I agree with your sentiments, however it's worth pointing out that the "pumping" sound you mention (and attribute to over compression) can in some cases be desirable. For example, look at a classic house sound such as Daft Punk's "One More Time" - their use of a heavy compressor sidechained to the kick drum adds a very dynamic "pump" to the whole track which is really a signature sound (usually called "ducking" as the bassline ducks below the kick). IMHO it sounds awesome, but as with anything - you have to use it carefully:)
Simply not true. While yes, you could (potentially) get away without the limiter/compressor on the master bus you still typically want them on most of the individual tracks to make it sound "right". For example, use of compression can really alter the sound of a kick drum, and depending on the kind of sound you want in your track you will need a compressor to make it sound punchy and come through the rest of the mix.
The problem isn't that DJs haven't heard of FLAC (I use it for all my stuff at home) it's that the developers of DJ software haven't. Once Serato, NI, and all the embedded stuff in CDJ's is FLAC happy the world will be a better place:)
Peer to peer traffic isn't illegal, is it? File sharing isn't either. File sharing of copyrighted works is.
Pedantic correction: File sharing of copyrighted works without permission is illegal. The emphasis is important because pretty much everything is copyrighted but in many cases the public has permission to share (e.g. linux distros, game demos, CC licensed materials etc).
Errmmm....the Wii is already "encumbered" with all of those things. There are plenty of patented and licensed technologies in there, for which royalties were undoubtably paid - and the games are already region locked.
Sigh. There is virtually never a single "best" in any category. I would rewrite your golden rule as "Buy the best for your needs, and be content with what you have". Most of the world seems to agree that the iPod is the "best" mp3 player around - I disagree (and I have one) - it doesn't meet my needs as well as other players. Is an Impreza the "best" car money can buy? That seems unlikely unless you have very specific needs (is your name McRae?) - for a family with 5 kids something larger is probably "better". What's the "best" OS? Many people might say Linux, and that didn't cost anything.
So no - the best is not always the most expensive, and the best for one person is very rarely universal.
The iPod search interface needs a lot of work, it's actually a PITA to find a specific track. Whose idea was it to not display the name of the Artist when scrolling through the album list? Or worse - when looking at a list of song names? For example, in my collection I have 3 tracks called "Adagio For Strings" by 3 different artists. When either browsing by song or searching by name I have no way of telling which is which without playing them. The search function is amazingly slow too...
Overall, coming from my old Rio player I find the iPod interface a big step backwards (including the click wheel - I much prefer a normal thumb wheel). I could find a specific track in under 10 seconds easily - and actually be certain I'd got the right one.
I don't know which jurisdiction you're based in, but in my experience it's very unusual for sales tax to be paid on anything but the final (retailer->consumer) transaction. Retailers, distributors and other businesses don't typically pay sales tax on the products they buy - whether they be for direct use or resale. They do, of course, pay various operating taxes as you point out.
I'd click it just to find out what was on the other side - I'm curious about such things. Yes I run windows, but I'm also reasonably confident in my security precautions. The point is, I think, that of that 400 or so clicks, we don't know how many were mistakes, how many were people mis-reading the link, how many were just plain idiots and how many were inquisitive types like myself. Thus, the raw statistic (400!!OMGWTF!!hahaL00zers!) is not really very useful or interesting.
A vast majority of the systems of "high importance" are *nix boxes. Do you really think the PCs owned by soccer moms across the country have more important data on them than bank servers,.mil servers, or the bulk of non-fluff on the net?
No, but that's not the point. Your typical malware is after one of three things - (a) the ability to popup ads (b) the ability to intercept/redirect browser traffic or (c) control of the machine to send spam etc - they don't care about the data already on the PC. So yes, your typical bank server is running unix, and yes it's typically more secure that an average PC (running ANY o/s), but they have to be because the people trying to break them are a lot smarter and a lot more focussed than the random botnet operators who simply want access to everyone's broadband pipes.
Well it's not a space voyage for sure, but these guys are planning on being at sea on a small yacht for three years, with no resupplying or docking. They can catch fish, but apart from that they're on their own.
I think you'll find that the CoS is not officially for-profit (I may be wrong, but I'd be surprised if I was) - all the money they take as donations is "officially" used to fund the activities of the religon itself. Much like the millions televangelists all over the US take from their congregations. None of that's spent on their own cars or mansions, no sir.
Thanks for the tip, however (at risk of taking this even further offtopic) I can't even login - the initial boot screen is totally garbled. I did find a few forum posts which suggest a way of running the full installer and substituting some drivers at some point, but as I said I was really just looking to run the live cd and try out some stuff. When I get a chance maybe I'll install a blank disk and do a full install.
Just because you call something a religion doesn't mean it is
OK, so what does make something a religon? What's the definition? I'm not disagreeing with you that Scientology is at best rather absurd, but I don't see any clear way of distinguishing it from other more conventional religions other than by number of belivers or age - neither of which seem fair ways to judge legitimacy to me.
It's not only ATI, I have a pretty recent nVidia card and I can't make it work with Ubuntu. Well, I should clarify that, I wanted to try the live cd and it doesn't work, I'm lead to believe that it can be made to work with a full install but I don't have the time to tinker right now. Still - I'm a little surprised that the brand new version of Ubuntu won't work "out of the box" on a pretty common card.
* Title Update (fixes annoyances, adds some minor new features) - FREE (as always)
* Free For All Pack ("Keys To The City" mode, vehicle collection challenge, new co-op chellenges, new achivements) - FREE
* Getting Busy Pack (new vehicles, weapons, game modes and achievements) - 800 points
I have to say this is WAY more than I was expecting and I can't wait to download it all. One of the best games around for the 360 just got even better.
First off, that's not really an apples-for-apples comparison. I assume this guy runs his own shop, so he doesn't get medical, pension or other benefits, and also has to pay (at least a part of) the cost of running the building, rent, advertising etc. Maybe he also has staff who aren't revenue generating (a receptionist, cleaner, whatever). Just because you pay the guy $xxx an hour does not mean that's what ends up in his pay packet - and for the same reason an employee of a company costs their employer significantly more than they actually get paid.
Spoken like someone who's never used a modern DAW with integrated MIDI. Whilst there's nothing wrong with doing things the way you describe if that's how you prefer to work, for me (and from the comments here, others too) the ability to record, edit, mix and generally futz with both audio and midi in the same place at the same time is wonderfully liberating. I no longer have to get one bit right, then import it into another app, realise I need to change something, go back, etc etc. It's all right there. Personally I use Ableton and a bunch of plugins (none of which are available on Linux FWIW) and whilst I would certainly give other full featured DAWs (e.g. Cubase) a try, I wouldn't go back in time to when I had to use many different apps.
Look on any thread involving the RIAA, MPAA or BitTorrent - they're everywhere. Anyone who supports the unrestricted duplication of (recently created) commercial copyrighted works is, IMHO, arguing for the abolition of copyright. I'm all for restricting the length of copyright, fair use exemptions, etc. However, I have a firm belief that someone who creates something should have some say about how it is distributed and the right, if they so choose, to demand compensation for it's use.
Java doesn't use any native GUI toolkits, except in AWT Not really true anymore. Java 6 (Mustang) added support for native component rendering in XP/Vista and GTK from Swing. Not there on OSX yet (AFAIK), but hopefully soon. A lot of the JDesktop stuff (desktop integration support) is implemented on OSX.
nobody in their right mind uses AWT anymore. It's been unofficially deprecated ever since Swing came out Well, Swing is built on top of AWT, so anyone using Swing is by definition also using AWT. It's true that in most cases it's a better idea to use the Swing API than the AWT one directly, but even that's not a hard & fast rule.
Don't discount *that* - that's the argument in a nutshell. I have to spend $10 in mileage costs to go buy a physical CD. If I was billing the round-trip time to a client instead of driving to go get it that CD probably costs well over a hundred dollars (not that I work 24/7/365 - I sleep too, but you get the point).
Pizza delivery proves that people will pay more for convenience
How so? Pizza costs the same at all the places near me whether they deliver it or I go pick it up (that's what "free delivery" means). If I actually want to go somewhere and sit down and have a waiter bring me a pizza, that'll cost considerably more.
I mean I don't disagree with the premise, convenience is an important aspect to pricing, but the pizza example doesn't seem like a very good one. A better one would be the fact that I pay $2.50 a pop to have my shirts washed and pressed rather than do it myself or have my wife do it. Or that I pay $200 a month for a parking space near my apartment rather than spend 10 minutes driving around looking for a spot on the street every time I want to park.
Agreed 100%. I don't understand this "one good track per album" thing either - I buy albums, not "songs" (which is a pretty useless term seeing as most of what I listen to is instrumental). Anyhow, to satisfy the usual complaints about getting off your ass and going to a store, I use iTunes to preview stuff I might want to buy and then order it from Amazon. Couple of days later the CD arrives at my door - a quick rip to flac and I'm done.
Which is all great, except that we can't live "aside from the DMCA" (or it's equivalent in your jurisdiction). And besides, in many cases there are licensing terms attached to newer formats (like Blu Ray and HD-DVD) which require exactly these kinds of restrictions - they're not laws but they are binding if you want to support the format.
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I agree with your sentiments, however it's worth pointing out that the "pumping" sound you mention (and attribute to over compression) can in some cases be desirable. For example, look at a classic house sound such as Daft Punk's "One More Time" - their use of a heavy compressor sidechained to the kick drum adds a very dynamic "pump" to the whole track which is really a signature sound (usually called "ducking" as the bassline ducks below the kick). IMHO it sounds awesome, but as with anything - you have to use it carefully :)
Simply not true. While yes, you could (potentially) get away without the limiter/compressor on the master bus you still typically want them on most of the individual tracks to make it sound "right". For example, use of compression can really alter the sound of a kick drum, and depending on the kind of sound you want in your track you will need a compressor to make it sound punchy and come through the rest of the mix.
The problem isn't that DJs haven't heard of FLAC (I use it for all my stuff at home) it's that the developers of DJ software haven't. Once Serato, NI, and all the embedded stuff in CDJ's is FLAC happy the world will be a better place :)
Peer to peer traffic isn't illegal, is it? File sharing isn't either. File sharing of copyrighted works is.
Pedantic correction: File sharing of copyrighted works without permission is illegal. The emphasis is important because pretty much everything is copyrighted but in many cases the public has permission to share (e.g. linux distros, game demos, CC licensed materials etc).
Errmmm....the Wii is already "encumbered" with all of those things. There are plenty of patented and licensed technologies in there, for which royalties were undoubtably paid - and the games are already region locked.
Buy the best, or be content with what you have.
Sigh. There is virtually never a single "best" in any category. I would rewrite your golden rule as "Buy the best for your needs, and be content with what you have". Most of the world seems to agree that the iPod is the "best" mp3 player around - I disagree (and I have one) - it doesn't meet my needs as well as other players. Is an Impreza the "best" car money can buy? That seems unlikely unless you have very specific needs (is your name McRae?) - for a family with 5 kids something larger is probably "better". What's the "best" OS? Many people might say Linux, and that didn't cost anything.
So no - the best is not always the most expensive, and the best for one person is very rarely universal.
The iPod search interface needs a lot of work, it's actually a PITA to find a specific track. Whose idea was it to not display the name of the Artist when scrolling through the album list? Or worse - when looking at a list of song names? For example, in my collection I have 3 tracks called "Adagio For Strings" by 3 different artists. When either browsing by song or searching by name I have no way of telling which is which without playing them. The search function is amazingly slow too...
Overall, coming from my old Rio player I find the iPod interface a big step backwards (including the click wheel - I much prefer a normal thumb wheel). I could find a specific track in under 10 seconds easily - and actually be certain I'd got the right one.
I don't know which jurisdiction you're based in, but in my experience it's very unusual for sales tax to be paid on anything but the final (retailer->consumer) transaction. Retailers, distributors and other businesses don't typically pay sales tax on the products they buy - whether they be for direct use or resale. They do, of course, pay various operating taxes as you point out.
I'd click it just to find out what was on the other side - I'm curious about such things. Yes I run windows, but I'm also reasonably confident in my security precautions. The point is, I think, that of that 400 or so clicks, we don't know how many were mistakes, how many were people mis-reading the link, how many were just plain idiots and how many were inquisitive types like myself. Thus, the raw statistic (400!!OMGWTF!!hahaL00zers!) is not really very useful or interesting.
A vast majority of the systems of "high importance" are *nix boxes. Do you really think the PCs owned by soccer moms across the country have more important data on them than bank servers, .mil servers, or the bulk of non-fluff on the net?
No, but that's not the point. Your typical malware is after one of three things - (a) the ability to popup ads (b) the ability to intercept/redirect browser traffic or (c) control of the machine to send spam etc - they don't care about the data already on the PC. So yes, your typical bank server is running unix, and yes it's typically more secure that an average PC (running ANY o/s), but they have to be because the people trying to break them are a lot smarter and a lot more focussed than the random botnet operators who simply want access to everyone's broadband pipes.
Well it's not a space voyage for sure, but these guys are planning on being at sea on a small yacht for three years, with no resupplying or docking. They can catch fish, but apart from that they're on their own.
Two words for you "Oral Roberts".
I think you'll find that the CoS is not officially for-profit (I may be wrong, but I'd be surprised if I was) - all the money they take as donations is "officially" used to fund the activities of the religon itself. Much like the millions televangelists all over the US take from their congregations. None of that's spent on their own cars or mansions, no sir.
Thanks for the tip, however (at risk of taking this even further offtopic) I can't even login - the initial boot screen is totally garbled. I did find a few forum posts which suggest a way of running the full installer and substituting some drivers at some point, but as I said I was really just looking to run the live cd and try out some stuff. When I get a chance maybe I'll install a blank disk and do a full install.
Just because you call something a religion doesn't mean it is
OK, so what does make something a religon? What's the definition? I'm not disagreeing with you that Scientology is at best rather absurd, but I don't see any clear way of distinguishing it from other more conventional religions other than by number of belivers or age - neither of which seem fair ways to judge legitimacy to me.
It's not only ATI, I have a pretty recent nVidia card and I can't make it work with Ubuntu. Well, I should clarify that, I wanted to try the live cd and it doesn't work, I'm lead to believe that it can be made to work with a full install but I don't have the time to tinker right now. Still - I'm a little surprised that the brand new version of Ubuntu won't work "out of the box" on a pretty common card.
* Title Update (fixes annoyances, adds some minor new features) - FREE (as always)
* Free For All Pack ("Keys To The City" mode, vehicle collection challenge, new co-op chellenges, new achivements) - FREE
* Getting Busy Pack (new vehicles, weapons, game modes and achievements) - 800 points
I have to say this is WAY more than I was expecting and I can't wait to download it all. One of the best games around for the 360 just got even better.
First off, that's not really an apples-for-apples comparison. I assume this guy runs his own shop, so he doesn't get medical, pension or other benefits, and also has to pay (at least a part of) the cost of running the building, rent, advertising etc. Maybe he also has staff who aren't revenue generating (a receptionist, cleaner, whatever). Just because you pay the guy $xxx an hour does not mean that's what ends up in his pay packet - and for the same reason an employee of a company costs their employer significantly more than they actually get paid.
Spoken like someone who's never used a modern DAW with integrated MIDI. Whilst there's nothing wrong with doing things the way you describe if that's how you prefer to work, for me (and from the comments here, others too) the ability to record, edit, mix and generally futz with both audio and midi in the same place at the same time is wonderfully liberating. I no longer have to get one bit right, then import it into another app, realise I need to change something, go back, etc etc. It's all right there. Personally I use Ableton and a bunch of plugins (none of which are available on Linux FWIW) and whilst I would certainly give other full featured DAWs (e.g. Cubase) a try, I wouldn't go back in time to when I had to use many different apps.
Look on any thread involving the RIAA, MPAA or BitTorrent - they're everywhere. Anyone who supports the unrestricted duplication of (recently created) commercial copyrighted works is, IMHO, arguing for the abolition of copyright. I'm all for restricting the length of copyright, fair use exemptions, etc. However, I have a firm belief that someone who creates something should have some say about how it is distributed and the right, if they so choose, to demand compensation for it's use.
Example: you can build a bridge that lasts 5 years, 15 years, 25 years, or even 100 years. Yes, 100 years. It is feasible
Not just feasible but pretty standard practice 200 years ago. Makes me sad to see how far we have fallen.
Java doesn't use any native GUI toolkits, except in AWT
Not really true anymore. Java 6 (Mustang) added support for native component rendering in XP/Vista and GTK from Swing. Not there on OSX yet (AFAIK), but hopefully soon. A lot of the JDesktop stuff (desktop integration support) is implemented on OSX.
nobody in their right mind uses AWT anymore. It's been unofficially deprecated ever since Swing came out
Well, Swing is built on top of AWT, so anyone using Swing is by definition also using AWT. It's true that in most cases it's a better idea to use the Swing API than the AWT one directly, but even that's not a hard & fast rule.
Don't discount *that* - that's the argument in a nutshell. I have to spend $10 in mileage costs to go buy a physical CD. If I was billing the round-trip time to a client instead of driving to go get it that CD probably costs well over a hundred dollars (not that I work 24/7/365 - I sleep too, but you get the point).
There, fixed.
Pizza delivery proves that people will pay more for convenience
How so? Pizza costs the same at all the places near me whether they deliver it or I go pick it up (that's what "free delivery" means). If I actually want to go somewhere and sit down and have a waiter bring me a pizza, that'll cost considerably more.
I mean I don't disagree with the premise, convenience is an important aspect to pricing, but the pizza example doesn't seem like a very good one. A better one would be the fact that I pay $2.50 a pop to have my shirts washed and pressed rather than do it myself or have my wife do it. Or that I pay $200 a month for a parking space near my apartment rather than spend 10 minutes driving around looking for a spot on the street every time I want to park.
Agreed 100%. I don't understand this "one good track per album" thing either - I buy albums, not "songs" (which is a pretty useless term seeing as most of what I listen to is instrumental). Anyhow, to satisfy the usual complaints about getting off your ass and going to a store, I use iTunes to preview stuff I might want to buy and then order it from Amazon. Couple of days later the CD arrives at my door - a quick rip to flac and I'm done.
Which is all great, except that we can't live "aside from the DMCA" (or it's equivalent in your jurisdiction). And besides, in many cases there are licensing terms attached to newer formats (like Blu Ray and HD-DVD) which require exactly these kinds of restrictions - they're not laws but they are binding if you want to support the format.