You aren't looking in the wrong places...you're just not willing to pay to get to the right ones.
There are, for example, hard disc based players which allow you to store your CDs in uncompressed formats like FLAC. They're well over $1000, but they're out there and they often have really cool interfaces. Some of your "network" players support FLAC for much less. Check out a Hi-fi mag, they'll have a shoot out every few months on component digital audio players. The iPod will let you store your music uncompressed, but you'll kill your battery life pretty good. I tried it for a while with my Tenacious D sets, but couldn't tell the difference between that and AAC 160 to justify the 8x size difference.
There are a number of ruggedized laser printers. They're in the $800 range.
And as for a super clear cellphone...you may not be able to find it, but you probably wouldn't want to pay for it, anyway. Doubling the bits transferred for digital traffic would require at least doubling the number of antennas, or doubling their effectiveness. Either way, it would require raising the prices for the outlay...and when people are willing to get fuzzy audio on their phones if it means $10 less per month (which they were...remember the switch from Analog to Digital), they'd be crazy to do it.
Lots of people were really comfortable driving carbureted engines, too. But you can't buy a new car that isn't fuel injected, because fuel injection is more efficient.
Similarly, MP3 is less efficient than AAC, so as new devices and software come out, they'll gradually default to using AAC.
As long as it's transparent to the consumer, it won't matter.
This post is insightful, I guess, but it doesn't show a real understanding of the formats involved.
AAC isn't some out-of-the-blue format popularized by Apple. It's part of the MPEG-4 multimedia standard. It can be considered in some ways the phiolsophical child of MP3, or at least the next step down the path.
MPEG-4 is a massive, far reaching set of standards that do pretty much anything you could want to. And because they're set by the same standard group that worked out the technology behind MP3, DVD and digital TV, they've got a lot of industry support. It's a no-brainer to put AAC on a DVD-ROM.
WMV and Ogg Vorbis are very nice. But WMV is very new technology in coinstant flux with no real position in the industry and a distinct resistance to multiple platforms. And Vorbis has nobody in the industry pushing for it...it's a bit like a really great local band: doesn't matter how much good it is, it's got no promotion so nobody will hear it except by word of mouth.
And the player issue is kind of moot, as new technology will be needed to read DVD-ROM anyway. But there are MANY high quality AAC players for Windows, several for Mac, and a few for Lunix as well.
Of course, good binaural recordings (and good stereo recordings) are better at sound immersion than any 4, 5.1 or 7.1 setup you might make. After all, like you said, we only have two ears which process all the sound in the world. So all those extra channels become downmixed when they get to your ears.
But you need a slightly different mix for binaural vs. stereo devices (due to differences in delays and placement of the drivers). And to produce a proper stereo soundstage, you need to be really careful about speaker placement (especially with regards to reflection and overlapping), and you need to buy speakers which have power, precision and a wide enough cone across the entire spectrum to maintain a soundstage for all listeners regardless of head position.
By adding more speakers into the mix, you decrease the need for such tight controls over environment. Which means you can get by with less power and lower quality speakers -- and that the immersion effect is not limited to the guy in the middle of the soundstage keeping his head relatively still
Personally, I'm strictly stereo (I go by the Jolida adage, "Why use 6 speakers when you can't get 2 right?"). And it's occasionally a problem for movies...not because the sound is bad, but because when I watch movies with my wife, she puts her head on my shoulder, essentially eliminating half of the one channel. If I did have a 5.1 setup, I'd get fill in from the rear channel and the effect would be reduced.
Besides, there are a lot of bassheads who can't distinguish between realistic sound stage and a bunch of poorly positioned speakers and a bone-shaking thumpbox. If what you look for in sound is measured in Watts...
I used 10.0 from day one. Most of the macs at my old job STILL use 10.0, with no problems other than the fact that they can't use the absolute latest builds of Java.
Never was it "broken" beyond what's broken in any OS. It worked fine, did what it said it would. In fact, for everything that was written to run natively, it was great. The emulated stuff worked fairly well, too. Photoshop for OS 9 worked better for me under Classic Mode than it did under 9 (mostly due to all the crappy extensions I had to pollute my memory with in 9 that I didn't need for Classic Mode). Subsequent OS updates have been released to add features, speed up the user interface or reorganize difficult settings.
Yes, some apps crashed under 10. But many apps crashed under 9, too. And under 10, it was much less likely that a crashed app -- even one in classic mode -- would bring down your machine. During my time using 10.0, I saw two kernel panics. I guess I might call that beta. But one of them was on a graphite iMac that three weeks later didn't work at all...so, you know, I shrug.
I respond to trolls because it gives them a secret thrill. Who am I to deny that?
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The main reason Apple is constantly reported as "dying" is that same reason that so many of us are captivated by the company:
We have no idea what they're up to.
An ordinary tech company, as soon as something goes wrong, they start firing people and puffing out their chest about strategic alliances and new products that might come out some day, maybe.
Apple, on the other hand, doesn't tell us what they're up to until they're pretty much done with it. And then when they tell us, they do so in a way that impresses the shit out of us. We don't see the broken-ass beta version for six months before the final...we only see the final (which may have some bugs, or issues, but is definitely usable). Their R&D department is one of the most locked down in any industry. They don't issue press releases or hints the second they come up with an idea. Instead, they embark on internal analysis and testing.
The economic pundits of the world look at Apple and see their tight lipped R&D as "no ideas on the horizon." Which is ludicrous. Do these people think that iTMS, the iPod, the G4, OSX, just materialized out of thin air at MacWorld? Every time somebody's predicted Apple's imminant failure "unless they do something," they did something. Anybody who still makes predictions on a company that's proven so versatile and resourceful is a goddamn moron. Apple's successes were not ACCIDENTS.
Well, if you're converting ANY form of lossy compressed media to ANY other form of lossy compressed media, you're going to be worse off than you were originally.
So "converting" 20 gig from MP3 to OGG or MP3 to AAC or anything to anything else is a Bad Idea. If your music's in one format, keep it in one format, on all your players, etc.
Which makes converting a music collection to a (let's face it) marginalized lossy format like OGG a Bad Idea. In theory, OGG's freedom means more choice...but in practice, its lack of industry support means you're basically stuck with a handful of player options, none of which have the elegant simplicity of the iTunes/iPod combination.
Of course, I re-ripped all my CDs to AAC last year, mostly because I wanted to associate them with images and genres. This is the last reripping I plan to do, as my teenage brother has now borrowed every cool CD I own and I will probably never see them again in a non-digitized form...
Of course, the problem with your assessment is this:
Back when WinCE devices were substantially larger and more expensive than Palm Devices, Palm outsold them.
But now that Pocket PCs are comparably priced and sized, they outsell the PalmOS stuff. Because you can do a lot more with the Pocket PC.
PalmOS is trying to catch up, feature wise, but since PocketPC has had things like multimedia and wireless for a lot longer, they work better than they do on the PalmOS. They don't seem as clunky. And therefore PalmOS is in a tight spot, playing catch up.
The demand was always there. MS pushed their devices out before they were cost effective, and by doing so, a lot of really great software was written.
It could be they're doing the same in this market. On the other hand, they could also be making another AutoPC...
For $700 to $800, you could get a FUCKING AWESOME device that was a similar size but had better processor speed, better input options, better everything. I mean, there are SONY laptops that are about this size, with keyboards. This is about what you'd pay for a sweet 802.11b palmtop and a big CF hard disk to go with it. Things with which you could ACTUALLY USE WITHOUT A LOT OF HASSLES, installing Linux or not.
But instead, you'd prefer to buy a multimedia device, REMOVE the multimedia subsystem, and try and write your own?
That's nuts man. I love working on cars, and I like that I can customize my communter sedan if I want to, but I wouldn't go buy a new car with the intent of ripping out the engine and building my own engine from scratch. Seems to me you'd be better off buying an OLDER (read: cheaper) car and doing your restorations on that. Or buying the NEWER device, and just using it as is without putting in several hundred hours of work to get back to where you started from.
I just don't understand it. Oh no -- maybe I'm not a nerd anymore! What'll I do with all these ThinkGeek T-shirts?
I always got guaranteed delivery when I did pager duty. In fact, climbing down from a mountain, I knew exactly when I got into AirPage range...the thing vibrated for like a minute while I received 30 pages (of course, I wasn't on duty, so it didn't matter too much).
PHB: But...that doesn't explain why you didn't know about XYZ!! YOU: Well, these alerts all come on my cell phone, you see, and since it's company policy that Cells Are Not Allowed...
Continued:
PHB: But you knew about the cell phone regulation. You've known about it for a week. And yet, you couldn't come up with some other way to notify yourself? Like maybe to your company email address, or to your company IM account? YOU: Yes, but I wanted to prove that the policy was foolish. So I let the server break and stay broken. PHB: Brilliant! In unrelated news, can I see your security pass? We are going to relaminate for you.
Which is exactly what he should do -- ask for a pager. If it's really required that this guy get 24 hour notification (as opposed to something he did as a gee-whiz application or to feel empowered), they'll cough up the money no problem.
I'm certain his company doesn't want him using his personal devices to monitor company processes. If he left the company or the department, the monitoring infrastructure would go with him. And what's he gonna do, leave his cell phone behind with the intern who takes his place while he's on vacation?
I think it's quite nice to have my cell phone at work, but i wouldn't miss it for a second if I was asked not to have it. My old cell phone didn't even WORK inside the glorified Faraday cage I used to work in, and it didn't diminish my quality of life or the quality of my work. I even developed a WAP version of our site on that job -- did all the dev work on an OpenWave emulator, then checked out my handiwork from the patio on smoke breaks. Boss thought it was so cool, he offered to cover the airtime I spent on the project.
Well, this worm also spread using a TCP stack from Microsoft.
I'm sure if Microsoft hadn't released a TCP stack, or an API for creating sockets and connections, it would have been much more difficult for this code to gain access to the internet, and to other peoples' computers.
What happens to Microsoft when somebody breaks the law using Microsoft's code?
Nothing. Because there's nothing they could have done about it. OSS is the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
You aren't looking in the wrong places...you're just not willing to pay to get to the right ones.
There are, for example, hard disc based players which allow you to store your CDs in uncompressed formats like FLAC. They're well over $1000, but they're out there and they often have really cool interfaces. Some of your "network" players support FLAC for much less. Check out a Hi-fi mag, they'll have a shoot out every few months on component digital audio players. The iPod will let you store your music uncompressed, but you'll kill your battery life pretty good. I tried it for a while with my Tenacious D sets, but couldn't tell the difference between that and AAC 160 to justify the 8x size difference.
There are a number of ruggedized laser printers. They're in the $800 range.
And as for a super clear cellphone...you may not be able to find it, but you probably wouldn't want to pay for it, anyway. Doubling the bits transferred for digital traffic would require at least doubling the number of antennas, or doubling their effectiveness. Either way, it would require raising the prices for the outlay...and when people are willing to get fuzzy audio on their phones if it means $10 less per month (which they were...remember the switch from Analog to Digital), they'd be crazy to do it.
Lots of people were really comfortable driving carbureted engines, too. But you can't buy a new car that isn't fuel injected, because fuel injection is more efficient.
Similarly, MP3 is less efficient than AAC, so as new devices and software come out, they'll gradually default to using AAC.
As long as it's transparent to the consumer, it won't matter.
This post is insightful, I guess, but it doesn't show a real understanding of the formats involved.
AAC isn't some out-of-the-blue format popularized by Apple. It's part of the MPEG-4 multimedia standard. It can be considered in some ways the phiolsophical child of MP3, or at least the next step down the path.
MPEG-4 is a massive, far reaching set of standards that do pretty much anything you could want to. And because they're set by the same standard group that worked out the technology behind MP3, DVD and digital TV, they've got a lot of industry support. It's a no-brainer to put AAC on a DVD-ROM.
WMV and Ogg Vorbis are very nice. But WMV is very new technology in coinstant flux with no real position in the industry and a distinct resistance to multiple platforms. And Vorbis has nobody in the industry pushing for it...it's a bit like a really great local band: doesn't matter how much good it is, it's got no promotion so nobody will hear it except by word of mouth.
And the player issue is kind of moot, as new technology will be needed to read DVD-ROM anyway. But there are MANY high quality AAC players for Windows, several for Mac, and a few for Lunix as well.
Of course, good binaural recordings (and good stereo recordings) are better at sound immersion than any 4, 5.1 or 7.1 setup you might make. After all, like you said, we only have two ears which process all the sound in the world. So all those extra channels become downmixed when they get to your ears.
But you need a slightly different mix for binaural vs. stereo devices (due to differences in delays and placement of the drivers). And to produce a proper stereo soundstage, you need to be really careful about speaker placement (especially with regards to reflection and overlapping), and you need to buy speakers which have power, precision and a wide enough cone across the entire spectrum to maintain a soundstage for all listeners regardless of head position.
By adding more speakers into the mix, you decrease the need for such tight controls over environment. Which means you can get by with less power and lower quality speakers -- and that the immersion effect is not limited to the guy in the middle of the soundstage keeping his head relatively still
Personally, I'm strictly stereo (I go by the Jolida adage, "Why use 6 speakers when you can't get 2 right?"). And it's occasionally a problem for movies...not because the sound is bad, but because when I watch movies with my wife, she puts her head on my shoulder, essentially eliminating half of the one channel. If I did have a 5.1 setup, I'd get fill in from the rear channel and the effect would be reduced.
Besides, there are a lot of bassheads who can't distinguish between realistic sound stage and a bunch of poorly positioned speakers and a bone-shaking thumpbox. If what you look for in sound is measured in Watts...
He was being serious.
After all, a person who doesn't have time to RTFA isn't going to take the time to watch their kids, either.
I'd be more insightful, but I think my puppy is eating my couch.
I used 10.0 from day one. Most of the macs at my old job STILL use 10.0, with no problems other than the fact that they can't use the absolute latest builds of Java.
Never was it "broken" beyond what's broken in any OS. It worked fine, did what it said it would. In fact, for everything that was written to run natively, it was great. The emulated stuff worked fairly well, too. Photoshop for OS 9 worked better for me under Classic Mode than it did under 9 (mostly due to all the crappy extensions I had to pollute my memory with in 9 that I didn't need for Classic Mode). Subsequent OS updates have been released to add features, speed up the user interface or reorganize difficult settings.
Yes, some apps crashed under 10. But many apps crashed under 9, too. And under 10, it was much less likely that a crashed app -- even one in classic mode -- would bring down your machine. During my time using 10.0, I saw two kernel panics. I guess I might call that beta. But one of them was on a graphite iMac that three weeks later didn't work at all...so, you know, I shrug.
I respond to trolls because it gives them a secret thrill. Who am I to deny that?
The main reason Apple is constantly reported as "dying" is that same reason that so many of us are captivated by the company:
We have no idea what they're up to.
An ordinary tech company, as soon as something goes wrong, they start firing people and puffing out their chest about strategic alliances and new products that might come out some day, maybe.
Apple, on the other hand, doesn't tell us what they're up to until they're pretty much done with it. And then when they tell us, they do so in a way that impresses the shit out of us. We don't see the broken-ass beta version for six months before the final...we only see the final (which may have some bugs, or issues, but is definitely usable). Their R&D department is one of the most locked down in any industry. They don't issue press releases or hints the second they come up with an idea. Instead, they embark on internal analysis and testing.
The economic pundits of the world look at Apple and see their tight lipped R&D as "no ideas on the horizon." Which is ludicrous. Do these people think that iTMS, the iPod, the G4, OSX, just materialized out of thin air at MacWorld? Every time somebody's predicted Apple's imminant failure "unless they do something," they did something. Anybody who still makes predictions on a company that's proven so versatile and resourceful is a goddamn moron. Apple's successes were not ACCIDENTS.
Is this alternate dimensions called "India?"
Alright, I concede.
Yes, something can be false and also funny. But you should still flag it as false.
Obligatory link to remind moderators why this isn't +1, Funny, but instead -1, False.
Just like a furniture store.
Well, if you're converting ANY form of lossy compressed media to ANY other form of lossy compressed media, you're going to be worse off than you were originally.
So "converting" 20 gig from MP3 to OGG or MP3 to AAC or anything to anything else is a Bad Idea. If your music's in one format, keep it in one format, on all your players, etc.
Which makes converting a music collection to a (let's face it) marginalized lossy format like OGG a Bad Idea. In theory, OGG's freedom means more choice...but in practice, its lack of industry support means you're basically stuck with a handful of player options, none of which have the elegant simplicity of the iTunes/iPod combination.
Of course, I re-ripped all my CDs to AAC last year, mostly because I wanted to associate them with images and genres. This is the last reripping I plan to do, as my teenage brother has now borrowed every cool CD I own and I will probably never see them again in a non-digitized form...
Really?
What I do is "emerge -u openssl."
For me it seems easier, but what the hell do I know.
Does "High Profile" mean "Sells more units than all of the other manufacturers you mentioned combined?"
Because that's the context you're using it in.
How telling is it that I'm a PICO / Textpad user who knows his way around BBEdit?
I believe the market segment is "People with less brains than money."
It's a lucrative market.
Of course, the problem with your assessment is this:
Back when WinCE devices were substantially larger and more expensive than Palm Devices, Palm outsold them.
But now that Pocket PCs are comparably priced and sized, they outsell the PalmOS stuff. Because you can do a lot more with the Pocket PC.
PalmOS is trying to catch up, feature wise, but since PocketPC has had things like multimedia and wireless for a lot longer, they work better than they do on the PalmOS. They don't seem as clunky. And therefore PalmOS is in a tight spot, playing catch up.
The demand was always there. MS pushed their devices out before they were cost effective, and by doing so, a lot of really great software was written.
It could be they're doing the same in this market. On the other hand, they could also be making another AutoPC...
A music player that doesn't handle OGG is like an automobile that doesn't make toast.
WHY?
For $700 to $800, you could get a FUCKING AWESOME device that was a similar size but had better processor speed, better input options, better everything. I mean, there are SONY laptops that are about this size, with keyboards. This is about what you'd pay for a sweet 802.11b palmtop and a big CF hard disk to go with it. Things with which you could ACTUALLY USE WITHOUT A LOT OF HASSLES, installing Linux or not.
But instead, you'd prefer to buy a multimedia device, REMOVE the multimedia subsystem, and try and write your own?
That's nuts man. I love working on cars, and I like that I can customize my communter sedan if I want to, but I wouldn't go buy a new car with the intent of ripping out the engine and building my own engine from scratch. Seems to me you'd be better off buying an OLDER (read: cheaper) car and doing your restorations on that. Or buying the NEWER device, and just using it as is without putting in several hundred hours of work to get back to where you started from.
I just don't understand it. Oh no -- maybe I'm not a nerd anymore! What'll I do with all these ThinkGeek T-shirts?
No, a camaro is bitchen.
In related news, administrators who say "boxen" are retarded, and do not get promotions.
Sounds like you have a shitty pager.
I always got guaranteed delivery when I did pager duty. In fact, climbing down from a mountain, I knew exactly when I got into AirPage range...the thing vibrated for like a minute while I received 30 pages (of course, I wasn't on duty, so it didn't matter too much).
PHB: But...that doesn't explain why you didn't know about XYZ!!
YOU: Well, these alerts all come on my cell phone, you see, and since it's company policy that Cells Are Not Allowed...
Continued:
PHB: But you knew about the cell phone regulation. You've known about it for a week. And yet, you couldn't come up with some other way to notify yourself? Like maybe to your company email address, or to your company IM account?
YOU: Yes, but I wanted to prove that the policy was foolish. So I let the server break and stay broken.
PHB: Brilliant! In unrelated news, can I see your security pass? We are going to relaminate for you.
Which is exactly what he should do -- ask for a pager. If it's really required that this guy get 24 hour notification (as opposed to something he did as a gee-whiz application or to feel empowered), they'll cough up the money no problem.
I'm certain his company doesn't want him using his personal devices to monitor company processes. If he left the company or the department, the monitoring infrastructure would go with him. And what's he gonna do, leave his cell phone behind with the intern who takes his place while he's on vacation?
I think it's quite nice to have my cell phone at work, but i wouldn't miss it for a second if I was asked not to have it. My old cell phone didn't even WORK inside the glorified Faraday cage I used to work in, and it didn't diminish my quality of life or the quality of my work. I even developed a WAP version of our site on that job -- did all the dev work on an OpenWave emulator, then checked out my handiwork from the patio on smoke breaks. Boss thought it was so cool, he offered to cover the airtime I spent on the project.
Well, this worm also spread using a TCP stack from Microsoft.
I'm sure if Microsoft hadn't released a TCP stack, or an API for creating sockets and connections, it would have been much more difficult for this code to gain access to the internet, and to other peoples' computers.
What happens to Microsoft when somebody breaks the law using Microsoft's code?
Nothing. Because there's nothing they could have done about it. OSS is the same way.