a vinyl album will reproduce higher frequencies than CD, which cuts out around 22 KHz, which they say is above human hearing.
Correct. The figure given is the upper limit of human hearing is 20KHz, and for a middle-aged male nearer 15kHz
Except for people with asthma, who top out around 30 KHz. Not sure what the deal is with Asthma giving you better hearing.
I've never heared of that, and a quick google turns up nothing on it. To be frank, it sounds daft. I get asthma sometimes and it does nothing for my hearing. Can you supply a reference for this remarkable claim?
dB refers to (think of it as signal strength or just loudness), rather than resolution.
Yes, and dynamic range of Db (what I was using) refers to the ratio between the loudest and the softest sound that can be recorded at the same time on the same medium. It is a measure of resolution. Cds outclass vinyl here. What's more, vinyl gets worse over time and with use. Cds don't.
Film is made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Atoms are not infinitely small. Film therefor has finite resolution. You should know this.
So which is higher? You cannot assume that the analogue sytem has higher resolution For instance, Cds store music to a greater level of detail than vinyl LPs do, due to limitations of the processes used to record music as wobbles in the grooves in the vinly. (60 Db dynamic range on vinyl, 96 dB on a CD).
Most desktop applications don't need to be optimised. Those that do follow the 80-20 rule. They get 80% of the benefit from optimising 20% of the code. Often the ratio is more extreme. Most of the code doesn't need to be optimised.
When optimising, you won't get much benefit from jerking around with changing "if (!ptr)" to "if (ptr==NULL)". What you need is a whole different approach to the problem. e.g. Searching a list with a for loop? Is the list large and searching more common than insertion? Then it would make sense to sort the list first and use a binary search.
In conclusion: stupid question, especially from a 10-year coder.
And there I was thinking that they did the M&Ms thing because they had huge, coke-addled egos, were on a petty power trip, and liked to jerk people around.
So by that logic, you can write OO code in machine language. Which you can't.
Of course you can. You just code machine code similar to that which would be generated by the equivalent OO-style C++ program:)
Machine language makes OO hard to do, C#/Java et all make it hard not to do, but it can be done - just make everything static methods of the same objects and voila - procedural programming.
Firefox hangs up its towel after a long hard battle.
This is insightful? Firefox is free, open source software. How on earth can it "hang up its towel"? It's not like if the owner stops supporting it that it goes away.
The worst case scenario is that certain big companies stop funding mozilla development, but a few enthusiasts keep at it, and progress slows. And around your step 6 or 7, the mozilla/firefox development very rapidly starts up again from where it left off.
Once an open-source product like this exists, the cat is out of the bag, the marketspace is comoditised and things will not go back to how they were before. Unless all copies of the source somehow go missing.
Bandwidth grows so much faster than CPU speed that you'll spend more time unflacing your music than you save on the bandwidth
If you're listening to music, you only need to decode one second's worth of audio per second. I don't know FLAC well, but I found that with MP3, past a (fairly low) threshhold of PC CPU power, you don't notice this performance hit at all.
CPU speed doesn't have to grow faster, it just has to exceed the threshhold.
compression on ppp links... no-one does that with DSL/cable because it's not worth it in terms of the amount of CPU you have to use?
Don't they? I was under the impression that it was built into the router-to-router protocol these days. I could be wrong here.
Compression will be VERY undesirable in the future.
Maybe you mean that lossy compression will be undesirable. What could be undesirable about lossless compression? Does.zip decrease the quality if the files in it? No. Therefor FLAC may be a winner for audio files.
In fact, Oracle and MS SQL are not entirely compliant with SQL 92 as they have their own extensions.
That's what I said, as in "This is a big step away from that. Much like the features you'd find in Oracle or MS SQL."
Perhaps I should have drool-proofed it and written "This is a big step away from standardisation. It is reminicent of the features you'd find in Oracle or MS SQL that lead one down the proprietary path."
One of the most exciting features of 8.0 is plperl, their Perl-based server side language
I'm not convinced. SQL is supposed to a standard, so you can move from one database server to another with not much effort. This is a big step away from that. Much like the features you'd find in Oracle or MS SQL.
Music is art. It is not objective. It is not rational. It is not definable. It is not quantifiable.
I'd like to see proof of that, because I've a sneaking suspicion that it might not be so. For "good art", you're talking about the preferences of human beings. Those preferences are shaped by fixed forces - factors that have been selected for over the last 100 000 years or so, and the preferences are expressed in a definiable physical system, the brain. "unquantifiable" and "not definable" as opposed to "has not been quantified" and "to complex for us to define at present" are strong terms, and there's no proof that it is like that.
For hits as opposed to art, even better, you're not trying to predict the actions of a single human being, merely those of most a large crowd of them.
I listened to punk rock for decades. In the 80s songs by the bands All and 7 Seconds would never have been recognized by any system as being hits. But fast-forward a decade and suddenly artists like Blink 182 and Greenday ARE having hits using the same formula.
So such a system, when fed a lot of 80s hits as training data, and a new punk song as input, will conclude that it has no hit potential. But put in hits of the 90s, and it should match. That's basically "sounds like what already sells", which is so simple that even a record company exec can do it.
Basically, this system will stagnate the music industry as it will lock it into a very narrow form of music and it will not be allowed to grow. People will get even more bored which will lead to decreases sales.
Chart music already = narrow and boring, existing styles. I suspect that this has already been happening for a while, and explains why new musical styles have to gaina an "undergrownd" fanbase before they "go mainstream". This software would lock this trend in even more (you get what you ask for), assuming that everyone used it. If not, small labels stand to make the occasional killing when a breakthrough happens (e.g. sub pop).
It would help sales in the short term, but hinder them in the long term. I'm actually for it. Anything that helps hasten the complete irrelevance of the mass-market lowest-common denominator music charts must be good. Maybe I'm too old, but they don't affect me any more at all. We've got better new toys like MP3, inernet radio, cds from amazon, podcasts, etc.
Absolutely. Unions have campained long and hard for things like a legal upper limit to working hours, minimum wages, occupational health and safety standards, the right not to be fired for being sick, etc, etc, etc. All of these are a net drain on the economy.
"the economy" is not the be-all and end-all. Especially when we say "a net drain on the economy" we might as well say "a net drain on a few people who are rich already".
Science is, loosely speaking, the study of the observable universe
..and the unobservable universe is not something that one can meaningfully talk about, since you can't ever measure anything about it, directly or indirectly, by definitionn
Not to mention a loose sense of "all". No amount of science will tell us what our aims ought to be in life, or about social values, or morality. Science can tell us about the consequences of our actions, but not which of those consequences we should prefer.
As a word choice, it seemed to me to sum up that they had been around a long time, had withstood many tests, and were highly regarded by serious students of the respective fields, or rather are cornerstones of those fields.
In relation to those who lament the world's lack of knowledge of scripture and failure to venerate a god of some sort.
As another poster on this thread mentioned, no amount of studying scripures of the one true way (take your pick) and veneration of the one true god/pantheon (again, take your pick of faiths), would have saved any of the 150 000 people who died from a tsunami. Yet a few million dollars worth of monitoring technology would have saved a significant fraction of them.
What testable predictions about the observable universe result from this assumption? If there are none, you must entertain the posiblity that your statement has no meaning.
That's a hasty conclusion, and a problematic one.
It's problematic that an untestable statement might be meaningless? That's what I said. So are you saying that all untestable statements are meaningful? Bosh.
What has striken me most the last few years, is the arrogance... that Science will Have All The Answers. Eventually we will comprehend everything
Here's the thing: no other method comes anywhere close to the scientific one for generating real knowledge about the observable universe. Science keeps on generating better understanding, so either the universe is infinitely complex, in which case we'll never stop generting better science; or we'll eventually run out of steam due to our admittedly tiny minds - I doubt this one since we already so most of our science using mind-tools like oh, books, computers, etc to help us understand it; or we will eventually know it all. In a loose sense of "know". Much of the world doesn't know the venerable physics of Einstein and Heisenberg very well; and even more sadly, many deny the even more venerable biology of Darwin.
You often hear people come with arguments like 'but God can't exist' or 'we don't need God to explain the universe'. Sure, if you think that man can eventually comprehend everything there is to know about the universe, then you can make those claims.
So either we can know all, or we need God to explain it? false dichotomy.
Religion/faith is all about the step after that.
A totally meaningless sentence.
I personally do... have faith that there is a God (paraphrase).
What testable predictions about the observable universe result from this assumption? If there are none, you must entertain the posiblity that your statement has no meaning.
"Mono basic (mbas) is a CIL compiler for the VisualBasic.NET language, an extended version of Visual Basic. It's based on the MCS compiler and still in heavy development, though many language features are already supported."
Mono basic will be based on VB.NET, not awful old VB. Mono basic will actually be rather compatible with MS VB.NET in language and class library. Mono basic will be able to take advantage of code written in or for Mono/C#, and any other languages that get ported to the mono platform.
So what does this project have going for it over mono basic? OK, so right now it's a bit further down the road than mono basic, but will it really maintain that lead? I think Mono has more weight behind it. e.g. novell.
Microsoft v1.0 products don't always have to make money. They are often aimed at gaining market share, leveraging related product areas where Microsoft is already dominant, learning what the customers really want, and generally harassing the competition as a prelude to crushing them with a version 2 or 3 product.
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a vinyl album will reproduce higher frequencies than CD, which cuts out around 22 KHz, which they say is above human hearing.
Correct. The figure given is the upper limit of human hearing is 20KHz, and for a middle-aged male nearer 15kHz
Except for people with asthma, who top out around 30 KHz. Not sure what the deal is with Asthma giving you better hearing.
I've never heared of that, and a quick google turns up nothing on it. To be frank, it sounds daft. I get asthma sometimes and it does nothing for my hearing. Can you supply a reference for this remarkable claim?
dB refers to (think of it as signal strength or just loudness), rather than resolution.
Yes, and dynamic range of Db (what I was using) refers to the ratio between the loudest and the softest sound that can be recorded at the same time on the same medium. It is a measure of resolution. Cds outclass vinyl here. What's more, vinyl gets worse over time and with use. Cds don't.
So exactly what part of my post was not true?
film ... have infinite resolution
Film is made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Atoms are not infinitely small. Film therefor has finite resolution. You should know this.
So which is higher? You cannot assume that the analogue sytem has higher resolution
For instance, Cds store music to a greater level of detail than vinyl LPs do, due to limitations of the processes used to record music as wobbles in the grooves in the vinly. (60 Db dynamic range on vinyl, 96 dB on a CD).
what must be hand optimized?"
Most desktop applications don't need to be optimised.
Those that do follow the 80-20 rule. They get 80% of the benefit from optimising 20% of the code. Often the ratio is more extreme. Most of the code doesn't need to be optimised.
When optimising, you won't get much benefit from jerking around with changing "if (!ptr)" to "if (ptr==NULL)". What you need is a whole different approach to the problem. e.g. Searching a list with a for loop? Is the list large and searching more common than insertion? Then it would make sense to sort the list first and use a binary search.
In conclusion: stupid question, especially from a 10-year coder.
And there I was thinking that they did the M&Ms thing because they had huge, coke-addled egos, were on a petty power trip, and liked to jerk people around.
everyone has to agree that the story line for the first two prequels ... is actuallly pretty good
We have to, or else what?
So by that logic, you can write OO code in machine language. Which you can't.
:)
Of course you can. You just code machine code similar to that which would be generated by the equivalent OO-style C++ program
Machine language makes OO hard to do, C#/Java et all make it hard not to do, but it can be done - just make everything static methods of the same objects and voila - procedural programming.
Firefox hangs up its towel after a long hard battle.
This is insightful? Firefox is free, open source software. How on earth can it "hang up its towel"? It's not like if the owner stops supporting it that it goes away.
The worst case scenario is that certain big companies stop funding mozilla development, but a few enthusiasts keep at it, and progress slows. And around your step 6 or 7, the mozilla/firefox development very rapidly starts up again from
where it left off.
Once an open-source product like this exists, the cat is out of the bag, the marketspace is comoditised and things will not go back to how they were before. Unless all copies of the source somehow go missing.
..Back under the bridge, troll. "Slows the planet's rotation?" Please cite your source for THAT one,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking or a google search on "tidal locking" will do you.
Don't be so hasty with the troll label, or you'll be labeled a troll yourself. Troll.
Bandwidth grows so much faster than CPU speed that you'll spend more time unflacing your music than you save on the bandwidth
... no-one does that with DSL/cable because it's not worth it in terms of the amount of CPU you have to use?
If you're listening to music, you only need to decode one second's worth of audio per second. I don't know FLAC well, but I found that with MP3, past a (fairly low) threshhold of PC CPU power, you don't notice this performance hit at all.
CPU speed doesn't have to grow faster, it just has to exceed the threshhold.
compression on ppp links
Don't they? I was under the impression that it was built into the router-to-router protocol these days. I could be wrong here.
Compression will be VERY undesirable in the future.
.zip decrease the quality if the files in it? No. Therefor FLAC may be a winner for audio files.
Maybe you mean that lossy compression will be undesirable. What could be undesirable about lossless compression? Does
"consumers will win once the US dollar rises over Euro."
Which consumers: American, European, or both?
It looks like at any given exchange rate someone, somewhere will be getting the short end of it.
In fact, Oracle and MS SQL are not entirely compliant with SQL 92 as they have their own extensions.
That's what I said, as in "This is a big step away from that. Much like the features you'd find in Oracle or MS SQL."
Perhaps I should have drool-proofed it and written "This is a big step away from standardisation. It is reminicent of the features you'd find in Oracle or MS SQL that lead one down the proprietary path."
One of the most exciting features of 8.0 is plperl, their Perl-based server side language
I'm not convinced. SQL is supposed to a standard, so you can move from one database server to another with not much effort. This is a big step away from that. Much like the features you'd find in Oracle or MS SQL.
Music is art. It is not objective. It is not rational. It is not definable. It is not quantifiable.
I'd like to see proof of that, because I've a sneaking suspicion that it might not be so. For "good art", you're talking about the preferences of human beings. Those preferences are shaped by fixed forces - factors that have been selected for over the last 100 000 years or so, and the preferences are expressed in a definiable physical system, the brain. "unquantifiable" and "not definable" as opposed to "has not been quantified" and "to complex for us to define at present" are strong terms, and there's no proof that it is like that.
For hits as opposed to art, even better, you're not trying to predict the actions of a single human being, merely those of most a large crowd of them.
I listened to punk rock for decades. In the 80s songs by the bands All and 7 Seconds would never have been recognized by any system as being hits. But fast-forward a decade and suddenly artists like Blink 182 and Greenday ARE having hits using the same formula.
So such a system, when fed a lot of 80s hits as training data, and a new punk song as input, will conclude that it has no hit potential. But put in hits of the 90s, and it should match. That's basically "sounds like what already sells", which is so simple that even a record company exec can do it.
Basically, this system will stagnate the music industry as it will lock it into a very narrow form of music and it will not be allowed to grow. People will get even more bored which will lead to decreases sales.
Chart music already = narrow and boring, existing styles. I suspect that this has already been happening for a while, and explains why new musical styles have to gaina an "undergrownd" fanbase before they "go mainstream". This software would lock this trend in even more (you get what you ask for), assuming that everyone used it. If not, small labels stand to make the occasional killing when a breakthrough happens (e.g. sub pop).
It would help sales in the short term, but hinder them in the long term. I'm actually for it. Anything that helps hasten the complete irrelevance of the mass-market lowest-common denominator music charts must be good. Maybe I'm too old, but they don't affect me any more at all. We've got better new toys like MP3, inernet radio, cds from amazon, podcasts, etc.
What is up with you God hating Atheists?
You need some punctuation to make sense of that, either "What is up with you God, hating Atheists?" or "What is up with you God-hating Atheists?"
Stay out until 10, get home at 11, get to bed at 12, get to sleep at 1.
Unions ... are a net drain on the economy.
Absolutely. Unions have campained long and hard for things like a legal upper limit to working hours, minimum wages, occupational health and safety standards, the right not to be fired for being sick, etc, etc, etc. All of these are a net drain on the economy.
"the economy" is not the be-all and end-all. Especially when we say "a net drain on the economy" we might as well say "a net drain on a few people who are rich already".
The difference here is that Linus basically started with nothing ... Valve on the other side does have invested millions into producing the game
So, you're saying that they will eventually be challenged by an open-source startup with nothing to lose?
First define "saved". If you mean something akin to the Christian notion of salvation
We'll never live to see the day that I mean that.
Not to mention a loose sense of "all". No amount of science will tell us what our aims ought to be in life, or about social values, or morality. Science can tell us about the consequences of our actions, but not which of those consequences we should prefer.
That's a sweeping statement, and one can find counterexamples to it: Sociobiology and Evolutionary psychology
Venerable? An interesting choice of words.
As a word choice, it seemed to me to sum up that they had been around a long time, had withstood many tests, and were highly regarded by serious students of the respective fields, or rather are cornerstones of those fields.
In relation to those who lament the world's lack of knowledge of scripture and failure to venerate a god of some sort.
As another poster on this thread mentioned, no amount of studying scripures of the one true way (take your pick) and veneration of the one true god/pantheon (again, take your pick of faiths), would have saved any of the 150 000 people who died from a tsunami. Yet a few million dollars worth of monitoring technology would have saved a significant fraction of them.
What testable predictions about the observable universe result from this assumption? If there are none, you must entertain the posiblity that your statement has no meaning.
That's a hasty conclusion, and a problematic one.
It's problematic that an untestable statement might be meaningless? That's what I said. So are you saying that all untestable statements are meaningful? Bosh.
your logic skills could use some work.
Ahem. Pot. Ahem. Kettle.
What has striken me most the last few years, is the arrogance ... that Science will Have All The Answers. Eventually we will comprehend everything
... have faith that there is a God (paraphrase).
Here's the thing: no other method comes anywhere close to the scientific one for generating real knowledge about the observable universe. Science keeps on generating better understanding, so either the universe is infinitely complex, in which case we'll never stop generting better science; or we'll eventually run out of steam due to our admittedly tiny minds - I doubt this one since we already so most of our science using mind-tools like oh, books, computers, etc to help us understand it; or we will eventually know it all. In a loose sense of "know". Much of the world doesn't know the venerable physics of Einstein and Heisenberg very well; and even more sadly, many deny the even more venerable biology of Darwin.
You often hear people come with arguments like 'but God can't exist' or 'we don't need God to explain the universe'. Sure, if you think that man can eventually comprehend everything there is to know about the universe, then you can make those claims.
So either we can know all, or we need God to explain it? false dichotomy.
Religion/faith is all about the step after that.
A totally meaningless sentence.
I personally do
What testable predictions about the observable universe result from this assumption? If there are none, you must entertain the posiblity that your statement has no meaning.
"Mono basic (mbas) is a CIL compiler for the VisualBasic.NET language, an extended version of Visual Basic. It's based on the MCS compiler and still in heavy development, though many language features are already supported."
Mono basic will be based on VB.NET, not awful old VB.
Mono basic will actually be rather compatible with MS VB.NET in language and class library.
Mono basic will be able to take advantage of code written in or for Mono/C#, and any other languages that get ported to the mono platform.
So what does this project have going for it over mono basic?
OK, so right now it's a bit further down the road than mono basic, but will it really maintain that lead? I think Mono has more weight behind it. e.g. novell.
I do my communication with international relatives by email and on my livejournal. ... what are phones for again?
It's not "piracy"; it's copying without permission. If you sell copied films, then you're a pirate.
No. If you sell copied films, then you're a thief of intellectual property. If you raid ships at sea; plunder, rape and murder, then you're a pirate.
Laugh, but it's also sad - unknowingly, you are using loaded language chosen for you.
Microsoft v1.0 products don't always have to make money. They are often aimed at gaining market share, leveraging related product areas where Microsoft is already dominant, learning what the customers really want, and generally harassing the competition as a prelude to crushing them with a version 2 or 3 product.