* Posts by Olli Mannisto

13 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2009

Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warped

Olli Mannisto

Oh no you don't

To give it credit, MP3 was useful in making digital music more portable and less reliant on playback devices with fragile moving parts. But it was always a compromise to fool your ear, rather like FM radio: you're not getting the whole sound and, despite the initial claims that sensible compression settings only discard inaudible frequencies, you do notice the difference.

Yes, you definitely do notice the difference. Except if you have to do it in blind testing. Hydrogen audio performed quite a long time ago testing on different MP3/AAC bitrates, on properly functioning codec (=no blatant bugs, incorrect settings) very few people can tell 128kbit apart from FLAC. Throw in variable bitrate and/or higher constant bitrate and you're completely SOL. (*)

But as if by magic once you know it's MP3 you start to notice the differences right away..

This is just age old "debate", cf audiophiles claiming in all seriousness vinyl is better in absolute sound quality than CD. Uncompressed audio does not bring really anything to the table except higher bitrates and file sizes. Those DTS-HD tracks take surprising amounts of space in a movie if you still watch them on disk. There's a reason why netflix does not have uncompressed audio..

(*) yes, some people have unusual hearing but you're not one of them. How many even hear pitch perfect?

Ten... Qwerty mobiles

Olli Mannisto
Thumb Up

Re: sony xperia mini pro

>>xperia mini,pro is by far, the best. and upgreadable to android 4.

Ahem. It's, well, mini. Xperia pro is the real thing. Like Desire Z, only with better specs. Quite nice for writing, I gave up on on-screen keyboards pretty completely after a day or two. I prefer the Xperia to a tablet if I need to write something.

Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition Android tablet

Olli Mannisto
Boffin

Kinda slow..

From the Antutu image it looks like 3D performance is kinda naff. That's the olive green before yellow. Gotta wonder why they went with the Geforce ULP (great name!) instead of the PowerVR 540 everyone else uses with this CPU.

Philips Cinema 21:9 Gold 50in ultra widescreen TV

Olli Mannisto

>Are you trying to say that a film made for 21:9 would display properly on a 16:9 screen? I see from

>your post that you aren't so where in my post am I wrong?

In the part that you can NOT GET 21:9 film to your TV right now. BD is 16:9 and so is digital broadcast. So you always get 16:9 film with black bars no matter what..

If there was BD Pro or whatever with 21:9 aspect ratio support, 21:9 TV would be nice, right now it's pointless.

Olli Mannisto
FAIL

Numbers, aye..

>Let me try to explain it for you. Film made 21:9 not show good on TV made 16:9 - no silly complain >complain make laws of number county changey changey!

It's always ironic when someone takes this attitude.. and is wrong.

There is NO source of 21:9 movie material available at the moment for consumers. BD is 16:9 with no support for aspect ratio correction, something that caused moderate angst with projector freaks when the format was introduced.

In other words, you gain absolutely nothing over getting this TV over regular 16:9 wide-screen TV that has the same width. Source material is still 1980x1080 and actually you get only 1980x800 since there is no aspect ratio support. Considering scaling always hurts picture quality, that 60" (too lazy to check exact figure) 16:9 TV actually has better image quality with 21:9 films.

There's of course nothing stopping BD standard from being updated to support anamorphic aspect ratio but I wouldn't hold my breath over it. Breaking backwards compatibility is a biggie when you have great numbers of BD players out unlike in the infancy of the standard (profile 1.0 and 1.1 players..)

21:9 would be useful for PC games, thought.

Neato Robotics XV-15 vacuum cleaner

Olli Mannisto
Go

Neato experiences

Unlike any other posters, I actually do own the XV-15.

In my flat Neato works rather well, wife runs it about daily - That's the big advantage of a cleaning bot, you can let it do it's stuff while you're getting groceries or whatever and it doesn't mind doing it every day. Cleaning result is adequate meaning it does pick off a lot of gunk. Corners are not handled and you still have to clean up manually occasionally. Much less often than otherwise, tho. Emptying the dust bin is hardly a big deal considering it's designed to be easily detached.

I got two cats and pretty easy apartment with no rugs. Most setup needed was to place some plastic strip under certain furniture Neato would get stuck on / waste lot of time navigating - There's a problem with furniture that has just enough gap under it that the laser doesn't see it but the top of the robot will get caught..

Otherwise the navigation works quite well, neato will steer around obstacles like your feet when you're sitting on the couch. With latest firmware it seems the thing gets confused less often, previously it'd sometimes eg. give up trying to find a way out from under baby crib too easily.

EU to lift flight ban on carry-on liquids

Olli Mannisto
Pint

Duty free bottles

Wait a sec.. You can already take duty free bottles to the plane. You need to have them sealed in a bag, yes. And the stewardesses will raise a stink about you daring to drink stuff not on the plane list if they catch you.

Now if this means I can take my OWN water bottle on-board, which certainly does not cost 2.5€, that'd be brilliant!

Dane-Elec myDitto Nas device

Olli Mannisto
FAIL

Benchmarks..

Would it have killed Reg to run some simple read/write tests on this thing? NAS boxes can be surprisingly slow. And it's not like it's trivial matter if you plan to actually use that storage.

It's time to presume the web is guilty

Olli Mannisto
Boffin

Whitelisting for spam does not work

There is a boilerplate form you can fill in every time someone proposes a solution to spam. I can't be bothered to dig it up but simply speaking it will never work and here's why: Your scheme does not allow for zombi networks. By far most spam comes from perfectly legitimate desktop PCs using completely legit ISP networks. Throw in dynamic IPs and you start to see why it can never work.

Maybe with IPv6 this kind of scheme actually had some hope with the built-in MAC address field, but how long until zombie boxes start randomizing this for each spam message? Or perhaps the concept was total complete cooperation from every ISP to enforce 24/7 kill switches to every PC connected to the network or face being blocked from th whitelist? I'm sure they'll go for that..

Ten Essential... Gaming Mice

Olli Mannisto

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/gaming/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=100

El Reg is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Sidewinder Gaming Mouse

The original sidewinder reviwal is in fact superior to any of the three "improved" models. The main innovation was to provide vertical side buttons that are easy to press with your thumb inside a game and each subsequent iteration has made it worse. The original one with chunky aluminium buttons does not look pretty to marketoids but it's best so far for games.

Still in sale and dirt cheap by now as well.

PLDS iHES208 Blu-ray drive

Olli Mannisto

Stereo powerdvd?

If the bundle is the same as everywhere else, the powerdvd is stereo-only, which is pretty much useless for HTPC.

BD writing sounds cool but as long as the media costs like 5€/pop, it's just not worth it. And the time the prices come to around 1€/disc, these writers are real dinosaurs.

Microsoft purges AutoRun from older Windows

Olli Mannisto

Autorun.inf parsing..

Disabling autorun is fine, but did they ever do anything about the fact that when you doubleclick on the drive icon from explorer, windows _still parses the bloody autorun.inf_ which allows redefining what "doubleclick" does.

Disabling that feature on XP ws rather complicated too.

Communist car given electric overhaul

Olli Mannisto
Headmaster

Solar power..

They sort of neglected to tell us how many days of sunny weather do you need to top up a dead battery, thought.