Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
We have nothing to lose from being locked into a proprietary format that won't play on most devices? Who seriously uses their phones to play music, anyway? I strongly beg to differ.
"Most devices"? When the iPod has 85% of the portable player market?
AAC is a standardised format: it's part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards. There's no royalty attached to it, but it does require a licence - although it's possible to get around that by distributing FOSS versions of it as source code only.
MP3 (aka MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3), on the other hand, is a complete mess on the patent level. If I were Apple, I'd be having as little to do with MP3 as possible after what happened to Microsoft (ie: they got sued by Lucent for billions of dollars for patent infringement for using MP3 when Microsoft, like everyone else, thought it was supposed to be paying royalties to Fraunhofer for the same thing).
Yes, a higher bitrate AAC file is going to sound better than 128Kbps MP3. So will a higher bitrate MP3 file. I grant you that the compression algorithm may be better with AAC ...
Yes, it is. It has many technical advantages over MP3.
but a VBR MP3 is not "outdated" technology and is a significant improvement on a CBR file. So why aren't they releasing them as VBR MP3s if they want to pull in the punters?
See above. And, also, iTunes lets you convert your AAC files to MP3 with a single click, if that's what you really want to do.
I don't see any discussion about truly open formats like OGG or FLAC. OGG, as a compressed format, blows away AAC, CBR (and, often, VBR) MP3, and WMA. Of course, alas, there are even fewer music devices that support OGG - no prizes for guessing why that is.
Good for you. I understand why you'd do that if OSS was a primary criterion for you, but not many people are going to do that. Do you rip your movies to OGG Theora?
Anyway my impression that there's very little difference between any of the more modern codecs at higher bitrates. And remember, iTunes stuff is professionally encoded from masters, not from CD. I rip at home to 256k AAC and I'm expecting these new files to sound about as good as I really need them to.
-
I do believe the specific comment that chewed Auer's gristle was Salinger's claim that 'with global warming, warmer air can hold more water, leading to heavier rain'.
Which is exactly what the IPCC draft report says. It's not like Salinger was out of line with the bulk of expert opinion or anything.
Anyway, here's the Climate Science Coalition press release calling for "the disbanding of NIWA and the return of all weather matters to MetService". It's deranged, frankly:
-
there is no good reason that a 256k AAC file should be more expensive than a 128k AAC file.
Well, I do pay more for uncompressed WAV files than for the smaller lossy formats on Beatport - but those WAV files are 10 times bigger ...
I'm convinced that most people would give EMI far more money at $2 an album than at $2 a track. It would virtually kill the piracy incentive, and the profits would far outweigh the initial investment in digitisation.
The labels would make more. The artists would make more. Not per unit -- just more overall.
You might be right, but it won't happen on iTunes. That doesn't mean someone else can't come to EMI with a long-tail proposition.
-
While this might be a good moment to say a quick 'hooray' for the demise of DRM in the face of common sense, it's probably also worth highlighting the fact that EMI just repaired a faulty product, put the price up and called it 'premium' -- and wound up with a good batch of PR to boot.
Meanwhile Steve Jobs gets the credit for persuading a major record label to ditch DRM despite the fact that the IFPI announced that the majors were walking away from DRM months ago.
Yes, but as I explained in the post, I think it's been done with maximum cleverness. Apple had to shift on price at some point, and combining the no-DRM with a doubling of bitrate (256k AACs sound really good, in my experience) was a sweet way of doing it. And don't forget, the pricing of albums hasn't changed.
-
As far as I can see, the weather war is the consequence of an ideologically-driven fuckup akin to the splitting of the Ministry of Justice functions in the 1990s. The forecasting arm was split from its research base in an unhelpful way.
-
Oh, and some more research, this time from Arizona State University:
Parents who smack their children may gain short-term relief, and even immediate obedience by their child, but both parents and children pay a heavy price for this indulgence. This is the thrust of a powerful and wide-ranging meta-analysis of 30-years of research into the consequences of corporal punishment.
The messages from the research are that smacking doesn't create citizens with pro-social values, doesn't make effective citizens, sends confusing messages to children, blinds them, through fear, from telling right from wrong, and is ultimately self-defeating. There is also evidence it may be more harmful to younger children - and in Britain 75% of children are smacked before they are 1 year old.
The report concludes that while a mild smack may be better than no discipline at all, non-violent parenting is by far the best for family and society. For many parents hitting begins the slippery slope, oiled by stress or emotion, to physical abuse. Not one single study was found which showed corporal punishment was necessary. Parents should therefore be helped to learn non-violent means of disciplining and training their children - the advice of bodies as widely spread as the NSPCC in the UK, Save the Children in Sweden and the UK, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
This ties in with the experience of Sweden, which banned corporal punishment in 1979. Whereas in 1971, 65% of Swedes thought children could be reared successfully without corporal punishment, by 1994, with greater experience of such parenting, the proportion had risen to 89%.
I suspect that last part's what some of the pro-smackers are really afraid of.
Would anyone who's arguing against the bill care to comment on the study I've cited above?
-
Yes, some friends of Families First who popped over from Scandinavia recently making all sorts of claims. Most of which have been discredited by people back in Scandinavia.
I'm really tired of that number being quoted like it's authoritative, when everyone who says it knows it's extremely questionable. It's one of the Family First talking points.
On a wholly subjective and unscientific level, I was annoyed to some degree by all the pro-smackers on the programme, especially the woman who rudely interrupted Olo Brown's mum while she was talking - where did she learn her manners? And of course, my views on Christine Rankin are well enough known by now.
-
I recall that dumb-assed story about your book, but I hadn't made the connection. That and the Mark Burton story. What a piece of work he is.
I'm now wondering exactly what Cook said to the Auckland Zoo management when he called them ....
The Herald does a lot of lofty sermonising in its editorials. I bloody well hope its considering its position now.
-
Of course what is a PVR? it's something that rips streams based on meta-data ....
Heh. And there's no Public Address reader who'd know better than you, Paul.
In Sky's (or the new TVNZ digital broadcasts) case the meta-data is embedded in the same digital stream as the video (or sometimes for longer-term data on the stream next door), for Tivo the meta-data comes from a modem or the 'net ...
Well clearly, they should all be shut down then ...
-
It wasn't music, but I watched Idiocracy over the weekend thanks to a friend of a friend of a friend who downloaded and then burnt it, and I was so glad to have seen it I wanted to send Mike Judge some money to say thank you.
Though I probably won't.
You need Electric Koha attached to the files ...
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 2184 2185 2186 2187 2188 … 2279 Older→ First