CD's record infrasonic. It's up to your playback device to handle them, but the CD encodes them in the waveform. Ultrasonics, obviously, are a different beast.
Of course, as most mixing is digital these days, you're making an ultrasonic compromise somewhere in your chain. You can record at a much higher rate than you burn to, but you're still going to bump into it.
And, of course, most people can hear the noise of a blank record being played. It's painfully obvious on anything. The quantization on a decently mixed CD should be inaudible to the average person for basically everything but the quietest sounds on a good playback system, and even then probably only if you point it out.
Allow me to rephrase: the conversion of AAC (I believe they are 240 now) to 160 VBR MP3 is not likely to introduce artifacts over a CD-> 160 VBR MP3 conversion that any normal people are likely to notice. The conversion step to MP3 introduces its own slight artifacts that trained people can hear and untrained people might "feel", but the difference in source isn't going to change that significantly.
Of course, we're also talking about people who are training themselves for years to hear the slightest difference in sound, vs people who are listening on the bus on the way to work. Real people only notice even obvious things like clipping when you point it out to them. The point of what is an obvious sound problem vs what is an "obvious" sound problem drives me nuts, and makes it difficult to get management signoff on fixing real problems before production is complete. Wolf has just been cried too many times.
To extend your car analogy to the breaking point, an iTunes encoded AAC->MP3 vs a CD->MP3 is like buying a link bar from a manufacturer's China plant vs that same manufacturer's Mexico plant. While there may be some theoretical stress test differences, they're slight and you'll never notice them. The most important thing is still what kind of music you're listening to. If you're still driving a Geo (Nickelback), it's still going to drive like crap.
iTunes will actually handle the conversion from AAC -> MP3 for you. While it isn't lossless, a single format conversion from their quite frankly rather well encoded AAC files to a 160 VBR MP3 file won't introduce any artifacts that a real person is likely to notice.
The only major shortcoming I've found with AAC files these days is that most movie editing software has no idea what to do with that file format, while dropping in MP3 files is trivial. But a quick conversion to AIFF with Audacity (free), and everything is fine.
To be fair, PC game sales are approximately 1/10th of their console cousins, while some PC game developers have seen 10 pirate users for every 1 legitimate user. I would personally expect PC games to be a very different space than consoles for different reasons, but PC game piracy is genuinely rampant. It's also the reason why most PC game development has turned to multiplayer games, which involve a central licensing server and are harder to pirate.
I was under the impression that Pandora's recording and skipping restrictions were due to licensing restrictions. I'm not really seeing how making a huge investment in hardware manufacturing is going to help that.
Also, didn't Slacker give up on dedicated hardware in 2009?
The web is becoming a series of interdependent systems that all interact with each other. You may have one company that serves your ads, another that helps you understand your users better, another that serves extra content, etc. All of these services "tentacle" together to create a modern mature web experience.
That's the nature of things once a system matures. Middleware providers, essentially, move in. They start providing portions of service to web pages from 3rd party servers. This can be as simple as a 3rd party e-mail provider showing the number of unread messages on your college homepage, or as nefarious as those evil TrAcKiNg cOoKiEs. Even the worst ones mostly just want to know if you're interested in cars, in case you'd like to buy a car.
Well, for Twitter at least, you need link shorteners if you're posting a google map or other generated URL. Some simply won't fit into 140 characters, and most won't fit into that with a description.
Facebook's 400 character limit is much less objectionable, but you definitely bump up against them sometimes.
But ideas have backers, and marketing pushes. Similarly, as a citizen if your "Idea" is that "You guys should riot against those bastards" you will probably find yourself in jail for inciting a riot. If this were used against the US government, it would be considered inciting terrorism.
While I don't agree that such a thing would be an act of war, I can see how a propaganda effort to convince people to rebel would be extremely poor form for a government.
Now now. In the safety circle, we try not to point fingers at others, but explain how their actions make us feel. Nothing is wrong or right. How does the Russian government make you feel?
On a side note, I never would have expected this level of touchy-feelyness from the Russian government. This is the country that gave us Rocky 4?
My understanding under US law, is that theft does not change ownership. And similarly, buying stolen property similarly does not change ownership as the seller did not have ownership to sell. If you buy a stolen laptop, even if you didn't know it was stolen, the true owner can walk over and take it back as you never actually had ownership of the property, and you were defrauded by the seller who didn't have the rights to sell.
UK law may be different, but under US law it's still his dog.
I believe the Xbox's HD streaming bandwidth rates were 4.5Mb/s. Netflix is similar. Both are decent, but you can see artifacts all over in certain scenes.
And that 0.2 bits / pixel rate is an average. Depending on the complexity of the scene, you may want to burst much higher than that.
I picked up a 42" 1080p HDTV (60fps) for $700 earlier this year. The prices have dropped astronomically in the past two years, and the quality remains high. Avoid unnecessary extras like 120 / 240 hz, any sort of BS color correction, etc, and you can get a great looking screen for quite reasonable amounts these days. This is especially true over old CRT's, that had issues with color blur, "bending" the picture when things got bright, colored fringes around spots of light or dark, and weighing a bloody ton. If you're happy with your screen, by all means hold out until it breaks: the prices will be even lower later. But the screens coming out now are a quite nice upgrade.
DVD's were far more expensive than VHS tapes when it first came out. They weren't more expensive to manufacture, they were just sold for more. As the market matured, they became the same price old VHS tapes had been in their prime. The same is starting to happen to Blu-Ray. You can get The Dark Knight off Amazon for 6 dollars on Blu-Ray, along with lots of other great movies. They were gouging, but the prices are starting to return in line with reality. I've seen double-packs of older Blu-Ray movies at Target for $10.
And I have to say, while I never originally intended to pick up a blu-ray player, the quality is significantly higher on HDTVs. DVD's are fine for 640x480 interlaced content, but they really start to show their age when you stretch them to 1080p. It just looks really blurry. And as pretty much all TV's being sold these days are either 720 or 1080p, that difference is likely to start becoming significant to people as their old CRT's burn out. Add in that most DVD's don't handle widescreen displays quite right, and Blu-Ray seems like it will be around for quite some time.
True, but the government does have a legitimate interest in copyright control as well. Or else we wouldn't have copyright laws in the first place, ostensibly. And supposedly we have protections in place to prevent punitive traffic fines from becoming cash cows for cities.
Punitive fines are just that: a form of punishment to deter rules violations. When you go to jail for 2 years for breaking into an Ikea, you don't go to Ikea jail where they make you build crappy Swedish furniture for their profits. If you shoplift from Ikea, you're hit with a fine that goes to the state, not Ikea. Why is it, then, that if you shoplift from the RIAA, you're hit with a massive punitive fine that goes straight to the RIAA?
$200 is definitely a deterrent, and sounds completely reasonable to be paying in a small city court somewhere.
She's facing about 5k dollars deterrent for sharing 3 CD's. You'd have to shoplift an entire pallette of CD's off of the back of a truck to get that much of a fine. And that's *reduced* below the legal minimum.
USB flash is still expensive to mass produce on the sizes that Blu-Ray offers. Those $15 / 8GB flash cards are far more expensive than disks, and would still need to be imaged with the game.
There are other digital media that people have been working on, in more obscure formats. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those were offered in liu of blu-ray, to help combat physical piracy. Or even the higher density blu-ray options that are coming out there.
I can now quite easily envision a day very soon when all my new media (games, movies, music, TV shows, books, etc.) will belong to studios, software companies, publishers, etc.--with me just renting it.
Not to take a different point, but do we really *need* to own media? I keep seeing people ranting about owning games and movies indefinitely. And while I agree that you pay your money, you should get to keep your product. But are you really going to want to re-watch Avatar in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? "Oh," you think, "but now I have that Avatar problem all sewed up! I can watch it any time I want." And that's fine. But that's just collecting stuff. I re-watch really good movies maybe four or five times maximum, as there are just far too many new good movies coming out. Even going through netflix's instant streaming options would take a few years of one-a-night watching to exhaust all of the quality films on there.
So while I hate validation servers, and I hate the idea of a company controlling things that I've bought, maybe the idea of it all going away in ten years is just to teach us a lesson about life.
I'm still kind of baffled as to why people are so paranoid about cookies. If the police want to know what you've been reading, they don't need cookies. They go to your ISP and get a log of everything you've ever visited at any time. If amazon wants to know what you're interested in, they have entire teams of social scientists discovering the inner workings of your consumer brain. Google probably knows more about you than your children do, and your children have gone through all of your drawers. Really, the biggest threat with cookies is that you'll get ads served up to you that happen to know you visit car websites, instead of a random banner for Mrs. Smiths muffins. So what? It increases the value to the serving website, which means they have more money to generate the content you're looking at. On the flip side, the advertiser shows you something you might actually be interested in, though you'll probably just tune it out like all of the rest. And the entirety of the data that is compromised is A: pointless and B: already available through private databases anyway, albeit for a large fee.
It's not like people don't have databases on all aspects of your life already. It's just this way of getting that data is much cheaper. Anyone who would use that data for nefarious reasons has much better routes to it anyway. And who really cares if the ads are targeted?
It's a PITA to log in every time you visit a website, or to set preferences over and over and over again. This is the problem cookies were meant to solve: local persistent data in a system designed for single-shot non-interactive file requests. And while this does enable advertisers to swap in better targeted ads for less targeted ones... who really cares? And why? There are far huger privacy battles out there. This is like complaining about a hangnail when your leg's been lopped off.
1. Lots of intranet and other internal company websites are I.E. only. It would be good to know now if those sites will continue to function. 2. Lots of employees are locked into I.E., and want to know what is coming up. 3. I.E. still means "the internet" to a lot of people. 4. Everyone who has a plug-in or toolbar needs to know if this will work with their "product." 5. There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be hard pressed to find a court that would require you to keep paying for a service that the company specifically decided not to provide.
CD's record infrasonic. It's up to your playback device to handle them, but the CD encodes them in the waveform. Ultrasonics, obviously, are a different beast.
Of course, as most mixing is digital these days, you're making an ultrasonic compromise somewhere in your chain. You can record at a much higher rate than you burn to, but you're still going to bump into it.
And, of course, most people can hear the noise of a blank record being played. It's painfully obvious on anything. The quantization on a decently mixed CD should be inaudible to the average person for basically everything but the quietest sounds on a good playback system, and even then probably only if you point it out.
...which start at about 15 grand. At that point, buy the DVD-A.
Allow me to rephrase: the conversion of AAC (I believe they are 240 now) to 160 VBR MP3 is not likely to introduce artifacts over a CD-> 160 VBR MP3 conversion that any normal people are likely to notice. The conversion step to MP3 introduces its own slight artifacts that trained people can hear and untrained people might "feel", but the difference in source isn't going to change that significantly.
Of course, we're also talking about people who are training themselves for years to hear the slightest difference in sound, vs people who are listening on the bus on the way to work. Real people only notice even obvious things like clipping when you point it out to them. The point of what is an obvious sound problem vs what is an "obvious" sound problem drives me nuts, and makes it difficult to get management signoff on fixing real problems before production is complete. Wolf has just been cried too many times.
To extend your car analogy to the breaking point, an iTunes encoded AAC->MP3 vs a CD->MP3 is like buying a link bar from a manufacturer's China plant vs that same manufacturer's Mexico plant. While there may be some theoretical stress test differences, they're slight and you'll never notice them. The most important thing is still what kind of music you're listening to. If you're still driving a Geo (Nickelback), it's still going to drive like crap.
iTunes will actually handle the conversion from AAC -> MP3 for you. While it isn't lossless, a single format conversion from their quite frankly rather well encoded AAC files to a 160 VBR MP3 file won't introduce any artifacts that a real person is likely to notice.
The only major shortcoming I've found with AAC files these days is that most movie editing software has no idea what to do with that file format, while dropping in MP3 files is trivial. But a quick conversion to AIFF with Audacity (free), and everything is fine.
Amazon.com's MP3 service is unrestricted, reasonably exhaustive, and (unlike iTunes) is actually quite nice to use.
To be fair, PC game sales are approximately 1/10th of their console cousins, while some PC game developers have seen 10 pirate users for every 1 legitimate user. I would personally expect PC games to be a very different space than consoles for different reasons, but PC game piracy is genuinely rampant. It's also the reason why most PC game development has turned to multiplayer games, which involve a central licensing server and are harder to pirate.
I was under the impression that Pandora's recording and skipping restrictions were due to licensing restrictions. I'm not really seeing how making a huge investment in hardware manufacturing is going to help that.
Also, didn't Slacker give up on dedicated hardware in 2009?
The web is becoming a series of interdependent systems that all interact with each other. You may have one company that serves your ads, another that helps you understand your users better, another that serves extra content, etc. All of these services "tentacle" together to create a modern mature web experience.
That's the nature of things once a system matures. Middleware providers, essentially, move in. They start providing portions of service to web pages from 3rd party servers. This can be as simple as a 3rd party e-mail provider showing the number of unread messages on your college homepage, or as nefarious as those evil TrAcKiNg cOoKiEs. Even the worst ones mostly just want to know if you're interested in cars, in case you'd like to buy a car.
Well, for Twitter at least, you need link shorteners if you're posting a google map or other generated URL. Some simply won't fit into 140 characters, and most won't fit into that with a description.
Facebook's 400 character limit is much less objectionable, but you definitely bump up against them sometimes.
But ideas have backers, and marketing pushes. Similarly, as a citizen if your "Idea" is that "You guys should riot against those bastards" you will probably find yourself in jail for inciting a riot. If this were used against the US government, it would be considered inciting terrorism.
While I don't agree that such a thing would be an act of war, I can see how a propaganda effort to convince people to rebel would be extremely poor form for a government.
Now now. In the safety circle, we try not to point fingers at others, but explain how their actions make us feel. Nothing is wrong or right. How does the Russian government make you feel?
On a side note, I never would have expected this level of touchy-feelyness from the Russian government. This is the country that gave us Rocky 4?
The 24 hour propaganda radio was highly effective. Same with the 24 hour propaganda movies and satellite TV broadcasts.
Wait, you're not talking about Warner, MGM, Michael Jackson, and Levi Jeans?
My understanding under US law, is that theft does not change ownership. And similarly, buying stolen property similarly does not change ownership as the seller did not have ownership to sell. If you buy a stolen laptop, even if you didn't know it was stolen, the true owner can walk over and take it back as you never actually had ownership of the property, and you were defrauded by the seller who didn't have the rights to sell.
UK law may be different, but under US law it's still his dog.
I believe the Xbox's HD streaming bandwidth rates were 4.5Mb/s. Netflix is similar. Both are decent, but you can see artifacts all over in certain scenes.
And that 0.2 bits / pixel rate is an average. Depending on the complexity of the scene, you may want to burst much higher than that.
I picked up a 42" 1080p HDTV (60fps) for $700 earlier this year. The prices have dropped astronomically in the past two years, and the quality remains high. Avoid unnecessary extras like 120 / 240 hz, any sort of BS color correction, etc, and you can get a great looking screen for quite reasonable amounts these days. This is especially true over old CRT's, that had issues with color blur, "bending" the picture when things got bright, colored fringes around spots of light or dark, and weighing a bloody ton. If you're happy with your screen, by all means hold out until it breaks: the prices will be even lower later. But the screens coming out now are a quite nice upgrade.
DVD's were far more expensive than VHS tapes when it first came out. They weren't more expensive to manufacture, they were just sold for more. As the market matured, they became the same price old VHS tapes had been in their prime. The same is starting to happen to Blu-Ray. You can get The Dark Knight off Amazon for 6 dollars on Blu-Ray, along with lots of other great movies. They were gouging, but the prices are starting to return in line with reality. I've seen double-packs of older Blu-Ray movies at Target for $10.
And I have to say, while I never originally intended to pick up a blu-ray player, the quality is significantly higher on HDTVs. DVD's are fine for 640x480 interlaced content, but they really start to show their age when you stretch them to 1080p. It just looks really blurry. And as pretty much all TV's being sold these days are either 720 or 1080p, that difference is likely to start becoming significant to people as their old CRT's burn out. Add in that most DVD's don't handle widescreen displays quite right, and Blu-Ray seems like it will be around for quite some time.
True, but the government does have a legitimate interest in copyright control as well. Or else we wouldn't have copyright laws in the first place, ostensibly. And supposedly we have protections in place to prevent punitive traffic fines from becoming cash cows for cities.
Punitive fines are just that: a form of punishment to deter rules violations. When you go to jail for 2 years for breaking into an Ikea, you don't go to Ikea jail where they make you build crappy Swedish furniture for their profits. If you shoplift from Ikea, you're hit with a fine that goes to the state, not Ikea. Why is it, then, that if you shoplift from the RIAA, you're hit with a massive punitive fine that goes straight to the RIAA?
$200 is definitely a deterrent, and sounds completely reasonable to be paying in a small city court somewhere.
She's facing about 5k dollars deterrent for sharing 3 CD's. You'd have to shoplift an entire pallette of CD's off of the back of a truck to get that much of a fine. And that's *reduced* below the legal minimum.
Where do parking tickets go?
USB flash is still expensive to mass produce on the sizes that Blu-Ray offers. Those $15 / 8GB flash cards are far more expensive than disks, and would still need to be imaged with the game.
There are other digital media that people have been working on, in more obscure formats. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those were offered in liu of blu-ray, to help combat physical piracy. Or even the higher density blu-ray options that are coming out there.
I can now quite easily envision a day very soon when all my new media (games, movies, music, TV shows, books, etc.) will belong to studios, software companies, publishers, etc.--with me just renting it.
Not to take a different point, but do we really *need* to own media? I keep seeing people ranting about owning games and movies indefinitely. And while I agree that you pay your money, you should get to keep your product. But are you really going to want to re-watch Avatar in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? "Oh," you think, "but now I have that Avatar problem all sewed up! I can watch it any time I want." And that's fine. But that's just collecting stuff. I re-watch really good movies maybe four or five times maximum, as there are just far too many new good movies coming out. Even going through netflix's instant streaming options would take a few years of one-a-night watching to exhaust all of the quality films on there.
So while I hate validation servers, and I hate the idea of a company controlling things that I've bought, maybe the idea of it all going away in ten years is just to teach us a lesson about life.
I'm still kind of baffled as to why people are so paranoid about cookies. If the police want to know what you've been reading, they don't need cookies. They go to your ISP and get a log of everything you've ever visited at any time. If amazon wants to know what you're interested in, they have entire teams of social scientists discovering the inner workings of your consumer brain. Google probably knows more about you than your children do, and your children have gone through all of your drawers. Really, the biggest threat with cookies is that you'll get ads served up to you that happen to know you visit car websites, instead of a random banner for Mrs. Smiths muffins. So what? It increases the value to the serving website, which means they have more money to generate the content you're looking at. On the flip side, the advertiser shows you something you might actually be interested in, though you'll probably just tune it out like all of the rest. And the entirety of the data that is compromised is A: pointless and B: already available through private databases anyway, albeit for a large fee.
It's not like people don't have databases on all aspects of your life already. It's just this way of getting that data is much cheaper. Anyone who would use that data for nefarious reasons has much better routes to it anyway. And who really cares if the ads are targeted?
It's a PITA to log in every time you visit a website, or to set preferences over and over and over again. This is the problem cookies were meant to solve: local persistent data in a system designed for single-shot non-interactive file requests. And while this does enable advertisers to swap in better targeted ads for less targeted ones... who really cares? And why? There are far huger privacy battles out there. This is like complaining about a hangnail when your leg's been lopped off.
Hidden form values have the annoying tendency of breaking the back button. That, in my mind, is a far greater sin than cookies.
Javascript seems to be key to getting HTML 5 to work. I wouldn't count on being able to broadly NoScript forever.
I can see a few reasons for this:
1. Lots of intranet and other internal company websites are I.E. only. It would be good to know now if those sites will continue to function.
2. Lots of employees are locked into I.E., and want to know what is coming up.
3. I.E. still means "the internet" to a lot of people.
4. Everyone who has a plug-in or toolbar needs to know if this will work with their "product."
5. There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.