Just curious- where did you read that AAC encoding has been changed from "fast" to "best"? I haven't seen anything official on this- and it's not a trivial point for those of us who did a spate of encoding when 4.0/AAC came out...
Miyamoto is indeed a genius. His ability to weave a whimsical narrative together with cool graphics, entertaining puzzle-solving and hand-eye coordination makes him unique.
For me, Mario64, particularly viewed in the context of its time, is still the high-water mark. I wish he would move it to the GameCube- same story & setting, but with upgraded graphics. I'd spend a few dozen more hours on it, without a doubt.
Someone said earlier that Ogg's advantage is greatest at low bit rates. But I have no interest in getting 128kbps mp3 quality at 64kbps- I have no interest in getting 128kbps mp3 quality, period- it's not good enough.
I encode mp3's at 224kbps, which sounds pretty good to me. This is the minimum quality that I want, and not having had a chance to check Ogg out, I wonder what you need to encode Ogg at to get comparable sound. And how does AAC compare to Ogg at 128kbps & above?
Amiga is the *whole reason* I got excited about personal computers to begin with. Remember the Amiga baboon and the red & white checked ball... Anyone who wants to understand the Amiga enthusiasm would have to know how utterly revolutionary it was in the mid 80's. Sigh. In a way I felt guilty going with the Mac in the late 80's, but it had PageMaker and Adobe Illustrator and so much more. Now, I love OS X. But *much* respect to the Amiga.
Why? - I'm trying to understand how much of an advance the journaling filesystem will be. As an OS X user, I'm also curious about how much benefit I would get in exchange for the "10-15%" disk performance hit.
Online defrag sounds good. But I'm not running any UFS filesystems- just HFS+. I'm not entirely clear on the importance of defragging on UFS vs. HFS+. Sigh- so much to learn- but I'm loving being a part of the UNIX world...
Trying to learn here... Of course there's the unclean shutdown scenario where a journaling file system means you don't have to wait for a lengthy fsck.
My question is, what other advantages are there? E.g. would a journaling file system mean that general, ongoing file system maintenance is somehow better? Or, if you can afford to wait for fsck once in a while, are you pretty much just as well off?
If you read the cached Google page, the MS switcher story ends with these lines:
"*Editor's Note: Now that we've successfully converted our writer to a Windows PC, we
will be working on getting her to try a Pocket PC. Stay tuned for more developments!"
*But* - if you go to the site mentioned by Kostya, you can read a biker's thanks to Ms. Mallinson for helping him set up his handheld PC. (http://www.ibike.org/bikeafrica/malawi/)
"The computer, on the other hand, was one problem solving exercise after another--
though I must also add that when everything is going right the Handheld (H/PC) never
stops impressing me and I am tickled pink to have it. I also didn't have to do most of
the problem solving and troubleshooting by myself. Val Mallinson, of Wes Rataushk
and Associates, was a great help discussing solutions, getting equipment and finding
resources with answers prior to my departure."
Get her to "try a Pocket PC?" - she's already providing Pocket PC consulting services!
No wonder MS yanked this- it could only get uglier for them...
The only reason they didn't give it an integer increment to "11" is that they have too much invested in the "OS X" ("X" as in "10") brand right now. Under any other circumstances, this would be a full integer upgrade. And it *does* have "tons of features," not the least of which is much better *speed*.
If this one isn't worth paying for, there's no OS X upgrade worth paying for.
Great irony here- the last Newtons are nearly 5 years old, but there's no other handheld out there that can do what it does.
I still use mine for keeping a journal- when people see what it does for the first time, they're typically fascinated. When I tell them it's 5 years old and no longer available, they're shocked.
Even in 1986, there were many ways (and formats) for storing computer data that would help ensure longevity. Did they really do all that text entry and then throw away the word processing source files? Let me tell you about MY files from 1986- there's tons of my stuff I still have access to, and none of it was worth £2.5 million.
I've been using a Mac since 1986, and every time I got a new Mac, I copied over the old hard disk contents. The result? I have documents and folders dating back to 1986 on my current computer (a G4 running OSX). Just for fun, after reading this article, I searched for old files. I found an old utility called "Icon Collector" (1985, Sofcom Distributors) and a couple of its docs. I double-clicked my doc, and the ancient utility opened with my icon collection. I selected a 1986 icon, then switched to Photoshop 6.0 and pasted it in. No problem.
Next I found an Adobe Illustrator file from 1987. It opens fine, too. How little I knew about Bezier curves then... I have old MS Word docs, too- they're all fine. Obviously not all Mac software & docs from 1986 still work under OSX, but this is just a bit of perspective. There are some Pagemaker 2.0 docs I can't open, but I thought about that issue 10 years ago and decided it wasn't worth the trouble- plus, if I were *really* motivated, I could still recover those, too.
So you say this thing was too big to sit around on a hard disk? There were things I saved on floppies too. They say that floppies only last a few years, but everything I cared about, I put on two floppies. I've now thrown them all out except for a few souvenirs, but even on floppies I never lost anything I really needed. Once in a while I pop one in my old Mac 8500 for the hell of it, and the old 800k disks are mostly still reading!
Who is this "computer expert" Paul Wheatley? What an idiotic quote: "We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years."
If there is some break in civilization (nuclear war, etc), then all bets are of course off. But barring that, we will *always* be able to read web pages and Word docs- even if only in museum archives. Computers just get faster, and dealing with older file formats is computationally trivial. For crying out loud, I can still run 1981 Donkey Kong code in emulation today- through *shareware* (MacMAME). You think that in 2010 we'll magically forget how MS Word worked? ("Shit, guys! It's the Egyptians & mummies all over- we just FORGOT how!")
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you "have to" pay for a .mac account?
Thanks so much.
Just curious- where did you read that AAC encoding has been changed from "fast" to "best"? I haven't seen anything official on this- and it's not a trivial point for those of us who did a spate of encoding when 4.0/AAC came out...
So, like, we can decide if we want to install it...
For me, Mario64, particularly viewed in the context of its time, is still the high-water mark. I wish he would move it to the GameCube- same story & setting, but with upgraded graphics. I'd spend a few dozen more hours on it, without a doubt.
Send me an email when you can run Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and (err) MS Office on that machine.
That's when I'll buy one too.
It didn't kill my moviephone search channel.
No problems at all so far. Trying to decide whether (& when) to enable journalling...
I encode mp3's at 224kbps, which sounds pretty good to me. This is the minimum quality that I want, and not having had a chance to check Ogg out, I wonder what you need to encode Ogg at to get comparable sound. And how does AAC compare to Ogg at 128kbps & above?
Amiga is the *whole reason* I got excited about personal computers to begin with. Remember the Amiga baboon and the red & white checked ball... Anyone who wants to understand the Amiga enthusiasm would have to know how utterly revolutionary it was in the mid 80's. Sigh. In a way I felt guilty going with the Mac in the late 80's, but it had PageMaker and Adobe Illustrator and so much more. Now, I love OS X. But *much* respect to the Amiga.
Why? - I'm trying to understand how much of an advance the journaling filesystem will be. As an OS X user, I'm also curious about how much benefit I would get in exchange for the "10-15%" disk performance hit.
Online defrag sounds good. But I'm not running any UFS filesystems- just HFS+. I'm not entirely clear on the importance of defragging on UFS vs. HFS+. Sigh- so much to learn- but I'm loving being a part of the UNIX world...
My question is, what other advantages are there? E.g. would a journaling file system mean that general, ongoing file system maintenance is somehow better? Or, if you can afford to wait for fsck once in a while, are you pretty much just as well off?
At this point, there's no reason not to declare statehood.
If you read the cached Google page, the MS switcher story ends with these lines:
"*Editor's Note: Now that we've successfully converted our writer to a Windows PC, we
will be working on getting her to try a Pocket PC. Stay tuned for more developments!"
*But* - if you go to the site mentioned by Kostya, you can read a biker's thanks to Ms. Mallinson for helping him set up his handheld PC. (http://www.ibike.org/bikeafrica/malawi/)
"The computer, on the other hand, was one problem solving exercise after another--
though I must also add that when everything is going right the Handheld (H/PC) never
stops impressing me and I am tickled pink to have it. I also didn't have to do most of
the problem solving and troubleshooting by myself. Val Mallinson, of Wes Rataushk
and Associates, was a great help discussing solutions, getting equipment and finding
resources with answers prior to my departure."
Get her to "try a Pocket PC?" - she's already providing Pocket PC consulting services!
No wonder MS yanked this- it could only get uglier for them...
The only reason they didn't give it an integer increment to "11" is that they have too much invested in the "OS X" ("X" as in "10") brand right now. Under any other circumstances, this would be a full integer upgrade. And it *does* have "tons of features," not the least of which is much better *speed*.
If this one isn't worth paying for, there's no OS X upgrade worth paying for.
I still use mine for keeping a journal- when people see what it does for the first time, they're typically fascinated. When I tell them it's 5 years old and no longer available, they're shocked.
I was hoping v1.1 would improve the battery indicator, but my four-bar indicator still has only two states:
- Four bars (full)
- Three bars
After three bars it dies.These people were idiots.
Even in 1986, there were many ways (and formats) for storing computer data that would help ensure longevity. Did they really do all that text entry and then throw away the word processing source files? Let me tell you about MY files from 1986- there's tons of my stuff I still have access to, and none of it was worth £2.5 million.
I've been using a Mac since 1986, and every time I got a new Mac, I copied over the old hard disk contents. The result? I have documents and folders dating back to 1986 on my current computer (a G4 running OSX). Just for fun, after reading this article, I searched for old files. I found an old utility called "Icon Collector" (1985, Sofcom Distributors) and a couple of its docs. I double-clicked my doc, and the ancient utility opened with my icon collection. I selected a 1986 icon, then switched to Photoshop 6.0 and pasted it in. No problem.
Next I found an Adobe Illustrator file from 1987. It opens fine, too. How little I knew about Bezier curves then... I have old MS Word docs, too- they're all fine. Obviously not all Mac software & docs from 1986 still work under OSX, but this is just a bit of perspective. There are some Pagemaker 2.0 docs I can't open, but I thought about that issue 10 years ago and decided it wasn't worth the trouble- plus, if I were *really* motivated, I could still recover those, too.
So you say this thing was too big to sit around on a hard disk? There were things I saved on floppies too. They say that floppies only last a few years, but everything I cared about, I put on two floppies. I've now thrown them all out except for a few souvenirs, but even on floppies I never lost anything I really needed. Once in a while I pop one in my old Mac 8500 for the hell of it, and the old 800k disks are mostly still reading!
Who is this "computer expert" Paul Wheatley? What an idiotic quote: "We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years."
If there is some break in civilization (nuclear war, etc), then all bets are of course off. But barring that, we will *always* be able to read web pages and Word docs- even if only in museum archives. Computers just get faster, and dealing with older file formats is computationally trivial. For crying out loud, I can still run 1981 Donkey Kong code in emulation today- through *shareware* (MacMAME). You think that in 2010 we'll magically forget how MS Word worked? ("Shit, guys! It's the Egyptians & mummies all over- we just FORGOT how!")
Idiots!