07:35 – Poor Cyprus. Until yesterday, everyone seemed to be agreed that Cyprus needed €17 billion to avoid bankruptcy. The Troika would provide €10 billion of that amount as a bailout loan, and Cyprus itself had to come up with the other €7 billion. That was sufficient to gut the Cypriot economy and bankrupt its large banks. But today it turns out that things were worse than first believed, boosting the required total to €23 billion. And Cyprus has to come up with the entire extra €6 billion, nearly doubling its required share. Meanwhile, the Troika expects the Cypriot economy to contract by a disastrous 8.8% in the next year. That’d be bad enough, but no one really believes that prediction. The Cypriot government itself is expecting a contraction closer to 13%, and most economists think even that’s extremely optimistic. My own guess is that a 30% to 40% contraction might turn out to be closer to reality. Poor Cyprus. Until recently, it appeared to be a reasonably prosperous country. Now, it makes the Greek economy look good. And Portugal and Slovenia are now teetering on the edge of collapse as well.
Work on science kits continues.
14:04 – As of this morning, I still had 600 each of the 50 mL and 100 mL plastic beakers on backorder with one of my main suppliers. This is a show-stopper for us. We’re out of those beakers, which are in every kit we offer, and we can’t build more kits of any type until we get more. So I just checked with another of our major suppliers, who had 6,000 of the 50 mL and 8,000 of the 100 mL beakers in stock. I just issued a PO for 1,000 of each and notified the first vendor to clear the backorder. A thousand of each is sufficient to build 500 of the CK01A chemistry kits or 1,000 of any of the other kits, so we should be in good shape for the next few months anyway. I hate tying up working capital and storage space on a lot of units of particular items, but not when the alternative is running out and ending up dead in the water.
I guess this could be a long, drawn-out affair before it comes to our shores, maybe over the next ten years; OTOH, any couple of major disruptive events (see Kashmir, North Korea, another major hurricane, another large terrorist attack, a stock market crash, etc.) could trigger things a lot faster here.
Work on the new RHEL 6.x cluster continues. The racks were apparently assembled in Red Chiner and every one so far has been different, in terms of the cabling, power setups, placement of stuff, etc. A real PITA; the team lead tells me that far better work is done by Mexicans on these things. We needed 48-port terminal concentrators and we got sent 32-port ones, so they all have to come out and be replaced, another tedious PITA. Well, it’s either this, or fire up a meth lab; the Army is out and the convenience store/gas stations won’t hire an old fart like me.
I think Chuck is the audio/video expert, and if not certainly higher on the food chain than I am, when dealing with issues. I have an issue that I need advice.
I ripped some DVDs using the latest version of DVDFab. I used the MP4 format. The videos were played on the computer and the audio and video are in perfect sync. But when I transfer the file to my iPad the audio and video are about a second apart with the video leading the audio.
This has happened on multiple DVDs that I have ripped. Some, such as a couple of BluRay dics, turned out OK. Any idea what is causing the problem and how to resolve the issue? Some obscure posting indicates something to do with 48 bit audio vs 24 bit audio vs 16 bit audio. I cannot find a setting in DVDFab to change the audio bit rates. Any ideas Chuck?
I’m not Chuck, but I’d suggest using VLC and VirtualDub. There’s a good short tutorial here:
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/28/how-to-correct-out-of-sync-audio-before-burning-video-to-dvd/
If I do that then the audio and video in the file on the PC would no longer be in sync. The ripping is fine when played on the PC using either VLC or Windows Media Player. The problem arises when the file is played on the iPad.
I already have video editing software that will allow me to sync the audio. I would have to load the file to the iPad, find what I think is the offset, save as a new files, then load to the iPad again, etc. until I get the sync correct for the iPad. That is a tedious process that I don’t want to endure when the audio in the rip is correct according to VLC and WMP.
Something in the file is causing problems on the iPad causing the audio delay. I would like to find a solution to that issue.
Or perhaps the file is fine and it’s something in the iPad causing the problem.
AV sync on DVDs, including commercial ones, sucks. It’s often particularly obvious on DVD players, which are dumb devices. We’ve had that happen many times on both commercial DVDs and ones I’ve burned (all of which play correctly on computers). One weird thing is that on a DVD player, stopping (not pausing, stopping) the disc playback and then restarting it puts the audio and video back in sync, at least for a while.
I now understand the government’s “No Child Left Behind” program. I was grading some tests yesterday with the following procedure: determine the percentage correct and translate that to a final grade of 1 through 4 for the school record. In so doing, 95% correct earns a 4, 90% is a 3, 60% translates to 2, and 0% correct garners a 1!. That’s right even 0% right, or 100% wrong still registers something above 0! Nobody is left unrewarded!
They get a 2 for 60%? Geez. How about:
4 – 95%
3 – 90%
2 – 80%
1 – 70%
0 – 69% or lower
No no no, RBT. That would have a disparate impact, you racist.
I’ve got a better idea. Let’s just set up tests where the students receive a piece of paper with their name already at the top, and then return that paper to the teacher. Everyone gets a perfect score, and there’s no question about unfair advantage or bias. That’s just the logical conclusion of where the public schools are heading anyway.
(Yes, our daughter is going to a private school next year, for first grade. No, we can’t afford it, but we’re doing it anyway.)
I don’t think the problem Slim describes is cause by No Child Gets Ahead. Here in Smallville, grades are still done the way they were when I was a kid. As in with letters, and on a scale similar to what Bob would suggest.
Close, Bob. Actually:
100% – 91%: 4
90% – 75%: 3
74% – 60 %: 2
59% – 0%: 1
And don’t expect anything but a minimal description of the distribution, highly skewed to the left; very few 4s with well over 50% 1s.
Tenga cuidado!
<Or perhaps the file is fine and it’s something in the iPad causing the problem.
I am not sure. Some videos work just fine, some don’t. I have not found a pattern. I have even seen TV broadcasts where the audio and video are not synced. My understanding is that audio and video take different paths from the source to the destination broadcast point. In our studio at the church the audio and video are separate until they reach the m RFI multiplexer that puts the signal on the cable. Because of a couple of digital converters for the video we have to a delay of a few milliseconds to the audio before it reaches the multiplexer.
Some obscure web post indicated that the issue was due to using 48 bit audio rather than 32 bit audio. Sounds plausible but not reasonable. I have been using the same procedure and settings to rip multiple DVDs, some with perfect sync (well to my ears and eyes), and others with almost a 1 second delay in the audio. I have never found the audio to be ahead of the video.
<i.Everyone gets a perfect score, and there’s no question about unfair advantage or bias.
And if you are considered special ed you get a free pass. You can graduate with a diploma when all you are capable of is sitting in a corner and slobbering on yourself. Of course during your time in school you had a dedicated person to wipe your face, change your diaper, spoon feed you and push your wheelchair, all at taxpayer expense. A babysitting service.
It’s all just a bad joke now anyway; why even pay attention to or bother with the publik skool charade? It’s like the national and state election charades and Homeland Insecurity; utterly pointless except as a show. The late Gore Vidal, probably one of our two or three best historians in this country of the past century, had this all sussed out decades ago; I recommend some of his political essays from the Glorious Sixties on; he is not easily categorized as to Left or Right.
why even pay attention to or bother with the publik skool charade?
State universities are not much better except they charge to babysit and don’t care if you pass or fail as long as you continue paying money. Of course I am speaking of the humanity courses which are nothing but fluff and a complete waste of time.
Many of the students on the UT campus are too stupid to understand walk/don’t walk signals, are ignorant of the purpose of a crosswalk, many forgetting they left their expensive bicycle chained to to a post. A rain storm is totally baffling causing many to forget how to walk in a straight line. These are the product of the public school system and UT does nothing to improve on that experience.
That’s one of the main reasons that home schooling is getting more and more popular. Of course, there are a lot who homeschool for political/religious reasons, but they’re now in a minority. More and more parents are homeschooling because they don’t want their kids exposed to drugs/gangs/bullies and because they correctly perceive the public schools as completely inadequate educationally for brighter students.
“These are the product of the public school system and UT does nothing to improve on that experience.”
Exactly my own first-hand experience twenty years ago at four different East Coast universities as a graduate teaching assistant for their English departments. The classes I had to teach were about half remedial, i.e. the kids had roughly 8th-grade-level grasp of their own language and reading was not one of their regular pastimes; and the other half were ESL, from all over the globe, and struggling with the most basic English. So what did the people who ran the whole program at each place concern themselves with most? Yeah, political indoctrination; no books from before the Glorious Sixties and all reading assignments were from texts written by various hard-Left cadre writers who have been icons of the Left for decades now. Needless to say, at the most “cutting-edge” university English department, the program was run by a matriarchy/collective, filled with hatred and bitterness toward the other gender and of course the repressive patriarchy that is the sum total of Western civilization.
It was a struggle; reading and “correcting” (bad word!) a hundred or so papers each week, most of them utter dreck, and having to put up with the assigned curriculum. To their credit, many of the kids laughed at the whole thing and knew it was a complete sham. Easy to do, of course, when you’re there on Papa’s dime.
Now, of course, as you have noticed, the situation is much worse; the poor buggers can’t even tie their shoes or get in out of the fucking rain. I blame parents, mostly.
Actually, as a teacher, I have to say that the test is simply too easy. There is almost no room for good students to make mistakes, if 3 (“B”?) and 4 (“A”?) are that close together. If I translate my typical scale to the same grades, it comes out something like
4 – 90%
3 – 75%
2 – 60%
1 – 30%
The point is: there ought to be a lot of questions that the average student has trouble with, and a few questions that make even the best students stretch. How else can you differentiate them? How else can the really excellent students show their stuff?
Of course, in the US, you aren’t supposed to excel; it’s a nuisance, and causes extra work, and anyway it’s so much more PC to heave up the lousy students than to challenge the good students.
The problem with that is that it’s difficult to come up with a test which has a high difficulty ramp like that. It can be done, certainly, but not by the marginally-if-at-all-qualified drones who make up most of the teaching pool. And it’s more effort to make a test like that, and as we all know, public school teachers are grossly, almost criminally, under-paid.
RPI profs tested that way, at least in engineering 30 years ago. I got my first test back and was horrified to see that I’d gotten something like 21% on it. Then I found that was a high B after the curve.
In undergrad, I’ll never forget our p-chem professor. He used to wear a t-shirt on test days that had an erect middle finger on it. On the first test he gave, three of us–I, my suite-mate, and my lab partner–got scores of 100, 99, and 98, which were by far the highest in the whole class. The 100 paper was graded A, the 99 B, and the 98 C.
And the first-year organic prof, Dr. Shaw, was famous for giving tests in which getting the correct answer for a question required getting the correct answer for the preceding question. They’d be a series of reactions with the answer being a product. The next question would assume the product from the preceding question as the reactant, so if you’d gotten that wrong, by definition you got the answer to the next question and all following questions wrong.
I’ll never forget the first organic lecture class. It was standing room only, and Dr. Shaw counted every one. He then announced the total enrolled and commented that there were only 36 positions available for the lab course. “Oh, well,” he said, “we’ll be down to 36 after the first test.” Which indeed we were.
What we have here is state Department of Education mandated “standardized” tests. As such, in a school with ESL, economically disadvantaged, educationally challenged students, the majority (of this minority) will score less than 50%.
OFD, how do you like my politically correct characterizations?
Ray,
I have DVDFab on my desktop, so I must have used it one time or another. If so, I cannot recall any lack of sync, and I expect that I would have if it had occurred.
Over the years I have converted video recorded from analog TV onto VHS to digital. Also, video recorded from analog TV to hard drive with Hauppauge PCI card and video downloaded from YouTube. These two, from TV have then been converted to view on my Sandisk Sansa player and then converted again for my Android cellphone and Android tablet. (It does not surprise me that the Android and Sansa require different video formats.)
In all this, I can’t recall any offsets between video and audio. I’m sure that I have converted to MP4 successfully using one converter or another. Is it feasible to send me a little chunklet for me to check out.
Chuck, did you ever catch my recommendation for MP3Gain, a normalizer that will not munge tags (the only one of which I was aware.)
If so, I cannot recall any lack of sync, and I expect that I would have if it had occurred.
The lack of sync is only when the video is played on the iPad. Video played on the computer is fine. I doubt you had an iPad years ago and that is where my problem is located. I am guessing there is some setting in DVDFab that will resolve the issue but I am clueless as to what it would be.
Is it feasible to send me a little chunklet for me to check out.
Yes, I can do that. I will post it on my website when I get home tonight and put the link here. Of course it will have gone through some editing software so I don’t know if that would influence the final outcome.
“OFD, how do you like my politically correct characterizations?”
You’re off to a great start, Ray! I’d also include some boilerplate on just why it is that these students are in the shape they’re in: “…as a result of being continually marginalized in a racist culture, itself part of a patriarchal hegemony that privileges whiteness and derives its power and ubiquitous repression from its exploitation of nonwhite foreign subject peoples whose natural resources are extracted…etc., etc…” you get the picture.
The trick is to always base every statement on a bedrock foundation of questions involving race, gender and class. Of course our waxing jocular at our own parodies of this claptrap is a criminal offense with these people, who have zero sense of humor, as you no doubt know.
you get the picture
The hell I did. That sentence gave me motion sickness from the twists and curves.
Ray,
I found a 19.4MB MP4 file on my Android phone which plays fine. I ripped it from a DVD Video of a Waylon Jennings (sorry, no hip-hop or rap). I could send it to you to check as I have no iStuff on which to test it for that which you see and then hear, which may be an artifact for the Cult of Jobs.
http://forum.dvdfab.com/showthread.php?t=12308
Several mentions of audio sync problems with iPad.
Work on the new RHEL 6.x cluster continues. The racks were apparently assembled in Red Chiner and every one so far has been different, in terms of the cabling, power setups, placement of stuff, etc. A real PITA; the team lead tells me that far better work is done by Mexicans on these things. We needed 48-port terminal concentrators and we got sent 32-port ones, so they all have to come out and be replaced, another tedious PITA.
Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/intel-wants-to-kill-the-traditional-server-rack-with-100gbps-links/
Interesting. May happen but I doubt it. I just know that this stuff will be made in the cheapest place available with no pollution laws.
The Cypriot government itself is expecting a contraction closer to 13%, and most economists think even that’s extremely optimistic. My own guess is that a 30% to 40% contraction might turn out to be closer to reality. Poor Cyprus. Until recently, it appeared to be a reasonably prosperous country. Now, it makes the Greek economy look good.
You know, there have been revolutions with less public provocation. Somewhere in Cyprus, a cabinet maker and a blacksmith are building a guillotine …
“Why aren’t people buying new PCs? Because they don’t have to.”
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/04/why-arent-people-buying-new-pcs-because-they-dont-have-to/
And the march from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets continues. And Windows 8 sucks.
“Based on what I’ve heard from readers and IT pros I’ve spoken with, I’d have to agree with IDC’s suggestion that Windows 8 is a deterring some PC purchases.”
“But I’ll add one other theory: People aren’t buying new PCs because they don’t have to. The computers they bought five years ago are more than capable of handling basic tasks today.”
Yup. Except SSD drives are freaking awesome.
We got lotsa racks here, and new ones have been coming in; naturally we have to retrofit them due to stuff that was ordered wrong or not ordered at all or something else got screwed up. While PHB manglers hound us hourly for updates, as “the customer is having a cow.” And they split the project into us doing the hw up here and our “sister” group down in East Fishkill doing the sw thang. This ain’t working out real well about now. But hey, whatever; I’m just a minor drone who does what he’s told, and if the manglers keep hassling us, we’ll do that old union thang and “work to the rule.” They’ll get off our asses soon enough.
” Somewhere in Cyprus, a cabinet maker and a blacksmith are building a guillotine …”
Those are real good skillz to know. And someone to pull the rope and pick up the head.
“…Except SSD drives are freaking awesome.”
I keep hearing this here; and I’m getting sales pitches from Crucial on theirs. I may just back up my current Win8 and RHEL drives and swap them out for the SSDs….but first I gotta jack up the RAM on both machines, which has been sitting in my desk drawer for months now. May as well do both gigs while both cases are open. I don’t need huge drives; I use external ones for the movies and tee-vee shows anyway.
“Well, it’s either this, or fire up a meth lab; the Army is out and the convenience store/gas stations won’t hire an old fart like me.”
Well, OFD, Mexico got you there again. Down in old Mexico the mass produce meth in former tequilla distilleries. Yes, the raw material comes from Red Chiner of the now obsolete, oil tankers of the ’80s. And I have to have my driver’s license scanned at the pharmacy to buy Sudafed….my tax dollars at work!
I don’t have an SSD. Don’t know enough about them to buy one with confidence. Waiting for a new, updated edition of BTPPC.
My SSD experience is with the Intel 520 series:
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Series-Solid-State-Drive-2-5-Inch/dp/B006VCP8L2/
Fast, wicked fast and no failures in four of them to date. But the average age of our SSD drives so far is a little over a year.
“But the average age of our SSD drives so far is a little over a year.”
That’s not acceptable; that is a showstopper.
So they’re scanning our driver licences now to buy OTC Sudafed???
OK. Let me get this straight: I have zero options now. Can’t get a job selling slurpies and ciggies at the local Shell station/store around the corner, too f***ing old and ugly and decrepit and they have local teenage honeys with large racks to do that gig. Can’t enlist in the military because they have not yet jacked up the maximum age to 60, but they may get around to it eventually, like in the 1945 Wehrmacht. And now Stu breaks it to me that my vision of “Breaking Bad” for Retroville (where now the latest low-tech is doing it all in one pot) is kaput; our Mexican friends have cornered that deal.
What now? Keep horsing racks and servers and network cable around, I guess, and maintain a security clearance so on both counts they can’t outsource my stuff to Bangladesh or Kuala Lumpur or Uttar Pradesh.
“So they’re scanning our driver licences now to buy OTC Sudafed???”
Well, OFD, not exactly OTC. Behind The Counter, one has to ask the pharmacy attendent in the white coat as the shelf just contains paper tickets to take up to the counter. It goes back years when the Hell’s Angels used to buy scads at pharmacies to cook up meth in their abodes. I’ve never tried it because I only buy one package several times a year. I think that it precludes me from buying 6 packs a day.
Not as bad as after RFK was assasinated and I had to sign in pencil for 22s at KMart. Now there were over 500 street shootings in Chicago last year. How many times do you think that the detectives from the CPD went to KMart to inspect the bullet purchase logs? My tax dollars at work. Well, my sister’s anyway as she still lives there.
“…Except SSD drives are freaking awesome.”
I keep hearing this here; and I’m getting sales pitches from Crucial on theirs. I may just back up my current Win8 and RHEL drives and swap them out for the SSDs
I second that (or is third) that nomination. SSD is the way to go. 120 gig for less than $100.00 at Newegg. Put one in a slow low end HP netbook. That machine now boots faster than a high end laptop with a spinning platter. With the exception of CPU intensive tasks the cheap netbook outruns the more expensive machine. Office applications applications load in seconds rather than dozens of seconds.
First upgrade to a system should be to 8 gig of memory, second most important upgrade is a SSD. And you could make a strong argument for swapping the order of the upgrades.
I see. So once again, self-appointed guardians at some level or other decided that since some bikers had bought large quantities before, which apparently did not excite their interest at the time, then, perforce, John Q. Citizen, i.e., Stu Nicol, must be prevented from doing so henceforth. Much like the situation years ago when some hadji-befuddled wack job tried to light off an explosive substance in his shoe. Since then MILLIONS of human beings on the planet have had to remove their shoes at the airport terminals. DESPITE the fact that the “shoe bomber’s” attempt utterly FAILED. Jesus wept. There is just no rationality left in this world.
Chicago?? From what I’ve read over the past several years about that city, it seems like it could be the ‘failed city’ as Mexico is a ‘failed state.’ Like Cyprus is becoming, and soon other countries on the southern Med tier.
I have enjoyed, and been informed by, this ex-Chicago-cop’s blog:
http://www.crimefilenews.com/
I x-posted w/Ray. And was replying to Stu.
@Ray: Lynn also mentioned that the lifespan of the SSD’s was a year and I said that was unacceptable, a show-stopper. Which it is.
I plan to quadruple the RAM on this Win8 machine to 32GB and double the RAM on the RHEL 6.4 box to 16GB. I would consider putting an SSD in my ancient laptop running on 1GB with an old 40GB drive in it, and now running CrunchBang Linux, just for laffs, and if it blows up after a year, no big thang. Just to test it out.
Chuck W:
Thanks for the tip yesterday on Lipton Half & Half. I picked up a pack today at my local Walmart.
OFD:
I don’t think Lynn meant the lifespan of an SSD was one year, but that his have been in service only a year.
Sorry for the delay in answering. I’m heads down with multiple things going on here—including taxes,—and on top of that, I have to babysit the radio station throughout the weekend.
Audio and video sync has been a problem since non-linear editing on computers started. Impossible to get them out-of-sync when it was all recorded on hardware using videotape, because the audio and video heads were spaced a determined difference from each other and that never varied.
I have never used DVDFab, so am completely unfamiliar with it. But I would guess the problem is either with DVDFab or your player. This is a frequent problem—even on TV stations now with all digital signal paths,—and I do not know that anybody has a solution to it, but in our realm of providing DVD’s to others, we take RBT’s approach: it’s in the player. When there are sync problems, we tell the folks to get new equipment. So far, that has always worked. There are no real concrete ISO-type standards for this area that are obeyed by everyone, but we generally have no problems with new equipment.
It is a losing battle to try and slip sync for non-compliant players, and it sounds like what you are using on the iPad is a problem. That is surprising, as Apple shines in video, and always has. However, we do not deal with anybody who plays back on Apple—everyone uses PC’s or standalone DVD players. Actually, we recommend using Windows Media Player on new computers, and never have a sync problem there. Usually, the problem with older DVD players is that they will not play the DVD at all. Standards and codecs are changing all the time, so equipment that is more than about 4 years old, is often problematic. Fortunately, lawyers never have trouble coughing up enough funds for a snappy new computer or DVD player; same with courtrooms, where they are only too happy to upgrade using our tax dollars.
The problem is likely to be consistent, however. So if there is some offset adjustment in the player, the change necessary to correct will probably be the same across all the DVD’s from DVDFab.
Even .wav files are just containers, so what is inside all the various different file formats can vary. But seldom does one file have both audio and video interlaced in the same file; it is usually a separate audio and video file. They have to be synced by some method, and that is where it is going wrong. How they are synced differs. Adding video to audio, or vice-versa, seems much more complex than it ought to be. But I would experiment with different player software and see if that corrects the problem. It should, if you are not having problems on other playback units.
I don’t think Lynn meant the lifespan of an SSD was one year, but that his have been in service only a year.
Yes, that is what I meant. I bought my current 180 GB Intel 520 last October, it is the newest SSD that we have. The others are all over one year of age, none has failed or gotten corrupted. I passed my old SSD drive to one of my employees and bought two more for others. And would buy more if I could. Especially that 480 GB Intel 520 for my CRM server. That would get our CRM to screaming.
Jeff Atwood, one of the http://stackoverflow.com/ founders, wrote a great column about SSDs:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
“Solid state hard drives are so freaking amazing performance wise, and the experience you will have with them is so transformative, that I don’t even care if they fail every 12 months on average! I can’t imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it’d be like going back to dial-up internet or 13″ CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!”
One of my pals recommended a SSD to me. I bought one and was unimpressed by the performance. Not that it was bad, just that I didn’t notice an improvement.
Plus it died after about a year. Needed TRIM, which I knew nothing about. I’m not in a hurry to get another one.
Drug idiocy isn’t limited to the US:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-09/new-laws-target-drug-ingredients/4617428
And for once the Green Party MP is completely right.
@Ray: Lynn also mentioned that the lifespan of the SSD’s was a year and I said that was unacceptable, a show-stopper. Which it is.
You can get software from the vendors that will indicate the life left in an SSD. The SSD on our graphics system that is used to produce the magazine currently has 6 years left and has been in service for a year. We will replace the entire system before the SSD fails.
The life of an SSD is based on the number of writes. Reads have no effect on the life. Has something to do with the loss of electrons (or something like that) with each write. The more that are lost the more voltage it takes to write the data into a cell and make it stay.
If you put an SSD as the boot drive, put a second spinning platter for data, then the SSD will probably last for a dozen or more years. That is the configuration I have on my home system. I have a 180 gig boot and software drive and three 1tb spinning platters for data. One of those is 75% filled with nothing but photographs, one is my other data, the other is the scratch disk for Photoshop.
The netbook is a different story as all I have in the machine is an SSD. It will fail within 5 years and I will most certainly have a new laptop by that time. So the life of an SSD is irrelevant in my opinion.
It is a losing battle to try and slip sync for non-compliant players, and it sounds like what you are using on the iPad is a problem.
The iPad is the problem as WMP and VLC plays the videos just fine. There is no offset adjustment as Apple thinks all their users are stupid and would not allow such adjustment.
What is strange is that it does not happen with all the DVDs that I rip. The problem is not consistent. So I am thinking it must have something to do with the type of audio on the original DVD. Mono, stereo, Dolby 5.1, Dolby 7.1, 24 bit, 48 bit, whatever.
I ripped a bluray of The Hobbit, highest quality, resulting file was 7 gig. Sound is excellent as is the video. I ripped a standard DVD of Lincoln and everything is off by about 1 second. I ripped a standard DVD of Argo and the sound is OK. I rip a bluray DVD of Les Miserables and the audio is off by about 1 second.
The offset never gets worse or better as the movie is played so I don’t think it is a frame rate issue as was suggested on one of the Apple discussion boards. The sound is always behind, never ahead of the speaking.
Of course contacting Apple produces the usual response that there is no problem in their software and the problem lies elsewhere. And the classic “I can find no mention of the problem in our database so I am not going to enter the issue as a problem.”
When I was doing aircrew training in the USAF is worked out as follows:
85% to 100% = Pass
0% to 84.9% = Fail
Fail three exams and you were force cross-trained to a simpler careerfield. I am sure there are other careerfields with similar criteria (nuclear munitions, air traffic control, etc.) but I only have first-hand knowledge of aircrew.
“So the life of an SSD is irrelevant in my opinion.”
Outstanding; thanks for the succinct summary and tips, sir.
“…I only have first-hand knowledge of aircrew.”
You were USAF aircrew? Where and when; your fellow zoomie wants to know…I appreciated the work those guys did back in the Bronze Age.
“We can thank the Great “Libertarian” Milton Friedman for helping the federal government develop tax withholding, an ingenious government scam which helps the feds maximize revenues and hold excess funds interest-free for a time, all the while convincing some people that they’re actually getting some kind of gift from the feds.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/135425.html
Plus it died after about a year. Needed TRIM, which I knew nothing about. I’m not in a hurry to get another one.
Windows 7 does TRIM automatically on SSD drives. I am not sure about Windows Vista. I am sure that Windows XP does not support TRIM directly.
You Linux guys are on your own about TRIM. I have zero TRIM knowledge about Linux but I suspect that Linux supported TRIM a long time back.
BTW, if you have a Android (Linux) smartphone then you are running a SSD drive already and just do not know it.
You suspect right. Linux had TRIM support right about the same time SSDs starting shipping.
Windows 7 was the first MS OS to support the trim function needed for long life SSD operation.
My son had his SSD for a couple of years and then started having problems. It was not the SSD, but the controller that was bad. The maker sent him a new SSD with a new controller that did not have the problem. I have never personally heard of an SSD failure that was due to wear on the SSD memory cells.
The offending machine was running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. It had a SSD as the boot drive and several rotating drives for data. I left that machine running 24×7, and after about a year I woke one morning to a machine that wouldn’t boot…
I left that machine running 24×7, and after about a year I woke one morning to a machine that wouldn’t boot…
I have had that happen on machines with nothing but spinning platters. Servers, on 24×7. Come in one morning the server is dead. Now these are highly redundant machines, raid, triple power supplies, etc. And the one part that fails is the CPU motherboard. All four machines eventually succumbed to the same problem.
My Windows 7 Ultimate 64 also failed to boot a few months ago but that was due to the motherboard getting fried twice by power surges here. The hard drive, a standard ol’ platter, was fine, and I can still access it when I need to.
I may get another refurbished ThinkPad laptop from work and throw an SSD in that for my next little project (after jacking up the RAM on these existing two desktops). I think I will replace the supplied Win7 with Fedora, however. I am somewhat disenchanted lately with the whole Ubuntu family.
Nah, OFD, don’t bother buying a refurb laptop. Instead, shoot a couple of cops and take the laptop from their patrol car. On the slight chance that the typical Vermont cop isn’t by default deserving of a bullet in the head, you’re close to NY, and I can state with great confidence that the world will not be a poorer place for the loss of a few state troopers.
The good thing is, by looting a cop car, you can also stock up on ammo and firearms, even full-auto rifles, likely enough, and other stuff forbidden to the serfs.
For future reference, any time you find yourself stumped by life’s little problems, just come to me. I’m just full of out-of-the-box thinking.
My Windows 7 Ultimate 64 also failed to boot a few months ago but that was due to the motherboard getting fried twice by power surges here.
No UPS at your place? Please said it is not so. Get a CyberPower unit:
http://www.amazon.com/CyberPower-CP1000AVRLCD-Intelligent-Series-Mini-Tower/dp/B000QZ3UG0/
I both live and work about five miles away from the largest power plant in the USA, the Parish Power Plant ( http://www.texas-flyer.com/Fly-In-EngineOut/powerplant.htm ) . Twelve different generating units. We have power outages, surges and brownouts galore. I’ve seen them have all 12 units going and backflash the switching yards into each and trip the whole mess.
I’ve got UPS’s on anything of value in the house and office that has a plug. We get so much over voltage occasionally that the fluorescent bulbs go real bright and then “pop”.
Hey Steve, you are a little close to home there. The wife’s youngest uncle was a NY State Trooper until he died of lung cancer a few years ago at the tender age of 48. He was a K9 unit and carried a 130 lb German Shepard named Bruno around in the backseat.
I am aware that every cannibal, child molester, and government employee has a mother and other relatives and neighbors, who can generally be counted on to say he was a nice guy and helped with carrying furniture and was all-around a credit to the community.
“No UPS at your place?”
It somehow dropped off the IT equipment list until just now, Lynn; too much other stuff going on.
“Get a CyberPower unit”
Done. Ordered. I figure where you live is a dahn good recommendation for same.
“…by looting a cop car, you can also stock up on ammo and firearms, even full-auto rifles, likely enough, and other stuff forbidden to the serfs.”
I’d trade the Mattel Toy semi-autos for something heavier first thing. Keep the shotguns, if any. Sell the crunchenticker ammo. With any luck it might be a sniper’s car and I’d get a nice scoped rifle accordingly. Also be nice to jack the onboard radio/computer gizmo and have somebody reverse-engineer that puppy.
Recently our troopers up here have been a pain in the ass; spending inordinate amounts of time hassling people for minor traffic infractions and still going full tilt after pot smokers, growers and dealers (when the main narc gigs up here are prescription pills, meth and heroin; i.e. fah more dangerous.) We also had a career sergeant falsifying the hell out of his overtime sheets each week for years, to the point of completely fabricating calls he went on and situations he responded to. Hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars at work. I am not impressed with these guys up here, after living in this state now for sixteen years. Back in the day, the Massachusetts State troopers were a force to be reckoned with, however; OFD is a graduate of their Academy, June, 1980. Winter uniforms are dead ringers for Gestapo or SS. Only blue instead of black.
“…don’t bother buying a refurb laptop.”
Can’t really beat the deals; couple-hundred for Thinkpads with 4GB RAM, easily doubled, and these buggers are iron, very durable. My plan is to get whichever one I can that already comes with 8GB and swap out the drive for an SSD. Install Fedora. Wouldn’t want the cop laptop except as intel-gathering and reverse-engineering stuff; too much LE bloatware on it. Probably a bunch of malware, too; dollars to doughnuts they’re Wintel machines.
“…has a mother and other relatives and neighbors, who can generally be counted on to say he was a nice guy and helped with carrying furniture and was all-around a credit to the community.”
Gee, I bet nobody sez that about me.
“…any time you find yourself stumped by life’s little problems, just come to me. I’m just full of out-of-the-box thinking…”
Noted, sir.
OFD, my advice against refurb computers was to be used in conjunction with the advice to kill and loot police. If you’re not going to go the loot route, then a refurb computer is a good way to go. (The laptop I’m typing this on is a refurb. It’s a piece of crap, but that’s because it’s a Lenovo, not because it’s a refurb.)
Me neither. I’m annoyed. I’m trying to get things set so that at some point in the future all the neighbors will be shown on TV saying “I can’t believe he could have done such a thing.” Of course, the other problem with that scenario is that I’m much too lazy to get off my ass to commit an atrocity or two. Maybe I can bestir myself to write a snarky letter to the editor of the local weekly newspaper, whose main income comes from the adult entertainment insert.
Recently our troopers up here have been a pain in the ass; spending inordinate amounts of time hassling people for minor traffic infractions and still going full tilt after pot smokers, growers and dealers (when the main narc gigs up here are prescription pills, meth and heroin; i.e. fah more dangerous.)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, The War on Drugs (sm) in the USA has been completely and utterly lost. I am beginning to think that The WOD has totally corrupted every police department involved in it. There is so much bribery and illegal seizures going on out there that fixing The WOD is just impossible.
We’ve been playing around with Pot houses here in Southern Texas lately. Somebody will rent a house, install drip lines, fresh air vents and grow light bulbs all over the place. By the time that the landlord twigs to the destruction of their rent house or the cops notice the 10X electric bill, about 2 or 3 crops of pot have been grown and sold for a premium.
If someone want to medicate themselves into a stupor, their problem and not mine. Just don’t expect me to buy your meals and provide a free place for you and your eight kids to live.
Depends on where you’re sitting. Sure, it’s likely that everyone reading this site agrees with you, but we’re not the ones collecting the big payout. The police get lots of toys and money and power. The prison guards’ union is very strong in some states, and they get more and more members when dopers are jailed. Lobbyists raise lots of money from concerned citizens who are worried about the loss of rights or are worried about the dopers terrorizing the neighborhood, and a lot of that money is funneled to politicians. See, there’s lots of victory to be found in the War on (Some) Drugs.
“…It’s a piece of crap, but that’s because it’s a Lenovo, not because it’s a refurb.)”
Yes, the refurb I got Mrs. OFD is a Lenovo Thinkpad refurb and works great. The work laptop I have is also a Thinkpad, though not a refurb, and it’s stood up really well for over two years now, moving from XP to RHEL 6.3. Or actually, 6.4, what with all the updates. The next one I get will have Fedore 18 or 19 on it, the experimental, cutting-edge version of RH. Thinkpads have long had a rep for solid durability.
“…the other problem with that scenario is that I’m much too lazy to get off my ass to commit an atrocity or two.”
That’s your excuse. Mine is that I’m too fucking beat and tired and old by the end of each day to do anything much, not even a letter to the nooz editors. Best I can manage is rant a few minutes to Mrs. OFD and then her eyes roll back in her head and she dozes off. Yep, that’s me: Mr. Excitement.
“Just don’t expect me to buy your meals and provide a free place for you and your eight kids to live.”
Racist. Nativist. Xenophobe.
As an ex-cop, I’d MUCH rather see people stoned on weed than booze, pills, or any other dope, or even smoking nicotine ciggies. But I’m with ya; if folks wanna blitz themselves and if they stay at home and don’t go out driving and operating machinery and suchlike, then laissez les bon temps rouler, baby; but I ain’t paying for the processed junk food and takeout, or anything else in their couch potato lives.
And it’s The War on SOME Drugs; booze is still accepted in this culture, as are a host of mood drugs and prescription stuff. A total failure, and our prisons are crammed with non-violent people as one awful and tragic result. They ain’t gonna be so tranquil and peaceful when they come out.
And what SteveF said about the “victory” in this war; as usual, cui bono?
@Lynn: Parish power plant – I followed your link. “36,000 tons of coal a day”, and that’s only half of their generators. Christ in a handbasket, how can anyone think this is better than nuclear?
” Christ in a handbasket, how can anyone think this is better than nuclear?”
No kidding. The public has been thoroughly cowed and hornswoggled on this for decades now, since Three-Mile-Island and Chernobyl.
We need thirty plants built a year for thirty years but the chances of that are the proverbial snowball. The “conservatives” here will always go for the oil, gas and coal; the libruls and Progs dream of windmills and solar panels, which might be swell for the hippie conclaves in Vermont and Kalifornia but not for 330-million people pent up in megalopolis-type cities on both coasts. And now our latest ideological battleground is fracking; the so-called Right would crack the continent from sea to sea; the Left will show us horrible pictures of toxic sludge and flames shooting out of kitchen faucets in Flyover Country.
But I have faith that our lords temporal will find a solution.
I was enlisted aircrew (Aircraft Loadmaster – 1A251) on C-5’s at Travis AFB, California, from 1995-1999.
Ah, the good old USA. I’ve mentioned this before, but this reminded me of a discussion I had when I was in college with a guy who’d been a junior SS officer fighting on the Russian front in WWII. He commented that he, as a junior lieutenant, had the authority to make decisions that would be made by a Soviet colonel. He thought the SS and Wehrmacht had done as well as they had against the Red Army, although greatly outnumbered, at least in part to the flexibility allowed junior German officers.
Then in 1944, as a Captain, he moved with his division, the First SS, to counter the Allied landings at Normandy. He was very surprised to learn that in the US Army, sergeants and even PFCs made decisions that would have to be bumped up to his level or higher in the German forces.
I admit I was surprised that as an enlisted man you had authority for something as mission-critical as Loadmaster. Nowadays, I figured the USA would have a field-grade officer doing something like that.
@Lynn: Parish power plant – I followed your link. “36,000 tons of coal a day”, and that’s only half of their generators. Christ in a handbasket, how can anyone think this is better than nuclear?
Correction, one third of their power plants. The other eight use natural gas or steam from heat recovery boilers.
Power plants use tremendous quantities of fuel no matter what the fuel is: natural gas, coal, lignite, fissionable U-235, bunker c fuel oil (also known as fuel oil #6), gasoline, diesel (also know as fuel oil #2), petroleum coke, kerosene, naptha, white gasoline, trash, etc, etc, etc. I used to work at a natural gas / fuel oil #6 power plant in west Texas that regularly used a quarter of a million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Per day!
I ran a test one day on 100% fuel oil on the largest unit. Over one hour we burned 1,022 barrels of fuel oil running at 560 MW (751,000 hp). That is 42,924 gallons of fuel oil. When I started working at the plant in 1982, we had 600,000 barrels of fuel oil in storage. When I left in 1985, we had 200,000 barrels of fuel oil in storage when the PUC decided that we only needed three days of fuel oil in storage.
“…at Travis AFB, California, from 1995-1999.:
Damn, son, you’s just a young’un! I mustered out finally at Travis, March, 1975, with a cold wind blowing across the tarmac there. Thanks for your service, man; more folks than you might know appreciate it.
The Germans also did well against everybody because of their blitzkreig style of warfare and because a whole lot of them were True Believers. And against the Red Army also because Koba the Dread had murdered two-thirds of his generals.
As for U.S. enlisted scum, yours truly routinely braced field grade and above out on the flight lines when they didn’t have their line badges, either because they forgot, lost them, or were fucking testing our asses. I had full birds braced with the full support of our flight chief and NCOs. And I once had a brigadier come out and thank me.
Nowadays, I have no idea; affirmative action, the worship of the Goddesses Democracy and Diversity, the careerist bullshit, who knows? Maybe they have Vietnamese chick colonels doing the loadmaster gig now. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least.