I'm doing the same thing, having ripped much of my collection to MP3, MP3pro, and started high bitrate MP3 before realizing that I could do this forever. If MP3 doesn't end up the dominant format, I can just run foobar2k on my drive and get the format of the day. It takes so much time to actually rip (and I only have about 250-260CDs) that if I do it once correctly, I'll never have to go through it again. Even if I decide to switch to Monkey, it's easy. And fast...FLAC is super efficient, processor-wise. That can make a difference when you're going through 60-80GB of data.
It's not necessarily about every bit, its about doing it to the best quality ONCE, and never having to worry about it again. You're going to worry about saving 50% HD space (FLAC vs 320kb MP3) when 200GB drives are $100 or less? Many portable consumer devices choke on high-bit-rate (and low- for that matter) MP3s. It will take hours of time to rip a decent collection, there's no need to take shortcuts.
Do we always want physical failsafes on the deepest levels? Do we trust brake lines/brake fluid more than we trust data and power cables to a remote braking mechanism?
When windows locks up your laptop, isn't it nice to know that you can manually eject the battery rather than waiting several hours for it to run out of juice by itself? (I actually had an informal support call about this a week ago)
Yes, it's confirmed that you don't have kids. When we were kids you could roll around in the back of the car and play on long trips. You could crawl into the back or lay down on the seat take a nap. You could press your face against the windows and see the scenery or make faces at passing cars. With all of our advances, that's not "safe" anymore, and until you're 25 years old and wiegh more than 140 lbs you must be strapped into an approved, anchored, uncomfortable 5-point harness which restrict the movement of all but the tip of you nose and your eyeballs.
I had exactly this discussion with my wife on our trip to the beach last summer with my (then) 20 month old. I set up the laptop between the front two seats (in a harness) and after being on the road for 30-40 minutes on the road she started getting antsy so I popped in a few episodes of The Muppet Show. She went from impending basket case to zombie in about thirty seconds. I asked my wife if we should fee guilty about that. We agreed that it was worth the danger, given that the muppet shows didn't destroy us in the past, she was far more relaxed for the trip (and so were we), and it's sort of her "reward" for not making the rest of the trip a living hell for us.
The result is that the 3 hour trip was pleasant, we ALL arrived in good spirits, and started the week off on a good note.
As for tuning out, I've noticed that my daughter generally isn't interested in watching TV most of the time. She likes two or three particular segments on Sesame Street and Bear in the Big Blue House, and will sing or count with the characters. It's rare that she will watch more than a few minutes, and will always abandon any indoor activity if given the option to go outside and swing or go to the park. She goes to daycare 5 days a week, and there are no TVs in the baby or toddler rooms - they read, sing, play with toys, play outside, or do arts and crafts all day, so she's never had the TV used as a babysitter. Maybe that's the difference?
...but MS needs to change their business model to full subscription service (which would no be popular, as it's currently NOT one).
How/why? Think of it as content delivery instead of software. Most content delivery services heavily subsidize the hardware costs - DirecTV, Dish, Cable, Cell Phones, etc. all will give you free hardware or let you buy the good stuff at a reduced rate. Even TiVo, which is really just a software company with data updates, has subsidized the hardware in the past. All to get you locked into a contract or hook you on a service which is billed monthly.
What if microsoft stopped selling stand alone discs and oem copies? What if you could only subscribe to the MS operating system for $19.95/mo (33.95 for the pro version, and 7.95/connection/mo for the server version, of course) plus $9.95 for the word/excel productivity add-on? Now what if you could buy a Dell 4600 in a standard config for $99 with a two year MS committment, and get a $99 rebate? Or buy any computer and get a $299 rebate when you sign up for 2 years of MS service? They'll still give you all those free updates, like they do now, but they'll have a steady revenue stream from subscriptions.
Steve Ballmer is right. And wrong. And I expect a future where I'll have to pay the software bill along with electricity, phone, cable, and beer-of-the-month.
It helps if you think of it like John Stewart lambasting the Crossfire hosts. If we have shitty grammar and can't spell worth a damn, it's okay, 'cause we're just joe-everyguy standing around the virtual watercooler we call slashdot. He's the leader of the USA, he goddamned better get it right. He gets a quarter-mil salary, great benes, a set-for-life retirement, and the option to play whack-a-mole with nuclear weapons when he gets bored. He should, at least, stop making up words in public statements.
Gawd, I've never had the chance to play around with GIMP, but I can't imagine it's actually worse than Photoshop. The only reason I use PS is taht I learned it a decade ago on the company's dime, so I have a good grounding in what goes where, and how to make the print-oriented world of PS jive with the computer imaging world.
Man, to think GIMP would be worse is just way to scary.
While the gp is certainly a TiVo fan, I'll reiterate the features which make TiVo worth the extra $5, plus the $99 to buy the box (I just got a 40h TiVo for my father-in-law, and my total cost, after rebate, was $99.00).
The "suggestions" make the TiVo worthwhile to me. I asked TiVo to record the Va Tech vs NC State football game a few weeks ago. Two weeks later, I was looking through the suggestions it had recorded, and it had the next Va Tech game recorded. I had actually intended to record that game, but forgot to set it up (I didn't look for the next NC State game...it may have been a bye week, or I may have just not seen it). Based on my thumbs and viewing, I'd say it will pick up a good item once or twice a month for me, and my wife probably watches half of all her viewing from the suggestions list. It's really her TiVo, she watches ~4-5x as muich TV as I do.
As for recording shows, Tivo will record only "first run" instances of series shows, which is a big timesaver for box maintenance and storage management (though with 140hrs, I don't have to manage much).
A disclaimer - I have a modified DirecTiVo (just more hours, no hacks), and had a standalone unit before that.
And it wouldn't be worth paying $300 for a lifetime with DirecTV. 300/5=60 months payback at 0% interest. I have no illusions that a TiVo won't die beyond repair in 5 years, on average. (I'm 15 months in and the drive fubar'd last week. I had to d/l a virgin image off eMule and replace the drive to get it running again). You get the second+ receiver at the extra-receiver charge (a cmopletely bogus charge, btw), so the service is "free" on extra receivers.
...were my favorites for dispensing voter-rage justice. Flipping the mechanical levers next to the names, changing as many times as you want, then that satisfying *crackhackhackhackhackhackha* as you pull the handle and make you decision permanent.
As for overall ease, and being a student in the scan-tron era, I liked the fill-in-the-bubble cards I used once in Maryland. Simple to fill out (we used them for all our standardized tests from preschool though SATs), simple to tally, simple to automatically recount, simple to manually recount.
"The results are released in 2 or 3 days after elections for president."
Americans don't have that much patience. If it can't be tallied by the 6 o'clock news, it's not fast enough. Never mind that polls don't close until 11pm or 12pm EST, the results STILL need to be in by the 6 o'clock news. THAT's why we need e-voting - they can announce the results early, 'cause the actual voting won't affect the outcome!
Yes quite a troll. Most folks ar of the opinion that JS is the only thing that saved TDS from dying an early and painful death. It's a rare case of a reverse shark jump.
You're not watching it for "news," you're watching it and getting a comedic background vocal track syncronized with current events. The things on (most) of the videos actually happened - they're not staged or done with celebrity impersonators.
If you don't know whats happening you can't ask questions. Those who watch TDS to get their "news" are just getting snippets that they would not get on the major channels.
The fact that remaning 3/4 of the show is satire/comedy/host-guest interview makes it fun to watch the whole thing.
The repubs hold the WH and both houses of congress, they're going to catch the most flak from a show like TDS. If the tables were reveresed, the Dems would be front and center in TDS's sights.
Jon is civil with many on the right, sometimes even when they're defending the right (John McCain's interview was one of these cases). The interview portion of the show is just a general discourse that Jon tries to get a laugh or two out of. Would anyone criticize David Letterman for throwing softballs at a politician?
Jon is clearly left of center, but he's willing to make fun of anyone who does stupid stuff, just as he's willing to make fun of stupid things jews do. The "This is so stupid it's funny" line is usually applied to everything, even though the real message is "This is so stupid it would be funny if it weren't actually happening"
It's clear that Surlyboi's contemporaries (as with much of the m(b)illions of other typical humans) believe that 200k will do far more for the good of mankind if it's traded for a very comfortable automobile into which they can place their tender ass.
While I won't claim that I'm getting a great return on my investment which is taken from my paycheck, my money is, infact, going to investments in science and technology, biotech, education, law enforcement, national defense, community outreach, and other worthy programs. Out of my $200,000 in taxes, only $50k,000 may go to programs I deem useful, but that's $50,000 more than if I'd spent it on another Bentley.
Oh, and your free market can't do squat when it comes to efficiency. How do I know? Take a look at what Brittney Spears made last year and then tell me that - based on her talent - that sum was justified, because THAT is the free market in action.
How is this different than a barcode scan of a wristband? They both bring up the data on a pda. How about a (smaller) pen-barcode you scan at the wrist and on the chart, with a pleasant beep if they match and an annoying buzz if they don't?
As for your scenerio, you're assuming that there's no possible way that you could miss an important bit of information on 150 pages of scanned records viewed 1/8 page at a time on a pda, even if it was "automatic."
Reliability is a task which requires vigilence. What if some $6/hr data entry drone types the wrong procedure into your database? Your pda pen slips and you checked D instead of S on the hand needing the cyst removed?
I'd be with you if it weren't for all the bastardizations of previous single-use identifiers which have become used for less nobel causes. I don't just mean SSNs and DL#s, what about grocery story "discount cards", time/date stamping your location via CC purchases, RF toll booth records, and cell phone usage. That information is more valuable to someone else than you have money to prevent it from getting out.
Paranoid? I suggest you speak to Sen Bob Dole, who uses mostly cash for his transactions, taking several thousand dollars in cash out of his account every month for his expensies instead of paying by check or cc - both trackable.
Why get one replaced? Couldn't you make a hackable version with a modifiable ID number? It sort of like being able to change your MAC address.
If you could actually hack the database, you could make up a several purly fictitious personas, and reprogram your VariChip (that's my new trademark, by the way) for whomever you wanted to be. Hacking need not be external...you just need a friend on the inside.
Only if they happen to come into the SAME hospital, or a hospiotal which is linked to the original through a database. A Medic Alert tag with your SSN and major allergies is probably a better bet.
I happen to live in an area with thre competing companies who own the various hospitals. Even if I'm in a car crash close to home I would only have a 33% chance of being rushed to a hosipital which has access to my records. The chance of my wrist being intact when I arrive is much higher.
What happens over the next 20 years when the baby boomers have to live on their stock portfolios, and are no longer throwing their upper-middle management salaries at anything listed by their mutual find company websites?
The correct answer is...we don't know. I would not be suprised to find out that there will be a hard sell-side imbalance which could cause a market stagnation or decline over an extended period of time. The "overvalulation" is, in part, due to the hoards of money people are putting into the system. In a carefully balanced system, relatively small perturbations can mkae significant changes.
That said, most of my money is in the S&P, with a bit in mid-caps since I'm out a couple of decades from real retirement. Personally, I tend to be a large-cap value-guy, since most large, stable companies will eventually pull out of a slump given decent management, but are unlikely to really take a dive with even medeocre guidance. I invest in the indexes because they're low cost and require no oversight on my part.
Of course, I just moved to a less expensive house with a (much) smaller mortgage, have money put away for my daughters college (thanks in large part to generous grandparents and a tax-free 529 savings plan), and don't carry any other debt.
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I'm doing the same thing, having ripped much of my collection to MP3, MP3pro, and started high bitrate MP3 before realizing that I could do this forever. If MP3 doesn't end up the dominant format, I can just run foobar2k on my drive and get the format of the day. It takes so much time to actually rip (and I only have about 250-260CDs) that if I do it once correctly, I'll never have to go through it again. Even if I decide to switch to Monkey, it's easy. And fast...FLAC is super efficient, processor-wise. That can make a difference when you're going through 60-80GB of data.
It's not necessarily about every bit, its about doing it to the best quality ONCE, and never having to worry about it again. You're going to worry about saving 50% HD space (FLAC vs 320kb MP3) when 200GB drives are $100 or less? Many portable consumer devices choke on high-bit-rate (and low- for that matter) MP3s. It will take hours of time to rip a decent collection, there's no need to take shortcuts.
They're using Google, of course ;-)
Do we always want physical failsafes on the deepest levels? Do we trust brake lines/brake fluid more than we trust data and power cables to a remote braking mechanism?
When windows locks up your laptop, isn't it nice to know that you can manually eject the battery rather than waiting several hours for it to run out of juice by itself? (I actually had an informal support call about this a week ago)
Yes, it's confirmed that you don't have kids. When we were kids you could roll around in the back of the car and play on long trips. You could crawl into the back or lay down on the seat take a nap. You could press your face against the windows and see the scenery or make faces at passing cars. With all of our advances, that's not "safe" anymore, and until you're 25 years old and wiegh more than 140 lbs you must be strapped into an approved, anchored, uncomfortable 5-point harness which restrict the movement of all but the tip of you nose and your eyeballs.
I had exactly this discussion with my wife on our trip to the beach last summer with my (then) 20 month old. I set up the laptop between the front two seats (in a harness) and after being on the road for 30-40 minutes on the road she started getting antsy so I popped in a few episodes of The Muppet Show. She went from impending basket case to zombie in about thirty seconds. I asked my wife if we should fee guilty about that. We agreed that it was worth the danger, given that the muppet shows didn't destroy us in the past, she was far more relaxed for the trip (and so were we), and it's sort of her "reward" for not making the rest of the trip a living hell for us.
The result is that the 3 hour trip was pleasant, we ALL arrived in good spirits, and started the week off on a good note.
As for tuning out, I've noticed that my daughter generally isn't interested in watching TV most of the time. She likes two or three particular segments on Sesame Street and Bear in the Big Blue House, and will sing or count with the characters. It's rare that she will watch more than a few minutes, and will always abandon any indoor activity if given the option to go outside and swing or go to the park. She goes to daycare 5 days a week, and there are no TVs in the baby or toddler rooms - they read, sing, play with toys, play outside, or do arts and crafts all day, so she's never had the TV used as a babysitter. Maybe that's the difference?
...but MS needs to change their business model to full subscription service (which would no be popular, as it's currently NOT one).
How/why? Think of it as content delivery instead of software. Most content delivery services heavily subsidize the hardware costs - DirecTV, Dish, Cable, Cell Phones, etc. all will give you free hardware or let you buy the good stuff at a reduced rate. Even TiVo, which is really just a software company with data updates, has subsidized the hardware in the past. All to get you locked into a contract or hook you on a service which is billed monthly.
What if microsoft stopped selling stand alone discs and oem copies? What if you could only subscribe to the MS operating system for $19.95/mo (33.95 for the pro version, and 7.95/connection/mo for the server version, of course) plus $9.95 for the word/excel productivity add-on? Now what if you could buy a Dell 4600 in a standard config for $99 with a two year MS committment, and get a $99 rebate? Or buy any computer and get a $299 rebate when you sign up for 2 years of MS service? They'll still give you all those free updates, like they do now, but they'll have a steady revenue stream from subscriptions.
Steve Ballmer is right. And wrong. And I expect a future where I'll have to pay the software bill along with electricity, phone, cable, and beer-of-the-month.
It helps if you think of it like John Stewart lambasting the Crossfire hosts. If we have shitty grammar and can't spell worth a damn, it's okay, 'cause we're just joe-everyguy standing around the virtual watercooler we call slashdot. He's the leader of the USA, he goddamned better get it right. He gets a quarter-mil salary, great benes, a set-for-life retirement, and the option to play whack-a-mole with nuclear weapons when he gets bored. He should, at least, stop making up words in public statements.
Gawd, I've never had the chance to play around with GIMP, but I can't imagine it's actually worse than Photoshop. The only reason I use PS is taht I learned it a decade ago on the company's dime, so I have a good grounding in what goes where, and how to make the print-oriented world of PS jive with the computer imaging world.
Man, to think GIMP would be worse is just way to scary.
While the gp is certainly a TiVo fan, I'll reiterate the features which make TiVo worth the extra $5, plus the $99 to buy the box (I just got a 40h TiVo for my father-in-law, and my total cost, after rebate, was $99.00).
The "suggestions" make the TiVo worthwhile to me. I asked TiVo to record the Va Tech vs NC State football game a few weeks ago. Two weeks later, I was looking through the suggestions it had recorded, and it had the next Va Tech game recorded. I had actually intended to record that game, but forgot to set it up (I didn't look for the next NC State game...it may have been a bye week, or I may have just not seen it). Based on my thumbs and viewing, I'd say it will pick up a good item once or twice a month for me, and my wife probably watches half of all her viewing from the suggestions list. It's really her TiVo, she watches ~4-5x as muich TV as I do.
As for recording shows, Tivo will record only "first run" instances of series shows, which is a big timesaver for box maintenance and storage management (though with 140hrs, I don't have to manage much).
A disclaimer - I have a modified DirecTiVo (just more hours, no hacks), and had a standalone unit before that.
And it wouldn't be worth paying $300 for a lifetime with DirecTV. 300/5=60 months payback at 0% interest. I have no illusions that a TiVo won't die beyond repair in 5 years, on average. (I'm 15 months in and the drive fubar'd last week. I had to d/l a virgin image off eMule and replace the drive to get it running again). You get the second+ receiver at the extra-receiver charge (a cmopletely bogus charge, btw), so the service is "free" on extra receivers.
I nominate the guys at TiVo to come up with a voter setup and interface.
...were my favorites for dispensing voter-rage justice. Flipping the mechanical levers next to the names, changing as many times as you want, then that satisfying *crackhackhackhackhackhackha* as you pull the handle and make you decision permanent.
As for overall ease, and being a student in the scan-tron era, I liked the fill-in-the-bubble cards I used once in Maryland. Simple to fill out (we used them for all our standardized tests from preschool though SATs), simple to tally, simple to automatically recount, simple to manually recount.
"The results are released in 2 or 3 days after elections for president."
Americans don't have that much patience. If it can't be tallied by the 6 o'clock news, it's not fast enough. Never mind that polls don't close until 11pm or 12pm EST, the results STILL need to be in by the 6 o'clock news. THAT's why we need e-voting - they can announce the results early, 'cause the actual voting won't affect the outcome!
Yes quite a troll. Most folks ar of the opinion that JS is the only thing that saved TDS from dying an early and painful death. It's a rare case of a reverse shark jump.
You're not watching it for "news," you're watching it and getting a comedic background vocal track syncronized with current events. The things on (most) of the videos actually happened - they're not staged or done with celebrity impersonators.
If you don't know whats happening you can't ask questions. Those who watch TDS to get their "news" are just getting snippets that they would not get on the major channels.
The fact that remaning 3/4 of the show is satire/comedy/host-guest interview makes it fun to watch the whole thing.
The repubs hold the WH and both houses of congress, they're going to catch the most flak from a show like TDS. If the tables were reveresed, the Dems would be front and center in TDS's sights.
Jon is civil with many on the right, sometimes even when they're defending the right (John McCain's interview was one of these cases). The interview portion of the show is just a general discourse that Jon tries to get a laugh or two out of. Would anyone criticize David Letterman for throwing softballs at a politician?
Jon is clearly left of center, but he's willing to make fun of anyone who does stupid stuff, just as he's willing to make fun of stupid things jews do. The "This is so stupid it's funny" line is usually applied to everything, even though the real message is "This is so stupid it would be funny if it weren't actually happening"
Actually, yes.
It's clear that Surlyboi's contemporaries (as with much of the m(b)illions of other typical humans) believe that 200k will do far more for the good of mankind if it's traded for a very comfortable automobile into which they can place their tender ass.
While I won't claim that I'm getting a great return on my investment which is taken from my paycheck, my money is, infact, going to investments in science and technology, biotech, education, law enforcement, national defense, community outreach, and other worthy programs. Out of my $200,000 in taxes, only $50k,000 may go to programs I deem useful, but that's $50,000 more than if I'd spent it on another Bentley.
Oh, and your free market can't do squat when it comes to efficiency. How do I know? Take a look at what Brittney Spears made last year and then tell me that - based on her talent - that sum was justified, because THAT is the free market in action.
How is this different than a barcode scan of a wristband? They both bring up the data on a pda. How about a (smaller) pen-barcode you scan at the wrist and on the chart, with a pleasant beep if they match and an annoying buzz if they don't?
As for your scenerio, you're assuming that there's no possible way that you could miss an important bit of information on 150 pages of scanned records viewed 1/8 page at a time on a pda, even if it was "automatic."
Reliability is a task which requires vigilence. What if some $6/hr data entry drone types the wrong procedure into your database? Your pda pen slips and you checked D instead of S on the hand needing the cyst removed?
I'd be with you if it weren't for all the bastardizations of previous single-use identifiers which have become used for less nobel causes. I don't just mean SSNs and DL#s, what about grocery story "discount cards", time/date stamping your location via CC purchases, RF toll booth records, and cell phone usage. That information is more valuable to someone else than you have money to prevent it from getting out.
Paranoid? I suggest you speak to Sen Bob Dole, who uses mostly cash for his transactions, taking several thousand dollars in cash out of his account every month for his expensies instead of paying by check or cc - both trackable.
Why get one replaced? Couldn't you make a hackable version with a modifiable ID number? It sort of like being able to change your MAC address.
If you could actually hack the database, you could make up a several purly fictitious personas, and reprogram your VariChip (that's my new trademark, by the way) for whomever you wanted to be. Hacking need not be external...you just need a friend on the inside.
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Only if they happen to come into the SAME hospital, or a hospiotal which is linked to the original through a database. A Medic Alert tag with your SSN and major allergies is probably a better bet.
I happen to live in an area with thre competing companies who own the various hospitals. Even if I'm in a car crash close to home I would only have a 33% chance of being rushed to a hosipital which has access to my records. The chance of my wrist being intact when I arrive is much higher.
Hey, some of the moderators got it...you see it's been moderated "Funny". Funny in sort of a sad, fatalistic way, but funny nonetheless.
That would be too easy. Make it DL compatible, and you've got 9.4GB which is a mess of music encoded for automotive listening environments.
Bose sells a lot of speakers, too.
What happens over the next 20 years when the baby boomers have to live on their stock portfolios, and are no longer throwing their upper-middle management salaries at anything listed by their mutual find company websites?
The correct answer is...we don't know. I would not be suprised to find out that there will be a hard sell-side imbalance which could cause a market stagnation or decline over an extended period of time. The "overvalulation" is, in part, due to the hoards of money people are putting into the system. In a carefully balanced system, relatively small perturbations can mkae significant changes.
That said, most of my money is in the S&P, with a bit in mid-caps since I'm out a couple of decades from real retirement. Personally, I tend to be a large-cap value-guy, since most large, stable companies will eventually pull out of a slump given decent management, but are unlikely to really take a dive with even medeocre guidance. I invest in the indexes because they're low cost and require no oversight on my part.
Of course, I just moved to a less expensive house with a (much) smaller mortgage, have money put away for my daughters college (thanks in large part to generous grandparents and a tax-free 529 savings plan), and don't carry any other debt.
That's hilarious. The first time I heard the title, I thought "how'd they let _that_ title make it up in lights." The original isn't nearly as bad.