The heart of music compression is exploiting masking effects - a loud sound obscures quieter sounds that happen near the same time and frequency. When compressing a mixed together song, the encoder will not bother to encode the sound of e.g. a clarinet at he moment a cymbal crashes, because you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway. This is one of the ways mp3 saves information, and encoding tracks separetely would prevent this from happening.
Re: your first point about entropy -- the entropy in a downmixed track is strictly less than or equal to the sum of the entropies of the individual tracks. So encoding the tracks separately would require more space for the same quality.
IN Seattle this morning, the bus I was on tried to pass another bus that was using the same electric, um, bus. Whoops, both of them got stuck in the street needing repairs.
Lots of colleges try to, especially those that use Abelson and Sussman's Sturcture and Interpretation of Computer Programs as an intro text. For younger students Logo used to be a very popular and effective teaching language, and it's pretty much an alternate syntax for Lisp.
I spent lots of time navigating the labyrinth of underground steam tunnels at college. Keeping track of north is no big deal. You keep a direction in your head and update it every time you turn a corner. Man-made buildings are all laid out at 90 degree angles, so it's really hard to get lost that way.
I get them for $4.99 at Fred Meyer. DuraBright brand, manufactured by TCP. They have 5 distinct colors in the spectrum, better than the standard 3 but not as good as the balanced 7 you get from more expensive CFLs. I think they look better than incandescents anyway.
I'm sorry, but the article made specific claims about the power used by a digital audio player in decoding licenses AS OPPOSED TO the codec. Read the quote again.
"It takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself."
Did they test this? No. They tested two conditions that had a number of differences, ONE OF WHICH was the presence of licenses. But then they make the claim:
"It takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself."
which focuses on one aspect of the diference and attributes a singular mechanism to the loss of battery life.
Suppose that the digital audio players took less power to decode a DRM'd WMA file than an otherwise identical WMA file. This would contradict the above statement, while remaining entirely consistent with the existing results. Therefore, the above quote from the article is not a claim that can be made in good faith.
If the article had not made the claim above, you may have had a point. Unfortunately, you're blowing hot air.
The action of using DRM files means you are using CPU power to not only decode the DRM encrpytion,
Now you are starting to attribute mechanisms to that for which you have no evidence. There is no evidence that decoding the DRM encryption is a source of power loss (which the article DID claim.)
but also to decode a less efficient CODEC.
On the other hand there is no evidence from this study that decoding a less efficient codec is a cause of power loss.
The only reasonable claim is that the power loss is associated with the COMBINATION of two factors. But the article DID NOT MAKE the reasonable claim.
Both of these things cause the files drain your battery life faster. How that is distributed between the CODEC and the DRM scheme is irrelevant in this study.
It cannot be irrelevant if they make specific claims about the effect of one AND NOT the other.
Let's put the quote into more context:
"My music library consists of higher-bit-rate MP3s, purchased iTunes tracks, and even a few WAV and Apple Lossless tracks--all of which require more decoding/processing power than a vanilla 128Kbps MP3. The same applies to variable bit-rate files.
Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself."
So: the author ALREADY has files in codecs and formats other than mp3, and than goes on to claim that adding DRM to the mix taeks even more power on top of that.
I'm afraid the point of the article went completely over your head if you can't read what it says.
Your notion of methodology is oddly familiar. Do you work for a nutritional supplements company by any chance? Or maybe a purveyor of hi-fi equipment?
You missed the point of the article completely. It doesn't matter if the AAC or WMA DRM encryption takes up more processor power than non DRM AAC or WMA files.
Funny, the article I read claimed "It takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them." And if you're going to make a claim like that, you need a control group that actually tests the claim.
We alrady have all of the machinery needed to perform 'molecular manufacturing' -- granted we didn't invent it but we're getting quite good at adapting it to make new things. I don't know how long the peptides used in this study were, but after a certain length it becomes easier to employ genetically modified microorganisms to synthesize them.
When nanotech arrives my bet is that will be on a biochemical basis rather than the silicon-lithography basis that eats up all the funding nowadays. Designer proteins, not MEMS. The problem is not manufacturing things at the molecular scale using molecular-scale machinery (that problem has been solved for billions of years), it's figuring out what to manufacture.
Operations at those scales are driven by random thermal fluctuations which we don't know how to design for (and this makes the scifi notion of 'nanotech' as 'microscopic machinery,' i.e. regular gears and motors and whatnot scaled down, particularly silly). Evolution has developed machinery that is suited for and exploits the stochastic nature of small scale processes. Protein chemistry is ideally suited for this purpose. The challenge for us is to figure out design methods that will allow us to make proteins that do what we want them to do rather than waiting around for evolution to come up with the solution.
So this is why I like the current study--their mechanism is based on the random diffusion and binding of molecules, a natural small scale process. It's a step towards what nanotech will turn out to be, rather than what sci-fi imagines it to be. And yeah, the unimaginative term for this kind of nanotech is 'chemistry.'
I think, if a 'pattern' can be communicated accurately between observers, and the observers can independently look at the evidence and uniformly reach the same conclusion, the claim of 'subjectiveness' and 'peculiarity' of the pattern to each consciousness look rather weak. Mathematics is a reliable language for communicating patterns. That is, a mathematical statement can be interpreted true or false according to accepted rules of mathematics, and the judgement of veracity can be performed independently by any observer familiar with the rules, while still reaching the same result.
There are many schemes for describing patterns in the world, but so far as I am aware none share the mathematical characteristic of precise definition independent of the particular consciousness observing. Perhaps this accounts for what Wigner calls 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.'
Back to the "graduate-level math problem." Suppose I have ben tasked to design a system for navigating an anthropoid robot up and down flights of stairs. Presuming I have been successful, and program the procedure of solution into a robot that walks over flights of stairs, I feel that I would be perfectly legitimate, in accordance with the way I usually use the words, in saying that the robot solves instances of the mathematical problem I have posed. In what sense, then, is it not legitimate to say that a person, who exhibits the same behavior in the same situation, is solving the problem?
If you're saying that there's no difference between saying [...] and saying [...]
The set of statements is different, but the truth of one set has no bearing on the truth of the other set. The computation of mathematical solutions and the employment of real-time feedback systems are both perfectly legitimate models. In fact, I would hope so, since most people who think hard about real-time feedback mechanisms construct theory about their application to problems which can be expressed mathematically.
I do not believe that either set of statements is more appreciably anthropomorphized.
A "highly evolved real-time feedback mechanism" is just another model, dude. As is "understanding" and "solving". Your post boils down to "I don't like the name of your model, use the name of my model instead!" and is therefore content-free.
You seem to be confused about the nature and utility of models. A model establishes a correspondence of behavior between two systems. Given a system that can be well described by a model, it's perfectly legitimate to sue the model to answer questions about the system--and it's also perfectly legitimate to ask the system about the behavior of the model.
For instance, it turns out that fluid is very good at modeling the behavior of flow equations in complicated situations. That's why people build wind tunnels.
Please define "pattern recognition" in a way that can be used to form a testable hypothesis. I dare you. Likewise "different in a very visual sense."
If you mean that the visual system innately computes right angles, or whether a point is inside or outside of bounds, or whether a curve is closed -- how it that not innate knowledge of those geometrical relations?
TCPMP is free and works well for me, plays MPEG and most MPEG4 derivative formats (though you'll probably have to reencode to 320x240 to keep from skipping frames).
Re:Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Eh? When Eclipse offers completions of a function for me it shows me the javadoc! So when I 'm getting ready to call a function I can see all the edge cases and caveats documented for me on the screen. That's much better than being a macho/masochistic programmer and thinking I remember everything about a function from the last time I used in in a different context.
No one remembers all the edge cases, especially people who think they've got it all so memorized that they don't bother to double-check the documented behavior while they're calling functions.
Er, rap does use melody in the lead vocal. Else why would big studios go to so much expense to use pitch-correction to fix up mediocre talent like 50 Cent?
Go listen to, say, "Rebirth of Slick" by Digable Planets and then tell me they're not being very careful about vocal tone.
Armand Tanguay at USC is leading development of an intraocular camera system. Quite a ways off still, and will be quite an engineering and surgical challenge, especially if he plans to fit all the electronics inside the eye--heating is a huge problem.
There are several groups working on competing approaches. There are two groups in the US (disclaimer: I work for one) and one in Germany working on the epitetinal electrical stimulation approach; one US group working on a subretinal light-powered device; one US group working on an approach involving light-activated neurotransmitter chemicals, one group in Belgium using an optic nerve "cuff" electrode; a group using cortical stimulation (the main subject of the Wired article); and probably others, not to mention all the work being done on stem cell transplants.
Interesting that the prices are comparable. On the other hand, I think electric motors are more efficient at using the energy content of batteries than gasoline motors are at using the energy in gasoline.
My desk is only 24" deep and it's against a cube wall... there's no way I'd be able to fit a decent size CRT on it and have a keyboard in front of it. Without taking a chainsaw to that cube wall, that is.
Actually he's right--all the video interconnects, VGA, DVI, ADC etc. work by sending the entire image down the pipe at 60Hz (or whatever the refresh rate is.) Physically, an LCD pixel can change whenever you tell it to, but all the circuitry and interface behind an LCD monitor means a pixel will only be asked to change once per refresh.
DVI plans future support for a "selective refresh" interface, but to my knowledge no cards or displays supporting it are on the market.
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The heart of music compression is exploiting masking effects - a loud sound obscures quieter sounds that happen near the same time and frequency. When compressing a mixed together song, the encoder will not bother to encode the sound of e.g. a clarinet at he moment a cymbal crashes, because you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway. This is one of the ways mp3 saves information, and encoding tracks separetely would prevent this from happening.
Re: your first point about entropy -- the entropy in a downmixed track is strictly less than or equal to the sum of the entropies of the individual tracks. So encoding the tracks separately would require more space for the same quality.
IN Seattle this morning, the bus I was on tried to pass another bus that was using the same electric, um, bus. Whoops, both of them got stuck in the street needing repairs.
Lots of colleges try to, especially those that use Abelson and Sussman's Sturcture and Interpretation of Computer Programs as an intro text. For younger students Logo used to be a very popular and effective teaching language, and it's pretty much an alternate syntax for Lisp.
When I lived down south I was pretty good at this. Now I'm up in Washington and the sun is in the wrong place all the time and I keep getting lost.
I spent lots of time navigating the labyrinth of underground steam tunnels at college. Keeping track of north is no big deal. You keep a direction in your head and update it every time you turn a corner. Man-made buildings are all laid out at 90 degree angles, so it's really hard to get lost that way.
I get them for $4.99 at Fred Meyer. DuraBright brand, manufactured by TCP. They have 5 distinct colors in the spectrum, better than the standard 3 but not as good as the balanced 7 you get from more expensive CFLs. I think they look better than incandescents anyway.
I'm sorry, but the article made specific claims about the power used by a digital audio player in decoding licenses AS OPPOSED TO the codec. Read the quote again.
"It takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself."
Did they test this? No. They tested two conditions that had a number of differences, ONE OF WHICH was the presence of licenses. But then they make the claim:
"It takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself."
which focuses on one aspect of the diference and attributes a singular mechanism to the loss of battery life.
Suppose that the digital audio players took less power to decode a DRM'd WMA file than an otherwise identical WMA file. This would contradict the above statement, while remaining entirely consistent with the existing results. Therefore, the above quote from the article is not a claim that can be made in good faith.
If the article had not made the claim above, you may have had a point. Unfortunately, you're blowing hot air.
The action of using DRM files means you are using CPU power to not only decode the DRM encrpytion,
Now you are starting to attribute mechanisms to that for which you have no evidence. There is no evidence that decoding the DRM encryption is a source of power loss (which the article DID claim.)
but also to decode a less efficient CODEC.
On the other hand there is no evidence from this study that decoding a less efficient codec is a cause of power loss.
The only reasonable claim is that the power loss is associated with the COMBINATION of two factors. But the article DID NOT MAKE the reasonable claim.
Both of these things cause the files drain your battery life faster. How that is distributed between the CODEC and the DRM scheme is irrelevant in this study.
It cannot be irrelevant if they make specific claims about the effect of one AND NOT the other.
Let's put the quote into more context:
"My music library consists of higher-bit-rate MP3s, purchased iTunes tracks, and even a few WAV and Apple Lossless tracks--all of which require more decoding/processing power than a vanilla 128Kbps MP3. The same applies to variable bit-rate files.
Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself."
So: the author ALREADY has files in codecs and formats other than mp3, and than goes on to claim that adding DRM to the mix taeks even more power on top of that.
I'm afraid the point of the article went completely over your head if you can't read what it says.
You missed the point of the article completely. It doesn't matter if the AAC or WMA DRM encryption takes up more processor power than non DRM AAC or WMA files.
Funny, the article I read claimed "It takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them." And if you're going to make a claim like that, you need a control group that actually tests the claim.
I don't know about you, but the audio files I download from P2P usually come in higher bitrates than ones I get from online stores.
We alrady have all of the machinery needed to perform 'molecular manufacturing' -- granted we didn't invent it but we're getting quite good at adapting it to make new things. I don't know how long the peptides used in this study were, but after a certain length it becomes easier to employ genetically modified microorganisms to synthesize them.
When nanotech arrives my bet is that will be on a biochemical basis rather than the silicon-lithography basis that eats up all the funding nowadays. Designer proteins, not MEMS. The problem is not manufacturing things at the molecular scale using molecular-scale machinery (that problem has been solved for billions of years), it's figuring out what to manufacture.
Operations at those scales are driven by random thermal fluctuations which we don't know how to design for (and this makes the scifi notion of 'nanotech' as 'microscopic machinery,' i.e. regular gears and motors and whatnot scaled down, particularly silly). Evolution has developed machinery that is suited for and exploits the stochastic nature of small scale processes. Protein chemistry is ideally suited for this purpose. The challenge for us is to figure out design methods that will allow us to make proteins that do what we want them to do rather than waiting around for evolution to come up with the solution.
So this is why I like the current study--their mechanism is based on the random diffusion and binding of molecules, a natural small scale process. It's a step towards what nanotech will turn out to be, rather than what sci-fi imagines it to be. And yeah, the unimaginative term for this kind of nanotech is 'chemistry.'
I think, if a 'pattern' can be communicated accurately between observers, and the observers can independently look at the evidence and uniformly reach the same conclusion, the claim of 'subjectiveness' and 'peculiarity' of the pattern to each consciousness look rather weak. Mathematics is a reliable language for communicating patterns. That is, a mathematical statement can be interpreted true or false according to accepted rules of mathematics, and the judgement of veracity can be performed independently by any observer familiar with the rules, while still reaching the same result.
There are many schemes for describing patterns in the world, but so far as I am aware none share the mathematical characteristic of precise definition independent of the particular consciousness observing. Perhaps this accounts for what Wigner calls 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.'
Not subjective -- the first sequence has a much lower Kolmogorov complexity.
AFAIK a lot of click fraud is done using botnets. IP addresses won't help much there.
if your code is "largely nested" you're doing it wrong.
Back to the "graduate-level math problem." Suppose I have ben tasked to design a system for navigating an anthropoid robot up and down flights of stairs. Presuming I have been successful, and program the procedure of solution into a robot that walks over flights of stairs, I feel that I would be perfectly legitimate, in accordance with the way I usually use the words, in saying that the robot solves instances of the mathematical problem I have posed. In what sense, then, is it not legitimate to say that a person, who exhibits the same behavior in the same situation, is solving the problem?
If you're saying that there's no difference between saying [...] and saying [...]
The set of statements is different, but the truth of one set has no bearing on the truth of the other set. The computation of mathematical solutions and the employment of real-time feedback systems are both perfectly legitimate models. In fact, I would hope so, since most people who think hard about real-time feedback mechanisms construct theory about their application to problems which can be expressed mathematically.
I do not believe that either set of statements is more appreciably anthropomorphized.
A "highly evolved real-time feedback mechanism" is just another model, dude. As is "understanding" and "solving". Your post boils down to "I don't like the name of your model, use the name of my model instead!" and is therefore content-free.
You seem to be confused about the nature and utility of models. A model establishes a correspondence of behavior between two systems. Given a system that can be well described by a model, it's perfectly legitimate to sue the model to answer questions about the system--and it's also perfectly legitimate to ask the system about the behavior of the model.
For instance, it turns out that fluid is very good at modeling the behavior of flow equations in complicated situations. That's why people build wind tunnels.
Please define "pattern recognition" in a way that can be used to form a testable hypothesis. I dare you. Likewise "different in a very visual sense."
If you mean that the visual system innately computes right angles, or whether a point is inside or outside of bounds, or whether a curve is closed -- how it that not innate knowledge of those geometrical relations?
what you use to play the video on your palm?
TCPMP is free and works well for me, plays MPEG and most MPEG4 derivative formats (though you'll probably have to reencode to 320x240 to keep from skipping frames).
No one remembers all the edge cases, especially people who think they've got it all so memorized that they don't bother to double-check the documented behavior while they're calling functions.
Er, rap does use melody in the lead vocal. Else why would big studios go to so much expense to use pitch-correction to fix up mediocre talent like 50 Cent?
Go listen to, say, "Rebirth of Slick" by Digable Planets and then tell me they're not being very careful about vocal tone.
Armand Tanguay at USC is leading development of an intraocular camera system. Quite a ways off still, and will be quite an engineering and surgical challenge, especially if he plans to fit all the electronics inside the eye--heating is a huge problem.
There are several groups working on competing approaches. There are two groups in the US (disclaimer: I work for one) and one in Germany working on the epitetinal electrical stimulation approach; one US group working on a subretinal light-powered device; one US group working on an approach involving light-activated neurotransmitter chemicals, one group in Belgium using an optic nerve "cuff" electrode; a group using cortical stimulation (the main subject of the Wired article); and probably others, not to mention all the work being done on stem cell transplants.
Some of the latest research results in the area have been collected in an issue of the Journal of Neuroengineering.
Interesting that the prices are comparable. On the other hand, I think electric motors are more efficient at using the energy content of batteries than gasoline motors are at using the energy in gasoline.
My desk is only 24" deep and it's against a cube wall... there's no way I'd be able to fit a decent size CRT on it and have a keyboard in front of it. Without taking a chainsaw to that cube wall, that is.
Actually he's right--all the video interconnects, VGA, DVI, ADC etc. work by sending the entire image down the pipe at 60Hz (or whatever the refresh rate is.) Physically, an LCD pixel can change whenever you tell it to, but all the circuitry and interface behind an LCD monitor means a pixel will only be asked to change once per refresh.
DVI plans future support for a "selective refresh" interface, but to my knowledge no cards or displays supporting it are on the market.