My requirements for entry are low: An SD slot (I'm not willing to budge here), ability to read most formats I can buy, or download content in, and access to an online store where ebooks are priced according to how much I value them; 50% or less than paperbacks, since there is no physical print and distribution system involved. It's the last part that each and every publisher's ebook reader not only fails, but fails proudly at.
Yeah, I read the infographic and the subjective stuff is terrible and hard to ignore. The objective stuff is often just wrong, implying connections that weren't there, and missing other very important ones. The history and chronology was all off, and the examples used frequently not even representative of the trend he's trying to illustrate.
A historical approach may have needed to be ten times as long, but it also would have been actually worth reading.
Social RPGS... Mafia Wars? Really? That's the best you can do?
This isn't to discredit the idea of ease of use or good design - god knows Google graphs requires way more hoops than it should (compare, say, Visifire).
I think it's easy to look at the developer's guide and just flee in terror, but honestly if that's your reaction, Google storage API is probably not the droid you're looking for. If you need simple file sharing that a typical user can appreciate without having to read a manual, Dropbox may be more appropriate; Google Storage API is written with developers in mind.. I'm a big fan of some of Google's APIs, Dropbox, and Google Docs for sure.
If these are machines that are regularly going to be utilized to a degree where they are maxing out CPU/GPU availability (high-end CAD, video encoding, rendering etc), you don't need a vendor machine test that costs thousands of dollars. You need benchmarks on the specific CPUs and GPU solutions you're considering.
The advantage there is that (particularly if your GPU is a mainstream GPU and not a CAD-specific workstation GPU), there are loads of sites who've already done the work for you, and update their benchmarks regularly. Tom's Hardware seems to have really dropped the ball, but Anandtech seems to be holding the torch still, and I'm sure someone else can provide links if there are better sites for this sort of comparison review (with pretty graphs and all) than Anandtech.
If these are office machines for people running 3rd party vendor apps, office apps, and web browsers, then none of this is worthwhile, and you'd be foolish to shop outside the triangle of price, warranty and vendor's support reputation. And by 'foolish', I'm being extremely generous.
...the original complaint lists "pornography featuring children, violence, bestiality, and incest" in one section, and every other mention of "pornography" is listed as "child pornography".
Even excluding the child pornography, reading the complaint, the pornography aspects of his business are not legitimate porn sites. He runs porn sites whose primary purpose is to catch search engine hits and direct them to sites containing malware, viruses, and fake anti-virus products (ransom anti-virus software, effectively). This is not a guy who runs a few woefully unethical businesses and then runs a legitimate pornography business on the side. Please don't confuse this for the shutdown of a pornography website, even the porn sites are just tools to infect unsuspecting visitors with hostile software.
Pretending this particular case is the law coming in and preventing you from looking at pornography is roughly akin to suggesting that Adolf Hitler was considered an enemy of the Allied powers because they didn't like his painting.
Michigan did a sneaky trick in this regard. They imposed a "Driver Responsibility Fee" and attached it to a fairly broad selection of traffic violations, from things as severe as driving while severely intoxicated, to stuff as innocuous as not having proof of insurance - misplacing papers, effectively.
I got hit with it a few years ago for no POI, $200 a year for two years. The court can't waive it because it's "not a court fine" - it comes directly from the State Treasury Dept.
Shady as hell. In related news, Michigan's legislature passed a "texting while driving" ban which sounds good to the uninitiated on the surface, but will no doubt become a "holding a cell phone while in the driver's seat" ban, be it taking a call or looking at a map on a smart phone.
The Democrats in the state legislature even tried to use the projected proceeds of this law to eliminate some of the Driver Responsibility Fees for lesser violations, but they were shot down by the Republicans.
I found this puzzling to see Republicans defending a tax, but to be honest, our state legislatures' Republicans would legislate the sky green if they thought it would help them against the Democrats. Partisanship wins, the people lose.
These sorts of laws are easy to pass because nobody thinks it will affect them; it's a tax on "other" people. Until you get caught unprepared at a random traffic stop. Or, in this case, tell a cop you have "no fucking idea" what he's talking about.
Invariably, these penalties affect the working poor the most.
Turned out to be bursitis. To be fair, I didn't really google it but went to webmd so I didn't end up in hypochondriac hell. It was very specific about every symptom I had (swollen elbow, the sort of pain, the warmness), and it gave me a reasonable diagnosis (don't mess with it, use the body part as little as possible, see a doctor if it doesn't stop being swollen in about two weeks). It saved me a doctor's visit, but more importantly, it gave me peace of mind.
I'm very well aware that sites like those, particularly online versions of the DSM IV, are hellholes for developing hypochondriacs, but when used responsibly with reasonable expectations, sites that are more professional in tone can be very useful. And if you don't like what you read, or it gets worse, well, you get to make the call about going to the doctor instead.
...their head examined. Traffic court is already filled with bogus cases in defense of laws whose primary purpose is to generate income for the locality.
Fair taxation, please, not harassment in lieu of it.
...for solid-state media, for my tastes. It has connotations of low capacities and clunky housings.
But it does bring up a good question - what's the next media format? Is Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD the last family of media formats (since they can all be read by BD devices) before we go to all-online distribution? I suspect that we're done with cheap universal physical media formats in the near future.
Music stores are pretty much on their last legs, as much as it pains me to admit that. When physical game software dries up (PC or console) It has the added supposed-benefit (to the software industry) of eliminating the second-hand software market, which is something the industry has been trying to quash for what, 20 years?
I've "pirated" albums I own because I don't listen to CDs directly, and didn't feel like going into another room, getting the CD, then encoding it for future listening. "Pirating" the album was quicker and easier.
I remember all of these industry arguments back in the 8-bit software days, and the claims that "piracy = lost sales" was fatuous even then: none of us 13-18 year old pirates had thousands of dollars of disposable income to spend on the games we were pirating.
If you're getting your downloads from TPB, then yes, you're going to get a lot of low-bitrate and lossy-to-lossy transcodes.
If you're encoding CDs yourself and downloading from sites (commercial or otherwise) that have strict quality standards, you have all the tools you need. Bad encodes are possible on any format, lossy or lossless. When it doubt, use spectral analysis to examine audio files. Bad encoding practices have very specific patterns one can observe very quickly with very little effort.
Agreed. If diskspace IS an issue (for example, wanting to get a large audiobook on a single data CD for the car stereo, where the audio quality isn't important), there's v8.
I'm with you: saving 3% filesize at a given audio quality isn't compelling to me where I want audio quality to be transparent to source.
I thought it didn't need to be explained, but in case I was wrong: I am referring solely to audio formats as used by end-users who listen to audio files directly, either on their computer or on other hardware.
I am aware that other codecs for audio are more common for audio/video container formats and media, such as the fact that LPCM, DTS, mp2 and AC3 are audio codecs used in DVDs.
I'm talking about people listening to non-streamed local content that they have ripped or downloaded themselves. To deliberately misunderstand that is unhelpful.
Agreed. If you can't ABX the difference to a reliable percentage, you can't hear a difference.
Any statements that don't involve ABX testing are mere heresay, rumors, legend, and possible misinformation. I've used WinABX when I want to ABX different sources, it's a fairly small program and to the point. The only disadvantage is that it only handles WAV files, so you'll have to take your MP3s, FLACs, Oggs, or whatever, and convert them to.wav before ABXing. Transcoding to WAV will preserve perfectly any discrepencies between the formats that you're testing for. WinABX also does ABXY testing, but frankly, as OCD and anal as I am, that's a bridge too far even for me.
MP3 can be encoded at levels which achieve transparency - just like any other modern audio codec. While I'm not really up on what encoder and bitrates Lala used for its MP3 offerings, the notion that your music just sounds better than my mp3 library assumes that I am encoding MP3s at below-transparency levels, and that you are encoding your AAC, Ogg, or whatever lossy format at transparency levels, or that you are using a lossless codec and that somehow transparency "isn't enough".
This is incorrect, sir. MP3 as a format choice isn't the sole (or even main) criteria for most people who use it. MP3 is able to achieve transparency, its file sizes are reasonable (LAME encoding at v0 comes to mind), it's compatible with any hardware or software that one will encounter in the real world, and if your friend asks you for a copy of that latest Autechre album, you don't have to pontificate about how your chosen encoding format is better than their chosen encoding format, despite the fact that their software may not support it and their factory-included car CD/MP3 player most certainly won't. A 3% file size decrease with, say, Ogg, simply isn't compelling when it means putting up with the fact that a lot of hardware doesn't support it.
I'm here for the music. Give me transparency, and give me ubiquity. Your claim that you can achieve a better sound at "x" bitrate is not compelling when the file size of MP3 is not obscene, and when both formats can achieve transparency at a reasonable bitrate. Not having to pontificate about audio formats that hardly anyone actually uses? Hell, that's just icing on the cake.
the SEC is the host of our Strategic Porn Reserves. Then you'll thank that attorney's forward-thinking approach to preserving a domestic supply to reduce our vulnerability to the whims of foreign porn suppliers.
...either in software form (nothing more fussy than html or pdf, please) or within in-game help, that would merely be a disappointment.
But what really going on here is that they're turning their manuals from a cost to a profit by outsourcing their manuals to BradyGames, Prima, and other publishers. I'm sick to death of paying for games which need manuals (rts/tbs yes, fps, no), but I'm only provided with a razor thin command reference sheet, if that.
UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses. More of the usual.
Yes, TFA is a bit of scare-mongering. Quite honestly, most businesses are not in jeopardy if their old printed/scanned documents get out of their hands; by the time anyone else has access to the device, the documents aren't timely.
Having said that, the article also points out that two of the devices they scanned were from police departments and contained documents that, if leaked, would put their previous owners in liability, and the subjects of the documents in jeopardy of blackmail or worse.
I think that, with the proper amount of user education, this can be dealt with properly, either by the lessee being required to wipe the device between users or by the owner doing so. If the product is at the end of its life, destroying a hard drive to the degree that it would not be practical to recover requires very little: a cheap torx screwdriver and a ten minute fun session of scraping the hell out of the platters should do the trick.
Completely unrelated, but you'd be amazed at how far an eighteen inch hard drive platter will go if bounced off a smooth surface. When it made contact with the wall, it was about four inches into the drywall. Whoops.
I see this issue crop up with large-format printers/copiers, but the issue is really the same as what the article is talking about. Many photocopiers, printers - both small format and large format - have the ability to re-print from history, and this is because all the jobs are saved locally to the device. Depending on the device and manufacturer, this may or may not be a real problem. On some of our devices (large format), the history is set in terms of gigabytes - usually ten or less - and for some of our less-frequent users, that can actually cover a year or more. Other devices are set in terms of time period. This setting may be applied differently to scans and prints on many devices.
In our case these are our devices that we lease out. When a is taken from one customer to another, it's necessary to clear out history queues if they've been set, but sometimes also necessary to delete problem queues that some devices send jobs to if there is a failure of some sort. In most small-format devices that are customer-owned, there should be a way to delete histories and user data, but short of re-installing the device's operating system, there's no way to securely wipe the now-unused portion of the hard drive and sell the device, and most end users do not have access to re-installation discs for the printer's firmware/OS. If the device is being decommissioned, though, destroying the hard drive is easier to justify.
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My requirements for entry are low: An SD slot (I'm not willing to budge here), ability to read most formats I can buy, or download content in, and access to an online store where ebooks are priced according to how much I value them; 50% or less than paperbacks, since there is no physical print and distribution system involved. It's the last part that each and every publisher's ebook reader not only fails, but fails proudly at.
Yeah, I read the infographic and the subjective stuff is terrible and hard to ignore. The objective stuff is often just wrong, implying connections that weren't there, and missing other very important ones. The history and chronology was all off, and the examples used frequently not even representative of the trend he's trying to illustrate.
A historical approach may have needed to be ten times as long, but it also would have been actually worth reading.
Social RPGS ... Mafia Wars? Really? That's the best you can do?
This isn't to discredit the idea of ease of use or good design - god knows Google graphs requires way more hoops than it should (compare, say, Visifire).
I think it's easy to look at the developer's guide and just flee in terror, but honestly if that's your reaction, Google storage API is probably not the droid you're looking for. If you need simple file sharing that a typical user can appreciate without having to read a manual, Dropbox may be more appropriate; Google Storage API is written with developers in mind.. I'm a big fan of some of Google's APIs, Dropbox, and Google Docs for sure.
If these are machines that are regularly going to be utilized to a degree where they are maxing out CPU/GPU availability (high-end CAD, video encoding, rendering etc), you don't need a vendor machine test that costs thousands of dollars. You need benchmarks on the specific CPUs and GPU solutions you're considering.
The advantage there is that (particularly if your GPU is a mainstream GPU and not a CAD-specific workstation GPU), there are loads of sites who've already done the work for you, and update their benchmarks regularly. Tom's Hardware seems to have really dropped the ball, but Anandtech seems to be holding the torch still, and I'm sure someone else can provide links if there are better sites for this sort of comparison review (with pretty graphs and all) than Anandtech.
If these are office machines for people running 3rd party vendor apps, office apps, and web browsers, then none of this is worthwhile, and you'd be foolish to shop outside the triangle of price, warranty and vendor's support reputation. And by 'foolish', I'm being extremely generous.
...the original complaint lists "pornography featuring children, violence, bestiality, and incest" in one section, and every other mention of "pornography" is listed as "child pornography".
Even excluding the child pornography, reading the complaint, the pornography aspects of his business are not legitimate porn sites. He runs porn sites whose primary purpose is to catch search engine hits and direct them to sites containing malware, viruses, and fake anti-virus products (ransom anti-virus software, effectively). This is not a guy who runs a few woefully unethical businesses and then runs a legitimate pornography business on the side. Please don't confuse this for the shutdown of a pornography website, even the porn sites are just tools to infect unsuspecting visitors with hostile software.
Pretending this particular case is the law coming in and preventing you from looking at pornography is roughly akin to suggesting that Adolf Hitler was considered an enemy of the Allied powers because they didn't like his painting.
Michigan did a sneaky trick in this regard. They imposed a "Driver Responsibility Fee" and attached it to a fairly broad selection of traffic violations, from things as severe as driving while severely intoxicated, to stuff as innocuous as not having proof of insurance - misplacing papers, effectively.
I got hit with it a few years ago for no POI, $200 a year for two years. The court can't waive it because it's "not a court fine" - it comes directly from the State Treasury Dept.
Shady as hell. In related news, Michigan's legislature passed a "texting while driving" ban which sounds good to the uninitiated on the surface, but will no doubt become a "holding a cell phone while in the driver's seat" ban, be it taking a call or looking at a map on a smart phone.
The Democrats in the state legislature even tried to use the projected proceeds of this law to eliminate some of the Driver Responsibility Fees for lesser violations, but they were shot down by the Republicans.
I found this puzzling to see Republicans defending a tax, but to be honest, our state legislatures' Republicans would legislate the sky green if they thought it would help them against the Democrats. Partisanship wins, the people lose.
These sorts of laws are easy to pass because nobody thinks it will affect them; it's a tax on "other" people. Until you get caught unprepared at a random traffic stop. Or, in this case, tell a cop you have "no fucking idea" what he's talking about.
Invariably, these penalties affect the working poor the most.
Turned out to be bursitis. To be fair, I didn't really google it but went to webmd so I didn't end up in hypochondriac hell. It was very specific about every symptom I had (swollen elbow, the sort of pain, the warmness), and it gave me a reasonable diagnosis (don't mess with it, use the body part as little as possible, see a doctor if it doesn't stop being swollen in about two weeks). It saved me a doctor's visit, but more importantly, it gave me peace of mind.
I'm very well aware that sites like those, particularly online versions of the DSM IV, are hellholes for developing hypochondriacs, but when used responsibly with reasonable expectations, sites that are more professional in tone can be very useful. And if you don't like what you read, or it gets worse, well, you get to make the call about going to the doctor instead.
...their head examined. Traffic court is already filled with bogus cases in defense of laws whose primary purpose is to generate income for the locality.
Fair taxation, please, not harassment in lieu of it.
I never had a problem with optical discs for reliability. I really really don't understand people who can't keep CDs in good condition.
CD-Rs I can kind of understand, since the reflective surface is applied to the top and often uncoated.
...for solid-state media, for my tastes. It has connotations of low capacities and clunky housings.
But it does bring up a good question - what's the next media format? Is Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD the last family of media formats (since they can all be read by BD devices) before we go to all-online distribution? I suspect that we're done with cheap universal physical media formats in the near future.
Music stores are pretty much on their last legs, as much as it pains me to admit that. When physical game software dries up (PC or console) It has the added supposed-benefit (to the software industry) of eliminating the second-hand software market, which is something the industry has been trying to quash for what, 20 years?
"All languages are exploitable" != "all languages are equally exploitable".
You're the first person to bring the word "equally" into the conversation, and have missed the point.
Anyone who thinks a digital encoding of an analog waveform can be lossless needs their geek license revoked.
Lossless as in lossless compared to playing the CD directly, which is to say FLAC.
Please don't be pedantic.
I've "pirated" albums I own because I don't listen to CDs directly, and didn't feel like going into another room, getting the CD, then encoding it for future listening. "Pirating" the album was quicker and easier.
I remember all of these industry arguments back in the 8-bit software days, and the claims that "piracy = lost sales" was fatuous even then: none of us 13-18 year old pirates had thousands of dollars of disposable income to spend on the games we were pirating.
If you're getting your downloads from TPB, then yes, you're going to get a lot of low-bitrate and lossy-to-lossy transcodes.
If you're encoding CDs yourself and downloading from sites (commercial or otherwise) that have strict quality standards, you have all the tools you need. Bad encodes are possible on any format, lossy or lossless. When it doubt, use spectral analysis to examine audio files. Bad encoding practices have very specific patterns one can observe very quickly with very little effort.
Agreed. If diskspace IS an issue (for example, wanting to get a large audiobook on a single data CD for the car stereo, where the audio quality isn't important), there's v8.
I'm with you: saving 3% filesize at a given audio quality isn't compelling to me where I want audio quality to be transparent to source.
I thought it didn't need to be explained, but in case I was wrong: I am referring solely to audio formats as used by end-users who listen to audio files directly, either on their computer or on other hardware.
I am aware that other codecs for audio are more common for audio/video container formats and media, such as the fact that LPCM, DTS, mp2 and AC3 are audio codecs used in DVDs.
I'm talking about people listening to non-streamed local content that they have ripped or downloaded themselves. To deliberately misunderstand that is unhelpful.
Agreed. If you can't ABX the difference to a reliable percentage, you can't hear a difference.
Any statements that don't involve ABX testing are mere heresay, rumors, legend, and possible misinformation. I've used WinABX when I want to ABX different sources, it's a fairly small program and to the point. The only disadvantage is that it only handles WAV files, so you'll have to take your MP3s, FLACs, Oggs, or whatever, and convert them to .wav before ABXing. Transcoding to WAV will preserve perfectly any discrepencies between the formats that you're testing for. WinABX also does ABXY testing, but frankly, as OCD and anal as I am, that's a bridge too far even for me.
MP3 can be encoded at levels which achieve transparency - just like any other modern audio codec. While I'm not really up on what encoder and bitrates Lala used for its MP3 offerings, the notion that your music just sounds better than my mp3 library assumes that I am encoding MP3s at below-transparency levels, and that you are encoding your AAC, Ogg, or whatever lossy format at transparency levels, or that you are using a lossless codec and that somehow transparency "isn't enough".
This is incorrect, sir. MP3 as a format choice isn't the sole (or even main) criteria for most people who use it. MP3 is able to achieve transparency, its file sizes are reasonable (LAME encoding at v0 comes to mind), it's compatible with any hardware or software that one will encounter in the real world, and if your friend asks you for a copy of that latest Autechre album, you don't have to pontificate about how your chosen encoding format is better than their chosen encoding format, despite the fact that their software may not support it and their factory-included car CD/MP3 player most certainly won't. A 3% file size decrease with, say, Ogg, simply isn't compelling when it means putting up with the fact that a lot of hardware doesn't support it.
I'm here for the music. Give me transparency, and give me ubiquity. Your claim that you can achieve a better sound at "x" bitrate is not compelling when the file size of MP3 is not obscene, and when both formats can achieve transparency at a reasonable bitrate. Not having to pontificate about audio formats that hardly anyone actually uses? Hell, that's just icing on the cake.
Much like foreign oil, if porn is a limited, precious supply, I fully advocate using everyone else's before our own.
Our Stategic Porn Reserves aren't an alternative to foreign porn when supply is plentiful, but as a guarantor that we will not run out when it is not.
the SEC is the host of our Strategic Porn Reserves. Then you'll thank that attorney's forward-thinking approach to preserving a domestic supply to reduce our vulnerability to the whims of foreign porn suppliers.
...either in software form (nothing more fussy than html or pdf, please) or within in-game help, that would merely be a disappointment.
But what really going on here is that they're turning their manuals from a cost to a profit by outsourcing their manuals to BradyGames, Prima, and other publishers. I'm sick to death of paying for games which need manuals (rts/tbs yes, fps, no), but I'm only provided with a razor thin command reference sheet, if that.
UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses. More of the usual.
Oh, physical rocks. I thought at first this was about Acid Mothers Temple, the other Japanese Space Rock.
Yes, TFA is a bit of scare-mongering. Quite honestly, most businesses are not in jeopardy if their old printed/scanned documents get out of their hands; by the time anyone else has access to the device, the documents aren't timely.
Having said that, the article also points out that two of the devices they scanned were from police departments and contained documents that, if leaked, would put their previous owners in liability, and the subjects of the documents in jeopardy of blackmail or worse.
I think that, with the proper amount of user education, this can be dealt with properly, either by the lessee being required to wipe the device between users or by the owner doing so. If the product is at the end of its life, destroying a hard drive to the degree that it would not be practical to recover requires very little: a cheap torx screwdriver and a ten minute fun session of scraping the hell out of the platters should do the trick.
Completely unrelated, but you'd be amazed at how far an eighteen inch hard drive platter will go if bounced off a smooth surface. When it made contact with the wall, it was about four inches into the drywall. Whoops.
No hard drive, no real issue.
I see this issue crop up with large-format printers/copiers, but the issue is really the same as what the article is talking about. Many photocopiers, printers - both small format and large format - have the ability to re-print from history, and this is because all the jobs are saved locally to the device. Depending on the device and manufacturer, this may or may not be a real problem. On some of our devices (large format), the history is set in terms of gigabytes - usually ten or less - and for some of our less-frequent users, that can actually cover a year or more. Other devices are set in terms of time period. This setting may be applied differently to scans and prints on many devices.
In our case these are our devices that we lease out. When a is taken from one customer to another, it's necessary to clear out history queues if they've been set, but sometimes also necessary to delete problem queues that some devices send jobs to if there is a failure of some sort. In most small-format devices that are customer-owned, there should be a way to delete histories and user data, but short of re-installing the device's operating system, there's no way to securely wipe the now-unused portion of the hard drive and sell the device, and most end users do not have access to re-installation discs for the printer's firmware/OS. If the device is being decommissioned, though, destroying the hard drive is easier to justify.
...to the five-assed monkey!