Fair enough so long as there is no additional lossiness in the conversion.
What are you talking about, "fair enough?" Your original question was whether or not the format is proprietary. It is not. The idea that AAC is proprietary is FUD - unadulterated FUD.
And now you find it "fair enough" to accept that one non-proprietary format will convert to another provided that it's lossless?
You were ignorant of AAC and were educated.
Now you have additional terms and conditions and you'll decide what's fair, in a tour de force display of further technological ignorance?
Who died and made you in charge? Better yet, who are you supposed to be shilling for?
I get letters and "announcements" that are Excel documents for some reason.
Welcome to Lotus 1-2-3, the program that does it all! Yes, when you think of it, the entire world is rows and columns! When you want to use those rows and columns for math, we call it a spreadsheet - that's #1! Just look at any newspaper - rows and columns again! Word Processing, that's #2! And when you want to look up things based on some row and column intersection of data, why, that's just that relational database you've heard about in those tricky magazines like Byte! And that's #3!
Yes - welcome to the enduring hell foisted off on the people as Lotus 1-2-3.
Not only does it sound like you're still being victimized by it, I'm still wretching that VisiCalc never got its just dues in the Lotus/Excel fight.
In case I come across as holding back or blocking, let me be perfectly clear: Fuck Lotus, fuck their corporation, fuck each and everything they ever did - right down to their copy-protected floppies and their "free" backup floppy.
6502 and 68k were early RISC, Z80 was early CISC. All differences stem from that.
And yepper, I wrote assembly (spare us the "it's assembler!" Nazis) for all three.
Couldn't beat the 6502 for fast memory access and movement, IMO - read: graphics on a Commodore or Apple. Couldn't beat the 68k for handling large tables. Couldn't beat the Z80 because everything I did in it was under CP/M - and yes, you could too trace BDOS.:)
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears. Having the spreadsheet program produce charts and graphs for you is the single most important advancement in accounting since language.
Gee, I don't know about you, but I used VisiCalc. And its companion, VisiPlot.
I built a just-in-time inventory control system for our small manufacturing concern (about 90 parts suppliers, with lead times from 3 months to 2 weeks), tied to past sales overviews and various sales projections.
Had about 8 or 10 "standard" graphs for the boss every two weeks, showing inventory as idle, in QA, in production, in final QA, in shipping, and in repair (warranty and not).
All around 1980 thru 1982, all on an Apple ][+.
That's a good 28 years ago.
Sorry - for all of the new and fab fancy Excel features, as far as I'm concerned, they're simply not there.
The only things I've used Excel for that I didn't with the Visi series are: 1. Quick building of Fourier transform tables when I was just too lazy and hungover to code them up 2. To increase my vocabulary of cursewords (OK - that's not possible, I'm lying, I'm from Detroit) trying to get simple x-y plots without markers
And to the idea that the new spreadsheets provide statistical functions: big whoopie deal. Sum_y, sum_y_squared - you're done, and you've used VisiCalc. (Then again, I'm a snob who believes that you can't work the teleography of statistical equations you've no right to be spewing about statistics anyways.)
I set a policy in interviews over 20 years ago and it has served me well. Whenever the applicant announces that he has X years of any kind of programming experience, I always warn them that we are about to find out if they've had X years of experience or One Year of Experience, X Times.
Well, I'm nothing if not boring then. But I do feel the pain of others, so I said to myself, "EarlyMon, how could you teach others to be less boring?" Now, this seemed like a pretty good question, in light of the fact that the commandment to not take oneself too seriously is lost these days, so imagine my surprise at the answer that went, "Well, EarlyMon, that's a good question! Why not try Google? They mirror the collective knowledge of all things!" Well, you can't argue with that logic, so I googled for "not boring" and lo and behold, here's what I found (at http://www.ehow.com/how_2136052_not-be-boring.html which is full of ads, not surprisingly including a lot for people that have machines to make holes in the ground, so I'm copying the full information section of the page):
Step 1 - Figure out what it is that makes you boring. Is it your life? Is it your friends? Is it your family? Step 2 - Figure out different things to make yourself not boring, or your life not boring. Step 3 - Enforce it. Don't just go back to slacking and being boring again. Step 4 - Watch as you become popular!!
I don't mind admitting that at that, I said to myself, "You know, EarlyMon, that sure sounds a lot like Homer Simpson running around telling people to Safen Up!" "Yeah, you're right on that, EarlyMon. What do you think?" "Well, I was going to say that that makes it all baloney, but you know, EarlyMon, I just realized that there's really nothing boring at all about the Simpsons."
Well, if you're like me, you're just as surprised as I was at the truth of that argument, because it proves by extension that the steps listed above must be right. But then, I had to question whether I wanted to live in a world with MORE Homer Simpsons or FEWER Homer Simpsons, and I had to admit that that was a pretty good question, too.
But I was even more surprised that I was able to process all of that and share it without ever once having the word cromulent creep into my thoughts, otherwise it would have made it into this reply, which it didn't.
So I've got that going for me, which is, you know, nice.
Many thanks - I was aware of those - it's full-size that I don't want - laptop form factor would be ideal, but the mini denovo is closer to the mark. (Others may prefer full-size. In my experience, you want coffee table easy and pass it over to a pal easy ("That was cool! Can I use your keyboard a second? I want to show you....").
Many thanks! Don't know how I missed that one - evidently, it's been out for a year.
That just might do it - it's definitely close enough (I wouldn't mind something just a tad bigger for the old eyes:) but we've no trouble thumbing along sms on our phones, so this is definitely considerable).
Sounds like better paths than what I was trying via my iBook (a small G3 laptop) - but I was less happy with its lower battery performance in this application.
That being said, I can already feel myself starting to click that link in your post....
If you have the time and inclination, kindly help me. I use/love WinXP, but Win is my secondary OS. I rely on public info and my dilemma is that I'm soon going to have to switch to Vista for work-related stuff.
Some months back, Vista haters were talking all about performance problems - I *thought* for the OS as a whole - with whatever it was that they did so drearily with DRM. And some time back, I remember a lot +5/. posts about that but I was skimming back then - Vista was below my radar.
Your anger indicates that you personally know the fact from fiction on this. If you have time, would you kindly provide some links on this that I can study in my own time to understand what's really the state of what on this issue today? All I seem to hit are arguments that are too arcane for me - I'm not a Vista user YET.
Many thanks in advance for any light you can shed. I am not trolling, I am not a shill, I am simply really confused and not too proud to ask for help. I'd really like to know what I'm in for. I have no idea if I'll be able to skip Vista and go Win7 - I have to follow the organization on this one.
This is comparable to a mini pc tucked under the TV with a wireless keyboard and/or a harmony control.
I agree. And speaking as someone using a Mac mini connected to my HDTV and to my DirecTV DVR via EyeConnect and their hardware (USB->TV->PC) for my DVD storage of favorite shows, and interacting with all of that with fancy remotes and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I feel well-qualified to say exactly what's wrong with that whole model.
What I'd really like is a bluetooth laptop keyboard - with trackpad. The EEE keyboard is like the one I use - too big for entertainment-just-put-it-on-your-lap and mousing is still a separate issue. I've even tried pressing an old iBook into laptop service for that - too little battery life (BT keyboard and mouse batteries last *months*!).
I get close with the mini and its little tiny remote and Front Row for a lot of music playing, etc. And I know (and have recommended Sofa Control and Remote Buddy) that it can do more - but there's no substitute for grabbing that keyboard/mouse, surfing over to youtube and playing the Clash's Rocking The Casbah (they have an "HD" version on youtube that looks and sounds great!) or over to http://www.hulu.com/ and watching Muppets in Space (select 480p option, full-screen) - again, looks and sounds great. And I'm sorry, but I can't accept that hacking an AppleTV - and still doing it all via a tiny remote - is as good as a dedicated home theater PC (HTPC). My pref is the Mac mini, but an equivalent Windows model exists in features, price and form factor (if anyone asks, I'll look it up again, link not handy right now) and I'm not an OS snob so I see no reason why the same model won't hold true for Linux with MythTV or whatever.
BUT!!! - From across the room, it's all about the user interface - and in this case, just like the TV remote, it's the little piece of hardware - that I can't find anywhere - that is the missing interface.
I'd love nothing more than somebuddy here at/. to call me a bonehead and send me the links to where I can already buy one - because I haven't found it yet. Standard small laptop keyboard with trackpad, works mac or pc, bluetooth - nothing more or less.
By declaring affiliation with a group, what have you lost?
Dignity and freedom.
The dignity associated with being a self-actualized individual and the freedom to choose brutality and death over enslavement and conformance.
Not utopian. The world behind bars is amplified by density of oppression - but the oppressions and choices in and of themselves are not exclusive to prison - neither is the choice to escape them by pretending to be part of the group.
Case in point: I have long hair and wear flip-flops to work as weather permits. The group hates this as does my employer. Individually, each one privately says that they wish that they could get away with what I do. And they could have - but they chose group conformity - and thereby have become hypocrites without freedom of expression.
Whether it's flip-flops or beatings (and I am speaking as someone gang beaten and left for dead because I would not say a few words of cowardice) - it all comes down to the exact same thing: join any group that you don't belong to in order to conform and thereby profit from that joining and you have said goodbye to your dignity and freedom.
Give me liberty or give me death - some of us get that, some of us don't.
PS on all of that - if you agree that the BSG mythos is indeed ONeillian then by extension - as our rock was one of those colonies - we're all of ONeillian origin and awaiting rendezvous with our ONeillian cousins.
That should make ONeillians such as yourself more than happy.
I think you have no choice but to completely agree with me while you're ahead! (rotflmao)
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough so long as there is no additional lossiness in the conversion.
What are you talking about, "fair enough?" Your original question was whether or not the format is proprietary. It is not. The idea that AAC is proprietary is FUD - unadulterated FUD.
And now you find it "fair enough" to accept that one non-proprietary format will convert to another provided that it's lossless?
You were ignorant of AAC and were educated.
Now you have additional terms and conditions and you'll decide what's fair, in a tour de force display of further technological ignorance?
Who died and made you in charge? Better yet, who are you supposed to be shilling for?
I get letters and "announcements" that are Excel documents for some reason.
Welcome to Lotus 1-2-3, the program that does it all! Yes, when you think of it, the entire world is rows and columns! When you want to use those rows and columns for math, we call it a spreadsheet - that's #1! Just look at any newspaper - rows and columns again! Word Processing, that's #2! And when you want to look up things based on some row and column intersection of data, why, that's just that relational database you've heard about in those tricky magazines like Byte! And that's #3!
Yes - welcome to the enduring hell foisted off on the people as Lotus 1-2-3.
Not only does it sound like you're still being victimized by it, I'm still wretching that VisiCalc never got its just dues in the Lotus/Excel fight.
In case I come across as holding back or blocking, let me be perfectly clear: Fuck Lotus, fuck their corporation, fuck each and everything they ever did - right down to their copy-protected floppies and their "free" backup floppy.
Sorry. I'm better now.
Toot toot!
All of that, and you still haven't learned: go for trilogy! Therefore, I humbly submit on your behalf:
Toot toot toot!
IOW - well done, sir! (OTOH, you may be using the typically British understated toot form.....)
6502 and 68k were early RISC, Z80 was early CISC. All differences stem from that.
And yepper, I wrote assembly (spare us the "it's assembler!" Nazis) for all three.
Couldn't beat the 6502 for fast memory access and movement, IMO - read: graphics on a Commodore or Apple. Couldn't beat the 68k for handling large tables. Couldn't beat the Z80 because everything I did in it was under CP/M - and yes, you could too trace BDOS. :)
We used a outboard 68k tied to an Apple ][+ - if that rings a bell, then this surely will: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1064
Ah, but have you done one interview/year 20 times ?
No and thanks for asking.
Ever write any code?
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears. Having the spreadsheet program produce charts and graphs for you is the single most important advancement in accounting since language.
Gee, I don't know about you, but I used VisiCalc. And its companion, VisiPlot.
I built a just-in-time inventory control system for our small manufacturing concern (about 90 parts suppliers, with lead times from 3 months to 2 weeks), tied to past sales overviews and various sales projections.
Had about 8 or 10 "standard" graphs for the boss every two weeks, showing inventory as idle, in QA, in production, in final QA, in shipping, and in repair (warranty and not).
All around 1980 thru 1982, all on an Apple ][+.
That's a good 28 years ago.
Sorry - for all of the new and fab fancy Excel features, as far as I'm concerned, they're simply not there.
The only things I've used Excel for that I didn't with the Visi series are:
1. Quick building of Fourier transform tables when I was just too lazy and hungover to code them up
2. To increase my vocabulary of cursewords (OK - that's not possible, I'm lying, I'm from Detroit) trying to get simple x-y plots without markers
And to the idea that the new spreadsheets provide statistical functions: big whoopie deal. Sum_y, sum_y_squared - you're done, and you've used VisiCalc. (Then again, I'm a snob who believes that you can't work the teleography of statistical equations you've no right to be spewing about statistics anyways.)
I think this sums up what you're referring to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpMkRIXhLH0
I set a policy in interviews over 20 years ago and it has served me well. Whenever the applicant announces that he has X years of any kind of programming experience, I always warn them that we are about to find out if they've had X years of experience or One Year of Experience, X Times.
You make an excellent point. To carry it a step further, all we know is that a publication claims that their readers think this.
This sort of thing raises interesting ethical questions with respect to stock trading, as well.
What's inside information? Where is the accountability?
Perception is often as important as substance - in some cases, more so.
I'm imagining that I'm in for an endless round of History/Science/Discovery/Animal Planet/BBC channel reruns on this.
Well, I'm nothing if not boring then. But I do feel the pain of others, so I said to myself, "EarlyMon, how could you teach others to be less boring?" Now, this seemed like a pretty good question, in light of the fact that the commandment to not take oneself too seriously is lost these days, so imagine my surprise at the answer that went, "Well, EarlyMon, that's a good question! Why not try Google? They mirror the collective knowledge of all things!" Well, you can't argue with that logic, so I googled for "not boring" and lo and behold, here's what I found (at http://www.ehow.com/how_2136052_not-be-boring.html which is full of ads, not surprisingly including a lot for people that have machines to make holes in the ground, so I'm copying the full information section of the page):
Step 1 - Figure out what it is that makes you boring. Is it your life? Is it your friends? Is it your family?
Step 2 - Figure out different things to make yourself not boring, or your life not boring.
Step 3 - Enforce it. Don't just go back to slacking and being boring again.
Step 4 - Watch as you become popular!!
I don't mind admitting that at that, I said to myself, "You know, EarlyMon, that sure sounds a lot like Homer Simpson running around telling people to Safen Up!" "Yeah, you're right on that, EarlyMon. What do you think?" "Well, I was going to say that that makes it all baloney, but you know, EarlyMon, I just realized that there's really nothing boring at all about the Simpsons."
Well, if you're like me, you're just as surprised as I was at the truth of that argument, because it proves by extension that the steps listed above must be right. But then, I had to question whether I wanted to live in a world with MORE Homer Simpsons or FEWER Homer Simpsons, and I had to admit that that was a pretty good question, too.
But I was even more surprised that I was able to process all of that and share it without ever once having the word cromulent creep into my thoughts, otherwise it would have made it into this reply, which it didn't.
So I've got that going for me, which is, you know, nice.
Many thanks - I was aware of those - it's full-size that I don't want - laptop form factor would be ideal, but the mini denovo is closer to the mark. (Others may prefer full-size. In my experience, you want coffee table easy and pass it over to a pal easy ("That was cool! Can I use your keyboard a second? I want to show you....").
Most helpful - many thanks!
Many thanks! Don't know how I missed that one - evidently, it's been out for a year.
That just might do it - it's definitely close enough (I wouldn't mind something just a tad bigger for the old eyes :) but we've no trouble thumbing along sms on our phones, so this is definitely considerable).
Many thanks for the tip - sincerely.
Sounds like better paths than what I was trying via my iBook (a small G3 laptop) - but I was less happy with its lower battery performance in this application.
That being said, I can already feel myself starting to click that link in your post....
Wyld Stallyns
Yes, preview is my friend.....
Would you say, "Can we please move beyond Mozart"? Some music is timeless.
I agree. Uh... ...we're talking about Wyld Stallions, right?
If you have the time and inclination, kindly help me. I use/love WinXP, but Win is my secondary OS. I rely on public info and my dilemma is that I'm soon going to have to switch to Vista for work-related stuff.
Some months back, Vista haters were talking all about performance problems - I *thought* for the OS as a whole - with whatever it was that they did so drearily with DRM. And some time back, I remember a lot +5 /. posts about that but I was skimming back then - Vista was below my radar.
Your anger indicates that you personally know the fact from fiction on this. If you have time, would you kindly provide some links on this that I can study in my own time to understand what's really the state of what on this issue today? All I seem to hit are arguments that are too arcane for me - I'm not a Vista user YET.
Many thanks in advance for any light you can shed. I am not trolling, I am not a shill, I am simply really confused and not too proud to ask for help. I'd really like to know what I'm in for. I have no idea if I'll be able to skip Vista and go Win7 - I have to follow the organization on this one.
Preview before Submit is your friend.
This is comparable to a mini pc tucked under the TV with a wireless keyboard and/or a harmony control.
I agree. And speaking as someone using a Mac mini connected to my HDTV and to my DirecTV DVR via EyeConnect and their hardware (USB->TV->PC) for my DVD storage of favorite shows, and interacting with all of that with fancy remotes and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I feel well-qualified to say exactly what's wrong with that whole model.
What I'd really like is a bluetooth laptop keyboard - with trackpad. The EEE keyboard is like the one I use - too big for entertainment-just-put-it-on-your-lap and mousing is still a separate issue. I've even tried pressing an old iBook into laptop service for that - too little battery life (BT keyboard and mouse batteries last *months*!).
I get close with the mini and its little tiny remote and Front Row for a lot of music playing, etc. And I know (and have recommended Sofa Control and Remote Buddy) that it can do more - but there's no substitute for grabbing that keyboard/mouse, surfing over to youtube and playing the Clash's Rocking The Casbah (they have an "HD" version on youtube that looks and sounds great!) or over to http://www.hulu.com/ and watching Muppets in Space (select 480p option, full-screen) - again, looks and sounds great. And I'm sorry, but I can't accept that hacking an AppleTV - and still doing it all via a tiny remote - is as good as a dedicated home theater PC (HTPC). My pref is the Mac mini, but an equivalent Windows model exists in features, price and form factor (if anyone asks, I'll look it up again, link not handy right now) and I'm not an OS snob so I see no reason why the same model won't hold true for Linux with MythTV or whatever.
BUT!!! - From across the room, it's all about the user interface - and in this case, just like the TV remote, it's the little piece of hardware - that I can't find anywhere - that is the missing interface.
I'd love nothing more than somebuddy here at /. to call me a bonehead and send me the links to where I can already buy one - because I haven't found it yet. Standard small laptop keyboard with trackpad, works mac or pc, bluetooth - nothing more or less.
Sometimes if you have nothing intelligent to say, ...post your story on slashdot
I hope you know that you're blowing my whole strategy here.
By declaring affiliation with a group, what have you lost?
Dignity and freedom.
The dignity associated with being a self-actualized individual and the freedom to choose brutality and death over enslavement and conformance.
Not utopian. The world behind bars is amplified by density of oppression - but the oppressions and choices in and of themselves are not exclusive to prison - neither is the choice to escape them by pretending to be part of the group.
Case in point: I have long hair and wear flip-flops to work as weather permits. The group hates this as does my employer. Individually, each one privately says that they wish that they could get away with what I do. And they could have - but they chose group conformity - and thereby have become hypocrites without freedom of expression.
Whether it's flip-flops or beatings (and I am speaking as someone gang beaten and left for dead because I would not say a few words of cowardice) - it all comes down to the exact same thing: join any group that you don't belong to in order to conform and thereby profit from that joining and you have said goodbye to your dignity and freedom.
Give me liberty or give me death - some of us get that, some of us don't.
So, you are in favor of allowing the continuous vectors of communications that leads to most of us never escaping unplanned / unpaid overtime.
Or, it could all be shut down in the name of terrorism.
One question - are you nuts or something??
And you connect two machines that way and recruit yourself, not only are you a terrorist, you're a schizophrenic one!
Probably explains your confession masquerading as commentary.
PS on all of that - if you agree that the BSG mythos is indeed ONeillian then by extension - as our rock was one of those colonies - we're all of ONeillian origin and awaiting rendezvous with our ONeillian cousins.
That should make ONeillians such as yourself more than happy.
I think you have no choice but to completely agree with me while you're ahead! (rotflmao)