Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Doesn't move me. (Score 1) 502

Tell you what, ring me again when a piece of software composes something simple that "moves" me.

I've listened to the example tracks and they made me feel nothing, they go nowhere, they have no story, no soul.

Here's a popular track as comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2XzoA94Zws

That's a relatively simple piece, well executed. Good luck with your algorithms.

Comment SImple, good RNG (Score 1) 395

I made a pretty darn good rng a while ago. Simply have three independent white noise generators made with two transistors and an op-amp each. The noise is generated by a transistor going into avalanche mode, and that's basically influenced by quantum states. The problem with using just one is that its output isn't 50/50. So you XOR two. You can stop there but if you're really paranoid, use a third to clock a latch so you can't event predict when the random bit changes. All in all the whole circuit fit in a box smaller about 2" x 3" x 1".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests were quite happy with the output.

With /dev/random & urandom, I don't care about it anymore.

Comment A CPU for this? (Score 5, Informative) 81

Just goes to show ya that MIT guys will crack a nut using a bulldozer. There's plenty of dedicated level-meter chips around which cost next to nothing and provide a better, logarithmic response, which is what you want for sound.

The LM3915 is an oldie but a goodie, you can even daisy-chain them.

See http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM3915.html

Comment My anecdotal experiences with Flash. (Score 2, Insightful) 357

I've been running my home desktop/server (Linux 2.6) on a Sandisk Cruzer 8GB usb stick (root, swap, tmp, everything except large media files) for a year and four months without any glitches. I've napkin-calculated that at current usage and wear levelling, I should be able to use it for over 50 years without a failure. Funnily enough, the portable USB drive that I use to back it up failed last December. I keep multiple backups, I didn't flinch.

Then again some flash devices fail miserably and silently. I've had a few 64MB and 128MB stick batches with stuck bits, and those were practically new. The operating systems they were used on didn't detect the errors, I did, by trying to open garbled files.

My wish list: A SATA gizmo that has 4-5 USB connectors with each their own bus that presents itself to the SATA bus as a single drive, and does RAID-5 automatically. That'd be sweet.

Slashdot Top Deals

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. - Seneca

Working...