No, there was significantly more bass using the ALAC audio without the EQ than there was using the AAC audio with the EQ settings. The sound was significantly different, the AAC audio was much emptier.
One thing audiophiles like to say is that you don't need an equalizer or bass/treble controls to listen to music with a good stereo. However, this rule pretty much applies if you have at least a $3000-ish stereo system. And you must have well-mastered, non-compressed music.
All my music is stored as ALAC, streamed to my Airport Express, and fed to the stereo with an optical cable. My brother was visiting once, and I mentioned how this stereo really does work without fiddling with an equalizer. In my absence, he hooked up his iPod to the computer and listened to his 192 kbit AAC audio, and in order to get it to sound good he had to fiddle with the bass & treble. When I came back he mentioned this, and showed me how it sounded without the adjustments (it was pretty flat). I have some of the same music he does, so I showed him how the same song sounds with lossless audio (with the stereo still having no adjustments). His jaw dropped. There was BASS and clear, distinct treble. It's just not there in compressed audio (at least, with 192kbit AAC. MP3 is hopeless).
If you have a single instrument playing solo, it doesn't really matter what codec you use. But once you add layers of instruments, or voices, that original instrument is going to sound pretty muffled with a poor codec.
Unfortunately the biggest problem with audio quality is the loudness war. Uncompressed music is unforgiving, and the loudness war is badly distorting the raw audio we get on CDs now. Right now the best way to get audio is DTS audio on a DVD. The loudness war has no affect on that, because DTS is a compressed format, and 'loudness' is just part of reconstructing the signal (and the dynamic range of DTS is phenomenal). Unfortunately, you can't get much music that way.
I have a hard time believing this (though I didn't read the article), but I suppose it's true. I grew up in Ontario. When I was in high school in the 90s, they really grilled us for spelling & grammar, especially "comma splices." I remember in particular the teachers "threatening" us by claiming that in university you lost something like 10% for each spelling mistake (though from my experience, they really didn't care outside of literature courses).
Where I work now we have a steady supply of co-op students. I remember we had this one student who made liberal use of chat-speak... over IM. I was actually pretty surprised to see a client-facing email of hers written perfectly eloquently.
If people are using 'cuz' in academic papers, they deserve to fail. Dang idiots.
Yeah, that's a pretty useless test. An "empty" song with one vocal and one instrument (I'm not talking about Billie Jean, I'm just stating a metric) wouldn't sound that wrong at a low bitrate. However, if you use a song with several distinct instruments, spanning high trebles and deep, smooth bass, and add in a clear voice, 48kbps will totally fall apart.
Basically, if you have content with detail & range at the same time, you require a higher bitrate. As far as how good it sounds, well, if the music requires a higher bitrate, it'll sound bad no matter what. If a codec is designed to make low bitrates sound "pleasing" vs. "accurate when possible," well, people might like the fact that it sounds pleasing. I don't know if AAC is designed to sound just pleasing at low bitrates, but it's not a bad idea since it can't sound accurate anyway.
It's like vinyl. People like vinyl because the process of converting vinyl waveforms to play on speakers is pretty easy, and purely analog. If you're going to listen to a CD with high quality speakers, you absolutely must have a great digital-to-audio converter somewhere in the chain. With an ordinary DAC, good speakers will just make the music sound very "discrete" and digital (cheap speakers won't reproduce that level of detail, but will probably sound better playing records than they do playing CDs).
More at issue is not the fact that they have the patent, but that they're trying to suck money out of everyone by participating in the IEEE and not signing a Letter of Assurance. A Letter of Assurance doesn't mean that you won't make money or won't sue, just that you'll charge reasonable royalties (IEEE's all about co-operation). Their requested royalty rates are several dollars per sale, which is stupid when you're talking about a technology that should be used in the cheapest devices. They signed a letter of assurance for 802.11a but kept silent on g and n. Then they started suing when g was adopted.
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function. This allows for a more intuitive interface for the standard user.
Actually no. I've learned that there are two kinds of people in the world, problem solvers/designers, and those who follow. Those who follow don't think "logically," they are perfectly happy to spend time searching, or waiting for something to happen. If you give them options and possibilities to think about, they don't follow the same "logic" designers do, kind of like children.
If Apple did it right, then I'm pretty sure one can programmatically change the per-file association. Or probably even with the AppleScript.
No, they didn't do it right, they just chopped the functionality out. This is determined by the launch services database and the LaunchServices framework. The only thing you can use to "set" something using LaunchServices is the function LSSetItemAttribute, which only supports kLSItemQuarantineProperties. There's also stuff like LSSetExtensionHidden, but they didn't add anything for this.
There is no way to programatically influence what application a file should open in when running on Snow Leopard, and there was before. This is a significant loss of functionality. Text files are a great example of this; if I have a set of text files (or even XML) files that I like to create using with BBEdit because of BBEdit's feature set, I want to open them in BBEdit again. I don't want to save one, open an info window in the Finder, and select BBEdit from the popup menu, that's just stupid.
If I'm saving PDF compatible files in Illustrator with a.pdf extension, I still want them to open in Illustrator! Not with Preview or Acrobat.
There are only two ways to set a file type in OS X: using a file extension (which is stupid, but supports the lowest common denominator) or HFS+ meta data (which is actually a good idea, because it's file meta data). There's no new extended attribute where you can set a UTI or other attribute that influences launch services other than quarantine (if you happen to find one, run to the top of a very large hill and yell loudly, preferably screaming the name of the attribute; then put a recording of it on YouTube).
Ideally, you'd have more file-system metadata to determine this kind of behaviour, but the "change" popup in the Get Info window only modifies the.DS_Store file next to the file you're inspecting.
That's probably one of my biggest gripes. I was trying to restore a corrupted config directory for Aptana Studio (Eclipse), and I had to open it from the command line.
Well, if you knew the name of it you could have just done View > Go to Folder (Command-Shift-G), and typed (for example) ~/.subversion.
For me, learning functional programming in comp sci was the most eye opening. This was part of my programming languages course. We did functional programming in Lisp, but we had to use it purely -- we couldn't declare variables. That, combined with what my OS prof said once, something like "there is no useful program that doesn't take input and produce output," gave me proper insight to what a clean, purposeful software solution is.
With functional programming, where you have no variables, everything you produce is a function of your input. Constants and the source code itself consist of the input. And of course your only goal is to produce output.
You can make designs that achieve a lot of functionality with a small amount of code by following that idea. Lisp itself is proof of that.
The Wii has changed the definition of what makes a good game. Nintendo proved that there was a huge market waiting for games that are relatively easy to produce, fun to play, and very profitable (and unfortunately, a lot of business players have forgotten how to make and sell those).
Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metroid Prime 3 are great. Those kinds of games aren't going anywhere. But myself, and a lot of other people, are glad that games based on fun gameplay concepts have a home again.
I love Heavenly Sword, but it was written off largely because people consider it short. If the developer's hadn't wasted so much money (and consequently lost it) on making it a cutting edge blend of technology and art, there couldn't have been a hell of a lot more fun gameplay in it.
That's a hell of a drawback. That by itself is enough to make me hold off installing Leopard until I've got time to look up how to disable that paranoid security theatre.
It's the difference between "the application Mail has been updated. Do you want it to allow access to your keychain items?" and not bugging you at all.
The D80 is a massive upgrade over the D70. If you're perfectly happy with the D70, you'll be happy with a D50. The D50 is a fantastic camera.
The extra megapix makes a big difference when you have to straighten photos. With 6MP, you've probably hit the resolution of your DX lens, and if you don't need to straighten stuff, you're fine. But if you do, you've just chopped down the useful megapixels by a serious degree. It's especially bad when you you have a lot of buildings with fine window borders, or bricks.
SD is an improvement over CF. The most notable thing is battery life. The D200 and D80 have very similar electronics, but Nikon's battery benchmarks gives the D80 a useful edge over the D70, while the D200 falls quite short of the D70. Going over the specs, the only electronic difference I can see is the use of SD cards.
SD cards are unbelievably cheap too. Very high end SD cards aren't yet available in the same degree as CF, but that's just a matter of time, as there is now serious demand for such cards.
I upgraded from a D70 to a D80 and it's just wonderful. It handily solved all the issues I had with the D70, except that it doesn't show ISO in the viewfinder like the D200 does (it doesn't show it at all, I think it just shows if Auto ISO is in effect or not). Better performance at 1200-1600 ISO is very important to me for a lot of the shots I do. And the new autofocus system is absolutely FANTASTIC!
Apple's recent Aperture debacle, where it was discovered that Aperture was majorly inferior to Adobe's Lightbox in performance, features and quality probably resulted in a major shakeup in Apple's software development divisions.
What's this bullshit? Lightbox is shit slow and relatively bare bones. It's basically a competitor to iPhoto. Aperture is perfectly useable on a PowerBook G4, where Lightbox crawls like a snail. You obviously haven't used either software.
Aperture isn't a debacle, Ars Technica's useless performance-oriented review of Aperture is.
I had an IBM Deathstar that was replaced under warranty with a nice crappy loud Western Digital drive, so it's not like I'm a fan either.
But seriously, do you think the Hitachi drives have anything to do with the old 5 platter ones?
Admit it, Deskstar is a fairly cool name, especially when compared to codenames like Longhorn, or product names like Windows Vista. It's so cool that you can call it Deathstar, and it has the heritage to live up to that name! How cool is that?
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This would mean a DAC, headphone amp, and batteries in every headphone.
Otherwise known as "the only sane way to simulate exceptions in C".
Right, because using exceptions for error handling is safe.
No, there was significantly more bass using the ALAC audio without the EQ than there was using the AAC audio with the EQ settings. The sound was significantly different, the AAC audio was much emptier.
Sorry, but your stereo's not very good ;-)
One thing audiophiles like to say is that you don't need an equalizer or bass/treble controls to listen to music with a good stereo. However, this rule pretty much applies if you have at least a $3000-ish stereo system. And you must have well-mastered, non-compressed music.
All my music is stored as ALAC, streamed to my Airport Express, and fed to the stereo with an optical cable. My brother was visiting once, and I mentioned how this stereo really does work without fiddling with an equalizer. In my absence, he hooked up his iPod to the computer and listened to his 192 kbit AAC audio, and in order to get it to sound good he had to fiddle with the bass & treble. When I came back he mentioned this, and showed me how it sounded without the adjustments (it was pretty flat). I have some of the same music he does, so I showed him how the same song sounds with lossless audio (with the stereo still having no adjustments). His jaw dropped. There was BASS and clear, distinct treble. It's just not there in compressed audio (at least, with 192kbit AAC. MP3 is hopeless).
If you have a single instrument playing solo, it doesn't really matter what codec you use. But once you add layers of instruments, or voices, that original instrument is going to sound pretty muffled with a poor codec.
Unfortunately the biggest problem with audio quality is the loudness war. Uncompressed music is unforgiving, and the loudness war is badly distorting the raw audio we get on CDs now. Right now the best way to get audio is DTS audio on a DVD. The loudness war has no affect on that, because DTS is a compressed format, and 'loudness' is just part of reconstructing the signal (and the dynamic range of DTS is phenomenal). Unfortunately, you can't get much music that way.
I have a hard time believing this (though I didn't read the article), but I suppose it's true. I grew up in Ontario. When I was in high school in the 90s, they really grilled us for spelling & grammar, especially "comma splices." I remember in particular the teachers "threatening" us by claiming that in university you lost something like 10% for each spelling mistake (though from my experience, they really didn't care outside of literature courses).
Where I work now we have a steady supply of co-op students. I remember we had this one student who made liberal use of chat-speak... over IM. I was actually pretty surprised to see a client-facing email of hers written perfectly eloquently.
If people are using 'cuz' in academic papers, they deserve to fail. Dang idiots.
Yeah, that's a pretty useless test. An "empty" song with one vocal and one instrument (I'm not talking about Billie Jean, I'm just stating a metric) wouldn't sound that wrong at a low bitrate. However, if you use a song with several distinct instruments, spanning high trebles and deep, smooth bass, and add in a clear voice, 48kbps will totally fall apart.
Basically, if you have content with detail & range at the same time, you require a higher bitrate. As far as how good it sounds, well, if the music requires a higher bitrate, it'll sound bad no matter what. If a codec is designed to make low bitrates sound "pleasing" vs. "accurate when possible," well, people might like the fact that it sounds pleasing. I don't know if AAC is designed to sound just pleasing at low bitrates, but it's not a bad idea since it can't sound accurate anyway.
It's like vinyl. People like vinyl because the process of converting vinyl waveforms to play on speakers is pretty easy, and purely analog. If you're going to listen to a CD with high quality speakers, you absolutely must have a great digital-to-audio converter somewhere in the chain. With an ordinary DAC, good speakers will just make the music sound very "discrete" and digital (cheap speakers won't reproduce that level of detail, but will probably sound better playing records than they do playing CDs).
So because the software is burned to a chip that makes it acceptable?
More at issue is not the fact that they have the patent, but that they're trying to suck money out of everyone by participating in the IEEE and not signing a Letter of Assurance. A Letter of Assurance doesn't mean that you won't make money or won't sue, just that you'll charge reasonable royalties (IEEE's all about co-operation). Their requested royalty rates are several dollars per sale, which is stupid when you're talking about a technology that should be used in the cheapest devices. They signed a letter of assurance for 802.11a but kept silent on g and n. Then they started suing when g was adopted.
It's a valid patent? How does it compare then if BSD patented their government-funded work?
The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function. This allows for a more intuitive interface for the standard user .
Actually no. I've learned that there are two kinds of people in the world, problem solvers/designers, and those who follow. Those who follow don't think "logically," they are perfectly happy to spend time searching, or waiting for something to happen. If you give them options and possibilities to think about, they don't follow the same "logic" designers do, kind of like children.
If Apple did it right, then I'm pretty sure one can programmatically change the per-file association. Or probably even with the AppleScript.
No, they didn't do it right, they just chopped the functionality out. This is determined by the launch services database and the LaunchServices framework. The only thing you can use to "set" something using LaunchServices is the function LSSetItemAttribute, which only supports kLSItemQuarantineProperties. There's also stuff like LSSetExtensionHidden, but they didn't add anything for this.
There is no way to programatically influence what application a file should open in when running on Snow Leopard, and there was before. This is a significant loss of functionality. Text files are a great example of this; if I have a set of text files (or even XML) files that I like to create using with BBEdit because of BBEdit's feature set, I want to open them in BBEdit again. I don't want to save one, open an info window in the Finder, and select BBEdit from the popup menu, that's just stupid.
If I'm saving PDF compatible files in Illustrator with a .pdf extension, I still want them to open in Illustrator! Not with Preview or Acrobat.
There are only two ways to set a file type in OS X: using a file extension (which is stupid, but supports the lowest common denominator) or HFS+ meta data (which is actually a good idea, because it's file meta data). There's no new extended attribute where you can set a UTI or other attribute that influences launch services other than quarantine (if you happen to find one, run to the top of a very large hill and yell loudly, preferably screaming the name of the attribute; then put a recording of it on YouTube).
Ideally, you'd have more file-system metadata to determine this kind of behaviour, but the "change" popup in the Get Info window only modifies the .DS_Store file next to the file you're inspecting.
That's probably one of my biggest gripes. I was trying to restore a corrupted config directory for Aptana Studio (Eclipse), and I had to open it from the command line.
Well, if you knew the name of it you could have just done View > Go to Folder (Command-Shift-G), and typed (for example) ~/.subversion.
For me, learning functional programming in comp sci was the most eye opening. This was part of my programming languages course. We did functional programming in Lisp, but we had to use it purely -- we couldn't declare variables. That, combined with what my OS prof said once, something like "there is no useful program that doesn't take input and produce output," gave me proper insight to what a clean, purposeful software solution is.
With functional programming, where you have no variables, everything you produce is a function of your input. Constants and the source code itself consist of the input. And of course your only goal is to produce output.
You can make designs that achieve a lot of functionality with a small amount of code by following that idea. Lisp itself is proof of that.
You can also create emacs. I'll stop here.
Wow, you really hate the Wii.
d'oh. could have been a lot more fun gameplay.
The Wii has changed the definition of what makes a good game. Nintendo proved that there was a huge market waiting for games that are relatively easy to produce, fun to play, and very profitable (and unfortunately, a lot of business players have forgotten how to make and sell those).
Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metroid Prime 3 are great. Those kinds of games aren't going anywhere. But myself, and a lot of other people, are glad that games based on fun gameplay concepts have a home again.
I love Heavenly Sword, but it was written off largely because people consider it short. If the developer's hadn't wasted so much money (and consequently lost it) on making it a cutting edge blend of technology and art, there couldn't have been a hell of a lot more fun gameplay in it.
That's a hell of a drawback. That by itself is enough to make me hold off installing Leopard until I've got time to look up how to disable that paranoid security theatre.
It's the difference between "the application Mail has been updated. Do you want it to allow access to your keychain items?" and not bugging you at all.What the heck do you put in the boot ROM for this kind of thing?
The D80 is a massive upgrade over the D70. If you're perfectly happy with the D70, you'll be happy with a D50. The D50 is a fantastic camera.
The extra megapix makes a big difference when you have to straighten photos. With 6MP, you've probably hit the resolution of your DX lens, and if you don't need to straighten stuff, you're fine. But if you do, you've just chopped down the useful megapixels by a serious degree. It's especially bad when you you have a lot of buildings with fine window borders, or bricks.
SD is an improvement over CF. The most notable thing is battery life. The D200 and D80 have very similar electronics, but Nikon's battery benchmarks gives the D80 a useful edge over the D70, while the D200 falls quite short of the D70. Going over the specs, the only electronic difference I can see is the use of SD cards.
SD cards are unbelievably cheap too. Very high end SD cards aren't yet available in the same degree as CF, but that's just a matter of time, as there is now serious demand for such cards.
I upgraded from a D70 to a D80 and it's just wonderful. It handily solved all the issues I had with the D70, except that it doesn't show ISO in the viewfinder like the D200 does (it doesn't show it at all, I think it just shows if Auto ISO is in effect or not). Better performance at 1200-1600 ISO is very important to me for a lot of the shots I do. And the new autofocus system is absolutely FANTASTIC!
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my D70!
Apple's recent Aperture debacle, where it was discovered that Aperture was majorly inferior to Adobe's Lightbox in performance, features and quality probably resulted in a major shakeup in Apple's software development divisions.
What's this bullshit? Lightbox is shit slow and relatively bare bones. It's basically a competitor to iPhoto. Aperture is perfectly useable on a PowerBook G4, where Lightbox crawls like a snail. You obviously haven't used either software.
Aperture isn't a debacle, Ars Technica's useless performance-oriented review of Aperture is.
WTF? Mario 64 had some of the worst graphics on the N64. Hey, it was the first game on it, it better not be the best!
Games like ExciteBike 64 look so good that you completely forget that you're playing on a system of that generation.
Even the Nintendo DS version of Super Mario 64 looks better!
AARGH! How dare they belittle the mighty N64's graphics!
Hey, good job.
um, I meant lick, not like.
everyone contracts a particularly virulent disease from a dirty telephone booth.
:0)
Do yourself a flavour, like the ground once in a while. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger
I had an IBM Deathstar that was replaced under warranty with a nice crappy loud Western Digital drive, so it's not like I'm a fan either.
But seriously, do you think the Hitachi drives have anything to do with the old 5 platter ones?
Admit it, Deskstar is a fairly cool name, especially when compared to codenames like Longhorn, or product names like Windows Vista. It's so cool that you can call it Deathstar, and it has the heritage to live up to that name! How cool is that?
"Hey baby, I've got a Deathstar in my box."
Ok, it's not cool enough for that.