I think that this is an incredibly mature, forward-thinking thing to say, coming from the inherently egotistical corporate giant. While it sounds like I just like my pr0nz0rz, which may or may not be true (you, the reader of this drivel, decide!), I honestly do believe that censorship, even in pornography, is the exact opposite to being beneficial to society as a whole. I'm all for cordoning off the areas and age-checking, however.
That said, on a completely unrelated note, apparently Firefox doesn't underline the word "pr0nz0rz" as being a spelling mistake. Hmm.
Some software cases have held that copying is allowed if it's required for the normal use of the product (and you're allowed to do that). That is to say, you can't sue me for copyright infringement for running your program, which copies itself into memory.
Ah, but a web browser doesn't have to copy anything to the hard drive/cache - Only to memory. So therefore, copying it to the hard drive is a gross excess and a threat to copyright law. =D
While this is an obvious troll, someone out there might mod you insightful.
Digital audio can be played on virtually anything with a CPU and a speaker/line-out, without much difference in processing requirements, and most media players (iPod included) have a processor powerful enough to decode practically any format (see Rockbox).
Games have massive requirements, and each game is created specifically for a certain system. iTunes is not creating music specifically for the iPod; iTunes is simply encoding it with the software equivalent to a lock-out, similar to region-specific encodings in DVDs and certain video games.
As the saying goes, pictures say a thousand words. When Fox News puts up the latest Nintendo DS "pedophile haven" or Playstation "Pornable" report, and faces of concerned parents come up on screen, punctuated with images of dark silhouettes and foreboding music in the background, the idiots take notice. The radio, it's passive. Television is active - It engages the senses of both sight and sound, rather than just sound. With your eyes focused on a TV screen, it's much harder to ignore what's being said than when you're listening to a radio broadcast, especially if there's background noise.
The gamble (aside from the obvious obsolescence of analog TV signals) is, I suppose, that many people will be buying big screens on which to watch their propaganda, the next patriotic 9/11 flick, and the latest Land Before Time for the kiddies. With bigger, clearer pictures, it becomes easier still to focus on the TV - in fact, it becomes downright difficult to draw your eyes away from the sharp, colourful picture, to draw your ears away from the room-filling sound of the often-powerful speaker systems in a large-screen HDTV. This is especially so for the current generation, who grew up watching the moving pictures inside the Radiation King.
Sega did, too, but not before Nintendo entirely sunk the Master System in North America due to their "Develop for us and only us - Or don't develop for us at all!" policy. Though eventually deemed illegal, it didn't help the Master System, which by then was only known in North America for its rather good / bad arcade ports, and for some, Phantasy Star, Alex Kidd and Wonderboy.
The registry is still a massive, system-wide collection of configuration data which under normal circumstances would be OK; However, if damaged or misconfigured, the corrupted registry causes the entire system to become inoperable. A much better scheme would be to have configs for each installed program link to the registry, so rather than tossing all your eggs in the same basket, you have your eggs all over the place and the Registry is simply a central hub. The way it is now, again, if it dies, so does your system. That's an abominable in my books.
Yes, I actually remembered that after posting. Still, Windiz at least avoids phoning home quite so often, and will work on virtually any copy of Windows that you can still get updates for, so long as you're using an alternative browser.
Not really; That 276 bytes applies to every 2048 byte sector. If one sector dies ENTIRELY, then you still have the rest of the disc (you're only out 2048 bytes), not to mention, as others have said in other comments, you can easily repair physical damage to a CD-ROM, unless it's cracked in half, in which case NO error correction will work for you.
In Mode 1 CD-ROM, for every 2048 bytes of data, there's 276 bytes of Reed-Solomon error correcting code and 4 bytes of error detection. Considering we're talking bytes, that's pretty reliable, and as you know, a single scratch often doesn't render a CD totally useless. Usually, a CD has to look like an ice skating rink after an hour of skating for it to fail miserably, and light scratches, even in high numbers, are generally not a factor.
So what the hell? Why is this even necessary, unless you're using a Mode 2 CD (and then, Mode 2 is usually used for videos/streaming data, which requires a more sequential read, where adding ECC would defeat the purpose).
Waste of money.
Re:Yeah, I've tried, but thats not the question.
on
NASA Fires Astronaut
·
· Score: 1
That's because natural bodily functions are wholly taboo in our society, and thus, become a form of humour in that they're generally unspeakable in most non-vulgar social situations.
"OLOL SHE WENT PEE PEE AND POO POO IN HER FANNY SHE IS SUCH A RETURD LOL GET IT RETURD?!111 OLOLOOLOLOLOLO!!!!!11111!!shiftone"
Not to mention that most of the time, you need to either wait in line for an hour, pay for a subscription, put up with low bandwidth, or any combination thereof.
Most game demos today are the size of a CD image, which is not cool. I'm not wasting that time and disk space to play 10 minutes or one level of a game, whichever comes first.
All through high school, one of my teachers kept saying, "If they did away with homework, and both shifted the start time and extended the day by an hour, we'd get so much more done." - And it's true. We could have finished the curriculum maybe a month or so earlier than expected, which would pave the way for either more advanced subjects or more time off between study periods, which equals rested and ready students.
Of course, this is the high school level I'm talking about, an age group that generally doesn't "wake up" until midday anyway. I know *I* was a zombie until about 10:30 AM. Actually, I still am...
But anyway, the only "homework" I can see as being necessary is studying, and learning to study, which is absolutely necessary when the college/university level hits. When I went through school, I don't think - or at least, I don't recall - that it was ever actually taught (or it was taught in a backwards way), and as a result, I never developed good study habits - I'm guessing my classmates, excepting those who developed their own, were in a similar boat.
Structural faults in buildings are also something that is unavoidable, though the utmost of care is taken to ensure it doesn't happen, both before and after construction. Therefore, such an engineer on the software side would be responsible for ensuring that software is relatively bug-free and well-tested, and to ensure that any bugs found are swiftly and effectively squashed.
Bah, it's not DST's fault. It's that everyone's too lazy to set their computer's time the same way they set their other clocks that this sort of thing happens. Better still, why not just have a single NTP server that pulls atomic time off the internet (pool.ntp.org anyone?) and lets the other computers on the network pull time from it? Much simpler, and accurate, too. Network time FTW.
You can find those virtually everywhere. I work at a local computer shop, and we have PCI-E cards with DVI-out for about $60.00 CAD, and those aren't even the bottom of the barrel. AGP are also fairly cheap, though not as cheap as PCI-E any more, you'll find them for much less than even $100 CAD. Where was THIS guy looking?
MP3's sweet spot is 128kbps-192kbps, 44.1KHz, stereo. AFAIK, MP3 can't go beyond stereo for audio, and thus is a terrible choice for anyone needing 5.1, unless you want to play 3 MP3's at once. The only reason MP3 sounds even remotely good right now is because of LAME, which provides a massive quality boost over the Fraunhofer codec, as well as all those other MP3 codecs (Blade, Xing, etc), as well as incorporating very advanced encoding methods. It takes much longer to encode in LAME in comparison, but it sounds much better.
I personally like AACPlus(v2) for low-bitrate (CT encoder at 24kbps, Nero at 48-64kbps), since it sounds acceptable in this range, and is perfect for streaming media, like on my webserver.
I use AoTuV Ogg Vorbis for mid-range (64kbps - 160kbps), and, personally, I cannot find a difference between 96kbps Ogg Vorbis and 128kbps LAME MP3, and I have the feeling that Ogg Vorbis is just plainly more efficient at this range than MP3 is - Thus, I save a third of the filesize per file, which, for albums, is a lot. However, the distinction blurs after 128kbps, I'm told. Like AACPlus, it's optimized for sub-128kbps bitrates. That said, bitrate is a poor measure of quality, anyway, though like MHz/GHz, you can usually tell which file is of higher quality within the same class. The other reason I use Ogg Vorbis is that the P4-optimized encoder encodes in single-digit seconds.
As for high-range lossy, nothing beats MusePack. I personally use Monkey's Audio for lossless, though, even if there's no real difference in compression ratios across formats.
There are only very rare occasions where I will encode to MP3, which include portable media and uploads to sites that require the MP3 format. Call it a matter of taste.
Telus (Canada) already restricts the download of Opera Mini and other third-party apps not readily available from their internal website. I'm pretty sure that there aren't anything better in my area, where Aliant (Bell) and Rogers (no coverage) are the only other competitors. I like Telus, anyway, but I wouldn't mind having Opera Mini, all the same. WAP is just too basic.
To their defense, they charge by the pageview, not by the KB.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a little silly, considering how most acronyms are considered spelling mistakes. Like NAND, DAC, AGP, PCI, etc.
I think that this is an incredibly mature, forward-thinking thing to say, coming from the inherently egotistical corporate giant. While it sounds like I just like my pr0nz0rz, which may or may not be true (you, the reader of this drivel, decide!), I honestly do believe that censorship, even in pornography, is the exact opposite to being beneficial to society as a whole. I'm all for cordoning off the areas and age-checking, however.
That said, on a completely unrelated note, apparently Firefox doesn't underline the word "pr0nz0rz" as being a spelling mistake. Hmm.
Excuse me, but how is a dog supposed to sniff terrorism? WMD's, maybe, depending upon what, exactly, it is, but... Uh... No. Just no.
Ah, but a web browser doesn't have to copy anything to the hard drive/cache - Only to memory. So therefore, copying it to the hard drive is a gross excess and a threat to copyright law. =D
Unfortunately, Amarok, AFAIK, won't run on anything but Linux, or at least, not officially.
While this is an obvious troll, someone out there might mod you insightful.
Digital audio can be played on virtually anything with a CPU and a speaker/line-out, without much difference in processing requirements, and most media players (iPod included) have a processor powerful enough to decode practically any format (see Rockbox).
Games have massive requirements, and each game is created specifically for a certain system. iTunes is not creating music specifically for the iPod; iTunes is simply encoding it with the software equivalent to a lock-out, similar to region-specific encodings in DVDs and certain video games.
screaming 13 year old
I want some motherf*ckin' chocolate milk!
As the saying goes, pictures say a thousand words. When Fox News puts up the latest Nintendo DS "pedophile haven" or Playstation "Pornable" report, and faces of concerned parents come up on screen, punctuated with images of dark silhouettes and foreboding music in the background, the idiots take notice. The radio, it's passive. Television is active - It engages the senses of both sight and sound, rather than just sound. With your eyes focused on a TV screen, it's much harder to ignore what's being said than when you're listening to a radio broadcast, especially if there's background noise.
The gamble (aside from the obvious obsolescence of analog TV signals) is, I suppose, that many people will be buying big screens on which to watch their propaganda, the next patriotic 9/11 flick, and the latest Land Before Time for the kiddies. With bigger, clearer pictures, it becomes easier still to focus on the TV - in fact, it becomes downright difficult to draw your eyes away from the sharp, colourful picture, to draw your ears away from the room-filling sound of the often-powerful speaker systems in a large-screen HDTV. This is especially so for the current generation, who grew up watching the moving pictures inside the Radiation King.
The more money you print, the more worthless it becomes.
Sega did, too, but not before Nintendo entirely sunk the Master System in North America due to their "Develop for us and only us - Or don't develop for us at all!" policy. Though eventually deemed illegal, it didn't help the Master System, which by then was only known in North America for its rather good / bad arcade ports, and for some, Phantasy Star, Alex Kidd and Wonderboy.
The registry is still a massive, system-wide collection of configuration data which under normal circumstances would be OK; However, if damaged or misconfigured, the corrupted registry causes the entire system to become inoperable. A much better scheme would be to have configs for each installed program link to the registry, so rather than tossing all your eggs in the same basket, you have your eggs all over the place and the Registry is simply a central hub. The way it is now, again, if it dies, so does your system. That's an abominable in my books.
Yes, I actually remembered that after posting. Still, Windiz at least avoids phoning home quite so often, and will work on virtually any copy of Windows that you can still get updates for, so long as you're using an alternative browser.
Use Windiz Update!
Not really; That 276 bytes applies to every 2048 byte sector. If one sector dies ENTIRELY, then you still have the rest of the disc (you're only out 2048 bytes), not to mention, as others have said in other comments, you can easily repair physical damage to a CD-ROM, unless it's cracked in half, in which case NO error correction will work for you.
In Mode 1 CD-ROM, for every 2048 bytes of data, there's 276 bytes of Reed-Solomon error correcting code and 4 bytes of error detection. Considering we're talking bytes, that's pretty reliable, and as you know, a single scratch often doesn't render a CD totally useless. Usually, a CD has to look like an ice skating rink after an hour of skating for it to fail miserably, and light scratches, even in high numbers, are generally not a factor.
So what the hell? Why is this even necessary, unless you're using a Mode 2 CD (and then, Mode 2 is usually used for videos/streaming data, which requires a more sequential read, where adding ECC would defeat the purpose).
Waste of money.
That's because natural bodily functions are wholly taboo in our society, and thus, become a form of humour in that they're generally unspeakable in most non-vulgar social situations.
"OLOL SHE WENT PEE PEE AND POO POO IN HER FANNY SHE IS SUCH A RETURD LOL GET IT RETURD?!111 OLOLOOLOLOLOLO!!!!!11111!!shiftone"
I AM a mod, you insensitive clod!
Not to mention that most of the time, you need to either wait in line for an hour, pay for a subscription, put up with low bandwidth, or any combination thereof.
Most game demos today are the size of a CD image, which is not cool. I'm not wasting that time and disk space to play 10 minutes or one level of a game, whichever comes first.
All through high school, one of my teachers kept saying, "If they did away with homework, and both shifted the start time and extended the day by an hour, we'd get so much more done." - And it's true. We could have finished the curriculum maybe a month or so earlier than expected, which would pave the way for either more advanced subjects or more time off between study periods, which equals rested and ready students.
Of course, this is the high school level I'm talking about, an age group that generally doesn't "wake up" until midday anyway. I know *I* was a zombie until about 10:30 AM. Actually, I still am...
But anyway, the only "homework" I can see as being necessary is studying, and learning to study, which is absolutely necessary when the college/university level hits. When I went through school, I don't think - or at least, I don't recall - that it was ever actually taught (or it was taught in a backwards way), and as a result, I never developed good study habits - I'm guessing my classmates, excepting those who developed their own, were in a similar boat.
Structural faults in buildings are also something that is unavoidable, though the utmost of care is taken to ensure it doesn't happen, both before and after construction. Therefore, such an engineer on the software side would be responsible for ensuring that software is relatively bug-free and well-tested, and to ensure that any bugs found are swiftly and effectively squashed.
Bah, it's not DST's fault. It's that everyone's too lazy to set their computer's time the same way they set their other clocks that this sort of thing happens. Better still, why not just have a single NTP server that pulls atomic time off the internet (pool.ntp.org anyone?) and lets the other computers on the network pull time from it? Much simpler, and accurate, too. Network time FTW.
You can find those virtually everywhere. I work at a local computer shop, and we have PCI-E cards with DVI-out for about $60.00 CAD, and those aren't even the bottom of the barrel. AGP are also fairly cheap, though not as cheap as PCI-E any more, you'll find them for much less than even $100 CAD. Where was THIS guy looking?
Granted, if he's after PCI, he's mostly SOL.
MP3's sweet spot is 128kbps-192kbps, 44.1KHz, stereo. AFAIK, MP3 can't go beyond stereo for audio, and thus is a terrible choice for anyone needing 5.1, unless you want to play 3 MP3's at once. The only reason MP3 sounds even remotely good right now is because of LAME, which provides a massive quality boost over the Fraunhofer codec, as well as all those other MP3 codecs (Blade, Xing, etc), as well as incorporating very advanced encoding methods. It takes much longer to encode in LAME in comparison, but it sounds much better.
I personally like AACPlus(v2) for low-bitrate (CT encoder at 24kbps, Nero at 48-64kbps), since it sounds acceptable in this range, and is perfect for streaming media, like on my webserver.
I use AoTuV Ogg Vorbis for mid-range (64kbps - 160kbps), and, personally, I cannot find a difference between 96kbps Ogg Vorbis and 128kbps LAME MP3, and I have the feeling that Ogg Vorbis is just plainly more efficient at this range than MP3 is - Thus, I save a third of the filesize per file, which, for albums, is a lot. However, the distinction blurs after 128kbps, I'm told. Like AACPlus, it's optimized for sub-128kbps bitrates. That said, bitrate is a poor measure of quality, anyway, though like MHz/GHz, you can usually tell which file is of higher quality within the same class. The other reason I use Ogg Vorbis is that the P4-optimized encoder encodes in single-digit seconds.
As for high-range lossy, nothing beats MusePack. I personally use Monkey's Audio for lossless, though, even if there's no real difference in compression ratios across formats.
There are only very rare occasions where I will encode to MP3, which include portable media and uploads to sites that require the MP3 format. Call it a matter of taste.
Telus (Canada) already restricts the download of Opera Mini and other third-party apps not readily available from their internal website. I'm pretty sure that there aren't anything better in my area, where Aliant (Bell) and Rogers (no coverage) are the only other competitors. I like Telus, anyway, but I wouldn't mind having Opera Mini, all the same. WAP is just too basic.
To their defense, they charge by the pageview, not by the KB.