Do not waste your time on this. On this story comments you can see the lack of maturity in a majority of slashdoters. They do not want to see the real state of Google or any other companies. I am amazed at the level of stupidity people show just because someone told them that X company is "good" or "cool" then they should follow like sheeps.
You're probably not surprised to learn that I agree totally. It's just all a bit dissappointing to me. Isn't/. supposed to a haven for rationality? The zeal with which people who have never set foot inside the place are telling me about how wonderful Google is has a truly religious feel to it. I don't think I could have drawn so many fiery posts if I had gone on to a Chatholic forum and proclaimed the Pope a former Nazi. The fact that my assertions are all totally true seems to be irrelevant to these folks.
And that, to anyone still reading this, is why it's probably a pretty good time to sell you GOOG stock. It's just my guess, but I think I can see the peak from here. Or does anyone want to believe that they will finally meet their insane overvaluation by selling episodes of "I Love Lucy"?
To quote Battlestar Galatica, this has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Sometimes the young folks lack the perspective to see that.
You sure seem to know a lot about Google; when did you work there?. And you seem to know a lot about me; did we used to hang out?
You assume that you know all the answers. You display the arrogance which is typical of youth. It's ok, I was like that once too. But I'm telling you - that same arrogance is why Google will fall. So if you're so sure that you're right, go ahead and buy a bunch of shares of Google right now. See how that works out for you.
I said that I was bitter in my post, so I don't think you get any insight points for pointing that out. It was a lot of damn money, so yeah, bitterness... I'll live. Google isn't the first hot new company in this town's history, and it certainly will not be the last. Just wait till the robot revolution starts, I'm going to find a way to make a mint on that one.
The thing about it is, we have laws in this country. The good guys are supposed to obey those laws. It's one thing if I had a sneaking suspicion that age was a factor, but this chick told me to my face. And I wasn't 65... I said in the original post that I was 32. And as far as my productivity, they didn't need to guess how productive I would be based on my age. I had worked there for months, so they knew how productive I was. And if low productivity was an issue, they could have said that to me. It wasn't, and they didn't.
I wonder if any of you GOOG worshipers would have had different feelings about all this if they had told me that they were not hiring me because I was black? Are some forms of discrimination unacceptable to you, or are you cool with all of them?
Why on earth would a company discontinue the employment of a TEMP? I just can't believe TEMPORARY employees wouldn't be PERMANENTLY employed!
What's up with the caps, dude? You seem to be pretty excited about all this. Take a deep breath and put the Mountain Dew down.
I indicated in my post that many of the temps were hired on as regular employees. I was not. I understood that there were no guarantees going into it. But other younger folks did get jobs, and my age was cited as a reason why I did not. In fact, it was the only reason given to me. She specifically said that the quality of my work was good. Also, I had actual experience, having spent two and a half years at Yahoo. All of the kids they did hire were fresh out of college and ten years younger. Sorry bud, but that's evil in my book. Just one man's opinion, nothing to flip out over.
Maybe when the girl said "The rest of the group was pretty young", she was politely saying "The rest of the group are up-to-speed on new tech and brilliant and you're a temp whose skills have languished in your old age."
So it's your position that rather than cite a valid reason for not hiring me, she gave an illegal one? All in the name of being polite? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And besides, this job had nothing to do with tech skills. It was reviewing the ads to make sure they conformed to editorial policy.
Maybe that's my polite way of saying that you're a dumbass.
I don't mean to come off as some kind of word nazi here, but considering that you got "insightful" points, I feel like I ought to point out that I don't think that redundant means what you think it means. Redundant means that something is not required because it is a duplication of something else (or in the case of a RAID, it IS required because it duplicates something else). I'm pretty sure that you didn't mean to say that the Constitution is no longer needed because something else guarantees our civil rights.
Perhaps a better choice would be obsolete, which means "No longer in use; gone into disuse; disused or neglected".
But to get back to the topic at hand, I have some first hand experience with GOOG, and to me, the whole "don't be evil" concept was a sham from the start. Google got sued because of age discrimination. That's pretty evil to me. I worked at Google for a few months when they were first starting the Adwords program. Most of the temps were let go, but the ones that they considered to be the best were hired on as regular employees. This was all before the IPO, so if you sense some bitterness on my part, you can probably guess why.
When I was shown the door at Google, the young (and gorgeous, I might add) woman told me (I was 32 at the time) that I didn't really fit in with the Adwords group, which was in her exact words "pretty young". I'd have sued too, but I didn't see any way that I could prove that she acutally said that to me.
I have lots of friends that work there, and trust me, there's no one on the planet more evil than a 25 year old millionaire who didn't really earn it.
I'd sooner read well-written marketing copy than poorly-written criticism.
I really agree with that. Someone else mentioned the site videogamessuck.com. Lemme tell ya, it's not exactly wikipedia, in terms of the quality of content. It seems that allowing just anyone to write an encyclopedia works much better than allowing just anyone to write a video game site. At least it does in that particular case.
I remember reading my guitar magazines when I was 17 and having it suddenly dawn on me that I had never read a bad review. I told myself that if the gear sucks, they just don't review it. That way, all the reviews can be good, and yet the sponsors don't get pissed off. How naive I was.
Now my attitude is that reviews are usually only good for getting a sense of the product, of what the manufacturer was attempting to accomplish. Whether or not they accomplish that goal is usually a subjective judgement anyway. And the lesson I've learned the hard way over the years is: try before you buy. Don't give EA or whoever your money until you've actually played the game (IF then), because (to somewhat mangle Sturgeon) 90 percent of video games are crap. And the ratio for video game commentary is even less favorable to the consumer.
Funny you should mention Zepplin - as soon as I posted, I figured that Zepplin 4 would be a good place to start. I'll give that a shot.
But, if CDs are pretty constrained, and yet they are also the source of most all digital audio files, how do I find a truly prisine version of the source? Won't my Zepplin IV CD be messed up from the git go, thus making all of my rips, regardless of compression format, messed up? I'm thinking that must be why I can't hear the difference in my blind a/b testing. Like I said before, a lossless version of a messed up copy just means that nothing further is lost, right?
You mention well-recorded live shows, and that's a funny thing - it's often so loud that the idea of "good" sound just goes right out the window. I'm just trying to hear myself _at all_. It's one of those areas where the lab-type setting of a studio and the real-world application of a live gig are so different. I have a lot of experience with live shows, but practically none in a studio.
Do you post on any audio forums where I could learn more about all this stuff from you and others like you? When someone with real knowledge speaks on the subject, it seems a lot less like voodoo to me.
That is a very good point. Amounts of disk space that seemed huge to me just a few years ago are trivial now, and I'm sure everyone else feels the same way. But that said, I also think that in the future, the majority of that archived music will be easy to download in the uberformat of the future. I truly expect that even indy and other hard to find music will be fairly easy to come by, as bandwidth and disk space just continue to increase.
Thanks, that's interesting. Can you tell me a track or two where I might hear the difference? I'm curious now. I wonder if it was my speakers that made the difference. The ones I use now are ok, but probably not as good as a decent set of headphones. And Radio Shack headphones? What kind of audio snob are you?;)
I think you sorta prove my point - you're a pro, so that puts you in that less than one percent that I would expect to hear the difference. I don't think Apple is going to worry about making their ipods to please the audio engineers of the world.
But now that you say warble and shimmer, I'm curious if I can note that same effect. Can you think of a particular audio track where the difference is noteable? Something that I have a decent shot at finding in both lossey and lossless formats? Not that I usually download music illegally, but this is different - it's for science!
Also, another thing that hasn't been mentioned is the fact that if you are ripping from a CD that has already compromised the audio, then lossless compression isn't going to give you back what was lost. I've heard people mention that the cymbals on The Who's "Live at Leeds" sounded good to them on the original LP, but the CD version is butchered and just provides layers of noise where the ride was being, well, ridden particularly hard.
And that point brings me to my next question, which is that if 44.1 KHz produces a constrained sound, doesn't that mean that all CDs are constrained? I've heard people say that 48KHz was much better, but I thought that the CD format just wasn't capable of that. So in essence, you could make an original recording at that rate, then compress it with FLAC and preserve the full range, but with a CD, that info is already gone. Your thoughts? And thanks for post - mod this dude up, informative!
Cymbals, eh? Holy smokes, I never would have thought of that. It's pretty hard to find any popular music that features them, but I'll make a special point of it. I don't mean to be snotty (oh wait, yes I did), but that's pretty obvious.
I think YOU should try cymbals, when you conduct your blind A/B test.
Did you do the test? Until you do, I gotta lump you in with the people who buy 200 dollar power cables for their 10,000 dollar power amps. Congratulations on being a "connoisseur".
This guy mentions twice in the article that he's a big fan of losless audio compression. That's all the proof I need that he's a hype-driven goofball who really has no clue.
I've been a musician for over 20 years. I can easily hear the difference between single coil and humbucking pickups, and between a fuzz pedal that uses germanium trasistors and one that uses silicon. Those are subtle differences that the vast majority of people can't hear. What I can't hear is the difference between a properly done 192kbps/44khz mp3 rip and one made with FLAC. Now, I'm not saying that means that no one on earth can. I'm sure there are golden-eared freaks out there. But I would seriously crap out a brick if this dillhole Case could.
And before you let me know what a moron I am, be sure to conduct a blind A/B test yourself. It has to be blind, or it's just not scientific. Have a friend play two different versions for you, one a high quality mp3, and one FLAC, and see if you can tell. Since the odds of guessing correctly are 50/50, you need to repeat the experiment several times to be sure that you weren't just lucky. I'm here to tell you, it's a rare, rare person who can choose correctly ten times in a row.
And yet this guy is surprised that hardware makers haven't put these lossless codecs into their players? Most people are happy with FM audio quality, let alone FLAC. Case is useless, as proven by the fact that he hyped so many technologies that went nowhere. Extremetech, indeed - extremely stupid.
I agree with your not-so-controversial-round-these-parts opinion. If you want to support your favorite band, download all the free music you want, then buy their T-shirt. They make much more money from those than they do from their albums, especially if they are a new band in their first major label contract. Now you have the music and the T-shirt, and your favorite band has more coinage in their pockets than if you had bought the CD.
Being a RINO or DINO is just a cynical ploy to appeal to the moderate swing voters who decide elections. The party faithful on both sides have already made up their minds, long before the election. Appealing to the center is the key. Both McCain and Lieberman have come a lot closer to the presidency than most politicians, and both still have a shot at reaching the nation's top post.
I'm not saying that either one of them is Satan, but what they are is politicians, and successful ones at that. I don't hate the player, but the game pretty much stinks. In order to make it to the top, politicians absolutely must whore themselves and compromise their ideals. I applaude McCain for working to minimize the influence that money has on elections, but nevertheless, he has to exist in the current system, and so he is dirty.
If McCain was really "free thinker" he'd have opposed extending the Patriot Act. Or if he was a real free thinker, he'd have voted against it in the first place. But no, he and almost all of the rest of the Senate got swep up in a wave of post-9/11 panic, and voted for an unconstitutional law. Oh yeah, they're a regular bunch of Tom Paine's, our Senate.
As someone who was a temp at google for a few months, I can tell you from first hand knowledge that there is plenty of evil going on at GOOG. The first thing that jumps out at you is the company's age-ism: Google doesn't trust anyone over 30. They famously got sued for it. I was told to my face that one of the reasons I wasn't hired on as a regular employee was that I was too old. I was 32 at the time. Everyone else being hired for Google's then-fledgling Adwords department was 21 and right out of school.
The second type of bias that I saw there was what I call look-ism: everyone that worked in the Adwords department was gorgeous. And I'm not saying that anyone was unqualified. They were all bright kids who had just gotten out of good schools. But when you get hundreds of resumes for each available position, I guess you can afford to choose people who are both intelligent and attractive. So is that evil? You tell me.
It's probably easy to dismiss my comments because they come from someone who is bitter that he didn't get hired by them just a few months before the IPO. And you'd be correct. But I felt that my experience (I had several years at various high tech companies under my belt, including 2.5 years at Yahoo) made me MORE qualified than someone who had a degree from Stanford and no experience. GOOG did not agree.
I can't say enough about the food though. That guy Charlie who used to cook for the Dead is a culinary genius. So is it evil to pamper your sexy employees with swordfish steaks while 25 percent of America's children live below the poverty line? Again... you tell me.
I think that a person who only listens to singles misses out on a lot of great music, but I think that sometimes, the whole album just isn't worth having, and I know that ahead of time. I might have a Bannannarama (if I didn't spell that correctly, please keep it to yourself) song or two on my hard drive, but there's just no way I need a whole album.
I know the Bit torrent kicks monkey butt for finding whole albums, but suppose I just want one song? Napster was so great for that back in the day, and then Kazaa was pretty cool, but now I can't get Kazaa lite to connect. I've tried emule, but it's absurdly slow. Does emule work well for anyone else? Or is there someother good way to get singles?
I'm so tired of hearing about the "weird specialzed pieces". I've heard variations on that comment for 25 years. The fact is, you're a Lego luddite. It's tough to make anything but a wheel from one of Lego's wheel pieces, but the cars just don't work as well with square tires. So it seems obvious to me that a certain amount of specialization is required. And far from limiting your options, more types of bricks actually increases the options that are available to the builder.
And guess what? They still make plenty of sets that include little besides basic bricks. So the consumer has choice.
If you had your way, I guess we'd have nothing besides the basic 2x8 brick. Thank goodness we don't live in your world of sameness and lack of options, Lego Nazi!
I don't agree with your assertion that the price of gas in the US needs to stay low, but I do agree with you that public transportation is one of the best answers to the current dilemna. It's better to start biting the bullet of high fuel costs now, and allow migration to public transportation and alternative fuels to be more gradual.
Where I live, in San Jose, California, we built a light-rail system (sorta like a monorail, but with two rails) over the past couple of decades that had become something of a joke. It lost money hand over fist. But when gas prices shot up recently, it suddenly got a lot more popular. Ridership is up - 23 thousand people a day rode it on average in August of this year, up from 21k a year ago and 16k in the same month two years ago. So contrary to what you said, I think that $2.50 gas has already pushed some people on to public transportation.
The current war in Iraq and dozens of other military actions which were designed to secure our access to oil have cost us hundreds of billions. Why not ensure that the tab is picked up by the people who actually use the most gas? What more fair way to do that could there be than higher gas costs? It's the dickweeds in the Hummers who got us into this mess - let them pay for it.
I basically agree with your idea, but I don't really see it as a gas tax. I see it as allowing the true cost of obtaining oil to actually flow through the pump. That is, make people pay what the gas really costs. We've had cheap gas in the US for decades because we had deals with the Saudis where we provided them with fighter jets and missiles, and then we got our gas cheaper than anyone else. It was good for the US economy in the short term, but it was remarkably short-sighted.
The smart thing to do would have been to invest heavily in alternative fuels back in the 70's when President Carter urged us to do so. But since our nation is run by oilmen, we chose not to do that. We chose to spend billions on things like the Iraq war, which rather than lower the cost of fuel has raised it.
The summary doesn't mention this, but Toys R Us and Walmart aren't donating their shelf space. So the correct formula to determine the cost to MS isn't their cost minus retail price. It's the cost to MS to make the unit, minus whatever they sell the units to retailers for. So MS is losing more than the article summary states.
Slashdot Mirror
Do not waste your time on this. On this story comments you can see the lack of maturity in a majority of slashdoters. They do not want to see the real state of Google or any other companies. I am amazed at the level of stupidity people show just because someone told them that X company is "good" or "cool" then they should follow like sheeps.
/. supposed to a haven for rationality? The zeal with which people who have never set foot inside the place are telling me about how wonderful Google is has a truly religious feel to it. I don't think I could have drawn so many fiery posts if I had gone on to a Chatholic forum and proclaimed the Pope a former Nazi. The fact that my assertions are all totally true seems to be irrelevant to these folks.
You're probably not surprised to learn that I agree totally. It's just all a bit dissappointing to me. Isn't
And that, to anyone still reading this, is why it's probably a pretty good time to sell you GOOG stock. It's just my guess, but I think I can see the peak from here. Or does anyone want to believe that they will finally meet their insane overvaluation by selling episodes of "I Love Lucy"?
To quote Battlestar Galatica, this has all happened before, and it will all happen again. Sometimes the young folks lack the perspective to see that.
You sure seem to know a lot about Google; when did you work there?. And you seem to know a lot about me; did we used to hang out?
You assume that you know all the answers. You display the arrogance which is typical of youth. It's ok, I was like that once too. But I'm telling you - that same arrogance is why Google will fall. So if you're so sure that you're right, go ahead and buy a bunch of shares of Google right now. See how that works out for you.
I said that I was bitter in my post, so I don't think you get any insight points for pointing that out. It was a lot of damn money, so yeah, bitterness... I'll live. Google isn't the first hot new company in this town's history, and it certainly will not be the last. Just wait till the robot revolution starts, I'm going to find a way to make a mint on that one.
The thing about it is, we have laws in this country. The good guys are supposed to obey those laws. It's one thing if I had a sneaking suspicion that age was a factor, but this chick told me to my face. And I wasn't 65... I said in the original post that I was 32. And as far as my productivity, they didn't need to guess how productive I would be based on my age. I had worked there for months, so they knew how productive I was. And if low productivity was an issue, they could have said that to me. It wasn't, and they didn't.
I wonder if any of you GOOG worshipers would have had different feelings about all this if they had told me that they were not hiring me because I was black? Are some forms of discrimination unacceptable to you, or are you cool with all of them?
Why on earth would a company discontinue the employment of a TEMP? I just can't believe TEMPORARY employees wouldn't be PERMANENTLY employed!
What's up with the caps, dude? You seem to be pretty excited about all this. Take a deep breath and put the Mountain Dew down.
I indicated in my post that many of the temps were hired on as regular employees. I was not. I understood that there were no guarantees going into it. But other younger folks did get jobs, and my age was cited as a reason why I did not. In fact, it was the only reason given to me. She specifically said that the quality of my work was good. Also, I had actual experience, having spent two and a half years at Yahoo. All of the kids they did hire were fresh out of college and ten years younger. Sorry bud, but that's evil in my book. Just one man's opinion, nothing to flip out over.
Maybe when the girl said "The rest of the group was pretty young", she was politely saying "The rest of the group are up-to-speed on new tech and brilliant and you're a temp whose skills have languished in your old age."
So it's your position that rather than cite a valid reason for not hiring me, she gave an illegal one? All in the name of being polite? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And besides, this job had nothing to do with tech skills. It was reviewing the ads to make sure they conformed to editorial policy.
Maybe that's my polite way of saying that you're a dumbass.
I don't mean to come off as some kind of word nazi here, but considering that you got "insightful" points, I feel like I ought to point out that I don't think that redundant means what you think it means. Redundant means that something is not required because it is a duplication of something else (or in the case of a RAID, it IS required because it duplicates something else). I'm pretty sure that you didn't mean to say that the Constitution is no longer needed because something else guarantees our civil rights.
Perhaps a better choice would be obsolete, which means "No longer in use; gone into disuse; disused or neglected".
But to get back to the topic at hand, I have some first hand experience with GOOG, and to me, the whole "don't be evil" concept was a sham from the start. Google got sued because of age discrimination. That's pretty evil to me. I worked at Google for a few months when they were first starting the Adwords program. Most of the temps were let go, but the ones that they considered to be the best were hired on as regular employees. This was all before the IPO, so if you sense some bitterness on my part, you can probably guess why.
When I was shown the door at Google, the young (and gorgeous, I might add) woman told me (I was 32 at the time) that I didn't really fit in with the Adwords group, which was in her exact words "pretty young". I'd have sued too, but I didn't see any way that I could prove that she acutally said that to me.
I have lots of friends that work there, and trust me, there's no one on the planet more evil than a 25 year old millionaire who didn't really earn it.
I'd sooner read well-written marketing copy than poorly-written criticism.
I really agree with that. Someone else mentioned the site videogamessuck.com. Lemme tell ya, it's not exactly wikipedia, in terms of the quality of content. It seems that allowing just anyone to write an encyclopedia works much better than allowing just anyone to write a video game site. At least it does in that particular case.
I remember reading my guitar magazines when I was 17 and having it suddenly dawn on me that I had never read a bad review. I told myself that if the gear sucks, they just don't review it. That way, all the reviews can be good, and yet the sponsors don't get pissed off. How naive I was.
Now my attitude is that reviews are usually only good for getting a sense of the product, of what the manufacturer was attempting to accomplish. Whether or not they accomplish that goal is usually a subjective judgement anyway. And the lesson I've learned the hard way over the years is: try before you buy. Don't give EA or whoever your money until you've actually played the game (IF then), because (to somewhat mangle Sturgeon) 90 percent of video games are crap. And the ratio for video game commentary is even less favorable to the consumer.
Er, I meant to say the article -summary- mentions Trillian. The article on ZDnet doesn't seem to, nor is it listed on the Google page.
The article mentions Trillian, but as far as I can see, it's not actually part of the "pack".
Funny you should mention Zepplin - as soon as I posted, I figured that Zepplin 4 would be a good place to start. I'll give that a shot.
But, if CDs are pretty constrained, and yet they are also the source of most all digital audio files, how do I find a truly prisine version of the source? Won't my Zepplin IV CD be messed up from the git go, thus making all of my rips, regardless of compression format, messed up? I'm thinking that must be why I can't hear the difference in my blind a/b testing. Like I said before, a lossless version of a messed up copy just means that nothing further is lost, right?
You mention well-recorded live shows, and that's a funny thing - it's often so loud that the idea of "good" sound just goes right out the window. I'm just trying to hear myself _at all_. It's one of those areas where the lab-type setting of a studio and the real-world application of a live gig are so different. I have a lot of experience with live shows, but practically none in a studio.
Do you post on any audio forums where I could learn more about all this stuff from you and others like you? When someone with real knowledge speaks on the subject, it seems a lot less like voodoo to me.
That is a very good point. Amounts of disk space that seemed huge to me just a few years ago are trivial now, and I'm sure everyone else feels the same way. But that said, I also think that in the future, the majority of that archived music will be easy to download in the uberformat of the future. I truly expect that even indy and other hard to find music will be fairly easy to come by, as bandwidth and disk space just continue to increase.
Did you even read my post? I specifically said that I did a blind a/b test. And I gave a blind a/b test to my roommate. So.... whatever.
Thanks, that's interesting. Can you tell me a track or two where I might hear the difference? I'm curious now. I wonder if it was my speakers that made the difference. The ones I use now are ok, but probably not as good as a decent set of headphones. And Radio Shack headphones? What kind of audio snob are you? ;)
I think you sorta prove my point - you're a pro, so that puts you in that less than one percent that I would expect to hear the difference. I don't think Apple is going to worry about making their ipods to please the audio engineers of the world.
But now that you say warble and shimmer, I'm curious if I can note that same effect. Can you think of a particular audio track where the difference is noteable? Something that I have a decent shot at finding in both lossey and lossless formats? Not that I usually download music illegally, but this is different - it's for science!
Also, another thing that hasn't been mentioned is the fact that if you are ripping from a CD that has already compromised the audio, then lossless compression isn't going to give you back what was lost. I've heard people mention that the cymbals on The Who's "Live at Leeds" sounded good to them on the original LP, but the CD version is butchered and just provides layers of noise where the ride was being, well, ridden particularly hard.
And that point brings me to my next question, which is that if 44.1 KHz produces a constrained sound, doesn't that mean that all CDs are constrained? I've heard people say that 48KHz was much better, but I thought that the CD format just wasn't capable of that. So in essence, you could make an original recording at that rate, then compress it with FLAC and preserve the full range, but with a CD, that info is already gone. Your thoughts? And thanks for post - mod this dude up, informative!
Try something with cymbals.
Cymbals, eh? Holy smokes, I never would have thought of that. It's pretty hard to find any popular music that features them, but I'll make a special point of it. I don't mean to be snotty (oh wait, yes I did), but that's pretty obvious.
I think YOU should try cymbals, when you conduct your blind A/B test. Did you do the test? Until you do, I gotta lump you in with the people who buy 200 dollar power cables for their 10,000 dollar power amps. Congratulations on being a "connoisseur".
This guy mentions twice in the article that he's a big fan of losless audio compression. That's all the proof I need that he's a hype-driven goofball who really has no clue.
I've been a musician for over 20 years. I can easily hear the difference between single coil and humbucking pickups, and between a fuzz pedal that uses germanium trasistors and one that uses silicon. Those are subtle differences that the vast majority of people can't hear. What I can't hear is the difference between a properly done 192kbps/44khz mp3 rip and one made with FLAC. Now, I'm not saying that means that no one on earth can. I'm sure there are golden-eared freaks out there. But I would seriously crap out a brick if this dillhole Case could.
And before you let me know what a moron I am, be sure to conduct a blind A/B test yourself. It has to be blind, or it's just not scientific. Have a friend play two different versions for you, one a high quality mp3, and one FLAC, and see if you can tell. Since the odds of guessing correctly are 50/50, you need to repeat the experiment several times to be sure that you weren't just lucky. I'm here to tell you, it's a rare, rare person who can choose correctly ten times in a row.
And yet this guy is surprised that hardware makers haven't put these lossless codecs into their players? Most people are happy with FM audio quality, let alone FLAC. Case is useless, as proven by the fact that he hyped so many technologies that went nowhere. Extremetech, indeed - extremely stupid.
I agree with your not-so-controversial-round-these-parts opinion. If you want to support your favorite band, download all the free music you want, then buy their T-shirt. They make much more money from those than they do from their albums, especially if they are a new band in their first major label contract. Now you have the music and the T-shirt, and your favorite band has more coinage in their pockets than if you had bought the CD.
Being a RINO or DINO is just a cynical ploy to appeal to the moderate swing voters who decide elections. The party faithful on both sides have already made up their minds, long before the election. Appealing to the center is the key. Both McCain and Lieberman have come a lot closer to the presidency than most politicians, and both still have a shot at reaching the nation's top post.
I'm not saying that either one of them is Satan, but what they are is politicians, and successful ones at that. I don't hate the player, but the game pretty much stinks. In order to make it to the top, politicians absolutely must whore themselves and compromise their ideals. I applaude McCain for working to minimize the influence that money has on elections, but nevertheless, he has to exist in the current system, and so he is dirty.
If McCain was really "free thinker" he'd have opposed extending the Patriot Act. Or if he was a real free thinker, he'd have voted against it in the first place. But no, he and almost all of the rest of the Senate got swep up in a wave of post-9/11 panic, and voted for an unconstitutional law. Oh yeah, they're a regular bunch of Tom Paine's, our Senate.
As someone who was a temp at google for a few months, I can tell you from first hand knowledge that there is plenty of evil going on at GOOG. The first thing that jumps out at you is the company's age-ism: Google doesn't trust anyone over 30. They famously got sued for it. I was told to my face that one of the reasons I wasn't hired on as a regular employee was that I was too old. I was 32 at the time. Everyone else being hired for Google's then-fledgling Adwords department was 21 and right out of school.
The second type of bias that I saw there was what I call look-ism: everyone that worked in the Adwords department was gorgeous. And I'm not saying that anyone was unqualified. They were all bright kids who had just gotten out of good schools. But when you get hundreds of resumes for each available position, I guess you can afford to choose people who are both intelligent and attractive. So is that evil? You tell me.
It's probably easy to dismiss my comments because they come from someone who is bitter that he didn't get hired by them just a few months before the IPO. And you'd be correct. But I felt that my experience (I had several years at various high tech companies under my belt, including 2.5 years at Yahoo) made me MORE qualified than someone who had a degree from Stanford and no experience. GOOG did not agree.
I can't say enough about the food though. That guy Charlie who used to cook for the Dead is a culinary genius. So is it evil to pamper your sexy employees with swordfish steaks while 25 percent of America's children live below the poverty line? Again... you tell me.
I think that a person who only listens to singles misses out on a lot of great music, but I think that sometimes, the whole album just isn't worth having, and I know that ahead of time. I might have a Bannannarama (if I didn't spell that correctly, please keep it to yourself) song or two on my hard drive, but there's just no way I need a whole album.
I know the Bit torrent kicks monkey butt for finding whole albums, but suppose I just want one song? Napster was so great for that back in the day, and then Kazaa was pretty cool, but now I can't get Kazaa lite to connect. I've tried emule, but it's absurdly slow. Does emule work well for anyone else? Or is there someother good way to get singles?
I'm so tired of hearing about the "weird specialzed pieces". I've heard variations on that comment for 25 years. The fact is, you're a Lego luddite. It's tough to make anything but a wheel from one of Lego's wheel pieces, but the cars just don't work as well with square tires. So it seems obvious to me that a certain amount of specialization is required. And far from limiting your options, more types of bricks actually increases the options that are available to the builder.
And guess what? They still make plenty of sets that include little besides basic bricks. So the consumer has choice.
If you had your way, I guess we'd have nothing besides the basic 2x8 brick. Thank goodness we don't live in your world of sameness and lack of options, Lego Nazi!
I don't agree with your assertion that the price of gas in the US needs to stay low, but I do agree with you that public transportation is one of the best answers to the current dilemna. It's better to start biting the bullet of high fuel costs now, and allow migration to public transportation and alternative fuels to be more gradual.
Where I live, in San Jose, California, we built a light-rail system (sorta like a monorail, but with two rails) over the past couple of decades that had become something of a joke. It lost money hand over fist. But when gas prices shot up recently, it suddenly got a lot more popular. Ridership is up - 23 thousand people a day rode it on average in August of this year, up from 21k a year ago and 16k in the same month two years ago. So contrary to what you said, I think that $2.50 gas has already pushed some people on to public transportation.
The current war in Iraq and dozens of other military actions which were designed to secure our access to oil have cost us hundreds of billions. Why not ensure that the tab is picked up by the people who actually use the most gas? What more fair way to do that could there be than higher gas costs? It's the dickweeds in the Hummers who got us into this mess - let them pay for it.
I basically agree with your idea, but I don't really see it as a gas tax. I see it as allowing the true cost of obtaining oil to actually flow through the pump. That is, make people pay what the gas really costs. We've had cheap gas in the US for decades because we had deals with the Saudis where we provided them with fighter jets and missiles, and then we got our gas cheaper than anyone else. It was good for the US economy in the short term, but it was remarkably short-sighted.
The smart thing to do would have been to invest heavily in alternative fuels back in the 70's when President Carter urged us to do so. But since our nation is run by oilmen, we chose not to do that. We chose to spend billions on things like the Iraq war, which rather than lower the cost of fuel has raised it.
The summary doesn't mention this, but Toys R Us and Walmart aren't donating their shelf space. So the correct formula to determine the cost to MS isn't their cost minus retail price. It's the cost to MS to make the unit, minus whatever they sell the units to retailers for. So MS is losing more than the article summary states.
You call me a fag, but you seem to be the flamer around here, trollboy. Way to talk anonymous shit - you're a real man.