Buddhism generally doesn't assert the existence of the supernatural, not does Taoism. Many devotees of these are hold syncretic beliefs that incorporate supernatural elements, though.
Certain tenets of Scientology are supernatural, most saliently, the claim of the existence of "thetans."
I dunno, the original claim was pretty general in nature and equally unsupported.
The actual "evidence" question is actually sorta beside the point. Arendt specifically in Origins of Totalitarianism discussed how the Nazis would systematically treat actual criminals better than political prisoners or random arrestees, because in the end the message they were trying to send was that they could destroy you whenever they wanted, and it didn't really matter if you'd done anything wrong. The only way you could be safe is by enthusiastically cooperating, and even then it was never really enough.
At this point we would make the distinction between a merely authoritarian regime and a more "bloodthirsty" thing. The first would be like, say, Morsi's Egypt or Iran, where they arrest people for opposing the state. The latter would be more like North Korea, where they arrest people at random wether they oppose the state or not, because the terror is an end itself.
Miller was writing about the Hollywood Blacklist in the end, but it's an important example of authoritarianism of the first kind. Joe McCarthy knew that Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets hung out, that they were fellow travelers with more committed Communists and even soviet agents, he had all the evidence he needed to prove association. But the logic of the 50s Red Scare wasn't driven by the desire to find Communist agents as much as it was to get "suspect" individuals to turn over their friends, so that even though there was no evidence of actual wrongdoing, there were simply so many people named that spectre of conspiracy took on a life all its own, and the spectacle of people evading the "justice" of HUAAC or the senate, of "hiding" their friends and associations, would cast disrepute on leftism in general. They arrest you to make you look guilty, and then they make you turn States Evidence to buy back your respectability.
Your choices are to lie convincingly or be taken out and shot.
This is often how the hypothetical is phrased but it almost never works out in just this way. The usual options are:
Door number 1: Tell the truth and accept those consequences.
Door number 2: Deny your involvement. The people arresting you usually have physical evidence of your association though, so in order to prove your loyalty they demand you become an informer and you have to turn over your friends. That's what's required to make your lie "convincing." Then when the revolution comes you're tarred a "collaborator."
Lying will save your hide but often at the cost of your cause. The "oppressive, murderous dictatorships" we have experience with won't settle for someone who's merely innocent, regardless of wether that innocence is the truth or a lie.
Sorry this was me, I didn't realize I wasn't logged in:
The round LG is about $50 cheaper and it looks like a nice $100 watch. Which is problematic since it costs $300.
I think when it comes to pricing these wearable things out, Apple has the right idea in that the functionality is there but it's redundant to the value proposition. The value of the watch is its value as jewlery. That it is useful is nice but even a cheap smart watch is still going to cost over $200, and for that if better get something that looks as good as a $200 chronograph.
1) Sometimes I need a timecode stopwatch, and it's distracting to use the phone in screenings.
2) I do like the idea of discreet notifications.
3) I usually wear a Fossil on dates and when I meet clients but, typically for a man's watch, it's very blocky and it doesn't really work under a sport jacket or french cuffs, which I like to wear. Something like an Apple Watch has a cleaner look, but it's still a smartwatch so it projects sophistication. It's really the only piece of jewelry a man can pull off in professional situations, except for maybe cufflinks and a wedding band.
Understand, this thing is being sold primarily as jewelry. It's a kewl smartwatch too, but the smartwatch features are necessary, not sufficient.
Let's punish people who are good at something! Diversity!
All it really does is shift the external negotiation, between company and employee, to an internal negotiation, with HR and upper management on one side (who want people cheap), and the staff and project managers (who want the best people).
Ability to negotiate, or rather, communicate your needs in a persuasive way, is sortof a core competence, everybody who wants to be successful and progress in their career either needs to have it or at least needs to have confidence in the process.
The "letter-number-symbol" verifiers are the bane of my existence.
I have a really simply rule: "You may choose whatever password you wish. If your password is compromised, you will be denied further access to this system. If your job requires access to this system, you will be terminated."
Maybe that's too severe, but if the user needs a little color-coded bar-graph to tell them how good their password is, that would suggest that (1) they don't understand what a password is actually protecting or is for, and (2) the incentives aren't correctly aligned. Personally I think employees should be assigned passwords to company servers. If they have trouble remembering it print it on a key fob or something, it'd be better than them doing what they obviously are going to do: "$username.2015". If a company's password policy is know, a reasonably clever script kiddy can generate a list of 10 probable passwords per account that would probably crack a few percent of them.
And of course the execs are the worst offenders, because their incentives are completely misaligned. It transpired after the Sony hack that the co-chariman of the motion picture group, Michael Lynton, used "sonyml3" as his email password.
Those meters are stupid.
How do they actually work? Do they do any kind of entropy calculation, or check the data against known rainbow tables? Or do they just apply rules?
Don't get too cute, sugar is a perfectly cromulent part of your diet; a very small part, but a part.
Sugar doesn't rot your teeth. Sugar stimulates the growth of mouth flora, many of these critters exude waste substances that lower your mouth's pH, your teeth erode in an acidic environment, particularly if you don't have fluorine ions in your enamel.
This is definitely an issue, Apple's supply chain model is much more efficient than Samsungs. Like most west asian conglomerates it maintains a bloated, 20th century heavy industrial infrastructure.
Why doesn't Samsung run its factories and supply chain like Apple? Because they're a byzantine Korean chaebol that doesn't know half the time if it's making a cellphone, a car or an oil tanker, and measures its success by how many little paternalistic fiefdoms it can sustain.
I don't think Sammy has anything to gain by cutting prices to get marketshare. It's good to sell more units but they don't benefit in the slightest by having a marginally higher percentage of the pie. From a platform perspective and drawing developers and mindshare, the Android share is the important number, and that's mostly out of Samsung's control, eating HTCs business is a wash and even at the prices they charge their flagship phones are still basically the same price as iPhones for the same specs and generation.
If you're Samsung you have to ask, I'm cutting my prices under the prevailing market price point, so I'm going to lose X million dollars in prospective revenues in order to get more marketshare. So exactly what is an additional 5% of smartphone marketshare worth? It's not worth much of anything. it'd be worth a lot if you were selling that 5% of phones at a good profit, but you already sacrificed that.
The whole point of marketshare is that share should give you leverage, like you get more bargaining power with sales channels, or you make it more profitable to sell complementary goods (like apps); you have Network Effects that draw in more consumers because of the perception that they need to have a Samsung phone over and above any other. But if Android is a commodity, and the phones are a commodity, market share is useless; it can be an indicator of your health in a competitive market but it does not itself reify into something you can use to your advantage. It's an indicator, not a cause.
Yeah that's why I said I thought the articles sounded like BS. I could see it maybe being part of some kind of watch or tie-in strategy, maybe "we'll take your phone if you want to get an Apple-watch" or something like that.
Also they might just be offering it just for the recycling value, it's not clear they're going to offer over and above the market value of the phone (i.e. "buy marketshare"), they might just be trying to front-run Gazelle's business. There are people in the article speculating that they may be paying a premium for old Android phones but nobody knows what their business model for the service is actually going to be (assuming it's not BS in the first instance).
Yeah I don't think market share is a goal. I think they just want to make money. What good is market share if you have to sell at or below cost to get it, and the share doesn't actually give you a competitive advantage?
Apple is trying everything except the one thing that would actually work - stop price gouging their customers.
It seems to me like everything they do works great. This story kinda sounds like BS, very un-Apple, they've never cared about market share, except in the depths of the Gil Amelio/Mac Clone days, and anyways their actual unit share of sales in the US and other developed markets is increasing.
Everybody just wants mobile to play out like the PC/Mac wars, and for network effects to award the whole pie to the dominant player, but it's just not working out that way. Network effects don't count for much anymore, "ecosystems" aren't as closed as they were, even the Apple one, and the most important applications, the drivers of growth in the IT space, of our era are cross-platform, usually web-centered. Android has a majority of the mobile installed base, but it's a worthless hill to hold. Things have reverted to a mean and traditional branding and product positioning are more important now, you buy from a company you had a good experience with, not the company that's logo-compliant with your box at work.
Apple had the most profitable quarter ever recently and is the most profitable company in the world. How do you do that without heavy markup?
Right, but why don't Samsung or HTC have such a high margin on their phones? Do they sell at a lower price because they want to be nice to you? Or because the people who set the prices at Samsung and HTC only want to charge you a "fair" price?
Their phones are just less desirable. Supply and demand.
I'm not in a big hurry, and I want to see what DTS comes out with before I invest in an object-oriented sound system.
Seriously, don't bother, all the features and TV shows doing objects mixing now are mixing in Atmos, and the DTS-Barco system is a vaporware "open spec" that's DOA.
You don't have to do a ceiling installation for home atmos, I've heard good things about top-firing speakers.
But this feature is sorta incidental, as literally nothing is mixed in Neural Surround.
Oh you don't understand, by "nothing" I mean no films or television shows are distributed using a Neural Surround downmixer. Because of this, there's no reason to have a Neural Surround decoder for your home.
There is no disk format for "DTS Neural Surround" as such.
Right, it's a phase matrix format, like Dolby Stereo or Pro Logic II. And like those, you can listen to the LtRt as a plain left-right and you'll still hear something that's tolerable stereo, it's just perilous for certain applications (it'll have bad mono compatibility).
See also this press release. A radio station was broadcasting in 5.1 using Neural Surround... broadcasting in ordinary stereo FM as well as HD radio. Anyone could listen in stereo, but those with Neural Upmix in their stereo receivers could hear 5.1 sound.
Right, it's a format. In a professional context this would be called a format. Format does not imply digital. Optical SVA Dolby SR is a "format" in this context.
Then I would say that DTS 11.1 is an actual format exactly the way Dolby Surround was an actual format.
Neural Surround is a format, it's a 7.1 format. DTS 11.1 is Neo:X, at least it's the only one I can find.
If you read their white paper it says nothing about encoding or encoding format, Neo:X is an upmixing system. This is what it is:
To match the user's speaker layout, DTS Neo:X separates input frequencies into sub-bands and then creates additional output channels. As it adds depth and intensity, it maintains the integrity of the original audio, keeping elements in their intended locations.
Okay, any box that "adds depth and intensity" is rank woo. You can't take a stereo mix from, say, the 1980s, run it through an upmixer and call that a high-fidelity process, you're making up a mix that the original mixer never intended. If the guy who made the mix didn't make it in DTS 11.1, there's absolutely no reason for you to play it back in 11.1, unless you're an audiophile or a horn-counting crackpot. But this is what the DTS gear is selling -- play any format through our box and we'll make it surround, that's the pitch. (More like, we won't make you feel like an idiot for buying all those speakers when nothing on cable, Internet or Blu-Ray uses them.)
I'm a feature film sound designer and mixer, DTS is completely out of theatrical and television -- the original theater format is owned by a different company now, and the DTS name is just used to sell stereo equipment. DTS has become is the Bose of home theater. Go through their website and there's basically nothing for filmmakers, film mixers or TV mixers. I can't find any documentation of a Neo:X encoder, or a licensing system for productions. All of their "for professionals" documentation looks like its for home theater installers. Neo:X is just a box in your house that sprinkles fairy dust on your speaker outputs.
The difference with Dolby Stereo is Dolby Stereo uses an encoder, an SEU4 or the AAX/VST/AudioUnits equivalent, and you need the decoder in order to hear the mix in surround, and the filmmaker has complete control over how sound is placed and presented, not a box in the viewer's living room. It's up to the filmmaker to add "depth and intensity" if he wants to, not some box.
The only movie I can actually find that's advertised as Neo:X is Expendables 2, and it doesn't appear to be encoded for Neo:X, it's just been "optimized" for Neo:X, which means they just listened to the mix it through a Neo:X receiver and made a whole new mix just for people with Neo:X receivers -- in other words, the mixer had to change his mix so the Neo:X box wouldn't screw it up the presentation. Any box that remixes my work is crap. We spend weeks getting this stuff right and getting the director, editor and producers to sign off on every little detail, and then some home theater box is going to re-pan everything, add nonstandard height channels and multiband crossovers? What's the point of that, except to sell speaker gear?
Every electronic space/reverb algorithm I've heard just adds distortion and makes the original sound worse.
Well, by definition any signal-dependent component a process adds to an original signal is distortion.:) I just don't think you've heard good ones. Also, part of doing good music mixing is using reverb in a way that people don't notice, or just accept as natural. There are also applications of reverb that don't sound like reverb.
I prefer to hear just the original instruments in as pristine quality as possible as if we were in an infinite volume room.
I assure you, no recording of music you love has been recorded or presented in this way. Anechoic musical recordings exist but they're sorta special and they only work for certain instruments (OK for strings, awful for percussion, death for winds and vocals).
Despite the name "Neural Upmix", it is designed to work with phase-encoded signals intentionally mixed using Neural Downmix.
They sell it as doing both, it's marketed as a spatializing upmixer that can also decode Neural Surround (which is a third format not necessarily related to Neo:X). But this feature is sorta incidental, as literally nothing is mixed in Neural Surround.
I don't know what you mean by "DTS 11.1 is an actual format"... if you mean that it has 12 discrete channels, I believe you are mistaken on this point... "without changing the delivery chain": no new audio format, disks play fine on older DTS decoders
My understand is that the height channels are encoded sum-and-difference with the main L-R channels, and a special decoder reads reads additional channel data to subtract out the height channels from the mains. Auro 3D uses a similar method with it's high 5.0 array in order to do the same thing: make a deliverable that can be turned into a bare 5.1 just by dropping additional channels.
By "actual format" I mean its a communications channel where the sender and recipient agree on what goes into the channel and what is supposed to come out.
Slashdot Mirror
Buddhism generally doesn't assert the existence of the supernatural, not does Taoism. Many devotees of these are hold syncretic beliefs that incorporate supernatural elements, though.
Certain tenets of Scientology are supernatural, most saliently, the claim of the existence of "thetans."
I dunno, the original claim was pretty general in nature and equally unsupported.
The actual "evidence" question is actually sorta beside the point. Arendt specifically in Origins of Totalitarianism discussed how the Nazis would systematically treat actual criminals better than political prisoners or random arrestees, because in the end the message they were trying to send was that they could destroy you whenever they wanted, and it didn't really matter if you'd done anything wrong. The only way you could be safe is by enthusiastically cooperating, and even then it was never really enough.
At this point we would make the distinction between a merely authoritarian regime and a more "bloodthirsty" thing. The first would be like, say, Morsi's Egypt or Iran, where they arrest people for opposing the state. The latter would be more like North Korea, where they arrest people at random wether they oppose the state or not, because the terror is an end itself.
Miller was writing about the Hollywood Blacklist in the end, but it's an important example of authoritarianism of the first kind. Joe McCarthy knew that Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets hung out, that they were fellow travelers with more committed Communists and even soviet agents, he had all the evidence he needed to prove association. But the logic of the 50s Red Scare wasn't driven by the desire to find Communist agents as much as it was to get "suspect" individuals to turn over their friends, so that even though there was no evidence of actual wrongdoing, there were simply so many people named that spectre of conspiracy took on a life all its own, and the spectacle of people evading the "justice" of HUAAC or the senate, of "hiding" their friends and associations, would cast disrepute on leftism in general. They arrest you to make you look guilty, and then they make you turn States Evidence to buy back your respectability.
Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Miller... read something, kiddo.
This is often how the hypothetical is phrased but it almost never works out in just this way. The usual options are:
Door number 1: Tell the truth and accept those consequences.
Door number 2: Deny your involvement. The people arresting you usually have physical evidence of your association though, so in order to prove your loyalty they demand you become an informer and you have to turn over your friends. That's what's required to make your lie "convincing." Then when the revolution comes you're tarred a "collaborator."
Lying will save your hide but often at the cost of your cause. The "oppressive, murderous dictatorships" we have experience with won't settle for someone who's merely innocent, regardless of wether that innocence is the truth or a lie.
Worked for Kirk when he encountered the Kobayashi Maru.
Sorry this was me, I didn't realize I wasn't logged in:
1) Sometimes I need a timecode stopwatch, and it's distracting to use the phone in screenings.
2) I do like the idea of discreet notifications.
3) I usually wear a Fossil on dates and when I meet clients but, typically for a man's watch, it's very blocky and it doesn't really work under a sport jacket or french cuffs, which I like to wear. Something like an Apple Watch has a cleaner look, but it's still a smartwatch so it projects sophistication. It's really the only piece of jewelry a man can pull off in professional situations, except for maybe cufflinks and a wedding band.
Understand, this thing is being sold primarily as jewelry. It's a kewl smartwatch too, but the smartwatch features are necessary, not sufficient.
All it really does is shift the external negotiation, between company and employee, to an internal negotiation, with HR and upper management on one side (who want people cheap), and the staff and project managers (who want the best people).
Ability to negotiate, or rather, communicate your needs in a persuasive way, is sortof a core competence, everybody who wants to be successful and progress in their career either needs to have it or at least needs to have confidence in the process.
I probably wouldn't be interested in a CA that gave me my cert, I'd rather have one that signed one I generated :)
The "letter-number-symbol" verifiers are the bane of my existence.
I have a really simply rule: "You may choose whatever password you wish. If your password is compromised, you will be denied further access to this system. If your job requires access to this system, you will be terminated."
Maybe that's too severe, but if the user needs a little color-coded bar-graph to tell them how good their password is, that would suggest that (1) they don't understand what a password is actually protecting or is for, and (2) the incentives aren't correctly aligned. Personally I think employees should be assigned passwords to company servers. If they have trouble remembering it print it on a key fob or something, it'd be better than them doing what they obviously are going to do: "$username.2015". If a company's password policy is know, a reasonably clever script kiddy can generate a list of 10 probable passwords per account that would probably crack a few percent of them.
And of course the execs are the worst offenders, because their incentives are completely misaligned. It transpired after the Sony hack that the co-chariman of the motion picture group, Michael Lynton, used "sonyml3" as his email password.
How do they actually work? Do they do any kind of entropy calculation, or check the data against known rainbow tables? Or do they just apply rules?
I bet you're .login just launches Midnight Commander too. Bah you people!
Don't get too cute, sugar is a perfectly cromulent part of your diet; a very small part, but a part.
Sugar doesn't rot your teeth. Sugar stimulates the growth of mouth flora, many of these critters exude waste substances that lower your mouth's pH, your teeth erode in an acidic environment, particularly if you don't have fluorine ions in your enamel.
This is definitely an issue, Apple's supply chain model is much more efficient than Samsungs. Like most west asian conglomerates it maintains a bloated, 20th century heavy industrial infrastructure.
Why doesn't Samsung run its factories and supply chain like Apple? Because they're a byzantine Korean chaebol that doesn't know half the time if it's making a cellphone, a car or an oil tanker, and measures its success by how many little paternalistic fiefdoms it can sustain.
I don't think Sammy has anything to gain by cutting prices to get marketshare. It's good to sell more units but they don't benefit in the slightest by having a marginally higher percentage of the pie. From a platform perspective and drawing developers and mindshare, the Android share is the important number, and that's mostly out of Samsung's control, eating HTCs business is a wash and even at the prices they charge their flagship phones are still basically the same price as iPhones for the same specs and generation.
If you're Samsung you have to ask, I'm cutting my prices under the prevailing market price point, so I'm going to lose X million dollars in prospective revenues in order to get more marketshare. So exactly what is an additional 5% of smartphone marketshare worth? It's not worth much of anything. it'd be worth a lot if you were selling that 5% of phones at a good profit, but you already sacrificed that.
The whole point of marketshare is that share should give you leverage, like you get more bargaining power with sales channels, or you make it more profitable to sell complementary goods (like apps); you have Network Effects that draw in more consumers because of the perception that they need to have a Samsung phone over and above any other. But if Android is a commodity, and the phones are a commodity, market share is useless; it can be an indicator of your health in a competitive market but it does not itself reify into something you can use to your advantage. It's an indicator, not a cause.
Yeah that's why I said I thought the articles sounded like BS. I could see it maybe being part of some kind of watch or tie-in strategy, maybe "we'll take your phone if you want to get an Apple-watch" or something like that.
Also they might just be offering it just for the recycling value, it's not clear they're going to offer over and above the market value of the phone (i.e. "buy marketshare"), they might just be trying to front-run Gazelle's business. There are people in the article speculating that they may be paying a premium for old Android phones but nobody knows what their business model for the service is actually going to be (assuming it's not BS in the first instance).
Yeah I don't think market share is a goal. I think they just want to make money. What good is market share if you have to sell at or below cost to get it, and the share doesn't actually give you a competitive advantage?
It seems to me like everything they do works great. This story kinda sounds like BS, very un-Apple, they've never cared about market share, except in the depths of the Gil Amelio/Mac Clone days, and anyways their actual unit share of sales in the US and other developed markets is increasing.
Everybody just wants mobile to play out like the PC/Mac wars, and for network effects to award the whole pie to the dominant player, but it's just not working out that way. Network effects don't count for much anymore, "ecosystems" aren't as closed as they were, even the Apple one, and the most important applications, the drivers of growth in the IT space, of our era are cross-platform, usually web-centered. Android has a majority of the mobile installed base, but it's a worthless hill to hold. Things have reverted to a mean and traditional branding and product positioning are more important now, you buy from a company you had a good experience with, not the company that's logo-compliant with your box at work.
Right, but why don't Samsung or HTC have such a high margin on their phones? Do they sell at a lower price because they want to be nice to you? Or because the people who set the prices at Samsung and HTC only want to charge you a "fair" price?
Their phones are just less desirable. Supply and demand.
Taxi companies have to settle for Paul Schrader...
Seriously, don't bother, all the features and TV shows doing objects mixing now are mixing in Atmos, and the DTS-Barco system is a vaporware "open spec" that's DOA.
You don't have to do a ceiling installation for home atmos, I've heard good things about top-firing speakers.
Buy a Home Atmos rig. I've been going around to Gearslutz and asking around here at the studio and nobody has even heard of Neo:X.
Oh you don't understand, by "nothing" I mean no films or television shows are distributed using a Neural Surround downmixer. Because of this, there's no reason to have a Neural Surround decoder for your home.
Right, it's a phase matrix format, like Dolby Stereo or Pro Logic II. And like those, you can listen to the LtRt as a plain left-right and you'll still hear something that's tolerable stereo, it's just perilous for certain applications (it'll have bad mono compatibility).
Right, it's a format. In a professional context this would be called a format. Format does not imply digital. Optical SVA Dolby SR is a "format" in this context.
Neural Surround is a format, it's a 7.1 format. DTS 11.1 is Neo:X, at least it's the only one I can find.
If you read their white paper it says nothing about encoding or encoding format, Neo:X is an upmixing system. This is what it is:
Okay, any box that "adds depth and intensity" is rank woo. You can't take a stereo mix from, say, the 1980s, run it through an upmixer and call that a high-fidelity process, you're making up a mix that the original mixer never intended. If the guy who made the mix didn't make it in DTS 11.1, there's absolutely no reason for you to play it back in 11.1, unless you're an audiophile or a horn-counting crackpot. But this is what the DTS gear is selling -- play any format through our box and we'll make it surround, that's the pitch. (More like, we won't make you feel like an idiot for buying all those speakers when nothing on cable, Internet or Blu-Ray uses them.)
I'm a feature film sound designer and mixer, DTS is completely out of theatrical and television -- the original theater format is owned by a different company now, and the DTS name is just used to sell stereo equipment. DTS has become is the Bose of home theater. Go through their website and there's basically nothing for filmmakers, film mixers or TV mixers. I can't find any documentation of a Neo:X encoder, or a licensing system for productions. All of their "for professionals" documentation looks like its for home theater installers. Neo:X is just a box in your house that sprinkles fairy dust on your speaker outputs.
The difference with Dolby Stereo is Dolby Stereo uses an encoder, an SEU4 or the AAX/VST/AudioUnits equivalent, and you need the decoder in order to hear the mix in surround, and the filmmaker has complete control over how sound is placed and presented, not a box in the viewer's living room. It's up to the filmmaker to add "depth and intensity" if he wants to, not some box.
The only movie I can actually find that's advertised as Neo:X is Expendables 2, and it doesn't appear to be encoded for Neo:X, it's just been "optimized" for Neo:X, which means they just listened to the mix it through a Neo:X receiver and made a whole new mix just for people with Neo:X receivers -- in other words, the mixer had to change his mix so the Neo:X box wouldn't screw it up the presentation. Any box that remixes my work is crap. We spend weeks getting this stuff right and getting the director, editor and producers to sign off on every little detail, and then some home theater box is going to re-pan everything, add nonstandard height channels and multiband crossovers? What's the point of that, except to sell speaker gear?
Well, by definition any signal-dependent component a process adds to an original signal is distortion. :) I just don't think you've heard good ones. Also, part of doing good music mixing is using reverb in a way that people don't notice, or just accept as natural. There are also applications of reverb that don't sound like reverb.
I assure you, no recording of music you love has been recorded or presented in this way. Anechoic musical recordings exist but they're sorta special and they only work for certain instruments (OK for strings, awful for percussion, death for winds and vocals).
They sell it as doing both, it's marketed as a spatializing upmixer that can also decode Neural Surround (which is a third format not necessarily related to Neo:X). But this feature is sorta incidental, as literally nothing is mixed in Neural Surround.
My understand is that the height channels are encoded sum-and-difference with the main L-R channels, and a special decoder reads reads additional channel data to subtract out the height channels from the mains. Auro 3D uses a similar method with it's high 5.0 array in order to do the same thing: make a deliverable that can be turned into a bare 5.1 just by dropping additional channels.
By "actual format" I mean its a communications channel where the sender and recipient agree on what goes into the channel and what is supposed to come out.