If I listen to an MP3 or AAC file on my computer with its sound card and speakers (SB Audigy, Boston Accoustics) I can tell the difference between the same (160kbs) MP3 file and a (128k) AAC - the AAC sounds better. I can't tell the difference between the AAC and a WAV file however.
If I move up to my ($$$$) home stereo then I can easily tell the difference between the compressed and non-compressed versions of the same song. AAC still sounds better to me than MP3 however.
The difference here is money and environment, my office is a noisy place with all the computers etc running. My listening room is quiet and I spent a lot of time setting the stereo up so that its at its best.
I have not looked at OOG or any of the other formats so I can't comment on the relative merits of them.
All the posts here saying 6 is not enough seem to assume that the light being used is all one color.
What happens if other colors are introduced as part of the key. Doesn't the number of combinations rise astronomically or can fibre only handle one color?
Debt is a very useful thing to have if you need extensive capital investment in material things or you need a pool of money to fund the development of an idea.
If you have no need to do capital investments in things like plant and equipment or buying another company then debt is a BAD thing because you're paying interest and usually more than you'd get investing in a similar risk item.
Americans seem to have an idea that being in debt is a good thing. For some things like a House which will normally be a long term asset whose value will be more than the total cost of the debt this is an OK idea. For cars and such its usually not a great idea as the asset depreciates very quickly, for computers its even worse. Unless of course you use that asset for something useful like running your business (one of the reasons Graphics people don't care about the cost of a new Mac is that it pays for itself very quickly).
So lets look at Apple. Their major assets are their people and ideas. If they have enough revenue to continue to pay those people they shouldn't borrow for it. R&D is normally expensive but most of what Apple does is consumer design, software development and (some) assembly. CPU's, Disks etc are all developed by others - sometimes with input from Apple. For these things they don't need extensive physical assets like factories and machinery. They need enough space for everyone to work, and they can get someone else to build/assemble their designs at very little risk to themselves usually.
This is one of the reasons why tech companies usually have very little debt.
In Apples case debt would only be good if they needed to acquire another company and believed they could run the acquisition better than the current management or they needed to invest significantly in something else that required a large chunk of change up front.
Low debt may make a company a takeover target but in Apples case you'd 1. Have to pay a significant premium over the value of their cash assests and 2. be really sure you could run the company better than Steve and his key people. Otherwise you'd be buying a declining asset or looking to put a competitor out of business. Microsoft might like to try but the Anti-trust brigade would have a field day.
As long as Apple stays profitable and can fund its own R&D internally it doesn't need more debt.
I also have a large collection of mp3's (about 48GB)
Mine are stored on a network share and when I tried to import them iTunes seemed to hang. It just does it really slowly (>24hrs)! Every other player I've tried except Winamp has the same problem.
An acceptable solution for me was to remove all the m3u and pls files in each directory (I just temporarily sotred them in the recycle bin) the let iTunes at it again. Significantly better performance.
Another quick tip is to use winamp to scan you collection, create an all songs playlist and point iTunes at that.
Gaming performance one of the most important arenas for PC performance?
Get real.
What matters most is what YOU use the computer for. If its as a gaming machine, fine buy Intel. If you need to work with Photoshop all day buy a Mac, the price difference per MHz is irrelevant if you make your money doing this type of work. Need to compile stuff fast? How about a AMD or Alpha. Need to run Oracle with very high reliability, use SPARC/Solaris. Need to process as million records a second for a billing application, use an IBM Mainframe. Want to edit home movies, buy a Mac.
Get it right, its USEABILITY that matters not MHz.
Find the best machine for a task and then worry about MHz.
My personal opinion is that the best machine for a geek to play with linux, games, fool around with hardware etc has to be an x86 box because of the all round flexibility for a great price. In a business though? I don't care if costs $1K or $100K more if its more useable for the given task then the extra cost is almost irrelevant.
So what will make you watch a new show? How will you know what's on - word of mouth?
I suspect that all PVR makers will eventually sell advertising and preference space (like search engines do now).
How will we avoid a 30 second ad that plays each time we select a new program to view, or a Tivo insistance that we really, really like say 6 Feet Under?
So WTFD does the frequency make?
OK so the US has already allocated the 800 & 1800 MHz bands to other uses having ignored the standards almost all the rest of the world has chosen.
I can then understand that the US needed to use another frequency to provide GSM service.
As a Non-American living and working in the US (no smart remarks please I pay more in US taxes per year than the average US salary/wage) my take is that the US has more competition than some countries in the World but less actual market benefit to the consumer.
GSM is one example of governments saying "this is the standard you need to use" and in many countries (AFAIK not Japan) "if you use it you can compete with anyone else". This to me seems like sensible government regulation similar to "in this country we drive on the right" type standards.
It's neither right nor better, more just the way things are.
But consider the benefits - with my non US GSM phone I can go to nearly any other country in the world, use the phone (pay nothing for incoming calls) at perhaps a slightly higher rate with the SAME phone number. Normally the caller knows they're calling a celluar phone. They pay the full cost of calling the reciever in the receivers normal home area which is usually the country their service is from. The receiver pays the full cost of the call from thier normal service area to where they are. So if I am a New Zealander in Europe and someone in NZ calls me then they pay the normal NZ rate to call a cellular phone. I pay the costs from NZ to Europe. To me this provides the best of both worlds, with me paying nothing to have people ring me in my home country but accepting the charges for them to call me when overseas.
I know and understand that Americans have a different perspective and I can see some merit in the US model. I hate the fact that if I change providers I need to buy a new fscking phone even if the new provider offers the exact same model! That's not competition its extortion. I also hate that I can't get off a plane and continue to use my phone. If the US adopted GSM as even a quasi standard (even at 1900 Mhz) then most phones on the market would soon be tri-GSM-band (800/1800/1900 Mhz). GSM may not be the best standard, I know that for some tasks CDMA offers the best technolological advantages, but just like VHS and BetaMax its THE standard end of story.
I a lot of cases it comes down to the US centric view of "the world". Just because the US is such a large market (perhaps the biggest single market for technology) US companies focus on the home market. Other companies such as NOKIA and Ericsson have to export to survive and so go after the biggest share of the market world wide. Perhaps this is a reason the finn's are the best at providing cellular technology to the world?
In the end I think this attitude will be the downfall of America.
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A Simple interface, lockup the box ad just have the controller available - These are cheap, capable and reliable.
Bollocks! BUT...
If I listen to an MP3 or AAC file on my computer with its sound card and speakers (SB Audigy, Boston Accoustics) I can tell the difference between the same (160kbs) MP3 file and a (128k) AAC - the AAC sounds better. I can't tell the difference between the AAC and a WAV file however.
If I move up to my ($$$$) home stereo then I can easily tell the difference between the compressed and non-compressed versions of the same song. AAC still sounds better to me than MP3 however.
The difference here is money and environment, my office is a noisy place with all the computers etc running. My listening room is quiet and I spent a lot of time setting the stereo up so that its at its best.
I have not looked at OOG or any of the other formats so I can't comment on the relative merits of them.
I have a question.
All the posts here saying 6 is not enough seem to assume that the light being used is all one color.
What happens if other colors are introduced as part of the key. Doesn't the number of combinations rise astronomically or can fibre only handle one color?
Debt is a very useful thing to have if you need extensive capital investment in material things or you need a pool of money to fund the development of an idea.
If you have no need to do capital investments in things like plant and equipment or buying another company then debt is a BAD thing because you're paying interest and usually more than you'd get investing in a similar risk item.
Americans seem to have an idea that being in debt is a good thing. For some things like a House which will normally be a long term asset whose value will be more than the total cost of the debt this is an OK idea. For cars and such its usually not a great idea as the asset depreciates very quickly, for computers its even worse. Unless of course you use that asset for something useful like running your business (one of the reasons Graphics people don't care about the cost of a new Mac is that it pays for itself very quickly).
So lets look at Apple. Their major assets are their people and ideas. If they have enough revenue to continue to pay those people they shouldn't borrow for it. R&D is normally expensive but most of what Apple does is consumer design, software development and (some) assembly. CPU's, Disks etc are all developed by others - sometimes with input from Apple. For these things they don't need extensive physical assets like factories and machinery. They need enough space for everyone to work, and they can get someone else to build/assemble their designs at very little risk to themselves usually.
This is one of the reasons why tech companies usually have very little debt.
In Apples case debt would only be good if they needed to acquire another company and believed they could run the acquisition better than the current management or they needed to invest significantly in something else that required a large chunk of change up front.
Low debt may make a company a takeover target but in Apples case you'd 1. Have to pay a significant premium over the value of their cash assests and 2. be really sure you could run the company better than Steve and his key people. Otherwise you'd be buying a declining asset or looking to put a competitor out of business. Microsoft might like to try but the Anti-trust brigade would have a field day.
As long as Apple stays profitable and can fund its own R&D internally it doesn't need more debt.
At some stage in your career if you have any ambition you will need to accept a job that you don't really want to do in order to move ahead.
Rejecting an offer will often be seen as a sign you're happy where you are. The next offer might not come your way.
Think of it this way - at least you seem to work for a company that's doing some sort of career planning for you.
Besides, do a good job and turn a team around and you'll be very highly considered in future.
The real problem he's talking about here is just as applicable to open or closed source.
I can easily develop and deploy malicious code from inside an organization using one of the multitude of closed systems (like excel or word).
Or I can be exposed by a contractor inserting all manner of backdoors etc. into projects they work on.
The real issue is one of trust and he seems to think we can trust someone we can sue more than something we can't
I also have a large collection of mp3's (about 48GB)
Mine are stored on a network share and when I tried to import them iTunes seemed to hang. It just does it really slowly (>24hrs)! Every other player I've tried except Winamp has the same problem.
An acceptable solution for me was to remove all the m3u and pls files in each directory (I just temporarily sotred them in the recycle bin) the let iTunes at it again. Significantly better performance.
Another quick tip is to use winamp to scan you collection, create an all songs playlist and point iTunes at that.
Get real.
What matters most is what YOU use the computer for. If its as a gaming machine, fine buy Intel. If you need to work with Photoshop all day buy a Mac, the price difference per MHz is irrelevant if you make your money doing this type of work. Need to compile stuff fast? How about a AMD or Alpha. Need to run Oracle with very high reliability, use SPARC/Solaris. Need to process as million records a second for a billing application, use an IBM Mainframe. Want to edit home movies, buy a Mac.
Get it right, its USEABILITY that matters not MHz.
Find the best machine for a task and then worry about MHz.
My personal opinion is that the best machine for a geek to play with linux, games, fool around with hardware etc has to be an x86 box because of the all round flexibility for a great price. In a business though? I don't care if costs $1K or $100K more if its more useable for the given task then the extra cost is almost irrelevant.
So what will make you watch a new show? How will you know what's on - word of mouth? I suspect that all PVR makers will eventually sell advertising and preference space (like search engines do now). How will we avoid a 30 second ad that plays each time we select a new program to view, or a Tivo insistance that we really, really like say 6 Feet Under?
So WTFD does the frequency make? OK so the US has already allocated the 800 & 1800 MHz bands to other uses having ignored the standards almost all the rest of the world has chosen. I can then understand that the US needed to use another frequency to provide GSM service. As a Non-American living and working in the US (no smart remarks please I pay more in US taxes per year than the average US salary/wage) my take is that the US has more competition than some countries in the World but less actual market benefit to the consumer. GSM is one example of governments saying "this is the standard you need to use" and in many countries (AFAIK not Japan) "if you use it you can compete with anyone else". This to me seems like sensible government regulation similar to "in this country we drive on the right" type standards. It's neither right nor better, more just the way things are. But consider the benefits - with my non US GSM phone I can go to nearly any other country in the world, use the phone (pay nothing for incoming calls) at perhaps a slightly higher rate with the SAME phone number. Normally the caller knows they're calling a celluar phone. They pay the full cost of calling the reciever in the receivers normal home area which is usually the country their service is from. The receiver pays the full cost of the call from thier normal service area to where they are. So if I am a New Zealander in Europe and someone in NZ calls me then they pay the normal NZ rate to call a cellular phone. I pay the costs from NZ to Europe. To me this provides the best of both worlds, with me paying nothing to have people ring me in my home country but accepting the charges for them to call me when overseas. I know and understand that Americans have a different perspective and I can see some merit in the US model. I hate the fact that if I change providers I need to buy a new fscking phone even if the new provider offers the exact same model! That's not competition its extortion. I also hate that I can't get off a plane and continue to use my phone. If the US adopted GSM as even a quasi standard (even at 1900 Mhz) then most phones on the market would soon be tri-GSM-band (800/1800/1900 Mhz). GSM may not be the best standard, I know that for some tasks CDMA offers the best technolological advantages, but just like VHS and BetaMax its THE standard end of story. I a lot of cases it comes down to the US centric view of "the world". Just because the US is such a large market (perhaps the biggest single market for technology) US companies focus on the home market. Other companies such as NOKIA and Ericsson have to export to survive and so go after the biggest share of the market world wide. Perhaps this is a reason the finn's are the best at providing cellular technology to the world? In the end I think this attitude will be the downfall of America.