The USA has a very good system of checks and balances - currently these are NOT being used and are not working correctly, but it is inevitable (I say) that they will start to work soon-ish.
I'm not optimistic, given the success Republicans have had campaigning against it ("judicial activism"). These days, I'm far less interested in a supreme court nominee's opinion on Roe v. Wade than Marbury v. Madison.
Now, when IT workers themselves are threatened by advances in communications technology that allows their work to be done by foreign competitors, many of them cry foul and demand protection.
Replacing people with automation is not the same as replacing people with other people elsewhere. When people are replaced with automation, the money to purchase and maintain the machines goes elsewhere within the economy (leading to other jobs -- probably fewer, but higher paying). The money saved results in lower prices, which also helps the local economy.
When local people are replaced with people elsewhere, that money is *leaving* the local economy, and essentially subsidizing the foreign economy. Now I think some of that is a good thing, as it will help bring up those other countries, and they will eventually start buying more from themselves, and then from us. However, I think some government-level consideration needs to be given to how much of that our local economy can afford.
That said, India seems to be rising far faster than I ever would have thought (I was mostly using Mexico as a benchmark, and now I'm wondering what the hell is wrong with Mexico), and China doesn't seem to be doing half bad, either. It may not be much of an issue for long.
lets say you are in your A-10 and about to blast the ever living shit out of something, don't you think you would go down and take a look at what ever it is you're about to shoot? That would kinda defeat the purpose of being in a plane, wouldn't it? Normally, the A-10s are shooting at what the ground troops have asked them to.
American pilots apprently don't. They just follow the little numbers on their little displays in their little cockpits and push the little button on the stick when the light goes on, or whatever. Thats why they KEEP on blasting the crap out of their OWN British and Canadian allies. Friendly fire accidents happened, have always happened, and major rules-of-engagement attempts to prevent them tend to result in *more* friendly troops being lost to enemy fire.
Really, if you're going to complain about American attitudes with regards to war, how about the fact that most Americans know we've lost around 3,100 troops in Iraq, but don't even know where we'd find out how many Iraqis have been killed.
There was a competition of self-driving cars (or SUV's, mostly, and one big truck) put on by DARPA last year, and five of them managed to complete a 132 mile desert course. Next year's DARPA challenge is in an urban environment with the requirement of obeying traffic laws. The U.S. Army is attempting to use robots for a significant portion of its noncombatant ground vehicles by 2015.
And pedalboards, where the stomp boxes are mounted together with the power supply so that it's one convenient unit. I was under the impression those were brand-specific, and you'd generally get either a Boss pedalboard or a DoD pedalboard because their input power was standardized, but only within each company. Is that basically right?
AAD or ADD is almost invariably going to be better than DDD if you listen to music with a lot of texture and dynamic range. Except that the single best-sounding album I can think of, Dire Straits Brothers in Arms, is DDD.
Healthcare is one of the best investiments in workers. If you have ailing workers, their productivity is lowered by far. Yes, but that's all independant of how much it costs. The article wasn't really about people being healthier.
They also tend to believe firmly that VB is the best tool for everything from web development to arcade machine emulation, whereas the brackets-and-braces crowd I know tend first to consider the task, then choose a language to suit it. I think that's more of a function of the corporate information systems (IS) environment more than the language. For internal IS work, most companies with less than a few dozen programmers pretty much use SQL and one application language (or maybe one they're moving from and one they're moving to), to avoid having systems that only one or two people can maintain. That would also be why you're seeing the same thing with Java; it's really big for internal IS work.
Wildly different syntax when learning your second or third language increases the chance that you'll give up and decide the "new" language is just crap, simply because you haven't understood how doing things differently can often be an improvement. I guess I can see that, although I'm not happy about the new syntax being C's, which I really don't like. (Maybe that comes from starting with Pascal? I did like C's syntax when I first learned it, but I type faster now.) That would also be an argument against starting with Python, which a lot of colleges are doing these days.
As for VB.NET, I don't really get the difference yet between that and C# With the exception of a couple of quirks put in to allow easier porting of VB6 code, it's just an alternate syntax of the same basic language.
Not to knock VB, but if you learn BASIC or VB you can basically program in... BASIC or VB. Learn Javascript and you've got a leg-up on the syntax of C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby
Do you really think the syntax is that important? I would say that Java is much more like VB (even pre.Net VB) than it is like C++.
Re:prof.dr.Edsger W.Dijkstra Is An Idiot
on
Why Johnny Can't Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do you even know who he was (he died a few years ago)?
Yes, I think he overstated the case against BASIC (although I believe BASIC was much worse when he wrote that than by the time Commodore came along), but he's probably one of the top ten or so computer science figures of all time, along with John Bachus, John McCarthy, Tony Hoare, John Von Neuman, Alan Turing and a few others.
You are technically correct that to ACCURATELY approximate, let's say, a sine wave, the sampling frequency must be greater than the sine wave (analog) frequency. Greater than double. And while period snapshots of a wave mostly come up in digitization, this is not fundamentally an analog vs. digital distinction. It would be pointless and difficult, but you could build a system to take 44k analog snapshots per second of an audio source, too.
I never said the 24-bit depth was the same as or equal to the frequency and the word amplitude did not occur in my post. You said that the 24 bits are used to record frequency. It is closer to true (although still not quite right) to say that they are used to record amplitude.
Why are you defending Crispy's egregiously misinformed and confused post? I'm not sure I had actually read it before. Looking now, he or she is a little off about the nature of an individual sample, but not too badly. The bit about the sampling rate seems to be correct, although some of the audiophiles who chimed in may have a point about the reverberations being affected by higher frequency sounds (I'm not sure they've demonstrated that the effect is for the better.).
you are obscuring other people's understanding with technically correct but irrelevant "corrections" to what I wrote No, I'm not. You clearly do not understand what is actually being recorded when an analog signal is digitized. And if you understand the difference between analog and digital, you are not displaying it well.
A file listing the indvidual waves in a sound, including their start time, duration, frequency and amplitude might be a reasonable audio format. It might even be how MP3,.Ogg, etc. work; I don't know. It is not, however, how CD audio,.Wav, or analog-to-digital converters work. The initial conversion and the cruder audio formats are recording "What's the electrical level now?", "What's the electrical level now?" at a steady rate. For CD audio, those samples are taken 44k times per second per channel, and each one is a 16 bit number. No single sample tells you anything about frequency.
That's how many times per second the Analog to Digital converter took a reading of the analog signal. It has nothing to do with the frequency of the analog sound being digitized. You're mistaken, those two frequencies are very closely related. To record a frequency clearly, you need to sample at >= double the rate of what you want to record.
The 24-bit designation refers to the depth of sound and has NOTHING to do with dynamic range. Each sample (1/96,000s) has a value for the frequency at that instant. Again, no. To get frequencies you'd need to do a Fourier analysis. Each sample is an instantaneous value of the electrical signal. They don't exactly record amplitude, because that refers to entire waves rather than a single point in time, but amplitude is a lot closer to correct than frequency.
In digital recording, we're taking quantized samples of an analog phenomenon at regular intervals. Unless it was a digital source to begin with, like keyboards or electronic drums. I'd like to see an audio format support MIDI in parallel with the digitized samples within the same file. You might only have to worry about the audio compression for three of the parts, rather than five, or maybe even better for pop music.
Vista does seem to handle high-load situations better than XP (which quite frankly, sucked at dealing with them.) That will arrive just in time to not matter, as the new computers that come with Vista will nearly all have dual-core chips.
That said, I personally (although I expect that others feel differently) find Aero to be so-so... it's got several cool effects, but I actually ended up turning it off when I got sick of it. I'm looking forward to seeing what IDE designers do with it. When you're tracing a procedure call, zooming through the calling code into the called (and being able to manually back out of a 3D representation of the call stack to examine where you came from) could be a big help.
I once sat down and calculated an estimate how much my life expectancy is shortened because of terrorist bombings. I don't remember what exact value I came up with, but I remember that I concluded I had just wasted more time doing the calculation.
And how can a company that spends $6+B per year on R&D have so little to show for it? There's easily $5B per year that can be extracted there, and to be perfectly reasonable, nearly all of it could be eliminated. It doesn't take $6B per year to copy Apple.
Microsoft doesn't really spend $6 billion on R&D. That number includes basically all software development.
If you like pulled beef, you can throw it in a crock pot with a little vinegar and water on low for around 12 hours. Let it cool off, put it in a big bowl and sit down to watch TV while you pull it with your bare hands (wash), mix it with barbeque sauce or something more interesting (I like a mix of Frank's Red Hot, mesquite liquid smoke and red wine vinegar), and eat it on pita bread.
Actually smoking for 12 hours would be better, of course, but that takes more equipment.
And to the poster below: Alton Brown is a TV chef. Has he ever even had a restaurant? I don't know where he came up, but no. He was trained as a TV producer first, and then went to culinary school after he decided that he could do a better job at a cooking show than what he was seeing on TV. I've learned an awful lot from Good Eats, but I don't often use his recipes.
This would be an excellent candidate for a user mode driver, which requires no signing. You may be right, but I'm not sure we're talking about the same sort of signing. A user mode driver won't bring down the system, but if a device works with the audio on a PC, how is Windows going to know that it won't just copy stuff wholesale? If Microsoft doesn't require DRM audits for that sort of thing, it seems like they're opening a big hole. I suppose the media companies could just sue to block the publication of anything like that that they hear about, under the DMCA...
It is certainly possible to make copying content nearly impossible for *most* people in *most* situations with a combination of hardware and software. Until they were banned under the DMCA, you could go into Best Buy and pay about $40 for software that would make a copy of any DVD for you, with CSS removed. This would be a little trickier for the user with DRM built into the computer, but not much. All they would see is that you have to boot to the CD once (so that it can disable the Windows DRM support while Windows isn't running to prevent it), and then go back to your regular Windows use.
Beyond that, if Windows isn't actually preventing access to the files, you could just download a different media player program that didn't pay any attention to DRM restrictions. That wouldn't take much effort on the part of the user, or much computer knowledge.
Well, I would say that the VAST majority of people can't write device drivers to begin with, nor would they want to. On their own, probably not, but it raises the barrier to entry for small companies that want to make hardware, especially innovative hardware, and especially hardware that works with the audio or video systems.
For instance, I have a Line6 GuitarPort on my computer. You plug it into the computer via the audio plug and USB, and you plug headphones (or speakers) and a guitar into it. It intercepts the computer's audio and processes the guitar signal (I believe with help from the CPU), combines them into the final output, and makes the processed guitar sound available to recording programs. If that has to be audited by Microsoft to ensure it doesn't interfere with DRM, that's going to be a big and expensive job, of which not a small part will be just getting them to understand what it's basically doing.
Nevertheless, how is this different from other forms of licensing? In order to make an iPod accessory, I have to pay Apple. In order to make a Playstation controller (or game, for that matter) I have to pay Sony. Is this any different? No, it isn't any different, and that's a problem. The comparisons you're making are to consumer electronics, not general-purpose computers. Personal computers have historically been very open to tinkering, which is how many technologists (programmers in particular, of course) get started; if you interfere with that, you're risking damaging the electronics and computer industries to help the much smaller entertainment industry.
This is an entirely different topic. I'm pro-DRM, and anti-DRM laws. That was the point of the "everything has to play by the same rules" section, though. DRM really has no hope of working without laws backing it up.
That's really not true at all. You can build your own machine, get one with Linux, or format it on arrival. As long as the hardware isn't checking for a signed operating system, sure (there have been plans to do that, but I don't know what's become of them). Anyway, *I* could probably do it, but your average person on the street really doesn't have a practical option of using Linux at home when they're using Windows at work. That's just too much to learn and remember when computers are not your job.
If you did this with video, I don't think that many users would care that they couldn't play the video on their computer, because watching a movie on a computer screen sucks.
Um, no. If I'm watching a movie by myself, I use my computer, even if no one else is home. The computer looks better because you're closer, and the DVD menus are much easier to navigate with a mouse.
There are a select few installations that still allow drinking on post at 18 by soldiers...Fort Bliss is one that I know of, and I believe there are a few others near the Mexican border. Not just by soldiers, unless it's changed lately. My wife (now 31) could drink at 18 at Fort Huachuca (Arizona, around Tucson) when her father was stationed there and her family lived on base. She looked about 14 at the time, but she had a military ID.
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The USA has a very good system of checks and balances - currently these are NOT being used and are not working correctly, but it is inevitable (I say) that they will start to work soon-ish.
I'm not optimistic, given the success Republicans have had campaigning against it ("judicial activism"). These days, I'm far less interested in a supreme court nominee's opinion on Roe v. Wade than Marbury v. Madison.
Now, when IT workers themselves are threatened by advances in communications technology that allows their work to be done by foreign competitors, many of them cry foul and demand protection.
Replacing people with automation is not the same as replacing people with other people elsewhere. When people are replaced with automation, the money to purchase and maintain the machines goes elsewhere within the economy (leading to other jobs -- probably fewer, but higher paying). The money saved results in lower prices, which also helps the local economy.
When local people are replaced with people elsewhere, that money is *leaving* the local economy, and essentially subsidizing the foreign economy. Now I think some of that is a good thing, as it will help bring up those other countries, and they will eventually start buying more from themselves, and then from us. However, I think some government-level consideration needs to be given to how much of that our local economy can afford.
That said, India seems to be rising far faster than I ever would have thought (I was mostly using Mexico as a benchmark, and now I'm wondering what the hell is wrong with Mexico), and China doesn't seem to be doing half bad, either. It may not be much of an issue for long.
lets say you are in your A-10 and about to blast the ever living shit out of something, don't you think you would go down and take a look at what ever it is you're about to shoot?
That would kinda defeat the purpose of being in a plane, wouldn't it? Normally, the A-10s are shooting at what the ground troops have asked them to.
American pilots apprently don't. They just follow the little numbers on their little displays in their little cockpits and push the little button on the stick when the light goes on, or whatever. Thats why they KEEP on blasting the crap out of their OWN British and Canadian allies.
Friendly fire accidents happened, have always happened, and major rules-of-engagement attempts to prevent them tend to result in *more* friendly troops being lost to enemy fire.
Really, if you're going to complain about American attitudes with regards to war, how about the fact that most Americans know we've lost around 3,100 troops in Iraq, but don't even know where we'd find out how many Iraqis have been killed.
Asimov thought... that the self-driving car "Sally" would be in production long before 2020.e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darpa_grand_challeng
There was a competition of self-driving cars (or SUV's, mostly, and one big truck) put on by DARPA last year, and five of them managed to complete a 132 mile desert course. Next year's DARPA challenge is in an urban environment with the requirement of obeying traffic laws. The U.S. Army is attempting to use robots for a significant portion of its noncombatant ground vehicles by 2015.
I don't think that one is so far off.
And pedalboards, where the stomp boxes are mounted together with the power supply so that it's one convenient unit. I was under the impression those were brand-specific, and you'd generally get either a Boss pedalboard or a DoD pedalboard because their input power was standardized, but only within each company. Is that basically right?
AAD or ADD is almost invariably going to be better than DDD if you listen to music with a lot of texture and dynamic range.
Except that the single best-sounding album I can think of, Dire Straits Brothers in Arms, is DDD.
Healthcare is one of the best investiments in workers. If you have ailing workers, their productivity is lowered by far.
Yes, but that's all independant of how much it costs. The article wasn't really about people being healthier.
They also tend to believe firmly that VB is the best tool for everything from web development to arcade machine emulation, whereas the brackets-and-braces crowd I know tend first to consider the task, then choose a language to suit it.
I think that's more of a function of the corporate information systems (IS) environment more than the language. For internal IS work, most companies with less than a few dozen programmers pretty much use SQL and one application language (or maybe one they're moving from and one they're moving to), to avoid having systems that only one or two people can maintain. That would also be why you're seeing the same thing with Java; it's really big for internal IS work.
Wildly different syntax when learning your second or third language increases the chance that you'll give up and decide the "new" language is just crap, simply because you haven't understood how doing things differently can often be an improvement.
I guess I can see that, although I'm not happy about the new syntax being C's, which I really don't like. (Maybe that comes from starting with Pascal? I did like C's syntax when I first learned it, but I type faster now.) That would also be an argument against starting with Python, which a lot of colleges are doing these days.
As for VB.NET, I don't really get the difference yet between that and C#
With the exception of a couple of quirks put in to allow easier porting of VB6 code, it's just an alternate syntax of the same basic language.
Not to knock VB, but if you learn BASIC or VB you can basically program in... BASIC or VB. Learn Javascript and you've got a leg-up on the syntax of C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby
.Net VB) than it is like C++.
Do you really think the syntax is that important? I would say that Java is much more like VB (even pre
Do you even know who he was (he died a few years ago)?
Yes, I think he overstated the case against BASIC (although I believe BASIC was much worse when he wrote that than by the time Commodore came along), but he's probably one of the top ten or so computer science figures of all time, along with John Bachus, John McCarthy, Tony Hoare, John Von Neuman, Alan Turing and a few others.
You are technically correct that to ACCURATELY approximate, let's say, a sine wave, the sampling frequency must be greater than the sine wave (analog) frequency.
.Ogg, etc. work; I don't know. It is not, however, how CD audio, .Wav, or analog-to-digital converters work. The initial conversion and the cruder audio formats are recording "What's the electrical level now?", "What's the electrical level now?" at a steady rate. For CD audio, those samples are taken 44k times per second per channel, and each one is a 16 bit number. No single sample tells you anything about frequency.
Greater than double. And while period snapshots of a wave mostly come up in digitization, this is not fundamentally an analog vs. digital distinction. It would be pointless and difficult, but you could build a system to take 44k analog snapshots per second of an audio source, too.
I never said the 24-bit depth was the same as or equal to the frequency and the word amplitude did not occur in my post.
You said that the 24 bits are used to record frequency. It is closer to true (although still not quite right) to say that they are used to record amplitude.
Why are you defending Crispy's egregiously misinformed and confused post?
I'm not sure I had actually read it before. Looking now, he or she is a little off about the nature of an individual sample, but not too badly. The bit about the sampling rate seems to be correct, although some of the audiophiles who chimed in may have a point about the reverberations being affected by higher frequency sounds (I'm not sure they've demonstrated that the effect is for the better.).
you are obscuring other people's understanding with technically correct but irrelevant "corrections" to what I wrote
No, I'm not. You clearly do not understand what is actually being recorded when an analog signal is digitized. And if you understand the difference between analog and digital, you are not displaying it well.
A file listing the indvidual waves in a sound, including their start time, duration, frequency and amplitude might be a reasonable audio format. It might even be how MP3,
That's how many times per second the Analog to Digital converter took a reading of the analog signal. It has nothing to do with the frequency of the analog sound being digitized.
You're mistaken, those two frequencies are very closely related. To record a frequency clearly, you need to sample at >= double the rate of what you want to record.
The 24-bit designation refers to the depth of sound and has NOTHING to do with dynamic range. Each sample (1/96,000s) has a value for the frequency at that instant.
Again, no. To get frequencies you'd need to do a Fourier analysis. Each sample is an instantaneous value of the electrical signal. They don't exactly record amplitude, because that refers to entire waves rather than a single point in time, but amplitude is a lot closer to correct than frequency.
In digital recording, we're taking quantized samples of an analog phenomenon at regular intervals.
Unless it was a digital source to begin with, like keyboards or electronic drums. I'd like to see an audio format support MIDI in parallel with the digitized samples within the same file. You might only have to worry about the audio compression for three of the parts, rather than five, or maybe even better for pop music.
Vista does seem to handle high-load situations better than XP (which quite frankly, sucked at dealing with them.)
That will arrive just in time to not matter, as the new computers that come with Vista will nearly all have dual-core chips.
That said, I personally (although I expect that others feel differently) find Aero to be so-so... it's got several cool effects, but I actually ended up turning it off when I got sick of it.
I'm looking forward to seeing what IDE designers do with it. When you're tracing a procedure call, zooming through the calling code into the called (and being able to manually back out of a 3D representation of the call stack to examine where you came from) could be a big help.
I once sat down and calculated an estimate how much my life expectancy is shortened because of terrorist bombings. I don't remember what exact value I came up with, but I remember that I concluded I had just wasted more time doing the calculation.
Does that mean the terrorists have already won?
And how can a company that spends $6+B per year on R&D have so little to show for it? There's easily $5B per year that can be extracted there, and to be perfectly reasonable, nearly all of it could be eliminated. It doesn't take $6B per year to copy Apple.
Microsoft doesn't really spend $6 billion on R&D. That number includes basically all software development.
If you like pulled beef, you can throw it in a crock pot with a little vinegar and water on low for around 12 hours. Let it cool off, put it in a big bowl and sit down to watch TV while you pull it with your bare hands (wash), mix it with barbeque sauce or something more interesting (I like a mix of Frank's Red Hot, mesquite liquid smoke and red wine vinegar), and eat it on pita bread.
Actually smoking for 12 hours would be better, of course, but that takes more equipment.
And to the poster below: Alton Brown is a TV chef. Has he ever even had a restaurant?
I don't know where he came up, but no. He was trained as a TV producer first, and then went to culinary school after he decided that he could do a better job at a cooking show than what he was seeing on TV. I've learned an awful lot from Good Eats, but I don't often use his recipes.
This would be an excellent candidate for a user mode driver, which requires no signing.
You may be right, but I'm not sure we're talking about the same sort of signing. A user mode driver won't bring down the system, but if a device works with the audio on a PC, how is Windows going to know that it won't just copy stuff wholesale? If Microsoft doesn't require DRM audits for that sort of thing, it seems like they're opening a big hole. I suppose the media companies could just sue to block the publication of anything like that that they hear about, under the DMCA...
It is certainly possible to make copying content nearly impossible for *most* people in *most* situations with a combination of hardware and software.
Until they were banned under the DMCA, you could go into Best Buy and pay about $40 for software that would make a copy of any DVD for you, with CSS removed. This would be a little trickier for the user with DRM built into the computer, but not much. All they would see is that you have to boot to the CD once (so that it can disable the Windows DRM support while Windows isn't running to prevent it), and then go back to your regular Windows use.
Beyond that, if Windows isn't actually preventing access to the files, you could just download a different media player program that didn't pay any attention to DRM restrictions. That wouldn't take much effort on the part of the user, or much computer knowledge.
Well, I would say that the VAST majority of people can't write device drivers to begin with, nor would they want to.
On their own, probably not, but it raises the barrier to entry for small companies that want to make hardware, especially innovative hardware, and especially hardware that works with the audio or video systems.
For instance, I have a Line6 GuitarPort on my computer. You plug it into the computer via the audio plug and USB, and you plug headphones (or speakers) and a guitar into it. It intercepts the computer's audio and processes the guitar signal (I believe with help from the CPU), combines them into the final output, and makes the processed guitar sound available to recording programs. If that has to be audited by Microsoft to ensure it doesn't interfere with DRM, that's going to be a big and expensive job, of which not a small part will be just getting them to understand what it's basically doing.
Nevertheless, how is this different from other forms of licensing? In order to make an iPod accessory, I have to pay Apple. In order to make a Playstation controller (or game, for that matter) I have to pay Sony. Is this any different?
No, it isn't any different, and that's a problem. The comparisons you're making are to consumer electronics, not general-purpose computers. Personal computers have historically been very open to tinkering, which is how many technologists (programmers in particular, of course) get started; if you interfere with that, you're risking damaging the electronics and computer industries to help the much smaller entertainment industry.
This is an entirely different topic. I'm pro-DRM, and anti-DRM laws.
That was the point of the "everything has to play by the same rules" section, though. DRM really has no hope of working without laws backing it up.
That's really not true at all. You can build your own machine, get one with Linux, or format it on arrival.
As long as the hardware isn't checking for a signed operating system, sure (there have been plans to do that, but I don't know what's become of them). Anyway, *I* could probably do it, but your average person on the street really doesn't have a practical option of using Linux at home when they're using Windows at work. That's just too much to learn and remember when computers are not your job.
You must be single. :)
Or have kids who are always using the TV or doing homework in the living room when you're home.
Yes, probably. I was just objecting to "watching a movie on a computer screen sucks."
If you did this with video, I don't think that many users would care that they couldn't play the video on their computer, because watching a movie on a computer screen sucks.
Um, no. If I'm watching a movie by myself, I use my computer, even if no one else is home. The computer looks better because you're closer, and the DVD menus are much easier to navigate with a mouse.
There are a select few installations that still allow drinking on post at 18 by soldiers...Fort Bliss is one that I know of, and I believe there are a few others near the Mexican border.
Not just by soldiers, unless it's changed lately. My wife (now 31) could drink at 18 at Fort Huachuca (Arizona, around Tucson) when her father was stationed there and her family lived on base. She looked about 14 at the time, but she had a military ID.