I've spoken to too many 60-year olds who had to delay retirement for lack of funds, hardly see the children from their first marriage, and ended up having their sports cars repo'd to be so wild-eyed and idealistic about chasing that rainbow.
It's not about "following your dreams". One presumed that's what you did to get where you are. What you are doing now is pining for the chance to see if there's more to life than what you've already accomplished.
There is. And you already have it. Learn to appreciate how good you've got it, and get past this foolish feeling of unrest which is 90% caused by the drop in testosterone that every man experiences as he gets old, and 10% caused by pondering the roads you chose not to go down.
Difference is that if you go to work for a body shop, unless you're already a veteran you'll spend the first few months cleaning paint guns and sweeping up the shop, whereas with an ASE cert in auto electrical and a little bit of competence, you'll be making more than you ever did with computers.
Dude, I'm pretty much in the middle of the pack when it comes to programmer salaries in my region at my level of experience, and I've yet to meet an auto mechanic of any kind who makes half as much as I do.
These days, when a component of an electrical system in a car fails, they don't bring in an engineer to rebuild it. A shop monkey reads the diagnostic computer that tells him which part to replace, he replaces it, and the car is back on the road a few hours later.
Take a look at your hobbies, interests and what you do well at. Look at the classifieds and see what kind of jobs center around those things. See what kind of experience and education they require. Go from there.
That's good advice, as long as what you meant by "go from there" was "then stay in your current job that pays well, and have fun with your hobbies on evenings and weekends."
Do you want to live like a 22-year old again? In a tiny apartment with a roommate or two and an old beat-up car in the parking garage? Having to borrow from family to buy any big-ticket items? With no health insurance? Being on the bottom rung of pretty much everything? Only without as much energy, naive optimism, or potential for growth?
If so, then changing careers or starting a new business is a fantastic idea.
Otherwise, find the fun in what you are doing now. Being poor when you're fresh out of college is normal. Being poor as a middle-aged man is depressing.
If you expect anything like the same money, about your only options would be producing porn videos, politics, or some other life of crime.
Otherwise, get a job flipping burgers at your local McDonalds, and work your way up.
He got modded down as a troll, but he's exactly right. It was just about the best advice offered here.
The worst thing you can do with a mid-life crisis is follow your impulse.
Do not change careers. Do not buy an expensive sports car. Do not leave your wife for a 20-year old bimbo.
They might all seem like VERY good ideas right now, but your rich, comfortable 60-year old self will thank you if you stick it out right now as you go through this "trapped in a life you hate" phase and keep cranking away.
Re:Who Reads Politician's Web Site to Get the Fact
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Hilary has the problem that she is currently setting herself up as a strong anit-Iraq War candidate when she voted for authorizing the use of force.
She can split hairs all she likes about how that vote wasn't really a vote for going to war (it was - Bush was stridently clear about his intentions), but a lot of anti-war Democrats are not going to simply forgive her on that vote... at least not until she gets through the primaries and is running against a pro-war Republican (which may well be the case, since all three Republican candidates seem to favor ramping up troop levels and oppose time-tables for leaving.)
You really can't talk about state-government legislation experience as something which will provide much of a litmus for what sort of executive Obama will be.
The real surprise in this race is that none of the six candidates are former governors. The only former executive of any sort is the Drag Queen, and you could make the argument that his resume is the lightest of the bunch, depending on how big of a job you consider running NYC to be. (Some would say that it's a bigger deal than being Governor of a small state, but that is open to some debate.)
I'm still hoping for somebody else to throw their hat in the ring. I had high hopes for Tom Vilsack (Democrat Governor from Iowa), but he announced recently that he would not run.
Ron Paul would be great, but I'd be a fool to think he has a real chance.
Tommy Thompson is an intriguing "dark horse". He implemented a Welfare Reform plan in Wisconsin which became a model for the Clinton Administration's plan on the national level. He's far from perfect, but I'd take him over the current crop of leading candidates of either party.
I'm also very tempted to Throw My Vote Away on George Phillies of the LP.
I guess we'll see how things shake out over the next few months...
Re:Who Reads Politician's Web Site to Get the Fact
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Except with Obama, there isn't much of a voting record to look at.
He was a STATE senator for Illinois when he was made an instant celebrity by being allowed to make the keynote at the '04 convention. He's basically a stuffed shirt with barely any political experience, and no executive experience whatsoever. It makes him very attractive in the early running because he doesn't have a lot of bad past decisions to run away from the way any experienced politician would, but in the long haul the Shrill Harpie from Little Rock... er... I mean New York... is going to mop the floor with him.
After all, she's a second-term US Senator who also has 8 years experience of telling the President what to do.
I don't know what's scarier, the fact that the Democrat race is shaping up to be these two and the Breck Girl, or that the Republican race is down to the Crazy-Go-Nuts Former POW, the Drag Queen Mayor, and the Book-of-Mormon Thumper.
Out of the six, I'm narrowly leaning towards the Drag Queen Mayor... but praying for SOMEBODY better to come along than these six freaks. I don't care which party. Just find me a candidate I can actually be HAPPY about supporting. Is that so much to ask?
There may be a perception that MySpace is a teenage playground, but the majority of users are over 30, and that has been the case for more than a year now. Try to keep up.
Actually, in this case it applies. You are talking about setting aside money in a proxy in order to "buy" something without any agreement with the seller (for far less money than they are likely to demand), and then behaving as if you've legally purchased it.
So shall I start moving in to your house now? The $20 is ready for you anytime.
If you don't want OSX, you'd have to be an idiot to buy an Apple, quite honestly. That's like buying a Porsche, and putting a Toyota 4 cylinder engine in it.
So you're saying Windows is a cheap 4-cyl to OS X's Porsche, then?
At last, something we can all agree on.
That said, Apples prices are only a modest premium over name-brand PCs of the same specifications, so it's like getting a Porsche for only slightly more money than a Toyota Tercell... and if you REALLY prefer to drive a Toyota, it's equipped to be downgraded. In fact, it can be switched back and forth very quickly every time you pull it into the garage.
I've got a great new Core 2 duo machine, and I've spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet cooling system for it because I use the computer for music production. I've made a great effort choosing the very best components including 10k hard drives. I can run Windows XP Pro SP2 (which I do) or Vista Home, Premium or Business or Ubuntu Studio (which I will).
I'd like Apple to sell me a version of OSX that I could run on this new machine, too, but they've decided that I can't use their OS unless I pay a premium for their hardware (which is basically either the same or inferior to what I've got). This is not an example of "giving the customer what they want".
Free markets are supposed to be about choices. It's the lack of choices that has kept me from switching to Vista. After careful consideration, and despite the fact that I admire much about OSX, I choose not to use Macs because I don't want to be limited in such a way.
I bought a mini for my music studio, and spent zero effort making it quiet. It's one of the quietest pieces of electronics in the studio. Dead silent. Certainly quieter than my guitar amp, and well below the ambient noise floor of the room.
A PC can run Windows, and if it is on the hardware compatibility list, can be made to run Linux. I choose not to use PCs because I don't want to be limited in such a way.
On a Mac, I can run OS X, Windows, or Linux. Also, the audio software for OS X is superior. I care more about software than hardware. All the cool specs in the world are useless if it's a pain in the ass to lay my tracks down. On OS X, it does what I need, and does it easily. Why would I want to jump through all the hoops you did and still not be able to run the best recording software?
AllofMP3 can't help the fact that the RIAA refuses to take the money that is due to them from ROMS.
I'd like to buy your house for $20. Therefore I've set $20 aside so you can pick it up whenever you are ready. In the meanwhile, I'm just going to move in. I'm not doing anything illegal, because it's not MY fault that you haven't picked up your money. Quit whining and come get your stuff off the curb in front of my new house.
Dude. You sound like you really need to believe that it's not common to be able to hear the drastic difference between MP3 and uncompressed (or lossless) music, but I've yet to sit somebody down in front of a good pair of speakers and not have them hear that difference with absolute certainty.
For that matter, though I can't possibly afford a $10,000 pair of speakers at this stage in my life, I've auditioned many in the $1000 - $2000 range and I'm sorry, if you can't hear the difference immediately, well enough to describe the compromises and shortcomings of each design, then you flat-out can't hear properly. Go get your ears checked.
Listening to MP3 *is* like looking through a dirty window. You mind can fill in the information with what it knows about how your yard looks (as it does when listening to MP3s), but clean or open the window and only a half-blind man would have a hard time seeing the difference.
To quote, "In any case, doubling the bitrate from 128 kbps to 256 kbps won't make music sound twice as good, because the smaller file already has the most important information."
That probably goes doubly when you go from 256 kbps with a good encoder to "lossless", as 99.999% of that data is already represented. Again, to quote, "So, as you compare higher and higher bitrates, sound quality becomes harder to distinguish--the musical equivalent of diminishing returns."
You can see most of the visual image of your back yard through a muddy window, but that doesn't make it as pleasant as looking out through a clean one.
Or an open one.
To make in less of an analogy and more of a direct comment about audio: If I stand right next to you and scream at the top of my lungs while you are trying to listen to a nice jazz quartet, you will probably be able to hear just about everything, but wouldn't it be better if I stopped screaming?
Tiny, incremental improvements in sound quality matter a lot to some people. Enough to drop 10 grand on a pair of speakers in many cases.
The Windows Media format is actually the MOST compatible, working with far more devices than AAC at presen
Other than my work PC (which I don't use for audio files), I can't get WMA files from any legal download site to play on any of my COMPUTERS, never mind my portable media player.
AAC is an industry standard. It's the audio layer of MP4. Every portable player worth owning (including Microsoft's Zune) can play AAC. Those that don't now, will. .
WMA is proprietary crap.
Even if I owned no Macs or Linux systems, even if I had something other than an iPod, I still wouldn't touch WMA, let alone pay for it.
The reason this is meaningless is right there in the article summary. It's outselling what the X-Box sold last year while experiencing shortages.
In other words, it's not that more people wanted to buy a PS3 now than wanted to buy an X-Box 360 then.
It's that only slightly more people wanted to buy a PS3 now than the few that were able to buy a 360 then, while many more people were waiting on availability.
To suggest that this is an indicator of high demand for the PS3 is simply laughable./disclaimer: I own none of the three new game consoles. I currently intend to skip this generation of consoles entirely. Two high-def platforms for playing sequels of the same-old same-old, and one low-def platform for waving your arms around like an idiot. No thanks.
Of course. The left vs. right debate always has been about competing fanboi mentalities. Where have you been?
And yes. Rabies is perhaps the most rational explanation for people being in a tizzy about who complete strangers are forming family units with. At any rate, it makes more sense to me than any explanation I've heard to date for that line of thinking.
I'll get over it just as soon as the negative ramifications of the 2000 are finished. Hell, I'll settle for the war to be over.
We have no way of knowing with any certainty how a President Gore would have responded to 9/11, but if his statements prior to the attack are any indication, he considered overturning the Iraqi regime a rather high priority in the war against terror at the time, and may very well have made the exact same decision, despite all the fist-shaking he's done since then.
Sure Bush made himself a war president and got the 2004 election handily, benefiting from how the way he won in 2000 made 3rd party candidates seem even less viable than usual.
Bush campaigned in the hopes that people would vote for him in spite of the lack of WMD stockpiles and the long drudgery which the Iraq war had already turned into by that point. To suggest that being a "wartime president" in the most heinously unpopular war since Veitnam (possibly even more so) helped him get elected is simply silly.
Also, the decline of third-party influence in '04 worked against Bush. Nader split off a large chunk of the liberal vote in 2000, and his impact was roughly equal to the combined Libertarian/Constitution siphon of the conservative vote in '08. If anything, the lack of Nader's relevance alone should have been enough to put Kerry over the top, had Bush not gained ground.
What got Bush elected, sad to say, is mainly domestic social issues. Rabid opponents of gay marriage came out to the poles in droves to vote for "ZOMG DON'T LET THE QUEERS CHEAPEN OUR SACRED INSTITUTIONS" resolutions, and while they were at it, they pulled the lever for the guy who didn't look frightened and uncomfortable when visiting Sunday pot-lucks in the deep South.
That, and the fact that Kerry made the tactical mistake of letting the sum total of the DNC theme be "I went to 'Nam, you know!!!" An actual articulation of a platform would have been really helpful at some point along the way.
As for the quirk of the electoral college occasionally resulting in a win without the popular vote: That's exactly how it's supposed to work. People are culturally different in different parts of the country, and you can't allow a few highly-populated cities to choose the President for everybody else if you expect a republic as big as ours to last for the long haul. Don't worry, with elections going as close as they are, a Republican presidential candidate is likely to get the shaft in the very same way sometime in our lifetimes.
1. The mini has a much faster processor than your ghetto Celeron Windows Media Center. You should be comparing it to the other offerings on the page you linked. 2. The mini does not "lack" HDMI. DVI and HDMI are pin-for-pin identical for the video signal. All you need is a cable with DVI on one end and HDMI on the other. 3. Your ghetto WMC has no optical sound output. 4. The mini also has both USB2 and FireWire, so your ghetto WMC has nothing on it there. 5. People are playing high-bitrate h.264 video RIGHT NOW on Mac minis, so your warning about Blu-Ray not working with it is pure, unadulterated FUD. 6. People have already done Core 2 Duo upgrades to minis. It's not hard unless you have the fine motor skills of a drunken rhino.
7. A mini with the same 1GB RAM, a bigger HD (SATA, not ATA like yours), a better OS, built-in Bluetooth, built-in Wi-Fi, an optical remote control, and a tiny USB EyeTV High-Def tuner costs $825, slightly less than that ghetto piece of crap you're shilling. Oh, and in addition to being faster, it's also quieter and has a better graphics chipset (950 vs. 900).
And just for the record, I don't consider the Mac mini to be a particularly good bargain right now. Apple is long-overdue for a refresh of the mini line. In spite of that, it's still a better deal than the AOpen, IMHO, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda.
"They've made it super easy to deploy, manage, extend, expand and use."
Considering that this will not be even showcased until June, how do you have any idea about that?
Probably because OS X Server has been around a while, and has always been super easy to deploy, manage, extend, expand and use.
The thing is, anybody who can administer Linux can also admin an OS X (non-server) box to do the exact same stuff. OS X is basically just Mach+BSD+Aqua. You don't need OS X Server to just run sendmail or apache or whatever. The consumer-level OS X does all that with little more effort (and sometimes less) compared to Linux.
OS X Server is a product designed to line up favorably, ease-of-use-wise, with Windows servers. If that's not important to you, save your money and select one of the cheaper options.
You know, when he was re-elected, getting more votes than Kerry, who got more votes than Gore did in 2000, the pointless whining became even more pointless.
Bush won two very close elections, in one of which he got over 50% of the vote, something his predecessor never did.
Get over it.
Swerving back on topic: I don't give a crap about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Anamorphic 480p DVDs are easier to work with and look great on my projection screen for movies, and I get plenty of high-def content anyway, thanks to h.264 and over-the-air HDTV.
I'm sure most of the Blu-Ray sales of "Casino Royale" were to PS3 owners, who wanted to justify the high cost of their game consoles badly enough that they rushed out to buy the first non-crappy movie they could find in the format to try it out.
I like that the new formats might push down the cost of optical data storage, but otherwise I'm unimpressed.
I found far more new music worth listening to by browsing iMixes and following "Users who bought this also bought" links on iTunes than I ever did via the radio.
It was only a couple weeks ago that the big question was, "why doesn't apple want to sell the non-mainstream artists who don't want DRM on their music?"
That was never a big question. They don't want to sell non-mainstream artists because nobody wants to buy it.
If people did buy it, it wouldn't be "non-mainstream" anymore, because whatever gets sold is what the mainstream is. Duh.
I think it's hilarious that people want to consider "music nobody buys" to be a genre, let alone a genre that makes good business sense to specialize in.
Online delivery is clearly the end goal for everyone.
Except for consumers, who will not widely select a format that comes with strings attached.
As long as there is DRM on the online stuff, the CD will not die, for the same reason why the encrypted CD & music DVD formats continue to fail. Unless they abruptly drop the CD format entirely (which would murder their sales for long enough for some of them to go under), consumers will chose the CD over the other options.
Even those who love the convenience of iTunes only use it for a small sliver of their playlist, and DRM is one of the two main reasons why. (The other being the slightly lower audio quality.)
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If he truly can afford to retire now, why not simply do so?
I've spoken to too many 60-year olds who had to delay retirement for lack of funds, hardly see the children from their first marriage, and ended up having their sports cars repo'd to be so wild-eyed and idealistic about chasing that rainbow.
It's not about "following your dreams". One presumed that's what you did to get where you are. What you are doing now is pining for the chance to see if there's more to life than what you've already accomplished.
There is. And you already have it. Learn to appreciate how good you've got it, and get past this foolish feeling of unrest which is 90% caused by the drop in testosterone that every man experiences as he gets old, and 10% caused by pondering the roads you chose not to go down.
Difference is that if you go to work for a body shop, unless you're already a veteran you'll spend the first few months cleaning paint guns and sweeping up the shop, whereas with an ASE cert in auto electrical and a little bit of competence, you'll be making more than you ever did with computers.
Dude, I'm pretty much in the middle of the pack when it comes to programmer salaries in my region at my level of experience, and I've yet to meet an auto mechanic of any kind who makes half as much as I do.
These days, when a component of an electrical system in a car fails, they don't bring in an engineer to rebuild it. A shop monkey reads the diagnostic computer that tells him which part to replace, he replaces it, and the car is back on the road a few hours later.
Take a look at your hobbies, interests and what you do well at. Look at the classifieds and see what kind of jobs center around those things. See what kind of experience and education they require. Go from there.
That's good advice, as long as what you meant by "go from there" was "then stay in your current job that pays well, and have fun with your hobbies on evenings and weekends."
Do you want to live like a 22-year old again? In a tiny apartment with a roommate or two and an old beat-up car in the parking garage? Having to borrow from family to buy any big-ticket items? With no health insurance? Being on the bottom rung of pretty much everything? Only without as much energy, naive optimism, or potential for growth?
If so, then changing careers or starting a new business is a fantastic idea.
Otherwise, find the fun in what you are doing now. Being poor when you're fresh out of college is normal. Being poor as a middle-aged man is depressing.
If you expect anything like the same money, about your only options would be producing porn videos, politics, or some other life of crime.
Otherwise, get a job flipping burgers at your local McDonalds, and work your way up.
He got modded down as a troll, but he's exactly right. It was just about the best advice offered here.
The worst thing you can do with a mid-life crisis is follow your impulse.
Do not change careers.
Do not buy an expensive sports car.
Do not leave your wife for a 20-year old bimbo.
They might all seem like VERY good ideas right now, but your rich, comfortable 60-year old self will thank you if you stick it out right now as you go through this "trapped in a life you hate" phase and keep cranking away.
Hilary has the problem that she is currently setting herself up as a strong anit-Iraq War candidate when she voted for authorizing the use of force.
She can split hairs all she likes about how that vote wasn't really a vote for going to war (it was - Bush was stridently clear about his intentions), but a lot of anti-war Democrats are not going to simply forgive her on that vote... at least not until she gets through the primaries and is running against a pro-war Republican (which may well be the case, since all three Republican candidates seem to favor ramping up troop levels and oppose time-tables for leaving.)
You really can't talk about state-government legislation experience as something which will provide much of a litmus for what sort of executive Obama will be.
The real surprise in this race is that none of the six candidates are former governors. The only former executive of any sort is the Drag Queen, and you could make the argument that his resume is the lightest of the bunch, depending on how big of a job you consider running NYC to be. (Some would say that it's a bigger deal than being Governor of a small state, but that is open to some debate.)
I'm still hoping for somebody else to throw their hat in the ring. I had high hopes for Tom Vilsack (Democrat Governor from Iowa), but he announced recently that he would not run.
Ron Paul would be great, but I'd be a fool to think he has a real chance.
Tommy Thompson is an intriguing "dark horse". He implemented a Welfare Reform plan in Wisconsin which became a model for the Clinton Administration's plan on the national level. He's far from perfect, but I'd take him over the current crop of leading candidates of either party.
I'm also very tempted to Throw My Vote Away on George Phillies of the LP.
I guess we'll see how things shake out over the next few months...
Except with Obama, there isn't much of a voting record to look at.
He was a STATE senator for Illinois when he was made an instant celebrity by being allowed to make the keynote at the '04 convention. He's basically a stuffed shirt with barely any political experience, and no executive experience whatsoever. It makes him very attractive in the early running because he doesn't have a lot of bad past decisions to run away from the way any experienced politician would, but in the long haul the Shrill Harpie from Little Rock... er... I mean New York... is going to mop the floor with him.
After all, she's a second-term US Senator who also has 8 years experience of telling the President what to do.
I don't know what's scarier, the fact that the Democrat race is shaping up to be these two and the Breck Girl, or that the Republican race is down to the Crazy-Go-Nuts Former POW, the Drag Queen Mayor, and the Book-of-Mormon Thumper.
Out of the six, I'm narrowly leaning towards the Drag Queen Mayor... but praying for SOMEBODY better to come along than these six freaks. I don't care which party. Just find me a candidate I can actually be HAPPY about supporting. Is that so much to ask?
There may be a perception that MySpace is a teenage playground, but the majority of users are over 30, and that has been the case for more than a year now. Try to keep up.
Actually, in this case it applies. You are talking about setting aside money in a proxy in order to "buy" something without any agreement with the seller (for far less money than they are likely to demand), and then behaving as if you've legally purchased it.
So shall I start moving in to your house now? The $20 is ready for you anytime.
If you don't want OSX, you'd have to be an idiot to buy an Apple, quite honestly. That's like buying a Porsche, and putting a Toyota 4 cylinder engine in it.
So you're saying Windows is a cheap 4-cyl to OS X's Porsche, then?
At last, something we can all agree on.
That said, Apples prices are only a modest premium over name-brand PCs of the same specifications, so it's like getting a Porsche for only slightly more money than a Toyota Tercell... and if you REALLY prefer to drive a Toyota, it's equipped to be downgraded. In fact, it can be switched back and forth very quickly every time you pull it into the garage.
I've got a great new Core 2 duo machine, and I've spent a lot of time and money creating a quiet cooling system for it because I use the computer for music production. I've made a great effort choosing the very best components including 10k hard drives. I can run Windows XP Pro SP2 (which I do) or Vista Home, Premium or Business or Ubuntu Studio (which I will).
I'd like Apple to sell me a version of OSX that I could run on this new machine, too, but they've decided that I can't use their OS unless I pay a premium for their hardware (which is basically either the same or inferior to what I've got). This is not an example of "giving the customer what they want".
Free markets are supposed to be about choices. It's the lack of choices that has kept me from switching to Vista. After careful consideration, and despite the fact that I admire much about OSX, I choose not to use Macs because I don't want to be limited in such a way.
I bought a mini for my music studio, and spent zero effort making it quiet. It's one of the quietest pieces of electronics in the studio. Dead silent. Certainly quieter than my guitar amp, and well below the ambient noise floor of the room.
A PC can run Windows, and if it is on the hardware compatibility list, can be made to run Linux. I choose not to use PCs because I don't want to be limited in such a way.
On a Mac, I can run OS X, Windows, or Linux. Also, the audio software for OS X is superior. I care more about software than hardware. All the cool specs in the world are useless if it's a pain in the ass to lay my tracks down. On OS X, it does what I need, and does it easily. Why would I want to jump through all the hoops you did and still not be able to run the best recording software?
AllofMP3 can't help the fact that the RIAA refuses to take the money that is due to them from ROMS.
I'd like to buy your house for $20. Therefore I've set $20 aside so you can pick it up whenever you are ready. In the meanwhile, I'm just going to move in. I'm not doing anything illegal, because it's not MY fault that you haven't picked up your money. Quit whining and come get your stuff off the curb in front of my new house.
Meh.
Wouldn't it make more sense just to spend $300 on a used G4 mini or something? Then it would come with a DVD drive and everything.
I mean, I can easily find computers that run OS X for $300, if that's all you really want. The used market is flooded with them.
Dude. You sound like you really need to believe that it's not common to be able to hear the drastic difference between MP3 and uncompressed (or lossless) music, but I've yet to sit somebody down in front of a good pair of speakers and not have them hear that difference with absolute certainty.
For that matter, though I can't possibly afford a $10,000 pair of speakers at this stage in my life, I've auditioned many in the $1000 - $2000 range and I'm sorry, if you can't hear the difference immediately, well enough to describe the compromises and shortcomings of each design, then you flat-out can't hear properly. Go get your ears checked.
Listening to MP3 *is* like looking through a dirty window. You mind can fill in the information with what it knows about how your yard looks (as it does when listening to MP3s), but clean or open the window and only a half-blind man would have a hard time seeing the difference.
To quote, "In any case, doubling the bitrate from 128 kbps to 256 kbps won't make music sound twice as good, because the smaller file already has the most important information."
That probably goes doubly when you go from 256 kbps with a good encoder to "lossless", as 99.999% of that data is already represented. Again, to quote, "So, as you compare higher and higher bitrates, sound quality becomes harder to distinguish--the musical equivalent of diminishing returns."
You can see most of the visual image of your back yard through a muddy window, but that doesn't make it as pleasant as looking out through a clean one.
Or an open one.
To make in less of an analogy and more of a direct comment about audio: If I stand right next to you and scream at the top of my lungs while you are trying to listen to a nice jazz quartet, you will probably be able to hear just about everything, but wouldn't it be better if I stopped screaming?
Tiny, incremental improvements in sound quality matter a lot to some people. Enough to drop 10 grand on a pair of speakers in many cases.
The Windows Media format is actually the MOST compatible, working with far more devices than AAC at presen
Other than my work PC (which I don't use for audio files), I can't get WMA files from any legal download site to play on any of my COMPUTERS, never mind my portable media player.
AAC is an industry standard. It's the audio layer of MP4. Every portable player worth owning (including Microsoft's Zune) can play AAC. Those that don't now, will. .
WMA is proprietary crap.
Even if I owned no Macs or Linux systems, even if I had something other than an iPod, I still wouldn't touch WMA, let alone pay for it.
The reason this is meaningless is right there in the article summary. It's outselling what the X-Box sold last year while experiencing shortages.
/disclaimer: I own none of the three new game consoles. I currently intend to skip this generation of consoles entirely. Two high-def platforms for playing sequels of the same-old same-old, and one low-def platform for waving your arms around like an idiot. No thanks.
In other words, it's not that more people wanted to buy a PS3 now than wanted to buy an X-Box 360 then.
It's that only slightly more people wanted to buy a PS3 now than the few that were able to buy a 360 then, while many more people were waiting on availability.
To suggest that this is an indicator of high demand for the PS3 is simply laughable.
Of course. The left vs. right debate always has been about competing fanboi mentalities. Where have you been?
And yes. Rabies is perhaps the most rational explanation for people being in a tizzy about who complete strangers are forming family units with. At any rate, it makes more sense to me than any explanation I've heard to date for that line of thinking.
I'll get over it just as soon as the negative ramifications of the 2000 are finished. Hell, I'll settle for the war to be over.
We have no way of knowing with any certainty how a President Gore would have responded to 9/11, but if his statements prior to the attack are any indication, he considered overturning the Iraqi regime a rather high priority in the war against terror at the time, and may very well have made the exact same decision, despite all the fist-shaking he's done since then.
Sure Bush made himself a war president and got the 2004 election handily, benefiting from how the way he won in 2000 made 3rd party candidates seem even less viable than usual.
Bush campaigned in the hopes that people would vote for him in spite of the lack of WMD stockpiles and the long drudgery which the Iraq war had already turned into by that point. To suggest that being a "wartime president" in the most heinously unpopular war since Veitnam (possibly even more so) helped him get elected is simply silly.
Also, the decline of third-party influence in '04 worked against Bush. Nader split off a large chunk of the liberal vote in 2000, and his impact was roughly equal to the combined Libertarian/Constitution siphon of the conservative vote in '08. If anything, the lack of Nader's relevance alone should have been enough to put Kerry over the top, had Bush not gained ground.
What got Bush elected, sad to say, is mainly domestic social issues. Rabid opponents of gay marriage came out to the poles in droves to vote for "ZOMG DON'T LET THE QUEERS CHEAPEN OUR SACRED INSTITUTIONS" resolutions, and while they were at it, they pulled the lever for the guy who didn't look frightened and uncomfortable when visiting Sunday pot-lucks in the deep South.
That, and the fact that Kerry made the tactical mistake of letting the sum total of the DNC theme be "I went to 'Nam, you know!!!" An actual articulation of a platform would have been really helpful at some point along the way.
As for the quirk of the electoral college occasionally resulting in a win without the popular vote: That's exactly how it's supposed to work. People are culturally different in different parts of the country, and you can't allow a few highly-populated cities to choose the President for everybody else if you expect a republic as big as ours to last for the long haul. Don't worry, with elections going as close as they are, a Republican presidential candidate is likely to get the shaft in the very same way sometime in our lifetimes.
OOK ACK Blu-Ray. etc.
1. The mini has a much faster processor than your ghetto Celeron Windows Media Center. You should be comparing it to the other offerings on the page you linked.
2. The mini does not "lack" HDMI. DVI and HDMI are pin-for-pin identical for the video signal. All you need is a cable with DVI on one end and HDMI on the other.
3. Your ghetto WMC has no optical sound output.
4. The mini also has both USB2 and FireWire, so your ghetto WMC has nothing on it there.
5. People are playing high-bitrate h.264 video RIGHT NOW on Mac minis, so your warning about Blu-Ray not working with it is pure, unadulterated FUD.
6. People have already done Core 2 Duo upgrades to minis. It's not hard unless you have the fine motor skills of a drunken rhino.
7. A mini with the same 1GB RAM, a bigger HD (SATA, not ATA like yours), a better OS, built-in Bluetooth, built-in Wi-Fi, an optical remote control, and a tiny USB EyeTV High-Def tuner costs $825, slightly less than that ghetto piece of crap you're shilling. Oh, and in addition to being faster, it's also quieter and has a better graphics chipset (950 vs. 900).
And just for the record, I don't consider the Mac mini to be a particularly good bargain right now. Apple is long-overdue for a refresh of the mini line. In spite of that, it's still a better deal than the AOpen, IMHO, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda.
But thanks for playing.
"They've made it super easy to deploy, manage, extend, expand and use."
Considering that this will not be even showcased until June, how do you have any idea about that?
Probably because OS X Server has been around a while, and has always been super easy to deploy, manage, extend, expand and use.
The thing is, anybody who can administer Linux can also admin an OS X (non-server) box to do the exact same stuff. OS X is basically just Mach+BSD+Aqua. You don't need OS X Server to just run sendmail or apache or whatever. The consumer-level OS X does all that with little more effort (and sometimes less) compared to Linux.
OS X Server is a product designed to line up favorably, ease-of-use-wise, with Windows servers. If that's not important to you, save your money and select one of the cheaper options.
You know, when he was re-elected, getting more votes than Kerry, who got more votes than Gore did in 2000, the pointless whining became even more pointless.
Bush won two very close elections, in one of which he got over 50% of the vote, something his predecessor never did.
Get over it.
Swerving back on topic: I don't give a crap about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Anamorphic 480p DVDs are easier to work with and look great on my projection screen for movies, and I get plenty of high-def content anyway, thanks to h.264 and over-the-air HDTV.
I'm sure most of the Blu-Ray sales of "Casino Royale" were to PS3 owners, who wanted to justify the high cost of their game consoles badly enough that they rushed out to buy the first non-crappy movie they could find in the format to try it out.
I like that the new formats might push down the cost of optical data storage, but otherwise I'm unimpressed.
I found far more new music worth listening to by browsing iMixes and following "Users who bought this also bought" links on iTunes than I ever did via the radio.
It was only a couple weeks ago that the big question was, "why doesn't apple want to sell the non-mainstream artists who don't want DRM on their music?"
That was never a big question. They don't want to sell non-mainstream artists because nobody wants to buy it.
If people did buy it, it wouldn't be "non-mainstream" anymore, because whatever gets sold is what the mainstream is. Duh.
I think it's hilarious that people want to consider "music nobody buys" to be a genre, let alone a genre that makes good business sense to specialize in.
Online delivery is clearly the end goal for everyone.
Except for consumers, who will not widely select a format that comes with strings attached.
As long as there is DRM on the online stuff, the CD will not die, for the same reason why the encrypted CD & music DVD formats continue to fail. Unless they abruptly drop the CD format entirely (which would murder their sales for long enough for some of them to go under), consumers will chose the CD over the other options.
Even those who love the convenience of iTunes only use it for a small sliver of their playlist, and DRM is one of the two main reasons why. (The other being the slightly lower audio quality.)