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Thoughts on the New Crop of Ogg Aware Players?
Steve Andre' asks: " Given the approaching season, I'm wondering if many have used and have opinions about the new Ogg Vorbis capable portable players out there. What I'd like to find is at least a CD/MP3/Ogg capable player which sounds good and doesn't do 'odd' things. What's it like out there? Can I finally roast my Ogg files and take them with me for a walk?"
yea! lada deee deee deee da! DOO DOO DEEE!
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I used to work as a consultant for a Fortune 500 company (more than 10,000 employees). As an expert in the field of IT
.NET Framework at the kernel level. I didn't use C, because contrary to popular belief, ASP and .NET VB compiler produces code that is more portable and faster than C.
consulting, I think I can shed a little light on the current climate of the open source community, and Linux in particular.
The main reason that open source software, and Linux in particular, is failing is due to the underlying immaturity of the
technology and the perception of the viral GNU license.
I know that the above statements are strong, but I have hard facts to back it up with. At the Fortune 500 company that I
worked for, we wanted to leverage the power of Linux and associated open source technologies to benefit our server pool. The
perception that Linux is "free" was too much to ignore. I recommended to the company that we use the newest version of
Linux, version 9.0. My expectations were high that it would outperform our current solution at the time, Windows2000, which
was doing an absolutely superb job (and still is!) serving as web, DNS, and FTP servers.
I felt that I was up to the job to convert the entire server pool to the Linux technology. I had several years experience
programming VB, C#, ASP, and
VB can go just as low level as C can, and the latest
I took it upon myself to configure and compile all of the necessary shareware versions of software that we needed, including
sendmail, apache, and BIND. I even used the latest version of gcc (3.1) to increase the execution time of the binaries.
After a long chain of events, the results of the system were less than impressive..
The first bombshell to hit my project was that my client found out from another consultant that the GNU community has close
ties to former communist leaders. Furthermore, he found out that the 'x' in Linux was a tribute to the former Communist
philosopher, Karl Marx, whose name also ends in 'x'. The next bombshell to hit my project was the absolutely horrible
performance. I knew from the beginning that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but I had always been told by my colleagues
that it was better suited for a "server". As soon as I replaced all of the Windows2000 servers with Linux servers, the Linux
servers immediately went into swap. Furthermore, almost all of the machines were quad-processor x86 servers. We had no idea
that Linux had such awful SMP support. After less than 1 day in service, I was constantly having to restart servers, because
for some reason, many of the servers were experiencing kernel panics caused by mod_perl crashing apache! The hardship did
not end there! Apparently, the version of BIND installed on the server pool was remotely exploitable. Soon after we found
that out, a new worm was remotely infecting all of our servers! We were not expecting this, because our IIS servers running
on Windows2000 had never experienced a worm attack. Microsoft has always provided us with patches in the unlikely event that
an exploit was found. It took us hundreds of man-hours just to disinfect our Linux servers! After just 48 hours of operating
Linux servers in our server pool, we had exhausted our budget for the entire year! It was costing us approximately 75% more
to run Linux than Windows2000.
Needless to say, I will not be recommending Linux to any of my Fortune 500 clients. In the beginning, we thought that since
Linux was such "old" technology, it would be more mature than anything on the market. We also found out the hard way that
rag-tag volunteer efforts responsible for Apache and BIND simply are not able to compete with the professional operations of
Microsoft. I guess the old saying is true; "You get what you pay for!" Needless to say, I will be using Microsoft's "shared
license" solution for my enterprise clients, rather than the communist GNU license.
As it stands now, I d
There's more than one?
Very insightful comment.
gnarle Gnarble young one.
your Spirit Flies Free. The jihad Is not Werth pErsuit//.k Keep up grand job Mr Coward,, the rivirs In Moscow Are beautiful This Summer---
-eot-
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Join the jihad today!How many stupid posts will say "But does it play ogg!?"
Nah maybe they'll switch to "Does it play Flac ?"
Or maybe "But is it compatible with iTunes !?"
I've used several commercially available Ogg Vorbis players, and I've not been pleased with any of them. On the other hand, I've used players for both the MP3 and WMA formats and have been very pleased.
Every Ogg Vorbis player I've used complains about the songs being encoded at too high of a bitrate, doesn't play at all claiming the files are corrupted, plays the audio in a very choppy way, or plays at a very poor quality. A ~192 kbps Ogg Vorbis file sounds very similar, played over the hardware I used, to a 64 kbps MP3 file. They're nothing but trouble, in my experiences, and consume batteries at least 30% quicker than their MP3 and CD playing counterparts.
I've been very pleased with the MP3 players I've used, which provide the same quality as I expect from playing such files on my computer.
But the winner has to be the WMA files which play at an exceptional quality and I've had absolutely no trouble. If I was recommending a format to someone to buy a player for, it would have to be WMA.
I respect the ideals of the open format that Ogg Vorbis is, but at this point in time, Ogg Vorbis players are worthless. Your money is much better spent on a MP3 or WMA player.
The solution is to stop using ogg. It's just a bad mp3 pretending to be avi, and the file sizes are too big and bloated. Get a real audio encoding format or stop listening to music, which you probably pirated anyway.
Since they *still* haven't released official specs, you don't have much choice about it.
"As a Christian, as a human being, I just want to have a pleasant, civil conversation with you..." (because you are apparently sub-Christian and subhuman)
"I don't force people to believe what I believe... I don't mock others with different beliefs..." (because I am better than you)
I sure hope you don't mock others with different beliefs. My belief is that you are a hypocritical spaz. Have a pleasant, civil discussion with some of that shit, biiyotch.