I know there can be both a civil and a criminal suit on the same issue... after the jury, more swayed by Cochran's theatrics than scientific evidence that they didn't have the intelligence/attention span to comprehend, acquitted him for murder, the victim's family turned around and brought civil suit against him for her wrongful death.
I'll answer that question: not very lossy at all. You probably don't want to do it on an onboard sound card, but any decent PCI (or even USB) sound board ($~40) will provide for this purpose perfect recording.
This is compounded by the fact that radio signals (as someone above pointed out) go through a process called "dynamic range compression", which basically makes the soft bits louder and the loud bits softer. This does a couple of things: 1) it makes setting recording levels for FM recording a snap, since it's all close to the same amplitude, 2) it makes sound card fidelity even less important, since you don't have a huge dynamic range to deal with*, 3) it screws up the quality anyway, so who cares if your card puts a -50 dB noise signal in there?
(Comment about dynamic range compression: I suppose boosting soft bits of the audio helps to raise the signal-to-noise ratio for weak FM signals--otherwise very soft passages would get lost in static. Even with range compression the local classical station has issues with this.However, wouldn't it be trivial to do the range compression, then broadcast the dynamic shift on a sideband channel? Then the FM receiver could reconstruct the original dynamic from the (compressed) signal and the sideband dynamic indication. That would be the best of both worlds... and would be backwards-compatible since older FM receivers would just get the compressed signal, same as they do now.)
You're not going to get audiophile-quality sound off an FM broadcast. This isn't the fault of the recording equipment, the radio receiver, or the FM transmission process; it's what they do to the signal before it hits the transmitter. This is a good thing for this purpose though, since it means even crappy hardware doesn't mess up the recording!
*Some of the most challenging signals to record accurately are those with both very loud and very soft periods. The recording gain has to be set low enough to accomodate the loud passages. Then, the combination of the low gain with the low intrinsic volume of the soft bits makes for a very low signal--which, on bad hardware, can be comparable to the noise floor. But we don't care about this on the radio, since it's *all* loud.
Power consumption is an issue...
on
Open Source Hotspots
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you're using the same computer both as an access point and a, well, computer (ftp/mail/www/whatever else server), this makes sense. But I would think that reusing old hardware as a dedicated AP would pull 150-200 watts, while a commercial AP would draw less than ten...
They do have that right legally; there is nothing legally wrong with it. However, it's up to individuals to determine whether something's ethically wrong with it and determine whether they dislike Paypal for it.
If I own a store, there's nothing stopping me from refusing to serve people with tongue piercings. There's also nothing wrong with people who sympathise with the tongue-pierced from boycotting or criticising* my store.
That whole vote-with-your-dollars principle that's put forth by capitalist theorists as a way of enforcing business ethics? It only works if you do it.
*As long as they don't run afoul of slander/libel laws...
That's the point. It's not about money. The most pure form of capitalism assumes that everything that has value can be made to be about money.... and, as you point out, free software isn't about money.
The "American way" is not about capitalism, per se. It's about liberty. Sure, capitalism is a part of this, since it's the economic system that gives people the most freedom... but the founding documents of this country show no special devotion to capitalism. The Framers' attitude toward economics is best described as "As long as you pay your taxes and play fair, do whatever the hell you want."
Free software is indeed anti-capitalistic, sort of. Capitalism is based on the notion that the value of all goods can be measured monetarily; the idea that someone would be willing to code for free (or for some non-monetary benefit, like prestige) causes a division-by-zero error in the system.
But it's certainly not non-American, since it fits with the *real* American ideal of liberty: do what you want, as long as you don't hurt anyone. Free Software coders aren't hurting anyone other than by out-competing them (which is legal). They're helping a great many people: those who get neat software for free.
(If I start handing out free cookies in the street in front of a bakery, I'm not breaking the law. In fact I'm a major benefit to society, because people get free cookies. Whether the bakery goes out of business isn't my problem.)
Disclaimer: the *ideal* American Way involves liberty and governmental non-interference. It doesn't exactly work that way any more...
Tactical AI has gotten pretty good, especially in twitch-type games like UT2K4: the bots are competent opponents without being "obviously bots".
However, strategic AI is quite lacking. I am thinking mainly of D&D-type games, as that's where most of my experience lies.
For instance, in games like ToEE or NWN, enemies have basically one reaction to the player's presence: fight until they die. I want enemies that are obviously overmatched to retreat and go fetch help... to set ambushes on their own without having special scripting to do so... etc.
Computers are a bucketload faster now than they were five years ago... and games look a bucketload better. This is a good thing.
I only want to see more advances in how to use all this power for AI/complex worlds as well as advances in graphics. The development of pretty pictures has outstripped the development of smart NPC's for quite a while; NWN looks a hell of a lot better than Nethack, but the critters aren't much smarter (and in some cases are dumber).
Nobody's criticizing modern games, other than to say "There are lots of neat things that could be done with all this processing power that haven't been done yet."
Well, we have good computer archival media. A RAID array with replacing disks that die should be able to maintain huge quantities with little investment.
The only problem is that it requires an input of energy to do so. Someone's got to keep swapping out disks as they die. All storage solutions are like that--we've got no *single* durable storage object. Everything relies on redundancy and the replacement of bad media.
I suppose the most durable things used nowadays are vinyl records...
Someone really should do a detailed study on failure rates for optical media.
Stuff like:
-How do humidity, temperature, and the presence of light affect deterioration rates?
-What does the failure rate vs. time look like? Mean-life isn't the only important statistic you need to know when designing a system.
-How exactly do disks fail? Does the whole disk go at once, or do you only lose a few bits here and there?
-How do the lifetimes of cdrs vs. "real" cd's differ?
-Is there any way to detect deterioration of a cd before it gets to the point of losing bits? Ideally the reader should be able to tell when the 1's and 0's start to look similar (or whatever) and raise some red flags.
I am the sound engineer for a university choir. Many days I announce that I'll be bringing my laptop to rehearsal, and will sit around before/after practice churning out copies of recordings people need.
There is no need for consciousness to arise from or be associated with anything non-physical, either. No assumption that the mind is something apart from matter has led to a contradiction. As in many things scientific, we just do not know which way it goes.
However, since the assumption that the mind is physical has not led to contradictions, and since humans understand physics better than theology (or whatever), scientists tend to stick with the atoms-are-all-you-get approach.
Nobody's arguing that materialism is definitely the case. But it's not been shown to *not* work, and it's certainly simpler than the alternative...... and has more experimental evidence. Remember psycho bell tower sniper dude? He had a tumor on his amygdala.
I don't think they were trivializing anything--rather alluding to Linus' tendency to make pithy, and often insightful, comments on pretty much everything.
The difference is that science, by definition, can never claim to have actually *achieved* absolute truth. That's indeed what we're looking for, but science can never claim to have found it.
The best that science can say is "We have this model that, so far, doesn't conflict with any data. If you've got an argument that our model is wrong, we'd love to hear it."
Religions, on the other hand, generally claim absolute certainty about something: "We know the Earth was created 6000 years ago, because this book says so. To question this is heretical."
It's this claim of certainty that pisses off science types. I've got no problem with the idea of a deity, just the "take it on faith that there is a deity with these traits" bit.
Huntsville, as a city populated mainly by immigrant engineers working on NASA/military contracts, is less infested by rednecks than the rest of the state. There's still something of a bible-belt atmosphere here, of course, but this place is a lot better than the rest of the state.
Once you get out of Huntsville (and Madison), all bets are off. All those redneck jokes you hear? They're all true, and then some.
I attend the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which has an atrocious track record on networking issues.
Our Network Services department, despite repeated requests from faculty and students, has not set up any sort of wireless coverage anywhere on campus. They also prohibit faculty and students from setting up their own wireless equipment, whether or not it is connected to their network. I am not permitted to put a wireless NIC in my desktop and have it talk to my laptop, even if neither machine is on the campus network.
(I figure that since I'm allowed to use a cordless telephone operating in the 2.4GHz band, Network Services has no right to dictate what other signals I generate in that band.)
Any Slashdotters who are pondering attending this university should think carefully about whether they are willing to accept the complete lack of wireless and consistent 15-25% packet loss on the dormitory connections. (People use dialup because it's more reliable.)
In contrast, a friend of mine in Washington University Law School frequently IM's me from class lamenting how boring class is. (How someone can be bored with a computer (with 3d card) and network access in front of them is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Slashdot Mirror
... does it have enough features to get people to switch from OpenOffice?
I know there can be both a civil and a criminal suit on the same issue ... after the jury, more swayed by Cochran's theatrics than scientific evidence that they didn't have the intelligence/attention span to comprehend, acquitted him for murder, the victim's family turned around and brought civil suit against him for her wrongful death.
I'll answer that question: not very lossy at all. You probably don't want to do it on an onboard sound card, but any decent PCI (or even USB) sound board ($~40) will provide for this purpose perfect recording.
This is compounded by the fact that radio signals (as someone above pointed out) go through a process called "dynamic range compression", which basically makes the soft bits louder and the loud bits softer. This does a couple of things: 1) it makes setting recording levels for FM recording a snap, since it's all close to the same amplitude, 2) it makes sound card fidelity even less important, since you don't have a huge dynamic range to deal with*, 3) it screws up the quality anyway, so who cares if your card puts a -50 dB noise signal in there?
(Comment about dynamic range compression: I suppose boosting soft bits of the audio helps to raise the signal-to-noise ratio for weak FM signals--otherwise very soft passages would get lost in static. Even with range compression the local classical station has issues with this.However, wouldn't it be trivial to do the range compression, then broadcast the dynamic shift on a sideband channel? Then the FM receiver could reconstruct the original dynamic from the (compressed) signal and the sideband dynamic indication. That would be the best of both worlds... and would be backwards-compatible since older FM receivers would just get the compressed signal, same as they do now.)
You're not going to get audiophile-quality sound off an FM broadcast. This isn't the fault of the recording equipment, the radio receiver, or the FM transmission process; it's what they do to the signal before it hits the transmitter. This is a good thing for this purpose though, since it means even crappy hardware doesn't mess up the recording!
*Some of the most challenging signals to record accurately are those with both very loud and very soft periods. The recording gain has to be set low enough to accomodate the loud passages. Then, the combination of the low gain with the low intrinsic volume of the soft bits makes for a very low signal--which, on bad hardware, can be comparable to the noise floor. But we don't care about this on the radio, since it's *all* loud.
If you're using the same computer both as an access point and a, well, computer (ftp/mail/www/whatever else server), this makes sense. But I would think that reusing old hardware as a dedicated AP would pull 150-200 watts, while a commercial AP would draw less than ten...
They do have that right legally; there is nothing legally wrong with it. However, it's up to individuals to determine whether something's ethically wrong with it and determine whether they dislike Paypal for it.
If I own a store, there's nothing stopping me from refusing to serve people with tongue piercings. There's also nothing wrong with people who sympathise with the tongue-pierced from boycotting or criticising* my store.
That whole vote-with-your-dollars principle that's put forth by capitalist theorists as a way of enforcing business ethics? It only works if you do it.
*As long as they don't run afoul of slander/libel laws...
That's the point. It's not about money. The most pure form of capitalism assumes that everything that has value can be made to be about money. ... and, as you point out, free software isn't about money.
The "American way" is not about capitalism, per se. It's about liberty. Sure, capitalism is a part of this, since it's the economic system that gives people the most freedom... but the founding documents of this country show no special devotion to capitalism. The Framers' attitude toward economics is best described as "As long as you pay your taxes and play fair, do whatever the hell you want."
Free software is indeed anti-capitalistic, sort of. Capitalism is based on the notion that the value of all goods can be measured monetarily; the idea that someone would be willing to code for free (or for some non-monetary benefit, like prestige) causes a division-by-zero error in the system.
But it's certainly not non-American, since it fits with the *real* American ideal of liberty: do what you want, as long as you don't hurt anyone. Free Software coders aren't hurting anyone other than by out-competing them (which is legal). They're helping a great many people: those who get neat software for free.
(If I start handing out free cookies in the street in front of a bakery, I'm not breaking the law. In fact I'm a major benefit to society, because people get free cookies. Whether the bakery goes out of business isn't my problem.)
Disclaimer: the *ideal* American Way involves liberty and governmental non-interference. It doesn't exactly work that way any more...
You make a good point.
Tactical AI has gotten pretty good, especially in twitch-type games like UT2K4: the bots are competent opponents without being "obviously bots".
However, strategic AI is quite lacking. I am thinking mainly of D&D-type games, as that's where most of my experience lies.
For instance, in games like ToEE or NWN, enemies have basically one reaction to the player's presence: fight until they die. I want enemies that are obviously overmatched to retreat and go fetch help... to set ambushes on their own without having special scripting to do so... etc.
Grandparent has a valid point.
Computers are a bucketload faster now than they were five years ago... and games look a bucketload better. This is a good thing.
I only want to see more advances in how to use all this power for AI/complex worlds as well as advances in graphics. The development of pretty pictures has outstripped the development of smart NPC's for quite a while; NWN looks a hell of a lot better than Nethack, but the critters aren't much smarter (and in some cases are dumber).
Nobody's criticizing modern games, other than to say "There are lots of neat things that could be done with all this processing power that haven't been done yet."
Well, we have good computer archival media. A RAID array with replacing disks that die should be able to maintain huge quantities with little investment.
The only problem is that it requires an input of energy to do so. Someone's got to keep swapping out disks as they die. All storage solutions are like that--we've got no *single* durable storage object. Everything relies on redundancy and the replacement of bad media.
I suppose the most durable things used nowadays are vinyl records...
Someone really should do a detailed study on failure rates for optical media.
Stuff like:
-How do humidity, temperature, and the presence of light affect deterioration rates?
-What does the failure rate vs. time look like? Mean-life isn't the only important statistic you need to know when designing a system.
-How exactly do disks fail? Does the whole disk go at once, or do you only lose a few bits here and there?
-How do the lifetimes of cdrs vs. "real" cd's differ?
-Is there any way to detect deterioration of a cd before it gets to the point of losing bits? Ideally the reader should be able to tell when the 1's and 0's start to look similar (or whatever) and raise some red flags.
I have on-site CD duplication too: a laptop.
I am the sound engineer for a university choir. Many days I announce that I'll be bringing my laptop to rehearsal, and will sit around before/after practice churning out copies of recordings people need.
You don't even have to waste the disk--just mount the image using daemontools or equivalent.
There are as many agents as they want there to be.
Haven't you seen Matrix: Reloaded?
There is no need for consciousness to arise from or be associated with anything non-physical, either. No assumption that the mind is something apart from matter has led to a contradiction. As in many things scientific, we just do not know which way it goes.
... and has more experimental evidence. Remember psycho bell tower sniper dude? He had a tumor on his amygdala.
However, since the assumption that the mind is physical has not led to contradictions, and since humans understand physics better than theology (or whatever), scientists tend to stick with the atoms-are-all-you-get approach.
Nobody's arguing that materialism is definitely the case. But it's not been shown to *not* work, and it's certainly simpler than the alternative...
For a Winders system:
G aim
Opera
Winamp
CDex
BSPlayer
Audacity
Nero
mIRC
Sygate Personal Firewall
Daemon Tools
I don't think they were trivializing anything--rather alluding to Linus' tendency to make pithy, and often insightful, comments on pretty much everything.
Imagine the inbreeding. It'd be worse than Alabama, where I live!
The Lord knew what he doing?
Take off every 'ark'. Move 'ark'. For great superstition.
The difference is that science, by definition, can never claim to have actually *achieved* absolute truth. That's indeed what we're looking for, but science can never claim to have found it.
The best that science can say is "We have this model that, so far, doesn't conflict with any data. If you've got an argument that our model is wrong, we'd love to hear it."
Religions, on the other hand, generally claim absolute certainty about something: "We know the Earth was created 6000 years ago, because this book says so. To question this is heretical."
It's this claim of certainty that pisses off science types. I've got no problem with the idea of a deity, just the "take it on faith that there is a deity with these traits" bit.
IAAP (I am a physicist)
Sounds like this would be a good application for Ian Clarke's Freenet project.
Unfortunately, the least expensive colocation package that they offer is $1500/month. There's just no way a smallish FS project can afford that.
I was all agreeing with you until you said "core competency". Then I felt like I'd walked into a Dilbert strip.
Huntsville, as a city populated mainly by immigrant engineers working on NASA/military contracts, is less infested by rednecks than the rest of the state. There's still something of a bible-belt atmosphere here, of course, but this place is a lot better than the rest of the state.
Once you get out of Huntsville (and Madison), all bets are off. All those redneck jokes you hear? They're all true, and then some.
I attend the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which has an atrocious track record on networking issues.
Our Network Services department, despite repeated requests from faculty and students, has not set up any sort of wireless coverage anywhere on campus. They also prohibit faculty and students from setting up their own wireless equipment, whether or not it is connected to their network. I am not permitted to put a wireless NIC in my desktop and have it talk to my laptop, even if neither machine is on the campus network.
(I figure that since I'm allowed to use a cordless telephone operating in the 2.4GHz band, Network Services has no right to dictate what other signals I generate in that band.)
Any Slashdotters who are pondering attending this university should think carefully about whether they are willing to accept the complete lack of wireless and consistent 15-25% packet loss on the dormitory connections. (People use dialup because it's more reliable.)
In contrast, a friend of mine in Washington University Law School frequently IM's me from class lamenting how boring class is. (How someone can be bored with a computer (with 3d card) and network access in front of them is left as an exercise to the reader.)