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I think you have just bought into the hype.

Actual evidence shows that AAC sucks at 128K, and MP3 does much better in many cases.

With AAC you need at least 256K to get acceptable output.

Neither is the end-all be-all of music formats. You should be allowed to select the format for each song that sounds best.

adding information [...] that I had solid 100% reliable information on, [...] deleted because [...] the information was only "hearsay". Well, months later, the information turned out 100% correct

Kilobyte has been 1024 bytes for over 50 years. It is a de facto standard.

iTunes uses MPEG 4 Audio http://www.m4a.com/ for its encoding. There seems to be a lot of varying and conflicting opinions on the differences in audio quality (ie. here: http://forums.macnn.com/archive/index.php/t-158250 .html , here: http://www.xciv.org/~meta/audio-shootout/ ) but my university lecturer, who has been a professional sound engineer for a long time, has told me in the past that M4A is much better at preserving the original sound than MP3, with a 96kbs M4A file being equivalent to something like a 260kbs MP3. I'm not sure if he's right as I can't seem to find any supporting evidence but the general consensus from my googling, other than the last link I posted, seems to be that M4A offers a higher quality output than MP3.

If by "weighted rateing" you mean the iPod's signal to noise ratio (SNR), Apple doesn't post it on their website, but I did find this: http://www.cnet.com.au/mp3players/mp3players/0,390 36128,40062302-2,00.htm Note that most people can't tell the difference between a couple of dB, so most of the higher rated ones are fairly evenly matched, and I wouldn't be suprised if the results for those would change if the test was carried out again by somebody else. The lower ones are particularly bad, though; you would probably hear the white noise during the quiet parts of your music :)

I've been responding to this trend by actively stripping out everything from my site that's just link-propagation. If people want that, they can subscribe to my del.iciou.us feed. In general I've been writing more and longer opinion, fact and commentary pieces recently, and avoiding stuff everyone else is talking about. (Who really gives a crap about Dick Cheney shooting some other Republican in the face?)

I also found that my content quality went up dramatically after I was kicked off of LiveJournal without notice, so in the end that turned out to be a good thing.

I did my own tests comparing MP3 and AAC. While it's true that iTunes-encoded AAC is better than iTunes-encoded AAC, LAME encoded MP3 is better than both.

Yes, LAME-encoded MP3 is better than iTunes Music Store AAC, at the same bitrates. http://www.xciv.org/~meta/audio-shootout/

They'll kill your account any time they dislike what you post. Paid member, lifetime member, whatever. No right of appeal, your accuser and judge remain anonymous, no compromise allowed.

I never used Dave's software, so it didn't matter to me at all when he suddenly increased the price from $0 to $900 a year. So no grudge at all.

If you really want to see my first publically posted criticism of Dave Winer and his software pricing, you'll have to go back to at least 1992. Nice try, though.

Perhaps you missed the bit about how Dave Winer did not in fact invent RSS--he co-opted Netscape's invention and pretended it was his own.

I guess he has sycophants, just like he has enemies. I just think he's a bit of an asshat.

I think Apple will do just fine, so long as they start addressing the gaps in their hardware lineup.

Personally, I have zero interest in buying a cheap beige box to run OS X. I'm running an old iBook G3, which I intend to keep until the new turd sandwich PowerBooks are out.

However, I want a Mac tablet. And since Steve Jobs is apparently religiously opposed to Apple selling tablet computers, I might have to buy from another company and run hacked OS X to get what I want.

As the reviewer said, precise synchronization is absolutely critical for forensic purposes. Can you conclusively demonstrate that Event A on machine Foo occurred before Event B on machine Bar?

If you think you might ever need to do that, better hope you're not using BSD syslog or that the intruders are kind enough not to do so during the wrong time window.

It seems like you're reading a different Perl 6 design commentary from me. To me, Apocalypse 12 (for example) is a cruft sandwich with a side-order of bloat, sprinkled with liberally with sigils. More thoughts at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2005/03/02#2005-03-02, but basically the way I see it is that Perl doesn't need more ideas, it needs fewer.

(Still writing Ruby, still liking it.)

Recovering from a recession that started during the Clinton administration.

The trouble is, when you post something like that which is easily and objectively verifiable to be an outright lie, you kinda detract from your position, you know?

(Yes, that's my web site. The citations to the official federal data are there. It's just easier to link to my own site than copy and paste, plus you get the pretty graphs.)

Recovering from a recession that started during the Clinton administration.

The trouble is, when you post something like that which is easily and objectively verifiable to be an outright lie, you kinda detract from your position, you know?

(Yes, that's my web site. The citations to the official federal data are there. It's just easier to link to my own site than copy and paste, plus you get the pretty graphs.)

"Clearly, there is no place in modern reporting for this kind of unregulated, unprotected access to readily available facts..."

BUUUUURN.
Actually, this reminds me of a story I read on LiveJournal (flame suit engaged.) Someone's account was deleted because they posted someone's home address without their permission. Funny thing was, the guy's address was readily available on his own web site. Nevertheless, the poster's account was terminated, and he was told that he had violated the TOS for LiveJournal. (He also wasn't refunded the fee for his paid account.)

Found it! Where's Meta?

I wrote a series of articles in which I mentioned this problem, caused by many approaches to spam filtering. http://www.xciv.org/~meta/Technology/2005-02-14-di smal.html

Basically, spam is an economic problem. Attempts at a technological solution usually involve filtering spam. Since a filter can never be 100% accurate, as filters are deployed the volume of spam increases. So basically, filters "work" as long as most people aren't using them; once they become widespread, the spam volume goes up and up until the network collapses under the bandwidth load (or we try a different approach).

As I conclude in my article, attempting to analyze logically from first principles, the only type of solution which will work is an economic one. Unfortunately, most people dismiss economic solutions out of hand. They're too attached to the fundamentally broken economic model of today's e-mail.

Ironically, the same people often express surprise that the RIAA can't see how broken their economic model is...

Just because you're not under attack on home ground and don't hear people running and screaming is no reason to get so content that you call the guy who kept the attacks from happening for 4 years evil.

On behalf of the fact-based community, I refer you to http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/30#2004-09-29

There is a genuine weakness to the open source world when it meets the mass market.

90% of computer users do not have the knowledge necessary to evaluate whether a piece of software is garbage or not. Because open source software can be forked and kept around by anyone, garbage often can't be removed. No matter how awful the code, someone will keep it alive.

This problem applies somewhat to the BSDs too; except that there aren't as many BSD distributions, so it's more likely that they'll all decide to remove a given piece of crap that should be removed. With Linux, there's practically no chance of getting something godawful removed from every distribution, because they all compete with each other for completeness. I mean, we still have sendmail, and RPM was even made part of the LSB. There are still IMAP servers that use mbox format, and one of them has such shitty code that it doesn't even check malloc return values for failure.

Actually, if we're talking about fundamental flaws in OSs, perhaps Theo could spend some of his time fixing BSD's syslog before he turns his attention to ranting about Linux.

Although ogg does sound better at lower bitrates, a quick google search reveals that the difference is minimal.

Also, the link you provided is either in another language or won't open properly in firefox. Either way, I see gibberish.

Oh dear, you're right. It's Yet Another CR System, but with some standard sender verification (a la SpamAssassin) glued on the front.

In other words, it's as utterly useless and counterproductive as any other challenge-response system. See http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2005/02/15/ for more discussion (from me) of why CR won't work.

Ten cars which sound like Robert Ludlum novels:

1. The Honda Accord
2. The Isuzu Axiom
3. The Buick Rendezvous
4. The Mazda Protegé
5. The Alfa Quadrifoglio
6. The Diahatsu Charade
7. The Lambourghini Murcielago
8. The Mitsubishi Endeavor
9. The Oldsmobile Intrigue
10. The Subaru Legacy

Is he worth hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Because that's how many his men have killed since he was in power.

And guess what? We killed ten of thousands ourselves "liberating" them, and now the civilian death rate is worse than it was under Saddam.

And they didn't just die from bombings, we're talking rape and torture. And no, not the kind of torture where people have sex in front of you and make you undress, but the kind where things are shoved up your ass that don't belong in your ass, where you are slowly killed, you know, real torture.

You mean like the Iraqi teenager who was seen in Abu Ghraib, lying on the floor with his anus bleeding while US troops discussed sodomizing him with metal objects? I guess that story didn't get reported on FOX News, huh?

So what makes LiveJournal the pile of crap that it is?

Policy? Anyone who tries to post anything informative or intelligent eventually pisses someone else off, and gets stomped by the "Abuse" team, who seem to think that troll rights are more important than the rights of paying users who contribute interesting content. I know several people who left LJ for other systems.

However, the current measures taken by the US government are going way too far, it's not worth reducing freedom for in any way whatsoever, the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is extremely small.

Although in fact, MORE people have been killed by terrorists under Bush than were killed by terrorists under Clinton, even once you deduct the number killed on 9/11. That's according to the government's own official figures.

See http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/30#2004-09-29 for graphic, data source, etc.

I did my own listening tests, thanks.

We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html. Have a nice day.

Started under Bush, continued under Bush. We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html

Ah, the old "recession started during the Clinton administration" lie being passed around again.

No, it didn't. We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html

Vorbis fork AoTuV scored the highest and ranks as the winner together with open source contender Musepack closely followed by Apple's AAC implementation and LAME MP3, which improved markably since last year thanks to further tunings of its VBR model done by Gabriel Bouvigne. Sony's ATRAC3 format ranks last after WMA on the third place.

• Depending on the bitrate, the best codec isn't the same.
• Open-Source codecs (Ogg Vorbis and MP3 Lame) did improve a lot over time. for exemple, compare conclusion from oldest studies : "Vorbis isn't mature enough", with latest : "Ogg+AoTuV is the best"
• WMA plain sucks, it's only advantage is that it comes pre-installed with Windows on the largest part of all PCs.

I guess you're not a developer, then, or else you'd probably have discovered that RedHat's "stable" releases are more broken than Debian's "testing".

Hahahaha. But whatever, I'm up for taking 5 minutes to do some simple troll killing.

1. Rpm isn't perfect, but it's far better than you imply. It almost never crashes, and fixing an rpm DB is very painless.

2. *shrug*, debian is at least as bad (I had to install xemacs from tarballs throught "potato" because the package was so broken). Plus you get joyful things like the modem defaulting to 1970s speed on debian. And with Red Hat I won't have to wait 5 years for an update ... plus this is Java, on the Free beer product. So what, I don't care and I'm pretty sure jar will just work in RHEL 3.

3. Yes, I have. And I much prefer rpm/yum over dpkg/apt.

4. Err, yeh. Whatever. Pass the crack pipe etc.

5. Please learn to read, "I would argue that ... for that classic consumer purchaser, it is my view that (Linux) technology needs to mature a little bit more." is not close to what you implied.

6. I assume you are running in an en_US locale so grep is doing what you told it to. How terrible for you.

7. By "X" I presume you mean some of the libraries, my how terrible this bug must be for you at todays prices this has to be at least 1 of disk space.

8. You can break your machines however you wish, I fail to see how that's Red Hat's fault though. All my perl stuff is in RPM format, and life is good.

9. This is complete crack, it's at least as easy as upgrading debian ... the big difference being you need to reboot on Red Hat, which is a nice propert of debian ... but hardly worth the 5 year waiting period.

10. Oh woe is you, another 1 of disk space on backwards compatability.

Then you have to realise that you don't get guaranteed security updates with testing, and indeed some well known remotely available packages have gone months before the security errata rolls into testing.

Debian stable isn't bad, if you don't mind being 3-5 years behind the curve, and indeed in some cases I don't but it's sure as hell not my first choice.

But, hey, you do what you want. If you don't screw it up too bad, well done ... and when^Wif you don't, I can come in and offer your company a solution.

I guess you're not a developer, then, or else you'd probably have discovered that RedHat's "stable" releases are more broken than Debian's "testing".

Oh, and good luck compiling from source on your RedHat box. Say hello to RPM dependency hell!

Apple has a tendency to bloat the features of their products. AAC is nowhere near as good as MP3 is, but they come out with ambitious, if not overly deceptive messages like "rivals CD quality", when it is nowhere near MP3, and MP3 being nowhere near CD quality.