I think you are saying some good things, but I think Nirvana is a terrible example of a band that continues to sell well after promotion drops off. First of all, the nature of their breakup (Cobain's death) was a Jame's-Dean-for-the-90's affair. Much of their current success is the dead artist syndrome. In addition, they still get heavy play time on the radio and primo placement in record stores. Is this all because of popularity? Or is it because distributers are well aware of the selling power of their albums, and are continuing to push them on radio and in stores?
Of course I don't know the answers to these questions, but unless you do, it's not saying much about the industry.
In order for Johnson's "For everybody else" advice to succeed, we are missing a crucial element: a place for people to be exposed to music.
Sure, there's MP3.com, which I think is quite successful at introducing people to some new songs, but what is really needed are powerful independent webcasters, and the technology to give them an audience. However big net radio is today, it won't come into its own until the wireless networks allow you to listen to it in your car, or while jogging.
If wireless moves quickly enough, it's possible that non-industry people could even end up dominating this new "digital radio" market before their competitors (old school radio) ever wake up and do something about it. After all, a 128kbps stream is of far higher quality than conventional radio, and though webcasters pay for bandwidth, they don't have the enormous initial costs of a radio station, transmitter, and licenses.
What would this kind of movement do for music? Most probably, it would mean that in any city in the world, you could choose from several thousand radio stations, rather than a dozen. There would be stations that would cater to subgenres, playing music never before heard on commercial radio. And it would be a panacea for artists outside the system, who attract the attention of a DJ with a few thousand listeners, whose attention spreads the music from there.
Even more beneficial, the digital nature makes it easy to push the names of songs and artists to the listener, and facilitates purchasing: a song stream could easily embed an URL.
In short, grassroots digital radio is a promotional path for artists who are outside the RIAA system, and have no wish to become a part of it. It's also a godsend to the thousands of RIAA groups who are too small to be worth pushing on radio, whose talents languish because people are never exposed to them. Contrary to Clear Channel's opinion, some people really do like to listen to different music: even the good stuff gets boring after a while.
The major bar to this wonderful idea is that the RIAA has such a stranglehold on the market that it will be exceedingly difficult for independent operators to build up the critical mass of music that will keep the public listening. It wouldn't be such a big deal if the RIAA would allow webcasters reasonable access to music, but we all know that short of congressional action this is not going to happen. Perhaps the creation of a independently controlled rights management website would help: artists would indicate in some form the rights they give to webcasters, and perhaps the royalties they desire. If such a thing got big enough, even RIAA artists might demand the right to webcast their music in their contracts.
Competing with the RIAA/ClearChannel will be exceedingly hard. But hopefully that critical mass of webcasters, artists, and (!) lawyers is out there. I hope so.
If you had ever coded even simple reentrant code you would realize how subtle race conditions can be. And look at the conditions required for the exploit to work:
Works best after reboot - the +s program must not be executed before, seems
executes/tmp/sh
/tmp/su must be a link to +s program
if the +s program has been executed, create and run shell script the size of RAM
You may need to type "fg" if the program receives stop signal
you may need to run the program several times
Even allowing for all of this, the exploit doesn't work every time.
The hardest bugs to spot are the ones that happen rarely. Even harder to spot are exploits...because while they are technically bugs, in practice they generally rely on the author to do things that no sane coder would ever try in a "normal" program.
Re:Why it's so small and why you want to avoid it
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 1
Can you back the statement about sound cards up anywhere? I don't have much background in ASP but the little anecdotal testing I've done has shown sound cards to be quite agile in reproducing signals...the combination of a waveform generator program driving the sound card and my oscilliscope have revealed an ability to reproduce waveforms whose characteristics generally exceed the abilities of power amplifiers (let alone loudspeaker drivers) to reproduce. The distortion figures are often craptacular, but the waveform is still within nominal amplitude.
Re:Why it's so small and why you want to avoid it
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 1
Up to here I agree. But I am sure even an untrained listener will be able to pick up a signal that has been through a 10Khz lowpass filter. It causes a dull sound, without definition. Most people will immediately recognize this as a noticeable quality loss.
I think we actually both agree, it's just that it can be hard to qualify these things without writing a book.;) I bet you are correct that most people could tell the difference, but I also bet that they wouldn't realize what they were missing unless it was either pointed out to them or they compared the two.
I seldom notice that MP3s sound bad (at least the properly encoded ones ^_^) but I often get the feeling that there is something missing....like the earlier audiophile article, once you realize what you have been missing it is hard to go back.
I'll have to check out the new LAME encoder...thanks for the info.
Re:Why it's so small and why you want to avoid it
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 2
MP3Pro is limited to 10Khz, and can replicate
the sounds up to 15Khz. A cd is 22Khz and the
human ear can go to 19Khz for a normal healty
person. This means that you LOSE over half
the spectrum.
This statement is somewhat disingenuous. If you consider the audible range to be 20-20000Hz, then there are 10 octaves in this band, and losing 10-20kHz is just one octave (10% of the total range-logarithmic). In addition, this last octave generally contains little musical power, which is why it can be omitted without immediate notice to most listeners.
While I'm not saying chopping off this octave is a good thing, I think that the psycoacoustic modeling used can be even more detrimental to the sound quality. What I notice most about MP3s is not the loss of clarity in the high end but the lack of definition in soft passages. (presumably because music content is being guessed to be subaudible when it isn't)
"Although the majority of ibuprofen overdosages are not very serious, acute renal failure, hepatic failure, and hypotension and coma have been described" "Tissue levels of ibuprofen after fatal overdosage of ibuprofen and acetaminophen." Steinmetz JC, Lee CY, Wu AY.
"In the group of propionic acid derivatives, ibuprofen, pirprofen and naproxen have been implicated in hepatitis of various types" "[Hepatitis due to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents]" Furet Y, Metman EH, Breteau M, Bertrand J.
"Ninety years ago aspirin was discovered, and within the last forty years phenylbutazone, indomethacin, ibuprofen, the oxicams and many others were discovered. All of these drugs are acidic. They inhibit the prostaglandin synthetase, combine analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity and show side-effects mainly in the GI-tract, liver, bone-marrow, and kidney...Intensive hepatic metabolisation may be related to enhanced hepatic damage...These observations indicate that certain pharmacokinetic characteristics of distinct nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are responsible, at least in part, for well-known side-effects." "Towards safer nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs." Brune K, Beck WS.
This could also be interesting reading: "Drug-induced hepatic injury: an analysis of 1100 cases reported to the Danish Committee on Adverse Drug Reactions between 1978 and 1987." Friis H, Andreasen PB.
Even the networks will likely accept this fact. However, they'll fight it tooth and nail, even if they might make more money with the switch. Why? Because despite the 200+ channels out there, the networks still dominate TV. If you change the model, you give other companies an opportunity to get a piece of the action.
Historically we've seen many examples of the dominant players in the marketplace holding back technology in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. (most recently in the U.S. the cellphone and bankcard industries) I doubt this will be any different.
I, for one, appreciate getting 190F (or thereabouts) coffee that actually stays hot on the drive into work. Shall we outlaw tea, since the water needs to be boiling (212F) when it is poured?
Or maybe people should recognize that hot beverages (amazingly enough) are HOT.
Advil (along with other over-the-counter painkillers) is also well known for causing liver damage, including acute hepatic failure in rare cases. Large doses and alcohol exacerbate this effect.
Better answer: most printers never truly approach their physical resolution in terms of actual accuracy, just like all those "32 bit" soundcards that only have about 12 significant bits of audio. I think laser are generally much better because of the toner bonding process, rather than ink jets which bleed even on high quality paper.
I think the other factor is a psycological one; since the monitor looks good at 12-18" we never go in and peer at it 2" away, whereas we are often not so kind to printed paper or photos. Since they both look "good" we assume they are the same, even though different benchmarks are being applied.
Well, you must have gotten in ahead of the game, because most of the download sites are now down, and even continuously retrying for 24 hours I've only logged on to 2 sites, downloading a whopping 21k.
If it looks like garbage to you your browser is probably setup wrong. I usually use Shift-JIS for Japanese, so it does come out as garbage under that, but it appears fine under UTF-8.
You are dead right that the browser won't choose the correct encoding...if you look at my other comment this is precisely why universal unicode usage is a good idea. There's no way that/. could even push the correct encoding, since I've noticed a number of people who frequently add asides in Japanese or Chinese, so with any encoding you are screwing someone. (even with UTF, since few people use it at the moment)
(note that reposting the valid UTF-8 hiragana through a Latin-1 browser fubar'd it since the browser interpreted the raw bits wrong...another good argument for unicode)
Hehe...at least you picked three that I know. Seriously, though, the web (and html/xml) is only one source of documents. Wouldn't be really nice to be able to open any document, of any type (pdf, word, etc), anywhere in the world? That's the power of a single standard.
The reason it is useful is because with Unicode you don't need to guess the encoding. You can't rely on document creators to tag their documents; plenty of times my browser has guessed the wrong encoding for a page, and that requires manually going in and changing it. Can you imagine an automated system printing out reams from a website and then realizing the encoding was fubar?
Also consider how often one might want Chinese/Korean/Japanese/German/French/English in the same document. (product manual?) Unicode easily handles this...localized standards don't.
I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. I'm posting from IE on windoze, and both UTF-8 as well as SHIFT-JIS have worked fine for months on/. For that matter, I also use Netscape on X from time to time, and set up correctly that works like a charm too with international characters.
Don't forget iaido. It's generally within the physical capabilities of most people, the movements can be gentle, and it emphasizes good posture. Or maybe sensei emphasizes good posture...
An excellant link. It's a good idea also to check out EXRX for some good routines and explanations of movements. And of course spending a few weeks reading misc.fitness.weights won't hurt...you even have a good chance of seeing Krista post.;)
Oh, and as another poster noted: your abs are more important to spinal stability than your back muscles (a "weight belt" is basically an abdominal supporter) so don't forget the incline sits. If you DL correctly and do situps it should go a long way toward preventing back injuries.
In the true spirit of slashdot, here are some pseudo technical ramblings made with little knowledge of the underlying principles:
3. I kind of doubt the sonic attack thing will work...your power output just gets spread out so quickly (starts approaching d^3 the farther out you go) that it wouldn't be effective at reasonable distances. Even if you force a torpedo out of super-cavitation at 1000 yards out it's still going to smash into you at a good clip. It might be effective at small projectiles, but then the problem becomes taking down much larger numbers of projectiles from (potentially) very different vectors.
5. I don't think any ablative armor is going to work; even the mass of a shell is significant, so you would need to expend a massive amount of energy to have much effect, especially since the water would strongly resist this effect. The situation is much worse when you are talking about a 5000 lb. torpedo...not only are you going to be unable to stop it, if it explodes anywhere near the target its probably a "hit".
Actually many (most?) digital video cameras from prosumer on up use filters to seperate out RGB elements and direct them to different CCDs. This allows the full bandwidth of the CCD to be applied to one spectrum, effectively increasing the number of significant bits that are captured.
Well, ATRAC is just compression. The actual copy protection is all part of the transmission standard (SPDIF). Of course, its easy to toggle the copy protect bits off if you have the right hardware.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are saying some good things, but I think Nirvana is a terrible example of a band that continues to sell well after promotion drops off. First of all, the nature of their breakup (Cobain's death) was a Jame's-Dean-for-the-90's affair. Much of their current success is the dead artist syndrome. In addition, they still get heavy play time on the radio and primo placement in record stores. Is this all because of popularity? Or is it because distributers are well aware of the selling power of their albums, and are continuing to push them on radio and in stores?
Of course I don't know the answers to these questions, but unless you do, it's not saying much about the industry.
In order for Johnson's "For everybody else" advice to succeed, we are missing a crucial element: a place for people to be exposed to music.
Sure, there's MP3.com, which I think is quite successful at introducing people to some new songs, but what is really needed are powerful independent webcasters, and the technology to give them an audience. However big net radio is today, it won't come into its own until the wireless networks allow you to listen to it in your car, or while jogging.
If wireless moves quickly enough, it's possible that non-industry people could even end up dominating this new "digital radio" market before their competitors (old school radio) ever wake up and do something about it. After all, a 128kbps stream is of far higher quality than conventional radio, and though webcasters pay for bandwidth, they don't have the enormous initial costs of a radio station, transmitter, and licenses.
What would this kind of movement do for music? Most probably, it would mean that in any city in the world, you could choose from several thousand radio stations, rather than a dozen. There would be stations that would cater to subgenres, playing music never before heard on commercial radio. And it would be a panacea for artists outside the system, who attract the attention of a DJ with a few thousand listeners, whose attention spreads the music from there.
Even more beneficial, the digital nature makes it easy to push the names of songs and artists to the listener, and facilitates purchasing: a song stream could easily embed an URL.
In short, grassroots digital radio is a promotional path for artists who are outside the RIAA system, and have no wish to become a part of it. It's also a godsend to the thousands of RIAA groups who are too small to be worth pushing on radio, whose talents languish because people are never exposed to them. Contrary to Clear Channel's opinion, some people really do like to listen to different music: even the good stuff gets boring after a while.
The major bar to this wonderful idea is that the RIAA has such a stranglehold on the market that it will be exceedingly difficult for independent operators to build up the critical mass of music that will keep the public listening. It wouldn't be such a big deal if the RIAA would allow webcasters reasonable access to music, but we all know that short of congressional action this is not going to happen. Perhaps the creation of a independently controlled rights management website would help: artists would indicate in some form the rights they give to webcasters, and perhaps the royalties they desire. If such a thing got big enough, even RIAA artists might demand the right to webcast their music in their contracts.
Competing with the RIAA/ClearChannel will be exceedingly hard. But hopefully that critical mass of webcasters, artists, and (!) lawyers is out there. I hope so.
The hardest bugs to spot are the ones that happen rarely. Even harder to spot are exploits...because while they are technically bugs, in practice they generally rely on the author to do things that no sane coder would ever try in a "normal" program.
Can you back the statement about sound cards up anywhere? I don't have much background in ASP but the little anecdotal testing I've done has shown sound cards to be quite agile in reproducing signals...the combination of a waveform generator program driving the sound card and my oscilliscope have revealed an ability to reproduce waveforms whose characteristics generally exceed the abilities of power amplifiers (let alone loudspeaker drivers) to reproduce. The distortion figures are often craptacular, but the waveform is still within nominal amplitude.
I seldom notice that MP3s sound bad (at least the properly encoded ones ^_^) but I often get the feeling that there is something missing....like the earlier audiophile article, once you realize what you have been missing it is hard to go back.
I'll have to check out the new LAME encoder...thanks for the info.
While I'm not saying chopping off this octave is a good thing, I think that the psycoacoustic modeling used can be even more detrimental to the sound quality. What I notice most about MP3s is not the loss of clarity in the high end but the lack of definition in soft passages. (presumably because music content is being guessed to be subaudible when it isn't)
"Although the majority of ibuprofen overdosages are not very serious, acute renal failure, hepatic failure, and hypotension and coma have been described" "Tissue levels of ibuprofen after fatal overdosage of ibuprofen and acetaminophen." Steinmetz JC, Lee CY, Wu AY.
"In the group of propionic acid derivatives, ibuprofen, pirprofen and naproxen have been implicated in hepatitis of various types" "[Hepatitis due to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents]" Furet Y, Metman EH, Breteau M, Bertrand J.
"Ninety years ago aspirin was discovered, and within the last forty years phenylbutazone, indomethacin, ibuprofen, the oxicams and many others were discovered. All of these drugs are acidic. They inhibit the prostaglandin synthetase, combine analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity and show side-effects mainly in the GI-tract, liver, bone-marrow, and kidney...Intensive hepatic metabolisation may be related to enhanced hepatic damage...These observations indicate that certain pharmacokinetic characteristics of distinct nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are responsible, at least in part, for well-known side-effects." "Towards safer nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs." Brune K, Beck WS.
This could also be interesting reading:
"Drug-induced hepatic injury: an analysis of 1100 cases reported to the Danish Committee on Adverse Drug Reactions between 1978 and 1987." Friis H, Andreasen PB.
Even the networks will likely accept this fact. However, they'll fight it tooth and nail, even if they might make more money with the switch. Why? Because despite the 200+ channels out there, the networks still dominate TV. If you change the model, you give other companies an opportunity to get a piece of the action.
Historically we've seen many examples of the dominant players in the marketplace holding back technology in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. (most recently in the U.S. the cellphone and bankcard industries) I doubt this will be any different.
I, for one, appreciate getting 190F (or thereabouts) coffee that actually stays hot on the drive into work. Shall we outlaw tea, since the water needs to be boiling (212F) when it is poured?
Or maybe people should recognize that hot beverages (amazingly enough) are HOT.
Advil (along with other over-the-counter painkillers) is also well known for causing liver damage, including acute hepatic failure in rare cases. Large doses and alcohol exacerbate this effect.
Simple answer: b/c printers are sucks
Better answer: most printers never truly approach their physical resolution in terms of actual accuracy, just like all those "32 bit" soundcards that only have about 12 significant bits of audio. I think laser are generally much better because of the toner bonding process, rather than ink jets which bleed even on high quality paper.
I think the other factor is a psycological one; since the monitor looks good at 12-18" we never go in and peer at it 2" away, whereas we are often not so kind to printed paper or photos. Since they both look "good" we assume they are the same, even though different benchmarks are being applied.
Why?
Well, you must have gotten in ahead of the game, because most of the download sites are now down, and even continuously retrying for 24 hours I've only logged on to 2 sites, downloading a whopping 21k.
If it looks like garbage to you your browser is probably setup wrong. I usually use Shift-JIS for Japanese, so it does come out as garbage under that, but it appears fine under UTF-8.
/. could even push the correct encoding, since I've noticed a number of people who frequently add asides in Japanese or Chinese, so with any encoding you are screwing someone. (even with UTF, since few people use it at the moment)
You are dead right that the browser won't choose the correct encoding...if you look at my other comment this is precisely why universal unicode usage is a good idea. There's no way that
(note that reposting the valid UTF-8 hiragana through a Latin-1 browser fubar'd it since the browser interpreted the raw bits wrong...another good argument for unicode)
Hehe...at least you picked three that I know. Seriously, though, the web (and html/xml) is only one source of documents. Wouldn't be really nice to be able to open any document, of any type (pdf, word, etc), anywhere in the world? That's the power of a single standard.
The reason it is useful is because with Unicode you don't need to guess the encoding. You can't rely on document creators to tag their documents; plenty of times my browser has guessed the wrong encoding for a page, and that requires manually going in and changing it. Can you imagine an automated system printing out reams from a website and then realizing the encoding was fubar?
Also consider how often one might want Chinese/Korean/Japanese/German/French/English in the same document. (product manual?) Unicode easily handles this...localized standards don't.
I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. I'm posting from IE on windoze, and both UTF-8 as well as SHIFT-JIS have worked fine for months on /. For that matter, I also use Netscape on X from time to time, and set up correctly that works like a charm too with international characters.
ããï¼Y
This post was UTF-8 posting Japanese, and it worked fine.
Ooooo...if you read my post you'd see I didn't endorse godaddy in any way...I just said it was cheap.
$9 at godaddy, only need to register for one year, all online updating. Can't comment on their service, but the price is right.
Don't forget iaido. It's generally within the physical capabilities of most people, the movements can be gentle, and it emphasizes good posture. Or maybe sensei emphasizes good posture...
An excellant link. It's a good idea also to check out EXRX for some good routines and explanations of movements. And of course spending a few weeks reading misc.fitness.weights won't hurt...you even have a good chance of seeing Krista post. ;)
Oh, and as another poster noted: your abs are more important to spinal stability than your back muscles (a "weight belt" is basically an abdominal supporter) so don't forget the incline sits. If you DL correctly and do situps it should go a long way toward preventing back injuries.
In the true spirit of slashdot, here are some pseudo technical ramblings made with little knowledge of the underlying principles:
3. I kind of doubt the sonic attack thing will work...your power output just gets spread out so quickly (starts approaching d^3 the farther out you go) that it wouldn't be effective at reasonable distances. Even if you force a torpedo out of super-cavitation at 1000 yards out it's still going to smash into you at a good clip. It might be effective at small projectiles, but then the problem becomes taking down much larger numbers of projectiles from (potentially) very different vectors.
5. I don't think any ablative armor is going to work; even the mass of a shell is significant, so you would need to expend a massive amount of energy to have much effect, especially since the water would strongly resist this effect. The situation is much worse when you are talking about a 5000 lb. torpedo...not only are you going to be unable to stop it, if it explodes anywhere near the target its probably a "hit".
Actually many (most?) digital video cameras from prosumer on up use filters to seperate out RGB elements and direct them to different CCDs. This allows the full bandwidth of the CCD to be applied to one spectrum, effectively increasing the number of significant bits that are captured.
Well, ATRAC is just compression. The actual copy protection is all part of the transmission standard (SPDIF). Of course, its easy to toggle the copy protect bits off if you have the right hardware. :)