For users, as people who use a particular software package, there is actually not too much difference between the BSD and the GPL license. Both let them use the software and they can let their friends make copies. The GPL tells them in that situation to provide the source code and BSD-license to leave the license intact (advertising clause).
Now for developers there are more differences. Fans of the BSD-license say that the BSD-license is more free, because they impose less restrictions, but that is purely philosophical.
In practice I prefer the GPL, because when I code something it makes sure that commercial companies, who use my source provide their changes back to me. Under the BSD-license I could not demand that.
This is perhaps a restriction but helps free software. For example Microsoft can buy Apple (perhaps not monopoly wise) and cripple the BSD kernel so Apple users can only play DRM'ed WMA's. Apple users can't take their kernel (with all work already done on it by Apple) and continue to work on it, making a better product which plays all music formats. Fortunately there are other *BSD's, but work on OS X integration should be started anew.
If however Apple had choosen the GPL-ed Linux kernel for OS X, the Apple users could from any point fork the kernel, including all changes done until the fork happened. That is the power of the GPL.
This is of course theoretical, but KHTML (for KDE Konqueror) has had code back from Apple, due to GPL. I seriously doubt they had provided their changes if KHTML was BSD-licensed.
If all web pages were like usit.com the internet would definately a better place. It is mostly text which is big pro (no annoying flash pictures, imagedriven menu's, or buggy javascripts). Also you can easily find the search button and you can easily distinguish were you are. (tree in the top).
Because of the simple layout, using your own stylesheet (and thus your own favorite colors) works rather good.
However I see, some problems also, there are better websites, yes, but not the majority. This funny link gives useit.com a C score (75%) on its own criteria! (Nielsen said about this, that he found that rather good, compared to the budget). Usabilty analysis of useit.com.
It's interesting so many unsupported and blatantly false claims are made by people that claim to have PhD's. Never claimed I obtained my Phd, BUT I'm 100% sure I am working on it.
Really? Correctly modelling those is one of the greatest challenges in improving psychoacoustic encoders. We know how things work on a coarse level, but finemodelling needs a lot of work still. I'm not going to discuss in depth issues on./ However you are right in what you say (and I know your ogg work, you understand the topic fine), BUT here we are talking on a different wavelength. I say the psychoacoustics principles are known and take modelling as a signalling issue. Or have the ogg guys measured the human ear themselve? The efficient coding and tricks you mention fall under the umbrella of signal coding in my (foreign) dictionary.
>The spectrum of a decoded signal shows almost all artifacts very well and is therefore >something which helps a lot in showing artifacts in a coding scheme.
This is blatantly false and if you had ever seriously worked in this field you would know it. Perhaps you should read some scientific articles instead of keeping your nose in C-code. (I don't need to come up with arguments as you don't do that either?)
probably a troll anyway (see the nic and remember this is/.) This is partly correct, my nick was a bit of troll four years ago (grew a bit tired of the anti ms comments, which were 50% of the posts), however not anymore, just kept it.
Anyway, please don't feel offendend and keep up the good work!
Good answer:-), I was a bit too quick with my FFT comment. I just wanted to bite and return the google comment, thus the mistake.
Fact is that these encoders do their data-twiddling in the MDCT domain, from which the parameters are saved. However the inverse MDCT of a MDCTransformed block is not equal to the original block.
For a perfect reconstruction the blocks are smeared out in re- and construction, and thus the information in an input block of audio in the time domain does NOT have the same amount of information as the decoded block in the fourier domain. => You are wrong anyway:-). (although for an entire audio signal you are right).
And as all who know AAC and Ogg vorbis know, know: These codecs use the MDCT and not the FFT for signal processing. (FFT is just a way to describe the frequency of sines in the original signal, there are more transforms which are able to do so). The MDCT has only real and no imaginary numbers in their domain! Go google for MDCT!
You are right, the encoding scheme's name is Vorbis. I know this and still say Ogg a lot, because that's the extension of the files.. Bah.
I blame xiph a bit for this, they choose these stupid names themself. However I consider format's claimig to be mp4 (which should be Mpeg 1 Layer 4, huh, we are already at Mpeg 4!), even more evil.
Re:Spectrum analysis is useless
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How can this parent be +5 insightful? It is wrong and uninformative.
I worked with MPEG4 (AAC) and OGG a lot (for my phd. thesis) and spectral analysis IS very important. Although it is correct that it doesn't show precisely what information is left out because of what our hearing system doesn't register. However, these hearing curves and integration times are already known (although not the same for evry human) and most post-MP3 encoders do this rather correct. Most profit nowadays is in clever signal processing. The spectrum of a decoded signal shows almost all artifacts very well and is therefore something which helps a lot in showing artifacts in a coding scheme.
Of course listening test must also be done. They show that modern encoders make choices (not all our ears are the same, and so isn't all the music) which very often pays of in a certain test.
Theoratically AAC and OGG are rather similar, but AAC has a few nice extra's like the Temporal Noise Shaper. However in practice OGG seems good enough (unless MP3) and is free, while AAC is not that much better and unfree, so my choice is obvious.
I will wait for the OGG hack of the IPod, now it had a better processor.
Yes, Apache 2 is stable and ready for some time. No doubt about that, it runs on lots of productions sites (check netcraft.com).
Also mod_php, ssl and mod_php are working fine. (although shorter then Apache 2 itself). This is partly because Apache 2 wants thread-safety and some modules (actually not sure about Perl) aren't.
Is see no particular reason not to install Apache 2, but also no reason to do. Redhat is used a lot by internet providers and ships with 2.0 default since 8.0. The 1.3 branch is still maintained and seems faster on Unix-based systems (with fork). On Windows Apache 2 wins, due to the use of threads.
This is a bit standard answer (everyone knows this things, easy to find out), so I want to ask this: How long will all products (mod_*) still work just as good under Apache 1.3.x as under 2.0.x and will 3rd party providers drop support for 1.3 soon? (thus 'forcing' us to upgrade)?
Under Gnome 2.0 there was no menu editor. (See the Release Notes. This was not Redhat's fault. The editor is back since Gnome 2.02+ and thus in Redhat 9.
I wonder when this benchmark was published, because the FFTW homepage already offers a 3.0beta for download, including SIMD support (SSE/SSE2/3DNow!/Altivec) support.
For applications where raw speed is not very important I recommend everyone to use the fftw library, it is already installed on a lot of systems and easy in use. Very fast are Intel's SDK version and DJ Bernstein's (only 256 points).
The posts here give a nice insight in the problems between physicians and electrical engineers.
The author of this paper is right! There is no interference in a spectrum (besides the modulation of the signal to broadcast, but that is an effect of no importance here). This is mathematically and physically true.
However I can understand that electrical engineers have problems with this, because they notice interference every day. This has however to do with the _implementation_ of the radio signals, not the theory.
A lot of comments here deal with issues which are quite off-topic, such as what antenna (omni or not, size) you use. This has nothing to do with the spectrum or interference, the direction is an extra design parameter for a system, which can be used to pick up a certain frequency, but there is no coherence with the interference topic; a a certain spectral component stays the same in the air, no matter what antenna you use.
However I don't find this artical inspiring, because it contains nothing new. Let the electrical engineers deal with the problems, they are more experienced with the implementation..
To come up with something innovative is more difficult in a mature market then a new one. In the beginning a lot of titles were innovative (started a new game genre). Now almost everything is done. Look at the already matured music or movie industry: almost all products are a variant on something else.
Sometimes a new genre becomes mainstream, but mostly that just means that the genre already existed, but comes to the attention of the masses (for example old tunes used in a commercial influence newer pop music).
However we do not have to despair, sometimes a real new movie concept comes up (and has of course a lot of follow-ups...) or someone writes a real new composition.
The frequency of innovation is just lower. This will also be the case in the game industry.
The man behind this corporation doesn't have a very good name in the Netherlands. (Pieter Plass). He has already been trying to hype his 'honest thief' service on various occasions (the last years). Without releasing one single byte.
He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...
Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).
He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...
Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).
I disagree with this. Gentoo is not for beginners, because it takes too much trouble to install. How good the documentation may be, it still are a lot of instructions to work through.
Typical beginner thinks, 'I hear a lot about this Linux thing, what is that?'. Once they see it running and find some cool things, they learn more and more about there system.
If at one moment during the installation it becomes too difficult, they think something along: "Mmm, maybe I will try again in a year." Knoppix is perhaps the best distribution for beginners.
For a beginner who's harddisk is crashed four times because of Windows, is perhaps motivated enough to start looking in Gentoo (just like a more experienced GNU/Linux user, who fights with dependencies a lot).
Saying Javascript != Java is too easy! This is absolutely true, however almost all applats I have seen could easily be done with Javascript and
Some examples would help believing you. Java applets are for example a lot used to write web banking applications. The Java banking applications are usually crap compared to the server-side/javascript applications (at least in Holland).
That's just one example, but I'm sure there are a lot! Not everything can be done with Javascript but most web applications don't need to much. Some shuffling with data and interactivity and some calculations. This is easy with Javascript.
Only reason I see for Java applets is to take some load of the server if you are using very heavy calculations, but in this kind of applications the algorithm must be kept secret, so the calculation HAVE to be done server side.
I want to make an appeal to all developpers, to let this not be a starting point of making Java applets for the web again! The web is actually a lot better now developpers know that ActiveX, Java and full Flash sites have a lot of problems attached. Finally there is some knownledge about (and government pressure for use of) the W3.org principles. Portability and accessibility are beginning to become standards for the web. Furthermore, if you really need more action in your site, Javascript can do a lot.
Everyone, whatever disabilities or browser they have, should have the right to use the web. (and Java is still not standard in say Lynx, and electronica for blind people will fail seeing the information).
Java server side is fine, Java for applications is ok, if the application is fast enough or people are willing to wait for it, please please never make applets again...
So actually if everyone listens to me:-), Java on Windows is not such a big deal...
Slashdot Mirror
No modpoints at the moment, so I'll bite.
For users, as people who use a particular software package, there is actually not too much difference between the BSD and the GPL license. Both let them use the software and they can let their friends make copies. The GPL tells them in that situation to provide the source code and BSD-license to leave the license intact (advertising clause).
Now for developers there are more differences. Fans of the BSD-license say that the BSD-license is more free, because they impose less restrictions, but that is purely philosophical.
In practice I prefer the GPL, because when I code something it makes sure that commercial companies, who use my source provide their changes back to me. Under the BSD-license I could not demand that.
This is perhaps a restriction but helps free software. For example Microsoft can buy Apple (perhaps not monopoly wise) and cripple the BSD kernel so Apple users can only play DRM'ed WMA's. Apple users can't take their kernel (with all work already done on it by Apple) and continue to work on it, making a better product which plays all music formats. Fortunately there are other *BSD's, but work on OS X integration should be started anew.
If however Apple had choosen the GPL-ed Linux kernel for OS X, the Apple users could from any point fork the kernel, including all changes done until the fork happened. That is the power of the GPL.
This is of course theoretical, but KHTML (for KDE Konqueror) has had code back from Apple, due to GPL. I seriously doubt they had provided their changes if KHTML was BSD-licensed.
If all web pages were like usit.com the internet would definately a better place. It is mostly text which is big pro (no annoying flash pictures, imagedriven menu's, or buggy javascripts). Also you can easily find the search button and you can easily distinguish were you are. (tree in the top).
Because of the simple layout, using your own stylesheet (and thus your own favorite colors) works rather good.
However I see, some problems also, there are better websites, yes, but not the majority. This funny link gives useit.com a C score (75%) on its own criteria! (Nielsen said about this, that he found that rather good, compared to the budget).
Usabilty analysis of useit.com.
It's interesting so many unsupported and blatantly false claims are made by people that claim to have PhD's.
./ However you are right in what you say (and I know your ogg work, you understand the topic fine), BUT here we are talking on a different wavelength. I say the psychoacoustics principles are known and take modelling as a signalling issue. Or have the ogg guys measured the human ear themselve? The efficient coding and tricks you mention fall under the umbrella of signal coding in my (foreign) dictionary.
/.)
Never claimed I obtained my Phd, BUT I'm 100% sure I am working on it.
Really? Correctly modelling those is one of the greatest challenges in improving psychoacoustic encoders. We know how things work on a coarse level, but finemodelling needs a lot of work still.
I'm not going to discuss in depth issues on
>The spectrum of a decoded signal shows almost all artifacts very well and is therefore
>something which helps a lot in showing artifacts in a coding scheme.
This is blatantly false and if you had ever seriously worked in this field you would know it.
Perhaps you should read some scientific articles instead of keeping your nose in C-code. (I don't need to come up with arguments as you don't do that either?)
probably a troll anyway (see the nic and remember this is
This is partly correct, my nick was a bit of troll four years ago (grew a bit tired of the anti ms comments, which were 50% of the posts), however not anymore, just kept it.
Anyway, please don't feel offendend and keep up the good work!
Good answer :-), I was a bit too quick with my FFT comment. I just wanted to bite and return the google comment, thus the mistake.
:-). (although for an entire audio signal you are right).
Fact is that these encoders do their data-twiddling in the MDCT domain, from which the parameters are saved. However the inverse MDCT of a MDCTransformed block is not equal to the original block.
For a perfect reconstruction the blocks are smeared out in re- and construction, and thus the information in an input block of audio in the time domain does NOT have the same amount of information as the decoded block in the fourier domain. => You are wrong anyway
And as all who know AAC and Ogg vorbis know, know: These codecs use the MDCT and not the FFT for signal processing. (FFT is just a way to describe the frequency of sines in the original signal, there are more transforms which are able to do so). The MDCT has only real and no imaginary numbers in their domain! Go google for MDCT!
You are right, the encoding scheme's name is Vorbis. I know this and still say Ogg a lot, because that's the extension of the files.. Bah.
I blame xiph a bit for this, they choose these stupid names themself. However I consider format's claimig to be mp4 (which should be Mpeg 1 Layer 4, huh, we are already at Mpeg 4!), even more evil.
How can this parent be +5 insightful? It is wrong and uninformative.
I worked with MPEG4 (AAC) and OGG a lot (for my phd. thesis) and spectral analysis IS very important. Although it is correct that it doesn't show precisely what information is left out because of what our hearing system doesn't register. However, these hearing curves and integration times are already known (although not the same for evry human) and most post-MP3 encoders do this rather correct. Most profit nowadays is in clever signal processing. The spectrum of a decoded signal shows almost all artifacts very well and is therefore something which helps a lot in showing artifacts in a coding scheme.
Of course listening test must also be done. They show that modern encoders make choices (not all our ears are the same, and so isn't all the music) which very often pays of in a certain test.
Theoratically AAC and OGG are rather similar, but AAC has a few nice extra's like the Temporal Noise Shaper. However in practice OGG seems good enough (unless MP3) and is free, while AAC is not that much better and unfree, so my choice is obvious.
I will wait for the OGG hack of the IPod, now it had a better processor.
Yes, Apache 2 is stable and ready for some time. No doubt about that, it runs on lots of productions sites (check netcraft.com).
Also mod_php, ssl and mod_php are working fine. (although shorter then Apache 2 itself). This is partly because Apache 2 wants thread-safety and some modules (actually not sure about Perl) aren't.
Is see no particular reason not to install Apache 2, but also no reason to do. Redhat is used a lot by internet providers and ships with 2.0 default since 8.0. The 1.3 branch is still maintained and seems faster on Unix-based systems (with fork). On Windows Apache 2 wins, due to the use of threads.
This is a bit standard answer (everyone knows this things, easy to find out), so I want to ask this: How long will all products (mod_*) still work just as good under Apache 1.3.x as under 2.0.x and will 3rd party providers drop support for 1.3 soon? (thus 'forcing' us to upgrade)?
Under Gnome 2.0 there was no menu editor. (See the Release Notes. This was not Redhat's fault. The editor is back since Gnome 2.02+ and thus in Redhat 9.
I wonder when this benchmark was published, because the FFTW homepage already offers a 3.0beta for download, including SIMD support (SSE/SSE2/3DNow!/Altivec) support.
For applications where raw speed is not very important I recommend everyone to use the fftw library, it is already installed on a lot of systems and easy in use. Very fast are Intel's SDK version and DJ Bernstein's (only 256 points).
The posts here give a nice insight in the problems between physicians and electrical engineers.
The author of this paper is right! There is no interference in a spectrum (besides the modulation of the signal to broadcast, but that is an effect of no importance here). This is mathematically and physically true.
However I can understand that electrical engineers have problems with this, because they notice interference every day. This has however to do with the _implementation_ of the radio signals, not the theory.
A lot of comments here deal with issues which are quite off-topic, such as what antenna (omni or not, size) you use. This has nothing to do with the spectrum or interference, the direction is an extra design parameter for a system, which can be used to pick up a certain frequency, but there is no coherence with the interference topic; a a certain spectral component stays the same in the air, no matter what antenna you use.
However I don't find this artical inspiring, because it contains nothing new. Let the electrical engineers deal with the problems, they are more experienced with the implementation..
[Disclaimer: I have phys. degree]
To come up with something innovative is more difficult in a mature market then a new one. In the beginning a lot of titles were innovative (started a new game genre). Now almost everything is done. Look at the already matured music or movie industry: almost all products are a variant on something else.
Sometimes a new genre becomes mainstream, but mostly that just means that the genre already existed, but comes to the attention of the masses (for example old tunes used in a commercial influence newer pop music).
However we do not have to despair, sometimes a real new movie concept comes up (and has of course a lot of follow-ups...) or someone writes a real new composition.
The frequency of innovation is just lower. This will also be the case in the game industry.
The man behind this corporation doesn't have a very good name in the Netherlands. (Pieter Plass). He has already been trying to hype his 'honest thief' service on various occasions (the last years). Without releasing one single byte.
He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...
Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).
The man behind this corporation doesn't have a very good name in the Netherlands. (Pieter Plass). He has already been trying to hype his 'honest thief' service on various occasions (the last years). Without releasing one single byte.
He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...
Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).
I disagree with this. Gentoo is not for beginners, because it takes too much trouble to install. How good the documentation may be, it still are a lot of instructions to work through.
Typical beginner thinks, 'I hear a lot about this Linux thing, what is that?'. Once they see it running and find some cool things, they learn more and more about there system.
If at one moment during the installation it becomes too difficult, they think something along: "Mmm, maybe I will try again in a year." Knoppix is perhaps the best distribution for beginners.
For a beginner who's harddisk is crashed four times because of Windows, is perhaps motivated enough to start looking in Gentoo (just like a more experienced GNU/Linux user, who fights with dependencies a lot).
Saying Javascript != Java is too easy! This is absolutely true, however almost all applats I have seen could easily be done with Javascript and
Some examples would help believing you. Java applets are for example a lot used to write web banking applications. The Java banking applications are usually crap compared to the server-side/javascript applications (at least in Holland).
That's just one example, but I'm sure there are a lot! Not everything can be done with Javascript but most web applications don't need to much. Some shuffling with data and interactivity and some calculations. This is easy with Javascript.
Only reason I see for Java applets is to take some load of the server if you are using very heavy calculations, but in this kind of applications the algorithm must be kept secret, so the calculation HAVE to be done server side.
I want to make an appeal to all developpers, to let this not be a starting point of making Java applets for the web again!
:-), Java on Windows is not such a big deal...
The web is actually a lot better now developpers know that ActiveX, Java and full Flash sites have a lot of problems attached. Finally there is some knownledge about (and government pressure for use of) the W3.org principles. Portability and accessibility are beginning to become standards for the web. Furthermore, if you really need more action in your site, Javascript can do a lot.
Everyone, whatever disabilities or browser they have, should have the right to use the web. (and Java is still not standard in say Lynx, and electronica for blind people will fail seeing the information).
Java server side is fine, Java for applications is ok, if the application is fast enough or people are willing to wait for it, please please never make applets again...
So actually if everyone listens to me