So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have...
Sure it does... the kind of people that use ogg vorbis and LAME already do this... the kind of 'barrier to entry' that all technology needs... lest joe and his Xing encoder get to screwing things up...
I use Vorbis alot.... but man, these RC candidates might be harmful more than anything else.
Sure, I know the Ogg team wants to release a good quality codec, but the longer Ogg Vorbis sits in pre-1.0, the harder a time it will face in a market flooded by codecs. I can go out right now and grab a stereo for my car that will play MP3s, but not Ogg Vorbis... you're running out of time, ship the thing, or we'll all be stuck in WMA/MP3 hell...
more and more products are shipping, and they are not smart enough to have upgradeable hardware... ship it now and tweak later!
I really like the Thinkpads and some of their desktop machines. I think IBM PCs will always have that image problem that they are expensive and underperforming, regardless of their true merits.
It's a Dell/Compaq world for PCs at the moment. They're cheap, come with Winprinters, winmodems, built in audio, built in ethernet, and crappy support with crappy drivers. Our company just bought ~100 Dell Optiplexes, and they are horrible, horrible performance, horrible price, and junky hardware.
Say what you want about IBM's products, but their support is awesome.
No matter what happens though, IBM keyboards are the best ever made.:)
Online gaming with Quake et al. is only "corporate-controlled" in the sense that the games are made with corporate backing; the major fun of these online games comes from the people who participate in them.
Ah yes, but notice now how multiplayer games come 'locked in' to certain service right out of the box. The Quake1 days were a boon for independent servers and user contributed mods. Since they all started becoming 'Foxed', and more and more games tie you into a service (ala battle.net), it starts to get locked in.
Now, in the name of 'preventing cheating' and tying in a gamer for a monthly service fee, I can see alot of the games becoming more "corporate-controlled".
I agree that commercialization of the net can generally be bad. (More spam for everybody).
But at the same time, it's good to know that there are alternatives to all the commercialism on the web. What we need to be fighting for is to ensure that the open protocols of the net remain open, and that I don't have to have a Passport/Sun doohicky to buy a book if I don't need it.
Come to think of it, I rarely browse commercial sites unless I am looking for something. Commercialism tends to be counter to what the internet was ideally supposed to be, a repository for information.
Ever notice how stories on Yahoo, ZDNet, MSNBC and others mention things, but really never provide links to anything that they are talking about? That's because some marketing moron decided that it's best to 'lock in' a surfer to their specific 'content channel'. I say screw that. Link the hell out of everything and let the content stand on its own.
I think that 1GHz Palmtops, IM, new fuel cells, and that new screen technology could be combined into one super PDA that has been promised since someone uttered convergence.
The Handspring Treo will replace my phone, my PDA, and my Blackberry. Now there's a something I'd shell out hard cash for in 2002.
Funny how even today, Q3A is still the standard for 3D gaming. Carmack's code is clean, easily portable, and scales well. You could be benchmarking Q3A 10 years from now, and I think it would still be viable. Pure gold... the standard bearer for OpenGL... Sometimes I think it's a "waste" that he's spoiling those talents on video games (as much as I love them). Imagine 100% of his effort going to KDE/GNOME/Xfree or the kernel.
"If you think about it, the content industry does not want people to have computers; they're too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc."
I don't really know who to cheer for. The content guys are obviously stupid, but MS's tactics and IBMs tendency to forget what one hand is doing means Linux guys get stuck right in the middle. We can access content through 'uncoventional means', without the advertising channels and other marketing gizmos.
You have IBM supporting linux on one hand, and its hard drive people pulling that digital management stuff for IDE drives.
We need to tread lightly before we jump to conclusions...
Reading this thread and the KDE3.0 this morning really made me wonder - Is there something that will prevent me from running Linux on the desktop? No, so I do, what's the big rush to indoctrinate the planet?
Some of you are acting like these kind of surveys, ZDNet 'studies', and clueless sysadmin students are going to ruin Linux on the desktop.
It's not like KDE and GNOME guys are going to wake up one day and say, "Well geez, 'Computer Expert' on ZDNet talkbalk forums thinks that our stuff is hard to use, we might as well stop development, someone call Mathias!"
Stop for a moment and look at the pace of development that GNOME/KDE have achieved in the last 2 years. It's amazing how far they have come.
People have this twisted perception that because it's Not Windows(tm) that it's difficult to use.
Well guess what, these are the same people that can't use Windows either! For those of us who do desktop support (It's an additional duty of mine which I abhor), how many times have you seen some clueless user do something totally absurd on Windows? Wether they use Windows or KDE, they will find a way to break it. How many times have you said to someone 'right click this' and they look at you like you are from another planet. These people remind me of my mother, bless her soul, but no matter what, she will never be a good driver, that doesn't make cars hard to use...
Personally, I don't care if Linux on the desktop ever makes it mainstream. If you want a toy, recommend XP to someone, if you want a power system, linux comes in. At the rate we're going, it will provide me with what I need, and that's what Linux is about. It fits MY needs, if it met your needs, then that's great to...
Re:opt-in left unchecked from a likely source
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, too bad Money decides to open up that annoying sidebar in IE everytime you access a site that has anything to do with banking/money/investing. One kind of spam for another...
Thanks guys, we all know we can't rely on ATI for decent drivers - for anything. Heh.
Re:How do you tell what is and isn't spam?
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 2
In my book it's all spam. I consider the 'Monthly Newsletter' from my ISP as spam. Unless a specific person wants to communicate with me, it's spam. By my definition, any company that sends me an email is spamming me.
My favorite is how they all have 'Send me more information' checkbox already selected for you when you install a win program. Thanks, good thing they check that for me, what would I do if I couldn't get any of those great offers..... bleh...
Lower spam ratio is the best reason to buy a domain...
Article is already slashdotted, but coming for experience, it is hard to sell OSS to PHBs that are used to paying serious cash for something as simple as email.
Recently I convinced a client to use Linux/Apache over Win/IIS. He couldn't believe that you can setup a webserver without paying for the software. He would have spent alot more money on the close source solution.
The only way he would agree to my solution was if I set up both a Lin and Win box, show that the Linux box could do all of the same things as the Windows server. Once I did that then he sprung for the total Linux solution.
Of course, the kicker would be,
"You know, we saved you about $100,000 in software costs, why don't you donate 10% of that cost to Debian and/or Apache." "Um, no."
what makes you think that people will suddenly start saying that "i am fed up", etc...
That's where your Friendly Neighborhood Linux Advocacy Guy comes in:
"Man, all that cash for Exchange! This junk is so expensive"
"You know, you can do email without exchange, and for free..."
"No you can't, seriously?"
"Yep, we can even get rid of IIS too, just let me come in on the weekend and I'll set it all up, IMAP, the works..."
"But what about support?"
"Don't fire me.":)
There are a lot of companies that cannot afford fancy new hardware; they must make do on something that was brought in years ago. And Microsoft products play nice with them.
I strongly disagree. Older hardware is Linux's strong point. I'm sitting here looking at my 386 firewall. Linux only has problems with hardware that Should Not Exist(tm) anyway, things like cable select. Blame the OEMs, crappy hardware is crappy hardware.
"This company here is responsible for it"
That point is irrelevant. If you find a bug in MS's software, you have to wait for MS to fix it, which is the same as "some people on the Internet". Either way, you have to wait. With the code available you at least have the option to fix it yourself.
That's too big a liability for a company.
Do you really think that having MS software is not a liability? Can you blame them when their software fails? If it's there fault what can you do about it? You can't even sue them if your mission critical software fails. What can your company do about it? Nothing! Read the EULA. There is nothing you can do... you're worse off than the OSS solution!
Has Linux ever had a successful pre-emptive publicity strike against MS?
(NASDAQ Guy Voice)
Actually, there's a list of them published everyday - BUGTRAQ, the anti-MS marketing engine for the new millenium.
Moving on.... There's MS's marketing, and there are the plain facts. We don't need to attack Microsoft on the marketing front. They do that for us. Their security record and dumb licensing costs will continue to harm Microsoft, regardless of what they say about Linux.
Companies are slowly becoming more enlightened to Linux every day. Believe me, people are starting to notice the ridiculous security problems and licensing costs. One step at a time. I sit in the corner, waiting for the day when someone high up enough asks "I'm sick of this garbage and all our IT money going down the drain, there has to be an alternative, if only we had a choice!"
Agreed. Domino.doc does this on top of Notes/Domino. It even replaces all the Office save dialogs so they have to save it into a repository. For the real sticks in the mud that resist, it even has an explorer looking 'My Domino.doc' icon that they can drag documents into.
Thanks for those links. I have tears from laughter in my eyes. I don't know what's funnier, the fact that Monster sells ethernet cables for $20, or this fine quote:
Monster Cable JNOCNJHP3, September 20, 2000
Reviewer: doy004 from Claremont, CA
Worked great with my T3 connection at school. Ive noticed I get faster downloading speeds than with generic cables.
Slashdot Mirror
The article states that Romero left id after Quake 2. If my memory serves me correctly, didn't he leave after the original Quake?
So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have...
... the kind of people that use ogg vorbis and LAME already do this ... the kind of 'barrier to entry' that all technology needs ... lest joe and his Xing encoder get to screwing things up ...
Sure it does
and/or help the developers get drunk?
.... :)
you know, if more people had that kind of attitude, i think OSS would be WAY farther along than it is now
Here's to getting all those guys drunk and happy!!!
I use Vorbis alot .... but man, these RC candidates might be harmful more than anything else.
... you're running out of time, ship the thing, or we'll all be stuck in WMA/MP3 hell ...
... ship it now and tweak later!
Sure, I know the Ogg team wants to release a good quality codec, but the longer Ogg Vorbis sits in pre-1.0, the harder a time it will face in a market flooded by codecs. I can go out right now and grab a stereo for my car that will play MP3s, but not Ogg Vorbis
more and more products are shipping, and they are not smart enough to have upgradeable hardware
..because TAG-clones ruled 313 ... :)
I really like the Thinkpads and some of their desktop machines. I think IBM PCs will always have that image problem that they are expensive and underperforming, regardless of their true merits.
:)
It's a Dell/Compaq world for PCs at the moment. They're cheap, come with Winprinters, winmodems, built in audio, built in ethernet, and crappy support with crappy drivers. Our company just bought ~100 Dell Optiplexes, and they are horrible, horrible performance, horrible price, and junky hardware.
Say what you want about IBM's products, but their support is awesome.
No matter what happens though, IBM keyboards are the best ever made.
Online gaming with Quake et al. is only "corporate-controlled" in the sense that the games are made with corporate backing; the major fun of these online games comes from the people who participate in them.
Ah yes, but notice now how multiplayer games come 'locked in' to certain service right out of the box. The Quake1 days were a boon for independent servers and user contributed mods. Since they all started becoming 'Foxed', and more and more games tie you into a service (ala battle.net), it starts to get locked in.
Now, in the name of 'preventing cheating' and tying in a gamer for a monthly service fee, I can see alot of the games becoming more "corporate-controlled".
Digerati? That is a perfect example of why normal people should NOT be allowed to make up tech jargon....
I agree that commercialization of the net can generally be bad. (More spam for everybody).
But at the same time, it's good to know that there are alternatives to all the commercialism on the web. What we need to be fighting for is to ensure that the open protocols of the net remain open, and that I don't have to have a Passport/Sun doohicky to buy a book if I don't need it.
Come to think of it, I rarely browse commercial sites unless I am looking for something. Commercialism tends to be counter to what the internet was ideally supposed to be, a repository for information.
Ever notice how stories on Yahoo, ZDNet, MSNBC and others mention things, but really never provide links to anything that they are talking about? That's because some marketing moron decided that it's best to 'lock in' a surfer to their specific 'content channel'. I say screw that. Link the hell out of everything and let the content stand on its own.
I think that 1GHz Palmtops, IM, new fuel cells, and that new screen technology could be combined into one super PDA that has been promised since someone uttered convergence.
The Handspring Treo will replace my phone, my PDA, and my Blackberry. Now there's a something I'd shell out hard cash for in 2002.
both winamp and xmms have .ogg plugins. .ogg support even back when has always been more reliable than real(anything).
Agreed .... that is why he is The Carmack ...
... the standard bearer for OpenGL ... Sometimes I think it's a "waste" that he's spoiling those talents on video games (as much as I love them). Imagine 100% of his effort going to KDE/GNOME/Xfree or the kernel.
Funny how even today, Q3A is still the standard for 3D gaming. Carmack's code is clean, easily portable, and scales well. You could be benchmarking Q3A 10 years from now, and I think it would still be viable. Pure gold
You da man, John.
"If you think about it, the content industry does not want people to have computers; they're too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc."
I don't really know who to cheer for. The content guys are obviously stupid, but MS's tactics and IBMs tendency to forget what one hand is doing means Linux guys get stuck right in the middle. We can access content through 'uncoventional means', without the advertising channels and other marketing gizmos.
You have IBM supporting linux on one hand, and its hard drive people pulling that digital management stuff for IDE drives.
We need to tread lightly before we jump to conclusions...
Please do this right. Don't bring on some loser to fill in the geek stereotype. (like that kid from TechTV that ruined the screen savers..)
...
What am I talking about, it will probably be some glossed over garbage that gives every game an 8/10 so as not to turn away potential advertisers
Reading this thread and the KDE3.0 this morning really made me wonder - Is there something that will prevent me from running Linux on the desktop? No, so I do, what's the big rush to indoctrinate the planet?
...
Some of you are acting like these kind of surveys, ZDNet 'studies', and clueless sysadmin students are going to ruin Linux on the desktop.
It's not like KDE and GNOME guys are going to wake up one day and say, "Well geez, 'Computer Expert' on ZDNet talkbalk forums thinks that our stuff is hard to use, we might as well stop development, someone call Mathias!"
Stop for a moment and look at the pace of development that GNOME/KDE have achieved in the last 2 years. It's amazing how far they have come.
People have this twisted perception that because it's Not Windows(tm) that it's difficult to use.
Well guess what, these are the same people that can't use Windows either! For those of us who do desktop support (It's an additional duty of mine which I abhor), how many times have you seen some clueless user do something totally absurd on Windows? Wether they use Windows or KDE, they will find a way to break it. How many times have you said to someone 'right click this' and they look at you like you are from another planet. These people remind me of my mother, bless her soul, but no matter what, she will never be a good driver, that doesn't make cars hard to use...
Personally, I don't care if Linux on the desktop ever makes it mainstream. If you want a toy, recommend XP to someone, if you want a power system, linux comes in. At the rate we're going, it will provide me with what I need, and that's what Linux is about. It fits MY needs, if it met your needs, then that's great to
Yeah, too bad Money decides to open up that annoying sidebar in IE everytime you access a site that has anything to do with banking/money/investing. One kind of spam for another ...
Thanks guys, we all know we can't rely on ATI for decent drivers - for anything. Heh.
In my book it's all spam. I consider the 'Monthly Newsletter' from my ISP as spam. Unless a specific person wants to communicate with me, it's spam. By my definition, any company that sends me an email is spamming me.
..... bleh ...
...
My favorite is how they all have 'Send me more information' checkbox already selected for you when you install a win program. Thanks, good thing they check that for me, what would I do if I couldn't get any of those great offers
Lower spam ratio is the best reason to buy a domain
Article is already slashdotted, but coming for experience, it is hard to sell OSS to PHBs that are used to paying serious cash for something as simple as email.
Recently I convinced a client to use Linux/Apache over Win/IIS. He couldn't believe that you can setup a webserver without paying for the software. He would have spent alot more money on the close source solution.
The only way he would agree to my solution was if I set up both a Lin and Win box, show that the Linux box could do all of the same things as the Windows server. Once I did that then he sprung for the total Linux solution.
Of course, the kicker would be,
"You know, we saved you about $100,000 in software costs, why don't you donate 10% of that cost to Debian and/or Apache."
"Um, no."
what makes you think that people will suddenly start saying that "i am fed up", etc...
..."
:)
That's where your Friendly Neighborhood Linux Advocacy Guy comes in:
"Man, all that cash for Exchange! This junk is so expensive"
"You know, you can do email without exchange, and for free..."
"No you can't, seriously?"
"Yep, we can even get rid of IIS too, just let me come in on the weekend and I'll set it all up, IMAP, the works
"But what about support?"
"Don't fire me."
There are a lot of companies that cannot afford fancy new hardware; they must make do on something that was brought in years ago. And Microsoft products play nice with them.
... you're worse off than the OSS solution!
I strongly disagree. Older hardware is Linux's strong point. I'm sitting here looking at my 386 firewall. Linux only has problems with hardware that Should Not Exist(tm) anyway, things like cable select. Blame the OEMs, crappy hardware is crappy hardware.
"This company here is responsible for it"
That point is irrelevant. If you find a bug in MS's software, you have to wait for MS to fix it, which is the same as "some people on the Internet". Either way, you have to wait. With the code available you at least have the option to fix it yourself.
That's too big a liability for a company.
Do you really think that having MS software is not a liability? Can you blame them when their software fails? If it's there fault what can you do about it? You can't even sue them if your mission critical software fails. What can your company do about it? Nothing! Read the EULA. There is nothing you can do
Has Linux ever had a successful pre-emptive publicity strike against MS?
.... There's MS's marketing, and there are the plain facts. We don't need to attack Microsoft on the marketing front. They do that for us. Their security record and dumb licensing costs will continue to harm Microsoft, regardless of what they say about Linux.
(NASDAQ Guy Voice)
Actually, there's a list of them published everyday - BUGTRAQ, the anti-MS marketing engine for the new millenium.
Moving on
Companies are slowly becoming more enlightened to Linux every day. Believe me, people are starting to notice the ridiculous security problems and licensing costs. One step at a time. I sit in the corner, waiting for the day when someone high up enough asks "I'm sick of this garbage and all our IT money going down the drain, there has to be an alternative, if only we had a choice!"
Agreed. Domino.doc does this on top of Notes/Domino. It even replaces all the Office save dialogs so they have to save it into a repository. For the real sticks in the mud that resist, it even has an explorer looking 'My Domino.doc' icon that they can drag documents into.
Isn't it true that you can run a Notes/Domino backend but keep Outlook as the client?
Also, isn't Notes Rnext or whatever coming soon?
Thanks for those links. I have tears from laughter in my eyes. I don't know what's funnier, the fact that Monster sells ethernet cables for $20, or this fine quote:
.... too much ...
Monster Cable JNOCNJHP3, September 20, 2000
Reviewer: doy004 from Claremont, CA
Worked great with my T3 connection at school. Ive noticed I get faster downloading speeds than with generic cables.
Man