Just out of curiosity, if the prevailing conspiracy theorist opinion (to which it is obvious you readily subscribe) is now that it was a con by the Bush administration--to what gain? What could they possibly have gained?
They wanted a foothold in the Middle East so they could eventually control the whole area. They've wanted this ever since Reagan was president, because he wasn't aggressive enough for the PNAC.
* "Their" in this case referring to the Project for a New American Century, which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfled, Wolfowitz, etc., belong to.
About 2/3 of my programs won't operate (I'm a software developer) at all.
As others have said, this is the fault of the developers of that software.
Microsoft has been telling developers for at least five years now to put user data/config/whatever in the My Documents folder for whoever is running it. *Not* doing this is really stupid, because as soon as you install an app that writes config data or whatever to its install folder, you run into problems on multi-user machines like termservers.
I work in IT for a fairly large corporation. Most of our users do not have admin rights, and their apps work just fine.
These are the kind of apps we've had problems with:
- Software from "Enterprise"-only vendors like BMC, Quest, Niku, Merant, and Attachmate. This is because they refuse to follow good coding practices, much like they refuse to design decent UIs. Some of these we've found workarounds for, like giving the Users group write or modify access to the install folder.
- Legacy internal applications. This is because they were written in the Windows 95 era by people who didn't think they'd still be in use ten years later. Usually we add a wrapper to run these in the context of a privileged user.
You ever install a virus/keylogger onto a school computer, just because you could? I've dealt with that.
If yours is a Windows environment, you should be restricting software installation with Group Policy. If you know exactly which executables are supposed to be allowed to be run by users, you should be restricting that with GP too.
With a bit of planning, your IT staff could come up with a design where the techs don't *know* the local Administrator password for the machines, and the only one they can leak would be their own.
Masamune Shirow, the Sci-Fi author of Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell says that removing organs will decrease brain activity. Replacing not only limbs but also organs or your whole torso might make you a mouth breathing idiot.
And he bases this on what scientific research exactly?
Even if he is referring to nerve decay, as long as you keep stimulating them like this technology does, I don't see why it would be a problem.
He also said that total body cyborgification is better if you want superhuman strenght because a super strong arm is no good if lifting something heavy will just rip it off it's fleshy attachements.
I agree. Plus you can swap entire bodies as needed based on what you're doing.
What do you get when you cross a cat and a dog? cat dog sin theta
Hah, I was going to post almost the same thing. A friend of mine came up with it on her own, with rhinocerous and hippopotamus in place of cat and dog (like the kids' joke with the same intro).
From Babylon 5 (paraphrased):
Renee Descartes is down at the pub, drowning his sorrows in a few drinks. He finishes the last one, and the bartender asks "have another?"
Descartes (who has been having a bad day) mulls it over, replies "I think... not," and disappears.
Why on earth would anyone want to trade in a real arm for a robotic one? Why not just have 3 arms?
Three arms wouldn't look appealing on a human body, for one.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to get organic replacement parts for my body as I grow older. If they aren't available by then, I wouldn't mind robotic ones, assuming they were at least as good as what they were replacing.
Robotic arms - or better yet, a full body, General Grievous-style - would be really useful in a lot of ways. You could race motorcycles or work with heavy machinery without worrying as much about getting killed or spending months recovering from a serious injury.
If they had standard connections, you could even swap out various types depending on the task. Playing the piano? Switch to the hands with fingers twice the length that an un-augmented human has.
You'd just have to watch out for the jokers with giant electromagnets =P.
Even people with tatoos and piercings are going to look at a watch implant as wierd.
I doubt it. You've seen photos of people with cosmetic implants, right? Like the subdermal stuff that creates raised lines and half-spheres? Or the people with metal spikes attached to their skulls?
Personally, I think the grandparent was remembering Neuromancer, because there's a watch implant description exactly like that in it.
Dude, get your models away from the backgrounds and use broad (large) lights instead of those small lights you use now.
He can fudge the lighting. Bounce the light off of white construction cardboard from the drug store, or put a white bed sheet in-between the light and the model.
But yeah, further from the background would be good. The Tattoine double-shadow thing tends to draw my eyes away from the model (and therefore, the product).
Photoshop's Auto Colour and Auto Contrast operations will greatly improve this particular image (that appears to be a white wall she's in front of, and not yellowish).
I would also suggest some coloured or textured backgrounds. Go down to the fabric store and get a few meters of material in various neutral shades, or light colours.
These are just minor quibbles, though. It's an awesome idea, and it's great that these two are able to have fun with it.
in fact, when human are hearing, in our inner ear different frequency compoennt of the sound wave stimulate different region, effectively doing a transform from the time domain to frequency domain, and as the cutoff of human hearing is around 20kHz (in fact, it's much lower in older people who are in their 10s or 20s, by 20kHz we're talkin' about kids)
Yes, I know =).
I'm sorry, but most instrument does not have fundamental frequencies above 20kHz and harmonics above 20kHz are usually too insignificant in terms of energy for them to be heard in reality.
You're missing my point. Even sounds that have a fundamental frequency well below the Nyquist are not represented accurately by digital systems, and this becomes more and more evident as those sounds approach it.
i thought by highest component i'm talking about an even more absolute measurement of frequency (note harmonics are also complex waveforms which can be broken into their own frequency components).
I think we're in agreement here. But again, find me some commercially successful music whose absolute highest component is 11KHz. I don't think you will. 11-22KHz is only one more octave, but the harmonics in that octave are very important for the timbre of the sound.
I'm sorry, but there is nothing such as sawtooth in any natural instrument.
*sigh*
I used a sawtooth because it's easiest to see how its representation becomes less and less accurate as the fundamental frequency approaches the Nyquist frequency.
The *same thing* happens with other sounds, it's just not as immediately obvious in a waveform view.
by the PCM standard, it will NEVER look like a triangle or square wave which both has a frequency component of infinity
I know. As I said, interpolation, blah blah blah. My point here is that whether you interpolate it into a sine wave or leave it as a triangle/square, you are not *accurately* representing the original waveform, and therefore the sound will not be identical.
i'm sorry, but by what you've done, i smell audiophile.
Hardly. But I *can* hear the difference in things like mp3 vs uncompressed audio, so I know audiophiles are not entirely full of shit.
p.s. i'm an audio enginneer; and yes, i'm extremely picky
Not as picky as the professors who taught me, apparently =).
I would be very impressed if you could hear the difference between say an 18khz sine wave and an 18khz square/triangle/sawtooth wave. That would imply your ear is detecting harmonics above the frequency range the human ear is capable of.
I used higher-frequency fundamental tones to illustrate extreme cases. The same thing occurs to lower-frequency tones, it's just not as obvious visually.
Nobody is interested in how luke grew up to be such a brat that he is at the start of EP4. Star Wars is all about epic (and maybe not so epic) battles, not about the growing pains of a twit.
It's a story *for* children. They're supposed to watch the various episodes as they grow older. That's why Anakin is a child in Ep1.
Complaining about Lucas' target audience for Star Wars is like getting upset that the Prydain books are typeset with an oversized font and relatively short.
Nyquist theorem If input signal has _maximum frequency_ (bandwidth) f, sampling frequency must be at least 2f
I studied electroacoustic music and digital recording at university. I am very familiar with the Nyquist frequency.
Here, I'll illustrate with a sawtooth wave, sampling frequency 44KHz:
This is a 5512Hz sawtooth wave. As you can see, it is already far from perfect, because the number of samples per cycle means that much of the data has to be interpolated for it to not sound harsh and "digital."
This is a 11024Hz sawtooth wave. By doubling the frequency, I have halved the number of samples per cycle, futher distorting the original shape (and therefore timbre) of the wave. It's almost a rounded-off triangle wave now.
This is a 22048Hz sawtooth wave. By being so close to the Nyquist frequency, all I'm left with is a sine wave, because I'm only getting two samples per cycle. Not only that, but because of which data points were lost, the amplitude has decreased by about half.
The smoothness of these waves is (as I said) because of the interpolation my system is using. Without that, the closer I got to the Nyquist frequency, the more my wave would look like a triangle or square wave, depending on what data points were discarded and the shape of the original wave.
First, you are definitely wrong about 'for an example......four times a second',
Sorry, I was in a hurry. Obviously I meant four times per cycle of the waveform.
as when we are considering the nyquist frequency you should look at the frequency domain to see the highest harmonics
Yes, but as we have seen, even below the Nyquist frequency, waveforms are distorted as they approach that limit.
and a signal with highest frequency component of 11kHz is always faithfully sampled with 44kHz sampling
Yes, if the *absolute highest harmonic* is 11KHz, then it will be accurate. Now please show me some commercial music where that is the case.
and for your information, a violin actually has frequency ranging from the low end of some hundred Hz to around 8kHz
My speciality is electronics. It was a hypothetical example. You may replace "violin" with the higher-pitched instrument of your choice =).
It's certainly a murky issue for a number of reasons. When P2P software was first introduced, I fully opposed it, for exactly the reasons you've outlined. I *have* met people who exclusively pirate media, and I can see why the media industry is afraid of that behaviour.
I felt that way for literally years. However, I didn't believe then or now that the solution is a technological one.
Technology is very good at making things faster, more efficient, and easier. It is *not* (at least, in my experience) good at implementing restrictions. Today's advanced copy protection or encryption is tomorrow's trivial hassle to bypass, and this is especially true of things like digital audio files that many people need to be able to make use of for it to be effective.
People just need to understand that artists need to be able to make a living, or they'll find another line of work. I think most people already do, or realize it quickly enough when they're reminded.
There's an industrial record store in my city, and for awhile they were seeing a decline in sales because of P2P, so they stuck little stickers on the discs about how they'd have to close down if it continued, and sales picked back up, because people here wanted a store like that.
The MPAA's ads *almost* went in the right direction, but I think they should have cut to the point - if films become less profitable, we won't see the kind of big-budget releases that seem to be the most popular.
My experience is that the people doing most of the pirating are so loud that they seem more numerous than they actually are, as well as being young enough that their limited income means they wouldn't be contributing much to the bottom line anyway. As they grow older, they start buying things, like I did.
I don't really have a problem with P2P companies either. The videotape industry sold shipfulls of blank tapes, and most of those were used for taping things off of TV (timeshifting is protected, but taping a movie to keep instead of buying it is not). Blank audiotapes were mostly used (at least at my highschool) for copying CDs from the public library, or copying tapes for friends. Yet until DAT, no one called for the hardware and media manufacturers to assume responsibility for those illegal uses.
I guess my position boils down to "it's not possible to prevent piracy, so it's a waste of time to make its elimination the goal of any media corporation." They should look at why the majority of people do it (usually for reasons that are more or less harmless in the big picture*), and making them understand the consequences of not buying the things they enjoy.
I honestly don't think there will ever be another format as good as CD. The sound quality is as good as the human ear can discern (and I will continue to believe so until somebody has some actual evidence to the contrary)
Read up about digital audio and the Nyquist frequency.
While CDs have a theoretical frequency range of 20hz-22KHz, the quality of the audio degrades as it approaches the maximum frequency, because it cannot be represented accurately.
For an example, let's say I am recording a violin solo, and part of it takes place at around, I don't know, 11KHz. With a 44KHz sampling rate (like CDs), it's only being sampled four times a second.
A violin obviously has a fairly complex waveform, but if you only get four samples per second, that complex waveform is reduced to something more like a square wave. Your CD player might interpolate data on playback, but with only four data points per second, it's going to look more like a sine wave than the original sound.
That's just the sampling rate. The bitrate is also a factor, meaning quieter passages are much less defined than loud ones (at least, with a linear scale like CD audio systems use).
Basically, if time travel is actually possible, the instant that you travel back in time, you would create a fork in the past; you go back to 1978, and every single event prior to the time that you land in may be the same, but as soon as you land in 1978 you create a version of 1978 where you existed. Getting back to your own future would be really difficult, if not impossible.
Exactly, and this is not even close to a new idea.
I read about it in David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, which is seven years old now. I'm sure that he didn't invent the concept either, even in terms of grounding it in quantum physics.
Of course, it's all a little silly until someone can actually gather some empirical data.
There are people I read regularly who think that fair use means any kind of copying, as long as it's not for profit, or as long as you can make some tortured argument that it's analoguous to something that might possibly be fair use, kind of. ie the "How is me making a back-up of a CD and letting a friend borrow it any different to me putting it on Kazaa and allowing anyone who also happens to be on Kazaa download it?" argument.
I agree with you that most of the justifications are at best extremely shakey from a legal perspective.
However, a decade or two ago it wasn't really frowned upon to share mix tapes with friends, who would share them with friends, etc. I don't know if it was covered under Fair Use, but the music industry didn't care.
I think this was because generally this leads to wider exposure for that music, and therefore people going to record stores and buying it. When I was 18 or so, my girlfriend at the time gave me a mix tape that was a copy of one a friend had given her, which was a copy of her friend's friend's tape, etc. It convinced me to buy 5-10 albums.
I treat P2P as a modern extension of that concept. If someone tells me about a band, I'll download a track or an album by them, and if it's something I like I'll buy the CD.
I did this just two weeks ago with In Flames. I'd never heard of them before, but some friends of mine were discussing them at a party. I downloaded two of their albums, and liked the music so much I bought the CDs as soon as I could get to the record stores.
In Flames is a European metal band, so even if I did listen to the crappy pop radio stations around here I wouldn't have heard them.
I did pretty much the same thing with the new Psyclon Nine release, although I only downloaded one track first, since I'm a big fan of their first CD and just needed confirmation that the new album was good.
There are other ways I could have taken this music for a test drive, but P2P was easy, and resulted in me buying the CDs faster than any of the alternatives.
Music is too expensive for me to take chances any more. I've been burned too many times buying things that were supposed to be "awesome" only to find out that I didn't like any of the album, even when it was a band I'd loved the previous releases by. I'm looking at you Funker Vogt/Apoptygma Berzerk/Sunshine Blind/Black Atmosphere/:Wumpscut:/Front Line Assembly/Trent Reznor/Front 242/Switchblade Symphony/Clan of Xymox/X Marks the Pedwalk/Evils Toy/Ministry/Voice Industrie.
Do I *really* care if previewing music this way is legal or not? No. It's the most efficient way for me to find music that I like to listen to, and will therefore buy. If I couldn't do it, I probably wouldn't buy CDs at all. There is no legitimate, free, convenient way for me to hear new music that I would be interested in.
I own 700+ CDs. I *am* a musician. I am not an enemy of the music industry, but they seem unable to grasp that concept.
He even went as far as saying that MLB baseball games would no longer be broadcast because of "piracy".
Do sports fans even trade recordings of games online? I am not a member of that category, but my friends who are seem to be very into the idea that it's a live broadcast.
In the early drafts, Vader wasn't even related to the Skywalkers/Starkillers.
There are so many languages spoken on this planet that pretty much any "synthetic" name invented for a fictional story is going to collide with one or more of them./offtopic, no karma bonus
This is probably exactly why many development firms release educational versions of their software for noncommercial use. VS 2003 Academic costs $99 at my school bookstore. I suspect that many pirates would gladly prefer a company that releases a free or cheap version over pirating an expensive one.
Not the ones I know, and not me when I was a teenager.
What's the point in paying $100-$200 for a crippled piece of software, when you can get the real thing for free? $100 was a LOT when I was a student. I'm not even sure I spent that much in a month on food.
This was especially true for me because I couldn't see the point in paying that money at the time, then having to shell out *again* for the full version once I finished school.
I agree with the grandparent. Piracy when I was a low-income teenager is what's resulted in my buying software now, as well as getting software purchased by the companies I've worked for since then.
It's the same with movies. There's no *way* I could have afforded the piles of VHS rental movies I pirated. On the other hand, it gave me a love of having them around, and as an adult I've bought hundreds of DVDs because of that.
However, this is a problem that must affect programmers of cash-registers already. Somebody, somewhere, must be making good money for maintaining a database of local sales taxes. They could make a little more good money renting that database to Borders, Amazon, etc. Then the programming problem is simply to compare the ZIP code of the book buyer to the database.
Nationwide brick and mortar retailers already do this.
I work in IT for one. We have a register system that reports to a centralized system, but the registers apply whatever sales tax, etc. is due based on the location of the store.
A commercial product that's a near-copy of the Visual Studio IDE, used to code apps in a language very much like VB.NET, from a company with a name almost identical to RealNetworks.
Why do I suspect this won't last long in its current form?
Has there ever been a commercial, proprietary language/IDE released by a smaller company that's actually taken off? I've seen a lot of these, the first one I used being AMOS on the Amiga, and they never become very popular, meaning anyone who uses them ends up with a bunch of code that can't be used elsewhere, and which eventually loses vendor support.
I have to wonder how the Music industry gets around this as often I hear music that "samples" tracks from other artists, or even sound bites from TV and the movies. So I know there is a process in place to take an original work and modify it (And combine it with your own original work) to create your own unique art...but I don't know what it is, or where that shade of gray turns black.
The test of legality used to boil down to something like "does the work stand on its own without the sampled material, and does it not detract from the value of the original."
So Skinny Puppy could get away with using tons of dialogue from television and film in the 80s, because:
- Their music didn't depend on the samples, it just incorporated them.
- Using those samples didn't devalue, for example, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Charles Manson documentaries, or incredibly awful Canadian vampire movies.
- The samples were used to provide commentary on society.
Over time, sampling became more about swiping someone else's bassline, or another part of their music. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this (although I think the incest factor makes the new work less interesting), but it did change the nature of using sampled elements.
Today, basically if you are a major-label band, you *must* clear all your samples, no matter how short, or there will be a legal battle.
Most copyright holders seem to ignore bands on non-mainstream labels (e.g. Metropolis), but if there is enough publicity, and the copyright holder takes issue with the music, there have still been court battles.
You can't buy Apotheosis' "O Fortuna" new anymore, because Karl Orff's estate sued over it. Granted, that failed the "does it stand on its own?" test miserably, but on the other hand even the total worldwide sales of that track wouldn't have covered the licensing costs for the music, so it would never have been made "legitimately" anyway.
The money issue is a big one for smaller bands. Some copyright holders will charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for the use of a single sample, even if it's for an album which will sell 2000 copies at most.
The pricing makes some sense in the inflated world of major labels, but it stifles independent artists. For example, I once estimated that to clear the samples in *one* of my tracks from back in 2000, it would cost something like $50k-$100k, far more than the entire album it was from would ever generate even in gross profit.
Personally I think it's illogical to the point of frustration that a visual artist can make and sell collages made from Chiquita banana stickers and newspaper clippings all day, but using audio samples is somehow different.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of curiosity, if the prevailing conspiracy theorist opinion (to which it is obvious you readily subscribe) is now that it was a con by the Bush administration--to what gain? What could they possibly have gained?
Are you serious? It's right there on their* website.
They wanted a foothold in the Middle East so they could eventually control the whole area. They've wanted this ever since Reagan was president, because he wasn't aggressive enough for the PNAC.
* "Their" in this case referring to the Project for a New American Century, which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfled, Wolfowitz, etc., belong to.
karma bonus omitted for being offtopic.
About 2/3 of my programs won't operate (I'm a software developer) at all.
As others have said, this is the fault of the developers of that software.
Microsoft has been telling developers for at least five years now to put user data/config/whatever in the My Documents folder for whoever is running it. *Not* doing this is really stupid, because as soon as you install an app that writes config data or whatever to its install folder, you run into problems on multi-user machines like termservers.
I work in IT for a fairly large corporation. Most of our users do not have admin rights, and their apps work just fine.
These are the kind of apps we've had problems with:
- Software from "Enterprise"-only vendors like BMC, Quest, Niku, Merant, and Attachmate. This is because they refuse to follow good coding practices, much like they refuse to design decent UIs. Some of these we've found workarounds for, like giving the Users group write or modify access to the install folder.
- Legacy internal applications. This is because they were written in the Windows 95 era by people who didn't think they'd still be in use ten years later. Usually we add a wrapper to run these in the context of a privileged user.
You ever install a virus/keylogger onto a school computer, just because you could? I've dealt with that.
If yours is a Windows environment, you should be restricting software installation with Group Policy. If you know exactly which executables are supposed to be allowed to be run by users, you should be restricting that with GP too.
With a bit of planning, your IT staff could come up with a design where the techs don't *know* the local Administrator password for the machines, and the only one they can leak would be their own.
Masamune Shirow, the Sci-Fi author of Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell says that removing organs will decrease brain activity. Replacing not only limbs but also organs or your whole torso might make you a mouth breathing idiot.
And he bases this on what scientific research exactly?
Even if he is referring to nerve decay, as long as you keep stimulating them like this technology does, I don't see why it would be a problem.
He also said that total body cyborgification is better if you want superhuman strenght because a super strong arm is no good if lifting something heavy will just rip it off it's fleshy attachements.
I agree. Plus you can swap entire bodies as needed based on what you're doing.
What do you get when you cross a cat and a dog? cat dog sin theta
Hah, I was going to post almost the same thing. A friend of mine came up with it on her own, with rhinocerous and hippopotamus in place of cat and dog (like the kids' joke with the same intro).
From Babylon 5 (paraphrased):
Renee Descartes is down at the pub, drowning his sorrows in a few drinks. He finishes the last one, and the bartender asks "have another?"
Descartes (who has been having a bad day) mulls it over, replies "I think... not," and disappears.
Why on earth would anyone want to trade in a real arm for a robotic one? Why not just have 3 arms?
Three arms wouldn't look appealing on a human body, for one.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to get organic replacement parts for my body as I grow older. If they aren't available by then, I wouldn't mind robotic ones, assuming they were at least as good as what they were replacing.
Robotic arms - or better yet, a full body, General Grievous-style - would be really useful in a lot of ways. You could race motorcycles or work with heavy machinery without worrying as much about getting killed or spending months recovering from a serious injury.
If they had standard connections, you could even swap out various types depending on the task. Playing the piano? Switch to the hands with fingers twice the length that an un-augmented human has.
You'd just have to watch out for the jokers with giant electromagnets =P.
He did voices in most of the well-known action cartoons in the 80s (he was Optimus Prime, for example), so it's not like he's a nobody.
He still seems to do a lot of narration for big-budget films and games (Warcraft III's trailers, I remember in particular).
Definitely one of the coolest male voices ever. I was shocked when I realized that Black Sheep really had gotten ahold of him for this.
Even people with tatoos and piercings are going to look at a watch implant as wierd.
I doubt it. You've seen photos of people with cosmetic implants, right? Like the subdermal stuff that creates raised lines and half-spheres? Or the people with metal spikes attached to their skulls?
Personally, I think the grandparent was remembering Neuromancer, because there's a watch implant description exactly like that in it.
Dude, get your models away from the backgrounds and use broad (large) lights instead of those small lights you use now.
He can fudge the lighting. Bounce the light off of white construction cardboard from the drug store, or put a white bed sheet in-between the light and the model.
But yeah, further from the background would be good. The Tattoine double-shadow thing tends to draw my eyes away from the model (and therefore, the product).
Photoshop's Auto Colour and Auto Contrast operations will greatly improve this particular image (that appears to be a white wall she's in front of, and not yellowish).
I would also suggest some coloured or textured backgrounds. Go down to the fabric store and get a few meters of material in various neutral shades, or light colours.
These are just minor quibbles, though. It's an awesome idea, and it's great that these two are able to have fun with it.
in fact, when human are hearing, in our inner ear different frequency compoennt of the sound wave stimulate different region, effectively doing a transform from the time domain to frequency domain, and as the cutoff of human hearing is around 20kHz (in fact, it's much lower in older people who are in their 10s or 20s, by 20kHz we're talkin' about kids)
Yes, I know =).
I'm sorry, but most instrument does not have fundamental frequencies above 20kHz and harmonics above 20kHz are usually too insignificant in terms of energy for them to be heard in reality.
You're missing my point. Even sounds that have a fundamental frequency well below the Nyquist are not represented accurately by digital systems, and this becomes more and more evident as those sounds approach it.
i thought by highest component i'm talking about an even more absolute measurement of frequency (note harmonics are also complex waveforms which can be broken into their own frequency components).
I think we're in agreement here. But again, find me some commercially successful music whose absolute highest component is 11KHz. I don't think you will. 11-22KHz is only one more octave, but the harmonics in that octave are very important for the timbre of the sound.
I'm sorry, but there is nothing such as sawtooth in any natural instrument.
*sigh*
I used a sawtooth because it's easiest to see how its representation becomes less and less accurate as the fundamental frequency approaches the Nyquist frequency.
The *same thing* happens with other sounds, it's just not as immediately obvious in a waveform view.
by the PCM standard, it will NEVER look like a triangle or square wave which both has a frequency component of infinity
I know. As I said, interpolation, blah blah blah. My point here is that whether you interpolate it into a sine wave or leave it as a triangle/square, you are not *accurately* representing the original waveform, and therefore the sound will not be identical.
i'm sorry, but by what you've done, i smell audiophile.
Hardly. But I *can* hear the difference in things like mp3 vs uncompressed audio, so I know audiophiles are not entirely full of shit.
p.s. i'm an audio enginneer; and yes, i'm extremely picky
Not as picky as the professors who taught me, apparently =).
I would be very impressed if you could hear the difference between say an 18khz sine wave and an 18khz square/triangle/sawtooth wave. That would imply your ear is detecting harmonics above the frequency range the human ear is capable of.
I used higher-frequency fundamental tones to illustrate extreme cases. The same thing occurs to lower-frequency tones, it's just not as obvious visually.
...How does her top stay up?
You've never seen a bustier or other strapless top before?
Nobody is interested in how luke grew up to be such a brat that he is at the start of EP4. Star Wars is all about epic (and maybe not so epic) battles, not about the growing pains of a twit.
It's a story *for* children. They're supposed to watch the various episodes as they grow older. That's why Anakin is a child in Ep1.
Complaining about Lucas' target audience for Star Wars is like getting upset that the Prydain books are typeset with an oversized font and relatively short.
Nyquist theorem
...four times a second',
If input signal has _maximum frequency_ (bandwidth) f, sampling frequency must be at least 2f
I studied electroacoustic music and digital recording at university. I am very familiar with the Nyquist frequency.
Here, I'll illustrate with a sawtooth wave, sampling frequency 44KHz:
This is a 5512Hz sawtooth wave. As you can see, it is already far from perfect, because the number of samples per cycle means that much of the data has to be interpolated for it to not sound harsh and "digital."
This is a 11024Hz sawtooth wave. By doubling the frequency, I have halved the number of samples per cycle, futher distorting the original shape (and therefore timbre) of the wave. It's almost a rounded-off triangle wave now.
This is a 22048Hz sawtooth wave. By being so close to the Nyquist frequency, all I'm left with is a sine wave, because I'm only getting two samples per cycle. Not only that, but because of which data points were lost, the amplitude has decreased by about half.
The smoothness of these waves is (as I said) because of the interpolation my system is using. Without that, the closer I got to the Nyquist frequency, the more my wave would look like a triangle or square wave, depending on what data points were discarded and the shape of the original wave.
First, you are definitely wrong about 'for an example...
Sorry, I was in a hurry. Obviously I meant four times per cycle of the waveform.
as when we are considering the nyquist frequency you should look at the frequency domain to see the highest harmonics
Yes, but as we have seen, even below the Nyquist frequency, waveforms are distorted as they approach that limit.
and a signal with highest frequency component of 11kHz is always faithfully sampled with 44kHz sampling
Yes, if the *absolute highest harmonic* is 11KHz, then it will be accurate. Now please show me some commercial music where that is the case.
and for your information, a violin actually has frequency ranging from the low end of some hundred Hz to around 8kHz
My speciality is electronics. It was a hypothetical example. You may replace "violin" with the higher-pitched instrument of your choice =).
It's certainly a murky issue for a number of reasons. When P2P software was first introduced, I fully opposed it, for exactly the reasons you've outlined. I *have* met people who exclusively pirate media, and I can see why the media industry is afraid of that behaviour.
I felt that way for literally years. However, I didn't believe then or now that the solution is a technological one.
Technology is very good at making things faster, more efficient, and easier. It is *not* (at least, in my experience) good at implementing restrictions. Today's advanced copy protection or encryption is tomorrow's trivial hassle to bypass, and this is especially true of things like digital audio files that many people need to be able to make use of for it to be effective.
People just need to understand that artists need to be able to make a living, or they'll find another line of work. I think most people already do, or realize it quickly enough when they're reminded.
There's an industrial record store in my city, and for awhile they were seeing a decline in sales because of P2P, so they stuck little stickers on the discs about how they'd have to close down if it continued, and sales picked back up, because people here wanted a store like that.
The MPAA's ads *almost* went in the right direction, but I think they should have cut to the point - if films become less profitable, we won't see the kind of big-budget releases that seem to be the most popular.
My experience is that the people doing most of the pirating are so loud that they seem more numerous than they actually are, as well as being young enough that their limited income means they wouldn't be contributing much to the bottom line anyway. As they grow older, they start buying things, like I did.
I don't really have a problem with P2P companies either. The videotape industry sold shipfulls of blank tapes, and most of those were used for taping things off of TV (timeshifting is protected, but taping a movie to keep instead of buying it is not). Blank audiotapes were mostly used (at least at my highschool) for copying CDs from the public library, or copying tapes for friends. Yet until DAT, no one called for the hardware and media manufacturers to assume responsibility for those illegal uses.
I guess my position boils down to "it's not possible to prevent piracy, so it's a waste of time to make its elimination the goal of any media corporation." They should look at why the majority of people do it (usually for reasons that are more or less harmless in the big picture*), and making them understand the consequences of not buying the things they enjoy.
* e.g. my previous post.
I honestly don't think there will ever be another format as good as CD. The sound quality is as good as the human ear can discern (and I will continue to believe so until somebody has some actual evidence to the contrary)
Read up about digital audio and the Nyquist frequency.
While CDs have a theoretical frequency range of 20hz-22KHz, the quality of the audio degrades as it approaches the maximum frequency, because it cannot be represented accurately.
For an example, let's say I am recording a violin solo, and part of it takes place at around, I don't know, 11KHz. With a 44KHz sampling rate (like CDs), it's only being sampled four times a second.
A violin obviously has a fairly complex waveform, but if you only get four samples per second, that complex waveform is reduced to something more like a square wave. Your CD player might interpolate data on playback, but with only four data points per second, it's going to look more like a sine wave than the original sound.
That's just the sampling rate. The bitrate is also a factor, meaning quieter passages are much less defined than loud ones (at least, with a linear scale like CD audio systems use).
Basically, if time travel is actually possible, the instant that you travel back in time, you would create a fork in the past; you go back to 1978, and every single event prior to the time that you land in may be the same, but as soon as you land in 1978 you create a version of 1978 where you existed. Getting back to your own future would be really difficult, if not impossible.
Exactly, and this is not even close to a new idea.
I read about it in David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, which is seven years old now. I'm sure that he didn't invent the concept either, even in terms of grounding it in quantum physics.
Of course, it's all a little silly until someone can actually gather some empirical data.
There are people I read regularly who think that fair use means any kind of copying, as long as it's not for profit, or as long as you can make some tortured argument that it's analoguous to something that might possibly be fair use, kind of. ie the "How is me making a back-up of a CD and letting a friend borrow it any different to me putting it on Kazaa and allowing anyone who also happens to be on Kazaa download it?" argument.
I agree with you that most of the justifications are at best extremely shakey from a legal perspective.
However, a decade or two ago it wasn't really frowned upon to share mix tapes with friends, who would share them with friends, etc. I don't know if it was covered under Fair Use, but the music industry didn't care.
I think this was because generally this leads to wider exposure for that music, and therefore people going to record stores and buying it. When I was 18 or so, my girlfriend at the time gave me a mix tape that was a copy of one a friend had given her, which was a copy of her friend's friend's tape, etc. It convinced me to buy 5-10 albums.
I treat P2P as a modern extension of that concept. If someone tells me about a band, I'll download a track or an album by them, and if it's something I like I'll buy the CD.
I did this just two weeks ago with In Flames. I'd never heard of them before, but some friends of mine were discussing them at a party. I downloaded two of their albums, and liked the music so much I bought the CDs as soon as I could get to the record stores.
In Flames is a European metal band, so even if I did listen to the crappy pop radio stations around here I wouldn't have heard them.
I did pretty much the same thing with the new Psyclon Nine release, although I only downloaded one track first, since I'm a big fan of their first CD and just needed confirmation that the new album was good.
There are other ways I could have taken this music for a test drive, but P2P was easy, and resulted in me buying the CDs faster than any of the alternatives.
Music is too expensive for me to take chances any more. I've been burned too many times buying things that were supposed to be "awesome" only to find out that I didn't like any of the album, even when it was a band I'd loved the previous releases by. I'm looking at you Funker Vogt/Apoptygma Berzerk/Sunshine Blind/Black Atmosphere/:Wumpscut:/Front Line Assembly/Trent Reznor/Front 242/Switchblade Symphony/Clan of Xymox/X Marks the Pedwalk/Evils Toy/Ministry/Voice Industrie.
Do I *really* care if previewing music this way is legal or not? No. It's the most efficient way for me to find music that I like to listen to, and will therefore buy. If I couldn't do it, I probably wouldn't buy CDs at all. There is no legitimate, free, convenient way for me to hear new music that I would be interested in.
I own 700+ CDs. I *am* a musician. I am not an enemy of the music industry, but they seem unable to grasp that concept.
He even went as far as saying that MLB baseball games would no longer be broadcast because of "piracy".
Do sports fans even trade recordings of games online? I am not a member of that category, but my friends who are seem to be very into the idea that it's a live broadcast.
"Darth" also means "Dark".
In what language? Not Dutch, according to Babelfish, in which "dark" is "donker," and "darth" doesn't translate back to anything.
Even the Wiki article on Darth Vader doesn't make this claim, and reiterates what I said about the early drafts. Darth Vader was originally just "a tall, grim-looking general."
karma bonus once again omitted.
Vader is Dutch for "father."
/offtopic, no karma bonus
That doesn't mean that's why Lucas used it.
In the early drafts, Vader wasn't even related to the Skywalkers/Starkillers.
There are so many languages spoken on this planet that pretty much any "synthetic" name invented for a fictional story is going to collide with one or more of them.
This is probably exactly why many development firms release educational versions of their software for noncommercial use. VS 2003 Academic costs $99 at my school bookstore. I suspect that many pirates would gladly prefer a company that releases a free or cheap version over pirating an expensive one.
Not the ones I know, and not me when I was a teenager.
What's the point in paying $100-$200 for a crippled piece of software, when you can get the real thing for free? $100 was a LOT when I was a student. I'm not even sure I spent that much in a month on food.
This was especially true for me because I couldn't see the point in paying that money at the time, then having to shell out *again* for the full version once I finished school.
I agree with the grandparent. Piracy when I was a low-income teenager is what's resulted in my buying software now, as well as getting software purchased by the companies I've worked for since then.
It's the same with movies. There's no *way* I could have afforded the piles of VHS rental movies I pirated. On the other hand, it gave me a love of having them around, and as an adult I've bought hundreds of DVDs because of that.
However, this is a problem that must affect programmers of cash-registers already. Somebody, somewhere, must be making good money for maintaining a database of local sales taxes. They could make a little more good money renting that database to Borders, Amazon, etc. Then the programming problem is simply to compare the ZIP code of the book buyer to the database.
Nationwide brick and mortar retailers already do this.
I work in IT for one. We have a register system that reports to a centralized system, but the registers apply whatever sales tax, etc. is due based on the location of the store.
Hmm.
A commercial product that's a near-copy of the Visual Studio IDE, used to code apps in a language very much like VB.NET, from a company with a name almost identical to RealNetworks.
Why do I suspect this won't last long in its current form?
Has there ever been a commercial, proprietary language/IDE released by a smaller company that's actually taken off? I've seen a lot of these, the first one I used being AMOS on the Amiga, and they never become very popular, meaning anyone who uses them ends up with a bunch of code that can't be used elsewhere, and which eventually loses vendor support.
I have to wonder how the Music industry gets around this as often I hear music that "samples" tracks from other artists, or even sound bites from TV and the movies. So I know there is a process in place to take an original work and modify it (And combine it with your own original work) to create your own unique art...but I don't know what it is, or where that shade of gray turns black.
The test of legality used to boil down to something like "does the work stand on its own without the sampled material, and does it not detract from the value of the original."
So Skinny Puppy could get away with using tons of dialogue from television and film in the 80s, because:
- Their music didn't depend on the samples, it just incorporated them.
- Using those samples didn't devalue, for example, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Charles Manson documentaries, or incredibly awful Canadian vampire movies.
- The samples were used to provide commentary on society.
Over time, sampling became more about swiping someone else's bassline, or another part of their music. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this (although I think the incest factor makes the new work less interesting), but it did change the nature of using sampled elements.
Today, basically if you are a major-label band, you *must* clear all your samples, no matter how short, or there will be a legal battle.
Most copyright holders seem to ignore bands on non-mainstream labels (e.g. Metropolis), but if there is enough publicity, and the copyright holder takes issue with the music, there have still been court battles.
You can't buy Apotheosis' "O Fortuna" new anymore, because Karl Orff's estate sued over it. Granted, that failed the "does it stand on its own?" test miserably, but on the other hand even the total worldwide sales of that track wouldn't have covered the licensing costs for the music, so it would never have been made "legitimately" anyway.
The money issue is a big one for smaller bands. Some copyright holders will charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for the use of a single sample, even if it's for an album which will sell 2000 copies at most.
The pricing makes some sense in the inflated world of major labels, but it stifles independent artists. For example, I once estimated that to clear the samples in *one* of my tracks from back in 2000, it would cost something like $50k-$100k, far more than the entire album it was from would ever generate even in gross profit.
Personally I think it's illogical to the point of frustration that a visual artist can make and sell collages made from Chiquita banana stickers and newspaper clippings all day, but using audio samples is somehow different.