It's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about "volume normalization" as VLC calls it, which matches to the description I gave of it.
Normalization applies the same change in amplitude to the entire input.
Compression is different. It's being used in this discussion in the audio processing sense, not the "making a file smaller" sense. It (basically) varies the amount of amplification based on a sliding window. It's typically used to reduce the amount of difference between the highest and lowest amplitude parts of a sound (or song, etc).
Maybe an example will help. If you take a sine wave and normalize it, it will still be a sine wave (just with higher peaks and deeper valleys). Compressing it instead would "squash" it vertically, so it would no longer be a true sine wave. This is a bit simplified - at least in my experience a compressor is typically set for time scales much greater than a single cycle of a sine wave, e.g. to "squash" drum sounds down to more consistent levels.
What YouTube is doing as described in TFA is compression, not normalization.
If the data was preserved properly AND somebody bothered to write a good conversion utility that didn't lose too much information in the process, you might have some good photographs.
It would be nice if NASA were willing to give the public a shot at the raw data for the files in formats that they don't have decoders for.
I've reverse-engineered proprietary image formats before for fun. I'm sure there aren't many people who do that, but I know I'm not the only one.
You know, like some of these interesting NASA pics
Do you have to be wearing the sunglasses from They Live in order to see the UFOs in those pictures? In a few of them (maybe 1/4 or less of the images) there are bright spots whose source isn't immediately obvious. In the others, I was left scratching my head. I could only assume that in many of them, the site's owner was trying to say that the sun/Earth in the sky or one of the background hills was a UFO.
I would like to see the context from which that quote was taken. It seems to me like something he would have said as a lead-in to a criticism of that point of view.
This has nothing to do with "dns tunnelling" whatever that is on internal networks or what have you. I dunno about where you are but around here every provider of dialup, broadband, wireless and sat uses these dumb "transparent" web proxies. They're also a vixieism, iroically.
DNS tunneling is essentially the ability to set up a VPN tunnel using only DNS queries. It's a very interesting topic if you haven't read about it before - I only just found out about it a couple of months ago. The upshot is that if a machine has the ability to directly query DNS for arbitrary public domains, and the person using it has a public domain name and the ability to set up a pseudo-DNS server, then they can set up a VPN tunnel from that machine to their pseudo-DNS server on the public internet even if the client machine does not have internet access otherwise.
I'm not really familiar with transparent proxies, but I would guess that they're not actually doing the DNS lookup for you, but reading the host header and possibly doing a DNS lookup on that. I mean, if you don't tell your browser/OS to use an explicit proxy, how is it going to know to hand off DNS resolution to a transparent proxy that it doesn't even know about?
Anyway, if I'm right, then it can't really be "turned off", since you have to send a host header to get to basically every website now. And it's not as if the owners of the transparent proxies would choose to turn it off if it were optional, since presumably the reason they set them up was to intercept traffic.
They need to take the dns lookup out of the web proxies.
The problem with doing that would be that it would then be impossible (at least using current DNS software, as far as I know) to allow clients on an internal network to have limited internet access without allowing them to perform DNS tunneling (and thereby upgrade their internet access to "full").
Once someone (anyone?) releases a DNS package that allows firewall-style rules (e.g. "client on this range of IPs may only resolve subdomains of the following domains...", "clients may only look up X distinct subdomains each of Y domains every Z hours" then the picture would probably change.
Re:SPOILER - Really, it is...
on
Batman Discussion
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· Score: 2, Funny
He's Bruce Wayne for crying out loud, he can afford a voice modulator or some neat device to mask his voice instead of a harsh whisper.
Maybe he's a black metal fan. Did you ever think of that? Obviously not!
If he's on a BES the problem is non-existent, the Admin can remotely wipe the BlackBerry with a single command.
Unless whoever stole the BlackBerry has put it inside a metal box, or taken it to a sub-basement, or done anything else to block it from receiving a signal.
And yet most 16 year olds can't vote and can get a license.
Over the last decade or so, that ability has been continuously chipped away at and crippled, at least in some parts of the US. E.g. if you are 16 or 17, you can get a "license", but you can't have passengers in your car unless one of them is over 25, that kind of thing.
So I would say that the GP is correct - politicians *would* dare to restrict the driving abilities of those who can't vote.
BTW, Canadian taxes are actually a little lower than ours, and they get free healthcare! taxes in Canada.
No, they're not. Assuming the author of that page is correct, their federal income tax is (slightly) lower than what the US has.
However, Canada also has federal sales tax, provincial income tax, and provincial sales tax. The US has no federal sales tax, and state taxes vary widely (no sales tax in Oregon, no income tax in Washington, etc).
I lived in Canada for three years, and I paid something like 20% combined sales tax alone.
I do think that their healthcare system is slightly preferable to ours, but they both have big problems IMO.
The fact that Open Source is vulnerable as well means that we will eventually know what the problems were and be able to look to see that it was fixed in the Open Source versions.
Anyone with a serious interest in finding out the details of the flaw doesn't need the source code to figure it out, or to see what changes were made to address it. All they need are the binaries and a disassembler.
If I complete a loan/job/cell phone application and indicate that my name is George Bush (it's not) and provide other false information, I could face legal consequences for providing such false information.
I'm sorry, but signing up for MySpace is not in the same category as applying to any of those things. The closest real-world equivalent I can think of is signing up for a hobby/book club.
If you tried reporting someone to the police for signing up for the chess club with a pseudonym, the police would rightfully tell you it wasn't their problem, and they should have the same disdain if someone complains about a fake name submitted to MySpace.
I used to believe the same thing. Then my PC got infected by an autorun virus that was included on a music player I bought (new).
I disabled autorun after that, but it got me thinking - if Windows still has stupid stuff like autorun of USB devices enabled by default, what other potential vectors are there for infection?
I've been running AVG with on-access scanning enabled ever since.
(I assume from the summary that we're talking about the mirror universe Microsoft, the universe in which in 1976 Bill Gates wrote an open letter to the hacker community praising them for their efforts and exhorting them to "keep software free for the good of everyone, for the good of the world.")
Unfortunately, it turns out that by doing that, he set the mirror universe Microsoft up to be enslaved by a coalition of IBM, Sun, and the FSF. You might think that's awesome, until you find out that their Intendant is a promiscuous bisexual RMS and are forced to gouge out your own eyes when he walks off camera with his pet Microsoft slave Steve Ballmer and Carly Fiorina.
Also, if you have scanners in highly-trafficked doorways, you can at least get a good idea of where a passively-tagged item is based on the last one it passed through, and possibly the last few (to give you a rough vector).
It would depend upon how large the closed-source company was.
What, like how Executive Software/Diskeeper refuses to sell their product or provide support to pharmaceutical companies because their CEO is a Scientologist?
That's the Diskeeper which is included in Windows in a reduced form as the defragmentation utility, in case you're not familiar with how big its market is.
There are lots of DIY 'scope kits out there, many that are purely software and rely on your soundcard's digitizer.
I've heard of those, but I wonder how useful they would actually be.
They're only going to have a bandwidth of 48KHz (or 96KHz if it's a higher-end card). That's roughly 200-400 times lower than even my $40 secondhand scope, and when I was researching what bandwidth to look for even that 20MHz was considered low end.
The inputs are almost certainly going to have coupling capacitors, so measuring DC is right out.
Finally, I would expect the noise level to be higher, and the calibration to be very suspect.
Basically it seems to me like they're cool if you want to view an audio waveform, but beyond that it's best to get even a very budget hardware or hardware/software scope.
Better would be an oscilloscope, but that's a much bigger outlay.
If you aren't working with high frequencies, second-hand analogue oscilloscopes are cheap. I got a 20MHz, 8-input Tektronix rackmount oscilloscope for about $40 on eBay. Since I'm mostly interested in working with audio frequencies, I don't need 100+ MHz.
Of course, the two probes I bought were also about $40 each, but I can use those on other Tektronix oscilloscopes I might buy in the future.
An alternative is something like a PicoScope, but even their cheapest model is more expensive than a secondhand analogue oscilloscope and a couple of probes.
Again, all of this stuff can be bought in a quick trip to radio shack.
Unfortunately, few Radio Shack stores (at least in the Seattle area) still carry electronic components. Of all of them around here, there are two (the one in the University District and to a lesser extent the one in lower Queen Anne) that stock any (I went to all of them last year looking for a particular part).
What they do stock is very limited compared to an online store (particularly with regards to ICs), and their prices are generally much higher. They also don't have staff who know anything about components, so expect to have trouble finding anything even if it is in stock.
Frys has the same problems (although at least they still stock etchant, unlike Radio Shack). I buy all of my parts online now.
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George Bush criticiz nafta for spotted owl gay sex with firearms
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
It's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about "volume normalization" as VLC calls it, which matches to the description I gave of it.
Normalization applies the same change in amplitude to the entire input.
Compression is different. It's being used in this discussion in the audio processing sense, not the "making a file smaller" sense. It (basically) varies the amount of amplification based on a sliding window. It's typically used to reduce the amount of difference between the highest and lowest amplitude parts of a sound (or song, etc).
Maybe an example will help. If you take a sine wave and normalize it, it will still be a sine wave (just with higher peaks and deeper valleys). Compressing it instead would "squash" it vertically, so it would no longer be a true sine wave. This is a bit simplified - at least in my experience a compressor is typically set for time scales much greater than a single cycle of a sine wave, e.g. to "squash" drum sounds down to more consistent levels.
What YouTube is doing as described in TFA is compression, not normalization.
If the data was preserved properly AND somebody bothered to write a good conversion utility that didn't lose too much information in the process, you might have some good photographs.
It would be nice if NASA were willing to give the public a shot at the raw data for the files in formats that they don't have decoders for.
I've reverse-engineered proprietary image formats before for fun. I'm sure there aren't many people who do that, but I know I'm not the only one.
You know, like some of these interesting NASA pics
Do you have to be wearing the sunglasses from They Live in order to see the UFOs in those pictures? In a few of them (maybe 1/4 or less of the images) there are bright spots whose source isn't immediately obvious. In the others, I was left scratching my head. I could only assume that in many of them, the site's owner was trying to say that the sun/Earth in the sky or one of the background hills was a UFO.
I would like to see the context from which that quote was taken. It seems to me like something he would have said as a lead-in to a criticism of that point of view.
This has nothing to do with "dns tunnelling" whatever that is on internal networks or what have you. I dunno about where you are but around here every provider of dialup, broadband, wireless and sat uses these dumb "transparent" web proxies. They're also a vixieism, iroically.
DNS tunneling is essentially the ability to set up a VPN tunnel using only DNS queries. It's a very interesting topic if you haven't read about it before - I only just found out about it a couple of months ago. The upshot is that if a machine has the ability to directly query DNS for arbitrary public domains, and the person using it has a public domain name and the ability to set up a pseudo-DNS server, then they can set up a VPN tunnel from that machine to their pseudo-DNS server on the public internet even if the client machine does not have internet access otherwise.
I'm not really familiar with transparent proxies, but I would guess that they're not actually doing the DNS lookup for you, but reading the host header and possibly doing a DNS lookup on that. I mean, if you don't tell your browser/OS to use an explicit proxy, how is it going to know to hand off DNS resolution to a transparent proxy that it doesn't even know about?
Anyway, if I'm right, then it can't really be "turned off", since you have to send a host header to get to basically every website now. And it's not as if the owners of the transparent proxies would choose to turn it off if it were optional, since presumably the reason they set them up was to intercept traffic.
Perhaps those "files" should actually be in a database. SQL makes automatic manipulation quite easy.
Exactly. That also makes it easy to build a change audit logging table.
They need to take the dns lookup out of the web proxies.
The problem with doing that would be that it would then be impossible (at least using current DNS software, as far as I know) to allow clients on an internal network to have limited internet access without allowing them to perform DNS tunneling (and thereby upgrade their internet access to "full").
Once someone (anyone?) releases a DNS package that allows firewall-style rules (e.g. "client on this range of IPs may only resolve subdomains of the following domains...", "clients may only look up X distinct subdomains each of Y domains every Z hours" then the picture would probably change.
He's Bruce Wayne for crying out loud, he can afford a voice modulator or some neat device to mask his voice instead of a harsh whisper.
Maybe he's a black metal fan. Did you ever think of that? Obviously not!
If he's on a BES the problem is non-existent, the Admin can remotely wipe the BlackBerry with a single command.
Unless whoever stole the BlackBerry has put it inside a metal box, or taken it to a sub-basement, or done anything else to block it from receiving a signal.
And yet most 16 year olds can't vote and can get a license.
Over the last decade or so, that ability has been continuously chipped away at and crippled, at least in some parts of the US. E.g. if you are 16 or 17, you can get a "license", but you can't have passengers in your car unless one of them is over 25, that kind of thing.
So I would say that the GP is correct - politicians *would* dare to restrict the driving abilities of those who can't vote.
BTW, Canadian taxes are actually a little lower than ours, and they get free healthcare! taxes in Canada.
No, they're not. Assuming the author of that page is correct, their federal income tax is (slightly) lower than what the US has.
However, Canada also has federal sales tax, provincial income tax, and provincial sales tax. The US has no federal sales tax, and state taxes vary widely (no sales tax in Oregon, no income tax in Washington, etc).
I lived in Canada for three years, and I paid something like 20% combined sales tax alone.
I do think that their healthcare system is slightly preferable to ours, but they both have big problems IMO.
The fact that Open Source is vulnerable as well means that we will eventually know what the problems were and be able to look to see that it was fixed in the Open Source versions.
Anyone with a serious interest in finding out the details of the flaw doesn't need the source code to figure it out, or to see what changes were made to address it. All they need are the binaries and a disassembler.
It's included with Vista and Server 2008, so MS did make at least one good decision for those products.
And yes, it is awesome.
If I complete a loan/job/cell phone application and indicate that my name is George Bush (it's not) and provide other false information, I could face legal consequences for providing such false information.
I'm sorry, but signing up for MySpace is not in the same category as applying to any of those things. The closest real-world equivalent I can think of is signing up for a hobby/book club.
If you tried reporting someone to the police for signing up for the chess club with a pseudonym, the police would rightfully tell you it wasn't their problem, and they should have the same disdain if someone complains about a fake name submitted to MySpace.
I used to believe the same thing. Then my PC got infected by an autorun virus that was included on a music player I bought (new).
I disabled autorun after that, but it got me thinking - if Windows still has stupid stuff like autorun of USB devices enabled by default, what other potential vectors are there for infection?
I've been running AVG with on-access scanning enabled ever since.
(I assume from the summary that we're talking about the mirror universe Microsoft, the universe in which in 1976 Bill Gates wrote an open letter to the hacker community praising them for their efforts and exhorting them to "keep software free for the good of everyone, for the good of the world.")
Unfortunately, it turns out that by doing that, he set the mirror universe Microsoft up to be enslaved by a coalition of IBM, Sun, and the FSF. You might think that's awesome, until you find out that their Intendant is a promiscuous bisexual RMS and are forced to gouge out your own eyes when he walks off camera with his pet Microsoft slave Steve Ballmer and Carly Fiorina.
Also, if you have scanners in highly-trafficked doorways, you can at least get a good idea of where a passively-tagged item is based on the last one it passed through, and possibly the last few (to give you a rough vector).
Going out an hour a day is enough to produce enough vitamin D.
How many computer nerds go outside for an hour a day wearing clothes that expose a significant amount of their body to the sunlight?
It would depend upon how large the closed-source company was.
What, like how Executive Software/Diskeeper refuses to sell their product or provide support to pharmaceutical companies because their CEO is a Scientologist?
That's the Diskeeper which is included in Windows in a reduced form as the defragmentation utility, in case you're not familiar with how big its market is.
There are lots of DIY 'scope kits out there, many that are purely software and rely on your soundcard's digitizer.
I've heard of those, but I wonder how useful they would actually be.
They're only going to have a bandwidth of 48KHz (or 96KHz if it's a higher-end card). That's roughly 200-400 times lower than even my $40 secondhand scope, and when I was researching what bandwidth to look for even that 20MHz was considered low end.
The inputs are almost certainly going to have coupling capacitors, so measuring DC is right out.
Finally, I would expect the noise level to be higher, and the calibration to be very suspect.
Basically it seems to me like they're cool if you want to view an audio waveform, but beyond that it's best to get even a very budget hardware or hardware/software scope.
Better would be an oscilloscope, but that's a much bigger outlay.
If you aren't working with high frequencies, second-hand analogue oscilloscopes are cheap. I got a 20MHz, 8-input Tektronix rackmount oscilloscope for about $40 on eBay. Since I'm mostly interested in working with audio frequencies, I don't need 100+ MHz.
Of course, the two probes I bought were also about $40 each, but I can use those on other Tektronix oscilloscopes I might buy in the future.
An alternative is something like a PicoScope, but even their cheapest model is more expensive than a secondhand analogue oscilloscope and a couple of probes.
Again, all of this stuff can be bought in a quick trip to radio shack.
Unfortunately, few Radio Shack stores (at least in the Seattle area) still carry electronic components. Of all of them around here, there are two (the one in the University District and to a lesser extent the one in lower Queen Anne) that stock any (I went to all of them last year looking for a particular part).
What they do stock is very limited compared to an online store (particularly with regards to ICs), and their prices are generally much higher. They also don't have staff who know anything about components, so expect to have trouble finding anything even if it is in stock.
Frys has the same problems (although at least they still stock etchant, unlike Radio Shack). I buy all of my parts online now.
Exactly.
I wouldn't look for a packaged kit as such. Just buy a big breadboard or two and make a parts list from the Mims book (or other text of your choice).
"Mundus" is Latin for "world". So, unless I'm mistaken, A "Mundaneum" is essentially "where the world is kept".