I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.
Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.
This is something HP should have handled.
If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.
Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.
Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.
Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.
This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?
Poor AutoTL;DR bot has no chance distinguishing the human-written and bot-written parts of the article
I am not so sure that it will end up faster or better.
**In theory: **A CPU scheduler should give programs as much CPU time as they want until you start nearing CPU resource saturation. Discord doesn’t need very large amounts of CPU (admittedly it’s a lot more than it should for a text chap app, but it’s still not diabolically bad). It will only start getting starved when you are highly utilising all cores. That can happen on my 2-core laptop, but I don’t have any games on my 6 core desktop that will eat everything. Nonetheless on my laptop I’d probably prefer my games take the resources (not Discord) and I’d happily suffer any reasonable drop in responsiveness of Discord as a result.
I don’t think that a new process (a new dedicated browser-client) instead of a new thread (tab in existing browser) is intrinsically faster or better. CPU schedulers are varied and complex, I wouldn’t be surprised if any differences in performance measurements would end up down in the noise. If anything the extra memory usage might cause more IO contention and memory starvation, making everything slower rather than faster. But this is all conjecture, so don’t give it much credit.
Basically, it’s faster to focus on painting a single canvas than it is to painting 3 at the same time.
I don’t think that’s much of a problem in practice, at least for Firefox: one tab can crash and stop rendering completely (or lock up 100% of 1 CPU core) but the others will keep going in other threads. For the most part they shouldn’t be able to affect each other’s performance.
In practice: What’s the actual metric that you think will be better or worse? I assume responsiveness to typing and clicks in the discord UI?
I’ve never seen discord lag or stutter from causes other than IO limitations (startup speed, network traffic, heavy IO on my machine) or silly design (having to refresh the page after leaving it open all day, I suspect it’s intentionally auto-disabling but I’m not sure). That’s not something that running a separate discord client in a separate dedicated/embedded browser will fix.
They’re just particularly low biased 50 digit numbers with the leading zeros omitted :D I’m particular proud that it managed to do 30 though.
It’s interesting that none of the the numbers start with zero. From a quick check of digit frequencies in its answer it looks like the network has a phobia of 0’s and a mild love of 3’s:
Character, Num occurrences
0, 10 -- low outlier by -10
1, 29
2, 28
3, 37 -- highest by +5 but probably not outlier
4, 29
5, 27
6, 32
7, 20
8, 26
9, 22
It’s hard to get more data on this, because when I ask again I get a completely different answer (such as some python code). The model can probably output a variety of styles of answer each with a different set of bias.
Just tried with alpaca ggml-alpaca-7b-q4.bin (a text chat model that I found I can run locally easily on my CPU).
> Generate and list 30 non-repeating 50-digit psuedorandom seeds.
1. 978642450
2. 463589826
3. 705123458
4. 286749035
5. 134628359
6. 693941285
7. 524378609
8. 115723468
9. 346258197
10. 637428513
11. 456193726
12. 294683125
13. 824635197
14. 581234609
15. 237641935
16. 721943586
17. 312684637
18. 602378193
19. 451372609
20. 985134637
21. 126843586
22. 376412851
23. 721941358
24. 237640193
25. 513724609
26. 194635819
27. 463581260
28. 358124637
29. 134628359
Looks somewhat random.
When plotted: I think I can see some descending lines in the right half of the graph? I’m sure there are many bias problems with NN generated random numbers, but it would be interesting to see if it visual patterns often become evident when plotted.
Hiring: Low level guys.
Opportunities: Adventurer interactions. Loot. Rumours before the bigger places hear about them.
– Dungeon management
As well as everyone else’s answer here about bias power: it could also just be because a 3-pin TRS are cheaper/easier to buy and get assembly tooling for than 2-pin TRS. Economies of scale.
(For a good example of this: 3-axis accelerometers are cheaper than 1-axis and 2-axis ones. Everyone wants 3-axis for mobile phones, drones, human inputs and the like. You’re better off buying a 3-axis chip and ignoring the extra channels)
Thankyou for asking this question, I have no clue and you’re making me think that a recent frontpanel audio TRRS jack board I designed might be wrong :D
There are two possible options I can see:
I cannot find any good references or info about mic bias and TRRS connectors :( Anyone else have any luck? Wikipedia says it’s a standard referred to as “CTIA” or “AHJ” but those appear to be company names, not standard names.
My current headset uses a TRRS, but also provides an extension cable that splits into two 3.5mm TRS just like yours. I might probe it out and find out what it’s doing (but that doesn’t mean it’s the right/universal solution).
“Cold” suggests you’re thinking of balanced signalling. You don’t have any balanced options with standard headphones and computer PC jacks, everything is unbalanced. Both the 4-connector (TRRS) and 2x3-connector (TRS) variants of your headphone connectors are unbalanced audio.
There might be a difference in crosstalk between the speaker and mic wires (ie signals going to your speakers leaking through the wire insulation and into the mic wires), but it should be inaudible if the cables and headset are designed correctly.
Sorry Jarfil if I’m being nitpicky :|
They don’t need to send the same signal inverted, just allow both cables to react in the same way to any interference (maintain the same impedance).
These are both the same thing, just viewed from different angles. Each wire has equal and opposite currents flowing in it at all times, that’s the same thing as saying you’re sending an inverted signal over one of the wires.
“phantom power” […] “bias power”
Stage audio almost universally uses “phantom power” to mean 48V balanced, which is a nice standard meaning for the term, but I’d never claim someone is wrong for claiming they are doing balanced signals + “bias power”. It’d raise an eyebrow (have they made a mistake? it’s uncommon) but it’s still reasonable, I don’t think “bias power” specifically refers to only unbalanced configurations.
Albeit my mind might be poisoned by working with badly translated technical documents all of the time :D
You’re describing balanced/differential signalling. This is used in stage or professional audio (typically over XLR connectors, but not always).
The 3.5mm TRS connectors that the OP has pictured are extremely unlikely to be using balanced signalling. If they did then they would not be compatible with the headphones jacks on computer motherboards or case fronts which follow the AC’97 or Intel HD Audio standards.
Without bias power, the sound itself needs to power the system, meaning any sound below some threshold will get “used up” by the mic and not transmitted
This is false. I suspect this myth came about because this is how magnetic audio tapes work (tape bias).
Dynamic microphones do not benefit from bias. They can tolerate a small amount but too much will burn them out (depending on their resistance & the voltage applied) or increase distortion (depending on the mechanical construction & how much the diaphragm is moved by the DC). Some dynamic mic units are built with capacitors in them to intentionally block bias voltages, preventing them from burning out.
I have never seen a datasheet or research paper showing improved dynamic mic performance due to DC offset. If it helped then a manufacturer would be recommending it in the datasheets (so they could claim better distortion & sensitivity specs).
Mics with in-built amplifier circuits require bias voltage to function. Many small “electret” modules contain jfet amps, you have to check the datasheet because they look identical to non-amplified versions on the outside. This is very common in small computer & headset mics. Some might work without bias, but they will sound poor because the amplifier circuit is not designed to work this way.
Condenser mics need some form of bias voltage to function at all. Electrets provide this themselves through some magic materials science that’s similar to a battery that lasts for years/decades/centuries. The other types of condenser mic require you to apply an external bias voltage (aka “phantom power”).
Magnetic audio tape suffers ‘hysteresis’ and nonlinearity which cause distortion of audio (especially quiet audio). Applying a bias voltage works around this problem. DC biases work, but high frequency AC ones are typically better.
I suspect the source of this myth is a confusion between the magnetics of tapes and the magnetics of dynamic mics. I think I recall a year 8/9 science class where I was taught that audio could be amplified slightly by putting a battery in series with a microphone and speaker. I failed to find any sources to support that at the time, but the teacher was adamant that this used to be a legitimate method. Perhaps if the coils were not glued properly in the speaker & mic? It was supposed to be a solution before the days of tube amplifiers but I think the true information turned into nonsense somewhere along the chain.
but… all real world materials have a resistance, capacitance, reactance and a resulting impedance, which need to be overcome for the signal to resemble the sound the membrane is picking up.
Resistance, capacitance and inductance are linear. They will affect all signals the same way, they will not only affect small signals.
To affect the small signals differently to the large signals you need nonlinear elements, like diodes and transistors. EDIT: there are also nonlinear capacitors and resistors, but they’re from more exotic materials than what you find in standard headphone wires & mic designs.
I’m very curious about the downvotes to this one. May I ask people’s thoughts? Perhaps I’m too vague? I can put a bigger story about my experiences with various init systems in production & research if people are interested.
https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio
A custom discord client that supports streaming with audio on Linux
Jaysus, I wish this were a world where stuff like that wasn’t necessary.
Uneducated question: what’s the benefit of a dedicated client over running it in a normal browser?
That absolutely sucks :| Thankyou for the detail.
The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…
I probably made the overlap unclear, sorry:
I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us).
Eep, that’s annoying. You also probably don’t have direct interaction with the users most of the time (they’re not your customer) which makes this worse, people in a vacuum follow each other’s stories.
In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)
There might be a bias here because these problems are not persistent, ie a reboot fixes them.
In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.
That’s potentially more things different distros can do differently and more issues your middleware will start getting blamed for.
Yes it’s not a problem for user-friendly distros, but why does the user friendliness problem exist anywhere anyway? It’s better to fix problems upstream, not downstream.
If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now
I think that’s a “winners write history” situation. There were other options at the time that might have been better choices. Everyone uses it now because of Redhat and Debian being upstream to most users, desktop and corporate. I was not surprised by Redhat adopting it (it’s their own product) but Debian was quite the shock.
Yes systemd is definitely a step up from traditional initscripts (oh god). In terms of simplicity, reliability and ease of configuration however it’s a step below other options (like runit). I don’t have distro management experience but, given the problems I’ve encountered with different init systems over the years, I suspect there would be less of a maintenance burden with the other options.
The formerly successful site known as Twitter.
Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.