Internal sites can be browser specific. And if you can go crazy with IE DIV's SPAN's and VBScript you can make one hell of a k-rad page in about 1 hour. I was doing that about 5 months ago, the problem is that now I hate making browser independent code, doing everything in TABLE's and still not having it look right is really frustrating.
In IE you can do an amazing amount of cool shit, the DHTML support is mind blowing, it's putting VB and MFC out of business because you may as well just do it in IE, it's faster to develop, looks better, and most likely have less bugs.
Remember, alcohol is a narcotic, it's highly addictive. Millions of people WANT to stop drinking, but they can't just stop. What the liquor companies do to their alcohol [prices] has a high impact on this number of people, plus it is more lethal.
This also affects people who take in alcohol second hand, don't forget that. Hundreds of thousands of people die from second hand drinking/driving.
Liquor companies certainly are not innocent here. They are morally, and legally partly responsible for this.
Can you think of a better way to make a graph of net usage?
Anyway, I'm really happy Justin did this, I've been a big fan of his for some time. It's really assume to see his code. It's relatively compressed and logical, also it's good to see how win32 code is written by people outside of Microsoft, after all 99% of the win32 code you WILL see is from Microsoft source examples. Those examples range widely in quality, and are never for anything very cool.
I've never seen a dev team larger then 7 people. Even with something like Win2k, you'll have something like 100, 2-7 people teams. Each team will have 6 Managers, 10 testers, and 1 person that is just sort of "there".
this guy is a manager/pm.. check out this passage...
We've tried not to take an "ivory tower" approach to engineering C# and the.Net framework. We can't afford to rewrite all of our software. The industry just can't afford it, especially now when we're moving on Internet time. You've got to leverage what you have, and so I think interoperability is just key
Ya VB does suck. I used to be a VB monkey, I was one for about 3 years. I got pretty darn good at it. I remember calling MS and asking a support guy when they we're going to fix something about variant arrays, or something like that...
Anyway, they main reason VB should die IMHO is because IE is just way better. Three weeks ago I was given a little project (very little), I had to make a calendar app. It needed to populate some fields in a database, and let this guy schedule events.
I did it in IE, there was no reason to use VB, it's a small app, I like VBScript better then VBA, and there would be less code for me to write, plus it would install-less and somewhat portable. Doing it in VB would require a decent amount of basic windowing, resizing windows, adding menu options, and of course.
So small apps I would do in IE, how about big apps? Naww, I wouldn't touch VB for much more then a window with a button in the middle.
I once wrote a large program in VB, it contained about 10.DLL, and 4.OCX's and a.exe that weighed in at 1 meg. Funny enough VB didn't work very well, lots of strange COM registration problems, lots of machine specific problems.
The reviewer forgot to mention that the Mambo-X is supossed to ship with VBR decoding, display the ID3 info and be able to see mp3s not the in the root directory. Any maybe someother stuff I can't remember.
The VBR is what sold me on it, I would hate to rencode some perfectly good 128-192kbit songs just to put them on a CD.
Freshports is an effort by the guy who did www.freebsddiary.org, which BTW is one of the most useful websites I have every encountered.
To spread a little *bsd advacocy, I like the fact that BSD isn't to poplar, it's not fragmented. If I have a problem with Apache 1.3.4 and FreeBSD 3.4, it's going to have "an answer", or at least a lot fewer answers then under a linux.
So I can go to freebsddiary and get the skinny on darn near anything, I want to setup ssh? No problem, how about apache+php4+ssl, no problem.
I've only been to freshports a few times, I run my server on FreeBSD and am much more concerned with new exploits then new programs I don't need to run or check out.
However, One chapter makes one an expert on mp3, not. The book talks NOTHING about how each of the filters and compressions levels work, how one implements audio masking, DCT etc... The only thing that chapter gives you enough detail to actually work with is the file format, which is more or less trivial.
The rest of the book is not technical, and at least for me completely useless.
MP3 -or- MPEG 2[.5] Audio Layer 3 is very similar to JPEG as is first uses a "Discrete Cosine Transform" or DCT then Quantization (the real lossy part), then Huffman encoding (pretty sure it's not LZW).
The interesting thing about audio compression is that, unlike video or image compression many of the techniques have been around for a long time. Many of the same methods carry over from traditional DSP in EE. Things like quadrature mirror filters and such.
To date, I still havn't found a good book on MP3's. This book gave you the skinny on the file format, which is trivial. Then goes on to talk about how he things X encoder is better then a BeOS Y encoder, etc... It's almost entirely an end users book. I would not recommend it for anyone who cares about the algorithms in MP3.
If you are really interested, I would recommend you talk to Monty from the OggVorbis project, he defiantly knows his shit; also you might want to look through the ISO demonstration source encoder for MP3. It's a lot cleaner then lame, or mpg123.
Moffitt, who is overseeing the project, is himself the creator of the open-source Icecast, a streaming MP3 technology similar to Nullsoft's Shoutcast, now owned by America Online. He came to iCast last year when the company acquired Net radio firm Green Witch.
Well from the copyrights at the top of the code I've looked at, a chap by the name of Monty has done all the work.
I think Moffit is working on implementing OggVorbis into icecast, but I seriously doubt he's "overseeing the project", as in leading it.
As someone else mentioned this has OggVorbis has already been "new" http://slashdot.org/articles/00/ 04/11/118219.shtml
Since then I have taken the time to actually check it out; compile the winamp plug-in, compile the encoder, browse through the mailing list archives
First off the code strikes me as very clean and well written, It looks like the guy knows what he's doing. Second he sounds like he knows what he's doing, he talks to people about the idiosyncrasies of audio compression, DSP etc... so I defiantly give the author props.
As for "how good is it". Well the skinny is that it's a little bigger then mp3, and a little lower quality, also encoding a 5 minute song a PII 500 took around 1/2 an hour. However REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked. This doesn't suck. And it's not even 1.0.
The author expects the low bitrate compression to surpass mp3, it's just a matter of time to get things finished.
Right now it looks like 90% of all the min-projects are done, they just finalized the bit stream format, xmms/winamp plugs only miss streaming support. And the command line project is nearing completion. Next I'm sure they will attempt to optimize it, and tweak the audio quality.
Somewhere in the mailing list I noticed the author was talking about how he kept the specifics of the quantization process open. Meaning it could be changed very easily, which in turn means that the compression could be very precisely tuned, that should be much more useful then simply picking bitrate/hz/stereo.
OggVorbis has the smell and feel of a next generation audio codec, It's open source, free and not owned by patents. I can't wait..
This is really off topic, but how do I get vim syntax highlighting working when telneting into my FreeBSD box? I sort of have it work, as the keywords are underlined and bold. I just can't get it to be color.
Personal box: Win2k. BeOS on a virtual drive. Linux and 98 on a VM Our server: FreeBSD 3.4 STABLE
I don't like KDE or Gnome, they're too immature, I also can't stand Mac's they crash far to often. So I use Win2k IMHO it's the best GUI in terms of stability and usefulness.
What about Linux? The vast majority of computer users--even professionals--want nothing to do with a command line. Witness the earlier success of Windows NT. Although Windows, Inc. makes Office available for Linux, the lack of a first-class unified graphical interface severely hobbles that platform for the majority of would-be users. People begin to realize that Linux has little to offer that Unix hasn't offered for years, and with Mac OS X's BSD core and Aqua interface running on cheap hardware, the needs of even die-hard geeks are being met. For those in the Open Source movement, Darwin is all they need
I can't disagree with the "most people don't want to use a command line part", but in a few years (which is what this guy is talking about) KDE or Gnome should be as far a long as Aqua. It seems to me KDE/Gnome are already ahead in the game. Lets break it down.
GUI: KDE/Gnome are already released, MacOS/X will be released, someday... I guess. KDE/Gnome 1, MacOS/X 0
Apps: Koffice and whatever Gnome is working on are already in beta ware, and somewhat workable. I don't think my brothers at MS have even starting working on an Office port to MacOS/X yet. KDE/Gnome 1, MacOS/X 0
..And of course some other comparisons.
Stability: While it's easy to assume that MacOS/X will be a rock. This is anything from fact. Let me remind you that NextStep is also a micro-kernel design, and is not nearly as stable as WinNT, and not even close to *nix. *nix 1, MacOS/X 0
Working well on x86: Ya right, it's taken Microsoft 10 years to half ass support everything out there. Linux can't do half of what's out there, and what it can do is a huge bitch to get working. It is absolutely absurd to think that MacOS/X is going to magically work perfectly on x86. nix 1/2, MacOS/X 0
Looking "eatable", well admittedly I have spent some nights just dreaming drooling over the Aqua movies and screen shots, so I can't take that away from them. But then again enlightenment also looks freakin sweet. *nix 1, MaxOS/X 1
Total: unix: 4 1/2. MaxOS/X: 1
Of course I'm biased. I've never used MaxOS/X, but then again nether has anyone else.
-Jon
Bugging Microsoft is useless.
on
IE For FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2
To bad no-one will see this because: A: BSD threads seem to get about 2 moderator points, total. B: this is off from the home page.
That being said..
Microsoft didn't really port IE to anything but Windows or Mac; they use MainSoft's Win32 port to port it to Solaris. MainSoft does not support Linux or FreeBSD (last time I checked). Therefore it would take a great deal more work to port.
So it seems unlikely Microsoft is going to go out of their way to support FreeBSD or linux and time soon. The only reason they ported it to Solaris is because MainSoft made it relatively painless for them.
People should petition for MainSoft to port their Win32 layer to other unix's, instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Wily Coyote Sling Shot Maneuver
beepbeep
It's actually codecs for the ACM, Audio Compression Manager, part of Win32.
And i'm sure someone will make a OggVorbis codec for windows, just as they already have one for winamp.
-Jon
Internal sites can be browser specific. And if you can go crazy with IE DIV's SPAN's and VBScript you can make one hell of a k-rad page in about 1 hour. I was doing that about 5 months ago, the problem is that now I hate making browser independent code, doing everything in TABLE's and still not having it look right is really frustrating.
In IE you can do an amazing amount of cool shit, the DHTML support is mind blowing, it's putting VB and MFC out of business because you may as well just do it in IE, it's faster to develop, looks better, and most likely have less bugs.
-Jon
Remember, alcohol is a narcotic, it's highly addictive. Millions of people WANT to stop drinking, but they can't just stop. What the liquor companies do to their alcohol [prices] has a high impact on this number of people, plus it is more lethal.
This also affects people who take in alcohol second hand, don't forget that. Hundreds of thousands of people die from second hand drinking/driving.
Liquor companies certainly are not innocent here. They are morally, and legally partly responsible for this.
I say we just legalize them all.
-Jon
Anyway, I'm really happy Justin did this, I've been a big fan of his for some time. It's really assume to see his code. It's relatively compressed and logical, also it's good to see how win32 code is written by people outside of Microsoft, after all 99% of the win32 code you WILL see is from Microsoft source examples. Those examples range widely in quality, and are never for anything very cool.
-Jon
-- Your favorite OS sucks
Here's one...
Consumer software - ALTAIR BASIC was in quite possibly the first software ever sold to consumers.
-Jon
-Jon
We've tried not to take an "ivory tower" approach to engineering C# and the .Net framework. We can't afford to rewrite all of our software. The industry just can't afford it, especially now when we're moving on Internet time. You've got to leverage what you have, and so I think interoperability is just key
-Jon
it's pretty much the whole freakin thing :)
-Jon
Ya VB does suck. I used to be a VB monkey, I was one for about 3 years. I got pretty darn good at it. I remember calling MS and asking a support guy when they we're going to fix something about variant arrays, or something like that...
.DLL, and 4 .OCX's and a .exe that weighed in at 1 meg. Funny enough VB didn't work very well, lots of strange COM registration problems, lots of machine specific problems.
Anyway, they main reason VB should die IMHO is because IE is just way better. Three weeks ago I was given a little project (very little), I had to make a calendar app. It needed to populate some fields in a database, and let this guy schedule events.
I did it in IE, there was no reason to use VB, it's a small app, I like VBScript better then VBA, and there would be less code for me to write, plus it would install-less and somewhat portable. Doing it in VB would require a decent amount of basic windowing, resizing windows, adding menu options, and of course.
So small apps I would do in IE, how about big apps? Naww, I wouldn't touch VB for much more then a window with a button in the middle.
I once wrote a large program in VB, it contained about 10
-Jon
The reviewer forgot to mention that the Mambo-X is supossed to ship with VBR decoding, display the ID3 info and be able to see mp3s not the in the root directory. Any maybe someother stuff I can't remember.
The VBR is what sold me on it, I would hate to rencode some perfectly good 128-192kbit songs just to put them on a CD.
btw: I don't think either run linux
-Jon
I ordered my MP3 CD thing about 2 months ago, no word yet.
Funny enough people on e-bay auction where to get information on where to buy these things.
amazeing.
-Jon
That is the funniet post i have seen in a long ass time, LOL
LOFL, no shit --
-Jon
Freshports is an effort by the guy who did www.freebsddiary.org, which BTW is one of the most useful websites I have every encountered.
To spread a little *bsd advacocy, I like the fact that BSD isn't to poplar, it's not fragmented. If I have a problem with Apache 1.3.4 and FreeBSD 3.4, it's going to have "an answer", or at least a lot fewer answers then under a linux.
So I can go to freebsddiary and get the skinny on darn near anything, I want to setup ssh? No problem, how about apache+php4+ssl, no problem.
I've only been to freshports a few times, I run my server on FreeBSD and am much more concerned with new exploits then new programs I don't need to run or check out.
I have a linux box for stuff like that.
-Jon
However, One chapter makes one an expert on mp3, not. The book talks NOTHING about how each of the filters and compressions levels work, how one implements audio masking, DCT etc... The only thing that chapter gives you enough detail to actually work with is the file format, which is more or less trivial.
The rest of the book is not technical, and at least for me completely useless.
-Jon
MP3 -or- MPEG 2[.5] Audio Layer 3 is very similar to JPEG as is first uses a "Discrete Cosine Transform" or DCT then Quantization (the real lossy part), then Huffman encoding (pretty sure it's not LZW).
The interesting thing about audio compression is that, unlike video or image compression many of the techniques have been around for a long time. Many of the same methods carry over from traditional DSP in EE. Things like quadrature mirror filters and such.
To date, I still havn't found a good book on MP3's. This book gave you the skinny on the file format, which is trivial. Then goes on to talk about how he things X encoder is better then a BeOS Y encoder, etc... It's almost entirely an end users book. I would not recommend it for anyone who cares about the algorithms in MP3.
If you are really interested, I would recommend you talk to Monty from the OggVorbis project, he defiantly knows his shit; also you might want to look through the ISO demonstration source encoder for MP3. It's a lot cleaner then lame, or mpg123.
-Jon
...As Jon trys to figure out why his foot tasts like leathor.....
I should have read the article
I apologize...
(note: this is the author people, moderate his ass up!!!)
Well from the copyrights at the top of the code I've looked at, a chap by the name of Monty has done all the work.
I think Moffit is working on implementing OggVorbis into icecast, but I seriously doubt he's "overseeing the project", as in leading it.
-Jon
As someone else mentioned this has OggVorbis has already been "new"
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/ 04/11/118219.shtml
Since then I have taken the time to actually check it out; compile the winamp plug-in, compile the encoder, browse through the mailing list archives
First off the code strikes me as very clean and well written, It looks like the guy knows what he's doing. Second he sounds like he knows what he's doing, he talks to people about the idiosyncrasies of audio compression, DSP etc... so I defiantly give the author props.
As for "how good is it". Well the skinny is that it's a little bigger then mp3, and a little lower quality, also encoding a 5 minute song a PII 500 took around 1/2 an hour. However REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked. This doesn't suck. And it's not even 1.0.
The author expects the low bitrate compression to surpass mp3, it's just a matter of time to get things finished.
Right now it looks like 90% of all the min-projects are done, they just finalized the bit stream format, xmms/winamp plugs only miss streaming support. And the command line project is nearing completion. Next I'm sure they will attempt to optimize it, and tweak the audio quality.
Somewhere in the mailing list I noticed the author was talking about how he kept the specifics of the quantization process open. Meaning it could be changed very easily, which in turn means that the compression could be very precisely tuned, that should be much more useful then simply picking bitrate/hz/stereo.
OggVorbis has the smell and feel of a next generation audio codec, It's open source, free and not owned by patents. I can't wait..
-Jon
-Jon
looks like rootPrompt has succumbed to the infamous ./ DDOS attack!
-Jon
This is really off topic, but how do I get vim syntax highlighting working when telneting into my FreeBSD box? I sort of have it work, as the keywords are underlined and bold. I just can't get it to be color.
Thanks,
-Jon
Actually my setup is as follows:
Personal box: Win2k. BeOS on a virtual drive. Linux and 98 on a VM
Our server: FreeBSD 3.4 STABLE
I don't like KDE or Gnome, they're too immature, I also can't stand Mac's they crash far to often. So I use Win2k IMHO it's the best GUI in terms of stability and usefulness.
-Jon
I can't disagree with the "most people don't want to use a command line part", but in a few years (which is what this guy is talking about) KDE or Gnome should be as far a long as Aqua. It seems to me KDE/Gnome are already ahead in the game. Lets break it down.
GUI: KDE/Gnome are already released, MacOS/X will be released, someday... I guess.
KDE/Gnome 1, MacOS/X 0
Apps: Koffice and whatever Gnome is working on are already in beta ware, and somewhat workable. I don't think my brothers at MS have even starting working on an Office port to MacOS/X yet.
KDE/Gnome 1, MacOS/X 0
Stability: While it's easy to assume that MacOS/X will be a rock. This is anything from fact. Let me remind you that NextStep is also a micro-kernel design, and is not nearly as stable as WinNT, and not even close to *nix.
*nix 1, MacOS/X 0
Working well on x86: Ya right, it's taken Microsoft 10 years to half ass support everything out there. Linux can't do half of what's out there, and what it can do is a huge bitch to get working. It is absolutely absurd to think that MacOS/X is going to magically work perfectly on x86.
nix 1/2, MacOS/X 0
Looking "eatable", well admittedly I have spent some nights just dreaming drooling over the Aqua movies and screen shots, so I can't take that away from them. But then again enlightenment also looks freakin sweet.
*nix 1, MaxOS/X 1
Total: unix: 4 1/2. MaxOS/X: 1
Of course I'm biased. I've never used MaxOS/X, but then again nether has anyone else.
-Jon
To bad no-one will see this because:
A: BSD threads seem to get about 2 moderator points, total.
B: this is off from the home page.
That being said..
Microsoft didn't really port IE to anything but Windows or Mac; they use MainSoft's Win32 port to port it to Solaris. MainSoft does not support Linux or FreeBSD (last time I checked). Therefore it would take a great deal more work to port.
So it seems unlikely Microsoft is going to go out of their way to support FreeBSD or linux and time soon. The only reason they ported it to Solaris is because MainSoft made it relatively painless for them.
People should petition for MainSoft to port their Win32 layer to other unix's, instead.
-Jon