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User: iluvcapra

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  1. Re:Correction: on FCC Warned Not To Take Actions a Republican-Led FCC Would Dislike · · Score: 1

    Those telcos are forced to provide service to everybody at the same price, which means they make a profit on tightly packed businesses in the city and that offsets their losses on the more widespread customers out of town.

    Even granting all of this is correct, this doesn't mean that municipal broadband should be forbidden, it simply means they're competing interests, between a city to offer broadband as a public amenity, versus a franchise to offer it commercially. Maybe it's up to the people of the city to decide which they'd prefer. The market is whatever we make it, even if the incumbent telco market is "free," that doesn't mean that it's "good" or "effective," or that it "does what we want" (perish the thought). Maybe they don't care if they make it hard for local telcos to compete -- municipal water makes it hard for Vivendi to sell water as a profitable enterprise, but no one in the US calls this socialism.

  2. Re:Correction: on FCC Warned Not To Take Actions a Republican-Led FCC Would Dislike · · Score: 1

    They don't claim their party has anything good about it - it's just "better than Republicans".

    In the US we have first-past-the-post plurality voting, in single-seat winnner-take-all elections; "better than the alternative" is all that is required. You don't have to be faster than the bear, just the other guy.

  3. Re:Why such paranoia ? on Smartphone Kill Switch, Consumer Boon Or Way For Government To Brick Your Phone? · · Score: 1

    The ability to brick phones without the consent of the one who possesses the phone inherently indicates that the user does not actually control their phone.

    Any information a company possesses on your behalf, including any codes, messages, or instrumentality necessary to brick a brickable phone, must be disclosed if the government agent has a warrant. Your consent is absolutely not required by any known legal principle.

    That's just bog-standard liberal-democratic law, consistent with the constitutional order of any modern western country, no need for secret spy agencies or black sites. You don't have allodial title to your cellphone.

  4. Re:which turns transport into a monopoly... on Helsinki Aims To Obviate Private Cars · · Score: 1

    Except it's not, because of scale. If your elevator sucks, you can just move to the next building over.

    I admire how this crystalizes the contrary position. If a building's elevators stop working, telling families they can move out whenever they want is preferable to The State (evil music here) ensuring elevators are in working order.

    The terminal libertarian solution to every problem: move. Your city too congested? Move to the suburbs. Too far from work? Get another job. Isolated from friends, family and culture? We have Internet now, and Internet (praise be upon it) replaces all forms of community interaction.

    And just remember, you might not like living in the exurbs, 20 miles from a movie theater, making ends meet with freelance coding and Uber shifts, but the alternative was putting up kiosks where you could order a rideshare, you monster.

  5. Re:Support for your position on C++14 Is Set In Stone · · Score: 2

    Yes, but it corrupted the malloc areola.

  6. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 1

    This is something I don't have enough information on -- I figure they're doing something like this, but Dolby is being somewhat vague with the branding and not really making a clear distinction.

    I wonder how much this will complicate mixes though. As it is, we can spend a month doing the final mix on a big action movie, and then two months making all of the deliverables:

    • 7.1 (2D and 3D)
    • 7.1 home theater (2D and 3D)
    • 5.1 (2D and 3D)
    • 5.1 home theater (2D and 3D)
    • Atmos (2D and 3D)
    • Auro 13.1 (2D and 3D)
    • Auro 11.1 (2D and 3D)
    • IMAX (which has its own system) (2D and 3D)
    • stereo
    • Dolby SR (2D and 3D)
    • Dolby Pro Logic 2 (2D and 3D)

    All of these mixes are slightly different, mixed on appropriate speakers, and then you do a second version of most of these for the 3D, to accentuate panning effects. I guess to this we'd add to that the Atmos home theater mix.

  7. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 1

    Again, you highlight the key argument here: how is the incremental cost justifying the incremental benefit? 3D did the same thing and I doubt the theater owners ever recovered their investment.

    3D doesn't actually cost theaters that much. The business model is very slick for them-- all the projection hardware is leased from Real3D (or whatever) and paid for with some percentage/per-seat formula off the top of each ticket sold. Real3D handles all the glasses, the DCP and other delivery chain items are basically the same. The downside risk to offering 3D for an exhibitor is actually quite low, the upfront costs are marginal and they're effectively guaranteed a return as long as they get butts in seats.

  8. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 1

    Actually late update- a guy on the crew of Transformers tells me they'd pan music as objects occasionally. The choir would be panned to the ceiling, among other things.

  9. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 1

    I dunno, keep an eye out and see if titles are actually released in it. I haven't seen any studios or distributors making any pledges, it could all just turn into the next BD-Live.

  10. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 2

    Better for doing this is a wavefront system, where you capture the whole wavefront of the soundwaves approaching the listener.

    There is a film wavefront synthesis system: IOSONO. There were a few screens at the Mann Chinese here in LA wired for it, it sounds amazing and you get real 3D depth through the screen, but it never really caught on for business reasons. These mixes didn't use live recording either, they were multitrack, but IOSONO had a panner algorithm that could position a sound source in depth by artificially synthesizing a wavefront for it.

    Dolby isn't interested in this because the theaters aren't. Dolby didn't really want to make Atmos: AMC came to them and asked them to develop a sound system that would justify a $20 ticket in AMC's premium rooms. The Atmos speaker array is the "Fuck It, We're Going to Five Blades" approach, and the theater owners make sure that all the speaker emplacements are clearly visible to the audience, so they know that they're paying for all those speakers, and Moar is Better.

  11. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 2

    This really isn't how we do music recording. I had the opportunity to work with John Eargle before he passed on, he had a bunch of Grammys and had done hundreds of classical and jazz albums, and his standard rig for live-house music recording was an 8-track recorder, with maybe 2 of those tracks set aside for spot mics -- the rest were a Decca tree or other stereo array, plus room mics. We use more spot mics for film music recording, but we do that specifically so we can reposition and alter the relationship between the soloist and ensemble, not to preserve it.

    Also, nobody uses the pannable objects for music, it's just not done. The composer's scoring engineer makes a 7.1 or 9.1 and this is what you end up hearing.

  12. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is why I suspect Dolby Atmos will never be put on a consumer format.

    "Paul" is my boss.

  13. Re: Stereo on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 1

    Sure you can. Your ear has asymmetrical geometry front-to-back, your pinna, outer ear, nose and head diffract sounds as they approach your ears and apply a transfer function to the sound that varies with regard to azimuth.

  14. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 1

    Three minute videos with terrible sound and multiple opportunities for ad insertion are definitely what Google wants you to watch...

  15. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The way Atmos works is it can carry up to 128 individual audio channels. 20 of these are set aside for two discrete 9.1 mixes (mixers choice what goes in those), the remaining 108 are set aside for individual pannable objects. In the file themselves, these audio objects are full-rez and lossless; however, these objects don't "live" all the time, the mixer can use them for a few seconds here and there. Nothing as general as "all the dialogue" or "all the car sound effects" lives in the pannable objects throughout the entire project.

    There are discrete sounds in the Atmos bitstream itself though, and in principle it would make remixing easier, so I suspect you'll never see an Atmos bitstream in a consumer format without DRM.

  16. Re:Ambisonics on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem with Ambisonics is it tends to favor a strong Sweet Spot, which is OK in a home theater but will fail in a large room, where people are seated to the four corners of the space. Speakers near the walls will always tend to be perceived as louder, and the further you are from the tuned center of the room, the more the sound field will appear to be warped toward the closest wall. This happens with 5.1 but the effect is mitigated by the fact that there's a center speaker behind the screen, and the mixers have individual control over speaker levels and panner divergence.

    Ambisonic mixes are almost by definition not mono-compatible and don't allow the mixers to address sounds to individual speakers with unlimited panner divergence. There's always some situation where you want a sound to come from every speaker in the room, or to come from speakers on the opposite sides of the room, with equal intensity: the latter is impossible with B-format (and only possible in the limit with n channels), and the former is impossible with any theoretical pure ambisonic sound system.

  17. Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... on Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? · · Score: 5, Informative

    and yes, you dont have enough speakers and amps for atmos at home. sound bars wont make it. hell, most people i know have their 5.1 systems setup wrong.

    I'm a sound designer in Hollywood, my credits include Men in Black 3 and Zero Dark Thirty.

    The main promise of ATMOS was that it wouldn't matter how many speakers you had -- a mixer could prepare a final mix in Atmos in his 60-horn room, but then when the bitstream on the DCP or Blu-Ray was decoded in the theater or home, it wouldn't matter if the end-user had a 60-speaker Atmos rig, a 9.1, a Barco Auro speaker system, a 5.1, a stereo or even a mono. The Dolby renderering algos would simply take the panned objects and automatically render the correct audio stream for each speaker, as a function of the speaker's position relative to the listener. The Dolby RMU is just a glorified OpenAL audio engine, it gets fed audio streams that have an alt/azimuth data envelope, and this envelope is transformed down to whatever speaker array the end user has.

    What's even more interesting is you could have a significantly more complex speaker array than the person who mixed it -- maybe he mixed it with 32 speakers, and you have some future-ready system with 100 -- and the renderer will still do the Right Thing and expand the spatial resolution accordingly. Atmos mixes are future-proof for any simple, non-phase-related speaker array.

  18. Re:Cascade of brown noses on Email Is Not Going Anywhere · · Score: 1

    Regrettably, "kafoom.com" appears to already be registered.

  19. Re:Cascade of brown noses on Email Is Not Going Anywhere · · Score: 3, Funny

    At least it has a REST API so you can update Yammer entities with HipzZap and Plinkus. We use them with our federated QUERTOS hive at the shop, which replicates the Yammers to Wo0tgrams for iOS (or Kafoom posts on Android).

    And we read them on a boat, and we read them on a goat...

  20. Re:Move your keys off your hardware on Ask Slashdot: Open Hardware/Software-Based Security Token? · · Score: 1

    The certs on the card would be the thing you have, the passkey to decrypt the certs on the card would be the thing you know.

  21. Re:Mac OS X Yosemite on Mac OS X Yosemite Beta Opens · · Score: 0

    3. British car: It's not running again

    Why didn't the British invent Mac OS? Because they couldn't figure out how to get it to leak oil.

  22. Re:Flat UI Design on Mac OS X Yosemite Beta Opens · · Score: 1

    There are ways to express the clickability of a region without 3Ds, it's just Apple's approach (on iOS) at the moment is somewhat lackluster. Mac OS X NSButtons still have a eency bit of bezel.

  23. Re:Not how this is supposed to work... on Tesla Model S Hacking Prize Claimed · · Score: 1

    In fact until they tell Tesla and give them some time to get a fix, they probably shouldn't tell the general public.

    The hell you say! O_O

  24. Not how this is supposed to work... on Tesla Model S Hacking Prize Claimed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The security firm declined to reveal details at this point about how the hack was accomplished

    So it could be a hoax, but more likely they're black-hatting in public view.

  25. Re:PowerPC worked out for Apple ... on Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises · · Score: 1

    Or Wii's for that matter? A lotta STBs and consoles run PowerPC.