Sometimes I like the Old Fashioned fun of getting outdoors and riding my bike. Of course, I have a GBA duct taped to my handlebars so I can have some real fun. It's fairly low impact... most of the time.
If you have a lot of passwords, use a program to store them in encrypted form and have one good rotating password to open them all up. Ultimately I guess one of these could be cracked but it's a distant chance and thus a good compromise for someone who's got a lot to keep track of.
Look at the number of music download services that are referenced in the article. Every damn company has to have one it seems. If anything this will guarantee they all fail because nobody wants to have to go to a number of different sites, figure out how to use them and be disappointed none has all the songs they want. As long as iTunes has a similar sized catalogue to the US version all these little crappy sites will only be a help to iTunes consumer acceptance.
Please, the first 3 weren't made just for kids. There is an edge to the films and some important psychological parts that kids just don't get. Add to that a fair number of adult-oriented jokes and the father-son dimension and I think there's a really good balance between kid and adult angles. The new films have none of the adult components, they're just schlock, violence and animation. They have none of the character or plot motivation of the originals- that's why adults hate them.
I took it and it was certainly possible that more than one of the 6 test files were duplicates, otherwise you wouldn't be testing every codec (since there are 6). Also, you only submit the results once. Only in the ABX "practice" mode can you do the same sample (but randomly reversed) over and over. So it seems to me that there's a lot of room for error.
I don't think that consistency plays any factor in the test. Again, I don't know how the results are tabulated, but certain scenarios could totally skew the results. For example, if everyone chose the original as sounding worse than the codec because they thought they heard a difference on their crappy speakers, the results for that codec would be really screwed up. Even if you had a few people who always could tell the difference, their vote would be lost in the sea of other votes. Even worse, if everyone in the test was using crappy speakers, there would appear to be little absolute difference between the codecs. Likely they'd all be close to 5. This gives you no insight into the absolute difference between the codecs, even if they were all less than the original.
I'm not sure how the averaging works in the final results but if it's weighted and you have 100,000 people with bad speakers and 10 with good speakers any meaningful difference in the results will be negated. Most likely as time goes on the larger sampling population will bring results that are all very close to 5 regardless of codec.
Not having the equipment or the desire to hear details doesn't mean there isn't a difference. The point of doing the 128kbps test is to systematically document the advancing quality of low bit rate audio codecs. Nothing will ever convince all the audiophiles 128 is the way to go because most of them don't need compression. You should be thankful that they push the market to improve low quality codecs so that the rest of the world gets to hear better music. Remember a few years ago when 128kbps MP3 had splashy effects in it? If the few gave in to the majority nothing would ever improve.
On the best speakers you will almost always hear the differences. Naturally the system has to be up to the task as well but the difference between 128 and original is as wide as hearing a real instrument vs. a recording of the same instrument. It's true, on most speakers you will never hear the difference but that doesn't mean it's not there. And it doesn't take a "golden ear" to hear the difference. You can tell as soon as the music starts that something isn't right. Headphones are even worse because they lack any sense of realistic scale. Most of what humans are good at hearing is "action" which is more the feeling of the nuances of the music, not whether all the frequencies are completely correct. Codecs usually get the frequencies right, they just completely kill the "touch" or "action" of the music. For a nice description of these nuances (short of listening to a great stereo yourself), this is a good review:
As has been pointed out in other posts, Canadian companies and work environments tend to be on the low end of the competitiveness scale. The preferred mindset seems to be "keep things steady and we will all have jobs for a long time." For most companies this works fine but it doesn't create a very challenging or interesting workplace. The government is the extreme example of this. If creativity or advancement are on your agenda you will probably be disappointed. Canada has far fewer start-up type companies because the markets are small and widely spaced. There just isn't the opportunity or the infrastructure to support many really dynamic companies.
I really don't agree. The writing process on paper is a cumulative process. For most people they have little idea of the topic at hand so writing a first draft just gets something of an idea on paper. As they write, they think of more ideas, some better, some worse that make it into a second draft. By the third or fourth draft you have a very solid, multifaceted argument that you're intimately aware of because you know every word. This does take a lot of effort for a beginner, but it builds critical thinking skills because you have an incentive to write richly the first time to limit the number of drafts. As time goes on you plan things out in your head and the whole process becomes very productive and intelligible.
On the computer, there are really no boundaries to flow and no chronological building process. If you've already learned the traditional essay writing procedure and have critical thinking skills it doesn't matter so much because a computer just makes that process easier. But, if you're a beginner, you end up putting down random ideas and you spend most of your time re-organising them and quite often no one idea takes prominence. I think that's what the teacher is referring to.
Computers are only tools which make writing easier. They don't teach writing or critical thinking.
Not if the dialog said something to the effect of "This applet involves emptying the trash, please provide your admin password." It would take like 10 seconds to code that in. If you were a real stickler you could have a check option that said "Ignore this warning in the future". There, everyone's happy.
It's not even as complicated as that. Why isn't there a system alert when the Home folder is moved or moved to the trash? Apple has always had this kind of thing for other folders, it should be no different with this. Barring that, perhaps AppleScript should have limitations (or dialogs) regarding emptying the trash. If it's allowed to do it, there should be an admin prompt when you run the AppleScript.
Those that like Spatial desktops have few files and use the same files repeatedly. Those that like Browser desktops have many files that are always changing and have deep hierarchies. They both work great for their specific user but if you can't interchange them. People simply work better with space as an organizer when it's a limited number of things their working with. Large numbers need lists, and nested lists.
Even though eBay is the defacto marketplace for selling personal items online, bad service or lack of accountability will eventually erode its business. No business regardless of size or market share is immune from disatisfied customers, especially in such a liquid communal market as eBay - word travels fast.
It's been my experience, and I can see this in my friends who've used eBay that there's a lifespan to using eBay which pretty much follows the bell curve. The steps are basically:
1. Initial awe and amazement
2. Lots of impulse purchases
3. "Hey, I can make great money selling crap"
4. "Hey, I can make great money beating the system"
5. A couple bad experiences either buying or selling
7. Losing interest in buying
8. No items left to sell/effort too large for profits
9. Disillusionment with high eBay fees
10. One really bad experience buying (less so selling)
11. Beginning to hate eBay's policies
12. Realizing anything you want costs more on eBay
13. Almost never using eBay
It's pretty clear to me where the curve starts plunging downward - whenever there's a need to use eBay or PayPal feedback/protection/or dispute resolution.
Eventually eBay will run out of customers to cycle through and another competitor will snap them up. Likely they'll just target experienced eBayers and provide them with a dispute resolution service that introduces accountability. If eBay wants to fix the curve they should do the same for themselves and keep their users for the long term.
If you're thinking of headphones I can recommend the Audio Technica ATH-M30. I use them in my record store for listening stations and they're both excellent quality and very reliable. At $49 on Amazon you can't do better. I'm a bit of an audio nut and I've tried most everything.
My point was in relation to recognition of the whole. A picture on a piece of paper remains intact and useful as a picture on a piece of paper for hundreds of years even if it has minor blemishes. Corrupt the directory on a CD, or even part of an important file even slightly and it's likely you've lost the content in its entirety. Vinyl's just an example for audio, which is the angle the article took.
You'll find 60 or 70 year old records that sound and play just fine. There is next to no deterioration of either the sleeve or the record if they're stored and unplayed. I'd imagine the lifespan would easily be hundreds of years. Sure, you get some deterioration in the form of clicks and pops but you'll never get a complete failure like a digital or even magnetic medium. Now that MP3-for-pay is coming of age, finding a stable medium is going to be a top priority for the average person. Heck, most people don't even backup their hard drives and duping CD-Rs is time consuming and wasteful.
Since most everyone who uses a computer is using it to get things done, most distro reviews end pretty quickly because there aren't any desktop apps to torture test with. Most major news sources test audio, video, graphics, games, and word processor suites to gauge the seamlessness or work flow of the OS. Linux doesn't really have any serious average-person work apps yet. While the OS might be solid and getting nicer to look at all the reviews end on that anti-climax as the article writer pointed out. It's like reviewing a nice new car that has no tires- you just sit there waiting until the tires arrive to drive it.
Read any reputable site's Mac or Windows review and you'll see that they're concerned with how easy it is to get programs to work together and to get work done easily and quickly. Heck, even Windows has the menus pretty much sorted out and it will run for weeks if you don't launch anything... that's not why people use it.
The parent poster has got the thinking right. I run a record/CD store so I have lots of opportunity to talk with customers about their digital music needs. The basic trends are:
1. People want vinyl records. They see it as a format from simpler times. They hate CDs for any number of reasons and vinyl lets them just listen to music.
2. People buy CDs, copy them and sell them back. For those that rip they use MP3 and they don't care about quality. They hate any compressed format other than MP3 because it's one extra choice they don't want to think about.
3. The only people that are happy with digital music are the ones that have an iPod because they see it has being their whole collection in a little box. People who listen to music on their computer jukebox, or any of the competing portable players complain about the experience for any number of reasons.
4. The people who do know about DRM or any new formats have sworn to never use them.
Overall from what I see, the trend is to actively resist any kind of format that requires too much decision making, too much restriction, or which makes too much extra work. This negative wave has extended back against CDs and no one wants the majority of them because they have no physical character. I think from here on out, all new consumer audio and video formats are going to have a huge problem with adoption. The effort to adopt them is well past the acceptable limit of consumers. Need we mention DVD-A or SACD?
I've often found that Japanese games have a nice rhythm of gameplay. The game moves along at a kind of relaxing pace with the next few moves easily "felt". A lot of FPS and US games seem to have lots of empty-time and lots of high energy time but not a nice constant rhythm.
The "clean" version they've made is really a disgrace to any historian or music lover. The original was actually recorded very well and has a near perfect equalization. It sounds very natural and it's rare to hear the treble so extended on early recordings. The new version has no highs and the mid range is filled with gaussian noise and is far too prominent. Even a half-deaf recording engineer would notice that right away. Sure, the clicks and pops are reduced, but the music is completely ruined as well. I just hope they're keeping high resolution originals as well as these hacked versions.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the G5 is doing all this in real time with the standard internal disks right? Is this not impressive in itself? How many stock Windows boxes do this and what do they cost? Beyond that, how easy are those apps to use compared to Apple's?
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Sometimes I like the Old Fashioned fun of getting outdoors and riding my bike. Of course, I have a GBA duct taped to my handlebars so I can have some real fun. It's fairly low impact... most of the time.
If you have a lot of passwords, use a program to store them in encrypted form and have one good rotating password to open them all up. Ultimately I guess one of these could be cracked but it's a distant chance and thus a good compromise for someone who's got a lot to keep track of.
Look at the number of music download services that are referenced in the article. Every damn company has to have one it seems. If anything this will guarantee they all fail because nobody wants to have to go to a number of different sites, figure out how to use them and be disappointed none has all the songs they want. As long as iTunes has a similar sized catalogue to the US version all these little crappy sites will only be a help to iTunes consumer acceptance.
Please, the first 3 weren't made just for kids. There is an edge to the films and some important psychological parts that kids just don't get. Add to that a fair number of adult-oriented jokes and the father-son dimension and I think there's a really good balance between kid and adult angles. The new films have none of the adult components, they're just schlock, violence and animation. They have none of the character or plot motivation of the originals- that's why adults hate them.
I took it and it was certainly possible that more than one of the 6 test files were duplicates, otherwise you wouldn't be testing every codec (since there are 6). Also, you only submit the results once. Only in the ABX "practice" mode can you do the same sample (but randomly reversed) over and over. So it seems to me that there's a lot of room for error.
I don't think that consistency plays any factor in the test. Again, I don't know how the results are tabulated, but certain scenarios could totally skew the results. For example, if everyone chose the original as sounding worse than the codec because they thought they heard a difference on their crappy speakers, the results for that codec would be really screwed up. Even if you had a few people who always could tell the difference, their vote would be lost in the sea of other votes. Even worse, if everyone in the test was using crappy speakers, there would appear to be little absolute difference between the codecs. Likely they'd all be close to 5. This gives you no insight into the absolute difference between the codecs, even if they were all less than the original.
I'm not sure how the averaging works in the final results but if it's weighted and you have 100,000 people with bad speakers and 10 with good speakers any meaningful difference in the results will be negated. Most likely as time goes on the larger sampling population will bring results that are all very close to 5 regardless of codec.
Not having the equipment or the desire to hear details doesn't mean there isn't a difference. The point of doing the 128kbps test is to systematically document the advancing quality of low bit rate audio codecs. Nothing will ever convince all the audiophiles 128 is the way to go because most of them don't need compression. You should be thankful that they push the market to improve low quality codecs so that the rest of the world gets to hear better music. Remember a few years ago when 128kbps MP3 had splashy effects in it? If the few gave in to the majority nothing would ever improve.
Sorry, wrong link:
"action" take 2
On the best speakers you will almost always hear the differences. Naturally the system has to be up to the task as well but the difference between 128 and original is as wide as hearing a real instrument vs. a recording of the same instrument. It's true, on most speakers you will never hear the difference but that doesn't mean it's not there. And it doesn't take a "golden ear" to hear the difference. You can tell as soon as the music starts that something isn't right. Headphones are even worse because they lack any sense of realistic scale. Most of what humans are good at hearing is "action" which is more the feeling of the nuances of the music, not whether all the frequencies are completely correct. Codecs usually get the frequencies right, they just completely kill the "touch" or "action" of the music. For a nice description of these nuances (short of listening to a great stereo yourself), this is a good review:
"action" defined
As has been pointed out in other posts, Canadian companies and work environments tend to be on the low end of the competitiveness scale. The preferred mindset seems to be "keep things steady and we will all have jobs for a long time." For most companies this works fine but it doesn't create a very challenging or interesting workplace. The government is the extreme example of this. If creativity or advancement are on your agenda you will probably be disappointed. Canada has far fewer start-up type companies because the markets are small and widely spaced. There just isn't the opportunity or the infrastructure to support many really dynamic companies.
I really don't agree. The writing process on paper is a cumulative process. For most people they have little idea of the topic at hand so writing a first draft just gets something of an idea on paper. As they write, they think of more ideas, some better, some worse that make it into a second draft. By the third or fourth draft you have a very solid, multifaceted argument that you're intimately aware of because you know every word. This does take a lot of effort for a beginner, but it builds critical thinking skills because you have an incentive to write richly the first time to limit the number of drafts. As time goes on you plan things out in your head and the whole process becomes very productive and intelligible.
On the computer, there are really no boundaries to flow and no chronological building process. If you've already learned the traditional essay writing procedure and have critical thinking skills it doesn't matter so much because a computer just makes that process easier. But, if you're a beginner, you end up putting down random ideas and you spend most of your time re-organising them and quite often no one idea takes prominence. I think that's what the teacher is referring to.
Computers are only tools which make writing easier. They don't teach writing or critical thinking.
Not if the dialog said something to the effect of "This applet involves emptying the trash, please provide your admin password." It would take like 10 seconds to code that in. If you were a real stickler you could have a check option that said "Ignore this warning in the future". There, everyone's happy.
It's not even as complicated as that. Why isn't there a system alert when the Home folder is moved or moved to the trash? Apple has always had this kind of thing for other folders, it should be no different with this. Barring that, perhaps AppleScript should have limitations (or dialogs) regarding emptying the trash. If it's allowed to do it, there should be an admin prompt when you run the AppleScript.
Those that like Spatial desktops have few files and use the same files repeatedly. Those that like Browser desktops have many files that are always changing and have deep hierarchies. They both work great for their specific user but if you can't interchange them. People simply work better with space as an organizer when it's a limited number of things their working with. Large numbers need lists, and nested lists.
Even though eBay is the defacto marketplace for selling personal items online, bad service or lack of accountability will eventually erode its business. No business regardless of size or market share is immune from disatisfied customers, especially in such a liquid communal market as eBay - word travels fast.
It's been my experience, and I can see this in my friends who've used eBay that there's a lifespan to using eBay which pretty much follows the bell curve. The steps are basically:
1. Initial awe and amazement
2. Lots of impulse purchases
3. "Hey, I can make great money selling crap"
4. "Hey, I can make great money beating the system"
5. A couple bad experiences either buying or selling
7. Losing interest in buying
8. No items left to sell/effort too large for profits
9. Disillusionment with high eBay fees
10. One really bad experience buying (less so selling)
11. Beginning to hate eBay's policies
12. Realizing anything you want costs more on eBay
13. Almost never using eBay
It's pretty clear to me where the curve starts plunging downward - whenever there's a need to use eBay or PayPal feedback/protection/or dispute resolution.
Eventually eBay will run out of customers to cycle through and another competitor will snap them up. Likely they'll just target experienced eBayers and provide them with a dispute resolution service that introduces accountability. If eBay wants to fix the curve they should do the same for themselves and keep their users for the long term.
If you're thinking of headphones I can recommend the Audio Technica ATH-M30. I use them in my record store for listening stations and they're both excellent quality and very reliable. At $49 on Amazon you can't do better. I'm a bit of an audio nut and I've tried most everything.
My point was in relation to recognition of the whole. A picture on a piece of paper remains intact and useful as a picture on a piece of paper for hundreds of years even if it has minor blemishes. Corrupt the directory on a CD, or even part of an important file even slightly and it's likely you've lost the content in its entirety. Vinyl's just an example for audio, which is the angle the article took.
You'll find 60 or 70 year old records that sound and play just fine. There is next to no deterioration of either the sleeve or the record if they're stored and unplayed. I'd imagine the lifespan would easily be hundreds of years. Sure, you get some deterioration in the form of clicks and pops but you'll never get a complete failure like a digital or even magnetic medium. Now that MP3-for-pay is coming of age, finding a stable medium is going to be a top priority for the average person. Heck, most people don't even backup their hard drives and duping CD-Rs is time consuming and wasteful.
Since most everyone who uses a computer is using it to get things done, most distro reviews end pretty quickly because there aren't any desktop apps to torture test with. Most major news sources test audio, video, graphics, games, and word processor suites to gauge the seamlessness or work flow of the OS. Linux doesn't really have any serious average-person work apps yet. While the OS might be solid and getting nicer to look at all the reviews end on that anti-climax as the article writer pointed out. It's like reviewing a nice new car that has no tires- you just sit there waiting until the tires arrive to drive it.
Read any reputable site's Mac or Windows review and you'll see that they're concerned with how easy it is to get programs to work together and to get work done easily and quickly. Heck, even Windows has the menus pretty much sorted out and it will run for weeks if you don't launch anything... that's not why people use it.
This is what I meant by "simple" in relation to LPs, thanks for the expansion.
The parent poster has got the thinking right. I run a record/CD store so I have lots of opportunity to talk with customers about their digital music needs. The basic trends are:
1. People want vinyl records. They see it as a format from simpler times. They hate CDs for any number of reasons and vinyl lets them just listen to music.
2. People buy CDs, copy them and sell them back. For those that rip they use MP3 and they don't care about quality. They hate any compressed format other than MP3 because it's one extra choice they don't want to think about.
3. The only people that are happy with digital music are the ones that have an iPod because they see it has being their whole collection in a little box. People who listen to music on their computer jukebox, or any of the competing portable players complain about the experience for any number of reasons.
4. The people who do know about DRM or any new formats have sworn to never use them.
Overall from what I see, the trend is to actively resist any kind of format that requires too much decision making, too much restriction, or which makes too much extra work. This negative wave has extended back against CDs and no one wants the majority of them because they have no physical character. I think from here on out, all new consumer audio and video formats are going to have a huge problem with adoption. The effort to adopt them is well past the acceptable limit of consumers. Need we mention DVD-A or SACD?
I've often found that Japanese games have a nice rhythm of gameplay. The game moves along at a kind of relaxing pace with the next few moves easily "felt". A lot of FPS and US games seem to have lots of empty-time and lots of high energy time but not a nice constant rhythm.
The "clean" version they've made is really a disgrace to any historian or music lover. The original was actually recorded very well and has a near perfect equalization. It sounds very natural and it's rare to hear the treble so extended on early recordings. The new version has no highs and the mid range is filled with gaussian noise and is far too prominent. Even a half-deaf recording engineer would notice that right away. Sure, the clicks and pops are reduced, but the music is completely ruined as well. I just hope they're keeping high resolution originals as well as these hacked versions.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the G5 is doing all this in real time with the standard internal disks right? Is this not impressive in itself? How many stock Windows boxes do this and what do they cost? Beyond that, how easy are those apps to use compared to Apple's?