This article should be on the Onion, not slashdot.
I am an extremely critical listener, but this vinyl superiority stuff is nonsense. While there is a valid point that they have been mucking about making louder CDs to much, that doesn't make Vinyl superior.
Vinyl is not a better medium than digital aside from the nastalgia value. These days those "superior" vinyl albums likely come from digital masters, so vinyl is just adding another one more extra stage to the conversion.
I am old enough to have owned decent high quality turntable(not audiophile though), to have read reviews about moving coil and moving magnet pickup cartriges. I remember the glossy adverts for the pickups. I rejoiced when I got my first CD player and the noise floor nearly dissapeared.
These days I have gone a step further and tested the other modern bugaboo. Lossy compressed Audio (MP3).
Using high quality headphones a Denon reciever and optical output from my computer, with rate matched output to limit artifacts I did a lot of ABX testing, to try to find the merest telltale difference between the original Wave and a good quality (180VBR) mp3. You know what? I can't tell the difference using the most critical setup and being ultra critical on the listening.
I am not alone, the vast majority of snobbish audiophile wannabees that claim MP3s are offessive to listen to, can't actually pick them out when tested. There are freakish individuals who can, but chances are you are not one of them.
Says MP3 not installed by default would you like to install it. Excellent. Yes. This must be the simple MP3 install I was hearing about.... It does a too quick to read bit of install activity and tells me to restart Amorak. I do so...
Amorak Launches, it says MP3 support Not installed, would I like to install, errr. Yes... Endless loop, argh here we go again.
Next I head to the net. Find something about looking for restricted packages in add/remove programs. It is not there...
So no it is NOT easy. Not remotely easy. This is the third and likely last time I will ever install Linux, my first time was slackware in the 90's from a stack of floppies. Ironic that 10 years later and I am still having problems with sound.
It is still very clunky next to WindowsXp or Solaris.
In deciding between 64bit/32bit version, is there any downside to the 64 bit version. I notice something mentioned about sticking with 32bit version if you need 32 bit compatibility. Is wine more compatible with the 32 bit version?
Every once in a while (since slackware on floppies) I try Linux, end up disappointed (poor audio support, clunky).
I just got a new computer with Intel Cord Duo and I figure now is a good time to try again...
I am not a RH fan so I didn't get this album buy any method, but if I was interested, I would go download it elsewhere and decide if I liked it. If I did, I would then go to their site and buy it. How can I judge what to pay, if I don't know what I am getting? If a band I like does this, I am on board.
A few months back I saw an older game at the store I thought about buying. I downloaded it instead, played it, verified it wouldn't make me ill (motion sick problems with some games) and that it seemed like a good game. I then went out and bought the game. I haven't installed it though, because it contains copy protection annoyances that the downloaded version doesn't.
Counting downloads as lost sales doesn't make any sense. Some people are downloading to try it. Some others are pathological collectors who will download everything whether they even care about what they are downloading. What number of people downloading from BT are actually RH fans, who want this album, but don't want to pay for it? I don't know.
If you want a Mac you can buy a Mac, they are available online. Dell was #1 for a long time with only online sales. The problem is not availability. Macs are available for online purchase and they are available at apple stores and most big big electronics stores.
I am a multi-OS user and thought about giving Macs a try. But when you look at the lackluster choices in Hardware it easy to see why Macs are a niche. They sell only niche hardware. All in one desktops may look cool but they have all the functionality of a laptop without batteries.
Macs have a 3% market share and I bet that is more 5% laptop share and 1% desktop share. That 3% market share is another problem, because there is not much 3rd party software available. If you think 3% market share is not a problem, you are confused. This is a great limiter on 3rd party support. It is almost insignificant market compared to the PC market. 20% would be a good number to shoot for that would be too large to ignore as is, if I write shareware, Macs aren't even on the radar.
So we have niche hardware with limited software availability. An ok internet box for mom maybe, but anyone with wide ranging needs will look elsewhere.
If Apple wanted to grow market share they would sell some mainstream hardware, like a decent mini tower, or something (return of the cube?) with expansion capability and NO built in monitor. No the hideously crippled mini doesn't count, again it is a web surfing machine and little else.
I really wanted to give Macs a shot, but I could not get beyond lackluster hardware choices.
Let me address the argument, sure to follow, that only more technical users want expansion capabilities. Think for a second who makes computer purchasing decisions. It is always the techy friend or family member. By eliminating them from the user base, you essentially eliminate a large free sales force.
It is hard for me to look at Apples poor Mac performance and not think they have little interest in this space and are happier selling devices than computers and that is another reason to avoid Macs.
You are just assuming it lives up to it's exceptional claims.
The tighter a filter is, the harder it is put water through it. The easier it clogs and the sooner needs cleaning.
If you have used a a much more coarse Hiking filter you realize that this device is making claims that seem to require not just new technology but new physics.
The MSR pump allows you to exert a fair bit of force and you will get tired pumping a single liter. The MSR has a coarser (more open filter). The MSR will start to clog withing tens of liters of what looks like fairly clean water. You then need to clean the filter.
The MSR is actually one of the better filters on the market.
Now how can a filter that is supposedly much tighter, be easier to pump (squeeze bottle) and last for thousands of liters of brackish water with no cleaning requirements mentioned.
I also noticed no technical info when I clicked it on the web page.
Personally I would stay far away until there was independent lab reviews and field testing, because this really doesn't add up.
I see a lot of insults leveled at Indian programming teams and they are largely unwarranted IMO. I have been at my current (telecom) company for over a decade we have always used Indian Contractors. The results have NEVER been stellar, BUT we also bring many of the Indian contractors over here to work and they are EASILY the equal of their North American counterparts as individuals. There education is solid and they are motivated. Anyone disparaging the quality of the people hasn't met many in person.
The poor results of Indian outsourcing is largely due to project management difficulties, made more difficult by geographic separation, time zone difference and second language proficiency. Even managing between Canada/USA causes many issues and delivers poorer results than doing it in house.
But this is where it is going regardless. My company is rapidly outsourcing the bulk of staff to China/India, which I think will lead to long term failure due to project management issues and possibly loss of intellectual property.
I am in the process of training myself in new skills for eventual departure from my current company.
Do I recommend this profession. Absolutely not. IMO, there is place for the North American Computer Scientist, but only for those who love it enough to ignore my recommendations. You have to love what you are doing, you have to always be prepared to sell yourself for a new position because there is no such thing as a stable job in this field (IMO). That can be alright when you are younger but as I hit middle age some stability would be nice. If I had it all to do over again, this is not the field I would have entered, even though I was the kid building electronic circuits and reading memory maps of my Vic20 so I could poke stuff into memory. In many ways this is what I was meant to do, but I think it would have been more rewarding as a hobby.
Knowing everything I do now(about the market and myself), what would I have chosen? I would have become an optometrist and tinkered/coded as a Hobby.:-)
I don't find holding down shift as clean as "Left click, same tab", "middle click, new" tab behavior of Firefox. This is really the only thing that I find acceptable at this point.
Also de-selecting "reuse tab" now results near random reuse of the current tab, or opening a new one. This is much worse than the default.
Search in Opera highlights multiple instances of a word in pale gray both at work on Redhat and at home in XP, so it is not bright green by a long shot. It is so nearly invisible I didn't even realize for some time that Opera was even doing it.
I am not on a Mac, I want to make use of my mouse buttons instead shift-MB which is a waste and a PITA if you also use Firefox.
I was a long time Opera user until Firefox 1.0, but FF won me over with plugins and better default behaviors.
Like when you are looking at a page and you see something to search for, highlight and right click search for.... In Firefox you automatically get a new tab with the search, which is what I want. Opera overwrites the page you were reading with the search. Other features work similarly. You can hold down alt or something and get what you want.
Similarly with bookmarks. Firefox I middle click a bookmark in my bookmark bar and I get a new tab. Opera, nothing happens, if I left click it over-writes my current page. Seeing a pattern
Search in page. Firefox much better implementation with obvious highlighting.
Speed isn't enough to win me back.
So why use Opera at work. It is stable. Firefox crashes all the time on my Redhat corporate install. Perhaps something wrong with the Redhat because I have tried out IT supplied Firefox and my own DL copy with the same results.
A lot was stolen from Opera, it is time for Opera to steal back with some of the better interface elements of firefox.
Testing also revealed that Vista had changed it's driver model to virtualizing Vram into limited user address space, leading to minor things like crashing out in the midst of heated gaming sessions. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=3044
So we have slower gaming, crashing from memory space exhaustion, and networking reduced to a crawl if you play an audio file, and this is just recently and major headlines.
Basically you are very lucky if it works anywhere near as well as XP. For degraded performance/lower reliability you get what? Aero?
I realize that in a few years most of use will be using Vista, but I never touch a MS OS without at least 1 service pack. Vista is MS most unnecessary upgrade since Millennium.
I don't see a problem paying for bandwidth at a fair rate. As more and more services like downloadable HD movies, HD streaming etc come online, more bandwidth will be used.
If a fair rate is charged, there should be no problem. More bandwidth used, more profit for ISP's and then they will be able to build the supporting infrastructure/pay for the bandwidth.
Unlimited access doesn't seem to be something that can survive in the long term.
"Barcelona could be say 10x faster than anything Q6xx0 on Intel's"
BS: At what tasks?
Because Intel has already demonstrated near 4x performance with it's "untrue" quad core. You are not going to get more than 4x single core performance. There is only a tiny margin of efficiency of multi-cores that AMD could improve upon.
AMDs only real Barcelona hope is if it increases basic core performance significantly, there is no magical "real 4 core" performance leap to be had certainly not a 10X performance increases. That is impossible.
It seems the main selling point for Vista is DX10 exclusivity, which is aimed at gamers.
But Vista is slower than XP for games and now it appears that Vista has a second problem, it memory maps the entire Video memory into user address space, wasting this precious resource:
I went here to get Opera for my Redhat machine at work.
There are on the order of 40 different variants for download. If they are binary compatible, why isn't there just one or two? As there is for windows/OSX/Solaris.
I am not Open Source Hater, but I tend to agree with the article. Linux is totally fragmenting it's minuscule desktop share amongst 50 pseudo-compatible variations.
It seems like they are just getting their act together now on this and I am not certain all the original players support BD+. Many didn't support the Java interactivity features so how do we know this will work with older players.
If it doesn't work on older players you destroy they tiny market share you have built so far and hand the war to HD-DVD.
I guess we find out if/when someone actually releases a BD disk.
Unless this is supported on the old players this seems to be an academic discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
This article should be on the Onion, not slashdot.
I am an extremely critical listener, but this vinyl superiority stuff is nonsense. While there is a valid point that they have been mucking about making louder CDs to much, that doesn't make Vinyl superior.
Vinyl is not a better medium than digital aside from the nastalgia value. These days those "superior" vinyl albums likely come from digital masters, so vinyl is just adding another one more extra stage to the conversion.
I am old enough to have owned decent high quality turntable(not audiophile though), to have read reviews about moving coil and moving magnet pickup cartriges. I remember the glossy adverts for the pickups. I rejoiced when I got my first CD player and the noise floor nearly dissapeared.
These days I have gone a step further and tested the other modern bugaboo. Lossy compressed Audio (MP3).
Using high quality headphones a Denon reciever and optical output from my computer, with rate matched output to limit artifacts I did a lot of ABX testing, to try to find the merest telltale difference between the original Wave and a good quality (180VBR) mp3. You know what? I can't tell the difference using the most critical setup and being ultra critical on the listening.
I am not alone, the vast majority of snobbish audiophile wannabees that claim MP3s are offessive to listen to, can't actually pick them out when tested. There are freakish individuals who can, but chances are you are not one of them.
INstall Kubuntu 7.10 from standard live 7.10 DVD.
... It does a too quick to read bit of install activity and tells me to restart Amorak. I do so...
Click on MP3 file.
Amorak Launches.
Says MP3 not installed by default would you like to install it. Excellent. Yes. This must be the simple MP3 install I was hearing about.
Amorak Launches, it says MP3 support Not installed, would I like to install, errr. Yes... Endless loop, argh here we go again.
Next I head to the net. Find something about looking for restricted packages in add/remove programs. It is not there...
Search some more and find I should do this:
"sudo apt-get install kubuntu-restricted-extras"
Builds some dependency trees then reports:
E: Couldn't find package kubuntu-restricted-extras
So no it is NOT easy. Not remotely easy. This is the third and likely last time I will ever install Linux, my first time was slackware in the 90's from a stack of floppies. Ironic that 10 years later and I am still having problems with sound.
It is still very clunky next to WindowsXp or Solaris.
In deciding between 64bit/32bit version, is there any downside to the 64 bit version. I notice something mentioned about sticking with 32bit version if you need 32 bit compatibility. Is wine more compatible with the 32 bit version?
Every once in a while (since slackware on floppies) I try Linux, end up disappointed (poor audio support, clunky).
I just got a new computer with Intel Cord Duo and I figure now is a good time to try again...
I am not a RH fan so I didn't get this album buy any method, but if I was interested, I would go download it elsewhere and decide if I liked it. If I did, I would then go to their site and buy it. How can I judge what to pay, if I don't know what I am getting? If a band I like does this, I am on board.
A few months back I saw an older game at the store I thought about buying. I downloaded it instead, played it, verified it wouldn't make me ill (motion sick problems with some games) and that it seemed like a good game. I then went out and bought the game. I haven't installed it though, because it contains copy protection annoyances that the downloaded version doesn't.
Counting downloads as lost sales doesn't make any sense. Some people are downloading to try it. Some others are pathological collectors who will download everything whether they even care about what they are downloading. What number of people downloading from BT are actually RH fans, who want this album, but don't want to pay for it? I don't know.
In the computer industry everything gets cheaper with time, not more expensive.
If Apples cut is really only 15% do you have anything to back that up?
The Fall of the USD has been so fast (as it is not the rise of the CDN dollar at work), that prices will need quite some time to equalize.
Also if you are a foreign good producer, you want the Americans to pay Canadian prices, not the other way around.
Say a few years ago (simplification):
Profit point was:
$100USD, Canadian had to pay $140.
Now with the Fall in the USD, the profit point is:
$140 USD, $140 CDN.
but goods are priced at:
$100USD and $140 CDN...
This is a simplification, but you see the problem, US prices have to rise more than CDN prices have to fall.
Where prices finally settle will be determined by acceptable profit margins etc, what the US market will bear etc.
Meantime Canadian will have to travel to the USA to buy under priced goods, where they can save thousands on Automobiles for instance.
If you want a Mac you can buy a Mac, they are available online. Dell was #1 for a long time with only online sales. The problem is not availability. Macs are available for online purchase and they are available at apple stores and most big big electronics stores.
I am a multi-OS user and thought about giving Macs a try. But when you look at the lackluster choices in Hardware it easy to see why Macs are a niche. They sell only niche hardware. All in one desktops may look cool but they have all the functionality of a laptop without batteries.
Macs have a 3% market share and I bet that is more 5% laptop share and 1% desktop share. That 3% market share is another problem, because there is not much 3rd party software available. If you think 3% market share is not a problem, you are confused. This is a great limiter on 3rd party support. It is almost insignificant market compared to the PC market. 20% would be a good number to shoot for that would be too large to ignore as is, if I write shareware, Macs aren't even on the radar.
So we have niche hardware with limited software availability. An ok internet box for mom maybe, but anyone with wide ranging needs will look elsewhere.
If Apple wanted to grow market share they would sell some mainstream hardware, like a decent mini tower, or something (return of the cube?) with expansion capability and NO built in monitor. No the hideously crippled mini doesn't count, again it is a web surfing machine and little else.
I really wanted to give Macs a shot, but I could not get beyond lackluster hardware choices.
Let me address the argument, sure to follow, that only more technical users want expansion capabilities. Think for a second who makes computer purchasing decisions. It is always the techy friend or family member. By eliminating them from the user base, you essentially eliminate a large free sales force.
It is hard for me to look at Apples poor Mac performance and not think they have little interest in this space and are happier selling devices than computers and that is another reason to avoid Macs.
You are just assuming it lives up to it's exceptional claims.
The tighter a filter is, the harder it is put water through it. The easier it clogs and the sooner needs cleaning.
If you have used a a much more coarse Hiking filter you realize that this device is making claims that seem to require not just new technology but new physics.
This strikes me more likely a scam.
I am a hiker, I use an MSR pump filter.
The MSR pump allows you to exert a fair bit of force and you will get tired pumping a single liter.
The MSR has a coarser (more open filter).
The MSR will start to clog withing tens of liters of what looks like fairly clean water. You then need to clean the filter.
The MSR is actually one of the better filters on the market.
Now how can a filter that is supposedly much tighter, be easier to pump (squeeze bottle) and last for thousands of liters of brackish water with no cleaning requirements mentioned.
I also noticed no technical info when I clicked it on the web page.
Personally I would stay far away until there was independent lab reviews and field testing, because this really doesn't add up.
I see a lot of insults leveled at Indian programming teams and they are largely unwarranted IMO. I have been at my current (telecom) company for over a decade we have always used Indian Contractors. The results have NEVER been stellar, BUT we also bring many of the Indian contractors over here to work and they are EASILY the equal of their North American counterparts as individuals. There education is solid and they are motivated. Anyone disparaging the quality of the people hasn't met many in person.
:-)
The poor results of Indian outsourcing is largely due to project management difficulties, made more difficult by geographic separation, time zone difference and second language proficiency. Even managing between Canada/USA causes many issues and delivers poorer results than doing it in house.
But this is where it is going regardless. My company is rapidly outsourcing the bulk of staff to China/India, which I think will lead to long term failure due to project management issues and possibly loss of intellectual property.
I am in the process of training myself in new skills for eventual departure from my current company.
Do I recommend this profession. Absolutely not. IMO, there is place for the North American Computer Scientist, but only for those who love it enough to ignore my recommendations. You have to love what you are doing, you have to always be prepared to sell yourself for a new position because there is no such thing as a stable job in this field (IMO). That can be alright when you are younger but as I hit middle age some stability would be nice. If I had it all to do over again, this is not the field I would have entered, even though I was the kid building electronic circuits and reading memory maps of my Vic20 so I could poke stuff into memory. In many ways this is what I was meant to do, but I think it would have been more rewarding as a hobby.
Knowing everything I do now(about the market and myself), what would I have chosen? I would have become an optometrist and tinkered/coded as a Hobby.
Yes, but I use a bookmark bar, not the panel and this is just another sign of the inconsistency of behavior.
If the NDA is insane, don't sign it. This sounds like AMD want to filter all reviews. Certainly some will wait and just review it with no strings.
Sounds like we get the AMD official reviews monday, and the real reviews after you can buy it.
I don't find holding down shift as clean as "Left click, same tab", "middle click, new" tab behavior of Firefox. This is really the only thing that I find acceptable at this point.
Also de-selecting "reuse tab" now results near random reuse of the current tab, or opening a new one. This is much worse than the default.
Search in Opera highlights multiple instances of a word in pale gray both at work on Redhat and at home in XP, so it is not bright green by a long shot. It is so nearly invisible I didn't even realize for some time that Opera was even doing it.
I am not on a Mac, I want to make use of my mouse buttons instead shift-MB which is a waste and a PITA if you also use Firefox.
Thanks that is closer.
But still not exactly what I want.
Now bookmarks always open a new tab. FF behavior is better. Left click ->same tab, middle click ->new tab.
Page links now almost at random open in the current tab or open in a new tab, where again with FF I get left click ->current, middle click ->new.
These minor interface differences are a PITA for someone using both browsers.
I was a long time Opera user until Firefox 1.0, but FF won me over with plugins and better default behaviors.
Like when you are looking at a page and you see something to search for, highlight and right click search for....
In Firefox you automatically get a new tab with the search, which is what I want. Opera overwrites the page you were reading with the search. Other features work similarly. You can hold down alt or something and get what you want.
Similarly with bookmarks. Firefox I middle click a bookmark in my bookmark bar and I get a new tab. Opera, nothing happens, if I left click it over-writes my current page. Seeing a pattern
Search in page. Firefox much better implementation with obvious highlighting.
Speed isn't enough to win me back.
So why use Opera at work. It is stable. Firefox crashes all the time on my Redhat corporate install. Perhaps something wrong with the Redhat because I have tried out IT supplied Firefox and my own DL copy with the same results.
A lot was stolen from Opera, it is time for Opera to steal back with some of the better interface elements of firefox.
I get a chuckle out of people who pay to beta test products.
C xoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
? i=3044
The truth is that there are a host of issues.
The best experiences I have heard from anyone is that it is almost as good as XP.
Reviews that tested gaming performance, show Vista slower across the board.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMzNCw2L
Testing also revealed that Vista had changed it's driver model to virtualizing Vram into limited user address space, leading to minor things like crashing out in the midst of heated gaming sessions.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Vista brings networking to a crawl when playing audio:
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?t=83112
So we have slower gaming, crashing from memory space exhaustion, and networking reduced to a crawl if you play an audio file, and this is just recently and major headlines.
Basically you are very lucky if it works anywhere near as well as XP. For degraded performance/lower reliability you get what? Aero?
I realize that in a few years most of use will be using Vista, but I never touch a MS OS without at least 1 service pack. Vista is MS most unnecessary upgrade since Millennium.
People are forced to go to Vista if they want DX10. Win.
PC gaming is further messed up and more people go to console (Xbox). Win.
The downside for Microsoft is what? People pissed with Microsoft tactics? Yeah that would be new...
I don't see a problem paying for bandwidth at a fair rate. As more and more services like downloadable HD movies, HD streaming etc come online, more bandwidth will be used.
If a fair rate is charged, there should be no problem. More bandwidth used, more profit for ISP's and then they will be able to build the supporting infrastructure/pay for the bandwidth.
Unlimited access doesn't seem to be something that can survive in the long term.
This was indeed a paid for choice, they are probably making little money on either format right now so it seemed like easy money I guess:
s ney.html?ei=5088&en=d4e1f285e2f41437&ex=1345348800 &adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=118769814 3-B5wO3L/F+4r1NyAsum87vQ
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/technology/21di
Though Paramount joins my shit list for extending the stupid war.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8046
I think the dust to dust, Hummer comparison folk were just a tad disingenuous.
"Barcelona could be say 10x faster than anything Q6xx0 on Intel's"
BS: At what tasks?
Because Intel has already demonstrated near 4x performance with it's "untrue" quad core. You are not going to get more than 4x single core performance. There is only a tiny margin of efficiency of multi-cores that AMD could improve upon.
AMDs only real Barcelona hope is if it increases basic core performance significantly, there is no magical "real 4 core" performance leap to be had certainly not a 10X performance increases. That is impossible.
It seems the main selling point for Vista is DX10 exclusivity, which is aimed at gamers.
? i=3044&p=1
But Vista is slower than XP for games and now it appears that Vista has a second problem, it memory maps the entire Video memory into user address space, wasting this precious resource:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Also this is not done for performance reasons, but seems to be part of Microsofts efforts to tighten the DRM screws.
So vista gives gamers DX10 which is currently pointless, slows performance and steals address space leading to more crashes. Yay Vista.
Yuk.
http://www.opera.com/download/
I went here to get Opera for my Redhat machine at work.
There are on the order of 40 different variants for download. If they are binary compatible, why isn't there just one or two? As there is for windows/OSX/Solaris.
I am not Open Source Hater, but I tend to agree with the article. Linux is totally fragmenting it's minuscule desktop share amongst 50 pseudo-compatible variations.
It seems like they are just getting their act together now on this and I am not certain all the original players support BD+. Many didn't support the Java interactivity features so how do we know this will work with older players.
If it doesn't work on older players you destroy they tiny market share you have built so far and hand the war to HD-DVD.
I guess we find out if/when someone actually releases a BD disk.
Unless this is supported on the old players this seems to be an academic discussion.