It's been a few years now that amateur musicians could produce quality recordings at home with only a few thousand dollars worth of gear -- you only need to go to a traditional studio anymore to get into the real upper echelon of production value. It is nice to see movement in the same direction in cinema. Even if the entire entertainment industry insists on clinging desperately to 50-year-old ideas about copyright, despite the inevitable consequence of that doomed ideology, it's nice to know that we can lose them all and still not lose cinema and music as artistic media.
Of course you could, theoretically, spin records at a faster speed and then pitch them down in software if you want -- but if you are going to transfer a record to digital, it is usually a better plan to record them at a slower speed and then pitch them up in software, as you'll have more samples available for each second of audio. Software like Audacity even includes processing presets for doing pitch manipulation among standard record speeds -- this is why the 33/45 turntable that Thinkgeek offers, for example, is marketed as being capable of transferring 78rpm records, even though it is not capable of playing them in real time.
Certainly, some very well-made pressings can sound outstanding, even better than digital in a few cases. But the poorer signal-to-noise ratio, essentially unavoidable surface wear, and the distortion introduced by the medium, on balance, make digital a better choice when the highest quality audio is needed. One thing records do have going for them is that they tend to be mastered, counterintuitively, with a wider dynamic range than contemporary CDs. Of course, this is a product of human decisions, not the media, and the optimal solution to this is simply to abandon the current practice of excessive compression and limiting on CDs, as they offer a greater potential for dynamic range than records.
The music industry, hoping to find another revenue source that doesn't easily lend itself to illegal downloads, has happily jumped on the bandwagon.
I am sure the fact that records wear out with repeated plays also contributed to their excitement over this trend. But hey, records are something I can't make at home. I would be more than happy to see the music industry shrink away to one that only manufactures records. At the moment they seem to manufacture mostly ill will.
p>Whatever they come up with, in the end, I have only one wish for the USB3 hardware developers: that they be made to plug 1000 of them in upside down in the dark.
No, the comparison is not really apt, as the PortalPlayer system includes a firmware with those codecs built in. Please refer to the PP5022 Product Briefing for details. I'm not really claiming one way or another on the suit's merits, as I am not a lawyer, but OP seemed to be having some difficulty accessing the article.
Oh, I wish I'd copied the text while it was still mysterious red. Anyway, he provides screenshots, model numbers, and so forth. There's a "DRM reset" tool that Netflix recommended that they say will nuke anything from other vendors. It's clear that his digital restrictions keystore became corrupted somehow, and Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft all directed him to each other. In the end he wonders why he bothered paying at all, noting that he could obtain higher-resolution rips for less money using bittorrent.
Well, the thrust of the suit is that they are building Ipods using a third-party decoder chip, which has WMA support already, and then they are actively disabling it. It's not a matter of failing to implement the competitor's file format; the argument is that they are buying off-the-shelf hardware and disabling formats they wish to kill.
Please. Do NOT call DVD "classic DVD", as though HD-DVD is in some way related to DVD. The HD-DVD format has a couple of things in common with DVD (e.g., circular, mostly polycarbonate), but your choice of phrase makes about as much sense as calling a CD an "HD-LP record".
It might work (I am not sure if the heat requirements for melting the lamp contents pose a risk to the CFL), but of course this requires modifying or replacing the existing unit, to make room for a transformer to power the CFL.
Most of the lighting in my home is provided by compact fluorescent lamps; I save a lot on energy and the light is perfectly adequate. However, as you note, there are plenty of legitimate uses for incandescent bulbs that are not filled adequately by CFLs. While the spectra of CFLs (or a later technology) might one day improve to the point that they can replace incandescent lights for photography, there are a few areas in which they'll never work: lamps for reptiles, lava lamps, and so forth. In these cases we use incandescent bulbs primarily for the heat they radiate and only secondarily as a source of illumination.
Hmmm... compilations...
Track list encompassing exactly the finest output of Led Zeppelin... check
Mastered so hot it sounds atrocious... check
SOMEONE RING UP ATLANTIC. LED ZEPPELIN HAS BEEN PIRATED.
Valve have indicated that they intend to follow it up with something -- expansion maps were one obvious possibility they mentioned, but multiplayer was another... might want to keep an eye on that.
Would you really want to play much more of those puzzles in a single-player campaign? Personally, I thought Portal was of an excellent length -- and the writing, sound design, etc. probably benefited a great deal from the lack of pressure to produce a 50-hour epic in this case. Between the advanced maps and the challenge maps you can certainly get quite a few more sessions out of it, too.
Most of the companion cube plushes are gone, sadly -- but the site says there are a few left if you want to make a donation to Child's Play.
That's exactly what deletion does, by the way -- it puts articles into cold storage, all revisions easily restored by any administrator using the web interface. The only way an article may be permanently removed is by the use of "oversight", which requires substantially greater system access than that held by the administrators closing deletions.
Just as a library's main challenge is not finding sufficient bulk storage for books, Wikipedia's main challenge is not one of finding computing resources to support all possible articles. It is a problem of organization and of prioritizing which articles are most important. It is a problem of allocating limited human resources in the most effective way possible. If you genuinely believe that expanding coverage of individual Pokemon species is of a higher priority than expanding the current coverage of nonwestern cultures, then I do not believe we will ever come to an agreement because our priorities are fundamentally incompatible.
The "notability hammer" is not some kind of unjustified attack by a biased mob; it's a standard by which Wikipedia eliminates content that is not appropriate for an encyclopedia. Try not to think of Wikipedia as "the wiki for all stuff". It's not a general dumping ground for all human knowledge. There are other sites (some Wikimedia projects, and some not) that serve other goals better.
Your argument does not make sense. Piracy is every bit as effective as a boycott in harming the RIAA labels. If anything, engaging in piracy has a small chance of hurting the labels even more than a mere boycott, because someone else might grab it out of your shares.
As music lovers we should be committed to harming the RIAA labels as much and as quickly as possible. If we can do that while thoughtlessly accumulating hundreds of terabytes of free music, then I can't say the boycott is all that appealing an option.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a few years now that amateur musicians could produce quality recordings at home with only a few thousand dollars worth of gear -- you only need to go to a traditional studio anymore to get into the real upper echelon of production value. It is nice to see movement in the same direction in cinema. Even if the entire entertainment industry insists on clinging desperately to 50-year-old ideas about copyright, despite the inevitable consequence of that doomed ideology, it's nice to know that we can lose them all and still not lose cinema and music as artistic media.
Oh, that's true. You would have to defeat the EQ and then apply that in software as well. In the case of 78's you'd have to defeat it anyway.
Of course you could, theoretically, spin records at a faster speed and then pitch them down in software if you want -- but if you are going to transfer a record to digital, it is usually a better plan to record them at a slower speed and then pitch them up in software, as you'll have more samples available for each second of audio. Software like Audacity even includes processing presets for doing pitch manipulation among standard record speeds -- this is why the 33/45 turntable that Thinkgeek offers, for example, is marketed as being capable of transferring 78rpm records, even though it is not capable of playing them in real time.
Certainly, some very well-made pressings can sound outstanding, even better than digital in a few cases. But the poorer signal-to-noise ratio, essentially unavoidable surface wear, and the distortion introduced by the medium, on balance, make digital a better choice when the highest quality audio is needed. One thing records do have going for them is that they tend to be mastered, counterintuitively, with a wider dynamic range than contemporary CDs. Of course, this is a product of human decisions, not the media, and the optimal solution to this is simply to abandon the current practice of excessive compression and limiting on CDs, as they offer a greater potential for dynamic range than records.
I am sure the fact that records wear out with repeated plays also contributed to their excitement over this trend. But hey, records are something I can't make at home. I would be more than happy to see the music industry shrink away to one that only manufactures records. At the moment they seem to manufacture mostly ill will.
hahaha mods need to RTFA
Warning! There is GOATSE at the end of the article!!
p>Whatever they come up with, in the end, I have only one wish for the USB3 hardware developers: that they be made to plug 1000 of them in upside down in the dark.
No, the comparison is not really apt, as the PortalPlayer system includes a firmware with those codecs built in. Please refer to the PP5022 Product Briefing for details. I'm not really claiming one way or another on the suit's merits, as I am not a lawyer, but OP seemed to be having some difficulty accessing the article.
Oh, I wish I'd copied the text while it was still mysterious red. Anyway, he provides screenshots, model numbers, and so forth. There's a "DRM reset" tool that Netflix recommended that they say will nuke anything from other vendors. It's clear that his digital restrictions keystore became corrupted somehow, and Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft all directed him to each other. In the end he wonders why he bothered paying at all, noting that he could obtain higher-resolution rips for less money using bittorrent.
Well, the thrust of the suit is that they are building Ipods using a third-party decoder chip, which has WMA support already, and then they are actively disabling it. It's not a matter of failing to implement the competitor's file format; the argument is that they are buying off-the-shelf hardware and disabling formats they wish to kill.
Killing you and giving you good advice aren't mutually exclusive.
Please. Do NOT call DVD "classic DVD", as though HD-DVD is in some way related to DVD. The HD-DVD format has a couple of things in common with DVD (e.g., circular, mostly polycarbonate), but your choice of phrase makes about as much sense as calling a CD an "HD-LP record".
It might work (I am not sure if the heat requirements for melting the lamp contents pose a risk to the CFL), but of course this requires modifying or replacing the existing unit, to make room for a transformer to power the CFL.
I definitely prefer "Golf Golf Golf Revolution"
Most of the lighting in my home is provided by compact fluorescent lamps; I save a lot on energy and the light is perfectly adequate. However, as you note, there are plenty of legitimate uses for incandescent bulbs that are not filled adequately by CFLs. While the spectra of CFLs (or a later technology) might one day improve to the point that they can replace incandescent lights for photography, there are a few areas in which they'll never work: lamps for reptiles, lava lamps, and so forth. In these cases we use incandescent bulbs primarily for the heat they radiate and only secondarily as a source of illumination.
Hmmm... compilations... Track list encompassing exactly the finest output of Led Zeppelin... check Mastered so hot it sounds atrocious... check SOMEONE RING UP ATLANTIC. LED ZEPPELIN HAS BEEN PIRATED.
Valve have indicated that they intend to follow it up with something -- expansion maps were one obvious possibility they mentioned, but multiplayer was another... might want to keep an eye on that.
Would you really want to play much more of those puzzles in a single-player campaign? Personally, I thought Portal was of an excellent length -- and the writing, sound design, etc. probably benefited a great deal from the lack of pressure to produce a 50-hour epic in this case. Between the advanced maps and the challenge maps you can certainly get quite a few more sessions out of it, too.
Most of the companion cube plushes are gone, sadly -- but the site says there are a few left if you want to make a donation to Child's Play.
My kingdom for a mod point.
Actually, it's been a dead heat between Linux and OS X for close to two years now.
That's exactly what deletion does, by the way -- it puts articles into cold storage, all revisions easily restored by any administrator using the web interface. The only way an article may be permanently removed is by the use of "oversight", which requires substantially greater system access than that held by the administrators closing deletions.
Just as a library's main challenge is not finding sufficient bulk storage for books, Wikipedia's main challenge is not one of finding computing resources to support all possible articles. It is a problem of organization and of prioritizing which articles are most important. It is a problem of allocating limited human resources in the most effective way possible. If you genuinely believe that expanding coverage of individual Pokemon species is of a higher priority than expanding the current coverage of nonwestern cultures, then I do not believe we will ever come to an agreement because our priorities are fundamentally incompatible.
The "notability hammer" is not some kind of unjustified attack by a biased mob; it's a standard by which Wikipedia eliminates content that is not appropriate for an encyclopedia . Try not to think of Wikipedia as "the wiki for all stuff". It's not a general dumping ground for all human knowledge. There are other sites (some Wikimedia projects, and some not) that serve other goals better.
Your argument does not make sense. Piracy is every bit as effective as a boycott in harming the RIAA labels. If anything, engaging in piracy has a small chance of hurting the labels even more than a mere boycott, because someone else might grab it out of your shares.
As music lovers we should be committed to harming the RIAA labels as much and as quickly as possible. If we can do that while thoughtlessly accumulating hundreds of terabytes of free music, then I can't say the boycott is all that appealing an option.