and yet, more and more mainstream releases are so mixed for loudness that one cant tell one instrument from another (if they even use instruments, rather then a beat box and a synth for a basic rythm).
True, but even just throwing compression on every track and extreme compression on the output just makes it sound loud. Even the most highly compressed commercial releases are highly mixed and mastered to sound good before run through the loudness grinder. There's still a difference between "would sound good if it wasn't so loud" and "this sounds terrible, and it's so loud I want to claw out my ear drums".
Also, the record companies are no longer needed. In the past it was indeed prohibitively expensive to make a record, but the cost od digital recording has dropped to the point that recording and professionally duplicating 1,000 CDs costs less than a couple of good amplifiers or a drum set.
They're no longer 'needed', but they are definitely helpful. Access to a better studio (and more importantly, a better recording and mixing engineer) will give a better sound. Getting sounds recorded to 1s and 0s is indeed easy to do well, but making it sound good is still a huge pain in the ass, especially if you don't know anything going into it (in other words, if you're indie). The barrier to entry is smaller, but only if you don't need quality.
If you don't believe me, look at a publication or forum dedicated to home recording. The biggest question/topic is "how do you make [any instrument] sound good?" or "10 tips for a better sound using [some tool]". If it was so easy and obvious, there wouldn't be so many questions on the topic. When my band recorded several years back, I learned a lot, but the best I could do was make it sound like a decent demo. If I got a few years of experience under my belt, I think maybe then I'd be able to get reasonable 'indie radio' sound, but it would never match a pro. Access to these guys (on someone else's dime) will cement labels as a mainstay for those who are large enough to want to get on the radio, but haven't been around long enough to pay for their own professional recording help up front.
And their PR tools are still going to beat whatever you can leverage on your own, even if you are a hit on last.fm, iTunes, et al. There's an argument that record contracts will eventually be mostly for this PR package, but it still requires the band is able to finance their own professional studio with engineers.
However, the asteroid will not pass near the main belt of geosynchronous satellites in 2029, and the chance of a collision with a satellite is exceedingly remote.
Isn't the point of privacy protections to prevent these unlikely circumstances from ever needing to be considered? Add the fact that the dataset is publicly available and it's even more severe. It's a breach of privacy, regardless of whether it is exploited or not.
Besides, I'm sure there are trolls out there who would get their jollies purely by skimming the dataset to find people with embarrasing movie habits purely to expose them. Why wait until that happens when you can file as a Jane Doe to prevent it in the first place?
My point is still the same... she's given up on her privacy in order to sue someone for a potential (but not yet real) breach of privacy.
It's a catch-22, no doubt, but at least this way she can possibly force Netflix to fix the initial problem.
She chose to be proactive, rather than sit and worry. Can't fault her for that. Besides, it is hardly a forgone conclusion that she will be revealed as the Jane Doe in a reasonable time frame.
But if your code works on 80-90% of your installed machines (Windows) and you're certain to keep that architecture, it can be justifiable to lock into the platform. Unless you absolutely need to be multi-platform (how many people really need that?), C# is often a better choice.
Remember, Java was supposed to be used on embedded systems, like VCRs. It never caught on because it wasn't portable or powerful enough, and people just continued to write C for their microcontrollers.
"scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs"
Personally, my favorite are the games which take you to a high score page with a URL something like this: facebook.com/silly_game/score.php?score=1364
Replace that with facebook.com/silly_game/score.php?score=999999999 and instantly top the leaderboards. Hooray! I don't see why that would be part of the game if they didn't intend for me to do that...
You define banning the entry to the University Campus to a student without a customary investigation or even an interview a "little additional caution"???
She is being investigated, and until the disciplinary board reviews the case she is barred from campus. Assuming she (or anyone else) was a danger to others, you wouldn't let her continue to go to classes until after the investigation was completed, would you?
But it would be OK if a football student said they were looking forward to cracking heads in Monday's practice.
Not if the same student also expressed a desire to 'split someone's skull', then looked forward to 'cracking heads monday' shortly thereafter. The second statement, on its own, is nothing to worry about. It's when there are corroborating messages that violence can be implied.
Unless the student made a habit of mentioning their desire to go to class, it might be reasonably assumed odd that the order of messages was "I want to stab someone with an embalming instrument" -> "I can't wait to go use embalming instruments". I'd be uneasy as well, since the implication is that a violent urge is the impetus for enjoying the class, rather than simply thinking the embalming process is bitchin'.
Context is all. Would you call the police against Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel because they are killing softly Roberta Flack with their song?
When a mortuary science student says publicly on a blog that she is "looking forward to Monday's embalming therapy" it's obvious she is talking about her monday's class.
The context is there as well. Her other posting says "I still want to stab a certain someone in the throat with a trocar though. Hmmm... perhaps I will spend the evening updating my 'Death List #5' and making friends with the crematory guy. I do know the code..." Suddenly the context can be seen to shift from simply about class, to referencing her desire to do violence.
Keep in mind that earlier this year we had a mentally unstable student charged with murder. The offense? Poor lab protocol. So, a college student going off the rails isn't unprecedented. I see no harm in a little additional caution when an already stressed (by nature of university) college student is having violent thoughts or fantasies and is looking forward to their next classroom time with sharp instruments. She has the chance to appeal, as well.
I might buy Call of Duty, then, said it was "broken", and returned it.
I can see a similar phenomenon as people buying large HDTVs right before the Super Bowl and returning them on Monday, basically a 'free' rental. With games, I don't see anything but this becoming more common, due to the reduced difficulty of returning a game compared to a 50" television. Buy the game, burn through the single player in a weekend, then return the game claiming some inconsequential glitch. That's extra cost for the retailers dealing with returns and repackaging, and extra cost to the publishers if the retailers send the games back to them.
The only way to stop the system from being abused (so it can stay around for when it's needed) would be putting specific requirements on what can and can't be returned, but we all know how well our judicial system does that.
I think the original author should have thought through his rant a bit more before he posted it.
Well, it's obvious that he's not an engineer, so I can forgive him (somewhat).
Physical size, power density, weight, efficiency, maximum current, equivalent series resistance, number of charge/discharge cycles, and consumer regulations differ between the applications, and all have an effect on material and design costs. Of course the battery that's in use constantly with a small form factor will be more expensive in comparison to your lawnmower battery.
Thanks for the thorough information. How does this throwing off mass thing relate to electric cars? Do electric cars accelerate without loosing mass? If not, they must be loosing mass as the battery discharges, right? So how would this vacuum mobile be any different?
They accelerate through road friction. In a car, you exert a force on the road in the oposite direction that you are accelerating (Newton's Third Law). In space, where there is nothing to push against, generally you need to throw mass behind you such that the force on what you throw behind you is equal to your force forward.
This technique removes the need to carry mass to propel from the ship to balance the forces. Instead of energy going into stored propellant which is lost, the energy performs a reaction with the vaccuum to produce a net force against the ship with no loss of mass or propellant.
...electricity companies trying to charge you different prices for using different applicances. We already have "electricity neutrality", why isn't net neutrality taken for granted?
That said, it doesn't matter if this is caused by a large motor or what the motor is used for, which is how the ISPs would love to regulate. The utility companies also tell you up front what PF results in which charge, while the ISPs may not.
So, the utility companies are actually fantastic examples of neutrality. Limits are placed only due to load on the system (device agnostic) and are enumerated to customers. All the ISPs need to do is set their limits to be blind to final destination or device (if you throtle VoIP, you must treat your VoIP traffic and Vonage traffic the same) and the limits should be well described in writing to the customer. And, since utility companies are already a monopoly, a similar neutrality would probably work well.
Actually, the article is far less irritating than the summary had led me to believe. Yes, it points out 10 games that are not recommended for children and teens. But it isn't trying to get the games banned (the original commonsensemedia article actually points out that these are good games), just trying to help parents make informed decisions. This, I believe, is a good thing.
It's also hardly ironic that a list of "games not to buy your children when they ask for them" would be populated by good games worth asking for. It's not like everyone's kids are asking for shitty games.
Anyone else think these are the worst possible alternatives? "My son asked for a fantasy RPG and a zombie apocalypse FPS, so I got him a 2D platformer and a 3rd person strategy game. I done good!"
So you've been running slow b and g 802.11 while the rest of us have been screaming along on draft n for 4 years. You must feel real kewl.
I don't do anything that requires 802.11n speeds wirelessly, currently. My PC and XBox are wired Cat 5e, and I don't stream HD video to my Droid or eeePC. So I've been saving money using acceptable hardware, I do feel kewl!
So, the main difference is not that scientists might be proved wrong or fraudulent, since that happens from time to time and is proof that the system works. The problem here is that the system itself is alleged to be rigged.
Within the academic community, you have the same problem in both of these cases: inability to repeat the experiment. With Cold Fusion, you can't get the same results when you follow the experimental procedure. That's failed science. With the global warming 'scandal', you have a few scientists who are the only ones with access to the raw temperature data. There is no independent analysis of the data, meaning the statistics (and released data) can be tweaked or cherry-picked until the authors get results they want. Without independent analysis repeating their results, that's failed science as well.
The issue is when other studies are based off of the 'groomed' data, rather than the raw measurements. We need to take their word that the data wasn't cherry-picked to seem hotter, and nobody can independently verify that it wasn't. That makes it easy to dismiss the findings, and makes it hell for those who want to study the phenomenon. It's too important not to verify.
The other problem is that a layperson (or even many scientists) wouldn't know if it was rigged or not. For the layperson, we see news articles that say "In a research paper published in Nature...", and nobody gets to read the paper. So the average person is told "take our word for it", which doesn't do much to combat rumors of poor science. Without people who are science-literate (though perhaps not PhD scientists) being able to read the paper, see that it is sound, and tell their non-scientific friends why, it will always appear like a bunch of hand-waving.
Zynga's Cafe World and Playfish's Restaurant City (the two most popular Facebook games).
This article would beg to differ that they are the two most popular. However, the top two (FarmVille and Cafe World) do have clones (Farm Town and Restaurant City) at 8th and 9th places.
But can you blame them? FarmVille had 65.6 million active users in one month, I think a lot of devs would be just fine with only 1% of that, and a clone might be a simple way to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of exercise bikes!
and yet, more and more mainstream releases are so mixed for loudness that one cant tell one instrument from another (if they even use instruments, rather then a beat box and a synth for a basic rythm).
True, but even just throwing compression on every track and extreme compression on the output just makes it sound loud. Even the most highly compressed commercial releases are highly mixed and mastered to sound good before run through the loudness grinder. There's still a difference between "would sound good if it wasn't so loud" and "this sounds terrible, and it's so loud I want to claw out my ear drums".
Also, the record companies are no longer needed. In the past it was indeed prohibitively expensive to make a record, but the cost od digital recording has dropped to the point that recording and professionally duplicating 1,000 CDs costs less than a couple of good amplifiers or a drum set.
They're no longer 'needed', but they are definitely helpful. Access to a better studio (and more importantly, a better recording and mixing engineer) will give a better sound. Getting sounds recorded to 1s and 0s is indeed easy to do well, but making it sound good is still a huge pain in the ass, especially if you don't know anything going into it (in other words, if you're indie). The barrier to entry is smaller, but only if you don't need quality.
If you don't believe me, look at a publication or forum dedicated to home recording. The biggest question/topic is "how do you make [any instrument] sound good?" or "10 tips for a better sound using [some tool]". If it was so easy and obvious, there wouldn't be so many questions on the topic. When my band recorded several years back, I learned a lot, but the best I could do was make it sound like a decent demo. If I got a few years of experience under my belt, I think maybe then I'd be able to get reasonable 'indie radio' sound, but it would never match a pro. Access to these guys (on someone else's dime) will cement labels as a mainstay for those who are large enough to want to get on the radio, but haven't been around long enough to pay for their own professional recording help up front.
And their PR tools are still going to beat whatever you can leverage on your own, even if you are a hit on last.fm, iTunes, et al. There's an argument that record contracts will eventually be mostly for this PR package, but it still requires the band is able to finance their own professional studio with engineers.
No, it doesn't
However, the asteroid will not pass near the main belt of geosynchronous satellites in 2029, and the chance of a collision with a satellite is exceedingly remote.
But it is much more probable for the meteorite to kill us all than a succession of lightnings killing each and every human being.
And not just because after the first few thousand lightning hits we'd start thinking about hiding in caves.
Not really, an assumed impact would 'only' kill millions. There would be no long-term climatic disaster to kill everyone.
Unless, of course, we try making a massive pile of the entire planet's nuclear weapons to cushion the impact...
Do you also give your Gender and Birthdate in order to get stuff delivered?
Only when I'm being facetious ;)
Isn't the point of privacy protections to prevent these unlikely circumstances from ever needing to be considered? Add the fact that the dataset is publicly available and it's even more severe. It's a breach of privacy, regardless of whether it is exploited or not.
Besides, I'm sure there are trolls out there who would get their jollies purely by skimming the dataset to find people with embarrasing movie habits purely to expose them. Why wait until that happens when you can file as a Jane Doe to prevent it in the first place?
Yeah, only people who want deliveries to their actual house give their correct ZIP code!
My point is still the same... she's given up on her privacy in order to sue someone for a potential (but not yet real) breach of privacy.
It's a catch-22, no doubt, but at least this way she can possibly force Netflix to fix the initial problem.
She chose to be proactive, rather than sit and worry. Can't fault her for that. Besides, it is hardly a forgone conclusion that she will be revealed as the Jane Doe in a reasonable time frame.
But if your code works on 80-90% of your installed machines (Windows) and you're certain to keep that architecture, it can be justifiable to lock into the platform. Unless you absolutely need to be multi-platform (how many people really need that?), C# is often a better choice.
Remember, Java was supposed to be used on embedded systems, like VCRs. It never caught on because it wasn't portable or powerful enough, and people just continued to write C for their microcontrollers.
In other words, lower bitrate can be better, but only if you compare to shitty and inefficient compression.
"scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs"
Personally, my favorite are the games which take you to a high score page with a URL something like this: facebook.com/silly_game/score.php?score=1364
Replace that with facebook.com/silly_game/score.php?score=999999999 and instantly top the leaderboards. Hooray! I don't see why that would be part of the game if they didn't intend for me to do that...
You define banning the entry to the University Campus to a student without a customary investigation or even an interview a "little additional caution"???
She is being investigated, and until the disciplinary board reviews the case she is barred from campus. Assuming she (or anyone else) was a danger to others, you wouldn't let her continue to go to classes until after the investigation was completed, would you?
But it would be OK if a football student said they were looking forward to cracking heads in Monday's practice.
Not if the same student also expressed a desire to 'split someone's skull', then looked forward to 'cracking heads monday' shortly thereafter. The second statement, on its own, is nothing to worry about. It's when there are corroborating messages that violence can be implied.
Unless the student made a habit of mentioning their desire to go to class, it might be reasonably assumed odd that the order of messages was "I want to stab someone with an embalming instrument" -> "I can't wait to go use embalming instruments". I'd be uneasy as well, since the implication is that a violent urge is the impetus for enjoying the class, rather than simply thinking the embalming process is bitchin'.
Context is all. Would you call the police against Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel because they are killing softly Roberta Flack with their song?
When a mortuary science student says publicly on a blog that she is "looking forward to Monday's embalming therapy" it's obvious she is talking about her monday's class.
The context is there as well. Her other posting says "I still want to stab a certain someone in the throat with a trocar though. Hmmm ... perhaps I will spend the evening updating my 'Death List #5' and making friends with the crematory guy. I do know the code ..." Suddenly the context can be seen to shift from simply about class, to referencing her desire to do violence.
Keep in mind that earlier this year we had a mentally unstable student charged with murder. The offense? Poor lab protocol. So, a college student going off the rails isn't unprecedented. I see no harm in a little additional caution when an already stressed (by nature of university) college student is having violent thoughts or fantasies and is looking forward to their next classroom time with sharp instruments. She has the chance to appeal, as well.
I might buy Call of Duty, then, said it was "broken", and returned it.
I can see a similar phenomenon as people buying large HDTVs right before the Super Bowl and returning them on Monday, basically a 'free' rental. With games, I don't see anything but this becoming more common, due to the reduced difficulty of returning a game compared to a 50" television. Buy the game, burn through the single player in a weekend, then return the game claiming some inconsequential glitch. That's extra cost for the retailers dealing with returns and repackaging, and extra cost to the publishers if the retailers send the games back to them.
The only way to stop the system from being abused (so it can stay around for when it's needed) would be putting specific requirements on what can and can't be returned, but we all know how well our judicial system does that.
I think the original author should have thought through his rant a bit more before he posted it.
Well, it's obvious that he's not an engineer, so I can forgive him (somewhat).
Physical size, power density, weight, efficiency, maximum current, equivalent series resistance, number of charge/discharge cycles, and consumer regulations differ between the applications, and all have an effect on material and design costs. Of course the battery that's in use constantly with a small form factor will be more expensive in comparison to your lawnmower battery.
Thanks for the thorough information. How does this throwing off mass thing relate to electric cars? Do electric cars accelerate without loosing mass? If not, they must be loosing mass as the battery discharges, right? So how would this vacuum mobile be any different?
They accelerate through road friction. In a car, you exert a force on the road in the oposite direction that you are accelerating (Newton's Third Law). In space, where there is nothing to push against, generally you need to throw mass behind you such that the force on what you throw behind you is equal to your force forward.
This technique removes the need to carry mass to propel from the ship to balance the forces. Instead of energy going into stored propellant which is lost, the energy performs a reaction with the vaccuum to produce a net force against the ship with no loss of mass or propellant.
...electricity companies trying to charge you different prices for using different applicances. We already have "electricity neutrality", why isn't net neutrality taken for granted?
Actually, they do charge more for locations with a worse power factor. A lower power factor is caused by inductive loads, so you are charged extra for using too much inductive loading.
That said, it doesn't matter if this is caused by a large motor or what the motor is used for, which is how the ISPs would love to regulate. The utility companies also tell you up front what PF results in which charge, while the ISPs may not.
So, the utility companies are actually fantastic examples of neutrality. Limits are placed only due to load on the system (device agnostic) and are enumerated to customers. All the ISPs need to do is set their limits to be blind to final destination or device (if you throtle VoIP, you must treat your VoIP traffic and Vonage traffic the same) and the limits should be well described in writing to the customer. And, since utility companies are already a monopoly, a similar neutrality would probably work well.
Actually, the article is far less irritating than the summary had led me to believe. Yes, it points out 10 games that are not recommended for children and teens. But it isn't trying to get the games banned (the original commonsensemedia article actually points out that these are good games), just trying to help parents make informed decisions. This, I believe, is a good thing.
It's also hardly ironic that a list of "games not to buy your children when they ask for them" would be populated by good games worth asking for. It's not like everyone's kids are asking for shitty games.
Dragon Age: Origins
Alternative: Braid
Left 4 Dead 2
Alternative: Overlord II
Anyone else think these are the worst possible alternatives? "My son asked for a fantasy RPG and a zombie apocalypse FPS, so I got him a 2D platformer and a 3rd person strategy game. I done good!"
So you've been running slow b and g 802.11 while the rest of us have been screaming along on draft n for 4 years. You must feel real kewl.
I don't do anything that requires 802.11n speeds wirelessly, currently. My PC and XBox are wired Cat 5e, and I don't stream HD video to my Droid or eeePC. So I've been saving money using acceptable hardware, I do feel kewl!
So I guess you'll not be using any of that "not-yet-finalized" html5 stuff, or any beta software from Google ?
Not if it requires a hardware purchase.
So, the main difference is not that scientists might be proved wrong or fraudulent, since that happens from time to time and is proof that the system works. The problem here is that the system itself is alleged to be rigged.
Within the academic community, you have the same problem in both of these cases: inability to repeat the experiment. With Cold Fusion, you can't get the same results when you follow the experimental procedure. That's failed science. With the global warming 'scandal', you have a few scientists who are the only ones with access to the raw temperature data. There is no independent analysis of the data, meaning the statistics (and released data) can be tweaked or cherry-picked until the authors get results they want. Without independent analysis repeating their results, that's failed science as well.
The issue is when other studies are based off of the 'groomed' data, rather than the raw measurements. We need to take their word that the data wasn't cherry-picked to seem hotter, and nobody can independently verify that it wasn't. That makes it easy to dismiss the findings, and makes it hell for those who want to study the phenomenon. It's too important not to verify.
The other problem is that a layperson (or even many scientists) wouldn't know if it was rigged or not. For the layperson, we see news articles that say "In a research paper published in Nature...", and nobody gets to read the paper. So the average person is told "take our word for it", which doesn't do much to combat rumors of poor science. Without people who are science-literate (though perhaps not PhD scientists) being able to read the paper, see that it is sound, and tell their non-scientific friends why, it will always appear like a bunch of hand-waving.
Zynga's Cafe World and Playfish's Restaurant City (the two most popular Facebook games).
This article would beg to differ that they are the two most popular. However, the top two (FarmVille and Cafe World) do have clones (Farm Town and Restaurant City) at 8th and 9th places.
But can you blame them? FarmVille had 65.6 million active users in one month, I think a lot of devs would be just fine with only 1% of that, and a clone might be a simple way to get it.