One of the editors for PC Gaming World (UK) maintains a personal ramblings site, and he did head to head comparisons between WAV, MP3 and MSA with tough source material. The encoding results are downloadable from his page:
http://www.mats.net/plan/
Here's a bit of the accompanying text:
I was doing a bit of testing and found some really harsh material on a Fat Boy Slim CD. The first is the start of Kalifornia has a vocoder that relies on the phase shift from left/right to sound like it does. There's *no* compression scheme that sounds remotely like it. That's mp3 or MSA. The second is a bit of fairly dirty percussion in Built it Up. This mp3 reproduces quite satisfactorily but sadly MSA makes a complete and utter pig's ear of at any bitrate. Listen for the truly disgusting melodic ringing as MSA struggles to reproduce white noise. It's far less pronounced in the 128k MS Audio track but the horrible echo effect is still there. Um, if it's superior to MP3 I'd really expect infinitely better at the same darn high bitrate of 128k!
The game under discussion is Star Control 2, and it had a PC premiere. Star Control, a damn fine game in it's own right (I was good enough with the skiff to wipe out the entire Urquan alliance with it alone in meelee), did appear on the Amiga first, but it is not the game under discussion.
I hear the duo behind SC 1&2 have a Playstation game out called Unholy War (iffy on the title).
The characters of Beavis and Butthead were stupid. The show was not. Come on, you're talking about a show that had the lead character quote Shakespeare in reaction to Van Halen's "Right Now": "Words, words, words." If can't grok the irony involved in something like that, don't bother trying to convince others that the show was stupid.
Considering the VERY prominent soundtrack accompanyment to that brilliant scene, along with the camera angles and slo-mo work, I think some of the major influences for that sequence come from the world of rap video, possibly the early 90's video for the Geto Boyz "My Mind Playin' Tricks On Me" with some influence from The Beastie Boys "So What'cha Want."
paudio (or/proc/audio) This is a loadable kernel modules and kernel patch that allows you to read and save a copy of the data currently being played by the soundcard. This allows you to save any data being played, regardless of what software is used to play it, or what format the data is in.
Some audio streaming software doesn't allow audio data to be saved to disk, and some use formats whose specifications are not publically available. This is a way around these problems. Check out the announcement and LSM entry.
This is useful also for anyone interested in how the/proc filesystem works, how some of the soundcard works, or how loadable modules work
I reject your proposition that the PSN makes a new and previously unattainable level of e-commerce security. There are two main flaws with this reasoning:
1) This identifies a machine, and not a user. 2) Superior means already exist, and they are less intrusive. PGP keys are already available and do a better job of identifying a user, as opposed to a machine. In addition, the key is part of a system that protects privacy, rather than skewering it by default.
>It might not matter to you, or a lot of other >consumers, but corporations like security.
Bogus argument. Read the original message and it's title again. "When is this ever in the consumer's interest?" It is the consumers that are going to be footing the bill for this. How will it help them? What new and previously unavailable benefits will consumers be buying when they pay their own money to give up their privacy?
Your message has failed to illuminate anything previously unavailable that this sacrifice of privacy would provide to the people paying for it.
Don't think I'm attacking you. I'm challenging your arguments, not your character. Please take this message in that spirit.
I seen a lot of talk and speculation as to whether or not this is a legitimate privacy concern, whether or not it will help the SPA/BSA combat piracy, if it could force identification in e-commerce...
But when is it ever a direct benefit to the consumer?
I've come up with no examples of how this would provide a unique benefit to the end user not available via any other (less compromising) means.
Nor have I seen anyone else cite any examples. Are people skeptical? Hell yes. And why not? "Hi, we're going to track everything you do on the net, and provide no discernable benefit to you for doing so. Have a nice day!"
Don't tell me about turning it off. Tell me why I, the consumer and end user, would ever want it on. Unless it provides a benefit that can't otherwise be made available, then it will never be seen as anything but a tool of surveillance.
Guess what, people don't like having anyone, including website operators of every stripe, looking over their shoulders any more than necessary. Without a clear benefit to consumers, it's in their natural interests to resist this.
Here is the disappearing story from Saturday
on
Pentium III review
·
· Score: 1
A signal that some people out there really do get it can be found in an interview with the girl that developed the radically faster encryption technique:
*** She had no plans to patent her work as current systems are free. "It's good to share your ideas with the science world. By patenting it I'd be hindering that process," she said. ***
See http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,30930,00.html?st .ne.ni.lh for more.
"* Voodoo does NOT require PCI slots." I'll take your word on it.
"You could build one onto a motherboard if you want." Doubtful, as no has ever built any of the currently available Voodoo cards and chips (Voodoo, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee) onto a motherboard. But just doubtful, as "it hasn't happened" != "it can't happen"
"The iMac has a high-bandwidth slot + port called the mezzanine, and this is what Griffin Technologies is using for their iMac VooDoo card." I'll take your word on it. That's why this is the only point I qualified with a "Could be I missed something major..." prefix. And is that a Voodoo, or Voodoo 2? If Voodoo 2, can I get a Voodoo 2 SLI configuration in an iMac, doubling the fill rate? Single slot SLI configurations are available for PC's, and I'd hate to take a step back from the performance level my SLI rig gives me.
"* Regarding above, I am disappointed the iMac rev3 didn't build one in. Then again I wouldn't buy one simply because I am used to larger monitors. Maybe when they revamp for 17/19"ers..." :-) I too am spoiled by large monitors...
"* AGP isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that can be backed up. Intel was nowhere NEAR the performance peak of PCI when they introduced AGP. AGP is just one more area of the motherboard this CPU vendor can control, as Intel slowly closes the platform." No, AGP isn't all it's cracked up to be, but yes, current AGP implementations are faster than the double-speed PCI slot in the new G3 boxes.
"* How has Apple defined 16 MB as "the standard" any more than currently-shipping PC's with 12 MB RAM defined THAT as the standard for Wintel? This is just a current configuration, and games adapt to all sorts of setups, or you'd still be setting up EMM386 . Cranking PCI up to 66 MHz and 64-bit is a good short-term solution for gaming bandwidth." The AC covered this pretty well; 16 MB video memory available to Macs, 32 MB video memory, fed by a faster pipe, available to pc's. As Carmack said though, this point is is of little overall importance.
Benchmarks--I'll be more interested when the measure relevant to the discussion, Q3A timedemos, can be done in person. Setting equivalent image properties and running timedemos should provide very useful 3D game performance comparison numbers. I still relish the memory of watching Cyrix apologists trying to find a way to wiggle out of timerefresh comparisons...
And for the other guy, yup, looks like I was wrong about some level of Voodoo availability for the iMac. Show me to be wrong on all the other points in my original post and I'll welcome both you and Every back from fantasyland.
Wow, this is one of the most aggresively misinformed pieces I've seen in a long time.
He starts with overwhelming stereotypes of game coders and game code and all that's wrong with it in his opinion. Then he offhandedly mentions that he's never seen Carmack's code (this ignorance in spite of the fact that Carmack has released more code to the public than pretty much everyone not named Linus). Guess what, He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about when it comes to Carmack's code.
I like how he says he not aiming to insult Carmack, identifies Carmack as a low-level coder, and then then takes pot shots at "low-level weenies".
I especially love the flagrant display of ignorance with regards to id's developement environments. No, id never developed Doom in a "Win16" environment. Doom was developed on Next! Jesus, you'd think that maybe he'd want to at least get that one right, as it comes from Steve Jobs.
Before Doom, it was mostly DOS with assembly code. After Doom, Quake was primarily coded using DJGPP. The enhancement process for Quake 2 was the first time id did major developement in a Win32 environment, and Carmack touches on in the original plan entry. He did read that, right?
Ooh, hardware tech... I was gonna rant on the fact that he displays broad ignorance of CPU architecture issues by ignoring the fact that Intel's desktop CPU line's depend on a decoupled microarchitecture with a very RISC like core, but then I realized that there's a decent chance he knows this and is purposefully misrepresenting the truth. Note how he ignores the major generational differences between the Pentium and Pentium Pro/Pentium II lines when making his dismissive statements about CISC.
BYTEmarks--Wonderful, I guess embarrassing shills with abandonned benchmarks are to be the final remembrance of the departed Byte magazine.
"Stuff a Voodoo card in an iMac..." Uh, how? Could be I missed something major, but I'm pretty damn sure iMacs lack PCI slots, which Voodoo cards require. This is THE misrepresentation that made me write this. What a load. At best this guy is off in a fantasy world. At worst he's knowingly lying to his readers.
He excuses the lack of AGP to the snazzy (and available to PC and Mac users) Rage 128 3D graphics setup by saying that local memory is significantly faster. Yup, and PC users will be getting that card with up to twice the ram available (32 MB) that the Macs have defined as their standard (16 MB), and of course PC's will be feeding that RAM with a faster pipe.
"Why isn't there a working PlayStation emulator on the PC, despite years of trying?" Uh, tell that to Connectix. They've promised to sell their emulator on both platforms. Or check out the emulators projects at http://www.davesclassics.com/psxemu.html. (It all seems pretty pointless though. Connectix wants $50 for it's Mac PS emulator, while the real thing cost $100 new.)
And one last thing, he's not "moving" his games to the Mac, he's expanding then to include the Mac's niche market.
Slashdot Mirror
godfuck.com has been in continuous operation for years. Go visit http://www.godfuck.com to see.
Powerful in the Force am I.
Got it covered. That's what I trained my midichlorians to do.
Heh, good going Slothy.
So, are we still the only Quake clan with a Slothy splash image on our page?
Norton
(And why aren't you at Kevin's, ya slacker?)
One of the editors for PC Gaming World (UK) maintains a personal ramblings site, and he did head to head comparisons between WAV, MP3 and MSA with tough source material. The encoding results are downloadable from his page:
http://www.mats.net/plan/
Here's a bit of the accompanying text:
I was doing a bit of testing and found some really harsh material on a Fat Boy Slim CD. The first is the start of Kalifornia has a vocoder that relies on the phase shift from left/right to sound like it does. There's *no* compression scheme that sounds remotely like it. That's mp3 or MSA. The second is a bit of fairly dirty percussion in Built it Up. This mp3 reproduces quite satisfactorily but sadly MSA makes a complete and utter pig's ear of at any bitrate. Listen for the truly disgusting melodic ringing as MSA struggles to reproduce white noise. It's far less pronounced in the 128k MS Audio track but the horrible echo effect is still there. Um, if it's superior to MP3 I'd really expect infinitely better at the same darn high bitrate of 128k!
My beleaguered little 98 box at home prints to the work printers (4SI MX) over straight TCP/IP all the time.
No NT involved.
The game under discussion is Star Control 2, and it had a PC premiere. Star Control, a damn fine game in it's own right (I was good enough with the skiff to wipe out the entire Urquan alliance with it alone in meelee), did appear on the Amiga first, but it is not the game under discussion.
I hear the duo behind SC 1&2 have a Playstation game out called Unholy War (iffy on the title).
Probably not.
Me too!
Hitler uses KDE to track vegetarian abortion warez!
So, is it GEE NOAM or GUH NOAM?
Gee you really think this'll hit 1000 comments?
Icon Directed Interactive Online Technology!
I can smell 1000 comments! Come on people!
The characters of Beavis and Butthead were stupid. The show was not. Come on, you're talking about a show that had the lead character quote Shakespeare in reaction to Van Halen's "Right Now": "Words, words, words." If can't grok the irony involved in something like that, don't bother trying to convince others that the show was stupid.
Considering the VERY prominent soundtrack accompanyment to that brilliant scene, along with the camera angles and slo-mo work, I think some of the major influences for that sequence come from the world of rap video, possibly the early 90's video for the Geto Boyz "My Mind Playin' Tricks On Me" with some influence from The Beastie Boys "So What'cha Want."
You missed it. John Goodman already delivered a bowling ball fatality to Flea and his nihilist buddies in "The Big Lebowski."
Sigh, true Art is always ahead of it's time...
Find it at http://source.syr.edu/~jdimpson/proj/
/proc/audio)
/proc filesystem works, how some of the soundcard works, or how loadable modules work
paudio (or
This is a loadable kernel modules and kernel patch that allows you to read and save a copy of the data currently being played by the soundcard. This allows you to save any data being played, regardless of what software is used to play it, or what format the data is in.
Some audio streaming software doesn't allow audio data to be saved to disk, and some use formats whose specifications are not publically available. This is a way around these problems. Check out the announcement and LSM entry.
This is useful also for anyone interested in how the
I reject your proposition that the PSN makes a new and previously unattainable level of e-commerce security. There are two main flaws with this reasoning:
1) This identifies a machine, and not a user.
2) Superior means already exist, and they are less intrusive. PGP keys are already available and do a better job of identifying a user, as opposed to a machine. In addition, the key is part of a system that protects privacy, rather than skewering it by default.
>It might not matter to you, or a lot of other
>consumers, but corporations like security.
Bogus argument. Read the original message and it's title again. "When is this ever in the consumer's interest?" It is the consumers that are going to be footing the bill for this. How will it help them? What new and previously unavailable benefits will consumers be buying when they pay their own money to give up their privacy?
Your message has failed to illuminate anything previously unavailable that this sacrifice of privacy would provide to the people paying for it.
Don't think I'm attacking you. I'm challenging your arguments, not your character. Please take this message in that spirit.
I seen a lot of talk and speculation as to whether or not this is a legitimate privacy concern, whether or not it will help the SPA/BSA combat piracy, if it could force identification in e-commerce...
But when is it ever a direct benefit to the consumer?
I've come up with no examples of how this would provide a unique benefit to the end user not available via any other (less compromising) means.
Nor have I seen anyone else cite any examples. Are people skeptical? Hell yes. And why not? "Hi, we're going to track everything you do on the net, and provide no discernable benefit to you for doing so. Have a nice day!"
Don't tell me about turning it off. Tell me why I, the consumer and end user, would ever want it on. Unless it provides a benefit that can't otherwise be made available, then it will never be seen as anything but a tool of surveillance.
Guess what, people don't like having anyone, including website operators of every stripe, looking over their shoulders any more than necessary. Without a clear benefit to consumers, it's in their natural interests to resist this.
http://www.slashdot.org/articles/99/01/16/1114214. shtml
That's the other one that got yanked after attracting around 100 comments.
Huh? What happened to the article about the Pentium III/Katmai?
It was up and drawing a healthy stream of contents, now it's nowhere to be found.
What gives?
A signal that some people out there really do get it can be found in an interview with the girl that developed the radically faster encryption technique:
t .ne.ni.lh for more.
***
She had no plans to patent her work as current systems are free. "It's good to share your ideas with the science world. By patenting it I'd be hindering that process," she said.
***
See http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,30930,00.html?s
Wow, this almost slipped by me:
"AGP is just one more area of the motherboard this CPU vendor can control, as Intel slowly closes the platform."
Did I really just see a Mac user bemoan the alleged closing of the PC platform?!?
Hah! Pot, kettle, black!
Holy cow, that's got to be the definition of chutzpah.
"* Voodoo does NOT require PCI slots."
I'll take your word on it.
"You could build one onto a motherboard if you want."
Doubtful, as no has ever built any of the currently available Voodoo cards and chips (Voodoo, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee) onto a motherboard. But just doubtful, as "it hasn't happened" != "it can't happen"
"The iMac has a high-bandwidth slot + port called the mezzanine, and this is what Griffin Technologies is using for their iMac VooDoo card."
I'll take your word on it. That's why this is the only point I qualified with a "Could be I missed something major..." prefix. And is that a Voodoo, or Voodoo 2? If Voodoo 2, can I get a Voodoo 2 SLI configuration in an iMac, doubling the fill rate? Single slot SLI configurations are available for PC's, and I'd hate to take a step back from the performance level my SLI rig gives me.
"* Regarding above, I am disappointed the iMac rev3 didn't build one in. Then again I wouldn't buy one simply because I am used to larger monitors. Maybe when they revamp for 17/19"ers..."
:-) I too am spoiled by large monitors...
"* AGP isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that can be backed up. Intel was nowhere NEAR the performance peak of PCI when they introduced AGP. AGP is just one more area of the motherboard this CPU vendor can control, as Intel slowly closes the platform."
No, AGP isn't all it's cracked up to be, but yes, current AGP implementations are faster than the double-speed PCI slot in the new G3 boxes.
"* How has Apple defined 16 MB as "the standard" any more than currently-shipping PC's with 12 MB RAM defined THAT as the standard for Wintel? This is just a current configuration, and games adapt to all sorts of setups, or you'd still be setting up EMM386 . Cranking PCI up to 66 MHz and 64-bit is a good short-term solution for gaming bandwidth."
The AC covered this pretty well; 16 MB video memory available to Macs, 32 MB video memory, fed by a faster pipe, available to pc's. As Carmack said though, this point is is of little overall importance.
Benchmarks--I'll be more interested when the measure relevant to the discussion, Q3A timedemos, can be done in person. Setting equivalent image properties and running timedemos should provide very useful 3D game performance comparison numbers. I still relish the memory of watching Cyrix apologists trying to find a way to wiggle out of timerefresh comparisons...
And for the other guy, yup, looks like I was wrong about some level of Voodoo availability for the iMac. Show me to be wrong on all the other points in my original post and I'll welcome both you and Every back from fantasyland.
Wow, this is one of the most aggresively misinformed pieces I've seen in a long time.
He starts with overwhelming stereotypes of game coders and game code and all that's wrong with it in his opinion. Then he offhandedly mentions that he's never seen Carmack's code (this ignorance in spite of the fact that Carmack has released more code to the public than pretty much everyone not named Linus). Guess what, He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about when it comes to Carmack's code.
I like how he says he not aiming to insult Carmack, identifies Carmack as a low-level coder, and then then takes pot shots at "low-level weenies".
I especially love the flagrant display of ignorance with regards to id's developement environments. No, id never developed Doom in a "Win16" environment. Doom was developed on Next! Jesus, you'd think that maybe he'd want to at least get that one right, as it comes from Steve Jobs.
Before Doom, it was mostly DOS with assembly code. After Doom, Quake was primarily coded using DJGPP. The enhancement process for Quake 2 was the first time id did major developement in a Win32 environment, and Carmack touches on in the original plan entry. He did read that, right?
Ooh, hardware tech... I was gonna rant on the fact that he displays broad ignorance of CPU architecture issues by ignoring the fact that Intel's desktop CPU line's depend on a decoupled microarchitecture with a very RISC like core, but then I realized that there's a decent chance he knows this and is purposefully misrepresenting the truth. Note how he ignores the major generational differences between the Pentium and Pentium Pro/Pentium II lines when making his dismissive statements about CISC.
BYTEmarks--Wonderful, I guess embarrassing shills with abandonned benchmarks are to be the final remembrance of the departed Byte magazine.
"Stuff a Voodoo card in an iMac..." Uh, how? Could be I missed something major, but I'm pretty damn sure iMacs lack PCI slots, which Voodoo cards require. This is THE misrepresentation that made me write this. What a load. At best this guy is off in a fantasy world. At worst he's knowingly lying to his readers.
He excuses the lack of AGP to the snazzy (and available to PC and Mac users) Rage 128 3D graphics setup by saying that local memory is significantly faster. Yup, and PC users will be getting that card with up to twice the ram available (32 MB) that the Macs have defined as their standard (16 MB), and of course PC's will be feeding that RAM with a faster pipe.
"Why isn't there a working PlayStation emulator on the PC, despite years of trying?" Uh, tell that to Connectix. They've promised to sell their emulator on both platforms. Or check out the emulators projects at http://www.davesclassics.com/psxemu.html. (It all seems pretty pointless though. Connectix wants $50 for it's Mac PS emulator, while the real thing cost $100 new.)
And one last thing, he's not "moving" his games to the Mac, he's expanding then to include the Mac's niche market.
Ugh.