One needn't look much further than the DMCA, which was passed unanimously by the Senate and signed into law by our Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to see that Democrats don't respect the Internet any more than Republicans. What needs to happen is more technological education of politicians, not party changes. With the changing of the majority party we won't have a chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee claiming the Internet is a series of tubes, but I bet his replacement won't know particularly more.
Tags are not valuable solely for their search indexing qualities. They're also valuable as summaries of the comments below, and can even alert you to when the linked article is wrong. Tags like "badarticle" tell you to look into the comments for the correct article -- which is super valuable -- but not something you would ever use for search. And not to overly defend the "fud" tag, but it does tell you that many comments will be critical of the article rather than supportive. If you're too busy to read comments, it could be useful.
Here's a great idea, though: how about showing the number of submissions per tag? Then the "yes" and "no" tags could actually be an ad-hoc voting system for questions posed in the blurb. So as you can see, tags can take on lots of different meanings -- don't cast them solely as keywords.
That's far more practical than what I was thinking. I was wondering why you'd want to implement a game controller as Throwable -- why not use Exception?
Fly out of Denver, San Francisco, or Seattle on United. They haven't checked me at those airports for probably 2-3 years. Same thing for Alaska out of San Francisco or Seattle. It's probably dependent on the airline since they're the ones doing the gate checking, but AFAIK they're not required to check ID anymore.
Just before elections isn't the best time to make people in Silicon Valley rethink democrats on security.
Wtf are Silicon Valley voters going to do about it?? Do you realize how many friggen people live in Southern California? The ~100k techy people in Silicon Valley aren't going to affect much except the local races in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
maybe then I'll take something about airports seriously again
Ya, I feel you, man. That whole flying thing is a complete hoax. Who the hell actually believes big pieces of metal actually fly in the air like birds??? And how come no one ever noticed that airplanes were "invented" the same time as TVs? Have you noticed how small the "windows" are in planes, too?? SAME SIZE AS TVS!!!
You use the fake boarding pass to create a pass for your real identity. This gets you through security. Then you buy an actual ticket using a fake identity, and you sit in that seat when you get on the plane. (You also use the real ticket at the gate for boarding -- they don't verify IDs there.)
There IS brilliance behind his idea. Perhaps you didn't read it... but basically, you can fly on a fake identity without any screening of your actual identity.
1) Go to 7-Eleven and buy a pre-paid credit card with cash using a fake name. This will be the name you fly under. 2) Buy a ticket with this credit card. 3) Print out an ADDITIONAL ticket for your real identity. He gives you an HTML form to do this.
Now, show up at the airport. Go through security with the fake ticket... it will match your ID, but since it's not in any computer systems, they won't check to see if you're on the no-fly list. When at the gate, provide the ticket you actually bought. Nowadays you don't need an ID at the gates anymore -- just have your ticket scanned and hop on the plane!
Now, I'm not exactly sure if you can check bags. If you have to go to the counter before security, they ask for your ID. But if you can avoid that (and you can now, as far as I know), you can fly on a fake identity.
I didn't believe we were doing compression on the individual tracks. I thought the question was could a better Fourier transform be created by knowing the original two uncompressed tracks versus the merger of the two uncompressed tracks.
data retention aint going to help you track a hacker.
This is logically false. I can give you a theoretical and a practical example. Theoretically, any information is more helpful than no information. The only practical exception would be polluting good information with bad information, but since this information would be logically separate from existing information, this problem would not exist.
Practically, have you ever tracked down a hacker at your company? Logs are the BEST place to do this. Look for SQL injection attempts in URLs. Track those IP addresses to see where else they went. If you know the IP address already, you can look up what user account they were using. There's tons and tons of information in logs. You're suggesting that it's wise for a corporation to delete this data??? The argument is less concrete when you're talking about an ISP's logs, but data retention within a corporation's network is a great idea.
Actually, the change isn't as major as I thought. According to an IEBlog article:
"In addition, users will no longer see the so-called Mixed-Content prompt, which read: This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to see the nonsecure items? IE7 renders only the secure content and offers the user the opportunity to unblock the nonsecure content using the Information Bar. This is an important change because very few users (or web developers) fully understand the security risks of rendering HTTP-delivered content within a HTTPS page."
So basically, if pages previously displayed the Mixed-Content prompt, now they'll act slightly differently. But there's very few serious corporations or online services that display that error message, so I believe the impact on F5's revenues will be minimal. Oh well, I thought I was on to something:).
I know in the applications I've developed, we've pointed image locations to HTTP on our HTTPS pages to reduce SSL overhead. If what you're saying is true, I could see a lot of people buying SSL accelerators in the next six months. I wonder if this is priced into the earnings projections for major SSL vendors like F5 Networks? Something tells me that Wall Street wouldn't quite understand IE7's implications yet.
I'm pretty confident that compression would not be improved if the original tracks were available during the compression process. To prove this, think about how MP3s primarily store waves as cosine functions. If one wave is cos(x), and the other is 2cos(x+1), the combined wave will be approximately 2.6cos(x+0.7). If an MP3 encoder encountered 2.6cos(x+0.7), would it benefit from knowing its components? No. The combined wave is what's heard by listeners, and no improvement could be made by considering the component pieces. This is overly simplified, which is why I'm "pretty confident", but I can't think of a situation where the combined wave would be missing valuable frequencies. The only exception would be clipping (combined frequencies above the maximum allowed), in which case the combined frequency would be more relevant than the component frequencies (though the compressor would likely detect the clipping and do the right thing).
Your example of two people whistling at 700 Hz and 703 Hz is misleading. I believe you're assuming that since the difference is 3 Hz, and the human ear can only hear Hz greater than 20, that the difference would be inaudible and one could be dropped. But what actually happens is that the two waves will alternatingly compliment and destruct each other, with the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases.
This gets to the fundamental mistake in your explanation. If MP3s (or more generally, digital music) only stored the most prominant waves, the above phenomenon would not be recorded. The recording would not match the actual sound at all, as the complimentary aspects of sound waves are a big part of what makes music interesting to listen to.
What actually happens is that the waves are all recorded as one master waveform. The amplitude of this waveform is recorded regularly at very short intervals. For CDs, there are 44,100 recorded points per second. Due to the very small intervals, any waveforms that could not be caught at this fidelity would be due to frequencies so high that they're inaudible. MP3s try to draw the same curve without taking so many recordings. It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform, carefully deciding on which differences would result acceptable errors that are either outside of human hearing or small compared to the other frequencies compositing the wave. There is never a datapoint in either CD or MP3 that says "currently there's a sound at 700 Hz and at 703 Hz." Instead, the only recorded data is where the wave is (in terms of amplitude) and (in the case of MP3s) where the wave is going.
The parent poster asked about "tracks" and how they're seperated out. I believe this the poster's just using the wrong terminology. What's actually seperated out is the output from the different speakers. These are more accurately called channels. "Tracks" are the output of a specific instrument, and are traditionally stored as two unique channels in recording studios. The bitrate of these channels would match, or exceed, the quality of the end recording. Therefore if a pop song has 16 tracks, it would take 32 channels, all individually stored at high bitrates, to store in an unmixed format. This is a lot more data than distributing the "mixed" version, where all the waveforms are saved together as two channels, and is what is sold at CD stores and as MP3s/AACs.
I hope this explains things a bit better:). I was actually hoping the Wikipedia article would explain the data portion of the MP3 format, and not just the header. But the above is what I learned from reading the actual technical documentation years ago.
Jon
ps. Sorry for the original post as AC, but I don't want this post to be buried at 0 moderation.
Earnings and revenues *BOTH* matter, coupled with growth. In a growing environment, a company's going to spend whatever it takes to expand the business and see what can happen. But at any time, it could cut back that spending and have great earnings. You should put this consideration in your valuations of a company. If a company's new, it probably isn't as lean as it could be. It's not a "blue chip", trying to shave off costs to have high earnings. I classify Google more in the growing category. It's certainly not a mature company. Considering that, Google's revenues ARE more valuable than its earnings in valuing its worth. In 10 years, you will probably be able to use the same valuation models on Google and Microsoft.
what gives content providers the "right" to use DRM?
Are you suggesting that people cannot sell whatever they wish? If I want to sell my toenails on eBay, even though they're completely worthless, are you saying I shouldn't be able to? Sure, restaurants cannot put feces in the food they sell, but there are specific laws in place prohibiting that. There are not laws prohibiting DRM. Therefore content producers have every right to sell their content in any method they wish.
Is say physical assualt bad? Absolutely. And whilst worse for one person, I'm not convinced the overall suffering is actually worse than say ten guys facing the gnawing fear of layoffs, ten wives dealing with losing their homes they poured their souls in to, ten kids having to deal with daddy suddenly being unemployed and having to move away from friends and ten families living with the risk of no medical insurance.
Today's my last day as an Adobe employee, and I have to say -- the results of not working for Adobe are not unemployment. Most people who work for Adobe are highly talented and can easily get a job somewhere else in Silicon Valley within a month or two. Adobe also has COBRA health insurance that can cover you while you're unemployed. In my case, I'm going to enjoy a pay increase and will be buying property!
Of course, what you're really saying is that increased piracy decreases the demand for software developers. This is true, but the people who would be software developers in a world without piracy aren't busy selling their houses to avoid bankruptcy. They're doing other skilled labor jobs -- perhaps computer related, perhaps not. While it's great to reduce piracy and keep more money in the hands of the people who design and write the software, piracy itself has always been a form of competition and no established company is laying off employees because of it.
I wouldn't be surprised if that film actually wins best film.
Are you a constant victim of practical jokes or something? Do people pop-out from behind corners and scream "AHHH!H#$!" five times a day? Does your girlfriend leave out pregnancy tests in the bathroom with two lines hastily drawn with a Bic pen? I'm guessing so. Dave, for your own sanity, fix your life so that if SoaP wins Best Picture it surprises you!!!
Edison had a vested interest in portraying direct current as safer than alternating current, since his company sold direct current while Westinghouse sold alternating current. While sometimes people with vested interests are honest, Edison proposed incredibly strange things to portray alternating current as unsafe, including using alternating current for the first electric chair. It was an awful experiment, pushed by Edison only for marketing purposes. It was quickly established afterwards that direct current is a safer and faster electricity for electrocutions, and anything Edison had to say about alternating current's danger was FUD.
Calgary is sprawling outward at an incredible rate, it's bigger in area than NY city.
Is sprawl supposed to be a good thing?? If your argument held any weight, we'd all be moving to Jacksonville, Florida. The impressive thing about New York City is it's population (8.1 million), not it's land area.
Slashdot Mirror
One needn't look much further than the DMCA, which was passed unanimously by the Senate and signed into law by our Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to see that Democrats don't respect the Internet any more than Republicans. What needs to happen is more technological education of politicians, not party changes. With the changing of the majority party we won't have a chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee claiming the Internet is a series of tubes, but I bet his replacement won't know particularly more.
Tags are not valuable solely for their search indexing qualities. They're also valuable as summaries of the comments below, and can even alert you to when the linked article is wrong. Tags like "badarticle" tell you to look into the comments for the correct article -- which is super valuable -- but not something you would ever use for search. And not to overly defend the "fud" tag, but it does tell you that many comments will be critical of the article rather than supportive. If you're too busy to read comments, it could be useful.
Here's a great idea, though: how about showing the number of submissions per tag? Then the "yes" and "no" tags could actually be an ad-hoc voting system for questions posed in the blurb. So as you can see, tags can take on lots of different meanings -- don't cast them solely as keywords.
Polling data: Utah U.S. Senate: Hatch 62%, Ashdown 25%
i on/viewItem/itemID/13412
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseact
While I agree with Ashdown's position a lot more than Orrin's, the incumbent is looking pretty strong.
That's far more practical than what I was thinking. I was wondering why you'd want to implement a game controller as Throwable -- why not use Exception?
Fly out of Denver, San Francisco, or Seattle on United. They haven't checked me at those airports for probably 2-3 years. Same thing for Alaska out of San Francisco or Seattle. It's probably dependent on the airline since they're the ones doing the gate checking, but AFAIK they're not required to check ID anymore.
Just before elections isn't the best time to make people in Silicon Valley rethink democrats on security.
Wtf are Silicon Valley voters going to do about it?? Do you realize how many friggen people live in Southern California? The ~100k techy people in Silicon Valley aren't going to affect much except the local races in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
Lately when I've done self check-in, they've verified my ID in the process.
maybe then I'll take something about airports seriously again
Ya, I feel you, man. That whole flying thing is a complete hoax. Who the hell actually believes big pieces of metal actually fly in the air like birds??? And how come no one ever noticed that airplanes were "invented" the same time as TVs? Have you noticed how small the "windows" are in planes, too?? SAME SIZE AS TVS!!!
You use the fake boarding pass to create a pass for your real identity. This gets you through security. Then you buy an actual ticket using a fake identity, and you sit in that seat when you get on the plane. (You also use the real ticket at the gate for boarding -- they don't verify IDs there.)
There IS brilliance behind his idea. Perhaps you didn't read it... but basically, you can fly on a fake identity without any screening of your actual identity.
1) Go to 7-Eleven and buy a pre-paid credit card with cash using a fake name. This will be the name you fly under.
2) Buy a ticket with this credit card.
3) Print out an ADDITIONAL ticket for your real identity. He gives you an HTML form to do this.
Now, show up at the airport. Go through security with the fake ticket... it will match your ID, but since it's not in any computer systems, they won't check to see if you're on the no-fly list. When at the gate, provide the ticket you actually bought. Nowadays you don't need an ID at the gates anymore -- just have your ticket scanned and hop on the plane!
Now, I'm not exactly sure if you can check bags. If you have to go to the counter before security, they ask for your ID. But if you can avoid that (and you can now, as far as I know), you can fly on a fake identity.
No bias, eh? May I suggest this device if you ever choose to go into telemarketing. Or any interaction with people, really.
I didn't believe we were doing compression on the individual tracks. I thought the question was could a better Fourier transform be created by knowing the original two uncompressed tracks versus the merger of the two uncompressed tracks.
data retention aint going to help you track a hacker.
This is logically false. I can give you a theoretical and a practical example. Theoretically, any information is more helpful than no information. The only practical exception would be polluting good information with bad information, but since this information would be logically separate from existing information, this problem would not exist.
Practically, have you ever tracked down a hacker at your company? Logs are the BEST place to do this. Look for SQL injection attempts in URLs. Track those IP addresses to see where else they went. If you know the IP address already, you can look up what user account they were using. There's tons and tons of information in logs. You're suggesting that it's wise for a corporation to delete this data??? The argument is less concrete when you're talking about an ISP's logs, but data retention within a corporation's network is a great idea.
Actually, the change isn't as major as I thought. According to an IEBlog article:
:).
"In addition, users will no longer see the so-called Mixed-Content prompt, which read: This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to see the nonsecure items? IE7 renders only the secure content and offers the user the opportunity to unblock the nonsecure content using the Information Bar. This is an important change because very few users (or web developers) fully understand the security risks of rendering HTTP-delivered content within a HTTPS page."
So basically, if pages previously displayed the Mixed-Content prompt, now they'll act slightly differently. But there's very few serious corporations or online services that display that error message, so I believe the impact on F5's revenues will be minimal. Oh well, I thought I was on to something
I know in the applications I've developed, we've pointed image locations to HTTP on our HTTPS pages to reduce SSL overhead. If what you're saying is true, I could see a lot of people buying SSL accelerators in the next six months. I wonder if this is priced into the earnings projections for major SSL vendors like F5 Networks? Something tells me that Wall Street wouldn't quite understand IE7's implications yet.
I'm pretty confident that compression would not be improved if the original tracks were available during the compression process. To prove this, think about how MP3s primarily store waves as cosine functions. If one wave is cos(x), and the other is 2cos(x+1), the combined wave will be approximately 2.6cos(x+0.7). If an MP3 encoder encountered 2.6cos(x+0.7), would it benefit from knowing its components? No. The combined wave is what's heard by listeners, and no improvement could be made by considering the component pieces. This is overly simplified, which is why I'm "pretty confident", but I can't think of a situation where the combined wave would be missing valuable frequencies. The only exception would be clipping (combined frequencies above the maximum allowed), in which case the combined frequency would be more relevant than the component frequencies (though the compressor would likely detect the clipping and do the right thing).
Your example of two people whistling at 700 Hz and 703 Hz is misleading. I believe you're assuming that since the difference is 3 Hz, and the human ear can only hear Hz greater than 20, that the difference would be inaudible and one could be dropped. But what actually happens is that the two waves will alternatingly compliment and destruct each other, with the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases.
:). I was actually hoping the Wikipedia article would explain the data portion of the MP3 format, and not just the header. But the above is what I learned from reading the actual technical documentation years ago.
This gets to the fundamental mistake in your explanation. If MP3s (or more generally, digital music) only stored the most prominant waves, the above phenomenon would not be recorded. The recording would not match the actual sound at all, as the complimentary aspects of sound waves are a big part of what makes music interesting to listen to.
What actually happens is that the waves are all recorded as one master waveform. The amplitude of this waveform is recorded regularly at very short intervals. For CDs, there are 44,100 recorded points per second. Due to the very small intervals, any waveforms that could not be caught at this fidelity would be due to frequencies so high that they're inaudible. MP3s try to draw the same curve without taking so many recordings. It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform, carefully deciding on which differences would result acceptable errors that are either outside of human hearing or small compared to the other frequencies compositing the wave. There is never a datapoint in either CD or MP3 that says "currently there's a sound at 700 Hz and at 703 Hz." Instead, the only recorded data is where the wave is (in terms of amplitude) and (in the case of MP3s) where the wave is going.
The parent poster asked about "tracks" and how they're seperated out. I believe this the poster's just using the wrong terminology. What's actually seperated out is the output from the different speakers. These are more accurately called channels. "Tracks" are the output of a specific instrument, and are traditionally stored as two unique channels in recording studios. The bitrate of these channels would match, or exceed, the quality of the end recording. Therefore if a pop song has 16 tracks, it would take 32 channels, all individually stored at high bitrates, to store in an unmixed format. This is a lot more data than distributing the "mixed" version, where all the waveforms are saved together as two channels, and is what is sold at CD stores and as MP3s/AACs.
I hope this explains things a bit better
Jon
ps. Sorry for the original post as AC, but I don't want this post to be buried at 0 moderation.
Earnings and revenues *BOTH* matter, coupled with growth. In a growing environment, a company's going to spend whatever it takes to expand the business and see what can happen. But at any time, it could cut back that spending and have great earnings. You should put this consideration in your valuations of a company. If a company's new, it probably isn't as lean as it could be. It's not a "blue chip", trying to shave off costs to have high earnings. I classify Google more in the growing category. It's certainly not a mature company. Considering that, Google's revenues ARE more valuable than its earnings in valuing its worth. In 10 years, you will probably be able to use the same valuation models on Google and Microsoft.
The number of people searching for MySpace and related properties on Google is still in a nice uptrend, indicating that MySpace is continuing to grow.
Google Trends search: http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace
Nice attempt at making up data on your own, though. Maybe it'll work next time.
what gives content providers the "right" to use DRM?
Are you suggesting that people cannot sell whatever they wish? If I want to sell my toenails on eBay, even though they're completely worthless, are you saying I shouldn't be able to? Sure, restaurants cannot put feces in the food they sell, but there are specific laws in place prohibiting that. There are not laws prohibiting DRM. Therefore content producers have every right to sell their content in any method they wish.
Is say physical assualt bad? Absolutely. And whilst worse for one person, I'm not convinced the overall suffering is actually worse than say ten guys facing the gnawing fear of layoffs, ten wives dealing with losing their homes they poured their souls in to, ten kids having to deal with daddy suddenly being unemployed and having to move away from friends and ten families living with the risk of no medical insurance.
Today's my last day as an Adobe employee, and I have to say -- the results of not working for Adobe are not unemployment. Most people who work for Adobe are highly talented and can easily get a job somewhere else in Silicon Valley within a month or two. Adobe also has COBRA health insurance that can cover you while you're unemployed. In my case, I'm going to enjoy a pay increase and will be buying property!
Of course, what you're really saying is that increased piracy decreases the demand for software developers. This is true, but the people who would be software developers in a world without piracy aren't busy selling their houses to avoid bankruptcy. They're doing other skilled labor jobs -- perhaps computer related, perhaps not. While it's great to reduce piracy and keep more money in the hands of the people who design and write the software, piracy itself has always been a form of competition and no established company is laying off employees because of it.
I wouldn't be surprised if that film actually wins best film.
Are you a constant victim of practical jokes or something? Do people pop-out from behind corners and scream "AHHH!H#$!" five times a day? Does your girlfriend leave out pregnancy tests in the bathroom with two lines hastily drawn with a Bic pen? I'm guessing so. Dave, for your own sanity, fix your life so that if SoaP wins Best Picture it surprises you!!!
Edison had a vested interest in portraying direct current as safer than alternating current, since his company sold direct current while Westinghouse sold alternating current. While sometimes people with vested interests are honest, Edison proposed incredibly strange things to portray alternating current as unsafe, including using alternating current for the first electric chair. It was an awful experiment, pushed by Edison only for marketing purposes. It was quickly established afterwards that direct current is a safer and faster electricity for electrocutions, and anything Edison had to say about alternating current's danger was FUD.
Not as funny as tossing a handful of ice into the deep fryer when a new hire was stationed there, but pretty funny.
What happens if you do that?
Calgary is sprawling outward at an incredible rate, it's bigger in area than NY city.
Is sprawl supposed to be a good thing?? If your argument held any weight, we'd all be moving to Jacksonville, Florida. The impressive thing about New York City is it's population (8.1 million), not it's land area.