Tech-T Productions

Nothin' Beats a Good CD

Here's one that can really fluff some feathers in the audio community. Brad Meyer and David Moran have written a paper, "Audibility of a CD-Standard A/DA/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback", and published by AES, essentially saying that no one can tell the difference between CD and all other high quality formats (DVD-A, DSD, etc...). The specs of the setup can be viewed at the Boston Audio Society web page. While we subscribe to the notion that most listeners are not able to discern the difference, it is still imperative to capture the source at higher rates (and bit depths). The original audio is still processed at some point via mixing, mastering, and format conversion in which more data available in the source leads to less distortion (quantization error) in the audible range. However, one last word of advice, professional (level conscience) mastering is still the most impactful process on sound quality as it relates to the medium for which it is produced.

DNS problems?

Earlier this week, I reported having DNS troubles over the weekend. I thought that there might be some folks who would want more information on the topic. I found an excellent snippet of a book over at O'Reilly Media. The book is titled,

Learning Windows Server 2003, Second Edition

by Jonathan Hassell. It gives very in depth information on the subject.

The Mac can catch a cold!

One of the big trumpeting points for Mac lovers has been that they have always seemed invincible to the invation of viruses, worms, and other such ickies. Now it seems that someone has turned that smiley face on its head.

There really was not ever some big secret that the Apple team had to look so superior to the beige box of the Windows PCs. It came down to two big points:

1. Apple Inc. (at the time Apple Computer Inc.) used proprietary hardware, including the CPU.
2. When compared to the total number of computers in the world very few were Macs. So, why would someone derive a virus which would maybe infect a few hundred computers (because it seems very unlikly that it would reach every Mac in the wold), and have to go through so much trouble to learn proprietary coding for such little return.

   Read the rest of the story here.

Bye-bye Apple RAID

Apple has dicontinued thier RAID hardware. Many are saying that this is actually a good thing, though don't tell that to the guy or gal who just bought one last week. The good is that we now should have a braoder choice in manufacturers and hardware configurations. The current blessed by Apple system is from Promise Technology. They have crammed in MUCH more storage than what Apple had available. I personally like the smaller options that are dropping in price quite rapidly. When I tried Promise's site it seemed to be overloaded and I couldn't view anything other than the home page. I did find much more information over at PC Connection.