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Comment Re:You are completely wrong. (Score 1) 841

Yes I do understand about the sampling theory, I didn't say I hear it smoother, I meant effectively it would be equal to having a 'smoother' waveform in much the same way a picture would get smoother as the DPI goes up. my explanation was a very simple way of looking at it, and perfectly adequate for the purpose of what I was trying to say.

I did not claim that I could hear better sound from 192khz sampling rate, Infact what I meant to say was exactly the opposite of that. I can see how you could interpret it the other way though. Seeing as english isnt my primary language my grammer may or may not be correct there :).

Seeing as most others appear to have understood what I was saying I think it was good enough.

Comment Re:No smooth (Score 1) 841

I agree with all of what you say, But my point is who knows what the future can bring. Maybe there will be some kind of way in which the extra detail is used to enhance audio into some kind of pseudo 3d or something we haven't thought of. The point I make is it's quite possible, that some future researcher will figure out a novel way of using that extra bits of information to do something AND it doesn't cost me anything at the moment (at least nothing i notice) to store those files. On a practical level 192, 128, 96 all have the same cost for me, So if possible I keep 192. I don't go looking for it, nor do I pay high bucks for it. But if its there I'll keep it.

Comment Sampling rate (Score 3, Insightful) 841

96KHz isn't the audio frequency. It doesn't mean that the audio contains a 90Khz tone. It's the sampling rate. The higher the sampling rate smoother the signal.

Human perception wise a audio signal recorded at 96KHz sampling rate might well be indistinguishable from one sampled at 192Khz, but so is the file size between these files for practical purposes. I don't deceive my self thinking that I'm hearing better sound from a 192Khz file, specially considering that I'm using a basic pair of headphones on a my basic phone to listen to them. But my thinking is that future technologies might let you do interesting things with the extra bit of data which is useless to us right now. So given the choice I opt to get the higher sampled versions. Kind of like with digital pictures which are too noisy or blurred, but which might be cleaned up with future algorithms to give us a slightly more useful picture.

Comment Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle (Score 1) 418

One advantage I find with a 6 inch e-ink reader is that you can read them standing up on the bus.

True enough.

Unfortunately my daily commute is usually so crowded, it wouldnt allow me to read a book in any form. Fortunately it's a short journey in anycase. Most of my reading is done at leasure and usually on my desk or bed so I have a wider set of choices. Regardless I find reading books in electronic form much easier than printed 'legacy' variety :).

Comment Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle (Score 1) 418

The best reader for me is my computer, Desktop or Laptop. I find both much easier to read than any other device or even dead book format. Maybe it's just me, but I don't get distracted when I'm reading unless I want to be distracted (i.e. boring book). I can easily read a book on a PC for a couple of hours, and in some cases I have downloaded a copy off the internet, after having bought the physical book because it's just more convenient to read on a PC.

The problem for me is reading ebooks are the lousy eBook reader software. What I do is decrypt the books and extract the HTML, then read them through the browser. I have a couple of bookmarklets which does some nice formatting to the text. Gives a very nice format with my preferred fonts in my preferred size hence no eyestrain.

If you think about it almost everyone is already doing most of the reading on the PC when browsing the net, and yet they find it difficult to read a book on it. I think this is more of a psychological barrier than a physical barrier. In my mind whenever I read a physical book I try to press Ctrl+F to find stuff and groans when I realize 'yeah it's a deadtree format'.

Only special case for having a printed book is useful is for something like a datasheet where you need to keep referring to a page while having other stuff open in both your monitors. But then this is only due to limited monitor count/space.

But maybe that's just me.

Comment Re:Why the anxiety? (Score 4, Interesting) 807

10 might take more disk space. But it is far supieror in memory usage.

I keep the browser open for weeks with multiple tabs open and i've quite often seen it hit 1GB+ of memory use, but around version 8-9 that it went down. while it's still one of the more memory hungry it's memory usage doesn't seem to be stacking up as much.

The only reason that I can see for holding back from the latest version would be, because of potential compatibility with existing sites. But this is mainly for corporates with intranet sites which might still have legacy html. I've personally not run into any such issues. For personal use I see no reason not to update to the latest version. In my experiance while in some version there have been regressions, it's generally been faster and more memory efficient.

I think mozilla messed royally up with this fast update cycle. Had they slowed it down just a tad bit and not publically said anything about a fast updating and version numbers, most people would just update to the latest version without so much anxiety.

Comment Re:Pre-School? (Score 3, Informative) 126

Why should the trackball faze her any more than any other object in the house. They are all new items as far as she is concerned. Whether they were invented 1 month ago or a 1000 years ago are irrelevant. Everything is new. She'd just learn using a trackball just like learning to use a cup or even walk.

I like to think of the brain as a sponge and knowledge to be water. In kids it's like a dry sponge it has plenty of space and will absorb things quickly. We on the other hand have quite a lot of our spongie brain filled already for better or for worse.

My nephew who is also 4 years old navigates youtube for his cartoon fix. And knows how to start any installed games. He also knows how navigate to flash game sites from history and knows not to click on ads :).

Comment Re:And parents wonder (Score 4, Interesting) 126

Generally yes. But remember that anything running on the VM is behind your routers firewall and might be in a more permissive network. So it can be used as a platform to execute a exploit to gain access to other machines on the network, the host machine or maybe even compromise the router/firewall (defualt passwords anyone?).

I use VMs when I test applications if I'm not sure about its origin, but you should always be carefull about how it's network access and such.

Data Storage

Submission + - NAND Flash Memory - A Future Not So Bleak After All (pcper.com)

Vigile writes: "A recent story that foretold the death of the solid state drive market by 2024 has been making the rounds and the hardware community has been discussing its ramifications. The basic claim was latency increases and error rates would cause its demise but an editorial over at PC Perspective counters that the researchers are ignoring simple improvements in SSD design including write combining, wear leveling, data compression and even bit drift compensation. Latency increases can even be countered by the increased parallelism of additional dies though the paper in question artificially creates a fixed die count for its research. While there are still hurdles for SSDs going forward there have always been those that claim in the end is near — just ask Moore's Law."

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