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I sadly have to agree, and I've voiced the same objections for a long time. It really is like he tells it: it's just bad at everything it was intended to achieve. It's a source of bugs, it's horrendously complicated to support, and it's horrendously inefficient at anything but audio (and even then, not so good).

It seems to me, most of what went wrong was trying to support concatenation of Ogg streams. This is a nice idea, but actually quite a rare case. It's also incredibly naive for the specification document to request that Ogg implementation detect this. What, I'm supposed to scan the entire file in case that happens? No. I'll just not be compliant to that, thank you very much.

I even wrote my own Ogg/Vorbis decoder from scratch a while back (and dabble every now and then), and found Ogg to be a never-cooling, never-extinguishing steaming pile of hippo crap left over from consuming a dog. It just made everything so difficult to do. Seeking a stream involves divide-and-conquer - not necessarily a bad thing, but when you have huge streams the number of seeks can be bad. Not to mention if your stream has an endpoint the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Why oh why did they pick timestamps being at the END of a page and indicating the output byte count produced by the END of that page? That little detail alone probably cost me days of debug.

I almost gave up at one point and went to a container format of my own which would have worked much better. Header: 'CONTAINER v1'. Packet: 'MAGIC', 4 byte Length, 4 byte Output pos. Job done. The sad fact is, that's easier than Ogg, smaller than Ogg (unless you're talking really low bit rate), and does entirely the job of Ogg without the complexity.

I'm probably going to add a Matroska container to my codec just to see how easy they are to produce. The spec looks fantastic, but the devil's always in the details - although seeing the praise on various (engineer) forums, it looks like the way to go.

So, Ogg, please die. We need you to get out of the way.

Your objective is to Armchair engineers? Ok, well I'm not an armchair engineer. I've written my own Ogg/Vorbis decoder from scratch in the past (here). I've worked on codecs for about 10 years. I'm a fan of Vorbis and Theora, but Ogg needs to die a horrible death.

Ogg was by far the most bug-inducing part of the code. It's just AWFUL. It's ill-designed. It's incredibly complicated. It's inherently inefficient (copy sometimes required).

In short, it's the worst container format I've used in any serious application, and I've used pretty much all the common ones.

The irony of what you're saying, is that actually Ogg is what you'd end up with if an armchair engineer designed an audio codec container from scratch.

I reviewed the hp LaserJet 1320 on my web site. In short, it's cheap (maybe not under $300, but definitely under $400, and often discounted on Newegg), has awesome text quality and very good graphics quality, prints relatively quickly, duplexes (an uncommon feature in such a cheap printer!), and conserves toner (I haven't replaced the cartridge yet, in several years of use.

Imagine the Plinko board on The Price Is Right. the last 25% of the board (the EBD) could be equipped with gates, that according to current core / threads bings incoming jobs to a less heavily burdened core?

(/me doesn't get the The Price Is Right reference, but...) This is already done by the OS scheduler. It tries to keep an equal load on each core. But my issue is that the application doesn't know how many threads to spawn in the first place, and shouldn't need to know. It should only need to know how many tasks it has to do, and the OS/processor/libraries should work together to decide how many parallel threads should be running to get those tasks done.

BTW, I've posted a slightly bigger version of my original comment on my website: Thoughts on Multithreading.

Sylpheed is pretty nice. Back when I used GNOME, I tried it as my email client. Really nice, great performance on large folders. (Now I use mutt.)

I agree that the calculators have gotten much worse.

I would partially disagree, however, about the printers... I have had an hp LaserJet 1320 for a while, and I like it so far. (That's a link to a review on my web site.) Their tech support was also very nice, at least the one time I needed to talk to them. I can't speak for the inkjets, as I religiously avoid recommending inkjets to people (like my dad, who bought the 1320), because they eat cartridges.

Code Monkey.mp3 mirrored here.

picking through files and putting them on a CD is anal

Indeed, check out this site to reduce your pain.

Get a EPIA-M/nehemiah based VIA Mini-ITX system and run Freepia to get TiVo like functionality. It works great and you can also run a LiveCD version to get a taste of the system ;-) If you like it then you can install it. Discuss about it at http://freepia.shaibn.com

While you're at it, collect your useless use of cat award.

Spam is a social problem, just like any other type of fraud.

Yes, often the goods and/or services promoted through spam are fraud, but spam itself is not fraud. It is advertising.

As for the problem, I see it as a technical problem, as in "Why can't my damn service provider reject email with forged headers, from unsecured servers, from ISP's that are notorious for hosting spamers, and is obviously and easily recognised as spam by even the most half-assed filters? I guess I'll have to get my service somewhere else or check and filter it myself."

I haven't been "on the 'net" all that long (about seven years), but I still wonder when it happened that my fellow "netizens" started begging to be regulated. If you have a spam problem, do something about it. Learn something about the problems with open relays, irresponsible ISPs and how touse procmail to filter spam.

Help others learn by pointing them in the right direction.

Encourage your provider to take proper measures to stop spam from entering or exiting thier domain, and put pressure on other providers to do the same.

Don't use services that encourage spammers (Hotmail, AOL, MSN, Mail.com, etc)

Stop asking lawmakers who don't understand the problem to do something about it.

cat /dev/urandom | grep "Elsinore. A platform before the castle."

for about a year now. No luck yet, but much less feces to clean up than my last project.

Overkill. UUOC. Behold what my 386 can do with the appropriate choice of software:

ingram% fgrep 'Some wine' /dev/urandom
Some wine, ho!

And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink
A soldier's a man;
A life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.

Some wine, boys!