No, the grandparent comment is correct. You have misunderstood how the device works.
The primary source of the vibrations is not the bones themselves. The article clearly says a vibrator is attached to various parts of the body, and a sensor is attached on the wrist to measure the vibrations. The vibrations travel through the flesh and bones, and reach the sensor (#1) on the wrist where they are measured.
The important point made by the grandparent is that the vibrator generates vibrations not only in the body but also in the air around the vibrator. The vibrator will unavoidably emit sound directly into the air around it. Another sensor (#2) not in direct contact with the body, can measure the resulting sound waves in the air. Using bone-conducted sound waves as a secure method of communication is silly because it is not secure.
You are either trolling or horribly racist against Argentines. The Argentinian farmers I know look after their animals very well and they completely respect the Argentine national law on animal welfare. Treating the animals well makes for faster, more healthy growth. Argentinian beef certainly tastes fantastic. And it's good for business. Even now before full recovery from FMD, Argentinian beef is again a huge export (US 0,5 billion) to the US, Europe, Japan etc.
Yet I have no doubt that this will eventually happen. PG already has a section devoted to sheet music. The tools are beginning to appear : lilypond [lilypond.org] is a superb Free music engraving software package. I'm personnally working on music OCR software, and others are as well I'm sure. Eventually this will work out well I think. think.
He seems to be a very fine young pianist. Why don't you put up more samples, and persuade him to do at least one or two 18th and 19th century works? I think it would also be a good idea to put up a proper webpage describing each recording, e.g. giving recording date(s)/venue name/piano-name(Steinway D,Yamaha C7,etc) and programme notes.
"maybe you should add in the costs of the musical instruments too, which are MUCH more expensive than the pc's."
It is true musical instruments are generally much more expensive than PCs but unlike PCs which depreciate quickly to almost zero over 3-5 years, it is not uncommon for a good-quality, musical instrument to last the whole of a musician's lifetime or longer.
"And yes, I'm more than aware that some churches have good acoustics for concerts, but for serious recordings with 100-piece orchestras I'm not so sure... Are you?"
Yes, absolutely - many professional classical recordings with symphony orchestras have been made in churches.
No, you missed the point about copyright expiry: "their stuff" in the case of classical musicians is available for them to use at no cost because it is classical music which was owned, not by the performing musicians, but by the classical composers whose copyrights have mostly expired, and also the point I made earlier here about the availability of talent apart from professional performers.
You forgot to multiply the cost of one broadband connection by 100 people for 2 years in a software project (a symphony orchestra has up to 100 people), and to add to that the costs of 100 computer purchases' pro rata depreciation during those 2 years, 100 electricity users during evenings and weekends at 500Watts for a PC, plus 3kWatts more if there is room heating/air conditioning... Assuming the bandwidth for hosting the software project itself is free to the users (e.g. sourceforge), the PC room is effectively free and the PCs are used for the project for say 1/5 of the switched-on time, the total cost is still at least USD 20000. Let's compare that with the costs of producing a digital recording of one piece of classical music in a project that is intended to release the music for eventual free distribution, i.e. minimized costs -- no need to hire Carnegie Hall, no need for 5* hotels, etc. Did you know that classical music can be very satisfactorily performed and recorded in a large church (many of which have excellent acoustics) at a cost of USD300-500 for one evening's hire of the church using multi-track digital recording kit at a hire cost including amps, mikes, stands etc of USD600-1000, and a whole-day's hire of a recording engineer at USD500-1000? That's a total hire cost of around USD1400-2500 to produce a digital recording of one piece of classical music.
No, not all. The analogy is extremely apt because it shows firstly that whether creative people can afford to publish their stuff under a free-redistribution type of copyright licence has nothing to do with whether they are musicians or software engineers, and secondly that being a non-professional does not automatically imply the person can make only lower-quality content.
The point I was making to followup what the other poster said is that, for most classical works, no fee is payable to the estate of the composer. You are right that there may be a fee payable to the owner of the copyright of the score. However, it has not always been the case. There was a recent, highly controversial decision in a court case in the UK on this very subject:
Hyperion Records fails at appeal.
As a general rule, if you're a professional classical musician, you can't afford to give away your work for free -- not to mention the costs of renting a recording studio which can fit an entire symphony orchestra. If you're an amateur classical musician (defined as "has a full time job which isn't music"), then unless you're really exceptional, you're not good enough to make recordings which people will want to listen to.
As a general rule, if you're a professional software engineer, you can't afford to give away your work as free software -- not to mention the costs of renting broadband internet connections for periods of months to years so that an entire group of software engineers can collaborate effectively on a large open-source project. If you're an amateur software engineer (defined as "has a full time job which isn't in software"), then unless you're really exceptional, you're not good enough to make software which people will want to use.
"You have to hire the music, which includes a fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases. "
Given that most classical music was written by composers who have been dead for much longer than 90 years, there is no fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases because the copyright of the composer has expired. Copyright should expire after a fixed period of time according to the US Constitution:
[Copyright is] "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Whether that is what is actually happening in practice is the responsibility of the legislators.
I think you're missing something. There are many equally brilliant classical musicians who are not professional performers. Some live too far away from major cities which are the only places you have any chance of finding a job in performing classical music. Some give up because rates of pay for classical artists in many places is not high.
The main reason for all of this: supply of classical musicians vastly exceeds demand. On the supply side, music schools, universities and conservatories worldwide are graduating thousands of performers of classical music every year. On the demand side, you can count the number of classical music professional orchestras in most countries in the low single digits; the reality is that the market for classical music concerts is much smaller than the market for popular music concerts.
However, what this means for the future of open-licensed freely downloadable recordings of classical music is less clear. There is no shortage of brilliant musicians already employed full-time in other paying jobs like music teaching who might consider getting together with others to perform classical works under some sort of open licence, like one of the Creative Commons licences. I suspect that as more people become aware of the open-licensing phenomenon in other media, more classical music performers will help create a similar bandwagon for classical music recordings.
DjVu is a wavelet-based image compression format which gets about 50-70% better compression ratio than JPEG for a given level of image quality loss after compression.
The open-source DjVu decoder and encoder implementation is called DjVuLibre.
Interesting background information from www.djvuzone.org:
After a 2 year hiatus, DjVuZone is coming back to life. DjVuZone is maintained by the original developers of DjVu Yann LeCun and Leon Bottou. Until recently, we had major disagrements with LizardTech's DjVu strategy. Seeing our creation go to waste because of corporate greed and incompetence was too much to bear. Rather than wasting our time trying to help LizardTech with their failed strategy, we decided to concentrate our efforts on maintaining DjVuLibre, the open source implementation of DjVu, and Any2DjVu, the free conversion server. Were it not for DjVuLibre, Any2DjVu, and a few dedicated fans of the technology (such as Jim Rile at PlanetDjVu), DjVu would have disappeared by now.
Rosegarden has a MIDI sequencer, a music-notation editor, audio, DSSI plugins, etc. For musicians who can read music notation, Rosegarden is probably the best available MIDI software for Linux.
jakiru hakusei to haido shi to iu shinduromu desu ne.
No, he is not re-inventing the wheel
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
He wants maps which are under a Creative-Commons type of copyright licence because he wants to be able to publish derivative works such as annotated or modified versions of the original map. The copyright licences on most existing maps, as used by map24.com, are not compatible with Creative-Commons licences, which prevents him from using them.
The Xiph.org project is producing some amazing software including Theora. One of the components of the Xiph.org multimedia architecture is FLAC - aka the Free Lossless Audio Coder. Could someone kindly moderate up the interesting question about how to configure FLAC? I'm not the only person who'd like to be able to start using Theora with FLAC but being prevented by configuration difficulties but right now the poster's question is languishing at -1 Off-topic when it's really totally on-topic.
"My main worry about open source is that it doesn't foster conceptual innovation. [...] What conceptual innovations has[have] the open source software movement come up with after the days of emacs and tex?"
Your criticism is invalid because you're comparing apples and oranges. It is not necessary for [members of] the open-source software "movement" to foster innovation for the movement to be judged a success, as you seem to think. Perhaps you've misunderstood the rationale for open-source software. Conceptual innovation is the result of successful research. It is neither a necessary input to nor a necessary output of open source software projects. This is because the goals of research and the goals of the open-source software movement are different. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise. Nonetheless, if you were familiar with academic research, you would know of many successful computer-based research projects which published some or all of their results as open-source software. The irony of your ridiculous and untrue comments about Octave is that Matlab is itself based on some very old open-source software. If you don't know much about a subject, it is better not to write dogmatically about it.
I mostly agree with what you said about not wanting to change Linux/X11 to be more like MS Windows. However, in my work with universities, companies and other organisations over the last 15 years, I can say very few people use the X11 protocol over a network. I do think networked X applications are becoming more common. This may be because network speeds have increased making it more practicable to use networked X applications, and also because the advent of secure tunneling software like ssh has made it very easy to use networked X applications in a secure way.
In case anyone is fooled by the baseless criticisms of X given by the regular troll above, here is a brief rebuttal.
"1.Too much focused on 2D user interfaces, no native transperency for multimedia, low level and optimized applications."
Most major computer operating systems have 2d user-interfaces, but this doesn't matter because applications provide their own 3d user-interface if they really need one. Another reason may be that there are very few genuine 2D users who can satisfactorily project themselves onto a 3d user interface. Transparency is not a major requirement for X because those rare applications which require it can implement it themselves e.g. using GIF or PNG transparency. There is also going to be a transparency extension for X
"2.Too little scalability between devices with varing performance and ability."
Not true. X runs fast, and much faster than Microsoft Windows 95, on my old i486 PC with 8MB RAM.
"3.No sufficient support for disabled user enhanching devices."
This is a problem not of X itself but of the hardware manufacturers not writing device driver modules for XFree86. When enough people run Linux desktops in the opinion of the hardware manufacturers, device drivers for XFree86 will be written.
"4.Severe security issues in the protocol. Especially no encrypted operation at NATO standard SECPROT level 4."
Very few people ever use the X11 protocol over a network, firstly, because most people who use X are using it for X applications running locally on their desktop computer, and, secondly, because anyone wanting to run X applications on a remote computer would use an X11 protocol compressor. The X11 protocol is complicated because it is powerful and easily extensible. As an aside, most intelligent people don't seem to have much trouble understanding the X11 protocol or the various extensions.
"6.No smooth integration into the operating system."
That would be a very bad idea. Increasing the complexity of the interfaces between vital system components such as the kernel and X is a recipe for worse security, worse compatibility, and worse maintainability.
"7.No smooth integration of the window managers."
Integration with what? X? The whole point of separating window management from X is to give you the freedom of choice to use whichever window manager you like. You can even change the window manager without having to reboot the kernel or re-start X. Otherwise, if you don't like using window managers, use GNOME, or KDE, or return to MS-Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
The primary source of the vibrations is not the bones themselves. The article clearly says a vibrator is attached to various parts of the body, and a sensor is attached on the wrist to measure the vibrations. The vibrations travel through the flesh and bones, and reach the sensor (#1) on the wrist where they are measured.
The important point made by the grandparent is that the vibrator generates vibrations not only in the body but also in the air around the vibrator. The vibrator will unavoidably emit sound directly into the air around it. Another sensor (#2) not in direct contact with the body, can measure the resulting sound waves in the air. Using bone-conducted sound waves as a secure method of communication is silly because it is not secure.
You are either trolling or horribly racist against Argentines. The Argentinian farmers I know look after their animals very well and they completely respect the Argentine national law on animal welfare. Treating the animals well makes for faster, more healthy growth. Argentinian beef certainly tastes fantastic. And it's good for business. Even now before full recovery from FMD, Argentinian beef is again a huge export (US 0,5 billion) to the US, Europe, Japan etc.
There was a recent discussion about the making of freely redistributable recordings of classical music here
He seems to be a very fine young pianist. Why don't you put up more samples, and persuade him to do at least one or two 18th and 19th century works? I think it would also be a good idea to put up a proper webpage describing each recording, e.g. giving recording date(s)/venue name/piano-name(Steinway D,Yamaha C7,etc) and programme notes.
No, you missed the point about copyright expiry: "their stuff" in the case of classical musicians is available for them to use at no cost because it is classical music which was owned, not by the performing musicians, but by the classical composers whose copyrights have mostly expired, and also the point I made earlier here about the availability of talent apart from professional performers.
You forgot to multiply the cost of one broadband connection by 100 people for 2 years in a software project (a symphony orchestra has up to 100 people), and to add to that the costs of 100 computer purchases' pro rata depreciation during those 2 years, 100 electricity users during evenings and weekends at 500Watts for a PC, plus 3kWatts more if there is room heating/air conditioning... Assuming the bandwidth for hosting the software project itself is free to the users (e.g. sourceforge), the PC room is effectively free and the PCs are used for the project for say 1/5 of the switched-on time, the total cost is still at least USD 20000. Let's compare that with the costs of producing a digital recording of one piece of classical music in a project that is intended to release the music for eventual free distribution, i.e. minimized costs -- no need to hire Carnegie Hall, no need for 5* hotels, etc. Did you know that classical music can be very satisfactorily performed and recorded in a large church (many of which have excellent acoustics) at a cost of USD300-500 for one evening's hire of the church using multi-track digital recording kit at a hire cost including amps, mikes, stands etc of USD600-1000, and a whole-day's hire of a recording engineer at USD500-1000? That's a total hire cost of around USD1400-2500 to produce a digital recording of one piece of classical music.
No, not all. The analogy is extremely apt because it shows firstly that whether creative people can afford to publish their stuff under a free-redistribution type of copyright licence has nothing to do with whether they are musicians or software engineers, and secondly that being a non-professional does not automatically imply the person can make only lower-quality content.
The point I was making to followup what the other poster said is that, for most classical works, no fee is payable to the estate of the composer. You are right that there may be a fee payable to the owner of the copyright of the score. However, it has not always been the case. There was a recent, highly controversial decision in a court case in the UK on this very subject: Hyperion Records fails at appeal.
If you don't like classical music, that's fine but there's no need to be such a troll about it.
The main reason for all of this: supply of classical musicians vastly exceeds demand. On the supply side, music schools, universities and conservatories worldwide are graduating thousands of performers of classical music every year. On the demand side, you can count the number of classical music professional orchestras in most countries in the low single digits; the reality is that the market for classical music concerts is much smaller than the market for popular music concerts.
However, what this means for the future of open-licensed freely downloadable recordings of classical music is less clear. There is no shortage of brilliant musicians already employed full-time in other paying jobs like music teaching who might consider getting together with others to perform classical works under some sort of open licence, like one of the Creative Commons licences . I suspect that as more people become aware of the open-licensing phenomenon in other media, more classical music performers will help create a similar bandwagon for classical music recordings.
DjVu is a wavelet-based image compression format which gets about 50-70% better compression ratio than JPEG for a given level of image quality loss after compression.
The open-source DjVu decoder and encoder implementation is called DjVuLibre.
Interesting background information from www.djvuzone.org:
Rosegarden has a MIDI sequencer, a music-notation editor, audio, DSSI plugins, etc. For musicians who can read music notation, Rosegarden is probably the best available MIDI software for Linux.
mou slashcode wa kana mo kanji mo wakattara ii desu ne. ima Shift-JIS de kaku "desu" wa "Ç" no you ni miemasu.
tokoro de tadashii tango "hakase" o tsukau hou ga ii desu.
dou itashimashite.
"jakiru hakusei to haido shi" no eigo dewa "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" desu.
jakiru hakusei to haido shi to iu shinduromu desu ne.
He wants maps which are under a Creative-Commons type of copyright licence because he wants to be able to publish derivative works such as annotated or modified versions of the original map . The copyright licences on most existing maps, as used by map24.com, are not compatible with Creative-Commons licences, which prevents him from using them.
The Xiph.org project is producing some amazing software including Theora. One of the components of the Xiph.org multimedia architecture is FLAC - aka the Free Lossless Audio Coder. Could someone kindly moderate up the interesting question about how to configure FLAC? I'm not the only person who'd like to be able to start using Theora with FLAC but being prevented by configuration difficulties but right now the poster's question is languishing at -1 Off-topic when it's really totally on-topic.
Your criticism is invalid because you're comparing apples and oranges. It is not necessary for [members of] the open-source software "movement" to foster innovation for the movement to be judged a success, as you seem to think. Perhaps you've misunderstood the rationale for open-source software. Conceptual innovation is the result of successful research. It is neither a necessary input to nor a necessary output of open source software projects. This is because the goals of research and the goals of the open-source software movement are different. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise. Nonetheless, if you were familiar with academic research, you would know of many successful computer-based research projects which published some or all of their results as open-source software. The irony of your ridiculous and untrue comments about Octave is that Matlab is itself based on some very old open-source software. If you don't know much about a subject, it is better not to write dogmatically about it.
I mostly agree with what you said about not wanting to change Linux/X11 to be more like MS Windows. However, in my work with universities, companies and other organisations over the last 15 years, I can say very few people use the X11 protocol over a network. I do think networked X applications are becoming more common. This may be because network speeds have increased making it more practicable to use networked X applications, and also because the advent of secure tunneling software like ssh has made it very easy to use networked X applications in a secure way.
In case anyone is fooled by the baseless criticisms of X given by the regular troll above, here is a brief rebuttal.
Most major computer operating systems have 2d user-interfaces, but this doesn't matter because applications provide their own 3d user-interface if they really need one. Another reason may be that there are very few genuine 2D users who can satisfactorily project themselves onto a 3d user interface. Transparency is not a major requirement for X because those rare applications which require it can implement it themselves e.g. using GIF or PNG transparency. There is also going to be a transparency extension for X
Not true. X runs fast, and much faster than Microsoft Windows 95, on my old i486 PC with 8MB RAM.
This is a problem not of X itself but of the hardware manufacturers not writing device driver modules for XFree86. When enough people run Linux desktops in the opinion of the hardware manufacturers, device drivers for XFree86 will be written.
This has been nominated for Top 10 Absurd Comments on Slashdot. With a properly configured firewall, this is irrelevant because nobody on the internet can attack your computer's X display. By using ssh for securely forwarding X11 connections most attackers will be unable either to watch or to disrupt your X session.
Very few people ever use the X11 protocol over a network, firstly, because most people who use X are using it for X applications running locally on their desktop computer, and, secondly, because anyone wanting to run X applications on a remote computer would use an X11 protocol compressor. The X11 protocol is complicated because it is powerful and easily extensible. As an aside, most intelligent people don't seem to have much trouble understanding the X11 protocol or the various extensions.
That would be a very bad idea. Increasing the complexity of the interfaces between vital system components such as the kernel and X is a recipe for worse security, worse compatibility, and worse maintainability.
Integration with what? X? The whole point of separating window management from X is to give you the freedom of choice to use whichever window manager you like. You can even change the window manager without having to reboot the kernel or re-start X. Otherwise, if you don't like using window managers, use GNOME, or KDE, or return to MS-Windows.
You don't seem to have heard of NX for real-time X11 protocol compression which typically achieves a 1000:1 compression ratio, of the ancient LBX, or of Differential X Compressor