At Apple I hear there used to be an in-house tool that takes AfterEffect raw output and convert it into full transformation matrices (which covers rotation, translation and scale, which in turn covers everything within an animation) that can be directly used by CoreAnimation.

A lot of the hostile postures are methods for each government to redirect its population's attention toward external problems instead of focusing on internal ones. For Americans, instead of really acknowledging weakness in our society, a simple blame like "The Chinese are stealing everything from us , including tech and jobs" is very attractive for a populist politician. For the Chinese, vilifying the U.S government as a global bully fuels nationalism internally and distract the people away from issues such as social inequality and government corruption.

It benefits China greatly to have a "hostile" relationship, at least as far as using networked computing to carry it out.

Computers and cyber-attacks bring a lot for China that are asymmetrically not as advantageous for much of the rest of the world.

- They are much more covert means of conducting espionage (either industrial or political, take your pick). Obviously NSA finds this useful too, but even if we assume NSA had an industrial espionage program as advanced as China's, what does China have for the U.S. to steal, relative to what the U.S. has for China? This question repeats itself for every other country in the West.

- Attribution of cyberattacks is difficult, which adds to the deniability aspect. If literally all that China has to worry about is a loss of face, then they can proverbially cry all the way to the bank. No one is going to be nuking or invading China for an over-active spy program.

- Because of the economic ties you mention, it is difficult for victim nations to take effective deterrence measures to convince China to change their behavior, since many measures that might cause China to feel a pinch would hurt the parties imposing sanctions just as much.

Moreover, "eye for an eye" is taken off the table by the asymmetric nature of the threat, and passive defense is taken away by the interconnected nature of the Internet. Sure, the U.S. and its critical industries can do better as far as defense, but so far it's been a case of "the bomber will always get through".

There were saying exactly the same thing for European powers just before World War I started.

The same things almost to the letter, actually: "The economic interdependence between industrial countries meant that war would be economically harmful to all the countries involved."

From this boom for one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion , but there were many other sources with similar thinking.

ding that's the crux of it. people want something that makes them feel good, which often isn't something you can quantify in a lab. so rather than trying to build a better headphone, beats built the equivalent of a booming car stereo strapped to your head, and that evokes a very specific emotional response for most of their customers.

I tested them out. It was horrible, it sounded almost like what it sounds like when a stereo headphone jack is only partially inserted -- on three different devices and two different pairs of headphones.

They suck and are a major ripoff.

Not to say that Beats are great or anything, but applying a bass boost to something with a flat response is not going to produce better bass than housing, speaker, etc that all resonate together at the right frequency.

I think that if people want a strong bass, they should listen to music that has strong bass and use headphones that will accurately reproduce it.

If they want music that doesn't have strong bass to sound like it does, well that's the role of the equalizer, not the headphones. The role of the headphones is to take whatever signal they're given and accurately reproduce it.

Not true. Engineers working in pop and hip hop mix primarily with the understanding that the first listen by a consumer will be on the radio in their car. This has several built-in assumptions, and the expectation of lots of sub bass being reproduce-able is not among them. Sales of records are heavily affected by how good the song sounds on the radio, and most people have the audio equipment that came with their car.

Not only that, the next stage of music marketing evolution is earbuds. So, if one were to mix for the next most popular method of getting your music into the ears of consumers, you'd mix with the expectation of being heard first through cheap earbuds.

Engineers mix knowing that their tracks will be played on a wide variety of equipment, from very bad to very good. The more accurate their equipment is, the better they'll be able to serve all of those listeners. But, the best results will always come from having accurate equipment for playing it back.

The bottom line is that virtually all playback systems that exist in the real world are nothing remotely like an accurate studio monitor. The engineer is always concerned with how the mix translates to different systems. In this process accurate monitoring is profoundly helpful, but that doesn't mean the engineer expects any listeners to have such a system.

Have you seen the actual frequency response curves of headphones? They are by no means flat! They can approach flat from 20-20k, but there are always trade offs, at least until you get to certain price points.

What is good or bad sound is largely subjective and socially conditioned. The expectations around binaural recordings of natural sound are very different from highly produced studio production. What is bad in one context is good in another and vice versa. And while I'd go for headphones with better frequency response, it's not the be-all end all measurement either.

Yes. And, as I said: Most cheap products accidentally fail at this goal.

It costs a bit of money to produce a quality transducer that is stable, reliably mass-produced, and lasts a long time. Not as much for headphones as for larger transducers, however. For $100 you can buy any of several models that are extremely accurate (compared to what $100 would buy you in speakers). Sennheiser, Shure, AKG, and Audio Technica all offer several models in the $50-$100 range that will destroy Beats offerings at even much higher price points.

See this sound on sound article for more (and why you might want a mixing desk)

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/articles/yamahans10.ht...

It is true that for a decade or two, the NS10 was the monitor on which more records were produced than any other. And, they are reasonably accurate. There are more accurate speakers than the NS10, even at similar prices, but part of the value of the NS10 was that you'd have them wherever you were working. The mastering engineer would have a pair of them, too, so you'd know everybody in the path from tracking to cutting the master would be hearing roughly the same thing. But, it's worth mentioning that I've never been in a professional studio that only had a pair of NS10s. They were considered the sanity check speakers...not the speakers used for all of your mixing and such.

Anyway, the newer models (HS series or MSP series) from Yamaha might be a good choice, if you want good reference monitors.

I've heard producers and studio engineers say that if something sounds good on NS10s, it'll sound good on anything.

In a noisy environment though, they just can't compete. Yes, the 770 Pro have excellent passive isolation characteristics, but they do absolutely nothing for low frequencies [0] whereas the QC15 achieves 20db [1]. This makes all the difference in the world when you're trying to escape into music while flying.

I know what you mean about active noise cancelling being fatiguing. I've been lured into noise cancellation before, only to be repelled by the strange feeling of pressure within the ear. I wouldn't have given a moment's consideration to the QC15 had I not been loaned a pair by a friend. I'm not going to say the QC15 are perfect for everyone, but to my ears the pressure phenomenon is pretty much nonexistent. I've worn them for an entire 13 hour flight without a moment's discomfort.

[0] http://www.innerfidelity.com/images/BeyerdynamicDT770.pdf

Say if there is a device that offers 99.9% accuracy but is used to screen a disease that occurs 1 in 100,000, then applying your logic would mean out of the 100 people who were identified positive, only 1 actually was accurate, thus makes the actual result of the device 99% false.

The 85% here is likely to refer to that out of the positive results, there is a 15% false-positive rate.

Amazon on the other hand continues to build out enormous infrastructure both for Amazon Web Services and Amazon.com. AWS is also in something of a price was with Google right now with various headlines today somewhat hyperbolically predicting that cloud services were headed towards essentially free. That said, Amazon is arguably building a huge (and costly) moat around its business.