I don't think so. But I think they're expecting this to moves hardware units and tech licenses and promote the Apple brand, whcih while not probably as lucrative immediately as a small transaction fee, has the potential to draw a lot of people into their ecosystem.
B%'s dialogue was mostly awful and heavy-handed, because JMS (at least at the time) wrote a LOT of expository, comic-booky stuff. Given over the years he's matured having been a script editor for a lot of bigger name, subtler stuff, one would hope he's got a grasp of it now. BUt back then, whooweee there was a lot of leaden phrasing. It took actors with a lot of gravitas, like Katsulas and Jurasik to make some of that stuff work. Unfortunately most of the actors lacked that.
And then there's the whole thing that 90% of the foreshadowing was done by either time-jump flashforwards or a riddle-talking alien.
I also found the central conceit of the Vorlon/Shadow conflict, and the resolution thereof, deeply unsatisfying. Millions-of-years-old ultrapowerful Type IV civilisations and their endless conflict reads like a 1st-year philosophy paper - and is resolved by some dude yelling "Shut up! Go away! I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, DAD!" Buh.
For standard operations, it basically makes little difference. Movies, games, etc - unless you're dealing with an acoustically treated space and really good speakers, mobo audio exceeded the necessary standards a long time ago.
If you're an audio pro, though, then you generally need something else. But that tends to be specialized - high-end converters, mic preamps, multichannels, ADAT/TOSLink, yadda yadda. Eventually you start worrying about what brand of transformer is in your mic pre and how to impedance match your mics.
But that's pretty rarefied.
The standalone sound card has kind of been squeezed out on both ends. No significant benefit for your average user, not good enough for your prosumer.
The modifier is "who has had (often historical) power in the situation."
This is really hard for white folks to get, because they've pretty much always had the power in this country, and with the exception of some ethnic groups (irish, italians, jews to name a few, although that situation has for the most part changed in the past century) there's never been a term used by groups in power for us that basically means "we're reducing you and everything in your culture to a single attribute that intends to justify our treatment of you as less-than-human." Yeah, "honkey", "redneck" and "cracker" are epithets, but there weren't tacit (or explicit in some cases) endorsements of honkey-lynchings or cracker-scalping throughout our country's history.
Vikings don't get offended because vikings don't exist anymore, and their descendants got to pick the team name for themselves. When a white dude calls a team full of white dudes the "Redskins" because he can with impunity, it's pretty much indicative of the imbalance of the situation.
Where I'm living, we're having some controversy with Uber and Lyft and the taxis. We do *not* have the super-high license costs of NY or even Victoria, and most cabbies own all their licenses. Most of our cab companies are employee owned, as well.
The regulations we do have, though: criminal background checks, commercial insurance, requirement of training to support the disabled (and subsequent participation in subsidized transport programs for the disabled), 24/7 operation (for the company, not individual cabbies), and required service to the entire city.
Both Uber and Lyft started operating here without any of those requirements being met, so the city said "um, no." Lyft sent a rep (who was not from their legal team, just a sales rep or...something) to a town hall meeting about it whose primary argument was "we're not a cab company, so it doesn't apply to us." The city's argument was "not directly, but you're operating like a cab company, so you're subject to our regulations." And back and forth it goes.
I'm not entirely sure who's right (although the whole "hey look you can't just skip picking up disabled people" part seems kind of important) but what does strike me as distasteful and a little sketchy is that nobody from either company either researched any of this before they started operating, or if they did, they didn't bother to have a discussion with the city beforehand. Seems like due diligence, and they probably could've gotten an exception if they'd made their case beforehand (there are enough tech-friendly alderpeople to lobby on their behalf) but unfortunately the shoot first, ask questions later methodology set up a lot of ill-will.
> That's why you have the customer sign off on the analysis stage, making the customer responsible for any delays if > requirements are changed.
AHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHAHAH AHAHA HAHA HAHAHAHA HAHAHA HAH AHAHA HAHA HA HA HA
AHAHAHA HAHA HAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA
HAHAHA HAHAHA AHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA
[wheeze]
HAHA HAHAHAHA HAHAHA HAH AHAHA HAHA
[cough]
Ahem.
Okay, sure.
Yeah, you can warn them from the very beginning. You can say "hey, don't ask for changes, because it will change the timeline." Then what they do is go over your head to some manager's manager's manager or the CEO who says "I don't care, we need this now and so-and-so says it's an easy change (and I don't know why you estimated 160 hours of dev time for this) so make it work. If you need extra time we'll just cut it off of the testing phase."
No dev plan is immune to office politics.
Besides, even if the customer is *aware* they're responsible for the delays and they assume said responsibility, *they're* not the ones coming in on weekends to write code to hit a deadline or scrambling to integrate the new change into a nice clean architecture plan. And upper management rarely yells at (or fires) the customers when stuff goes overbudget or over time.
What baffles me is that the people who spend a lot of time touting the superiority of analog over digital, and spend time ripping the mp3/AAC/etc formats to shreds, are the same ones who get behind this pointless revival of awful compromise tech like cassette.
The specs on cassettes are AWFUL. Terrible noise floor, poor dynamic range, bad frequency response...sure, if you're carrying a 2inch tape reel and have a nice Studer deck I'll grant you the vintage sound can be awesome, but cassette...really? Really?
Monty's talking about playback. And so is Neil Young. So it's relevant.
Some movies do have a high dynamic range. But unless you want it to *actually injure* members of the audience, it's still less than what 16bit audio can hypothetically reproduce - there's only about 100db between the quietest whisper and the threshold of human pain, likely far less than that between "loud onscreen noise" and "stage whisper."
What you get from 24bit is just an extremely low noise floor. Great for processing, since noise you add probably never exceeds the level of human hearing. Unnecessary for playback, though.
Technically speaking, dithering doesn't remove the aliasing, it just masks it with specially designed noise. Most DACs oversample to ensure that aliasing and jitter noise are above the range of human hearing. Most professional ITB audio processing does the same thing.
Some humans maybe can see near infrared and ultraviolet. MAYBE. But assuming those...six people can also hear 22khz...well, CD is still plenty good. 48khz audio would be like a human being able to see deep ultraviolet. 96khz would be akin to looking at xrays. I'm pretty sure there's not that much human variation.
Unless your mastering engineer is Superman. Or maybe Krypto, the Superdog.
The fact that People Who Should Know Better keep pushing this idea drives me bonkers. I saw a talk by George fricken Massenburg where he went on and on about how we should all be downloading 24/96 audio and I'm thinking two things: 1) Are you nuts? and 2) geez what sort of data plan do you have for your phone?
And just yesterday I read an article by some highly regarded pro mastering engineers who started spouting about how 384khz (!) audio was the only useful format because "your brain doesn't need to interpolate." That's some hardcore misunderstanding of digital audio AND physiology. And while I can see that maybe there's a place in mastering engineering for higher sampling rates when using some sort of digital processing that doesn't oversample well or is somehow lossy near the nyquist, there's generally the problems that virtually no commercial sample rate converter is perfect enough to not introduce more noise going back down to 44.1 than you would eliminate with hi-res audio, and any of the ultrasonic frequencies you'd be preserving are like 10x beyond the hearing range of porpoises and bats. That's like worrying about whether your camera is properly processing all the interactions from gamma rays.
There's the issue, too, that not *everyone* who faces these needs and consequences weren't initially adequately prepared for this.
There are a large number of people using government assistance who are educated, planned, and things were going great...until the plant shut down, or there was a catastrophic medical issue, or the financial system collapsed, or, you know, something. Yeah, a lot of people are born into poverty too, but it's not uniform.
So really the only solution is NOBODY have sex EVER because you MIGHT have an unintended consequence that you MIGHT not be able to pay for in case something goes wrong in your life.
Given the population of/. that solution is probably pretty moot already.
My former violin teacher own a Guarneri- not even one of the famous ones,one by the famous Guarneri's son - and it was STILL worth more than his very expensive house.
While there's a lot of this going on, the stuff that gets radio play in most genres is still heavily biased to the studio system. At the very least, a professional mastering engineer gets involved. It's not uniform, but most rock, pop, jazz, country and classical is recorded in a studio and not some dude's basement. (yet).
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I don't think so. But I think they're expecting this to moves hardware units and tech licenses and promote the Apple brand, whcih while not probably as lucrative immediately as a small transaction fee, has the potential to draw a lot of people into their ecosystem.
...unless he's a fan of the author for whom Bester is named.
B%'s dialogue was mostly awful and heavy-handed, because JMS (at least at the time) wrote a LOT of expository, comic-booky stuff. Given over the years he's matured having been a script editor for a lot of bigger name, subtler stuff, one would hope he's got a grasp of it now. BUt back then, whooweee there was a lot of leaden phrasing. It took actors with a lot of gravitas, like Katsulas and Jurasik to make some of that stuff work. Unfortunately most of the actors lacked that.
And then there's the whole thing that 90% of the foreshadowing was done by either time-jump flashforwards or a riddle-talking alien.
I also found the central conceit of the Vorlon/Shadow conflict, and the resolution thereof, deeply unsatisfying. Millions-of-years-old ultrapowerful Type IV civilisations and their endless conflict reads like a 1st-year philosophy paper - and is resolved by some dude yelling "Shut up! Go away! I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, DAD!" Buh.
> The same thing a train does when it arrives at a train station.
Blow through at high speeds, jump the track and maim dozens of passerby?
For standard operations, it basically makes little difference. Movies, games, etc - unless you're dealing with an acoustically treated space and really good speakers, mobo audio exceeded the necessary standards a long time ago.
If you're an audio pro, though, then you generally need something else. But that tends to be specialized - high-end converters, mic preamps, multichannels, ADAT/TOSLink, yadda yadda. Eventually you start worrying about what brand of transformer is in your mic pre and how to impedance match your mics.
But that's pretty rarefied.
The standalone sound card has kind of been squeezed out on both ends. No significant benefit for your average user, not good enough for your prosumer.
Yeah, they went and got the disability, so they should be willing to pay for it. /sarcasm
"Mensa Match: The Dating Site For the Insufferably Smug."
It's the urdu (loaned from arabic) for "foreigner", generally "westerner?"
Okay so maybe their characterization was pretty awful but I don't see the beef with the name.
The modifier is "who has had (often historical) power in the situation."
This is really hard for white folks to get, because they've pretty much always had the power in this country, and with the exception of some ethnic groups (irish, italians, jews to name a few, although that situation has for the most part changed in the past century) there's never been a term used by groups in power for us that basically means "we're reducing you and everything in your culture to a single attribute that intends to justify our treatment of you as less-than-human." Yeah, "honkey", "redneck" and "cracker" are epithets, but there weren't tacit (or explicit in some cases) endorsements of honkey-lynchings or cracker-scalping throughout our country's history.
Vikings don't get offended because vikings don't exist anymore, and their descendants got to pick the team name for themselves. When a white dude calls a team full of white dudes the "Redskins" because he can with impunity, it's pretty much indicative of the imbalance of the situation.
What about "Semprini?"
Where I'm living, we're having some controversy with Uber and Lyft and the taxis. We do *not* have the super-high license costs of NY or even Victoria, and most cabbies own all their licenses. Most of our cab companies are employee owned, as well.
The regulations we do have, though: criminal background checks, commercial insurance, requirement of training to support the disabled (and subsequent participation in subsidized transport programs for the disabled), 24/7 operation (for the company, not individual cabbies), and required service to the entire city.
Both Uber and Lyft started operating here without any of those requirements being met, so the city said "um, no." Lyft sent a rep (who was not from their legal team, just a sales rep or...something) to a town hall meeting about it whose primary argument was "we're not a cab company, so it doesn't apply to us." The city's argument was "not directly, but you're operating like a cab company, so you're subject to our regulations." And back and forth it goes.
I'm not entirely sure who's right (although the whole "hey look you can't just skip picking up disabled people" part seems kind of important) but what does strike me as distasteful and a little sketchy is that nobody from either company either researched any of this before they started operating, or if they did, they didn't bother to have a discussion with the city beforehand. Seems like due diligence, and they probably could've gotten an exception if they'd made their case beforehand (there are enough tech-friendly alderpeople to lobby on their behalf) but unfortunately the shoot first, ask questions later methodology set up a lot of ill-will.
It's just weird that they're working that way.
> That's why you have the customer sign off on the analysis stage, making the customer responsible for any delays if
> requirements are changed.
AHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHAHAH AHAHA HAHA HAHAHAHA HAHAHA HAH AHAHA HAHA HA HA HA
AHAHAHA HAHA HAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA
HAHAHA HAHAHA AHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA
[wheeze]
HAHA HAHAHAHA HAHAHA HAH AHAHA HAHA
[cough]
Ahem.
Okay, sure.
Yeah, you can warn them from the very beginning. You can say "hey, don't ask for changes, because it will change the timeline." Then what they do is go over your head to some manager's manager's manager or the CEO who says "I don't care, we need this now and so-and-so says it's an easy change (and I don't know why you estimated 160 hours of dev time for this) so make it work. If you need extra time we'll just cut it off of the testing phase."
No dev plan is immune to office politics.
Besides, even if the customer is *aware* they're responsible for the delays and they assume said responsibility, *they're* not the ones coming in on weekends to write code to hit a deadline or scrambling to integrate the new change into a nice clean architecture plan. And upper management rarely yells at (or fires) the customers when stuff goes overbudget or over time.
What baffles me is that the people who spend a lot of time touting the superiority of analog over digital, and spend time ripping the mp3/AAC/etc formats to shreds, are the same ones who get behind this pointless revival of awful compromise tech like cassette.
The specs on cassettes are AWFUL. Terrible noise floor, poor dynamic range, bad frequency response...sure, if you're carrying a 2inch tape reel and have a nice Studer deck I'll grant you the vintage sound can be awesome, but cassette...really? Really?
Cello guy is clearly stoned out of his mind, too. The other two look like they're posing for DMV photos.
Granted, there's no such thing as a band photo that DOESN'T make you look like a douchebag, but this is pretty far up there on the list of offenders.
Admit it, you're a porpoise who has somehow figured out how to post to /.
That's the only way I can account for you being able to hear "only 24khz."
Well, speaker isolation isn't a terrible idea. They keep the desk from making that whoomph whoomph noise when your bass is loud. :)
But really you can accomplish that with like a few pieces of packing foam or something like that.
Monty's talking about playback. And so is Neil Young. So it's relevant.
Some movies do have a high dynamic range. But unless you want it to *actually injure* members of the audience, it's still less than what 16bit audio can hypothetically reproduce - there's only about 100db between the quietest whisper and the threshold of human pain, likely far less than that between "loud onscreen noise" and "stage whisper."
What you get from 24bit is just an extremely low noise floor. Great for processing, since noise you add probably never exceeds the level of human hearing. Unnecessary for playback, though.
Technically speaking, dithering doesn't remove the aliasing, it just masks it with specially designed noise. Most DACs oversample to ensure that aliasing and jitter noise are above the range of human hearing. Most professional ITB audio processing does the same thing.
Some humans maybe can see near infrared and ultraviolet. MAYBE. But assuming those...six people can also hear 22khz...well, CD is still plenty good. 48khz audio would be like a human being able to see deep ultraviolet. 96khz would be akin to looking at xrays. I'm pretty sure there's not that much human variation.
Unless your mastering engineer is Superman. Or maybe Krypto, the Superdog.
The fact that People Who Should Know Better keep pushing this idea drives me bonkers. I saw a talk by George fricken Massenburg where he went on and on about how we should all be downloading 24/96 audio and I'm thinking two things: 1) Are you nuts? and 2) geez what sort of data plan do you have for your phone?
And just yesterday I read an article by some highly regarded pro mastering engineers who started spouting about how 384khz (!) audio was the only useful format because "your brain doesn't need to interpolate." That's some hardcore misunderstanding of digital audio AND physiology. And while I can see that maybe there's a place in mastering engineering for higher sampling rates when using some sort of digital processing that doesn't oversample well or is somehow lossy near the nyquist, there's generally the problems that virtually no commercial sample rate converter is perfect enough to not introduce more noise going back down to 44.1 than you would eliminate with hi-res audio, and any of the ultrasonic frequencies you'd be preserving are like 10x beyond the hearing range of porpoises and bats. That's like worrying about whether your camera is properly processing all the interactions from gamma rays.
And I for one welcome our new Canadian overlords, eh?
There's the issue, too, that not *everyone* who faces these needs and consequences weren't initially adequately prepared for this.
There are a large number of people using government assistance who are educated, planned, and things were going great...until the plant shut down, or there was a catastrophic medical issue, or the financial system collapsed, or, you know, something. Yeah, a lot of people are born into poverty too, but it's not uniform.
So really the only solution is NOBODY have sex EVER because you MIGHT have an unintended consequence that you MIGHT not be able to pay for in case something goes wrong in your life.
Given the population of /. that solution is probably pretty moot already.
Maybe he drives a Bugatti Veyron?
My former violin teacher own a Guarneri- not even one of the famous ones,one by the famous Guarneri's son - and it was STILL worth more than his very expensive house.
Beautiful sounding instrument, though.
Wuss. I don't see how fermenting fish entrails is any worse than the processes used to make cheese. Or sausages. Or stinky tofu. Or sauerkraut.
Fermentation as a preservation method (and a developer of umami flavor) goes back millennia.
I know how fish sauce is made, and I still use it all the time. It's *great* stuff.
"...how insanely expensive will cable/sat providers make it to watch any of this bandwidth-consuming video?"
While there's a lot of this going on, the stuff that gets radio play in most genres is still heavily biased to the studio system. At the very least, a professional mastering engineer gets involved. It's not uniform, but most rock, pop, jazz, country and classical is recorded in a studio and not some dude's basement. (yet).
The primary exception is dance music.