Geekery, thou art a harsh mistress

[andrewducker]

Currently I am:
Downloading music from AllofMP3.com that is at a higher bit-rate than the music I had (discovered that all of my Sisters of Mercy was at 56kbps, having been encoded about 9 years ago when space was at a higher premium than quality).
Copying all of the music I like onto my new 8GB iPod Nano.
Converting this fantastic talk on MITs fabrication labs into avi (so I can watch it on TV rather than the PC). (cheers to heron61 for that one)

Strangely, my PC has ground to a near halt. If I did this kind of thing a lot then I suspect I'd need one of those fancy multi-core things I've heard so much about :->

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I was surprised at just how noticeable the difference in quality was when going from an album I'd downloadz0r3d as mp3s to the actual purchased CD.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Having been using Windows at work for a couple of months, I've found that it seems to cope miserably with having more than one process demanding CPU at the same time. It's most strange, even with do disk access my workstation can become unresponsive when I'm running 3 or 4 compute-intensive things at a time.

Manually tweaking the process priorities in Task Manager to keep them below interactive levels helps a bit, but not that much. I find it very... perplexing. Scheduling CPU for interactive systems is supposed to be a solved problem, goddammit. And in fact some of the people that helped solve it are working for Microsoft Research.

And while I'm at it, how on earth am I supposed to get Windows to swap the caps-lock and control keys round? I still haven't figured that out...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

If there are any of the Sisters of Mercy albums you can't get there, let me know as I just bought a moderately large stack of CDs from a chap at work at 50p each :-)