It's a different issue, but as compression causes distortion, so does the translation to digital, so it is related.
Now before you say that a CD is distortionless, I know that in theory sampling at 44kHz should allow you to perfectly reproduce any sound below 22kHz (above what pretty much anyone can hear), but this is only theory. In your CD player, many other factors come into play, such as stability of the clock and the high-frequency noise it generates, accuracy of the encoder and reproducer (quantization and construction errors), and odd-order harmonics generated by the reproduction and amplification circuitry - a distortion inherent to solid state audio electronics.
If he really wants pure sound, tell him to go buy a concert ticket (and even that's distorted, depending on the venue). Personally, I can live with my setup of CDs and Reels.
... and I couldn't care less! Half the fun in WH is collecting the pieces and making the terrain, and it's a good way to waste some time in RL with friends. There is nothing special about the game mechanics of WH. It has a cool story and some interesting units, but I think that the real appeal is that it's something physical instead of digital.
Indeed - good example. Once connectivity is available from everywhere, it'l be a simple matter to post anything. I expect that processing and filtering the absolutely massive ammount of raw info this kind of thing will generate will become the next software holy grail.
So what if you take, say, a 1000kg vehicle (which weighs roughly 9,800 Newtons), attach an engine that can deliver 10,000 Newtons of thrust, and let it go? Will it also fail to reach space?
It definitely won't reach Mach 25...
And don't bother attacking my credibility in basic physics - engineering student and all.
I ended up listening in on a streaming radio broadcast from 'Dr Space' on the Space Show radio program. Pretty sure he was broadcasting over a cell phone, and his feed was./ed for a few minutes, but all in all did a pretty good job.
That's the kind of thing we need to look for in the future - noncommercial news reporting. I expect that the spectators probably would have done a better job than the anchors for the news networks:)
I've always perferred a much simpler method to avoid those flash ads - don't install flash for mozilla. Very few of the sites I visit require flash, and if I really want to see a particular animation, I'll simply fire up IE for a few minutes.
Haven't seen a popup in ages (except in IE of course).
Actually, I don't see why it has to be a pc based solution at all? Why an OS and all the extra hassle and security holes that it brings (yes, even with Linux).
I'll take the Indian system over any pc-based setup any day. No exploits in the software, no network connection to attack, and just as secure as paper ballots (ie relying on the officials not to tamper with the box). And if you want to make the tallying automatic too, it's as simple as putting a jack on the back that gives read access to the internal memory.
The only downside, as someone previously mentioned, is that it's quite easy to stick something over the names on the machine itself. Layer of plexiglass on top, maybe (to make it obvious that the names should be *under* the glass, not on top)?
Too bad for your congresscritters that the `french' in french fries mainly refers to the way they are cut, not to their inventors. It was brought to English-speaking countries from France and of course dubbed `fries cut in the french fashion', but in France they are simply referred to as potatoe fries. Who actually invented them is up to debate - we Belgians like to take the credit, but on the other hand, we were part of France when fries first appeared...
In any case, if you want good fries today, come to Belgium. You don't know what you've been missing.:)
The abnormality lies in the fact that it's (the temp) rising faster than it ever has, and all the evidence (statistical, geological, oceanographic...) points to us as the culprits. Whether this is a bad thing is up to debate of course, but the expected side effects (flooding, heavy storms, dried-out farmland) are rather undesirable.
Sure, the planet will be able to adjust. The question is, will we be able to?
Jw
Re:A 3D version of Windows XP? So it has to have..
on
Sphere XP Makes GUI 3D
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· Score: 1
I'm sure they'll get on it right after implementing the evil bit.
Jw
Re:Forget them
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
You know, you may have said that as a joke, but Europeans say exactly the same thing about Americans, and they mean it (although not as strongly as 'hate', more dislike)...:(
To use a frequently-appearing example: "Oh, the Spanish were so evil, they killed off all the Aztec" - Well, guess who the Aztec sacrificed to their gods.
No one is free from the guilt, so don't go trying to lay a guilt trip on me, buddy. Just like every government and most societies do, we'll continue to ignore those violations while it's to our advantage.
The ribbon could very well be dangerous if it snapped above half way.
To stay in orbit, the ribbon has to be roughly 2X as long as the distance to geosynchronous orbit, so that the force pulling down due to gravity is perfectly counterbalanced by centripital force pulling up. This means that you have a cable roughly 70,000Km long, or about 3 earth diameters.
Now when the cable breaks, it's probably gonna break in the middle, due to the greatest ammount of stress being located there. So half the cable will fly off to Mars and half will begin wrapping itself around the Earth. The first bit may not be too bad, but that cable's not gonna fall straight down, and the whiplash from when the end finally reaches the ground could be huge.
How about the simple fact that if you're talking about a 16-bit ADC/DAC you only have 65536 possible discrete values that you can record, and everything in between is rounded off to one of those values. If you assume the DAC can handle 5V, that means incremens of 0,076mV, and a smaller increment will be lost or overestimated in rounding.
First off, I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said that at low levels you get significantly more distortion in the sound versus recording at higher levels. Compare a 1mV and a 100mV signals run through a DAC and then a ADC, with the 1mV amplified to the same output level as the 100mV. the 1mV signal will be significantly more distorted due to the staircase nature of a digital signal - If you assume the DAC has a step of.1mV, your amplified 1mV will have a step of 10mV after amplification, meaning you've lost a lot of resolution.
As for compression; heard of it, understand your argument, pretty sure it introduces even more distortion of the music. Personally I don't care as I listen to older stuff that is far less or even not compressed.
You also chose to ignore the other factors I mentioned - jitter and harmonics - which are also both important factors.
There may be no information loss, but that does not neccessarily mean that the reproduction is perfect. All CD players, especially low-end ones, are sensitive to jitter (especially prevalent above 14kHz where you only have two sample points per period, thus the so-called 14kHz limit for CDs), one of the more noticable forms of distortion, and have issues with odd-order harmonics, a characteristic of solid-state amplifiers. Your 96dB range is also only theory on anything but top of the line studio gear - you go that low on anything else and you'lle end up with a whole mess of quantization errors and external noise. So although in theory you have no information loss, you're always going to have a degree of distortion, and the trick is to try and reduce it to an acceptable level for the listener.
I think what he means is that, if you get your access from the power company and the power goes out, your internet is probably going to go out too. This means that, even with your hour of battery power you have no internet until the power problems are fixed. Compare this with other systems where, with dialup for example, if your power goes out you can still dial up to the phone company, who will probably be still alive...
Microwaves can cook food because they send out radiation at a multiple/factor (forget which) of the frequency at which water resonates. You get a standing wave in your food, pushing the water molecules around and causing a large amount of friction, leading to lots of heat. This is also the reason why it's not safe to stand in front of a high-gain amplified wifi antenna; water resonates at 2.2GHz.
The radiation weapons described here, however, operate at a variety of frequencies and will probably be tuned so that they do not fry the civilians. You could build one that would microwave a few square blocks, but that would probably fall under the category of atrocities.
Slashdot Mirror
As I stated before, so does the digitalization process.
Jw
It's a different issue, but as compression causes distortion, so does the translation to digital, so it is related.
Now before you say that a CD is distortionless, I know that in theory sampling at 44kHz should allow you to perfectly reproduce any sound below 22kHz (above what pretty much anyone can hear), but this is only theory. In your CD player, many other factors come into play, such as stability of the clock and the high-frequency noise it generates, accuracy of the encoder and reproducer (quantization and construction errors), and odd-order harmonics generated by the reproduction and amplification circuitry - a distortion inherent to solid state audio electronics.
If he really wants pure sound, tell him to go buy a concert ticket (and even that's distorted, depending on the venue). Personally, I can live with my setup of CDs and Reels.
Jw
Anyone know where the '-1 Missed the Joke' mod is?
Jw
... and I couldn't care less! Half the fun in WH is collecting the pieces and making the terrain, and it's a good way to waste some time in RL with friends.
There is nothing special about the game mechanics of WH. It has a cool story and some interesting units, but I think that the real appeal is that it's something physical instead of digital.
Jw
Sure. How about the Saturn rocket? I expect that the thrust it produced was slightly larger than it's weight.
My point is that you do not need to reach Mach 25 to get into orbit - you only need a constant thrust to counteract gravity.
Jw
Indeed - good example. Once connectivity is available from everywhere, it'l be a simple matter to post anything.
I expect that processing and filtering the absolutely massive ammount of raw info this kind of thing will generate will become the next software holy grail.
Jw
So what if you take, say, a 1000kg vehicle (which weighs roughly 9,800 Newtons), attach an engine that can deliver 10,000 Newtons of thrust, and let it go? Will it also fail to reach space? It definitely won't reach Mach 25... And don't bother attacking my credibility in basic physics - engineering student and all.
I ended up listening in on a streaming radio broadcast from 'Dr Space' on the Space Show radio program. Pretty sure he was broadcasting over a cell phone, and his feed was ./ed for a few minutes, but all in all did a pretty good job.
:)
That's the kind of thing we need to look for in the future - noncommercial news reporting. I expect that the spectators probably would have done a better job than the anchors for the news networks
Jw
Indeed. Sackware en enlightenment running here on a high-end notebook. Had to play around with the config for a while before it took off, but then...
Downloaded some of the new stuff out of the enlightenment CVS too - beautiful.
Jw
I've always perferred a much simpler method to avoid those flash ads - don't install flash for mozilla. Very few of the sites I visit require flash, and if I really want to see a particular animation, I'll simply fire up IE for a few minutes.
Haven't seen a popup in ages (except in IE of course).
Jw
Actually, I don't see why it has to be a pc based solution at all? Why an OS and all the extra hassle and security holes that it brings (yes, even with Linux).
I'll take the Indian system over any pc-based setup any day. No exploits in the software, no network connection to attack, and just as secure as paper ballots (ie relying on the officials not to tamper with the box). And if you want to make the tallying automatic too, it's as simple as putting a jack on the back that gives read access to the internal memory.
The only downside, as someone previously mentioned, is that it's quite easy to stick something over the names on the machine itself. Layer of plexiglass on top, maybe (to make it obvious that the names should be *under* the glass, not on top)?
Jw
Too bad for your congresscritters that the `french' in french fries mainly refers to the way they are cut, not to their inventors. It was brought to English-speaking countries from France and of course dubbed `fries cut in the french fashion', but in France they are simply referred to as potatoe fries. Who actually invented them is up to debate - we Belgians like to take the credit, but on the other hand, we were part of France when fries first appeared...
:)
In any case, if you want good fries today, come to Belgium. You don't know what you've been missing.
Jw
The abnormality lies in the fact that it's (the temp) rising faster than it ever has, and all the evidence (statistical, geological, oceanographic...) points to us as the culprits. Whether this is a bad thing is up to debate of course, but the expected side effects (flooding, heavy storms, dried-out farmland) are rather undesirable.
Sure, the planet will be able to adjust. The question is, will we be able to?
Jw
Isn't that a quake weapon?
:)
I'm sure they'll get on it right after implementing the evil bit.
Jw
You know, you may have said that as a joke, but Europeans say exactly the same thing about Americans, and they mean it (although not as strongly as 'hate', more dislike)... :(
Jw
They most certainly will NOT be spending 18 months researching this.
Researching? Who said anything about researching?
Jw
Everyone's got a bad human rights record!
To use a frequently-appearing example: "Oh, the Spanish were so evil, they killed off all the Aztec" - Well, guess who the Aztec sacrificed to their gods.
No one is free from the guilt, so don't go trying to lay a guilt trip on me, buddy. Just like every government and most societies do, we'll continue to ignore those violations while it's to our advantage.
Need I get into the US's human rights record?
Jw
The ribbon could very well be dangerous if it snapped above half way.
To stay in orbit, the ribbon has to be roughly 2X as long as the distance to geosynchronous orbit, so that the force pulling down due to gravity is perfectly counterbalanced by centripital force pulling up. This means that you have a cable roughly 70,000Km long, or about 3 earth diameters.
Now when the cable breaks, it's probably gonna break in the middle, due to the greatest ammount of stress being located there. So half the cable will fly off to Mars and half will begin wrapping itself around the Earth. The first bit may not be too bad, but that cable's not gonna fall straight down, and the whiplash from when the end finally reaches the ground could be huge.
Jw
Not when you amplify it up to a level where you get sound out of your speakers
How about the simple fact that if you're talking about a 16-bit ADC/DAC you only have 65536 possible discrete values that you can record, and everything in between is rounded off to one of those values. If you assume the DAC can handle 5V, that means incremens of 0,076mV, and a smaller increment will be lost or overestimated in rounding.
Jw
First off, I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said that at low levels you get significantly more distortion in the sound versus recording at higher levels. Compare a 1mV and a 100mV signals run through a DAC and then a ADC, with the 1mV amplified to the same output level as the 100mV. the 1mV signal will be significantly more distorted due to the staircase nature of a digital signal - If you assume the DAC has a step of .1mV, your amplified 1mV will have a step of 10mV after amplification, meaning you've lost a lot of resolution.
As for compression; heard of it, understand your argument, pretty sure it introduces even more distortion of the music. Personally I don't care as I listen to older stuff that is far less or even not compressed.
You also chose to ignore the other factors I mentioned - jitter and harmonics - which are also both important factors.
Jw
There may be no information loss, but that does not neccessarily mean that the reproduction is perfect. All CD players, especially low-end ones, are sensitive to jitter (especially prevalent above 14kHz where you only have two sample points per period, thus the so-called 14kHz limit for CDs), one of the more noticable forms of distortion, and have issues with odd-order harmonics, a characteristic of solid-state amplifiers. Your 96dB range is also only theory on anything but top of the line studio gear - you go that low on anything else and you'lle end up with a whole mess of quantization errors and external noise. So although in theory you have no information loss, you're always going to have a degree of distortion, and the trick is to try and reduce it to an acceptable level for the listener.
If you want good music, go to a live show.
Jw
I think what he means is that, if you get your access from the power company and the power goes out, your internet is probably going to go out too. This means that, even with your hour of battery power you have no internet until the power problems are fixed. Compare this with other systems where, with dialup for example, if your power goes out you can still dial up to the phone company, who will probably be still alive...
Jw
Your analogy is not entirely correct.
Microwaves can cook food because they send out radiation at a multiple/factor (forget which) of the frequency at which water resonates. You get a standing wave in your food, pushing the water molecules around and causing a large amount of friction, leading to lots of heat. This is also the reason why it's not safe to stand in front of a high-gain amplified wifi antenna; water resonates at 2.2GHz.
The radiation weapons described here, however, operate at a variety of frequencies and will probably be tuned so that they do not fry the civilians. You could build one that would microwave a few square blocks, but that would probably fall under the category of atrocities.
Jw