In fact, some have said that 128kbps is almost as good as 320kbps.
Parent:
"Can anyone confirm, is 256kbps enough for an AAC file to be indistinguishable from a CD in a true double blind listening test?" Actually 128 is for all but about three people on HydrogenAudio.:D I see 256 as a bit of a waste.
Post a link to a source. That goes for both you and GP.
I've always considered 192 kbps AAC about equal to 128 kbps mp3, but I have no verification of that. I don't see anywhere on HA that says all but 3 people consider 128 kbps AAC = lossless in quality. Their listening test forum is kind of a clusterfuck though, so I may have missed it. I see several threads that say something to the affect of "at 192|256|320 kbps most of us wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the original." Nowhere do I see anyone saying that about 128 kbps.
I was one of those people complaining about the poor quality of iTMS downloads and the DRM. I'd never buy a DRM'd track from iTMS, and allofmp3's lossless and high bitrate for cheap were, and still are, a much better deal. But I'd rather buy through an official channel. We'll have to see whether they continue this DRM-free streak.
I've been soured on music for so long because of anti-piracy measures (and I kind of just got sick of everything on the radio/MTV) that it may be a while before I buy any of these. I'm more into movies and games now. Personally, I'd rather they did the same quality bump and DRM-drop for movies and TV.
The 4X4 and Intel Quadcore are both 4 CPU cores. Intel's 2 brand-new architecture 65nm dual core CPUs in a single chip package should have trounced the AMD 2 separate 3+ year old architecture 90nm dual core CPUs in a single system. The fact that it couldn't....
You're saying it doesn't? Looks to me like everything down to Intel's dual core E6700 beats FX-74 Quad-FX. That's comparing one Intel $500 CPU to two AMD $500 CPUs ($1000 + expensive $350 MB). 1/2 price for the same performance isn't a trouncing?
When you move on to multitasking, the Quads end up closer in performance, but still not enough to justify the cost and power consumption of the Quad-FX platform.
I'd rather get Core Duo Mac Mini that has more available options (like 1080p playback), add some adapters, and hook that up instead.
Good luck with that. It's not nearly powerful enough to play 1080p. Even the iMac needs an upgraded video card (over $2000 total) to play 1080p from Blu-Ray or HD-DVD without dropping frames. Check out the CPU tests for HD on Anandtech, or anywhere that they actually bench it. It's much easier to compare Macs by processor and video card now that they are on the same platform. They don't hold up very well for HD, except the very high end. Cheaper to build if you want HD, by about $1000 dollars, with much better hardware that will have some headroom while playing HD, instead of stuttering on it.
i guess you wanted to say "..stand for something GOOD". If they stand for corruption and their own pockets, it doesnt really work.
and a good portion of them will always stand for corruption, as long as we are a republic. I mean, if you were in power, would you write laws to restrict how much damage you could do, or how corrupt you could be? Of course not. And they don't.
Once you have Congress representing you, there really is no way to reform the system. Especially with the party system added to that, where there are really usually only two options, neither of which adequately represents the people, and both of which want to protect their corruption.
If you actually want to watch a 1080i/1080p stream (as the HD-DVD/BD formats provide/will provide), you're going to need substantially more horsepower. They claim a 2.8Ghz P4 can cut it, but I'd be surprised if you can eliminate stuttering and frame drops with anything less than a dual core.
You'll need at least a Core 2 Duo E6700 to avoid dropping frames in H.264 Blu-Ray without help from the video card. With a 7- or 8-series nVidia or X1k-series Radeon with hardware acceleration of H.264, the requirements drop a bit.
Intel does have four-core offerings, and they do call them Core 2 Quads. The Core 2 Extreme is not necessarily a four-core chip; there are Core 2 Extreme Duo and Core 2 Extreme Quad flavors.
You can tell the Intel chips apart by their model numbers. Extreme edition means the multiplier is unlocked both up and down. All the rest have locked multipliers that can only be decreased.
Extreme edition (X, QX): X6800 is dual-core. QX6700 is quad-core.
Also Quad, not extreme edition (Q): Q6600
All the rest are dual-core (E), Conroe (E6): E6700 4 MB cache E6600
Our government needs to realize that high-speed data service now is as important as electricity or running water. For those that doubt that statement, try to apply for a job without using the internet. Sure, you can in some cases, but high-paying jobs almost require you to apply via electronic means.
We need to vote for guys that make this a priority (not Ted Stevens).
You don't need high-speed internet access to apply for a job. High-speed internet access will only become a "requirement" for people when things like TV/video news move to the internet. Or top rated sitcoms or reality shows. Or football.
The current TV industry won't let that happen easily though. Perhaps if video speeches become popular for Congressional candidates on YouTube or something, you might at least get some of them on your side. But the campaign contributions they receive from the media conglomerates will negate most of that.
It likely won't become a requirement until TV shows are released primarily online and the majority of the population gets their news online, over a decade from now.
Everyone who complains that UAC is annoying doesn't understand that the purpose of UAC is to be annoying. UAC makes elevation a pain, in the hope that software creators will write software which doesn't need to elevate!
VMWare 6, for example, constantly elevates on Vista. What do you want to bet that VMWare 7 won't?
Well behaved programs elevate only when and where they have to. Even if 50% of Vista users turn UAC off, that's still 50% of your client base who is being constantly bombarded by elevation dialogs. The solution? Write your software so it doesn't need to elevate.
Exactly. For people who have running as non-admin for a few years now, this is nothing new. It is allowing most of the population of Vista users who will be running as non-admin in Vista to share our pain. That is a good thing. It means, as long as they don't turn UAC off, that people will begin shunning applications that don't work properly as non-admin. This should have been done a long time ago. It will be a painful couple of years adjusting for people that never knew non-admin existed, but so be it. Anything to wake up clueless app devs.
Usually you can only return an opened product if it is faulty. A digital download is never faulty.
One TV episode I downloaded from Unbox was the wrong episode. I complained and asked them to authorize me to download the right one or return my money. They refused, but sometime along the way, fixed the download on their site. Luckily, Unbox, unlike iTMS, lets you redownload the same episode as many times as you want, so I got to download the right one even though their customer service didn't help me any.
Long story short, you can receive a faulty digital download and should have the right to get a replacement.
I think the obvious point you're missing is that harddrives are huge and cheap. Disks are fine for backup, but if it's anything you might conceivably need ever, just keep it on the drive.
That's really quite wrong.
Best deal on a HDD I've seen: 320 GB for $90 = 3.5 GB/$ Best deal on DVD: 100 x 4.7 GB for $20-25 = 470 GB for $25 = 18.8 GB/$
So HDDs are roughly 5x as expensive (worse if you buy the flagship 750 GB drives). Personally, I use both for recorded TV shows and DVDs. The HDD for stuff I watch often, DVDs for stuff I just want to keep around and watch later. My 300 DVDs (1.4 TB) that cost $75 would have cost roughly $400 to keep on a RAID. I put that money into a new Core 2 Duo build instead, silly me.
It's not just that. Bigger companies (and governments) solve bigger problems. The reason the Army is careful is because going off half-cocked gets people killed just as much as doing nothing, and, yes, is more scandalous. It sounds great to give everybody autonomy so they can react quickly and decisively, but along with that comes Abu Ghraib, friendly fire, and missing palettes of cash.
The missing palettes of cash were known about through independent news and radio long before the news hit mainstream media, including an interview with a woman soldier who had refused to take the money who said that she was told to keep quiet about it, not send any home, and not to make it obvious when she returned home. But it's only a small part of a bigger picture. The DoD has over $2.3 trillion unaccounted for[CBS], 25% of its budget of taxpayers' money. The palettes of cash are business as usual. The worrisome part is not the American and Iraqi soldiers receiving what one might call "bonuses", but where the rest of that $2.3 trillion+ went. If the Executive and military authority are that brazen about giving out unaccounted for money and then telling them to keep quiet about it, imagine what other undocumented transactions of our tax money they might be willing to do. It's obvious at this point that the people of this country (and their representatives) will not hold them accountable, and I'm sure they realize that.
It's also hard to believe that Abu Graib was the result of giving too much "autonomy" while Alberto Gonzales is arguing for the use of torture. Do you think you'll ever really know how high up the chain of command the knowledge of what was going on in Abu Graib reached? Or whether the same thing didn't happen at other locations? Do you think you'll ever know all the horrors and atrocities that have resulted from an urban war that has gone on far too long, with many of its battered participants now having served several tours of duty?
No, it is my belief that only the uninformed will believe that these cases are isolated incidents resulting from giving the perpetrators too much autonomy. They are the exact opposite: the inevitable corruption resulting from giving a military bureaucracy too much power with far too little oversight.
I, on the other hand, have no need for the sheer horsepower of a Mac Pro. So when I dumped my Windows machines a couple of months ago, I got Mac Mini for my desktop and a Macbook for my laptop. Couldn't be happier.
I have no need for the horsepower of a Mac Pro either. I went for modern mid-range: the Core 2 Duo E6600. I built my own PC.
Mine: E6600 2.4 GHz overclocked to 3.2 GHz - quiet and stable eVGA nForce 680i with 2 x16 PCIe and 1 x8 PCIe 1 GB Corsair DDR2 800 BFG 7600 GT 320 GB Seagate 7200.10 HDD 16x DVD+-R/DL burner Lian Li PC-A05 case $950
Theirs: Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors 1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC) NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1 16x double-layer SuperDrive $2500
The funny thing is for most desktop applications, including games, dual-core currently beats quad-core (for example E6600 beats Q6600 in most benchmarks), especially clocked 20% faster. It likely beats 2 separate socket dual-cores even worse. Core 2 Duo also outperforms Xeon in most desktop applications. You also don't have to buy special memory like you do with Xeon. The memory is also 20% higher clock on mine. The board accepts up to the highest memory available right now: Corsair Dominator DDR2 1250. The hard drive is one of the fastest 7200 drives, if not the fastest @ 77 MB/s sustained read. The 7600 GT is also 10-20% faster than the 7300 GT.
It's also a mid-tower, and I like its looks and size better than the Mac Pro. And I saved over $1400 for a better performing, mid-tower, standard ATX, highly upgradeable machine for my tasks.
Actually, this legacy user stopped going to the page itself because I could see my Inbox from my MSN Messenger account and I never got anything but spam - and after 15 days they promptly deleted all my messages. 10 years of archived emails, LOST. FOREVER.
They did the same with my buddylist in messenger. Luckily I had gaim logs to add most back. But I try to use aim for everything now.
iTunes itself will let you burn your collection to a CD, stripping off it's own DRM.
True, but it only works for music. There is no simple way to do it with movies, TV shows, or music videos. Even with music, it is definitely not simple enough for most iTMS customers to do it. They're still more likely to keep buying iPods than to burn and rerip huge collections to move to another player.
I can put any mp3 I wan't on the iPod no matter where I got it from. If they wanet lockin it would only play AAC files. Guess what? that wouldn't sell many iPods, which is what they want because they are a hardware company.
But you're looking at that backwards. It's not about preventing you from playing non-aac formats and locking you into the store. It's about selling you music that only plays on an iPod, and locking you into the iPod. Once you have a $500 collection of iTMS music, it becomes too much of a waste of money to make your next purchase *not* an iPod. Protects their revenue stream. The hardware.
You said it better than I could. I don't really believe a word Jobs said. Apple's lock-in is the best thing they have going for them right now. My opinion is that Apple realized they only need part of the catalog to have DRM to maintain their lock-in, and by doing away with DRM on some purchases, they gain customers that don't want DRM. But they still have the initial DRM-forgiving customers, who are still locked in. That or he knew that none of the record companies would give up DRM, yet said it anyway for positive PR. Like this story, for instance.
I'm not sure where you live, but the biggest line for the Vista launch that I've seen reported was 18 people. Even at $400 for the Ultimate version, that hardly makes a dent in the total OS X revenue thus far.
Why would you wait in line for Vista? It is not like it is hard to come by. Newegg.com next day delivery ring a bell? Come on, it's a DVD that can easily be mass produced and shipped. It is not a piece of hardware that requires ramping up production and is only delivered to a few stores in small quantities.
See other posters for the explanation that it is also shipping in large quantities on new PCs.
Well, wouldn't you know it, we just happen to have acquired a rough version of that very presentation. Geeks out there can read up on IBM's breakthrough ahead of time via this PDF - a Register exclusive.
Doesn't it suck when someone messes with your timing?
IBM deserves a bit of a jab from the folks at Register whom they fooled for a few days with their "paper release" technology.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but Dell did. I remember one of the big jokes around here was that Dell detailed the Vista Capable specs in a table as:
And that's all the Vista Capable boxes were claimed to be "Great for..."
Bah, I meant 128 kbps AAC = 192 mp3, from what I've heard/seen.
Parent:
Post a link to a source. That goes for both you and GP.
I've always considered 192 kbps AAC about equal to 128 kbps mp3, but I have no verification of that. I don't see anywhere on HA that says all but 3 people consider 128 kbps AAC = lossless in quality. Their listening test forum is kind of a clusterfuck though, so I may have missed it. I see several threads that say something to the affect of "at 192|256|320 kbps most of us wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the original." Nowhere do I see anyone saying that about 128 kbps.
I was one of those people complaining about the poor quality of iTMS downloads and the DRM. I'd never buy a DRM'd track from iTMS, and allofmp3's lossless and high bitrate for cheap were, and still are, a much better deal. But I'd rather buy through an official channel. We'll have to see whether they continue this DRM-free streak.
I've been soured on music for so long because of anti-piracy measures (and I kind of just got sick of everything on the radio/MTV) that it may be a while before I buy any of these. I'm more into movies and games now. Personally, I'd rather they did the same quality bump and DRM-drop for movies and TV.
You're saying it doesn't? Looks to me like everything down to Intel's dual core E6700 beats FX-74 Quad-FX. That's comparing one Intel $500 CPU to two AMD $500 CPUs ($1000 + expensive $350 MB). 1/2 price for the same performance isn't a trouncing?
When you move on to multitasking, the Quads end up closer in performance, but still not enough to justify the cost and power consumption of the Quad-FX platform.
Unless you're applying it to an Intel dual or quad core. Then it is a line across the cores, not a dot.
But you're right, it is not spread across the whole heat spreader.
Good luck with that. It's not nearly powerful enough to play 1080p. Even the iMac needs an upgraded video card (over $2000 total) to play 1080p from Blu-Ray or HD-DVD without dropping frames. Check out the CPU tests for HD on Anandtech, or anywhere that they actually bench it. It's much easier to compare Macs by processor and video card now that they are on the same platform. They don't hold up very well for HD, except the very high end. Cheaper to build if you want HD, by about $1000 dollars, with much better hardware that will have some headroom while playing HD, instead of stuttering on it.
and a good portion of them will always stand for corruption, as long as we are a republic. I mean, if you were in power, would you write laws to restrict how much damage you could do, or how corrupt you could be? Of course not. And they don't.
Once you have Congress representing you, there really is no way to reform the system. Especially with the party system added to that, where there are really usually only two options, neither of which adequately represents the people, and both of which want to protect their corruption.
You make it sound like going against the will of the people is always a good thing. I submit to you that in most cases, it is not.
You'll need at least a Core 2 Duo E6700 to avoid dropping frames in H.264 Blu-Ray without help from the video card. With a 7- or 8-series nVidia or X1k-series Radeon with hardware acceleration of H.264, the requirements drop a bit.
You can tell the Intel chips apart by their model numbers. Extreme edition means the multiplier is unlocked both up and down. All the rest have locked multipliers that can only be decreased.
Extreme edition (X, QX):
X6800 is dual-core.
QX6700 is quad-core.
Also Quad, not extreme edition (Q):
Q6600
All the rest are dual-core (E), Conroe (E6):
E6700 4 MB cache
E6600
E6400 2 MB cache
E6300
Allendale (E4):
E4300 2 MB cache
You don't need high-speed internet access to apply for a job. High-speed internet access will only become a "requirement" for people when things like TV/video news move to the internet. Or top rated sitcoms or reality shows. Or football.
The current TV industry won't let that happen easily though. Perhaps if video speeches become popular for Congressional candidates on YouTube or something, you might at least get some of them on your side. But the campaign contributions they receive from the media conglomerates will negate most of that.
It likely won't become a requirement until TV shows are released primarily online and the majority of the population gets their news online, over a decade from now.
Exactly. For people who have running as non-admin for a few years now, this is nothing new. It is allowing most of the population of Vista users who will be running as non-admin in Vista to share our pain. That is a good thing. It means, as long as they don't turn UAC off, that people will begin shunning applications that don't work properly as non-admin. This should have been done a long time ago. It will be a painful couple of years adjusting for people that never knew non-admin existed, but so be it. Anything to wake up clueless app devs.
One TV episode I downloaded from Unbox was the wrong episode. I complained and asked them to authorize me to download the right one or return my money. They refused, but sometime along the way, fixed the download on their site. Luckily, Unbox, unlike iTMS, lets you redownload the same episode as many times as you want, so I got to download the right one even though their customer service didn't help me any.
Long story short, you can receive a faulty digital download and should have the right to get a replacement.
That's really quite wrong.
Best deal on a HDD I've seen: 320 GB for $90 = 3.5 GB/$
Best deal on DVD: 100 x 4.7 GB for $20-25 = 470 GB for $25 = 18.8 GB/$
So HDDs are roughly 5x as expensive (worse if you buy the flagship 750 GB drives). Personally, I use both for recorded TV shows and DVDs. The HDD for stuff I watch often, DVDs for stuff I just want to keep around and watch later. My 300 DVDs (1.4 TB) that cost $75 would have cost roughly $400 to keep on a RAID. I put that money into a new Core 2 Duo build instead, silly me.
Where did you get a Mac Pro with a Core 2 Duo?
Should be LGA-771 2-socket Xeon Woodcrest, and not fit a LGA-775 C2D, right?
The missing palettes of cash were known about through independent news and radio long before the news hit mainstream media, including an interview with a woman soldier who had refused to take the money who said that she was told to keep quiet about it, not send any home, and not to make it obvious when she returned home. But it's only a small part of a bigger picture. The DoD has over $2.3 trillion unaccounted for[CBS], 25% of its budget of taxpayers' money. The palettes of cash are business as usual. The worrisome part is not the American and Iraqi soldiers receiving what one might call "bonuses", but where the rest of that $2.3 trillion+ went. If the Executive and military authority are that brazen about giving out unaccounted for money and then telling them to keep quiet about it, imagine what other undocumented transactions of our tax money they might be willing to do. It's obvious at this point that the people of this country (and their representatives) will not hold them accountable, and I'm sure they realize that.
It's also hard to believe that Abu Graib was the result of giving too much "autonomy" while Alberto Gonzales is arguing for the use of torture. Do you think you'll ever really know how high up the chain of command the knowledge of what was going on in Abu Graib reached? Or whether the same thing didn't happen at other locations? Do you think you'll ever know all the horrors and atrocities that have resulted from an urban war that has gone on far too long, with many of its battered participants now having served several tours of duty?
No, it is my belief that only the uninformed will believe that these cases are isolated incidents resulting from giving the perpetrators too much autonomy. They are the exact opposite: the inevitable corruption resulting from giving a military bureaucracy too much power with far too little oversight.
No, actually the first legal place to buy music was eMusic (since 1995), and without DRM.
I have no need for the horsepower of a Mac Pro either. I went for modern mid-range: the Core 2 Duo E6600. I built my own PC.
Mine:
E6600 2.4 GHz overclocked to 3.2 GHz - quiet and stable
eVGA nForce 680i with 2 x16 PCIe and 1 x8 PCIe
1 GB Corsair DDR2 800
BFG 7600 GT
320 GB Seagate 7200.10 HDD
16x DVD+-R/DL burner
Lian Li PC-A05 case
$950
Theirs:
Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors
1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1
16x double-layer SuperDrive
$2500
The funny thing is for most desktop applications, including games, dual-core currently beats quad-core (for example E6600 beats Q6600 in most benchmarks), especially clocked 20% faster. It likely beats 2 separate socket dual-cores even worse. Core 2 Duo also outperforms Xeon in most desktop applications. You also don't have to buy special memory like you do with Xeon. The memory is also 20% higher clock on mine. The board accepts up to the highest memory available right now: Corsair Dominator DDR2 1250. The hard drive is one of the fastest 7200 drives, if not the fastest @ 77 MB/s sustained read. The 7600 GT is also 10-20% faster than the 7300 GT.
It's also a mid-tower, and I like its looks and size better than the Mac Pro. And I saved over $1400 for a better performing, mid-tower, standard ATX, highly upgradeable machine for my tasks.
They did the same with my buddylist in messenger. Luckily I had gaim logs to add most back. But I try to use aim for everything now.
True, but it only works for music. There is no simple way to do it with movies, TV shows, or music videos. Even with music, it is definitely not simple enough for most iTMS customers to do it. They're still more likely to keep buying iPods than to burn and rerip huge collections to move to another player.
You said the same thing here.
But you're looking at that backwards. It's not about preventing you from playing non-aac formats and locking you into the store. It's about selling you music that only plays on an iPod, and locking you into the iPod. Once you have a $500 collection of iTMS music, it becomes too much of a waste of money to make your next purchase *not* an iPod. Protects their revenue stream. The hardware.
You said it better than I could. I don't really believe a word Jobs said. Apple's lock-in is the best thing they have going for them right now. My opinion is that Apple realized they only need part of the catalog to have DRM to maintain their lock-in, and by doing away with DRM on some purchases, they gain customers that don't want DRM. But they still have the initial DRM-forgiving customers, who are still locked in. That or he knew that none of the record companies would give up DRM, yet said it anyway for positive PR. Like this story, for instance.
See other posters for the explanation that it is also shipping in large quantities on new PCs.