MP3 is a file format. The algorithm used to arrive at this format varies, as does the sound quality.
That's like saying, "If two chefs output the same kind of omelette, how would one taste better than the other? This is like the great egg debate, farm fresh eggs with Government Grade AAA certificates versus Kwik-E-Mart corner-store eggs past their expiration dates. Which is better. Strangely enough with OMX testing no one can tell."
Anyways, if you don't believe me, you should try some different chefs^H^H^H^H^Hencoders for yourself. I'll bet ya $5 you can tell them apart.
I can't wait for Freenet to get out of beta. According to the documentation:
IMPORTANT WARNING ----------------- This release of Freenet is a proof-of-concept to test scalability and routing. It does not (yet) provide any meaningful security! Please do not insert or request any material which would place you at risk if your anonymity were compromised. If you require strong anonymity, please wait for the next release. However, if you want to help us test and develop the system, please carry on!
BladeEnc was the first encoder I used for encoding my albums into MP3. I've converted approximately 1/5 of my CD collection (maybe 70 albums), using Blade as well as the Lame encoder, and they both sound excellent at the right bitrates.
I noticed that the legal trouble has been going on for quite some time. I was perusing the BladeEnc site again looking for graphical frontends a couple months ago (yeah, I know it's not 'leet - pshaw), which was when I first noticed the message.
It's troubling to me that so many smaller sites are becoming pressured into removing or self-censoring their own work, but I guess it's better than having the sites shut down entirely.
Hopefully Freenet will be able to get their work out of beta and garner some support, before the web is completely sucked of life, fun, and excitement. In the meantime, it would be cool if some of the e-conomy's Instant Winners would help out by setting up some legal funds.
Hey, thank you very much for the help, Les. It's cool to see someone who actually will give up moderating a story because they happen to know the answer to a (some would say "dumb") question.;-)
Here's a funny little story: I hit "post", looked at the clock here (4:18 AM I think), went to sleep. Woke up at about 11:00, and thought, "Hey, I wonder if my post has any replies!"
Come into my server room, the WAN light on my poor little Cisco is convulsing uncontrollably; my site is down (of course)...
Anyway, from one simple four o'clock in the morning post, I got one flame, one joke, one post trying to justify the aforementioned joke, a denial-of-service attack, and one real, honest-to-goodness actual response! Pretty good, hunh?
And to think that some people say the *BSD "community" is just a bunch of 'leet snobs...I haven't the foggiest where they'd get that idea.;-)
Anyway, I think I'll try to run the Slash code on OpenBSD... hopefully if I have problems, I can find people (like Les) who can help. Thanks again!
OK, so I am going to be installing the Slash code to run a portion of my web site. My major question of the day (Or at least my Major 4:00 AM Question of the Day) is:
Can I run the Slash code on a *BSD? If so, does it require any special considerations?
What does Slashdot use for their server OS? They credit Debian and Red Hat on the Slash Code Site, but I haven't seen what they are using. I'd really be interested in finding out what distro it is, not because I'd necessarily use it, but because it might help me decode the Slash documentation. I've run Caldera, Mandrake, and SuSE before, but I'm willing to try others of course.
Anyway, I was also considering running OpenBSD or FreeBSD as my web server OS for Dragonfly Dynamix, but then I decided in the car today on the way home that I wanted to run the Slash code...
Anyway, I know this is slightly off-topic, but I at least nailed the right forum. Right? Guys? Right?
Is it just me, or is the article splitting, coupled with the increasingly awful grammatical errors, annoying enough to make other people stop going to tomshardware.com?
I don't care if he is a "doctor"; he needs to take a remedial English class.
I have a couple thoughts that probably aren't going to jibe with the rest of the (more market-related) comments, so I'm starting a new thread.
Does anyone know why the fabs for the higher density modules (i.e. 256 and 512 Mb) are taking so long to come online? I can get 256 MB modules at a price premium, but they seem to be taking their time getting to market. I have yet to see a consumer box ship with a single 256 MB chip, as opposed to two 128's which I see all the time.
Doesn't Moore's Law apply to memory fabrication as well as processor fabs? When the graphics chipset makers like nVidia are able to cut the product cycles time to 6-12 months, instead of 12-18, as Moore predicted so famously, why is there such a holdup in the memory market? Is it because memory isn't quite as glamorous and, dare I say, sexy as graphics or CPUs?
Anyway, what would be ideal would be to see a few high density fabs come online and start pushing out the 256 and 512 MB modules. Otherwise, we're going to keep getting whiplash trying to track the prices of 128 MB SDRAM.
Why this hasn't happened (Taiwan earthquake? Poor market analysis?) yet is beyond me.
Ahh, thanks for the tip... sigh. I was kind of wondering what I could do with the Performa. Any suggestions? Would MKLinux be a decent distro for a web or DNS server, or a possibly a light mail server?
Anyways, thanks for letting me know! I'm glad I'm not off on some wild goose chase tonight...;-)
I had thought that the MacOS multitasking, at least, was kind of a kludgey patch. Maybe I'm wrong, but the few times I've been on a Mac lately the only thing that happens when I try to multi-task is that it crashes.
Threading, I'd have to say definitely not; and while MacOS supports multiple processes, it is truly a kludge that was added on as an afterthought.
But....I just got a Performa 6116cd from a friend; I'm gonna go ahead now and try to put that there Yellow Dog on it; thanks for the lead! I can't wait to benchmark it against x86 boxen, since the tests I always see are skewed to the point of uselessness.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I had a significant period of time in my late teens (I'm 26 now) where my computer skills were completely dormant. I'd played with computers since the days of the Apple II (1981) until around 1990, when I finally got sick of getting made fun of for being a nerd.
So, for about six years, I didn't touch computers except to write papers for school possibly. Instead, I learned how to play the guitar, how to talk to women, what parties were, and what it means to be an artist. (This, too, is on-topic; I'm just speaking for myself!)
When I finally got around to working with computers again it was like rediscovering a long-lost friend. I also experienced the added bonus of bringing a strong sense of design, clarity, and a little bit of wisdom into what had previously been a "geek" domain.
Now, I use the computer as a set of tools for self-expression, and I'm able to help other people who aren't as technically oriented use computers, as well.
I think that you may be underestimating the number of people who have had long periods of time when they didn't use their computer skills, and how that can actuallly help you be a better programmer. I know that letting my skills lay dormant helped them grow into a stronger overall grasp of what I'd like to accomplish.;-)
Personally, I want to learn how to be a better programmer for a complex combination of reasons. Some of these are practical, and some of them are not.;-)
The practical reasons can be summarized in two words. I'm lazy. I know from personal experience that some extremely repetitive, tedious jobs can be automated, to the point where it takes 1/2 an hour to do what took the previous employee 8 hours to do. This obviously makes the work easier, less boring, less time-consuming, and somewhat more lucrative.
The drawbacks to this are that the institution whose workflow you streamlined starts to expect you to do even more work, as the norm, and they expect you to train others to streamline their workflow, etc. It sort of sucks, because they hardly ever compensate you fairly for increasing a department's efficiency by, say, 400%.
The other side of programming, in my experience, are the true artists and mages of the computer world; the people who have such an intimate knowledge of an architecture that they can find entirely new forms and mediums within them.
Steve Wozniak, who orchestrated the construction and customized the design of stock components into fully functional Personal Computers, comes to mind. The artistry and complexity of a design like the Apple computer is no small feat.
The programmers of Adventure!, the first text-based game and precursor to every MUD ever created, took a complex, "serious" tool, and made it into a world that drew people inside. Infocom, with Zork, continued this trend by bringing those types of programs to the masses. What better way to get someone involved in technology, than to introduce them to entirely new worlds to explore?
When the two sides of programming meet, though; this is where the true miracles occur. The practical side of email, which many people don't understand the complexity of well enough to appreciate the programming side, is all fine and good for business purposes.
However, the true miracle is that email has become easy enough (remember Pine?) and ubiquitous enough that we can use it to communicate across borders, with familiy and friends that would be lost, or forgotten, otherwise.
Really, the programmers that I respect the most walked the line between the practical, functionality-oriented world, and the mystical, immersive, transcendant world, and created systems and programs that either side could see the value of. That's my goal.
Wow, this calls for a celebration! I can't think of anything that would be more gratifying than having Linux be chosen to power such a high-profile, "officially-condoned" cluster. Although it probably will make some of the people in the/. community sad, to see their labor of love go "establishment" so quickly, I personally think it's very cool.
All the IPO's, the media hype, and the whiplash publicity have shattered any hope of the Linux community remaining a small-ish group of unrecognized collaborators, but there must be Something Else out there... a new toy to play with...
"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all- nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you:-)"
-Linus Torvalds, October 5, 1991.
Anyways, congratulations to everybody who helped shape Linux into what it is today. I'm not going to claim to be an old-school kernel junkie or anything, but even those of us who got here late can appreciate the odds of succeeding at something like this.
Steve? Steve Woston??? I didn't know you were on Slashdot! You're my favorite programmer!
Spork II was one of the best games ever! And the Nokia games you wrote kick ass!
I love to play those Nokia games on my phone when I'm sitting in traffic. I especially love "Traellern Under the Bridge", it is very whimsical and fresh.
Anyways, it's good to see you're not dead or living on the streets or something. I don't know what these other posters are talking about. I can pull up www.jjjulius.com just fine on my browser.
After reading a bit about the dispute I'm still not convinced Chuck D is in the wrong, although I can appreciate your viewpoint, given Public Enemy's history.
If anyone is interested, the actual lyrics to the song can be found here.
Anyway, my interpretation of the lyrics is that Chuck D is sick of industry moguls in general making huge profits through unfair recording contracts with black musicians.
The Anti-Defamation Leagues's press release detailing their concerns can be found here.
Just because someone chooses to create an art form by collaborating with someone else, does not make that they share the same opinions about everything.
I don't (personally) like the opinions Professor Griff expressed, either; but I try not to assign those negative attributes to everyone in PE, nor to their audience.
For the most part, Chuck D has always been a solidly moral individual, with more sense than 90% of pop superstars.
Does the Coriolis Effect have any influence over the operation of these? One would think there would be gyroscopic forces at work here...
Does anyone remember "Shipstones" from Heinlein's books? They were a super-efficient non-lossy energy storage unit, which were so sophisticated in design that the inventor didn't even bother to get a patent, because (supposedly) they were almost impossible to reverse-engineer.
Heh; well, you can't be right about everything, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying, "If two chefs output the same kind of omelette, how would one taste better than the other? This is like the great egg debate, farm fresh eggs with Government Grade AAA certificates versus Kwik-E-Mart corner-store eggs past their expiration dates. Which is better. Strangely enough with OMX testing no one can tell."
Anyways, if you don't believe me, you should try some different chefs^H^H^H^H^Hencoders for yourself. I'll bet ya $5 you can tell them apart.
BladeEnc was the first encoder I used for encoding my albums into MP3. I've converted approximately 1/5 of my CD collection (maybe 70 albums), using Blade as well as the Lame encoder, and they both sound excellent at the right bitrates.
I noticed that the legal trouble has been going on for quite some time. I was perusing the BladeEnc site again looking for graphical frontends a couple months ago (yeah, I know it's not 'leet - pshaw), which was when I first noticed the message.
It's troubling to me that so many smaller sites are becoming pressured into removing or self-censoring their own work, but I guess it's better than having the sites shut down entirely.
Hopefully Freenet will be able to get their work out of beta and garner some support, before the web is completely sucked of life, fun, and excitement. In the meantime, it would be cool if some of the e-conomy's Instant Winners would help out by setting up some legal funds.
Here's a funny little story: I hit "post", looked at the clock here (4:18 AM I think), went to sleep. Woke up at about 11:00, and thought, "Hey, I wonder if my post has any replies!"
Come into my server room, the WAN light on my poor little Cisco is convulsing uncontrollably; my site is down (of course)...
Anyway, from one simple four o'clock in the morning post, I got one flame, one joke, one post trying to justify the aforementioned joke, a denial-of-service attack, and one real, honest-to-goodness actual response! Pretty good, hunh?
And to think that some people say the *BSD "community" is just a bunch of 'leet snobs...I haven't the foggiest where they'd get that idea. ;-)
Anyway, I think I'll try to run the Slash code on OpenBSD... hopefully if I have problems, I can find people (like Les) who can help. Thanks again!
OK, so I am going to be installing the Slash code to run a portion of my web site. My major question of the day (Or at least my Major 4:00 AM Question of the Day) is:
Can I run the Slash code on a *BSD? If so, does it require any special considerations?
What does Slashdot use for their server OS? They credit Debian and Red Hat on the Slash Code Site, but I haven't seen what they are using. I'd really be interested in finding out what distro it is, not because I'd necessarily use it, but because it might help me decode the Slash documentation. I've run Caldera, Mandrake, and SuSE before, but I'm willing to try others of course.
Anyway, I was also considering running OpenBSD or FreeBSD as my web server OS for Dragonfly Dynamix, but then I decided in the car today on the way home that I wanted to run the Slash code...
Anyway, I know this is slightly off-topic, but I at least nailed the right forum. Right? Guys? Right?
*gulp*
*Watches Karma plummet...*
=P
I don't care if he is a "doctor"; he needs to take a remedial English class.
Does anyone know why the fabs for the higher density modules (i.e. 256 and 512 Mb) are taking so long to come online? I can get 256 MB modules at a price premium, but they seem to be taking their time getting to market. I have yet to see a consumer box ship with a single 256 MB chip, as opposed to two 128's which I see all the time.
Doesn't Moore's Law apply to memory fabrication as well as processor fabs? When the graphics chipset makers like nVidia are able to cut the product cycles time to 6-12 months, instead of 12-18, as Moore predicted so famously, why is there such a holdup in the memory market? Is it because memory isn't quite as glamorous and, dare I say, sexy as graphics or CPUs?
Anyway, what would be ideal would be to see a few high density fabs come online and start pushing out the 256 and 512 MB modules. Otherwise, we're going to keep getting whiplash trying to track the prices of 128 MB SDRAM.
Why this hasn't happened (Taiwan earthquake? Poor market analysis?) yet is beyond me.
The default configurations at those prices are $1538 for 512 MB (upgradeable to 1 GB) and $9840 for 4 GB (upgradeable to 8).
I'm curious; does anyone think that having an external power supply on the RAM drives make them worth the price premium over a software RAM drive?
Hopefully the prices will drop as the next generation of SDRAM factories comes online... ;-)
Screwing the Record Company's Bloated Distribution Channel: $8.50 per CD.
I'd say that the band is lucky that he's going so easy on them. Coulda been the other way around.
Anyways, thanks for letting me know! I'm glad I'm not off on some wild goose chase tonight... ;-)
Which is part of the reason I'm only buying Compactflash Type II peripherals... So when I can afford a Microdrive, it'll work with what I got. =P
Thanks!
I had thought that the MacOS multitasking, at least, was kind of a kludgey patch. Maybe I'm wrong, but the few times I've been on a Mac lately the only thing that happens when I try to multi-task is that it crashes.
Threading, I'd have to say definitely not; and while MacOS supports multiple processes, it is truly a kludge that was added on as an afterthought.
But....I just got a Performa 6116cd from a friend; I'm gonna go ahead now and try to put that there Yellow Dog on it; thanks for the lead! I can't wait to benchmark it against x86 boxen, since the tests I always see are skewed to the point of uselessness.
So, for about six years, I didn't touch computers except to write papers for school possibly. Instead, I learned how to play the guitar, how to talk to women, what parties were, and what it means to be an artist. (This, too, is on-topic; I'm just speaking for myself!)
When I finally got around to working with computers again it was like rediscovering a long-lost friend. I also experienced the added bonus of bringing a strong sense of design, clarity, and a little bit of wisdom into what had previously been a "geek" domain.
Now, I use the computer as a set of tools for self-expression, and I'm able to help other people who aren't as technically oriented use computers, as well.
I think that you may be underestimating the number of people who have had long periods of time when they didn't use their computer skills, and how that can actuallly help you be a better programmer. I know that letting my skills lay dormant helped them grow into a stronger overall grasp of what I'd like to accomplish. ;-)
Your first goal, on the other hand, sounds familiar...it's my goal too.
The practical reasons can be summarized in two words. I'm lazy. I know from personal experience that some extremely repetitive, tedious jobs can be automated, to the point where it takes 1/2 an hour to do what took the previous employee 8 hours to do. This obviously makes the work easier, less boring, less time-consuming, and somewhat more lucrative.
The drawbacks to this are that the institution whose workflow you streamlined starts to expect you to do even more work, as the norm, and they expect you to train others to streamline their workflow, etc. It sort of sucks, because they hardly ever compensate you fairly for increasing a department's efficiency by, say, 400%.
The other side of programming, in my experience, are the true artists and mages of the computer world; the people who have such an intimate knowledge of an architecture that they can find entirely new forms and mediums within them.
Steve Wozniak, who orchestrated the construction and customized the design of stock components into fully functional Personal Computers, comes to mind. The artistry and complexity of a design like the Apple computer is no small feat.
The programmers of Adventure!, the first text-based game and precursor to every MUD ever created, took a complex, "serious" tool, and made it into a world that drew people inside. Infocom, with Zork, continued this trend by bringing those types of programs to the masses. What better way to get someone involved in technology, than to introduce them to entirely new worlds to explore?
When the two sides of programming meet, though; this is where the true miracles occur. The practical side of email, which many people don't understand the complexity of well enough to appreciate the programming side, is all fine and good for business purposes.
However, the true miracle is that email has become easy enough (remember Pine?) and ubiquitous enough that we can use it to communicate across borders, with familiy and friends that would be lost, or forgotten, otherwise.
Really, the programmers that I respect the most walked the line between the practical, functionality-oriented world, and the mystical, immersive, transcendant world, and created systems and programs that either side could see the value of. That's my goal.
All the IPO's, the media hype, and the whiplash publicity have shattered any hope of the Linux community remaining a small-ish group of unrecognized collaborators, but there must be Something Else out there... a new toy to play with...
-Linus Torvalds, October 5, 1991.
Anyways, congratulations to everybody who helped shape Linux into what it is today. I'm not going to claim to be an old-school kernel junkie or anything, but even those of us who got here late can appreciate the odds of succeeding at something like this.
Spork II was one of the best games ever! And the Nokia games you wrote kick ass!
I love to play those Nokia games on my phone when I'm sitting in traffic. I especially love "Traellern Under the Bridge", it is very whimsical and fresh.
Anyways, it's good to see you're not dead or living on the streets or something. I don't know what these other posters are talking about. I can pull up www.jjjulius.com just fine on my browser.
If anyone is interested, the actual lyrics to the song can be found here.
Anyway, my interpretation of the lyrics is that Chuck D is sick of industry moguls in general making huge profits through unfair recording contracts with black musicians.
The Anti-Defamation Leagues's press release detailing their concerns can be found here.
Just because someone chooses to create an art form by collaborating with someone else, does not make that they share the same opinions about everything.
I don't (personally) like the opinions Professor Griff expressed, either; but I try not to assign those negative attributes to everyone in PE, nor to their audience.
For the most part, Chuck D has always been a solidly moral individual, with more sense than 90% of pop superstars.
Does anyone remember "Shipstones" from Heinlein's books? They were a super-efficient non-lossy energy storage unit, which were so sophisticated in design that the inventor didn't even bother to get a patent, because (supposedly) they were almost impossible to reverse-engineer.
Heh; well, you can't be right about everything, I guess...
Seriously, the people reading at +2 should be able to read this, it's well done.