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Websites That Don't Need to Be Made Anymore 161

Posted by samzenpus from the do-not-want dept.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but there is a finite number of social networking or selling websites that the world needs. Here is a collection of the eight kinds of websites that absolutely don't need to be made anymore. I'd add dating sites and anybody who uses pop-up ads myself, but I think that would eliminate half the Web.
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Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Comment Re:This is useless. (Score 5, Insightful) 346

by m0rbidini (#27321677) Attached to: New Lossless MP3 Format Explained
No really. It is useless and a lousy hack. It's just a way for Thomson and FhG to further milk the mp3 buzzword, one more time.

Useless format:
        * The lossless part is stored in ID3v2 tags.
        * Size of ID3v2 tags is limited to 256MB by specifications; as a result, lossless part of an mp3hd file can't be larger than 256MB.

Addendum:
Current tagging software isn't prepared to deal with this kind of situation, so you're going to see various disturbing behaviors such as:
        * Very slow tag updates (near-full-file-rewrite with each edit).
        * Heavy memory usage of tag editors.
        * Retagging stripping correction data.
        * Tag editing or even reading failures when approaching the 256MB limit because software will try to put each ID3v2 frame in a single memory block and allocating a single block of such size is likely to fail in 32-bit address space because of fragmentation issues.

From: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=70548
Data Storage

Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs? 578

Posted by kdawson from the fast-secure-reliable-cheap dept.
hoggoth writes "As a common everyman who needs big, fast, reliable storage without a big budget, I have been following a number of emerging technologies and I think they have finally become usable in combination. Specifically, it appears to me that I can put together the little brother of a $50,000 NAS/SAN solution for under $3,000. Storage experts: please tell me why this is or isn't feasible." Read on for the details of this cheap storage solution.
Data Storage

Experiences w/ Software RAID 5 Under Linux? 541

Posted by Cliff from the how-well-has-it-worked-for-you dept.
MagnusDredd asks: "I am trying to build a large home drive array on the cheap. I have 8 Maxtor 250G Hard Drives that I got at Fry's Electronics for $120 apiece. I have an old 500Mhz machine that I can re-purpose to sit in the corner and serve files. I plan on running Slackware on the machine, there will be no X11, or much other than SMB, NFS, etc. I have worked with hardware arrays, but have no experience with software RAIDs. Since I am about to trust a bunch of files to this array (not only mine but I'm storing files for friends as well), I am concerned with reliability. How stable is the current RAID 5 support in Linux? How hard is it to rebuild an array? How well does the hot spare work? Will it rebuild using the spare automatically if it detects a drive has failed?"

Comment Re:I want CD quality damn it. (Score 1) 388

by m0rbidini (#9513385) Attached to: iTMS Europe: 800,000 Tracks In A Week
I checked the price of an album on iTMS and Amazon before buying it on iTMS. It was five pounds cheaper on iTMS. Note also that there is a huge difference between 128Kb/s AAC encoded with the Dolby Pro encoder (used by iTMS) and the consumer encoder (used by QuickTime). I encode my music at 256Kb/s AAC when I'm using the consumer encoder, and the tracks I've bought from iTMS sound at least as good (you start to get into diminishing returns with AAC around 160-190Kb/s usually).


CD quality is a highly subjective thing. I have encoded a CD as AAC and played it on my iPod and a CD player (with the same amp and speakers) and found it sound better on the iPod (the CD player was from the '80s, and did not handle digital to analogue conversion as well as the iPod. These results are probably not repeatable with a modern CD player).


Sorry, but AFAIK the tracks supplied by iMTS are encoded with the same encoder that is in QuickTime. Can you prove me otherwise? This has been discussed on Hydrogenaudio and, so far, the conclusion is that they're exactly the same.

Oh, and btw, if the source is the same and the encoded file sounds better to you, then there's something wrong with the encoder, cause the objective is to sound as the original as much as possible. Not to "sound better". That's probably placebo effect. Try doing an ABX test.

Cya

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