I pesonally would have supported the war if our government had done as yours, and said "we're doing this for reigeme change in Iraq"
The Bush administration has been criticized in the US, not unfairly, for also stressing the WMD concerns above the other reasons for going to war.
I personally don't feel the US Republicans nor the UK Labor leadership "lied" about WMDs. Worst-case, they were wrong, because they trusted the wrong intel and chose to err on the side of keeping WMD capacity out of Saddam's hands.
The recently uncovered Saddam tapes (while far from a smoking gun), do lend support to the idea that a crapload of weapons and related tech were squirreled away to Syria and/or buried in the desert during the ramp-up to the war. It would not at all surprise me if even harder evidence were to come to light in the near future. It certainly seems consistant with what we know about the previous Iraqi government to suspect that they had these weapons, but did a very good job of hiding them.
Football shoulderpads and helmets are weapons, not armor. They are hard on the outside, and mainly built up on the top of the shoulders and head. This allows you to spear the other player harder when you tackle them.
The place were you are likely to get hit in football, the abdomen, is usually completely unprotected.
The only sport with a higher rate of serious injuries than American football is cheerleading. (Because those girls are basically doing advanced gymnastics without floor pads. Lots of broken bones.)
Most American universities have co-rec rugby teams, and apart from a few bumps and bruises, hardly anybody ever gets hurt that badly, even with women and men taking the field together.
Considering response to Cindy Sheehan by Bush Admin...
Oh, so it was the Bush Administration that ordered the NYC police to arrest her for trespassing when she and her fellow protesters locked their legs together and blocked the door to the US Mission of the UN???
And this is "not far off" from arresting a drunk for sedition after he bad-mouths FDR?
"Hello in there, Cliff. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?"
At last! All the fun, drama, and thrills of table tennis without having to go outside to your local ping-pong court. For the first time ever, you can play it from the comfort of your family rec room!!!
We just provided the whole damned Internet a perfect example how how heated things can get between two people who probably agree about most things related to a topic when they use casually-written text as the only means of discussion.
For my own part, I find Apple Lossless rips, either from an iPod or from the TOSLink connection on my Mac, to be a step UP from almost every CD player I've ever owned (and I've gone through quite a few of them.)
(Hmm... and iPod with an optical digital output... now THERE would be something worth calling an "iPod Hi-Fi"!)
However, the slow rise of DVD Audio might change that. While most of what we thought was wrong with CD's back in the 80s was really just the artifacts of poor playback devices, I'm still not 100% happy with CD sound.
I'm no vinyl bigot... most of my audio library is digital... but I have yet to hear a CD match the magic of a pristine Sheffield Labs record. Whatever high-end format finally catches on, I'm hoping it will finally achieve what people once hoped the CD would deliver.
Then again, iTunes will probably just be adapted to rip and play whatever format that turns out to be.
I'd love to have a remote for my iPod, but oh well. I'm just stuck creating playlists where I like all of the music in them. It admittedly does take a bit of filtering on my part, but there you go.
Well, the nicer screen, longer battery life, and video capabilities of you 5G nicely offset that disadvantage. Still, it's a feature that I'm sad to see has been "Steved" somewhere along the way.
The point which you seem to have forgotten that you made, and the one which I am criticizing you for, is the contention that the iPod itself is a "low fi" device... a contention which seems to be based entirely on hearing lossy compressed audio files played from it.
And as I've tried to get through your thick skull, again and again, this is simply not the case. The iPod, when playing uncompressed or lossless music, performs extremely well against even the best CD players on the market. This is not just my opinion, but the evaluation of many leading audio critics around the world.
As to the two points you claim to be the only ones you are making:
1. You kept repeating your "cretentials" as a golden-ear audiophile as reasoning why your opinion of the iPod must simply more selective than other people, but I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts you've never subjected uncompressed files on an iPod to double-blind testing with your precious Denon and Sony CD players. If you had, I think the results would really surprise you.
2. The iPod Speaker...with its actual shortcomings (I have heard one. It's not much better than the Bose or similar offerings out there) is perfectly fine as a low-fi boom box, but that is not how it's marketed, nor is it how it is priced. People have the right to hear about the evaluations of those of us who have actually listened to the damned thing, and that's all I was offering.
You're the one who jumped on me for daring to suggest that even we lowly iPod listeners might demand something better that this particular gadget.
Who would've taken you seriously if, 5 years ago, you'd suggest that the iPod itself were to become a fashion statement?
I don't take them seriously when they tell me that today.
If it looked exactly like a lump of fresh dog turd, I'd still take it everywhere, because I find it extremely handy. (I might be more tempted to buy a case from Coach to hide it in, though...)
I have, and I'll say this: They blow away the similarly sized and more expensive Bose iPod speaker set up, by leaps and bounds.
I have also heard it, and agree that it sounds better than the Bose iPod unit.
However, that is what I could call "damning it with faint praise," because the Bose sounds remarkably bad, while the Apple iPod Hi-Fi sound only slightly bad.
I'm very happy for you in that you seem to think you are the only musician and/or audio engineer and/or audiophile on Slashdot.
Basically, I can hear subtle to sometimes dramatic differences depending on the input source device.
So can I, and I'm telling you that the iPod, when playing uncompressed files, if a VERY good performer. I've owned several respectale CD players in the past which didn't do as well. (Especially since CDs do get wear & dust over time, and the biggest difference between CD players is how well they handle read error correction. D/A Conversion itself is all pretty much based on the same logic these days. Ripping new CD's to an iPod eliminates a great deal of this problem, especially if you do multi-pass rips.)
But are the Sony ones the iconic dirty-white? (well, the buds themselves are white, but the cord - the bit you really see - is definately light grey). Didn't think so. Sales = 0.
Sales = 0???
You haven't set foot in a Best buy in quite some time have you. Those little jobbies fly off the shelves there.
Also, those won't work with the new 5G iPods, nor with the Nano (thanks to the remote plug), unless they can (as one would hope) be separated from the remote itself.
They can. They are the exact same ear buds as the ones that don't come with the remote.
In which case you've just wasted $35 on a useless remote and the other $5 went to overpriced earbuds.
You could always eBay the remote if you don't want it. There's a lot of people who own iPods which support it yet don't have one. (A friend of mine was eyeballing my remote with a bit of envy during a recent ski trip. It sucks having to dig around in your powder jacket to adjust the volume or skip a track while riding the chairlift.)
An iPod case from Coach is not just a cover, it's a fashion accessory. They are a company which mostly sells $300+ purses.
Note that a purse does exactly the same job as a paper grocery bag under most circumstances. From a functional point of view, it's just a bag with a handle.
Women buy expensive Coach bags (and even more expensive ones from other makers) because what a woman carries is considered part of her outfit. She doesn't carry a purse; she wears it.
From the photos I've seen, the $100 iPod cover from Apple seems a little more utilitarian. I doubt it will become a big fashion statement.
Then again, if the Pink RAZR can become a must-have item for celebrity runways, I suppose just about anything is possible.
If you are going to listen to AAC or MP3 files, you might as well use a MUCH cheaper room system than the "iPod Hi-Fi" ]
Portable CD player, I would agree. My Denon 5910 or my Sony ES-555? Coming out of B&W DM's? No freakin' way.
An iPod playing lossless or uncompressed files into your amp and out your B&Ws (great speakers, btw!), will sound every bit as good as some of the top-of-the-line analog-out CD players, including your treasured Denon. Several leading audio magazines have written reviews (and double-blind tests) which confirm this.
Apple lossless sounds good enough that I no longer even have a CD player hooked up to my main audio system.
By the way, Rotel made a $300 unit which did just as well as the Sony ES-555, and several other players have come out in even lower price ranges which compare favorably. The 1980s are over, and the difference between a $100 CD player and a $1500 CD player just ain't what it used to me. The only people who think they hear a difference between a good cheap one and the top of the line are the same people who were coloring in the inside circle of their CD's with green markers and buying all their speaker wire from Monster. If that's you, I apologize. I have some vibration-dampening feet for your Denon which I would like to sell you for a mere $450 (each).
How is it a troll to voice a suspicion that some guy who gave away local log-ins whole holding a security "contest" on OS X was astroturfing.
His whole project seems tailor-made to generate bad press for Mac security. It would not surprise me at all if he got a nice fat check from Redmond to set this up.
On the old G4 mini, my experience was that Quicktime generally out-performed VLC (which seemed to out-perform MPlayer). YMMV.
I was always under the impression that the problem with integrated graphics was that the cooperative sharing of memory between the CPU and GPU created a performance hit. That's not really something you can get around by writing "better drivers." It's just the nature of the beast.
It can display at that resolution, sure, but it's a question of performance when decoding H.264 files (or naked MPEG-2 files) on the fly.
It's also a question of what frame-rate and resolution it can handle when playing games.
The bump in CPU power over the old mini is significant, but the hit to the system from having a shared-memory GPU is a step in the opposite direction, where anything video-intensive is concerned.
I'm waiting to hear what happens when somebody hooks up an EyeTV 500 to it, and pulls up the info box to see if it displays the HDTV signal in full resolution and frame rate, or scales down to "1/4" like the G4 minis did.
Slashdot Mirror
I pesonally would have supported the war if our government had done as yours, and said "we're doing this for reigeme change in Iraq"
The Bush administration has been criticized in the US, not unfairly, for also stressing the WMD concerns above the other reasons for going to war.
I personally don't feel the US Republicans nor the UK Labor leadership "lied" about WMDs. Worst-case, they were wrong, because they trusted the wrong intel and chose to err on the side of keeping WMD capacity out of Saddam's hands.
The recently uncovered Saddam tapes (while far from a smoking gun), do lend support to the idea that a crapload of weapons and related tech were squirreled away to Syria and/or buried in the desert during the ramp-up to the war. It would not at all surprise me if even harder evidence were to come to light in the near future. It certainly seems consistant with what we know about the previous Iraqi government to suspect that they had these weapons, but did a very good job of hiding them.
Rugby players don't wear body armour
Neither to (real) Football players.
A lot of non-Americans make the same mistake.
Football shoulderpads and helmets are weapons, not armor. They are hard on the outside, and mainly built up on the top of the shoulders and head. This allows you to spear the other player harder when you tackle them.
The place were you are likely to get hit in football, the abdomen, is usually completely unprotected.
The only sport with a higher rate of serious injuries than American football is cheerleading. (Because those girls are basically doing advanced gymnastics without floor pads. Lots of broken bones.)
Most American universities have co-rec rugby teams, and apart from a few bumps and bruises, hardly anybody ever gets hurt that badly, even with women and men taking the field together.
Says the guy who's sig file cites an old Hebrew law out of context.
According to opinion polls most of us Brits didn't support it
Most Americans didn't support it either.
I did, and still do, but I'm clearly in the minority.
Bush won re-election in spite of the Iraq decision, not because of it.
hot paddle-on-paddle action.
If you are just hitting the paddles against each other, you are doing it wrong, and your partner is simply too nice to tell you so.
OMGFTFBBQ!!!! He just implied that the Bushies might not be pure evil!!1!ONE!!1!
O !!
Nuance!!! Thoughtful discussion!!!1!
-1, Flamebait!!
-1, Flamebait!!!1!!!THELONELIESTNUMBERTHATYOU'LLEVERD
Considering response to Cindy Sheehan by Bush Admin...
Oh, so it was the Bush Administration that ordered the NYC police to arrest her for trespassing when she and her fellow protesters locked their legs together and blocked the door to the US Mission of the UN???
And this is "not far off" from arresting a drunk for sedition after he bad-mouths FDR?
"Hello in there, Cliff. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?"
(Exactly why the market-socialist UK is supporting this I'm not sure).
Maybe it's because your theory about the "real" motivations for the war are not quite as on-target as you think. Just a thought.
At last! All the fun, drama, and thrills of table tennis without having to go outside to your local ping-pong court. For the first time ever, you can play it from the comfort of your family rec room!!!
Hey, wait...
i think that after posting this story on slashdot, there's really little chance to do anything on the machine for today
The new RTFA: Before complaining of a site being slashdotted, check to see if it's actually... you know... slashdotted.
'cause it's not. It's chugging away nicely.
Go OS X, Apache, and hogging your university's network resources!
We just provided the whole damned Internet a perfect example how how heated things can get between two people who probably agree about most things related to a topic when they use casually-written text as the only means of discussion.
For my own part, I find Apple Lossless rips, either from an iPod or from the TOSLink connection on my Mac, to be a step UP from almost every CD player I've ever owned (and I've gone through quite a few of them.)
(Hmm... and iPod with an optical digital output... now THERE would be something worth calling an "iPod Hi-Fi"!)
However, the slow rise of DVD Audio might change that. While most of what we thought was wrong with CD's back in the 80s was really just the artifacts of poor playback devices, I'm still not 100% happy with CD sound.
I'm no vinyl bigot... most of my audio library is digital... but I have yet to hear a CD match the magic of a pristine Sheffield Labs record. Whatever high-end format finally catches on, I'm hoping it will finally achieve what people once hoped the CD would deliver.
Then again, iTunes will probably just be adapted to rip and play whatever format that turns out to be.
I'd love to have a remote for my iPod, but oh well. I'm just stuck creating playlists where I like all of the music in them. It admittedly does take a bit of filtering on my part, but there you go.
Well, the nicer screen, longer battery life, and video capabilities of you 5G nicely offset that disadvantage. Still, it's a feature that I'm sad to see has been "Steved" somewhere along the way.
The point which you seem to have forgotten that you made, and the one which I am criticizing you for, is the contention that the iPod itself is a "low fi" device... a contention which seems to be based entirely on hearing lossy compressed audio files played from it.
And as I've tried to get through your thick skull, again and again, this is simply not the case. The iPod, when playing uncompressed or lossless music, performs extremely well against even the best CD players on the market. This is not just my opinion, but the evaluation of many leading audio critics around the world.
As to the two points you claim to be the only ones you are making:
1. You kept repeating your "cretentials" as a golden-ear audiophile as reasoning why your opinion of the iPod must simply more selective than other people, but I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts you've never subjected uncompressed files on an iPod to double-blind testing with your precious Denon and Sony CD players. If you had, I think the results would really surprise you.
2. The iPod Speaker...with its actual shortcomings (I have heard one. It's not much better than the Bose or similar offerings out there) is perfectly fine as a low-fi boom box, but that is not how it's marketed, nor is it how it is priced. People have the right to hear about the evaluations of those of us who have actually listened to the damned thing, and that's all I was offering.
You're the one who jumped on me for daring to suggest that even we lowly iPod listeners might demand something better that this particular gadget.
Who would've taken you seriously if, 5 years ago, you'd suggest that the iPod itself were to become a fashion statement?
I don't take them seriously when they tell me that today.
If it looked exactly like a lump of fresh dog turd, I'd still take it everywhere, because I find it extremely handy. (I might be more tempted to buy a case from Coach to hide it in, though...)
I have, and I'll say this: They blow away the similarly sized and more expensive Bose iPod speaker set up, by leaps and bounds.
I have also heard it, and agree that it sounds better than the Bose iPod unit.
However, that is what I could call "damning it with faint praise," because the Bose sounds remarkably bad, while the Apple iPod Hi-Fi sound only slightly bad.
Neither is worth the price tag.
I'm very happy for you in that you seem to think you are the only musician and/or audio engineer and/or audiophile on Slashdot.
Basically, I can hear subtle to sometimes dramatic differences depending on the input source device.
So can I, and I'm telling you that the iPod, when playing uncompressed files, if a VERY good performer. I've owned several respectale CD players in the past which didn't do as well. (Especially since CDs do get wear & dust over time, and the biggest difference between CD players is how well they handle read error correction. D/A Conversion itself is all pretty much based on the same logic these days. Ripping new CD's to an iPod eliminates a great deal of this problem, especially if you do multi-pass rips.)
But are the Sony ones the iconic dirty-white? (well, the buds themselves are white, but the cord - the bit you really see - is definately light grey). Didn't think so. Sales = 0.
Sales = 0???
You haven't set foot in a Best buy in quite some time have you. Those little jobbies fly off the shelves there.
Also, those won't work with the new 5G iPods, nor with the Nano (thanks to the remote plug), unless they can (as one would hope) be separated from the remote itself.
They can. They are the exact same ear buds as the ones that don't come with the remote.
In which case you've just wasted $35 on a useless remote and the other $5 went to overpriced earbuds.
You could always eBay the remote if you don't want it. There's a lot of people who own iPods which support it yet don't have one. (A friend of mine was eyeballing my remote with a bit of envy during a recent ski trip. It sucks having to dig around in your powder jacket to adjust the volume or skip a track while riding the chairlift.)
An iPod case from Coach is not just a cover, it's a fashion accessory. They are a company which mostly sells $300+ purses.
Note that a purse does exactly the same job as a paper grocery bag under most circumstances. From a functional point of view, it's just a bag with a handle.
Women buy expensive Coach bags (and even more expensive ones from other makers) because what a woman carries is considered part of her outfit. She doesn't carry a purse; she wears it.
From the photos I've seen, the $100 iPod cover from Apple seems a little more utilitarian. I doubt it will become a big fashion statement.
Then again, if the Pink RAZR can become a must-have item for celebrity runways, I suppose just about anything is possible.
Apple doesn't sell replacements as far as I can tell.
A ppleStore.woa/6034003/wo/5j7PKMQPV1zg2TmF2SXxlrDh2 9B/1.SLID?mco=49C8A68F&nplm=M9128G%2FA
Right here. They even throw in a little remote like the one that some of the 3G iPods used to come with.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
For $40, you can probably buy much nicer headphones. I find that the Sony $10 earbuds sound just as good if not better.
If you are going to listen to AAC or MP3 files, you might as well use a MUCH cheaper room system than the "iPod Hi-Fi" ]
Portable CD player, I would agree. My Denon 5910 or my Sony ES-555? Coming out of B&W DM's? No freakin' way.
An iPod playing lossless or uncompressed files into your amp and out your B&Ws (great speakers, btw!), will sound every bit as good as some of the top-of-the-line analog-out CD players, including your treasured Denon. Several leading audio magazines have written reviews (and double-blind tests) which confirm this.
Apple lossless sounds good enough that I no longer even have a CD player hooked up to my main audio system.
By the way, Rotel made a $300 unit which did just as well as the Sony ES-555, and several other players have come out in even lower price ranges which compare favorably. The 1980s are over, and the difference between a $100 CD player and a $1500 CD player just ain't what it used to me. The only people who think they hear a difference between a good cheap one and the top of the line are the same people who were coloring in the inside circle of their CD's with green markers and buying all their speaker wire from Monster. If that's you, I apologize. I have some vibration-dampening feet for your Denon which I would like to sell you for a mere $450 (each).
How is it a troll to voice a suspicion that some guy who gave away local log-ins whole holding a security "contest" on OS X was astroturfing.
His whole project seems tailor-made to generate bad press for Mac security. It would not surprise me at all if he got a nice fat check from Redmond to set this up.
On the old G4 mini, my experience was that Quicktime generally out-performed VLC (which seemed to out-perform MPlayer). YMMV.
I was always under the impression that the problem with integrated graphics was that the cooperative sharing of memory between the CPU and GPU created a performance hit. That's not really something you can get around by writing "better drivers." It's just the nature of the beast.
If you don't want to see sigs then turn off sigs and stop bitching about what people put in them.
I don't mind seeing what people put in their sigs. I like sigs.
If you don't want to be called a whore, quit selling yourself.
It can display at that resolution, sure, but it's a question of performance when decoding H.264 files (or naked MPEG-2 files) on the fly.
It's also a question of what frame-rate and resolution it can handle when playing games.
The bump in CPU power over the old mini is significant, but the hit to the system from having a shared-memory GPU is a step in the opposite direction, where anything video-intensive is concerned.
I'm waiting to hear what happens when somebody hooks up an EyeTV 500 to it, and pulls up the info box to see if it displays the HDTV signal in full resolution and frame rate, or scales down to "1/4" like the G4 minis did.
I don't know what this guy was trying to prove
Perhaps he was one of those people trying to "prove" that Macs are "not so secure after all."
Just a thought.