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Stop Ruining It

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Re: Stop Ruining It

#111

Post by kazinator »

djkoolaide wrote: post #103
kazinator wrote: post #70

Paul McGowan makes bullshit: "Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation" Yikes; run the other way ...

On his YouTube channel he claimed that FLAC is different from WAV[1]. No need for any of that in my subscriptions anymore. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc

No; he clearly acknowledges that FLAC is lossless, so the audio is bit for bit identical to the original waveform.

The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly.

I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?)

Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#112

Post by giancarlostoro »

fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

> so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\..."

This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#113

Post by sunaookami »

hunter2_ wrote: post #107
andai wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10. I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened. I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened. Fully rendered. After a single video frame. On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time. Twenty years of progres…

Presumably that's to keep hardware sales up, e-waste be damned. You won't notice it taking 8 times longer when you have 8 times as many cores, or whatever.

But it's still just as slow on current hardware. Windows 11 has that latency everywhere and it grinds my gears. At my workplace I got a very recent beefy machine and every click in explorer, start menu, etc. feels like walking through mud.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#114

Post by sunaookami »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #112
fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

> so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\..." This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts. Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.

They fired their QA team 10 years ago and thought the Windows Insider Program could replace them.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#115

Post by Hammershaft »

iknowstuff wrote: post #105
elevation wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space. I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

tbh all tabs seem like a deficiency in the window management paradigm to me. Instead of tabs our WMs should just allow us to easily list and transition between all windows of an app.

Absolutely agree. Recently learning emacs with vertico/consult/orderless/embark has had me thinking constantly about how needlessly crippled most OS windowing system workflows are.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#116

Post by Night_Thastus »

fifticon wrote: post #15

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs…

Join those of us using File Pilot.

It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)

Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#117

Post by wl »

rightbyte wrote: post #108
TremendousJudge wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow that's actually insane, the fact that they would have an "improvement" dial is ridiculous by itself, but also the picture looks extremely fake? is this a scam website? leaves me wondering what the product actually looks like btw it costs $9,999 according to google edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with an…

It would be funny if the "improvement dial" measured amplifier gain in a linear scale. Except just being bogus, what could it show that "improves" the signal? It can't lower the noise.

From the manual:

> The Improvement Factor is an average of the Voltage Output and the THD output. It gives you a factor of how much the AC power is improved by the P20.

Which also doesn't make much sense to me. So the lower the THD, the less improvement? And averaging that with the 120 V output? So the 230 V European version has a higher improvement factor?

Re: Stop Ruining It

#118

Post by thewebguyd »

vitally3643 wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the…

We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.

That's not unique to tech either. Before my career in tech, I went through school doing retail jobs. The verbiage then was "how do we capture our share of their (the customer's) wallet?" Not how do we provide what they need, a good experience, or whatever else. As if the company was entitled to a portion of the shopper's income.

I found it completely disgusting, and this wasn't unique to one retail chain either. It's how the capital class views people, as a resource to be extracted.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#119

Post by solid_fuel »

hunter2_ wrote: post #107
andai wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10. I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened. I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened. Fully rendered. After a single video frame. On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time. Twenty years of progres…

Presumably that's to keep hardware sales up, e-waste be damned. You won't notice it taking 8 times longer when you have 8 times as many cores, or whatever.

No I think it's a consequence of so much of the industry abandoning caring about the craft in favor of just shipping whatever garbage checks off their Jira tickets. This is the same attitude that leads to vibe coding. It's the idea that the code doesn't matter and the only thing of any importance is the business attached to the product.

It's stupid and shortsighted, but the entire industry seems pretty damned nearsighted these days.

Re: Stop Ruining It

#120

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #111
djkoolaide wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On his YouTube channel he claimed that FLAC is different from WAV[1]. No need for any of that in my subscriptions anymore. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc

No; he clearly acknowledges that FLAC is lossless, so the audio is bit for bit identical to the original waveform. The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly. I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I sus…

[deleted]
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