A few years ago, I wrote software to compare lossy to lossless, and determined that lossy compression was only useful when listening through cheap speakers. Because I use high quality speakers, I decided to subscribe to Tidal: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog...

After about two years, I started having problems. Tidal would go into a mode where I had to restart the application in order for it to stream. Sometimes it wouldn't work for hours. Their support would ignore me, or claim it was a problem with my internet connection. (It wasn't.)

Ultimately, I switched to Google Music because I can upload music that's missing from the service. I hope Amazon offers the same feature, because that would get me to switch to Amazon.

20khz is a truism: It's an average. Some people can hear a little higher than 20khz, and some people can't. There's data that shows some people can hear up to about 28khz. (Which is still less than half of an octave above 20khz, not much.)

A lot of data savings comes from lossy formats trimming the high end down a bit, somewhere between 15-18 khz. Again, this is "good enough" in many cases: Cheap speakers, low volumes, older ears.

I ran a study about what lossy trims out, with graphs that show where the loss happens: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog.... In summary, if you're listening through a good system, lossless is critical.

Some of the stupid-name stuff is actually a good value

Agreed. In many cases, items with well-known brand names are just re-branded versions of a stupid-name company's OEM offerings.

It brings to mind a consumer news report that I saw about a decade ago that showed jackets being made in a Chinese sweatshop. The assembly line diverged into three separate areas where three different labels were sewn on: Ralph Lauren, Nautica, and George (Walmart). The reporter followed the shipments to their destinations and noted the retail prices. The RL jackets were sold for $400, the Nautica were sold for $150, and the George went for $80. Knowing that kind of info, it doesn't take a genius IQ to understand that one should shop around.

On a more personal note, I bought a stupid-name Chinese tool from Amazon recently. Before buying, I searched for the name on Google and, maybe not surprisingly, some AliExpress links popped up. On one link, the stupid-name manufacturer posted side-by-side photos of their tools and ones that they'd made for various name-brands. As far as I could tell the OEM and name-brand items were identical.

So, I guess the basic point is that you can get decent deals if you're a smart shopper. Reviews can give you some idea of quality, but relying on them is a fool's game.

That sounds reasonable. A 200,000 year long process now takes 100 years. I hope geological changes speed up the same way. That'd move the next Yellowstone caldera eruption from sometime in the next 600,000 years, to possibly next Thursday. Just enough time to plan an apocalypse party!

In my team, it's much easier to hire overseas contractors. It's not about internal office politics; it's that we work with a contracting firm that makes a big effort to screen candidates well. I find that American recruiters are so focused on being salesmen that it's very hard to pre-screen candidates. They work hard to convince us that a candidate is awesome, when in fact the candidate is a poor match. In contrast, when our contracting firms present a candidate, there's a good chance it's a good candidate.

When you look at pictures of Pilgrim power on Google Maps, you can see where they store the spent fuel rods. They're almost on top of the shoreline: https://goo.gl/maps/yB8EG8AYNk...

I'm not really opposed to nuclear, but the politics on all sides makes it a poor option. The anti-nuclear crowd blocks legitimate research, and the pro-nuclear crowd doesn't want to do what's needed to keep radiation contained. Even worse, we can't get the politics together to move our nuclear waste to safer storage, so it just piles up at our nuclear plants forever.

Remember: Those round things in this picture contain nuclear waste just feet away from the shoreline: https://goo.gl/maps/yB8EG8AYNk...

We really need this. Pilgrim power, a nearby nuclear plant that generates a large percentage of MA's power, is set to close in a few years.

So?

I just had a Comcast install, and it cost under $30. The guy came to my house, and told me that we had 10 techs for 10,000 households. He (the installer) needs to make money for the service visit.

Comcast offers a free "self install" if the wiring is already there. They will either ship your equipment, you pick it up yourself, or you provide your own. I didn't do it because I needed the tech to bring the wire into the house from the curb.

Sounds like the start of a blockbuster comedy movie!

He's leaving because the intern program openly discriminates based on gender, sexual orientation, or ancestry. Basically, they won't hire a white American male as an intern. (See https://www.outreachy.org/appl...)

Logging a password is a beginner's mistake, like SQL injection. I found the same bug in unreleased code many years back, and raised it to management so we could track down the engineer who did it. It's the kind of (cough) mistake that can be the "straw that broke the camel's back" when dealing with an engineer who has (cough) "negative productivity."

Ideally, this kind of bug should be caught in code reviews. As someone who reviews a lot of code, even I'll admit that it's possible for something like this to slip through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...: "The developed hologram's surface consists of a very fine, seemingly random pattern, which appears to bear no relationship to the scene it recorded."

Increasing TV resolution like this is a good thing.

A hologram works by using photographic film capable of photographing the actual light waves. Once we have resolutions better than light's wavelength, we can have holographic TV.

I've probably had thousands of lithium ion batteries pass through my hands over the years.

When I started playing Ingress, battery packs weren't popular and yet, so we carried spare batteries. To play for hours, we had to swap batteries, or be tethered to a car. They were dropped, manhandled, and otherwise abused. Of everyone I know that did it, none died. No explosions. No fires.

The only real thing we found was, repeated charge/discharge cycles daily did eventually degrade the life of the batteries. A typical work day could be 1hr before work, .5 hours on smoke breaks and lunch, and a few hours in the evening. That's just Ingress. Actually using the phone as a phone added hours, but didn't suck up the battery life as much.

We see the same from ecigs and 18650 batteries. I only made one smoke, and that was by physically cutting the battery open. I wanted to see what was inside. :)

The only battery that I've had swell to the point of almost bursting was a Macbook Pro's battery. I stopped using it months before, and only noticed when the battery cover popped off by itself.