probably slightly slower but I don't notice because I don't type fast enough.

My iPad Air has been stellar thus far.

I'm not touching my old iPad 2, unless one of my MIDI controller apps requires the update for something.

Whoa! You mean Apple made a technology on one of their devices *proprietary*??!?!??!?!??!

HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS WHY ISN'T THIS A HEADLINE AROUND THE WORLD? /sarcasm

They sure are pretty. A bit big, though. Would look fine on my wrist, but probably not on my wife's.

That's been one issue with wearables so far - while some of them have decent industrial design, they've all been positioned as "computers that you wear as an accessory", when the mass market would much rather go for "accessories that are also computers." They've all been either too big or too unstylish to make a fashion statement beyond "I read Slashdot", and frankly have been pretty biased towards male wearers.

I dunno if Apple's cracked the code on that yet, but it's interesting to see a wearable that acknowledges that (more than just customize-able faces and bands, actual different form factors and designs).

Verify me.

Man I'm glad I'm not the only person who remembers that movie.

I don't think so. But I think they're expecting this to moves hardware units and tech licenses and promote the Apple brand, whcih while not probably as lucrative immediately as a small transaction fee, has the potential to draw a lot of people into their ecosystem.

...unless he's a fan of the author for whom Bester is named.

B%'s dialogue was mostly awful and heavy-handed, because JMS (at least at the time) wrote a LOT of expository, comic-booky stuff. Given over the years he's matured having been a script editor for a lot of bigger name, subtler stuff, one would hope he's got a grasp of it now. BUt back then, whooweee there was a lot of leaden phrasing. It took actors with a lot of gravitas, like Katsulas and Jurasik to make some of that stuff work. Unfortunately most of the actors lacked that.

And then there's the whole thing that 90% of the foreshadowing was done by either time-jump flashforwards or a riddle-talking alien.

I also found the central conceit of the Vorlon/Shadow conflict, and the resolution thereof, deeply unsatisfying. Millions-of-years-old ultrapowerful Type IV civilisations and their endless conflict reads like a 1st-year philosophy paper - and is resolved by some dude yelling "Shut up! Go away! I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, DAD!" Buh.

> The same thing a train does when it arrives at a train station.

Blow through at high speeds, jump the track and maim dozens of passerby?

For standard operations, it basically makes little difference. Movies, games, etc - unless you're dealing with an acoustically treated space and really good speakers, mobo audio exceeded the necessary standards a long time ago.

If you're an audio pro, though, then you generally need something else. But that tends to be specialized - high-end converters, mic preamps, multichannels, ADAT/TOSLink, yadda yadda. Eventually you start worrying about what brand of transformer is in your mic pre and how to impedance match your mics.

But that's pretty rarefied.

The standalone sound card has kind of been squeezed out on both ends. No significant benefit for your average user, not good enough for your prosumer.