Posts by paulc 770 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2007
see the "Loudness wars", where record companies fight to make their releases sound "hotter" than the others so they stand out more when listening on the radio...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://www.performermag.com/loudness.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
iPods etc. make things worse by reproducing the "music" on the crappiest audio circuits they can get away with... and people don't help by using the lowest bit-rate they can get away with so they can squeeze more tracks on it...
disgraceful really... and it needs to be brought up in open parliament... no surprise that they delayed this one until they just disbanded for the summer so it could slip out and probably slip under the RADAR when they reconvene...
funny that...
and as for the artillery corps...
they're paranoid about losing their reason for existing... they count guns and rocket launchers rather like the RAF count aircraft and the Navy count ships... it's no surprise that the Army consider guns so important that it's a major disaster if a gun falls into enemy hands...
"To actually unmount the disk, you needed to drag it to the Trashcan."
ahh gee, that is so unintuitive... you see normal people would associate that action with deleting the files...
and as for the common man needing a graphical configurator for apache, mysql and PHP??? wtf... no normal mortal ever needs to install those on a desktop... only admin geeks need to do this on servers... and they already know what they're doing...
is that they've had literally decades to think of something to do when the oil, gas & coal run out.. the problem is that they've buried their heads in the sand thinking a solution will come up... this problem should have been addressed 20 years ago when they had the time do do something... but as usual, they've procrastinated...
http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/latestnews/BUS-spotter-hang-camera-paedophile-terrorist-accusations/article-194852-detail/article.html
you may have to cut and paste the link... but allegedly, a local has effectively given up his hobby of bus spotting because of the hassle he was getting over photographing them...
"The credit controller says his first brush with the long arm of the law was in Pontypridd, last September.
A bus driver took exception to being snapped and called the police, who demanded to see what he had on his camera.
A second incident in Monmouth saw an embarrassed PCSO approach Rob and run his name and address through police computers after a member of the public complained he had been acting strangely."
surely whitespace grabbers check the frequency is unused first before grabbing it???
I blame the wireless mic manufacturers... fancy assuming no-one else is using the channel and not broadcasting a channel in use "signal" that can be easily removed from the audio...
When whitespace comes out, it'll be up to devices who intend to use it to manage clashes and back off to try other channels...
Peter... "The moment you pull directors from behind that legal shield a company represents and make them PERSONALLY liable for such offenses, THEN matters will change.
The guys at the top need to know that they are going to get personally hit before they will act, at the moment it's still too easy for incompetents to hide behind "I didn't know" (Enron defense) and sacking some poor shlob to he/she leaves and takes the blame away. Nothing beats the risk of personally having to take the rap to focus someone's attention.
It's a human problem - not technical."
yup, he's right... this is why companies pay so much attention to health & safety regulations because their asses are on the line...
terminate all downgrade rights... push users onto Vista... you have to be cruel to be kind... only then will the true reality of the horror show that is Vista will be revealed... the Vista sales figures are apparently good, however, the reality is most of those are being downgraded back to XP...
@ Peter Leech
"> I'll stockpile XP licences before I put vista on my network.
No need, the vista business versions come with rights for XP if you call Microsoft licensing."
sadly that still counts as a Vista sale... no one will ever get the truth out of Microsoft as to the number of Vista licenses that have been downgraded...
"Artists. get off your ass and do gigs like you used to do, and you will not starve. and for god sake, don't use the RIAA as it is the most anti-consumers criminal gangs that have ever existed."
doesn't work... a lot of the venues are now getting away with "pay to play"... actually charging the artist a "fee" for the "privilege" of playing to an audience while they make like bandits on the door fees and drinks charges...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-play#In_music
CC no commercial use is perfectly compatible with the same material being licensed with a commercial use license...
give away the material free under the no commercial use license and if someone does want to make money with it (for instance as music for their film or commercial or perhaps to play in Discos for paying punters), then license it to them so that they can...
the debates etc. should be streamed live so that independent organisations can record and archive them. The House of Commons and House of Lords should also be charged with recording and archiving the debates and hearings and these recordings should be "tamper proof". Any attempt to have them edited to fit later wishes should be viewed as contempt of the House involved.
If you put this 6000 page monstrosity out on the playing field, you'd have a distinct depression... this thing is so huge, it can warp space and time around it... witness so many people coming out in favour of a standard that not even Microsoft can implement themselves as it has so may completely contradictory sections...
daftest thing I ever saw was a BMW that was camera surfing in a roadworks that had average speed enforcement cameras in place... he charged along, slamming his brakes on for each camera mast before roaring off again... he probably accumulated enough points to get banned just for that one stretch...
Microsoft are doomed... my daughter is pestering me to get her one for school... it does exactly what she wants, web access, plays MP3s, has a wordprocessor and spreadsheet program... and it's light and fits into her backpack with all her books...
I'll be getting myself one as well this summer to replace the Palm Tungsten E I currently cart around
2008... the year of Linux... finally...
Vista... no matter how much lipstick you put on it, it's still a dog with lipstick on it...
the period is too long... there's stuff that should most definitely be in the public domain...
personally I think the terms should be 25 years on mechanical performance rights and 50 years on the actual composition itself... in return, they can have stronger policing... but let us have stuff enter the public domain far sooner so we can actually make meaningful use of it...
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