I heard of it, but never got a clear sense of WTF it is. Without that, I had no reason to be interested. If you don't catch my interest somehow, then your marketing has failed.
The only reason HDTracks sells MP3 is for compatibility, as far as I can tell. The MP3s they sell are 320kb/s. Likewise, they only sell AIFF for compatibility with iPods etc. Obviously, you could play MP3 on an iPod, but it won't be lossless, even at 320kb/s. AIFF is lossless, but it is also uncompressed.
That said, it seems as though the format they want to sell is FLAC. FLAC is available on all of their offerings at 44.1kHz/16bit, and, as WScottC pointed out, lots of their material is also available at 96kHz (or close to it, e.g. 88.2kHz) and 24 bits.
Now, I'm not a huge classical music fan. I like it some, but I don't go nuts for it. I am, however, an audiophile, and have bought some tracks from HDTracks, both in 44/16 FLAC and 96/24 FLAC, and I have got to tell you, one of these recordings (Destroyer by the Kinks) was so sharp you could hear the flaws in the studio where they were recording.
The downloads aren't fast, but this is because they aren't small. The prices are higher than, say, Amazon, but for good reason. This is the audiophile record store of today.
Another option is to buy a 3.5mm (or 1/8", as you so archaicly put it) plug and just stuff it into the mic jack, thus causing the internal mic switch to disconnect the real mic. If you don't want to buy one, just cut the plug off of a dead pair of headphones (every teenager has at least one) and use that, instead.
Neither option will work if the sound hardware has dual mic inputs, though, so be aware of that.
Now, I pose the question. If our impact did not cause it, are we responsible to fix it?
If you ask your child to pick something up, and he/she responds that his/her brother/sister put it there, do you accept that answer? No. You asked him/her to pick it up. Non-causation doesn't imply non-responsibility.
However, let me pose a different angle to you: If our impact didn't cause it, can we fix it? If so, I propose that we should do so, on the grounds that continuing to live is a desirable thing. Even if this extends beyond our own lifespans, how do you want your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live?
I know you're joking, but I actually would have thought it really cool if they had a second control group who took nothing, just to see if there is a psychosomatic element in play.
I was actually the Facilities Chair and A/V geek for the District 53 conference in Saratoga Springs NY last month. Loads of fun. It was my first District Conference, and I got a lot more enjoyment out of it than I expected.
A simple solution would be to add a file full of redundancy data alongside the original on the archival media. A simple application could be used to repair the file if it becomes damaged, or test it for damage before you go to use it, but the original format of the file remains unchanged, and your recovery system is file system agnostic.
What we need is a smarter computer that says, "I don't know what this is supposed to be, but here's my best guess," and displays noise. Let the brain then takeover and mentally remove the noise from the audio or image.
Audio CDs have always done this. Audio CDs are also uncompressed*.
The problem, I suspect, is that we have come to rely on a lot of data compression, particularly where video is concerned. I'm not saying this is the wrong choice, necessarily, because video can become ungodly huge without it (NTSC SD video -- 720 x 480 x 29.97 -- in the 4:2:2 colour space, 8 bits per pixel per plane, will consume 69.5 GiB an hour without compression), but maybe we didn't give enough thought to stream corruption.
Mini DV video tape, when run in SD, uses no compression on the audio, and the video is only lightly compressed, using a DCT-based codec, with no delta coding. In practical terms, what this means is that one corrupted frame of video doesn't cascade into future frames. If my camcorder gets a wrinkle in the tape, it will affect the frames recorded on the wrinkle, and no others. It also makes a best-guess effort to reconstruct the frame. This task may not be impossible with more dense codecs that do use delta coding and motion compensation (MPEG, DiVX, etc), but it is certainly made far more difficult.
Incidentally, even digital cinemas are using compression. It is a no-delta compression, but the individual frames are compressed in a manner akin to JPEGs, and the audio is compressed either using DTS or AC3 or one of their variants in most cinemas. The difference, of course, is that the cinemas must provide a good presentation. If they fail to do so, people will stop coming. If the presentation isn't better than watching TV/DVD/BluRay at home, then why pay the $11?
(* I refer here to data compression, not dynamic range compression. Dynamic range compression is applied way too much in most audio media)
I am extremely pleased with my LInux box. I have an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard, which is a Mini-ITX and comes pre-populated with an Atom 330 processor, 1.6GHz, Dual core. My system ends up using around 43W (actually measured) when both cores are running full-out; 42W otherwise. There is also a single-core version available on the D945GCLF motherboard, which uses an Atom 230 clocked at the same rate (1.6GHz). I imagine that if I were to remove the optical drive and use a laptop HDD (or even a thumb drive) in place of the 3.5", 7200 RPM drive that I am using, that I could probably get that down into the 30ish watt range.
It's going to have to be the randomly out-of-sync audio at this point, for the most part. Any non-CRT display, or CRT that scans at 31kHz or greater shouldn't cause any kind of audible sensation.
I say that as someone who has really good hearing (yes, I could hear CRTs before) and also has a 31kHz CRT TV.
The digital switch doesn't do much about it per se, rather, it's the higher scan rates or the non-scanning nature of the TV involved. I noticed the other day that Wal*Mart still sells one model of CRT TV, with a 15kHz tube, but with a digital tuner. The store was otherwise noisy enough that I can't honestly say that I heard it, but I suspect that I would have.
However, that said, analogue TV did something that digital probably doesn't, exactly. Theoretically, if you had a bunch of TVs all displaying a 480i (or 576i for our European friends) image all at once, analogue TVs would all be doing it in perfect sync with each other. Digital TVs will only do this if you are driving them all from a single HDMI or DVI signal or an analog (Component, S-video, composite) source, such as a Blu-Ray player, DVD player, satellite receiver, DTV tuner or what have you. CRT Digital TVS, if all fed from a single channel are going to be independently decoding the MPEG stream and displaying the video on their own, internal time bases. The practical upshot of this is that you won't have one big interference pattern from all of those TVs, so perhaps digital TV itself is enough to ease the pain a bit. The almost-complete abandonment of CRTs, however, certainly helps matters a lot more, though.
In a similar vein, I had a machine that, having been moved to a new chassis, would not connect to the network. Naturally, I blamed the power supply, because it was the only functional component that had actually changed. Changing the power supply did not fix the problem. Ultimately, replacing the CD-ROM in that machine did. My best hypothesis for this is that the CD-ROM was muddying up one of the power rails, but I have never bothered to confirm this. That very same CD-ROM in another machine with another motherboard is working fine to this day, and not causing any issues of which I am aware.
First, it sounds like a file size difference of a few kilobytes could be attributed to ASCII vs. binary mode in FTP
Second, if, after checking that, you do decide to retire FTP, I'd suggest using http, if, and only if, you can initiate the file transfer from the receiving end. Use wget with the --tries=<big_number> and --continue flags.
Another option is to chunk the data. You may have to brew something yourself here, but if you can chunk the data and then validate the chunks by a hashing algorithm (MD5, SHA, etc), you can re-request the b0rked chunks before attempting to re-assemble the file.
On UDP . . . While I don't necessarily advocate TIBCO per se, they do have a UDP-based system (Rendezvous) that has an option that they call a "certified" delivery -- missed packets can be re-requested. It's really more intended for one-to-many transmissions, but it (or a competitor) might be an option.
I would be surprised about diabetes, but not so surprised about epilepsy. The rotating blades would cause a strobing effect when the sun hits them wrong, which could be a problem, maybe.
Howard Stern conducted an impromptu 'experiment' involving a powerful subwoofer that the gal could 'ride' astraddle of a sub-woofer under his control that achieved the same orgasmic results of motorcycles and horseback riding.
Even without that specially-designed sub, the right sound system can help.
Back in 1994 or so, around the time I had first met the woman who is now my wife, she and her then-boyfriend were visiting me at my apartment. It was a great apartment, being over a detached garage, because whatever I did didn't bother the neighbours.
So you now have the setup. I was talking computers with her then-boyfriend (who was my then-friend) and I mentioned a project called IUMA, which posted free music online in MP2 format, and I played some of the music on the little bookshelf speakers I had in the computer room.
Then we hit a song by Velvet Chain called Lovin Ain't so Easy which has a very deep, powerful bassline to it. Without any ill intentions, I said, "Oh, you need to hear this one on the speakers in the other room".
The speakers in the other room were a pair of 70's vintage Harmon Kardon acoustic suspension speakers with 12" woofers that could flood that little apartment with all the bass you could stand, and do it without ringing.
I pushed the "B" speakers button on my amp and the sound came booming in from the next room, to which my very-soon-to-be-girlfrend (i.e. my very-soon-to-be-ex-friend's very-soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend), unprompted, declared, "Oooh baby!"
Obviously, there is more to the relationship than this, and we have been happily married for 11 years, but it was one of the things that got the ball rolling.
There is a standardized set of modules that are used for temporarily naming heavy elements, which modules are all one-syllable, and have been carefully selected from Latin and Greek both, with the purpose being to make sure that taking the first letter of each module will provide a unique mnemonic for the element. Hence, element 112 gets the mnemonic Uub, just as Hydrogen gets H and Helium gets He. The Latin-language correctness or incorrectness is not at all part of the consideration.
I am not so sure. My employer has a Google appliance, and it has never been able to find relevant content for me on the company Intranet. It isn't that the content isn't there, but there is so much boilerplate language in place that, quite often, there are a glut of documents that contain my search terms. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
I think, though, that what may be needed her is a process, not a product. It will be long and painful, but your best bet, always, is to put a small group of humans authoratatively in charge of the documents. They can use technology to help them (such as the aforementioned Google appliance, Bayes categorizers, etc), but the ultimate decision needs to be a human one.
The Plague: Our recent unknown intruder penetrated using the superuser account, giving him access to our whole system.
Margo: Precisely what you're paid to prevent.
The Plague: Someone didn't bother reading my carefully prepared memo on commonly-used passwords. Now, then, as I so meticulously pointed out, the four most-used passwords are: love, sex, secret, and...
Margo: [glares at The Plague]
The Plague: god. So, would your holiness care to change her password?
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I heard of it, but never got a clear sense of WTF it is. Without that, I had no reason to be interested. If you don't catch my interest somehow, then your marketing has failed.
Let me add fuel to this.
The only reason HDTracks sells MP3 is for compatibility, as far as I can tell. The MP3s they sell are 320kb/s. Likewise, they only sell AIFF for compatibility with iPods etc. Obviously, you could play MP3 on an iPod, but it won't be lossless, even at 320kb/s. AIFF is lossless, but it is also uncompressed.
That said, it seems as though the format they want to sell is FLAC. FLAC is available on all of their offerings at 44.1kHz/16bit, and, as WScottC pointed out, lots of their material is also available at 96kHz (or close to it, e.g. 88.2kHz) and 24 bits.
Now, I'm not a huge classical music fan. I like it some, but I don't go nuts for it. I am, however, an audiophile, and have bought some tracks from HDTracks, both in 44/16 FLAC and 96/24 FLAC, and I have got to tell you, one of these recordings (Destroyer by the Kinks) was so sharp you could hear the flaws in the studio where they were recording.
The downloads aren't fast, but this is because they aren't small. The prices are higher than, say, Amazon, but for good reason. This is the audiophile record store of today.
I predict the following:
This has been true for some time. Witness The Problem With Music or Some of Your Friends May Already Be This Fucked, which is a ripping expose of the music industry, written in the 90's by Steve Albini of Negativland.
Another option is to buy a 3.5mm (or 1/8", as you so archaicly put it) plug and just stuff it into the mic jack, thus causing the internal mic switch to disconnect the real mic. If you don't want to buy one, just cut the plug off of a dead pair of headphones (every teenager has at least one) and use that, instead.
Neither option will work if the sound hardware has dual mic inputs, though, so be aware of that.
If you ask your child to pick something up, and he/she responds that his/her brother/sister put it there, do you accept that answer? No. You asked him/her to pick it up. Non-causation doesn't imply non-responsibility.
However, let me pose a different angle to you: If our impact didn't cause it, can we fix it? If so, I propose that we should do so, on the grounds that continuing to live is a desirable thing. Even if this extends beyond our own lifespans, how do you want your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live?
I know you're joking, but I actually would have thought it really cool if they had a second control group who took nothing, just to see if there is a psychosomatic element in play.
I think Wii Fit constitutes prior art -- within the context of the program, your avatar's appearance changes in response to your body weight.
I was actually the Facilities Chair and A/V geek for the District 53 conference in Saratoga Springs NY last month. Loads of fun. It was my first District Conference, and I got a lot more enjoyment out of it than I expected.
The theatres in our area don't have sticky floors! I feel cheated!
Having dealt with corrupted DVDs, I do.
You could always put the redundancy data someplace else entirely, too. Realistically, this is an extension of the RAID concept.
A simple solution would be to add a file full of redundancy data alongside the original on the archival media. A simple application could be used to repair the file if it becomes damaged, or test it for damage before you go to use it, but the original format of the file remains unchanged, and your recovery system is file system agnostic.
Audio CDs have always done this. Audio CDs are also uncompressed*.
The problem, I suspect, is that we have come to rely on a lot of data compression, particularly where video is concerned. I'm not saying this is the wrong choice, necessarily, because video can become ungodly huge without it (NTSC SD video -- 720 x 480 x 29.97 -- in the 4:2:2 colour space, 8 bits per pixel per plane, will consume 69.5 GiB an hour without compression), but maybe we didn't give enough thought to stream corruption.
Mini DV video tape, when run in SD, uses no compression on the audio, and the video is only lightly compressed, using a DCT-based codec, with no delta coding. In practical terms, what this means is that one corrupted frame of video doesn't cascade into future frames. If my camcorder gets a wrinkle in the tape, it will affect the frames recorded on the wrinkle, and no others. It also makes a best-guess effort to reconstruct the frame. This task may not be impossible with more dense codecs that do use delta coding and motion compensation (MPEG, DiVX, etc), but it is certainly made far more difficult.
Incidentally, even digital cinemas are using compression. It is a no-delta compression, but the individual frames are compressed in a manner akin to JPEGs, and the audio is compressed either using DTS or AC3 or one of their variants in most cinemas. The difference, of course, is that the cinemas must provide a good presentation. If they fail to do so, people will stop coming. If the presentation isn't better than watching TV/DVD/BluRay at home, then why pay the $11?
(* I refer here to data compression, not dynamic range compression. Dynamic range compression is applied way too much in most audio media)
I am extremely pleased with my LInux box. I have an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard, which is a Mini-ITX and comes pre-populated with an Atom 330 processor, 1.6GHz, Dual core. My system ends up using around 43W (actually measured) when both cores are running full-out; 42W otherwise. There is also a single-core version available on the D945GCLF motherboard, which uses an Atom 230 clocked at the same rate (1.6GHz). I imagine that if I were to remove the optical drive and use a laptop HDD (or even a thumb drive) in place of the 3.5", 7200 RPM drive that I am using, that I could probably get that down into the 30ish watt range.
Maybe, maybe not. Earlier this year, I was able to demonstrate that OGG Vorbis is a superior-sounding codec to MP3 and Dolby Digital at low bitrates. Comparing MP3 to OGG is comparing apples to oranges.
It's going to have to be the randomly out-of-sync audio at this point, for the most part. Any non-CRT display, or CRT that scans at 31kHz or greater shouldn't cause any kind of audible sensation.
I say that as someone who has really good hearing (yes, I could hear CRTs before) and also has a 31kHz CRT TV.
The digital switch doesn't do much about it per se, rather, it's the higher scan rates or the non-scanning nature of the TV involved. I noticed the other day that Wal*Mart still sells one model of CRT TV, with a 15kHz tube, but with a digital tuner. The store was otherwise noisy enough that I can't honestly say that I heard it, but I suspect that I would have.
However, that said, analogue TV did something that digital probably doesn't, exactly. Theoretically, if you had a bunch of TVs all displaying a 480i (or 576i for our European friends) image all at once, analogue TVs would all be doing it in perfect sync with each other. Digital TVs will only do this if you are driving them all from a single HDMI or DVI signal or an analog (Component, S-video, composite) source, such as a Blu-Ray player, DVD player, satellite receiver, DTV tuner or what have you. CRT Digital TVS, if all fed from a single channel are going to be independently decoding the MPEG stream and displaying the video on their own, internal time bases. The practical upshot of this is that you won't have one big interference pattern from all of those TVs, so perhaps digital TV itself is enough to ease the pain a bit. The almost-complete abandonment of CRTs, however, certainly helps matters a lot more, though.
In a similar vein, I had a machine that, having been moved to a new chassis, would not connect to the network. Naturally, I blamed the power supply, because it was the only functional component that had actually changed. Changing the power supply did not fix the problem. Ultimately, replacing the CD-ROM in that machine did. My best hypothesis for this is that the CD-ROM was muddying up one of the power rails, but I have never bothered to confirm this. That very same CD-ROM in another machine with another motherboard is working fine to this day, and not causing any issues of which I am aware.
TrueCrypt claims to do whole-system encryption for Windows, and is mostly open-source. I haven't tried it myself, though (I use Linux).
Okay, getting serious now . . .
First, it sounds like a file size difference of a few kilobytes could be attributed to ASCII vs. binary mode in FTP
Second, if, after checking that, you do decide to retire FTP, I'd suggest using http, if, and only if, you can initiate the file transfer from the receiving end. Use wget with the --tries=<big_number> and --continue flags.
Another option is to chunk the data. You may have to brew something yourself here, but if you can chunk the data and then validate the chunks by a hashing algorithm (MD5, SHA, etc), you can re-request the b0rked chunks before attempting to re-assemble the file.
On UDP . . . While I don't necessarily advocate TIBCO per se, they do have a UDP-based system (Rendezvous) that has an option that they call a "certified" delivery -- missed packets can be re-requested. It's really more intended for one-to-many transmissions, but it (or a competitor) might be an option.
I would be surprised about diabetes, but not so surprised about epilepsy. The rotating blades would cause a strobing effect when the sun hits them wrong, which could be a problem, maybe.
Then again, I am not a doctor.
It's alright. I didn't get very loud very often, and was quiet most of the time.
Even without that specially-designed sub, the right sound system can help.
Back in 1994 or so, around the time I had first met the woman who is now my wife, she and her then-boyfriend were visiting me at my apartment. It was a great apartment, being over a detached garage, because whatever I did didn't bother the neighbours.
So you now have the setup. I was talking computers with her then-boyfriend (who was my then-friend) and I mentioned a project called IUMA, which posted free music online in MP2 format, and I played some of the music on the little bookshelf speakers I had in the computer room.
Then we hit a song by Velvet Chain called Lovin Ain't so Easy which has a very deep, powerful bassline to it. Without any ill intentions, I said, "Oh, you need to hear this one on the speakers in the other room".
The speakers in the other room were a pair of 70's vintage Harmon Kardon acoustic suspension speakers with 12" woofers that could flood that little apartment with all the bass you could stand, and do it without ringing.
I pushed the "B" speakers button on my amp and the sound came booming in from the next room, to which my very-soon-to-be-girlfrend (i.e. my very-soon-to-be-ex-friend's very-soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend), unprompted, declared, "Oooh baby!"
Obviously, there is more to the relationship than this, and we have been happily married for 11 years, but it was one of the things that got the ball rolling.
Oh, and I still have those speakers.
There is a standardized set of modules that are used for temporarily naming heavy elements, which modules are all one-syllable, and have been carefully selected from Latin and Greek both, with the purpose being to make sure that taking the first letter of each module will provide a unique mnemonic for the element. Hence, element 112 gets the mnemonic Uub, just as Hydrogen gets H and Helium gets He. The Latin-language correctness or incorrectness is not at all part of the consideration.
I am not so sure. My employer has a Google appliance, and it has never been able to find relevant content for me on the company Intranet. It isn't that the content isn't there, but there is so much boilerplate language in place that, quite often, there are a glut of documents that contain my search terms. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
I think, though, that what may be needed her is a process, not a product. It will be long and painful, but your best bet, always, is to put a small group of humans authoratatively in charge of the documents. They can use technology to help them (such as the aforementioned Google appliance, Bayes categorizers, etc), but the ultimate decision needs to be a human one.
The Plague: Our recent unknown intruder penetrated using the superuser account, giving him access to our whole system.
Margo: Precisely what you're paid to prevent.
The Plague: Someone didn't bother reading my carefully prepared memo on commonly-used passwords. Now, then, as I so meticulously pointed out, the four most-used passwords are: love, sex, secret, and...
Margo: [glares at The Plague]
The Plague: god. So, would your holiness care to change her password?