My 13 year-old son spends an inordinate amount of time in school studying and practicing for a thing called a TAKS test here in Texas.
When I was in Texas, they didn't have TAKS yet, but did have TAAS. I don't think the TAAS affected the students in any way, but it was the big thing to determine the schools' funding. You can imagine the pressure on the administration and faculty to improve TAAS scores, so most teachers really strongly taught to the TAAS.
Now, the better teachers didn't. They would be sure to cover the areas the TAAS tests, sure-- which was the intention of the TAAS to begin with. I'm glad I had a lot of the better teachers!m
I've always wanted to see a study of whether states with programs like TAAS, AIMS, MCAS, etc. produce students who do any better in college than those states that don't.
This doesn't mean 360 degree coverage is a good idea - it will decrease the ratio of direct to reflected sound.
That was supposed to be the main point of my post, but I'm off my game today. Thanks for the insight.
Therefore the walls and ceiling receive a very uneven frequency response, which they pass on to the listeners. If you compensate this with equalization, life still isn't perfect because the direct sounds seem quite different in localization and character from the reflected sounds.
While I agree with what you say, it sounds like this is would be an argument against 360 degree coverage. Wouldn't that amplify the effect, meaning that you'd have to do more with the eq?
But there will be anomalies - for example, at the crossover point the woofer and horn will conspire to throw a narrow beam of sound in the vertical plane.
Can you elaborate on this point? If the question is whether or not 360 degrees is a good thing, then these anomalies would seem to be the biggest determining factor.
I can see a few crossover effects. For example, cancellation effects at the crossover point would mean you end up with a very choppy response pattern as you move in space; some points would be canceled, others reinforced. My radio mind is thinking of the radiation pattern of a 1/4-wave antenna. I guess that additional reflected sound would help to dampen this effect.
Maybe the tradeoff is to use a 360 degree design that may muddy the sound throughout the range, but match the timbre near crossover points with the rest.
I guess I'm just having a hard time accepting the idea that, after being trained to minimize reflections and go for direct sound, a 360 degree radiator will minimize the effects of reflections.
Yes, you're right of course. This is what I get for posting right after I get up in the morning.
I was thinking of the case where the reflection distance (both ways) is equal to (k+1/2)l (where l is the wavelength and k is an integer). This would (if I'm still not hazy, and after last night I may be) produce an effect that the mic wouldn't detect. However, it also would, I believe, not produce the ickyness that standing waves do.
Even so, given the strange effects that bass has (standing waves being a degenerate case), I don't think that measuring the bass at the point of the loudspeaker is going to produce predictable results in a real-world environment.
Acoustic lensing has been used for quite some time. I'm also not convinced that equal distribution is a good thing. With the traditional sound cone, most of the sound is directed at the listener. With equal dispersion, a lot the sound is being reflected. This means it's being muddied on reflection, and you have delay issues.
Regarding ABC: One of the biggest problems in bass is the standing wave. A standing wave is inaudible at one part of the room, but overpowering in another. One aspect of a standing wave is that it has no effect at the speaker.
Now, using a mic for calibration is a good thing. The Pioneer Elite VSX-45TX reciever, for example, can be hooked up to a mic that is placed at the listening position. It can then calibrate itself for delay, levels, and per-channel eq. That accommodates most room dynamic problems as well as they can be, at least by preprocessing. But if your subwoofer seems to have a screwy response curve, then no preprocessing is going to make it right-- you have to actually stand up and move it.
How about just building an audio mixer? IIRC, Forrest Mims's "Engineers Notebook" (the one on op-amps, I think) has a multi-channel mixer that allows for an arbitrary number of inputs. This way, your MP3s don't stop when you go to work on your laptop, etc.
A lot of Lisp people are gravitating towards Python-- mostly because it's a good programming language that offers a lot of what Lisp offers without the stigma attached to Lisp. Over the last ten years, programming languages have started to approach Lisp; Graham writes about it in Revenge of the Nerds. From this:
You could translate simple Lisp programs into Python line for line. It's 2002, and programming languages have almost caught up with 1958.
I, and the Perl-oriented students in my Lisp class, are convinced that Perl 6 is shaped the way it is because Larry Wall looked at Lisp and thought, "Hey, that's good!"
That's good for who needs this. As for why, the NSS code works by dynamically loading the necessary backends. That's presumably why a dynamic/bin and/sbin are needed.
So, my question is, why are/bin and/sbin traditionally static? Gordon's patch pretty much just sets them to dynamic linkage, and puts some libs and rtld in/lib. I'd think that if having/bin and/sbin dynamically linked was kosher, tho, that they would be. So I'm a little worried about this patch.
I made my own CA, and made certs that I can put on other computers I used. (The details of this are discussed extensively online; google for something like "howto ca openssl".)
Then I told Apache to proxy to listen on a separate port (8126), and require a cert signed by my CA. This was forwarded to tivoweb.
Note that you can't easily use name-based virtual hosts instead of a unique port, since the host being requested isn't available until after SSL negotiation is complete.
Most of the boilerplate SSL options have been omitted here; copy whatever you feel is relevant from your existing <VirtualHost _default_:443> section. As always, RTFM before proceeding. Most of this is fairly standard client-side apache+mod_ssl authentication stuff.
<IfDefine SSL> Listen 8126 <VirtualHost *:8126> SSLEngine on ProxyPass / http://tivo.piquan.org/ ProxyPassReverse / http://tivo.piquan.org/ <Location/> SSLRequireSSL SSLVerifyClient require SSLRequire ( %{SSL_CIPHER} !~ m/^(EXP|NULL)/ \ and %{SSL_CLIENT_VERIFY} eq "SUCCESS" \ and %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_Email} =~ m/[.@]piquan\.org$/i \ and %{SSL_CLIENT_I_DN_CN} eq "Piquan's CA" \ and %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_O} eq "Piquan" ) </Location> </VirtualHost> </IfDefine& g t;
And that last line is getting hosed by/.; it's supposed to be </IfDefine>
Favorite commentaries: Free Enterprise; I may have heard that commentary more times than the actual soundtrack. When Joss gives a running commentary on the Buffy and Angel DVDs: great stuff! The interviews with Joss are less interesting because of bad editing, but his running commentaries are great.
I don't follow. Are you using a different definition of "shareware" than I'm used to?
My definition is that it's a program that the author intends to be distributed widely by its users, etc. The documentation, about box, banner screen, or something indicates that, if keep using the program after trying it out, please send the author $X.
How does having this on warez sites-- or any other distribution medium-- hurt you? I'd think it would just help, since with shareware, you want a wide distribution.
The determination is made in a court of law, but the guidelines are that, to be protected, a character must be "distinctly delineated". The existing stories must develop the character. The character must constitute original expression, ie, it's not a generic character. The degree of development required to create a protected character varies. Some courts require that the character "constitutes the story being told". In the case of a cartoon, though, look to Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119 (2d. Cir. 1930), in which the court held that the character only needs a detailed visual image.
You can read more about this in a number of fan fiction FAQs.
I'm not weighing in an opinion on whether illegal copying is right or wrong, but your argument has problems.
However, if the seller doesn't want to sell me a copy, I'll just steal it instead.
The MPAA/RIAA justify their losses due to piracy by implying that each copy represents a lost sale. In your widget scenario, you have lost a widget. If the widget were data (and was not secret), then you have lost nothing at all from somebody copying. You can't even use the MPAA's argument of losing a sale, because you have already refused the sale at any price.
If you have refused the sale, then how can you claim a loss was incurred from somebody making a copy? If there is something that caused him to gain, and nobody to lose-- even the loss of a potential sale-- then how can this be considered wrong?
While I like the article, it doesn't link to anything for the reader to make their own comparison.
The EFF has a Super-DMCA archive, with analyses, the templates the MPAA gives to state legislatures, and info on the individual states.
The MPAA has an anti-piracy statement, and press releases relating to legislation , but I was unable to find anything specifically discussing these particular laws after a brief search.
This is close, and better than most descriptions I've seen, but there's a few things I'd like to clarify.
-STABLE is not opened from the -RELEASE. On a major revision (eg, the 4.x series), the tree is developed-- usually with a release or two-- and then -STABLE is brought up to a stable release. That's why, at the moment, there are 5.x releases, but -STABLE is still on the 4.x series.
At some point-- probably 5.2-- then -STABLE will be brought up to the 5.x tree, starting at (for example) 5.2.
-RELEASE isn't really a development branch; it's a tag. However, each release does have its security patch branch, such as 4.7-RELENG.
Yes, of course. The "got the message" line was
left over from an edit and should have been deleted; I didn't mean to imply
that the ISP deserved it or anything of the kind. Of course ISPs are
often the biggest victims of spam, and (as recent
actions show) are sometimes the ones most likely to fight
it.
Regarding cross vs multiposting: I had an impression of a memory
of Green Card angering me more than anything else I had seen, in a large part because of the multiposting. I didn't think that the "Jesus" spam had been multiposted, but I guess I was wrong.
I wonder why Green Card stands out so much more clearly in my memory than the "Jesus" spam. With GC, I recall clearly where I was, at which terminal, who else was in the room, and what they were doing. But the "Jesus" spam made much less of a dent in my memory. Not sure why, tho.
It's been a long time, and I don't have anything to back up my memory, so bear with me.
The others you mentioned were more confined than Green Card. Also, Green Card was multiposted, not cross-posted.
However, we (the denizens of Usenet) did shut down Green Card's ISP-- within hours of the spam, if my memory of the night serves. (I can tell you which terminal of which terminal room I was at.)
The ISP was deluged with complaints. They had to upgrade their mailserver, and I seem to recall them having to offload either bandwidth or mail, I forget which.
That night, they were begging the Net to quit. They got the message.
I don't recall anything prior to Green Card with the same scope and response.
Dolby Digital has better compression than DTS, but... audiophiles insist that they can hear a difference.
I've done a fair bit of comparison between the two technologies, just listening. Here's what I've decided. It's all in the quality of the sound engineer.
Consider a good sound engineer, of the sort that produces most mainstream movies. I'm talking about things like Princess Bride, Fifth Element (okay, bad example), Buffy, or Shrek. He can produce better sound using DTS than Dolby. He gets better fidelity and separation with DTS. When he works on a DVD, he'll put down both a Dolby and a DTS track.
Now consider an excellent sound engineer. He works for Skywalker Sound, 4MC, or somebody like that. He can make Dolby do wonders. He can bring life to the format. And-- this is the big one-- he can do more with Dolby than he can with DTS.
I really do think that Dolby is the better format, but it takes a better engineer to realize its potential. For the average engineer, I think that DTS gives better results.
3. Maltron and similar devices do NOT address the mousing (the builtin touchpad is a poor excuse).
No, but Emacs does.:-)
Seriously, I spend almost all my time in Emacs. I so rarely have to touch the mouse, because it's so much faster and easier to use the navigation commands! My hands stay glued to my Maltron (go, Maltron!).
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My 13 year-old son spends an inordinate amount of time in school studying and practicing for a thing called a TAKS test here in Texas.
When I was in Texas, they didn't have TAKS yet, but did have TAAS. I don't think the TAAS affected the students in any way, but it was the big thing to determine the schools' funding. You can imagine the pressure on the administration and faculty to improve TAAS scores, so most teachers really strongly taught to the TAAS.
Now, the better teachers didn't. They would be sure to cover the areas the TAAS tests, sure-- which was the intention of the TAAS to begin with. I'm glad I had a lot of the better teachers!m
I've always wanted to see a study of whether states with programs like TAAS, AIMS, MCAS, etc. produce students who do any better in college than those states that don't.
This doesn't mean 360 degree coverage is a good idea - it will decrease the ratio of direct to reflected sound.
That was supposed to be the main point of my post, but I'm off my game today. Thanks for the insight.
Therefore the walls and ceiling receive a very uneven frequency response, which they pass on to the listeners. If you compensate this with equalization, life still isn't perfect because the direct sounds seem quite different in localization and character from the reflected sounds.
While I agree with what you say, it sounds like this is would be an argument against 360 degree coverage. Wouldn't that amplify the effect, meaning that you'd have to do more with the eq?
But there will be anomalies - for example, at the crossover point the woofer and horn will conspire to throw a narrow beam of sound in the vertical plane.
Can you elaborate on this point? If the question is whether or not 360 degrees is a good thing, then these anomalies would seem to be the biggest determining factor.
I can see a few crossover effects. For example, cancellation effects at the crossover point would mean you end up with a very choppy response pattern as you move in space; some points would be canceled, others reinforced. My radio mind is thinking of the radiation pattern of a 1/4-wave antenna. I guess that additional reflected sound would help to dampen this effect.
Maybe the tradeoff is to use a 360 degree design that may muddy the sound throughout the range, but match the timbre near crossover points with the rest.
I guess I'm just having a hard time accepting the idea that, after being trained to minimize reflections and go for direct sound, a 360 degree radiator will minimize the effects of reflections.
Yes, you're right of course. This is what I get for posting right after I get up in the morning.
I was thinking of the case where the reflection distance (both ways) is equal to (k+1/2)l (where l is the wavelength and k is an integer). This would (if I'm still not hazy, and after last night I may be) produce an effect that the mic wouldn't detect. However, it also would, I believe, not produce the ickyness that standing waves do.
Even so, given the strange effects that bass has (standing waves being a degenerate case), I don't think that measuring the bass at the point of the loudspeaker is going to produce predictable results in a real-world environment.
I'm having a hard time swallowing this.
Acoustic lensing has been used for quite some time. I'm also not convinced that equal distribution is a good thing. With the traditional sound cone, most of the sound is directed at the listener. With equal dispersion, a lot the sound is being reflected. This means it's being muddied on reflection, and you have delay issues.
Regarding ABC: One of the biggest problems in bass is the standing wave. A standing wave is inaudible at one part of the room, but overpowering in another. One aspect of a standing wave is that it has no effect at the speaker.
Now, using a mic for calibration is a good thing. The Pioneer Elite VSX-45TX reciever, for example, can be hooked up to a mic that is placed at the listening position. It can then calibrate itself for delay, levels, and per-channel eq. That accommodates most room dynamic problems as well as they can be, at least by preprocessing. But if your subwoofer seems to have a screwy response curve, then no preprocessing is going to make it right-- you have to actually stand up and move it.
How about just building an audio mixer? IIRC, Forrest Mims's "Engineers Notebook" (the one on op-amps, I think) has a multi-channel mixer that allows for an arbitrary number of inputs. This way, your MP3s don't stop when you go to work on your laptop, etc.
If only there were good UNIX API bindings for it, and a good graphical toolkit...
What are your criteria here?
A lot of Lisp people are gravitating towards Python-- mostly because it's a good programming language that offers a lot of what Lisp offers without the stigma attached to Lisp. Over the last ten years, programming languages have started to approach Lisp; Graham writes about it in Revenge of the Nerds. From this:
I, and the Perl-oriented students in my Lisp class, are convinced that Perl 6 is shaped the way it is because Larry Wall looked at Lisp and thought, "Hey, that's good!"
That's good for who needs this. As for why, the NSS code works by dynamically loading the necessary backends. That's presumably why a dynamic /bin and /sbin are needed.
So, my question is, why are /bin and /sbin traditionally static? Gordon's patch pretty much just sets them to dynamic linkage, and puts some libs and rtld in /lib. I'd think that if having /bin and /sbin dynamically linked was kosher, tho, that they would be. So I'm a little worried about this patch.
My normal response is, "You bought these movies from great artists and directors, and your pan&scan doesn't show all of them, what a waste!"
I made my own CA, and made certs that I can put on other computers I used. (The details of this are discussed extensively online; google for something like "howto ca openssl".)
Then I told Apache to proxy to listen on a separate port (8126), and require a cert signed by my CA. This was forwarded to tivoweb.
Note that you can't easily use name-based virtual hosts instead of a unique port, since the host being requested isn't available until after SSL negotiation is complete.
Most of the boilerplate SSL options have been omitted here; copy whatever you feel is relevant from your existing <VirtualHost _default_:443> section. As always, RTFM before proceeding. Most of this is fairly standard client-side apache+mod_ssl authentication stuff.
And that last line is getting hosed by /.; it's supposed to be </IfDefine>
Favorite commentaries: Free Enterprise; I may have heard that commentary more times than the actual soundtrack. When Joss gives a running commentary on the Buffy and Angel DVDs: great stuff! The interviews with Joss are less interesting because of bad editing, but his running commentaries are great.
I do a whole lot with GNU Emacs, but never really got good at Zmacs. So I'm curious: in what ways do you feel that it's more advanced?
You owe them a sale and are not paying up.
In the hypothesis under examination, the seller has refused to make a sale at any price.
Again, my post was simply pointing out a flaw with the AC's argument in that context. It was not meant to weigh in an opinion on the general case.
I don't follow. Are you using a different definition of "shareware" than I'm used to?
My definition is that it's a program that the author intends to be distributed widely by its users, etc. The documentation, about box, banner screen, or something indicates that, if keep using the program after trying it out, please send the author $X.
How does having this on warez sites-- or any other distribution medium-- hurt you? I'd think it would just help, since with shareware, you want a wide distribution.
IANAL. The following is for the US only; YMMV.
The determination is made in a court of law, but the guidelines are that, to be protected, a character must be "distinctly delineated". The existing stories must develop the character. The character must constitute original expression, ie, it's not a generic character. The degree of development required to create a protected character varies. Some courts require that the character "constitutes the story being told". In the case of a cartoon, though, look to Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119 (2d. Cir. 1930), in which the court held that the character only needs a detailed visual image.
You can read more about this in a number of fan fiction FAQs.
You may not want to buy a movie for $20 today,
In the scenario under debate, the seller has refused a sale at any price. It's not "want to", it's "can't".
I'm not weighing in an opinion on whether illegal copying is right or wrong, but your argument has problems.
However, if the seller doesn't want to sell me a copy, I'll just steal it instead.
The MPAA/RIAA justify their losses due to piracy by implying that each copy represents a lost sale. In your widget scenario, you have lost a widget. If the widget were data (and was not secret), then you have lost nothing at all from somebody copying. You can't even use the MPAA's argument of losing a sale, because you have already refused the sale at any price.
If you have refused the sale, then how can you claim a loss was incurred from somebody making a copy? If there is something that caused him to gain, and nobody to lose-- even the loss of a potential sale-- then how can this be considered wrong?
While I like the article, it doesn't link to anything for the reader to make their own comparison.
The EFF has a Super-DMCA archive, with analyses, the templates the MPAA gives to state legislatures, and info on the individual states.
The MPAA has an anti-piracy statement, and press releases relating to legislation , but I was unable to find anything specifically discussing these particular laws after a brief search.
This is close, and better than most descriptions I've seen, but there's a few things I'd like to clarify.
-STABLE is not opened from the -RELEASE. On a major revision (eg, the 4.x series), the tree is developed-- usually with a release or two-- and then -STABLE is brought up to a stable release. That's why, at the moment, there are 5.x releases, but -STABLE is still on the 4.x series.
At some point-- probably 5.2-- then -STABLE will be brought up to the 5.x tree, starting at (for example) 5.2.
-RELEASE isn't really a development branch; it's a tag. However, each release does have its security patch branch, such as 4.7-RELENG.
Yes, of course. The "got the message" line was left over from an edit and should have been deleted; I didn't mean to imply that the ISP deserved it or anything of the kind. Of course ISPs are often the biggest victims of spam, and (as recent actions show) are sometimes the ones most likely to fight it.
Regarding cross vs multiposting: I had an impression of a memory of Green Card angering me more than anything else I had seen, in a large part because of the multiposting. I didn't think that the "Jesus" spam had been multiposted, but I guess I was wrong.
I wonder why Green Card stands out so much more clearly in my memory than the "Jesus" spam. With GC, I recall clearly where I was, at which terminal, who else was in the room, and what they were doing. But the "Jesus" spam made much less of a dent in my memory. Not sure why, tho.
The others you mentioned were more confined than Green Card. Also, Green Card was multiposted, not cross-posted.
However, we (the denizens of Usenet) did shut down Green Card's ISP-- within hours of the spam, if my memory of the night serves. (I can tell you which terminal of which terminal room I was at.) The ISP was deluged with complaints. They had to upgrade their mailserver, and I seem to recall them having to offload either bandwidth or mail, I forget which. That night, they were begging the Net to quit. They got the message.
I don't recall anything prior to Green Card with the same scope and response.
Dolby Digital has better compression than DTS, but... audiophiles insist that they can hear a difference.
I've done a fair bit of comparison between the two technologies, just listening. Here's what I've decided. It's all in the quality of the sound engineer.
Consider a good sound engineer, of the sort that produces most mainstream movies. I'm talking about things like Princess Bride, Fifth Element (okay, bad example), Buffy, or Shrek. He can produce better sound using DTS than Dolby. He gets better fidelity and separation with DTS. When he works on a DVD, he'll put down both a Dolby and a DTS track.
Now consider an excellent sound engineer. He works for Skywalker Sound, 4MC, or somebody like that. He can make Dolby do wonders. He can bring life to the format. And-- this is the big one-- he can do more with Dolby than he can with DTS.
I really do think that Dolby is the better format, but it takes a better engineer to realize its potential. For the average engineer, I think that DTS gives better results.
Because a long time ago, they agreed not to enter that business. Hit google, find out why "sosumi" was their first sound's name.
Excellent, a platform to power a robotic Vigor and take over the world! Bwahahaha!
3. Maltron and similar devices do NOT address the mousing (the builtin touchpad is a poor excuse).
No, but Emacs does. :-)
Seriously, I spend almost all my time in Emacs. I so rarely have to touch the mouse, because it's so much faster and easier to use the navigation commands! My hands stay glued to my Maltron (go, Maltron!).