Posts by Ed-H

Top rocket exec quits after telling the truth about SpaceX price war

Re: Reality versus spin

Not as dumb as you may think...

1. The fuel and other consumables only account for ~0.3% of the launch cost ($200k/$60m)

2. The Falcon 9 has a designed 30% margin over the sold mass-to-orbit spec - for many flights the extra required fuel weight is easily accommodated.

3. The rockets don't fire at anything like full thrust all the way down, they just have stop the now much lighter first stage (much less fuel, no 2nd stage/payload) falling too fast. Only on landing approach do they throttle up.

Hold that upgrade: Critical bug in .NET 4.6 'breaks applications'

Re: Stop distributing .NET as part of windows!

Great Idea...

BTW, You do realize that NuGet/PowerShell are written with .net don't you?

Hi-res audio folk to introduce new rules and weed out impure noises

Re: Monty....

> but the human ear can't deal with more than CD quality - that's why it was defined.

To be historically accurate, the CD standard 44.1KHz was just the best they could do with late-70s technology... the original Sony PCM digital systems recorded to video tape, and 44.1Khz was the highest sample rate they could accommodate.

[As an aside: early CD players were a truly remarkable feat of engineering! Processing data from the CD (at rate of over 4Mbits/s) with 1980 era LSI chips was quite something...]

The main problem with the 44.1kHz sample rate is that it requires *very* steep reconstruction filters. It is basically impossible to design such a filter without significant passband ripples and/or time-domain problems. Bumping the sample-rate up (to at least 48kHz) allows for better behaved filters:)

The second problem that the sensitivity of human ears varies by frequency, and in the region of greatest sensitivity (3-4kHz) the apparent noise floor of a (non-noise shaped) dithered 16bit signal *can* be heard. Using a noise-shaping dither can improve things, but with a 44.1kHz sample-rate there really isn't enough frequency headroom available...

Of course, 24/192 is complete overkill!

In fact, a properly engineered 16/96 system, using pre-emphasis and a noise-shaped dither, should easily exceed any realistic requirements.

Police kill mobile phone service to squelch protest

Whiners...

I know SF denizens have a reputation for being pretentious twats, but some of these comments are ridiculous. The job of the BART is to transport you from A to B, not to encourage your fondleslab onanism.

The BART supplies underground cells as a courtesy service. Mobile reception is not a constitutional right! If the idiots at EFF want to make something of it, all BART have to do is pull the service permanently.

I'd be interested to know which stations/lines were affected, and how long would a commuter have been without reception in the worst case. I have a feeling it would not have been *that* long...

Fairlight: The Rolls Royce of synthesizers

Probably not the "Rolls-Royce"

The title "Rolls-Royce of electronic music" would probably more appropriately be applied to the NED Synclavier. With system costs of anything up to $200K, and built from military/aviation spec components it was a high-class monster!

Nerd Trivia - The CPU that NED custom-designed for the Synclavier was later used to drive the imaging system on NASAs Galileo Probe sent to Jupiter...

Assange traveled in drag to evade gov spooks

Yeah, that'll work....

I bet the spooks keeping tabs on him were pissing themselves laughing (as they watched from their black helicopter with night vision cameras)

I wouldn't be surprised if the video footage makes the MI5 xmas gag-reel - "watch this idiot . He thought dressing in drag would fool us!"

Microsoft UK researchers roll out barrel in Cambridge

An area the company isn't famed for pioneering?

You've obviously never had to cover SIGGRAPH. In 2006 and 2007 they presented more papers than any other organisation.

Some of the 'greats' of the computer graphics world work for MS Research - Jim Blinn, Michael Cohen, Tex Avery, Hugues Hoppe, Jim Kajiya, Andrew Glassner - the list goes on and on....

Why Microsoft's IE 9 will frustrate standards fans

Unfounded rant?

Wow, that was quite a rant!

The only problem is that it seems to be predicated on the idea that the rendering improvements somehow involve MS-only 'extensions'.

Maybe I'm dumb, but from what I saw they are hooking into DirectX *within* the renderer - no HTML/CSS changes required, no new 'APIs' to code against....