>Nah; that can't explain it. After all, if all the recordings were at half the current level, >then you'd just turn the volume dial to get the same loudness.
Multiband compression does not work the same way as amplification, not physically, and not psychoacoustically. The "Loudness War" is being fought in a domain that's quite different from merely "volume". "Perceived volume is a different beast.
People accept loss of dynamic range and it seems to often escape them until they notice it. It's much more obvious in video. I've had to point out shadows, color gradients, etc. Once people see it, they keep seeing it and suddenly the DVR isn't good enough:-)
It's the same with music, but of course much less obvious to most people. The compression is as if, instead of a color spectrum, everything is crammed into one or two shades of red, green, and blue. At least, I think that's a very good analogy.
There's also compression in the frequency domain. Everybody seems so happy with audio compression, until they realize that they *can* hear the difference and that it does matter. "Listen to just the cymbals in this", I'll say. There's a moment when people realize that audiophiles aren't crazy, don't have superhuman hearing, etc. And suddenly 64Kbps MP3's aren't good to them either.
So how did the Senator's proposal go when he pitched it to the Regents at the universities in his home state? Those results would be very useful when trying to persuade a US Senate committee...
"Not necessarily. My grandmother still gets the phone bill in my grandfather's name, and my grandfather is still listed in the phonebook. I've never met the man - he was dead 20 years before I was born, and I'm 21 years old."
Phone bill and phone book aren't junk mail. Besides, your grandmother might legally be "Mrs. Your Grandpa". I'm talking about gift and gardening catalogs, coupon books, etc., and I've seen this stuff *stop* with no action taken (other than people dying.)
I called this the "TJ Maxx Effect". Yes, I shop there; it's near my house and I can usually do better on housewares and necessary items than I could do even in thrift stores.
So anyway, the "Effect" is this: If you are shopping, and you take an interest in some category of items, say, curtain rods, and another shopper sees you checking out curtain rods, all of a sudden *they* are interested in curtain rods. Same thing happens if you look in the towel aisle. Someone who wasn't looking at towels suddenly needs to crowd into your space to look at towels as well. I've observed this phenomenon numerous times and particularly at TJ Maxx, and I believe the psychology of it is "they" don't want "you" to get a deal that they missed out on.
To be fair, sometimes there really are awesome deals to be had, because the people setting the prices don't tend to be particularly savvy as to desirability of certain kinds of items. For instance, I got a JA Henckel knife set -- a really high quality made in Spain set -- that was priced the same as another made in China set. These are completely different products, massively differently priced in retail stores, and the TJ Maxx manager didn't know. (I'm not above capitalizing on the misfortune of others.)
Anyway, as for the article, I got as far as realizing that physical access means you have the keys to the store, so to speak. At my local store, the clerks watch the application machine, as well as everything else in the shop, like a hawk. I get the impression that shoplifting is more common in discount stores than in regular retail stores; maybe I can study this and name THAT effect as well.
>If you read the opinion, you will see that Commercial vs. Noncommercial use is a factor to consider during the fair use >analysis - specifically Factor #1 "Nature and Purpose of the Use".
I have a real problem with this, on Equal Protection grounds.
I misused the idiom, I guess. I meant, it "has feet" -- it travels, it leaves footprints. It's a fallacy that is widely accepted as fact.
>I hope this clarifies the matter.
Not really, because I still need a good way to explain, so that people will understand, that the creator of something like an open source software product, or a song that's freely distributed, something "free" in that nature, where someone has infringed its copyright, suffers damages, and should be entitled to equivalent relief, as, say, that claimed by Disney with respect to an unlicensed DVD of Snow White...
Just because Disney is a giant corporation, and the product is commercially distributed, should have NO bearing on the equal protection of rights reserved under copyright, compared with an individual who retains the copyright on a minor work that is distributed noncommercially.
Equal rights regardless if you are a private person or a stakeholder in a multi-trillion-dollar corporation.
"Not at all. One of the key features of cryptographic algorithms is that knowing what algorithm is being used has absolutely no impact on the strength."
A layer of obscurity makes a secure cipher no less secure.
"You cannot reproduce copyrighted material in its entirety and distribute it to hundreds of people. Charging for the copies doesn't matter."
Thank you for pointing out that crucially important fact! The idea that damage due to copyright infringement is only possible if it is done for financial gain, or if the copyright work is commercially traded, has legs, and is preposterous.
"Soap, a surfactant, kills using physics. It turns lipid membranes inside out. Also by reducing surface tension it creates other havoc"
If I had mod points you'd get them. People don't seem to understand how or why "antibacterial soap" is "antibacterial." If you want to be clean, just use soap. If you want a sterile field, use Betadine and a proper scrub protocol. If you just want everything dead, use liquid bleach and/or one minute in boiling water.
"Try choosing a color sometime. OpenOffice is the only application I've seen in a long time that requires users to add a color to a color list through a completely separate color list editing dialog and then choose that color from the color selection dialog."
Good one! NeoOffice doesn't take advantage of OSX's excellent system-wide color picker. It should. (I realize it's a Java program, and I don't care.) Usability issue for those who want an arbitrary palette in Presentation or whatever.
I think you answered your own question. Unfortunately there are a lot of incompetent executives.
Curiously, this situation does not create a competitive advantage to be exploited by competent executives.
Perhaps incompetence is necessary for success in business?
>So what? Who cares? Forcing people to GPL all the code which uses functionality "derived" from GPL code is a feature of
>the GPL.
It's more than that. It is the right of the copyright holder.
What is being alleged is that a corporation is abridging the rights of one or more individuals. The suggestion (raised several times already in this thread) that this should be overlooked because of their community affiliations, is preposterous.
We're in violent agreement -- the point was that the stated price for the tail is in easy reach. Which means it will either revolutionize diving, getting a lot of people into trouble, or it won't be all that useful in practice...:-)
It is perceived as slow to load, but MS Office amortizes some of its load time into Windows' startup.
Like any Java program, lots of components are lazy-initialized, and with most JRE's these are also slow.
But once you're operating, it's not slow.
What are you comparing? Computationally intensive resolution of spreadsheets? OO Spreadsheet isn't bad. When does a measure of "speed" enter into a Word Processor program, aside from the perception of font rendering, reflow formatting, preparation for printing, and that sort of thing? OO Writer is pretty good on these points as well.
My gripes about OO are also gripes about Excel. Reporting scientific research and don't like the scatter plots? Need to constrain error bars? These programs can be quite lacking, but it's not as though Excel surpasses OO in many areas. When I need something that Writer won't do, I'd be doing it in LaTeX anyway. I wouldn't bother with a spreadsheet for anything but the most simple calculation, since I use Matlab day in and day out.
Maybe I'm not qualified to speak on the virtues of spreadsheets, since I'm a scientist and those things are made for financial analysts who have entirely different use cases. Even so, I have yet to see a spreadsheet sans macro programming, that could not have been done on the 2.1 version of Lotus 1-2-3. If "speed" was really the concern, I am quite confident that 1-2-3 running in dosemu on a current machine will beat anything out there. Probably has a Y2K showstopper or something.
I just don't see the argument that it's "slow". And yes, I do run NeoOffice on a Macbook Pro. Takes a while to startup. So does MS Office, but it takes advantage of tight integration and hides it from you.
>let's hope that OpenOffice fixes its usabilities problems by then
Usability problems? I have not seen these enumerated.
I have features I would like to see in the Open Office spreadsheet, but most of these are features that Excel also lacks. But I see no genuine usability bugs, not even for users dealing with large volumes of material, multiple languages, multi-user systems, etc.
>I wouldn't be surprised if all the equipment for your typical diver exceeds $2k.
A good regulator runs $300 to $500. You can spend $700 or $1000 in a dive shop on a regulator, and professional divers will spend a lot more than that. A good cold water wetsuit is easily upwards of $500; way more than your typical surfing suit. It's so easy to spend five grand on diving equipment it's not even funny; and let's don't even talk about what dive enthusiasts have in their *boats*, *motor homes*, *hotel bills*, and *airfare*. A $500 marginal cost isn't all that significant to a real diving enthusiast, especially not for one who is into deep dives.
Don't get me wrong -- you can rent a whole package, get some safety training, etc., for like $50 to $100 a day, all over the Caribbean, if you don't mind doing the group thing. But you ought to be able to get the lecture, pool lesson, equipment and a good day's worth of a reef dive for under a hundred bucks at pretty much any resort.
>Seriously though, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that it's not legal to break into someone's network. This might seem like crazy talk, but hear me out.
There's no law against it in the place where I was at the time I was there, and the person whose network it was, could never have prevailed in any kind of civil suit for any kind of damages whatsoever. Different laws may apply in different places; I don't care -- in this case I wanted to take off my scientist hat and put on my stupid user hat. I just wanted the internet to work.
By comparison, breaking and entering is against the law in that same place, and would cause damage for which the proprietor could seek relief. Completely different situation, completely flawed analogy.
Even though J&J appear to be in the right on this, I still want them to have to argue before a jury, that money must be taken from disaster relief efforts and given to 2Johnson's lawyers.
No, I mean, it was legal. I had a right to use the network, and there is no law in that jurisdiction that would apply. So, certainly not illegal.
>Not completely unethical
Completely ethical. I had paid for a service that I could not use because the people on staff were unable to remember the password. Apparently someone uses the internet there maybe once every two months...
>Probably not "necessary"
Matter of opinion.
Main point: It took you a lot longer to write your message, than the "start to finish in 90 seconds" that is frequently claimed. If it was so easy, why doesn't somebody just make a widget to do it in one step?
Slashdot Mirror
>Nah; that can't explain it. After all, if all the recordings were at half the current level,
>then you'd just turn the volume dial to get the same loudness.
Multiband compression does not work the same way as amplification, not physically, and not psychoacoustically.
The "Loudness War" is being fought in a domain that's quite different from merely "volume". "Perceived volume
is a different beast.
People accept loss of dynamic range and it seems to often escape them until they notice it. It's much more obvious
in video. I've had to point out shadows, color gradients, etc. Once people see it, they keep seeing it and suddenly
the DVR isn't good enough
It's the same with music, but of course much less obvious to most people. The compression is as if, instead of a color
spectrum, everything is crammed into one or two shades of red, green, and blue. At least, I think that's a very good
analogy.
There's also compression in the frequency domain. Everybody seems so happy with audio compression, until they realize that they *can* hear the difference and that it does matter. "Listen to just the cymbals in this", I'll say. There's a moment when people realize that audiophiles aren't crazy, don't have superhuman hearing, etc. And suddenly 64Kbps MP3's aren't good to them either.
So how did the Senator's proposal go when he pitched it to the Regents at the universities in his home state? Those results would be very useful when trying to persuade a US Senate committee...
"Not necessarily. My grandmother still gets the phone bill in my grandfather's name, and my grandfather is still listed in the phonebook. I've never met the man - he was dead 20 years before I was born, and I'm 21 years old."
Phone bill and phone book aren't junk mail. Besides, your grandmother might legally be "Mrs. Your Grandpa". I'm talking about gift and gardening catalogs, coupon books, etc., and I've seen this stuff *stop* with no action taken (other than people dying.)
>How would it entertain your audience?
If you can keep the gays in your audience, you have it made. Ask Kathy Griffin or Margaret Cho, Barry Manilow or Bette Midler.
>It's why you get junk snail mail when you buy a house
You get junk mail with frighteningly accurate details about your loan, value of your house, equity position, etc.
>have a child
What's really scary is that when someone in your household dies, the junk mail *stops*.
>And like it or not, sharing copyrighted material IS a crime in the USA at this point in time.
So my torrent seed of Ubuntu (which is comprised almost entirely of copyrighted material) is illegal?
That is the claim you have made.
I called this the "TJ Maxx Effect". Yes, I shop there; it's near my house and I can usually do better on housewares and necessary items than I could do even in thrift stores.
So anyway, the "Effect" is this: If you are shopping, and you take an interest in some category of items, say, curtain rods, and another shopper sees you checking out curtain rods, all of a sudden *they* are interested in curtain rods. Same thing happens if you look in the towel aisle. Someone who wasn't looking at towels suddenly needs to crowd into your space to look at towels as well. I've observed this phenomenon numerous times and particularly at TJ Maxx, and I believe the psychology of it is "they" don't want "you" to get a deal that they missed out on.
To be fair, sometimes there really are awesome deals to be had, because the people setting the prices don't tend to be particularly savvy as to desirability of certain kinds of items. For instance, I got a JA Henckel knife set -- a really high quality made in Spain set -- that was priced the same as another made in China set. These are completely different products, massively differently priced in retail stores, and the TJ Maxx manager didn't know. (I'm not above capitalizing on the misfortune of others.)
Anyway, as for the article, I got as far as realizing that physical access means you have the keys to the store, so to speak. At my local store, the clerks watch the application machine, as well as everything else in the shop, like a hawk. I get the impression that shoplifting is more common in discount stores than in regular retail stores; maybe I can study this and name THAT effect as well.
>If you read the opinion, you will see that Commercial vs. Noncommercial use is a factor to consider during the fair use
>analysis - specifically Factor #1 "Nature and Purpose of the Use".
I have a real problem with this, on Equal Protection grounds.
>If the argument has legs, it 'stands up';
I misused the idiom, I guess. I meant, it "has feet" -- it travels, it leaves footprints. It's a fallacy that is widely accepted as fact.
>I hope this clarifies the matter.
Not really, because I still need a good way to explain, so that people will understand, that the creator of something like an open source software product, or a song that's freely distributed, something "free" in that nature, where someone has infringed its copyright, suffers damages, and should be entitled to equivalent relief, as, say, that claimed by Disney with respect to an unlicensed DVD of Snow White...
Just because Disney is a giant corporation, and the product is commercially distributed, should have NO bearing on the equal protection of rights reserved under copyright, compared with an individual who retains the copyright on a minor work that is distributed noncommercially.
Equal rights regardless if you are a private person or a stakeholder in a multi-trillion-dollar corporation.
"Not at all. One of the key features of cryptographic algorithms is that knowing what algorithm is being used has absolutely no impact on the strength."
A layer of obscurity makes a secure cipher no less secure.
"You cannot reproduce copyrighted material in its entirety and distribute it to hundreds of people. Charging for the copies doesn't matter."
Thank you for pointing out that crucially important fact! The idea that damage due to copyright infringement is only possible if it is done for financial gain, or if the copyright work is commercially traded, has legs, and is preposterous.
>Don't photocopy articles for commercial purposes.
That position serves to diminish the value of damages of copyright infringement in noncommercial contexts.
"Soap, a surfactant, kills using physics. It turns lipid membranes inside out. Also by reducing surface tension it creates other havoc"
If I had mod points you'd get them. People don't seem to understand how or why "antibacterial soap" is "antibacterial."
If you want to be clean, just use soap. If you want a sterile field, use Betadine and a proper scrub protocol. If you just want everything dead, use liquid bleach and/or one minute in boiling water.
"Try choosing a color sometime. OpenOffice is the only application I've seen in a long time that requires users to add a color to a color list through a completely separate color list editing dialog and then choose that color from the color selection dialog."
Good one! NeoOffice doesn't take advantage of OSX's excellent system-wide color picker. It should. (I realize it's a Java program, and I don't care.) Usability issue for those who want an arbitrary palette in Presentation or whatever.
I think you answered your own question. Unfortunately there are a lot of incompetent executives.
Curiously, this situation does not create a competitive advantage to be exploited by competent executives.
Perhaps incompetence is necessary for success in business?
>So what? Who cares? Forcing people to GPL all the code which uses functionality "derived" from GPL code is a feature of
>the GPL.
It's more than that. It is the right of the copyright holder.
What is being alleged is that a corporation is abridging the rights of one or more individuals. The suggestion (raised several times already in this thread) that this should be overlooked because of their community affiliations, is preposterous.
We're in violent agreement -- the point was that the stated price for the tail is in easy reach. Which means it will either revolutionize diving, getting a lot of people into trouble, or it won't be all that useful in practice... :-)
Can't help but assume there will be a cease and desist order in the /. headlines tomorrow.
It is perceived as slow to load, but MS Office amortizes some of its load time into Windows' startup.
Like any Java program, lots of components are lazy-initialized, and with most JRE's these are also slow.
But once you're operating, it's not slow.
What are you comparing? Computationally intensive resolution of spreadsheets? OO Spreadsheet isn't bad. When does a measure of "speed" enter into a Word Processor program, aside from the perception of font rendering, reflow formatting, preparation for printing, and that sort of thing? OO Writer is pretty good on these points as well.
My gripes about OO are also gripes about Excel. Reporting scientific research and don't like the scatter plots? Need to constrain error bars? These programs can be quite lacking, but it's not as though Excel surpasses OO in many areas. When I need something that Writer won't do, I'd be doing it in LaTeX anyway. I wouldn't bother with a spreadsheet for anything but the most simple calculation, since I use Matlab day in and day out.
Maybe I'm not qualified to speak on the virtues of spreadsheets, since I'm a scientist and those things are made for financial analysts who have entirely different use cases. Even so, I have yet to see a spreadsheet sans macro programming, that could not have been done on the 2.1 version of Lotus 1-2-3. If "speed" was really the concern, I am quite confident that 1-2-3 running in dosemu on a current machine will beat anything out there. Probably has a Y2K showstopper or something.
I just don't see the argument that it's "slow". And yes, I do run NeoOffice on a Macbook Pro. Takes a while to startup. So does MS Office, but it takes advantage of tight integration and hides it from you.
>let's hope that OpenOffice fixes its usabilities problems by then
Usability problems? I have not seen these enumerated.
I have features I would like to see in the Open Office spreadsheet, but most of these are features that Excel also lacks. But I see no genuine usability bugs, not even for users dealing with large volumes of material, multiple languages, multi-user systems, etc.
>I wouldn't be surprised if all the equipment for your typical diver exceeds $2k.
A good regulator runs $300 to $500. You can spend $700 or $1000 in a dive shop on a regulator, and professional divers will spend a lot more than that. A good cold water wetsuit is easily upwards of $500; way more than your typical surfing suit. It's so easy to spend five grand on diving equipment it's not even funny; and let's don't even talk about what dive enthusiasts have in their *boats*, *motor homes*, *hotel bills*, and *airfare*.
A $500 marginal cost isn't all that significant to a real diving enthusiast, especially not for one who is into deep dives.
Don't get me wrong -- you can rent a whole package, get some safety training, etc., for like $50 to $100 a day, all over the Caribbean, if you don't mind doing the group thing. But you ought to be able to get the lecture, pool lesson, equipment and a good day's worth of a reef dive for under a hundred bucks at pretty much any resort.
If there is any question that you might not like math, PLEASE drop it before you get to Analysis or P-Chem.
>Seriously though, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that it's not legal to break into someone's network. This might seem like crazy talk, but hear me out.
There's no law against it in the place where I was at the time I was there, and the person whose network it was, could never have prevailed in any kind of civil suit for any kind of damages whatsoever. Different laws may apply in different places; I don't care -- in this case I wanted to take off my scientist hat and put on my stupid user hat. I just wanted the internet to work.
By comparison, breaking and entering is against the law in that same place, and would cause damage for which the proprietor could seek relief. Completely different situation, completely flawed analogy.
Thanks for the links.
Even though J&J appear to be in the right on this, I still want them to have to argue before a jury, that money must be taken from disaster relief efforts and given to 2Johnson's lawyers.
>I think you mean:
>Possibly not illegal
No, I mean, it was legal. I had a right to use the network, and there is no law in that jurisdiction that would apply. So, certainly not illegal.
>Not completely unethical
Completely ethical. I had paid for a service that I could not use because the people on staff were unable to remember the password. Apparently someone uses the internet there maybe once every two months...
>Probably not "necessary"
Matter of opinion.
Main point: It took you a lot longer to write your message, than the "start to finish in 90 seconds" that is frequently claimed. If it was so easy, why doesn't somebody just make a widget to do it in one step?