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mirumu

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Posts posted by mirumu

  1. Anyone knows what exactly OpenCL does? I was sad to see that my 1 year old MacBook doesn't support it, though it's not completely surprising considering the cheapo integrated X3100 graphic card.

    OpenCL is designed to provide an abstracted view of the hardware and a way of specifying tasks that maximizes parallelism and portability. The idea is that OpenCL can deal with the problem of hardware optimization and hand off the tasks to the units that will execute them the fastest or most efficiently be they CPUs, GPUs or whatever.

    If we take Blu-ray decoding for example the picture is actually split into four quadrants each of which can be decoded independently in parallel. OpenCL may for example hand off say three of these decode tasks to your GPU and one to your CPU. If you have a weaker GPU and a faster CPU it may do the opposite. Essentially it makes better use of the hardware available and avoids compute resources sitting idle when there's work they could be doing.

  2. 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.

  3. Are the 4070s as brutal to drive as the O2s?

    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.

  4. I drink orange juice, but I don't keep the music at arm's length. But I understand the analogy, maybe that's the appeal -- because I can appreciate music, even when listened to through an analytical system.

    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.

  5. What says HC of the 4070? I head it at CJ and I was really rather impressed. I'm thinking that they may be more neutral than the O2 and I'm not loving the O2's sound leakage.

    What's the ruling in these parts?

    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.

  6. That decided it for me pretty quickly in terms of picture quality. While I will say the Vizio is a pretty decent TV, the Panasonic just had the better picture. The 'Blackground' was fantastic! And the colors were better in every respect.

    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.

  7. it gets my goat because it's a waste of money that is usually touted as being completely necessary.

    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 :palm: 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.

  8. it's not about hearing what you "want" to hear.

    how exactly did you compare the cables? where the cables competently built? there are aspects of cable design that can come out during DBT (large capacitance differences, for instance, though never massively preferred, from a statistical standpoint), but material has never been one of those things, in my experience. electrons is electrons.

    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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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. ;)

  11. True multi-core support...

    Yeah, I'm with you -- I want it. And no, I don't know when it's due. He said almost a year ago, in about a year. So...could be next week, could be next month, could be later. I don't think there've been any updates on the ETA since then, other than speculation and rumour-mongering.

    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.

  12. Lol, someone needs a better ebay bidding strategy. Put in your max bid at the right time, and your done.

    Biggie.

    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.

  13. Well kuboTEN lost a customer today. It's one thing to offer a bid service that has delays because they have humans looking over the bids but not telling me that I was outbid for nearly 24 hours after I was and conveniently after the auction had ended is absolutely ridiculous. Many said that Craig is a "gentleman" but when you're dealing in things costing thousands that's rather ridiculous/insane in my opinion. Is it too much to ask the human that's entering the bid notify the other KuboTEN users that they've been outbid when it happens not 24 hours later. I think not.

    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.

  14. 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. ;D

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