What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
The full text of the 2nd amendment is: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So, the part I don't understand is, if the people who wrote the bill of rights thought that everyone should always have the right to bear arms under any circumstances, then why did they put it in the context of a "well regulated Militia"?
I think that people should be allowed to own guns...but I think that background checks and waiting periods are very reasonable and definitely constitutional. I also think that a mandatory safety course wouldn't be a bad idea...after all, we have one for driving, why not gun ownership?
Re:speed and memory management
on
Mozilla 1.4b Loosed
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· Score: 3, Insightful
IMHO if the mozilla developers organized one thread or one fork per window - they would be better off. If they are interested in doing this - then they should change the way malloc() is handled.
What do you mean by "better off"? Would it fix bugs? Improve latency? Or what?
Ever heard of profiling? If you think that something's slow, or inefficient, you profile it to figure out where the inefficiencies are. Believe me, if malloc showed up on the list, it would have been optimized long ago (and from what I understand, Mozilla already does some pretty clever things with malloc).
You're trying to suggest a solution, when you haven't even established a problem. Until you have some gprof or cachegrind output proving that more malloc kung fu is needed, I doubt any Mozilla developers will listen to you.
Besides, your original premise is that Mozilla needs one thread per window. What about the networking thread? Do you know anything about how a modern web browser is implemented or are you just making up random junk?
Why would we donate money Daniel Peng? Yeah, he got screwed, but the fact is he settled rather than fight. I'd be willing to donate $ for his legal bills had he opted to fight the RIAA lawsuit -- but not now; why should we give him money to help pay the settlement, when it will go straight to the RIAA?
I gave him a few bucks because that could have been me in his shoes. I've written lots of programs, and plenty of them could be used for illegal activities, and it's not that hard to imagine being sued in this day and age because somebody else did something illegal with software I wrote and distributed.
It's easy for you to say that you would have fought it if it had been you, but how many of you would actually do so? What if that meant putting college on hold for a couple of years? Even if you could afford the legal defense, how would you keep yourself fed?
What if you were one of the four targetted by the RIAA, and the RIAA refused to accept a settlement unless all four students settled, and what if the other three students wanted to settle? I'm just trying to point out that it's not fair to judge Daniel Peng for settling under these extreme circumstances, especially when we don't know all of the details.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Nobody deserves to be in a situation like he was in just for writing some software that could be used for both legal and illegal activities.
It says exactly what it should say about SIMD speed: "how fast does regular C/Fortran code run when I compile it with a regular compiler". If the compiler can figure out how to transform, say, Fortran array code into SIMD, it will help the SPECmarks. If not, then whatever SIMD features the chip has are useless for most applications, in particular scientific applications. The exception are a few specially crafted apps like Photoshop plugins and MP3 encoders.
That's not true at all, considering that Apple has carefully optimized the vast majority of the system library functions that could benefit from Altivec, and provides routines like FFT, BLAS (matrix multiply), and other building blocks that usually represent the main bottlenecks for scientific applications.
The truth is that there is no single benchmark that gives you a good impression of a processor's features. PowerPC processors tend to perform about how you'd expect for their MHz speed, as is reflected in SPEC numbers, but then when you test code that takes advantage of Altivec, it performs 2-4x better. (In contrast, SSE and SSE2 on Intel chips don't see anywhere near that type of performance increase.)
Real-world applications, including scientific ones, tend to see performance somewhere in-between, since they usually call at least some functions that are Altivec-optimized, but do other things that are not.
Try audacity-help@lists.sourceforge.net - if you ask a reasonable question, the rest of the developers and I will be happy to answer it. Or if you want commercial-level support, one of us would be happy to consult. Or you can just take the source code to any other competent C++ developer and pay them to figure out your problem and/or fix it.
Besides the fact that you compared a Toshiba laptop with a 15" screen to a Powerbook with a 17" screen, you also neglected to compare the optical drives. The $3300 Powerbook you were comparing your Toshiba against comes with a SuperDrive - i.e. CDRW and DVD-R all in one drive. I'll bet your Toshiba doesn't have that.
A much better comparison would be against Apple's 15" Powerbook - with 512 MB of RAM and a 60 GB HD, it comes to $2450 - but it comes with a slot-loading CD-RW/DVD "combo" drive - again, I'll bet your Toshiba doesn't do that. Nor does your Toshiba have Gigabit Ethernet with automatic crossover, a built-in wireless antenna, or digital video out, right?
You might want to check the price at toshiba.com, too, because I certainly couldn't spec out anything with a 2.4 GHz processor for as low as $1600.
Re:CD is the problem, not wma, mp3 or ogg
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
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· Score: 1
CDs have flat sound to begin with when compared to analog masters. So in order to get "better than CD" quality you would have to rip from the master tape.
Steve Jobs claimed that they had gone back to the master tapes for some of the songs on the Apple Music Store. My guess is that it's a few of their "featured" classic albums.
If you use grip on linux, there have been very nice speed increases in the last year. My slow ass 24x cd-rom in my P3 500MHz Thinkpad will rip at 1.9x and encode at the same time at 1.4-1.6x
My Power Mac with a 733 MHz G4 can rip and encode a CD to MP3 at an average of 10x.
And Apple's MP3 encoder consistently gets high marks for quality.
As much as I like Ogg, it has a long way to go before it will be competitive with the competition.
Re:But what does it actually sound like???
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
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· Score: 1
I don't think graphs are all that useful for comparing lossy sound compression.
Amen! The whole point of audio compression is that our EARS are less sensitive to certain high frequencies under certain circumstances.
So it's meaningless to compare a compressed signal to the original VISUALLY - they SHOULD differ: the question is, can you HEAR the difference?
Are our mods on crack? No the problem is that this ISN'T priced better.. a buck a song is NO BETTER than what we currently pay when we buy an album at the store. The average album costs $12.50 in the US, the average album has more than 12 songs on it.
Therefore, the average album costs less than a buck a song.
This is so far from the truth that I don't know where to begin.
The only places I know where you can find a large number of CDs for $13 or less are Walmart, Best Buy, etc. But their selection is horrible - basically the top 50 plus some really mainstream stuff. You can't find any jazz, folk, classical, world music, broadway musicals, etc. there at all.
The only other option is to go to a CD store like Tower Records, Virgin, Wherehouse, Silver Platters, etc. - and guess what? They have the selection, but you'll pay $16.99 for most CDs.
I've already started using Apple's music service, and I'm sure I'll be spending hundreds of dollars there a year, for the following reasons:
1. Selection - already I've found a few albums there that I can't find in stores, or even on Amazon. Their selection will only improve over time.
2. Price - unless it's mainstream, $9.99 for an album is much cheaper than the $15+ you pay buying the album online, once you factor in shipping.
3. Individual songs - there are lots of songs I'd like to own without buying the whole album. As a jazz musician, it will be fun to buy seven different recordings of the same song every now and then, just to hear how many different ways there are of interpreting it.
4. Instant gratification - sometimes I'm in the mood for hearing a particular song RIGHT NOW and I can't stand having to wait until the CD arrives in the mail. Now I can buy it instantly!
Will I continue to buy CDs? Of course! I want the liner notes for some of my favorite artists, and sometimes a CD will be a better deal. But probably half of my purchases are going to switch over to Apple's service, especially assuming their selection only gets better from here.
So how about offering discounts if you buy the whole album? That or they start discounting slow moving songs. I can see a number of ways that this business might go.
If I'm going to pay $15 for 15 tracks, I want glossy cover art and a pressed (aka UV resistant) CD.
Most albums are available from Apple's download service for $9.99. They include cover art.
Apple's servers seem to have trouble displaying albums, but it works fine if you just use "Power Search" for everything. I haven't had any trouble listening to tracks; the 30-second previews sound great (much better than the RealAudio previews at Amazon.com). For some reason, just browsing seems to be broken right now.
But I would rather pay $300 for a tiny, ultralight player with 256-512MB than an ipod size 10GB player. Yes, the ipod is very small, light, and durable for a hard drive based player, but it will never come close to the size/weight/durability of flash players. Having something I can barely notice in my pocket is much more important than having every single MP3 I will ever own on hand at all times, even if this means loading new songs every 2 or 3 days (which is about how often I change the mp3 files on my flash players now).
Um, I have an original 5GB iPod, and it fits into my pocket, no problem. I hardly even notice it's there.
The new iPods weight about half as much and are a lot smaller.
I think you should borrow a friend's iPod for a day and see if you still want a Flash-based model. iPods are very tiny and lightweight - more so than they look in the pictures.
Am I the only one who can't access the new store using iTunes 4 because of timeouts? It looks like Apple's servers are collapsing due to high demand...
A lot of readers here seem to think that this new service is too expensive and doesn't offer enough features.
Guess what? That's what they said about the iPod...and the iPod was a huge success.
Is it perfect? No. But it's still way better than anything else out there. Same with Apple's music download service. Sure, I'd prefer MP3 or Ogg over AAC. Sure, I'd prefer less than 0.99 per song. But you know what? I'm going to buy a lot of songs from Apple, because a lot of the time their service is exactly what I've always wanted. The rest of the time I'll just order the CD.
Why not just call it Mozilla 2.0? Thats what is really is, the next major release of mozilla.
No, it isn't. The Mozilla project encompasses a number of technologies, and the "Mozilla" all-in-one web browser, email client, etc is not disappearing anytime soon.
Firebird (the browser formerly known as Phoenix) is a smaller, lighter, browser built on top of the same technologies as Mozilla, but without the email client, chat client, and other extra programs, and without many of the tools for developing web sites and web applications. Unlike Mozilla, Firebird is intended for the "average joe" to use as their main web browser.
fixed implementation: reader to NP: this guy says he wants a coke NP to reader: give him a coke, lets call it UNIQUE_KEY reader to NP: can i give this guy a coke and call it UNIQUE_KEY? NP to reader: if this challenge already occured respond "no, you already did", otherwise, respond "yes, give him a coke" and log the UNIQUE_KEY
But why couldn't you intercept the last "yes, give him a coke" message?
I believe that there's a way to fix the implementation, but I think it would have to be at least slightly more complicated than you made it. I think you'd have to have more smarts in the reader.
Mod parent up...the grandparent was wrong about Beowulfs typically using shared memory.
Fact is, Google's cluster is more like a Beowulf than it isn't. The standard definition of Beowulf is just a supercomputer built out of commodity hardware.
Actually, I wonder if the employees would be happier with an IPO.
I believe Microsoft didn't go public for a long time until internal pressure forced the issue because the employees wanted their stock to be worth something.
I doubt that most of their employees want an IPO. The way the economy is today, they should feel very lucky for what they have: good salaries, job security, incredible benefits (games, massages, free snacks, and a grand piano), and the satisfaction of working for a company they believe in.
When the economy picks up again, there'll probably be more employee pressure. I hope not: I think that the main reason Google hasn't sold out yet is that they don't have to answer to anyone. Once shareholders are in control, there's a much bigger chance that they'll eventually stop doing what's right, and start maximizing profits.
Music (not so good to makes one want to hear the music instead of working, neither something so bad that breaks concentration)
Here's my approach to music: when I'm working on the most creative part of the programming, I turn off the music and concentrate (unless the room I'm in is noisy...then I try to find non-distracting music).
But there are also tedious parts of programming (like recompiling from scratch because you changed a common header file, fixing compile errors, search/replacing variable names, etc) and then I switch on the music...the music actually helps me stay concentrated and not get distracted from what I'm doing.
I've found that the trick is to know when to switch the music off, so that I can use 100% of my creativity when it's needed...
The masses using a PC as an entertainment hub in the living room will only happen when PCs are nearly silent, But the way we're going they never will be.
That's a really good point.
Does anyone sell really, really quiet Linux PCs that are still powerful? I wouldn't mind a larger case if that was what it took to make it quieter. I'd like roughly a 2 GHz P4 / Athlon 2000+ at a minimum - in other words, a modern fast CPU but not the super-top-of-the-line that requires massive cooling.
Please point me to any manufacturers you know that make quiet Linux PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
The full text of the 2nd amendment is: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So, the part I don't understand is, if the people who wrote the bill of rights thought that everyone should always have the right to bear arms under any circumstances, then why did they put it in the context of a "well regulated Militia"?
I think that people should be allowed to own guns...but I think that background checks and waiting periods are very reasonable and definitely constitutional. I also think that a mandatory safety course wouldn't be a bad idea...after all, we have one for driving, why not gun ownership?
IMHO if the mozilla developers organized one thread or one fork per window - they would be better off. If they are interested in doing this - then they should change the way malloc() is handled.
What do you mean by "better off"? Would it fix bugs? Improve latency? Or what?
Ever heard of profiling? If you think that something's slow, or inefficient, you profile it to figure out where the inefficiencies are. Believe me, if malloc showed up on the list, it would have been optimized long ago (and from what I understand, Mozilla already does some pretty clever things with malloc).
You're trying to suggest a solution, when you haven't even established a problem. Until you have some gprof or cachegrind output proving that more malloc kung fu is needed, I doubt any Mozilla developers will listen to you.
Besides, your original premise is that Mozilla needs one thread per window. What about the networking thread? Do you know anything about how a modern web browser is implemented or are you just making up random junk?
Why would we donate money Daniel Peng? Yeah, he got screwed, but the fact is he settled rather than fight. I'd be willing to donate $ for his legal bills had he opted to fight the RIAA lawsuit -- but not now; why should we give him money to help pay the settlement, when it will go straight to the RIAA?
I gave him a few bucks because that could have been me in his shoes. I've written lots of programs, and plenty of them could be used for illegal activities, and it's not that hard to imagine being sued in this day and age because somebody else did something illegal with software I wrote and distributed.
It's easy for you to say that you would have fought it if it had been you, but how many of you would actually do so? What if that meant putting college on hold for a couple of years? Even if you could afford the legal defense, how would you keep yourself fed?
What if you were one of the four targetted by the RIAA, and the RIAA refused to accept a settlement unless all four students settled, and what if the other three students wanted to settle? I'm just trying to point out that it's not fair to judge Daniel Peng for settling under these extreme circumstances, especially when we don't know all of the details.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Nobody deserves to be in a situation like he was in just for writing some software that could be used for both legal and illegal activities.
SPEC doesn't say much about SIMD speed.
It says exactly what it should say about SIMD speed: "how fast does regular C/Fortran code run when I compile it with a regular compiler". If the compiler can figure out how to transform, say, Fortran array code into SIMD, it will help the SPECmarks. If not, then whatever SIMD features the chip has are useless for most applications, in particular scientific applications. The exception are a few specially crafted apps like Photoshop plugins and MP3 encoders.
That's not true at all, considering that Apple has carefully optimized the vast majority of the system library functions that could benefit from Altivec, and provides routines like FFT, BLAS (matrix multiply), and other building blocks that usually represent the main bottlenecks for scientific applications.
The truth is that there is no single benchmark that gives you a good impression of a processor's features. PowerPC processors tend to perform about how you'd expect for their MHz speed, as is reflected in SPEC numbers, but then when you test code that takes advantage of Altivec, it performs 2-4x better. (In contrast, SSE and SSE2 on Intel chips don't see anywhere near that type of performance increase.)
Real-world applications, including scientific ones, tend to see performance somewhere in-between, since they usually call at least some functions that are Altivec-optimized, but do other things that are not.
So who do I call for Audacity support?
Try audacity-help@lists.sourceforge.net - if you ask a reasonable question, the rest of the developers and I will be happy to answer it. Or if you want commercial-level support, one of us would be happy to consult. Or you can just take the source code to any other competent C++ developer and pay them to figure out your problem and/or fix it.
Open source. You really can have it both ways.
Besides the fact that you compared a Toshiba laptop with a 15" screen to a Powerbook with a 17" screen, you also neglected to compare the optical drives. The $3300 Powerbook you were comparing your Toshiba against comes with a SuperDrive - i.e. CDRW and DVD-R all in one drive. I'll bet your Toshiba doesn't have that.
A much better comparison would be against Apple's 15" Powerbook - with 512 MB of RAM and a 60 GB HD, it comes to $2450 - but it comes with a slot-loading CD-RW/DVD "combo" drive - again, I'll bet your Toshiba doesn't do that. Nor does your Toshiba have Gigabit Ethernet with automatic crossover, a built-in wireless antenna, or digital video out, right?
You might want to check the price at toshiba.com, too, because I certainly couldn't spec out anything with a 2.4 GHz processor for as low as $1600.
CDs have flat sound to begin with when compared to analog masters. So in order to get "better than CD" quality you would have to rip from the master tape.
Steve Jobs claimed that they had gone back to the master tapes for some of the songs on the Apple Music Store. My guess is that it's a few of their "featured" classic albums.
If you use grip on linux, there have been very nice speed increases in the last year. My slow ass 24x cd-rom in my P3 500MHz Thinkpad will rip at 1.9x and encode at the same time at 1.4-1.6x
My Power Mac with a 733 MHz G4 can rip and encode a CD to MP3 at an average of 10x.
And Apple's MP3 encoder consistently gets high marks for quality.
As much as I like Ogg, it has a long way to go before it will be competitive with the competition.
I don't think graphs are all that useful for comparing lossy sound compression.
Amen! The whole point of audio compression is that our EARS are less sensitive to certain high frequencies under certain circumstances.
So it's meaningless to compare a compressed signal to the original VISUALLY - they SHOULD differ: the question is, can you HEAR the difference?
Are our mods on crack? No the problem is that this ISN'T priced better.. a buck a song is NO BETTER than what we currently pay when we buy an album at the store. The average album costs $12.50 in the US, the average album has more than 12 songs on it.
Therefore, the average album costs less than a buck a song.
This is so far from the truth that I don't know where to begin.
The only places I know where you can find a large number of CDs for $13 or less are Walmart, Best Buy, etc. But their selection is horrible - basically the top 50 plus some really mainstream stuff. You can't find any jazz, folk, classical, world music, broadway musicals, etc. there at all.
The only other option is to go to a CD store like Tower Records, Virgin, Wherehouse, Silver Platters, etc. - and guess what? They have the selection, but you'll pay $16.99 for most CDs.
I've already started using Apple's music service, and I'm sure I'll be spending hundreds of dollars there a year, for the following reasons:
1. Selection - already I've found a few albums there that I can't find in stores, or even on Amazon. Their selection will only improve over time.
2. Price - unless it's mainstream, $9.99 for an album is much cheaper than the $15+ you pay buying the album online, once you factor in shipping.
3. Individual songs - there are lots of songs I'd like to own without buying the whole album. As a jazz musician, it will be fun to buy seven different recordings of the same song every now and then, just to hear how many different ways there are of interpreting it.
4. Instant gratification - sometimes I'm in the mood for hearing a particular song RIGHT NOW and I can't stand having to wait until the CD arrives in the mail. Now I can buy it instantly!
Will I continue to buy CDs? Of course! I want the liner notes for some of my favorite artists, and sometimes a CD will be a better deal. But probably half of my purchases are going to switch over to Apple's service, especially assuming their selection only gets better from here.
So how about offering discounts if you buy the whole album? That or they start discounting slow moving songs. I can see a number of ways that this business might go.
If I'm going to pay $15 for 15 tracks, I want glossy cover art and a pressed (aka UV resistant) CD.
Most albums are available from Apple's download service for $9.99. They include cover art.
Apple's servers seem to have trouble displaying albums, but it works fine if you just use "Power Search" for everything. I haven't had any trouble listening to tracks; the 30-second previews sound great (much better than the RealAudio previews at Amazon.com). For some reason, just browsing seems to be broken right now.
But I would rather pay $300 for a tiny, ultralight player with 256-512MB than an ipod size 10GB player. Yes, the ipod is very small, light, and durable for a hard drive based player, but it will never come close to the size/weight/durability of flash players. Having something I can barely notice in my pocket is much more important than having every single MP3 I will ever own on hand at all times, even if this means loading new songs every 2 or 3 days (which is about how often I change the mp3 files on my flash players now).
Um, I have an original 5GB iPod, and it fits into my pocket, no problem. I hardly even notice it's there.
The new iPods weight about half as much and are a lot smaller.
I think you should borrow a friend's iPod for a day and see if you still want a Flash-based model. iPods are very tiny and lightweight - more so than they look in the pictures.
Am I the only one who can't access the new store using iTunes 4 because of timeouts? It looks like Apple's servers are collapsing due to high demand...
A lot of readers here seem to think that this new service is too expensive and doesn't offer enough features.
Guess what? That's what they said about the iPod...and the iPod was a huge success.
Is it perfect? No. But it's still way better than anything else out there. Same with Apple's music download service. Sure, I'd prefer MP3 or Ogg over AAC. Sure, I'd prefer less than 0.99 per song. But you know what? I'm going to buy a lot of songs from Apple, because a lot of the time their service is exactly what I've always wanted. The rest of the time I'll just order the CD.
Focus follows mouse? Just use CodeTek Virtual Desktop
Why not just call it Mozilla 2.0? Thats what is really is, the next major release of mozilla.
No, it isn't. The Mozilla project encompasses a number of technologies, and the "Mozilla" all-in-one web browser, email client, etc is not disappearing anytime soon.
Firebird (the browser formerly known as Phoenix) is a smaller, lighter, browser built on top of the same technologies as Mozilla, but without the email client, chat client, and other extra programs, and without many of the tools for developing web sites and web applications. Unlike Mozilla, Firebird is intended for the "average joe" to use as their main web browser.
Not at all the same thing as Mozilla 2.0.
fixed implementation:
reader to NP: this guy says he wants a coke
NP to reader: give him a coke, lets call it UNIQUE_KEY
reader to NP: can i give this guy a coke and call it UNIQUE_KEY?
NP to reader: if this challenge already occured respond "no, you already did", otherwise, respond "yes, give him a coke" and log the UNIQUE_KEY
But why couldn't you intercept the last "yes, give him a coke" message?
I believe that there's a way to fix the implementation, but I think it would have to be at least slightly more complicated than you made it. I think you'd have to have more smarts in the reader.
Fourier transforms are used for image compression (JPEG).
Sorry to nitpick, but JPEG actually uses a Discrete Cosine Transform, which is not quite the same as a Fourier Transform.
Mod parent up...the grandparent was wrong about Beowulfs typically using shared memory.
Fact is, Google's cluster is more like a Beowulf than it isn't. The standard definition of Beowulf is just a supercomputer built out of commodity hardware.
Tell me again why we are supposed to care about this? There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.
True. Good thing Susan Kare had a 32x32 canvas to work with (the size of all Mac icons from the original 128K Mac through OS 9.1).
If you just search for Susan Kare using Google Images, you'll find quite a few examples.
Actually, I wonder if the employees would be happier with an IPO.
I believe Microsoft didn't go public for a long time until internal pressure forced the issue because the employees wanted their stock to be worth something.
I doubt that most of their employees want an IPO. The way the economy is today, they should feel very lucky for what they have: good salaries, job security, incredible benefits (games, massages, free snacks, and a grand piano), and the satisfaction of working for a company they believe in.
When the economy picks up again, there'll probably be more employee pressure. I hope not: I think that the main reason Google hasn't sold out yet is that they don't have to answer to anyone. Once shareholders are in control, there's a much bigger chance that they'll eventually stop doing what's right, and start maximizing profits.
Music (not so good to makes one want to hear the music instead of working, neither something so bad that breaks concentration)
Here's my approach to music: when I'm working on the most creative part of the programming, I turn off the music and concentrate (unless the room I'm in is noisy...then I try to find non-distracting music).
But there are also tedious parts of programming (like recompiling from scratch because you changed a common header file, fixing compile errors, search/replacing variable names, etc) and then I switch on the music...the music actually helps me stay concentrated and not get distracted from what I'm doing.
I've found that the trick is to know when to switch the music off, so that I can use 100% of my creativity when it's needed...
The masses using a PC as an entertainment hub in the living room will only happen when PCs are nearly silent, But the way we're going they never will be.
That's a really good point.
Does anyone sell really, really quiet Linux PCs that are still powerful? I wouldn't mind a larger case if that was what it took to make it quieter. I'd like roughly a 2 GHz P4 / Athlon 2000+ at a minimum - in other words, a modern fast CPU but not the super-top-of-the-line that requires massive cooling.
Please point me to any manufacturers you know that make quiet Linux PCs.