Except it's nowhere *near* as easy as the simple "replace GBP with EUR" solution you imply; there are massive economic & political issues - basically the government passing/losing power to Europe - as well as the straight social one: people don't want to change their currency, as it'll mean they have to rethink/relearn the price of *everything* - would you be willing to do it? Read this for more info:
There's a half-decent guide to VAT over at Channel4 Money. Page 4 shows some of the interesting stuff that's VAT exempt - which is just different wording for zero-rated, apparently. And as you say, yes, the law is ugly! For instance: funerals are VAT-exempt, but headstones aren't; frozen food's exempt, but frozen food *that you eat frozen*, such as ice cream, isn't; it's so silly you'd think they were making half of it up! And don't even start on the Jaffa cake thing;)
Apparently one of the best price-performance ones at the moment is the Sony Artisan (unless you've got serious money to spend, that is). There's a review over at Luminous Landscape. Wish I had a spare $1800, my (Spyder-calibrated) Trinitron is starting to annoy me: the blacks are a bit undefined, even with good desk lighting (Solux bulbs) and a hood:(
And that's a damn good point about viewing X-rays. I went to the new hospital the government just built here - at a cost of some GBP£111.7 million! - and they have standard Dell machines and TFTs displaying their X-rays! I was NOT impressed; when I spoke with the radiologist about it he just gave the blank "what the hell are you talking about" look:( At least with their old lightboxes there was a guaranteed level of quality...
Excellent post; I'll tag something vaguely related on to it. I'd recommend that everyone watch Brian Springer's documentary "Spin", it's a fascinating insight into how media is used and abused in a presidential race. Now go get yourself a motorised sat dish and watch some pre-air broadcasts;)
Well said. Personally I find it almost offensive that someone would willingly use such a great speaker setup with such a crap source!;)
To do those Mackies proper justice I'd plug them into a serious mixer: ideally something like the Yamaha 02R (the version 2 24bit/96KHz one), which'll also do full 5.1 surround as good as anything you're likely to get without a dedicated monitor matrix system & router. And if he couldn't stretch to its heady pricetag - which I'd imagine, considering the cost of his monitoring system, wouldn't be _that_ expensive - then a second-hand 03D would suffice.
Sheesh, the very least he could do would be to hook them up to a Hammerfall...:)
After re-reading my parent post it seems to sound a bit arsy/confrontational - just want to say that that wasn't my intention, just that I was at work and probably fairly stressed (though the fact that I was posting on/. instead of working doesn't exactly help me;)).
But that's my point. Even relatively lowly hardware such as an iPod combined with *decent headphones* (such as Shure E3C's or the much cheaper Sony NUDEs) and a decent quality source (=>196Kbit AAC) will easily sound as good as the average-to-good home stereo, so if you wouldn't transcode music played on your home stereo, why would you on a portable device?
I think, if anything, most people underestimate the capabilities of portable devices rather than overestimate the effects of transcoding, purely because they never change the $3USD token bundled headphones that came with it...
(Note, my original quote was purely to indicate the quality scale of portable hardware, with a decent baseline low-end being the iPod + Sony's, up to the pinnacle of a good portable DAT or iRiver IMP-150 hooking its digital-out into a portable headphone amp like the HeadRoom Total Bithead, coupled with the "king of headphones" Sennheiser HD650's.)
Like I said, people with decent ears and decent equipment tend to hear it as it *actually sounds*: which is bloody awful. Seriously, have you ever actually tried it?
For your average Joe who'll never use anything but the white Apple earbuds "cause they look cool and show everyone I've got an iPod" it probably won't sound much, if at all, different, due to his hearing being dull and his equipment incapable of even generating the subtle nuances in the first place. But for anyone that cares about their music enough to invest in decent hardware, be it an iPod + SonyNUDES right up to a portable DAT + seperate headphone amp + Sennheiser HD650's, it's certainly *not* an over-estimation.
Yes, the quality will drop but oh-so-very-slightly. (People tend to really overestimate the quality loss when transcoding a single time. Do it like five or ten times though....)
No, no, no, no, no! Maybe if you're deaf, stick with the crappy stock headphones and encode at 64Kbit/sec. but otherwise, you will definitely notice. Buy yourself some Shure E3C's/Ultimate Ears/Etymolics, or, if you don't want to spend that much, spend $40USD on a pair of Sony NUDE MDR-EX71SL Fontopia's, then encode your music at at least 196Kbit/sec. You'll be amazed how much better your music sounds than with, say, the rubbish Apple white earbuds. Now transcode them from AAC to MP3 and listen to how crap they sound. But anyway, back to transcoding:
Lossy encoding works by stripping out the sounds that the encoder thinks your ears won't hear, using fancy psychoacoustic techniques and other assorted magic mojo. You get 10:1 (or better) compression, and it'll sound pretty good because most of the 4th gen. encoders (Apple AAC, Nero AAC, Vorbis, WMA9, etc.) do a good job of guessing what you won't miss. HOWEVER, when you then transcode this to another lossy format the new codec'll try to do this *all over again*, except it won't have much source material to work with this time (well, 1/10th of what it had before) and as a result will mash the sound terribly.
To use a variation on the good old "baking a cake" analogy:
You start with your "source", which is a fully baked crusty cake (your 44KHz 16bit CD).
You want to make it "lighter" but appear visually the same, so, to do it in a vaguely similar way to what an encoder would do: you pull the cake into many pieces or so, then hollow out the middle bits and stick the outer crust pieces back together with some similar coloured icing. Flip it back over and, to most everyone, it still looks fairly like a normal cake (this is your encoding to AAC or whatever).
Now you want to "transcode" it. This would now be the equivalent of smashing this hollow cake up again, trying to take away another 10th of it, then trying to reconstruct the original "shell". Good luck, but it's going to look (sound) rubbish;)
Kinda reminds me of what happened when we ran this Caption Competition. My, how we giggled - and were disturbed - when we saw the search-engine stats for that! It seems like a lot of people out there like drinking horse semen, for instance: ewwwwwwwwww!
A great many people use search engines as modern-day confessional booths - supposedly confidential ways to bear their most personal and private thoughts (well, search engines are more useful, but suck at spiritual advice).
..."your work" even, ack! Just thought I'd pre-empt the grammar Nazis; I'm ashamed I let that one through. And I've just finished "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", oh the shame!;)
CD Baby has a guide on how to do a cover song in the US: http://www.cdbaby.net/dd?f=8
It's slightly different here in the UK (and slightly easier as it's a single "clearing-house"), you'll need to get in touch with the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) and probably the Performing Rights Society: http://www.prs.co.uk/soundadvice/ http: //www.mcps.co.uk/
For specific advice on doing a cover, see the FAQ (question 9) here: http://www.mcps.co.uk/productlicensing/
Note that when you publicly perform a cover you'll need a Public Entertainment Licence (PEL) and a PRS licence.
If you're an artist/band then I'ld recommend joining/registering with both the MCPS & PRS, it doesn't cost much (if anything) and means that you're work is protected and you'll get paid for things like radio play, so it's well worth it. They also give you a load of advice and are really helpful in general.
Remember, though, that lyrics have their own individual copyright. This is why when you print up the lyrics in say, a CD sleeve, you have to get explicit permission from the songwriter even if you own the copyright to the particular mechanical recording and have publishing rights for the song itself. Bizarre, I know, but that's the way it works.
The encryption's not great, and it's only for the initial authentication handshake/exchange; it sends the rest of the session unencrypted, so you can capture and "replay", obtaining any typed-in passwords; it's vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks as there's no server authentication. Tunnel it over SSH and it's OK, though;)
Tell you what I miss most from ICQ: the fact that you could set your status to invisible/offline and *then* sign in, so you could quickly check whether certain contacts were around without announcing your presence to everyone - including the people you're trying to avoid (which is what MSN/MS-Messenger does).
Some of the third-party ones (e.g. aMSN) let you do this, but it's still annoying that the official client shouts "Everybody look, I've just signed in even though I'm supposed to be off work sick!";)
I seem to remember watching a TV documentary that said it was much more likely that the lead solder used to hold very early (1800's) tin cans together was the toxin. A quick search on Google reveals some more details on this: it was the Franklin Expedition:- http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Nun avut/franklin_ expedition.htm
Modern "tin cans" are actually made of steel with a thin continous coating of tin, as it's cheaper to make them this way and steel is stronger. Also, I'm pretty sure various acidic contents, such as fruit & tuna, aren't particularly good candidates for tins once they've been opened, which is why these products say "once opened please transfer from the tin to a suitable container" (or words to that effect). This is because the acid will react with the tin and impart a metallic taste to the food; I'm not sure if it's actually toxic, but I'd imagine not.
Parent - Score: +5, Insightful Well said, crabpeople, that's more like it!
The biggest problem with the grandparent post is that it's all about prevention of EFFECT rather than prevention of CAUSE; it seems like it was leading on to, "...barcode all citizens at birth, track all movements, kill anyone that breaks the law, rewrite history. Freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength!" (or 'Freedom is a privilege, not a right!')
I thought America was supposed to be a fairly liberal society, but it really does seem that essential liberty has been lost to (perceived) temporary safety, and that the public is too apathetic - or scared - to recind these restrictions. But I suppose they've fallen for the classic pacifier: pretend to be in a constant state of war so the public is too scared to pay attention to those small problems like domestic issues and taxes; remember that we're at war, people! And if that doesn't fool them, brand them as unpatriotic! Now give me your papers, please...
For those people that haven't seen it, do yourself a favour and find yourself a copy of Chris Morris's Brass Eye Paedophile Special (buy the DVD or find it by other means). Brass Eye was a truly legendary British TV series exposing the hipocricy of the media, using gullible celebrities and fake documentary-style filmwork to convey the ridiculousness of hysteria & misinformation that has become so commonplace throughout the newspapers & TV. You will laugh your ass off, guaranteed!
No such forced terms of service exist for open WAPs that I know of unfortunately
There are a few: anyone thinking of running an open Access Point should strongly consider the use of something like the NoCatSplash firmware (if you've got a WRT54G). This'll turn your AP into a "NoCat open
portal", which means that users will be presented with a "splash page" of your choosing, and must click a button before they can access the network
from your AP: instant ToS agreement/disclaimer. Also, you'll need to make sure all logging is turned off and there's no way of recording or knowing who is doing what with the connection; this'll then protect you - at least to some extent - though, like you say, you'll probably still be breaking your own ISP's ToS, and maybe other laws (depending on where you live).
There are plenty of other firmware hacks for the WRT54G (and similar) around, too, check out LinksysInfo.org for more details. There are a good few that include similar features to NoCatSplash, plus enhancements such as the "ping" hack (to boost the AP's signal strength), in an easier-to-use firmware: for example EWRT. Oh, and Seattle Wireless is another good source of information.
Of course, IANAL and I don't play one on TV; the fact of the matter is that if you want to run an open AP and *really want to be certain of the legal issues & ramifications* then - gasp - you need to speak to a lawyer!;)
Re:Where is SP2...
on
Latest SP2 News
·
· Score: 4, Informative
XP SP2 was definitely made available on the 16th (Monday) for Software Update Services (SUS - soon to be called WUS), 'cause it shows up in my list of downloaded updates (and there was a big spike of incoming traffic in my MRTG logs on Monday morning) - not that I'll be approving it just yet;) Whether they've pulled it from this distribution channel I'm not sure, but given that most SUS installs update daily it's probably too late to bother.
BTW, for any small NT network admins I'd highly recommend SUS. It's basically the same as Automatic Updates but centralized to one (or more) of your servers, saving you bandwidth and allowing control of which patches are approved for internal distribution (so can hold back until you've done your testing), amongst other things. For more info see the link above; it's remarkably easy to set up and roll out.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it's nowhere *near* as easy as the simple "replace GBP with EUR" solution you imply; there are massive economic & political issues - basically the government passing/losing power to Europe - as well as the straight social one: people don't want to change their currency, as it'll mean they have to rethink/relearn the price of *everything* - would you be willing to do it? Read this for more info:
http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/docs/efaq.htm
Not that I'm saying switching to the Euro would be a bad thing, it's just nowhere near as easy as people tend to make out.
There's a half-decent guide to VAT over at Channel4 Money. Page 4 shows some of the interesting stuff that's VAT exempt - which is just different wording for zero-rated, apparently. And as you say, yes, the law is ugly! For instance: funerals are VAT-exempt, but headstones aren't; frozen food's exempt, but frozen food *that you eat frozen*, such as ice cream, isn't; it's so silly you'd think they were making half of it up! And don't even start on the Jaffa cake thing ;)
Apparently one of the best price-performance ones at the moment is the Sony Artisan (unless you've got serious money to spend, that is). There's a review over at Luminous Landscape. Wish I had a spare $1800, my (Spyder-calibrated) Trinitron is starting to annoy me: the blacks are a bit undefined, even with good desk lighting (Solux bulbs) and a hood :(
And that's a damn good point about viewing X-rays. I went to the new hospital the government just built here - at a cost of some GBP£111.7 million! - and they have standard Dell machines and TFTs displaying their X-rays! I was NOT impressed; when I spoke with the radiologist about it he just gave the blank "what the hell are you talking about" look- Prince Humperdink: To the death!
- Westley: No! To the Pain!
(sorry, I couldn't resist)Excellent post; I'll tag something vaguely related on to it. I'd recommend that everyone watch Brian Springer's documentary "Spin", it's a fascinating insight into how media is used and abused in a presidential race. Now go get yourself a motorised sat dish and watch some pre-air broadcasts ;)
Not that you're going to get a balanced view (in the other direction) from these guys, but check this out:
http://moveon.org/front/
(scroll down to "Taking on Fox")
Been playing Doom 3 much lately, have we? ;)
(Yes, I know it's not out for OS X yet; some of us have Apple laptops and PC desktops.)Well said. Personally I find it almost offensive that someone would willingly use such a great speaker setup with such a crap source! ;)
:)
To do those Mackies proper justice I'd plug them into a serious mixer: ideally something like the Yamaha 02R (the version 2 24bit/96KHz one), which'll also do full 5.1 surround as good as anything you're likely to get without a dedicated monitor matrix system & router. And if he couldn't stretch to its heady pricetag - which I'd imagine, considering the cost of his monitoring system, wouldn't be _that_ expensive - then a second-hand 03D would suffice.
Sheesh, the very least he could do would be to hook them up to a Hammerfall...
After re-reading my parent post it seems to sound a bit arsy/confrontational - just want to say that that wasn't my intention, just that I was at work and probably fairly stressed (though the fact that I was posting on /. instead of working doesn't exactly help me ;)).
But that's my point. Even relatively lowly hardware such as an iPod combined with *decent headphones* (such as Shure E3C's or the much cheaper Sony NUDEs) and a decent quality source (=>196Kbit AAC) will easily sound as good as the average-to-good home stereo, so if you wouldn't transcode music played on your home stereo, why would you on a portable device?
I think, if anything, most people underestimate the capabilities of portable devices rather than overestimate the effects of transcoding, purely because they never change the $3USD token bundled headphones that came with it...
(Note, my original quote was purely to indicate the quality scale of portable hardware, with a decent baseline low-end being the iPod + Sony's, up to the pinnacle of a good portable DAT or iRiver IMP-150 hooking its digital-out into a portable headphone amp like the HeadRoom Total Bithead, coupled with the "king of headphones" Sennheiser HD650's.)
Nahhh, that would be "hifi enthusiast" ;)
Like I said, people with decent ears and decent equipment tend to hear it as it *actually sounds*: which is bloody awful. Seriously, have you ever actually tried it?
For your average Joe who'll never use anything but the white Apple earbuds "cause they look cool and show everyone I've got an iPod" it probably won't sound much, if at all, different, due to his hearing being dull and his equipment incapable of even generating the subtle nuances in the first place. But for anyone that cares about their music enough to invest in decent hardware, be it an iPod + SonyNUDES right up to a portable DAT + seperate headphone amp + Sennheiser HD650's, it's certainly *not* an over-estimation.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a sound engineer.
No, no, no, no, no! Maybe if you're deaf, stick with the crappy stock headphones and encode at 64Kbit/sec. but otherwise, you will definitely notice. Buy yourself some Shure E3C's/Ultimate Ears/Etymolics, or, if you don't want to spend that much, spend $40USD on a pair of Sony NUDE MDR-EX71SL Fontopia's, then encode your music at at least 196Kbit/sec. You'll be amazed how much better your music sounds than with, say, the rubbish Apple white earbuds. Now transcode them from AAC to MP3 and listen to how crap they sound. But anyway, back to transcoding:
Lossy encoding works by stripping out the sounds that the encoder thinks your ears won't hear, using fancy psychoacoustic techniques and other assorted magic mojo. You get 10:1 (or better) compression, and it'll sound pretty good because most of the 4th gen. encoders (Apple AAC, Nero AAC, Vorbis, WMA9, etc.) do a good job of guessing what you won't miss. HOWEVER, when you then transcode this to another lossy format the new codec'll try to do this *all over again*, except it won't have much source material to work with this time (well, 1/10th of what it had before) and as a result will mash the sound terribly.
To use a variation on the good old "baking a cake" analogy:You start with your "source", which is a fully baked crusty cake (your 44KHz 16bit CD).
You want to make it "lighter" but appear visually the same, so, to do it in a vaguely similar way to what an encoder would do: you pull the cake into many pieces or so, then hollow out the middle bits and stick the outer crust pieces back together with some similar coloured icing. Flip it back over and, to most everyone, it still looks fairly like a normal cake (this is your encoding to AAC or whatever).
Now you want to "transcode" it. This would now be the equivalent of smashing this hollow cake up again, trying to take away another 10th of it, then trying to reconstruct the original "shell". Good luck, but it's going to look (sound) rubbish
(Yes, that analogy is pretty crap, but hey!)
Kinda reminds me of what happened when we ran this Caption Competition. My, how we giggled - and were disturbed - when we saw the search-engine stats for that! It seems like a lot of people out there like drinking horse semen, for instance: ewwwwwwwwww!
..."your work" even, ack! Just thought I'd pre-empt the grammar Nazis; I'm ashamed I let that one through. And I've just finished "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", oh the shame! ;)
CD Baby has a guide on how to do a cover song in the US:
: //www.mcps.co.uk/
http://www.cdbaby.net/dd?f=8
It's slightly different here in the UK (and slightly easier as it's a single "clearing-house"), you'll need to get in touch with the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) and probably the Performing Rights Society:
http://www.prs.co.uk/soundadvice/
http
For specific advice on doing a cover, see the FAQ (question 9) here:
http://www.mcps.co.uk/productlicensing/
Note that when you publicly perform a cover you'll need a Public Entertainment Licence (PEL) and a PRS licence.
If you're an artist/band then I'ld recommend joining/registering with both the MCPS & PRS, it doesn't cost much (if anything) and means that you're work is protected and you'll get paid for things like radio play, so it's well worth it. They also give you a load of advice and are really helpful in general.
Remember, though, that lyrics have their own individual copyright. This is why when you print up the lyrics in say, a CD sleeve, you have to get explicit permission from the songwriter even if you own the copyright to the particular mechanical recording and have publishing rights for the song itself. Bizarre, I know, but that's the way it works.
The encryption's not great, and it's only for the initial authentication handshake/exchange; it sends the rest of the session unencrypted, so you can capture and "replay", obtaining any typed-in passwords; it's vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks as there's no server authentication. Tunnel it over SSH and it's OK, though ;)
Tell you what I miss most from ICQ: the fact that you could set your status to invisible/offline and *then* sign in, so you could quickly check whether certain contacts were around without announcing your presence to everyone - including the people you're trying to avoid (which is what MSN/MS-Messenger does).
;)
Some of the third-party ones (e.g. aMSN) let you do this, but it's still annoying that the official client shouts "Everybody look, I've just signed in even though I'm supposed to be off work sick!"
I seem to remember watching a TV documentary that said it was much more likely that the lead solder used to hold very early (1800's) tin cans together was the toxin. A quick search on Google reveals some more details on this: it was the Franklin Expedition:-n avut/franklin_ expedition.htm
http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Nu
Modern "tin cans" are actually made of steel with a thin continous coating of tin, as it's cheaper to make them this way and steel is stronger. Also, I'm pretty sure various acidic contents, such as fruit & tuna, aren't particularly good candidates for tins once they've been opened, which is why these products say "once opened please transfer from the tin to a suitable container" (or words to that effect). This is because the acid will react with the tin and impart a metallic taste to the food; I'm not sure if it's actually toxic, but I'd imagine not.
Parent - Score: +5, Insightful
Well said, crabpeople, that's more like it!
The biggest problem with the grandparent post is that it's all about prevention of EFFECT rather than prevention of CAUSE; it seems like it was leading on to, "...barcode all citizens at birth, track all movements, kill anyone that breaks the law, rewrite history. Freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength!" (or 'Freedom is a privilege, not a right!')
I thought America was supposed to be a fairly liberal society, but it really does seem that essential liberty has been lost to (perceived) temporary safety, and that the public is too apathetic - or scared - to recind these restrictions. But I suppose they've fallen for the classic pacifier: pretend to be in a constant state of war so the public is too scared to pay attention to those small problems like domestic issues and taxes; remember that we're at war, people! And if that doesn't fool them, brand them as unpatriotic! Now give me your papers, please...
For those people that haven't seen it, do yourself a favour and find yourself a copy of Chris Morris's Brass Eye Paedophile Special (buy the DVD or find it by other means). Brass Eye was a truly legendary British TV series exposing the hipocricy of the media, using gullible celebrities and fake documentary-style filmwork to convey the ridiculousness of hysteria & misinformation that has become so commonplace throughout the newspapers & TV. You will laugh your ass off, guaranteed!
There are a few: anyone thinking of running an open Access Point should strongly consider the use of something like the NoCatSplash firmware (if you've got a WRT54G). This'll turn your AP into a "NoCat open portal", which means that users will be presented with a "splash page" of your choosing, and must click a button before they can access the network from your AP: instant ToS agreement/disclaimer. Also, you'll need to make sure all logging is turned off and there's no way of recording or knowing who is doing what with the connection; this'll then protect you - at least to some extent - though, like you say, you'll probably still be breaking your own ISP's ToS, and maybe other laws (depending on where you live).
There are plenty of other firmware hacks for the WRT54G (and similar) around, too, check out LinksysInfo.org for more details. There are a good few that include similar features to NoCatSplash, plus enhancements such as the "ping" hack (to boost the AP's signal strength), in an easier-to-use firmware: for example EWRT. Oh, and Seattle Wireless is another good source of information.
Of course, IANAL and I don't play one on TV; the fact of the matter is that if you want to run an open AP and *really want to be certain of the legal issues & ramifications* then - gasp - you need to speak to a lawyer!XP SP2 was definitely made available on the 16th (Monday) for Software Update Services (SUS - soon to be called WUS), 'cause it shows up in my list of downloaded updates (and there was a big spike of incoming traffic in my MRTG logs on Monday morning) - not that I'll be approving it just yet ;) Whether they've pulled it from this distribution channel I'm not sure, but given that most SUS installs update daily it's probably too late to bother.
BTW, for any small NT network admins I'd highly recommend SUS. It's basically the same as Automatic Updates but centralized to one (or more) of your servers, saving you bandwidth and allowing control of which patches are approved for internal distribution (so can hold back until you've done your testing), amongst other things. For more info see the link above; it's remarkably easy to set up and roll out.