I was not referring to the error correction of surviving big chucks of missing data. I was referring to the error correction of a few bits here or there, which the old players did a rather poor job at.
A lot of what critics of digital used to think of as the "digital sound" (harsh highs, lack of proper spacial imaging, etc.) was actually the result of lossy error correction and poor D/A conversion methods.
A $350 Rotel CD player today sounds better than many of the $2000 players from the 80's.
Of course, a cheap-assed bottom-of-the-line CD changer will not be very good, but I am talking about gear that is good enough to satisfy picky audiophiles here, and the low-end Rotel is probably one of the cheapest units which fits that description at the moment. I'm not talking about people who plug walkmans into their home stereo.
Au contaire! They LOVE doing blind a/b testing, and can ALWAYS make the distiction. I know several of them, and they day they can't tell the difference is the day they will give up their turntables forever.
Needless to say, the vinyl sounded slightly, if only slightly better. I'm not an audiophile myself and barely have the ears to hear, much less describe the difference, but it was there.
You hit the nail right on the head, for a whole lot of expense and trouble, you can get a tiny bit more sound quality on ultra-fragile vinyl records which become nearly worthless if they get a little scratch on them.
For 99% of the world, the small-yet-perceptable advantage of good analog is simply not worth the trouble. Digital sound is not the holy grail, but it is really good, much better than the early CD players of the 80's (thanks to superior D/A conversion algorithms and better error correction). It's good enough that most of us really don't need to bother with more.
However, that 1% of 31337 Hi-Fi freaks want that tiny bit of extra sonic fidelity, and will spend thousands of dollars (and/or endless hours at their workbench) chasing it. These days, most of them have a top-of-the-line digital system and a turntable built by naked virgins with a stylus made out of weapons-grade plutonium (or something more expensive)... and they love nothing more than to do side-by-side comparisons of Sheffield Lab's "The Moscow Sessions" recordings on both platforms when their friends are over, just so they can proove how much better analog can sound when it's done right, and pontificate about their 7-year quest for the perfect turntable arm, which ended in the basement of some mad-genious engineer who says he crafts them out of material salvaged from the Roswell alien ship.
Their hobby may seem stange to us... but then they probably react the same way when they hear about somebody building a clustered array of 200 overclocked, custom-built PC's just to run SETI@home. To each his own.
I know somebody who had a stroke and lost the use of almost everything. He has been using a head-mounted laser-pointer as his ONLY interface for years now. (He types using a fuzzy-logic driven selection system like Stephen Hawkings uses... point at a letter, and a menu of your most common words comes up, which changes as you select more letters; select a word, and the menu gives you likely phrases, etc.) It's time-consuming to type that way, but as a mouse-pointer the gadget works like a champ.
While it has been a boon to those with disabiliies, a gadget like this for the rest of us would probably reduce RSI quite a bit. As much as people complain about keyboards, unergonomic mouse techniques are probably responsible for at least as many injuries.
Collaborative filtering and comment programs are all the rage these days on the Net, a symbol of
empowerment, choice, freedom, self-policing, even protection.
The very first sentice of Jon's article is false, and yet he wonders why so few people read his whole article before commenting.
Collaborative filtering and comment programs are not "all the rage". It's something that goes on here and a few other pages, but over 95% of the sites on a regular basis have no such system. Another case of Jon's myopic worldview revealed though his column.
I kind of pity Mr. Katz. He is genuinely trying to sort out What It All Means, and that means looking for global trends in a wildy diverse and chaotic environment. The sad truth is that the only universal trend on the net is that there are no other universal trends on the net.
The only reason I have not turned on the notorious "Katz filter" is because the comments which follow his trolling articles often have very interesting discussions. Perhaps instead of all the JonKatz Article Generator scripts floating around, he could just be replaced with a random topic generator, just enough to kick off the thread.
In my opinion, if a product can harm the consumer, even a little,
the vendor has an obligation to provide explicit and obvious notification of the possibility.
In the case of TiVO, the product can not harm the consumer, even a little, and they did provide explicit and obvious notification anyway. Not in the bottom of a locked filing cabenet in a basement office with a sign that says "beware of the leopard"... right up front, in the manual, in a screen you see during installation, and on their web page. They do everything short of calling you at home during dinner to say "by the way, we use aggregate data to provide information for advertisers about general veiwing habits."
and beleive me, capture of anonymous data is far easier and cheaper.
Read my post again, that was exactly my point. The "4 times as much" was totally hypothetical, but the logic still applies... non-anonymous data costs more to collect, and alienates your customers, so why would you want to spend money on it?
(Unless the wing-nuts of the world are right, and all government and corporate power is controlled by some hidden cabal... but the people who believe that are too busy fashioning tin-foil hats to really participate much in society.)
So, you are saying that if somebody spends a tremendous ammount of time and resources, they just might manage to figure out that I am a guy who likes to watch "Yes, Minister" reruns on PBS, and thinks that ST:Voyager really sucks.
Hell, I would be happy to tell them Voyager sucks in person, if they really want to know that badly.
Oh yea, and DoubleClick doesn't have my name. They probably don't have yours either. Even if they do, nobody cares what your favorite porno sites are.
A lot of people on/. really need to come to terms with the fact that their lives are not interesting enough to be worth spying on.
Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of a company that makes a product like this.
Your sales force tells you the anonymous data can be sold to advertisers for a huge pile of money without scaring your customers off (other than the 1% of ultra-paranoid Jon Katz fans).
Your staff tells you that you can gather keep a database like this for about $250k per year.
If you want to keep specific, non-anonymous information, it will cost you 4 times as much, and scare away a third of your customers. Do you, as a businessman, want to spend the money on something like that? If not, the information will be lost forever, because why would you bother to store data that you have no interest in?
So the black helicopters arrive and want your database... So what? There's nothing there that will help them, unless the FBI wants to know the ideal time and station to run ads for Dexitrim.
I will charge nothing to share my opinion that your observation is the funniest (and most insightful) comment I've seen on/. in a long time. Thanks for the laughs.
Yeah and if GM decides to make shoddy cars you should just not buy them
Correct.
and if meat packing plants decide to process meat that has been sitting on the floor with poisoned bread to catch rats, the dead rats themselves, and their fecal matter it shouldn't matter right?
That might be analogous to the situation if the meat was clearly labeled "this meat contains rat poison, dead rats, and rat shit. For God's sake, don't eat it, but if you want to buy it for composting, it's great".
TiVO made no secret of the fact tha they are sharing aggregate data, so no crime was committed. Cool your jets, Mr. Nader.
Actually, if there is any demand at all for niche programming, the data will reflect that. As an example of how ratings do not always lead to what you call "majority oriented" programming, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is about 70th in the Neilson ratings (which is pathetic... that means it is getting about a 2.0 share, at best), but there is a 4-way network war going on to pick up the show next season, because advertisers know that Buffy has a very loyal cult following.
On the other hand, if all the people like you who prefer the more obscure shows are too paranoid to participate in the survey, the data will show that we all really love watching "Will and Grace", and you will get 24 hours of nothing else.
Can somebody please tell me how anonymous tracking data can possibly be considered a privacy violation to anyone other than black-helicopter conspiracy nuts?
Does it really hurt anybody if advertisers know that 35% of Simpsons viewers also watch ER (or whatever)?
What the astroturfers seem to misunderstand is the fact that grass roots support follows lots of people loving the product... it doesn't generate lots of people loving the product.
Due to this small causal falicy ("fan sites create buzz" vs. "lots of buzz leads to fan sites"), marketers are often fooled into thinking that astroturfing can create the illusion of lots of people excited about their crappy film or software, which will surely lead to lots of people actually excited... In the end, they always learn, the hard way, that lots of sites saying "Wow! $CRAPPYMOVIE is the best film I've ever seent!!!" fool nobody, and make the company look like complete idiots.
Balmer and Gates probably still blush at the occational chuckle years after they launced their astroturfing efforts. They learned their lesson, and now only buy off mainstream media to pimp their software (i.e., ZDnet).
There's one other reason why cell phones have caught on so quickly in Europe: economy of scale.
You see, here in America, we pay a fairly low flat-rate bill for all local land-line calls... So low, that we tend to think of local calls as being "free".
In Europe, people generally take it up the ass (sorry, "arse") with per-minute charges on every local call they make.
As a result, the cell phone network charge is an expense which Europeans are used to accepting, so lots of Europeans decided to make the jump to wireless... might as well have the added convenience if you are paying a fortune just to make your calls anyway.
Because of the quick adoption of cell phones in Europe, the economies of scale kick in... it becomes cheaper to serve somebody in the European market, so the service gets better while the US market is still only beginning to catch up.
Of course, the local land-line charges are also one reason why Internet use is so much stronger in the US than in the UK, but that's another issue.
By the way, that reminds me of an old joke:
Why don't the English manufacture PC's? Because they haven't figured out how to make one leak oil yet! Bah-dum-bump.
What is innovative about taking something that already exists in plentitude, and decoding what parts do what!?!
Funny you should ask. That's exactly what Compaq did with IBM's ROMs, resulting in the availability of relatively cheap PC's, much like the one you are surely using to read these words. Without their reverse-engineering effort to make cheap PC's, the web revolution might have never moved beyon the university CS labs.
Also, some people might have wanted to see if it really was as bad as the critics were saying.
Curiosity about a bomb might explain a high rate of DVD rentals, but DVD sales is another matter.
As an example "Mallrats" does not sell all that well, but it rents like crazy because everybody is curious about Kevin Smith's worst film. The audio commentary alone makes it worth renting on a lazy afternoon, as a detailed anatomy of a film that didn't quite work.
It's far more likely that the scientologists are buying the hell out of the DVD to get it onto best-seller lists, and pretend that the movie was not a total dud.
I can confirm for a fact that this goes on. I once worked at a major bookstore, and we would occationally get a copy of Dianetics or one of his novels in a shipment of new books, but with a months-old price tag from our store still on it.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of what critics of digital used to think of as the "digital sound" (harsh highs, lack of proper spacial imaging, etc.) was actually the result of lossy error correction and poor D/A conversion methods.
A $350 Rotel CD player today sounds better than many of the $2000 players from the 80's.
Of course, a cheap-assed bottom-of-the-line CD changer will not be very good, but I am talking about gear that is good enough to satisfy picky audiophiles here, and the low-end Rotel is probably one of the cheapest units which fits that description at the moment. I'm not talking about people who plug walkmans into their home stereo.
Au contaire! They LOVE doing blind a/b testing, and can ALWAYS make the distiction. I know several of them, and they day they can't tell the difference is the day they will give up their turntables forever.
You hit the nail right on the head, for a whole lot of expense and trouble, you can get a tiny bit more sound quality on ultra-fragile vinyl records which become nearly worthless if they get a little scratch on them.
For 99% of the world, the small-yet-perceptable advantage of good analog is simply not worth the trouble. Digital sound is not the holy grail, but it is really good, much better than the early CD players of the 80's (thanks to superior D/A conversion algorithms and better error correction). It's good enough that most of us really don't need to bother with more.
However, that 1% of 31337 Hi-Fi freaks want that tiny bit of extra sonic fidelity, and will spend thousands of dollars (and/or endless hours at their workbench) chasing it. These days, most of them have a top-of-the-line digital system and a turntable built by naked virgins with a stylus made out of weapons-grade plutonium (or something more expensive)... and they love nothing more than to do side-by-side comparisons of Sheffield Lab's "The Moscow Sessions" recordings on both platforms when their friends are over, just so they can proove how much better analog can sound when it's done right, and pontificate about their 7-year quest for the perfect turntable arm, which ended in the basement of some mad-genious engineer who says he crafts them out of material salvaged from the Roswell alien ship.
Their hobby may seem stange to us... but then they probably react the same way when they hear about somebody building a clustered array of 200 overclocked, custom-built PC's just to run SETI@home. To each his own.
It would be a completely unsuitable interface for Quake, because turning your head beyond the edge of the screen would not do anything.
In Quake, you use the mouse to simulate 360 degrees of motion, but your field of vision is probably only about 30 degrees.
I meant that it would reduce RSI for office workers... Frequent gamers still have wrist braces and Advil in their futures.
While it has been a boon to those with disabiliies, a gadget like this for the rest of us would probably reduce RSI quite a bit. As much as people complain about keyboards, unergonomic mouse techniques are probably responsible for at least as many injuries.
One of these days, I will use the preview button like I'm supposed to. Sheesh!
The very first sentice of Jon's article is false, and yet he wonders why so few people read his whole article before commenting.
Collaborative filtering and comment programs are not "all the rage". It's something that goes on here and a few other pages, but over 95% of the sites on a regular basis have no such system. Another case of Jon's myopic worldview revealed though his column.
I kind of pity Mr. Katz. He is genuinely trying to sort out What It All Means, and that means looking for global trends in a wildy diverse and chaotic environment. The sad truth is that the only universal trend on the net is that there are no other universal trends on the net.
The only reason I have not turned on the notorious "Katz filter" is because the comments which follow his trolling articles often have very interesting discussions. Perhaps instead of all the JonKatz Article Generator scripts floating around, he could just be replaced with a random topic generator, just enough to kick off the thread.
Saying it's "based on" is plagerism... saying "inspired by" is homage. Ain't Hollywood grand?
Your post kind of reminds me of Linus Van Pelt, preaching about the Great Pumpkin. ("You'll see!")
In the case of TiVO, the product can not harm the consumer, even a little, and they did provide explicit and obvious notification anyway. Not in the bottom of a locked filing cabenet in a basement office with a sign that says "beware of the leopard"... right up front, in the manual, in a screen you see during installation, and on their web page. They do everything short of calling you at home during dinner to say "by the way, we use aggregate data to provide information for advertisers about general veiwing habits."
That's why this whole "issue" is just silly.
Read my post again, that was exactly my point. The "4 times as much" was totally hypothetical, but the logic still applies... non-anonymous data costs more to collect, and alienates your customers, so why would you want to spend money on it?
(Unless the wing-nuts of the world are right, and all government and corporate power is controlled by some hidden cabal... but the people who believe that are too busy fashioning tin-foil hats to really participate much in society.)
I didn't claim to have data. It was a hypothetical situation. Try to use a little imagination sometime.
Hell, I would be happy to tell them Voyager sucks in person, if they really want to know that badly.
Oh yea, and DoubleClick doesn't have my name. They probably don't have yours either. Even if they do, nobody cares what your favorite porno sites are.
A lot of people on /. really need to come to terms with the fact that their lives are not interesting enough to be worth spying on.
Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of a company that makes a product like this.
Your sales force tells you the anonymous data can be sold to advertisers for a huge pile of money without scaring your customers off (other than the 1% of ultra-paranoid Jon Katz fans).
Your staff tells you that you can gather keep a database like this for about $250k per year.
If you want to keep specific, non-anonymous information, it will cost you 4 times as much, and scare away a third of your customers. Do you, as a businessman, want to spend the money on something like that? If not, the information will be lost forever, because why would you bother to store data that you have no interest in?
So the black helicopters arrive and want your database... So what? There's nothing there that will help them, unless the FBI wants to know the ideal time and station to run ads for Dexitrim.
I will charge nothing to share my opinion that your observation is the funniest (and most insightful) comment I've seen on /. in a long time. Thanks for the laughs.
Correct.
and if meat packing plants decide to process meat that has been sitting on the floor with poisoned bread to catch rats, the dead rats themselves, and their fecal matter it shouldn't matter right?
That might be analogous to the situation if the meat was clearly labeled "this meat contains rat poison, dead rats, and rat shit. For God's sake, don't eat it, but if you want to buy it for composting, it's great".
TiVO made no secret of the fact tha they are sharing aggregate data, so no crime was committed. Cool your jets, Mr. Nader.
On the other hand, if all the people like you who prefer the more obscure shows are too paranoid to participate in the survey, the data will show that we all really love watching "Will and Grace", and you will get 24 hours of nothing else.
Can somebody please tell me how anonymous tracking data can possibly be considered a privacy violation to anyone other than black-helicopter conspiracy nuts?
Does it really hurt anybody if advertisers know that 35% of Simpsons viewers also watch ER (or whatever)?
Due to this small causal falicy ("fan sites create buzz" vs. "lots of buzz leads to fan sites"), marketers are often fooled into thinking that astroturfing can create the illusion of lots of people excited about their crappy film or software, which will surely lead to lots of people actually excited... In the end, they always learn, the hard way, that lots of sites saying "Wow! $CRAPPYMOVIE is the best film I've ever seent!!!" fool nobody, and make the company look like complete idiots.
Balmer and Gates probably still blush at the occational chuckle years after they launced their astroturfing efforts. They learned their lesson, and now only buy off mainstream media to pimp their software (i.e., ZDnet).
The net has brought more information to shut-in armchair philosophers than ever before.
You see, here in America, we pay a fairly low flat-rate bill for all local land-line calls... So low, that we tend to think of local calls as being "free".
In Europe, people generally take it up the ass (sorry, "arse") with per-minute charges on every local call they make.
As a result, the cell phone network charge is an expense which Europeans are used to accepting, so lots of Europeans decided to make the jump to wireless... might as well have the added convenience if you are paying a fortune just to make your calls anyway.
Because of the quick adoption of cell phones in Europe, the economies of scale kick in... it becomes cheaper to serve somebody in the European market, so the service gets better while the US market is still only beginning to catch up.
Of course, the local land-line charges are also one reason why Internet use is so much stronger in the US than in the UK, but that's another issue.
By the way, that reminds me of an old joke:
Why don't the English manufacture PC's?
Because they haven't figured out how to make one leak oil yet!
Bah-dum-bump.
Funny you should ask. That's exactly what Compaq did with IBM's ROMs, resulting in the availability of relatively cheap PC's, much like the one you are surely using to read these words. Without their reverse-engineering effort to make cheap PC's, the web revolution might have never moved beyon the university CS labs.
Now that's what I call innovation!!!
It's true that you accused the original poster of "asking stupid questions", but that's because he was.
It's not flamebait to call this guy ignorant, it's insightful. Kudos to those who had the sense to mod you up.
Curiosity about a bomb might explain a high rate of DVD rentals, but DVD sales is another matter.
As an example "Mallrats" does not sell all that well, but it rents like crazy because everybody is curious about Kevin Smith's worst film. The audio commentary alone makes it worth renting on a lazy afternoon, as a detailed anatomy of a film that didn't quite work.
It's far more likely that the scientologists are buying the hell out of the DVD to get it onto best-seller lists, and pretend that the movie was not a total dud.
I can confirm for a fact that this goes on. I once worked at a major bookstore, and we would occationally get a copy of Dianetics or one of his novels in a shipment of new books, but with a months-old price tag from our store still on it.