mp3PRO has no hope of gaining enough market share to become a worthy competitor. It's a very proprietary extention to MP3.
mp3PRO has one very specific advantage over all the other formats on the market-share front. It has the characters m, p, and 3 in it. Everyone has heard of mp3, and people who don't care about the open source cause (read: the vast majority of people) will buy an mp3PRO device way before considering an Ogg Vorbis device.
As I've said before, name is really important when marketing comes into play. And Ogg Vorbis' name simply blows.
For those interested in database design instead of (or alongside) programming, here's a short list:
Any of E.F. Codd's original papers (hard to find)
Introduction to Database Systems - Chris Date
The SQL Standard - Chris Date
Practical Issues in Database Management - Fabian Pascal
The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Ralph Kimball
Building the Data Warehouse - W. H. Inmon
Programmers, if you ever find yourself building a relational database for a project, please please please read up and design it properly. There are way too many fucked up database designs out there already. Designing a mathematically sound database is way different from designing an algorithm.
So isn't this basically the same thing, except that he's not wasting time and gasoline to get there, and he's not potentially depriving someone else of the opportunity to read the book?
By the way, if you're at work and don't have your bill handy, you can get your Verizon account number by calling 800-621-9900 and wading through some other folks:) This step took about 3 minutes.
That's what I have a regular CD player for. Actually, the fact that that is such a pain in the ass is why I never use my regular CD player (except in the car).
Of course, of you decide to process all of your documents with another application, you are at the mercy of the vendor.
That's the vendor's problem, not the format's. If Microsoft wants you to be able to reverse-engineer their document format, they'll give you documentation of it. If they don't want you to reverse-engineer their format, they won't (and they sure as hell won't make it XML).
Plain-text, while space-consuming, will always be accessible.
That's true. But we're not talking about plain text; we're talking about XML (which is a bloated "self-documenting" structure that happens to be stored in plain text). If you want plain text, save your Word docs as text.
Even M-crew, however, doesn't let you copy MP3 files from your PC to the L7HD -- no surprise, really, when you consider that Sony is also a record company with a vested interest in stifling the casual trading of MP3 music.
The lack of this key feature renders the machine dead in the water. Next.
If I ever wrote or read my stored data manually, your post might be relevant. But we're not talking about computer/human interface here. No, we're talking about machine representation of data.
Of course progamming languages need to be human-readable; that's what they're for. Stored data does not; it needs to be efficient. XML is bloat of the worst kind.
You're implying that XML was designed to make data more human-readable? Bollocks! That's what documentation is for!
So, other than making it easier to reverse-engineer a data format that you're not supposed to be reverse-engineering (complete with bugs that come in because you guessed wrongly that <co> means Country and not County), what other benefits are there?
XML is a giant leap backwards. It makes us convert data from a binary format, to a terribly verbose text format, then back to a binary format for use. This leads to:
conversion complexity
conversion errors
vast storage requirements
vast bandwidth requirements
The only benefit AFAIK is that applications from different vendors can use it to "talk" to each other. However, the applications still have to understand the same set of XML tags to begin with, then must conform to this hideous standard with all of its verbosity. Said applications would have been better off using a proprietary (read: efficient) binary storage format in the first place.
Beautiful answer. Now if we can just get these cretins to understand why views, subqueries, and transactions (not this "atomic operations" BS) are important too, we'll be getting somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
mp3PRO has one very specific advantage over all the other formats on the market-share front. It has the characters m, p, and 3 in it. Everyone has heard of mp3, and people who don't care about the open source cause (read: the vast majority of people) will buy an mp3PRO device way before considering an Ogg Vorbis device.
As I've said before, name is really important when marketing comes into play. And Ogg Vorbis' name simply blows.
- Any of E.F. Codd's original papers (hard to find)
- Introduction to Database Systems - Chris Date
- The SQL Standard - Chris Date
- Practical Issues in Database Management - Fabian Pascal
- The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Ralph Kimball
- Building the Data Warehouse - W. H. Inmon
Programmers, if you ever find yourself building a relational database for a project, please please please read up and design it properly. There are way too many fucked up database designs out there already. Designing a mathematically sound database is way different from designing an algorithm.So isn't this basically the same thing, except that he's not wasting time and gasoline to get there, and he's not potentially depriving someone else of the opportunity to read the book?
I'll be damned, he's right . . . why why why? 'com0' works, 'com1' ~ 'com9' fail, 'com10'+ works . . . WTF?
So charge it up again every hour.
Groundskeeper Willie: STOP, thats me retirement grease!
We meet at last, stealer-of-my-first-choice!
It's finally 1.0! Too bad it still has the worst name ever.
By the way, if you're at work and don't have your bill handy, you can get your Verizon account number by calling 800-621-9900 and wading through some other folks :) This step took about 3 minutes.
Better opt out right away . . . anybody know how?
Say it again to someone that can do something about it, like Congress.
Don't forget the cigar . . .
That joke might have been funny if it wasn't already in this story's headline.
. . . but not new. And these guys actually have sound samples, too . . .
That's what I have a regular CD player for. Actually, the fact that that is such a pain in the ass is why I never use my regular CD player (except in the car).
That's the vendor's problem, not the format's. If Microsoft wants you to be able to reverse-engineer their document format, they'll give you documentation of it. If they don't want you to reverse-engineer their format, they won't (and they sure as hell won't make it XML).
Plain-text, while space-consuming, will always be accessible.
That's true. But we're not talking about plain text; we're talking about XML (which is a bloated "self-documenting" structure that happens to be stored in plain text). If you want plain text, save your Word docs as text.
The lack of this key feature renders the machine dead in the water. Next.
Of course progamming languages need to be human-readable; that's what they're for. Stored data does not; it needs to be efficient. XML is bloat of the worst kind.
So, other than making it easier to reverse-engineer a data format that you're not supposed to be reverse-engineering (complete with bugs that come in because you guessed wrongly that <co> means Country and not County), what other benefits are there?
- conversion complexity
- conversion errors
- vast storage requirements
- vast bandwidth requirements
The only benefit AFAIK is that applications from different vendors can use it to "talk" to each other. However, the applications still have to understand the same set of XML tags to begin with, then must conform to this hideous standard with all of its verbosity. Said applications would have been better off using a proprietary (read: efficient) binary storage format in the first place.Ban XML!
Catch it with something that is also moving that fast.
Has everyone already forgotten about the Trojan Room?
Music piracy has been going on en masse for several years. Video piracy is newer. It's just a matter of time and technology . . .
Codd or Date would be appalled that you're using MySQL in the first place :)
Beautiful answer. Now if we can just get these cretins to understand why views, subqueries, and transactions (not this "atomic operations" BS) are important too, we'll be getting somewhere.