Anyone have any data on the expected signal loss when going from.aac to.mp3 (or.ogg, for that matter). I know, it depends on lots of different variables (mp3 bitrate, original signal, human range of hearing, etc...) but it is even worth it to burn these songs to CD so I can rip them back to MP3? Anyone tried it? How does it sound?
It would probably be wise for you to bump that payment up several notches and pay the loan off early (but pay off your higher interest loans first).
The interest rate is so low on these loans that my money is better off elsewhere (and I already have a house). Plus, I was overestimating a little on the length of the loan. I had to go back and check but it's 20, not 30.
Not all debt is bad debt. When you can borrow money at or just above the prime rate (+0.5% above in this case) it's better to keep paying the minimums on those loans and use your liquid capital for long term investments with a higher rate of return. So sure, I'll pay like $75,000 in interest, but i'll make like $300,000 (over 20 years) by investing the money instead, so you come out ahead by keeping the debt.
My college saving evaporated in my sophomore year when my dad lost his company. If it wasn't for the federal school loan program (and getting lots of part time programming jobs), I would have had to drop out. The interest rates are extremely low (usually near the prime rate) and the cost to taxpayers is almost nil, AFAIK, so it's good for everyone.
I'll be paying $80 a month for the next 30 years, but I wouldn't have my current (great) job if I didn't have a degree, so in the long run, there's no question. Student loans are a wonderful thing.
Computer Science is as much a science as Physics or Biology. The problem is that "Computer Scientists" rarely, if ever, do actual Computer Science after they get thier degrees.
How many people out there with C.S. degrees have gotten jobs that require them to develop, for example, a new compression algorithm? When's the last time you wrote your own language and a complier to go with it? I'm not saying it never happens, but the reality is that most Computer Scientists wind up being Software Engineers.
I mean, It's important to have the scientific background when being an engineer. How many civil engineers do you know that never learned static-state physics? But developing software systems is no more a science than designing cars or buildings. It's applied science, which is a different thing.
No individual class files, only improved class bundles called "Assemblies" (this is a good thing)?!?
".Net Remoting" - basically RMI with support for any.NET language
First off, I have to give him some credit. This is the first time I've ever seen a specific breakdown of exactly what.NET is good at that Java isn't. And he's right, these things are pretty cool (except maybe for #3).
But would I trade J2EE for this? Not on your life. All of this stuff can be done in one way or another with Java, and Java is still way more mature in most respects. I mean, I'm assuming that since he chose to highlight these features, they're probably the most significant, and if this is the best that.NET has to offer over Java, the choice is clear for me.
If I was going to develop a new Windows app, I'd be doing it in.NET, no question. But when it comes to cross-platform or enterprise level development,.NET is not ready for prime time.
For most developers the issue of cross platform is irrelevant.
Oh, really? Well 78% of the developers out there disagree with you. Cross-platform development is not only relevant, in many cases it is required.
The enterprise level apps I have been involved with are either Intranet based (and this.NET is perfect) or Windows based. In both cases.NET is a great environment and has strong advantages over Java.
"strong advantages" eh? Like what exactly? This is what I always run into when talking with people about.NET. The answer I get is "it's better" (in one form or another) but they never specifically state why. I can give you a list of very useful technologies that Java has that.NET doesn't (applets, checked exceptions, and multiple VM implementations, to name a few). And regarding PDA/Phone applications:
You can cut the framework down for custom applications.
So are you going to distribute your stripped down version of.NET with a 50k cell phone app? Java 2 Micro Edition is going to come pre-installed on 100 million nokia phones this year. How many phones are going to have.NET pre-installed? Is that even possible?
My main problem right now is that I still have no idea what.NET is capable of, and I've spent way too much time looking already. If Microsoft has such a great product, why aren't they promoting the benefits? It's not like they don't have the marketing talent. I suspect the real reason is that all they have is a rebranded version of COM/DCOM and a new GUI toolkit. And until someone can give me some specific technology that.NET provides that can't be found elsewhere, that's what I (and a lot of other developers) will continue to think.
Could someone explain to me exactly what.NET is good for, that couldn't be better accomplished using Java, or Win32/C++, or PHP? Seriously.
I can't see it being useful for games, because it's going to be slower than C++.
I can't see it being useful for cross-platform GUI apps because there's no guarantee that.NET really is cross-platform.
I can't see it being better than any of the various web development solutions (PHP, cold fusion, etc...)
I can't see it being useful for enterprise server side apps because Java is more mature, more reliable, and has a VM implementation on lots of different platforms.
I can't see it being useful for PDA/Phone apps because the framework is too heavyweight.
So I know that it's new and shiny and Microsoft....but what, exactly, is it good for? What can you do with.NET that you can't do better with something else?
You obviously have not used _this_ tool on anything.
I was easily able to it up and running to test a 1000 class project that I've been working on for about two years now. It took all of 5 minutes from the time I read the article on slashdot to the point where I was fixing bugs that I had missed in two years of constant debugging, testing and refactoring. No scripts, no regular expressions, just point at the.jar and go.
Now, granted, they were some fairly simplistic bugs, and it's questionable whether or not they would have ever floated to the surface as an actual bug report. But they would still be in the code now if it wasn't for this tool.
How do we know that this 'kill' command kills the RFID tag and not...say...the user ?! Next thing you know, they'll be putting these things in your teeth! And when I say "they" I mean the Martians...right after the anal probe.
The real value of tools like this is that they act as a sort of Instant Code Review. Just as you can use unit tests to quickly verify the (partial) correctness of your system, you can use tools like this to quickly find bad code so that it can be corrected before it causes more problems. Obviously, just like unit tests are not a complete replacement for QA, this is not a complete replacement for code reviews, but every little but helps.
And although it would be useful everywhere, I would think that a tool like this would fit nicely into an extreme programming shop, where the developers are already used to using automated tools on thier code.
The reason that the causes for the drop in sales are irrelevant is because digital distribution of music is, far and away, a better method than mailing out a bunch of round plastic discs. This is EMI's motivation...simply to cut costs and increase profts by adopting a better system. The drop is CD sales are just a catalyst for change.
Is this the only thing EMI is doing to stay alive? No. They're laying off people, they're suing people, they're doing all the things that a company does when it starts to die. But they are dying...for the simple reason that the Internet made thier business model obsolete.
First off, I don't disagree with you on the cause of declining record sales. It's not just piracy.
However, you're missing my point. EMI is looking at this from a purely financial point of view. They don't care about music, or fair-use, or artists. They care about money.
That's why I used the "McM.B.A. portion of my brain" for those calculations. They see the 10% drop in sales this year, as continuing at a linear, fixed rate (for example $6 billion a year) and not as a percentage. So if you have a 60 billion dollar a year industry, and you lose 6 billion a year for 10 years... This is the same kind of thinking that makes them conclude that 3 guys at a University can do 80 billion dollars in damage, and it's typical of business types who wouldn't understand mathmatics and statistics if you tatooed a bell curve on the inside of thier eyelids.
What I'm saying is that the reason behind the sales drop is irrelevant. Any way you cut it the effect is the same; EMI is forced to adapt to changes in the market, which is a good thing.
Did I say anything about piracy? That's not the issue. The issue is that sales are down about 10%. Using the McM.B.A. portion of my brain, I figure that means they've got about 10 years left of doing what they're doing now before they go out of business. It doesn't matter if the drop in sales is due to piracy, crappy music, 9/11, the war in Iraq, or the phases of the fucking moon. The goal here is to increase sales (or, at least, lower costs) by moving to a new delivery system. Which is what they should have done 5 years ago.
They've been backed into a corner. It's this, or go out of business in 10 years. Of course, that's the only way you get any company to do anything; Make it the only viable financial option.
I read this article a while ago (seems to be slashdotted now), and as I recall, this cartridge has a native Java CPU (one that runs the bytecode directly, as opposed to in a VM) so it should be only slightly slower than an equivlent C application.
I think the main use for this technology will not be writing games solely for the GBA, but as a platform "porting" path for J2ME cell phone game developers.
You can set up Netjuke to play files locally (as in, on the server where the MP3's are) via MPG123 or Winamp. You just set up a standard Netjuke playlist, log in as an admin user and send it to the local player. Then you can control it via the standard Netjuke interface.
Couldn't you design the RFID tags to disable themselves when the clothes are washed? Maybe have some kind of heat sensitive material that would disable the tag (or just melt) when it got hot enough, or wet enough.
I suppose "Dry Clean Only" presents a problem tho...
Yes. And you could have done the same rearchitecting of the code in C, and had even better performance.
On the two re-architecture projects I've worked on, we considered implementing our improved design in C++ (no classes in C, so that wasn't an option). However, we found that it would have been cost prohibitive, due to portability and maintence costs, and the limitations of the STL vs the Java 2 JDK. So, yeah, we _could_ have done it in C/C++, but we wouldn't be selling it now, we'd still be writing it.
Yeah, you can get better Java performance if you create all your objects in a huge pool and then just hand around references to the thing. It's also a pain in the ass.
Object pools are a bad idea in Java, but I can't even count the number of C/C++ programmers who I've heard say thats what's needed to "fix" Java. I'll say it again...If you take the time to learn how Java is supposed to work, you'll be 10 times more productive and create a product of equal (or better) quality.
Uh, huh. As evidenced by all those high quality horizontal Java apps. Oh, wait.
Considering Java has 54% of the software development market, I'd say there's probably more Java out there than you think. It's just mostly on the backend, so you don't see it (unless you bother to look).
Is a for() loop in Java faster than in C? No. But if raw performance was the only consideration, we'd all be writing in assembler. Development costs, maintainence costs, deployment costs, portability, security....in all these other respects, Java beats C/C++ hands down.
My company's entire business model is centered around making enterprise applicatons in Java. It's extremely efficent and performant for server-side apps and web services. We also have Java client side apps that are as fast and memory efficent as any of our competitor's products (that are not written in Java).
Java will run as fast or as slow as you make it. We've re-written C applicatons in Java and actually made them run faster by improving the architecture. If you try to write a Java app using C/C++ programming techniques, it will suck. If you take the time to learn how Java is supposed to work, you'll be 10 times more productive and create a product of equal (or better) quality.
Microsoft sales people are truly adept at their trade.
That's exactly the point. Microsoft is a company based on marketing, not engineering. That's why they almost always hire new college grads as programmers...anyone with any actual development experience would see right through all the marketing hype and realize how much thier products suck.
Actually, I would argue that Sun has the exact opposite problem. Love it or hate it, Java has made a huge impact on the software industry, but Sun has been thus far unable to greatly profit from it because they're all engineering and no marketing. If Sun recruited some of those evil, undead marketing gurus over at Microsoft, they could make a killing. If Microsoft hired some lab-rat engineers over at Sun (and actually gave them some resources), they might actually be able to deliver on 1/10 of the shit they promise....
Biggest scam ever! They get more and more useless every day...."Oh, I printed half a page, time to buy a new $50 ink cartridge".
Printer technology peaked with the laserjet printer and everything since then has been a ugly and annoying attempt by printer manufacturers at a constant revenue stream. Blegh!
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have any data on the expected signal loss when going from .aac to .mp3 (or .ogg, for that matter). I know, it depends on lots of different variables (mp3 bitrate, original signal, human range of hearing, etc...) but it is even worth it to burn these songs to CD so I can rip them back to MP3? Anyone tried it? How does it sound?
It would probably be wise for you to bump that payment up several notches and pay the loan off early (but pay off your higher interest loans first).
The interest rate is so low on these loans that my money is better off elsewhere (and I already have a house). Plus, I was overestimating a little on the length of the loan. I had to go back and check but it's 20, not 30.
Not all debt is bad debt. When you can borrow money at or just above the prime rate (+0.5% above in this case) it's better to keep paying the minimums on those loans and use your liquid capital for long term investments with a higher rate of return. So sure, I'll pay like $75,000 in interest, but i'll make like $300,000 (over 20 years) by investing the money instead, so you come out ahead by keeping the debt.
My college saving evaporated in my sophomore year when my dad lost his company. If it wasn't for the federal school loan program (and getting lots of part time programming jobs), I would have had to drop out. The interest rates are extremely low (usually near the prime rate) and the cost to taxpayers is almost nil, AFAIK, so it's good for everyone.
I'll be paying $80 a month for the next 30 years, but I wouldn't have my current (great) job if I didn't have a degree, so in the long run, there's no question. Student loans are a wonderful thing.
Computer Science is as much a science as Physics or Biology. The problem is that "Computer Scientists" rarely, if ever, do actual Computer Science after they get thier degrees.
How many people out there with C.S. degrees have gotten jobs that require them to develop, for example, a new compression algorithm? When's the last time you wrote your own language and a complier to go with it? I'm not saying it never happens, but the reality is that most Computer Scientists wind up being Software Engineers.
I mean, It's important to have the scientific background when being an engineer. How many civil engineers do you know that never learned static-state physics? But developing software systems is no more a science than designing cars or buildings. It's applied science, which is a different thing.
First off, I have to give him some credit. This is the first time I've ever seen a specific breakdown of exactly what
But would I trade J2EE for this? Not on your life. All of this stuff can be done in one way or another with Java, and Java is still way more mature in most respects. I mean, I'm assuming that since he chose to highlight these features, they're probably the most significant, and if this is the best that
If I was going to develop a new Windows app, I'd be doing it in
...aim for September and you might make it by Christmas. I wonder what percentage of PC games actually stay on schedule? 20%? 10%?
Oh, really? Well 78% of the developers out there disagree with you. Cross-platform development is not only relevant, in many cases it is required.
"strong advantages" eh? Like what exactly? This is what I always run into when talking with people about
So are you going to distribute your stripped down version of
My main problem right now is that I still have no idea what
Could someone explain to me exactly what .NET is good for, that couldn't be better accomplished using Java, or Win32/C++, or PHP? Seriously.
.NET really is cross-platform.
.NET that you can't do better with something else?
I can't see it being useful for games, because it's going to be slower than C++.
I can't see it being useful for cross-platform GUI apps because there's no guarantee that
I can't see it being better than any of the various web development solutions (PHP, cold fusion, etc...)
I can't see it being useful for enterprise server side apps because Java is more mature, more reliable, and has a VM implementation on lots of different platforms.
I can't see it being useful for PDA/Phone apps because the framework is too heavyweight.
So I know that it's new and shiny and Microsoft....but what, exactly, is it good for? What can you do with
You obviously have not used _this_ tool on anything.
.jar and go.
I was easily able to it up and running to test a 1000 class project that I've been working on for about two years now. It took all of 5 minutes from the time I read the article on slashdot to the point where I was fixing bugs that I had missed in two years of constant debugging, testing and refactoring. No scripts, no regular expressions, just point at the
Now, granted, they were some fairly simplistic bugs, and it's questionable whether or not they would have ever floated to the surface as an actual bug report. But they would still be in the code now if it wasn't for this tool.
How do we know that this 'kill' command kills the RFID tag and not...say... the user ?! Next thing you know, they'll be putting these things in your teeth! And when I say "they" I mean the Martians...right after the anal probe.
No, I will not take off my tin foil hat....
The real value of tools like this is that they act as a sort of Instant Code Review. Just as you can use unit tests to quickly verify the (partial) correctness of your system, you can use tools like this to quickly find bad code so that it can be corrected before it causes more problems. Obviously, just like unit tests are not a complete replacement for QA, this is not a complete replacement for code reviews, but every little but helps.
And although it would be useful everywhere, I would think that a tool like this would fit nicely into an extreme programming shop, where the developers are already used to using automated tools on thier code.
The reason that the causes for the drop in sales are irrelevant is because digital distribution of music is, far and away, a better method than mailing out a bunch of round plastic discs. This is EMI's motivation...simply to cut costs and increase profts by adopting a better system. The drop is CD sales are just a catalyst for change.
Is this the only thing EMI is doing to stay alive? No. They're laying off people, they're suing people, they're doing all the things that a company does when it starts to die. But they are dying...for the simple reason that the Internet made thier business model obsolete.
First off, I don't disagree with you on the cause of declining record sales. It's not just piracy.
However, you're missing my point. EMI is looking at this from a purely financial point of view. They don't care about music, or fair-use, or artists. They care about money.
That's why I used the "McM.B.A. portion of my brain" for those calculations. They see the 10% drop in sales this year, as continuing at a linear, fixed rate (for example $6 billion a year) and not as a percentage. So if you have a 60 billion dollar a year industry, and you lose 6 billion a year for 10 years... This is the same kind of thinking that makes them conclude that 3 guys at a University can do 80 billion dollars in damage, and it's typical of business types who wouldn't understand mathmatics and statistics if you tatooed a bell curve on the inside of thier eyelids.
What I'm saying is that the reason behind the sales drop is irrelevant. Any way you cut it the effect is the same; EMI is forced to adapt to changes in the market, which is a good thing.
Did I say anything about piracy? That's not the issue. The issue is that sales are down about 10%. Using the McM.B.A. portion of my brain, I figure that means they've got about 10 years left of doing what they're doing now before they go out of business. It doesn't matter if the drop in sales is due to piracy, crappy music, 9/11, the war in Iraq, or the phases of the fucking moon. The goal here is to increase sales (or, at least, lower costs) by moving to a new delivery system. Which is what they should have done 5 years ago.
They've been backed into a corner. It's this, or go out of business in 10 years. Of course, that's the only way you get any company to do anything; Make it the only viable financial option.
Better yet, a SEGA Genesis emulator....
I read this article a while ago (seems to be slashdotted now), and as I recall, this cartridge has a native Java CPU (one that runs the bytecode directly, as opposed to in a VM) so it should be only slightly slower than an equivlent C application.
I think the main use for this technology will not be writing games solely for the GBA, but as a platform "porting" path for J2ME cell phone game developers.
In the second paragraph:
The three warnings, all issued on Wednesday, involve the Microsoft Virtual Machine for running Java applets on Windows
So it's Microsoft's VM implementation...
You can set up Netjuke to play files locally (as in, on the server where the MP3's are) via MPG123 or Winamp. You just set up a standard Netjuke playlist, log in as an admin user and send it to the local player. Then you can control it via the standard Netjuke interface.
Couldn't you design the RFID tags to disable themselves when the clothes are washed? Maybe have some kind of heat sensitive material that would disable the tag (or just melt) when it got hot enough, or wet enough.
I suppose "Dry Clean Only" presents a problem tho...
Yes. And you could have done the same rearchitecting of the code in C, and had even better performance.
On the two re-architecture projects I've worked on, we considered implementing our improved design in C++ (no classes in C, so that wasn't an option). However, we found that it would have been cost prohibitive, due to portability and maintence costs, and the limitations of the STL vs the Java 2 JDK. So, yeah, we _could_ have done it in C/C++, but we wouldn't be selling it now, we'd still be writing it.
Yeah, you can get better Java performance if you create all your objects in a huge pool and then just hand around references to the thing. It's also a pain in the ass.
Object pools are a bad idea in Java, but I can't even count the number of C/C++ programmers who I've heard say thats what's needed to "fix" Java. I'll say it again...If you take the time to learn how Java is supposed to work, you'll be 10 times more productive and create a product of equal (or better) quality.
Uh, huh. As evidenced by all those high quality horizontal Java apps. Oh, wait.
Considering Java has 54% of the software development market, I'd say there's probably more Java out there than you think. It's just mostly on the backend, so you don't see it (unless you bother to look).
Is a for() loop in Java faster than in C? No. But if raw performance was the only consideration, we'd all be writing in assembler. Development costs, maintainence costs, deployment costs, portability, security....in all these other respects, Java beats C/C++ hands down.
My company's entire business model is centered around making enterprise applicatons in Java. It's extremely efficent and performant for server-side apps and web services. We also have Java client side apps that are as fast and memory efficent as any of our competitor's products (that are not written in Java).
Java will run as fast or as slow as you make it. We've re-written C applicatons in Java and actually made them run faster by improving the architecture. If you try to write a Java app using C/C++ programming techniques, it will suck. If you take the time to learn how Java is supposed to work, you'll be 10 times more productive and create a product of equal (or better) quality.
That's exactly the point. Microsoft is a company based on marketing, not engineering. That's why they almost always hire new college grads as programmers...anyone with any actual development experience would see right through all the marketing hype and realize how much thier products suck.
Actually, I would argue that Sun has the exact opposite problem. Love it or hate it, Java has made a huge impact on the software industry, but Sun has been thus far unable to greatly profit from it because they're all engineering and no marketing. If Sun recruited some of those evil, undead marketing gurus over at Microsoft, they could make a killing. If Microsoft hired some lab-rat engineers over at Sun (and actually gave them some resources), they might actually be able to deliver on 1/10 of the shit they promise....
Biggest scam ever! They get more and more useless every day...."Oh, I printed half a page, time to buy a new $50 ink cartridge".
Printer technology peaked with the laserjet printer and everything since then has been a ugly and annoying attempt by printer manufacturers at a constant revenue stream. Blegh!
Rant Over.
Don't use our products.