there is... just use Exact Audio Copy and have it create its own TOC from the disc layout.
The fact is, as long as the bits are on the discs to be read, there is no way they will ever devise an unbreakable cd copy protection format. This is really why they are trying to trojan us with this DVD-A and SACD crap.
no, the idea is that documents will need authentication to be read, so if the document leaves the company it remains in encrypted form. This is a good thing in theory.
Okay, I'll bite. IN THEORY, that is in a perfect world, the idea of programs/documents needing authentication is a good idea. It would be great for administering desktops in an office environment for example. That is if I (as the admin) get to control the authentication server. IN PRACTICE, i see this as a move towards a closed development model (not as in closed-source, as in closed dev like consoles for instance where everyone needs to go through nintendo/sony/MS to publish software) where MS controls access. I could be wrong though, and the idea that we could finally stop idiot employees/customers etc from installing gator or emailing out confidential information by mistake is a nice one.
yeh, i knew that actually. I was exaggerating - both movies (and all the ones you listed actually) have amazing wire stunts, but Iron Monkey is the best IMHO.
Understand that essentially NO ONE is as right-wing as the american Republican party. Up here in Canada, your Democrats appear pretty center (akin to our Conservatives) while your Republicans appear hard-core right (some would compare them to fascists, but I'm just trying to educate here, not stoke the flames).
This is simply because America is really the least socialist, most capitalist western nation out there. Chirac is OUR idea of right-wing (and France's), but certainly not yours.
Go demo one yourself, only do it double-blind and you'll find the placebo effect is extraordinary. Careful though - don't double-blind with the CD layer on a SACD: It appears they are intentionally doing a superiour mastering job with the SACD layer just to make the difference apparent. Like I said, due to the horendous compression used on current CDs, most of the 16-bits of dynamic range are being wasted as it is. And there is no way you can hear a tone past 22050hz.
Generally this is good advice. Speaker cable is pretty high current however... so as long as you're using a good gauge things like shielding shouldn't matter. For A/V cabling though I like to use a little better sheilding - say $20 cables at the most though. Anything more, and you should just be investing that money into better equipment.
Fair enough, but I (and hopefully a large slashdot audience) know the differences, and when I rip my CDs to a lossless format, I'm using LAME --alt-preset standard MP3s, so that I can play them back on my PC, my stereo, and my nomad jukebox.
When MPC or AAC mature enough to be that universal, I'll switch.
wave files ripped from a CD (44.1khz, 16 bits) are 1411khz, which may be a better comparison because both are data formats. dividing the avg bitrate by this value gives the compression ratio.
Xing is FAST, but it is fast at the expense of a number of things. It's psychoacoustic model tends to ignore a number of expensive calculations in the interest of speed. In addiction, it's joint-stereo mode (which is used in LAME to essentially flawlessly compress the stereo channels together) is so broken that it defaults to full stereo, waisting valuable bits. Plus it doesn't encode sounds over 16khz.
As far as high-frequency sounds go, most encoders (Xing) just ignore them. The FhG MP3 specification says to cut off frequencies above 16khz. LAME allows you to set the cut-off as high as you want with --lowpass xx... --alt-preset standard uses 19khz. I suggest not setting it any higher though because high-frequency sounds are awful needy bit-wise, and most people can't tell the difference.
Lots of audiophiles use PCs, but they tend to use a soundcard that doesn't resample to 48khz (like the audigy's do), hooked up to either a good stereo or (better) a headphone amp and a set of sennheiser 600s for example.
REAL audiophiles aren't crazy (ie they are not die-hard vinyl fans), and they tend to recognize that SACD/DVD-A are no better in theory than CD, but are simple a way of backdooring DRM. 44.1khz/16-bit is a much larger dynamic range than any recording studio uses, so why would you need more resolution than that?
Indeed. anyone who makes claims about audio quality without ABXing (double-blind testing) should be ignored compeletely. The audio industry is full of rediculous claims by "audiophiles", convincing the rich and gullible to purchase absolutely useless shit. They're as bad as "alternative healers".
I disagree about MP3 being a "not hugely high quality codec".
MP3s encoded at 128kbps CBR (constant bit rate) using an encoder such as Xing WILL result in poor-quality mp3s, easily discernible by the averagle listen using poor quality equipment. However, an mp3 encoded using a recent version of LAME (i recommend 3.90.2) and "--alt-preset standard" will find that the resulting files are virtually indistinguishable from the source CDs (even to audiophiles), at an average bitrate of around 192kbps. This is superiour compression to ATRAC, and the LAME psychoacoustic model is significantly better tuned IMHO.
For more information on ALL lossy and lossless codecs by people who really know their stuff, check out the message boards at Hydrogen Audio.
Yes, as I recall Linus Torvalds made such a statement recently, saying that the hacks involved seriously hamper x86 servers performance when addressing more than 4gb memory. The x86-64 architechture fixes this issue, which should at the very least allow for some inexpensive and powerful high-end servers.
As an additional "huh?", the high-end athlons are now going for pretty much exactly the same price as the high-end P4s. I like my Athlon, I like AMD, I support underdogs, but right now buying AMD isn't nearly the steal it used to be.
Well, latest kernels don't need you to mess with hdparm anymore, nor do you need to pass arguments to get it to recognize all your ram AFAIK. Sorry but BSD does NOT have "a good policy on staying a step behind the bleeding edge without being too far behind" like you say, at least not compared to gentoo. Nothing is as up-to-date bleeding edge as gentoo.
The VM and scheduler, sure. I like having threads though. Hopefully all of your concerns will be addressed soon with linux 2.6.
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there is... just use Exact Audio Copy and have it create its own TOC from the disc layout.
The fact is, as long as the bits are on the discs to be read, there is no way they will ever devise an unbreakable cd copy protection format. This is really why they are trying to trojan us with this DVD-A and SACD crap.
Reminds me of a (bad) joke.
"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do."
no, the idea is that documents will need authentication to be read, so if the document leaves the company it remains in encrypted form. This is a good thing in theory.
Okay, I'll bite. IN THEORY, that is in a perfect world, the idea of programs/documents needing authentication is a good idea. It would be great for administering desktops in an office environment for example. That is if I (as the admin) get to control the authentication server. IN PRACTICE, i see this as a move towards a closed development model (not as in closed-source, as in closed dev like consoles for instance where everyone needs to go through nintendo/sony/MS to publish software) where MS controls access. I could be wrong though, and the idea that we could finally stop idiot employees/customers etc from installing gator or emailing out confidential information by mistake is a nice one.
I am so reporting you under the DMCA.
yeh, i knew that actually. I was exaggerating - both movies (and all the ones you listed actually) have amazing wire stunts, but Iron Monkey is the best IMHO.
right, because Liberals are sexual deviants. Why did I just respond to a troll anyway? /slaps self
Iron Monkey... that movie's choreography made Crouching Tiger look like the Power Rangers.
Understand that essentially NO ONE is as right-wing as the american Republican party. Up here in Canada, your Democrats appear pretty center (akin to our Conservatives) while your Republicans appear hard-core right (some would compare them to fascists, but I'm just trying to educate here, not stoke the flames).
This is simply because America is really the least socialist, most capitalist western nation out there. Chirac is OUR idea of right-wing (and France's), but certainly not yours.
The US already controls Saudi Arabia however. The monarchy there is essentially just a puppet dictatorship supported by US troops in exchange for oil.
And America wonders why everyone hates them...
Go demo one yourself, only do it double-blind and you'll find the placebo effect is extraordinary. Careful though - don't double-blind with the CD layer on a SACD: It appears they are intentionally doing a superiour mastering job with the SACD layer just to make the difference apparent. Like I said, due to the horendous compression used on current CDs, most of the 16-bits of dynamic range are being wasted as it is. And there is no way you can hear a tone past 22050hz.
yep, i did, but thanks for catching that :)
Generally this is good advice. Speaker cable is pretty high current however... so as long as you're using a good gauge things like shielding shouldn't matter. For A/V cabling though I like to use a little better sheilding - say $20 cables at the most though. Anything more, and you should just be investing that money into better equipment.
Fair enough, but I (and hopefully a large slashdot audience) know the differences, and when I rip my CDs to a lossless format, I'm using LAME --alt-preset standard MP3s, so that I can play them back on my PC, my stereo, and my nomad jukebox.
When MPC or AAC mature enough to be that universal, I'll switch.
wave files ripped from a CD (44.1khz, 16 bits) are 1411khz, which may be a better comparison because both are data formats. dividing the avg bitrate by this value gives the compression ratio.
Xing is FAST, but it is fast at the expense of a number of things. It's psychoacoustic model tends to ignore a number of expensive calculations in the interest of speed. In addiction, it's joint-stereo mode (which is used in LAME to essentially flawlessly compress the stereo channels together) is so broken that it defaults to full stereo, waisting valuable bits. Plus it doesn't encode sounds over 16khz.
As far as high-frequency sounds go, most encoders (Xing) just ignore them. The FhG MP3 specification says to cut off frequencies above 16khz. LAME allows you to set the cut-off as high as you want with --lowpass xx ... --alt-preset standard uses 19khz. I suggest not setting it any higher though because high-frequency sounds are awful needy bit-wise, and most people can't tell the difference.
*bullshit*...
Lots of audiophiles use PCs, but they tend to use a soundcard that doesn't resample to 48khz (like the audigy's do), hooked up to either a good stereo or (better) a headphone amp and a set of sennheiser 600s for example.
REAL audiophiles aren't crazy (ie they are not die-hard vinyl fans), and they tend to recognize that SACD/DVD-A are no better in theory than CD, but are simple a way of backdooring DRM. 44.1khz/16-bit is a much larger dynamic range than any recording studio uses, so why would you need more resolution than that?
Indeed. anyone who makes claims about audio quality without ABXing (double-blind testing) should be ignored compeletely. The audio industry is full of rediculous claims by "audiophiles", convincing the rich and gullible to purchase absolutely useless shit. They're as bad as "alternative healers".
I disagree about MP3 being a "not hugely high quality codec".
MP3s encoded at 128kbps CBR (constant bit rate) using an encoder such as Xing WILL result in poor-quality mp3s, easily discernible by the averagle listen using poor quality equipment. However, an mp3 encoded using a recent version of LAME (i recommend 3.90.2) and "--alt-preset standard" will find that the resulting files are virtually indistinguishable from the source CDs (even to audiophiles), at an average bitrate of around 192kbps. This is superiour compression to ATRAC, and the LAME psychoacoustic model is significantly better tuned IMHO.
For more information on ALL lossy and lossless codecs by people who really know their stuff, check out the message boards at Hydrogen Audio.
Yes, as I recall Linus Torvalds made such a statement recently, saying that the hacks involved seriously hamper x86 servers performance when addressing more than 4gb memory. The x86-64 architechture fixes this issue, which should at the very least allow for some inexpensive and powerful high-end servers.
As an additional "huh?", the high-end athlons are now going for pretty much exactly the same price as the high-end P4s. I like my Athlon, I like AMD, I support underdogs, but right now buying AMD isn't nearly the steal it used to be.
This is true. There were to be no grasses at all for several million years.
they do have CDs with precompiled binaries for lots of different archs (i686 for example). Don't think the ports tree is on there though.
Well, latest kernels don't need you to mess with hdparm anymore, nor do you need to pass arguments to get it to recognize all your ram AFAIK. Sorry but BSD does NOT have "a good policy on staying a step behind the bleeding edge without being too far behind" like you say, at least not compared to gentoo. Nothing is as up-to-date bleeding edge as gentoo.
The VM and scheduler, sure. I like having threads though. Hopefully all of your concerns will be addressed soon with linux 2.6.