It is only religious delusion that gets people excited about forcing this ideology on others, and lets them think that more restrictive is more "free".
The real reason is that "free software," as defined by the GNU folks, has nothing to do with the meaning of the word "free." Instead, it's been given a definition that suits their cause. So of course the GPL is "more free" according to them than any other license. That was the whole point.
As of my reading, you have twelve replies, every single one of which has failed to answer your question. I'm curious too. Can anyone tell us what sets SkyOS apart from other operating systems?
Then again, if they are willing to rewrite, the MPlayer group may allow them to rewrite without opening code...
This is a possibility, but in my opinion, it's a rather ridiculous one. A better solution (if the MPlayer team doesn't want to insist on opening the code) would be for KISS to pay off the MPlayer team. A couple hundred thousand bucks could pay for some people to work on mplayer full time.
This only works if the reason why people didn't vote is because they don't support any of the candidates. If they didn't vote because they are apathetic, then we would never elect anyone.
I have gotten into quite a few arguments with people that do say we should do nothing. They think the cost of inconveniences to people and industry is more than what the damage being done is, so hence there should not be any more regulations related to pollution.
Be careful. No more governmental regulations is not the same as doing nothing. Enforcing the laws that are already in place, encouraging research into alternate energy sources or pollution reduction, and improved education are just a few other ways that we can combat the environmental problem. In my opinion, all of those are probably better ideas -- and will have more of an effect -- than passing yet another law.
The idea was to try to identify the compressed music. While we could not tell on some pieces, on others it was obvious, and that was bad enough for me. I did not consider this test as part of my casual listening experience.
Without mentioning how they were encoded, this is absolutely meaningless.
You most certainly claimed to have golden ears, as you claimed that you can hear things which are beyond human capability to hear. Although many people claim that they can hear the difference between a high-bitrate MP3 (or OGG) and the original, blind listening tests consistently show that they cannot.
When I was in elementary school, they tried to scare us by telling us that by the year 2000, the earth would run out of oil and the ozone layer would be completely gone. Global warming is getting the same attention today, and I have no doubt that in twenty years the environmentalists will have found some other bogeyman to use to push their agenda.
A lot of people seem to complain that we shouldn't do anything since we don't know what the problem is.
This is the usual strawman that the "global warming proponents" trot out. It's not true. Most anybody who doesn't buy into the whole global warming thing still believes in protecting the environment. There are lots of good reasons to reduce pollution and cut carbon dioxide emissions. There are very few people who would argue that reducing pollution is a bad thing.
However, that doesn't make it right for so-called environmentalists to go running around screaming that the sky is falling without proof. Right now, all we can say is that humans might be increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that the amounts might be enough to have a significant effect on the climate, that the effect might be to cause the average temperature of the earth to increase, and that overall global warming might be a bad thing to happen. Personally, I think that those are a few too many mights to warrant turning global warming into the biggest environmental concern of today. However, since global warming plays well into a nice doomsday scenario for the media, that's what everybody focuses on.
While I do not dispute the claim, that with careful work, one could encode an MP3 from a.wav file that was indistinguisible from the original...
Sorry. When you said, "Given the fidelity of my stereo system, the losses associated with MP3 compression are unacceptable to me", I made the unwarranted assumption that you meant that the losses associated with MP3 compression were unacceptable to you. I understand now that I should have interpreted that to mean that you were too lazy to spend 5 minutes looking at a man page. But to make it easy on you, I'll do the "careful work" for you:
lame -b 320
Do us all a favor and do a blind listening test, where you will find that you can't tell the difference.
I have, I could, and the MP3s sucked.
You didn't, you couldn't, and they probably did. Your statement "What few MP3s I've heard came from web site listings a while ago" contradicts your claim that you have ever done a blind listening test.
What's the point of having lossless originals if you can't play them back as they are?
There's no point in having the lossless originals in the first place.
In the end, nobody cares if you decide to store all your music as wav files. But if you're going to make assertions such as "to not support.wav files is a travesty", or claiming that MP3s are for "transcoding of legacy audio cassettes", without being able to back it up, you deserve some ridicule.
Besides, I've heard enough MP3s, to be turned off from the format,
So you downloaded a few MP3s off Kazaa that some idiot encoded at 128 kbps with a crap encoder, could tell that the sound quality was lower, and therefore concluded that "with my golden ear and gigantic... stereo system, I can tell the difference between any lossless and lossy compressed music." Do us all a favor and do a blind listening test, where you will find that you can't tell the difference.
If you're that set on having the lossless originials, you could always write a trivial script that streams an mp3 stream from your wav music on the fly, and use this device.
I know it sounds bizarre in our GOP/conservative dominated culture,
Yeah, conservatives are really happy about the gutting of contract law that goes on today. After all, contracts only form the basis of business, it's not like it's all that important...
I simply don't understand why so many people are infatuated with the book. The characters are infuriatingly stereotypical, the plotline is old (and, as you mentioned, often nonsensical), and the writing is determinedly mediocre.
To top it off, if you read the introduction to the book, the guy practically claims to have invented the idea of "wargames in space." It's one thing to write a piece of trash -- I've got plenty of those on my bookshelves -- but if you're going to brag, you ought to at least have something to back it up.
Given that the reviewer said "I haven't felt this satisfied after finishing a science fiction novel since Ender's Game", I'd say that badly written and pretentious was exactly the kind of book that he wanted to read.
That either the current directory or part of your home directory is in your path.
That may help keep someone from running a spyware program called 'ls', but there are plenty of other ways to get someone to run a program.
That/home and/tmp (plus any other user writable areas) are not mounted noexec
True, and maybe reasonable for a work machine, but hardly practical for most of us.
I agree that right now, unix programs are generally more secure than the corresponding windows programs. But if the make-linux-just-like-windows-so-that-everyone-will -switch crowd gets their way, we'll get plenty of insecure programs for unix as well. I really don't believe that unix is inherently secure enough to protect a system from the actions of stupid users.
In other words, you're looking at it with three decades of space in between, and probably have never heard the vast majority of the music from that time period, which -- like always -- was crap.
Don't mistake your preference for certain music for being evidence of that music's quality. Do you listen to classical music? Jazz? Gregorian chants? If not, do you deny that there is quality to be found among them?
There are some talented musicians today. Yes, even ones under the big-name labels. Sure, most of today's music is crap, but that's certainly not a change from twenty years ago, fifty years ago, or five hundred years ago.
so that we can use a system designed by people with whom we sympathise.
So now the free software crowd wants to only use software written by people with the exact same views? That's got to be the most juvenile logic I've heard from the supposed "free software" advocates -- and that's saying something.
Once again, I'm glad that I ally myself with the open source crowd rather than those free software nuts.
In fact, whatever happened to the general guideline of not moderating a comment just becuase you don't agree with the content?
Um... the one that's been completely ignored for at least the last four years that I've been reading slashdot? Since Taco has repeatedly stated that he's completely uninterested in fixing the moderation system, as long as the moderations happen to match his own views, I'd say that we're stuck with it.
What's the point of OSS ? Making better software ? No.
Slow down there. You don't speak for everyone who uses and develops open source software, and as such you can't make the blanket statement of the "point of OSS." I do both, and I most certainly do so because I believe open source makes for better software. In the cases where it doesn't -- for instance, in my opinion, Opera for web browsing -- then I'm perfectly happy to use a closed source alternative
Slashdot Mirror
It is only religious delusion that gets people excited about forcing this ideology on others, and lets them think that more restrictive is more "free".
The real reason is that "free software," as defined by the GNU folks, has nothing to do with the meaning of the word "free." Instead, it's been given a definition that suits their cause. So of course the GPL is "more free" according to them than any other license. That was the whole point.
As of my reading, you have twelve replies, every single one of which has failed to answer your question. I'm curious too. Can anyone tell us what sets SkyOS apart from other operating systems?
It is if posting on slashdot counts as a social activity...
Then again, if they are willing to rewrite, the MPlayer group may allow them to rewrite without opening code...
This is a possibility, but in my opinion, it's a rather ridiculous one. A better solution (if the MPlayer team doesn't want to insist on opening the code) would be for KISS to pay off the MPlayer team. A couple hundred thousand bucks could pay for some people to work on mplayer full time.
This only works if the reason why people didn't vote is because they don't support any of the candidates. If they didn't vote because they are apathetic, then we would never elect anyone.
I have gotten into quite a few arguments with people that do say we should do nothing. They think the cost of inconveniences to people and industry is more than what the damage being done is, so hence there should not be any more regulations related to pollution.
Be careful. No more governmental regulations is not the same as doing nothing. Enforcing the laws that are already in place, encouraging research into alternate energy sources or pollution reduction, and improved education are just a few other ways that we can combat the environmental problem. In my opinion, all of those are probably better ideas -- and will have more of an effect -- than passing yet another law.
The idea was to try to identify the compressed music. While we could not tell on some pieces, on others it was obvious, and that was bad enough for me. I did not consider this test as part of my casual listening experience.
Without mentioning how they were encoded, this is absolutely meaningless.
You most certainly claimed to have golden ears, as you claimed that you can hear things which are beyond human capability to hear. Although many people claim that they can hear the difference between a high-bitrate MP3 (or OGG) and the original, blind listening tests consistently show that they cannot.
When I was in elementary school, they tried to scare us by telling us that by the year 2000, the earth would run out of oil and the ozone layer would be completely gone. Global warming is getting the same attention today, and I have no doubt that in twenty years the environmentalists will have found some other bogeyman to use to push their agenda.
A lot of people seem to complain that we shouldn't do anything since we don't know what the problem is.
This is the usual strawman that the "global warming proponents" trot out. It's not true. Most anybody who doesn't buy into the whole global warming thing still believes in protecting the environment. There are lots of good reasons to reduce pollution and cut carbon dioxide emissions. There are very few people who would argue that reducing pollution is a bad thing.
However, that doesn't make it right for so-called environmentalists to go running around screaming that the sky is falling without proof. Right now, all we can say is that humans might be increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that the amounts might be enough to have a significant effect on the climate, that the effect might be to cause the average temperature of the earth to increase, and that overall global warming might be a bad thing to happen. Personally, I think that those are a few too many mights to warrant turning global warming into the biggest environmental concern of today. However, since global warming plays well into a nice doomsday scenario for the media, that's what everybody focuses on.
Sorry. When you said, "Given the fidelity of my stereo system, the losses associated with MP3 compression are unacceptable to me", I made the unwarranted assumption that you meant that the losses associated with MP3 compression were unacceptable to you. I understand now that I should have interpreted that to mean that you were too lazy to spend 5 minutes looking at a man page. But to make it easy on you, I'll do the "careful work" for you:
I have, I could, and the MP3s sucked.
You didn't, you couldn't, and they probably did. Your statement "What few MP3s I've heard came from web site listings a while ago" contradicts your claim that you have ever done a blind listening test.
What's the point of having lossless originals if you can't play them back as they are?
There's no point in having the lossless originals in the first place.
In the end, nobody cares if you decide to store all your music as wav files. But if you're going to make assertions such as "to not support
Besides, I've heard enough MP3s, to be turned off from the format,
... stereo system, I can tell the difference between any lossless and lossy compressed music." Do us all a favor and do a blind listening test, where you will find that you can't tell the difference.
So you downloaded a few MP3s off Kazaa that some idiot encoded at 128 kbps with a crap encoder, could tell that the sound quality was lower, and therefore concluded that "with my golden ear and gigantic
If you're that set on having the lossless originials, you could always write a trivial script that streams an mp3 stream from your wav music on the fly, and use this device.
I know it sounds bizarre in our GOP/conservative dominated culture,
Yeah, conservatives are really happy about the gutting of contract law that goes on today. After all, contracts only form the basis of business, it's not like it's all that important...
The fact of the matter is that 0.01% of Ogg users use it because they're convinced it's superior way to encode music.
It's a well-known fact that 79.4337 percent of slashdot moderators wish that there was a "-1, pulled some statistics out of his butt" moderation.
I simply don't understand why so many people are infatuated with the book. The characters are infuriatingly stereotypical, the plotline is old (and, as you mentioned, often nonsensical), and the writing is determinedly mediocre.
To top it off, if you read the introduction to the book, the guy practically claims to have invented the idea of "wargames in space." It's one thing to write a piece of trash -- I've got plenty of those on my bookshelves -- but if you're going to brag, you ought to at least have something to back it up.
Given that the reviewer said "I haven't felt this satisfied after finishing a science fiction novel since Ender's Game", I'd say that badly written and pretentious was exactly the kind of book that he wanted to read.
Maybe you should specifically state what leads you to say something like the above.
I'll do it for him. He prefers GNOME.
That may help keep someone from running a spyware program called 'ls', but there are plenty of other ways to get someone to run a program.
True, and maybe reasonable for a work machine, but hardly practical for most of us.
I agree that right now, unix programs are generally more secure than the corresponding windows programs. But if the make-linux-just-like-windows-so-that-everyone-wil
Well, sure, if we keep our timestamps in seconds. But what if we decide that we need microseconds, or nanoseconds ... ?
When I first used Linux and I ran X, my thought was "damn, this is slow."
I thought the same thing. Then, I saved my pennies and got rid of my 486.
Imagine there are only three ways to do something (gain karma?), and one of the only (three) ways is to prove my point?
Proving your point on slashdot will net you a (-1, Flamebait).
(Ready for the real shocker? I'm 16.)
In other words, you're looking at it with three decades of space in between, and probably have never heard the vast majority of the music from that time period, which -- like always -- was crap.
Don't mistake your preference for certain music for being evidence of that music's quality. Do you listen to classical music? Jazz? Gregorian chants? If not, do you deny that there is quality to be found among them?
There are some talented musicians today. Yes, even ones under the big-name labels. Sure, most of today's music is crap, but that's certainly not a change from twenty years ago, fifty years ago, or five hundred years ago.
Now the articles get upwards of 150-200 with tons of "me too!" comments while the real gems get buried in the rubbish.
Seems to me that Groklaw is in serious need of adopting the Slashdot moderator system.
Please tell me that you're joking.
so that we can use a system designed by people with whom we sympathise.
So now the free software crowd wants to only use software written by people with the exact same views? That's got to be the most juvenile logic I've heard from the supposed "free software" advocates -- and that's saying something.
Once again, I'm glad that I ally myself with the open source crowd rather than those free software nuts.
In fact, whatever happened to the general guideline of not moderating a comment just becuase you don't agree with the content?
... the one that's been completely ignored for at least the last four years that I've been reading slashdot? Since Taco has repeatedly stated that he's completely uninterested in fixing the moderation system, as long as the moderations happen to match his own views, I'd say that we're stuck with it.
Um
What's the point of OSS ? Making better software ? No.
Slow down there. You don't speak for everyone who uses and develops open source software, and as such you can't make the blanket statement of the "point of OSS." I do both, and I most certainly do so because I believe open source makes for better software. In the cases where it doesn't -- for instance, in my opinion, Opera for web browsing -- then I'm perfectly happy to use a closed source alternative