Before the 5.1 and 7.1 digital standards, there was Dolby Surround that was encoded within a stereo soundtrack. A simple audio mixer could "upmix" from stereo to surround. DTS Neural Upmix can make a very clean 7.1 from a stereo signal, and it works from an analog signal (it's not something tricky inside a digital encoded format).
There's a fundamental difference between an encoded mix and an upmixer. Dolby Surround is intended to be decoded from 2 tracks into LCRS, the filmmakers mixed the film in Dolby Stereo and were listening to the surrounds so they know what's in them. The phase encoding is part of the channel spec.
An upmixer takes a stereo or 5.1 mix and applies effects to it to make it sound like it was mixed in a wider format, but there's nothing really being decoded, it's just synthesizing or guessing what should be in the additional channels using heuristics, all-pass filters, delays, crossover networks and other stuff that sounds cool or "provide a good experience" but, in fact, interfere with the filmmaker's intent.
Neural Upmix is an upmixer, DTS Neo:X is an actual format that decodes an 11.1. Neo:X home receivers also employ upmixing, mainly because no films are mixed in 11.1 Neo:X, it's a surround audiophile format, and it needs to do an upmix in order to justify people spending money on it.
Not really anything regarding stereo, but how to digitally recreate a 3D space and provide the resultant acoustic signature to stereo headphones?
We can do this without any fancy computers, traditionally someone would make a binaural recording with a dummy head.
So, you could digitally model Carnegie Hall, or a warehouse, or a coffee shop, and if you know the locations of your point sources of audio you can then create what the room would sound like based on a given listener location and orientation?
It's not generally possible to do this from procedural models, because it turns out a space like Carnegie Hall has a lot of variables, but we can do the equivalent of LIDARing the space for its audio character by capturing an impulse response and creating a convolution reverb of the space. There isn't a commercially-available IR of Carnegie that I'm aware of but recording the aural character of a space is a pretty routine thing nowadays.
the ogg file format has supported multiple streams pretty much since inception. Couple this with a bit of positional tagging information and you're done.
Yeah, but this thing isn't just positional tagging, it's 3D soundscape stuff. So you have to have a way of communicating to the receiver the kind of space the audio stream is in -- the size of it, the general shape, how reflective the surfaces are, diffusion, the position of the space relative to the source, etc. and then you have to rigorously define the reverb algorithms that will be applied to the source taking these into account. You also have to define equalization (and perhaps other LTI) functions for distance, and diffraction around obstacles.
Then, if better reverb and EQ spatialization algos are developed, how do you push these out? How do you handle legacy content that used the old algos? Do they get auto-upgraded or do they play in the old ones?
And then there's the HRTF business: you have to define the HRTFs that will be used, and under what conditions.
And the positioning itself has subtleties you have to address. Will sound sources be positioned relative to a central listener in spherical coordinates, or will it be positioned relative to a reference space with rectangular ones? How will in-phase content be handled when mixed to one speaker?
"5.1/7.1/8.1" doesn't have an elevation component. Certain IMAX formats did, as did some experimental 70mm formats in the 70s, but it hasn't really been widely available before Dolby ATMOS and Barco Auro.
The big difference with the traditional X.Y formats is these regard individual screen channels as discrete, and when films are mixed, sound sources are hard-assigned to certain speaker channels, and the speaker placement has to be matched in every venue . "3D" systems use procedural methods to assign sound sources a vector or coordinate with metadata, and a decoder at the receiving end does the job of assigning speakers, which may have different placement and number from venue to venue.
Something mixed in 5.1 or 7.1 can be "downmixed" to stereo by summing channels together and applying pan and gain to position the multichannel sources in a stereo field. But a stereo signal can't really be "upmixed" to a 7.1, the position of individual sound sources is lost and can't really be extracted from the mix -- there are fancy ways of "spatializing" stereo mixes to 5.1 or 7.1 with fourier analysis and panning certain phase correlations or frequencies to different speakers, but there's really no way for a spatializer to split the celli from the violas and pan them separately, or the machine guns and the explosions.
3D audio formats keep violas and cellis on separate streams in the file, and then use position metadata to do the speaker mix in the receiver, so something mixed on stereo or 5.1 speakers could be unmixed to a 7.1, or 11.1, or 64 channel setup and you would actually get more fidelity.
This could be quite promising if incorporated into movies and video games.
There are already several platforms for object-based 3D audio in games, they already offer solutions for binaural and HRTF listening.
The AES has promulgated many standards with regard to file interchange and computer audio, they're always several years behind and chasing proprietary vendor technology that's already established (See AES31, a timeline interchange format supported by no one, even open source projects avoid it like the plague). In the end vendors have nothing to gain by adopting the AES standard.
On the videogame side there's OpenAL, X3d and a bunch of other platforms that build on these. Speaking as a film sound designer, 3D audio systems just don't offer the level of control I'd want: I don't want the user's cellphone applying my fucking reverbs and distance rolloffs for me, and nether do my clients. This is why there's Dolby ATMOS and the competing Barco-DTS standard which will probably be FRAND and offer down mixing modes which should preserve the experience on headphones, and don't leave things like equalization, or panning, or reverb to the interpretation of the platform or the host.
I see, so it IS okay for Apple to strong arm banks into doing things Apple's way, provided Apple's way meets your standard. Funny that.
I mean obviously this is a foul up and both the banks and Apple should work to fix it, they're BOTH responsible. The idea that banks are just helpless ninnies at the mercy of Apple, forced to conduct their business exactly as Apple demands, is dumbass.
Geez, if Apple told you to jump off a cliff, you have to, right? I mean they have "such a large war chest."
At a certain point surely the responsibility of bankers to keep their customers' accounts secure entails-- it's the very basis of their profession.
and anyway, what exactly are they afraid of? Did they even ask to implement the necessary security features? Did they ask, and did Apple refuse? Has Apple threatened any sort of sanctions against banks that don't comply? It's all very amorphous, and again, seems to rely on the idea that bankers have minimal accountability or responsibility, and may respond to undefined, mysterious, and unsubstantiated "fears" without basis.
I'm a liberal who wants the next president to be a sharp operator who knows how to keep her hands clean and has no compunction about crushing her enemies. So yes, it helps me quite a bit.
So, the Bush White House had its staffers use government email for government stuff, who'da thunk it?
Nah, you see the problem was that they didn't really pay attention to what business was running on either blackberry, or they intentionally used the non-government emails for business that was clearly government-related ("we should fire these US Attorneys") but they didn't want captured by the Records Act.
You see, when you give people two email systems it doesn't address the ethical problem, since you're now allowing someone to choose wether their correspondence is recorded or not. The only alternative now is to force people to turn over their private emails as long as they're government employees.
Note, by the by, that the argument that all her official correspondence with State Dept. staff is a matter of public record because the worker bees were using government accounts is specious.
I don't think ANY emails of ANY kind should be public record. I thought I made that clear.
There is a concerted effort throughout government to communicate in manners that cannot be audited.
Like phone calls, or meeting another official at a bar.
I just don't think emails should be regarded this way, they're far too casual and they don't really reflect the official acts of people in the way that a true "record" does (in the sense that someone in the 1960s would understand the term "government record.") Emails should be afforded the same leniency as phone calls -- maybe we keep them for a little while, but people, even people in government, should have the right to delete them.
Sometimes I wonder if transparency advocates won't be happy until they've stapled a Google Glass onto the head of every government employee recording a 24 hour stream of their every sight and utterance. The problem with this approach is that the only people who actually use government transparency are other politicians, mainly to dig up dirt, and lobbyists -- it makes their job so much easier when they can confirm that a politician remains bought. Beyond a certain point transparency only benefits the loud and wealthy, it makes discretion impossible and it subjugates elected officials to the whim of anyone that runs a PR operation.
She said that anything that is classified isn't handled via email at all, but via secure diplomatic channels and cables, which are all done via the State department and on record.
This sort of thing isn't unprecedented, the Bush White House had a policy of issuing important staffers two Blackberries, one that had a whitehouse.gov email and one that had a gop.org email, and using both systems indifferently for communication.
I sorta don't care in either place, at least from an ethics perspective, since all emails ever seem to do is trigger dopey years-long investigations and pseudo-controversies about the parsing of language and people going off half-cocked. Case in point: Benghazi.
On the other hand, I'd rather not people like this be president of the United States. I think Lindsey Graham has the right idea, if you're an official person, NEVER USE EMAIL. Write official documents carefully, or just call someone.
The difference between Pi and the golden ratio is that the golden ratio isn't transcendental, it's just irrational. In fact, you can state Phi perfectly as (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2.
If it ain't publicly known and reproducible then it ain't science. No public policy or regulation should be based in reasons that are not subject to examination and validation. This is pretty simple.
This is ridiculous. Real after me: It is impossible to scientifically prove that environmental damage is bad, or should be illegal. It is impossible to scientifically prove that killing innocent people is wrong. It is impossible to scientifically prove that theft is wrong. It is impossible to scientifically prove that the risk of particulate pollution above level X creates an intolerable hazard, but below the level does not, and lacking that level of predication, rule making becomes impossible.
If you create the standard that a law must be justified by science, no law could be sufficiently justified. The EPA makes regulations based on science, but also on things like risk assessments, ethics, moral attitudes on the value of human life, and popular democratic demands. Risk assessments and ethics aren't science and never can be, making them into science is scientism. If the people vote for clean air or dirty air, or their legislators demand it, they should get clean or dirty air, science be damned.
Meanwhile, there is this PC platform that wiped out all of it's other bespoke competitors probably before you even touched your first computer.
An open platform running a bespoke OS stack. It also helped that the original PC clone makers were just that, cloning down to the schematic level the IBM PC.
Android smartphones are bespoke hardware, the average Samsung or Nokia smartphone might as well be Kaypro or a Commodore PET. iPhones are relatively generic by comparison.
In the end this isn't really a technological problem, the business dynamics of the smartphone business just aren't the same as PCs. Development man-hours are very cheap now compared to the 1980s, it's very practical to port an app back and forth. But this means that there is the Network Effect for the OSs quite diminished, so the platform that offers the best business case to developers is going to get the most developers.
And Google doesn't care about third party developers. Google just isn't MS in the 1980s, it doesn't approach app devs as if they were clients, or their core constituency. It doesn't hate them, it doesn't like them, doesn't lock them out, doesn't lock them in, it's just indifferent. They make a big show when it comes to cool libraries and features, but they have minimal commitment to seeing app dev paid. Fragmentation is what iOS fanboys point to when they want to see Android fail, and it's what Android devs point to when they want to talk about something other than revenue.
But Android will continue to be the dominant cellphone platform for the foreseeable future worldwide, because it's cheap and it's "enough." App devs will continue to be losers who need to sell to iOS to make money, smartphone manufacturers will continue to get piss-poor margins as they grind each other into the ground, and actual smartphone users won't really get anything more out of their phone than they ever did, but Google will get its a impressions and user metrics. Which was the whole reason they started this cockamamie thing in the first place.
This is just NOT the PC business in 1980 -- you've got a billion-dollar behemoth basically giving away the keys to the castle so it can make money on the ads and front-running web searches. This completely disrupts the model that MS and the PC manufacturers exploited.
FranÃois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Bigdonavich were critics before they were filmmakers.
Roger Ebert was a screenwriter early in his career. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is a strange movie but I cannot fault it's originality.
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There's a fundamental difference between an encoded mix and an upmixer. Dolby Surround is intended to be decoded from 2 tracks into LCRS, the filmmakers mixed the film in Dolby Stereo and were listening to the surrounds so they know what's in them. The phase encoding is part of the channel spec.
An upmixer takes a stereo or 5.1 mix and applies effects to it to make it sound like it was mixed in a wider format, but there's nothing really being decoded, it's just synthesizing or guessing what should be in the additional channels using heuristics, all-pass filters, delays, crossover networks and other stuff that sounds cool or "provide a good experience" but, in fact, interfere with the filmmaker's intent.
Neural Upmix is an upmixer, DTS Neo:X is an actual format that decodes an 11.1. Neo:X home receivers also employ upmixing, mainly because no films are mixed in 11.1 Neo:X, it's a surround audiophile format, and it needs to do an upmix in order to justify people spending money on it.
We can do this without any fancy computers, traditionally someone would make a binaural recording with a dummy head.
It's not generally possible to do this from procedural models, because it turns out a space like Carnegie Hall has a lot of variables, but we can do the equivalent of LIDARing the space for its audio character by capturing an impulse response and creating a convolution reverb of the space. There isn't a commercially-available IR of Carnegie that I'm aware of but recording the aural character of a space is a pretty routine thing nowadays.
Yeah, but this thing isn't just positional tagging, it's 3D soundscape stuff. So you have to have a way of communicating to the receiver the kind of space the audio stream is in -- the size of it, the general shape, how reflective the surfaces are, diffusion, the position of the space relative to the source, etc. and then you have to rigorously define the reverb algorithms that will be applied to the source taking these into account. You also have to define equalization (and perhaps other LTI) functions for distance, and diffraction around obstacles.
Then, if better reverb and EQ spatialization algos are developed, how do you push these out? How do you handle legacy content that used the old algos? Do they get auto-upgraded or do they play in the old ones?
And then there's the HRTF business: you have to define the HRTFs that will be used, and under what conditions.
And the positioning itself has subtleties you have to address. Will sound sources be positioned relative to a central listener in spherical coordinates, or will it be positioned relative to a reference space with rectangular ones? How will in-phase content be handled when mixed to one speaker?
"5.1/7.1/8.1" doesn't have an elevation component. Certain IMAX formats did, as did some experimental 70mm formats in the 70s, but it hasn't really been widely available before Dolby ATMOS and Barco Auro.
The big difference with the traditional X.Y formats is these regard individual screen channels as discrete, and when films are mixed, sound sources are hard-assigned to certain speaker channels, and the speaker placement has to be matched in every venue . "3D" systems use procedural methods to assign sound sources a vector or coordinate with metadata, and a decoder at the receiving end does the job of assigning speakers, which may have different placement and number from venue to venue.
Something mixed in 5.1 or 7.1 can be "downmixed" to stereo by summing channels together and applying pan and gain to position the multichannel sources in a stereo field. But a stereo signal can't really be "upmixed" to a 7.1, the position of individual sound sources is lost and can't really be extracted from the mix -- there are fancy ways of "spatializing" stereo mixes to 5.1 or 7.1 with fourier analysis and panning certain phase correlations or frequencies to different speakers, but there's really no way for a spatializer to split the celli from the violas and pan them separately, or the machine guns and the explosions.
3D audio formats keep violas and cellis on separate streams in the file, and then use position metadata to do the speaker mix in the receiver, so something mixed on stereo or 5.1 speakers could be unmixed to a 7.1, or 11.1, or 64 channel setup and you would actually get more fidelity.
There are already several platforms for object-based 3D audio in games, they already offer solutions for binaural and HRTF listening.
The AES has promulgated many standards with regard to file interchange and computer audio, they're always several years behind and chasing proprietary vendor technology that's already established (See AES31, a timeline interchange format supported by no one, even open source projects avoid it like the plague). In the end vendors have nothing to gain by adopting the AES standard.
On the videogame side there's OpenAL, X3d and a bunch of other platforms that build on these. Speaking as a film sound designer, 3D audio systems just don't offer the level of control I'd want: I don't want the user's cellphone applying my fucking reverbs and distance rolloffs for me, and nether do my clients. This is why there's Dolby ATMOS and the competing Barco-DTS standard which will probably be FRAND and offer down mixing modes which should preserve the experience on headphones, and don't leave things like equalization, or panning, or reverb to the interpretation of the platform or the host.
I see, so it IS okay for Apple to strong arm banks into doing things Apple's way, provided Apple's way meets your standard. Funny that.
I mean obviously this is a foul up and both the banks and Apple should work to fix it, they're BOTH responsible. The idea that banks are just helpless ninnies at the mercy of Apple, forced to conduct their business exactly as Apple demands, is dumbass.
Geez, if Apple told you to jump off a cliff, you have to, right? I mean they have "such a large war chest."
At a certain point surely the responsibility of bankers to keep their customers' accounts secure entails-- it's the very basis of their profession.
and anyway, what exactly are they afraid of? Did they even ask to implement the necessary security features? Did they ask, and did Apple refuse? Has Apple threatened any sort of sanctions against banks that don't comply? It's all very amorphous, and again, seems to rely on the idea that bankers have minimal accountability or responsibility, and may respond to undefined, mysterious, and unsubstantiated "fears" without basis.
Molecular printers, flying cars and fuel-cell smartphones...
They're on it
we'll see if she can't talk her way out of this first.
I'm not sure the fourth amendment should apply to email.
Yet another reason why people just shouldn't use email for anything substantive.
I'm a liberal who wants the next president to be a sharp operator who knows how to keep her hands clean and has no compunction about crushing her enemies. So yes, it helps me quite a bit.
Nah, you see the problem was that they didn't really pay attention to what business was running on either blackberry, or they intentionally used the non-government emails for business that was clearly government-related ("we should fire these US Attorneys") but they didn't want captured by the Records Act.
You see, when you give people two email systems it doesn't address the ethical problem, since you're now allowing someone to choose wether their correspondence is recorded or not. The only alternative now is to force people to turn over their private emails as long as they're government employees.
I don't think ANY emails of ANY kind should be public record. I thought I made that clear.
Like phone calls, or meeting another official at a bar.
I just don't think emails should be regarded this way, they're far too casual and they don't really reflect the official acts of people in the way that a true "record" does (in the sense that someone in the 1960s would understand the term "government record.") Emails should be afforded the same leniency as phone calls -- maybe we keep them for a little while, but people, even people in government, should have the right to delete them.
Sometimes I wonder if transparency advocates won't be happy until they've stapled a Google Glass onto the head of every government employee recording a 24 hour stream of their every sight and utterance. The problem with this approach is that the only people who actually use government transparency are other politicians, mainly to dig up dirt, and lobbyists -- it makes their job so much easier when they can confirm that a politician remains bought. Beyond a certain point transparency only benefits the loud and wealthy, it makes discretion impossible and it subjugates elected officials to the whim of anyone that runs a PR operation.
On record at Wikileaks, that is.
This sort of thing isn't unprecedented, the Bush White House had a policy of issuing important staffers two Blackberries, one that had a whitehouse.gov email and one that had a gop.org email, and using both systems indifferently for communication.
I sorta don't care in either place, at least from an ethics perspective, since all emails ever seem to do is trigger dopey years-long investigations and pseudo-controversies about the parsing of language and people going off half-cocked. Case in point: Benghazi.
On the other hand, I'd rather not people like this be president of the United States. I think Lindsey Graham has the right idea, if you're an official person, NEVER USE EMAIL. Write official documents carefully, or just call someone.
The difference between Pi and the golden ratio is that the golden ratio isn't transcendental, it's just irrational. In fact, you can state Phi perfectly as (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2.
He should pay his PAs better.
And for what the Kindle does it's can't replace an iPad.
This is ridiculous. Real after me: It is impossible to scientifically prove that environmental damage is bad, or should be illegal. It is impossible to scientifically prove that killing innocent people is wrong. It is impossible to scientifically prove that theft is wrong. It is impossible to scientifically prove that the risk of particulate pollution above level X creates an intolerable hazard, but below the level does not, and lacking that level of predication, rule making becomes impossible.
If you create the standard that a law must be justified by science, no law could be sufficiently justified. The EPA makes regulations based on science, but also on things like risk assessments, ethics, moral attitudes on the value of human life, and popular democratic demands. Risk assessments and ethics aren't science and never can be, making them into science is scientism. If the people vote for clean air or dirty air, or their legislators demand it, they should get clean or dirty air, science be damned.
Exactly, they're a single concept, so they should use the same operator. And if C++ don't have overloading, that would be impossible.
"Concepts" don't come from a language, they come from the programmer.
Buy a Mac, install Windows.
An open platform running a bespoke OS stack. It also helped that the original PC clone makers were just that, cloning down to the schematic level the IBM PC.
Android smartphones are bespoke hardware, the average Samsung or Nokia smartphone might as well be Kaypro or a Commodore PET. iPhones are relatively generic by comparison.
In the end this isn't really a technological problem, the business dynamics of the smartphone business just aren't the same as PCs. Development man-hours are very cheap now compared to the 1980s, it's very practical to port an app back and forth. But this means that there is the Network Effect for the OSs quite diminished, so the platform that offers the best business case to developers is going to get the most developers.
And Google doesn't care about third party developers. Google just isn't MS in the 1980s, it doesn't approach app devs as if they were clients, or their core constituency. It doesn't hate them, it doesn't like them, doesn't lock them out, doesn't lock them in, it's just indifferent. They make a big show when it comes to cool libraries and features, but they have minimal commitment to seeing app dev paid. Fragmentation is what iOS fanboys point to when they want to see Android fail, and it's what Android devs point to when they want to talk about something other than revenue.
But Android will continue to be the dominant cellphone platform for the foreseeable future worldwide, because it's cheap and it's "enough." App devs will continue to be losers who need to sell to iOS to make money, smartphone manufacturers will continue to get piss-poor margins as they grind each other into the ground, and actual smartphone users won't really get anything more out of their phone than they ever did, but Google will get its a impressions and user metrics. Which was the whole reason they started this cockamamie thing in the first place.
This is just NOT the PC business in 1980 -- you've got a billion-dollar behemoth basically giving away the keys to the castle so it can make money on the ads and front-running web searches. This completely disrupts the model that MS and the PC manufacturers exploited.
Don't you mean Steve Buscemi?
FranÃois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Bigdonavich were critics before they were filmmakers.
Roger Ebert was a screenwriter early in his career. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is a strange movie but I cannot fault it's originality.