I think "The librarian was killed by falling books" is ironic. For a librarian, books are providers and sustainers; they provide his wages and hence his food, shelter and luxuries. For these books to kill him is discongruous, and therefore ironic.
Lots of information in The Audio Critic, which is unfortunately not online.
I remember seeing an in-store demo where you could listen to a tone from a "regular" phone wire and a monster phone wire (they were claiming that their modem-grade phone wire would make dialup faster). It was hilarious, because the difference was night and day. Clearly, they had doctored the "regular" wire because nothing could sound that bad.
Some people make a ton of money playing online, but for myself, playing poker online is a good way to practice for "the real thing." It's very good to have thousands of hands of real poker experience behind you, and online poker makes that much easier.
To that end, you should play online if you can win money or at least break even. There's only one way to find out, and that's to put a couple hundred down and try.
I don't keep accurate stats on my playing; it does seem like the money comes a little harder these days, but I don't know if I can attribute this to worse play, better opponent play, or some form of cheating. But I still make more than I lose, so it's still worth playing (since I also enjoy it).
I would recommend against playing the free money games online. People play so poorly that it dulls your instincts for when you're playing for real money. It's easy to make money just by playing only the strongest hands, but you don't get a sense for when to fold an iffy hand, or how to push somebody out of a pot.
Yes, the word "literally" is misused literally (sic) all the time. Everybody knows what people mean. If I say I ain't never gonna do something, are you going to tell me that I'm using a double negative?
Thanks for the info. I confess that I did not finish this current test, and that the last one I did was a long time ago (64kbps codecs, Ogg won, though I think I preferred AAC). With that one, the submitted results were in plaintext.
The testing is ABX. I am not a scientist, but the methodology looks pretty good. The only thing that might be suspect is that the subjects could send in false reports after the testing was done.
The way it works is, you listen to a given music clip. You have three streams to choose from. One is the uncompressed.wav, and is labeled as such. The other two are not identified, and consist of the compressed source and the original source. You then rate the two unidentified sources based on how closely they approximate the original. Then you repeat the process five times for each of the codecs. When you're performing the experiment, you don't even know which codec you're testing at any given time.
I agree what you say about most audiophiles, but this is in no way invalidates the kind of testing going on here. Most "Stereophile" reading audiophiles wouldn't know an ABX comparison if it bit them in the ass. This test is most emphatically not pseudoscience, and the results should be viewed as a rock to withstand the gales of "incessant audiophile blather," rather than part of the blather itself.
True, the last 128kb test came out as a four-way tie, indicating that most codecs are just about the same. But I participated in a 64kb test a while back that was pretty interesting.
As an aside, when I first started using MP3s in 1996, I certainly wasn't in awe of 128Kbps recordings. They sounded like crap to me. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a freakin' miracle that they could get listenable music files that small, but I could often tell a glaring difference between an MP3 and its source. In the intervening years, codecs have gotten much better and my ears have gotten slightly worse, so that now I'm almost always satisfied with 128Kbps MP3s.
I love iTunes, but I could never get the downloaded songs to work on my iPod. For whatever reason, iTunes will let me copy the songs to my girlfriend's iPod, but not mine. I've looked through all the options to see if I could direct a purchase from one iPod to another, but I never figured it out. Checked online too, never found a solution.
Now I can purchase tunes and actually listen to them at work!
Best RPG series I've ever played:
Final Fantasy (admittedly, I prefer console-styele RPGs)
Best "Arcade-Style" Game Developer:
EA Big
These are the types of games I like to play nowadays, and they're all done best on consoles. If I was into other styles of gaming (FPS, RTS, strategy), the PC would be a better (but much more expensive) choice.
I used to like FPS's, but I got bored of single-player and got tired of getting my ass handed to me by cheaters and 16 year olds who play 8 hours a day and call me "haha gay loser faggot" when they frag me.
I used to like RTS games but find that the learning curve is too high to get into any particular game. Too many options, too much stuff to do. In Warcraft II, there were only two races and they were nearly identical, and yet there was endless nuance. In Warcraft III, there's so much variation that the nuances get lost. I mean, they're there, but you gotta be a Grand Master to appreciate them.
I used to like strategy games (who wasn't at some point a Civilization junkie?) but I've found that as the market for the genre gets more rarefied, so do the games. They tend to be highly specialized, with a steep learning curve and low production values. I'm sure they're immensely satisfying if you can devote a lot of time them, but I don't have that kind of time anymore.
As many people have remarked before me, games are the only credible killer app that drives home-PC upgrades. Digital video editing is not something with mass-market appeal (sorry Apple, Intel), and most people don't do CG on their home boxes. I suppose people do buy new hardware somewhat for DVD encoding, but aside from that, it's games baby. I know I upgrade much less frequently now that I don't game on my computer. Intel should be very worried.
If I were them, I'd get into the gaming business, or at least forge strong partnerships with developers. It's been a successful strategy for other hardware manufacturers. Look at Sony's developers and partnerships (Square, Polyphony Digital), or Microsoft buying Bungie. Having some exclusive games on the level of a Gran Turismo (can you imagine how good it would be on a PC?) would help quite a bit.
I second a previous statement that somehow, resolution doesn't seem to matter so much on a console, at least for a specific type of game. RTS games definitely suffer, but most everything else is just fine.
I've played games on a PC where I prefer the graphics on the console version, even at the lower resolutions. This probably has to do with the fact that my graphics card would choke with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on. But I don't need that stuff with my console--the fuzziness of my TV screen acts as my own low-budget AA and AF!
It's called her boyfriend. Presumably she too has a skill set which he relies on. Quid pro quo, Clarice.
I've been to many a foreign country without knowing the language or having a translator. It's amazing how much can be communicated without language. Of course, a little humility goes a long way in these situations.
I think it's funny people complain so much about technical illiterates. If your friends and family is good people, then what goes around will eventually come around. If you've surrounded yourself with users, than you have a more fundamental problem.
As for Ms. Tauber's "moody people" analogy, I think she's right on the money. The logic gates in the CPU might be "purely logical," barring the occasional flipped bit or Pentium bug, but the modern day computer experience is comprised of layers upon layers of code, with arbitrary constructs, metaphors, and bugs strewn throughout. What we see on the computer screen (the conscious mind) is but the tip of the iceberg, supported by a vast, subconscious motley of processes, protocols, libraries, etc., all interacting in strange and often suboptimal ways. I'm a bush league computer guru, pathetic by Slashdot standards but accredited god-like status by my coworkers, and there are many times when I have no idea what the problem is. We've all that experience with that intermittent problem that won't go away and can't be diagnosed.
I fix my coworker's computers for free. I fix my boss's computers for cut-rate, just to be on the up-and-up.
I used to have a pickup truck. I helped a lot of people move.
Maybe I'm just a nice guy. Maybe. But I don't feel taken advantage of. I'm doing favors for my friends. From a purely mercenary perspective, what goes around comes around, and it's nice to build up a little good karma for when it's you who needs help.
Sometimes I get weird requests. It's pretty easy to say no. No one gets offended when you refuse to do free work. You can get off with the slightest excuse.
E-Waste recycling is only in very specific cases profitable.
Plastics used with electronics usually use flame-retardants which makes it very costly to recycle.
Chips are pulled for refurb, but remember that technology goes out of date really quickly. There are still big barrels of chips that get processed for the metals. But this is barely profitable, and only when the chip can be easily removed from other parts.
The worst are CRT's, which average about 8lbs of lead a piece. There used to be a couple plants in the States that would pay to melt down the leaded glass, but I believe they went out of business. The vast majority of these monitors end up in China, where they're taken apart by villagers (including children) in extremely unsafe conditions.
Check out Exporting Harm, by the Basel Action Network for more info on that.
If recycling E-Waste were so profitable, then organizations like StRUT would not be on the rocks. I've visited their warehouse, and I'll tell you they run a tight ship. But they only use vendors who recycle materials responsibly, and that requires lots of money. Beware companies that will take your electronics for free, especially monitors. It's a sure sign they're sending stuff to China.
I work in a Congressional district office (Earl Blumenenauer, 3rd District OR), and while I don't speak for other Senator's and Congressman's offices, it doesn't matter whether you call, write, or send an email. Either way, your comments get categorized by the same person, and I don't think we let any slip.
Well technically, we have a webform rather than email for constituent comments.
If you do want to send snailmail, send it to your District office rather than Washington DC. Mail gets through much faster over here, and it ends up in the same place.
Believe me, it's just as easy to misplace snailmail as electronic mail. And not that we would wilfully trash constituent letters, if we wanted to I don't think it would be much of a challenge.
Calling is effective. It does take up alot of our time and lets the entire staff know that it's a hotbutton issue (even the people who don't answer the main line have to hear it). Remember to be polite, even if you don't support the representative's stance.
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I think "The librarian was killed by falling books" is ironic. For a librarian, books are providers and sustainers; they provide his wages and hence his food, shelter and luxuries. For these books to kill him is discongruous, and therefore ironic.
Maybe this is a joke? If so, I'm slow.
Lots of information in The Audio Critic, which is unfortunately not online. I remember seeing an in-store demo where you could listen to a tone from a "regular" phone wire and a monster phone wire (they were claiming that their modem-grade phone wire would make dialup faster). It was hilarious, because the difference was night and day. Clearly, they had doctored the "regular" wire because nothing could sound that bad.
To that end, you should play online if you can win money or at least break even. There's only one way to find out, and that's to put a couple hundred down and try.
I don't keep accurate stats on my playing; it does seem like the money comes a little harder these days, but I don't know if I can attribute this to worse play, better opponent play, or some form of cheating. But I still make more than I lose, so it's still worth playing (since I also enjoy it).
I would recommend against playing the free money games online. People play so poorly that it dulls your instincts for when you're playing for real money. It's easy to make money just by playing only the strongest hands, but you don't get a sense for when to fold an iffy hand, or how to push somebody out of a pot.
Yes, the word "literally" is misused literally (sic) all the time. Everybody knows what people mean. If I say I ain't never gonna do something, are you going to tell me that I'm using a double negative?
Thanks for the info. I confess that I did not finish this current test, and that the last one I did was a long time ago (64kbps codecs, Ogg won, though I think I preferred AAC). With that one, the submitted results were in plaintext.
The way it works is, you listen to a given music clip. You have three streams to choose from. One is the uncompressed .wav, and is labeled as such. The other two are not identified, and consist of the compressed source and the original source. You then rate the two unidentified sources based on how closely they approximate the original. Then you repeat the process five times for each of the codecs. When you're performing the experiment, you don't even know which codec you're testing at any given time.
True, the last 128kb test came out as a four-way tie, indicating that most codecs are just about the same. But I participated in a 64kb test a while back that was pretty interesting.
As an aside, when I first started using MP3s in 1996, I certainly wasn't in awe of 128Kbps recordings. They sounded like crap to me. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a freakin' miracle that they could get listenable music files that small, but I could often tell a glaring difference between an MP3 and its source. In the intervening years, codecs have gotten much better and my ears have gotten slightly worse, so that now I'm almost always satisfied with 128Kbps MP3s.
I love iTunes, but I could never get the downloaded songs to work on my iPod. For whatever reason, iTunes will let me copy the songs to my girlfriend's iPod, but not mine. I've looked through all the options to see if I could direct a purchase from one iPod to another, but I never figured it out. Checked online too, never found a solution. Now I can purchase tunes and actually listen to them at work!
Best RPG series I've ever played: Final Fantasy (admittedly, I prefer console-styele RPGs)
Best "Arcade-Style" Game Developer: EA Big
These are the types of games I like to play nowadays, and they're all done best on consoles. If I was into other styles of gaming (FPS, RTS, strategy), the PC would be a better (but much more expensive) choice.
I used to like FPS's, but I got bored of single-player and got tired of getting my ass handed to me by cheaters and 16 year olds who play 8 hours a day and call me "haha gay loser faggot" when they frag me.
I used to like RTS games but find that the learning curve is too high to get into any particular game. Too many options, too much stuff to do. In Warcraft II, there were only two races and they were nearly identical, and yet there was endless nuance. In Warcraft III, there's so much variation that the nuances get lost. I mean, they're there, but you gotta be a Grand Master to appreciate them.
I used to like strategy games (who wasn't at some point a Civilization junkie?) but I've found that as the market for the genre gets more rarefied, so do the games. They tend to be highly specialized, with a steep learning curve and low production values. I'm sure they're immensely satisfying if you can devote a lot of time them, but I don't have that kind of time anymore.
As many people have remarked before me, games are the only credible killer app that drives home-PC upgrades. Digital video editing is not something with mass-market appeal (sorry Apple, Intel), and most people don't do CG on their home boxes. I suppose people do buy new hardware somewhat for DVD encoding, but aside from that, it's games baby. I know I upgrade much less frequently now that I don't game on my computer. Intel should be very worried.
If I were them, I'd get into the gaming business, or at least forge strong partnerships with developers. It's been a successful strategy for other hardware manufacturers. Look at Sony's developers and partnerships (Square, Polyphony Digital), or Microsoft buying Bungie. Having some exclusive games on the level of a Gran Turismo (can you imagine how good it would be on a PC?) would help quite a bit.
I've played games on a PC where I prefer the graphics on the console version, even at the lower resolutions. This probably has to do with the fact that my graphics card would choke with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on. But I don't need that stuff with my console--the fuzziness of my TV screen acts as my own low-budget AA and AF!
I've been to many a foreign country without knowing the language or having a translator. It's amazing how much can be communicated without language. Of course, a little humility goes a long way in these situations.
I think it's funny people complain so much about technical illiterates. If your friends and family is good people, then what goes around will eventually come around. If you've surrounded yourself with users, than you have a more fundamental problem. As for Ms. Tauber's "moody people" analogy, I think she's right on the money. The logic gates in the CPU might be "purely logical," barring the occasional flipped bit or Pentium bug, but the modern day computer experience is comprised of layers upon layers of code, with arbitrary constructs, metaphors, and bugs strewn throughout. What we see on the computer screen (the conscious mind) is but the tip of the iceberg, supported by a vast, subconscious motley of processes, protocols, libraries, etc., all interacting in strange and often suboptimal ways. I'm a bush league computer guru, pathetic by Slashdot standards but accredited god-like status by my coworkers, and there are many times when I have no idea what the problem is. We've all that experience with that intermittent problem that won't go away and can't be diagnosed.
I fix my coworker's computers for free. I fix my boss's computers for cut-rate, just to be on the up-and-up. I used to have a pickup truck. I helped a lot of people move. Maybe I'm just a nice guy. Maybe. But I don't feel taken advantage of. I'm doing favors for my friends. From a purely mercenary perspective, what goes around comes around, and it's nice to build up a little good karma for when it's you who needs help. Sometimes I get weird requests. It's pretty easy to say no. No one gets offended when you refuse to do free work. You can get off with the slightest excuse.
E-Waste recycling is only in very specific cases profitable. Plastics used with electronics usually use flame-retardants which makes it very costly to recycle. Chips are pulled for refurb, but remember that technology goes out of date really quickly. There are still big barrels of chips that get processed for the metals. But this is barely profitable, and only when the chip can be easily removed from other parts. The worst are CRT's, which average about 8lbs of lead a piece. There used to be a couple plants in the States that would pay to melt down the leaded glass, but I believe they went out of business. The vast majority of these monitors end up in China, where they're taken apart by villagers (including children) in extremely unsafe conditions. Check out Exporting Harm, by the Basel Action Network for more info on that. If recycling E-Waste were so profitable, then organizations like StRUT would not be on the rocks. I've visited their warehouse, and I'll tell you they run a tight ship. But they only use vendors who recycle materials responsibly, and that requires lots of money. Beware companies that will take your electronics for free, especially monitors. It's a sure sign they're sending stuff to China.
This could easily work the other way around.
Guy in high-paying position buys pass, doesn't have traffic to worry about, so he leaves home at 8:30 and gets to work at 9:00.
Gal in low-paying position can't afford pass, hates traffic, so she goes to work at 7:30 and gets to work at 8:00.
Boss notices what a hard-worker she is and she gets promoted.
I don't know how many passes will be issued, but I imagine very few will be issued outside of the transportation industry.
I'm cool with it so long as they use the funds to help develop light-rail in the region. If ever there was a metro area that needed it, it's Seattle.
I work in a Congressional district office (Earl Blumenenauer, 3rd District OR), and while I don't speak for other Senator's and Congressman's offices, it doesn't matter whether you call, write, or send an email. Either way, your comments get categorized by the same person, and I don't think we let any slip. Well technically, we have a webform rather than email for constituent comments. If you do want to send snailmail, send it to your District office rather than Washington DC. Mail gets through much faster over here, and it ends up in the same place. Believe me, it's just as easy to misplace snailmail as electronic mail. And not that we would wilfully trash constituent letters, if we wanted to I don't think it would be much of a challenge. Calling is effective. It does take up alot of our time and lets the entire staff know that it's a hotbutton issue (even the people who don't answer the main line have to hear it). Remember to be polite, even if you don't support the representative's stance.