Posts by Russell Brown
-
Busytown: School bully, in reply to Pi Roy,
We are losing a whole lot of kids through the cracks ,yes their parents should step up first but that is not and will not happen for many kids today or tommorrow.So for Gods sake what is wrong with trying
Because what Parata suggests and what the government has done not only works against the most vulnerable children, but diminishes a good education system. Because they've consistently bucked the evidence, bullied schools, executed poorly and basically seemed more interested in populism than education.
In no sense was whisking national standards through -- under urgency! -- almost immediately after the 2008 election a responsible act. These people are vandals.
-
Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to bmk,
I have to say this surprised me. I’m not a fan of National but I would say he’s easily been the most effective minister throughout their two terms. Others get more publicity but that’s been his success that he hasn’t. I can’t remember a previous six-year period where health has been out of the news and that’s despite very constrained budgets.
I tend to agree. The lack of health scandals has been remarkable, and it's not as if he hasn't had very able Labour and Green spokespeople to contend with.
-
Busytown: School bully, in reply to HORansome,
That makes me sad and angry, Matthew.
You're a gifted educator and one of only a few people to understand how my younger son learns.
Fuck.
-
Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Katita,
… when I hear about Judith Collins and her conflict of interest I just can’t help wondering why Pansy Wong had to go but Judith doesn’t? Are the circumstances really that different? Or is it just ‘ministerial profile/ closeness to an election’ that is driving it?
Wong actually paid for her husband's personal business trip on the taxpayer dollar, so it was definitely a level up.
-
Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’d also note, Russell, you’re very generously drawing a distinction for Cunliffe’s legal but unwise leadership campaign financing he and his own party weren’t generous enough to extend to National when they were *cough* lightly rinsing donations through trusts.
I’m not, though. Labour’s long record of criticising the use of trusts (while using them) is precisely the reason that Cunliffe doing so was such political idiocy. You’ll note I didn’t go all Daily Blog about the Tony Astle dinner donation either. But the paragraph you quoted was about the Adams questions, which I think are of a wholly different nature.
Perhaps I’m on old crank, but if parties want to have US-style leadership primaries I’d like then conducted without US-style backroom chequebook politics.
It would require a law change to bind parties to electoral funding declaration laws when they elect party posts, but sure -- although it would presumably come as a bit of a shock to Act, which is the only other party that stages primaries. Otherwise it's a matter of political management, for better or worse.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Alec Morgan,
I have a Paul Money ‘top of Dominion Rd’ not halfway down, Yamaha and solid speakers. All you do is link an Apple TV to a DAC to the amp and everything works.
As per discussion above, I'm happy enough to trust the DAC in my Onkyo amp.
$100 usb turntable helps too. Vinyl rules!
Oh. Where'd you buy that?
-
Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Three of the five immigration/inappropriate ministerial behaviour scandals I can think of in the last few years involve China.
Good point. The Bill Liu affair is just another reason for Shane Jones' colleagues to curse his name under their breaths.
-
Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Cam Slater,
Because Bruce Pulman is a stalwart of the Papakura environs, he even has a massive park named after him and his company Heb Contractors is based there.
He also produces an excellent product that can be bought locally at a substantially lower price than the competing Fonterra products. Which isn't all that relevant, but, just saying.
-
Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’ve got very little sympathy when that comes back to bite the likes of Collins and Cunliffe in the arse.
Just so long as we're not drawing an equivalence between the quite legal but politically very stupid use of a trust to channel four donations for an internal party election, and questions about potential conflicts related to government actions affecting multi-million dollar interests. Because they don't seem equivalent to me.
-
Someone pointed me to this excellent, informed blog post, which basically says:
Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.
And nails it on the actual value of lossless. I was kinda aware that my older MP3 might not have been well-encoded, but had not suspected the problem was nearly as bad with AAC:
It's true enough that a properly encoded Ogg file (or MP3, or AAC file) will be indistinguishable from the original at a moderate bitrate.
But what of badly encoded files?
Twenty years ago, all mp3 encoders were really bad by today's standards. Plenty of these old, bad encoders are still in use, presumably because the licenses are cheaper and most people can't tell or don't care about the difference anyway. Why would any company spend money to fix what it's completely unaware is broken?
Moving to a newer format like Vorbis or AAC doesn't necessarily help. For example, many companies and individuals used (and still use) FFmpeg's very-low-quality built-in Vorbis encoder because it was the default in FFmpeg and they were unaware how bad it was. AAC has an even longer history of widely-deployed, low-quality encoders; all mainstream lossy formats do.
Lossless formats like FLAC avoid any possibility of damaging audio fidelity [23] with a poor quality lossy encoder, or even by a good lossy encoder used incorrectly.
A second reason to distribute lossless formats is to avoid generational loss. Each reencode or transcode loses more data; even if the first encoding is transparent, it's very possible the second will have audible artifacts. This matters to anyone who might want to remix or sample from downloads. It especially matters to us codec researchers; we need clean audio to work with.