I love, love, love CD Baby. I really, really do. They are what a label in the 21st century ought to be. The cut they take is perfectly fair, they give you all kinds of tips to help you sell your stuff, and really they just provide the store-front and a way to get your stuff into as many net-storefronts as possible, and they just keep doing more and more about this. I get 62.5 cents per iTunes purchase, several times more than any big-label band would get, regardless of how many I sell. I mean, working with them is SO SWEET. You can download your sales as a spreadsheet, something I do to make sure I'm paid up on my cover songs' licensing deals.
CD Baby is fuckin' rad, man. They should be the only label any musician should even consider.
It's hard enough to make money with music without some fucking label assraping you for every dime you "cost" them.
There are a lot of dialogs for configuration that need to be there that Gnome doesn't have. What bothers me most about Gnome is that this seems to be a conscious decision on the part of Gnome: They don't want too many config options, because they're afraid of confusing people.
I hit this every time I use Gnome, too. I can think of no other desktop environment so limited in its capabilities. Even OSX's conscious decisions to limit config (e.g. not allowing skins) is generally with things that aren't part of the core user experience; things like pointer sensitivity and desktop resolution that I can't find anywhere in Gnome are there as they should be.
Either they aren't there, or they're buried so deep I can't find them after 10 minutes of looking.
We did not have "faith" (religious/blind faith), no. In fact, we kept trying to poke holes in those theories. Science isn't "truth", it's observation and formulating descriptions of those observations.
If I understand you correctly, you define all religious faith to be blind faith -- faith without evidence, and all non-religious faith to be not blind faith, faith that only exists in the face of clear proof. This does ensure that your conclusion will follow from your premises, no doubt! The question is, what factual basis and evidence do you have for these assertions?
In my experience, I have seen plenty of scientists hold onto their theories in the face of the facts, with blind faith. And I have known many people of faith who alter their beliefs as they learn new things. I may be wrong, and I'm certainly wrong most of the time, but I think that blind faith is a flaw of all humans, and that a healthy skepticism does not require one to disavow God.
What you felt wasn't God. It was a purely naturalistic event which has in fact been explained by scientists already. You only think you "felt the presence of God", but you didn't really.
I'm somewhat surprised that you know so much about what I experienced given the limited description I gave of it, but I'll take your word for it. I would be very interested in reading about this research. Would you care to share it with me?
Remember how Newtonian physics gave way to quantum physics? Newtonian physics was our truth until we experienced something that disproved them. We had faith that Newtonian physics would describe the behavior of everything, even things we hadn't seen. Did we give up when it failed at the subatomic level? Of course not. We re-described everything in a way that explained everything we had seen so far. We now apply quantum physics to describe the interactions of particles, having faith that it will continue to work even as we go deeper.
For me, my belief in God's existence does have evidence.
I myself, while in fine physical and mental health, with no one around to tell me what I should feel or that I should expect a feeling, no strange diet or drugs or anything, have physically felt the presence of God. Other Christians have shared their experiences with me, and have had similar experiences. My atheist girlfriend felt it; she simply did not interpret it to be the Christian idea of God (which she's not familiar with, anyway), but found it no less spiritual. It's my opinion that we have had the same experience, and interpret it different ways.
Re-read the summary. This began because the Red Cross began starting to sell the logo, a logo that they do not own. J&J has every right to complain and be upset about this, and it's a statement of the ridiculousness of modern "intellectual property" law that after 120 years of peaceful coexistence, the Red Cross could provoke this.
The reason they can do it is not because they have a tenable legal position, but because they know that if they go to trial, most people will have the same knee-jerk reaction you had, and thus they can get away with it.
Read the summary again. If it's accurate, then this whole thing started because the ARC started asking health/first aid manufacturers to pony up money for the right to use the Red Cross symbol, presumably including J&J.
J&J has every right to cry "foul!" if they've used it first, but even beyond that, where's the sense in asking for money now, 120 years after both have used the symbol without any problems? Ultimately, that's the real sign of the times, of how insane this whole "intellectual property" culture has become in the USA, that a 120-year-old international symbol for a hit point boost has become something to fight over.
Guided -- Resize Master and use freed space Guided -- Use the entire disk Guided -- Use the largest continuous free space Manual
Is that precisely what it says? If not, ignore the rest of the post below.
I -do- know a few things about partitioning, and I've installed more Linux and dual-boot systems than I can remember. I also have had to do tech support, from getting Mom's email working on up to helping resolve an issue with a customer who happens to be a Fortune 500 company.
Why not add some explanation to the options this way:
Guided -- Resize Master and use freed space. This will preserve your old system, and allow you to boot into both Ubuntu and the old system. Guided -- Use the entire disk. This will destroy everything on your hard drive and install Ubuntu over it. Guided -- Use the largest continuous free space. Honestly, I don't know exactly what this means; does this mean a new partition is created, or is it referring to un-partitioned free space? This should be re-written to specify exactly which it means. Manual. Only select this if you are experienced with creating disk partitions, or have unusual requirements.
There is always room for clarity. Do you think that would help make the options more clear to average users? How else could we make the options more clear?
I never claimed SCIM didn't do that. Why attack an argument I haven't made?
The problem isn't that SCIM doesn't function. It's that miniscule reductions in the number of keystrokes affect everything the user does. The impact of subtle differences is terrible. The difference in the usability of SCIM versus NJStar is not subtle. Worse, there are a handful of people in the world with the expertise required to make a Simplified Chinese IME really, really good; it's not just something some coder who writes Chinese can do. It's going to take such an expert with an awful lot of expertise a long time to bring SCIM even up to the mediocre standards of OSX's IME; bringing it in line with NJStar is probably too much to ask, but absolutely required to make Linux competitive with Windows.
When people who hate Microsoft like my in-laws do end up booting to Windows any time they want to write a short e-mail, then you know that SCIM is not doing the job it's supposed to.
If everyone in the Linux community took the "It's just fine, all your problems are imaginary" attitude you demonstrate here, well, then Microsoft would deserve to rule China and the world, and Linux wouldn't deserve to run on a goddamned toaster oven.
Suppose someone just handed you an OS and said, "It's awesome, does everything you want and totally legally free, but you have to hit vowels twice before they'll appear on screen." Sure, it works, but would you use it?
The tough thing for a Chinese IME -- and the one thing that Windows' does better than any other -- is to show, for a given pinyin, the character the typist most likely wants. Some of this is determined by common usage ("le" had damned well better bring up "?" first, for example), and some by context. And if it fails to pick what you intend, it better be quick to find the one you want. Think of all the UI studies that count motions and keystrokes. Now multiply that by every word on every page.
This is the problem Linux faces in winning Chinese converts.*
Chinese Windows users are used to typing a certain amount to get words to display. If SCIM requires more keystrokes for the same paragraph of text, it is not good enough.
* Well, that and the QQ videoconferencing support thing...
Right, and that was my point exactly: Even though they themselves can't stand it, the Chinese IME, QQ support and fonts are so horrible in Linux, that it's basically unusable.
My in-laws are Chinese, and they can't stand Microsoft. The wife won't even put money into a mutual fund if she knows Microsoft's in it. Father-in-law can't stand 'em, either, and both have tried several different versions of Linux. I personally find Windows irritating to deal with, and use OSX and Linux exclusively.
But they all came back to Windows, because there are Windows input methods and word processors for Simplified and Traditional Chinese that kick the pants off of anything available for Linux. The wife doesn't even care so much for Mac OSX compared to the one for Windows. And the fonts for Simplified Chinese in Fedora are mediocre at best, and awful at worst. Looking at a Google.cn search in Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04 is hideous even to my untrained eyes -- you see many characters missing, and the characters that are there look like a mish-mash of multiple fonts.
So, if you care about this issue, this is what needs to happen.
Go check out NJStar on Windows. Make something like that for Linux, but better.
Go check out how the Windows Simplified Chinese works, and put that there.
And steal some decent fonts for Linux and make sure your favorite distro has 'em.
This is one of those times where we need to recognize that the better product won. And the only thing for us to do is to make ours better.
Remember the old days of Ma Bell, before Bell was broken up by the government? You may be too young. Back then, the only way to buy a telephone was through Bell. You couldn't just drop into Target or Wal-Mart, grab one of a large selection of phones of various styles, take it home and plug it in. You had to buy it through Bell, and what you got was cheaply-made, only had essential dialing functions, and costed a fortune.
The cell phone carriers are a heavily-regulated (and essentially government-sponsored) oligopoly. If you want to sell a cell phone, you can't sell it directly to consumers. Instead, each carrier will give you specific requirements for you to meet and a way to lock your phone so that it only works with their network. Just like in the bad old days of Ma Bell.
Elsewhere, such as Japan, you buy whatever phone you want directly from the handset manufacturer, plug in a SIM card, and enjoy what you bought.
There's really no need for these patronising quotation marks. I'm a 45 year old electronics engineer - I was designing digital audio systems when you were still a zygote.
I'm sorry that you found those quotation marks patronizing; as we are on a public forum, those were for the benefit of the laymen who would possibly wander across our discussion.
So you were designing digital audio systems when you were eleven years old, you say? That's impressive. I'm surprised that someone with such vast experience would write what you did in the post you did, because with your many years of experience you surely must be aware that one need not be able to hear a 22kHz waveform to be able to hear distortion -- or miss what's been cut off by a low-pass filter -- on a CD.
You knew better, but you posted it anyway. Shame on you.
Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz? Or noise components below -96dB? CDs may have poor sound in practice for all sorts of reasons, but the basic sampling of the analogue original is not one of them. Careless, thoughtless production and over-processing I can all too readily believe in, but not problems with the essential theory at the heart of it.
Your argument is based on the assumption that a CD can sample any random waveform up to and including 22.050 kHz accurately.
On that topic, I'd like to introduce you to two terms: "Phase" and "Aliasing."
In order for a CD to accurately capture a waveform at 22.050 kHz, the waveform has to be perfectly in phase with the sampling. If the waveform is out of phase, instead of being sampled at the peaks of the wave, it gets sample at mid-points of the wave.
What's more, any wave between 11,025 Hz and 22,050 Hz is going to have peaks that are in-between samples. Instead, you don't quite get the soundwave you had originally; peaks are clipped and entirely new frequencies are introduced. The peaks are also out of phase with the sample rate at most points and only occasionally in the neighborhood of where they should be.
All of this creates what's called "aliasing."
If you're only listening to electronic crap, you'll never notice. If you listen to string music or rock 'n' roll, with all of the high frequencies in there, you'll notice.
I was transferring some old rock cassette tapes (AC/DC's "Who Made Who" and Sammy Hagar's "Unboxed") to my hard drive a few months back -- freaking cassette tapes, mind you, not even vinyl -- and I was completely astonished how much better these two tapes sounded than every other rock CD I own -- including all of the stuff made before CDs had dynamic compression out the wazoo. And the difference was clear; the CDs all either have a distortion that sounds exactly like the noise you hear in an 8kHz sample, but at a much higher frequency, or those frequencies simply don't exist because they've been filtered out.
I'm not sure if the parent post saw the article or not, but the observation is spot on. I saw the little tease about "forgotten facts in the open" and clicked the link to find those, only to see "OMGWTFPONIEZ GARTNER WAS PAYED BY MICRO$OFT!" for paragraph after paragraph.
I'm an anti-Microsoft zealot, but I like to think I'm an anti-Microsoft zealot based on a preponderance of evidence which suggests that their domination of the software industry has a negative impact on it, not a hysterical emotional anti-Microsoft zealot.
Yeah, you don't get that great bass drum Thud or bass boom without compressing them. Compression of vocals is needed since most vocalists suck -- same reason they use auto-tuners now, as well.
As for mastering, that's pretty close to the truth; one uses dynamic compression in the mastering process is because the average sound system has poor frequency response and dynamic range, and on different systems different voices get "lost" if you leave the full dynamic range in. So for popular music, it makes sense to add compression so that people listening on crap equipment can hear everything.
For classical music, on the other hand, you expect to capture the full dynamic range, and leave it to the listener to go buy a set of Meridian DSP8000's so that you don't have to compress anything.
"Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want,"
If I'm not mistaken, thats the whole idea of freedom of speech right?
Nope, you're not mistaken. The whole idea of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech that is offensive, for whatever reason, because no one's interested in restricting speech that's inoffensive.
What a Revolutionary idea.
The goal of course is not just to have freedom of speech but freedom after speech. You know, because you can say whatever you want in China, but you might lose your freedom afterwards.:)
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I just wanted to say something about CD Baby.
I love, love, love CD Baby. I really, really do. They are what a label in the 21st century ought to be. The cut they take is perfectly fair, they give you all kinds of tips to help you sell your stuff, and really they just provide the store-front and a way to get your stuff into as many net-storefronts as possible, and they just keep doing more and more about this. I get 62.5 cents per iTunes purchase, several times more than any big-label band would get, regardless of how many I sell. I mean, working with them is SO SWEET. You can download your sales as a spreadsheet, something I do to make sure I'm paid up on my cover songs' licensing deals.
CD Baby is fuckin' rad, man. They should be the only label any musician should even consider.
It's hard enough to make money with music without some fucking label assraping you for every dime you "cost" them.
There are a lot of dialogs for configuration that need to be there that Gnome doesn't have. What bothers me most about Gnome is that this seems to be a conscious decision on the part of Gnome: They don't want too many config options, because they're afraid of confusing people.
I hit this every time I use Gnome, too. I can think of no other desktop environment so limited in its capabilities. Even OSX's conscious decisions to limit config (e.g. not allowing skins) is generally with things that aren't part of the core user experience; things like pointer sensitivity and desktop resolution that I can't find anywhere in Gnome are there as they should be.
Either they aren't there, or they're buried so deep I can't find them after 10 minutes of looking.
If I understand you correctly, you define all religious faith to be blind faith -- faith without evidence, and all non-religious faith to be not blind faith, faith that only exists in the face of clear proof. This does ensure that your conclusion will follow from your premises, no doubt! The question is, what factual basis and evidence do you have for these assertions?
In my experience, I have seen plenty of scientists hold onto their theories in the face of the facts, with blind faith. And I have known many people of faith who alter their beliefs as they learn new things. I may be wrong, and I'm certainly wrong most of the time, but I think that blind faith is a flaw of all humans, and that a healthy skepticism does not require one to disavow God.
I'm somewhat surprised that you know so much about what I experienced given the limited description I gave of it, but I'll take your word for it. I would be very interested in reading about this research. Would you care to share it with me?
Remember how Newtonian physics gave way to quantum physics? Newtonian physics was our truth until we experienced something that disproved them. We had faith that Newtonian physics would describe the behavior of everything, even things we hadn't seen. Did we give up when it failed at the subatomic level? Of course not. We re-described everything in a way that explained everything we had seen so far. We now apply quantum physics to describe the interactions of particles, having faith that it will continue to work even as we go deeper.
For me, my belief in God's existence does have evidence.
I myself, while in fine physical and mental health, with no one around to tell me what I should feel or that I should expect a feeling, no strange diet or drugs or anything, have physically felt the presence of God. Other Christians have shared their experiences with me, and have had similar experiences. My atheist girlfriend felt it; she simply did not interpret it to be the Christian idea of God (which she's not familiar with, anyway), but found it no less spiritual. It's my opinion that we have had the same experience, and interpret it different ways.
That's particularly true in Stillwater in the Summer, when baseball season's over and football season hasn't started yet.
Re-read the summary. This began because the Red Cross began starting to sell the logo, a logo that they do not own. J&J has every right to complain and be upset about this, and it's a statement of the ridiculousness of modern "intellectual property" law that after 120 years of peaceful coexistence, the Red Cross could provoke this.
The reason they can do it is not because they have a tenable legal position, but because they know that if they go to trial, most people will have the same knee-jerk reaction you had, and thus they can get away with it.
Read the summary again. If it's accurate, then this whole thing started because the ARC started asking health/first aid manufacturers to pony up money for the right to use the Red Cross symbol, presumably including J&J.
J&J has every right to cry "foul!" if they've used it first, but even beyond that, where's the sense in asking for money now, 120 years after both have used the symbol without any problems? Ultimately, that's the real sign of the times, of how insane this whole "intellectual property" culture has become in the USA, that a 120-year-old international symbol for a hit point boost has become something to fight over.
Is that precisely what it says? If not, ignore the rest of the post below.
I -do- know a few things about partitioning, and I've installed more Linux and dual-boot systems than I can remember. I also have had to do tech support, from getting Mom's email working on up to helping resolve an issue with a customer who happens to be a Fortune 500 company.
Why not add some explanation to the options this way:
Guided -- Resize Master and use freed space. This will preserve your old system, and allow you to boot into both Ubuntu and the old system.
Guided -- Use the entire disk. This will destroy everything on your hard drive and install Ubuntu over it.
Guided -- Use the largest continuous free space.
Honestly, I don't know exactly what this means; does this mean a new partition is created, or is it referring to un-partitioned free space? This should be re-written to specify exactly which it means.
Manual. Only select this if you are experienced with creating disk partitions, or have unusual requirements.
There is always room for clarity. Do you think that would help make the options more clear to average users? How else could we make the options more clear?
If you're entering a whole page of text, you'll do it in fewer keystrokes with NJStar than with SCIM.
It just predicts which character you want better than anything else out there. So I've been told by my wife. And who would argue with his wife?
I never claimed SCIM didn't do that. Why attack an argument I haven't made?
The problem isn't that SCIM doesn't function. It's that miniscule reductions in the number of keystrokes affect everything the user does. The impact of subtle differences is terrible. The difference in the usability of SCIM versus NJStar is not subtle. Worse, there are a handful of people in the world with the expertise required to make a Simplified Chinese IME really, really good; it's not just something some coder who writes Chinese can do. It's going to take such an expert with an awful lot of expertise a long time to bring SCIM even up to the mediocre standards of OSX's IME; bringing it in line with NJStar is probably too much to ask, but absolutely required to make Linux competitive with Windows.
When people who hate Microsoft like my in-laws do end up booting to Windows any time they want to write a short e-mail, then you know that SCIM is not doing the job it's supposed to.
If everyone in the Linux community took the "It's just fine, all your problems are imaginary" attitude you demonstrate here, well, then Microsoft would deserve to rule China and the world, and Linux wouldn't deserve to run on a goddamned toaster oven.
Suppose someone just handed you an OS and said, "It's awesome, does everything you want and totally legally free, but you have to hit vowels twice before they'll appear on screen." Sure, it works, but would you use it?
The tough thing for a Chinese IME -- and the one thing that Windows' does better than any other -- is to show, for a given pinyin, the character the typist most likely wants. Some of this is determined by common usage ("le" had damned well better bring up "?" first, for example), and some by context. And if it fails to pick what you intend, it better be quick to find the one you want. Think of all the UI studies that count motions and keystrokes. Now multiply that by every word on every page.
This is the problem Linux faces in winning Chinese converts.*
Chinese Windows users are used to typing a certain amount to get words to display. If SCIM requires more keystrokes for the same paragraph of text, it is not good enough.
* Well, that and the QQ videoconferencing support thing...
Right, and that was my point exactly: Even though they themselves can't stand it, the Chinese IME, QQ support and fonts are so horrible in Linux, that it's basically unusable.
But they all came back to Windows, because there are Windows input methods and word processors for Simplified and Traditional Chinese that kick the pants off of anything available for Linux. The wife doesn't even care so much for Mac OSX compared to the one for Windows. And the fonts for Simplified Chinese in Fedora are mediocre at best, and awful at worst. Looking at a Google.cn search in Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04 is hideous even to my untrained eyes -- you see many characters missing, and the characters that are there look like a mish-mash of multiple fonts.
So, if you care about this issue, this is what needs to happen.
This is one of those times where we need to recognize that the better product won. And the only thing for us to do is to make ours better.
Remember the old days of Ma Bell, before Bell was broken up by the government? You may be too young. Back then, the only way to buy a telephone was through Bell. You couldn't just drop into Target or Wal-Mart, grab one of a large selection of phones of various styles, take it home and plug it in. You had to buy it through Bell, and what you got was cheaply-made, only had essential dialing functions, and costed a fortune.
The cell phone carriers are a heavily-regulated (and essentially government-sponsored) oligopoly. If you want to sell a cell phone, you can't sell it directly to consumers. Instead, each carrier will give you specific requirements for you to meet and a way to lock your phone so that it only works with their network. Just like in the bad old days of Ma Bell.
Elsewhere, such as Japan, you buy whatever phone you want directly from the handset manufacturer, plug in a SIM card, and enjoy what you bought.
Ditto.
Dreamcast immediately came to my mind upon reading the summary.
The June numbers include the first week of July.
So the week-per-week sales went down from 21,000 for the 4 weeks of May down to 20,000 for the 5 weeks of June + July.
I'm sorry that you found those quotation marks patronizing; as we are on a public forum, those were for the benefit of the laymen who would possibly wander across our discussion.
So you were designing digital audio systems when you were eleven years old, you say? That's impressive. I'm surprised that someone with such vast experience would write what you did in the post you did, because with your many years of experience you surely must be aware that one need not be able to hear a 22kHz waveform to be able to hear distortion -- or miss what's been cut off by a low-pass filter -- on a CD.
You knew better, but you posted it anyway. Shame on you.
Your argument is based on the assumption that a CD can sample any random waveform up to and including 22.050 kHz accurately.
On that topic, I'd like to introduce you to two terms: "Phase" and "Aliasing."
In order for a CD to accurately capture a waveform at 22.050 kHz, the waveform has to be perfectly in phase with the sampling. If the waveform is out of phase, instead of being sampled at the peaks of the wave, it gets sample at mid-points of the wave.
What's more, any wave between 11,025 Hz and 22,050 Hz is going to have peaks that are in-between samples. Instead, you don't quite get the soundwave you had originally; peaks are clipped and entirely new frequencies are introduced. The peaks are also out of phase with the sample rate at most points and only occasionally in the neighborhood of where they should be.
All of this creates what's called "aliasing."
If you're only listening to electronic crap, you'll never notice. If you listen to string music or rock 'n' roll, with all of the high frequencies in there, you'll notice.
I was transferring some old rock cassette tapes (AC/DC's "Who Made Who" and Sammy Hagar's "Unboxed") to my hard drive a few months back -- freaking cassette tapes, mind you, not even vinyl -- and I was completely astonished how much better these two tapes sounded than every other rock CD I own -- including all of the stuff made before CDs had dynamic compression out the wazoo. And the difference was clear; the CDs all either have a distortion that sounds exactly like the noise you hear in an 8kHz sample, but at a much higher frequency, or those frequencies simply don't exist because they've been filtered out.
Because it's better than Norway!
Why wouldn't the court do so?
Judges live to do just this sort of thing: Stand up for the "little guy" against the "big bully."
I'm not sure if the parent post saw the article or not, but the observation is spot on. I saw the little tease about "forgotten facts in the open" and clicked the link to find those, only to see "OMGWTFPONIEZ GARTNER WAS PAYED BY MICRO$OFT!" for paragraph after paragraph.
I'm an anti-Microsoft zealot, but I like to think I'm an anti-Microsoft zealot based on a preponderance of evidence which suggests that their domination of the software industry has a negative impact on it, not a hysterical emotional anti-Microsoft zealot.
Funny you'd mention that.
I'm surprised that no one seems to have noticed that there were three parties to the WWDC announcement... EA, Apple and Transgaming.
In other words, EA isn't porting anything. They're releasing the games on top of Cider for the Mac.
Yeah, you don't get that great bass drum Thud or bass boom without compressing them. Compression of vocals is needed since most vocalists suck -- same reason they use auto-tuners now, as well.
As for mastering, that's pretty close to the truth; one uses dynamic compression in the mastering process is because the average sound system has poor frequency response and dynamic range, and on different systems different voices get "lost" if you leave the full dynamic range in. So for popular music, it makes sense to add compression so that people listening on crap equipment can hear everything.
For classical music, on the other hand, you expect to capture the full dynamic range, and leave it to the listener to go buy a set of Meridian DSP8000's so that you don't have to compress anything.
It makes a good double whammy for the article, and the effect in both cases is that sound quality degrades.
Nope, you're not mistaken. The whole idea of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech that is offensive, for whatever reason, because no one's interested in restricting speech that's inoffensive.
What a Revolutionary idea.
The goal of course is not just to have freedom of speech but freedom after speech. You know, because you can say whatever you want in China, but you might lose your freedom afterwards.