mirumu

OpenCL relies pretty heavily on NVidia's CUDA and ATI's Stream processing. These have only really become usable in the last generation or two of GPUs. I've currently got nothing that will accelerate it myself. Quite interested in seeing what can be done with it though. If something like x264 can be made to make use for noticeable speed gains I'd be quite keen to upgrade my G5 tower.

That isn't something I can answer. The 4070s I've heard are Carl's pair and I haven't had the chance to experiment with different system setups. Theoretically their requirements should be similar to the 404s given the drivers are the same although there could be other factors.

Yes, I don't think it's a bad aspect of the 4070 by any means. I could happily live with them as my primary headphone. I just feel the O2s have the edge when it comes to capturing the energy and excitement of a performance.

Excellent! Congrats too B.T.W.

If I had to go closed the 4070 would be my headphone of choice. I'd tend to say it is more neutral than the O2s in frequency response, but to me the O2s win overall when looking at the bigger picture. The 4070 is the headphone that while out at a party spends the whole night drinking squeezed orange juice. I don't mean that in a bad sense per-se. It's just that it always retains a brutally analytical perspective to the extent that it keeps the music at arms length. It's bass isn't as strong as the O2s, but what's there is very nice and it goes deep. I especially love their midrange performance. I didn't find them especially heavy or awkward on my head, but some do. YMMV I guess.

On the downside it will ruin your ability to watch TV at other people's houses. I've got a Samsung LA46A950 which is one of the previous generation of LED models and when the screen goes black you can't really tell the TV is on as there is no glow at all. Once you get used to a display like that you won't be able to unsee the lack of true black on most TVs.

Nice to see you here Wayne. Welcome.

Hopefully it won't be delayed by the new lawsuit. Tim Schafer's response to it is gold though.

Haha oh wow! That thread is gold.

I must have missed the "Now with inline DSP!" bullet-points showing up on recent cable packaging.

I think it depends what kind of cables we're talking about. There's a significant difference between a quality well made cable and some expensive voodoo wire claiming to be sprinkled in magical pixie dust. The ones that get my goat are the exceedingly expensive HDMI and digital coax cables. I can't help do a when a salesman is an apparent expert on how ordinary cables noticeably corrupt digital signals, but somehow doesn't even know what a packet or ECC bits are.

The cables I was comparing were commercially made, but other than that I can't make any claims as to their build quality. This was a number of years back now. As I said there may have been other factors involved and those you describe world certainly be feasible. It may simply be the copper cables were just really poorly made. I do agree that it's not about hearing what you want to hear, but that is an argument I see put forward from time to time on places like HF. It often devolves into the old "You must be deaf if you hear/don't hear X" argument. My point there was more that preconceived notions don't necessarily bias a test as long as we're open to the results being different to our expectations. In my more recent experience I can't claim to notice any difference between properly constructed cables, although it has been a long time since I've had ICs made with silver to compare with.

In the past when I compared ICs (copper and silver) I went in skeptical expecting to hear no difference whatsoever. To my surprise the difference was not subtle. Maybe there were other factors involved, but since then I've never had much faith in the "You only hear what you want to hear" train of thought.

I'll take a Ferrari 430. No sound system please. It's impressive to see AMTs being used in an application like this though.

Glad to see you've got your hands on some O2 mk1s. I'm still extremely happy with mine. Hope the KGSS meets your expectations.

Hey, happy birthday! Hope it's a great one!

Yes, after Vista SP1 came out I never noticed any significant performance hit of any sort in CPU intensive work when compared with XP (memory usage aside). Vista's user interface just felt a lot more sluggish. Even if Windows 7 fixes only that and UAC it's okay in my book.

I've got some STAX SRX Mk3s bought new by their previous owner in 1977 that are still going strong. He looked after them but never replaced anything on them. All I've done to them was replace the well worn pads.

I wouldn't, but some do. My brother for example is only happy if he wins the auction and may end up making multiple bids.

As one of the people affected by this auction I just wanted to add that I completely agree with Chris in that a timely outbid notice was not too much to expect. I don't see automated outbid notices as being a difficult thing to add to the website at all, but in saying that my day job is at a software development house where financial systems are our day-to-day business so I may have a distorted view here. Whether the items will come up again soon in another auction or whether other factors were involved is neither here nor there in a business transaction. While we may not have raised our bid had we known of the outbid, we would have still had the option of doing so. As it turned out we had lost hours before the auction even finished. I'm largely unconcerned about missing out on the 717, but that's not really the point. I do have sympathy for Craig's position too and appreciate his acknowledgement of the problem and upfront attitude. If anything his response makes me think more of him. I think too that there was an element of bad luck involved on our part in that this just happened to be the auction where parallel bidding really caused serious problems. For my part I accept Craig's apology and I won't personally rule out any future dealings with kuboTEN. Just not until the new website is online.

Two betas were released to developers in April. That's usually a sign of the OS being feature-complete. Pure speculation on my part, but I can't see them releasing prior to the WWDC in June. If I had to guess my divining rod leans towards September.

Yahoo Japan isn't as simple as ebay when you live outside of Japan. Most sellers will not ship outside the country so you have to have a go-between, and that person may also be acting on behalf of others in the same auction. That's essentially what KuboTEN was doing here.

I think this would be a hard thing for a proxy bidding service to get right since they are hiding multiple people behind a single YJ account. I could certainly understand them not want to tell us bid amounts, but I do agree a simple "You have been outbid" would suffice. I tend to prefer the automated proxy services myself but I suspect they may not be any better if multiple users were bidding on the same auction.

Snow Leopard from the start was about significant under the hood changes. Full 64-bit, LLVM-gcc, full ZFS support, OpenCL, Quicktime X, NIB file compression. There have also been rumors of large scale Finder re-writes. Most of this probably won't be visible to users, but personally I want every one of those features. Quicktime X and OpenCL especially. It's a must buy for me. I'm quite keen on seeing Windows 7 too and will probably end up moving some machines at work to use it. Home too if all goes well. To me Windows XP and Vista both have their pros and cons with neither coming out on top, but Windows 7 does look like a solid successor that actually improves usability. In response to the trash talk though who needs all this vapourware? Ubuntu 9.04 came out a few days ago.

Hey, happy 18th! Enjoy!