When you try to order, it asks for a new billing address, one in the US. So I gave it a fake one and happily bought and downloaded some songs.
I did put in as much real street/town information, so it might be a good enough match for Visa to let it through. We'll see what happens when they actually try to bill this to my card!:D
If that is the case, then how about this: the US is only making Iran THINK they are staging nukes for the middle east to put pressure on them and the whole story was made up, with some guys at those bases going: "WTF!? I never saw any nukes on those days!" (or they did actually send them there but with no intention of using them - not first anyway)
The answer to e) is for someone to get out Visual Studio for an hour or two and write a patcher. (a simple.reg file won't do as you need the GUID of the NIC)
People will just have to get their non-Lundi's Energi friends to download it for them.
If you do it, you will be the town hero, a banquet will be held in honour of the unveiling of your statue and folks will be singing songs about your greatness for centuries to come!
You need the GUID of the NIC that it applies to. So you need a little more logic than a.reg file can offer. But nothing you couldn't handle in VC++ quite easily.
The problem with that theory is, why go through all that trouble only to end up with songs whose start and end overlap with other songs and have gone through audio processing when you can simply get onto the usual torrent sites and other P2P networks and get CD rips?
I have no doubt P2P is costing them money, though not to the tune they calculate; just because someone downloads it doesn't mean they would have bought it otherwise. But online radio is not costing them money, it is free advertising. I have nothing against revenue sharing; that is how radio in Europe has worked for a long time and at the end of the day the station is making money off the music too. But the rates need to be reasonable as the stations are also advertising the music.
Right now, SoundExchange is being rather unreasonable.
Don't forget the RAT, or Ram Air Turbine. If all else fails, it will power enough systems to allow you to glide safely to the ground:
"A ram air turbine (RAT) is a small propeller and connected hydraulic pump, or electrical generator used as an emergency power source for aircraft. In case of the loss of both primary and auxiliary power sources the RAT will power vital systems (flight controls, linked hydraulics and also flight-critical instrumentation). Some RATs produce only hydraulic power, that is then used to power electrical generators."
Most hollywood films you would see now in the cinema were edited using Digital_intermediates; film scanned at either 2K or (probably more common now) 4K and then recorded back to film. That is 4000 pixels wide, not 4000 lines. So at the now popular 1:2.35 aspect ratio, that is less than 7MP.
Plus when projected, the actual resolution of film as seen off the silver screen is very, very low. This is simply because running at 24 fps through a projector and being stopped for a brief moment it is on screen, the frame is never completely flat or motionless. Plus the frame is tiny and the much larger magnification needed compared to a digital projector's CCD/whatever brings with it a lot of unsharpness due to lens flaws. Not to mention the positive film you see in the theater is a 3rd or 4th generation copy from the original negative.
This is why even 2K digital scans in the theater are a lot sharper than any project 35mm/24fps film will ever be. Not to mention far less black time in between frames.
Back to HD-DVD:
If you have a computer or laptop capable of playing it back and an HDTV with HDMI or DVI input (or a converter plug) you should try a downloaded HD rip. (search for "1080p" on any torrent site) I only have a 37" 720p TV with a rather good upscaling HDMI DVD player. But even at just 720p, downloaded 4 mb/sec x264 movies ripped from BR/HDVD played back on this TV using DVI from my MacBook Pro look a lot better than any upscaled DVDs.
I also can't wait for Dolby TrueHD audio from the actual discs!
That said, a far cheaper upgrade would have been h.264 on the same 9GB disk. No room for TrueHD audio, but any feature film would have fit at a high enough bitrate to put any DVD to shame.
I don't agree with a film looking better straight off film projection rather than scanned 2K. The most important improvement digital projection makes is stability of the film. When you are running film at 24fps through a projector, stopping each frame during the time it is projected, it is never going to be completely motionless nor flat.
Because the film is scanned at more lower speeds than it is projected, scans are truly motionless and flat.
So digital, even lowly 2K, does not have that problem and I would say that the resulting sharpness/resolution of the image as projected on the screen by a digital projector is much, much greater than 35mm/24fps film could ever hope to achieve.
On top of that, the LCD or other projection device is much larger than a frame of 35mm film. This mean the lens will have far less enlarging to do and thus introduces far less unsharpness caused by lens flaws than a higher magnification needed for 355 film would do.
Did I say Latitude in that post? Of course I mean Inspiron!
I only have experience with them in the past 5 years, so things might be different now compared to when you worked there.
I have never seen a dead Mac laptop due to dropping; mostly because I don't know anyone who has ever dropped one. Similarly, yours may be a fluke; I have seen dead-dropped Dells too, but in cases they were dropped and didn't break, the users wouldn't have told me about it so it is impossible for either of us to say which is better in that regard - we just don't have enough data!
It is also interesting to note that whenever Dell reliability comes up in forums such as these, there usually are two distinct camps: those with nothing but trouble and those that run hundreds or thousands and have very few problems. When you dig down to it; the trouble sufferers are the buyers of the dirt-cheap-must-compete-with-wallmart consumer systems and those that have no troubles run Precision workstations or better - despite often having much the same specs, QC and reliability seems to differ enormously.
In the iBook G3 (and early G4s) there apparently was a problem with pressing the power switch flexing the motherboard and eventually components coming loose. There even was a class action about it. Mind you, I am sure that Dell and others make the occasional mistake like that, but if you always have that many different models and recycle them quite quickly, the percentage of users affected is much smaller. Plus you know how vocal Apple users can be compared to Windows users...
All well and good, but why then do Latitudes and other cheap ones start sounding horrible, creaking when you move them and breaking well before the more expensive Dells do?
I also don't buy that they are often the same machines with a name change; at the very least they are obviously put in a different case: a much cheaper one that isn't as sturdy. And as the iBook G3 owners will testify, a better, sturdier case makes all the difference as PCBs and other components do not like being flexed constantly.
They are usually also a lot bigger, making me put more doubt on you saying they are the same one the insides. (making things smaller is more expensive) What do they do with the extra space, leave it full of air? To what point? To make the more expensive ones look worth the extra cost?
While impressive, these are not workstation chips. They only thrive in an environment where they run many processes or threads in parallel, like a webserver. If you were to use it as workstation and run Linux and browser and desktop suites, you'd probably find it feels slow!
Just look at the 4-core Mac Pro vs. 8-core benchmarks; not much difference.
The only "workstation" activity where these multi-core multi-thread CPUs shine is video rendering.
That is not the kind of feeding off each other I was talking about, I mean writing songs and recording them *together*.
But to address your point, sampling is very much restricted by law indeed and needs prior written consent from the owner of the recording you are sampling.
But if you want to cover a song, you need no permission. (they just get all the writing royalties) And if you just want to use a guitar riff or baseline someone else came up with and play it yourself in your song, that is fine too and you just have to give part of the writing credit and the part of the royalties they are due because of it.
Yeah, except that if you RTFA, you'll see that this is not a "piracy is killing music" stab; not at all. It is about people now making cold electronic music in their bedrooms rather than going out, getting together with other musicians and feed off each other creativity to make truly great music.
And I think he has a point. Shutting down the internet may be a bit drastic, though.
Having worked with the entire line of Dell laptops and MacBook/MacBook Pro, I would say they best comparison to a current 17" MBP in the Dell world would be an M90 or XPS. The Inspiron may have the same specs, but the build and screen quality just isn't there. There is a reason these Latitudes are so much cheaper and you get what you pay for!
If you go for 15", a Latitude D820 built to the same specs as an entry level MBP 15" comes to within single digit percentages of costing the same. (If you include Apple Care, which you should as Dell warranty as standard on these things is superior to Apple's, otherwise the Apple is cheaper.) Again, anything less than a Latitude does not compare to the MacBook Pro on anything other than specs on paper.
For those of us that happen to be happy with the stereo that came with the car, the upside is no more having to take the thing apart and hide it every time you leave the car somewhere and no more smashed windows and some wires hanging out of your dash when you come back to it...
I, for one, welcome our new fully integrated un-steal-able car stereo overlords!
America's wealth and living standards did not come from selling their wares as cheap as possible to other countries. Instead, they stem from America being a natural resource rich country and efficiently turning those resources into products that people like. Getting ever more efficient at this cycle is called "economic growth". (i.e.: when you only need half the amount of people to make the same amount of stuff, the other half can move on to making other stuff)
That is how you are supposed to sustainably industrialize. Buying manufacturing knowledge and equipment on credit from more advanced nations and then operating them by virtual slaves who will do anything just to stay alive, is not.
China, as vast as it is, has those resources too; it doesn't need anyone else. In isolation, they too can become as prosperous as any "western" country if they put their minds to it and are patient.
If someone wants to crack down on "unregistered gatherings" they do not need cameras to do it. Police states throughout history have been ruthless and brutal without these tools.
For now the British do not live in a police state and no amount of cameras and using them the track real criminals is going to change that. And if Britain ever does turn into a police state, the dictators would have put them up for evil doings anyway.
Police states turn to cameras, cameras do not turn a democracy into a police state.
And there are many online stores that will sell you CDs at a lower cost than you get them on the iTunes Store. The difference isn't earth shattering, but why pay more to get less? (albeit a little faster)
That said, yeah, a lot of new music has been so overprocessed and made loud that the they don't really benefit much from a CD. Still, people who listen to classical etc will be able to tell the difference.
Highly compressed (loud) content doesn't actually mix very well with lossy formats. Music with a medium level of dynamic range (say early-mid 90s pop and current 'quality' adult pop music) fares a lot better at the same bitrate than completely squashed music does. So the same squashed music sounds a lot better on CD than it does lossy.
Also, because CDs (and any current digital format for that matter) uses linear sampling, rather than the logarithmic way our ears work, they have higher resolution in the more significant bits, i.e.: the loader ones. This means that it is much better suited to medium to high levels of processing (low dynamic range) than it is for high dynamic range, like classical music. Maybe someday a format will exist that actually works well with classical too! I know 24 bit audio (DVD-A) improves things, but really they should have distributed a CD's 16 bits logarithmic to begin with and it wouldn't have been a problem at all...
Florida is a "swing state" with many cuban voters. They left cuba for a reason and that reason is that they hate Castro. So much so that they would rather see the family and friends they left behind live in poverty than give any legitimacy to Cuba by trading with them. So any party that would get rid of the idiotic embargo (China is a preferred trade partner for crying out loud!) loses the Cuban vote in Florida and thus lose any election.
Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.
It did prove one thing quite clearly: you might me able to get it working the first time, but forget about upgrading your MMPC and keep using the same card in a few years time.
And the process of "divorce" should be a 5 minute call to your cable provider with clear instruction on how to do it given right there on screen in MCE. (ie: "call number 555-1234567, give them number A0FEA7D322 and type in the number they give you in return")
Slashdot Mirror
When you try to order, it asks for a new billing address, one in the US. So I gave it a fake one and happily bought and downloaded some songs.
:D
I did put in as much real street/town information, so it might be a good enough match for Visa to let it through. We'll see what happens when they actually try to bill this to my card!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(attorn ey)
If that is the case, then how about this: the US is only making Iran THINK they are staging nukes for the middle east to put pressure on them and the whole story was made up, with some guys at those bases going: "WTF!? I never saw any nukes on those days!" (or they did actually send them there but with no intention of using them - not first anyway)
The answer to e) is for someone to get out Visual Studio for an hour or two and write a patcher. (a simple .reg file won't do as you need the GUID of the NIC)
People will just have to get their non-Lundi's Energi friends to download it for them.
If you do it, you will be the town hero, a banquet will be held in honour of the unveiling of your statue and folks will be singing songs about your greatness for centuries to come!
You need the GUID of the NIC that it applies to. So you need a little more logic than a .reg file can offer. But nothing you couldn't handle in VC++ quite easily.
The problem with that theory is, why go through all that trouble only to end up with songs whose start and end overlap with other songs and have gone through audio processing when you can simply get onto the usual torrent sites and other P2P networks and get CD rips?
I have no doubt P2P is costing them money, though not to the tune they calculate; just because someone downloads it doesn't mean they would have bought it otherwise. But online radio is not costing them money, it is free advertising. I have nothing against revenue sharing; that is how radio in Europe has worked for a long time and at the end of the day the station is making money off the music too. But the rates need to be reasonable as the stations are also advertising the music.
Right now, SoundExchange is being rather unreasonable.
Don't forget the RAT, or Ram Air Turbine. If all else fails, it will power enough systems to allow you to glide safely to the ground:
"A ram air turbine (RAT) is a small propeller and connected hydraulic pump, or electrical generator used as an emergency power source for aircraft. In case of the loss of both primary and auxiliary power sources the RAT will power vital systems (flight controls, linked hydraulics and also flight-critical instrumentation). Some RATs produce only hydraulic power, that is then used to power electrical generators."
Most hollywood films you would see now in the cinema were edited using Digital_intermediates; film scanned at either 2K or (probably more common now) 4K and then recorded back to film. That is 4000 pixels wide, not 4000 lines. So at the now popular 1:2.35 aspect ratio, that is less than 7MP.
Plus when projected, the actual resolution of film as seen off the silver screen is very, very low. This is simply because running at 24 fps through a projector and being stopped for a brief moment it is on screen, the frame is never completely flat or motionless. Plus the frame is tiny and the much larger magnification needed compared to a digital projector's CCD/whatever brings with it a lot of unsharpness due to lens flaws. Not to mention the positive film you see in the theater is a 3rd or 4th generation copy from the original negative.
This is why even 2K digital scans in the theater are a lot sharper than any project 35mm/24fps film will ever be. Not to mention far less black time in between frames.
Back to HD-DVD:
If you have a computer or laptop capable of playing it back and an HDTV with HDMI or DVI input (or a converter plug) you should try a downloaded HD rip. (search for "1080p" on any torrent site) I only have a 37" 720p TV with a rather good upscaling HDMI DVD player. But even at just 720p, downloaded 4 mb/sec x264 movies ripped from BR/HDVD played back on this TV using DVI from my MacBook Pro look a lot better than any upscaled DVDs.
I also can't wait for Dolby TrueHD audio from the actual discs!
That said, a far cheaper upgrade would have been h.264 on the same 9GB disk. No room for TrueHD audio, but any feature film would have fit at a high enough bitrate to put any DVD to shame.
I don't agree with a film looking better straight off film projection rather than scanned 2K. The most important improvement digital projection makes is stability of the film. When you are running film at 24fps through a projector, stopping each frame during the time it is projected, it is never going to be completely motionless nor flat.
Because the film is scanned at more lower speeds than it is projected, scans are truly motionless and flat.
So digital, even lowly 2K, does not have that problem and I would say that the resulting sharpness/resolution of the image as projected on the screen by a digital projector is much, much greater than 35mm/24fps film could ever hope to achieve.
On top of that, the LCD or other projection device is much larger than a frame of 35mm film. This mean the lens will have far less enlarging to do and thus introduces far less unsharpness caused by lens flaws than a higher magnification needed for 355 film would do.
You only need one if:
a) you are photographing from a private location. (public road is fine)
- or -
b) the photograph is used for commercial purposes.
What Google is doing can very easily be justified as editorial, not commercial.
In any case, it would not surprise me if it is included with the questionnaire that is taken inside to the owner.
Did I say Latitude in that post? Of course I mean Inspiron!
I only have experience with them in the past 5 years, so things might be different now compared to when you worked there.
I have never seen a dead Mac laptop due to dropping; mostly because I don't know anyone who has ever dropped one. Similarly, yours may be a fluke; I have seen dead-dropped Dells too, but in cases they were dropped and didn't break, the users wouldn't have told me about it so it is impossible for either of us to say which is better in that regard - we just don't have enough data!
It is also interesting to note that whenever Dell reliability comes up in forums such as these, there usually are two distinct camps: those with nothing but trouble and those that run hundreds or thousands and have very few problems. When you dig down to it; the trouble sufferers are the buyers of the dirt-cheap-must-compete-with-wallmart consumer systems and those that have no troubles run Precision workstations or better - despite often having much the same specs, QC and reliability seems to differ enormously.
In the iBook G3 (and early G4s) there apparently was a problem with pressing the power switch flexing the motherboard and eventually components coming loose. There even was a class action about it. Mind you, I am sure that Dell and others make the occasional mistake like that, but if you always have that many different models and recycle them quite quickly, the percentage of users affected is much smaller. Plus you know how vocal Apple users can be compared to Windows users...
All well and good, but why then do Latitudes and other cheap ones start sounding horrible, creaking when you move them and breaking well before the more expensive Dells do?
I also don't buy that they are often the same machines with a name change; at the very least they are obviously put in a different case: a much cheaper one that isn't as sturdy. And as the iBook G3 owners will testify, a better, sturdier case makes all the difference as PCBs and other components do not like being flexed constantly.
They are usually also a lot bigger, making me put more doubt on you saying they are the same one the insides. (making things smaller is more expensive) What do they do with the extra space, leave it full of air? To what point? To make the more expensive ones look worth the extra cost?
Sorry, but I don't buy this.
While impressive, these are not workstation chips. They only thrive in an environment where they run many processes or threads in parallel, like a webserver. If you were to use it as workstation and run Linux and browser and desktop suites, you'd probably find it feels slow!
Just look at the 4-core Mac Pro vs. 8-core benchmarks; not much difference.
The only "workstation" activity where these multi-core multi-thread CPUs shine is video rendering.
That is not the kind of feeding off each other I was talking about, I mean writing songs and recording them *together*.
But to address your point, sampling is very much restricted by law indeed and needs prior written consent from the owner of the recording you are sampling.
But if you want to cover a song, you need no permission. (they just get all the writing royalties) And if you just want to use a guitar riff or baseline someone else came up with and play it yourself in your song, that is fine too and you just have to give part of the writing credit and the part of the royalties they are due because of it.
Yeah, except that if you RTFA, you'll see that this is not a "piracy is killing music" stab; not at all. It is about people now making cold electronic music in their bedrooms rather than going out, getting together with other musicians and feed off each other creativity to make truly great music.
And I think he has a point. Shutting down the internet may be a bit drastic, though.
Having worked with the entire line of Dell laptops and MacBook/MacBook Pro, I would say they best comparison to a current 17" MBP in the Dell world would be an M90 or XPS. The Inspiron may have the same specs, but the build and screen quality just isn't there. There is a reason these Latitudes are so much cheaper and you get what you pay for!
If you go for 15", a Latitude D820 built to the same specs as an entry level MBP 15" comes to within single digit percentages of costing the same. (If you include Apple Care, which you should as Dell warranty as standard on these things is superior to Apple's, otherwise the Apple is cheaper.) Again, anything less than a Latitude does not compare to the MacBook Pro on anything other than specs on paper.
For those of us that happen to be happy with the stereo that came with the car, the upside is no more having to take the thing apart and hide it every time you leave the car somewhere and no more smashed windows and some wires hanging out of your dash when you come back to it...
I, for one, welcome our new fully integrated un-steal-able car stereo overlords!
America's wealth and living standards did not come from selling their wares as cheap as possible to other countries. Instead, they stem from America being a natural resource rich country and efficiently turning those resources into products that people like. Getting ever more efficient at this cycle is called "economic growth". (i.e.: when you only need half the amount of people to make the same amount of stuff, the other half can move on to making other stuff)
That is how you are supposed to sustainably industrialize. Buying manufacturing knowledge and equipment on credit from more advanced nations and then operating them by virtual slaves who will do anything just to stay alive, is not.
China, as vast as it is, has those resources too; it doesn't need anyone else. In isolation, they too can become as prosperous as any "western" country if they put their minds to it and are patient.
If someone wants to crack down on "unregistered gatherings" they do not need cameras to do it. Police states throughout history have been ruthless and brutal without these tools.
For now the British do not live in a police state and no amount of cameras and using them the track real criminals is going to change that. And if Britain ever does turn into a police state, the dictators would have put them up for evil doings anyway.
Police states turn to cameras, cameras do not turn a democracy into a police state.
And there are many online stores that will sell you CDs at a lower cost than you get them on the iTunes Store. The difference isn't earth shattering, but why pay more to get less? (albeit a little faster)
Highly compressed (loud) content doesn't actually mix very well with lossy formats. Music with a medium level of dynamic range (say early-mid 90s pop and current 'quality' adult pop music) fares a lot better at the same bitrate than completely squashed music does. So the same squashed music sounds a lot better on CD than it does lossy.
Also, because CDs (and any current digital format for that matter) uses linear sampling, rather than the logarithmic way our ears work, they have higher resolution in the more significant bits, i.e.: the loader ones. This means that it is much better suited to medium to high levels of processing (low dynamic range) than it is for high dynamic range, like classical music. Maybe someday a format will exist that actually works well with classical too! I know 24 bit audio (DVD-A) improves things, but really they should have distributed a CD's 16 bits logarithmic to begin with and it wouldn't have been a problem at all...
Florida is a "swing state" with many cuban voters. They left cuba for a reason and that reason is that they hate Castro. So much so that they would rather see the family and friends they left behind live in poverty than give any legitimacy to Cuba by trading with them. So any party that would get rid of the idiotic embargo (China is a preferred trade partner for crying out loud!) loses the Cuban vote in Florida and thus lose any election.
THAT is why the embargo is still in place.
Basically, TFA is written by someone without the first clue about the difference between dynamic range compression and lossy audio data compression.
The two have absolutely nothing in common and yet they are somehow grouped together by the author.
It did prove one thing quite clearly: you might me able to get it working the first time, but forget about upgrading your MMPC and keep using the same card in a few years time.
And the process of "divorce" should be a 5 minute call to your cable provider with clear instruction on how to do it given right there on screen in MCE. (ie: "call number 555-1234567, give them number A0FEA7D322 and type in the number they give you in return")
Haha, you Northern Hemisphere suckers always being hit by delays!
At least I will get it in Spring while you are still twiddling your thumbs.