367 karma · joined March 17, 2017
https://books.google.com/books/about/Mathematics_1001.html?i...
Another great resource for understanding what went on at Bell Labs is Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Engineering: Learning to Learn"
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
It pains me especially that this is the company that way back in the day gave us Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, and the transistor.
I don't know why they want to get out of the copper business...after 2022 FTC change, copper lines increased like 10X in cost and the provider has literally no legal obligation to provide uptime guarantee/support, sounds like a telecom's wet dream!
For non-musician HN'ers, if you've heard Brian May with Queen, that's the sound of overdriven Class A EL84s!
Besides that, any wireless speakers using Bluetooth - it's a garbage consumer technology that I can't believe became a standard. Curious if there was a superior "Betamax" to its "VHS".
- https://capturedbyrobots.com/
- https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19242-squarepusher-z-ma...
- In this month's TapeOp magazine, Jeff Jones mentions he always monitors through such a codec so he can adjust accordingly for the best sound regardless of final format https://tapeop.com/interviews/163/jeff-jones/
- IMO Rush's Moving Pictures is one of the best (and best-sounding) albums from the '80s despite the fact that it was mastered to a Sony digital device that's renowned as terrible sounding, with only 14 bits of usable resolution. How/Why? The production team monitored through the Sony system while mastering and made tweaks as they went to account for its limitations.
- I've had my own music professionally mastered at high resolution, and discovered that converting hi-res to MP3 (even at highest bitrate) caused digital peaks over 0.0 dB, I fixed by normalizing to -0.3 dB.
TBH if the resulting file is going to be transmitted over BlueTooth it's going to be further degraded. And yet people can still make a strong emotional connection to the underlying music and artist...
That's by far the most disappointing book I've read in that series (esp. given the author's history) - with all the anorak trainspotting detail about online album ID databases and song glyphs, but precisely zero insight into how/why RDJ did what he did sonically.
Also more recent versions of Max/MSP have "mc" (multi-channel connections so you don't have to create separate wires/nodes for multiple identical signals) and text-based programming nodes with "~gen" and JavaScript.