Most of the venom surrounding UAC is directed at the pants-on-head-retarded implementation, not the idea. UAC is MS's cack-handed attempt to re-invent sudo.
Unlike sudo, UAC doesn't prompt you for an admin password by default—bad. Unlike sudo, UAC doesn't offer the option to remember your credentials for a preset period so you don't have to keep swatting it down mid-task—bad. Unlike sudo, UAC doesn't log commands issued through it by default, or even offer an option to do so—terribad. This is one place where even Apple culti^H^H^H^H^Henthusiasts wouldn't complain if MS just copied them straight up, as it would actually do a bit to improve the state of things. Faced with this seemingly simple choice though, MS contracted an acute case of NIH-itis and regurgitated this mess upon us.
tl;dr - we bitch about UAC because we do know better.
I've been reading through Surface Detail recently, and it seems tailor-made for a screen adaptation: murder, corruption, intrigue, and a fight for the souls of the departed. They'd have to tone down the hell scenes a bit from what the book depicts, but overall I think it would work rather well.
...an mp3 converted from aac is going to sound worse than one converted from a CD, to me.
Not just to you. MP3 and AAC are both lossy compression algorithms. Which psymodel fits you better is a matter of taste, but there's no doubt that both throw away parts of the song that they think you can't hear. Running a song through both in sequence, then, will lead to a demonstrably lower quality file.
Which, incidentally, is the whole point of the submitter's call to distribute music in FLAC. FLAC is lossless, so you can transcode from it to whatever format you please without suffering the double-degradation problem of transcoding from one lossy format to another.
I'm not fond of how each bit below the summary has its own line with surrounding whitespace. Concatenate that into one or two lines so that I don't have to scroll down as much to start reading the comments.
Also, the navbar on the left bleeds over when I set the browser window to 1024x768. Would prefer to see the site scale gracefully down to 840x1050, so that I can have two windows open side-by side on a standard 22" monitor.
I'm not terribly fond of the gray border around the edges either; it's just wasted space.
Would prefer a white-on-black display option for low-light viewing; having to monkey with style-sheets to get something consistent is a pain.
As others have mentioned, comment preview is very slow, though it speeds up somewhat for subsequent edits to the comment before submitting.
Sadly, there are many games that fail to recognize any mouse buttons beyond the basic 3 (left, right, middle). Additionally, there are mouses out there with >5 buttons, and almost no game I've seen recognizes mouse6-mouse11 for keybinding.
For these reasons, and many more (macros, custom sensitivity stages, bypassing Windows's awful acceleration curve, &c.), installing mouse drivers often makes sense.
They don't mention OpenGL because they've already got people who are good at that; the PS3 port of the Source engine proves this. What they're after here is somebody who can dive into the hairy backend code, and do the massive amount of work needed to decouple the game code from the Win32 platform.
Y'know, I haven't yet missed out on those other tracks, as the first thing I do when I look up a song on iTunes is preview the other tracks on the album...heck, I'll often go through an artist or group's entire discography--as much of it as is represented in the iTMS catalog, anyway.
And you know what? Sometimes the 2 or 3 songs you hear on the radio really are the only good ones.
Other times, I've listened to the artist's other songs, re-listened to the one I came for, and decided that I didn't really need that track after all. Still others had me buying three or four of the artist's albums. With independent artists, this has me going to Magnatune for FLAC copies, for ease of transcoding operations. For artists signed with major labels, this has been by seeking out the actual CD, as DRMed 160k AAC doesn't really appeal to me, for many reasons. With iTunes Plus, however, I may decide that 256k AAC is good enough for me with some kinds of music, and grab those tracks individually.
And I'm hardly the only one I know who does this.
So, to be honest, the CD really doesn't matter. What matters is the album, which, it is being argued, doesn't need to be tied to the CDDA format anymore.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
Err, provided of course, you commit yourself to only ever using that distro's package management system of choice, right?
If I never see another RPM failed dependency due to having had to compile a lib from.tgz, I'll be happy. Then give Gentoo a spin. It compiles everything from source, and Portage never breaks a dependency--unless you decide to install everything from the unstable tree, and there you're getting what you asked for. <g> Granted, installing it is a long and involved procedure, but the install documentation lays it out clearly enough that most mid-to-high skill users can do it without much trouble. And, as an added bonus, the folks in the Gentoo IRC channels are some of the friendliest and most knowledgeable people I've come across. The whole philosophy with Gentoo is about not just choice, but educated choice. Once you're done, you'll have a system configured the way you want it, with only the software you asked for, and optimized for your hardware to boot. Sure, it's not the distro of choice for the technically challenged...but we have Ubuntu for that.
Though I have to admit, I've had more trouble with three different versions of Ubuntu (Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, and Feisty Fawn) than I've ever had with Gentoo when it comes to getting a new system up and running. Sure, Ubuntu goes on faster, but getting issues resolved--static IP configuration and getting OpenAL to work correctly with my games, to name a couple--was a lot more difficult. The response time on the Ubuntu forums is a whole lot slower than I'm accustomed to, and most of the replies were
precooked generic fixes that were copypasta-ed from existing sources, and inapplicable to my setup, or in some cases Ubuntu in general
or, the functional equivalent of "lol, dunno"
So, after a month or so of wrestling with it each time, I always ended up going back to Gentoo. Doing up the necessary config files took all of a half hour--this on a dual-boot XP/Linux machine with a partitioning scheme funkier than a straight-to-video blacksploitation flick. Once I had my list of basic packages and meta-packages to install typed in, I walked away, went to bed, and it was ready to go the next morning. I've had this latest install going for half a year, and the worst issue I've run into is the occasional hung process. Pop open KSysGuard, kill the process, move on with life.
Note what I said above, meta-packages, Gentoo not only abstracts the dependency issues to the point where you barely have to think about them, it goes one step further and allows you to ignore the package names for certain functional groups of software altogether.
So, if you're really and truly fed up with rpms, give Gentoo a spin. It requires some work on the front end, but the results are well worth it.
GPP's point was taken, I was responding to PP's delusion that using AAC again wouldn't degrade the signal, as opposed to using a different lossy codec on the 2nd go 'round.
there's still a lot of 4:3 content that will burn itself "nicely" into the phosphor
Friend, the aspect ratio of the image hasn't a blessed thing to do with phosphor burn-in. Burn-in occurs when you have a static image that is projected onto the screen continuously, past the phosphor's limit of "forgetfulness". You don't want your phosphors to remember what color they used to be, because then they won't be the color they're supposed to be now. Properly done, the letterboxes can't be "burned in", because the plasma display would simply turn off the unused pixels. (Not sure if any do this, or if they all display a "pseudo-black" image, which would indeed cause burn-in.) CRT's do indeed have this problem, though manufacturers have done much to lengthen the burn-in time past the point where most uses would casue problems.
And if the black space bothers you that much, a nice status display, stock/news ticker, or abstract pattern would be a possible fix.
Your commentary about the quality of tv shows aside, you're kinda missing the point. TiVo isn't designed to archive, it's designed to time-shift. The whole point of TiVo is that you can watch what you want, when you want. You set it to record the shows you want to see, and then play them back at your leisure. So if they're running Futurama reruns at 0-dark-30 in the morning, fine and dandy. With TiVo, I can watch them the next morning with my cereal. In effect, it's a more flexible replacement for all those VCR's that have VCRPlus functionality.
You're half-right. Burning to CD does not, indeed, degrade the signal any. However, re-encoding the track with ANY lossy codec (AAC included) will degrade the quailty, as the waveform will have bits of it stripped out twice. The only real (read: significant to audio quality) differences between AAC and MP3 are the psychoacoustic models used, and the bit-packing methods. Which is better is an argument for these folks, but the fact remains that both are lossy codecs, and therefore suffer from the re-encoding entropy problem.
Pff. Logitech wouldn't know speaker clarity if it leapt up and smacked them in the face. Listen to a set of Klipsh ProMedia Ultra 5.1's some time, and it will.:D
Only thing the Z680 set has going for it is a loud sub, and if the Klipsch sub isn't earth-rattling enough for you, you can add on an extra sub (or two, or three, or twenty!) through its SWS Link.
So remind me why I should spend $50 more for an inferior system?
If I'm not mistaken, isn't the telecom industry in Sweden directly controlled by the government? Over in the US the telcos are privately owned, so any truly large-scale change in infrastructure must either be mandated by federal law--a process that takes literally decades to get going--or it must have blindingly obvious business benefits--which means only a few forward-thinking corps will implement, leaving the rest to play catch up over the next 20 years or so.
Add to that the expense: Government owned institutions have no problem spending massive amounts of money on infrastructure improvements, as they've got a guaranteed source of funding. Private companies are usually gun-shy when that sort of thing is mentioned, though. They're content to wait until the old system is so thoroughly buggered up that an upgrade is necessary to maintain basic QoS.
What's so amazing about that? Carl Jung pointed out what we all subconsciously knew all along: People are a walking mass of contradictions (heavily paraphrased, I know, bear with me here). The ability to entertain two contradictatory thoughts at the same time is one of the main things that differentiates the human mind from a computer. I have a friend who gives forth eloquently and logically on any number of geopolitical/social topics, yet still harbors an irrational hatred for France (though I've managed to convince him to scale back his rantings to a mostly personal loathing for Jacques Chirac and his cronies).
"Stand not amaz'd," for such is the human condition.
Call me crazy, but I think people could find some other ways to utilize the extra speed (VoIP, distributed/remote computing, and centralized network storage spring to mind). True, the Internet as currently structured does fine without multi-mbps connections to each and every home. Over time, however, the uses to which we put this little (D)ARPA-assigned school project will doubtless change and multiply, mandating an increase in throughput to satisfy these ends.
The main problem with slow broadband--stateside and elsewhere--is the transmission medium. Rollout of broadband to new areas often entails laying down hundreds of km of fibre, as many areas have nothing but Cu wire prior to this. Add to this that the two most prevalent broadband solutions still use Cu for the "Last Mile", and you have huge bottlenecking problems. To their credit, Verizon is trying to fix the problem, but any infrastructure change on this scale is going to take aeons.
Contrast this with S. Korea--the poster child for a wired society. Look back a measly few decades, and lo and behold, no telecom/cable infrastructure to speak of! By the time they started really getting serious about geting wired, fibre had become the Medium of Choice, so that's what they used.
Everywhere. In everything.
Consequently, they get blisteringly fast internet connections, and are often puzzled or pitying when their US friends complain about slow downloads or quadruple-digit ping values. The US can have this kind of speed, and it will, but the time required to replace an existing network (or notwork, as may be the case ^_^) is several orders of magnitude greater than the requirement for installing an infrastructure into a virgin environment.
The MP3 codec was not, in fact designed to run on portable systems, indeed it was never intended to be used separately from the MPEG-1 Video codec at all! Fraunhofer IIs simply came up with an audio codec that would pair well with MPEG's high-level video compression, someone figured out how to separate the stream into its own file, WinAmp came along, and presto, new music format.
In fact, because of its kludgy origin, the MP3 spec lacks many features that would make life easier, including (exemplia gratis) a proper indexing system--hence the seeking weirdness and sometimes fugly playback that plagues VBR-MP3 files.
The OGG container-file format and Vorbis encoder were designed to address these issues, as well as to provide a Free (speech & beer) and Open alternative to MP3, which is after all, property of Fraunhofer IIs.
OGG's non-popularity as a music format is attributable to two things:
obscurity, and
the "good enough" factor.
As a FOSS-developed format, OGG hasn't got the corporate backing (and advertising) that MP3 and WMA/ASF have. Therefore, not many have heard of it, outside of techie circles.
Even beside that, many who do hear of OGG Vorbis will often casually dismiss it, saying "MP3 is good enough for me". A heresy for the/. set, to be sure, but many people simply don't have the time/energy/interest to pursue a better alternative when a functional alternative is staring them in the face.
OGG support is nowhere near as hard to do as you make out, it's simply not done as often. Please do at least a little checking before you post such flamebait. (hint: try looking here or possibly here
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/169/
Most of the venom surrounding UAC is directed at the pants-on-head-retarded implementation, not the idea. UAC is MS's cack-handed attempt to re-invent sudo. Unlike sudo, UAC doesn't prompt you for an admin password by default—bad. Unlike sudo, UAC doesn't offer the option to remember your credentials for a preset period so you don't have to keep swatting it down mid-task—bad. Unlike sudo, UAC doesn't log commands issued through it by default, or even offer an option to do so—terribad. This is one place where even Apple culti^H^H^H^H^Henthusiasts wouldn't complain if MS just copied them straight up, as it would actually do a bit to improve the state of things. Faced with this seemingly simple choice though, MS contracted an acute case of NIH-itis and regurgitated this mess upon us.
tl;dr - we bitch about UAC because we do know better.
I've been reading through Surface Detail recently, and it seems tailor-made for a screen adaptation: murder, corruption, intrigue, and a fight for the souls of the departed. They'd have to tone down the hell scenes a bit from what the book depicts, but overall I think it would work rather well.
...an mp3 converted from aac is going to sound worse than one converted from a CD, to me.
Not just to you. MP3 and AAC are both lossy compression algorithms. Which psymodel fits you better is a matter of taste, but there's no doubt that both throw away parts of the song that they think you can't hear. Running a song through both in sequence, then, will lead to a demonstrably lower quality file.
Which, incidentally, is the whole point of the submitter's call to distribute music in FLAC. FLAC is lossless, so you can transcode from it to whatever format you please without suffering the double-degradation problem of transcoding from one lossy format to another.
I'm not fond of how each bit below the summary has its own line with surrounding whitespace. Concatenate that into one or two lines so that I don't have to scroll down as much to start reading the comments.
Also, the navbar on the left bleeds over when I set the browser window to 1024x768. Would prefer to see the site scale gracefully down to 840x1050, so that I can have two windows open side-by side on a standard 22" monitor.
I'm not terribly fond of the gray border around the edges either; it's just wasted space.
Would prefer a white-on-black display option for low-light viewing; having to monkey with style-sheets to get something consistent is a pain.
As others have mentioned, comment preview is very slow, though it speeds up somewhat for subsequent edits to the comment before submitting.
Sadly, there are many games that fail to recognize any mouse buttons beyond the basic 3 (left, right, middle). Additionally, there are mouses out there with >5 buttons, and almost no game I've seen recognizes mouse6-mouse11 for keybinding. For these reasons, and many more (macros, custom sensitivity stages, bypassing Windows's awful acceleration curve, &c.), installing mouse drivers often makes sense.
They don't mention OpenGL because they've already got people who are good at that; the PS3 port of the Source engine proves this. What they're after here is somebody who can dive into the hairy backend code, and do the massive amount of work needed to decouple the game code from the Win32 platform.
Trouble is, the Steam-distributed version has both Steam's copy-protection scheme and SecuROM on it, so you really can't get around it that way.
And you know what? Sometimes the 2 or 3 songs you hear on the radio really are the only good ones.
Other times, I've listened to the artist's other songs, re-listened to the one I came for, and decided that I didn't really need that track after all. Still others had me buying three or four of the artist's albums. With independent artists, this has me going to Magnatune for FLAC copies, for ease of transcoding operations. For artists signed with major labels, this has been by seeking out the actual CD, as DRMed 160k AAC doesn't really appeal to me, for many reasons. With iTunes Plus, however, I may decide that 256k AAC is good enough for me with some kinds of music, and grab those tracks individually.
And I'm hardly the only one I know who does this.
So, to be honest, the CD really doesn't matter. What matters is the album, which, it is being argued, doesn't need to be tied to the CDDA format anymore.
I believe this http://www.voice-overlay.info.ms/ is what you're looking for.
Though I have to admit, I've had more trouble with three different versions of Ubuntu (Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, and Feisty Fawn) than I've ever had with Gentoo when it comes to getting a new system up and running. Sure, Ubuntu goes on faster, but getting issues resolved--static IP configuration and getting OpenAL to work correctly with my games, to name a couple--was a lot more difficult. The response time on the Ubuntu forums is a whole lot slower than I'm accustomed to, and most of the replies were
So, after a month or so of wrestling with it each time, I always ended up going back to Gentoo. Doing up the necessary config files took all of a half hour--this on a dual-boot XP/Linux machine with a partitioning scheme funkier than a straight-to-video blacksploitation flick. Once I had my list of basic packages and meta-packages to install typed in, I walked away, went to bed, and it was ready to go the next morning. I've had this latest install going for half a year, and the worst issue I've run into is the occasional hung process. Pop open KSysGuard, kill the process, move on with life.
Note what I said above, meta-packages, Gentoo not only abstracts the dependency issues to the point where you barely have to think about them, it goes one step further and allows you to ignore the package names for certain functional groups of software altogether.
So, if you're really and truly fed up with rpms, give Gentoo a spin. It requires some work on the front end, but the results are well worth it.
GPP's point was taken, I was responding to PP's delusion that using AAC again wouldn't degrade the signal, as opposed to using a different lossy codec on the 2nd go 'round.
Friend, the aspect ratio of the image hasn't a blessed thing to do with phosphor burn-in. Burn-in occurs when you have a static image that is projected onto the screen continuously, past the phosphor's limit of "forgetfulness". You don't want your phosphors to remember what color they used to be, because then they won't be the color they're supposed to be now. Properly done, the letterboxes can't be "burned in", because the plasma display would simply turn off the unused pixels. (Not sure if any do this, or if they all display a "pseudo-black" image, which would indeed cause burn-in.) CRT's do indeed have this problem, though manufacturers have done much to lengthen the burn-in time past the point where most uses would casue problems.
And if the black space bothers you that much, a nice status display, stock/news ticker, or abstract pattern would be a possible fix.
Your commentary about the quality of tv shows aside, you're kinda missing the point. TiVo isn't designed to archive, it's designed to time-shift. The whole point of TiVo is that you can watch what you want, when you want. You set it to record the shows you want to see, and then play them back at your leisure. So if they're running Futurama reruns at 0-dark-30 in the morning, fine and dandy. With TiVo, I can watch them the next morning with my cereal. In effect, it's a more flexible replacement for all those VCR's that have VCRPlus functionality.
Just out of idle curiosity, what exactly is that supposed to accomplish (other than possibly getting yourself high on the marker fumes :P)?
You're half-right. Burning to CD does not, indeed, degrade the signal any. However, re-encoding the track with ANY lossy codec (AAC included) will degrade the quailty, as the waveform will have bits of it stripped out twice. The only real (read: significant to audio quality) differences between AAC and MP3 are the psychoacoustic models used, and the bit-packing methods. Which is better is an argument for these folks, but the fact remains that both are lossy codecs, and therefore suffer from the re-encoding entropy problem.
Pff. Logitech wouldn't know speaker clarity if it leapt up and smacked them in the face. Listen to a set of Klipsh ProMedia Ultra 5.1's some time, and it will. :D
Only thing the Z680 set has going for it is a loud sub, and if the Klipsch sub isn't earth-rattling enough for you, you can add on an extra sub (or two, or three, or twenty!) through its SWS Link.
So remind me why I should spend $50 more for an inferior system?
it saves keystrokes :P
If I'm not mistaken, isn't the telecom industry in Sweden directly controlled by the government? Over in the US the telcos are privately owned, so any truly large-scale change in infrastructure must either be mandated by federal law--a process that takes literally decades to get going--or it must have blindingly obvious business benefits--which means only a few forward-thinking corps will implement, leaving the rest to play catch up over the next 20 years or so.
Add to that the expense: Government owned institutions have no problem spending massive amounts of money on infrastructure improvements, as they've got a guaranteed source of funding. Private companies are usually gun-shy when that sort of thing is mentioned, though. They're content to wait until the old system is so thoroughly buggered up that an upgrade is necessary to maintain basic QoS.
What's so amazing about that? Carl Jung pointed out what we all subconsciously knew all along: People are a walking mass of contradictions (heavily paraphrased, I know, bear with me here). The ability to entertain two contradictatory thoughts at the same time is one of the main things that differentiates the human mind from a computer. I have a friend who gives forth eloquently and logically on any number of geopolitical/social topics, yet still harbors an irrational hatred for France (though I've managed to convince him to scale back his rantings to a mostly personal loathing for Jacques Chirac and his cronies).
"Stand not amaz'd," for such is the human condition.
Call me crazy, but I think people could find some other ways to utilize the extra speed (VoIP, distributed/remote computing, and centralized network storage spring to mind). True, the Internet as currently structured does fine without multi-mbps connections to each and every home. Over time, however, the uses to which we put this little (D)ARPA-assigned school project will doubtless change and multiply, mandating an increase in throughput to satisfy these ends.
The main problem with slow broadband--stateside and elsewhere--is the transmission medium. Rollout of broadband to new areas often entails laying down hundreds of km of fibre, as many areas have nothing but Cu wire prior to this. Add to this that the two most prevalent broadband solutions still use Cu for the "Last Mile", and you have huge bottlenecking problems. To their credit, Verizon is trying to fix the problem, but any infrastructure change on this scale is going to take aeons.
Contrast this with S. Korea--the poster child for a wired society. Look back a measly few decades, and lo and behold, no telecom/cable infrastructure to speak of! By the time they started really getting serious about geting wired, fibre had become the Medium of Choice, so that's what they used.
Everywhere. In everything.Consequently, they get blisteringly fast internet connections, and are often puzzled or pitying when their US friends complain about slow downloads or quadruple-digit ping values. The US can have this kind of speed, and it will, but the time required to replace an existing network (or notwork, as may be the case ^_^) is several orders of magnitude greater than the requirement for installing an infrastructure into a virgin environment.
So I guess iRiver missed the memo huh? They have support for OGG on almost all of their flash players, and all of their HDD players.
Click here if you doubt.
The MP3 codec was not, in fact designed to run on portable systems, indeed it was never intended to be used separately from the MPEG-1 Video codec at all! Fraunhofer IIs simply came up with an audio codec that would pair well with MPEG's high-level video compression, someone figured out how to separate the stream into its own file, WinAmp came along, and presto, new music format.
In fact, because of its kludgy origin, the MP3 spec lacks many features that would make life easier, including (exemplia gratis) a proper indexing system--hence the seeking weirdness and sometimes fugly playback that plagues VBR-MP3 files.
The OGG container-file format and Vorbis encoder were designed to address these issues, as well as to provide a Free (speech & beer) and Open alternative to MP3, which is after all, property of Fraunhofer IIs.
OGG's non-popularity as a music format is attributable to two things:
As a FOSS-developed format, OGG hasn't got the corporate backing (and advertising) that MP3 and WMA/ASF have. Therefore, not many have heard of it, outside of techie circles.
Even beside that, many who do hear of OGG Vorbis will often casually dismiss it, saying "MP3 is good enough for me". A heresy for the /. set, to be sure, but many people simply don't have the time/energy/interest to pursue a better alternative when a functional alternative is staring them in the face.
OGG support is nowhere near as hard to do as you make out, it's simply not done as often. Please do at least a little checking before you post such flamebait. (hint: try looking here or possibly here
From what I've seen, it doesn't offer a whole lot that IrfanView doesn't, except support for a few odd OS/2 formats.
I was referring mainly to the app pack, but it's pretty damn useless without some AV codecs to use.