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
"I went all through school looking down at my desk without getting a crick in my neck."
You weren't 47 years old.
"The difference is that I see them as obstacles to be overcome"
Just because something is of old design doesn't mean it's crap. We are all still human with human limitations, and until we all become disembodied and living in the Singularity (spit) we are going to have to have interfaces and tools that match our anatomy.
>It's possible to have a desk with a sunken monitor, so you don't have to lift your arm so much. >There's no reason monitors have to be put on your desk vertically.
But there's a reason why this isn't popular. Because you get a crick in your neck if you're looking down all day. The only desks I see where the monitor is sunken and tilted at an angle are "executive" desks that cater to the suits.
Sinking and tilting the monitor creates new problems.
Touch is great on tablets and other devices where the environment is hostile to keyboards and mice. Touch screens can be good (but not great, I'll get to this in the postscript) for machine tool front panel controls, for example. Carrying around a keyboard with you everywhere with a tablet sucks. Thus, touch. This is fine.
But touch on a desktop OS, except for edge cases, is nuts.
-- BMO
PS: Using a touchscreen instead of a front panel with physical switches removes one-handed "blind" operation - where you can look at the work being done and not at the front panel, and switch/knob identification by feel. A stop switch feels different than the sunken and guarded start switch.
Yeah, snow can have an effect when you have to go out and shovel out the C-band dish because the snow is half melted and the water is causing a flat spot in the nice parabola.
Another simple way to keep ssh out of the bots is if you don't need to, just don't use port 22. If they have to scan the entire machine to find the ssh port, they're not gonna do it. Too slow. This won't deter the determined cracker at all, but it helps.
>key auth ssh
Not only is this more secure, but it's easier once it's set up.
> It's not invincibility,
Anyone with any real common sense with regards to this knows it. The problem with common sense is that it isn't.
"Pleading guilty should never be taken as an admission of guilt, only an admission that you're not powerful enough to stop the government from fucking you."
"Dixon, 34, pleaded guilty last year to charges of obstruction and wire fraud after federal agents targeted him in an undercover sting."
Why he got so much time:
O'Grady acknowledged "the gray areas" between the constitutional right to discuss the techniques and the crime of teaching someone to lie while undergoing a government polygraph. "There's nothing unlawful about maybe 95 percent of the business he conducted," the judge said.
However, O'Grady added that "a sentence of incarceration is absolutely necessary to deter others."
-- BMO
Postscript:
Degoobering the quotation marks and apostrophes by having to hit preview all the time is a pain in the ass. Slashdot, we are 13 years and 9 months into the 21'st century. Use Unicode already, dammit.
Ask anybody who lives in an urban neighborhood what their #1 neurotic fear is, and they'll tell you -- "Friends coming to visit, and getting their car broken into"
You're right, it's a neurosis.
My biggest concern living in an urban neighborhood is whether Ada's was open yet or not. Mmmmm!
White-bread suburbia (where I came from) is so damn uninteresting and bland. The only advantage was a private beach a 5 minute walk away. Fat lotta good that does you when you're a teen and it's winter.
The destruction of trust (Score:5, Insightful) by Arrogant-Bastard (141720) on 7:08 Friday 06 September 2013 (#44773249)
The worst part of the damage done by this isn't technical. It's human.
The reporting on this latest disclosure reveals that the NSA has systematically inserted itself into the standard-crafting process, in order to deliberately weaken those standards. It also reveals that the NSA has bypassed the management of communications providers and recruited technical staff directly. In both cases it's reasonable to assume that the people involved have been through a security clearance process and are thus barred for life from disclosing what they know.
I must now ask myself how many people I've worked with weren't doing so in good faith. When they argued that such-and-such a fine point of a network protocol standard didn't need improvement or that it should be changed in a certain way, were they doing so because it was their principled engineering opinion, or because it served some other purpose? Or when they were recommending that one of the many operations I've run move its colocation point or change its router hardware, was that good customer service, or was it to facilitate easier traffic capture?
Will anyone be asking themselves the same questions about me? (They probably should.)
The Internet was built on, and runs on, trust. Every postmaster, every network engineer, every webmaster, every system admin, every hostmaster, everyone crafting standards, everyone writing code, trusts that everyone else -- no matter how vehemently they disagree on a technical point -- is acting in good faith. The NSA, in its enormous arrogance, has single-handedly destroyed much of that trust overnight.
I think it's great. Somebody with capital and grand long term visions.
Even when you have money and a long term vision, some ideas are just dumb. Like the Segway.
This is one of them.
There's a reason why you only see interfaces like this in the movies, and it's not because the technology isn't there. It's because waving your hands in the air for a whole workday sucks. Someone in this thread mentioned light pens. When you no longer had to hold your arm up to the screen because of the popularity of the mouse, light pens disappeared from everyone's desks.
There's this thing called weather. Perhaps you've heard of it.
The problem with lasers is that they do not penetrate clouds at all.
Clouds take lasers and other light beams and spread them out into nothing in only a few feet. That's because they're composed of a bunch of little prisms - water droplets. As a land survey technician, I couldn't get a beam bounce from a retroreflector during a fog even if I could still see it myself 20 feet away.
I'll bet you're one of those guys who puts all the dimensions on every drawing to 4 places, even when 3 place or fractional tolerances make more sense.
"I've been pulled over a few times when they get no laser return off it and told to get a new plate. "
And you just ignore them.
Because I'm betting that the statute requiring a plate doesn't mention the condition must be in except that the plate must not be obscured by crud, mud, covers, (even clear covers can be illegal sometimes), or license plate holders. That it must be legible.
" In an example shown by a South Carolina vendor, "
>South Carolina vendor >California State Senate
Of course this would come from states that gets hardly any real weather. The advantage of dumb-stamped-metal plates is that they are dumb. They require no batteries, electronics, etc, that need to be shielded from snow, rain, sleet, salt, rocks kicked up from the road, or falling meteors. Sure, you can take an electronic picture frame and put it on a car to display this stuff. Good luck weather-proofing it for cheap. Not gonna happen.
Go look at how much a Toughbook costs compared to a similarly powered normal laptop.
There's a solution to this that's more reliable and cheaper, and it's already out there.
Encourage the use of EZ-Pass. Not only can EZ-Pass be detected by toll booths, but you can have readers in police cruisers. Done.
"If you have to hide, the Internet isn't for you." "pedophiles and botnets"
Are you cutting yourself with that edginess?
You know what, I've yet to see anything worth reading coming from your keyboard and this is your crowning glory - associating people who want some privacy with pedophiles.
Your opinions are worth less than the photons they have been written with.
"Jokes about this kid getting hurt are about as funny as jokes about the Shuttle Columbia's last re-entry"
Q: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue eyed? A: One blew left and one blew right.
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words? A: "What's this button do?"
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words to her husband? A: "You feed the kids - I'll feed the fish."
Q: What was the Shuttle's last transmission? A: "I said BUD LITE!"
Q: What does NASA stand for? A1: Need Another Seven Astronauts A2: Need Another Shuttle Also
Q: Did you know that NASA has a new space drink? A: Ocean Spray - It was their second choice because they couldn't get 7-UP.
Q: What do Playtex tampon users and Christa McAuliffe have in common? A: They both should have stayed on the pad.
Q: What does a sea lion, the space shuttle and Tylenol have in common? A: They're all looking for a tight seal.
Q: How many people will fit in a Florida Volkswagen? A: Four in the seats and seven in the ashtray.
Q: On future shuttle missions, why will one of the astronauts have to be a naval officer? A: So when they decide to use it as an experimental submarine, they'll have a rated officer onboard.
Q: What do Christa McAuliffe and Donna Rice have in common. A: They both went down on the challenger.
Q: Did you hear that they are sending up another teacher on the next shuttle mission? A: She's going to be a substitute.
Q:Why did the NASA engineers want to delay the Challenger launch. A:They wanted to wait for the Fourth of July.
New Ones
Q:What goes up and doesn't come down?
A:Columbia
Q: Why couldn't the Columbia crew escape?
A: Nasa couldn't afford an escape system and a Blaupunk stereo system for the cockpit.
Q;What was the last transmission from Columbia? A; "I can see my house from here?"
Q:What does the Columbia crash and Ted Bundy have in common? A:They both left bodies in four states.
They found Columbia's flight recorder. Analysis of determined that the Challenger and Columbia crashes are connected. The shuttles are blowing up in alphabetical order.
Two farmers in Texas were having a conversation: Bob: "Did ya see the Shuttle blow up?" Charlie:"Hell, yes!!" Bob: "Didja get any on ya?"
Q: What should you do if you find a piece of the Space Shuttle Columbia? A: Sell it on eBay.
Q: Why aren't NASA engineers good at crossword puzzles? A:They couldn't get seven down.
They just found a penis in a field in Texas. They think it is a shuttle cock.
Q: What doe NASA stand for? A: Need Another Shuttle Again.
Q:Why can't the republican's keep politics out of the Columbia investigation? A:They keep blaming it on the left wing!
Q: What did the crew of Columbia miss while they were in orbit? A: The Runway.
Slashdot Mirror
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
"I went all through school looking down at my desk without getting a crick in my neck."
You weren't 47 years old.
"The difference is that I see them as obstacles to be overcome"
Just because something is of old design doesn't mean it's crap. We are all still human with human limitations, and until we all become disembodied and living in the Singularity (spit) we are going to have to have interfaces and tools that match our anatomy.
--
BMO
Audiophile "logic" is the worst.
"Hurr, you haven't spent $50,000 on a power cord!"
Never mind the fact that there are tens, or hundreds of miles of "power cord" between the stereo and the power station.
"You haven't spent enough on your equipment~! How can you listen to that? Don't you hear that?" - Audiophile actually listening to his tinnitus.
Honest to glub. Listen to the music. Don't listen to the equipment or the imagined superiority.
--
BMO
>It's possible to have a desk with a sunken monitor, so you don't have to lift your arm so much.
>There's no reason monitors have to be put on your desk vertically.
But there's a reason why this isn't popular. Because you get a crick in your neck if you're looking down all day. The only desks I see where the monitor is sunken and tilted at an angle are "executive" desks that cater to the suits.
Sinking and tilting the monitor creates new problems.
Touch is great on tablets and other devices where the environment is hostile to keyboards and mice. Touch screens can be good (but not great, I'll get to this in the postscript) for machine tool front panel controls, for example. Carrying around a keyboard with you everywhere with a tablet sucks. Thus, touch. This is fine.
But touch on a desktop OS, except for edge cases, is nuts.
--
BMO
PS: Using a touchscreen instead of a front panel with physical switches removes one-handed "blind" operation - where you can look at the work being done and not at the front panel, and switch/knob identification by feel. A stop switch feels different than the sunken and guarded start switch.
Yeah, snow can have an effect when you have to go out and shovel out the C-band dish because the snow is half melted and the water is causing a flat spot in the nice parabola.
This one.
http://i.imgur.com/qg9KGAm.jpg
--
BMO
Sabotage and incompetence look the same.
Either should not be tolerated.
"Any advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
Me, butchering a quote from Arthur C. Clarke.
--
BMO
You certainly must be an expert about large city, urban living, being from Providence, Rhode Island.
I enjoy Dorchester and Jamaica Plain, too.
--
BMO
>Bam, saved myself from a ton of port spam,
Another simple way to keep ssh out of the bots is if you don't need to, just don't use port 22. If they have to scan the entire machine to find the ssh port, they're not gonna do it. Too slow. This won't deter the determined cracker at all, but it helps.
>key auth ssh
Not only is this more secure, but it's easier once it's set up.
> It's not invincibility,
Anyone with any real common sense with regards to this knows it. The problem with common sense is that it isn't.
--
BMO
"Pleading guilty should never be taken as an admission of guilt, only an admission that you're not powerful enough to stop the government from fucking you."
That's what Nolo pleas are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolo_contendere
--
BMO
Read TFA:
"Dixon, 34, pleaded guilty last year to charges of obstruction and wire fraud after federal agents targeted him in an undercover sting."
Why he got so much time:
--
BMO
Postscript:
Degoobering the quotation marks and apostrophes by having to hit preview all the time is a pain in the ass. Slashdot, we are 13 years and 9 months into the 21'st century. Use Unicode already, dammit.
Ask anybody who lives in an urban neighborhood what their #1 neurotic fear is, and they'll tell you -- "Friends coming to visit, and getting their car broken into"
You're right, it's a neurosis.
My biggest concern living in an urban neighborhood is whether Ada's was open yet or not. Mmmmm!
White-bread suburbia (where I came from) is so damn uninteresting and bland. The only advantage was a private beach a 5 minute walk away. Fat lotta good that does you when you're a teen and it's winter.
Ada's:
http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/41/450014/restaurant/South-Side/Adas-Creations-Providence
>Your message and the other messages in this thread saying "URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS OOOH SCARY"
Stormfront, pls go.
--
BMO
Just navigate to Arrogant-Bastard's profile.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4173525&cid=44773249
--
BMO
The great thing about this is that you wind up kicking out the incompetents simultaneously.
Someone who is shit at maintaining a security module? NSA hack or incompetent, doesn't matter. Find someone else to do it.
--
BMO
"In all seriousness, how should the technical and geek community deal with this sort of sabotage?"
Identify who is doing the sabotaging and shun them. Professionally shun them. Expel such people from committees.
--
BMO
This post needs repeating.
+=+begin paste+=+
The destruction of trust (Score:5, Insightful)
by Arrogant-Bastard (141720) on 7:08 Friday 06 September 2013 (#44773249)
The worst part of the damage done by this isn't technical. It's human.
The reporting on this latest disclosure reveals that the NSA has systematically inserted itself into the standard-crafting process, in order to deliberately weaken those standards. It also reveals that the NSA has bypassed the management of communications providers and recruited technical staff directly. In both cases it's reasonable to assume that the people involved have been through a security clearance process and are thus barred for life from disclosing what they know.
I must now ask myself how many people I've worked with weren't doing so in good faith. When they argued that such-and-such a fine point of a network protocol standard didn't need improvement or that it should be changed in a certain way, were they doing so because it was their principled engineering opinion, or because it served some other purpose? Or when they were recommending that one of the many operations I've run move its colocation point or change its router hardware, was that good customer service, or was it to facilitate easier traffic capture?
Will anyone be asking themselves the same questions about me? (They probably should.)
The Internet was built on, and runs on, trust. Every postmaster, every network engineer, every webmaster, every system admin, every hostmaster, everyone crafting standards, everyone writing code, trusts that everyone else -- no matter how vehemently they disagree on a technical point -- is acting in good faith. The NSA, in its enormous arrogance, has single-handedly destroyed much of that trust overnight.
+=+end paste+=+
--
BMO
Then start marketing light pens. Make a new kind that can be used on LCDs.
See how far that gets you.
Here's a protip: a lot of the hate pointed at Windows 8 involves a touch interface on a desktop operating system.
It's not just me. It's over 40 years of UI research.
--
BMO
It's not a dumb idea.
>goes 12mph
>cost in thousands, indeed as much as a full blown motorcycle.
And what does a good quality bicycle cost at a bike shop? How much does even an e-bike go for?
The Segway is a dumb idea.
--
BMO
I think it's great. Somebody with capital and grand long term visions.
Even when you have money and a long term vision, some ideas are just dumb. Like the Segway.
This is one of them.
There's a reason why you only see interfaces like this in the movies, and it's not because the technology isn't there. It's because waving your hands in the air for a whole workday sucks. Someone in this thread mentioned light pens. When you no longer had to hold your arm up to the screen because of the popularity of the mouse, light pens disappeared from everyone's desks.
This interface sucks even in concept.
--
BMO
Can't they get the signal lasers working?
There's this thing called weather. Perhaps you've heard of it.
The problem with lasers is that they do not penetrate clouds at all.
Clouds take lasers and other light beams and spread them out into nothing in only a few feet. That's because they're composed of a bunch of little prisms - water droplets. As a land survey technician, I couldn't get a beam bounce from a retroreflector during a fog even if I could still see it myself 20 feet away.
--
BMO
>getting this upset over a 4 percent tolerance.
I'll bet you're one of those guys who puts all the dimensions on every drawing to 4 places, even when 3 place or fractional tolerances make more sense.
--
BMO
"I've been pulled over a few times when they get no laser return off it and told to get a new plate. "
And you just ignore them.
Because I'm betting that the statute requiring a plate doesn't mention the condition must be in except that the plate must not be obscured by crud, mud, covers, (even clear covers can be illegal sometimes), or license plate holders. That it must be legible.
http://i.imgur.com/pdzF80Q.jpg
--
BMO
Then why is it powered by a kangaroo?
"But they'll be dead soon. Fucking kangaroos."
--
BMO
" In an example shown by a South Carolina vendor, "
>South Carolina vendor
>California State Senate
Of course this would come from states that gets hardly any real weather. The advantage of dumb-stamped-metal plates is that they are dumb. They require no batteries, electronics, etc, that need to be shielded from snow, rain, sleet, salt, rocks kicked up from the road, or falling meteors. Sure, you can take an electronic picture frame and put it on a car to display this stuff. Good luck weather-proofing it for cheap. Not gonna happen.
Go look at how much a Toughbook costs compared to a similarly powered normal laptop.
There's a solution to this that's more reliable and cheaper, and it's already out there.
Encourage the use of EZ-Pass. Not only can EZ-Pass be detected by toll booths, but you can have readers in police cruisers. Done.
--
BMO
"If you have to hide, the Internet isn't for you."
"pedophiles and botnets"
Are you cutting yourself with that edginess?
You know what, I've yet to see anything worth reading coming from your keyboard and this is your crowning glory - associating people who want some privacy with pedophiles.
Your opinions are worth less than the photons they have been written with.
Ciao. Meet your new status.
--
BMO
"Jokes about this kid getting hurt are about as funny as jokes about the Shuttle Columbia's last re-entry"
Q: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue eyed?
A: One blew left and one blew right.
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?
A: "What's this button do?"
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words to her husband?
A: "You feed the kids - I'll feed the fish."
Q: What was the Shuttle's last transmission?
A: "I said BUD LITE!"
Q: What does NASA stand for?
A1: Need Another Seven Astronauts
A2: Need Another Shuttle Also
Q: Did you know that NASA has a new space drink?
A: Ocean Spray - It was their second choice because they couldn't get 7-UP.
Q: What do Playtex tampon users and Christa McAuliffe have in common?
A: They both should have stayed on the pad.
Q: What does a sea lion, the space shuttle and Tylenol have in common?
A: They're all looking for a tight seal.
Q: How many people will fit in a Florida Volkswagen?
A: Four in the seats and seven in the ashtray.
Q: On future shuttle missions, why will one of the astronauts have to be a naval officer?
A: So when they decide to use it as an experimental submarine, they'll have a rated officer onboard.
Q: What do Christa McAuliffe and Donna Rice have in common.
A: They both went down on the challenger.
Q: Did you hear that they are sending up another teacher on the next
shuttle mission?
A: She's going to be a substitute.
Q:Why did the NASA engineers want to delay the Challenger launch.
A:They wanted to wait for the Fourth of July.
New Ones
Q:What goes up and doesn't come down?
A:Columbia
Q: Why couldn't the Columbia crew escape?
A: Nasa couldn't afford an escape system and a Blaupunk stereo system for the cockpit.
Q;What was the last transmission from Columbia?
A; "I can see my house from here?"
Q:What does the Columbia crash and Ted Bundy have in common?
A:They both left bodies in four states.
They found Columbia's flight recorder. Analysis of determined that the Challenger and Columbia crashes are connected. The shuttles are blowing up in alphabetical order.
Two farmers in Texas were having a conversation:
Bob: "Did ya see the Shuttle blow up?"
Charlie:"Hell, yes!!"
Bob: "Didja get any on ya?"
Q: What should you do if you find a piece of the Space Shuttle Columbia?
A: Sell it on eBay.
Q: Why aren't NASA engineers good at crossword puzzles?
A:They couldn't get seven down.
They just found a penis in a field in Texas. They think it is a shuttle cock.
Q: What doe NASA stand for?
A: Need Another Shuttle Again.
Q:Why can't the republican's keep politics out of the Columbia investigation?
A:They keep blaming it on the left wing!
Q: What did the crew of Columbia miss while they were in orbit?
A: The Runway.
Nyeah.
--
BMO