I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.
So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.
Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the.ogg format).
The procedure is, although effective, rather unorthodox. Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures. Simply mounting your hard disk upside down enables centripetal forces to cancel out the rotational ruptures in the disk. As I said, unorthodox, and mainstream manufactures will not approve as it hurts sales (less rotational velocidensity damage means a slighter chance of disk failure.)
I'd still go with uncompressed.wav myself, but there's nothing wrong with compressed formats like flac or mp3 when you treat your hardware right
There's pedantry which serves the useful purpose of correcting other people's mistakes, and then there's pedantry of the "look how clever I am" variety; posts like yours, which seem to get posted to every single story on any kind of astronomical event that takes place outside the solar system, are examples of the latter.
There is an excellent word for this and it means far more than just "pedant" and it's Finnish.
The word is pilkunnussija, literally "comma fucker"
>you'd think they would offer a repo with signed freeware software for their customers.
They don't even have to provide the actual server space. All they have to do is provide the infrastructure in the OS and it will happen. You'll see mirrors of free Windows software pop up on servers everywhere. It's how the community works.
A CDROM image does not really cut it. Sure, a handful of packages give a taste of what's available, but there's a lot out there that cannot be fit on a CD. And there is no way to keep up with updates except manually.
One of the greatest advantages of many Linux distros is that they have repositories of software that are kept up to date, with just about everything you could ask for in F/OSS.
Windows users are stuck crawling the likes of Tucows and Download.com and the venerable Simtel archive is not even a shadow of its former self (really, have you seen it lately?). Windows users just don't even know how nice it is to open up a software management window and get free/open source software without hassle. Signed packages in a vetted searchable mirrored database really is the way to go.
> let's make ISP's fully responsible for all incidental and consquential damages.
You're taking an argument that a business should be held up to its promises to be an invitation to make them "responsible for all incidental and consequential damages" which is anything and everything. And then you say that "hey, wouldn't it be swell if we apply it to ISPs" which means they're liable for everything, even infringing content posted by users, among other things (or hate speech or whatever).
That is not what the parent is asking for.
The parent is asking for businesses to deal fairly. If it takes regulation to make businesses deal fairly, then that's what should happen. But to take this basic idea and twist it into about how onerous the slightest regulation is by exaggerating the case at hand is intellectually dishonest.
Banks are responsible if they lose your money. That's why tellers are bonded and the bank is insured. Why should you expect less from someone else who is also holding your money, be it real or synthetic? Business who act as brokers *and* traders in bitcoins should be required to have insurance as a matter of course. This is not onerous. It is goddamn common sense.
"MAKE Magazine asks: is it 'Time For Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts 2.0?' What might the future of education be like if it were based on online & earned skill badges, and what could the future of traditional organizations for kids, like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, be like in a very modern, tech-savvy world?
Wasn't this answered decades ago when they came up with Explorers?
Typical Explorer posts include groups of teenagers specializing in a field such as law enforcement, fire and emergency service, health careers, engineering, aviation, skilled trades, and technology. The majority of Explorer posts have an Explorer uniform that they have especially designed for wear during formal meetings and community service activities, a long-standing tradition dating from the time when Exploring was a traditional BSA program.
> let's make ISP's fully responsible for all incidental and consquential damages.
Strawman: Hi, you didn't say this, but I'm going to say that you want to have ISPs responsible for content and then I'm going to attack it.
False dichotomy: "obviously" some regulation leads to regulation of everything down to the most minor minutia, implying that you can either have no regulation at all or intrusive regulation, excluding the middle.
Reductio ad absurdum: "I'm going to take what you said and invent a mythical case (ISPs responsible for content) that would never exist in reality and somehow this is proof of something"
All three of these are related. Can you guess how?
In case you can't, I'll put it in simple terms: You are putting words in the parent's mouth that were never said. In even simpler terms, it's a lie.
What was the point of the article? That the trade show is like every trade show ever?
Really, I'll write a report the next time I go to EASTEC and whine about the lack of "Makers" (in the geek culture sense of the word) among the vendors of Big Machinery.
As a Linux user and abuser for the last 14 years (regularly... irregularly before that), digital distribution has been very good to me.
Bait and switch is not a new concept. It's a long-time, er, tradition in retail and other businesses. Bait and switch schemes are fraud and should be treated as such, and such publishers should be shunned by the community at large if not prosecuted.
>Minding my own business and setting up the next neutrino experiment
>The director of CERN has me on the phone
>"What is it mein fuhrer?"
>"SERGIO! EL EXPERIMENT NO WORKO! NO GUSTA! NEUTRINO TOO FAST!"
>Go to Italy, find that there is spaghetti sauce on the detector, ravioli on the the reflectors, pizza in the mass spectrometer, pepperoncini in the heatsink, wine cooling the magnets, langostini in the computer refrigerant, beans cooking on the laser, and olive oil in the PSU.
>Fuck it, I'm going to Greece.
>Go to Greece.
>Considering marrying a Greek girl
>Berlusconi is there
>Talks to me about Greek girls
>I get really hyped about Greek girls
>Decide to marry one on the spot
>Reach for the wedding ring
>Suddenly, spaghetti spills out of my pocket
>There's spaghetti on the floor
>Everybody walk the dinosaur
>Try to clean it all up
>I look down
>There's fur in the spaghetti, leading to the realization that I am a bear
I signed up for Dropbox and my experience with it is that it's slow as molasses when uploading and I can't just drop a link there and have it point at my server. Nono, I must upload the entire file itself.
Most people would be better off with Opera Unite. While some here may laugh and point at it because it is not a full-blown server setup, it is probably the easiest ad-hoc file sharing/server program going. Sure, I've personally installed Apache, sftpd and sshd on my home server but just the concepts of these services alone are beyond the grasp of most people. Opera Unite makes this kind of thing drool-proof.
You declare which directories are shared and that's it. You're done. No uploading to the "cloud" like Dropbox, Skydrive, or Apple's music thingy (and Unite will do media streaming). And you don't get locked in or risk losing control of your data should the cloud service get closed down.
No. The limit is a single atom. Not unless someone comes up with a way of making a transistor out of free quarks. We'd have to have some sort of breakthrough in physics to do that and that's not even on the horizon yet.
-theoretical ---we are not even here yet. -empirical -demo devices -prototype devices -production/commercial devices
Slashdot Mirror
bug-eyed alien, a prankster, or a combination of the two.
I am an owl with big eyes, and a prankster. :-D
--
BMO
Go listen to Stuart Copeland tap on his hi-hats with FLAC, shn, cd-audio, or apple lossless, and then at 192.
Then get back to me.
--
BMO - One world is enough, for all of us --The Police
I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.
So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.
Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).
The procedure is, although effective, rather unorthodox. Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures. Simply mounting your hard disk upside down enables centripetal forces to cancel out the rotational ruptures in the disk. As I said, unorthodox, and mainstream manufactures will not approve as it hurts sales (less rotational velocidensity damage means a slighter chance of disk failure.)
I'd still go with uncompressed .wav myself, but there's nothing wrong with compressed formats like flac or mp3 when you treat your hardware right
--
BMO
>There is a huge problem with file sizes
Not any more, pumpkin.
We hit the terabyte size in drives a couple of years ago. There's no reason to be buying this format vs "archive quality" cd-audio or other lossless.
Buy/rip lossless. Transcode to lossy as needed. Anything else and you're being ripped off.
I listen to real music with real instruments. The "swish" you get in high-frequency percussion with lossy algorithms is annoying as fuck.
--
BMO
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
And you have proved which one you are.
--
BMO
There's pedantry which serves the useful purpose of correcting other people's mistakes, and then there's pedantry of the "look how clever I am" variety; posts like yours, which seem to get posted to every single story on any kind of astronomical event that takes place outside the solar system, are examples of the latter.
There is an excellent word for this and it means far more than just "pedant" and it's Finnish.
The word is pilkunnussija, literally "comma fucker"
The more you know.
--
BMO - perkele
The thing is that the people who are /always/ wrong are the ones who are cocksure, such as yourself.
When you change the model to fit the data, we call that science.
Everything else is snake oil, religion, and dogma.
--
BMO
>you'd think they would offer a repo with signed freeware software for their customers.
They don't even have to provide the actual server space. All they have to do is provide the infrastructure in the OS and it will happen. You'll see mirrors of free Windows software pop up on servers everywhere. It's how the community works.
--
BMO
... is a repository system of free software.
A CDROM image does not really cut it. Sure, a handful of packages give a taste of what's available, but there's a lot out there that cannot be fit on a CD. And there is no way to keep up with updates except manually.
One of the greatest advantages of many Linux distros is that they have repositories of software that are kept up to date, with just about everything you could ask for in F/OSS.
Windows users are stuck crawling the likes of Tucows and Download.com and the venerable Simtel archive is not even a shadow of its former self (really, have you seen it lately?). Windows users just don't even know how nice it is to open up a software management window and get free/open source software without hassle. Signed packages in a vetted searchable mirrored database really is the way to go.
--
BMO
>if you're looking for government regulation, you're looking to shut down bitcoin.
Then maybe that's what needs to be done.
I'm serious. The only "uses" for bitcoin seem to be money laundering.
--
BMO
You said:
> let's make ISP's fully responsible for all incidental and consquential damages.
You're taking an argument that a business should be held up to its promises to be an invitation to make them "responsible for all incidental and consequential damages" which is anything and everything. And then you say that "hey, wouldn't it be swell if we apply it to ISPs" which means they're liable for everything, even infringing content posted by users, among other things (or hate speech or whatever).
That is not what the parent is asking for.
The parent is asking for businesses to deal fairly. If it takes regulation to make businesses deal fairly, then that's what should happen. But to take this basic idea and twist it into about how onerous the slightest regulation is by exaggerating the case at hand is intellectually dishonest.
Banks are responsible if they lose your money. That's why tellers are bonded and the bank is insured. Why should you expect less from someone else who is also holding your money, be it real or synthetic? Business who act as brokers *and* traders in bitcoins should be required to have insurance as a matter of course. This is not onerous. It is goddamn common sense.
--
BMO
"MAKE Magazine asks: is it 'Time For Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts 2.0?' What might the future of education be like if it were based on online & earned skill badges, and what could the future of traditional organizations for kids, like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, be like in a very modern, tech-savvy world?
Wasn't this answered decades ago when they came up with Explorers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_for_Life
Typical Explorer posts include groups of teenagers specializing in a field such as law enforcement, fire and emergency service, health careers, engineering, aviation, skilled trades, and technology. The majority of Explorer posts have an Explorer uniform that they have especially designed for wear during formal meetings and community service activities, a long-standing tradition dating from the time when Exploring was a traditional BSA program.
The organization is already there. Just use it.
--
BMO
> let's make ISP's fully responsible for all incidental and consquential damages.
Strawman: Hi, you didn't say this, but I'm going to say that you want to have ISPs responsible for content and then I'm going to attack it.
False dichotomy: "obviously" some regulation leads to regulation of everything down to the most minor minutia, implying that you can either have no regulation at all or intrusive regulation, excluding the middle.
Reductio ad absurdum: "I'm going to take what you said and invent a mythical case (ISPs responsible for content) that would never exist in reality and somehow this is proof of something"
All three of these are related. Can you guess how?
In case you can't, I'll put it in simple terms: You are putting words in the parent's mouth that were never said. In even simpler terms, it's a lie.
>Calling you out on bullshit isn't allowed
Oh yes it is.
Good Day.
--
BMO
Oh, look, it's reductio ad absurdum *and* a strawman *and* a false dichotomy all in one neat little package!
Always the libertarian argument: Less regulation is ALWAYS good, and ANY regulation means TOTAL FASCISM and NO MIDDLE GROUND AT ALL.
--
BMO
And I have to ask...
What was the point of the article? That the trade show is like every trade show ever?
Really, I'll write a report the next time I go to EASTEC and whine about the lack of "Makers" (in the geek culture sense of the word) among the vendors of Big Machinery.
--
BMO
>barely feral
Oh dear gawd.
--
BMO
Good thing it's the EFF, because we're spreading our browsing history every which way as it is.
Your ISP knows all about you, and your family, and what the cat looks at while you are away.
Just in case you didn't think the tinfoil was tight enough.
--
BMO
Why should they sue the hosts? Historical fact is neither libel nor slander, nor is it hosted with malice.
Removing history we don't like is called censorship and is Orwellian in the extreme.
--
BMO - doubleplusungood.
As a Linux user and abuser for the last 14 years (regularly... irregularly before that), digital distribution has been very good to me.
Bait and switch is not a new concept. It's a long-time, er, tradition in retail and other businesses. Bait and switch schemes are fraud and should be treated as such, and such publishers should be shunned by the community at large if not prosecuted.
--
BMO
>Minding my own business and setting up the next neutrino experiment
>The director of CERN has me on the phone
>"What is it mein fuhrer?"
>"SERGIO! EL EXPERIMENT NO WORKO! NO GUSTA! NEUTRINO TOO FAST!"
>Go to Italy, find that there is spaghetti sauce on the detector, ravioli on the the reflectors, pizza in the mass spectrometer, pepperoncini in the heatsink, wine cooling the magnets, langostini in the computer refrigerant, beans cooking on the laser, and olive oil in the PSU.
>Fuck it, I'm going to Greece.
>Go to Greece.
>Considering marrying a Greek girl
>Berlusconi is there
>Talks to me about Greek girls
>I get really hyped about Greek girls
>Decide to marry one on the spot
>Reach for the wedding ring
>Suddenly, spaghetti spills out of my pocket
>There's spaghetti on the floor
>Everybody walk the dinosaur
>Try to clean it all up
>I look down
>There's fur in the spaghetti, leading to the realization that I am a bear
The model really didn't change.
Just a bunch of smaller models spun off of it with more rigid thinking.
What changed was the politics.
--
BMO
Cloud service is just a new term for big-iron mainframe service. It is mainframe companies with a new old purpose in life.
Unite and other peer-to-peer is not the same thing.
--
BMO
I signed up for Dropbox and my experience with it is that it's slow as molasses when uploading and I can't just drop a link there and have it point at my server. Nono, I must upload the entire file itself.
Most people would be better off with Opera Unite. While some here may laugh and point at it because it is not a full-blown server setup, it is probably the easiest ad-hoc file sharing/server program going. Sure, I've personally installed Apache, sftpd and sshd on my home server but just the concepts of these services alone are beyond the grasp of most people. Opera Unite makes this kind of thing drool-proof.
You declare which directories are shared and that's it. You're done. No uploading to the "cloud" like Dropbox, Skydrive, or Apple's music thingy (and Unite will do media streaming). And you don't get locked in or risk losing control of your data should the cloud service get closed down.
--
BMO
But that was before they got a closer look.
When the model changes to accept new data, we call it science.
When the model never changes and rejects all new data, we call it religion and dogma.
Hope this helps.
--
BMO
>Subatomic
No. The limit is a single atom. Not unless someone comes up with a way of making a transistor out of free quarks. We'd have to have some sort of breakthrough in physics to do that and that's not even on the horizon yet.
-theoretical ---we are not even here yet.
-empirical
-demo devices
-prototype devices
-production/commercial devices
--
BMO