typical word durations in spontaneously spoken English are about 300 msec
Out of curiosity, how many syllables do you figure are in the average word in spontaneous production? Is it just a derived average from a corpus, or...? I don't do speech recognition, but I'm in grad school in linguistics (and a certificate in NLP), and find this stuff fascinating.
It is the more dramatic and grammatically correct phrasing that Armstrong, now 76, has often said was the version he transmitted to NASA's Mission Control for broadcast to worldwide television.
What does the authorm mean by "grammatically correct phrasing"? Or is it "more...grammatically correct phrasing"? And still, what the hell does the author mean by that? "That's one small step for man" is a perfectly grammatical utterance. How is "That's one small step for a man" any more grammatical? Becuase it has another article? Whoopee.
[H]is global audience heard his comment without the "a," making it "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" -- a phrase that technically gave the same meaning of humankind to "man" and "mankind."
No, it doesn't "technically" give the same meaning of humankind to "man" and "mankind". It *precisely* gives the same meaning of humankind to "man" and "mankind". Which is why I'd always interpreted the a-less version of the statement as showing an amount of poetic flair. I *like* the juxtaposition. But that's really beside the point... back to bashing the article.
According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, "One small step for a man..." in a total of 35 milliseconds, 10 times too fast for the "a" to be audible.
I hope Ford didn't say that. And I'm sure Armstrong didn't say that. Armstrong said "One small step for a man" in 35 milliseconds? As in.035 seconds? As in, um, well, you try and get it out in one thirtieth of a second and see how you do, huh? Furthermore, on what basis is 35 milliseconds too fast for a schwa (the sound that unstressed "a" would make in this utterance) to be audible? That sounds pretty reasonable to me. Was it too fast for their analog radio communications? What component of the signal chain only had a resolution of one-third of a second?
I can't speak to the study or the conclusions thereof, but the accuracy of that article was crap.
What the hell kind of reply is that? You post a disparaging link as a response to something, and in return show absolutely no capacity for indpendent thought? Geez, I guess you've won this round, regurgitator.
...my biggest question was "What the hell is up with the stupid logo they use for Firefox?" I've been an Ubuntu user pretty much from the get-go, and I've always wondered what the deal was with their logos. Honestly, I can't see myself using anything other than whatever I wind up getting from Synaptic / apt-get, but really, I think they should just acquiesce and move along.
Hitler, Stalin, Gorbachev and others, while very powerful and varyingly-sane heads of state, were still only individuals. You'll notice Sting's lyrics uses the generic/plural "Russians", which might be evocative of the idea that because Russians in general care about the well-being of their loved ones, that there may still be enough of a prevailing sentiment to override the unstable nature of crazed leaders.
Which is kind of what I hope for every day here in the US.
Agreed. I assume it would come down to people going to the Supreme Court and one side saying "nuh-uh" and one side saying "yuh-huh" and then another line-item veto law gets taken down, because that pesky Constitution is pretty explicit, like you said.
In theory, the potential is that it gives the president a chance to point to particular sections of appropriations bills and send them back to Congress for approval. I think the idea is that the line-item veto would work rather the opposite of a full veto -- Congress has to approve the line items vs. having to overturn the full veto.
Thus, theoretically, the President could return appropriations legislation with line-item vetoes for approval, presumably with the threat that if changes aren't made, a full veto could be coming.
All grandparent said is that in nearly 6 years of being the nation's chief executive, Bush has vetoed exactly one bill. That's an empirical point, and ought not to be construed as placing blame.
Grandparent also pointed out that the one bill Bush did veto was on the basis of religious grounds, which is also a thoroughly documented fact.
(As it happens, and as a disclaimer: I don't like Bush, and I do think everything bad that happens is his fault. But it's not that I don't attribute his successes to him; I simply don't think he's had any measurable successes.)
The whole point of social networking, be it on the internet or otherwise, is to be inclusive, not exclusive. If you're being exclusive, you're not networking. Either they missed the boat, or it was an incredibly poor choice of words.
That doesn't matter, though, becuase in either event, I can excoriate Microsoft and garner more karma.
I'm sure they can flag you based on the skin tone in the photo on your drivers license or passport too. Or by your just family history or name. Or where you live.
I'm so glad none of that goes on in America today.
In TFA, the prof. notes that the system is currently only tuned to professional, published writings. The reason for this is that they are A) available in massive quantities for analysis and B) have no human subjects concerns and C) use a relatively similar style sheet and register.
DHS is a long way from tuning this to be feasible for less stylistically precise, more casually-formulated forms of writing, e.g., lots of blogs, most email, nearly all IMs and chat rooms -- especially the latter three because they're (at the simplest) dyadic "two way" communications (chat rooms can be even more confusing), whereas newspapers and journals and books are written only going "one way".
I am something of a linguist, and I do have a grad certificate in NLP. Believe me, the need for a tinfoil (hat | newspaper cover | envelope) on account of NLP is not what you make it out to be. You should be far more concerned that some government person -- rather than some government computer -- is reading your email.
For many of the reasons trying to get clients to use Linux seems like a good thing, it's also not so hot.
Example: Client gets virus, client calls you. Sure, putting Linux on that machine would probably prevent a similar problem in the future, and given their computer usage, may even be feasible. But the reason people call you is because they don't want to fix anything on their own! So even if you do use a distro with good community support (I 3 (X)Ubuntu), the chances of them using a message board to resolve an issue, or not freaking out when someone suggests they install / edit / modify whatever, are slim to none.
Suddenly, instead of being the person they call because "the internet is broken" or something, you get called every damn time they get a kernel update message or something. Hurrah.
I'm certainly not going to discourage you brave souls who do want to go to the lengths of installing Linux, customized pacakge lists, whatever. More power to you, in fact... But too many people have my cell phone number for it to be practical for me!
MS hasn't "broken" their DRM. PlaysForSure devices still work.
But it doesn't even work on their own damn device, they're going to stymie every attempt for you to use the files you paid for in good faith, and the difference between the two formats doesn't just break backward-compatibility, but compatibility altogether! They did break their DRM. If Apple released a new device, broke AAC support on it, and converted iTunes to a different, noncompatible DRM, there would be demands for their heads. Microsoft's mediocrity in their multimedia performance has been a blessing for them, to that extent.
Zune is in a different division than PlaysForSure, and totally independent.
What the hell kind of monopoly are they running, anyway?
You guys have been howling for MS to be split up so as not to abuse their "monopoly"
Cite it, fanboy;) I have not said so much as a peep about wanting MS split up.
yet you're still bitching.
It's more than just rhetorical flair, it's a way of life!
The Zune isn't using PlaysForSure at all -- in fact, it doesn't even support it. So all your DellPod or Creative things with PFS DRM on it, um, all those songs are toast and will not run on Zune according to reports.
This is another side effect of DRM that people had talked about, but I'm not sure that we'd ever seen in the wild: The company that controls a DRM can also break that DRM. MS has done just that with Zune / PlaysForSure(orNotAtAll).
I was explaing that this is not part of the ADC process, it is part of the process (which also typically includes compression to compensate for 16bit audio's lack of amplitude resolution) of doctoring up the signal before it hits to ADC. Or at least I don't consider it part of the ADC process, I have always looked at the ADC and DAC chips as their own stage in the signal chain.
Absoultely. I was not considering the components of the signal chain individually, so that's where we were getting our -- ahem -- wires crossed;)
[T]hey all share the same root flaws. And that is the digital sampling process it self, which at that bit width and sample rate is too low of a resolution for high end auido needs. How ever, even when we do get to the point of 32bit @ 4.5 MHz audio formats you will still want a low pass (hi cut) filter before going into the ADC. Except then you would want the cut off point way up there, like 80Khz to 100Khz or so.
You'll also want a bloody big and fast hard drive when you get around to it, too. You're talking 144 Mbps audio streams!
Of course we don't call it journalism -- even they don't call it journalism! Read the F'in header. Or if that's too much all at once, take a reading course, for God's sake:
Comment No more backups, or Tivo
Comment! It's a commentary! A commentary! A commentary!
Undersample? I don't beleive that is a term I have ever heard before.
Well, now you have. It refers to using a sample rate which is less than twice the maximum frequency you wish to capture in the digital recording (e.g., the frequency exceeds the Nyquist limit). From Wikipedia:
"Undersampling, which causes aliasing, is not in general a reversible operation. Oversampling may be inefficient or wasteful, but it is also reversible, meaning that no information is lost."
Second: You seem to have a misunderstanding of what the term "lowpass filter" means. Lowpass filters do not attenuate lower frequencies relative to the cutoff, they attenuate higher frequencies relative to the cut off. That is to say, they allow "low" frequencies to "pass". So what you have on your AD converters is a lowpass filter which prevents artifacting from using too low a sampling rate to reconstruct the waveform. On your turntables, however, you're concerned about low-freq electromagnetic noise in the signal, so you use a highpass filter.
Actually, there is no "cutoff" in the sampling process it self.
In any good A -> D conversion, there is a lowpass filter, right? Otherwise you can't digitally capture the waveform and end up undersampling, which sounds bonkers.
1. Props to grandparent, who realized, unlike great-grandparent, that althought you *can* tow a boat with a Buick if it's got a ball hitch, that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Make sure you have the right tool for the job, and there's no way a six or seven (or eight or nine) year old computer is up to the task of running one of the modern, big-ass DEs.
2. Re parent: I am running XFCE now, actually biding my time till I risk upgrading the system to Edgy (Dapper++). The XFCE 4.4 release really looks like it's fixed all my major qualms with the system. If you take a little time to get it set up properly, XFCE shares all the major components of the GNOME look and feel, just running a little lighter. I'm super-pleased with how I have things set up now, which is so close to GNOME, actually, that my boyfriend didn't realize anything had changed other than the window decorations.
But still, you can be good and damn sure that the natural outcome of a machine "anyone" can tamper with isn't exactly good for any country with democratic aspirations.
The logical follow-up to "anyone can tamper with them" as an excuse is that whoever can do the most tampering wins. It ain't about the votes anymore, but who can fix the vote in their favor the best.
Their iTunes AAC files (which you purchase from their site) do have fairplay DRM on them but MP3s they are not.
These should *not* be confused with the AAC files you can rip from CD / convert files to via iTunes. Only files purchased from the store come in the protected format. The other ones are open and will play with, among other things, the faac/faad packages for Linux. Yes, even in Linux!
You can rip CDs all day long with iTunes to MP3s or AACs (I don't know why you would want to rip to AAC but you can) and not get a bit of DRM on those files.
I realize here you mention you can rip to AAC and not get DRM with it -- but I wanted to reiterate the point above:)
AAC is allegedly better on battery life as other commenters in this thread have noted, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Most importantly, though, AAC is qualitatively and quantitatively better at reproducing music at a given bitrate. Thus, you either get better quality at the same file size as MP3, or you can get the same quality at a lower file size, which over the course of an iPod's library, can equate to a fair amount of extra music.
Heck you can even rip to Apple Loseless mp4 without DRM. Its just that only quicktime, iTunes, and iPods only have the patent codec for them
This answers your earlier aside about why anyone would want to rip to AAC. I don't believe Apple Lossless codecs are available for Linux, however AAC certainly is. It's so cross-platform, AAC will even work with the Zune.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity, how many syllables do you figure are in the average word in spontaneous production? Is it just a derived average from a corpus, or...? I don't do speech recognition, but I'm in grad school in linguistics (and a certificate in NLP), and find this stuff fascinating.
What does the authorm mean by "grammatically correct phrasing"? Or is it "more...grammatically correct phrasing"? And still, what the hell does the author mean by that? "That's one small step for man" is a perfectly grammatical utterance. How is "That's one small step for a man" any more grammatical? Becuase it has another article? Whoopee.
No, it doesn't "technically" give the same meaning of humankind to "man" and "mankind". It *precisely* gives the same meaning of humankind to "man" and "mankind". Which is why I'd always interpreted the a-less version of the statement as showing an amount of poetic flair. I *like* the juxtaposition. But that's really beside the point... back to bashing the article.
I hope Ford didn't say that. And I'm sure Armstrong didn't say that. Armstrong said "One small step for a man" in 35 milliseconds? As in
I can't speak to the study or the conclusions thereof, but the accuracy of that article was crap.
I didn't ask. I was relaying my initial reaction. That's all.
What the hell kind of reply is that? You post a disparaging link as a response to something, and in return show absolutely no capacity for indpendent thought? Geez, I guess you've won this round, regurgitator.
...my biggest question was "What the hell is up with the stupid logo they use for Firefox?" I've been an Ubuntu user pretty much from the get-go, and I've always wondered what the deal was with their logos. Honestly, I can't see myself using anything other than whatever I wind up getting from Synaptic / apt-get, but really, I think they should just acquiesce and move along.
Hitler, Stalin, Gorbachev and others, while very powerful and varyingly-sane heads of state, were still only individuals. You'll notice Sting's lyrics uses the generic/plural "Russians", which might be evocative of the idea that because Russians in general care about the well-being of their loved ones, that there may still be enough of a prevailing sentiment to override the unstable nature of crazed leaders.
Which is kind of what I hope for every day here in the US.
Agreed. I assume it would come down to people going to the Supreme Court and one side saying "nuh-uh" and one side saying "yuh-huh" and then another line-item veto law gets taken down, because that pesky Constitution is pretty explicit, like you said.
In theory, the potential is that it gives the president a chance to point to particular sections of appropriations bills and send them back to Congress for approval. I think the idea is that the line-item veto would work rather the opposite of a full veto -- Congress has to approve the line items vs. having to overturn the full veto.
Thus, theoretically, the President could return appropriations legislation with line-item vetoes for approval, presumably with the threat that if changes aren't made, a full veto could be coming.
All grandparent said is that in nearly 6 years of being the nation's chief executive, Bush has vetoed exactly one bill. That's an empirical point, and ought not to be construed as placing blame.
Grandparent also pointed out that the one bill Bush did veto was on the basis of religious grounds, which is also a thoroughly documented fact.
(As it happens, and as a disclaimer: I don't like Bush, and I do think everything bad that happens is his fault. But it's not that I don't attribute his successes to him; I simply don't think he's had any measurable successes.)
Well, true, there's also that possibility...
MS does have an equity stake, I guess. *shrug*
The whole point of social networking, be it on the internet or otherwise, is to be inclusive, not exclusive. If you're being exclusive, you're not networking. Either they missed the boat, or it was an incredibly poor choice of words.
That doesn't matter, though, becuase in either event, I can excoriate Microsoft and garner more karma.
I'm so glad none of that goes on in America today.
In TFA, the prof. notes that the system is currently only tuned to professional, published writings. The reason for this is that they are A) available in massive quantities for analysis and B) have no human subjects concerns and C) use a relatively similar style sheet and register.
DHS is a long way from tuning this to be feasible for less stylistically precise, more casually-formulated forms of writing, e.g., lots of blogs, most email, nearly all IMs and chat rooms -- especially the latter three because they're (at the simplest) dyadic "two way" communications (chat rooms can be even more confusing), whereas newspapers and journals and books are written only going "one way".
I am something of a linguist, and I do have a grad certificate in NLP. Believe me, the need for a tinfoil (hat | newspaper cover | envelope) on account of NLP is not what you make it out to be. You should be far more concerned that some government person -- rather than some government computer -- is reading your email.
For many of the reasons trying to get clients to use Linux seems like a good thing, it's also not so hot.
Example: Client gets virus, client calls you. Sure, putting Linux on that machine would probably prevent a similar problem in the future, and given their computer usage, may even be feasible. But the reason people call you is because they don't want to fix anything on their own! So even if you do use a distro with good community support (I 3 (X)Ubuntu), the chances of them using a message board to resolve an issue, or not freaking out when someone suggests they install / edit / modify whatever, are slim to none.
Suddenly, instead of being the person they call because "the internet is broken" or something, you get called every damn time they get a kernel update message or something. Hurrah.
I'm certainly not going to discourage you brave souls who do want to go to the lengths of installing Linux, customized pacakge lists, whatever. More power to you, in fact... But too many people have my cell phone number for it to be practical for me!
But it doesn't even work on their own damn device, they're going to stymie every attempt for you to use the files you paid for in good faith, and the difference between the two formats doesn't just break backward-compatibility, but compatibility altogether! They did break their DRM. If Apple released a new device, broke AAC support on it, and converted iTunes to a different, noncompatible DRM, there would be demands for their heads. Microsoft's mediocrity in their multimedia performance has been a blessing for them, to that extent.
What the hell kind of monopoly are they running, anyway?
Cite it, fanboy
It's more than just rhetorical flair, it's a way of life!
The Zune isn't using PlaysForSure at all -- in fact, it doesn't even support it. So all your DellPod or Creative things with PFS DRM on it, um, all those songs are toast and will not run on Zune according to reports.
This is another side effect of DRM that people had talked about, but I'm not sure that we'd ever seen in the wild: The company that controls a DRM can also break that DRM. MS has done just that with Zune / PlaysForSure(orNotAtAll).
Absoultely. I was not considering the components of the signal chain individually, so that's where we were getting our -- ahem -- wires crossed
You'll also want a bloody big and fast hard drive when you get around to it, too. You're talking 144 Mbps audio streams!
Comment! It's a commentary! A commentary! A commentary!
Not journalism! A commentary!
Well, now you have. It refers to using a sample rate which is less than twice the maximum frequency you wish to capture in the digital recording (e.g., the frequency exceeds the Nyquist limit). From Wikipedia:
"Undersampling, which causes aliasing, is not in general a reversible operation. Oversampling may be inefficient or wasteful, but it is also reversible, meaning that no information is lost."
Second: You seem to have a misunderstanding of what the term "lowpass filter" means. Lowpass filters do not attenuate lower frequencies relative to the cutoff, they attenuate higher frequencies relative to the cut off. That is to say, they allow "low" frequencies to "pass". So what you have on your AD converters is a lowpass filter which prevents artifacting from using too low a sampling rate to reconstruct the waveform. On your turntables, however, you're concerned about low-freq electromagnetic noise in the signal, so you use a highpass filter.
In any good A -> D conversion, there is a lowpass filter, right? Otherwise you can't digitally capture the waveform and end up undersampling, which sounds bonkers.
Thanks for backing me up :)
1. Props to grandparent, who realized, unlike great-grandparent, that althought you *can* tow a boat with a Buick if it's got a ball hitch, that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Make sure you have the right tool for the job, and there's no way a six or seven (or eight or nine) year old computer is up to the task of running one of the modern, big-ass DEs.
2. Re parent: I am running XFCE now, actually biding my time till I risk upgrading the system to Edgy (Dapper++). The XFCE 4.4 release really looks like it's fixed all my major qualms with the system. If you take a little time to get it set up properly, XFCE shares all the major components of the GNOME look and feel, just running a little lighter. I'm super-pleased with how I have things set up now, which is so close to GNOME, actually, that my boyfriend didn't realize anything had changed other than the window decorations.
But still, you can be good and damn sure that the natural outcome of a machine "anyone" can tamper with isn't exactly good for any country with democratic aspirations.
The logical follow-up to "anyone can tamper with them" as an excuse is that whoever can do the most tampering wins. It ain't about the votes anymore, but who can fix the vote in their favor the best.
That is what I call bullshit.
These should *not* be confused with the AAC files you can rip from CD / convert files to via iTunes. Only files purchased from the store come in the protected format. The other ones are open and will play with, among other things, the faac/faad packages for Linux. Yes, even in Linux!
I realize here you mention you can rip to AAC and not get DRM with it -- but I wanted to reiterate the point above
AAC is allegedly better on battery life as other commenters in this thread have noted, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Most importantly, though, AAC is qualitatively and quantitatively better at reproducing music at a given bitrate. Thus, you either get better quality at the same file size as MP3, or you can get the same quality at a lower file size, which over the course of an iPod's library, can equate to a fair amount of extra music.
This answers your earlier aside about why anyone would want to rip to AAC. I don't believe Apple Lossless codecs are available for Linux, however AAC certainly is. It's so cross-platform, AAC will even work with the Zune.
Only if you want to vote more than once. Or for the "right people".