96 is the limit, rest is "the equaliser" of your stereo.
And of your ears. Noise shaping moves dither noise up into areas where you can't hear jack because your ears act as an equalizer that cuts out most energy at 16 kHz and above. This is similar to how 1-bit delta-sigma DACs work: they output only 0 and 1 samples, but they shift dither noise up into the hundreds of kHz, and then they pass the result through an analog low-pass filter.
This calculation for the noise floor assumes a flat dither noise curve. If the dither noise is concentrated up in high-frequency land, we may just have 120 dB of dynamic range where it counts, such as around 3000 Hz. That's why I suggested looking up noise shaping.
By the way, GOSH (Great Ormond Street Hospital) owns a perpetual copyright on James M. Barrie's Peter Pan works. No, it's not a 95-year copyright or a life+70 copyright. It's a perpetual copyright, recognized by the Berne treaty. (Read More...) When Disney brings Peter Pan II to Region 2 (where European copyrights are more strictly enforced), GOSH is going to make a wad of dough on royalties, giving Disney a taste of its own medicine.
(posted without bonus because it's only tangential to the article)
The reason that cassettes are still available is that people like to listen to music in their cars.
Not cars. As lucifuge31337 said, any car CD player over $50 should handle bumps well. The same can't be said for pocket CD players. No matter how big your pocket CD player's buffer is, it won't be able to buffer over 10 minutes of jogging. A pocket tape player is also much cheaper than a MiniDisc recorder or an MP3 player.
In any case, part of what I was saying was that the 'new media' would be a higher quality than CD.
No. Quality is not a linear function of signal-to-noise ratio or frequency because the ear has limits to what it can hear. The recording industry will have a hard time convincing the audio-enlightened that their new format has higher fidelity than good old CD Audio. A well-mastered CD has 120 dB dynamic range in 20-16000 Hz and decent dynamic range above that because modern mastering techniques shove all the dither noise into the high frequencies (16-22 kHz) where the human ear is not nearly as sensitive. (Look up "noise shaping" on Google to see how.)
The problem with this is.. How do I get my music that I bought on my portable MP3 player?
Line out, line in. Sony can't stop that, even with the CBDTPA, because the draft CBDTPA includes a provision that makes it illegal to watermark a copy of a work in such a manner as to prohibit clearly fair uses such as space-shifting.
<whine>But it's not digital and it'll lose quality!</whine>
So what? For one thing, the MP3 encoding at 128 kbps (the bitrate used for portable MP3 players; for archiving, use 192 VBR) loses more information than a decent D/A/D conversion loses. For another, Even cheap consumer D/A/D conversion will add noise of about 60 dB below rail, and ambient environmental noise will mask that. (Unless, of course, you habitually turn up your pocket stereo high enough to risk permanent hearing damage.)
There's a warning in my car owner's manual that admits that pouring gasoline all over myself and lighting a match may cause permanent injury or death. I should sue them!
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see how a rational judge would interpret the warning label "Will not play on PC" as "If inserted into a PC, may irreversibly damage PC hardware". Sony's best bet here is to blame the CD-ROM drive manufacturers and shift the damage to their warranty. In that case, if it's a Sony drive, tough sh*t for Sony.
But what is to stop anyone from just recording a song off the radio?
To the RIAA, a digital transmission is easier to pirate than an analog transmission, as there is zero loss from one generation to the next. That's why we've seen sh*t such as the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, etc.
He/She is talking about computers. You can't test a pentium IV cpu in gaming consoles.
If the U.S. Congress manages to pass the CBDTPA, what's the difference between a computer in the U.S. and a video game console in the U.S.?
Yes, you can test a P4 CPU in gaming consoles: run an emulator. However, a PIII/866 is sufficient for everything up to and including Game Boy Advance. And no, not all emulation is piracy.
"Life expectancy" is mostly infant mortality
on
When Elephants Dance
·
· Score: 2
I'd call 20+ years' life expectancy increase rather significant...
Life span != life expectancy. The natural life span of an average person who has already entered puberty has remained roughly constant at around 80 years over the last couple centuries. Most of the increase in the "life expectancy" statistic is due to decreased infant mortality. If you can find real evidence of increase in life span (the difference being that span doesn't count infant mortality), please point me to the URL.
Besides, even if life span has increased by 20 years, how do you reconcile this with a copyright term extension of over triple that?
vocoding is taking an orignal sound and filtering it with the nuances of vocal frequencies. In other words it manipulates the freqeuncies of a source sound by using a second sound.
However, if you vocode against a pulsetrain that follows the melody, the properties of the pulsetrain (equal power in all frequencies) don't affect the frequency. Thus, it behaves exactly the same as pitch correction. The biggest algorithmic difference between vocoder and pitch correction is that pitch correction separates the signal into buzz (periodic vowel sounds) from the hiss (noiselike breath and consonant sounds) and processes only the buzz, whereas the cheaper vocoder implementations generally assume that the incoming voice signal is entirely buzz, making the voice harder-edged and turning 's' consonants into 'z'.
exaple of pitch correction: Sher - Do you believe in life after love or whatever the hell that song is.
Look in my previous comment. It's called "Cher - Believe". Boycott Cher.
10 LET II$ = "Microsoft Internet Information Services"
The 404 message coming back is the standard IIS one, and it is even labelled as IIS.
It's easy to get Apache HTTP Server to lie about its identity. Just capture the II$ error page, save it as 404.html, and use the Apache ErrorDocument directive to serve that page as the HTTP error result. Repeat this for II$'s other error pages, and you perpetuate the lie.
Primarily Mac OS, whatever operating systems PS2 and GCN use, and GBA BIOS. (Yes, the Game Boy Advance has an operating system, but it's about as powerful as the PC DOS kernel. That is, not very.)
Since Microsoft Windows users are... about 99.9% of the gaming population
WHAT? Are you claiming that the Nintendo GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation 2 platforms have less than 0.1% combined market share? Heck, I'm being generous, assuming that by "Microsoft Windows" you meant Windows 9x, Windows NT, Xbox, and Pocket PC platforms. (The Xbox OS is based on the Win2K kernel and media layer.) I am aware that Windows technologies power many of the gaming systems available today, but 0.1% non-Windows? Gimme a break.
For example, if you know what to listen for (hard 'edges' to notes on vocals) you can hear it all over Britney's music. It's also being used as a vocoder-type effect (synth filtered by voice) on some recordings. The song on Kid Rock's hit CD that he sang on (it was country sounding) used it extensively.
Popular songs that have used a vocoder effect with hard transitions between pitches:
Eiffel 65 - Blue (the song rumored to be about homosexuality: "I'm in need of a guy, I'm in need of a guy")
However, use of the vocoder on some other songs is more subtle. Sometimes, the vocoder's pitch is set halfway between the pitch the slut is actually singing and the pitch that her producers want her to sing, which produces a much less synthetic perception. (Following a single voice's pitch is straightforward: square-root the signal to restore the fundamental, apply a 4th order low pass filter to remove harmonics, and count sign changes. If you want to know more, mail me.)
Oops! I did it again. I just described how to do something that probably infringes a dozen patents worldwide.
If this software utilized any cycles on my system, it will impact performance causing me expense which will rapidly increase to the $5000 threshold (a cumulative threshold).
Not if it's niced down to the lowest priority. I see zero performance impact even on my Windows ME box from running the distributed.net client.
Not entirely an AF joke. CJAN is *real*.
on
CPAN Shifts Focus
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This story is fake, but it did inspire me to do a Google search, which turned up CJAN: Comprehensive Java Archive Network. It's not up yet (the front page is just a blog), but it's coming. Seriously.
a wide array of data-harvester bots have visited us, and the only one allowed to stay is Google's.
I knew that. I was complaining that Teoma did not take into account the text of incoming links' anchors.
For a while, E2 had a robots.txt denying everything (no pun intended) from everyone, and Google still found E2 on the first try. That's because it indexed links to Everything 2 from sites that linked to it using the text "Everything 2". (Teoma does not do this.) If numerous pages link to a page blocked by robots.txt, Google still indexes the page under the search terms of the text of A elements by which other sites link to the page.
I am not a lawyer, but I feel I can at least get the gist of what a patent claim is trying to say.
Well, CSS is patented
What documentation can you find for that? When I searched for css patent, Google only gave me information on Microsoft's patent on cascading stylesheets. Searching for css scrambling patent, on the other hand, revealed mostly pages about Digimarc's patents on watermarks along with a few pages denying existence of any patent on the Content Scrambling System here. However, this page lists a couple patents; which one are you talking about?
If this library really doesn't exist and is only an elaborate april fool's joke, the blackout begins. On April Fool's Day 2001, over 75% of the stories posted to Slashdot's front page were total crap. This year, if we get three crap stories, I'm not going to contribute PageViews for 36 hours.
It's a replacement for GNU Screen
on
Qt For The Console
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Slashdot Mirror
96 is the limit, rest is "the equaliser" of your stereo.
And of your ears. Noise shaping moves dither noise up into areas where you can't hear jack because your ears act as an equalizer that cuts out most energy at 16 kHz and above. This is similar to how 1-bit delta-sigma DACs work: they output only 0 and 1 samples, but they shift dither noise up into the hundreds of kHz, and then they pass the result through an analog low-pass filter.
20*log(2^16) = 96.3 dB
This calculation for the noise floor assumes a flat dither noise curve. If the dither noise is concentrated up in high-frequency land, we may just have 120 dB of dynamic range where it counts, such as around 3000 Hz. That's why I suggested looking up noise shaping.
By the way, GOSH (Great Ormond Street Hospital) owns a perpetual copyright on James M. Barrie's Peter Pan works. No, it's not a 95-year copyright or a life+70 copyright. It's a perpetual copyright, recognized by the Berne treaty. (Read More...) When Disney brings Peter Pan II to Region 2 (where European copyrights are more strictly enforced), GOSH is going to make a wad of dough on royalties, giving Disney a taste of its own medicine.
(posted without bonus because it's only tangential to the article)
The reason that cassettes are still available is that people like to listen to music in their cars.
Not cars. As lucifuge31337 said, any car CD player over $50 should handle bumps well. The same can't be said for pocket CD players. No matter how big your pocket CD player's buffer is, it won't be able to buffer over 10 minutes of jogging. A pocket tape player is also much cheaper than a MiniDisc recorder or an MP3 player.
In any case, part of what I was saying was that the 'new media' would be a higher quality than CD.
No. Quality is not a linear function of signal-to-noise ratio or frequency because the ear has limits to what it can hear. The recording industry will have a hard time convincing the audio-enlightened that their new format has higher fidelity than good old CD Audio. A well-mastered CD has 120 dB dynamic range in 20-16000 Hz and decent dynamic range above that because modern mastering techniques shove all the dither noise into the high frequencies (16-22 kHz) where the human ear is not nearly as sensitive. (Look up "noise shaping" on Google to see how.)
I'm pretty sure somebody'll figure out a way (if they haven't already done so) to rip the audio off it.
I already have. See my previous comment.
The problem with this is.. How do I get my music that I bought on my portable MP3 player?
Line out, line in. Sony can't stop that, even with the CBDTPA, because the draft CBDTPA includes a provision that makes it illegal to watermark a copy of a work in such a manner as to prohibit clearly fair uses such as space-shifting.
<whine>But it's not digital and it'll lose quality!</whine>
So what? For one thing, the MP3 encoding at 128 kbps (the bitrate used for portable MP3 players; for archiving, use 192 VBR) loses more information than a decent D/A/D conversion loses. For another, Even cheap consumer D/A/D conversion will add noise of about 60 dB below rail, and ambient environmental noise will mask that. (Unless, of course, you habitually turn up your pocket stereo high enough to risk permanent hearing damage.)
There's a warning in my car owner's manual that admits that pouring gasoline all over myself and lighting a match may cause permanent injury or death. I should sue them!
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see how a rational judge would interpret the warning label "Will not play on PC" as "If inserted into a PC, may irreversibly damage PC hardware". Sony's best bet here is to blame the CD-ROM drive manufacturers and shift the damage to their warranty. In that case, if it's a Sony drive, tough sh*t for Sony.
But what is to stop anyone from just recording a song off the radio?
To the RIAA, a digital transmission is easier to pirate than an analog transmission, as there is zero loss from one generation to the next. That's why we've seen sh*t such as the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, etc.
He/She is talking about computers. You can't test a pentium IV cpu in gaming consoles.
If the U.S. Congress manages to pass the CBDTPA, what's the difference between a computer in the U.S. and a video game console in the U.S.?
Yes, you can test a P4 CPU in gaming consoles: run an emulator. However, a PIII/866 is sufficient for everything up to and including Game Boy Advance. And no, not all emulation is piracy.
I'd call 20+ years' life expectancy increase rather significant...
Life span != life expectancy. The natural life span of an average person who has already entered puberty has remained roughly constant at around 80 years over the last couple centuries. Most of the increase in the "life expectancy" statistic is due to decreased infant mortality. If you can find real evidence of increase in life span (the difference being that span doesn't count infant mortality), please point me to the URL.
Besides, even if life span has increased by 20 years, how do you reconcile this with a copyright term extension of over triple that?
vocoding is taking an orignal sound and filtering it with the nuances of vocal frequencies. In other words it manipulates the freqeuncies of a source sound by using a second sound.
However, if you vocode against a pulsetrain that follows the melody, the properties of the pulsetrain (equal power in all frequencies) don't affect the frequency. Thus, it behaves exactly the same as pitch correction. The biggest algorithmic difference between vocoder and pitch correction is that pitch correction separates the signal into buzz (periodic vowel sounds) from the hiss (noiselike breath and consonant sounds) and processes only the buzz, whereas the cheaper vocoder implementations generally assume that the incoming voice signal is entirely buzz, making the voice harder-edged and turning 's' consonants into 'z'.
exaple of pitch correction: Sher - Do you believe in life after love or whatever the hell that song is.
Look in my previous comment. It's called "Cher - Believe". Boycott Cher.
The 404 message coming back is the standard IIS one, and it is even labelled as IIS.
It's easy to get Apache HTTP Server to lie about its identity. Just capture the II$ error page, save it as 404.html, and use the Apache ErrorDocument directive to serve that page as the HTTP error result. Repeat this for II$'s other error pages, and you perpetuate the lie.
you complain about the $, you don't know basicWhat is the other 10% using? BeOS?
Primarily Mac OS, whatever operating systems PS2 and GCN use, and GBA BIOS. (Yes, the Game Boy Advance has an operating system, but it's about as powerful as the PC DOS kernel. That is, not very.)
Since Microsoft Windows users are ... about 99.9% of the gaming population
WHAT? Are you claiming that the Nintendo GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and PlayStation 2 platforms have less than 0.1% combined market share? Heck, I'm being generous, assuming that by "Microsoft Windows" you meant Windows 9x, Windows NT, Xbox, and Pocket PC platforms. (The Xbox OS is based on the Win2K kernel and media layer.) I am aware that Windows technologies power many of the gaming systems available today, but 0.1% non-Windows? Gimme a break.
For example, if you know what to listen for (hard 'edges' to notes on vocals) you can hear it all over Britney's music. It's also being used as a vocoder-type effect (synth filtered by voice) on some recordings. The song on Kid Rock's hit CD that he sang on (it was country sounding) used it extensively.
Popular songs that have used a vocoder effect with hard transitions between pitches:However, use of the vocoder on some other songs is more subtle. Sometimes, the vocoder's pitch is set halfway between the pitch the slut is actually singing and the pitch that her producers want her to sing, which produces a much less synthetic perception. (Following a single voice's pitch is straightforward: square-root the signal to restore the fundamental, apply a 4th order low pass filter to remove harmonics, and count sign changes. If you want to know more, mail me.)
Oops! I did it again. I just described how to do something that probably infringes a dozen patents worldwide.
Great, that means I can't listen to my music, DVDs, use my software when I am on holidays, on a business trip or at my second home?
Do you really think consumers are going to buy into some re-hashed Circuit Shitty DIVX with GPS protection?
If this software utilized any cycles on my system, it will impact performance causing me expense which will rapidly increase to the $5000 threshold (a cumulative threshold).
Not if it's niced down to the lowest priority. I see zero performance impact even on my Windows ME box from running the distributed.net client.
This story is fake, but it did inspire me to do a Google search, which turned up CJAN: Comprehensive Java Archive Network. It's not up yet (the front page is just a blog), but it's coming. Seriously.
a wide array of data-harvester bots have visited us, and the only one allowed to stay is Google's.
I knew that. I was complaining that Teoma did not take into account the text of incoming links' anchors.
For a while, E2 had a robots.txt denying everything (no pun intended) from everyone, and Google still found E2 on the first try. That's because it indexed links to Everything 2 from sites that linked to it using the text "Everything 2". (Teoma does not do this.) If numerous pages link to a page blocked by robots.txt, Google still indexes the page under the search terms of the text of A elements by which other sites link to the page.
Has Slashdot disabled anonymous commenting?
Well, CSS is patented
What documentation can you find for that? When I searched for css patent, Google only gave me information on Microsoft's patent on cascading stylesheets. Searching for css scrambling patent, on the other hand, revealed mostly pages about Digimarc's patents on watermarks along with a few pages denying existence of any patent on the Content Scrambling System here. However, this page lists a couple patents; which one are you talking about?
all we need is one single DVD which should be public domain on which DeCSS can be used for the whole thing to be made legal.
Mickey Mouse may already have entered the public domain due to lack of proper copyright notice. Your single DVD may be "Mickey's Early Years."
So I run Teoma searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2. None of them finds the site I'm looking for. On the other hand, Google searches for Everything, Everything 2, and E2 leave me Feeling Lucky.
Nathan, this is unacceptable.
So why exactly hasn't the DVD production of "The Birth of a Nation" (1915, DVD distributed by Image Entertainment) changed anything?
Probably because it's not CSS encrypted. Only an encrypted DVD falling into the public domain will open up the DMCA loophole.
If this library really doesn't exist and is only an elaborate april fool's joke, the blackout begins. On April Fool's Day 2001, over 75% of the stories posted to Slashdot's front page were total crap. This year, if we get three crap stories, I'm not going to contribute PageViews for 36 hours.
Konsole? why?
As Ed Avis mentioned, you can think of it as a replacement for GNU Screen.