Do any of you guys have ears? If you have heard live music vs an mp3, the loss of audio info is very obvious. Many mp3 files--especially rock music--are horrible. Neil is not in this to make money. He's got plenty. He's passionate about music.
A number of double blind tests show that almost no one are able to hear the difference between properly encoded 320kbps and original, including those that are absolutely convinced that they do. The mind is a beautiful thing.
The main problem with Neil is that he is mixing up different issues. Is overly dynamically compressed music a real problem? Absolutely. But that is the mixing and mastering, not related to format. Are there bad low-bitrate MP3 encodings out there? Absolutely, but with higher bitrate and better encoders being the norm it is a problem going away on its own. Are there any reasons at all to go lossless? there is one; if you want to keep the ability to re-compress to different formats/bitrate, then you can avoid compounding of compression artefacts across multiple generations (sort of like how you shouldn't jpeg a jpeg).
And don't get me started on the various snake oil attempts to describe why higher bitrate and higher samplingrates are needed, actually, just read this: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmo...
"To steal the coins of users who encrypt their private keys with passwords, many of the Bitcoin stealing programs also included keyloggers designed to eavesdrop on users’ typing. Even more tricky are malware types that wait for users to copy a Bitcoin address they want to send bitcoins to into their clipboard. When the user tries to paste the address, the malware replaces it with a different string, irreversibly sending the currency to the malware operator’s wallet.
That last method never sends data to a remote server, so it can be much harder to detect, SecureWorks’ researchers say. In fact, they tested a range of antivirus scanners on their malware samples and found that roughly 50% went unnoticed."
Yeah, it is also a key generator, so? I can sort of understand the FSF anti-DRM stance on this, but that is the same for Win7 and I thought this was about 7 vs 8, no difference. There might be with tpm2.0 but that isn't out yet and my hardware won't autoupdate
Enjoy your always-on TPM module then. I'm sure you like it, after all it's "trusted"
Can you explain what exactly you mean by this? I guess that what is essentially a key store chip on my motherboard is "always on", since it receives power, but if you don't want disk encryption or secure boot, don't use it.
List 5 reasons to back up your claims and I may be interested...
Well, some of my reasons: It starts and sleeps/resumes faster on my PC. It has better multi-monitor support. It has greatly improved task manager and better file manager (file copy and native mounting of ISOs and VHDs). It has improved security. And I like the full syncing between machines (settings, data,etc), but that requires that you accept to use Microsoft Account and the built-in skydrive of course. And I like the new power-user shortcut menu in 8.1 (it hasn't just addressed the critique against 8.0 of difficult to find menu options, but made it even better than 7). It definitely seems to be less aggressive than 7 on restarts (after updates), not sure if that is a system change or just less nagging, anyway good.
Anyone who I have known who wanted to buy a new computer, I have told them to make sure they get windows 7. Those people have been pretty ok. If Microsoft wasn't trying to kill their good product (Win 7) by pushing everyone to Win 8, they'd be fine.
So, I get the hate on metro, but it is mostly easily avoided, and Win8 desktop is better than Win7. I'm running Win8 and even though I don't use and don't like metro on a non-touch machine, I would never want to downgrade to Win7.
what will it take for general acceptance to finally take hold?
A red LED that glows when the 'glasses' are actually recording and is dark when they aren't.
Which is easily disabled. Even laptop camera lights that claimed to be "hardware inline" has been showed to have exploits that malware can use to disable the light while recording (they won't really be as "inline" as you think because of noise issues with that, and the fact that many cameras these days double as light sensors, so they are always on). If you are the owner it is even easier, you can cover up the light, or disconnect a wire.
Yes, malware for OSX and iOS does exist. It is very possible. But the problem seems to be about the same size as malware for Linux at this stage. By that I mean there is very little of anecdotal evidence of widespread, active malware in the wild targeting OSX, iOS and Linux. The same can't be said for Windows.
So far I've never been hit on OSX, iOS or Linux. I've had plenty of Windows machines go down in flames though. I still have friends of family for which this is a fairly regular occurrence. Even myself, I had a fully patched Windows VM just for testing websites in IE. No antivirus installed. Visited some legitimate news and html/css sites... Boom. Malware installed.
proper aliases that are not revealing your real email and can be easily discontinued with a bounce to sender as result.
I haven’t studied SMTP for a long while, but I think what you’re describing isn’t possible with ordinary email over the ’net. That sounds like something restricted to an internal mail system since it requires a centralized database of mappings between aliases and email addresses.
No, Outlook.com has solved this the way it should be. They are using real standalone email addresses for aliases. It can be completely different than your main email, and by default it shows up in a separate folder in your inbox. If you kill the alias, it is for the rest of the world the same as killing a standalone email address, and mail to it will bounce.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It's not hard. You just have to actually bother to turn up and vote them out. Most other western nations than US have a stronger grasp of this concept.
Just so you know: That "97 percent of all scientists in the world" silliness came from a rigged "poll."
Basically, an AGW-supporting scientist polled a number of his AGW-supporting scientist friends and co-workers - 30 or so - and asked them if they thought AGW was real.
That's where your number came from. Which should tell you something about the actual support for AGW among the scientific population at large...
They recently came up with another poll, where they cherry-picked a bunch of papers, and said "97% of scientific papers agree!" While not mentioning that only about a third of them actually addressed AGW, and they got their "new" 97% by only looking at 65 papers. Out of 12,000. Oops.
ok, so.. read through all of this page, and repeat that this is just a guy polling his friends:
...that the money for this transaction ultimately comes from all of us. We bought the products and services of the companies whose marketing and advertising rely on Facebook. And those of us who have FB accounts, (along with those of us who don't do our best to stop FB tracking us all over the Web), have made Facebook at least look like it's worth the money those companies hand over to it. That's how Facebook can pay almost a thousand years' of WhatApp's current revenue for the fledgling company.
A large part of what Facebook is paying for is to not have their position threatened. A large part of what built Facebook was photo sharing, can't risk anyone steal that position from them, which is why they also bought Instagram. Seeing it as a $19B investment to safeguard their $170B valuation makes more sense than trying to find the value in current SnapChat business.
They find searches based on what people click on when they search things.
If chinese language users in the filtered system can't see those links then they will have a lower rank if that search system is combined with the unfiltered system.
Therefore, the real solution is to compartmentalize the two lists rather then combining them.
This is a very good point. This report doesn't appear to say directly that search results are actually missing (eg. outright blocked), just that they are different. It if is just a case of different automated ranking based on user behaviour then that's another story.
The most popular casual games for iOS are not Flash (unless you count AIR). Nor are the most popular casual games for Android.
That is true, but doesn't change anything when people are on their PC or don't have a large screen tablet with keyboard and mouse accessories (many games categories are not suitable for mobile screen, or touch). And, especially for particular games categories, they have no-where near the rich catalogue of Flash web games, which importantly also are mostly free while the good iOS/Android ones are mostly paid or free versions that is not the full game.
How far away are we from gaining a critical mass of website who don't necessarily need flash anymore, with the arrival of HTML 5? How long before the scale tips?
When most of the popular casual games are non-Flash.
Even knowing all the evils and dangers of Flash, if I for some reason were forced to stop using most websites and had to chose only a few to continue using, this would be on that list of what to keep (I'm a tower defense game addict).
no we're saying you're using a strawman: the story you're referring to was about a certain *version* of IE that was now in the single-digit market share.
You needn't use IE for it to be useful to attackers. It is the one thing present on EVERY SINGLE system running an OS from MS, and it is the one single thing on every MS OS operated PC that is not only well suited to making connections via internet but also the one that the MS firewall routinely allows to in the default setting.
The good old "we send the user a bogus EXE in mail" isn't really good anymore because of the MS firewall and UAC. Works like a charm, though, with a bogus script abusing an IE vulnerability since IE is considered a "trusted" application by default.
IE is by default running in protected mode, a significantly less trusted zone than the user. If you already have a script running on the user system you already have higher privileges and less sandboxing than if you try to hand it off to IE.
but could not hook into the OS because MS would not allow it to allow them a lead.
If you by "hook into the OS" mean anything technical, that is not what the EU case against Microsoft on IE was about at all. It was about Microsoft having an unfair advantage in the browser market because they could bundle their browser with their market dominating operating system, and the competitors couldn't.
It was only about the OS as a distribution channel competitors didn't have access to, not any form of technical integration advantage or the IE was "deeply integrated into the core of the OS" myth (btw. on modern Windows exactly similar to Safari/WebKit in OSX). This is also why the browser ballot that forced Microsoft to offer competitors browsers as an option at install was the EU solution. They made no changes to Windows or IE or changed the way any browser behave on Windows, they just gave them distribution, as that was the complaint to begin with.
What I find amazing is that people who have such privacy problems with a voluntary service where you yourself fully control what information you choose to share,
If only it were that simple. Even if you choose not to share any information, your friends can tag you in photos,
No. They cannot. You control if you want to let your friends tag you, approve tags, or flat out block tags.
Yeah, from my perspective I can't help but to notice the huge boner most people on internet have towards market share and mainstream market acceptance, regardless if it's for smartphones, computers, game consoles and accessories or services. People just seem to forget that business are about making money. Having a huge share may have some help with it, but that is not always true.
Depends on whether you are thinking as an investor or consumer I guess. I find it puzzling when consumers have a huge boner for the extreme profit margin a manufacturer is extracting from them;)
Can I add a physical keyboard? It seems like I am one of only a handful of people on the planet that still likes them so I would love to add that although I am not holding my breath.
I think a lot of people like physical keyboards. I've had various full qwerty physical keyboard phones that have been far superior to any predictive touch input, for writing emails etc. The problem is that the cost is too high compared to the simplicity of touch screens handling everything. And that is cost both in terms of production cost and the added size/weight and breakage risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Do any of you guys have ears? If you have heard live music vs an mp3, the loss of audio info is very obvious. Many mp3 files--especially rock music--are horrible. Neil is not in this to make money. He's got plenty. He's passionate about music.
A number of double blind tests show that almost no one are able to hear the difference between properly encoded 320kbps and original, including those that are absolutely convinced that they do. The mind is a beautiful thing.
The main problem with Neil is that he is mixing up different issues. Is overly dynamically compressed music a real problem? Absolutely. But that is the mixing and mastering, not related to format. Are there bad low-bitrate MP3 encodings out there? Absolutely, but with higher bitrate and better encoders being the norm it is a problem going away on its own. Are there any reasons at all to go lossless? there is one; if you want to keep the ability to re-compress to different formats/bitrate, then you can avoid compounding of compression artefacts across multiple generations (sort of like how you shouldn't jpeg a jpeg).
And don't get me started on the various snake oil attempts to describe why higher bitrate and higher samplingrates are needed, actually, just read this: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmo...
From the article:
"To steal the coins of users who encrypt their private keys with passwords, many of the Bitcoin stealing programs also included keyloggers designed to eavesdrop on users’ typing. Even more tricky are malware types that wait for users to copy a Bitcoin address they want to send bitcoins to into their clipboard. When the user tries to paste the address, the malware replaces it with a different string, irreversibly sending the currency to the malware operator’s wallet. That last method never sends data to a remote server, so it can be much harder to detect, SecureWorks’ researchers say. In fact, they tested a range of antivirus scanners on their malware samples and found that roughly 50% went unnoticed."
Yeah, it is also a key generator, so? I can sort of understand the FSF anti-DRM stance on this, but that is the same for Win7 and I thought this was about 7 vs 8, no difference. There might be with tpm2.0 but that isn't out yet and my hardware won't autoupdate
Enjoy your always-on TPM module then. I'm sure you like it, after all it's "trusted"
Can you explain what exactly you mean by this? I guess that what is essentially a key store chip on my motherboard is "always on", since it receives power, but if you don't want disk encryption or secure boot, don't use it.
List 5 reasons to back up your claims and I may be interested...
Well, some of my reasons: It starts and sleeps/resumes faster on my PC. It has better multi-monitor support. It has greatly improved task manager and better file manager (file copy and native mounting of ISOs and VHDs). It has improved security. And I like the full syncing between machines (settings, data,etc), but that requires that you accept to use Microsoft Account and the built-in skydrive of course. And I like the new power-user shortcut menu in 8.1 (it hasn't just addressed the critique against 8.0 of difficult to find menu options, but made it even better than 7). It definitely seems to be less aggressive than 7 on restarts (after updates), not sure if that is a system change or just less nagging, anyway good.
Anyone who I have known who wanted to buy a new computer, I have told them to make sure they get windows 7. Those people have been pretty ok. If Microsoft wasn't trying to kill their good product (Win 7) by pushing everyone to Win 8, they'd be fine.
So, I get the hate on metro, but it is mostly easily avoided, and Win8 desktop is better than Win7. I'm running Win8 and even though I don't use and don't like metro on a non-touch machine, I would never want to downgrade to Win7.
How is the possession or viewing of child porn a crime at all? I dare someone to prove the harm in possessing/viewing cold porn
If you were a victim of child abuse, you wouldn't find anything wrong with movies of that abuse being legally distributed for peoples pleasure?
what will it take for general acceptance to finally take hold?
A red LED that glows when the 'glasses' are actually recording and is dark when they aren't.
Which is easily disabled. Even laptop camera lights that claimed to be "hardware inline" has been showed to have exploits that malware can use to disable the light while recording (they won't really be as "inline" as you think because of noise issues with that, and the fact that many cameras these days double as light sensors, so they are always on). If you are the owner it is even easier, you can cover up the light, or disconnect a wire.
Yeah, that one piece of malware is a real pain.
Yes, malware for OSX and iOS does exist. It is very possible. But the problem seems to be about the same size as malware for Linux at this stage. By that I mean there is very little of anecdotal evidence of widespread, active malware in the wild targeting OSX, iOS and Linux. The same can't be said for Windows.
So far I've never been hit on OSX, iOS or Linux. I've had plenty of Windows machines go down in flames though. I still have friends of family for which this is a fairly regular occurrence. Even myself, I had a fully patched Windows VM just for testing websites in IE. No antivirus installed. Visited some legitimate news and html/css sites... Boom. Malware installed.
Mac Malware Outbreak Is Bigger than 'Conficker'
proper aliases that are not revealing your real email and can be easily discontinued with a bounce to sender as result.
I haven’t studied SMTP for a long while, but I think what you’re describing isn’t possible with ordinary email over the ’net. That sounds like something restricted to an internal mail system since it requires a centralized database of mappings between aliases and email addresses.
No, Outlook.com has solved this the way it should be. They are using real standalone email addresses for aliases. It can be completely different than your main email, and by default it shows up in a separate folder in your inbox. If you kill the alias, it is for the rest of the world the same as killing a standalone email address, and mail to it will bounce.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It's not hard. You just have to actually bother to turn up and vote them out. Most other western nations than US have a stronger grasp of this concept.
Just so you know: That "97 percent of all scientists in the world" silliness came from a rigged "poll."
Basically, an AGW-supporting scientist polled a number of his AGW-supporting scientist friends and co-workers - 30 or so - and asked them if they thought AGW was real.
That's where your number came from. Which should tell you something about the actual support for AGW among the scientific population at large...
They recently came up with another poll, where they cherry-picked a bunch of papers, and said "97% of scientific papers agree!" While not mentioning that only about a third of them actually addressed AGW, and they got their "new" 97% by only looking at 65 papers. Out of 12,000. Oops.
ok, so.. read through all of this page, and repeat that this is just a guy polling his friends:
http://climate.nasa.gov/scient...
...that the money for this transaction ultimately comes from all of us. We bought the products and services of the companies whose marketing and advertising rely on Facebook. And those of us who have FB accounts, (along with those of us who don't do our best to stop FB tracking us all over the Web), have made Facebook at least look like it's worth the money those companies hand over to it. That's how Facebook can pay almost a thousand years' of WhatApp's current revenue for the fledgling company.
A large part of what Facebook is paying for is to not have their position threatened. A large part of what built Facebook was photo sharing, can't risk anyone steal that position from them, which is why they also bought Instagram. Seeing it as a $19B investment to safeguard their $170B valuation makes more sense than trying to find the value in current SnapChat business.
They find searches based on what people click on when they search things.
If chinese language users in the filtered system can't see those links then they will have a lower rank if that search system is combined with the unfiltered system.
Therefore, the real solution is to compartmentalize the two lists rather then combining them.
This is a very good point. This report doesn't appear to say directly that search results are actually missing (eg. outright blocked), just that they are different. It if is just a case of different automated ranking based on user behaviour then that's another story.
The most popular casual games for iOS are not Flash (unless you count AIR). Nor are the most popular casual games for Android.
That is true, but doesn't change anything when people are on their PC or don't have a large screen tablet with keyboard and mouse accessories (many games categories are not suitable for mobile screen, or touch). And, especially for particular games categories, they have no-where near the rich catalogue of Flash web games, which importantly also are mostly free while the good iOS/Android ones are mostly paid or free versions that is not the full game.
How far away are we from gaining a critical mass of website who don't necessarily need flash anymore, with the arrival of HTML 5? How long before the scale tips?
When most of the popular casual games are non-Flash.
Even knowing all the evils and dangers of Flash, if I for some reason were forced to stop using most websites and had to chose only a few to continue using, this would be on that list of what to keep (I'm a tower defense game addict).
no we're saying you're using a strawman: the story you're referring to was about a certain *version* of IE that was now in the single-digit market share.
No, it wasn't: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
You needn't use IE for it to be useful to attackers. It is the one thing present on EVERY SINGLE system running an OS from MS, and it is the one single thing on every MS OS operated PC that is not only well suited to making connections via internet but also the one that the MS firewall routinely allows to in the default setting.
The good old "we send the user a bogus EXE in mail" isn't really good anymore because of the MS firewall and UAC. Works like a charm, though, with a bogus script abusing an IE vulnerability since IE is considered a "trusted" application by default.
IE is by default running in protected mode, a significantly less trusted zone than the user. If you already have a script running on the user system you already have higher privileges and less sandboxing than if you try to hand it off to IE.
but could not hook into the OS because MS would not allow it to allow them a lead.
If you by "hook into the OS" mean anything technical, that is not what the EU case against Microsoft on IE was about at all. It was about Microsoft having an unfair advantage in the browser market because they could bundle their browser with their market dominating operating system, and the competitors couldn't.
It was only about the OS as a distribution channel competitors didn't have access to, not any form of technical integration advantage or the IE was "deeply integrated into the core of the OS" myth (btw. on modern Windows exactly similar to Safari/WebKit in OSX). This is also why the browser ballot that forced Microsoft to offer competitors browsers as an option at install was the EU solution. They made no changes to Windows or IE or changed the way any browser behave on Windows, they just gave them distribution, as that was the complaint to begin with.
Bit of a tangent, but this story got me thinking about this: http://shamonica.com/2012/05/wizard-spotting-wizards-on-the-bus/
I mean you have Star Wars, Star Trek, Senerity, Farscape (I guess), Dune (maybe). A few movies from the 60's/70's (silent running, 2001, whatever).
What other sci-fi movies are there? It's all shit.
Not shit: District 9. Bladerunner. Alien. Aliens. The Matrix (1). The Fifth Element. Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
If only it were that simple. Even if you choose not to share any information, your friends can tag you in photos,
No. They cannot. You control if you want to let your friends tag you, approve tags, or flat out block tags.
At least he brought us this.
Yeah, from my perspective I can't help but to notice the huge boner most people on internet have towards market share and mainstream market acceptance, regardless if it's for smartphones, computers, game consoles and accessories or services. People just seem to forget that business are about making money. Having a huge share may have some help with it, but that is not always true.
Depends on whether you are thinking as an investor or consumer I guess. I find it puzzling when consumers have a huge boner for the extreme profit margin a manufacturer is extracting from them ;)
Can I add a physical keyboard? It seems like I am one of only a handful of people on the planet that still likes them so I would love to add that although I am not holding my breath.
I think a lot of people like physical keyboards. I've had various full qwerty physical keyboard phones that have been far superior to any predictive touch input, for writing emails etc. The problem is that the cost is too high compared to the simplicity of touch screens handling everything. And that is cost both in terms of production cost and the added size/weight and breakage risk.