The dictionary definition doesn't really clarify the scenario, other than pointing out that it does mean the same thing as whine, and that its chiefly british - two things you could find just by reading my own post.
The issue is that while its a british phrase, its not widely used enough to have a good web site explaining why its "whine" in the US and "whinge" elsewhere. It would also mean why I could go for so long without hearing it in any actual media, just random people on the internet saying it.
What the heck is with the extra G in "whining?" I thought it was a typo the first time I saw it but now I've seen lots of different people do it? Is this pronounced like it rhymes with "singing" or does it rhyme with "cringing?" I've never, ever, heard anyone anywhere say this out loud, not even on like British TV shows, so where the heck did this come from? Is "whing" even a word when you leave off the -ing?
I've been saying for years that there is a new kind of wrong-headedness that people in today's society apply to factual matters - that if they don't understand the reasoning behind a factual statement, then they just claim its a matter of opinion. I think this is overcompensation for when we were taught in 2nd grade that sometimes facts are actually opinions. Well, the less intelligent among us have extended that to mean "sometimes things you don't understand and make factually incorrect statements about are 'just opinions'
Everyone is welcome to an opinion, but certain matters aren't a matter of taste. Example:
"Red is better than green." This is an opinion because you could like red or green or whatever color with essentially no justification and nobody questions you on it, because its purely a matter of taste.
"The color red has a wavelength of around 300nm" would be a factually incorrect statement, not a matter of opinion. Red has a wavelength thats more like 550-650nm or something like that... I wanna say 300nm is violet or ultraviolet. (I might be wrong on that one, but it still illustrates the point). Some people never learned the difference between "A factually untrue statement" and "an opinion." And 'magical cables make sound better!' is a factually untrue statement, not an opinion. It just takes more verification than the average jerk audiophile can be bothered with.
Disclaimer: My expertise is audio design/engineering, so the above comments may be tainted with objective fact.
In some particular benchmark it doesn't have as high sequential read speeds as you might expect, and yet these "mp3" and "video" read benchmarks probably don't require the maximum bandwidth allocated from the drive. It might be working EXACTLY as expected if its streaming MP3s from the flash media which may have a "slower, but fast enough for media streaming" sequential speed and its doing it so that the platter mechanism is free for anything else that might come up.
I don't rate the performance of this drive as "having issues" at all, even after reading the entire benchmark page. The hybrid nature of the drive seems like it would make it very hard to benchmark accurately - the real question is whether it feels SSD-like in normal operation or if it feels slower than a regular laptop drive from the same company. If its the latter - THATS a problem. I know theres no quantitative measurement of "does my computer feel faster" but it seems like the data they've presented is likely not representative of what you should expect from the drive. The actual large-file sequential speed seems to be at the top of the laptop hard drive list and the random reads are close to "true SSD" territory.
I'm guessing nothing needs to be fixed at all and its working exactly as intended... its just that one or two benchmarks seem to turn out lower numbers than you'd expect even if the overall performance is good.
Does this study include the 300 million in the US living with bad IP laws? Over restrictive is just as bad as not restrictive enough. The fact that a big company can get a $2 million dollar judgment against somebody for non-commercially (and possibly inadvertently) sharing mere tens of song tracks on a file sharing service MIGHT be a sign that our own system is just as screwed up as the systems with no copyright protection at all.
We are not trending towards a happy medium, at least not if Disney and the RIAA have anything to say about it.
Speaking of which, I am also NOT of the opinion that "all cops" are bad, or anywhere near a majority. A small minority of cops are bad... but these people have the authority to FUCK. YOUR. LIFE. Just because they might have been having a bad day. In some cases, figuratively, in other cases literally like with say 41 bullets in your chest. (Yeah, I didn't just pick the number 41 randomly).
If theres 1 idiot on every police squad that thinks they are the law rather than enforcers of the law, all it takes is for that one idiot to be the one that gets sent to interrogate you instead of the other 50 reasonable people.
And when the one idiot screws up horribly, they get a paid vacation for it.
The real thing I don't like about police is that its not really in their best interest to give you the benefit of the doubt - they want to reduce crime but they don't care if any given person is telling the unbelievable truth or feeding them a lie. They won't err in your best interest.
The best solution is to simply avoid cops and avoid doing things that would attract the attention of the cops. I don't even go more than a few mph over the speed limit anymore, not because i'm afraid of a mere 5 over or 10 over ticket, but because I was once pulled over for doing 50 in a 30 when a closer, more prudent examination of the situation would have shown that I was doing 50, but in a 40mph zone. I then slowed down to about 35mph as I was passing an (obstructed) 30mph sign, and he told me I was doing 20 over. Was I doing 10 over? Definitely. Was I doing 20 over? Thats pretty questionable and the cop isn't going to doubt his own judgement. Had I been going 40 as I crossed from the 40mph zone to the 30mph zone, he might have let me go with a warning instead of a court date.
(Yay for sequence of non sequitors, but I figure this is as good as any time to share).
This isn't a troll. It is a law school professor explaining why that interacting with the police can lead to trouble for you down the road, even if you're innocent, and even if you say only things that would point towards you being innocent. Cops have absolutely no requirement to quote you in context, and out-of-context quotes can make a completely innocent statement sound strange. Furthermore, while cops can use anything you say AGAINST you in a court of law, if you ask them to repeat something you said that would help your case, that would be heresay, and therefore can not help you.
The cop's followup to the law school professor's talk is less interesting, but the very least it validates most of what the law school professor said.
So, indeed, do not talk to cops when you can avoid doing so.
IANAL, but I did watch the video in its entirety and you should at least watch the first half too.
Funny you mention the "move into the 21st century with the rest of us" bit. I've been taking a seminar on terrorism and one (of the many) reasons the middle east and (some of) the Muslims that inhabit it are so prone to violence is because they've had considerably less time to modernize. Europe and America had hundreds of years to turn from an agrarian society into a modern one. The middle eastern world has had considerably less time, and yet they still have access to all the AK-47s they can imagine. The modernization of the western world was not a clean process, but we had a lot of time to do it. Now we expect the same of all these random goat herders, but they don't want to drop their farm and start working in a cubicle and watching comedy central. This isn't the only reason for terrorism, but its something to ponder anyway.
My other thought as soon as I read the summary is, "You idiots. They did this to illustrate how stupid it is to get up in arms over a mere image. The fact that you took the bait and threatened actual violence against the South Park creators shows how backwards and moronic your whole life is. You have failed epically."
Of course, that would sound a bit like flamebait itself, but its pretty much the case. If a poorly drawn bear suit on a cartoon on TV thats merely purported to be "Muhammad" is an issue for you, maybe its time to grow some thicker skin.
Eh... theres really no such risk with regular overclocking. The biggest threat to your CPU is increasing the voltage - which would strictly be overvolting, not overclocking. If you turn up your clock speed high enough that it "could" cause damage to it at load... odds are you've turned it up so high that it won't make all the way through bootup. And the solution to that is simply revert it back to its stock speed, or cut the difference between stock and what it won't run at until you find a working speed. The chance of permanent damage to a CPU without changing the core voltage is essentially zilch.
The big difference between overclocking and unlocking hidden cores is that you can make small incremental overclock adjustments, say from 2.6ghz to 3ghz or 3.2ghz or 3.5ghz or whatever until you find that its unstable, and just back off a bit. You can't incrementally unlock one core, its unlocked or it isn't. And if it was disabled due to being flawed, it should stay that way or else your computer is just gonna blue screen right in the middle of some important work/gaming session.
Why would you store images and HD video on an expensive-per-gigabyte SSD? They don't benefit from high iops. You already have a platter drive thats presumably big enough for your media storage needs - why would you move it off your hypothetical ~1TB drive and back to the expensive 40GB SSD?
SSDs are just another intermediate step in the memory hierarchy. HDs are slower but cheaper than SSD, SSDs are slower but cheaper than ram, ram is slower but cheaper than L3 cache, L3 cache is slower but cheaper than L2 cache, L2 cache is slower but cheaper than L1 cache, L1 cache is slower but cheaper than registers.
When processors started coming with L3 cache, people weren't posting on Slashdot saying "Why do I want L3 6MB of cache, thats not even big enough for firefox!" Adding more in-between faster but lower capacity memory speeds up your computer without rendering the slower-but-cheaper memory obsolete.
The answer doesn't seem to be in the article, but why would they search Karttunen's house after arresting the guy he was trying to frame? I understand how he would have been implicated after they searched his computer, but how did they figure out that they needed to search his house in the first place?
Either way, guy is an idiot for copying the guy's hard drive to his own. And an idiot for trying the whole scheme in the first place. And an idiot for getting caught when it seems like it would be hard to trace that back to somebody.
Yeah. I saw "Pac Man" and "Death Star" and "Herschel" but you have to read half the summary before you even get to the key word that tells you wtf its talking about, which is to say Mimas. And I still didn't know what that is until I clicked the article to see wtf it was talking about. Its a moon of Saturn I guess, but the summary is only of any interest to people who know exactly what it was talking about already. Lacking knowledge of the solar system beyond the planets and our own moon, the summary might as well have just said "Blah blah blah, click here for some article about pac man" and it would have achieved the same goal.
Thats not how it works. What it actually does is shuts power off to cores that aren't in use, and then overclocks the remaining ones. It won't/can't run different cores at different clock speeds. So if you have a 4 core processor, it might shut off 2 of the cores and then boost the clock speed by up to like 50% depending on what CPU it is, up to the thermal limits of the processor. The "breakthrough" in engineering is the part of the circuit that shuts off power to the unused cores better than anything else has in the past. This essentially gets you the best of both worlds in a single CPU - a lower clocked quad and a higher clocked single/dual core.
The plural of anecdote is not data... but I still have to throw in my own 2 cents. It seems that as long as you have at least 1.5GB ram, win7 will be using about 700MB of that on startup, and the rest goes to apps. I have 4GB ram and I've never seen more than 3GB of ram in use, including running Supreme Commander with other stuff open.
I agree that Win7 can't run on systems with less than 1GB ram, and only runs "alright" on systems with exactly 1GB ram, but if its using ram for something other than disk cache, then its not the OS itself using the ram, its the applications they're running.
Its a c2d macbook but its only got 1GB of ram. Does that affect whether snow leopard runs better?
(I ask because if i only had 1GB ram I wouldn't want to upgrade from XP to Win7, but on the flip side if I had vista i'd definitely want to upgrade to 7 regardless of the amount of ram)
Yeah. My girlfriend has a macbook, I have no idea exactly when she bought it, but its a Core2Duo system at like 2ghz and it has Tiger on it. She's not enough of a computer freak to upgrade everything that comes out, she just has an irrational hatred of PCs. If her laptop seems pretty new but only has tiger on it, that means she might have bought it in like... 2007 before Leopard was released. So I guess that means she'd have to upgrade to get Firefox (not that she cares at all).
I'm not a Mac person so I don't keep track of every update, but why is it that OSX 10.4, a version which only came out in 2005 according to Wikipedia, has so much code that prevents Mozilla from trivially continuing to maintain compatibility in Firefox? Does it have something to do with the PPC->Intel switch? The fact that they'd drop support for an OS version thats only 5 years old, when Firefox quite obviously still works on 10 year old Windows 2000, is sort of surprising.
Finally, sanity prevails. I wonder if this is going to the beginning of the end for RIAA suing its own customers, or if they still have more in the pipeline.
To extend on this even further, though I could see you already may have drawn the parallel.
The people who think HP is what makes a car go and don't even know what "torque means" are making the error of only looking at PEAK horsepower.
In reality, horsepower IS still the most important number, except you have to measure torque to calculate horsepower. If car A has 100HP at 1700 rpms and car B has 40HP at 1700 rpms but car A tops out at 200HP at 5500 rpms and car B tops out at 300HP at 7000 rpms, car A will be faster off the line but car B will probbaly have a higher top speed (given that their weight/aerodynamics/etc are similiar). The best comparison I can think of is a VTEC Civic SI vs a GTI 2.0T FSI. The vtec engine and the turbo engine have similiar maximum horsepower, but the vtec engine only has like 100lbft of torque at 2000 rpms. The GTI engine has double the torque at low rpms and like 1.5x more torque at midrange RPMs. It has a lower rev limit though.
Transmissions can make up for this difference, and the Civic SI won't have any turbo lag but a new GTI doesn't have much turbo lag to speak of either.
I've been saying this for years - it is not hard to reach a point where an MP3 is indistinguishable from the uncompressed source, "even if you have top notch equipment and well-practiced hearing skills."
It is basically scale of bitrate vs odds that the recording will be indistinguishable at that bitrate.
My personal experience tells me that most songs are audibly degraded at 128kbps, some songs are audibly degraded at 160kbps, few songs are audibly degraded at 192kbps, and nothing I've yet experienced is audibly degraded at 256kbps. And this is being conservative... with a superior modern codec like LAME, MP3 may be even harder to distinguish at 128kbps than you might expect. Other codecs besides MP3 could be even better, but I don't have enough experience with other codecs, so I can't comment there. Plus, VBR makes the situation even better. You could have a lower average bitrate but still achieve a signal thats indistinguishable from the original with VBR.
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as.wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp. An $80 1TB hard drive can hold $19,000 worth of uncompressed CDs. Sure... in flac format I could store more like $60,000 worth... but who has a $20,000 CD collection let alone a $60,000 one?
Anyway, the primary counterarguments I've heard are either from neurotic audiophiles that think "mathematically lossy" means "audibly lossy." People from that same category justify multi-thousand-dollar power cables to their amplifier and claim night and day differences, so their opinions can safely be ignored.
The other end of the fence says low bitrate stuff sounds "perfect." In my experience when presented with a reasonable comparison, even audio-ignorant people can tell the difference between a crap 128kbit mp3 and the original, but that difference might not be immediately obvious on, for example, built-in laptop speakers.
"You know that BetaMax never really died? Almost every TV station in the US used it."
Only the lowest budget TV stations would consider using Betamax. Betamax is a consumer format that, revisionist history aside, had only nitpicky benefits over VHS. Pretty similiar bandwidth/noise specs as VHS.
What you're thinking of Beta-CAM (And more accurately, Betacam SP) which is records high bandwidth analog component video. This is what TV stations use, and the only thing in common it had with Betamax is that the smaller of the two tape formats it supported was, if memory serves, the same cassette as consumer betamax.
TV stations would have upgraded directly from Umatic to Betacam because the consumer VHS/Betamax formats have too much loss from one generation to the next.
Pretty sure he meant "Degrade or not degrade" moreso than "improve or not improve." Even if its a downhill ride - there are different directions you can go downhill. Why accept mechanical AND digital distortion when you could at least avoid the digital distortion by playing higher bitrate sound files.
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The dictionary definition doesn't really clarify the scenario, other than pointing out that it does mean the same thing as whine, and that its chiefly british - two things you could find just by reading my own post.
The issue is that while its a british phrase, its not widely used enough to have a good web site explaining why its "whine" in the US and "whinge" elsewhere. It would also mean why I could go for so long without hearing it in any actual media, just random people on the internet saying it.
What the heck is with the extra G in "whining?" I thought it was a typo the first time I saw it but now I've seen lots of different people do it? Is this pronounced like it rhymes with "singing" or does it rhyme with "cringing?" I've never, ever, heard anyone anywhere say this out loud, not even on like British TV shows, so where the heck did this come from? Is "whing" even a word when you leave off the -ing?
I've been saying for years that there is a new kind of wrong-headedness that people in today's society apply to factual matters - that if they don't understand the reasoning behind a factual statement, then they just claim its a matter of opinion. I think this is overcompensation for when we were taught in 2nd grade that sometimes facts are actually opinions. Well, the less intelligent among us have extended that to mean "sometimes things you don't understand and make factually incorrect statements about are 'just opinions'
Everyone is welcome to an opinion, but certain matters aren't a matter of taste. Example:
"Red is better than green." This is an opinion because you could like red or green or whatever color with essentially no justification and nobody questions you on it, because its purely a matter of taste.
"The color red has a wavelength of around 300nm" would be a factually incorrect statement, not a matter of opinion. Red has a wavelength thats more like 550-650nm or something like that... I wanna say 300nm is violet or ultraviolet. (I might be wrong on that one, but it still illustrates the point). Some people never learned the difference between "A factually untrue statement" and "an opinion." And 'magical cables make sound better!' is a factually untrue statement, not an opinion. It just takes more verification than the average jerk audiophile can be bothered with.
Disclaimer: My expertise is audio design/engineering, so the above comments may be tainted with objective fact.
Google: BAN TURKEY!
In some particular benchmark it doesn't have as high sequential read speeds as you might expect, and yet these "mp3" and "video" read benchmarks probably don't require the maximum bandwidth allocated from the drive. It might be working EXACTLY as expected if its streaming MP3s from the flash media which may have a "slower, but fast enough for media streaming" sequential speed and its doing it so that the platter mechanism is free for anything else that might come up.
I don't rate the performance of this drive as "having issues" at all, even after reading the entire benchmark page. The hybrid nature of the drive seems like it would make it very hard to benchmark accurately - the real question is whether it feels SSD-like in normal operation or if it feels slower than a regular laptop drive from the same company. If its the latter - THATS a problem. I know theres no quantitative measurement of "does my computer feel faster" but it seems like the data they've presented is likely not representative of what you should expect from the drive. The actual large-file sequential speed seems to be at the top of the laptop hard drive list and the random reads are close to "true SSD" territory.
I'm guessing nothing needs to be fixed at all and its working exactly as intended... its just that one or two benchmarks seem to turn out lower numbers than you'd expect even if the overall performance is good.
Does this study include the 300 million in the US living with bad IP laws? Over restrictive is just as bad as not restrictive enough. The fact that a big company can get a $2 million dollar judgment against somebody for non-commercially (and possibly inadvertently) sharing mere tens of song tracks on a file sharing service MIGHT be a sign that our own system is just as screwed up as the systems with no copyright protection at all.
We are not trending towards a happy medium, at least not if Disney and the RIAA have anything to say about it.
Speaking of which, I am also NOT of the opinion that "all cops" are bad, or anywhere near a majority. A small minority of cops are bad... but these people have the authority to FUCK. YOUR. LIFE. Just because they might have been having a bad day. In some cases, figuratively, in other cases literally like with say 41 bullets in your chest. (Yeah, I didn't just pick the number 41 randomly).
If theres 1 idiot on every police squad that thinks they are the law rather than enforcers of the law, all it takes is for that one idiot to be the one that gets sent to interrogate you instead of the other 50 reasonable people.
And when the one idiot screws up horribly, they get a paid vacation for it.
The real thing I don't like about police is that its not really in their best interest to give you the benefit of the doubt - they want to reduce crime but they don't care if any given person is telling the unbelievable truth or feeding them a lie. They won't err in your best interest.
The best solution is to simply avoid cops and avoid doing things that would attract the attention of the cops. I don't even go more than a few mph over the speed limit anymore, not because i'm afraid of a mere 5 over or 10 over ticket, but because I was once pulled over for doing 50 in a 30 when a closer, more prudent examination of the situation would have shown that I was doing 50, but in a 40mph zone. I then slowed down to about 35mph as I was passing an (obstructed) 30mph sign, and he told me I was doing 20 over. Was I doing 10 over? Definitely. Was I doing 20 over? Thats pretty questionable and the cop isn't going to doubt his own judgement. Had I been going 40 as I crossed from the 40mph zone to the 30mph zone, he might have let me go with a warning instead of a court date.
(Yay for sequence of non sequitors, but I figure this is as good as any time to share).
This isn't a troll. It is a law school professor explaining why that interacting with the police can lead to trouble for you down the road, even if you're innocent, and even if you say only things that would point towards you being innocent. Cops have absolutely no requirement to quote you in context, and out-of-context quotes can make a completely innocent statement sound strange. Furthermore, while cops can use anything you say AGAINST you in a court of law, if you ask them to repeat something you said that would help your case, that would be heresay, and therefore can not help you.
The cop's followup to the law school professor's talk is less interesting, but the very least it validates most of what the law school professor said.
So, indeed, do not talk to cops when you can avoid doing so.
IANAL, but I did watch the video in its entirety and you should at least watch the first half too.
Funny you mention the "move into the 21st century with the rest of us" bit. I've been taking a seminar on terrorism and one (of the many) reasons the middle east and (some of) the Muslims that inhabit it are so prone to violence is because they've had considerably less time to modernize. Europe and America had hundreds of years to turn from an agrarian society into a modern one. The middle eastern world has had considerably less time, and yet they still have access to all the AK-47s they can imagine. The modernization of the western world was not a clean process, but we had a lot of time to do it. Now we expect the same of all these random goat herders, but they don't want to drop their farm and start working in a cubicle and watching comedy central. This isn't the only reason for terrorism, but its something to ponder anyway.
My other thought as soon as I read the summary is, "You idiots. They did this to illustrate how stupid it is to get up in arms over a mere image. The fact that you took the bait and threatened actual violence against the South Park creators shows how backwards and moronic your whole life is. You have failed epically."
Of course, that would sound a bit like flamebait itself, but its pretty much the case. If a poorly drawn bear suit on a cartoon on TV thats merely purported to be "Muhammad" is an issue for you, maybe its time to grow some thicker skin.
Eh... theres really no such risk with regular overclocking. The biggest threat to your CPU is increasing the voltage - which would strictly be overvolting, not overclocking. If you turn up your clock speed high enough that it "could" cause damage to it at load... odds are you've turned it up so high that it won't make all the way through bootup. And the solution to that is simply revert it back to its stock speed, or cut the difference between stock and what it won't run at until you find a working speed. The chance of permanent damage to a CPU without changing the core voltage is essentially zilch.
The big difference between overclocking and unlocking hidden cores is that you can make small incremental overclock adjustments, say from 2.6ghz to 3ghz or 3.2ghz or 3.5ghz or whatever until you find that its unstable, and just back off a bit. You can't incrementally unlock one core, its unlocked or it isn't. And if it was disabled due to being flawed, it should stay that way or else your computer is just gonna blue screen right in the middle of some important work/gaming session.
Why would you store images and HD video on an expensive-per-gigabyte SSD? They don't benefit from high iops. You already have a platter drive thats presumably big enough for your media storage needs - why would you move it off your hypothetical ~1TB drive and back to the expensive 40GB SSD?
SSDs are just another intermediate step in the memory hierarchy. HDs are slower but cheaper than SSD, SSDs are slower but cheaper than ram, ram is slower but cheaper than L3 cache, L3 cache is slower but cheaper than L2 cache, L2 cache is slower but cheaper than L1 cache, L1 cache is slower but cheaper than registers.
When processors started coming with L3 cache, people weren't posting on Slashdot saying "Why do I want L3 6MB of cache, thats not even big enough for firefox!" Adding more in-between faster but lower capacity memory speeds up your computer without rendering the slower-but-cheaper memory obsolete.
The answer doesn't seem to be in the article, but why would they search Karttunen's house after arresting the guy he was trying to frame? I understand how he would have been implicated after they searched his computer, but how did they figure out that they needed to search his house in the first place?
Either way, guy is an idiot for copying the guy's hard drive to his own. And an idiot for trying the whole scheme in the first place. And an idiot for getting caught when it seems like it would be hard to trace that back to somebody.
Yeah. I saw "Pac Man" and "Death Star" and "Herschel" but you have to read half the summary before you even get to the key word that tells you wtf its talking about, which is to say Mimas. And I still didn't know what that is until I clicked the article to see wtf it was talking about. Its a moon of Saturn I guess, but the summary is only of any interest to people who know exactly what it was talking about already. Lacking knowledge of the solar system beyond the planets and our own moon, the summary might as well have just said "Blah blah blah, click here for some article about pac man" and it would have achieved the same goal.
Thats not how it works. What it actually does is shuts power off to cores that aren't in use, and then overclocks the remaining ones. It won't/can't run different cores at different clock speeds. So if you have a 4 core processor, it might shut off 2 of the cores and then boost the clock speed by up to like 50% depending on what CPU it is, up to the thermal limits of the processor. The "breakthrough" in engineering is the part of the circuit that shuts off power to the unused cores better than anything else has in the past. This essentially gets you the best of both worlds in a single CPU - a lower clocked quad and a higher clocked single/dual core.
The plural of anecdote is not data... but I still have to throw in my own 2 cents. It seems that as long as you have at least 1.5GB ram, win7 will be using about 700MB of that on startup, and the rest goes to apps. I have 4GB ram and I've never seen more than 3GB of ram in use, including running Supreme Commander with other stuff open.
I agree that Win7 can't run on systems with less than 1GB ram, and only runs "alright" on systems with exactly 1GB ram, but if its using ram for something other than disk cache, then its not the OS itself using the ram, its the applications they're running.
This article looks totally photoshopped, its probably fake.
Its a c2d macbook but its only got 1GB of ram. Does that affect whether snow leopard runs better?
(I ask because if i only had 1GB ram I wouldn't want to upgrade from XP to Win7, but on the flip side if I had vista i'd definitely want to upgrade to 7 regardless of the amount of ram)
Yeah. My girlfriend has a macbook, I have no idea exactly when she bought it, but its a Core2Duo system at like 2ghz and it has Tiger on it. She's not enough of a computer freak to upgrade everything that comes out, she just has an irrational hatred of PCs. If her laptop seems pretty new but only has tiger on it, that means she might have bought it in like... 2007 before Leopard was released. So I guess that means she'd have to upgrade to get Firefox (not that she cares at all).
I'm not a Mac person so I don't keep track of every update, but why is it that OSX 10.4, a version which only came out in 2005 according to Wikipedia, has so much code that prevents Mozilla from trivially continuing to maintain compatibility in Firefox? Does it have something to do with the PPC->Intel switch? The fact that they'd drop support for an OS version thats only 5 years old, when Firefox quite obviously still works on 10 year old Windows 2000, is sort of surprising.
You're welcome.
Finally, sanity prevails. I wonder if this is going to the beginning of the end for RIAA suing its own customers, or if they still have more in the pipeline.
To extend on this even further, though I could see you already may have drawn the parallel.
The people who think HP is what makes a car go and don't even know what "torque means" are making the error of only looking at PEAK horsepower.
In reality, horsepower IS still the most important number, except you have to measure torque to calculate horsepower. If car A has 100HP at 1700 rpms and car B has 40HP at 1700 rpms but car A tops out at 200HP at 5500 rpms and car B tops out at 300HP at 7000 rpms, car A will be faster off the line but car B will probbaly have a higher top speed (given that their weight/aerodynamics/etc are similiar). The best comparison I can think of is a VTEC Civic SI vs a GTI 2.0T FSI. The vtec engine and the turbo engine have similiar maximum horsepower, but the vtec engine only has like 100lbft of torque at 2000 rpms. The GTI engine has double the torque at low rpms and like 1.5x more torque at midrange RPMs. It has a lower rev limit though.
Transmissions can make up for this difference, and the Civic SI won't have any turbo lag but a new GTI doesn't have much turbo lag to speak of either.
I've been saying this for years - it is not hard to reach a point where an MP3 is indistinguishable from the uncompressed source, "even if you have top notch equipment and well-practiced hearing skills."
It is basically scale of bitrate vs odds that the recording will be indistinguishable at that bitrate.
My personal experience tells me that most songs are audibly degraded at 128kbps, some songs are audibly degraded at 160kbps, few songs are audibly degraded at 192kbps, and nothing I've yet experienced is audibly degraded at 256kbps. And this is being conservative... with a superior modern codec like LAME, MP3 may be even harder to distinguish at 128kbps than you might expect. Other codecs besides MP3 could be even better, but I don't have enough experience with other codecs, so I can't comment there. Plus, VBR makes the situation even better. You could have a lower average bitrate but still achieve a signal thats indistinguishable from the original with VBR.
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as .wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp. An $80 1TB hard drive can hold $19,000 worth of uncompressed CDs. Sure... in flac format I could store more like $60,000 worth... but who has a $20,000 CD collection let alone a $60,000 one?
Anyway, the primary counterarguments I've heard are either from neurotic audiophiles that think "mathematically lossy" means "audibly lossy." People from that same category justify multi-thousand-dollar power cables to their amplifier and claim night and day differences, so their opinions can safely be ignored.
The other end of the fence says low bitrate stuff sounds "perfect." In my experience when presented with a reasonable comparison, even audio-ignorant people can tell the difference between a crap 128kbit mp3 and the original, but that difference might not be immediately obvious on, for example, built-in laptop speakers.
"You know that BetaMax never really died? Almost every TV station in the US used it."
Only the lowest budget TV stations would consider using Betamax. Betamax is a consumer format that, revisionist history aside, had only nitpicky benefits over VHS. Pretty similiar bandwidth/noise specs as VHS.
What you're thinking of Beta-CAM (And more accurately, Betacam SP) which is records high bandwidth analog component video. This is what TV stations use, and the only thing in common it had with Betamax is that the smaller of the two tape formats it supported was, if memory serves, the same cassette as consumer betamax.
TV stations would have upgraded directly from Umatic to Betacam because the consumer VHS/Betamax formats have too much loss from one generation to the next.
Pretty sure he meant "Degrade or not degrade" moreso than "improve or not improve." Even if its a downhill ride - there are different directions you can go downhill. Why accept mechanical AND digital distortion when you could at least avoid the digital distortion by playing higher bitrate sound files.