Probably it was the horrendous over-use of it as a popular 90's buzzword.
From 1900 to 1989 it was only uttered by bearded and PHD'd market analysts describing what we mere mortals refer to as MSRP. Then in the dot-bomb days, everyone decided that sounding like a market-droid was a desirable thing, so we heard tons of over- and mis-used buzzwords.
My biggest problem with it is it is unnecessary extra verbiage that serves no useful purpose other than an attempt to make the speaker appear more "intelligent" or "hip".
Just think of all the print ribbons and extra memory and disk Kbytes used on storing extra useless "points" back in the 90's - that was why main core went from 640K to 4GB, you know.
Pricepoint? The 90's called and they want their buzzword back. Gezzus, just say fucking "price". The amount something is for sale at is its price. Period. Sheesh.
Or, as Arthur C. Clarke put it so well: "How dare we be so arrogant as a species to assume we are the only intelligent ones in the whole vast universe?".
As to the modding, the fundies got in here early and mod-bombed most of the intelligent posts (which were the non ID ones, natch).
Whitewash was a kind of paint used in the old days for fence and barn painting. It was called that (gasp) - because it was white! Think Tom Sawyer... Anyway, the term "whitewashing" means to cover up (as in with white paint).
Blacklisting comes from (also) old times, in Hollywood movie studios, if you were allowed on premises, you were on a list the security guards were given. If you pissed off the director or some studio exec, you got a line drawn through your name with a (you guessed it) - black - pencil - and were denied access from then on.
That's it, no racist overtones or conspiracies - except, perhaps in your mind!
FireFox does that, too. Control-F puts a search box on the bottom toolbar and any word you type it will find the next one of, or check "highlight all" box and it will do what you describe. I also really like that feature, it makes searching for a specific thing on a big page much easier.
Try FireFox, with the Adblock and NoScript add-in extensions. Blocks 99.9% of ads, scripts, etc. I get no floating boxes at all, anywhere (God, I hate those!).
Very bad slashdotter! You didn't even read the entire sentence you copied! The third thing I listed, "reduced/compressed bandwidth", is related to the exact type of compression we're discussing here today, and MP3 compression utilizes that type of compression, among others. All three "types" of compression are subtly inter-related. And, I do know why they do it, like seatbelts or cycle helmets, they suck but they serve a useful purpose as you described.
However, your description of MP3 compression is incorrect. The compression (reduction) of bandwidth definitely occurs, good luck trying to get anything back over about 15KHz. Trying to "stretch" them out (recoding them) back to 44.1KHz WAV's will NOT restore any missing information.
Second, the dynamic range of a lot of information is not only "compressed" it is REMOVED. That's part of the psychoacoustic compression algorithm's mechanism, to reduce or remove anything the ear can't (In Their Humble Opinions) hear, like fast transient peaks.
Finally, when you squash the shit out of the dynamic range of something (the second type of "compression") you can reduce it's bandwidth. That's how noise reduction systems like DBX and Dolby "compressed" a wideband signal onto a lower-bandwidth medium like tape or LP's then try to expand it back to the original signal losing some noise along the way due to the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis.
So, yes, the other forms of "compression" help reduce the overall bitrate (the third type of "compression", data reduction), which is what you thought I was thinking of. I just didn't list all 3 types as bitching bullet points.
Exactly, people are used to shit and now expect more of it.
BTW - I'm pretty sure normalizing is exactly the opposite of what you want to do here. Normalization makes that quiet contrapuntal ballad as loud as the acid rock song coming up next. Great for being lazy with the volume knob, but it squeezes some of the "soul" out of the material.
For the tin-eared masses. The bar of quality for audio/music/telephony has never been lower. We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". We are now getting spoon-fed the worst quality audio since wax recordings and the Western Electric "Noiseless" recording system of movies from the 30-40's. And like everything else around us that continues to suck worse and worse, we take it in stride, shrug and say "well, it sounds good enough, I guess."
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a Luddite, and I love the Digital revolution of music. I am just sickened by it's apparent side-effects, and AMAZED at the tolerance we the "consuming public" have for getting fed shit. As long as we accept this as the standard of quality we find acceptable, the various producers and manufacturers will keep feeding us more and crappier garbage.
BZZZZT. The download link refers to an "external site" which refers back to the page you gave, in an endless stupid loop. Any other ideas - the oldversion.com links have been passworded so you can't get the archived versions anymore.
OK, good resource. Now, WHICH version is the last known good one? There is a list of about 15 different ones. I'm guessing it's the 2nd to last one - the final version listed got cut down to 10M from 24M. Anyone know for sure?
Slashdot Mirror
Older Joke:
Q: What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg?
A: One is a flaming Nazi gas bag, the other is a dirigible.
Probably it was the horrendous over-use of it as a popular 90's buzzword.
From 1900 to 1989 it was only uttered by bearded and PHD'd market analysts describing what we mere mortals refer to as MSRP. Then in the dot-bomb days, everyone decided that sounding like a market-droid was a desirable thing, so we heard tons of over- and mis-used buzzwords.
My biggest problem with it is it is unnecessary extra verbiage that serves no useful purpose other than an attempt to make the speaker appear more "intelligent" or "hip".
Just think of all the print ribbons and extra memory and disk Kbytes used on storing extra useless "points" back in the 90's - that was why main core went from 640K to 4GB, you know.
Pricepoint? The 90's called and they want their buzzword back. Gezzus, just say fucking "price". The amount something is for sale at is its price. Period. Sheesh.
Aliens: "Bak Bak, BaBa Bak Bak, BAK BAK BAK"
Translator: "We come in peace, we mean you no harm!"
"See? They mean us no harm!"
Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong with that...
I am running FireFox with NoScript and I had to turn off the script block for the root site to allow the windows link to work. Hope that helps.
Didn't you mean "y4y"?
Or, as Arthur C. Clarke put it so well: "How dare we be so arrogant as a species to assume we are the only intelligent ones in the whole vast universe?".
As to the modding, the fundies got in here early and mod-bombed most of the intelligent posts (which were the non ID ones, natch).
Possible species names:
Dysonasaurus
Tyrannolectrolux
Eurekaceratops
Rainbodocus
Hooverdon
OK, I'll bite.
Whitewash was a kind of paint used in the old days for fence and barn painting. It was called that (gasp) - because it was white! Think Tom Sawyer... Anyway, the term "whitewashing" means to cover up (as in with white paint).
Blacklisting comes from (also) old times, in Hollywood movie studios, if you were allowed on premises, you were on a list the security guards were given. If you pissed off the director or some studio exec, you got a line drawn through your name with a (you guessed it) - black - pencil - and were denied access from then on.
That's it, no racist overtones or conspiracies - except, perhaps in your mind!
There's Elvis Costello - former computer programmer who chucked it all for Rock 'N Roll...
(He kept the geek look but lost the career!)
Peter Gabriel is quite the computer nerd...
Joe Walsh of the Eagles - he's got a Ham Radio license...
And Jeff Foxworthy used to work for IBM, but I'm not sure how nerdy he was.
Or his Mountibank Codpiece, for that matter!
Recent slashdot article about Japanese agri officials editing Wikipedia entries... search for it...
FireFox does that, too. Control-F puts a search box on the bottom toolbar and any word you type it will find the next one of, or check "highlight all" box and it will do what you describe. I also really like that feature, it makes searching for a specific thing on a big page much easier.
Every time I hear "Dali Lama", I think of melting llamas draped over tables and held up by poles and crutches!
Try FireFox, with the Adblock and NoScript add-in extensions. Blocks 99.9% of ads, scripts, etc. I get no floating boxes at all, anywhere (God, I hate those!).
"It's On... No, It's Off. No, now it's On. Now it's Off."
"That's called 'Blinking', Dean"
BZZZZZZZZZZT.
Very bad slashdotter! You didn't even read the entire sentence you copied! The third thing I listed, "reduced/compressed bandwidth", is related to the exact type of compression we're discussing here today, and MP3 compression utilizes that type of compression, among others. All three "types" of compression are subtly inter-related. And, I do know why they do it, like seatbelts or cycle helmets, they suck but they serve a useful purpose as you described.
However, your description of MP3 compression is incorrect. The compression (reduction) of bandwidth definitely occurs, good luck trying to get anything back over about 15KHz. Trying to "stretch" them out (recoding them) back to 44.1KHz WAV's will NOT restore any missing information.
Second, the dynamic range of a lot of information is not only "compressed" it is REMOVED. That's part of the psychoacoustic compression algorithm's mechanism, to reduce or remove anything the ear can't (In Their Humble Opinions) hear, like fast transient peaks.
Finally, when you squash the shit out of the dynamic range of something (the second type of "compression") you can reduce it's bandwidth. That's how noise reduction systems like DBX and Dolby "compressed" a wideband signal onto a lower-bandwidth medium like tape or LP's then try to expand it back to the original signal losing some noise along the way due to the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis.
So, yes, the other forms of "compression" help reduce the overall bitrate (the third type of "compression", data reduction), which is what you thought I was thinking of. I just didn't list all 3 types as bitching bullet points.
"We Suck Less" - I love it!
:)
PS - Why, an RF Power Transistor, of course!
Exactly, people are used to shit and now expect more of it.
BTW - I'm pretty sure normalizing is exactly the opposite of what you want to do here. Normalization makes that quiet contrapuntal ballad as loud as the acid rock song coming up next. Great for being lazy with the volume knob, but it squeezes some of the "soul" out of the material.
Umm... I think you're trying to play your WINDOWS O/S CDROM!
For the tin-eared masses. The bar of quality for audio/music/telephony has never been lower. We now accept crap MP3 audio as "acceptable", stuttering vocoders and dropped calls as "tolerable", and reduced/compressed bandwidth as "louder (hence better)". We are now getting spoon-fed the worst quality audio since wax recordings and the Western Electric "Noiseless" recording system of movies from the 30-40's. And like everything else around us that continues to suck worse and worse, we take it in stride, shrug and say "well, it sounds good enough, I guess."
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a Luddite, and I love the Digital revolution of music. I am just sickened by it's apparent side-effects, and AMAZED at the tolerance we the "consuming public" have for getting fed shit. As long as we accept this as the standard of quality we find acceptable, the various producers and manufacturers will keep feeding us more and crappier garbage.
BZZZZT. The download link refers to an "external site" which refers back to the page you gave, in an endless stupid loop. Any other ideas - the oldversion.com links have been passworded so you can't get the archived versions anymore.
Apparently, they promptly went and passworded all the OLD archived versions! Dicks!!
OK, good resource. Now, WHICH version is the last known good one? There is a list of about 15 different ones. I'm guessing it's the 2nd to last one - the final version listed got cut down to 10M from 24M. Anyone know for sure?