Applications can store all of their data files and resources on your SD card. Many do already. It's just the executable code that has to be installed locally.
NX is great for programmers. When I'm coding, I have 30 emacs windows open, 10 terminals, 50 tabs in Firefox, etc., spread across several virtual desktops. It takes a while to recreate that state, especially when it's not just the windows, but a lot of useful stuff in each one. With NX, I can grab my laptop for a while and within 5 seconds I'm accessing the same desktop, with no perceptible latency. I just need to scroll a bit since I'm viewing a large desktop on a small screen - but it's much better to scroll a bit and continue coding where I left off, than to recreate my state on my laptop. Then later I close my laptop, go back to my desktop and now I have a nice big monitor again. It's a seamless transition.
The Dell is 1.5" thick and 4.9+ pounds compared to 0.95" thick and 4.5 pounds for the MacBook. It's easy to make a cheap laptop with good specs if you don't care about portability.
When blind people use a computer they use software called a "screen reader". It reads all of the text on the screen to them using speech synthesis (text-to-speech) or alternatively using a braille display. It requires using some extra keyboard shortcuts to navigate around and tell it what to read, along with the normal keyboard shortcuts all of us can use.
There's only one mobile phone operating system that supports fully-functional screenreaders: Symbian. Almost all Symbian-based Nokia phones support screenreaders, and just a couple of other brands that run Symbian.
There are two major phone screenreaders: "Talks" and "Mobile Speak". (Both companies also make mobile phone magnifiers for people who have low vision.) Both Talks and Mobile Speak have approximately the same functionality, they're both way too expensive (around $400), and you can purchase both of them separately from the phone and install it yourself.
In theory, you can use the phone book, send and receive text messages and email, use the media player, use the web browser, and hear the caller ID name spoken when someone calls. In practice there are often bugs on particular phone models - I've heard of a lot of problems with the web browser, caller ID, and the media player - but it is possible to get them to work. The main complaint with the web browser is that it's functional but almost completely impractical to use - even more so than it is for a sighted person on a mobile phone. On the other hand, SMS and email seem to work great - my blind friends can text as fast as anyone I know.
Our executive branch needs the leaders with experience to... lead. That just does not come with a single term in the senate.
Except that's the funny thing about leadership. A few lucky rare people are just born with it. A few others can learn to be good leaders after years of experience and mentoring. But most of us will never be good leaders no matter how much experience we get.
Have you ever worked with someone who was promoted into management from a non-management track? Most of them completely fail at it. When I think back to the few really fantastic leaders I've worked under (at jobs, universities, etc.) they didn't grow slowly into good leaders as they accumulated experience - they were naturally good at it.
Obama has 8 years in the state senate. For some reason people don't want to count it at all, rather than just counting it as a little less important than the U.S. senate. It still counts as leadership.
Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review. How is that not leadership experience?
Finally, Obama led the most well-organized presidential campaign in recent history. I think that proves his leadership skills more than anything.
I work at Google. Most full-time engineering developers have both a Linux desktop and a Windows or Mac laptop. It's a great combination, since all of Google's web backend stuff runs on Linux, but it's often nice to have a Windows or Mac box around too, and they tend to be better choices for laptops.
There are lots of exceptions, of course - Mac desktops, Linux laptops, etc. - plus of course everyone whose full-time job at Google is to write Windows or Mac client software.
I don't have any statistics, but my observation is that even more than 30% of laptops are Macs - probably close to 50%. Desktops are 90% Linux.
Anyway, when you consider that most Google developers use Linux as their development machine and they're trying to decide between a Mac or Windows laptop as a second machine, the article is accurate.
It sounds like you're basically doing the right thing. Ignore your mother and apply to MIT and 5 other good schools, and 2 safe schools to make your mother happy.
Don't bother calling MIT before you're accepted because they won't give you the time of day. I don't blame them, since they only accept a tiny fraction of the people who apply.
Despite what so many other people here are saying, I think you should definitely apply to a top school, but please don't limit yourself to MIT! Grab a list of the top 10 schools for CS and figure out which ones are a good match for you. Putting all of your eggs in the MIT basket is too dangerous. Plus, depending on your exact interests, MIT might not even be the best - in some ways CMU is better, and if you want to start a business someday, arguably Stanford is better.
The difference between getting a CS degree at MIT vs a CS degree at an average state college is your classmates. At MIT, you'll be surrounded by the best and brightest - people who were not only accepted, but chose to go to MIT, even though that meant working harder and taking out more loans. Many of your classmates will be the people starting the next Google, Facebook, or FedEx. The people you do a class project with your senior year might be the people you start a company with the following year. You'll be surprised to discover that top science/engineering schools tend to not be that competitive - they're mostly collaborative. Everyone studies in groups, and your peers will inspire you to do better than you thought you could. The basic material is not much different than at other schools, but when everyone in your class is actually excited about it, you'll learn it better.
When you go to an average school, you'll be surrounded by average students. On the plus side, you might stand out as exceptional. On the down side, you will have relatively few other students who are as smart, ambitious, and interested as you are. It does make a difference.
All of the top U.S. schools offer fantastic financial assistance. First of all, they all practice need-blind admissions - meaning that they don't care how much money you have when deciding if you should be admitted. Once you're admitted, they'll send you a financial package, based on the information they got from your FAFSA and other forms. Unless your parents make a million dollars a year, you're almost certainly going to get a small grant (i.e. free money) and some loans.
If the total remaining amount you and your parents are supposed to pay is still to high, no problem - that's just their initial offer. They will negotiate - the job of the financial aid office is to make it so that you can attend. Let them know how much your parents are willing to spend, and see what they can do for you. If you're lucky, they will find some grants and scholarships to cover more of the difference, and they will definitely offer more loans. Not crappy loans like a car loan or credit card - college loans often have no interest while you're in school, and very low interest rates after that.
And trust me, if you're going into software engineering, some loans are no big deal. You'll get a nice salary and pay them off in a few years, and it will all be worth it.
One thing, though - the financial offer you'll get will vary dramatically from school to school. Virtually all good schools have great financial aid programs that can negotiate with you - but they all value different things and have different rules. Your best bet is to apply and get accepted to a lot of great schools - MIT, Caltech, CMU, Harvard, Yale, UTexas, UIUC, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd - and then pick one of the ones with the best financial offer for you.
What do you suggest as an alternative? Audacity has essentially the same problem but I never found a good solution other than bundling all of the libraries and trying to make system libraries an option for bundlers. Some reasons why it's necessary to bundle certain libraries:
There's no standard repository for such packages on Windows and Mac. So all of the Win/Mac developers need a good place to get those libraries
Many libraries don't come with build files for Win/Mac, and the upstream authors aren't interested
Many libraries use crappy build rules that aren't as portable as the main program
Sometimes a patch or bug fix to the library is necessary for the program to run. Even if you submit it upstream, users with an earlier version installed get a broken application.
Some libraries have many incompatible versions floating around that claim to be the same library, so the app can break if linked to the wrong one
Upstream authors sometimes release new versions that actually break old functionality - again, leading to a broken app. Sometimes it's better to stick with a previous known-good version.
1. They're not actually federal employees. They're employees of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working at a federally-funded research and development center.
2. 3% of JPL employees do have security clearance. They do work on secretive stuff. The other 97% do not. They don't even work in the same "building" - the secret buildings have all sorts of extra security measures. Would you think it's reasonable if a large university like UCLA or Harvard required ALL employees to go through the proceduce to get security clearance, just because one lab in one building has some secrets? Cause that's basically what's being asked of JPL employees, most of whom work on entirely public research.
3. The worst part is that the employees are being required to go through the SAME background check that's required for security clearance, but then they're not even being given clearance! All they get is an ordinary badge that gets them in the front gate. All that, and you don't even get anything in return...except to keep the job you've been doing loyally for 20 years.
What do they want to do when no one signs this? Fire every scientist? Not going to happen.
Unfortunately more than 90% of the roughly 5000 employees at JPL have already signed. Only a few hundred are actively protesting, and 28 are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
If the appeals court hadn't granted a preliminary injuction, they would already have lost their jobs. Despite the fact that they are irreplaceable, NASA would rather fire them rather than back down on these new invasions of privacy.
Your first targets to blame should be Java and the DVD player. Only after you have eliminated them (eg: does the DVD player stop whenever it loses focus ?), does it become reasonable to look at the OS as a potential culprit.
No. My Mac has never interrupted my Keynote presentation except once to say that my battery was so low that the computer was about to sleep (in which case it was a 100% necessary interruption). Quite often when I finish a presentation I'll find a dialog box or two; the operating system silently queued them up or opened them in the background. That's what a modern operating system should do. The fact that a Microsoft presentation program can't do this on the latest Microsoft operating system is pathetic.
I only have two things in my gmail inbox. Spam and messages from my web host (since my main email resides on their servers, if there's an outage, or something, it makes sense for them to have an alternate service address).
I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail. Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.
Have you ever considered the possibility that because the only messages that ever get sent to your gmail box are spam or nonpersonal, gmail is being extra conservative about flagging things as spam? I also suspect that you're not telling gmail which messages are spam, either. Remember, one person's favorite mailing list is another person's spam, so gmail needs at least a little bit of training data. If you start sending real mail to your gmail address and actually read it, and if you mark a few spam messages using their "mark as spam" feature, your spam will almost completely go away.
If you're curious how a blind person "sees" a website, this will give you a pretty good idea in Firefox:
1. Preferences -> Content -> uncheck Load Images Automatically; optionally turn off Flash also. 2. Load the page (target.com) 3. View -> Page Style -> No Style (turns off CSS)
Actually target.com is a little better now than before they filed the lawsuit, but you can still see some really confusing things, like a bunch of images that link to something but without alt tags. And apparently some of the other pages deeper within Target are still inaccessible.
I think this is potentially a really great idea, especially for content that actually has to be presented graphically.
However, to a person who's been blind their whole life, the two-dimensional layout of a webpage is often irrelevant. It doesn't matter to them that one button is to the right of another most of the time. It's far easier to find something by name than it is to find it spatially.
Since you've never seen a screenreader before, check out this video:
It might totally blow your mind to see a blind person fiddling with a preferences dialog or browsing the web as fast as you do; with many years of practice one can learn to understand computer-synthesized speech at several hundred words per minute - about as fast as the average person reads - and with a lot of hot-keys and shortcuts it's possible to navigate pretty fast, too.
Not trying to knock the Wii idea, it's pretty cool - but definitely understand the current solutions first.
I know that Libertarians like to pretend it isn't true, but there are some things that are good for society that would almost never happen under the free market. If 0.5% of Target's customers are blind (a decent estimate), it might not be profitable for Target to go to the expense of assisting them. But if all businesses came to the same conclusion, we'd have a completely inaccessible society, and everyone with a disability would be forced to either live on social security or have a generous person assist them with everything in life. It's not only cruel, it's also worse for the overall economy if these people can't live independently.
Requiring businesses to make reasonable accomodations to the disabled is not intruding, it's really reducing the amount of our tax dollars that need to be spent helping those who can't live independently. This is in addition to the fact that in our society we believe that everyone should be treated equally, even when it requires extra effort to do so.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
Have you actually given yourself a blind listening test? 256 kbps AAC is very, very good. I have never seen a study where anyone could tell the difference between 256 kbps files and uncompressed files a significant fraction of the time. Many people claim that they don't like the sound of MP3 or AAC compression, even at such a high bitrate, but they don't back it up with a real test to prove it.
Do you think that photo sites should get rid of JPEGs and replace them with uncompressed TIFFs, too? I think that JPEG at the 99% quality setting is a fair comparison to AAC 256 kbps.
Let's not forget, they still encode e-mail addresses and names in these 'DRM free' tracks. I still consider that DRM.
You may not like it, but please don't confuse the issue by calling it DRM. It's metadata, even potentially useful metadata, that discourages copyright infringement while not in any way restricting fair use. You can copy those files to any device, or even transcode them into any other format, easily stripping all metadata in the process. Totally different than DRM, where you have to actually break encryption or suffer quality loss in order to do that.
If we're gonna love someone for providing DRM free tracks, remember Amazon is providing actual unencoded MP3s.
Except that they haven't opened their store yet. So don't go lauding them when you don't even know that they're not going to include the user id of the person who downloaded the song in the metadata.
I agree entirely, the Amiga was an awesome computer. But what was impressive was what the Mac was able to do in pure software. The Amiga had some amazing features, but the Mac provided a more polished experience despite having more limited hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm back here because Reddit is down too.
Comment system is not bad.
Stories are good. ...but there just aren't very many of them!
The thing is, most people with a Nokia phone never install a 3rd-party app.
It's real Java. You can use most existing Java libraries. What's different is:
* It uses its own bytecode and its own virtual machine instead of the JVM.
* It uses its own GUI libraries rather than AWT or Swing.
So, you basically need to write your UI from scratch - but otherwise you can reuse any existing Java libraries and source code.
Applications can store all of their data files and resources on your SD card. Many do already. It's just the executable code that has to be installed locally.
NX is great for programmers. When I'm coding, I have 30 emacs windows open, 10 terminals, 50 tabs in Firefox, etc., spread across several virtual desktops. It takes a while to recreate that state, especially when it's not just the windows, but a lot of useful stuff in each one. With NX, I can grab my laptop for a while and within 5 seconds I'm accessing the same desktop, with no perceptible latency. I just need to scroll a bit since I'm viewing a large desktop on a small screen - but it's much better to scroll a bit and continue coding where I left off, than to recreate my state on my laptop. Then later I close my laptop, go back to my desktop and now I have a nice big monitor again. It's a seamless transition.
The Dell is 1.33" thick compared to 0.95" for the MacBook. That's how they save money.
The Dell is 1.5" thick and 4.9+ pounds compared to 0.95" thick and 4.5 pounds for the MacBook. It's easy to make a cheap laptop with good specs if you don't care about portability.
When blind people use a computer they use software called a "screen reader". It reads all of the text on the screen to them using speech synthesis (text-to-speech) or alternatively using a braille display. It requires using some extra keyboard shortcuts to navigate around and tell it what to read, along with the normal keyboard shortcuts all of us can use.
There's only one mobile phone operating system that supports fully-functional screenreaders: Symbian. Almost all Symbian-based Nokia phones support screenreaders, and just a couple of other brands that run Symbian.
There are two major phone screenreaders: "Talks" and "Mobile Speak". (Both companies also make mobile phone magnifiers for people who have low vision.) Both Talks and Mobile Speak have approximately the same functionality, they're both way too expensive (around $400), and you can purchase both of them separately from the phone and install it yourself.
In theory, you can use the phone book, send and receive text messages and email, use the media player, use the web browser, and hear the caller ID name spoken when someone calls. In practice there are often bugs on particular phone models - I've heard of a lot of problems with the web browser, caller ID, and the media player - but it is possible to get them to work. The main complaint with the web browser is that it's functional but almost completely impractical to use - even more so than it is for a sighted person on a mobile phone. On the other hand, SMS and email seem to work great - my blind friends can text as fast as anyone I know.
Our executive branch needs the leaders with experience to... lead. That just does not come with a single term in the senate.
Except that's the funny thing about leadership. A few lucky rare people are just born with it. A few others can learn to be good leaders after years of experience and mentoring. But most of us will never be good leaders no matter how much experience we get.
Have you ever worked with someone who was promoted into management from a non-management track? Most of them completely fail at it. When I think back to the few really fantastic leaders I've worked under (at jobs, universities, etc.) they didn't grow slowly into good leaders as they accumulated experience - they were naturally good at it.
Obama has 8 years in the state senate. For some reason people don't want to count it at all, rather than just counting it as a little less important than the U.S. senate. It still counts as leadership.
Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review. How is that not leadership experience?
Finally, Obama led the most well-organized presidential campaign in recent history. I think that proves his leadership skills more than anything.
I work at Google. Most full-time engineering developers have both a Linux desktop and a Windows or Mac laptop. It's a great combination, since all of Google's web backend stuff runs on Linux, but it's often nice to have a Windows or Mac box around too, and they tend to be better choices for laptops.
There are lots of exceptions, of course - Mac desktops, Linux laptops, etc. - plus of course everyone whose full-time job at Google is to write Windows or Mac client software.
I don't have any statistics, but my observation is that even more than 30% of laptops are Macs - probably close to 50%. Desktops are 90% Linux.
Anyway, when you consider that most Google developers use Linux as their development machine and they're trying to decide between a Mac or Windows laptop as a second machine, the article is accurate.
It sounds like you're basically doing the right thing. Ignore your mother and apply to MIT and 5 other good schools, and 2 safe schools to make your mother happy.
Don't bother calling MIT before you're accepted because they won't give you the time of day. I don't blame them, since they only accept a tiny fraction of the people who apply.
Despite what so many other people here are saying, I think you should definitely apply to a top school, but please don't limit yourself to MIT! Grab a list of the top 10 schools for CS and figure out which ones are a good match for you. Putting all of your eggs in the MIT basket is too dangerous. Plus, depending on your exact interests, MIT might not even be the best - in some ways CMU is better, and if you want to start a business someday, arguably Stanford is better.
The difference between getting a CS degree at MIT vs a CS degree at an average state college is your classmates. At MIT, you'll be surrounded by the best and brightest - people who were not only accepted, but chose to go to MIT, even though that meant working harder and taking out more loans. Many of your classmates will be the people starting the next Google, Facebook, or FedEx. The people you do a class project with your senior year might be the people you start a company with the following year. You'll be surprised to discover that top science/engineering schools tend to not be that competitive - they're mostly collaborative. Everyone studies in groups, and your peers will inspire you to do better than you thought you could. The basic material is not much different than at other schools, but when everyone in your class is actually excited about it, you'll learn it better.
When you go to an average school, you'll be surrounded by average students. On the plus side, you might stand out as exceptional. On the down side, you will have relatively few other students who are as smart, ambitious, and interested as you are. It does make a difference.
All of the top U.S. schools offer fantastic financial assistance. First of all, they all practice need-blind admissions - meaning that they don't care how much money you have when deciding if you should be admitted. Once you're admitted, they'll send you a financial package, based on the information they got from your FAFSA and other forms. Unless your parents make a million dollars a year, you're almost certainly going to get a small grant (i.e. free money) and some loans.
If the total remaining amount you and your parents are supposed to pay is still to high, no problem - that's just their initial offer. They will negotiate - the job of the financial aid office is to make it so that you can attend. Let them know how much your parents are willing to spend, and see what they can do for you. If you're lucky, they will find some grants and scholarships to cover more of the difference, and they will definitely offer more loans. Not crappy loans like a car loan or credit card - college loans often have no interest while you're in school, and very low interest rates after that.
And trust me, if you're going into software engineering, some loans are no big deal. You'll get a nice salary and pay them off in a few years, and it will all be worth it.
One thing, though - the financial offer you'll get will vary dramatically from school to school. Virtually all good schools have great financial aid programs that can negotiate with you - but they all value different things and have different rules. Your best bet is to apply and get accepted to a lot of great schools - MIT, Caltech, CMU, Harvard, Yale, UTexas, UIUC, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd - and then pick one of the ones with the best financial offer for you.
- There's no standard repository for such packages on Windows and Mac. So all of the Win/Mac developers need a good place to get those libraries
- Many libraries don't come with build files for Win/Mac, and the upstream authors aren't interested
- Many libraries use crappy build rules that aren't as portable as the main program
- Sometimes a patch or bug fix to the library is necessary for the program to run. Even if you submit it upstream, users with an earlier version installed get a broken application.
- Some libraries have many incompatible versions floating around that claim to be the same library, so the app can break if linked to the wrong one
- Upstream authors sometimes release new versions that actually break old functionality - again, leading to a broken app. Sometimes it's better to stick with a previous known-good version.
Do you have a better solution in mind?Does anybody else have any links to interesting open data sets?
My favorite: near-real-time medium-resolution satellite images from NASA: http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
I worked at JPL for 5 years.
1. They're not actually federal employees. They're employees of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working at a federally-funded research and development center.
2. 3% of JPL employees do have security clearance. They do work on secretive stuff. The other 97% do not. They don't even work in the same "building" - the secret buildings have all sorts of extra security measures. Would you think it's reasonable if a large university like UCLA or Harvard required ALL employees to go through the proceduce to get security clearance, just because one lab in one building has some secrets? Cause that's basically what's being asked of JPL employees, most of whom work on entirely public research.
3. The worst part is that the employees are being required to go through the SAME background check that's required for security clearance, but then they're not even being given clearance! All they get is an ordinary badge that gets them in the front gate. All that, and you don't even get anything in return...except to keep the job you've been doing loyally for 20 years.
What do they want to do when no one signs this? Fire every scientist? Not going to happen.
Unfortunately more than 90% of the roughly 5000 employees at JPL have already signed. Only a few hundred are actively protesting, and 28 are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
If the appeals court hadn't granted a preliminary injuction, they would already have lost their jobs. Despite the fact that they are irreplaceable, NASA would rather fire them rather than back down on these new invasions of privacy.
Your first targets to blame should be Java and the DVD player. Only after you have eliminated them (eg: does the DVD player stop whenever it loses focus ?), does it become reasonable to look at the OS as a potential culprit.
No. My Mac has never interrupted my Keynote presentation except once to say that my battery was so low that the computer was about to sleep (in which case it was a 100% necessary interruption). Quite often when I finish a presentation I'll find a dialog box or two; the operating system silently queued them up or opened them in the background. That's what a modern operating system should do. The fact that a Microsoft presentation program can't do this on the latest Microsoft operating system is pathetic.
I only have two things in my gmail inbox. Spam and messages from my web host (since my main email resides on their servers, if there's an outage, or something, it makes sense for them to have an alternate service address).
I never understood people who say they don't get spam on gmail. Since I don't use it except as a backup, I've never given my address to anyone save for my web host and yet, here is all this spam.
Have you ever considered the possibility that because the only messages that ever get sent to your gmail box are spam or nonpersonal, gmail is being extra conservative about flagging things as spam? I also suspect that you're not telling gmail which messages are spam, either. Remember, one person's favorite mailing list is another person's spam, so gmail needs at least a little bit of training data. If you start sending real mail to your gmail address and actually read it, and if you mark a few spam messages using their "mark as spam" feature, your spam will almost completely go away.
If you're curious how a blind person "sees" a website, this will give you a pretty good idea in Firefox:
1. Preferences -> Content -> uncheck Load Images Automatically; optionally turn off Flash also.
2. Load the page (target.com)
3. View -> Page Style -> No Style (turns off CSS)
Actually target.com is a little better now than before they filed the lawsuit, but you can still see some really confusing things, like a bunch of images that link to something but without alt tags. And apparently some of the other pages deeper within Target are still inaccessible.
I think this is potentially a really great idea, especially for content that actually has to be presented graphically.
However, to a person who's been blind their whole life, the two-dimensional layout of a webpage is often irrelevant. It doesn't matter to them that one button is to the right of another most of the time. It's far easier to find something by name than it is to find it spatially.
Since you've never seen a screenreader before, check out this video:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=329037&fr=
It might totally blow your mind to see a blind person fiddling with a preferences dialog or browsing the web as fast as you do; with many years of practice one can learn to understand computer-synthesized speech at several hundred words per minute - about as fast as the average person reads - and with a lot of hot-keys and shortcuts it's possible to navigate pretty fast, too.
Not trying to knock the Wii idea, it's pretty cool - but definitely understand the current solutions first.
I know that Libertarians like to pretend it isn't true, but there are some things that are good for society that would almost never happen under the free market. If 0.5% of Target's customers are blind (a decent estimate), it might not be profitable for Target to go to the expense of assisting them. But if all businesses came to the same conclusion, we'd have a completely inaccessible society, and everyone with a disability would be forced to either live on social security or have a generous person assist them with everything in life. It's not only cruel, it's also worse for the overall economy if these people can't live independently.
Requiring businesses to make reasonable accomodations to the disabled is not intruding, it's really reducing the amount of our tax dollars that need to be spent helping those who can't live independently. This is in addition to the fact that in our society we believe that everyone should be treated equally, even when it requires extra effort to do so.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
Have you actually given yourself a blind listening test? 256 kbps AAC is very, very good. I have never seen a study where anyone could tell the difference between 256 kbps files and uncompressed files a significant fraction of the time. Many people claim that they don't like the sound of MP3 or AAC compression, even at such a high bitrate, but they don't back it up with a real test to prove it.
Do you think that photo sites should get rid of JPEGs and replace them with uncompressed TIFFs, too? I think that JPEG at the 99% quality setting is a fair comparison to AAC 256 kbps.
Let's not forget, they still encode e-mail addresses and names in these 'DRM free' tracks. I still consider that DRM.
You may not like it, but please don't confuse the issue by calling it DRM. It's metadata, even potentially useful metadata, that discourages copyright infringement while not in any way restricting fair use. You can copy those files to any device, or even transcode them into any other format, easily stripping all metadata in the process. Totally different than DRM, where you have to actually break encryption or suffer quality loss in order to do that.
If we're gonna love someone for providing DRM free tracks, remember Amazon is providing actual unencoded MP3s.
Except that they haven't opened their store yet. So don't go lauding them when you don't even know that they're not going to include the user id of the person who downloaded the song in the metadata.
I agree entirely, the Amiga was an awesome computer. But what was impressive was what the Mac was able to do in pure software. The Amiga had some amazing features, but the Mac provided a more polished experience despite having more limited hardware.