The story might be bogus, but your facts are, too.
If you know anything about old Soviet aircraft, you'll know that an Su-9 could never reach the operational altitude of a U-2.
Err whut? The Su-9 is, as you say, quite similar to the MiG-21. The Ye-66A, an experimental version of the MiG-21, held the altitude record for a brief period in the early 1960s - 113,829 feet. The F-104s were hitting 90,000 feet even before they started strapping booster rockets onto them. Obviously this is not a sustainable altitude (ask Chuck Yeager - whoops) but the idea of an Su-9 blowing by a U2 at 75,000 feet is certainly not impossible. Don't confuse operational ceiling with maximum altitude.
Err whut? Mach 2.1 for the MiG-21, Mach 1.8 for the Su-9.
While I don't neccesarily buy the Su-9 story, realize that a properly piloted Su-9 will zoom climb much higher than a U2's cruise altitude. So the story's plausible.
Oh I don't doubt it. I only suggest it as an appeasement for the large number of audiophiles who are completely clueless as to how digital audio is stored and reproduced, and to what degree Reed Solomon and the gang are able to get data from point A to point B and back, intact, without the need for multi-thousand-dollar doo-dads and hundred dollar cables. The implementation of some kind of "rip verification" in the form of a CRC would probably help dispell the "every cd drive rips differently, I can hear it!" myth.
"Besides, if bathing a CD in green light has proven to be beneficial, think of the benefits of flooding your entire listening room with it!" (heh sorry had to add that, from here)
Um, did you guys read the articles, or even my post in its entirety? Sheesh.
The people who build these DACs know far more about building them then any transport manufacture.
Did you even read the links? The thing has 24-bit Burr Brown DACs on board. You're saying Burr Brown doesn't know how to make DAs? LOL. Even more importantly for demonstrating the irrelevance of your outboard DAC talk, it also has SPDIF (digital optical for outboard DAs) out. So you can reclock and dither and jittercorrect and flux-capacitate your audio stream all you like.
Also, sure lossy compression has audiophiles in a snit - but I am certain the device will play WAV files as ripped from CD. Even my $89 Sonicblue RV90 CD player does that. If not, it would obviously be the first thing they would add to the firmware.
As for the audiophiles complaining about rip quality, well sure - thats why you could set it to rip at 0.1x, re-reading each track ten times (like Exact Audio Copy, the ripping proggy can do) to make *sure* the data is copied properly. Oh joy, perfect, checksummed copies of CDs! You could even go to www.more$thanbrains.audiophile.net and check the checksums from your rips against those published by TELARC and your peers to make sure you really got the correct rip!
And imagine the money that could be made by shareware audiophiles making software-based rip/dither-to-24-bit/jitter-correct processing software!
I love the guy who posted "nope they won't" in response to my post. Genius, innit.
I can only assume from the pricepoint ($1500MSRP, so $1000+ street price, at least initially) that the average MP3-laden geek is not the target market here. In fact, the pricepoint may be one of the things that allows this thing to avoid (at least somewhat) some flak from the RIAA and its gang of enforcers.
For an audiophile, this thing just might make some sense. First of all, the type of people who spend $300 on speaker wire are obviously not concerned with value per dollar. Second of all, such folks also cling to the ridiculous notion that the rotational stability of a CD is of key importance to audio quality, with typical ghetto-trash (read sub-$5000) CD players incapable of reproducing their music faithfully. For these folks, having a device that would play their music buffered from a hard drive (with the device stashed far away and connected with Monster Cable Ethernet would eliminate the need to worry about such things as spending thousands of dollars to isolate their hardware from any vibrations caused by their cat farting or toilet flushing. (That last link rules):)
Seriously, a device that allows audiophiles to play their music from a non-CD platform, esp thru decent D/As, or even better, their multi-thousand dollar outboard D/As, would sell. The Linn Kivor, no doubt priced in the stratosphere, is one such example. My guess is that the SonicBlue DAC is about a tenth the price of the Linn.
Sooo, while I'm not going to rush out and buy one, I'd still say it may find a market with audiophiles.
...is for future-minded silicon valley tech firms to encourage their engineers and techie-types to breed with those as intellectually and physically dissimilar to themselves as possible. Not so far out, really - folks like Ric Ocasek, Billy Bob Thornton, and Lyle Lovett have been practicing such things for years.
Remember that the way digital cell phones work is that they analyze the sound input, and send it not as audio data, but as coefficients to a human-voice synthesis DSP to save bandwidth.
"The quality of the algorithm is good enough for reliable speaker recognition; even music often survives transcoding in recognizable form (given the bandwidth limitations of 8 kHz sampling rate)."
What's this about human voice synthesis DSP? Sounds a bit black-helicopters-faked-the-moon-landing to me. (or else I'm totally out of it - it happens! my cellphone here's still analog)
Which is to say that 32khz sounded better, all said. Nyquist be damned.
Hey, leave me outta this!:)
Seriously, if you are getting artifacts at 44.1khz that you aren't getting at 32khz, there's something wrong with your codec setup (ie, its Xing/Audiograbber/etc.)
Previous poster's comment at 32khz being the absolute lowest for 16khz is correct, in fact 32khz won't even do 16khz properly b/c you need a lowpass filter to prevent anti-aliasing. So, all of this is to say that 32khz on a PVR is IMHO sub-par.
I'd rather see better methods of delivering food and medicine to desperate people than have one more other than the current million ways to kill people. I'd rather not use intimidation as a means of protection.
Um hello, the main problem with getting food and medicine to desperate people is making sure the goods get to where they are supposed to go instead of being stolen and sold to the highest bidder. The whole "Blackhawk Down" Somalia bit came about because of exactly that. As a Washington Post article from 1992 explains,
"[Former UN Sec-Gen] Boutros-Ghali...concluded that only 'a country-wide show of force' by outside troops can guarantee deliveries of food and humanitarian aid in the face of attacks by warring militias."
International Organizations including the UN are in a serious cash crunch, in no small part because of the US goverment's inabilities to pay their dues on time. Financial and technical resources are finite. You suggest spending money to develop, say, a revolutionary new delivery system for a vaccine, but you don't agree with the idea that an attempt should be made to ensure that such a device, once produced, actually makes it TO those in need? Without protection for such shipments, such a device would get stolen and sold on the black market to heroin addicts in no time.
Don't get me wrong. I work for the UN, but obviously my opinions are my own. That said, you say I'd rather not use intimidation as a means of protection well of course not, no one would. But you cannot eliminate the capabilities and devices for it and expect to remain protected. The B52 is such a device - it is, as another poster mentioned, a recognized symbol - a deterrent.
You think the DMCA is totalitarian, and that having to live under it means you're not free? Oh please. I'm in a developing (nee third-world) country. Trust me, you have no idea how good you've got it. I suggest you go see some of the world you're talking about.
Had this not been miraculously modded up into the realm of positive numbers, I would have continued to ignore it. However, given that the weirdos with spare points and an antiwar axe to grind deem, by their positive moderation, your comment somehow relevant to the original article, I will respond (nee bite).
(If the original AC post, entitled "Sick", has since been appropriately re-modded into oblivion, Slashdot folks can move right along to the next post, as there's nothing to see here.)
First, we're not all Americans on here, you know - I would hardly call Slashdot "US media" (Fastcompany, I'll acknowledge, is as US as it comes this side of Guns and Ammo). Second, if you were paying attention in history class you'd know that, by most interpretations, there wouldn't be an english-speaking Great Britain today if it weren't for the Americans and Canadians that rolled up onto the shores of Normandy. (Granted the Soviets also had a lot to do with it, but the history books most post-war Brits undoubtedly favoured the American influence over the Soviet influence on the matter. Save the debate for later.)
The reality of the matter is that there are certain times where force, and/or the threat of force, absolutely MUST be used in the name of peace and saving lives. Asking an advancing army nicely doesn't always work. I think that much is pretty obvious to anyone over three apples high.
As for the B52s in question, you (as a war hater) should be able to grasp that preserving B52s is GOOD for those with your mentality, for three simple reasons.
#1 - It's good for the environment to reduce, reuse and recycle, right? Better to use what we have already than build new bombers.
#2 - B52s are hardly high-tech. Keeping them around means less likelihood of an arms race based on either a) more of the planes that replace them (B1-B/B2 etc) or b)the search for alternative delivery mechanisms (ICBM / space laser / rail-gun / death ray).
YOU of all people should be THANKFUL that B52s are being kept instead of scrapped for newer, scarier war technologies - better the smoky, subsonic devil you know than the one you don't. Let me know if you're still having trouble with this concept.
#3 - Economics. Undoubtedly, you're not a big fan of your tax money going to defence. I know, I know, you're not an American, but from UN dues to NATO dues to peacekeeper participation, I'd guess your country foots some of the bill somewhere down the line. And besides, would you rather have the best scientists and engineers in the world working on a B52 replacement, or working on more peaceful things?
So yes, tell me again how you disapprove of this article and the news that B52s are going to be kept online for the next fourty years.
Last little bit, the US military is becoming MORE militaristic than it was in, say, the 1980s? Or in the 1960s, when Walt Disney submitted each of his films to the FBI for editing? Or during WWII, when major pro-war Hollywood films were made entirely with government grants? Where-ya-been? Now, more than ever (which admittedly isn't saying much), US media is quasi-objective about what its government and military are doing. If you're a Western European, you're shallow for not recognizing that your country's freedom is in no small way connected to Americans. If you're an Eastern European, you are a hypocrite for complaining about the actions of American media when your own (former soviet) media are so blind to what goes on in Chechnya and if you are neither Eastern European nor Western European, how in heck are you able to offer a "European point of view"?
Sheesh.
Enjoy your 16th birthday... and the freedom that surrounds it.
From what I recall, the SR71 offered a task that no satellite or U2 could perform - high-speed, on-demand surveillance overflights of not-yet-completely-controlled airspace. Sending a U2 into enemy territory without adequate SAM surpression is a very bad idea (ask Gary Powers, who probably still has burn scars on his ass... unless he's dead by now). The raw speed of the SR71 means that a) it can get there faster, so that action, before the party's over, and b) it is harder (altho not impossible) to shoot down. Wasn't there something about the US finding Bin Laden during the first few days of the campaign but not getting proper surveillance data soon enough?
I'm reminded of a scene in a Tom Clancy film (Clear and Present Danger?) where terrorists at a desert training camp hide all of their equipment during satellite overflight times, much like the white folk stopped their partying when the black man got on the bus in that oft-referenced SNL skit. Also, while one can argue that satellite imaging resolution is much more advanced than it was when the SR71 was conceived, and that such might reduce the utility of the SR71, would not the equipping of an SR71 with the same upgraded optics allow even *greater* imaging capabilities? I think to those satellite images shown during the press briefings during the early part of the Afghanistan campaign... "and this slide shows a runway... err, no wait, I think it's a... oh sorry folks, this is my son's biology experiment, let me just change that" - surely greater detail would help? (I'm sure the US military has better slides than it shows up, but the same "get the camera closer" logic applies in either case.
Anyone that is remotely interested in the SR71 or the U2 or surveillance / stealth planes in general owes it to themselves to read Skunk Works. There is also a decent SR-71 site that even has the flight manual (recently declassified) online! In case you ever find one left running unattended at the local 7-11, natch.
That sounds like another case of the feds "Mitnicking" again - arbitrarily multiplying the damage reports for the sake of making things sound more serious.
1TB? come on. Maybe a seven drive external SCSI enclosure filled with 150GB drives. Otherwise, how would they do it? I'm no warez expert, how could you even get more than six 120GB HDs in a computer (assuming four IDE channels, a CDROM and a CDRW, leaving six free for those 120GB HDs... and four or five hundred CDRs besides?)
A couple hundred megs, maybe. But I highly doubt more than a handful of those computers were terabyte plus capacity (one to two terabytes... as the original poster suggests). I don't condone warezing, but I don't want to see the kids get lynched for a billion dollars of theft, either.
Typical sensationalism. I bet there's an awful lot of us that were at one point either FTP siteops or into the warez scene to some degree... its almost like a rite of passage for the internet-inclined. (donning flame suit)
I think the original poster's comment about being happy to see better targeted ads applies here, too. The starbucks coupon would be welcome! The canopy? At least it would be a relevant pitch. How much do you hate telemarketers who call up and say "hi, can I clean your chimney?" and you say "sure, if you can find it. I have no fireplace!", frustrated at the irrelevance of the sales call. If, on the other hand, you get the call "Hi, it's Bob from Shyzmecca BMW. I see you bought a 328i last year, and at your last oil change, you had 16,000 miles on it. So you know, we have a promotion on this week, where you get a free interior shampoo and hand wax with every front brake pad replacement. When can I book you in?" Even though those BMW pads are twice the price of aftermarket pads, and even though BMW mechanics get paid on par with laywers and dentists, for the most of us, we'll still bite.
If tracking is used to give us relevant offers on stuff close to what we need, bring it on! The alternative is advertispamming, with every square inch of the earth covered in junk mail, billboards, and other strange advertising ideas.
Advertising, done properly, is only informing us of products or services that we might want. Isn't that half the reason we buy magazines, surf sites like pricewatch.com, etc?
Next thing you know, my 79 cent loaf costs $1.39 and I'm supposed to feel lucky when they sometimes offer a special membership price of $1.10. Uh huh.
If we assume that:
A) every company is out there to maximize their profits, and that the best way to maximize those profits is to balance margin (markup) with # of units sold,
and
B) in a proper implementation of such "tracking", every company in a given industry (in this example, a grocery store / supermarket would track ALL products, not just those of a certain brand) would take advantage of such technology,
then one would assume that the technology would be used to find the "best" pricepoint for every product. Best being defined as the point at which raising the price hurts unit sales to the point that net profits go down, and lowering the price does not increase the nunmber of units sold, but detracts from profits. A BBA-type can probably tell us the proper terminology for this, but I think its a simple concept.
Let us assume that, on our way to buy groceries tomorrow morning, instead of walking into our normal grocery store, we walked into a store with a solid tracking system. Every item in the store would be effectively priced and positioned - nothing would be "overpriced" for the effects of overpricing would be noted and corrected for. True, nothing would be underpriced either, but (and here's the contentious part of my post)... would we really be paying more on our grocery bill? How many times do you look at a product and think to yourself "if this was x dollars cheaper, they would sell TONS of these!"
Of course, if the grocery store sells only one brand of stuff, and/or there is only one grocery store in town, (ie monopoly) then the whole theory gets ugly, quickly. But assuming that grocery stores remain grocery stores, and they compete, and carry many different brands, then tracking would produce a net benefit for the consumer.
Of course, all of this tracking (grocery store concept) doesn't really need to be tied to an individial identity, but there are other benefits to that. All I am suggesting is that shopping at a place where our purchases are tracked has the potential, though healthy competition, to serve us in the long run, by killing off the inferior products and effectively pricing the good ones.
I just wish some of the restaurants around here (I live in Antigua, in the Caribbean) would grasp the concept that, in times of tourism downturn, restaurants would grasp that if they didnt charge $30USD for their entrees, they wouldn't sit empty, and that lowering their prices would result in an INCREASE in profits... but I digress)
Have I seen gas prices in the United States lately? Hell no. I'm nowhere near your country, nor am I a citizen of it. I am, however, aware enough of international politics (and your domestic politics) to understand just how connected your President is to the oil industry both domestically and internationally.
Are you trying to suggest that the present depression in US gas pricing provides any evidence for or against the suggestion that US President Bush is involved in the oil business?
To attempt to drag this stuff back on topic and away from Republican American ethnocentrism, let me try this:
I would humbly suggest that this venture will face significant opposition from the traditional energy (nee oil) companies.
You're right tho, facts don't get points unless they're relevant or related to the discussion. Otherwise we could all get our 50 karma by posting mathematics formulae, now couldn't we?
The article states that the process of charging up the borax produces pollution, though so does this not (for now) just represent the "make the pollution elsewhere" paradox of electric cars, whereby one uses coal-generated electricity to drive around instead of gasoline, substituting one fossil fuel's energy for another?
This is about the stupidest thing I ever heard. It's like claiming that Ford makes unsafe cars because their engines fry when you drain all the oil from them. Try this: remove the heatsink and fan from your P4 and see how long it takes for it to catch fire.
Ok, obviously the humour was lost on you guys. No CPU, AMD or Intel or otherwise, is going to burst into flames. She bought a P4 over an Althon because her husband, who gets all his tech info, a day late and a dollar short, from CNET, insisted on Intel Inside. "I'd rather pay the extra to get the real thing" I believe his words were. My first AMD was my 386DX/40.
As for the bandwidth issue, I guess I should have clarified by saying "isn't the DDR-SDRAM implementation intel proposes slower than their RDRAM implementation?". Which, AFAIK, it is.
It's unfortunate that Rambus RIMMs are even more obsolete now that Intel's new chipsets are going to DDR. Not that I'll miss them, but its always unfortunate when early adopters get hosed with proprietary hardware. Anyone remember the Socket 4 P60/P66? Drop a ton of money on the new Pentium, and watch while everyone who waited is able to upgrade while you can't. Ditto to those with Asus P4Ts - not only are they hosed on processor options because intel changed pinouts for the new P4s, but now the RAM is obsolete too.
From the article: Intel is planning the stealth introduction of a chipset that will let computer makers connect the Pentium 4 to speedy DDR (double data rate) memory.
Speedy? Isn't DDR-SDRAM slower than RDRAM? Sounds a bit fluffy to me. What they really mean, but don't clearly spell out, is that DDR is faster than the normal SDRAM the 845 supports. But its still no RDRAM. Which I guess everyone here knew anyways.
Ahh well, I'm just grumpy b/c I convinced my mom to buy a P4T/Rambus-based P4 1.7Ghz, and now I have to ditch the Ram/Mobo/CPU to upgrade it. (I'd have given her an Athlon but the dustbunnies at her place are such that I'd be afraid of her burning the place down... remember that THG vid of the flaming Athlons?)
Psychologically, they don't want to encourage it because warezers in college can/will become warezers in the workplace. They'll think, "we didn't buy this shit in college, why should I buy it now, increasing our product development costs?" I've witnessed this firsthand as an employee at a few places.
I admit my suggestion is a bit unorthodox.
While it is true that college kids who pirate are likely to "learn" it as acceptable behaviour, the majority of kids coming out of college are never going to be making the software decisions for their company, and secondly, companies have a LOT to lose for pirating software - even if the employees *want* to pirate, the SPA has (as it should) very effective and intimidating ways of encouraging compliance. The conversation at XYZ corp should go like this:
Employer: "Well, Jimmy, here's your new desk. We've always wanted an in-house graphic designer! Let us know what you need."
New Grad: "Great! I'll need Photoshop 8.0, with plugins X,Y and Z. But it's ok, I have it at home on CD and can bring it in, ok?"
Employer: "Well Jimmy, thanks to that new SPA initiative, our company policy is that any employee who installs pirated software on their computer is stripped naked and set afire before being dismissed. New Grad: "uhh... well, I need that software, it's what we used at college!"
IT Nerd (overhearing conversation): "Hey, ever tried open source software?"
New Grad: "open what?"
Employer: "No problem, we'll get you the software you need. After all, if you used it in college, it must be good."
The optiumum formula is this. Get the kids hooked on it in college so its all they know how to use. THEN, make it so darn illegal to have pirated software in the corporate world, that corporations are forced to buy the software the emerging workforce knows how to use.
College kids are NOT going to buy software. So, which of these two scenarios is better for M$?
#1 - College kid pirates expensive software, and learns how to use it. Graduates with knowledge of said software, and no knowledge of cheaper / free alternatives.
#2 - College kid is afraid to pirate after Billy one floor up was gangraped by an SPA SWAT team. Desperate for beer money, learns to use entirely free / open source software. Graduates a staunch opponent to anything M$ (after what they did to Billy, and hey, can't use it anyways) and a strong Linux advocate. Convinces employers to switch to Linux, because its all the new grads know how to use.
Of course, you could argue that corporations should sell special "academic" licenses. Those are ripe for abuse, with everyone and their brother thinking they're eligible for them in the corporate world, and its a seperate expensive program. And, unless they're remarkably cheap, the kids will just pirate anyways. So the solution? Let the kiddies burn their warez. Just don't let it spill over into areas where the software would actually have been bought in the first place.
I agree entirely that piracy hurts the open source movement. If it weren't for the ready availability of the high-end M$ OS's (NT/Win2k/XP) for free to warezers, there'd be a LOT more linux users out there, who choose free MS over free Linux, but would choose free linux over $$ MS. A seperate arguement, but one I agree entirely with.
Actually, Steve Ballmer said: "If you're going to get pirated, you want them to priate your stuff, not your competitiors' stuff. In developing countries, it is important to have a high share of the piracy software."
The EXACT SAME concept should be applied to college students. The university I went to, Acadia University in Canada, gives every student an IBM Thinkpad. It's loaded with all sorts of less-than-ideal software. Many kids there would warez their laptops out with the latest versions of windows, office, photoshop, etc etc. They'd never buy the software, but gee whiz as they come out of school and get jobs, they know the software to use - the expensive stuff, NOT shareware/freeware stuff. If you have an emerging workforce that prefers to use expensive software, then that means that when those students enter the workforce, they will PREFER the expensive software with which they have experience, thus encouraging sales of said software.
In simple terms, if a fine arts major pirates photoshop in school, they'll insist on using photoshop when they enter the field. If they can't warez their photoshop, they'll learn a freeware/shareware photo program, and/or learn to master the least expensive version available (no plugins, etc).
If a software company wants to have the world addicted to their software by the time they get to the workforce, and they know they're not losing any sales by allowing college piracy to continue, then why not ENCOURAGE (tacitly, of course) college piracy? Busting them only turns them off the very programs you hope they'll be addicted to.
While in university, I spent my summers selling computer software - and I sold *TONS* of software, games, OS's, and applications, based on my warez experience. When a customer asked me "why should I upgrade to (winME/Win2k/Office2000/etc)?" or "what can Photoshop do for me?" I could tell them from firsthand experience. Anyone in the computer reselling business will tell you that the software companies themselves, for the most part, do dick all to help the salesmammals get real at-home hands-on experience with software. Would you trust buying a car from a car salesperson who'd never driven a single model made by that car company?
Anyhoo, busting college kids for warezing is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it does nobody any good. Busting a college kid often involves his or her being suspended/expelled/missing school time. That's one less college-educated kid in the country.
Enough ranting for now.
Re:I must be missing something
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2
You *are* missing something. Assuming that your server (or other machine with big hard drive full of MP3s) is in one room, and you have a stereo (or stereos) elsewhere, this device allows you to listen to your MP3s wherever you have ethernet (or wireless 802.11), *and* allows you to control those MP3s and view whats playing without having to run to the room where the computer is.
True, it has no functionality over a PC, but then again neither does a laptop or palmtop - people buy those not for the added functionality, but rather for the fact that they can be taken places where its not really very convenient to take a full PC. Like your living room, for example.
If this is what it appears to be - the most basic, upgradable option for those of us who have a network, a bunch of mp3s on a server, and the desire to hear them played in other areas of the house - then it is a worthwhile item indeed.
Haha I had to read your response three or four times before it made sense to me (its nearly 3am here) but yes, I suppose you're right - that there are probably a lot of people in the land of fine arts that would lap up her ideas. Too bad.
Hopefully digital photography will enter the fine arts faculties, instead of the trade schools and colleges getting all the cool technologies. At my school the fine arts dept is pastels and oil paints - while the rest of the school runs around with laptops. But I digress...
I sincerely hope that this was an undergraduate thesis and not doctoral-level stuff. I sure wouldn't want to have to defend it!:) It seems not only is Ms. West presenting a weak argument, it seems that an application of common sense would suggest the exact OPPOSITE hypotheses to the ones she chose to defend. Allow me...
Issue #1 - But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along. I know everyone on/. is harping on this for being inaccurate, but I'd go one further. Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap and so reuseable that the digital photographer takes MORE pictures, not less. Hey, they're free, right? Click click click click click. Argument inverted.
Issue #2 - A whole collection of material, that may well be far more interesting in the months and years after the event than in the hard news context, is being lost at that stage. Lets imagine photographer A is old-school SLR-boy, and he took 1000 pictures of a given news event. Photographer B is techno-girl, with her 7-bazillipixel Sony Megivica. She takes 500 pictures, because she was told by her ill-informed friend Jayne West that she should delete half the ones she takes.
Now imagine this news event turns out to be worthy of going thru the "dud" pictures afterwards. What is more easily examined after the fact - 500 digital pictures (click click zoom zoom enhance enhance hey lets email this to the expert in LA) or 1000 negatives (lets make chemical soup x 1000 and bust out the magnifying glasses)? Even if the hypothesis about "less digital photos remain" holds true (which is preposterous), certainly the accessibility of the digital images more than makes up for it - if a diligent investigator / journalist can access the images from his or her desk or dump them on his or her laptop, then they're ten times more likely to peruse the images for shady stuff in the background. Argument inverted.
Issue #3 - Obviously off-site backup of perfect-copy images is an impossibility in the land of real film, but a nightly automated process in digital film land. Not to mention that optical media and redundant backups means a virtually infinite shelf life, versus the sub-century longevity of developed 35mm film. Argument inverted.
I'm surprised the silly "digital photography means you can't prove faked images" argument wasn't raised by our loom-burning film lover.
Issue #4 - In some ways, it's no different to the invention of the telegraph a 100 odd years ago, when it suddenly became possible to transmit messages over long distances in a very short space of time.
This is RUBBISH. A telegraph was ephemeral - a transmission and a disposable record of the message sent. Digital photography opens the doors to PERFECT, archival of INFINITE DURATION (with refreshing and conversion to current media, all of which is lossless). Could a worse example have been chosen? She could have compared it to the invention of the electic can opener and been less out to lunch.
Issue #5 - We don't have the build-up, we don't have the aftermath, we don't have incidental shots of who was there. Au contraire, mon ananas. If you're reloading every 24/36 shots, you're taking a lot less incidental shots than if your camera will hold 200+ images. Not to mention those cameras that permit the recording of simple video and/or audio in case all hell breaks loose. Would that not provide more build-up, more aftermath, and more incidental shots?
I could go on but I guess a lot of this is pretty obvious. Strange day on/. today - I'm surprised I didn't have to pay to download the PDF from BBC!:)
First thing, its a CDR drive. In my experience, CDR drives are fragile and flaky and prone to sudden death even while standing still (I'm on my 8th in 5 years). MP3 players are also fragile and flaky and prone to sudden death (scratch two PMP300s and two NJBs - my RioVolt shows up next week along with the replacement HD for my NJB).
Second thing, related to the first. Who makes it? Assuming IMation has OEM'd the thing out, who did the fab? I would suspect the thing is far from durable.
Third thing, I have seen mini CDR media but no mini CDRW. Who wants to backup their stuff onto a 180MB mini CDR? I mean once in a while its cool, but if you can't use your CDR to back up CDs, whats the point? The mini media is nice, but a mini burner that wont take fullsize media at all is useless IMHO.
Fourth thing, its $400. That's enough for an NJB($220), a RioVolt 90 ($89, for when the NJB breaks) and an internal CDR for your computer ($89).
Based on point four - what advantage does this thing really have over the NJB+Riovolt+CDR-in-your-computer? And if you don't have room in your computer for a CDR, and you're gonna buy this contraption, could you not just buy a USB CDRW and a Riovolt for less? Of course you could. And that way you're not banging your CDR drive around.
Seems like a silly idea to me. Now if only it had restrictive rights management!:)
Slashdot Mirror
The story might be bogus, but your facts are, too.
If you know anything about old Soviet aircraft, you'll know that an Su-9 could never reach the operational altitude of a U-2.
Err whut? The Su-9 is, as you say, quite similar to the MiG-21. The Ye-66A, an experimental version of the MiG-21, held the altitude record for a brief period in the early 1960s - 113,829 feet. The F-104s were hitting 90,000 feet even before they started strapping booster rockets onto them. Obviously this is not a sustainable altitude (ask Chuck Yeager - whoops) but the idea of an Su-9 blowing by a U2 at 75,000 feet is certainly not impossible. Don't confuse operational ceiling with maximum altitude.
Err whut? Mach 2.1 for the MiG-21, Mach 1.8 for the Su-9.
While I don't neccesarily buy the Su-9 story, realize that a properly piloted Su-9 will zoom climb much higher than a U2's cruise altitude. So the story's plausible.
The flameout theory's been pretty thoroughly debunked as far as I know, both by recently declassified documents and by NASA's records: "Powers...insists that he was shot down ata operational altitude"
No kidding! That's amazing, I never knew that. Thanks for posting this.
Oh I don't doubt it. I only suggest it as an appeasement for the large number of audiophiles who are completely clueless as to how digital audio is stored and reproduced, and to what degree Reed Solomon and the gang are able to get data from point A to point B and back, intact, without the need for multi-thousand-dollar doo-dads and hundred dollar cables. The implementation of some kind of "rip verification" in the form of a CRC would probably help dispell the "every cd drive rips differently, I can hear it!" myth.
"Besides, if bathing a CD in green light has proven to be beneficial, think of the benefits of flooding your entire listening room with it!" (heh sorry had to add that, from here)
Um, did you guys read the articles, or even my post in its entirety? Sheesh.
The people who build these DACs know far more about building them then any transport manufacture.
Did you even read the links? The thing has 24-bit Burr Brown DACs on board. You're saying Burr Brown doesn't know how to make DAs? LOL. Even more importantly for demonstrating the irrelevance of your outboard DAC talk, it also has SPDIF (digital optical for outboard DAs) out. So you can reclock and dither and jittercorrect and flux-capacitate your audio stream all you like.
Also, sure lossy compression has audiophiles in a snit - but I am certain the device will play WAV files as ripped from CD. Even my $89 Sonicblue RV90 CD player does that. If not, it would obviously be the first thing they would add to the firmware.
As for the audiophiles complaining about rip quality, well sure - thats why you could set it to rip at 0.1x, re-reading each track ten times (like Exact Audio Copy, the ripping proggy can do) to make *sure* the data is copied properly. Oh joy, perfect, checksummed copies of CDs! You could even go to www.more$thanbrains.audiophile.net and check the checksums from your rips against those published by TELARC and your peers to make sure you really got the correct rip!
And imagine the money that could be made by shareware audiophiles making software-based rip/dither-to-24-bit/jitter-correct processing software!
I love the guy who posted "nope they won't" in response to my post. Genius, innit.
I can only assume from the pricepoint ($1500MSRP, so $1000+ street price, at least initially) that the average MP3-laden geek is not the target market here. In fact, the pricepoint may be one of the things that allows this thing to avoid (at least somewhat) some flak from the RIAA and its gang of enforcers.
:)
For an audiophile, this thing just might make some sense. First of all, the type of people who spend $300 on speaker wire are obviously not concerned with value per dollar. Second of all, such folks also cling to the ridiculous notion that the rotational stability of a CD is of key importance to audio quality, with typical ghetto-trash (read sub-$5000) CD players incapable of reproducing their music faithfully. For these folks, having a device that would play their music buffered from a hard drive (with the device stashed far away and connected with Monster Cable Ethernet would eliminate the need to worry about such things as spending thousands of dollars to isolate their hardware from any vibrations caused by their cat farting or toilet flushing. (That last link rules)
Seriously, a device that allows audiophiles to play their music from a non-CD platform, esp thru decent D/As, or even better, their multi-thousand dollar outboard D/As, would sell. The Linn Kivor, no doubt priced in the stratosphere, is one such example. My guess is that the SonicBlue DAC is about a tenth the price of the Linn.
Sooo, while I'm not going to rush out and buy one, I'd still say it may find a market with audiophiles.
...is for future-minded silicon valley tech firms to encourage their engineers and techie-types to breed with those as intellectually and physically dissimilar to themselves as possible. Not so far out, really - folks like Ric Ocasek, Billy Bob Thornton, and Lyle Lovett have been practicing such things for years.
Remember that the way digital cell phones work is that they analyze the sound input, and send it not as audio data, but as coefficients to a human-voice synthesis DSP to save bandwidth.
Err, what?
You're talking about GSM encoding?
"The quality of the algorithm is good enough for reliable speaker recognition; even music often survives transcoding in recognizable form (given the bandwidth limitations of 8 kHz sampling rate)."
What's this about human voice synthesis DSP? Sounds a bit black-helicopters-faked-the-moon-landing to me. (or else I'm totally out of it - it happens! my cellphone here's still analog)
Which is to say that 32khz sounded better, all said. Nyquist be damned.
:)
Hey, leave me outta this!
Seriously, if you are getting artifacts at 44.1khz that you aren't getting at 32khz, there's something wrong with your codec setup (ie, its Xing/Audiograbber/etc.)
Previous poster's comment at 32khz being the absolute lowest for 16khz is correct, in fact 32khz won't even do 16khz properly b/c you need a lowpass filter to prevent anti-aliasing. So, all of this is to say that 32khz on a PVR is IMHO sub-par.
I'd rather see better methods of delivering food and medicine to desperate people than have one more other than the current million ways to kill people. I'd rather not use intimidation as a means of protection.
Um hello, the main problem with getting food and medicine to desperate people is making sure the goods get to where they are supposed to go instead of being stolen and sold to the highest bidder. The whole "Blackhawk Down" Somalia bit came about because of exactly that. As a Washington Post article from 1992 explains,
"[Former UN Sec-Gen] Boutros-Ghali...concluded that only 'a country-wide show of force' by outside troops can guarantee deliveries of food and humanitarian aid in the face of attacks by warring militias."
International Organizations including the UN are in a serious cash crunch, in no small part because of the US goverment's inabilities to pay their dues on time. Financial and technical resources are finite. You suggest spending money to develop, say, a revolutionary new delivery system for a vaccine, but you don't agree with the idea that an attempt should be made to ensure that such a device, once produced, actually makes it TO those in need? Without protection for such shipments, such a device would get stolen and sold on the black market to heroin addicts in no time.
Don't get me wrong. I work for the UN, but obviously my opinions are my own. That said, you say I'd rather not use intimidation as a means of protection well of course not, no one would. But you cannot eliminate the capabilities and devices for it and expect to remain protected. The B52 is such a device - it is, as another poster mentioned, a recognized symbol - a deterrent.
You think the DMCA is totalitarian, and that having to live under it means you're not free? Oh please. I'm in a developing (nee third-world) country. Trust me, you have no idea how good you've got it. I suggest you go see some of the world you're talking about.
Had this not been miraculously modded up into the realm of positive numbers, I would have continued to ignore it. However, given that the weirdos with spare points and an antiwar axe to grind deem, by their positive moderation, your comment somehow relevant to the original article, I will respond (nee bite).
(If the original AC post, entitled "Sick", has since been appropriately re-modded into oblivion, Slashdot folks can move right along to the next post, as there's nothing to see here.)
First, we're not all Americans on here, you know - I would hardly call Slashdot "US media" (Fastcompany, I'll acknowledge, is as US as it comes this side of Guns and Ammo). Second, if you were paying attention in history class you'd know that, by most interpretations, there wouldn't be an english-speaking Great Britain today if it weren't for the Americans and Canadians that rolled up onto the shores of Normandy. (Granted the Soviets also had a lot to do with it, but the history books most post-war Brits undoubtedly favoured the American influence over the Soviet influence on the matter. Save the debate for later.)
The reality of the matter is that there are certain times where force, and/or the threat of force, absolutely MUST be used in the name of peace and saving lives. Asking an advancing army nicely doesn't always work. I think that much is pretty obvious to anyone over three apples high.
As for the B52s in question, you (as a war hater) should be able to grasp that preserving B52s is GOOD for those with your mentality, for three simple reasons.
#1 - It's good for the environment to reduce, reuse and recycle, right? Better to use what we have already than build new bombers.
#2 - B52s are hardly high-tech. Keeping them around means less likelihood of an arms race based on either a) more of the planes that replace them (B1-B/B2 etc) or b)the search for alternative delivery mechanisms (ICBM / space laser / rail-gun / death ray).
YOU of all people should be THANKFUL that B52s are being kept instead of scrapped for newer, scarier war technologies - better the smoky, subsonic devil you know than the one you don't. Let me know if you're still having trouble with this concept.
#3 - Economics. Undoubtedly, you're not a big fan of your tax money going to defence. I know, I know, you're not an American, but from UN dues to NATO dues to peacekeeper participation, I'd guess your country foots some of the bill somewhere down the line. And besides, would you rather have the best scientists and engineers in the world working on a B52 replacement, or working on more peaceful things?
So yes, tell me again how you disapprove of this article and the news that B52s are going to be kept online for the next fourty years.
Last little bit, the US military is becoming MORE militaristic than it was in, say, the 1980s? Or in the 1960s, when Walt Disney submitted each of his films to the FBI for editing? Or during WWII, when major pro-war Hollywood films were made entirely with government grants? Where-ya-been? Now, more than ever (which admittedly isn't saying much), US media is quasi-objective about what its government and military are doing. If you're a Western European, you're shallow for not recognizing that your country's freedom is in no small way connected to Americans. If you're an Eastern European, you are a hypocrite for complaining about the actions of American media when your own (former soviet) media are so blind to what goes on in Chechnya and if you are neither Eastern European nor Western European, how in heck are you able to offer a "European point of view"?
Sheesh.
Enjoy your 16th birthday... and the freedom that surrounds it.
Amen.
From what I recall, the SR71 offered a task that no satellite or U2 could perform - high-speed, on-demand surveillance overflights of not-yet-completely-controlled airspace. Sending a U2 into enemy territory without adequate SAM surpression is a very bad idea (ask Gary Powers, who probably still has burn scars on his ass... unless he's dead by now). The raw speed of the SR71 means that a) it can get there faster, so that action, before the party's over, and b) it is harder (altho not impossible) to shoot down. Wasn't there something about the US finding Bin Laden during the first few days of the campaign but not getting proper surveillance data soon enough?
I'm reminded of a scene in a Tom Clancy film (Clear and Present Danger?) where terrorists at a desert training camp hide all of their equipment during satellite overflight times, much like the white folk stopped their partying when the black man got on the bus in that oft-referenced SNL skit. Also, while one can argue that satellite imaging resolution is much more advanced than it was when the SR71 was conceived, and that such might reduce the utility of the SR71, would not the equipping of an SR71 with the same upgraded optics allow even *greater* imaging capabilities? I think to those satellite images shown during the press briefings during the early part of the Afghanistan campaign... "and this slide shows a runway... err, no wait, I think it's a... oh sorry folks, this is my son's biology experiment, let me just change that" - surely greater detail would help? (I'm sure the US military has better slides than it shows up, but the same "get the camera closer" logic applies in either case.
Anyone that is remotely interested in the SR71 or the U2 or surveillance / stealth planes in general owes it to themselves to read Skunk Works. There is also a decent SR-71 site that even has the flight manual (recently declassified) online! In case you ever find one left running unattended at the local 7-11, natch.
That sounds like another case of the feds "Mitnicking" again - arbitrarily multiplying the damage reports for the sake of making things sound more serious.
1TB? come on. Maybe a seven drive external SCSI enclosure filled with 150GB drives. Otherwise, how would they do it? I'm no warez expert, how could you even get more than six 120GB HDs in a computer (assuming four IDE channels, a CDROM and a CDRW, leaving six free for those 120GB HDs... and four or five hundred CDRs besides?)
A couple hundred megs, maybe. But I highly doubt more than a handful of those computers were terabyte plus capacity (one to two terabytes... as the original poster suggests). I don't condone warezing, but I don't want to see the kids get lynched for a billion dollars of theft, either.
Typical sensationalism. I bet there's an awful lot of us that were at one point either FTP siteops or into the warez scene to some degree... its almost like a rite of passage for the internet-inclined. (donning flame suit)
I think the original poster's comment about being happy to see better targeted ads applies here, too. The starbucks coupon would be welcome! The canopy? At least it would be a relevant pitch. How much do you hate telemarketers who call up and say "hi, can I clean your chimney?" and you say "sure, if you can find it. I have no fireplace!", frustrated at the irrelevance of the sales call. If, on the other hand, you get the call "Hi, it's Bob from Shyzmecca BMW. I see you bought a 328i last year, and at your last oil change, you had 16,000 miles on it. So you know, we have a promotion on this week, where you get a free interior shampoo and hand wax with every front brake pad replacement. When can I book you in?" Even though those BMW pads are twice the price of aftermarket pads, and even though BMW mechanics get paid on par with laywers and dentists, for the most of us, we'll still bite.
If tracking is used to give us relevant offers on stuff close to what we need, bring it on! The alternative is advertispamming, with every square inch of the earth covered in junk mail, billboards, and other strange advertising ideas.
Advertising, done properly, is only informing us of products or services that we might want. Isn't that half the reason we buy magazines, surf sites like pricewatch.com, etc?
Next thing you know, my 79 cent loaf costs $1.39 and I'm supposed to feel lucky when they sometimes offer a special membership price of $1.10. Uh huh.
If we assume that:
A) every company is out there to maximize their profits, and that the best way to maximize those profits is to balance margin (markup) with # of units sold,
and
B) in a proper implementation of such "tracking", every company in a given industry (in this example, a grocery store / supermarket would track ALL products, not just those of a certain brand) would take advantage of such technology,
then one would assume that the technology would be used to find the "best" pricepoint for every product. Best being defined as the point at which raising the price hurts unit sales to the point that net profits go down, and lowering the price does not increase the nunmber of units sold, but detracts from profits. A BBA-type can probably tell us the proper terminology for this, but I think its a simple concept.
Let us assume that, on our way to buy groceries tomorrow morning, instead of walking into our normal grocery store, we walked into a store with a solid tracking system. Every item in the store would be effectively priced and positioned - nothing would be "overpriced" for the effects of overpricing would be noted and corrected for. True, nothing would be underpriced either, but (and here's the contentious part of my post)... would we really be paying more on our grocery bill? How many times do you look at a product and think to yourself "if this was x dollars cheaper, they would sell TONS of these!"
Of course, if the grocery store sells only one brand of stuff, and/or there is only one grocery store in town, (ie monopoly) then the whole theory gets ugly, quickly. But assuming that grocery stores remain grocery stores, and they compete, and carry many different brands, then tracking would produce a net benefit for the consumer.
Of course, all of this tracking (grocery store concept) doesn't really need to be tied to an individial identity, but there are other benefits to that. All I am suggesting is that shopping at a place where our purchases are tracked has the potential, though healthy competition, to serve us in the long run, by killing off the inferior products and effectively pricing the good ones.
I just wish some of the restaurants around here (I live in Antigua, in the Caribbean) would grasp the concept that, in times of tourism downturn, restaurants would grasp that if they didnt charge $30USD for their entrees, they wouldn't sit empty, and that lowering their prices would result in an INCREASE in profits... but I digress)
Have I seen gas prices in the United States lately? Hell no. I'm nowhere near your country, nor am I a citizen of it. I am, however, aware enough of international politics (and your domestic politics) to understand just how connected your President is to the oil industry both domestically and internationally.
Are you trying to suggest that the present depression in US gas pricing provides any evidence for or against the suggestion that US President Bush is involved in the oil business?
To attempt to drag this stuff back on topic and away from Republican American ethnocentrism, let me try this:
I would humbly suggest that this venture will face significant opposition from the traditional energy (nee oil) companies.
You're right tho, facts don't get points unless they're relevant or related to the discussion. Otherwise we could all get our 50 karma by posting mathematics formulae, now couldn't we?
Not that I expect them to take on the Dubya's oil folks, but Yahoo's Market Guide has some interesting background on the company, Millennium Cell.
The article states that the process of charging up the borax produces pollution, though so does this not (for now) just represent the "make the pollution elsewhere" paradox of electric cars, whereby one uses coal-generated electricity to drive around instead of gasoline, substituting one fossil fuel's energy for another?
This is about the stupidest thing I ever heard. It's like claiming that Ford makes unsafe cars because their engines fry when you drain all the oil from them. Try this: remove the heatsink and fan from your P4 and see how long it takes for it to catch fire.
Ok, obviously the humour was lost on you guys. No CPU, AMD or Intel or otherwise, is going to burst into flames. She bought a P4 over an Althon because her husband, who gets all his tech info, a day late and a dollar short, from CNET, insisted on Intel Inside. "I'd rather pay the extra to get the real thing" I believe his words were. My first AMD was my 386DX/40.
As for the bandwidth issue, I guess I should have clarified by saying "isn't the DDR-SDRAM implementation intel proposes slower than their RDRAM implementation?". Which, AFAIK, it is.
It's unfortunate that Rambus RIMMs are even more obsolete now that Intel's new chipsets are going to DDR. Not that I'll miss them, but its always unfortunate when early adopters get hosed with proprietary hardware. Anyone remember the Socket 4 P60/P66? Drop a ton of money on the new Pentium, and watch while everyone who waited is able to upgrade while you can't. Ditto to those with Asus P4Ts - not only are they hosed on processor options because intel changed pinouts for the new P4s, but now the RAM is obsolete too.
From the article: Intel is planning the stealth introduction of a chipset that will let computer makers connect the Pentium 4 to speedy DDR (double data rate) memory.
Speedy? Isn't DDR-SDRAM slower than RDRAM? Sounds a bit fluffy to me. What they really mean, but don't clearly spell out, is that DDR is faster than the normal SDRAM the 845 supports. But its still no RDRAM. Which I guess everyone here knew anyways.
Ahh well, I'm just grumpy b/c I convinced my mom to buy a P4T/Rambus-based P4 1.7Ghz, and now I have to ditch the Ram/Mobo/CPU to upgrade it. (I'd have given her an Athlon but the dustbunnies at her place are such that I'd be afraid of her burning the place down... remember that THG vid of the flaming Athlons?)
Psychologically, they don't want to encourage it because warezers in college can/will become warezers in the workplace. They'll think, "we didn't buy this shit in college, why should I buy it now, increasing our product development costs?" I've witnessed this firsthand as an employee at a few places.
I admit my suggestion is a bit unorthodox.
While it is true that college kids who pirate are likely to "learn" it as acceptable behaviour, the majority of kids coming out of college are never going to be making the software decisions for their company, and secondly, companies have a LOT to lose for pirating software - even if the employees *want* to pirate, the SPA has (as it should) very effective and intimidating ways of encouraging compliance. The conversation at XYZ corp should go like this:
Employer: "Well, Jimmy, here's your new desk. We've always wanted an in-house graphic designer! Let us know what you need."
New Grad: "Great! I'll need Photoshop 8.0, with plugins X,Y and Z. But it's ok, I have it at home on CD and can bring it in, ok?"
Employer: "Well Jimmy, thanks to that new SPA initiative, our company policy is that any employee who installs pirated software on their computer is stripped naked and set afire before being dismissed.
New Grad: "uhh... well, I need that software, it's what we used at college!"
IT Nerd (overhearing conversation): "Hey, ever tried open source software?"
New Grad: "open what?"
Employer: "No problem, we'll get you the software you need. After all, if you used it in college, it must be good."
The optiumum formula is this. Get the kids hooked on it in college so its all they know how to use. THEN, make it so darn illegal to have pirated software in the corporate world, that corporations are forced to buy the software the emerging workforce knows how to use.
College kids are NOT going to buy software. So, which of these two scenarios is better for M$?
#1 - College kid pirates expensive software, and learns how to use it. Graduates with knowledge of said software, and no knowledge of cheaper / free alternatives.
#2 - College kid is afraid to pirate after Billy one floor up was gangraped by an SPA SWAT team. Desperate for beer money, learns to use entirely free / open source software. Graduates a staunch opponent to anything M$ (after what they did to Billy, and hey, can't use it anyways) and a strong Linux advocate. Convinces employers to switch to Linux, because its all the new grads know how to use.
Of course, you could argue that corporations should sell special "academic" licenses. Those are ripe for abuse, with everyone and their brother thinking they're eligible for them in the corporate world, and its a seperate expensive program. And, unless they're remarkably cheap, the kids will just pirate anyways. So the solution? Let the kiddies burn their warez. Just don't let it spill over into areas where the software would actually have been bought in the first place.
I agree entirely that piracy hurts the open source movement. If it weren't for the ready availability of the high-end M$ OS's (NT/Win2k/XP) for free to warezers, there'd be a LOT more linux users out there, who choose free MS over free Linux, but would choose free linux over $$ MS. A seperate arguement, but one I agree entirely with.
Actually, Steve Ballmer said: "If you're going to get pirated, you want them to priate your stuff, not your competitiors' stuff. In developing countries, it is important to have a high share of the piracy software."
The EXACT SAME concept should be applied to college students. The university I went to, Acadia University in Canada, gives every student an IBM Thinkpad. It's loaded with all sorts of less-than-ideal software. Many kids there would warez their laptops out with the latest versions of windows, office, photoshop, etc etc. They'd never buy the software, but gee whiz as they come out of school and get jobs, they know the software to use - the expensive stuff, NOT shareware/freeware stuff. If you have an emerging workforce that prefers to use expensive software, then that means that when those students enter the workforce, they will PREFER the expensive software with which they have experience, thus encouraging sales of said software.
In simple terms, if a fine arts major pirates photoshop in school, they'll insist on using photoshop when they enter the field. If they can't warez their photoshop, they'll learn a freeware/shareware photo program, and/or learn to master the least expensive version available (no plugins, etc).
If a software company wants to have the world addicted to their software by the time they get to the workforce, and they know they're not losing any sales by allowing college piracy to continue, then why not ENCOURAGE (tacitly, of course) college piracy? Busting them only turns them off the very programs you hope they'll be addicted to.
While in university, I spent my summers selling computer software - and I sold *TONS* of software, games, OS's, and applications, based on my warez experience. When a customer asked me "why should I upgrade to (winME/Win2k/Office2000/etc)?" or "what can Photoshop do for me?" I could tell them from firsthand experience. Anyone in the computer reselling business will tell you that the software companies themselves, for the most part, do dick all to help the salesmammals get real at-home hands-on experience with software. Would you trust buying a car from a car salesperson who'd never driven a single model made by that car company?
Anyhoo, busting college kids for warezing is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it does nobody any good. Busting a college kid often involves his or her being suspended/expelled/missing school time. That's one less college-educated kid in the country.
Enough ranting for now.
You *are* missing something. Assuming that your server (or other machine with big hard drive full of MP3s) is in one room, and you have a stereo (or stereos) elsewhere, this device allows you to listen to your MP3s wherever you have ethernet (or wireless 802.11), *and* allows you to control those MP3s and view whats playing without having to run to the room where the computer is.
True, it has no functionality over a PC, but then again neither does a laptop or palmtop - people buy those not for the added functionality, but rather for the fact that they can be taken places where its not really very convenient to take a full PC. Like your living room, for example.
If this is what it appears to be - the most basic, upgradable option for those of us who have a network, a bunch of mp3s on a server, and the desire to hear them played in other areas of the house - then it is a worthwhile item indeed.
Of course, I've been using an FM25 transmitter from Ramsey Electronics to cover my section of the neighbourhood with MP3s, which is a seperate topic entirely!
Apologies if I'm restating the obvious, I figured rather than modding this down, I'd reply to it.
Oui, c'est ca. I'm glad someone was paying attention! ;)
Zut alors!
Haha I had to read your response three or four times before it made sense to me (its nearly 3am here) but yes, I suppose you're right - that there are probably a lot of people in the land of fine arts that would lap up her ideas. Too bad.
Hopefully digital photography will enter the fine arts faculties, instead of the trade schools and colleges getting all the cool technologies. At my school the fine arts dept is pastels and oil paints - while the rest of the school runs around with laptops. But I digress...
I sincerely hope that this was an undergraduate thesis and not doctoral-level stuff. I sure wouldn't want to have to defend it! :) It seems not only is Ms. West presenting a weak argument, it seems that an application of common sense would suggest the exact OPPOSITE hypotheses to the ones she chose to defend. Allow me...
/. is harping on this for being inaccurate, but I'd go one further. Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap and so reuseable that the digital photographer takes MORE pictures, not less. Hey, they're free, right? Click click click click click. Argument inverted.
/. today - I'm surprised I didn't have to pay to download the PDF from BBC! :)
Issue #1 - But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along. I know everyone on
Issue #2 - A whole collection of material, that may well be far more interesting in the months and years after the event than in the hard news context, is being lost at that stage. Lets imagine photographer A is old-school SLR-boy, and he took 1000 pictures of a given news event. Photographer B is techno-girl, with her 7-bazillipixel Sony Megivica. She takes 500 pictures, because she was told by her ill-informed friend Jayne West that she should delete half the ones she takes.
Now imagine this news event turns out to be worthy of going thru the "dud" pictures afterwards. What is more easily examined after the fact - 500 digital pictures (click click zoom zoom enhance enhance hey lets email this to the expert in LA) or 1000 negatives (lets make chemical soup x 1000 and bust out the magnifying glasses)? Even if the hypothesis about "less digital photos remain" holds true (which is preposterous), certainly the accessibility of the digital images more than makes up for it - if a diligent investigator / journalist can access the images from his or her desk or dump them on his or her laptop, then they're ten times more likely to peruse the images for shady stuff in the background. Argument inverted.
Issue #3 - Obviously off-site backup of perfect-copy images is an impossibility in the land of real film, but a nightly automated process in digital film land. Not to mention that optical media and redundant backups means a virtually infinite shelf life, versus the sub-century longevity of developed 35mm film. Argument inverted.
I'm surprised the silly "digital photography means you can't prove faked images" argument wasn't raised by our loom-burning film lover.
Issue #4 - In some ways, it's no different to the invention of the telegraph a 100 odd years ago, when it suddenly became possible to transmit messages over long distances in a very short space of time.
This is RUBBISH. A telegraph was ephemeral - a transmission and a disposable record of the message sent. Digital photography opens the doors to PERFECT, archival of INFINITE DURATION (with refreshing and conversion to current media, all of which is lossless). Could a worse example have been chosen? She could have compared it to the invention of the electic can opener and been less out to lunch.
Issue #5 - We don't have the build-up, we don't have the aftermath, we don't have incidental shots of who was there. Au contraire, mon ananas. If you're reloading every 24/36 shots, you're taking a lot less incidental shots than if your camera will hold 200+ images. Not to mention those cameras that permit the recording of simple video and/or audio in case all hell breaks loose. Would that not provide more build-up, more aftermath, and more incidental shots?
I could go on but I guess a lot of this is pretty obvious. Strange day on
First thing, its a CDR drive. In my experience, CDR drives are fragile and flaky and prone to sudden death even while standing still (I'm on my 8th in 5 years). MP3 players are also fragile and flaky and prone to sudden death (scratch two PMP300s and two NJBs - my RioVolt shows up next week along with the replacement HD for my NJB).
:)
Second thing, related to the first. Who makes it? Assuming IMation has OEM'd the thing out, who did the fab? I would suspect the thing is far from durable.
Third thing, I have seen mini CDR media but no mini CDRW. Who wants to backup their stuff onto a 180MB mini CDR? I mean once in a while its cool, but if you can't use your CDR to back up CDs, whats the point? The mini media is nice, but a mini burner that wont take fullsize media at all is useless IMHO.
Fourth thing, its $400. That's enough for an NJB($220), a RioVolt 90 ($89, for when the NJB breaks) and an internal CDR for your computer ($89).
Based on point four - what advantage does this thing really have over the NJB+Riovolt+CDR-in-your-computer? And if you don't have room in your computer for a CDR, and you're gonna buy this contraption, could you not just buy a USB CDRW and a Riovolt for less? Of course you could. And that way you're not banging your CDR drive around.
Seems like a silly idea to me. Now if only it had restrictive rights management!