Yes... and no. It depends. Maybe. No way to predict it reliably for each geographic location. Frankly, for better or for worse (and just for the record, I think IPv6 rocks; I like it)... that's not likely to happen for the vast majority of small-to-medium-sized private networks. Not if they're working fine now. You might can make a little money helping people go IPv6 on the Internet, but that's about it.
Our facilities are a case in point. We have so much IPv4 stuff, including licensed microwave links that have never heard of IPv6, that we're just not in a hurry. Our 12 broadcast studios use an audio-over-IP system that's IPv4 (with no way to upgrade). All of my remote controls systems, transmitters, satellite receivers and other equipment are IPv4. We need to get a return on that substantial investment before we can even think about replacing it.
We could do a mixed IPv4/IPv6 network, but why bother? It works, don't fix it. We will buy IPv6-ready equipment whenever possible, but here's the real rub: there ain't a lot of it available, not for what we need. (I've been looking for 2 years, since I first heard about IPv6. If you go to a typical equipment manufacturer's Website and search for "IPv6," you won't even get a HIT. "No results found.").
I'm going to ensure we can still do that Internet-thingie (which means that we'll need some IPv6 work there, including IPv6 static IPs and DNS "AAAA" records), but our in-house network is fine the way it is.
I doubt very seriously that I'm the only one saying this, either. Consultants who expect to become wealthy in the next two years helping people with their "IPv6 Migration Strategies" are going to be disappointed. That's my prediction.:)
Right. I'm no fan of GoDaddy, and I think SOPA is one of the worst pieces of legislation to come along in a while. But here's the problem: if someone is doing "wrong," and then changes their mind -- even if that change of mind is obviously grudging and insincere -- how are we supposed to respond?
As an analogy, a million years ago when I working in customer service (consumer electronics), my manager told me something I've never forgotten. The customer who calls to complain, and who says, "I've always used you in the past, but I'm disappointed and I hope you'll make this right," got whatever we could give them. We bent over backwards to make them happy, up to and including giving them a replacement for their original purchase.
BUT... the customer who calls, threatening, and who says, "I'll never buy your junk again and if you don't refund my money I'll write [insert name of authority or media outlet] and [insert random legal threat], you bunch of [insert random profanity].... " we would do precisely what we had to, and no more.
(Yes, we considered the fact that the poor customer was upset, and that maybe we could "win them back," but once it became obvious that the customer couldn't be satisfied no matter what we did, we stopped trying, too.)
Like I said, I'm not a fan of GoDaddy. Not at all. But continuing to punish them after they've backed off of an unpopular decision may not be the best course of action.
Just my opinion, and you know what those are worth. (Precisely what you pay for them.):)
> Jus being able to refine ballistic tables could have made WWI much more lethal.
Exactly. Like I said, though, the big problem was the attitudes back then. We easily make the mistake of assuming that people back then thought like we do nowadays. That's NOT the case. Look up that famous image of a young Adolf Hitler standing in the square when WWI was announced, hat waving in the air and cheering. Then look at that equally-famous image of Americans equally as thrilled when the US entered the war, cheering Woodrow Wilson.
Kind of frightening, really, if you were to give these people even just the technology that existed in WWII -- real fighter planes, aircraft carriers, submarines, better calculators for targeting, and so on.
And by the way, I also ought to add... if Babbage HAD started a revolution that moved technology forward even just a few decades, WWI quite possibly wouldn't have been survivable for the species. There would have been pockets of civilization that survived with a hunter-gatherer or farming level of technology, but it would have been bad. VERY bad.
Think about it. Given the attitudes and mores of the time (and that's something else that most of us don't think about, by the way), if either side had had nukes (just to name one), much less truly accurate targeting "computers" and other innovations (or unmanned drones with nukes, sheesh!), it would have been an even greater bloodbath than it was.:/
Stephen Stirlings "Peshawar Lancers" has the British Empire move to India after an catastrophe, and they had an analytical engine as well. Eric Flint's alternate history might make better reading if you're postulating "what if." Flint covers "gearing down," because in order to make advanced technology, there's a logical procession. Many of the things that we take for granted are the result of incremental improvements and discoveries.
Simply put, there's no way to make the leap from a mechanical "analytical engine" OR a mechanical "difference calculator" even to to the original IBM PC. (Or for that matter, the first Z80-based 8 bit computers.)
There's no doubt that Babbage might have moved technology forward a few decades. But what you and I know of as "computers" nowadays are based on a number of discoveries, from physics (Quantam Theory, in particular) to electromagnetism to advanced fab technologies for silicon to you name it.
I love reading alternative history, but I prefer those that are realistic. If you and I were to find ourselves as the "Yankee In King Author's Court," we'd actually be frustrated more than anything else. There's so much technology that even our grandparents took for granted that wouldn't be available.
Just the ability to measure down to microns (and smaller) is vital when making a great deal of modern technology.
If price is all you care about, then you get what you pay for. McDonalds and Burger King have nice, cheap lunches... that will eventually kill you.
My ISP here in Alabama is Hiwaay Information Services. Yes, they charge about $10 more per month than ATT, but they're extremely reliable. When I have a problem, I speak to a local expert who actually knows what he or she is talking about. Y' gets what you pay for.
We can say that we oppose things like SOPA, but one of the most effective ways to prove it is to put your money where your mouth is. Support those businesses that are doing the "right" thing -- EVEN IF IT COSTS A BIT MORE.
Otherwise, when the day comes that the entire Internet is censored and controlled by powerful interests, you'll have no one but yourself to blame.
> all I can say is that life in rural areas just doesn't resemble life in the city
Exactly. Well said. The way I was raised in the rural south, we were around guns and responsible gun owners all the time. It was understood that guns were extremely dangerous *tools.* Any responsible parent would beat a dozen rules into the kid's head before he/she ever allowed the child to get near a gun: never, ever point that gun at someone, not even as a joke, not even if you're 100% sure it's unloaded. Always look twice before firing to make sure you know what you're shooting at.
Things are getting rough here north of Birmingham, AL, and for the first time in years, I've thought about owning a gun again. I asked my next door neighbor, who's a Birmingham Police officer, where to buy one, and we started chatting. He pulled out his Walther and handed it to me -- but NOT before he popped out the clip, checked the chamber, and so on. He did this automatically and without thinking; gun safety had been beaten into his head when he was a child.
In rural areas where people hunt regularly, in fact, there are several rights of passage: getting your driver's license and your first car. Your first kiss. Making the ball team at school.. ... and, when your parents judge you to be old enough and responsible enough, your first rifle.
It's the way you're raised. People who are afraid of guns think that people like me are backwoods hicks who live in the past. Fine; to me, people who have a knee-jerk, "ban all guns!" nanny-state mentality strike me as just plain silly.:)
Nothing personal. It's just the way I was raised. I'd never force you to own a gun, but don't ever tell me I shouldn't own one, either.
> hard knee setting, like a Universal Audio 1176LN?
As a general rule, NO professional tries to control *loudness* with a single-band limiter, whether it has a hard or soft knee. It just doesn't work. The key word in that last sentence is "loudness." Older compressor/limiter devices basically followed the envelope and tried to use that to estimate level. Modern digital processors crack the signal into a pile of discrete events and then make intelligent decisions on how much gain control to apply to each event. Achieving a high average-to-peak ratio is the goal in radio and TV, but without sounding objectionably distorted.
Remember that "loudness" is about as subjective as you can get. Granny with a $10 hearing aid with a half-dead battery might think that a jet airplane is only "moderately loud," where someone with very sensitive hearing might object to a level difference between program and commercials of only 6-10db (which sounds like a lot, but it's not). The ear isn't linear, either in the frequency or amplitude domains. Further, every ear is different.
The famous FM Loudness Curves are *averages* derived from testing a crowd of different people.
Sorry to wax so eloquent about this, but audio processing is one of my loves.:)
> a "smart" detector that not only examines peak amplitude, but also the AVERAGE.
A professional broadcast audio processor divides the audio into several different bands, then uses all sorts of proprietary algorithms to "decide" where and when to apply compression. The peak limiters are even more sophisticated: our Vorsis AirAura processor, for example, splits the audio into 31 different bands(!) and uses psychoacoustic masking to hide any generated artifacts. (For the curious: http://vorsis.com/audio-processors/airaura-digital-audio-processor.html) It is, without exception, one of the most amazing audio processors I've ever heard. When it's adjusted properly, it's a transparent as a piece of wire.
In radio, our product IS the audio. The sound. We want it ALL to be loud and clean, but we cannot overmodulate (i.e., "overdrive" the transmitter input).
The key, of course, is to ADJUST it properly. It takes a lot of work and patience. I consider it a specialty, and there are others (the corporate chief for Cumulus, Gary Klein, is considered something of a processing "guru" amongst my brethren). A small, unattended TV operation isn't going to devote the time and attention needed. A cable operator has neither the skill nor the personnel.
(Shoot, I've complained to some of our satellite network providers about widely varying audio levels. Some have admitted to me that they don't even have processing on the audio: it's straight from the mike into the uplink. With hundreds of channels, it would cost millions of dollars to put truly effective compression and limiting on each one, so they don't even bother.)
Then again... let me disclaim: I can't speak for the Cable people. I suspect that they calibrate their equipment when it's first installed and then never look at it again. It really, truly is automated -- their commercials are inserted automatically. That's why they make so many mistakes.:)
(Sorry, a little inter-species rivalry there ... . ):)
Can a broadcast engineer stick in his two cent's worth?
The problem isn't absolute levels, it's processing. Our own FM stations use processors (two Omnias and a Wheatstone/Vorsis) that cost over $12,000 EACH. They have support for European loudness limitations -- which are quite restrictive -- built in. Similar processors are available for television. So... technically, it wouldn't be a problem for us ..... IF we received the commercials in unadorned, unprocessed form. We don't.
Simply put, the people who produce the commercials are the ones who smash, squeeze, compress, clip and mangle the audio to make it sound like the Monster Truck man on an acid trip. My processor basically goes into bypass whenever one of these commercials comes along and it's STILL too loud.
The poster who thinks that we (meaning broadcasters) "turn up" the commercials is wrong, too, by the way. Most of that is automated now, and/or goes through the aforementioned processing. Even our live music stations with a "deejay" in the control room are typically automated now: the computer pauses when it's time for the show host to talk, then goes back into automation when they're done.
As a communications engineer, I can attest that towers and transmitter buildings cost money. (Tower crews, just to name one expense, charge thousands of dollars per day now -- just relamping a 200-300' tower can cost well over a grand.) So... the PHBs at all of the wireless providers are constantly faced with a terrible choice: do they spend the $$$$ to improve their coverage, or try to grab customers with bells and whistles?
There's a REASON why so many wireless ads started pushing fancy phones, built-in cameras and the ability to send movies to one another. They figure that if they can grab customers with features instead of actually investing in more capacity, they're ahead of the game.
The old saying, "first, kill all the lawyers" needs to be updated for the new millennium. I propose, "first, banish all PHBs to a remote island and force them to live with their own products as punishment."
If you read the fine print in your contract, you'll probably find that the $20 a month was an "introductory" offer. They're notorious for that -- and in fairness, they're by no means the only provider that does it.
This. Here's a quick example from my own experience. It might seem unrelated, but it's similar: back when Daddy Reagan was President, the first big deregulation of broadcasting occurred. I had just passed the test and had gotten my FCC First Class Phone license -- and it was turned into a pretty wall hanging. Operators were no longer required, any class of license could work on a transmitter, yadda, yadda. Many of the PHBs who ran radio stations trimmed their (licensed and trained) engineering staff. Didn't need 'em anymore. Fast forward a few years... and all of a sudden, I started getting calls again. "Hey, we keep going off the air and Bozo here can't figger it out...":)
Moral: the PHBs will always believe the line that they can blow up and trim staff until things start falling apart and they're forced to hire at least a few people. (In my own industry, as I write this, Clear Channel has laid off a LOT of people. It goes in cycles.)
As for open source costing jobs... NO. It moves them around is all. Small to medium enterprises like ours now do a lot MORE stuff in house. We build our own servers in house and maintain them ourselves. We hired a guy just to make sure our Websites looked slick and eye-candyish. So I can categorically state that in our case, at least, it has ENHANCED employment.
Sure, one incidental case doesn't prove anything, but even if the OP has figgers, I doubt the situation is as dismal as you might believe from reading the headline. Some jobs may be lost, but others will be hired. Things change; y' learns to change with 'em, and you'll have a job.:)
> you don't verify identity, you verify transactions.
I'll Google Schneier's proposal. I was thinking about something like that this morning, only for online transactions. I mean, it can't be all THAT deep, can it? I know it'll cost and it'll slow down the speed of transactions, but... well, the way I look at it, 100 years ago, you either paid in person and/or signed a contract, or you didn't get what you wanted. I know we can't go back to that now, not unless we want to wreck e-commerce and online records in general.
But honestly... why couldn't someone at least send me a quick email or text that says, "Joe Schmo wants to withdraw $500 from your bank account," or "Dr. Whazzup is looking at your medical records?"
We have the technology to do it.
Thanks for that. I'll take a look at Schneier's idea.
It's not a government vs. private sector thing, either. The simple fact is, you will always be able to find some corruptible person who's will to sell (or "leak," if he/she is just trying to harm a rival) information.
I'm a geek and I loves me some technology, but still, I'm not blind to the dangers of giant databases filled with sensitive data And to be honest, I itch at the thought that anyone -- be it the federal government (with the Affordable Health Care Act) or private business (think of some large, national hospital group) has access to all of my medical records -- including prescriptions, diagnoses, and all the rest of it.
But I don't know what the answer is. Someone smarter than me will have to come up with that.
> If you're so worried about the economy being wrecked, you ought to pay more attention to Wall Street's crimes and excesses...
I do. There you go, insisting on pushing me into a box so that you can label me and then dismiss my opinion. (Or, like I said, worst of all, call me a Republican, at which point you could just dismiss me and high five yourself in the mirror.):)
That's related to binary thinking, too. You MUST label anyone with whom you disagree, the better to dismiss them. "Ah, forget what he says, he's just a [insert label here]. Whaddaya expect from him?"
Off topic, but to give you an idea, I was pleasantly surprised and gratified that the ATT/T-Mobile merger may not happen. I'm sick and tired of monopolies.
(There's a point there that I could make about the topic at hand, but hey; it's the day after Thanksgiving and we still have pumpkin pie to be et, and frankly, that's more important to me.)
> We're still in the Great Recession, unemployment is still very high...
Absolutely! And this would be the worst possible time to attempt a forced move to alternative energy sources. That needs to be done gradually and with careful planning precise to avoid making the economy even worse than it already it.
You've done a marvelous job of stating the entire rationale behind Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'll give you credit for that.
But I'm old enough to remember the 1980's, when climatologists were warning that we were heading into another Ice Age -- once again, caused by Mean Old Mankind. (I won't say, "MOM," because she'd start whining.) The theory back then -- just as logically developed, step by step, was that particulates were blocking out the sun and would eventually cause temperatures to drop worldwide, on a large, averaged scale.
My skepticism may not have a PhD behind it, but it's based on many years of watching one crisis after another arise, only to be dismissed later (or more accurately, be quietly dropped -- without ceremony -- for the Next Newest Proof That Mankind Is Evil And Pookie(tm)). Example: I distinctly remember the claims, first made a couple of decades ago, that the rain forests in the tropics would disappear "within 10 years." They were based on sound math and science, too, too.
> That's like saying you won't believe anything from the field of advanced physics
Wrong, because their predictions are imminently testable and then falsified through experimentation. I'm an amateur cosmologist, in fact, and love reading as much as I can't understand about it.:)
I was speaking of using those experiments to SET PUBLIC POLICY. (An extremely important distinction.) Physicists don't do that, as a general rule.
> Understanding that mankind's release... of CO2... has contributed to global warming...
AH. There's the rub, and that's where you've failed to convince me. Or rather, you haven't convinced me that my CO2 emissions are the KEY cause of global warming.
What makes me really happy is that when I ask honest questions, I get an "appeal to authority" -- same as you see in the silly Creationist - vs - Evolutionist debates online. "Well, if it's good enough for most climate researchers, it should be good enough for you!"
Ummm... no, it's not. Go back to my original post: Particle physicists can demonstrate, repeatedly, how to make positrons and other extravagant particles in their accelerators. The AGW people HAVE NOT proven, to my satisfaction, that their argument is testable, falsifiable and a good foundation for public policy.
I wonder how many times my post will be modded down, then back up. Every time I post something like this, it's actually funny to watch how the numbers jump up and down. More fun than watching wrasslin' on TV.:)
Heh. Actually, no. Some years, Dr. Gray's predictions are fairly accurate. Others, they're worse than a shot in the dark. I have nothing but respect for Mssr. Gray, but even he admits that he's wrong as often as not.
That's a good point. Scientists can't even predict with repeatable, proven accuracy the NUMBER of hurricanes in a given season. And yet, AGW proponents not only want us to believe that mankind is causing global warming with our greenhouse gases, they refuse to consider other possibilities -- and want to put in place a draconian, central planning authority to "fight" it.
And best of all, they mod as "troll" anyone here on/. who even attempts to make an argument that might cause others to question their assertion.:)
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> make some big bucks ...
Yes ... and no. It depends. Maybe. No way to predict it reliably for each geographic location. Frankly, for better or for worse (and just for the record, I think IPv6 rocks; I like it) ... that's not likely to happen for the vast majority of small-to-medium-sized private networks. Not if they're working fine now. You might can make a little money helping people go IPv6 on the Internet, but that's about it.
Our facilities are a case in point. We have so much IPv4 stuff, including licensed microwave links that have never heard of IPv6, that we're just not in a hurry. Our 12 broadcast studios use an audio-over-IP system that's IPv4 (with no way to upgrade). All of my remote controls systems, transmitters, satellite receivers and other equipment are IPv4. We need to get a return on that substantial investment before we can even think about replacing it.
We could do a mixed IPv4/IPv6 network, but why bother? It works, don't fix it. We will buy IPv6-ready equipment whenever possible, but here's the real rub: there ain't a lot of it available, not for what we need. (I've been looking for 2 years, since I first heard about IPv6. If you go to a typical equipment manufacturer's Website and search for "IPv6," you won't even get a HIT. "No results found.").
I'm going to ensure we can still do that Internet-thingie (which means that we'll need some IPv6 work there, including IPv6 static IPs and DNS "AAAA" records), but our in-house network is fine the way it is.
I doubt very seriously that I'm the only one saying this, either. Consultants who expect to become wealthy in the next two years helping people with their "IPv6 Migration Strategies" are going to be disappointed. That's my prediction. :)
Right. I'm no fan of GoDaddy, and I think SOPA is one of the worst pieces of legislation to come along in a while. But here's the problem: if someone is doing "wrong," and then changes their mind -- even if that change of mind is obviously grudging and insincere -- how are we supposed to respond?
As an analogy, a million years ago when I working in customer service (consumer electronics), my manager told me something I've never forgotten. The customer who calls to complain, and who says, "I've always used you in the past, but I'm disappointed and I hope you'll make this right," got whatever we could give them. We bent over backwards to make them happy, up to and including giving them a replacement for their original purchase.
BUT ... the customer who calls, threatening, and who says, "I'll never buy your junk again and if you don't refund my money I'll write [insert name of authority or media outlet] and [insert random legal threat], you bunch of [insert random profanity] .. .. " we would do precisely what we had to, and no more.
(Yes, we considered the fact that the poor customer was upset, and that maybe we could "win them back," but once it became obvious that the customer couldn't be satisfied no matter what we did, we stopped trying, too.)
Like I said, I'm not a fan of GoDaddy. Not at all. But continuing to punish them after they've backed off of an unpopular decision may not be the best course of action.
Just my opinion, and you know what those are worth. (Precisely what you pay for them.) :)
> Jus being able to refine ballistic tables could have made WWI much more lethal.
Exactly. Like I said, though, the big problem was the attitudes back then. We easily make the mistake of assuming that people back then thought like we do nowadays. That's NOT the case. Look up that famous image of a young Adolf Hitler standing in the square when WWI was announced, hat waving in the air and cheering. Then look at that equally-famous image of Americans equally as thrilled when the US entered the war, cheering Woodrow Wilson.
Kind of frightening, really, if you were to give these people even just the technology that existed in WWII -- real fighter planes, aircraft carriers, submarines, better calculators for targeting, and so on.
And by the way, I also ought to add ... if Babbage HAD started a revolution that moved technology forward even just a few decades, WWI quite possibly wouldn't have been survivable for the species. There would have been pockets of civilization that survived with a hunter-gatherer or farming level of technology, but it would have been bad. VERY bad.
Think about it. Given the attitudes and mores of the time (and that's something else that most of us don't think about, by the way), if either side had had nukes (just to name one), much less truly accurate targeting "computers" and other innovations (or unmanned drones with nukes, sheesh!), it would have been an even greater bloodbath than it was. :/
Stephen Stirlings "Peshawar Lancers" has the British Empire move to India after an catastrophe, and they had an analytical engine as well. Eric Flint's alternate history might make better reading if you're postulating "what if." Flint covers "gearing down," because in order to make advanced technology, there's a logical procession. Many of the things that we take for granted are the result of incremental improvements and discoveries.
Simply put, there's no way to make the leap from a mechanical "analytical engine" OR a mechanical "difference calculator" even to to the original IBM PC. (Or for that matter, the first Z80-based 8 bit computers.)
There's no doubt that Babbage might have moved technology forward a few decades. But what you and I know of as "computers" nowadays are based on a number of discoveries, from physics (Quantam Theory, in particular) to electromagnetism to advanced fab technologies for silicon to you name it.
I love reading alternative history, but I prefer those that are realistic. If you and I were to find ourselves as the "Yankee In King Author's Court," we'd actually be frustrated more than anything else. There's so much technology that even our grandparents took for granted that wouldn't be available.
Just the ability to measure down to microns (and smaller) is vital when making a great deal of modern technology.
If price is all you care about, then you get what you pay for. McDonalds and Burger King have nice, cheap lunches ... that will eventually kill you.
My ISP here in Alabama is Hiwaay Information Services. Yes, they charge about $10 more per month than ATT, but they're extremely reliable. When I have a problem, I speak to a local expert who actually knows what he or she is talking about. Y' gets what you pay for.
We can say that we oppose things like SOPA, but one of the most effective ways to prove it is to put your money where your mouth is. Support those businesses that are doing the "right" thing -- EVEN IF IT COSTS A BIT MORE.
Otherwise, when the day comes that the entire Internet is censored and controlled by powerful interests, you'll have no one but yourself to blame.
> Why do these tinfoil hat types keep bringing up the _NSAShell functionality? Enough already!
Because it hasn't been patched yet, and because it's a significant vulnerability.
Clear enough?
> all I can say is that life in rural areas just doesn't resemble life in the city
Exactly. Well said. The way I was raised in the rural south, we were around guns and responsible gun owners all the time. It was understood that guns were extremely dangerous *tools.* Any responsible parent would beat a dozen rules into the kid's head before he/she ever allowed the child to get near a gun: never, ever point that gun at someone, not even as a joke, not even if you're 100% sure it's unloaded. Always look twice before firing to make sure you know what you're shooting at.
Things are getting rough here north of Birmingham, AL, and for the first time in years, I've thought about owning a gun again. I asked my next door neighbor, who's a Birmingham Police officer, where to buy one, and we started chatting. He pulled out his Walther and handed it to me -- but NOT before he popped out the clip, checked the chamber, and so on. He did this automatically and without thinking; gun safety had been beaten into his head when he was a child.
In rural areas where people hunt regularly, in fact, there are several rights of passage: getting your driver's license and your first car. Your first kiss. Making the ball team at school .. . .. and, when your parents judge you to be old enough and responsible enough, your first rifle.
It's the way you're raised. People who are afraid of guns think that people like me are backwoods hicks who live in the past. Fine; to me, people who have a knee-jerk, "ban all guns!" nanny-state mentality strike me as just plain silly. :)
Nothing personal. It's just the way I was raised. I'd never force you to own a gun, but don't ever tell me I shouldn't own one, either.
Correction: 6-10db is a noticeable change. I meant to say "1-4 db." :)
> hard knee setting, like a Universal Audio 1176LN?
As a general rule, NO professional tries to control *loudness* with a single-band limiter, whether it has a hard or soft knee. It just doesn't work. The key word in that last sentence is "loudness." Older compressor/limiter devices basically followed the envelope and tried to use that to estimate level. Modern digital processors crack the signal into a pile of discrete events and then make intelligent decisions on how much gain control to apply to each event. Achieving a high average-to-peak ratio is the goal in radio and TV, but without sounding objectionably distorted.
Remember that "loudness" is about as subjective as you can get. Granny with a $10 hearing aid with a half-dead battery might think that a jet airplane is only "moderately loud," where someone with very sensitive hearing might object to a level difference between program and commercials of only 6-10db (which sounds like a lot, but it's not). The ear isn't linear, either in the frequency or amplitude domains. Further, every ear is different.
The famous FM Loudness Curves are *averages* derived from testing a crowd of different people.
Sorry to wax so eloquent about this, but audio processing is one of my loves. :)
> a "smart" detector that not only examines peak amplitude, but also the AVERAGE.
A professional broadcast audio processor divides the audio into several different bands, then uses all sorts of proprietary algorithms to "decide" where and when to apply compression. The peak limiters are even more sophisticated: our Vorsis AirAura processor, for example, splits the audio into 31 different bands(!) and uses psychoacoustic masking to hide any generated artifacts. (For the curious: http://vorsis.com/audio-processors/airaura-digital-audio-processor.html) It is, without exception, one of the most amazing audio processors I've ever heard. When it's adjusted properly, it's a transparent as a piece of wire.
In radio, our product IS the audio. The sound. We want it ALL to be loud and clean, but we cannot overmodulate (i.e., "overdrive" the transmitter input).
The key, of course, is to ADJUST it properly. It takes a lot of work and patience. I consider it a specialty, and there are others (the corporate chief for Cumulus, Gary Klein, is considered something of a processing "guru" amongst my brethren). A small, unattended TV operation isn't going to devote the time and attention needed. A cable operator has neither the skill nor the personnel.
(Shoot, I've complained to some of our satellite network providers about widely varying audio levels. Some have admitted to me that they don't even have processing on the audio: it's straight from the mike into the uplink. With hundreds of channels, it would cost millions of dollars to put truly effective compression and limiting on each one, so they don't even bother.)
Then again ... let me disclaim: I can't speak for the Cable people. I suspect that they calibrate their equipment when it's first installed and then never look at it again. It really, truly is automated -- their commercials are inserted automatically. That's why they make so many mistakes. :)
(Sorry, a little inter-species rivalry there . .. . ) :)
Can a broadcast engineer stick in his two cent's worth?
The problem isn't absolute levels, it's processing. Our own FM stations use processors (two Omnias and a Wheatstone/Vorsis) that cost over $12,000 EACH. They have support for European loudness limitations -- which are quite restrictive -- built in. Similar processors are available for television. So ... technically, it wouldn't be a problem for us . .. .. IF we received the commercials in unadorned, unprocessed form. We don't.
Simply put, the people who produce the commercials are the ones who smash, squeeze, compress, clip and mangle the audio to make it sound like the Monster Truck man on an acid trip. My processor basically goes into bypass whenever one of these commercials comes along and it's STILL too loud.
The poster who thinks that we (meaning broadcasters) "turn up" the commercials is wrong, too, by the way. Most of that is automated now, and/or goes through the aforementioned processing. Even our live music stations with a "deejay" in the control room are typically automated now: the computer pauses when it's time for the show host to talk, then goes back into automation when they're done.
As a communications engineer, I can attest that towers and transmitter buildings cost money. (Tower crews, just to name one expense, charge thousands of dollars per day now -- just relamping a 200-300' tower can cost well over a grand.) So ... the PHBs at all of the wireless providers are constantly faced with a terrible choice: do they spend the $$$$ to improve their coverage, or try to grab customers with bells and whistles?
There's a REASON why so many wireless ads started pushing fancy phones, built-in cameras and the ability to send movies to one another. They figure that if they can grab customers with features instead of actually investing in more capacity, they're ahead of the game.
The old saying, "first, kill all the lawyers" needs to be updated for the new millennium. I propose, "first, banish all PHBs to a remote island and force them to live with their own products as punishment."
If you read the fine print in your contract, you'll probably find that the $20 a month was an "introductory" offer. They're notorious for that -- and in fairness, they're by no means the only provider that does it.
-- Stephen
Most of our technical manuals come in PDF form now, but thank God for Okular. It has really, really improved. :)
> You still need somebody to deal with ...
This. Here's a quick example from my own experience. It might seem unrelated, but it's similar: back when Daddy Reagan was President, the first big deregulation of broadcasting occurred. I had just passed the test and had gotten my FCC First Class Phone license -- and it was turned into a pretty wall hanging. Operators were no longer required, any class of license could work on a transmitter, yadda, yadda. Many of the PHBs who ran radio stations trimmed their (licensed and trained) engineering staff. Didn't need 'em anymore. Fast forward a few years ... and all of a sudden, I started getting calls again. "Hey, we keep going off the air and Bozo here can't figger it out ..." :)
Moral: the PHBs will always believe the line that they can blow up and trim staff until things start falling apart and they're forced to hire at least a few people. (In my own industry, as I write this, Clear Channel has laid off a LOT of people. It goes in cycles.)
As for open source costing jobs ... NO. It moves them around is all. Small to medium enterprises like ours now do a lot MORE stuff in house. We build our own servers in house and maintain them ourselves. We hired a guy just to make sure our Websites looked slick and eye-candyish. So I can categorically state that in our case, at least, it has ENHANCED employment.
Sure, one incidental case doesn't prove anything, but even if the OP has figgers, I doubt the situation is as dismal as you might believe from reading the headline. Some jobs may be lost, but others will be hired. Things change; y' learns to change with 'em, and you'll have a job. :)
> you don't verify identity, you verify transactions.
I'll Google Schneier's proposal. I was thinking about something like that this morning, only for online transactions. I mean, it can't be all THAT deep, can it? I know it'll cost and it'll slow down the speed of transactions, but ... well, the way I look at it, 100 years ago, you either paid in person and/or signed a contract, or you didn't get what you wanted. I know we can't go back to that now, not unless we want to wreck e-commerce and online records in general.
But honestly ... why couldn't someone at least send me a quick email or text that says, "Joe Schmo wants to withdraw $500 from your bank account," or "Dr. Whazzup is looking at your medical records?"
We have the technology to do it.
Thanks for that. I'll take a look at Schneier's idea.
It's not a government vs. private sector thing, either. The simple fact is, you will always be able to find some corruptible person who's will to sell (or "leak," if he/she is just trying to harm a rival) information.
I'm a geek and I loves me some technology, but still, I'm not blind to the dangers of giant databases filled with sensitive data And to be honest, I itch at the thought that anyone -- be it the federal government (with the Affordable Health Care Act) or private business (think of some large, national hospital group) has access to all of my medical records -- including prescriptions, diagnoses, and all the rest of it.
But I don't know what the answer is. Someone smarter than me will have to come up with that.
Don't bring these things to Alabama. The coal and junk trunks drive dangerously fast as it is.
We also apparently have trouble with people here trying to eat these trucks.
A typical warning
(Hope that link works. That's the first time I've ever posted a direct link to Facebook.)
> If you're so worried about the economy being wrecked, you ought to pay more attention to Wall Street's crimes and excesses ...
I do. There you go, insisting on pushing me into a box so that you can label me and then dismiss my opinion. (Or, like I said, worst of all, call me a Republican, at which point you could just dismiss me and high five yourself in the mirror.) :)
That's related to binary thinking, too. You MUST label anyone with whom you disagree, the better to dismiss them. "Ah, forget what he says, he's just a [insert label here]. Whaddaya expect from him?"
Off topic, but to give you an idea, I was pleasantly surprised and gratified that the ATT/T-Mobile merger may not happen. I'm sick and tired of monopolies.
(There's a point there that I could make about the topic at hand, but hey; it's the day after Thanksgiving and we still have pumpkin pie to be et, and frankly, that's more important to me.)
> We're still in the Great Recession, unemployment is still very high ...
Absolutely! And this would be the worst possible time to attempt a forced move to alternative energy sources. That needs to be done gradually and with careful planning precise to avoid making the economy even worse than it already it.
You've done a marvelous job of stating the entire rationale behind Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'll give you credit for that.
But I'm old enough to remember the 1980's, when climatologists were warning that we were heading into another Ice Age -- once again, caused by Mean Old Mankind. (I won't say, "MOM," because she'd start whining.) The theory back then -- just as logically developed, step by step, was that particulates were blocking out the sun and would eventually cause temperatures to drop worldwide, on a large, averaged scale.
My skepticism may not have a PhD behind it, but it's based on many years of watching one crisis after another arise, only to be dismissed later (or more accurately, be quietly dropped -- without ceremony -- for the Next Newest Proof That Mankind Is Evil And Pookie(tm)). Example: I distinctly remember the claims, first made a couple of decades ago, that the rain forests in the tropics would disappear "within 10 years." They were based on sound math and science, too, too.
> That's like saying you won't believe anything from the field of advanced physics
Wrong, because their predictions are imminently testable and then falsified through experimentation. I'm an amateur cosmologist, in fact, and love reading as much as I can't understand about it. :)
I was speaking of using those experiments to SET PUBLIC POLICY. (An extremely important distinction.) Physicists don't do that, as a general rule.
> Understanding that mankind's release ... of CO2 ... has contributed to global warming ...
AH. There's the rub, and that's where you've failed to convince me. Or rather, you haven't convinced me that my CO2 emissions are the KEY cause of global warming.
What makes me really happy is that when I ask honest questions, I get an "appeal to authority" -- same as you see in the silly Creationist - vs - Evolutionist debates online. "Well, if it's good enough for most climate researchers, it should be good enough for you!"
Ummm ... no, it's not. Go back to my original post: Particle physicists can demonstrate, repeatedly, how to make positrons and other extravagant particles in their accelerators. The AGW people HAVE NOT proven, to my satisfaction, that their argument is testable, falsifiable and a good foundation for public policy.
> I wonder if the OP will respond.
I wonder how many times my post will be modded down, then back up. Every time I post something like this, it's actually funny to watch how the numbers jump up and down. More fun than watching wrasslin' on TV. :)
> can they predict the number of hurricanes ...
Heh. Actually, no. Some years, Dr. Gray's predictions are fairly accurate. Others, they're worse than a shot in the dark. I have nothing but respect for Mssr. Gray, but even he admits that he's wrong as often as not.
That's a good point. Scientists can't even predict with repeatable, proven accuracy the NUMBER of hurricanes in a given season. And yet, AGW proponents not only want us to believe that mankind is causing global warming with our greenhouse gases, they refuse to consider other possibilities -- and want to put in place a draconian, central planning authority to "fight" it.
And best of all, they mod as "troll" anyone here on /. who even attempts to make an argument that might cause others to question their assertion. :)