That may be necessary in order to synchronise the audio. The 48Khz input source might not be exactly synchronous with the output and hence has to be resampled.
Take for example: you want to mix together a digital input at 48KHz and the microphone input. The 48KHz input is driven by a clock in whatever is providing the signal. The microphone is sample using a clock generated by the soundcard. These two clocks will be fractionally different, which will cause problems with under/over flow of data across the clock domains, which would result in some distortion every few seconds. The ideal solution is to make all the system clocks synchronous - effectively genlocking, so that all sampling and output is driven by the same clock source. This is not an option on most consumer devices, and hence the _only_ solution that will lead to audio playback with no distortion is to sample rate convert, even if it's between two 48KHz sources that are running at marginally different rates. If the clocks differ by 1 ppm then you still have an extra second of samples every 20.8 seconds.
I agree it's not the best option, but it is probably the most sensible given their market. You want to able to do fully synchronous digital audio you need some professional kit that lets you drive its internal clocks from a single source. Something like a: http://www.lynxstudio.com/lynxl22.html should do the job.
I tend to find the instant on/off of them to be more startling. Turn signals (which are orange over here in blighty) look weird with LEDs because they flash on and off instantly, rather than fading away a little bit.
Much as I like the prospects of biofuels I am afraid to say that using Brazil as an example is not particularly relevant. The fuel consumption of Brazil does not compare to that consumed by the US or Europe. You have enough resources for food and fuel now, you may do so for the rest of eternity, that doesn't mean that it is a viable proposition anywhere else. I can't remember where I read it, but the fuel consumption per capita in Brazil is about 11% of that in the US. source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con_percap-energy-oil-consumption-per-capita So essentially if you have 10x as much food as you need then maybe you are onto something, otherwise the problem still stands.
Being English I appreciate a good jab at the French more than anyone, but I have to point out that the French produce something like 80% of their power from Nuclear Energy (they even sell it to us - and EDF are destined to build all the new nuclear reactors in the UK it seems). It stands to reason then that they would be unlikely to be sitting in their filth in the dark, but rather simply sitting in their filth.
Just to be awkward, I submit that ice is a verb and a noun, since one can ice a cake, things ice over and there is that song that rather confusingly suggests you should ice ice. Baby.
Forget using it as a prank, it's an awesome form of terrorism. Just go around planting traces of this stuff on (innocent?) people's luggage in airports. Phone in threats on suspicious people who's luggage you've tainted. If you were systematic you could probably shut down dozens of airports, train stations, subways etc. in a period of a few hours and cause untold panic as people assumed that they were under some kind of mass attack. All without directly harming anyone...
I've been looking a for a good point to jump in to this, and it's as good as I've found, so sorry if I'm a little of the track of your previous post. Anyways..
There are a vast number of applications where it does cost a huge amount to have complex instruction format. I'm thinking of the realms of DSP and real-time embedded systems, where the performance must be completely predictable. This does not necessarily imply it has to be lightning fast, but that code executes in the exact same amount of time, every time. These are processors that sometimes don't have cache, and almost certainly don't have microcode so that the behaviour can be predicted.
For example: You have an audio DSP, running a filter with incoming samples at 48KHz, giving you approx 208 us to process a sample. With a 120MHz processor you have 2500 cycles for each sample. The complex approach is to have an interrupt triggered when a sample arrives etc. However to minimise hardware resources and maximise the processing ability it is possible just to write the filter as a loop that takes 2500 cycles to complete. Run your CPU clock synchronous to the audio clock (or vice versa as appropriate) and you have your system with a lot less complexity.
This of course only works if the instruction accesses are entirely predictable. If you have a microcode based processor then it is possible that for certain specific cases it will need to load a microcode instruction (an unusual case in floating point arithmetic is an example). This can cause instructions to take hundreds of times longer than they should, and will completely break your system.
If you look at the ARM instruction set it is specifically designed with lots of features to allow this kind of functionality - e.g. conditional execution of instructions - for a bit of code that reads like:
while (1)
if (i = 0)
j = j+1
else
j = j-1
k = k+1
end if end while
Depending on the value of i the loop may take longer to execute. Using the conditional instructions (the exact syntax escapes me) you'd have something which will resemble (in assembly).
while (1)
if (i = 0) j = j+1
if (i != 0) j = j-1
if (i != 0) k = k+1 end while
When executed each instruction will take the same amount of time regardless of the condition, allowing the behaviour of the loop to be characterised exactly. There are also loads of other benefits due to jump instructions being avoided etc.
The number of embedded processors in the world outweighs the number of desktop/server style processors by quite a significant margin, so it seems a bit wrong to say that there is no distinction between the two. I'd be more inclined to say there is a wide range of processors from very simple RISC processors up to the very complex (IA-64) and that there the correct choice is highly dependent on the application.
But if you think about it that may be the correct behaviour for best performance. I agree Windows memory management is terrible, and often seems to do stupid things, but I think that the case for optimal performance is a little more complex than you mention.
An (horrific and oversimplified) example: I run a simulation with a very large dataset (in the order of hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of data), but it's in the background/not all the data is required at once. In the meantime I open and close firefox a few times. Now in your ideal, as much of my simulation data would remain in memory as possible, and firefox would be left out of the cache. However that won't lead to the optimum performance since firefox will be reloaded from disk each time which will be slower. In fact assuming all my RAM is used up by the simulation data, then some of it will have to page out to load firefox. It makes more sense to keep the firefox object code in RAM even after it has closed since it will respond faster if it is used again, and the simulation data was paged out anyway because there was not enough RAM, so no matter what it will have to be reloaded. It is admittedly a gamble, but I can see the case for paging out data that is incredibly rarely used in favour of having more memory available for a performance enhancing cache. This same behaviour is used on Linux and no doubt other systems.
That said I do agree that Windows seems to cling too much to its application cache, if you have several applications consuming very large amounts of memory and CPU time it seems that Windows is incapable of distributing the resources well. I have used Solaris systems that have had 6 or 7 simulations, each with gigabytes of data running simultaneously on a four processor machine. I only noticed that there was this much load when I went to run a simulation myself and it was quite slow. The responsiveness of other applications and the user interface was barely affected, something which I'd attribute to an operating system that does the right thing with memory and processor allocation.
I'd suggest what is called 'defensive driving'. If someone wants to belt it along at ludicrous speed, then let them do it, it's probably best not to be near them. Getting in their way will only encourage them to try something stupid to get round you.
If people looked at driving as a cooperative effort - try and let everyone drive at the speed they want to - then everyone ends having a lot smoother journey. If everyone only acts in their own interests it all gets a bit more stressful and scary.
It consumes two watts of power. It is not a Bluetooth replacement.
Using my phone for comparison: 1100mAh 3.7 V
3.7V / 2W = 1.85 A
1.1 Ah / 1.85 A = 0.59 Hours = approx. 36 Minutes.
I know it won't be transmitting the whole time, but essentially this will be useless in a mobile application.
Then you bought the wrong equipment. If I buy a front door for my house that has no lock and a big sign that says 'Welcome, please come in and take my stuff...' but what I actually wanted was a locked door with no windows that only lets people I specifically give keys to in well then I just bought the wrong door didn't I?
Strange, I think the problem is that these companies sold an 'unlimited' package and then got upset when people tried to use it.
What could have happened is someone did some maths and went 'hey, we can offer everyone unlimited usage of their broadband, but actually the majority will not use very much, hence we cover the costs of the few that do use a lot' and essentially got it wrong and didn't count on people taking 'unlimited' seriously. The more likely alternative is that someone in marketing heard that people don't use most of the bandwidth offered and the rest is history...
If I go out and buy a car with a '3 year, unlimited mileage' warranty I would be somewhat disgruntled if I took it in 35 months later having driven for every waking hour of every day since I bought it and they said I had covered too many miles.
If they don't have the capacity then they shouldn't have fscking sold it. All the 'people aren't using it fairly' b.s. in the world doesn't excuse them from the fact that they succumbed to what sounded like a great marketing idea (it was probably one company, but then everyone else had to do it) at the time, but without considering the consequences. Going back to my car analogy: If two people buy the same model car, with the same 3 year unlimited mileage warranty, would you expect the person who'd driven further to be excluded?
If I need to consume 160GB a month I am going to look at the packages available, and pick the cheapest one that fits my needs. The one that says 'unlimited' is quite likely to be that package.
Plus they are constantly advertising products that are being slated in TFA. I don't know if there's some kind of AdSense type logic behind it, but every post attacking Windows Server has an advert for Windows Server on it somewhere.
And also, who buys enterprise scale software and hardware on the basis of an Ad on a web page. I can conceive that the increase in user awareness is important, but I can't imagine many people go and buy the $5000 Powervault MD3000 I see advertised at the top of this page simply because it was so advertised.
Can't answer your question exactly, but I do remember an American neighbour explaining to me once that the reason they had their Turkey at thanksgiving was because they didn't have the patience to put up with the obnoxious birds until Christmas.
I suggest using the uptime of the previous session as a random number generator. Of course the numbers would always be small, but at least they'd be completely random...
Is that similar to the keys stored in smart cards (chip and pin etc.) As far as I know there are some pretty effective ways of breaking encryption in those systems. I know of one for RSA where some of the data stored on the chip is damaged (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsa, specifically side channel attacks) then the encryption can be very easily broken. Likewise if there is a huge amount of plaintext available then it becomes easier to break.
If it is possible to request the signature of the firmware is it not possible to bodge it to allow differential cryptanalysis to be performed? I could be wrong, maybe this is entirely secure, however it would be a first...
I was just thinking that using a similar approach, but with image matching would work quite well. Sort of thing you seen in IQ tests. 1 picture (e.g. a Hammer) and four choices (kitten, puppy, cheese, nail). Click the matching picture.
You could probably perform all kinds of clever tricks to make it hard to auto-detect, from simply having many images (and many of the same type of image), to scaling, rotation etc. type tricks that would make it harder for a bot to work out and store matching sequences. Shouldn't confuse too many people, and you could probably raid a clipart library for the images.
Unlike in the US where firearms are never a factor in murders. Go look up the statistics idiot. Murderers cause murder. Firearms facilitate murderers, some of whom probably wouldn't have the stones to bash someone's head in with a blunt object, but can easily pull a trigger. How long can a guy fight the police or go storming round a university campus killing people if he doesn't have a gun? Guns are not completely banned in the UK, they are restricted to those who can prove a legitimate use for them. Rather than just having one on the off chance you might need to shoot someone, which is probably not the best approach.
Ok, much as it is a big joke that their datacentre has been slashdotted, ha ha, it does strike me as a little unlikely that they are running the blogs etc. from the actual finished datacentre itself. After all, they haven't actually built it yet, right? I mean if they actually managed to get a blog/webcam/whatever to work in an empty room _before_ they installed the hardware, i'd say they were pretty good at their jobs, non?
There's so many factors involved with these things that it is very hard to make a judgement. A well organised test would specifically select songs that do not compress well with lossy codecs. It is conceivable that music with a fairly even PSD (power spectral density) would not compress as well as one with a PSD that focusses more on certain areas, since the amount of information stored would have to be spread across a greater range. Hence the higher bitrate should sound better because more detail is preserved. Think speech quality (telephone, AM radio) vs CD quality, it sounds like the original, but the detail is all missing. That's what that extra bitrate adds back in. 128K is acceptable to the majority of people out there. Some people are more sensitive, I know people who work in professional audio and they can't stand 128K, personally, the vast majority of times I can't tell. I generally use OGG at around 160Kbit, and when an mp3 gets played I do get a sense that it is not quite the same, but it's not conclusive - it could just be the encoder used.
The headphones do make a difference. I used the stock headphones with my portable music player. Dropped them in/on/off something and broke them and got a set of Sennheiser ear buds. They do not cost $400. The interesting thing is I perceived the same effect as the people in the test: A reduction in bass 'kick' but a clearer response. There is definitely a lot to be said for good quality listening equipment, but in that arena, proper over the ear headphones are the only way to go. They aren't that practical though. The standard ear buds don't have the high frequency response and clarity you can get from slightly more expensive ones. Spending as much on your ear buds as on the player itself seems a little excessive though. You could probably get a larger size player, decent headphones, and use FLAC and get better quality than 256K mp3 through a set of very expensive ear buds. Also, you are going to be even more upset when they end up in your beer or something.
Finally, spotting mp3 artefacts is a strange thing. I'd never noticed any (at 128K) until someone pointed out the sound to me (usually it's cymbals). From then on, it became much clearer, and now I notice it a lot more (again it's mostly cymbals). Some songs are more susceptible than others, again I guess it is related to the make-up of the music.
Essentially I have come to the conclusion that: OGG sounds better than MP3 (although some of the audio professionals I know think the oposite), ear buds can only go so far and break - not worth spending a fortune, but worth spending a little, and that if you _really_ want to hear stuff at the finest detail, you should invest in some good over the ear headphones. It's a different experience: the noise occlusion, crisp, clear sound, and defined and powerful bass. The main thing you notice is that strong bass does not corrupt the higher frequencies, giving a very different overall feel of the sound, one that is, in my opinion, quite unique.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who has no gender: Action Man!!!
That may be necessary in order to synchronise the audio. The 48Khz input source might not be exactly synchronous with the output and hence has to be resampled.
Take for example: you want to mix together a digital input at 48KHz and the microphone input. The 48KHz input is driven by a clock in whatever is providing the signal. The microphone is sample using a clock generated by the soundcard. These two clocks will be fractionally different, which will cause problems with under/over flow of data across the clock domains, which would result in some distortion every few seconds. The ideal solution is to make all the system clocks synchronous - effectively genlocking, so that all sampling and output is driven by the same clock source. This is not an option on most consumer devices, and hence the _only_ solution that will lead to audio playback with no distortion is to sample rate convert, even if it's between two 48KHz sources that are running at marginally different rates. If the clocks differ by 1 ppm then you still have an extra second of samples every 20.8 seconds.
I agree it's not the best option, but it is probably the most sensible given their market. You want to able to do fully synchronous digital audio you need some professional kit that lets you drive its internal clocks from a single source. Something like a: http://www.lynxstudio.com/lynxl22.html should do the job.
I tend to find the instant on/off of them to be more startling. Turn signals (which are orange over here in blighty) look weird with LEDs because they flash on and off instantly, rather than fading away a little bit.
Much as I like the prospects of biofuels I am afraid to say that using Brazil as an example is not particularly relevant. The fuel consumption of Brazil does not compare to that consumed by the US or Europe. You have enough resources for food and fuel now, you may do so for the rest of eternity, that doesn't mean that it is a viable proposition anywhere else. I can't remember where I read it, but the fuel consumption per capita in Brazil is about 11% of that in the US. source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con_percap-energy-oil-consumption-per-capita So essentially if you have 10x as much food as you need then maybe you are onto something, otherwise the problem still stands.
Being English I appreciate a good jab at the French more than anyone, but I have to point out that the French produce something like 80% of their power from Nuclear Energy (they even sell it to us - and EDF are destined to build all the new nuclear reactors in the UK it seems). It stands to reason then that they would be unlikely to be sitting in their filth in the dark, but rather simply sitting in their filth.
And probably eating garlic...
while talking about onions...
moving hastily away from conflict...
and being mean to geese...
Ok I'm done
Just to be awkward, I submit that ice is a verb and a noun, since one can ice a cake, things ice over and there is that song that rather confusingly suggests you should ice ice. Baby.
Forget using it as a prank, it's an awesome form of terrorism. Just go around planting traces of this stuff on (innocent?) people's luggage in airports. Phone in threats on suspicious people who's luggage you've tainted. If you were systematic you could probably shut down dozens of airports, train stations, subways etc. in a period of a few hours and cause untold panic as people assumed that they were under some kind of mass attack. All without directly harming anyone...
Mmmm fragrant abuse of the law...
I'll agree though, it does stink.
I've been looking a for a good point to jump in to this, and it's as good as I've found, so sorry if I'm a little of the track of your previous post. Anyways..
There are a vast number of applications where it does cost a huge amount to have complex instruction format. I'm thinking of the realms of DSP and real-time embedded systems, where the performance must be completely predictable. This does not necessarily imply it has to be lightning fast, but that code executes in the exact same amount of time, every time. These are processors that sometimes don't have cache, and almost certainly don't have microcode so that the behaviour can be predicted.
For example: You have an audio DSP, running a filter with incoming samples at 48KHz, giving you approx 208 us to process a sample. With a 120MHz processor you have 2500 cycles for each sample. The complex approach is to have an interrupt triggered when a sample arrives etc. However to minimise hardware resources and maximise the processing ability it is possible just to write the filter as a loop that takes 2500 cycles to complete. Run your CPU clock synchronous to the audio clock (or vice versa as appropriate) and you have your system with a lot less complexity.
This of course only works if the instruction accesses are entirely predictable. If you have a microcode based processor then it is possible that for certain specific cases it will need to load a microcode instruction (an unusual case in floating point arithmetic is an example). This can cause instructions to take hundreds of times longer than they should, and will completely break your system.
If you look at the ARM instruction set it is specifically designed with lots of features to allow this kind of functionality - e.g. conditional execution of instructions - for a bit of code that reads like:
while (1)
if (i = 0)
j = j+1
else
j = j-1
k = k+1
end if
end while
Depending on the value of i the loop may take longer to execute. Using the conditional instructions (the exact syntax escapes me) you'd have something which will resemble (in assembly).
while (1)
if (i = 0) j = j+1
if (i != 0) j = j-1
if (i != 0) k = k+1
end while
When executed each instruction will take the same amount of time regardless of the condition, allowing the behaviour of the loop to be characterised exactly. There are also loads of other benefits due to jump instructions being avoided etc.
The number of embedded processors in the world outweighs the number of desktop/server style processors by quite a significant margin, so it seems a bit wrong to say that there is no distinction between the two. I'd be more inclined to say there is a wide range of processors from very simple RISC processors up to the very complex (IA-64) and that there the correct choice is highly dependent on the application.
But if you think about it that may be the correct behaviour for best performance. I agree Windows memory management is terrible, and often seems to do stupid things, but I think that the case for optimal performance is a little more complex than you mention.
An (horrific and oversimplified) example: I run a simulation with a very large dataset (in the order of hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of data), but it's in the background/not all the data is required at once. In the meantime I open and close firefox a few times. Now in your ideal, as much of my simulation data would remain in memory as possible, and firefox would be left out of the cache. However that won't lead to the optimum performance since firefox will be reloaded from disk each time which will be slower. In fact assuming all my RAM is used up by the simulation data, then some of it will have to page out to load firefox. It makes more sense to keep the firefox object code in RAM even after it has closed since it will respond faster if it is used again, and the simulation data was paged out anyway because there was not enough RAM, so no matter what it will have to be reloaded. It is admittedly a gamble, but I can see the case for paging out data that is incredibly rarely used in favour of having more memory available for a performance enhancing cache. This same behaviour is used on Linux and no doubt other systems.
That said I do agree that Windows seems to cling too much to its application cache, if you have several applications consuming very large amounts of memory and CPU time it seems that Windows is incapable of distributing the resources well. I have used Solaris systems that have had 6 or 7 simulations, each with gigabytes of data running simultaneously on a four processor machine. I only noticed that there was this much load when I went to run a simulation myself and it was quite slow. The responsiveness of other applications and the user interface was barely affected, something which I'd attribute to an operating system that does the right thing with memory and processor allocation.
I'd suggest what is called 'defensive driving'. If someone wants to belt it along at ludicrous speed, then let them do it, it's probably best not to be near them. Getting in their way will only encourage them to try something stupid to get round you.
If people looked at driving as a cooperative effort - try and let everyone drive at the speed they want to - then everyone ends having a lot smoother journey. If everyone only acts in their own interests it all gets a bit more stressful and scary.
It consumes two watts of power. It is not a Bluetooth replacement. Using my phone for comparison: 1100mAh 3.7 V 3.7V / 2W = 1.85 A 1.1 Ah / 1.85 A = 0.59 Hours = approx. 36 Minutes. I know it won't be transmitting the whole time, but essentially this will be useless in a mobile application.
Then you bought the wrong equipment. If I buy a front door for my house that has no lock and a big sign that says 'Welcome, please come in and take my stuff...' but what I actually wanted was a locked door with no windows that only lets people I specifically give keys to in well then I just bought the wrong door didn't I?
Strange, I think the problem is that these companies sold an 'unlimited' package and then got upset when people tried to use it.
What could have happened is someone did some maths and went 'hey, we can offer everyone unlimited usage of their broadband, but actually the majority will not use very much, hence we cover the costs of the few that do use a lot' and essentially got it wrong and didn't count on people taking 'unlimited' seriously. The more likely alternative is that someone in marketing heard that people don't use most of the bandwidth offered and the rest is history...
If I go out and buy a car with a '3 year, unlimited mileage' warranty I would be somewhat disgruntled if I took it in 35 months later having driven for every waking hour of every day since I bought it and they said I had covered too many miles.
If they don't have the capacity then they shouldn't have fscking sold it. All the 'people aren't using it fairly' b.s. in the world doesn't excuse them from the fact that they succumbed to what sounded like a great marketing idea (it was probably one company, but then everyone else had to do it) at the time, but without considering the consequences. Going back to my car analogy: If two people buy the same model car, with the same 3 year unlimited mileage warranty, would you expect the person who'd driven further to be excluded?
If I need to consume 160GB a month I am going to look at the packages available, and pick the cheapest one that fits my needs. The one that says 'unlimited' is quite likely to be that package.
Plus they are constantly advertising products that are being slated in TFA. I don't know if there's some kind of AdSense type logic behind it, but every post attacking Windows Server has an advert for Windows Server on it somewhere.
And also, who buys enterprise scale software and hardware on the basis of an Ad on a web page. I can conceive that the increase in user awareness is important, but I can't imagine many people go and buy the $5000 Powervault MD3000 I see advertised at the top of this page simply because it was so advertised.
A mathematical question.
Of course, what they should have done was built more reactors.
Can't answer your question exactly, but I do remember an American neighbour explaining to me once that the reason they had their Turkey at thanksgiving was because they didn't have the patience to put up with the obnoxious birds until Christmas.
I suggest using the uptime of the previous session as a random number generator. Of course the numbers would always be small, but at least they'd be completely random...
Longhorn
Is that similar to the keys stored in smart cards (chip and pin etc.) As far as I know there are some pretty effective ways of breaking encryption in those systems. I know of one for RSA where some of the data stored on the chip is damaged (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsa, specifically side channel attacks) then the encryption can be very easily broken. Likewise if there is a huge amount of plaintext available then it becomes easier to break.
If it is possible to request the signature of the firmware is it not possible to bodge it to allow differential cryptanalysis to be performed? I could be wrong, maybe this is entirely secure, however it would be a first...
I was just thinking that using a similar approach, but with image matching would work quite well. Sort of thing you seen in IQ tests. 1 picture (e.g. a Hammer) and four choices (kitten, puppy, cheese, nail). Click the matching picture.
You could probably perform all kinds of clever tricks to make it hard to auto-detect, from simply having many images (and many of the same type of image), to scaling, rotation etc. type tricks that would make it harder for a bot to work out and store matching sequences. Shouldn't confuse too many people, and you could probably raid a clipart library for the images.
Unlike in the US where firearms are never a factor in murders. Go look up the statistics idiot. Murderers cause murder. Firearms facilitate murderers, some of whom probably wouldn't have the stones to bash someone's head in with a blunt object, but can easily pull a trigger. How long can a guy fight the police or go storming round a university campus killing people if he doesn't have a gun? Guns are not completely banned in the UK, they are restricted to those who can prove a legitimate use for them. Rather than just having one on the off chance you might need to shoot someone, which is probably not the best approach.
Ok, much as it is a big joke that their datacentre has been slashdotted, ha ha, it does strike me as a little unlikely that they are running the blogs etc. from the actual finished datacentre itself. After all, they haven't actually built it yet, right? I mean if they actually managed to get a blog/webcam/whatever to work in an empty room _before_ they installed the hardware, i'd say they were pretty good at their jobs, non?
There's so many factors involved with these things that it is very hard to make a judgement. A well organised test would specifically select songs that do not compress well with lossy codecs. It is conceivable that music with a fairly even PSD (power spectral density) would not compress as well as one with a PSD that focusses more on certain areas, since the amount of information stored would have to be spread across a greater range. Hence the higher bitrate should sound better because more detail is preserved. Think speech quality (telephone, AM radio) vs CD quality, it sounds like the original, but the detail is all missing. That's what that extra bitrate adds back in. 128K is acceptable to the majority of people out there. Some people are more sensitive, I know people who work in professional audio and they can't stand 128K, personally, the vast majority of times I can't tell. I generally use OGG at around 160Kbit, and when an mp3 gets played I do get a sense that it is not quite the same, but it's not conclusive - it could just be the encoder used.
The headphones do make a difference. I used the stock headphones with my portable music player. Dropped them in/on/off something and broke them and got a set of Sennheiser ear buds. They do not cost $400. The interesting thing is I perceived the same effect as the people in the test: A reduction in bass 'kick' but a clearer response. There is definitely a lot to be said for good quality listening equipment, but in that arena, proper over the ear headphones are the only way to go. They aren't that practical though. The standard ear buds don't have the high frequency response and clarity you can get from slightly more expensive ones. Spending as much on your ear buds as on the player itself seems a little excessive though. You could probably get a larger size player, decent headphones, and use FLAC and get better quality than 256K mp3 through a set of very expensive ear buds. Also, you are going to be even more upset when they end up in your beer or something.
Finally, spotting mp3 artefacts is a strange thing. I'd never noticed any (at 128K) until someone pointed out the sound to me (usually it's cymbals). From then on, it became much clearer, and now I notice it a lot more (again it's mostly cymbals). Some songs are more susceptible than others, again I guess it is related to the make-up of the music.
Essentially I have come to the conclusion that: OGG sounds better than MP3 (although some of the audio professionals I know think the oposite), ear buds can only go so far and break - not worth spending a fortune, but worth spending a little, and that if you _really_ want to hear stuff at the finest detail, you should invest in some good over the ear headphones. It's a different experience: the noise occlusion, crisp, clear sound, and defined and powerful bass. The main thing you notice is that strong bass does not corrupt the higher frequencies, giving a very different overall feel of the sound, one that is, in my opinion, quite unique.