Wouldn't a 24bit 96kHz Ogg/Vorbis trump a "perfect" 16bit 44.1kHz FLAC and still be smaller?)
Only if you can't hear the difference at 16/44 -- Ogg works by "deleting" the sounds their psychoacoustic model says people won't notice are missing. If your personal hearing ability differs from what Ogg's model predicts, then you will hear the artifacts just as much at 24/96 as at 16/44.
Plus, the relatively few people likely to benefit from 24/96 are sufficiently outside of the first standard deviation of the population's hearing ability as to be precisely the people for whom the ogg model is not a good match in the first place.
So, people who would benefit from a 24/96 ogg are extremely small in number.
The logical conclusion I always get to is that we should focus a lot more health resources on the very young, i.e. pre-natal and neo-natal care, free vaccinations, healthy childhood diets and exercise, lifelong sunscreen habits, semi-intentional exposure to a variety of colds and flus in the teens and 20's, and moderation of alcohol and fatty foods after that.
But, it will never happen because kids don't vote. And even if they did vote, they would never vote for that stuff.
Unless your doing some form of audio editing or "production" recording, is lossless really worth the extra size compared to a 192kbps Ogg or MP3?
300GB hard disk = $150. Average flac compressed CD =~ 250MB That equals 1200 albums stored on $150 of hardware, or 13 cents per CD and it is only getting cheaper.
The question should really be - for long term storage, is it really worth not going lossless? Remember, you can always convert from flac to your favorite lossy format at whatever bitrate you want, but you can never convert from lossy back to lossless.
There was an article in one of the local oregon papers that suggested their incident was st elmo's fire and not an actual laser.
Pilots aren't that bright outside of their rather narrow speciality - I've known a few commercial airline pilots myself and heard plenty of stories - and they are just as subject to the herd mentality. I'm sure that any unusual light-related phenomenon withnessed by a pilot since that silly DHS alert about laser attacks a few months ago has been reported as a laser.
Placing the bug on the car is the equivalent of a search of the vehicle. You seem to think it is a reasonable search. We don't. Furthermore, the problem is not necessarily that it is a location monitor, it is that they can put anything on the car at all. The vehicle is private property, they can't come along and stick something on the side of your house without your permission, they should not be able to come along and stick something on your car either.
And yes you can put a GPS on my car, you won't find anything interesting just a lot of trips to Taco Bell.
Ah yes, the old "Only the guilty have anything to fear" fallacy. The police are never corrupt, and they don't even make honest mistakes.
Would you still be so happy if that taco bell was robbed just 30 seconds after you left and the description of the robbers' vehicle matched yours too? They've now got absolute proof of your presence at the scene of the crime and you match the description to boot. Sounds like a slam-dunk prosecution to me, no point in wasting any valuable manpower investigating further, book'em Dano!
So, what is the qualitative difference between using a piece of technology (surreptitiously placed location transponder) and a human (plainclothes cop)?
Why should this be limited to a transponder placed on a car? How about on your clothes? It is qualitatively the same thing, particularly with respect to private property - parking your bugged car in your garage is fundamentally the same as wearing your bugged clothing inside your house.
Heck, how is this any different from having a transponder surreptisouly implanted under your skin? After all, when you are walking around in public, you are just as susceptible to being tailed by a plainclothes cop, this is just more efficient.
You're right - now I remember all the hype about winfs, I had forgotten it since most of the hyped stuff had been "pushed back" for the release after longhorn...
Basically, a pre-emptive strike to keep from loosing customers to Microsoft OS integration.
Assuming, of course, that microsoft would have even thought of implementing a good desktop search system if Google had not it first.
MS has had a crude one for years, I remember my Win98 machine periodically going into a flury of disk activity, and consquently killing interactive response time, every couple of hours just to rebuild (from scratch) the full keyword index of MS word and other "Text" documents.
It took me almost a month to figure out that my machine wasn't broken, that MS intended that slowness and disk fight to happen regularly and that I could actually turn it off, if I knew where to look.
But from then until Google did their thing, MS certainly had not improved on their system and most people had learned to avoid installing it in the first place.
So there's no question what his answer to the question I raised would be, which was what my point was.
You mean the question which you qualified with this statement?
The standard response "software is already protected by copyright, patents are unnecessary" doesn't work, because anyone can study the code (even the binary will do), describe the algorithm to someone else, who can then reimplement it. Standard cleanroom process; takes only a couple of days for a competent team.
Your statement is so broad as to support ALL software patents. You might as well have just come right out and said that, "Because code can be reverse engineered, software patents should be allowed." There is nothing about this particular case with stuffit that has any more meaning or brings a different POV to the topic.
But you spiced it up with a little RMS is a commie silliness -- "no one has the right to own anything" is more than just a bit of exaggeration -- and voila! lots-o-karma, but bad dharma.
Think back to the last time you did an all-night coding session. What kind of food did you eat? Those vending machines don't exactly sell health food.
I want to know why the hell not?
I sure wish the big, fancy refrigerated, robotic soda machines at my job carried a couple of rows of dilberitos instead of another forty 20oz bottles of pepsi.
I'm sure there are other healthy foods that could be put in vending machines. If they can have vending machines with egg-salad sandwidches (yeech!) they can can have them with salads and other flavorful, but healthy foods.
Considering how diet-conscious the country is, I can't understand why such things aren't common place. Instead, it seems like a miracle when the soda machine has even just one flavor of diet soda among like 400 bottles of liquid sugar, much less a healthy snack or meal substitute.
this drive is encrypted to the point the NSA can't break in, but no, I'm too stupid to enable WEP, and no, I just can't remember the pass-phrase for the drive".
If you are akamai enough to encrypt your hard disk with that level of security, then you are smart enough to use a physical token, like a usb flash-drive, to contain a nice big and completely unmemorizable "pass-phrase."
Too bad you were just dumb enough to have somehow misplaced it in a burning fireplace when your PC was confiscated -- probably due to the emotional stress the confiscation caused you.
The bullets RELEASED UV radiation. If they trapped it, they would have SAVED the vampires, not killed them. Depleted uranium bullets release gamma(?) radiation (although that's just a side-effect), so a UV bullet isn't really in the realm of magical. In other words, it ain't funny if you don't get it right.
You did a pretty poor job of ignoring the next sentence where I said that since Apple holds more than 90% of the market for such devices, ipod or otherwise -- that very same similarity of functionality you went on about.
A monopoly is (legally) when no one can enter the market and make money, even if they have a better product.
So, how exactly can another company, say Real, enter the market for DRM-restricted music playable on an ipod and make money at it? The answer is, they can not.
Heck, even for DRM-restricted music playable on any portable hard disk player? Still not feasible. With the ipod having a market share exceeding 90% for portable hard disk players, the ability to profitably compete in the related market for DRM-restricted music on those players does not exist.
Therefore, by your own definition, Apple does indeed have a monopoly. Furthermore, Apple's actions to prevent Real from either licensing or independently using ipod-comptabile DRM constitutes an abuse of that monopoly position.
Are there any standalone DVD players that do this? I'd be more interested in that.
Yes, many. Go to http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks and search through the lists of hacks there. Chances are, if you go with a cheapo player, it is more likely to have a hack available to make it more consumer friendly. In case you are a fearin' the word "hack" most of them are just the pressing of an obscure combination of keys on the remote control, and typically you only do it once, not every time you turn on the player.
As for durability of media - get yourself a DVD burner, the aforementioned videohelp website has forums discussing the relative merits of the available burners, but for way under $100 you can pick up a high quality unit such as the NEC 3500. Then, use it to copy the media your toddler will be interacting with, store the original somewhere toddler-proof and give her the copy. When she breaks it, make a new copy. Blank media is readily available for less than 25 cents per disc, and the software to duplicate a video dvd is free, just google for "dvd shrink"
You can buy a diesel Civic in other parts of the world. We're screwed in the US though...
It is my understanding that those other parts of the world have a higher standard of purity for their diesel than the USA does and that our current standard would not allow for the same levels of efficiency and/or reduced emissions.
I also recall hearing that california (maybe the entire country) was only a year or two away from implementing those same higher minimum purity standards for diesel and thus we might start seeing similarly efficient diesel vehicles here soon.
I hope you're not claiming that is true of Solaris. Starting with SunOS 5 it was pretty much rewritten in collaboration with AT&T (aka SVR4).
Of course not, I think you are grasping at straws to even say that. SunOS 1-4 came first, without BSD Sun would not have existed to even get to the point of creating Solaris.
None of this would exist without AT&T's liberal licensing policies, so we can play oneupsmanship on who came first too.
So? ATT had a sorta-kinda OSS license that enabled BSD. That certainly doesn't make Sun's existence any less dependent on OSS.
So if you're going to attack Sun, pick a version you want to attack instead of what you can conjure out of worst of all instantiations.
I was only attacking your premise that OSS owes "respect" to Sun. As far as I can tell, Sun owes at least as much to OSS as OSS owes to Sun.
For example: GNU would not be where it is today if it hadn't been built on Unix, and particularly Solaris/SunOS for a long time before The Linux kernel was a sparkle in Linus' eye.
Lest ye forget, SunOS was itself a BSD derivative. In other words, Sun took an effectively open source OS, closed it up and called it their own. All perfectly legal under the BSD license, but certainly not very neighborly of them.
So, considering that Sun would not even exist were it not for OSS I think it is a little bit misleading to characterize OSS as being hugely dependent on Sun when Sun itself was at least as much dependent on OSS.
Plus, you have to wonder how much did gcc's existence help sell Sun hardware? For a very long time, gcc produced faster and more efficient binaries than Sun's own C compiler, and unlike gcc, you had to pay extra to get it. Without gcc, a lot of general purpose sun hardware would never have been purchased because less money would have been left over after paying for the C compilers.
The first poster is refering to positive atheism which is a faith-based denial of the existance of a God.
The second poster refers to negative atheism which is simply a lack of opinion on the topic.
Agnosticism, in almost all forms, is focused on the question of existence and one might argue that an agnostic's belief about the parameters of that question (as to how verifiable an answer would be, if there were one) is almost bordering on a kind of faith itself. A little tiny faith in comparision to, say, catholicism, but still a faith.
The first poster, obviously a creature of faith is probably unable to see the world in terms of anything but faith and so can only see or accept atheism as positive atheism. Negative atheism, or the idea that the question is a "don't care" is particularly incomprehensible for him.
Yet, negative atheism is exactly the model the courts, and the rest of government, ought to, and generally do, follow in the USA.
No I don't have any data to show huge profit margins. I don't even have a link to back up what I'm about to say. But, the recording industry, and to a lesser extent, the movie industry, is famous for cooking the books in order to reduce payments to the actual artists.
The stereotypical example is the artist that signs a contract for X% of the profits from sales of their work. Their publisher then does everything they can, including bogus "breakage" fees and zero-cost "promotional" sales, to show a loss or at best break-even in order to weasel out of paying anything to the artist.
If the books have to be cooked to steal from the artists, then that means that the same cooked numbers are reported to wall-street, thus cooking the numbers that we see as being officially reported.
Ok, I lied, one link. But it did not have too much in the way of hard numbers.
Guess what; you just re-built an SAP or a PeopleSoft.
With one key difference -
If this new hypothetical company goes belly-up, they don't take the software with them.
If they get bought out and the shut down, they don't take the software with them.
If their top talent starts feeling that corporate management is taking development in the wrong direction - they can quit and start their own company to go in the right direction.
etc
Making money by selling support services is the most obvious and long-standing open-source business strategy in existence.
Either way, I am still not concerned about lettign someone swipe my ID, as the amount of information they collect is still far less than what they could get with a simple freeze frame and some basic image enhancement of a security camera tape as I pulled out my wallet to pay for something.
That's ridiculously poor risk assesment on your part
The information may be the same, or even more with the camera, but the effort required to acquire it is orders of magnitude more expensive. The chances that your local liquor store has an automated system going over all security tapes to pull that information off all video-taped customer transactions is infitisemally small.
The chance that they have a computer recording all the data from each swipe of a driver's license is probably close to 100% - the official justification being that they need a record of having verified a customer's age in case they get sued or fined for underage sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't a 24bit 96kHz Ogg/Vorbis trump a "perfect" 16bit 44.1kHz FLAC and still be smaller?)
Only if you can't hear the difference at 16/44 -- Ogg works by "deleting" the sounds their psychoacoustic model says people won't notice are missing. If your personal hearing ability differs from what Ogg's model predicts, then you will hear the artifacts just as much at 24/96 as at 16/44.
Plus, the relatively few people likely to benefit from 24/96 are sufficiently outside of the first standard deviation of the population's hearing ability as to be precisely the people for whom the ogg model is not a good match in the first place.
So, people who would benefit from a 24/96 ogg are extremely small in number.
The logical conclusion I always get to is that we should focus a lot more health resources on the very young, i.e. pre-natal and neo-natal care, free vaccinations, healthy childhood diets and exercise, lifelong sunscreen habits, semi-intentional exposure to a variety of colds and flus in the teens and 20's, and moderation of alcohol and fatty foods after that.
But, it will never happen because kids don't vote. And even if they did vote, they would never vote for that stuff.
Unless your doing some form of audio editing or "production" recording, is lossless really worth the extra size compared to a 192kbps Ogg or MP3?
300GB hard disk = $150.
Average flac compressed CD =~ 250MB
That equals 1200 albums stored on $150 of hardware, or 13 cents per CD and it is only getting cheaper.
The question should really be - for long term storage, is it really worth not going lossless? Remember, you can always convert from flac to your favorite lossy format at whatever bitrate you want, but you can never convert from lossy back to lossless.
It is both simultaneously disheartening and reassuring that our only protection from realization of a Big Brother is the mythical man month.
There was an article in one of the local oregon papers that suggested their incident was st elmo's fire and not an actual laser.
Pilots aren't that bright outside of their rather narrow speciality - I've known a few commercial airline pilots myself and heard plenty of stories - and they are just as subject to the herd mentality. I'm sure that any unusual light-related phenomenon withnessed by a pilot since that silly DHS alert about laser attacks a few months ago has been reported as a laser.
Placing the bug on the car is the equivalent of a search of the vehicle. You seem to think it is a reasonable search. We don't. Furthermore, the problem is not necessarily that it is a location monitor, it is that they can put anything on the car at all. The vehicle is private property, they can't come along and stick something on the side of your house without your permission, they should not be able to come along and stick something on your car either.
And yes you can put a GPS on my car, you won't find anything interesting just a lot of trips to Taco Bell.
Ah yes, the old "Only the guilty have anything to fear" fallacy. The police are never corrupt, and they don't even make honest mistakes.
Would you still be so happy if that taco bell was robbed just 30 seconds after you left and the description of the robbers' vehicle matched yours too? They've now got absolute proof of your presence at the scene of the crime and you match the description to boot. Sounds like a slam-dunk prosecution to me, no point in wasting any valuable manpower investigating further, book'em Dano!
So, what is the qualitative difference between using a piece of technology (surreptitiously placed location transponder) and a human (plainclothes cop)?
Why should this be limited to a transponder placed on a car? How about on your clothes? It is qualitatively the same thing, particularly with respect to private property - parking your bugged car in your garage is fundamentally the same as wearing your bugged clothing inside your house.
Heck, how is this any different from having a transponder surreptisouly implanted under your skin? After all, when you are walking around in public, you are just as susceptible to being tailed by a plainclothes cop, this is just more efficient.
You're right - now I remember all the hype about winfs, I had forgotten it since most of the hyped stuff had been "pushed back" for the release after longhorn...
Basically, a pre-emptive strike to keep from loosing customers to Microsoft OS integration.
Assuming, of course, that microsoft would have even thought of implementing a good desktop search system if Google had not it first.
MS has had a crude one for years, I remember my Win98 machine periodically going into a flury of disk activity, and consquently killing interactive response time, every couple of hours just to rebuild (from scratch) the full keyword index of MS word and other "Text" documents.
It took me almost a month to figure out that my machine wasn't broken, that MS intended that slowness and disk fight to happen regularly and that I could actually turn it off, if I knew where to look.
But from then until Google did their thing, MS certainly had not improved on their system and most people had learned to avoid installing it in the first place.
So there's no question what his answer to the question I raised would be, which was what my point was.
You mean the question which you qualified with this statement?
The standard response "software is already protected by copyright, patents are unnecessary" doesn't work, because anyone can study the code (even the binary will do), describe the algorithm to someone else, who can then reimplement it. Standard cleanroom process; takes only a couple of days for a competent team.
Your statement is so broad as to support ALL software patents. You might as well have just come right out and said that, "Because code can be reverse engineered, software patents should be allowed." There is nothing about this particular case with stuffit that has any more meaning or brings a different POV to the topic.
But you spiced it up with a little RMS is a commie silliness -- "no one has the right to own anything" is more than just a bit of exaggeration -- and voila! lots-o-karma, but bad dharma.
Think back to the last time you did an all-night coding session. What kind of food did you eat? Those vending machines don't exactly sell health food.
I want to know why the hell not?
I sure wish the big, fancy refrigerated, robotic soda machines at my job carried a couple of rows of dilberitos instead of another forty 20oz bottles of pepsi.
I'm sure there are other healthy foods that could be put in vending machines. If they can have vending machines with egg-salad sandwidches (yeech!) they can can have them with salads and other flavorful, but healthy foods.
Considering how diet-conscious the country is, I can't understand why such things aren't common place. Instead, it seems like a miracle when the soda machine has even just one flavor of diet soda among like 400 bottles of liquid sugar, much less a healthy snack or meal substitute.
this drive is encrypted to the point the NSA can't break in, but no, I'm too stupid to enable WEP, and no, I just can't remember the pass-phrase for the drive".
If you are akamai enough to encrypt your hard disk with that level of security, then you are smart enough to use a physical token, like a usb flash-drive, to contain a nice big and completely unmemorizable "pass-phrase."
Too bad you were just dumb enough to have somehow misplaced it in a burning fireplace when your PC was confiscated -- probably due to the emotional stress the confiscation caused you.
The bullets RELEASED UV radiation. If they trapped it, they would have SAVED the vampires, not killed them. Depleted uranium bullets release gamma(?) radiation (although that's just a side-effect), so a UV bullet isn't really in the realm of magical. In other words, it ain't funny if you don't get it right.
You did a pretty poor job of ignoring the next sentence where I said that since Apple holds more than 90% of the market for such devices, ipod or otherwise -- that very same similarity of functionality you went on about.
A monopoly is (legally) when no one can enter the market and make money, even if they have a better product.
So, how exactly can another company, say Real, enter the market for DRM-restricted music playable on an ipod and make money at it? The answer is, they can not.
Heck, even for DRM-restricted music playable on any portable hard disk player? Still not feasible. With the ipod having a market share exceeding 90% for portable hard disk players, the ability to profitably compete in the related market for DRM-restricted music on those players does not exist.
Therefore, by your own definition, Apple does indeed have a monopoly. Furthermore, Apple's actions to prevent Real from either licensing or independently using ipod-comptabile DRM constitutes an abuse of that monopoly position.
Are there any standalone DVD players that do this? I'd be more interested in that.
Yes, many. Go to http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks and search through the lists of hacks there. Chances are, if you go with a cheapo player, it is more likely to have a hack available to make it more consumer friendly. In case you are a fearin' the word "hack" most of them are just the pressing of an obscure combination of keys on the remote control, and typically you only do it once, not every time you turn on the player.
As for durability of media - get yourself a DVD burner, the aforementioned videohelp website has forums discussing the relative merits of the available burners, but for way under $100 you can pick up a high quality unit such as the NEC 3500. Then, use it to copy the media your toddler will be interacting with, store the original somewhere toddler-proof and give her the copy. When she breaks it, make a new copy. Blank media is readily available for less than 25 cents per disc, and the software to duplicate a video dvd is free, just google for "dvd shrink"
Long story short, the MPAA is being sold a lot of snake oil. It's too bad that they're too technologically clueless to realize it.
Slight correction:
Long story short, the MPAA is being sold a lot of snake oil. We are very fortunate that they're too technologically clueless to realize it.
You can buy a diesel Civic in other parts of the world. We're screwed in the US though...
It is my understanding that those other parts of the world have a higher standard of purity for their diesel than the USA does and that our current standard would not allow for the same levels of efficiency and/or reduced emissions.
I also recall hearing that california (maybe the entire country) was only a year or two away from implementing those same higher minimum purity standards for diesel and thus we might start seeing similarly efficient diesel vehicles here soon.
I hope you're not claiming that is true of Solaris. Starting with SunOS 5 it was pretty much rewritten in collaboration with AT&T (aka SVR4).
Of course not, I think you are grasping at straws to even say that. SunOS 1-4 came first, without BSD Sun would not have existed to even get to the point of creating Solaris.
None of this would exist without AT&T's liberal licensing policies, so we can play oneupsmanship on who came first too.
So? ATT had a sorta-kinda OSS license that enabled BSD. That certainly doesn't make Sun's existence any less dependent on OSS.
So if you're going to attack Sun, pick a version you want to attack instead of what you can conjure out of worst of all instantiations.
I was only attacking your premise that OSS owes "respect" to Sun. As far as I can tell, Sun owes at least as much to OSS as OSS owes to Sun.
For example: GNU would not be where it is today if it hadn't been built on Unix, and particularly Solaris/SunOS for a long time before The Linux kernel was a sparkle in Linus' eye.
Lest ye forget, SunOS was itself a BSD derivative. In other words, Sun took an effectively open source OS, closed it up and called it their own. All perfectly legal under the BSD license, but certainly not very neighborly of them.
So, considering that Sun would not even exist were it not for OSS I think it is a little bit misleading to characterize OSS as being hugely dependent on Sun when Sun itself was at least as much dependent on OSS.
Plus, you have to wonder how much did gcc's existence help sell Sun hardware? For a very long time, gcc produced faster and more efficient binaries than Sun's own C compiler, and unlike gcc, you had to pay extra to get it. Without gcc, a lot of general purpose sun hardware would never have been purchased because less money would have been left over after paying for the C compilers.
Gotta watch out for that employer brainwashing.
The first poster is refering to positive atheism which is a faith-based denial of the existance of a God.
The second poster refers to negative atheism which is simply a lack of opinion on the topic.
Agnosticism, in almost all forms, is focused on the question of existence and one might argue that an agnostic's belief about the parameters of that question (as to how verifiable an answer would be, if there were one) is almost bordering on a kind of faith itself. A little tiny faith in comparision to, say, catholicism, but still a faith.
The first poster, obviously a creature of faith is probably unable to see the world in terms of anything but faith and so can only see or accept atheism as positive atheism. Negative atheism, or the idea that the question is a "don't care" is particularly incomprehensible for him.
Yet, negative atheism is exactly the model the courts, and the rest of government, ought to, and generally do, follow in the USA.
No I don't have any data to show huge profit margins. I don't even have a link to back up what I'm about to say. But, the recording industry, and to a lesser extent, the movie industry, is famous for cooking the books in order to reduce payments to the actual artists.
The stereotypical example is the artist that signs a contract for X% of the profits from sales of their work. Their publisher then does everything they can, including bogus "breakage" fees and zero-cost "promotional" sales, to show a loss or at best break-even in order to weasel out of paying anything to the artist.
If the books have to be cooked to steal from the artists, then that means that the same cooked numbers are reported to wall-street, thus cooking the numbers that we see as being officially reported.
Ok, I lied, one link. But it did not have too much in the way of hard numbers.
Guess what; you just re-built an SAP or a PeopleSoft.
With one key difference -
If this new hypothetical company goes belly-up, they don't take the software with them.
If they get bought out and the shut down, they don't take the software with them.
If their top talent starts feeling that corporate management is taking development in the wrong direction - they can quit and start their own company to go in the right direction.
etc
Making money by selling support services is the most obvious and long-standing open-source business strategy in existence.
Some states (I know Illinois is an example) use an 2D barcode.
And even easier to deface - black felt tip marker anyone?
Does illinois, or any of the other states, make it illegal to scribble out the barcode?
Either way, I am still not concerned about lettign someone swipe my ID, as the amount of information they collect is still far less than what they could get with a simple freeze frame and some basic image enhancement of a security camera tape as I pulled out my wallet to pay for something.
That's ridiculously poor risk assesment on your part
The information may be the same, or even more with the camera, but the effort required to acquire it is orders of magnitude more expensive. The chances that your local liquor store has an automated system going over all security tapes to pull that information off all video-taped customer transactions is infitisemally small.
The chance that they have a computer recording all the data from each swipe of a driver's license is probably close to 100% - the official justification being that they need a record of having verified a customer's age in case they get sued or fined for underage sales.