The truth, as always, isn't quite the same as what you read in the tame corporate media (and, yes, Slashdot does fit that description).
In fact, the author of that article died in a car accident three days after it ran. The Seattle police claim that there was "no evidence of foul play", but there was no autopsy and the body was cremated within a week, which some observers think was a bit hasty. There are been a number of requests for an in-depth investigation from concerned citizens, but the police insist that these people "have no standing", that there is "no evidence of anything", etc. etc. The usual story. Of course there's no evidence; the police haven't looked for any. Without an investigation, doubts will remain, and rightly so.
There are a lot of unanswered questions. As usualy, the media are not even asking them.
The Democratic party was panicking that Dean would actually get the nomination,... his platform overall failed to connect with the average American. Dean was losing momentum...
Okay, he was losing momentum and the voters didn't like him. How does that translate into winning the nomination? Or are you suggesting that "average Americans" rarely vote in Democratic primaries? That seems unlikely.
And don't forget that the media loved Dean until the voters lost interest. Your apparent suggestion that there was a Democratic Party/media conspiracy doesn't fit very many facts, not to mention offending against Hanlon's Razor.
Sesequepedalianism does not, however, imply 'intelligence'.
Agreed! What it implies is literacy,if the words are used correctly, but malapropisms are so common online that the syllable counts here are essentially meaningless. Is this style thing smart enough to detect nonsensical usage? Unlikely.
Therefore, it may well be that Mac users are just desperate to look "smart" in front of their peers -- except that the numbers appear to suggest that they're more desperate than Slahdot users! I personally find that hard to believe.
Since you guys let us have Neil Young and Leon Redbone, you needn't feel bad about Celine Dion. All things considered, even she isn't awful enough to counteract those two.
However, IIRC Canada has European-style restrictions on "hate speech", which I'm not too keen on: Once you start banning the expression of ideas that all right thinking people disapprove of, who knows what "all right thinking people" may disapprove of next? To me, that seems just as malignant as atrocities like the DMCA or the Patriot Act.
The US no-tits-on-TV thing is idiotic, certainly, but it's not a ban on tits in general; you can have all the tits you like in a magazine, DVD, or whatever.
In a nutshell, what you're saying boils down to the following:
The people who run the place are reasonably competent, reasonably honest, and treat the contributors with reasonable justice and consideration (if all those weren't true, the quality wouldn't be so damn high).
The people who run the place tend to sidline the paranoid dingbats (like you) who'd rather engage in endless intramural power struggles than do real work.
That's a pretty good thumbnail sketch of a competent project management team.
Sounds like somebody's doing something right over there.
We all know that "global" means "European"; I'm fine with that. And the "international community" means the EU. No problem. Now that Europeans have repented of their colonialist/paternalis past, they're once again qualified to decide what's best for the rest of the world.
What's difficult is keeping track of which "international" things are evil and which are good.
"Multinational" is bad, right? Because it's got something to do with corporations, which are bad. Unless they're European. A "multinational" corporation is an American corporation which operates in more than one country, and it's bad, even if it practices "internationalization", in spite of the fact that "internationalization" is good (right?). But what about "multinationalism"? Is that one good or bad? I can't tell.
International standards are good, of course, provided that they're European, because then they're "multilateral" (which is good, I think, because "multilateral" means "involving any set of one or more nations which includes France"). If standards are not European, they're "unilateral", which is bad. "Unilateral" means "not including France" (or else "not excluding the US"), and it's very, very bad.
"Globalism" is good, because it includes France. "Globalization" is bad because, even though it includes France (except for Jose Bove), it doesn't exclude the US. "Globalism" is good because it excludes the US by definition: Anything which includes US is no longer "global". Instead, it's "hegemonic", which is very, very bad.
Did I miss any?
I'll scan my damn pet if a damn well please!
on
Robots in Hospitals
·
· Score: 1
To hell with you! There's not a damn thing wrong with scanning pets! My dog would be DEAD now if a regular scan hadn't detected his throbmotic uiriosyntactic metascrofolosus of the anterior dithyramb!
You cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch. I hope your kitty turns into a fucking alligator.
One thing I'd really appreciate from everyone, is if you could please encode your rare out of print material to 320 mp3 or lossless flac and put it up for archival purposes (ok, maybe it technically violates copyrights, but if you can't buy it any where any more, I think of it as a public service).
Sing it, brother!
We need to recognize that stuff like Viva Saturn's back catalog is more endangered than the giant panda, and way more useful in the car on a long drive. Somebody has to preserve these things.
You mean the goal of their marketing is to SELL their PRODUCTS?! What kind of SATANIC FREAKS would do a thing like THAT?! I always thought marketing was supposed to be a purely selfless PUBLIC SERVICE!
In every case I've checked in this discussion where somebody finds a search which returns no results (e.g., "cat", somewhere above -- yep, "cat" returned ZERO results), it starts returning results later on.
So... How do you explain this?
Perhaps somebody at MS is reading this discussion and fixing the cases reported here. That sounds implausible to me, dunno 'bout you.
It's more reasonable to assume that there's some meaningful reason why this is happening: MS may be annoying, but they do have competent programmers there. Maybe the engine is supposed to be "learning" what people are interested in searching for, or something wacky like that.
Chances are, it's doing (or trying to do) something which sounded clever to some PhD at MS Research, and at the moment the implementation isn't working very well. But any company which could make Windows reasonably stable (even if it did take them over a decade) can eventually write a search engine that actually finds things. They will do this while everybody at Slashdot is still busy laughing at what idiots they are. Netscape learned this the hard way. A lot of UNIX companies (remember UNIX? Obsolete OS, sort of like Windows but even less compatible with itself, and without the usability or manageability features) did the same.
I've noticed that the defects I do hear in the sound, guess what? THEY COME FROM THE FREAKING ORIGINAL SOURCE!...[snip]... I was listening to the ATRAC3plus encoded tunes...
If so, then maybe ATRAC3 doesn't suck as much as everybody's claiming (I'll believe nothing I hear from anybody until I hear the format myself). What's the bitrate? Were these tracks re-encoded from MP3s? If so, what were the MP3 bitrates? A 256k MP3 generally sounds tolerable (at least to my ears; hard-core golden-eared fanatics like Neil Young, who thinks CDs sound unacceptably bad, will no doubt find flaws everywhere). If you've got all the bitrates along the way cranked up to the point where the compression isn't mangling much audible information, why then of course the audible information won't be mangled much. But then the example is perfectly irrelevant, because the only case I was discussing was the case where naïve users leave all the settings on "default": 128kbps for MP3, the equivalent for ATRAC3. This is the only case that's commercially significant: On Kazaa or whatever, virtually all of the MP3s you see are 128k, they sound like crap, and they're wildly popular anyway. This is why improved CD formats have gained no traction: Zero demand. Zero.
If that's your case, if you're listing to an ATRAC3 (at any bitrate) re-encoded from a low-bitrate MP3, your perceptions probably aren't worth much. I've rarely heard a 128k MP3 which didn't have painfully audible compression artifact, bad enough to spoil the track. A few have been listenable, as in "the artifact is there, but it's not in my face to the point where I can't choose to ignore it." MP3 compression artifact, the "underwater sound", cannot be mistaken for conventional analog-source noise, not by anybody with any sense. It's a totally different animal. "Original CD"? Yes, I've compared the two.
All you're really saying is that you can't tell good sound from bad, so you don't much care. Right! That's my point. Most customers don't care if their MP3s sound like crap, so they won't care if their ATRAC3s sound like crap either.
Nobody seems to think much of ATRAC3 itself, but that's not the truly awful part anyway.
The awful part is that they're talking about taking data that's already been mutilated by an MP3 encoder, and then mutilating what's left by encoding it again. MP3 gives you an approximation of the CD. Sony's player will give you an approximation of the approximation.
But this is why Sony's not crazy: The users can't hear the difference. Most users insist that 128k MP3s "sound just like the CD". These are the same people who think that the brown things at McDonald's "taste just like a hamburger". You can call them idiots all you like, but they won't listen. That's because they think you "sound just like their neurotic Aunt Mamie who checks her lampshades for dust every ten minutes".
I'm not kidding. 128k MP3s clobbered CDs in the marketplace, and 128k MP3s are pure crap. They sound worse than lacquer 78s. They're worse than cassette tapes, the previous record-holder for "shittiest sound available anywhere". Sound quality is not a selling point, period. LPs survived alongside cassettes because you could access them randomly, not because they sounded better (in fact, after a few years on some idiot's floor gathering gouges and dog hair, they sounded worse than cassettes anyway).
Few of the technical deficiencies of this product are relevant. The time spent re-encoding all the files may well piss customers off, but I guarantee you that few if any of them will care that their music sounds like a water balloon in a garbage disposal.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth, as always, isn't quite the same as what you read in the tame corporate media (and, yes, Slashdot does fit that description).
In fact, the author of that article died in a car accident three days after it ran. The Seattle police claim that there was "no evidence of foul play", but there was no autopsy and the body was cremated within a week, which some observers think was a bit hasty. There are been a number of requests for an in-depth investigation from concerned citizens, but the police insist that these people "have no standing", that there is "no evidence of anything", etc. etc. The usual story. Of course there's no evidence; the police haven't looked for any. Without an investigation, doubts will remain, and rightly so.
There are a lot of unanswered questions. As usualy, the media are not even asking them.
The Democratic party was panicking that Dean would actually get the nomination, ... his platform overall failed to connect with the average American. Dean was losing momentum...
Okay, he was losing momentum and the voters didn't like him. How does that translate into winning the nomination? Or are you suggesting that "average Americans" rarely vote in Democratic primaries? That seems unlikely.
And don't forget that the media loved Dean until the voters lost interest. Your apparent suggestion that there was a Democratic Party/media conspiracy doesn't fit very many facts, not to mention offending against Hanlon's Razor.
Sesequepedalianism does not, however, imply 'intelligence'.
Agreed! What it implies is literacy, if the words are used correctly, but malapropisms are so common online that the syllable counts here are essentially meaningless. Is this style thing smart enough to detect nonsensical usage? Unlikely.
Therefore, it may well be that Mac users are just desperate to look "smart" in front of their peers -- except that the numbers appear to suggest that they're more desperate than Slahdot users! I personally find that hard to believe.
Since you guys let us have Neil Young and Leon Redbone, you needn't feel bad about Celine Dion. All things considered, even she isn't awful enough to counteract those two.
However, IIRC Canada has European-style restrictions on "hate speech", which I'm not too keen on: Once you start banning the expression of ideas that all right thinking people disapprove of, who knows what "all right thinking people" may disapprove of next? To me, that seems just as malignant as atrocities like the DMCA or the Patriot Act.
The US no-tits-on-TV thing is idiotic, certainly, but it's not a ban on tits in general; you can have all the tits you like in a magazine, DVD, or whatever.
In a nutshell, what you're saying boils down to the following:
The people who run the place are reasonably competent, reasonably honest, and treat the contributors with reasonable justice and consideration (if all those weren't true, the quality wouldn't be so damn high).
The people who run the place tend to sidline the paranoid dingbats (like you) who'd rather engage in endless intramural power struggles than do real work.
That's a pretty good thumbnail sketch of a competent project management team.
Sounds like somebody's doing something right over there.
We all know that "global" means "European"; I'm fine with that. And the "international community" means the EU. No problem. Now that Europeans have repented of their colonialist/paternalis past, they're once again qualified to decide what's best for the rest of the world.
What's difficult is keeping track of which "international" things are evil and which are good.
"Multinational" is bad, right? Because it's got something to do with corporations, which are bad. Unless they're European. A "multinational" corporation is an American corporation which operates in more than one country, and it's bad, even if it practices "internationalization", in spite of the fact that "internationalization" is good (right?). But what about "multinational ism "? Is that one good or bad? I can't tell.
International standards are good, of course, provided that they're European, because then they're "multilateral" (which is good, I think, because "multilateral" means "involving any set of one or more nations which includes France"). If standards are not European, they're "unilateral", which is bad. "Unilateral" means "not including France" (or else "not excluding the US"), and it's very, very bad.
"Globalism" is good, because it includes France. "Globalization" is bad because, even though it includes France (except for Jose Bove), it doesn't exclude the US. "Globalism" is good because it excludes the US by definition: Anything which includes US is no longer "global". Instead, it's "hegemonic", which is very, very bad.
Did I miss any?
To hell with you! There's not a damn thing wrong with scanning pets! My dog would be DEAD now if a regular scan hadn't detected his throbmotic uiriosyntactic metascrofolosus of the anterior dithyramb!
You cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch. I hope your kitty turns into a fucking alligator.
One thing I'd really appreciate from everyone, is if you could please encode your rare out of print material to 320 mp3 or lossless flac and put it up for archival purposes (ok, maybe it technically violates copyrights, but if you can't buy it any where any more, I think of it as a public service).
Sing it, brother!
We need to recognize that stuff like Viva Saturn's back catalog is more endangered than the giant panda, and way more useful in the car on a long drive. Somebody has to preserve these things.
You mean the goal of their marketing is to SELL their PRODUCTS?! What kind of SATANIC FREAKS would do a thing like THAT?! I always thought marketing was supposed to be a purely selfless PUBLIC SERVICE!
In every case I've checked in this discussion where somebody finds a search which returns no results (e.g., "cat", somewhere above -- yep, "cat" returned ZERO results), it starts returning results later on.
So... How do you explain this?
Perhaps somebody at MS is reading this discussion and fixing the cases reported here. That sounds implausible to me, dunno 'bout you.
It's more reasonable to assume that there's some meaningful reason why this is happening: MS may be annoying, but they do have competent programmers there. Maybe the engine is supposed to be "learning" what people are interested in searching for, or something wacky like that.
Chances are, it's doing (or trying to do) something which sounded clever to some PhD at MS Research, and at the moment the implementation isn't working very well. But any company which could make Windows reasonably stable (even if it did take them over a decade) can eventually write a search engine that actually finds things. They will do this while everybody at Slashdot is still busy laughing at what idiots they are. Netscape learned this the hard way. A lot of UNIX companies (remember UNIX? Obsolete OS, sort of like Windows but even less compatible with itself, and without the usability or manageability features) did the same.
I've noticed that the defects I do hear in the sound, guess what? THEY COME FROM THE FREAKING ORIGINAL SOURCE! ...[snip]... I was listening to the ATRAC3plus encoded tunes ...
If so, then maybe ATRAC3 doesn't suck as much as everybody's claiming (I'll believe nothing I hear from anybody until I hear the format myself). What's the bitrate? Were these tracks re-encoded from MP3s? If so, what were the MP3 bitrates? A 256k MP3 generally sounds tolerable (at least to my ears; hard-core golden-eared fanatics like Neil Young, who thinks CDs sound unacceptably bad, will no doubt find flaws everywhere). If you've got all the bitrates along the way cranked up to the point where the compression isn't mangling much audible information, why then of course the audible information won't be mangled much. But then the example is perfectly irrelevant, because the only case I was discussing was the case where naïve users leave all the settings on "default": 128kbps for MP3, the equivalent for ATRAC3. This is the only case that's commercially significant: On Kazaa or whatever, virtually all of the MP3s you see are 128k, they sound like crap, and they're wildly popular anyway. This is why improved CD formats have gained no traction: Zero demand. Zero.
If that's your case, if you're listing to an ATRAC3 (at any bitrate) re-encoded from a low-bitrate MP3, your perceptions probably aren't worth much. I've rarely heard a 128k MP3 which didn't have painfully audible compression artifact, bad enough to spoil the track. A few have been listenable, as in "the artifact is there, but it's not in my face to the point where I can't choose to ignore it." MP3 compression artifact, the "underwater sound", cannot be mistaken for conventional analog-source noise, not by anybody with any sense. It's a totally different animal. "Original CD"? Yes, I've compared the two.
All you're really saying is that you can't tell good sound from bad, so you don't much care. Right! That's my point. Most customers don't care if their MP3s sound like crap, so they won't care if their ATRAC3s sound like crap either.
Nobody seems to think much of ATRAC3 itself, but that's not the truly awful part anyway.
The awful part is that they're talking about taking data that's already been mutilated by an MP3 encoder, and then mutilating what's left by encoding it again. MP3 gives you an approximation of the CD. Sony's player will give you an approximation of the approximation.
But this is why Sony's not crazy: The users can't hear the difference. Most users insist that 128k MP3s "sound just like the CD". These are the same people who think that the brown things at McDonald's "taste just like a hamburger". You can call them idiots all you like, but they won't listen. That's because they think you "sound just like their neurotic Aunt Mamie who checks her lampshades for dust every ten minutes".
I'm not kidding. 128k MP3s clobbered CDs in the marketplace, and 128k MP3s are pure crap. They sound worse than lacquer 78s. They're worse than cassette tapes, the previous record-holder for "shittiest sound available anywhere". Sound quality is not a selling point, period. LPs survived alongside cassettes because you could access them randomly, not because they sounded better (in fact, after a few years on some idiot's floor gathering gouges and dog hair, they sounded worse than cassettes anyway).
Few of the technical deficiencies of this product are relevant. The time spent re-encoding all the files may well piss customers off, but I guarantee you that few if any of them will care that their music sounds like a water balloon in a garbage disposal.