Unfortunately, I use Google because I like the results it provides.
What else is there?
With google I can do:
my doctor's last name my_city, state
Hit return, and at the top of the page there is the phone number to call. If only the number was hooked into an autodialer, when that comes, it will be cool.
Google has usenet searches.
Google has news searches (I get confused sometimes between news.google.com and groups.google.com, but...)
Google has search by domain searches. Very useful to do.edu or.org or whatever to eliminate the.com domains who are trying to sell me crap.
Google is instantaneous. ask.com is slow right now.
Google has image searches.
Google has video searches.
Google will have music searches.
Google...
Yes, I'm a happy user. Thanks for Google having the best real estate on the web, and those greedy link parking whores that pay for my searching capabilities. Not to mention that its refreshing that I can buy ANYTHING that I search for at eBay while I'm at it. Very convenient.
I can certainly see the difference in customers where I live. At Wal-mart, most of the customers look like they emerged from a nearby crack house, whereas at Target the customers tend to be more of a mix of lower- and middle-class shoppers.
Not to include hottie cashiers and MILFs.
I'm middle class and those are the benefits I get from Target.
But I guess that it is relatively easy to go past your comfort zone once you get acclimated to a certain volume and many different songs have different RMS values to them, so mixes can be difficult, even with a max threshold.
Also, I hope that the lawsuit goes the way of the fat people suing McDonalds. Food and headphones are nothing new, and overusing them is personal responsibility.
Next week, I might drink 8 or so gallons of water, die, and then come back and sue the waterworks of my town. That will teach them not to sell water anymore.
Historical note: the United States got its start in the textile industry not by producing higher quality stuff than you'd find in, say, Britain, but by producing lower quality stuff that was "good enough", but much cheaper. America got a reputation for cheap, lousy material - but then again, everyone bought it, even when better-but-more-expensive local material was available
In the 70s, Japanese cars were cheap pieces of junk.
The difference with the US selling cheap crap for a while, and Japan selling cheap crap for a while, is that they grew out of it and diversified into other fields. The US, AFAIK, is not the world leader of cheap textiles anymore, and the Japanese are not known for cheap piece of junk cars.
Walmart's business model is selling cheap crap, and for now it is working for them, and hurting most everyone in the US. I do not see any change in Walmart's business plan.
The last time I went into a walmart (with a friend, I never buy there and avoid it like the plague), the place was dirty, shelves were disorganized, and no one was willing to help other than to point down an isle. Price isn't always more important, although I believe that through advertising the american public is being brainwashed into thinking it is.
Can we repeat this, and make it a mantra?
I do not shop at walmart.
The only people that I know of that only care about price are "poor" people. I'm using poor lightly here, because my family was not monetarily challenged, but I felt poor as a child, because everything was based on price. My father recently came to this self-revelation, and has called himself "cheap". Other "poor" people I know that shop at walmart do so because of price and to some degree convenience. I had a girlfriend whose father said that if he can't get it at walmart, he didn't need it.
The thing is that first there was McDonaldization (good book, read it), and now there is Wal-martization, which are similar, but I believe that the walmart one is worse.
McDonaldization is about low skilled, low pay, and highly regulated jobs. Walmart is the same, but walmart supplies a much greater variety of items and a much larger volume.
If walmart had its way, everybody would work at walmart, live at walmart, and of course shop at walmart. With just enough money left over at the end of the week for the luxury of supersizing a meal at the McDonald's that is embedded in walmart.
Walmart does not pay nor treats their employees well. It has killed the mom and pop thing in smaller towns. It has killed entire companies (vlasic pickles comes to mind). It has greatly benefitted the Chinese in producing and selling cheap crap to us here in the US.
Supporting walmart is supporting just above subsistence level for everyone involved. Yes, the shelves are a mess, the employees don't know a thing, and the people there... I feel like a lower human being when shopping at walmart. Over the past 7 or so years, I have only gone there with friends and family, and I expressed my opinion when doing so.
Supposedly, walmart has lowered the rate of inflation in the US. That initially looks like a good thing, but if you take into account that much of that money is going overseas and not in the US pockets, the whole outweighs the slight economic stat of lowered inflation.
I got the $14.99 account with unlimited local calls and 200 long distance minutes
Does that include the same $13+ of FCC fees and taxes like my $13.00 land line account tacks on?
Its next to impossible for consumers to do comparative pricing for phones. For some reason, they always cost between 50 and 400% more than the advertised monthly fee.
Yes, I got a $400+ phone bill one month for all local calls.
They specifically mentioned Jessica Lynch and how she was just a truck driver who should never of been exposed to combat.
She should have not volunteered for such a dangerous job.
I have a pet peeve with sob stories about how people enter known dangerous jobs, especially the military, where their existence is to be disposable to help the poor people of Iraq and ensure the economic welfare of the people back home.
Now, the initial invasion of Iraq is at best controversial. The continued occupation with no plans of leaving are another story. Every time I see one of those cute bumper stickers that say, "I support our troops" which is the most noncommittal version of "Its OK to be at war", I say to myself, "Then bring our troops home where they are safe".
I'm glad to see Stanley won because this is the technology needed for automated driving, imagine using the Red team's solution and have to preprogram you car? What's the point?
Exactly. I believe that the Stanley approach was more "real life" for what we do now, and what will be done in the future. When I go on a trip, or even go to somewhere locally where I don't know the exact location of where I go, I at least get the address and correlate it to something I do know. With the ease and availability of Google maps, I usually get a map. This is what the Stanley team did.
The Red team had something like 15 or more people parallel processing and micromanaging the whole trip with arbitrary 5m/s or 6m/s speeds, and again, its worth noting that the red team had 2 vehicles one with a more aggressive and one with a more conservative speed input.
Stanley was able to drive 132 miles at an average of about 20m/h across rugged terrain up and down mountains, through tunnels, hairpin turns, and _pass_ the red team truck to win. Plus, its worthwhile to point out that the Red team had H1s whereas the Stanley team had a more modest and fuel efficient VW.
The Stanford Stanley team kicked ass. I'm very impressed.
I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night.
on
Inside DARPA's Robot Race
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I will say, I was impressed, and surprised that I did not see an article on it at/.. I believe there was one last year.
I will say, that aside from "Stanley" winning the race on completion and time, I also believe that Stanley was the best technology. The H1lander and friend were micromanaged, and there were two vehicles that had different strategies (the tortoise and the hair) and it took almost the whole 2 hours of a team of people to map out the course and program the robots. They then added the fudge factor for human error with the fast and slow strategies.
Stanley was programmed in minutes of receiving the map, and it calculated its speed dynamically on its own. Stanley had "adaptive vision" which overlaid laser, video, and other sensory data to create a dynamic field of view of what was safe to drive through.
Now, what shocked me, was that so many teams finished this year. Nobody got past 7 or 9 miles last year, and many vehicles passed the entire 132 mile trip this year. Watching the vehicles drive was impressive. Most of the time, they appeared to be manned.
The course was not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. With the success of Stanley, I believe that this will increase the adaptive and learning capabilities in current software controlled systems. Currently, software is brute forced into trying to accommodate all possible logical conditions, which is impossible, and often just wrong.
Don't know about the 50Hz vs 60Hz thing - although I can tell you that as a citizen of a 50Hz country I notice low-level 60Hz hum, whereas I can't normally hear 50Hz hum.
Another interesting thing, is that where I live, in 60Hz land, if you stop and ask somebody to hum a constant hum. Just hmmmmmmm for a few seconds, they will hum at about 60Hz.
We are used to hearing that hum in the background of our lives.
The human body is argueably more complex than a car.
The complexity defense is a good one. It holds up well against a jury of lay people and even judges with things that they have no experience with like technical things or medical issues.
I'm sure you have read and understand all of the laws of your city, state, nation, and international law. And any ignorance of that in the event that you infract upon one of those will get you off. After all, it takes someone 7 years of formal training, and a fulltime job to understand and halfway know a subset of the law, so ignorance of a normal person is forgivable and often dismissed for small infractions of the law.
In fact, I used the complexity defense of a mechanic one time. My father had an electrical short in his car, and it took the mechanic like a week or a week and a half to find it. I said, "There are miles of electrical wire in your car. Its complex." The mechanic did find the short. It was in the drivers seat, and the mechanic accidentally found the short when he sat down in the drivers seat with the electrical stuff hooked up to the car. He put some electrical tape around the wire, and it was OK for over 10 years after that.
We are talking about a medical condition so rare that lay people only know it as "lazy eye". I've known people with it, and people have shared on this discussion about having it or having friends, coworkers, or family with it, like the post above mine.
That post said:
I recall that at age 2 there is something like a 98% chance of correcting it, and by age 9 there is a 2% chance. He tried the patch for quite a while with little improvement. A different doctor then had him get rid of the patch and had him use some drops in the 'good' eye instead. These drops would numb the focusing of the 'good' eye and allow the 'bad' eye to strengthen more by doing more work. It worked great!! He is now 12, long done with the treatment, and although his eyes are not perfect, they are very much improved. I only wish we had gone with the drops much earlier.
So, this lay person understood that there was a window of time where the problem could be corrected. At one point of the window, the treatment was 98% successful. He did not say when he started treatment, but it appears as though it was definitely before 9.
It was not that the first doctor, supposedly trained and an expert in eye issues, noticed that his treatment was not working, and it took a separate doctor to try a different method before getting results. To me, the first doctor did not have the proper skills, experience, or desire to help with the problem, and does not deserve payment.
I wish there was a quick way to change your eye-edness. I am right handed but left-eyed, and tasks that require aiming (like darts, shooting, etc) are handicapped.
I'm right handed and left eyed as well. Not to many people know their "eye-edness".
I was told that hitting a baseball is the only advantage to being cross hand-eye dominant. Makes sense.
The real funny thing is that I'm about as good at darts with my eyes closed as with them open. Try it, you'll be surprised. The dart board never moves, so vision does not give you much of an advantage. Get oriented, and just throw the thing.
I met one guy that could hit bulls all day long blindfolded.
A different doctor then had him get rid of the patch and had him use some drops in the 'good' eye instead. These drops would numb the focusing of the 'good' eye and allow the 'bad' eye to strengthen more by doing more work. It worked great!!
Did you get a refund from the first doctor?
It worries me sometimes that with the cost of health care, there is little assurance that there is any quality to it. I've had to go to multiple doctors in the past or have paid doctors to fix something and they either didn't or made the situation worse.
The grease covered auto mechanics don't have these issues. I've never had a car not get repaired by the first person I took it to. Up to replacing motors, and for a nominal fee that did not involve a 3rd party that I had to pay monthly (health insurance).
I guess people are so relieved when they get help or eventually die before they get good healthcare that they don't complain about the many bad doctors out there.
I haven't heard much about Ruby since the (geek) media blitz of over a year ago. How many people actually use Ruby on Rails? I see the same thing happening with AJAX.
Its the way geeks do things.
It reminds me back in the late 90s when everything was Java!!!
It reminds me of even further back in high school.
Back then, everybody was interested in sex, talked about sex, wanted sex, but nobody was doing sex.
Same thing with Java in the late 90s and Ruby today, and AJAX tomorrow.
What should be on trial here is not this specific patent, but the state in which our patent system currently is. The fact that this case is likely to appear ridiculous to a common citizen with no technical or legal background helps make the case for patent reform, and hopefully serves as a dire warning to the legislature of any other nation currently considering implementing software and business process patents.
The last time this was posted on slashdot, people did not get this point. A google search on the address of the "company" yields this google optimized page:
ATTORNEY Thomas Woolston 703-757-6503 MercExchange, LLC P O Box 1272 Great Falls, VA 22066
Clearly his legal and monetary interests outweigh the info found here that says:
Mercexchange's mission is to improve businesses through the application of new digital technologies, especially in networked environments. The businesses and products developed by MercExchange address large-scale consumer needs and business inefficiencies, resulting in new ways of doing business, new ways of creating value, and new industry paradigms.
This guy is a lawyer, disguised as an "inventor" that invents patents into inventions to give himself business that make working people pay for him not to work. Nice.
Just lighten up and deal with crappy quality for "environmental" music, but satisfy your need for quality by listening to as much real live music as you can. Life is short, and you can add good friends, food, and drink to the live music - after you've driven there in your GT car with its inaudible crappy stereo.
I'm much "lighter" than most people my age.
I've seen over 40 "brand-name" artists in concert. Highlights include Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. I drink and do other fun, but body/mind destroying things, on a daily basis. I record live music. I have an open door policy at my house and my friends just walk in my door on a daily basis. I still see between 5 and 10 "brand-name" shows a year.
Hey, I splurged with my car this time around. I spend almost 10k on it with the stereo. Mid-life crisis I guess. I can't justify spending the insurance, interest to banks, and gas for a GT with a crappy stereo. I'm satisfied with my vehicle, and life in general.
Yeah, but it pays well. All you have to do is convince people that know less than you that they know less than you.
Is your real-to-real also better then studio quality analog tape?
Its reel to reel. And no, studio quality is studio quality, not consumer level. You get what you pay for.
Is your cassette player? (amazing if it is)
Sure.
I think you're ears are just trained to expect the distortion.
All ears are. The best sounding stereo has yet to of convinced me that Metallica is playing in my car (or theirs).
Did you initially prefer LPs to CDs?
That is tough. Back when I switched from LPs to CDs, I preferred CDs. I bought a turntable for a friend just before Christmas this past year and transfered an LP from 1985 to CD. I really liked the sound of the LP. Very warm, and I was surprised at the quality.
Initially I suspected you had very sensitive hearing to notice the problems with MP3s (With high data rates I can only tell when listening on good headphones). Now I'm suspicious you have very poor hearing and are just set in your ways.
I have high end equipment at home and in my car. I have a recording studio in my house. I bought my car stereo, and set it up different than my home setup, so I could hear my mixes on different types of systems. I have a bandpass sub at home, and a sealed in my car. I have bass reflex speakers at home and sealed enclosures in my car for my 8" drivers. I don't sit and listen to much music at home. Too many distractions. I have a small high end loss in my left ear from an ear infection that exploded 20 years ago, but I've had my ears tested and they are good. Thanks for caring.
You also did'nt address my point r.e. the acustics of car interiors. Why argue about 0.001 THD vs 0.01 when your speakers are going to add 1-2% THD. (Yes I know there's more to audio quality then THD)
I never argued THD, nor mentioned it. The acoustics in my car have been corrected as much as possible by dampening all of the doors and custom built enclosures. I then calibrated my time alignment and EQ via a microphone and computer. Its not perfect, but damn good. I'll do better next time, or just settle for a factory stereo. Who knows? Interests and priorities change.
Back to MP3s. I have an MP3, that I downloaded at 320kbps CBR. It gurgles in the vocals. Now, it could have come from an idiot who reMP3ed the file or something. I dunno. I don't know where to get good MP3s from or how to make them. I've used every "high end" flag on lame that I could. I've given up on the technology.
I've studied audio technology and hearing for over 20 years in humans and animals. Harmonics and timing is critical to hearing, and they suck when lossy codecs like MP3 are used. ogg is better. DTS is damn good. Dolby Digital is pretty good. SDDS (don't know the details here) is good. Yes, my home theater is better than most movie theaters, but my screen is only 8 foot diagonal.
You do understand that downloading random files from Usenet is not a reliable indicator of the quality of a particular codec, right?
Most all of them were encoded with lame. I ditched any that were lower than 190 kbps average bitrate that were VBR encoded. Some were 320 kbps. I've encoded my own stuff at 320 and I'm still not impressed.
You are (were) eather smoking crack or don't remember cassette tapes very well. They were hissy, lost more top then MP3s and degraded badly in the heat of summer. Good MP3s sound much better.
Smoking crack had/has nothing to do with it.
Sure, cheap CD or MP3 players sound better than a cheap tape deck, but I had better ones. Denon and Nakamici (sp??). When I made a tape from a CD it was difficult to tell the difference.
I've got cassette recordings that are 25+ years old that sound better than any MP3 you could throw my way, and nobody would ask "dude, is that from a cassette?" They sound good.
I'm a sucker for reel-to-reel tapes. At 7.5 or 15 ips those were excellent. Much better than the 1.5 ips cassettes AND much better than CDs.
Yeah. My next car stereo will probably be McIntosh, but its pricey. I like Mc stuff because its about audio quality and simplilicty. It doesn't have 50,000 features that half work. Just track skip, basic tone control, and volume. What more do you need?
I have and Eclipse head unit and 5 channel amp, 4x50 watt with 150 for the sub. I honestly don't know how loud it gets before it starts to distort or I can't stand it any louder. I'm pretty happy with it. I have a compact car that with the stereo cost me less than $10k. My insurance is like $300/year and I get between 30 and 39 mpg.
I would guess that people lease cars for more than $10k a year including insurance and gas. I'm into quality, but I'm thrifty:)
What car do you have with such good speakers that when driving you can tell the difference between CD quality and 256kbps VBR mp3? 99% of cars don't have that good fidelity.
Trust me. I have 5.25" drivers in my door with tweeters on the pillar, 8" drivers in the back dash, and a 10" sub in the trunk. 8 volt preamp outs from the head unit to the deck. The four in-cabin speakers are time aligned. The time alignment and parametric EQ on the deck is calibrated with a computer. Its cool stuff.
I would bet my car stereo is better than 99.99% of those on the road:)
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I use Google because I like the results it provides.
.edu or .org or whatever to eliminate the .com domains who are trying to sell me crap.
What else is there?
With google I can do:
my doctor's last name my_city, state
Hit return, and at the top of the page there is the phone number to call. If only the number was hooked into an autodialer, when that comes, it will be cool.
Google has usenet searches.
Google has news searches (I get confused sometimes between news.google.com and groups.google.com, but...)
Google has search by domain searches. Very useful to do
Google is instantaneous. ask.com is slow right now.
Google has image searches.
Google has video searches.
Google will have music searches.
Google...
Yes, I'm a happy user. Thanks for Google having the best real estate on the web, and those greedy link parking whores that pay for my searching capabilities. Not to mention that its refreshing that I can buy ANYTHING that I search for at eBay while I'm at it. Very convenient.
I can certainly see the difference in customers where I live. At Wal-mart, most of the customers look like they emerged from a nearby crack house, whereas at Target the customers tend to be more of a mix of lower- and middle-class shoppers.
Not to include hottie cashiers and MILFs.
I'm middle class and those are the benefits I get from Target.
Eh?
But I guess that it is relatively easy to go past your comfort zone once you get acclimated to a certain volume and many different songs have different RMS values to them, so mixes can be difficult, even with a max threshold.
Also, I hope that the lawsuit goes the way of the fat people suing McDonalds. Food and headphones are nothing new, and overusing them is personal responsibility.
Next week, I might drink 8 or so gallons of water, die, and then come back and sue the waterworks of my town. That will teach them not to sell water anymore.
I was wrong. They filed for bankruptcy in 2001, I thought they were gone. I'm not much into pickles.
t _pricing.html
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3046wal-mar
January 2001, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy from here plenty of other success stories in the article as well.
Historical note: the United States got its start in the textile industry not by producing higher quality stuff than you'd find in, say, Britain, but by producing lower quality stuff that was "good enough", but much cheaper. America got a reputation for cheap, lousy material - but then again, everyone bought it, even when better-but-more-expensive local material was available
In the 70s, Japanese cars were cheap pieces of junk.
The difference with the US selling cheap crap for a while, and Japan selling cheap crap for a while, is that they grew out of it and diversified into other fields. The US, AFAIK, is not the world leader of cheap textiles anymore, and the Japanese are not known for cheap piece of junk cars.
Walmart's business model is selling cheap crap, and for now it is working for them, and hurting most everyone in the US. I do not see any change in Walmart's business plan.
The last time I went into a walmart (with a friend, I never buy there and avoid it like the plague), the place was dirty, shelves were disorganized, and no one was willing to help other than to point down an isle. Price isn't always more important, although I believe that through advertising the american public is being brainwashed into thinking it is.
Can we repeat this, and make it a mantra?
I do not shop at walmart.
The only people that I know of that only care about price are "poor" people. I'm using poor lightly here, because my family was not monetarily challenged, but I felt poor as a child, because everything was based on price. My father recently came to this self-revelation, and has called himself "cheap". Other "poor" people I know that shop at walmart do so because of price and to some degree convenience. I had a girlfriend whose father said that if he can't get it at walmart, he didn't need it.
The thing is that first there was McDonaldization (good book, read it), and now there is Wal-martization, which are similar, but I believe that the walmart one is worse.
McDonaldization is about low skilled, low pay, and highly regulated jobs. Walmart is the same, but walmart supplies a much greater variety of items and a much larger volume.
If walmart had its way, everybody would work at walmart, live at walmart, and of course shop at walmart. With just enough money left over at the end of the week for the luxury of supersizing a meal at the McDonald's that is embedded in walmart.
Walmart does not pay nor treats their employees well. It has killed the mom and pop thing in smaller towns. It has killed entire companies (vlasic pickles comes to mind). It has greatly benefitted the Chinese in producing and selling cheap crap to us here in the US.
Supporting walmart is supporting just above subsistence level for everyone involved. Yes, the shelves are a mess, the employees don't know a thing, and the people there... I feel like a lower human being when shopping at walmart. Over the past 7 or so years, I have only gone there with friends and family, and I expressed my opinion when doing so.
Supposedly, walmart has lowered the rate of inflation in the US. That initially looks like a good thing, but if you take into account that much of that money is going overseas and not in the US pockets, the whole outweighs the slight economic stat of lowered inflation.
I got the $14.99 account with unlimited local calls and 200 long distance minutes
Does that include the same $13+ of FCC fees and taxes like my $13.00 land line account tacks on?
Its next to impossible for consumers to do comparative pricing for phones. For some reason, they always cost between 50 and 400% more than the advertised monthly fee.
Yes, I got a $400+ phone bill one month for all local calls.
They'll never try to voluntarily assist their customers in limiting the number of air minutes used by their customers.
I have call waiting, which AFAIK, is a standard feature on all mobile phones on my mobile phone. On my land line, I refuse to pay extra for caller ID.
I get suckered into answering the phone much more on the land line vs my cell.
If I see a number that I don't want to talk to at the time, I hit ignore and see if voicemail finds anything relevant.
They specifically mentioned Jessica Lynch and how she was just a truck driver who should never of been exposed to combat.
She should have not volunteered for such a dangerous job.
I have a pet peeve with sob stories about how people enter known dangerous jobs, especially the military, where their existence is to be disposable to help the poor people of Iraq and ensure the economic welfare of the people back home.
Now, the initial invasion of Iraq is at best controversial. The continued occupation with no plans of leaving are another story. Every time I see one of those cute bumper stickers that say, "I support our troops" which is the most noncommittal version of "Its OK to be at war", I say to myself, "Then bring our troops home where they are safe".
I'm glad to see Stanley won because this is the technology needed for automated driving, imagine using the Red team's solution and have to preprogram you car? What's the point?
Exactly. I believe that the Stanley approach was more "real life" for what we do now, and what will be done in the future. When I go on a trip, or even go to somewhere locally where I don't know the exact location of where I go, I at least get the address and correlate it to something I do know. With the ease and availability of Google maps, I usually get a map. This is what the Stanley team did.
The Red team had something like 15 or more people parallel processing and micromanaging the whole trip with arbitrary 5m/s or 6m/s speeds, and again, its worth noting that the red team had 2 vehicles one with a more aggressive and one with a more conservative speed input.
Stanley was able to drive 132 miles at an average of about 20m/h across rugged terrain up and down mountains, through tunnels, hairpin turns, and _pass_ the red team truck to win. Plus, its worthwhile to point out that the Red team had H1s whereas the Stanley team had a more modest and fuel efficient VW.
The Stanford Stanley team kicked ass. I'm very impressed.
I will say, I was impressed, and surprised that I did not see an article on it at
I will say, that aside from "Stanley" winning the race on completion and time, I also believe that Stanley was the best technology. The H1lander and friend were micromanaged, and there were two vehicles that had different strategies (the tortoise and the hair) and it took almost the whole 2 hours of a team of people to map out the course and program the robots. They then added the fudge factor for human error with the fast and slow strategies.
Stanley was programmed in minutes of receiving the map, and it calculated its speed dynamically on its own. Stanley had "adaptive vision" which overlaid laser, video, and other sensory data to create a dynamic field of view of what was safe to drive through.
Now, what shocked me, was that so many teams finished this year. Nobody got past 7 or 9 miles last year, and many vehicles passed the entire 132 mile trip this year. Watching the vehicles drive was impressive. Most of the time, they appeared to be manned.
The course was not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. With the success of Stanley, I believe that this will increase the adaptive and learning capabilities in current software controlled systems. Currently, software is brute forced into trying to accommodate all possible logical conditions, which is impossible, and often just wrong.
Don't know about the 50Hz vs 60Hz thing - although I can tell you that as a citizen of a 50Hz country I notice low-level 60Hz hum, whereas I can't normally hear 50Hz hum.
Another interesting thing, is that where I live, in 60Hz land, if you stop and ask somebody to hum a constant hum. Just hmmmmmmm for a few seconds, they will hum at about 60Hz.
We are used to hearing that hum in the background of our lives.
The human body is argueably more complex than a car.
The complexity defense is a good one. It holds up well against a jury of lay people and even judges with things that they have no experience with like technical things or medical issues.
I'm sure you have read and understand all of the laws of your city, state, nation, and international law. And any ignorance of that in the event that you infract upon one of those will get you off. After all, it takes someone 7 years of formal training, and a fulltime job to understand and halfway know a subset of the law, so ignorance of a normal person is forgivable and often dismissed for small infractions of the law.
In fact, I used the complexity defense of a mechanic one time. My father had an electrical short in his car, and it took the mechanic like a week or a week and a half to find it. I said, "There are miles of electrical wire in your car. Its complex." The mechanic did find the short. It was in the drivers seat, and the mechanic accidentally found the short when he sat down in the drivers seat with the electrical stuff hooked up to the car. He put some electrical tape around the wire, and it was OK for over 10 years after that.
We are talking about a medical condition so rare that lay people only know it as "lazy eye". I've known people with it, and people have shared on this discussion about having it or having friends, coworkers, or family with it, like the post above mine.
That post said:
I recall that at age 2 there is something like a 98% chance of correcting it, and by age 9 there is a 2% chance. He tried the patch for quite a while with little improvement. A different doctor then had him get rid of the patch and had him use some drops in the 'good' eye instead. These drops would numb the focusing of the 'good' eye and allow the 'bad' eye to strengthen more by doing more work. It worked great!! He is now 12, long done with the treatment, and although his eyes are not perfect, they are very much improved. I only wish we had gone with the drops much earlier.
So, this lay person understood that there was a window of time where the problem could be corrected. At one point of the window, the treatment was 98% successful. He did not say when he started treatment, but it appears as though it was definitely before 9.
It was not that the first doctor, supposedly trained and an expert in eye issues, noticed that his treatment was not working, and it took a separate doctor to try a different method before getting results. To me, the first doctor did not have the proper skills, experience, or desire to help with the problem, and does not deserve payment.
From what I remember, Einstein had four white shirts and four pairs of pants that were the same color.
I wish there was a quick way to change your eye-edness. I am right handed but left-eyed, and tasks that require aiming (like darts, shooting, etc) are handicapped.
I'm right handed and left eyed as well. Not to many people know their "eye-edness".
I was told that hitting a baseball is the only advantage to being cross hand-eye dominant. Makes sense.
The real funny thing is that I'm about as good at darts with my eyes closed as with them open. Try it, you'll be surprised. The dart board never moves, so vision does not give you much of an advantage. Get oriented, and just throw the thing.
I met one guy that could hit bulls all day long blindfolded.
A different doctor then had him get rid of the patch and had him use some drops in the 'good' eye instead. These drops would numb the focusing of the 'good' eye and allow the 'bad' eye to strengthen more by doing more work. It worked great!!
Did you get a refund from the first doctor?
It worries me sometimes that with the cost of health care, there is little assurance that there is any quality to it. I've had to go to multiple doctors in the past or have paid doctors to fix something and they either didn't or made the situation worse.
The grease covered auto mechanics don't have these issues. I've never had a car not get repaired by the first person I took it to. Up to replacing motors, and for a nominal fee that did not involve a 3rd party that I had to pay monthly (health insurance).
I guess people are so relieved when they get help or eventually die before they get good healthcare that they don't complain about the many bad doctors out there.
I haven't heard much about Ruby since the (geek) media blitz of over a year ago. How many people actually use Ruby on Rails? I see the same thing happening with AJAX.
Its the way geeks do things.
It reminds me back in the late 90s when everything was Java!!!
It reminds me of even further back in high school.
Back then, everybody was interested in sex, talked about sex, wanted sex, but nobody was doing sex.
Same thing with Java in the late 90s and Ruby today, and AJAX tomorrow.
The last time this was posted on slashdot, people did not get this point. A google search on the address of the "company" yields this google optimized page:
http://patents.oncloud8.com/paa/us_patent_agents_
Which shows:
ATTORNEY Thomas Woolston 703-757-6503 MercExchange, LLC P O Box 1272 Great Falls, VA 22066
Clearly his legal and monetary interests outweigh the info found here that says:This guy is a lawyer, disguised as an "inventor" that invents patents into inventions to give himself business that make working people pay for him not to work. Nice.
Just lighten up and deal with crappy quality for "environmental" music, but satisfy your need for quality by listening to as much real live music as you can. Life is short, and you can add good friends, food, and drink to the live music - after you've driven there in your GT car with its inaudible crappy stereo.
I'm much "lighter" than most people my age.
I've seen over 40 "brand-name" artists in concert. Highlights include Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. I drink and do other fun, but body/mind destroying things, on a daily basis. I record live music. I have an open door policy at my house and my friends just walk in my door on a daily basis. I still see between 5 and 10 "brand-name" shows a year.
Hey, I splurged with my car this time around. I spend almost 10k on it with the stereo. Mid-life crisis I guess. I can't justify spending the insurance, interest to banks, and gas for a GT with a crappy stereo. I'm satisfied with my vehicle, and life in general.
So basically you are full of it.
Yeah, but it pays well. All you have to do is convince people that know less than you that they know less than you.
Is your real-to-real also better then studio quality analog tape?
Its reel to reel. And no, studio quality is studio quality, not consumer level. You get what you pay for.
Is your cassette player? (amazing if it is)
Sure.
I think you're ears are just trained to expect the distortion.
All ears are. The best sounding stereo has yet to of convinced me that Metallica is playing in my car (or theirs).
Did you initially prefer LPs to CDs?
That is tough. Back when I switched from LPs to CDs, I preferred CDs. I bought a turntable for a friend just before Christmas this past year and transfered an LP from 1985 to CD. I really liked the sound of the LP. Very warm, and I was surprised at the quality.
Initially I suspected you had very sensitive hearing to notice the problems with MP3s (With high data rates I can only tell when listening on good headphones). Now I'm suspicious you have very poor hearing and are just set in your ways.
I have high end equipment at home and in my car. I have a recording studio in my house. I bought my car stereo, and set it up different than my home setup, so I could hear my mixes on different types of systems. I have a bandpass sub at home, and a sealed in my car. I have bass reflex speakers at home and sealed enclosures in my car for my 8" drivers. I don't sit and listen to much music at home. Too many distractions. I have a small high end loss in my left ear from an ear infection that exploded 20 years ago, but I've had my ears tested and they are good. Thanks for caring.
You also did'nt address my point r.e. the acustics of car interiors. Why argue about 0.001 THD vs 0.01 when your speakers are going to add 1-2% THD. (Yes I know there's more to audio quality then THD)
I never argued THD, nor mentioned it. The acoustics in my car have been corrected as much as possible by dampening all of the doors and custom built enclosures. I then calibrated my time alignment and EQ via a microphone and computer. Its not perfect, but damn good. I'll do better next time, or just settle for a factory stereo. Who knows? Interests and priorities change.
Back to MP3s. I have an MP3, that I downloaded at 320kbps CBR. It gurgles in the vocals. Now, it could have come from an idiot who reMP3ed the file or something. I dunno. I don't know where to get good MP3s from or how to make them. I've used every "high end" flag on lame that I could. I've given up on the technology.
I've studied audio technology and hearing for over 20 years in humans and animals. Harmonics and timing is critical to hearing, and they suck when lossy codecs like MP3 are used. ogg is better. DTS is damn good. Dolby Digital is pretty good. SDDS (don't know the details here) is good. Yes, my home theater is better than most movie theaters, but my screen is only 8 foot diagonal.
You do understand that downloading random files from Usenet is not a reliable indicator of the quality of a particular codec, right?
Most all of them were encoded with lame. I ditched any that were lower than 190 kbps average bitrate that were VBR encoded. Some were 320 kbps. I've encoded my own stuff at 320 and I'm still not impressed.
You are (were) eather smoking crack or don't remember cassette tapes very well. They were hissy, lost more top then MP3s and degraded badly in the heat of summer. Good MP3s sound much better.
Smoking crack had/has nothing to do with it.
Sure, cheap CD or MP3 players sound better than a cheap tape deck, but I had better ones. Denon and Nakamici (sp??). When I made a tape from a CD it was difficult to tell the difference.
I've got cassette recordings that are 25+ years old that sound better than any MP3 you could throw my way, and nobody would ask "dude, is that from a cassette?" They sound good.
I'm a sucker for reel-to-reel tapes. At 7.5 or 15 ips those were excellent. Much better than the 1.5 ips cassettes AND much better than CDs.
Yeah. My next car stereo will probably be McIntosh, but its pricey. I like Mc stuff because its about audio quality and simplilicty. It doesn't have 50,000 features that half work. Just track skip, basic tone control, and volume. What more do you need?
I have and Eclipse head unit and 5 channel amp, 4x50 watt with 150 for the sub. I honestly don't know how loud it gets before it starts to distort or I can't stand it any louder. I'm pretty happy with it. I have a compact car that with the stereo cost me less than $10k. My insurance is like $300/year and I get between 30 and 39 mpg.
I would guess that people lease cars for more than $10k a year including insurance and gas. I'm into quality, but I'm thrifty
What car do you have with such good speakers that when driving you can tell the difference between CD quality and 256kbps VBR mp3? 99% of cars don't have that good fidelity.
:)
Trust me. I have 5.25" drivers in my door with tweeters on the pillar, 8" drivers in the back dash, and a 10" sub in the trunk. 8 volt preamp outs from the head unit to the deck. The four in-cabin speakers are time aligned. The time alignment and parametric EQ on the deck is calibrated with a computer. Its cool stuff.
I would bet my car stereo is better than 99.99% of those on the road