The data isn't "clocked" anywhere until the DAC is literally pulling the data out of the filter output buffer. Everything else is asyncronous.
Sure, but that clock will have its own jitter spectrum and will therefore have a significant effect on the analogue sound quality. As I say, I'd like to see what the spectrum looks like...
Actually, with uncompressed audio, this is a serious piece of kit.
It's battery powered, so you've a low-impedance power supply totally isolated from any sort of mains bourne interference. All the audio data coming from the hard drive will be accurately re-clocked before being sent to the DAC, which incidentally includes s 60mW headphone/cable driver... nice low impedance output. I would like to see some jitter spectra and figures to see how accurate that re-clocking is, mind...
As digital audio equipment goes, it could be engineered a whole lot worse, and my own ears tell me that an iPod in tandem with Sony MDR-EX70 in-ear headphones sounds sublime. These headphones are noise-isolating, superb sounding, and extremely good value for money.
Yep, they certainly have, and they've said that the video format will be MPEG-4-based too. I throw down the gauntlet for someone to get XviD encoded video playing on a Playstation Portable:-)
Before we can do that though, we're going to need recordable UMDs. I had assumed thus far the UMD was going to be a read only medium. Has anyone seen any indication that it'll be more like Minidisc, with a recordable option. Unless they're going to put a writer in the PSP itself, we're also going to need external writers.
Yes, I'd love to be able to time-shift TV onto a PSP too, but at this stage, I don't think we know if it's going to go down that route. I don't have much of an interest in games, so by the time the PSP comes out / I can afford it, it'll be better for me to get a hard-drive based solution.
Touche... that's a matter of probabilities I guess. They could of course put lots of 'scratch' data on the disc and let the disc pass if a majority of them are there.
New scratches won't affect gameplay. The point is that the 'fake scratch data' won't be copied verbatim by disc copying software[1], so the code knows the disc is a copy.
Read errors caused by new scratches on an original disc will just get corrected as per normal. The 'fake' scratches will still be there, so the game will play fine.
Matt...
[1] Yet...
--
A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
You're half right... the theory goes that there's a peak in the number of objects which 'drop' out of the Oort Cloud into earth-crossing orbits a few million years after the solar system passes through the galactic disc... which is round about now.
The eminent professor asked the Batchelor student to explain General Relativity. The student thought for a moment before replying "Well, I'm sure I understood it at some point, sir, but I appear to have forgotten".
The professor looked startled: "This is an unfortunate turn of events. It appears that of the two people in the world ever to have understood General Relativity, one of them has forgotten".
Anyway, thing is, General Relativity is all about the fact that the presence of mass causes the curvature of space-time. What we call gravity is a consequence of that curvature.
Get your head around that one, and we'll talk some more.
Intel made this mistake once with the first-generation Celeron chips. These were, IIRC, based on the Pentium Pro core, and it was found that they'd double-up just fine. The Abit BP6 motherboard lets you run two of these very nicely.
I don't think they'll make the same mistake again.
Self-Organising Maps can be used to solve many similar problems to those for which ANNs are appropriate. Check out the SOMPAK software. A shame my own research into data visualisation using this technique is company confidential to an ex-employer, some very pretty pictures:-)
The package inlcudes source code to produce Sammon Maps in Postscript format. These can be very useful tools for finding clusters in data. What they revealed about UK higher education institutes was eye opening.
Matt...
--
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Could someone clarify a legal point for me please? Is it actually illegal to offer a file containing a representation of a copyrighted work for download?
I believe that here in the UK at least, the legal liability lies with the person making the copy: "The person who puts their finger in the record button" I've heard it put.
What it appears the RIAA are doing is to pursue those who offer files for download, who have them 'shared' in their P2P software. Is there actually anything illegal in that? Surely it's the person downloading from you who is breaking the law?
Another argument might be that these files are unlicenced. But how do they know that? The person sharing the files might actually have all those CDs on their shelves and choose to listen to them via the MP3 medium.
Also, the RIAA are presumably building their case around the filenames of the files being shared. Just because someone shares "Jake Thackray - Isobel Makes Love Upon National Monuments.mp3" doesn't mean that the file contains a representation of that work. Are the RIAA downloading each and every file to check?
Jeez, I don't know where to hook into this discussion, so I'll try here.
I currently use a 20Gb iPod on a daily commute and for background music. When I first got it, about the first thing I thought after "Mmmm... shiny" was "it really needs a record button". For an iPod-based solution, I reckon you could go with a PC-104 motherboard and firewire controller and mount the iPod as a hard drive. But that's a bit Heath Robinson (left pondians: read 'flaky') for serious use in the rough and tumble of the mosh pit.
An old Toshiba Libretto (sigh) would probably fit the bill quite well if mummified in bubble wrap inside a Jiffy bag, but finding a reliable one these days might be getting tricky.
Problem is, on the one hand we have these portable media players, which have relatively vast hard drives but limited functionality. On the other we have PDAs with universal functionality and limited storage. Errr... hello?
Will someone please put a 20Gb hard drive in a capable PDA, allow us to power it down when we're not being media whores, and let us play?
I like having my media portable, it makes the UK public transport 'system' a whole lot more bearable. The iPod's used for time-shifting radio programmes as well as tunes. Would Six Feet Under work on the bus? I don't know, but I'd love to try it.
Take one of these things, use as a PVR of an evening, take it to work during the day. Mount it on a networked PC for archiving shows to CD or network playback. Not quite a portable TiVo (who will be first to integrate it with PC PVR software though?) but a lot more pocketable, and you can archive your shows without hacking.
As for the whole P2P thing, file sharing is great for stuff beyond that which Hollywood churns out, and for me that means radio and TV shows. P2P is the global tape-swapping community, without the restrictions of lesser media. Is downloading a show instead of timeshifting onto VHS or cassette really outside fair use? The BBC will have much of its archive on line soon, so they say, so that'll be much of my source material legalised.
P2P allows 'perfect' (within the bounds of compression - nothing more is lost) copies to be made anywhere in the world. The record companies missed the boat, should quit griping and put any 'losses' from file sharers under the same heading as radio broadcasts: promotion. And before you assess those losses, are you sure we haven't just got format fatigue? We have a new format now, and you're really not getting it to us in the ways we want, at least not in the UK.
Yeah, I wondered a while back whether if you factored electricity costs into TCO, whether it might be cheaper in the long run to use a larger number of lower-powered but higher MFLOPS/Watt processors.
Why is this such a big deal? We Brits have been using chaotic physical systems to generate random numbers for at least 45 years. Might not be cryptographically sound, mind you...
Assuming 92 is the correct figure, the short version would be:
1) There are no naturally occurring stable atomic nuclei with more than 92 protons.
2) See above. There may be ultra-heavy, ultra rare nuclei which are stable, but the quantities in which they occur in our environment are vanishingly small.
3) Possibly, but they would be similarly unstable to those produced in the lab, and so would be very short lived.
And perhaps most famous of all, "out of sight, out of mind" supposedly came back as "blind idiot".
I always knew the translation as "invisible maniac", but that must have been late 70s / early 80s. I presume machine translation has progressed rather since then...
Try Messagelabs or similar for pretty much 100% effective e-mail virus filtering. They use the top four anti-virus solutions to catch everything that's known about, followed by heuristic analysis to catch anything suspicious that's not been seen before.
They recommend using a conventional anti-virus solution to catch the 2% of viruses coming into your establishment on portable media, but they'll keep your mail pretty damn clean.
I don't work for them (my partner used to work for part of the same outfit), but I have been an end user of their solution. Good stuff, and they do anti-spam as well...
I think you forget Europe, Australasia etal, where there is no iTunes store available, the media moguls would have only given iTunes the rights to US distribution, besides, most of the sound track will probably be available today for download of the p2p networks as well as purchase from Music stores. (you would probably have to buy several albums to get it all though).
At least in theory, it would be possible to distinguish MP3s ripped from 'normal' CDs and 'download' CDs. The latter will have a set of known processing artefacts in its AAC-download-sourced data which are likely to remain detectable through a futher layer of MP3 encoding.
If those involved have any sense, there'll be some sort of watermarking on the download tracks anyway, although I'm not aware if there are watermarking systems out there designed to survive psychoacoustic compression.
Mini-DVD-RAM drives have recently been seen on Hitachi MPEG-2 camcorders, so the portable drive technology is there. I agree this would be a damn good removable format both for audio and short video clips.
I doubt it would prize me away from my iPod though...
Thing is, you've either got to have 80% marketing expense product cost, or pay the same amount in taxes to keep all those out-of-work marketing staff on welfare. Welcome to the post-industrial economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but that clock will have its own jitter spectrum and will therefore have a significant effect on the analogue sound quality. As I say, I'd like to see what the spectrum looks like...
Matt.
MDR-EX70 headphones: What exactly did you find shitty about their sound?
It's battery powered, so you've a low-impedance power supply totally isolated from any sort of mains bourne interference. All the audio data coming from the hard drive will be accurately re-clocked before being sent to the DAC, which incidentally includes s 60mW headphone/cable driver... nice low impedance output. I would like to see some jitter spectra and figures to see how accurate that re-clocking is, mind...
As digital audio equipment goes, it could be engineered a whole lot worse, and my own ears tell me that an iPod in tandem with Sony MDR-EX70 in-ear headphones sounds sublime. These headphones are noise-isolating, superb sounding, and extremely good value for money.
Matt...
Before we can do that though, we're going to need recordable UMDs. I had assumed thus far the UMD was going to be a read only medium. Has anyone seen any indication that it'll be more like Minidisc, with a recordable option. Unless they're going to put a writer in the PSP itself, we're also going to need external writers.
Yes, I'd love to be able to time-shift TV onto a PSP too, but at this stage, I don't think we know if it's going to go down that route. I don't have much of an interest in games, so by the time the PSP comes out / I can afford it, it'll be better for me to get a hard-drive based solution.
Matt...
Matt...
Read errors caused by new scratches on an original disc will just get corrected as per normal. The 'fake' scratches will still be there, so the game will play fine.
Matt...
[1] Yet...
--
A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
Matt...
Try getting stuck into e.g. this for a start.
Matt...
The professor looked startled: "This is an unfortunate turn of events. It appears that of the two people in the world ever to have understood General Relativity, one of them has forgotten".
Anyway, thing is, General Relativity is all about the fact that the presence of mass causes the curvature of space-time. What we call gravity is a consequence of that curvature.
Get your head around that one, and we'll talk some more.
Matt...
I don't think they'll make the same mistake again.
Matt...
The package inlcudes source code to produce Sammon Maps in Postscript format. These can be very useful tools for finding clusters in data. What they revealed about UK higher education institutes was eye opening.
Matt...
--
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
I believe that here in the UK at least, the legal liability lies with the person making the copy: "The person who puts their finger in the record button" I've heard it put.
What it appears the RIAA are doing is to pursue those who offer files for download, who have them 'shared' in their P2P software. Is there actually anything illegal in that? Surely it's the person downloading from you who is breaking the law?
Another argument might be that these files are unlicenced. But how do they know that? The person sharing the files might actually have all those CDs on their shelves and choose to listen to them via the MP3 medium.
Also, the RIAA are presumably building their case around the filenames of the files being shared. Just because someone shares "Jake Thackray - Isobel Makes Love Upon National Monuments.mp3" doesn't mean that the file contains a representation of that work. Are the RIAA downloading each and every file to check?
Matt...
I currently use a 20Gb iPod on a daily commute and for background music. When I first got it, about the first thing I thought after "Mmmm... shiny" was "it really needs a record button". For an iPod-based solution, I reckon you could go with a PC-104 motherboard and firewire controller and mount the iPod as a hard drive. But that's a bit Heath Robinson (left pondians: read 'flaky') for serious use in the rough and tumble of the mosh pit.
An old Toshiba Libretto (sigh) would probably fit the bill quite well if mummified in bubble wrap inside a Jiffy bag, but finding a reliable one these days might be getting tricky.
Problem is, on the one hand we have these portable media players, which have relatively vast hard drives but limited functionality. On the other we have PDAs with universal functionality and limited storage. Errr... hello? Will someone please put a 20Gb hard drive in a capable PDA, allow us to power it down when we're not being media whores, and let us play?
I like having my media portable, it makes the UK public transport 'system' a whole lot more bearable. The iPod's used for time-shifting radio programmes as well as tunes. Would Six Feet Under work on the bus? I don't know, but I'd love to try it.
Take one of these things, use as a PVR of an evening, take it to work during the day. Mount it on a networked PC for archiving shows to CD or network playback. Not quite a portable TiVo (who will be first to integrate it with PC PVR software though?) but a lot more pocketable, and you can archive your shows without hacking.
As for the whole P2P thing, file sharing is great for stuff beyond that which Hollywood churns out, and for me that means radio and TV shows. P2P is the global tape-swapping community, without the restrictions of lesser media. Is downloading a show instead of timeshifting onto VHS or cassette really outside fair use? The BBC will have much of its archive on line soon, so they say, so that'll be much of my source material legalised.
P2P allows 'perfect' (within the bounds of compression - nothing more is lost) copies to be made anywhere in the world. The record companies missed the boat, should quit griping and put any 'losses' from file sharers under the same heading as radio broadcasts: promotion. And before you assess those losses, are you sure we haven't just got format fatigue? We have a new format now, and you're really not getting it to us in the ways we want, at least not in the UK.
Matt...
Anyone done the math?
Dr. Matt...
Dr. Matt.
Assuming 92 is the correct figure, the short version would be:
1) There are no naturally occurring stable atomic nuclei with more than 92 protons.
2) See above. There may be ultra-heavy, ultra rare nuclei which are stable, but the quantities in which they occur in our environment are vanishingly small.
3) Possibly, but they would be similarly unstable to those produced in the lab, and so would be very short lived.
4) Yes.
Dr. Matt...
I always knew the translation as "invisible maniac", but that must have been late 70s / early 80s. I presume machine translation has progressed rather since then...
Matt...
They recommend using a conventional anti-virus solution to catch the 2% of viruses coming into your establishment on portable media, but they'll keep your mail pretty damn clean.
I don't work for them (my partner used to work for part of the same outfit), but I have been an end user of their solution. Good stuff, and they do anti-spam as well...
Matt...
At least in theory, it would be possible to distinguish MP3s ripped from 'normal' CDs and 'download' CDs. The latter will have a set of known processing artefacts in its AAC-download-sourced data which are likely to remain detectable through a futher layer of MP3 encoding.
If those involved have any sense, there'll be some sort of watermarking on the download tracks anyway, although I'm not aware if there are watermarking systems out there designed to survive psychoacoustic compression.
Matt...
I doubt it would prize me away from my iPod though...
Dr. Matt...
Dr. Matt...
Of course... I thought everyone knew it was the embodiment of The Force. It has a dark side and a light side and it binds the universe together...
Dr. Matt...
An Abit BP6 motherboard with a couple of Celerons should do you nicely. See eBay.
Dr. Matt...
Dr. Matt...