I consider it _very_ interesting to know what frequencies pre-echo and over-ring are occurring. As you know, the sonic results of this type of distortion are greatly different depending on what frequency they're at. It's going to be a hell of a lot harder to hide a pre-echo or ring at 3K than one at 200hz- or 12K.
That said- the sonograms are greyscale plots of deviation from the original signal. They are inevitably offset in time by the encoding process- I aligned them using those ugly transients in the center. There are two little charts under each. The second is the pre-echo and over-ring. The _first_ is precisely the opposite- deviation from the sound that was the 'same', with the weighting of the little chart (a RELATIVE measurement) emphasising the content of the wave rather than areas that are supposed to be free of additional frequency content.
I don't think it's possible for an encoder to mangle the audio quality and have a pristine 'sonogram' as differenced with the source material. A pristine sonogram would be uniformly BLACK when this was done- none of the encoders remotely approached this. Any mangling, no matter what sort, will show up as a lighter-than-black area on the differenced image. I'm very much a high end audio dweeb at heart, but I don't believe there can be mangled audio quality without the Fourier content changing, and thus the sonogram showing big gray or white blobs.
I wholeheartedly agree that quantitative analysis of perceptual audio coding is not easy!:)
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Woops. Or I could have said 'checkerboard' and saved myself the hassle:)
The idea is from company named Boxtop Software which produced a photoshop plugin that put different web safe colors in checkerboard patterns to produce a much greater range of 'web safe' colors (which look solid). I figured, why not run with that and do textures that way? Maybe the Gimp would benefit from some websafe checkerboard texture generators too:)
Doh! For years I've used a purely white background for airwindows.com, with a sort of vintage-cnet layout. I also used to keep a 'graphics' section in which I had some web background gifs I'd done. They were made like this:
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Do a diffusion dither between white and the lightest 'web safe' gray- then take all the pixels at x positions and knock 'em out to white too. The result (works with other colors as well) is a texture in which no two colored pixels are ever directly next to each other- it's a paperlike texture but never gets darker than half Netscape grey.
Which is to say- sorry, I did it that way because I liked it, and I'll keep it. Honest, I have done everything I possibly could to avoid obscuring the text, but it's sort of like a trade-off: in getting rid of additional table clutter that I used to have, I found that I liked the pages when this simpler layout was backed by the softest texture I had, rather than plain white.
I'd be hugely interested in that. I consider it very relevant. I'm doing all this on a Mac, and have tried repeatedly to compile Vorbis in any sort of way- one of the Ogg people did this at MacHack and has not made binaries available. If he had, Vorbis would be represented at every bit rate level. I am simply not coder enough to deal with porting Vorbis, even a cheap hack, and I wish I was. I've begged for Vorbis/Mac repeatedly, and finally I had to go on without it, as there were decisions I needed to make on what mp3 encoder to use for my stuff, and the whole project was to answer for me what was most appropriate for 128K-range and what was best at arbitrarily high bit rates.
You can add me to that list- and such a comparison (I naturally kept a logbook to be able to reproduce the process later) would indeed be meaningful to me. For instance, if Vorbis was more sophisticated in its control of over-ring and either imposed a flatter characteristic (resisting resonant peaks) or went for an intentionally tailored characteristic (say, suppressing ring around 3-5K like Fraunhofer 32K bit rate) this would have obvious and interesting application to the sound quality. Conversely, if it had big ugly peaks and artifacts, their location in the frequency response would tell a lot about the sonic signature of the encoder.
The mp3s I used to have up on mp3.com were Blade. That's because at the time, I hadn't located any other encoders that could be simply downloaded- it might be overlooked that for the most part these are _free_ _Mac_ encoders. When I used Blade, I was happy with the frequency response, but the pre-echo and weakness of transient attack always bothered me. I had certain music ("Koala", off the "anima" album) in which there were sounds (wood block combined with reggae rhythm guitar) that _severely_ failed to be reproduced by Blade in any sort of acceptable fashion- instead of going "klik!" the sound sorta went "whuf".
I had to know why- no, scratch that, I knew why. I had to know which encoders did better- what they in turn traded off- and I had to know across a wide range of bit rates in a way I could quickly cross correlate.
I've written for (IMNSHO) the foremost High End Audio journal. It's not that I'm not interested in listening to encoders! But if they are _all_ quite compromised, why not break 'em down into a series of measurements relative against each other with clearly identifiable characteristics? Shows you what to listen for- and tips you off to particular issues.
On the Mac, I would have to _pay_ to use the Xing encoder. I just got through a serious ramen-and-spaghettios period, and there's just no way I'm going to merrily throw money at people who not only support the mp3 licensing patentholders, but also make an encoder that is considered to be more prone to artifacts and ringiness than even the Fraunhofer high bit rate stuff.
Beat me, whip me, slashdot me and call me unrigorous, but I'm not paying money for Xing. The lurkers support me in email. So there;)
Less talented developers aren't necessarily going to be putting out more impressive stuff (as you said, provided it ever gets made). The argument that it's gonna be easier to develop for is suggestive- it's basically saying 'more BAD developers can thrive here!'. For a console this would hardly be thrilling- but here's the catch- when X-Box is quietly abandoned, all those people can rather easily turn their efforts towards shipping on PCs- PCs that run _Windows_, which is of course strategically important for MS. The whole bizarre ploy and fizzle will result in taking the gaming industry exactly nowhere- but it will have stopped the gaming industry from turning, en masse, to the far higher selling console market, and might be able to stop consoles from developing comparable sophistication (in terms of controls, networkability) that PCs have.
Mind you, I run a Mac- but that means I get a really clear view of just how Windows PC-oriented most gaming really is. Microsoft are not going to give that up, you know. They are not going to lose lots of money out of the goodness of their hearts in order to replace Windows PCs with some console. All the X-Box is, is a mirage- when it fades out, the developers will shrug, realise they've been developing for a Windows platform all along, and it'll be more of the same.
Um, foreign intelligence computer espionage agents don't post to Slashdot. _Good_ hackers post to slashdot. Military spies may be good _at_ hacking but they really suck rocks at 'information sharing':P
Wake up, this was a military action, not geek subculture. If you want to see the source you'll have to crack into MS yourself. The Russian spies are not going to share.
Military entities would grab this sort of thing in a heartbeat, a nanosecond. There's no way this was some curious geek or 'rogue Russian company' trying to be more compatible with windows! That's utterly absurd.
This was a military exploit. Everything from military IT to battleships runs off Windows. In addition to that, lots of other countries' militaries run off Windows as well. We will not be seeing script kiddies putting up funny defaced web pages.
The purpose of this espionage is this: when the missles come over, the target country's military IT will be DOWN.
I simply hope my country (the US) isn't actually the target that somebody has in mind. Just about any country would be as vulnerable, this isn't about the US only. It's not strictly military IT either- consider a war with the shipping and industry of the target country crippled through IT attacks.
I've felt for a long time that people should be nervous of Microsoft waking up and realising their control of IT was a military weapon. It seems I was wrong- they never smartened up enough to understand this. Somebody in Russia, however, did- and struck first, gaining access to the proprietary information that would reveal every point of weakness for later attack. Whether Microsoft figures out it possesses the capacity for denial of IT services as a military weapon, at this point, is meaningless. It's too late as they no longer control the information- they lost the first-strike capability.
It might be a good idea for the US military to seize control of the very same code so at least they can have equal capacity to attack, or to know what will be attacked and how. If MS tries to resist that it would be a matter of, "No- you can pay money to run our products, and the Russians have total information on all their weaknesses, but YOU have to trust us that your IT is not compromised. Trust us, we're Very Smart!"
Frankly, the political applications of this are staggering.
What is this viewpoint on intellectual property? As a musician, I've had to re-evaluate a lot of assumptions people currently hold about intellectual property- most notably, when I decided to vote Progressive in the coming election (that's basically Green/Nader for president, and Pollina for governor of Vermont).
One particular aspect of the Progressive platform struck me very forcibly- the idea that wealth needs to correspond to work, not position or power. Basically, if I work 18 hours a day, the deck should be stacked in my favor so that I can take home wealth. If I don't work at all but I 'own people' and my employees do all the work, currently I'd get even more wealth, and the Progressive opinion is that is inequitable.
The thing is, intellectual property's based on the idea that my ideas or creations exist out there in some nebulous intellectual space and go on 'working' WITHOUT me. As if it made sense that I could record a super hit song, and (in theory- ha!) sit back and never lift a finger again, with my income guaranteed for the rest of my life by the fact that I'd done terrific work- once.
Even though the industry I'm associated with is completely committed to this twisted fantasy, I personally find it inequitable- to the point that it has profoundly affected my expectations and the way I see my work.
At this point, I see no use for intellectual property at all. I'm letting my expectations on my music change dramatically- it is not and will never be allowed to be the 'engine' for generating wealth for me. Instead, the _process_ of recording such music is the engine- I have a somewhat unusual and eclectic musical style and can work on commission, I have equipment and software resources (some of the software I wrote myself because there was nothing out there to do what I needed!) that can be used for this type of work, and most significantly the expectations for pay for this type of professional work are very decent.
The actual music gets to be a lot freer in its expectations- I can basically guarantee a certain level of technical quality and the artistic judgements don't need to make any compromises to popular taste because the idea of THE MUSIC going out and earning money is doomed. Instead the music goes out and gets attention and mindshare, which can then be used to attract business. The role of intellectual property earning money through scarcity in a digital information economy is completely doomed...
The one area that may or may not still warrant protection is simply authentication- if 50 guys all claim to have recorded my album, that could be a problem. Yet even here, this is not a completely persuasive argument- it simply turns into a 'caveat emptor' situation, because the sort of person who _would_ attempt to pass themselves off as a more skilled worker is not the sort of person who can actually do the work- 'stealing' credit for IP is a con and cannot be backed up by action. You'd turn to the person and say "Great! I'm sold. Now let's go to work, record me something new!" and they'd absolutely fail- and of course if the IP is valueless and ubitiquous, neither they nor I can actually sell it no matter who claims they invented it- they can only use it as leverage to win bids for other work, and there I'd have a really serious advantage. So even _authentication_ might be dispensed with- at the cost of completely rethinking what a musician's "job" is. You'd have to entirely give up on the idea of IP and fall back on a level that's much harder to fake or cheat- the ability to perform a task in the real world. Only that act would correspond to wealth- and the musician would need to do it as a consistent job, continuing to produce new material (perhaps on commission or patronage, or work for hire) in order to have consistent income. You'd have to work- you'd have to want to work.
Now, I'm wondering (if you can be distracted from throwing rocks at the Eugene anarchists;) )- how much of this sounds like your anarchist radical viewpoint on intellectual property?
Present-day capitalism: the government tells you what to do, takes all your money and gives it to giant multinational corporations which fire you and hire 6 ill-paid malaria-ridden sweatshop workers in a country whose name you can't pronounce.
Libertarianism: the government gives up and goes home, at which point the giant multinational corporation buys your town/state/country and tells you what to do while (see above)
That's the bottom line. You can like it, or not. Approve of it- or not. Encourage it, or fight it. But across the board, what 'free trade' means is "if you can come up with slave labor and kill people off in your factories to undersell us union-beset industrialised nations, we'll happily punish our own companies by giving all our business to you!"
There are some interesting variations, such as "if you can grab a copy of W2K and replicate 100,000,000 copies of it in Taiwan, we can treat you as a supplier of that product, look the other way and start buying from you rather than the official Microsoft sources". Free trade is not an automatic homerun for business- there are some nasty boobytraps in it. Primarily, however, it isn't about gray or black market- primarily it's about 'he who wields the biggest whip wins the bid', an excuse to massively reward the most ruthless industries that exist on the planet and punish anyone forced to behave more reasonably.
Of course, the libertarian perspective can be 'spun' to make it seem like Libertarians all _want_ to remove any controls and allow the entire world to turn into a big sweatshop ruled by the most ruthless and powerful people and organisations. Not all libertarians feel that way. Some do. Which is to say, some people _like_ whips and the subjugation of the weak and powerless, and vehemently dislike the idea of protecting anyone just because they are weak or powerless.
Oh... "which will be reflected in employee salaries"... *chuckle* no comment. *chuckle*
...which is of course why it will never ship. It not only threatens PC markets, it threatens the Windows market. Every X-Box that shipped could be a Windows license gathering dust somewhere. Plus, the profit margin on consoles is... not as good as on, say, Windows. (That's a hell of an understatement).
So in spite of this, does anyone still think Microsoft is going to choose to make less profit and cut into potential Windows marketshare out of the goodness of their own hearts and a love of spiffy technology?
:)
However- it does make _great_ vaporware to try and cut off Sony's air supply with, and the risks of faking demos for it are much less than the risks of faking demos in court! So you'll be hearing a LOT about the wonderful X-Box.
Just don't bank on ever _buying_ it. That is not its purpose.
That was Nixon's opinion. He was wrong, and he resigned before he could be held accountable for his actions as President.
The office is held in trust. It is a job. It does not convey automatic, obligatory respect and deference- there are limits. You might consider the statement, "The King ought not be beneath any man- but he is beneath the law, and God" (attribution? I remember this from a book I read about Watergate, but don't know the original context)
Let's look at that for a moment. Our President is not a 'King', but he is in a similar position. It is reasonable to expect (indeed, insist) that he not lick the boots of, say, Bill Gates, or any industrial robber baron or special interest. He should not be _beneath_ such people, he should not be _beneath_ Joe Sixpack.
However, he is not _above_ Joe either. There is a name for that- 'class'. America was _meant_ to be basically egalatarian- the President is neither a King nor a special upper caste held automatically superior to the common peasants. He's a guy doing a job- it's always been that way. He has enough authority to do that job but the office does not grant him mystical powers, or make him royalty. The office does not deserve respect- the office should EARN respect. If you are an American citizen it is your DUTY to question the Presidential office and the guy occupying it- if it seems to you that he's abusing the office and not living up to it.
That is why we have impeachment laws: because that top office is a job, not divine appointment. How difficult can this be to understand?
In an era where both major party candidates have alarming flaws (Bush isn't smart, and Gore isn't trustworthy) it is all the more important to remain aware that the Presidency is a job, not a position of royalty. Our political system allows for the man to be FIRED. In order to judge this, you cannot simply look at the office- you must look at the man, the job he's done, the actions he's taken. You must overlook the office- having the office does not put the guy above the law.
These people are our _servants_. They are public servants. They are our _employees_, not royalty or a higher caste in society. They are elected to do a job, and can be thrown out if they are treacherous- if they are incompetent they should not be 'hired' by our votes again.
This is weird- of course the idea with OSS medical software isn't to get 10,000 teenage hackers debugging it. That's an absurd notion (though there could probably be a code base with reusable components that have been proven reliable).
The point of OSS in a medical context is this: using OSS, you cannot be held hostage by a commercial vendor with lives at stake.
There's too many cases on record already of faulty (commercial) medical software killing people (high-powered scanners and the like) and too many cases of commercial companies foot-dragging and refusing to admit problems because debugging and fixing them would cost money and be a publicity stain. On the other hand it would be a winning strategy for a commercial medical software company to (say) do an upgrade or better still find and fix a potentially dangerous bug- and then charge a really BIG amount for the upgrade/bugfix. That's being held hostage, and that would be less of a risk with OSS developed by a competent medical software developer. Ideally the software should be a matter of public record- so that if the primary developer isn't available another competent one can be found, and so that if there are subtle bugs, some unrelated person could make a claim that there's a bug and offer a fix- and the claim and fix could be audited by third parties.
I don't see where this requires 10,000 script kiddies- but it does make a case that ownership of such important software should rest with the user and not be reserved for the supplier. Can you imagine if the.NET model caught on with medical software?!? "Okay, the old rental rate was $500, but there's been an adjustment- the new rate is $60,000 and a 10% interest in the hospital. Or, you can choose not to pay, and we'll flip this switch and 72 people die..."
Hang on- his problem with the Corvair was oversteer, and I think that's a legitimate complaint. I personally like oversteer:) but that's because I'm a crazy bastard, and anyhow it's a moot point as I bike instead of drive. However, for almost anyone on the road, there is a huge difference between oversteer and understeer on a rainy road or a patch of grease or leaves- picture traffic, and then picture the car that loses traction. The understeering car noses into something or goes straight off the road. The oversteering car SWAPS ENDS, in a hurry. It might be fun on a race track or in an empty parking lot but it's a really _sucky_ behavior for a vehicle in traffic:)
You've reminded me of one of the things that bugs me about this issue- by your mentioning War On Drugs and 'the responsible application of recreational drugs'.
You see, my personal experience with drugs was not positive. In fact, I dove into them with such intensity that it was all downhill until I finally got some help and quit 'em- and I currently feel that there's no way _I_ personally can 'responsibly' apply such drugs. YMMV. I am just saying that for me, drugs were HARMFUL, that I got very dependent on them and got into a vicious circle, losing all perspective and chasing 'soma' until my life was shit, frankly. It's taken some years to get back out of that trap...
Now, here is the problem. I feel I have a right to have any search on 'drugs' return the stuff I just typed, just as much as you've a right for such an inquiry to return _your_ viewpoint. I know good and well that the kids in the schoolyard and on the back streets are going to be taking _your_ viewpoint for the most part- they haven't had time to see a downside to it, and they probably don't trust the hysteria of teachers and authority figures.
Once censorship blocks all discussion of 'drugs', those kids don't have _access_ to random thoughts from people arguing on a web page. They're cut off- I can say, here and now, that drugs _sucked_ for me and I got really compulsive and nothing was ever as good as the first buzz, which I futilely chased for years, and it's obvious I'm just saying that because that's how it was for _me_. You could say the opposite if you wanted- eavesdropping kids could make up their own minds, some might decide they weren't going to mess with their brain cells after all (or would be more wary about it). It's all communication among peers.
If censorship blocks the whole subject, it is denying _me_ the chance to say my piece just as myself, as a peer. Sure, I could easily write a 'Drugs Bad Mkay?' page and put it up somewhere and have all the teachers and censors specially let only _my_ side be heard- but guess what? That puts me on the side of the brainwashers- to hell with that! I would rather be _censored_ than side with them- I'm not like them- I'm just a dope addict that chooses to not drink or use anymore, and I'd like to think that choice could be seen as one of many, that it wouldn't automatically align me with censoring manipulative authority figures. But as soon as the issue is censored for 'childrens' safety', it's be silenced or side with the brainwashers- because the context of having an independent opinion (namely, "Drugs were bad for me, I quit doing them because they did me harm") is _gone_.
Yikes- didn't mean to get so carried away:) anyhow- even on an issue that's personal to me like that, I'd rather see 10,000 people whispering 'do it, go on, drugs are good, never hurt anybody, it's cool' without being silenced- if that gives me the chance to go 'Uh, NOT' in the SAME CONTEXT. Being made to take a position as some authority figure makes the message meaningless! (People who do drugs don't like authority figures:) ) I realise this is a weird perspective, but this is one issue I understand pretty well, and you just can't _make_ someone stop doing drugs- the only thing that works (even when they're really sick and their life sucks) is if you're the same sort of person but you can tell them that not using works better for you- from a position of FREEDOM.
Censorship silences that along with the enticements to use. That cost is just too high.
(though it could be worse- I've heard of NA meetings in South America in which the recovering addicts in the meetings are hunted by drug lords, since the message of 'you never have to use again' is seen as competition!:P After all, the NA people do intend to teach addicts how to do continuous abstinence- and that's bad for the drug business. Now that's censorship- 'use our drugs or we kill you!')
You're out of line here, because you're overlooking one of the most important end results of the Internet- it is now possible for little children in school to make PERSONAL contact with other little children in other countries in other parts of the world. Your other points (no commercial, no pr0n) are good but to block personal contact is a serious mistake.
For tyranny to be backed by the people, the people have to believe that the ones tyrannized are subhuman or 'don't count' in some way. The history of war is full of situations where entire countries felt automatically superior to everyone else. Making personal contact with people in other countries neatly undercuts that- in fact on the Net you can't be sure who's from where, as an awful lot of people all over the world can and do speak English (it's like Star Trek syndrome, and just as convenient).
For many, many years, schools have done cute little things like assign 'pen-pals' overseas, or send foreign exchange students: the first is rather disconnected, the second too exotic to seem like an everyday thing. So one word: "IRC". Suddenly it becomes possible for schoolchildren to not just communicate but shirk, misbehave, bicker etc. with schoolchildren across the world, just like they were in the same room. And this may seem like a pointless bad thing- but back up a second, wasn't the goal of such exercises to _break_ _down_ the distance and help establish more of the sense of an interdependent global village, where you can _know_ someone overseas in a more immediate and direct way than sending postal mail? This is a very significant development, that should be encouraged not stifled.
Regarding pr0n, I see no reason not to stifle that unless the students are in Sex Ed *g* there, they'd better get full and accurate information! And regarding saturation advertising of a legally captive audience of impressionable age (what's next, _subliminal_ saturation captive advertising? No, wait, _viral_ subliminal saturation captive advertising!), I quite agree that this should be outright forbidden. Advertising is all very well, but it becomes a torment if you don't feel you can walk away- if you are LEGALLY FORCED to remain, we are no longer talking about advertising, we're talking about brainwashing- and that is completely unacceptable- and of course that is exactly what N2H2 is hyping for all they are worth.
I would not consider it wildly excessive to have "conspiring to engage in mass compulsory commercial brainwashing of children" punishable by death. I think _all_ those terms would have to be there for it to be that severe a crime- for instance if you drop 'mass' we're talking a case of weird child abuse, if you drop 'compulsory' the child is allowed to walk away, if you drop 'commercial' you could apply that to many sorts of religious and moral education with some plausibility. But the full extent, 'mass compulsory commercial brainwashing of children'- how can this not rate at least a hell of a prison sentence? Why is this not a felony? It should at _least_ be a felony crime, rendering the criminal permanently unable to vote as a citizen.
Don't tell me the only thing that will work is vigilante justice- we have a government for a _reason_. Let's make forcible commercial brainwashing of children in schools a crime.
What I would hope is this: if children are to be manipulated like this, let them be warned.
"Your school will use your body to sell Pepsi. Your education will be restricted to content in line with advertiser expectations (no Holocaust- concentration camp pictures make slimness look _bad_! Love, Slimfast for Kids). As you get older your very teachers will be more likely to be paid tools of large multinational corporations actively attempting to propagandise and brainwash you..."
Now... how do we get the message through the layers of censorship when it cannot be viewed in schools or libraries due to being uniformly added to the blocking list for politico-economic reasons?:/
How about 'Every vote is counted'? That is, after all, the rule.
The question is, given that the votes are counted, what do the numbers mean? I happen to think that votes for Dems or Reps mean zilch apart from the immediate election. However, any and all votes for anyone _else_ means one thing: "Hi! I'm the vote you DIDN'T GET and could have had if you supported THIS platform!"
You'd better believe _those_ votes are counted- by both camps. Politics is serious, winning is everything- you have to think about how to get _more_ votes or you lose.
I want both parties to think they have to crack down on corporate abuses in order to get more votes- I'm voting for Nader. Feel free to express _your_ key issues in the same manner whether or not they match mine- couldn't hurt!:)
Direct democracy scares the heck out of me. Assuming perfect counting and recording systems, how are you going to overcome the tendency to flatten smaller factions? Are you thinking in terms of an arrangement where it's direct voting and the 'losers' get proportional representation (or some adjusted form, like rounding it up), or are you thinking in terms of direct voting and just doing things in the way that gets the most votes without thought to the 'losers'? Having a good answer for this would impress me, but doing it 'winner takes all' is freaking scary. If 10,000,000 people deeply believe that dust is water, they will still all die of thirst. If they got to vote on provisions- _everybody_ dies.
It's pretty simple- the reason we have the system we do is because _pure_ democracy doesn't work or last for very long. Once you get into majority votes and 'winner takes all' you start seeing the majority stomping all over all the other, smaller factions in a 'darwinist' sort of way. Everybody in the US would be white, run Windows, drive a Ford or whatever- to be otherwise would be illegal! (or at least more 'unsupported' than you could possibly imagine).
Instead, we have a sort of republic, geared to put up roadblocks to the unrestricted dominance of the largest factions. The intention is that, if you are a small faction (like Linux users, for instance) you are supposed to have stronger representation than just the level of awareness for your cause in the general public.
This does go against social Darwinism- that's why it works. It was pioneered by early American political types who were looking at a number of other cases in which democracy was attempted (on the 'just count everyone' system) and had failed due to the 'evils of faction'. It turned out the problem wasn't to make everyone uniform and identical, but to give the smaller factions enough clout that they don't get so marginalised that they end up desperate and go on the attack (which weakens the overall system).
Next let's stick on some bull horns, a tiger tail, a couple rocket launchers... >;)
Talk about bad advertising tactics. This ad is funny and cool and makes Linux look funky, bizarre and flexible. Which is basically true (including ungainly, goofy, and fun) so what we have here is a MS-funded advertising agency failing to understand that and producing advertising that not only gives free publicity to their competition but un-sells their product. More please:)
Slashdot Mirror
That said- the sonograms are greyscale plots of deviation from the original signal. They are inevitably offset in time by the encoding process- I aligned them using those ugly transients in the center. There are two little charts under each. The second is the pre-echo and over-ring. The _first_ is precisely the opposite- deviation from the sound that was the 'same', with the weighting of the little chart (a RELATIVE measurement) emphasising the content of the wave rather than areas that are supposed to be free of additional frequency content.
I don't think it's possible for an encoder to mangle the audio quality and have a pristine 'sonogram' as differenced with the source material. A pristine sonogram would be uniformly BLACK when this was done- none of the encoders remotely approached this. Any mangling, no matter what sort, will show up as a lighter-than-black area on the differenced image. I'm very much a high end audio dweeb at heart, but I don't believe there can be mangled audio quality without the Fourier content changing, and thus the sonogram showing big gray or white blobs.
I wholeheartedly agree that quantitative analysis of perceptual audio coding is not easy! :)
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Woops. Or I could have said 'checkerboard' and saved myself the hassle :)
The idea is from company named Boxtop Software which produced a photoshop plugin that put different web safe colors in checkerboard patterns to produce a much greater range of 'web safe' colors (which look solid). I figured, why not run with that and do textures that way? Maybe the Gimp would benefit from some websafe checkerboard texture generators too :)
Doh! For years I've used a purely white background for airwindows.com, with a sort of vintage-cnet layout. I also used to keep a 'graphics' section in which I had some web background gifs I'd done. They were made like this:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Do a diffusion dither between white and the lightest 'web safe' gray- then take all the pixels at x positions and knock 'em out to white too. The result (works with other colors as well) is a texture in which no two colored pixels are ever directly next to each other- it's a paperlike texture but never gets darker than half Netscape grey.
Which is to say- sorry, I did it that way because I liked it, and I'll keep it. Honest, I have done everything I possibly could to avoid obscuring the text, but it's sort of like a trade-off: in getting rid of additional table clutter that I used to have, I found that I liked the pages when this simpler layout was backed by the softest texture I had, rather than plain white.
I hope it didn't bother your eyes too much :)
You can add me to that list- and such a comparison (I naturally kept a logbook to be able to reproduce the process later) would indeed be meaningful to me. For instance, if Vorbis was more sophisticated in its control of over-ring and either imposed a flatter characteristic (resisting resonant peaks) or went for an intentionally tailored characteristic (say, suppressing ring around 3-5K like Fraunhofer 32K bit rate) this would have obvious and interesting application to the sound quality. Conversely, if it had big ugly peaks and artifacts, their location in the frequency response would tell a lot about the sonic signature of the encoder.
I had to know why- no, scratch that, I knew why. I had to know which encoders did better- what they in turn traded off- and I had to know across a wide range of bit rates in a way I could quickly cross correlate.
I've written for (IMNSHO) the foremost High End Audio journal. It's not that I'm not interested in listening to encoders! But if they are _all_ quite compromised, why not break 'em down into a series of measurements relative against each other with clearly identifiable characteristics? Shows you what to listen for- and tips you off to particular issues.
On the Mac, I would have to _pay_ to use the Xing encoder. I just got through a serious ramen-and-spaghettios period, and there's just no way I'm going to merrily throw money at people who not only support the mp3 licensing patentholders, but also make an encoder that is considered to be more prone to artifacts and ringiness than even the Fraunhofer high bit rate stuff.
Beat me, whip me, slashdot me and call me unrigorous, but I'm not paying money for Xing. The lurkers support me in email. So there ;)
Giving this sort of thing to Slashdot is as fun as nude mudwrestling. Gotta love it. :)
Mind you, I run a Mac- but that means I get a really clear view of just how Windows PC-oriented most gaming really is. Microsoft are not going to give that up, you know. They are not going to lose lots of money out of the goodness of their hearts in order to replace Windows PCs with some console. All the X-Box is, is a mirage- when it fades out, the developers will shrug, realise they've been developing for a Windows platform all along, and it'll be more of the same.
Wake up, this was a military action, not geek subculture. If you want to see the source you'll have to crack into MS yourself. The Russian spies are not going to share.
Military entities would grab this sort of thing in a heartbeat, a nanosecond. There's no way this was some curious geek or 'rogue Russian company' trying to be more compatible with windows! That's utterly absurd.
This was a military exploit. Everything from military IT to battleships runs off Windows. In addition to that, lots of other countries' militaries run off Windows as well. We will not be seeing script kiddies putting up funny defaced web pages.
The purpose of this espionage is this: when the missles come over, the target country's military IT will be DOWN.
I simply hope my country (the US) isn't actually the target that somebody has in mind. Just about any country would be as vulnerable, this isn't about the US only. It's not strictly military IT either- consider a war with the shipping and industry of the target country crippled through IT attacks.
I've felt for a long time that people should be nervous of Microsoft waking up and realising their control of IT was a military weapon. It seems I was wrong- they never smartened up enough to understand this. Somebody in Russia, however, did- and struck first, gaining access to the proprietary information that would reveal every point of weakness for later attack. Whether Microsoft figures out it possesses the capacity for denial of IT services as a military weapon, at this point, is meaningless. It's too late as they no longer control the information- they lost the first-strike capability.
It might be a good idea for the US military to seize control of the very same code so at least they can have equal capacity to attack, or to know what will be attacked and how. If MS tries to resist that it would be a matter of, "No- you can pay money to run our products, and the Russians have total information on all their weaknesses, but YOU have to trust us that your IT is not compromised. Trust us, we're Very Smart!"
Frankly, the political applications of this are staggering.
One particular aspect of the Progressive platform struck me very forcibly- the idea that wealth needs to correspond to work, not position or power. Basically, if I work 18 hours a day, the deck should be stacked in my favor so that I can take home wealth. If I don't work at all but I 'own people' and my employees do all the work, currently I'd get even more wealth, and the Progressive opinion is that is inequitable.
The thing is, intellectual property's based on the idea that my ideas or creations exist out there in some nebulous intellectual space and go on 'working' WITHOUT me. As if it made sense that I could record a super hit song, and (in theory- ha!) sit back and never lift a finger again, with my income guaranteed for the rest of my life by the fact that I'd done terrific work- once.
Even though the industry I'm associated with is completely committed to this twisted fantasy, I personally find it inequitable- to the point that it has profoundly affected my expectations and the way I see my work.
At this point, I see no use for intellectual property at all. I'm letting my expectations on my music change dramatically- it is not and will never be allowed to be the 'engine' for generating wealth for me. Instead, the _process_ of recording such music is the engine- I have a somewhat unusual and eclectic musical style and can work on commission, I have equipment and software resources (some of the software I wrote myself because there was nothing out there to do what I needed!) that can be used for this type of work, and most significantly the expectations for pay for this type of professional work are very decent.
The actual music gets to be a lot freer in its expectations- I can basically guarantee a certain level of technical quality and the artistic judgements don't need to make any compromises to popular taste because the idea of THE MUSIC going out and earning money is doomed. Instead the music goes out and gets attention and mindshare, which can then be used to attract business. The role of intellectual property earning money through scarcity in a digital information economy is completely doomed...
The one area that may or may not still warrant protection is simply authentication- if 50 guys all claim to have recorded my album, that could be a problem. Yet even here, this is not a completely persuasive argument- it simply turns into a 'caveat emptor' situation, because the sort of person who _would_ attempt to pass themselves off as a more skilled worker is not the sort of person who can actually do the work- 'stealing' credit for IP is a con and cannot be backed up by action. You'd turn to the person and say "Great! I'm sold. Now let's go to work, record me something new!" and they'd absolutely fail- and of course if the IP is valueless and ubitiquous, neither they nor I can actually sell it no matter who claims they invented it- they can only use it as leverage to win bids for other work, and there I'd have a really serious advantage. So even _authentication_ might be dispensed with- at the cost of completely rethinking what a musician's "job" is. You'd have to entirely give up on the idea of IP and fall back on a level that's much harder to fake or cheat- the ability to perform a task in the real world. Only that act would correspond to wealth- and the musician would need to do it as a consistent job, continuing to produce new material (perhaps on commission or patronage, or work for hire) in order to have consistent income. You'd have to work- you'd have to want to work. Now, I'm wondering (if you can be distracted from throwing rocks at the Eugene anarchists ;) )- how much of this sounds like your anarchist radical viewpoint on intellectual property?
Present-day capitalism: the government tells you what to do, takes all your money and gives it to giant multinational corporations which fire you and hire 6 ill-paid malaria-ridden sweatshop workers in a country whose name you can't pronounce.
Libertarianism: the government gives up and goes home, at which point the giant multinational corporation buys your town/state/country and tells you what to do while (see above)
I mean, come on... let's be practical...
That's the bottom line. You can like it, or not. Approve of it- or not. Encourage it, or fight it. But across the board, what 'free trade' means is "if you can come up with slave labor and kill people off in your factories to undersell us union-beset industrialised nations, we'll happily punish our own companies by giving all our business to you!"
There are some interesting variations, such as "if you can grab a copy of W2K and replicate 100,000,000 copies of it in Taiwan, we can treat you as a supplier of that product, look the other way and start buying from you rather than the official Microsoft sources". Free trade is not an automatic homerun for business- there are some nasty boobytraps in it. Primarily, however, it isn't about gray or black market- primarily it's about 'he who wields the biggest whip wins the bid', an excuse to massively reward the most ruthless industries that exist on the planet and punish anyone forced to behave more reasonably.
Of course, the libertarian perspective can be 'spun' to make it seem like Libertarians all _want_ to remove any controls and allow the entire world to turn into a big sweatshop ruled by the most ruthless and powerful people and organisations. Not all libertarians feel that way. Some do. Which is to say, some people _like_ whips and the subjugation of the weak and powerless, and vehemently dislike the idea of protecting anyone just because they are weak or powerless.
Oh... "which will be reflected in employee salaries"... *chuckle* no comment. *chuckle*
So in spite of this, does anyone still think Microsoft is going to choose to make less profit and cut into potential Windows marketshare out of the goodness of their own hearts and a love of spiffy technology?
However- it does make _great_ vaporware to try and cut off Sony's air supply with, and the risks of faking demos for it are much less than the risks of faking demos in court! So you'll be hearing a LOT about the wonderful X-Box.
Just don't bank on ever _buying_ it. That is not its purpose.
The office is held in trust. It is a job. It does not convey automatic, obligatory respect and deference- there are limits. You might consider the statement, "The King ought not be beneath any man- but he is beneath the law, and God" (attribution? I remember this from a book I read about Watergate, but don't know the original context)
Let's look at that for a moment. Our President is not a 'King', but he is in a similar position. It is reasonable to expect (indeed, insist) that he not lick the boots of, say, Bill Gates, or any industrial robber baron or special interest. He should not be _beneath_ such people, he should not be _beneath_ Joe Sixpack.
However, he is not _above_ Joe either. There is a name for that- 'class'. America was _meant_ to be basically egalatarian- the President is neither a King nor a special upper caste held automatically superior to the common peasants. He's a guy doing a job- it's always been that way. He has enough authority to do that job but the office does not grant him mystical powers, or make him royalty. The office does not deserve respect- the office should EARN respect. If you are an American citizen it is your DUTY to question the Presidential office and the guy occupying it- if it seems to you that he's abusing the office and not living up to it.
That is why we have impeachment laws: because that top office is a job, not divine appointment. How difficult can this be to understand?
In an era where both major party candidates have alarming flaws (Bush isn't smart, and Gore isn't trustworthy) it is all the more important to remain aware that the Presidency is a job, not a position of royalty. Our political system allows for the man to be FIRED. In order to judge this, you cannot simply look at the office- you must look at the man, the job he's done, the actions he's taken. You must overlook the office- having the office does not put the guy above the law.
Never forget that.
The point of OSS in a medical context is this: using OSS, you cannot be held hostage by a commercial vendor with lives at stake.
There's too many cases on record already of faulty (commercial) medical software killing people (high-powered scanners and the like) and too many cases of commercial companies foot-dragging and refusing to admit problems because debugging and fixing them would cost money and be a publicity stain. On the other hand it would be a winning strategy for a commercial medical software company to (say) do an upgrade or better still find and fix a potentially dangerous bug- and then charge a really BIG amount for the upgrade/bugfix. That's being held hostage, and that would be less of a risk with OSS developed by a competent medical software developer. Ideally the software should be a matter of public record- so that if the primary developer isn't available another competent one can be found, and so that if there are subtle bugs, some unrelated person could make a claim that there's a bug and offer a fix- and the claim and fix could be audited by third parties.
I don't see where this requires 10,000 script kiddies- but it does make a case that ownership of such important software should rest with the user and not be reserved for the supplier. Can you imagine if the .NET model caught on with medical software?!? "Okay, the old rental rate was $500, but there's been an adjustment- the new rate is $60,000 and a 10% interest in the hospital. Or, you can choose not to pay, and we'll flip this switch and 72 people die..."
Hang on- his problem with the Corvair was oversteer, and I think that's a legitimate complaint. I personally like oversteer :) but that's because I'm a crazy bastard, and anyhow it's a moot point as I bike instead of drive. However, for almost anyone on the road, there is a huge difference between oversteer and understeer on a rainy road or a patch of grease or leaves- picture traffic, and then picture the car that loses traction. The understeering car noses into something or goes straight off the road. The oversteering car SWAPS ENDS, in a hurry. It might be fun on a race track or in an empty parking lot but it's a really _sucky_ behavior for a vehicle in traffic :)
You see, my personal experience with drugs was not positive. In fact, I dove into them with such intensity that it was all downhill until I finally got some help and quit 'em- and I currently feel that there's no way _I_ personally can 'responsibly' apply such drugs. YMMV. I am just saying that for me, drugs were HARMFUL, that I got very dependent on them and got into a vicious circle, losing all perspective and chasing 'soma' until my life was shit, frankly. It's taken some years to get back out of that trap...
Now, here is the problem. I feel I have a right to have any search on 'drugs' return the stuff I just typed, just as much as you've a right for such an inquiry to return _your_ viewpoint. I know good and well that the kids in the schoolyard and on the back streets are going to be taking _your_ viewpoint for the most part- they haven't had time to see a downside to it, and they probably don't trust the hysteria of teachers and authority figures.
Once censorship blocks all discussion of 'drugs', those kids don't have _access_ to random thoughts from people arguing on a web page. They're cut off- I can say, here and now, that drugs _sucked_ for me and I got really compulsive and nothing was ever as good as the first buzz, which I futilely chased for years, and it's obvious I'm just saying that because that's how it was for _me_. You could say the opposite if you wanted- eavesdropping kids could make up their own minds, some might decide they weren't going to mess with their brain cells after all (or would be more wary about it). It's all communication among peers.
If censorship blocks the whole subject, it is denying _me_ the chance to say my piece just as myself, as a peer. Sure, I could easily write a 'Drugs Bad Mkay?' page and put it up somewhere and have all the teachers and censors specially let only _my_ side be heard- but guess what? That puts me on the side of the brainwashers- to hell with that! I would rather be _censored_ than side with them- I'm not like them- I'm just a dope addict that chooses to not drink or use anymore, and I'd like to think that choice could be seen as one of many, that it wouldn't automatically align me with censoring manipulative authority figures. But as soon as the issue is censored for 'childrens' safety', it's be silenced or side with the brainwashers- because the context of having an independent opinion (namely, "Drugs were bad for me, I quit doing them because they did me harm") is _gone_.
Yikes- didn't mean to get so carried away :) anyhow- even on an issue that's personal to me like that, I'd rather see 10,000 people whispering 'do it, go on, drugs are good, never hurt anybody, it's cool' without being silenced- if that gives me the chance to go 'Uh, NOT' in the SAME CONTEXT. Being made to take a position as some authority figure makes the message meaningless! (People who do drugs don't like authority figures :) ) I realise this is a weird perspective, but this is one issue I understand pretty well, and you just can't _make_ someone stop doing drugs- the only thing that works (even when they're really sick and their life sucks) is if you're the same sort of person but you can tell them that not using works better for you- from a position of FREEDOM.
Censorship silences that along with the enticements to use. That cost is just too high.
(though it could be worse- I've heard of NA meetings in South America in which the recovering addicts in the meetings are hunted by drug lords, since the message of 'you never have to use again' is seen as competition! :P After all, the NA people do intend to teach addicts how to do continuous abstinence- and that's bad for the drug business. Now that's censorship- 'use our drugs or we kill you!')
For tyranny to be backed by the people, the people have to believe that the ones tyrannized are subhuman or 'don't count' in some way. The history of war is full of situations where entire countries felt automatically superior to everyone else. Making personal contact with people in other countries neatly undercuts that- in fact on the Net you can't be sure who's from where, as an awful lot of people all over the world can and do speak English (it's like Star Trek syndrome, and just as convenient).
For many, many years, schools have done cute little things like assign 'pen-pals' overseas, or send foreign exchange students: the first is rather disconnected, the second too exotic to seem like an everyday thing. So one word: "IRC". Suddenly it becomes possible for schoolchildren to not just communicate but shirk, misbehave, bicker etc. with schoolchildren across the world, just like they were in the same room. And this may seem like a pointless bad thing- but back up a second, wasn't the goal of such exercises to _break_ _down_ the distance and help establish more of the sense of an interdependent global village, where you can _know_ someone overseas in a more immediate and direct way than sending postal mail? This is a very significant development, that should be encouraged not stifled.
Regarding pr0n, I see no reason not to stifle that unless the students are in Sex Ed *g* there, they'd better get full and accurate information! And regarding saturation advertising of a legally captive audience of impressionable age (what's next, _subliminal_ saturation captive advertising? No, wait, _viral_ subliminal saturation captive advertising!), I quite agree that this should be outright forbidden. Advertising is all very well, but it becomes a torment if you don't feel you can walk away- if you are LEGALLY FORCED to remain, we are no longer talking about advertising, we're talking about brainwashing- and that is completely unacceptable- and of course that is exactly what N2H2 is hyping for all they are worth.
I would not consider it wildly excessive to have "conspiring to engage in mass compulsory commercial brainwashing of children" punishable by death. I think _all_ those terms would have to be there for it to be that severe a crime- for instance if you drop 'mass' we're talking a case of weird child abuse, if you drop 'compulsory' the child is allowed to walk away, if you drop 'commercial' you could apply that to many sorts of religious and moral education with some plausibility. But the full extent, 'mass compulsory commercial brainwashing of children'- how can this not rate at least a hell of a prison sentence? Why is this not a felony? It should at _least_ be a felony crime, rendering the criminal permanently unable to vote as a citizen.
Don't tell me the only thing that will work is vigilante justice- we have a government for a _reason_. Let's make forcible commercial brainwashing of children in schools a crime.
What I would hope is this: if children are to be manipulated like this, let them be warned.
Now... how do we get the message through the layers of censorship when it cannot be viewed in schools or libraries due to being uniformly added to the blocking list for politico-economic reasons?The question is, given that the votes are counted, what do the numbers mean? I happen to think that votes for Dems or Reps mean zilch apart from the immediate election. However, any and all votes for anyone _else_ means one thing: "Hi! I'm the vote you DIDN'T GET and could have had if you supported THIS platform!"
You'd better believe _those_ votes are counted- by both camps. Politics is serious, winning is everything- you have to think about how to get _more_ votes or you lose.
I want both parties to think they have to crack down on corporate abuses in order to get more votes- I'm voting for Nader. Feel free to express _your_ key issues in the same manner whether or not they match mine- couldn't hurt! :)
Direct democracy scares the heck out of me. Assuming perfect counting and recording systems, how are you going to overcome the tendency to flatten smaller factions? Are you thinking in terms of an arrangement where it's direct voting and the 'losers' get proportional representation (or some adjusted form, like rounding it up), or are you thinking in terms of direct voting and just doing things in the way that gets the most votes without thought to the 'losers'? Having a good answer for this would impress me, but doing it 'winner takes all' is freaking scary. If 10,000,000 people deeply believe that dust is water, they will still all die of thirst. If they got to vote on provisions- _everybody_ dies.
Instead, we have a sort of republic, geared to put up roadblocks to the unrestricted dominance of the largest factions. The intention is that, if you are a small faction (like Linux users, for instance) you are supposed to have stronger representation than just the level of awareness for your cause in the general public.
This does go against social Darwinism- that's why it works. It was pioneered by early American political types who were looking at a number of other cases in which democracy was attempted (on the 'just count everyone' system) and had failed due to the 'evils of faction'. It turned out the problem wasn't to make everyone uniform and identical, but to give the smaller factions enough clout that they don't get so marginalised that they end up desperate and go on the attack (which weakens the overall system).
Talk about bad advertising tactics. This ad is funny and cool and makes Linux look funky, bizarre and flexible. Which is basically true (including ungainly, goofy, and fun) so what we have here is a MS-funded advertising agency failing to understand that and producing advertising that not only gives free publicity to their competition but un-sells their product. More please :)