Aah, any time streaming music (or digital music in general) is brought up, someone always makes the obligatory "Ogg Vorbis" comment. It's getting to be as old as the beowulf cluster jokes. There are several reasons these players will probably never support ogg. The most glaring of these is a limited marketplace. Nobody outside the geek community even knows what ogg is. It has no real advantages over MP3, other than being "free," which most people don't give a flying fuck about.
Ogg is essentially a solution without a problem. MP3 fills the void as a good quality compression scheme, and has been around a lot longer than ogg. I'm not saying they should give up, it's always a nice intellectual exercise to have a choice, but please, PLEASE stop posting the stupid "I wanna see this MP3 technology in ogg!" comments. It's old, we know you envy MP3, but if you want to use the technology, nobody is stopping you from using MP3. I'm sure the streamium format is proprietary anyway, so don't feed me the "but MP3 is proprietary" crap. I'm sure this will be modded down as flamebait, but honestly guys, we're sick of hearing it.
Aah, to be idealistic. I agree with you, that's the way it SHOULD work. But American voters are so apathetic of elections that who gets into office largely depends on their party affiliation. This is especially true for representatives. Nobody knows who these guys are, they just elect them because they're a republican or a democrat. The only election people pay attention to is the presidential election. The money helps because it allows for name recognition; people who know nothing about the issues and are middle of the road are more likely to vote for the guy whose name they recognize.
The two party system also doesn't help. Party platforms are the bane of modern politics. I'm personally pro-choice yet against a lot of gun control. Who the fuck do I vote for? I have to choose which of these issues (which really are both the same issue; the government's ability to legislate my private life) is more important to me, there's no viable third party that encompasses both of these. Yes, I realize that these views are supported by the Libertarians. They are not a viable third party because they will never win an important election. Not with the winner-take-all system in US politics. And that's not something you can change by calling your representative.
Yes, that will work for about 5 seconds until the/. types start screaming "DRM! DRM!" and someone cracks the encryption scheme allowing you to convert your songs to MP3 and keep them forever. So in other words, this has about as much chance happening as Dubya getting into Mensa.
Ah.. well it's hard to compare them. ATRAC3 was designed to be used at higher bitrates and is significantly older technology than Ogg.. So I'd say Ogg is probably better on a quality/size ratio.. But iirc ATRAC3 takes much less processing power to encode/decode (thus making it better for portables; the NetMDs get around 100 hours battery life off a single AA battery,) so I guess there's a tradeoff.
I dunno where you buy RAM, but you can get 512 MB sticks of PC3100 for $120. Crucial, good stuff too. That's right about $250 for a gig of fast, stable RAM.
ATRAC3 is pretty much the antithesis of ogg vorbis.:) Ogg is a free, open codec, while ATRAC3 is a closely guarded, definately closed standard. Sony is pretty much the only company that uses ATRAC3 (with good reason, they own it) and they're both used in opposing markets.. ATRAC3 where DRM is needed, ogg where it is not wanted.
Well also helping sony here was the fact that MDs are pretty much exclusively used as portables (yeah, some guys like to master to MDs, but that's a totally different market.) Most people using portables have shitty $10 headphones because they use them while working out, sitting on the bus, etc. With crappy headphones, the difference between MDLP4 (think 60kbit mp3s) and ATRAC3 is more or less inaudible. With MDLP4, I can fit 4 CDs on one minidisc. Yes, they're all mono and crappy quality, but I use my MD while working out anyway, so I don't care.
The problem with sony's codecs is that they're not "open." I'm not one of those zealots here, but ATRAC3 and MDLP have a significant amount of DRM associated with them. The NetMD software absolutely blows. Why? Because you have to "check out" your MP3s. You can only have a song "checked out" twice, then you have to check it in (delete it from an MD) to use it on another MD. There are ways to get around this (use Nero to burn MP3s to an image, mount the image then NetMD treats it like a legit CD) but it's largely a pain in the ass that accomplishes nothing.
Also, there will probably never be a program that will put songs on an MD that's not written by Sony. ATRAC3 and MDLP belong to Sony, and you're almost assured to get sued if you release another program that doesn't allow them to use DRM to protect Columbia records (a Sony holding.) If it weren't such a royal pain in the ass, NetMD would probably own the market, but as it is, it's a bit too cumbersome for most people.
Right on. The main speed advantage of a 64 bit processor is that it processes 64-bit integers faster. There really isn't THAT much difference in speed for applications that use 32 bit integers. Most desktop PC applications use 32 bit ints and larger floats (which are already handled by SSE2/x87) The only real gain in speed will be in applications that use 64 bit ints, namely scientific computing.
In other words, 64 bit processors allow you to process LARGER numbers, but not more of them. Yes, 64 bit has a use, but right now I really don't think the home market is ready for a 64-bit platform. The workstation market.. maybe. But the vast majority of PCs bought are home/office PCs, which definately don't need 64-bit yet. MS word runs just fine on 32-bit systems. It probably won't be much faster on a 64-bit system. Neither will most games. Now, there could be some benefit if the PLATFORM is upgraded, like faster bus speeds (hypertransport, etc) but the CPU itself probably won't speed too much up. So basically, 64-bit isn't twice as fast as 32-bit. Any performance differences will probably be marginal.
There's a difference between using tubes and transistors in audio. One of the biggest misconceptions is that tubes sound better than transistors. This is only somewhat true.:) Tubes do sound "warmer" than transistors, but technically (especially on digital recordings) transistors are "more accurate." It all depends on the listener's preference. There are actually some really great modeling amps out there (transistor amps specifically designed to sound like tube amps) that cost a LOT less than tube amps. On the whole, transistors are MUCH better than tubes, but since audio is subjective anyway, tube amps have endured. That said, I'm really drooling over a couple really nice guitar amps with tubes. They just sound classier.;)
Hah, this is more true than you realize.. In Texas, it is legal to shoot a man in the back as he flees from robbing your house. Also, supposedly (this is probably just a stupid urban legend) people hunt "border jumpers." In other words, shoot them in Mexico from Texas. Like I said, it's probably an urban legend, but I wouldn't put it past Texas (and I live there:P)
Yeah, but AMD CPUs, because they don't use quite as huge a pipeline, aren't affected by L2 cache size like the P4. The 512k P4s were cache starved, where the smaller-cache Athlons weren't being held back by the cache size. None of this matters though if nobody puts them in computers though.
Better yet why doesn't slashdot just post the reg free link to begin with:P Maybe they have a deal with the NYT to not link to reg-free pages? Who knows.
To reduce crosstalk between the wires so that you can run at faster speeds. Indeed, the "rounded" IDE cables often reduce performance by 5% or so. We're getting better at data throughput though, so we can use serial technologies and actually get faster transfer rates. Good riddance to ribbon cables:P
OLEDs are Organic LEDs. Basically, OLED technology is like LCD (in its application, the two are about as different as can be technically) except once the technology matures, OLEDs are cheaper, easier to manufacture and don't require a backlight (as like normal LEDs, they produce their own light.) It's not really any brighter (well it may be, but that's not its main advantage.) Basically, they're like LCDs except without all the drawbacks like viewing angle, price and physical sensitivity. Unfortunately, it'll be a few years before this technology gets into computer displays. The current life expectancy of them leaves a bit to be desired, but eventually this will be solved.
Yeah, a space elevator TO THE MOON. Realize something like this would take about as much material as the moon itself, not to mention the little problem of the moon rotating around the earth. Personally I think the idea of a space elevator is just retarded.
Amen. I've got a Linux box built from off-the-shelf hardware that's currently sitting on almost 600 days uptime. Amazing. Contrast to the SGI boxen I used to run where we had to reboot every hundred days or so because the VM system would get corrupted and start spewing garbage. Now I'm not saying that these commercial Unix OSes are useless (I've never done anything really besides internet servers and non-enterprise database servers) but for most tasks, Linux seems more than adequate.
European spice is nothing compared to Texas spice. I'm used to it, but northerners will come here and order the "XXX SUPER HOT" expecting it it to be like it is up north. Well, after their tongues are vaporized, they soon realize that food made with fresh ground habaneros is not something to play with.:)
Dark fibre! Dark fibre is the savior until you look at the economics of it. It would cost more to light that fibre than they could ever make off it. This isn't because they're evil; why the hell are they going to spend tens of millions of dollars to light this fibre when the existing networks are adequate? Especially when doing so will further saturate an already-saturated market, driving prices lower? Not to mention that the big problem with dark fibre is that it's going to all the wrong places. Namely to places where there are already adequate links.
And at the high-capacity link level, things aren't charged per mb, they're charged a flat-rate. A DS3 circuit will cost you a specific amount per month no matter if you're using it full capacity or you don't use it at all. Last mile providers (read: cable, DSL, etc) want to charge per-mb because if people are using more mb, they have to have more large pipes. There is actually an abundance of high capacity links (hence all the dark fibre, it's not needed) it's just that they cost so much because nobody is using them.
But this goes against everything you learned in intro to economics! Well, the thing is, demand curves are asymptotic. In other words, there are a lot of people out there who will pay for DS3 circuits no matter what they cost. So the bandwidth providers set prices high to cover their costs, because they know they'll make money by doing so. Besides, the interface equipment is so expensive that even if they lowered the price to affordable levels, cost would still be prohibitive.
Think again. The "religious right" is almost EXCLUSIVELY protestant. Catholics and Protestants agree on a few issues (abortion being one of them) but largely they are very very far apart. Hispanics also tend to swing far left. Look at a breakdown of the voting in Texas (I'd suggest California but you can see it better in Texas) and you'll see a solid line of hardcore democrat counties on the border with Mexico, where the population is almost 100% Hispanic.
As for the second point, yeah, I agree. There are two types of conservatives: moral conservatives and political conservatives. Political conservatives I have no real problem with; they're for a reduction in big government, etc. Moral conservatives are the ones behind these heavy-handed big brother initiatives. You can't legislate morality, no matter how hard you try.
Bandwidth is most assuredly not free. Industrial strength routers and packet switching equipment cost lots of money (we're talking several million for an installation needed for a central hub.) They have to pay people to run the datacenters, do line repair, keep things secure, make sure the routes are running smoothly, etc. Now I'm sure that there's some padding added on top of this, because the line provider probably wants to make some money, but rest assured that bandwidth is not free.
Well, no, a trust is technically a holding company that owns the supply chain of a product from top to bottom. Say I own all the crude oil reserves in the world and then I decide I want to start making gasoline. I sell the crude oil to the gasoline companies at a high price, then make my gasoline and sell it for half the price of theirs. Soon they'll be gone and I can jack the prices as high as I want, because nobody will be around to fight me. That's what anti-trust laws were developed to fight.:)
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Aah, any time streaming music (or digital music in general) is brought up, someone always makes the obligatory "Ogg Vorbis" comment. It's getting to be as old as the beowulf cluster jokes. There are several reasons these players will probably never support ogg. The most glaring of these is a limited marketplace. Nobody outside the geek community even knows what ogg is. It has no real advantages over MP3, other than being "free," which most people don't give a flying fuck about.
Ogg is essentially a solution without a problem. MP3 fills the void as a good quality compression scheme, and has been around a lot longer than ogg. I'm not saying they should give up, it's always a nice intellectual exercise to have a choice, but please, PLEASE stop posting the stupid "I wanna see this MP3 technology in ogg!" comments. It's old, we know you envy MP3, but if you want to use the technology, nobody is stopping you from using MP3. I'm sure the streamium format is proprietary anyway, so don't feed me the "but MP3 is proprietary" crap. I'm sure this will be modded down as flamebait, but honestly guys, we're sick of hearing it.
Aah, to be idealistic. I agree with you, that's the way it SHOULD work. But American voters are so apathetic of elections that who gets into office largely depends on their party affiliation. This is especially true for representatives. Nobody knows who these guys are, they just elect them because they're a republican or a democrat. The only election people pay attention to is the presidential election. The money helps because it allows for name recognition; people who know nothing about the issues and are middle of the road are more likely to vote for the guy whose name they recognize.
The two party system also doesn't help. Party platforms are the bane of modern politics. I'm personally pro-choice yet against a lot of gun control. Who the fuck do I vote for? I have to choose which of these issues (which really are both the same issue; the government's ability to legislate my private life) is more important to me, there's no viable third party that encompasses both of these. Yes, I realize that these views are supported by the Libertarians. They are not a viable third party because they will never win an important election. Not with the winner-take-all system in US politics. And that's not something you can change by calling your representative.
Yes, that will work for about 5 seconds until the /. types start screaming "DRM! DRM!" and someone cracks the encryption scheme allowing you to convert your songs to MP3 and keep them forever. So in other words, this has about as much chance happening as Dubya getting into Mensa.
Ah.. well it's hard to compare them. ATRAC3 was designed to be used at higher bitrates and is significantly older technology than Ogg.. So I'd say Ogg is probably better on a quality/size ratio.. But iirc ATRAC3 takes much less processing power to encode/decode (thus making it better for portables; the NetMDs get around 100 hours battery life off a single AA battery,) so I guess there's a tradeoff.
I dunno where you buy RAM, but you can get 512 MB sticks of PC3100 for $120. Crucial, good stuff too. That's right about $250 for a gig of fast, stable RAM.
6) Profit!
ATRAC3 is pretty much the antithesis of ogg vorbis. :) Ogg is a free, open codec, while ATRAC3 is a closely guarded, definately closed standard. Sony is pretty much the only company that uses ATRAC3 (with good reason, they own it) and they're both used in opposing markets.. ATRAC3 where DRM is needed, ogg where it is not wanted.
Well also helping sony here was the fact that MDs are pretty much exclusively used as portables (yeah, some guys like to master to MDs, but that's a totally different market.) Most people using portables have shitty $10 headphones because they use them while working out, sitting on the bus, etc. With crappy headphones, the difference between MDLP4 (think 60kbit mp3s) and ATRAC3 is more or less inaudible. With MDLP4, I can fit 4 CDs on one minidisc. Yes, they're all mono and crappy quality, but I use my MD while working out anyway, so I don't care.
The problem with sony's codecs is that they're not "open." I'm not one of those zealots here, but ATRAC3 and MDLP have a significant amount of DRM associated with them. The NetMD software absolutely blows. Why? Because you have to "check out" your MP3s. You can only have a song "checked out" twice, then you have to check it in (delete it from an MD) to use it on another MD. There are ways to get around this (use Nero to burn MP3s to an image, mount the image then NetMD treats it like a legit CD) but it's largely a pain in the ass that accomplishes nothing.
Also, there will probably never be a program that will put songs on an MD that's not written by Sony. ATRAC3 and MDLP belong to Sony, and you're almost assured to get sued if you release another program that doesn't allow them to use DRM to protect Columbia records (a Sony holding.) If it weren't such a royal pain in the ass, NetMD would probably own the market, but as it is, it's a bit too cumbersome for most people.
Right on. The main speed advantage of a 64 bit processor is that it processes 64-bit integers faster. There really isn't THAT much difference in speed for applications that use 32 bit integers. Most desktop PC applications use 32 bit ints and larger floats (which are already handled by SSE2/x87) The only real gain in speed will be in applications that use 64 bit ints, namely scientific computing.
In other words, 64 bit processors allow you to process LARGER numbers, but not more of them. Yes, 64 bit has a use, but right now I really don't think the home market is ready for a 64-bit platform. The workstation market.. maybe. But the vast majority of PCs bought are home/office PCs, which definately don't need 64-bit yet. MS word runs just fine on 32-bit systems. It probably won't be much faster on a 64-bit system. Neither will most games. Now, there could be some benefit if the PLATFORM is upgraded, like faster bus speeds (hypertransport, etc) but the CPU itself probably won't speed too much up. So basically, 64-bit isn't twice as fast as 32-bit. Any performance differences will probably be marginal.
There's a difference between using tubes and transistors in audio. One of the biggest misconceptions is that tubes sound better than transistors. This is only somewhat true. :) Tubes do sound "warmer" than transistors, but technically (especially on digital recordings) transistors are "more accurate." It all depends on the listener's preference. There are actually some really great modeling amps out there (transistor amps specifically designed to sound like tube amps) that cost a LOT less than tube amps. On the whole, transistors are MUCH better than tubes, but since audio is subjective anyway, tube amps have endured. That said, I'm really drooling over a couple really nice guitar amps with tubes. They just sound classier. ;)
Hah, this is more true than you realize.. In Texas, it is legal to shoot a man in the back as he flees from robbing your house. Also, supposedly (this is probably just a stupid urban legend) people hunt "border jumpers." In other words, shoot them in Mexico from Texas. Like I said, it's probably an urban legend, but I wouldn't put it past Texas (and I live there :P)
Yeah, but AMD CPUs, because they don't use quite as huge a pipeline, aren't affected by L2 cache size like the P4. The 512k P4s were cache starved, where the smaller-cache Athlons weren't being held back by the cache size. None of this matters though if nobody puts them in computers though.
Better yet why doesn't slashdot just post the reg free link to begin with :P Maybe they have a deal with the NYT to not link to reg-free pages? Who knows.
To reduce crosstalk between the wires so that you can run at faster speeds. Indeed, the "rounded" IDE cables often reduce performance by 5% or so. We're getting better at data throughput though, so we can use serial technologies and actually get faster transfer rates. Good riddance to ribbon cables :P
Yeah, cept Kodak is the leading developer of OLEDs and owns almost all the patents on them. :)
OLEDs are Organic LEDs. Basically, OLED technology is like LCD (in its application, the two are about as different as can be technically) except once the technology matures, OLEDs are cheaper, easier to manufacture and don't require a backlight (as like normal LEDs, they produce their own light.) It's not really any brighter (well it may be, but that's not its main advantage.) Basically, they're like LCDs except without all the drawbacks like viewing angle, price and physical sensitivity. Unfortunately, it'll be a few years before this technology gets into computer displays. The current life expectancy of them leaves a bit to be desired, but eventually this will be solved.
The jury is still out on this one, but I think it's called money.
Yeah, a space elevator TO THE MOON. Realize something like this would take about as much material as the moon itself, not to mention the little problem of the moon rotating around the earth. Personally I think the idea of a space elevator is just retarded.
Amen. I've got a Linux box built from off-the-shelf hardware that's currently sitting on almost 600 days uptime. Amazing. Contrast to the SGI boxen I used to run where we had to reboot every hundred days or so because the VM system would get corrupted and start spewing garbage. Now I'm not saying that these commercial Unix OSes are useless (I've never done anything really besides internet servers and non-enterprise database servers) but for most tasks, Linux seems more than adequate.
European spice is nothing compared to Texas spice. I'm used to it, but northerners will come here and order the "XXX SUPER HOT" expecting it it to be like it is up north. Well, after their tongues are vaporized, they soon realize that food made with fresh ground habaneros is not something to play with. :)
20-gauge? I'd hope that's a 10 or 12 gauge :P Smaller number, bigger boom.
Dark fibre! Dark fibre is the savior until you look at the economics of it. It would cost more to light that fibre than they could ever make off it. This isn't because they're evil; why the hell are they going to spend tens of millions of dollars to light this fibre when the existing networks are adequate? Especially when doing so will further saturate an already-saturated market, driving prices lower? Not to mention that the big problem with dark fibre is that it's going to all the wrong places. Namely to places where there are already adequate links.
And at the high-capacity link level, things aren't charged per mb, they're charged a flat-rate. A DS3 circuit will cost you a specific amount per month no matter if you're using it full capacity or you don't use it at all. Last mile providers (read: cable, DSL, etc) want to charge per-mb because if people are using more mb, they have to have more large pipes. There is actually an abundance of high capacity links (hence all the dark fibre, it's not needed) it's just that they cost so much because nobody is using them.
But this goes against everything you learned in intro to economics! Well, the thing is, demand curves are asymptotic. In other words, there are a lot of people out there who will pay for DS3 circuits no matter what they cost. So the bandwidth providers set prices high to cover their costs, because they know they'll make money by doing so. Besides, the interface equipment is so expensive that even if they lowered the price to affordable levels, cost would still be prohibitive.
Think again. The "religious right" is almost EXCLUSIVELY protestant. Catholics and Protestants agree on a few issues (abortion being one of them) but largely they are very very far apart. Hispanics also tend to swing far left. Look at a breakdown of the voting in Texas (I'd suggest California but you can see it better in Texas) and you'll see a solid line of hardcore democrat counties on the border with Mexico, where the population is almost 100% Hispanic.
As for the second point, yeah, I agree. There are two types of conservatives: moral conservatives and political conservatives. Political conservatives I have no real problem with; they're for a reduction in big government, etc. Moral conservatives are the ones behind these heavy-handed big brother initiatives. You can't legislate morality, no matter how hard you try.
Bandwidth is most assuredly not free. Industrial strength routers and packet switching equipment cost lots of money (we're talking several million for an installation needed for a central hub.) They have to pay people to run the datacenters, do line repair, keep things secure, make sure the routes are running smoothly, etc. Now I'm sure that there's some padding added on top of this, because the line provider probably wants to make some money, but rest assured that bandwidth is not free.
Well, no, a trust is technically a holding company that owns the supply chain of a product from top to bottom. Say I own all the crude oil reserves in the world and then I decide I want to start making gasoline. I sell the crude oil to the gasoline companies at a high price, then make my gasoline and sell it for half the price of theirs. Soon they'll be gone and I can jack the prices as high as I want, because nobody will be around to fight me. That's what anti-trust laws were developed to fight. :)