All things being equal (and they're not), vinyl and CDs are battling two different enemies at very low levels. Vinyl has a noise floor which can overcome low level passages, but it still has full resolution audio down there. Most of the noise on vinyl is in the band below 100Hz. CDs don't have a noise floor unless you count dither. What does happen on low level passages is a dramatic loss of audio resolution the lower you get on a CD. Once you hit the -96db "noise floor" on a CD, you've got one or two bit audio resolution and it sounds terrible.
If you've ever attended a real concert hall performance, the subtleties of the sounds are fantastic compared to a rock concert. CDs have a hard time reproducing those subtleties. I have the same recording of the Brandenburg Concertos from Deutsche Grammophon on both vinyl and CD. The CD sounds good but on the vinyl, you could hear the solo violinist breathing through his nose and you could hear string noises that were absent on the CD, swallowed up by poor audio resolution I suppose.
That's 160k VBR using which codec? AAC? That's about where I also stop hearing the differences, so I just go to 256k for round numbers. Well, round numbers for a computer, anyway.
I may also be fooling myself now because age takes a toll on hearing, but there was a time when there was nothing like listening to a studio master tape. Capitol Records was letting us into their vault to make DVD-A disks about 10 years ago. That's when I started noticing aliasing in the audio - it was actually high frequency content in the music beating against the slight 15.7khz tone I was starting to hear constantly but didn't notice.
You might want to find the following DVD-A discs I had a hand in encoding and mastering to 192khz PCM 24 bit:
The Beach Boys - Animal Sounds Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery Eric Johnson - Ah Via Musicom The Band - Music From Big Pink Dave Koz - The Dance Crowded House - Crowded House (self titled) Richard Thompson - Rumor and Sigh
Those are just the old check disks I can find on my shelf right now. There were dozens more. DVD-A never hit with consumers because they couldn't really hear/appreciate/care about the difference. The point is, we made CD proofs out of the final layouts of all these and we were like "what happened to the sound?" It was an enormous difference to the point that we tore the equipment apart to find out what the problem was. There was no problem. CDs are constricted quality. Even switching between the PCM tracks and the DTS tracks was audible.
In the early days of CDs, most audiophiles listened to classical music and they could tell you right away that CDs were bad compared to analog vinyl. The really quiet passages, and there were plenty, sounded gritty and dirty. That's because the audio way down there is encoded using maybe 4 bits of quantizing depth. Vinyl didn't have that problem (although it had other problems). But it's like chemical photography. Large format (4x5 and up) vs small format (35mm and down). There's nothing like starting with an acre of film to maintain the quality of an original capture.
And you're doing... what... to find the answer? Whining on slashdot? That's what's sad. I've already got the answer for my compression needs. Do your own testing and let me know how that came out.
Absolutely right. I think 96khz data rate is a threshold where you can start hearing degradations. All these people are doing is testing each other's hearing, not the audio files. We know they're flawed.
Heh... "blind test"... why didn't I think of that?
I've got the perfect two guys with absolute golden ears. They could hear the difference between a digital music master and a perfect copy of that music recorded to another audio workstation. They said the image was "smeared". The rest of us engineers couldn't hear any difference at all. Turns out they were hearing clock jitter from the AES signal system. We did a data copy and that solved it.
Both guys are legally blind, but they can mix audio.
...you can't blame CDs for the crap work of the mixing engineers
If you've ever listened to an audio master at 192khz 24 bit, you'll hear the difference between that and the 44.1khz 16 bit from a CD. It's like someone cleaned your ears out. CDs relatively suck.
Hitachi. I had a 14 disk array of Hitachi SATA drives where all but three drives failed within a year of turning three years old. I have another array of 50 Hitachi drives that runs fine that's about four years old. The rest are HP labeled 10k 2.5" SAS drives which I believe are made by Hitachi. Out of 144 of those drives, I was replacing about one a week after they turned three years old. I've built about 400TB of RAID storage cabinets using Seagate 7200.11 drives (1.5TB) and have had four failures in three years.
Whatever the case, the advertised 300,000 hours MTBF on hard drives is supposed to mean that half your drives fail after 34 years. That's an overstatement by an order of magnitude.
That's the difference really - determining the long term asset value for your data and considering how much there is to archive. My company expects to pull something off the shelf in 100 years and use it.
However, every piece of math I've done about storage says LTO tape is less expensive and safer in the long run. That gap may be narrowing, but the first 100TB of storage is still cheaper on LTO. The second 100TB is dirt cheap compared to hard drives unless you use consumer grade drives instead of enterprise grade - and don't make a redundant copy.
I can store 200TB of data on 134 LTO-5 tapes for about $8,700. Add the $2,500 single external tape drive and you're just north of $10k. That would be fine for a small video facility if they value their data but I can see where a consumer would grimace. I can't tell you how often I've helped a small video facility recover data (if possible) from too many G-Tech and LaCie portable drives. Entire ad campaigns and years of media are GONE and the clients want these guys dead. Since I installed an LTO drive in that small facility, their data loss has ceased - as long as they remember to archive.
For the consumer, the short term storage offered by a pair of 2TB external drives may suffice. I've got about 25TB I'd like to archive right now, so I'm within striking distance of using LTO instead of drives. My RAID system losing two drives in a week was frightening enough. I nearly lost 10TB in one shot.
For a professional building a 200TB spinning disk array, you're talking about a Fiber SAN and a bunch of RAID boxes which would cost a minimum of $80k, or more like $180k if you're going to do it right. Not to mention the kilowatts of power to run it, cool it, time to monitor it and pop spare drives in when half have failed in four years (that's about the average for our plant).
If you're going to do it on single drives (not a SAN), you can put the drives on a shelf like a tape but you had better do at least two hard drives if you want insurance. In the days of consumer equipment doing nothing but data out of HD video cameras, 18Mpixel still cameras, music, movies etc, there will be a capacity threshold where they should have used data tape. Figuring out how much you're going to generate plays into what you're going to use.
I'll tell you what's true; I can pull any 20 year old 8mm Exabyte or DDS-1 tape off my shelf and run it. You can link to my claims because I actually do it at this organization that uses a gold vertical rectangular outline for a logo. Do you actually do it or did you just Google some papers? I can Google papers too, you know, and they agree with what I'm actually doing.
It's all about the storage environment. In 1995, they said this: "Estimates for tape life expectancy may vary from less than ten years to several decades, depending on temperature and RH levels. As a general rule, lower temperatures and drier conditions lead to longer life span." (https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/webfm_send/303)
Fast forward to 2005 and they said this: :...at moderately controlled temperature and humidities the projected lifetimes for these tapes is sufficient for archival storage and lifetimes of 50 to 100 years can be anticipated for the more stable ones." (http://storageconference.org/2003/papers/15_Judge-Media.pdf)
So, don't buy anything from the low bidder. It probably isn't any good. I've taken hundreds of Exabyte tapes and rolled the data to several LTO-3-4-5 tapes over the years. Anyway, I've seen hundreds of drive failures compared to one or two tape failures, usually because of the transport getting hung on eject but you can fix that with a splice back to the leader.
The bigger problem in the very long term is keeping the technology around to recover any of this media, tape or disk - a working transport, a computer with the right HBA, the right OS, and the right version of archive software, the ability to handle the file system etc. You have to run your own museum of technology. I dug out an old AS-6000 to try mounting a RAID pair of disks a few years ago. Had to pull some AIX expert out of retirement to understand the system. It almost worked except we couldn't resolve the sym links in the data which spanned across the disks.
I have to agree with LordLimecat. LTO tape is still cheaper per GB than hard disks, plus:
1) Tape has an average shelf life of 17 years or 30 years depending on who you ask. 2) I've encountered drives which won't start after a long idle time (six years) unless you thump them on the top cover. Whew. They usually start. 3) Carpet your machine room area with thick padding because dropping the drive out of the cradle may kill the data. I've seen it happen too often. I can throw an LTO tape across the room and recover the data.
That's why I said "individual above a certain poverty line", so someone earning less than $18,000 a year (just saying) pays 0% tax. Even some sliding scale where you kick in gradually more % until you get to 15% at some income breakpoint would smooth that out.
Yes, donations are mostly influenced by tax advantages rather than philanthropy. How many of those donation accepting organizations only send 2% of the take to the advertised beneficiary anyway?
The deductions... you're right, that's sticky. If I pay 33% tax now and have the home mortgage deduction taken away in exchange for 15% flat tax, I think that's about a wash. The other deductions - and there are a ton - need to be addressed or accounted for so it's not a punishment to the individual. Corporate tax incentives also need to be addressed to encourage construction of factories in places that need work. Otherwise, corporations the size of GM, CitiCorp or Bank of America which (or "who" since they're considered an individual now) pay no taxes goes away. Corporate brass with gazillion dollar salaries, benefits and bonuses also pay 15%.
Yes; eliminate the loopholes. People would rather burn money than pay any portion of it as taxes.
Oh... forgot a hundred other variables, but make people accountable for the work they do. Labor unions were invented to keep powerful corporate lords from abusing the workforce, and boy, did they ever abuse the workforce. Quite often, Unions turned into a bludgeon to protect workers who are doing a bad job, or to artificially inflate the labor force with way more workers than needed. No wonder jobs are going overseas. Cause and effect.
If an Automaker is making cars that fall apart, something has to be fixed. You can't export a car like that. Sometimes you have to fix the workforce and it becomes Automaker vs Labor Union which deflects workers' accountability. Sometimes you have to fix the Automaker deciding to use a cheap fuel pump which makes the car explode on impact because it's more profitable. Either way, both of these groups need to realize that making bad cars kills exports. Exports is the only way to make money. Japan, Inc. realized this a LONG time ago and the Gov't holds the Corporations and Workers accountable for product quality.
Scrooge McDuck - exactly. Large corporations are interested in only a few things:
Shareholder value
Sending jobs offshore (where it's cheaper to do things)
Paying themselves massive salaries and bonuses
Purchasing laws to let them keep everything
This concentrates all the money with the wealthiest people. The more money one entity has, the less money everyone else has. Nothing flows - "Trickle Down Economics" has proven not to work. We think corporations are all about creating wonderful products to make our lives easier and a pleasure to live; no, it's about making money.
It isn't taxes that don't create jobs, it's the behavior of the people who are supposed to create jobs. They have no obligation to make the economy run. The Republicans represent the wealthy lords and are learning how to bully everyone to get what they want - money. The Democrats represent the people who are supposed to earn a wage and can't, so they over compensate with public programs and fail to make corporations and the wealthy pay the same percentage of tax the middle pays. The Democrats also represent the people who WON'T earn a living - people who have gamed the system into paying them to make babies and not do anything (I actually worked with a single mother of three who became pregnant again and exulted that she was going to have another Government baby - we all wanted to slap her. She made a ton of dough off that).
Corporations aren't going to pay people they don't employ, but sending jobs overseas leaves a lot of the workforce on the Gov't dole. Someone has to pay for that. Either bring the jobs back to the homeland or use some of those billions in profit to help the people survive. Why should a corporation which inhibits the economy get a tax break? Conversely, make the people living on the Gov't dole actually WORK. Make them work on infrastructure projects or something. Don't show up for work, you don't get paid. It's very WPA, but that's about where we're headed.
There was a move to make a "Flat Tax" at one time. What happened to that? Pay 15% of what you earn. Period. Whether you're a corporation or an individual above a certain poverty line, you pay. No deductions.
It's not just about rockets, even though that's the most visible aspect of space flight. NASA people have figured out how to keep someone alive in the damnedest environments, so they know a thing or two about the human body. NASA has 18,000 people working for it and part of them are at several medical institutes: The Cleveland Clinic Center for Space Medicine, The National Space Biomedicine Research Institute in Houston, The John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium which includes medical Universities and a few others. All of them have contributed to medical breakthroughs, mostly specific to space flight but refocusing them on something else isn't beyond reason.
As for world hunger, I'm not sure where we're going to get enough food to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Somebody should start figuring that out - not politicians or agribusiness. Why not a bunch of smart people we're about to put on the street?
I saw NASA get disbanded at the end of Apollo and wondered why we didn't take the talent and brains assembled and say "ok, now go cure cancer" or "solve world hunger". I bet they could do it.
Popular Science February 1935 has an article about recording audio directly to a record - a shellac or lacquer disk. I had a record cutting machine intended for consumers. It was made in 1946 and worked pretty well. Since I couldn't get the lacquer blanks anymore, I recorded on plexiglas. Or how about the 1957 Mutoscope Voice-O-Graph, a walk-up voice recording thing about the size of a phone booth. You stick in coins, say something into the microphone and out comes a record. Technically, it isn't vinyl but the phonograph was in fact recordable media.
If you're fairly new to iOS, there's no way you're going to have 75 apps. However, if you've been around iOS devices for a few years, you've probably got twice that many (I've got 137 not counting the handful I've deleted). Almost all my friends regularly start asking what apps they should get within a month or two of getting comfortable with iPhone/iPad. After that, they get voracious by themselves.
I just checked my 3GS and I'm surprised - 137 apps, two of which cost $0.99 apiece (Talking Carl and Keynote Remote). The rest were free.
I think 75 apps per iOS device is easy to hit. Every time my friends showed up with their 10 year old daughter, I let her download a couple of free games on my iPhone and she played for hours. As of a few months ago, that family now owns several iOS devices and they're stuffed to the gills with entertainment.
FCPX is great for creative editing but doesn't help at all with program packaging, 24 audio channels with surround mixes and language splits, captioning, external QC equipment, external Dolby-E encoders and decoders, the fact that we have thousands of DigiBeta SR masters we need to draw from. The latter is the bulk of our work and FCPX doesn't help... yet. If only Final Cut would continue until FCPX could mature a little first.
...but I can't build the other eight Final Cut rooms that were in this year's budget nor replace the rest of the 14 Avid rooms. This changes everything - we have to stick with Avids for now. I love fixing things, but not that much.
There are perhaps a half dozen Android phones worth talking about. The rest are junkyard class giveaways. I just know what people bring me and we discover their phone won't load the NetFlix app or are slow to get updates (if at all) or I have to get used to the millisecond delays and touch response problems on Android that I don't have with the iPhone.
True, most of these are second tier devices that are given away for free (which amounts to a "sale", I suppose) but that's what people are doing. They buy the cheap shit that doesn't work, some of which won't do the live wallpaper or it slows the phone down so bad they can't really use it fluidly or the screen isn't that good. I run into a lot more unhappy Android users than iPhone users and many of them have asked if I have an Android charger they can borrow by 3:00 in the afternoon. Then there are the people who installed Angry Birds with the red logo. Oops.
As far as iPhones needing a "whole bunch of other crap to make it work", you're talking about a single cable and one piece of software. I really dislike the iPhone syncing system as it stands now myself but moving phones couldn't be simpler. Just encrypt your backup and restore to the new device and everything moves. Music, movies, apps, contacts, email, passwords etc, and it doesn't take "hours". Android, on the other hand, really does need a bunch of other crap to make it work. Do you use AppReferrer to move phones? I find that simpler to do but most people wouldn't know to do something like that. People call it "customizing" but the casual user has no clue how to get that great Android experience they've heard so much about and why they should be careful.
The tethering part of the iOS system was recognized as a problem three years ago and Apple started building massive data centers. Apple didn't have data centers like Google. Disadvantage Apple. They're done now, so that's about to change dramatically. Yes, Apple is playing catch up there. However, they're in the process of leapfrogging everyone else as far as media availability and connectivity for the casual user.
Slashdot Mirror
All things being equal (and they're not), vinyl and CDs are battling two different enemies at very low levels. Vinyl has a noise floor which can overcome low level passages, but it still has full resolution audio down there. Most of the noise on vinyl is in the band below 100Hz. CDs don't have a noise floor unless you count dither. What does happen on low level passages is a dramatic loss of audio resolution the lower you get on a CD. Once you hit the -96db "noise floor" on a CD, you've got one or two bit audio resolution and it sounds terrible.
If you've ever attended a real concert hall performance, the subtleties of the sounds are fantastic compared to a rock concert. CDs have a hard time reproducing those subtleties. I have the same recording of the Brandenburg Concertos from Deutsche Grammophon on both vinyl and CD. The CD sounds good but on the vinyl, you could hear the solo violinist breathing through his nose and you could hear string noises that were absent on the CD, swallowed up by poor audio resolution I suppose.
That's 160k VBR using which codec? AAC? That's about where I also stop hearing the differences, so I just go to 256k for round numbers. Well, round numbers for a computer, anyway.
I may also be fooling myself now because age takes a toll on hearing, but there was a time when there was nothing like listening to a studio master tape. Capitol Records was letting us into their vault to make DVD-A disks about 10 years ago. That's when I started noticing aliasing in the audio - it was actually high frequency content in the music beating against the slight 15.7khz tone I was starting to hear constantly but didn't notice.
I just posted a rant to someone else who thought I was making untested, unsubstantiated proclamations about standard red book CDs which may be interesting:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2346324&cid=36867560
I'll stop ranting now and get some sleep.
Cheers.
You might want to find the following DVD-A discs I had a hand in encoding and mastering to 192khz PCM 24 bit:
The Beach Boys - Animal Sounds
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery
Eric Johnson - Ah Via Musicom
The Band - Music From Big Pink
Dave Koz - The Dance
Crowded House - Crowded House (self titled)
Richard Thompson - Rumor and Sigh
Those are just the old check disks I can find on my shelf right now. There were dozens more. DVD-A never hit with consumers because they couldn't really hear/appreciate/care about the difference. The point is, we made CD proofs out of the final layouts of all these and we were like "what happened to the sound?" It was an enormous difference to the point that we tore the equipment apart to find out what the problem was. There was no problem. CDs are constricted quality. Even switching between the PCM tracks and the DTS tracks was audible.
In the early days of CDs, most audiophiles listened to classical music and they could tell you right away that CDs were bad compared to analog vinyl. The really quiet passages, and there were plenty, sounded gritty and dirty. That's because the audio way down there is encoded using maybe 4 bits of quantizing depth. Vinyl didn't have that problem (although it had other problems). But it's like chemical photography. Large format (4x5 and up) vs small format (35mm and down). There's nothing like starting with an acre of film to maintain the quality of an original capture.
And you're doing... what... to find the answer? Whining on slashdot? That's what's sad. I've already got the answer for my compression needs. Do your own testing and let me know how that came out.
Absolutely right. I think 96khz data rate is a threshold where you can start hearing degradations. All these people are doing is testing each other's hearing, not the audio files. We know they're flawed.
Heh... "blind test"... why didn't I think of that?
I've got the perfect two guys with absolute golden ears. They could hear the difference between a digital music master and a perfect copy of that music recorded to another audio workstation. They said the image was "smeared". The rest of us engineers couldn't hear any difference at all. Turns out they were hearing clock jitter from the AES signal system. We did a data copy and that solved it.
Both guys are legally blind, but they can mix audio.
...you can't blame CDs for the crap work of the mixing engineers
If you've ever listened to an audio master at 192khz 24 bit, you'll hear the difference between that and the 44.1khz 16 bit from a CD. It's like someone cleaned your ears out. CDs relatively suck.
Hitachi. I had a 14 disk array of Hitachi SATA drives where all but three drives failed within a year of turning three years old. I have another array of 50 Hitachi drives that runs fine that's about four years old. The rest are HP labeled 10k 2.5" SAS drives which I believe are made by Hitachi. Out of 144 of those drives, I was replacing about one a week after they turned three years old. I've built about 400TB of RAID storage cabinets using Seagate 7200.11 drives (1.5TB) and have had four failures in three years.
Whatever the case, the advertised 300,000 hours MTBF on hard drives is supposed to mean that half your drives fail after 34 years. That's an overstatement by an order of magnitude.
That's the difference really - determining the long term asset value for your data and considering how much there is to archive. My company expects to pull something off the shelf in 100 years and use it.
However, every piece of math I've done about storage says LTO tape is less expensive and safer in the long run. That gap may be narrowing, but the first 100TB of storage is still cheaper on LTO. The second 100TB is dirt cheap compared to hard drives unless you use consumer grade drives instead of enterprise grade - and don't make a redundant copy.
I can store 200TB of data on 134 LTO-5 tapes for about $8,700. Add the $2,500 single external tape drive and you're just north of $10k. That would be fine for a small video facility if they value their data but I can see where a consumer would grimace. I can't tell you how often I've helped a small video facility recover data (if possible) from too many G-Tech and LaCie portable drives. Entire ad campaigns and years of media are GONE and the clients want these guys dead. Since I installed an LTO drive in that small facility, their data loss has ceased - as long as they remember to archive.
For the consumer, the short term storage offered by a pair of 2TB external drives may suffice. I've got about 25TB I'd like to archive right now, so I'm within striking distance of using LTO instead of drives. My RAID system losing two drives in a week was frightening enough. I nearly lost 10TB in one shot.
For a professional building a 200TB spinning disk array, you're talking about a Fiber SAN and a bunch of RAID boxes which would cost a minimum of $80k, or more like $180k if you're going to do it right. Not to mention the kilowatts of power to run it, cool it, time to monitor it and pop spare drives in when half have failed in four years (that's about the average for our plant).
If you're going to do it on single drives (not a SAN), you can put the drives on a shelf like a tape but you had better do at least two hard drives if you want insurance. In the days of consumer equipment doing nothing but data out of HD video cameras, 18Mpixel still cameras, music, movies etc, there will be a capacity threshold where they should have used data tape. Figuring out how much you're going to generate plays into what you're going to use.
Cheers.
I'll tell you what's true; I can pull any 20 year old 8mm Exabyte or DDS-1 tape off my shelf and run it. You can link to my claims because I actually do it at this organization that uses a gold vertical rectangular outline for a logo. Do you actually do it or did you just Google some papers? I can Google papers too, you know, and they agree with what I'm actually doing.
It's all about the storage environment. In 1995, they said this: "Estimates for tape life expectancy may vary from less than ten years to several decades, depending on temperature and RH levels. As a general rule, lower temperatures and drier conditions lead to longer life span." (https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/webfm_send/303)
Fast forward to 2005 and they said this: : ...at moderately controlled temperature and humidities the projected lifetimes for these tapes is sufficient for archival storage and lifetimes of 50 to 100 years can be anticipated for the more stable ones." (http://storageconference.org/2003/papers/15_Judge-Media.pdf)
So, don't buy anything from the low bidder. It probably isn't any good. I've taken hundreds of Exabyte tapes and rolled the data to several LTO-3-4-5 tapes over the years. Anyway, I've seen hundreds of drive failures compared to one or two tape failures, usually because of the transport getting hung on eject but you can fix that with a splice back to the leader.
The bigger problem in the very long term is keeping the technology around to recover any of this media, tape or disk - a working transport, a computer with the right HBA, the right OS, and the right version of archive software, the ability to handle the file system etc. You have to run your own museum of technology. I dug out an old AS-6000 to try mounting a RAID pair of disks a few years ago. Had to pull some AIX expert out of retirement to understand the system. It almost worked except we couldn't resolve the sym links in the data which spanned across the disks.
I have to agree with LordLimecat. LTO tape is still cheaper per GB than hard disks, plus:
1) Tape has an average shelf life of 17 years or 30 years depending on who you ask.
2) I've encountered drives which won't start after a long idle time (six years) unless you thump them on the top cover. Whew. They usually start.
3) Carpet your machine room area with thick padding because dropping the drive out of the cradle may kill the data. I've seen it happen too often. I can throw an LTO tape across the room and recover the data.
I'm going with tape.
That's why I said "individual above a certain poverty line", so someone earning less than $18,000 a year (just saying) pays 0% tax. Even some sliding scale where you kick in gradually more % until you get to 15% at some income breakpoint would smooth that out.
Yes, donations are mostly influenced by tax advantages rather than philanthropy. How many of those donation accepting organizations only send 2% of the take to the advertised beneficiary anyway?
The deductions... you're right, that's sticky. If I pay 33% tax now and have the home mortgage deduction taken away in exchange for 15% flat tax, I think that's about a wash. The other deductions - and there are a ton - need to be addressed or accounted for so it's not a punishment to the individual. Corporate tax incentives also need to be addressed to encourage construction of factories in places that need work. Otherwise, corporations the size of GM, CitiCorp or Bank of America which (or "who" since they're considered an individual now) pay no taxes goes away. Corporate brass with gazillion dollar salaries, benefits and bonuses also pay 15%.
Yes; eliminate the loopholes. People would rather burn money than pay any portion of it as taxes.
Oh... forgot a hundred other variables, but make people accountable for the work they do. Labor unions were invented to keep powerful corporate lords from abusing the workforce, and boy, did they ever abuse the workforce. Quite often, Unions turned into a bludgeon to protect workers who are doing a bad job, or to artificially inflate the labor force with way more workers than needed. No wonder jobs are going overseas. Cause and effect.
If an Automaker is making cars that fall apart, something has to be fixed. You can't export a car like that. Sometimes you have to fix the workforce and it becomes Automaker vs Labor Union which deflects workers' accountability. Sometimes you have to fix the Automaker deciding to use a cheap fuel pump which makes the car explode on impact because it's more profitable. Either way, both of these groups need to realize that making bad cars kills exports. Exports is the only way to make money. Japan, Inc. realized this a LONG time ago and the Gov't holds the Corporations and Workers accountable for product quality.
Replace "Automaker" with any other entity.
Don't get me started on Banks.
Scrooge McDuck - exactly. Large corporations are interested in only a few things:
Shareholder value
Sending jobs offshore (where it's cheaper to do things)
Paying themselves massive salaries and bonuses
Purchasing laws to let them keep everything
This concentrates all the money with the wealthiest people. The more money one entity has, the less money everyone else has. Nothing flows - "Trickle Down Economics" has proven not to work. We think corporations are all about creating wonderful products to make our lives easier and a pleasure to live; no, it's about making money.
It isn't taxes that don't create jobs, it's the behavior of the people who are supposed to create jobs. They have no obligation to make the economy run. The Republicans represent the wealthy lords and are learning how to bully everyone to get what they want - money. The Democrats represent the people who are supposed to earn a wage and can't, so they over compensate with public programs and fail to make corporations and the wealthy pay the same percentage of tax the middle pays. The Democrats also represent the people who WON'T earn a living - people who have gamed the system into paying them to make babies and not do anything (I actually worked with a single mother of three who became pregnant again and exulted that she was going to have another Government baby - we all wanted to slap her. She made a ton of dough off that).
Corporations aren't going to pay people they don't employ, but sending jobs overseas leaves a lot of the workforce on the Gov't dole. Someone has to pay for that. Either bring the jobs back to the homeland or use some of those billions in profit to help the people survive. Why should a corporation which inhibits the economy get a tax break? Conversely, make the people living on the Gov't dole actually WORK. Make them work on infrastructure projects or something. Don't show up for work, you don't get paid. It's very WPA, but that's about where we're headed.
There was a move to make a "Flat Tax" at one time. What happened to that? Pay 15% of what you earn. Period. Whether you're a corporation or an individual above a certain poverty line, you pay. No deductions.
Thomas Jefferson, where are you? We need you now.
It's not just about rockets, even though that's the most visible aspect of space flight. NASA people have figured out how to keep someone alive in the damnedest environments, so they know a thing or two about the human body. NASA has 18,000 people working for it and part of them are at several medical institutes: The Cleveland Clinic Center for Space Medicine, The National Space Biomedicine Research Institute in Houston, The John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium which includes medical Universities and a few others. All of them have contributed to medical breakthroughs, mostly specific to space flight but refocusing them on something else isn't beyond reason.
As for world hunger, I'm not sure where we're going to get enough food to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Somebody should start figuring that out - not politicians or agribusiness. Why not a bunch of smart people we're about to put on the street?
I saw NASA get disbanded at the end of Apollo and wondered why we didn't take the talent and brains assembled and say "ok, now go cure cancer" or "solve world hunger". I bet they could do it.
Popular Science February 1935 has an article about recording audio directly to a record - a shellac or lacquer disk. I had a record cutting machine intended for consumers. It was made in 1946 and worked pretty well. Since I couldn't get the lacquer blanks anymore, I recorded on plexiglas. Or how about the 1957 Mutoscope Voice-O-Graph, a walk-up voice recording thing about the size of a phone booth. You stick in coins, say something into the microphone and out comes a record. Technically, it isn't vinyl but the phonograph was in fact recordable media.
If you're fairly new to iOS, there's no way you're going to have 75 apps. However, if you've been around iOS devices for a few years, you've probably got twice that many (I've got 137 not counting the handful I've deleted). Almost all my friends regularly start asking what apps they should get within a month or two of getting comfortable with iPhone/iPad. After that, they get voracious by themselves.
I just checked my 3GS and I'm surprised - 137 apps, two of which cost $0.99 apiece (Talking Carl and Keynote Remote). The rest were free.
I think 75 apps per iOS device is easy to hit. Every time my friends showed up with their 10 year old daughter, I let her download a couple of free games on my iPhone and she played for hours. As of a few months ago, that family now owns several iOS devices and they're stuffed to the gills with entertainment.
You owe me a keyboard.
FCPX is great for creative editing but doesn't help at all with program packaging, 24 audio channels with surround mixes and language splits, captioning, external QC equipment, external Dolby-E encoders and decoders, the fact that we have thousands of DigiBeta SR masters we need to draw from. The latter is the bulk of our work and FCPX doesn't help... yet. If only Final Cut would continue until FCPX could mature a little first.
...but I can't build the other eight Final Cut rooms that were in this year's budget nor replace the rest of the 14 Avid rooms. This changes everything - we have to stick with Avids for now. I love fixing things, but not that much.
Apple is the single most evil corporation I'm aware of, and Google is the single most ethical corporation I'm aware of.
You work for the RIAA, don't you?
Silverlight contains the last gasp of Windows Media.
There are perhaps a half dozen Android phones worth talking about. The rest are junkyard class giveaways. I just know what people bring me and we discover their phone won't load the NetFlix app or are slow to get updates (if at all) or I have to get used to the millisecond delays and touch response problems on Android that I don't have with the iPhone.
True, most of these are second tier devices that are given away for free (which amounts to a "sale", I suppose) but that's what people are doing. They buy the cheap shit that doesn't work, some of which won't do the live wallpaper or it slows the phone down so bad they can't really use it fluidly or the screen isn't that good. I run into a lot more unhappy Android users than iPhone users and many of them have asked if I have an Android charger they can borrow by 3:00 in the afternoon. Then there are the people who installed Angry Birds with the red logo. Oops.
As far as iPhones needing a "whole bunch of other crap to make it work", you're talking about a single cable and one piece of software. I really dislike the iPhone syncing system as it stands now myself but moving phones couldn't be simpler. Just encrypt your backup and restore to the new device and everything moves. Music, movies, apps, contacts, email, passwords etc, and it doesn't take "hours". Android, on the other hand, really does need a bunch of other crap to make it work. Do you use AppReferrer to move phones? I find that simpler to do but most people wouldn't know to do something like that. People call it "customizing" but the casual user has no clue how to get that great Android experience they've heard so much about and why they should be careful.
The tethering part of the iOS system was recognized as a problem three years ago and Apple started building massive data centers. Apple didn't have data centers like Google. Disadvantage Apple. They're done now, so that's about to change dramatically. Yes, Apple is playing catch up there. However, they're in the process of leapfrogging everyone else as far as media availability and connectivity for the casual user.