LAME MP3s are still compatible with the original reference spec. Sure, VBR sounds even better, but even 128kbps CBR has jumped light-years ahead in quality past the original generation of MP3 encoders.

In theory, the BBC's new encoders could be making better use of error analysis, redistributing the bitrate to avoid highly-noticeable errors (such as macroblock artifacts) in exchange for increased error in less important/perceptible regions of the picture.

There is no theoretical reason that a perfectly encoded 9.6mbps stream has to look worse than today's average 16mbps stream.

In reality though, from the complaints it sounds like the BBC's new encoders are kind of shitty.

But those things require format changes. My point is that you can improve the decision making in the encoder without changing the output format at all.

If you play an 128kbps CBR MP3 authored with the latest LAME using an MP3 player from 1992, it will sound light-years better than the same MP3 from a 1992-era encoder. This is not because of new features; there is no new coding, no varible block sizes, just a better understanding of which frequencies are important for human hearing.

Lossy compression formats depend on an understanding of human perception. Nobody has a perfect model of the human brain, and nobody has a perfect algorithm for deciding what data to keep and what data to throw away.

If you have a better model of human perception than your competitors, then your encoder will yield higher quality output. If you spend 50% of your bits on things that nobody will notice, and I spend 25% of my bits on things that nobody will notice, then my 650kbps stream is going to look better than your 900kbps stream.

LAME did not win out as the MP3 encoder of choice just because it is free. It won out because its psychoacoustic model yields better-sounding MP3s at 128kbps than its competitors managed at 160kbps or even 192kbps.

I'll bet that you are actually being bothered by something else - perhaps near-inaudible high frequency buzzing from some electronic component - and have mentally associated it with Wifi. But because of the mental association, you will feel discomfort whenever you expect to, which is whenever you are near an active Wifi device.

Diagnosing the actual cause of the discomfort could be useful because if you can demonstrated to yourself that it is not Wifi, you might convince your brain to stop feeling uncomfortable :)

A competitor to OpenDNS that doesn't hijack the google.com domain results and redirect users to a private server, for one.

Also they get plenty of high-level aggregate data on website popularity from bookmarks and so forth, which they can't capture from search data alone.

Ignore the trolls who will spin conspiracy theories about logging individual behavior and tying it to accounts, they expressly deny it in the FAQ and it would open them to so many international lawsuits that they'd have to fire all their engineers and replace them with lawyers.

They state very bluntly that IP addresses are expunged from the logs after 48 hours, and that no data is shared with Google Accounts or other Google services. They still get to play with a lot of aggregated data, but this seems like a fairly non-evil way to do it. Good for them. http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy

Excel and Word are practically their own operating systems. You can't blame their problems on anything other than the insane legacy of backwards compatibility with a sprawling 20-year codebase.

They aren't even suppressing this article! They suppressed a previous article where he meticulously detailed a flaw in the cashback system without giving MS a chance to fix it.

This whole thing is ridiculous and nothing but anti-Microsoft / anti-Bing bashing.

This has nothing to do with Microsoft. From the article: Butterfly Photo set a three month cookie on my computer to indicate that I came from Bing.

So, a disreputable web site is setting a cookie when you click on a sales link. How is this Microsoft's fault again? What does this have to do with Bing?

A/V and photography stores are notorious for ripping off customers, both in-store and on-line. Surprise surprise, you can find these disreputable sites using search engines. Trying to blame this on Bing is like trying to blame your phone book for recommending a sketchy car mechanic.

Citation Needed.

Please provide one example of where EA released an alpha build. Or one example of where EA purchased a game already in development and then immediately diverted funds.

As much as you would like EA to be the big bad wolf knocking over studios left and right, the facts are that almost every studio that has gone down in flames under EA's ownership has done so due to its own people dropping the ball.

If you read any of the ex-Pandemic posts you will see that it was local mismanagement which led to poor quality product, not EA interference.

Likewise if you read the Escapist's article on the acquisition of Origin, one the most important quotes is this:

Garriott: "We doubled the size of the company from 200 to 400 that first year. We went from 5-10 projects to 10-20, and staffed those projects almost entirely with inexperienced people. It won't surprise you to learn those projects were not well managed. That was totally Origin's fault. We failed, and we ended up killing half of those products. That's probably what set up the EA mentality that 'Origin is a bunch of [deleted],' pardon my French."

This is a common pattern. EA buys a studio and gives the studio exactly what it wants, and the studio immediately hires new people and doubles its burn rate, spending tons of cash on payroll. And yet at the same time, the number of quality products at the studio declines. Growing pains, inexperienced management, whatever the cause, the result is the same. EA buys a successful studio, gives them money, the studio stops being successful.

Of course the game will be shipped before the studio says it's 100% done, because the studio is never going to claim that a shitty or buggy game is 100% done. The fact that it is still not a good game after 24 months of very-high-budget development does not mean that EA should pay for another 12 months. It means that the studio failed.

Then maybe that is something the Firefox team should have thought about. As part of their, you know, open-source tradition of focusing on usability and user-experience consistency?

I can definitely see how it would be annoying to the end user, but I can't agree with blaming Microsoft for following a well-documented API.

New ideas? Please.

The right way to manage a large problem is to periodically examine your processes, figure out the flaws and bottlenecks, and fix them. This is as old as time itself. Agile and Scrum just slap new buzzwords on old ideas, and their proponents act as if they have invented a cure for cancer.

If your business was failing under its old methodology, changing to "agile methods" is not going to help, except maybe as a catalyst to get your dinosaurs to quit in frustration over the meaningless jingo. The problem is that your business was unable to self-identify its flaws and correct them.

Nobody fails because they haven't heard of agile methods. Nobody fails because they honestly believe that a single "waterfall" cycle is the correct way to run a large project.

People and projects fail because they get locked into a specific process without any effort to identify and correct flaws in that process. Scrum is just one more process that you can be blindly locked into.

Everyone wishing that the money were spent on development instead of marketing is, unfortunately, living in an ideal fantasy world.

People are dumb. They follow trends, soak up advertisements, and generally do what marketers tell them to do. You personally might be immune, but remember that just by reading Slashdot (and therefore being somewhat tech-savvy) you have already self-selected against most of the population.

In modern culture, quality does not correlate with success. (Arguably, in entertainment, it never has... consider ticket sales for generic romantic comedies with famous actors vs thought-provoking art-house films.) Quantity is much stronger than quality. Exposure is all that matters.

Nobody bothers to do independent research anymore; Consumer Reports has been dropped in favor of Google search, and whoever has the most hits wins.

Welcome to the present day.

The lack of splitscreen is, sadly, a design tradeoff for having a huge open world where you can drive anywhere.

In most level-based games, like past Burnouts, the whole level is loaded ahead of time. Splitscreen just means having more players in the same amount of space. Every new player in splitscreen comes with a small, fixed overhead cost. The whole level has already been put into memory so there is nothing extra to be loaded.

But in an open-world game like Burnout Paradise, the players could be anywhere. The world is too big to fit into memory, so the game loads as much as possible and then intelligently loads "ahead" of where the player is, so that the world appears to be seemless.

But splitscreen players could be in totally different places on the map, driving at full speed in opposite directions. So the game would have to load twice as much data in the same amount of time. The second player doubles the cost of everything - twice as much memory, twice as much disk bandwidth to load ahead of each player, etc.

There are hardware limitations about how fast textures can be loaded from disk, how much memory is available, etc. Splitscreen is very hard for open-world games. It can be done, but it would take significant resources - making it work would probably tie up their best programmers for months.

Game development is all about allocating your resources as best you can. Ultimately someone decided that it was acceptable to drop split-screen in favor of making sure that the single-player and online experiences were as good as possible, and getting the game out the door on time.

The removal of split-screen still stings, of course :( But maybe you can understand why it's missing.

The interview (as opposed to the article) is at least a little more interesting.

There is nothing fancy here but he is trying to explain about the distinction between between running five tasks at once (a classic "threading" model), and splitting one task into five work units.

Many common threading models in video-game engines do not reduce latency; eg, "render thread", "audio thread", etc. You get a big win from doing two or three threads, but after that your physics takes an entire frame, or your rendering takes an entire frame, and you bottleneck. No matter how many more CPU cores you throw at it, those fixed number of threads are not getting any faster.

Nine women can't deliver a baby in one month, etc etc.

Hardly groundbreaking, but still a nice achievement given the state of most video game engines out there today. Burnout Paradise runs at 60hz with very low latency between input and screen. That's worth some kudos.