Vinyl for home listening as it has superior sound quality
I suspect you've been blasted on this already, but this is absolutely false. Vinyl has a higher noise floor and the sampling rate of digital audio is above the limit of human perception. If you're perceiving a difference, it's because of the mastering of the recordings. That or the placebo effect.
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. Have you ever actually done a side by side listen?
I was given a turntable as a gift - I was highly skeptical about the vinyl revival, probably as much as most people on./ - but the first time I listened to one of my favourite albums played from a brand new vinyl pressing through a very modest pre-amp I was instantly converted. I would have listened to this album 1000+ times on CD/FLAC/MP3, yet on vinyl I could hear more detail and subtlety in the sound than I'd ever experienced before, and the overall sound was (for want of a better term) 'smoother' and more complete.
This is playing the same album side by side through the same amp and speakers. There is no comparison. I am not an audiophile - my setup is very modest by hi-fi standards, components worth maybe $3000 in total.
IMHO, if you buy a brand new album cut in 2011 on CD and vinyl, there is no question that anyone without serious hearing impairment can hear the difference and that the vinyl is vastly superior as a listening experience.
This is one of those stupid memes on./ that just won't die - a bunch of nerds with no actual experience of a decent turntable setup declaring that it's impossible that vinyl sounds better. It does. It really, really does. Do yourself a favour - pick out a favourite CD, get hold of the vinyl and play it through a decent turntable.
USA - scanners, retinal scanners, fingerprints, aggressive unpleasant TSA employees.
EU - scanners, weird obsession with bureaucracy and officialdom, in France they blow up your luggage at CDG if you leave it unattended.
Asia/Africa/Russia - some scanners in the more developed countries IIRC, approximately 90000% higher chance of corrupt officials detaining or "fining" you.
Enjoy your trip to the Antarctic!
PS - I oppose these scanners, but the reason we're getting them is because the US and EU already have them.
And in 2 hrs of watching I never once saw an Aussie get a random pat down on an international flight.
Just checking, but you do realise that not all Australians are white, right? Given that you don't generally have to show your passport when you go through security in Australia, I'm not sure what you're basing your assessment of "Aussie" vs "non-Aussie" on.
In my experience, the factors which affect "extra" security in Australia are: walking speed (slower = more likely to get stopped), eye contact (making it = more likely to get stopped), having a beard (beard = likely terrorist), being male (less perceived risk of someone complaining about harassment).
With all the hassles of flying to the USA, I now try and avoid it, managing to reduce my trips by one or two a year. Total cost to the US economy is about US$3000 per trip. There must be many others doing likewise. Cost to the US economy overall is probably millions of dollars, a direct loss to the travel industry (airline, hotel, car hire, restaurants, entertainment etc). Add in the burden to the economy to support all the spurious security measures and it adds insult to injury.
Was about to post something similar - flying into the US is now so unpleasant, demeaning and intimidating that it actually has a serious impact on the decision about whether to fly there or go somewhere where unaccountable uniformed guards won't treat me like a likely criminal, fingerprint me and scan my retinas.
We won't have to be talked into anything. Israel will attack Iran sometime this year(almost for sure).
In case you haven't been paying attention, Israel began attacking Iran some months ago - a lot of Iranian scientists have been mysteriously exploding, along with at least one major Iranian facility. And what was the real reason Iran was able to bring down that drone, I wonder?
If a foreign power was murdering state employed scientists in the U.S. and blowing up facilities in the U.S. while flying drones in U.S. airspace I'm pretty sure that would count as being under attack.
Funny you should say that - I just got the Bold 9900 through my work and I'd say it's one of the best phones I've used. Ridiculously high build quality, silky smooth menus, excellent touch screen, convenience of a really nice physical keyboard, good size, intuitive menus, etc etc etc. Battery life seems good too by current gen standards. And of course as with most blackberries it's excellent for email and productivity generally. It's also made from a nice lump of metal and feels like it could be used as a deadly weapon.
Absolutely beats the hell out of other current gen phones I've used, including the iphone, Galaxy S II and my current personal phone (an HTC running android 2.3).
So I would say the sad thing for RIM is that they are probably going to fall apart just at the moment when they have finally caught up to (and arguably overtaken) the market...
5 justices who think the expectation of privacy involved in one's movements should provide 4th amendment protection when long-term electronic tracking is used, regardless of whether trespass occurs
This is really critical. Between networked traffic surveillance cameras and satellite technology, along with built-in broadcasting tech in cars, its probably possible right now to track vehicles precisely without actually attaching a GPS tracker. At the moment I would guess it's just difficult and expensive - at the rate this type of tech is developing, in a few years it'll be trivial.
At that point, there will be no need for any trespass to property to comprehensively track someone. Only the privacy analysis can offer real protection to people targeted by the police (which might, conceivably, be all of us...).
PS - you are forbidden to use condoms despite the clear evidence that they prevent vast amounts of suffering and death by controlling AIDS and overpopulation in the third world and the complete lack of any evidence that there is any downside to using them.
Also a magical guy in the sky exists. Again, I have no evidence to back this up.
1. In contrast to religious fundamentalists, none of those individuals set out with the primary goal of forcefully imposing atheism on the whole of society (as opposed to a broader socio-political agenda which may have included eliminating religion or reducing its power). The Russian Revolution was about economic subjugation and World War One. The French Revolution was about economic subjugation. Etc. etc. for all of your examples. Just because a particular revolution, war or movement includes as an incident an attempt to limit or destroy the power of organised religion does not make that event inherently "atheist" in nature.
2. You are a liar, or at best twisting the truth to suit your anti-atheist agenda. For instance:
Mussolini - 'Mussolini publicly reconciled with the Pope Pius XI in 1932, but "took care to exclude from the newspapers any photography of himself kneeling or showing deference to the Pope." He wanted to persuade Catholics that "[f]ascism was Catholic and he himself a believer who spent some of each day in prayer..." The Pope began referring to Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence." Despite Mussolini's efforts to appear pious, by order of his party, pronouns referring to him "had to be capitalized like those referring to God..."'
Napoleon - 'As an adult, Napoleon was described as a "deist with involuntary respect and fondness for Catholicism." He never believed in a living God; Napoleon's deity was an absent and distant God, but he pragmatically considered organised religions as key elements of social order, and especially Catholicism, whose, according to him, "splendorous ceremonies and sublime moral better act over the imagination of the people than other religions".'
Hitler - 'After his move to Germany, Hitler did not leave his church. Historian Richard Steigmann-Gall concludes that he "can be classified as Catholic", but that "nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context."' His interest in the occult is also widely documented.
As I found all of that in Wikipedia in about 10 seconds, I can only assume that you are deliberately being misleading.
Unfortunately, it is the lawyers themselves who have a disproportionate influence over the legal structure itself. They are also the only ones who would know how to fix it and every reason not to. Hence, our current problems.
No, your current problems stem from you permitting corporations with a vested interest in controlling IP to comandeer your representative government, leading to bad laws.
Contrary to what you apparently believe, practising lawyers don't get to make up the law as they go along. They can only apply it creatively. It's interesting that out of (a) the people who wrote these laws (b) the people who agitated for these laws and now routinely abuse them for commercial gain and (c) the people who have the job of dispassionately arguing the law for whatever client elects to retain them, you blame (c) for the problems with the patent system.
If you want to get rid of lawyers, stop having disputes. If you want to stop having shitty patent disputes, fix the shitty patent laws. If you want to fix the shitty patent laws, you're going to have to go via your shitty elected representatives.
But that would require work on your part and might be hard and take a long time. So, by all means, keep slagging off lawyers.
But that would mean real work instead of lawyering, and the lawyers can't have that.
Really? This gets moderated insightful?
Do you know what lawyers are? A dispute resolution tool. They are nothing more or less than a more civilized way of resolving disputes than killing one another. They do not make laws - politicians do that. And how to politicians decide which laws to make? You vote for them.
You don't like lawyers getting money from disputes arising out of bad laws? Blame yourself. Your failure to control your elected representatives is what permits those laws to exist.
But take away the legal system, and we're back to killing each other to resolve our disputes.
Blaming lawyers for patent disputes is like blaming your treating doctor if you get cancer.
You haven't seen a PC game in the last 5 years, I take it? Those graphics look pretty average, and I'm very confident the PS4 and next Xbox will be vastly better.
DO: Pack in the RAM. Of all of the factors that are driving developer frustration with the current console generation, RAM seems to be at the top of the pack. It's worse for the PS3 (with its awkward memory-split and larger OS footprint) than for the 360, but still... RAM is pretty cheap and packing plenty of it in will pay dividends in 5 years time.
This. This times a million.
When you actually look at the pitiful amount of RAM in a 360 or PS3 it's obvious why they look like crap compared to even a very modest PC. RAM is as cheap as its ever been and it is the most essential way to future-proof a console.
If they have any sense they'll resist putting in a disk to begin with. Saying "Oh, you need Blu-ray to be future proof" is laughable. The format isn't going anywhere, despite the best efforts of Hollywood to save it, the entire world is going online.
Written like someone who hasn't got a decent A/V setup with a blu ray player. The format kicks butt. Awesome resolution and picture quality, amazing sound, and carries an amount of data that would take a very long time to download and would be impossible to stream with existing network infrastructure.
I don't know where you live, but where I live blu ray is getting more and more popular and is finally starting to push out DVD as the default format.
Try getting that proprietary battery in another 5-10 years. There are vintage cameras operating today that are many decades old. This will not be the case in future.
I understand what you're saying, but think you are wrong. I have a Panasonic camera which is 10 years old, was relatively unpopular at the time it was new, and relies on a proprietary battery which only works in that model and maybe 1-2 others of a similar vintage. I can still get that battery from third party manufacturers for about $30.
I also think you underestimate both the popular interest in DSLR equipment of all vintages and the commitment of Nikon and Canon in particular to supporting their products for a loooooooooong time after they are superseded.
Man is very arrogant, to think that we should be the judge and jury of every species on the planet. We need to remember that we only one of countless other species of this planet and to be good neighbors.
Change is inevitable, it's probably my biggest gripe against people that are vehement about global warming, this idea that nothing should ever change. Just because a bird species used to stop at this place means that it should always stop at this place.
Ridiculous post is ridiculous.
We shouldn't be the "judge and jury", as you say. The problem with global warming is that we ARE being the judge and jury - we're condemning thousands of species to death for no reason at all through our own voluntary actions. We should be trying not to do that as far as possible.
Basically, you are confusing inaction in the face of some natural change with "inaction" in the face of huge change caused by our own actions. I.e., you are apparently in favour of some random action, but not action to undo that action.
Your bird species point would make more sense if there were thousands of places for the birds in question to stop. On recent human form, though, there's a decent chance that these birds and this place may have taken on a species-defining importance. Wipe them out here and that might be it for them. We are intelligent and aware that our actions have consequences, so we should work out whether this is the case and try to avoid wiping them out.
Yes, there have been big changes in the past. But human-induced climate change has the potential to rank with a major catastophe on an evolutionary timescale.
Yep. I look forward to the front page stories about new alleged rumoured possible screen sizes for HTC, Nokia, Sony etc... oh wait, those won't get published. Because they're irrelevant and boring. Like this story.
Get rid of the budget and go for a charge model. Set up an internal IT Shop where people "buy" services using internal money which comes out of their budget.
They can "buy" network access. They can "buy" 10 support calls they can "buy" backups on X, they can buy (Windows+MS Office(latest), Linux+OpenOffice, Mac+MS Office) + maintenance on their desktop for a year. They can "buy" a 10Tb NFS file system. They can "buy" professional services solution design for particular problems. They can "buy" a 100Gb mailbox if they want.
This is the very definition of IT doing the OPPOSITE of its job - you apparently see your role as making it HARDER to get things done.
If I want support calls, backups, various software, a bigger file system and a larger mailbox and these things make me more productive, then IT's role is to make it happen, not to tell me I have to choose the most important two of those.
The cleaners don't get to decide whether to empty my bin or vaccuum the floor in my office. Reception don't get to limit the calls they will forward for me to 3 per day. Why the hell should IT be any different?
Slashdot Mirror
Vinyl for home listening as it has superior sound quality
I suspect you've been blasted on this already, but this is absolutely false. Vinyl has a higher noise floor and the sampling rate of digital audio is above the limit of human perception. If you're perceiving a difference, it's because of the mastering of the recordings. That or the placebo effect.
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. Have you ever actually done a side by side listen?
I was given a turntable as a gift - I was highly skeptical about the vinyl revival, probably as much as most people on ./ - but the first time I listened to one of my favourite albums played from a brand new vinyl pressing through a very modest pre-amp I was instantly converted. I would have listened to this album 1000+ times on CD/FLAC/MP3, yet on vinyl I could hear more detail and subtlety in the sound than I'd ever experienced before, and the overall sound was (for want of a better term) 'smoother' and more complete.
This is playing the same album side by side through the same amp and speakers. There is no comparison. I am not an audiophile - my setup is very modest by hi-fi standards, components worth maybe $3000 in total.
IMHO, if you buy a brand new album cut in 2011 on CD and vinyl, there is no question that anyone without serious hearing impairment can hear the difference and that the vinyl is vastly superior as a listening experience.
This is one of those stupid memes on ./ that just won't die - a bunch of nerds with no actual experience of a decent turntable setup declaring that it's impossible that vinyl sounds better. It does. It really, really does. Do yourself a favour - pick out a favourite CD, get hold of the vinyl and play it through a decent turntable.
So where are you going to go?
USA - scanners, retinal scanners, fingerprints, aggressive unpleasant TSA employees.
EU - scanners, weird obsession with bureaucracy and officialdom, in France they blow up your luggage at CDG if you leave it unattended.
Asia/Africa/Russia - some scanners in the more developed countries IIRC, approximately 90000% higher chance of corrupt officials detaining or "fining" you.
Enjoy your trip to the Antarctic!
PS - I oppose these scanners, but the reason we're getting them is because the US and EU already have them.
And in 2 hrs of watching I never once saw an Aussie get a random pat down on an international flight.
Just checking, but you do realise that not all Australians are white, right? Given that you don't generally have to show your passport when you go through security in Australia, I'm not sure what you're basing your assessment of "Aussie" vs "non-Aussie" on.
In my experience, the factors which affect "extra" security in Australia are: walking speed (slower = more likely to get stopped), eye contact (making it = more likely to get stopped), having a beard (beard = likely terrorist), being male (less perceived risk of someone complaining about harassment).
One reason Australia is getting attention is that, unlike the EU and USA, here pat downs will not be an option - it's "scan" or "don't fly".
With all the hassles of flying to the USA, I now try and avoid it, managing to reduce my trips by one or two a year. Total cost to the US economy is about US$3000 per trip. There must be many others doing likewise. Cost to the US economy overall is probably millions of dollars, a direct loss to the travel industry (airline, hotel, car hire, restaurants, entertainment etc). Add in the burden to the economy to support all the spurious security measures and it adds insult to injury.
Was about to post something similar - flying into the US is now so unpleasant, demeaning and intimidating that it actually has a serious impact on the decision about whether to fly there or go somewhere where unaccountable uniformed guards won't treat me like a likely criminal, fingerprint me and scan my retinas.
we could cleanly demonstrate just how dangerous such power is in the hand of those who might abuse it
You mean the United States, I take it?
We won't have to be talked into anything. Israel will attack Iran sometime this year(almost for sure).
In case you haven't been paying attention, Israel began attacking Iran some months ago - a lot of Iranian scientists have been mysteriously exploding, along with at least one major Iranian facility. And what was the real reason Iran was able to bring down that drone, I wonder?
If a foreign power was murdering state employed scientists in the U.S. and blowing up facilities in the U.S. while flying drones in U.S. airspace I'm pretty sure that would count as being under attack.
If only we'd listened to Al Gore and brought along our vorpal blade.
Funny you should say that - I just got the Bold 9900 through my work and I'd say it's one of the best phones I've used. Ridiculously high build quality, silky smooth menus, excellent touch screen, convenience of a really nice physical keyboard, good size, intuitive menus, etc etc etc. Battery life seems good too by current gen standards. And of course as with most blackberries it's excellent for email and productivity generally. It's also made from a nice lump of metal and feels like it could be used as a deadly weapon.
Absolutely beats the hell out of other current gen phones I've used, including the iphone, Galaxy S II and my current personal phone (an HTC running android 2.3).
So I would say the sad thing for RIM is that they are probably going to fall apart just at the moment when they have finally caught up to (and arguably overtaken) the market...
5 justices who think the expectation of privacy involved in one's movements should provide 4th amendment protection when long-term electronic tracking is used, regardless of whether trespass occurs
This is really critical. Between networked traffic surveillance cameras and satellite technology, along with built-in broadcasting tech in cars, its probably possible right now to track vehicles precisely without actually attaching a GPS tracker. At the moment I would guess it's just difficult and expensive - at the rate this type of tech is developing, in a few years it'll be trivial.
At that point, there will be no need for any trespass to property to comprehensively track someone. Only the privacy analysis can offer real protection to people targeted by the police (which might, conceivably, be all of us...).
Faith can never conflict with reason.
PS - you are forbidden to use condoms despite the clear evidence that they prevent vast amounts of suffering and death by controlling AIDS and overpopulation in the third world and the complete lack of any evidence that there is any downside to using them.
Also a magical guy in the sky exists. Again, I have no evidence to back this up.
Regards,
Pope John Paul II
1. In contrast to religious fundamentalists, none of those individuals set out with the primary goal of forcefully imposing atheism on the whole of society (as opposed to a broader socio-political agenda which may have included eliminating religion or reducing its power). The Russian Revolution was about economic subjugation and World War One. The French Revolution was about economic subjugation. Etc. etc. for all of your examples. Just because a particular revolution, war or movement includes as an incident an attempt to limit or destroy the power of organised religion does not make that event inherently "atheist" in nature.
2. You are a liar, or at best twisting the truth to suit your anti-atheist agenda. For instance:
Mussolini - 'Mussolini publicly reconciled with the Pope Pius XI in 1932, but "took care to exclude from the newspapers any photography of himself kneeling or showing deference to the Pope." He wanted to persuade Catholics that "[f]ascism was Catholic and he himself a believer who spent some of each day in prayer..." The Pope began referring to Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence." Despite Mussolini's efforts to appear pious, by order of his party, pronouns referring to him "had to be capitalized like those referring to God..."'
Napoleon - 'As an adult, Napoleon was described as a "deist with involuntary respect and fondness for Catholicism." He never believed in a living God; Napoleon's deity was an absent and distant God, but he pragmatically considered organised religions as key elements of social order, and especially Catholicism, whose, according to him, "splendorous ceremonies and sublime moral better act over the imagination of the people than other religions".'
Hitler - 'After his move to Germany, Hitler did not leave his church. Historian Richard Steigmann-Gall concludes that he "can be classified as Catholic", but that "nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context."' His interest in the occult is also widely documented.
As I found all of that in Wikipedia in about 10 seconds, I can only assume that you are deliberately being misleading.
Unfortunately, it is the lawyers themselves who have a disproportionate influence over the legal structure itself. They are also the only ones who would know how to fix it and every reason not to. Hence, our current problems.
No, your current problems stem from you permitting corporations with a vested interest in controlling IP to comandeer your representative government, leading to bad laws.
Contrary to what you apparently believe, practising lawyers don't get to make up the law as they go along. They can only apply it creatively. It's interesting that out of (a) the people who wrote these laws (b) the people who agitated for these laws and now routinely abuse them for commercial gain and (c) the people who have the job of dispassionately arguing the law for whatever client elects to retain them, you blame (c) for the problems with the patent system.
If you want to get rid of lawyers, stop having disputes. If you want to stop having shitty patent disputes, fix the shitty patent laws. If you want to fix the shitty patent laws, you're going to have to go via your shitty elected representatives.
But that would require work on your part and might be hard and take a long time. So, by all means, keep slagging off lawyers.
But that would mean real work instead of lawyering, and the lawyers can't have that.
Really? This gets moderated insightful?
Do you know what lawyers are? A dispute resolution tool. They are nothing more or less than a more civilized way of resolving disputes than killing one another. They do not make laws - politicians do that. And how to politicians decide which laws to make? You vote for them.
You don't like lawyers getting money from disputes arising out of bad laws? Blame yourself. Your failure to control your elected representatives is what permits those laws to exist.
But take away the legal system, and we're back to killing each other to resolve our disputes.
Blaming lawyers for patent disputes is like blaming your treating doctor if you get cancer.
the WIiU's graphics look amazing.
You haven't seen a PC game in the last 5 years, I take it? Those graphics look pretty average, and I'm very confident the PS4 and next Xbox will be vastly better.
DO: Pack in the RAM. Of all of the factors that are driving developer frustration with the current console generation, RAM seems to be at the top of the pack. It's worse for the PS3 (with its awkward memory-split and larger OS footprint) than for the 360, but still... RAM is pretty cheap and packing plenty of it in will pay dividends in 5 years time.
This. This times a million.
When you actually look at the pitiful amount of RAM in a 360 or PS3 it's obvious why they look like crap compared to even a very modest PC. RAM is as cheap as its ever been and it is the most essential way to future-proof a console.
If they have any sense they'll resist putting in a disk to begin with. Saying "Oh, you need Blu-ray to be future proof" is laughable. The format isn't going anywhere, despite the best efforts of Hollywood to save it, the entire world is going online.
Written like someone who hasn't got a decent A/V setup with a blu ray player. The format kicks butt. Awesome resolution and picture quality, amazing sound, and carries an amount of data that would take a very long time to download and would be impossible to stream with existing network infrastructure.
I don't know where you live, but where I live blu ray is getting more and more popular and is finally starting to push out DVD as the default format.
Yep, this will just about be the final straw for me in terms of coming here or contributing anything.
Very, very disappointing.
Why not power it using the key presses?
Try getting that proprietary battery in another 5-10 years. There are vintage cameras operating today that are many decades old. This will not be the case in future.
I understand what you're saying, but think you are wrong. I have a Panasonic camera which is 10 years old, was relatively unpopular at the time it was new, and relies on a proprietary battery which only works in that model and maybe 1-2 others of a similar vintage. I can still get that battery from third party manufacturers for about $30.
I also think you underestimate both the popular interest in DSLR equipment of all vintages and the commitment of Nikon and Canon in particular to supporting their products for a loooooooooong time after they are superseded.
The reality contradicts your theory. There are 121,000 companies and individuals with apps published on the iPhone App Store.
And how many of the apps released by those 121,000 companies do something which is contrary to Apple's interests or corporate strategy?
Man is very arrogant, to think that we should be the judge and jury of every species on the planet. We need to remember that we only one of countless other species of this planet and to be good neighbors.
Change is inevitable, it's probably my biggest gripe against people that are vehement about global warming, this idea that nothing should ever change. Just because a bird species used to stop at this place means that it should always stop at this place.
Ridiculous post is ridiculous.
We shouldn't be the "judge and jury", as you say. The problem with global warming is that we ARE being the judge and jury - we're condemning thousands of species to death for no reason at all through our own voluntary actions. We should be trying not to do that as far as possible.
Basically, you are confusing inaction in the face of some natural change with "inaction" in the face of huge change caused by our own actions. I.e., you are apparently in favour of some random action, but not action to undo that action.
Your bird species point would make more sense if there were thousands of places for the birds in question to stop. On recent human form, though, there's a decent chance that these birds and this place may have taken on a species-defining importance. Wipe them out here and that might be it for them. We are intelligent and aware that our actions have consequences, so we should work out whether this is the case and try to avoid wiping them out.
Yes, there have been big changes in the past. But human-induced climate change has the potential to rank with a major catastophe on an evolutionary timescale.
Remind me not to accept "facetime" requests from you.
Yep. I look forward to the front page stories about new alleged rumoured possible screen sizes for HTC, Nokia, Sony etc... oh wait, those won't get published. Because they're irrelevant and boring. Like this story.
Get rid of the budget and go for a charge model. Set up an internal IT Shop where people "buy" services using internal money which comes out of their budget.
They can "buy" network access.
They can "buy" 10 support calls
they can "buy" backups on X,
they can buy (Windows+MS Office(latest), Linux+OpenOffice, Mac+MS Office) + maintenance on their desktop for a year.
They can "buy" a 10Tb NFS file system.
They can "buy" professional services solution design for particular problems.
They can "buy" a 100Gb mailbox if they want.
This is the very definition of IT doing the OPPOSITE of its job - you apparently see your role as making it HARDER to get things done.
If I want support calls, backups, various software, a bigger file system and a larger mailbox and these things make me more productive, then IT's role is to make it happen, not to tell me I have to choose the most important two of those.
The cleaners don't get to decide whether to empty my bin or vaccuum the floor in my office. Reception don't get to limit the calls they will forward for me to 3 per day. Why the hell should IT be any different?