Honest question: are any online stores offering lossless (flac or otherwise) files? I don't really care about buying physical CDs but I'll put up with a closet full of CDs as long as the alternative is a lossy format that will have awful quality if I ever choose to convert the files to something else. Last time I cared to check I couldn't find an online retailer offering lossless formats.
And I've been waiting over a month for Amazon to get an album back in stock and ship it to me >:(
Most video material comes, originally, from a camera of some sort. (Obviously, this isn't the case for animation.) All of the HD camera systems I know of record in H.264, MPEG-4 or MPEG-2. (It might be called HD-DV or something else, but it's MPEG compressing under the hood.) So, if that gives H.264 an advantage, there isn't much that can be done about it. It will take a long time to replace all of the camera gear out there...
As I understand it the argument is that when you're comparing the final result to the source material the results will show H.264 being more "accurate", but since we are talking about "accuracy" of artifacts it may or may not be an indication of video quality.
There is also this little piece of text on the bottom of the page (from the VP8 developers):
Even with this limitation, VP8 delivered respectable results against other encoders, especially considering this is the first time VP8 has been included in the test and VP8 has not been specifically optimized for SSIM as some other codecs have.
To date, WebM developers have focused on the VP8 decoder performance and are only starting to optimize the encoder for speed. The WebM project has only been underway for three weeks, and we believe that our encoder speed will improve significantly in the near future.
Yeah it sounds a little bit like they're making excuses but their claims are believable. We'll see if they are telling the truth about these "significant speed improvements in the near future".
If I was King of California, I'd know what I'd do solve the budget problems of California. I'd raise taxes.
Except California already has the highest sales tax (when local taxes are added). Not to mention one of the highest costs of living in the country. I would say that's a pretty good indication that our problem is related more to our spending than our taxing.
Driving up the cost of living and the cost of doing business can cause plenty of negative side effects, so just raising taxes isn't a fix-all for California's budget problems.
taxes haven't been able to be raised in California for since the 1970s
And if you're talking about property taxes not going up the value of the property is still assessed when the property changes ownership. Even if the percentage of the property value paid doesn't change it's still a lot more for the state government than it was in the 70s since home prices have gone up quite a bit faster than inflation.
ms office is lucky if it gets the format of a ms office file correct, the format is just that convoluted.
At work we have a bunch of.xls files. We use Excel 2003 files because we have a mix of 2003 and 2007. Every time you save these files in 2007 it complains that some things are incompatible with 2003, though most of the time you just used a color 2003 doesn't support so people just ignore the error. On one of them someone managed to save the file such that when you open it in Excel 2003 all of the formatting and coloring is gone. So yeah... not even Microsoft can save their files in a compatible format.
I'm not a huge fan of OpenOffice myself but I prefer Writer to Word. I can't stand the ribbon for one. Also, when you put an image into Word it tries to be "smart" about the placement and as a result moves everything all over the place. Writer lets me put the image exactly where I want it without trying to "help".
And Calc is a decent replacement for 90% of Excel users, though it does break down when you try to do more advanced things.
"We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance.
Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said.
This isn't clear whether they mean the "financial assistance" is limited to the borrowing, or if there's some other financial assistance program where they basically buy the laptop for you. But either way nobody is *required* to buy a $900 laptop. It just might be less convenient, depending on what they meant by "financial assistance".
Also,
The district considered PCs but decided to go with MacBooks because Apple offers a better package with educational and technical support, Hayes said. Plus, the software the district would have to purchase for a PC adds up.
"When it came down to it, there was a minimal difference in savings," he said.
So they are arguing that even though $900 is a lot for a laptop the other software they would have to buy for a Windows-based machine would make the prices comparable anyway.
It is a clever program teaching students to fix other students' computers and such. Though which parent is going to hand a $900 laptop they just bought to a high school student to fix when it's probably still under warranty?
Really though the best thing they could do to "teach" these kids is to have mac as the only supported platform and if the kids want to use a different one they have to figure out how to do the equivalent work on their platform of choice. Some parents (and students) might complain, but getting your hands dirty is how you learn.
To clarify I doubt they are using GPS for this. Many phones do have GPS capability and it can often be disabled. Most likely they are just triangulating your position using their towers. GPS uses satellites.
Unfortunately, they still require online activation, don't support LAN play, and are region locking SC2 so that you can't play with people from a different region without purchasing that regions version.
I consider region locking a plus. It's not very fun having someone on the other side of the world lagging up your game, which they seem to love doing in Warcraft 3.
I won't miss LAN play so much assuming it doesn't hurt the third party developers adding features that should be in the game anyway (from Warcraft 3: banlists, latency reducers, hosting bots, ping checkers, etc.)
Realise that some of what you learned in college was bullshit, but not all of it. Don't go around preaching shit like you're the smartest guy there when you have almost no experience. Try to learn from other people's experience even if they're wrong - usually they have a reason for being the way they are after so many years. Have a can-do attitude but not too much. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Often times when someone requests a new feature the best thing to do is say "I'll look into it" and start by figuring out just how much effort it will take. Many problems are more complicated than they seem on the surface and if something will take a long time to complete communicating this early is a very good idea, or more thorough analysis may reveal you don't fully understand what they were asking you to do. Use this experience to learn to judge how long different tasks take to complete since your estimates will be completely wrong at first. Also work on communication skills. Before you go designing some complicated system it's a good idea to make sure that's what your customer or boss is expecting.
Also, understand your boss and your co-workers. If I think someone is approaching something wrong I will generally tell them. Most people appreciate this, but some people just can't take criticism. Learn how to nicely communicate criticism and when you're dealing with someone who can't handle it, but I guess that comes a year or more later when you actually know what you're doing.
And ask questions. Nobody expects someone fresh out of college to know what they're doing and hit the ground running, and it's better that you ask questions than sit around wasting time. You probably won't be very productive for at least the first 6 months or so if you're working on an existing project or doing something you've never done before.
I still prefer to vote for the candidate I like the best, whether he be Republican, Democrat, or other. Usually this means "other" lately. Because at the end of the day it's a winner take all system and my vote will not affect the end result. The most significant impact i can have is to be part of the statistic of people who are ready to take some other candidates seriously. Too many people follow the logic that they don't get votes so they won't win so you shouldn't give them your vote.
That said most of the third party and independent candidates are still extremists I wouldn't vote for, but I have found a few I liked.
"Manual Deskterity" (did not see this term referenced in the slideshow by the way - where did it come from?) sounds like something they developed just so they could patent it. This seems like the natural progression for something like the Wiimote or possibly even an iPad-like device, considering it's what people do naturally anyway.
Funny thing I noticed flipping through the slideshow: many of the annoying pop-up mouseover ads open a bing window (including the word "Apple"). Of course there are also Google ads unobtrusively placed under the main content of the page. If only Microsoft had some people around who could research ways of making their ads less annoying...
I watched the congressional committee on the National Broadband Plan. Everyone should really watch C-SPAN once in a while as it can be very insightful. Every so often you see a congressman that isn't too bad and it would be a shame to kick these people out of office because you're so angry at party X.
Most of it was everyone just giving speeches for camera time and repeating the same thing as everyone else in their party. The Democrats pointed out all of the studies showing how we're far from the top country in terms of broadband access, while the Republicans waved their hands and said "We're the best! Don't change anything!" without any facts to back it up. So of course on the topic of net neutrality the Republicans were very vocal about this evil "net neutrality" business and how terrible it is that the FCC wants to "regulate the internet." Not one of them appeared to have any grasp of what net neutrality is really about. Genachowski tried to explain it to one of them but didn't do a very good job. Even the Republicans in the FCC were against net neutrality. One of them (I forgot his name) said he thinks it doesn't need enforced because the free market will fix it as broadband speeds increase, showing he doesn't really understand the problem. Not to mention even if he was right this is just another incentive for the ISPs to make sure speeds don't increase too much.
But the Democrats had an equally scary complaint. Most of them were bothered by the fact that the National Broadband Plan didn't lay out ways to police the internet for copyright and IP infringement. It does mention the need to address the problem (and Genachowski said several times that this is a problem), but it doesn't lay out anything specific, which is why they were complaining. Off the top of my head the lady from Tennessee was the most vocal about how "her constituents" demand strict enforcement of intellectual property laws on the internet.
So for anyone saying congress should pass laws about this stuff be careful what you ask for. I feel a lot better about Genachowski making these rules than any of the congressmen I saw in that room. Though I know in general it is preferred to have elected officials making the rules, our congressmen generally don't know what they're talking about in this field.
On an interesting side note apparently this plan mentions opening the market for set top boxes, which the congressional chairman (Boucher) pointed out they had discussed 15 years ago and nothing came of it. He told the FCC "please do this as soon as possible". I am planning on building a MythBox so I was happy about this.
Yeah I have the WRT610N and I've been checking the DD-WRT site every so often. I think this router has been listed as "supported" for a while but if you read the forum thread about it people are still having issues with reboots and slow speeds. It's a shame because DD-WRT is much better than the stock firmware, but I'm not changing firmware until I know it's going to work without too many headaches.
It always helps to try out different versions of linux. There are always little things that are different, or little things that work in one and not in another.
For example, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and normally run Kubuntu on my laptop. Since Ubuntu is more Gnome-centered the KDE version would have little bugs here and there (updating to 9.04 killed wireless networking - had to switch to WICD with a wired connection, I had a bunch of "available updates" appearing in the updater, only to tell me I can't actually update them when I tried, etc.)
I recently (this week) decided to try Fedora 12 and see if their KDE version is any better. The first thing I notice is that it uses nouveau by default for the graphics driver and they have decided to make it a pain in the ass to install the official nVidia driver. Also, dragging my finger along the right side of the touch pad to scroll doesn't work (it's a Thinkpad so that's the only thing I use the touch pad for. The eraser head is much better for moving the pointer.) I also noticed there is less stuff in the repository.
I'm still using Fedora on my laptop because I like to keep up on the different options (hence Gnome on the desktop even though I prefer KDE). Every OS has its quirks and the different versions of linux are no different.
For a server you have a whole different set of concerns and have to worry about reliability and how well the distro is tested for the types of applications you're using it for.
So "better" depends partly on application and partly on personal preference in most cases.
Probably not the best example. Altria (symbol MO) owns Philip Morris USA (according to the description at http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MO) and Philip Morris International (PM) operates outside of the U.S. So they really only changed their name in the U.S.
I still prefer the way Opera does it, which is if I want to search I can type "g " or "y " to search google or yahoo. I use this all the time. This way if I want to search using the bar it is explicit. On the other hand most people wouldn't bother to figure out such a feature even exists...
Well I would argue that VB's syntax is trash and should have been killed off long ago, but I guess that's subjective. Anyway, thanks for the clarification.
Anyone going into a programming major will at one point or another be exposed to C or C++ unless their university is garbage. I do agree that showing them static typing and memory management early is good, but it doesn't need to be their first exposure to programming.
C, C++ and Java are not an option. They all need years to master and have numerous non-obvious pitfalls. Pascal is pretty limitad and definitly a historic design. PHP is obscure in palaces. Visual Basic still is a bad joke, confined to just one platform and wioth numerous design problems.
On the other hand Python is fine, with the only thing to master the indention. Not on the list, but Ruby would also be nice. And for a minimalistic, yet powerful language, loot at (again not on the list) Lua.
So I've gotten from this post that PHP is fine as long as you're not coding in palaces and Lua contains other programming languages if you loot it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or there will be a plague in eastern Florida of sharks or elephants or whatever it is that eats turtles.
Honest question: are any online stores offering lossless (flac or otherwise) files? I don't really care about buying physical CDs but I'll put up with a closet full of CDs as long as the alternative is a lossy format that will have awful quality if I ever choose to convert the files to something else. Last time I cared to check I couldn't find an online retailer offering lossless formats.
And I've been waiting over a month for Amazon to get an album back in stock and ship it to me >:(
Most video material comes, originally, from a camera of some sort. (Obviously, this isn't the case for animation.) All of the HD camera systems I know of record in H.264, MPEG-4 or MPEG-2. (It might be called HD-DV or something else, but it's MPEG compressing under the hood.) So, if that gives H.264 an advantage, there isn't much that can be done about it. It will take a long time to replace all of the camera gear out there...
As I understand it the argument is that when you're comparing the final result to the source material the results will show H.264 being more "accurate", but since we are talking about "accuracy" of artifacts it may or may not be an indication of video quality.
There is also this little piece of text on the bottom of the page (from the VP8 developers):
Even with this limitation, VP8 delivered respectable results against other encoders, especially considering this is the first time VP8 has been included in the test and VP8 has not been specifically optimized for SSIM as some other codecs have.
To date, WebM developers have focused on the VP8 decoder performance and are only starting to optimize the encoder for speed. The WebM project has only been underway for three weeks, and we believe that our encoder speed will improve significantly in the near future.
Yeah it sounds a little bit like they're making excuses but their claims are believable. We'll see if they are telling the truth about these "significant speed improvements in the near future".
If I was King of California, I'd know what I'd do solve the budget problems of California. I'd raise taxes.
Except California already has the highest sales tax (when local taxes are added). Not to mention one of the highest costs of living in the country. I would say that's a pretty good indication that our problem is related more to our spending than our taxing.
Driving up the cost of living and the cost of doing business can cause plenty of negative side effects, so just raising taxes isn't a fix-all for California's budget problems.
taxes haven't been able to be raised in California for since the 1970s
That's just outright wrong. For the past year we've been paying an extra 1% sales tax and local taxes have certainly gone up. LA county went up half a percent at the same time.
And if you're talking about property taxes not going up the value of the property is still assessed when the property changes ownership. Even if the percentage of the property value paid doesn't change it's still a lot more for the state government than it was in the 70s since home prices have gone up quite a bit faster than inflation.
ms office is lucky if it gets the format of a ms office file correct, the format is just that convoluted.
At work we have a bunch of .xls files. We use Excel 2003 files because we have a mix of 2003 and 2007. Every time you save these files in 2007 it complains that some things are incompatible with 2003, though most of the time you just used a color 2003 doesn't support so people just ignore the error. On one of them someone managed to save the file such that when you open it in Excel 2003 all of the formatting and coloring is gone. So yeah... not even Microsoft can save their files in a compatible format.
I'm not a huge fan of OpenOffice myself but I prefer Writer to Word. I can't stand the ribbon for one. Also, when you put an image into Word it tries to be "smart" about the placement and as a result moves everything all over the place. Writer lets me put the image exactly where I want it without trying to "help".
And Calc is a decent replacement for 90% of Excel users, though it does break down when you try to do more advanced things.
"We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance.
Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said.
This isn't clear whether they mean the "financial assistance" is limited to the borrowing, or if there's some other financial assistance program where they basically buy the laptop for you. But either way nobody is *required* to buy a $900 laptop. It just might be less convenient, depending on what they meant by "financial assistance".
Also,
The district considered PCs but decided to go with MacBooks because Apple offers a better package with educational and technical support, Hayes said. Plus, the software the district would have to purchase for a PC adds up.
"When it came down to it, there was a minimal difference in savings," he said.
So they are arguing that even though $900 is a lot for a laptop the other software they would have to buy for a Windows-based machine would make the prices comparable anyway.
It is a clever program teaching students to fix other students' computers and such. Though which parent is going to hand a $900 laptop they just bought to a high school student to fix when it's probably still under warranty?
Really though the best thing they could do to "teach" these kids is to have mac as the only supported platform and if the kids want to use a different one they have to figure out how to do the equivalent work on their platform of choice. Some parents (and students) might complain, but getting your hands dirty is how you learn.
To clarify I doubt they are using GPS for this. Many phones do have GPS capability and it can often be disabled. Most likely they are just triangulating your position using their towers. GPS uses satellites.
Unfortunately, they still require online activation, don't support LAN play, and are region locking SC2 so that you can't play with people from a different region without purchasing that regions version.
I consider region locking a plus. It's not very fun having someone on the other side of the world lagging up your game, which they seem to love doing in Warcraft 3.
I won't miss LAN play so much assuming it doesn't hurt the third party developers adding features that should be in the game anyway (from Warcraft 3: banlists, latency reducers, hosting bots, ping checkers, etc.)
That's the first time I've heard Perl and better readability together.
He did say they started out as bat files...
Was he playing faster and faster?
If only they had painted him black he could have joined a metal band.
Realise that some of what you learned in college was bullshit, but not all of it. Don't go around preaching shit like you're the smartest guy there when you have almost no experience. Try to learn from other people's experience even if they're wrong - usually they have a reason for being the way they are after so many years. Have a can-do attitude but not too much. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Often times when someone requests a new feature the best thing to do is say "I'll look into it" and start by figuring out just how much effort it will take. Many problems are more complicated than they seem on the surface and if something will take a long time to complete communicating this early is a very good idea, or more thorough analysis may reveal you don't fully understand what they were asking you to do. Use this experience to learn to judge how long different tasks take to complete since your estimates will be completely wrong at first. Also work on communication skills. Before you go designing some complicated system it's a good idea to make sure that's what your customer or boss is expecting.
Also, understand your boss and your co-workers. If I think someone is approaching something wrong I will generally tell them. Most people appreciate this, but some people just can't take criticism. Learn how to nicely communicate criticism and when you're dealing with someone who can't handle it, but I guess that comes a year or more later when you actually know what you're doing.
And ask questions. Nobody expects someone fresh out of college to know what they're doing and hit the ground running, and it's better that you ask questions than sit around wasting time. You probably won't be very productive for at least the first 6 months or so if you're working on an existing project or doing something you've never done before.
I still prefer to vote for the candidate I like the best, whether he be Republican, Democrat, or other. Usually this means "other" lately. Because at the end of the day it's a winner take all system and my vote will not affect the end result. The most significant impact i can have is to be part of the statistic of people who are ready to take some other candidates seriously. Too many people follow the logic that they don't get votes so they won't win so you shouldn't give them your vote.
That said most of the third party and independent candidates are still extremists I wouldn't vote for, but I have found a few I liked.
"Manual Deskterity" (did not see this term referenced in the slideshow by the way - where did it come from?) sounds like something they developed just so they could patent it. This seems like the natural progression for something like the Wiimote or possibly even an iPad-like device, considering it's what people do naturally anyway.
Funny thing I noticed flipping through the slideshow: many of the annoying pop-up mouseover ads open a bing window (including the word "Apple"). Of course there are also Google ads unobtrusively placed under the main content of the page. If only Microsoft had some people around who could research ways of making their ads less annoying...
I watched the congressional committee on the National Broadband Plan. Everyone should really watch C-SPAN once in a while as it can be very insightful. Every so often you see a congressman that isn't too bad and it would be a shame to kick these people out of office because you're so angry at party X.
Most of it was everyone just giving speeches for camera time and repeating the same thing as everyone else in their party. The Democrats pointed out all of the studies showing how we're far from the top country in terms of broadband access, while the Republicans waved their hands and said "We're the best! Don't change anything!" without any facts to back it up. So of course on the topic of net neutrality the Republicans were very vocal about this evil "net neutrality" business and how terrible it is that the FCC wants to "regulate the internet." Not one of them appeared to have any grasp of what net neutrality is really about. Genachowski tried to explain it to one of them but didn't do a very good job. Even the Republicans in the FCC were against net neutrality. One of them (I forgot his name) said he thinks it doesn't need enforced because the free market will fix it as broadband speeds increase, showing he doesn't really understand the problem. Not to mention even if he was right this is just another incentive for the ISPs to make sure speeds don't increase too much.
But the Democrats had an equally scary complaint. Most of them were bothered by the fact that the National Broadband Plan didn't lay out ways to police the internet for copyright and IP infringement. It does mention the need to address the problem (and Genachowski said several times that this is a problem), but it doesn't lay out anything specific, which is why they were complaining. Off the top of my head the lady from Tennessee was the most vocal about how "her constituents" demand strict enforcement of intellectual property laws on the internet.
So for anyone saying congress should pass laws about this stuff be careful what you ask for. I feel a lot better about Genachowski making these rules than any of the congressmen I saw in that room. Though I know in general it is preferred to have elected officials making the rules, our congressmen generally don't know what they're talking about in this field.
On an interesting side note apparently this plan mentions opening the market for set top boxes, which the congressional chairman (Boucher) pointed out they had discussed 15 years ago and nothing came of it. He told the FCC "please do this as soon as possible". I am planning on building a MythBox so I was happy about this.
Yeah I have the WRT610N and I've been checking the DD-WRT site every so often. I think this router has been listed as "supported" for a while but if you read the forum thread about it people are still having issues with reboots and slow speeds. It's a shame because DD-WRT is much better than the stock firmware, but I'm not changing firmware until I know it's going to work without too many headaches.
What makes one Linux better than another?
It always helps to try out different versions of linux. There are always little things that are different, or little things that work in one and not in another.
For example, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and normally run Kubuntu on my laptop. Since Ubuntu is more Gnome-centered the KDE version would have little bugs here and there (updating to 9.04 killed wireless networking - had to switch to WICD with a wired connection, I had a bunch of "available updates" appearing in the updater, only to tell me I can't actually update them when I tried, etc.)
I recently (this week) decided to try Fedora 12 and see if their KDE version is any better. The first thing I notice is that it uses nouveau by default for the graphics driver and they have decided to make it a pain in the ass to install the official nVidia driver. Also, dragging my finger along the right side of the touch pad to scroll doesn't work (it's a Thinkpad so that's the only thing I use the touch pad for. The eraser head is much better for moving the pointer.) I also noticed there is less stuff in the repository.
I'm still using Fedora on my laptop because I like to keep up on the different options (hence Gnome on the desktop even though I prefer KDE). Every OS has its quirks and the different versions of linux are no different.
For a server you have a whole different set of concerns and have to worry about reliability and how well the distro is tested for the types of applications you're using it for.
So "better" depends partly on application and partly on personal preference in most cases.
I don't think that would sit well.
Probably not the best example. Altria (symbol MO) owns Philip Morris USA (according to the description at http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MO) and Philip Morris International (PM) operates outside of the U.S. So they really only changed their name in the U.S.
I still prefer the way Opera does it, which is if I want to search I can type "g " or "y " to search google or yahoo. I use this all the time. This way if I want to search using the bar it is explicit. On the other hand most people wouldn't bother to figure out such a feature even exists...
Now Biden has convinced him? What about when he appointed 5 of RIAA lawyers to the Department of Justice?
Well I would argue that VB's syntax is trash and should have been killed off long ago, but I guess that's subjective. Anyway, thanks for the clarification.
Anyone going into a programming major will at one point or another be exposed to C or C++ unless their university is garbage. I do agree that showing them static typing and memory management early is good, but it doesn't need to be their first exposure to programming.
C, C++ and Java are not an option. They all need years to master and have numerous non-obvious pitfalls. Pascal is pretty limitad and definitly a historic design. PHP is obscure in palaces. Visual Basic still is a bad joke, confined to just one platform and wioth numerous design problems.
On the other hand Python is fine, with the only thing to master the indention. Not on the list, but Ruby would also be nice. And for a minimalistic, yet powerful language, loot at (again not on the list) Lua.
So I've gotten from this post that PHP is fine as long as you're not coding in palaces and Lua contains other programming languages if you loot it.
Don't use VB anything unless you hate these kids. I haven't used VB.Net but if it bears any resemblance to VBA and VBScript whatsoever stay far away.