Let's ignore the fact that the grandparent was very tongue-in-cheek; your reply was less so. If it contained some flippancy, it was still clear you basically meant what you said:-
There's nothing bad about stealing. It's only an ipod, it's not like the victim's life was ruined by not having it.
Actually, some people's lives *are* ruined by the experience of crime, and your answer smacks of off-the-cuff superficiality masquerading as "logic"; oh, it's not essential, so it doesn't matter that much.
Yeah, some kids are greedy, superficial little gets. Maybe that kid was one of them; would it justify holding a knife to his throat to get the iPod? Or maybe it was a major birthday present? Who knows?
Oh, *you* do. Of course.
Some people are going to take the experience of crime more badly than others, and viewing it in cold terms of "loss of $x" is complete bullshit.
Marketingspeak used to just be funny. After reading 1984 however, the concept of making words so obtuse that they lose their meaning and create mindlessness is downright frightening.
Of course, the irony is that the system it serves is more like the intentional dumbing-down seen in 'Brave New World' than the brutal repression in 'Ninteen Eighty-Four'.
OTOH, it could be said that in BNW, superficial distraction was a means to an end for controlling the population, whereas in real life, the population is controlled in order to support the system producing the superficial distractions (i.e. consumerism).
Don't be fooled by Dvorak, the gaming industry is unlikely to implode. It just means that we'll appreciate the ground-breaking games more when they arrive.
Actually, I'd expected the gist of it to be that the gaming industry was going to die because of the economics of it; namely the "feast and famine" nature that sees companies having massive hits, then going to the wall because they can't get funding for the next big-budget blockbuster.
That's as good a reason as any to avoid the games industry like the plague, as far as I'm concerned. That and the fact that it looks interesting from the outside (and thus attracts high numbers of applicants), but actually pushes its participants (or at least the programmers and testers) notoriously hard- doubly so when launch-time approaches- and gives them precious little creativity.
Tetris is probably one of the most addictive and popular games of all time, but if it was invented today no one would pay $50.00 for it.
Let's bear one very important thing in mind about Tetris. There was nothing really "state of the art" about it when it first appeared in the mid-late 1980s.
Put simply, if you ignore the pretty-but-unimportant backgrounds/pictures, etc., you could write Tetris for the Atari 2600 or the Sinclair ZX81 without any change in the gameplay. In short, if you asked someone with no previous knowledge of the game (generically, not regarding a specific implementation) when it first appeared, they'd probably guess something like:-
"Pong, Breakout... Tetris. Probably not too long after Breakout, but before Space Invaders or Asteroids."
Tetris came out at around the same time as OutRun, but it doesn't feel like it.
It's worth remembering that it only became a really big hit when the Nintendo GameBoy came out in the early 1990s, and that was when it was *bundled*. No-one paid $50 for it then, and (although it got good reviews), it wasn't *that* big a smash when it was being sold as a full-price game for home computers (8 and 16-bit) in the late 1980s.
If there's an open source alternative and it's of higher quality, why should I settle for the norm?
Because it's not widely supported, whereas MP3 support is almost universal?
If the ogg fans don't take a stand on the issue, why would any company ever care about supporting it?
Good point about asking for Ogg Vorbis support; if people make enough noise you might get it. *However*...
You say "It really is a serious problem for some of us".... no offence, but you made your own 'serious problem' when you decided to encode your music collection in a semi-obscure (*) format that might, or might not have gained widestream support, but was unlikely to ever become as universal as MP3.
Before you pick me up on this, consider that you yourself said that "why should I settle for the norm?" Well... because the 'norm' is the one that's supported. If you want to go for something different, that's your choice, but don't complain when it isn't supported.
The 'free' support isn't free; firstly, it requires work on the implementation, secondly it requires more processing power than MP3, and finally, MP3 hardware chips are widely-available and fairly cheap. Are there *any* Ogg-compatible chips available, let alone those at an acceptable price for a niche-feature? I doubt it.
So, let's just say that there *are* good reasons for leaving Ogg support out unless the potential increase in sales makes up for the cost of supporting this 'free' format.
Long and the short of it; I like the idea of Ogg, I'm quite willing to accept that it's better than MP3 and I hope it gets support. But standardisation brings benefits, even when it's on an ageing format such as MP3; you encoded your music collection using a relatively unsupported format, you take some pride in the fact you didn't "settle for the norm", and I'm sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it by complaining about "serious problems" caused by lack of support.
Well, obviously.
(*) Not a slight on the quality of the format; simple fact is that if you ask your average iPod-type what they think of Ogg Vorbis, they'll say 'Ogg WHAT?! Never heard of it'. So from that point of view, it *is* semi-obscure.
Like it or not, Apple has the golden touch of style that Nokia never had
Uh... the Nokia 3210 was one of the first (if not *the* first) mobile phones that launched the 'mobile phone as fashion accessory'. It was damn fashionable at the time (and pretty nice looking as well).
The fact that Nokia's recent models look as if the designers were given permission to place looks over usability and went horribly OTT shouldn't detract from their earlier stuff.
> > What was Gen X? The "me" generation? And we're supprised that their kids are turning out to be jerks?
> Wow, this whole time I thought you were talking about the parents of Gen Xers.
Amen; IMHO this started with the baby-boomers, who grew up with self-absorption masked by association with watered-down, commercialised versions of the counter-culture. They grew up, and turned into corporate/consumerist hippie types that were way more commercial than *their* parents were, and sold their youth (AKA the 1960s) as some type of lost utopia to the next generation.
Gen-X is what you get when people grow up with that hypocrisy. Superficially cynical, it is part of the system; they may recognise the bullshit and hypocrisy, but it seems 'normal'; if they are slackers, it's because there's nothing worth believing in. They've seen the bullshit, but they'll buy into it anyway.
In short: Gen-X; self-aware enough that they want cynical advertising that says "you'll die if you smoke these", "this soft drink sucks"; advertising that doesn't try to hide what it is, they will accept. But too lazy, hypocritical, selfish or just plain stupid to be arsed working for anything better.
Personally, if I can find it in my heart to like advertising, I usually keep my liking of that separate from my perception of the product itself. In other words, show me the pretty pictures, and I'll agree that they're pretty, but it doesn't say anything about your bank/phone/shoes. Anyway, I think that the 'Gen-X' stereotype is to some extent, an American thing (for example... ask someone who lived in China of their perceptions of the 1960s; it won't have much in common with the US/UK '1960s'). Age-wise, I'm supposedly part of it (29), but the 'slacker' thing doesn't really tie in with me... of course, that could just be my personality.
I went and got one of Samsung's camera phones a few months ago. My reason for getting it (even with the two -year contract) is that it I can hook it into my laptop and go online from anywhere I can get a cellular signal. My connect speed is somewhere around 300Kbaud (the older phones would have been limited to about 56Kbaud)
Wow... I read the 300Kbaud as 300 baud for a while there, and was going to joke that I didn't know they made accoustic couplers for mobile phones. I also remembered thinking that it wasn't such a damn stupid idea for occasional use on things such as (text-only) email and browsing with Lynx (though 300 baud would really be pushing things too far).
Since GSM is limited to (IIRC) approx 9kbps (and that's assuming you can inject the digital information directly as digital call data), I assume that you are using GPRS and getting it on your minutes allowance?
I didn't see Ogg Vorbis in that list. Seriously... I really dont' feel like re-encoding all my music b/c they were too lazy to add a completely free of charge feature to their phone... I know it's become sort of an obligatory joke to mention the lack of Ogg support in media players, but it really is a serious problem for some of us;)
Is *that* meant to be a joke, indicated by the winking smiley to the end? Or did it refer to the part before?
Yeah, maybe Vorbis *is* free-of-charge in terms of royalties, but not (I assume) to program an implementation.
But that's not my point; my point is that... if wide compatibility was of concern to you, why on *earth* did you encode your music collection as Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3?
Yeah; it probably *is* a better format in terms of quality. So is WMA, but I still used high-bitrate MP3s because I knew that pretty much anything (Sony excepted) supports MP3 without arbitrary restrictions. Frankly, given the capacity of modern players, size just isn't that much of an issue nowadays.
Those who come after you should only be able to find one or two
contradictory, early drafts of the design document hidden on some
dusty shelving in the back room near the dead 286 computers.
"But the designs were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. They were on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
Well there are always sinister plots happening *somewhere*. I have to wonder about the real motivations of the people who keep pushing this China bashing?
Perhaps they just don't like the fact that they (the government, not the Chinese people) manipulate and oppress their own citizens via a dictatorship which is not (and was never) communism, and is not really free-market capitalism either. If the labour market isn't free, it's not a "free" market.
The PRC are not perfect, but neither is the government of any powerful nation. Some just have better PR than others.
Someone help me out here; there must be a name for this form of argument. Namely, "A isn't perfect, but neither is B, so that implicitly excuses A". Let's ignore that while B is far from perfect, A may be an order of magnitude worse.
I'm not American, and I'll apologise to no-one for my dislike of Bush and his warmongering, blatantly self-serving and unashamedly greedy and parasitic cronies. And as far as PR goes, I can tell you that the Bush administration doesn't impress many people (power-blinded politicians excepted) outside the United States. PR is mainly directed inwards; I'm sure that from a Chinese person's perspective, the Chinese government are made to look far better than the US.
But if you think that this somehow excuses the general behaviour of the Chinese government (who I still consider to be an order of magnitude worse, although nowhere near as evil as they were in Mao's day), then you are mistaken.
Am I the only one that sees the XP in windows XP as a disgusted smiley?
Genius!.... I think I love you
What is it supposed to stand for anyways?
'eXPerience'!
No, I *am* serious, unfortunately.
The whole name smacks of what would happen if one corporate type trying to come up with an 'urban' sounding name met with another who had just invented the most banal, homogenised, meaningless touchy-feely name ever, and the two of them invoked the powers of darkness to create a satanic offspring.
This foul child would then create the name 'eXPerience', and shorten it to XP.
Five years later, having infested various world governments, he would bring about the downfall of western civilisation.
When I pay a buck for a 24 oz. Coke in a cup at the local convenience store I know their cost was about three cents, and two of those were for the cup.
That's right. Most store owners don't bother paying Monsanto, even though that company put the effort into genetically engineering the trees that stores, land and electricity grow on.
Those scum... anyway, some people would say they were stupid to risk something illegal like that when money has grown on trees since biblical times.
Unfortunately, the only money that grows on trees is the North Korean Peso, and you need three barrowfuls of them for your cup of Coke.
People will ask about them, then go to Barnes And Noble on the other side of the mall to buy one.
And when people ask, Apple can in general:-
- Be honest, and at best say they don't sell Wiley books and don't explain why
- Be less honest, and say that they withdrew Wiley books because (e.g.) they weren't up to Apple's standards.
- Lie outright, and say that Wiley went bankrupt because their books are rubbish, and would the customer like to buy one of the fine selection on the shelves.
In the first case, Apple lose. In the second case, if it happens more than a couple of times, Wiley can probably sue on the basis of defamation or something (IANAAmericanL). In the third case, Wiley would probably find it trivial to prove and win a case; the only question would be whether they gained more than they lost by pissing off Apple.
VideoPlus first rose to prominence in the early 1990s, and quickly became commonplace. DVD didn't really take off at a VCR-like level of magnitude until 8 or 9 years later.
And besides which, recordable DVD only became affordable or worthwhile (by the standards required to make it a mass-market success) in the past year or so, and even then, a vanilla DVD recorder doesn't offer *that* much over VHS for daily use unless it incorporates TiVo/PVR-like compatibility.
And I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the DVD-recorder might be the 'obvious' replacement for VCR recording, because the parts/operation are fairly analagous. But, for *recording*, a PVR- possibly without a DVD recorder- is probably a better replacement for what people actually want to *do* with it; which is time-shift recording. Keep the DVD player for playback.
Ideally, what you want is
- Hard-drive-based PVR
- DVD Recorder
- Digital TV tuner
- Analogue TV tuner (or at least composite video recordability; that is, some form of digitiser)
in one box. Having them combined, and not separate makes it *much* easier to record/transfer the signal in digital form, whilst still being able to transfer legacy VHS tapes.
Any connections between separate boxes would either have to be complex (to preserve functionality) or lose information/quality, which kind of defeats the purpose of digital.
But on a more serious note I wholeheartedly agree. The only reason I would rebuy stuff on CD when I've already got the vinyl is because most of my vinyl is knackered (or should I say well used:)
You forgot the other reason; because you can buy it on CD at a price that's far less than your time taken to transfer the thing is realistically worth.
I find it very hard to get good transfers from vinyl to CD/MP3. Of course, I am using a cheap (and old) 'Midi' HiFi (an oxymoron, but I digress), and doing it for one-offs, but...
If I can buy the CD for UKP 10.00, it is probably not worth my time transferring, bearing in mind the mediocre-quality end results.
Of course, if you have a good audio system, very good quality vinyl or cassette sources, and have enough material to make it worth your time setting it up very carefully and doing your collection on a 'production line' basis, then that would probably not be the case.
But it'd still be questionable whether it was worth it if you could get the album in question for 5.00 at your local Fopp store(note: Flash required, I don't use that...).
Singles are a different kettle of fish; it's often hard to get songs individually once out of the charts, and buying 20 mediocre CD albums to get 20 single tracks isn't much good. So, I would transfer them in that case.... *after* scouring the P2P networks for decent-quality rips.
.. a frustrated consumer doesn't automagically turn into a consumer that is aware of his/her own market power.
If that were the case, consumers would be able to program their VCRs (because only usable VCRs would be sold), Windows would be a lot safer, spyware would be non-existant, etc, etc.
There is something called 'VideoPlus' in the UK (AKA VCR+ in the US; was it as successful there?), that lets you set the timer for a programme simply by entering a short numeric code.
This is available on almost all video recorders in the UK (except at the dirt-cheap end of the market where every penny counts); most recent recorders include PDC (program delivery control) in this, where the channel sends a signal when the programme starts, increasing the accuracy of the system.
Maybe it was the fall in cost of video recorders, but after peaking sometime around 1990, the complexity/usability tradeoff of most models is not as bad now.
Rather than tear it down, I thought they had simply changed it slightly to look like a huge hand giving the bird to the rest of the world.
Arf. Seriously, how can you 'slightly' change the statue of liberty into a huge hand? If you're implying that just the statue's huge hand would change, wouldn't that mean a large green French woman giving New York the bird?
Then again, we do need more copper for creating pennies, so how ironic would it be if it got melted down to make pennies
It's your statue; it's your choice.
That wouldn't be irony, by the way; it would be, uh... coppery.
(remember, kids around the US donated pennies to build the pedestal)
I'm sure there's a joke in there; either about what's currently on the pedestal, or what should replace it.
> You mean the big statue in New York? I guess > slashdot really IS late with the news lately!
Regrettably, following the wave of anti-French sentiments in the United States in the past couple of years, the Statue of Liberty was dismantled and sold off for scrap. From a news report:-
"Although it had become something of a national icon, it was felt that the French-built statue from old Europe had no place in modern America.
This was necessary to demonstrate that we had the guts to stand up for what we said, even if that meant sacrificing our statue.
Had we not been willing to back up our words in this way, actions such as the renaming of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries" would have been seen as cheap-and-easy point scoring or kneejerk xenophobia.
Our willingness to destroy the Statue of Liberty shows that this is not the case; we have principles and when we say something, we *mean* it."
I've noticed some pretty nasty banding effects on smooth gradients and the like on BBC1 - I think the reason it annoys me so much is not that it's a technical limitation, but more that there's precious bandwidth being used for junk like 'Bid-Up TV' and its many, many siblings, ITV 3 and so on. Give Auntie another multiplex (or two), I say...;-)
I'd rather they'd based the whole thing on MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 personally. Of course, digital terrestrial is quite a few years old now, but the pain-in-the-arse is that they're standardising on a technology that is already woefully inefficient compared to more modern codecs.
As for the banding, I don't know how much of that is down to the decoder. I know that when I watch DVDs using PowerDVD, the quality is *far* better than under Windows Media Player, and I'd assume there must be something similar with DVB-T.
Actually, I'm sure that with enough processing power, the artifacts could be vastly reduced, by intelligently smoothing out and filling in detail in (e.g.) moving areas.
Also, the picture quality isn't quite as good as it's cracked up to be. It's definitely better than a bad analogue picture, but it's nowhere near good analogue reception thanks to all the blocking artefacts on fast-moving stuff.
Really depends on the station. Freeview channels have varying bit-rates. I don't have the exact figures, but I know that the commercial channels use lower bit-rates than the BBC does, in order to squeeze more into a given multiplex (group of channels).
IIRC, the likes of BBC One has the highest bit-rate, and Sky Travel and Sky Sports have some of the lowest.
Plus it's highly susceptible to interference, too...
That's definitely true; however, the newer boxes are far more resilient than the old (i.e. early On-Digital) ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's ignore the fact that the grandparent was very tongue-in-cheek; your reply was less so. If it contained some flippancy, it was still clear you basically meant what you said:-
There's nothing bad about stealing. It's only an ipod, it's not like the victim's life was ruined by not having it.
Actually, some people's lives *are* ruined by the experience of crime, and your answer smacks of off-the-cuff superficiality masquerading as "logic"; oh, it's not essential, so it doesn't matter that much.
Yeah, some kids are greedy, superficial little gets. Maybe that kid was one of them; would it justify holding a knife to his throat to get the iPod? Or maybe it was a major birthday present? Who knows?
Oh, *you* do. Of course.
Some people are going to take the experience of crime more badly than others, and viewing it in cold terms of "loss of $x" is complete bullshit.
Marketingspeak used to just be funny. After reading 1984 however, the concept of making words so obtuse that they lose their meaning and create mindlessness is downright frightening.
Of course, the irony is that the system it serves is more like the intentional dumbing-down seen in 'Brave New World' than the brutal repression in 'Ninteen Eighty-Four'.
OTOH, it could be said that in BNW, superficial distraction was a means to an end for controlling the population, whereas in real life, the population is controlled in order to support the system producing the superficial distractions (i.e. consumerism).
Gonna have to start watching Wheaton's site. With all the vet bills
....although going by this, it seems you might be? Hey... whatever floats your boat and all that nonsense. (^_^)
My GOD! Wil Wheaton is so short of cash he's visiting a vet's instead of a doctor's?
For his sake, I hope they didn't throw in a free neutering.
I expect his next release from O'Reilly will now be "Lovin' Longhorn" or something like that.
"Lovin' Longhorn"? Ahem... the guy's married! Whatever the rumours say, I don't think he's that way inclined....
Don't blame him a bit.
the copy of the book I had, had a photo of the author on the back leaf, in the nude, looking very dignified on a small chair wearing only a laptop
I'll bet he wouldn't have looked very dignified if he'd held the pose much longer and the laptop had fried his wedding tackle.
No worries, mate. English is my second language and sometimes I'm guilty of word-confusion with phonetically equal words. Thanks for pointing it out.
Don't feel bad about it; if the guy was picking holes in your spelling, he ought to have realised that 'nazi' should have been capitalised. (^_^)
Don't be fooled by Dvorak, the gaming industry is unlikely to implode. It just means that we'll appreciate the ground-breaking games more when they arrive.
Actually, I'd expected the gist of it to be that the gaming industry was going to die because of the economics of it; namely the "feast and famine" nature that sees companies having massive hits, then going to the wall because they can't get funding for the next big-budget blockbuster.
That's as good a reason as any to avoid the games industry like the plague, as far as I'm concerned. That and the fact that it looks interesting from the outside (and thus attracts high numbers of applicants), but actually pushes its participants (or at least the programmers and testers) notoriously hard- doubly so when launch-time approaches- and gives them precious little creativity.
Tetris is probably one of the most addictive and popular games of all time, but if it was invented today no one would pay $50.00 for it.
Let's bear one very important thing in mind about Tetris. There was nothing really "state of the art" about it when it first appeared in the mid-late 1980s.
Put simply, if you ignore the pretty-but-unimportant backgrounds/pictures, etc., you could write Tetris for the Atari 2600 or the Sinclair ZX81 without any change in the gameplay. In short, if you asked someone with no previous knowledge of the game (generically, not regarding a specific implementation) when it first appeared, they'd probably guess something like:-
"Pong, Breakout... Tetris. Probably not too long after Breakout, but before Space Invaders or Asteroids."
Tetris came out at around the same time as OutRun, but it doesn't feel like it.
It's worth remembering that it only became a really big hit when the Nintendo GameBoy came out in the early 1990s, and that was when it was *bundled*. No-one paid $50 for it then, and (although it got good reviews), it wasn't *that* big a smash when it was being sold as a full-price game for home computers (8 and 16-bit) in the late 1980s.
If there's an open source alternative and it's of higher quality, why should I settle for the norm?
Because it's not widely supported, whereas MP3 support is almost universal?
If the ogg fans don't take a stand on the issue, why would any company ever care about supporting it?
Good point about asking for Ogg Vorbis support; if people make enough noise you might get it. *However*...
You say "It really is a serious problem for some of us".... no offence, but you made your own 'serious problem' when you decided to encode your music collection in a semi-obscure (*) format that might, or might not have gained widestream support, but was unlikely to ever become as universal as MP3.
Before you pick me up on this, consider that you yourself said that "why should I settle for the norm?" Well... because the 'norm' is the one that's supported. If you want to go for something different, that's your choice, but don't complain when it isn't supported.
The 'free' support isn't free; firstly, it requires work on the implementation, secondly it requires more processing power than MP3, and finally, MP3 hardware chips are widely-available and fairly cheap. Are there *any* Ogg-compatible chips available, let alone those at an acceptable price for a niche-feature? I doubt it.
So, let's just say that there *are* good reasons for leaving Ogg support out unless the potential increase in sales makes up for the cost of supporting this 'free' format.
Long and the short of it; I like the idea of Ogg, I'm quite willing to accept that it's better than MP3 and I hope it gets support. But standardisation brings benefits, even when it's on an ageing format such as MP3; you encoded your music collection using a relatively unsupported format, you take some pride in the fact you didn't "settle for the norm", and I'm sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it by complaining about "serious problems" caused by lack of support.
Well, obviously.
(*) Not a slight on the quality of the format; simple fact is that if you ask your average iPod-type what they think of Ogg Vorbis, they'll say 'Ogg WHAT?! Never heard of it'. So from that point of view, it *is* semi-obscure.
Like it or not, Apple has the golden touch of style that Nokia never had
Uh... the Nokia 3210 was one of the first (if not *the* first) mobile phones that launched the 'mobile phone as fashion accessory'. It was damn fashionable at the time (and pretty nice looking as well).
The fact that Nokia's recent models look as if the designers were given permission to place looks over usability and went horribly OTT shouldn't detract from their earlier stuff.
You had a Nokia 3310 in 1997? They were only launched in 2001; even the 3210 only came out in 1999.
> > What was Gen X? The "me" generation? And we're supprised that their kids are turning out to be jerks?
> Wow, this whole time I thought you were talking about the parents of Gen Xers.
Amen; IMHO this started with the baby-boomers, who grew up with self-absorption masked by association with watered-down, commercialised versions of the counter-culture. They grew up, and turned into corporate/consumerist hippie types that were way more commercial than *their* parents were, and sold their youth (AKA the 1960s) as some type of lost utopia to the next generation.
Gen-X is what you get when people grow up with that hypocrisy. Superficially cynical, it is part of the system; they may recognise the bullshit and hypocrisy, but it seems 'normal'; if they are slackers, it's because there's nothing worth believing in. They've seen the bullshit, but they'll buy into it anyway.
In short: Gen-X; self-aware enough that they want cynical advertising that says "you'll die if you smoke these", "this soft drink sucks"; advertising that doesn't try to hide what it is, they will accept. But too lazy, hypocritical, selfish or just plain stupid to be arsed working for anything better.
Personally, if I can find it in my heart to like advertising, I usually keep my liking of that separate from my perception of the product itself. In other words, show me the pretty pictures, and I'll agree that they're pretty, but it doesn't say anything about your bank/phone/shoes. Anyway, I think that the 'Gen-X' stereotype is to some extent, an American thing (for example... ask someone who lived in China of their perceptions of the 1960s; it won't have much in common with the US/UK '1960s'). Age-wise, I'm supposedly part of it (29), but the 'slacker' thing doesn't really tie in with me... of course, that could just be my personality.
I went and got one of Samsung's camera phones a few months ago. My reason for getting it (even with the two -year contract) is that it I can hook it into my laptop and go online from anywhere I can get a cellular signal. My connect speed is somewhere around 300Kbaud (the older phones would have been limited to about 56Kbaud)
Wow... I read the 300Kbaud as 300 baud for a while there, and was going to joke that I didn't know they made accoustic couplers for mobile phones. I also remembered thinking that it wasn't such a damn stupid idea for occasional use on things such as (text-only) email and browsing with Lynx (though 300 baud would really be pushing things too far).
Since GSM is limited to (IIRC) approx 9kbps (and that's assuming you can inject the digital information directly as digital call data), I assume that you are using GPRS and getting it on your minutes allowance?
I didn't see Ogg Vorbis in that list. Seriously... I really dont' feel like re-encoding all my music b/c they were too lazy to add a completely free of charge feature to their phone... I know it's become sort of an obligatory joke to mention the lack of Ogg support in media players, but it really is a serious problem for some of us ;)
Is *that* meant to be a joke, indicated by the winking smiley to the end? Or did it refer to the part before?
Yeah, maybe Vorbis *is* free-of-charge in terms of royalties, but not (I assume) to program an implementation.
But that's not my point; my point is that... if wide compatibility was of concern to you, why on *earth* did you encode your music collection as Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3?
Yeah; it probably *is* a better format in terms of quality. So is WMA, but I still used high-bitrate MP3s because I knew that pretty much anything (Sony excepted) supports MP3 without arbitrary restrictions. Frankly, given the capacity of modern players, size just isn't that much of an issue nowadays.
Those who come after you should only be able to find one or two contradictory, early drafts of the design document hidden on some dusty shelving in the back room near the dead 286 computers.
"But the designs were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. They were on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
Well there are always sinister plots happening *somewhere*. I have to wonder about the real motivations of the people who keep pushing this China bashing?
Perhaps they just don't like the fact that they (the government, not the Chinese people) manipulate and oppress their own citizens via a dictatorship which is not (and was never) communism, and is not really free-market capitalism either. If the labour market isn't free, it's not a "free" market.
The PRC are not perfect, but neither is the government of any powerful nation. Some just have better PR than others.
Someone help me out here; there must be a name for this form of argument. Namely, "A isn't perfect, but neither is B, so that implicitly excuses A". Let's ignore that while B is far from perfect, A may be an order of magnitude worse.
I'm not American, and I'll apologise to no-one for my dislike of Bush and his warmongering, blatantly self-serving and unashamedly greedy and parasitic cronies. And as far as PR goes, I can tell you that the Bush administration doesn't impress many people (power-blinded politicians excepted) outside the United States. PR is mainly directed inwards; I'm sure that from a Chinese person's perspective, the Chinese government are made to look far better than the US.
But if you think that this somehow excuses the general behaviour of the Chinese government (who I still consider to be an order of magnitude worse, although nowhere near as evil as they were in Mao's day), then you are mistaken.
Am I the only one that sees the XP in windows XP as a disgusted smiley?
Genius!.... I think I love you
What is it supposed to stand for anyways?
'eXPerience'!
No, I *am* serious, unfortunately.
The whole name smacks of what would happen if one corporate type trying to come up with an 'urban' sounding name met with another who had just invented the most banal, homogenised, meaningless touchy-feely name ever, and the two of them invoked the powers of darkness to create a satanic offspring.
This foul child would then create the name 'eXPerience', and shorten it to XP.
Five years later, having infested various world governments, he would bring about the downfall of western civilisation.
Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
When I pay a buck for a 24 oz. Coke in a cup at the local convenience store I know their cost was about three cents, and two of those were for the cup.
That's right. Most store owners don't bother paying Monsanto, even though that company put the effort into genetically engineering the trees that stores, land and electricity grow on.
Those scum... anyway, some people would say they were stupid to risk something illegal like that when money has grown on trees since biblical times.
Unfortunately, the only money that grows on trees is the North Korean Peso, and you need three barrowfuls of them for your cup of Coke.
People will ask about them, then go to Barnes And Noble on the other side of the mall to buy one.
And when people ask, Apple can in general:-
- Be honest, and at best say they don't sell Wiley books and don't explain why
- Be less honest, and say that they withdrew Wiley books because (e.g.) they weren't up to Apple's standards.
- Lie outright, and say that Wiley went bankrupt because their books are rubbish, and would the customer like to buy one of the fine selection on the shelves.
In the first case, Apple lose. In the second case, if it happens more than a couple of times, Wiley can probably sue on the basis of defamation or something (IANAAmericanL). In the third case, Wiley would probably find it trivial to prove and win a case; the only question would be whether they gained more than they lost by pissing off Apple.
VideoPlus first rose to prominence in the early 1990s, and quickly became commonplace. DVD didn't really take off at a VCR-like level of magnitude until 8 or 9 years later.
And besides which, recordable DVD only became affordable or worthwhile (by the standards required to make it a mass-market success) in the past year or so, and even then, a vanilla DVD recorder doesn't offer *that* much over VHS for daily use unless it incorporates TiVo/PVR-like compatibility.
And I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the DVD-recorder might be the 'obvious' replacement for VCR recording, because the parts/operation are fairly analagous. But, for *recording*, a PVR- possibly without a DVD recorder- is probably a better replacement for what people actually want to *do* with it; which is time-shift recording. Keep the DVD player for playback.
Ideally, what you want is
- Hard-drive-based PVR
- DVD Recorder
- Digital TV tuner
- Analogue TV tuner (or at least composite video recordability; that is, some form of digitiser)
in one box. Having them combined, and not separate makes it *much* easier to record/transfer the signal in digital form, whilst still being able to transfer legacy VHS tapes.
Any connections between separate boxes would either have to be complex (to preserve functionality) or lose information/quality, which kind of defeats the purpose of digital.
But on a more serious note I wholeheartedly agree. The only reason I would rebuy stuff on CD when I've already got the vinyl is because most of my vinyl is knackered (or should I say well used :)
You forgot the other reason; because you can buy it on CD at a price that's far less than your time taken to transfer the thing is realistically worth.
I find it very hard to get good transfers from vinyl to CD/MP3. Of course, I am using a cheap (and old) 'Midi' HiFi (an oxymoron, but I digress), and doing it for one-offs, but...
If I can buy the CD for UKP 10.00, it is probably not worth my time transferring, bearing in mind the mediocre-quality end results.
Of course, if you have a good audio system, very good quality vinyl or cassette sources, and have enough material to make it worth your time setting it up very carefully and doing your collection on a 'production line' basis, then that would probably not be the case.
But it'd still be questionable whether it was worth it if you could get the album in question for 5.00 at your local Fopp store(note: Flash required, I don't use that...).
Singles are a different kettle of fish; it's often hard to get songs individually once out of the charts, and buying 20 mediocre CD albums to get 20 single tracks isn't much good. So, I would transfer them in that case.... *after* scouring the P2P networks for decent-quality rips.
.. a frustrated consumer doesn't automagically turn into a consumer that is aware of his/her own market power.
If that were the case, consumers would be able to program their VCRs (because only usable VCRs would be sold), Windows would be a lot safer, spyware would be non-existant, etc, etc.
There is something called 'VideoPlus' in the UK (AKA VCR+ in the US; was it as successful there?), that lets you set the timer for a programme simply by entering a short numeric code.
This is available on almost all video recorders in the UK (except at the dirt-cheap end of the market where every penny counts); most recent recorders include PDC (program delivery control) in this, where the channel sends a signal when the programme starts, increasing the accuracy of the system.
Maybe it was the fall in cost of video recorders, but after peaking sometime around 1990, the complexity/usability tradeoff of most models is not as bad now.
Rather than tear it down, I thought they had simply changed it slightly to look like a huge hand giving the bird to the rest of the world.
Arf. Seriously, how can you 'slightly' change the statue of liberty into a huge hand? If you're implying that just the statue's huge hand would change, wouldn't that mean a large green French woman giving New York the bird?
Then again, we do need more copper for creating pennies, so how ironic would it be if it got melted down to make pennies
It's your statue; it's your choice.
That wouldn't be irony, by the way; it would be, uh... coppery.
(remember, kids around the US donated pennies to build the pedestal)
I'm sure there's a joke in there; either about what's currently on the pedestal, or what should replace it.
> > Bless you France for your gift of liberty.
> You mean the big statue in New York? I guess
> slashdot really IS late with the news lately!
Regrettably, following the wave of anti-French sentiments in the United States in the past couple of years, the Statue of Liberty was dismantled and sold off for scrap. From a news report:-
"Although it had become something of a national icon, it was felt that the French-built statue from old Europe had no place in modern America.
This was necessary to demonstrate that we had the guts to stand up for what we said, even if that meant sacrificing our statue.
Had we not been willing to back up our words in this way, actions such as the renaming of "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries" would have been seen as cheap-and-easy point scoring or kneejerk xenophobia.
Our willingness to destroy the Statue of Liberty shows that this is not the case; we have principles and when we say something, we *mean* it."
I've noticed some pretty nasty banding effects on smooth gradients and the like on BBC1 - I think the reason it annoys me so much is not that it's a technical limitation, but more that there's precious bandwidth being used for junk like 'Bid-Up TV' and its many, many siblings, ITV 3 and so on. Give Auntie another multiplex (or two), I say... ;-)
I'd rather they'd based the whole thing on MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 personally. Of course, digital terrestrial is quite a few years old now, but the pain-in-the-arse is that they're standardising on a technology that is already woefully inefficient compared to more modern codecs.
As for the banding, I don't know how much of that is down to the decoder. I know that when I watch DVDs using PowerDVD, the quality is *far* better than under Windows Media Player, and I'd assume there must be something similar with DVB-T.
Actually, I'm sure that with enough processing power, the artifacts could be vastly reduced, by intelligently smoothing out and filling in detail in (e.g.) moving areas.
Also, the picture quality isn't quite as good as it's cracked up to be. It's definitely better than a bad analogue picture, but it's nowhere near good analogue reception thanks to all the blocking artefacts on fast-moving stuff.
Really depends on the station. Freeview channels have varying bit-rates. I don't have the exact figures, but I know that the commercial channels use lower bit-rates than the BBC does, in order to squeeze more into a given multiplex (group of channels).
IIRC, the likes of BBC One has the highest bit-rate, and Sky Travel and Sky Sports have some of the lowest.
Plus it's highly susceptible to interference, too...
That's definitely true; however, the newer boxes are far more resilient than the old (i.e. early On-Digital) ones.