I have sat through hours of DVD extras and have come to the conclusion that sound effects are done from scratch by sound gurus for every single movie. It's almost like professionals ALSO don't have a huge library to draw upon
Part of the reason professionals recreate sound effects from scratch almost every time is because they want them to match their situation exactly, ie one movie may have 12 cars piling up on top of each other in a scene that takes 15 seconds, a different movie may have 15 cars taking 12 seconds -- the sound effects won't match perfectly. Or a better example may be footsteps. From my understanding, it's pretty hard to create authentic footsteps..each person has a slightly different footstep because of their weight and the way they walk, not to mention their pace varies.
Oh, I forgot to mention that during the semester-long slowdown there were often times when 'net access would go down for days on end, and once or twice it was isolated to specific dorms. There are two helpdesks, one for students and one for profs. I called the student helpdesk (which is, unfortunatly, staffed by students -- often clueless ones) to ask about and/or report outages on several occasions..the responses ranged from "yeah, I've heard from other students that the network is down but don't know anything about why or when it will come back" to "I'm online right now, the problem must be your computer. Try restarting your computer" -- after I tried accessing the internet from three different computers in that dorm.
This happened where I went to school at least once...pulled the network down for a while (days, not a week). Of course, this was right around the time where we had almost an entire semester of 'net access that could be clocked in bytes -- my downloads typically ran at under 512 bytes/sec and of course it took like 10 minutes to load a single web page. The next semester they had Packetshaper installed (but didn't get all the kinks worked out of it for a while...).
Then there was the time my newly installed Linux box was sending its anacron logs to root@the-university.org rather than root@localhost. Apparently three guys in suits came to my room (while i was out), looked at my computer set up (two desktops and a laptop, along with the appropriate networking gear), and left a message for me to call them -- my roomates were pretty shook up by it.
Why, I'm glad you came to slashdot with your question. Compaq was friendly enough to provide all the information on your support issue that you need to be a real hacker [grin].
I completely agree with Shoten in the parent post -- there is nothing to be gained by informing your school; go straight to the developers of this application. The school may not even find out about you if you don't tell them; the administrators (other than the server admin) probably won't even know about the security fix once it comes out -- administrators don't care about general security fixes from a vendor, they care a lot about a student calling them up to report being able to change your grades.
this post by Czyl also has some good advice and is worth a read.
Oh, and if they don't fix it; raise a stink (by publication) -- don't just let it fade away.
You mention Avid operators, which brings up a sore point with me.
Try explaining to a client why they should someone hire a good Avid editor for (say) $150/hr (or audio- or lighting- or camera-person) when they can have their son do their company's commercial on the family's Final Cut Pro machine with their $700 digital camera?
I'm a TV guy and very interested in where the market is going to go in the next few years. I know your comment was about music production but it's really the same thing...people who used to get paid decently can't get work because potential clients don't understand that they're paying for experience.
dB, or decibles, are the standard measurement of an audio signal's strength or amplitude. 0 is the maximum that can be handled (older analog equipment could take more; sometimes +4 or +7 db -- that's like asking someone to make it 110% louder -- you're going above what it's spec'ed to. With digital equipment you don't have much extra room above -0, usually if you hit 0 it clips -- which produces a distorted signal. Analog recordings could clip as well but generally it handled sudden peaks better than digital recordings do.
Headroom is the measurement of how much amplitude you're leaving between your loud passages and 0dB. If you're recording your band's newest song into a CD recorder (or your computer's sound card) and the input is set so that the loudest part of the recording is set to peak the meter at -20dB; you've got 20dB of headroom. See, a decible is really just a relative measurement. 0 is "max" and negative numbers get softer the smaller the number (ie, -6 is quieter than -3db).
Headroom is important because if your garage band suddenly gets excited during the recording and the drummer does his huge drum solo a lot harder than when you set the levels; he'll clip the recording.
email me if you want more information or have other questions.
Yes, they do it with songs as well as commercials, but IMO they are worse about it with commercials. (Television commercials are really bad about it, and it's especially annoying during quiet shows like X Files, where you have to turn the sound up to follow the conversations.)
This is true -- I was just reading in article a few days ago (I think it was in TV Technology magazine about how non-uniform tv audio is in volume. The article specifically referenced the author's cable company but the part about commercials is applicable to this discussion. The author measured a 30- or 40-dB variation, as I recall, in the volumes across various channels.
The parent is correct in that tv commercials are often heavily compressed, and the reason is excactly what you (and me and everyone else on the planet) are complaining about -- the commercial being louder than the rest of the program material. Selling a product on TV is [apparently] rather difficult and advertisers look for any edge to get you to notice their spot over others' -- and making their spot play back louder than anyone else's is a good way to get you to notice (or hear from the kitchen/bathroom) their product.
By the way; with hi-def and digital audio "they" are working on encoding meta-data, one of the tags would be related to the volume so that all your stations sound the same volume and all the programs and commercials would seem the same volume.
I've called in a couple of times with problems the Level 1 techs couldn't handle (once when my hard drive developed bad sectors, still under a "no questions asked" warranty. I had put Linux on a partition like 6 months before and the tech kept trying to figure out if that was to blame. Or the time when every now and then I'd get a noisy internet connection dialing in -- I traced everything at my end and the most logical conclusion was that it was a dying modem or phone line at their end [whether this is a correct assumption doesn't matter] -- I called up and very nicely asked if that were something they could check and got a dead silent space of about three seconds before they offered to talk me through re-setting up the dial up settings (which I'd already done).
anyway; now that I'm done ranting I'll make my point: I've never been bumped up to level 2; even though I was once on the phone with the tech (for the hard drive) for 45 minutes or an hour near his quitting time. I've tried various methods of socially engineering my way up and they haven't worked too well. So my question to you; how do you get escalated??
While I agree that my computer is more likely to be secure than a random public terminal when all you're concerned about protecting yourself from is Joe Cracker who is collecting credit card numbers; but if the FBI (or whatever secret government organization is out to get you this week) is really determined; they're not going to let Windows' (or your Mac or Linux boxen's) security stop them from installing whatever they want on your computer. And you'd better believe that they're not going to leave the timestamp the same on those files -- it's going to be set way in the past so you can't find it.
or call me paranoid....
Re:CDBurners not the end for high-capacity Zip dri
on
DVD Burner Round-up
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· Score: 1
You make a great point -- USB drives are great for the college market. When I was a college student (graduated this past May) I couldn't count on any computer having a working floppy disk drive -- and of those that did work, the odds of it corrupting my disks were extremely high. I can't count the number of floppies that have died at the hands of the filthy lab computers. Zips were expensive, suffered from the click of death, and not available on all computers. Solid-state USB storage would have been awesome -- no worries of what the last person had spilled on their disk or tried to shove in the drive.
I've never used rsync so I can't compare and contrast, but I'm rather happy with unison, which is like rsync (I'm told) but different (somehow).
In my configuration; I run the server on my w2k desktop (with the big drive) and use the unison client from my laptop to sync files (bookmarks, the my documents folder, etc) across the two systems. Unison detects changes and propagates them, if there is a conflict it will prompt you or can even launch diff (for ascii files, you're kinda screwed if it's binary though(1). It can be tunneled over ssh or has a built in server that can bind to whatever port you specify.
Maybe someone who knows better can explain exactly what rsync is and how it differs from unison. Regardless, the original question dealt more with networking protocols than syncronization.
1 - I guess; I've never tried to diff a binary file though.
But then again, the only proof may or may not be locked in a hanger somewhere, it's hard to tell.
True, but the thing that I question (assuming "something" happened there, which I neither have an opinion on nor care about, this is just a mind-game) is the first-hand reports of the military and government personel who were involved -- especially in any cover-up. Here's what happens:
- Something happens
- "they" cover it up, remove all evidence and delete any documents reporting anything about "it"
- Everyone invovled dies of old age (Roswell was what, fifty years ago -- another twenty or thirty years and no first-hand witnesses will be around)
- No one ever finds out the truth
I'm not looking for a job. If I were, I'd be out of business because running a Linux box in a business environment is not something I'm good at. But I do want to get cvs-conf working on my home servers. I'd love to try the LDAP idea the [great- ?] grandparent poster mentioned. But I don't care enough to wade through countless pages of vague documentation that doesn't tell me how to do what I want. It's one thing to do it for the user, it's another to provide enough information for them to do it themselves. For example, at this point I'd take anything for cvs-conf, because all it installed are a couple files in the examples folder that don't make much sense and a Makefile. Google doesn't turn up a thing. Maybe I need to learn more about how to use CVS before trying to do this, but I'm just looking for an example or two of how someone else got it to work.
Bah. When I took the SATs in high school (about 5 years ago) they made us write -- in cursive -- a paragraph stating essentially that we were who we claimed to be and that we weren't cheating. Several of my friends -- and me -- had a lot of trouble with this because we hadn't used cursive in so long we forgot it. And this wasn't because of computers, we were high school kids who constantly took notes in class, wrote assignments and whatnot; it's just that we all printed rather than using cursive
Personally, I had bad handwriting long before I used computers regularly and stopped using cursive as soon as possible (they make you write things in cursive in elementary school and sometimes in middle school; but I didn't hvae to at all in high school).
My point? Only that good penmanship and the ability to remember how to write cursive may be dying, but not because of computers. I hated cursive and it actually was slower for me than "plain old" printing.
This would actually be a great feature -- for those of us who are isolated from interfereing with 802.11b networks we could run at a full 54Mb/sec; people in corporate or other mixed environments don't get interference because they're running in the IEEE mode. Everyone wins and people still have motivation to move to a full 54Mb/sec infrastructure at some point.
I remember reading something about a year ago about someone who got arrested at (I think) Circuit City for writing down the prices; on a laptop he brought with him, as I recall. A quick Google search didn't turn up anything; maybe someone will remember more information than I can recall.
Also, I've seen some online sites seem to have "this information is for your personal use only" type 'licenses' for their prices; the notices I've seen are usually in tiny print in some legal page link no one ever clicks; and the legality of such a clause is something I'm not sure about either.
machines to play them will cease to be available long before 20 years is up (remember Beta, 8-track, U-matic, and Elcassette?)
Actually I have access to a number of U-Matic decks; and where I'm finishing up my internship (the production arm of a local cable company) we still get programs shipped to us regularly on 3/4" U-Matic tapes. Yeah; it's a dying technology but definitely it's still very avalible.
Good point -- I was only thinking about the context of the article (bookmarks, which can be a simple text-only file). I momentarily forgot that this program would handle not only text but any file type that happens to be syncronized. Your points, Ian, are very valid and thanks for pointing out my forgetfulness!
Here is the manual's information on conflicts and conflict resolution. If I'm reading it correctly, it prompts you to decide what to do. Although it doesn't seem to mention what I consider to be the idea solution -- merging the files so you don't loose anything from either machine.
I have two TVs at home; both require the remote to access most of their customization functions.
Which explains pretty well my soon-to-be-parents-in-law's TV..when pressing the up/down channel buttons none of them are skipped (they pull signals off the air the old-fasioned way and only get 4 or 5 total). So when I'm there watching TV I have to move slowly through 10 non-existant stations to get to one (sort-of) good one. It's a simple matter to program it but for some reason they don't (autoprogram wouldn't work, it would block some of the marginal stations and *all* of their stations are marginal).
Hot mail is *the* worst web-mail system on the planet.
Go to this Google directory [google.com] for a list of thousands of alternatives.
You know, just the other day I was so frustrated at hotmail I vowed to quit -- and decided to go to freemail.fm because of how many slashdotters seem to recommend it (well, either that or a small but loud group). But the site seems to be down. Thanks for this google list; I'll pour over that and see if I can find anything worth my effort.
Several years ago, HoTMaiL was the best (and at that time, only) free webmail avalible. Others tried to compete but couldn't come close. After Microsoft took over, the number of spam messages I got skyrocketted (YMMV), I regularly have had trouble connecting to their server (it was -- and still is -- slow and sometimes times-out), and the whole interface has changed [for the worse, in my opinion...they've recently (last week or so) tied the start page directly to msn which resulted in serveral days of extremely slow logging on for me].
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Oh, I forgot to mention that during the semester-long slowdown there were often times when 'net access would go down for days on end, and once or twice it was isolated to specific dorms. There are two helpdesks, one for students and one for profs. I called the student helpdesk (which is, unfortunatly, staffed by students -- often clueless ones) to ask about and/or report outages on several occasions..the responses ranged from "yeah, I've heard from other students that the network is down but don't know anything about why or when it will come back" to "I'm online right now, the problem must be your computer. Try restarting your computer" -- after I tried accessing the internet from three different computers in that dorm.
This happened where I went to school at least once...pulled the network down for a while (days, not a week). Of course, this was right around the time where we had almost an entire semester of 'net access that could be clocked in bytes -- my downloads typically ran at under 512 bytes/sec and of course it took like 10 minutes to load a single web page. The next semester they had Packetshaper installed (but didn't get all the kinks worked out of it for a while...).
Then there was the time my newly installed Linux box was sending its anacron logs to root@the-university.org rather than root@localhost. Apparently three guys in suits came to my room (while i was out), looked at my computer set up (two desktops and a laptop, along with the appropriate networking gear), and left a message for me to call them -- my roomates were pretty shook up by it.
Why, I'm glad you came to slashdot with your question. Compaq was friendly enough to provide all the information on your support issue that you need to be a real hacker [grin].
True, especially since the Kazaa-happy college kids aren't due back for two more weeks.
I completely agree with Shoten in the parent post -- there is nothing to be gained by informing your school; go straight to the developers of this application. The school may not even find out about you if you don't tell them; the administrators (other than the server admin) probably won't even know about the security fix once it comes out -- administrators don't care about general security fixes from a vendor, they care a lot about a student calling them up to report being able to change your grades.
this post by Czyl also has some good advice and is worth a read.
Oh, and if they don't fix it; raise a stink (by publication) -- don't just let it fade away.
You mention Avid operators, which brings up a sore point with me.
Try explaining to a client why they should someone hire a good Avid editor for (say) $150/hr (or audio- or lighting- or camera-person) when they can have their son do their company's commercial on the family's Final Cut Pro machine with their $700 digital camera?
I'm a TV guy and very interested in where the market is going to go in the next few years. I know your comment was about music production but it's really the same thing...people who used to get paid decently can't get work because potential clients don't understand that they're paying for experience.
I'd rather work in sports...
dB, or decibles, are the standard measurement of an audio signal's strength or amplitude. 0 is the maximum that can be handled (older analog equipment could take more; sometimes +4 or +7 db -- that's like asking someone to make it 110% louder -- you're going above what it's spec'ed to. With digital equipment you don't have much extra room above -0, usually if you hit 0 it clips -- which produces a distorted signal. Analog recordings could clip as well but generally it handled sudden peaks better than digital recordings do. Headroom is the measurement of how much amplitude you're leaving between your loud passages and 0dB. If you're recording your band's newest song into a CD recorder (or your computer's sound card) and the input is set so that the loudest part of the recording is set to peak the meter at -20dB; you've got 20dB of headroom. See, a decible is really just a relative measurement. 0 is "max" and negative numbers get softer the smaller the number (ie, -6 is quieter than -3db).
Headroom is important because if your garage band suddenly gets excited during the recording and the drummer does his huge drum solo a lot harder than when you set the levels; he'll clip the recording.
email me if you want more information or have other questions.
The parent is correct in that tv commercials are often heavily compressed, and the reason is excactly what you (and me and everyone else on the planet) are complaining about -- the commercial being louder than the rest of the program material. Selling a product on TV is [apparently] rather difficult and advertisers look for any edge to get you to notice their spot over others' -- and making their spot play back louder than anyone else's is a good way to get you to notice (or hear from the kitchen/bathroom) their product.
By the way; with hi-def and digital audio "they" are working on encoding meta-data, one of the tags would be related to the volume so that all your stations sound the same volume and all the programs and commercials would seem the same volume.
I've called in a couple of times with problems the Level 1 techs couldn't handle (once when my hard drive developed bad sectors, still under a "no questions asked" warranty. I had put Linux on a partition like 6 months before and the tech kept trying to figure out if that was to blame. Or the time when every now and then I'd get a noisy internet connection dialing in -- I traced everything at my end and the most logical conclusion was that it was a dying modem or phone line at their end [whether this is a correct assumption doesn't matter] -- I called up and very nicely asked if that were something they could check and got a dead silent space of about three seconds before they offered to talk me through re-setting up the dial up settings (which I'd already done).
anyway; now that I'm done ranting I'll make my point: I've never been bumped up to level 2; even though I was once on the phone with the tech (for the hard drive) for 45 minutes or an hour near his quitting time. I've tried various methods of socially engineering my way up and they haven't worked too well. So my question to you; how do you get escalated??
While I agree that my computer is more likely to be secure than a random public terminal when all you're concerned about protecting yourself from is Joe Cracker who is collecting credit card numbers; but if the FBI (or whatever secret government organization is out to get you this week) is really determined; they're not going to let Windows' (or your Mac or Linux boxen's) security stop them from installing whatever they want on your computer. And you'd better believe that they're not going to leave the timestamp the same on those files -- it's going to be set way in the past so you can't find it.
or call me paranoid....
You make a great point -- USB drives are great for the college market. When I was a college student (graduated this past May) I couldn't count on any computer having a working floppy disk drive -- and of those that did work, the odds of it corrupting my disks were extremely high. I can't count the number of floppies that have died at the hands of the filthy lab computers. Zips were expensive, suffered from the click of death, and not available on all computers. Solid-state USB storage would have been awesome -- no worries of what the last person had spilled on their disk or tried to shove in the drive.
I've never used rsync so I can't compare and contrast, but I'm rather happy with unison, which is like rsync (I'm told) but different (somehow).
In my configuration; I run the server on my w2k desktop (with the big drive) and use the unison client from my laptop to sync files (bookmarks, the my documents folder, etc) across the two systems. Unison detects changes and propagates them, if there is a conflict it will prompt you or can even launch diff (for ascii files, you're kinda screwed if it's binary though(1). It can be tunneled over ssh or has a built in server that can bind to whatever port you specify.
Maybe someone who knows better can explain exactly what rsync is and how it differs from unison. Regardless, the original question dealt more with networking protocols than syncronization.
1 - I guess; I've never tried to diff a binary file though.
- Something happens
- "they" cover it up, remove all evidence and delete any documents reporting anything about "it"
- Everyone invovled dies of old age (Roswell was what, fifty years ago -- another twenty or thirty years and no first-hand witnesses will be around)
- No one ever finds out the truth
I'm not looking for a job. If I were, I'd be out of business because running a Linux box in a business environment is not something I'm good at. But I do want to get cvs-conf working on my home servers. I'd love to try the LDAP idea the [great- ?] grandparent poster mentioned. But I don't care enough to wade through countless pages of vague documentation that doesn't tell me how to do what I want. It's one thing to do it for the user, it's another to provide enough information for them to do it themselves. For example, at this point I'd take anything for cvs-conf, because all it installed are a couple files in the examples folder that don't make much sense and a Makefile. Google doesn't turn up a thing. Maybe I need to learn more about how to use CVS before trying to do this, but I'm just looking for an example or two of how someone else got it to work.
Bah. When I took the SATs in high school (about 5 years ago) they made us write -- in cursive -- a paragraph stating essentially that we were who we claimed to be and that we weren't cheating. Several of my friends -- and me -- had a lot of trouble with this because we hadn't used cursive in so long we forgot it. And this wasn't because of computers, we were high school kids who constantly took notes in class, wrote assignments and whatnot; it's just that we all printed rather than using cursive
Personally, I had bad handwriting long before I used computers regularly and stopped using cursive as soon as possible (they make you write things in cursive in elementary school and sometimes in middle school; but I didn't hvae to at all in high school).
My point? Only that good penmanship and the ability to remember how to write cursive may be dying, but not because of computers. I hated cursive and it actually was slower for me than "plain old" printing.
This would actually be a great feature -- for those of us who are isolated from interfereing with 802.11b networks we could run at a full 54Mb/sec; people in corporate or other mixed environments don't get interference because they're running in the IEEE mode. Everyone wins and people still have motivation to move to a full 54Mb/sec infrastructure at some point.
I remember reading something about a year ago about someone who got arrested at (I think) Circuit City for writing down the prices; on a laptop he brought with him, as I recall. A quick Google search didn't turn up anything; maybe someone will remember more information than I can recall.
Also, I've seen some online sites seem to have "this information is for your personal use only" type 'licenses' for their prices; the notices I've seen are usually in tiny print in some legal page link no one ever clicks; and the legality of such a clause is something I'm not sure about either.
Good point -- I was only thinking about the context of the article (bookmarks, which can be a simple text-only file). I momentarily forgot that this program would handle not only text but any file type that happens to be syncronized. Your points, Ian, are very valid and thanks for pointing out my forgetfulness!
Here is the manual's information on conflicts and conflict resolution. If I'm reading it correctly, it prompts you to decide what to do. Although it doesn't seem to mention what I consider to be the idea solution -- merging the files so you don't loose anything from either machine.
Several years ago, HoTMaiL was the best (and at that time, only) free webmail avalible. Others tried to compete but couldn't come close. After Microsoft took over, the number of spam messages I got skyrocketted (YMMV), I regularly have had trouble connecting to their server (it was -- and still is -- slow and sometimes times-out), and the whole interface has changed [for the worse, in my opinion...they've recently (last week or so) tied the start page directly to msn which resulted in serveral days of extremely slow logging on for me].
I'd hate to see Google go the same route.