I've got an ipod touch and I've a-b ed a couple of videos. Though youtube is probably converting from the original source (i remember them mentioning they keep the original videos in addition to the converted flv format), it looks like they ran most videos through a very rapid compression setting in order to quickly provide service to the tons of new iphone users. Consequently, they all have seemed to suffer from some terrible quality (encoding errors, huge blocking issues, etc) whereas the flv videos are often much smoother. Color saturation seems to be better on the ipod though, I admit.
On a related note, I wasn't sure if the newer 'high' quality videos are actually higher res or just encoded with smaller blocksize or whatnot. When I click the "make original size" button on the newer videos, they're still larger than the originals. Does that suggest the new videos are higher-resolution in addition to being encoded with higher quality?
I'm a student at Harvard, and for what it's worth, I can confirm the Widener stretch of Massachusetts Ave was lined with an unusual (and infuriating) number of peter pan buses today (maybe 4-5 buses total). I had assumed it was a group of foreign tourists or a big alumni meeting (two busloads of said travelers are a common sight every month or so) but now that I know the truth, I'm fuming at the ears over this.
I'm contacting some friends in the Crimson to see if they plan to cover this in tomorrow's paper.
I find PBS to be quite level-headed, but I'm speaking as someone quite opposed to the current administration. Bill Moyer's Journal is great, and probably free online, as are most PBS shows. Frontline has also continually improved their coverage of in-depth issues lately.
As a consumer, I don't *want* a tiered system. I don't want bluray. I want streaming HD movies from netflix (or apple, if their prices are lowered and appletv lockin is removed). I want to be able to watch youtube without watching a meter. Comcast and other ISPs will have to expand their network capacity to keep all the consumers happy, otherwise they will lose customers with either route (torrent blocking or tiered service).
Except for that whole broadband monopoly issue in most areas....:(
There's a lot of EEs in my classes, but that's probably because I'm taking all the hardware courses. In the theory courses I haven't met anyone outside of CS and applied math, so I can't really answer the question well, outside of what the CUE guide reports as folks taking x class as an elective, and I can't really bother to trawl through those right now.
and not very many people would have understood what the heck I was talking about:)
But yes, for the record, I'm a 'concentrator' in CS.
Also, I really didn't mean to flame anyone if that's the impression I gave, I was just kidding around, a lot of my friends have great taste in music (but most of them are music concentrators, or in the humanities and don't use computers for much more than writing reports and response papers)
and from what I can tell 1) most kids here are too busy with chairing their Model-UN-Investment-Banking-Labor-Movement meeting to even care about music, so they listen to a few cds and buy tracks from itunes (like many college campuses with high tuition, most kids have some hardware from apple) and hear most of their music on the loudspeakers at god-awful binge drinking parties 2) the few kids who listen to a lot of music are into indie bands, and the RIAA seems to go after folks who download more popular tunes. also there's pretty significant downloading/computer-illiteracy here (kids dont have the time to waste playing with the computer, and thus dont really understand where to get music illegally) 3) there's only like a couple hundred cs majors here, and there's only one out of that group with immaculate taste in music (me!) so I'm probably the only person at harvard that the RIAA could ever be angry at, but I don't download music.
There's nobody to sue!
Note to reader: The error bounds on this comprehensive study may be non-trivial.:)
What's important is that we all do our best, of course. As I stated, I wasn't assuming anyone just didn't vote (or voted for the opposition), and I don't think it's a crime if someone doesn't vote, for instance if someone's struggling with depression or anxiety they shouldn't feel guilty if they can't get out to the voting machines.
Nonetheless! Campaigning in the face of such adversity is definitely still important, even necessary, because that other 25% may never have existed. Complacency is a major reason dictatorships take root and thrive, and a major reason Bush's administration has been able to demolish our own rights to privacy.
Just because you didn't vote for him, doesn't mean you are absolved from blame.
Voting isn't our sole responsibility. We must strive to educate others (folks who live in the red states, in this example). The right to voice political dissidence is a necessity. Everyone would love Bush if we weren't given critical thinking abilities through education, and that education is often distributed through dissenters who don't sit complicit with the status quo, and strive for improvement.
I'm not suggesting you *don't* do your part to educate others and voice your opinions to your countrymen and leaders, but to leave it at "I didn't vote for him" is a big mistake, and a major reason for why so many Russians aren't fighting Putin.
when we come up with fusion (in the future....hehe) we'll just line the underside of our highways with superconductors and some energy inefficient way to keep em cool, and levitate our safe, friction free plastic cars. or...ourselves!
1) Symbian probably wasn't sitting on the liquid treasure chest that Google is. 2) Hopefully, data prices in the US will be low enough in 2008 to make gPhone apps feasible for the common man 3) ??? 4) no, really, ??? I don't know how much google is throwing at this but here are my thoughts from the discussion on arstechnica:
"So how much work does google have to commit with this effort, besides trying to twist other telcos' arms to adopt the platform? I'm sure most of the development will come from regular folks, plus a few 20%ers for the underlying architecture, but say this goes nowhere (TMobile's userbase doesn't expand, google loses the 700mhz auction, etc). Google isn't going to get too badly hurt, right?"
Well if you're listening to The The for any reason other than to hear Johnny Marr's post Smiths work (and thus you have it tagged with Marr as well), you're probably better off not hearing it in the first place.
You don't need wikipedia to whore karma this time. Imagine reading two or more websites at once, maybe even with some ajaxy instant messaging stuff, all kind of mixed together.
This is useful because you don't get excess cheeto dust in your keyboard by having to type in multiple URLs.
Rubin produced both Californication and By The Way. I liked BSSM, but those two chili peppers albums were among the most amazing pieces of art I've ever heard. He claims to not have a very deep sense of music however, which I believe...he's worked with some less than stellar artists and the output has been less than stellar as well.
My impression is that he's a bit of a life coach. He helped clean up the Peppers (though John Frusciante and the others were moving towards a cleaner lifestyle during that era already). Frusciante's wicked melodies and soaring harmonies however were his own. I used to believe Rubin could work magic (Cochise is perhaps the hardest rock song on earth) but I think he just unleashes the talent of whoever he's in the room with.
It sounds more like folks are upset that software which can be obtained for free (as in without money) from hard-working and good-hearted programmers is being sold for pure profit by other people without credit given. That sounds ridiculously obvious, but I state it because you seem to find downloading mp3s less of a crime because you think that the original artists are getting compensated, or at least recognized (via some form of royalties or ID3 tags, as the case may be).
This train of thought is dangerous. Since this is a discussion of the law, and neither your nor anyone else's sense of morality should factor into what's wrong or right and the penalties one should face. We all have to go by the books (or work on changing the books *before* deciding what *we* think is ok to do - such as downloading music).
Sorry for not specifying; I meant to suggest users *on slashdot* reading my previous comment would know about the option. You're right, it's a rare situation. As an aside, I'm working with video compression so even short uncompressed sources quickly spiral up to hundreds of gigs. That's definitely a minority usage pattern as far as comcast is concerned, but if I sat down with the head of their series of tubes division, I'd explain to them that I pay the same bill as everyone else and I deserve to know if I'm going to lose my connection two hours before a problem set is due.
Home business users know they're better off with a busines package from Comcast or other ISPs, or with a dedicated symmetrical line. But I'm talking about just working from home - I can't afford a pro connection to work on large data sets, especially as a student. My point is that if Comcast is going to enforce caps, they can't justify avoiding disclosure just because folks must be using all that precious bandwidth to pirate stuff, or to run servers from home (which is probably against their ToS)
I'm always connecting to the servers and especially my own box at school when i'm at home. I'm swapping huge data files back and forth, backing stuff up, and vnc-ing. Comcast can only see that everything is going through ssh. Add all the non-copyright infringing youtube videos, linux distros and kernels, so on and so forth, to that and I'm already a huge drain without even pirating anything. If they announce their secret limit, they better let their customers see some reports on our own traffic, especially *according to what they're measuring.*
If they include as part of the limit all the packet and port snooping they're apparently doing on their customers, I want to know.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got an ipod touch and I've a-b ed a couple of videos. Though youtube is probably converting from the original source (i remember them mentioning they keep the original videos in addition to the converted flv format), it looks like they ran most videos through a very rapid compression setting in order to quickly provide service to the tons of new iphone users. Consequently, they all have seemed to suffer from some terrible quality (encoding errors, huge blocking issues, etc) whereas the flv videos are often much smoother. Color saturation seems to be better on the ipod though, I admit.
On a related note, I wasn't sure if the newer 'high' quality videos are actually higher res or just encoded with smaller blocksize or whatnot. When I click the "make original size" button on the newer videos, they're still larger than the originals. Does that suggest the new videos are higher-resolution in addition to being encoded with higher quality?
Sorry, I meant yesterday (obviously). I've been awake for the past 48 hours +/- a nap, working on a pset, if that serves as an excuse.
I'm a student at Harvard, and for what it's worth, I can confirm the Widener stretch of Massachusetts Ave was lined with an unusual (and infuriating) number of peter pan buses today (maybe 4-5 buses total). I had assumed it was a group of foreign tourists or a big alumni meeting (two busloads of said travelers are a common sight every month or so) but now that I know the truth, I'm fuming at the ears over this.
I'm contacting some friends in the Crimson to see if they plan to cover this in tomorrow's paper.
I find PBS to be quite level-headed, but I'm speaking as someone quite opposed to the current administration. Bill Moyer's Journal is great, and probably free online, as are most PBS shows. Frontline has also continually improved their coverage of in-depth issues lately.
As a consumer, I don't *want* a tiered system. I don't want bluray. I want streaming HD movies from netflix (or apple, if their prices are lowered and appletv lockin is removed). I want to be able to watch youtube without watching a meter. Comcast and other ISPs will have to expand their network capacity to keep all the consumers happy, otherwise they will lose customers with either route (torrent blocking or tiered service).
:(
Except for that whole broadband monopoly issue in most areas....
That's why the word 'faster' is meaningless without a discussion on the pipeline depth of the chip(s) in question.
I'm probably overestimating actually. Lately, we've only had about 60-70 CS majors per class (see the bottom of http://webdocs.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/ugrad_handbook/current/chapter3/computer_science.html)
There's a lot of EEs in my classes, but that's probably because I'm taking all the hardware courses. In the theory courses I haven't met anyone outside of CS and applied math, so I can't really answer the question well, outside of what the CUE guide reports as folks taking x class as an elective, and I can't really bother to trawl through those right now.
and not very many people would have understood what the heck I was talking about :)
But yes, for the record, I'm a 'concentrator' in CS.
Also, I really didn't mean to flame anyone if that's the impression I gave, I was just kidding around, a lot of my friends have great taste in music (but most of them are music concentrators, or in the humanities and don't use computers for much more than writing reports and response papers)
and from what I can tell
:)
1) most kids here are too busy with chairing their Model-UN-Investment-Banking-Labor-Movement meeting to even care about music, so they listen to a few cds and buy tracks from itunes (like many college campuses with high tuition, most kids have some hardware from apple) and hear most of their music on the loudspeakers at god-awful binge drinking parties
2) the few kids who listen to a lot of music are into indie bands, and the RIAA seems to go after folks who download more popular tunes. also there's pretty significant downloading/computer-illiteracy here (kids dont have the time to waste playing with the computer, and thus dont really understand where to get music illegally)
3) there's only like a couple hundred cs majors here, and there's only one out of that group with immaculate taste in music (me!) so I'm probably the only person at harvard that the RIAA could ever be angry at, but I don't download music.
There's nobody to sue!
Note to reader: The error bounds on this comprehensive study may be non-trivial.
What's important is that we all do our best, of course. As I stated, I wasn't assuming anyone just didn't vote (or voted for the opposition), and I don't think it's a crime if someone doesn't vote, for instance if someone's struggling with depression or anxiety they shouldn't feel guilty if they can't get out to the voting machines.
Nonetheless! Campaigning in the face of such adversity is definitely still important, even necessary, because that other 25% may never have existed. Complacency is a major reason dictatorships take root and thrive, and a major reason Bush's administration has been able to demolish our own rights to privacy.
Just because you didn't vote for him, doesn't mean you are absolved from blame.
Voting isn't our sole responsibility. We must strive to educate others (folks who live in the red states, in this example). The right to voice political dissidence is a necessity. Everyone would love Bush if we weren't given critical thinking abilities through education, and that education is often distributed through dissenters who don't sit complicit with the status quo, and strive for improvement.
I'm not suggesting you *don't* do your part to educate others and voice your opinions to your countrymen and leaders, but to leave it at "I didn't vote for him" is a big mistake, and a major reason for why so many Russians aren't fighting Putin.
when we come up with fusion (in the future....hehe) we'll just line the underside of our highways with superconductors and some energy inefficient way to keep em cool, and levitate our safe, friction free plastic cars. or...ourselves!
1) Symbian probably wasn't sitting on the liquid treasure chest that Google is.
2) Hopefully, data prices in the US will be low enough in 2008 to make gPhone apps feasible for the common man
3) ???
4) no, really, ??? I don't know how much google is throwing at this but here are my thoughts from the discussion on arstechnica:
"So how much work does google have to commit with this effort, besides trying to twist other telcos' arms to adopt the platform? I'm sure most of the development will come from regular folks, plus a few 20%ers for the underlying architecture, but say this goes nowhere (TMobile's userbase doesn't expand, google loses the 700mhz auction, etc). Google isn't going to get too badly hurt, right?"
Well if you're listening to The The for any reason other than to hear Johnny Marr's post Smiths work (and thus you have it tagged with Marr as well), you're probably better off not hearing it in the first place.
You don't need wikipedia to whore karma this time. Imagine reading two or more websites at once, maybe even with some ajaxy instant messaging stuff, all kind of mixed together.
This is useful because you don't get excess cheeto dust in your keyboard by having to type in multiple URLs.
My God!!! It's full of *****s!
You're right, sorry for the ...mix-up (groaaann)
I forget who mixed it, they're the one to blame for that (may have been Rubin but I doubt it).
Rubin produced both Californication and By The Way. I liked BSSM, but those two chili peppers albums were among the most amazing pieces of art I've ever heard. He claims to not have a very deep sense of music however, which I believe...he's worked with some less than stellar artists and the output has been less than stellar as well.
My impression is that he's a bit of a life coach. He helped clean up the Peppers (though John Frusciante and the others were moving towards a cleaner lifestyle during that era already). Frusciante's wicked melodies and soaring harmonies however were his own. I used to believe Rubin could work magic (Cochise is perhaps the hardest rock song on earth) but I think he just unleashes the talent of whoever he's in the room with.
It sounds more like folks are upset that software which can be obtained for free (as in without money) from hard-working and good-hearted programmers is being sold for pure profit by other people without credit given. That sounds ridiculously obvious, but I state it because you seem to find downloading mp3s less of a crime because you think that the original artists are getting compensated, or at least recognized (via some form of royalties or ID3 tags, as the case may be).
This train of thought is dangerous. Since this is a discussion of the law, and neither your nor anyone else's sense of morality should factor into what's wrong or right and the penalties one should face. We all have to go by the books (or work on changing the books *before* deciding what *we* think is ok to do - such as downloading music).
Disclaimer: except for Thoreau.
LOTR is a good example of getting two objects at different distances in focus - Hobbits, six foot + dwarf, and Ian McKellan...
Sorry for not specifying; I meant to suggest users *on slashdot* reading my previous comment would know about the option. You're right, it's a rare situation. As an aside, I'm working with video compression so even short uncompressed sources quickly spiral up to hundreds of gigs. That's definitely a minority usage pattern as far as comcast is concerned, but if I sat down with the head of their series of tubes division, I'd explain to them that I pay the same bill as everyone else and I deserve to know if I'm going to lose my connection two hours before a problem set is due.
Home business users know they're better off with a busines package from Comcast or other ISPs, or with a dedicated symmetrical line. But I'm talking about just working from home - I can't afford a pro connection to work on large data sets, especially as a student. My point is that if Comcast is going to enforce caps, they can't justify avoiding disclosure just because folks must be using all that precious bandwidth to pirate stuff, or to run servers from home (which is probably against their ToS)
I'm always connecting to the servers and especially my own box at school when i'm at home. I'm swapping huge data files back and forth, backing stuff up, and vnc-ing. Comcast can only see that everything is going through ssh. Add all the non-copyright infringing youtube videos, linux distros and kernels, so on and so forth, to that and I'm already a huge drain without even pirating anything. If they announce their secret limit, they better let their customers see some reports on our own traffic, especially *according to what they're measuring.*
If they include as part of the limit all the packet and port snooping they're apparently doing on their customers, I want to know.
That's a valid interpretation of what I said, I don't fault you for it one bit. I should've been more clear. Rock on man