Posted 12/26/2008 at 07:11:18pm

These days it depends on how lazy my wife and I are, or how tired we are of adverts.

 
If we're really lazy we'll put on the Radio, lots of music fast.  Of course, then the adverts come on and we usually switch to a recorded format after that.

 Over the past 2 years my wife and I have purchased roughly 30 LP's, 15-20 CD's, and the only album I can recall purchased digitally was Radiohead's "In Rainbows" which is actually quite good.

My main complaint with the "digital" era is compression.   Most forms of compression popular today are lossy, so you always loose something.   Yeah, I shoot with a DSLR now, but I always shoot in RAW.  I don't mess around with JPEGs unless they're going to my gallery online, and even then, it's only 2% compressed.

At any rate, LP's are the most "lossless" type of compression you can have on a recorded medium these days IMO.  CD's do have compression, albeit much less so than MP3's.     That, and I just love that "feel" of an old record playing on my turntable. ;)

 We do listen to Slacker occasionaly, it is our favorite of the online music sites.   However, when listened through the reciever, it just seems to have lost too much quality being broadcast over the internet in the type of compression required to fit the lowest common denominator of broadband here in the USA.

Anyway, Our favorite Music, and the medium it's stored on:

 LP: 

Eric Clapton: Slowhand

Fleetwood Mac:  Tango in the Night

Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory

CD: 

Snow Patrol: Eyes Open

Placebo:  Meds

Portisehead: Dummy

Other "obscure" music:

Moby,  Wyclef Jean, David Gilmour, Moody Blues.

But if you want really obscure?  And festive?  The Monks of Weston Priory: "Winter's Coming Home"

 Yeah, I know it sounds odd, but my father listened to this album on LP every year around the holidays since I can remember.   So, I bought my own copy on vinyl about a month or two ago.

Dan

Posted 11/19/2008 at 03:02:21am

I'm the only guy I've ever heard of that met his wife in Linux class. :-P

As such, I have  a slightly unique point of view...

 1.  Some women, though few, like the "nerd / geek" status.   My wife is not alone in this area, her sister, and a few other women I've met fall into this category.   

 2.  Upbringing can have a lot of influence.    My mother-in-law was in the Computer Programming field in college, worked with all the old-skool languages like FORTRAN and such.   Back then, programming was done on punch cards.    At any rate, she passed on some of that knowledge as they grew up, especially things like how to read binary and hex, and how to love Star Trek. 

 3.  My sisters (all 6 of them) are the complete opposite, and none of them know what to do when the PC doesn't do what they want.   This, despite the fact that most of us grew up from a young age with a PC in the house (1985 on up).   Turns out a  lot of women are just simply afraid of PC's, or at least afraid they'll screw something up, therefore they don't even attempt to try something new with a PC, which is the basics of learning.

 Dan O.

Posted 10/16/2008 at 02:57:22pm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000240124%20115750974&bop=And&Order=PRICE

*Note* The first one listed is Direct Storage not NAS, but most of the others are NAS.

Prices range from $189 to $369 for 1TB models, with 3 popular models at the $229 price range.

FWIW, Iomega has a drive listed there as well, although not the one in the article above, for $269, which is a bit pricey when you factor the lack of GbE.

Dan 

Posted 05/31/2007 at 07:46:11am

Something I have noticed is that the Audio Engine used plays a large part in the quality of the audio output.
For example, when I first played music on Linux I was blown away. ALSA was just a vastly superior audio engine to Windows' Audio Engine.
One of the things that came out in the discussion of Vista's features was improvements to the audio engine. The spec's on the old XP engine were so bad it's no wonder most people can't discern the difference between bitrates.
It's a bit like ripping MP3's with whatever codec you find on the net, using the default settings. Then encoding the same song using LAME or another high-quality codec. And that also comes to play here.
I'd personally like to see some sort of test done in this same way, but using the latest ALSA engine vs Windows XP or even Vista. Everytime I go back into Windows and play an MP3, it's blatantly obvious to me the difference between it and ALSA.
Dan