Er, I think you must have me mixed up with someone else...
But don't you think that creators of good music should be rewarded somehow? How many people are there who would be creating great music that would please lots of people, but can't because they don't have the time?
But for every 'artist' raking in the profits, there are a hundred who just get by. (And some who need day jobs. Maybe they're the real artists, making music for the joy of doing so, not for the money.)
It's just that you only get to hear about the successful ones. (Which is precisely why they're raking in the profits...)
An idle observation; 'an anti-American rant'? So our cities tend to be laid out differently from yours. How is that 'anti-American'? (Believe me, if I'd meant to post a rant, you'd have known about it:)
Nope. But I have spent a while driving through parts of California, Nevada, and Arizona, so I'm not totally ignorant of such things. And everywhere I went, there was a huge difference from the sort of layout I'm used to in the UK (ever driven here?).
Strange, coz my first thought was "Wow, that looks just like every other US city!"
But then, I'm from the UK, where (with one exception) cities aren't built on an unimaginative characterless grid that makes everywhere the same as everywhere else and takes all the fun out of navigation...
Re: Data from Startrek TNG played poker
on
Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, Cause And Effect -- that was a good one. In fact, that was the one episode which convinced me TNG was worth watching, so from having seen a handful of episodes before that, I watched them all from then on.
It's still one of my favourites, along with Ship In A Bottle (the second one with Moriarty), Darmok (the aliens who speak only in mythological references), Loud As A Whisper (the deaf mediator), and Frame Of Mind (where Riker wakes up in a mental hospital). Why don't they make 'em like that any more?
In the mid 90'ies Sony actually introduced MD for data.
Yes they did, and it's a good example of what's wrong with Sony:
They made it prohibitively expensive (both drives and media). And they made it needlessly incompatible with audio MD (different media; data drives couldn't read audio data; &c).
Plus it wasn't really suitable for many of its intended uses: not fast enough for a floppy replacement, not big enough or flexible enough for 4- and 8-track recording (when direct-to-disk systems were becoming available), drives not cheap enough for use in many consumer devices.
In all, a good technology scuppered by enforced technical and economic limitations. Sound familiar?
That way of allowing multiple suppliers of gas and electricity is exactly what happens here in the UK -- leading to the bizarre situation where you can get your electricity from British Gas, and your gas from Eastern Electricity!
Nice as it may be to be able to cut an A(n) sheet into two A(n+1) sheets, or stick two A(n+1) sheets together to get an A(n) one, the real benefit that I get is being able to fold sheets in two or four, and still get a standard size. I can get A3 paper, fold it in half, and get a nice A4 booklet. (Jolly handy for photocopying sheet music -- for personal use only, of course!)
I'm no physicist (though I did get an 'A' grade for A-Level physics), but from general reading, I think that the way light behaves is pretty well understood and explained by the standard model -- in particular, by the branch of Quantum Theory known as Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). The problem isn't that we don't know what photons do, but that what they do seems so different from what our normal intuition about the world expects them to!
(A great book on QED for the interested layman is that by Richard Feynman, one of the theory's originators. Not much maths, but goes into lots of detail and manages to make it fascinating.)
Remember that the 'many-worlds' interpretation of QM isn't the only one, nor even the prevailing one. Another way of understanding the Young's Slits experiment is to think of the photon interfering with all the other possible paths it could take. In reality, as far as we can tell, the photon doesn't actually take a single path anyway until it impinges on the observer -- in some sense, photons taking all possible paths half-exist before that point, so interfering with each other makes some vague sort of sense...
Anyway, the point is that the Young's Slits experiment is one of the few which are simple enough to set up in a living room, clear enough that you can see the results with the naked eye, apparently obvious in classical-physics terms, and yet (once you know that light is made of particle-like things) bizarre and inexplicable without the deep mathematics of QM.
You make it sound so simple and straightforward. But it's one of the most counter-intuitive and mind-twisting experiments in physics.
Because light isn't a standard classical wave -- it's made up of discrete particles. But you get the standard wave diffraction pattern built up, even if you only let through one photon at a time...
It's the fact that light is made up of discrete particles and yet can still behave like a wave, that's like nothing we see in the large-scale world, and that leads directly to QM.
I believe the explanation for the double-slit experiment in the many-worlds interpretation of QM boils down to the photon interfering with all the corresponding photons in all the other universes...
True. But once there's an 'official, supported M$ version' that's being actively developed, and an unofficial open-source version of less obvious qualifications, which one will the hordes go with? And once that one has the mindshare, how long before M$ starts changing file formats and playing all their old tricks?
It'd be as if they released the source to Windows 97 now. It might be interesting, but hardly a threat to them.
It also allows for closed source binary-only distribution.
That's the one that worries me. What if, say, M$ runs this as an open-source project for a couple of years, accepts a lot of contributions from people, then announces that the open-source 'experiment' is over, and closes the source again.
Upshot of this? They've had lots of extra people working on their software for free, but the main point is that they've captured mindshare. While it was open, they gained lots more users, and stopped many people moving to alternatives. Or creating alternatives.
In fact, it's pretty much the same policy that they've used time and time again: embrace, extend, extinguish -- only this time applied to their own product.
It's worse than that, and much more self-interested.
Someone who can't install vital service packs has three choices: keep using it unpatched, buy a legal copy, or switch to something else. M$ desperately wants to stop people cold-turkeying themselves off their software, and I'm sure the service pack is partly to prevent that.
As others have said, surely the best sign of a healthy and bias-free society wouldn't be that they felt able to mention his sexuality, but that they did't see the point of mentioning it?
Unless there is a perceived advantage, unfortunately it isn't going to become widely adopted
Yes, this has always been true.
However, perhaps we're reaching a time when being unrestricted, open-sourced, and freely available is perceived as an advantage -- by enough people to tilt the balance?
Or at least, so we can hope... And maybe we can help to make it happen?
One of the problems with JPEG is that it treats each 8x8 block of pixels separately -- I don't think it preserves any relationship between adjacent blocks.
This means that when information is dropped in each block (according to the compression required), the edges of blocks suffer in a way unrelated to the edge of adjacent blocks. The result -- as the quality decreases, the edges between blocks become more and more obvious, and the whole image becomes 'blocky'.
I believe this is one way that wavelet technology improves -- the individual wavelets are spread over the whole image, without regard for any blocks, and so the compression degrades much more gracefully.
As you say, the DCT converts each 8x8 block into a series of cosine waves, both horizontally and vertically in the block. Then, when it needs to reduce the space, it drops the higher-frequency coefficients first -- this is why sharp edges, with lots of high frequency information, suffer most. (You tend to find that lower-frequency coefficients try to compensate, giving the characteristic ripples near sharp edges.) Areas that are relatively smooth, with only low-frequency information to start with, suffer much less.
Another way JPEG loses information is by colour. The human eye is much more sensitive to fine changes in brightness than it is to fine changes in colour; so the picture is transformed from RGB into a brightness channel and two colour channels, and the brightness channel gets a greater share of the limited space. It's quite interesting, if you're, er, interested in that sort of thing...
Like yours, it uses each letter exactly once. Unlike yours, every word is a valid (if archaic) full English word, and it makes grammatical sense; but unlike mine, yours was understandable:)
(I think it means something about an unlucky grassland annoying a certain type of cattle belonging to a mosque. There're more here.)
They do: it's called the Mac OS X version. Hard to find, but it plays nice, doesn't hijack anything, doesn't do anything it shouldn't, and is easy to remove. It still looks ugly, of course, and the compression is still dire, but as an app it's quite reasonable. So they've proved they can do it...
Slashdot Mirror
Er, I think you must have me mixed up with someone else...
But don't you think that creators of good music should be rewarded somehow? How many people are there who would be creating great music that would please lots of people, but can't because they don't have the time?
It's just that you only get to hear about the successful ones. (Which is precisely why they're raking in the profits...)
Do you take all comments so personally?
That's the one I had in mind, yes!
Nope. But I have spent a while driving through parts of California, Nevada, and Arizona, so I'm not totally ignorant of such things. And everywhere I went, there was a huge difference from the sort of layout I'm used to in the UK (ever driven here?).
But then, I'm from the UK, where (with one exception) cities aren't built on an unimaginative characterless grid that makes everywhere the same as everywhere else and takes all the fun out of navigation...
It's still one of my favourites, along with Ship In A Bottle (the second one with Moriarty), Darmok (the aliens who speak only in mythological references), Loud As A Whisper (the deaf mediator), and Frame Of Mind (where Riker wakes up in a mental hospital). Why don't they make 'em like that any more?
Yes they did, and it's a good example of what's wrong with Sony:
They made it prohibitively expensive (both drives and media). And they made it needlessly incompatible with audio MD (different media; data drives couldn't read audio data; &c).
Plus it wasn't really suitable for many of its intended uses: not fast enough for a floppy replacement, not big enough or flexible enough for 4- and 8-track recording (when direct-to-disk systems were becoming available), drives not cheap enough for use in many consumer devices.
In all, a good technology scuppered by enforced technical and economic limitations. Sound familiar?
That way of allowing multiple suppliers of gas and electricity is exactly what happens here in the UK -- leading to the bizarre situation where you can get your electricity from British Gas, and your gas from Eastern Electricity!
My first web browser ran on my Atari Falcon with 4MB of RAM. And I still run Opera on my Psion; it takes only about 3MB.
32MB, huh...
So what went wrong? I remember the TNG days, when a Braga writing credit had a very high correlation with a great story...
Then load up Metallifizer, and they all will!
Nice as it may be to be able to cut an A(n) sheet into two A(n+1) sheets, or stick two A(n+1) sheets together to get an A(n) one, the real benefit that I get is being able to fold sheets in two or four, and still get a standard size. I can get A3 paper, fold it in half, and get a nice A4 booklet. (Jolly handy for photocopying sheet music -- for personal use only, of course!)
I'm no physicist (though I did get an 'A' grade for A-Level physics), but from general reading, I think that the way light behaves is pretty well understood and explained by the standard model -- in particular, by the branch of Quantum Theory known as Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). The problem isn't that we don't know what photons do, but that what they do seems so different from what our normal intuition about the world expects them to!
(A great book on QED for the interested layman is that by Richard Feynman, one of the theory's originators. Not much maths, but goes into lots of detail and manages to make it fascinating.)
Remember that the 'many-worlds' interpretation of QM isn't the only one, nor even the prevailing one. Another way of understanding the Young's Slits experiment is to think of the photon interfering with all the other possible paths it could take. In reality, as far as we can tell, the photon doesn't actually take a single path anyway until it impinges on the observer -- in some sense, photons taking all possible paths half-exist before that point, so interfering with each other makes some vague sort of sense...
Anyway, the point is that the Young's Slits experiment is one of the few which are simple enough to set up in a living room, clear enough that you can see the results with the naked eye, apparently obvious in classical-physics terms, and yet (once you know that light is made of particle-like things) bizarre and inexplicable without the deep mathematics of QM.
Because light isn't a standard classical wave -- it's made up of discrete particles. But you get the standard wave diffraction pattern built up, even if you only let through one photon at a time...
It's the fact that light is made up of discrete particles and yet can still behave like a wave, that's like nothing we see in the large-scale world, and that leads directly to QM.
I believe the explanation for the double-slit experiment in the many-worlds interpretation of QM boils down to the photon interfering with all the corresponding photons in all the other universes...
Well, I didn't think so, but some of the comments hereabouts make me wonder :-(
I assume you mean [Windows] 98
Er, yes... Can you tell I'm not a Windows user? :)
It'd be as if they released the source to Windows 97 now. It might be interesting, but hardly a threat to them.
That's the one that worries me. What if, say, M$ runs this as an open-source project for a couple of years, accepts a lot of contributions from people, then announces that the open-source 'experiment' is over, and closes the source again.
Upshot of this? They've had lots of extra people working on their software for free, but the main point is that they've captured mindshare. While it was open, they gained lots more users, and stopped many people moving to alternatives. Or creating alternatives.
In fact, it's pretty much the same policy that they've used time and time again: embrace, extend, extinguish -- only this time applied to their own product.
Someone who can't install vital service packs has three choices: keep using it unpatched, buy a legal copy, or switch to something else. M$ desperately wants to stop people cold-turkeying themselves off their software, and I'm sure the service pack is partly to prevent that.
As others have said, surely the best sign of a healthy and bias-free society wouldn't be that they felt able to mention his sexuality, but that they did't see the point of mentioning it?
Your reference for this? The first few references I found on Google all disagree with you:
- the human eye is more sensitive to luminance than chrominance
- We know that the human eye cannot perceive differences in color as well as it can differences in intensity.
- The human eye is more sensitive to brightness (gray scale data) variations than to hue variations
- the human eye is much more sensitive to luminance than chrominance
- the human eye is much more sensitive to brightness variations in gray-scale than to color variations
Need I go on?Yes, this has always been true.
However, perhaps we're reaching a time when being unrestricted, open-sourced, and freely available is perceived as an advantage -- by enough people to tilt the balance?
Or at least, so we can hope... And maybe we can help to make it happen?
This means that when information is dropped in each block (according to the compression required), the edges of blocks suffer in a way unrelated to the edge of adjacent blocks. The result -- as the quality decreases, the edges between blocks become more and more obvious, and the whole image becomes 'blocky'.
I believe this is one way that wavelet technology improves -- the individual wavelets are spread over the whole image, without regard for any blocks, and so the compression degrades much more gracefully.
As you say, the DCT converts each 8x8 block into a series of cosine waves, both horizontally and vertically in the block. Then, when it needs to reduce the space, it drops the higher-frequency coefficients first -- this is why sharp edges, with lots of high frequency information, suffer most. (You tend to find that lower-frequency coefficients try to compensate, giving the characteristic ripples near sharp edges.) Areas that are relatively smooth, with only low-frequency information to start with, suffer much less.
Another way JPEG loses information is by colour. The human eye is much more sensitive to fine changes in brightness than it is to fine changes in colour; so the picture is transformed from RGB into a brightness channel and two colour channels, and the brightness channel gets a greater share of the limited space. It's quite interesting, if you're, er, interested in that sort of thing...
(I think it means something about an unlucky grassland annoying a certain type of cattle belonging to a mosque. There're more here.)
They do: it's called the Mac OS X version. Hard to find, but it plays nice, doesn't hijack anything, doesn't do anything it shouldn't, and is easy to remove. It still looks ugly, of course, and the compression is still dire, but as an app it's quite reasonable. So they've proved they can do it...