...I am simply stating is that when a test is conducted properly, you will not be able to tell them apart....Every other test conducted in such experiments have failed to produce people who can discern a difference.
Really? Are you saying that the quality of vinyl can actually compare with that of a CD?
Perhaps if a given record had never been played with a stylus before and you had amplifiers that responded strongest to the "best" frequencies of a record you might get a decent sound without ugly pops and hissing but every (non-scientific) test I've done myself has had the same conclusion:
True that humans can't hear much over 20KHz, but there are people who believe harmonics between two waveforms above 20Khz can be heard on some level, even if not consciously.
Sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum. End of story.
Of course you're right, but is space in the SW universe a vacuum? Notice how the ships move, rolling, pitching, yawing like they're in an atmosphere.
I prefer the feedback theory though which I think I remember reading in a Zahn novel. I tend to explain it thus:
All space-faring vessels in the SW universe are equipped with a sensor that picks up various properties of close bodies - mass, proximity, engine signatures, energy discharges etc, and relay them through the means of 'feedback' speakers to the cockpit. You can kind of use this to explain the cheesy space-invaders sounds heard when the falcon flys through the 'asteroid collision' remains of Alderaan in ANH. Sufficiently well-placed speakers would allow a pilot to identify what objects were and where in 3D space they are. In combat situations auditory feedback is very important as the eyes are fully occupied. Those headphones in the Death Star escape sequence would seem to back that up, if they're not just for Han and Luke to chatter.
For ex-ship space shots, the camera is located in a box or vessel with this feedback facility if you like.
I think you'll find that's true for nearly every movie ever made - the experience is better if you drop everything and devote every ounce of your attention to it for the full duration.
I bought the OT DVD set when it came out in 2004, and would have considered buying these ones too if:
1) They fixed the plethora of problems introduced by doing a rushed DVD transfer by Lowry Digital. Examples that stand out include forgetting to take lightsabre colours into account when colour-correcting scenes and flipping music channels. From what I gather Lowry had 30 days per movie.
2) They included the classic trilogy, obtained from film material from the 1997 film restoration of the OT for the DVD transfer. It seems they underwent a major film restoration process to get the best possible source material for the Special Edition. Surely they preserved that before Lucas started scribbling on it with new effects.
So as it stands I won't be buying these. They've done nothing to fix the Special Edition, and the Classic Edition looks no better than on Laserdisc.
The writing has been on the wall for years now, and it's not going to get any better for mp3 users. Fraunhofer/Thomson have fully disclosed since day one that they hold the patents (unethical as the patent system that permitted them may be) and intend to pursue licence "breakers". Not that it matters, since much better codecs exist that aren't so encumbered.
In this day and age there's no good reason for anyone to still be using mp3.
Turning off that feature results in much quicker page rendering (verified with FasterFox). Text resizing is much faster too.
Switching between tabs is a bit faster (say 0.5 seconds now rather than 1.0 before) but still not as fast as under windows.
The docs included in/usr/bin/firefox is interesting too: ## ## In order to better support certain scripts (such as Indic and some CJK ## scripts), Fedora builds its Firefox, with permission from the Mozilla ## Corporation, with the Pango system as its text renderer. This change ## is known to break rendering of MathML, and may negatively impact ## performance on some pages. To disable the use of Pango, set ## MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 in your environment before launching Firefox. ## #
Have they done anything to fix performance on linux builds?
It's sad watching FF on a dual boot system run significantly slower under linux than under window on the same machine. Especially when other linux applications fly.
And it's not even just DNS lookups. Simply switching tabs can take up to a second (?!) under linux whereas under windows it's 0.2 seconds (the perceived direct interaction threshold for most people).
My general rule of thumb is - the more you spend initially on the printer, the less the consumables usually are. That $80 inkjet will use $100 worth of ink in a year, but my $400 laser printer uses about $40 of toner a year...You can either pay now, or pay later...
That has been my experience too. If you're printing any decent volume my advice is to stay well clear of the HP Laserjet 1000 models and go for the next model up. The cheaper models have a nasty habit of curling paper and overheating if left to run large print jobs too.
Don't print B&W documents on colour printers -the Black toner in them is optimized to make photos look good and is significantly more expensive than toner for mono printers.
Here's the results of a recent audit I did of HP toner costs in NZ cents/page
I keep seeing this repeated but don't really know where it came from.
I realise it's an important component, but is instilling fear really the primary overbearing goal of terrorism? Because if it is, then we'd better start calling what's going on something else.
Are you still speaking English at your job? Then they haven't won yet. Does your SO wear a burkuh? No? Are you still free to choose your religion or lack thereof? Is pork and ham still on the menu in your country?
You might want to look at Zero Point energy at some point. It seems there is more energy in the universe now than 100 years ago due to a couple of tiny plates being banged together by the Casimir effect.
Of course it all depends on your definition of Universe and where it begins and ends I guess.
Off-topic for this article, but relevant to this site:
What's up with Slashdot tags these days? Articles seem to have few if any tags whereas a couple of months ago every article had 3 or 4.
You can even see informative, relevant tags listed in the Examples when you expand tags for any given article so they are still being submitted.
Supposedly the rate of tag 'submissions' has declined after the initial novelty wore off, but I would have thought SlashCode would compensate by displaying the top 4 tags once each one passed a troll-filter threshold of, say, 2 occurences.
Didn't the same thing happen to OpenOffice.org group, forcing them to adopt the silly '.org' to their name? IIRC the trademark "Open Office" was bought by a Brazilian company at the behest of Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
...I am simply stating is that when a test is conducted properly, you will not be able to tell them apart. ...Every other test conducted in such experiments have failed to produce people who can discern a difference.
Really? Are you saying that the quality of vinyl can actually compare with that of a CD?
Perhaps if a given record had never been played with a stylus before and you had amplifiers that responded strongest to the "best" frequencies of a record you might get a decent sound without ugly pops and hissing but every (non-scientific) test I've done myself has had the same conclusion:
Compared to a CD, vinyl sounds like crap.
True that humans can't hear much over 20KHz, but there are people who believe harmonics between two waveforms above 20Khz can be heard on some level, even if not consciously.
Man someone really needs to tell Dylan Avery about this!
Today being International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ya bunch o' scallywags.
I wonder if there's such thing as a 1984 overture?
Sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum. End of story.
Of course you're right, but is space in the SW universe a vacuum? Notice how the ships move, rolling, pitching, yawing like they're in an atmosphere.
I prefer the feedback theory though which I think I remember reading in a Zahn novel. I tend to explain it thus:
All space-faring vessels in the SW universe are equipped with a sensor that picks up various properties of close bodies - mass, proximity, engine signatures, energy discharges etc, and relay them through the means of 'feedback' speakers to the cockpit. You can kind of use this to explain the cheesy space-invaders sounds heard when the falcon flys through the 'asteroid collision' remains of Alderaan in ANH. Sufficiently well-placed speakers would allow a pilot to identify what objects were and where in 3D space they are. In combat situations auditory feedback is very important as the eyes are fully occupied. Those headphones in the Death Star escape sequence would seem to back that up, if they're not just for Han and Luke to chatter.
For ex-ship space shots, the camera is located in a box or vessel with this feedback facility if you like.
I think you'll find that's true for nearly every movie ever made - the experience is better if you drop everything and devote every ounce of your attention to it for the full duration.
I bought the OT DVD set when it came out in 2004, and would have considered buying these ones too if:
1) They fixed the plethora of problems introduced by doing a rushed DVD transfer by Lowry Digital. Examples that stand out include forgetting to take lightsabre colours into account when colour-correcting scenes and flipping music channels. From what I gather Lowry had 30 days per movie.
2) They included the classic trilogy, obtained from film material from the 1997 film restoration of the OT for the DVD transfer. It seems they underwent a major film restoration process to get the best possible source material for the Special Edition. Surely they preserved that before Lucas started scribbling on it with new effects.
So as it stands I won't be buying these. They've done nothing to fix the Special Edition, and the Classic Edition looks no better than on Laserdisc.
I'm tagging this one "itoldyouso".
The writing has been on the wall for years now, and it's not going to get any better for mp3 users. Fraunhofer/Thomson have fully disclosed since day one that they hold the patents (unethical as the patent system that permitted them may be) and intend to pursue licence "breakers". Not that it matters, since much better codecs exist that aren't so encumbered.
In this day and age there's no good reason for anyone to still be using mp3.
THANK YOU!
/usr/bin/firefox is interesting too:
Turning off that feature results in much quicker page rendering (verified with FasterFox). Text resizing is much faster too.
Switching between tabs is a bit faster (say 0.5 seconds now rather than 1.0 before) but still not as fast as under windows.
The docs included in
##
## In order to better support certain scripts (such as Indic and some CJK
## scripts), Fedora builds its Firefox, with permission from the Mozilla
## Corporation, with the Pango system as its text renderer. This change
## is known to break rendering of MathML, and may negatively impact
## performance on some pages. To disable the use of Pango, set
## MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 in your environment before launching Firefox.
##
#
So who's up for tagging this one "youtube"?
Have they done anything to fix performance on linux builds?
It's sad watching FF on a dual boot system run significantly slower under linux than under window on the same machine. Especially when other linux applications fly.
And it's not even just DNS lookups. Simply switching tabs can take up to a second (?!) under linux whereas under windows it's 0.2 seconds (the perceived direct interaction threshold for most people).
That has been my experience too. If you're printing any decent volume my advice is to stay well clear of the HP Laserjet 1000 models and go for the next model up. The cheaper models have a nasty habit of curling paper and overheating if left to run large print jobs too.
Don't print B&W documents on colour printers -the Black toner in them is optimized to make photos look good and is significantly more expensive than toner for mono printers.
Here's the results of a recent audit I did of HP toner costs in NZ cents/page
4350TN (large toner) 1.8
(small toner) 2.4
5M 2.4
2100TN 2.8
4000N 2.4
1100A 3.4
6/6M/6MP 3.3
1200 3.6
1015 4.0
3700 black 4.5
3700 per colour 4.5
1000 4.5
All griping aside I'm still very grateful that inkjets are now just a bad memory.
Gosh, this post got picked up by the lameness filter. And I don't even own an iPod.
What is a junk character anyway? A space? I think the lameness filter really needs a serious overhaul if one can't post a simple table.
I keep seeing this repeated but don't really know where it came from.
I realise it's an important component, but is instilling fear really the primary overbearing goal of terrorism? Because if it is, then we'd better start calling what's going on something else.
Are you still speaking English at your job? Then they haven't won yet.
Does your SO wear a burkuh? No?
Are you still free to choose your religion or lack thereof?
Is pork and ham still on the menu in your country?
Then they haven't won yet.
Is it 2008 already?
I bet you also design web sites that only work in Internet Explorer.
You forgot the top layer in the OSI stack:
8: Operator
So many network problems I've had to troubleshoot have been tracked to layer 8.
Unfortunately it's also the hardest layer to debug.
Right, I'm tagging this 'notprojectorion' after it got my hopes up.
Not a problem - if they didn't sign an NDA beforehand then the firefox devs have agreed to nothing and are compelled to cease development of nothing.
If MS themselves disclosed the source code then they've broken what is most likely their own trade secret and copyright no longer applies.
You might want to look at Zero Point energy at some point. It seems there is more energy in the universe now than 100 years ago due to a couple of tiny plates being banged together by the Casimir effect.
Of course it all depends on your definition of Universe and where it begins and ends I guess.
You should really check out a Joe Cell some time.
Off-topic for this article, but relevant to this site:
What's up with Slashdot tags these days? Articles seem to have few if any tags whereas a couple of months ago every article had 3 or 4.
You can even see informative, relevant tags listed in the Examples when you expand tags for any given article so they are still being submitted.
Supposedly the rate of tag 'submissions' has declined after the initial novelty wore off, but I would have thought SlashCode would compensate by displaying the top 4 tags once each one passed a troll-filter threshold of, say, 2 occurences.
They're not green are they?
Didn't the same thing happen to OpenOffice.org group, forcing them to adopt the silly '.org' to their name? IIRC the trademark "Open Office" was bought by a Brazilian company at the behest of Microsoft.
:)
How would virtualdub.org sound?