lol, same here. I thought the FBI had made a mistake with their proxy that screwed up the base URL or something. Had me a little worried for a second or 2. Nothing to worry about. Their proxy is still working fine.
Almost everything you said equally applies to OS X. It also seems to be nitpicking, but I guess I've never been into micromanagement of GUI features.
The color scheme is *definitely* an improvement over the default preschool blue ox XP (The Royale TabletPC theme is the only thing that makes XP look sane). The large borders on the side are unnecessary, I agree. But they help people that don't even understand what a window is to grasp what they're doing. See iTunes, Quicktime, WMP, Finder, etc.
OS X definitely has way more effects like the ones you mention, except with OS X there's no way to turn them off.
As reported in the Washington Times, Reid's strategy memo advises: "Ensure that you have the proper U.S. and state flags at the event, and consider finding someone to sing the national anthem and lead the group in the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the event."
Sorry but I find nothing unusual about that statement. What's more surprising is that it was reported on in that manner. What American politician doesn't have that sort of patriotic crap at all their events? Is it somehow okay for every other politician to do it, for at least as long as we've had televised events, and suddenly not okay for a Democratic leader to?
They'll be drawing up Patriot Act 3, plus new national ID cards and street cameras on every street corner, just like they're installing in the UK.
We haven't had Democratic leadership since the WTC and Pentagon were demolished and we started the wars that "won't end in our lifetime." I don't know where you could draw any knowledge of how they will act from.
You didn't even know about the law, but you are concerned?
I didn't know about the FISA law. But I knew that the government couldn't just wiretap me without any oversight. Then congress stood up for their right to have the President follow laws that they specifically drafted to prevent him from doing what he did anyway. Then I found out that "executive authority," or whatever Bush's word of the day for it is, is only applicable when Congress hasn't made a law to cover a specific act. Then I realized just how fucked up Bush was acting.
So yeah, being concerned, taking notice, and getting informed is a good thing. Just knowing that you have rights, even if you don't know what specific laws are protecting them, that shouldn't be taken away is a start.
Just for the record, Repubs didn't give a crap Clinton got a BJ.
That's BS. They were trying to get him on that before Monica Lewinsky even got involved, looking for scandals in Arkansas. Remember the whole Whitewater thing? Ever notice that nobody ever pursued that? The republicans were looking for anything to destroy Clinton. And obviously, they found it.
If you are producing large professional documents with tons of linked fields and complex spreadsheet analyses, Open Office is absolutely useless.
MS Office WORKS and it works well. I personally produce over $500,000 worth of professional documents every year. They could charge $2000 for office and I would still buy it, it is peanuts compared to the value of what I produce annually.
In my experience, businesses that produce "large professional documents with tons of linked fields and complex spreadsheet analyses" have a fairly low CMM.
I would suggest analyzing your processes and focusing on databases so your company doesn't have to pay $70,000+/year for somebody to move fields around in Excel.
You almost certainly don't *need* Word for anything. On the other hand, you probably do need Excel for *some* ad hoc analysis and PowerPoint for presentations.
First, dual boot is a myth, it is damn annoying and so counterproductive. Most people dont realise that until they actually experiment it, it's hype now, but all Linux users know it's a pain, and I know from experience that a dual boot Windows/Linux means one thing... Windows 90% of the time.
Count me out of the group of Linux users that "know it's a pain" to dual boot. Firefox, Gaim, similar text editors, ext2 drivers for Windows, ntfs+fat drivers for linux....anything I can do in one I can do in the other.
So then it only becomes a matter of rebooting when you have that one thing you can only do in the other OS. 30 seconds later you're ready. And you have all the other tools you need in both OSes anyway, so it's not like you have to drop everything while you're in that OS.
It's not hard, and I sometimes wonder what the other dual-booters are smoking when I hear that dual-booting is hard or annoying.
I'm not paying these guys to design websites, and the people who do generally don't care about Firefox or any other niche browser.
Ah, but the people who design websites do care about Firefox. 25% of w3schools.com's visitors use Firefox to visit their site, twice as many as the percentage reported by web statistics organizations across other sites.
They should care, and they often do care. Whether designing for accessibility is budgeted by their bosses is another matter.
I'm really getting tired of that first blog post being cited everywhere. After Goodger posted that blog entry and received tens of comments suggesting that the bfcache is not the only memory problem, and there are others that are far worse and actually are bugs, he posted a second blog (which nobody seems to cite), saying that bfcache "is just one area of memory usage."
What about some card that's focused on HDTV? It sounds like you're not going to need millions of polygons (a gaming card), but instead just high bandwidth, similar to what might be needed for HDTV. I don't really know whether there are cinema-focused cards that have higher bandwidth, just offering an idea.
It doesn't have to be subjective. Google uses its PageRank algorithm to order results, along with other factors. They keep track of how popular a domain is, then when another popular site links to that domain (especially with the relevant keyword in the link), the PageRank goes up, and the relevance for that particular keyword goes up.
It's a pretty good method of having the world organize your results for you, assuming people use links that are named correctly, like this: Labour Party instead of this: click here. Not only is the former better webdesign and flows better on screen and in print, but it will also get you better placement in Google.
Be sure to read the comments on that blog. You'll find it is a bug, and probably unrelated to the bfcache that Ben Goodger claims it is. That's why his next post is More on Memory.
He probably should have updated his original post though, so this wouldn't be incorrectly spread around the web, as if it's the only Firefox memory problem.
When playing a video game, I move my head, and the games visual field stays completely still. It's not natural and I don't notice it.
You don't move your head enough to make much of a difference. If you did, you wouldn't be looking at the screen anymore.
Let's be realistic, the AAC format is far ahead of the mp3 format, we shouldn't even be talking about them together. AAC is much closer to OGG in quality (so much so, that there seems to be a never-ending war on which one is better).
I realize that. For high-quality rips, the order appears to go something like lossless > MPC > OGG > AAC > MP3, with some cases where OGG is best in the latest versions of it. But when you compare [any bitrate of any codec you want all the way up to lossless] to [128 kbps aac], shifting your thinking from the abstract to the specific case, you get an obvious win for the [any bitrate of any codec...]. That's the case whether you're arguing for buying CDs or buying from allofmp3. iTMS loses.
In fact, try going to hydrogenaudio.org and arguing that 128kbps aac gives you CD quality, or that 128kbps aac is the best encoding of a song. Those that do the ABX tests would surely not agree.
If you think about it, AACs do lose some quality, but they never will again, whereas CDs eventually get scratched and become unusable.
But that's a bit of a red herring, because when you buy a CD (assuming it's not a Sony DRM CD played in Windows), you can then encode backups, extra copies, etc. in whatever format you like, including uncompressed, lossless, or lossy formats. Hell, you can make a 128kbps DRM-protected AAC if you like!
You're getting what most people consider to be an original copy. If you wish, you can even make an exact duplicate of the CD, which will be perfect no matter how many times you copy it because of error correction on the CDs. Even if you try it after you've already scratched your CD, you can use something like Exact Audio Copy to perform multiple reads and average out the errors from your rip.
The way I look at it, when you buy a CD you're getting a less restrictive license and a higher quality ("original") music file. allofmp3 gives you close to the same thing, for a ~88% discount before even considering that you can pick only the tracks you want.
Hell, in 5 years, memory will be so cheap that we'll see iPods with the capability of storing as many apple lossless files as we can store AACs now.
That's in 5 years and has no affect on the music purchases you add to your library now. Unless you're suggesting that iTMS will upgrade your music files for free. I highly doubt that will happen.
Have fun with your transcoded goodness from allofmp3 too.
Have you tried transcoding MPC -q6 to mp3? Get back to me when you have.
The legailty [sic] is also disputed.
Since importing "phonographs" is legal, as written explicitly into law, and no clear verdict has been given as to how that applies to digital music files, I'll take my chances.
From an ethic point of view though, you might as well just download it from a P2P service of you choice.
I disagree. allofmp3 is legal in Russia, importing appears to be legal, and the RIAA does receive money from allofmp3 sales. Nobody's going to come knocking on my door saying they witnessed my IP address downloading some file.
Ethics? Please. I'm a poor struggling college student getting less financial aid thanks to this administration while the multi-millionaire artists get tax breaks. Give me a break. At least I pay for what I can afford. I'd be spending just as much money on music if I bought all CDs. The ONLY difference would be it would be spread between fewer artists.
...I suspect that most just want to listen to some tunes. And most "zealots" know that when you're in environments containing a lot of ambient noise, you're not going to hear the difference anyway.
I just want to listen to tunes as well, whether driving or in my room on my computer, or in the living room with my home stereo system, or at work on my computer with headphones. Currently 2 of those play mp3s, the others only play CDs. I prefer a solution that meets all of those requirements, not one where I'd have to re-buy stuff to get the best quality, or suffer with inferior formats on powerful stereo systems.
I don't have a whole lot of need for a portable player atm, which is why I haven't had one since high school. But I imagine I will buy one eventually, and thankfully it should be better than what's currently available, esp. regarding connecting to car decks and home stereos.
It doesn't take an audiophile to notice the difference between a 128kbps mp3/aac file and a CD, or a high-quality lossless, MPC, or OGG file. It may take a decent stereo system or decent computer speakers. Maybe iPod's earbuds aren't good enough to notice, but I doubt that, as I've heard they're good quality earbuds.
The point is, when everyone was buying CDs, you could encode files for whatever devices you wanted and play them anywhere, without crappy quality. iTMS makes it harder to play anywhere and gives you less than CD quality, even prior to any transcoding you want to do.
If I hadn't found allofmp3, I would continue buying CDs rather than iTMS for the good albums, and use P2P for rare songs and live material. It doesn't make any sense to me why you'd want to spend almost as much money on something so much crappier than CDs.
And it's definitely not over-engineering. It took an hour or two of reading to find out about a really high quality, near lossless sounding but much smaller format that I intend to use for storing all my music. Worth it to me.
Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality. Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
I haven't bought any DRM'd music files online, and I don't own an iPod. But I did own a Rio when they first came out, used Napster when it existed, used the first versions of WinAMP, etc. So I'm not clueless when it comes to digital media.
I wanted to get back into downloading songs, this time legally. So I found out about allofmp3.com and how they offer a service to download individual tracks in practically whatever un-DRM'd format you want. They even have lossless, but it ends up costing more than a CD if you go that route (because you pay by MB), except with the benefit of individual tracks.
So I went to hydrogenaudio.org's forums to research, because they really know their audio formats. They find it fun to do all sorts of listening tests and find out which codecs are best, while I don't really have the time for all that. So I found out that short of lossless, MPC and OGG are the best sounding codecs for high-quality, high-bitrate rips.
I even found a thread about re-encoding lossy formatted files to another format, and how their recommendation was to use MPC's -extreme (at least -q6 I think it was) quality level, and you will be able to re-encode to mp3 or aac at near direct CD-rip quality.
So now I download albums in MPC for later conversion to whatever format my next player is at ~$2.13 per album, legally, as far as I can tell. I have the MPC WinAMP plugin and redownloaded some songs that I had in mp3 before. Sounds much better even with a fairly old 5.1 computer speaker system, and when I want to burn them to CD for my car, they sound very close to CD-quality in a high-end car system.
Makes me laugh about iTMS zealot loons. But I imagine many of them were the ones who either jumped onto Napster near the end with the misnamed tracks and other crap or never used it at all, think Kazaa is the best P2P, that there's no quality difference between 128kbps and 192kbps, that the iPod was the first portable player, and that iTunes is the best (first?!?) player app. Have fun with that...
Burning CDs when you want to reencode? Yeah that sounds like a step up from CDs. How convenient!</sarcasm>
As mentioned by the OP, requiring that students have a laptop allows financial aid to pay for it.
Requiring laptops is not necessary to allow them to be paid for with financial aid money.
I could go down to my local community college right now, sign up for 2 courses (because financial aid requires half-time status) @ $400 each, take out a student loan for $3000, and in a few weeks when financial aid refunds/overpays get distributed by the school, take my $2200 remaining and go buy crack^H^H^H^H^Ha laptop.
You should check with your Homeowner's Insurance company. I had a 48-CD wallet stolen, and said it was in my car parked in front of my house. I got $13 back from them per CD. That's not the full value that I paid for them, but it helps.
This stuff about Netflix has been known for a long time by their actual customers. I first read about it when I was comparing Blockbuster and Netflix and read this site. (I went with Netflix)
Blockbuster didn't have the same selection as Netflix and the free in-store rentals don't appeal to me, living 30 mins from the nearest Blockbuster. And Blockbuster is slower to deliver your rentals in general, not just when throttling.
Slashdot Mirror
lol, same here. I thought the FBI had made a mistake with their proxy that screwed up the base URL or something. Had me a little worried for a second or 2. Nothing to worry about. Their proxy is still working fine.
It's not flamebait just because you disagree with it. Please comment instead of modding that way.
Almost everything you said equally applies to OS X. It also seems to be nitpicking, but I guess I've never been into micromanagement of GUI features.
The color scheme is *definitely* an improvement over the default preschool blue ox XP (The Royale TabletPC theme is the only thing that makes XP look sane). The large borders on the side are unnecessary, I agree. But they help people that don't even understand what a window is to grasp what they're doing. See iTunes, Quicktime, WMP, Finder, etc.
OS X definitely has way more effects like the ones you mention, except with OS X there's no way to turn them off.
Sorry but I find nothing unusual about that statement. What's more surprising is that it was reported on in that manner. What American politician doesn't have that sort of patriotic crap at all their events? Is it somehow okay for every other politician to do it, for at least as long as we've had televised events, and suddenly not okay for a Democratic leader to?
We haven't had Democratic leadership since the WTC and Pentagon were demolished and we started the wars that "won't end in our lifetime." I don't know where you could draw any knowledge of how they will act from.
You didn't even know about the law, but you are concerned?
I didn't know about the FISA law. But I knew that the government couldn't just wiretap me without any oversight. Then congress stood up for their right to have the President follow laws that they specifically drafted to prevent him from doing what he did anyway. Then I found out that "executive authority," or whatever Bush's word of the day for it is, is only applicable when Congress hasn't made a law to cover a specific act. Then I realized just how fucked up Bush was acting.
So yeah, being concerned, taking notice, and getting informed is a good thing. Just knowing that you have rights, even if you don't know what specific laws are protecting them, that shouldn't be taken away is a start.
That's BS. They were trying to get him on that before Monica Lewinsky even got involved, looking for scandals in Arkansas. Remember the whole Whitewater thing? Ever notice that nobody ever pursued that? The republicans were looking for anything to destroy Clinton. And obviously, they found it.
In my experience, businesses that produce "large professional documents with tons of linked fields and complex spreadsheet analyses" have a fairly low CMM.
I would suggest analyzing your processes and focusing on databases so your company doesn't have to pay $70,000+ /year for somebody to move fields around in Excel.
You almost certainly don't *need* Word for anything. On the other hand, you probably do need Excel for *some* ad hoc analysis and PowerPoint for presentations.
It was rewritten already. They switched from the XP base to the 2003 base.
Count me out of the group of Linux users that "know it's a pain" to dual boot. Firefox, Gaim, similar text editors, ext2 drivers for Windows, ntfs+fat drivers for linux....anything I can do in one I can do in the other.
So then it only becomes a matter of rebooting when you have that one thing you can only do in the other OS. 30 seconds later you're ready. And you have all the other tools you need in both OSes anyway, so it's not like you have to drop everything while you're in that OS.
It's not hard, and I sometimes wonder what the other dual-booters are smoking when I hear that dual-booting is hard or annoying.
Ah, but the people who design websites do care about Firefox. 25% of w3schools.com's visitors use Firefox to visit their site, twice as many as the percentage reported by web statistics organizations across other sites.
They should care, and they often do care. Whether designing for accessibility is budgeted by their bosses is another matter.
I click my thumb mouse button, which is programmed to CTRL-W. I can't live without a 12-button laser mouse now.
I'm really getting tired of that first blog post being cited everywhere. After Goodger posted that blog entry and received tens of comments suggesting that the bfcache is not the only memory problem, and there are others that are far worse and actually are bugs, he posted a second blog (which nobody seems to cite), saying that bfcache "is just one area of memory usage."
4 .html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/00977
What about some card that's focused on HDTV? It sounds like you're not going to need millions of polygons (a gaming card), but instead just high bandwidth, similar to what might be needed for HDTV. I don't really know whether there are cinema-focused cards that have higher bandwidth, just offering an idea.
It doesn't have to be subjective. Google uses its PageRank algorithm to order results, along with other factors. They keep track of how popular a domain is, then when another popular site links to that domain (especially with the relevant keyword in the link), the PageRank goes up, and the relevance for that particular keyword goes up.
It's a pretty good method of having the world organize your results for you, assuming people use links that are named correctly, like this: Labour Party instead of this: click here. Not only is the former better webdesign and flows better on screen and in print, but it will also get you better placement in Google.
Be sure to read the comments on that blog. You'll find it is a bug, and probably unrelated to the bfcache that Ben Goodger claims it is. That's why his next post is More on Memory.
He probably should have updated his original post though, so this wouldn't be incorrectly spread around the web, as if it's the only Firefox memory problem.
When playing a video game, I move my head, and the games visual field stays completely still. It's not natural and I don't notice it. You don't move your head enough to make much of a difference. If you did, you wouldn't be looking at the screen anymore.
Let's be realistic, the AAC format is far ahead of the mp3 format, we shouldn't even be talking about them together. AAC is much closer to OGG in quality (so much so, that there seems to be a never-ending war on which one is better).
I realize that. For high-quality rips, the order appears to go something like lossless > MPC > OGG > AAC > MP3, with some cases where OGG is best in the latest versions of it. But when you compare [any bitrate of any codec you want all the way up to lossless] to [128 kbps aac], shifting your thinking from the abstract to the specific case, you get an obvious win for the [any bitrate of any codec...]. That's the case whether you're arguing for buying CDs or buying from allofmp3. iTMS loses.
In fact, try going to hydrogenaudio.org and arguing that 128kbps aac gives you CD quality, or that 128kbps aac is the best encoding of a song. Those that do the ABX tests would surely not agree.
If you think about it, AACs do lose some quality, but they never will again, whereas CDs eventually get scratched and become unusable.
But that's a bit of a red herring, because when you buy a CD (assuming it's not a Sony DRM CD played in Windows), you can then encode backups, extra copies, etc. in whatever format you like, including uncompressed, lossless, or lossy formats. Hell, you can make a 128kbps DRM-protected AAC if you like!
You're getting what most people consider to be an original copy. If you wish, you can even make an exact duplicate of the CD, which will be perfect no matter how many times you copy it because of error correction on the CDs. Even if you try it after you've already scratched your CD, you can use something like Exact Audio Copy to perform multiple reads and average out the errors from your rip.
The way I look at it, when you buy a CD you're getting a less restrictive license and a higher quality ("original") music file. allofmp3 gives you close to the same thing, for a ~88% discount before even considering that you can pick only the tracks you want.
Hell, in 5 years, memory will be so cheap that we'll see iPods with the capability of storing as many apple lossless files as we can store AACs now. That's in 5 years and has no affect on the music purchases you add to your library now. Unless you're suggesting that iTMS will upgrade your music files for free. I highly doubt that will happen.
Have fun with your transcoded goodness from allofmp3 too.
Have you tried transcoding MPC -q6 to mp3? Get back to me when you have.
The legailty [sic] is also disputed.
Since importing "phonographs" is legal, as written explicitly into law, and no clear verdict has been given as to how that applies to digital music files, I'll take my chances.
From an ethic point of view though, you might as well just download it from a P2P service of you choice.
I disagree. allofmp3 is legal in Russia, importing appears to be legal, and the RIAA does receive money from allofmp3 sales. Nobody's going to come knocking on my door saying they witnessed my IP address downloading some file.
Ethics? Please. I'm a poor struggling college student getting less financial aid thanks to this administration while the multi-millionaire artists get tax breaks. Give me a break. At least I pay for what I can afford. I'd be spending just as much money on music if I bought all CDs. The ONLY difference would be it would be spread between fewer artists.
...I suspect that most just want to listen to some tunes. And most "zealots" know that when you're in environments containing a lot of ambient noise, you're not going to hear the difference anyway.
I just want to listen to tunes as well, whether driving or in my room on my computer, or in the living room with my home stereo system, or at work on my computer with headphones. Currently 2 of those play mp3s, the others only play CDs. I prefer a solution that meets all of those requirements, not one where I'd have to re-buy stuff to get the best quality, or suffer with inferior formats on powerful stereo systems.
I don't have a whole lot of need for a portable player atm, which is why I haven't had one since high school. But I imagine I will buy one eventually, and thankfully it should be better than what's currently available, esp. regarding connecting to car decks and home stereos.
It doesn't take an audiophile to notice the difference between a 128kbps mp3/aac file and a CD, or a high-quality lossless, MPC, or OGG file. It may take a decent stereo system or decent computer speakers. Maybe iPod's earbuds aren't good enough to notice, but I doubt that, as I've heard they're good quality earbuds.
The point is, when everyone was buying CDs, you could encode files for whatever devices you wanted and play them anywhere, without crappy quality. iTMS makes it harder to play anywhere and gives you less than CD quality, even prior to any transcoding you want to do.
If I hadn't found allofmp3, I would continue buying CDs rather than iTMS for the good albums, and use P2P for rare songs and live material. It doesn't make any sense to me why you'd want to spend almost as much money on something so much crappier than CDs.
And it's definitely not over-engineering. It took an hour or two of reading to find out about a really high quality, near lossless sounding but much smaller format that I intend to use for storing all my music. Worth it to me.
Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality. Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
I haven't bought any DRM'd music files online, and I don't own an iPod. But I did own a Rio when they first came out, used Napster when it existed, used the first versions of WinAMP, etc. So I'm not clueless when it comes to digital media.
I wanted to get back into downloading songs, this time legally. So I found out about allofmp3.com and how they offer a service to download individual tracks in practically whatever un-DRM'd format you want. They even have lossless, but it ends up costing more than a CD if you go that route (because you pay by MB), except with the benefit of individual tracks.
So I went to hydrogenaudio.org's forums to research, because they really know their audio formats. They find it fun to do all sorts of listening tests and find out which codecs are best, while I don't really have the time for all that. So I found out that short of lossless, MPC and OGG are the best sounding codecs for high-quality, high-bitrate rips.
I even found a thread about re-encoding lossy formatted files to another format, and how their recommendation was to use MPC's -extreme (at least -q6 I think it was) quality level, and you will be able to re-encode to mp3 or aac at near direct CD-rip quality.
So now I download albums in MPC for later conversion to whatever format my next player is at ~$2.13 per album, legally, as far as I can tell. I have the MPC WinAMP plugin and redownloaded some songs that I had in mp3 before. Sounds much better even with a fairly old 5.1 computer speaker system, and when I want to burn them to CD for my car, they sound very close to CD-quality in a high-end car system.
Makes me laugh about iTMS zealot loons. But I imagine many of them were the ones who either jumped onto Napster near the end with the misnamed tracks and other crap or never used it at all, think Kazaa is the best P2P, that there's no quality difference between 128kbps and 192kbps, that the iPod was the first portable player, and that iTunes is the best (first?!?) player app. Have fun with that...
Burning CDs when you want to reencode? Yeah that sounds like a step up from CDs. How convenient!</sarcasm>
As mentioned by the OP, requiring that students have a laptop allows financial aid to pay for it.
Requiring laptops is not necessary to allow them to be paid for with financial aid money.
I could go down to my local community college right now, sign up for 2 courses (because financial aid requires half-time status) @ $400 each, take out a student loan for $3000, and in a few weeks when financial aid refunds/overpays get distributed by the school, take my $2200 remaining and go buy crack^H^H^H^H^Ha laptop.
That is, if I really wanted to.
You should check with your Homeowner's Insurance company. I had a 48-CD wallet stolen, and said it was in my car parked in front of my house. I got $13 back from them per CD. That's not the full value that I paid for them, but it helps.
This stuff about Netflix has been known for a long time by their actual customers. I first read about it when I was comparing Blockbuster and Netflix and read this site. (I went with Netflix)
Blockbuster didn't have the same selection as Netflix and the free in-store rentals don't appeal to me, living 30 mins from the nearest Blockbuster. And Blockbuster is slower to deliver your rentals in general, not just when throttling.