A 16-bit integer can represent numbers from 0-65535 (2^0-1 through 2^16-1), and since there's no need for negative numbers (this is Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM, so no, you don't need to represent a +/- of a waveform) you get the full 0-65535 swing.
Well, not exactly so. The Red Book standard explicitly specifies that the format is 44.1 kHz, two channels, with 16-bit signed samples. How you choose to represent the zero amplitude level in a PCM format is only a question of definition. Higher bit depth nets you a larger dynamic range, as well as a slightly better representation of the waveform (albeit with very quickly diminishing returns).
This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz. Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.
Nitpicking a little more, that's presuming some ideal conditions that don't come into effect when you step out into reality. In practice you lose more detail the closer to that end of the spectrum you get, and production stages tend to use higher sampling frequencies precisely because of that.
A reason I've often heard as to why some people prefer vinyl and analog equipment in general is that the sound seems "warmer" in a sense - which on the other hand might well be due to different characteristics in how high-frequency detail is preserved (or lost). It's not difficult to see why this point would be lost to audiophiles for whom the sole defining metric of better equipment is more precise numerical representation of sound.
The CPU doesn't have its own on-board memory (besides cache) or a high-speed DAC part, and the motherboard provides all of its other auxiliary circuitry. Bundle all of that on the same board and you have your explanation for the expensiveness of high-end cards.
My personal remedy is black electric tape, which masks enough that you just see a faint spot of colour while the light is on. Works wonders for those really bright and distracting blue LEDs that seem to be all the rage these days.
Or just kinda, you know, get in there in the kitchen and ask to help out with her cooking. It's cheaper, you'll learn about the real thing right away and you get to spend some time together. Who knows, you might even become interested in trying things out for yourself.
Your desire to make money at any cost to others is far less important then my desire not to be subjected to a totalitarian regime resulting from your attempts at satisfying your desire.
I tend to take a certain derision to being demonised, but I'll have to admit it's a bit amusing as well. I know a certain spaghetti monster who might like to employ your services.
Information cannot be controlled once it is released to the public in any form, but its desirability can be promoted selectively.
Then, it doesn't really matter if information wanted to be free or not, as it's a slave to its promotion and distribution. It's not a triviality, so in a capitalist society such as ours, it has value. It has nothing to do with whether some hairless monkey can grab it by his meaty implements.
As far as your derided class of businessman artists goes, by the way, you might want to take a look at some examples of artists who literally make their living plagiarising the works of others. Todd Goldman was the one most recently and publicly caught, but there's loads of others who either play the odds well enough or aren't as well publicised. Remember the recent Timbaland incident? China also has whole amusement parks furnished with plagiarised characters, and factories producing car models developed at great effort and expense in other countries. They ignore copyright as much as you seem to loathe it, but I wouldn't exactly say it's the key to humanity's progress and enlightenment.
Their role is to pickup amateur artists who show promise and offer them an opportunity to expand their wings. If the fans enjoy the results, they can then support specifically that artist and his art through their specific patronage. This has an advantage over the "commercial" system because the unknown, but promising, artists are being supported by the public even if their art is at that stage not widely recognized and thus would be "unprofitable" for a business concern.
I'm a software engineer by profession myself - that is, I produce copyrighted works of software. I'm paid to do my job, which is to apply my creativity on problems presented to me (through some sensibility filtering) by various customers. I probably wouldn't be doing similar projects if it were just my spare time, and neither is it all fun and roses. But guess what - I still enjoy solving those problems, and it lets me live in my own apartment instead of mom's basement and put food on my plate. I'm not a label artist or a scientist with a grant, so I probably don't fit into your particular ideology, but that's fine by me as well. Copyright protects the value of my work in a very concrete way.
I know several people who are artists by profession, and was raised by one. Many of them earn their bread doing commissioned works (design, illustration and so on) for public media, companies and private persons - only a minority lives through government grants and selling their individual works. Copyright also helps in retaining the value of their original works and keeps them in business, whether you like the word or not. The real world happens to work like that - there isn't a viable market for too many popular artists who can live by doing whatever they wish, even though there's a demand for good design in a wide variety of commodities. There's no shame in applying your skill and creativity to make your surrounding world a bit more beautiful in such a way.
They simply do so by owning all the "distribution" channels, for example all the radio stations, which they then can use to pick and choose whose "art" will be promoted 24/7 to the public.
But you have just stated that information can't be controlled. This seems somewhat self-contradictory for a man who speaks so loudly of logic.
I don't know if your view is inspired by the Piratpartiet's agenda or whatever, but I know logic requires sufficient data in order to be of use. If I may say so, being blind to seemingly opposing views isn't a very good way of gathering information. In any case, it's been a nice chat.
You seem to live under the illusion that a professional artist is simply a hobbyist who happens to get paid.
Talent is only half the job of being an artist, graphic designer, writer, software engineer or a scientist, as getting to a point where you can actually take your raw ideas and bring them to completion as a finished piece isn't just something you pick up beside your day job. It's literally years of study and training, acquiring skills and knowledge of your field which don't come readily to any common person. One employs a creative worker to create information which isn't trivial to come across; if it was, you wouldn't need him in the first place. That value doesn't go away once you've reached that information for the first time, though. Distributors are there to promote and make that information available and to transfer a compensation back to the artist.
Incidentally, the distributing bodies are also where I see most of the problems of today's copyright system (and are the ones you also appear to be arguing against; that's one part where we would agree). A better alternative to abolishing copyright completely, however, would be to make it impossible for a person to completely transfer his rights to a work.
Seeing as the whole IP confusion scheme seems to have worked to some extent, I'll also mention separately that I'm opposed to software patents, as they seek to protect ideas as opposed to works. It's a whole different issue from copyright, though, and belongs in a different discussion.
I beg to differ. Given an infinite length of time and a random number generator, it's inevitable that I'll stumble upon a representation of any given work of art. It doesn't, however, diminish the work done by an artist that the results exist within the space of all possible works. Copyright is there to emphasize the value of that work - numbers without context aren't creative works, and as far as I've understood the AACS don't even make claims to such an end.
It's a different matter that major distributors in the music industry misappropriate copyright to keep artists in a leash, that software giants likewise look toward patent legislation to keep a stranglehold of their markets, and that both bend terminology in an attempt to disguise what they intend to do.
Nope, I just enjoy throwing out contrary ideas and watching people slap them down because they don't agree with what they think.
Just thinking, without data to support either way, isn't really that much better. Note that I didn't say I had the numbers either, simply that the net result is more important than some localised gain somewhere in the middle of the whole process, and that my hunch is contrary to yours.
Some things are certainly worth recycling. Metal for instance. But we've always recycled metal. Some other things are probably best stored until we can recycle them efficiently. But you can't SAY that... recycling is good for the environment! No matter what.
It's all about how you put things in relation. Probably the most environmentally friendly thing people could do is severely reduce our population and give up on most of our industries, but you can't realistically go about demanding such things. More efficient use of resources certainly counts. Again, my hunch in here goes to bringing new metal out of the ground being more costly than taking the used stuff to a recycling plant and reshaping it (especially since we like to use stuff such as aluminium which really takes effort to refine).
I like to tell those people how I no longer recycle paper products because I want to do my part to reduce carbon in the air.
Have you actually done the math on this or do you simply enjoy being contrarian? Trees don't just cut, transport and process themselves, you need to burn fuel to that end. In addition, you'll be adding to the consumption of the precious carbon-binding fauna so that in the end you'll probably be creating a net efficiency loss instead of saving the environment.
Erring on the side of caution, rather than convenience, strikes me as the more rational choice here.
For those who don't know or remember, the Z-machine was the virtual machine environment used to develop the famous Infocom interactive fiction titles, such as Zork and its sequels. Incidentally it was also the first thing that sprang to my mind when reading the title.
It is a microkernel design with isolated loadable plugin subsystems.
No, it's not. Microsoft themselves refer to it as a "hybrid kernel"; practically, it means it's a monolithic kernel that sort of looks somewhat like a microkernel if you squint and turn your head a little, but it still misses out on most of the relevant advantages of a real microkernel architecture. Most modern operating systems have kernels that support pluggable binary format and other kernel service modules, but the amount of marketing spin has more variety.
As long as the ABI remains the same, you can dodge a lot of problems by using some common sense while linking - ie. don't require the exact minor release and patch level of the library your own distribution happens to have. The situation isn't close to as bad as it was some years ago with widget kits and DEs progressing at a fast pace at the same time as major glibc and GCC changes were made.
This likely isn't something that would just work on your PowerPC desktop anyway. The POWER architecture is aimed at a completely different market, for bigger servers and the like, and the instruction set is a superset of PPC's. Moreover, games these days use various HAL APIs to talk with acceleration hardware rather than directly accessing it - you'd want something like WINE with an x86 emulator, but DOSBox is available for PPC platforms if you need to run those older titles.
The worst possible mistake the Americans can now make, is to fail to prosecute the current administrations for the crimes they have self evidently committed, this failure would inevitably lead to even greater excesses by future administrations.
You're a bit late in that assessment. As long as people like Henry Kissinger aren't hanging in the gallows, I'm not holding very high hopes. People seem to have a short memory for this sort of thing, especially when the public media is geared to silence it down.
What bothers me personally is that "it's easier to upgrade" is one of the excuses used when producing those skimmed-down Windows-devices. You can guess twice if it's ever improved the quality of the products, or if even half of the bugs they ship with ever get any attention from the vendors.
So yeah, please give them one more reason to ship too early, more often and cheap enough to sell by the bucketload.
It may be unsettling to some to believe, but this idea of 'free will,' that we're in control of our minds and can freely choose to do whatever we want is an illusion created by the very brain that tells us what to do.
I'm not exactly sure what people mean by free will in any case, but I think "incredibly complicated" is a key part. Supposing one could transcend to a point where you are aware of and can track every variable in the universe, it would be a simple thing to go on and say, "Hah! I knew that would happen!" forever. The essential part is, we most probably can't; so in the absence of spoiler sheets the relevant remaining thing is the experience.
I guess what this means to say is just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Despite the image based on what US-based news outlets report to you, the reality of things might be somewhat different. EU based companies aren't getting away scot free, it just happens that sales restrictions across member state borders and blatant disregard for the law are a few of those things that the union doesn't look upon very kindly.
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Well, not exactly so. The Red Book standard explicitly specifies that the format is 44.1 kHz, two channels, with 16-bit signed samples. How you choose to represent the zero amplitude level in a PCM format is only a question of definition. Higher bit depth nets you a larger dynamic range, as well as a slightly better representation of the waveform (albeit with very quickly diminishing returns).
Nitpicking a little more, that's presuming some ideal conditions that don't come into effect when you step out into reality. In practice you lose more detail the closer to that end of the spectrum you get, and production stages tend to use higher sampling frequencies precisely because of that.
A reason I've often heard as to why some people prefer vinyl and analog equipment in general is that the sound seems "warmer" in a sense - which on the other hand might well be due to different characteristics in how high-frequency detail is preserved (or lost). It's not difficult to see why this point would be lost to audiophiles for whom the sole defining metric of better equipment is more precise numerical representation of sound.
The CPU doesn't have its own on-board memory (besides cache) or a high-speed DAC part, and the motherboard provides all of its other auxiliary circuitry. Bundle all of that on the same board and you have your explanation for the expensiveness of high-end cards.
Ah right, I'm from neither place so I wasn't aware of the difference. Thanks for the clarification.
My personal remedy is black electric tape, which masks enough that you just see a faint spot of colour while the light is on. Works wonders for those really bright and distracting blue LEDs that seem to be all the rage these days.
Yeah, I can already hear in my mind the public outcries of "what on Earth does that mean?"
Or just kinda, you know, get in there in the kitchen and ask to help out with her cooking. It's cheaper, you'll learn about the real thing right away and you get to spend some time together. Who knows, you might even become interested in trying things out for yourself.
Dunno, maybe I'm just becoming old-fashioned.
I'm thinking it could just be a typo made while attempting to write "land of opportunism".
I tend to take a certain derision to being demonised, but I'll have to admit it's a bit amusing as well. I know a certain spaghetti monster who might like to employ your services.
Then, it doesn't really matter if information wanted to be free or not, as it's a slave to its promotion and distribution. It's not a triviality, so in a capitalist society such as ours, it has value. It has nothing to do with whether some hairless monkey can grab it by his meaty implements.
As far as your derided class of businessman artists goes, by the way, you might want to take a look at some examples of artists who literally make their living plagiarising the works of others. Todd Goldman was the one most recently and publicly caught, but there's loads of others who either play the odds well enough or aren't as well publicised. Remember the recent Timbaland incident? China also has whole amusement parks furnished with plagiarised characters, and factories producing car models developed at great effort and expense in other countries. They ignore copyright as much as you seem to loathe it, but I wouldn't exactly say it's the key to humanity's progress and enlightenment.
I'm a software engineer by profession myself - that is, I produce copyrighted works of software. I'm paid to do my job, which is to apply my creativity on problems presented to me (through some sensibility filtering) by various customers. I probably wouldn't be doing similar projects if it were just my spare time, and neither is it all fun and roses. But guess what - I still enjoy solving those problems, and it lets me live in my own apartment instead of mom's basement and put food on my plate. I'm not a label artist or a scientist with a grant, so I probably don't fit into your particular ideology, but that's fine by me as well. Copyright protects the value of my work in a very concrete way.
I know several people who are artists by profession, and was raised by one. Many of them earn their bread doing commissioned works (design, illustration and so on) for public media, companies and private persons - only a minority lives through government grants and selling their individual works. Copyright also helps in retaining the value of their original works and keeps them in business, whether you like the word or not. The real world happens to work like that - there isn't a viable market for too many popular artists who can live by doing whatever they wish, even though there's a demand for good design in a wide variety of commodities. There's no shame in applying your skill and creativity to make your surrounding world a bit more beautiful in such a way.
But you have just stated that information can't be controlled. This seems somewhat self-contradictory for a man who speaks so loudly of logic.
I don't know if your view is inspired by the Piratpartiet's agenda or whatever, but I know logic requires sufficient data in order to be of use. If I may say so, being blind to seemingly opposing views isn't a very good way of gathering information. In any case, it's been a nice chat.
You seem to live under the illusion that a professional artist is simply a hobbyist who happens to get paid.
Talent is only half the job of being an artist, graphic designer, writer, software engineer or a scientist, as getting to a point where you can actually take your raw ideas and bring them to completion as a finished piece isn't just something you pick up beside your day job. It's literally years of study and training, acquiring skills and knowledge of your field which don't come readily to any common person. One employs a creative worker to create information which isn't trivial to come across; if it was, you wouldn't need him in the first place. That value doesn't go away once you've reached that information for the first time, though. Distributors are there to promote and make that information available and to transfer a compensation back to the artist.
Incidentally, the distributing bodies are also where I see most of the problems of today's copyright system (and are the ones you also appear to be arguing against; that's one part where we would agree). A better alternative to abolishing copyright completely, however, would be to make it impossible for a person to completely transfer his rights to a work.
Seeing as the whole IP confusion scheme seems to have worked to some extent, I'll also mention separately that I'm opposed to software patents, as they seek to protect ideas as opposed to works. It's a whole different issue from copyright, though, and belongs in a different discussion.
I beg to differ. Given an infinite length of time and a random number generator, it's inevitable that I'll stumble upon a representation of any given work of art. It doesn't, however, diminish the work done by an artist that the results exist within the space of all possible works. Copyright is there to emphasize the value of that work - numbers without context aren't creative works, and as far as I've understood the AACS don't even make claims to such an end.
It's a different matter that major distributors in the music industry misappropriate copyright to keep artists in a leash, that software giants likewise look toward patent legislation to keep a stranglehold of their markets, and that both bend terminology in an attempt to disguise what they intend to do.
Just thinking, without data to support either way, isn't really that much better. Note that I didn't say I had the numbers either, simply that the net result is more important than some localised gain somewhere in the middle of the whole process, and that my hunch is contrary to yours.
It's all about how you put things in relation. Probably the most environmentally friendly thing people could do is severely reduce our population and give up on most of our industries, but you can't realistically go about demanding such things. More efficient use of resources certainly counts. Again, my hunch in here goes to bringing new metal out of the ground being more costly than taking the used stuff to a recycling plant and reshaping it (especially since we like to use stuff such as aluminium which really takes effort to refine).
Have you actually done the math on this or do you simply enjoy being contrarian? Trees don't just cut, transport and process themselves, you need to burn fuel to that end. In addition, you'll be adding to the consumption of the precious carbon-binding fauna so that in the end you'll probably be creating a net efficiency loss instead of saving the environment.
Erring on the side of caution, rather than convenience, strikes me as the more rational choice here.
High risk, no guarantee of a long-term income. Real first-rate scum knows to squeeze people little by little.
Some harsh moderators we have here.
For those who don't know or remember, the Z-machine was the virtual machine environment used to develop the famous Infocom interactive fiction titles, such as Zork and its sequels. Incidentally it was also the first thing that sprang to my mind when reading the title.
No, it's not. Microsoft themselves refer to it as a "hybrid kernel"; practically, it means it's a monolithic kernel that sort of looks somewhat like a microkernel if you squint and turn your head a little, but it still misses out on most of the relevant advantages of a real microkernel architecture. Most modern operating systems have kernels that support pluggable binary format and other kernel service modules, but the amount of marketing spin has more variety.
As long as the ABI remains the same, you can dodge a lot of problems by using some common sense while linking - ie. don't require the exact minor release and patch level of the library your own distribution happens to have. The situation isn't close to as bad as it was some years ago with widget kits and DEs progressing at a fast pace at the same time as major glibc and GCC changes were made.
This likely isn't something that would just work on your PowerPC desktop anyway. The POWER architecture is aimed at a completely different market, for bigger servers and the like, and the instruction set is a superset of PPC's. Moreover, games these days use various HAL APIs to talk with acceleration hardware rather than directly accessing it - you'd want something like WINE with an x86 emulator, but DOSBox is available for PPC platforms if you need to run those older titles.
You're a bit late in that assessment. As long as people like Henry Kissinger aren't hanging in the gallows, I'm not holding very high hopes. People seem to have a short memory for this sort of thing, especially when the public media is geared to silence it down.
You're almost half right. Unless it's a live gig setup, it's definitely not an obstacle to usability.
What bothers me personally is that "it's easier to upgrade" is one of the excuses used when producing those skimmed-down Windows-devices. You can guess twice if it's ever improved the quality of the products, or if even half of the bugs they ship with ever get any attention from the vendors.
So yeah, please give them one more reason to ship too early, more often and cheap enough to sell by the bucketload.
You forgot the part where you had to unpack a huge multi-part archive and it was always the last or second-last disk that was broken.
I'm not exactly sure what people mean by free will in any case, but I think "incredibly complicated" is a key part. Supposing one could transcend to a point where you are aware of and can track every variable in the universe, it would be a simple thing to go on and say, "Hah! I knew that would happen!" forever. The essential part is, we most probably can't; so in the absence of spoiler sheets the relevant remaining thing is the experience.
I guess what this means to say is just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Despite the image based on what US-based news outlets report to you, the reality of things might be somewhat different. EU based companies aren't getting away scot free, it just happens that sales restrictions across member state borders and blatant disregard for the law are a few of those things that the union doesn't look upon very kindly.
Well, that was certainly Interesting.