While true, I don't consider that a very happy thought...
Most people (i.e. the general public) can better relate
to how much it is going to cost them to drive 500 miles than
how many kWh this represents.
Though I agree with you, using dollars as a metric here
amounts to "useless" at best, and more likely "outright
deceptive". The very fact that it leaves us some room
to speculate about how they arrived at that number aught
to send up great big red flags in every reader's minds - But
sadly, it won't. Most non-Slashdotters will merrily go
about their day, longing for a $9 fillup for their car
but otherwise not even wondering these same points.
Presumably (if they were honest)
And there you have the biggest red flag of all - Even if
the rest of the accounting doesn't push the laws of physics
to the breaking point, you still have to trust an unknown
(or worse in this case - a PR department, a group known for
their skill at lying without breaking the law) entity to
have acted in good faith in coming up with those numbers.
Thanks, but I'll keep my credibility card snugly in my wallet
until I see one in action that gets the specified dollars-per-mile.
1) Give her an account on your NAT machine
2) Add "export TMOUT=3540" to her.profile
3) Write a.bash_logout script that contacts everyone necessary
4) Log her in
If she doesn't whack a key every 59 minutes, it will log her out, thus
alerting everyone necessary via email, paging, fax, whatever you like.
You can however get a long way, and I believe do a lot of useful work, but ASSERTing
on all conditions at the start of functions, and on the return value, where approriate.
Do ANY of you work in the "real" world?
"assert", in C, counts as a frickin' obscenity for anything that makes it out the
door (now, for debugging, sure, throw 'em in like candy on Halloween, but make sure
to remove every last one before release).
End-users will, for the most part, deal with "odd" behavior. They tweak, however, when
programs just arbitrarily exit. And for "mission critical" apps, far from reversing,
the situation gets worse - Imagine an ATC system just randomly shutting itself
down, not because of an unrecoverable error, but because of a design methodology
buzzword... People die and programmers go to prison for bugs like that.
ALWAYS check your inputs, but don't chuck the whole program in the middle of
decrease_radiation_strength() because your call to format_a_string_real_pretty_like()
didn't like the color-name passed to it.
Re:Combine this with 15min quick charge
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
You're overlooking the fact that if the batteries survive those 4 cycles,
you've broken even and everything after that is gravy.
The more charge cycles you get, the lower your cost-per-battery
drops. Yes, you break even at 4 charges... And at 8 charges,
they've cost you half of a regular pack of AAs. And at somewhere around
120 charges, they've cost you less than a penny per battery per charge.
Just becuase you've broken even compared to alkalines doesn't make it
a good idea to knowingly kill them faster, it just means you haven't
wasted money in switching to rechargeables.
Telling anyone they should avoid this technology because it *may*
reduce the cell's lifetime is being penny wise, pound foolish.
Just giving some generally good advice on battery maintenance. As another
poster pointed out, the Rayovac chargers coupled with special Rayovac batteries
actually have sensors in the batteries themselves, so they may well not suffer
any damage from the charging (then again, just because you can safely
do it doesn't make doing so optimal for battery life - charging produces a lot
of heat, and heat WILL eventually kill your batteries); but I've seen PLENTY of
non-intelligent-battery chargers that claim to do 1C safely, which just does
not hold true.
If you NEED your batteries recharged in 15 minutes, I agree with you. If
not, what harm do you see in letting them charge while you sleep?
Re:Combine this with 15min quick charge
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
I thought NiMH likes the fast charging? Check out this wikipedia article.
From your link (bolding for emphasis mine): "When fast-charging, it is advisable to charge the
NiMH batteries with a smart battery charger to avoid overcharging, which can damage batteries and cause
dangerous conditions. Modern NiMH batteries contain catalysts to immediately deal with gases
developed as a result of over-charging without being harmed (2 H2 + O2 ---catalyst--> 2 H2O).
However, this only works with over-charging currents of up to C/10 h (nominal capacity divided
by 10 hours). As a result of this reaction, the batteries will heat up considerably, marking
the end of the charging process. Some quick chargers have a fan to keep the batteries cool."
Re:Combine this with 15min quick charge
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
I don't recall which chemistry it is (NiMH or NiCAD), but IIRC, charging them fast is a good idea.
I hadn't heard of that for either NiMH or NiCADs, but it does limit the lifetime of Li-ion batteries.
However, those don't like rapid charging, either, as it GREATLY accelerates electrolyte breakdown... So you
have a lose/lose situation there.
Re:Combine this with 15min quick charge
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have a 15 minute quick charger (by Rayovac) and I would hate to go back to having
to actually wait hours for my batteries to charge. This is a cool idea, but lets try and
speed it up and then I'll be interested.
For the longevity of your batteries (ie, the reason you pay about 4x as much for
rechargeables in the first place), you really should use an intelligent
trickle-charger (around C/10) with an automatic pre-charging discharge. I seriously
suspect the battery manufacturers (such as Rayovac) came up with the idea of a
15-minute charge just to drastically shorten the life of your rechargeables. It has
to seriously hurt their profitability that we can now use a single set of batteries
that will last for five to ten years if properly maintained.
It amazes some of my friends (who, like you, use a 4C flash charger) that I have
5 year old NiMH batteries that, after several hundred charge cycles, not
only still work, but still hold over 90% of their stated capacity. Well, now you
know the secret. Stop abusing your batteries, and just let them charge overnight.
Keep the flash charger in the car for emergencies, but unless you absolutely need a
battery now, don't use it.
The very first video game (yes, a full decade before
"Pong") had, as its theme, a scifi twist on mankind's
second oldest form of recreation - Killing one another
for fun and profit, framed as a team sport.
Of course, once upon a time that served a purpose, since
our oldest form of recreation tended to lead to
overpopulation before the availability of effective birth
control methods, but some of the more foolish packs of
domesticated primates still haven't caught on to that
concept yet.
Maybe young Tolkein thinks in the same fashion? He is bringing
his fathers work to life. Just another viewpoint.
BIG difference between the two - I will presume that the vast majority
of Slashdot readers wouldn't know your father's works (feel free to
correct me if you use "e2d2" rather than a better-known name such as
David Asimov, but my general point would still hold). By extending and
publishing his works, you CAN bring your father's work to life.
By comparison, EVERYONE has heard of JRR Tolkien. Many people (certainly
any SciFi fans) have heard of Frank Herbert. Their children can't
increase awareness of their works beyond "ubiquity".
Now, I have no problem with famous authors' offspring publishing
things like memoirs and fragmentary writings - hard-core fans
appreciate those things, even if it does seem a bit like making a
buck off the dead. But when those same offspring take on airs
that they can "finish" fragmentary works - Sorry, no. That instantly
takes them from "cool, Tolkien's kid" to "pretentious little bastard".
And when the book cover has their family name in HUGE letters, with
the only mention of a first name hidden in the reviews on the back in
a 2-point fonr, they drop down to "Copyright-exploting scum not fit
to read the works he bastardized".
It is "illegal copying", not stealing. These are materially different.
Actually, no - Failure to obey region coding doesn't even count as copyright
violation. It doesn't break ANY laws (except, in just a few countries, if
you circumvent the access control mechanism involved) whatsoever.
Industry cartels (generally illegal, but somehow they've gotten away with
this in the movie and video game industries) have NO authority of
enforcement whatsoever. Thus the "need" for various forced region coding
schemes on their part in the first place.
Third, AAC was developped by Dolby and was shown to be the best or second best CODEC
in all the audio tests that have been done. As for the bitrate, AAC is more efficient with
128kbps than MP3 or WMA.
AAC does indeed do a great job at lossy compression. At 128kbps, it CAN beat every
other 128kbps encoding out there - Key word, "can".
You have to consider, though, that "AAC" doesn't really refer to just one specific way to
encode music, though - More like handing someone a toolbox and blueprints for a house. You
can create a compliant AAC encoder using nothing more than than the LC profile, or you could
use LTP+SRS+PNS with KB windowing. On top of that, even limiting yourself to just the MAIN
profile, you can tweak the parameters such that encoding a three minute 2ch 44khz song will
encode faster than realtime, or take over a full day to finish.
Now, all that aside, I doubt Apple skimped all that much on the encoder, as they
don't need to encode in realtime, just when they add a track to their library. Regardless,
you just can't compare a 128kbps encoding to one at 240kpbs. If Apple had gone with 192 or higher,
I'd say any modern format approaches perceptually equivalent to CD quality. But NO format at
128kbps can pull that off yet.
Once again, a doomsayer who just doesn't "get" it
on
Would You Date Microsoft?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users are skirted
Which I will point out as the single most revealing point, by virtue of its absence, of the entire link.
Virtually every criticism I've seen about open source, "free" software, and Linux in general, centers
around a single (irrelevant) point: Not business-friendly.
You also hear "not ready for the desktop" or "too focused on developers", but those only matter
in relation to the POV of trying to sell a product, in that they reduce the potential customer base. Thus
even those classics reduce to "not business-friendly".
Well, I have news for Hilf, and Roland, and IDC, and all the rest who go on about why
Linux and open source will fail - open source doesn't exist in a form that can
fail. Yes, you have assorted groups with the goal of advancing open source (RMS, Debian),
and various companies who have pretended to embrace the idea (IBM), but as much as they
may contribute to the underlying idea of free software, they don't embody it in some
mortality-inducing way. They can vanish tomorrow, and I can still build my own Linux
distro from sources.
So, when any criticism of open source "skirts" the issue of free-as-in-freedom, you can
ignore that criticism without a second thought. Because "open source" MEANS free-as-in-freedom.
It doesn't depend on any company or person or government. Laws and patents and liabilities can
make it harder to obtain and contribute to, but NOTHING can ever eliminate it completely. As
long as a single fourth-world geek with a bicycle-powered laptop can compile a "hello world"
program, open source will remain.
I thank IBM for its massive contributions of code and ideas. I thank RedHat for its PR work.
I thank Linus for the kernel itself. But the abstraction doesn't need any of them
to survive. Making a profit counts as a nice side effect, not the goal, of open source.
I love how the average/.er is against the FCC when they're censoring Howard
Stern or Janet Jackson, but in favor of their cracking down on "big business".
I love how the average Slashdot troll doesn't understand that the FCC exists
for the SOLE purpose of spectrum allocation, not censorship of content.
I also love how some folks fail to remember that the FCC causes
the problem of media monopolies in the first place by imposing such high
barriers to entry that only megacorps can even dream of get anything
more useful than a ham license.
Allocation of spectrum once served the public good, both for safety and in the
sense of fairly sharing a limited resource. We now, however, have the tech to target
individual active receivers, with stations "broad"casting in the tens of watts
rather than in megawatts, thus making the FCC entirely irrelevant.
When anyone who can afford the hardware can throw up a phased array and
fire up their own talk-radio station, I will agree with your point. Until
then, yes, I have a problem with both media ownership rules and the
response to Janet's nipple.
If a bank doesn't want to be held responsible for what happens to my money, I'll do the responsible thing
and move my money elsewhere
Damn - Here goes a wasted mod point, but I consider this point so insightful, I must reply.
I know people who, even in the current environment where banks bear the vast majority of
the pain for most financial fraud, refuse to keep their money in the bank. They currently
fall in the minority, but do exist. And not just fogies and Luddites - I know a 26YO
EE who has no credit cards, no bank account, and buys EVERYTHING with cash or money-orders.
If banks start telling people "Aww, gee, someone emptied your account using
seemingly-legit info, tough luck; I guess you'll use a bit more care next
time, eh?", you can expect to see the world's economies collapse overnight
as people move their life saving to their mattresses.
So no, banks will stoically take the hit, as they have always done. Not just
for fear of losing customers, but for fear of losing public confidence in the
the ONE thing they actually "sell" - The legal fiction of fungibility of food/goods
for paper, and more recently, paper for bits. If they lose that quite literally
delusional association of "value" most people have for their magical green paper,
game over - They go from running the world, to owning a lot of nonmagical
green paper.
I'm much more likely to put the product on my shit list. Not the show.
While I tend to agree, consider the sort of companies that will resort to
tactics like this to "trick" people into seeing their product...
Personally, I don't think I use any products for which I've ever seen an
advertisement - Scratch that, I've seen ads for Guinness. And I can't imagine
I've never seen a BirdsEye ad (I use their frozen spinach in a lot of recipes,
it works MUCH better than fresh, and doesn't tend to have sand in it like the
generics), though I can't remember any offhand. Hmmm... Okay, I've seen ads
for the American Cotton Growers association (or whatever the hell they call
themselves), and do prefer all-cotton clothing. But at a quick glance
around my house, I seriously doubt I could win a million dollar bet to find a
dozen items with ads currently running on TV.
But that pretty much illustrates my point (and yours as well, to a degree) - Not
only do commercials push me away from products rather than attract me, but
the vast majority of products worth using (for their own merits rather than
the hype) don't need ads.
Is capturing a DVI signal and then recording it something you want to do?
Yes, actually, since we can all but bet on future HDTV decoders (whether cable or satellite or
even OTA) having nothing but DVI or HDMI connector (though they might still have plain
ol' coax, for all those people who want to pay for high-res digital but watch it on an ancient
NTSC TV).
Why do you consider Component the best? What was wrong with RGB that it needed to be replaced?
RGB? For the sake of argument, I will presume you refer to YPbPr rather than RGB (of which, "Component"
can refer to either, along with several other variants). So two problems with that - First, no standard
consumer AV equipment uses pure RGB (at least not in the US). Second, TVs do not actually display "true"
red, green, and blue - They display something that, coincidentally enough, very closely matches the
colorspace expressable by YCbCr (the "normalized" digital information carried by the analog YPbPr signal).
Finally, and perhaps most relevant, DVDs do not encode RGB triplets - They encode YCbCr, which compresses
quite a lot better while conveying almost the same information.
So to summarize that, the most common reason to need an HD cable, DVDs, involves YCbCr displayed on a YCbCr
display. Converting that to takes far more work and incurs significantly more signal loss than using a
YPbPr path between the two ends.
As for why not use digital - Hey, DVI works just fine. HDMI would work just fine as well, and with a
higher bandwidth than DVI. But the addition of HDCP, in my opinion (and the opinion of MANY people who just
don't know better - yet), makes that plain ol' low-bandwidth coax connector more appealing, since at
least we can actually use the signal it carries however we want.
You certainly did your level best in your "summary" to make
it seem so.
Could you perhaps quote the part of the summary that mentions
any political party directly (not by way of an
entirely-relevant project on which DCI has worked)?
Because, put simply, I don't see anything partisan in the FP.
And for the record, I call myself neither a Democrat nor a
Republican - I consider myself a "moderate anarchist". As all
governments exist for the sole purpose of slowly removing "real"
freedoms from its citizens (new laws, by definition, make something
you formerly had the freedom to do, now illegal), I consider
"downsizing" the one and only viable political strategy.
they should be in the public domain, many of them, but I
believe that they have been copyrighted as part of the conversion
to electronic format.
By virtue of them existing online, and aided by a Slashdotting,
they did just enter the public domain.
Granted, various courts may disagree and you may need to move
to Vanuatu to use them, but the more important issue (that they
not vanish someday like much of the pre-1970 BBC archive during
an overzealous cleaning spree, or worse, by some religious whackjob
in the Holy Pentacostal Empire 150 years from now declaring them
blasphemous and burning the lot) has just gone from "eventually
likely" to a virtual impossibility.
Ah well, I'll file these along with my Elsevier archive. Anyone
know if they have a download limit per account or IP (ie, how many
accounts I'll need to make to rip the whole collection)?
Good thing they paid up. Uncle RIAA thought it would be a shame
if "something should happen to their nice office building".
For some reason you got modded down, but really, I have to wonder
about the legality of this...
"eDonkey, has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential
copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry".
Not damages awarded by a court, not even to settle a pending
suit - To avoid a potential lawsuit!
If that doesn't meet the textbook definition of extortion,
I don't know what would.
I'm curious what you have to say about the "few bad apples" among Americans torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. ...
Yes, they're all terrorist orgs when they create terror to cause political change. Hezbollah is certainly a terrorist
org by any definition.
Well, then, brother... Viva la resistance! If all Hezbolah's bad apples make
Hezbolah terrorists, then I suppose, by that logic, a few bad apples in Abu Ghraib
would make all Americans terrorists. Great, thanks, you've extended the idea
to hit even harder home. But you've kinda argued the wrong stance - This works much
more smoothly if you argue against me rather than for me.
Ah, I get it, you meant to do the classic Bugs Bunny mind-trick. Well, you
won't confuse me, you wascally wabbit! "No, shoot ME, me, me!"
anything they think god told them is theirs.
Do you really want to go there, considering
the current Crusader-In-Chief?
Interesting equivalence there between practicing holistic medicine
and lobbing missiles into a city. -5 insightful on that one.
Yes, actually, he did make an interesting comparison, and it
saddens me to see him modded as a troll while your one-liner gets +5
insightful...
You either blame the group or its members. You can't pick and choose
based on the sin-of-the-week.
In the case of Hezbolah, the actions of a few radical separatists,
quite possibly not even members of Hezbolah but just entirely
different radical separatists with more testosterone than brains,
get attributed to an internationally unpopular political party.
So what conclusion do you get if you apply that same reasoning for Falun Gong?
The GP dared to go there. And got bitch-slapped for it. But as
Bill Watterson once said (via Calvin) of his fight with his syndicate
over merchandising when they accused him of seeing the issue in
black-and-white, "Sometimes that's just the way things are!"
Slashdot Mirror
Then you, sir, are in the minority.
While true, I don't consider that a very happy thought...
Most people (i.e. the general public) can better relate to how much it is going to cost them to drive 500 miles than how many kWh this represents.
Though I agree with you, using dollars as a metric here amounts to "useless" at best, and more likely "outright deceptive". The very fact that it leaves us some room to speculate about how they arrived at that number aught to send up great big red flags in every reader's minds - But sadly, it won't. Most non-Slashdotters will merrily go about their day, longing for a $9 fillup for their car but otherwise not even wondering these same points.
Presumably (if they were honest)
And there you have the biggest red flag of all - Even if the rest of the accounting doesn't push the laws of physics to the breaking point, you still have to trust an unknown (or worse in this case - a PR department, a group known for their skill at lying without breaking the law) entity to have acted in good faith in coming up with those numbers.
Thanks, but I'll keep my credibility card snugly in my wallet until I see one in action that gets the specified dollars-per-mile.
I fail to see the difficulty here...
.profile .bash_logout script that contacts everyone necessary
1) Give her an account on your NAT machine
2) Add "export TMOUT=3540" to her
3) Write a
4) Log her in
If she doesn't whack a key every 59 minutes, it will log her out, thus alerting everyone necessary via email, paging, fax, whatever you like.
You can however get a long way, and I believe do a lot of useful work, but ASSERTing on all conditions at the start of functions, and on the return value, where approriate.
Do ANY of you work in the "real" world?
"assert", in C, counts as a frickin' obscenity for anything that makes it out the door (now, for debugging, sure, throw 'em in like candy on Halloween, but make sure to remove every last one before release).
End-users will, for the most part, deal with "odd" behavior. They tweak, however, when programs just arbitrarily exit. And for "mission critical" apps, far from reversing, the situation gets worse - Imagine an ATC system just randomly shutting itself down, not because of an unrecoverable error, but because of a design methodology buzzword... People die and programmers go to prison for bugs like that.
ALWAYS check your inputs, but don't chuck the whole program in the middle of decrease_radiation_strength() because your call to format_a_string_real_pretty_like() didn't like the color-name passed to it.
You're overlooking the fact that if the batteries survive those 4 cycles, you've broken even and everything after that is gravy.
The more charge cycles you get, the lower your cost-per-battery drops. Yes, you break even at 4 charges... And at 8 charges, they've cost you half of a regular pack of AAs. And at somewhere around 120 charges, they've cost you less than a penny per battery per charge.
Just becuase you've broken even compared to alkalines doesn't make it a good idea to knowingly kill them faster, it just means you haven't wasted money in switching to rechargeables.
Telling anyone they should avoid this technology because it *may* reduce the cell's lifetime is being penny wise, pound foolish.
Just giving some generally good advice on battery maintenance. As another poster pointed out, the Rayovac chargers coupled with special Rayovac batteries actually have sensors in the batteries themselves, so they may well not suffer any damage from the charging (then again, just because you can safely do it doesn't make doing so optimal for battery life - charging produces a lot of heat, and heat WILL eventually kill your batteries); but I've seen PLENTY of non-intelligent-battery chargers that claim to do 1C safely, which just does not hold true.
If you NEED your batteries recharged in 15 minutes, I agree with you. If not, what harm do you see in letting them charge while you sleep?
I thought NiMH likes the fast charging? Check out this wikipedia article.
From your link (bolding for emphasis mine): "When fast-charging, it is advisable to charge the NiMH batteries with a smart battery charger to avoid overcharging, which can damage batteries and cause dangerous conditions. Modern NiMH batteries contain catalysts to immediately deal with gases developed as a result of over-charging without being harmed (2 H2 + O2 ---catalyst--> 2 H2O). However, this only works with over-charging currents of up to C/10 h (nominal capacity divided by 10 hours). As a result of this reaction, the batteries will heat up considerably, marking the end of the charging process. Some quick chargers have a fan to keep the batteries cool."
I don't recall which chemistry it is (NiMH or NiCAD), but IIRC, charging them fast is a good idea.
I hadn't heard of that for either NiMH or NiCADs, but it does limit the lifetime of Li-ion batteries.
However, those don't like rapid charging, either, as it GREATLY accelerates electrolyte breakdown... So you have a lose/lose situation there.
I have a 15 minute quick charger (by Rayovac) and I would hate to go back to having to actually wait hours for my batteries to charge. This is a cool idea, but lets try and speed it up and then I'll be interested.
For the longevity of your batteries (ie, the reason you pay about 4x as much for rechargeables in the first place), you really should use an intelligent trickle-charger (around C/10) with an automatic pre-charging discharge. I seriously suspect the battery manufacturers (such as Rayovac) came up with the idea of a 15-minute charge just to drastically shorten the life of your rechargeables. It has to seriously hurt their profitability that we can now use a single set of batteries that will last for five to ten years if properly maintained.
It amazes some of my friends (who, like you, use a 4C flash charger) that I have 5 year old NiMH batteries that, after several hundred charge cycles, not only still work, but still hold over 90% of their stated capacity. Well, now you know the secret. Stop abusing your batteries, and just let them charge overnight.
Keep the flash charger in the car for emergencies, but unless you absolutely need a battery now, don't use it.
What Came First, the Violence or the Videogame?
Two words - "Space War".
The very first video game (yes, a full decade before "Pong") had, as its theme, a scifi twist on mankind's second oldest form of recreation - Killing one another for fun and profit, framed as a team sport.
Of course, once upon a time that served a purpose, since our oldest form of recreation tended to lead to overpopulation before the availability of effective birth control methods, but some of the more foolish packs of domesticated primates still haven't caught on to that concept yet.
Maybe young Tolkein thinks in the same fashion? He is bringing his fathers work to life. Just another viewpoint.
BIG difference between the two - I will presume that the vast majority of Slashdot readers wouldn't know your father's works (feel free to correct me if you use "e2d2" rather than a better-known name such as David Asimov, but my general point would still hold). By extending and publishing his works, you CAN bring your father's work to life.
By comparison, EVERYONE has heard of JRR Tolkien. Many people (certainly any SciFi fans) have heard of Frank Herbert. Their children can't increase awareness of their works beyond "ubiquity".
Now, I have no problem with famous authors' offspring publishing things like memoirs and fragmentary writings - hard-core fans appreciate those things, even if it does seem a bit like making a buck off the dead. But when those same offspring take on airs that they can "finish" fragmentary works - Sorry, no. That instantly takes them from "cool, Tolkien's kid" to "pretentious little bastard". And when the book cover has their family name in HUGE letters, with the only mention of a first name hidden in the reviews on the back in a 2-point fonr, they drop down to "Copyright-exploting scum not fit to read the works he bastardized".
It is "illegal copying", not stealing. These are materially different.
Actually, no - Failure to obey region coding doesn't even count as copyright violation. It doesn't break ANY laws (except, in just a few countries, if you circumvent the access control mechanism involved) whatsoever.
Industry cartels (generally illegal, but somehow they've gotten away with this in the movie and video game industries) have NO authority of enforcement whatsoever. Thus the "need" for various forced region coding schemes on their part in the first place.
My fav are the short glasses with a thick heavy base. It has a good weight even when empty.
I agree, but after four to eight of them (depending on proof), I find I can no longer maintain very good posture.
And, of course, I can't really use those at work...
Third, AAC was developped by Dolby and was shown to be the best or second best CODEC in all the audio tests that have been done. As for the bitrate, AAC is more efficient with 128kbps than MP3 or WMA.
AAC does indeed do a great job at lossy compression. At 128kbps, it CAN beat every other 128kbps encoding out there - Key word, "can".
You have to consider, though, that "AAC" doesn't really refer to just one specific way to encode music, though - More like handing someone a toolbox and blueprints for a house. You can create a compliant AAC encoder using nothing more than than the LC profile, or you could use LTP+SRS+PNS with KB windowing. On top of that, even limiting yourself to just the MAIN profile, you can tweak the parameters such that encoding a three minute 2ch 44khz song will encode faster than realtime, or take over a full day to finish.
Now, all that aside, I doubt Apple skimped all that much on the encoder, as they don't need to encode in realtime, just when they add a track to their library. Regardless, you just can't compare a 128kbps encoding to one at 240kpbs. If Apple had gone with 192 or higher, I'd say any modern format approaches perceptually equivalent to CD quality. But NO format at 128kbps can pull that off yet.
The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users are skirted
Which I will point out as the single most revealing point, by virtue of its absence, of the entire link.
Virtually every criticism I've seen about open source, "free" software, and Linux in general, centers around a single (irrelevant) point: Not business-friendly.
You also hear "not ready for the desktop" or "too focused on developers", but those only matter in relation to the POV of trying to sell a product, in that they reduce the potential customer base. Thus even those classics reduce to "not business-friendly".
Well, I have news for Hilf, and Roland, and IDC, and all the rest who go on about why Linux and open source will fail - open source doesn't exist in a form that can fail. Yes, you have assorted groups with the goal of advancing open source (RMS, Debian), and various companies who have pretended to embrace the idea (IBM), but as much as they may contribute to the underlying idea of free software, they don't embody it in some mortality-inducing way. They can vanish tomorrow, and I can still build my own Linux distro from sources.
So, when any criticism of open source "skirts" the issue of free-as-in-freedom, you can ignore that criticism without a second thought. Because "open source" MEANS free-as-in-freedom. It doesn't depend on any company or person or government. Laws and patents and liabilities can make it harder to obtain and contribute to, but NOTHING can ever eliminate it completely. As long as a single fourth-world geek with a bicycle-powered laptop can compile a "hello world" program, open source will remain.
I thank IBM for its massive contributions of code and ideas. I thank RedHat for its PR work. I thank Linus for the kernel itself. But the abstraction doesn't need any of them to survive. Making a profit counts as a nice side effect, not the goal, of open source.
I love how the average /.er is against the FCC when they're censoring Howard
Stern or Janet Jackson, but in favor of their cracking down on "big business".
I love how the average Slashdot troll doesn't understand that the FCC exists for the SOLE purpose of spectrum allocation, not censorship of content.
I also love how some folks fail to remember that the FCC causes the problem of media monopolies in the first place by imposing such high barriers to entry that only megacorps can even dream of get anything more useful than a ham license.
Allocation of spectrum once served the public good, both for safety and in the sense of fairly sharing a limited resource. We now, however, have the tech to target individual active receivers, with stations "broad"casting in the tens of watts rather than in megawatts, thus making the FCC entirely irrelevant.
When anyone who can afford the hardware can throw up a phased array and fire up their own talk-radio station, I will agree with your point. Until then, yes, I have a problem with both media ownership rules and the response to Janet's nipple.
If a bank doesn't want to be held responsible for what happens to my money, I'll do the responsible thing and move my money elsewhere
Damn - Here goes a wasted mod point, but I consider this point so insightful, I must reply.
I know people who, even in the current environment where banks bear the vast majority of the pain for most financial fraud, refuse to keep their money in the bank. They currently fall in the minority, but do exist. And not just fogies and Luddites - I know a 26YO EE who has no credit cards, no bank account, and buys EVERYTHING with cash or money-orders.
If banks start telling people "Aww, gee, someone emptied your account using seemingly-legit info, tough luck; I guess you'll use a bit more care next time, eh?", you can expect to see the world's economies collapse overnight as people move their life saving to their mattresses.
So no, banks will stoically take the hit, as they have always done. Not just for fear of losing customers, but for fear of losing public confidence in the the ONE thing they actually "sell" - The legal fiction of fungibility of food/goods for paper, and more recently, paper for bits. If they lose that quite literally delusional association of "value" most people have for their magical green paper, game over - They go from running the world, to owning a lot of nonmagical green paper.
I'm much more likely to put the product on my shit list. Not the show.
While I tend to agree, consider the sort of companies that will resort to tactics like this to "trick" people into seeing their product...
Personally, I don't think I use any products for which I've ever seen an advertisement - Scratch that, I've seen ads for Guinness. And I can't imagine I've never seen a BirdsEye ad (I use their frozen spinach in a lot of recipes, it works MUCH better than fresh, and doesn't tend to have sand in it like the generics), though I can't remember any offhand. Hmmm... Okay, I've seen ads for the American Cotton Growers association (or whatever the hell they call themselves), and do prefer all-cotton clothing. But at a quick glance around my house, I seriously doubt I could win a million dollar bet to find a dozen items with ads currently running on TV.
But that pretty much illustrates my point (and yours as well, to a degree) - Not only do commercials push me away from products rather than attract me, but the vast majority of products worth using (for their own merits rather than the hype) don't need ads.
Is capturing a DVI signal and then recording it something you want to do?
Yes, actually, since we can all but bet on future HDTV decoders (whether cable or satellite or even OTA) having nothing but DVI or HDMI connector (though they might still have plain ol' coax, for all those people who want to pay for high-res digital but watch it on an ancient NTSC TV).
Why do you consider Component the best? What was wrong with RGB that it needed to be replaced?
RGB? For the sake of argument, I will presume you refer to YPbPr rather than RGB (of which, "Component" can refer to either, along with several other variants). So two problems with that - First, no standard consumer AV equipment uses pure RGB (at least not in the US). Second, TVs do not actually display "true" red, green, and blue - They display something that, coincidentally enough, very closely matches the colorspace expressable by YCbCr (the "normalized" digital information carried by the analog YPbPr signal). Finally, and perhaps most relevant, DVDs do not encode RGB triplets - They encode YCbCr, which compresses quite a lot better while conveying almost the same information.
So to summarize that, the most common reason to need an HD cable, DVDs, involves YCbCr displayed on a YCbCr display. Converting that to takes far more work and incurs significantly more signal loss than using a YPbPr path between the two ends.
As for why not use digital - Hey, DVI works just fine. HDMI would work just fine as well, and with a higher bandwidth than DVI. But the addition of HDCP, in my opinion (and the opinion of MANY people who just don't know better - yet), makes that plain ol' low-bandwidth coax connector more appealing, since at least we can actually use the signal it carries however we want.
You certainly did your level best in your "summary" to make it seem so.
Could you perhaps quote the part of the summary that mentions any political party directly (not by way of an entirely-relevant project on which DCI has worked)?
Because, put simply, I don't see anything partisan in the FP.
And for the record, I call myself neither a Democrat nor a Republican - I consider myself a "moderate anarchist". As all governments exist for the sole purpose of slowly removing "real" freedoms from its citizens (new laws, by definition, make something you formerly had the freedom to do, now illegal), I consider "downsizing" the one and only viable political strategy.
they should be in the public domain, many of them, but I believe that they have been copyrighted as part of the conversion to electronic format.
By virtue of them existing online, and aided by a Slashdotting, they did just enter the public domain.
Granted, various courts may disagree and you may need to move to Vanuatu to use them, but the more important issue (that they not vanish someday like much of the pre-1970 BBC archive during an overzealous cleaning spree, or worse, by some religious whackjob in the Holy Pentacostal Empire 150 years from now declaring them blasphemous and burning the lot) has just gone from "eventually likely" to a virtual impossibility.
Ah well, I'll file these along with my Elsevier archive. Anyone know if they have a download limit per account or IP (ie, how many accounts I'll need to make to rip the whole collection)?
Although a great gesture, this has far less use than I had hoped.
I've checked out a few of their articles so far, and they all have one conspicuous show-stopping problem: These consist of PDFs of scanned images.
Not error-corrected OCRs of scanned images, but the actual images. Great for historians, I suppose, but absolutely bloody useless for searching.
So - Thanks guys, I honestly do appreciate this, but your collection of (text) abstracts would prove more useful than your entire archive of images.
And the ones where were actually "Banned" have merely been banned by one school district or another or some such nonesense.
Find me a copy of Wilhelm Reich's Creation. Or a 1922 edition of Joyce's Ulysses.
Freedom of the press, indeed.
I'll copyright the O2 molecule. Using it without my express permission is copyright infringement.
No, copying it would infringe, not using.
Fortunately, I only consume O2 - I do, however, produce CO2, of which I declare myself copyright holder.
Hope y'all know how to metabolize hydrogen sulfide...
Good thing they paid up. Uncle RIAA thought it would be a shame if "something should happen to their nice office building".
For some reason you got modded down, but really, I have to wonder about the legality of this...
"eDonkey, has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry". Not damages awarded by a court, not even to settle a pending suit - To avoid a potential lawsuit!
If that doesn't meet the textbook definition of extortion, I don't know what would.
I'm curious what you have to say about the "few bad apples" among Americans torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.
... Yes, they're all terrorist orgs when they create terror to cause political change. Hezbollah is certainly a terrorist org by any definition.
Well, then, brother... Viva la resistance! If all Hezbolah's bad apples make Hezbolah terrorists, then I suppose, by that logic, a few bad apples in Abu Ghraib would make all Americans terrorists. Great, thanks, you've extended the idea to hit even harder home. But you've kinda argued the wrong stance - This works much more smoothly if you argue against me rather than for me.
Ah, I get it, you meant to do the classic Bugs Bunny mind-trick. Well, you won't confuse me, you wascally wabbit! "No, shoot ME, me, me!"
anything they think god told them is theirs.
Do you really want to go there, considering the current Crusader-In-Chief?
Interesting equivalence there between practicing holistic medicine and lobbing missiles into a city. -5 insightful on that one.
Yes, actually, he did make an interesting comparison, and it saddens me to see him modded as a troll while your one-liner gets +5 insightful...
You either blame the group or its members. You can't pick and choose based on the sin-of-the-week.
In the case of Hezbolah, the actions of a few radical separatists, quite possibly not even members of Hezbolah but just entirely different radical separatists with more testosterone than brains, get attributed to an internationally unpopular political party.
So what conclusion do you get if you apply that same reasoning for Falun Gong?
The GP dared to go there. And got bitch-slapped for it. But as Bill Watterson once said (via Calvin) of his fight with his syndicate over merchandising when they accused him of seeing the issue in black-and-white, "Sometimes that's just the way things are!"