First, it's not clipped, it's compressed. If you're getting CDs with clipped wave forms they're just poorly recorded, and I wouldn't expect any form of media from that recording engineer to come out any better than the CD.
Second, you're assuming the vinyl isn't mastered from the same compressed recording as the CD. That may or may not be true for the particular album you cite, but in general I have to assume that there is a single master for both versions for both business practice and economic reasons. If I'm willing to compress for loudness on a CD why wouldn't I compress for loudness on vinyl -- I get all the same benefits (and determents) on vinyl that I do on the CD, and I only have to produce one version of the song. Otherwise I have to pay someone to produce another master for an already low-volume media format, and I lose the perceived benefit of the compression that I intentionally added to the CD.
Finally, "warmer" is also a measurably different waveform, though I admit somewhat less objectively defined than "wider dynamic range." Anyone who as ever run a sound board or programmed a synth could tell you exactly what people mean when they say "make it warmer." If you're mixing existing waveforms it generally means "add some reverb to simulate a sounding board or hall" and if you're creating the waveform from scratch it generally means "add an LFO (low-frequency oscillator) to simulate vibrato."
As long as your durability requirements don't include the ability to withstand or recover from: crushing, bending, moderately high temperatures, airborne particulate matter, skin oils, or frequent playback, then sure, vinyl is waaaaaaay more durable.
You *want* slot loading? I'll put up with it on laptops in place of that flimsy "tray", but I wouldn't want a slot-loading drive on any machine with enough space for a realy tray. Of course, I also liked CD caddys and owned a DVD-RAM drive before DVD-RW was available, so maybe I'm biased toward cased media formats (which don't get along well with modern slot-loading optical drives for obvious reasons).
If you're willing to pay more the $14 I'm guessing you could find a better drive. It's not like the cheapest drive Lite-On makes is your only choice -- I'm guessing most people buying an SATA optical drive would at least buy a DVD-ROM drive for the $3 price difference.
You could make most buildings reach a state of resonance given the right conditions, but one of those conditions is an oscillator that imparts enough energy to overcome the damping effect of, say, having a foundation buried in the ground.
I agree that there's some wave reflection from the foundation, but there's also a lot of less-than-rigid dirt around the footings, and it will absorb a lot of energy. Which is good, otherwise buidlings would be in danger of falling down from all sorts of low-energy oscillations, like people walking.
The public says "No way, I don't want your pollution clogging my air, worsening my asthma, and causing my city to become subject to EPA regulations. I resent you trying to avoid cleaning up your own mess. By the way, who's driving this demand for power? Is it big business or folks like me, because I know I try to conserve my power use by turning off lights and even switching to CFLs? I don't want to pay (in terms of taxes or pollution) for power generated to serve some big out-of-state business, especially one that doesn't generate many local jobs." Right. Because big business is evil and always wastes power and individuals are always good and save power. And businesses don't hire anyone locally, not even to run their new power plants. And local people wouldn't want new "out-of-state" businesses in their town even if they did. And air pollution in some other state is better than air pollution here.
Thanks for clearing that up for me. Without all those perfectly valid lines of thought I might have suspected your were just trolling.
While your issue is certainly annoying, it's really a limitation of the BIOS more than the OS. I mean, it would be great if the installer could figure out (or let you figure out) what you wanted to do, but it's not a trivial problem for any OS -- it's not like the Windows installer would have done something better. On most PC systems BIOS will only load the MBR from the first drive that claims to be bootable. So OS installers must install their bootloader on whatever they detect to be the first BIOS drive. Anything else would leave your system unbootable as far as the installer can tell.
On a system that lets you select a boot disk from the pre-boot environment this isn't an issue, because there is no MBR, and you can execute any machine code from anywhere on any device the pre-boot environment knows how to read. Given such a system it's trivial to switch between OSes on different disks, and to add, remove, and re-order disks without breaking booting; on BIOS-based system it's not and never will be.
In short, if you want to boot from more than one logical disk find a machine that has OpenFirmware or EFI instead of an old-school BIOS and you'll be much happier.
My problem with cell phone contracts is that it's not an optional incentive to use their services -- it's required. Just trying bring in your own phone as a new customer and buying month-to-month service. They won't let you do it. You have to sign a contract and take their "free" phone even if you have no use for it. Such a contract provides no benefit to me, and there's no way to avoid it, at least not at any of the three national providers I've tried.
People and things in games look more visually realistic than they did 10 years ago. But that's as far as it goes -- it's still a cartoon, it's still on TV, it's still just audio and video, and you still control it by wiggling your thumbs. There aren't a lot of things in real life that resemble that, other than coding, which is presumably something you want your child to learn.
Until someone builds an armed robot with human-like mobility and a remote control/video feed, and then sells that robot to me with an Xbox controller, I'm not going to be terribly worried that my 6-year-old will be confused by the "realistic setting" of a video game.
Can you actually buy 17" monitors that are 1600x1200? I have trouble finding anything better than 1280x1024, and 2560x1024 is not better 2560x1600, at least not for me.
The student who thinks that art history and physics don't have any relation to one another, and that there's nothing to be learned outside the immediate confines of one's field of study
There's a difference between "is interested in" and "thinks a relation exists to". I don't doubt that learning a foreign language might improve studies in physics. It doesn't necessarily follow that a physics student would be equally interested in or willing to devote the same amount of energy to learning both calculus and Latin. If school was free and you had twenty years to study one might be more willing to explore the effect of language on physics, but school is expensive and many people need to get done to both pay for it and to get on with the non-academic pursuits in their life.
IMHO it's bloody stupid to pretend that undergraduate studies are some form of altruistic academics, or that most people would want them to be.
You say that Windows use is voluntary, and I'll agree, so long as you agree that working 9-5 is voluntary. And that being so, you could find a job that let you work whatever hours you wanted, having daylight before or after work as you saw fit, without the hassle of the changing the clock or anyone else's schedule at all.
we thought that Earth was the center of the universe, that the sun revolved around Earth
I really wish people would stop telling these lies. The Earth *is* the center of the universe, and the sun *does* revolve around the Earth. If you're talking about other planets or galaxies it's not necessary a handy reference point, but there's no technical reason that you can't define Earth as the origin in any coordinate system. Similarly it's just as accurate to say that the sun revolves around Earth as it is to say that Earth revolves around the sun; the sun and Earth revolve around each other, and anything more specific only expresses a frame a reference, not a technical truth.
The only part people ever got wrong was the the movement of other planets; there were models that showed other planets in revolution around Earth, and those were inaccurate (and quickly discovered to be so as soon as the technology existed to measure the inaccuracies in the predicted orbits of the planets). But in a time before access to high-quality optics it's not entirely unreasonable to suppose that distant non-star objects you observe behave in the same way as the sun and the moon -- that they also revolve around the Earth.
I won't argue the "earth was flat" point (much) for the moment, as there were at least some people at some point in history who believed that. Not many people who actually studied the subject, at least not since some year that ended with "BC", but there were some people in the Early Middle Ages who argued for a flat-earth model, and their belief was wrong, so it's a better point than the first two, even if it's based on a misunderstanding of history.
And while religion does may bad (fight about stupid things) and good things (organize society in the absence of stable political powers), they can't be blamed for your misunderstanding of astronomy or history, so maybe you should lay off.
It's different to require Xbox hardware for Xbox games than to require that you play Xbox games on Xbox hardware? I'm afraid I don't see the difference.
check with the authoritative nameserver for the domain as reported by whois
As reported by who's whois? It's not like whois is some totally unrelated system -- it's tied to the same information as any other part of DNS.
You can certianly query along different root paths and compare the results without naming an authority, but if you're going to use whois to resolve conflicts you'd have to pick a root path for your whois requests and trust it to be accurate.
I prefer the Tennant branded ones, because they actually make ice resurfacers (i.e. Zambonis). The hockey rink where I grew up had a great differential-speed-steering, yoke-controlled Tennant ice resurfacer, and I can think of nothing else when I see the self-propelled vacuums.
Maybe because they don't sell PCs? I'm not saying that it is or even should be illegal, but it's not really the same. And MS does say you can only play Xbox games on Xbox.
As long as people see the GPL as just a software license and a way to share without really giving, I have no qualms. But I personally don't want to do that, and the parent to my original post cited people's desire to publish their software without giving up control as a flaw in BSD licensing -- it's not a flaw, it just has different goals.
Maybe I'm exceptional, but when I publish software at no cost it's because I believe A) it has little monetary value or B) the market in which it is valuable is difficult for me break into. And if either of those is true I'm happy to let people do whatever they will with my software, becuase I'm not going to do anything with it.
Other people may have other criteria for when they want to publish software. They may be unmotivated to sell their software and just want community recognition. They may hate corporations in general and want to make it hard for big software houses to use their code (and I'm not saying big software houses couldn't use GPL code, but as a business reality it is harder than using non-GPL code). The GPL license might be great in those cases, but I have trouble believing I'm the only one who really wants to give away, not just share, the software that I publish at no cost.
The GPL reserves for the copyright holder, the exclusive right to release derivative software under any non-GPL license. There are probably other rights reserved, but that's the one that turns me off.
You might not be bothered by that. You might want to contain control of your code. There's nothing wrong with that, but it silly to pretend that the GPL doesn't reserve some of the rights of the copyright holder, and/or impose restrictions on the use of GPL licensed code in contexts outside the orignal project.
If I want to have a park on my land, I can build a park. I can encourage other people to use it. I could even set up a trust to keep the park going after I die, presumably in near perpetuity given trustees with a similar mindset.
Or I could give the land to the local municipality and let the people, through their local government, decide how best to use the land. Maybe they want a park there forever. Maybe they'd rather have a pool. Maybe they'd rather build a library on it. Maybe they'd like to sell it to some land developer and make a quick buck. If I'm really going to give the land to the people I have to accept that they might do things I don't like with it, otherwise it's a just a way to make myself feel good without really giving.
Most people aren't willing to publish their hard work just so some big company can sell it back to them. Then again, big companies are more willing to pay developers to work hard on a project that they own outright and to which they can sell exclusive rights. I've worked at one of them, and they paid people to work on FreeBSD. It's not such a bad deal.
The only projects I've ever released under a GPL license are projects that I inherited under a GPL license. I'm reluctant to "give away" my code under a license that takes away (or at least reserves for me) rights from other people that may want to use it -- I'd like to really give it away, no strings attached, or to actually sell it. The GPL's it's-yours-but-you-can-only-like-I-say seems a lot like giving a "gift" to someone that you really bought for yourself.
I think I understand the motivation behind the GPL (but I could be wrong), and I'm not angry that other people use it, but to me it seems like a distasteful compromise between giving and keeping, and that sort of license holds no interest for me at all.
Took about 25 seconds to load in Safari on my system, tying up Safari pretty good in the process. But things were fine once it was done and other programs continued to respond normally throughout. And they said I'd never use dual processors -- apparently they didn't know my browsing habits.
And the free-market answer to that is that no manufacturer will be able to sell the price-fixed product because no retailers will do business with them. While I'm sure you could come up with a few counter-examples, in many markets manufacturers are at the mercy of retailers, and exactly the *opposite* problem occurs -- retailers dictate price to manufacturers. This is one of the thing people whine about when the bash Wal-Mart.
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First, it's not clipped, it's compressed. If you're getting CDs with clipped wave forms they're just poorly recorded, and I wouldn't expect any form of media from that recording engineer to come out any better than the CD.
Second, you're assuming the vinyl isn't mastered from the same compressed recording as the CD. That may or may not be true for the particular album you cite, but in general I have to assume that there is a single master for both versions for both business practice and economic reasons. If I'm willing to compress for loudness on a CD why wouldn't I compress for loudness on vinyl -- I get all the same benefits (and determents) on vinyl that I do on the CD, and I only have to produce one version of the song. Otherwise I have to pay someone to produce another master for an already low-volume media format, and I lose the perceived benefit of the compression that I intentionally added to the CD.
Finally, "warmer" is also a measurably different waveform, though I admit somewhat less objectively defined than "wider dynamic range." Anyone who as ever run a sound board or programmed a synth could tell you exactly what people mean when they say "make it warmer." If you're mixing existing waveforms it generally means "add some reverb to simulate a sounding board or hall" and if you're creating the waveform from scratch it generally means "add an LFO (low-frequency oscillator) to simulate vibrato."
As long as your durability requirements don't include the ability to withstand or recover from: crushing, bending, moderately high temperatures, airborne particulate matter, skin oils, or frequent playback, then sure, vinyl is waaaaaaay more durable.
You *want* slot loading? I'll put up with it on laptops in place of that flimsy "tray", but I wouldn't want a slot-loading drive on any machine with enough space for a realy tray. Of course, I also liked CD caddys and owned a DVD-RAM drive before DVD-RW was available, so maybe I'm biased toward cased media formats (which don't get along well with modern slot-loading optical drives for obvious reasons).
If you're willing to pay more the $14 I'm guessing you could find a better drive. It's not like the cheapest drive Lite-On makes is your only choice -- I'm guessing most people buying an SATA optical drive would at least buy a DVD-ROM drive for the $3 price difference.
8 2E16812206001
Or for a whopping $9.99 you could buy an adapter and use whatever IDE drive you like:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N
Now remember reading about how that doesn't actually work due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping and stop telling people about it.
You could make most buildings reach a state of resonance given the right conditions, but one of those conditions is an oscillator that imparts enough energy to overcome the damping effect of, say, having a foundation buried in the ground.
I agree that there's some wave reflection from the foundation, but there's also a lot of less-than-rigid dirt around the footings, and it will absorb a lot of energy. Which is good, otherwise buidlings would be in danger of falling down from all sorts of low-energy oscillations, like people walking.
Thanks for clearing that up for me. Without all those perfectly valid lines of thought I might have suspected your were just trolling.
But they weren't big companies when they started. They *became* big companies as part of beating K-Mart.
While your issue is certainly annoying, it's really a limitation of the BIOS more than the OS. I mean, it would be great if the installer could figure out (or let you figure out) what you wanted to do, but it's not a trivial problem for any OS -- it's not like the Windows installer would have done something better. On most PC systems BIOS will only load the MBR from the first drive that claims to be bootable. So OS installers must install their bootloader on whatever they detect to be the first BIOS drive. Anything else would leave your system unbootable as far as the installer can tell.
On a system that lets you select a boot disk from the pre-boot environment this isn't an issue, because there is no MBR, and you can execute any machine code from anywhere on any device the pre-boot environment knows how to read. Given such a system it's trivial to switch between OSes on different disks, and to add, remove, and re-order disks without breaking booting; on BIOS-based system it's not and never will be.
In short, if you want to boot from more than one logical disk find a machine that has OpenFirmware or EFI instead of an old-school BIOS and you'll be much happier.
My problem with cell phone contracts is that it's not an optional incentive to use their services -- it's required. Just trying bring in your own phone as a new customer and buying month-to-month service. They won't let you do it. You have to sign a contract and take their "free" phone even if you have no use for it. Such a contract provides no benefit to me, and there's no way to avoid it, at least not at any of the three national providers I've tried.
Better graphics != realistic setting.
People and things in games look more visually realistic than they did 10 years ago. But that's as far as it goes -- it's still a cartoon, it's still on TV, it's still just audio and video, and you still control it by wiggling your thumbs. There aren't a lot of things in real life that resemble that, other than coding, which is presumably something you want your child to learn.
Until someone builds an armed robot with human-like mobility and a remote control/video feed, and then sells that robot to me with an Xbox controller, I'm not going to be terribly worried that my 6-year-old will be confused by the "realistic setting" of a video game.
Can you actually buy 17" monitors that are 1600x1200? I have trouble finding anything better than 1280x1024, and 2560x1024 is not better 2560x1600, at least not for me.
The student who thinks that art history and physics don't have any relation to one another, and that there's nothing to be learned outside the immediate confines of one's field of study
There's a difference between "is interested in" and "thinks a relation exists to". I don't doubt that learning a foreign language might improve studies in physics. It doesn't necessarily follow that a physics student would be equally interested in or willing to devote the same amount of energy to learning both calculus and Latin. If school was free and you had twenty years to study one might be more willing to explore the effect of language on physics, but school is expensive and many people need to get done to both pay for it and to get on with the non-academic pursuits in their life.
IMHO it's bloody stupid to pretend that undergraduate studies are some form of altruistic academics, or that most people would want them to be.
You say that Windows use is voluntary, and I'll agree, so long as you agree that working 9-5 is voluntary. And that being so, you could find a job that let you work whatever hours you wanted, having daylight before or after work as you saw fit, without the hassle of the changing the clock or anyone else's schedule at all.
we thought that Earth was the center of the universe, that the sun revolved around Earth
I really wish people would stop telling these lies. The Earth *is* the center of the universe, and the sun *does* revolve around the Earth. If you're talking about other planets or galaxies it's not necessary a handy reference point, but there's no technical reason that you can't define Earth as the origin in any coordinate system. Similarly it's just as accurate to say that the sun revolves around Earth as it is to say that Earth revolves around the sun; the sun and Earth revolve around each other, and anything more specific only expresses a frame a reference, not a technical truth.
The only part people ever got wrong was the the movement of other planets; there were models that showed other planets in revolution around Earth, and those were inaccurate (and quickly discovered to be so as soon as the technology existed to measure the inaccuracies in the predicted orbits of the planets). But in a time before access to high-quality optics it's not entirely unreasonable to suppose that distant non-star objects you observe behave in the same way as the sun and the moon -- that they also revolve around the Earth.
I won't argue the "earth was flat" point (much) for the moment, as there were at least some people at some point in history who believed that. Not many people who actually studied the subject, at least not since some year that ended with "BC", but there were some people in the Early Middle Ages who argued for a flat-earth model, and their belief was wrong, so it's a better point than the first two, even if it's based on a misunderstanding of history.
And while religion does may bad (fight about stupid things) and good things (organize society in the absence of stable political powers), they can't be blamed for your misunderstanding of astronomy or history, so maybe you should lay off.
It's different to require Xbox hardware for Xbox games than to require that you play Xbox games on Xbox hardware? I'm afraid I don't see the difference.
check with the authoritative nameserver for the domain as reported by whois
As reported by who's whois? It's not like whois is some totally unrelated system -- it's tied to the same information as any other part of DNS.
You can certianly query along different root paths and compare the results without naming an authority, but if you're going to use whois to resolve conflicts you'd have to pick a root path for your whois requests and trust it to be accurate.
I prefer the Tennant branded ones, because they actually make ice resurfacers (i.e. Zambonis). The hockey rink where I grew up had a great differential-speed-steering, yoke-controlled Tennant ice resurfacer, and I can think of nothing else when I see the self-propelled vacuums.
Maybe because they don't sell PCs? I'm not saying that it is or even should be illegal, but it's not really the same. And MS does say you can only play Xbox games on Xbox.
Explain to me the difference between "fails to grant" and "reserves" in practical terms.
As long as people see the GPL as just a software license and a way to share without really giving, I have no qualms. But I personally don't want to do that, and the parent to my original post cited people's desire to publish their software without giving up control as a flaw in BSD licensing -- it's not a flaw, it just has different goals.
Maybe I'm exceptional, but when I publish software at no cost it's because I believe A) it has little monetary value or B) the market in which it is valuable is difficult for me break into. And if either of those is true I'm happy to let people do whatever they will with my software, becuase I'm not going to do anything with it.
Other people may have other criteria for when they want to publish software. They may be unmotivated to sell their software and just want community recognition. They may hate corporations in general and want to make it hard for big software houses to use their code (and I'm not saying big software houses couldn't use GPL code, but as a business reality it is harder than using non-GPL code). The GPL license might be great in those cases, but I have trouble believing I'm the only one who really wants to give away, not just share, the software that I publish at no cost.
The GPL reserves for the copyright holder, the exclusive right to release derivative software under any non-GPL license. There are probably other rights reserved, but that's the one that turns me off.
You might not be bothered by that. You might want to contain control of your code. There's nothing wrong with that, but it silly to pretend that the GPL doesn't reserve some of the rights of the copyright holder, and/or impose restrictions on the use of GPL licensed code in contexts outside the orignal project.
Here's my take on that same situation:
If I want to have a park on my land, I can build a park. I can encourage other people to use it. I could even set up a trust to keep the park going after I die, presumably in near perpetuity given trustees with a similar mindset.
Or I could give the land to the local municipality and let the people, through their local government, decide how best to use the land. Maybe they want a park there forever. Maybe they'd rather have a pool. Maybe they'd rather build a library on it. Maybe they'd like to sell it to some land developer and make a quick buck. If I'm really going to give the land to the people I have to accept that they might do things I don't like with it, otherwise it's a just a way to make myself feel good without really giving.
The only projects I've ever released under a GPL license are projects that I inherited under a GPL license. I'm reluctant to "give away" my code under a license that takes away (or at least reserves for me) rights from other people that may want to use it -- I'd like to really give it away, no strings attached, or to actually sell it. The GPL's it's-yours-but-you-can-only-like-I-say seems a lot like giving a "gift" to someone that you really bought for yourself.
I think I understand the motivation behind the GPL (but I could be wrong), and I'm not angry that other people use it, but to me it seems like a distasteful compromise between giving and keeping, and that sort of license holds no interest for me at all.
Took about 25 seconds to load in Safari on my system, tying up Safari pretty good in the process. But things were fine once it was done and other programs continued to respond normally throughout. And they said I'd never use dual processors -- apparently they didn't know my browsing habits.
And the free-market answer to that is that no manufacturer will be able to sell the price-fixed product because no retailers will do business with them. While I'm sure you could come up with a few counter-examples, in many markets manufacturers are at the mercy of retailers, and exactly the *opposite* problem occurs -- retailers dictate price to manufacturers. This is one of the thing people whine about when the bash Wal-Mart.