I'm terribly sorry for the posting above, I saw my comment had a new reply and thought it was the parent above, which really was a reply to another reply of an Anonymous Coward, which was below my threshold, so I thought...
Anyway, what I really would've had to write was: "You could hardly be more right, you totally got my point.":-)
Arrgh, I should change my settings so something like that can't happen.
you totally missed his point. he is referring to digitizing records (read: LPs), and not limiting one's self to the 44.1KHz, 16bit or whatever standard of CDs
You could hardly be more wrong; you missed my point. He really referred to digitising LPs and not limiting oneself to sample rates which are standard for CDs and cheap sound cards, but in a way that implied that every digital rip would go onto a CD-Audio and could never be of higher quality. I just pointed out that this implication is totally wrong.
and how do you propose you obtain this super high bitrate digital file ? you cannot create what doesnt exist, upsampling and the like is a waste of time if you are ripping from CD
And another one who's compelled to start babbling about CDs upon reading about ripping records. Look, my parent said if a record's audio quality is higher than a CDs, there's no point in ripping it to CD. I merely reminded him that you don't have to put your rip on a CD-Audio. Absolutely no one was talking about ripping from CD.
Naturellement, that's the very definition of 'digital'! All that talk about bitrates, samplerates, bit depth, channels, DACs and codecs is pure poppycock, intended to confuse pure customers and talk them into upgrading from the perfectly good record players they bought from their pocket money as a child!
Just remember - a new record will sound far, far better then a CD.
A digital file with a high enough bitrate will also sound far, far better than a CD, no matter how old it is. Just remember -- you don't have to restrict yourself to 44.1KHz, 16bit on-board sound. In fact, many people buy good soundcards for the sole purpose of digitising their records the very first time they play them back, to have a non-degrading copy before using them for DJing or just normal playback.
If anyone's interested in launching a SF project to build a Java version of this thing and either get the Protocol/API or even source from the Trepia guys, or, should this fail, reverse engineer it, contact me, I'm willing to help.
I don't really beleive [sic] that figure. Upload is so slow.
Upload is slow, so what? Broadband was intended for faster web surfing, for video on demand, quick file downloads over ftp and http. That are relatively short time spans, in which you want as much KB/s as possible. If you run a P2P client and offer some interesting files, however, it's uploading at your maximum upload limit (either the one of your modem or a lower one you set in your preferences) 24-7. That more than compensates for the slow upload.
I saw the smiley, but my comment looked nicer that way;-) Seriously, I doubt that routing their packets into the Internet and out again would make any sense. They have to pay for the bandwidth, i.e. the network infrastructure, either way. Of course, when buying data lines, there might well be Internet traffic going through other fibers in the very same lines, and there might even some load balancing going on between these two types of traffic, but I don't see any advantage in mixing them.
I very much doubt that they'll route calls over the public internet.
You _doubt_ it, your parent says _probably_ not. Well, they're _definitely_ not connected to the Internet in any way, which becomes apparent if you just read the first few paragrphs of the article. The/. headline says something different, of course. Great job, timothy!
Btw, in related multi-network client news, the Shareaza team is working on support for the eDonkey network.
This is nice, I've waited for a development like that for years, it's about time it finally happens. However, it would be _really_ great news if the no-spyware, no-nagware, no-bullshit eMule would support the Shareaza network. And Gnutella.
Any P2P client that encourages non-complete files to be shared is stupid, and should die.
No, you are stupid, because you don't understand the merit of sharing partial files. It's what BitTorrent does. If I am the only source of a rare file, but a hundred people want it, I'd have to upload it to them a hundred times. However, if they help each other out while downloading it, I can give a different part of the file to each of them, once, and after that I'll be just one among 100 sources. That's lots of saved bandwitdh for you, a good incentive to share more content. And the file will reach its various destinations much faster, too!
It seems to allow impartially downloaded files to be shared on the network, and even encourages this by showing you a bar for each file that illustrates which parts of the file the person has. When I tried to download a video from there, *nobody* had the whole thing, they all just had the same small snippets of it!
It doesn't just show you who has what, it also shows you how available/rare each part of the file is and when a complete version of the file was last seen. If you download a file whith red (missing) parts that are not likely to come online again because they were last seen three months ago, it's again you who's stupid, not the program. But I'm not saying you should die;-)
Bittorrent?? I cant figure out how the heck to make it work (actually cant be bothered once I look at the instructions).
Well, you just install it, which requires two clicks (sadly, it doesn't ask where you want to put it). Then, whenever you see a link on the web, saying something like 'here's matrix reloaded over bittorrent', you click it, enter the destination for the file, and wait for a while. There's your file! There's not much to figure out at all. Those instructions must be _really_ bad -- you wouldn't really need them, but once you read them, you think it's too complicated, wow.
Until things get point and click easy with some of the software you've mentioned, I'm unlikely to use them.
But it is!
Oh, wait a moment, maybe you read the instructions on how to _publish_ content via BitTorrent? Well, okay, that might be a bit more complicated, haven't checked that out yet. But only original content publishers are supposed to do bother with that. You just download the files, and share the same files automatically until you terminate the client. You don't use it to share your MP3 collection, that's just not what it's intended for, not at all.
You redefine the Joule, and let 1 kg = c^2 Joules.
Oh, that's brilliant! You solved the problem of making the kilogram reproducible, at the mere cost of introducing the new problem of making the Joule reproducible. Now you just have to explain to us dumb non-scientists why this second problem is o much easier to solve.
I'm also right on my 1st point. If E=m*c^2, mass can _not_ be defined as a multiple of energy;-p Anyway, thanks for reminding me of how they are related and what c has to do with it, that formula had kind of gotten swapped out of my cache.
Why not just define a kilogram in terms of 'x' number of Joules.
Well, firstly, (kilo-)gram is a unit for mass, while Joule is not, so you can't define one as the multiple of the other. Secondly, which Joule are you talking about? Isn't it defined as m2*kg/sec2 or something like that, thus depending on the kilogram? Sure, the length of a second and of a metre are defined, so you could reconstruct the 'ur-kilogram', if you had an 'ur-Joule'. But as this would be a quantity of energy, I doubt something like that would exist? And how is the constant c supposed to help you there?
... to the contrary, Europe will probably import some parts from the US.
I would very much doubt that. So, you build an independent system, yet are dependent on components for said system.
No, not at all; there doesn't have to be a dependency. The NASA also buys tons and tons of European equipment for their space programme. One company in my home country Austria, for example, has been assigned the very important task of making climate conditioning underwear for space-suits. That doesn't mean that the ISS will have to be shut down if Austria refuses to deliver more of it.
That Europe wants an independent system doesn't mean that they want to produce every tiny part independently and, for example, set up an expensive plant for manufacturing microchips that are available on the free market anyway. Of course, whereever it makes sense to give contracts to European companies and thus provide Europeans with employment, this will be done. However, the project will still do more good than bad to the American economy. Many Americans will want new end devices that can receive both signals, which American companies will be happy to sell them. So, when you say my argument doesn't make sense, you're wrong.
Really? To my knowledge, the US has never actively stopped GPS signals with the intent of disturbing Europe...
This statement is 100% correct, but has nothing to do with the argument it wants to appear to counter. It doesn't matter if European GPS reception is disturbed because the intended target is a European country or an Arabian one.
Europe did not take any actions, besides diplomatical ones, to stop US action in Iraq.
This is exactly my point. They almost never take any action.
What exactly is your point? That instead of trying to peacfully find a solution that is acceptable for everyone, Europe should have sent armed forces to Iraq to stop US action? European politicians really are interested in disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, and they certainly are more concerned about the nukes in Pakistan and Korea than they are about the nukes in the US. However, it seems that Europeans are more opposed to killing lots of innocents, because they're not as easily fooled by PR doublespeak like 'surgical strike' (look, we're _healing_ them!), 'disarmement' (US takes weapons from THEM), or 'shock and awe' (hey, it's basically an impressive firework, nothing like massive bombing in the city centre!).
All in all, would you say the war did more good than bad, yes or no?
I couldn't give a qualified answer to that yet, as I read/watch _much_ more news on technology than on foreign politics. Of course I'm happy that Hussein is gone, but I don't know enough about the political situation to be able to anticipate the severe consequences of this war. But even if it turns out that it did more good than bad, this does neither prove that it would have been possible to do still more good and still less bad, nor does it prove that this wasn't just another one of those strikes that, per _chance_, result in something desireable half of the time, and in a disaster the other half of the time (e.g. Vietnam).
I believe that, in a democracy, politicians should do what the people want. If the government disagrees with the public opinion, they should educate the citizens and provide them with the facts they need to vote for the right decision, but they shouldn't lie to them. It was okay to tell people how cruel Saddam was to his own subjects and how inacceptable his diplomatic relations with the US were. But it was not okay to direct the people's anger against terrorists towards Iraq, as if Saddam had anything to do with the Assault on the WTC. It was not okay to present speculations about Iraq's armament as facts without waiting for the results of UN examinations. It was not okay to _stage_ the 'rescue' of private Lynch.
Of course, I want Europe to be on good terms with the US. I want a relationship of friendship and trust. However, the current US government proved, in my opinion, that you can't trust them too much.
Even if I try really hard I can't imagine a scenario where Europe really needed satellite navigation but the US would block GPS from them.
Actually, it's very easy to imagine the US to switch of half or all of GPS because they're combating some 'rogue state'. It's even easier to imagine that they continue to use the encryptet military channels, but switch off or degrade the accuracy of the civilian channels again.
Of course, no one should _rely_ on GPS, because it can fail and drop out any time. In aviation, for example, where a high degree of fault tolerance and backup systems for everything are needed, GPS plays only a tiny role. But still, millions of people depend on it. Rescue teams use GPS-based navigation systems to get somewhere fast without getting lost, but can only fall back to paper maps if it fails because they don't have the resources to set up a backup system, et cetera et cetera. If you can't imagine a scenario in which someone in Europe needs sattelite navigation, but the US is blocking it, you must be an idiot.
Even if Europe had had this Gallileo that would not have enabled them to stop US action in Iraq or Afghanistan.
You're hitting straw men there. Europe did not take any actions, besides diplomatical ones, to stop US action in Iraq. The majority of people over here are still asking themselves whether it was really justified to liberate the Iraqis against their will (where are the weapons of mass destrucion, by the way?), or if it was just a PR campaign for Dubya, so it was the duty of their official representatives to give their opinion a voice. Galileo has absolutely nothing to do with interfering with US actions, it is not, and was never, intended to get in the way of US forces. The only relation to recent events is that the USA are waging wars and threatening to switch off civilian GPS every few years, so it became apparent that it's a bad idea to make onself depend on their goodwill.
If Europe would have taken a more of a leadership role in world politics...
You're confusing politics with war mongering there. Besides, Europe doesn't raise the claim to be the _leader_ of the world.
...
I am sure the US would be delighted and more the willing to let them use GPS.
I don't think that the US would be delighted if Europe would compete for their role as world police. Besides, they're letting the whole world use GPS anyway. This only changes when they fear the system could be helping some 'rogues' to do evil things, and in this case, they don't care about Europe or anyone a bit, as we saw again recently.
This sounds like a very expensive French idea.
Expensive? Why do you care? It's not going to cost the US anything; to the contrary, Europe will probably import some parts from the US. And it's certainly not as expensive as certain US activities which arguably have less merit.
Doesn't the US have some trademark or some other crap on the name "Galileo" relating to a spacecraft?
Lot's of space related things, in Europe as well as the US, have been named after Galileo, Copernicus, or Kepler for ages. All of which were European, by the way. If something in the US is called 'Galileo', that choice probably wasn't all that original in the first place; it's definitely not 'your' name.
I'd have a hard time thinking of a bigger waste of resources. Unnecessarily duplicating a very expensive piece of infrastructure that the world needs only one instance of.
Not long ago, I read something (here on/., I think) about defective GPS sattelites and (financial) trouble with repairing them and replenishing the stock of spare sattelites. Then there was the war and speculations wheter someone would be able to take those sattelites down with missiles. So, you should be really happy that someone's going to install a backup system!
And many people, I think, will be happy about a positioning system which is not in the hands of '_the_ superpower', which decides who is good and who is bad and who should be allowed to receive positioning data.
A scary vision indeed. The really frightening ideas are hard to implement, though. My printer could hide a serial number and someone who gets a printout, and suspects me of having originated it, could get another printout of me and compare the hidden serial numbers. The printer itself couldn't include my IP or anything, though. If you want to hide this information in the hardcopy, this has to be done in the printer driver, so the abvious choice for paranoid people are reputable open source printer drivers.
Then again, if the printer hides the watermark itself, it would be much harder to detect. If actual pixel data is changed on the PC, these changes can often be uncovered because the original image data can be reconstructed (hard if the original is a photo on some unknown harddisk, easy if it's a reproducable Word document). But the printer could introduce tiny variations in the speed of the printing head that would like ordinary fluctuations/irregularites. Well, maybe.
Hmm, I have to admit Euros are _really_ thin compared to other notes, maybe that's it. I thought the clothlike texture becomes apparent only with age and wear, but I never handled Swedish crowns. I really should visit Sweden sometime. Are there any plans about joining the currency union? Things would be much easier for an Austrian visitor...:-)
I agree that euros feel very different, but I'm not sure if the quality really is inferior. I haven't found any info on the web, unfortunately. Maybe the note you have feels more 'paperish' because it's brand new?
By the way, while it doesn't feel like other currency I've handled, it's also very different from normal copying paper. On one side of the bill, you feel a silky roughness, while the other side is plasticy smooth. So, tehy do feel peculiar (which is a security feature), but I wouldn't say they feel cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm terribly sorry for the posting above, I saw my comment had a new reply and thought it was the parent above, which really was a reply to another reply of an Anonymous Coward, which was below my threshold, so I thought ...
:-)
Anyway, what I really would've had to write was: "You could hardly be more right, you totally got my point."
Arrgh, I should change my settings so something like that can't happen.
If anyone's interested in launching a SF project to build a Java version of this thing and either get the Protocol/API or even source from the Trepia guys, or, should this fail, reverse engineer it, contact me, I'm willing to help.
I saw the smiley, but my comment looked nicer that way ;-) Seriously, I doubt that routing their packets into the Internet and out again would make any sense. They have to pay for the bandwidth, i.e. the network infrastructure, either way. Of course, when buying data lines, there might well be Internet traffic going through other fibers in the very same lines, and there might even some load balancing going on between these two types of traffic, but I don't see any advantage in mixing them.
Oh, wait a moment, maybe you read the instructions on how to _publish_ content via BitTorrent? Well, okay, that might be a bit more complicated, haven't checked that out yet. But only original content publishers are supposed to do bother with that. You just download the files, and share the same files automatically until you terminate the client. You don't use it to share your MP3 collection, that's just not what it's intended for, not at all.
Thanks for the info (see there), but that doesn't really help (see there).
That Europe wants an independent system doesn't mean that they want to produce every tiny part independently and, for example, set up an expensive plant for manufacturing microchips that are available on the free market anyway. Of course, whereever it makes sense to give contracts to European companies and thus provide Europeans with employment, this will be done. However, the project will still do more good than bad to the American economy. Many Americans will want new end devices that can receive both signals, which American companies will be happy to sell them. So, when you say my argument doesn't make sense, you're wrong.
I believe that, in a democracy, politicians should do what the people want. If the government disagrees with the public opinion, they should educate the citizens and provide them with the facts they need to vote for the right decision, but they shouldn't lie to them. It was okay to tell people how cruel Saddam was to his own subjects and how inacceptable his diplomatic relations with the US were. But it was not okay to direct the people's anger against terrorists towards Iraq, as if Saddam had anything to do with the Assault on the WTC. It was not okay to present speculations about Iraq's armament as facts without waiting for the results of UN examinations. It was not okay to _stage_ the 'rescue' of private Lynch.
Of course, I want Europe to be on good terms with the US. I want a relationship of friendship and trust. However, the current US government proved, in my opinion, that you can't trust them too much.
Of course, no one should _rely_ on GPS, because it can fail and drop out any time. In aviation, for example, where a high degree of fault tolerance and backup systems for everything are needed, GPS plays only a tiny role. But still, millions of people depend on it. Rescue teams use GPS-based navigation systems to get somewhere fast without getting lost, but can only fall back to paper maps if it fails because they don't have the resources to set up a backup system, et cetera et cetera. If you can't imagine a scenario in which someone in Europe needs sattelite navigation, but the US is blocking it, you must be an idiot. You're hitting straw men there. Europe did not take any actions, besides diplomatical ones, to stop US action in Iraq. The majority of people over here are still asking themselves whether it was really justified to liberate the Iraqis against their will (where are the weapons of mass destrucion, by the way?), or if it was just a PR campaign for Dubya, so it was the duty of their official representatives to give their opinion a voice. Galileo has absolutely nothing to do with interfering with US actions, it is not, and was never, intended to get in the way of US forces. The only relation to recent events is that the USA are waging wars and threatening to switch off civilian GPS every few years, so it became apparent that it's a bad idea to make onself depend on their goodwill. You're confusing politics with war mongering there. Besides, Europe doesn't raise the claim to be the _leader_ of the world. I don't think that the US would be delighted if Europe would compete for their role as world police. Besides, they're letting the whole world use GPS anyway. This only changes when they fear the system could be helping some 'rogues' to do evil things, and in this case, they don't care about Europe or anyone a bit, as we saw again recently. Expensive? Why do you care? It's not going to cost the US anything; to the contrary, Europe will probably import some parts from the US. And it's certainly not as expensive as certain US activities which arguably have less merit.
And many people, I think, will be happy about a positioning system which is not in the hands of '_the_ superpower', which decides who is good and who is bad and who should be allowed to receive positioning data.
A scary vision indeed. The really frightening ideas are hard to implement, though. My printer could hide a serial number and someone who gets a printout, and suspects me of having originated it, could get another printout of me and compare the hidden serial numbers. The printer itself couldn't include my IP or anything, though. If you want to hide this information in the hardcopy, this has to be done in the printer driver, so the abvious choice for paranoid people are reputable open source printer drivers. Then again, if the printer hides the watermark itself, it would be much harder to detect. If actual pixel data is changed on the PC, these changes can often be uncovered because the original image data can be reconstructed (hard if the original is a photo on some unknown harddisk, easy if it's a reproducable Word document). But the printer could introduce tiny variations in the speed of the printing head that would like ordinary fluctuations/irregularites. Well, maybe.
Hmm, I have to admit Euros are _really_ thin compared to other notes, maybe that's it. I thought the clothlike texture becomes apparent only with age and wear, but I never handled Swedish crowns. I really should visit Sweden sometime. Are there any plans about joining the currency union? Things would be much easier for an Austrian visitor ... :-)
I agree that euros feel very different, but I'm not sure if the quality really is inferior. I haven't found any info on the web, unfortunately. Maybe the note you have feels more 'paperish' because it's brand new?
By the way, while it doesn't feel like other currency I've handled, it's also very different from normal copying paper. On one side of the bill, you feel a silky roughness, while the other side is plasticy smooth. So, tehy do feel peculiar (which is a security feature), but I wouldn't say they feel cheap.