Posts by Jim 59

Re: hi-res audio bullshit

The source was pretty much perfected in the mid 80s with the advent of CD. My lovely Goldring-Lenco turntable, though infinitely more graceful than a CD player, changed overnight from being a piece of state-of-the-art engineering, into being merely a thing of beauty.

The amplification problem was pretty much solved in the 60s with solid state amps. The early designs were poor, but once they got it right, there wasn't much more audible improvment to be made.

The speaker has long been the bottleneck. And it is likely to remain so, when you think of all the dirty reality it has to deal with. As a rule of thumb, for the most natural sound, buy the biggest loudspeakers you (and your family) can tolerate.

Re: European justice commissioner Viviane Reding...

Yep, and you can vote against Juncker by voting for an EU party other than his. Your vote acts to remove him and his party from power.

No. The victorious Europarty doesn't really win anything except the right to nominate a candidate for president to the European council. There is no concept of removing a ruler or his party from power. The EU has no "parties" in that sense.

You are mistaken, Cameron was only on the ballot for MP, not for Prime Minister. There is no ballot for PM because PMs aren't elected by the British electorate. They are appointed in back room deals by a handful of people in a political party.

No. Cameron can lose his seat like any other MP, or his party can lose. In both cases he is booted out of Number 10 within seconds. He is undeniably and directly elected under full suffrage. (Although you may have a point with the current coalition).

It makes perfect sense. He voted for a party that had Schulz as a candidate. That is what the EU electorate does. Just like the British people in 2010 voted for parties in Westminster, each with their own candidate. Had the majority of the EU electorate voted on a different party, Juncker would not be president of the EC.

No. It is *nothing* like a UK election. To repeat, the leader (or nominee) of the winning Europarty only gets to be nominated to the EU council as a candidate. The council (who are also unelected) then choose who they like behind closed doors. There isn't even a press release. The Council choose who they like, not you. Heck, Shultz could even win the election and they might still choose Junker (I think).

It is an absurd belief that UK elections have no influence over the UK. Many elections in my memory have led to immediate and huge change, eg Thatcher's win in 1979, Blair in 1997, Cameron/Clegg in 2010.

The rest of your post is an apology for non-democracy in the EU. Don't apologise, fix it. EU leaders have got used to being non-democratic, it will be extremely hard to persuade them otherwise. Think of it from their view. They have a great lifestyle, don't have to bother pleasing voters or accounting to anyone. The life of Riley, why should they want to change that ? And how can we force them, since there is no democratic basis on which to do so ?

Re: Bell Labs GaAs modem from 1960s

@Kev99 sadly, Googling for "Gallium Arsenide modem" returns only one page, this one. I fear we must categorize this desirable item with yogic flying, force processing gyroscope, etc.

Yeah. None of us wants to be reminded of the stupid made-up words of our own yoof.

Re: That is a dodged bullet :o

No-one survived exposure even though some were vaccinated as they were exposed to such a high dose of the virus.

So their vaccination/immunization made them resistant, not immune...

Re: Prevailing winds

The barrels had all been tethered to the rock, the pod or both. The tethers hadn't failed, but the handles on the barrels had been torn off and left forlornly swinging on the leashes."

holy ***t !

Bamboo pickup arm

But no progress can be made when science is replaced by bizarre belief structures and marketing fluff, leading to a decades-long stagnation of the audiophile domain.

No. The ludicrous "audiophile" market, thought annoying, is tiny, and should not prove a barrier to any serious new technology. It certainly didn't slow down the adoption of CDs, for example. And thankfully it has no influence over commercial audio. There are no oxygen-free cables in Sony studios.

I am surprised that commentators continue to talk about MP3s and compressing codecs. Storage capacities have already made music compression fairly redundant. A micro SD card can happily house a major CD collection uncompressed these days.

This article covers a lot of ground in a short space, and is therefore superficial in parts, annoyingly so. The author clearly believes that time delay is the overarching consideration in pretty much all audio design, even dismissing (he calls it "debunking") transmission line speakers in a couple of sentences. But this doesn't stand up. As Douglas Self points out in parts 6 and 9 (also numbered 11) of this article

http://douglas-self.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm

...phase may be important for a base drum, but what about an electric guitar, where even the live performance is provisioned through "legacy" loudspeakers ?

I would add that that live music does not originate at a point source. In an auditorium, the audience members are in widely different positions relative to each instrument, with corresponding wide variations in time delay and sound direction and distance. So should the CD be based on the time delays at seat 34-A or those present at seat 6-C ?

Commercial music passes down an extremely long channel before it reaches your hi-fi. Perhaps hundreds of amplifiers, CPUs, mixing units, filters, DSPs. How likely is it that group/phase delay passes through unchanged at all these points ? Only if all these components have zero group/phase delay is it worth redesigning your loudspeaker crossover unit, and even them only if you think that the effect is gross enough to be audible.

Re: We need more laws!

Good point. This prospective law could be very handy the rich and famous wanting to censor unwanted images of themselves, under the disguise of a superficially worthy cause.

That embarrassing picture of Boris Johnson and Dave Cameron at the Bullingdon club ? Will this make it illegal ?

What about the recent video of the Coops banker buying crack ? Published without his permission surely ? Censor it.

Re: not password protected?

Do you seriously log into your home computer with a username and password each time you use it?

Yes. And I have never used a computer that didn't work that way, at either home or work, since the last century. Comes from having laptops I suppose.

Re: Just strike on principle!

IT sure is the whipping boy when it comes to cost savings, and a handy scapegoat when the cheapened system goes wrong

Re: Don't believe everything you read. OTOH...

Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects is a bot ffs and people are replying to it ?

Search on its other posts, they all read the same.

Re: Jim 59 customer information was not compromised

@Matt Bryant I don't mind social comments, even if they are daft. It is putting them in the wrong forum that is annoying. AC thinks: "I don't have anything to say on the ATM story, but I sure fancy raging about <whatever>, so I will just do it here". Finds an almost-empty forum and curls one off. ACers please don't go to the toilet in The Register, use YouTube forums like everybody else.

Re: Nice

So the mention of the word "Texas" is enough to provoke an off-topic unfocussed outrage aimed at nothing in particular. And down-voters pile in, desperate to be offended by something or other. FFS. It seems that we really do miss Eadon.

Re: @Jim 59 - "how to spy on your enemy without spying on your citizens"

Super. And how does this attractive platitude translate into practical action ?

Some 'tards in here prefer headbanging to the smell of their own outrage than answering a tough question. How do you spy on your enemies without spying on your own citizens too, when the global internet puts them on the same copper, encrypted? A 1975 answer won't do.

The govt has answered the question with a sledgehammer - ie, spy on every doggone thing you can, all the time. Which apalls the innocent who are spied on wrongly. But everyone agrees we must do some spying, so what's the answer ? I try to think of a compromise but encryption makes that difficult.

NB - the answer is not an irrelevent 3 page up-the-workers rant.

Re: He is giving a talk about mavern

Utterly ludicrous story. It was a harmless joke but that isn't the point. These Twitter busy-bodies choose to be offended in order to undermine the free speech of others. The only thing they care about is censoring anybody who expresses an opinion not on their recommended list. They must be all told to foxtrot-oscar, loudly, regularly, until they understand that we have freedom of expression, bought at very great expense by the last generation and to be passed intact onto the next.

"We are going through all the events that allowed this slide to reach the public"

translation: "oh no! sorry! we will censor these opinions as quickly as possible!"

Says TarahWheelerVanVlack:

Don't apologize b/c I'm offended. Apologize because you were wrong.

No. Don't apologize at all. Instead tell the self-appointed censors how repugnant you find their attempt to muzzle free speech, on today of all days.

Re: Why no coin op version ?

Oh yeah...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nice-Tetris-commercial-coin-operated-arcade-game-/171346139756