apparently it is broken anyway, there have been several articles that show just changing the URL got around it on launch, not sure on the status at the current time...

"any project, no matter how big" can be split into sub-lots which can be done by 6 people... but may take a lot of time if the same six people have to install in several different countries, or install hundreds of machines for infrastructure :)

Two well identified principles at work here (and the bigger an organisation, the more likely they are to happen, especially without strong leadership)

1. Parkinson's law : basically, work spreads out to fill the time that was earmarked to complete a project
2. Brooks' law : Adding people to a project increases lateness, because the number of communication channels to manage increases as a square of the number of people on a project

Only very sound management and trusting delegation - along with having a reasonably competent project team in the first place - can make things happen quickly.

The law should be the law whether it's M$ or RMS on the stand. If we could stop all this post-modern relativistic crap of punishing the power holders and balancing market forces and just ask the simple question what is the "right way to do things" we could find our way out of this mess we are in.

Lets hope these new middle east democracies get there act together in time to help liberate us from our rulers that are tired of all the problems with juries, and elections

Someone needs to question the US Patent Office and the whole patent system. It's current state lies somewhere between broken and totally "busticated". If Congress or the Courts won't man up to the challenge I say let the Jury do it. I don't care if your Democratic or Republican if your not pissed off your not paying attention

The overall IE market share is slipping, but a proportion of windows users seem stuck to IE only. Since XP users are effectively stuck at IE8, those that don't already run Firefox or Chrome (or Opera, or Safari...) are not likely to change their ways.

Getting rid of XP will soon become important in order to improve market share of "modern" browsers capable of rendering HTML5 / CSS3 reasonably correctly.

I guess you're right there. Sony BMG in any case was a big record company before Betamax...

I think I'm using a more liberal interpretation of what deprecate means, but it doesn't matter - we both mean the same thing - redundant, pointless, once relevant now no longer relevant.

Good point in the irony - though I wonder if their protectionism is driven by agreements with content companies that allowed Sony to defend BluRay in the first place? After all the hardware manufacturers shouldn't care much about how their hardware is used, unless they need help from the big studios etc. to push their hardware formats.

Minidisc was an affordable recordable digital format before CD burners became prevalent. DAT was better though as it was 16 bit, 48KHz. Minidisc was a lossy compressed format, though it wasn't a total flop.

For non hacking, Sony do manage to be reasonably relevant. The PS3 and the win for BluRay exorcised some of the ghosts of the Betamax era (and Betamax was a superior technology from a quality point of view). Their midrange consumer equipment is reasonable, and their semi pro stuff still dominates in AV markets and provides a big range of equipment.

That being said, they're no longer dominant in home audio (though they still have reasonable CD players and stuff) since their real flagship - The Walkman - has been deprecated by apple. Home HiFi is not selling as much, the PC is the new media center and there it's Apple all the way for most of my real music-mad friends. Sony have big corporate culture issues, but that's nothing new.

If you really are director of studies at a major uni, given your language and style, I'd like some of what you're smoking at night please.

- not many people have 5.1 listening equipment where they listen to music
- it's likely that audio engineers for music don't have 5.1 in their workspaces either unless they regularly work on film too, which usually means in a studio big enough to house an orchestra

But it's an interesting point. I'd quite like to have a few 5.1 mixes, where do you get them from?

Let us not forget that double blind doesn't mean telling apart (they may both sound different) but actually telling which source is which while listening to a sample that is randomly selected so that you don't know which one it is beforehand and neither does the test observer (hence double blind).

MP3s encoded properly from a proper CD rip (Exact Audio Copy comes to mind) at >192kbps for all passages and VBR is practically transparent even on reasonably good equipment. Very well mastered CDs may sound different (depends on how good you notice these things) but double blind tests consistently show transparent results above 192kbps.

Shitty 128kbps mp3s (typically the median bitrate) are not transparent. Never have been.