Hence no reason to lament; all is forgotten when a technology finds some use in the tour of duties (trains and electricity really picked up steam when it was again time to slaughter lots of women's' children, in the name of dubious interests)
As far as I'm concerned, every "classic" FM / AM station of note also provides a stream; no need to go to "online radio stations" per se.
Then there are new models of Last.fm or Spotify. Or how most of scheduled broadcasts could be cached while in the range of something like WiFi; typically with, say, just the news and announcements provided live via cellular, on a much stronger voice-only codec, and also in most cases not strictly real-time.
Then there's how, at my place, "up to 256 kbps" cellular access now also becomes FREE... (512 in a year, generally 20% of network capacity; one condition for winners of LTE bid, but working also via existing HSPA; makes sense considering it's a license for the use of public spectrum, and how a basic internet access will become fairly necessary; fast enough for public radio, & such practise might become relatively widespread in the region)
There was nothing particularly wrong with FM in the first place, so such early [*] push for DAB as it happened in few places (not really most of EU; and not only in Europe) was a solution in search of a problem...yeah, gradual shift would make a bit more sense.
But overall, such digital radio systems feel a bit like an awkward transitional approach; possibly even almost a blip between analogue tech and "radio" consumed mostly via wireless IP networks (and those aren't screwed up in the EU, quite the contrary). And/or: digital radio seems to have much more uptake in a form transmitted via... DVB - which definitely made sense for TV, so radio could as well just piggyback on the transition; radio which, in contrast to TV, was well into "good enough quality" territory for a long time, and with bandwidth requirements that will only go down.
And even a transition (while maintaining very "classic" multicast transmitters) for a radio method which does have lots of wrong with it (and I don't mean the talkshow programming:p ), shortwave AM, to the much nicer tech of DRM (Radio Mondiale kind, not Rights Management kind)...doesn't seem to be really going anywhere.
* That's the major reason why especially the non-plus DAB fares badly in comparison with HD radio (why did you forget to remind us the silly name of the latter?;) )
Scalable Video Coding H.264 extension, apparently spearheaded by Vidyo and used by (there's a mention of Vidyo tech when downloading browser plugin) Gmail / Android / Jingle video (and presumably also by Google+ Hangouts)
I didn't play with Vidyo stuff, but I guess SVC might be one of the reasons why Gmail video is probably the best choice on slow & unreliable connections (like it was also with Gtalk / Gmail audio; quite a few of VoIP codecs seem to do what you ask about)
Which isn't such a problem for DVB as compared to DAB; at least TVs are generally stationary...
Photosynth is somewhat nice...of course it sort of just lingers (it would probably see more uptake built into already popular photo sharing service like Flickr or, even better, Wiki; it's probably too much to expect MS donating it to the latter...otoh they did open source even something non-tiny (as a project / code base) as Allegiance, which was also a MS Research project). Similar with Autocollage or Group Shot (adding such perks doesn't seem to make photo sharing platforms popular; perhaps people are also just prejudiced against online MS venues; and not without some good reasons)
It does paint the picture of rather limited area of research when it comes to something fun & new. NVM how this exploration of images and visual memory (Sensecam is interesting; even if it manages to be uncomfortably long in the tooth, hardware-wise) doesn't translate to much of anything in area of products. And then there's MS Songsmith - maybe fun in a way, but also the bane of humanity.
Can we still count.Net? One of the finest things among its ilk, and still "emerging" actively so there's most likely quite a bit of research behind it (Wiki table "Microsoft Research (MSR)" has one group clearly related to.Net - plus one of them gets the price just for the name:p...particularly in the light of recent events)
The payload capability of the space shuttle is incredible.
The payload capability of the Shuttle is in the range of many expendable launchers. Proton, Ariane 5, Delta IV, Atlas V, Falcon, Long March, Angara, Rus. Pick one.
Oh, you include the wasted upmass of airframe? A lot of good that does in space... The last rocket really having such capability was Energia (hm, and 7x stack of heavy Angara core stages won't be far).
Generally, describing abandonment of spaceplanes in favour of capsules as "a step backwards" is at odds with basic chronology; plus when you really seriously do the math (like they did with HOTOL, for example), winged vehicles using the atmosphere turn out not really better than a "dumb rocket" using comparable materials...which for a spaceplane are required to make it even barely feasible.
The non-problem is that we have the guts to abandon a wrong approach; it doesn't matter how "sleek" something looks. We generally build ships, trains, airplanes, all in a very different way. Making a spacecraft look like an aircraft demonstrably doesn't do much good (and by the time it maybe-who-knows might, we could be on our way to in-situ manufacturing and making the "from reactive atmosphere to low orbit" problem uninteresting)
The largest user of Hubble-like (but looking down) sats launched them on not-Shuttle for some time now; it's more efficient to launch a new one. Plus the number of times not-Shuttle did a rendezvous with another sat, docked with it, and delivered spare parts or fuel...absolutely dwarfs the number of times Shuttle did it.
As to if the money spent by NASA over the past 30 years has been wisely spent, that is a whole separate discussion.
The Shuttle appears to make more sense if you look at it as a geopolitical engineering project (more like over the past 40 years, BTW), to provoke the ignorant Soviet generals[1] into pushing for a rampant spending of their counterpart, to have a parity for (non-existent) "strategic advantage" of the STS. Of course, then one has to ask why was it allowed to continue sucking NASA dry for the past two decades?... there even was a good opportunity to terminate the program post-Challenger (of course, that in turn could be also a "revenge of the Buran" of sorts - it was essentially being prepped on its launchpad at the time, and of course the Soviets couldn't be allowed to be the only ones with a shuttle[2])
1. Their engineers very much didn't want to go there, preferring Spiral approach. With the vehicle being just a payload...ultimately, when forced, also doing it with STS-class vehicle (Energia was a more sensible Ares V-like approach from the start) - but it bled them dry, killed what they really wanted (Zarya "super Soyuz")
2. Who knows, the history might judge the last laugh was even more on Buran - in its only flight, it demonstared the whole main "point" behind a shuttle (its flight profile) to a much fuller degree than any of STS vehicles ever did. With the secondary point (LEO space station) being essentially, for STS fleet, in the form of maintenance and expansion of two space stations meant for Buran...
as compared to the Apollo program in terms of how beneficial it has been
Apollo might be not the best counterexample (vs. the dick-waving reasons alluded to in the posts above); at its core it was a crazy unsustainable crash project, with scientific benefits demonstrably more or less equalled by unmanned probes of the time (especially considering that of the twelve people, only one was a geologist, during the last mission - how the hell did we manage that / one of the saddest testimonies about the mindset of humanity IMHO). "Structural" / educational / etc. benefits revving up already after Sputnik.
I'm really not convinced that the current programs, particularly the SLS, is going to be of any benefit to the country especially as they are doing a retread program to "boldly go where hundreds have gone before" and do so on gilded spacecraft on top of that.
It's debatable if "retreat" fits more to current programs or to... the Shuttle (heck, the ISS can be soon raised a bit, to its intended orbit, finally unconstrained by STS limitations) - everybody at first expected "aerodynamic" or "spaceplane-ish" shapes from reentry vehicles, and worked towards it hard. They proved pretty much unworkable. Blunt shape entry capsule was a relatively late innovation, an improvement; and a bit of a surprise. There's nothing wrong with capsules; physics, rocket equation, are a bitch.
It's simply how dreams about expected modes of space travel turned out to be wrong; dreams extrapolating (not understanding, generally) rates and directions of observed progress. Look at those airplanes from "our" times (imagined during rapid advances of marine tech; and we can even build them - take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy... still a horrible idea vs. "boring" reality).
Consider how the "spaceplanes" came to dominate scifi... around the 40s, during rapid advances of airplane tech (I can see a pattern...); how the designers and decision-makers of the Shuttle were undoubtedly raised on those works of fiction. And how they gave us an analogue of Catalina, at best (Spruce Goose, at worst); but something which looked very soothing and "inspiring"
Even (roughly) architecturally modern computer could be probably done in antiquity;p (hydraulic / water gates, most likely?)...though I was thinking more about something not too far from present approaches (which use, yup, the convenience of electrical power)
Something Roomba-like shouldn't have many problems with showing up a decade, maybe two, earlier - just more bulky, I guess; or even earlier (if people would accept more bulk or, say, a retractable cord; considering the "futurist" desires in interior design of the times in question, remodelling of rooms for vacuum cleaner perhaps wouldn't be much of an issue). Even easier with ovens.
But no, our imagination was hijacked by cargo cultisms / Rosie the robot.
Seems to be quite the contrary. The realms of US or UK for example, even while being at the bottom (~50% of the outcome determined by lineage) of developed realms when it comes to social mobility (so called "nanny dungeons" being at the top...), are notably above what most people have to put up with from their DM.
...web developers standardized development using some version of Firefox 3.x and the Developer Toolbar plugin. This increased the adoption of web standards...
Sooner, I'd say; and perhaps too often via "we have to support it because of visitor stats" (so yeah, maybe driven by users), ending in a bit of duopoly of "best viewed in IE & FF" (not much of a win for standards at that point)
Quite a bit more interesting in Russia or Ukraine, BTW (generally, most of CIS; those two having majority of its population already, anyway). They seem to be trending towards roughly equal usage share of every major engine, probably a perfect situation for standards. Shows the advantages of communism, I guess...;)
...and one long-term-stable for businesses and those who don't like having to trash half of their plugins every three months. The latter can take the good things from the former, and implement them on a sane schedule
Not too long ago it wouldn't work too well also for personal-scale / medical / scans-making devices (which were for some time also even an "entertainment" of sorts). I guess it's possible that cargo cultists cherish big objects in particular; maybe there's more than one kind of inertia such objects bring, maybe the apes running around need impressive temples...
They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them,..." approach, during large part of the 90s; with dubious results (expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.92% is after massive growth over the past 5 years). That's despite a determination sufficient for dubious backstage practices / nice sums of money changing hands informally - which virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up of the machines in the face of economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k+ city BTW), and how such things were done ("but Macs have polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" probably not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout (physically identical to US layout) wasn't a problem before or after...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)
It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)
Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)
As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?
PS. And at the crossroads of NLE and the mentioned above tablets, one has to wonder how a large (more in the league of MS Surface) tablet setup could work for the "pros":p
many people can tell the difference between 128kkps mp3 and flac
"Many" might be not the best word, it might be too many, for modern mp3 encoders (well, lame...) at ~128kbps, if proper listening tests are any indication. Their encodings have gone a long way; basically, many people would need to train themselves to have any chance of reliably hearing the difference (and what would be the point of that, anyway?)
Did you do an actual ABX test when comparing? "But when you play it against the FLAC, it does sound a little suppressed. The FLAC is obviously clearer, more dynamic, and has more depth" might as well describe approaches which fall prey to natural biases of our perception.
(and BTW the last part - funnily enough, the iPod right at the top of portable analogue circuitry implementations, appears to be 1st gen Shuffle...)
BTC kinda looks like a fairly reliable and convenient method of ranking botnets, of certifying their capacity; almost like it was meant for this by botnet herders, so they can (really) monetize their "assets" so much smoothly.
Which I guess also wouldn't be far from new age libertines, and/or the kinds of people who held gold and want again this random (but theirs) ore to be a bechmark of economies.
Overall, this is one of the stronger examples of govs ultimately reflecting their societies.
Not even the "from where else would the people forming them come from?", and so on.
No, this isn't even slightly abstract. It's how they're supposed to work, a clean representation - too large portions of many societies opposing such actions. For one, there's lots of people who don't really care about...or even bask in how the unbearable suffering of slowly dying people strenghtens their perceptions of ancient bonfire stories. Masses of people who want to maintain that suffering (from wherever the concept came)
Slashdot Mirror
Hence no reason to lament; all is forgotten when a technology finds some use in the tour of duties (trains and electricity really picked up steam when it was again time to slaughter lots of women's' children, in the name of dubious interests)
As far as I'm concerned, every "classic" FM / AM station of note also provides a stream; no need to go to "online radio stations" per se.
Then there are new models of Last.fm or Spotify. Or how most of scheduled broadcasts could be cached while in the range of something like WiFi; typically with, say, just the news and announcements provided live via cellular, on a much stronger voice-only codec, and also in most cases not strictly real-time.
Then there's how, at my place, "up to 256 kbps" cellular access now also becomes FREE... (512 in a year, generally 20% of network capacity; one condition for winners of LTE bid, but working also via existing HSPA; makes sense considering it's a license for the use of public spectrum, and how a basic internet access will become fairly necessary; fast enough for public radio, & such practise might become relatively widespread in the region)
There was nothing particularly wrong with FM in the first place, so such early [*] push for DAB as it happened in few places (not really most of EU; and not only in Europe) was a solution in search of a problem ...yeah, gradual shift would make a bit more sense.
:p ), shortwave AM, to the much nicer tech of DRM (Radio Mondiale kind, not Rights Management kind) ...doesn't seem to be really going anywhere.
;) )
But overall, such digital radio systems feel a bit like an awkward transitional approach; possibly even almost a blip between analogue tech and "radio" consumed mostly via wireless IP networks (and those aren't screwed up in the EU, quite the contrary). And/or: digital radio seems to have much more uptake in a form transmitted via... DVB - which definitely made sense for TV, so radio could as well just piggyback on the transition; radio which, in contrast to TV, was well into "good enough quality" territory for a long time, and with bandwidth requirements that will only go down.
And even a transition (while maintaining very "classic" multicast transmitters) for a radio method which does have lots of wrong with it (and I don't mean the talkshow programming
* That's the major reason why especially the non-plus DAB fares badly in comparison with HD radio (why did you forget to remind us the silly name of the latter?
Scalable Video Coding H.264 extension, apparently spearheaded by Vidyo and used by (there's a mention of Vidyo tech when downloading browser plugin) Gmail / Android / Jingle video (and presumably also by Google+ Hangouts)
I didn't play with Vidyo stuff, but I guess SVC might be one of the reasons why Gmail video is probably the best choice on slow & unreliable connections (like it was also with Gtalk / Gmail audio; quite a few of VoIP codecs seem to do what you ask about)
Which isn't such a problem for DVB as compared to DAB; at least TVs are generally stationary...
Photosynth is somewhat nice ...of course it sort of just lingers (it would probably see more uptake built into already popular photo sharing service like Flickr or, even better, Wiki; it's probably too much to expect MS donating it to the latter ...otoh they did open source even something non-tiny (as a project / code base) as Allegiance, which was also a MS Research project). Similar with Autocollage or Group Shot (adding such perks doesn't seem to make photo sharing platforms popular; perhaps people are also just prejudiced against online MS venues; and not without some good reasons)
.Net? One of the finest things among its ilk, and still "emerging" actively so there's most likely quite a bit of research behind it (Wiki table "Microsoft Research (MSR)" has one group clearly related to .Net - plus one of them gets the price just for the name :p ...particularly in the light of recent events)
It does paint the picture of rather limited area of research when it comes to something fun & new. NVM how this exploration of images and visual memory (Sensecam is interesting; even if it manages to be uncomfortably long in the tooth, hardware-wise) doesn't translate to much of anything in area of products. And then there's MS Songsmith - maybe fun in a way, but also the bane of humanity.
Can we still count
If only astronomers made something up, any remote connection between what they do and [...] population behavior control
Pushing the expansion of astrology (hey, it seems to be catchy as far as the apes running around are concerned) to far objects / systems?
But seriously, what hope is there if even the discovery of the vastness of hydrocarbon deposits on Titan didn't do the trick?
The payload capability of the space shuttle is incredible.
The payload capability of the Shuttle is in the range of many expendable launchers. Proton, Ariane 5, Delta IV, Atlas V, Falcon, Long March, Angara, Rus. Pick one.
...which for a spaceplane are required to make it even barely feasible.
...absolutely dwarfs the number of times Shuttle did it.
Oh, you include the wasted upmass of airframe? A lot of good that does in space... The last rocket really having such capability was Energia (hm, and 7x stack of heavy Angara core stages won't be far).
Generally, describing abandonment of spaceplanes in favour of capsules as "a step backwards" is at odds with basic chronology; plus when you really seriously do the math (like they did with HOTOL, for example), winged vehicles using the atmosphere turn out not really better than a "dumb rocket" using comparable materials
The non-problem is that we have the guts to abandon a wrong approach; it doesn't matter how "sleek" something looks. We generally build ships, trains, airplanes, all in a very different way. Making a spacecraft look like an aircraft demonstrably doesn't do much good (and by the time it maybe-who-knows might, we could be on our way to in-situ manufacturing and making the "from reactive atmosphere to low orbit" problem uninteresting)
The largest user of Hubble-like (but looking down) sats launched them on not-Shuttle for some time now; it's more efficient to launch a new one. Plus the number of times not-Shuttle did a rendezvous with another sat, docked with it, and delivered spare parts or fuel
The biggest[*] irony of history - the capability was to a fullest degree demonstrated in the one flight of the Soviet shuttle Buran...
* With the possible exception of how the STS fleet, essentially, maintained and expanded two LEO space stations meant for Buran.
As to if the money spent by NASA over the past 30 years has been wisely spent, that is a whole separate discussion.
The Shuttle appears to make more sense if you look at it as a geopolitical engineering project (more like over the past 40 years, BTW), to provoke the ignorant Soviet generals[1] into pushing for a rampant spending of their counterpart, to have a parity for (non-existent) "strategic advantage" of the STS. Of course, then one has to ask why was it allowed to continue sucking NASA dry for the past two decades?... there even was a good opportunity to terminate the program post-Challenger (of course, that in turn could be also a "revenge of the Buran" of sorts - it was essentially being prepped on its launchpad at the time, and of course the Soviets couldn't be allowed to be the only ones with a shuttle[2])
...ultimately, when forced, also doing it with STS-class vehicle (Energia was a more sensible Ares V-like approach from the start) - but it bled them dry, killed what they really wanted (Zarya "super Soyuz")
1. Their engineers very much didn't want to go there, preferring Spiral approach. With the vehicle being just a payload
2. Who knows, the history might judge the last laugh was even more on Buran - in its only flight, it demonstared the whole main "point" behind a shuttle (its flight profile) to a much fuller degree than any of STS vehicles ever did. With the secondary point (LEO space station) being essentially, for STS fleet, in the form of maintenance and expansion of two space stations meant for Buran...
as compared to the Apollo program in terms of how beneficial it has been
Apollo might be not the best counterexample (vs. the dick-waving reasons alluded to in the posts above); at its core it was a crazy unsustainable crash project, with scientific benefits demonstrably more or less equalled by unmanned probes of the time (especially considering that of the twelve people, only one was a geologist, during the last mission - how the hell did we manage that / one of the saddest testimonies about the mindset of humanity IMHO). "Structural" / educational / etc. benefits revving up already after Sputnik.
I'm really not convinced that the current programs, particularly the SLS, is going to be of any benefit to the country especially as they are doing a retread program to "boldly go where hundreds have gone before" and do so on gilded spacecraft on top of that.
It's debatable if "retreat" fits more to current programs or to... the Shuttle (heck, the ISS can be soon raised a bit, to its intended orbit, finally unconstrained by STS limitations) - everybody at first expected "aerodynamic" or "spaceplane-ish" shapes from reentry vehicles, and worked towards it hard. They proved pretty much unworkable. Blunt shape entry capsule was a relatively late innovation, an improvement; and a bit of a surprise. There's nothing wrong with capsules; physics, rocket equation, are a bitch.
It's simply how dreams about expected modes of space travel turned out to be wrong; dreams extrapolating (not understanding, generally) rates and directions of observed progress. Look at those airplanes from "our" times (imagined during rapid advances of marine tech; and we can even build them - take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy... still a horrible idea vs. "boring" reality).
Consider how the "spaceplanes" came to dominate scifi... around the 40s, during rapid advances of airplane tech (I can see a pattern...); how the designers and decision-makers of the Shuttle were undoubtedly raised on those works of fiction. And how they gave us an analogue of Catalina, at best (Spruce Goose, at worst); but something which looked very soothing and "inspiring"
Some personal stalker of mine? Cute / sweet (even if quaint; too bad one which doesn't get what a collation is, NVM with "kinda" or "wouldn't be")
Even (roughly) architecturally modern computer could be probably done in antiquity ;p (hydraulic / water gates, most likely?) ...though I was thinking more about something not too far from present approaches (which use, yup, the convenience of electrical power)
Something Roomba-like shouldn't have many problems with showing up a decade, maybe two, earlier - just more bulky, I guess; or even earlier (if people would accept more bulk or, say, a retractable cord; considering the "futurist" desires in interior design of the times in question, remodelling of rooms for vacuum cleaner perhaps wouldn't be much of an issue). Even easier with ovens.
But no, our imagination was hijacked by cargo cultisms / Rosie the robot.
The young remember about those in Finland (1/2 the population density of the US), Sweden (2/3) or Norway (1/3)?
Since he did demonstrate to be a capable ruler / coordinator of tech-inclined slave camps?...
Hm, yes, not making too much of a fuss from just saying his name seems like what Hitler would do.
...IRL seems to be a largely classless system...
Seems to be quite the contrary. The realms of US or UK for example, even while being at the bottom (~50% of the outcome determined by lineage) of developed realms when it comes to social mobility (so called "nanny dungeons" being at the top...), are notably above what most people have to put up with from their DM.
...web developers standardized development using some version of Firefox 3.x and the Developer Toolbar plugin. This increased the adoption of web standards...
Sooner, I'd say; and perhaps too often via "we have to support it because of visitor stats" (so yeah, maybe driven by users), ending in a bit of duopoly of "best viewed in IE & FF" (not much of a win for standards at that point)
;)
Quite a bit more interesting in Russia or Ukraine, BTW (generally, most of CIS; those two having majority of its population already, anyway). They seem to be trending towards roughly equal usage share of every major engine, probably a perfect situation for standards. Shows the advantages of communism, I guess...
...and one long-term-stable for businesses and those who don't like having to trash half of their plugins every three months. The latter can take the good things from the former, and implement them on a sane schedule
Maybe also adopting a bit "colder" name, to contrast itself from the hot rush release.
Not too long ago it wouldn't work too well also for personal-scale / medical / scans-making devices (which were for some time also even an "entertainment" of sorts). I guess it's possible that cargo cultists cherish big objects in particular; maybe there's more than one kind of inertia such objects bring, maybe the apes running around need impressive temples...
(was it about the cat, or of the cat?)
They will try to enter the business market from the other end, with people learning to use Macs at home and users forcing IT-depts to integrate macs in their systems.
The last time they tried something similar(!), it didn't go too well. That's possibly most striking with past Apple efforts at my place, which also had "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them, ..." approach, during large part of the 90s; with dubious results (expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.92% is after massive growth over the past 5 years). That's despite a determination sufficient for dubious backstage practices / nice sums of money changing hands informally - which virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up of the machines in the face of economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k+ city BTW), and how such things were done ("but Macs have polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" probably not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout (physically identical to US layout) wasn't a problem before or after ...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)
:p
It's a triangle, three markets possibly influencing each other - business, education, consumer. Starting from the 2nd one doesn't seem to work terribly well. As for working from the 3rd... hm, who knows (anecdotally: here, two generations of Commodore machines were the consumer standard for a decade - and also ignored by businesses, their computerisation basically started with PCs anyway when the time had finally come)
Unless... there really will be a dynamics-changing shift, and the tablets will turn out to be the "PC for normal people" (so also good for a very large chunk of business machines); here Apple is doing fine so far, even at my place (unless the world also waits for "PC tablets"...)
As for the general NLE discussion - I wonder if Vegas could get more chance out of this, at least among "indies"; it's quite fine overall, and perhaps unbeatable for the price (with the possible exception of Lightworks). More broadly, I wonder with which tool would you prefer to get accustomed with, on which would you bet as having the greatest chance of filling the void now that FCP might be on its way out?
PS. And at the crossroads of NLE and the mentioned above tablets, one has to wonder how a large (more in the league of MS Surface) tablet setup could work for the "pros"
many people can tell the difference between 128kkps mp3 and flac
"Many" might be not the best word, it might be too many, for modern mp3 encoders (well, lame...) at ~128kbps, if proper listening tests are any indication. Their encodings have gone a long way; basically, many people would need to train themselves to have any chance of reliably hearing the difference (and what would be the point of that, anyway?)
Did you do an actual ABX test when comparing? "But when you play it against the FLAC, it does sound a little suppressed. The FLAC is obviously clearer, more dynamic, and has more depth" might as well describe approaches which fall prey to natural biases of our perception.
(and BTW the last part - funnily enough, the iPod right at the top of portable analogue circuitry implementations, appears to be 1st gen Shuffle...)
http://kyon.pl/img/16263,science,.html
BTC kinda looks like a fairly reliable and convenient method of ranking botnets, of certifying their capacity; almost like it was meant for this by botnet herders, so they can (really) monetize their "assets" so much smoothly.
Which I guess also wouldn't be far from new age libertines, and/or the kinds of people who held gold and want again this random (but theirs) ore to be a bechmark of economies.
Go ahead?
Overall, this is one of the stronger examples of govs ultimately reflecting their societies. Not even the "from where else would the people forming them come from?", and so on. No, this isn't even slightly abstract. It's how they're supposed to work, a clean representation - too large portions of many societies opposing such actions. For one, there's lots of people who don't really care about ...or even bask in how the unbearable suffering of slowly dying people strenghtens their perceptions of ancient bonfire stories. Masses of people who want to maintain that suffering (from wherever the concept came)