I am surprised that they are going after Yale if they are leaving Harvard alone.... while it is a lot smaller university, it has a larger endowment per capita than Harvard. Also it has graduated 4 of the last 6 presidents, and several current or recent past candidates for the presidency (Kerry, Hillary etc.), along with a collection of well placed judges, senators, etc. much like Harvard.
The Ivy schools are very incestuous - they share a lot of information, faculty moves back and forth, etc., they cooperate in a lot of areas.
If I were the RIAA I'd worry about the Ivys joining together to come up with a common policy (that the RIAA won't like).
Maybe leaving Harvard alone has the idea behind it that the Ivy's won't put together a common policy without Harvard.
You see the point of a law in France is to give the citizens entertainment - something to find a way around, flout, ignore or weasel around. Once caught, well then it gets more exciting.
The cultural history is of repeated cycles of revolution followed by short periods of freedom then massively repressive over-regulation leading again to revolution. It really doesn't matter who is doing the regulation - King, Emperor or President.
It is also why the French Military really never amounted to much.
Claim 1: Stops cancer cells from metastasizing. Article Says: Used to treat metastatic cancer.
Claim 2: Non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy Article Says: this might be useful as a low toxicity chemotherapy drug.
The fact is that any drug that is effective in treating cancer must be toxic to at least cancer cells, and chemotherapy is by definition the use of a drug to control cancer.
The jury is out on emphysema, but there is no question that smoking marijuana (or probably anything else) is harmful to your lungs.
Also the article used the phrase 'non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy'. That is bullshit. For a drug to treat cancer it must be at toxic to at least cancer cells. And if a drug is used to treat cancer it is by definition chemotherapy.
5th generation iPods can be flashed with Rockbox or iPodLinux, both of which have FLAC support.
5th gen (or any other) iPods have crappy DACs and poor amps. FLAC support is irrelevant for them.
Also USB sound cards are $40 and usually don't sound better than the cards bundled with most laptops, while also being slower than onboard chips.
USB sound cards that cost $40 don't sound better than the laptop sound cards because they have the same crappy amps and DACs as the laptop sound card. Get a $250 USB sound card like the iBasso D1 or Meier Move that are designed to drive high quality headphones and you are in a whole 'nuther league.
Finally, $200 will get you 750GB, which is adequate for music, assuming, of course, that you are storing lossless.
$100 for a 500 GB drive lets you store about 2000 CD's ripped to FLACs. That is pretty adequate and I think would satisfy most people.
Open your mind and your ears. The world of high fidelity is easy to experience. You won't want to go back to iPods, low bit rate MP3s and earbuds - I assure you.
Additional hard drive to store your lossless music collection: $200.
More like $100.
Portable audio player that supports FLAC: $300.
I don't mess with these. There are no portable players in production that meet my needs. The only one close are the iRivers with SPDIF, and the models I would be interested in are not in production any more.
High-end headphones and speakers necessary to hear the difference between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $1000.
I was able to hear a big difference on a pair of $69 headphones and $20 sound card.
Card: Chaintech AV710 Headphones: Grado SR-60
Gold shielded power, speaker, and headphone cables to avoid picking up noise that masks the differences between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $2000.
I call bullshit.
Watching all that equipment turn into one big zombie spambot as soon as you press "play": priceless.
I don't download flac's so that is not going to happen.
People really should do a bit of research before spouting off. It is pretty cheap to get excellent sound with a headphone based system out of a desktop computer. For a laptop you probably need a USB sound card which will add another $250 or so to the price. However the cost is NOT in the thousands, and the sound quality you can get for a relatively minor cost is jaw-dropping compared the usual iPod crap.
I have no idea why people put up with low bit rate MP3's, ear buds, lousy DACs and amps when it is so easy to do far better.
While government agencies surely have the upper hand here, there is always the possibility that a mole in the NSA gets their hands on the backdoor information, or a lone genius working in say Russia finds a mathematical flaw in the system.
As far as poisoning your water supply etc. lookie here:
Hardware errors are a potential problem, but they are #3 on the list after human and software problems. Why search for hardware problems when the first two are far more likely to bear fruit?
got any kids... tough-shit... their future does not look very promising unless they emigrate to China
We heard that before from Japan in the '80s, the Soviets in the '60s, the Nazis in the 40's and so on. The problem is that centrally managed economies can grow fast for a while, but then they hit a wall because of the market inefficiencies that these practices inevitably introduce.
The problem with the Chemistry analogy is that up until recently Mathematics has not followed the precepts of an experimental science; it's theorems are the result of deductive logic, while chemistry's laws are based on inductive logic.
For an experimental science tools like NMR (FTIR, GC, etc.) are part of what is needed to to gather experimental evidence that is used to support or disprove hypotheses. Part of that process as you have noted is assuring that the apparatus performs as expected using calibration standards etc., and whether or not the experiment can be repeated by other workers in the field.
Now the question regarding the software that mathematicians use it whether or not the steps used are verifiable. To me this is not a matter of free versus non-free software, it is whether or not the basic nature of mathematics is changing - is it going to remain mathematics, or is it going to become something else? Ultimately publications that depend on software aided proofs are going to become worthless unless all the steps used are documented. Twenty years from now that software will not be available.
To be fair the Australian "innovation patent" law is more like a provisional patent in the US - it really has no legal standing until some additional legal work is done.
In related news I have the pleasure of announcing that The Eric Conspiracy has commissioned a fully-owned subsidiary named "The Open Document Format Conspiracy" or ODFC. The ODFC has acquired all of the trademarks, intellectual property and desk accessories of the Open Document Foundation (not saying how) and will soon take over all of the rights, duties and responsibilities of the Open Document Foundation (if any exist).
Watch this space for future announcements, news, and requests for donations.
I don't think the technology exists to do deep packet inspection of all of AT&T's traffic. The cost would be unreal, and the hardware to do it on 10GBps links didn't exist until this year. Most backbones have 40Gbps links now, and AFAIK the equipment to DPI that doesn't exist. You would have to install many, many monitoring installations at the network edges.
Yes, you could split off, filter or otherwise selective scan certain sites, origins or destinations IF you could get your equipment in place. But the whole internet? I don't think so.
Absolutely correct. In fact I have read that one of the professional audio societies put on a seminar at their annual meeting titled something like "Audiophile Cables: Consumer Fraud". It is a small market; otherwise I think some Attorney General would go after these guys.
There are a lot of other, similar frauds in the audiophile world, including if you can believe it CD demagnetizers, magic clocks, cable burn in devices, you name it.
These are the real facts:
1. Properly designed amplifiers operating below clipping is indistinguishable from each other. 2. CD Redbook is indistinguishable in audio quality from any higher resolution stereo format. 3. Cables conforming to sound electrical (LCR) standards made from commodity materials do not audibly alter audio reproduction. 4. Jitter levels in properly operating systems are not audible. 5. Power filters are a waste of money and in some circumstances can do harm. If you are worried about power get a surge protector that works at your electrical distribution box and have a dedicated power line run to your system.
Some of the advice for the video display was ok, but the rest of the article was very poor. One of the main determinations of audio performance is room acoustics - yet this is not covered at all. Monster cables are generic stuff that is horribly overpriced with outrageous markups. Never buy that stuff. Power filters are a total wast of money for 95% of people, and can often hurt more than they help. The speaker selection (Polk) is sort of a mass-market default - there is much better to be had out there in other brands, especially from the Canadian companies like PSB and Paradigm. Polk is by no means a brand that you would expect in a reference home theater.
It appears to me that this article was written with a lot of feedback from a big box store like Best Buy because the brands they recommend are typically what these stores carry, and in particular they push Monster stuff and power filters hard because of the huge markups.
The topic of whether or not CD's give adequate bandwidth for 100% of the hearing capacity of human ear to be utilized is a very interesting topic. There are a number of formats that have been offered as an improvement, and there are some theoretical reasons to believe that a smidge more bandwidth or dynamic range could be useful. The best argument I have heard for this is that additional bandwidth would make the level setting process during recording less critical. If you miss on this you end up either having the noise level in the recording being higher than it should be, or the possibility of clipping. Clipping is much worse than a little bit extra noise. So I think that a 20 bit rather than 16 bit process makes sense. The reset of it I don't believe. The microphones, mixing consoles, D to A converters and so on are not good enough to be able to make use of data beyond the resolution of Redbook. If you get a high quality recording (say something from Chesky) and play it on a good system in a very quiet room I think you would be shocked as to how good it sounds. The speakers just disappear and the instrument floats in the room as a bit of audio holography. Often you can hear the singers breathe, or the valves on a Sax close.
There are a lot of reviews of SACDs out there that claim the sound is much better because of the improved digital resolution - but now as time has gone on a some of the smarter people in the field are realizing that this improved sound is mostly due to the remastering process that many labels use when producing these SACDs - and when the remastered tracks are put in Redbook format the difference between SACD and CD quality becomes very hard if not impossible for a listener to detect.
One of the interesting things about this is that I often buy Hybrid SACD's - If I can determine if the CD layer contains the remastered version of the recording. Otherwise I generally leave SACDs alone.
One of the most surprising things to me about this whole medium is that even though it is maybe 25 years since CDs started becoming available there is still significant unrealized potential in terms of getting the best sound from the Redbook format.
Wow and flutter doesn't really exist for CD players - these systems are controlled by the same kind of quartz clock that is used to measure wow and flutter, meaning any number you try to measure is going to be about the same as accuracy of measurement equipment. There is something called jitter, which is a high frequency time fluctuation that can cause sidebands in the conversion of digital data to analog signals in the DAC step. Some people claim to be able to hear this as it is a form of distortion. Some buffering techniques can turn that distortion into noise, or even reduce it below the noise floor of CDs.
Actually the statement about Nyquist's theorem is poppycock. This a mathematical fact, not some weird subjective result open to interpretation. Saying that Nyquist's theorem is wrong is equivalent to stating that the value of pi is really 6.
As you said, the comment about compression is nonsense. Compression is the removal of dynamic range, and is actually REQUIRED for vinyl to get the low volume sounds out of the vinyl surface noise to make them audible.
The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it. Are they perfect? No, that does not exist in technology. The Redbook standard is a tad short of the maximum theoretical dynamic range and frequency response the human ear is capable of. The conversion of digital data back to analog is tricky to get right. But it is superior to vinyl.
But some people do like vinyl better. Audio tastes are funny. People become habituated to certain types of distortion and other artifacts in the sound. To them is sounds better. But by any measurable means it looks like garbage compared to CD.
Yes, Vista sells a lot more over the counter than Linux does. But Linux is not about traditional economic models or sales channels. Such comparisons are like saying that falcons fly much faster than pine trees.
Linux has already been through several economic downturns. The dot com crash was particularly hard on developers, but there were no signs of any issues in the open source community,
Slashdot Mirror
I am surprised that they are going after Yale if they are leaving Harvard alone.... while it is a lot smaller university, it has a larger endowment per capita than Harvard. Also it has graduated 4 of the last 6 presidents, and several current or recent past candidates for the presidency (Kerry, Hillary etc.), along with a collection of well placed judges, senators, etc. much like Harvard.
The Ivy schools are very incestuous - they share a lot of information, faculty moves back and forth, etc., they cooperate in a lot of areas.
If I were the RIAA I'd worry about the Ivys joining together to come up with a common policy (that the RIAA won't like).
Maybe leaving Harvard alone has the idea behind it that the Ivy's won't put together a common policy without Harvard.
You see the point of a law in France is to give the citizens entertainment - something to find a way around, flout, ignore or weasel around. Once caught, well then it gets more exciting.
The cultural history is of repeated cycles of revolution followed by short periods of freedom then massively repressive over-regulation leading again to revolution. It really doesn't matter who is doing the regulation - King, Emperor or President.
It is also why the French Military really never amounted to much.
Not true. It doesn't have to be toxic, it just has to prevent the cancer from spreading for long enough for other treatments to do the killing.
Ho is it going to stop the cancer from spreading without interfering with the cancer cells' metabolism? As soon as it does it is toxic.
Claim 1: Stops cancer cells from metastasizing.
Article Says: Used to treat metastatic cancer.
Claim 2: Non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy
Article Says: this might be useful as a low toxicity chemotherapy drug.
The fact is that any drug that is effective in treating cancer must be toxic to at least cancer cells, and chemotherapy is by definition the use of a drug to control cancer.
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2000/B/200001082.html
http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/humanservicesnews/may06/study.htm
http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/0791.html
http://209.189.226.235/stories/080107/health_20070801002.php
The jury is out on emphysema, but there is no question that smoking marijuana (or probably anything else) is harmful to your lungs.
Also the article used the phrase 'non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy'. That is bullshit. For a drug to treat cancer it must be at toxic to at least cancer cells. And if a drug is used to treat cancer it is by definition chemotherapy.
but because they stayed sounding the same for longer due to not corroding?
Yes, it is a matter of reliability.
5th generation iPods can be flashed with Rockbox or iPodLinux, both of which have FLAC support.
5th gen (or any other) iPods have crappy DACs and poor amps. FLAC support is irrelevant for them.
Also USB sound cards are $40 and usually don't sound better than the cards bundled with most laptops, while also being slower than onboard chips.
USB sound cards that cost $40 don't sound better than the laptop sound cards because they have the same crappy amps and DACs as the laptop sound card. Get a $250 USB sound card like the iBasso D1 or Meier Move that are designed to drive high quality headphones and you are in a whole 'nuther league.
Finally, $200 will get you 750GB, which is adequate for music, assuming, of course, that you are storing lossless.
$100 for a 500 GB drive lets you store about 2000 CD's ripped to FLACs. That is pretty adequate and I think would satisfy most people.
Open your mind and your ears. The world of high fidelity is easy to experience. You won't want to go back to iPods, low bit rate MP3s and earbuds - I assure you.
Additional hard drive to store your lossless music collection: $200.
More like $100.
Portable audio player that supports FLAC: $300.
I don't mess with these. There are no portable players in production that meet my needs. The only one close are the iRivers with SPDIF, and the models I would be interested in are not in production any more.
High-end headphones and speakers necessary to hear the difference between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $1000.
I was able to hear a big difference on a pair of $69 headphones and $20 sound card.
Card: Chaintech AV710
Headphones: Grado SR-60
Gold shielded power, speaker, and headphone cables to avoid picking up noise that masks the differences between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $2000.
I call bullshit.
Watching all that equipment turn into one big zombie spambot as soon as you press "play": priceless.
I don't download flac's so that is not going to happen.
People really should do a bit of research before spouting off. It is pretty cheap to get excellent sound with a headphone based system out of a desktop computer. For a laptop you probably need a USB sound card which will add another $250 or so to the price. However the cost is NOT in the thousands, and the sound quality you can get for a relatively minor cost is jaw-dropping compared the usual iPod crap.
I have no idea why people put up with low bit rate MP3's, ear buds, lousy DACs and amps when it is so easy to do far better.
While government agencies surely have the upper hand here, there is always the possibility that a mole in the NSA gets their hands on the backdoor information, or a lone genius working in say Russia finds a mathematical flaw in the system.
As far as poisoning your water supply etc. lookie here:
http://sandia.gov/scada/home.htm
Hardware errors are a potential problem, but they are #3 on the list after human and software problems. Why search for hardware problems when the first two are far more likely to bear fruit?
got any kids ... tough-shit ... their future does not look very promising unless they emigrate to China
We heard that before from Japan in the '80s, the Soviets in the '60s, the Nazis in the 40's and so on. The problem is that centrally managed economies can grow fast for a while, but then they hit a wall because of the market inefficiencies that these practices inevitably introduce.
If you go top slashdot.cn you end up at digibuzz.com which seems to be a site similar to slashdot in content.
I wonder if this would qualify as a bad faith domain name registration under WIPO rules.
The problem with the Chemistry analogy is that up until recently Mathematics has not followed the precepts of an experimental science; it's theorems are the result of deductive logic, while chemistry's laws are based on inductive logic.
For an experimental science tools like NMR (FTIR, GC, etc.) are part of what is needed to to gather experimental evidence that is used to support or disprove hypotheses. Part of that process as you have noted is assuring that the apparatus performs as expected using calibration standards etc., and whether or not the experiment can be repeated by other workers in the field.
Now the question regarding the software that mathematicians use it whether or not the steps used are verifiable. To me this is not a matter of free versus non-free software, it is whether or not the basic nature of mathematics is changing - is it going to remain mathematics, or is it going to become something else? Ultimately publications that depend on software aided proofs are going to become worthless unless all the steps used are documented. Twenty years from now that software will not be available.
To be fair the Australian "innovation patent" law is more like a provisional patent in the US - it really has no legal standing until some additional legal work is done.
Craig's List is a good alternative to EBay.
In related news I have the pleasure of announcing that The Eric Conspiracy has commissioned a fully-owned subsidiary named "The Open Document Format Conspiracy" or ODFC. The ODFC has acquired all of the trademarks, intellectual property and desk accessories of the Open Document Foundation (not saying how) and will soon take over all of the rights, duties and responsibilities of the Open Document Foundation (if any exist).
Watch this space for future announcements, news, and requests for donations.
Anti-Lincoln sympathizers? WTF is an anti-Lincoln?
Yeah, because they had a popular former president running as a candidate.
I don't think the technology exists to do deep packet inspection of all of AT&T's traffic. The cost would be unreal, and the hardware to do it on 10GBps links didn't exist until this year. Most backbones have 40Gbps links now, and AFAIK the equipment to DPI that doesn't exist. You would have to install many, many monitoring installations at the network edges.
Yes, you could split off, filter or otherwise selective scan certain sites, origins or destinations IF you could get your equipment in place. But the whole internet? I don't think so.
Absolutely correct. In fact I have read that one of the professional audio societies put on a seminar at their annual meeting titled something like "Audiophile Cables: Consumer Fraud". It is a small market; otherwise I think some Attorney General would go after these guys.
There are a lot of other, similar frauds in the audiophile world, including if you can believe it CD demagnetizers, magic clocks, cable burn in devices, you name it.
These are the real facts:
1. Properly designed amplifiers operating below clipping is indistinguishable from each other.
2. CD Redbook is indistinguishable in audio quality from any higher resolution stereo format.
3. Cables conforming to sound electrical (LCR) standards made from commodity materials do not audibly alter audio reproduction.
4. Jitter levels in properly operating systems are not audible.
5. Power filters are a waste of money and in some circumstances can do harm. If you are worried about power get a surge protector that works at your electrical distribution box and have a dedicated power line run to your system.
Some of the advice for the video display was ok, but the rest of the article was very poor. One of the main determinations of audio performance is room acoustics - yet this is not covered at all. Monster cables are generic stuff that is horribly overpriced with outrageous markups. Never buy that stuff. Power filters are a total wast of money for 95% of people, and can often hurt more than they help. The speaker selection (Polk) is sort of a mass-market default - there is much better to be had out there in other brands, especially from the Canadian companies like PSB and Paradigm. Polk is by no means a brand that you would expect in a reference home theater.
It appears to me that this article was written with a lot of feedback from a big box store like Best Buy because the brands they recommend are typically what these stores carry, and in particular they push Monster stuff and power filters hard because of the huge markups.
I like the Chesky SACD catalog.
There is also an interesting artice:
"Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback". E. Brad Meyer and David R. Moran. JAES 55(9) September 2007
And discussion thereof at:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57406&st=0
The topic of whether or not CD's give adequate bandwidth for 100% of the hearing capacity of human ear to be utilized is a very interesting topic. There are a number of formats that have been offered as an improvement, and there are some theoretical reasons to believe that a smidge more bandwidth or dynamic range could be useful. The best argument I have heard for this is that additional bandwidth would make the level setting process during recording less critical. If you miss on this you end up either having the noise level in the recording being higher than it should be, or the possibility of clipping. Clipping is much worse than a little bit extra noise. So I think that a 20 bit rather than 16 bit process makes sense. The reset of it I don't believe. The microphones, mixing consoles, D to A converters and so on are not good enough to be able to make use of data beyond the resolution of Redbook. If you get a high quality recording (say something from Chesky) and play it on a good system in a very quiet room I think you would be shocked as to how good it sounds. The speakers just disappear and the instrument floats in the room as a bit of audio holography. Often you can hear the singers breathe, or the valves on a Sax close.
There are a lot of reviews of SACDs out there that claim the sound is much better because of the improved digital resolution - but now as time has gone on a some of the smarter people in the field are realizing that this improved sound is mostly due to the remastering process that many labels use when producing these SACDs - and when the remastered tracks are put in Redbook format the difference between SACD and CD quality becomes very hard if not impossible for a listener to detect.
One of the interesting things about this is that I often buy Hybrid SACD's - If I can determine if the CD layer contains the remastered version of the recording. Otherwise I generally leave SACDs alone.
One of the most surprising things to me about this whole medium is that even though it is maybe 25 years since CDs started becoming available there is still significant unrealized potential in terms of getting the best sound from the Redbook format.
Wow and flutter doesn't really exist for CD players - these systems are controlled by the same kind of quartz clock that is used to measure wow and flutter, meaning any number you try to measure is going to be about the same as accuracy of measurement equipment. There is something called jitter, which is a high frequency time fluctuation that can cause sidebands in the conversion of digital data to analog signals in the DAC step. Some people claim to be able to hear this as it is a form of distortion. Some buffering techniques can turn that distortion into noise, or even reduce it below the noise floor of CDs.
Actually the statement about Nyquist's theorem is poppycock. This a mathematical fact, not some weird subjective result open to interpretation. Saying that Nyquist's theorem is wrong is equivalent to stating that the value of pi is really 6.
As you said, the comment about compression is nonsense. Compression is the removal of dynamic range, and is actually REQUIRED for vinyl to get the low volume sounds out of the vinyl surface noise to make them audible.
The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it. Are they perfect? No, that does not exist in technology. The Redbook standard is a tad short of the maximum theoretical dynamic range and frequency response the human ear is capable of. The conversion of digital data back to analog is tricky to get right. But it is superior to vinyl.
But some people do like vinyl better. Audio tastes are funny. People become habituated to certain types of distortion and other artifacts in the sound. To them is sounds better. But by any measurable means it looks like garbage compared to CD.
Yes, Vista sells a lot more over the counter than Linux does. But Linux is not about traditional economic models or sales channels. Such comparisons are like saying that falcons fly much faster than pine trees.
Linux has already been through several economic downturns. The dot com crash was particularly hard on developers, but there were no signs of any issues in the open source community,