That's pretty meaningless; 192kbps average will vary from Xing/WMA quality to practically transparent depending on the settings and version of Lame used.
Now, from their website: To encode the files on Emusic, we used LAME version 3.92. The import option that was used is -alt-preset standard.
I would have prefered version 3.90.3, but never mind; at least they're not using -r3mix:)
(Actually I would have prefered FLAC, but that's just me..)
Most inexperienced home users don't feel a need to do most of what you listed.
I don't care. Nobody ever said everything had to be aimed at the average user.
Many of the things you listed need a second computer; many families can afford only one.
Again, so what? Aside from all that being perfectly possible with a 20 486 or so, why should it make any difference to me what the average user has, wants, or is capable of?
Many of the things you listed (receive and process e-mail, run web servers) are prohibited by typical acceptable use policies of residential Internet access providers.
Um, receiving mail over POP3 and filtering it locally are against most AuP's? Since when? And there's nothing stopping you running a webserver locally; in fact, by "testbed" there's the suggestion that it will only be running internally (although it's not).
GUI programs can feel as easy as your text mode programs provided that they're made keyboard accessible.
No, not really. If you can point to a mail client which beats my mutt setup which is 90% controlled by the cursor keys, and which is flexible enough to read mail from my own ~/Mail/ directory layout complete with automatically filtered mailing list messages, maybe I'll be vaguely interested, but really I don't see why I should bother when mutt is perfect for me.
Most commercial PC games are made for inexperienced home users with one computer per household.
What do games have to do with anything? I have a WinXP desktop for that. I'm talking about a *headless* server that sits under my desk and serves the house's networking needs, not a games machine or a desktop.
In other words, you confirm that your time is worth little to nothing.
Yeah, because Windows is so wonderfully suited to minimal-maintainence outside-facing headless servers which process and filter email, NAT/firewall and bandwidth shape networks, run testbed web and database servers, and run textmode apps which I find more user friendly than any GUI equivilent I've ever used; all while making use of SMP and not bankrupting me in the process.
Oh, wait -- it isn't. And I don't even get that warm fuzzy feeling from using BSD licenced software. Damn.
Or the wheel... I mean, talk about beating a dead horse.
Yeah, they should be using Microsoft Antigrav 2003. Ok, so it takes 3 minutes to start, runs so low that the car will keep bottoming out, has a tendancy to cut out for no apparant reason, and needs 5 times as much power as an equivilent wheel driven car, but hey, it's new!
Am I the only one who's more interested in that big-ass cooling system, the in-OS BIOS updating, the fan control, the SATA and the GBit ethernet? Who cares about a pointless ATA hack?
Ruby uses { } for hashes (h = {'foo' => 'bar',:wibble =>:wobble}) and blocks (h.each {|k,v| puts "#{k} => #{v}" }), although do..end is more common, and general stuff like methods and classes use def..end, class..end etc.
In general I find Ruby's way easier to read than Python's, especially in the case of weenies who haven't yet learnt to indent properly and have tabs/spaces randomly mixed in with their indents (a practice that seems so common as to outnumber the more traditional spaces OR tabs methods many times over).
It doesn't bother me that much though.. I just find Python less natural than Ruby. I think I'm spoiled by it;)
I wouldn't really care about the vid. card. There are much noisier components in a system, mainly the powersupply and some hard drives can be quite loud
HD's these days are amazingly quiet. PSU's don't tend to be that loud. CPU's and GPU's are the two hottest components in most systems, and GPU's tend to be squeezed into very tight areas, meaning their fans are often rather powerful to offset the small heatsink. Consequently, GPU coolers on modern GFX cards can be one of, if not THE loudest parts of a system these days.
Certainly on my machine; with a 5400RPM fan cooling my Athlon 1.4GHz Tbird (hottest AMD until the XP3000+), a dual fan Antec PSU, two 120mm case fans and no less than four HD's (including two amazingly quiet Seagate 7200.7's), the GPU cooler on my Ti4200 is the loudest component.
I'm sick of it telling me I need to register; I've done it once and promptly forgot about it. The next time I used a nytimes link, it told me to log in/register again. Their site isn't valuable enough for me to bother looking up what username/password I ended up using, so I just close the browser window and move on.
never stop until you die. This keeps you happy, healthy, and employed
If you're lucky, the latter may be true. If. I wouldn't count on either of the other two.
Sadly, I doubt humanity is even slightly mature enough to pick a route that doesn't involve working everyone to death for the sake of a largely pointless and arbitary system. Who cares if everyone's working 100 hour weeks and needs drugs to help them not kill themselves, profit's up 5%!
PHP sessions only store a session key too. The same may not necessarily be said about all PHP developers, of course, but PHP itself isn't *that* retarded (usually):)
Cookies keep client-specific data outside URL's and in a well specified, preditable and easy to manage system. You can set your browser to accept or reject them at will quite easily; even IE's really quite good at handling this automatically.
Compare this with storing the same data in the URL; instead of setting a SID=12345 cookie to track your session id, it gets tacked onto the end of every link, Referer header, etc; now you have no automated method to accept or reject the "cookie", nor much control over having it leaking into access logs all over the place by way of referer headers.
Congratulations, by not using cookies you just reduced the user's control over their own privacy! Well done!
He said the end is near; we only have a factor of 100 left in density?then the Seagate guys are out of ideas.
Hopefully by then they'll have had some new ideas.
How about custom universes designed for data storage; instead of the big bang in the subuniverse creating those useless star things, have trillions of RAIDed HD's form spontaniously, with the SATA connector poking out of a wormhole linking both universes - the ultimate in portable mass storage!
You could even adjust the time ratios on either side of the wormhole; for every second in this universe, a billion could pass in the HD universe! That should make formatting it a bit less painful...
as harddrives get more and more high-tech, the reliability seems to be taking a big nosedive
Not really. HD's are now more reliable than they've ever been; they're just a lot more common (9 HD's in my various systems at home now), and often not treated with the respect such precise electronics need.
Tips to making sure your HD's at least reach their design life:
Don't buy from that cheapo supplier who's boxes are always a bit mangled. HD's don't like shock, even when they're off.
Keep your drives cool. Especially now 7200RPM is so common, drives frequently report temperatures rivaling that of CPU's. Heat is not good for drives or their electronics, and a lot of cases have their 3.5" bays in air deadzones. A slow, effectively silent fan could mean the difference between a 3 year lifespan and a 7 year one.
HD's are fragile. Treat them like eggshells; don't force them into that tight little bay on your cheapo case and end up ramming it into the front of the bay. Duh!
Yeah I know what FLAC is, but streamed? I mean, first you have the issue of encoding flac in realtime,
Erm, FLAC is rather fast at encoding, provided you stick to the more sane settings and avoid --super-secret-totally-impractical-compression-lev el (yes, that is a real setting).
but the bitrate on flac is far too high for most connections.
It's fine for LAN situations; fileserver under stairs, player under TV, stream over network. The sort of people who would do something like this are precisely the sort of user who would appreciate lossless compression.
Is this because most people are skeptical about what happens after they quit the game or because they're enjoying it too much? Even though it isn't "very fun"?
Reasons I haven't quit:
Real Life sucks, but quitting involves the complete and utter termination of existance. Not existing has got to be the least fun thing imaginable, if only because you're no longer around to experience it. Ever.
Real Life sucks now, has sucked, and is quite likely to suck in the future, but there's always the chance that it won't. And even if it does, there might be some quite nice bits. Even a 0.1% chance of things turning out worthwhile is better than 0% chance of experiencing anything ever again.
Quitting is a one-way process. The lack of QuickSave and QuickLoad was a major oversight by the development team, and sadly looks to be extremely difficult to add after release.
Quitting is not a guaranteed process; you can get through most of the way only for the process to be interrupted, leaving the possibility of you being stuck only partly in the game, unable to interact with it properly. You'll quit eventually, but that might take years.
Quitting may also be painful, and ruin the game for other players.
I think I speak for many of us when I say: "Life sucks, but what else is there?"
Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn trilogy actually had something like this happen on Earth; waste heat from centuries of increasing energy use pushed the climate into one that's practically unlivable. The people of Earth live in huge reinforced domes while "Armada" storms tear into everything.
Anyone care to take a guess at how much heat we would need to pump out in order to significantly impact global temperatures directly?
The iTunes Music Store requires a Mac equipped with iTunes 4 and Mac OS X Version 10.1.5 or later.... 128 kbps... AAC
So, not only do I have to use a specific OS and a specific application, I have no choice over format and have to use a low bitrate AAC? I don't think so.
Sure, I'll pay, but not for DRM enabled "CD quality" (i.e. 64kbps) WMA, or even unprotected 128kbps MP3.
Let me download a high quality FLAC (maybe even optionally at higher bitrates; 24bit 96khz would make audiophiles cream) so I can transcode to whatever format I like. Let me download a smaller MP3 or Ogg at a range of qualities. Let me have my full fair use out of it, and maybe charge on a sliding scale based on the different sizes. Hell, let me get it elsewhere and just pay for a cheap license so I can support my favourite artist.
Let me not have to worry about whether some dumbass transcoded all his Ogg's from his MP3's encoded with Xing and ripped from a scratched CD in burst mode. Let me not have to spend 3 weeks downloading an album from a billion different encodes. Let me not have to wait for someone to post something to news and spend hours every day hunting through 100's of MB's of headers.
If the music industry can't compete with slow annoying overloaded networks full of substandard rips of music that doesn't even come properly indexed, it doesn't deserve to make money.
And no, pouring more money into lawsuits does not count as competing.
Re:WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU....
on
Phish Moves To FLAC
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm one of the people who finds the 128kbs AAC files from the Apple iTunes Music Store to be superior in quality to the old 192kbs VBR MP3s I made of the same CD track with LAME with the advice of r3mix.net
Well, part of that will be that r3mix is bogus; it's going in the right direction, but the lame --r3mix option is by no means as good as MP3 gets at those bitrates.
I, like you, once thought r3mix ruled, and ripped all my CD's with it.
Then I discovered the --alt-preset settings and EAC and.. well, ripped my CD's again, using --alt-preset standard.
Then OGG Vorbis arrived, and I re-ripped (with EAC normalization) to Vorbis -q6.
Then I discovered ReplayGain, and, joy of joys, re-ripped again. Guess what? A few of my CD's have been damaged becase they've been stored badly or dropped during their lifetime.
Now I've got MusePack and new Vorbis encoders tuned to higher bitrates, and I'm looking to rip them *again*, and some of my music's stuck several formats behind.
The point is, codecs change, codec tunings change, software changes, hardware changes, and *people* change, and everyone experiences these changes differently -- I get a new hi-fi and start noticing artifacts in some of my encoded MP3's; you get a new portable and start wanting 64kbps MP3 files. Your portable gets a firmware update and switch to Vorbis; Vorbis 1.1 comes out, and I want to benefit from the higher quality at lower bitrates.
With lossless sources, everyone can burn a perfect original to CD and generate precisely what they want on their HD without the evils of transcoding lossy formats, and they can change should the need or desire arise. Not so if they just get a 160kbps MP3 to play with.
Accurate Stream means EAC doesn't need to perform (expensive) software jitter correction. I'm not aware of any cases where you'd want to disable it when your drive supports it; unlike C2, it seems to be perfectly safe.
You can verify whether it makes any difference by ripping multiple times and comparing the resulting wav's, or by using Test and comparing the CRC's.
Re:How does FLAC compares to others?
on
Phish Moves To FLAC
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This means that the quality is CD-quality
More accurately, it means the audio stream that comes out of the FLAC decoder is bit-for-bit identical to the audio stream that went into it.
For those interested in backing up their music CD's, using Exact Audio Copy in a properly configured Secure Mode (For most people, this means: Drive caches audio, Accurate Stream, NO C2) and setting it to produce a WAV image and cuesheet with detected gaps, then FLACing the WAV and including the cuesheet in the FLAC with the relevent command line option should be just about perfect; burn it to DVD or store it on a HD, and put the original somewhere safe.
This has the added advantage of being a good source to play about with other encoding methods, since you can transcode from FLAC to other formats without any loss of quality; you can run ABX tests against the original and your encoded files to see if you can tell the difference, re-encode at a lower bitrate, and try again to give yourself an idea of what sort of quality settings you can use.
Nothing you can't also do with WAV, obviously, but FLAC's smaller;)
(Foobar 2000 comes highly recommended for cue/(flac|ape|wav|etc) images and ABXing with it's ABX plugin).
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That's pretty meaningless; 192kbps average will vary from Xing/WMA quality to practically transparent depending on the settings and version of Lame used.
Now, from their website: To encode the files on Emusic, we used LAME version 3.92. The import option that was used is -alt-preset standard.
I would have prefered version 3.90.3, but never mind; at least they're not using -r3mix
(Actually I would have prefered FLAC, but that's just me..)
I don't care. Nobody ever said everything had to be aimed at the average user.
Again, so what? Aside from all that being perfectly possible with a 20 486 or so, why should it make any difference to me what the average user has, wants, or is capable of?
Um, receiving mail over POP3 and filtering it locally are against most AuP's? Since when? And there's nothing stopping you running a webserver locally; in fact, by "testbed" there's the suggestion that it will only be running internally (although it's not).
No, not really. If you can point to a mail client which beats my mutt setup which is 90% controlled by the cursor keys, and which is flexible enough to read mail from my own ~/Mail/ directory layout complete with automatically filtered mailing list messages, maybe I'll be vaguely interested, but really I don't see why I should bother when mutt is perfect for me.
What do games have to do with anything? I have a WinXP desktop for that. I'm talking about a *headless* server that sits under my desk and serves the house's networking needs, not a games machine or a desktop.
Yeah, because Windows is so wonderfully suited to minimal-maintainence outside-facing headless servers which process and filter email, NAT/firewall and bandwidth shape networks, run testbed web and database servers, and run textmode apps which I find more user friendly than any GUI equivilent I've ever used; all while making use of SMP and not bankrupting me in the process.
Oh, wait -- it isn't. And I don't even get that warm fuzzy feeling from using BSD licenced software. Damn.
Yeah, they should be using Microsoft Antigrav 2003. Ok, so it takes 3 minutes to start, runs so low that the car will keep bottoming out, has a tendancy to cut out for no apparant reason, and needs 5 times as much power as an equivilent wheel driven car, but hey, it's new!
Who needs maturity, anyway?
Am I the only one who's more interested in that big-ass cooling system, the in-OS BIOS updating, the fan control, the SATA and the GBit ethernet? Who cares about a pointless ATA hack?
Ruby uses { } for hashes (h = {'foo' => 'bar', :wibble => :wobble}) and blocks (h.each {|k,v| puts "#{k} => #{v}" }), although do..end is more common, and general stuff like methods and classes use def..end, class..end etc.
;)
In general I find Ruby's way easier to read than Python's, especially in the case of weenies who haven't yet learnt to indent properly and have tabs/spaces randomly mixed in with their indents (a practice that seems so common as to outnumber the more traditional spaces OR tabs methods many times over).
It doesn't bother me that much though.. I just find Python less natural than Ruby. I think I'm spoiled by it
Thermaltake Aquarius II, £60 for an all-included watercooling kit. Reasonable enough for you?
Not completely silent, but 29dBA isn't that far off.
HD's these days are amazingly quiet. PSU's don't tend to be that loud. CPU's and GPU's are the two hottest components in most systems, and GPU's tend to be squeezed into very tight areas, meaning their fans are often rather powerful to offset the small heatsink. Consequently, GPU coolers on modern GFX cards can be one of, if not THE loudest parts of a system these days.
Certainly on my machine; with a 5400RPM fan cooling my Athlon 1.4GHz Tbird (hottest AMD until the XP3000+), a dual fan Antec PSU, two 120mm case fans and no less than four HD's (including two amazingly quiet Seagate 7200.7's), the GPU cooler on my Ti4200 is the loudest component.
I'm sick of it telling me I need to register; I've done it once and promptly forgot about it. The next time I used a nytimes link, it told me to log in/register again. Their site isn't valuable enough for me to bother looking up what username/password I ended up using, so I just close the browser window and move on.
If you're lucky, the latter may be true. If. I wouldn't count on either of the other two.
Sadly, I doubt humanity is even slightly mature enough to pick a route that doesn't involve working everyone to death for the sake of a largely pointless and arbitary system. Who cares if everyone's working 100 hour weeks and needs drugs to help them not kill themselves, profit's up 5%!
PHP sessions only store a session key too. The same may not necessarily be said about all PHP developers, of course, but PHP itself isn't *that* retarded (usually) :)
Cookies keep client-specific data outside URL's and in a well specified, preditable and easy to manage system. You can set your browser to accept or reject them at will quite easily; even IE's really quite good at handling this automatically.
Compare this with storing the same data in the URL; instead of setting a SID=12345 cookie to track your session id, it gets tacked onto the end of every link, Referer header, etc; now you have no automated method to accept or reject the "cookie", nor much control over having it leaking into access logs all over the place by way of referer headers.
Congratulations, by not using cookies you just reduced the user's control over their own privacy! Well done!
Hopefully by then they'll have had some new ideas.
How about custom universes designed for data storage; instead of the big bang in the subuniverse creating those useless star things, have trillions of RAIDed HD's form spontaniously, with the SATA connector poking out of a wormhole linking both universes - the ultimate in portable mass storage!
You could even adjust the time ratios on either side of the wormhole; for every second in this universe, a billion could pass in the HD universe! That should make formatting it a bit less painful...
*Runs off to patent office*
Not really. HD's are now more reliable than they've ever been; they're just a lot more common (9 HD's in my various systems at home now), and often not treated with the respect such precise electronics need.
Tips to making sure your HD's at least reach their design life:
Common sense, really...
Erm, FLAC is rather fast at encoding, provided you stick to the more sane settings and avoid --super-secret-totally-impractical-compression-le
It's fine for LAN situations; fileserver under stairs, player under TV, stream over network. The sort of people who would do something like this are precisely the sort of user who would appreciate lossless compression.
- Real Life sucks, but quitting involves the complete and utter termination of existance. Not existing has got to be the least fun thing imaginable, if only because you're no longer around to experience it. Ever.
- Real Life sucks now, has sucked, and is quite likely to suck in the future, but there's always the chance that it won't. And even if it does, there might be some quite nice bits. Even a 0.1% chance of things turning out worthwhile is better than 0% chance of experiencing anything ever again.
- Quitting is a one-way process. The lack of QuickSave and QuickLoad was a major oversight by the development team, and sadly looks to be extremely difficult to add after release.
- Quitting is not a guaranteed process; you can get through most of the way only for the process to be interrupted, leaving the possibility of you being stuck only partly in the game, unable to interact with it properly. You'll quit eventually, but that might take years.
- Quitting may also be painful, and ruin the game for other players.
I think I speak for many of us when I say: "Life sucks, but what else is there?"Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn trilogy actually had something like this happen on Earth; waste heat from centuries of increasing energy use pushed the climate into one that's practically unlivable. The people of Earth live in huge reinforced domes while "Armada" storms tear into everything.
Anyone care to take a guess at how much heat we would need to pump out in order to significantly impact global temperatures directly?
Like what? Not trying to troll, just wondering what reasons people would have not to want to give a sample.
Um...
So, not only do I have to use a specific OS and a specific application, I have no choice over format and have to use a low bitrate AAC? I don't think so.
Sure, I'll pay, but not for DRM enabled "CD quality" (i.e. 64kbps) WMA, or even unprotected 128kbps MP3.
Let me download a high quality FLAC (maybe even optionally at higher bitrates; 24bit 96khz would make audiophiles cream) so I can transcode to whatever format I like. Let me download a smaller MP3 or Ogg at a range of qualities. Let me have my full fair use out of it, and maybe charge on a sliding scale based on the different sizes. Hell, let me get it elsewhere and just pay for a cheap license so I can support my favourite artist.
Let me not have to worry about whether some dumbass transcoded all his Ogg's from his MP3's encoded with Xing and ripped from a scratched CD in burst mode. Let me not have to spend 3 weeks downloading an album from a billion different encodes. Let me not have to wait for someone to post something to news and spend hours every day hunting through 100's of MB's of headers.
If the music industry can't compete with slow annoying overloaded networks full of substandard rips of music that doesn't even come properly indexed, it doesn't deserve to make money.
And no, pouring more money into lawsuits does not count as competing.
Well, part of that will be that r3mix is bogus; it's going in the right direction, but the lame --r3mix option is by no means as good as MP3 gets at those bitrates.
I, like you, once thought r3mix ruled, and ripped all my CD's with it.
Then I discovered the --alt-preset settings and EAC and.. well, ripped my CD's again, using --alt-preset standard.
Then OGG Vorbis arrived, and I re-ripped (with EAC normalization) to Vorbis -q6.
Then I discovered ReplayGain, and, joy of joys, re-ripped again. Guess what? A few of my CD's have been damaged becase they've been stored badly or dropped during their lifetime.
Now I've got MusePack and new Vorbis encoders tuned to higher bitrates, and I'm looking to rip them *again*, and some of my music's stuck several formats behind.
The point is, codecs change, codec tunings change, software changes, hardware changes, and *people* change, and everyone experiences these changes differently -- I get a new hi-fi and start noticing artifacts in some of my encoded MP3's; you get a new portable and start wanting 64kbps MP3 files. Your portable gets a firmware update and switch to Vorbis; Vorbis 1.1 comes out, and I want to benefit from the higher quality at lower bitrates.
With lossless sources, everyone can burn a perfect original to CD and generate precisely what they want on their HD without the evils of transcoding lossy formats, and they can change should the need or desire arise. Not so if they just get a 160kbps MP3 to play with.
See for yourself.
Accurate Stream means EAC doesn't need to perform (expensive) software jitter correction. I'm not aware of any cases where you'd want to disable it when your drive supports it; unlike C2, it seems to be perfectly safe.
You can verify whether it makes any difference by ripping multiple times and comparing the resulting wav's, or by using Test and comparing the CRC's.
More accurately, it means the audio stream that comes out of the FLAC decoder is bit-for-bit identical to the audio stream that went into it.
For those interested in backing up their music CD's, using Exact Audio Copy in a properly configured Secure Mode (For most people, this means: Drive caches audio, Accurate Stream, NO C2) and setting it to produce a WAV image and cuesheet with detected gaps, then FLACing the WAV and including the cuesheet in the FLAC with the relevent command line option should be just about perfect; burn it to DVD or store it on a HD, and put the original somewhere safe.
This has the added advantage of being a good source to play about with other encoding methods, since you can transcode from FLAC to other formats without any loss of quality; you can run ABX tests against the original and your encoded files to see if you can tell the difference, re-encode at a lower bitrate, and try again to give yourself an idea of what sort of quality settings you can use.
Nothing you can't also do with WAV, obviously, but FLAC's smaller
(Foobar 2000 comes highly recommended for cue/(flac|ape|wav|etc) images and ABXing with it's ABX plugin).