I, for one, welcome our self-replicating robot overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Slashdot personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground iron mines.
This problem is only going to get worse before it gets better. There's a worse case that hasn't been encountered yet. If the consumer marketplace ends up with genetically modified apples that aren't intentionally seedless, then who knows where those apple seeds might wind up. If that modification turns up to be dominant, then non-modified apple trees are going to have a fight with the force of evolution.
I was under the impression that you almost never planted apples from seed because apples don't breed true. All modern apple growing works from budding or grafting or some such thing.
Funny.. Nowhere in my google toolbar are the words "Advanced Features" showing up anywhere. And if I turn on the PageRank display, a popup warns me that that particular feature has privacy implications and even provides a link to explain them to me.
I think it's possibly the most non-spyware tool that I've ever seen integrate into IE.
RDF specifies how you can assign properties to things. Like the "manufacturer" of that computer you're looking at is "Dell" or the "creator" of this post was "Otto" or what have you. It lets you describe facts about things.
RDF Schema lets you describe general classes of things. Like that "Otto" is a "person" which makes him a member of "livingPeople" which is a subset of "allPeopleWhoEverLived" and so on. It lets you group things into vocabularies.
OWL lets you define relationships between those vocabularies and draw interferences using those relationships. Since "Otto" and "Mz6" are each a "person", they're the same type of thing. Since this thing is a "computer" that was "manufactured" by "Dell" which is a "company", then it is not a "person" because "companies" are not in the schema of "people".
That sort of thing, broadly put. Anyway, it lets you define stuff in such a way that a computer can understand it and draw meaningful conclusions about the relationships there. The examples are pretty vague, I grant you, but it has potential. Needs a lot of advance work defining everything to get anything particularly useful out of it though.
My professors used custom scripts to help them grade programming assignments. In that case, you can do things like unit testing.. feed in inputs, expect certain outputs. If your program doesn't produce the desired output, instant fail. Simple enough. It doesn't have to do anything requiring non-boolean judgement routines, simple comparisons will suffice in many cases.
Grading essays is a whole other level of sophisication. While it can easily check for simple things such as spelling errors and even errors in grammer or word order, no computer program can grade based on the content or subject matter. One of the things English classes teach is how to think coherently, how to write a paper to convice someone of an argument and such. How to present an idea. It's not all about the grammer.
I see nothing wrong with using computer grading as an aid to the teacher. But to give it the whole grading process is silly.
But a mailserver admin, who is usually just a regular employee, has no discretion to make such decisions on his own.
What kind of whacked out company do you work at that actually has problems with admins of various systems making critical decisions like these on their own?
Admins who don't implement company policy don't stay admins for very long.
If the admin has the companies' authority to make such decisions, then that's what his job is: to make such decisions. If he doesn't have that authority, then he'll get fired for making such decisions. Again, self-solving problem.
Yes, it was unclear because you provided too much information.
What you appear to actually want is a generic way to wrap a library that reads a file or stream of some type and be able to feed it from an http stream doing efficent requests, by getting byteranges over http.
The fact that you want ID3 isn't totally relevant, as you want a way to wrap the existing ID3 class to read from http instead of, say, a file. This probably confused a lot of people.
Short answer is that no, I don't think there's any good way to do this for all libraries. Too much varience in what the library does.. If the library can read from stream input you give it directly (instead of from a file descriptor you pass in), then you could possibly fool it that way by writing something that pretends to be a stream but instead is reading from a file.. Could be tricky, but it's doable.
But if you're passing in a file descriptor, then you're looking as faking the file descriptor out, and that's probably kernel level code to do that. I don't think there's anyway to do it in userland.
The job of a mailserver admin is NOT to decide who's allowed to send mail to the users and who's not. If a user asks (e.g. block all but this whitelist), sure. But absent a request from the user, you have no rights to decide which email goes through and which is blocked (with obvious exceptions for things like viruses).
You are a mailserver admin -- that's a SUPPORT position. You don't decide what your users are allowed to see and you have no rights to demand to know the real name of people who are not even your users, but are just sending email to them.
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. The mailserver admin is acting on behalf or (or may be in fact) the owners of the hardware that the mail in question is travelling through. That gives them every right to decide, by any standards they like, what mail they accept or don't accept.
This is a simple question of property rights. My property, my rights.
As far as what the users want, sheesh, it's like you just don't trust market forces anymore.. If the admin blocks too much, the users get pissed and find a new ISP. It's a self-correcting problem.
It is the mailserver admin's job to ensure the correct operation of the mailing system, and the owners of the system get to decide what "correct" means. Deal with it.
It won't be good enough for me to buy a T1 and run my mail server from there, I'll have to rely on Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Comcast and a few others to be my MTA because people won't accept mail from a small provider (or a single point system) any more.
Sure they will. With SPF, for example, you setup the SPF rule for your domain to allow that domain to be a sender of mail for the domain.
A Cisco ping command basically spews out some number of ping packets as fast as possible.
The results then get displayed in order, with a dot displayed for every packet that times out and a ! displayed for every packet that actually gets echoed back.
So the upshot of this is that the echo art program isn't actually sending artwork, it's responding to packets or not responding to packets based on the artwork file you give it, which will cause it to draw the art on the other side, the guy doing the pinging.
And of course there's no tension, because we all know (since it's a prequel) that Earth isn't going to be destroyed.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but I'm pretty sure that the Earth is going to be destroyed, or at least seriously screwed in some fashion. Look, you've got time travellers always zipping about the place, so expect next season to be all about that and trying to get the Earth restored, sort of thing.
I mean, what better way to ensure a continuing plot line than to completely rewrite history every season? Sounds exactly like something B&B would do. And hey, what a cliffhanger season finale, right?
I loved that episode, too, but I always wondered how a civilization with such a specific form of language (i.e., referencing past historical and mythical events) could have ever developed beyond the stone/bronze age?
How could you teach a course in warp propulsion dynamics, for example?
Answer: You can't. You can't really even have a language/species that works/thinks that way. It just doesn't stand up to any kind of rational thought beyond the episode.
But nevertheless, it was a pretty neat idea and made a good story. Unlike some people you see complaining about this sort of thing, I don't expect my sci-fi to make every little bit of sense all the way through. It's supposed to be entertainment, you know.:)
Go find your acrobat reader folder off in the Program Files directory. You should see a "Plugins" folder and an "Optional" folder in there. Move everything in the plugins folder into the optional folder.
Voila, instant speed. When Acrobat starts up, it pre-loads everything in the plugins folder. This is what causes the tremendous slowdown. If you move the plugins off into the optional folder, it's still all accessible, but it's only loaded on demand, when you're actually using it.
That's why, for example, hotels generally don't ask you to show ID when you claim you've lost your room key.
I used to travel a lot for work, and I've been to a lot of hotels, all over the country. All hotels nowadays use swipe cards or something along those lines, and if you lose your card, yes, you show ID to get back in. I've lost my card on a number of occasions (usually only to find it later hidden in the depths of my wallet) and they *always* prove that you are who you say you are. Some places are satisfied with a driver's license, but some require you to show the credit card you used to pay for the room, so they can compare the numbers in the computer to the numbers on the card.
Maybe if you stay in a place that allows non-credit card transactions, but I haven't seen a place that'll take cash for a hotel room for years and years...
Yes, I did, but what I meant was that in those 18 samples, if you consistenly tag AAC as better than MP3, across most of the samples, then that has some meaning. If you tag MP3 as better than AAC half the time and AAC as better than MP3 half the time, it has less meaning. Get my drift? You don't have to have repeats, but consistency across different samples is what it wants to see in that respect.
This begs the question; how much of mp3's general crappiness is due not to the codec itself, but to the incompetence of the person making the original encoding?
Nearly all of it. Downloaded MP3's usually sound like crap because the encoder used was very sub-par.
Most encoders out there are either based on very old versions of LAME, Fraunhofer's encoder, or (egads!) the old Xing encoder. All three of these are known to suck, and to suck hard. There are very few rippers with built in encoding that use the code from a recent version of LAME, which produces very high quality sound indeed.
I mean, I think the most used ripper/encoder in the Windows world is MusicMatch Jukebox for crying out loud. Most people just don't know about EAC/LAME and such.
While there is merit in your argument about testing them both, the results of small scale listening tests on both have shown, fairly consistently, that 4.5 made the sound quality worse.
They have different tests for different things, is what I'm saying. The purpose of this test is to determine among the best of several types of codecs. Including two different forms of AAC would be a bit pointless when you're looking for the best type of codec instead of the best codec for each type.
Now, a test to determine the best AAC codec could be useful. You could stick in iTunes 4.2, iTunes 4.5, FAAD, Nero 6, etc, etc. Figure out what works best for AAC.
I don't think that consistency plays any factor in the test.
Of course it does. That's the whole point of ABX testing, to determine whether the difference you perceive is real or not. If you really can perceive the difference, you'd be able to do it consistently.
If it's just a matter of "which sounds better to you" then big deal. You can figure that out on your own. But things happen in your mind that way, and you might think one is better when in reality it's only because you happen to think one is better. If you can consistently say "A is better than B" without knowing which is which, then you are really hearing it, sort of thing.
And yes, certain scenarios could skew the results, which is why inconsistent results have to be eliminated. If someone runs the test and says A is better than B and then that B is better than A, then obviously that result is worthless. They didn't really hear the difference. If someone said the original is worse than the compressed version, then obviously they're deluded. That sort of thing.
If you don't eliminate the inconsistent ones, your results mean nothing, because the signal gets lost in the noise. Only consistent results get factored into the final tally, I'm sure. Otherwise, why do a double blind test in the first place?
Are these the same professionals who claim that one form of digital connection is superior to another?
No, because those people are idiots.:)
I read HydrogenAudio a lot. It's good stuff, which often goes over my head in some of the forums... In any case, these are not "audiophiles", these are people who actually know WTF they are talking about and tend to flame those who only think they know what they're talking about.
Using visual graphing and statistics makes a HELL of alot more sense than having people listen, people imagine what they here, they don't imagine digital analysis. The Audiophile who argues with the computer is wrong everytime.
Well.. yes, and no. A digital analysis will help someone see that their algorithims are doing what they are supposed to be doing. But you still cannot replace or discount the human side of things.
See, it's easy to analyse your algorithims and tweak them by using digital analysis of the results. But the listening tests show whether or not your algorithims are the correct ones to be using in the first place. If you use a new type of filter, and it looks good digitally, but introduces a weird high frequency harmonic, then it'll sound like crap. But a harmonic won't show up on those digital pictures of your audio, because it's not in the frequency range you're analysing to begin with, it's a combination of several frequencies that you're hearing. The listening tests are crucial to determine whether any given algorithim is wise to use or not, as well as to determine comparitive results between multiple algorithims/formats.
Essentially, you're comparing different formats using multiple types of samples.
If I have sample A and sample B and encode them both in, say, AAC and MP3, then I have something more useful, even with crappy speakers.
If someone says they can't tell the difference, then great.
If someone says that they can tell a difference, then I'm able to see whether they are *consistent* about it or not. If they say AAC is better in one sample but MP3 is better in another sample or if they can't tell the difference reliably between WAV and any compressed sample, then this will show that.
The testing is blind. So it might play the AAC twice and you'd never know. Unless your results are internally consistent, they're kinda useless. So you can use this sort of thing to eliminate bad data from the testing.
But someone who can consistently and accuracy tell the difference between the sounds, well, they obviously have a good setup or a good ear or something on their side. If they consistently rate the AAC compressed version as better than the MP3 compressed one, for example, then they likely can hear a difference. That sort of thing.
With enough testing, you can weed out the crap and get the real differences.
Still, a DRM-cracking plug-in for a legally-legit program could become a huge problem.
Agreed, but I don't know of any P2P programs that support a plug-in architecture. At least, none that offer that level of capability to their plug-ins.
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, welcome our self-replicating robot overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Slashdot personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground iron mines.
This problem is only going to get worse before it gets better. There's a worse case that hasn't been encountered yet. If the consumer marketplace ends up with genetically modified apples that aren't intentionally seedless, then who knows where those apple seeds might wind up. If that modification turns up to be dominant, then non-modified apple trees are going to have a fight with the force of evolution.
I was under the impression that you almost never planted apples from seed because apples don't breed true. All modern apple growing works from budding or grafting or some such thing.
Am I wrong somehow?
Unfortunately, nobody can tell you who the Moto is... You have to see it for yourself.
Red pill or Blue pill?
Funny.. Nowhere in my google toolbar are the words "Advanced Features" showing up anywhere. And if I turn on the PageRank display, a popup warns me that that particular feature has privacy implications and even provides a link to explain them to me.
I think it's possibly the most non-spyware tool that I've ever seen integrate into IE.
RDF specifies how you can assign properties to things. Like the "manufacturer" of that computer you're looking at is "Dell" or the "creator" of this post was "Otto" or what have you. It lets you describe facts about things.
RDF Schema lets you describe general classes of things. Like that "Otto" is a "person" which makes him a member of "livingPeople" which is a subset of "allPeopleWhoEverLived" and so on. It lets you group things into vocabularies.
OWL lets you define relationships between those vocabularies and draw interferences using those relationships. Since "Otto" and "Mz6" are each a "person", they're the same type of thing. Since this thing is a "computer" that was "manufactured" by "Dell" which is a "company", then it is not a "person" because "companies" are not in the schema of "people".
That sort of thing, broadly put. Anyway, it lets you define stuff in such a way that a computer can understand it and draw meaningful conclusions about the relationships there. The examples are pretty vague, I grant you, but it has potential. Needs a lot of advance work defining everything to get anything particularly useful out of it though.
My professors used custom scripts to help them grade programming assignments. In that case, you can do things like unit testing.. feed in inputs, expect certain outputs. If your program doesn't produce the desired output, instant fail. Simple enough. It doesn't have to do anything requiring non-boolean judgement routines, simple comparisons will suffice in many cases.
Grading essays is a whole other level of sophisication. While it can easily check for simple things such as spelling errors and even errors in grammer or word order, no computer program can grade based on the content or subject matter. One of the things English classes teach is how to think coherently, how to write a paper to convice someone of an argument and such. How to present an idea. It's not all about the grammer.
I see nothing wrong with using computer grading as an aid to the teacher. But to give it the whole grading process is silly.
But a mailserver admin, who is usually just a regular employee, has no discretion to make such decisions on his own.
What kind of whacked out company do you work at that actually has problems with admins of various systems making critical decisions like these on their own?
Admins who don't implement company policy don't stay admins for very long.
If the admin has the companies' authority to make such decisions, then that's what his job is: to make such decisions. If he doesn't have that authority, then he'll get fired for making such decisions. Again, self-solving problem.
Replace "instead is reading from a file" with "instead is reading from http". Sorry.
Was I that unclear?
Yes, it was unclear because you provided too much information.
What you appear to actually want is a generic way to wrap a library that reads a file or stream of some type and be able to feed it from an http stream doing efficent requests, by getting byteranges over http.
The fact that you want ID3 isn't totally relevant, as you want a way to wrap the existing ID3 class to read from http instead of, say, a file. This probably confused a lot of people.
Short answer is that no, I don't think there's any good way to do this for all libraries. Too much varience in what the library does.. If the library can read from stream input you give it directly (instead of from a file descriptor you pass in), then you could possibly fool it that way by writing something that pretends to be a stream but instead is reading from a file.. Could be tricky, but it's doable.
But if you're passing in a file descriptor, then you're looking as faking the file descriptor out, and that's probably kernel level code to do that. I don't think there's anyway to do it in userland.
The job of a mailserver admin is NOT to decide who's allowed to send mail to the users and who's not. If a user asks (e.g. block all but this whitelist), sure. But absent a request from the user, you have no rights to decide which email goes through and which is blocked (with obvious exceptions for things like viruses).
You are a mailserver admin -- that's a SUPPORT position. You don't decide what your users are allowed to see and you have no rights to demand to know the real name of people who are not even your users, but are just sending email to them.
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. The mailserver admin is acting on behalf or (or may be in fact) the owners of the hardware that the mail in question is travelling through. That gives them every right to decide, by any standards they like, what mail they accept or don't accept.
This is a simple question of property rights. My property, my rights.
As far as what the users want, sheesh, it's like you just don't trust market forces anymore.. If the admin blocks too much, the users get pissed and find a new ISP. It's a self-correcting problem.
It is the mailserver admin's job to ensure the correct operation of the mailing system, and the owners of the system get to decide what "correct" means. Deal with it.
It won't be good enough for me to buy a T1 and run my mail server from there, I'll have to rely on Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Comcast and a few others to be my MTA because people won't accept mail from a small provider (or a single point system) any more.
Sure they will. With SPF, for example, you setup the SPF rule for your domain to allow that domain to be a sender of mail for the domain.
You will need to have your own domain, I admit.
It's actually slightly more complex than that..
Cisco style ping: "A '.' is printed for every packet sent and a backspaced '!' for every valid response."
So it prints a . then backspaces over it and prints a ! if it gets a response.
A Cisco ping command basically spews out some number of ping packets as fast as possible.
:)
The results then get displayed in order, with a dot displayed for every packet that times out and a ! displayed for every packet that actually gets echoed back.
So the upshot of this is that the echo art program isn't actually sending artwork, it's responding to packets or not responding to packets based on the artwork file you give it, which will cause it to draw the art on the other side, the guy doing the pinging.
Neat trick, actually.
And of course there's no tension, because we all know (since it's a prequel) that Earth isn't going to be destroyed.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but I'm pretty sure that the Earth is going to be destroyed, or at least seriously screwed in some fashion. Look, you've got time travellers always zipping about the place, so expect next season to be all about that and trying to get the Earth restored, sort of thing.
I mean, what better way to ensure a continuing plot line than to completely rewrite history every season? Sounds exactly like something B&B would do. And hey, what a cliffhanger season finale, right?
Shaaka - When the walls fell!
:)
I loved that episode, too, but I always wondered how a civilization with such a specific form of language (i.e., referencing past historical and mythical events) could have ever developed beyond the stone/bronze age?
How could you teach a course in warp propulsion dynamics, for example?
Answer: You can't. You can't really even have a language/species that works/thinks that way. It just doesn't stand up to any kind of rational thought beyond the episode.
But nevertheless, it was a pretty neat idea and made a good story. Unlike some people you see complaining about this sort of thing, I don't expect my sci-fi to make every little bit of sense all the way through. It's supposed to be entertainment, you know.
While I have not used them and thus cannot vouch for them, they sound suited to your application. Expensive though.
3 8/
Example: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/5c
Go find your acrobat reader folder off in the Program Files directory. You should see a "Plugins" folder and an "Optional" folder in there. Move everything in the plugins folder into the optional folder.
Voila, instant speed. When Acrobat starts up, it pre-loads everything in the plugins folder. This is what causes the tremendous slowdown. If you move the plugins off into the optional folder, it's still all accessible, but it's only loaded on demand, when you're actually using it.
It's a tremendous speedup for Acrobat.
That's why, for example, hotels generally don't ask you to show ID when you claim you've lost your room key.
I used to travel a lot for work, and I've been to a lot of hotels, all over the country. All hotels nowadays use swipe cards or something along those lines, and if you lose your card, yes, you show ID to get back in. I've lost my card on a number of occasions (usually only to find it later hidden in the depths of my wallet) and they *always* prove that you are who you say you are. Some places are satisfied with a driver's license, but some require you to show the credit card you used to pay for the room, so they can compare the numbers in the computer to the numbers on the card.
Maybe if you stay in a place that allows non-credit card transactions, but I haven't seen a place that'll take cash for a hotel room for years and years...
Yes, I did, but what I meant was that in those 18 samples, if you consistenly tag AAC as better than MP3, across most of the samples, then that has some meaning. If you tag MP3 as better than AAC half the time and AAC as better than MP3 half the time, it has less meaning. Get my drift? You don't have to have repeats, but consistency across different samples is what it wants to see in that respect.
This begs the question; how much of mp3's general crappiness is due not to the codec itself, but to the incompetence of the person making the original encoding?
Nearly all of it. Downloaded MP3's usually sound like crap because the encoder used was very sub-par.
Most encoders out there are either based on very old versions of LAME, Fraunhofer's encoder, or (egads!) the old Xing encoder. All three of these are known to suck, and to suck hard. There are very few rippers with built in encoding that use the code from a recent version of LAME, which produces very high quality sound indeed.
I mean, I think the most used ripper/encoder in the Windows world is MusicMatch Jukebox for crying out loud. Most people just don't know about EAC/LAME and such.
While there is merit in your argument about testing them both, the results of small scale listening tests on both have shown, fairly consistently, that 4.5 made the sound quality worse.
They have different tests for different things, is what I'm saying. The purpose of this test is to determine among the best of several types of codecs. Including two different forms of AAC would be a bit pointless when you're looking for the best type of codec instead of the best codec for each type.
Now, a test to determine the best AAC codec could be useful. You could stick in iTunes 4.2, iTunes 4.5, FAAD, Nero 6, etc, etc. Figure out what works best for AAC.
I don't think that consistency plays any factor in the test.
Of course it does. That's the whole point of ABX testing, to determine whether the difference you perceive is real or not. If you really can perceive the difference, you'd be able to do it consistently.
If it's just a matter of "which sounds better to you" then big deal. You can figure that out on your own. But things happen in your mind that way, and you might think one is better when in reality it's only because you happen to think one is better. If you can consistently say "A is better than B" without knowing which is which, then you are really hearing it, sort of thing.
And yes, certain scenarios could skew the results, which is why inconsistent results have to be eliminated. If someone runs the test and says A is better than B and then that B is better than A, then obviously that result is worthless. They didn't really hear the difference. If someone said the original is worse than the compressed version, then obviously they're deluded. That sort of thing.
If you don't eliminate the inconsistent ones, your results mean nothing, because the signal gets lost in the noise. Only consistent results get factored into the final tally, I'm sure. Otherwise, why do a double blind test in the first place?
Are these the same professionals who claim that one form of digital connection is superior to another?
:)
No, because those people are idiots.
I read HydrogenAudio a lot. It's good stuff, which often goes over my head in some of the forums... In any case, these are not "audiophiles", these are people who actually know WTF they are talking about and tend to flame those who only think they know what they're talking about.
Using visual graphing and statistics makes a HELL of alot more sense than having people listen, people imagine what they here, they don't imagine digital analysis. The Audiophile who argues with the computer is wrong everytime.
Well.. yes, and no. A digital analysis will help someone see that their algorithims are doing what they are supposed to be doing. But you still cannot replace or discount the human side of things.
See, it's easy to analyse your algorithims and tweak them by using digital analysis of the results. But the listening tests show whether or not your algorithims are the correct ones to be using in the first place. If you use a new type of filter, and it looks good digitally, but introduces a weird high frequency harmonic, then it'll sound like crap. But a harmonic won't show up on those digital pictures of your audio, because it's not in the frequency range you're analysing to begin with, it's a combination of several frequencies that you're hearing. The listening tests are crucial to determine whether any given algorithim is wise to use or not, as well as to determine comparitive results between multiple algorithims/formats.
Essentially, you're comparing different formats using multiple types of samples.
If I have sample A and sample B and encode them both in, say, AAC and MP3, then I have something more useful, even with crappy speakers.
If someone says they can't tell the difference, then great.
If someone says that they can tell a difference, then I'm able to see whether they are *consistent* about it or not. If they say AAC is better in one sample but MP3 is better in another sample or if they can't tell the difference reliably between WAV and any compressed sample, then this will show that.
The testing is blind. So it might play the AAC twice and you'd never know. Unless your results are internally consistent, they're kinda useless. So you can use this sort of thing to eliminate bad data from the testing.
But someone who can consistently and accuracy tell the difference between the sounds, well, they obviously have a good setup or a good ear or something on their side. If they consistently rate the AAC compressed version as better than the MP3 compressed one, for example, then they likely can hear a difference. That sort of thing.
With enough testing, you can weed out the crap and get the real differences.
Still, a DRM-cracking plug-in for a legally-legit program could become a huge problem.
Agreed, but I don't know of any P2P programs that support a plug-in architecture. At least, none that offer that level of capability to their plug-ins.