I beg to differ. When he said "Just because the first amedment says the gov't can't do it, doesn't mean that anyone else can.", he wasn't wrong. That statement doesn't mean that anyone else can. Of course, it doesn't mean that anyone else can't either!
So the hell what if they don't openly embrace their competitors.
Embracing is not needed. However, U.S. law says that monopolists cannot use the profits in one area (say Windows and Office) to extend their monopoly to other areas (say Palm computers.) You may not like the law, but there it is. While they are a U.S. company and selling to U.S. citizens, they have to obey the law. Or buy new laws!:-)
Maybe there is a problem when the stuff they do is to "cut off the air supply" of their competitors. They can afford to charge very little (or nothing) when selling against those competitors. Here's an example Pocket PC for $324, with Windows, Pocket Outlook, Word, and Excel. Look at the hardware specs on the mahine, 64 MB RAM and 32 MB ROM and 300 MHz XScale processor and 240 x 320 pixel color screen, and then tell me how much of the $324 selling price went into MS coffers.
Most often they don't get full list price on a sale. When you buy a computer at retail for $500 with Windows XP and Office on it, you get a very deeply discounted copy. The price MS charges for those copies might be very close to their stated costs.
I also think the whole purpose behind it (DRM) is so if you wish, you can keep people from stealing your music.
Do you actually believe that the whole purpose of MS's scheme for DRM is to keep people from seeking into your computer and taking your music files away from you without your permission? Wouldn't it make more sense to make the operating system so people couldn't sneek into your machine and take whatever they want?
If you adjust the gain so the LSB is the quietest that can still be heard, it implies that the next bit down, 1/2 that amplitude or 3dB quieter, is inaudible. At the lowest hearing levels, you can only pick up pitch, not whether it is a sine wave or a square wave or triangle.
With a 16 bit representation, there are 65,000 different amplitude sign waves that I can make using a D/A converter. Each of those amplitudes lined up from smallest to largest, has exactly the same difference in amplitude relative to the next smallest or next largest, the amount measured by 1 bit. So, if I am trying to span from 30dB (very quiet) to 78dB with 16 bits, the next sine wave up from 30dB (height of 1) would be 33dB (height of 2), as you say. But the next sign wave up is not 36dB(height of 4), that is two more up. The next is about 34db (height of 3). By the time you get to the loud end of the scale, 78db, the amplitude steps are tiny compared to full scale. At the top, you are losing only 1 part in 65,000 of amplitude, almost no dB's at all.
I guess with 24 bit sampling you can cover a range of 72dB. If you have a need for such a range, you must have an audience with both a very quite room for listening, and a good tolerance for pain. Some classical music fans might fit this description, so I guess you have a point there. But I don't need it for Daft Punk!
Any number of bits is enough to go from inaudible to the pain threshold, but the more bits, the less quantization error.
This is not so, if you wish to maintain acuracy of faint high piched sounds on top of loud low pitch sounds. You need linear (not companded) representation to do this. Another way to look at this is to say that if you set the energy level of the LSB to be the lowest audible sound, then every additional bit will allow a doubling of amplitude. If you know what amplitude you want to go to, you can calculate exactly how many bits you will need.
In fact, going from a quiet room (40db) to the uncomfortably loud sound and possibly harmful level of operating a vacuum cleaner (70db) is arguably enough. Since sound energy doubles every 3 db, one bit is needed to represent each additional 3db. So a 30 db range needs 2^10 or 10 bits, and covers most of the useful range, if your data is properly scaled.
I know some people like to listen to music at louder than 70db, rock music is often up to 100db at a concert. That would need 70db of range, or 23 bits, but only if the noise floor were as quiet as your livingroom. More likely, the noise floor at a concert is 50db or higher. 16 bit (or 48 db) above that is 98 db.
I'm not saying more bits aren't better for reproduction in theory, I'm just saying that once the information is reproduced better than the speakers can do, or the people can hear, then you can stop. I would welcome a reference to any double-blind studies you know of that show 24 bit can be distinguished from 16 bit.
16 bits of resolution is enough to go from inaudable in a normal environment (like a quiet room) to the pain threshold. 44.1KHz sampling in theory could give you response to 20KHz, but in practice you have to back off a bit. 16KHz is certainly achievable. That's above most peoples' hearing limit. It's certainly good enough for any use I have.
Even a Sony PlayStation 2 has a frequency response of 20 Hz to 17.9 kHz with only +0.12, -3 dB variation. You better have a really kick-butt sound system to hear anything better than that.
The gravitational pull of the earth is the source of power.
The source of this power is the Sun. It evaporates the water, and provides the heat to drive convection to lift the water vapor to a higher altitude, where it condenses into rain. The turbines you mention harvest the potential energy of this water.
From the article:"The Norwegian sub-sea turbine will have a tiny capacity of 300 killowatts..." and "The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France,... It has a 240-megawatt capacity"
That makes it smaller than the French plant by 239.7 megawatts, unless I'm missing something here.
Google shows almost 8000 references to "stinker phone". It is a commonly used term for this particular MS product. Read a few links if you are interested in seeing why.
You seems surprised that "importing" an Excel workbook into Excel went faster and with less problems than importing the same workbook into other programs. Why not import a sxm file into Excel for comparision?
So I take it then that you think the FBI should go after Steve Ballmer for theft of internet services, too? He admits to doing it, and he encouraged his friends to steal some bandwidth too. (Check the last three paragraphs of article.)
Would you mind explaining how stealing bandwidth isn't as bad as stealing from a store?
Not at all. First, let me make clear that I don't condone violating terms of service. However, it is fair to say that stealing bandwith is not as bad as stealing from a store for at least a couple of reasons. First, what you are stealing has little marginal cost. You are only stealing additional bandwidth, you have already paid for the base bandwidth, and you are paying for the lines, the modem, and all the gear for 24x7 operation, all fully legit. The extra packets are going to load the fiber a bit, sure, but for how many pennies worth per day? Moving a ton of data is dirt cheap once you've paid for the access hardware.
Additonally, once you've stolen something from a store, the store doesn't have it. If you stop stealing, the store still has to buy replacement inventory to cover what you've stolen. If you steal bandwidth, and then stop stealing, the ISP is back to exactly the normal situation. Nothing is missing from the ISP's holdings in the current situation.
Hey, man, if this is what it takes to allow M$ to release an OS that's actually stable, I'm all for it.
Ben Franklin put it best when he said "those who would trade a little freedom for a little security deserve neither". And in this case will get neither, I might add.
I did'nt know I had a "right" to infringe on someone's copyright.
It's not copyright infringement to rip an MP3 from a CD you bought, play it on your computer, play it on your PDA, play it in your car, or make a backup of it. It is not copyright infringement to sell a CD you bought to another individual, if you destroy any copies in your possesion. The Palladium system eliminates the possibilty of these legal uses.
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I beg to differ. When he said "Just because the first amedment says the gov't can't do it, doesn't mean that anyone else can.", he wasn't wrong. That statement doesn't mean that anyone else can. Of course, it doesn't mean that anyone else can't either!
Embracing is not needed. However, U.S. law says that monopolists cannot use the profits in one area (say Windows and Office) to extend their monopoly to other areas (say Palm computers.) You may not like the law, but there it is. While they are a U.S. company and selling to U.S. citizens, they have to obey the law. Or buy new laws! :-)
Maybe there is a problem when the stuff they do is to "cut off the air supply" of their competitors. They can afford to charge very little (or nothing) when selling against those competitors. Here's an example Pocket PC for $324, with Windows, Pocket Outlook, Word, and Excel. Look at the hardware specs on the mahine, 64 MB RAM and 32 MB ROM and 300 MHz XScale processor and 240 x 320 pixel color screen, and then tell me how much of the $324 selling price went into MS coffers.
If you are talking mark up, marking a $45 cost product up to $300 retail is a 567% markup. The MS markup makes the jewelry store markups look anemic.
Most often they don't get full list price on a sale. When you buy a computer at retail for $500 with Windows XP and Office on it, you get a very deeply discounted copy. The price MS charges for those copies might be very close to their stated costs.
Is 4NT.EXE a virus, or is it a trojan of some sort? It seems to be from JP Software, which looks legit.
Do you actually believe that the whole purpose of MS's scheme for DRM is to keep people from seeking into your computer and taking your music files away from you without your permission? Wouldn't it make more sense to make the operating system so people couldn't sneek into your machine and take whatever they want?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
If you adjust the gain so the LSB is the quietest that can still be heard, it implies that the next bit down, 1/2 that amplitude or 3dB quieter, is inaudible. At the lowest hearing levels, you can only pick up pitch, not whether it is a sine wave or a square wave or triangle.
With a 16 bit representation, there are 65,000 different amplitude sign waves that I can make using a D/A converter. Each of those amplitudes lined up from smallest to largest, has exactly the same difference in amplitude relative to the next smallest or next largest, the amount measured by 1 bit. So, if I am trying to span from 30dB (very quiet) to 78dB with 16 bits, the next sine wave up from 30dB (height of 1) would be 33dB (height of 2), as you say. But the next sign wave up is not 36dB(height of 4), that is two more up. The next is about 34db (height of 3). By the time you get to the loud end of the scale, 78db, the amplitude steps are tiny compared to full scale. At the top, you are losing only 1 part in 65,000 of amplitude, almost no dB's at all.
I guess with 24 bit sampling you can cover a range of 72dB. If you have a need for such a range, you must have an audience with both a very quite room for listening, and a good tolerance for pain. Some classical music fans might fit this description, so I guess you have a point there. But I don't need it for Daft Punk!
This is not so, if you wish to maintain acuracy of faint high piched sounds on top of loud low pitch sounds. You need linear (not companded) representation to do this. Another way to look at this is to say that if you set the energy level of the LSB to be the lowest audible sound, then every additional bit will allow a doubling of amplitude. If you know what amplitude you want to go to, you can calculate exactly how many bits you will need.
In fact, going from a quiet room (40db) to the uncomfortably loud sound and possibly harmful level of operating a vacuum cleaner (70db) is arguably enough. Since sound energy doubles every 3 db, one bit is needed to represent each additional 3db. So a 30 db range needs 2^10 or 10 bits, and covers most of the useful range, if your data is properly scaled.
I know some people like to listen to music at louder than 70db, rock music is often up to 100db at a concert. That would need 70db of range, or 23 bits, but only if the noise floor were as quiet as your livingroom. More likely, the noise floor at a concert is 50db or higher. 16 bit (or 48 db) above that is 98 db.
I'm not saying more bits aren't better for reproduction in theory, I'm just saying that once the information is reproduced better than the speakers can do, or the people can hear, then you can stop. I would welcome a reference to any double-blind studies you know of that show 24 bit can be distinguished from 16 bit.
Seems a bit like Space Channel 5 with Ulala to me.
16 bits of resolution is enough to go from inaudable in a normal environment (like a quiet room) to the pain threshold. 44.1KHz sampling in theory could give you response to 20KHz, but in practice you have to back off a bit. 16KHz is certainly achievable. That's above most peoples' hearing limit. It's certainly good enough for any use I have.
Even a Sony PlayStation 2 has a frequency response of 20 Hz to 17.9 kHz with only +0.12, -3 dB variation. You better have a really kick-butt sound system to hear anything better than that.
But would you want something with the reliability of IE 3.0?
Get Logitech DUAL sensor optical, especially for gaming where you need to mix fast acurate moves with precision moves.
The source of this power is the Sun. It evaporates the water, and provides the heat to drive convection to lift the water vapor to a higher altitude, where it condenses into rain. The turbines you mention harvest the potential energy of this water.
From the article:"The Norwegian sub-sea turbine will have a tiny capacity of 300 killowatts..." and "The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France,... It has a 240-megawatt capacity"
That makes it smaller than the French plant by 239.7 megawatts, unless I'm missing something here.
Google shows almost 8000 references to "stinker phone". It is a commonly used term for this particular MS product. Read a few links if you are interested in seeing why.
Why use 3d when you can use 5 dimensions?
You seems surprised that "importing" an Excel workbook into Excel went faster and with less problems than importing the same workbook into other programs. Why not import a sxm file into Excel for comparision?
I use IE at work, Opera at home. I like Opera better. IE is not the best for me.
Err, that would be two continents, North America and South America, if you want to be picky.
So I take it then that you think the FBI should go after Steve Ballmer for theft of internet services, too? He admits to doing it, and he encouraged his friends to steal some bandwidth too. (Check the last three paragraphs of article.)
Not at all. First, let me make clear that I don't condone violating terms of service. However, it is fair to say that stealing bandwith is not as bad as stealing from a store for at least a couple of reasons. First, what you are stealing has little marginal cost. You are only stealing additional bandwidth, you have already paid for the base bandwidth, and you are paying for the lines, the modem, and all the gear for 24x7 operation, all fully legit. The extra packets are going to load the fiber a bit, sure, but for how many pennies worth per day? Moving a ton of data is dirt cheap once you've paid for the access hardware.
Additonally, once you've stolen something from a store, the store doesn't have it. If you stop stealing, the store still has to buy replacement inventory to cover what you've stolen. If you steal bandwidth, and then stop stealing, the ISP is back to exactly the normal situation. Nothing is missing from the ISP's holdings in the current situation.
Ben Franklin put it best when he said "those who would trade a little freedom for a little security deserve neither". And in this case will get neither, I might add.
It's not copyright infringement to rip an MP3 from a CD you bought, play it on your computer, play it on your PDA, play it in your car, or make a backup of it. It is not copyright infringement to sell a CD you bought to another individual, if you destroy any copies in your possesion. The Palladium system eliminates the possibilty of these legal uses.