One would think (and I could be wrong on this) that the noise filters on software like Audacity and Cool Edit Pro could clean up the sound well enough that any moderately good ATDC would produce digital music that sounds at least as good (if not better) than the analog original played on regular stereo equipment. This should especially be true for your interviews and recordings of live performances unless you had some seriously good recording gear. The distortion introduced by conversion to digital should be well below the improvements that can be made by filtering out noise.
The noise filter on Audacity is simply amazing. And Audacity is free!
Scratched and worn vinyl sounds worse than CD audio.
Vinyl only sounds better than CD audio if (1) the vinyl is in pristine condition and (2) it is played on some very expensive kit. Being analog, the sound quality of vinyl is only limited in theory by the quality of the gear used to record and playback. In practice, most equipment used to record and playback the vinyl medium has worse sound than CD audio.
IMO, the major contribution of St. Cyrill and Methodius is not the creation of an alphabet, but their disputes with the Western church and the Pope regarding the right for the different peoples to learn and practice Christianity in their own language. Up to that point only Latin, Greek and Hebrew was used in church services...
This was only true in Western Christendom and then only true to a limited extent. For example, in the west, the first Christian missionaries to the British Isles translated the service books of the early Church to Gaelic and other Celtic languages. In the east, the the generally accepted practice was to use the venacular. This is why some of the oldest extent copies of the Bible are in one of the Ethiopic languages, Coptic, Syrian, etc.
The Roman canon that the liturgy could only be practiced in one of the tongues spoken by the apostles was of relatively late invention and only applied to congregations under the sole apostolic see of the west, Rome. Congregations under the apostolic sees of the east always used the venacular.
Hence it is somewhat ironic that many eastern Churches refuse to update the liturgy from being in liturgical Greek or old Slavonic into their modern equivalents.
The form factor is that of the codex. The codex format is only about 20 centuries old.
Prior to that everything was written on scrolls or tablets. And I must admit that the scroll form factor for paper is probably still the most ubiquitous world wide. Although I hear that in some countries they don't use paper . . .
First, consider that for non-premium and non-public channels between one sixth to one third of all broadcast time is advertisement. That cuts the length of original content to between sixteen to twenty hours each day right there.
Second, consider that in the US most prime-time drama and comedy show will film between nine and twenty new episodes per season. (I don't know how frequently news magazine shows produce new episodes.) Even generously assuming one special event that co-opts a show's time slot happens once a month, this means that for prime time comedy and drama shows, only one quarter to one half of broadcast time is original content. Three hours of prime already gets reduced from 180 minutes to 120 to 150 minutes from commercials. Then we need to reduce that by one quarter to one half yielding a range of 60 (at worst) to 115 (at best) minutes of original content programming each night.
Third consider that Friends and ER are the exceptions. The vast majority of television shows do not cost nearly as much as high profile prime time hits.
Fourth, one isn't counting syndication of programs from series that are owned by a network.
Fifth, networks pay studios so much for high profile prime time hits because the studios can get away with charging the networks so much. Whether or not Friends would still be made at the same quality (*cough*) and sold for such a high price in market driven by subscriptions is an unknown.
Sixth, your division of money is skewed because many of those 100 channels are repeats of the same network. A network only has to pay for a program once, when it purchases it. Your figures would only make sense if 100 channels were actually making 100 different prime time hit programs. As it is, of those 100 channels 10 are ABC, 10 are NBC, 10 are CBS, 10 are WB, 10 are FOX, 10 are independant and 10 are PBS or community access.
Seventh, the thirty odd channels left are by sucscription only. It should be rather obvious that these channels already find subscriptions are more than adequate for producing or purchasing enough original content to stay in business.
Your entire argument is built on verbal flatulence. You may in fact be right, but your numbers are so skewed as to be meaningless to figuring out whether or not subscriptions service only is viable as the main model of television viewing.
The majority opinion was the source of the famous line about shouting "fire" in a crowded theater - you don't have the right to do that because it could cause a panic and result in injuries and other damage.
The actual statement from the majority opinion is: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
That single omitted word, "falsely", offers an enormous difference in meaning. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre if there is a fire is probably protected speech, even if it might not be the most intelligent manner of addressing a clear and present danger.
Last I read, WinCE devices had less that 20% marketshare.
This means that they are not ubiquitous.
I probably know a few dozen people with hand held computing devices. None of them own a PocketPC. One owns a Sharp Zaurus.
They need to be periodically reset. Also consider that twenty to thirty hours of use translates to several months for most (not all) users of hand held computers.
Indeed the idea of a computer needing frequent reboots is very much a Windowsism.
This depends on the meaning of frequent and reboot. Consider:
Game consoles that need to reboot to load new games.
Game consoles that sometimes freeze and need to be rebooted in order to abort the frozen program.
Palm OS devices that need periodic hard resets.
Computer based appliances that sometimes act flaky and need to be reset. For example, my Pioneer 25 disk cd changer occasionally needs to be powered cycled.
I'll gladly concede that using a reboot as a trouble-shooting device was an area heavily pioneered by help desks supporting various flavors of Windows. However, many devices need periodic resets due to defects in software and/or hardware.
So are we really talking about desktop PC's or something more like a missile fire control system on a warship which needs to work straight after being forcably power cycled, before the next bomb or antiship missile is launched at it?
Probably both, possibly neither. Your options are neither exclusive nor exhaustive.
As if Microsoft were the only maker of software with this problem.
Here's a clue: which ubiquitous hand held device commonly needs to be reset after twenty to thirty hours of use because the software gets all munged up?
I think this is the same / links to MRAM articles
on
No More Rebooting?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The trasentric paper quoted Electronic Buyer's News:
"Honeywell Inc. and Motorola Inc. are hoping to spin volume quantities of MRAM through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract that is also shared by IBM. DRAM powerhouses Micron, NEC, and Samsung are said to be developing the technology, while Hewlett-Packard has a design team looking into the viability of chip-level magnetic storage."
The interesting elements of this:
Much of this research is funded by a DARPA contract which means it is the money of US Taxpayers at work.
Samsung is part of the same contract.
Methinks that perhaps Samsung and IBM are using the same (or very similar) technology.
The Wired article is fairly lengthy and also details the biography of Stuart Parkin. Parkin is the IBM fellow that has been driving most of the MRAM research.
Ciao.
How different is this than MRAM?
on
No More Rebooting?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The press release doesn't really go into detail, so I don't know how similar (or disparate) the respective IBM and Samsung solutions are. They do both have the same net effect for users: non-volatile main memory.
This is cool stuff, but what hasn't been said is that as long as operating systems and applications leak memory, there will be a need for reboots.
Of course, I have no idea why they ported XSI to Linux anyway. How many Linux users can afford an $8000 piece of software (for the light version, no less)?
Because powerhouse graphic workshops like ILM and Henson Associates like Linux. And they can afford $8,000 pieces of software. Of course just because it's built doesn't mean they will come. Henson's Creature Shop is rumored to be quite fond of Maya on Linux.
For data center applications, raw partition support is preferable becuase it is less likely to cause errors. An application using a raw partition can exercise total control of the device being written to. An application using a filesystem is at the mercy of the operating system.
Consider Oracle running on an OS (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS/400, whatever). Do you trust the OS more or less than Oracle to have up to date journaling entries regarding the most recent transactions prior to a really bad, catasrophic event that causes an uncontrolled powering down of the server?
Anyway, visit the Oracle 9i DBA Guide to see Oracle's current capabilities in terms of working with raw partitions.
Gavin Menzies' work allegedly demonstrates that Christopher Columbus had a map based on the work of Venetian cartiographer Nicolo da Conti who sailed with Emperor Zhui Di's navy during its circumnavigation of the globe.
Certainly, as you state "If I have a country that doesn't know china existed, and I build a boat and go looking for lands far away, then find China, I discovered it. It doesn't mean no one elso is there, or that it didn't exist before, it just means I found someplace I never new existed." However, if you do know that China exists because you have a map from those who have gone before and you follow the map to China, you didn't discover it.
Regards,
-l
You're thinking of the wrong venue
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 1
"Here's the reality: You block ads. You cost us money. Ultimately, I mean."
This is where you have to stop and think "Hey... if Slashdot DOES go down because of a lack of profits, where will I turn?"
So would you believe ABC if they went on air asking you not to use TiVO or ReplayTV to zap the commercials on their broadcast because if you zap the commercials you cost them money?
The reality is, if the figures taco and hemos threw out were correct, there is only a 12% chance someone who blocks ads is costing/. money on a given page view. The remainder of the time, the person who blocks ads saves/. money because the add being viewed is not a paid ad.
Not to mention that ad rates are largely driven by number of readers of the site, not necessarily by numbers of readers of the site that view ads.
This is what needs to change . . .
on
Netwinder is Back
·
· Score: 2, Informative
/. linked to coverage of the autopsy of rebel.com last September. Rebel's problems were mostly financial in nature. The Ottowa Citizen article in the original/. link lists some of the symptoms . ..
By the late 1990s, [Mac] Brown was on top of the world. Revenues at Hardware Canada Computing were approaching $40 million annually and the company was solidly profitable, boasting net margins of 8 to 12 per cent of sales, according to Brown.
Already though, there were warning signs. Most serious entrepreneurs plow their company's earnings back into the business to help finance new projects, research and growth. Brown was already diverting a significant portion of his profits into supporting an extravagant lifestyle. Generous with his money when it came to family and friends, he had moved many of his New Brunswick relatives -- including his parents and two brothers -- into well-appointed homes in the Ottawa area. Brown built himself a 12,000 square foot home and marina on the river near Manotick.
. ..
The company had already distinguished itself by spending more on its Corel Centre entertainment suite than most of the other, much larger corporations with a presence at the arena: Aside from the $120,000 annual rental, Rebel was shelling out more than $1,000 per night for food and drinks.
Unfortunately both parts of the Ottawa Citizen article are now invisible except to paid subscribers to the Citizen. Their no-cost archive only goes back 14 days.
Regards,
-l
Hopefully the new company won't . . .
on
Netwinder is Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Price themselves into oblivion
The first time around, while a netwinder could hypothetically save money because of its low-power consumption, in practice the premium one paid over faster, better supported hardware would have made it tough to break even over the useful life of the product.
Spend money on the wrong things
How much did rebel.com pay for the domain name again? And for using the James Dean logo? For hot tub parties? For limos?
Lag on updating the OS
The variant of Linux on the Netwinder was quite old, to the point of being outdated and making it quite difficult to install other programs.
The netwinder hardware has impressed me since I first read about it. IMHO, if they would have taken the design to slightly ruggedized portables (Apple Message Book style) and PDAs and spent more money on attracting developers, they would have made a killing.
The big thing, though, is to keep from repeating the spending mistakes of the past.
My largest worry is that even if Microsoft hands over the source code, they will endeavor to make certain that that there is not really sufficient time for the plaintiffs to give it the going over that it needs.
My second largest worry is that the attourneys general of the states will not be able to find the right people to give the code a good going over. HHopefully, someone on the caliber of Andrew Schulman who gave Microsoft an incredible amount of grief with Undocumented Windows 95 will agree to help out.
(1) Water can act as a catalyst to cause solder, chips, wires to corrode and/or rust to the point of making the device useless. A roommate of mine did this with a cordless phone of mine. He used it while washing dishes, got it wet and hung it on the base. The water ran into the unit and caused a connection on the circuit board to rust itself into uselessness.
(2) Water can cause an active circuit to short itself out, possibly in a permanently descructive manner.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the /. article. Find resources at the Google Web Directory.
The noise filter on Audacity is simply amazing. And Audacity is free!
Vinyl only sounds better than CD audio if (1) the vinyl is in pristine condition and (2) it is played on some very expensive kit. Being analog, the sound quality of vinyl is only limited in theory by the quality of the gear used to record and playback. In practice, most equipment used to record and playback the vinyl medium has worse sound than CD audio.
Of course, YMMV.
This was only true in Western Christendom and then only true to a limited extent. For example, in the west, the first Christian missionaries to the British Isles translated the service books of the early Church to Gaelic and other Celtic languages. In the east, the the generally accepted practice was to use the venacular. This is why some of the oldest extent copies of the Bible are in one of the Ethiopic languages, Coptic, Syrian, etc.
The Roman canon that the liturgy could only be practiced in one of the tongues spoken by the apostles was of relatively late invention and only applied to congregations under the sole apostolic see of the west, Rome. Congregations under the apostolic sees of the east always used the venacular.
Hence it is somewhat ironic that many eastern Churches refuse to update the liturgy from being in liturgical Greek or old Slavonic into their modern equivalents.
Regards,
-l
Prior to that everything was written on scrolls or tablets. And I must admit that the scroll form factor for paper is probably still the most ubiquitous world wide. Although I hear that in some countries they don't use paper . . .
First, consider that for non-premium and non-public channels between one sixth to one third of all broadcast time is advertisement. That cuts the length of original content to between sixteen to twenty hours each day right there.
Second, consider that in the US most prime-time drama and comedy show will film between nine and twenty new episodes per season. (I don't know how frequently news magazine shows produce new episodes.) Even generously assuming one special event that co-opts a show's time slot happens once a month, this means that for prime time comedy and drama shows, only one quarter to one half of broadcast time is original content. Three hours of prime already gets reduced from 180 minutes to 120 to 150 minutes from commercials. Then we need to reduce that by one quarter to one half yielding a range of 60 (at worst) to 115 (at best) minutes of original content programming each night.
Third consider that Friends and ER are the exceptions. The vast majority of television shows do not cost nearly as much as high profile prime time hits.
Fourth, one isn't counting syndication of programs from series that are owned by a network.
Fifth, networks pay studios so much for high profile prime time hits because the studios can get away with charging the networks so much. Whether or not Friends would still be made at the same quality (*cough*) and sold for such a high price in market driven by subscriptions is an unknown.
Sixth, your division of money is skewed because many of those 100 channels are repeats of the same network. A network only has to pay for a program once, when it purchases it. Your figures would only make sense if 100 channels were actually making 100 different prime time hit programs. As it is, of those 100 channels 10 are ABC, 10 are NBC, 10 are CBS, 10 are WB, 10 are FOX, 10 are independant and 10 are PBS or community access.
Seventh, the thirty odd channels left are by sucscription only. It should be rather obvious that these channels already find subscriptions are more than adequate for producing or purchasing enough original content to stay in business.
Your entire argument is built on verbal flatulence. You may in fact be right, but your numbers are so skewed as to be meaningless to figuring out whether or not subscriptions service only is viable as the main model of television viewing.
The actual statement from the majority opinion is: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
That single omitted word, "falsely", offers an enormous difference in meaning. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre if there is a fire is probably protected speech, even if it might not be the most intelligent manner of addressing a clear and present danger.
This means that they are not ubiquitous.
I probably know a few dozen people with hand held computing devices. None of them own a PocketPC. One owns a Sharp Zaurus.
They need to be periodically reset. Also consider that twenty to thirty hours of use translates to several months for most (not all) users of hand held computers.
This depends on the meaning of frequent and reboot. Consider:
I'll gladly concede that using a reboot as a trouble-shooting device was an area heavily pioneered by help desks supporting various flavors of Windows. However, many devices need periodic resets due to defects in software and/or hardware.
Ciaio.
Probably both, possibly neither. Your options are neither exclusive nor exhaustive.
Ciao
As if Microsoft were the only maker of software with this problem.
Here's a clue: which ubiquitous hand held device commonly needs to be reset after twenty to thirty hours of use because the software gets all munged up?
Interesting highlights:
The trasentric paper quoted Electronic Buyer's News:
The interesting elements of this:- Much of this research is funded by a DARPA contract which means it is the money of US Taxpayers at work.
- Samsung is part of the same contract.
Methinks that perhaps Samsung and IBM are using the same (or very similar) technology.The Wired article is fairly lengthy and also details the biography of Stuart Parkin. Parkin is the IBM fellow that has been driving most of the MRAM research.
Ciao.
The press release doesn't really go into detail, so I don't know how similar (or disparate) the respective IBM and Samsung solutions are. They do both have the same net effect for users: non-volatile main memory.
This is cool stuff, but what hasn't been said is that as long as operating systems and applications leak memory, there will be a need for reboots.
Ciao.
Because powerhouse graphic workshops like ILM and Henson Associates like Linux. And they can afford $8,000 pieces of software. Of course just because it's built doesn't mean they will come. Henson's Creature Shop is rumored to be quite fond of Maya on Linux.
Regards,
Lee Irenæus Malatesta
Consider Oracle running on an OS (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS/400, whatever). Do you trust the OS more or less than Oracle to have up to date journaling entries regarding the most recent transactions prior to a really bad, catasrophic event that causes an uncontrolled powering down of the server?
Anyway, visit the Oracle 9i DBA Guide to see Oracle's current capabilities in terms of working with raw partitions.
Certainly, as you state "If I have a country that doesn't know china existed, and I build a boat and go looking for lands far away, then find China, I discovered it. It doesn't mean no one elso is there, or that it didn't exist before, it just means I found someplace I never new existed." However, if you do know that China exists because you have a map from those who have gone before and you follow the map to China, you didn't discover it.
Regards,
-l
This game could clean up.
So would you believe ABC if they went on air asking you not to use TiVO or ReplayTV to zap the commercials on their broadcast because if you zap the commercials you cost them money?
The reality is, if the figures taco and hemos threw out were correct, there is only a 12% chance someone who blocks ads is costing /. money on a given page view. The remainder of the time, the person who blocks ads saves /. money because the add being viewed is not a paid ad.
Not to mention that ad rates are largely driven by number of readers of the site, not necessarily by numbers of readers of the site that view ads.
. .
Unfortunately both parts of the Ottawa Citizen article are now invisible except to paid subscribers to the Citizen. Their no-cost archive only goes back 14 days.
Regards,
-l
The first time around, while a netwinder could hypothetically save money because of its low-power consumption, in practice the premium one paid over faster, better supported hardware would have made it tough to break even over the useful life of the product.
How much did rebel.com pay for the domain name again? And for using the James Dean logo? For hot tub parties? For limos?
The variant of Linux on the Netwinder was quite old, to the point of being outdated and making it quite difficult to install other programs.
The netwinder hardware has impressed me since I first read about it. IMHO, if they would have taken the design to slightly ruggedized portables (Apple Message Book style) and PDAs and spent more money on attracting developers, they would have made a killing.
The big thing, though, is to keep from repeating the spending mistakes of the past.
Regards,
-l
Go ARM!
My second largest worry is that the attourneys general of the states will not be able to find the right people to give the code a good going over. HHopefully, someone on the caliber of Andrew Schulman who gave Microsoft an incredible amount of grief with Undocumented Windows 95 will agree to help out.
(2) Water can cause an active circuit to short itself out, possibly in a permanently descructive manner.
Have a day,
-l