Re:About as viral as accidentally giving away secr
on
What if SCO is Right?
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· Score: 1
Given the level of information one can mine from lkml and the kernel BitKeeper archive, isn't it fairly easy to trace a particular piece of code to some person who submitted it? I know my kernel code has my name pasted at the top of it.
Re:About as viral as accidentally giving away secr
on
What if SCO is Right?
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· Score: 1
As despicable an act as that is... I know it happens in the world of patents (thanks RAMBUS... @ssh0les). It wouldn't suprise me to see it used in an IP violation case. I just don't know if it's similar to the patent cases or not.
Re:About as viral as accidentally giving away secr
on
What if SCO is Right?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't support SCO, and I hope this matter is resolved in such a way as brings about their ruin, and IANAL, but... SCO's argument is that in good faith they redistributed code that they were told was an entirely original creation or otherwise GPLd under agreement with a copyright holder.
If SCO's IP was in there, then those whom originally released the code acted in bad faith. You can't go around tricking companies into releasing their IP by executing bad faith deals and then claiming that it is too bad because they weren't forced to release the code in the first place. I doubt the court will support this mode of argument.
I think what SCO will have to show is that their IP is in the kernel (the hard part) and then show that prior to them releasing the code themselves, somebody else released the code in bad faith claiming it was legitimately licensed under the GPL, that they had no reason to believe the claim false, and acting on the good faith assumption that it did not violate any IP then distributed it themselves.
it's typical for the easy problem in TopCoder competitions to be brute-forceable
I'm assuming there is an assumption about the maximum input size the easy problem would be given? Even at "only" n^4, having just 100 nodes in the graph produces 100 million possible four-cycles that must be considered. I pick 100 because it seems like a fairly round number on the low end of what one might see in a network flow / flight path / circuit problem.
in the real world one does not look for solutions that run in optimal time, but rather for the appropriate trade-off between development time and running time
I think in the real world an n^4 solution would be placed on the back burner until time has been spent considering better ways, or pruning n^4 down with some small coefficient.
you really shouldn't be casting aspersions on others' ability to analyze algorithms
I didn't. Re-read what I wrote. I said they have to be good at unlearning what those classes teach. I don't know what Duke University teaches in those classes, but the ones I took were an exhaustive discourse on methods of finding optimal solutions, generally ones that run in n, log n, n log n or at worst n^2.
It should be obvious that four nested for loops do not take exponential time to run
True. At that late hour I was probably extrapolating the problem to how many n-cycles exist, which is 2^n, but in this case n=4.
there's nothing ludicrous about having an NP-complete problem
If your problem is truly np-complete, then you must have a small data set or your running time will get intolerably long.
At any rate, TopCoder is ultimately a coding competition, not a competition in asymptotic running time.
My interpretation of the intent of the parent posts was that TopCoder has applicability to the real world. Based on this example, and one of the parent posts, I was agreeing that the skill set one needs for TopCoder are significantly different because as this example showed a "good" solution for TopCoder should be a solution of last resort in professional programming.
You should be able to easily optimize the whole thing down to a theta of 0.25*n*m^3 where m is the average number of edges between nodes. In most cases m<<n, but in the worst case m=(n-1) and the algorithm will take n^4. There are probably better cases, but that's my "less than half an hour" stab at the problem.
After doing a quick (and probably inadequate) analysis the TopCoder problems and Java solutions from the web page... I'd say one primarily must be very good at un-learning much of what algorithm analysis has taught them to be successful in the TopCoder competitions.
Take for instance the Java solution to the DQuad problem... If I'm reading it correctly, it constructs a 2D array representing the directed edges and then does an exhaustive search against it to find the solutions. That's what I think the "return res/4;" at the end is for, when the code has reached that point it will have counted all valid solutions 4 times over. I believe also that the time complexity of this solution has a big-O of 2^n.
It may be that the problem is in NP, in which case all solutions would have that kind of time complexity, I haven't looked carefully enough at it yet. I'd find it rather ludicrous of those running the competition to introduce an NP problem though.
In the real world of computer science, we look for solutions that run in optimal time, not solutions found in optimal time. I'm not convinced that TopCoder translates well to the real world (yes that may be a bit hasty having seen only one example).
but it could be that they are asking for a piece of Columbia that need not necessarily be debris; it could be a piece that NASA had given out in the past.
>>From the parent post<<
I appreciate that NASA may have given away or auctioned off parts of Columbia prior to the recent disaster...
(And, clearly, getting hold of a debris fragment is the target goal here.)
The parent post already conceded that point. Don't backtrack. The issue was the bad taste that goal is in.
I thought in this case it meant that a nuke that would have gotten through without SDI gets through anyway. At least this way we *try* and knock out the inbound weapon. The risk (vaporizing a house) seems worth the benefit (not vaporizing a city).
sending a spark back up into your tank, which would then explode
Something like this happened one day in my college chem lab once. One of the students caught a paper of hers on fire, and in her panicked effort to extinguish the problem, knocked the hose to the bunsen burner off the valve. The gas coming out of the valve immediately found the single sheet of college ruled tinder and started burning. It all took about 2 seconds to happen at which point all of us watching turned pale white certain that the entire chem department would soon be a 20 foot deep crater. The chem prof looked over and calmly said "why don't you turn the valve off?"
Upon determining that we were all scared witless about the near certain explosion, we all got an extra helping of homework that day... Something about oxidation and natural gas, ideal gas law, entropy and such... The result of which was - the gas in the pipes won't burn without oxygen, the line is positively pressurized, therefore the oxygen necessary to cause the explosion won't violate the laws of thermodynamics and leech upstream into the line.
If the tanks were properly purged, the gasoline inside them wouldn't ignite. (Though gasoline does dissolve many plastics)
There are a growing number of computer chicks out there
Out of curiousity, are you a good number of years outside of high school?
One thing I have noticed is that the number of geek girls increases dramatically as you get several years away from high school. The social mores that make all things geek abhorrent in high school and a threat to one's popularity standing break down afterwards and make such wicked fields as "Computer Science" acceptable goals to a young woman deciding on an upper division major.
A computer club in high school is still a terrible way to meet girls.
The only problem with that theory is that it assumes the quality of all playbacks was exceedingly poor and we could differentiate one from the other because the CD was used as a reference (as in "does this sound different from the CD?"). That wasn't the case. The way it started was having all three play on a once through random shuffle, then asking which one sounded "best". It immediately became uninteresting because it was so easy to spot which of the three was the CD. The sound quality of the CD was remarkably higher than either a 128kbps mp3 or ogg. The brightness and subtlety of the instruments was much more obvious on the CD recording. It wasn't until the 320kbps mp3 that, with the playback equipment we had, we guessed "which was the CD?" wrong.
For what it's worth, we both spent years in Junior and Senior High School band and orchestra and are still performing in ensembles today. We know well what a violin, french horn, guitar, banjo, piano, oboe, flute or clarinet should sound like.
It starts defeating the purpose of the small filesize of downloaded music...
I know it seems kind of odd... but... I buy music on CDs and don't share the high bit rate ripped audio. I'm sorry I'm a/. infidel. The DMCA still sucks.
First of all, this claim is refuted by every test ever done:
If you honestly believe it, it's either because you simply like the sound of MP3 distortion, or you really wanted to like MP3, so you've conviced yourself that you do.
I said the tests were double blind. Unless you can provide some evidence of bias inherent in a double blind test, I think you simply do not know what you are talking about.
Can you provide a link to a couple of tests (blind golden ears at a minimum, preferably double blind) that refute the statement, specifically on high bit rate encodings exceeding 200kbps?
Personally, I just assumed you were trolling because of your following comments:
That is just plain bullshit. No audio codec is going to relieve fatigue. Even if you do believe it.
Here's a little piece of research text I picked up off the net:
Hearing fatigue is not a good indicator of whether damage has occurred. Fatigue is usually caused
by excessive intermodulation distortion. While sometimes such distortion is caused by audio systems driven to extremes, it is not the only source. Damaging levels can be obtained by clean undistorted power, and it can be very painless.
That reads to me an awful lot like listening to low bit rate compressed audio will increase fatigue. Can you provide anything indicating that none of the distortion that occurs due to compression causes hearing fatigue? Again, I don't think you know what you are talking about. I never said a codec relieved fatigue, I said higher bit rates did.
So you are saying that high end speakers will increase the fidelity of lower quality audio by a substantial margin but will *not* increase the quality of high quality audio as much to the point that high end speakers can make low fidelity and high fidelity audio sound the same?
My point of using low end speakers was that the argument is usually that low end speakers decrease the quality of both to the point that they sound the same. The low end speakers have poorer response and dynamic range so the missing audio components in the compressed version are unnoticeable because the speakers are unable to reproduce them in the non-compressed version anyway.
In this case, that wasn't true. Only the 320kbps mp3's were indiscernable from the CD audio.
If crap speakers can discriminate between a mid bit rate Ogg and a high fidelity CD recording, what does this tell you about high quality speakers? Maybe that the differences would be more pronounced? Maybe that is why it's insightful. I mentioned the speakers because I've read a lot of posts that argue the reason you cannot tell the difference between a 128Kbps encoded audio stream and a CD is because of low quality speakers. My results dispute that. Inability to discern an mp3/ogg from a CD, except for very high bitrates, probably has to do with the listener not the equipment.
So what exactly is your argument? That I didn't do the informal experiment? That those weren't really the results? Those weren't the codecs I was using? That the higher bitrate music wasn't less fatiguing?
Then, you have to do a blind test with all of them. You also need to use a variety of source material, because different genres of music compress better under some encoders.
I don't disagree with you, but I just wanted to throw in my own 2 cents worth of informal experimentation:
I recently discovered the sourceforge cdex ripping software, so I finally had a chance to rip all my music to the superior sounding ogg format instead of mp3. Before doing so, my wife and I ran a couple double blind tests with one another to see where the best encoding was.
The only pair of speakers I had to test this was a pair of old Yamaha YST-M7's. These are Yamaha branded $20 single driver computer speakers that came with some computer I bought a while ago. They are pretty bad speakers. For the test, I selected a reasonable genre swath of music:
Dixie Chicks "There's your Trouble" Oingo Boingo "On the Outside" Samuel Barber "Adagio for Strings" W. A. Mozart "Queen of the Night's Vengeance Aria" REM "Nightswimming"
Each piece was selected because of particular aspects of song such as use of strings, use of horns, or use of voice. Each song was tried in a variety of encodings in both ogg and mp3, constant and variable bit rate, with the original CD wav file thrown in amongst the samples. The mp3 encoder was Lame v 1.27 engine 3.92 Alpha 1 MMX, the ogg encoder was Ogg Vorbis DLL Encoder v 1.09 enging 1.05.
The results strongly disagreed with conventional wisdom. In every case, across genres, on these low end speakers, 320Kbps mp3's were the only ones that fooled our ears. Low bit rate ogg and mp3 recordings were different, but we didn't take time to notice which was better... they were both unquestionably inferior to the source material. Ogg's 350Kbps encoding was good, but inferior to the smaller 320Kbps mp3 files of the same work.
Reading some of the posts on this article, I am rather shocked how many people find sound reproduction to be anywhere between "very good" and "excellent" on mid end equipment listening to 192Kbps encoded audio.
After running this experiment, I ripped about 30 of my CDs to 320Kbps mp3's and noticed another benefit to CD quality rips: I could listen to the music longer without my ears feeling fatigued. I had always thought that it was pumping sound directly into my head from my headphones that caused my ears to become tired of the music. For whatever reason, it takes much longer now. Perhaps 3 or 4 hours compared to 1 to 1 1/2 before.
No you diverted attention to a non-sequiter. The Scott Peterson case is a criminal investigation and as such has been overseen from warrant, through arraignment and to holding without bail by a judge. This is a civil case concerning a subpoena with no judicial oversight.
You can argue that it should have judicial review, but the law doesn't require it.
Isn't this what is being argued?
Now, under the law the copyright holder must provide significant reason for it to be issued
Under the law, the copyright holder, in order to obtain the subpoena from the court clerk, must provide:
A copy of a notification to the ISP of alleged infringing activity.
A proposed subpoena
"a sworn declaration to the effect that the purpose for which the subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer and that such information will only be used for the purpose of protecting rights under this title".
The only "detail" is that the notification sent to the ISP must identify what work is being infringed and the complainant must provide a statement that they have a "good faith" belief that the manner in which the material is being used is not allowed by law.
Congress intended to enable copyright holders to move quickly to stop infringement
Regardless of the intention, the assertion by Verizon is that this tramples a persons right to privacy... And reducing basic civil liberties of citizens outweighs any harm copyright holders may suffer.
Yeah, that Scott Peterson, hasn't been convictied of murdering his wife. Why is he in jail???
*eye roll* mmmmm.... red herring.
Read the article. A subpeona has to come from the court, and so it was filed with the court.
Well, let's see what the article says:
The RIAA cited the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- or DMCA -- in its legal effort to force Verizon to reveal the names. The DMCA gives movie studios, record companies, software makers and other copyright owners the right to subpoena Internet service providers without getting a judge's approval.
You said:
It is simply that the misuse of P2P networks is so widespread that there is little need to prove that illegal activity is going on and it is granted automatically.
Unless you have evidence that the article is patently incorrect, I think you misunderstand the issue at hand. No subpoena was "granted" by the court. And the Judge isn't saying "Okay, well now I am granting the discovery subpoena", the ruling was based entirely on the powers the DMCA gives to a copyright holder. Verizon argues that the power is unconstitutional. As the article says:
Verizon originally argued that it is unfair for the music industry to be allowed to obtain subpoenas without judicial approval, but Bates threw out that argument in a January ruling. Verizon then turned to its argument that the DMCA is unconstitutional.
But they are obviously involved in copyright violation.
Guilty until proven innocent. I don't like your style.
They are being idetified for prosecution. They will still have a right to defend themselves in court.
As if a discovery subpoena has never been used for an illegitimate purpose.
Last I saw, a corporation can read your e-mails on the company network, check your desk, etc., if they suspect you of anything. It all belongs to the company, kind of like how these criminals do not own Verizon but are renting its use.
Did you really mean to say that? Are you saying the phone company has the right at any time to tap your phone calls? Look up "common carrier" and "reasonable expectation of privacy". There is a world of difference between your employer monitoring internet usage and an ISP doing so.
The ISP will not remain guiltless if it doesn't comply with the court order.
Note how you fell into the trap already. You said "court order". The DMCA says they need no such thing. That's what this fight is over. RIAA didn't start with a court order for Verizon to provide these people's identity. They just said "Tell us, you have no choice"
The court has not said "we order you to reveal the identity of these individuals because the RIAA has a probable chance of success in litigation", the court has said "we order you to reveal the identity of these individuals because RIAA has complied with the DMCA"
RIAA: No, the DMCA says we can get the name of anybody we accuse of stealing without a court order.
Verizon: That sounds unconstitutional. A judge should decide if your case has sufficient merit to pierce their right to privacy.
RIAA: Judge! They won't give us the names of people that the DMCA says we can have without a court order.
Judge: Okay Verizon, do what the DMCA says.
Verizon: I think you should reconsider, Judge. The DMCA is unconstitutional.
Judge: It's the law, I am not changing my decision.
Now verizon has to appeal to a higher court that the DMCA is unconstitutional. (hint: It probably is, and if it looks like this case will cause a constitutionality review by a federal circuit court, RIAA will drop the case and prevent that from happening. Does the name "Felden" ring a bell?)
Your privacy deserves to be gone if you commit an illegal act.
I assume you mean this in a more narrow sense than you stated it. Note that neither of those two Verizon customers has been convicted of anything. They have only been accused. Are you saying anyone accused by corporation of doing something illegal deserves to lose their privacy?
The only reason Verizon is withholding the names is so all their subscribers. don't migrate to other services in order to prevent from being caught.
You didn't read the article did you? Verizon is fighting on behalf of all ISPs. Other services would be less able to fight this than Verizon. The only reason these two haven't been handed over to the RIAA is because Verizon objects to the DMCA.
I don't see anyone here crying about the Enron CEO being placed under house arrest with a tracking bracelet, violating his privacy
Did a judge place the Enron CEO under house arrest? Did a judge order the tracking bracelet? Did you read the article?!
Verizon is objecting to the fact that privacy can be pierced without judicial review.
The story lies in the fact that the name change was made in an impolite way, apparently without any attempt to contact the FirebirdSQL group at all.
As one of the previous posts points out, the Firebird SQL team can no longer claim the moral high road on this one. They have resorted to a campaign of harrassment via spam. If there was one sure way to invoke the ire of the internet community, spam is it.
they're both open source, they're both computer programs
I always love arguments that in order to bulk up throw in large redundant sweeping generalizations. How many "open source" projects are not computer programs? How large is the "open source" software world? Should we argue that two persons should not have the same name because they are both people and they both live on planet earth?
and sometimes you use a browser to access a SQL database. Fairly often, in fact.
I have never once used a browser to access a SQL database. A browser's primary role is accessing an http server. The only server I've used that can access a SQL database is Tomcat. The most popular web server out there is apache and apache doesn't access a SQL database, it hands the request off to a handler module or invokes an external program (cgi). There are generally two layers between browser and database, and by the time you're into that second layer the method of datastore is immaterial.
If your argument is that the browser is the interface through which people see the representation of the data stored in an sql database, that is still a pretty weak argument. A browser is also the interface through which many people see the images taken by a camera. Should a browser ensure that its name does not conflict with the name of a digital camera? There are all manner of representations of information that are now "web enabled", and by "web enabled" we mean "viewable in a web browser". A browser should not be limited in name because something of similar name could be accessed by it because practically everything can be accessed by a browser through an appropriately enabled web server (that's why browsers are so popular!).
It's not as though there's no precedent for two OSS projects to share a name. [...] At the very bottom of that second link you'll find a little note from the developer of the file manager
So was the developer of the file manager consulted by the gentoo distribution before the distribution came into existence, or did they have civil discourse after the fact and come to an amicable resolution?
They could even have exchanged reciprocal links, so that anybody who did get confused would easily be set straight.
This could have been done after the naming issue had come to light. Did the FirebirdSQL people try this or did they just head straight to a spam campaign? There are all manner of things rationally thinking people could have done. Which of them did the database folks use?
Slashdot Mirror
Given the level of information one can mine from lkml and the kernel BitKeeper archive, isn't it fairly easy to trace a particular piece of code to some person who submitted it? I know my kernel code has my name pasted at the top of it.
As despicable an act as that is... I know it happens in the world of patents (thanks RAMBUS... @ssh0les). It wouldn't suprise me to see it used in an IP violation case. I just don't know if it's similar to the patent cases or not.
I don't support SCO, and I hope this matter is resolved in such a way as brings about their ruin, and IANAL, but... SCO's argument is that in good faith they redistributed code that they were told was an entirely original creation or otherwise GPLd under agreement with a copyright holder.
If SCO's IP was in there, then those whom originally released the code acted in bad faith. You can't go around tricking companies into releasing their IP by executing bad faith deals and then claiming that it is too bad because they weren't forced to release the code in the first place. I doubt the court will support this mode of argument.
I think what SCO will have to show is that their IP is in the kernel (the hard part) and then show that prior to them releasing the code themselves, somebody else released the code in bad faith claiming it was legitimately licensed under the GPL, that they had no reason to believe the claim false, and acting on the good faith assumption that it did not violate any IP then distributed it themselves.
it's typical for the easy problem in TopCoder competitions to be brute-forceable
I'm assuming there is an assumption about the maximum input size the easy problem would be given? Even at "only" n^4, having just 100 nodes in the graph produces 100 million possible four-cycles that must be considered. I pick 100 because it seems like a fairly round number on the low end of what one might see in a network flow / flight path / circuit problem.
in the real world one does not look for solutions that run in optimal time, but rather for the appropriate trade-off between development time and running time
I think in the real world an n^4 solution would be placed on the back burner until time has been spent considering better ways, or pruning n^4 down with some small coefficient.
you really shouldn't be casting aspersions on others' ability to analyze algorithms
I didn't. Re-read what I wrote. I said they have to be good at unlearning what those classes teach. I don't know what Duke University teaches in those classes, but the ones I took were an exhaustive discourse on methods of finding optimal solutions, generally ones that run in n, log n, n log n or at worst n^2.
It should be obvious that four nested for loops do not take exponential time to run
True. At that late hour I was probably extrapolating the problem to how many n-cycles exist, which is 2^n, but in this case n=4.
there's nothing ludicrous about having an NP-complete problem
If your problem is truly np-complete, then you must have a small data set or your running time will get intolerably long.
At any rate, TopCoder is ultimately a coding competition, not a competition in asymptotic running time.
My interpretation of the intent of the parent posts was that TopCoder has applicability to the real world. Based on this example, and one of the parent posts, I was agreeing that the skill set one needs for TopCoder are significantly different because as this example showed a "good" solution for TopCoder should be a solution of last resort in professional programming.
You should be able to easily optimize the whole thing down to a theta of 0.25*n*m^3 where m is the average number of edges between nodes. In most cases m<<n, but in the worst case m=(n-1) and the algorithm will take n^4. There are probably better cases, but that's my "less than half an hour" stab at the problem.
After doing a quick (and probably inadequate) analysis the TopCoder problems and Java solutions from the web page... I'd say one primarily must be very good at un-learning much of what algorithm analysis has taught them to be successful in the TopCoder competitions.
Take for instance the Java solution to the DQuad problem... If I'm reading it correctly, it constructs a 2D array representing the directed edges and then does an exhaustive search against it to find the solutions. That's what I think the "return res/4;" at the end is for, when the code has reached that point it will have counted all valid solutions 4 times over. I believe also that the time complexity of this solution has a big-O of 2^n.
It may be that the problem is in NP, in which case all solutions would have that kind of time complexity, I haven't looked carefully enough at it yet. I'd find it rather ludicrous of those running the competition to introduce an NP problem though.
In the real world of computer science, we look for solutions that run in optimal time, not solutions found in optimal time. I'm not convinced that TopCoder translates well to the real world (yes that may be a bit hasty having seen only one example).
but it could be that they are asking for a piece of Columbia that need not necessarily be debris; it could be a piece that NASA had given out in the past.
>>From the parent post<<
I appreciate that NASA may have given away or auctioned off parts of Columbia prior to the recent disaster...
(And, clearly, getting hold of a debris fragment is the target goal here.)
The parent post already conceded that point. Don't backtrack. The issue was the bad taste that goal is in.
You are assuming that SDI will be used in defense.
What does the D in SDI stand for again?
When used for its primary purpose - attacking countries that do not approve of the US regime
You forgot to add a <conspiracy nut> tag to your post.
I thought in this case it meant that a nuke that would have gotten through without SDI gets through anyway. At least this way we *try* and knock out the inbound weapon. The risk (vaporizing a house) seems worth the benefit (not vaporizing a city).
assuming that a re-entry vehicle is twice that, it still leaves a pretty small radar cross-section,
There are a few things working in our favor though:
The launch vehicle has an enormous infrared signature. It's easy to track while the boost is on.
Since the path of the projectile is ballistic, we can ascertain with a good degree of certainty where our radar should be looking for it.
Upon re-entry the projectile once again has a huge spike in infrared visibility, and the path is entirely ballistic at this point.
It's reasonable that we should be able to spot it on radar if we have a very good idea where it should show up.
It's a hard target to hit, no doubt. But finding and tracking it should not to be the hardest part of the problem.
sending a spark back up into your tank, which would then explode
Something like this happened one day in my college chem lab once. One of the students caught a paper of hers on fire, and in her panicked effort to extinguish the problem, knocked the hose to the bunsen burner off the valve. The gas coming out of the valve immediately found the single sheet of college ruled tinder and started burning. It all took about 2 seconds to happen at which point all of us watching turned pale white certain that the entire chem department would soon be a 20 foot deep crater. The chem prof looked over and calmly said "why don't you turn the valve off?"
Upon determining that we were all scared witless about the near certain explosion, we all got an extra helping of homework that day... Something about oxidation and natural gas, ideal gas law, entropy and such... The result of which was - the gas in the pipes won't burn without oxygen, the line is positively pressurized, therefore the oxygen necessary to cause the explosion won't violate the laws of thermodynamics and leech upstream into the line.
If the tanks were properly purged, the gasoline inside them wouldn't ignite. (Though gasoline does dissolve many plastics)
There are a growing number of computer chicks out there
Out of curiousity, are you a good number of years outside of high school?
One thing I have noticed is that the number of geek girls increases dramatically as you get several years away from high school. The social mores that make all things geek abhorrent in high school and a threat to one's popularity standing break down afterwards and make such wicked fields as "Computer Science" acceptable goals to a young woman deciding on an upper division major.
A computer club in high school is still a terrible way to meet girls.
Is that a distinction of nobility? As opposed to the electronic devices for the laity, the lobread?
The only problem with that theory is that it assumes the quality of all playbacks was exceedingly poor and we could differentiate one from the other because the CD was used as a reference (as in "does this sound different from the CD?"). That wasn't the case. The way it started was having all three play on a once through random shuffle, then asking which one sounded "best". It immediately became uninteresting because it was so easy to spot which of the three was the CD. The sound quality of the CD was remarkably higher than either a 128kbps mp3 or ogg. The brightness and subtlety of the instruments was much more obvious on the CD recording. It wasn't until the 320kbps mp3 that, with the playback equipment we had, we guessed "which was the CD?" wrong.
For what it's worth, we both spent years in Junior and Senior High School band and orchestra and are still performing in ensembles today. We know well what a violin, french horn, guitar, banjo, piano, oboe, flute or clarinet should sound like.
It starts defeating the purpose of the small filesize of downloaded music...
/. infidel. The DMCA still sucks.
I know it seems kind of odd... but... I buy music on CDs and don't share the high bit rate ripped audio. I'm sorry I'm a
If you honestly believe it, it's either because you simply like the sound of MP3 distortion, or you really wanted to like MP3, so you've conviced yourself that you do.
I said the tests were double blind. Unless you can provide some evidence of bias inherent in a double blind test, I think you simply do not know what you are talking about.
Can you provide a link to a couple of tests (blind golden ears at a minimum, preferably double blind) that refute the statement, specifically on high bit rate encodings exceeding 200kbps?
Personally, I just assumed you were trolling because of your following comments:
That is just plain bullshit. No audio codec is going to relieve fatigue. Even if you do believe it.
Here's a little piece of research text I picked up off the net:
That reads to me an awful lot like listening to low bit rate compressed audio will increase fatigue. Can you provide anything indicating that none of the distortion that occurs due to compression causes hearing fatigue? Again, I don't think you know what you are talking about. I never said a codec relieved fatigue, I said higher bit rates did.
So you are saying that high end speakers will increase the fidelity of lower quality audio by a substantial margin but will *not* increase the quality of high quality audio as much to the point that high end speakers can make low fidelity and high fidelity audio sound the same?
My point of using low end speakers was that the argument is usually that low end speakers decrease the quality of both to the point that they sound the same. The low end speakers have poorer response and dynamic range so the missing audio components in the compressed version are unnoticeable because the speakers are unable to reproduce them in the non-compressed version anyway.
In this case, that wasn't true. Only the 320kbps mp3's were indiscernable from the CD audio.
If crap speakers can discriminate between a mid bit rate Ogg and a high fidelity CD recording, what does this tell you about high quality speakers? Maybe that the differences would be more pronounced? Maybe that is why it's insightful. I mentioned the speakers because I've read a lot of posts that argue the reason you cannot tell the difference between a 128Kbps encoded audio stream and a CD is because of low quality speakers. My results dispute that. Inability to discern an mp3/ogg from a CD, except for very high bitrates, probably has to do with the listener not the equipment.
So what exactly is your argument? That I didn't do the informal experiment? That those weren't really the results? Those weren't the codecs I was using? That the higher bitrate music wasn't less fatiguing?
Or are you just trolling?
Then, you have to do a blind test with all of them. You also need to use a variety of source material, because different genres of music compress better under some encoders.
I don't disagree with you, but I just wanted to throw in my own 2 cents worth of informal experimentation:
I recently discovered the sourceforge cdex ripping software, so I finally had a chance to rip all my music to the superior sounding ogg format instead of mp3. Before doing so, my wife and I ran a couple double blind tests with one another to see where the best encoding was.
The only pair of speakers I had to test this was a pair of old Yamaha YST-M7's. These are Yamaha branded $20 single driver computer speakers that came with some computer I bought a while ago. They are pretty bad speakers. For the test, I selected a reasonable genre swath of music:
Dixie Chicks "There's your Trouble"
Oingo Boingo "On the Outside"
Samuel Barber "Adagio for Strings"
W. A. Mozart "Queen of the Night's Vengeance Aria"
REM "Nightswimming"
Each piece was selected because of particular aspects of song such as use of strings, use of horns, or use of voice. Each song was tried in a variety of encodings in both ogg and mp3, constant and variable bit rate, with the original CD wav file thrown in amongst the samples. The mp3 encoder was Lame v 1.27 engine 3.92 Alpha 1 MMX, the ogg encoder was Ogg Vorbis DLL Encoder v 1.09 enging 1.05.
The results strongly disagreed with conventional wisdom. In every case, across genres, on these low end speakers, 320Kbps mp3's were the only ones that fooled our ears. Low bit rate ogg and mp3 recordings were different, but we didn't take time to notice which was better... they were both unquestionably inferior to the source material. Ogg's 350Kbps encoding was good, but inferior to the smaller 320Kbps mp3 files of the same work.
Reading some of the posts on this article, I am rather shocked how many people find sound reproduction to be anywhere between "very good" and "excellent" on mid end equipment listening to 192Kbps encoded audio.
After running this experiment, I ripped about 30 of my CDs to 320Kbps mp3's and noticed another benefit to CD quality rips: I could listen to the music longer without my ears feeling fatigued. I had always thought that it was pumping sound directly into my head from my headphones that caused my ears to become tired of the music. For whatever reason, it takes much longer now. Perhaps 3 or 4 hours compared to 1 to 1 1/2 before.
No you diverted attention to a non-sequiter. The Scott Peterson case is a criminal investigation and as such has been overseen from warrant, through arraignment and to holding without bail by a judge. This is a civil case concerning a subpoena with no judicial oversight.
You can argue that it should have judicial review, but the law doesn't require it.
Isn't this what is being argued?
Now, under the law the copyright holder must provide significant reason for it to be issued
Under the law, the copyright holder, in order to obtain the subpoena from the court clerk, must provide:
The only "detail" is that the notification sent to the ISP must identify what work is being infringed and the complainant must provide a statement that they have a "good faith" belief that the manner in which the material is being used is not allowed by law.
Congress intended to enable copyright holders to move quickly to stop infringement
Regardless of the intention, the assertion by Verizon is that this tramples a persons right to privacy... And reducing basic civil liberties of citizens outweighs any harm copyright holders may suffer.
Yeah, that Scott Peterson, hasn't been convictied of murdering his wife. Why is he in jail???
*eye roll* mmmmm.... red herring.
Read the article.
A subpeona has to come from the court, and so it was filed with the court.
Well, let's see what the article says:
The RIAA cited the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- or DMCA -- in its legal effort to force Verizon to reveal the names. The DMCA gives movie studios, record companies, software makers and other copyright owners the right to subpoena Internet service providers without getting a judge's approval.
You said:
It is simply that the misuse of P2P networks is so widespread that there is little need to prove that illegal activity is going on and it is granted automatically.
Unless you have evidence that the article is patently incorrect, I think you misunderstand the issue at hand. No subpoena was "granted" by the court. And the Judge isn't saying "Okay, well now I am granting the discovery subpoena", the ruling was based entirely on the powers the DMCA gives to a copyright holder. Verizon argues that the power is unconstitutional. As the article says:
Verizon originally argued that it is unfair for the music industry to be allowed to obtain subpoenas without judicial approval, but Bates threw out that argument in a January ruling. Verizon then turned to its argument that the DMCA is unconstitutional.
But they are obviously involved in copyright violation.
Guilty until proven innocent. I don't like your style.
They are being idetified for prosecution. They will still have a right to defend themselves in court.
As if a discovery subpoena has never been used for an illegitimate purpose.
Last I saw, a corporation can read your e-mails on the company network, check your desk, etc., if they suspect you of anything. It all belongs to the company, kind of like how these criminals do not own Verizon but are renting its use.
Did you really mean to say that? Are you saying the phone company has the right at any time to tap your phone calls? Look up "common carrier" and "reasonable expectation of privacy". There is a world of difference between your employer monitoring internet usage and an ISP doing so.
The ISP will not remain guiltless if it doesn't comply with the court order.
Note how you fell into the trap already. You said "court order". The DMCA says they need no such thing. That's what this fight is over. RIAA didn't start with a court order for Verizon to provide these people's identity. They just said "Tell us, you have no choice"
The court has not said "we order you to reveal the identity of these individuals because the RIAA has a probable chance of success in litigation", the court has said "we order you to reveal the identity of these individuals because RIAA has complied with the DMCA"
You should RTFA. The issue goes like this:
RIAA: Hey give me the names of these two people
Verizon: Uh, get a court order
RIAA: No, the DMCA says we can get the name of anybody we accuse of stealing without a court order.
Verizon: That sounds unconstitutional. A judge should decide if your case has sufficient merit to pierce their right to privacy.
RIAA: Judge! They won't give us the names of people that the DMCA says we can have without a court order.
Judge: Okay Verizon, do what the DMCA says.
Verizon: I think you should reconsider, Judge. The DMCA is unconstitutional.
Judge: It's the law, I am not changing my decision.
Now verizon has to appeal to a higher court that the DMCA is unconstitutional. (hint: It probably is, and if it looks like this case will cause a constitutionality review by a federal circuit court, RIAA will drop the case and prevent that from happening. Does the name "Felden" ring a bell?)
Your privacy deserves to be gone if you commit an illegal act.
I assume you mean this in a more narrow sense than you stated it. Note that neither of those two Verizon customers has been convicted of anything. They have only been accused. Are you saying anyone accused by corporation of doing something illegal deserves to lose their privacy?
The only reason Verizon is withholding the names is so all their subscribers. don't migrate to other services in order to prevent from being caught.
You didn't read the article did you? Verizon is fighting on behalf of all ISPs. Other services would be less able to fight this than Verizon. The only reason these two haven't been handed over to the RIAA is because Verizon objects to the DMCA.
I don't see anyone here crying about the Enron CEO being placed under house arrest with a tracking bracelet, violating his privacy
Did a judge place the Enron CEO under house arrest? Did a judge order the tracking bracelet? Did you read the article?!
Verizon is objecting to the fact that privacy can be pierced without judicial review.
The story lies in the fact that the name change was made in an impolite way, apparently without any attempt to contact the FirebirdSQL group at all.
As one of the previous posts points out, the Firebird SQL team can no longer claim the moral high road on this one. They have resorted to a campaign of harrassment via spam. If there was one sure way to invoke the ire of the internet community, spam is it.
they're both open source, they're both computer programs
I always love arguments that in order to bulk up throw in large redundant sweeping generalizations. How many "open source" projects are not computer programs? How large is the "open source" software world? Should we argue that two persons should not have the same name because they are both people and they both live on planet earth?
and sometimes you use a browser to access a SQL database. Fairly often, in fact.
I have never once used a browser to access a SQL database. A browser's primary role is accessing an http server. The only server I've used that can access a SQL database is Tomcat. The most popular web server out there is apache and apache doesn't access a SQL database, it hands the request off to a handler module or invokes an external program (cgi). There are generally two layers between browser and database, and by the time you're into that second layer the method of datastore is immaterial.
If your argument is that the browser is the interface through which people see the representation of the data stored in an sql database, that is still a pretty weak argument. A browser is also the interface through which many people see the images taken by a camera. Should a browser ensure that its name does not conflict with the name of a digital camera? There are all manner of representations of information that are now "web enabled", and by "web enabled" we mean "viewable in a web browser". A browser should not be limited in name because something of similar name could be accessed by it because practically everything can be accessed by a browser through an appropriately enabled web server (that's why browsers are so popular!).
It's not as though there's no precedent for two OSS projects to share a name. [...] At the very bottom of that second link you'll find a little note from the developer of the file manager
So was the developer of the file manager consulted by the gentoo distribution before the distribution came into existence, or did they have civil discourse after the fact and come to an amicable resolution?
They could even have exchanged reciprocal links, so that anybody who did get confused would easily be set straight.
This could have been done after the naming issue had come to light. Did the FirebirdSQL people try this or did they just head straight to a spam campaign? There are all manner of things rationally thinking people could have done. Which of them did the database folks use?