Personally the association with Teenage Engineering makes me more concerned that this will not be as exciting as it sounds. TE's Op-1 is a fine piece of kit, but their recent offerings have been very underwhelming. Also the placement of the crank and the form factor look very un-ergonomic.
The OP-1 is a well built, self contained musical instrument (sequencing, synthesis/sampling, effects, mixing) with a very clean industrial design and solid construction.
The main issues people have with it are 1) long-standing software bugs that don’t get fixed 2) TE doesn’t seem that focused on producing it anymore- it was out of stock for a couple years, and they raised the price significantly on the new batches.
It's an opinionated piece of hardware, designed and manufactured more or less uncompromisingly for a specific musician experience. I decided it's not for me (though its follow-up, the OP-Z, is a lot closer), but I absolutely adore Teenage Engineering's approach to pretty much everything, even when it's not personally my style.
made this in bed at 3am last night. sampled the vox straight from my phones headphone output into the line in on the op-1. its a beautiful piece of hardware that i take with me wherever i go.
Not from personal experience, but it seems that it's an all around decent synth/sequencer/sampler that makes a good musical scratchpad. People like it, and if I had a g to spare, I might join in.
Yes, that's one way to describe what I'm hoping to do with this. The focus right now is on markdown, but since Pandoc supports so many input formats, it should be easy to add support for other formats like LaTeX once the markdown features stabilize. There isn't yet an equivalent of org-babel's ability to share data between code blocks, though I hope to add something similar eventually. The next big feature will probably be the ability to name code blocks, and then insert any combination of their code/output/errors at arbitrary other locations in the document.
Org is essentially tied to Emacs. Which is great if you use Emacs, but means you miss out on that functionality elsewhere.
If you're not using Emacs, pandoc is a great tool for converting documents (e.g. to HTML, to PDF). And a tool like codebrain would be useful for imitating some of the functionality that org-babel provides.
This wouldn't do any noticeable damage. Modern CPUs have excellent thermal management. As far a wear goes, a hot spot in chip would in theory slightly decrease the long life span of a CPU.
If you expanded your question to hardware in the computer, then yes you can easily cause damage. BIOS’s can be flashed to make the system unbootable or overclock/stress components. Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings.
Your question got me thinking what’s the MTBF of modern CPUs? My google-fu failed me finding any reliable source of this, but I’m sure it’s long, 10+ years.
> Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings
You could also damage a floppy drive making it read/write, for many times, few sectors outer the common limits. Being there, done that.
But after so many discussions on online forums that it was impossible to cause physical damage using software (other than overwriting firmwares), I gave up and kept this (and the asm code) deep inside my heart.
And bringing it up still gives me chills that those discussions will return right now...
Your question got me thinking what’s the MTBF of modern CPUs? My google-fu failed me finding any reliable source of this, but I’m sure it’s long, 10+ years.
Probably decreasing, and soon not much longer than warranty period... the transistors have gotten so small that they're on the threshold of barely working even in normal operation.
As for older CPUs, they could definitely last many decades because of the lower stresses of larger process sizes, and they were designed with much higher margins.
According to the paper linked in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373015), apparently the high-k dielectric nodes used at 45nm and below show ~5x times worse NBTI ageing than non-high-k 45nm PMOS gates, which decides the tolerances that are selected to provide X years of life.
Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings.
Back when a certain kind of line printer was commonplace (has a circulating ribbon with the typeface repeated, and n hammers in a line going across the entire width) programmers could sabotage the printer by printing the pattern on the ribbon. This would cause all of the hammers to fire at once, which the machine wasn't designed to withstand.
I've also heard of monitors being broken by having the speaker output the resonant frequency of the glass cover. However, I can't vouch for this one.
Wow, thanks, that's a fascinating paper! Direct link to pdf: [1].
So it turns out that if a transistor is kept on continuously its threshold voltage gradually increases (Negative-Bias Temperature-Instability (NBTI)), increasing the switching delay. This attack targets transistors along the critical path, increasing the path's delay until it exceeds the allowed tolerance (guardband). Turning the transistor off "heals" it; as a workaround they suggest periodically executing certain nop instructions to ensure critical path transistors spend at least 0.05% of their time turned off. They perform simulations using models of 45nm high-k PMOS transistors to produce their results. A good quote about processor reliability:
Guardbanding is the current industrial practice to cope with transistor aging and
voltage droops [Agarwal et al. 2007]. It entails slowing down the clock frequency (i.e.,
adding timing margin during design) based on the worst degradation the transistors
might experience during their lifetime. The guardbands ensure that enough current
passes through the processor to keep it above the threshold voltage and in turn ensure
that the processor functionality is intact for an average period of 5 to 7 years [Tiwari
and Torrellas 2008]. However, inserting wide guardbands degrades performance and
increases energy consumption. Hence, processor design companies usually have small
guardbands, typically 10% [Agarwal et al. 2007]. However, the MAGIC-based attack
can deteriorate the critical path by 11% and cause erroneous results in 1 month.
This also explains why overclocking a CPU may be a bad idea, although they also show that random instructions don't come close to the worst case ageing.
Well, I think this can be answered by considering that even under normal conditions there are transistors that are used as much as in your hypothetical scenario. For example, the instruction decoding logic is invoked for every instruction. Since all logic transistors are the same (afaik), I don't think that using one type of instruction would significantly reduce the life-time of your CPU.
I mean the porn. It seems like a non sequitur to withhold something ideologically compatible and inessential, plus the notion of pornographers fighting for equality is a joke.
Why is the notion of pornographers fighting for equality a joke? XHamster seems to have a pretty progressive corporate view towards sexuality. Obviously not all the content on the site is that way, but you seem to be implying pornography is inherently bad?
Besides, you're naive if you think the Republican lawmakers who push this type of legislation are actually so wholesome that this is totally irrelevant.
I think because in many cases porn can be exploitative and can perpetuate stereotypes of aggression in sex and set unrealistic expectations for many people who then develop complexes.
It's a complex issue. On the one hand sex is natural, on the other hand the way it's portrayed can have major influence on how young adults (and even mature adults) view sex which can be loving and consensual to violent and unrealistic. And it can lead some to objectifying people.
I'll go further than imply, and outright state that pornography is inherently and irredeemably bad. Enough has been written and said about it, so I'll leave that to you to sort out.
I think though that for one of several dozen companies to shut down services just means that people will get it elsewhere, republican or not.
They're just trying to look progressive, but real progress is fundamentally incompatible with their business.
> I'll go further than imply, and outright state that pornography is inherently and irredeemably bad.
While I don't agree, I also think this is a reasonable stance for someone to take. I would encourage others who disagree with this comment to avoid downvoting it simply because you disagree with it.
I realize that not everyone accepts that pornography is inherently harmful as a medium, and thought to avoid that discussion (which has been going on for longer than we've been alive) in favor of discussing how futile this act of faux solidarity is.
I'll go further than imply, and outright state that pornography is inherently and irredeemably bad.
I agree with you, but porn is a small part of the larger problem that modernity presents us with hypernormal stimuli absolutely everywhere. Television, movies, calorie-dense foods, even things like HVAC. Decrying porn without decrying all forms of hypernormal stimuli seems odd.
Pornography is more than hyperstimulation: the messages in pornography are hateful towards women and minorities. Coupling those messages with the reward of orgasm is going much further.
Yes, and like I said, money makes the consent given questionable at best. Threats of violence can also be used to negate consent. Social pressure applies as well. These factors do not disappear in so called amateur pornography.
> plus the notion of pornographers fighting for equality is a joke.
Do explain. Are you saying the porn industry pushes a certain ideology (e.g. only anonymous-male-on-model sex!1)? I'm pretty sure the porn industry is purely a capitalistic endeavour, as in, whatever sells - and non-traditional (if that's the right term to use) porn happens to sell.
I think the porn jabs at the hypocrisy of it all. Most of these anti-gay groups love to throw stones from their insanely tall horses. They pick and choose from the buffet of sins, and ignore the rest.
Porn is likely something they publicly are against, but i would be honestly impressed if it's something they (in their private homes) are against.
Hell, most of these people can't even stomach "Love thy neighbor". Let alone sins of the flesh.
Obligatory reminder that since gender is not innate, studies of male/female brain differences are as likely to be showing the cumulative effect of years of social differences on neurochemistry, as they are to show biological differences between the sexes.
Well, if you're transgender (male mind in a female body or, female mind inside a male body) then this drug may or may not affect you differently, because the study did not test a transgender mice.
HOWEVER, if you have a male mind inside a male body, then this drug will not affect you.
And if you have a female mind inside a female body, then this drug WILL affect you.
Meaning, there is a difference, biologically, between male and female.
Transgender is left up to debate at this point because this study does not deal with it.
I don't think that this 'fake humanitarianism' is limited to the valley: this happens everywhere, and it really is terrible. Your gleeful materialism is pretty offensive too though. I can't really choose the lesser evil here.
I just work in a call center right now, but live in my scratch buffer all day long. Being able to go from note taking to evaluating elisp for quick calculations and never having to switch tools is great. Plus the main piece of software for taking orders is a horrendous java application, with all kinds of weird buggy behavior, so the more I can do with firefox + emacs the better.
