Pretty far off-topic, I know, but late it's late in the thread: Germany has several other 'features' that I would highly recommend to any visitor:
1) Some of the best beer that I've ever had in my life (local breweries are very popular there, so there is much variety) - I discovered that I have a particular affinity for the "Dunkeles Hefe Weizen", a dark wheat beer that they serve only in 1/2 litre steins (don't mix this with the Autobahn, though) and which must, by law IIRC, be made only with 4 natural ingredients and contain no preservatives
Uh, what part of Germany was that? I *rarely* see Germans pay much attention to the speed limit, unless of course they know there's a radar camera nearby (in which case they slow down for maybe a few seconds).
I expected that I would get a comment like yours from Germany. All things are relative. I've pretty much toured the whole country - I've driven in and between Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Frankfurt aM (finding parking there was as bad as New York), Köln, Düsseldorf, Hannover, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, München, Konstanz and many places in between. But I haven't been there since 1995 and things may have changed somewhat. Germans generally think that I'm crazy for doing so much driving there since the train system is so good (orders of magnitude better than here) and I've taken many train trips there and highly recommend the trains (again, it's relative). I never rode the ICE, but I had a chance to step into one in a station - it reminded me of an airplane inside. But I like the flexibility of driving and got cheap corporate car rental rates (car rentals are horribly expensive there). Paying for the gas was hell, though, since it was about 2 ½ times as expensive as here, IIRC.
Here in the north-east, a lot of people seem to drive whatever speed the road will accommodate (or higher) and don't understand what the signs with the numbers mean.
Many tailgate like crazy, don't know why they have a stick on the side of the steering wheel makes lights flash on the corners of their car, and tend to view stop signs and traffic lights as vague suggestions. It's kind of like in France or Italy. By comparison, driving in Germany seemed quite civilized (ghosts aside - does that still go on?).
Many years ago, I worked for a (far) different division of a company heavily involved in development of MagLev trains. When I used to see them in their glossy corporate brochures ("Transportation of the Future"), I would roll my eyes and think "this will never get beyond the prototype stage". I may have to revise my opinion.
I have driven in Germany many times, and can attest to fellow North Americans that the Germans take their driving far more seriously. They obey the speed limits right down to the km/hr., where they exist (secondary and city roads and many parts of the Autobahn), and on the stretches of Autobahn that are unregulated, they obey rules very carefully about slower traffic keeping to the right, proper signaling, passing etc. North American driving looks very sloppy in comparison. The sections of the Autobahn that are unregulated are (by comparison to here) beautifully engineered, built and maintained (flat, smooth, properly banked turns, etc.).
A few years after the wall came down, I drove from Berlin to Bavaria through the former east (Leipzig, etc). There was massive Autobahn (and everything else) reconstruction was under way. There were sections of new road that were like a glass table interspersed with sections that were like an old washboard - quite a difference. Oh, and there were a lot of Trabants on the road in the "former East". For those who haven't seen them, picture a small toaster on wheels with blue smoke billowing out the back (2-stroke engines) and a top speed of about 80km/hr. (~50 mph). I remember seeing a Trabant pulling a trailer that had a brand new Mercedes 500SEL on it and thinking it ironic. After passing another Trabant on a slight curve on the Autobahn, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw its passenger side door fly open. The car is so narrow that the (large) driver was able to reach over the passenger, grab the passenger door handle an slam the door shut while still steering the car.
Interesting curiosities: I was told that in Germany, if you come up behind another car and want him to move over, you can be charged for flashing your lights at him and that you can also be successfully sued for giving another driver the middle finger gesture.
Popular Canadian rock group Rush has received a letter from Microsoft's lawyers, directing them to cease and desist selling their 1985 album under the title "Power Windows". Several hundred other artists (some of whom are dead) received similar letters ordering them to remove the word "Windows" from their song titles.
The RIAA rushed to the artists' defense and had this to say: "Bug off".
A court battle of unprecedented magnitude and length is expected to follow as the two Titans square off.
Elsewhere in the news...
- a worldwide shortage of lawyers is forecast for the next 5 years for obvious reasons
- Webster's dictionary is bracing itself for a legal battle with Microsoft for including some definitions of the word "Windows" other than "An inexpensive and secure computer operating system from the philanthropic people at Microsoft (All praise Microsoft!) that should by law be the only operating system allowed on any computer".
- Home Depot has been requested by Microsoft stop advertising "We Sell Windows" and are evaluating a suggestion from Microsoft that they instead advertise "Well Sell Transparent or Semi-Transparent Glass Coverings for Holes Often Found In The Sides of Buildings and Other Structures That Usually Allow The Passage Of Some Degree Of Light"
Curiously, a Google News search does not currently turn up the NYT article on Google, but does turn up this Slashdot thread on the NYT article on Google. I mention this because when you follow a Google news link to the NYT, you don't need to register (partner site).
I've sometimes wondered whether many of the Millionaire lifeline(?) call recipients do exactly that - sit at home with the broadband fired up and Google on the screen, waiting for the phone to ring.
This doesn't only happen with small companies. Years ago, I worked for a Very Large company that had 60% of the world market in their particular field (no, not MS:-). We had a $150 million contract with a Very Large customer to provide systems that were critical to their business.
Despite the fact that we were very large, and insolvency was highly unlikely, part of the contractual requirement was to provide source code to be held in escrow along with the development tools, all build info, doc's etc. It was up to the customer to keep and maintain the host equipment on which to build (melange of VAX's, PC's and other development systems). At the end of the project, when all deliverables had been met, we were required to do builds with the customer from the stuff in escrow to verify that it could be built. The source code "container" (yes, a strong box) was then sealed.
The customer had no right to open the container for any reason other than insolvency of our company AND surviving that, no right to disclose, transfer or assign the source code or knowledge gained therefrom to any outside party AND no right to use it for any other purpose than the support or enhancement of their own systems. We reserved the perpetual right to inspect and audit the container with no prior notice. What was known and clearly understood then was that at the rate of technology obsolesce, the source code would have quickly diminishing value to any of our competitors.
It's an uneasy arrangement all around, but sometimes necessary and from the customer's perspective, understandable.
But what the article(s) suggest appears to be the unconditional provision of source code at the time of sale or release.
... a magic bullet. Never seen one of those before.
Tomorrow, I going to my boss and I'm going to tell him "we can solve all the software quality issues. No more worrying about underfunding, time to market, sudden mid-development directions changes due to marketing stupidity, expensive yet crummy dev tools, poorly spec'd requirements, weird hardware, lousy host o/s's that are chosen for the sole reason that "that's what everyone uses", unrealistic expectations from senior management, competitive pressures, ridiculous stock market and share holder expectations, etc., etc. We'll just release all the source and the developers will be shamed into fixing those issues from the bottom up. Let's go out on a limb and be world leaders here!"
The following day, I'll go to the employment office.
No argument that there is a lot of bad software out there. No argument that some things have to be done. Yes, developers could do a better job, but that is only a very small piece of the problem. Whole books with a multitude of recommendations have been dedicated to the subject. But no more magic bullets, please. This is not a simple topic and requires a top-down re-think (that I don't see hapenning).
Note: I am not against open source - I quite like the concept and I'm trying to find the time to get involved. But that is not what this is really about.
for a very special episode of Junkyard Wars, when an American and a Russian team will be tasked with converting disused space stations, space debris , and old computers into nuclear powered mopeds.
No apology necessary:-). Thanks again for the tip - I will look at splay. I do like Winamp (2.x), though.
By the way, Winamp went through a bad spell decoder-wise. I'll probably get the history wrong here, but it was something like:
1) Winamp uses Fraunhofer, but it was a CPU hog (for the time) 2) Winamp develops and switches to Nitrane decoder - less CPU utilization 3) People discover Nitrane has big-time error with reproduction ~ 100 Hz 4) Winamp pulls Nitrane and licenses someone else's decoder (Fraunhofer again?) 5) Winamp fixes Nitrane and goes back to it
IIRC, there was also some potential patent infringement noise made at Winamp by Fraunhofer along the way, but I might be wrong.
I kept the old Fraunhofer decoder dll and used it with later 2.x versions of Winamp. It worked fine up to and including 2.70. I'm not sure about Winamp 3. I tried it right after release, but found it too slow loading and buggy at that time.
Maybe I should have qualified my comment a little more. I was only talking about the (IMO) inferiority of wma vs mp3 in my experience. I find is that wma sounds universally poor and mp3 can (when well encoded) sound much better at similar bit rates.
I think that Vorbis does an excellent job. I also agree that at higher bit rates, things start to level off between several encoders (Blade, Lame, Fraunhofer, etc), and technologies.
I also find that some mp3's (at 128 kbit fixed rate) sound a hell of a lot better than the average ones (at 128 kbit fixed rate), even when the encoding is otherwise free of gross distortion. When I look at a spectrum analysis of the better mp3's, they haven't got the steep cutoff at around 15-16 kHz - they go out to 20kHz or so. I did a little research a while ago that lead me to believe that the later Fraunhofer encoders accomplish this. Later I found a suggestion that it was Lame. Whoever it is, it puzzles me - it seems to me that they would have to reduce the resolution of other samples to do this. And since it sounds so much better, I wonder why many other mp3 encoders don't do this. Anybody know the answer?
Then please point me to some good wma's (just to be clear, I'm talking about a minimum of 128k for bit rate - to me anything lower just for 'preview'). I'm not saying that it's not possible (although I do find the half the bit rate part very hard to buy), but I've never heard any that don't have some really annoying encoding errors. I pipe my sound card through a pretty decent amplifier and set of speakers. Typically, wma's have a very annoying phasing or envelope type distortion in the higher frequencies and it really puts me off. Some badly encoded mp3's do too, but a well-encoded (and decoded) mp3 can sound pretty darned good, even at 128 kbits.
Yeah, that made me laugh - getting modded flamebait for flaming myself. I guess there's some sort of twisted circular logic in that. They probably just didn't RTFP carefully.
over the last several years, if it is WMA, it would be lousy as well as lossy. I have never heard a WMA file (and I have listened to many) that sounded as good as a well-encoded mp3 at comparable bit-rates. The trouble is, there are a lot of poor mp3 encoders/decoders out there that give mp3's a bad name quality-wise, so some people think that WMA sounds just as good. Not in my book.
According to this which reproduces what is apparently a recent letter from Emusic, there are limits. The letter uses the "all you can eat buffet" as a point of comparison. I'm not judging Emusic here, since they appear to provide a very good service and to be only going after abusers, but the term "unlimited" seems somewhat misleading (a.k.a. marketing speak).
How else would the subscription sites build their erroneous profiles on people?;-)
But the WSJ is like the NYT. Register once (lie if you want) and forget about it. Just remember to turn your cookies on when you go there (Opera makes that so easy - hit F12 then c).
I remember an episode of the Flintstones in which Fred gets very annoyed at a TV commercial and turns the TV off. A hand pops out of the screen and switches the TV on again - the popup was born. I wonder whether Hanna-Barbera patented the idea - could be some big time royalties for them.
Seriously though, I understand that sites need to advertise, but there is a limit. I love Opera for the 'Disable Popup' feature (and many others) and use it. And if a site is really annoying, I just don't come back. I have yet to find a site that I couldn't live without.
John Lettice at the Reg has a very interesting take on this subject, wherein he suggests that MS may know EXACTLY what they're doing with the subject paper. (Yes, I posted this in another thread yesterday, but some of you may have missed it).
needs to spend less time on the 'net and more time at the library brushing up on English grammar. Surely they can't be serious about the following item on the right side of the page (under "Special Reports"):
Slashdot Mirror
1) Some of the best beer that I've ever had in my life (local breweries are very popular there, so there is much variety) - I discovered that I have a particular affinity for the "Dunkeles Hefe Weizen", a dark wheat beer that they serve only in 1/2 litre steins (don't mix this with the Autobahn, though) and which must, by law IIRC, be made only with 4 natural ingredients and contain no preservatives
2) Excellent (but expensive) food
3) Topless beaches ^-^ need I say more?
I expected that I would get a comment like yours from Germany. All things are relative. I've pretty much toured the whole country - I've driven in and between Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Frankfurt aM (finding parking there was as bad as New York), Köln, Düsseldorf, Hannover, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, München, Konstanz and many places in between. But I haven't been there since 1995 and things may have changed somewhat. Germans generally think that I'm crazy for doing so much driving there since the train system is so good (orders of magnitude better than here) and I've taken many train trips there and highly recommend the trains (again, it's relative). I never rode the ICE, but I had a chance to step into one in a station - it reminded me of an airplane inside. But I like the flexibility of driving and got cheap corporate car rental rates (car rentals are horribly expensive there). Paying for the gas was hell, though, since it was about 2 ½ times as expensive as here, IIRC.
Here in the north-east, a lot of people seem to drive whatever speed the road will accommodate (or higher) and don't understand what the signs with the numbers mean. Many tailgate like crazy, don't know why they have a stick on the side of the steering wheel makes lights flash on the corners of their car, and tend to view stop signs and traffic lights as vague suggestions. It's kind of like in France or Italy. By comparison, driving in Germany seemed quite civilized (ghosts aside - does that still go on?).
Tschüß
I have driven in Germany many times, and can attest to fellow North Americans that the Germans take their driving far more seriously. They obey the speed limits right down to the km/hr., where they exist (secondary and city roads and many parts of the Autobahn), and on the stretches of Autobahn that are unregulated, they obey rules very carefully about slower traffic keeping to the right, proper signaling, passing etc. North American driving looks very sloppy in comparison. The sections of the Autobahn that are unregulated are (by comparison to here) beautifully engineered, built and maintained (flat, smooth, properly banked turns, etc.).
A few years after the wall came down, I drove from Berlin to Bavaria through the former east (Leipzig, etc). There was massive Autobahn (and everything else) reconstruction was under way. There were sections of new road that were like a glass table interspersed with sections that were like an old washboard - quite a difference. Oh, and there were a lot of Trabants on the road in the "former East". For those who haven't seen them, picture a small toaster on wheels with blue smoke billowing out the back (2-stroke engines) and a top speed of about 80km/hr. (~50 mph). I remember seeing a Trabant pulling a trailer that had a brand new Mercedes 500SEL on it and thinking it ironic. After passing another Trabant on a slight curve on the Autobahn, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw its passenger side door fly open. The car is so narrow that the (large) driver was able to reach over the passenger, grab the passenger door handle an slam the door shut while still steering the car.
Interesting curiosities: I was told that in Germany, if you come up behind another car and want him to move over, you can be charged for flashing your lights at him and that you can also be successfully sued for giving another driver the middle finger gesture.
The RIAA rushed to the artists' defense and had this to say: "Bug off".
A court battle of unprecedented magnitude and length is expected to follow as the two Titans square off.
Elsewhere in the news ...
- a worldwide shortage of lawyers is forecast for the next 5 years for obvious reasons
- Webster's dictionary is bracing itself for a legal battle with Microsoft for including some definitions of the word "Windows" other than "An inexpensive and secure computer operating system from the philanthropic people at Microsoft (All praise Microsoft!) that should by law be the only operating system allowed on any computer".
- Home Depot has been requested by Microsoft stop advertising "We Sell Windows" and are evaluating a suggestion from Microsoft that they instead advertise "Well Sell Transparent or Semi-Transparent Glass Coverings for Holes Often Found In The Sides of Buildings and Other Structures That Usually Allow The Passage Of Some Degree Of Light"
We don't need no steenking flux capacitor.
Al Gore invented it.
_
_
Yeah, yeah, I know that he was talking about the Internet, not the WWW. Call it poetic license.
Curiously, a Google News search does not currently turn up the NYT article on Google, but does turn up this Slashdot thread on the NYT article on Google. I mention this because when you follow a Google news link to the NYT, you don't need to register (partner site).
I've sometimes wondered whether many of the Millionaire lifeline(?) call recipients do exactly that - sit at home with the broadband fired up and Google on the screen, waiting for the phone to ring.
Despite the fact that we were very large, and insolvency was highly unlikely, part of the contractual requirement was to provide source code to be held in escrow along with the development tools, all build info, doc's etc. It was up to the customer to keep and maintain the host equipment on which to build (melange of VAX's, PC's and other development systems). At the end of the project, when all deliverables had been met, we were required to do builds with the customer from the stuff in escrow to verify that it could be built. The source code "container" (yes, a strong box) was then sealed.
The customer had no right to open the container for any reason other than insolvency of our company AND surviving that, no right to disclose, transfer or assign the source code or knowledge gained therefrom to any outside party AND no right to use it for any other purpose than the support or enhancement of their own systems. We reserved the perpetual right to inspect and audit the container with no prior notice. What was known and clearly understood then was that at the rate of technology obsolesce, the source code would have quickly diminishing value to any of our competitors.
It's an uneasy arrangement all around, but sometimes necessary and from the customer's perspective, understandable.
But what the article(s) suggest appears to be the unconditional provision of source code at the time of sale or release.
Tomorrow, I going to my boss and I'm going to tell him "we can solve all the software quality issues. No more worrying about underfunding, time to market, sudden mid-development directions changes due to marketing stupidity, expensive yet crummy dev tools, poorly spec'd requirements, weird hardware, lousy host o/s's that are chosen for the sole reason that "that's what everyone uses", unrealistic expectations from senior management, competitive pressures, ridiculous stock market and share holder expectations, etc., etc. We'll just release all the source and the developers will be shamed into fixing those issues from the bottom up. Let's go out on a limb and be world leaders here!"
The following day, I'll go to the employment office.
No argument that there is a lot of bad software out there. No argument that some things have to be done. Yes, developers could do a better job, but that is only a very small piece of the problem. Whole books with a multitude of recommendations have been dedicated to the subject. But no more magic bullets, please. This is not a simple topic and requires a top-down re-think (that I don't see hapenning).
Note: I am not against open source - I quite like the concept and I'm trying to find the time to get involved. But that is not what this is really about.
for a very special episode of Junkyard Wars, when an American and a Russian team will be tasked with converting disused space stations, space debris , and old computers into nuclear powered mopeds.
No apology necessary :-). Thanks again for the tip - I will look at splay. I do like Winamp (2.x), though.
By the way, Winamp went through a bad spell decoder-wise. I'll probably get the history wrong here, but it was something like:
1) Winamp uses Fraunhofer, but it was a CPU hog (for the time)
2) Winamp develops and switches to Nitrane decoder - less CPU utilization
3) People discover Nitrane has big-time error with reproduction ~ 100 Hz
4) Winamp pulls Nitrane and licenses someone else's decoder (Fraunhofer again?)
5) Winamp fixes Nitrane and goes back to it
IIRC, there was also some potential patent infringement noise made at Winamp by Fraunhofer along the way, but I might be wrong.
I kept the old Fraunhofer decoder dll and used it with later 2.x versions of Winamp. It worked fine up to and including 2.70. I'm not sure about Winamp 3. I tried it right after release, but found it too slow loading and buggy at that time.
Maybe I should have qualified my comment a little more. I was only talking about the (IMO) inferiority of wma vs mp3 in my experience. I find is that wma sounds universally poor and mp3 can (when well encoded) sound much better at similar bit rates.
I think that Vorbis does an excellent job. I also agree that at higher bit rates, things start to level off between several encoders (Blade, Lame, Fraunhofer, etc), and technologies.
I also find that some mp3's (at 128 kbit fixed rate) sound a hell of a lot better than the average ones (at 128 kbit fixed rate), even when the encoding is otherwise free of gross distortion. When I look at a spectrum analysis of the better mp3's, they haven't got the steep cutoff at around 15-16 kHz - they go out to 20kHz or so. I did a little research a while ago that lead me to believe that the later Fraunhofer encoders accomplish this. Later I found a suggestion that it was Lame. Whoever it is, it puzzles me - it seems to me that they would have to reduce the resolution of other samples to do this. And since it sounds so much better, I wonder why many other mp3 encoders don't do this. Anybody know the answer?
Then please point me to some good wma's (just to be clear, I'm talking about a minimum of 128k for bit rate - to me anything lower just for 'preview'). I'm not saying that it's not possible (although I do find the half the bit rate part very hard to buy), but I've never heard any that don't have some really annoying encoding errors. I pipe my sound card through a pretty decent amplifier and set of speakers. Typically, wma's have a very annoying phasing or envelope type distortion in the higher frequencies and it really puts me off. Some badly encoded mp3's do too, but a well-encoded (and decoded) mp3 can sound pretty darned good, even at 128 kbits.
That's probably because I never wrote one. Thanks for the input though.
Yeah, that made me laugh - getting modded flamebait for flaming myself. I guess there's some sort of twisted circular logic in that. They probably just didn't RTFP carefully.
there are a lot of poor mp3 encoders/decoders out there
Thanks for the tip, though, I always on the lookout for something better.
over the last several years, if it is WMA, it would be lousy as well as lossy. I have never heard a WMA file (and I have listened to many) that sounded as good as a well-encoded mp3 at comparable bit-rates. The trouble is, there are a lot of poor mp3 encoders/decoders out there that give mp3's a bad name quality-wise, so some people think that WMA sounds just as good. Not in my book.
According to this which reproduces what is apparently a recent letter from Emusic, there are limits. The letter uses the "all you can eat buffet" as a point of comparison. I'm not judging Emusic here, since they appear to provide a very good service and to be only going after abusers, but the term "unlimited" seems somewhat misleading (a.k.a. marketing speak).
Just to save you the trouble of flaming me, I'll flame myself:
Hey asshole, it's not the same. You gotta PAY!
Sorry, my mistake. I was thinking of another paper. I wish Slashdot had an unsubmit button.
I have one more comment:
Would be great if /. stopped linking to PAY only sites
But the WSJ is like the NYT. Register once (lie if you want) and forget about it. Just remember to turn your cookies on when you go there (Opera makes that so easy - hit F12 then c).
Seriously though, I understand that sites need to advertise, but there is a limit. I love Opera for the 'Disable Popup' feature (and many others) and use it. And if a site is really annoying, I just don't come back. I have yet to find a site that I couldn't live without.
John Lettice at the Reg has a very interesting take on this subject, wherein he suggests that MS may know EXACTLY what they're doing with the subject paper. (Yes, I posted this in another thread yesterday, but some of you may have missed it).
Ohio's broken mental retardation system
Have them ummm, errr, read books? Gasp! Shriek! Oh, the inhumanity!