(although not as low as 46kbps) and reached the same conclusion. Most people vastly overestimate their ability to distinguish tracks encoded at different bitrates. And I've seen study after study that backs this up. This includes self-professed audiophiles, the original authors of particular tracks of music, and so forth.
This is true. Mostly.
On most material, you cannot hear the difference; however, every once in a while (though rarely), there will be a song which not even a 320 kbps mp3 can encode properly[1], and there'll be distortion on cymbals or applause or a snare drum or a weird synth. If you don't know how the original is supposed to sound, you won't notice anything strange, but if you do and if you can recognize that "mp3 sizzle", which is far easier for those of us who have been dealing with mp3s ever since the days of early FhG and Xing at 112/128 kbps, the track or even the album is ruined entirely. And I do mean entirely. There's no point in listening to it anymore because you know it's flawed and you'll just be spending time trying to listen to the sound waves instead of music.
For example, today I listened to a straight FLAC encode of an Armin van Buuren live set / album from Ibiza 2008 (or something) and several tracks were totally messed up - the "sizzle" was perfectly clear, as AvB either used mp3s directly, or burned mp3s to CDs.
[1] I remember ripping a Cranberries album in the late 90s, when lossless container formats didn't exist and the best encoder was the original Fraunhofer, which couldn't deal with Dolores and her band at all, even with 256 kbps. The situation has since improved greatly (though it's not anywhere near perfect), but we have the opposite circumstances: those were the days of 1-2 GB hard drives and.wav lossless was just out of the question, whereas today we have 1-2 TB drives and 300-500 MB for a FLAC is a drop in the storage ocean. I don't care about mp3s at all anymore. I buy a CD, I rip it and encode to FLAC - what the hell else am I going to spend disk space on?
There's a 28" Philips on that site listed with 87W, a 32" with 109W, and another 32" with 124W. My CRT shouldn't be using more than 100W, but I've given it extra room and said it used 110-120W.
I've never seen better CRT TVs than the latest Philips models with Pixel Plus, by the way.
You have a very good point there. Still, if we go down to a 32" LCD, the most efficient one - according to that UK site - is at 90W. The LCD in tenth place is already at 110W, which is likely to be around the power consumption of my CRT.
But my point still stands: CRTs really weren't such power hogs. Yes, flat-screen TVs are more power-efficient for a given screen surface, but the difference isn't THAT huge and they tend to use more power, anyway, because of larger screen sizes.
The real problem are huge LCDs and plasmas, which can easily go up to 500W.
And if someone has the money to pay for the electricity consumed by his/her CRT TV, then let them.
I have a 28" Philips CRT TV. I can't find its papers and I cannot be bothered to look on its back for possible power consumption, but according to this page, it shouldn't be using more than 110-120W. There weren't many larger CRTs made due to their sheer weight.
Now play around on that site and check out the power consumption of a 37" LCD, which has roughly the same height as my CRT, but is wide-screen. Whoops, the most efficient one is 123W.
The numbers they have on that site probably aren't completely accurate, but CRTs really weren't the power hogs people make them to be. Today's LCD and plasma screens - especially since they come in larger sizes - use a LOT more power than the biggest CRTs in the old days.
All of this is nice. When are you going to allow meta-moderation again? It doesn't work for me. At all. Probably because I'm not using the fancy dynamic display that destroys CPUs and takes minutes to accomplish anything.
I recently bought a monitor for exactly double its price in the USA.
For commodity hardware, a rule of 1.5x the US price is quite accurate, but for those a little bit more rare, it goes all the way up to 2.5x. If the Kindle becomes available here (which I strongly doubt), I would fully expect a price of $550-600.
Yes. On that site. Now go to Russia and neighbouring countries and you'll see Opera with above 40% browser marketshare, IE second, Firefox third. There were no fanboys there to create crop circles and donate money to buy newspaper ads.
IMDB link I gave: top of the page says "Threads (1984) (TV) More at IMDbPro", and "Threads" is written in a 32px bold font as contents of an h1 element:)
I don't think there's a legal way to obtain the movie, so you know where to look for it... If you really think you want to. It's not something you can unsee.
Re:If you liked Elite...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I went and downloaded it.
First it tried to install into c:\oolite, completely disrespecting the past fifteen years of application development for Windows. I have no idea where it's going to save files, but I'm willing to bet it's not nowhere near my profile folder.
After it got installed, it opened a readme file that said how to edit.GNUstepDefaults (what?) and somewhere near the end of the file - which I can't find anymore - it said that exiting the game is done through Shift+Escape (huh?), plus a whole bunch of stuff I forgot.
When first running the game, it asked me if I wanted to load the previous commander, despite never running the game before.
Then I somehow got into the game and started pressing various keys, starting with Escape, Enter and Space, which got me nowhere. Then I pressed F1 (as I decided to go one by one) and suddenly I was in space. Randomly pressing all other keys also managed to get me nowhere.
I admitted defeat and went to read the reference sheet. Again, that got me nowhere, despite somehow going to a different solar system, until I googled for "oolite tutorial", which helped me find out that I should press the "j" key in order to get to the planet a lot faster. Sadly, that didn't work, and I have no idea why... So it got me nowhere for the third time.
It might be a good Elite clone and full of goodness, but it's anything but intuitive and playable. I see there are all kinds of expansion packs available; all that time spent and nobody ever thought of adding such a simple thing as a god damn menu when the Escape key is pressed, or incorporating a small tutorial, or at least making the F1 key display *help* instead of throwing you out into space at the start of the game?!
Bye, uninstalled. I'll check out Vega Strike next week.
Not that I'm surprised -- women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map. If I changed a street sign outside my apartment, my male friends probably wouldn't be able to find the place anymore. My female friends, on the other hand, would show up and likely never notice the sign was changed.
In my experience, and pretty much the experience of the vast majority of men on this planet, it's the exact opposite, so I think you are a bit mistaken with your beliefs in your friends.
If you want your obligatory quip about evolution, here you go: men have evolved from hunters and they had to know their landscape pretty damn fucking well in order to catch that $animal, whereas women have evolved from collectors of berries who were pretty much forbidden to venture more than a minute's worth of walking away from the cave.
Agreed on the extended functionality - I hate the 'Awesome Bar', but no other browser offers keyword searches or the ability to easily add search engines to the search box (save for IE which I dont want to use).
Start Opera. Go to a website not included by default in its search options. Right click on the search field. Choose "Create Search".
Give me something to replace 'wp rabbits' and I will dump Firefox in an instant for Chrome or Safari.
C: "STFU both of you wankers, tabs need to be on the left side!"... sigh.
It's all a matter of personal preference. For as long as Firefox offers the option to rearrange things as you'd like them to be, everything will be fine. (Note that I have no idea if Firefox allows that. I'm sure it does, or an extension is available for it. End result - it's possible.)
*My* personal preference would probably make most of you sick: my tabs are actually on the _bottom of the browser window_. From top to bottom, it's app menu, navigation + address bar, personal bar, web page itself, tabs, status bar. And I like it that way. Been using that arrangement for about seven years now.
Don't make a big deal out of nothing. Whatever is chosen by default, you will surely have the ability to rearrange it as you see fit.
Will SC3 finally introduce some of the modern (read: 21st century) RTS concepts, such as directional weapons, cover, suppression, flanking, and the ability to be considered a good player even if you can't do 250 CPM?
Thanks for telling me that my system has been unstable for the past two and a half years. Also, thank you for telling me that my two fixed-speed 800rpm fans in the entire case are running "more" now. My PSU, however, is not very happy about learning that it has to keep the motherboard at bay because a CPU using roughly 35W at full load is such a beast, so I can't thank you for that:(
It doesn't take a lot of thinking to see that the Q9550 power draw is bunk. Their fully loaded system power for the machine was 208 Watts. Their Idle load was 120 Watts. Either the Q9550 processor supplies 4 extra Watts to the motherboard at idle or something fishy is going on there.
Nothing fishy going on. Power supplies and VRMs on motherboard have efficiencies below 100%.
If the PSU has 70% efficiency at 70W load, which isn't unheard of, it will draw 70/0.7 = 100W from the wall. If it has 80% efficiency at 180W load, it will draw 225W from the wall. The difference measured from the wall in the two scenarios is thus 225-100=125W, while the component load increased by 180-70=110W in this example, for a "mysterious" difference of 15W.
Also, don't forget that you can never only stress the CPU; the motherboard takes its power, too. Higher temperature also increases power consumption.
Nothing is linear.
There's also something horribly wrong with the 147 Watt measurement for the AMD processor. That's 7 Watts over it's absolute maximum design rating which would put it over and above what the Motherboard manufacturer's are supposed to design for.
Motherboard manufacturers *always* design for higher loads because of overclockers and future CPUs. It is also quite possible that other AMD motherboards have more efficient VRMs, so an X4 965 using 147W on that motherboard could use 120W on another.
In short, X-Bit has power numbers that are well under the real Q9550 numbers and well over the real X4 965 numbers which would make them seem to be fairly untrustworthy in my opinion.
Not at all. They are the only ones to have tested the true CPU power consumption - granted, before the VRMs kick in, as there's no other way of doing it. Other sites only measured total system consumption from the wall, which is far more inaccurate.
Clearer now?
Oh, I forgot to mention - Intel has a Q9550S, which is a 65W TDP version of the Q9550. Do you think it uses 30W less than the regular Q9550?
Slashdot Mirror
(although not as low as 46kbps) and reached the same conclusion. Most people vastly overestimate their ability to distinguish tracks encoded at different bitrates. And I've seen study after study that backs this up. This includes self-professed audiophiles, the original authors of particular tracks of music, and so forth.
This is true. Mostly.
On most material, you cannot hear the difference; however, every once in a while (though rarely), there will be a song which not even a 320 kbps mp3 can encode properly[1], and there'll be distortion on cymbals or applause or a snare drum or a weird synth. If you don't know how the original is supposed to sound, you won't notice anything strange, but if you do and if you can recognize that "mp3 sizzle", which is far easier for those of us who have been dealing with mp3s ever since the days of early FhG and Xing at 112/128 kbps, the track or even the album is ruined entirely. And I do mean entirely. There's no point in listening to it anymore because you know it's flawed and you'll just be spending time trying to listen to the sound waves instead of music.
For example, today I listened to a straight FLAC encode of an Armin van Buuren live set / album from Ibiza 2008 (or something) and several tracks were totally messed up - the "sizzle" was perfectly clear, as AvB either used mp3s directly, or burned mp3s to CDs.
[1] I remember ripping a Cranberries album in the late 90s, when lossless container formats didn't exist and the best encoder was the original Fraunhofer, which couldn't deal with Dolores and her band at all, even with 256 kbps. The situation has since improved greatly (though it's not anywhere near perfect), but we have the opposite circumstances: those were the days of 1-2 GB hard drives and .wav lossless was just out of the question, whereas today we have 1-2 TB drives and 300-500 MB for a FLAC is a drop in the storage ocean. I don't care about mp3s at all anymore. I buy a CD, I rip it and encode to FLAC - what the hell else am I going to spend disk space on?
There's a 28" Philips on that site listed with 87W, a 32" with 109W, and another 32" with 124W. My CRT shouldn't be using more than 100W, but I've given it extra room and said it used 110-120W.
I've never seen better CRT TVs than the latest Philips models with Pixel Plus, by the way.
You have a very good point there. Still, if we go down to a 32" LCD, the most efficient one - according to that UK site - is at 90W. The LCD in tenth place is already at 110W, which is likely to be around the power consumption of my CRT.
But my point still stands: CRTs really weren't such power hogs. Yes, flat-screen TVs are more power-efficient for a given screen surface, but the difference isn't THAT huge and they tend to use more power, anyway, because of larger screen sizes.
The real problem are huge LCDs and plasmas, which can easily go up to 500W.
And if someone has the money to pay for the electricity consumed by his/her CRT TV, then let them.
I have a 28" Philips CRT TV. I can't find its papers and I cannot be bothered to look on its back for possible power consumption, but according to this page, it shouldn't be using more than 110-120W. There weren't many larger CRTs made due to their sheer weight.
Now play around on that site and check out the power consumption of a 37" LCD, which has roughly the same height as my CRT, but is wide-screen. Whoops, the most efficient one is 123W.
The numbers they have on that site probably aren't completely accurate, but CRTs really weren't the power hogs people make them to be. Today's LCD and plasma screens - especially since they come in larger sizes - use a LOT more power than the biggest CRTs in the old days.
Thanks for modding me -3 down and modding these up. Much appreciated!
All of this is nice. When are you going to allow meta-moderation again? It doesn't work for me. At all. Probably because I'm not using the fancy dynamic display that destroys CPUs and takes minutes to accomplish anything.
I'd like to meta-mod, seriously. So how about it?
What made you think I was from the UK? ;) If only I was - then the Kindle with my predicted price wouldn't cost 50% of my monthly salary...
I recently bought a monitor for exactly double its price in the USA.
For commodity hardware, a rule of 1.5x the US price is quite accurate, but for those a little bit more rare, it goes all the way up to 2.5x. If the Kindle becomes available here (which I strongly doubt), I would fully expect a price of $550-600.
P.S. The VAT on books here is 0%.
http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2009/03/16/a-look-at-desktop-market-share-cis-edition
Yes. On that site. Now go to Russia and neighbouring countries and you'll see Opera with above 40% browser marketshare, IE second, Firefox third. There were no fanboys there to create crop circles and donate money to buy newspaper ads.
From +4 insightful to 0 offtopic. Apologies to Firefox fanboys, I know that truth hurts.
Great, that happened *ten* years ago. What has happened since? They've been chasing the Fox for past *five* years.
And Firefox has been chasing Opera for the past five years and still isn't anywhere near it. What's your point?
I didn't name it?
Slashdot post subject: "Threads"
IMDB link I gave: top of the page says "Threads (1984) (TV) More at IMDbPro", and "Threads" is written in a 32px bold font as contents of an h1 element :)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
It can still end like this...
I don't think there's a legal way to obtain the movie, so you know where to look for it... If you really think you want to. It's not something you can unsee.
I went and downloaded it.
First it tried to install into c:\oolite, completely disrespecting the past fifteen years of application development for Windows. I have no idea where it's going to save files, but I'm willing to bet it's not nowhere near my profile folder.
After it got installed, it opened a readme file that said how to edit .GNUstepDefaults (what?) and somewhere near the end of the file - which I can't find anymore - it said that exiting the game is done through Shift+Escape (huh?), plus a whole bunch of stuff I forgot.
When first running the game, it asked me if I wanted to load the previous commander, despite never running the game before.
Then I somehow got into the game and started pressing various keys, starting with Escape, Enter and Space, which got me nowhere. Then I pressed F1 (as I decided to go one by one) and suddenly I was in space. Randomly pressing all other keys also managed to get me nowhere.
I admitted defeat and went to read the reference sheet. Again, that got me nowhere, despite somehow going to a different solar system, until I googled for "oolite tutorial", which helped me find out that I should press the "j" key in order to get to the planet a lot faster. Sadly, that didn't work, and I have no idea why... So it got me nowhere for the third time.
It might be a good Elite clone and full of goodness, but it's anything but intuitive and playable. I see there are all kinds of expansion packs available; all that time spent and nobody ever thought of adding such a simple thing as a god damn menu when the Escape key is pressed, or incorporating a small tutorial, or at least making the F1 key display *help* instead of throwing you out into space at the start of the game?!
Bye, uninstalled. I'll check out Vega Strike next week.
Not that I'm surprised -- women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map. If I changed a street sign outside my apartment, my male friends probably wouldn't be able to find the place anymore. My female friends, on the other hand, would show up and likely never notice the sign was changed.
In my experience, and pretty much the experience of the vast majority of men on this planet, it's the exact opposite, so I think you are a bit mistaken with your beliefs in your friends.
If you want your obligatory quip about evolution, here you go: men have evolved from hunters and they had to know their landscape pretty damn fucking well in order to catch that $animal, whereas women have evolved from collectors of berries who were pretty much forbidden to venture more than a minute's worth of walking away from the cave.
You seem to be a very confused young lady.
You can also ask for this: MOD PARENT DOWN!
*Why* IE 8 gets better battery life than Safari?
Here's what they did:
"For testing, we load the three sites into tabs on our test web browser, wait 60 seconds, and then reload all three tabs."
And they've only done the test once, without making sure that *all* browsers get the *same* HTML and JS with the *same* CPU-hungry Flash ads.
Make your own conclusion.
Agreed on the extended functionality - I hate the 'Awesome Bar', but no other browser offers keyword searches or the ability to easily add search engines to the search box (save for IE which I dont want to use).
Start Opera. Go to a website not included by default in its search options. Right click on the search field. Choose "Create Search".
Give me something to replace 'wp rabbits' and I will dump Firefox in an instant for Chrome or Safari.
Built into Opera before Firefox had it.
I have never had Flash notify me that it needs an update. Ever. The only time I've seen the notification was on a single computer at the office.
A few days ago I was given this link http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager05.html - I think it was somewhere on Slashdot, either in the article, or in the comments. Sure enough, I went there, and Flash was set to never notify me of updates.
Worth checking out.
A: "Tabs on top!"
B: "No, tabs on bottom!"
A: "STFU!!!"
B: "No, you STFU n00b!!!!!!"
C: "STFU both of you wankers, tabs need to be on the left side!" ... sigh.
It's all a matter of personal preference. For as long as Firefox offers the option to rearrange things as you'd like them to be, everything will be fine. (Note that I have no idea if Firefox allows that. I'm sure it does, or an extension is available for it. End result - it's possible.)
*My* personal preference would probably make most of you sick: my tabs are actually on the _bottom of the browser window_. From top to bottom, it's app menu, navigation + address bar, personal bar, web page itself, tabs, status bar. And I like it that way. Been using that arrangement for about seven years now.
Don't make a big deal out of nothing. Whatever is chosen by default, you will surely have the ability to rearrange it as you see fit.
I get the same thing and I'm even unable to meta-moderate because of the same issue.
Slashdot, getting more broken every day.
Will SC3 finally introduce some of the modern (read: 21st century) RTS concepts, such as directional weapons, cover, suppression, flanking, and the ability to be considered a good player even if you can't do 250 CPM?
Thanks for telling me that my system has been unstable for the past two and a half years. Also, thank you for telling me that my two fixed-speed 800rpm fans in the entire case are running "more" now. My PSU, however, is not very happy about learning that it has to keep the motherboard at bay because a CPU using roughly 35W at full load is such a beast, so I can't thank you for that :(
It doesn't take a lot of thinking to see that the Q9550 power draw is bunk. Their fully loaded system power for the machine was 208 Watts. Their Idle load was 120 Watts. Either the Q9550 processor supplies 4 extra Watts to the motherboard at idle or something fishy is going on there.
Nothing fishy going on. Power supplies and VRMs on motherboard have efficiencies below 100%.
If the PSU has 70% efficiency at 70W load, which isn't unheard of, it will draw 70/0.7 = 100W from the wall. If it has 80% efficiency at 180W load, it will draw 225W from the wall. The difference measured from the wall in the two scenarios is thus 225-100=125W, while the component load increased by 180-70=110W in this example, for a "mysterious" difference of 15W.
Also, don't forget that you can never only stress the CPU; the motherboard takes its power, too. Higher temperature also increases power consumption.
Nothing is linear.
There's also something horribly wrong with the 147 Watt measurement for the AMD processor. That's 7 Watts over it's absolute maximum design rating which would put it over and above what the Motherboard manufacturer's are supposed to design for.
Motherboard manufacturers *always* design for higher loads because of overclockers and future CPUs. It is also quite possible that other AMD motherboards have more efficient VRMs, so an X4 965 using 147W on that motherboard could use 120W on another.
In short, X-Bit has power numbers that are well under the real Q9550 numbers and well over the real X4 965 numbers which would make them seem to be fairly untrustworthy in my opinion.
Not at all. They are the only ones to have tested the true CPU power consumption - granted, before the VRMs kick in, as there's no other way of doing it. Other sites only measured total system consumption from the wall, which is far more inaccurate.
Clearer now?
Oh, I forgot to mention - Intel has a Q9550S, which is a 65W TDP version of the Q9550. Do you think it uses 30W less than the regular Q9550?