Yes, but for these purposes, 4-N (as in 99.99%) copper's no different at all from 5-N, and that's about all you're gaining from spending hundreds more.
Cables make a difference up to a point, and then they make no difference at all.
Now just sell us the files in FLAC or some other lossless format, and make sure that it's always cheaper, by quite some margin, than buying the CD. Then you might see some of my money. I will not buy downloadable music from anybody until this is what they offer.
Supercavitation's the trick. My layman's understanding of it is that you fire the torpedo or submarine or whatever so fast that it pushes out the water around it, creating a vacuum, and the only part of it that meets any resistance is the very tip.
Of course, the problem with this is that if it's not touching anything, you can't steer it. So you'd better aim straight, and hope you don't hit anything unexpected on the way...
It amazes me the lengths that Apple will go to to avoid admitting that their clinging to the single-button mouse for so long was misguided. First they design the Mighty Mouse, a two-button mouse masquerading as a one-button mouse (with the side buttons and scroll wheel in exactly the wrong places, but that's another story). It's an incredibly convoluted solution to a pretty simple problem - simple, that is, if you're not as pig-headed as Apple. And then, as you say, they don't even enable the second button out of the box!
Honestly, Apple, it's OK to admit you got it wrong, or at least that times have changed since 1984. We'll forgive you.
Maybe one day they'll accept that being able to resize windows by dragging areas other than just the bottom right-hand corner is useful, too. I live in hope.
Amarok is so much better than iTunes it's just embarrassing. It's simply the best music player I know of, bar none. Try it and you'll realise just how limited iTunes is.
The biggest failure of iTunes is that you can view your music library in its entirety, or a playlist, but you can't make up a temporary playlist as you go along. I mean, just today I found myself picking through tunes in my collection in iTunes (I'm at work, on a Mac, and I can't install anything else) and wanting to line them up as I went along. You can't. You can make a playlist and add songs to it, or you can play them one by one from your collection, but you can't just select songs and add them to a queue like you can in Amarok. It's pathetic.
There's umpteen million other reasons why Amarok's better, but this alone is justification enough. Honestly, just try it. iTunes is a bag of shite. Most people just don't care to know any better.
And there was a girl there who I hadn't met before. She used to work for my company, but now works at RealNetworks, managing what content they make available for purchase or something. Now, like most of you, my first reaction was "boo, hiss" when she told me who she worked for. But she swore to me that their top brass have seen the light and realised that annoying the living shite out of all your users isn't a good long-term business plan. She was raving on about their new player that's about to come out, particularly about its ability to save stuff from Youtube etc., and advised me to give it a chance, because it wasn't the RealPlayer we all know and hate from the past.
And I probably will give it a chance, purely because she's extremely attractive...
Ditto DAB radio here in the UK - it sounds like SHIT. Most stations are 128kbit MPEG-1 layer 2 streams, which is more or less equivalent to a 96kHz MP3, i.e. horrible. And to cap it off, apparently it takes six times as much power to broadcast the signal as it does for FM. But of course Most People think it's fine, because Most People are cloth-eared.
Progress, eh? New technology used to be about making things better, now it seems to be about making the minimum acceptable level of quality as cheap as possible.
It's so bad that they're quietly migrating to some sort of AAC-based codec, and new receivers will use this instead of the current standard, so eventually they'll stop broadcasting the MPEG streams. Of course, more than likely the broadcasters will choose to send out more stations at crap quality rather than give us the same stations that we have now at higher quality, but I live in hope.
Not exclusively, anyway. There's loads of people making Blu-Ray players. In fact, HD-DVD is far worse from this point of view - the only major backing it's receiving is from Toshiba and Microsoft.
I don't know why people keep perpetuating this. Sure, Sony has a reputation for pushing proprietary formats when everybody else is co-operating, but on this occasion it's the other way round.
Damn right it is. I've just signed up with them. They advertise up to 24 meg, but I personally am seeing just over 16, and my upload speed is 1.2 meg. It's plenty for anybody, I'd say. And as for download limits, they claim to be unlimited, although this isn't strictly true, but apparently no user's ever actually hit their limits, so they must be pretty high.
That's the point, these people aren't crazy. They've just got nothing more pressing to worry about. I'm not for one minute suggesting that it's not a real problem, I'm merely saying that it's an irrational problem and that the only way to deal with it is to confront it head-on.
Well, they'd never managed to find an answer to penicillin in the countless millions of years before Fleming stumbled on it, so the indications are that they'd need a very, very long time to crack it by themselves if we weren't bathing the entire world in a weak antibiotic solution that they're getting increasingly used to.
And they'd never quite managed to wipe us out completely either. We can adapt too, admittedly not as fast as they can, but if we have a large and sufficiently genetically diverse population, the chances of at least some of us surviving are very good.
The problem now is that we're acting as if we can eradicate them, but we never, ever can, and if we keep exposing them to antibiotics etc. in doses insufficient to completely wipe them out, they'll come back stronger, and eventually we'll run out of tricks. The reason why your doctor reminds you to finish your course of antibiotics, even if you're feeling 100% normal again, is to make sure that nothing has survived to reproduce.
And then KDE did it properly. As is so often the case with Microsoft, it was all about adding features without really giving that much thought to their implementation. Just because they did it badly doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
Probably all those ex-pats living in Spain and France. You know, the ones who left England because it's "full of foreigners who don't even speak the language"...
I think you're being overly charitable there. It's absolutely dire. I got a Windows Mobile 5 phone because it had loads of seemingly useful features, and I have cursed the day ever since. Really, I should have known better. What kind of a phone crashes regularly when you go to answer a call? And what genius came up with the idea of keeping programs in memory even though you've closed them, so that eventually the phone slows to a crawl, forcing you to kill all running applications?
And as for the UI - oh my. The simplest, most common operations are incredibly complicated. The other day, someone asked me for a friend's phone number, and I went to send it as a text message, like you can with every other phone in existence, and generally with ease. It won't do it. It'll try to send it as a picture message, even though the contact didn't actually have a picture attached, and you don't get any alternative. In the end I gave up and cut and pasted it into an SMS myself. I could quote similar examples all day long.
It's windows 3.1 reincarnated, I'm convinced of it. Avoid at all costs.
Meanwhile, in my sleepy small town in Surrey, where nothing has ever happened, there's a CCTV camera right outside my bedroom window.
Big Brother is watching you, but he most certainly isn't watching the fucking criminals.
Now, just for a minute, try and do something that British people are generally terrible at, and try and look at the big picture. Why is there so much armed crime round your way? Clue: the answer is not "because there aren't any CCTV cameras".
The real, underlying problem with life in Britain today - the problem which is a major cause not only of this sort of crime, but of the creeping totalitarianism that this documentary is about - is that the majority of the populace care about absolutely nothing besides the value of their fucking houses. The greed and selfishness is the root cause of the crime, and it's the reason why the government can get away with the stunts they've been pulling. As long as those house prices keep going up, nothing else matters to the average voter.
It wasn't just that poem. After the war was over, there was a spectacular bloom of poppies on the fields where it was fought, because the poppy grows best on land that's been thoroughly turned over. It was an obvious choice as a symbol of peace and regeneration.
And I don't mean this to sound like a troll, but I don't exactly find it a revelation that Bill Gates is a nasty bastard with a severe lack of social skills. Clearly Microsoft has been built in his own image.
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Yes, but for these purposes, 4-N (as in 99.99%) copper's no different at all from 5-N, and that's about all you're gaining from spending hundreds more.
Cables make a difference up to a point, and then they make no difference at all.
Now just sell us the files in FLAC or some other lossless format, and make sure that it's always cheaper, by quite some margin, than buying the CD. Then you might see some of my money. I will not buy downloadable music from anybody until this is what they offer.
Supercavitation's the trick. My layman's understanding of it is that you fire the torpedo or submarine or whatever so fast that it pushes out the water around it, creating a vacuum, and the only part of it that meets any resistance is the very tip.
Of course, the problem with this is that if it's not touching anything, you can't steer it. So you'd better aim straight, and hope you don't hit anything unexpected on the way...
It amazes me the lengths that Apple will go to to avoid admitting that their clinging to the single-button mouse for so long was misguided. First they design the Mighty Mouse, a two-button mouse masquerading as a one-button mouse (with the side buttons and scroll wheel in exactly the wrong places, but that's another story). It's an incredibly convoluted solution to a pretty simple problem - simple, that is, if you're not as pig-headed as Apple. And then, as you say, they don't even enable the second button out of the box!
Honestly, Apple, it's OK to admit you got it wrong, or at least that times have changed since 1984. We'll forgive you.
Maybe one day they'll accept that being able to resize windows by dragging areas other than just the bottom right-hand corner is useful, too. I live in hope.
Amarok is so much better than iTunes it's just embarrassing. It's simply the best music player I know of, bar none. Try it and you'll realise just how limited iTunes is.
The biggest failure of iTunes is that you can view your music library in its entirety, or a playlist, but you can't make up a temporary playlist as you go along. I mean, just today I found myself picking through tunes in my collection in iTunes (I'm at work, on a Mac, and I can't install anything else) and wanting to line them up as I went along. You can't. You can make a playlist and add songs to it, or you can play them one by one from your collection, but you can't just select songs and add them to a queue like you can in Amarok. It's pathetic.
There's umpteen million other reasons why Amarok's better, but this alone is justification enough. Honestly, just try it. iTunes is a bag of shite. Most people just don't care to know any better.
And there was a girl there who I hadn't met before. She used to work for my company, but now works at RealNetworks, managing what content they make available for purchase or something. Now, like most of you, my first reaction was "boo, hiss" when she told me who she worked for. But she swore to me that their top brass have seen the light and realised that annoying the living shite out of all your users isn't a good long-term business plan. She was raving on about their new player that's about to come out, particularly about its ability to save stuff from Youtube etc., and advised me to give it a chance, because it wasn't the RealPlayer we all know and hate from the past.
And I probably will give it a chance, purely because she's extremely attractive...
Isn't pretty much every camera technique ripped off from Citizen Kane, though?
Ditto DAB radio here in the UK - it sounds like SHIT. Most stations are 128kbit MPEG-1 layer 2 streams, which is more or less equivalent to a 96kHz MP3, i.e. horrible. And to cap it off, apparently it takes six times as much power to broadcast the signal as it does for FM. But of course Most People think it's fine, because Most People are cloth-eared.
Progress, eh? New technology used to be about making things better, now it seems to be about making the minimum acceptable level of quality as cheap as possible.
It's so bad that they're quietly migrating to some sort of AAC-based codec, and new receivers will use this instead of the current standard, so eventually they'll stop broadcasting the MPEG streams. Of course, more than likely the broadcasters will choose to send out more stations at crap quality rather than give us the same stations that we have now at higher quality, but I live in hope.
I'm guessing it's because they're expensive to make. No matter who makes them.
I mean, the cheapest player around is the PS3 and we all know Sony's taking a massive kicking on those.
It is NOT Sony's.
Not exclusively, anyway. There's loads of people making Blu-Ray players. In fact, HD-DVD is far worse from this point of view - the only major backing it's receiving is from Toshiba and Microsoft.
I don't know why people keep perpetuating this. Sure, Sony has a reputation for pushing proprietary formats when everybody else is co-operating, but on this occasion it's the other way round.
Damn right it is. I've just signed up with them. They advertise up to 24 meg, but I personally am seeing just over 16, and my upload speed is 1.2 meg. It's plenty for anybody, I'd say. And as for download limits, they claim to be unlimited, although this isn't strictly true, but apparently no user's ever actually hit their limits, so they must be pretty high.
All for £24 a month. That'll do me.
That's the point, these people aren't crazy. They've just got nothing more pressing to worry about. I'm not for one minute suggesting that it's not a real problem, I'm merely saying that it's an irrational problem and that the only way to deal with it is to confront it head-on.
Well, they'd never managed to find an answer to penicillin in the countless millions of years before Fleming stumbled on it, so the indications are that they'd need a very, very long time to crack it by themselves if we weren't bathing the entire world in a weak antibiotic solution that they're getting increasingly used to.
And they'd never quite managed to wipe us out completely either. We can adapt too, admittedly not as fast as they can, but if we have a large and sufficiently genetically diverse population, the chances of at least some of us surviving are very good.
The problem now is that we're acting as if we can eradicate them, but we never, ever can, and if we keep exposing them to antibiotics etc. in doses insufficient to completely wipe them out, they'll come back stronger, and eventually we'll run out of tricks. The reason why your doctor reminds you to finish your course of antibiotics, even if you're feeling 100% normal again, is to make sure that nothing has survived to reproduce.
Erm... "Get a grip"?
Funny how you don't get obsessive-compulsive hand-washers in poor countries, isn't it?
This is because they have real problems.
When your mind's got nothing to worry about, it starts making shit up.
Only solution for these OCD types is to confront it and stop it.
Nobody believed them anyway.
Did they?
And then KDE did it properly. As is so often the case with Microsoft, it was all about adding features without really giving that much thought to their implementation. Just because they did it badly doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
Probably all those ex-pats living in Spain and France. You know, the ones who left England because it's "full of foreigners who don't even speak the language"...
Dear Auntie,
Are you aware that while one arm of your organisation is asking Microsoft to protect your content, another is broadcasting it on an open circuit?
It's a bit like putting up a locked gate in the middle of a prairie and expecting it to keep the buffalo in.
Use your fucking loaf, eh?
Yours sincerely,
Bertie.
I think you're being overly charitable there. It's absolutely dire. I got a Windows Mobile 5 phone because it had loads of seemingly useful features, and I have cursed the day ever since. Really, I should have known better. What kind of a phone crashes regularly when you go to answer a call? And what genius came up with the idea of keeping programs in memory even though you've closed them, so that eventually the phone slows to a crawl, forcing you to kill all running applications?
And as for the UI - oh my. The simplest, most common operations are incredibly complicated. The other day, someone asked me for a friend's phone number, and I went to send it as a text message, like you can with every other phone in existence, and generally with ease. It won't do it. It'll try to send it as a picture message, even though the contact didn't actually have a picture attached, and you don't get any alternative. In the end I gave up and cut and pasted it into an SMS myself. I could quote similar examples all day long.
It's windows 3.1 reincarnated, I'm convinced of it. Avoid at all costs.
Meanwhile, in my sleepy small town in Surrey, where nothing has ever happened, there's a CCTV camera right outside my bedroom window.
Big Brother is watching you, but he most certainly isn't watching the fucking criminals.
Now, just for a minute, try and do something that British people are generally terrible at, and try and look at the big picture. Why is there so much armed crime round your way? Clue: the answer is not "because there aren't any CCTV cameras".
The real, underlying problem with life in Britain today - the problem which is a major cause not only of this sort of crime, but of the creeping totalitarianism that this documentary is about - is that the majority of the populace care about absolutely nothing besides the value of their fucking houses. The greed and selfishness is the root cause of the crime, and it's the reason why the government can get away with the stunts they've been pulling. As long as those house prices keep going up, nothing else matters to the average voter.
Actually, watch that very clip, and you'll see... Randi going after a faith healer.
It wasn't just that poem. After the war was over, there was a spectacular bloom of poppies on the fields where it was fought, because the poppy grows best on land that's been thoroughly turned over. It was an obvious choice as a symbol of peace and regeneration.
And I don't mean this to sound like a troll, but I don't exactly find it a revelation that Bill Gates is a nasty bastard with a severe lack of social skills. Clearly Microsoft has been built in his own image.
And the PS3 could be (-1, Overrated)...
If there is a God, farting is absolute proof that He has a sense of humour.