Because vinyl isn't higher quality than CD. Perhaps if you've got extremely high end gear and you never play a record more than a couple times that might be true.
No, still not true.
CD, as a medium, has every audio advantage over vinyl other than myth.
What is different — and does matter — is the recording technique. Vinyl with good recording technique can sound better than a CD with poor recording technique.
Part of what takes people legitimately back to vinyl is that many older recordings sound better, primarily because the dynamic range wasn't horribly crushed, as is often the approach taken today with CD recordings.
But best recording technique on vinyl, against best recording technique on CD... CD wins on every possible audible metric. Signal to noise, dynamic range, accuracy of reproduction, consistent audible frequency response, ancillary distortion, immunity to surface defects that damage the recording, repeatability, THD, etc.
Vinyl offers some non-audio features, such as large jackets, with larger artwork. Those same large jackets can, and often do, carry great liner notes you won't get with a CD due to the packaging area; such as interesting colors and artwork on the center of the platter. And of course, for those of us who are older, just plain old nostalgia.
Personally, speaking as an older fellow, I don't find the trade of the art and liner notes worth the candle when I can have better audio from a CD. I buy from high-end CD makers such as Telarc, and those productions are well worth the money spent. But when I can't find a good modern recording of something I treasure, then sometimes, it's vinyl FTW.
It wasn't designed to be anything but stupid. Because it is stupid.
The fad business comes about like any fad; people are also stupid. You can put the notch right next to pet rocks and the like. Just one more really bad hardware decision by Apple. Of many recent such.
So far at least, Samsung hasn't bought into the "let's put a hole in the display" or the "let's take the analog audio away" or the "let's take away the memory card" stupids, but we certainly are seeing all of those things in various combinations from other non-Apple phone manufacturers.
The design philosophy for these things is "ready, fire aim." Apple gets away with a lot because they have a largely unthinking fanbase. And I say that as someone with multiple Macs up and running.
I doubt they could do much better than simply going back to the 2012 cheesegrater hardware, with a new motherboard that offers the same expansion capabilities but newer, faster/more CPU and RAM and so forth. Pluggable gfx cards, hard drives, absolutely no non-replaceable flash storage, optical drives, lots of standard USB I/O, ethernet, optical and analog audio, etc.
I also highly doubt they'll do it. They'll almost certainly just screw up again. Look at the mini and so on; just one more screwup after another last few iterations. There's no sign of sanity over there at all. And the iMac "Pro" is outright ridiculous.
That's okay, though. The cheesegraters will probably last for many years yet. I feel no burning need to give them money for yet another design fail.
OTOH, I'd be happy to give them money if they actually improved the mac pro beyond the cheesegrater. Or went back to the cheesegrater. Or actually improved the mini beyond its peak (which is not the current mini.) Or put out a decent mid-tower.
But again... breath-holding is not called for here. The evidence shows they're thoroughly lost in stupidland.
What, Google payments? No. Google's evil. No point in going there. I'm suggesting something reasonable. Google would not be on my list of "reasonable" corporations. They data mine, they censor, they invade privacy, they do a terrible job of providing relevant search results above the mediocre level, they constantly offer services and then yank them once people have invested time into them.
Someone else - someone with a social conscience - needs to create a reasonable version of such services.
How long would you expect a reasonable person to spend carefully reading dozens of pages of terms of service before giving up?
I consider myself reasonable. I always read them from start to finish. Mind you, it's a very rare website/service that I actually venture into that has that kind of required agreement, so this is a pretty minor issue for me. Also, it doesn't take long to figure out if a site is mining, and if that's a reasonable trade for whatever they are offering. (usually, no.)
Otherwise, if you agree to the terms without reading the terms, you have no idea what you're agreeing to. That strikes me as entirely unreasonable. And stupid.
Over the last 30 years, computers have become more and more powerful, hard drives and monitors have become bigger and cheaper, and yet today most people spend all their time staring at a phone with a 5 inch screen and the power and storage of an early 90s era PC.
My phone has a 2960x1440 display; that's higher resolution than my desktop monitors are. It is small, but that's a feature, not a bug. It also can do displayport-out to a 4K display and connect to a bluetooth keyboard, should I desire that.
It also has a 64-bit, 8-core, 2.8 GHz CPU; 6 GB of ram; 64 GB of storage (plus an additional storage card slot capable of swapping up to 400 GB removable storage in and out); three cameras; quite a few sensors; cellular, bluetooth, multi-band wifi, near-field, FM, and GPS(+) radio services; and very nice audio capabilities to top it all off.
So you can have considerably more than "the power and storage of an early 90s era PC", although as with all reasonably capable computing hardware, you have to know enough to identify what you want and you have to be able to afford it.
How would the website know whether I viewed it for more than ten seconds if I've turned off JS?
If JS is the means to implement this, then the website would know not to serve you a page if it couldn't work with your browser. This is easily done. If JS is off, you're already not seeing a good deal of content on the web; this would just be more of what you're already experiencing. A web site could refuse to serve you anything, or it might serve you a watered-down or "teaser" version of the available content.
OTOH, it might be a new technology (or several) that doesn't use scripting, but instead utilizes a new handshaking capability built into browsers that doesn't do anything but handle that particular payment task.
Or you might see both.
And how would the micropayment processor assure readers of their privacy?
Privacy, or lack thereof, is a feature/malfeature between you and the services you choose to use — it's a technology-enabled policy issue, by which I mean that a company could choose to be entirely on the "we don't use your personal information" side, or entirely on the "we make Facebook look private" side, or anywhere in between. I imagine no likely scenario where you release micropayments without having to authorize same at some point along the line. If the terms and conditions aren't acceptable to you, don't engage. Quite literally, vote with your wallet.
For instance, when considering Facebook, one of the things I did was read the terms and conditions. I found them unacceptable, so I never joined. I eventually found alternative services where the terms were acceptable to me, and that's where my social presence is, such as it is.
I would imagine that a useful component of something like this might be a dialog that offers something like:
o Don't pay out o Authorize pay out for this visit only o Authorize pay out for visits in the next N days o Pay out every visit o Increase pay out above minimum by X for N visits
o Plus the ability to easily alter the settings at any time thereafter by entering the website into a revision dialog, or re-setting them for all websites.
That, or equivalent functionality. These are just technical implementation details.
Because the main problem I have with Google's "Contributor" micropayment system is that it shares a parent company with AdWords and DoubleClick and therefore likely shares Contributor users' browsing history as well.
That is in the nature of suspicion. I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual." My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them and make a conscious decision based on what you read as to whether you actually proceed, or not.
Nope. Your ASR-33s were just somewhat clumsy interfaces, not computer systems. And other than wasting paper and being slow, they could do a lot of what those early glass CRTs could do. The important parts, in terms of letting you stretch your computing chops.
Handling reflections perfectly is trivially easy with raytracers, and there have been plenty of real-time raytracers even for low-end consumer hardware in the 90's.
Even with a simplistic ray model, the more objects there are in the scene, the more complex the trace becomes. Until you hit an object, you don't know at what angle the ray diverges from that object; it may, for instance, go through several partially transparent objects before it reaches a light source, or it may reflect off of several items that are colored, or metallic (which, if done properly, introduces further complexities.)
The classic ray tracer has to examine every object N for every pixel generated M:. So the more objects and pixels there are, the longer it takes to render the scene. Complexity is straight-up NxM. This is without even thinking about things like soft shadows.
That is the bottleneck; and you're not going to solve it for all scenes just by throwing hardware at it.
You can solve it by simplifying the scene until the hardware can keep up, and as near as I can tell, that's what's being described here.
You might say "animate" vs. "inanimate" is merely a question of location, or arrangement/architecture.
Certainly.
Either all matter is animate or none is.
You said it yourself: there's (at least) a difference by arrangement / architecture. Therefore you are saying that some matter is animate, and some is not. Which is correct.
You could be saying that "all matter could be animate", and that's at least an interesting claim, but it's not borne out experimentally to date. And without being animate, no system has shown awareness. So you're right back to square one: your idea that atoms might be aware is presently baseless.
then it follows that awareness must somehow arise from the inanimate.
No. You're missing a step. It follows that animate can arise from the inanimate. Awareness then arises from the animate. This is what we know to be true; and it's all we have seen thus far.
The claim you are making is that awareness can arise directly from the inanimate; your suggestion that atoms (rocks, etc.) might be aware is exactly that.
The fact is that there's no evidence at all that awareness can arise from the inanimate without forming an animate system first. So your suggestion is no more than speculation, and unfounded speculation at that. For it to have any value beyond "here's an idea", you need evidence. So far, there isn't any. If you can manage to bring some, then we can talk about what you've found. But right now, it's simply baseless handwaving.
IRC has some merit, particularly when it's on specific servers serving specific needs. But it's a bit too open for general social use, and its ability to share and to keep history leaves something to be desired. That varies from client to client somewhat, but that in itself is a shortcoming.
I run a rocket.chat server for the family, and am also a member of one for a special interest group (radio enthusiasts.) It's easy to share stuff — you can drag in images, audio, video, etc. — you have control over who you let in and what they can access, it's secure (well, as secure as https allows for) and there's no advertising, data mining, or other creepiness going on. I have the source code and can modify it (and have) to do some cool things.
If anyone wants to get ahold of me, email still works just fine and I expect it will continue to well into the indefinite future. We can go from there if that's indicated.
I have not been on usenet since I was perusing a cat group and ran into some serious filth. I'll never go back. Having moved to locally (meaning, me) controlled social environments, I'm convinced this is the optimum way to go for family and friends. I've met some interesting people who became actual friends in more open environments, most notably Flickr (probably because there tends to be common interests there as to the types of photography people pursue), but as it turns out, carrying on the friendship at any level above the most vague and casual level is far better done in a closed, locally-controlled system.
Money, power, fame? These do not equate to happiness.
Money can very much lead to happiness, if you use it well.
Money can enable charity; comfort; security; health; knowledge; and amplify all manner of social goods, including love and kindness. It can also uplift your lifestyle from victim to empowered. Some of this is due to flaws in society, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.
--David Lee Roth
Myself, I have spent most of my earnings on charity, and yes, it made me happy. Still does.:)
Filed right alongside your evidence that they are NOT aware, a few aisles over from your evidence that awareness can arise from the interactions of completely inanimate substance.
Brains are not inanimate. Brains are very much animate; they are measurably and significantly active, and it is, as near as anyone can tell at this point due to experimentation and the resulting evidence, this very activity that produces awareness (among many other things.) To suggest that the same thing can happen with (for example) a rock without some comparable active mechanism isn't in nearly the same aisle, nor should it be unless someone can come up with evidence that there is a comparable level of activity going on, or, that said activity isn't required. Neither is true at the moment.
Just because someone can think of something, doesn't mean that the universe will support that something. There is a very good reason for the scientific method being a gateway for ideas that must be passed before those same ideas are worth any more than "well, that's an interesting idea" or "can I share your drugs?"
If fundamental particles are truly inanimate, wouldn't you expect them to behave in a predictable fashion even on an individual basis?
No, I wouldn't. Reality is full of randomness and the ineffable: from the unmeasurable, to decay, to classical physics interactions far beyond our ability to follow (a circumstance which we often call "chaotic.") I see no need at this point in time to postulate awareness as a causative factor for any of this, as there's both no evidence for it and no way to test for it. It'd be fascinating if there was actual evidence for this that exceeded the standard of "there are things we have not fully understood yet", but so far, nothing.
When you (anyone) says "there is an alternative to A, and that is B", B is a second-class citizen (quite often, worse than 2nd) right out of the door when (A) has falsifiable tests producing repeatable, measurable results that provide a framework for experimentation and subsequent characterization, and (B) has only "Here is an idea."
Also anesthesia; coma; knockouts (fights, accidents); some instances of fugue.
It's very clear that the brain, given that it's reasonably healthy, is very good at warm restarts.
I find the assertions that consciousness is something "outside" the brain to be without notable merit. The handwaving about quantum this-and-that being a dynamic, active part of the actual thought process or consciousness is also, at present, entirely speculative — there's no evidence for this at all. If some arises, that would of course be fascinating. So far, though, nothing.
For someone like me with sleep apnea where I wake up and fall back asleep all night discontinuity is something I face all the time.
Get a CPAP mask. Soon. Sleep apnea can have extremely serious consequences. I know. It almost destroyed me. My CPAP mask saved my life. No exaggeration.
Slashdot Mirror
No, still not true.
CD, as a medium, has every audio advantage over vinyl other than myth.
What is different — and does matter — is the recording technique. Vinyl with good recording technique can sound better than a CD with poor recording technique.
Part of what takes people legitimately back to vinyl is that many older recordings sound better, primarily because the dynamic range wasn't horribly crushed, as is often the approach taken today with CD recordings.
But best recording technique on vinyl, against best recording technique on CD... CD wins on every possible audible metric. Signal to noise, dynamic range, accuracy of reproduction, consistent audible frequency response, ancillary distortion, immunity to surface defects that damage the recording, repeatability, THD, etc.
Vinyl offers some non-audio features, such as large jackets, with larger artwork. Those same large jackets can, and often do, carry great liner notes you won't get with a CD due to the packaging area; such as interesting colors and artwork on the center of the platter. And of course, for those of us who are older, just plain old nostalgia.
Personally, speaking as an older fellow, I don't find the trade of the art and liner notes worth the candle when I can have better audio from a CD. I buy from high-end CD makers such as Telarc, and those productions are well worth the money spent. But when I can't find a good modern recording of something I treasure, then sometimes, it's vinyl FTW.
[looks hard at Galaxy S9]
Nope. Don't have to deal with it. Not a law of physics.
The notch is just really stupid design.
It wasn't designed to be anything but stupid. Because it is stupid.
The fad business comes about like any fad; people are also stupid. You can put the notch right next to pet rocks and the like. Just one more really bad hardware decision by Apple. Of many recent such.
So far at least, Samsung hasn't bought into the "let's put a hole in the display" or the "let's take the analog audio away" or the "let's take away the memory card" stupids, but we certainly are seeing all of those things in various combinations from other non-Apple phone manufacturers.
The design philosophy for these things is "ready, fire aim." Apple gets away with a lot because they have a largely unthinking fanbase. And I say that as someone with multiple Macs up and running.
I doubt they could do much better than simply going back to the 2012 cheesegrater hardware, with a new motherboard that offers the same expansion capabilities but newer, faster/more CPU and RAM and so forth. Pluggable gfx cards, hard drives, absolutely no non-replaceable flash storage, optical drives, lots of standard USB I/O, ethernet, optical and analog audio, etc.
I also highly doubt they'll do it. They'll almost certainly just screw up again. Look at the mini and so on; just one more screwup after another last few iterations. There's no sign of sanity over there at all. And the iMac "Pro" is outright ridiculous.
That's okay, though. The cheesegraters will probably last for many years yet. I feel no burning need to give them money for yet another design fail.
OTOH, I'd be happy to give them money if they actually improved the mac pro beyond the cheesegrater. Or went back to the cheesegrater. Or actually improved the mini beyond its peak (which is not the current mini.) Or put out a decent mid-tower.
But again... breath-holding is not called for here. The evidence shows they're thoroughly lost in stupidland.
1/4 as good, 4x the price.
What, Google payments? No. Google's evil. No point in going there. I'm suggesting something reasonable. Google would not be on my list of "reasonable" corporations. They data mine, they censor, they invade privacy, they do a terrible job of providing relevant search results above the mediocre level, they constantly offer services and then yank them once people have invested time into them.
Someone else - someone with a social conscience - needs to create a reasonable version of such services.
It's not here yet. I just want it to be here.
I consider myself reasonable. I always read them from start to finish. Mind you, it's a very rare website/service that I actually venture into that has that kind of required agreement, so this is a pretty minor issue for me. Also, it doesn't take long to figure out if a site is mining, and if that's a reasonable trade for whatever they are offering. (usually, no.)
Otherwise, if you agree to the terms without reading the terms, you have no idea what you're agreeing to. That strikes me as entirely unreasonable. And stupid.
My phone has a 2960x1440 display; that's higher resolution than my desktop monitors are. It is small, but that's a feature, not a bug. It also can do displayport-out to a 4K display and connect to a bluetooth keyboard, should I desire that.
It also has a 64-bit, 8-core, 2.8 GHz CPU; 6 GB of ram; 64 GB of storage (plus an additional storage card slot capable of swapping up to 400 GB removable storage in and out); three cameras; quite a few sensors; cellular, bluetooth, multi-band wifi, near-field, FM, and GPS(+) radio services; and very nice audio capabilities to top it all off.
So you can have considerably more than "the power and storage of an early 90s era PC", although as with all reasonably capable computing hardware, you have to know enough to identify what you want and you have to be able to afford it.
If JS is the means to implement this, then the website would know not to serve you a page if it couldn't work with your browser. This is easily done. If JS is off, you're already not seeing a good deal of content on the web; this would just be more of what you're already experiencing. A web site could refuse to serve you anything, or it might serve you a watered-down or "teaser" version of the available content.
OTOH, it might be a new technology (or several) that doesn't use scripting, but instead utilizes a new handshaking capability built into browsers that doesn't do anything but handle that particular payment task.
Or you might see both.
Privacy, or lack thereof, is a feature/malfeature between you and the services you choose to use — it's a technology-enabled policy issue, by which I mean that a company could choose to be entirely on the "we don't use your personal information" side, or entirely on the "we make Facebook look private" side, or anywhere in between. I imagine no likely scenario where you release micropayments without having to authorize same at some point along the line. If the terms and conditions aren't acceptable to you, don't engage. Quite literally, vote with your wallet.
For instance, when considering Facebook, one of the things I did was read the terms and conditions. I found them unacceptable, so I never joined. I eventually found alternative services where the terms were acceptable to me, and that's where my social presence is, such as it is.
I would imagine that a useful component of something like this might be a dialog that offers something like:
o Don't pay out
o Authorize pay out for this visit only
o Authorize pay out for visits in the next N days
o Pay out every visit
o Increase pay out above minimum by X for N visits
o Plus the ability to easily alter the settings at any time thereafter by entering the website into a revision dialog, or re-setting them for all websites.
That, or equivalent functionality. These are just technical implementation details.
That is in the nature of suspicion. I expect that reading terms of service would go a long way to letting you know if your "likely" is "actual." My suggestion is that when a website — any website — offers terms of service you have to agree to, you actually read them and make a conscious decision based on what you read as to whether you actually proceed, or not.
Micropayments.
I visit your web page and stay for more than ten seconds, you get a penny.
I'm be totally for this rather than ads or site-specific paywalls or being data-mined.
Nope. Your ASR-33s were just somewhat clumsy interfaces, not computer systems. And other than wasting paper and being slow, they could do a lot of what those early glass CRTs could do. The important parts, in terms of letting you stretch your computing chops.
Your school system is habituating people to crippled, minimal devices - the very poster child for dumbing down the students.
Chromebooks are only a good answer to going backwards.
Which is another (rather, a further) way of saying "it's not really a ray tracer at all" and therefore no, we don't have realtime ray tracing. :)
Even with a simplistic ray model, the more objects there are in the scene, the more complex the trace becomes. Until you hit an object, you don't know at what angle the ray diverges from that object; it may, for instance, go through several partially transparent objects before it reaches a light source, or it may reflect off of several items that are colored, or metallic (which, if done properly, introduces further complexities.)
The classic ray tracer has to examine every object N for every pixel generated M:. So the more objects and pixels there are, the longer it takes to render the scene. Complexity is straight-up NxM. This is without even thinking about things like soft shadows.
That is the bottleneck; and you're not going to solve it for all scenes just by throwing hardware at it.
You can solve it by simplifying the scene until the hardware can keep up, and as near as I can tell, that's what's being described here.
Or IOW, there's more hype here than truth.
Certainly.
You said it yourself: there's (at least) a difference by arrangement / architecture. Therefore you are saying that some matter is animate, and some is not. Which is correct.
You could be saying that "all matter could be animate", and that's at least an interesting claim, but it's not borne out experimentally to date. And without being animate, no system has shown awareness. So you're right back to square one: your idea that atoms might be aware is presently baseless.
No. You're missing a step. It follows that animate can arise from the inanimate. Awareness then arises from the animate. This is what we know to be true; and it's all we have seen thus far.
The claim you are making is that awareness can arise directly from the inanimate; your suggestion that atoms (rocks, etc.) might be aware is exactly that.
The fact is that there's no evidence at all that awareness can arise from the inanimate without forming an animate system first. So your suggestion is no more than speculation, and unfounded speculation at that. For it to have any value beyond "here's an idea", you need evidence. So far, there isn't any. If you can manage to bring some, then we can talk about what you've found. But right now, it's simply baseless handwaving.
No, it's just one placed by a Chupacabra: "Will bite livestock for blurry photo ops"
This is a job for evolutionary software. Definitely.
More like 30,000 years, and...
Because we have yet to get it right. :)
IRC has some merit, particularly when it's on specific servers serving specific needs. But it's a bit too open for general social use, and its ability to share and to keep history leaves something to be desired. That varies from client to client somewhat, but that in itself is a shortcoming.
I run a rocket.chat server for the family, and am also a member of one for a special interest group (radio enthusiasts.) It's easy to share stuff — you can drag in images, audio, video, etc. — you have control over who you let in and what they can access, it's secure (well, as secure as https allows for) and there's no advertising, data mining, or other creepiness going on. I have the source code and can modify it (and have) to do some cool things.
If anyone wants to get ahold of me, email still works just fine and I expect it will continue to well into the indefinite future. We can go from there if that's indicated.
I have not been on usenet since I was perusing a cat group and ran into some serious filth. I'll never go back. Having moved to locally (meaning, me) controlled social environments, I'm convinced this is the optimum way to go for family and friends. I've met some interesting people who became actual friends in more open environments, most notably Flickr (probably because there tends to be common interests there as to the types of photography people pursue), but as it turns out, carrying on the friendship at any level above the most vague and casual level is far better done in a closed, locally-controlled system.
Money can very much lead to happiness, if you use it well.
Money can enable charity; comfort; security; health; knowledge; and amplify all manner of social goods, including love and kindness. It can also uplift your lifestyle from victim to empowered. Some of this is due to flaws in society, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Myself, I have spent most of my earnings on charity, and yes, it made me happy. Still does. :)
Brains are not inanimate. Brains are very much animate; they are measurably and significantly active, and it is, as near as anyone can tell at this point due to experimentation and the resulting evidence, this very activity that produces awareness (among many other things.) To suggest that the same thing can happen with (for example) a rock without some comparable active mechanism isn't in nearly the same aisle, nor should it be unless someone can come up with evidence that there is a comparable level of activity going on, or, that said activity isn't required. Neither is true at the moment.
Just because someone can think of something, doesn't mean that the universe will support that something. There is a very good reason for the scientific method being a gateway for ideas that must be passed before those same ideas are worth any more than "well, that's an interesting idea" or "can I share your drugs?"
No, I wouldn't. Reality is full of randomness and the ineffable: from the unmeasurable, to decay, to classical physics interactions far beyond our ability to follow (a circumstance which we often call "chaotic.") I see no need at this point in time to postulate awareness as a causative factor for any of this, as there's both no evidence for it and no way to test for it. It'd be fascinating if there was actual evidence for this that exceeded the standard of "there are things we have not fully understood yet", but so far, nothing.
When you (anyone) says "there is an alternative to A, and that is B", B is a second-class citizen (quite often, worse than 2nd) right out of the door when (A) has falsifiable tests producing repeatable, measurable results that provide a framework for experimentation and subsequent characterization, and (B) has only "Here is an idea."
Also anesthesia; coma; knockouts (fights, accidents); some instances of fugue.
It's very clear that the brain, given that it's reasonably healthy, is very good at warm restarts.
I find the assertions that consciousness is something "outside" the brain to be without notable merit. The handwaving about quantum this-and-that being a dynamic, active part of the actual thought process or consciousness is also, at present, entirely speculative — there's no evidence for this at all. If some arises, that would of course be fascinating. So far, though, nothing.
Get a CPAP mask. Soon. Sleep apnea can have extremely serious consequences. I know. It almost destroyed me. My CPAP mask saved my life. No exaggeration.
And your evidence for this is?