...is that it came out so quickly behind ISDN (at least compared to ISDN here in the UK), something BT had invested a _LOT_ of money in, both in setting up and marketing, that they needed to keep it going for a while longer before announcing ADSL. The actual timespan between the proper public announcement of ADSL (with no upgrade path from ISDN, nyuk nyuk nyuk) and its launch was not long at all, compared to the length of the ADSL trials themselves. And of course as a result people are damn furious, saying they'd never have signed up for ISDN (which can be *more* expensive than ADSL, easily!) if they new ADSL was just round the corner.
I have been waiting for 3 months for business DSL here in the US, watching the comedy of errors as the reseller miscommunicates with the providers, who miscommunicates with the local telecom. It seems these UK companies are having the same problems with BT.
You think that's bad? I've been having the same problem, between BT and _itself_!
Here's the scenario. I used to be a BT ADSL customer. Easynet comes along and is selling, for me, a more attractive ADSL package. BT of course is reselling Easynet the ADSL, but they're allowing more things for a better price, so I decide to switch to them. Easy? Yeah right.
So as I was at the end of my contract with BT, I tell them I don't want to renew it. They say fine, the line will be ceased in a week. So I call Easynet, and get it set up to be installed 2 weeks later. (I had a week away anyway)
So about 10 days later Easynet contacts me. Saying they can't install ADSL on my line due to "conflicting services". Guess what, BT hadn't deactivated my old ADSL! But even worse, guess who performed the line test for Easynet? BT!!!
Much gnashing of teeth later, it turns out BT's cease department, and their installation department, are completely separate and are not allowed to talk to each other! Apparently this is company policy! So can you tell the installation department "the line test is okay, it's just failing because I have old ADSL on the line, as you can see from the cease order it'll be gone by the time you get here to install"? Of course not! That would be too... too easy!
So I have to put the cease through myself, by mail, and wait til they get around to it. And can they coordinate so the same engineer deactivates my old one and then installs the new one? Of course not! You have to wait until the cease is done to put in the order so they can do the line test and it won't fail, so they can schedule an engineer!
So something like 5 weeks later, it got worked out, and I have my ADSL, and it is good. Yes, it's laughable now, so you'd better mod this up as funny;)
I've been a triallist since BT first started their closed public (1000) adsl testing, and recently changed to another ADSL distributor. Of course I've paid a lot of attention to the status of DSL availability and plans here over the past two years, and can tell you...
the article is exaggerating the problem greatly.
Definitely, there _is_ a problem with the availability of DSL here, as there have been delays in its launch for almost a year, and demand has overwhelmed the (poor) supply from BT - a note for those unaware, BT is the only company able to provide ADSL, and resells it through other companies as well as marketing it itself.
The five companies mentioned in the article, with the exception of NTL, are of little to no consequence in this arena, and nowhere near the size of larger ISPs (Demon, Easynet, etc) who are offering DSL services and have no plans to back down. NTL is in fact a cable company who has been performing cable modem trials over the last year, so their interest in DSL is unlikely to be more than academic.
The demand for broadband here is phenomenal, and so many companies (probably approaching 50 by now?) are offering DSL that this will continue. Sure, it is still expensive here (i pay around $2000 a year, including taxes, for a 2M/256k line, 20:1 contention, fully routed with 15 IPs. However, having to pay for local phone calls ere i was racking up around $150 a month for 56k access as it was...), and demand exceeds supply, but wasn't this the case in the USA when it was launched? Couple that with getting our appetites whetted by hearing about it for so long, and this is of course what happens.
I live in London, England, and we already did something like this over the last few years. In fact, we've done it a lot. Here's some information:
Originally, London had the "area code" 01-xxx-xxxx
Around 15 years ago (?) this changed to inner london (071-xxx-xxxx) and outer london (081-xxx-xxxx)
Eight (?) years ago the whole country changed, adding a "1" onto of all area codes, so London became 0171-xxx-xxxx and 0181-xxx-xxxx.
Last year, several large cities (manchester, birmingham, and of course, london) changed to have new number, again. Now, london is 020-7xxx-xxxx and 020-8xxx-xxxx. The most significant change here is that all local numbers change due to this too. With the other changes local numbers stayed the same (xxx-xxxx, no prefix), but now you needed a 7 or 8 just to dial the number locally as well...
All these changes were due to shortage in numbers. I am surprised this hasn't risen its head sooner in the USA.
So what can i tell you about them? They are a) disruptive, b) obviously costly to the Telco (and to businesses!), and c) shows they have no forward planning nor vision of what future demand will be.
Every one of these "upgrades" in London were promised to be the last. Can you imagine if this sort of thing happened with domains? We're seeing it happening with IPs, at least IPv6 has enough foresight to not need to be expandable hopefully ever again...
In short, moving to a 10 digit number with an eye to expand later to 11 and 12 is short-sighted and will lead only to further disruption. If you anticipate the demand will be there, upgrade to 12 immediately.
So it's there. i download it. 20 megs. not too bad considering (note, i didnt get mail, news, or half the plugins.) Nice installer.
Boot it up, loads quite quickly. Go to Slashdot, looks okay. the Gecko engine is showing its stuff, very nice indeed.
Go to news.bbc.co.uk. Not bad. again fast rendering.
Go to an e-commerce site that uses CSS and SSL quite extensively. this works on NS 4.75 and IE5.5 very well, i use it every day.
Netscape 6's handling of CSS is even worse than 4.75, from what i can tell. sometimes it even stops rendering CSS from a linked file halfway through the page. and when viewing pages under SSL, it is SO slow it is unreal.
This looks like a particularly buggy mosaic milestone with AOL tags bunched on it. i will wait for a 6.x release i hear good things about, but nothing until then.
I expect it from the local newspaper and tabloids who have nothing better to write about. But I don't want to have "THEE WORLDE WILL ENDE!" thrust into my face on/. of all places.
We're all sensible enough to realise that if there were the remotest chance of it happening, the world would club together and nuke/laser/persuade it off course as necessary. And anyway, I'd put the likelihood of the world being ripped apart in a Nuclear war before 2030 at more than 500/1 anyway.
We're more than sensible enough to know when the media is just spinning to fill column inches. There's enough to talk about without this.
You said it yourself.. those children had problems.
For sure they did. their mental instability may or may not have been affected by computer games. or by violence on television. or movies. or the news. or books, or magazines. or music.
But the main thing that differentiated these kids from the 99.9% who don't act like them? they were bullied. they were shown violence in the most direct way - applied to them. and humiliation. and what did the school do about it? their parents? anyone who should have been looking out for them? obviously, not enough.
There are always complete nutcases going around. we can't ever assume there won't be. What we have to do is ensure they are listened to, understood, and accepted. We shouldn't be cushioning them, and:
This stuff needs to be illegal.
We shouldn't be cushioning anyone else. People are free to make their own choices - children being the exception to some extent, as their parents or guardians are, morally and legally, responsible for them.
And the last thing this needs are self-righteous crusaders charging mightily up their own backsides because they choose to follow whatever media shock story is there to trigger the synapses of the braindead that day. get with the program and don't simply lash out at something you obviously don't understand.
A simple pricewatch check shows that 6 dollars gets you either one 100MB zip disk, or ten 650MB CD-RW discs.
must say i'm surprised, my Local Vendor here (in the UK) has zips for about $4 each, CD-RWs are about $1.80 each, so my comments were based on price compared to ease of use etc (i tend to reuse zipdisks a lot, but not CD-RWs, apart from wiping them and reusing from scratch.) i guess it's just because it's easier to delete a few files and then just throw a few more on, with zips.
...covered in some other emails, but here's an analysis of some of them, and implementation methods as well.
Floppy disks - low capacity, slow, unreliable. not a great option, though fine as a secondary/tertiary backup.
Flash media - fast, low-medium capacity, reliable, and some of these can even be used in floppy drives using an adapter, obviating the need for a special drive. however, they are VERY expensive per megabyte, and won't drop any time soon. also they are small and easy to lose.
Zip drives - high capacity (100-250M), reasonably fast (scsi and usb), reasonable reliability (i've never had problems, though they are still potentially affected by strong magnetic fields?). the drives are somewhat expensive, but the media is cheap and getting cheaper all the time, especially the 100s.
Jazz drives - very high capacity (1-2G), reliable, fast, but very expensive. at something like $100 a disk, that's a bit much.
LS-120 - reasonable capacity, not too fast, about as reliable as floppies, heh. bonus here is that a LS-1230 drive can read floppies as well, so if you need to upgrade many machines to do this, you can simply replace the floppy drives instead.
other options exist, such as:
Provide network backup - set up a system (web-based?) where users get X amount of storage to access from wherever they want. reliable, fast internally, versatile, though may be an unneeded maintainance headache (warez kiddies, etc)
CD-RW - fast read, slow write, high capacity, high reliability. media is kind of expensive - at this point it's usually worth going for CD-R instead, the media is so cheap it's expendable, and writes faster. writable drives are still costly though, especially reliable ones.
What will probably accomplish more is instilling a good sense of backup in your people, if possible - encourage them to make backups regularly and often, on at least two separate media, and how to treat the media.
What may clinch it for one over another here though is how you implement it. obviously every machine has a floppy drive (or not?), but you may be able to attach a resource to the network, say one per 10 machines, used for backup purposes, instead of bolting one onto every machine. this would lower the installation costs of something like cd-r and zip, which are my two recommended options in this sort of installation. cd-r for portability (and implicitly usability elsewhere in any cd reader), zip for backups.
You are talking about applying only the psychoacoustic model of the mp3 encoding, and producing a comparison of that with the original signal. I would indeed be really interested in seeing that- I'd like to know which of the various distortions, over-rings etc. arise from the psych model and which arise from the fractal part.
yes that's exactly it, i think it would be an interesting exercise, as i don't recall seeing any study of that as of yet. i'm sure much has been done to develop psychoacoustics in the first instance, but as that was way before mp3 actually came about, this info won't be readily available from mp3 sites (though thanks to the anonymous coward's url elsewhere in this thread!)
i think removing the psychoacoustics and simply applying the fractal transform on its own would result in a lower perceived quality-per-bitrate ratio, not much else. but it's interesting also.
to do any of these experiments, we'd need access to the source code for an mp3 encoder - are any of these available? LAME for instance? i'm sure fraunhofer's is available from less reputable websites;)
first off, i must say this is a very interesting article, and an original and potentially useful analysis for comparison both between mp3 formats and, to some extent, between mp3 and other audio encoding formats. however, the correlations between visual distortion and loss of audio quality are *NOT* valid or accurate, something the article doesn't place enough emphasis on.:)
the key point here is that mp3 encoding is in fact a process of two separate transformations (both of which consist of many processes, of course), the first of these is my bone of contention as it seems less well-known than the second, which i will address first.
the "second transformation" is the one familiar to most people, the iterative fractal encoding procedure, which simply adds information to that audio frame until it a) either hits a "quality threshold" (ie is consider good enough), or b) fills up its bitrate allocation. it's similar in many ways to making a "jpeg of sound". you can get a good view of this whole process by following this link to a graphic of the aac encoding process on fraunhofer's website. It is the stuff inside the box at the lower left that this concerns.
however the first transformation here is the important one, this is the stuff outside and above the box in the graphic linked above. (i am not sure the graphic is detailed enough, there may be some missing, from what i remember) - this is a series of transformations to limit the amount of data the second transformation has to deal with (and hence get essentially better encoding for the same bitrate), according to the way the human ear works. our ears have "features" like having a dead area in frequencies near loud noises, which means these bits can be cut out, and other bits and pieces that i can't remember and don't have to hand;) this is of course psychoacoustics, as other people have commented. there is a _very_ basic primer on this at the fraunhofer site here, but it doesn't go into any technical detail.
as an aside, there used to be some fantastic and informative articles on these subjects at mp3.org back in the day (1997-1998?), may it rest in peace. does anyone have some links for where something as good on this subject is? i haven't been as in touch with the technical side of mpeg encoding as i used to be...
but anyway back on subject, this first transformation actually distorts the signal *significantly*, but only in a way that makes it easier to process, while still sounding the same (or close) to the human ear. it may be an interesting exercise to isolate this first transformation, apply it and then save without any fractal encoding, and compare that to the original signal. this transformation will cause great "visual degradation", as shown in the article, but imho this is not an accurate criteria for measuring audio quality. still interesting, and a good read, though:)
This exploit allows someone to view files that would otherwise be run natively on the server, without being preprocessed. In their entirety.
Something like global.asa, which for you non-IIS types out there, is a file run on webserver startup, which contains all sorts of interesting information. It is a repository for most developers using IIS to put in information like database usernames and passwords, so the webserver can talk to it.
_This_ is where the problem is. I'm not sure that exploit as reported on Bugtraq gives write-access to anything (except by revealing another port of entry), but it does allow someone to get access to databases and any sort of thing they choose to store anywhere within the webserver space, in any file.
Evil. and credit to the white-hat for reporting that. It builds more media coverage, with the hackers looking good, the sites looking good (for patching it quickly), the only ones who look bad are Microsoft for not fixing the bug in the forst place.
ObNostalgia: Anyone else remember playing this game until their hands ached from those black and orange joysticks?
God i hated those joysticks. worst designed ever. i ended up buying one of those adapters that allowed you to plug in two "regular" joysticks like Quickshot etc
I liked parsec, definitely the best game of its kind at the time, it was so colourful, and more fun than Defender et al.
Had so many TI-99/4A games... alpiner, chess, defender, pac man, donkey kong, q*bert, Adventure (with about 7 cassettes), but the best by far was one called Tunnels of Doom.
Tunnels of Doom was a cartridge for the basic engine, with cassettes to supply the actual dungeon etc.. it is comparable to something like might and magic etc, that kind of RPG. if you consider it had:
random map generation every game
buying/selling items
3d walking around view, changing to overhead (turn-based) for combat
tons of monsters and items, weapons and armour etc
4 character classes, each with unique skills and attributes
Character advancement through experience
not bad for 1982 eh? You can go check it out (along with a lot more info on the TI) here, it's just someone's homepage, but it's cool, and has a screenshot of Tunnels of Doom in it;)
"1-click shopping" means in essence two things:
a) maintaining information in your browser cookies determining who you are
b) allowing you to make a purchase based on this information.
neither of these are things amazon did first. people have been using cookies for ages. people have been buying stuff for ages.
their claim is that they are the first to have done the two together, and that that combination is something patentable. what someone would have to do to prove it is not patentable is either:
a) show prior use of an equivalent technology
b) make a case that the combination of those two technologies is not innovative enough to warrant a patent.
barnes and noble is trying to do (a). possibly not the best course of action (ie "it's not yours, it's mine!" rather than "you can't own that"), but you can't expect any business to act ethically where large sums of money are at stake.
we all know they didn't really "invent" it, we just have to convince the patent office of that.
There is a MUD i used to help run (which technically is still going on a machine in someone's bedroom) which has actually done this - someone recreated Doom within a text environment. And it worked! Multiplayer deathmatch was great.
For those uninitiated, a MUD is a text-based multiplayer adventure. as it isn't written by sadists (only masochists who spend weeks, months, years writing them!), they don't usually have as fiendishly bad puzzles in them, but are a bit more hands-on. So instead of "go north, get sword, tickle troll with sword, get shield, use shield to cook stir-fry", it'll be "go north, kill troll, get all from corpse, enter shop, sell all".
Suffice to say it was such a big undertaking to both port the Doom environment into the Mud, and the coder is very lazy (as the best mud coders are), that it never got past Beta, and is Doom instead of Quake 3.
but yes, playing it multiplayer actually worked, and was brilliant:)
Slashdot Mirror
...is that it came out so quickly behind ISDN (at least compared to ISDN here in the UK), something BT had invested a _LOT_ of money in, both in setting up and marketing, that they needed to keep it going for a while longer before announcing ADSL. The actual timespan between the proper public announcement of ADSL (with no upgrade path from ISDN, nyuk nyuk nyuk) and its launch was not long at all, compared to the length of the ADSL trials themselves. And of course as a result people are damn furious, saying they'd never have signed up for ISDN (which can be *more* expensive than ADSL, easily!) if they new ADSL was just round the corner.
Bastards.
I have been waiting for 3 months for business DSL here in the US, watching the comedy of errors as the reseller miscommunicates with the providers, who miscommunicates with the local telecom. It seems these UK companies are having the same problems with BT.
;)
You think that's bad? I've been having the same problem, between BT and _itself_!
Here's the scenario. I used to be a BT ADSL customer. Easynet comes along and is selling, for me, a more attractive ADSL package. BT of course is reselling Easynet the ADSL, but they're allowing more things for a better price, so I decide to switch to them. Easy? Yeah right.
So as I was at the end of my contract with BT, I tell them I don't want to renew it. They say fine, the line will be ceased in a week. So I call Easynet, and get it set up to be installed 2 weeks later. (I had a week away anyway)
So about 10 days later Easynet contacts me. Saying they can't install ADSL on my line due to "conflicting services". Guess what, BT hadn't deactivated my old ADSL! But even worse, guess who performed the line test for Easynet? BT!!!
Much gnashing of teeth later, it turns out BT's cease department, and their installation department, are completely separate and are not allowed to talk to each other! Apparently this is company policy! So can you tell the installation department "the line test is okay, it's just failing because I have old ADSL on the line, as you can see from the cease order it'll be gone by the time you get here to install"? Of course not! That would be too... too easy!
So I have to put the cease through myself, by mail, and wait til they get around to it. And can they coordinate so the same engineer deactivates my old one and then installs the new one? Of course not! You have to wait until the cease is done to put in the order so they can do the line test and it won't fail, so they can schedule an engineer!
So something like 5 weeks later, it got worked out, and I have my ADSL, and it is good. Yes, it's laughable now, so you'd better mod this up as funny
Fross
I've been a triallist since BT first started their closed public (1000) adsl testing, and recently changed to another ADSL distributor. Of course I've paid a lot of attention to the status of DSL availability and plans here over the past two years, and can tell you...
the article is exaggerating the problem greatly.
Definitely, there _is_ a problem with the availability of DSL here, as there have been delays in its launch for almost a year, and demand has overwhelmed the (poor) supply from BT - a note for those unaware, BT is the only company able to provide ADSL, and resells it through other companies as well as marketing it itself.
The five companies mentioned in the article, with the exception of NTL, are of little to no consequence in this arena, and nowhere near the size of larger ISPs (Demon, Easynet, etc) who are offering DSL services and have no plans to back down. NTL is in fact a cable company who has been performing cable modem trials over the last year, so their interest in DSL is unlikely to be more than academic.
The demand for broadband here is phenomenal, and so many companies (probably approaching 50 by now?) are offering DSL that this will continue. Sure, it is still expensive here (i pay around $2000 a year, including taxes, for a 2M/256k line, 20:1 contention, fully routed with 15 IPs. However, having to pay for local phone calls ere i was racking up around $150 a month for 56k access as it was...), and demand exceeds supply, but wasn't this the case in the USA when it was launched? Couple that with getting our appetites whetted by hearing about it for so long, and this is of course what happens.
Fross
I live in London, England, and we already did something like this over the last few years. In fact, we've done it a lot. Here's some information:
Originally, London had the "area code" 01-xxx-xxxx
Around 15 years ago (?) this changed to inner london (071-xxx-xxxx) and outer london (081-xxx-xxxx)
Eight (?) years ago the whole country changed, adding a "1" onto of all area codes, so London became 0171-xxx-xxxx and 0181-xxx-xxxx.
Last year, several large cities (manchester, birmingham, and of course, london) changed to have new number, again. Now, london is 020-7xxx-xxxx and 020-8xxx-xxxx. The most significant change here is that all local numbers change due to this too. With the other changes local numbers stayed the same (xxx-xxxx, no prefix), but now you needed a 7 or 8 just to dial the number locally as well...
All these changes were due to shortage in numbers. I am surprised this hasn't risen its head sooner in the USA.
So what can i tell you about them? They are a) disruptive, b) obviously costly to the Telco (and to businesses!), and c) shows they have no forward planning nor vision of what future demand will be.
Every one of these "upgrades" in London were promised to be the last. Can you imagine if this sort of thing happened with domains? We're seeing it happening with IPs, at least IPv6 has enough foresight to not need to be expandable hopefully ever again...
In short, moving to a 10 digit number with an eye to expand later to 11 and 12 is short-sighted and will lead only to further disruption. If you anticipate the demand will be there, upgrade to 12 immediately.
Fross
So it's there. i download it. 20 megs. not too bad considering (note, i didnt get mail, news, or half the plugins.) Nice installer.
Boot it up, loads quite quickly. Go to Slashdot, looks okay. the Gecko engine is showing its stuff, very nice indeed.
Go to news.bbc.co.uk. Not bad. again fast rendering.
Go to an e-commerce site that uses CSS and SSL quite extensively. this works on NS 4.75 and IE5.5 very well, i use it every day.
Netscape 6's handling of CSS is even worse than 4.75, from what i can tell. sometimes it even stops rendering CSS from a linked file halfway through the page. and when viewing pages under SSL, it is SO slow it is unreal.
This looks like a particularly buggy mosaic milestone with AOL tags bunched on it. i will wait for a 6.x release i hear good things about, but nothing until then.
Fross
how many was "enough"?
they already tried this. CD32.
I expect it from the local newspaper and tabloids who have nothing better to write about. But I don't want to have "THEE WORLDE WILL ENDE!" thrust into my face on /. of all places.
We're all sensible enough to realise that if there were the remotest chance of it happening, the world would club together and nuke/laser/persuade it off course as necessary. And anyway, I'd put the likelihood of the world being ripped apart in a Nuclear war before 2030 at more than 500/1 anyway.
We're more than sensible enough to know when the media is just spinning to fill column inches. There's enough to talk about without this.
Fross
You mean it'll start flaming CmdrTaco then throw all its toys out of the pram and storm off? :)
Fross
You said it yourself.. those children had problems.
For sure they did. their mental instability may or may not have been affected by computer games. or by violence on television. or movies. or the news. or books, or magazines. or music.
But the main thing that differentiated these kids from the 99.9% who don't act like them? they were bullied. they were shown violence in the most direct way - applied to them. and humiliation. and what did the school do about it? their parents? anyone who should have been looking out for them? obviously, not enough.
There are always complete nutcases going around. we can't ever assume there won't be. What we have to do is ensure they are listened to, understood, and accepted. We shouldn't be cushioning them, and:
This stuff needs to be illegal.
We shouldn't be cushioning anyone else. People are free to make their own choices - children being the exception to some extent, as their parents or guardians are, morally and legally, responsible for them.
And the last thing this needs are self-righteous crusaders charging mightily up their own backsides because they choose to follow whatever media shock story is there to trigger the synapses of the braindead that day. get with the program and don't simply lash out at something you obviously don't understand.
A simple pricewatch check shows that 6 dollars gets you either one 100MB zip disk, or ten 650MB CD-RW discs.
must say i'm surprised, my Local Vendor here (in the UK) has zips for about $4 each, CD-RWs are about $1.80 each, so my comments were based on price compared to ease of use etc (i tend to reuse zipdisks a lot, but not CD-RWs, apart from wiping them and reusing from scratch.) i guess it's just because it's easier to delete a few files and then just throw a few more on, with zips.
Fross
...covered in some other emails, but here's an analysis of some of them, and implementation methods as well.
Floppy disks - low capacity, slow, unreliable. not a great option, though fine as a secondary/tertiary backup.
Flash media - fast, low-medium capacity, reliable, and some of these can even be used in floppy drives using an adapter, obviating the need for a special drive. however, they are VERY expensive per megabyte, and won't drop any time soon. also they are small and easy to lose.
Zip drives - high capacity (100-250M), reasonably fast (scsi and usb), reasonable reliability (i've never had problems, though they are still potentially affected by strong magnetic fields?). the drives are somewhat expensive, but the media is cheap and getting cheaper all the time, especially the 100s.
Jazz drives - very high capacity (1-2G), reliable, fast, but very expensive. at something like $100 a disk, that's a bit much.
LS-120 - reasonable capacity, not too fast, about as reliable as floppies, heh. bonus here is that a LS-1230 drive can read floppies as well, so if you need to upgrade many machines to do this, you can simply replace the floppy drives instead.
other options exist, such as:
Provide network backup - set up a system (web-based?) where users get X amount of storage to access from wherever they want. reliable, fast internally, versatile, though may be an unneeded maintainance headache (warez kiddies, etc)
CD-RW - fast read, slow write, high capacity, high reliability. media is kind of expensive - at this point it's usually worth going for CD-R instead, the media is so cheap it's expendable, and writes faster. writable drives are still costly though, especially reliable ones.
What will probably accomplish more is instilling a good sense of backup in your people, if possible - encourage them to make backups regularly and often, on at least two separate media, and how to treat the media.
What may clinch it for one over another here though is how you implement it. obviously every machine has a floppy drive (or not?), but you may be able to attach a resource to the network, say one per 10 machines, used for backup purposes, instead of bolting one onto every machine. this would lower the installation costs of something like cd-r and zip, which are my two recommended options in this sort of installation. cd-r for portability (and implicitly usability elsewhere in any cd reader), zip for backups.
Fross
You are talking about applying only the psychoacoustic model of the mp3 encoding, and producing a comparison of that with the original signal. I would indeed be really interested in seeing that- I'd like to know which of the various distortions, over-rings etc. arise from the psych model and which arise from the fractal part.
;)
yes that's exactly it, i think it would be an interesting exercise, as i don't recall seeing any study of that as of yet. i'm sure much has been done to develop psychoacoustics in the first instance, but as that was way before mp3 actually came about, this info won't be readily available from mp3 sites (though thanks to the anonymous coward's url elsewhere in this thread!)
i think removing the psychoacoustics and simply applying the fractal transform on its own would result in a lower perceived quality-per-bitrate ratio, not much else. but it's interesting also.
to do any of these experiments, we'd need access to the source code for an mp3 encoder - are any of these available? LAME for instance? i'm sure fraunhofer's is available from less reputable websites
fross
the key point here is that mp3 encoding is in fact a process of two separate transformations (both of which consist of many processes, of course), the first of these is my bone of contention as it seems less well-known than the second, which i will address first.
the "second transformation" is the one familiar to most people, the iterative fractal encoding procedure, which simply adds information to that audio frame until it a) either hits a "quality threshold" (ie is consider good enough), or b) fills up its bitrate allocation. it's similar in many ways to making a "jpeg of sound". you can get a good view of this whole process by following this link to a graphic of the aac encoding process on fraunhofer's website. It is the stuff inside the box at the lower left that this concerns.
however the first transformation here is the important one, this is the stuff outside and above the box in the graphic linked above. (i am not sure the graphic is detailed enough, there may be some missing, from what i remember) - this is a series of transformations to limit the amount of data the second transformation has to deal with (and hence get essentially better encoding for the same bitrate), according to the way the human ear works. our ears have "features" like having a dead area in frequencies near loud noises, which means these bits can be cut out, and other bits and pieces that i can't remember and don't have to hand ;) this is of course psychoacoustics, as other people have commented. there is a _very_ basic primer on this at the fraunhofer site here, but it doesn't go into any technical detail.
as an aside, there used to be some fantastic and informative articles on these subjects at mp3.org back in the day (1997-1998?), may it rest in peace. does anyone have some links for where something as good on this subject is? i haven't been as in touch with the technical side of mpeg encoding as i used to be...
but anyway back on subject, this first transformation actually distorts the signal *significantly*, but only in a way that makes it easier to process, while still sounding the same (or close) to the human ear. it may be an interesting exercise to isolate this first transformation, apply it and then save without any fractal encoding, and compare that to the original signal. this transformation will cause great "visual degradation", as shown in the article, but imho this is not an accurate criteria for measuring audio quality. still interesting, and a good read, though :)
fross
i suggest Redmond, WA. ;)
This exploit allows someone to view files that would otherwise be run natively on the server, without being preprocessed. In their entirety.
Something like global.asa, which for you non-IIS types out there, is a file run on webserver startup, which contains all sorts of interesting information. It is a repository for most developers using IIS to put in information like database usernames and passwords, so the webserver can talk to it.
_This_ is where the problem is. I'm not sure that exploit as reported on Bugtraq gives write-access to anything (except by revealing another port of entry), but it does allow someone to get access to databases and any sort of thing they choose to store anywhere within the webserver space, in any file.
Evil. and credit to the white-hat for reporting that. It builds more media coverage, with the hackers looking good, the sites looking good (for patching it quickly), the only ones who look bad are Microsoft for not fixing the bug in the forst place.
Fross
God i hated those joysticks. worst designed ever. i ended up buying one of those adapters that allowed you to plug in two "regular" joysticks like Quickshot etc
I liked parsec, definitely the best game of its kind at the time, it was so colourful, and more fun than Defender et al.
Had so many TI-99/4A games... alpiner, chess, defender, pac man, donkey kong, q*bert, Adventure (with about 7 cassettes), but the best by far was one called Tunnels of Doom.
Tunnels of Doom was a cartridge for the basic engine, with cassettes to supply the actual dungeon etc.. it is comparable to something like might and magic etc, that kind of RPG. if you consider it had:
- random map generation every game
- buying/selling items
- 3d walking around view, changing to overhead (turn-based) for combat
- tons of monsters and items, weapons and armour etc
- 4 character classes, each with unique skills and attributes
- Character advancement through experience
not bad for 1982 eh? You can go check it out (along with a lot more info on the TI) here, it's just someone's homepage, but it's cool, and has a screenshot of Tunnels of Doom in itFross
You'd think they'd know better than to put a 113k animated gif on the front page.
the actual screenshots are very yummy though.
fross
"1-click shopping" means in essence two things:
a) maintaining information in your browser cookies determining who you are
b) allowing you to make a purchase based on this information.
neither of these are things amazon did first. people have been using cookies for ages. people have been buying stuff for ages.
their claim is that they are the first to have done the two together, and that that combination is something patentable. what someone would have to do to prove it is not patentable is either:
a) show prior use of an equivalent technology
b) make a case that the combination of those two technologies is not innovative enough to warrant a patent.
barnes and noble is trying to do (a). possibly not the best course of action (ie "it's not yours, it's mine!" rather than "you can't own that"), but you can't expect any business to act ethically where large sums of money are at stake.
we all know they didn't really "invent" it, we just have to convince the patent office of that.
fross
btw, What is the plural of OS?
If it's Microsoft operating systems, the plural is SOS.
Fross.
* hAx0r has joined channel #hAx
<hAx0r> wr0d
<hAx0r> i hAv3 jUZt hAx0r3d tHA iNfL1gHt c0mPUtAh
<hAx0r> 0n tH1s 7373131337
<hAx0r> aND n0w 3y3 d0 Fr33stYl3 pAtcH0rZ l1nk1nG dA w1nGz t0 mAh f0rc3-f33dBAcK j0yst1x p0rT 0n qUak3
<hAx0r> ph00lz!!! 34t l33t m4cH-1 r0x0r!!!
* hAx0r glides fr33stYl3
(airplane rocks back and forth erratically)
<hAx0r> aAAaH! ra1lgUnZ de4tH!
<hAx0r> 0k l3tZ trY r0ck3t jUmP
(airplane spins into a nosedive)
<hAx0r> wh3r3 1z tHA bUtT0n f0r g0d-m0d3?
(*crash*)
<hAx0r> n000! d1s 0c3aN 1z m4d3 0v lAvA!
<hAx0r> Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!
* Quits: hAx0r (Connection reset by peer))
* hAx0r has joined channel #hAx
wr0d
i hAv3 jUZt hAx0r3d tHA iNfL1gHt c0mPUtAh
0n tH1s 7373131337
aND n0w 3y3 d0 Fr33stYl3 pAtcH0rZ l1nk1nG dA w1nGz t0 mAh f0rc3-f33dBAcK j0yst1x p0rT 0n qUak3
ph00lz!!! 34t l33t m4cH-1 r0x0r!!!
* hAx0r glides fr33stYl3
(airplane rocks back and forth erratically)
aAAaH! ra1lgUnZ de4tH!
0k l3tZ trY r0ck3t jUmP
(airplane spins into a nosedive)
wh3r3 1z tHA bUtT0n f0r g0d-m0d3?
(*crash*)
n000! d1s 0c3aN 1z m4d3 0v lAvA!
Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!
* Quits: hAx0r (Connection reset by peer))
if it hadn't been slashdotted i'd have seen that ;)
thanks!
...is why the hell did they decide to call it a "mouse"?
There is a MUD i used to help run (which technically is still going on a machine in someone's bedroom) which has actually done this - someone recreated Doom within a text environment. And it worked! Multiplayer deathmatch was great.
:)
For those uninitiated, a MUD is a text-based multiplayer adventure. as it isn't written by sadists (only masochists who spend weeks, months, years writing them!), they don't usually have as fiendishly bad puzzles in them, but are a bit more hands-on. So instead of "go north, get sword, tickle troll with sword, get shield, use shield to cook stir-fry", it'll be "go north, kill troll, get all from corpse, enter shop, sell all".
Suffice to say it was such a big undertaking to both port the Doom environment into the Mud, and the coder is very lazy (as the best mud coders are), that it never got past Beta, and is Doom instead of Quake 3.
but yes, playing it multiplayer actually worked, and was brilliant
Fross