It may just be because demand for rewritables is lower.
With CDs, rewritables were initially more expensive, but they rarely played in CD players and so were largely useless for music. By the time CD-R media dropped below $0.50 per disk, rewritability seemed to be a low-value feature. Same thing pretty much held true for DVDs as well, though there's probably better overall player support for DVD+/-RW than there was for CD-RW.
Since consumers didn't find RW technology as useful as write only, demand for RWs is lower and therefore not really surprising that they are now cheaper.
Looking towards the future I have tinkered around with MPC which (on the Mac at least) is pain in the ass but so far looks like it's worth it.
I'm a bootleg collector, too. I use Musepack (MPC) on Windows for a lot of stuff that is of marginal quality that I don't feel need to store on disk in lossless (archive the FLACs to DVD+R and convert to MPCs for general listening). I used to OGG in the same way.
Software support for MPC is good in Windows (I use dbPowerAmp for conversion and foobar2000 for playback). Hopefully, Mac support will improve soon.
I switched from from OGG to MPC after reading the results of some listening tests on hydrogenaudio, which touted MPC as the best of the lossy codecs. So I set up my own comparative test of six tunes I encoded in FLAC, MP3 (preset standard), OGG (224kbps nominal bitrate), MPC (standard and extreme), and AAC (128 and 512 kbps). Note the test was done on decent but not exceptional computer speakers, and thanks to foobar2000's formatting, I could hide the codec info so I did not know which file was which until after I noted which files sounded better/worse. Two tunes I was never able to discern any difference among any of them, on the other four, I picked out either one or two that sounded decidedly worse, and in each case the offending files were either MP3, OGG, or AAC 128, which was consistent with the hydrogenaudio results. I also noticed during this experiment that MPC encoded twice as fast as OGG, which was a big benefit for me.
That said, though, if portable player support is an issue for you, MPC doesn't seem to be anyone's roadmap in the near future, which is really a shame.
I'm on the same boat. Hell, I'd just be happy if my six-CD changer could support MP3 or OGG on DVD+/-R so I at least had a reasonable selection in the dash any one point without having to slog through CD folders. 100GB or more of FLAC would be even better though.
Digital audio for the car seems to be far behind the curve.
I think one of the reasons that technical people make such poor managers is due to inflexible thinking in many corporate environments. In every place that I've worked, I've seen managers that were quite good at managing projects (in terms of getting the people they manage to do great work that meets or exceeds expectations), but invariably that management position comes along with expanding amounts of corporate middle management stuff (reviews, HR, tracking employee hours, days off, etc., etc.) which such people either hate or are poor at or both.
The result is that many people who could competently manage a technical project tend to avoid such positions because of the BS that goes along with it, and the people who do aspire to the management positions are the ones that aren't that good technically and, though they may be decent managers in the corporate sense, often times are over their heads when providing direction on the actual project.
The best solution in my experience would be to decouple technical project management from corporate/HR management. The person who leads the project should be focused on the project, and let it be someone else's job to deal with the corporate/employee issues.
A few folks are pointing out (correctly) that VHS/Betamax movie titles were often in the $70+ range in the early days of home video tape, but this neglects the fact that there was NO comparable home video technology to compete with it. The value of being able to watch movies at home when the alternative was *nothing* (OK, you had Super 8 for home movies and ur-porn) is far greater than a quality upgrade that is imperceptible on the vast majority of existing equipment.
I downloaded the stable Opera 8.5 a few days ago, and I have to say (as a current Firefox on Windows user) that Opera has an awful lot going for it. It's fast and seems a lot less bloated and quirky than Firefox, plus I've been finding a few features I really like.
But the one issue that kind of blows it for me is the page zooming. I happen to be one of the many people who due to eyesight issues often increase the browser's text size. One thing I love about Firefox over IE is that it has an easy hot key to up the text size (Ctrl-+). In Opera, there only seems to "Zoom", which although it has a greater amount of control, has the unfortunate behavior of stretching the graphics in proprotion to the text (FF and IE leave the graphics at their regular size no matter what the text size is). While I can appreciate that idea in theory, in practice most web graphics are simply not designed to scale that way, and the result is that if you want to browse with enlarged text (which I often do), you have to suffer with ugly, pixelated, and often overlapping images. Not to mention that the text itself renders oddly in many zoom levels. And there doesn't seem to be any option to change it.
It's bad enough that I think the vast majority of people who use enlarged text would reject Opera because of it. And that's a shame because Opera has so much else going for it.
I have Shaw in BC, and am a big BitTorrent user, but I have to say I don't see much they're doing in restricting BT trafiic. Mt BT client (ABC) seems to top out at 400 kBytes/sec no matter how many torrents are going, where the highest bandwidth I've ever seen was about 600 kB/s off of Usenet (Newsbin downloading off Giganews, using 8 download threads). I guess they could be throttling me back a little bit, but I'd guess it's more likely some limitation of the client or BT in general. Either way, it's not like 400 kBytes/sec is any meaningful restriction to my BT usage at this stage.
OTOH, Shaw is quite the proactive bandwidth Nazis. I pay quite a bit for the business grade service to get 50GB per month (30GB is standard) and I monitor my usage carefully and if I'm more than 4-5GB over, I'm guaranteed a call from "Carl" or "Pat" to shame me for my bandwidth gluttony, complete with threats to discontinue service. (This has resulted in some pretty animated conversations.)
The problem is that their pricing plans make it progressively more and more expensive to increase the usage limit. 30GB to 50GB per month cost me about $20 more per month, to increase to 70GB is about $35 on top of that, almost twice as expensive. (Oh yeah, you get some increased hosting services which I could buy better service from a hosting provider for $30/year.) I'm quite willing to pay them for extra usage, but not by setting the precedent of making bandwidth a commodity where prices go UP for quantity purchases.
I suspect it may be that because Shaw is owned by the "intellectual property" giant Time/Warner, they might be under pressure to try to discourage BT and high bandwidth usage in general, but who knows? I see no evidence of Shaw specifically restricting BT, though I'll also note I didn't see any mention of Shaw in TFA, only in the/. summary.
I have Shaw in BC, and am a big BitTorrent user, but I have to say I don't see much they're doing in restricting BT trafiic. Mt BT client (ABC) seems to top out at 400 kBytes/sec no matter how many torrents are going, where the highest bandwidth I've ever seen was about 600 kB/s off of Usenet (Newsbin downloading off Giganews, using 8 download threads). I guess they could be throttling me back a little bit, but I'd guess it's more likely some limitation of the client or BT in general. Either way, it's not like 400 kBytes/sec is any meaningful restriction to my BT usage at this stage.
OTOH, Shaw is quite the proactive bandwidth Nazis. I pay quite a bit for the business grade service to get 50GB per month (30GB is standard) and I monitor my usage carefully and if I'm more than 4-5GB over, I'm guaranteed a call from "Carl" or "Pat" to shame me for my bandwidth gluttony, complete with threats to discontinue service. (This has resulted in some pretty animated conversations.)
The problem is that their pricing plans make it progressively more and more expensive to increase the usage limit. 30GB to 50GB per month cost me about $20 more per month, to increase to 70GB is about $35 on top of that, almost twice as expensive. (Oh yeah, you get some increased hosting services which I could buy better service from a hosting provider for $30/year.) I'm quite willing to pay them for extra usage, but not by setting the precedent of making bandwidth a commodity where prices go UP for quantity purchases.
I suspect it may be that because Shaw is owned by the "intellectual property" giant Time/Warner, they might be under pressure to try to discourage BT and high bandwidth usage in general, but who knows? I see no evidence of Shaw specifically restricting BT, though I'll also note I didn't see any mention of Shaw in TFA, only in the/. summary.
In all fairness though, Christian, Martian, or Croatian don't rhyme with "fan" in English, either. Trying to make any rigid pronunciation system consistent with English is futile, IMO.
If such clarity and ease of understanding comes with the cost of restricting the range of human expression or the future evolution of language, then yes, I would say that's a reason to be concerned. I happen to believe that linguistic idiosyncracies like slang are an important part of human expression and the ongoing evolution of language, and I suspect the vast majority of linguists would agree.
Very interesting. Since you're a linguist, I wonder if you might address a concern I've had about speech recognition technology in general.
I've dabbled a bit with Dragon Naturally Speaking in the past (v.7) and frankly found it still too immature to be of much use to me. I find it still far easier to deal with an accurate yet artificial interface (keyboard and mouse) than an inaccurate but more "organic" interface (speech recognition).
But one of the things that stood out from the experience was the way in which I found myself quickly (if frustratedly) adapting my speech patterns to comply with the machine ability to interpret me.
Is anyone out there considering the consequences of speech recognition technology on the evolution of human speech? It seems to me that any speech technology is going to be imperfect to some extent, but the better it gets, more people are going to use it and those people will inevitably end up adapting their speech patterns to the machine.
Could this technology end up homogenizing human speech patterns to fit the computer's speech recognition model? Is this even a valid concern in your opinion, and if so, is anyone in the linguistics field considering these implications?
Evidently, that doesn't seem to apply to all information and all borders.
But it is also instructive to read thing #6..."You can make money without doing evil."
In reading this, it would appear "Don't be evil" is apparantly limited to not selling actual search placement (now questionable as the parent notes), only displaying relevant ads via AdWords, and not using pop-ups. A rather low bar of "evil", IMO.
That might actually be a valid interpretation if (a) new versions of Firefox were limited to only the very newest versions of Windows like IE7 is (which they're not) or (b) I was describing some new features or standards as opposed to old ones that are well documented as having been broken for years in IE (which I wasn't). winky back atcha
Amen to that. To say that MS is finally fixing things like XMLHTTPRequest or PNG alpha transparency (which has only been around like what, 11 years or so?) in IE7 ONLY is somehow "making web developers' lives easier" when IE7 will only install to XP post SP2 or Vista is nonsense. You still have several different standards to code around until all those older versions fade into obscurity. Post some of these fixes back to 5.5 and 6.0 and maybe they'll actually make someone's life easier this decade.
The Post could employ some automatic filters to weed out some of the worst offenders, and thus it seems hard to believe their claim that it was requiring two full-time moderators to keep out the blog comments that violated their standards. Either those were some pretty heavy standards that made context such an issue that automated filtering was ineffective, or their web guys are pretty inept.
Inept, indeed. These newspapers have been hosting discussion forums for a decade and dealing with trolls and flame wars since day one. Nothing in Pogue's article wasn't true 10 years ago. What, has the Grand Cosmic Shift of the Blog Paradigm somehow made it impossible to implement the filtering they've been using for years? How is an internet flame war even news?
dBpowerAMP Music Converter is a free Windows download which will convert between virtually all audio codecs and has a "Preserve ID Tags" option. However, SHN does not support tags so it can't transfer them, and many times I find even FLACs on eTree lack tags. Unfortunately, you have to buy the plugin for dBpowerAMP to edit tags directly, but there are a number of free tag editors out there, MP3Tag being my personal fave.
If issuing or enforcing of a particular copyright or patent IMPEDES the progress of science and useful arts, does that mean that the federal government's right to issue or enforce that particular patent doesn't qualify under this paragraph?
Well, considering that the courts have held that extending copyrights ex post facto does not violate the "limited times" clause (i.e., Mickey Mouse can stay copyrighted as long as Disney can successsfully lobby Congress to extend copyright terms), I'd say the chance of seeing any beneficial ruling on this to be about nil.
Yeah, I "knew" that ActiveX require admin acceptance to install, up until the day I was browser hijacked by a silently installed an ActiveX object. All I did was click on link from a Google search (yes, I was running with admin rights), and bam, it overwrote the WMP executable, launched several exes that my firewall caught trying to call home, and took over the start page no matter how you tried to reset it. That's when I switched to Firefox and haven't had a problem since. Maybe it's fixed in IE now, although I thought I read here that it's only fixed in XP SP2.
But that and the WMF exploit makes two incidents where IE has had a "merely click on a link and you're infected" bug. I am aware of no such bug ever in Firefox, even when running as admin. Until the day that Firefox has such an exploit, I don't think it's fair to say that there's no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
...isn't this information available when you type "man macho" at the command line?
With CDs, rewritables were initially more expensive, but they rarely played in CD players and so were largely useless for music. By the time CD-R media dropped below $0.50 per disk, rewritability seemed to be a low-value feature. Same thing pretty much held true for DVDs as well, though there's probably better overall player support for DVD+/-RW than there was for CD-RW.
Since consumers didn't find RW technology as useful as write only, demand for RWs is lower and therefore not really surprising that they are now cheaper.
You don't get it...he's a CEO, he doesn't have to do such time-wasteful frivolities, he has other people to do it for him.
Using the internet is a waste of time, just have others to do it for you and reap the benefits.
Writing things down on paper is a waste of time, just have others to do it for you and reap the benefits.
Cooking food and washing clothes is a waste of time, just have others to do it for you and reap the benefits.
Seriously, somebody who can delegate his usage of the Internet to an underling and then claim it a waste of time is engaging in self-deception, IMO.
I'm a bootleg collector, too. I use Musepack (MPC) on Windows for a lot of stuff that is of marginal quality that I don't feel need to store on disk in lossless (archive the FLACs to DVD+R and convert to MPCs for general listening). I used to OGG in the same way.
Software support for MPC is good in Windows (I use dbPowerAmp for conversion and foobar2000 for playback). Hopefully, Mac support will improve soon.
I switched from from OGG to MPC after reading the results of some listening tests on hydrogenaudio, which touted MPC as the best of the lossy codecs. So I set up my own comparative test of six tunes I encoded in FLAC, MP3 (preset standard), OGG (224kbps nominal bitrate), MPC (standard and extreme), and AAC (128 and 512 kbps). Note the test was done on decent but not exceptional computer speakers, and thanks to foobar2000's formatting, I could hide the codec info so I did not know which file was which until after I noted which files sounded better/worse. Two tunes I was never able to discern any difference among any of them, on the other four, I picked out either one or two that sounded decidedly worse, and in each case the offending files were either MP3, OGG, or AAC 128, which was consistent with the hydrogenaudio results. I also noticed during this experiment that MPC encoded twice as fast as OGG, which was a big benefit for me.
That said, though, if portable player support is an issue for you, MPC doesn't seem to be anyone's roadmap in the near future, which is really a shame.
I'm on the same boat. Hell, I'd just be happy if my six-CD changer could support MP3 or OGG on DVD+/-R so I at least had a reasonable selection in the dash any one point without having to slog through CD folders. 100GB or more of FLAC would be even better though.
Digital audio for the car seems to be far behind the curve.
"Red Queen to Gryphon Three"...if memory serves, that's one of few rock albums to have krummhorn listed among the instruments. Great stuff.
I think one of the reasons that technical people make such poor managers is due to inflexible thinking in many corporate environments. In every place that I've worked, I've seen managers that were quite good at managing projects (in terms of getting the people they manage to do great work that meets or exceeds expectations), but invariably that management position comes along with expanding amounts of corporate middle management stuff (reviews, HR, tracking employee hours, days off, etc., etc.) which such people either hate or are poor at or both.
The result is that many people who could competently manage a technical project tend to avoid such positions because of the BS that goes along with it, and the people who do aspire to the management positions are the ones that aren't that good technically and, though they may be decent managers in the corporate sense, often times are over their heads when providing direction on the actual project.
The best solution in my experience would be to decouple technical project management from corporate/HR management. The person who leads the project should be focused on the project, and let it be someone else's job to deal with the corporate/employee issues.
A few folks are pointing out (correctly) that VHS/Betamax movie titles were often in the $70+ range in the early days of home video tape, but this neglects the fact that there was NO comparable home video technology to compete with it. The value of being able to watch movies at home when the alternative was *nothing* (OK, you had Super 8 for home movies and ur-porn) is far greater than a quality upgrade that is imperceptible on the vast majority of existing equipment.
I downloaded the stable Opera 8.5 a few days ago, and I have to say (as a current Firefox on Windows user) that Opera has an awful lot going for it. It's fast and seems a lot less bloated and quirky than Firefox, plus I've been finding a few features I really like.
But the one issue that kind of blows it for me is the page zooming. I happen to be one of the many people who due to eyesight issues often increase the browser's text size. One thing I love about Firefox over IE is that it has an easy hot key to up the text size (Ctrl-+). In Opera, there only seems to "Zoom", which although it has a greater amount of control, has the unfortunate behavior of stretching the graphics in proprotion to the text (FF and IE leave the graphics at their regular size no matter what the text size is). While I can appreciate that idea in theory, in practice most web graphics are simply not designed to scale that way, and the result is that if you want to browse with enlarged text (which I often do), you have to suffer with ugly, pixelated, and often overlapping images. Not to mention that the text itself renders oddly in many zoom levels. And there doesn't seem to be any option to change it.
It's bad enough that I think the vast majority of people who use enlarged text would reject Opera because of it. And that's a shame because Opera has so much else going for it.
A fast track through the FDA could have one of the world's leading problems licked in less than a decade.
Huh? AIDS has been a "leading problem" for around 25 years by my count. What clock are they working off of?
I have Shaw in BC (Vancouver Island) and I download a lot with BT and have no such problem (yet).
But if that's what I have to look forward to, that sucks.
Thanks for the Ellacoya link, that's news to me.
I have Shaw in BC, and am a big BitTorrent user, but I have to say I don't see much they're doing in restricting BT trafiic. Mt BT client (ABC) seems to top out at 400 kBytes/sec no matter how many torrents are going, where the highest bandwidth I've ever seen was about 600 kB/s off of Usenet (Newsbin downloading off Giganews, using 8 download threads). I guess they could be throttling me back a little bit, but I'd guess it's more likely some limitation of the client or BT in general. Either way, it's not like 400 kBytes/sec is any meaningful restriction to my BT usage at this stage.
OTOH, Shaw is quite the proactive bandwidth Nazis. I pay quite a bit for the business grade service to get 50GB per month (30GB is standard) and I monitor my usage carefully and if I'm more than 4-5GB over, I'm guaranteed a call from "Carl" or "Pat" to shame me for my bandwidth gluttony, complete with threats to discontinue service. (This has resulted in some pretty animated conversations.)
The problem is that their pricing plans make it progressively more and more expensive to increase the usage limit. 30GB to 50GB per month cost me about $20 more per month, to increase to 70GB is about $35 on top of that, almost twice as expensive. (Oh yeah, you get some increased hosting services which I could buy better service from a hosting provider for $30/year.) I'm quite willing to pay them for extra usage, but not by setting the precedent of making bandwidth a commodity where prices go UP for quantity purchases.
I suspect it may be that because Shaw is owned by the "intellectual property" giant Time/Warner, they might be under pressure to try to discourage BT and high bandwidth usage in general, but who knows? I see no evidence of Shaw specifically restricting BT, though I'll also note I didn't see any mention of Shaw in TFA, only in the /. summary.
I have Shaw in BC, and am a big BitTorrent user, but I have to say I don't see much they're doing in restricting BT trafiic. Mt BT client (ABC) seems to top out at 400 kBytes/sec no matter how many torrents are going, where the highest bandwidth I've ever seen was about 600 kB/s off of Usenet (Newsbin downloading off Giganews, using 8 download threads). I guess they could be throttling me back a little bit, but I'd guess it's more likely some limitation of the client or BT in general. Either way, it's not like 400 kBytes/sec is any meaningful restriction to my BT usage at this stage.
OTOH, Shaw is quite the proactive bandwidth Nazis. I pay quite a bit for the business grade service to get 50GB per month (30GB is standard) and I monitor my usage carefully and if I'm more than 4-5GB over, I'm guaranteed a call from "Carl" or "Pat" to shame me for my bandwidth gluttony, complete with threats to discontinue service. (This has resulted in some pretty animated conversations.)
The problem is that their pricing plans make it progressively more and more expensive to increase the usage limit. 30GB to 50GB per month cost me about $20 more per month, to increase to 70GB is about $35 on top of that, almost twice as expensive. (Oh yeah, you get some increased hosting services which I could buy better service from a hosting provider for $30/year.) I'm quite willing to pay them for extra usage, but not by setting the precedent of making bandwidth a commodity where prices go UP for quantity purchases.
I suspect it may be that because Shaw is owned by the "intellectual property" giant Time/Warner, they might be under pressure to try to discourage BT and high bandwidth usage in general, but who knows? I see no evidence of Shaw specifically restricting BT, though I'll also note I didn't see any mention of Shaw in TFA, only in the /. summary.
In all fairness though, Christian, Martian, or Croatian don't rhyme with "fan" in English, either. Trying to make any rigid pronunciation system consistent with English is futile, IMO.
If such clarity and ease of understanding comes with the cost of restricting the range of human expression or the future evolution of language, then yes, I would say that's a reason to be concerned. I happen to believe that linguistic idiosyncracies like slang are an important part of human expression and the ongoing evolution of language, and I suspect the vast majority of linguists would agree.
Very interesting. Since you're a linguist, I wonder if you might address a concern I've had about speech recognition technology in general.
I've dabbled a bit with Dragon Naturally Speaking in the past (v.7) and frankly found it still too immature to be of much use to me. I find it still far easier to deal with an accurate yet artificial interface (keyboard and mouse) than an inaccurate but more "organic" interface (speech recognition).
But one of the things that stood out from the experience was the way in which I found myself quickly (if frustratedly) adapting my speech patterns to comply with the machine ability to interpret me.
Is anyone out there considering the consequences of speech recognition technology on the evolution of human speech? It seems to me that any speech technology is going to be imperfect to some extent, but the better it gets, more people are going to use it and those people will inevitably end up adapting their speech patterns to the machine.
Could this technology end up homogenizing human speech patterns to fit the computer's speech recognition model? Is this even a valid concern in your opinion, and if so, is anyone in the linguistics field considering these implications?
Yes, but can you anonymously transfer title?
Evidently, that doesn't seem to apply to all information and all borders.
But it is also instructive to read thing #6..."You can make money without doing evil."
In reading this, it would appear "Don't be evil" is apparantly limited to not selling actual search placement (now questionable as the parent notes), only displaying relevant ads via AdWords, and not using pop-ups. A rather low bar of "evil", IMO.
That might actually be a valid interpretation if (a) new versions of Firefox were limited to only the very newest versions of Windows like IE7 is (which they're not) or (b) I was describing some new features or standards as opposed to old ones that are well documented as having been broken for years in IE (which I wasn't). winky back atcha
Amen to that. To say that MS is finally fixing things like XMLHTTPRequest or PNG alpha transparency (which has only been around like what, 11 years or so?) in IE7 ONLY is somehow "making web developers' lives easier" when IE7 will only install to XP post SP2 or Vista is nonsense. You still have several different standards to code around until all those older versions fade into obscurity. Post some of these fixes back to 5.5 and 6.0 and maybe they'll actually make someone's life easier this decade.
Inept, indeed. These newspapers have been hosting discussion forums for a decade and dealing with trolls and flame wars since day one. Nothing in Pogue's article wasn't true 10 years ago. What, has the Grand Cosmic Shift of the Blog Paradigm somehow made it impossible to implement the filtering they've been using for years? How is an internet flame war even news?
dBpowerAMP Music Converter is a free Windows download which will convert between virtually all audio codecs and has a "Preserve ID Tags" option. However, SHN does not support tags so it can't transfer them, and many times I find even FLACs on eTree lack tags. Unfortunately, you have to buy the plugin for dBpowerAMP to edit tags directly, but there are a number of free tag editors out there, MP3Tag being my personal fave.
Well, considering that the courts have held that extending copyrights ex post facto does not violate the "limited times" clause (i.e., Mickey Mouse can stay copyrighted as long as Disney can successsfully lobby Congress to extend copyright terms), I'd say the chance of seeing any beneficial ruling on this to be about nil.
Yeah, I "knew" that ActiveX require admin acceptance to install, up until the day I was browser hijacked by a silently installed an ActiveX object. All I did was click on link from a Google search (yes, I was running with admin rights), and bam, it overwrote the WMP executable, launched several exes that my firewall caught trying to call home, and took over the start page no matter how you tried to reset it. That's when I switched to Firefox and haven't had a problem since. Maybe it's fixed in IE now, although I thought I read here that it's only fixed in XP SP2. But that and the WMF exploit makes two incidents where IE has had a "merely click on a link and you're infected" bug. I am aware of no such bug ever in Firefox, even when running as admin. Until the day that Firefox has such an exploit, I don't think it's fair to say that there's no difference.