The point is to socialize and not live in your own little world that nobody understands.
My little IT department got a good amount of respect from the whole company (and, like a previous poster said, nailing interns left and right as well:) by us socializing every little chance we got. They've come to associate us with controlling the amount of information they can or can't see while doing lots of work to make their work easier to do.
Suffice to say that my department was not considered a necessary evil, but an equal of accounting. Being a part of the community sure contributes a lot.
That said, if you consider accounting is just a "bean counter", then you deserve every amount of disrespect you have. Just treat others like how you want them treat you.
Yeah I guess after this we can expect the argument that IIS is "smarter, way waaaay smarter" than any other webserver out there. With ActiveX it can even be smarter in more than one way.
Nah, what I meant is MP3plus (or is it MP3pro?) never takes off. The technology in MP3pro is actually pretty inventive for low bitrate, MPEG decided to use it for AAC-HE.
Anyway it's all for the best. We get better quality music that's actually decent using dial up with a format no one company controls so we can use our player of choice. I noticed the steady decline of realaudio content that requires a pain in the ass player to listen to.
True, especially considering most audio coders are based on transforms rather than linear prediction.
The overkill part I'm referring to is the audio specific psychoacoustic processing which requires even heavier calculation than linear prediction since it has to calculate many variables. But as soon as it leaves that stage, everything else is quite simple by comparison.
But then again, when working at very low bitrates and the application is speech specific, audio coders simply can't compete with speech coders due to the fact that speech coders are designed with human speech and the properties of it in mind. Audio coders don't have the luxury of knowing beforehand the method of sound generation that it needs to replicate so it's designed with human perception in mind. Kinda like using a Swiss army knife to turn a screw instead of using a screwdriver.
Anyhow, the MPEG-2 AAC and MPEG-4 AAC are basically identical, except for the addition of some coding tools designed for low bitrate encoding, like internet radio.
There are some profiles for AAC encoding, which are (in decreasing quality) Main, Low Complexity (which we see in FAAC and Apple's), Low Delay, and the newest is High Efficiency which is low bitrate. There's also a scalable profile thrown in for good measure. I presume AACplus is actually AAC-HE. The technology they're using is from MP3plus we've seen quite some time ago but never takes off. So rest assured that you're not missing anything if you got your collection coded in AAC-LC.
Also, the previous poster is correct. The psychoacoustics are not defined in the standard. Hell, even the encoder is not actually defined. They only define the decoder and the stream format to ensure interoperability. But yes, obviously MDCT sizes are clearly defined otherwise you can't reverse transform the coefficients. But if you so choose you can ignore their specification on transient handling and your stream will decode correctly, although with crap quality.
Re:Low bit rates works well with speech.
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Actually the purpose of those technologies are specifically geared toward music. For speech, there are many researches done for exactly that purpose. The state of the art in speech coding can go as low as 4 or even 2 kbps AFAIK while maintaining toll quality speech.
Your ordinary GSM cell phone works at 16 kbps, off the top of my head, I don't exactly remember. Your landline works at roughly the same bitrate. The reason why we don't see an increase in speech quality is due to existing equipment that'll be too expensive to replace. Plus, basically all we need is the ability for us to recognize the speaker on the other end. There's heaps of research done on this topic, and what we're using on the phones are actually old technologies.
The fields of speech and audio coding are quite different. Currently I'm doing audio work, so I'm not really an expert in speech coding, although I know just enough. But I know for sure that if your application is geared toward speech coding, using a coder that is designed for general audio is overkill and inefficient.
That's almost true. Actually human _ear_ is geared toward speech. Our ears are much more sensitive at the frequencies of human speech, and much less sensitive at higher or lower frequencies. This is the reason why MP3 and AAC can sound good (and to a greater extent, DTS and Dolby AC-3 which are used in the cinemas). They encode low and high frequencies with less accuracy, because we don't perceive those frequencies as well as we should.
The exact point you're making is called the fields of psychoacoustics, and there's plenty of research already done from the 60s. The absolute threshold of hearing curve (ATH) is the result of those researches.
Ok I've been itching to ask this to a real actor who also happens to be a geek.
You know MPAA's been suing left and right claiming downloading movies are damaging to the industry as a whole. As an actor in probably the most popular science fiction series ever, how does piracy or file sharing affect you and your bottom line?
Does what the studios say about piracy is total bull? Or is it the truth?
The thing is Valve is getting so confident in their hit-making capability it borders on arrogance. They think they can get away with this crap while history has shown time and time again copy protection schemes simply does not work. People are either honest or not, and what they're doing is pissing off honest people that actually KNOW their rights. There are some honest people here that have no clue whatsoever of the implications of Steam if it ever takes off. All I hear is 13 year olds here crying "go buy the game you bastard Steam is cool HL2 r0x0r you all can read the EULA before you buy" while I laugh quietly at their naivety. Such innocence.
Piracy is a persistent problem. You will never be able to thwart it completely. Remember Quake? Doom? How many of those you think is pirated? Yet how do you explain the Ferraris? For. Each. Developer? You can't say that id is not getting their share of money even though some of them are lost due to piracy.
Valve should not follow Metallica's lead in blaming piracy for low sales where it's their own fault to blame.
I have no plan on buying anything from Valve ever again. Simply because their paranoia is getting on my nerves and getting ME to be paranoia about what they install in my computer as well. Games are for entertainment and I don't particularly find reading EULAS or whatnot is entertaining. EULAS are supposed to be common sense, in the theme of I can't pirate this game, I can't keep a copy of it when I sold it, etc. Reading the fine prints before I buy anything is not my idea of a good time. We got the lawyers that we pay lots of money to do that task for us.
I do believe in giving the producers their money. They definitely earned it. But making ME have to go through such bullshit just feels like a schoolkid lending their toys to you while they look at you with suspicious gaze and with a huge bully standing behind them ready to puch you at the slightest hint. That's not fun for me and to many people.
As a result of this activation bullshit I stopped playing PC games completely and grabbed a console instead (my xbox and PS2 are not modded, however, so I'm not pirating anything)
Believe it or not, it's almost true. Some CIOs or even my own manager have little clue of technical detail of anything. You would assume that those knowledge are required, but not necessarily.
I actually designed a database and asked him to approve it (or correct it if there's any error) and lo and behold he has no clue what relationship diagram looks like. This leads me to take most technical decisions myself.
On another note, I pushed PHP over ASP for the servers, citing PHP's better structure and extensibility. Of course, he refused. At one point we even had two versions of the same application, one in ASP and one in PHP. The reason for ASP? It's MS, so they can be trusted. I proved time and time again PHP is just as good if not better to no avail.
Of course there are exceptions. This is a big company where politics play a big part. Smaller companies usually don't exhibit this kind of thing.
Then again, the higher you are, the less detailed knowledge you'll need. His skills that I admire the most are making people feel bad about themselves for not following procedures and managing relationships between employees because some of us really hate each other's guts. As long as he can keep the division running smoothly and meet deadlines, if I were CEO I'd keep him in his post.
The thing is we all would like to see our beloved open standard flourish on businesses, it simply won't happen. At least, not yet.
I used to work as an admin and practically takes over my manager's work. We have no CIO, but the CFO does listen to me for my decisions. I learned a lot about office politics along the way.
Office politics stayed our hands, actually. Your CIO told you this garbage about winzip because he doesn't want you to know the details of how he managed to become CIO in the first place:) I can confidently tell you that his excuse is total bull, and he definitely knows about it.
To get to upper management, ass covering is of the utmost importance. Choosing to go with 7zip or pdfcreator is practically handing over all responsibilities of any fuckups to himself (and you, but since he's the CIO, he'll get 95% of the blame). Choosing to use winzip and adobe shifts the blame of any fuckups to them. Companies have tons of money. $10,000 is nothing for them. Even better if that $10,000 is budgeted to secure my upper management position by buying licenses and thus minimalize my risk of getting a blame. If that licenses turns out to be a good spending, there's a good chance it'll look good on my review too. See? win-win-win solution for your CIO. He's not as clueless as some posters might suggest:)
I am sometimes surprised by the technical prowess of some of slashdot's reader, but realize that zealotry of all things free and good won't get you anywhere in the workplace.
Damn man, I was drinking a bottle of water just as I was reading your post. Kinda makes me wonder what will happen if you accidentally drink that stuff.
wav file full bandwidth mono is 705.6 kbps, it's 16 bits per sample. 8 bits per sample will mean half of that number. The sampling rate in all cases is constantly 44.1 khz. A 128 kbps bitrate is about 1.4 bits per sample, no matter what the format.
Where did you get the 16 khz sampling rate from? Although you are correct that if the sampling rate is 16 khz, the maximum frequency attainable is 8 khz (assuming the signal is properly lowpassed to avoid aliasing, otherwise it'll sound weird)
Also, upping the bits per sample to 16 (assuming from the previous bandlimited signal of 8 khz) does not actually decrease the quality because that data is lost already in the first place. If 16 is from the original signal, then you don't actually change anything.
FYI, for stereo, you don't half the sampling rate. Sampling rate is calculated per frame, or number of channels. So a 44.1 khz stereo signal does not make a 22.05 khz mono signal. It's still 44.1.
People are constantly comparing audio coding standards, but realize that most of the stuff you hear is marketing speak. Many companies have lots of IP in this area and they obviously want to make their solution the standard.
What makes one codec sound different than others is the psychoacoustic measures implemented, quantization method, and the windowing scheme implemented before MDCT is performed. Note that all of the coders tested there do not use the same windowing method, but all of them use MDCT in a way.
MP3 is a subband coding, it slices the audio into sub bands before transforming them. AAC, OTOH, is not. AAC uses straight MDCT and does the filtering there. The criteria for filtering is still the same old, tho. That is part of the reason why AAC at 128 kbps way outperform MP3.
Psychoacoustic is not new, it's been described extensively in a book "Psychoacoustic" by Fastl. The catch is, audio coders have to take into account the complexity of performing the full model. MP3 uses a very simplified version of it, and it taxes the highest spec of its day. That is also the reason why AAC-LC (low complexity) is more popular than AAC-Main profile nowadays.
Vorbis can sound better because with new hardware, a more mathematical heavy version of psychoacoustic can be implemented today. Plus, they discard the notion of constant bitrate and use quantization quality instead. This is also evident in FAAC.
128 kbps stereo is practically the limit of almost-transparent quality audio now. 64 kbps mp3pro is just bull, it doesn't perform anywhere close to modern mp3 at 128 kbps. There is a limit on compression, and that is governed by the entropy (information content) of a signal. You go lower than entropy, you lose information, simple as that. Having said that, the only way to reduce entropy is using psychoacoustic models, and that also have a limit.
Note also that Dolby-AC3 that is used in DVD and movie theatre compresses 5.1 channels into 384 kbps, or roughly 150-ish kbps stereo. Again, the same lower limit is evident. They do compression by combining the high frequencies > 15 khz and ignore the phase information in that high frequencies. As you can probably tell, AC-3 sounds pretty good.
If you're interested in this area, I suggest the MPEG-4 book by Ebrahimi, Psychoacoustic by Fastl, Multimedia Compression by Gibson and DSP First by I forgot who:) Those books can provide a good basis of how all the coders tested works.
in a comment that's sure to get lots of bashing, a properly hardened NT is actually very stable. I've seen one NT firewall that survived power outages multiple times with no error whatsoever. That, and heavy traffic from inside and outside.
The trick for a stable NT is the installation process. MS tends to give default installation of NTs with lots of irrelevant apps (who in the hell actually uses Paint in servers?)
I hate MS as much as the next poster in slashdot, but hate to say this, NT is actually a pretty good OS if properly administered. Most NT hater I've seen usually comes from UNIX background. They tend to make NT crash because default install of NT is quite unsecured.
Fair use is no big deal, really. For myself I just use and buy whatever works well and easy to do.
Why in the rat's ass do I have to shell out tons of money and struggle with technological crap like DRM just to do something simple like reading a book? Granted, ebook is very handy when you want to bring that War & Peace together with the complete Lord of the Rings, but if being able to do that means that I have to do lots of work and PAYING for it instead of getting paid, I'll just buy and use an old-fashioned-works-well book instead. Cumbersome but less stressful. Besides I'll look more like an intellectual and less of a geek.
Remember the DIVX fiasco few years back (this is DIVX as in DRM-heavy version of DVD, not the file format). Many people here are scared shitless of DIVX at that time and the same thing happened to slashdot then. Now DIVX is a museum piece of what's not to do(tm). Simply put, any DRM that's restrictive and uncompromising will not survive. Ever.
The typical scenario is this: Joe: I want them new DVD shit. Seller: Ah, this new DVD player is a good choice. It's much improved from the older DVD. But to play this you also need this TV and this amp and this speaker because it's a new thing from Microsoft. Joe: Oh, can I use my old ones? I got them for $100,000. Top end shit. Seller: Sorry but no. (long sales pitch follows). Joe: Bye.
I agree that copyright is needed for the artist's protection, but since the one ripping off the artists are the studios themselves, the copyright law as we know it is biased more toward the studios.
DRM is not created for the artists. It's for the studios in a Frankensteinian twist of the copyright law. Apple's DRM succeeded mostly because it fits fair use in most people's mind, and the price is right at $1. At that price you can throw Janus or Anus or whatever and I won't care. If they want to twist DVDs this way, they better make it $1 a pop as well. I won't pay $30 for something that I can't use the way I like it. So is Joe.
On a lighter note, China practically ignores world standard and create their own. If ever this DRM stuff get a little out of hand, we can always use Chinese stuff. They have their own DVD-like format, and I'll bet it's free of any DRM whatsoever.
There are some posts here that defended the practice of blocking an entire country on the basis that THEY should regulate themselves over what happens in the internet space of the country. This is flawed logic and inconsistent with the definition of the internet itself. By blocking an entire country they imply that internet is hierarchically organized, which it is not. This is most probably the same people that cry fowl over taxation of the internet and voip by defining internet as loosely interconnected networks that has no hierarchical organization. AFAIK the only hierarchically organized facet of the internet is the DNS, and even you can skip that and go to the specific IP address if you know what you're doing.
If they change the definition of the internet accordingly to suit their purposes then sure as hell I won't take them seriously the next time around. If we can see this kind of behavior in politicians, then realize that we are behaving like them in this case.
I don't pretend to know the solution to spam, but let's just remind ourselves that this is definitely not the solution.
Probably it's worth it to check if the sender's or recipient's address is recognized? That way if one of your friend sends an email with no subject (like I usually do to my close friends) the mail won't get marked.
On another note, with so many rules for regexp checking, does it bog down the server or barely noticeable?
Anyway, it looks like a neat tool. Looking forward to it.
Nah, most probably it will look better but maybe doesn't work as good. It will be broken sometime before episode 4 starts because all the parts are second hand junk Made in Alderaan. Now you know why he destroyed Alderaan in the first place.
Although it'll be really cool to see the first ever vader costume is like Ned Kelly's armor with wires sticking out all over the place. Now THAT's an armor.
Which I think ruins the whole movie. Han should shoot first like in the original. He won't be a good smuggler if he waits to be shot all the time. Besides, it gives us a view of the dark side of Han which is very cool.
Can't blame Lucas tho. He seems to be more inclined to entertain the kids rather than making a dark scifi movie. That's why all the new releases are so chock full of cuddly characters.
One of the best part in the original is after Han shot that greenish guy and walked out cooly "sorry for the mess".
That's the point. Some of us can do all the work and studying required to learn a new trade relatively easy, while most general public do not have this talent.
At some point in our lives we will be called a moron by some know-it-all that needs to elevate themselves above and beyond the so-called public. And our lack of knowledge in that precise area was not because of our lack of brain to learn it, but from our lack of time. I would be offended.
Not to look down upon the "general public", but it has been said that the average IQ point is around 100, while I firmly believe anyone that can read and discuss slashdot is rated superior or above, or IQ point of 120 and up. This is just plain wrong if we continue to look down on people that doesn't have our talent or time. It's actually our job to educate them instead of keep swearing at them because then we get nothing done and the security hole or whatever is still wide open.
I do work on my car once and again if I have the time, but I couldn't care less about plumbing because it's not as interesting for myself. I used to work as an admin for a company and you just won't believe for the people's lack of understanding of computers.
I'm not making this up. Once I got called by some high ups that complains his program won't work, but it turns out that he got that prog running alright, it's just minimized. Humorously I enlightened him on the situation.
Pissed? Of course, I have to walk many stairs just to get to him. But I can't blame him because he simply doesn't know what happens in a computer, not because he's ignorant and doesn't want to know.
It's just that people have many different talents.
AFAIK there are two kinds of people that doesn't want to switch to broadband: 1. They don't know it exists. 2. They don't want to.
We in the know supposed to realize that not all people all computer-literate, my dad can't even type, forget computers. Since all they use is email, broadband is quite useless for them.
As for myself, I have broadband at school in my lab so I shuttle data back and forth using USB drive instead of getting a broadband in my own home. It's tempting, but here in Sydney the connection fee for a decent broadband is quite expensive for a student.
Not a critic to your post though, I do have the general feeling of increased 'eliteness' in slashdot for quite a while. Lots of posts lately have been calling people 'clueless', 'moronic', and all the wonderful words in between for not regularly applying a windows patch or plug a security hole in a home pc. We do have to realize that computers are not an easy thing to learn, and don't neglect the amount of time that we've all been through just to understand simple thing like pointers. Not everyone have the same patience or interest like we do.
This latest development in calling people stupid for not wanting broadband really cemented my opinion. Maybe they don't need it. Get over it.
I guess it's only fair that plumbers call us 'moron' and 'dumbass' for not being able to fix our own leaking faucet. Or, for mechanics to call us the same when we go to them to do car service, after all, all they did was change the oil filter, replace the oil, etc. Trivial matter, in their own trade.
The general attitude here toward people not of the same trade really concerns me. I hope it doesn't stay this way.
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The point is to socialize and not live in your own little world that nobody understands.
:) by us socializing every little chance we got. They've come to associate us with controlling the amount of information they can or can't see while doing lots of work to make their work easier to do.
My little IT department got a good amount of respect from the whole company (and, like a previous poster said, nailing interns left and right as well
Suffice to say that my department was not considered a necessary evil, but an equal of accounting. Being a part of the community sure contributes a lot.
That said, if you consider accounting is just a "bean counter", then you deserve every amount of disrespect you have. Just treat others like how you want them treat you.
Yeah I guess after this we can expect the argument that IIS is "smarter, way waaaay smarter" than any other webserver out there. With ActiveX it can even be smarter in more than one way.
Nah, what I meant is MP3plus (or is it MP3pro?) never takes off. The technology in MP3pro is actually pretty inventive for low bitrate, MPEG decided to use it for AAC-HE.
Anyway it's all for the best. We get better quality music that's actually decent using dial up with a format no one company controls so we can use our player of choice. I noticed the steady decline of realaudio content that requires a pain in the ass player to listen to.
True, especially considering most audio coders are based on transforms rather than linear prediction.
The overkill part I'm referring to is the audio specific psychoacoustic processing which requires even heavier calculation than linear prediction since it has to calculate many variables. But as soon as it leaves that stage, everything else is quite simple by comparison.
But then again, when working at very low bitrates and the application is speech specific, audio coders simply can't compete with speech coders due to the fact that speech coders are designed with human speech and the properties of it in mind. Audio coders don't have the luxury of knowing beforehand the method of sound generation that it needs to replicate so it's designed with human perception in mind. Kinda like using a Swiss army knife to turn a screw instead of using a screwdriver.
Blame MPEG for creating confusing standard :)
Anyhow, the MPEG-2 AAC and MPEG-4 AAC are basically identical, except for the addition of some coding tools designed for low bitrate encoding, like internet radio.
There are some profiles for AAC encoding, which are (in decreasing quality) Main, Low Complexity (which we see in FAAC and Apple's), Low Delay, and the newest is High Efficiency which is low bitrate. There's also a scalable profile thrown in for good measure. I presume AACplus is actually AAC-HE. The technology they're using is from MP3plus we've seen quite some time ago but never takes off. So rest assured that you're not missing anything if you got your collection coded in AAC-LC.
Also, the previous poster is correct. The psychoacoustics are not defined in the standard. Hell, even the encoder is not actually defined. They only define the decoder and the stream format to ensure interoperability. But yes, obviously MDCT sizes are clearly defined otherwise you can't reverse transform the coefficients. But if you so choose you can ignore their specification on transient handling and your stream will decode correctly, although with crap quality.
Actually the purpose of those technologies are specifically geared toward music. For speech, there are many researches done for exactly that purpose. The state of the art in speech coding can go as low as 4 or even 2 kbps AFAIK while maintaining toll quality speech.
Your ordinary GSM cell phone works at 16 kbps, off the top of my head, I don't exactly remember. Your landline works at roughly the same bitrate. The reason why we don't see an increase in speech quality is due to existing equipment that'll be too expensive to replace. Plus, basically all we need is the ability for us to recognize the speaker on the other end. There's heaps of research done on this topic, and what we're using on the phones are actually old technologies.
The fields of speech and audio coding are quite different. Currently I'm doing audio work, so I'm not really an expert in speech coding, although I know just enough. But I know for sure that if your application is geared toward speech coding, using a coder that is designed for general audio is overkill and inefficient.
That's almost true. Actually human _ear_ is geared toward speech. Our ears are much more sensitive at the frequencies of human speech, and much less sensitive at higher or lower frequencies. This is the reason why MP3 and AAC can sound good (and to a greater extent, DTS and Dolby AC-3 which are used in the cinemas). They encode low and high frequencies with less accuracy, because we don't perceive those frequencies as well as we should.
The exact point you're making is called the fields of psychoacoustics, and there's plenty of research already done from the 60s. The absolute threshold of hearing curve (ATH) is the result of those researches.
Ok I've been itching to ask this to a real actor who also happens to be a geek.
You know MPAA's been suing left and right claiming downloading movies are damaging to the industry as a whole. As an actor in probably the most popular science fiction series ever, how does piracy or file sharing affect you and your bottom line?
Does what the studios say about piracy is total bull? Or is it the truth?
The thing is Valve is getting so confident in their hit-making capability it borders on arrogance. They think they can get away with this crap while history has shown time and time again copy protection schemes simply does not work. People are either honest or not, and what they're doing is pissing off honest people that actually KNOW their rights. There are some honest people here that have no clue whatsoever of the implications of Steam if it ever takes off. All I hear is 13 year olds here crying "go buy the game you bastard Steam is cool HL2 r0x0r you all can read the EULA before you buy" while I laugh quietly at their naivety. Such innocence.
Piracy is a persistent problem. You will never be able to thwart it completely. Remember Quake? Doom? How many of those you think is pirated? Yet how do you explain the Ferraris? For. Each. Developer? You can't say that id is not getting their share of money even though some of them are lost due to piracy.
Valve should not follow Metallica's lead in blaming piracy for low sales where it's their own fault to blame.
I have no plan on buying anything from Valve ever again. Simply because their paranoia is getting on my nerves and getting ME to be paranoia about what they install in my computer as well. Games are for entertainment and I don't particularly find reading EULAS or whatnot is entertaining. EULAS are supposed to be common sense, in the theme of I can't pirate this game, I can't keep a copy of it when I sold it, etc. Reading the fine prints before I buy anything is not my idea of a good time. We got the lawyers that we pay lots of money to do that task for us.
I do believe in giving the producers their money. They definitely earned it. But making ME have to go through such bullshit just feels like a schoolkid lending their toys to you while they look at you with suspicious gaze and with a huge bully standing behind them ready to puch you at the slightest hint. That's not fun for me and to many people.
As a result of this activation bullshit I stopped playing PC games completely and grabbed a console instead (my xbox and PS2 are not modded, however, so I'm not pirating anything)
I used to rulez in quake. Now I'm hopelessly sitting on the bottom. Turns out it's because of my LCD! I thought it was the stuff I smoked.
Believe it or not, it's almost true. Some CIOs or even my own manager have little clue of technical detail of anything. You would assume that those knowledge are required, but not necessarily.
I actually designed a database and asked him to approve it (or correct it if there's any error) and lo and behold he has no clue what relationship diagram looks like. This leads me to take most technical decisions myself.
On another note, I pushed PHP over ASP for the servers, citing PHP's better structure and extensibility. Of course, he refused. At one point we even had two versions of the same application, one in ASP and one in PHP. The reason for ASP? It's MS, so they can be trusted. I proved time and time again PHP is just as good if not better to no avail.
Of course there are exceptions. This is a big company where politics play a big part. Smaller companies usually don't exhibit this kind of thing.
Then again, the higher you are, the less detailed knowledge you'll need. His skills that I admire the most are making people feel bad about themselves for not following procedures and managing relationships between employees because some of us really hate each other's guts. As long as he can keep the division running smoothly and meet deadlines, if I were CEO I'd keep him in his post.
The thing is we all would like to see our beloved open standard flourish on businesses, it simply won't happen. At least, not yet.
:) I can confidently tell you that his excuse is total bull, and he definitely knows about it.
:)
I used to work as an admin and practically takes over my manager's work. We have no CIO, but the CFO does listen to me for my decisions. I learned a lot about office politics along the way.
Office politics stayed our hands, actually. Your CIO told you this garbage about winzip because he doesn't want you to know the details of how he managed to become CIO in the first place
To get to upper management, ass covering is of the utmost importance. Choosing to go with 7zip or pdfcreator is practically handing over all responsibilities of any fuckups to himself (and you, but since he's the CIO, he'll get 95% of the blame). Choosing to use winzip and adobe shifts the blame of any fuckups to them. Companies have tons of money. $10,000 is nothing for them. Even better if that $10,000 is budgeted to secure my upper management position by buying licenses and thus minimalize my risk of getting a blame. If that licenses turns out to be a good spending, there's a good chance it'll look good on my review too. See? win-win-win solution for your CIO. He's not as clueless as some posters might suggest
I am sometimes surprised by the technical prowess of some of slashdot's reader, but realize that zealotry of all things free and good won't get you anywhere in the workplace.
Damn man, I was drinking a bottle of water just as I was reading your post. Kinda makes me wonder what will happen if you accidentally drink that stuff.
Nitro Glycerine is highly unstable. It does explode for no apparent reason other than it feels like it. Canning it is not practical or even possible.
:)
Although nitro does make a pretty good explosive. To make it stable, put some sawdust in it and you have a dynamite (IIRC).
I'm not an expert, but I think there's no high power explosive material that isn't a solid. So far I've never heard of a liquid one.
Damn there's so much words like "Explosives" in this post alone, the echelon network will be busy moderating everything here
Hold on I'm a little lost here.
wav file full bandwidth mono is 705.6 kbps, it's 16 bits per sample. 8 bits per sample will mean half of that number. The sampling rate in all cases is constantly 44.1 khz. A 128 kbps bitrate is about 1.4 bits per sample, no matter what the format.
Where did you get the 16 khz sampling rate from? Although you are correct that if the sampling rate is 16 khz, the maximum frequency attainable is 8 khz (assuming the signal is properly lowpassed to avoid aliasing, otherwise it'll sound weird)
Also, upping the bits per sample to 16 (assuming from the previous bandlimited signal of 8 khz) does not actually decrease the quality because that data is lost already in the first place. If 16 is from the original signal, then you don't actually change anything.
FYI, for stereo, you don't half the sampling rate. Sampling rate is calculated per frame, or number of channels. So a 44.1 khz stereo signal does not make a 22.05 khz mono signal. It's still 44.1.
People are constantly comparing audio coding standards, but realize that most of the stuff you hear is marketing speak. Many companies have lots of IP in this area and they obviously want to make their solution the standard.
:) Those books can provide a good basis of how all the coders tested works.
What makes one codec sound different than others is the psychoacoustic measures implemented, quantization method, and the windowing scheme implemented before MDCT is performed. Note that all of the coders tested there do not use the same windowing method, but all of them use MDCT in a way.
MP3 is a subband coding, it slices the audio into sub bands before transforming them. AAC, OTOH, is not. AAC uses straight MDCT and does the filtering there. The criteria for filtering is still the same old, tho. That is part of the reason why AAC at 128 kbps way outperform MP3.
Psychoacoustic is not new, it's been described extensively in a book "Psychoacoustic" by Fastl. The catch is, audio coders have to take into account the complexity of performing the full model. MP3 uses a very simplified version of it, and it taxes the highest spec of its day. That is also the reason why AAC-LC (low complexity) is more popular than AAC-Main profile nowadays.
Vorbis can sound better because with new hardware, a more mathematical heavy version of psychoacoustic can be implemented today. Plus, they discard the notion of constant bitrate and use quantization quality instead. This is also evident in FAAC.
128 kbps stereo is practically the limit of almost-transparent quality audio now. 64 kbps mp3pro is just bull, it doesn't perform anywhere close to modern mp3 at 128 kbps. There is a limit on compression, and that is governed by the entropy (information content) of a signal. You go lower than entropy, you lose information, simple as that. Having said that, the only way to reduce entropy is using psychoacoustic models, and that also have a limit.
Note also that Dolby-AC3 that is used in DVD and movie theatre compresses 5.1 channels into 384 kbps, or roughly 150-ish kbps stereo. Again, the same lower limit is evident. They do compression by combining the high frequencies > 15 khz and ignore the phase information in that high frequencies. As you can probably tell, AC-3 sounds pretty good.
If you're interested in this area, I suggest the MPEG-4 book by Ebrahimi, Psychoacoustic by Fastl, Multimedia Compression by Gibson and DSP First by I forgot who
in a comment that's sure to get lots of bashing, a properly hardened NT is actually very stable. I've seen one NT firewall that survived power outages multiple times with no error whatsoever. That, and heavy traffic from inside and outside.
The trick for a stable NT is the installation process. MS tends to give default installation of NTs with lots of irrelevant apps (who in the hell actually uses Paint in servers?)
I hate MS as much as the next poster in slashdot, but hate to say this, NT is actually a pretty good OS if properly administered. Most NT hater I've seen usually comes from UNIX background. They tend to make NT crash because default install of NT is quite unsecured.
Fair use is no big deal, really. For myself I just use and buy whatever works well and easy to do.
Why in the rat's ass do I have to shell out tons of money and struggle with technological crap like DRM just to do something simple like reading a book? Granted, ebook is very handy when you want to bring that War & Peace together with the complete Lord of the Rings, but if being able to do that means that I have to do lots of work and PAYING for it instead of getting paid, I'll just buy and use an old-fashioned-works-well book instead. Cumbersome but less stressful. Besides I'll look more like an intellectual and less of a geek.
Remember the DIVX fiasco few years back (this is DIVX as in DRM-heavy version of DVD, not the file format). Many people here are scared shitless of DIVX at that time and the same thing happened to slashdot then. Now DIVX is a museum piece of what's not to do(tm). Simply put, any DRM that's restrictive and uncompromising will not survive. Ever.
The typical scenario is this:
Joe: I want them new DVD shit.
Seller: Ah, this new DVD player is a good choice. It's much improved from the older DVD. But to play this you also need this TV and this amp and this speaker because it's a new thing from Microsoft.
Joe: Oh, can I use my old ones? I got them for $100,000. Top end shit.
Seller: Sorry but no. (long sales pitch follows).
Joe: Bye.
I agree that copyright is needed for the artist's protection, but since the one ripping off the artists are the studios themselves, the copyright law as we know it is biased more toward the studios.
DRM is not created for the artists. It's for the studios in a Frankensteinian twist of the copyright law. Apple's DRM succeeded mostly because it fits fair use in most people's mind, and the price is right at $1. At that price you can throw Janus or Anus or whatever and I won't care. If they want to twist DVDs this way, they better make it $1 a pop as well. I won't pay $30 for something that I can't use the way I like it. So is Joe.
On a lighter note, China practically ignores world standard and create their own. If ever this DRM stuff get a little out of hand, we can always use Chinese stuff. They have their own DVD-like format, and I'll bet it's free of any DRM whatsoever.
I couldn't agree more.
There are some posts here that defended the practice of blocking an entire country on the basis that THEY should regulate themselves over what happens in the internet space of the country. This is flawed logic and inconsistent with the definition of the internet itself. By blocking an entire country they imply that internet is hierarchically organized, which it is not. This is most probably the same people that cry fowl over taxation of the internet and voip by defining internet as loosely interconnected networks that has no hierarchical organization. AFAIK the only hierarchically organized facet of the internet is the DNS, and even you can skip that and go to the specific IP address if you know what you're doing.
If they change the definition of the internet accordingly to suit their purposes then sure as hell I won't take them seriously the next time around. If we can see this kind of behavior in politicians, then realize that we are behaving like them in this case.
I don't pretend to know the solution to spam, but let's just remind ourselves that this is definitely not the solution.
Probably it's worth it to check if the sender's or recipient's address is recognized? That way if one of your friend sends an email with no subject (like I usually do to my close friends) the mail won't get marked.
On another note, with so many rules for regexp checking, does it bog down the server or barely noticeable?
Anyway, it looks like a neat tool. Looking forward to it.
Nah, most probably it will look better but maybe doesn't work as good. It will be broken sometime before episode 4 starts because all the parts are second hand junk Made in Alderaan. Now you know why he destroyed Alderaan in the first place.
Although it'll be really cool to see the first ever vader costume is like Ned Kelly's armor with wires sticking out all over the place. Now THAT's an armor.
Which I think ruins the whole movie. Han should shoot first like in the original. He won't be a good smuggler if he waits to be shot all the time. Besides, it gives us a view of the dark side of Han which is very cool.
Can't blame Lucas tho. He seems to be more inclined to entertain the kids rather than making a dark scifi movie. That's why all the new releases are so chock full of cuddly characters.
One of the best part in the original is after Han shot that greenish guy and walked out cooly "sorry for the mess".
That's the point. Some of us can do all the work and studying required to learn a new trade relatively easy, while most general public do not have this talent.
At some point in our lives we will be called a moron by some know-it-all that needs to elevate themselves above and beyond the so-called public. And our lack of knowledge in that precise area was not because of our lack of brain to learn it, but from our lack of time. I would be offended.
Not to look down upon the "general public", but it has been said that the average IQ point is around 100, while I firmly believe anyone that can read and discuss slashdot is rated superior or above, or IQ point of 120 and up. This is just plain wrong if we continue to look down on people that doesn't have our talent or time. It's actually our job to educate them instead of keep swearing at them because then we get nothing done and the security hole or whatever is still wide open.
I do work on my car once and again if I have the time, but I couldn't care less about plumbing because it's not as interesting for myself. I used to work as an admin for a company and you just won't believe for the people's lack of understanding of computers.
I'm not making this up. Once I got called by some high ups that complains his program won't work, but it turns out that he got that prog running alright, it's just minimized. Humorously I enlightened him on the situation.
Pissed? Of course, I have to walk many stairs just to get to him. But I can't blame him because he simply doesn't know what happens in a computer, not because he's ignorant and doesn't want to know.
It's just that people have many different talents.
AFAIK there are two kinds of people that doesn't want to switch to broadband:
1. They don't know it exists.
2. They don't want to.
We in the know supposed to realize that not all people all computer-literate, my dad can't even type, forget computers. Since all they use is email, broadband is quite useless for them.
As for myself, I have broadband at school in my lab so I shuttle data back and forth using USB drive instead of getting a broadband in my own home. It's tempting, but here in Sydney the connection fee for a decent broadband is quite expensive for a student.
Not a critic to your post though, I do have the general feeling of increased 'eliteness' in slashdot for quite a while. Lots of posts lately have been calling people 'clueless', 'moronic', and all the wonderful words in between for not regularly applying a windows patch or plug a security hole in a home pc. We do have to realize that computers are not an easy thing to learn, and don't neglect the amount of time that we've all been through just to understand simple thing like pointers. Not everyone have the same patience or interest like we do.
This latest development in calling people stupid for not wanting broadband really cemented my opinion. Maybe they don't need it. Get over it.
I guess it's only fair that plumbers call us 'moron' and 'dumbass' for not being able to fix our own leaking faucet. Or, for mechanics to call us the same when we go to them to do car service, after all, all they did was change the oil filter, replace the oil, etc. Trivial matter, in their own trade.
The general attitude here toward people not of the same trade really concerns me. I hope it doesn't stay this way.