While that sounds right in principle, do you think the kids are any better off with someone that purchased them with money, as if they were goods to be owned, or services to be rendered (both of which are scary thoughts).
Hostility much? I recall reading about it. I can't locate it right now, and maybe it no longer exists, but I did read it on the Rockbox wiki and/or release notes. That doesn't mean it's true, but that's where our information came from, and we considered it to be reliable. All I know is that starting from Rockbox version x.y, my battery life jumped up by an order of magnitude when decoding MP3. At the time I was under the impression that one of the "what's new" features was making use of the iPod 5g's built-in MP3 decoder.
Regardless, it doesn't really matter -- my point still stands. FLAC is easier to decode than MP3.
This is a bold claim, considering that the wiki dates back 5 or 6 years. Did you personally monitor every page for this particular phrase, just in case this discussion came up? I recall reading about it. I can't locate it right now, and maybe it no longer exists, but I did read it on the Rockbox wiki and/or release notes. That doesn't mean it's true, but that's where our information came from, and we considered it to be reliable.
Vorbis is a totally different beast, because it, like MP3, is lossily encoded with a complex algorithm. FLAC was designed from the outside to be asymmetrically resource intensive -- that is, it takes a lot of CPU resources to encode a file, but barely any resources to decode it. Decoding FLAC amounts to very little more than decoding a waveform, which is the rawest form of digital audio.
However yes, FLACs are inherently bigger, so there will be more disk hits, but I don't remember them being all that bad. Besides, most of my comparison MP3s were probably up around 256+ kbps, with FLACs being ~750 kbps, there's only a factor of three in bitrate, and thus potential disk hits.
I have a 5th-gen iPod Video, with a spinning hard drive. I installed Rockbox on it so that I wouldn't have to encode my FLACs. In the beginning, battery life was horrible, until they figured out how to use the on-board hardware MP3 decoder. Then battery life was pretty comparable between running Rockbox or the stock firmware. FLAC files, however, have always been better on battery life than either of the other two. The efficiency gains in the CPU must have outweighed the added hard drive access.
You're right, I can't tell the difference between a CD-ripped FLAC and a high-quality MP3/Vorbis/AAC at high bit-rate encoded from the same source. However, why would I bother with losing any information at all? If I keep the FLACs and CUE sheet, I have an exact duplicate of the original disc, for maybe twice the storage of a high-quality lossy file. I also use fewer resources decoding that audio. I also have the benefit of Vorbis-style comments.
Hard drives are available at 3TB for wouldn't choose a lossless format these days. If your only reason is portable players that don't support it, then A) get a player that does, or B) encode on the fly. Incidentally, the more people purchase players that play FLAC, the more players will play it by default.
This. Exactly this. My entire library is ReplayGained, and that makes listening to it much easier on me, but when I choose to listen to my music on a high-quality sound system and turn it up, its because I want to get every detail out of the original composition that I can.
Incidentally, this is one of the main reasons die-hards still think vinyl sounds better -- its not that you have better audio density (you don't; but that's another discussion), its that often when albums are mastered for vinyl, the dynamic range compression is not applied. As a result, vinyls often come out with a more complete copy of the original than the digital copies (CDs, downloads, etc.).
And not just their own cars, the Model S, either. Tesla's business plan from the beginning was to develop the drive train technology and sell it to big-brand manufacturers. The Roadster -- i.e. the development of this technology -- was the first step. We've now seen the second step with the all-electric RAV4 from Toyota, which uses a Tesla drive train.
Tesla is far from folding, my friend.
Aikon-
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Gah, thank you for shattering my carefully constructed bubble of faith in humanity for the day =/
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Now for the anecdote part relating how a "one-size-fits-all" education scheme doesn't work in practice:
In elementary school, my brother's teacher would give the class spelling quizzes. He scored 100% on the first quiz. The second quiz rolled around and he scored 100% again. He was distraught because many of his colleagues had gotten stickers on their returned quizzes as rewards, and yet he had gotten nothing. The teacher's explanation was that the rewards were for improvement on the quizzes -- if you did better than last time, you got a sticker.
His response was to intentionally fail the subsequent quiz, and then slowly build up his score to 100%, and then restart the process. The teacher was concerned about his inconsistent spelling skills and thought he might have problems with distraction; my parents understood what had happened immediately.
When you reduce education to the lowest common denominator, you remove any chance for the gifted, the skilled, the interested, and the excited students to excel at their studies.
Aikon-
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
One of the worst things you can do to a student that truly understands the material is to drag them down and force them to do what they consider menial tasks. It is a fine line, because I agree that it is important that students learn how to work through more complicated problems. However, when someone has already demonstrated their ability and is effectively doing homework and writing tests simply to "jump through the hoops", you can seriously cripple their interest in pursuing the field entirely and drive them away.
I know that it is a difficult task in today's school system, but the correct approach is to challenge the student and engage them mentally.
I believe that naming system was used to fill in spots that either haven't been discovered/created, or that have been discovered but not verified/accepted. Once the corresponding element gets "voted onto the island", they give it an official name.
I would argue that in your wall example, it's not that humans work well in base-12, it's that when estimating fractions, we deal better with lower denominators. 1/2 is easier than 1/3, which is easier than 1/4, etc. Look at the same wall and point out 1/12 of the way up from the bottom, if you please. For me, that's harder than going 60% up the wall.
Furthermore, most of the fractions leading up to 12 are represented in decimal easily -- 1/2 (0.5), 1/3 (0.3,), 1/4 (0.25), 1/5 (0.2).
My car has a menu option for metric vs imperial; the speedometer just has numbers, and then a little backlit display shows whether the units are km/h or mph. All the other sensors and readouts are the same. Actually, when I drove through Niagara Falls and Buffalo last summer, I did exactly this, so that I didn't have to worry whether I was speeding too much, I could just look at my speedometer in meters.
I live in Canada, and I had never been exposed to A4 paper so I had no idea what the big deal was. Then in undergrad, one of my friends from Dubai had his dad bring boxes of A4 paper for him when he visited to use in class -- holy crap, what a difference. Everything about A4 is superior to letter, except that you can't get it in Canada! At least for anything remotely resembling a reasonable price =/
A4 may have a strange number of mm per side, but the benefits of that paper size of letter are pronounced. Just try it.
Treating cancer is also a tried, tested and true method of saving *some* people. Why not develope a cure and save them all?
If there was a potential avenue for a cure, but there were a lot of issues left with it that you didn't know how to solve, and the cost of researching it was prohibitively expensive, would you stop all current cancer treatment to pay for it and let all of those people die in the pursuit of this potential payout sometime in the future?
People are working on the technologies that will enable mega launch systems, like room-temperature superconductors and carbon nanotubes, but we're just not at the point where it's a cost-effective or even manageable project. Someday we'll get there and we'll build it, but in the meantime, we're going to continue to use and advance the methods available to us today.
Why not develop a more efficient gateway to space and save the $424 million next time?
This money is not lost; a significant portion of that cost is the NRE that went into designing the thing in the first place. Presumably they have enough spare components (as any good aerospace corporation should) to build a duplicate spacecraft for a mere fraction of that. The cost of materials and workmanship that goes into a spacecraft like that is a pretty tiny portion of the overall system cost.
Don't get me wrong, I would love easy access to space, but there are enormous up-front costs to constructing a mega launch service, like a launch loop or an elevator, not to mention significant technical risks, very few of which are in the process of being retired.
Rockets are a tried, tested, and true method of getting to space. They have put up many times the value of spacecraft as they have lost, not to mention a growing number of human payloads. They are also getting cheaper, with public ventures like SpaceX. I think it's going to be a good long while before you see someone investing heavily in alternative launch methods.
Yes, but more likely would by the emergency Soyuz capsule currently docked there, and then a series of Soyuz launches until everyone is down that is supposed to be. Much cheaper than scrapping STS-134.
The difference is that this time, they are planning on performing a thorough inspection on-orbit instead of relying on that expectation. Furthermore, I am sure that the limits of what is tolerable are much tighter now than they were then.
Slashdot Mirror
While that sounds right in principle, do you think the kids are any better off with someone that purchased them with money, as if they were goods to be owned, or services to be rendered (both of which are scary thoughts).
Aikon-
Personal experience would seem to disagree with you. I would be happy to look at any data you have, but until then I will rely on my own experiments.
Hostility much? I recall reading about it. I can't locate it right now, and maybe it no longer exists, but I did read it on the Rockbox wiki and/or release notes. That doesn't mean it's true, but that's where our information came from, and we considered it to be reliable. All I know is that starting from Rockbox version x.y, my battery life jumped up by an order of magnitude when decoding MP3. At the time I was under the impression that one of the "what's new" features was making use of the iPod 5g's built-in MP3 decoder.
Regardless, it doesn't really matter -- my point still stands. FLAC is easier to decode than MP3.
Aikon-
This is a bold claim, considering that the wiki dates back 5 or 6 years. Did you personally monitor every page for this particular phrase, just in case this discussion came up? I recall reading about it. I can't locate it right now, and maybe it no longer exists, but I did read it on the Rockbox wiki and/or release notes. That doesn't mean it's true, but that's where our information came from, and we considered it to be reliable.
Aikon-
Vorbis is a totally different beast, because it, like MP3, is lossily encoded with a complex algorithm. FLAC was designed from the outside to be asymmetrically resource intensive -- that is, it takes a lot of CPU resources to encode a file, but barely any resources to decode it. Decoding FLAC amounts to very little more than decoding a waveform, which is the rawest form of digital audio.
However yes, FLACs are inherently bigger, so there will be more disk hits, but I don't remember them being all that bad. Besides, most of my comparison MP3s were probably up around 256+ kbps, with FLACs being ~750 kbps, there's only a factor of three in bitrate, and thus potential disk hits.
Aikon-
I have a 5th-gen iPod Video, with a spinning hard drive. I installed Rockbox on it so that I wouldn't have to encode my FLACs. In the beginning, battery life was horrible, until they figured out how to use the on-board hardware MP3 decoder. Then battery life was pretty comparable between running Rockbox or the stock firmware. FLAC files, however, have always been better on battery life than either of the other two. The efficiency gains in the CPU must have outweighed the added hard drive access.
Aikon-
You're right, I can't tell the difference between a CD-ripped FLAC and a high-quality MP3/Vorbis/AAC at high bit-rate encoded from the same source. However, why would I bother with losing any information at all? If I keep the FLACs and CUE sheet, I have an exact duplicate of the original disc, for maybe twice the storage of a high-quality lossy file. I also use fewer resources decoding that audio. I also have the benefit of Vorbis-style comments.
Hard drives are available at 3TB for wouldn't choose a lossless format these days. If your only reason is portable players that don't support it, then A) get a player that does, or B) encode on the fly. Incidentally, the more people purchase players that play FLAC, the more players will play it by default.
Aikon-
I want the last 30s of my life back.. what a waste of computrons.
This. Exactly this. My entire library is ReplayGained, and that makes listening to it much easier on me, but when I choose to listen to my music on a high-quality sound system and turn it up, its because I want to get every detail out of the original composition that I can.
Incidentally, this is one of the main reasons die-hards still think vinyl sounds better -- its not that you have better audio density (you don't; but that's another discussion), its that often when albums are mastered for vinyl, the dynamic range compression is not applied. As a result, vinyls often come out with a more complete copy of the original than the digital copies (CDs, downloads, etc.).
Aikon-
The higher-resolution Google maps imagery is actually taken by aircraft, so linking to it there doesn't imply anything about visibility from space.
And not just their own cars, the Model S, either. Tesla's business plan from the beginning was to develop the drive train technology and sell it to big-brand manufacturers. The Roadster -- i.e. the development of this technology -- was the first step. We've now seen the second step with the all-electric RAV4 from Toyota, which uses a Tesla drive train.
Tesla is far from folding, my friend.
Aikon-
Gah, thank you for shattering my carefully constructed bubble of faith in humanity for the day =/
Now for the anecdote part relating how a "one-size-fits-all" education scheme doesn't work in practice:
In elementary school, my brother's teacher would give the class spelling quizzes. He scored 100% on the first quiz. The second quiz rolled around and he scored 100% again. He was distraught because many of his colleagues had gotten stickers on their returned quizzes as rewards, and yet he had gotten nothing. The teacher's explanation was that the rewards were for improvement on the quizzes -- if you did better than last time, you got a sticker.
His response was to intentionally fail the subsequent quiz, and then slowly build up his score to 100%, and then restart the process. The teacher was concerned about his inconsistent spelling skills and thought he might have problems with distraction; my parents understood what had happened immediately.
When you reduce education to the lowest common denominator, you remove any chance for the gifted, the skilled, the interested, and the excited students to excel at their studies.
Aikon-
One of the worst things you can do to a student that truly understands the material is to drag them down and force them to do what they consider menial tasks. It is a fine line, because I agree that it is important that students learn how to work through more complicated problems. However, when someone has already demonstrated their ability and is effectively doing homework and writing tests simply to "jump through the hoops", you can seriously cripple their interest in pursuing the field entirely and drive them away.
I know that it is a difficult task in today's school system, but the correct approach is to challenge the student and engage them mentally.
Aikon-
I believe that naming system was used to fill in spots that either haven't been discovered/created, or that have been discovered but not verified/accepted. Once the corresponding element gets "voted onto the island", they give it an official name.
Aikon-
For what would they sue? There are already a number of real vessels (water, air, and space) that share that name.
Real scientists use Rankine!
I would argue that in your wall example, it's not that humans work well in base-12, it's that when estimating fractions, we deal better with lower denominators. 1/2 is easier than 1/3, which is easier than 1/4, etc. Look at the same wall and point out 1/12 of the way up from the bottom, if you please. For me, that's harder than going 60% up the wall.
Furthermore, most of the fractions leading up to 12 are represented in decimal easily -- 1/2 (0.5), 1/3 (0.3,), 1/4 (0.25), 1/5 (0.2).
Aikon-
My car has a menu option for metric vs imperial; the speedometer just has numbers, and then a little backlit display shows whether the units are km/h or mph. All the other sensors and readouts are the same. Actually, when I drove through Niagara Falls and Buffalo last summer, I did exactly this, so that I didn't have to worry whether I was speeding too much, I could just look at my speedometer in meters.
Aikon-
I live in Canada, and I had never been exposed to A4 paper so I had no idea what the big deal was. Then in undergrad, one of my friends from Dubai had his dad bring boxes of A4 paper for him when he visited to use in class -- holy crap, what a difference. Everything about A4 is superior to letter, except that you can't get it in Canada! At least for anything remotely resembling a reasonable price =/
A4 may have a strange number of mm per side, but the benefits of that paper size of letter are pronounced. Just try it.
Aikon-
Actually, I buy milk in 4L bags.
Aikon-
Treating cancer is also a tried, tested and true method of saving *some* people. Why not develope a cure and save them all?
If there was a potential avenue for a cure, but there were a lot of issues left with it that you didn't know how to solve, and the cost of researching it was prohibitively expensive, would you stop all current cancer treatment to pay for it and let all of those people die in the pursuit of this potential payout sometime in the future?
People are working on the technologies that will enable mega launch systems, like room-temperature superconductors and carbon nanotubes, but we're just not at the point where it's a cost-effective or even manageable project. Someday we'll get there and we'll build it, but in the meantime, we're going to continue to use and advance the methods available to us today.
Why not develop a more efficient gateway to space and save the $424 million next time?
This money is not lost; a significant portion of that cost is the NRE that went into designing the thing in the first place. Presumably they have enough spare components (as any good aerospace corporation should) to build a duplicate spacecraft for a mere fraction of that. The cost of materials and workmanship that goes into a spacecraft like that is a pretty tiny portion of the overall system cost.
Nope.
Don't get me wrong, I would love easy access to space, but there are enormous up-front costs to constructing a mega launch service, like a launch loop or an elevator, not to mention significant technical risks, very few of which are in the process of being retired.
Rockets are a tried, tested, and true method of getting to space. They have put up many times the value of spacecraft as they have lost, not to mention a growing number of human payloads. They are also getting cheaper, with public ventures like SpaceX. I think it's going to be a good long while before you see someone investing heavily in alternative launch methods.
Aikon-
Yes, but more likely would by the emergency Soyuz capsule currently docked there, and then a series of Soyuz launches until everyone is down that is supposed to be. Much cheaper than scrapping STS-134.
Aikon-
The difference is that this time, they are planning on performing a thorough inspection on-orbit instead of relying on that expectation. Furthermore, I am sure that the limits of what is tolerable are much tighter now than they were then.
Aikon-