Re:WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU....
on
Phish Moves To FLAC
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The point I was trying to make (albeit rambling a bit) was that while lossless is a wonderful thing the percaentage of their audience who wants, no demands their music in a lossless format is probably a small one.
I'll probably check it out and see what I think about it, but as I have said I find the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes music store to be of good enough quality for me to consider it CD quality. I'm the first to admit I don't have golden ears! If you have them, great! If you don't then you're like me and stuck spending more time downloading something that is lost on you.
Personally, if they wanted to release these as 256kbs AAC files that would be real sweet. AAC is at least a standard that is well documented and I know I can find support for it in various pieces of software and some hardware.
Is my solution the best one? I don't know, but I think it represents a good comprimise. But thats just me I guess.
How many people could even tell the difference between a FLAC encoded live concert and a properly encoded 128-192kbs AAC/256kbs MP3 via LAME with the advice of r3mix.net/whatever the hell settings you ogg guys use for archival quality.
I mean, do I really need to hear a lossless version of your live concert? If anything, I bet it would make me notice any noise that might get subtly masked by the psycho-acoustic models used by MP3/AAC/Ogg. Stuff like dirty power in the recording equipment or mics, things of that nature.
Even with that said, how many of you will actually be listening to your FLAC encoded audio in a proper listening environment with a properly laid out, quality audio setup?
Nah, odds are you're just going to take your FLAC and then transcode it to MP3 or perhaps AAC if your an iPod owner or Ogg if your one of those wierdos who uses it (I think Ogg is a cool idea but honestly MP3 and AAC now are good enough for me and what I do)
And you'll do this why? Because how many portable and/or home stereo components play FLAC? I'd venture a guess of: none. But many units do play MP3, or WMA (ick, altho WM9 is nice), or recently AAC.
Of course I'm sure some of you will say: "But I run my computer audio to my outboard A/V reciever surround sound system via optical TOSlink out" For these people, this very small, limited audience market FLAC will be great, sure. I should know, I am one of those people. But even I can't tell the damn difference most of the times between the lossless and lossy audio codecs. Heck, I'm one of the people who finds the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes Music Store to be superior in quality to the old 192kbs VBR MP3s I made of the same CD track with LAME and the great advice from r3mix.net.
So, yeah I'm glad someone is doing this but I honestly think the market they are speaking to is so small and niche that its going to be lost in the statistical variance of the overall group.
"now what company would want to hire a guy which calls his customers idiots???"
You obviously have never been in a meeting with the senior management for any large tech corporation, have you?
Or, you could just ask anyone who has/had to field tech support calls from their own customers. Customers, for the most part, don't know what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to technical matters. Slashdot users are not your atypical customers, trust me, you folks can at least figure things out provided you're given the right bits of information to work off of.
In addition to all of this, what the fuck does the programmers opinion of the customers even matter? Is the customer *ever* going to have to deal with the programmer in a support situation? In a corporate environment I would highly doubt it.
Hell, I would let the guy have a HUGE poster in his cube that said:
"The customer is wrong, bitch!"
So long as he met his project targets and his code worked well.
Now if the programmer goes public with his sentiments that the customers are idiots while working for my company then his opinion becomes a problem because it is now a PR disaster that has to either get spun somehow or I now have to punish him somehow in a public way so it looks like I am giving a shit about my customers opinions (even if I agree with my employee that they are idiots...but they are the idiots who eventually pay both our checks).
So yeah, basically, the problem is customers are idiots whom you have to keep around otherwise you're out of a job at some point.
Unless your the CEO or senior management and then you just fuck over your lower pleeb employees but sucking your fat golden parachute out of the company pension fund or some equally horrendous lack of moral pulchritude.
And people think I am too pessimistic/sarcastic for someone who is 27. To them I say, work in the tech sector for the last 10 years and try to not turn out even MORE sarcastic/pessimistic then I. If you do find someone who turned out less sarcastic then me, he is lying to himself and therefore ergo must be in sales. Bastards.
I'm sorry but unless you were actually AT the Apple release show on Sunday at NAB then you have no idea how big an update these additions to FCP was.
Quite simply FCP4 makes Adobe Preimer look like a Mickey Mouse editor by comparision. When I saw the things they have enabled editors to do in FCP4 in realtime, or over Firewire it makes me tell my associates to go to the Mac platform. Now I just have to wait for WWDC in June in San Francisco and hope to see Panther and the IBM 970 PPC systems rolled out. After that point Mac will be back in the speed race again and in technologically superior foothold over the x86 platform IMHO.
You are wrong, most HD's in laptops are still 4200 rpm drives, this is usually a power/performance tradeoff that is made to help battery life in PC laptops due to how much juice the P4M chips use
About a year and a half ago I started working for a DSL ISP that shall remain unnamed. Well, on my first day their they were having problems with customers going dark because someone was systematically hacking into the DSL routers at the customer premises and trashing the configs on them so no one could remote into them any more.
Of course that was possible because the morons at this company had the same manufacturer default password on all their customer DSL routers.
The solution? Some quick Expect script writing skill and a little perl and I had a script that walked every customer router, logged in, changed the password (different one for EACH customer, kept in a MySQL database for support to lookup). Took about 5 hours for the script to run its course locking down all the remaining vulnerable customers.
Of course I doubt anyone at that part of Sprint even has ever heard of Expect scripting so they probably see themselves as hopelessly screwed and unable to affect such a huge change quickly.
Does this mean I can go out and get asshat yuppies driving around in their Ford RoadFucker(tm) SUV gas guzzler banned from the roads because their cars weigh so much more then your average sedan or subcompact hatchback and thusly create a more dangerous environment for all the people driving a normal sized car?
I hope so, I would LOVE to get rid of the SUV from America's highways.
Granted the article doesn't apply to the satelite based system but I wouldn't hold my breath on DirceWAY surviving another 6 months.
The service, when it works, is fast for downloads. The problem is the service will stop working all of a sudden for not appricable reason (flock of pigeons in the beam path? ghosts? jumbo jets? COBRA?). As soon as this happens you then basically have to pary to whatever gods you believe in that the service fixes itself and resumes working again.
It makes troubleshooting network issues an even bigger pain in the butt and this is before we even throw into the loop the TCP acceleration software or the geosat latency (about 600ms).
The service was a good idea but the execution seems flawed and is still too rough around the edges.
Yeah that was one of the errors I saw. They had another error on line 997 in one of their other.pm files but I forget what it was called now, its the one that powered the right-hand side column boxes I think.
So a bunch of ex-MS employees ended up at a competeting company, MS found out and said "Oh, by the by we had an agreement with these people who said they wouldn't work at a competitor so they are going to have to go or we will go after them in court"
Is that right?
This sounds sort of like the kind of mess that happens when you have tech workers who have to sign off on NDA's every other day just to do their work because of vendor realtionships and partnerships and crap of that nature.
Too much legal stuff happens in our sector if you ask me.
Look, its a piece of Sun hardware that is actually cheap for once!
I think this is a sure sign of the coming apocalypse.
A former company I worked for ended up buying a lot of Netra T1's because our co-location providers (AT&T) were bastards and demanded that everything going into their space be NEBS compliant.
NEBS compliance is evil evil evil!
We could have used Concorde's Netra clones and saved over 1 *million* dollars....but noooo AT&T has to have NEBS compliant hardware only and *only* the Sun Netra T1 series is 1U and rackmountable and NEBS....but the damn things cost us like $16k a pop. Too bad this new Netra isn't NEBS, but at least Sun isn't bending the customer over the barrel for this unit....unlike other crap of theirs.
No, I'm not bitter, not at all. I just despise the markup on Sun hardware and then having to defend a Sun clone (Concorde, great stuff, really good prices and reliable also) to upper management who wants to buy Sun directly because someone in upper management is boing some chick for a Sun reseller.
Now I'm not the slowest carbon lifeform unit around these days but I don't understand what the Starband quickie was refering to at all. Here I'll quote what I don't get to make it more obvious to everyone:
"USB to serial for starband is NOT needed. You can use a 9pin to 25pin modem cable."
Explain this to me? I have never seen a Starband setup, however their webpage states that the way they connect to your computer (unless you bought a Compaq from RatShack) is via a USB device plugged into your PCs USB port.
I do not get how a 9pin to 25pin serial cable can all of a sudden mate a usb cable to my PC. Not unless its passed through my ass which contains millions of nanites programmed to change the molecular structure of that 9-25pin serial cable into that of a usb to serial cable somehow.
I am also confused by this statement as well:
"Get rid of ALL the usb stuff on the starband..."
If all I am given by Starband is a USB device to connect to the Starband equipment then how the hell can I get rid of it? Explain this to me. Not even ass-nanites could pull this one off far as I can tell.
So anyone care to help me figure out what the heck they meant by these two quotes? Especially since there are NO URLs pointing to ANYTHING that would explain these statements.
*sigh*
My mind is like an endless carnival....only with more CHEESE!
I've been a user of mandrake for the last year and a half and I have always liked what they did with their distro.
However, it looks like they are doing some odd changes to their layout for the next release of the distro. Well, at least it looks that way based on what the new Mandrake Cooker stuff is looking like (yes, yes, Cooker is beta/alpha, don't base opinions on it, etc, you'll shoot your eye out, may cause birth defects)
For example they changed the layout of the 2.2.18 source code to point to/usr/src/linux22 (I assume they have a similar/usr/src/linux24 for 2.4 kernels). However you can't get any headers for 2.2.18 from Mandrake for Cooker, but you can get headers for 2.4.0.whateverthehellthelatesttestkernelwas. It also looks like Mandrake is trying to integrate the Alsa drivers with their distro now with the inclusion of alsa-0.5.10 in their kernel source. It would be nice if I could get the headers from Cooker for 2.2.18, but I guess Mandrake is more focused on getting a 2.4.0 kernel as the default for the next release of the distro. Any people working on Cooker care to speak up? Thanks!
Are you nonmundane?
http://www.nonmundane.org/
Yes I agree that the Internet has caused the demise of the local BBS. Without the local BBS scene anymore hordes of geeks, hackers, and coders around the US have been forced to try an interact with society at large with disastourus results. How is a geek/codes/hacker/technomage supposed to find compatible people of the opposite sex to have meaningful interactions with? Bring back the local BBS scene! Bring back the user meets at the Round Table pizzahouse! Most importantly, bring back gopher! While we are at it, we should resurrect WAIS again too!
Take the Lynx source and turn it into a gopher client!
If Chewbacca is not from Endor then you must acquitt!
Slashdot Mirror
The point I was trying to make (albeit rambling a bit) was that while lossless is a wonderful thing the percaentage of their audience who wants, no demands their music in a lossless format is probably a small one.
I'll probably check it out and see what I think about it, but as I have said I find the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes music store to be of good enough quality for me to consider it CD quality. I'm the first to admit I don't have golden ears! If you have them, great! If you don't then you're like me and stuck spending more time downloading something that is lost on you.
Personally, if they wanted to release these as 256kbs AAC files that would be real sweet. AAC is at least a standard that is well documented and I know I can find support for it in various pieces of software and some hardware.
Is my solution the best one? I don't know, but I think it represents a good comprimise. But thats just me I guess.
....my eardrums are bleeding!
How many people could even tell the difference between a FLAC encoded live concert and a properly encoded 128-192kbs AAC/256kbs MP3 via LAME with the advice of r3mix.net/whatever the hell settings you ogg guys use for archival quality.
I mean, do I really need to hear a lossless version of your live concert? If anything, I bet it would make me notice any noise that might get subtly masked by the psycho-acoustic models used by MP3/AAC/Ogg. Stuff like dirty power in the recording equipment or mics, things of that nature.
Even with that said, how many of you will actually be listening to your FLAC encoded audio in a proper listening environment with a properly laid out, quality audio setup?
Nah, odds are you're just going to take your FLAC and then transcode it to MP3 or perhaps AAC if your an iPod owner or Ogg if your one of those wierdos who uses it (I think Ogg is a cool idea but honestly MP3 and AAC now are good enough for me and what I do)
And you'll do this why? Because how many portable and/or home stereo components play FLAC? I'd venture a guess of: none. But many units do play MP3, or WMA (ick, altho WM9 is nice), or recently AAC.
Of course I'm sure some of you will say: "But I run my computer audio to my outboard A/V reciever surround sound system via optical TOSlink out" For these people, this very small, limited audience market FLAC will be great, sure. I should know, I am one of those people. But even I can't tell the damn difference most of the times between the lossless and lossy audio codecs. Heck, I'm one of the people who finds the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes Music Store to be superior in quality to the old 192kbs VBR MP3s I made of the same CD track with LAME and the great advice from r3mix.net.
So, yeah I'm glad someone is doing this but I honestly think the market they are speaking to is so small and niche that its going to be lost in the statistical variance of the overall group.
"now what company would want to hire a guy which calls his customers idiots???"
You obviously have never been in a meeting with the senior management for any large tech corporation, have you?
Or, you could just ask anyone who has/had to field tech support calls from their own customers. Customers, for the most part, don't know what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to technical matters. Slashdot users are not your atypical customers, trust me, you folks can at least figure things out provided you're given the right bits of information to work off of.
In addition to all of this, what the fuck does the programmers opinion of the customers even matter? Is the customer *ever* going to have to deal with the programmer in a support situation? In a corporate environment I would highly doubt it.
Hell, I would let the guy have a HUGE poster in his cube that said:
"The customer is wrong, bitch!"
So long as he met his project targets and his code worked well.
Now if the programmer goes public with his sentiments that the customers are idiots while working for my company then his opinion becomes a problem because it is now a PR disaster that has to either get spun somehow or I now have to punish him somehow in a public way so it looks like I am giving a shit about my customers opinions (even if I agree with my employee that they are idiots...but they are the idiots who eventually pay both our checks).
So yeah, basically, the problem is customers are idiots whom you have to keep around otherwise you're out of a job at some point.
Unless your the CEO or senior management and then you just fuck over your lower pleeb employees but sucking your fat golden parachute out of the company pension fund or some equally horrendous lack of moral pulchritude.
And people think I am too pessimistic/sarcastic for someone who is 27. To them I say, work in the tech sector for the last 10 years and try to not turn out even MORE sarcastic/pessimistic then I. If you do find someone who turned out less sarcastic then me, he is lying to himself and therefore ergo must be in sales. Bastards.
I'm sorry but unless you were actually AT the Apple release show on Sunday at NAB then you have no idea how big an update these additions to FCP was.
Quite simply FCP4 makes Adobe Preimer look like a Mickey Mouse editor by comparision. When I saw the things they have enabled editors to do in FCP4 in realtime, or over Firewire it makes me tell my associates to go to the Mac platform. Now I just have to wait for WWDC in June in San Francisco and hope to see Panther and the IBM 970 PPC systems rolled out. After that point Mac will be back in the speed race again and in technologically superior foothold over the x86 platform IMHO.
You are wrong, most HD's in laptops are still 4200 rpm drives, this is usually a power/performance tradeoff that is made to help battery life in PC laptops due to how much juice the P4M chips use
About a year and a half ago I started working for a DSL ISP that shall remain unnamed. Well, on my first day their they were having problems with customers going dark because someone was systematically hacking into the DSL routers at the customer premises and trashing the configs on them so no one could remote into them any more.
Of course that was possible because the morons at this company had the same manufacturer default password on all their customer DSL routers.
The solution? Some quick Expect script writing skill and a little perl and I had a script that walked every customer router, logged in, changed the password (different one for EACH customer, kept in a MySQL database for support to lookup). Took about 5 hours for the script to run its course locking down all the remaining vulnerable customers.
Of course I doubt anyone at that part of Sprint even has ever heard of Expect scripting so they probably see themselves as hopelessly screwed and unable to affect such a huge change quickly.
Does this mean I can go out and get asshat yuppies driving around in their Ford RoadFucker(tm) SUV gas guzzler banned from the roads because their cars weigh so much more then your average sedan or subcompact hatchback and thusly create a more dangerous environment for all the people driving a normal sized car?
I hope so, I would LOVE to get rid of the SUV from America's highways.
Granted the article doesn't apply to the satelite based system but I wouldn't hold my breath on DirceWAY surviving another 6 months.
The service, when it works, is fast for downloads. The problem is the service will stop working all of a sudden for not appricable reason (flock of pigeons in the beam path? ghosts? jumbo jets? COBRA?). As soon as this happens you then basically have to pary to whatever gods you believe in that the service fixes itself and resumes working again.
It makes troubleshooting network issues an even bigger pain in the butt and this is before we even throw into the loop the TCP acceleration software or the geosat latency (about 600ms).
The service was a good idea but the execution seems flawed and is still too rough around the edges.
Yeah that was one of the errors I saw. They had another error on line 997 in one of their other .pm files but I forget what it was called now, its the one that powered the right-hand side column boxes I think.
I've been getting funky slash.pm and Internal Server 500 errors on slashdot today, you guys trying to upgrade Slashcode or something?
So a bunch of ex-MS employees ended up at a competeting company, MS found out and said "Oh, by the by we had an agreement with these people who said they wouldn't work at a competitor so they are going to have to go or we will go after them in court"
Is that right?
This sounds sort of like the kind of mess that happens when you have tech workers who have to sign off on NDA's every other day just to do their work because of vendor realtionships and partnerships and crap of that nature.
Too much legal stuff happens in our sector if you ask me.
http://www.nonmundane.org/
Look, its a piece of Sun hardware that is actually cheap for once!
I think this is a sure sign of the coming apocalypse.
A former company I worked for ended up buying a lot of Netra T1's because our co-location providers (AT&T) were bastards and demanded that everything going into their space be NEBS compliant.
NEBS compliance is evil evil evil!
We could have used Concorde's Netra clones and saved over 1 *million* dollars....but noooo AT&T has to have NEBS compliant hardware only and *only* the Sun Netra T1 series is 1U and rackmountable and NEBS....but the damn things cost us like $16k a pop. Too bad this new Netra isn't NEBS, but at least Sun isn't bending the customer over the barrel for this unit....unlike other crap of theirs.
No, I'm not bitter, not at all. I just despise the markup on Sun hardware and then having to defend a Sun clone (Concorde, great stuff, really good prices and reliable also) to upper management who wants to buy Sun directly because someone in upper management is boing some chick for a Sun reseller.
Grrrr!
Nope, not bitter, really, seriously!
http://www.nonmundane.org/
Now I'm not the slowest carbon lifeform unit around these days but I don't understand what the Starband quickie was refering to at all. Here I'll quote what I don't get to make it more obvious to everyone:
"USB to serial for starband is NOT needed. You can use a 9pin to 25pin modem cable."
Explain this to me? I have never seen a Starband setup, however their webpage states that the way they connect to your computer (unless you bought a Compaq from RatShack) is via a USB device plugged into your PCs USB port.
I do not get how a 9pin to 25pin serial cable can all of a sudden mate a usb cable to my PC. Not unless its passed through my ass which contains millions of nanites programmed to change the molecular structure of that 9-25pin serial cable into that of a usb to serial cable somehow.
I am also confused by this statement as well:
"Get rid of ALL the usb stuff on the starband..."
If all I am given by Starband is a USB device to connect to the Starband equipment then how the hell can I get rid of it? Explain this to me. Not even ass-nanites could pull this one off far as I can tell.
So anyone care to help me figure out what the heck they meant by these two quotes? Especially since there are NO URLs pointing to ANYTHING that would explain these statements.
*sigh*
My mind is like an endless carnival....only with more CHEESE!
Ah cool. Time to find out if I can upgrade a 7.2 box to Cooker using 2.4.0.whatever
I've been a user of mandrake for the last year and a half and I have always liked what they did with their distro. However, it looks like they are doing some odd changes to their layout for the next release of the distro. Well, at least it looks that way based on what the new Mandrake Cooker stuff is looking like (yes, yes, Cooker is beta/alpha, don't base opinions on it, etc, you'll shoot your eye out, may cause birth defects) For example they changed the layout of the 2.2.18 source code to point to /usr/src/linux22 (I assume they have a similar /usr/src/linux24 for 2.4 kernels). However you can't get any headers for 2.2.18 from Mandrake for Cooker, but you can get headers for 2.4.0.whateverthehellthelatesttestkernelwas. It also looks like Mandrake is trying to integrate the Alsa drivers with their distro now with the inclusion of alsa-0.5.10 in their kernel source. It would be nice if I could get the headers from Cooker for 2.2.18, but I guess Mandrake is more focused on getting a 2.4.0 kernel as the default for the next release of the distro. Any people working on Cooker care to speak up? Thanks!
Are you nonmundane?
http://www.nonmundane.org/
Yes I agree that the Internet has caused the demise of the local BBS. Without the local BBS scene anymore hordes of geeks, hackers, and coders around the US have been forced to try an interact with society at large with disastourus results. How is a geek/codes/hacker/technomage supposed to find compatible people of the opposite sex to have meaningful interactions with? Bring back the local BBS scene! Bring back the user meets at the Round Table pizzahouse! Most importantly, bring back gopher! While we are at it, we should resurrect WAIS again too! Take the Lynx source and turn it into a gopher client! If Chewbacca is not from Endor then you must acquitt!
www.nonmundane.org