English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Johan Larsson

12:00 AM

yeah that is a good thing, pretty much agree with the choices.

Mitch

@MattЭллен ergo Matt's a dummy?

Johan Larsson

Pita to have to bring out the hammer directly.

Robusto

Why are you still up?

Mitch

@JohanLarsson Humus need to hit the nail on its head.

Johan Larsson

@Robusto I tried sleeping but failed. Never stopped refactoring :)

this will hurt tomorrows session

Johan Larsson

12:18 AM

@Mitch it is a pun right?

Mitch

ha ha yes. you said pita instead of pity. i said humus instead of you must

Johan Larsson

oh I meant PITA

dunno why I used shift for p

RegDwigнt

@Robusto well, there's mama and papa which both end in what you'd expect to be a feminine ending, and are of the same declension to boot, but of course have different genders. That said, yeah there are clear patterns, and actually not too many of them. There are only five declensions in total, with roughly a hundred subvariations, many of which are indeed gender-specific.

But of course as always with languages, ideally you first acquire fluency and only then start noticing patterns. The other way round will just make your brain melt without getting you anywhere near native speakers who don't even freaking care, those bastards. Go ask a German if he's ever noticed anything peculiar about lein or ung.

Johan Larsson

@Robusto More like the w in what actually. Water is so oater

A snappy what w

Robusto

12:33 AM

@RegDwigнt Yeah, of course. And when I was in Germany, I just mimicked what I heard, so it came easily. Decades later, I have to try to remember, and of course that's harder.

@JohanLarsson How do you pronounce Ø?

Johan Larsson

We have Ö Norway and Denmark use Ø

trying to think of a word

Mahnax

@JohanLarsson Your ö is not the same as the Finnish ö, right?

Johan Larsson

it is the same, I think

@Robusto like the i in third

Mahnax

@JohanLarsson Slightly different, then.

Johan Larsson

how is the finnish?

They say U as we say O

I is aj btw

Mahnax

12:45 AM

vocaroo.com/i/s1E0MxHzMhym

Like that.

Very similar, I suppose, now that I think about it.

@JohanLarsson I in Finnish is ee.

Johan Larsson

same in Swedish, maybe just one e

depending on which way we mean

Mahnax

And y is u. Kind of.

But I should study.

Moi moi!

Johan Larsson

@Robusto or the u in murder

Robusto

Ah, interesting.

tchrist

1:04 AM

@Rob I was just trying to figure out how I could read your book.

Swedish seems to have like 17 vowels:

Danish looks a bit different:

But not very.

However, Danish seems to have phonemic pitch and phonemic length, so they have something like 30 possibilities. That’s crazy.

Ugly. Try again.

The Swedish chart includes the long markers (:), but the Danish one doesn’t. I guess it’s like Finnish where vowel length is phonemic.

> However, vowel length and stød are most likely features of the syllable rather than features of the vowel.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен Ah, just like good ol' Basic

Or at least, some dialect of Basic I used. QuickBasic. GWBasic. one of those.

tchrist

There is no way my untrained brain could ever tell the difference between all those oe variants.

> Unlike the neighboring Mainland Scandinavian languages Swedish and Norwegian, the prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch. Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words like billigst [ˈb̥ilisd̥] "cheapest" and bilist [b̥iˈlisd̥] "car driver".

> The original pitch tone has been replaced by an opposition between syllables with and without the stød. The stød is not a separate phoneme, but a suprasegmental feature that may accompany certain syllables; those with a long vowel or that end with a voiced consonant.
The stød is phonemic since many words are kept apart on the basis of the presence or absence of the stød alone, e.g. løber "runner" [ˈløːb̥ɐ] ≠ løber "runs" [ˈløːˀb̥ɐ / ˈløʊ̯ˀɐ], ånden "breathing" [ˈʌnn̩] ≠ ånden "the spirit" [ˈʌnˀn̩].

Isn’t that jolly? "Impossible to predict, has to be learned". No wonder the Danes speak such fine English!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

1:24 AM

makes notes not to learn Danish

Robusto

2:20 AM

@tchrist Did you keep the link from last time?

tchrist

@Robusto Yes, I did.

Robusto

@tchrist Do you have a Kindle?

tchrist

No, that’s the thing.

I don’t have any sort of device for reading text apart from my computer.

Well, and my eyes, but that hardly counts.

Robusto

Do you mind reading it on the computer?

tchrist

Not terribly, no.

Robusto

2:26 AM

Then you can get a Kindle reader for the computer (free), and either download it from Amazon or I can send you a copy.

tchrist

It’s not especially convenient, but I recently did so for a book I couldn’t find the hardcopy of.

Robusto

If you do a lot of reading, a Kindle is a nice thing to have. I'm on my seventh.

tchrist

Does one acquire the Kindle-reading program from Amazon?

Robusto

amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000464931

tchrist

Dang. I’m still running 10.5.8, not 10.6.

Robusto

2:29 AM

The MacBook Pro I got with my new job runs 10.9.2. Pretty sweet.

Which rev is 10.6?

tchrist

You mean its bestial name?

Robusto

@tchrist Yes.

Leopard?

tchrist

That’s 10.5; I think Snow Leopard is 10.6.

Robusto

Ah. The latest rev is called Mavericks. So they're done with cats.

tchrist

And moved on to . . . what?

Robusto

2:32 AM

Beats me. Horses?

tchrist

Cowboys?

Robusto

Then there's the Kindle Cloud Reader.

tchrist

(James Garner)

Robusto

I know.

tchrist

@Robusto I think that might work.

Robusto

2:33 AM

Geez, I'm running 10.7.5 on my 6-year-old Mac Pro. I guess that's Lion or something.

Anyway, I'd really like to get your opinion on the book, you being a connoisseur of SF and all.

tchrist

How is the cloud reader different from installing the reader program on my computer? It just dumped 50 MB of something, so it smells like an install.

I’ll try.

Robusto

@tchrist Beats me. I use my Kindle so I don't have that problem. I have to say, I really like reading on that device.

tchrist

Why?

Oh, hm. The cloud reader is just a Safari tab, not a distinct program.

Well, insofar as there is any sense to that sentence, which there may not be.

Robusto

I can store scores of books on the Kindle, access any in my library with a wifi connection, adjust the font or font size, and read with one hand without ever having to hold a book open.

I can also search through the text, make notes, highlight passages, and more.

Bookmarking is as easy as touching the top right corner.

tchrist

I have enough trouble with phone service, let alone wifi.

Robusto

2:37 AM

Heh, you probably already use wifi for your MacBook.

tchrist

And books don’t break when you drop them or spill on them.

@Robusto Yes, but I don’t carry it around with me anywhere, except occasionally around the house to a different room or outside.

Robusto

No, but you can get a hard-shell cover that is pretty good protection. And the battery lasts a long time.

@tchrist Well, the point is you have wifi. So it's a minute to set that up on the Kindle.

tchrist

I do prefer owning books.

Robusto

I used to as well.

tchrist

Nobody can take them from me.

Robusto

2:39 AM

But Kindle just makes reading so easy.

tchrist

Or stop me from reading them.

Robusto

Yeah, I hear you. But that's an extreme edge case.

tchrist

When you buy a book from Amazon, you have bought a book.

When you pay them to access an ebook, you have not.

Robusto

My wife reads two or three books a week, and she would be lost without a Kindle.

tchrist

The whole DRM thing is evil.

Robusto

2:41 AM

@tchrist The flip side of that is that I have bought many, many books on Kindle over the past seven years, and Amazon actually keeps them all on my virtual bookshelf, so I can access them anytime, from anywhere.

I frequently lose track of where I put my print books; that never happens with Kindle.

tchrist

Yes, this is a problem.

There’s a Borges quote about it.

The typesetting I’ve seen on ebooks has often turned my stomach.

That would make it impossible to read for me.

Robusto

I can even switch Kindles and sync books to furthest page read. This is handy because most of the time I like to read on my Kindle Fire HD 8.9, but sometimes I like the handier Kindle PaperWhite, which fits in my back pocket.

tchrist

I would be constantly annoyed by how shitty it looked. You never get that with paper.

Robusto

@tchrist Well, this can be a problem, especially with free PD books and the like. I hate to see ellipses wrap from line to line and so forth.

tchrist

It’s just a shitty job. And scanned books are always miserable. You have to start with the source to have any hope.

Robusto

2:44 AM

@tchrist The Kindle Fire HD looks amazing. If you get newer books, the type is very crisp and clear.

tchrist

Tor books are free of DRM.

Robusto

Seriously, though, typography and especially copy-editing have plunged in quality horribly over the past two decades, even in hardcover books.

tchrist

One should not have to buy an expensive leather-bound book from Easton Press or Subterranean just to get a properly done book.

Robusto

No. But it's getting to be that way, unfortunately.

tchrist

Makes me mad at the world.

Robusto

2:47 AM

I don't think they even hire proofreaders any more.

tchrist

Madder.

Well, O’Reilly does for mine.

But it’s no longer an employee position, just a contractor.

Robusto

@tchrist O'Reilly is one of the few who care about quality.

I can't recall seeing a typo in an O'Reilly book, and I've read dozens.

tchrist

I spend my life looking at a screen. My eyes need a break sometimes.

I presume you gave them some sort of source, so it would not require disgusting scanning full of errors.

Robusto

The Kindle PaperWhite is very close to a paper look.

@tchrist Correct. I have a writing program called Scrivener, which outputs to the .mobi (Kindle e-book) format, among others.

tchrist

Hm.

Robusto

2:51 AM

I would say the type quality of the Kindle PaperWhite is roughly comparable to a paperback.

tchrist

I kinda feel like one should either use vi or emacs, or go the whole hog and use InDesign. Not sure about stuff that’s in between.

Robusto

There are other advantages to Scrivener. You can keep notes, arrange chapters and sections by dragging, add to character profiles, and so forth.

tchrist

The only books I have that are greppable are ones that I physically own as well. But I like to be able to write scripts to stuff with them.

Dragging?

Hm.

Robusto

Footnoting becomes trivial, too.

Indexing as well.

And you can output as Word, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, HTML, two flavors of e-book, .mmd, and others.

tchrist

I can’t even remember what the name of the super-converter that O’Reilly uses is.

I just know that I type everything in vi using pod, then convert that to DocBook, and then they run it through some XSLT transform to produces pdf.

Actually, it’s not real pod. It’s pseudopod with extensions for things like footnotes and stuff.

Robusto

2:57 AM

I've written novels on a manual typewriter, in a word processor I wrote in C way back in the day, in Word, and more recently in Scrivener, and I have to say the writing experience has reached its zenith in Scrivener.

tchrist

My library will outlive me.

Because it’s real.

This means something to me, something to pass on.

Robusto

Scrivener also gives you word and page counts, so if you're writing a novel, say, it's easy to keep a daily output quota.

tchrist

Trust me, I have no issues with determining word or page counts. :)

I wrote all kinds of scripts to diddle and cross-check my text.

Robusto

@tchrist Yes, I grant you that's a benefit. But digital works can live on as well.

@tchrist I used to do that too. But now I just let the software do it for me.

tchrist

Stuff locked in a binary vault isn’t useful to me. I need text I can work on.

Oh, but I do stuff that the software can't.

For example, after they convert it to PDF, I check for bad hyphenation, programmatically.

Robusto

3:00 AM

I know. But you also do stuff in the binary vault which couldn't be done in print.

tchrist

That’s a trivial example. I forget all the other things I did.

I simply don’t trust digital stuff to last.

And I don’t trust businesses AT ALL not to fuck us all over.

Robusto

BTW, I saw the paperback version of A Dance With Dragons in the store and it was as thick as a loaf of bread. I don't know how anybody could read that easily.

tchrist

In the UK, it’s split into two volumes for binding reasons.

In Germany, into three, but that’s the translation’s fault.

Robusto

@tchrist Well, true. But I trust Amazon to want my money enough not to piss me off. They're way better than iTunes for digital music downloads. Everything I've ever purchased from them is instantly recoverable, no questions asked.

tchrist

No frontis plates with ebooks. :)

Robusto

3:04 AM

I bought the first four books as a Kindle download, and it took me months to hack through it.

tchrist

What was that music service that you paid like $0.99 for songs with that went under and everybody lost everything they’d bought?

Robusto

@tchrist You could have that.

tchrist

No, it’s not the same.

Robusto

@tchrist I dunno. But I don't figure Amazon is going to go under.

tchrist

Maps and charts and tables and illustrations are a particular challenge for the teensy format.

Robusto

3:06 AM

Yes. But books, even hardback ones, never have big enough maps anyway. The maps of Westeros I saw in hardback suck ballz.

tchrist

That is not true.

Well, wait.

Yes, it is true of Martin.

But it is not ipso facto correct and generally applicable.

Robusto

Someone gave me a framed map of Westeros and it's still hard to make things out.

@tchrist I mostly agree. But few editions offer free-standing maps such as the Royal Ordnance Survey puts out with their historical maps of England (e.g., Britain Before the Norman Conquest).

tchrist

The map in my copy of The Lord of the Rings is 15" x 18". That seems good enough.

Robusto

That's a fair size, especially when the map is not very detailed.

tchrist

The maps in the Martin books are joke-sized.

Robusto

3:09 AM

Worthless, I'd say.

tchrist

Because it’s “too expensive” to do a good job.

Robusto

Aye. It's too expensive to have nice things.

tchrist

My LOTR has two 15x18 maps, one under each cover. And a silk ribbon and gilt page edges.

Robusto

Nice.

tchrist

It will endure.

I have the Robert Fagles translations of Homer that way too, etc.

Robusto

3:12 AM

So do you think you will try the book on the cloud reader?

tchrist

No big maps in them though. :)

It seems nutty, but the hold really does help to keep the dust out. My Burton translation of A Thousand Night and a Night has gilt pages and silk ribbons, but no slip cover. I just pulled out a volume and of course there’s dust on top. But the inside is safe.

Dust jacket was the wrong word.

Slip case or something is what I meant.

Robusto

Yes. I have a number of volumes like that. They're very nice.

tchrist

Some things really have to be done that way.

Robusto

3 mins ago, by Robusto

So do you think you will try the book on the cloud reader?

tchrist

The Audubon folios.

Robusto

3:15 AM

If not, I could probably send you a PDF.

tchrist

I didn’t see that. Sure.

No, I’ll try the reader.

Robusto

Cool.

tchrist

So, Steven Brust posted the first page of his upcoming novel.

Except he ran it through a sort first.

Very funny.

That is, the words are all there, but they are alphabetically sorted.

Robusto

Ha.

tchrist

a a a a a adult after ago Aliera Aliera all among an and and and and and and and and are All as asshole at Black bloodthirsty But can case Castle combat command considered course cousin dangerous Daymar Daymar The decide decisions Descin different different do doing don’t Dragonlords drank drank drunk during Dzur Empire Enchantress except finished five four from fully getting go good Great have having having host House Houses Houses I I I I I I in in in is it Jhereg just know know Lavode less library like make maybe more more more Morrolan Morrolan Morrolan’s most Mountain Necromancer of of…

Robusto

3:19 AM

Kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. You could probably put it together, given enough time.

tchrist

I did. :)

And I didn’t even have to use Markov chains based on his first ten books, which I had been going to do.

Robusto

If I were Jasper I would LOL right now.

tchrist

There, you can see.

I have a few words not in there, where I’ve used ellipses.

And I can’t for the life of me figure out who Descin is. It’s a new proper noun.

Robusto

Nice.

tchrist

It was a cool compliment from Steve, yeah.

He started life as a programmer.

Robusto

3:23 AM

Not surprised.

tchrist

Up in the Twin Cities. Was an early FRP gamer with the Arneson group up there.

I believe the original inspiration for the series grew out of one of his campaigns.

He still types his books in emacs.

It’s been fun to watch him grow as a writer. He doesn’t get in such a rut as so many do.

Robusto

I can see how one could do that. The actual writing would be amazing, but the organization would be more difficult.

tchrist

Well, there comes a point you have to convert the plaintext to something else, but that comes way down the road. The actual typing is super-faster that way.

And you don’t waste time with fritterware.

Robusto

Yeah. Like I said before, I used to be a whiz at emacs. I miss it. But for the last 15 years I've had to use this or that IDE, and my facility fell away. I can still do it, but I have to think about the shortcuts, which means I'm slow, which defeats the purpose.

tchrist

I can’t use IDEs.

I just tell people I have a learning disability. :)

I have a severe aversion to heavy framework stuff.

Robusto

3:30 AM

Heh. Intellisense and auto-complete are nice features, as is brace matching and so on.

tchrist

What, you think I don’t have that sort of thing when I want it?

Robusto

I'm sure you do.

tchrist

But really, if you need autocomplete, you either have a brain-memory issue or else your identifiers are too damned long.

It took me a while to get used to the color coding stuff, I confess.

Robusto

There are so many APIs these days that nobody can remember all that shit.

tchrist

See, that’s its own problem.

Robusto

3:32 AM

I practically have to learn a new framework for every project. Then I start forgetting the older ones.

tchrist

It’s madness, I tell ya.

Robusto

Oh, I know.

tchrist

When it cannot all fit into the mind of a mortal at once, it has reached the point that it cannot be understood by that mortal. And that is a big problem. You have passed the event horizon, and there is no escape.

You implode with the weight of unfathomable complexity.

Robusto

Believe me, I know. I wish I may never see another implementation of the MV* paradigm.

tchrist

And I am sick and fucking tired of dealing with other people’s god-damned framework and library bugs. Those are nearly impossible to debug.

Robusto

3:35 AM

Tell me about it.

tchrist

I am perfectly capable of producing my own troubles. Don’t shovel me a pile of shit on top of that which is not of my own making.

Robusto

I've had to monkey-patch frameworks all too frequently.

Gah, I'm going blind here. I need to sleep.

tchrist

Me same.

Was beautiful here today: all the flowering crabs etc are in bloom, and the irises are starting.

Robusto

Well, have a good night.

tchrist

And you.

Johan Larsson

4:36 AM

morning

Braiam

4:48 AM

PSA: Please, do not edit SPAM. Flag it and move on

Matt Эллен

6:40 AM

@Mitch it would seem to be the case

Matt Эллен

7:45 AM

started to insert Google 2gram frequency values into a sql DB. the waiting commences

medica

@MattЭллен Matt, are you here?

Matt Эллен

hello

medica

Hi!

MariLou wondered if someone in chat knows who the trolls are. Do you?

Matt Эллен

Other than NortonnS, who takes on many guises, I don't I'm afraid.

I believe tchrist has a way of assessing if a user is actually NortonnS, but you'd have to ask him about that.

medica

Huh, NortonnS... OK, yes, I do know Tom has a list and a 'generator'...

Matt Эллен

7:55 AM

most trolls are one offs, anyway. they spam the site then leave when they can't do it anymore

medica

Or they change names

Matt Эллен

yeah

sometimes they create a new user

medica

How's the blog going? or not going? What would you like to see happen?

yep

Matt Эллен

well, I've had no responses to the meta post and a couple of ideas thrown around in chat

personally I'd like some enthusiastic people to come and write about English

medica

Ahh, that's what I wanted to know

Matt Эллен

7:57 AM

but if people actually want to write about how the site works, that's fine too.

medica

I would be interested, but I'm afraid I don't have the chops

Matt Эллен

nor do I

medica

I'd be in some intimidating company

Matt Эллен

don't let that bother you

medica

yes you do, I've read some of your posts

Matt Эллен

7:59 AM

that's very kind :D

medica

but if we would be cross editing, I could do that.

Matt Эллен

but I think if you have something to say, you'd be able to write something

yes

if there is stuff to edit, having people with a critical eye would be important.

medica

well, keep me on your list as a committed participant, then.

(and I think I'm a pretty good editor.)

Matt Эллен

will do

medica

Good. I mean it. I will learn as well through writing about topics.

What time is it where you are?

Matt Эллен

8:02 AM

09:00

medica

well, then, good day to you! :)

I am up late, and should go to bed. :)

later.

Matt Эллен

good day to you!

sleep well

Stack Exchange

9:56 AM

Limerick Machine: Tiny robots could help you to heal I know that this doesn’t sound real Diller and Sitti Mig…

posted on April 27, 2014 by sgdi

Tiny robots could help you to heal I know that this doesn’t sound real Diller and Sitti Might fix you up pretty With robots and magnetic fields http://doi.org/sdb

Jasper Loy

10:12 AM

@MattЭллен Good morning!

Matt Эллен

11:27 AM

@JasperLoy hi!

3.6% (by number of files, not size) of the way through the 2grams

Robusto

@tchrist: If I were to read some of Brust's novels, where would you recommend I start?

skullpatrol

2:08 PM

Hi @cornbreadninja麵包忍者

tchrist

@Robusto Start with Jhereg.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@skullpatrol howdy

tchrist

2:27 PM

@Robusto Or perhaps Agyar, which is not part of the Dragaeran cycle.

But Jhereg is a remarkable first novel, and it is the start of the series.

In print, it is available as an omnibus edition covering Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla.

tchrist

2:52 PM

My goodness, Safari has 146 open file descriptors right now.

@Rob Unless you are a super-big fan of Alexander Dumas père, that is. Brust’s Khaavren Romances trilogy is an intentional homage to Dumas. But some people find that 3rd-person narrative in flowery language to be dead boring compared with Jhereg's contemporary voice with a first-person narrator and fast action.

Its first volume, Phoenix Guards, takes place in universe but 1,000 years before the start of Jhereg. I’m not sure anyone has ever started reading the series with Khaavren books instead of with the Vlad books, though. The last-published Vlad book, Tiassa, though, was as much a Khaavren book as a Vlad book, so you would want to knock off the Khaavren books before you got to Tiassa.

No, no time travel. Khaavren isn’t human like Vlad is, so he’s still kicking around.

There are veiled science-fiction aspects in Brust’s Dragaeran Cycle, but it’s basically fantasy. It’s not like Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun in which he set out to write a science fiction tale using fantasy tropes and Clarke’s Third Law.

Brust’s characters in his Vlad books remind you of Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber in their banter and wit.

Another cool thing about Brust is that every book (or “book”) he ever writes always has 17 chapters in it.

That means he keeps a tight rein on pacing and resolution and dénouement. Unlike say Martin these days.

The Khaavren “trilogy” has double-book volumes, though, so each volume there has 2*17=34 chapters.

But every other novel Brust has ever written has 17. When they first came out, they could fit in your back pocket, since that comes out to ~275–300pp.

Brust’s first novel Jhereg has a Zelaznyesque feel to it; this is a good thing.

Dumas’s d’Artagnan Romances:
    1. The Three Musketeers
    2. Twenty Years After
    3. The Vicomte de Bragelonne, often published in three volumes:
        3.1 The Vicomte de Bragelonne
        3.2 Louise de la Vallière
        3.3 The Man in the Iron Mask

Brust’s Khaavren Romances:
    1. The Phoenix Guards
    2. Five Hundred Years After
    3. The Viscount of Adrilankha, published in three volumes:
        3.1 The Paths of the Dead
        3.2 The Lord of Castle Black
        3.3 The Enchantress of Dzur Mountain (published as Sethra Lavode)

Robusto

3:31 PM

@tchrist Thanks, I'll look into them. I may wind up seeing if the local library has them, because a lot of these aren't available on Kindle and some are only available through third-party sellers on Amazon.

tchrist

Um, all Brust’s books are available DRM-free from Tor.

So I am surprised.

Oh, current offerings might be omnibus editions.

Robusto

Hmm.

tchrist

Omnibus volumes:
The Book of Jhereg (contains Jhereg, Yendi and Teckla)
The Book of Taltos (contains Taltos and Phoenix)
The Book of Athyra (contains Athyra and Orca)
Dragon & Issola (contains Dragon and Issola - SFBC hardcover)
The Book of Dragon (contains Dragon and Issola - Tor paperback)
The Book of Dzur (contains Dzur and Jhegaala)

I advise reading in publication order, even though that does not always exactly correspond to chronological order.

Robusto

This may sound stupid, but how do I get them from Tor?

tchrist

I just had that link, just a second. They sure make it tough to find.

tor.com/blogs/2012/06/…

Robusto

3:36 PM

Wait till Net Neutrality is dead. You won't be able to get there at all.

tchrist

torbooks.co.uk/buy-tor-ebooks

There must be a US link somewhere.

Annoying.

us.macmillan.com/series/Vlad

us.macmillan.com/author/stevenbrust

There you go, the last one.

Robusto

Thanks.

tchrist

Hm, not all seem available as ebooks. Weird.

Bootleg PDFs, not always well-converted, are available for the first ten volumes using just a wget and nothing else.

Jhereg

Yendi

Taltos

&c

Robusto

Yeah, I don't do bootlegs. I'm one of those weird people who don't do piracy. My friends think I'm being grandma-ish about it, but that's how I roll.

tchrist

Understood.

I have all of those in paperback and hardcover. I just wanted the computer readable text to do NLP stuff with it.

Robusto

3:45 PM

See, this is another benefit to digital media. Book stores can't stock everything, and print books go out of print with alarming alacrity. But the long tail of the online retailer can keep things around virtually forever.

tchrist

The problem with bootlegs is that they are usually poorly converted.

Robusto

Yeah, and might be infected with viruses and who knows what else.

tchrist

So you have errors. It’s too noisy with errors.

A PDF with a virus?

Robusto

Just like pirated MP3s. Usually are crummy rips, from what I've heard.

Metadata usually sucks as well.

tchrist

Yes.

My own rips are rich in metadata.

Robusto

3:47 PM

That is not surprising. ^)^

Amazon does good rips, 256k VBR, with plenty of metadata and no DMR.

tchrist

Can a PDF Document Contain a Virus?

Not if you use xpdf it cannot.

I promise you that that cannot happen to me. :)

Robusto

I hate when I find out about something I want, and then it proves hard to get. I'm a first-worlder: I don't deal well with petty frustrations.

tchrist

Same.

macbook# ogginfo B-minor/01-01-Kyrie.ogg
Processing file "B-minor/01-01-Kyrie.ogg"...

New logical stream (#1, serial: 5e5fd1cf): type vorbis
Vorbis headers parsed for stream 1, information follows...
Version: 0
Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20020717 (1.0)
Channels: 2
Rate: 44100

Nominal bitrate: 256.006000 kb/s
Upper bitrate not set
Lower bitrate not set
User comments section follows...
	title=Kyrie
	artist=J. S. Bach
	album=Mass In B Minor (The Bach Ensemble with Joshua Rifkin) Disk 1
	tracknumber=01

Well, I suppose it could be a lot better.

Robusto

CBR?

tchrist

TLA?

Robusto

3:53 PM

Constant Bit Rate (vs. Variable Bit Rate, which is superior).

tchrist

It’s variable.

Robusto

Good.

45

A: Are there any perceptible differences between the sound quality of 192 versus 320 kbps MP3 files?

Here is one surprising result, from an experiment described in Maximum PC's article "Do Higher MP3 Bit Rates Really Pay Off?": Its conclusion: [No other] Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to...

tchrist

> Average bitrate: 227.217543 kb/s

Robusto

That's the sweet spot.

I saw Upper bitrate not set, Lower bitrate not set, and wondered.

tchrist

macbook# ogginfo B-minor/02-05-Et\ Resurrexit.ogg
Processing file "B-minor/02-05-Et Resurrexit.ogg"...

New logical stream (#1, serial: 77047cec): type vorbis
Vorbis headers parsed for stream 1, information follows...
Version: 0
Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20020717 (1.0)
Channels: 2
Rate: 44100

Nominal bitrate: 256.006000 kb/s
Upper bitrate not set
Lower bitrate not set
User comments section follows...
	title=Et Resurrexit
	artist=J. S. Bach
	album=Mass In B Minor (The Bach Ensemble with Joshua Rifkin) Disk 2

So that one averaged to ~229.

Robusto

3:55 PM

I guess it would have helped if I had clicked "(see full text)".

tchrist

Aye.

Robusto

I rip to MP3 because it's a play-on-anything format.

If I weren't going to do that, I think I'd do FLAC.

tchrist

I long ago settled on OGG.

Robusto