Posts by Dave 126

Re: Further efficiency gains ahead?

>If you run out of toilet paper, you can ask Sirii where to get more, but I suspect she may respond "I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that".

You jest, but Siri's pre-Apple 'character' may well have given that response:

Back then, Siri boasted an even more irreverent tone -- and a more robust set of skills. Like fiction writers dreaming up a character, Dag Kittlaus, Siri's co-founder and chief executive, and Harry Saddler, a design expert, had carefully crafted the assistant's attitude and backstory. It was to be "otherworldly," "vaguely aware of popular culture" and armed with a "dry wit," Kittlaus says.

That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents, even as it endowed the assistant with new gifts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-apple-iphone_n_2499165.html

Re: The Martian

>David Lynch's Dune. Dune has crap script, crap acting and crap special effects,

Oh, but the set design and wardrobe are gorgeous!

Re: while it may look cheesy

>it would be even more impressive if these bots could sense, communicate, coordinate and execute autonomously

That has been looked into already - see the TED Talk 'Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate' below. It shouldn't be too difficult to incorporate Prof. Kumar's techniques into these ball robots. The sensing hardware is almost at the 'off the shelf' level - (i.e MS Kinect et al), plus mesh networking...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErEBkj_3PY

Re: Laboratory Street

The Consumer Association in the UK is similar - its monthly magazine is called 'Which?'. It has no advertising, and is financed by its subscribers.

They test all sorts of consumer goods, and they explain their methods which often involve a lot of real testing in controlled conditions. Recommendations are made, but the results of the tests and specifications of all tested products are always shown in a matrix.

Its subscribers give Which? a group of consumers with varied and broad interests who are willing to participate in surveys. They know that this information will not be used to sell stuff to them. Instead, the information will be processed and given back to them.

Such surveys include customer service from retailers, or the reliability of products.

It would be very difficult for any one company to 'game' these surveys, due to the range of products and services the subscribers are quizzed about.

Re: One thing which hasn't been mentioned re MP3 encoding

>Third point: the DAC on a phone or laptop is unlikely to be anything other than the cheapest the maker could get away with.

Some versions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 had Wolfson DACs, and the LG G2 is said to be good, too (and LG contributed to the Android Open Source Project the ability to play 192Khz 24bit FLAC natively)

Re: Records and WAV

Storage is cheap, but so is processing power- you may as well encode to FLAC, since the output is bit-for-bit identical to WAV, and you get meta-data too.

Re: May The Source Be With You*

What Craig said: Storage is cheap. Rip to FLAC because you might as well. Transcode to another (possibly not yet invented yet) format as and when required. Go to pub. Simple.

Oh, it goes without saying to ensure CDs are clean and scratch-free before ripping. Perhaps a £10 disc cleaner would be a worthwhile and inexpensive investment?

Re: Big boxen big bucks

Just to clarify, Class D doesn't mean 'digital'.

The Tripath Amps have enjoyed good reviews, especially given their price. There seems to be people who buy the inexpensive ones, and then upgrade the capcitors themselves.

For more on Smartphone Audio, Anadtech have one of these http://www.ap.com/products/apx585 and have produced graphs and everything:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7567/smartphone-audio-quality-testing

For each set of tests we can add a load, simulated or real, to see how the device handles more demanding headphones. For this article I am sticking with only a set of the updated Apple Earbuds. They are probably the most common headphone out there and easy to acquire to duplicate testing. For future tests the other loads will be AKG K701 headphones and Grado SR60 headphones. Both models are popular, and I happen to own them.

There are a few main tests we are going to use for all these reviews. Those key tests are maximum output level, Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise (THD+N), Frequency Response, Dynamic Range (as defined by AES17), and Crosstalk.

Re: Find your own threshold

Spot on, AC.

Its a sliding scale:

Low bitrate: 'Metallic goblin laughter' artefacts clearly audible to everyone.

[Middle ground]

High bitrate: indistinguishable by ear from source.

Of course, storage is so cheap that is is a no-brainer to rip CDs as FLAC, if only to be able to transcode them to any desired future format without cumulative compression artifacts creeping in. This is much the same philosophy as scanning photographs at a higher than required resolution and saving them in a lossless format (so to avoid any possibility of jpg > edit > jpg > edit > jpg etc jaggedness occuring).

Re: Digital Clone - billat29

>Had memory been cheaper when the CD was invented, it might have been that reclocking the data - through a first in-first out memory buffer - would have been used; it would have made a noticeable difference to the audio output.

It was featured on Sony 'Discman' portable CD players as 'ESP' - electronic shock protection. It was featured on all MD players because, like a computer HDD, the data was always stored sequentially (you could delete or rearrange tracks on a MD). The amount of buffer varied depending upon the model of Discman / MD player you had - the pricier models tended to have more solid-state memory, expressed in 'seconds' of anti-shock protection.

The Sharp 722 MD player (which has a scroll wheel in 1998) would play reliably in a pocket whilst walking - the cheaper 702 player would occaisionally have to catch up on itself.

This was a year or so before the £600 5GB iPod, and before 32MB (yes, MB) MP3 players were seen in Currys.

[Side note: If Sony hadn't been so awkward about copy protection and propriety formats, a proper High Density Data Minidisc (later versions could do around a GB, normal MDs were about 100 MB) could have pre-empted the iPod's impact on the market. Instead, we had SonicStage software and beautifully designed 20GB Sony HDD players that could only play ATRAC - not even MP3! - years after the iPod. Silly Sony.]

Re: Why even bother with that?

>Even easier still, just put the CD in the drive and listen to it.

Er, on a Mac? I have always found them to be well behaved and reliable machines, except for their optical drives which sometimes exhibit a tenacity for holding onto CDs rivalling that of a neurotic spaniel with a tennis ball.

Re: Phat Aluminium?

>It's actually an alloy.

Well yeah. Most structural metals are alloyed rather than used in their pure form. There are many types of aluminium alloy, to fine-tune the desired properties. Adding magnesium tends to make for easier casting, for example.

Re: Phat Aluminium?

>Aluminium isn't really that strong. It's usually fairly soft. Properly made plastic casings can actually be quite a bit stronger.

Aluminium is quite soft and not that stiff for a given cross-section. However, because it is less dense than steel, the actual cross section used to achieve the required strength is larger than that used for steel. As a consequence, aluminium structures tend to be stiffer than steel ones- look at bicycle frames as an example.

(there are other things going on here though - the choice of material defines the process used to shape it - so ribs might be stamped into steel sheet for stiffness, whereas you might choose to cast a mag/alu alloy, or machine it to achieve a stiff structure)

Of course the primary concern on a bicycle frame is light weight (it doesn't matter if the tubes are thicker), whereas on a phone it is the physical dimensions (W x L x T) that people compete on.

Now, you might choose to use one of a number of plastics instead for a phone- and you might arrive at an engineering solution where the device does bend, but can then return to is original flat state. Aluminium, unlike steel and titanium within their elastic limits, exhibits 'fatigue' where eventual catastrophic failure can result from a succession of small bends or vibration over time.

Another solution would be to build strain gauges into the phone, triggering an audible warning if too much strain is observed, or perhaps a message "get off me you fat bastard!". Or a sound like a mouse being crushed (simulated on a synthesiser of course, not recorded from life in a studio)

Anyway, looks my next phone will be the Xperia Z3 Compact, with flexible glass front and rear, and nylon corners to protect against shock. And it will be in a case. And I don't wear hipster skinny jeans.

I am quite butter-fingered though.

Re: Flaw in the argument

Vegetable soup makes you calm and happy - 3000 year-old Chinese proverb

Human subjects were found to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisone after eating vegetable soup daily for two weeks - scientific paper published around 2004

If the SSD manufacturers are expecting a more heat-tolerant capacitor chemistry to be available soon, they might not consider it worth investing in developing automated soldering techniques for the current generation of capacitors.

That's just a thought, I really don't know.

Re: Kaboom?

"Oh, meltdown. It’s one of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus."

Re: Indeed

My autocarrot always insist that I use 'ducking life'.

Anyway, I'm off down the sub for a riot.

Re: Battery life

There are websites that standardise (as far as is possible) their battery life tests of various handsets.

Anandtech have a reputation for such tests, and though they haven't yet released their full review and test results for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, they have released some preliminary results here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8559/iphone-6-and-iphone-6-plus-preliminary-results

"As with all of our battery life tests, we standardize on 200 nits and ensure that our workload in the web browsing test has a reasonable amount of time in all power states of an SoC." The test is done on WiFi.

NB: The founder of Anandtech left the website earlier this year and is now employed by Apple.

Re: God doesn't think he's X

Not earlier, but tangentially related:

Bernard explains the abbreviations for various Foreign Office honours.

Bernard: “Of course, in the service, CMG stands for Call Me God. And KCMG for Kindly Call Me God.”

Hacker: “What about GCMG?”

Bernard: “God Calls Me God.”

Re: Good effort but alas

Yeah, conspiracy theories are the mental equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "nanananana I can't hear you na na na na".

People conspire on a daily basis - from surprise birthday parties to price-fixing amongst competitors - hoodwinks at this scale are implausible for all sorts of reasons, from motive to execution.

Sidenote: The first *hardback* edition of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has blurb for Capricorn One on its back cover (and not a plain blue back cover). Capricorn One is film and novel about a faked manned mission to Mars.