OTOH, nobody I've met IRL has ever mentioned anything non-MP3. Not FLAC, not WMA, not AAC. Nobody gives a fuck about either WMA or AAC, except that those two are being crammed down their throats by places like Apple Music Store and BuyMusic.com. Most frequently asked question "can I convert this to MP3, and how will it sound if I do?"
Your grandma doesn't need a computer if she can't handle the two buttons on the front of her computer. No amount of work and research will make Linux ready for drooling morons, I'm sorry to say.
Hi. Either you're talking to yourself, or a comment was hidden. Whatever. This reply isn't for you, because you're obviously making a pathetic attempt to troll. This is for those folks who might be reading what you have to say, and may be agreeing. I want to dissuade those people from believing this drivel.
It was cool to trash Mac users and call them brainless in 1997. This is 2004. You're only 7 years behind the times.
There are damned good reasons for using MacOS still, unless you have a fully-functional clone of Photoshop 7, QuarkXPress 6, Illustrator, etc. ready for us. There's also still a need for Windows.
And FYI, and for everyone's information, the OS X userland is more or less FreeBSD's. That's as FreeBSD-like as it gets, folks; it's not FreeBSD-based at all, and isn't all that UNIXy to boot, despite its BSD roots. I for one think it's crap that the last two upgrades have been full price, but when you need features of the new system you don't have much choice. Ah, the joys of commercial operating systems.:-P
I want a world without brainless *n?x zealots. Can you understand that?
I use KDE, but have used GNOME in the past. I like both, but at this time, I prefer KDE. In fact, no matter what I used, say, one and a half years ago, I have eventually ended up back with KDE.
The only argument Perens makes that makes sense to me is that GTK+ can be used in a proprietary product without paying a licensing fee. Again, not trying to flame, but that more or less confirms that Bruce doesn't give a damn about Free Software. If he did, that wouldn't even be a point of contention for him.
Seriously, why do we keep seeing these heavy-handed tactics to kill KDE long after the licensing issues have been resolved? Other than the possibility of holding a grudge (and though I can't find it now, I swear I saw an RMS essay about continuing to treat KDE as a GPL-violator) I can't understand it.
You see, it's very simple. If you release your code under a GPL-compatible license and link against Qt, you're fine, since Qt is available under the GPL. If you want to release proprietary software, all you have to do is pay the licensing fee.
I know; I know. Someone's going to argue "but what about Joe Shmoe who wants to sell a text editor? What if he doesn't have the two grand?" Well, then, he can do what any other startup does: borrow money, and pay back the loan when the money starts coming in.
In no other business that I'm aware of is there the possibility of getting your tools for free, and then use those free tools to turn a profit. LGPL-using developers, you are aware, are you not, that your choice of license means that people are writing derivative works without giving back to you? You might as well be releasing your code under the BSD license (not a bad idea, IMHO, especially if you're not terribly interested in pursuing legal issues, though the BSD license isn't without strings, either.)
Couple the barely-valid cost-of-licensing complaint with the fact that GNOME is currently in a state of flux, the choice of GNOME is iffy at best. Where have all the features gone, and after usability work is done, when will the features come back? Why is the default GNOME 2.4 CD ripper incapable of allowing me to set a default MP3/Ogg Vorbis bitrate? If it's because it's assumed that the average GNOME user would become confused, is it really safe to assume that the average GNOME user is stupider than the average MacOS user? iTunes, at least, allows for some tweaking of settings; they're just not right out in the forefront, and limited to only a couple of important features.
I could go on for days, but to tell you the truth, had someone proposed this in the GNOME 2.0/2.2 days, I'd just have nodded my head; GNOME was a wee bit more bloated and had an ugly API, but if it became something of a standard, so be it. Now? Why are we burdening ourselves with this dumbed-down version of a UNIX desktop?
I recently had to check the office OS X machines to see if NetInfo and LDAP were enabled, due to a vulnerability. Although all the machines had the default install, and nobody had gone through changing settings, some machines had LDAP enabled, some had NetInfo enabled, and others had both. Did I mention that these were all OS X 10.2 Workstation?
Seems like the real question is "how come some OS X boxes are vulnerable by default?"
Ogg Vorbis will also do ABR files; that's what I use. I find that using ABR with both LAME and OggEnc yield files that are slightly smaller than CBR MP3s, yet superior sound quality. This is what I use, because I like semi-predictable filesizes, and even prefer this over the slightly higher sound quality.:-D
To get close to Vorbis (and I prefer Vorbis even if it does emphasize the high frequencies) you'll need to add several flags. I've just wiped my Debian install clean to make way for a Gentoo LiveCD, and have yet to dump my old home dir off of backup (so I can't look at my.abcde.conf, sorry.) But I've got a nice set of options for LAME that make for 128 kbps ABR MP3 files that're very clean sounding. However (and maybe this is because the Vorbis files emphasize the high frequencies; I'm not sure) the MP3s sound "flat", somehow. I've managed to ignore upper-frequency scintillation! Eep! They sound slightly flat compared to the WAVs I've made.
And about the compilers: you might also consider disabling MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE/SSE2 optimizations in both LAME and libvorbis. The performance-optimized routines tend to produce somewhat lower-quality audio. Personally, I don't have great speakers, and usually listen to Ogg Vorbis files on a Sawtooth G4's internal speaker(!) at work, and my home speakers were Radio Shack-rebranded "multimedia" speaker, so I'm not nearly as picky as many "audio snobs." But I do hear a difference.
I decided to switch away from using Gentoo (after I accidentally nuked my system for the 12th time, my fault) to Debian. The day afterward, they were compromised, and they still haven't gotten back to normal.
Today, I decided that I wasn't entirely happy with Debian, and so I have Gentoo stage3 LiveCDs sitting on my desk, ready for an install when I get home...
Maybe someone should start working on Desktop OpenBSD.:-P
Why must Gentoo be simple enough for your dimwitted mother?
Now, I know I'll be marked as "flamebait" for saying "dimwitted," but really. Why is the assumption that when something offers desktop apps, the entire system must be so simple that the user doesn't have to learn anything.
If someone can manage to meet the average "not ready for my mother"/. requirements, they'd have a system that would make Windows and MacOS look hopelessly complex. Is that really a good thing?
Yeah, good. Maybe now I'll fire up Linux again, instead of just working with OS X. If you have worked with Expose, you don't want anything else. It feels so natural.
Um, yeah. Instead of searching for a name in a titlebar, then simply clicking on it, you hit F9 which makes all the windows zoom, shrink, and move. Then you hunt around the screen, and click on it.
I'm sorry, but not only does it not feel more natural to me, but it takes longer than a taskbar. And I use OS X more than anything else (at least 45hr/wk.)
Well, I'm fairly paranoid, though I'm probably just going to leave my system alone. If they're certain the repositories are OK, then I suppose I'll trust them.;-D
Gah! Copy-pasted from Evolution. Evo seems to have stripped out newline characters. I added some, but missed a few. The email to Howard was formatted better than that.:-/
At my time in school (at a less than reputable state U) I found that the true scam artists were in the employ of the University.
Okay! I promised no flames. Sorry.
There were a few other tidbits that I loved:
"Another way to get free software is to have students develop our critical systems."
Or rather, students are paying you to develop the software for you. Yep!
"Schools often provide free food for you and your staff for working meetings during lunch."
Meanwhile, the students (who're helping to pay to keep the lightson...well, yes, more than likely their parents, grants, loans, scholarships, what have you) also have to pay for their meals. Thes eare the same students who're slackjawed cyber-sapiens, unworthy to betrusted with your important tasks. If they're not mature enough to handle important tasks, what's that sayabout Princeton?
The halls of Academia IT are filled with drooling morons.
See link mentioned above for a small taste of the idiocy you'll encounter, if you've not already had a taste.
The real scam artist here is Howard, who has managed to hold down this job at Princeton, of all places. To have a managerial position, apparently all one needs is the ability to write jargon-laden papers and know how to turn one's nose up at undergrads. Thinking is optional. Insight is unnecessary. Knowledge of the subject matter is most likely beyond a manager's grasp, even if the manager is supposedly a learned man. Rather than research the subject matter, go with one's gut, write about whatever one thinks is true.
When someone insists upon Linux and related software, one is a "Zealot" or in this case a "terrorist"! If you're a Microsoft zealot, you're "accepting."
Cute! Though he ought to watch his wording, because it does imply that simply accepting MS products is a poor compromise . . .;-D
Yes, and Ogg Vorbis has been free and open since the beginning, yet gets pushed out by WMA. Perhaps it's a better format, but both are (rightfully) claiming that they deliver better-than-MP3 quality audio at lower bitrates. WMA, open? Free? Bah. It's cheap, but not free. Maybe you should look into it. Content distribution is free. Isn't that nice of Microsoft? You can give a copy of your WMA file to someone else without paying a licensing fee. That's great. That's so generous of them! What a great company! Let's all light candles and sing songs of Microsoft's wonderous generosity at allowing us to do with our audio files as we wish! That's ever so nice.
But then again, Vorbis has the codecs, available for free. Vorbis has integer-math codecs that can be used for hardware, again for free. Why is it losing, again?
I'm not even going to argue Apple's case because I mostly agree with you. If you're implying that Apple isn't capable of streaming MPEG4, though, maybe you should do some more research before you open your mouth. Not only is it streamable, Apple's not the only company involved.
Now if only both companies would just switch to Vorbis, I'd be a happy man. In the world of DRM, though, I don't think it'll happen.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Enlightenment DR17.
I use Ogg Vorbis, but it's far from trendy, yeah.
Your grandma doesn't need a computer if she can't handle the two buttons on the front of her computer. No amount of work and research will make Linux ready for drooling morons, I'm sorry to say.
I have my threshold set where I want it. I can't help it that you're responding to the assholes.
Please show a bit more respect.
You're asking a Mac user to show you respect after that rant? Please...
It was cool to trash Mac users and call them brainless in 1997. This is 2004. You're only 7 years behind the times.
There are damned good reasons for using MacOS still, unless you have a fully-functional clone of Photoshop 7, QuarkXPress 6, Illustrator, etc. ready for us. There's also still a need for Windows.
And FYI, and for everyone's information, the OS X userland is more or less FreeBSD's. That's as FreeBSD-like as it gets, folks; it's not FreeBSD-based at all, and isn't all that UNIXy to boot, despite its BSD roots. I for one think it's crap that the last two upgrades have been full price, but when you need features of the new system you don't have much choice. Ah, the joys of commercial operating systems. :-P
I want a world without brainless *n?x zealots. Can you understand that?
Hell, I got rated funny, and that's what I was going for. Think I meant it? Think again...
:-D
It's a neat trick, as far as I'm concerned.
As far as I'm concerned, this is further proof that BSD zealots are far worse (and less trustworthy) than Linux zealots.
GNOME also suffered from the cuts, and some people were offended. Try Googling for it sometime.
The only argument Perens makes that makes sense to me is that GTK+ can be used in a proprietary product without paying a licensing fee. Again, not trying to flame, but that more or less confirms that Bruce doesn't give a damn about Free Software. If he did, that wouldn't even be a point of contention for him.
Seriously, why do we keep seeing these heavy-handed tactics to kill KDE long after the licensing issues have been resolved? Other than the possibility of holding a grudge (and though I can't find it now, I swear I saw an RMS essay about continuing to treat KDE as a GPL-violator) I can't understand it.
You see, it's very simple. If you release your code under a GPL-compatible license and link against Qt, you're fine, since Qt is available under the GPL. If you want to release proprietary software, all you have to do is pay the licensing fee.
I know; I know. Someone's going to argue "but what about Joe Shmoe who wants to sell a text editor? What if he doesn't have the two grand?" Well, then, he can do what any other startup does: borrow money, and pay back the loan when the money starts coming in.
In no other business that I'm aware of is there the possibility of getting your tools for free, and then use those free tools to turn a profit. LGPL-using developers, you are aware, are you not, that your choice of license means that people are writing derivative works without giving back to you? You might as well be releasing your code under the BSD license (not a bad idea, IMHO, especially if you're not terribly interested in pursuing legal issues, though the BSD license isn't without strings, either.)
Couple the barely-valid cost-of-licensing complaint with the fact that GNOME is currently in a state of flux, the choice of GNOME is iffy at best. Where have all the features gone, and after usability work is done, when will the features come back? Why is the default GNOME 2.4 CD ripper incapable of allowing me to set a default MP3/Ogg Vorbis bitrate? If it's because it's assumed that the average GNOME user would become confused, is it really safe to assume that the average GNOME user is stupider than the average MacOS user? iTunes, at least, allows for some tweaking of settings; they're just not right out in the forefront, and limited to only a couple of important features.
I could go on for days, but to tell you the truth, had someone proposed this in the GNOME 2.0/2.2 days, I'd just have nodded my head; GNOME was a wee bit more bloated and had an ugly API, but if it became something of a standard, so be it. Now? Why are we burdening ourselves with this dumbed-down version of a UNIX desktop?
Seems like the real question is "how come some OS X boxes are vulnerable by default?"
*yes, I'm just being an ass.
To get close to Vorbis (and I prefer Vorbis even if it does emphasize the high frequencies) you'll need to add several flags. I've just wiped my Debian install clean to make way for a Gentoo LiveCD, and have yet to dump my old home dir off of backup (so I can't look at my .abcde.conf, sorry.) But I've got a nice set of options for LAME that make for 128 kbps ABR MP3 files that're very clean sounding. However (and maybe this is because the Vorbis files emphasize the high frequencies; I'm not sure) the MP3s sound "flat", somehow. I've managed to ignore upper-frequency scintillation! Eep! They sound slightly flat compared to the WAVs I've made.
And about the compilers: you might also consider disabling MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE/SSE2 optimizations in both LAME and libvorbis. The performance-optimized routines tend to produce somewhat lower-quality audio. Personally, I don't have great speakers, and usually listen to Ogg Vorbis files on a Sawtooth G4's internal speaker(!) at work, and my home speakers were Radio Shack-rebranded "multimedia" speaker, so I'm not nearly as picky as many "audio snobs." But I do hear a difference.
That's got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've read in the past year.
Today, I decided that I wasn't entirely happy with Debian, and so I have Gentoo stage3 LiveCDs sitting on my desk, ready for an install when I get home...
Maybe someone should start working on Desktop OpenBSD. :-P
Now, I know I'll be marked as "flamebait" for saying "dimwitted," but really. Why is the assumption that when something offers desktop apps, the entire system must be so simple that the user doesn't have to learn anything.
If someone can manage to meet the average "not ready for my mother" /. requirements, they'd have a system that would make Windows and MacOS look hopelessly complex. Is that really a good thing?
Thanks a million.
Um, yeah. Instead of searching for a name in a titlebar, then simply clicking on it, you hit F9 which makes all the windows zoom, shrink, and move. Then you hunt around the screen, and click on it.
I'm sorry, but not only does it not feel more natural to me, but it takes longer than a taskbar. And I use OS X more than anything else (at least 45hr/wk.)
Well, I'm fairly paranoid, though I'm probably just going to leave my system alone. If they're certain the repositories are OK, then I suppose I'll trust them. ;-D
I just switched to Debian a couple of days ago, and am thinking I should reinstall.
Damn.
Gah! Copy-pasted from Evolution. Evo seems to have stripped out newline characters. I added some, but missed a few. The email to Howard was formatted better than that. :-/
It IS about your article in Syllabus, however. :D
At my time in school (at a less than reputable state U) I found that the true scam artists were in the employ of the University.
Okay! I promised no flames. Sorry.
There were a few other tidbits that I loved:
"Another way to get free software is to have students develop our critical systems."
Or rather, students are paying you to develop the software for you. Yep!
"Schools often provide free food for you and your staff for working meetings during lunch."
Meanwhile, the students (who're helping to pay to keep the lightson...well, yes, more than likely their parents, grants, loans, scholarships, what have you) also have to pay for their meals. Thes eare the same students who're slackjawed cyber-sapiens, unworthy to betrusted with your important tasks. If they're not mature enough to handle important tasks, what's that sayabout Princeton?
Cheers.
See link mentioned above for a small taste of the idiocy you'll encounter, if you've not already had a taste.
The real scam artist here is Howard, who has managed to hold down this job at Princeton, of all places. To have a managerial position, apparently all one needs is the ability to write jargon-laden papers and know how to turn one's nose up at undergrads. Thinking is optional. Insight is unnecessary. Knowledge of the subject matter is most likely beyond a manager's grasp, even if the manager is supposedly a learned man. Rather than research the subject matter, go with one's gut, write about whatever one thinks is true.
Move along; nothing to see here.
I wish I had moderator points right now. :-D I also wish I had the money to buy some GTK+ developers some X11 developer manuals.
Cute! Though he ought to watch his wording, because it does imply that simply accepting MS products is a poor compromise . . . ;-D
But then again, Vorbis has the codecs, available for free. Vorbis has integer-math codecs that can be used for hardware, again for free. Why is it losing, again?
I'm not even going to argue Apple's case because I mostly agree with you. If you're implying that Apple isn't capable of streaming MPEG4, though, maybe you should do some more research before you open your mouth. Not only is it streamable, Apple's not the only company involved.
Now if only both companies would just switch to Vorbis, I'd be a happy man. In the world of DRM, though, I don't think it'll happen.