861–870 of 1001 posts
The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.
Yes, the only direction seems to be that of closed systems. Smartphones will probably never be as open as desktop systems once were.
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In an alternate universe, Apple bought Be. Inc. instead of NeXT. It nearly happened too - they got down to talking price[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History
In that alternate universe, what happened next?
Eventually some company, Google comes to mind in particular, would have invented a device similar to, but not as well-designed as the iPhone. The development might just not have been that momentous and perhaps technology would have developed in an entirely different direction because of that.
Perhaps - due to a lack of an App Store business model - we even would have had a continuous boom of the web and more open technologies on mobile devices rather than the lull web technologies experienced on mobile devices until fairly recently. Who knows?
BeOS was very much a desktop OS. Like other operating systems such as AmigaOS it performed very well on some stripped-down desktop platforms such as set-top boxes, too (those were all the rage back in the 90s, at least some companies bet the whole farm on that assumption ...). I'm not sure if BeOS would've lent itself to mobile devices as well as NeXTSTEP did.
NeXTSTEP was a forward-looking, POSIX-compatible OS that was ahead of its time.
Most importantly though, Be Inc. didn't have Steve Jobs. They had Jean-Louis Gassée but I somehow doubt he would've had a similar influence on design, technology and the business world.
Someone once quipped that NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million. There's something very true about that statement.
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From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream. If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD. If you take audiophile-level pa…
I disagree with this. Labels are the main beneficiaries of music distribution[0]. In addition, the non-committal nature of streaming makes it so much easier to get people to listen to your music. There are tons of artists I love with Even if royalties are the biggest source of income (which I don't believe to be true), I still think streaming is beneficial to small artists. Using your math of 238 plays per CD, at 10,…
UDP for fast file transfer. Working in the television industry at the time and a few companies were making tools based on UDP, for sending large files across public networks. Smartjog, Aspera, Signiant. The companies are still around, but only operating in the B2B space as far as I know. I thought this technology was going to replace FTP. People wanting to punt bigger and bigger files around, they needed better tools…
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From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream. If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD. If you take audiophile-level pa…
If a single CD contains (say) 10 songs, then it seems odd to compare the cost of a listening to a cd to streaming a single song. Listening to the whole CD would be the equivalent of 10 streams. And if we divide those 238 streams by the 10 songs on the CD, it seems as though we only need to listen to a cd about 25 times before streaming becomes a better option for the artist.
Paypal used to have this feature that allowed you to install a browser add-on and you could generate a CC number on the fly that was good for either one time use or recurring use (for subscription services). This feature served two primary purposes: 1) to be able to pay using PayPal on sites that didn't support it 2) to help prevent against fraud which was becoming a massive problem at the time. If the number was sto…
Google Glass. IMHO they mistakenly went after the consumer and advertising markets instead of starting with maintenance workers and hobbyists. On a related note, I also expected some mobile computers would be "cyberdecks", embedded in the keyboard. Instead, the computer is the screen.
Glass failed because it was too early for the tech, they needed to be able have the functionality of the the camera they had but make it something you didn't immediately notice. Also the display mechanism needed to be less noticeable as well. What killed Glass was that it made people uncomfortable. Also glass relaunched in July targeting enterprise applications.
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> Their quality is indistinguishable from CDs despite what audiophiles would have you believe Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference. 95% of the reason why is people don't care about quality audio. It's something about human brains. MP3 sound horrible compared…
> Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference. Do you have an explanation of how that is possible? On the face of it, CD seems to have more SNR and frequency response than necessary. I've got intelligent friends on both sides of the debate, but I've never heard a pl…
Technically here is how it works. CDs are at 44.1khz sample rate and you record at 96khz back in 2000s, similar how video recordings are 8k for 4k or 1080p. Then when you exported your mix to be mastered it would get knocked down to 44.1khz not very noticeable in the least unless you listened to stuff all day everyday and had to train your ear to hear everything.
If you compare the two 96khz and 44.1khz there is a distinct difference BUT it is not something that people would care about because their equipment only gives a clarity of less than 44.1khz. My system from recording all the way to audio output and DAC were 96khz and cost my thousands and thousands of dollars.
I do believe that you can tell when you hear the two. Kind of like how FLAC and MP3 sound different on my LG V20 phone.
Ten years ago I was debating with a friend that GPUs would gradually change into massive general purpose processors. Instead they have remained special purpose and difficult to program. My thinking was that with a large number of cores of processors that are more general in nature, you could still do great graphics. But you could do many other things as well. There are plenty of problems that are embarrassingly paral…