The past 10 years have seen ticket prices near me double. I'm just glad prices on everything else haven't had the same rate of increase, as that would be dangerous levels of inflation.
latency in these systems make it unattractive for many internet applications (who wants to play FPS's over a spread-slotted Aloha CDMA system?).
While I don't know what protocol's being used with these, the laws of physics give it a lot more potential than satellite systems.
The stratosphere's a couple orders of magnitude closer than geosynchronous orbit. Assuming sufficiently fast data rates and no stratellite relay lag, the lag time for bouncing a signal off one of these at the top of the stratosphere is a third of a millisecond. That's negligible for anything time-dependent.
IANAL, but that sounds pretty close to fraud to me.
You are right though about the service plan being good for the price at time of purchase, not whatever the current price is. I had a Palm m500 die a couple months ago and got a new Palm Tungsten E because of the extended warranty on the m500.
IANAL, but, the Constitution does authorize Congress the power to amend and expand upon it.
That said, something does smell fishy about how the balance of copyright has shifted away from the public good (so much so that it seems to me that the social contract basis of copyrights set out in the Constitution has been unceremoniously defenestrated onto a pile of fertilizer).
I've always found alt-tab to be much faster than anything involving the mouse for switching applications, because, >90% of the time, I'm switching between a handful of applications in rapid succession, and I tend to have my hands over the keyboard already. Since I don't use it much anyways, and my propensity for having lots of windows open at once, I keep it hidden on the right side, covering about 30% of the screen when extended.
A liquid mass flow meter in a car would have to be calibrated with the same amount of aggregate fuel flow as the gas pumps. But most people don't have hundreds of gallons of fuel flowing through them in a single day. Most gas pumps do.
Provided you keep it free of spyware, XP and 2K are both quite stable (I never used NT). In my experience, most problems on relatively stable OSes (2K/XP/Linux) are related to hardware, driver, or spyware problems. Initially, I had some stability problems with XP, but a sound card change and SP1 ironed most of those out.
I'd hardly say the VIN system is coming up short. The CNet article said manufacturers may run out by the end of the decade, which would only be a year short of the original estimate. We never see that kind of accuracy in predictions in the computer world (Moore's law generally accepted), because the automobile industry is a much more mature industry.
Extending the VIN length makes the most sense to me, since there doesn't seem to be a way around this without having to reprogram all the systems anyways. Some people have suggested expanding the characters available for part or all of it, but the characters in use were selected because they're the easiest to tell apart when the VIN plate is encrusted with layers of rust. That's not something most of us are used to thinking about (who gets rusty computer parts?), but is absolutely vital for cars, as long as they're still made with steel or iron anywhere in them.
I recall hearing somewhere that they're based on tailpipe emissions(!) in a laboratory environment using a dynamometer to simulate travel, not actual fuel consumption on even a test track, let alone real roads.
You buy a new CD and it don't wanna play You ask the disc "Please?", and it still says, "NO!" There's two TOCs and none will work But your CD gives you files made by some kind of jerk
You gotta fight for your right to riiiiiiip it!
The Man caught you ripping, and he said, "No way!" That hypocrite steals music all day Man, this DRM is such a drag Now your mom threw away your best CD-ROM (Busted!)
You gotta fight for your right to riiiiiiip it! You gotta fight
Don't step onto the 'net if that's the things you're gonna do I'll sue you out of your home if you don't stop that drive Your mom busted in and said, "What's that noise?" Aw mom you're just jealous--it's the ripped CD!
You gotta fight for your right to riiiiiiip it! You gotta fight for your right to riiiiiiip it! riiiiiiip it! riiiiiiip it!
There's one flaw in your logic tho. Studio masters aren't the same 16-bit 44.1KHz sampling rate as cds (and iTMS). They're typically closer to the 24/96 or sometimes even 24/192 of DVD-A. Hence, you still have a brief 2nd generation of downsampling the original master before they encode it to AAC. Also, since it's a lossy algorithm, it doesn't matter how many lossless generations precede it. It'll still be missing data that my FLACs (and CDs) have.
The artifacting you mention in CDs is (assuming no physical media damage) primarily the result of the aforementioned downsampling, which is present in the iTMS files too. Take a new CD off the shelf, take it home, open it, rip it immediately with cdparanoia (or another ripper that uses the paranoia libraries, such as CDex), and you'll have everything but media manufacturing defects mitigated. That won't be very different from a file downsampled and encoded directly from a digital master.
Now, does this mean anyone can hear these differences? I've never bothered to rip anything to AAC, and I haven't used iTMS yet (for a variety of reasons), so I can't comment directly on it, but, I can compare my own experiences with mp3 and ogg vorbis, and extrapolate based on other people's findings with AAC. With mp3, I can hear a difference between 192kbit (and at higher bitrates when poorly encoded) files and the source wav. It's difficult with Ogg Vorbis at quality 6 or higher. Based on someone else's opinion, it seems I'd be able to tell with iTMS too.
A lot of people don't have ears as sharp as mine, and a lot of people care less about how their music sounds. They're entitled to their opinions, and so am I. They may be willing to pay for lossily-encoded music. I'm not.
More than just overclockers, there are those of us who are called upon by family and friends for recommendations for hardware. I (and a lot of us) go with whatever offers the best performance for the price. That's generally AMD (lately, however, they've been trying to match prices with the equivalently-measured Intel chips).
Or, you can (likely in violation of the DMCA or other offensively broad statutes) get/make a macrovision buster. Apparently most coaxial signal boosters have one built in.
1. Sue customers. 2. Make it known you can't win lawsuits. 3. Short your own stock. 4. Profit.
But that sounds like a pump & dump scheme, which I seem to recall hearing is illegal, and no company would EVER think of breaking the law in the name of profit....
DVD speeds are much faster (around 10x) than CD speeds. But still, 16x DVD is only 20MB/s. Just about any hard drive available in the past 5 years should be able to handle that sustained read speed, as long as it's not doing anything else.
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I really should've stopped at the first sentence. I guess i forgot the world uses compound interest for everything.
...or people would forego the theater viewing entirely and wait for the dvdrip (or netflix/blockbuster/etc. to get it in).
The past 10 years have seen ticket prices near me double. I'm just glad prices on everything else haven't had the same rate of increase, as that would be dangerous levels of inflation.
The stratosphere's a couple orders of magnitude closer than geosynchronous orbit. Assuming sufficiently fast data rates and no stratellite relay lag, the lag time for bouncing a signal off one of these at the top of the stratosphere is a third of a millisecond. That's negligible for anything time-dependent.
IANAL, but that sounds pretty close to fraud to me.
You are right though about the service plan being good for the price at time of purchase, not whatever the current price is. I had a Palm m500 die a couple months ago and got a new Palm Tungsten E because of the extended warranty on the m500.
The problem is, that would necessitate and angst-ridden teenager category.
On second thought...that could be quite useful for ignoring.
IANAL, but, the Constitution does authorize Congress the power to amend and expand upon it.
That said, something does smell fishy about how the balance of copyright has shifted away from the public good (so much so that it seems to me that the social contract basis of copyrights set out in the Constitution has been unceremoniously defenestrated onto a pile of fertilizer).
I've always found alt-tab to be much faster than anything involving the mouse for switching applications, because, >90% of the time, I'm switching between a handful of applications in rapid succession, and I tend to have my hands over the keyboard already. Since I don't use it much anyways, and my propensity for having lots of windows open at once, I keep it hidden on the right side, covering about 30% of the screen when extended.
A liquid mass flow meter in a car would have to be calibrated with the same amount of aggregate fuel flow as the gas pumps. But most people don't have hundreds of gallons of fuel flowing through them in a single day. Most gas pumps do.
Provided you keep it free of spyware, XP and 2K are both quite stable (I never used NT). In my experience, most problems on relatively stable OSes (2K/XP/Linux) are related to hardware, driver, or spyware problems. Initially, I had some stability problems with XP, but a sound card change and SP1 ironed most of those out.
I'd hardly say the VIN system is coming up short. The CNet article said manufacturers may run out by the end of the decade, which would only be a year short of the original estimate. We never see that kind of accuracy in predictions in the computer world (Moore's law generally accepted), because the automobile industry is a much more mature industry.
Extending the VIN length makes the most sense to me, since there doesn't seem to be a way around this without having to reprogram all the systems anyways. Some people have suggested expanding the characters available for part or all of it, but the characters in use were selected because they're the easiest to tell apart when the VIN plate is encrusted with layers of rust. That's not something most of us are used to thinking about (who gets rusty computer parts?), but is absolutely vital for cars, as long as they're still made with steel or iron anywhere in them.
I recall hearing somewhere that they're based on tailpipe emissions(!) in a laboratory environment using a dynamometer to simulate travel, not actual fuel consumption on even a test track, let alone real roads.
The machines are coming!
Not bad for 4am, eh?
There's one flaw in your logic tho. Studio masters aren't the same 16-bit 44.1KHz sampling rate as cds (and iTMS). They're typically closer to the 24/96 or sometimes even 24/192 of DVD-A. Hence, you still have a brief 2nd generation of downsampling the original master before they encode it to AAC. Also, since it's a lossy algorithm, it doesn't matter how many lossless generations precede it. It'll still be missing data that my FLACs (and CDs) have.
The artifacting you mention in CDs is (assuming no physical media damage) primarily the result of the aforementioned downsampling, which is present in the iTMS files too. Take a new CD off the shelf, take it home, open it, rip it immediately with cdparanoia (or another ripper that uses the paranoia libraries, such as CDex), and you'll have everything but media manufacturing defects mitigated. That won't be very different from a file downsampled and encoded directly from a digital master.
Now, does this mean anyone can hear these differences? I've never bothered to rip anything to AAC, and I haven't used iTMS yet (for a variety of reasons), so I can't comment directly on it, but, I can compare my own experiences with mp3 and ogg vorbis, and extrapolate based on other people's findings with AAC. With mp3, I can hear a difference between 192kbit (and at higher bitrates when poorly encoded) files and the source wav. It's difficult with Ogg Vorbis at quality 6 or higher. Based on someone else's opinion, it seems I'd be able to tell with iTMS too.
A lot of people don't have ears as sharp as mine, and a lot of people care less about how their music sounds. They're entitled to their opinions, and so am I. They may be willing to pay for lossily-encoded music. I'm not.
This is what I picture when I hear "war golfing".
More than just overclockers, there are those of us who are called upon by family and friends for recommendations for hardware. I (and a lot of us) go with whatever offers the best performance for the price. That's generally AMD (lately, however, they've been trying to match prices with the equivalently-measured Intel chips).
What about running a game server on a rolling ad-hoc network?
Or, you can (likely in violation of the DMCA or other offensively broad statutes) get/make a macrovision buster. Apparently most coaxial signal boosters have one built in.
Isn't it...
1. Sue customers.
2. Make it known you can't win lawsuits.
3. Short your own stock.
4. Profit.
But that sounds like a pump & dump scheme, which I seem to recall hearing is illegal, and no company would EVER think of breaking the law in the name of profit....
So get Wikipedia or whomever originated wikis to get a defensive patent for them.
DVD speeds are much faster (around 10x) than CD speeds. But still, 16x DVD is only 20MB/s. Just about any hard drive available in the past 5 years should be able to handle that sustained read speed, as long as it's not doing anything else.