"The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it."
A similar statement can be made about the superiority of a digital photograph to the medium of oil paint and canvas.
The inferior medium has an idiomatic artistic value.
On the other hand, I fully realize that I could take a good signal path, and make a 24-bit, 48kHz digital recording of a playback of a vinyl record, and no human being would be able to reliably differentiate them in a double-blind A/B/X test.
>But some people do like vinyl better.
People who make a reasoned, conscious analysis of such things realize that it's not the medium they prefer, but the mastering techniques.
Very often, even the CD release of old material has not merely been normalized to have peaks at 0dBFS, sometimes even *clipped*, but has actually been compressed to fit in 4 bits. If you try to get away with this in video, the viewer immediately recognizes loss of dynamic range as crap. But in audio, the listener perceives it as "louder".
>of course I couldn't prove that I didn't steal it
Of course?
Burden of proof for theft was never on you. You had just as much cause to accuse the store of theft. But it would have really been fraud, requiring a civil action. I would have explained it to the credit card company very carefully in terms of damage to my operation, damage to my reputation, and lost productivity. I've done this a few times and found it rather satisfying. I've never seen anyone pursue anything more aggressively than American Express investigating a merchant fraud.
>As much as the dollar has fallen, it's odd that inflation in the US isn't higher (except for gas, where we are feeling the weak dollar).
I believe you could rephrase that in order to claim the dollar has not fallen as much as is sometimes claimed.
For inflation, I like to use reference points other than the price of fuel. I get a big kick out of stuff like local grocery store ads that show the price of, say, milk, and seeing that I can come very close to those prices, or even beat them, today.
>There's a $1 million prize for proving or disproving P = NP from the Clay Mathematics institute if you're still interested.
That's a much harder thing to do (or is it? Show either way and become the most famous person in the world overnight:-) But to show a TM is a UTM, you can take a "guess and test" approach. Find a UTM that can be described by another TM, and that other TM becomes a UTM. The big problem is you have to have insight to know what to guess, and you have to have a lot of patience to work out computation with the (provably) minimal possible resources.
I struggled with drawing NFA's for regular expressions. I really can't imagine doing the tedious work that it would be to figure out a TM with a really small tape alphabet or a really small number of states, and of course this is both. Some people really enjoy doing Automata, others just want to get through it with a "C" and never touch the subject again:-)
>It will be horribly inefficient and slow, but it can be done.
I always hate to hear that. It's a thought experiment with no time domain at all. How can it be slow? It decides all decidable computation simultaneously, in no time at all. This is actually one of the limitations of the TM making it of less value in some cases for evaluating algorithm complexity and efficiency.
>They've proved that a 2,2 machine is impossible so a 2,3 machine was the simplest possible theoretical Turing machine.
As I understand it (which is not very well), the one thing left to prove is that the control automaton for this particular 2,3 machine is as simple as possible (six transitions seems pretty minimal to me, but does the proof show it can't be done in five?)
>Could anyone take a stab at explaining what this discovery actually means, in layman's terms?
This is pretty tough to explain from scratch. The Turing Machine is usually the subject of a semester-long Automata course which is usually one of the theory capstones for a Computer Science degree. It's not hard to explain the significance of the TM itself -- it's meant to be a simple thought experiment. But like many mathematical tools, you sort of need to understand the "itch" that the tool "scratches."
If you try to dive in with the Wikipedia entry or whatever, you're faced with "...A Turing Machine is a 7-tuple M=(Q, Sigma, beta, Epsilon, delta, q0, F)..." and I'm sure that's very unfriendly (but it makes sense if you build up to it).
In a nutshell, the Turing Machine separates "languages" into three categories: "Recognizable", "Decidable", and "Intractable." What we mean by "languages" here is a formal concept of languages. It turns out that all kinds of things can be represented by formal languages. So a language can be the input to a Turing Machine, think of it as the data and the program for the "Machine" if it helps you to consider the Machine "like a computer".
So, the first category, "Recognizable" also includes some classes of languages that can be recognized by less powerful things than Turing Machines. Here you have Regular Expressions which you may know from programming, which can be recognized by "Finite Automata" and "Context Free" languages that have "Pushdown Automata". So the Finite Automata and the Pushdown Automata are usually presented first, and the next step in the hierarchy is the Turing Machine. Each of these classes recognizes more languages than the previous classes.
The implications of the Turing Machine are at the core of computer science, because they can be used to show in a mathematically rigorous way, whether a given problem is in the class of "things that can be computed by a machine" (even if the machine is entirely hypothetical).
As for the "Universal" part, there is a class of Turing Machines that can simulate the operation of any specialized Turing Machine. This is really the amazing result from Turing's and Church's work (done at a time that computers as we understand them weren't even a well established *idea*!).
So, the UTM is a model that makes it possible to show that an algorithm exists to solve a given problem, and it provides a standard way for describing algorithms. The way a TM computes can be very (infinitely) roundabout and impractical, but that's not the point. The TM isn't supposed to be any kind of model of an efficient real machine. It's supposed to be a minimalist thought experiment for investigating algorithms, and for many, just a way to torture CS majors in their senior year.
Anyway, the proof being reported here is significant, because it represents the smallest currently known reduction of the UTM, and I believe may even prove that this is the smallest possible reduction. In order to understand this, I think you'd have to experiment a bit with TM's, then look at some of the less extreme reductions (e.g., Minsky's 7,4 UTM might be a more realistic place to start), and if that doesn't cure you of your curiosity, read the 2,3 proof. This result really is amazing.
It's a thought experiment, to be used as a mathematical tool. From time to time I run into people who seem to be unable to grasp the idea that a TM isn't meant to be built, or that a materialized TM is not required in order for it to be useful.
>You buy it 'there' because you can't get it 'here', that was the point.
You buy it "there" from someone who went "there" and brought it back. You make it worth their while to do that, either by unit price or by volume. If there was a strong market demand for these things, someone would be supplying.
I would bet that there are places in the UK where people typically don't have either mobile phones or microwave ovens. There are places like that in the US too. On the other hand, "acting shocked guy" was probably having a good laugh at your expense.
>What do you mean, can't get here? This is the post-globalist age, ffs. From TFA:
"Can't get it here" just means it's not popular enough for economies of scale to lead to an affordable gray market.
You *can* "get it here." Go there. Buy it. Bring it back with you. Easier, perhaps, for someone who already takes business trips to Asia every month or so, but not impossible to get.
"writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up."
What college doesn't require writing emphasis courses, some kind of critical reasoning course, classes that demand more or less hard work, and don't have *some* kind of attendance policy??? I'd love to see the author of this article get into my school, let alone out of it, for *any* major, without all those things he says aren't required, and much more.
The only time I have ever *had to* play a DVD on a computer, it was a locally produced disc. It played on Ubuntu "out of the box." I was very grateful, just like I have been grateful for linux every other one of the thousands of times it has been the OS that saved my butt.
The kind of people who "live" in the really expensive NYC real estate tend to not spend much time there themselves. These apartments are status symbols. Places to send your clients who want something better than a Times Square hotel room. Places to have an occasional party. That sort of thing. The person who has a Bentley and a $5 million apartment in NYC also has a "ranch" outside Denver, a mansion on the Big Island of Hawaii, and an island in the Caribbean... and somebody on the payroll to deal with the Bentley, and drive it, and park it. Not for the owner. For the people the owner is trying to impress...
Has anyone considered the effect of reducing the mass of the planet by sending matter to (or past) orbit? Call it insignificant if you want, but once it becomes cheap and easy, we will not only pollute space, but we will also reduce the mass of the planet.
>Your tone of voice isn't coming across. Are you joking?
Not really. If you can make the case you're trying to make for Radiohead, you can make it for, say, Haibib Koité as well. The point is well taken, of course. Radiohead isn't exactly an unsigned garage band and can leverage their popularity to create a direct sales market. Others have done it before; consider Ani DiFranco's approach (give the labels the middle finger by becoming a label), or the Grateful Dead with the whole self-produced "Dick's Picks" thing (taking never-licensed material that was already in open distribution, but packaging it for sale.) I don't know where I'm going with this, but I'm sure someone could name the top 25 acts in Korea or Indonesia, point out that their fanbase is larger than the populations of the US and Europe combined, and that's not going to make them mainstream, but you'll probably find in converse, Koreans generally recognize US and UK and European pop artists. To my mind "mainstream" is when people on every continent recognize your brand...
>It's terrible that we spend trillions of dollars to build militarys and almost zero on things like this which expand our knowledge for the betterment of >us all.
That money goes to people who invest in other things when they get bored. Post WWII industry is what built the space programs in various countries, most of whom regarded the whole thing as a weapons race anyway.
>You think Radiohead is famous because of Creep? God you're a fucking philistine.
I know about them because I'm heavily into electronic music and synthesizers.
But I can recognize that 100 out of 100 people out there in the mainstream, if they know anything about Radiohead, know the song Creep, maybe recognize the rat logo, and that's all. They are famous in what amounts to an underground scene in a nontraditional genre.
>Good point. The labels promotion certainly helped them get where they are.
This is based on the premise that they were heavily marketed in the first place. But Radiohead is at best, a marginally well-known band. They have received more publicity in the past week than the sum total of their previous career. The song "Creep" got tons of radio play because it was received as a novelty song. And the rat face logo got a lot of eyeshare. But the fact is, Radiohead qualifies still as an underground act, with a cult following drawn from a nontraditional demographic.
It looks to me like their label either did them a disservice by ignoring them, or else the label acceeded to the band's wishes by allowing them to stay under the mainstream radar.
Radiohead is hardly the band to use as an example of the relationship between a mainstream act and its mainstream label.
Slashdot Mirror
>After the, OH, 200th time some idiot tried that, we started turning them into the police.
You do that when you are willing to tell a judge, under oath, that you know the person you are accusing of theft is guilty.
Make the wrong call on this just once, and it could be *you* going to jail, and could represent unlimited liability for the company you work for.
You need credible, admissible *proof* when accusing someone of a felony.
"The truth of the matter is that vinyl records are crap compared to CD's in every measurable way - distortion, dynamic range, frequency response, signal to noise ratio, you name it."
A similar statement can be made about the superiority of a digital photograph to the medium of oil paint and canvas.
The inferior medium has an idiomatic artistic value.
On the other hand, I fully realize that I could take a good signal path, and make a 24-bit, 48kHz digital recording of a playback of a vinyl record, and no human being would be able to reliably differentiate them in a double-blind A/B/X test.
>But some people do like vinyl better.
People who make a reasoned, conscious analysis of such things realize that it's not the medium they prefer, but the mastering techniques.
Very often, even the CD release of old material has not merely been normalized to have peaks at 0dBFS, sometimes even *clipped*, but has actually been compressed to fit in 4 bits. If you try to get away with this in video, the viewer immediately recognizes loss of dynamic range as crap. But in audio, the listener perceives it as "louder".
"Loudness" is a strange perception.
>of course I couldn't prove that I didn't steal it
Of course?
Burden of proof for theft was never on you. You had just as much cause to accuse the store of theft. But it would have really been fraud, requiring a civil action. I would have explained it to the credit card company very carefully in terms of damage to my operation, damage to my reputation, and lost productivity. I've done this a few times and found it rather satisfying. I've never seen anyone pursue anything more aggressively than American Express investigating a merchant fraud.
>As much as the dollar has fallen, it's odd that inflation in the US isn't higher (except for gas, where we are feeling the weak dollar).
I believe you could rephrase that in order to claim the dollar has not fallen as much as is sometimes claimed.
For inflation, I like to use reference points other than the price of fuel. I get a big kick out of stuff like local grocery store ads that show the price of, say, milk, and seeing that I can come very close to those prices, or even beat them, today.
>There's a $1 million prize for proving or disproving P = NP from the Clay Mathematics institute if you're still interested.
That's a much harder thing to do (or is it? Show either way and become the most famous person in the world overnight
But to show a TM is a UTM, you can take a "guess and test" approach. Find a UTM that can be described by another TM, and that other TM becomes a UTM. The big problem is you have to have insight to know what to guess, and you have to have a lot of patience to work out computation with the (provably) minimal possible resources.
I struggled with drawing NFA's for regular expressions. I really can't imagine doing the tedious work that it would be to figure out a TM with a really small tape alphabet or a really small number of states, and of course this is both. Some people really enjoy doing Automata, others just want to get through it with a "C" and never touch the subject again
>It will be horribly inefficient and slow, but it can be done.
I always hate to hear that. It's a thought experiment with no time domain at all. How can it be slow? It decides all decidable computation simultaneously, in no time at all. This is actually one of the limitations of the TM making it of less value in some cases for evaluating algorithm complexity and efficiency.
>They've proved that a 2,2 machine is impossible so a 2,3 machine was the simplest possible theoretical Turing machine.
As I understand it (which is not very well), the one thing left to prove is that the control automaton for this particular 2,3 machine is as simple as possible (six transitions seems pretty minimal to me, but does the proof show it can't be done in five?)
>Could anyone take a stab at explaining what this discovery actually means, in layman's terms?
This is pretty tough to explain from scratch. The Turing Machine is usually the subject of a semester-long Automata course which is usually one of the theory capstones for a Computer Science degree. It's not hard to explain the significance of the TM itself -- it's meant to be a simple thought experiment. But like many mathematical tools, you sort of need to understand the "itch" that the tool "scratches."
If you try to dive in with the Wikipedia entry or whatever, you're faced with "...A Turing Machine is a 7-tuple M=(Q, Sigma, beta, Epsilon, delta, q0, F)..." and I'm sure that's very unfriendly (but it makes sense if you build up to it).
In a nutshell, the Turing Machine separates "languages" into three categories: "Recognizable", "Decidable", and "Intractable." What we mean by "languages" here is a formal concept of languages. It turns out that all kinds of things can be represented by formal languages. So a language can be the input to a Turing Machine, think of it as the data and the program for the "Machine" if it helps you to consider the Machine "like a computer".
So, the first category, "Recognizable" also includes some classes of languages that can be recognized by less powerful things than Turing Machines. Here you have Regular Expressions which you may know from programming, which can be recognized by "Finite Automata" and "Context Free" languages that have "Pushdown Automata". So the Finite Automata and the Pushdown Automata are usually presented first, and the next step in the hierarchy is the Turing Machine. Each of these classes recognizes more languages than the previous classes.
The implications of the Turing Machine are at the core of computer science, because they can be used to show in a mathematically rigorous way, whether a given problem is in the class of "things that can be computed by a machine" (even if the machine is entirely hypothetical).
As for the "Universal" part, there is a class of Turing Machines that can simulate the operation of any specialized Turing Machine. This is really the amazing result from Turing's and Church's work (done at a time that computers as we understand them weren't even a well established *idea*!).
So, the UTM is a model that makes it possible to show that an algorithm exists to solve a given problem, and it provides a standard way for describing algorithms. The way a TM computes can be very (infinitely) roundabout and impractical, but that's not the point. The TM isn't supposed to be any kind of model of an efficient real machine. It's supposed to be a minimalist thought experiment for investigating algorithms, and for many, just a way to torture CS majors in their senior year.
Anyway, the proof being reported here is significant, because it represents the smallest currently known reduction of the UTM, and I believe may even prove that this is the smallest possible reduction. In order to understand this, I think you'd have to experiment a bit with TM's, then look at some of the less extreme reductions (e.g., Minsky's 7,4 UTM might be a more realistic place to start), and if that doesn't cure you of your curiosity, read the 2,3 proof. This result really is amazing.
>The problem is the longish tape.
It's a thought experiment, to be used as a mathematical tool. From time to time I run into people who seem to be unable to grasp the idea that a TM isn't meant to be built, or that a materialized TM is not required in order for it to be useful.
>You buy it 'there' because you can't get it 'here', that was the point.
You buy it "there" from someone who went "there" and brought it back. You make it worth their while to do that, either by unit price or by volume. If there was a strong market demand for these things, someone would be supplying.
Liberals? Are you one of those people who blames everything on an ideology because it's popular among your peers?
I would bet that there are places in the UK where people typically don't have either mobile phones or microwave ovens. There are places like that in the US too. On the other hand, "acting shocked guy" was probably having a good laugh at your expense.
>What do you mean, can't get here? This is the post-globalist age, ffs. From TFA:
"Can't get it here" just means it's not popular enough for economies of scale to lead to an affordable gray market.
You *can* "get it here." Go there. Buy it. Bring it back with you. Easier, perhaps, for someone who already takes business trips to Asia every month or so, but not impossible to get.
"writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up."
What college doesn't require writing emphasis courses, some kind of critical reasoning course, classes that demand more or less hard work, and don't have *some* kind of attendance policy??? I'd love to see the author of this article get into my school, let alone out of it, for *any* major, without all those things he says aren't required, and much more.
The only time I have ever *had to* play a DVD on a computer, it was a locally produced disc. It played on Ubuntu "out of the box."
I was very grateful, just like I have been grateful for linux every other one of the thousands of times it has been the OS that saved my butt.
The kind of people who "live" in the really expensive NYC real estate tend to not spend much time there themselves. These apartments are status symbols. Places to send your clients who want something better than a Times Square hotel room. Places to have an occasional party. That sort of thing. The person who has a Bentley and a $5 million apartment in NYC also has a "ranch" outside Denver, a mansion on the Big Island of Hawaii, and an island in the Caribbean... and somebody on the payroll to deal with the Bentley, and drive it, and park it. Not for the owner. For the people the owner is trying to impress...
So maybe our survival *depends* on sending stuff into space...
Has anyone considered the effect of reducing the mass of the planet by sending matter to (or past) orbit? Call it insignificant if you want, but once it becomes cheap and easy, we will not only pollute space, but we will also reduce the mass of the planet.
>Your tone of voice isn't coming across. Are you joking?
Not really. If you can make the case you're trying to make for Radiohead, you can make it for, say, Haibib Koité as well.
The point is well taken, of course. Radiohead isn't exactly an unsigned garage band and can leverage their popularity to create a direct sales market. Others have done it before; consider Ani DiFranco's approach (give the labels the middle finger by becoming a label), or the Grateful Dead with the whole self-produced "Dick's Picks" thing (taking never-licensed material that was already in open distribution, but packaging it for sale.) I don't know where I'm going with this, but I'm sure someone could name the top 25 acts in Korea or Indonesia, point out that their fanbase is larger than the populations of the US and Europe combined, and that's not going to make them mainstream, but you'll probably find in converse, Koreans generally recognize US and UK and European pop artists. To my mind "mainstream" is when people on every continent recognize your brand...
>I thought "thumb drive" was perfect.. Don't see why people have changed it...
People still say thumb drive.
I say stuff like "USB 2.0 Flash Memory Device" just to piss off people who think they don't like nerds.
No way will I ever refer to one as a "drive."
Are you trying to claim that being popular in markets outside the USA qualifies something as "mainstream?"
Unlikely.
>It's terrible that we spend trillions of dollars to build militarys and almost zero on things like this which expand our knowledge for the betterment of >us all.
That money goes to people who invest in other things when they get bored. Post WWII industry is what built the space programs in various countries, most of whom regarded the whole thing as a weapons race anyway.
>You think Radiohead is famous because of Creep? God you're a fucking philistine.
I know about them because I'm heavily into electronic music and synthesizers.
But I can recognize that 100 out of 100 people out there in the mainstream, if they know anything about Radiohead,
know the song Creep, maybe recognize the rat logo, and that's all. They are famous in what amounts to an underground scene in a nontraditional genre.
>Good point. The labels promotion certainly helped them get where they are.
This is based on the premise that they were heavily marketed in the first place. But Radiohead is at best, a marginally well-known band. They have received more publicity in the past week than the sum total of their previous career. The song "Creep" got tons of radio play because it was received as a novelty song. And the rat face logo got a lot of eyeshare. But the fact is, Radiohead qualifies still as an underground act, with a cult following drawn from a nontraditional demographic.
It looks to me like their label either did them a disservice by ignoring them, or else the label acceeded to the band's wishes by allowing them to stay under the mainstream radar.
Radiohead is hardly the band to use as an example of the relationship between a mainstream act and its mainstream label.
>that would mean there was no cost to set up the site
Did you SEE the site? You can't expect anyone to believe they paid for that.
I will believe a music publisher loses money to "piracy" when they claim it as a specific loss for tax purposes.