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User: Alan+Partridge

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Comments · 3,901

  1. Re:Amazing on Hubble's Exoplanet Pics Outshined by Keck's · · Score: 1

    Tell that to the weapons manufacturers. War is HIGHLY profitable.

  2. Re:Verizon on WWDC '08 Sees Slimmer, Improved, 3G iPhone · · Score: 1

    Do Americans write "co-worker" because they can't spell "colleague"?

  3. Re:The problem with a 2GB FLAC player on Apple Prepares For the Coming iPod Slump · · Score: 1

    I use Sony MDR-D77 'phones and Apple Lossless encoding with my 80GB iPod.

  4. Re:Yeah, Heston! on Charlton Heston's Impact On Sci-Fi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yep, he was great. Let's not forget the chilling Omega Man, either - one of my all time faves.

  5. Re:There's more here than meets the eye on Apple Can't Afford iPhone's Carrier Exclusivity · · Score: 1

    "However much they try to hide the fact that they're limited to macs mostly because they're not able to handle a more technical and advanced machine"

    If you genuinely believe that a machine that is simpler and more pleasurable to use is LESS advanced then I can only pity you. As to what exactly "more technical" means in this context I'll leave an exercise for the other readers.

  6. Re:The answer is quite simple actually: on Apple QuickTime DRM Disables Video Editing Apps · · Score: 1

    This is the same Clié that Sony orphaned years ago, right? Your problem isn't Apple's updating of QuickTime, it's Sony's abandoning of the Clié

  7. Re:Oy vey on Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back · · Score: 1

    You know not of what you speak. Take away dynamics from a recording, and you've robbed it of one of the precious forms of musical expression. Maybe kids are so used to colossal dynamic compression now that, when the hear a vinyl record made from a less/uncompressed source they find the the experience pleasurably nuanced. Either that or internet porn has fully rotted their brain-stems.

  8. Re:Oy vey on Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back · · Score: 1

    Well, quite. I doubt you get anything nice at all to listen to at 128 millibits per second - certainly raising the rate to 256 millibits per second isn't going to help.

  9. Re:Loudness War on The Death of High Fidelity · · Score: 1

    Are you still missing the SUB-BAND part of psychoacoustic compression? I mentioned PASC because the name describes the concept quite well. If your data rate is insufficient, then you start to hear artifacts of the division of the frequency space into sub-bands.

  10. Re:MOD DOWN the whole story, Flamebait on The Death of High Fidelity · · Score: 1

    If FM audio was so great, then why did Laserdisc adopt digital audio instead? FM audio has its moments, but it simply doesn't stand up to CD-quality digital audio in terms of fidelity.

  11. Re:MOD DOWN the whole story, Flamebait on The Death of High Fidelity · · Score: 1

    Choice. Once people have more choice, they never want to go back to less.

    I used to carry around my Discman and about a dozen CDs - and I never had what I REALLY wanted with me.

  12. Re:Loudness War on The Death of High Fidelity · · Score: 1

    I can't believe that you know what a multiband compressor is but seemingly have no idea how psychcoacoustic audio data compression typically works.

    One of the first commercially available systems was Philips' Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding or PASC, as used in DCC - MPEG layer 3 is very similar in conception. Read up on it - it's a sensible approach to compression, but it's only designed to do what it's designed to do.

  13. Re:NEWSFLASH! MP3's suck. Use a lossless CODEC. on The Death of High Fidelity · · Score: 1

    "typical iPod ear phones" are better than 99% of loudspeaker systems ever made.

    Personally, I use a 80GB iPod with a pair of old Sony MDR-D77 'phones. I use Apple Lossless to compress my CDs and, overall, it's the most satisfying Walkman I've ever had. I do have the odd MP3 in my collection, and I can nearly always spot 'em immediately.

    Honestly, you can 160GB DAPs now, it won't be long before you can realistically store your entire collection as Apple Lossless or FLAC.

    Do it for your ears.

  14. Re:What? on US To Extinguish (Most) Incandescent Bulb Sales By 2012 · · Score: 1

    Any amount of domestic lighting that causes your irises to close more than slightly is wasteful of energy. Your visual system is designed to adapt to varying levels of illumination - but it's better to err on the side of too dim than too bright. personally, I tend to wear sunglasses on cloudless days to protect my eyes from the high brightness of full sunshine.

  15. Re:What? on US To Extinguish (Most) Incandescent Bulb Sales By 2012 · · Score: 1

    Have you considered WINDOWS?

  16. Re:Government Efficiency on US To Extinguish (Most) Incandescent Bulb Sales By 2012 · · Score: 1

    When someone tells you they saved a fortune switching to CFLs then you know you're being bored by someone with TOO MANY FUCKING LIGHTS. Not one room of my house has even 100W of lighting in it, and I use incandescent lighting exclusively.

    The answer to the waste of 150x 100W incadescent bulbs isn't 150x 13W flouros, it's LESS FUCKING BULBS PERIOD.

    You ever compared a 40W incandescent to a CANDLE or an OIL LAMP? The brightest bulbs I have installed are 40W halogens and they produce superb light - better than ANY flouro.

  17. Re:Funny you should mention IBM... on AT&T Playing Hardball With Apple? · · Score: 1

    Indeed they did, but the PPW was not good enough, and the roadmap was worse. This was discussed to death at the time, and many pro-PPCers like myself were very annoyed about it. We need MORE competition, never less.

  18. Re:noooo FP on Native Windows PE File Loading on OS X? · · Score: 1

    Yes please - we only keep Windows machines around for a couple of vital apps - we'd love to dump the crappy, unreliable hulks.

  19. Re:What "success" on AT&T Playing Hardball With Apple? · · Score: 0

    The plan isn't too expensive, neither is the upfront price - it's the COMBINATION that's too much for the UK. I'd gladly pay £400 upfront for an unlocked iPhone OR take one for free/£50 on the O2 plan - but I won't pay twice.

    I want an iPhone, I'm just waiting for the pricing to adjust to our market. If it never does, I'll never get one.

  20. Re:Pscht! on AT&T Playing Hardball With Apple? · · Score: 0

    A car isn't made up of a group of PEOPLE though, is it? Made BY a group of people, perhaps.

  21. Re:Funny you should mention IBM... on AT&T Playing Hardball With Apple? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "I would wager that IBM didn't blow off Apple, but that IBM really couldn't deliver a performance competitive in a form with a TDP appropriate for laptops, with the final straw being Intel releasing Core2, for all intents and purposes erasing the instructions per clock advantage the PPC architecture had. (I know Apple made the jump before that, but I guarantee you that Intel shared the Core2 info with Apple)."

    Jobs stated as much when he announced the Intel switch. It was all about performance per watt and the roadmap - why IBM doesn't want to compete on PPW is a mystery - it's just as applicable to the datacentre as it is to the notebook.

  22. Re:Stoopid scientists get sailors killed. on New Software Could Warn Sailors of Rogue Waves · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What's the problem with UFOs? They are simply UNIDENTIFIED - there's nothing unscientific about not being able to identify something and saying so. The term UFO doesn't imply anything other-worldy or impossible. I myself have seen a couple of UFOs - the first was probably some kind of static discharge from a cloud, ball lightning ,or something similar. The second was almost certainly a meteor of some sort (and yes, I've seen lots of them as an amateur astronomer), but this one flared in a different way, more slowly and the trail was very long - perhaps it grazed the atmosphere rather than burning up.

    UFOs are a legitimate area of study, though I'm sure that 90% of sightings are perfectly explicable.

  23. Re:I know the perfect defence on Houston Police Test Unmanned Surveillance Aircraft · · Score: 0

    Nonsense. What makes 5mph under an arbitrary speed limit inherently safer than 5mph over an arbitrary speed limit?

  24. Re:Odd. on Apple, Burst Reach Settlement · · Score: 0

    Than for fuck's sake. THAN.

  25. Re:Yeah. But no. on Apple, Burst Reach Settlement · · Score: 0

    Err.... how can you send data faster than real time? Data has no implicit timing. Every single time a CD is burned at faster than 1X it would qualify as 'sending data faster than real time', surely?

    I'm glad to see that Apple fucked Burst on this - Burst had to pay both their own and Apple's costs, so the settlement was trivial.