The record is not necessarily a lossy format. While pure digital (mp3s encoded at 320+) gives you a lot of good sound, it still can't compete with the warmth and depth of old fashioned vinyl. I realize a lot of people will disagree with this, but most of those people haven't listened to a record on a high quality turntable through a good amplifier playing on really good speakers.
The difference is highly noticeable.
Sadly, you'll find more folks listening through the speakers that came with their fancy new Dell claiming the difference can't be heard.
It really depends on the relative quality of how the mastering was performed. For example, Wendy Carlos will perform A-B comparisons of her master tapes to the vinyl records and state that the vinyl records are inferior. On her web site, she makes fun of people who claim that her stuff sounds better on vinyl, because she's so familiar with how the sound degraded on vinyl compared to the master tapes.
On the other hand, a lot of digital equipment in the 80s was rather primitive, thus the vinyl record would sound better. There were also engineers who made mistakes with their early digital work, which resulted in the vinyl versions sounding better.
I'll admit that I have some records which sound better then the CDs, and some CDs that sound better then the record. It's really situational, and in many cases it depends on the form of music being recorded. Vinyl really does impose artistic constraints that CD doesn't have.
It's also important to understand how the ear works... We never really hear silence, instead all sounds fade into hiss. On a record, the hiss is much louder then on a CD; yet a flaw in early digital engineering was that various algorithms would ignore the need for hiss. Vinyl would sound warmer because sounds would smoothly fade into hiss, whereas on CD the primitive algorithms would introduce artifacts that, while quieter then vinyl's hiss, were unpleasant to listen to.
Why doesn't he contact archive.org. Archiving old material is their mission. I know they have the storage space and the bandwidth to handle it. Besides, I want to be able to torrent all the wav files. ; -)
I've seen the Archive's vinyl digitization room. They have two turntables. Yesterday, they were digitizing Benny Hill LPs. It's right next to their system for digitizing Timothy Leary's old photos.
The REAL reason why this guy needs to go through the Archive is because it's an ISP and a Library; thus the DMCA gives it a little bit of leeway when hosting MP3s.
I'm gonna start a pool on how long it takes before the guy using this gets 'detained' or otherwise harassed by the gov't for looking suspicious. I give it a month.
You've never walked around Harvard Square? He probably fits right in.
I want a pill that will improve critical thinking skills! And logical reasoning ability!
And while we are at it, lets make it inhance one's capacity for impartial objectivity when making important decisions.
I would spend my entire life savings on this stuff just to dump it in my city's tap water.
One can dream...
Define (abstract) interfaces! Any time you have different architectures, the easiest is to make interfaces to work for you. Not difficult but when one side is "managed" (what an oxymoron!) and other side is also managed but by you, when you have different platforms, big/small endian, 32 and 64 bits, etc mixed - an interface is your friend.
That's essentially what I'd like to do. I got the idea from Facebook Thrift and Google Protocol Buffers; because they essentially define abstract interfaces in a language-neutral system.
To stay on topic, in theory; I should be able to do the same thing between WCF (Microsoft) and (CXF) Apache. The theory is that I could make a WSDL as my abstract interface. The reality is that I would have to do a bit of hacking to make them work together.
On the other hand, a lot of these frameworks have issues when using C# or Java interfaces. It's not always possible to say, "I'm going to send an object of type Foo over the wire, but I only want you to serialize the properties defined in the IFoo interface."
I guess for cross-compatible reasons, why not pick one (java) over the other? Why not use IIS if you need to use WCF? Respectfully, I'm just curious on the reason why you are in need to connect the two.
In this case, we need to use Windows and C# APIs in certain areas of the product, yet the core part of the product needs to be cross-platform. I'm still evaluating technologies and approaches, and I'm trying to find a workflow where the development team can easily modify the API without a steep learning curve.
I'm kinda ticked that my first post was modified as off topic, because in this case, interop between Microsoft and Apache technologies has a steep learning curve.
I'm currently trying to get C# to talk to Java through SOAP. In C#, I'm using WCF (A Microsoft Framework), and in Java I'm using CXF (An Apache Framework.) It's very difficult.
But - at least in the UK and most other English-speaking countries - cyclists use the road by right while motorists use it by license. The point about a license is you don't have a right - that it can be taken away from you.
In the US, bikes are considered vehicles and have to follow traffic law. This means obeying stop signs, traffic lights, keeping to the right side of the road unless passing a slower-moving vehicle, staying in designated bike lanes when present, signaling turns via hand signals, and following bike specific instructions on signs. The traffic police can enforce these laws, and will do so when bikes become a hazard to vehicles that obey traffic laws.
In the US, only pedestrians have "rights" to a road. The only "right" that a cyclist has in the US is to dismount the bike and carry it like an inanimate object.
In the case of the post you were replying to, a bike blocking traffic by going slow is usually violating US traffic laws, unless (s)he is cycling on a narrow and curvy road where it is unsafe to pass. A traffic officer would be within his/her duty to give the cyclist a ticket.
Bike to work. (Make living close enough to bike a priority.)
I strongly considered moving closer to work for that specific reason... But then I realized that the residential areas near big tech companies tend to have NO girls.
"If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money." So you can't get money for a shoddy product? Cry me a river.
There's always some risk with art. IMO, the best art has quite a bit of risk and isn't always a commercial success.
Then again, I am always skeptical of heavily marketed movies.
But...but...I thought the Internet was _not_ a truck???
The test involved three networks: The ARPANET, the Atlantic Packet Statlite Net, and the San Francisco Bay Area Packet Radio Net. The truck was on the packet radio net and set packets through a link into the ARPANET which travled through a satalite to the packaet satalite net and then back to a computer in the ARPANET.
I remember getting insulted at a hotel because they wanted to charge me $10 a day for internet access. I certainly sympathize...
...However, one must also understand the economics of the situation. For our cable modems and DSL lines, the long-term subscriptions allow the initial investment to be recaptured over time. Does the same apply at the Chinese Olympics?
Somehow I doubt that Al Gore played a significant role in democratizing the information age. That role would fall to a new category of leaders. And I think you of all people should know:)
Al Gore was instrumental in securing funding for the development of the internet. One can infer that the internet was always intended to eventually make its way to public use based on its initial test: The initial test involved VOIP! (You can see the truck used for testing the internet at the Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1191351626)
Furthermore, if you take the time to watch the video, you can listen to Vint Cerf's attitude towards internet. The internet was a way to make multiple networks talk to each other. Vint seemed to indicate that he always pushed for IP to be the protocol used to connect different networks together, which is why it beat OSI.
Thus, I think we can infer that there was always an intent to make the internet public and we can thank Al Gore for helping to fund its development. That's what Vint seems to indicate.
You should probably go clean your ears, because if you can't tell the difference you probably have years of wax build up in there.
I just had them cleaned out a few weeks ago. (The ironic thing is that it was YouTube videos of people digging huge chunks of earwax out of their ears that prompted me to do it.)
I didn't use a loud volume when I compared the two videos. I'm not doubting that YouTube is in some way altering the audio; however, an A-B comparison between two YouTube delivered videos really can't provide an accurate example of the distortion, because both videos are subject to the same distortion. I'd really like to see images of waveforms.
Actually driving is dangerous. Adding alcohol just makes it more so.
The thing with drunk driving is that, in a controlled experiment, one can prove that a person with a BAC > 0.08% (US) is impaired such that it is unsafe to drive. Some techniques include having the driver navigate an obstacle course and stop from "surprises."
These experiments establish that it's perfectly safe to drink alcohol and then drive, as long as the driver's BAC doesn't exceed 0.08%. For a 200-lb male, this is about 1 beer per hour.
The thing that a lot of the anonymous repliers don't understand is that the same experiments that determine a safe BAC are inconclusive with pot. Does this mean that it's safe to drive after eating a batch of ultra-potent brownies? Probably not, but it does establish that the pot equivalent of "drunk driving" requires that the driver smoke more weed then was used in the experiments!
So I tried these videos on three different playback mediums:
Macbook Pro, 17" w/ the big speakers, Recent FireFox: No audible difference; although the speakers aren't big and powerful enough to get anything spectacular.
Fancy Home Theater, Windows XP, Optical fixed at 44.1khz, IE 7: Subtle difference, the "better" one sounded a little quieter, although I wouldn't describe the original as "mangled" or over-compressed.
Fancy Home Theater, Wii (Opera), Analog with DSP: Again, a Subtle difference just like my experience with XP. The "mangled" one was slightly louder, but this could be attributed to YouTube applying normalization.
In all cases, the differences observed were too subtle to demonstrate the claims. Yes, the first video was louder, but the difference can easily be attributed to volume degradation by the post-processing performed on the second video. The placebo effect can play a big part in these comparisons.
The only way to prove what YouTube is doing to sound is to rip the audio and compare the waveform with the original. These videos do not prove the poster's claims.
The point is very simply this. Yes you can set up a computer with Linux that performs routine tasks and is easy enough for Aunt Mildred to use. But eventually everyone -- even Aunt Mildred -- outgrows routine tasks. Remember WebTV? Remember (hardware) Word Processors? Where are they now? I believe that Dell will save a few dollars by not installing Windows but spend much more than that on support calls. There are a lot of Aunt Mildreds out there.
You certainly have a point; although there needs to be a push for interoperable standards.
For example, I can buy a DVD and play it in any DVD player; no single company completely controls the DVD specification. (With the exception of 5.1 sound...)
On the other hand, I have to run XP under VMware Fusion because we still don't have a good system for software interoperability.
I hope computer manufacturers start pushing for interoperable software/hardware standards. Aunt Mildred shouldn't have to buy a Windows computer just to do what she wants to do. Hopefully this is the beginning.
So your argument is that people shouldn't drive while high. That seems reasonable, just as people can't drive while drunk. As far as I can tell your argument makes the point that it should be controlled like alcohol, not illegal.
There is a lot of tangible proof that driving drunk is dangerous.
There is no proof that driving high is dangerous. Many experiments are conducted, yet the results are inconclusive.
So then we decide to take them to mass. The parish priest stands up there and talk about the value of family and community, using bible stories to illustrate his point, and he's funny, too. Turns out he's also a terrific community leader who lives his values: tuition is the lowest in the entire region. The parish is full of families who work for a living and are trying to teach their kids not to be self-centered assholes. I sincerely doubt many of them would be interested in arguing the finer points of theology. Now, we're afraid to take them OUT of Catholic school.
My parents sent me to 12 years of Catholic school. What ultimately turned me away was the attitude of mindless conformity. The ironic thing is that in some cases, I get the impression that Jesus was protesting against mindless conformity of his religion.
Then again, when I see movies like Jesus Camp, and people thumping their Bible as if it's an alternatice to scientific fact, I realize that Catholisism is doing a lot to promote rational thought to irrational people.
just curious.. have you seen Songza?
Pretty cool implementation... uses a "pie" UI style.
It's a little awkward, IMO. (Then again, so is my player!) I personally like WinAmp / Windows Media Player's drag & drop playlist; which is what's in my player that's "locked behind closed doors."
The price of Gas in Dubai is 25 cents a gallon, Iran 42 cents, Qatar 83 cents, Saudi Arabia is 45 cents per gallon, Venezuela 11 cents. That is the real cost. What we in the western countries are paying is designed to generate huge profit margins for oil companies. They are fucking over the consumers, and yet you stand here saying, "Please sir can I have another!"
I suspect that they are paying below cost. Oil exploration is expensive.
Try to follow the established style(s) of the language until you're an expert.
Don't fight frameworks or spend a lot of time hacking around their deficiencies. If you have to work very hard to do something simple; you're doing something wrong.
Code generators should be highly limited in scope; they should only touch a single layer of your application at a time. This is because code generators tend to be quickly written and make lots of assumptions; code generators that dominate many layers of scope will be a nightmare when assumptions fail.
Don't write lots of class hierarchies that are highly similar. The code needed to martial data between types is error-prone and labor-intense.
Slashdot Mirror
The record is not necessarily a lossy format. While pure digital (mp3s encoded at 320+) gives you a lot of good sound, it still can't compete with the warmth and depth of old fashioned vinyl. I realize a lot of people will disagree with this, but most of those people haven't listened to a record on a high quality turntable through a good amplifier playing on really good speakers. The difference is highly noticeable. Sadly, you'll find more folks listening through the speakers that came with their fancy new Dell claiming the difference can't be heard.
It really depends on the relative quality of how the mastering was performed. For example, Wendy Carlos will perform A-B comparisons of her master tapes to the vinyl records and state that the vinyl records are inferior. On her web site, she makes fun of people who claim that her stuff sounds better on vinyl, because she's so familiar with how the sound degraded on vinyl compared to the master tapes.
On the other hand, a lot of digital equipment in the 80s was rather primitive, thus the vinyl record would sound better. There were also engineers who made mistakes with their early digital work, which resulted in the vinyl versions sounding better.
I'll admit that I have some records which sound better then the CDs, and some CDs that sound better then the record. It's really situational, and in many cases it depends on the form of music being recorded. Vinyl really does impose artistic constraints that CD doesn't have.
It's also important to understand how the ear works... We never really hear silence, instead all sounds fade into hiss. On a record, the hiss is much louder then on a CD; yet a flaw in early digital engineering was that various algorithms would ignore the need for hiss. Vinyl would sound warmer because sounds would smoothly fade into hiss, whereas on CD the primitive algorithms would introduce artifacts that, while quieter then vinyl's hiss, were unpleasant to listen to.
Why doesn't he contact archive.org. Archiving old material is their mission. I know they have the storage space and the bandwidth to handle it. Besides, I want to be able to torrent all the wav files. ; -)
I've seen the Archive's vinyl digitization room. They have two turntables. Yesterday, they were digitizing Benny Hill LPs. It's right next to their system for digitizing Timothy Leary's old photos.
The REAL reason why this guy needs to go through the Archive is because it's an ISP and a Library; thus the DMCA gives it a little bit of leeway when hosting MP3s.
I'm gonna start a pool on how long it takes before the guy using this gets 'detained' or otherwise harassed by the gov't for looking suspicious. I give it a month.
You've never walked around Harvard Square? He probably fits right in.
I want a pill that will improve critical thinking skills! And logical reasoning ability! And while we are at it, lets make it inhance one's capacity for impartial objectivity when making important decisions. I would spend my entire life savings on this stuff just to dump it in my city's tap water. One can dream...
Isn't it called Ritalin...?
Define (abstract) interfaces! Any time you have different architectures, the easiest is to make interfaces to work for you. Not difficult but when one side is "managed" (what an oxymoron!) and other side is also managed but by you, when you have different platforms, big/small endian, 32 and 64 bits, etc mixed - an interface is your friend.
That's essentially what I'd like to do. I got the idea from Facebook Thrift and Google Protocol Buffers; because they essentially define abstract interfaces in a language-neutral system.
To stay on topic, in theory; I should be able to do the same thing between WCF (Microsoft) and (CXF) Apache. The theory is that I could make a WSDL as my abstract interface. The reality is that I would have to do a bit of hacking to make them work together.
On the other hand, a lot of these frameworks have issues when using C# or Java interfaces. It's not always possible to say, "I'm going to send an object of type Foo over the wire, but I only want you to serialize the properties defined in the IFoo interface."
I guess for cross-compatible reasons, why not pick one (java) over the other? Why not use IIS if you need to use WCF? Respectfully, I'm just curious on the reason why you are in need to connect the two.
In this case, we need to use Windows and C# APIs in certain areas of the product, yet the core part of the product needs to be cross-platform. I'm still evaluating technologies and approaches, and I'm trying to find a workflow where the development team can easily modify the API without a steep learning curve.
I'm kinda ticked that my first post was modified as off topic, because in this case, interop between Microsoft and Apache technologies has a steep learning curve.
I'm currently trying to get C# to talk to Java through SOAP. In C#, I'm using WCF (A Microsoft Framework), and in Java I'm using CXF (An Apache Framework.) It's very difficult.
But - at least in the UK and most other English-speaking countries - cyclists use the road by right while motorists use it by license. The point about a license is you don't have a right - that it can be taken away from you.
In the US, bikes are considered vehicles and have to follow traffic law. This means obeying stop signs, traffic lights, keeping to the right side of the road unless passing a slower-moving vehicle, staying in designated bike lanes when present, signaling turns via hand signals, and following bike specific instructions on signs. The traffic police can enforce these laws, and will do so when bikes become a hazard to vehicles that obey traffic laws.
In the US, only pedestrians have "rights" to a road. The only "right" that a cyclist has in the US is to dismount the bike and carry it like an inanimate object.
In the case of the post you were replying to, a bike blocking traffic by going slow is usually violating US traffic laws, unless (s)he is cycling on a narrow and curvy road where it is unsafe to pass. A traffic officer would be within his/her duty to give the cyclist a ticket.
Bike to work. (Make living close enough to bike a priority.)
I strongly considered moving closer to work for that specific reason... But then I realized that the residential areas near big tech companies tend to have NO girls.
"If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money." So you can't get money for a shoddy product? Cry me a river.
There's always some risk with art. IMO, the best art has quite a bit of risk and isn't always a commercial success.
Then again, I am always skeptical of heavily marketed movies.
For a 200-lb male, this is about 1 beer per hour. Since when have 12 year old kids been allowed to drink or drive?
I think if the 12-year-olds are 200 lbs, then we have other things to worry about!
But...but...I thought the Internet was _not_ a truck???
The test involved three networks: The ARPANET, the Atlantic Packet Statlite Net, and the San Francisco Bay Area Packet Radio Net. The truck was on the packet radio net and set packets through a link into the ARPANET which travled through a satalite to the packaet satalite net and then back to a computer in the ARPANET.
I remember getting insulted at a hotel because they wanted to charge me $10 a day for internet access. I certainly sympathize...
...However, one must also understand the economics of the situation. For our cable modems and DSL lines, the long-term subscriptions allow the initial investment to be recaptured over time. Does the same apply at the Chinese Olympics?
Somehow I doubt that Al Gore played a significant role in democratizing the information age. That role would fall to a new category of leaders. And I think you of all people should know :)
Al Gore was instrumental in securing funding for the development of the internet. One can infer that the internet was always intended to eventually make its way to public use based on its initial test: The initial test involved VOIP! (You can see the truck used for testing the internet at the Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1191351626)
Furthermore, if you take the time to watch the video, you can listen to Vint Cerf's attitude towards internet. The internet was a way to make multiple networks talk to each other. Vint seemed to indicate that he always pushed for IP to be the protocol used to connect different networks together, which is why it beat OSI.
Thus, I think we can infer that there was always an intent to make the internet public and we can thank Al Gore for helping to fund its development. That's what Vint seems to indicate.
You should probably go clean your ears, because if you can't tell the difference you probably have years of wax build up in there.
I just had them cleaned out a few weeks ago. (The ironic thing is that it was YouTube videos of people digging huge chunks of earwax out of their ears that prompted me to do it.)
I didn't use a loud volume when I compared the two videos. I'm not doubting that YouTube is in some way altering the audio; however, an A-B comparison between two YouTube delivered videos really can't provide an accurate example of the distortion, because both videos are subject to the same distortion. I'd really like to see images of waveforms.
Actually driving is dangerous. Adding alcohol just makes it more so.
The thing with drunk driving is that, in a controlled experiment, one can prove that a person with a BAC > 0.08% (US) is impaired such that it is unsafe to drive. Some techniques include having the driver navigate an obstacle course and stop from "surprises."
These experiments establish that it's perfectly safe to drink alcohol and then drive, as long as the driver's BAC doesn't exceed 0.08%. For a 200-lb male, this is about 1 beer per hour.
The thing that a lot of the anonymous repliers don't understand is that the same experiments that determine a safe BAC are inconclusive with pot. Does this mean that it's safe to drive after eating a batch of ultra-potent brownies? Probably not, but it does establish that the pot equivalent of "drunk driving" requires that the driver smoke more weed then was used in the experiments!
So I tried these videos on three different playback mediums:
In all cases, the differences observed were too subtle to demonstrate the claims. Yes, the first video was louder, but the difference can easily be attributed to volume degradation by the post-processing performed on the second video. The placebo effect can play a big part in these comparisons.
The only way to prove what YouTube is doing to sound is to rip the audio and compare the waveform with the original. These videos do not prove the poster's claims.
The point is very simply this. Yes you can set up a computer with Linux that performs routine tasks and is easy enough for Aunt Mildred to use. But eventually everyone -- even Aunt Mildred -- outgrows routine tasks. Remember WebTV? Remember (hardware) Word Processors? Where are they now? I believe that Dell will save a few dollars by not installing Windows but spend much more than that on support calls. There are a lot of Aunt Mildreds out there.
You certainly have a point; although there needs to be a push for interoperable standards.
For example, I can buy a DVD and play it in any DVD player; no single company completely controls the DVD specification. (With the exception of 5.1 sound...)
On the other hand, I have to run XP under VMware Fusion because we still don't have a good system for software interoperability.
I hope computer manufacturers start pushing for interoperable software/hardware standards. Aunt Mildred shouldn't have to buy a Windows computer just to do what she wants to do. Hopefully this is the beginning.
So your argument is that people shouldn't drive while high. That seems reasonable, just as people can't drive while drunk. As far as I can tell your argument makes the point that it should be controlled like alcohol, not illegal.
There is a lot of tangible proof that driving drunk is dangerous.
There is no proof that driving high is dangerous. Many experiments are conducted, yet the results are inconclusive.
So then we decide to take them to mass. The parish priest stands up there and talk about the value of family and community, using bible stories to illustrate his point, and he's funny, too. Turns out he's also a terrific community leader who lives his values: tuition is the lowest in the entire region. The parish is full of families who work for a living and are trying to teach their kids not to be self-centered assholes. I sincerely doubt many of them would be interested in arguing the finer points of theology. Now, we're afraid to take them OUT of Catholic school.
My parents sent me to 12 years of Catholic school. What ultimately turned me away was the attitude of mindless conformity. The ironic thing is that in some cases, I get the impression that Jesus was protesting against mindless conformity of his religion.
Then again, when I see movies like Jesus Camp, and people thumping their Bible as if it's an alternatice to scientific fact, I realize that Catholisism is doing a lot to promote rational thought to irrational people.
The problem with many of you atheists
One doesn't need to be an atheist to have valid critisims of Christianity and the way that Christians behave.
just curious.. have you seen Songza? Pretty cool implementation... uses a "pie" UI style.
It's a little awkward, IMO. (Then again, so is my player!) I personally like WinAmp / Windows Media Player's drag & drop playlist; which is what's in my player that's "locked behind closed doors."
Remember kids, if all else fails, blame Microsoft!
The price of Gas in Dubai is 25 cents a gallon, Iran 42 cents, Qatar 83 cents, Saudi Arabia is 45 cents per gallon, Venezuela 11 cents. That is the real cost. What we in the western countries are paying is designed to generate huge profit margins for oil companies. They are fucking over the consumers, and yet you stand here saying, "Please sir can I have another!"
I suspect that they are paying below cost. Oil exploration is expensive.
Some thoughts:
Try to follow the established style(s) of the language until you're an expert.
Don't fight frameworks or spend a lot of time hacking around their deficiencies. If you have to work very hard to do something simple; you're doing something wrong.
Code generators should be highly limited in scope; they should only touch a single layer of your application at a time. This is because code generators tend to be quickly written and make lots of assumptions; code generators that dominate many layers of scope will be a nightmare when assumptions fail.
Don't write lots of class hierarchies that are highly similar. The code needed to martial data between types is error-prone and labor-intense.
Nothing comes for free.