The only difference between the pure sine and the piano is harmonics. If you couldn't hear harmonics you couldn't tell the difference between a guitar or a piano -- the only difference is the harmonics.
I was generalizing for the consumption of people who no relevant background, and should have been more specific. Harmonics are absolutely important, but not all of them. The challenge in perceptual coding is figuring out which harmonics are functionally relevant.
Also you are correct that Nyquist sampling is *not* sufficient for human perception of higher frequencies, as it introduces quantization and phasing errors if there aren't enough (or an integer number of) "samples per wave". It bugs me when people who ought to know better (Opus!!!) keep claiming this.
He clearly doesn't understand the first thing about the human ear or brain. The *bitrate* is 5% of the original CD, but the human-effective *datarate* is ~95%. That last ~5% of the signal is various harmonics, twitchy bits, and other stuff that the human ear is simply incapable of hearing, but in terms of actual spectral data it's pretty incompressible. Lossy audio compression makes the perfectly legitimate trade-off that you can completely skip that incompressible chunk of the audio signal that the human ear can't actually hear, and save bandwidth.
Modern psychoacoustic models take into account both the physical and mental limitations of the human body. A prime example is "masking", where a louder sound will completely overcome a quieter sound, and do so for a period *longer* than the loud sound. Think of the ear as having an AGC with a slow response: it has to adjust the "gain" for the louder sound and ends up missing the quiet bits before it, then has to adjust the gain back down before it can pick up the quiet bits after. Simple compression trick: toss the quiet bits cause you can't hear them anyway.
What's clear is that he's just fronting for the latest in a long line of "we're better at this than the entire rest of the world combined" snake-oil audio companies with a nifty little lock-in strategy. Just read the list of trademarks.....
He's looking for somewhere to put Windows 8. Normal toilets that sufficed for previous versions of Windows just aren't capable of handling Metro. God help you if you run across one of these new toilets and don't know where to "Start".....
I read "standard essential patents" as "you exist therefore you must pay our blackmail". That makes it blindingly clear that these patents utterly fail every possible test as far as non-obviousness, inventiveness, etc.
Showing at this festival were dozens of HD+ short films, not a DVcam in sight. The capstone of the festival was one of the (if not *the*) first showing of Toy Story in HD on a big screen. I could see pixels because it was only 1080p (and I got a late seat up close), but otherwise it was a *radically* new and infinitely superior experience. These days I *actively* avoid non-digital theatres because the physical intra-frame jitter on a film project is almost a guaranteed migraine.
I went to a very early digital cinema festival years ago, and in the round-table discussions all these people were focussing on how "sterile" digital looked, and moaning about how that "film look" was going to die a horrible ugly death, and the world as they knew it was ending. Everybody else was thrilled to death about how the image was actually sharp and consistent, you couldn't see the ugly film grain, colors were sharper, there was no crap stuck to every frame or spinning along down one side, you didn't have frames jumping all over the screen (60ft screen avg vertical jitter is +- 8 inches per frame!), etc etc etc.
Guess what? Digital won, end of story.
The "film purists" will always find something to complain about, while the rest of the world moves on.
Sorry, but when Gema is using the courts to force Google into a "licensing" agreement that they've defined on their own, knowing that what the courts have mandated is outright impossible, that's called "UNILATERAL".
they're trying to avoid getting into trouble in the first place.
No, they're looking to avoid getting into the kind of trouble they a) comprehend and b) actually care about. It's all the other kinds of trouble that are wreaking havoc with this country and planet right now.
I was generally of the position a few minutes ago that it's generally a bad idea to have the government step into the middle of what *should* be a private-to-private issue ("rights holder" vs "infringer"). However, in thinking about it I think there's actually a chance for the government to solve the problem that is the DMCA. Because the courts are all over the map in how the deal with these things, a DMCA takedown letter is basically a completely free shotgun approach that can be taken by an aggressive "rights holder", and as such they have things radically tilted their direction because it's not feasible or safe to fight bogus claims. However, if a single agency (with strong court oversight of course, assuming that's written in to OPEN somewhere but not looking forward to reading legistlatese that's comparable to patentese) has a set of rules they follow, and the shotgun approach used with the DMCA is forcibly redirected through it, there's a chance to reign in the probably millions of DMCA letters sent down to the 1000's that are legitimate. There's a (TBD) fee associated with filing a complaint, which should discourage the shogtun approach compared to DMCA takedowns, not sure if there are strong enough sanctions for filing invalid claims to deal with the RIAA and such who have deep enough pockets to shotgun entire lawsuits.
Wow, thanks for linking that!!! Looks like we might actually be able to "upgrade" to an OS that's not about to have a bullet put in it, without breaking our very stressed bank;-)
Of course, that doesn't hold true for Office, as there's no way I'd subject our staff to the latest version given the unanimous horrible things I've heard about it. OpenOffice FTW...
We have new hardware to install in my church's office. The old computers run XP, purchased as charity licenses. The new hardware came with Vista (bleck!), and I was hoping we could install Windows 7 instead. However, it seems that Microsoft decided to do away with charity licenses. That means that we'd be stuck spending over $400 for a 3-pack of licenses for machines that totaled $750 in hardware. That's not even remotely going to happen. As a result, we're going to be shoe-horning XP back onto the *new* machines, and I'll be installing an Ubuntu dual-boot on them to see if there's any way to get the staff to consider moving to it. Go-go-gadget greed, Microsoft!
I luckily managed to completely miss the "bad old days" of crazy-expensive boards, though it's still not "cheap". So far I've managed to get by without the really quick turn times, but I've got a deadline coming up here that may change that.
For most of my boards though the turn time isn't critical, and many of them are experimental anyway. I can pipeline the wait for PCBs with other stuff, and all is well. However, I end up using the DorkbotPDX group PCB order for most everything, because it's cheap and scalable ($5/sqin for 3 copies, period). I recently placed an order for a bunch of tiny boards, it came to something like $6;-)
Consider that most of the individual pieces of the ISS actually went into orbit *inside* the shuttle bay.... So the answer is yes: the Shuttle is larger than you thought, and the ISS is smaller than you thought;-)
Electron radius (wikipedia): 10^-22 meters Article's claim of error-from-round: 10^-29 meters Relative error: 10^7, or 0.1 parts per million
"Radius of solar system" randomly chosen as Eris's avg orbit fo 68AU (wikipedia): 1.017 * 10^13 meters Relative error scaled to size of solar system: ~1.017 * 10^6 meters, or ~1017km
Now I don't know about you, but my hair isn't exactly 1000km thick, eh?
Avg thickness of human hair (answers.com): 0.1mm, or 10^-4 meters Ratio by which Science Daily apparently cannot count: 10^10
It amazes me that they think this was an effective use of over $250 million dollars. If they had simply set up a proper crowd-sourcing system including actual speed tests plus enough marketing to get people to help fill it in, we would have ended up with actually useful data. Hell, they could have given a $3-5 reward to every single residential end-point in the entire US for providing info and still come in radically under that budget. And honestly, how much time does it take to go to comcast.com or twtelecom.com and look at their plans for a given region to at least get some basic sanity checks on this data??
This does NOT mean health care, new cars, TV's, college education, Nintendo 3DS's/Sony NGP or pizza.
That's quite the "non-elitist" viewpoint you have there, that equates a gaming console with basic healthcare. While I generally agree with almost all of your points, this single claim makes you a raving lunatic in the eyes of just about everybody else on the planet.
Dunno if you've ever actually read any MPEG specifications (I have), but the "open" standards process is not the best deal on the planet. Remember 802.11 "Draft N" and it's 5-year lifespan? That was a result of the standards process being held hostage by every vendor wanting to include their own pet features and patents. Constructing a standard around all those corporate filibusters took far too long, and the resulting standard is bloated and insanely complex. MPEG-4 and related (H.264 such) are stupidly huge standards that support all sorts of arcane features that nobody will ever use except as a) a marketing slide, and b) a patent to toss into the ring.
As per your claim that "anyone" can contribute to the MPEG standards, have you looked at the list of people involved? Every one of them comes from a major vendor or "research" company (or their university proxies) and is paying stupid sums of money to join and attend (meets move all over the planet). The reality is that if I had an idea I wanted to propose for an MPEG standard, hell will freeze over long before I even get a hearing let alone add the feature. Google is far more likely to pay attention to their (codec-savvy) users' comments.
I'll take unencumbered codecs with a single primary party keeping control over the standard every time.
Given the fact that these days absolutely anything can be called "art", I think it's entirely fair to say that absolutely everybody is fully qualified as an "art critic".
If this moron can call his publicity stunt "art", then I feel fully justified in critiquing it as "complete idiocy". More importantly, as per above, nobody can dispute my opinion (not fact!) as invalid in any way.
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The only difference between the pure sine and the piano is harmonics. If you couldn't hear harmonics you couldn't tell the difference between a guitar or a piano -- the only difference is the harmonics.
I was generalizing for the consumption of people who no relevant background, and should have been more specific. Harmonics are absolutely important, but not all of them. The challenge in perceptual coding is figuring out which harmonics are functionally relevant.
Also you are correct that Nyquist sampling is *not* sufficient for human perception of higher frequencies, as it introduces quantization and phasing errors if there aren't enough (or an integer number of) "samples per wave". It bugs me when people who ought to know better (Opus!!!) keep claiming this.
...I think I figured it out: he's a long-haul rocker, thus his hearing is pretty much shot anyway. His ears' gain only goes to 7.
(oh, and I mistyped above, should read "adjust the gain back down")
Modern psychoacoustic models take into account both the physical and mental limitations of the human body. A prime example is "masking", where a louder sound will completely overcome a quieter sound, and do so for a period *longer* than the loud sound. Think of the ear as having an AGC with a slow response: it has to adjust the "gain" for the louder sound and ends up missing the quiet bits before it, then has to adjust the gain back down before it can pick up the quiet bits after. Simple compression trick: toss the quiet bits cause you can't hear them anyway.
What's clear is that he's just fronting for the latest in a long line of "we're better at this than the entire rest of the world combined" snake-oil audio companies with a nifty little lock-in strategy. Just read the list of trademarks.....
He's looking for somewhere to put Windows 8. Normal toilets that sufficed for previous versions of Windows just aren't capable of handling Metro. God help you if you run across one of these new toilets and don't know where to "Start".....
I read "standard essential patents" as "you exist therefore you must pay our blackmail". That makes it blindingly clear that these patents utterly fail every possible test as far as non-obviousness, inventiveness, etc.
Maybe Australians will see their Fair Use rights expanded in a time when it's in fashion to expand copyright protections.
After spraying my keyboard with Pepsi, I honestly couldn't stop laughing....
Good luck with that.
Showing at this festival were dozens of HD+ short films, not a DVcam in sight. The capstone of the festival was one of the (if not *the*) first showing of Toy Story in HD on a big screen. I could see pixels because it was only 1080p (and I got a late seat up close), but otherwise it was a *radically* new and infinitely superior experience. These days I *actively* avoid non-digital theatres because the physical intra-frame jitter on a film project is almost a guaranteed migraine.
I went to a very early digital cinema festival years ago, and in the round-table discussions all these people were focussing on how "sterile" digital looked, and moaning about how that "film look" was going to die a horrible ugly death, and the world as they knew it was ending. Everybody else was thrilled to death about how the image was actually sharp and consistent, you couldn't see the ugly film grain, colors were sharper, there was no crap stuck to every frame or spinning along down one side, you didn't have frames jumping all over the screen (60ft screen avg vertical jitter is +- 8 inches per frame!), etc etc etc.
Guess what? Digital won, end of story.
The "film purists" will always find something to complain about, while the rest of the world moves on.
Sorry, but when Gema is using the courts to force Google into a "licensing" agreement that they've defined on their own, knowing that what the courts have mandated is outright impossible, that's called "UNILATERAL".
they're trying to avoid getting into trouble in the first place.
No, they're looking to avoid getting into the kind of trouble they a) comprehend and b) actually care about. It's all the other kinds of trouble that are wreaking havoc with this country and planet right now.
I was generally of the position a few minutes ago that it's generally a bad idea to have the government step into the middle of what *should* be a private-to-private issue ("rights holder" vs "infringer"). However, in thinking about it I think there's actually a chance for the government to solve the problem that is the DMCA. Because the courts are all over the map in how the deal with these things, a DMCA takedown letter is basically a completely free shotgun approach that can be taken by an aggressive "rights holder", and as such they have things radically tilted their direction because it's not feasible or safe to fight bogus claims. However, if a single agency (with strong court oversight of course, assuming that's written in to OPEN somewhere but not looking forward to reading legistlatese that's comparable to patentese) has a set of rules they follow, and the shotgun approach used with the DMCA is forcibly redirected through it, there's a chance to reign in the probably millions of DMCA letters sent down to the 1000's that are legitimate. There's a (TBD) fee associated with filing a complaint, which should discourage the shogtun approach compared to DMCA takedowns, not sure if there are strong enough sanctions for filing invalid claims to deal with the RIAA and such who have deep enough pockets to shotgun entire lawsuits.
My alternate method is Linux...
Wow, thanks for linking that!!! Looks like we might actually be able to "upgrade" to an OS that's not about to have a bullet put in it, without breaking our very stressed bank ;-)
Of course, that doesn't hold true for Office, as there's no way I'd subject our staff to the latest version given the unanimous horrible things I've heard about it. OpenOffice FTW...
We have new hardware to install in my church's office. The old computers run XP, purchased as charity licenses. The new hardware came with Vista (bleck!), and I was hoping we could install Windows 7 instead. However, it seems that Microsoft decided to do away with charity licenses. That means that we'd be stuck spending over $400 for a 3-pack of licenses for machines that totaled $750 in hardware. That's not even remotely going to happen. As a result, we're going to be shoe-horning XP back onto the *new* machines, and I'll be installing an Ubuntu dual-boot on them to see if there's any way to get the staff to consider moving to it. Go-go-gadget greed, Microsoft!
I luckily managed to completely miss the "bad old days" of crazy-expensive boards, though it's still not "cheap". So far I've managed to get by without the really quick turn times, but I've got a deadline coming up here that may change that.
For most of my boards though the turn time isn't critical, and many of them are experimental anyway. I can pipeline the wait for PCBs with other stuff, and all is well. However, I end up using the DorkbotPDX group PCB order for most everything, because it's cheap and scalable ($5/sqin for 3 copies, period). I recently placed an order for a bunch of tiny boards, it came to something like $6 ;-)
Consider that most of the individual pieces of the ISS actually went into orbit *inside* the shuttle bay.... So the answer is yes: the Shuttle is larger than you thought, and the ISS is smaller than you thought ;-)
And here I was thinking that Texans had a spine. Silly me.
The numbers in the article don't work for me.....
Electron radius (wikipedia): 10^-22 meters
Article's claim of error-from-round: 10^-29 meters
Relative error: 10^7, or 0.1 parts per million
"Radius of solar system" randomly chosen as Eris's avg orbit fo 68AU (wikipedia): 1.017 * 10^13 meters
Relative error scaled to size of solar system: ~1.017 * 10^6 meters, or ~1017km
Now I don't know about you, but my hair isn't exactly 1000km thick, eh?
Avg thickness of human hair (answers.com): 0.1mm, or 10^-4 meters
Ratio by which Science Daily apparently cannot count: 10^10
Let me know when you have something to measure in terabecquerels.... ;-)
at the shoulder. Extra points for getting some collarbone as well.
It amazes me that they think this was an effective use of over $250 million dollars. If they had simply set up a proper crowd-sourcing system including actual speed tests plus enough marketing to get people to help fill it in, we would have ended up with actually useful data. Hell, they could have given a $3-5 reward to every single residential end-point in the entire US for providing info and still come in radically under that budget. And honestly, how much time does it take to go to comcast.com or twtelecom.com and look at their plans for a given region to at least get some basic sanity checks on this data??
Dell sells support? Really? Have you ever actually dealt with Dell support at anything other than the corporate level?
"Support": I do not think it means what you think it means.
This does NOT mean health care, new cars, TV's, college education, Nintendo 3DS's/Sony NGP or pizza.
That's quite the "non-elitist" viewpoint you have there, that equates a gaming console with basic healthcare. While I generally agree with almost all of your points, this single claim makes you a raving lunatic in the eyes of just about everybody else on the planet.
Dunno if you've ever actually read any MPEG specifications (I have), but the "open" standards process is not the best deal on the planet. Remember 802.11 "Draft N" and it's 5-year lifespan? That was a result of the standards process being held hostage by every vendor wanting to include their own pet features and patents. Constructing a standard around all those corporate filibusters took far too long, and the resulting standard is bloated and insanely complex. MPEG-4 and related (H.264 such) are stupidly huge standards that support all sorts of arcane features that nobody will ever use except as a) a marketing slide, and b) a patent to toss into the ring.
As per your claim that "anyone" can contribute to the MPEG standards, have you looked at the list of people involved? Every one of them comes from a major vendor or "research" company (or their university proxies) and is paying stupid sums of money to join and attend (meets move all over the planet). The reality is that if I had an idea I wanted to propose for an MPEG standard, hell will freeze over long before I even get a hearing let alone add the feature. Google is far more likely to pay attention to their (codec-savvy) users' comments.
I'll take unencumbered codecs with a single primary party keeping control over the standard every time.
Given the fact that these days absolutely anything can be called "art", I think it's entirely fair to say that absolutely everybody is fully qualified as an "art critic".
If this moron can call his publicity stunt "art", then I feel fully justified in critiquing it as "complete idiocy". More importantly, as per above, nobody can dispute my opinion (not fact!) as invalid in any way.