We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV).
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stabs at providing personalized scores -- Slashcode lets people provide a minimal amount of metadata along with the score, like "Offtopic" (and, at least in theory, if you don't feel that Offtopic is a bad thing, you can make Offtopic have no effect for you). Google's Pagerank uses your current search as a bit of a "profile" for you to try to determine appropriate pages. TiVo contained some rudimentary stabs. But, in general, we are still using pre-computer-era evaluation mechanisms.
There is no technical reason for me not to have a review score based more heavily on the feedback of people who, in the past, have had review scores similar to my own. There are some organizational issues -- this sort of thing requires a large population of users/reviewers to be effective, which means that unless a single website is massive, like Amazon or eBay, it really needs to take advantage of user reviews written for other sites.
All of which is entirely inappropriate for children in Kansas.
To demonize something, you must keep people apart from it.
Let children come in contact with marijuana or homosexuals, and they might realize that neither is as objectionable as their parents desperately want them to believe.
It would be horrible for the American media to broadcast images of soldiers being killed ("we're going to move you back...for 'security' reasons") or killing civilians, or for photographic evidence of US-led prison atrocities to be spread around ("I find that 'offensive'"), and so on and so forth. People might get stirred up, uncomfortable with what their leaders are doing.
If you want propaganda, don't bother with Fox and friends -- they feed dillute, unsatisfying gruel. For the real stuff, just read the United State's official international propaganda source (currently, it appears that they're smearing the name of the Iraqi politician that turned out to dislike the idea of being a puppet). If you want vaguely more balanced news, try the excellent news.google.com, which includes a helping of different perspectives on stories. It's always fun to read an Arab and an Israeli view on the same story.:-)
So is it censorship if the individual library decides not to carry porn?
Yes.
More disturbingly, is it censorship if the individual library chooses not to carry the latest beheading video from Iraq?
Yes.
Just like it was discrimination when I decided to start dating a white girl instead of a black girl.
Or a girl who wasn't a serial killer. Just another characteristic. Yup.
Is it less censorship when the individual libraries do it, rather than the AG?
No, it's just as objectionable.
My old city library once had someone donate every issue of Playboy to the library. The library kept them behind the desk (didn't want parents angry that their kiddies were leafing through them), but they were in the card catalog and in circulation and could be checked out. Same for a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Frankly, I don't really think that it's a good idea for parents to restrict what their kids read/watch (talk it over with them, give and justify your views, do whatever you want, just don't "keep them from content", because there's only one way that people mature enough to deal with content, and that's experience). However, that isn't really the relevant issue here -- I'm certainly in the minority on this point. What is at issue is that a group of people should not dictate the set of ideas that *other* people can be exposed to -- this goes above and beyond molding and controlling your own child's development, which is as far as the rights of parents extend -- not to the children of other parents.
Well, I've only listened to Devo once, but the fact that the title has "Scalped", which could, I suppose, be vaguely considered violent, might do it
Kinda funny here -- I agree with the ACLU. The AG can (and should) block CDs, but it should not be on "decency" grounds. It should be on the grounds that the CDs do not represent the value that the RIAA agreed to pay to the states -- 1,500 copies of Willennium, as has been pointed out before, does not have much more than the value of a single CD.
We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV).
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stabs at providing personalized scores -- Slashcode lets people provide a minimal amount of metadata along with the score, like "Offtopic" (and, at least in theory, if you don't feel that Offtopic is a bad thing, you can make Offtopic have no effect for you). Google's Pagerank uses your current search as a bit of a "profile" for you to try to determine appropriate pages. TiVo contained some rudimentary stabs. But, in general, we are still using pre-computer-era evaluation mechanisms.
There is no technical reason for me not to have a review score based more heavily on the feedback of people who, in the past, have had review scores similar to my own. There are some organizational issues -- this sort of thing requires a large population of users/reviewers to be effective, which means that unless a single website is massive, like Amazon or eBay, it really needs to take advantage of user reviews written for other sites.
It's really nice to see that eWeek both is fixing their screwup and *admitted* doing so *AND* admitted to doing so promptly *AND* on Slashdot.
That being said, this reminds me of when a Lucasarts lawyer idiotically sent a C&D to the ScummVM people (yeah, that was bright -- the only reason Lucasarts sells any copies of their classics any more is because people can run them on the ScummVM engine). The Lucasarts people retracted what they said once things filtered around a bit.
Companies really need to have better policies in place regarding C&Ds and warnings. I personally think that threats regarding copyright infringement and similar, which is a threat made *on behalf of* and *in the name of* the company, should need to run through the top person at the company before going out. I've gotten a bogus C&D before, and it's very annoying.
I've always thought that game reviewers have a far too ambitious resolution on their scores, given the subjective nature of such scores. What person A likes "84%", person B may easily like "75%".
I could see someone maybe rating games from "1" to "5", without fractional breakdown. It's certainly possible to rate different factors -- graphics, fun, replayability, sound, and so forth (though the idea of "averaging" them to come up with an overall score is broken and pointless -- for example, strategy games generally don't put much emphasis on graphics, and adventure games not much on replayability). However, the idea of rating things based on a 1 to 10, 1 to 20, or even 1 to 100 scale is far too ambitious for any reviewer to effectively handle. Generally, if you start needing that kind of resolution, you should be asking yourself whether, perhaps, your scores might just be inflated and the distribution tilted heavily towards the top.
FWIW, for you other sufferers out there, it seems that setting content.notify.ontimer to false in about:config will disable the automatic reflow in Firefox, which will them hopefully work around the problem (I'm trying it now -- no mucked up pages thus far). Of course, one has to live without automatic reflow, but if you're a real tab-browsing affeciando, you shouldn't have any problems.
So in IE7 slashdot will be screwed up and displaying over to the right hand side inside a black background with black text?
Speaking of which, does anyone know (a) why this happens, (b) why it only happens occasionally, and (c) whether anyone is working on fixing it? I would have guessed that Taco and Jamie and so forth use Firefox, but maybe not. [shrug]
I don't like IE either, but come on. There is no "recent mass migration."
I think the tiny grain of truth somewhere was that the current version of IE actually saw a market share decrease last month instead of an increase.
Really, why do Slashdot story submitters have to have such completely and deliberately inaccurate stories? It *sucks*. I'd happily add a day or whatever on to the time until a story comes out if the eds would just read the linked to article on each story that they actually pass.
On the other hand, the "year of the desktop" claims have a bit more meat to them. Linux has a small desktop market share, and so a doubling over the course of a year doesn't look like all that much.
Also, most of the people talking about the "year of the desktop" are talking about whether the desktop is technically ready. They aren't factoring in transition time (which may well be up to five years -- nobody is going to throw out all their existing, reasonably well systems to install Linux -- they're just going to install Linux when they do their next upgrade).
Kensington, a company which has, from my past experience, made good use of "good image marketing", has made a guarantee with a product, realized that that guarantee is, well, expensive, and now refuses to honor it.
The lock picking people are using the entire thing as a teaser to sell a product.
I'll bet if some lawyer picks up on this, they'll start a class action suit with horrible stories about how much damage could be caused, so on and so forth, and try to rake in a hefty percentage of some settlement which will give everyone else involved about $1.50 per person.
The problem with involving money in something is that we are taught to act like complete assholes in the name of earning money (and I'm not saying that we shouldn't), but where there's money, there's assholishness.
This is particularly sad because once-upon-a-time Kensington made really nice (though expensive) trackballs. A nice big ball, plenty of buttons, etc. I heard a story about one guy that asked if he could buy a replacement trackball ball because his son liked to play with his ball and eventually lost it, and Kensington sent him a replacement ball -- and twelve more "for his son to play with". I thought that was kinda cool.
Their trackballs are supposed to have been going downhill, though, with cheaper, shoddier parts (especially that "ring around the trackball scroll wheel" device).
Okay, then, let the stock split eight times, at which point it's $1 a share. Does that make you feel any better?
Per-share price doesn't matter. Market cap does. If Google is selling one share, and you get to buy Google for $130, you can be certain that I'll take that share. If, on the other hand, Google is valuing itself at $130 trillion, and you get one trillionth of Google when you buy that share, I'm not interested.
$105-130 is too high a range and makes it completely speculative.
That's silly. Google can always split. Market cap is what matters, not per-share prices.
I hate per-share prices. They're an artifact of trying to provide a number that could be tracked manually back before computer days, and the degree of misunderstanding over basics of the stock market is staggering. I wish that price changes were listed as percentage changes, not as per-share-price changes, and that companies would talk about bleeding market cap at their IPO, not share prices.
Because $120 seems pretty clearly to be a silly price, at least compared to other stocks. I don't really think many people are going to want to buy at that price.
That doesn't make sense. Why do you even care what the share price is? It means effectively nothing. Remember when ESR made an ass of himself with a very open letter about share prices to Sun's CEO?
Market capitalization is the number you want to be looking for.
What is likely to happen, by my guess, is that Google is going to have a relatively stable stock. Works for me.
Moore's law dictates that passwords will weaken, with respect to brute force processing, by one bit every eighteen months.
The problem is that nobody that I know of uses a slow enough algorithm for password processing to make current passwords effective with respect to cracking.
Let's say people use completely random passwords (already unrealistic) with lower case letters (26 values), upper case letters (52 values), and digits (62 values). We'll be generous and round up to 64 values (maybe someone uses a period or a dollar sign or something). That's seven bits per character of the password.
So, if someone is using an eight-character password), and perfectly following all rules, and using a machine-generated password with things like tildes, backslashes, and right curly brackets, they have a fifty-six bit password.
The slowest hash that I know of that's generally used and approved by lots of cryptographers to not have known weaknesses and to avoid collisions is SHA-1.
You just have to SHA-1 eight bytes for each attempted password, in such a case.
For reference, I just downloaded sha_v1.b, and it can eat through, on my p4, using brute force, about 5% of the possible password space a minute for 26-value, 6-character passwords (and I doubt that this is as optimized as it could be -- hell, I didn't even compile with optimization on. 64^8/26^6 = 911170, so a perfectly random "strong" password is less than a million times as strong. Thus, by running for about one month on one hundred compromised machines, I am guaranteed to break any password.
The main current goal has been to avoid ever allowing the hashed passwords stored on a machine to leak. This way, we can establish methods for preventing an attacker from brute-forcing the system. For example, I can have a system only allow one password attempt on an account per three seconds or so, which pushes passwords back into the effetive range again.
This sounds a lot like ActiveMusic in DirectX. Go play "Munch's Oddysee" on Xbox for a good example. As you get more involved, the music changes.
[looks at MSDN] Ah, you're right. DirectMusic appears to do something like this with transition segments.
I'd like to see it be taken a bit further, with actual standardized states be used, though, which DirectMusic does not have a concept of (though I suppose you could implement this using DirectMusic).
Okay, look. Here is a line-by-line breakdown of what the original respondent said:
The comparison of a guitar to a sine wave is absurd.
I think that we can agree that this line is not part of the point in question.
Besides, the MIDI specification allows for 127 levels of volume (key velocity) in addition to the ability to manipulate and filter the audio after synthesis.
This is speaking about *synthesized audio*. *Not* audio that is just a bunch of already-rasterized data being tempo-shifted. For reference, here is the line I wrote in my original post:
It is very useful to be able to adjust tempo -- this gives, with little effort, a wide range of tracks that can indicate a modified condition, but unfortunately, with the move to storing simply raster music, it's not possible to adjust tempo very well in real-time, so we have lost a certain mechanism for conveying data via audio.
Note that I am talking *only* about raster music. I am not talking about MIDI, MOD, or *anything* other than straight raster audio, the kind of thing that you will find on a CD. Furthermore, the statement I made about tempo *only* related to tempo shifting *in real time*.
At no point in time did the respondent ever discuss audio that is both raster audio and tempo-shifted in real time. He does discuss both raster audio being tempo-shifted (but not in real time), and audio being tempo-shifted in real time (but not raster audio).
Here is the next line of the respondent's post:
And it is VERY easy to dynamically adjust tempo of synthesized music. If it's being synthesized in real-time, simply change the rate at which the note-on and note-off messages are sent. It's as easy as dynamically adjusting say the speed of a car in a driving game.
This is *synthesized* music he's discussing, *not* just a rasterized audio track.
In addition to that, modern digital signal processing techniques allow you to alter the speed of the audio while retaining the original pitch.
Here he has *just made* a statement about tempo-shifting of raster music, but not that it is real time.
Honestly, though, I'll happily accept that my initial claim may have been unclear. I'll rewrite it here.
"We have largely moved from synthesized audio (MIDI/MOD/SID/what-have-you) to raster (there may be a better term, but this is the closet term I can think of, from rasterizing fonts from descriptions of the font data...use "CD-style" if it's clearer). This raster audio can't be easily tempo-shifted in real time. (Unlike synthesized audio.)"
The difference is that I said "in real time", and you didn't -- simply adjusting tempo in software is obviously possible and has been around for a while. I've used tempo-shifting audio software before, but I've yet to run into a game audio engine that does it in real time.
Sure, but you can stick solar panels anywhere -- you have to compare putting plain glass on the skyscraper and regular solar panels elsewhere to putting these enhanced solar panels on the thing.
I just don't see the height of a skyscraper as being all that helpful.
And it is VERY easy to dynamically adjust tempo of synthesized music. If it's being synthesized in real-time, simply change the rate at which the note-on and note-off messages are sent.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems I forgot to end my italics.
We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV).
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stabs at providing personalized scores -- Slashcode lets people provide a minimal amount of metadata along with the score, like "Offtopic" (and, at least in theory, if you don't feel that Offtopic is a bad thing, you can make Offtopic have no effect for you). Google's Pagerank uses your current search as a bit of a "profile" for you to try to determine appropriate pages. TiVo contained some rudimentary stabs. But, in general, we are still using pre-computer-era evaluation mechanisms.
There is no technical reason for me not to have a review score based more heavily on the feedback of people who, in the past, have had review scores similar to my own. There are some organizational issues -- this sort of thing requires a large population of users/reviewers to be effective, which means that unless a single website is massive, like Amazon or eBay, it really needs to take advantage of user reviews written for other sites.
All of which is entirely inappropriate for children in Kansas.
:-)
To demonize something, you must keep people apart from it.
Let children come in contact with marijuana or homosexuals, and they might realize that neither is as objectionable as their parents desperately want them to believe.
It would be horrible for the American media to broadcast images of soldiers being killed ("we're going to move you back...for 'security' reasons") or killing civilians, or for photographic evidence of US-led prison atrocities to be spread around ("I find that 'offensive'"), and so on and so forth. People might get stirred up, uncomfortable with what their leaders are doing.
If you want propaganda, don't bother with Fox and friends -- they feed dillute, unsatisfying gruel. For the real stuff, just read the United State's official international propaganda source (currently, it appears that they're smearing the name of the Iraqi politician that turned out to dislike the idea of being a puppet). If you want vaguely more balanced news, try the excellent news.google.com, which includes a helping of different perspectives on stories. It's always fun to read an Arab and an Israeli view on the same story.
So is it censorship if the individual library decides not to carry porn?
Yes.
More disturbingly, is it censorship if the individual library chooses not to carry the latest beheading video from Iraq?
Yes.
Just like it was discrimination when I decided to start dating a white girl instead of a black girl.
Or a girl who wasn't a serial killer. Just another characteristic. Yup.
Is it less censorship when the individual libraries do it, rather than the AG?
No, it's just as objectionable.
My old city library once had someone donate every issue of Playboy to the library. The library kept them behind the desk (didn't want parents angry that their kiddies were leafing through them), but they were in the card catalog and in circulation and could be checked out. Same for a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Frankly, I don't really think that it's a good idea for parents to restrict what their kids read/watch (talk it over with them, give and justify your views, do whatever you want, just don't "keep them from content", because there's only one way that people mature enough to deal with content, and that's experience). However, that isn't really the relevant issue here -- I'm certainly in the minority on this point. What is at issue is that a group of people should not dictate the set of ideas that *other* people can be exposed to -- this goes above and beyond molding and controlling your own child's development, which is as far as the rights of parents extend -- not to the children of other parents.
Well, I've only listened to Devo once, but the fact that the title has "Scalped", which could, I suppose, be vaguely considered violent, might do it
Kinda funny here -- I agree with the ACLU. The AG can (and should) block CDs, but it should not be on "decency" grounds. It should be on the grounds that the CDs do not represent the value that the RIAA agreed to pay to the states -- 1,500 copies of Willennium, as has been pointed out before, does not have much more than the value of a single CD.
You know, apparently Amy Grant does Christian music now, but I liked Baby, Baby from her pre-Christian pop days.
We live in an era where an opinion is taken as fact by most people (Hello TV).
I so deeply agree with you. Our current content-rating systems (review scores, whether someone is a spammer, how "good" a Slashdot post is) generally provide "absolute" metrics -- they rely on the false idea that a single measurement is appropriate to every person who will read that measurement. An adventure game player will have completely different tastes than a wargamer. There are a few stabs at providing personalized scores -- Slashcode lets people provide a minimal amount of metadata along with the score, like "Offtopic" (and, at least in theory, if you don't feel that Offtopic is a bad thing, you can make Offtopic have no effect for you). Google's Pagerank uses your current search as a bit of a "profile" for you to try to determine appropriate pages. TiVo contained some rudimentary stabs. But, in general, we are still using pre-computer-era evaluation mechanisms.
There is no technical reason for me not to have a review score based more heavily on the feedback of people who, in the past, have had review scores similar to my own. There are some organizational issues -- this sort of thing requires a large population of users/reviewers to be effective, which means that unless a single website is massive, like Amazon or eBay, it really needs to take advantage of user reviews written for other sites.
If this quote was more appreciable by non-game-review-readers, it would be a dead ringer for the fortune database. Beautiful.
It's really nice to see that eWeek both is fixing their screwup and *admitted* doing so *AND* admitted to doing so promptly *AND* on Slashdot.
That being said, this reminds me of when a Lucasarts lawyer idiotically sent a C&D to the ScummVM people (yeah, that was bright -- the only reason Lucasarts sells any copies of their classics any more is because people can run them on the ScummVM engine). The Lucasarts people retracted what they said once things filtered around a bit.
Companies really need to have better policies in place regarding C&Ds and warnings. I personally think that threats regarding copyright infringement and similar, which is a threat made *on behalf of* and *in the name of* the company, should need to run through the top person at the company before going out. I've gotten a bogus C&D before, and it's very annoying.
I've always thought that game reviewers have a far too ambitious resolution on their scores, given the subjective nature of such scores. What person A likes "84%", person B may easily like "75%".
I could see someone maybe rating games from "1" to "5", without fractional breakdown. It's certainly possible to rate different factors -- graphics, fun, replayability, sound, and so forth (though the idea of "averaging" them to come up with an overall score is broken and pointless -- for example, strategy games generally don't put much emphasis on graphics, and adventure games not much on replayability). However, the idea of rating things based on a 1 to 10, 1 to 20, or even 1 to 100 scale is far too ambitious for any reviewer to effectively handle. Generally, if you start needing that kind of resolution, you should be asking yourself whether, perhaps, your scores might just be inflated and the distribution tilted heavily towards the top.
They should have read Rocketry for Dummies.
ed2k://|file|48InchCrash.mpg|4345860|c03ce17b98b49 c7a88621c721c33acb3|
As usual, you will need to manually remove the spaces that Slashcode adds.
Awesome. Many thanks for the data.
FWIW, for you other sufferers out there, it seems that setting content.notify.ontimer to false in about:config will disable the automatic reflow in Firefox, which will them hopefully work around the problem (I'm trying it now -- no mucked up pages thus far). Of course, one has to live without automatic reflow, but if you're a real tab-browsing affeciando, you shouldn't have any problems.
So in IE7 slashdot will be screwed up and displaying over to the right hand side inside a black background with black text?
Speaking of which, does anyone know (a) why this happens, (b) why it only happens occasionally, and (c) whether anyone is working on fixing it? I would have guessed that Taco and Jamie and so forth use Firefox, but maybe not. [shrug]
I don't like IE either, but come on. There is no "recent mass migration."
I think the tiny grain of truth somewhere was that the current version of IE actually saw a market share decrease last month instead of an increase.
Really, why do Slashdot story submitters have to have such completely and deliberately inaccurate stories? It *sucks*. I'd happily add a day or whatever on to the time until a story comes out if the eds would just read the linked to article on each story that they actually pass.
On the other hand, the "year of the desktop" claims have a bit more meat to them. Linux has a small desktop market share, and so a doubling over the course of a year doesn't look like all that much.
Also, most of the people talking about the "year of the desktop" are talking about whether the desktop is technically ready. They aren't factoring in transition time (which may well be up to five years -- nobody is going to throw out all their existing, reasonably well systems to install Linux -- they're just going to install Linux when they do their next upgrade).
The whole thing is kind of depressing.
Kensington, a company which has, from my past experience, made good use of "good image marketing", has made a guarantee with a product, realized that that guarantee is, well, expensive, and now refuses to honor it.
The lock picking people are using the entire thing as a teaser to sell a product.
I'll bet if some lawyer picks up on this, they'll start a class action suit with horrible stories about how much damage could be caused, so on and so forth, and try to rake in a hefty percentage of some settlement which will give everyone else involved about $1.50 per person.
The problem with involving money in something is that we are taught to act like complete assholes in the name of earning money (and I'm not saying that we shouldn't), but where there's money, there's assholishness.
This is particularly sad because once-upon-a-time Kensington made really nice (though expensive) trackballs. A nice big ball, plenty of buttons, etc. I heard a story about one guy that asked if he could buy a replacement trackball ball because his son liked to play with his ball and eventually lost it, and Kensington sent him a replacement ball -- and twelve more "for his son to play with". I thought that was kinda cool.
Their trackballs are supposed to have been going downhill, though, with cheaper, shoddier parts (especially that "ring around the trackball scroll wheel" device).
Okay, then, let the stock split eight times, at which point it's $1 a share. Does that make you feel any better?
Per-share price doesn't matter. Market cap does. If Google is selling one share, and you get to buy Google for $130, you can be certain that I'll take that share. If, on the other hand, Google is valuing itself at $130 trillion, and you get one trillionth of Google when you buy that share, I'm not interested.
$105-130 is too high a range and makes it completely speculative.
That's silly. Google can always split. Market cap is what matters, not per-share prices.
I hate per-share prices. They're an artifact of trying to provide a number that could be tracked manually back before computer days, and the degree of misunderstanding over basics of the stock market is staggering. I wish that price changes were listed as percentage changes, not as per-share-price changes, and that companies would talk about bleeding market cap at their IPO, not share prices.
Because $120 seems pretty clearly to be a silly price, at least compared to other stocks. I don't really think many people are going to want to buy at that price.
That doesn't make sense. Why do you even care what the share price is? It means effectively nothing. Remember when ESR made an ass of himself with a very open letter about share prices to Sun's CEO?
Market capitalization is the number you want to be looking for.
What is likely to happen, by my guess, is that Google is going to have a relatively stable stock. Works for me.
Moore's law dictates that passwords will weaken, with respect to brute force processing, by one bit every eighteen months.
The problem is that nobody that I know of uses a slow enough algorithm for password processing to make current passwords effective with respect to cracking.
Let's say people use completely random passwords (already unrealistic) with lower case letters (26 values), upper case letters (52 values), and digits (62 values). We'll be generous and round up to 64 values (maybe someone uses a period or a dollar sign or something). That's seven bits per character of the password.
So, if someone is using an eight-character password), and perfectly following all rules, and using a machine-generated password with things like tildes, backslashes, and right curly brackets, they have a fifty-six bit password.
The slowest hash that I know of that's generally used and approved by lots of cryptographers to not have known weaknesses and to avoid collisions is SHA-1.
You just have to SHA-1 eight bytes for each attempted password, in such a case.
For reference, I just downloaded sha_v1.b, and it can eat through, on my p4, using brute force, about 5% of the possible password space a minute for 26-value, 6-character passwords (and I doubt that this is as optimized as it could be -- hell, I didn't even compile with optimization on. 64^8/26^6 = 911170, so a perfectly random "strong" password is less than a million times as strong. Thus, by running for about one month on one hundred compromised machines, I am guaranteed to break any password.
The main current goal has been to avoid ever allowing the hashed passwords stored on a machine to leak. This way, we can establish methods for preventing an attacker from brute-forcing the system. For example, I can have a system only allow one password attempt on an account per three seconds or so, which pushes passwords back into the effetive range again.
This sounds a lot like ActiveMusic in DirectX. Go play "Munch's Oddysee" on Xbox for a good example. As you get more involved, the music changes.
[looks at MSDN] Ah, you're right. DirectMusic appears to do something like this with transition segments.
I'd like to see it be taken a bit further, with actual standardized states be used, though, which DirectMusic does not have a concept of (though I suppose you could implement this using DirectMusic).
Augh! I don't believe this is still ongoing!
Okay, look. Here is a line-by-line breakdown of what the original respondent said:
The comparison of a guitar to a sine wave is absurd.
I think that we can agree that this line is not part of the point in question.
Besides, the MIDI specification allows for 127 levels of volume (key velocity) in addition to the ability to manipulate and filter the audio after synthesis.
This is speaking about *synthesized audio*. *Not* audio that is just a bunch of already-rasterized data being tempo-shifted. For reference, here is the line I wrote in my original post:
It is very useful to be able to adjust tempo -- this gives, with little effort, a wide range of tracks that can indicate a modified condition, but unfortunately, with the move to storing simply raster music, it's not possible to adjust tempo very well in real-time, so we have lost a certain mechanism for conveying data via audio.
Note that I am talking *only* about raster music. I am not talking about MIDI, MOD, or *anything* other than straight raster audio, the kind of thing that you will find on a CD. Furthermore, the statement I made about tempo *only* related to tempo shifting *in real time*.
At no point in time did the respondent ever discuss audio that is both raster audio and tempo-shifted in real time. He does discuss both raster audio being tempo-shifted (but not in real time), and audio being tempo-shifted in real time (but not raster audio).
Here is the next line of the respondent's post:
And it is VERY easy to dynamically adjust tempo of synthesized music. If it's being synthesized in real-time, simply change the rate at which the note-on and note-off messages are sent. It's as easy as dynamically adjusting say the speed of a car in a driving game.
This is *synthesized* music he's discussing, *not* just a rasterized audio track.
In addition to that, modern digital signal processing techniques allow you to alter the speed of the audio while retaining the original pitch.
Here he has *just made* a statement about tempo-shifting of raster music, but not that it is real time.
Honestly, though, I'll happily accept that my initial claim may have been unclear. I'll rewrite it here.
"We have largely moved from synthesized audio (MIDI/MOD/SID/what-have-you) to raster (there may be a better term, but this is the closet term I can think of, from rasterizing fonts from descriptions of the font data...use "CD-style" if it's clearer). This raster audio can't be easily tempo-shifted in real time. (Unlike synthesized audio.)"
Does that clarify things?
The difference is that I said "in real time", and you didn't -- simply adjusting tempo in software is obviously possible and has been around for a while. I've used tempo-shifting audio software before, but I've yet to run into a game audio engine that does it in real time.
Sure, but you can stick solar panels anywhere -- you have to compare putting plain glass on the skyscraper and regular solar panels elsewhere to putting these enhanced solar panels on the thing.
I just don't see the height of a skyscraper as being all that helpful.
And it is VERY easy to dynamically adjust tempo of synthesized music. If it's being synthesized in real-time, simply change the rate at which the note-on and note-off messages are sent.
Right. Hence "with the move to raster music".
You can do that, as soon as you buy a DRM-enabled screwdriver to undo the DRM-enabled screws on the DRM-enabled case.
One wonders what Disney will do when presented with irritated people and their non-DRM-enabled hacksaws.