:) Don't worry, I criticise cosmologists for doing the same. I've written a couple of wild unfocused rants on this story already and to be honest they're actually more motivated from frustration at astrophysics and cosmology than particle physics...
it's not the theory that needs changing in that case, it's just the parameters in the theory. the theory itself is still fine, you just tweak a few numbers and suddenly it's "oh the lsp is up at 20TeV, sorry guys! you built that 15bn euro machine for nothing!" there's something like 127 free parameters in mssm which gives you a *huge* parameter space to run around in and hide from the experimentalists. play this game and the theory is still "valid". play it long enough and everyone else will give up and go and look for something else - but we might have to see a good few people retire before that happens.
supersymmetry doesn't unite the forces. you've got to do something else to do that, such as super(symmetric)gravity and super(symmetric)string theory. they're an extra layer (and a good few extra dimensions) on top of a "standard" supersymmetric model such as the minimally-supersymmetric standard model.
"And even if that paper held, it wouldn't have explained results like the Bullet Cluster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster), where maps of particulate dark matter have been made."
Not having a beef with you at all because I agree with basically everything you say, but this is the bit that really upsets me about dark matter studies. (Not you -- about dark matter in general:) ) There is almost certainly no *single cause* of what we call "dark matter" (which is, after all, just the observation of anomalous rotation curves. Ignore cosmological dark matter -- in principle that's totally unconnected and is just a term appearing in the Friedman equations which are totally phenomenological). We know that MACHOs exist. We also know that they're nothing like populous enough to be "the" dark matter. But we ignore them from then on, mainly because it makes our lives easier if we pretend they don't exist. But they do. We know neutrinos have mass. We also know that they're not massive enough to be "the" dark matter, but dark matter they certainly are. Warm, likely to dissipate from galaxies, but dark matter nonetheless. But we ignore them, too. We know an LSP is a dark matter, so for some reason we assume it HAS to exist and even attribute anomalous signals from the centre of the galaxy to dark matter annihilations and invent new channels for LSPs to interact and decay. But, for the sake of argument, let's say an LSP exists. Then it's a dark matter. And particle physicists will say it's "the" dark matter -- but it's not and it's entirely possible that actually it will only be the most significant component, the same as assuming the universe is hydrogen is a good first approximation and an appallingly shonky second approximation.
Add to that that it's undeniable that (spiral) galaxies rotate in a cylindrical metric and that just because the Newtonian potential is small doesn't change the fundamental nature of a spacetime, and it's at least suggestive. There are other papers out there that have looked at this and they've been better done and concluded that it can't be dark matter but it reduces the need by maybe 10% or 20%, in spiral galaxies. Add in a more complicated geometry to model the central bulge and maybe that'll go up to 25%. That's 10%, conservatively speaking, of a problem we're all masturbating over supersymmetry to solve potentially gone using century-old GR. Maybe an LSP is 90% of the dark matter, but it wouldn't be the whole thing. (Or maybe actually model it properly and relativistic effects *don't* alter the rotationc urves significantly. That's also cool.)
Then of course there's MOND. Is MOND fundamental? Nope, nothing like, it's pure phenomenology. But it fits galaxies way too close for comfort. You can ignore that all you like, but it's suggestive of at least some underlying correlation, if not actually modified gravity. The fact that it falls apart dramatically in clusters seems to argue against it being fundamental, but something fishy is going on.
As for the bullet cluster, even TeVeS (basically a relativistic generalisation of MOND) can fit that... if you play around and add in some massive neutrinos with a suspiciously high mass. Lower that mass and there's still a missing mass problem, but I'm happy with an LSP filling that if necessary -- but the case isn't really clear cut for dark matter having to be particle-like.
And it's certainly not clear cut for there being "a" dark matter. The way I see it it's actually clear-cut that there are various things going on, from new physics to a poor use of the old stuff, to supersymmetric particles, to actually just all the old stuff being there anyway as MACHOs and neutrinos.
most of them are pretty damn heavy. i believe the lsp is expected (from some models of supersymmetry) to show up in the lhc but it's easy enough to make sure it doesn't. if an lsp is found then at least part of the dark matter problem will be found, because that thing's basically stable and doesn't interact with us in any way.
warning: unfocused and off-topic rant ahead.
what's going to upset me is if an lsp is found (which i see as pretty unlikely, in all honesty) people are going to be shouting about how they've solved the dark matter problem -- they haven't, they've found that an lsp exists and is guaranteed to form *part* of the dark matter. there are plenty of other candidates and unfortunately i've been in physics long enough to realise that when there are about 15 or 20 candidates for something, most of them are there in some respect. i'll not be surprised if dark matter comprises of an lsp, massive neutrinos (we already *know* they're a dark matter, just not how significant they are if at all), relativistic corrections to the naive newtonian models of galaxies (galaxies are not living in flat space, they live in curved space which for spiral galaxies is cylindrical), a misapplication of the friedman equations in cosmology (the issue there being that they describe the universe "on average" and yet we haven't the faintest clue how that "average" is taken), and probably a host of other things i've forgotten and even others that have never been thought of yet.
No. We can never smash hard enough to disprove supersymmetry unless we find something that directly contradicts it. To put it another way, if all the LHC finds is a Higg's and expected results from the standard model, it doesn't actually disprove supersymmetry since any model of supersymmetry has so many parameters that you can tweak a few of them and lift the superpartners back up above the LHC's maximum energies. That is *always* going to be possible -- theoretically a limit would be if we had particle accelerators that reached the Planck energy and people would finally be saying "hang on, something's up here; we should be seeing quantum gravity by now and we're still not seeing the quarkinos", but in reality we're never getting to anything like an energy that would rule it out.
What's a lot more likely in my mind is that more physicists will begin to drop supersymmetry and look at something else that may actually have observable effects at "low" energies while otherwise the supersymmetry bandwagon will roll happily on with slightly more tightly-constrained parameters.
The hope is that the LHC not only doesn't see supersymmetry but *does* see something utterly unexpected. That's what I want from it. (Actually I want specifically no Higg's boson, and no supersymmetry.) Something unpredicted would rule out supersymmetry not least because any supersymmetric model that could account for it would be a posteriori -- constructed purely to do that and most likely grossly ugly as a result. By definition something unexpected is not a straight prediction of supersymmetric theories, and any model constructed purely to explain it will be under suspicion.
Before getting onto the next bit, the Higg's is not associated with supersymmetry, it's part of the standard model and doesn't require supersymmetry to exist. The Higg's is the last part of the standard model that is yet to be observed. They're different topics, and the LHC is hoped to shed light on both of them. As far as supersymmetry goes, the LHC was built basically to give us a pointer for where to go beyond the standard model and forms of supersymmetry are currently the most widely-favoured options.
The fear (at least my fear) is that the LHC will find nothing. Squat. No supersymmetry, nothing outwith the standard model -- but from my point of view, that it does find a Higg's. That would appear to add support to the standard model, which is a bit of a pain because the standard model's already broken since we *know* neutrinos have to have mass and fudging the standard model to put them in is pretty contrived.
However, not finding a Higg's at all would be brilliant -- so strictly speaking, the LHC finding *nothing at all* would be good. Because the Higg's should be within its capabilities and if it's not there there'll be a lot of head-scratching going on, and I always prefer things being rethought and reanalysed over mindlessly employing techniques chiefly developed in the 40s with QED and brought to fruition in the 70s with QCD and the electroweak theory.
But, in all fairness, I'm not a particle physicist, I'm a cosmologist.
totally off-topic, but i have a bad habit of doing this on *nix systems. cavalier use of "rm -Rf *" has cost me a day's worth of work more than once, and yet i never learn:( fortunately the daily backups mean i've not lost anything more than that. and for some reason i'm *still* using "rm -Rf *" on linux machines. on windows i habitually shift-delete but i don't think i've lost anything critical for a few years -- i have lost all the work i did up to and including my masters degree in 2002 though through a succession of idiotic shift-deletes. "oh, *i've* got a backup" i said as i deleted the last copy, forgetting that a few months before i'd said "oh, *i've* got a backup" and deleted the backup. thankfully the way apple set up osx makes me use the gui more than the command line and everything goes into the recycle bin. if i weren't such an idiot, it all wouldn't be such an issue...
I'll be happy to give it a look when I end up back on a Linux machine. At the minute I'm on a Mac and iTunes on a Mac isn't too bad. A bit of a resource hog but not enough to worry me. On Windows I've been using Foobar2000 so if it's similar it'll suit me fine.
Totally true in the most part but these days Mint are also issuing Mint Debian, which is directly based on Debian rather than via Ubuntu. You could view it as an alternative Ubuntu.
XMMS was fine last time I used Linux. Not exactly full-featured but if you're comparing with WinAmp you're not looking at iTunes anyway -- you're looking at a simple media player that's nice enough to use.
I would point out that I last used XMMS about five years back, though, before all my machines turned into Macs, not entirely through decisions of my own, so it might be development has totally stalled and it's not worth my recommendation. These things happen...
Well off-topic now from the Canonical/Banshee/GNOME shitfest, but I really like Arch. The best Linux setups I've ever had were Gentoo, back in 2005, and then Arch in about 2007. Unfortunately last time I installed Arch I had a motherfucker of a time getting X Windows running and ended up ditching it and putting Ubuntu back on because I'm running out of time to spend the time getting something running. When I get that computer back I'm going back to Arch again. (Or Gentoo if I suddenly start getting hard-ons for hours of compilation again.*)
(* Actually since I swapped computers and stopped using Gentoo they started dishing out precompiled binaries for a few things. Since the computer I was compiling on took at least a night and it may have been almost a day to compile up X and Gnome, that's probably a good thing. I always viewed Arch - and swapped to it because of that - as something akin to Gentoo without all the compile-time. Maybe Gentoo took note of people like me...)
yeah my disclaimer that i was doing all this through relatively decent (but far from top-end) headphones is doubtless extremely important. i've not done any tests with any better speakers
A year or two back I decided to actually test where I hit transparency on MP3s encoded with LAME as it then was. I thought I'd get transparency at somewhere between 192kbs and 256kbs. I didn't, I got it at roughly 160-170kbs depending on the song. (Too many cymbals does fuck that up but up the bitrate enough and at maybe 210-225kbs cymbals and cornets go transparent for me, too. Maybe I've got cloth ears but since I'm encoding my music for me I don't give the slightest hint of a fuck - also I doubt it, I think the desire to prove how great you are is driving a lot of audiophiles to convince themselves they can hear more than they can.)
A good friend of mine -- a better musician than me by a long way and I'm not actually that bad -- hits transparency at about 150-160kbs on modern encoders, though to be fair he uses OGG by default and I tend to hit transparency down around there on OGG too.
I'd love to see more people who claim they *need* lossless to listen properly do an actual, full double-blind on a range of tpyes of music. I've no issue believing other people hit transparency higher than I do, but frankly I don't believe anyone who says that 320kbs MP3 isn't good enough.
Disclaimer 1: I have FLAC rips of all my CDs except a few which I ripped with iTunes and haven't swapped from ALAC yet. This is partly to have full quality archives of my CD collection, and partly because I'm well aware of the haemorrhaging of quality you get by reencoding compressed files. Disclaimer 2: Both I and my friend did these double blinds through headphones. Nice quality headphones (Sennheiser over-the-ears, can't remember which model) but headphones nonetheless. The results through a big speaker stack would probably be different and I'd expect to hit transparency a bit higher, at maybe 256kbs again. But I might be wrong and it might be lower (or, of course, it might be higher). Disclaimer 3: Not really a disclaimer, just that when I record at home I tend to record in 48kHz and 24 bit. That's mainly because my computer is aging. Give me more RAM and I'll happily sit there and record at 96kHz and 32 bit. I'll then downsample it to 16 bit and 44.1kHz because I really don't see the point of doing anything else given I'm compressing everything so that maybe -50dB is the lowest volume my music hits and normally it's between -30dB and -0.1dB... Disclaimer 4: I'm very loathe to buy anything from online music stores because they're only offering compressed formats, so I've automatically taken a quality hit. But when there's no physical release I buy them anyway because in all reality I can't pretend to tell the difference between a 320kbs MP3 and a CD and nor can I tell the difference between a 192kbs AAC and a CD. But if I ever have to re-encode -- like if I end up back somewhere running Linux and I can't put on MP3 support unlikely as that now seems -- then I know I'll lose some quality. Which may or may not be audible, of course....
I'd say that might be debatable - that comes from common usage. If we're being lunatically pedantic I don't think we can use "Britain" as a synonym of "United Kingdom". Though I highly doubt all that many Northern Irish people are gonna care too much, unless they'd be... unreasonable... about it all.:)
One of the most interesting consequences is that they can save data from each of the receivers (given enough storage; I worked briefly on the LOFAR data storage and it's a big problem since there's terabyte upon terabyte of data flooding off these things and you'd rapidly run out of space if you kept it all for too long) and then basically point a radio telescope *in software*. The stations themselves have absolutely no pointing at all, they really are just dumb receivers. But with the data put onto a computer you can point around virtually, at a beautiful resolution.
Yes, that's more or less what you said, but I find it fascinating and I said it in a slightly different way:)
It's even written clearly on passports as "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". I think it would be quite tough for someone to claim it's only traditionally linked with the UK. Linked with Great Britain, now, that's a different matter - Northern Ireland isn't in Great Britain but we'd habitually call the Northern Irish "British" even though in an absurdly pedantic manner of thinking, they're not. Although you could swing it by pointing out that Ireland is part of the British Isles - which would then piss off the Irish because that would allow them to be called "British" too.
We've made a merry mess of our islands. I'll never cease to find it both entertaining and rather depressing.
(also, to be fair, the whole site really has been set up as a scam, and is a typical internet vendor thing. i don't actually like it either. but it seems the main argument people had other than "i don't like this" -- which would be uncontroversial since there's little to like here -- was "he's stolen copyrighted images". which is true enough, but kind of misses the main point.)
people are getting in a tizzy about the copyrighted images on the site. i think it's a reaction rather than the original reason, of course -- oh my god he's reselling open source the CUNT but i can't complain since it's legal oh shit oh shit oh thank fuck he's breached copyright on the pictures. which it seems he probably has.
.......so let them type the address into google and click on the first result. Seriously, is that so hard? Not everyone understands computers -- and many (perhaps the vast bulk, although generally I rarely overestimate the intelligence of any group of people) of them don't understand computers not because they're dumb but because, honestly, they give less than the slightest hint of a shit.
If they get to www.whatever.com by going to Google or Yahoo or Bing and typing it into the search engine, what matter to you? Why do you care? Are you that desperate to scrape together a superiority complex?
Believe it or not but I'm a cosmologist by trade and while I agree with a part of what you're saying -- dark energy is a term in the equations that balances everything -- the evidence is a lot stronger than "stars are putting out X energy, but we are only seeing X-Y energy. Y must be dark matter!" (I imagine that was a slip of the fingers; dark matter and dark energy have contradictory effects. Dark matter is a non-luminous clustering form of matter which appears to be necessary to get galaxies to form how they do, while dark energy is a non-luminous *non-clustering* form of matter with some form of anti-gravitational effect. For reasons I won't get into at the minute, if you believe the Friedman model -- which is your call; I have firm suspicions but there are too many successes of the model to simply dismiss it -- including predictions that have been tested and found well within experimental error).
I may not actually *believe* it myself either because, like you, I feel it's pure phenomenology, the evidence is too strong to dismiss that readily. Also, the evidence is very difficult to replicate the features of dark energy by encounters of photons with a LOT of other photons and getting "nudged around". (I'm not totally sure how that happens, either. Light travelling over cosmological distances can and does interact with matter -- which has significant but very characteristic effects on the CMB radiation in particular -- but I'm not aware of any strong self-interaction between photons. QED would probably not be a renormalisable theory if photons were strongly self-interacting. But I'm not a quantum physicist so I could very well be wrong.) You can do it by putting us in a big void, but then you really struggle to fit the characteristic wavelength running through the large-scale distribution of galaxies (which isn't a myth; it's observed). Actually that wavelength is a killer unless you use dark energy:( *And* dark matter.
Slashdot Mirror
:) Don't worry, I criticise cosmologists for doing the same. I've written a couple of wild unfocused rants on this story already and to be honest they're actually more motivated from frustration at astrophysics and cosmology than particle physics...
it's not the theory that needs changing in that case, it's just the parameters in the theory. the theory itself is still fine, you just tweak a few numbers and suddenly it's "oh the lsp is up at 20TeV, sorry guys! you built that 15bn euro machine for nothing!" there's something like 127 free parameters in mssm which gives you a *huge* parameter space to run around in and hide from the experimentalists. play this game and the theory is still "valid". play it long enough and everyone else will give up and go and look for something else - but we might have to see a good few people retire before that happens.
supersymmetry doesn't unite the forces. you've got to do something else to do that, such as super(symmetric)gravity and super(symmetric)string theory. they're an extra layer (and a good few extra dimensions) on top of a "standard" supersymmetric model such as the minimally-supersymmetric standard model.
"And even if that paper held, it wouldn't have explained results like the Bullet Cluster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster), where maps of particulate dark matter have been made."
Not having a beef with you at all because I agree with basically everything you say, but this is the bit that really upsets me about dark matter studies. (Not you -- about dark matter in general :) ) There is almost certainly no *single cause* of what we call "dark matter" (which is, after all, just the observation of anomalous rotation curves. Ignore cosmological dark matter -- in principle that's totally unconnected and is just a term appearing in the Friedman equations which are totally phenomenological). We know that MACHOs exist. We also know that they're nothing like populous enough to be "the" dark matter. But we ignore them from then on, mainly because it makes our lives easier if we pretend they don't exist. But they do. We know neutrinos have mass. We also know that they're not massive enough to be "the" dark matter, but dark matter they certainly are. Warm, likely to dissipate from galaxies, but dark matter nonetheless. But we ignore them, too. We know an LSP is a dark matter, so for some reason we assume it HAS to exist and even attribute anomalous signals from the centre of the galaxy to dark matter annihilations and invent new channels for LSPs to interact and decay. But, for the sake of argument, let's say an LSP exists. Then it's a dark matter. And particle physicists will say it's "the" dark matter -- but it's not and it's entirely possible that actually it will only be the most significant component, the same as assuming the universe is hydrogen is a good first approximation and an appallingly shonky second approximation.
Add to that that it's undeniable that (spiral) galaxies rotate in a cylindrical metric and that just because the Newtonian potential is small doesn't change the fundamental nature of a spacetime, and it's at least suggestive. There are other papers out there that have looked at this and they've been better done and concluded that it can't be dark matter but it reduces the need by maybe 10% or 20%, in spiral galaxies. Add in a more complicated geometry to model the central bulge and maybe that'll go up to 25%. That's 10%, conservatively speaking, of a problem we're all masturbating over supersymmetry to solve potentially gone using century-old GR. Maybe an LSP is 90% of the dark matter, but it wouldn't be the whole thing. (Or maybe actually model it properly and relativistic effects *don't* alter the rotationc urves significantly. That's also cool.)
Then of course there's MOND. Is MOND fundamental? Nope, nothing like, it's pure phenomenology. But it fits galaxies way too close for comfort. You can ignore that all you like, but it's suggestive of at least some underlying correlation, if not actually modified gravity. The fact that it falls apart dramatically in clusters seems to argue against it being fundamental, but something fishy is going on.
As for the bullet cluster, even TeVeS (basically a relativistic generalisation of MOND) can fit that... if you play around and add in some massive neutrinos with a suspiciously high mass. Lower that mass and there's still a missing mass problem, but I'm happy with an LSP filling that if necessary -- but the case isn't really clear cut for dark matter having to be particle-like.
And it's certainly not clear cut for there being "a" dark matter. The way I see it it's actually clear-cut that there are various things going on, from new physics to a poor use of the old stuff, to supersymmetric particles, to actually just all the old stuff being there anyway as MACHOs and neutrinos.
Rant over. :)
most of them are pretty damn heavy. i believe the lsp is expected (from some models of supersymmetry) to show up in the lhc but it's easy enough to make sure it doesn't. if an lsp is found then at least part of the dark matter problem will be found, because that thing's basically stable and doesn't interact with us in any way.
warning: unfocused and off-topic rant ahead.
what's going to upset me is if an lsp is found (which i see as pretty unlikely, in all honesty) people are going to be shouting about how they've solved the dark matter problem -- they haven't, they've found that an lsp exists and is guaranteed to form *part* of the dark matter. there are plenty of other candidates and unfortunately i've been in physics long enough to realise that when there are about 15 or 20 candidates for something, most of them are there in some respect. i'll not be surprised if dark matter comprises of an lsp, massive neutrinos (we already *know* they're a dark matter, just not how significant they are if at all), relativistic corrections to the naive newtonian models of galaxies (galaxies are not living in flat space, they live in curved space which for spiral galaxies is cylindrical), a misapplication of the friedman equations in cosmology (the issue there being that they describe the universe "on average" and yet we haven't the faintest clue how that "average" is taken), and probably a host of other things i've forgotten and even others that have never been thought of yet.
No. We can never smash hard enough to disprove supersymmetry unless we find something that directly contradicts it. To put it another way, if all the LHC finds is a Higg's and expected results from the standard model, it doesn't actually disprove supersymmetry since any model of supersymmetry has so many parameters that you can tweak a few of them and lift the superpartners back up above the LHC's maximum energies. That is *always* going to be possible -- theoretically a limit would be if we had particle accelerators that reached the Planck energy and people would finally be saying "hang on, something's up here; we should be seeing quantum gravity by now and we're still not seeing the quarkinos", but in reality we're never getting to anything like an energy that would rule it out.
What's a lot more likely in my mind is that more physicists will begin to drop supersymmetry and look at something else that may actually have observable effects at "low" energies while otherwise the supersymmetry bandwagon will roll happily on with slightly more tightly-constrained parameters.
The hope is that the LHC not only doesn't see supersymmetry but *does* see something utterly unexpected. That's what I want from it. (Actually I want specifically no Higg's boson, and no supersymmetry.) Something unpredicted would rule out supersymmetry not least because any supersymmetric model that could account for it would be a posteriori -- constructed purely to do that and most likely grossly ugly as a result. By definition something unexpected is not a straight prediction of supersymmetric theories, and any model constructed purely to explain it will be under suspicion.
Before getting onto the next bit, the Higg's is not associated with supersymmetry, it's part of the standard model and doesn't require supersymmetry to exist. The Higg's is the last part of the standard model that is yet to be observed. They're different topics, and the LHC is hoped to shed light on both of them. As far as supersymmetry goes, the LHC was built basically to give us a pointer for where to go beyond the standard model and forms of supersymmetry are currently the most widely-favoured options.
The fear (at least my fear) is that the LHC will find nothing. Squat. No supersymmetry, nothing outwith the standard model -- but from my point of view, that it does find a Higg's. That would appear to add support to the standard model, which is a bit of a pain because the standard model's already broken since we *know* neutrinos have to have mass and fudging the standard model to put them in is pretty contrived.
However, not finding a Higg's at all would be brilliant -- so strictly speaking, the LHC finding *nothing at all* would be good. Because the Higg's should be within its capabilities and if it's not there there'll be a lot of head-scratching going on, and I always prefer things being rethought and reanalysed over mindlessly employing techniques chiefly developed in the 40s with QED and brought to fruition in the 70s with QCD and the electroweak theory.
But, in all fairness, I'm not a particle physicist, I'm a cosmologist.
totally off-topic, but i have a bad habit of doing this on *nix systems. cavalier use of "rm -Rf *" has cost me a day's worth of work more than once, and yet i never learn :( fortunately the daily backups mean i've not lost anything more than that. and for some reason i'm *still* using "rm -Rf *" on linux machines. on windows i habitually shift-delete but i don't think i've lost anything critical for a few years -- i have lost all the work i did up to and including my masters degree in 2002 though through a succession of idiotic shift-deletes. "oh, *i've* got a backup" i said as i deleted the last copy, forgetting that a few months before i'd said "oh, *i've* got a backup" and deleted the backup. thankfully the way apple set up osx makes me use the gui more than the command line and everything goes into the recycle bin. if i weren't such an idiot, it all wouldn't be such an issue...
Haha cool. So maybe Arch took note of people who like compiling things.... :)
I'll be happy to give it a look when I end up back on a Linux machine. At the minute I'm on a Mac and iTunes on a Mac isn't too bad. A bit of a resource hog but not enough to worry me. On Windows I've been using Foobar2000 so if it's similar it'll suit me fine.
That looks pretty nice, cheers
Totally true in the most part but these days Mint are also issuing Mint Debian, which is directly based on Debian rather than via Ubuntu. You could view it as an alternative Ubuntu.
XMMS was fine last time I used Linux. Not exactly full-featured but if you're comparing with WinAmp you're not looking at iTunes anyway -- you're looking at a simple media player that's nice enough to use.
I would point out that I last used XMMS about five years back, though, before all my machines turned into Macs, not entirely through decisions of my own, so it might be development has totally stalled and it's not worth my recommendation. These things happen...
Well off-topic now from the Canonical/Banshee/GNOME shitfest, but I really like Arch. The best Linux setups I've ever had were Gentoo, back in 2005, and then Arch in about 2007. Unfortunately last time I installed Arch I had a motherfucker of a time getting X Windows running and ended up ditching it and putting Ubuntu back on because I'm running out of time to spend the time getting something running. When I get that computer back I'm going back to Arch again. (Or Gentoo if I suddenly start getting hard-ons for hours of compilation again.*)
(* Actually since I swapped computers and stopped using Gentoo they started dishing out precompiled binaries for a few things. Since the computer I was compiling on took at least a night and it may have been almost a day to compile up X and Gnome, that's probably a good thing. I always viewed Arch - and swapped to it because of that - as something akin to Gentoo without all the compile-time. Maybe Gentoo took note of people like me...)
yeah my disclaimer that i was doing all this through relatively decent (but far from top-end) headphones is doubtless extremely important. i've not done any tests with any better speakers
A year or two back I decided to actually test where I hit transparency on MP3s encoded with LAME as it then was. I thought I'd get transparency at somewhere between 192kbs and 256kbs. I didn't, I got it at roughly 160-170kbs depending on the song. (Too many cymbals does fuck that up but up the bitrate enough and at maybe 210-225kbs cymbals and cornets go transparent for me, too. Maybe I've got cloth ears but since I'm encoding my music for me I don't give the slightest hint of a fuck - also I doubt it, I think the desire to prove how great you are is driving a lot of audiophiles to convince themselves they can hear more than they can.)
A good friend of mine -- a better musician than me by a long way and I'm not actually that bad -- hits transparency at about 150-160kbs on modern encoders, though to be fair he uses OGG by default and I tend to hit transparency down around there on OGG too.
I'd love to see more people who claim they *need* lossless to listen properly do an actual, full double-blind on a range of tpyes of music. I've no issue believing other people hit transparency higher than I do, but frankly I don't believe anyone who says that 320kbs MP3 isn't good enough.
Disclaimer 1: I have FLAC rips of all my CDs except a few which I ripped with iTunes and haven't swapped from ALAC yet. This is partly to have full quality archives of my CD collection, and partly because I'm well aware of the haemorrhaging of quality you get by reencoding compressed files.
Disclaimer 2: Both I and my friend did these double blinds through headphones. Nice quality headphones (Sennheiser over-the-ears, can't remember which model) but headphones nonetheless. The results through a big speaker stack would probably be different and I'd expect to hit transparency a bit higher, at maybe 256kbs again. But I might be wrong and it might be lower (or, of course, it might be higher).
Disclaimer 3: Not really a disclaimer, just that when I record at home I tend to record in 48kHz and 24 bit. That's mainly because my computer is aging. Give me more RAM and I'll happily sit there and record at 96kHz and 32 bit. I'll then downsample it to 16 bit and 44.1kHz because I really don't see the point of doing anything else given I'm compressing everything so that maybe -50dB is the lowest volume my music hits and normally it's between -30dB and -0.1dB...
Disclaimer 4: I'm very loathe to buy anything from online music stores because they're only offering compressed formats, so I've automatically taken a quality hit. But when there's no physical release I buy them anyway because in all reality I can't pretend to tell the difference between a 320kbs MP3 and a CD and nor can I tell the difference between a 192kbs AAC and a CD. But if I ever have to re-encode -- like if I end up back somewhere running Linux and I can't put on MP3 support unlikely as that now seems -- then I know I'll lose some quality. Which may or may not be audible, of course....
I'd say that might be debatable - that comes from common usage. If we're being lunatically pedantic I don't think we can use "Britain" as a synonym of "United Kingdom". Though I highly doubt all that many Northern Irish people are gonna care too much, unless they'd be... unreasonable... about it all. :)
One of the most interesting consequences is that they can save data from each of the receivers (given enough storage; I worked briefly on the LOFAR data storage and it's a big problem since there's terabyte upon terabyte of data flooding off these things and you'd rapidly run out of space if you kept it all for too long) and then basically point a radio telescope *in software*. The stations themselves have absolutely no pointing at all, they really are just dumb receivers. But with the data put onto a computer you can point around virtually, at a beautiful resolution.
Yes, that's more or less what you said, but I find it fascinating and I said it in a slightly different way :)
It's even written clearly on passports as "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". I think it would be quite tough for someone to claim it's only traditionally linked with the UK. Linked with Great Britain, now, that's a different matter - Northern Ireland isn't in Great Britain but we'd habitually call the Northern Irish "British" even though in an absurdly pedantic manner of thinking, they're not. Although you could swing it by pointing out that Ireland is part of the British Isles - which would then piss off the Irish because that would allow them to be called "British" too.
We've made a merry mess of our islands. I'll never cease to find it both entertaining and rather depressing.
(also, to be fair, the whole site really has been set up as a scam, and is a typical internet vendor thing. i don't actually like it either. but it seems the main argument people had other than "i don't like this" -- which would be uncontroversial since there's little to like here -- was "he's stolen copyrighted images". which is true enough, but kind of misses the main point.)
people are getting in a tizzy about the copyrighted images on the site. i think it's a reaction rather than the original reason, of course -- oh my god he's reselling open source the CUNT but i can't complain since it's legal oh shit oh shit oh thank fuck he's breached copyright on the pictures. which it seems he probably has.
yeah i wasn't thinking when i posted any of that. bad news and alcohol combined :(
(And if your website isn't in Google's listings.... list it. It's not that hard...)
.......so let them type the address into google and click on the first result. Seriously, is that so hard? Not everyone understands computers -- and many (perhaps the vast bulk, although generally I rarely overestimate the intelligence of any group of people) of them don't understand computers not because they're dumb but because, honestly, they give less than the slightest hint of a shit.
If they get to www.whatever.com by going to Google or Yahoo or Bing and typing it into the search engine, what matter to you? Why do you care? Are you that desperate to scrape together a superiority complex?
^^ needs mod points
Believe it or not but I'm a cosmologist by trade and while I agree with a part of what you're saying -- dark energy is a term in the equations that balances everything -- the evidence is a lot stronger than "stars are putting out X energy, but we are only seeing X-Y energy. Y must be dark matter!" (I imagine that was a slip of the fingers; dark matter and dark energy have contradictory effects. Dark matter is a non-luminous clustering form of matter which appears to be necessary to get galaxies to form how they do, while dark energy is a non-luminous *non-clustering* form of matter with some form of anti-gravitational effect. For reasons I won't get into at the minute, if you believe the Friedman model -- which is your call; I have firm suspicions but there are too many successes of the model to simply dismiss it -- including predictions that have been tested and found well within experimental error).
I may not actually *believe* it myself either because, like you, I feel it's pure phenomenology, the evidence is too strong to dismiss that readily. Also, the evidence is very difficult to replicate the features of dark energy by encounters of photons with a LOT of other photons and getting "nudged around". (I'm not totally sure how that happens, either. Light travelling over cosmological distances can and does interact with matter -- which has significant but very characteristic effects on the CMB radiation in particular -- but I'm not aware of any strong self-interaction between photons. QED would probably not be a renormalisable theory if photons were strongly self-interacting. But I'm not a quantum physicist so I could very well be wrong.) You can do it by putting us in a big void, but then you really struggle to fit the characteristic wavelength running through the large-scale distribution of galaxies (which isn't a myth; it's observed). Actually that wavelength is a killer unless you use dark energy :( *And* dark matter.