I don't have much of a problem with this, since I don't download infringing content, nor do I do anything which might permit or enable other people to use my internet connection who may
First they came for the pot smokers, and I remained silent because I'm not a pot smoker. Then they came for the copyright infringers, and I remained silent because I'm not a copyright infringer...
Please do not feed the trolls, we're trying to get the fat bastards to lose some weight. Poor things are all diabetic. Are you trying to kill the poor barely sentient things?
disclaimer - my wife has CP (the legal kind) on her right side, so holding down a key with one hand when you can only properly move one hand is a bit of an accessibility issue.
Your wife? Looks like you have the same disability, considering your inability to use the shift key. I knew a fellow like that online about 15 years ago. Ironic that it seems that no caps might be a problem for someone with a serious visual impairment.
True that the first man-made object in space was launched on 3 October 1942 with the launching of the A-4, but that was a baby step that Space-X has far surpassed. Orbital launch capabilities didn't happen until 4 October 1957 when Sputnik freaked America out. I was five years old then, and remember how worried all the grownups were. Odd you never read about that, at least I've not seen anything in print mentioning it.
So really, I'd say fifty years rather than seventy, and wouldn't call that "commercial" space exploration anyway.
I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists.
It's going to take a lot more than seeds. Double Mars' mass, figure out a way to give it a magnetosphere, figure out a way to get more of an atmosphere and it'll be ready for seeds. It will probably happen, but not in your lifetime.
Oh, and seeds don't come from factories. They come from grain elevators.
He's AC so won't see your question, so I'll answer. TVAC: Thermal Vacuum NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration COTS: Commercial Off The Shelf LOX: Liquid Oxygen
Yes, I got a spam from my sister's ymail account a few weeks ago. I told her to wipe her hard drive and reinstall the OS (or rather, have her grandson do it for her).
Hard to tell if it's Yahoo being hacked, or if it's a botnet -- there are a lot of people using ymail, me included. How computer-savvy are your friends? It looks like the one may have been a phish trojan.
Word nerds trace the word bug to an old term for a monster - it's a word that has survived in obscure terms like bugaboo and bugbear and in a mangled form in the word boogeyman. Like gremlins in machinery, system bugs are malicious. Anyone who spends time trying to get all the faults out of a system knows how it feels: after a few hours of debugging, any problems that remain are hellspawn, mocking attempts to get rid of them with a devilish glee.
And that's the real origin of the term "bug." But we think the tale of the moth in the relay is worth retelling anyway. (TechWorld)
I remember those, they were really cool. The reason you won't see them today is because the flywheels were made of lead. Non-toxic metals don't have enough mass to be very good flywheels.
A bug is unwanted, undesigned for response. As this was designed in the equipment, it's a design flaw, not a bug.
BTW, the world's first bug was a moth caught in a computers wiring, hence its name. The first bug was indeed a hardware error, a short circuit caused by the moth.
So how does Monster Cables stay in business? How can that company that sells a $2500 turntable stay in business? They could sell albums for $200 each and these yokels would buy them. Plenty lucrative.
Actually, sounds almost exactly like what I'd think was the beginnings of the Borg.
No, your grandpa probably is. There are a lot of cyborgs walking around today -- I'm one, thanks to my CrystaLens implant. Those, cochlear implants, pacemakers, artificial joints, etc. Fifty years ago (less, actually) there were no cyborgs. Today, we're common. Tomorrow? Who knows?
The point of digital vs analog is that digital is a numeric representation of sampled voltages and analog stores the actual waveform itself. That was a good link, but you misunderstand what is meant by "pits" and I'm not sure it's accurate about being a spiral. In the context of CDs, pits are "no signal" (off, zero). I'll counter with ISO 9660 from a known source.
But the bottom line is, there's nothing digital about analog, and the only analog in digital is after the A/D converter circuit.
Interesting (and yes, Zeppelin rules!). You're probably a geezer too, and remember that Zeppelin and Hendrix got little if any air play; I probably had LZ1 for six months before I heard any on the radio. You probably also remember that the idiot critics panned Zep's music; so much for the gatekeepers!
I hope you're right that there's great music I never heard (and you probably are), but when I was in my teens and twenties, nobody was listening to what my dad listened to when he was young (Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, etc), not even him.
If you think things were better back in the day then that's probably because you're a grumpy old man or you just aren't into music anymore.
Yeah, kid, I'm a grumpy old man (can't find any reefer) but tell me, why is it that when I'm in a bar with a live band there's always some twenty five year old kid yelling "FREEBIRD!!!!"? And why aren't the band playing n'stink or whatever crap the labels are pushing these days instead of Zeppelin and Stones and Skynard?
Tell me, why are folks in their twenties listening to the same music I was listening to when I was in my twenties forty years ago? And why do they agree that today's music sucks?
Your example was both shitty and good, "Disco Duck" was making fun of disco, which was perhaps the very worst musical genre ever. BTW, hip hop is the disco of the 21st century.
90% of everything sucks. Even 90% of my stuff (but I have a LOT of it).
Also, the 'lossless' 'lossy' thing really kills me. It is like people paying double for Monster cables.
No. Monster cables are stupid, there's no difference whatever between any two digital cables, but a world of difference between an MP3 no matter what bitrate and a CD. I have CDs copied from other CDs, sampled from LPs and cassettes, and from MP3s. I can tell what the original was IN MY FUCKING CAR and I'm sixty years old. And in the house with real speakers it's more pronounced.
Earbuds? Might as well be sampling at 11k, earbuds are shit.
Vinyl records were very lossy
You don't understand what "lossy" means. Lossy means that you throw digital data away. Vinly degraded if played on a shitty turntable, but degradation isn't what "lossy" means.
the commercial stuff of somewhat low quality
Pure bullshit. Why is it that Zepplin's "Presence" and Boston's first album have more dynamics than the CD counterparts, despite the fact that CDs have a greater dynamic range? Because the old guard did their very best and today's "engineers" are lazy ignorant fucks (boy, will I get downmodded, but can you give me a better reason?).
THis is why the music industry is failing. They never really figured out how to make money when most people only buy a track once.
Bullshit, I have LPs I bought forty years ago that sound better than their CD counterpart that I stupidly bought twenty years ago on the lie that "CDs sound better". But I didn't buy very many, and neither did anybody else.
You were right about one thing -- if your output sucks, your input needs no quality.
+5 for being correct, -1 for looking like an idiot by eschewing the shift key. Grow up, boy!
BTW, when I moderate, saying "there" when you mean "their" or "they're", or spelling "lose" with two Os (especially if it changes the meaning of the sentence), or refusing to use caps gets you an automatic downmod from me. I don't come to slashdot to read comments from alliterates, I want to see stuff from folks smarter and more educated from me.
USING ALL CAPS IS STUPID. using no caps is just as stupid. grow up, boy.
His post was crap (good work, mods) but your denigrating Technics by saying "How is life in the 80's right now?" is pretty ignorant. They're still around and still selling expensive audio equipment (I just googled, if you would have you would look less ignorant).
You should have ragged him on the "six way speakers". The best I ever heard was four way, most professional speakers (like bands use in bars) are two way, one huge woofer (at least fifteen inches) and a horn. You want a killer stereo? Buy a couple Marshall amps and some speakers with twenty inch woofers and a horn. It'll break your neighbors windows with the purest sound you ever heard! Almost as good as a Vogon stereo.
You and the labels are forgetting the audiophile, who is basically a dumbass with shitloads of money, more dollars than sense. I mean, come on, these guys get scammed by "monster cables." You can sell these guys music with a bitrate high enough to make LPs sound like shit and charge the audiophiles ten times as much or more as a "losslesss" CD. And do you know what? Unlike Monster Cables, you really would hear the difference on their expensive equipment.
On your normal stereo with four dinky speakers and a "subwoofer"? No difference between the hypothetical 10x CD sample rate and a shitty MP3. If you oaid $1000 each for your speakers? Yeah, you'll hear it. I'd be an audiophile if I were rich, but I'm not. Hell, I have MP3s ripped from CDs that were sampled from cassettes that were recorded from LP. So you're right, unless you're filthy rich it makes no difference.
But they could make serious money from the monied minority.
CDs are physically analog too. There's pits and this spiral groove,
Incorrect. A CD has no grooves nor pits (analog has no pits, either). And CD's data aren't in a spiral, they're concentric circles. And a hard drive is as physical as a CD, and works much the same, except a CD has mirrors and black spots representing ones and zeros while a hard drive has magnetic fields.
CDs and hard drives (and thumb drives and every other digital medium) contain one thing and one thing only -- numbers. Zepplin's "Rock & Roll" CD is simply a series of numbers representing samples of input voltages taken 44000 times every second. The LP has grooves that correspond to the actual sound vibrations in the recording studio.
The only thing analog about a CD is the sound coming out of the speakers, same as an MP3. The sound is analog, the storing is digital. Analog music is analog all the way through the entire process, including storage.
Really, dude, if you're at slashdot you should know this stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have much of a problem with this, since I don't download infringing content, nor do I do anything which might permit or enable other people to use my internet connection who may
First they came for the pot smokers, and I remained silent because I'm not a pot smoker. Then they came for the copyright infringers, and I remained silent because I'm not a copyright infringer...
Please do not feed the trolls, we're trying to get the fat bastards to lose some weight. Poor things are all diabetic. Are you trying to kill the poor barely sentient things?
disclaimer - my wife has CP (the legal kind) on her right side, so holding down a key with one hand when you can only properly move one hand is a bit of an accessibility issue.
Your wife? Looks like you have the same disability, considering your inability to use the shift key. I knew a fellow like that online about 15 years ago. Ironic that it seems that no caps might be a problem for someone with a serious visual impairment.
True that the first man-made object in space was launched on 3 October 1942 with the launching of the A-4, but that was a baby step that Space-X has far surpassed. Orbital launch capabilities didn't happen until 4 October 1957 when Sputnik freaked America out. I was five years old then, and remember how worried all the grownups were. Odd you never read about that, at least I've not seen anything in print mentioning it.
So really, I'd say fifty years rather than seventy, and wouldn't call that "commercial" space exploration anyway.
I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists.
It's going to take a lot more than seeds. Double Mars' mass, figure out a way to give it a magnetosphere, figure out a way to get more of an atmosphere and it'll be ready for seeds. It will probably happen, but not in your lifetime.
Oh, and seeds don't come from factories. They come from grain elevators.
Wow, a Vogon E. E. Cummings! How's that bypass coming along?
It probably would have been better written as literature rather than video... but done right, that video would be pretty funny on YouTube.
He's AC so won't see your question, so I'll answer.
TVAC: Thermal Vacuum
NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
COTS: Commercial Off The Shelf
LOX: Liquid Oxygen
Maybe he should trade one of those belts for a pair of suspenders?
Yes, I got a spam from my sister's ymail account a few weeks ago. I told her to wipe her hard drive and reinstall the OS (or rather, have her grandson do it for her).
Hard to tell if it's Yahoo being hacked, or if it's a botnet -- there are a lot of people using ymail, me included. How computer-savvy are your friends? It looks like the one may have been a phish trojan.
Hmmm... it appears that you are correct.
I remember those, they were really cool. The reason you won't see them today is because the flywheels were made of lead. Non-toxic metals don't have enough mass to be very good flywheels.
A bug is unwanted, undesigned for response. As this was designed in the equipment, it's a design flaw, not a bug.
BTW, the world's first bug was a moth caught in a computers wiring, hence its name. The first bug was indeed a hardware error, a short circuit caused by the moth.
So how does Monster Cables stay in business? How can that company that sells a $2500 turntable stay in business? They could sell albums for $200 each and these yokels would buy them. Plenty lucrative.
Actually, sounds almost exactly like what I'd think was the beginnings of the Borg.
No, your grandpa probably is. There are a lot of cyborgs walking around today -- I'm one, thanks to my CrystaLens implant. Those, cochlear implants, pacemakers, artificial joints, etc. Fifty years ago (less, actually) there were no cyborgs. Today, we're common. Tomorrow? Who knows?
The point of digital vs analog is that digital is a numeric representation of sampled voltages and analog stores the actual waveform itself. That was a good link, but you misunderstand what is meant by "pits" and I'm not sure it's accurate about being a spiral. In the context of CDs, pits are "no signal" (off, zero). I'll counter with ISO 9660 from a known source.
But the bottom line is, there's nothing digital about analog, and the only analog in digital is after the A/D converter circuit.
Interesting (and yes, Zeppelin rules!). You're probably a geezer too, and remember that Zeppelin and Hendrix got little if any air play; I probably had LZ1 for six months before I heard any on the radio. You probably also remember that the idiot critics panned Zep's music; so much for the gatekeepers!
I hope you're right that there's great music I never heard (and you probably are), but when I was in my teens and twenties, nobody was listening to what my dad listened to when he was young (Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, etc), not even him.
If you think things were better back in the day then that's probably because you're a grumpy old man or you just aren't into music anymore.
Yeah, kid, I'm a grumpy old man (can't find any reefer) but tell me, why is it that when I'm in a bar with a live band there's always some twenty five year old kid yelling "FREEBIRD!!!!"? And why aren't the band playing n'stink or whatever crap the labels are pushing these days instead of Zeppelin and Stones and Skynard?
Tell me, why are folks in their twenties listening to the same music I was listening to when I was in my twenties forty years ago? And why do they agree that today's music sucks?
Your example was both shitty and good, "Disco Duck" was making fun of disco, which was perhaps the very worst musical genre ever. BTW, hip hop is the disco of the 21st century.
90% of everything sucks. Even 90% of my stuff (but I have a LOT of it).
Also, the 'lossless' 'lossy' thing really kills me. It is like people paying double for Monster cables.
No. Monster cables are stupid, there's no difference whatever between any two digital cables, but a world of difference between an MP3 no matter what bitrate and a CD. I have CDs copied from other CDs, sampled from LPs and cassettes, and from MP3s. I can tell what the original was IN MY FUCKING CAR and I'm sixty years old. And in the house with real speakers it's more pronounced.
Earbuds? Might as well be sampling at 11k, earbuds are shit.
Vinyl records were very lossy
You don't understand what "lossy" means. Lossy means that you throw digital data away. Vinly degraded if played on a shitty turntable, but degradation isn't what "lossy" means.
the commercial stuff of somewhat low quality
Pure bullshit. Why is it that Zepplin's "Presence" and Boston's first album have more dynamics than the CD counterparts, despite the fact that CDs have a greater dynamic range? Because the old guard did their very best and today's "engineers" are lazy ignorant fucks (boy, will I get downmodded, but can you give me a better reason?).
THis is why the music industry is failing. They never really figured out how to make money when most people only buy a track once.
Bullshit, I have LPs I bought forty years ago that sound better than their CD counterpart that I stupidly bought twenty years ago on the lie that "CDs sound better". But I didn't buy very many, and neither did anybody else.
You were right about one thing -- if your output sucks, your input needs no quality.
+5 for being correct, -1 for looking like an idiot by eschewing the shift key. Grow up, boy!
BTW, when I moderate, saying "there" when you mean "their" or "they're", or spelling "lose" with two Os (especially if it changes the meaning of the sentence), or refusing to use caps gets you an automatic downmod from me. I don't come to slashdot to read comments from alliterates, I want to see stuff from folks smarter and more educated from me.
USING ALL CAPS IS STUPID.
using no caps is just as stupid. grow up, boy.
His post was crap (good work, mods) but your denigrating Technics by saying "How is life in the 80's right now?" is pretty ignorant. They're still around and still selling expensive audio equipment (I just googled, if you would have you would look less ignorant).
You should have ragged him on the "six way speakers". The best I ever heard was four way, most professional speakers (like bands use in bars) are two way, one huge woofer (at least fifteen inches) and a horn. You want a killer stereo? Buy a couple Marshall amps and some speakers with twenty inch woofers and a horn. It'll break your neighbors windows with the purest sound you ever heard! Almost as good as a Vogon stereo.
You and the labels are forgetting the audiophile, who is basically a dumbass with shitloads of money, more dollars than sense. I mean, come on, these guys get scammed by "monster cables." You can sell these guys music with a bitrate high enough to make LPs sound like shit and charge the audiophiles ten times as much or more as a "losslesss" CD. And do you know what? Unlike Monster Cables, you really would hear the difference on their expensive equipment.
On your normal stereo with four dinky speakers and a "subwoofer"? No difference between the hypothetical 10x CD sample rate and a shitty MP3. If you oaid $1000 each for your speakers? Yeah, you'll hear it. I'd be an audiophile if I were rich, but I'm not. Hell, I have MP3s ripped from CDs that were sampled from cassettes that were recorded from LP. So you're right, unless you're filthy rich it makes no difference.
But they could make serious money from the monied minority.
CDs are physically analog too. There's pits and this spiral groove,
Incorrect. A CD has no grooves nor pits (analog has no pits, either). And CD's data aren't in a spiral, they're concentric circles. And a hard drive is as physical as a CD, and works much the same, except a CD has mirrors and black spots representing ones and zeros while a hard drive has magnetic fields.
CDs and hard drives (and thumb drives and every other digital medium) contain one thing and one thing only -- numbers. Zepplin's "Rock & Roll" CD is simply a series of numbers representing samples of input voltages taken 44000 times every second. The LP has grooves that correspond to the actual sound vibrations in the recording studio.
The only thing analog about a CD is the sound coming out of the speakers, same as an MP3. The sound is analog, the storing is digital. Analog music is analog all the way through the entire process, including storage.
Really, dude, if you're at slashdot you should know this stuff.
We're nerds, not lawyers (except Ray Beckerman, of course). When technical clashes with legal, technical wins here.
Fuck the lawyers, digital means digital. CDs are digital. Anybody whoe thinks CDs aren't digital doesn't belong at slashdot.