I hope you're kidding? Writing cryptic code that makes no sense is most certainly not something a compiler can catch. It's not what the computer does that's important in this case, its the maintainability of the code. I was the poor sap that had to try to figure out how that program works - that wasn't the most cryptic line either. One day someone's going to have to convert that code to run on another platform. You can bet your ass if it's me I won't be doing a dumb conversion. That code was gibberish and belongs in a C obfuscation contest not in commercial code. The fact that you don't understand any of this speaks volumes for the quality of your programming.
Let me get this straight. You wanted to get an good programmer who knows their way around code, straight out of an undergrad degree. Oh and he better not know what he's worth because you can't afford him. When you finally fooled yourself into thinking you could get a programming genius for a few pennies, you decided to let him loose re-writing your entire code base, didn't test it properly (hint: you didn't have the staff to do it since the guy that writes the code shouldn't be the only one to test it) and then wondered why HE left you with a mess???? You've learnt nothing. You have one person to blame and it's not some guy you picked fresh out of uni. YOU made the mess. The same guy may or may not have learnt under the wing of someone more skilled (granted if he spent his time grumbling, possibly not) but you didn't give him the opportunity to do so. You got greedy. You suffered. He suffered and you're now whining about his inadequacies, and blaming everyone but yourself.
I'm sorry but you can't use your car to go out this weekend. We need power to go to the grid. Try again next weekend, or apply for our weekend special at www.yourcarhahaha.com. Have a nice day.
It may be media company leveraged spin to say they care about freedom, but if you really do want to be able to play Quake without someone raiding your house and throwing you in jail for doing it (or for owning the game) then there is a genuine freedom issue too. Hey if you don't like violent games there are still other games that could be banned on the basis that they could be used for violence. eg. Imagine a ban on civilian flight sims because they've been used to train terrorists.
When I was about 10 or maybe 11 a mouse got into my Apple IIe floppy disk drive and left it's droppings. This somehow caused the drive to corrupt every floppy disk I put in the drive, even if it had a write protect tab (back in the day when the tabs were literally sticky things and floppy disks were literally floppy but I digress). Unfortunately I didn't work this out before I'd put in all copies of the code for a game I was writing in Apple Basic. (It was a combination of a sub vs ship game and ship vs ufo. I'd just gotten sprites moving on a screen. Very primitive and very badly coded but hey I was a kid and I was doing this with no help). That loss of that data put me off spending time writing code for a few years.
Well it cuts both ways. What happens when the doctor mis-diagnoses?
I can cite 2 examples to do with my wife:
1) She's got a bad shoulder and suffers from posterior shoulder dislocations. (We finally have it under control but if you're a doctor you'll understand the damage done by leaving a shoulder dislocated for 6 months) The doctors at the local hospitals around here don't seem to understand that they won't see a posterior dislocation in front on scans and therefore need an auxilary view. As a result despite the MASSIVE lump protruding from my wife's shoulderblade when this happens they simply refuse to believe that it's dislocated and label her a malingerer. After the last time this happened, I've taken to getting her to carry printouts of medical journal articles that outline the problem. Thanks to Google and Pub-Med I have something doctors may actually take some notice of.
2) After brain surgery several years ago, my wife started having seizures (petit and grand mal) plus narcolepsy. I actually believe the problem probably had nothing to do with her brain surgery. She had a car that was leaking massive amounts of CO2 into the passenger cabin which was supposedly fixed but which I suspect wasn't. Anyway I don't know for sure what the cause was. What I do know is that her local GP and the specialist kept upping the dose of anafranil - a medication that for which seizures is a contra-indication. 3 doctors including her specialist and many hundreds of dollars and the fuckers couldn't look up the documentation that comes with the drug. By the end of it she was having a couple of grand mal seizures a day. So when I got her to bring this information to the attention of her specialist he said "oh...yeah....okay....maybe you should stop it". Well that's lovely except for the fact that patients that aren't weaned off it slowly tend to end up suicidally depressed. She brings this to his attention "oh...yeah....okay well take less"...I think he was too busy thinking about his golf game that afternoon or something. He even fucking told his secretary that he'd be 5 minutes for his $300 consult that day. Arsehole.
I won't even start to tell you about issues I've had with my ankle and contradictory opinions from different specialists. Suffice it to say that I don't expect the secretary to start giving me medical advice at one doctor's sugery and the other doctor to spend half the consult giving me dieting tips (and yes I do need to lose weight but any solution that relies on that alone is doomed).
So before you point the finger at Google, Youtube or anything else, realize that in the hands of a reasonably well educated person who then checks with a medical professional it's a fucking life saver. Certainly has been for my family. Especially true when many medical professionals I've met should be stripped of their licenses...sadly that'd only leave the handful of good ones even further overworked and stretched. The medical profession is the only life critical one where the staff are expected to routinely work hours that make even the good ones a risk to themselves and their patients. Imagine if airline pilots had to do back to back 20 hour shifts for pity sake.
So do yourself a favour, since you're part of that profession. Make it better. Don't turn into one of the assholes, who puts down people who try to better their health. If it's misguided help them to learn how to get better information.
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? I mean, I get why people might use something like Wikipedia for this (with all the pitfalls that can bring), but this just plain does not make sense to me.
Who the hell goes to any single source for information when their health is what's at risk? I look for lots of authoritative sources. I've learnt from bitter experience to even check multiple drug safety sites before taking any prescription meds. You may think that's paranoid but I've personally seen well respected doctors prescribe meds that caused new problems or exacerbated existing ones. (I firmly believe my wife would be dead today if I hadn't stepped in and brought some information to a specialist's attention). When you have the best facts available, only then do you choose what to do with your health. Health can't be replaced, so it isn't something you risk.
Xbox consoles at their core run a highly customized version of WinNT and they only take up a few MB why do they need 2GB for the OLPC?...because it's the minimum requirement for WGA and windows media player DRM to run;-)
Ogg is open-source. If people still want it at any time, players will be available
Can you even read what you're writing? IF people want it. Plenty of open source projects die or are closed.
No proprietary vendor can take Ogg away. Hell, if no one else wanted to do it, I could get the source code myself and do it myself.
Oh puhlease! What a bunch of bullshit. You can single handledly bring to market an Ogg player if the format fails to take off? The entire fantasy that "if it's open source you can fix it yourself" is as ridiculous as suggesting that if you don't like your current car you can design and build one yourself. Purile!
"Varied musical taste" != liking only 1 song per artist. These are totally unrelated.
Listen bud, you're the one that said you've got only 50 artists to scroll through in your collection. If that's your definition of varied musical taste you can keep it.
Tell me, what advances in data compression have there been in the last 10 years? Nothing really significant, and nothing that ever completely dislodged ZIP.
Hmm perhaps that's why the latest versions of Winzip using proprietary password security (which can't be unzipped using other software) was an issue. You're talking out of the wrong hole.
I said that at parties, we'd put on INTERNET radio, you dumbfuck. Maybe you've never heard of that? There's no commercials, and they play stuff you don't hear on normal radio
Why the fuck do I care what brand of fucking radio or what mode of transmission. My point is you don't care what you're listening to beyond a handful of artists (50 by your count) and you don't have any interest in discussing or sharing music. Nothing you've said counters that. No amount of name calling will either.
Who will want it? "Audiophiles"? WTF cares about them? They're such a small portion of the market they don't matter
Tell that to the myriad of companies selling high end audio equipement. You bet your arse they care. Another stupid comment by you.
You only have 2 ears. With enough signal processing, you could replicate the sound of 7 speakers with just 2, and no one would be able to tell the difference. There's already a big debate over whether more speakers are actually useful or not
Okay this is laughable. You may have only 2 ears but you perceive sound from multiple dirrections and at different frequencies. Last I checked sound systems with more than 2 speakers were selling. Hell there's even a specialized speaker for bass hence 5.1 not just 5 etc. Different speakers built differently for different response at different frequencies. Imagine that. Heck imagine multiple bass speakes in future for that matter. I have 2 ears therefore I only need 2 speakers is a stupid stupid argument. If you had your way we'd never have had surround. Most people shelling out for a new home entertainment system think it's worthwhile. In fact I can't imagine a less than 5.1 in a home theatre these days.
I should ask you the same question! You still haven't addressed the issue of the cable! How are you going to get your songs from your iPod (or whatever) in MP3 format onto your friend's system?
Oh yeah I didn't answer one of your points therefore I must be mistaken. Get a life. If it's not DRM and it's a common format moving it across to your friend's system isn't a big problem. Lots of ways to do that. My issue was that if you hooked in your iPod you'd have the issue of scheduling the song to play in the middle of a playlist. THAT is why I consider this more than just a minor inconvenience. Nice straw man though. Fool.
Who cares about cutting over? Do you not know how to press a few buttons on a stereo? I don't even know WTF you're getting at here.
Who the hell wants to babysit their sound system at a party. I'd rather be socialising. So would most people which is why in most cases the song would never get played. It's clear you have no idea what I'm getting at
y the logic you've shown in this thread, all these iTunes buyers are "dumb", because they've chosen music in a codec other than MP3 which prevents them from easily sharing their music with their friends, playing on other brands of portables, etc. You're also insulting a lot of people who subscribe to/.
I said it wasn't for me. I'm not the one throwing around the word dumb.
I don't think I'll ever have to do this, as I think there will always be a player available that plays Oggs
Can I borrow your crystal ball? I'm hanging out to work out if my first born is going to be a boy or a girl.
I'm not going to choose codecs or anything else based on the remote possibility of a house fire or flood. (Floods are impossible where I live anyway, unless a cataclysm of Biblical proportions happens.)
Your choice. I'd prefer not to re-buy my entire music collection if my house burns down. I also keep a spare copy of my wedding photos on a hard drive at my mother's house. I like to back things up.
I have about 250 CDs. How hard is it to go to Artist and then Album? "Endless menus"? Please. With around 50 or so artists, and then usually several albums per artist (some 10-20), it doesn't take that long. Are you one of those people who has 1 song per artist?
Certainly not one song per artist, but now you're knocking others for having varied musical taste???? WTF!?! Varied musical taste is a good thing. I'm building up a picture of you as someone who doesn't care about music at all. You just have 50 or so favourite artists and then listen to the radio. Good for you. Your choice. Not mine though.
Tell me, what more improvement can there be in a compressed music format?
You're smoking something aren't you? When you say something that STUPID and lacking in imagination I wonder if you're just trolling....
Try more channels (optional subchannels). Improved compression. Better alogirthms for chosing what parts of the signal to lose. Better response. Better directional encoding. Imagine audio 20-30 years ago. That's how an MP3 player's going to look 20-30 years from now. Like a goddamn turn table.
Why do you think there are so many codecs with different characteristics in the first place?
That's already covered; the newer formats don't limit you to 16-bit, 44.1kHz. But this isn't very useful anyway since almost no one can hear the difference between 44.1kHz and 96kHz sampling rates. More speakers? I'm pretty sure the newer formats allow 5.1, 7.1, etc., though again this isn't very useful for studio music and especially for anything played through headphones; but it's supported since some of these formats are also used for A/V streams (movies) where surround is much more commonly used. Better tagging? The newer formats have that one covered. Better compression? They're already pretty close to the theoretical limit. A 2% better compression rate isn't going to attract anyone, and with lossy compression it's hard to compare them anyway since it's subjective. So what could be done better in a compressed music format? I'd honestly like to know.
What a silly rant. "Almost" no one can hear blah. That means someone will want it, even if it's not rational. Lots of people insist on using lossless codecs when blind testing can show the existing codecs are transparent. You can't imagine more than 7 speakers. Imagine directionality that lets you assign each instrument a channel and location so you get a virtual orchestra. One day that may happen too. Who knows how many speakers and how large or small that would take. I can imagine a grid of speakers that gets fitted to a wall. How about multiple microspeakers for headphones. You like the tagging today. Imagine tagging that includes lyrics, timing, a history of the song, embedded album art.
How many people do you think in the early days of circular tv would have imagined the entertainment systems that get sold today, and at a price that a moderately well of
As far as I'm concerned, anyone dumb enough to spend money on compressed music should be happy to spend more money to re-buy the same music in a different format.
You can believe what you like. Others think differently. If the quality is good enough many people are prepared to buy it. You can choose to regard them as "dumb" but you're insulting a lot of people who subscribe to/.
Me, my whole collection is on CD. I have physical discs (which themselves are backups) with UNcompressed audio which I can rip to the format of my choice. No need to re-rip.
That whole paragraph makes no sense. I think you mean you don't need to transcode, you can just rip them again. It does however take time and effort to feed the discs into your computer to rip them again, so yes you do need to re-rip. If that's what you want to do with your time, that's your business but I don't have time to spend feeding discs into a computer every few years. (Quite aside from the fact that in many places this is still illegal).
I guess you don't care much about sound quality if you're so happy to convert between compressed formats
I'm not "happy to" convert between compressed formats BUT if the CDs had been lost, damaged or destroyed, I'd certainly consider it before I re-bought it all. I might even do some tests to see how noticable the difference is before forking out thousands of dollars.
If I'm dumb enough to ruin one of my CDs, then I'll bite the bullet and buy a new copy.
What if you're "dumb enough" to have a house fire or other misfortune befall you. Under such circumstances you may have higher priority concerns than re-buying your collection of music. In fact depending on the nature of the misfortune that befalls you it may take you quite some to recover to the point where you have spare funds to re-buy all your CDs (and that's IF you can find them. If you damage a rare CD it may not be something you can replace).
Luckily, I've never managed to do this in 2 decades; I'm careful with my CDs, and since I've transitioned to compressed formats (I started with MP3, and went to Ogg later), my CDs have spend all their time in their cases, in a box in the closet, except for the brief times they were being ripped.
I too have CDs that are 2 decades old and still fine. Luckily is the key word here. You and I haven't had a house fire, major flood or anything else an insurance company chooses to call an act of God. Clearly no one's broken into your house and taken your CDs either. Same here.
I'm no longer 20, so I don't attend "parties" in the sense you think of them; people my age generally do things like hang out at friends' houses with a handful of guests, cooking food on the barbeque grill and swimming in the pool.
I'm in my 30s. I'm not socially dead. I still attend the occassional party. I was at a 30th birthday last weekend.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could take your music collection along to your BBQ/Pool party without having to worry whether the equipment there played it?
play music in the background, but we don't make a huge production of it; we generally just tune into an internet radio station, or play from the host's music library. As I said, if anyone wanted to hear my music, I'd plug my portable player into the stereo with a line-in cord. No big deal.
So you're taking me to task and questioning the quality of music I'd listen to for suggesting that I'd convert music between compressed formats, but you're happy to listen to the freaking radio, and don't even care what's on?
Look I very rarely will want to share a piece of music, but if I do want to do that, I don't want to be limited to splicing in my damned music player with a line in. What if you want to include your song in a mix or something??? I don't know about you but if I'm somewhere social I want to set up the music and walk away without having to select source etc. It's just not as convenient as having it in a file fo
I was making very good money with highly sought after niche skills in Smalltalk, and the company I was working for was making wonderful sales in 2000-2001. By 2004 people were avoiding the same software on the basis that it wasn't Smalltalk. I re-skilled to Java, and in the end got a good job elsewhere, but I'm still still playing catchup even now compared to a college kid that's been coding Java since 1997. If I hadn't moved across I'd be out of the industry , be stuck in a job where my employer had all the power because they realized that I had no marketable skills to allow me to move elsewhere, or possibly even collecting unemployment.
Why would anyone spend money creating compressed music files anyway?
You don't spend money? Well I'll assume you don't buy music. What's your time worth though? How long does it take you to feed CDs through your computer? You may have the time to re-rip your collection. I don't.
What kind of idiot would ever convert music from one compressed format to another?
The kind of idiot that has lost or damaged CDs perhaps? This is no straw man. Yeah it's not ideal if you can re-rip, but you don't instantly make a quality compressed music file unplayable through a single conversion so long as it's well thought out.
Why would I want to do that? I can carry my portable player in my pocket. If someone wants to listen to it, it has a line-out jack on it (yes, this is separate from the headphone jack).
I take it you've never wanted to play your music at a party. If you have the CD you just loan it out, but then you have to worry about it getting scratched. Do you ever attend parties? "I don't cater to other people" sounds a lot like "I live in my parents basement and have no friends". Good for you. Others don't.
Please, tell me what "features" I would want that would make me buy a new player.
Well I'm glad you think music players are at the pinnacle of their development. I can name dozens of features (none of which have anything to do with video), but i'll start with a 3 I personally find lacking which may or may not appear some day: 1) Advanced search. To start with by name, but imagine search by lyrics... 2) Ability to play new formats as they're brought out. 3) Nicer interface. All the interfaces currently are awful and I'm including the iPod clickwheel.
Even if features aren't a consideration, the players aren't built to last forever. A few years at best. Eventually parts will dry up on Ebay etc.
Bottom line: You're working way too hard to justify your decision to encode in Ogg. There are lots of disadvantages and my criticisms are not as "stupid" as you insist on trying to make them sound. You can't change reality by burying your head in the sand.
1) Your player dies and Ogg is out of fashion and unsupported. Then your Ogg collection is a steaming pile and any time or money you've spent buying or creating it is no longer benefiting you at all.
2You wish to convert that music at some time far into the future when finding software to do it is difficult.
3) You wish to play your Ogg file somewhere else through other equipment that doesn't support Ogg. You know like a friend's place or a party.
4) A new player comes out that supports features you like but doesn't support Ogg. Your choice is to ditch your existing collection, or not.
No thanks. Portable music tied to a small subset of players stinks.
Any one of those things on its own and I'd label the guy eccentric (except the history of his companies. I'd need more information to make an informed opinion about whether his previous companies were failures). However all of this put together I'm sorry I do smell snake oil. I do agree that he's "irrationally optimistic" about his disease. I'd say the same about his spam solution. (Though not his assessment of the future of the human race. Sorry that one's indefensible. Another doomsday prophet we just don't need.). I don't want to buy anything from a guy like that.
You would think with the amount of money spent on a visit to a doctor, particularly a specialist that they could do better than an educated person with Google and acccess to a couple of medical journals. Sadly my experience mirrors yours. I've had to self diagnose and research illnesses for my wife and I because the doctors were getting it wrong (consistently for one recurring problem, and in another my wife would be dead if I hadn't intervened). The medical system in my experience here in Australia, is a sham. It's no more scientific than witch doctoring. Surgeons try to get you to go through with surgery regardless of how beneficial it will be (and in one case I was palmed off to the personal assistant who proceded to answer medical questions without consulting with the doctor OR seeing my scans). In another case I got voodoo diet advice, based on the experience of another patient losing weight - that was $300 well spent.
90% or more of the music players out there support MP3. How many support Ogg again? You might love your iRiver but your options are limited by the format.
From TFA with commentary: "he has started four companies, all based on his frustrations with existing products or services"
Unless they're all still in business that's probably 3 failures on record.
"Along the way he has amassed a personal fortune of about $230 million"
But he got out before the ship sank and with a bundle of cash too. I wonder what his ex-employees got...
"This is harder on my wife than it is on me," he said during a recent interview. "I just look at it as a problem. Here's a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don't get to solve any more problems."
How philosophical...So he's going to cure himself single handedly of a rare disease in 4 years, because medical research is as easy (and cheap) as writing software or tinkering with a home engineering project. I think he's been watching Crusade and sniffing glue.
"His perspective on his disease is also clear. Fourth on his list is "Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years." He writes, "My incurable blood cancer is minor compared to what is happening with the planet. We have somewhat more than 90 years before humanity is virtually extinct.""
Don't even know where to start on this one. I can't be bothered reading about his reasoning, but he's not the first person to predict the end of the world just beyond his own lifetime.
Oh and by the way he has a bridge, I mean some anti-spam software to sell you.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're kidding? Writing cryptic code that makes no sense is most certainly not something a compiler can catch. It's not what the computer does that's important in this case, its the maintainability of the code. I was the poor sap that had to try to figure out how that program works - that wasn't the most cryptic line either. One day someone's going to have to convert that code to run on another platform. You can bet your ass if it's me I won't be doing a dumb conversion. That code was gibberish and belongs in a C obfuscation contest not in commercial code. The fact that you don't understand any of this speaks volumes for the quality of your programming.
Let me get this straight. You wanted to get an good programmer who knows their way around code, straight out of an undergrad degree. Oh and he better not know what he's worth because you can't afford him. When you finally fooled yourself into thinking you could get a programming genius for a few pennies, you decided to let him loose re-writing your entire code base, didn't test it properly (hint: you didn't have the staff to do it since the guy that writes the code shouldn't be the only one to test it) and then wondered why HE left you with a mess???? You've learnt nothing. You have one person to blame and it's not some guy you picked fresh out of uni. YOU made the mess. The same guy may or may not have learnt under the wing of someone more skilled (granted if he spent his time grumbling, possibly not) but you didn't give him the opportunity to do so. You got greedy. You suffered. He suffered and you're now whining about his inadequacies, and blaming everyone but yourself.
Thank FUCK I don't work for you. Seriously.
If that's good code I'm a pretzel.
/* j remains unchanged, no need to waste fucking cycles */
What are I and J representing exactly and why the fuck are you setting them to opposite ends of the range??
That's almost as bad as some code I ran across recently:
i *= 0;
j *= 1;
which would have been better replaced with
i = 0;
This was in some rather critical code. I was horrified!!!
I'm sorry but you can't use your car to go out this weekend. We need power to go to the grid. Try again next weekend, or apply for our weekend special at www.yourcarhahaha.com. Have a nice day.
apparently, "prote" is short for "protester"
I thought prot was an alien...or was he?
I don't see how enforcing the rating codes we already have is any different or any more of a threat to liberty.
Then you're blind since the ratings allow a game to be banned altogether.
It may be media company leveraged spin to say they care about freedom, but if you really do want to be able to play Quake without someone raiding your house and throwing you in jail for doing it (or for owning the game) then there is a genuine freedom issue too. Hey if you don't like violent games there are still other games that could be banned on the basis that they could be used for violence. eg. Imagine a ban on civilian flight sims because they've been used to train terrorists.
When I was about 10 or maybe 11 a mouse got into my Apple IIe floppy disk drive and left it's droppings. This somehow caused the drive to corrupt every floppy disk I put in the drive, even if it had a write protect tab (back in the day when the tabs were literally sticky things and floppy disks were literally floppy but I digress). Unfortunately I didn't work this out before I'd put in all copies of the code for a game I was writing in Apple Basic. (It was a combination of a sub vs ship game and ship vs ufo. I'd just gotten sprites moving on a screen. Very primitive and very badly coded but hey I was a kid and I was doing this with no help). That loss of that data put me off spending time writing code for a few years.
Well it cuts both ways. What happens when the doctor mis-diagnoses?
I can cite 2 examples to do with my wife:
1) She's got a bad shoulder and suffers from posterior shoulder dislocations. (We finally have it under control but if you're a doctor you'll understand the damage done by leaving a shoulder dislocated for 6 months) The doctors at the local hospitals around here don't seem to understand that they won't see a posterior dislocation in front on scans and therefore need an auxilary view. As a result despite the MASSIVE lump protruding from my wife's shoulderblade when this happens they simply refuse to believe that it's dislocated and label her a malingerer. After the last time this happened, I've taken to getting her to carry printouts of medical journal articles that outline the problem. Thanks to Google and Pub-Med I have something doctors may actually take some notice of.
2) After brain surgery several years ago, my wife started having seizures (petit and grand mal) plus narcolepsy. I actually believe the problem probably had nothing to do with her brain surgery. She had a car that was leaking massive amounts of CO2 into the passenger cabin which was supposedly fixed but which I suspect wasn't. Anyway I don't know for sure what the cause was. What I do know is that her local GP and the specialist kept upping the dose of anafranil - a medication that for which seizures is a contra-indication. 3 doctors including her specialist and many hundreds of dollars and the fuckers couldn't look up the documentation that comes with the drug. By the end of it she was having a couple of grand mal seizures a day. So when I got her to bring this information to the attention of her specialist he said "oh...yeah....okay....maybe you should stop it". Well that's lovely except for the fact that patients that aren't weaned off it slowly tend to end up suicidally depressed. She brings this to his attention "oh...yeah....okay well take less"...I think he was too busy thinking about his golf game that afternoon or something. He even fucking told his secretary that he'd be 5 minutes for his $300 consult that day. Arsehole.
I won't even start to tell you about issues I've had with my ankle and contradictory opinions from different specialists. Suffice it to say that I don't expect the secretary to start giving me medical advice at one doctor's sugery and the other doctor to spend half the consult giving me dieting tips (and yes I do need to lose weight but any solution that relies on that alone is doomed).
So before you point the finger at Google, Youtube or anything else, realize that in the hands of a reasonably well educated person who then checks with a medical professional it's a fucking life saver. Certainly has been for my family. Especially true when many medical professionals I've met should be stripped of their licenses...sadly that'd only leave the handful of good ones even further overworked and stretched. The medical profession is the only life critical one where the staff are expected to routinely work hours that make even the good ones a risk to themselves and their patients. Imagine if airline pilots had to do back to back 20 hour shifts for pity sake.
So do yourself a favour, since you're part of that profession. Make it better. Don't turn into one of the assholes, who puts down people who try to better their health. If it's misguided help them to learn how to get better information.
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? I mean, I get why people might use something like Wikipedia for this (with all the pitfalls that can bring), but this just plain does not make sense to me.
Who the hell goes to any single source for information when their health is what's at risk? I look for lots of authoritative sources. I've learnt from bitter experience to even check multiple drug safety sites before taking any prescription meds. You may think that's paranoid but I've personally seen well respected doctors prescribe meds that caused new problems or exacerbated existing ones. (I firmly believe my wife would be dead today if I hadn't stepped in and brought some information to a specialist's attention). When you have the best facts available, only then do you choose what to do with your health. Health can't be replaced, so it isn't something you risk.
Xbox consoles at their core run a highly customized version of WinNT and they only take up a few MB why do they need 2GB for the OLPC? ...because it's the minimum requirement for WGA and windows media player DRM to run ;-)
Let's go the medly
We want you...
We want you...
We want you...Locked into VISTA and Office too
Ogg is open-source. If people still want it at any time, players will be available
Can you even read what you're writing? IF people want it. Plenty of open source projects die or are closed.
No proprietary vendor can take Ogg away. Hell, if no one else wanted to do it, I could get the source code myself and do it myself.
Oh puhlease! What a bunch of bullshit. You can single handledly bring to market an Ogg player if the format fails to take off? The entire fantasy that "if it's open source you can fix it yourself" is as ridiculous as suggesting that if you don't like your current car you can design and build one yourself. Purile!
"Varied musical taste" != liking only 1 song per artist. These are totally unrelated.
Listen bud, you're the one that said you've got only 50 artists to scroll through in your collection. If that's your definition of varied musical taste you can keep it.
Tell me, what advances in data compression have there been in the last 10 years? Nothing really significant, and nothing that ever completely dislodged ZIP.
Hmm perhaps that's why the latest versions of Winzip using proprietary password security (which can't be unzipped using other software) was an issue. You're talking out of the wrong hole.
I said that at parties, we'd put on INTERNET radio, you dumbfuck. Maybe you've never heard of that? There's no commercials, and they play stuff you don't hear on normal radio
Why the fuck do I care what brand of fucking radio or what mode of transmission. My point is you don't care what you're listening to beyond a handful of artists (50 by your count) and you don't have any interest in discussing or sharing music. Nothing you've said counters that. No amount of name calling will either.
Who will want it? "Audiophiles"? WTF cares about them? They're such a small portion of the market they don't matter
Tell that to the myriad of companies selling high end audio equipement. You bet your arse they care. Another stupid comment by you.
You only have 2 ears. With enough signal processing, you could replicate the sound of 7 speakers with just 2, and no one would be able to tell the difference. There's already a big debate over whether more speakers are actually useful or not
Okay this is laughable. You may have only 2 ears but you perceive sound from multiple dirrections and at different frequencies. Last I checked sound systems with more than 2 speakers were selling. Hell there's even a specialized speaker for bass hence 5.1 not just 5 etc. Different speakers built differently for different response at different frequencies. Imagine that. Heck imagine multiple bass speakes in future for that matter. I have 2 ears therefore I only need 2 speakers is a stupid stupid argument. If you had your way we'd never have had surround. Most people shelling out for a new home entertainment system think it's worthwhile. In fact I can't imagine a less than 5.1 in a home theatre these days.
I should ask you the same question! You still haven't addressed the issue of the cable! How are you going to get your songs from your iPod (or whatever) in MP3 format onto your friend's system?
Oh yeah I didn't answer one of your points therefore I must be mistaken. Get a life. If it's not DRM and it's a common format moving it across to your friend's system isn't a big problem. Lots of ways to do that. My issue was that if you hooked in your iPod you'd have the issue of scheduling the song to play in the middle of a playlist. THAT is why I consider this more than just a minor inconvenience. Nice straw man though. Fool.
Who cares about cutting over? Do you not know how to press a few buttons on a stereo? I don't even know WTF you're getting at here.
Who the hell wants to babysit their sound system at a party. I'd rather be socialising. So would most people which is why in most cases the song would never get played. It's clear you have no idea what I'm getting at
Thanks. What I said earlier in the thread wasn't wasn't just me talking out of my backside, it's based on personal experience.
I'm only now getting back to what I was earning in 2001. I'm sure things changed for most.
y the logic you've shown in this thread, all these iTunes buyers are "dumb", because they've chosen music in a codec other than MP3 which prevents them from easily sharing their music with their friends, playing on other brands of portables, etc. You're also insulting a lot of people who subscribe to /.
I said it wasn't for me. I'm not the one throwing around the word dumb.
I don't think I'll ever have to do this, as I think there will always be a player available that plays Oggs
Can I borrow your crystal ball? I'm hanging out to work out if my first born is going to be a boy or a girl.
I'm not going to choose codecs or anything else based on the remote possibility of a house fire or flood. (Floods are impossible where I live anyway, unless a cataclysm of Biblical proportions happens.)
Your choice. I'd prefer not to re-buy my entire music collection if my house burns down. I also keep a spare copy of my wedding photos on a hard drive at my mother's house. I like to back things up.
I have about 250 CDs. How hard is it to go to Artist and then Album? "Endless menus"? Please. With around 50 or so artists, and then usually several albums per artist (some 10-20), it doesn't take that long. Are you one of those people who has 1 song per artist?
Certainly not one song per artist, but now you're knocking others for having varied musical taste???? WTF!?! Varied musical taste is a good thing. I'm building up a picture of you as someone who doesn't care about music at all. You just have 50 or so favourite artists and then listen to the radio. Good for you. Your choice. Not mine though.
Tell me, what more improvement can there be in a compressed music format?
You're smoking something aren't you? When you say something that STUPID and lacking in imagination I wonder if you're just trolling....
Try more channels (optional subchannels). Improved compression. Better alogirthms for chosing what parts of the signal to lose. Better response. Better directional encoding. Imagine audio 20-30 years ago. That's how an MP3 player's going to look 20-30 years from now. Like a goddamn turn table.
Why do you think there are so many codecs with different characteristics in the first place?
That's already covered; the newer formats don't limit you to 16-bit, 44.1kHz. But this isn't very useful anyway since almost no one can hear the difference between 44.1kHz and 96kHz sampling rates. More speakers? I'm pretty sure the newer formats allow 5.1, 7.1, etc., though again this isn't very useful for studio music and especially for anything played through headphones; but it's supported since some of these formats are also used for A/V streams (movies) where surround is much more commonly used. Better tagging? The newer formats have that one covered. Better compression? They're already pretty close to the theoretical limit. A 2% better compression rate isn't going to attract anyone, and with lossy compression it's hard to compare them anyway since it's subjective. So what could be done better in a compressed music format? I'd honestly like to know.
What a silly rant. "Almost" no one can hear blah. That means someone will want it, even if it's not rational. Lots of people insist on using lossless codecs when blind testing can show the existing codecs are transparent. You can't imagine more than 7 speakers. Imagine directionality that lets you assign each instrument a channel and location so you get a virtual orchestra. One day that may happen too. Who knows how many speakers and how large or small that would take. I can imagine a grid of speakers that gets fitted to a wall. How about multiple microspeakers for headphones. You like the tagging today. Imagine tagging that includes lyrics, timing, a history of the song, embedded album art.
How many people do you think in the early days of circular tv would have imagined the entertainment systems that get sold today, and at a price that a moderately well of
As far as I'm concerned, anyone dumb enough to spend money on compressed music should be happy to spend more money to re-buy the same music in a different format.
/.
You can believe what you like. Others think differently. If the quality is good enough many people are prepared to buy it. You can choose to regard them as "dumb" but you're insulting a lot of people who subscribe to
Me, my whole collection is on CD. I have physical discs (which themselves are backups) with UNcompressed audio which I can rip to the format of my choice. No need to re-rip.
That whole paragraph makes no sense. I think you mean you don't need to transcode, you can just rip them again. It does however take time and effort to feed the discs into your computer to rip them again, so yes you do need to re-rip. If that's what you want to do with your time, that's your business but I don't have time to spend feeding discs into a computer every few years. (Quite aside from the fact that in many places this is still illegal).
I guess you don't care much about sound quality if you're so happy to convert between compressed formats
I'm not "happy to" convert between compressed formats BUT if the CDs had been lost, damaged or destroyed, I'd certainly consider it before I re-bought it all. I might even do some tests to see how noticable the difference is before forking out thousands of dollars.
If I'm dumb enough to ruin one of my CDs, then I'll bite the bullet and buy a new copy.
What if you're "dumb enough" to have a house fire or other misfortune befall you. Under such circumstances you may have higher priority concerns than re-buying your collection of music. In fact depending on the nature of the misfortune that befalls you it may take you quite some to recover to the point where you have spare funds to re-buy all your CDs (and that's IF you can find them. If you damage a rare CD it may not be something you can replace).
Luckily, I've never managed to do this in 2 decades; I'm careful with my CDs, and since I've transitioned to compressed formats (I started with MP3, and went to Ogg later), my CDs have spend all their time in their cases, in a box in the closet, except for the brief times they were being ripped.
I too have CDs that are 2 decades old and still fine. Luckily is the key word here. You and I haven't had a house fire, major flood or anything else an insurance company chooses to call an act of God. Clearly no one's broken into your house and taken your CDs either. Same here.
I'm no longer 20, so I don't attend "parties" in the sense you think of them; people my age generally do things like hang out at friends' houses with a handful of guests, cooking food on the barbeque grill and swimming in the pool.
I'm in my 30s. I'm not socially dead. I still attend the occassional party. I was at a 30th birthday last weekend.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could take your music collection along to your BBQ/Pool party without having to worry whether the equipment there played it?
play music in the background, but we don't make a huge production of it; we generally just tune into an internet radio station, or play from the host's music library. As I said, if anyone wanted to hear my music, I'd plug my portable player into the stereo with a line-in cord. No big deal.
So you're taking me to task and questioning the quality of music I'd listen to for suggesting that I'd convert music between compressed formats, but you're happy to listen to the freaking radio, and don't even care what's on?
Look I very rarely will want to share a piece of music, but if I do want to do that, I don't want to be limited to splicing in my damned music player with a line in. What if you want to include your song in a mix or something??? I don't know about you but if I'm somewhere social I want to set up the music and walk away without having to select source etc. It's just not as convenient as having it in a file fo
I was making very good money with highly sought after niche skills in Smalltalk, and the company I was working for was making wonderful sales in 2000-2001. By 2004 people were avoiding the same software on the basis that it wasn't Smalltalk. I re-skilled to Java, and in the end got a good job elsewhere, but I'm still still playing catchup even now compared to a college kid that's been coding Java since 1997. If I hadn't moved across I'd be out of the industry , be stuck in a job where my employer had all the power because they realized that I had no marketable skills to allow me to move elsewhere, or possibly even collecting unemployment.
Why would anyone spend money creating compressed music files anyway?
You don't spend money? Well I'll assume you don't buy music. What's your time worth though? How long does it take you to feed CDs through your computer? You may have the time to re-rip your collection. I don't.
What kind of idiot would ever convert music from one compressed format to another?
The kind of idiot that has lost or damaged CDs perhaps? This is no straw man. Yeah it's not ideal if you can re-rip, but you don't instantly make a quality compressed music file unplayable through a single conversion so long as it's well thought out.
Why would I want to do that? I can carry my portable player in my pocket. If someone wants to listen to it, it has a line-out jack on it (yes, this is separate from the headphone jack).
I take it you've never wanted to play your music at a party. If you have the CD you just loan it out, but then you have to worry about it getting scratched. Do you ever attend parties? "I don't cater to other people" sounds a lot like "I live in my parents basement and have no friends". Good for you. Others don't.
Please, tell me what "features" I would want that would make me buy a new player.
Well I'm glad you think music players are at the pinnacle of their development. I can name dozens of features (none of which have anything to do with video), but i'll start with a 3 I personally find lacking which may or may not appear some day:
1) Advanced search. To start with by name, but imagine search by lyrics...
2) Ability to play new formats as they're brought out.
3) Nicer interface. All the interfaces currently are awful and I'm including the iPod clickwheel.
Even if features aren't a consideration, the players aren't built to last forever. A few years at best. Eventually parts will dry up on Ebay etc.
Bottom line: You're working way too hard to justify your decision to encode in Ogg. There are lots of disadvantages and my criticisms are not as "stupid" as you insist on trying to make them sound. You can't change reality by burying your head in the sand.
50% (a statistic made up on the spot)
Quick mod him +5:Informative!!!! Oh wait too late. Never mind.
...Yep, until
1) Your player dies and Ogg is out of fashion and unsupported. Then your Ogg collection is a steaming pile and any time or money you've spent buying or creating it is no longer benefiting you at all.
2You wish to convert that music at some time far into the future when finding software to do it is difficult.
3) You wish to play your Ogg file somewhere else through other equipment that doesn't support Ogg. You know like a friend's place or a party.
4) A new player comes out that supports features you like but doesn't support Ogg. Your choice is to ditch your existing collection, or not.
No thanks. Portable music tied to a small subset of players stinks.
Any one of those things on its own and I'd label the guy eccentric (except the history of his companies. I'd need more information to make an informed opinion about whether his previous companies were failures). However all of this put together I'm sorry I do smell snake oil. I do agree that he's "irrationally optimistic" about his disease. I'd say the same about his spam solution. (Though not his assessment of the future of the human race. Sorry that one's indefensible. Another doomsday prophet we just don't need.). I don't want to buy anything from a guy like that.
You would think with the amount of money spent on a visit to a doctor, particularly a specialist that they could do better than an educated person with Google and acccess to a couple of medical journals. Sadly my experience mirrors yours. I've had to self diagnose and research illnesses for my wife and I because the doctors were getting it wrong (consistently for one recurring problem, and in another my wife would be dead if I hadn't intervened). The medical system in my experience here in Australia, is a sham. It's no more scientific than witch doctoring. Surgeons try to get you to go through with surgery regardless of how beneficial it will be (and in one case I was palmed off to the personal assistant who proceded to answer medical questions without consulting with the doctor OR seeing my scans). In another case I got voodoo diet advice, based on the experience of another patient losing weight - that was $300 well spent.
90% or more of the music players out there support MP3. How many support Ogg again? You might love your iRiver but your options are limited by the format.
Till that problem is solved I'll stick with MP3.
From TFA with commentary:
"he has started four companies, all based on his frustrations with existing products or services"
Unless they're all still in business that's probably 3 failures on record.
"Along the way he has amassed a personal fortune of about $230 million"
But he got out before the ship sank and with a bundle of cash too. I wonder what his ex-employees got...
"This is harder on my wife than it is on me," he said during a recent interview. "I just look at it as a problem. Here's a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don't get to solve any more problems."
How philosophical...So he's going to cure himself single handedly of a rare disease in 4 years, because medical research is as easy (and cheap) as writing software or tinkering with a home engineering project. I think he's been watching Crusade and sniffing glue.
"His perspective on his disease is also clear. Fourth on his list is "Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years." He writes, "My incurable blood cancer is minor compared to what is happening with the planet. We have somewhat more than 90 years before humanity is virtually extinct.""
Don't even know where to start on this one. I can't be bothered reading about his reasoning, but he's not the first person to predict the end of the world just beyond his own lifetime.
Oh and by the way he has a bridge, I mean some anti-spam software to sell you.
Gimme a break! Nothing to see here.
Sorry MPAA not RIAA, so per movie, not per song. Same argument though.