Ogg is supposed to be better than MP3 in two respects: firstly, it is unencumbered by patents. Secondly, Ogg appears to deliver better quality at low bitrates.
As to whether Ogg is necessary, well...
I'm ambivalent. On the one hand I don't want to slag off the guy who put so much work into Ogg. On the other hand, I don't support the idea behind Ogg at all. Ogg was created to protect us against the evil of software patents, but in doing so, it legitimizes that same evil. I would rather not acknowledge it at all: I'd rather see it die through a massive failure of enforcement (after all, in retrospect, what was all the brouhaha over the GIF patent good for?).
MP3 works. I don't have to worry about my player supporting MP3. I don't have to worry about other people being able to play my MP3s. And I don't worry about MP3 licensing terms either. To be honest, I don't anybody should.
Generally you lose the data, unless you wrap it in another format to encapsulate all the information. This is what Macheads did on Classic MacOS: they.hqx'd or.bin'd their files before transferring them to another system. It's not ideal. The alternative, flat streams-of-bytes, is not ideal either (and not true: even in Unix, files have some metadata that doesn't translate very well).
Hopefully in the future our filesystems and transfer protocols will evolve to have some reasonably broad common ground where metadata is concerned (a development similar to the diminishing need to accomodate DOS 8+3 filenames).
The HZ value which determines scheduler granularity has been bumped from 100 (which gives 10ms granularity) to 1024 since 2.5.low-twenties or something. You can change the HZ value yourself on 2.4 kernels right now in fact.
Haven't heard much about scheduler/hyperthreading interaction.
Cable TV companies don't have to pay third parties for the bandwidth they are using. It's all local. It's cheap for them to broadcast on their local network for pretty much the same reason bandwidth is really cheap on your local LAN. Getting it out there is really expensive though.
Nevertheless, if you want to, you can buy that kind of service. A skimpy $50/month cable/DSL subscription won't cut it though. It'll be more like a $2000/month leased line. Which no ISP offers because no consumer can afford it. The fear of people stealing movies has nothing to do with it however.
Hmm, with everybody talking about Linux audio tools, I suppose this is my opportunity to plug GNUsound. GNUsound is now in version 0.6, and it's developing very well. If you need a fast, straightforward sound editor, you will want to give it a try.
Under the GPL, if you can't distribute it for free, you can't distribute it at all.
That's nonsense. The GPL doesn't stipulate that you have to distribute your software for free, but that you make the source available on request, and allow it to be redistributed. This has the tendency of driving the cost of obtaining the software down to zero, but that is by no means a necessity.
Stagnant (or even negative) population growth is certainly cause for concern, because it has tremendous socio-economic repercussions with unpredictable results. The peace and quiet of a 4 billion people planet may very well turn out to be the peace and quiet of a graveyard. Slow, controlled change is key.
The human population won't grow into the trillions, because there is a strong negative correlation between GDP and birth rates, and there are no reason to suppose that this trend will reverse itself anytime soon.
Birth rates have been steadily dropping all over the world since WWII. In countries such as Japan and Sweden, the birth rate is so low that most experts predict it to fall below the replacement rate within the next two decades. Some countries, such as Latvia, are in fact already faced with negative population growth.
That is not to say that in 50 years time there won't be a lot of people around. A recent UN forecast puts it at slightly over 9 billion. But the absolutely phenomenal increase of the human population as we've seen happen over the past 200 years appears to have run its course.
The problem with your argument is that it leads to the kind of reasoning that says you cannot disable image loading in a browser, because it deprives website owners of advertising income. It would also justify the storeowners wet dream: having to pay for browing the shop, whether you buy something or not.
There should be a distinction between recreational/sampling and commercial/evasive use/distribution. It wouldn't even be anything ground-breaking: the law frequently has to account for intent.
It's largely a matter of who you want to believe. The BSA stats aren't any more inaccurate than the RIAA stats on music piracy, Symantec stats on virus/worm damage, or ISP/pundit stats on the cost of spam.
For a group of people eager to believe that the "spam plague" allegedly costs us all billions, it is more than a bit hypocritical to summarily dismiss whatever numbers the BSA or the RIAA come up with.
It's all a matter of what you love to hate. When you're decided on that, the numbers will follow.
If that is the case, then you will agree that the ability to choose must be protected.
If the consumer doesn't make the choice you like, well that's just too fucking bad, ain't it? You can either 'educate' the consumer in the egotistical belief that the consumer would wake up and move to 'free' software if only she were enlightened, or you could assume that the consumer isn't a complete idiot, has made up his own mind as is his right, and just shut the fuck up.
Nothing you said contradicts anything I've said. Moreover, it isn't clear how anything you say relates to either 'free software' (which protects consumer choice must be protected by guaranteeing the freedoms to modify software and redistribute the result) or 'open source' (which holds that source code availability leads to better software). So I'm not really sure who's the person with the axe to grind, here.
As a free software person myself, I think you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice by misrepresenting what free software is all about.
The free software crowd holds that software which is freely modifiable and redistributable is always preferable above software which isn't, even if that software is better in every other way.
The open source crowd, on the other hand, believes that you should use whatever software suits your purposes best: even if that means perpetuating unjust monopolies or the further moronification of consumers. To embellish this drearily Darwinian interpretation, the open source crowd argues that open source software must lead to better software through competition (another thinly veiled Darwinism), but there isn't any evidence to back this up. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, the Linux desktop debacles have unmasked this argument as just so much wishful thinking.
Open source is an ideology of power, conceived during the heydays of.com madness, "new economy", and IBM billions. Under those circumstances, it looks and works like a better kind of free software: that is, free software without cumbersome restrictions and none of the righteous preaching. But under less favorable circumstances, it simply collapses.
The Eurozone was not conceived to counter US force, but to ensure that wars like WWI and WWII would not happen again.
Your comment just serves to underscore the perception of Americans as self-interested powermongers.
The view that the right programming language or paradigm will solve our problems is a very naive view, which Fred Brooks thoroughly debunked back in the eighties ("no silver bullets").
Programs written in Python or Scheme regularly "crash" on me, with cryptic stack backtraces mumbling about properties that are missing from objects and other unexpected errors (such as missing files and/or functionality due to version mismatches). The only difference is that the Python/Scheme/... community doesn't call this a "crash", they call it "dropping into the debugger so the programmer can fix the problem", which is just wishful nonsense.
Again, there is no silver bullet. Programming is hard. If the world were to switch to Scheme, we'd suffer "Wrong type argument" error instead of "Segmentation faults", but it wouldn't do anything for the reliability of our software. Because the hard part is not memory management or pointer arithmetic.
Consider this: ONLY in the U.S. are guns so easily available. If there is a problem here, I'd argue that it is NOT John Carmack; the problem here is N.R.A., and the fact that anybody out there can arm himself/herself to its teeth.
But, as the controversial film "Bowling for Columbine" points out, Canada also has lots of guns. So what gives...?
Well, Ardour definitely will meet your mixing needs. If you're looking for a simpler but also powerful editor that's more like Cool Edit you might want to try my program GNUsound as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Ogg is supposed to be better than MP3 in two respects: firstly, it is unencumbered by patents. Secondly, Ogg appears to deliver better quality at low bitrates.
As to whether Ogg is necessary, well...
I'm ambivalent. On the one hand I don't want to slag off the guy who put so much work into Ogg. On the other hand, I don't support the idea behind Ogg at all. Ogg was created to protect us against the evil of software patents, but in doing so, it legitimizes that same evil. I would rather not acknowledge it at all: I'd rather see it die through a massive failure of enforcement (after all, in retrospect, what was all the brouhaha over the GIF patent good for?).
MP3 works. I don't have to worry about my player supporting MP3. I don't have to worry about other people being able to play my MP3s. And I don't worry about MP3 licensing terms either. To be honest, I don't anybody should.
Generally you lose the data, unless you wrap it in another format to encapsulate all the information. This is what Macheads did on Classic MacOS: they .hqx'd or .bin'd their files before transferring them to another system. It's not ideal. The alternative, flat streams-of-bytes, is not ideal either (and not true: even in Unix, files have some metadata that doesn't translate very well).
Hopefully in the future our filesystems and transfer protocols will evolve to have some reasonably broad common ground where metadata is concerned (a development similar to the diminishing need to accomodate DOS 8+3 filenames).
Haven't heard much about scheduler/hyperthreading interaction.
It's pretty much irrelevant whether an X-Box sale amounts to a net loss or a net profit.
The thing you should be looking at is which benefits Microsoft more: an X-Box sold, or an X-Box shelved?
The US has started and/or supported countless insurgencies, wars, and uprisings. I think your proud arrogance is downright disgusting.
Cable TV companies don't have to pay third parties for the bandwidth they are using. It's all local. It's cheap for them to broadcast on their local network for pretty much the same reason bandwidth is really cheap on your local LAN. Getting it out there is really expensive though.
Nevertheless, if you want to, you can buy that kind of service. A skimpy $50/month cable/DSL subscription won't cut it though. It'll be more like a $2000/month leased line. Which no ISP offers because no consumer can afford it. The fear of people stealing movies has nothing to do with it however.
If it's the word of a cynical Slashdot regular against one of the most experienced intelligence agencies in the world, I'll take the latter, thanks.
Stone him to death with nano-sized pebbles.
Hmm, with everybody talking about Linux audio tools, I suppose this is my opportunity to plug GNUsound. GNUsound is now in version 0.6, and it's developing very well. If you need a fast, straightforward sound editor, you will want to give it a try.
You forgot the printing. The printing under Linux. 's Fun. Printing.
That's nonsense. The GPL doesn't stipulate that you have to distribute your software for free, but that you make the source available on request, and allow it to be redistributed. This has the tendency of driving the cost of obtaining the software down to zero, but that is by no means a necessity.
Stagnant (or even negative) population growth is certainly cause for concern, because it has tremendous socio-economic repercussions with unpredictable results. The peace and quiet of a 4 billion people planet may very well turn out to be the peace and quiet of a graveyard. Slow, controlled change is key.
The human population won't grow into the trillions, because there is a strong negative correlation between GDP and birth rates, and there are no reason to suppose that this trend will reverse itself anytime soon.
Birth rates have been steadily dropping all over the world since WWII. In countries such as Japan and Sweden, the birth rate is so low that most experts predict it to fall below the replacement rate within the next two decades. Some countries, such as Latvia, are in fact already faced with negative population growth.
That is not to say that in 50 years time there won't be a lot of people around. A recent UN forecast puts it at slightly over 9 billion. But the absolutely phenomenal increase of the human population as we've seen happen over the past 200 years appears to have run its course.
I agree, in principle, but not in practice.
The problem with your argument is that it leads to the kind of reasoning that says you cannot disable image loading in a browser, because it deprives website owners of advertising income. It would also justify the storeowners wet dream: having to pay for browing the shop, whether you buy something or not.
There should be a distinction between recreational/sampling and commercial/evasive use/distribution. It wouldn't even be anything ground-breaking: the law frequently has to account for intent.
It's largely a matter of who you want to believe. The BSA stats aren't any more inaccurate than the RIAA stats on music piracy, Symantec stats on virus/worm damage, or ISP/pundit stats on the cost of spam.
For a group of people eager to believe that the "spam plague" allegedly costs us all billions, it is more than a bit hypocritical to summarily dismiss whatever numbers the BSA or the RIAA come up with.
It's all a matter of what you love to hate. When you're decided on that, the numbers will follow.
If that is the case, then you will agree that the ability to choose must be protected.
If the consumer doesn't make the choice you like, well that's just too fucking bad, ain't it? You can either 'educate' the consumer in the egotistical belief that the consumer would wake up and move to 'free' software if only she were enlightened, or you could assume that the consumer isn't a complete idiot, has made up his own mind as is his right, and just shut the fuck up.
Nothing you said contradicts anything I've said. Moreover, it isn't clear how anything you say relates to either 'free software' (which protects consumer choice must be protected by guaranteeing the freedoms to modify software and redistribute the result) or 'open source' (which holds that source code availability leads to better software). So I'm not really sure who's the person with the axe to grind, here.
As a free software person myself, I think you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice by misrepresenting what free software is all about.
.com madness, "new economy", and IBM billions. Under those circumstances, it looks and works like a better kind of free software: that is, free software without cumbersome restrictions and none of the righteous preaching. But under less favorable circumstances, it simply collapses.
The free software crowd holds that software which is freely modifiable and redistributable is always preferable above software which isn't, even if that software is better in every other way.
The open source crowd, on the other hand, believes that you should use whatever software suits your purposes best: even if that means perpetuating unjust monopolies or the further moronification of consumers. To embellish this drearily Darwinian interpretation, the open source crowd argues that open source software must lead to better software through competition (another thinly veiled Darwinism), but there isn't any evidence to back this up. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, the Linux desktop debacles have unmasked this argument as just so much wishful thinking.
Open source is an ideology of power, conceived during the heydays of
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
The Eurozone was not conceived to counter US force, but to ensure that wars like WWI and WWII would not happen again. Your comment just serves to underscore the perception of Americans as self-interested powermongers.
Seriously, why change equipment that everybody has to use, just because the US doesn't want to print decent banknotes?
The view that the right programming language or paradigm will solve our problems is a very naive view, which Fred Brooks thoroughly debunked back in the eighties ("no silver bullets").
Programs written in Python or Scheme regularly "crash" on me, with cryptic stack backtraces mumbling about properties that are missing from objects and other unexpected errors (such as missing files and/or functionality due to version mismatches). The only difference is that the Python/Scheme/... community doesn't call this a "crash", they call it "dropping into the debugger so the programmer can fix the problem", which is just wishful nonsense.
Again, there is no silver bullet. Programming is hard. If the world were to switch to Scheme, we'd suffer "Wrong type argument" error instead of "Segmentation faults", but it wouldn't do anything for the reliability of our software. Because the hard part is not memory management or pointer arithmetic.
But, as the controversial film "Bowling for Columbine" points out, Canada also has lots of guns. So what gives...?
Well, Ardour definitely will meet your mixing needs. If you're looking for a simpler but also powerful editor that's more like Cool Edit you might want to try my program GNUsound as well.
Ardour is a bit overkill for my needs, and Audacity is too slow for my taste, so I wrote GNUsound. You might want to give it a try.
He might want to try GNUsound.