Having the write layer near the bottom surface should make it more vulnerable to scratches than HD. But other details matter like the plastic used, coatings, error correction.
Has anyone compared HD and blueray on reliability?
Not sure this is what I wanted. It's an Office IME, not a global IME. Also, one wonders what havoc this ancient version will play on Office 2007, which was installed on this machine before I bought it (but I don't have disks).
In any case, I want input in all programs, not just Microsoft ones.
That sticker with a license key and hologram? I've been told it's phoney key - Microsoft revoked the license keys for OEM machines and I guess is issuing ones they have no intention of honoring, so they can't be used to reinstall the OS from scratch.
See the OEM is just a hard drive image, so you can't install non-default features (like asian support).
AND you can't take a real Windows disk, install it on the machine and use the phoney license key that came with the machine to authenticate.
AND apparently, that phoney key doesn't entitle you to buy and install a replacement OEM image either - they don't replace the disk. The piece of paper is nothing!
I called Gateway in order to reinstall XP pro (that came with the machine - but the disk had been lost by the previous owner).
No can do. I would have to pay $200+ for a replacement OEM disk (not even a real Windows disk by the way - you can't add foreign language support from the OEM image, you can't repair a damaged installation - it's just a fucking hard drive image).
I still have the piece of paper with your license key and the hologram, I said. Not worth anything, they said. I called Microsoft, same answer.
Luckily I had a Ghost backup. Ghost had crashed as it finished the last disk, but luckily the disk was readable. How likely is that? Crashed AFTER the the last sector wrote.
My machine works again, but I still can't get Asian input support - the OEM never had that - joy!
Here's the experiment. Take some well recorded music on CD, something that isn't all noise, and get some high quality headphones ($300 Seinheiser is a great choice, but it doesn't have to be audiophile quality like that). Find a song that you really enjoy and listen to it, uncompressed for a month.
Then make a compressed version, and do double blind AB tests, THEN, now that you're familiar with the song and know what parts you enjoy in the uncompressed version.
I guarantee that you will hear a difference - and you won't be happy with the MP3.
I haven't tried MPEG-4 AAC 256, but I know that there is a moment or two in some songs where (assuming familiarity with the uncompressed track and top of the line headphones) one can hear something missing in 500kbit vorbis. I'm sure 256kbit AAC is good, but it's not lossless. There will be just enough pre and post echo to be distinguishable once one is familiar with the original, and some complex passages will have some modulations obscured.
The problem is that you can't hear these things unless you're familiar with the uncompressed track. It just sounds like it was recorded on a slightly lower quality mike - not like noise. How can you tell the difference between a mediocre recording and compressed sound? You just can't.
As for the sampling rates and bit widths - these days with perfect digital filters and noise shaping dithers, you can't hear the difference unless you're a child (with small ears that can hear clearly to 20khz and past) and playing at concert volume. I mean, serious, ears will ring for hours afterward, volume.
Also, on the sampling side - if the sampling filter goes to zero at nyquest you won't get aliasing of frequencies, and then an ideal output filter can you can get every frequency back up to just before sampling filter went to zero. But if you do the math, you'll see that the narrower those filters are, the slower the maximum slew rate (rate of change) of the volume of highest frequency can be - that's another way of saying that they have to ring. But, funny thing, if you watch them in action, it's that ringing that reconstructs the troughs and gets rid of those beat frequencies you mentioned.
It looks that way on an oscilloscope if you don't use perfect filters, but with modern perfect digital brick wall filters at both ends, all of those side effects are GONE GONE GONE. If a perfect digital filter was used in sampling and in playback, then you miss nothing and the only side effect of all this is ringing near nyquest (because the filters are so damn sharp).
I've written those output filters myself: super-sharp brick wall, upsampling, nearly perfect, phase-linear digital filters. And I looked at the output.
Summary: a very sharp filter can reconstruct very close to nyquest. And digital filters don't have to have any phase shifts either. Nor do they have to have imperfections in the frequency curve.
The down side is that the less roll off you're willing to put up with, the more ringing you get. The filters they use in CD mastering and playback are very sharp - they reconstruct a lot, and they ring a fair bit.
I am pretty happy with my amazingly efficient cheap new Phillips earbuds, they are about four times louder than earbuds claiming to be twice as loud (better impedance matching with the ear, I think due to small venting holes), and they don't distort at high volumes either.
Down side, they lasted a month before I had to resolder the tip.
from the Music industry's point of view. You will buy the MP3. Then buy the high quality Vorbis or whatever. Then buy the 44khz stereo lossless. Then by the 98khz five channel lossless. There you go, four times the sales!
And take may word for it, except for the jump 44khz to 98khz you can hear the difference (once you get to know the music). Children, who's hearing can go up to 30khz or higher, can hear the jump from 44khz to 98khz too, and some very young adults may still be able to hear a difference. But not for too long!
Wrong. At 320, an MP3 goes all the way to 20khz - it's 4 to 1 compression in every band, I think. I can hear the difference between 320 compression and none too, and my hearing only goes to 13 or 14 khz.
The problems are pretty much related - they're all different ways of describing the mathematical limitations caused by block quantizing the bands:
Limits to the dynamic range for a given frequency within a block. Pre and post echo, also you can think of it as gibbs phenomena in the volume of any frequency. Loss of detail in quiet sounds that are too close in frequency to loud ones - ie modulations.
The problem with all lossy compression systems is that they lose detail, modulations, sharp changes in volume, etc. in sounds and it's very hard for a listener to know how much detail was there in the first place. You can't really tell the difference between a moderately compressed sound and a badly recorded one. No wonder engineers are pissed off.
Take 1 frame every 2 minute from a source material (of a scene you want banned), choosing ones where there is no motion for (say) 3 frames. The two minute skip that means that you get a 3000 to one compression on the number of frames you're looking for, and the three frames of stillness means
(1) that the frame will compress well (making it a better match), and
(2) that you only have to look at 1 out of three frames in uploaded material - and even that you can ignore high motion scenes entirely..
Combined these methods and you can probably increase your search speed by 15,000 (!) times.
No you get Vista, Multimedia edition, all of the Blue ray disks that will ever be made, a 70 inch HDMI monitor with full resolution - and only 128 mb of RAM.
This "game tree" approach does work, but the specific type of strategy used in chess does not.
A conservative approach where you assume that your player is as near perfect as possible and look for moves that sit at the equilibrium such that any other move would be worse (against perfect play) is called an "optimal" approach.
The astute might think that such an equilibrium doesn't even have to exist - consider rock, scissors, paper, if you played any one of those options consistently, you'd lose. But what comes to the rescue here is that we're not even looking for the one best move in a given situation, we're looking for the best probability distribution for each move you can make. In this case the equilibrium is where you have an equal probability of taking each of the three choices, since that's the only strategy where you opponent couldn't make a profit by predicting the most likely choice.
In games like poker, where you're trying to hide information, it's important to not act consistently. But a game tree that assigns probabilities to each move you make (instead of choosing a single best move) is still a game tree.
So when you (at some probability) play as if you have a better hand than you do, that's called bluffing. But you have to be known to bluff, otherwise you give away too much information when you make a large bet and your opponent will always fold. See, but that's part of a game tree with probabilities. The same argument goes for "slow playing". You have to, sometimes, play as if your hand is worse than it is, otherwise you give away too much information when you don't raise.
But that's all just background.
The important thing here is that to play poker well, you have to do more than assign probabilities and play optimally. Since human beings aren't computers, it makes sense to try to play a strategy customized to the play of your opponent. There may be other reasons to do this (I'm guessing here):
1. There may be a short term gain to changing strategies when the end of the tournament is in sight (ie when you can get all of the money). So it's a good idea to have analyzed your opponent's previous tournaments to see to what extent he does this, and adjust. The game you have to analyze isn't just a single hand, it's a tournament. Perhaps it's even a season of tournaments, if you're going to be too clever. You have to consider things like the flow of money around the table, not just the cards...
2. In some cases the game tree may be so large that don't have processing to find a good equilibrium in it and your estimate of what "perfect" play is may be so flawed that heuristic statistics on the opponent's play will be more useful.
Playing the man rather than the game has a mathematical name too, it's called choosing a "maximal strategy" instead of an "optimal strategy". A maximal strategy is considered a important goal for poker.
I'm not a game theorist, so I may be wrong about some of this, but some years ago it was also my impression that the math used to make these analyses was incomplete for games of more than two players. I really am not sure what to what extent players can profit from cooperating for a time, for instance... Though I suspect that poker players themselves haven't thought too deeply about the gains that could be made by subtly cooperating with some opponents against others.
I worked on a commercial poker game some years ago, but I didn't have time to get as deep into this as I would have liked, but really that's more the subject of a PHD rather than a box on the shelves.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotter see slashdotter do!
Having the write layer near the bottom surface should make it more vulnerable to scratches than HD. But other details matter like the plastic used, coatings, error correction.
Has anyone compared HD and blueray on reliability?
Nope, but I do have a partition with Ubuntu.
Not sure this is what I wanted. It's an Office IME, not a global IME. Also, one wonders what havoc this ancient version will play on Office 2007, which was installed on this machine before I bought it (but I don't have disks).
In any case, I want input in all programs, not just Microsoft ones.
That sticker with a license key and hologram? I've been told it's phoney key - Microsoft revoked the license keys for OEM machines and I guess is issuing ones they have no intention of honoring, so they can't be used to reinstall the OS from scratch.
See the OEM is just a hard drive image, so you can't install non-default features (like asian support).
AND you can't take a real Windows disk, install it on the machine and use the phoney license key that came with the machine to authenticate.
AND apparently, that phoney key doesn't entitle you to buy and install a replacement OEM image either - they don't replace the disk. The piece of paper is nothing!
I have the old DOS ghost (forget the version) and Ghost 10 for XP.
It was the DOS version that made the backup.
My luck, I bought Ghost 10, the week before they came out with Ghost 12, and there's no upgrade available! Fuckers.
And Ghost 10 doesn't work with Vista! So there goes my Microsoft upgrade path!
I bet I can use DOS Ghost with Vista.
Oh the joy I've had installing OS2, Windows (various versions), Linux ....
It takes hours, and somehow I end up having to reformat the hard drive over and over.
The worse mistake I ever made was Os2 on top of third party disk compression software. It worked until it didn't and took all the data with it.
I called Gateway in order to reinstall XP pro (that came with the machine - but the disk had been lost by the previous owner).
No can do. I would have to pay $200+ for a replacement OEM disk (not even a real Windows disk by the way - you can't add foreign language support from the OEM image, you can't repair a damaged installation - it's just a fucking hard drive image).
I still have the piece of paper with your license key and the hologram, I said. Not worth anything, they said. I called Microsoft, same answer.
Luckily I had a Ghost backup. Ghost had crashed as it finished the last disk, but luckily the disk was readable. How likely is that? Crashed AFTER the the last sector wrote.
My machine works again, but I still can't get Asian input support - the OEM never had that - joy!
Here's the experiment. Take some well recorded music on CD, something that isn't all noise, and get some high quality headphones ($300 Seinheiser is a great choice, but it doesn't have to be audiophile quality like that). Find a song that you really enjoy and listen to it, uncompressed for a month.
Then make a compressed version, and do double blind AB tests, THEN, now that you're familiar with the song and know what parts you enjoy in the uncompressed version.
I guarantee that you will hear a difference - and you won't be happy with the MP3.
I haven't tried MPEG-4 AAC 256, but I know that there is a moment or two in some songs where (assuming familiarity with the uncompressed track and top of the line headphones) one can hear something missing in 500kbit vorbis. I'm sure 256kbit AAC is good, but it's not lossless. There will be just enough pre and post echo to be distinguishable once one is familiar with the original, and some complex passages will have some modulations obscured.
The problem is that you can't hear these things unless you're familiar with the uncompressed track. It just sounds like it was recorded on a slightly lower quality mike - not like noise. How can you tell the difference between a mediocre recording and compressed sound? You just can't.
As for the sampling rates and bit widths - these days with perfect digital filters and noise shaping dithers, you can't hear the difference unless you're a child (with small ears that can hear clearly to 20khz and past) and playing at concert volume. I mean, serious, ears will ring for hours afterward, volume.
Also, on the sampling side - if the sampling filter goes to zero at nyquest you won't get aliasing of frequencies, and then an ideal output filter can you can get every frequency back up to just before sampling filter went to zero. But if you do the math, you'll see that the narrower those filters are, the slower the maximum slew rate (rate of change) of the volume of highest frequency can be - that's another way of saying that they have to ring. But, funny thing, if you watch them in action, it's that ringing that reconstructs the troughs and gets rid of those beat frequencies you mentioned.
It looks that way on an oscilloscope if you don't use perfect filters, but with modern perfect digital brick wall filters at both ends, all of those side effects are GONE GONE GONE. If a perfect digital filter was used in sampling and in playback, then you miss nothing and the only side effect of all this is ringing near nyquest (because the filters are so damn sharp).
I've written those output filters myself: super-sharp brick wall, upsampling, nearly perfect, phase-linear digital filters. And I looked at the output.
Summary: a very sharp filter can reconstruct very close to nyquest. And digital filters don't have to have any phase shifts either. Nor do they have to have imperfections in the frequency curve.
The down side is that the less roll off you're willing to put up with, the more ringing you get. The filters they use in CD mastering and playback are very sharp - they reconstruct a lot, and they ring a fair bit.
There are good earbuds and crappy earbuds.
d -Earbuds/dp/B0001OY2VS/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-0733557 -1295142?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1187069521&sr=8 -2
I am pretty happy with my amazingly efficient cheap new Phillips earbuds, they are about four times louder than earbuds claiming to be twice as loud (better impedance matching with the ear, I think due to small venting holes), and they don't distort at high volumes either.
Down side, they lasted a month before I had to resolder the tip.
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-HE591-Surround-Soun
And what's this bullshit about being "surround sound"?
from the Music industry's point of view. You will buy the MP3. Then buy the high quality Vorbis or whatever. Then buy the 44khz stereo lossless. Then by the 98khz five channel lossless. There you go, four times the sales!
And take may word for it, except for the jump 44khz to 98khz you can hear the difference (once you get to know the music). Children, who's hearing can go up to 30khz or higher, can hear the jump from 44khz to 98khz too, and some very young adults may still be able to hear a difference. But not for too long!
Wrong. At 320, an MP3 goes all the way to 20khz - it's 4 to 1 compression in every band, I think. I can hear the difference between 320 compression and none too, and my hearing only goes to 13 or 14 khz.
The problems are pretty much related - they're all different ways of describing the mathematical limitations caused by block quantizing the bands:
Limits to the dynamic range for a given frequency within a block.
Pre and post echo, also you can think of it as gibbs phenomena in the volume of any frequency. Loss of detail in quiet sounds that are too close in frequency to loud ones - ie modulations.
The problem with all lossy compression systems is that they lose detail, modulations, sharp changes in volume, etc. in sounds and it's very hard for a listener to know how much detail was there in the first place. You can't really tell the difference between a moderately compressed sound and a badly recorded one. No wonder engineers are pissed off.
Godaddy web hosting comes with storage for a similar price, but also gives you guaranteed bandwidth and other extras..
... and COBOL
Yes I noticed poster tagged the article "wrong."
Read the description of how the "error rate" was measured. It's bullshit.
After all, Elton John has been destroying music longer than anyone!
The Music industry lived it's life like a candle in the wind...
He's awful enough to write songs for Disney!
Remaindered at Radio Shack! My first one cost $50 (also Radio Shack).
Take 1 frame every 2 minute from a source material (of a scene you want banned), choosing ones where there is no motion for (say) 3 frames. The two minute skip that means that you get a 3000 to one compression on the number of frames you're looking for, and the three frames of stillness means
(1) that the frame will compress well (making it a better match), and
(2) that you only have to look at 1 out of three frames in uploaded material - and even that you can ignore high motion scenes entirely..
Combined these methods and you can probably increase your search speed by 15,000 (!) times.
No need to worry, you won't fly in the stuff, they'll just use it to make the next space shuttle.
No you get Vista, Multimedia edition, all of the Blue ray disks that will ever be made, a 70 inch HDMI monitor with full resolution - and only 128 mb of RAM.
Why was something as obvious as "there is no suited pairs in a single deck" marked "informative"?
This "game tree" approach does work, but the specific type of strategy used in chess does not.
A conservative approach where you assume that your player is as near perfect as possible and look for moves that sit at the equilibrium such that any other move would be worse (against perfect play) is called an "optimal" approach.
The astute might think that such an equilibrium doesn't even have to exist - consider rock, scissors, paper, if you played any one of those options consistently, you'd lose. But what comes to the rescue here is that we're not even looking for the one best move in a given situation, we're looking for the best probability distribution for each move you can make. In this case the equilibrium is where you have an equal probability of taking each of the three choices, since that's the only strategy where you opponent couldn't make a profit by predicting the most likely choice.
In games like poker, where you're trying to hide information, it's important to not act consistently. But a game tree that assigns probabilities to each move you make (instead of choosing a single best move) is still a game tree.
So when you (at some probability) play as if you have a better hand than you do, that's called bluffing. But you have to be known to bluff, otherwise you give away too much information when you make a large bet and your opponent will always fold. See, but that's part of a game tree with probabilities. The same argument goes for "slow playing". You have to, sometimes, play as if your hand is worse than it is, otherwise you give away too much information when you don't raise.
But that's all just background.
The important thing here is that to play poker well, you have to do more than assign probabilities and play optimally. Since human beings aren't computers, it makes sense to try to play a strategy customized to the play of your opponent. There may be other reasons to do this (I'm guessing here):
1. There may be a short term gain to changing strategies when the end of the tournament is in sight (ie when you can get all of the money). So it's a good idea to have analyzed your opponent's previous tournaments to see to what extent he does this, and adjust. The game you have to analyze isn't just a single hand, it's a tournament. Perhaps it's even a season of tournaments, if you're going to be too clever. You have to consider things like the flow of money around the table, not just the cards...
2. In some cases the game tree may be so large that don't have processing to find a good equilibrium in it and your estimate of what "perfect" play is may be so flawed that heuristic statistics on the opponent's play will be more useful.
Playing the man rather than the game has a mathematical name too, it's called choosing a "maximal strategy" instead of an "optimal strategy". A maximal strategy is considered a important goal for poker.
I'm not a game theorist, so I may be wrong about some of this, but some years ago it was also my impression that the math used to make these analyses was incomplete for games of more than two players. I really am not sure what to what extent players can profit from cooperating for a time, for instance... Though I suspect that poker players themselves haven't thought too deeply about the gains that could be made by subtly cooperating with some opponents against others.
I worked on a commercial poker game some years ago, but I didn't have time to get as deep into this as I would have liked, but really that's more the subject of a PHD rather than a box on the shelves.