[warrenpchi]

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Congratulations on your graduation today vwinter! 

Lol thanks again. And don't think for a second that the extra large text isn't appreciated.

 
Now you can chill out for a little while.

 
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Here's a very blunt question

 
That's not that blunt...  You could be blunterish. 

 

[MrViolin]

Hmmm, so I guess the reason why obobskivich preferred his f1's over the sa5 was b/c it complemented his collection and met his tastes I guess.
 

sa5	f1
colder, analytical	warmer, musical
can't do much 3d for gaming, sound- stage is smaller	had a 3d effect, music floated in a sphere/bubble
bass is decent (for open phones)	very light bass

he really seemed to favor the f1's saying that the sa5's weren't really worth keeping. Don't really care about the gaming part, but he said the f1 could be more expansive than the k70x (seen them referred to as the baby k1000's) and at the same time bring the music up to the grills. The sa's were like listening in a music chamber (one of the members here said it was like listening back a few rows though). I can go back and look at the paragraphs he wrote for me, but man, he really loved his pair
 
IIRC, muppet said that the sa5 could do better in most cases. The ma900 also does better in all/most cases except build. 
 
Guess people just have different preferences... one of the few times I've seen 2 opinions be so black and white with both people having heard them.

 

[DigitalFreak]

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Insert image of moustache twiddling shark here----->

Yep, unfortunately there's enough of them in the world. I think the question is a valid one though or put in a more Walt Disney bad guy fashion: you're a nobody little guy and one day a black heart mustache twiddling richie rich sucking on a fat cigar comes along and decides to screw with you because he/she can and he/she knows they can get away with it. What then?
 
By the way, just so everyone knows and it's perfectly clear, when I say the words richie rich I'm not talking about the wealthy in general I'm talking about a certain type of person who could be wealthy or just upper middle class well off. There's a difference between being someone whose wealthy and someone whose a richie rich.

 

[eke2k6]

Yep, unfortunately there's enough of them in the world. I think the question is a valid one though or put in a more Walt Disney bad guy fashion: you're a nobody little guy and one day a black heart mustache twiddling richie rich sucking on a fat cigar comes along and decides to screw with you because he/she can and he/she knows they can get away with it. What then?

By the way, just so everyone knows and it's perfectly clear, when I say the words richie rich I'm not talking about the wealthy in general I'm talking about a certain type of person who could be wealthy or just upper middle class well off. There's a difference between being someone whose wealthy and someone whose a richie rich.

I don't even view the world like that.

The way I see it is that those who make it to the top tend to forget how they got there, and where they came from. Politicians who came up through government help in the form of immigration and student loans, now want to pull the ladder up behind them in the name of austerity, while deciding that the public should be dependent on the good graces of corporations. Politics.

 

[DigitalFreak]

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I don't even view the world like that.

The way I see it is that those who make it to the top tend to forget how they got there, and where they came from. Politicians who came up through government help in the form of immigration and student loans, now want to pull the ladder up behind them in the name of austerity, while deciding that the public should be dependent on the good graces of corporations. Politics.

I'm fast approaching middle age eke, believe me when I say there's good and bad in all walks of life.

 

[billybob_jcv]

IME, you are just as likely to get screwed by a wealthy person as you are a poor person or a middle class person. Wealth or status has very little to do with it. The only difference is that you believe the wealthy person is more evil because they do not need to screw you. I would say they are all evil, regardless of their net worth.

 

[DigitalFreak]

Hmph, THESE are news to me. Anyone here heard anything about these 3 IEM's? I first ran across them on this site. Rather funky looking to say the least.

 

[billybob_jcv]

Hmph, THESE are news to me. Anyone here heard anything about these 3 IEM's? I first ran across them on this site. Rather funky looking to say the least.

Those look incredibly uncomfortable!

 

[Magick Man]

A bunch of people I know (including myself) have been on schedule for a while, all of us doing what we love, no real debts, no real bad habits, working our asses off and trust me I'm pretty sure none of us will be wealthy. And I'm not talking about normal clerical jobs, most of us work on Pratt, Northrup, Rolls Royce, etc. etc. most of us are engineers, mathematicians, work at R&D, you know, bright people with good opportunities and even with our set goals we will never reach a different status (and that will probably never change once we start getting married, having kids, etc. etc.) So... no. I don't quite agree with most of what you are saying and I don't know why, but I'm almost pretty sure that if your "timetable" wouldn't have been "pushed", you'd be in the same situation you are right now... but I'm still hoping to win the Lotto... I'll let you guys know if that changes my views...

That's good, but I'd say you probably aren't following everything I've stated, it's more of a commitment than putting some money into a retirement account, going to work, and doing a good job there (all excellent things, of course). As I said, it's a change of perspective, an abandonment of spending as a source of enjoyment and becoming excited about new ways to do business. Also, credit cards, don't use those, and absolutely never carry over a balance, the only "reasonable" debt is a mortgage.

Here's a very blunt question, what if one day as you're going about your business, meeting your goals so to speak, someone far more influential and powerful then you (the proverbial great white shark) came along and decided that by intentionally going out of their way to screw your business dealings up they could reap a handsome profit for themselves. You may of coarse have been not to badly off at the time but the other person is by far more financially powerful and is easily more capable of using their financial wealth and connections to do whatever they wanted to completely derail whatever you tried to do. What then?

Yes this question is my way of steering the conversation towards a point I hope to make.

Insert image of moustache twiddling shark here----->

Indeed, that's a very bleak outlook, and generally not something anyone will run into. Taking advantage of individuals is much harder than doing the same to institutions, when you already have wealth. It isn't efficient at all. You're more likely to be directly screwed over by someone who isn't "rich", quite frankly.

Oh, and I have the most calculating, vicious, diabolical lawyer that hell ever spat out, and he loves me like a brother. So, that's a pretty good thing.

 

[jgray91]

Insert image of moustache twiddling shark here----->

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[a_recording]

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Congratulations on your graduation today vwinter! 

 
+1! Now go onto greatness!
 
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IIRC, muppet said that the sa5 could do better in most cases. The ma900 also does better in all/most cases except build. 

 
I generally prefer my MA900 but the SA5000 has a special sound to it that can be quite chilling...
 
/////////
 
So here are my very early impressions of the Mirosoft Surface Pro, which I got to replace a MacBook Air / Wacom Tablet / Nexus 7...

Firstly it's obvious that the device isn't great as a tablet. It's a bit too thick and a bit too heavy to really be used comfortably. Compared to a little notebook like my trusty 3 year old MacBook Air it is quite a densely packed power house - smaller and lighter with some fast hardware internals.

One thing to note though is that the Surface Pro's weight distribution is very different from a laptop. In a laptop the weight is divided between the screen and the keyboard / internals whereas the Surface Pro is a slab with an (optional) light cover / keyboard attached. It can be a little awkward to position on any surface which isn't completely flat, so using on your lap can be tricky. Surprisingly though I do a lot of web browsing just lying down / sitting inin bed and the Surface Pro is quite nice for that.

The touch / type cover is very cool, although I had a small hiccup where the thing stopped functioning for a while. It seems to be working fine now after installing mysterious firmware / software updates (I don't know if they have anything to do with the type cover) so I'll watch it for the next few days to see if it happens again. I'm typing on the type cover right now and while it still doesn't have as nice a keyboard feel as the MacBook Air it's very passable. The trackpad on the type cover is a different story - it's very small and not terribly accurate.

That is okay though because the combination of touch / keyboard / trackpad / stylus controls actually feels incredibly intuitive. I find myself quite easily just switching between all four controls naturally.

The stylus is by far the most important aspect of the Surface Pro and why I got it. And it's fantastic. The digitizer is by Wacom, supports pressure sensitivity and feels incredibly smooth and precise. One caveat: out of the box the digitizer was not completely accurate and was badly mapped by more than a few pixels, especially to screen corners. This was okay in the Not-Metro interface but for some programs where the UI elements are tiny on a 1080P screen (ie: Photoshop) this essentially rendered the stylus unusable. The default calibration routine for the digitizer uses 16 points of reference which seemingly was not enough to get an accurate mapping. I ended up finding a posting online that detailed how to run the calibration through a 200+ point routine, which was a chore to do (you have to tap on the screen 200 times on different points on a grid) but now the digitizer is accurate within a few pixels.

Because the digitizer supports pressure sensitivity the Surface Pro essentially becomes a very cheap Wacom Cintiq with a whole computer and battery in one. This really is the killer app of the Surface Pro. I've tried just doing a little sketching on Autodesk Sketchbook on the Surface and it's great fun. I haven't yet tried photo editing on the Pro but again this seems like it would be a good usage scenario - though it will probably be better once Adobe updates the Photoshop UI to work better with touch controls.

The way handwriting recognition works on Windows 8 is also deeply, deeply impressive and intuitive. Not that it doesn't make mistakes, but the system makes it very easy to correct them. While it still isn't nearly as fast as a physical keyboard this is the first time I've thought of handwriting recognition as a valid alternative to an on-screen keyboard.

As for Windows 8, I haven't used a Windows machine in 6+ years and I found a lot of the interface quite confusing - especially the division between Metro and Desktop versions of apps. Once it's all set up the way you want it though it actually works quite well, taking some clever elements from smartphone design that work really well on a touch interface. I'm actually really impressed by how personal Windows 8 feels - how you can kind of really make it your own in terms of the arrangement of the UI and the way it looks and feels. OSX actually feels a little bland in comparison, which is something I never thought I would say.

It's great that the Surface Pro supports full desktop class applications and in that sense the Surface Pro is the first tablet I have ever considered useful as opposed to some passive content creation device.

But herein lies the rub. It seems like all the tablet features the Surface Pro supports, a tablet could do better, and all the laptop features the Surface Pro supports, a laptop supports better. battery life isn't all crash hot but at 4-5 hours it's better than the old battery in my MBA... lt also gets quite warm to the touch. I feel like the fan profile could be more aggressive.

So you have to either really have to find the size and weight appealing, or have a very good idea of what you want to do with the stylus. In that sense the Surface Pro is a $1000 magic sketchbook. Do not get the Surface Pro if you cannot think how the stylus would be useful to you.

I don't know if I will keep this machine - I'll have a better idea when the window of opportunity starts closing to return it - but right now I'm sitting in a waiting room typing out these impressions and I really quite like it. I'm really looking forward to seeing the kinds of things I can actually do or create with the stylus.

I think that this is something that artists / designers should take a closer look at.

 

[Magick Man]

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I stole that, it's too awesome!

 

[jgray91]

I stole that, it's too awesome!

Good show, old chap. Cheerio.

 

[warrenpchi]

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I stole that, it's too awesome!

 
Wait!  Lemme crop it into a square for you!
 

 

[Magick Man]

woohoo!