Considering I grew up with vinyl records and cassette tapes, I absolutely prefer the sound of records over CD/MP3 and it seems the kids of today prefer digital. My pops and tape hiss are their sizzle and "magic castle sound" (that's the name I give to the chimey artifacts you hear on overly-compressed audio, mainly spoken word).
I've been wondering lately if kids are going to look back fondly at compressed video, macroblocking, banding, etc the way I do when I think back at the scanlines, snow, and 60Hz buzz of tubes sets with analog signals.
Amazon Sales Rank in no way represents reality. Just last week many members the HD-DVD rah-rah camp prematurely declared victory for software sales based on Amazon rankings showing HD-DVD titles outselling Blu-Ray by a large margin. In reality Nielsen VideoScan came back to show Blu-Ray taking the week 73:27.
For the entire month of July the PS3 was in the top three of the Video Game category at Amazon, seemingly outselling even the Wii most of the month. The Xbox 360 was barely in the top 20 for the month. When the smoke cleared the Wii outsold the PS3 by over 300% and the 360 beat it by 11k units.
Amazon Sales Rank is useless for comparing product sales.
The developers are looking to target AppleTV as the lead platform (at least on the low-end). This is great as the beauty of XBMC was that it ran on a console and everyone running it was on the same page hardware-wise. The only downside is lack of optical storage on the ATV and whether or not it can decode 1080p content.
I am reluctant to believe that 1M Zunes were sold through to consumers as opposed to sold to retail. Microsoft pulled this same stunt in December to meet their 10M Xbox 360 goal. They essentially flooded the retail channels with 360s, many of which are still on the shelves today. The question is, how many Zunes did they dump into retail to meet the 1M goal?
It will be the same situation as in the 90s where Sony Walkman cassette players were $50 and knock-offs from Koss and the likes were at $30. Once digital audio players are common, "throwaway" devices the luster of an iPod proper will evaporate.
The day you can walk into Walmart and buy a 4 - 8GB flash player for $39.99 is the day the iPod will die. The iPod will eventually meet the same fate as the Sony Walkman did in the 90s once cheap Japanese knock-offs can be manufactured for cheap enough.
I get it all the time. I have been using "Find as you type" since pre-1.0 and it's only started happening with 1.5.0.2. I brought it up at mozillaZine and nobody seemed to care.
Has anyone sumbitted and official bug report on it?
Jack-of-all-trades devices are rarely successful. The iPod can be used as a PDA via its contact management and calendar functions, but I don't know one person who uses that functionality (and Apple has not expanded on it since its introduction).
The iPod does one thing really well -- play media. I will admit that Apple are encroaching on shark jumping territory by adding video functionality to the device, and if they don't integrate it correctly it could be the point where the iPod's dominance falters.
Thank goodness the leak shots of the new iPod Video are fake. Sacrificing the awesome ergonomics of the iPod to incorporate a wide screen display would be nothing but detrimental to the brand.
...it's not an iPod. It's like at Christmas getting a cheap Korean knockoff of the year's hot item. To beat the iPod you have to leapfrog it not clone it.
This has always been Ken Kat strategy from day one. Hype the PS3 as a supercomputer and go on record that it will be "expensive." Then when all looks dire (and just in time for E3 '06) expose the true price point for $399 USD -- "Yes $399, to let it go at this price is killing us. Did I mention it's a supercomputer?"
If Sony knows one thing, it's how to hype a product.
My company threw a fit yesterday regarding the potential of internal documents ending up on Google's servers via Google Desktop 3.0. The IT department ordered that all copies of Desktop be uninstalled, even though the dubious functionality is turned off by default.
I can't see many large companies trusting Google with their internal email and documents. The ASP model will not be embraced by many. If they were serious about eating Exchange's lunch, they would offer Gmail as a self-hosted solution.
The whole point of email is to avoid "instant" IMO
on
Google Adds Chat To Gmail
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The whole reason I use email is that I don't want to talk (chat) with people realtime. I like to respond on my terms. Now my gmail contacts are going to want to up and chat with me all of the time?
Hopefully this feature can be disabled. I love gmail for it's simplicity, but now they are encroaching on feature bloat.
I thought Gates' solution was to have SMTP senders solve a simple math equation from each mail item they wished to post to a server, thus causing spammers a massive slowdown.
To the best of my knowledge this solution is not in practice and Microsoft is using Bayesian filtering which way predates Bill's promise.
included are language-defined threads, optional garbage collection, some automatic type deduction, and template concepts.
I liked it when it was called -- Java! But seriously, C++ is a bunch of crap grafted on C, now he wants to graft more crap onto C++? It's like Frankenstein meets the Reanimator at this point.
What do you think about the various dolby/fake surround sounds. I seem to be in a minority that prefers stereo over a center speaker.
Well, I like it for TV that's not DD 5.1. For music it's kind of weird. At least my receiver has a "party" mode that treats the rear surround speakers as stereo pairs.
My wife was commenting the other day how bad music sounds over the ProLogic II simulated 5.1 and she knows absolutely nothing at all about sound engineering.
Living in NYC, I haven't listened to the radio in years. However, I rented a car for Thanksgiving and had the radio on most of the time. One station played Boston's More Than a Feeling and I noticed not only was it speed up, but they completely chopped the second verse out. The original weighs in at only 4:44, but I think they chopped it to about 3 minutes and change.
I also noticed how extreme FM radio compresses music. I started studying mixing recently and have learned to listen to my music with a flat EQ. Man, FM crushes the hell out of the sound. It's all bass and treble.
Artists who are unknown, and thus most helped by file sharing
For the past 50-years the only way to be a "successful" musician was to write songs 2:50 long and sell 500,000 records. Ever wonder why everything on the radio sounds the same? If an artist can't break even, they're pretty much worthless in the eye of the label.
Legitimate online digital distribution of music could possibly replace the notion of rock stars with micro-stars in their respected genres. There just needs to be some sort of way to market these niche artists online so the cream rises to the top. A group who could make 80% off of their recordings is not so bad off considering the average signed artist only sees 5 - 15% per record.
Times are changing. People are no longer satisfied paying upwards to $20 USD for physical media which becomes more and more restrictive as time goes by.
The "free love" people tasted with P2P was a stake in the heart of the physical format. We can't go back to the way things were. People like iTunes because it sucks less than the alternatives. Sure, it's coated with DRM, but at least it's not installing rootkits on your PC.
Home recording, inexpensive marketing via the internet, and the digital media formats are the trifecta that will strip a lot of undeserving middle-aged record execs of their Diablos.
The music recording industry is fixing to implode, but what rises from the ashes could be very promising.
Thank you Microsoft for updating the "DOS" shell. Us command-line jocks really do appreciate it. They were even nice to us switch-hitters in that "cd/windows/system32" (note the forward slashes) actually works now. I guess they concede they lost the slash wars after all these years:)
But seriously. After spending in any time in a Linux or OS X sexy, semi-transparent shell windows, with a nice courier font and syntax highlighting, Monand (as it is now) still runs in the gross 1982 DOS window?
Funny how he was riding the HD-DVD parade all the way up until Warner Bros jumped ship this week, spelling pretty much the death of the format. Now, he's all about direct digital distribution? Sure optical media is going the way of the dodo, but Gates is very much flop-flopping here.
I sat there and watched it count down to zero, then it jumped back to a five minute countdown. Waited for that to end, then it jumped up to five and a half hours. They could have at least synced the time at startup, not rely on the system clock and time zones. They can't even write decent Flash code:(
I was thinking about what could possibly out-Google Google other than some other company making a better search engine.
Would it be possible to construct an OSS distributed search index, where anyone who participates would donate a portion of their disk to for indexing thus creating a super-distributed, free-Free, Google killer? The only downside I can see is that it might be painfully slow compared to Google, unless some genius out there came up with a clever algorithm to distribute the indices.
If it were OSS, couldn't it borrow heavily from PageRank[tm] as well?
Just a thought I thought I would throw out. The details and implementation are beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering I grew up with vinyl records and cassette tapes, I absolutely prefer the sound of records over CD/MP3 and it seems the kids of today prefer digital. My pops and tape hiss are their sizzle and "magic castle sound" (that's the name I give to the chimey artifacts you hear on overly-compressed audio, mainly spoken word).
I've been wondering lately if kids are going to look back fondly at compressed video, macroblocking, banding, etc the way I do when I think back at the scanlines, snow, and 60Hz buzz of tubes sets with analog signals.
Amazon Sales Rank in no way represents reality. Just last week many members the HD-DVD rah-rah camp prematurely declared victory for software sales based on Amazon rankings showing HD-DVD titles outselling Blu-Ray by a large margin. In reality Nielsen VideoScan came back to show Blu-Ray taking the week 73:27.
For the entire month of July the PS3 was in the top three of the Video Game category at Amazon, seemingly outselling even the Wii most of the month. The Xbox 360 was barely in the top 20 for the month. When the smoke cleared the Wii outsold the PS3 by over 300% and the 360 beat it by 11k units.
Amazon Sales Rank is useless for comparing product sales.
The developers are looking to target AppleTV as the lead platform (at least on the low-end). This is great as the beauty of XBMC was that it ran on a console and everyone running it was on the same page hardware-wise. The only downside is lack of optical storage on the ATV and whether or not it can decode 1080p content.
I am reluctant to believe that 1M Zunes were sold through to consumers as opposed to sold to retail. Microsoft pulled this same stunt in December to meet their 10M Xbox 360 goal. They essentially flooded the retail channels with 360s, many of which are still on the shelves today. The question is, how many Zunes did they dump into retail to meet the 1M goal?
It will be the same situation as in the 90s where Sony Walkman cassette players were $50 and knock-offs from Koss and the likes were at $30. Once digital audio players are common, "throwaway" devices the luster of an iPod proper will evaporate.
The day you can walk into Walmart and buy a 4 - 8GB flash player for $39.99 is the day the iPod will die. The iPod will eventually meet the same fate as the Sony Walkman did in the 90s once cheap Japanese knock-offs can be manufactured for cheap enough.
I get it all the time. I have been using "Find as you type" since pre-1.0 and it's only started happening with 1.5.0.2. I brought it up at mozillaZine and nobody seemed to care.
Has anyone sumbitted and official bug report on it?
It used to belong to Live Networks Inc (check Wayback). They are a vendor of streaming media tools. They had the domain since at least 1998.
...buying a new car with the caveat you have to drive Stan, the guy at the service desk, to work every other Thursday.
Jack-of-all-trades devices are rarely successful. The iPod can be used as a PDA via its contact management and calendar functions, but I don't know one person who uses that functionality (and Apple has not expanded on it since its introduction).
The iPod does one thing really well -- play media. I will admit that Apple are encroaching on shark jumping territory by adding video functionality to the device, and if they don't integrate it correctly it could be the point where the iPod's dominance falters.
Thank goodness the leak shots of the new iPod Video are fake. Sacrificing the awesome ergonomics of the iPod to incorporate a wide screen display would be nothing but detrimental to the brand.
...it's not an iPod. It's like at Christmas getting a cheap Korean knockoff of the year's hot item. To beat the iPod you have to leapfrog it not clone it.
This has always been Ken Kat strategy from day one. Hype the PS3 as a supercomputer and go on record that it will be "expensive." Then when all looks dire (and just in time for E3 '06) expose the true price point for $399 USD -- "Yes $399, to let it go at this price is killing us. Did I mention it's a supercomputer?"
If Sony knows one thing, it's how to hype a product.
My company threw a fit yesterday regarding the potential of internal documents ending up on Google's servers via Google Desktop 3.0. The IT department ordered that all copies of Desktop be uninstalled, even though the dubious functionality is turned off by default.
I can't see many large companies trusting Google with their internal email and documents. The ASP model will not be embraced by many. If they were serious about eating Exchange's lunch, they would offer Gmail as a self-hosted solution.
The whole reason I use email is that I don't want to talk (chat) with people realtime. I like to respond on my terms. Now my gmail contacts are going to want to up and chat with me all of the time?
Hopefully this feature can be disabled. I love gmail for it's simplicity, but now they are encroaching on feature bloat.
I thought Gates' solution was to have SMTP senders solve a simple math equation from each mail item they wished to post to a server, thus causing spammers a massive slowdown.
To the best of my knowledge this solution is not in practice and Microsoft is using Bayesian filtering which way predates Bill's promise.
I liked it when it was called -- Java! But seriously, C++ is a bunch of crap grafted on C, now he wants to graft more crap onto C++? It's like Frankenstein meets the Reanimator at this point.
Well, I like it for TV that's not DD 5.1. For music it's kind of weird. At least my receiver has a "party" mode that treats the rear surround speakers as stereo pairs.
My wife was commenting the other day how bad music sounds over the ProLogic II simulated 5.1 and she knows absolutely nothing at all about sound engineering.
I guess you're right.
Living in NYC, I haven't listened to the radio in years. However, I rented a car for Thanksgiving and had the radio on most of the time. One station played Boston's More Than a Feeling and I noticed not only was it speed up, but they completely chopped the second verse out. The original weighs in at only 4:44, but I think they chopped it to about 3 minutes and change.
I also noticed how extreme FM radio compresses music. I started studying mixing recently and have learned to listen to my music with a flat EQ. Man, FM crushes the hell out of the sound. It's all bass and treble.
For the past 50-years the only way to be a "successful" musician was to write songs 2:50 long and sell 500,000 records. Ever wonder why everything on the radio sounds the same? If an artist can't break even, they're pretty much worthless in the eye of the label.
Legitimate online digital distribution of music could possibly replace the notion of rock stars with micro-stars in their respected genres. There just needs to be some sort of way to market these niche artists online so the cream rises to the top. A group who could make 80% off of their recordings is not so bad off considering the average signed artist only sees 5 - 15% per record.
Times are changing. People are no longer satisfied paying upwards to $20 USD for physical media which becomes more and more restrictive as time goes by.
The "free love" people tasted with P2P was a stake in the heart of the physical format. We can't go back to the way things were. People like iTunes because it sucks less than the alternatives. Sure, it's coated with DRM, but at least it's not installing rootkits on your PC.
Home recording, inexpensive marketing via the internet, and the digital media formats are the trifecta that will strip a lot of undeserving middle-aged record execs of their Diablos.
The music recording industry is fixing to implode, but what rises from the ashes could be very promising.
Thank you Microsoft for updating the "DOS" shell. Us command-line jocks really do appreciate it. They were even nice to us switch-hitters in that "cd /windows/system32" (note the forward slashes) actually works now. I guess they concede they lost the slash wars after all these years :)
But seriously. After spending in any time in a Linux or OS X sexy, semi-transparent shell windows, with a nice courier font and syntax highlighting, Monand (as it is now) still runs in the gross 1982 DOS window?
I hope this changes come Long^M^M^M^M Vista
Funny how he was riding the HD-DVD parade all the way up until Warner Bros jumped ship this week, spelling pretty much the death of the format. Now, he's all about direct digital distribution? Sure optical media is going the way of the dodo, but Gates is very much flop-flopping here.
I sat there and watched it count down to zero, then it jumped back to a five minute countdown. Waited for that to end, then it jumped up to five and a half hours. They could have at least synced the time at startup, not rely on the system clock and time zones. They can't even write decent Flash code :(
That's a great idea. I was thinking of somehow to incorporate it into FireFox but didn't think of auto-indexing based on casual surfing.
One major concern would be protecting against "search optimizing" scammers and poisoning the well attacks.
I'm interested to see if anything like this does crop up.
I was thinking about what could possibly out-Google Google other than some other company making a better search engine.
Would it be possible to construct an OSS distributed search index, where anyone who participates would donate a portion of their disk to for indexing thus creating a super-distributed, free-Free, Google killer? The only downside I can see is that it might be painfully slow compared to Google, unless some genius out there came up with a clever algorithm to distribute the indices.
If it were OSS, couldn't it borrow heavily from PageRank[tm] as well?
Just a thought I thought I would throw out. The details and implementation are beyond me.