That doesn't mean that audiophiles couldn't make their results more quantitative. Has he tried a double-blind listening test? Or even a blind listening test?
All a double-blind test would prove is that the reviewer can indeed hear a difference between various bitrates of MP3 and AAC, and between MP3 and AAC, and between all those and the original CD.
So what?
To describe the character of those differences, so as to let the reader judge whether they are acceptable differences or not, would still require subjective language like "transparent" and "shimmering" and stuff like that.
Charges vary slightly from operator to operator, but they're otherwise constant - calling a cellphone from York costs as much as it does from Bristol
Doesn't caller-pays constrain the system to operate that way? Otherwise, if different phone companies could charge different rates, you'd need a way for the caller to figure out how expensive a call is going to be.
But if all phone companies have to charge basically the same rate, doesn't mean that they can't compete on price? Basically, you will be stuck with prices set by the government.
And how is billing handled? Does the cell phone company have to tell the wired phone company the cost, so the wired company can bill the caller? That can't be efficient.
It's a rather screwy system economically where the person paying for a service isn't the one who made the purchasing decision to acquire that service.
What typical audiophile fluff. Why don't audiophiles ever give any opinion that is actually backed up with data
Uhm...generally this stuff is backed by data. What you really meant was "...backed by data that comes from your instruments", with an implicit assumption that anything that you don't have instruments to measure cannot be valid.
Your assumption is bad science.
Sure, there is fluff in subjective audio, but there is also a lot of subjective stuff that is widely agreed on, which almost certainly means that there is some underlying physical explanation, that we simply do not yet understand.
Don't intentionally distribute information you know is false, and you won't have a problem.
Newspapers, for example, publish all kinds of nasty things without getting nailed by liability suits. If a major concern of a project is how to protect themselves from liability when they screw up (or worse), something has gone wrong with that project.
It's in The Register, for God's sake, with no link to a source, quoting a letter allegedly sent directly to a Register "reporter", that shows up nowhere else on Google.
The Register has a sense of humor. I suspect they are exercising it.
Strange, as normally a synth's sounds are later used on records and such, so they can't really sue for releasing their audio on a non-profit application...
Several people have brought up similar points, and they all make no sense.
Say a synth or a sound card or whatever has a particular sound, and you use it on your record. That use is not substituting for the synth or sound card. E.g., if another band likes the drum sound you use, and they want it, they go out and buy the same drum synth you used. They don't just buy your record and use the sound from it.
An emulator, on the other hand, does substitute for the original. That band that hears the sound on your record and goes out and gets the emulator doesn't need to get the original synth or sound card or whatever.
If Linux were to reach the unwashed masses' desktops then most there would either run as root, or have a very simple one-click method to run things as root (ie: to install stuff)
I doubt it. Why would Linux go that route rather than doing it like OS X, which is essentially Unix for the "unwashed masses".
I do believe that artists should be paid for their work, but in the form of concerts, etc. (since, then they are actually working)
So in your ideal world, someone who is a great composer but merely an average instrumentalist/singer should spend his time giving lousy concerts to try to make a living, rather than composing new works?
And seriously, does anyone listen to music encoded at 64 kbps? 128 is the bare minumum
If you mean "does anyone rip things at 64 kpbs?", then I'd guess mostly not. However, if you really mean what you asked, then plenty of people do.
Take a look at live365.com. A huge number of the streaming stations there are at 64 kbps or less.
I listen to filk radio via live365 a lot, for example, and it is below 64kbps.
64k and below can work fine for listenting to music. However, many people listen to the encoding, not the music, and for them it might be too painful.
BTW, I've noticed that if I listen to filk.com on my Linux box, my ears get worn out fairly quickly. On my Mac at work, however, it sounds a lot better. Same stream. I think Apple's doing some filtering or something to try to make low bitrate streams sound better.
There seem to be five approaches by major (or wannabe major) companies to dealing with Linux:
The Microsoft Approach. Treat it as any other competitor.
The Apple Approach. Cooperate with it somewhat. Use it when you can (e.g., the html handling in Safari), make it easy for people to port Linux stuff to OS X. Specialize in those areas where it is harder for Linux to do well (e.g., user interface). Someday, Linux will be trouble for Apple, perhaps, but for now, they are in separate enough markets that it is not a problem.
The IBM Approach. Embrace it. Become a Linux company. Figure out where the money is to be made in Open Source, and go there, rather than struggling to make Open Source fit in with previous ways to make money.
The SCO Approach. Claim you own it.
The Sun Approach. Even though it is killing you in your core market (servers), pretend that this isn't a problem. Instead, concentrate on the desktop, so you can, if you get very lucky, pick up the crumbs that fall from Apple while they eat Microsoft's table scraps. Meanwhile, continue to try to commoditize hardware by pushing Java, even though you are a hardware company and that's the last thing in the world you should want.
I don't understand. Where does that paper explain how to connect when both computers are behind NATs without using a server?
According to the article by the SpeakFreely author, it doesn't seem there would be a problem with using a server to set up connections. He just can't handle the bandwidth of having the voice traffic go through the server.
OK, let's think about this. Astronomers find an asteroid that has an extremely remote chance, BASED ON PRELIMINARY CALCULATIONS of hitting Earth 11 YEARS FROM NOW. It will take another TWO OR THREE DAYS days to get more accurate calculations.
So...what do they do? Instead of waiting the two days and seeing if the risk is real, they announce right away.
Let's consider the possibilities if they had waited a couple of days. In the overwhelmingly most likely case, they find after a couple days that things are OK, and so say nothing. No panic. All is well.
In the extremely unlikely case, it turns out it does have a reasonable chance of hitting the Earth, perhaps high enough that we actually need to do something about it. In that case, would a delay of TWO DAYS OUT OF 11 YEARS really have made a difference?
Either someone was very irresponsible in announcing in the first place, or someone was trying to get publicity for astronomers (perhaps to help with funding?)
The stupid thing is that they could simply build in two buttons and just MAKE THEM DEFAULT TO DOING THE SAME THING! That way, those who like one button have one button, and those that like two buttons make one change in Preferences.
It's not like a desktop, where you can easily replace the mouse. With a laptop, you are stuck with what they give you, unless you are willing to use a clumsy external mouse.
OK, things are weird. oqngksjdc.com does indeed resolve to the address given, but acdjdc.com does not resolve, nor does fffacdjdc.com. ughfnj.com resolves to the stated address, but pqkbjd.com does not.
So, it does not appear that *.com is being handled.
If not...then wouldn't this be unauthorized access to a computing device, which was made a federal crime I thought in the last round of Justice Department power grabbing?
Uhm...one big problem here. Microsoft isn't accessing your XBox. Your XBox is accessing Microsoft's servers.
Where I work, we wrote one of the earlier web acceleators, and it worked fine.
The benefit came from three things.
First, we cached DNS lookups. Back in the Win95 days, that wasn't something Windows did on its own. When you have a browser that doesn't start displaying the page until it has got every stupid little graphic on the page, one or two slow DNS lookups really kill performance.
Second, of course, was caching the heck out of anything we could.
Finally, there was smart prefetching. By "smart" I mean trying to figure out from the links the user is clicking what they are likely to click soon, and prefetching that.
Many sites, particularly news sites and search sites, are organized in such a way that we could do a good job at predicting clicks, and the user spent a fair amount of time reading on each page, so we had a reasonable amount of time to prefetch on a modem, so that we could actually make quite a noticable difference in speed to the user.
Later, everyone and his brother came out with a web accelerator, mostly just using caching, which gave the whole category a bad name.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of odd that so many screenshots in an OS X review are of GNOME and KDE apps (or desktops!) running under Apple's X.
All a double-blind test would prove is that the reviewer can indeed hear a difference between various bitrates of MP3 and AAC, and between MP3 and AAC, and between all those and the original CD.
So what?
To describe the character of those differences, so as to let the reader judge whether they are acceptable differences or not, would still require subjective language like "transparent" and "shimmering" and stuff like that.
Doesn't caller-pays constrain the system to operate that way? Otherwise, if different phone companies could charge different rates, you'd need a way for the caller to figure out how expensive a call is going to be.
But if all phone companies have to charge basically the same rate, doesn't mean that they can't compete on price? Basically, you will be stuck with prices set by the government.
And how is billing handled? Does the cell phone company have to tell the wired phone company the cost, so the wired company can bill the caller? That can't be efficient.
It's a rather screwy system economically where the person paying for a service isn't the one who made the purchasing decision to acquire that service.
Uhm...generally this stuff is backed by data. What you really meant was "...backed by data that comes from your instruments", with an implicit assumption that anything that you don't have instruments to measure cannot be valid.
Your assumption is bad science.
Sure, there is fluff in subjective audio, but there is also a lot of subjective stuff that is widely agreed on, which almost certainly means that there is some underlying physical explanation, that we simply do not yet understand.
Don't intentionally distribute information you know is false, and you won't have a problem. Newspapers, for example, publish all kinds of nasty things without getting nailed by liability suits. If a major concern of a project is how to protect themselves from liability when they screw up (or worse), something has gone wrong with that project.
The Register has a sense of humor. I suspect they are exercising it.
Several people have brought up similar points, and they all make no sense.
Say a synth or a sound card or whatever has a particular sound, and you use it on your record. That use is not substituting for the synth or sound card. E.g., if another band likes the drum sound you use, and they want it, they go out and buy the same drum synth you used. They don't just buy your record and use the sound from it.
An emulator, on the other hand, does substitute for the original. That band that hears the sound on your record and goes out and gets the emulator doesn't need to get the original synth or sound card or whatever.
I doubt it. Why would Linux go that route rather than doing it like OS X, which is essentially Unix for the "unwashed masses".
So in your ideal world, someone who is a great composer but merely an average instrumentalist/singer should spend his time giving lousy concerts to try to make a living, rather than composing new works?
Isn't one of Apple's selling points that since they control both the OS and the hardware, there isn't supposed to be this kind of problem?
So how come most of the trouble with software patents has come from small companies or even individuals with almost no money taking on big companies?
According to your theory, Microsoft should have blown Eolas out of the water right from the start.
If you mean "does anyone rip things at 64 kpbs?", then I'd guess mostly not. However, if you really mean what you asked, then plenty of people do.
Take a look at live365.com. A huge number of the streaming stations there are at 64 kbps or less.
I listen to filk radio via live365 a lot, for example, and it is below 64kbps.
64k and below can work fine for listenting to music. However, many people listen to the encoding, not the music, and for them it might be too painful.
BTW, I've noticed that if I listen to filk.com on my Linux box, my ears get worn out fairly quickly. On my Mac at work, however, it sounds a lot better. Same stream. I think Apple's doing some filtering or something to try to make low bitrate streams sound better.
The answer, of course, is all three.
That's fine for the catalog, but what about the shelves? You can't expect the library to buy three copies so they can put it on all three places?
I'm having a hard time seeing what would cover them.
According to the article by the SpeakFreely author, it doesn't seem there would be a problem with using a server to set up connections. He just can't handle the bandwidth of having the voice traffic go through the server.
He should have Googled before giving up
So...what do they do? Instead of waiting the two days and seeing if the risk is real, they announce right away.
Let's consider the possibilities if they had waited a couple of days. In the overwhelmingly most likely case, they find after a couple days that things are OK, and so say nothing. No panic. All is well.
In the extremely unlikely case, it turns out it does have a reasonable chance of hitting the Earth, perhaps high enough that we actually need to do something about it. In that case, would a delay of TWO DAYS OUT OF 11 YEARS really have made a difference?
Either someone was very irresponsible in announcing in the first place, or someone was trying to get publicity for astronomers (perhaps to help with funding?)
The stupid thing is that they could simply build in two buttons and just MAKE THEM DEFAULT TO DOING THE SAME THING! That way, those who like one button have one button, and those that like two buttons make one change in Preferences.
It's not like a desktop, where you can easily replace the mouse. With a laptop, you are stuck with what they give you, unless you are willing to use a clumsy external mouse.
So, it does not appear that *.com is being handled.
Sues for what? The XBox is doing everything it was advertised to do--it plays XBox games.
Uhm...one big problem here. Microsoft isn't accessing your XBox. Your XBox is accessing Microsoft's servers.
The benefit came from three things.
First, we cached DNS lookups. Back in the Win95 days, that wasn't something Windows did on its own. When you have a browser that doesn't start displaying the page until it has got every stupid little graphic on the page, one or two slow DNS lookups really kill performance.
Second, of course, was caching the heck out of anything we could.
Finally, there was smart prefetching. By "smart" I mean trying to figure out from the links the user is clicking what they are likely to click soon, and prefetching that.
Many sites, particularly news sites and search sites, are organized in such a way that we could do a good job at predicting clicks, and the user spent a fair amount of time reading on each page, so we had a reasonable amount of time to prefetch on a modem, so that we could actually make quite a noticable difference in speed to the user.
Later, everyone and his brother came out with a web accelerator, mostly just using caching, which gave the whole category a bad name.
"I'm using this program to steal your stuff, which gives you valuable marketing information as to what stuff of yours I like!"
Well, since it is too big to flush, there really wasn't an alternative, was there?