I've just tried this new version of NeoOffice and it's a huge improvement in consistency with Mac OS X over older versions - it does look and feel native now, at least in the cases I've been able to try so far. It's also a lot faster to load and run on my PowerBook G4 than older versions.
But the audio system is incredibly low bandwidth. The decoded MP3 is, at its heart, is 32 bit words (16 bits per channel) hitting the PCI bus and sound system at 44.1khz - i.e. 1.4 megabits per second. That's bugger all. You could stream a CD uncompressed over most broadband internet connections today without a stutter. An 8 bit Z80 CPU could push data down its bus at 1.4 megabits per second without even working up a sweat - give a Sinclair Spectrum, made in 1982, enough RAM, sure it wouldn't be able to decode an MP3 realtime, but it'd be able to push the data fast enough down its 8 bit bus and still have time left over to run the user interface for the program doing the transfer.
Having to drop network performance to ensure such a low bandwidth stream gets to the sound card on a machine with a big fat wide PCI Express bus and a multicore, multi-GHz processor is just laughable.
ARM11 is already better for that kind of application - much lower power still, and for embedded stuff, the need for x86 compatibility really doesn't exist.
I agree with you on that Oasis record - it just sounds incompetently engineered because it's so clipped.
The Chili's Californication would have been a much better album had they not let that get horribly clipped, too. There's only a couple of tracks I can stand on that album because it's so badly engineered.
My problem is I'm too lazy, and I don't really like playing music that must be memorized precisely to be played properly. So mostly I end up playing 12 bar blues! (And I'm not exactly the world's greatest piano player to start with).
We have - certainly in the Sinclair Spectrum community. Nearly every piece of Spectrum software has been saved. Not in MP3 format, but in TZX format which gives a compact and accurate representation of the original tape. The World of Spectrum archive has several thousand programs for the Speccy stored in this way.
Actually, a pilot of a plane DOES know all the default settings (at airline transport pilot level) and spends weeks of training learning about it, and is rigorously tested to ensure he knows it, too. Not 'can I regurgitate it' testing, but an oral test from hell where the examiner establishes not only that he knows the aircraft's systems inside out, but knows why the system is like that, understands it at a fundamental level, and the consequences of various subtle differences from normal.
So - more like DRAM (which not only needs to be kept powered, but also kept refreshed) than SRAM or ROM then.
I get the feeling that memory is a bit like a set of linked lists. If the head node in the list gets mislaid, then the memory might all still be there - but you can't get to it, at least not easily. I've noticed on many occasions I've tried to recall something - I know I know it, but I can't actually access the memory. Then several days later, the thing I was trying to recall will pop into my consciousness, a bit like a background "find / -name something" had been executing all along.
Funnily enough we were just discussing memory on IRC - how if we were playing a piece of classical music on the piano from memory, one bad note and all of a sudden you couldn't continue from where you were without going all the way back to the start, almost like losing the next node in the linked list.
Actually, the merchant usually DOES take the loss (although it's seldom the merchant who leaks the information who gets it in the shorts).
Basically, if you manage to fraudulently obtain a credit card, run up a huge bill, well - the person whose credit card you stole tends to get their money back. The credit card company also gets its money back, because it simply passes the chargeback to the merchant where the stolen credit card was used.
So there is little incentive for credit card companies to do anything about the problem, since it costs them little. The merchant, on the other hand, who had absolutely no reason to believe the credit card that was presented to him was fraudulent, ends up eating the cost.
I pay for the BBC with my TV license, as do millions of others.
The BBC using a proprietary, secret format for the iPlayer is exactly the same as if they made their TV broadcasts viewable on (say) only Sony televisions and only recordable with Sony video recorders. The BBC should be using an open standard implementable by anybody for internet based TV, just as any PAL TV can be used to watch over-the-air TV.
Re:I have no problem with this kind of thing
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
_Everyone_ has something to hide. The more intrusive systems like this are, the more use they may be to a potential future less-than-benign government. CCTV that is not networked is less of a problem - it's not so easy to abuse, but if a crime has been committed you can still get the tapes. Once you have a massive networked encompassing surveillance society, things change. It becomes trivial to track your political opponents.
If this lack of privacy is so good for the citizens, why don't MPs eat their own dog food? Recently they voted to opt themselves out of the Freedom of Information Act provisions that allows citizens to make sure that MPs aren't abusing their privileges. Perhaps they have something to hide?
Do MS design or make the hardware though, or do they simply give some requirements to a subcontractor who then builds the device? I understood that Microsoft's involvement with hardware only went as far as designing the box it came in (unless there's an OS to write, such as for the XBox)
The PC platform is quite awful for embedded stuff, power hungry and demanding (requires a big operating system) - it's unlikely to find its way into embedded platforms (except where the developer has a severe lack of imagination, or the production run is so small they have to use people with commodity skills to develop the code rather than those who know embedded systems). It's more likely to be used in small form factor PCs.
Re:Where does this leave EV1?
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
Robert Marsh long ago sold ev1.net to ThePlanet. However, if you search through Groklaw you can find he genuinely regretted dealing with SCO after they almost immediately reneged on the deal they did with him, and he lost quite a few customers too (I had been with ev1 since the start, first as a dialup ISP customer, then one of the first dedicated hosting customers when they started Rackshack. I moved all the boxes I could away from ev1.net after they did that deal)
Music companies have really just started waking up to why DRM is really bad, and it's nothing to do with their customers.
It has finally dawned on them that DRM - far from protecting them - will take control away from them and hand it to companies like Apple and Microsoft, who become the new gatekeepers since they own the DRM technologies that are popular. It's now dawned on the music companies that it won't be long before the likes of Apple and Microsoft get big enough in the music business to simply cut out the record companies and sign bands directly.
_That's_ why they are starting to drop DRM - they have finally come to the realisation that DRM is the trojan horse that will destroy them. Not piracy.
The trouble with this thing is that it can bite you in unexpected ways. You may know not to stare into the beam, like you may know not to look down the barrel of a loaded handgun. But unlike the handgun, you may accidentally aim the beam at something shiny you didn't notice, and it gets reflected back at you - you're blind. Most people, while they may think to not look into the beam - if they have no experience with lasers may not consider that specular reflection can blind them (or some random bystander).
The trouble is bicycle helmets generally aren't useful (particularly for road riding). For a helmet to be any good at all, it needs to be full face and include neck and temple protection, and protection against "torque" injuries. A bicycle helmet does none of these things - particularly the type of "torque" injury which is the most common type of head injury amongst road cyclists (simplistically, this is where the head is twisted in a collision, causing the brain to bang around inside the skull).
The head injury rate is actually higher for pedestrians than it is for cyclists, too - should pedestrians be compelled to wear helmets?
Head injury rates are also higher amongst countries that have high helmet usage amongst cyclists. Helmet usage rates in the United States is around 40%, but the head injury rate is MUCH higher amongst USA cyclists compared to cyclists in the Netherlands - where less than 0.1% of cyclists wear helmets.
Local exploits are only a phpBB vulnerability from being a remote exploit. If you're running a hosting service, and you're not treating local vulnerabilities as seriously as remote ones, it's only a matter of time before your machine is pwned and becomes a spam zombie. I've seen it happen.
If you allow scripting on your server, then you've essentially given your users shell access, anyway.
A net revenue of over 9 million euros is hardly irrelevant.
Actually, it does. E9M is a tiny company - I know specialist companies which deal with only one industry who make ten times that revenue.
In any case, you completely missed the context. Does SSH Inc. continue to set the standard? No. They are reduced to following the lead of OpenSSH, which is now the de-facto reference implementation after SSH Inc. went closed source. It doesn't make any difference whether they make E9M or E900M, they are still irrelevant in the context of being the reference implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just tried this new version of NeoOffice and it's a huge improvement in consistency with Mac OS X over older versions - it does look and feel native now, at least in the cases I've been able to try so far. It's also a lot faster to load and run on my PowerBook G4 than older versions.
But the audio system is incredibly low bandwidth. The decoded MP3 is, at its heart, is 32 bit words (16 bits per channel) hitting the PCI bus and sound system at 44.1khz - i.e. 1.4 megabits per second. That's bugger all. You could stream a CD uncompressed over most broadband internet connections today without a stutter. An 8 bit Z80 CPU could push data down its bus at 1.4 megabits per second without even working up a sweat - give a Sinclair Spectrum, made in 1982, enough RAM, sure it wouldn't be able to decode an MP3 realtime, but it'd be able to push the data fast enough down its 8 bit bus and still have time left over to run the user interface for the program doing the transfer.
Having to drop network performance to ensure such a low bandwidth stream gets to the sound card on a machine with a big fat wide PCI Express bus and a multicore, multi-GHz processor is just laughable.
A Persian culture of the past may have cared about human rights. The current Iran, though, executes teenagers just for being gay.
The current Iranian regime, from a human rights point of view, is repulsive.
ARM11 is already better for that kind of application - much lower power still, and for embedded stuff, the need for x86 compatibility really doesn't exist.
There'll be DRM, so it should really be "Where will we allow you to go today?"
I agree with you on that Oasis record - it just sounds incompetently engineered because it's so clipped.
The Chili's Californication would have been a much better album had they not let that get horribly clipped, too. There's only a couple of tracks I can stand on that album because it's so badly engineered.
Just before someone posts a snide comment to you, it's WPA, not WAP (WAP is a mobile phone browser technology).
My problem is I'm too lazy, and I don't really like playing music that must be memorized precisely to be played properly. So mostly I end up playing 12 bar blues! (And I'm not exactly the world's greatest piano player to start with).
But, the real question - Will It Blend?
We have - certainly in the Sinclair Spectrum community. Nearly every piece of Spectrum software has been saved. Not in MP3 format, but in TZX format which gives a compact and accurate representation of the original tape. The World of Spectrum archive has several thousand programs for the Speccy stored in this way.
Actually, a pilot of a plane DOES know all the default settings (at airline transport pilot level) and spends weeks of training learning about it, and is rigorously tested to ensure he knows it, too. Not 'can I regurgitate it' testing, but an oral test from hell where the examiner establishes not only that he knows the aircraft's systems inside out, but knows why the system is like that, understands it at a fundamental level, and the consequences of various subtle differences from normal.
So - more like DRAM (which not only needs to be kept powered, but also kept refreshed) than SRAM or ROM then.
I get the feeling that memory is a bit like a set of linked lists. If the head node in the list gets mislaid, then the memory might all still be there - but you can't get to it, at least not easily. I've noticed on many occasions I've tried to recall something - I know I know it, but I can't actually access the memory. Then several days later, the thing I was trying to recall will pop into my consciousness, a bit like a background "find / -name something" had been executing all along.
Funnily enough we were just discussing memory on IRC - how if we were playing a piece of classical music on the piano from memory, one bad note and all of a sudden you couldn't continue from where you were without going all the way back to the start, almost like losing the next node in the linked list.
Actually, the merchant usually DOES take the loss (although it's seldom the merchant who leaks the information who gets it in the shorts).
Basically, if you manage to fraudulently obtain a credit card, run up a huge bill, well - the person whose credit card you stole tends to get their money back. The credit card company also gets its money back, because it simply passes the chargeback to the merchant where the stolen credit card was used.
So there is little incentive for credit card companies to do anything about the problem, since it costs them little. The merchant, on the other hand, who had absolutely no reason to believe the credit card that was presented to him was fraudulent, ends up eating the cost.
I pay for the BBC with my TV license, as do millions of others.
The BBC using a proprietary, secret format for the iPlayer is exactly the same as if they made their TV broadcasts viewable on (say) only Sony televisions and only recordable with Sony video recorders. The BBC should be using an open standard implementable by anybody for internet based TV, just as any PAL TV can be used to watch over-the-air TV.
_Everyone_ has something to hide. The more intrusive systems like this are, the more use they may be to a potential future less-than-benign government. CCTV that is not networked is less of a problem - it's not so easy to abuse, but if a crime has been committed you can still get the tapes. Once you have a massive networked encompassing surveillance society, things change. It becomes trivial to track your political opponents.
If this lack of privacy is so good for the citizens, why don't MPs eat their own dog food? Recently they voted to opt themselves out of the Freedom of Information Act provisions that allows citizens to make sure that MPs aren't abusing their privileges. Perhaps they have something to hide?
Do MS design or make the hardware though, or do they simply give some requirements to a subcontractor who then builds the device? I understood that Microsoft's involvement with hardware only went as far as designing the box it came in (unless there's an OS to write, such as for the XBox)
Please. The name of the company that makes things like Netware and did a deal with Microsoft is Novell, not Novel. It's not that hard to get right!
However, I suspect "fired from NASA" on the resume doesn't have quite the money making opportunities associated with it...
The PC platform is quite awful for embedded stuff, power hungry and demanding (requires a big operating system) - it's unlikely to find its way into embedded platforms (except where the developer has a severe lack of imagination, or the production run is so small they have to use people with commodity skills to develop the code rather than those who know embedded systems). It's more likely to be used in small form factor PCs.
Robert Marsh long ago sold ev1.net to ThePlanet. However, if you search through Groklaw you can find he genuinely regretted dealing with SCO after they almost immediately reneged on the deal they did with him, and he lost quite a few customers too (I had been with ev1 since the start, first as a dialup ISP customer, then one of the first dedicated hosting customers when they started Rackshack. I moved all the boxes I could away from ev1.net after they did that deal)
Music companies have really just started waking up to why DRM is really bad, and it's nothing to do with their customers.
It has finally dawned on them that DRM - far from protecting them - will take control away from them and hand it to companies like Apple and Microsoft, who become the new gatekeepers since they own the DRM technologies that are popular. It's now dawned on the music companies that it won't be long before the likes of Apple and Microsoft get big enough in the music business to simply cut out the record companies and sign bands directly.
_That's_ why they are starting to drop DRM - they have finally come to the realisation that DRM is the trojan horse that will destroy them. Not piracy.
The trouble with this thing is that it can bite you in unexpected ways. You may know not to stare into the beam, like you may know not to look down the barrel of a loaded handgun. But unlike the handgun, you may accidentally aim the beam at something shiny you didn't notice, and it gets reflected back at you - you're blind. Most people, while they may think to not look into the beam - if they have no experience with lasers may not consider that specular reflection can blind them (or some random bystander).
The trouble is bicycle helmets generally aren't useful (particularly for road riding). For a helmet to be any good at all, it needs to be full face and include neck and temple protection, and protection against "torque" injuries. A bicycle helmet does none of these things - particularly the type of "torque" injury which is the most common type of head injury amongst road cyclists (simplistically, this is where the head is twisted in a collision, causing the brain to bang around inside the skull).
The head injury rate is actually higher for pedestrians than it is for cyclists, too - should pedestrians be compelled to wear helmets?
Head injury rates are also higher amongst countries that have high helmet usage amongst cyclists. Helmet usage rates in the United States is around 40%, but the head injury rate is MUCH higher amongst USA cyclists compared to cyclists in the Netherlands - where less than 0.1% of cyclists wear helmets.
Local exploits are only a phpBB vulnerability from being a remote exploit. If you're running a hosting service, and you're not treating local vulnerabilities as seriously as remote ones, it's only a matter of time before your machine is pwned and becomes a spam zombie. I've seen it happen.
If you allow scripting on your server, then you've essentially given your users shell access, anyway.
Actually, it does. E9M is a tiny company - I know specialist companies which deal with only one industry who make ten times that revenue.
In any case, you completely missed the context. Does SSH Inc. continue to set the standard? No. They are reduced to following the lead of OpenSSH, which is now the de-facto reference implementation after SSH Inc. went closed source. It doesn't make any difference whether they make E9M or E900M, they are still irrelevant in the context of being the reference implementation.