actually, I don't use my home stereo, ever since I blew out my speakers. The only things I listen to music on are:
home computer on cheap 40$ satellite/subwoofer setup from officemax (mp3s) ipod with earbuds (mp3s) and in my car with the iPod plugged into the aux audio-in (mp3s)
I actually noticed the difference almost immediately when I got the car stereo and started plugging my ipod in instead of using my CDs from the binder I carry around.
One could argue that the 1/8" phone plug isn't the highest quality method to transfer an audio signal, but I can hear the difference between my discman and my iPod, too.
I can't hear any difference on my computer since my speakers suck so bad and I have so many external drives and other computers around that the hum of all the fans kinda drowns out the low-end, anyway.
Also, the 1st generation ipod's earbuds are MUCH more bassy than the 2nd and 3rd gen. They make all my music sound (arguably) like CRAP
I like music, too. In fact, I like loud music, and I'm sure I have some significant hearing loss after the last 3+ years of free/cheap shows I've been going to at least every other week.
It doesn't matter how much hearing loss you have (unless you're up to grandpa level), there are certain types of music that completely degrade when you do audio compression on them. Some good examples are metal like At The Gates that has heavy guitars and drums and bass in the front, but then has a second guitar riffing over it. When you mp3 them, even at higher bitrates (high as in 160, 192), you lose the riffing a little. It starts to blend in with everything else. The same goes for types of electronica like AphexTwin. All his little twidly tinkering over the weird ass background effects get lost when encoded. And on some tracks, I've noticed that loss even at 256kbps mp3s. I've never played with VBR since it was first introduced and most software mp3 players would fuck up on them.
yeah, transcoding will REALLY degrade the music, even on things that wouldn't normally degrade when encoded.
I agree with you that XP came a long way in terms of a functional UI, but there's still some pretty bad problems. Namely, there's a lot of examples of what Kai Krauss calls "Boeing Cockpit Syndrome" where you have a window with just too much stuff in it (preference windows, etc).
Those first leaked screenshots of longhorn (the only ones I've seen) seem to take it to the next level with more buttons along the top of the explorer windows, more widgets in the start bar and hella more crap on that sidebar thingie. Longhorn, seems to me, is going to be a UI nightmare.
Also, using CSS for a userinterface is good, but I don't think it's THAT good for a whole system. It'd be fine for designing WinAmp skins, or the like, though. Hell, I think it'd be best for that.
I'd be willing to bet that M$'s CSS has some micro$pecific enhancements that aren't supported in anything except M$ products.
depends on your location. for those that live in metropolitan areas, it's easy to get your console modded, or even buy it already modded. in NYC, for instance, most of the small games shops offer import games and systems as well as systems with modchips preinstalled and mod chip installation services.
Even in no-so-metropolitan areas, you've got a highschool kid who will mass order the chips online and install them for all his friends.
The O'Reilly book actually helped me out a lot. My only complaint with it was its lack of ACL info (it would have been nice if it had an ACL cookbook, like) and lack of alternate configureation techniques (like if I wasn't going to set it up based on location).
It got me to the point of setting up slapd and getting my directory populated with the migration tools, and the Gentoo LDAP Authentication How-to got my server up and running on my Gentoo box.
It also has some great examples of PERL's LDAP libraries and functions.
when I first discovered Bash (in BeOS, then in linux), I noticed how many similarities it had to DOS (the only other commandline I had ever used beforehand). When I mentioned to my dad how many similar commands and similar sintax, such as cd and wildcards, he said that DOS was a complete ripoff of CPM.
I had actually used CPM when I was about 3 or 4 on our Kaypro, but I had always assumed it was DOS due to the similarities.
On another note, my friend Zad has been trying to book MC Chris for the last 6 months or so at the club he works (knitting factory NY). IIRC, he hasn't managed to successfully book him, but he did book a private party for the adult swim guys where he got to meet a lot of the artists and whatnot and got tons of free goodies. I still have a bunch of the posters. They're badass.
the crossfade is especially bad with tracks that are very short. I had a stint where I got into a couple of grindcore bands that had songs 40 seconds, some only 10-20 seconds and between the fade-in and fade-out, I'd miss 3/4 of the song.
On macslash.org, there was an Ask MacSlash about iTunes somehow figuring out what songs sounded good together using some crazy sonic algorithm. The guy was asking if it was plausible that iTunes analyzed the songs in the playlist to spit out the best mix possible.
The basic consensus in the discussion was either "dude, your entire playlist is songs you like, of course it's gonna be a good mix.," or, the option mentioned above about humans looking for patterns.
Although, throughout my history of having large (over 1000 song) playlists, I've found that no matter what mp3 player I used (hardware, software, or otherwise), there always seemed to be certain bands or artists that would get play more often. I've had weeks at a time where I'd hear Snoop Dogg's Lodi Dodi, Iron Maiden's Quest for Fire or In Flames' Clayman nearly every time I picked up my iPod
Re:Maybe it's going here
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
dude, thos pictures have already been confirmed fakes. You can see that it's just a white cardboard box with a color-laserprint top and front and ports...
I've had a PSP since early January and aside from the iPod-like "it's so pristine I don't want to touch it, but I cant' stop touching it" problem, I've got no real complaints. I do, however, have one issue which only bothers me in one game- the square button isn't as sensitive as the other 3 buttons.
In my Minna No Golf game (????GOLF) the square button is used to do a super-stroke and when you leisurely press it like that, it doesn't always register. It's not a huge deal, but it can be a little annoying sometimes.
I also just got Ridge Racers tonight, so I can't comment on the battery life for that, but for Kolon and Minna No Golf, the battery life is quite good (6 hours or so per charge).
well, like I said, they were all just calculations based on my max throughput.
Nevertheless, I still miss the much faster speeds I experienced with TimeWarner's RoadRunner service.
the TW/RR service's upstream was seriously erradic, though. It would jump all around and sometimes stall for seconds at a time. I don't know if it had to do with their routers or the method they were using to cap the bandwidth or what, that may be why my upload calculation was so far off.
When I was living in Manhattan, I had Roadrunner which was 3Mbit/512Kbit (from what I could tell) and had no ports blocked, so I was running a web server off my main linux box. I believe we were paying around 50$ a month.
Right before xmas they upgraded or something because I was getting over 600K/sec on my downloads, which makes me think they upgraded to around 6Mbit (I did some math on my max speed, and it was almost exactly 6Mbit), but the upload speed didn't change.
I had to move back to NJ on new years day, so that was the end of my high-speed enjoyment. DSL service in this area is horrendous. Verizon offers home users only 768Kbit DSL for some 40$/month and where I happen to live, I'm too far from the central office, so I get constant disconnects and outages that last hours and sometimes days.
I opted to get speakeasy since I had become addicted to running a web server and they had a slashdot promotion where I get 8 IPs, so I'm in hosting heaven right now, but I pay 80$/month for 1.5Mbit/768Kbit. The 6Mbit package isn't available here.
i could have also gotten comcast but I had their service from 1998-2000 and became completely dissatisfied with their service toward the end (started out GREAT and Fast as hell, I'd get 800Kbyte/sec downloads and 800Kbyte/sec uploads, but they decided to cap everyone to 1% of the upload bandwidth and 10% of the download bandwidth). I was paying 60$/month for that, I believe.
Luckily, I moved to another area where I got Optimum Online, which, aside from the internet in college, was the fastest broadband I ever had. I was paying 40$/month, and used to regularly get 1MByte/sec downloads, and in the beginning, 400Kbyte/sec uploads, which, later, were capped to about 80Kbyte/sec when they blocked inbound traffic on port 80 because I codeRed, or one of those stupid worms.
I've actually begun a project like this, too. I've got 3 NESs that I just dug up and have taken one apart to start. I began writing a front/backend to a sweet-ass multi-emulator program in Python/GTK.
My current plan is to fashion the front ports into USB ports, have the box run a highly customized install of Gentoo, and use the nice mini-itx Pentium4 board they now have available. I say "plan" since I don't know if I'll be able to do certain things and time/money constraints may change certain things. A 2.4ghz box may be overkill for such a project, but I have fears that the 1ghz VIA board may not have enough graphics power.
I also plan on having the machine act as a video player (and connect over NFS or similar technology to my server) as well as play CDs and DVDs in addition to GB/GBA/GBC/DS/NES/SNES/MAME/Genesis/Sega/GameGear/ TG16/etc/etc/etc emulators.
I agree to that. Or standard cross-platform (x86/PPC/etc) cards. I'm sick of having to spend extra $ just to get a card for my PPC machine (whether it's running OSX or linux, I don't care, I just want the damn thing to work).
I understand all of the reasons that these cross-platform cards don't exist, but I really don't care. =P
Also, I'm just as much of an eye-candy whore as the next guy. Hell, I love OSX's clean interface and awesome animation and transparency effects, but this stuff CAN be taken too far. Animation can be taken too far, M$ has done this with those animated menus, and apple has gotten close to this with their fade-out menus.
Smooth-animated buttons that move in and out as you push them is worthless. The interface needs to be as snappy and responsive as possible. That's why I have the gripe with the menus, and yeah, I know you can turn off the animation in Windows...
As long as the crap doesn't delay my work or play by anything more than 100ms, it doesn't bother me.
Some of the other effects sound pretty cool. The smoke thing seems like a pretty sweet idea, but I'd probably have it turned off.
I'm just waiting for some more desktop animation stuff. Very suttle animation on the desktop can be a good thing, especially for casual web browsing and chatting and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, I don't use my home stereo, ever since I blew out my speakers. The only things I listen to music on are:
home computer on cheap 40$ satellite/subwoofer setup from officemax (mp3s)
ipod with earbuds (mp3s)
and in my car with the iPod plugged into the aux audio-in (mp3s)
I actually noticed the difference almost immediately when I got the car stereo and started plugging my ipod in instead of using my CDs from the binder I carry around.
One could argue that the 1/8" phone plug isn't the highest quality method to transfer an audio signal, but I can hear the difference between my discman and my iPod, too.
I can't hear any difference on my computer since my speakers suck so bad and I have so many external drives and other computers around that the hum of all the fans kinda drowns out the low-end, anyway.
Also, the 1st generation ipod's earbuds are MUCH more bassy than the 2nd and 3rd gen. They make all my music sound (arguably) like CRAP
There's actually a firefox plugin called SlashFix. google it. It fixes the rendering errors.
I like music, too. In fact, I like loud music, and I'm sure I have some significant hearing loss after the last 3+ years of free/cheap shows I've been going to at least every other week.
It doesn't matter how much hearing loss you have (unless you're up to grandpa level), there are certain types of music that completely degrade when you do audio compression on them. Some good examples are metal like At The Gates that has heavy guitars and drums and bass in the front, but then has a second guitar riffing over it. When you mp3 them, even at higher bitrates (high as in 160, 192), you lose the riffing a little. It starts to blend in with everything else. The same goes for types of electronica like AphexTwin. All his little twidly tinkering over the weird ass background effects get lost when encoded. And on some tracks, I've noticed that loss even at 256kbps mp3s. I've never played with VBR since it was first introduced and most software mp3 players would fuck up on them.
yeah, transcoding will REALLY degrade the music, even on things that wouldn't normally degrade when encoded.
I especially like your Ansel Adams reference.
I agree with you that XP came a long way in terms of a functional UI, but there's still some pretty bad problems. Namely, there's a lot of examples of what Kai Krauss calls "Boeing Cockpit Syndrome" where you have a window with just too much stuff in it (preference windows, etc).
Those first leaked screenshots of longhorn (the only ones I've seen) seem to take it to the next level with more buttons along the top of the explorer windows, more widgets in the start bar and hella more crap on that sidebar thingie. Longhorn, seems to me, is going to be a UI nightmare.
Also, using CSS for a userinterface is good, but I don't think it's THAT good for a whole system. It'd be fine for designing WinAmp skins, or the like, though. Hell, I think it'd be best for that.
I'd be willing to bet that M$'s CSS has some micro$pecific enhancements that aren't supported in anything except M$ products.
depends on your location. for those that live in metropolitan areas, it's easy to get your console modded, or even buy it already modded. in NYC, for instance, most of the small games shops offer import games and systems as well as systems with modchips preinstalled and mod chip installation services.
Even in no-so-metropolitan areas, you've got a highschool kid who will mass order the chips online and install them for all his friends.
SLEEP!
DEATH!!!!
too bad 99% of the people on here have no idea wtf that video is.
man........ I just had to rebuild my system TODAY. grrrr. maybe I should have waited...
/lib/ld.so.1 throwing SIGSEGV signals in random programs... namely tar... so that means I couldn't emerge stuffs.)
(I had a problem with
The O'Reilly book actually helped me out a lot. My only complaint with it was its lack of ACL info (it would have been nice if it had an ACL cookbook, like) and lack of alternate configureation techniques (like if I wasn't going to set it up based on location).
It got me to the point of setting up slapd and getting my directory populated with the migration tools, and the Gentoo LDAP Authentication How-to got my server up and running on my Gentoo box.
It also has some great examples of PERL's LDAP libraries and functions.
Heh, I remember buying a box of 10 5.25" floppies for 100$. I don't remember how big they were though...
And we paid 999$ for a floppy with 10 fonts. IIRC, Times new roman and Brush Script were on there.
My dad has had this theory for years. Technologies are pushed by the pr0n industry.
Great examples: the internet, computers, DVDs, VHS...
Remember laserdisc? RCA Selectavision (I hope I spelled that right)? Failed because of lack of pr0n support.
OSX most definately uses Altivec QUITE extensively.
I switched from a 450mhz G3 to a 450mhz G4 a couple years ago, and there's a HUGE performance difference in OSX's boot and response time.
Of course, the GUI runs a bit faster on the G4, too, but that could be because of the AGP video card.
Perhaps SCO can sue itself to raise cash
That may seem like a good idea to them, given their poor judgement which Linus said best, "They must be smoking crack." (or something to that effect).
Gives new meaning to "SCO on the rocks"
when I first discovered Bash (in BeOS, then in linux), I noticed how many similarities it had to DOS (the only other commandline I had ever used beforehand). When I mentioned to my dad how many similar commands and similar sintax, such as cd and wildcards, he said that DOS was a complete ripoff of CPM.
I had actually used CPM when I was about 3 or 4 on our Kaypro, but I had always assumed it was DOS due to the similarities.
According to M$, the correct spelling of that is:
w3rd.
On another note, my friend Zad has been trying to book MC Chris for the last 6 months or so at the club he works (knitting factory NY). IIRC, he hasn't managed to successfully book him, but he did book a private party for the adult swim guys where he got to meet a lot of the artists and whatnot and got tons of free goodies. I still have a bunch of the posters. They're badass.
the crossfade is especially bad with tracks that are very short. I had a stint where I got into a couple of grindcore bands that had songs 40 seconds, some only 10-20 seconds and between the fade-in and fade-out, I'd miss 3/4 of the song.
On macslash.org, there was an Ask MacSlash about iTunes somehow figuring out what songs sounded good together using some crazy sonic algorithm. The guy was asking if it was plausible that iTunes analyzed the songs in the playlist to spit out the best mix possible.
The basic consensus in the discussion was either "dude, your entire playlist is songs you like, of course it's gonna be a good mix.," or, the option mentioned above about humans looking for patterns.
Although, throughout my history of having large (over 1000 song) playlists, I've found that no matter what mp3 player I used (hardware, software, or otherwise), there always seemed to be certain bands or artists that would get play more often. I've had weeks at a time where I'd hear Snoop Dogg's Lodi Dodi, Iron Maiden's Quest for Fire or In Flames' Clayman nearly every time I picked up my iPod
dude, thos pictures have already been confirmed fakes. You can see that it's just a white cardboard box with a color-laserprint top and front and ports...
heh.
I've had a PSP since early January and aside from the iPod-like "it's so pristine I don't want to touch it, but I cant' stop touching it" problem, I've got no real complaints. I do, however, have one issue which only bothers me in one game- the square button isn't as sensitive as the other 3 buttons.
In my Minna No Golf game (????GOLF) the square button is used to do a super-stroke and when you leisurely press it like that, it doesn't always register. It's not a huge deal, but it can be a little annoying sometimes.
I also just got Ridge Racers tonight, so I can't comment on the battery life for that, but for Kolon and Minna No Golf, the battery life is quite good (6 hours or so per charge).
well, like I said, they were all just calculations based on my max throughput.
Nevertheless, I still miss the much faster speeds I experienced with TimeWarner's RoadRunner service.
the TW/RR service's upstream was seriously erradic, though. It would jump all around and sometimes stall for seconds at a time. I don't know if it had to do with their routers or the method they were using to cap the bandwidth or what, that may be why my upload calculation was so far off.
DMCA has got fans... see the following obligatory code snippet as proof.
DMCA.fans = (BigBusiness && Bigwigs);
When I was living in Manhattan, I had Roadrunner which was 3Mbit/512Kbit (from what I could tell) and had no ports blocked, so I was running a web server off my main linux box. I believe we were paying around 50$ a month.
Right before xmas they upgraded or something because I was getting over 600K/sec on my downloads, which makes me think they upgraded to around 6Mbit (I did some math on my max speed, and it was almost exactly 6Mbit), but the upload speed didn't change.
I had to move back to NJ on new years day, so that was the end of my high-speed enjoyment. DSL service in this area is horrendous. Verizon offers home users only 768Kbit DSL for some 40$/month and where I happen to live, I'm too far from the central office, so I get constant disconnects and outages that last hours and sometimes days.
I opted to get speakeasy since I had become addicted to running a web server and they had a slashdot promotion where I get 8 IPs, so I'm in hosting heaven right now, but I pay 80$/month for 1.5Mbit/768Kbit. The 6Mbit package isn't available here.
i could have also gotten comcast but I had their service from 1998-2000 and became completely dissatisfied with their service toward the end (started out GREAT and Fast as hell, I'd get 800Kbyte/sec downloads and 800Kbyte/sec uploads, but they decided to cap everyone to 1% of the upload bandwidth and 10% of the download bandwidth). I was paying 60$/month for that, I believe.
Luckily, I moved to another area where I got Optimum Online, which, aside from the internet in college, was the fastest broadband I ever had. I was paying 40$/month, and used to regularly get 1MByte/sec downloads, and in the beginning, 400Kbyte/sec uploads, which, later, were capped to about 80Kbyte/sec when they blocked inbound traffic on port 80 because I codeRed, or one of those stupid worms.
Do you mean something like this?
/ TG16/etc/etc/etc emulators.
I've actually begun a project like this, too. I've got 3 NESs that I just dug up and have taken one apart to start. I began writing a front/backend to a sweet-ass multi-emulator program in Python/GTK.
My current plan is to fashion the front ports into USB ports, have the box run a highly customized install of Gentoo, and use the nice mini-itx Pentium4 board they now have available. I say "plan" since I don't know if I'll be able to do certain things and time/money constraints may change certain things. A 2.4ghz box may be overkill for such a project, but I have fears that the
1ghz VIA board may not have enough graphics power.
I also plan on having the machine act as a video player (and connect over NFS or similar technology to my server) as well as play CDs and DVDs in addition to GB/GBA/GBC/DS/NES/SNES/MAME/Genesis/Sega/GameGear
I log to another server using the neato stealth trick I learned in the O'Reilly Linux Security book.
It involves attaching a box to the uplink port of your switch and logging to the broadcast address with syslog-ng.
it's pretty neat, especially since that box doesn't have ssh (or any other service, for that matter) on that network interface.
Now I'm missing all of my legacy ports and can't attach my old 28.8 modem or my palmV without one of them griffin USB adapters.
I agree to that. Or standard cross-platform (x86/PPC/etc) cards. I'm sick of having to spend extra $ just to get a card for my PPC machine (whether it's running OSX or linux, I don't care, I just want the damn thing to work).
I understand all of the reasons that these cross-platform cards don't exist, but I really don't care. =P
Also, I'm just as much of an eye-candy whore as the next guy. Hell, I love OSX's clean interface and awesome animation and transparency effects, but this stuff CAN be taken too far. Animation can be taken too far, M$ has done this with those animated menus, and apple has gotten close to this with their fade-out menus.
Smooth-animated buttons that move in and out as you push them is worthless. The interface needs to be as snappy and responsive as possible. That's why I have the gripe with the menus, and yeah, I know you can turn off the animation in Windows...
As long as the crap doesn't delay my work or play by anything more than 100ms, it doesn't bother me.
Some of the other effects sound pretty cool. The smoke thing seems like a pretty sweet idea, but I'd probably have it turned off.
I'm just waiting for some more desktop animation stuff. Very suttle animation on the desktop can be a good thing, especially for casual web browsing and chatting and whatnot.