Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

[FLAC] Lossless? Yes.

The hint is in the acronym--'L' for .. (you guessed it) "Lossless".

The flac program has variable setting for how hard it should try to compress the file. It is not a "quality" setting.

Wavpack, on the other hand, does have a hybrid lossy/lossless mode, so seeing a .wv file doesn't necessarily mean lossless there--you'd need the corresponding "correction" file (.wvc) to get back the original file losslessly if hybrid mode was used. I'm a big fan of flac, but wavpack's hybrid mode could make it quite attractive to music vendors since they'd only have to create one master set of lossy/lossless (.wv/.wvc) files for each track and then sell each separately. It would also make it very suitable for mobile players, since you probably don't need the full lossless file for those devices and space is at a premium. Having the data split into lossy/lossless parts also makes it a lot easier for syncing since you don't need to do any transcoding--just copy the smaller .wv file across (assuming your device supports wavpack, of course).

Oh, and "mild DRM"? You're having a laugh there, right?

[citation needed]

You say that ALAC is less processor-intensive than FLAC. However, the hydrogenaudio.org wiki page[*] comparing lossless formats rates FLAC decoding as "very fast" whereas ALAC only gets a "fast" rating. If the best advantage you can come up with is actually not in ALAC's favour at all, then why would I want to use ALAC over FLAC? Or do you have some other evidence to support the claim that ALAC is less processor-intensive?

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article was whether Apple claims to have any patents covering ALAC. I'd be very interested in finding out whether they do. I find it quite hard to believe that there aren't some strings attached to this freeing up of the format. TBH, though, even if they'd released it under something like GPL3 with a "no patent" slant, I doubt there'd be any incentive for the majority of people to switch from FLAC to ALAC...

* http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison

actually ...

A grammar checker should find fault with "rioters should loose their benefits" on the grounds that "the sentence no verb". (Yes, I know "should" counts, but the embedded part describing what they should do is missing a verb). Change it to "loosen" or "let loose" and it does become grammatically sound, though obviously that's the wrong fix.

It's been a while since I used a grammar checker, and I don't have one installed on my machine right now so I can't check this, but I suspect that most checkers would flag "loose" to the user as being a frequently-confused word.

In fact, this online grammar checker (the first one I found in a web search) definitely flags the error: http://www.spellchecker.net/grammar/

yeah, but no but

just because the waiter gives you a choice, i doesn't mean you're opting out of spam.

top acronym

I was thinking on reading the article that if a helium balloon is too costly, why not make a hydrogen one? It's not like it's going to matter if it blows up. I reckon (in a totally non-numerical sense) a lacquered paper balloon could retain enough hydrogen to lift it quite a distance. You wouldn't necessarily need any expensive pressurised hydrogen tanks. If you had some sort of chemical or electrolytic reaction to produce the hydrogen and a way of sequestering at least some of the oxygen (in plain electrolysis of water) you could probably produce and trap enough of it in the balloon to get you to the desired height.

Once at a high enough altitude, you could then, hopefully, use a more conventional rocket to carry the payload beyond the atmosphere. Aiming would be tricky, but if you suspend the rocket below the hydrogen-producing part and have a combination of barometer (altimeter) and accelerometer readings (maybe combined with a timer) you can use a bit of fuzzy logic to determine the best time to engage the rocket stage while it's more or less pointing in the right direction and still retaining at least some kinetic energy from the balloon contraption.

Alternatively, I read that the most recent volcanic eruption in Iceland threw ash and other stuff up to a height of over 12 miles. That's still a long way to go to get to LEO and obviously reliant on the occurrence of a relatively rare event, not to mention needing to design a secondary rocket which could survive the initial lift-off, but at least it reduces the cost of the primary ballistic system to zero.

Paper Hydrogen Balloons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon

not necessarily

If I understand this correctly, there's no reason to assume linux is any more secure here.

Let's start with there being an infected MBR and this gets run before the operating system. In the old days of boot sector/MBR viruses, the virus would allocate some memory for itself using the BIOS, then patch in some entries into the interrupt table, say int 13h, which does low-level disk I/O. The classic sneaky viruses would intercept calls to access the disk and if it was already infected it would return a "cleaned" version so that virus scanners couldn't detect it (hence the need to boot off clean floppies if you wanted to be sure the scanner was working). If the disk (or file) wasn't infected, the virus would usually take that opportunity to do so at the time it's being accessed. The DIR-II virus worked quite like that.

Fast forward to more modern OSs and some things have changed, but not everything. In general, once linux has booted up, it doesn't use the BIOS for anything any more, so even if an MBR virus did manage to install itself before the OS, it would be stranded since int 13H would never get called and the virus would never execute. Apparently (from a quick search) windows still does use the BIOS for disk I/O, so maybe you'd chalk that up as a "linux is better" point. Actually, it's no reason to celebrate just yet... because Linux does use the BIOS at one key stage--when it's booting up, ie loading the kernel.

So actually, if you wrote an MBR virus that was aware of modern operating systems, you could actually hook into the BIOS entries for disk access and when Linux is booting the kernel you return an infected version on the fly. So in theory at least, neither OS is better on this score.

Or just make sure you use the

cone of silence...

Showing my age as I head out the door.

thumbs up for the

Only Forward reference. Cracking book.

same flight as McKinnon?

Are you mad? With two super-terrorists in the same plane, you're just asking for trouble. Have you never seen Con-Air?

24/7/365

I was going to post something similar but checked before posting. I'd have given you an upvote except that you seem to think dragging the fail icon into the message box tags your post with an icon.