How can the reviewer dump all over non-dos data recovery software without at least doing a comparison of what the alternatives were able to recover?
I've used R-Studio to recover 3 dead hard drives now, and it got absolutely everything every time. Last time there was a physically damaged SCSI hard drive which I got _everything_ off. (It showed up as an unpartitioned drive and had tens of thousands of bad sectors).
R-Studio is idiot proof windows software which does things like let you save off an image of the entire drive to another location before you start playing.
This guy gives a glowing review to software which has a user interface from the mid-eighties and limited him to recovering 32GB. Even then he didn't get all of his files back! How can he tell whether this is because they're gone or the software is lousy????
Re:But what does it actually sound like???
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 1
For the true Audiophile:
Windows Media Audio 8 encoding captures more of the original WAV audio file than MP3 or Real Audio 8. We have created an audio demonstration so you can hear and compare what gets left behind when encoding with MP3, Real Audio, or Windows Media 8.
What has been removed by lossy compression has very little bearing on whether the result sounds identical to the original or not.
I think Microsoft knows this - they weren't inviting you or me to check out this dubious piece of evidence; they left it for the same crowd that buy $1000 power cables and green marker pens to enthuse over.
If you look up the above URL at archive.org you'll see that they had a whole lot of compressed audio in different formats to compare.
After repeatedly claiming that they are better than mp3 (at 1/3rd of the size), they then leave mp3 out of their comparison table of audio samples.
I think it is also quite instructional to actually listen to their samples - they're all actually pretty rubbish, but I definitely prefer the realplayer 'softening' effect to the wma 'tin-can' effect: maybe they were hoping you'd take their word for their superiority and pass on actually listening.
Re:But what does it actually sound like???
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 1
I find the opposite!
I don't mind mp3 down to 128kbps most of the time (I can tell the difference between this and an original, but it doesn't annoy me).
112kbps mp3 is annoyingly "swishy" for me, even as background music on pc speakers.
112kbps ogg sounds absolutely fine for me; even 96kbps is ok sounding. Any lower though, and I do hear annoying artifacts.
But what does it actually sound like???
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't think graphs are all that useful for comparing lossy sound compression.
Microsoft likes to show how their wma looks better than the other compression methods... it does look beautiful in graphs, but it sounds all tinny and horrible.
I don't care if the compressed frequency response graph looks nothing like the original frequency graph, as long as my ears are unable to tell the difference between the two.
I just had to upgrade a whole bunch of different Vaios (several each of Z600NE, Z600HEK, QR10 and SR21) to Win2k and WinXP from Win98 and WinME.
My last experience was nearly a year ago, at which time there were no drivers of any kind available online for my Z600HEK.
This time round every model of laptop had drivers for everything from Win98 -> WinXP online... You just type in the model and serial off the bottom of the laptop and hey presto - downloads itemised by OS shows nearly every OS Microsoft ever released. It even included things like Norton Antivirus.
It's a major step up, as easy to find drivers and apps as Compaq or Dell.
I can't comment on all of the streams, but the radio 6 stream they were running for a while was well under 135 at -q3 the evening I listened. It was sitting around 112 most of the time.
I too have gone and encoded my CD collection at -q5. Every now and then the lack of any portable player (£400 PDAs don't really count) depresses me, but listening to 192kbps mp3s brings me back around to the OGG camp.
I ran this last night and had it generate 20 keys for each of the products it supported.
Out of 20 Office XP keys, 3 were exactly the same.
For Windows XP, there were two pairs of identical keys.
I have a feeling that there are going to be an awful lot of people using the same keys.
I have my entire cd collection as.ogg files, so I was quite keen to grab a HipZip. The disks are expensive and quite small, but I figured I'd live with that.
The problem is that the player is huge! I don't mind a largish player if it has a large capacity, but the HipZip is easily the largest non-hard drive mp3 player around. Heavy too.
I've been waiting two months now for any other device to come out with some support for.ogg, to no avail.
Seeing as every mp3 player advertises upgradability to new codecs, it'd be nice to see more that 1 supporting.ogg by now.
I can't comment on the situation in the US, but when I worked as third level support at a MS Certified Support Centre (or whatever they're called now), any customer with a support agreement got all their server issues passed by us as soon as they were logged, and we in turn had incidents logged with our MS Regional Support Centre pretty much straight away if there wasn't an obvious fix.
I will admit that the first response from MS was often some first level engineer asking us to check vaguely related KB articles, but as long as we included reasonable detail when logging an incident and preemptively listed KB articles which we'd tried / didn't apply then we got a proper engineer reasonably smartly.
If the problem was with something like Exchange Server then we'd usually get a very experience guy straight away. Also, you get to know the MS guys and I'd ring a good engineer direct if I was getting mucked about.
There's your Technical Account Manager at MS too - if we logged an incident with MS at the wrong priority or had been too slow in providing MS with followup information they'd asked for, you could guarantee our TAM would be on the phone to our manager. We could call him direct if we thought we weren't getting adequate service from the MS engineer.
If you had a Compaq Datacenter Server (for example) then Compaq would be your Premier Support Centre. They'd definitely have a named third level support person dealing with you, who would definitely be able to talk to real MS engineers very quickly (when we logged a Priority A incident MS guaranteed a knowledgable engineer would phone us day or night within an hour - it was in Microsoft's SLA with us).
The couple of times large customers encountered bugs that didn't already have hotfixes available, we got new hotfixes created by QFE remarkable quickly. Service packs for things like Terminal Server did come out after NT Server service packs, but hotfixes were available or created for all of the issues we had (lots and lots - we had 10 or 12 stability related hotfixes in our standard image when we did a very early rollout of a Terminal Server farm).
I'm pretty sure they were called Massive for quite some time before changing to Massive Attack... I bought my copy of Blue Lines quite soon after it was released and all of the packing refers to Massive rather than Massive Attack.
I downloaded the Tk source a couple of years ago to make a small modification and ended up printing out and reading the whole thing for the pure pleasure of it.
It shows that C can be very easy (enjoyable even) to follow. The code's modularity and reuseability is miles better than most of the "Object Oriented" code I've seen too.
Slashdot Mirror
Smartfilter seems to have decided that the entire .cx domain is Category: Sex.
Guess I'll wait until I get home tonight to read the article.
How can the reviewer dump all over non-dos data recovery software without at least doing a comparison of what the alternatives were able to recover?
I've used R-Studio to recover 3 dead hard drives now, and it got absolutely everything every time.
Last time there was a physically damaged SCSI hard drive which I got _everything_ off. (It showed up as an unpartitioned drive and had tens of thousands of bad sectors).
R-Studio is idiot proof windows software which does things like let you save off an image of the entire drive to another location before you start playing.
This guy gives a glowing review to software which has a user interface from the mid-eighties and limited him to recovering 32GB.
Even then he didn't get all of his files back! How can he tell whether this is because they're gone or the software is lousy????
What has been removed by lossy compression has very little bearing on whether the result sounds identical to the original or not.
I think Microsoft knows this - they weren't inviting you or me to check out this dubious piece of evidence; they left it for the same crowd that buy $1000 power cables and green marker pens to enthuse over.
If you look up the above URL at archive.org you'll see that they had a whole lot of compressed audio in different formats to compare.
After repeatedly claiming that they are better than mp3 (at 1/3rd of the size), they then leave mp3 out of their comparison table of audio samples.
I think it is also quite instructional to actually listen to their samples - they're all actually pretty rubbish, but I definitely prefer the realplayer 'softening' effect to the wma 'tin-can' effect: maybe they were hoping you'd take their word for their superiority and pass on actually listening.
I find the opposite!
I don't mind mp3 down to 128kbps most of the time (I can tell the difference between this and an original, but it doesn't annoy me).
112kbps mp3 is annoyingly "swishy" for me, even as background music on pc speakers.
112kbps ogg sounds absolutely fine for me; even 96kbps is ok sounding. Any lower though, and I do hear annoying artifacts.
I don't think graphs are all that useful for comparing lossy sound compression.
Microsoft likes to show how their wma looks better than the other compression methods... it does look beautiful in graphs, but it sounds all tinny and horrible.
I don't care if the compressed frequency response graph looks nothing like the original frequency graph, as long as my ears are unable to tell the difference between the two.
Funny this should come up!
I just had to upgrade a whole bunch of different Vaios (several each of Z600NE, Z600HEK, QR10 and SR21) to Win2k and WinXP from Win98 and WinME.
My last experience was nearly a year ago, at which time there were no drivers of any kind available online for my Z600HEK.
This time round every model of laptop had drivers for everything from Win98 -> WinXP online... You just type in the model and serial off the bottom of the laptop and hey presto - downloads itemised by OS shows nearly every OS Microsoft ever released. It even included things like Norton Antivirus.
It's a major step up, as easy to find drivers and apps as Compaq or Dell.
I can't comment on all of the streams, but the radio 6 stream they were running for a while was well under 135 at -q3 the evening I listened.
It was sitting around 112 most of the time.
I too have gone and encoded my CD collection at -q5. Every now and then the lack of any portable player (£400 PDAs don't really count) depresses me, but listening to 192kbps mp3s brings me back around to the OGG camp.
I ran this last night and had it generate 20 keys for each of the products it supported.
Out of 20 Office XP keys, 3 were exactly the same.
For Windows XP, there were two pairs of identical keys.
I have a feeling that there are going to be an awful lot of people using the same keys.
I have my entire cd collection as .ogg files, so I was quite keen to grab a HipZip. The disks are expensive and quite small, but I figured I'd live with that.
.ogg, to no avail.
.ogg by now.
The problem is that the player is huge! I don't mind a largish player if it has a large capacity, but the HipZip is easily the largest non-hard drive mp3 player around. Heavy too.
I've been waiting two months now for any other device to come out with some support for
Seeing as every mp3 player advertises upgradability to new codecs, it'd be nice to see more that 1 supporting
I can't comment on the situation in the US, but when I worked as third level support at a MS Certified Support Centre (or whatever they're called now), any customer with a support agreement got all their server issues passed by us as soon as they were logged, and we in turn had incidents logged with our MS Regional Support Centre pretty much straight away if there wasn't an obvious fix.
I will admit that the first response from MS was often some first level engineer asking us to check vaguely related KB articles, but as long as we included reasonable detail when logging an incident and preemptively listed KB articles which we'd tried / didn't apply then we got a proper engineer reasonably smartly.
If the problem was with something like Exchange Server then we'd usually get a very experience guy straight away. Also, you get to know the MS guys and I'd ring a good engineer direct if I was getting mucked about.
There's your Technical Account Manager at MS too - if we logged an incident with MS at the wrong priority or had been too slow in providing MS with followup information they'd asked for, you could guarantee our TAM would be on the phone to our manager. We could call him direct if we thought we weren't getting adequate service from the MS engineer.
If you had a Compaq Datacenter Server (for example) then Compaq would be your Premier Support Centre. They'd definitely have a named third level support person dealing with you, who would definitely be able to talk to real MS engineers very quickly (when we logged a Priority A incident MS guaranteed a knowledgable engineer would phone us day or night within an hour - it was in Microsoft's SLA with us).
The couple of times large customers encountered bugs that didn't already have hotfixes available, we got new hotfixes created by QFE remarkable quickly.
Service packs for things like Terminal Server did come out after NT Server service packs, but hotfixes were available or created for all of the issues we had (lots and lots - we had 10 or 12 stability related hotfixes in our standard image when we did a very early rollout of a Terminal Server farm).
I'm pretty sure they were called Massive for quite some time before changing to Massive Attack...
I bought my copy of Blue Lines quite soon after it was released and all of the packing refers to Massive rather than Massive Attack.
I downloaded the Tk source a couple of years ago to make a small modification and ended up printing out and reading the whole thing for the pure pleasure of it. It shows that C can be very easy (enjoyable even) to follow. The code's modularity and reuseability is miles better than most of the "Object Oriented" code I've seen too.