Apple is one of the most vile anti-consumer monster corporations out there
No:
If Apple fought more restrictive DRM it was because they thought it would hurt their bottom line
because Apple listens to their consumers well. It knows what its fans want and it gives it to them. It keeps us happy. And so we think that Apple is on the side of consumers, when in reality, they're just trying to lure profits away from competitors that don't listen quite as well.
But for all we care, we can pull Occam's Razor and say it's equivalent to Apple actively being on the side of consumers. Why can't they be both pro-consumer and pro-profit? Helping people who wish to give money to them? Capitalism at its best.
Let's see. One Library of Congress (1 LoC) is generally equated with twenty terabytes (20 TB). If we assume that all the data is represented in a standard-font printout, then you can fit about 60 lines per page and about 100 characters per line, giving 6 kB per page. So 20 TB / (6 kB/page) = 3.58 * 10^9 pages. Now we know that a ream of paper weighs about 10 pounds. A ream is 500 sheets, so each kilopage weighs 20 lbs. (Assume we're printing single-sided to make this easier.) So 3.58 * 10^9 pp * 20 lb / kpp = 7.16 * 10^7 lbs, or 3.25 * 10^7 kg. Thanks to Einstein's formula, we can convert this mass into energy (using a nuclear reaction - we're going for a Hiroshima-like explosion anyway). Multiply by c^2 and get 2.92 * 10^28 J.
Now the Hiroshima bombing had an estimated yield of 63 terajoules. If we divide that yield by the previous number, we get 2.16 * 10^-11. The bombing of Hiroshima - and by extension, this meteorite - is barely over a trillionth of the power of the entire Library of Congress converted to PURE ENERGY! <evil laugh> Um. Anyway. You get my point.
Unless you mean some other kind of remote access? Macs can natively handle most VPNs and have Samba built in. What sort of remote access does XP have built in that OS X doesn't?
Come on guys. Seriously. "Lunch"? Tagging was supposed to use humans to actually process what's important. Somehow I can't believe that slashdotters have coded a broken AI to tag articles for them.
"Lunch"? This article has anything to do with "lunch"? Give me a break.
Pretend you're a banker and that's called a loan. Except for two differences that cancel. Instead of the item itself, you just get the right to repo it. And they have to return even more money than you lent them.
They get a no-interest loan for half a week. Granted, it's just a couple of dollars, but multiply that by so many people and they can probably break even with the loaned money.
Castrati (singers who were castrated before puberty, allowing them to keep their high range) actually used to be great favorites of the women for some odd reason. One let his brother take advantage of this by leaving them in a seduceable state for him.
It depends - do you mind being paid by your employer in the same photocopied bills? No? Why?
Because when I produce a creative work, my employer gets the rights to it, and I may or may not have a right to license it for my own use. So I want my paycheck, and the employer might get some of it if I decide to invest in them.
But when I buy music online, I get a copy of the music, and the only right I have is to listen to it on that device and make a backup copy. Even if I buy on a CD, I only get those rights. So why shouldn't I send them a copy of my money that they can look at and feel rich, but not give to anyonle else?
What SHOULD be the purpose of the justice system? One thing, and one thing only:
To separate dangerous individuals from society, and keep them separated.
That is definitely not the only purpose of the justice system. There is an important other system: to threaten punishment on people to prevent them from committing crimes. Your definitiion would wait for people to commit crimes, then lock them up. As long as potential criminals realize that there is a punishment waiting for them if they act, they are dissuaded.
Now in order to maintain that threat, you have to actually punish the people you do catch. But once somebody's committed a crime, I agree that punishment for them is just vindictive. The purpose of punishment is really to threaten everyone else. The purpose of long court trials is to avoid overpunishing the person who's already violated society.
Well then you have the overhead of updating the tree as well as the overhead of updating the list. So you'll have to go through the inefficient parts of both structures. If one is always more efficient, use that alone. If both are at times inefficient, then you've got an inefficient algorithm and the point is moot.
How do you update said "temporary hierarchical index" in O(log n) time? It looks very much like an array. And if you're using a balanced tree, then it's one of the tree sorts, not an insertion sort.
Great summary, but you are describing a general Fourier Transform, not necessarily a *fast* FT.
Sorry this reply's a little late. Yes, I am describing the process of Fourier transforms. From the comments here, most people had no idea what you'd use the algorithm for. It's like if they announced a way to run quicksort on a hard disk controller or something, and people asked what quicksort can do. You'd need to explain sorting itself, not pivots and partitions.
Fast Fourier Transform, for the record, is a particular algorithm that can calculate the (discrete) Fourier series for given (discrete, sampled) data, reasonably efficiently. Monsieur Fourier's original formuation was actually an integral (to allow for a continuous summation across all frequencies and all times). Actually calculating this integral out, every time you need it, is hella slow, as you might assume. The FFT can give the same result as the integral much more quickly.
The original signal and the transformed signal are totally equivalent in the amount of data they contain, and, generally, in the space they take up.
Actually, they're only mathematically equivalent. Take a square wave, for example. I can represent that as simply 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 in the time domain, but you need an infinite series of sinusoids to represent it as a Fourier sum. Meanwhile, for sin(440 * 2 pi t), that's a single term in Fourier format, but requires infinitely detailed x-y pairs to represent it against time.
So if you have a pure sine wave, or a sine wave with a couple of overtones, it is easier to say as in my example "full-amplitude 440 Hz plus half-amplitude 880 Hz" than to sample these waves. But you are right; with real-world data, you're going to have a lot of differing frequencies. Good storage algorithms will eliminate the unimportant frequencies from the Fourier sum - a trick that is hard to do with the original sampled data.
As far as MIDI sounding like crap...have you ever heard those grand pianos with a MIDI floppy drive?
Ah thanks:-D. So I didn't make a big mathematical error. You can infer by my graduation year in my signature that I haven't actually studied Fourier series in school yet... I wasn't sure if that pitch transform would work, e.g.
What are you inserting into? No matter how you find the point, if you're in the original array, it takes average O(n) to shift each remaining element over by one to make room for your new element, so it's still O(n^2) so long as finding an element is at most O(n). If you're inserting into a doubly-linked list, then you've got O(n) space overhead. If you're inserting into a tree, then it's not an insertion sort.
Apparently nobody knows what an FFT is. Here's the best description I can give without descending into math too much.
The Fast Fourier Transform is an algorithm to turn a set of data (as amplitude vs. time) into a set of waves (as amplitude vs. frequency). Say that I have a recording of a piano playing an A at 440 Hz. If I plot the actual data that the sound card records, it'll come out something like this picture. There's a large fading-out, then the 440 Hz wave, then a couple of overtones at multiples of 440 Hz. The Fourier series will have a strong spike at 440 Hz, then smaller spikes at higher frequencies: something like this plot. (Of course, that's not at 440, but you get the idea.)
The reason we like Fourier transforms is that once you have that second plot, it's extremely easy to tell what the frequency of the wave is, for example - just look for the biggest spike. It's a much more efficient way to store musical data, and it allows for, e.g., pitch transformations (compute the FFT, add your pitch change to the result, and compute the inverse FFT which uses almost the same formula). It's good for data compression because it can tell us which frequencies are important and which are imperceptible - and it's much smaller to say "Play 440 Hz, plus half an 880 Hz, plus..." than to specify each height at each sampling interval.
The FFT is a very mathematics-heavy algorithm, which makes it well suited for a GPU (a math-oriented device, because it performs a lot of vector and floating-point calculations for graphics rendering) as opposed to a general-purpose CPU (which is more suited for data transfer and processing, memory access, logic structures, integer calculations, etc.) We're starting to see a lot of use of the GPU as the modern equivalent of the old math coprocessor.
If you're looking for more information, Wikipedia's FFT article is a good technical description of the algorithm itself. This article has some good diagrams and examples, but his explanation is a little non-traditional.
Never talk to them again; if you get a phone call from them, hang up immediately; if you get a letter, leave it in the mailbox and tell the postman you are refusing mail from them. If they cannot demonstrate proof that the guy asked for representation, no bounty hunter is going to go after him to get court fees.
why should a trademark name be entitled to it first? Apple shouldn't have sole rights to apple.mobi
And by "Apple" you meant the technology company based in Cupertino, right? If they have the rights to the use of the word "Apple" in conversation, why shouldn't they have rights to apple.mobi?
The purpose of a trademark is to reserve a particular name for the use of a company or product when used in that field..mobi is definitely in Apple's field of business.
It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
Unfortunately the Democratic and Republican parties are not at all representative of any political ideology other than autocracy.
The Democrats attempt to secure power by making you happy. The Republicans attempt to secure power by making others happy. The autocrats (fascists, Communists, etc.) attempt to secure power by threatening everyone with unhappiness. And the libertarians support giving everyone power, although you risk being unhappy.
FFS, kick the knee-jerking puritans out of office already.
You're the knee-jerker. The.xxx domain is almost universally despised.
Pornographers hate it 'cause it forces one level of regulation upon them. Then it's easy to block *.xxx at the ISP level or even at the national level (in slightly more repressive countries). Filtering software is easy to enable. Porn sites have to declare themselves and provide information about themselves, which makes them easier to target.
Borderline sites (artistic nudes, SI swimsuit, etc.) may have to move to.xxx by the law, which would be unfair to them since nothing is actually pornographic. In fact, nothing there would be illegal to show to minors, but.xxx requirements may be more than simply the Miller test. Educational institutions may filter *.xxx, preventing students from learning about Titian's Venus of Urbino or Boticelli's Birth of Venus, both of which prominently feature naked women. In fact, most art websites would either have to self-censor or move their entire gallery to.xxx. DeviantART would be in trouble because it would have to separate the really deviant art from the normal stuff. I've seen on Yahoo! Photos a checkbox to mark photo albums as "over 18 only." The new proposal would force a split of photos.yahoo.com and photos.yahoo.xxx - and then the next big news story is "Yahoo launches yahoo.xxx domain".
Conservatives/reactionaries and rabid Christians despise it because it legitimises porn. It also makes finding porn theoretically easier, and gives the raunchy stuff which they'd want to outlaw the excuse of saying that they're on.xxx so they should be immune..xxx creates a "virtual red-light district" in the words of some conservatives. If the goal is to ban pornography on the Internet, why give it a TLD of its own?
The only group that seems to really want.xxx is the.xxx registrar itself. Note who's suing the US - the registrar that stood to make a profit, not any porn sites. What they're asking is for a government-sponsored choke hold on the entire online pornography industry, so that they can force all existing sites to re-register at whatever prices and under whatever terms they dictate.
When pornographers and conservatives both oppose something, you know it has to be bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is one of the most vile anti-consumer monster corporations out there
No:
If Apple fought more restrictive DRM it was because they thought it would hurt their bottom line
because Apple listens to their consumers well. It knows what its fans want and it gives it to them. It keeps us happy. And so we think that Apple is on the side of consumers, when in reality, they're just trying to lure profits away from competitors that don't listen quite as well.
But for all we care, we can pull Occam's Razor and say it's equivalent to Apple actively being on the side of consumers. Why can't they be both pro-consumer and pro-profit? Helping people who wish to give money to them? Capitalism at its best.
Let's see. One Library of Congress (1 LoC) is generally equated with twenty terabytes (20 TB). If we assume that all the data is represented in a standard-font printout, then you can fit about 60 lines per page and about 100 characters per line, giving 6 kB per page. So 20 TB / (6 kB/page) = 3.58 * 10^9 pages. Now we know that a ream of paper weighs about 10 pounds. A ream is 500 sheets, so each kilopage weighs 20 lbs. (Assume we're printing single-sided to make this easier.) So 3.58 * 10^9 pp * 20 lb / kpp = 7.16 * 10^7 lbs, or 3.25 * 10^7 kg. Thanks to Einstein's formula, we can convert this mass into energy (using a nuclear reaction - we're going for a Hiroshima-like explosion anyway). Multiply by c^2 and get 2.92 * 10^28 J.
Now the Hiroshima bombing had an estimated yield of 63 terajoules. If we divide that yield by the previous number, we get 2.16 * 10^-11. The bombing of Hiroshima - and by extension, this meteorite - is barely over a trillionth of the power of the entire Library of Congress converted to PURE ENERGY! <evil laugh> Um. Anyway. You get my point.
Your company happens to be giving the Mac RDC client away for free. :-D
Unless you mean some other kind of remote access? Macs can natively handle most VPNs and have Samba built in. What sort of remote access does XP have built in that OS X doesn't?
Come on guys. Seriously. "Lunch"? Tagging was supposed to use humans to actually process what's important. Somehow I can't believe that slashdotters have coded a broken AI to tag articles for them.
"Lunch"? This article has anything to do with "lunch"? Give me a break.
Hot grits naked and petrified covered with Natalie Portman!
Pretend you're a banker and that's called a loan. Except for two differences that cancel. Instead of the item itself, you just get the right to repo it. And they have to return even more money than you lent them.
They get a no-interest loan for half a week. Granted, it's just a couple of dollars, but multiply that by so many people and they can probably break even with the loaned money.
Castrati (singers who were castrated before puberty, allowing them to keep their high range) actually used to be great favorites of the women for some odd reason. One let his brother take advantage of this by leaving them in a seduceable state for him.
It depends - do you mind being paid by your employer in the same photocopied bills? No? Why?
Because when I produce a creative work, my employer gets the rights to it, and I may or may not have a right to license it for my own use. So I want my paycheck, and the employer might get some of it if I decide to invest in them.
But when I buy music online, I get a copy of the music, and the only right I have is to listen to it on that device and make a backup copy. Even if I buy on a CD, I only get those rights. So why shouldn't I send them a copy of my money that they can look at and feel rich, but not give to anyonle else?
Quid pro quo.
What SHOULD be the purpose of the justice system? One thing, and one thing only:
To separate dangerous individuals from society, and keep them separated.
That is definitely not the only purpose of the justice system. There is an important other system: to threaten punishment on people to prevent them from committing crimes. Your definitiion would wait for people to commit crimes, then lock them up. As long as potential criminals realize that there is a punishment waiting for them if they act, they are dissuaded.
Now in order to maintain that threat, you have to actually punish the people you do catch. But once somebody's committed a crime, I agree that punishment for them is just vindictive. The purpose of punishment is really to threaten everyone else. The purpose of long court trials is to avoid overpunishing the person who's already violated society.
Well then you have the overhead of updating the tree as well as the overhead of updating the list. So you'll have to go through the inefficient parts of both structures. If one is always more efficient, use that alone. If both are at times inefficient, then you've got an inefficient algorithm and the point is moot.
How do you update said "temporary hierarchical index" in O(log n) time? It looks very much like an array. And if you're using a balanced tree, then it's one of the tree sorts, not an insertion sort.
And just you wait, France will develop a European alternative to that Fourier nonsense as well!
:-)
You do know that it's pronounced fooriyay, not foorier, right?
Great summary, but you are describing a general Fourier Transform, not necessarily a *fast* FT.
Sorry this reply's a little late. Yes, I am describing the process of Fourier transforms. From the comments here, most people had no idea what you'd use the algorithm for. It's like if they announced a way to run quicksort on a hard disk controller or something, and people asked what quicksort can do. You'd need to explain sorting itself, not pivots and partitions.
Fast Fourier Transform, for the record, is a particular algorithm that can calculate the (discrete) Fourier series for given (discrete, sampled) data, reasonably efficiently. Monsieur Fourier's original formuation was actually an integral (to allow for a continuous summation across all frequencies and all times). Actually calculating this integral out, every time you need it, is hella slow, as you might assume. The FFT can give the same result as the integral much more quickly.
The original signal and the transformed signal are totally equivalent in the amount of data they contain, and, generally, in the space they take up.
Actually, they're only mathematically equivalent. Take a square wave, for example. I can represent that as simply 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 in the time domain, but you need an infinite series of sinusoids to represent it as a Fourier sum. Meanwhile, for sin(440 * 2 pi t), that's a single term in Fourier format, but requires infinitely detailed x-y pairs to represent it against time.
So if you have a pure sine wave, or a sine wave with a couple of overtones, it is easier to say as in my example "full-amplitude 440 Hz plus half-amplitude 880 Hz" than to sample these waves. But you are right; with real-world data, you're going to have a lot of differing frequencies. Good storage algorithms will eliminate the unimportant frequencies from the Fourier sum - a trick that is hard to do with the original sampled data.
As far as MIDI sounding like crap...have you ever heard those grand pianos with a MIDI floppy drive?
Ah thanks :-D. So I didn't make a big mathematical error. You can infer by my graduation year in my signature that I haven't actually studied Fourier series in school yet... I wasn't sure if that pitch transform would work, e.g.
What are you inserting into? No matter how you find the point, if you're in the original array, it takes average O(n) to shift each remaining element over by one to make room for your new element, so it's still O(n^2) so long as finding an element is at most O(n). If you're inserting into a doubly-linked list, then you've got O(n) space overhead. If you're inserting into a tree, then it's not an insertion sort.
Apparently nobody knows what an FFT is. Here's the best description I can give without descending into math too much.
The Fast Fourier Transform is an algorithm to turn a set of data (as amplitude vs. time) into a set of waves (as amplitude vs. frequency). Say that I have a recording of a piano playing an A at 440 Hz. If I plot the actual data that the sound card records, it'll come out something like this picture. There's a large fading-out, then the 440 Hz wave, then a couple of overtones at multiples of 440 Hz. The Fourier series will have a strong spike at 440 Hz, then smaller spikes at higher frequencies: something like this plot. (Of course, that's not at 440, but you get the idea.)
The reason we like Fourier transforms is that once you have that second plot, it's extremely easy to tell what the frequency of the wave is, for example - just look for the biggest spike. It's a much more efficient way to store musical data, and it allows for, e.g., pitch transformations (compute the FFT, add your pitch change to the result, and compute the inverse FFT which uses almost the same formula). It's good for data compression because it can tell us which frequencies are important and which are imperceptible - and it's much smaller to say "Play 440 Hz, plus half an 880 Hz, plus..." than to specify each height at each sampling interval.
The FFT is a very mathematics-heavy algorithm, which makes it well suited for a GPU (a math-oriented device, because it performs a lot of vector and floating-point calculations for graphics rendering) as opposed to a general-purpose CPU (which is more suited for data transfer and processing, memory access, logic structures, integer calculations, etc.) We're starting to see a lot of use of the GPU as the modern equivalent of the old math coprocessor.
If you're looking for more information, Wikipedia's FFT article is a good technical description of the algorithm itself. This article has some good diagrams and examples, but his explanation is a little non-traditional.
Never talk to them again; if you get a phone call from them, hang up immediately; if you get a letter, leave it in the mailbox and tell the postman you are refusing mail from them. If they cannot demonstrate proof that the guy asked for representation, no bounty hunter is going to go after him to get court fees.
why should a trademark name be entitled to it first? Apple shouldn't have sole rights to apple.mobi
.mobi is definitely in Apple's field of business.
And by "Apple" you meant the technology company based in Cupertino, right? If they have the rights to the use of the word "Apple" in conversation, why shouldn't they have rights to apple.mobi?
The purpose of a trademark is to reserve a particular name for the use of a company or product when used in that field.
It's right-wing, but also anarchistic, what you might call libertarian.
Unfortunately the Democratic and Republican parties are not at all representative of any political ideology other than autocracy.
The Democrats attempt to secure power by making you happy.
The Republicans attempt to secure power by making others happy.
The autocrats (fascists, Communists, etc.) attempt to secure power by threatening everyone with unhappiness.
And the libertarians support giving everyone power, although you risk being unhappy.
Expecting the conservative mod down in 3..2..1
Conservative mod-down? Slashdot is mostly wacko-liberal. Thankfully they are nowhere near as wacko as the Administration.
Teach your kids to be sexual healthy and not sexually repressed.
1. Sexual healthiness is no more sexual indulgence than it is sexual repression.
2. Sexual healthiness is not porn.
You're the knee-jerker. The
When pornographers and conservatives both oppose something, you know it has to be bad.
Do you want hastily written software or do you want software that works?
Why else would I be using open-source?
Like dude, could we stop pushing this lame political correctness crap? No one group should be excluded from having a bit of fun poked at it
Spoken like a true white male middle-class American 20-to-30-year-old.