Yeah, remember that episode of Star Trek TNG when Wesley Crusher made a device which could say anything using Picard's voice? Then he took control of the ship with it, haw haw haw.
As more implementations appeared on the Internet, I'd get more junk packets, and would E-mail back the packet source telling them how their protocol stack was broken.
That's the official line, but I'm not so sure. The first HHGTTG is written almost as if he just sat down one day.. said 'I'm going to write a book'.. and bashed out 50,000 words in a sitting. The constant scene changes, quirky events and odd side-stories only make this case more convincing.
Yeah, I remember a really crappy obsolete language, called something like 'x86'. To write even the simplest program you had to write about 1000 lines.
You could barely do anything with a single line of code. Whereas in Perl, you can make the coffee and clean your bedroom in one line, with the obsolete 'x86' you had to pretty much write a bible-worth of code.
I reckon they should consign x86 to the scrap-heap and make Intel processors run directly on BASIC instead.
What planet are you on? The only reason console games might 'look better' is because the TV blurs them to such a point that they look all nice and smooth.
That doesn't mean they're any good though.. compare PC Quake 3 running at 1024x768x32 (hardly 'high-end') with Quake 3 on the Dreamcast.. no comparison. Ditto for Unreal Tournament vs the PS2 version. Max Payne? You're never going to see anything as good as that on a regular TV set.
PC monitors are just far crisper than TVs and have higher resolutions, hence they show up bad graphics to be awful. TVs, however, blur all the graphics together at such a low res that all the games look 'okay'.
This also occurs with headphones.. MP3s can sound okay on cheap headphones, but on expensive headphones they can sound like crap because the nasty MPEG artefacts are more noticable. That doesn't mean the crappy headphones are better though.
So, console owners can stick with their dismally poor Mario 64, Zelda, and blurry TV graphics.. and I'll stick with my crisp Max Payne, Quake 3, Nascar Racing 4 graphics, thank you very much.
19.4 x 1024 = 19865.6 Kbps
19865.6 x 1024 = 20342374.4 Bits Per Second Now lets divide by 8 20342374.4 / 8 = 2542796.8 Bytes Per Second 2542796.8 / (1024 x 1024) = 2.425 Mega Bytes Per Second
Or.. uh.. 19.4Mbps.. 8 bits in a byte. Divide 19.4 by 8, and you get 2.425 MB per second.
Haha, you crazy Americans. Can't cope with a little dance/house music. Perhaps we should ask Daft Punk to remix them to sound like The Ataris or Weezer?
How do you pick up a regular CD? By the edges. There's no evidence to suggest that just because the disc is smaller that you can't still pick it up by its edges.
It could also have a slight 'edge' on it like those business card CDRs. This would also make a space on a double-sized CD where the printed description could go.
Before most people had listened to CDs, many people would have said.. 'Why should we replace our albums, they sound good enough to me!' Sure, CDs didn't hiss or scratch as easily but people were used to the quality.
Almost twenty years later, people have, yet again, fallen into the rut of getting used to CDs. But the majority of people who get to hear top quality well-produced "DVD audio" (not the audio stream on a DVD video - the actual DVD Audio format..) are amazed by the quality and can hear the difference.
So, in another ten to fifteen years, we might all be listening to DVD Audio instead and be telling our children about the flat lifeless sound format known as CD. We might even wheel out an old CD player from time to time to show them how the Spice Girls used to sound.. Oooh, lo-fi!
I'd say this is doomed to failure, primarily because they've wrapped it up in a silly plastic 'caddy'.
There are certain instances where caddies are a necessity (i.e. tape applications - reel to reel doesn't count!!) but for optical media, what is the point of the caddy? It does nothing except increase the media cost significantly.
I daresay part of the wonderful things about CD is the fact that it doesn't have caddies. Remember in the early 90s when many CD-ROM drives required you to put your CDs in expensive caddies? Where are those caddies now? In the trash. We learned how to handle discs directly.
A far better idea would be for them to make some double sided mini CDs that aren't in caddies.. that way they'd still play in regular CD players and CDROM drives.. and they could make a mint from patenting the idea for double-sided mini CDs.
These new techologies might save most of the Western world from being conscripted to go and fight out in Asia, but what about the people we're fighting? Technology hasn't really done them any favors. A war with less casualties? Perhaps, but probably only ever on our side.
Ditching technology seems to have been one of the routes taken in Afghanistan. Apparently Usama Bin Laden has decided to go with the low-tech route of passing messages by running courier so that the US services can't spy on him as easily!
This all looks interesting, but the picture I don't get is the mock-up of the interior. Looks good as a completely hollow interior, but why is there a gigantic kid walking around on top of two tin cans? Is this going to be some sort of circus classroom where kids learn stilt techniques?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't both TNG and Voyager take about two years to 'migrate' to the UK. I'm sure I recall seeing TNG for the first time in 89/90..
However, with TV as it is nowadays, I'd imagine we might get it in several months. Series seem to come across pretty quick now.. i.e. Ally McBeal, Friends, Sex and the City.. and other such quality programming.
Anyone have some official news? I guess Sky One will be first to screen it.
Yep, that has to be one of the funniest things I've read for a while. Now why didn't the Skylarov demonstrators think of that? The US Embassy in London could be a pile of rubble now..
We already know from Stile's kitty.mpg featuring the cat being eaten that some people can watch people get killed but are distressed as soon as they see a kitten killed and eaten.
Therefore, for all of those people, I support all pussy-friendly weapons.
I archive all of my CDs to MP3, and I'll be sticking to MP3 for the foreseeable future.
My MP3 encoder is faster than any current Ogg encoder, and IMHO, a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg file anyway.
I'm also planning to get an MP3 CD player in the future for my car. If I had a lot of OGG files, I'd need to decode them and re-encode to MP3 just to put them onto CDR. Not much use.
Ogg Vorbis seems to be a good format, but it wasn't first. The fact that there are few strings attached to it is extremely good, and I think Ogg will be very useful for programmers and games developers. But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first, MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS versus Betamax.
I'm not sure, but it seems as if everyone has missed the point. Either that, or I'm just dumb.
The press release says that they've teamed up to allow users to buy EMI music (over the Web, I'd imagine).. download it to their computers, and then use special software to burn it to CD -- rather than offer it in MP3 format, which you could then distribute illegally.
That sounds like a good idea. It doesn't sound like it's going to cripple the player at all. It's just an added feature. It does not say that their burner will demand fees from you whenever you burn a CD.
For me, it all comes down to targeting. I don't care if a 20-50k banner comes down with every page I download, but the reason I don't click on many banner ads is because they just.. suck!
For example, at the top of this page I have some thing saying 'CLUELESSNESS' then it changes to 'BLAME' then to 'We've got NEW motivators' with a 'ThinkGeek' logo. Okay, what the heck does that ad mean? It's an awful advert, why should I want to click on it?
If I saw, however, 'XYZCorp Credit Card 2.5% APR first 6 months!' or '128mb MP3 Player $75' then I might be tempted!
Banners, and their technologies, are going to have to go through the same 'usability revolution' that Web pages are going through. Currently, too many ads just make no sense and take too long to read.. so why should I bother?
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Yeah, remember that episode of Star Trek TNG when Wesley Crusher made a device which could say anything using Picard's voice? Then he took control of the ship with it, haw haw haw.
As more implementations appeared on the Internet, I'd get more junk packets, and would E-mail back the packet source telling them how their protocol stack was broken.
Argh, here he is.. the first net-cop!
So the USA used the British pound once? That's scary.
That's the official line, but I'm not so sure. The first HHGTTG is written almost as if he just sat down one day.. said 'I'm going to write a book'.. and bashed out 50,000 words in a sitting. The constant scene changes, quirky events and odd side-stories only make this case more convincing.
Yeah, I remember a really crappy obsolete language, called something like 'x86'. To write even the simplest program you had to write about 1000 lines.
You could barely do anything with a single line of code. Whereas in Perl, you can make the coffee and clean your bedroom in one line, with the obsolete 'x86' you had to pretty much write a bible-worth of code.
I reckon they should consign x86 to the scrap-heap and make Intel processors run directly on BASIC instead.
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What planet are you on? The only reason console games might 'look better' is because the TV blurs them to such a point that they look all nice and smooth.
That doesn't mean they're any good though.. compare PC Quake 3 running at 1024x768x32 (hardly 'high-end') with Quake 3 on the Dreamcast.. no comparison. Ditto for Unreal Tournament vs the PS2 version. Max Payne? You're never going to see anything as good as that on a regular TV set.
PC monitors are just far crisper than TVs and have higher resolutions, hence they show up bad graphics to be awful. TVs, however, blur all the graphics together at such a low res that all the games look 'okay'.
This also occurs with headphones.. MP3s can sound okay on cheap headphones, but on expensive headphones they can sound like crap because the nasty MPEG artefacts are more noticable. That doesn't mean the crappy headphones are better though.
So, console owners can stick with their dismally poor Mario 64, Zelda, and blurry TV graphics.. and I'll stick with my crisp Max Payne, Quake 3, Nascar Racing 4 graphics, thank you very much.
Or.. uh.. 19.4Mbps.. 8 bits in a byte. Divide 19.4 by 8, and you get 2.425 MB per second.
Did I just miss something here?
Haha, you crazy Americans. Can't cope with a little dance/house music. Perhaps we should ask Daft Punk to remix them to sound like The Ataris or Weezer?
How do you pick up a regular CD? By the edges. There's no evidence to suggest that just because the disc is smaller that you can't still pick it up by its edges.
It could also have a slight 'edge' on it like those business card CDRs. This would also make a space on a double-sized CD where the printed description could go.
It's funny you say that.
Before most people had listened to CDs, many people would have said.. 'Why should we replace our albums, they sound good enough to me!' Sure, CDs didn't hiss or scratch as easily but people were used to the quality.
Almost twenty years later, people have, yet again, fallen into the rut of getting used to CDs. But the majority of people who get to hear top quality well-produced "DVD audio" (not the audio stream on a DVD video - the actual DVD Audio format..) are amazed by the quality and can hear the difference.
So, in another ten to fifteen years, we might all be listening to DVD Audio instead and be telling our children about the flat lifeless sound format known as CD. We might even wheel out an old CD player from time to time to show them how the Spice Girls used to sound.. Oooh, lo-fi!
I'd say this is doomed to failure, primarily because they've wrapped it up in a silly plastic 'caddy'.
There are certain instances where caddies are a necessity (i.e. tape applications - reel to reel doesn't count!!) but for optical media, what is the point of the caddy? It does nothing except increase the media cost significantly.
I daresay part of the wonderful things about CD is the fact that it doesn't have caddies. Remember in the early 90s when many CD-ROM drives required you to put your CDs in expensive caddies? Where are those caddies now? In the trash. We learned how to handle discs directly.
A far better idea would be for them to make some double sided mini CDs that aren't in caddies.. that way they'd still play in regular CD players and CDROM drives.. and they could make a mint from patenting the idea for double-sided mini CDs.
These new techologies might save most of the Western world from being conscripted to go and fight out in Asia, but what about the people we're fighting? Technology hasn't really done them any favors. A war with less casualties? Perhaps, but probably only ever on our side. Ditching technology seems to have been one of the routes taken in Afghanistan. Apparently Usama Bin Laden has decided to go with the low-tech route of passing messages by running courier so that the US services can't spy on him as easily!
This all looks interesting, but the picture I don't get is the mock-up of the interior. Looks good as a completely hollow interior, but why is there a gigantic kid walking around on top of two tin cans? Is this going to be some sort of circus classroom where kids learn stilt techniques?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't both TNG and Voyager take about two years to 'migrate' to the UK. I'm sure I recall seeing TNG for the first time in 89/90..
However, with TV as it is nowadays, I'd imagine we might get it in several months. Series seem to come across pretty quick now.. i.e. Ally McBeal, Friends, Sex and the City.. and other such quality programming.
Anyone have some official news? I guess Sky One will be first to screen it.
Yep, that has to be one of the funniest things I've read for a while. Now why didn't the Skylarov demonstrators think of that? The US Embassy in London could be a pile of rubble now..
We already know from Stile's kitty.mpg featuring the cat being eaten that some people can watch people get killed but are distressed as soon as they see a kitten killed and eaten.
Therefore, for all of those people, I support all pussy-friendly weapons.
I archive all of my CDs to MP3, and I'll be sticking to MP3 for the foreseeable future. My MP3 encoder is faster than any current Ogg encoder, and IMHO, a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg file anyway. I'm also planning to get an MP3 CD player in the future for my car. If I had a lot of OGG files, I'd need to decode them and re-encode to MP3 just to put them onto CDR. Not much use. Ogg Vorbis seems to be a good format, but it wasn't first. The fact that there are few strings attached to it is extremely good, and I think Ogg will be very useful for programmers and games developers. But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first, MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS versus Betamax.
I'm not sure, but it seems as if everyone has missed the point. Either that, or I'm just dumb. The press release says that they've teamed up to allow users to buy EMI music (over the Web, I'd imagine).. download it to their computers, and then use special software to burn it to CD -- rather than offer it in MP3 format, which you could then distribute illegally. That sounds like a good idea. It doesn't sound like it's going to cripple the player at all. It's just an added feature. It does not say that their burner will demand fees from you whenever you burn a CD.
For me, it all comes down to targeting. I don't care if a 20-50k banner comes down with every page I download, but the reason I don't click on many banner ads is because they just.. suck!
For example, at the top of this page I have some thing saying 'CLUELESSNESS' then it changes to 'BLAME' then to 'We've got NEW motivators' with a 'ThinkGeek' logo. Okay, what the heck does that ad mean? It's an awful advert, why should I want to click on it?
If I saw, however, 'XYZCorp Credit Card 2.5% APR first 6 months!' or '128mb MP3 Player $75' then I might be tempted!
Banners, and their technologies, are going to have to go through the same 'usability revolution' that Web pages are going through. Currently, too many ads just make no sense and take too long to read.. so why should I bother?
I even wrote a feature on this over at iBoost, Banner Usability