At those bitrates, with a decent encoder, you should not be able to hear a difference in the vast majority of tracks, even with golden ears.
The only way to know for sure that you can hear a difference, is with a blind ABX test of volume normalized samples. One easy way to perform such a test, is with foobar2k and it's foo_abx plugin.
I have an HP calculator emulator on my PC as well, but my muscle memory doesn't work with it. So it doesn't flow nearly as well. I supposed if I worked with it a lot more I might get better... But, if I do similar things on a PC I just pop up Matlab or a Ruby prompt or similar.
Mine's a 48sx, it's probably 18-19 years old. I had a GX for a while, but it's screen cracked. It used to go everywhere with me, though now it lives on my desk. I probably only use it on average once a week though. I keep looking at the newer HP calculators, but it sounds like none of them quite match the ergonomics of the early 90s models.
I don't consider it's use to be nostalgic though. It's still an excellent quick and easy to use calculating tool. Now if I were still developing programs for it... that would be pretty nostalgic.
Another annoyance with chrome search, as soon as you navigate off of the current page, the search panel closes. Both FF and IE leave the panel open, which is much more convenient when you want to repeat the same search on a group of linked pages.
It's been happening to me for ages. I just ignore any emails that are obviously intended for someone else. It's not my job to fix it.
I also get a chuckle when I receive emails with a disclaimer which claims I MUST destroy the email if I'm not the intended recipient. It's such an incredible display of arrogance.
I was wondering what speech recognition engine they were using. So I dug around a bit. At first glance, it appears they record some speech, convert it to flac, and then send the speech off to google servers to do the actual transcription.
There are some interesting privacy implications for this new feature, if it is indeed sending all of your speech to a server.
Does anyone have a clearer picture of how it works and/or what engine google is using?
C#/.net is Java without the 80s retro feel, and WPF is the best GUI toolkit I've ever used. I enjoy working with them. Their only significant flaw is that they are Microsoft platform centric.
To be fair, there are plenty of developers who use the click and code features of Visual Studio to create spaghetti. Heck, they may even be the rule rather than the exception. But, still you need to look a little deeper at a resume before you toss it, or you're going to miss some great talent.
The top is (potentially) a red herring. We're explicitely told that totems(the top) let their owner determine if they are in someone else's dream. If the whole movie was Cobb's(or Mal's) dream, then Cobb's totem would tell Cobb whatever he(she) wanted it to. Also Cobb has another Totem, watch for his wedding ring.
I think the whole movie is meant to be open to interpretation each viewer, and I like it that way.
The trick is to read everything remotely interesting the first time you visit. It takes a day or 2, but after that you can resist clicking in the future.
Now, the problem is, once the teams are fucked, they stay fucked... I often see entire squads of level 50 players on one team... and people leaving the other team in droves. No. Thank. You.
The main thing driving that behavior is the need to accumulate points in the first place. At least some servers do have auto team balancing turned on.
What BFBC2 really needs is some sort of handicapping system, where you get a lot more points killing a level 50 when you're level 1. And possibly rewarding more points when using weaker weapons. Penalities for stacking wouldn't be a bad idea either. To sum up, the players play the way they do, because they are rewarded for it.
There's no need for a new amendment. The first amendment, plus some common sense, *should* take care of it. Before photo-copiers, tape decks and the internet, copyright regulated printing and manufacturing. Now-a-days, especially due to the last item on the list, copyright is attempting to regulate speech. If digital bitstreams are speech, which I think has been pretty clearly established by this point, then the first amendment applies. If the first amendment applies, then copyright is just about null and void, though you could probably still play some games with commercial vs non-commercial speech.
Of course this assumes that laws are meant to be logical constructs...
IDSPISPOPD orginated from a humorous usenet post, complaining about all the posts by people asking for news about the imminent release of Doom. The acronym's place in history, was insured, a few days later, by the posting of the SPISPOPD FAQ, which described the features of the upcoming, fictional game, SPISPOPD.
My favorite feature, from the FAQ: ... Finally, as far as add-on modules go, you can import your cities from
SimCity 2000, your Hero from Champions, and your Mech from Mechwarrior II...
Great info. I knew EDID was stored in some sort of PROM on the Monitor/Display, and I knew it was a serial protocol to get it to the computer. But I didn't know that everything was available, ready to go, in a single IC.
Do you have any pointers to specific parts/schematics?
Avocent makes a few. I use a SC8 which I picked up for 1/20th the new cost from ebay. Unfortunately it's PS/2 only. It also sometimes requires me to press the switch button 2 or 3 times to get a proper display. It switches quick, so it's not as annoying as it might be. I eventually plan to somehow combine it with a USB switch, or a Synergy like(KV over ethernet) setup. I plan to use an Arduino dev board to control the switch(es).
Avocent's 2 and 4 port dual link DVI models are much cheaper, and are supposed to be pretty decent, and some have USB support.
Before the SC8, I tried a Gefen 4 port DVI-D switch, but the computers would constantly think I was unplugging the monitor, which was really annoying. I think it didn't pass the EDID through to non active PCs. Gefen's solution was to spend $50-$75 per computer for an EDID Doctor. I also probably could have solved it by overriding the graphics driver EDID settings, but I didn't find that out until after replacing it. It also took a good 2-3 seconds to switch the USB devices, since it didn't have keyboard/mouse emulation. Of course, a plus to the lack of emulation was that you could use all the features of fancier HIDs.
IOgear and Cables to Go, both have some models that sounde decent. But I haven't tried them personally.
I've recently gone through a mouse buying binge. Most of them have a right handed ergo shape, I use the mouse with my right hand, so it's not an issue for me. My hands/fingers are probably larger than average, but I use a claw grip, so most most sizes work fine. Strangely I hadn't ever really noticed there were categories of mouse gripping before starting this odyssey.
I started with a somewhat ancient but excellent:
Intellimouse Explorer 3.0
Which I had recently replaced the buttons on. As a result it was feeling just a bit off, brand new buttons are harder to press. Also my desktop resolution had increased from 3200x1200 in 2002, to around 6500x1600 today. And I knew a higher DPI mouse would speed up navigation around the larger space. So I decided it was finally time to go mouse shopping.
I tried, in order:
Razor Deathadder
Logitech G9
Logitech VX Nano(this one is left handed friendly)
Logitech MX 518
Logitech MX 1100
Logitech VX Revolution
Criterion for selecting the above, were either wired, or if wireless, a multi-month battery life with user replaceable standard(aa or aaa) batteries. I mostly use low self discharge(Sanyo Eneloop) NiMH batteries in the cordless mice, and they do last 2+ months without needing a recharge. The lack of user replaceable batteries ruled out the MX Revolution, which I otherwise probably would've given a try.
The Deathadder: Nirvana, if I'd stopped here, I would've thought it was perfect. This mouse is super comfortable, and awesome for long term use. It's nearly identical in shape to the IE 3.0, so the learning curve was virtually nil. I immediately noticed an advantage to the higher DPI, especially on the desktop, but, not as noticeable when gaming. The only slight problem was the scroll wheel, it feels a bit rougher, than the old, well broken in, IE 3.0 scroll wheel. But... I had already ordered a G9 before I received it, so the saga continues.
The G9: Nirvana++ but with one large annoyance. It looks very different compared to the IE 3.0, but with a claw grip, it feels similar enough. And I found it very comfortable for long term use. It's ++, a free scroll capable scroll wheel, which I immediately fell in love with. The on the fly DPI switching is nice, but I pretty much found the fastest that was not too fast, and stuck with it. The large annoyance with the G9, the middle mouse button is entirely too hard to press, both in desktop apps(opening new tabs in a browser), and games(selecting menu items and such). Another note on this mouse, I found the precision grip body to be very abrasive feeling, it feels like sandpaper to me. But I've had other people try it without issue, so it must be me. Luckily, the default wide grip doesn't have that issue. I haven't messed with the weights, the default weight seemed fine to me.
So at this point I had a clearly defined goal, a comfy mouse with a free scrolling scroll wheel, that doesn't take extreme force to click, so on with the search.
The VX Nano: This mouse has a separate middle button, which is nice and easy to press. Instead of acting as a button, pressing the scroll wheel, allows you to enable/disable free scrolling. This mouse is quite comfy, and in general lives up to the 4.5-5 star reviews it has received everywhere. Problems, it takes me a minute or 2 to retrain myself when I switch between it, and a mouse with a clickable scroll wheel. The forward and back buttons are in a sub optimal location, not a big issue for me, since I almost never use them. Though I really should start using them. The main reason I never got used to them was due to the use of a KVM switch that only emulated a 3 button mouse for the last 6+ years. The nano receiver is really nice, plug it into your laptop and forget it. So I stuck it on my personal laptop, and bought a second one, which I used it with my desktop for a few weeks, while I waited for something else to go on sale. I currently use the second one with my wor
I think I had to check the: Run in 256 colors checkbox, in the compatibility tab, to make Diablo II work on Vista 64-bit.
I'd guess the variable determining if you need to tweak things, might be the video card and drivers. The system I made it work on was using recentish nvidia drivers on an 8800 series card.
That "challenge" disallows disassembling the drive, so it's not likely to be won. It's my understanding that to recover data after a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/x", that you need to remove the platters from the drive, and scan them with a high resolution magnetic imager of some sort. In theory with sufficient resolution you'll be able to distinguish somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-8 previous writes due to newer writes not perfectly aligning on top of previous writes. Also knowing the last write was all zeros should make it much easier to pick out the previous track since an all zero track is a known signal.
I'd guess a sufficiently clueful hardware hacker could take a nth generation drive and adapt it to be a scanner for an n-(2-4) generation HDD. For some subset of magnetic encoding techniques anyways. Since the main thing that increases from one generation to the next is the data density.
I think the biggest problem with all this is that when someone makes a huge fortune we go and laud the "power" of capitalism. I think that is a flawed conclusion. I think a better way to view these huge fortunes, is that they are a sign that a flaw in the market was discovered. Rather than continue as we have, with the flaw discoverers being allowed to set the agenda, we should instead attempt to patch the flaws.
Examples:
Microsoft: IP law is too strong, bundling and advertising work too well. Solution: The bundling has already supposedly been fixed but the damage was done long before that occurred. Weaken IP law, possibly specifically Microsoft's IP holdings. Require registration of source code with the copyright office for a copyright to be granted on software and drop Microsoft's(if not everyone's) copyright duration to 3 years. *poof* MS has to compete with 3 year old derivatives of themselves, they either become a lot more productive or lose their ill gotten place in the market.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Advertising, buys out shelf space in super markets to keep out competition. First mover advantage has been compounded across decades. Solution: Outlaw purchase of shelf space. Take away their trade marks?
Ebay: Natural monopoly, the sellers want to be where the buyers are, and the buyers want to be where the sellers are. There is really only room for one "big" online auction house with the current architecture. And advertising plays a role yet again. Solution: Regulate the heck out of them, pricing, terms of service, make them open up auction listings to competitors, etc. Split paypal off into a separate company again. Hope some sort of non centralized online auction architecture is developed. Though even if it's developed having it catch on in the face of Ebay's lead will be nearly impossible.
Google: Advertising works too well, and plenty of people are willing to (over)pay for it. Solution: I don't see one. I'm probably missing something.
I don't know what to do about advertising, there are all sorts of mind games played with brand recognition that probably should not qualify as free speech. But creating a law that could differentiate without causing greater harm seems nearly impossible. One possible solution, once you have over 25% of "the market", and maintain that hold for say 5 years, then you can't hold trademarks anymore?
The status quo being more malware and more loss of dollars and privacy due to lack of computer/network security each and every year.
People love to throw around analogies about computer security. Door knocking and opening are thrown around a lot. Here's the proper analogy:
A computer on the internet is analagous to a house with a door on every street in every nation of the planet. If someone breaks down your door and pillages your house, it's quite likely they don't even live in a jurisdiction where you could attempt to find them criminally liable. And that's assuming you manage to find out who and where they are in the first place.
Creating these various computer crimes has only made research more difficult and added another layer of BS so that the creators of these insecure hardware and software systems can point blame at someone other than themselves.
If you truly want secure computers on a secure Internet, then decriminalize all hacking/cracking, we'll have a secure Internet within 5 years of this occuring.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have an estimate for the time and materials cost, required to design, build, and launch Qu8k?
At those bitrates, with a decent encoder, you should not be able to hear a difference in the vast majority of tracks, even with golden ears.
The only way to know for sure that you can hear a difference, is with a blind ABX test of volume normalized samples. One easy way to perform such a test, is with foobar2k and it's foo_abx plugin.
I have an HP calculator emulator on my PC as well, but my muscle memory doesn't work with it. So it doesn't flow nearly as well. I supposed if I worked with it a lot more I might get better... But, if I do similar things on a PC I just pop up Matlab or a Ruby prompt or similar.
Mine's a 48sx, it's probably 18-19 years old. I had a GX for a while, but it's screen cracked. It used to go everywhere with me, though now it lives on my desk. I probably only use it on average once a week though. I keep looking at the newer HP calculators, but it sounds like none of them quite match the ergonomics of the early 90s models.
I don't consider it's use to be nostalgic though. It's still an excellent quick and easy to use calculating tool. Now if I were still developing programs for it... that would be pretty nostalgic.
Another annoyance with chrome search, as soon as you navigate off of the current page, the search panel closes. Both FF and IE leave the panel open, which is much more convenient when you want to repeat the same search on a group of linked pages.
It's been happening to me for ages. I just ignore any emails that are obviously intended for someone else. It's not my job to fix it.
I also get a chuckle when I receive emails with a disclaimer which claims I MUST destroy the email if I'm not the intended recipient. It's such an incredible display of arrogance.
To answer my own question, I found a post on ycombinator it looks like they are sending the speech server side for transcription.
I was wondering what speech recognition engine they were using. So I dug around a bit. At first glance, it appears they record some speech, convert it to flac, and then send the speech off to google servers to do the actual transcription.
There are some interesting privacy implications for this new feature, if it is indeed sending all of your speech to a server.
Does anyone have a clearer picture of how it works and/or what engine google is using?
C#/.net is Java without the 80s retro feel, and WPF is the best GUI toolkit I've ever used. I enjoy working with them. Their only significant flaw is that they are Microsoft platform centric.
To be fair, there are plenty of developers who use the click and code features of Visual Studio to create spaghetti. Heck, they may even be the rule rather than the exception. But, still you need to look a little deeper at a resume before you toss it, or you're going to miss some great talent.
The top is (potentially) a red herring. We're explicitely told that totems(the top) let their owner determine if they are in someone else's dream. If the whole movie was Cobb's(or Mal's) dream, then Cobb's totem would tell Cobb whatever he(she) wanted it to. Also Cobb has another Totem, watch for his wedding ring.
I think the whole movie is meant to be open to interpretation each viewer, and I like it that way.
The trick is to read everything remotely interesting the first time you visit. It takes a day or 2, but after that you can resist clicking in the future.
Now, the problem is, once the teams are fucked, they stay fucked... I often see entire squads of level 50 players on one team... and people leaving the other team in droves. No. Thank. You.
The main thing driving that behavior is the need to accumulate points in the first place. At least some servers do have auto team balancing turned on.
What BFBC2 really needs is some sort of handicapping system, where you get a lot more points killing a level 50 when you're level 1. And possibly rewarding more points when using weaker weapons. Penalities for stacking wouldn't be a bad idea either. To sum up, the players play the way they do, because they are rewarded for it.
There's no need for a new amendment. The first amendment, plus some common sense, *should* take care of it. Before photo-copiers, tape decks and the internet, copyright regulated printing and manufacturing. Now-a-days, especially due to the last item on the list, copyright is attempting to regulate speech. If digital bitstreams are speech, which I think has been pretty clearly established by this point, then the first amendment applies. If the first amendment applies, then copyright is just about null and void, though you could probably still play some games with commercial vs non-commercial speech.
Of course this assumes that laws are meant to be logical constructs...
IDSPISPOPD orginated from a humorous usenet post, complaining about all the posts by people asking for news about the imminent release of Doom. The acronym's place in history, was insured, a few days later, by the posting of the SPISPOPD FAQ, which described the features of the upcoming, fictional game, SPISPOPD.
... Finally, as far as add-on modules go, you can import your cities from
SimCity 2000, your Hero from Champions, and your Mech from Mechwarrior II ...
My favorite feature, from the FAQ:
Great info. I knew EDID was stored in some sort of PROM on the Monitor/Display, and I knew it was a serial protocol to get it to the computer. But I didn't know that everything was available, ready to go, in a single IC.
Do you have any pointers to specific parts/schematics?
Avocent makes a few. I use a SC8 which I picked up for 1/20th the new cost from ebay. Unfortunately it's PS/2 only. It also sometimes requires me to press the switch button 2 or 3 times to get a proper display. It switches quick, so it's not as annoying as it might be. I eventually plan to somehow combine it with a USB switch, or a Synergy like(KV over ethernet) setup. I plan to use an Arduino dev board to control the switch(es).
Avocent's 2 and 4 port dual link DVI models are much cheaper, and are supposed to be pretty decent, and some have USB support.
Before the SC8, I tried a Gefen 4 port DVI-D switch, but the computers would constantly think I was unplugging the monitor, which was really annoying. I think it didn't pass the EDID through to non active PCs. Gefen's solution was to spend $50-$75 per computer for an EDID Doctor. I also probably could have solved it by overriding the graphics driver EDID settings, but I didn't find that out until after replacing it. It also took a good 2-3 seconds to switch the USB devices, since it didn't have keyboard/mouse emulation. Of course, a plus to the lack of emulation was that you could use all the features of fancier HIDs.
IOgear and Cables to Go, both have some models that sounde decent. But I haven't tried them personally.
I've recently gone through a mouse buying binge. Most of them have a right handed ergo shape, I use the mouse with my right hand, so it's not an issue for me. My hands/fingers are probably larger than average, but I use a claw grip, so most most sizes work fine. Strangely I hadn't ever really noticed there were categories of mouse gripping before starting this odyssey.
I started with a somewhat ancient but excellent:
Intellimouse Explorer 3.0
Which I had recently replaced the buttons on. As a result it was feeling just a bit off, brand new buttons are harder to press. Also my desktop resolution had increased from 3200x1200 in 2002, to around 6500x1600 today. And I knew a higher DPI mouse would speed up navigation around the larger space. So I decided it was finally time to go mouse shopping.
I tried, in order:
Razor Deathadder
Logitech G9
Logitech VX Nano(this one is left handed friendly)
Logitech MX 518
Logitech MX 1100
Logitech VX Revolution
Criterion for selecting the above, were either wired, or if wireless, a multi-month battery life with user replaceable standard(aa or aaa) batteries. I mostly use low self discharge(Sanyo Eneloop) NiMH batteries in the cordless mice, and they do last 2+ months without needing a recharge. The lack of user replaceable batteries ruled out the MX Revolution, which I otherwise probably would've given a try.
The Deathadder: Nirvana, if I'd stopped here, I would've thought it was perfect. This mouse is super comfortable, and awesome for long term use. It's nearly identical in shape to the IE 3.0, so the learning curve was virtually nil. I immediately noticed an advantage to the higher DPI, especially on the desktop, but, not as noticeable when gaming. The only slight problem was the scroll wheel, it feels a bit rougher, than the old, well broken in, IE 3.0 scroll wheel. But... I had already ordered a G9 before I received it, so the saga continues.
The G9: Nirvana++ but with one large annoyance. It looks very different compared to the IE 3.0, but with a claw grip, it feels similar enough. And I found it very comfortable for long term use. It's ++, a free scroll capable scroll wheel, which I immediately fell in love with. The on the fly DPI switching is nice, but I pretty much found the fastest that was not too fast, and stuck with it. The large annoyance with the G9, the middle mouse button is entirely too hard to press, both in desktop apps(opening new tabs in a browser), and games(selecting menu items and such). Another note on this mouse, I found the precision grip body to be very abrasive feeling, it feels like sandpaper to me. But I've had other people try it without issue, so it must be me. Luckily, the default wide grip doesn't have that issue. I haven't messed with the weights, the default weight seemed fine to me.
So at this point I had a clearly defined goal, a comfy mouse with a free scrolling scroll wheel, that doesn't take extreme force to click, so on with the search.
The VX Nano: This mouse has a separate middle button, which is nice and easy to press. Instead of acting as a button, pressing the scroll wheel, allows you to enable/disable free scrolling. This mouse is quite comfy, and in general lives up to the 4.5-5 star reviews it has received everywhere. Problems, it takes me a minute or 2 to retrain myself when I switch between it, and a mouse with a clickable scroll wheel. The forward and back buttons are in a sub optimal location, not a big issue for me, since I almost never use them. Though I really should start using them. The main reason I never got used to them was due to the use of a KVM switch that only emulated a 3 button mouse for the last 6+ years. The nano receiver is really nice, plug it into your laptop and forget it. So I stuck it on my personal laptop, and bought a second one, which I used it with my desktop for a few weeks, while I waited for something else to go on sale. I currently use the second one with my wor
I think I had to check the: Run in 256 colors checkbox, in the compatibility tab, to make Diablo II work on Vista 64-bit.
I'd guess the variable determining if you need to tweak things, might be the video card and drivers. The system I made it work on was using recentish nvidia drivers on an 8800 series card.
To open your Model M you'll need a 5.5mm nut driver.
Almost any machine can run that one:
Stack overflow (core dumped)
Yellow on Dark Blue. Especially for terminals and editors.
Video game: Combat! on the Atari 2600, christmas morning, I was probably 8.
Other: Candyland or maybe go fish/old maid/slap jack somewhere in the 4-6 age range.
Oh and don't forget patty cake.
That "challenge" disallows disassembling the drive, so it's not likely to be won. It's my understanding that to recover data after a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/x", that you need to remove the platters from the drive, and scan them with a high resolution magnetic imager of some sort. In theory with sufficient resolution you'll be able to distinguish somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-8 previous writes due to newer writes not perfectly aligning on top of previous writes. Also knowing the last write was all zeros should make it much easier to pick out the previous track since an all zero track is a known signal.
I'd guess a sufficiently clueful hardware hacker could take a nth generation drive and adapt it to be a scanner for an n-(2-4) generation HDD. For some subset of magnetic encoding techniques anyways. Since the main thing that increases from one generation to the next is the data density.
I think the biggest problem with all this is that when someone makes a huge fortune we go and laud the "power" of capitalism. I think that is a flawed conclusion. I think a better way to view these huge fortunes, is that they are a sign that a flaw in the market was discovered. Rather than continue as we have, with the flaw discoverers being allowed to set the agenda, we should instead attempt to patch the flaws.
Examples:
Microsoft: IP law is too strong, bundling and advertising work too well.
Solution: The bundling has already supposedly been fixed but the damage was done long before that occurred. Weaken IP law, possibly specifically Microsoft's IP holdings. Require registration of source code with the copyright office for a copyright to be granted on software and drop Microsoft's(if not everyone's) copyright duration to 3 years. *poof* MS has to compete with 3 year old derivatives of themselves, they either become a lot more productive or lose their ill gotten place in the market.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Advertising, buys out shelf space in super markets to keep out competition. First mover advantage has been compounded across decades.
Solution: Outlaw purchase of shelf space. Take away their trade marks?
Ebay: Natural monopoly, the sellers want to be where the buyers are, and the buyers want to be where the sellers are. There is really only room for one "big" online auction house with the current architecture. And advertising plays a role yet again.
Solution: Regulate the heck out of them, pricing, terms of service, make them open up auction listings to competitors, etc. Split paypal off into a separate company again. Hope some sort of non centralized online auction architecture is developed. Though even if it's developed having it catch on in the face of Ebay's lead will be nearly impossible.
Google: Advertising works too well, and plenty of people are willing to (over)pay for it.
Solution: I don't see one. I'm probably missing something.
I don't know what to do about advertising, there are all sorts of mind games played with brand recognition that probably should not qualify as free speech. But creating a law that could differentiate without causing greater harm seems nearly impossible. One possible solution, once you have over 25% of "the market", and maintain that hold for say 5 years, then you can't hold trademarks anymore?
The status quo being more malware and more loss of dollars and privacy due to lack of computer/network security each and every year.
People love to throw around analogies about computer security. Door knocking and opening are thrown around a lot. Here's the proper analogy:
A computer on the internet is analagous to a house with a door on every street in every nation of the planet. If someone breaks down your door and pillages your house, it's quite likely they don't even live in a jurisdiction where you could attempt to find them criminally liable. And that's assuming you manage to find out who and where they are in the first place.
Creating these various computer crimes has only made research more difficult and added another layer of BS so that the creators of these insecure hardware and software systems can point blame at someone other than themselves.
If you truly want secure computers on a secure Internet, then decriminalize all hacking/cracking, we'll have a secure Internet within 5 years of this occuring.