The solution we seek is what's known in the guitar world as a "compressor" or "limiter."
The iPod already has a compressor, it's called Sound Check. However, a compressor doesn't make things quieter, it just reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds in a music track.
If a particular track has a very wide dynamic range, than a compressor can be useful because you don't have to turn up the volume to hear the quiet parts (and blowing away your eardrums when the loud parts kick in), but as noted by another poster, most music today is so heavily compressed than adding more compression won't help much.
Microsoft alreadly licenses its DRM to anyone that wants to use it (which would include Apple, if Apple wanted to add support of DRM WMAs to iPods).
Kinda sorta - Microsoft licenses its DRM for any portable player, but not for any personal computer operating systems. MS could license WMA DRM for iPods, but then Mac users wouldn't have any way to play (or burn) the files on their Macs.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has implemented some kind of unique encrypted handshaking between the OS X installer and the hardware so that only Apple's OS can be installed on it...
From reading the article, I gather "quiet" is being used here as a technical term which is roughly synonymous with laminar, or lack of turbulence (rather than "gee I wish my vacuum cleaner were quiet").
As slashdotnickname said, that is at least part of it. But another part of it may mean (I fully admit I haven't RTFA, I just skimmed it), quiet may also mean that steps were taken to isolate the test chember from external noise sources (tunnel motor, lab equipment, students, etc) so that experimenters can be sure that the only noise is from the air flow, and not from something else.
As far as my background, I haven't stayed at a Holiday Inn for a while, but I did spend a year and a half working with MIT's subsonic anechoic wind tunnel before it was crated off to Wilmington to make room for the Pappalardo Labs.
For example, I have a Subversion post-commit script that takes the changelog, formats it, and posts it on a blog on tikiwiki. This serves as a nice permanent record, and anybody who just wants to keep track of my progress can subscribe to the RSS feed.
This, IMHO, is a perfect example of the usefulness of RSS. Everyone focuses on using RSS for blogs, but RSS can be used for any data that could be useful in a syndication format. RSS Weather is an obvious example, but I've also used used RSS for sound monitoring reports.
It's not the RSS is necessarily the best format, but since it's a widely supported format, I can access the data using RSS clients on nearly any platform - including a Java client that runs on my Sony Ericsson cell phone. By baking this stuff into Office (and to a lesser extent, Windows) MS is providing a useful way for clients (of the computer type and of the writing-the-checks-type) to get this type of data into a useful format for computational, organizations, or publishing purposes.
(BTW, I'm no MS fanboy - my active machines right now include 1 NetBSD box, 2 Mac OS X boxes, 1 McLinux box, and 1 XP Tablet PC - but I think that this could be a great thing)
I can't imagine anything else they could do to ensure that they'll get the very best from the entire world.
Hire some better professors?;)
In all seriousness, I had somegreat, greatinstructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.
Do MIT alumni tend to donate money to the School?
I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.
It's easy to reccomend the top 3 CS Universities on the planet, but it assumes that money isn't a concern
I can't speak for Berkley and Stanford, but MIT is need-blind. If you meet the qualifications, MIT will help you to pay tuition. And, the poorer you are, the more likely that 'help' will consist of grants rather than loans.
Aren't the effects of this student's blogging the same as Terrell Owens of the Philadelphia Eagles statements?
I don't see the parallels here:
TO is getting paid to work, the student is paying to learn.
TO publicly criticized specific teammates in the local and national media; the student criticized unnamed students and professors in an unknown blog.
TO's conduct violated the NFL players' collective bargaining agreement; the student's conduct didn't violate the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (as argued by Professor Daniel D'Angelo in the linked article)
TO is still getting paid as per his contract (admittedly without a chance to earn performance bonues); will the student still be forced to pay the $14,000 for the semester he's not getting credit for?
I hope it's mostly a case of not dotting the i's, not crossing the t's,
Given what I know about working for Mass, I strongly suspect that's the case.
<begin anecdote>
Back in my last job, I did some consulting for the MBTA. There was no problem with traveling within the state on project business. However, traveling out of the state on project business was a big deal, requiring several levels of approval. At one point we needed to fly to Colorado to conduct some testing - it would have cost several $million to test locally, and several $thousand to test in CO. I think it took something like 2 months for the approval to come through. Since the testing wasn't too time-critical, we just waited for the T to give us approval.
<end anecdote>
Given my experience working for the state, and my experience going to conferences, I don't find it hard to believe that Mr. Quinn may have been running against conference registration deadlines, hotel room deadlines, and airfare deadlines - I suspect that he followed proper procedures when he could, but if there was a time crunch (maybe it took too long for a gov't bean counter to approve the first of 12 forms), he may have just asked his boss (and council as TFA noted) for verbal approval.
Frankly, as a Mass taxpayer, I'm happy that state workers are going to conferences. Of course if it was a golfing junket, it would be a different matter. But (IMNSHO) technical people need to go to conferences to expose themselves to news ideas, to meet contacts, and, yes, to schmooze with vendors.
Wouldn't it be a better technology upgrade to reduce the noise on BART while traveling underground so people can talk to each other?
Easier said than done. FWIW, BART spends a lot of money of noise & vibration mitigation - in fact, some of the excessive noise in tunnel sections may be caused by the ground-borne vibration mitigation measures (floating slab track) that is used in several locations on the BART system.
I wonder if something as simple as noise-cancellation headphones would provide significant protection against LRAD usage.
Noise cancelling headsets (and noise cancelling technologies in general) don't work all that well for high-frequency sounds since the impinging noise and the 180-degree shifted sounds need to be perfectly aligned at the ear to cancel each other out. That's difficult to do with high-frequency sounds because of the relatively small wavelengths involved.
Now passive hearing protectors (e.g. ear plugs) work very well at high frequencies. However, the best ear plugs reduce sound by 20-30 dB at high-frequencies. If the LRAD literature is true, and it can produce sound levels of 150 dB, than ear plugs can reduce it to 120 dB, which is still uncomfortably loud.
but can't the government effectively decide/dictate its own "fair" price when invoking eminent domain?
Well, if the original Boston Central Artery (built in the '50's) is any indication, the answer is "yes and no."
In the Boston case, the highway department purposely offered below-market prices for the houses that were taken during construction. The rationale was that if the home owners sued for the full market value, the state would likely lose. However, they knew that the home owners couldn't *afford* to sue the state, so it never became an issue.
Assuming this is true (I am neither a lawyer or historian), if a government were to try to take drugs by eminent domain, the drug companies would have the ability to sue the government for full market value.
It's not just "[s]ome noise" - from TFA, the system generates a very large impulse, which means it is generating a low-frequencies (and possibly high frequencies if the delta-T is short enough). Low-frequencies propagate for very long distances in water. A lot of marine life (whales for example) use low-frequency sounds to navigate, and can become disoriented by low-frequency noise.
Obviously a sinking ship will cause environmental problems, but the damage will be somewhat localized. An acoustic system that generates high-amplitude/low-frequency waves in water can effect an area for hundreds of miles. I don't know how much of a problem it could be, but it's not something that should be casually dismissed.
Integrated amplifiers greatly reduce customizing, additional ADCs and DACs reduce resolution, increase the noise floor and change the sound.
That may be the perception, but in many cases (but not all), it's wrong. Integrated amps allow the manufacturer to to cutomize the amp for the specific driver which can greatly improve the performance of the overall speaker. for example:
the amp in the Sunfire sub (which is rated for 2kW, but doesn't actually deliver that kind of power to the speaker because of the back EMF properties of the speaker magnet - any other amp would be eaten alive), and
the BeoLab 5 integrated amp (I've written about the BeoLab 5 before).
Heck, even if you hate Bose speakers, try listening to externally-amplified Acoustimass-series speakers, and compare them to the internally-amp'd models - the self-amplified models sound much better.
You realise CDDA has an almost identical copy protection scheme, I presume?
I actually didn't know that, but I checked my copy of Principles of Digital Audio, and sure enough it's in the Q subcode data.
Interesting... it kind of begs the question: why haven't the record companies tried to enforce recognition of the digital copy bit rather than bastardizing the red book standard with multi-session discs? Is it a case of "the cat is out of the bag"?
Sony also backed DATs and 8MM video, both of which were viewed as superior formats, and neither of which gained much consumer acceptance.
FYI, DAT failed because of SCMS. But, much like Beta, DAT has had a wildly successful run in professional audio (although it recently started to be supplanted by harddrive and solid-state recording)
They needed Apple to stay alive to keep up the pretense that they were engaging an open market without recourse to any monopoly (which was nonsense - they lost). Bill also invested a bunch of cash in Apple at the same time for the same reason
That may be part of it, but the other part was because Apple caught Microsoft with their hand in the cookie jar (the settlement was on top of the stock investment).
Now that Linus is around, Office's days on the Mac may be numbered.
Keep in mind, Mac Office makes money for MS - to drop it just to spite Apple might make a shareholder or two upset.
He'll keep Apple alive as long as he can, even though he lost the monopoly ruling, because the alternative is all Linux and OpenOffice.
If I were Mr. Jobs, I would have had this conversation with Mr. Gates or Mr. Baller at some point:
"Look guys, it's in your interest to keep Mac Office around. You see, because of the dominance of MS Office, the lack of Office for the Mac might result in a drop in Mac sales. If Mac sales drop off enough, Apple could be in serious trouble, and perhaps go out of business. If Apple were to go out of business, my last act as CEO would be to release all (non-3rd-party-licensed) Mac OS X kernel and GUI code under the GPL. I'm betting you really don't want that to happen."
If this is the case, this RedOwl can easily be fooled where there are multiple gunshots, especially in a battle field.
Not necessarily.
The article (not surprisingly) doesn't go into detail about "REDOWL's microphones" but if they're using a mic array (which would be logical), than the array will be able to distinguish between multiple sources. The only way to fool it would be to a) fire at exactly the same moment and b) fire at exactly the same position (or at equidistant positions at a 90 degree angle from the array axis for a linear array).
Now you might be able to overwhelm the DSP's with enough gunshots, but as another poster said, this doesn't appear to be designed for battlefield situations, more like recon and security situations.
Yes, but the MTA (much like pretty much every other transit system in the U.S.) receives money from the Federal Government, and that means that the transit system has to abide by Federal guidelines (environmental rules, overhead caps, subcontractors must be paid in 30 days, AA goals, etc).
For example, the 2nd Avenue subway and East Side Access projects are both part of the recent Federal transportation bill. I'm pretty sure that MTA also gets some funding for maintenance and R&D, but I can't find a link right now.
PDA's, cell phones, and other similar devices don't really tend to have the scratching problems that Nano adopters have expressed frustration over.
I don't believe this: my last three cell phones (Nokia 6100, Nokia 8260, Sony-Ericsson T610) as well as my Handspring PDA all became horribly scratched after a few weeks of use. I even bought a case for the T610 to prevent scratching, and it hasn't helped a whole lot (WriteRIGHT screen protectors have helped for my PDA). Even my free-with-Comcast-cable-modem 128M Creative MP3 players has a few scratches, and it's been out of the house exactly twice.
Bases on a quick examination of friend's/relatives cell phones, I'm guessing that most PDAs/MP3 Players/Cell phones have similar issues, but the Nano issue is getting a lot of attention because 1) the Nano looks so aesthetically pleasing, and/or 2) some people like to take Apple town a peg or two, especially those that think Apple values form over function. But I just don't see that most other products are more scratch-resistant, I think we just don't care as much.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPod already has a compressor, it's called Sound Check. However, a compressor doesn't make things quieter, it just reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds in a music track.
If a particular track has a very wide dynamic range, than a compressor can be useful because you don't have to turn up the volume to hear the quiet parts (and blowing away your eardrums when the loud parts kick in), but as noted by another poster, most music today is so heavily compressed than adding more compression won't help much.
Kinda sorta - Microsoft licenses its DRM for any portable player, but not for any personal computer operating systems. MS could license WMA DRM for iPods, but then Mac users wouldn't have any way to play (or burn) the files on their Macs.
Apple will not "preclude someone from running [Windows] on a Mac. They probably will."
As slashdotnickname said, that is at least part of it. But another part of it may mean (I fully admit I haven't RTFA, I just skimmed it), quiet may also mean that steps were taken to isolate the test chember from external noise sources (tunnel motor, lab equipment, students, etc) so that experimenters can be sure that the only noise is from the air flow, and not from something else.
As far as my background, I haven't stayed at a Holiday Inn for a while, but I did spend a year and a half working with MIT's subsonic anechoic wind tunnel before it was crated off to Wilmington to make room for the Pappalardo Labs.
This, IMHO, is a perfect example of the usefulness of RSS. Everyone focuses on using RSS for blogs, but RSS can be used for any data that could be useful in a syndication format. RSS Weather is an obvious example, but I've also used used RSS for sound monitoring reports.
It's not the RSS is necessarily the best format, but since it's a widely supported format, I can access the data using RSS clients on nearly any platform - including a Java client that runs on my Sony Ericsson cell phone. By baking this stuff into Office (and to a lesser extent, Windows) MS is providing a useful way for clients (of the computer type and of the writing-the-checks-type) to get this type of data into a useful format for computational, organizations, or publishing purposes.
(BTW, I'm no MS fanboy - my active machines right now include 1 NetBSD box, 2 Mac OS X boxes, 1 McLinux box, and 1 XP Tablet PC - but I think that this could be a great thing)
Hire some better professors? ;)
In all seriousness, I had some great, great instructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.
Do MIT alumni tend to donate money to the School?I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.
I can't speak for Berkley and Stanford, but MIT is need-blind. If you meet the qualifications, MIT will help you to pay tuition. And, the poorer you are, the more likely that 'help' will consist of grants rather than loans.
Well, there is no prior art from Apple with regards to a DAP, but there is prior art from Apple nee NeXT.
I don't see the parallels here:
... they just might. Remember that the iTMS started off with music sales, and now they offer one free track each week.
Perhaps the annual(?) Pepsi iTMS giveaway may be extended to videos?
We can hope...
council = counsel
Given what I know about working for Mass, I strongly suspect that's the case.
<begin anecdote>Back in my last job, I did some consulting for the MBTA. There was no problem with traveling within the state on project business. However, traveling out of the state on project business was a big deal, requiring several levels of approval. At one point we needed to fly to Colorado to conduct some testing - it would have cost several $million to test locally, and several $thousand to test in CO. I think it took something like 2 months for the approval to come through. Since the testing wasn't too time-critical, we just waited for the T to give us approval.
<end anecdote>Given my experience working for the state, and my experience going to conferences, I don't find it hard to believe that Mr. Quinn may have been running against conference registration deadlines, hotel room deadlines, and airfare deadlines - I suspect that he followed proper procedures when he could, but if there was a time crunch (maybe it took too long for a gov't bean counter to approve the first of 12 forms), he may have just asked his boss (and council as TFA noted) for verbal approval.
Frankly, as a Mass taxpayer, I'm happy that state workers are going to conferences. Of course if it was a golfing junket, it would be a different matter. But (IMNSHO) technical people need to go to conferences to expose themselves to news ideas, to meet contacts, and, yes, to schmooze with vendors.
Easier said than done. FWIW, BART spends a lot of money of noise & vibration mitigation - in fact, some of the excessive noise in tunnel sections may be caused by the ground-borne vibration mitigation measures (floating slab track) that is used in several locations on the BART system.
Noise cancelling headsets (and noise cancelling technologies in general) don't work all that well for high-frequency sounds since the impinging noise and the 180-degree shifted sounds need to be perfectly aligned at the ear to cancel each other out. That's difficult to do with high-frequency sounds because of the relatively small wavelengths involved.
Now passive hearing protectors (e.g. ear plugs) work very well at high frequencies. However, the best ear plugs reduce sound by 20-30 dB at high-frequencies. If the LRAD literature is true, and it can produce sound levels of 150 dB, than ear plugs can reduce it to 120 dB, which is still uncomfortably loud.
Well, if the original Boston Central Artery (built in the '50's) is any indication, the answer is "yes and no."
In the Boston case, the highway department purposely offered below-market prices for the houses that were taken during construction. The rationale was that if the home owners sued for the full market value, the state would likely lose. However, they knew that the home owners couldn't *afford* to sue the state, so it never became an issue.
Assuming this is true (I am neither a lawyer or historian), if a government were to try to take drugs by eminent domain, the drug companies would have the ability to sue the government for full market value.
They gotta eat somewhere...
It's not just "[s]ome noise" - from TFA, the system generates a very large impulse, which means it is generating a low-frequencies (and possibly high frequencies if the delta-T is short enough). Low-frequencies propagate for very long distances in water. A lot of marine life (whales for example) use low-frequency sounds to navigate, and can become disoriented by low-frequency noise.
Obviously a sinking ship will cause environmental problems, but the damage will be somewhat localized. An acoustic system that generates high-amplitude/low-frequency waves in water can effect an area for hundreds of miles. I don't know how much of a problem it could be, but it's not something that should be casually dismissed.
That may be the perception, but in many cases (but not all), it's wrong. Integrated amps allow the manufacturer to to cutomize the amp for the specific driver which can greatly improve the performance of the overall speaker. for example:
I actually didn't know that, but I checked my copy of Principles of Digital Audio, and sure enough it's in the Q subcode data.
Interesting... it kind of begs the question: why haven't the record companies tried to enforce recognition of the digital copy bit rather than bastardizing the red book standard with multi-session discs? Is it a case of "the cat is out of the bag"?
FYI, DAT failed because of SCMS. But, much like Beta, DAT has had a wildly successful run in professional audio (although it recently started to be supplanted by harddrive and solid-state recording)
You doubt that Steve Jobs might act emotionally and irrationally? Yep, that would never happen. ;)
That may be part of it, but the other part was because Apple caught Microsoft with their hand in the cookie jar (the settlement was on top of the stock investment).
Now that Linus is around, Office's days on the Mac may be numbered.Keep in mind, Mac Office makes money for MS - to drop it just to spite Apple might make a shareholder or two upset.
He'll keep Apple alive as long as he can, even though he lost the monopoly ruling, because the alternative is all Linux and OpenOffice.If I were Mr. Jobs, I would have had this conversation with Mr. Gates or Mr. Baller at some point:
"Look guys, it's in your interest to keep Mac Office around. You see, because of the dominance of MS Office, the lack of Office for the Mac might result in a drop in Mac sales. If Mac sales drop off enough, Apple could be in serious trouble, and perhaps go out of business. If Apple were to go out of business, my last act as CEO would be to release all (non-3rd-party-licensed) Mac OS X kernel and GUI code under the GPL. I'm betting you really don't want that to happen."
:)
Not necessarily.
The article (not surprisingly) doesn't go into detail about "REDOWL's microphones" but if they're using a mic array (which would be logical), than the array will be able to distinguish between multiple sources. The only way to fool it would be to a) fire at exactly the same moment and b) fire at exactly the same position (or at equidistant positions at a 90 degree angle from the array axis for a linear array).
Now you might be able to overwhelm the DSP's with enough gunshots, but as another poster said, this doesn't appear to be designed for battlefield situations, more like recon and security situations.
Yes, but the MTA (much like pretty much every other transit system in the U.S.) receives money from the Federal Government, and that means that the transit system has to abide by Federal guidelines (environmental rules, overhead caps, subcontractors must be paid in 30 days, AA goals, etc).
For example, the 2nd Avenue subway and East Side Access projects are both part of the recent Federal transportation bill. I'm pretty sure that MTA also gets some funding for maintenance and R&D, but I can't find a link right now.
I don't believe this: my last three cell phones (Nokia 6100, Nokia 8260, Sony-Ericsson T610) as well as my Handspring PDA all became horribly scratched after a few weeks of use. I even bought a case for the T610 to prevent scratching, and it hasn't helped a whole lot (WriteRIGHT screen protectors have helped for my PDA). Even my free-with-Comcast-cable-modem 128M Creative MP3 players has a few scratches, and it's been out of the house exactly twice.
Bases on a quick examination of friend's/relatives cell phones, I'm guessing that most PDAs/MP3 Players/Cell phones have similar issues, but the Nano issue is getting a lot of attention because 1) the Nano looks so aesthetically pleasing, and/or 2) some people like to take Apple town a peg or two, especially those that think Apple values form over function. But I just don't see that most other products are more scratch-resistant, I think we just don't care as much.