Should do that with Matrix 2 and 3. Separate, boring they are. Together, one good movie it would be.
That's because they *are* a single overlong movie split into two parts in all but name. Even moreso than the explicitly split "Kill Bill" (where you could enjoy each of the parts in its own right due to its more scene-based nature).
More's the pity because, although it clearly wasn't as good as the original, The Matrix Reloaded was still quite good in its own way (if a bit too long)... but clearly a "part 1" that requires you to watch "part 2" to be complete.... except that "part 2" (i.e. Revolutions) was just lousy, and would have been too long at anything over an hour. I'd personally trim Reloaded and hack all but the essentials from Revolutions.
Even then it wouldn't solve the "resolution" of Revolutions which felt less like a satisfying "tying things up" ending and more like an intentionally incomplete and half-baked non-resolution designed to provide a point to expand the franchise (*) from. Ironically, we *haven't* really seen much Matrix-related stuff in the 8+ years since then (I'm sure they've done backstory comics and such guff for the fanboys, but I'm talking about mass market on the same scale as the movies themselves). Is this because it really was intended as the final movie, or because Revolutions' reception was so poor that it seriously damaged the prospects of more Matrix material?
To be honest, part of the problem may always have been that- although "The Matrix" looks on the surface like it should be one of those films that would work well as a franchise (due to the questions and possibilities it throws up and the expanded world it suggests)... it isn't. What worked about the first movie was wrapped up by the end. You can't redo the sense of wonder and discovery that drove the first movie, and once Neo has made that journey he's no longer really the confused and bemused everyman cipher (that Reeves' criticised acting style actually worked really well for), but a knowledgeable Superman in a much larger world (Zion) of characters with bad dialogue we really don't care about.
(*) Ugh, anyone notice how common that word has become in the past decade? We're all using terminology that makes us sound like a mixture of fanboy and corporate studio types. Though of course it's true- such things *are* moneymaking franchises, but it doesn't say much for artistic integrity, nor for us in that we accept and use the term.
Sure I know how useless bug reports (and reports of problems in general) can be coming from the man on the street- hence why I mentioned the word "useful", realising that Takei still probably has more technical competence than most people. (Assuming they didn't slant the story that much and his bug reports *were* useful!)
Still, the angle of this story is a somewhat poor attempt to give a misleading impression.
From reading the links, it sounds like Takei had some problems, and reported them to the Facebook team with some helpful to-and-fro exchange of information (i.e. giving them a useful bug report) before they fixed them in the usual manner.
No disrespect to him intended, it just sounds like someone is trying to make this story sound like a bigger deal than it is. The Slashdot headline doesn't help, compounding the misleading impression (probably intentionally) that Takei was sitting alongside the Facebook techies debugging nested right joins.
LaserDisc was an analog technology (save for the option of a digital audio track), so you're looking at uncompressed video.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but it depends what you consider "uncompressed". It's not compressed in the block-oriented digital MPEG sense, but you're still having to squeeze a picture into the bandwidth constraints of the signal that can be stored on the disc.
It's a composite signal (so it has dot crawl inherent in the format), but it has no video artifacts, so for scenes with fast motion, it is AGES better-looking than DVD.
For a well-encoded DVD (done with variable bitrate allocation and some content awareness), this should be much less of an issue though. As I mentioned above, and someone else elaborated upon, some of the early DVDs weren't done that well, and the compression was more visible than it would be on a disc done to present-day standards.
Does the Amiga OS have any inherent advantage over other modern OS?
This tends- justifiably- to be asked every time there's been a bit of Amiga "news" in the past few years (including that of the final release of Amiga OS 4, delayed for around 15 years).
If there *is* any major advantage, then no-one came up with one during any of those discussions.
Really, the Amiga OS nowadays is just a plaything for a few very hardcore hobbyists willing to pay for overpriced, underpowered custom hardware that isn't even directly compatible with the original Amiga anyway. Amiga OS (and the original hardware) was fantastic in its day, and beat the living heck out of MS-DOS and early Windows, but that was a long time ago. Anyone for whom Amiga OS/hardware compatibility was essential or even useful would have been forced to give up and migrate elsewhere by the late-90s at most. For that reason, even if one *could* upgrade it to a modern OS, it'd make more sense just to write a new OS from scratch- the "classic" core would just end up being legacy baggage that would please the Amiga obsessives because they could call it Amiga OS, but have little real world use beyond muddying the design.
(Sorry, didn't want that to sound like a dismissal of the genuinely innovative Amiga OS, but things have moved on too far now).
The Amiga IP seems to be a bit confusing, having been sold on several times, split and licensed (and the rights disputed), as well as the names having been used on things having apparently nothing to do with the Amiga (some mobile phone OS layer called "Amiga Anywhere" and even worse slapped onto some generic HTPC cases that reused the numbers of classic Amigas). F****** horrid, just let it go.
SafeNames is a UK business, and they have amazingly good service. Yes, the US is on good terms with the UK, but after the lopsided extradition nonsense getting all the press, this might be where they decide to draw the line.
Ha ha... that's pretty funny- you might even have fooled some people into thinking that this was meant seriously! Er... you were joking, weren't you?
Anyway, while Blair was an obsequious prick a few years back, the current lot (despite initial noises to the contrary) seem quite happy to continue the American deal of "you scratch my back and then you scratch my back again, and we see no reason to change while we're getting what we want".
Old people don't get it, and they never will. The digital revolution is about what's possible that wasn't possible before, not about doing everything the way you did it before only with digital files instead of physical media.
Yes, this is my theory on (partly) why DVD recorders rose then fell in popularity.
DVD recorders are obviously based on different technologies to VCRs, but from a consumer point of view, the usage model is similar- removable media that stores a similar quantity of video. You basically use it like you use a VCR, but with discs instead of tapes. Also, prerecorded DVDs and players replaced prerecorded videocassettes, so shouldn't video cassette recording be replaced by DVD recording? You can see how people used to VCRs would mentally have perceived the DVD recorder as their logical successor.
Except that this is flawed because it forgets that most recording on VCRs was done for timeshifting purposes rather than archiving, and now that PVRs/DVRs exist, they're way more useful because they remove the need to faff about with (and store) tapes altogether, hold more than enough for most people's timeshifting use and tend to include useful facilities like "series record" (i.e. no messing about with timers).
The video recorder was the best way of doing that in its day, but the DVD Recorder isn't the best way of doing it nowadays.
IMHO, people's thinking has now been weaned off the "VCR model" of doing things and they have now realised the benefits of the DVR. I also think that people realised that DVD recorders were a PITA, with media type compatibility issues and general temperamentality that made them less straightforward than a VCR replacement ought to have been. They might be useful for archiving, but the "old way of thinking" would blind one to the fact they're not, and were never, the VCR's true successor.
Mistake in the above; the first bit should read "weren't some of the early DVDs quite poor?"
While I'm here, I'll also note that my comment on non-remastered (i.e. noisier and blurrier) material compressing less well may give another reason why early DVDs might have looked less good, as those were less likely to have been remastered (or remastered to 90s standards at best) and hence would suffer more from compression.
"Laserdisc looks so much better" (I kid you not, those were prominent arguments against DVD in those days).
I didn't have one at the time, but weren't some of the early laserdiscs apparently quite poor? I might be wrong, but I vaguely remember hearing some of them were single layer (*), the transfers weren't apparently too great (the first Blade Runner DVD issue was apparently rubbish) and/or the compression wasn't that well done. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that a well-done Laserdisc would beat a poor DVD, or at least its limitations wouldn't be as obnoxious as visibly blocky compression.
(*) Actually, I have a DVD with a *2005* issue date on it that is a single layer (I'd checked when I noticed some distracting compression artifacts and suspected the reason). Granted, it was only a 109 minute film with no extras, but the compression was still clearly visible. (Probably didn't help that it apparently hadn't been remastered that much, as perversely lower-quality and noisier material tends to require more compression to compensate for that wasted reproducing the noise(!))
[The 44.1 kHz] sampling rate is something of a historical accident anyway
Yes, it dates back to the days when the only method of *recording* CD-sized amounts of data (i.e. hundreds of megabytes) was to use a video cassette recorder (with a suitable interface) as a backing store, which dictated some of the technical aspects.
You may not be able to hear the higher frequencies, but when they're sampled with a too low sample rate, you'll be converting waveforms you can hear.
Nyquist assumes that the signal to be sampled does not contain any frequencies higher than half the sampling rate. Any that exist thus *are* expected to be filtered out beforehand, otherwise aliasing will occur.
Try it for yourself on paper.
The "samples" do *not* represent the final "reconstructed" wave (are you suggesting the same "join the dots reconstruction" misconception that most people have about Nyquist?). My understanding of Nyquist (probably incomplete and far from perfect, but still miles better than most people's fundamental misunderstanding) is that this sample output has to be filtered so that all the harmonics above half the sampling rate are removed. Since Nyquist only says you get perfect reconstruction for frequencies up to that limit, there's no contradiction there.
A "perfect" square wave (which can never actually be created in the real world) has harmonics of infinite frequency, and even a "real-world" as-near-square-as-makes-no-difference-wave will contain very high harmonics. If one was to do a Fourier transform on a square wave, filter out all the frequencies above the human range of hearing, then convert it back to the familiar (spatial domain) wave form, it wouldn't be square any more.
Therefore, you can't sample a square wave using standard techniques anyway.
No, but it is *aliased*. The waveform between two samples is a simple interpolation.
Bzzt. No, you're wrong- that's absolutely *not* how Nyquist assumes the wave is going to be reconstructed, it's just a "refined" (but equally wrong) variant of the same widespread "join-the-dots-reconstruction" misconception that the article already explained was wrong.
As far as I'm aware (correct me if I'm incorrect here), one could in theory get the original signal by taking the "join the dots" version *and* then filtering out all the frequencies above the original range. (That second step being very significant).... or even by applying the same filter to an "impulse train" of value spikes representing the sample values of the original wave.
The parent already addressed and accepted use of higher sampling rates and resolutions for intermediate stages.
And that sampling frequency only gives you the correct frequency replication up to the Nyquist limit. It doesn't replicate phase or amplitude correctly, you need oversampled source for that.
What evidence do you have for this assertion?
To get the high C of a flute to sound different from the high C of a piccolo, you need to include more than just a sample at twice the frequency, since the overtones are at different apmlitudes compared to the main note.
I'm no sure what you're trying to say here. If there are any "overtones" beyond the frequency range of human hearing, then humans aren't going to hear them. If this means that subtleties of the two instruments are indistinguishable at higher pitches, then this would be the case with someone listening to the original performance as well.
In Sanitized's defence, it's easy for its success to blind us (in hindsight) to the fact that the iPod wasn't a runaway hit straight off (though it did still gain established success quickly in the scheme of things). Possibly because...
(1) The later versions didn't require Firewire (which still isn't standard on all machines, and was far less so ten years ago)
(2) The first version didn't support Windows and hence required a Mac (in fact, iTunes wasn't available for Windows for another couple of years after the iPod's launch)
(3) Most importantly, by the time it *had* became a mass market success, entry-level models were available for significantly below $400.
In short, he/she wasn't entirely wrong at the time.
Stopping point in the future to pick up oxygen as we move across the universe?
Interesting idea, but not really a "stopping off point". If we visualise the journey to even the nearest star (aside from the sun) as a journey from Los Angeles to New York (2790 miles), then in terms of relative distance Dione is equivalent to an, er... "gas" station just over 100 metres from your starting point.
I'm prepared to admit that the comment probably warranted cutting a bit of slack bearing in mind the author's clarification and putting his comment in context.
But if one takes it in the sense of being meant as a "great motivating message" (which the OP's clarification implies that it wasn't) then it falls flat, because if the person making the comments isn't even motivated enough to sacrifice some minor pleasure for their principles, then it pretty much has the opposite effect.
No they weren't, Instamatic was the name they used for their cameras that used the cartridge-based 126 film (and then later for 110-film based "Pocket Instamatic" models).
In my defence _everyone_ was doing lines in the 80's.
The only lines I was doing in the 80s were the ones I was given for misbehaving in school...
As for why this (and most viewdata services) didn't take off in the 80s, the answer is that it wasn't the Internet, but more of a closed, walled garden. Modems were slower, and dial-up calls were more expensive. (I don't know how many of these services provided local rate access, but I suspect that this might not have been the case for all services, considerably increasing access cost, even at medium to long distance rates).
I remember thinking that modems looked cool in the 80s, but realising that I wouldn't be able to afford the access costs anyway.
Also, I suspect that the "(anti)-network effect" was in play- few people except some random geeks who could afford it were online, so there was probably less reason to get online than later on when everyone was on the Internet.
And as one other person pointed out, one "viewdata" service did take off- the French Minitel was a major success, albeit just about the only place where this was the case. That was through state support, so obviously wouldn't have worked in the "OMG COMMIES!!!" US;-)
(And though some have claimed that latterly its established popularity slowed adoption of the Internet itself in France).
I also only buy quality exclusives [..] Both were quality games that were not available for any other platform, nor will they be any time soon, if ever.
So? How does the fact you are only buying "quality" games bolster your case? That just means they're more entertaining for you, it's not like buying your children more nutritious food, or buying a longer-lasting whatever that is more environmentally friendly. It's a non-excuse.
Similarly, how does the fact that they'll never be available for any other platform make any difference in principle?
You're weak-willed and wishy-washy because you go on about "matters of principle" and how you "don't like doing business with dishonest people", yet you conveniently draw the line in the sand at precisely the point where standing up for it would require anything approaching sacrifice on your part (i.e. not getting to play "Final Fantasy LXIX-XXL Online"). You didn't even rule out buying the PS4 with that silly non-commital line (a case where you obviously don't own the hardware yet, hence aren't committed to it in any way, yet would still consider handing over your hard-earned money for if it's shiny enough).
I'm pretty sure that your "4%" figure is wishful thinking based on ludicrously ideal calculations that you won't stick to- if you were really bothered enough to go that far, you wouldn't be giving Sony your money in the first place.
To be blunt, everything you said smacks of rationalisation.
I'll grant you that you didn't go as far as some who say "I'll be boycotting entirely Sony in future... er, except for that game I really want, that I'll give them the money for. But I'll still not like them." But if your quarter-baked sort-of-boycott is the most you're prepared to do while rambling about "principles", then please excuse me if I don't take you seriously.
The only games I have bought for PS3 since then are the console exclusives.
I sympathised with you up to that point; then I realised that this is the same weak-willed, half-baked, not-putting-one's-money-where-one's-mouth-is posts about "principles" or "boycotts" that appear endlessly on Slashdot and aren't worth the hard drive space they're stored on.
Your stern-willed resolve to stand up for your vaunted "principles" doesn't extend past foregoing the game of the month if it's only available on the PS3? Don't make me laugh.
I think it's pretty clear why Sony aren't too concerned, when of even the tiny percentage that supposedly care about this sort of thing, most of them will rant endlessly about it, but give Sony their money when push comes to shove anyway.
I don't know yet if I will bother with a PS4
Such resolve!
I'm sure you will though- it's been confirmed that "Call of Metal Gears of Modern Warfare 7" will be exclusive to the PS4 for at least 3 1/2 days after launch, and it would be unfair for you to have to forego your shiny toys for that long.
Please do come back and post another wishy-washy diatribe about "principles" after you do so though.
1 GB then, 1 TB now
33 MHz then, 3 GHz quad-core now
Notably though, most of the progress in these two occurred closer to 1995 than the present day. In particular, during the 90s and early 2000s, hard drive capacities were expanding at a high exponential rate. (I mean, two years before the 1GB figure in this article I was considering a 120 MB drive for my Amiga. Three years after 1995, the 3.2GB drive my new PC had was on the small side of "average", four years after *that* (2002) my next PC had an 80GB drive).
Nowadays? 1TB drives have been within the affordable range for around 4 years now, and even before last year's floods things had slowed down around 2TB with that only recently becoming normal, 3TB taking a long time to arrive and we *finally* got 4TB at the very high end.
Processor performance admittedly can't be judged by clock speed alone, plus we have more cores, but the latter doesn't provide the easy "free lunch" performance boost that previous improvements did.
The 1.44MB HD floppy actually came out in 1987 as an improvement to the original 1982 3.5" DD floppy. The Zip disc came out circa 1994-95, and was closer to what one would have expected a floppy to be by then, but while successful never replaced the 3.5" as a de facto "in every computer" standard. In fact, it wasn't truly displaced until pen drives got "no brainer" cheap a few years back, so it's a technology that stuck around well after it would otherwise have been superseded or obsolete.
Imagine thousands of accounts doing the same thing then slashdot = stagnated.
Anyway why do you cower? what are you afraid of?
Wait a minute...;)
Of course, that raises the question of whether the multiple "Michael Kristopeit" accounts are actually someone called Michael Kristopeit, whether they're pretending to be someone else with that name, or whether the name was randomly chosen and any resemblance to any real "Michael Kristopeits" is purely coincidental.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Should do that with Matrix 2 and 3. Separate, boring they are. Together, one good movie it would be.
That's because they *are* a single overlong movie split into two parts in all but name. Even moreso than the explicitly split "Kill Bill" (where you could enjoy each of the parts in its own right due to its more scene-based nature).
More's the pity because, although it clearly wasn't as good as the original, The Matrix Reloaded was still quite good in its own way (if a bit too long)... but clearly a "part 1" that requires you to watch "part 2" to be complete.... except that "part 2" (i.e. Revolutions) was just lousy, and would have been too long at anything over an hour. I'd personally trim Reloaded and hack all but the essentials from Revolutions.
Even then it wouldn't solve the "resolution" of Revolutions which felt less like a satisfying "tying things up" ending and more like an intentionally incomplete and half-baked non-resolution designed to provide a point to expand the franchise (*) from. Ironically, we *haven't* really seen much Matrix-related stuff in the 8+ years since then (I'm sure they've done backstory comics and such guff for the fanboys, but I'm talking about mass market on the same scale as the movies themselves). Is this because it really was intended as the final movie, or because Revolutions' reception was so poor that it seriously damaged the prospects of more Matrix material?
To be honest, part of the problem may always have been that- although "The Matrix" looks on the surface like it should be one of those films that would work well as a franchise (due to the questions and possibilities it throws up and the expanded world it suggests)... it isn't. What worked about the first movie was wrapped up by the end. You can't redo the sense of wonder and discovery that drove the first movie, and once Neo has made that journey he's no longer really the confused and bemused everyman cipher (that Reeves' criticised acting style actually worked really well for), but a knowledgeable Superman in a much larger world (Zion) of characters with bad dialogue we really don't care about.
(*) Ugh, anyone notice how common that word has become in the past decade? We're all using terminology that makes us sound like a mixture of fanboy and corporate studio types. Though of course it's true- such things *are* moneymaking franchises, but it doesn't say much for artistic integrity, nor for us in that we accept and use the term.
Sure I know how useless bug reports (and reports of problems in general) can be coming from the man on the street- hence why I mentioned the word "useful", realising that Takei still probably has more technical competence than most people. (Assuming they didn't slant the story that much and his bug reports *were* useful!)
Still, the angle of this story is a somewhat poor attempt to give a misleading impression.
From reading the links, it sounds like Takei had some problems, and reported them to the Facebook team with some helpful to-and-fro exchange of information (i.e. giving them a useful bug report) before they fixed them in the usual manner.
No disrespect to him intended, it just sounds like someone is trying to make this story sound like a bigger deal than it is. The Slashdot headline doesn't help, compounding the misleading impression (probably intentionally) that Takei was sitting alongside the Facebook techies debugging nested right joins.
LaserDisc was an analog technology (save for the option of a digital audio track), so you're looking at uncompressed video.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but it depends what you consider "uncompressed". It's not compressed in the block-oriented digital MPEG sense, but you're still having to squeeze a picture into the bandwidth constraints of the signal that can be stored on the disc.
It's a composite signal (so it has dot crawl inherent in the format), but it has no video artifacts, so for scenes with fast motion, it is AGES better-looking than DVD.
For a well-encoded DVD (done with variable bitrate allocation and some content awareness), this should be much less of an issue though. As I mentioned above, and someone else elaborated upon, some of the early DVDs weren't done that well, and the compression was more visible than it would be on a disc done to present-day standards.
Laserdisc was Analog
Yes, I know.
basically basically VHS stored on a shiny platter.
Not quite- it may still have been composite video based, but it had almost twice the horizontal resolution per scan line.
Does the Amiga OS have any inherent advantage over other modern OS?
This tends- justifiably- to be asked every time there's been a bit of Amiga "news" in the past few years (including that of the final release of Amiga OS 4, delayed for around 15 years).
If there *is* any major advantage, then no-one came up with one during any of those discussions.
Really, the Amiga OS nowadays is just a plaything for a few very hardcore hobbyists willing to pay for overpriced, underpowered custom hardware that isn't even directly compatible with the original Amiga anyway. Amiga OS (and the original hardware) was fantastic in its day, and beat the living heck out of MS-DOS and early Windows, but that was a long time ago. Anyone for whom Amiga OS/hardware compatibility was essential or even useful would have been forced to give up and migrate elsewhere by the late-90s at most. For that reason, even if one *could* upgrade it to a modern OS, it'd make more sense just to write a new OS from scratch- the "classic" core would just end up being legacy baggage that would please the Amiga obsessives because they could call it Amiga OS, but have little real world use beyond muddying the design.
(Sorry, didn't want that to sound like a dismissal of the genuinely innovative Amiga OS, but things have moved on too far now).
The Amiga IP seems to be a bit confusing, having been sold on several times, split and licensed (and the rights disputed), as well as the names having been used on things having apparently nothing to do with the Amiga (some mobile phone OS layer called "Amiga Anywhere" and even worse slapped onto some generic HTPC cases that reused the numbers of classic Amigas). F****** horrid, just let it go.
SafeNames is a UK business, and they have amazingly good service. Yes, the US is on good terms with the UK, but after the lopsided extradition nonsense getting all the press, this might be where they decide to draw the line.
Ha ha... that's pretty funny- you might even have fooled some people into thinking that this was meant seriously! Er... you were joking, weren't you?
Anyway, while Blair was an obsequious prick a few years back, the current lot (despite initial noises to the contrary) seem quite happy to continue the American deal of "you scratch my back and then you scratch my back again, and we see no reason to change while we're getting what we want".
Old people don't get it, and they never will. The digital revolution is about what's possible that wasn't possible before, not about doing everything the way you did it before only with digital files instead of physical media.
Yes, this is my theory on (partly) why DVD recorders rose then fell in popularity.
DVD recorders are obviously based on different technologies to VCRs, but from a consumer point of view, the usage model is similar- removable media that stores a similar quantity of video. You basically use it like you use a VCR, but with discs instead of tapes. Also, prerecorded DVDs and players replaced prerecorded videocassettes, so shouldn't video cassette recording be replaced by DVD recording? You can see how people used to VCRs would mentally have perceived the DVD recorder as their logical successor.
Except that this is flawed because it forgets that most recording on VCRs was done for timeshifting purposes rather than archiving, and now that PVRs/DVRs exist, they're way more useful because they remove the need to faff about with (and store) tapes altogether, hold more than enough for most people's timeshifting use and tend to include useful facilities like "series record" (i.e. no messing about with timers).
The video recorder was the best way of doing that in its day, but the DVD Recorder isn't the best way of doing it nowadays.
IMHO, people's thinking has now been weaned off the "VCR model" of doing things and they have now realised the benefits of the DVR. I also think that people realised that DVD recorders were a PITA, with media type compatibility issues and general temperamentality that made them less straightforward than a VCR replacement ought to have been. They might be useful for archiving, but the "old way of thinking" would blind one to the fact they're not, and were never, the VCR's true successor.
Mistake in the above; the first bit should read "weren't some of the early DVDs quite poor?"
While I'm here, I'll also note that my comment on non-remastered (i.e. noisier and blurrier) material compressing less well may give another reason why early DVDs might have looked less good, as those were less likely to have been remastered (or remastered to 90s standards at best) and hence would suffer more from compression.
"Laserdisc looks so much better" (I kid you not, those were prominent arguments against DVD in those days).
I didn't have one at the time, but weren't some of the early laserdiscs apparently quite poor? I might be wrong, but I vaguely remember hearing some of them were single layer (*), the transfers weren't apparently too great (the first Blade Runner DVD issue was apparently rubbish) and/or the compression wasn't that well done. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that a well-done Laserdisc would beat a poor DVD, or at least its limitations wouldn't be as obnoxious as visibly blocky compression.
(*) Actually, I have a DVD with a *2005* issue date on it that is a single layer (I'd checked when I noticed some distracting compression artifacts and suspected the reason). Granted, it was only a 109 minute film with no extras, but the compression was still clearly visible. (Probably didn't help that it apparently hadn't been remastered that much, as perversely lower-quality and noisier material tends to require more compression to compensate for that wasted reproducing the noise(!))
[The 44.1 kHz] sampling rate is something of a historical accident anyway
Yes, it dates back to the days when the only method of *recording* CD-sized amounts of data (i.e. hundreds of megabytes) was to use a video cassette recorder (with a suitable interface) as a backing store, which dictated some of the technical aspects.
You may not be able to hear the higher frequencies, but when they're sampled with a too low sample rate, you'll be converting waveforms you can hear.
Nyquist assumes that the signal to be sampled does not contain any frequencies higher than half the sampling rate. Any that exist thus *are* expected to be filtered out beforehand, otherwise aliasing will occur.
Try it for yourself on paper.
The "samples" do *not* represent the final "reconstructed" wave (are you suggesting the same "join the dots reconstruction" misconception that most people have about Nyquist?). My understanding of Nyquist (probably incomplete and far from perfect, but still miles better than most people's fundamental misunderstanding) is that this sample output has to be filtered so that all the harmonics above half the sampling rate are removed. Since Nyquist only says you get perfect reconstruction for frequencies up to that limit, there's no contradiction there.
A "perfect" square wave (which can never actually be created in the real world) has harmonics of infinite frequency, and even a "real-world" as-near-square-as-makes-no-difference-wave will contain very high harmonics. If one was to do a Fourier transform on a square wave, filter out all the frequencies above the human range of hearing, then convert it back to the familiar (spatial domain) wave form, it wouldn't be square any more.
Therefore, you can't sample a square wave using standard techniques anyway.
No, but it is *aliased*. The waveform between two samples is a simple interpolation.
Bzzt. No, you're wrong- that's absolutely *not* how Nyquist assumes the wave is going to be reconstructed, it's just a "refined" (but equally wrong) variant of the same widespread "join-the-dots-reconstruction" misconception that the article already explained was wrong.
As far as I'm aware (correct me if I'm incorrect here), one could in theory get the original signal by taking the "join the dots" version *and* then filtering out all the frequencies above the original range. (That second step being very significant).... or even by applying the same filter to an "impulse train" of value spikes representing the sample values of the original wave.
Why does Photoshop have 16bit colour? [etc]
The parent already addressed and accepted use of higher sampling rates and resolutions for intermediate stages.
And that sampling frequency only gives you the correct frequency replication up to the Nyquist limit. It doesn't replicate phase or amplitude correctly, you need oversampled source for that.
What evidence do you have for this assertion?
To get the high C of a flute to sound different from the high C of a piccolo, you need to include more than just a sample at twice the frequency, since the overtones are at different apmlitudes compared to the main note.
I'm no sure what you're trying to say here. If there are any "overtones" beyond the frequency range of human hearing, then humans aren't going to hear them. If this means that subtleties of the two instruments are indistinguishable at higher pitches, then this would be the case with someone listening to the original performance as well.
In Australia we call them Ranga's.
I thought you just called everyone "Bruce" or "Sheila" according to gender- anything else would surely cause confusion.
In Sanitized's defence, it's easy for its success to blind us (in hindsight) to the fact that the iPod wasn't a runaway hit straight off (though it did still gain established success quickly in the scheme of things). Possibly because...
(1) The later versions didn't require Firewire (which still isn't standard on all machines, and was far less so ten years ago)
(2) The first version didn't support Windows and hence required a Mac (in fact, iTunes wasn't available for Windows for another couple of years after the iPod's launch)
(3) Most importantly, by the time it *had* became a mass market success, entry-level models were available for significantly below $400.
In short, he/she wasn't entirely wrong at the time.
Stopping point in the future to pick up oxygen as we move across the universe?
Interesting idea, but not really a "stopping off point". If we visualise the journey to even the nearest star (aside from the sun) as a journey from Los Angeles to New York (2790 miles), then in terms of relative distance Dione is equivalent to an, er... "gas" station just over 100 metres from your starting point.
I'm prepared to admit that the comment probably warranted cutting a bit of slack bearing in mind the author's clarification and putting his comment in context.
But if one takes it in the sense of being meant as a "great motivating message" (which the OP's clarification implies that it wasn't) then it falls flat, because if the person making the comments isn't even motivated enough to sacrifice some minor pleasure for their principles, then it pretty much has the opposite effect.
Those were called "Instamatics".
No they weren't, Instamatic was the name they used for their cameras that used the cartridge-based 126 film (and then later for 110-film based "Pocket Instamatic" models).
In my defence _everyone_ was doing lines in the 80's.
The only lines I was doing in the 80s were the ones I was given for misbehaving in school...
As for why this (and most viewdata services) didn't take off in the 80s, the answer is that it wasn't the Internet, but more of a closed, walled garden. Modems were slower, and dial-up calls were more expensive. (I don't know how many of these services provided local rate access, but I suspect that this might not have been the case for all services, considerably increasing access cost, even at medium to long distance rates).
I remember thinking that modems looked cool in the 80s, but realising that I wouldn't be able to afford the access costs anyway.
Also, I suspect that the "(anti)-network effect" was in play- few people except some random geeks who could afford it were online, so there was probably less reason to get online than later on when everyone was on the Internet.
And as one other person pointed out, one "viewdata" service did take off- the French Minitel was a major success, albeit just about the only place where this was the case. That was through state support, so obviously wouldn't have worked in the "OMG COMMIES!!!" US ;-)
(And though some have claimed that latterly its established popularity slowed adoption of the Internet itself in France).
My brother was taking a BASIC programming course in the early 80's. I picked up his book and the rest is history...
Can't have been a very useful BASIC book then, if most of it was about history instead of computer programming.
I also only buy quality exclusives [..] Both were quality games that were not available for any other platform, nor will they be any time soon, if ever.
So? How does the fact you are only buying "quality" games bolster your case? That just means they're more entertaining for you, it's not like buying your children more nutritious food, or buying a longer-lasting whatever that is more environmentally friendly. It's a non-excuse.
Similarly, how does the fact that they'll never be available for any other platform make any difference in principle?
You're weak-willed and wishy-washy because you go on about "matters of principle" and how you "don't like doing business with dishonest people", yet you conveniently draw the line in the sand at precisely the point where standing up for it would require anything approaching sacrifice on your part (i.e. not getting to play "Final Fantasy LXIX-XXL Online"). You didn't even rule out buying the PS4 with that silly non-commital line (a case where you obviously don't own the hardware yet, hence aren't committed to it in any way, yet would still consider handing over your hard-earned money for if it's shiny enough).
I'm pretty sure that your "4%" figure is wishful thinking based on ludicrously ideal calculations that you won't stick to- if you were really bothered enough to go that far, you wouldn't be giving Sony your money in the first place.
To be blunt, everything you said smacks of rationalisation.
I'll grant you that you didn't go as far as some who say "I'll be boycotting entirely Sony in future... er, except for that game I really want, that I'll give them the money for. But I'll still not like them." But if your quarter-baked sort-of-boycott is the most you're prepared to do while rambling about "principles", then please excuse me if I don't take you seriously.
The only games I have bought for PS3 since then are the console exclusives.
I sympathised with you up to that point; then I realised that this is the same weak-willed, half-baked, not-putting-one's-money-where-one's-mouth-is posts about "principles" or "boycotts" that appear endlessly on Slashdot and aren't worth the hard drive space they're stored on.
Your stern-willed resolve to stand up for your vaunted "principles" doesn't extend past foregoing the game of the month if it's only available on the PS3? Don't make me laugh.
I think it's pretty clear why Sony aren't too concerned, when of even the tiny percentage that supposedly care about this sort of thing, most of them will rant endlessly about it, but give Sony their money when push comes to shove anyway.
I don't know yet if I will bother with a PS4
Such resolve!
I'm sure you will though- it's been confirmed that "Call of Metal Gears of Modern Warfare 7" will be exclusive to the PS4 for at least 3 1/2 days after launch, and it would be unfair for you to have to forego your shiny toys for that long.
Please do come back and post another wishy-washy diatribe about "principles" after you do so though.
1 GB then, 1 TB now
33 MHz then, 3 GHz quad-core now
Notably though, most of the progress in these two occurred closer to 1995 than the present day. In particular, during the 90s and early 2000s, hard drive capacities were expanding at a high exponential rate. (I mean, two years before the 1GB figure in this article I was considering a 120 MB drive for my Amiga. Three years after 1995, the 3.2GB drive my new PC had was on the small side of "average", four years after *that* (2002) my next PC had an 80GB drive).
Nowadays? 1TB drives have been within the affordable range for around 4 years now, and even before last year's floods things had slowed down around 2TB with that only recently becoming normal, 3TB taking a long time to arrive and we *finally* got 4TB at the very high end.
Processor performance admittedly can't be judged by clock speed alone, plus we have more cores, but the latter doesn't provide the easy "free lunch" performance boost that previous improvements did.
The 1.44MB HD floppy actually came out in 1987 as an improvement to the original 1982 3.5" DD floppy. The Zip disc came out circa 1994-95, and was closer to what one would have expected a floppy to be by then, but while successful never replaced the 3.5" as a de facto "in every computer" standard. In fact, it wasn't truly displaced until pen drives got "no brainer" cheap a few years back, so it's a technology that stuck around well after it would otherwise have been superseded or obsolete.
Imagine thousands of accounts doing the same thing then slashdot = stagnated. Anyway why do you cower? what are you afraid of? Wait a minute... ;)
Of course, that raises the question of whether the multiple "Michael Kristopeit" accounts are actually someone called Michael Kristopeit, whether they're pretending to be someone else with that name, or whether the name was randomly chosen and any resemblance to any real "Michael Kristopeits" is purely coincidental. :-)