This reminds me of the old joke about the two russian comrades that read in pravda how a new city in siberia needs engineers. The story says the city wants for nothing, the store shevles are stocked, the store clerks courteous, and there are no lines. But they know that sometime pravda is not isvestia (the truth) and it might be a trap. SO they agree that one of them will go and write back if the stories are true. but if it's a trap their mail will be searched to they agree on a code. If it is all lies the writer will write in red ink. and if true then in blue.
One day the letter arrives. It is in Blue ink. it raves about the luxury goods, and the stores of plenty. In fact says the writer, the only thing in short supply seems to be red ink.
The modern version would have the comrade unable to log in because all the keyboards were dvorak.
Acutally this is helping MS. we all know that piracy is actually what allowed MS to become the de facto and in some realms obligatory operating system. The more users you have the more developers and the more other people want it. It's a cycle and piracy was what helped get MS to the top. That's old history.
Now say you are at the top, and your main competition is your old operating system which is sufficiently non-turdy that an update is not an emergency. What do you do?
Ceerainly few people will shell out the bucks to update. You can't give it away because there would go your OEM market. So you just have to wait for the sales of enough new PCs with it pre-installed to seed the market enough to get the developers to the point where they write things that work exclusively for it's new features that won't work on XP. (Direct X, and Widgets. anything else???)
that would be a painfully long wait. So how do you jump start this without selling below the OED cost. Let the pirates do it for you.
once the market for vista has healthy numbers then you start flipping the WGA boobytraps on. activate new ones each week so even when people work around them, the prospect of your computer suddenly topping funcitoning till you find an update to patch it (and how are you going to do that if your computer and your neighbors computer dont work) is more than Chon Wang can bear. Especially if it's a bussiness. It's so not worth the hassle that they pay for the real thing. Or at least a large fraction do which is the best you can hope for anyway.
I think that's the real thing that is going on.
in the mean time these low numbers are building their case. When they do turn on the draconian lock down they can point to these amazing, STUNNING, low lumbers of sales and saying. Hey we tried to limit the DRM but it cut out expected sales by thousands. No one can argue.
Let's write our own adds. Post below why you think Mandriva is good. What's its forte. What sets it apart. Why would I choose this distro? Be sure to post a soundbite too. for example "Ubuntu: it's the desktop linux for people who aren't experts". Or Debian "Steady and depandable, and an awesome package (manager)". etc.. Damn Small " Small and fast, in and out quickly".
Thanks for the intelligent observations. Yes I was just sort of riffing on possibilities of digital sound on Vinyl. If Mp3 had been invented earlier it might well have come to pass that Vinyl held it's own against CDs much longer. Had I the equipment It would be fun to create an MP3 vinyl record as I outlined just for the heck of it.
In any case I'm old enough to remember Quadraphonic which never really took off. (And 8 track which did have it's day in the sun).
First off, CD quality in 30-40k. Really? Then why the hell haven't we seen it anywhere? You don't think Apple would kill to have a more efficient format for storing and distributing music? -1 point for reading comprehension. I said "near-cd" and I'm using the term that all the on-line radio simmulcasts use so go argue with them. my sole definition which I stated was "better than the original vinyl".
Also you seem to have no understanding of the problems of encoding to a broadband format. Thank you for your tedious flame sir. I won't bother to point you to my papers and patents on heterodyne modulation.
For one, you can't stack your channels right on top of each other. You'll find that you have all kinds of problems. Look at any real broadband system, and you'll find out they've built in space between channels for just that reason. This is not even wrong. Let's see where to begin?.
1) first in theory there is no reason at all one cannot virtually stack channels without a buffer between them. run them through a acausal anti-alias notch filter.
2) They have to have that buffer for TV channels because the modulation schema and detection schema in use do bleed outside their channels.
3) this is all moot anyhow. The analysis was (*obviously*) just a gendanken argument about channel capacity. Once could do better not making artificial channel boundaries but just using the whole range directly. It's just that by thinking of it as channels of a modulation scheme one already knows the data rate for, one can quickly suss out the expected data rate for the bandwidth without doing any complex maths
Next, you've got the problem of assuming that two stereo channels can be used separately. Errr, no. In any analogue system, two adjacent channels will have some amount of crosstalk. That is to say a signal on one channel will bleed over to the other to some degree...Not a big deal for stereo audio, it's highly correlated anyhow and we don't need a ton of separation to hear stereo, however it'll fuck with your encoding real bad. BZZT. sorry no. all that is handled by the SNR term. cross talk sets a noise floor. What the noise floor is may depend on the modulation scheme. Now if you wanted to make a point here you should point out that that the plasticity of vinyl and needles may introduce non-linearities that can't support simultaneous use of the full audio spectrum. Granted. However that is only going to lower my argument by some fudge factor. And the argument is only an order of magnitude sketch to begin with so I that's not something to fret at this point. I'm not going to quibble over factors of 2, are you?
Then of course we get to things like error correction, assumptions that the SNR is equal with regards to frequency (it's not) and so on. I'm not going to go in to all the problems in detail since it ought to be apparent at this point that you didn't think this through. Giggle. You are really taking this proposal seriously aren't you? The whole thing is a joke! if you really wanted to store more music on a cd just use Mp3s. good golly. However, the rather intriguing idea here is that if Mp3 had predated audio CDs Vinyl would have had a much larger storage capacity and signal to noise than we conventionally consider. It's very suprising how good vinyl really could have been.
If MS announces it it using honeypots then no third party can even keep statsitics on how many flaws it has. it will make any published stats meaningless and laughable. MS can even deny any claimed bug, saying it might have been a honeypot and that it's policy is never to comment on the true identity of bugs it has patched.
Really it's perfect because it frustrates those that want to somehow prove MS is less secure by counting bug rates.
(those numbers are kinda meaninngless as there is so little normalization over what counts as a bug in open versus closed source communities. Firefox for example has a higher bug rate than IE by some counts, but that's because firefox's bug tracker tends to make it look like there are more bugs than their really are, and distorts their criticallity.
Digital Vinyl data capacity blows CDs out of water
on
Return of the Vinyl Album
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Top notch modems are 56kbps. A DS0 can carry max 64kbps. Semi-OK cd quality is 128kbps. A normal telephone line is 8 bit, MONO 8,000hz.
When you said near CD-quality, you weren't thinking of 8 track tapes were you?
Let's try the math again. First many digital radio stations use ABBAcast or something like it for near-CD quality at 33 to 40Kbs. Even if it's not CD quality it's certainly higher quality that anything that came off the vinyl in the first place. But let's ignore that and incorrectly assume we need 128kb/sec and see how the math comes out.
Audio modems don't actually use the full spectrum of the phone. last I looked they used about 3Khz. Now a vinyl record has a lot of bandwidth. the main limit on the bandwidth is the needles voltage/amplitude response falls off. That's why you equalize them. (which is why your stereo has a different input jack for phono than for tapes) You can only equalize then so far and get a decent sounding thing but you could push this much further if you went to a an analog coding scheme other than amplitude modulation. (hey that's what modems do! how about that).
So just to have some numbers lets make some up that are not completely crazy. Lets say we could push audio signal recovery out to 30Khz. So that gives us ten 3khz wide modem channels. And since the record is stereo that gives 20 total channels. 20*56kb/sec = 1060 kb/sec
1060kb/sec/128 = 8.4 channels
Hey! that's what I claimed to begin with. I claimed I could fit about 8 cd quality channels (and here we mean 128Kb/sec) on a Vinyl record.
But wait! that's actually a gross underestimate. What determines the bits per second on a modem. it's a combination of two things, bandwidth and signal to noise. A vinyl record has enormously better signal to noise than a telephone. So the number of bits pers second my vinyl can support is vastly higher than the phone.
the shannon capacity scales as: Bandwidth * log_2 (1 + SNR) (where SNR is the singal to noise ratio in power)
to if I had 128 times better SNR on a record then that's about 8 times more bits per second.
I don't think people would care any more if it was 11x higher. Besides which they could even announce they are doing it. That would shut down those pesky security researchers who always claim that some bug might lead to a remote code exploit without actually working outhow it might. They'd hold their fire because then they would look stupid not MS when they find out it was a honeypot.
As I mentioned in my first post, each time they send out a patch they fix all the honeypots so no one can tell and then pre-load another set that will lay dormant until they need to announce another bug. Then they announce those salted ones too.
Microsoft should pre-publish a whole bunch of tasty looking security advisories that are 100% fake every time they publish one that is real. Make them the most enticing looking (remote code exploit with unvalidated input overflow in ssh). Any given cracker will probably pick the fake and quickly waste gobs of time.
If they wanted to get more diabolical, they could even put some honey pots into the code itself. For example, something that emulates a buffer overflow crash when a certain malfromed word is injected. Or maybe something more tantilizing but useless like a 1 second pause in Internet explorer when a certain tag combination appears followed by a page reload to make them think IE just belched but managed to somehow recover. Hint at this in the pre-pub or leak it on the web (post it in a slashdot comment). they can validate it's existence so they believe the bug really exists too.
Each time they patch the real security hole they can preload ten new honeypots for the next round of spoofing the hackers and eradicate the old ones so it looks like they are patching real bugs and the hackers never catch on.
Why am I posting this under this parent? Well because you could only get away with this in closed source. Open source would make this a give-away.
Why wold you want to degrade music on vinyl like that? You're degrading it when you concert from analogue to digital then again coverting it back to analogue.
What do you think is coming over the USB connection? Analog audio? or digital audio? And what do you think your computer is doing when it plays it over the speakers. Playing the bits or converting them back to audio.
oh yeah, and the original post was modded "funny" by the way.
I'm going to digital Vinyl, I take my Vinyl records, convert them to MP3 then send this out over a modem which I then record as analog audio on the vinyl record. This way I don't encounter the dynamic range limitations of the vinyl.
While you may think I'm joking I note that a 30-40Kb/sec stream is more than suficient to store audio at near CD quality in real time. You can send 30-40Kb/sec over a telephone which has a small fraction of the bandwidth of a record. Thus I can actually encode about 8 simultaneous stereo streams
since audio records last about 40 minutes, 8 streams gives me 320 minutes of near CD quality music which is longer than an audio encoded CD can provide. Next up VCD on Vinyl
From a collector's stand point, vinyls never really faded from popularity. I still have all of my old vinyls and purchase new ones today by more current bands. That's so last year. I'm going to digital Vinyl, I take my Vinyl records, convert them to MP3 then send this out over a modem which I then record as analog audio on the vinyl record. This way I don't encounter the dynamic range limitations of the vinyl.
The social equivalent of tongue piercing. Once everyone goes digital it's fun to shock people by going analog. Plus scarcity creates value among collectors.
One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability, and the error correction is much more robust on Analog.
Drinkypoo, I guess you got the Right Wing Talking points memo from instanpundit, who posted "These things do seem to take place in locations where it's not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that's the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset." before he even had any of the links to the facts. Good for you. Will you be on Rush Limbaugh tonight?
Interesting. But why would you lose the 16 sectors just because the ECC is borked. Seems like one could still read the sectors, cross ones fingers, and ignore the ECC.
Well in addition to the sociological problems there are going to be implementation problems. For example, if E-bay must report my gross income then they will need by Taxpayer ID number (aka social security number). I'm not giving that to e-bay. THe practical way to do this woul dbe as a sales tax but the US does not have a national sales tax. THis would also be a drag on marginally profitable transactions.
Miliken Library at caltech which was an ten story building built before 1980 had a huge eccentric weighted rotor on it's roof which every year the engineering school would Activate and drive the building into resonance. All the book shelves inside were cross braced to withstand the effect. It's still there.
Well I as not trying to blame the drive. I was speaking to the net effect. But from what you are telling me, it sounds like the drive almost instantly knows what propocol the disk is (cd, dvd+r etc). So presumably all the grunting is the OS trying to coax the data off the bad sectors. If so then I would extrapolate that adding new protocols won't actually extend the period of lock-up directly.
However I guess the reason why the lockup period for a bad DVD is noticably longer is simply because the DVD is bigger and the tendendy is to use it for larger files than a CD so the probability of a bad sector is higher for any given file. If this is all there is to it, then HDDVD is going to be a freakin nightmare since presumably one is going to have humungous amounts of data.
All that would be wrong however if the probability of failure per disk, (rather than per byte) is the same.
In the long run, after set up costs are ammortized, combined units are cheaper than multiple units. This is especially true from the point of view of a systems integrator like Dell. So in the long run combined units win. That is as long as there any perceived value for the alternate format. if no one uses Blue ray 5 years from now then you are completely correct.
Slashdot Mirror
always, otherwise no fapping.
This reminds me of the old joke about the two russian comrades that read in pravda how a new city in siberia needs engineers. The story says the city wants for nothing, the store shevles are stocked, the store clerks courteous, and there are no lines. But they know that sometime pravda is not isvestia (the truth) and it might be a trap. SO they agree that one of them will go and write back if the stories are true. but if it's a trap their mail will be searched to they agree on a code. If it is all lies the writer will write in red ink. and if true then in blue.
One day the letter arrives. It is in Blue ink. it raves about the luxury goods, and the stores of plenty. In fact says the writer, the only thing in short supply seems to be red ink.
The modern version would have the comrade unable to log in because all the keyboards were dvorak.
This is going to piss off that teenager in Helsinki that's been running their elections.
Acutally this is helping MS. we all know that piracy is actually what allowed MS to become the de facto and in some realms obligatory operating system. The more users you have the more developers and the more other people want it. It's a cycle and piracy was what helped get MS to the top. That's old history.
Now say you are at the top, and your main competition is your old operating system which is sufficiently non-turdy that an update is not an emergency. What do you do?
Ceerainly few people will shell out the bucks to update. You can't give it away because there would go your OEM market. So you just have to wait for the sales of enough new PCs with it pre-installed to seed the market enough to get the developers to the point where they write things that work exclusively for it's new features that won't work on XP. (Direct X, and Widgets. anything else???)
that would be a painfully long wait. So how do you jump start this without selling below the OED cost. Let the pirates do it for you.
once the market for vista has healthy numbers then you start flipping the WGA boobytraps on. activate new ones each week so even when people work around them, the prospect of your computer suddenly topping funcitoning till you find an update to patch it (and how are you going to do that if your computer and your neighbors computer dont work) is more than Chon Wang can bear. Especially if it's a bussiness. It's so not worth the hassle that they pay for the real thing. Or at least a large fraction do which is the best you can hope for anyway.
I think that's the real thing that is going on.
in the mean time these low numbers are building their case. When they do turn on the draconian lock down they can point to these amazing, STUNNING, low lumbers of sales and saying. Hey we tried to limit the DRM but it cut out expected sales by thousands. No one can argue.
Let's write our own adds. Post below why you think Mandriva is good. What's its forte. What sets it apart. Why would I choose this distro? Be sure to post a soundbite too. for example "Ubuntu: it's the desktop linux for people who aren't experts". Or Debian "Steady and depandable, and an awesome package (manager)". etc.. Damn Small " Small and fast, in and out quickly".
cool. thanks.
Thanks for the intelligent observations. Yes I was just sort of riffing on possibilities of digital sound on Vinyl. If Mp3 had been invented earlier it might well have come to pass that Vinyl held it's own against CDs much longer. Had I the equipment It would be fun to create an MP3 vinyl record as I outlined just for the heck of it.
In any case I'm old enough to remember Quadraphonic which never really took off. (And 8 track which did have it's day in the sun).
-1 point for reading comprehension. I said "near-cd" and I'm using the term that all the on-line radio simmulcasts use so go argue with them. my sole definition which I stated was "better than the original vinyl". Also you seem to have no understanding of the problems of encoding to a broadband format.
Thank you for your tedious flame sir. I won't bother to point you to my papers and patents on heterodyne modulation. For one, you can't stack your channels right on top of each other. You'll find that you have all kinds of problems. Look at any real broadband system, and you'll find out they've built in space between channels for just that reason. This is not even wrong. Let's see where to begin?. 1) first in theory there is no reason at all one cannot virtually stack channels without a buffer between them. run them through a acausal anti-alias notch filter. 2) They have to have that buffer for TV channels because the modulation schema and detection schema in use do bleed outside their channels. 3) this is all moot anyhow. The analysis was (*obviously*) just a gendanken argument about channel capacity. Once could do better not making artificial channel boundaries but just using the whole range directly. It's just that by thinking of it as channels of a modulation scheme one already knows the data rate for, one can quickly suss out the expected data rate for the bandwidth without doing any complex maths Next, you've got the problem of assuming that two stereo channels can be used separately. Errr, no. In any analogue system, two adjacent channels will have some amount of crosstalk. That is to say a signal on one channel will bleed over to the other to some degree...Not a big deal for stereo audio, it's highly correlated anyhow and we don't need a ton of separation to hear stereo, however it'll fuck with your encoding real bad.
BZZT. sorry no. all that is handled by the SNR term. cross talk sets a noise floor. What the noise floor is may depend on the modulation scheme. Now if you wanted to make a point here you should point out that that the plasticity of vinyl and needles may introduce non-linearities that can't support simultaneous use of the full audio spectrum. Granted. However that is only going to lower my argument by some fudge factor. And the argument is only an order of magnitude sketch to begin with so I that's not something to fret at this point. I'm not going to quibble over factors of 2, are you? Then of course we get to things like error correction, assumptions that the SNR is equal with regards to frequency (it's not) and so on. I'm not going to go in to all the problems in detail since it ought to be apparent at this point that you didn't think this through. Giggle. You are really taking this proposal seriously aren't you? The whole thing is a joke! if you really wanted to store more music on a cd just use Mp3s. good golly. However, the rather intriguing idea here is that if Mp3 had predated audio CDs Vinyl would have had a much larger storage capacity and signal to noise than we conventionally consider. It's very suprising how good vinyl really could have been.
If MS announces it it using honeypots then no third party can even keep statsitics on how many flaws it has. it will make any published stats meaningless and laughable. MS can even deny any claimed bug, saying it might have been a honeypot and that it's policy is never to comment on the true identity of bugs it has patched.
Really it's perfect because it frustrates those that want to somehow prove MS is less secure by counting bug rates.
(those numbers are kinda meaninngless as there is so little normalization over what counts as a bug in open versus closed source communities. Firefox for example has a higher bug rate than IE by some counts, but that's because firefox's bug tracker tends to make it look like there are more bugs than their really are, and distorts their criticallity.
When you said near CD-quality, you weren't thinking of 8 track tapes were you?
Let's try the math again. First many digital radio stations use ABBAcast or something like it for near-CD quality at 33 to 40Kbs. Even if it's not CD quality it's certainly higher quality that anything that came off the vinyl in the first place. But let's ignore that and incorrectly assume we need 128kb/sec and see how the math comes out.
Audio modems don't actually use the full spectrum of the phone. last I looked they used about 3Khz. Now a vinyl record has a lot of bandwidth. the main limit on the bandwidth is the needles voltage/amplitude response falls off. That's why you equalize them. (which is why your stereo has a different input jack for phono than for tapes) You can only equalize then so far and get a decent sounding thing but you could push this much further if you went to a an analog coding scheme other than amplitude modulation. (hey that's what modems do! how about that).
So just to have some numbers lets make some up that are not completely crazy. Lets say we could push audio signal recovery out to 30Khz. So that gives us ten 3khz wide modem channels. And since the record is stereo that gives 20 total channels.
20*56kb/sec = 1060 kb/sec
1060kb/sec
Hey! that's what I claimed to begin with. I claimed I could fit about 8 cd quality channels (and here we mean 128Kb/sec) on a Vinyl record.
But wait! that's actually a gross underestimate. What determines the bits per second on a modem. it's a combination of two things, bandwidth and signal to noise. A vinyl record has enormously better signal to noise than a telephone. So the number of bits pers second my vinyl can support is vastly higher than the phone.
the shannon capacity scales as:
Bandwidth * log_2 (1 + SNR)
(where SNR is the singal to noise ratio in power)
to if I had 128 times better SNR on a record then that's about 8 times more bits per second.
So you see my Digital Vinyl smokes your CD.
I don't think people would care any more if it was 11x higher. Besides which they could even announce they are doing it. That would shut down those pesky security researchers who always claim that some bug might lead to a remote code exploit without actually working outhow it might. They'd hold their fire because then they would look stupid not MS when they find out it was a honeypot.
As I mentioned in my first post, each time they send out a patch they fix all the honeypots so no one can tell and then pre-load another set that will lay dormant until they need to announce another bug. Then they announce those salted ones too.
Microsoft should pre-publish a whole bunch of tasty looking security advisories that are 100% fake every time they publish one that is real. Make them the most enticing looking (remote code exploit with unvalidated input overflow in ssh). Any given cracker will probably pick the fake and quickly waste gobs of time.
If they wanted to get more diabolical, they could even put some honey pots into the code itself. For example, something that emulates a buffer overflow crash when a certain malfromed word is injected. Or maybe something more tantilizing but useless like a 1 second pause in Internet explorer when a certain tag combination appears followed by a page reload to make them think IE just belched but managed to somehow recover. Hint at this in the pre-pub or leak it on the web (post it in a slashdot comment). they can validate it's existence so they believe the bug really exists too.
Each time they patch the real security hole they can preload ten new honeypots for the next round of spoofing the hackers and eradicate the old ones so it looks like they are patching real bugs and the hackers never catch on.
Why am I posting this under this parent? Well because you could only get away with this in closed source. Open source would make this a give-away.
Why wold you want to degrade music on vinyl like that? You're degrading it when you concert from analogue to digital then again coverting it back to analogue.
What do you think is coming over the USB connection? Analog audio? or digital audio? And what do you think your computer is doing when it plays it over the speakers. Playing the bits or converting them back to audio.oh yeah, and the original post was modded "funny" by the way.
And sewer rat might taste like pumkin pie but I'm not eating one to find out.
While you may think I'm joking I note that a 30-40Kb/sec stream is more than suficient to store audio at near CD quality in real time. You can send 30-40Kb/sec over a telephone which has a small fraction of the bandwidth of a record. Thus I can actually encode about 8 simultaneous stereo streams
since audio records last about 40 minutes, 8 streams gives me 320 minutes of near CD quality music which is longer than an audio encoded CD can provide. Next up VCD on Vinyl
The social equivalent of tongue piercing. Once everyone goes digital it's fun to shock people by going analog. Plus scarcity creates value among collectors. One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability, and the error correction is much more robust on Analog.
Drinkypoo, I guess you got the Right Wing Talking points memo from instanpundit, who posted "These things do seem to take place in locations where it's not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that's the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset." before he even had any of the links to the facts. Good for you. Will you be on Rush Limbaugh tonight?
Interesting. But why would you lose the 16 sectors just because the ECC is borked. Seems like one could still read the sectors, cross ones fingers, and ignore the ECC.
Isn't one of the selling points of the MicroKernel (like mac OSX) supposed to be higher driver security since everything is walled apart?
DEI
Well in addition to the sociological problems there are going to be implementation problems. For example, if E-bay must report my gross income then they will need by Taxpayer ID number (aka social security number). I'm not giving that to e-bay. THe practical way to do this woul dbe as a sales tax but the US does not have a national sales tax. THis would also be a drag on marginally profitable transactions.
Miliken Library at caltech which was an ten story building built before 1980 had a huge eccentric weighted rotor on it's roof which every year the engineering school would Activate and drive the building into resonance. All the book shelves inside were cross braced to withstand the effect. It's still there.
Well I as not trying to blame the drive. I was speaking to the net effect. But from what you are telling me, it sounds like the drive almost instantly knows what propocol the disk is (cd, dvd+r etc). So presumably all the grunting is the OS trying to coax the data off the bad sectors. If so then I would extrapolate that adding new protocols won't actually extend the period of lock-up directly.
However I guess the reason why the lockup period for a bad DVD is noticably longer is simply because the DVD is bigger and the tendendy is to use it for larger files than a CD so the probability of a bad sector is higher for any given file. If this is all there is to it, then HDDVD is going to be a freakin nightmare since presumably one is going to have humungous amounts of data.
All that would be wrong however if the probability of failure per disk, (rather than per byte) is the same.
any thoughts?
In the long run, after set up costs are ammortized, combined units are cheaper than multiple units. This is especially true from the point of view of a systems integrator like Dell. So in the long run combined units win. That is as long as there any perceived value for the alternate format. if no one uses Blue ray 5 years from now then you are completely correct.