Low volume levels nothing. Humans are worse at hearing low bass than other frequencies period.
Please take the time to look at the Fletcher Munson research. The curves they produced do not JUST show the obvious lack of low bass response you mention (and indeed the high end too, which disappears somewhere around 20kHz), far more interestingly they showed that our response to low and high levels ALSO varies with volume, not just pitch.
While we are bad at hearing 30Hz tones, we are slightly worse at hearing quiet 30Hz tones, and slightly better at hearing very loud ones. The recording can't take account of this effect, as the overall volume is set by the listener.
Don't try to use Fletcher and Munson to defend what those people are doing as anything other than an a musical atrocity.
I was very careful to point out that the Fletcher Munson ONLY justifies the smiley face at lower than normal volume levels, and that the opposite to the smiley face should actually be applied to high levels. Maybe you missed that part of my post?
The 'smiley face' EQ curve is actually desirable if you are listening at lower than usual volume levels. It's a known property of the human ear (discovered by Fletcher and Munson in 1933) that we are better at hearing midrange sounds at low levels. While it's true that the eq will have been set by the professional engineers who recorded the music, since they do not know the volume level you will be playing it back at, they cannot compensate for the changes in eq perception at low levels (or indeed high levels). To get back to what they intended, the 'smile curve' should be applied at low levels and it's oppostite at high levels.
The iPhone doesn't exist in a vacuum. Apple have (arguably) raised the bar on screen quality, usability, features and memory size, and the people who currently have 100% of the mobile phone market won't be ignoring that. The question is how quickly their corporate cultures can switch round to building phones that are not just designed to tick boxes on a features checklist but are actually good at the things they can currently just about do.
Who do I trust to make a slick usable media playing phone, Apple, or HTC? Well, HTC's hype site for the phone showed me nothing but a progress bar for 10 seconds, then asked me (in English) if I wanted to read the site in English. Not a good start!
What's the Spec like? Half the screen resolution of the iPhone, and 1/4 the memory?
The main 'faults with OS X' the reviewer finds are:
The MacMini only has 512Mb ram (because I configured it wrong) The MacMini has Wifi and bluetooth with I don't need instead of more ram (because I configured it wrong) The MacMini isn't expandable (I bought the wrong machine)
Which product was he supposed to be reviewing?
Why does the MacMini suddenly turn into a MacBook when he tries to return it?
Having watched the whole set of videos, I think this is a jibe at Gil Amelio. Earlier in the interview, he quoted Gil say saying "Apple is a ship with a hole in it, and it's my job to point it in the right direction" - which got quite a laugh as it's sort of management non-sequitur that the Dilbert newsletter ridicules. So, he meant that reason the ship was sinking was at the top of the organisation, ie. Gil himself.
As hinted in my earlier post, those controls turns off the lfavicons in the url bar, and in tabs. They do *not* turn off favicons in the bookmarks menu.
I really don't like favicons in the bookmark menu. Added in firefox 2.0, they force the menu linespacing to be bigger, so I fit less items in a screenful, and the site that I used to know was 6 inches down the screen isn't where I'm expecting it to be anymore. I understand why some people like them, but for me they are a distracting rainbow coloured mess.
Guess which one of the billion or so features in the UI I can't turn off? I can use about:config to remove them from the URL bar, and the tool bar, where they were actually somewhere between bearable and useful... but in the bookmarks menu where they annoy me, I'm stuck with them.
I've installed a plugin that turns custom ones off, so they all look like 5 cyan jellybeans (wtf?) so they are a bit less annoying, but why can't I banish them?
"I'm a sexual predator. I have to tell the truth. I'm really 45, fat, ugly, and I actually think some 15 year old girl or boy will see me and say, "Oh, baby! Give it to me! I just love beer bellies!'"
Well, if you promise to age-verify for them so they can get on myspace when their luddite parents won't, then thanks to this new law you'll be in with a chance!
...or 'favourites' if you haven't switched to Firefox yet.
Use folders and subfolders to organise them, and if you really honestly have an unmanageably large number of bookmarks that you couldn't possibly just google again later, cut and paste from the bookmarks file to any kind of saveable text document.
I'm entirely sure it does work this way, I even came pretty close to actually collecting my share of the money for having some of my music played on a small station in London, but the paperwork and membership fees put me off.
Some information about the commercial broadcast payments in Britain can be found at the Mechanical Copyright and Performance: http://www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk/
'Payola' money going in the opposite direction as you suggest may also exist, but I doubt that's the case for any of the BBC radio stations.
Well we've always had this here in Britain, and it seems to work. If the RIAA do manage to pass this in the US, I think their main problem will be explaining to artists why they don't get any of the new revenue.
MySpace is a horribly badly designed mess, but that doesn't mean all web 2.0 sites will be. Take a look at Trig.com (you could even listen to my geeky music there if you feel like it).
Their business model is basically 'Myspace but not a horribly designed mess'. I'm sure there's also someone out there building 'Youtube with buffering and no comment spam', 'slashdot with editors' and so on.
MySpace is the AOL of Web 2.0 - It got big early on, but it's not going to be long before people realise it's been left behind.
Microsoft have decided to put a "Windows Live" icon on the Mac version of MSN Messenger. It doesn't do anything, it's not clickable or selectable in any way as far as I can tell.
It was added in one of the annoyingly regular 'you must upgrade NOW or you'll never be allowed on MSN again' updates that Microsoft like to do for no clear reason (as opposed to the spurious 'upgrade to the latest version' messages that you get when someone tries to send you an animated gif that tries to get you to install the PC version).
Are we really supposed to believe that Sony's tiny diode-making division were charging Sony's huge games division $100 more than expected for the diodes because they were in short supply, when that short supply was entirely the diode division's fault?
Are Sony's internal purchasing systems really so screwed up that one department can make a huge unexpected profit out of their cock-up at the expense of potentially killing the PS3 by making the price ridiculous and pushing back the rest-of-world launch for many months?
This looks like an internal face-saving ploy to me, Sony's Games division knows it got the PS3 horribly wrong and are looking for a way to make some other division else carry the can.
You only have to walk into a games shop to see that there is no shortage, Sony's games division were simply far too optimistic about predicting sales figures. Compare the stacks of unsold PS3s to the real and continuing Wii shortage, which is due to people actually wanting to buy them, rather than the use of unobtainium in the manufacturing process.
Those piano key frequencies are misleading. Any sound apart from a pure sine wave has not only the root frequency (known as the fundamental) but a whole load of other (usually higher) frequencies that give the sound it's character.
The wikipedia table lists only the root frequencies, but even a mid-range piano note includes higher harmonic frequencies that go at least as high as the range of human hearing.
Since when have you been able to copyright or patent a number? The number in your sig isn't anyone's intellectual property. The number I chose for my bicycle padlock may well be something I want to keep secret, but it is certainly not my intellectual property, and I certainly don't have any right to stop it being used by anyone else.
If mods didn't like my post, they would have marked it overrated when it was posted at +2. The fact that it was almost instantly given 3 redundants in a row when (regardless of it's quality) it did not repeat any other posts makes me highly suspicious, especially as the redundant mod it the hardest to spot abuse of in metamoderation, as it requires a very concientious metamoderator to check through the whole debate chronologically for an earlier post with the same content.
I'm not so sure. I'm not suggesting linking to disambiguation pages (which could be gamed by SEO), I'm suggesting Google analyses the text and notices that pages tend to either use the words "Andrew Lloyd Webber" "Kitty-litter" or "set us up the bomb" and that these phrases tend to be mutually exclusive, so they would be good ones to offer as means of disambiguation.
The terms wouldn't be 'typical disambiguation terms', as they would be generated freshly from the content of the pages that appear in the search results. Probably too computationally intensive to do yet, but ontology isn't needed to give useful results when it becomes possible.
"Kitty-litter" isn't a great example, but it shows why I think this would be useful - I spent a while trying to thing of a phrase would occur in pages about the animal but not the musical and I couldn't come up with a good one. Doing a statistical analysis on the text content would probably find a much better term, and that term would be offered to me in the disambiguation line.
Normally I'd use "-musical" as a search term if I was after feline resultd, but that relies on me knowing about the existance of the musical and it does a sort of reverse pigeon-holing by throwing out pages that are 99% about felines but happen mention the musical in passing.
"leak" is usually used to say that someone inside an organisation revealed a secret, that's what I think a layperson would believe happened after reading the BBC article, and that's not what actually happened. As I understand the situation, it was discovered on the DVDs because people worked out where to look.
On your second point, I'm sure Digg were aware that the constitutional right to free speech trumps the DMCA, and they simply decided that taking down would be cheaper than fighting to protect a 3rd party's rights.
Oh, and any moderators reading this might like to take a look at my grandparent post which is currently at a suspicious looking -1 redundant despite not duplicating any other posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Low volume levels nothing. Humans are worse at hearing low bass than other frequencies period.
Please take the time to look at the Fletcher Munson research. The curves they produced do not JUST show the obvious lack of low bass response you mention (and indeed the high end too, which disappears somewhere around 20kHz), far more interestingly they showed that our response to low and high levels ALSO varies with volume, not just pitch.
While we are bad at hearing 30Hz tones, we are slightly worse at hearing quiet 30Hz tones, and slightly better at hearing very loud ones. The recording can't take account of this effect, as the overall volume is set by the listener.
Don't try to use Fletcher and Munson to defend what those people are doing as anything other than an a musical atrocity.
I was very careful to point out that the Fletcher Munson ONLY justifies the smiley face at lower than normal volume levels, and that the opposite to the smiley face should actually be applied to high levels. Maybe you missed that part of my post?
How about we lock this guy in a cell with a keyboard, and let him out when he's pressed 'delete' once for every spam he sent?
The 'smiley face' EQ curve is actually desirable if you are listening at lower than usual volume levels. It's a known property of the human ear (discovered by Fletcher and Munson in 1933) that we are better at hearing midrange sounds at low levels. While it's true that the eq will have been set by the professional engineers who recorded the music, since they do not know the volume level you will be playing it back at, they cannot compensate for the changes in eq perception at low levels (or indeed high levels). To get back to what they intended, the 'smile curve' should be applied at low levels and it's oppostite at high levels.
The iPhone doesn't exist in a vacuum. Apple have (arguably) raised the bar on screen quality, usability, features and memory size, and the people who currently have 100% of the mobile phone market won't be ignoring that. The question is how quickly their corporate cultures can switch round to building phones that are not just designed to tick boxes on a features checklist but are actually good at the things they can currently just about do.
Who do I trust to make a slick usable media playing phone, Apple, or HTC? Well, HTC's hype site for the phone showed me nothing but a progress bar for 10 seconds, then asked me (in English) if I wanted to read the site in English. Not a good start!
What's the Spec like? Half the screen resolution of the iPhone, and 1/4 the memory?
I'll pass on this one, thanks.
The main 'faults with OS X' the reviewer finds are:
The MacMini only has 512Mb ram (because I configured it wrong)
The MacMini has Wifi and bluetooth with I don't need instead of more ram (because I configured it wrong)
The MacMini isn't expandable (I bought the wrong machine)
Which product was he supposed to be reviewing?
Why does the MacMini suddenly turn into a MacBook when he tries to return it?
Having watched the whole set of videos, I think this is a jibe at Gil Amelio. Earlier in the interview, he quoted Gil say saying "Apple is a ship with a hole in it, and it's my job to point it in the right direction" - which got quite a laugh as it's sort of management non-sequitur that the Dilbert newsletter ridicules. So, he meant that reason the ship was sinking was at the top of the organisation, ie. Gil himself.
Getting close! That's getting rid of non-custom favicons, but only when I have no windows open. As soon as I open a window, they reappear :-/
As hinted in my earlier post, those controls turns off the lfavicons in the url bar, and in tabs. They do *not* turn off favicons in the bookmarks menu.
I really don't like favicons in the bookmark menu. Added in firefox 2.0, they force the menu linespacing to be bigger, so I fit less items in a screenful, and the site that I used to know was 6 inches down the screen isn't where I'm expecting it to be anymore. I understand why some people like them, but for me they are a distracting rainbow coloured mess.
Guess which one of the billion or so features in the UI I can't turn off? I can use about:config to remove them from the URL bar, and the tool bar, where they were actually somewhere between bearable and useful... but in the bookmarks menu where they annoy me, I'm stuck with them.
I've installed a plugin that turns custom ones off, so they all look like 5 cyan jellybeans (wtf?) so they are a bit less annoying, but why can't I banish them?
"I'm a sexual predator. I have to tell the truth. I'm really 45, fat, ugly, and I actually think some 15 year old girl or boy will see me and say, "Oh, baby! Give it to me! I just love beer bellies!'"
Well, if you promise to age-verify for them so they can get on myspace when their luddite parents won't, then thanks to this new law you'll be in with a chance!
...or 'favourites' if you haven't switched to Firefox yet.
Use folders and subfolders to organise them, and if you really honestly have an unmanageably large number of bookmarks that you couldn't possibly just google again later, cut and paste from the bookmarks file to any kind of saveable text document.
I'm entirely sure it does work this way, I even came pretty close to actually collecting my share of the money for having some of my music played on a small station in London, but the paperwork and membership fees put me off.
Some information about the commercial broadcast payments in Britain can be found at the Mechanical Copyright and Performance: http://www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk/
'Payola' money going in the opposite direction as you suggest may also exist, but I doubt that's the case for any of the BBC radio stations.
Well we've always had this here in Britain, and it seems to work. If the RIAA do manage to pass this in the US, I think their main problem will be explaining to artists why they don't get any of the new revenue.
I just ping foreign servers a lot
MySpace is a horribly badly designed mess, but that doesn't mean all web 2.0 sites will be. Take a look at Trig.com (you could even listen to my geeky music there if you feel like it).
Their business model is basically 'Myspace but not a horribly designed mess'. I'm sure there's also someone out there building 'Youtube with buffering and no comment spam', 'slashdot with editors' and so on.
MySpace is the AOL of Web 2.0 - It got big early on, but it's not going to be long before people realise it's been left behind.
Web 2.1 anyone?
Variable Valve Timing (VVT) has been around since the 1960s.
Microsoft have decided to put a "Windows Live" icon on the Mac version of MSN Messenger. It doesn't do anything, it's not clickable or selectable in any way as far as I can tell.
It was added in one of the annoyingly regular 'you must upgrade NOW or you'll never be allowed on MSN again' updates that Microsoft like to do for no clear reason (as opposed to the spurious 'upgrade to the latest version' messages that you get when someone tries to send you an animated gif that tries to get you to install the PC version).
Does anyone know why it's there?
It's an operating system for phones, so it's a competitor to the likes of the Symbian OS, not Apple's iPhone.
RTFA, they are buying them from "Sony Shiroishi Semiconductor, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony"
Are we really supposed to believe that Sony's tiny diode-making division were charging Sony's huge games division $100 more than expected for the diodes because they were in short supply, when that short supply was entirely the diode division's fault?
Are Sony's internal purchasing systems really so screwed up that one department can make a huge unexpected profit out of their cock-up at the expense of potentially killing the PS3 by making the price ridiculous and pushing back the rest-of-world launch for many months?
This looks like an internal face-saving ploy to me, Sony's Games division knows it got the PS3 horribly wrong and are looking for a way to make some other division else carry the can.
You only have to walk into a games shop to see that there is no shortage, Sony's games division were simply far too optimistic about predicting sales figures. Compare the stacks of unsold PS3s to the real and continuing Wii shortage, which is due to people actually wanting to buy them, rather than the use of unobtainium in the manufacturing process.
Those piano key frequencies are misleading. Any sound apart from a pure sine wave has not only the root frequency (known as the fundamental) but a whole load of other (usually higher) frequencies that give the sound it's character.
The wikipedia table lists only the root frequencies, but even a mid-range piano note includes higher harmonic frequencies that go at least as high as the range of human hearing.
Since when have you been able to copyright or patent a number? The number in your sig isn't anyone's intellectual property. The number I chose for my bicycle padlock may well be something I want to keep secret, but it is certainly not my intellectual property, and I certainly don't have any right to stop it being used by anyone else.
If mods didn't like my post, they would have marked it overrated when it was posted at +2. The fact that it was almost instantly given 3 redundants in a row when (regardless of it's quality) it did not repeat any other posts makes me highly suspicious, especially as the redundant mod it the hardest to spot abuse of in metamoderation, as it requires a very concientious metamoderator to check through the whole debate chronologically for an earlier post with the same content.
I'm not so sure. I'm not suggesting linking to disambiguation pages (which could be gamed by SEO), I'm suggesting Google analyses the text and notices that pages tend to either use the words "Andrew Lloyd Webber" "Kitty-litter" or "set us up the bomb" and that these phrases tend to be mutually exclusive, so they would be good ones to offer as means of disambiguation.
The terms wouldn't be 'typical disambiguation terms', as they would be generated freshly from the content of the pages that appear in the search results. Probably too computationally intensive to do yet, but ontology isn't needed to give useful results when it becomes possible.
"Kitty-litter" isn't a great example, but it shows why I think this would be useful - I spent a while trying to thing of a phrase would occur in pages about the animal but not the musical and I couldn't come up with a good one. Doing a statistical analysis on the text content would probably find a much better term, and that term would be offered to me in the disambiguation line.
Normally I'd use "-musical" as a search term if I was after feline resultd, but that relies on me knowing about the existance of the musical and it does a sort of reverse pigeon-holing by throwing out pages that are 99% about felines but happen mention the musical in passing.
I'm not seeing any way for SEO to game this.
"leak" is usually used to say that someone inside an organisation revealed a secret, that's what I think a layperson would believe happened after reading the BBC article, and that's not what actually happened. As I understand the situation, it was discovered on the DVDs because people worked out where to look.
On your second point, I'm sure Digg were aware that the constitutional right to free speech trumps the DMCA, and they simply decided that taking down would be cheaper than fighting to protect a 3rd party's rights.
Oh, and any moderators reading this might like to take a look at my grandparent post which is currently at a suspicious looking -1 redundant despite not duplicating any other posts.