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Comment Re:Why use Ogg and FLAC when we have Opus? (Score 1) 90

by the_germ (#56655508) Attached to: Faster Audio Decoding and Encoding Coming To Ogg and FLAC

And Opus use which container format? Hint: It starts with an O and ends in gg.

The Ogg performance improvements will speed up Opus decoding too (and save battery life when playing Opus on your mobile device).

And FLAC is lossless while Opus is not. So FLAC is the better choice for archival.
Earth

Officials Sue Couple Who Removed Their Lawn 819

Posted by kdawson from the revenge-of-the-lawn dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that Orange County officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for replacing the grass on their lawn with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants, reducing their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009. The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their front yard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water — and hundreds of dollars — each year. 'We've got a newborn, so we want to start worrying about her future,' said Quan Ha, an information technology manager for Kelley Blue Book. But city officials told the Has they were violating several city laws that require that 40% of residential yards to be landscaped predominantly with live plants. Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards. At the end of January, the Has received a letter saying they had been charged with a misdemeanor violation and must appear in court. The couple could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for their grass-free, eco-friendly landscaping scheme. 'It's just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,' says Quan Ha."

Comment Never used SSDs? (Score 1) 403

by the_germ (#28387815) Attached to: Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD

Whoever wrote that article has probably never used an SSD in real life.

Use a regular HDD for everyday work for half a year. Install and remove apps, edit and archive photos, organize your music library. After half a year it will take forever to start recently installed or updated apps and the whole system will feel so slooooowww...

SSD speed also degrades over time (though due to other reasons), but not as heavy as regular HDDs. In real life, I didn't notice any slowdown after half a year of using my SSD now. A difference like black and white compared to regular HDDs.
Medicine

Gates Foundation Funds "Altruistic Vaccine" 259

Posted by samzenpus from the needles-with-a-heart dept.
QuantumG writes "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the University of Queensland, Australia to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Unlike other vaccines, the 'altruistic vaccine' doesn't specifically protect the individual being bitten, but instead protects the community by stopping the transmission of the pathogen from one susceptible individual to another. The hope is to do this by effectively making their blood poisonous to mosquitoes, either killing them or at least preventing them from feeding on other individuals. Professor Paul Young explained how his work fell outside current scientific traditions and might lead to significant advances in global health — he said he could envision the vaccine being used around the world within 10 years, and it would be designed to be cheap and easy to implement."
It's funny. Laugh.

The Pirate Bay Seeks Interesting Route To "Pay" Fine 545

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the crowd-sourced dept.
Drivintin is one of many who have written to tell us about how The Pirate Bay has taken an interesting approach to the 30 million SEK fine levied in their recent court case (which they said they wont pay). "The bill inspired anakata to devise a plan involving sending money to Danowsky's law firm, but not to pay the fine of course which they say will never be paid. Anakata's clever plan is called internet-avgift, internet-fee in English. Anakata encourages all Internet users to pay extremely small sums around 1 SEK (0.13 USD) to Danowsky's law firm, which represented the music companies at the Pirate Bay trial. The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money."
Businesses

Submission + - The EU Strikes Back

Submitted by Anarchduke
Anarchduke writes: The European Union has decided to find Intel anti-competitive and generally a giant corporate douchebag in that they illegally paid manufacturers to scrap or delay implementation of AMD chips in their product offerings. They also paid to make manufacturers stick to ratio of their chips versus AMD chips in their systems. Lenovo Notebooks, for example, were to have only Intel CPUs in them, while NEC was told it could have up to 20% of its desktop and notebook offerings contain competitor chips.

Previous infractions by Intel include giving illegal rebates to computer makers back in 2007 and paying retailers not to sell AMD based computer systems.

The only question I would ask is which company is the bigger bastard, Intel or Microsoft.
Republicans

Submission + - SPAM: Open Source textbooks for California

Submitted by T-1000
T-1000 writes: The governor of California has launched a new initiative to compile open source textbooks for the state. He hopes that the plan will help cut costs and improve the quality of education. The effort seems very promising, but the state's complex standards and arduous textbook evaluation process will pose major challenges.
Link to Original Source
Privacy

Rapidshare Divulges Uploader Information 281

Posted by kdawson from the thanks-for-sharing dept.
Gorgonzolanoid notes a post on TorrentFreak reporting that the German Rapidshare is divulging uploader information to rights holders. Record labels are apparently making creative use of "paragraph 101" of German copyright law, which gives them a streamlined process to ask a court to order disclosure of information such as an IP address. "In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided."
Biotech

Cosmetic Neurology 369

Posted by kdawson from the we-have-a-pill-for-that dept.
The New Yorker has a long piece examining the growing trend of healthy people, not diagnosed with any mental condition, taking drugs that enhance mental functioning, including Adderall and Provigil. The profiles include a Harvard student, a professional poker player, a number of brain researchers, and a self-described transhumanist. "Zack [Lynch]... has a book being published this summer, called 'The Neuro Revolution'... In coming years, he said, scientists will understand the brain better, and we'll have improved neuroenhancers that some people will use therapeutically, others because they are 'on the borderline of needing them therapeutically,' and others purely 'for competitive advantage.' ... Even if today's smart drugs aren't as powerful as such drugs may someday be, there are plenty of questions that need to be asked about them. How much do they actually help? Are they potentially harmful or addictive? Then, there's the question of what we mean by 'smarter.' Could enhancing one kind of thinking exact a toll on others? All these questions need proper scientific answers, but for now much of the discussion is taking place furtively, among the increasing number of Americans who are performing daily experiments on their own brains. ... [A cognitive researcher said,] 'Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity. And there is some evidence that suggests that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative. ... I'm a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focused accountants.'"
Medicine

US Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu 695

Posted by kdawson from the man-bird-pig dept.
mallumax sends word from the NYTimes that US government officials today declared a public health emergency over increasing cases of the swine flu first seen in Mexico. Here is additional coverage from CNN. From the Times: "American health officials [say]... that they had confirmed 20 cases of the disease in the United States and expected to see more as investigators fan out to track down the path of the outbreak. Other governments around the world stepped up their response to the incipient outbreak, racing to contain the infection amid reports of potential new cases from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Spain, raising concerns about the potential for a global pandemic. The cases in US looked to be similar to the deadly strain of swine flu that has killed more than 80 people in Mexico and infected 1,300 more." Reader "The man who walks in the woods" sends a link to accounts emailed to the BBC from readers in Mexico. While these are anecdotal, they do paint a picture of a more serious situation than government announcements have indicated so far.
Power

What We Can Do About Massive Solar Flares 224

Posted by kdawson from the resistance-may-not-be-futile dept.
Reader resistant sends in an update to our discussion a month back on the possibility of violent space weather destroying power grids worldwide during the upcoming solar cycle. Wired is running an interview with Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End," and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech. The piece brings two new threads to the discussion: the recently discovered presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, magnifying our vulnerability, and possible steps we can take over the next few years to make the power grid more robust against solar flares and coronal mass ejections. There's also that whole Mayan 2012 thing. Quoting John Kapperman: "What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground connections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid. In its simplest form, it's something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine. ...we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer. [In the US] there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. ... We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things."
Social Networks

Academics To Predict Next Twitter and Its Pitfalls 150

Posted by samzenpus from the peer-into-my-crystal-ball dept.
An anonymous reader writes "University researchers in the UK have put together a team tasked with predicting the next big thing in terms of communication technologies, in a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls before they become a problem. This is in the wake of the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, which has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of personal information available online."

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The computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry. -- Peter Drucker

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