no joke.. I ripped my entire CD collection (>300 CDs) with LAME -V2 --vbr-new and half of the tracks end prematurely when played on my 4G iPod. They play just fine in iTunes, but the iPod cuts the last 3-90 seconds (never consistent) from the end of about half the tracks.
I now ended up losslessly encoding my CD collection and transcode to AAC 128kbps just for the stupid iPod. It's asinine that my TIVO!! has no trouble with LAME VBR, but the iPod, which is supposed to be a music player!! does not. This thing is so getting replaced with a NOMAD as soon as its battery dies.:(
Just curious.. I've always wondered why everyone is always so quick to offer AVG as the ideal no-cost antivirus solution. I tried it maybe a year ago or so and found it to be a bit slow. I went and spent money on Trend PC-Cillin (3 computer bundle) and NOD32 (four our 4th PC), and I was happy with both, but it does get expensive and I didn't renew when the year was up on each of them. When I found myself back in the market for a free AV again, I ended up going with Avast! It's every bit as good as Trend (minus the firewall), although nothing is as fast as NOD32. I highly recommend it, but it doesn't seem to get much press at all. Also, I haven't kept up with the newer versions of AVG.. maybe the newer versions include this, but Avast! also gives you anti-spam and IM protection. All no-cost, no adware, forever, for non-commercial use.
Please... this is not a case of Windows having a security hole and Microsoft knows about it and charges money for the fix. Not at all. Windows security fixes are issued for free and delivered via Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Neither of these has ever and will ever require a paid subscription. Microsoft has been much more up front and quick to address bugs and security problems in their software than most application vendors. Of course, none of this will be "good enough" for the anti-Microsoft crowd. Just go play with your Linux and quit bitching already. Maybe if Linux becomes popular enough, adware and spyware might target it as well. Crapware authors write their spyware/adware/trojans, etc. for the largest possible audience because they are trying to either make money or gain notoriety, neither of which motive makes it sensible to target a niche product like Linux or Mac OS, which combined account for something like less than 10% of the total personal computer desktop market, and that's being generous.
If anything, Microsoft is being responsible by making their product affordable and consumer-friendly, which is hard to say of most other computer security suites.
I never check off anything marked "Caucasian".. my ancestry is Italian and German.. nothing to do with the Caucasus.. I'm not Georgian or Ossetian or anything like that.
Besides, one of my German great-grandparents was a Jew, and one half of my Dad's Italian ancestry is Black African in origin.. Should I then claim Asian or Black?
Heck, my wife is a Black Angolan immigrant. Our son is technically "African-American" since his mother is African and his father American... but he's not really an "African-American" as that term is usually understood... so where does this madness stop?
This is why private clubs have bouncers.. they are allowed to restrict membership to whomever they please. You don't have a "right" to enter a private nightclub. Nondiscrimination laws simply don't apply. There are plenty of racially or otherwise exclusive country clubs. They're not illegal. But the PGA doesn't have to patronize them if they choose not to. This is called liberty, folks. We still have some in this country. People have the right to be bigots. We know they're idiots, but they've got a right to exist, too. Get used to it!
Windows NT is a great operating system. This is not to say that it is the greatest operating system, but each has its strong suits. There are easily situations which I would go with FreeBSD or Solaris, to give examples, but over all, I'm very happy with Windows NT as my primary desktop operating system.
Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, some of it is deserved, but I think a lot of it comes from two camps in particular: a) those who would bad-mouth anyone who had the dominant position in the marketplace and b) zealots of every stripe: the Linux fanbois, the free software ideologues, l337er-th4n-th0u teenagers who date their computers, etc..
If Windows were as horrible as the anti-Microsoft crowd would have us all think, it wouldn't sell. You can moan all you want about bundling or lack of OS choice when buying new computers, but the fact is that computer vendors bundle Windows because that's what the demand is for. Selling computers preloaded with SUSE Linux is not going to make as much money because the demand simply isn't there, plus Novell isn't giving hardware vendors as much incentive to preload their hardware. Think about it... For every PC a company like HP sells, they might pay $50 for Windows because Microsoft gives them an OEM discount for buying X thousand licenses. On top of that, they get $$ from Symantec, AOL, Sonic, and a bunch of other companies to put their product on that Windows PC. This ends up more than paying for the cost of the OS and even subsidizes part of the hardware. That's because consumers want things like AOL and MSN. They want that simple user experience. They don't want to be hackers. They want to use their computer for recreation or to stay in touch with other people. SUSE just doesn't offer these things. AOL is never going to develop a client for SUSE Linux because the demand isn't there. It's a different audience. So the subsidies are not going to be there. If you want to buy an HP computer with SUSE Linux preloaded, you're going to pay more money for it. It's a niche market, not mainstream. And it is not because Microsoft is evil, but because Microsoft designs their software with end-user experience in mind and they will license their system to anyone, unlike Apple, which fell behind largely because they insisted that the whole world needed SCSI and high-end peripherals and didn't sell a reasonably priced computer until the Mac was already 10 years old.
If it were possible to comfortably run Windows as a regular user and not an administrator, most if not all of Windows' security problems would be solved. The problem is that many software vendors often write their software for the least common denominator, which for the longest time was Windows 95/98/Me, which had _no_ idea of user security. This is changing as Windows NT/2000/XP becomes the standard. It's just hard for Microsoft to arbitrarily start enforcing security when it borks so much older software that people still use every day. But it looks like they're finally going to take the plunge with Windows Vista.
You have to understand that Windows was originally a single-user operating system. Windows NT added the idea of user accounts with differing privileges and a file system with ACLs (which most Linux distributions still, btw, don't fully support), but it had the challenge of retaining compatibility with not only the old single-user Windows 3.1, but also the single-user OS/2! And it had to retain compatibility with FAT and HPFS file systems, as well.
Unix systems for years shipped with inetd running and configured for every needless service known to man. Most had no concept of ACLs and had only the simple ugo-rwx concept of file security. You had daemons that ran as root and didn't drop privileges! Saying that it takes Microsoft 3 versions to fix its problems is unfair when you consider how far along Unix has come in those years, never mind Mac OS, which until version 10 had no concept of protected memory or even pre-emptive multi-tasking!!
Windows NT borrows and builds upon a lot of things that were in VMS. Microsoft hired the lead VMS engineer from DEC to head up Windows NT development. It seems kind of weird to allege that VMS is technically superior to Windows NT, when Windows NT was largely based on VMS and improvements that could be made upon VMS.
I dunno. I'm not exactly a light web'n'email user.. but I found that using XP with 512MB was unacceptable. I never want to swap out to disk if I can help it, except rarely. I have a full 1 GB in my box. And it's been fine.
I have already taken the 64-bit plunge. Granted, Windows XP x64 Edition has some annoying problems (such as my wifi driver periodically dropping all connectivity, forcing me to repair the connection), but overall, I'm very pleased with it. I find that even my 32-bit apps seem to run a little smoother. Most of the problems have been UI related (32-bit apps with shell extensions that don't show up because I'm using the 64-bit shell) or bad drivers, which I'm fortunate enough to only have one that's really problematic--the wifi driver. And I did run into one self-extracting archive that was apparently a DOS program, which was no big deal because I just ran it in DOSBox. In fact, I discovered something very strange-- some of the glitches I was experiencing with games under WinXP Home Edition went away when I changed to x64. I even get better frame rates! (This is all on the same PC-- a Shuttle SN95G5v1 with an Athlon64 3500+ and nVidia GeForceFX 5900XT)
I, for one, will definitely be upgrading to Vista once it comes out, only because I expect that the 64-bit support will be better in Vista. In all honesty, my only reason for going with x64 in the first place was because I thought it was dumb to have a 64-bit processor and not use it to its full capability. I paid for a 64-bit CPU, so I should use it as a 64-bit CPU.
With Microsoft saying that 512MB of RAM is a bare requirement and they wouldn't recommend running Vista at all on any PC with less than a full GB, I think we will be hitting that 4 GB mark sooner than you realize.
Take business out of the equation. Hand over all publishing to the people. Set up a national publishing board that is elected by the public to oversee all publishing in the United States. The public would have a say in not only prices of published works but what kind of rights a purchaser is entitled to wrt to the published work.
The current system of industry cartels and collusion cannot be allowed to continue. We need to stand up for our rights as citizens and consumers and demand not only a free and competitive market for these works, but public oversight and control of the means of production and distribution and the rights of the consumers who purchase these goods.
Where I live, I have two real choices for broadband internet. Cable at $50/month, or IDSL for $100/month. For those of us in semi-rural or rural areas, we don't have a ton of options, and the monopolies sure do take advantage. I pay Cablevision another $55/month just for basic cable (50 channels, 10 of which are free over-the-air but too far away to pick up with an antenna). In a place where an antenna would get me 4 channels, two of which are in Spanish. They have a captive market that has no one else to turn to, and they take unfair advantage of it. I used to have DirecTV, but given the strong winds we get off of the ocean, I got tired of paying someone $100 to re-mount it on the side of our house at least every year. And I'm just waiting for Cablevision to start blocking my Lingo VoIP service (at $20/month) to force me to use theirs at $40/month + higher international rates.
This is a company whose executives live very extravagantly and own sports venues and teams, as well as lay off half of their employees on a yearly cycle so they can re-hire them at entry-level wages.
If you ask me, cable and telephone service should have more government regulation, if not government ownership (provided that competition cannot be enforced). Our communications infrastructure is too valuable to leave in the hands of monopolists. Either enforce competition or hand over control to the government.
interesting.. I, too, had overlooked that this was a UK study. I wonder if this might have something to do with a higher prevalence of fundamentalism among Calvinists in the non-English countries, particularly Presbyterians in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as traditional Catholics. These groups are not so widespread in England, so perhaps this would explain the absolute shock with which many Britons (presumably English) are reacting..
I wonder if this also has something to do with the large immigrant population in the UK. I would imagine a very large percentage of Muslims would place themselves squarely in the creationist/ID camp.
What it really boils down to is the fact that the urban humanist elite believes that it is highly educated and "civilized" and therefore superior to the poor, the devout, the non-college degree holders. What they fail to realize is that there is a world beyond the university, beyond the city limits, and these people are not stupid. They just haven't been brainwashed by atheist, leftist, feminist, and other political agenda-pushing professors that have taught them things in the name of "science," "progress," and "modernity" and caused them to believe that anyone who does not hold to these "englightened" ideas is a rube.
My IQ has been measured at 144. I transferred schools twice, and eventually dropped out of college because I refused to conform myself to the anti-Western, anti-Christian, postmodern worldview. I was failing English classes because we were forced to read feminist literature, and I would write papers and argue in class against feminism. This is so-called "tolerance," I guess. There is no such thing as "dialog" in our universities anymore. It is indoctrination by professors who typically bring a view of the world that is elitist, anti-Western, anti-male, anti-Christian, and politically leftist to their classroom. They tend to exalt other cultures as some sort of "noble savages" that we could perhaps learn something from since they are not Western or Christian, and therefore, must be intrinsically superior to ours.
Honestly, I am hoping my son decides to do something useful with his life, like the military, the priesthood, police, tech school, rather than be subjected to the self-hating ideologies taught on college campuses these days. This evolution vs. creation debate is just another symptom of a culture war of urban elites vs. ordinary people.
The primary area where man has caused global temperatures to rise has been the release of methane and carbon dioxide gas from the increased consumption of Taco Bell, as they have expanded into new markets. Stop the chihuahua! Burrito-laced farts are what's really killing mother earth!
He's right.. January and February 2005 were unbearable here in New York. We probably got more snow in those two months in 2005 than we did in total the 3 years prior. And our summer was pretty mild, too. Weather will fluctuate and cycle, and it will be different in different parts of the world. Some areas may see record highs, others may see record lows. Global warming is a total myth perpetrated by tree-hugging earth worshipping new age freaks. Show me someone who's concerned about global warming that isn't a typical alternative-lifestyle hyper-liberal anti-authoritarian anti-Christian anti-Western Dalai Lama-loving PETA-loving zealot. Or a politician that wants the vote of said people.
Honestly, I absolutely hate science fiction. Most science fiction is deathly boring. I have been forced to sit through some sci-fi movies and seriously thought suicide was the only way out..
But Dr. Who (as well as H2G2) is actually entertaining because the writers actually have a sense of humor, which is curiously absent from most American sci-fi. (OK, MST3K proves that there is actually much humor in American sci-fi, but I'm talking about intentional humor here..)
I don't know. Maybe the British audience cares more about a good show that happens to be in a science fiction setting, whereas Americans are more apt to be geeks who drool and get a hardon over special effects and makeup and invented languages and crap like that.
They kept the look of the Dalek. But, they gave it some major attitude. When I watched the episode, it was a Dalek that was capable of kicking some serious ass!
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no joke.. I ripped my entire CD collection (>300 CDs) with LAME -V2 --vbr-new and half of the tracks end prematurely when played on my 4G iPod. They play just fine in iTunes, but the iPod cuts the last 3-90 seconds (never consistent) from the end of about half the tracks.
I now ended up losslessly encoding my CD collection and transcode to AAC 128kbps just for the stupid iPod. It's asinine that my TIVO!! has no trouble with LAME VBR, but the iPod, which is supposed to be a music player!! does not. This thing is so getting replaced with a NOMAD as soon as its battery dies. :(
Just curious.. I've always wondered why everyone is always so quick to offer AVG as the ideal no-cost antivirus solution. I tried it maybe a year ago or so and found it to be a bit slow. I went and spent money on Trend PC-Cillin (3 computer bundle) and NOD32 (four our 4th PC), and I was happy with both, but it does get expensive and I didn't renew when the year was up on each of them. When I found myself back in the market for a free AV again, I ended up going with Avast! It's every bit as good as Trend (minus the firewall), although nothing is as fast as NOD32. I highly recommend it, but it doesn't seem to get much press at all. Also, I haven't kept up with the newer versions of AVG.. maybe the newer versions include this, but Avast! also gives you anti-spam and IM protection. All no-cost, no adware, forever, for non-commercial use.
If anything, Microsoft is being responsible by making their product affordable and consumer-friendly, which is hard to say of most other computer security suites.
Don't newer Palms run Windows Mobile anyway?
Besides, one of my German great-grandparents was a Jew, and one half of my Dad's Italian ancestry is Black African in origin.. Should I then claim Asian or Black?
Heck, my wife is a Black Angolan immigrant. Our son is technically "African-American" since his mother is African and his father American... but he's not really an "African-American" as that term is usually understood... so where does this madness stop?
rms has proven himself again and again to be an extremist fanatic. The only thing separating him from `Usama bin Ladin is his cause.
This is why private clubs have bouncers.. they are allowed to restrict membership to whomever they please. You don't have a "right" to enter a private nightclub. Nondiscrimination laws simply don't apply. There are plenty of racially or otherwise exclusive country clubs. They're not illegal. But the PGA doesn't have to patronize them if they choose not to. This is called liberty, folks. We still have some in this country. People have the right to be bigots. We know they're idiots, but they've got a right to exist, too. Get used to it!
Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, some of it is deserved, but I think a lot of it comes from two camps in particular: a) those who would bad-mouth anyone who had the dominant position in the marketplace and b) zealots of every stripe: the Linux fanbois, the free software ideologues, l337er-th4n-th0u teenagers who date their computers, etc..
If Windows were as horrible as the anti-Microsoft crowd would have us all think, it wouldn't sell. You can moan all you want about bundling or lack of OS choice when buying new computers, but the fact is that computer vendors bundle Windows because that's what the demand is for. Selling computers preloaded with SUSE Linux is not going to make as much money because the demand simply isn't there, plus Novell isn't giving hardware vendors as much incentive to preload their hardware. Think about it... For every PC a company like HP sells, they might pay $50 for Windows because Microsoft gives them an OEM discount for buying X thousand licenses. On top of that, they get $$ from Symantec, AOL, Sonic, and a bunch of other companies to put their product on that Windows PC. This ends up more than paying for the cost of the OS and even subsidizes part of the hardware. That's because consumers want things like AOL and MSN. They want that simple user experience. They don't want to be hackers. They want to use their computer for recreation or to stay in touch with other people. SUSE just doesn't offer these things. AOL is never going to develop a client for SUSE Linux because the demand isn't there. It's a different audience. So the subsidies are not going to be there. If you want to buy an HP computer with SUSE Linux preloaded, you're going to pay more money for it. It's a niche market, not mainstream. And it is not because Microsoft is evil, but because Microsoft designs their software with end-user experience in mind and they will license their system to anyone, unlike Apple, which fell behind largely because they insisted that the whole world needed SCSI and high-end peripherals and didn't sell a reasonably priced computer until the Mac was already 10 years old.
If it were possible to comfortably run Windows as a regular user and not an administrator, most if not all of Windows' security problems would be solved. The problem is that many software vendors often write their software for the least common denominator, which for the longest time was Windows 95/98/Me, which had _no_ idea of user security. This is changing as Windows NT/2000/XP becomes the standard. It's just hard for Microsoft to arbitrarily start enforcing security when it borks so much older software that people still use every day. But it looks like they're finally going to take the plunge with Windows Vista.
You have to understand that Windows was originally a single-user operating system. Windows NT added the idea of user accounts with differing privileges and a file system with ACLs (which most Linux distributions still, btw, don't fully support), but it had the challenge of retaining compatibility with not only the old single-user Windows 3.1, but also the single-user OS/2! And it had to retain compatibility with FAT and HPFS file systems, as well.
Unix systems for years shipped with inetd running and configured for every needless service known to man. Most had no concept of ACLs and had only the simple ugo-rwx concept of file security. You had daemons that ran as root and didn't drop privileges! Saying that it takes Microsoft 3 versions to fix its problems is unfair when you consider how far along Unix has come in those years, never mind Mac OS, which until version 10 had no concept of protected memory or even pre-emptive multi-tasking!!
I realize that it's "cool" to slam Mi
When IE 6 is trusted to the exclusion of all else... be scared.. be very scared! :-)
Windows NT borrows and builds upon a lot of things that were in VMS. Microsoft hired the lead VMS engineer from DEC to head up Windows NT development. It seems kind of weird to allege that VMS is technically superior to Windows NT, when Windows NT was largely based on VMS and improvements that could be made upon VMS.
I have already taken the 64-bit plunge. Granted, Windows XP x64 Edition has some annoying problems (such as my wifi driver periodically dropping all connectivity, forcing me to repair the connection), but overall, I'm very pleased with it. I find that even my 32-bit apps seem to run a little smoother. Most of the problems have been UI related (32-bit apps with shell extensions that don't show up because I'm using the 64-bit shell) or bad drivers, which I'm fortunate enough to only have one that's really problematic--the wifi driver. And I did run into one self-extracting archive that was apparently a DOS program, which was no big deal because I just ran it in DOSBox. In fact, I discovered something very strange-- some of the glitches I was experiencing with games under WinXP Home Edition went away when I changed to x64. I even get better frame rates! (This is all on the same PC-- a Shuttle SN95G5v1 with an Athlon64 3500+ and nVidia GeForceFX 5900XT)
I, for one, will definitely be upgrading to Vista once it comes out, only because I expect that the 64-bit support will be better in Vista. In all honesty, my only reason for going with x64 in the first place was because I thought it was dumb to have a 64-bit processor and not use it to its full capability. I paid for a 64-bit CPU, so I should use it as a 64-bit CPU.
With Microsoft saying that 512MB of RAM is a bare requirement and they wouldn't recommend running Vista at all on any PC with less than a full GB, I think we will be hitting that 4 GB mark sooner than you realize.
Take business out of the equation. Hand over all publishing to the people. Set up a national publishing board that is elected by the public to oversee all publishing in the United States. The public would have a say in not only prices of published works but what kind of rights a purchaser is entitled to wrt to the published work.
The current system of industry cartels and collusion cannot be allowed to continue. We need to stand up for our rights as citizens and consumers and demand not only a free and competitive market for these works, but public oversight and control of the means of production and distribution and the rights of the consumers who purchase these goods.
Where I live, I have two real choices for broadband internet. Cable at $50/month, or IDSL for $100/month. For those of us in semi-rural or rural areas, we don't have a ton of options, and the monopolies sure do take advantage. I pay Cablevision another $55/month just for basic cable (50 channels, 10 of which are free over-the-air but too far away to pick up with an antenna). In a place where an antenna would get me 4 channels, two of which are in Spanish. They have a captive market that has no one else to turn to, and they take unfair advantage of it. I used to have DirecTV, but given the strong winds we get off of the ocean, I got tired of paying someone $100 to re-mount it on the side of our house at least every year. And I'm just waiting for Cablevision to start blocking my Lingo VoIP service (at $20/month) to force me to use theirs at $40/month + higher international rates.
This is a company whose executives live very extravagantly and own sports venues and teams, as well as lay off half of their employees on a yearly cycle so they can re-hire them at entry-level wages.
If you ask me, cable and telephone service should have more government regulation, if not government ownership (provided that competition cannot be enforced). Our communications infrastructure is too valuable to leave in the hands of monopolists. Either enforce competition or hand over control to the government.
...and more importantly, do they have open immigration policies? :)
interesting.. I, too, had overlooked that this was a UK study. I wonder if this might have something to do with a higher prevalence of fundamentalism among Calvinists in the non-English countries, particularly Presbyterians in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as traditional Catholics. These groups are not so widespread in England, so perhaps this would explain the absolute shock with which many Britons (presumably English) are reacting..
I wonder if this also has something to do with the large immigrant population in the UK. I would imagine a very large percentage of Muslims would place themselves squarely in the creationist/ID camp.
Isn't your head of state also the head of the state church? (i.e., Queen Elizabeth II and the Church of England)
My IQ has been measured at 144. I transferred schools twice, and eventually dropped out of college because I refused to conform myself to the anti-Western, anti-Christian, postmodern worldview. I was failing English classes because we were forced to read feminist literature, and I would write papers and argue in class against feminism. This is so-called "tolerance," I guess. There is no such thing as "dialog" in our universities anymore. It is indoctrination by professors who typically bring a view of the world that is elitist, anti-Western, anti-male, anti-Christian, and politically leftist to their classroom. They tend to exalt other cultures as some sort of "noble savages" that we could perhaps learn something from since they are not Western or Christian, and therefore, must be intrinsically superior to ours.
Honestly, I am hoping my son decides to do something useful with his life, like the military, the priesthood, police, tech school, rather than be subjected to the self-hating ideologies taught on college campuses these days. This evolution vs. creation debate is just another symptom of a culture war of urban elites vs. ordinary people.
The primary area where man has caused global temperatures to rise has been the release of methane and carbon dioxide gas from the increased consumption of Taco Bell, as they have expanded into new markets. Stop the chihuahua! Burrito-laced farts are what's really killing mother earth!
and it's amazing that you know you're going to get flamed like cherries jubilee so you posted this anonymous coward!
He's right.. January and February 2005 were unbearable here in New York. We probably got more snow in those two months in 2005 than we did in total the 3 years prior. And our summer was pretty mild, too. Weather will fluctuate and cycle, and it will be different in different parts of the world. Some areas may see record highs, others may see record lows. Global warming is a total myth perpetrated by tree-hugging earth worshipping new age freaks. Show me someone who's concerned about global warming that isn't a typical alternative-lifestyle hyper-liberal anti-authoritarian anti-Christian anti-Western Dalai Lama-loving PETA-loving zealot. Or a politician that wants the vote of said people.
Tomorrow's headline: world's smallest fish found to be a hoax
But Dr. Who (as well as H2G2) is actually entertaining because the writers actually have a sense of humor, which is curiously absent from most American sci-fi. (OK, MST3K proves that there is actually much humor in American sci-fi, but I'm talking about intentional humor here..)
I don't know. Maybe the British audience cares more about a good show that happens to be in a science fiction setting, whereas Americans are more apt to be geeks who drool and get a hardon over special effects and makeup and invented languages and crap like that.
Yes, but can they overcome... stairs?!