Posts by dan1980

Re: aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh

@Sokolik

But you are, at least in your frustration, partially correct because the Saudis do contribute to terrorist activities because their money does go to institutions that serve as recruiting or training influences for terrorists or to religious groups that preach violent jihad as an Islamic religious duty.

In other words, the Saudis, as a people, appear to have a tacit approval of terrorism.

Again, that's how it appears.

As someone else said, they do seem to be playing both sides to an extent. It's not quite allying with Stalin but the concept an unease if causes in many is not wholly dissimilar.

Re: And religeous fanatics of all forms wonder...

@AC

"Your credibility just hit zero and I stopped reading there."

Dude, naw.

Look . . . I firmly believe that there is a fundamental distinction between a world view that admits only of the material and one that includes - to be rather blunt - magic.

There is pretty much only a single conception of 'God' that can exist without any conflict with the material view, and that is God as the creator of the universe. By that I mean a god that sets off the big bang* and then forever removes itself from that creation.

As soon as you believe that a God interferes with the material world, you are (whether you know it or not) believing in a magical manipulation of the laws of physics. If you believe that God. If you believe that God 'speaks' to you then that is still a violation of the laws of physics because it implies that this entity has caused neurons to fire in your brain without any material input.

It's a material effect without a material cause.

BUT, there is no compelling reason why people who believe that cannot be part of a happy, free, open, peaceful and productive society. And, given we each have about 70-80 years to experience existence, that's all I really give a damn about.

You can be a firm, genuine believer in equality and freedom and human rights and yet hold personal beliefs that a non-physical entity magically grants you favours from time to time. (Apparently the Christian God is particularly partial to assisting people in feats of sporting prowess and acting/musical ability, if acceptance speeches and post-match interviews are anything to go by.)

What DOESN'T gel is believing that YOUR god has a way and a truth that is the ultimate good for all people and they should therefore be convinced, pressured or forced to fall in line.

Some might claim that any genuine religious believer who does not proselytise is being inconsistent or hypocritical but that is the believer's issue and not mine. If a believer is perfectly happy to keep it to themselves and believes that it is more important to be happy and free than to believe in their god then that person is utterly fine by me - we can be best friends.

That person can even be a distinguished and exceptionally valued and productive scientist who brings great advances to humanity.

You, my cowardly friend, might hold that any belief in any god or extra-physical reality is fundamentally irrational and thus anyone with such a belief is themselves irrational.

Well, I agree with that. BUT . . . If you can show me a human being that does not act irrationally then you let us know. No one expects perfectly consistent, perfectly rational thinking and acting from people because it's just not in our nature. So, if being irrational some times and about some things disqualifies a person from having valid opinions about the world and about life and about people and about society - and even about science - then we are all doomed utterly.

So, if you are a decent, open, fair, compassionate person who believes that all people have the right to their freedom and to hold their own counsel and live unmolested in the pursuit of their own happiness then step up - we need as many of you as possible and I don't give a damn what religious beliefs you hold any more than I care about your gender or colour or nationality.

BUT, if you are a close-minded twat who believes it's their way or nothing; who believes that those who hold different views are inherently not welcome and not fit to contribute - regardless of an other quality they may have - or help make decisions about how we make this world a good and happy place, well, you can fuck right off - we've got plenty of your type already.

* - That's as it stands at the moment. If we explain the big bang, there may still be room for a 'something' outside of that but we don't need to cross that bridge quite yet.

Re: aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh

@Sokolik

While accepting that money from the Saudi Government does end up with terrorist factions, saying that the 9/11 'perps' were Saudi subjects is not necessarily the full picture. Yes, Bin Laden and some of those who committed the attacks were Saudis. BUT, they were Saudis who were unhappy with the Saudi government. Bin Laden went to Afghanistan because he was annoyed at the Saudi government accepting/asking for help from the US, whom he despised.

Don't get me wrong - Saudi Arabia is a horrendously cloistered and repressed country with authoritarian laws, but I am not sure we can say they were responsible for the attack on September 11.

Re: And religeous fanatics of all forms wonder...

@RogerStenning

I've got no problem with "God botherers" - it's the ones who bother me that I get annoyed with!

Only way to be sure?

Re: Stop making our religion look bad!

Disrespecting Islam?

That's a paddlin'

Supporting women?

That's a paddlin'

Not believing in Allah?

Oh, you better believe that's a paddlin'

(Not to make light of the barbaric, closed-minded, authoritarian regime - it just popped into my head.)

Re: Religion of Peace?

@phil dude

Eh? What's this "and now murderous" part?

@AC

"An exercise in Physics: is such a long thin cane going to absorb some of the blow by bending? The person's back itself is too hard to offer much protection."

I suspect it wouldn't help that much as the longer the cane, the faster the end of it will be travelling.

Re: In a few decades...

@Mephistro

". . . when their oil finally runs out or gets replaced by better and cheaper energy sources, these countries will revert to their natural status . . ."

Maybe.

But then it's not like the Sheiks haven't been spending their money on business ventures and the likes. Take the bin Laden family, who operate the largest construction company in the world (unless i am mistaken).

That said, it's hard not to enjoy this quote form the Ides of March, delivered by George Clooney's character:

"You know how you fight the war on terror? Don't need their product anymore. Their product is oil - just don't need it and they go away. We don't have to bomb anyone, we don't have to invade anyone!"

Re: One Foot in Reality

Bad delivery of the data can ABSOLUTELY affect the output - sometimes audibly. This is just a fact.

However, as this is a fact, every engineer working in the field will be fully aware of this and thus design the equipment to deal with it.

What is required is one of two things: either superb delivery of the data or buffering and correction at the receiving end (the DAC). With anything, it's generally desirable to have as perfect an input as possible but the manufacturer of the component accepting the input will rarely be able to control that input so it is better to assume a less-than perfect source.

In any such system, you have to assess the path taken and the stage in that path where a clean signal is necessary. Once this is identified, it makes sense to have the filtering/correction applied just before that.

In this instance, that spot is the DAC and everyone knows that.

So, if your choice of storage is causing artifacts in the sound due to starvation, then, either the source/cable is faulty or far too stressed*. Or, you have a very poorly engineered (or faulty) DAC.

Now, considering that the DAC in use was a dual-box dCS DAC + upsampler going for around $7000 and $5000 USD respectively. That's $12,000 USD worth of filtering and buffering and pixie dust right there.

If it's possible that two different NAS boxes can really make any difference whatsoever in that context, then I think they really need to re-evaluate the value they are placing on all that expensive gear.

But no, the Arm-powered QNAP TS-439 Pro has better "drive" than a CD, particularly "in the sense of bass euphony and articulation". Pity that it had lost to CD in the "higher registers" with "some edgy grain" that "nudg[ed] it off neutrality".

And of course the Intel Atom-powered QNAP TS-419P+ "rendered the same song more tunefully". I can't even summarise the paragraph as every phrase is gold:

"It was more organic and made more sense, the lines of melody and rhythm cooperating better. As well as showing better individual instrument distinction, the whole piece sounded tidier, tonally less messy without the roughened HF, and perhaps better integrated in musical intent."

What the fuck does "better integrated in music intent" mean?

Either way, it became clear after another listen that the QNAP TS-419P+ was the superior choice, given that the difference was "akin to changing loudspeakers", delivering the improvement one might suspect from swapping a £500 DAC for a £2000 DAC. One has to ask what that implies about the $12000 worth of DAC already in the system.

I have to stop quoting that review because it's just so darned good. There seems to be no limit to what these people can convince themselves that they can hear. You can't make this stuff up. Or, I suppose, more accurately, you can:

"If the Kingston SSD stood apart from the disk drives for its mostly good yet quite alien character, drive four made itself known for entirely the wrong reasons. This Corsair drive (another SSD) conspicuously highlighted vocal sibilants, and had a hard, relentless quality that was impossible to miss. Strangely, it also robbed the music of pace; it was the least engaging on any emotional level thanks to an enveloping tunelessness that appeared to carve up a song like an MP3 rip."

The whole thing is just packed full of all the unquantifiable, unexplainable (and therefore completely useless) terms that audiophile reviews are so rightly ridiculed for. Air and space and energy and timing and transients and separation and blackness.

HOWEVER, the kicker is that these drives aren't just going straight into the DACs - the $4000 Naim media player is! The NAS boxes are just supplying the data. The Naim NDX is like a CD player and the HDDs can be considered the same way a CD can. What that means is that changing HDDs is in the same realm as re-recording your purchased CDs onto special CD-Rs.

Don't you know that "the black polycarbonate substrate has better translucency and creates improved dye absorption for a pit that's better defined?" No? But it's so obvious - "A better-defined pit means less jitter and more music!"

Of course, you still have to colour in the edges with your green marker and/or bevel the edges but everyone knows that.

Even then, you have to remember all this is competing with the amazing improvements in sound that the other devices add. The dCS Purcell 'upsampler' is an apparently astounding piece of kit. Just take this review from HiFi Advice:

"When switching from 44.1khz to 96khz immediately the soundfield became wider, airier and more nimble. But the typical square PCM sound remained evident. It's not as if everything is suddenly analog. But when you switch to 176.4khz (fourfold the original samplerate) something amazing happens: sound fills the room, so wide and deep that walls seem to have disappeared. It is so airy, fluid and amazingly finely detailed that you'd swear that the cd player was changed for a record player. Well, not quite, of course:-) But Voices really float as if attached to rubber strings in the room in front of you, not hammered to the floor as they are with regular cd, but at the same time they are amazingly sharply focused. Together with these amazing floating voices, comes a truly engulfing soundstage that wraps around you that makes you feel like taking a warm foamy bath. And everything just lingers in the air, long notes continuing seemingly forever instead of being cut off too soon. This is an effect I am familiar with only from playing lp's."

Sheesh.

* - Some NAS boxes can be setup to run all manner of services like bit-torrent clients and DLNA servers and media players and so forth so if you've got a low-powered box running a single slow drive and are streaming movies and playing music at the same time, it's quite possible that you'll have issues. That said, those issues will almost certainly manifest as gaps and stop-start playing as the media player (a $4000 Naim unit in this case) buffers the connection rather than any kind of audible difference to the sound.

Re: Aarrr!

You don't see them f$#king each other over for a goddamn percentage?

Re: Aarrr!

@Marcus Aurelius

"It's not meant to be fair . . ."

Fairness is not about there being no crime, it's about there being a level playing field. And, Frontier are very much going against themselves on this one. Take this from Braben on one of the reasons for making the game online-only:

"We were also looking at how people could cheat and those sorts of things. It’s a problem for a lot of games—for instance with exploration—the cheating spoils it for everybody. If someone does a blanket discovery of everything, that spoils things."

Right, so either gaining an unfair advantage "spoils it for everyone" or it doesn't.

As @I ain't Spartacus said, above:

"So tough luck, you lose the lot. That is the fairest response. And the system ought to have logs that can allow them to check up on this sort of stuff - so there's no excuse. All you're effectively doing is database work."

Couldn't agree more and this is also one of the reasons why an online single-player mode is just not the same as an offline mode. Cheating in an offline mode harms no one, except possibly yourself. If you want to exploit a bug so you can buy a powerful ship earlier and skip straight to destroying things rather than having to tediously earn the money then you should be able to. Offline.

Online, you have to clamp down to keep it fair for people but offline players get the freedom to play however they want, even if that involves 'cheating'. I sometimes play Civ3 with a mod that removes the nearly-crippling corruption and waste your cities experience when you have too many of them - something that makes larger maps a bit annoying. But that's my choice.

Tangent - sorry!

Re: Phil O'Sophical Not a problem

@Matt

Now, we seemingly always disagree but presumably we can agree that there is something of a continuum between a free, but lawless state and an authoritarian police state.

Presumably we can also agree that both freedom and safety are good.

So, where disagreement comes in is the point on that continuum that we consider to be best for society. Where a little of one can be traded for a lot of the other, this is often a worthwhile thing, though the VERY important caveat there is that there is no objective measure of what constitutes a 'little' freedom. Requiring people to carry photo ID at all times and be required to present that to any official when requested may seem to some to be a small price to pay for whatever increase in safety might comes from it. However, someone who experienced apartheid in South Africa and the system of internal passports that effectively made them black South Africans aliens in their own country, well, they might have a different view of that.

The simple truth is that safety - even real safety - is not self-evidently or objectively better than freedom and so simply saying that actions X, Y and Z have lead to a decrease in some problem (and thus an increase in safety) is only an argument that the measures were effective in some quantifiable way. It does not necessarily follow that the measures are actually worth the price being paid.

Re: Not a problem

@AC

"I see no problem what so ever with making some one log on to a PC for airport security. The terrorists are pretty smart and they know that powering up a PC is a common request. Logging on confirms the laptop is likely a functioning PC not a disguised bomb."

Like you said: "terrorists are pretty smart". The point that many people make is that, because terrorists are smart (not to mention usually well-funded), they are able to work around many of the counter-measures that are put in place.

The point is, in this case, that if you are going to the trouble of booting to some dummy system then it really isn't that much more effort to boot to a dummy Windows system so if you can do the former, you can (and probably would) do the latter.

So, in the end, you do nothing to really catch someone who has gotten that far (to the boarding gate!)

It comes down to a compromise between freedom and privacy on the one hand and safety on the other. Sacrificing a little of the former for a lot of the latter is generally considered a good idea but we have long passed the point of diminishing returns where we are asked to give up more and more of our privacy of smaller and smaller increases in safety.

@PCS

It is news. Specifically, it is news of a tech/IT bent and one with a particular focus on security and privacy - an area which is generally rather important to people here.

And here's the thing - not all of us fly internationally for business and so may not realise the extent of this paranoia and what may happen to them.

The passenger in question clearly flies about a bit and was aware that turning on a laptop to prove it's real and operational is a relatively standard procedure. Asking her to actually log in, however, was a first for her and not something she had seen before. It stands to reason that it will therefore be something many others would alos have been unaware of.

Now, presumably this is not actually common practice but what it shows is that it can happen. The benefit of knowing that this potential exists is that people can take appropriate steps.

Ms. Moussouris had her laptop encrypted and this was enough for her purposes. Now that she is aware of this potential, on presumes she will change her setup so she has either a hidden drive or have data encrypted separately. Others can do the same now that they know this is a possibility.

But of course EVERYONE encrypts everything like this already so this information is useless and anyone who doesn't is clearly an idiot so not worth helping. Right?

"So if a company supplied dongle can't be used then people will book elsewhere."

Splitting hairs, but a dongle, as the term is generally understood would be a USB 3G/4G adapter that you plug into your laptop. That, would be fine as it is not creating a wireless network.

Remember too that most phones that can create mobile hotspots can be setup instead in this fashion - connected via USB to provide internet access for a single device and thus would also not be affected.

Their problem - as stated - having dozens, if not hundreds of wireless networks that are potentially interfering with their own network. Whether that is the real story or even justified if it is, is another matter altogether and people have good reason to be skeptical of that.

I think what the are really targeting is not convention attendees but convention exhibitors. Not that that makes this any less greedy!

Re: I'll try again to comment

@TheProf

I remember that too. I remember queuing overnight for some and waiting outside a little-known outlet for others.

But online is where it is at now. Sales open at a certain time and people rush onto the site to snap them up, with some shows selling out in minutes. With that kind of demand you simple MUST have a stable and capable platform because it is otherwise unfair to the people looking to buy tickets.

Okay so the vendors don't really care if some people get screwed because they get their sales anyway and so this is why the problem happens all the bloody time.

Shows are stupidly expensive now and the increase in population of urban centres means there are even more people scrambling for them. It's annoying to miss out on a show you want to see but it's infuriating when that is due to a problem with the website you are trying to buy them from.

It doesn't matter what the show is or what the method of purchase is - just so long as it is fair and able to cope with demand.

To directly address the 'queuing at the kiosk' point, how would you feel if you had waited (in the rain, let's say) and were right near the front of the line but when the time came for the window to open, there was no one there. By the time the attendant arrived, 30 minutes late, all the tickets were sold out or, at best, you had to settle for nose-bleed or obstructed view seats. That is essentially what has happened here and the people affected are justified in their grievance.

Re: 'bait-and-switch'

I meant ineligible, obviously!

Re: 'bait-and-switch'

To those down-voting me above, please explain, with reference to any definition you can find, exactly how what has happened qualifies as a 'bait and switch'.

In a 'bait and switch', the bait must actually be real - a TV or a Car or a home-loan rate or whatever - but the trickiness comes when you find out that you can't get that product. Where a TV is advertised at an amazing price, you will find that the TV sold out. It's important that it did actually exist and it was available for that price. The problem is that they only have a handful of them - not even close to fulfilling demand. If it's a loan rate, the rate really does exist, but the conditions are such that 99% of the people who go to apply are actually eligible.

That is all I am saying. I disapprove whole-heartedly with what has happened and I think Braben has acted in bad faith by deliberately withholding the information but that was deceptive (if not outright lying) rather than a 'bait and switch' and no matter how angry you are, that doesn't change.

Look the term up now.