Generally they do give it out to people who buy a computer right before. My advice, if i had the money to buy one right now, is to do it. The extra time becoming familar (and getting the f*** off of windows) is well worth it.
No man, no. While I agree that the more like quicksilver spotlight is the better, it SURE isn't the other way around!
Quicksilver is a freaking godsend and is much faster because the point isn't searching all of your computer! it makes some intelligent guesses (applications folder, home folder, desktop, etc) as a minimal starting set, but then it has you add other places manually. Also, it only reindexes every ten minutes or so..
Quicksilver rocks because it was designed to do what it does WELL. Spotlight does FS-wide search well.
The two should not be confused for each other, i cannot imagine why you would want one to do the job of both.
A man staring at his equations said that the universe had a beginning. There had been an explosion, he said. A bang of bangs, and the universe was born. And it is expanding, he said. He had even calculated the length of its life: ten billion revolutions of the earth around the sun. The entire globe cheered; They found his calculations to be science. None thought that by proposing that the universe began, the man had merely mirrored the syntax of his mother tongue; a syntax which demands beginnings, like birth, and developments, like maturation, and ends, like death, as statements of facts. The universe began, and it is getting old, the man assured us, and it will die, like all things die, like he himself died after confirming mathematically the syntax of his mother tongue.
The Other Syntax
Did the universe really begin? Is the theory of the big bang true? These are not questions, though they sound like they are. Is the syntax that requires beginnings, developments and ends as statements of fact the only syntax that exists? That's the real question. There are other syntaxes. There is one, for example, which demands that varieties of intensity be taken as facts. In that syntax nothing begins and nothing ends; thus birth is not a clean, clear-cut event, but a specific type of intensity, and so is maturation, and so is death. A man of that syntax, looking over his equations, finds that he has calculated enough varieties of intensity to say with authority that the universe never began and will never end, but that it has gone, and is going now, and will go through endless fluctuations of intensity. That man could very well conclude that the universe itself is the chariot of intensity and that one can board it to journey through changes without end. He will conclude all that, and much more, perhaps without ever realizing that he is merely confirming the syntax of his mother tongue.
well the problem is that crappy technology is a fact not a conjecture; the impetueus to accept hardware that is provably flawed in various scenarios must be considered as having a wide range of possible actor, from a sloppy election technician all the way up... and up... and up..
Someone said elsewhere in the thread that we should not abscribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. HOWEVER, controlled ignorance and feigning of stupidity is often the keystone of a successful tech company - preying on the technological insecurities of the customer in the form of the everlasting 'sorry we just can't do that"....
I actually did learn something from your post, yes indeed!, and that as a cSound programmer who uses this stuff quite a bit. Still, it wouldn't go down the laymen's throat a'tall.. it's pretty complex for the average musician to begin with and i'm 'close enough'.
That said, my understanding of MP3's comes more from the biology of the human ear then it does the mathematics behind it, so cheers!
I only said that to get your attention, maybe a little cred. I doubt that most folks around here have even HEARD hiphop - although the radio has soaked you all in rap, for sure.
To quote the immortal KRS-One: Rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live.
I mean it, hip hop is barely a music format, it is more of a mindset that has NOTHIN' but NOTHIN' to do with the music you hear today. Really Really. Here is a underground tip for otherwise plaid slashdotters.. and an album i wish EVERYONE owned, which will prove the point: Aceyalone's Book Of Human Language.
After you listen to that, let's have this discussion again. We can go over the Four Elements. Maybe over the still cooling body of Clear Channel, if we can arrange it;)
You just can't make this stuff up! here's the text, reproduced, but as my friend said, it puts Weird Al to shame (sorry Al!), the song itself sounds really, really good! So, this is your Nerd Moment of Zen for the Week (for sure!):
Table 4.1: Properties of the Fourier Transform
(or, Fourier's Song)
Integrate your function times a complex exponential
It's really not so hard you can do it with your pencil
And when you're done with this calculation
You've got a brand new function - the Fourier Transformation
What a prism does to sunlight, what the ear does to sound
Fourier does to signals, it's the coolest trick around
Now filtering is easy, you don't need to convolve
All you do is multiply in order to solve.
From time into frequency - from frequency to time
Every operation in the time domain
Has a Fourier analog - that's what I claim
Think of a delay, a simple shift in time
It becomes a phase rotation - now that's truly sublime!
And to differentiate, here's a simple trick
Just multiply by J omega, ain't that slick?
Integration is the inverse, what you gonna do?
Divide instead of multiply - you can do it too.
From time into frequency - from frequency to time
Let's do some examples... consider a sine
It's mapped to a delta, in frequency - not time
Now take that same delta as a function of time
Mapped into frequency - of course - it's a sine!
Sine x on x is handy, let's call it a sinc.
Its Fourier Transform is simpler than you think.
You get a pulse that's shaped just like a top hat...
Squeeze the pulse thin, and the sinc grows fat.
Or make the pulse wide, and the sinc grows dense,
The uncertainty principle is just common sense.
short answer, nope, you'd get no extra info from that. But learning about fourier transform will help you understand that what you are calling "seperated" tracks has nothing to do the idea of seperating frequencies. In short, you'd have 5 seperate mp3's all summed together, with WORSE compression. It's just math man, read up on Fourier (cool stuff, really!) or just trust me./not that you should ever "just trust me", there is alot of info out there on this//although the conclusion is pretty bulletproof this time
And to be clear, Fourier Transforms do just this - they take a complex sound (well, physical sciences use this ALL over the place, but sound will do as an example) and turn them into frequency "slices" so that they say, at time X, we have Frequencies A, B, C at strenghts 1, 2 and 3.
There are tradeoffs to this - but here's a neat tidbit - The concept of fourier analysis is exatly how your ears work this very instant - your inner ear has "hairs" that vibrate at different frequncies (look it up, its cool) and your mind "recomposes" the stimulus of which hairs are vibrating into a sound you think is unified.
To be honest, mp3 spring right up from biology, if you understand the way your ear works, it's almost a no-brainer (hindsight, that is;) )
Actually, although it may not make sense at first, it's MUCH better to mix them all first. Why? Because you'd have to anyway! That is, if Track A has a frequency at 700 (a blowin sax) and Track B has a frequency of 701 (Jiving flute) but the flute is very soft (for that frame - a very short amount of time, so you can see it might happen alot as the instruments get louder and softer at different times together) then you'd be basically stripping out the 701. The kicker:
If they aren't mixed together, how would you know you can get rid of the flute for that instant? Now let's not get to specific, when it's all just frequencies, after the math is done, the point is that your best bet for choosing what to take out will occur if everything you want to play can be analyzed together. So nope, that's why they don't have that. Happy to explain this more if i didn't make sense..
They are facinating in how they work, but let me provide a quick laymen explanation:
First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.
Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:
1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)
Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have
2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?
This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a.wav file with equivalent (for most humans -some one might disagree - i don't) quality.
Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)
.j.
The ipod is ALREADY an ebook reader!!!!
on
The eBook, Mark 2
·
· Score: 1
this whole discussion, in avoiding that fact, makes my head hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally they do give it out to people who buy a computer right before. My advice, if i had the money to buy one right now, is to do it. The extra time becoming familar (and getting the f*** off of windows) is well worth it.
My opinion, of course.
No man, no. While I agree that the more like quicksilver spotlight is the better, it SURE isn't the other way around!
Quicksilver is a freaking godsend and is much faster because the point isn't searching all of your computer! it makes some intelligent guesses (applications folder, home folder, desktop, etc) as a minimal starting set, but then it has you add other places manually. Also, it only reindexes every ten minutes or so..
Quicksilver rocks because it was designed to do what it does WELL. Spotlight does FS-wide search well.
The two should not be confused for each other, i cannot imagine why you would want one to do the job of both.
If you're going to paranoid, might as well poke the mike with a soldering iron too
What's the problem? what's stopping you? Need those things?
Oh, I see.
feeling a little bitter about something?
the universe is fun place. To quote David Holmes, "Don't Die Just Yet!"
Syntax
A man staring at his equations
said that the universe had a beginning.
There had been an explosion, he said.
A bang of bangs, and the universe was born.
And it is expanding, he said.
He had even calculated the length of its life:
ten billion revolutions of the earth around the sun.
The entire globe cheered;
They found his calculations to be science.
None thought that by proposing that the universe began,
the man had merely mirrored the syntax of his mother tongue;
a syntax which demands beginnings, like birth,
and developments, like maturation,
and ends, like death, as statements of facts.
The universe began,
and it is getting old, the man assured us,
and it will die, like all things die,
like he himself died after confirming mathematically
the syntax of his mother tongue.
The Other Syntax
Did the universe really begin?
Is the theory of the big bang true?
These are not questions, though they sound like they are.
Is the syntax that requires beginnings, developments
and ends as statements of fact the only syntax that exists?
That's the real question.
There are other syntaxes.
There is one, for example, which demands that varieties
of intensity be taken as facts.
In that syntax nothing begins and nothing ends;
thus birth is not a clean, clear-cut event,
but a specific type of intensity,
and so is maturation, and so is death.
A man of that syntax, looking over his equations, finds that
he has calculated enough varieties of intensity
to say with authority
that the universe never began
and will never end,
but that it has gone, and is going now, and will go
through endless fluctuations of intensity.
That man could very well conclude that the universe itself
is the chariot of intensity
and that one can board it
to journey through changes without end.
He will conclude all that, and much more,
perhaps without ever realizing
that he is merely confirming
the syntax of his mother tongue.
And books dammit!!! Some of us still *gasp* like to READ!!
so let me scroll the page with my finger.. love that - already do alot of reading on nano (yes, i have good eyesight)..
(it's possible you were outlining a paradox, if so, forget the post)
nice troll.
the reason we have TOR is that so if i think we ARE living in a repressive regime, a**holes like yourself can't harm me for saying so.
Q E mutha-f'in D.
i say foo' cause i just don't see how anyone can live without it.. ....well after they're addicted to it anyway
well the problem is that crappy technology is a fact not a conjecture; the impetueus to accept hardware that is provably flawed in various scenarios must be considered as having a wide range of possible actor, from a sloppy election technician all the way up... and up... and up..
Someone said elsewhere in the thread that we should not abscribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. HOWEVER, controlled ignorance and feigning of stupidity is often the keystone of a successful tech company - preying on the technological insecurities of the customer in the form of the everlasting 'sorry we just can't do that"....
when of course they can [make good systems]
(I am a Consultant.)
These machines suck. They need to be lampooned, and paraded as the farce they are.
Unless your such a geek that you think touch screens make voting cool. then,
may the Farce be With You!
Then i'd buy it for sure!!!
(bit o' levity, eh?)
Forgoing mod pointage to respond.
No, the copyright infringer, when confined to digital distribution, never involves making a profit.
In cases where the GPL has been violated it almost always involves making a profit.
Slashdotters know where the slimeballs are.
tell me this isn't legal somehow? I just can't see how this is any different then any other use of a EULA, shrink wrap and all.
Please (wipes tear from eye) tell me why I can't do this?
thanks!~~
Because everyone gets it perfect the first time. I mean, why make the piano, didn't the harpsichord get it right THE FIRST TIME?
Didn't the get the magna carta get it right THE FIRST TIME? Isn't the consitiution just a sucking remix of it?
Shouldn't you just tell me to get off your lawn already? I wonder if Chaucer would really give two.. 'F'its about it anyway.
How is some one releasing a library under the LGPL and then another bloke using that library for another app different then the modern remix?
//ain't no different then dumb code - don't DL it!!
Your not upset about remixing, your upset about the general quality (at times). Trust me on this.
Volume 2 of that series is actually a favorite of mine... "when i'm falling" is excellent and North 1&2 i've even spun out at parties...
:))
Just a ++recommendation on that (or me too! if you prefer
I actually did learn something from your post, yes indeed!, and that as a cSound programmer who uses this stuff quite a bit. Still, it wouldn't go down the laymen's throat a'tall.. it's pretty complex for the average musician to begin with and i'm 'close enough'.
That said, my understanding of MP3's comes more from the biology of the human ear then it does the mathematics behind it, so cheers!
I only said that to get your attention, maybe a little cred. I doubt that most folks around here have even HEARD hiphop - although the radio has soaked you all in rap, for sure.
.
;)
_ hop (wikipedia, you shine tonight)
To quote the immortal KRS-One: Rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live.
I mean it, hip hop is barely a music format, it is more of a mindset that has NOTHIN' but NOTHIN' to do with the music you hear today. Really Really. Here is a underground tip for otherwise plaid slashdotters.. and an album i wish EVERYONE owned, which will prove the point: Aceyalone's Book Of Human Language
After you listen to that, let's have this discussion again. We can go over the Four Elements. Maybe over the still cooling body of Clear Channel, if we can arrange it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_elements_of_hip
this was too much, found it a few days ago:
e r.html
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/mp3s/fouri
You just can't make this stuff up! here's the text, reproduced, but as my friend said, it puts Weird Al to shame (sorry Al!), the song itself sounds really, really good! So, this is your Nerd Moment of Zen for the Week (for sure!):
Table 4.1: Properties of the Fourier Transform
(or, Fourier's Song)
Integrate your function times a complex exponential
It's really not so hard you can do it with your pencil
And when you're done with this calculation
You've got a brand new function - the Fourier Transformation
What a prism does to sunlight, what the ear does to sound
Fourier does to signals, it's the coolest trick around
Now filtering is easy, you don't need to convolve
All you do is multiply in order to solve.
From time into frequency - from frequency to time
Every operation in the time domain
Has a Fourier analog - that's what I claim
Think of a delay, a simple shift in time
It becomes a phase rotation - now that's truly sublime!
And to differentiate, here's a simple trick
Just multiply by J omega, ain't that slick?
Integration is the inverse, what you gonna do?
Divide instead of multiply - you can do it too.
From time into frequency - from frequency to time
Let's do some examples... consider a sine
It's mapped to a delta, in frequency - not time
Now take that same delta as a function of time
Mapped into frequency - of course - it's a sine!
Sine x on x is handy, let's call it a sinc.
Its Fourier Transform is simpler than you think.
You get a pulse that's shaped just like a top hat...
Squeeze the pulse thin, and the sinc grows fat.
Or make the pulse wide, and the sinc grows dense,
The uncertainty principle is just common sense.
short answer, nope, you'd get no extra info from that. But learning about fourier transform will help you understand that what you are calling "seperated" tracks has nothing to do the idea of seperating frequencies. In short, you'd have 5 seperate mp3's all summed together, with WORSE compression. It's just math man, read up on Fourier (cool stuff, really!) or just trust me. /not that you should ever "just trust me", there is alot of info out there on this //although the conclusion is pretty bulletproof this time
And to be clear, Fourier Transforms do just this - they take a complex sound (well, physical sciences use this ALL over the place, but sound will do as an example) and turn them into frequency "slices" so that they say, at time X, we have Frequencies A, B, C at strenghts 1, 2 and 3.
;) )
There are tradeoffs to this - but here's a neat tidbit - The concept of fourier analysis is exatly how your ears work this very instant - your inner ear has "hairs" that vibrate at different frequncies (look it up, its cool) and your mind "recomposes" the stimulus of which hairs are vibrating into a sound you think is unified.
To be honest, mp3 spring right up from biology, if you understand the way your ear works, it's almost a no-brainer (hindsight, that is
Actually, although it may not make sense at first, it's MUCH better to mix them all first. Why? Because you'd have to anyway! That is, if Track A has a frequency at 700 (a blowin sax) and Track B has a frequency of 701 (Jiving flute) but the flute is very soft (for that frame - a very short amount of time, so you can see it might happen alot as the instruments get louder and softer at different times together) then you'd be basically stripping out the 701. The kicker:
If they aren't mixed together, how would you know you can get rid of the flute for that instant? Now let's not get to specific, when it's all just frequencies, after the math is done, the point is that your best bet for choosing what to take out will occur if everything you want to play can be analyzed together. So nope, that's why they don't have that. Happy to explain this more if i didn't make sense..
They are facinating in how they work, but let me provide a quick laymen explanation:
.wav file with equivalent (for most humans -some one might disagree - i don't) quality.
.j.
First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.
Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:
1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)
Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have
2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?
This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a
Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)
this whole discussion, in avoiding that fact, makes my head hurt.
i read on it everyday.