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User: ucblockhead

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  1. Re:Lossless is compressed on Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? · · Score: 1

    First, you're using the term "lossy" in a domain where it doesn't apply. Second, any recording, digital or analog, is going to lose information from the original source.

  2. Re:Lossless is compressed on Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? · · Score: 1

    "Lossy" is a word describing a class of compression algorithms. That word does not apply to the precision of measurement.

  3. Re:Lossless is compressed on Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? · · Score: 1

    The inability to accurately measure and encode a signal is not the same as a mathematical algorithm designed to deliberately discard data to improve compression. "Lossy" applies only to the later.

    Also note that this has absolutely nothing to do with analog vs. digital. It is impossible to avoid losing information when copying an analogy signal regardless of whether you are copying it to an analogy or a digital representation.

    You also make want to look up the meaning of the word "loose" because while you can lose information, it's pretty hard to "loose" it.

  4. Re:Lossless is compressed on Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? · · Score: 1
    You are confusing compression with precision. The imprecision of a measurement is not compression. CDDA is a noncompressed representation of an imprecise measurement.


    "lossless" and "lossy" are technical terms involved in compression that have no relevance when talking about the precision of a measurement. It makes no sense to try to apply these terms to measurement because a "lossless" measurement is an impossibility.


    You can't just apply "lossy" willy-nilly to whatever takes your fancy..."lossy" applies to a particular domain, compression, and refers to a particular type of compression. The word the parent poster and you are looking for is "imprecise".

  5. Re:Why Wouldn't You Compress It? on Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? · · Score: 1

    The main reason I'd want music compressed losslessly is that it can be converted to any lossy format. Every time you convert from one lossy format to another, you lose quality. So if I buy a song from iTunes, burn it to CD, and rip that as an MP3, that MP3 is lower quality than the file I bought from iTunes. On the other hand, if I buy a FLAC file, I can convert it to MP3/WMA/OGG/Whatever and each will have exactly the quality of the compression parameters I choose.

  6. Re:Lossless is compressed on Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? · · Score: 2, Informative

    You are confusing terms. "Lossy" and "Lossless" are terms that apply only to compression. They have very specific meanings that has nothing to do with recording accuracy.

    You are correct that it is impossible (even theoretically) to record music perfectly accurately...but this doesn't have anything to do with "lossless". CDDA encoding uses lossless compression. That means that it is a perfectly accurate representation of what was recorded, though obviously the recording is not a perfectly accurate representation of the sound wave.

    This is an important distinction in that you can perfectly accurately convert between anything compressed in a lossless manner, but you lose accuracy every time you convert between anything compressed in a lossy manner. That is, I can convert CDDA->FLAC->Apple Lossless->CDDA over and over ad infinitum and still get exactly the same CDDA file. On the other hand, if I were to try this CDDA->MP3->WMA->CDDA, I'd end up with crappier and crappier reproductions.

  7. Re:it's the games, stupid on Media Fight - PS3 Blu-ray vs. 360 HD DVD Add-On · · Score: 1

    There are few movies because there's currently no market. There's little incentive for a studio to release on Blu-Ray because so few people have Blu-Ray players. If, however, there was a large installed base of users with Blu-Ray players, studios would be more inclined to release on Blu-Ray. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Studios won't make movies because there are few players and people won't buy players becaues there are few movies.

    So what Sony would need to do in order to break this log-jam is to figure out a way to get lots of Blu-Ray players in the home despite people not particularly caring about it. Like, say...releasing the successor to a popular console gaming system with it included.

    Blu-Ray isn't there to sell the PS3. They're attempting to use the PS3 to sell Blu-Ray. They're hope is to be able to say "look, there are 10 million people with Blu-Ray playing PS3s out there...release your movie on Blu-Ray!" next year at Christmas.

  8. Re:Desalinization on Blood Protein Used to Split Water · · Score: 1

    Yeah, and it's a pity, what with O2 so hard to come by and all

  9. How long should a game last? on The Importance of Game Length · · Score: 1

    Easy: until it gets boring. A 100 hours of gameplay is not too long if the game is still fun, but 4 hours is too long if the game is dull after an hour of gameplay.

  10. Re:It depends... on The Importance of Game Length · · Score: 1
    You forgot one:

    MMORPG: Until the divorce.

  11. Re:Give it time... on iPod Has Nothing To Fear From Slow-Starting Zune · · Score: 1

    Hell yeah...at this point, it looks like it's Nintendo that's the one taking advantage.

  12. Re:640k is enough for anybody on iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World? · · Score: 1

    Music and video won't expand like software. You can't really improve on CD quality...people just can't tell the difference. A 300mb/hour flac file is about as bloated as it'll get. Video's probably peaking with HD. The huge growth in flash devices shows that many people these days are more interested in battery life and portability than size already and the complete failure of better than CD quality formats like SACD shows that people just aren't interested in the quality that would require bigger files. Hell, what people put on their iPods these days is lower quality than what people bought in 1988.

  13. Re:Capacity. on iPod To Eventually Hold All the Video In the World? · · Score: 1

    Storage has actually been doubling every 12 months lately. But yeah, who knows how long that'll last.

  14. Re:Sleep vs Hibernate on Why Vista Took So Long · · Score: 1

    Hard to say which is the best...sleep allows the machine to resume immediately, but slowly draws power. Hibernate does not draw any power, but takes a long time to resume.

    (Though probably the best is to pick one mode (like sleep until battery is 5% then hibernate) and allow it to be changed in some buried section of the control panel for power users.)

  15. Why mine is always on on Why Vista Took So Long · · Score: 1

    It allows me ssh access from outside the house so that I can transfer files back and forth as needed. It allows me to run a simple web server from home, so that I can give relatives access to family pictures.

  16. "Success" on The Soul of A New Microsoft · · Score: 1

    "Success" doesn't mean "stomping out the competition". "Success" means "sell at a profit".

    iTunes is a success in that it is part of what sells iPods. No iTunes and the iPod would have failed.

  17. Re:Arthiritic? At 44? on The Last Games You'd Play? · · Score: 1

    Just after my 41st birthday I went into the doctor complaining of knee pain after running. After taking X-Rays, his diagnosis was the beginnings of osteo arthritis. He recommended glucosomine.

  18. Re:What's wrong with this definition? on Why the Word 'Planet' Will Never Be Defined · · Score: 1

    The problem is that "roughly" and "more-or-less" or not rigorous, so that definition will cause endless arguments about whether or not an object is "roughly spherical" and whether or not it's object is "more-or-less" circular.

  19. Re:Original Meaning on Why the Word 'Planet' Will Never Be Defined · · Score: 1

    This would mean that Neptune, Uranus and Pluto would no longer be planets as they are not visible with the naked eye. What do you call Neptune then? A large asteroid?

  20. Re:Ask yourself this... on Students Put UCLA Taser Video On YouTube · · Score: 1

    Confronting armed men who are in the process of showing themselves to be happy to bend the rules concerning use of force when you, yourself, are completely defensive is not particularly bright.

  21. Re:At the risk of being modded down... on You Call This Agile? · · Score: 1

    Yes. I've noticed that those two guys often complain about the great programming methodology du jour. If only the methodology gurus would listen to them more often.

  22. Re:noob on Video of Fedora On PS3 · · Score: 1

    Well...where I was, Southern California, only n00bs said "Gee You I"...going back to the original Amiga, Mac and Atari ST.

  23. Re:nice resolution on Video of Fedora On PS3 · · Score: 1

    This is mostly interesting in that it shows that a non-explicitly-supported distribution runs on the PS3. This is good news as most other consoles/devices (including the PSP) are actively crippled to prevent this sort of thing. Perhaps they learned from the issues they had fighting the PSP homebrew scene.

  24. Re:noob on Video of Fedora On PS3 · · Score: 1

    Really? So when everyone I knew said "gooey" when we were doing OS/2 1.5 programming in 1989, it wasn't "the old days"?

  25. Re:A product no one wanted on Opening Zune Sales Flaccid · · Score: 1

    My point was really that how can one expect the XBox to dominate this generation if it can't even dominate the last one? Honestly, I think that people who want cheap fun will go for the Wii and people who want the heaviest graphics will go for the PS3. The Xbox, being neither the cheapest nor the best, will satisfy neither the cheap bastards nor the "gotta have the power!" crowd, and languish. At least, that's my guess.