mp3 is not free and ogg is. However, mp3 doesn't cost me anything. I use winamp and cdex. That's really all i need to fit all my mp3 needs, encoding, decoding, playing. All for free. So even though it's not technically free I don't care. Also from an audio quality standpoint ogg does have higher quality audio at lower bitrates. Which allows you to save hard drive space and retain audio quality. But you know what? I don't care about hard drive space. I've got a 40 gigabyte drive I fill up with videos and mp3s. If I need something to be high quality I'll encode it with 128-320 VBR0 quality = best. Even better I'll just make a 320kbps mp3.
And for you crazy audiophiles. I can tell the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a CD. It's very apparent that a lot of sound is missing. But my ears are good, and a 320kbps mp3 might as well be a CD. If you can tell the difference between the highest quality mp3 and the higest quality ogg, you deserve a medal, because you have better ears than any other human being on earth.
So unless you are a dog, bird, or superman with super hearing. Who cares if you use ogg or mp3? It all depends on whether your disk space/quality preference. I personally couldn't care less. A high bitrate mp3 is small enough. At least it's smaller than a 40MB wav.
So stop the ogg/mp3 wars. It's personal preference, give it up.
is a great idea. It means you have one name and one password and you don't have to bother remembering different log-ons for every different website and computer you use. However, it does provide one big problem. Someone who is trying to crack you now only has to figure out one name and password to have everything. currently I have seperate password for online banking and my credit card and my computer and a random ftp server. If I have a single log-on someone who cracks the ftp server now has access to my bank account and credit card. Joy!
Green Lantern? what crap! seriously. Marvel has always been the company with the best heroes. Spiderman, the hulk, x-men, etc. But marvel villains were all crap. Except for Doctor Doom, Thanos, Magneto, and Mister Sinister. Look! I can count the good marvel villains on one hand! DC however, have very few good heroes Batman, Superman, that's about it. However, all of the DC villains totally rock the house. I don't think the comic book industry is doing as well as it once was. I mean didn't marvel almost go bankrupt a few years back? Now it seems as if they aren't really competing anymore. I mean they both have Heroclix http://www.wizkidsgames.com Both companies should merge and pit the marvel heroes against the dc villains. it would be like the second coming of the golden age of comics.
the license on software like WS_FTP or Sygate's firewalls is great. They have fully functional versions of their software available for free to home users that will continue working forever. But if a business user wants to use their software they have to shell out the cash. Keep in mind these aren't open source, but that really doesn't make a difference in this case. I really wish more software was like this.
The forums at Tom's Hardware or anandtech are some of the best places to get answers to tech questions. Especially if its a question about which hardware to buy. Another good way to go is to find a slashdot user who will probably have your answer, and check their journal/e-mail. And of course usenet is great. And you can use google for that too!
There was another alien vs predator. It was a side scrolling beat 'em up game for the SNES. Much in the style of final fight and streets of rage. It was actually pretty crappy. There might have been an even earlier AvsP, but I don't remember it. Does anyone remember the game with the cavemen for the Jaguar? I always wanted to play it, but I don't know the name.
So can someone explain to me why they didn't open the door? I mean seriously. If there is a big secret that nobody knows wouldn't you want to find out immediately? How can you possibly resist opening the door? What kind of idiot finds a new door and doesn't open it? I mean isn't that what video games teach us, open every door as soon as you find it! And don't they have sonar? They should use it to "see" what is behind the door. Whether it's an empty room or a treasure hoarde with a curse I doubt anything bad can come of opening a door. That is I don't believe in the supernatural. I'm sure the archaelogists don't either.
We already determined in a previous slashdot article that gaming pushes computer tech forward. Since the minimum requirements for most games are still a 500mhz cpu with a 32MB AGP video card, nobody has a need to upgrade their pcs except for the most bleeding edge gamers, and other power users who do video encoding or AutoCAD type applications. I remember back in the day Virtual On came out for PC and the minimum sysreq were higher than any available pc on the market, unless you had 5 grand. When the minimum amount of power required to use new software goes above the power of most people's pcs then they'll start buying faster CPUs. Heck, even the people who are already buying faster CPUs don't buy the fastest processor available. The money:speed ratio makes it so much more worth it to buy the second or third fastest AMD, even though the fastest P4 is the best you can get.
Keeping up on patches is one thing. A very important thing. More important however is correctly configuring everything. Microsoft has a handy program called baseline that is free and automatically checks out your windows system for mis-configurations that cause security holes. For example having guest accounts or mis-configured sharing on certaint folders. I know a lot of you people like to bash windows as being insecure or unstable. But I can't tell you how many times people have come to me and showed me problems with windows boxen that were simply misconfigurations. My win2k box (that I'm using right now) might be old and slow, but it's a rock. Configuration is key. Especially all the hidden options in deep down dialog boxes.
Nothing, not even the best linux, is secure out of the box.
error in that logic. People who use linux are too cheap to buy an operating system, they aren't going to pay for software. They will always seek out the free/open source alternative. Star Office now costs money, so a lot of people switch to Open Office. There is a group of wealthy/affluent/well off linux users who would pay for it. But how many people bought quake 3 for linux? I bet there are more people running quake 3 with wine than bought the linux version. And both version are the same game.
Linux users are a unique market in that they are a group of people who disliked the mainstream product, and rather than buy a different one, they made their own, and they share it with the world at no cost. No matter what you try to sell them, someone isn't going to like it and will make their own and share it. There is only one way to break into this market. Say a company like Adobe gives away illustrator/photoshop for free for linux. And charges for the windows version. For home users only (not businesses). And let's say these version were just as good if not better than the windows/mac versions. I guarantee a decrease in use of the gimp over a period of months. The gimp is good, just photoshop is better, its the best in fact. The next step is to wait until people switch away from windows just to use the free and maybe better version of photoshop in linux. At this point release a new version with lots and lots of new features and upgrades, and charge 50$ for it. Not 500$. No home users will ever pay 500$ for software, they will just pirate it. Now you have people at home using linux and and photoshop and adobe making money off of them. The same people will become used to linux/photohsop at home they will switch away from windows at work. Now all the companies will switch to linux/photoshop (even though photoshop for a busniness costs 500$) because its a better version of a program that is important to their business, and their employees are more proficient with the linux version. Even at 500$ photoshop/linux is cheaper than photoshop/windows.
Photoshop is just an example. And this is just one possible scenario. But I see it as a very easy way to get more linux users and better software for linux. As well as bringing much needed revenue into the open source community.
for me. All of the office suites today have too many features, most of them useless to me. They come with too many thigns also. I just want a word processor and a Pagemaker/Publisher type program. That's it. I do use OpenOffice, but only because its free and compatible with other things. One good thing I can say about it is that it saved me from Star Office 6. When SO6 was Beta and free I was using it. I wrote some important documents in it. Then the beta expired and I couldn't read the documents in anything I had. So I got OpenOffice and I was able to read my important files. Does anyone know about a lite word processor/pagemaker for win2k that has more features than wordpad (i.e: spellcheck, autocomplete, etc) but none of the useless features of other offices (the stuff that makes OpenOffice take forever to start up)??
Just as mandrake 9 is about to come out they go and update mozilla again. Since they're on RC2 I doubt they are going to hold back for the new Mozilla. It's times like this I'm glad that Mozilla installs in linux the same way it installs in windows. Graphically and easily, as everythign should. I first used Mozilla two years ago, when it was slow and crummy. I must say that since 1.0 there really is no significant difference between using Mozilla or IE, except for the pop-up blocking in Mozilla. I'm sure the newer version will be that much better. Keep it up.
the author of the article is a lawyer. However evil some of them are, they are the kind of people we need on our side. Good to see that they aren't all idiots.
of being reminded of 9/11. Yes it was horrible. Yes lets hope it never happens again. But let's not remind every single person of it every single day. I don't think a day has gone by in the last year where someone or something hasn't mentioned 9/11. Even those days where I almsot got by somebody would say something like "in this post 9/11 world..." I just want everyone to give it up already. You don't see me talking about the holocaust every day. Because everythign is so different in "this post holocaust world"
the new 320 gigabyte harddrives previously mentioned. And you divide 50000 (50TB) gigs by 320. you get an approximate cost of having 50TB by multiplying that by 350$ the appoximate cost of the drive. However, with that much data a RAID is certaintly in order. So multiply the number of drives by 1.5 or 1.75 to get the number of drives needed for a RAID. Then multiply that by 350. This comes out to a little over 80000 dollars. The only cost left is the cost of all the raid controllers (expensive) and networking all the drives together. So for the raw storage of 50 terabytes it costs about $80,000. If you were to buy ultrafast scsi drives instead of the 320GB drives the price will be multiplied by about 3 since a 100MB super fast scsi drive is also about 300$ with 1/3 of the space. So that brings it to $240,000. Add to that the cost of labor and all the other hardware and I don't see how it could come out to more than 1 million dollars. I'm not an expert, but just doing the math it seems that more than that is too much.
only because that's what I have. I don't use any of the MSN stuff that goes along with it. I do use some of the on-phone yahoo stuff however. Your best bet is to go with Sprint. Sprint is by far the best wireless provider in the country. If you really want whatever feature is provided by getting a passport then either get one, or leave Verizon.
What different specific pieces of software and/or hardware do you use to create music for video games? Do you have an actual recording studio with actual instruments, or do you use a program like Reason or other synthesizers? Do you also create sound effects for video games or just the background music?
this is probably not going to get seen as there are already a ton of posts and as we know on slashdot only early intelligent posts get recognition. Anyway, yes ogg vorbis IS free and open. And yes ogg vorbis sounds much better at low bitrates. That's really all ogg has in its favor. The way I see it, who gives a crap about file size anymore? I have many many gigs of hard drive space. If I really care about high audio quality I make variable bitrate mp3s or 320kbps mp3s. If you're that much of an audiophile to tell me that you can hear a difference what are you doing using ogg OR mp3? They are both lossy! You need super cds to get the perfect audio quality you desire. Since most of us are not audiophiles (I hope) then it only matters whether or not you care about hard drive space or audio quality more. I personally care about both. But hard drive space and bandwith are so plentiful that I'm going to get a high bitrate mp3 for any song I care about. Even better I'll use the lame encoders great vbr encoding. After 192kpbs I can't hear a difference, can you?
I have a personal moral code, as I'm sure most people do. My code amounts to the fact that I will not do anything that hurts someone else or myself. If you aren't hurting anybody, then its not wrong to do. Laws are neither good nor bad. Some apply to moral situations and some do not. For me, if a law is not enforced, it does not exist. For example if there is a stop sign in the middle of nowhere at night and there is no cop, then I can run the stop sign. As long as nobody is hurt. I broke the law, but I didn't hurt anyone and I didn't get hurt.
Here's where copyright gets in. I could care less what laws the government tries to pass. They can't enforce them on me. As we all do I'm sure, I have a rather large collection of mp3s. It's technically illegal, yes. But nobody is ever going to come and take me to jail for it. It's an unenforced law, so I refuse to obey it, since nobody is hurt.
As for unjust/unconstitutional laws I publicly disobey them on purpose, as we should all. The best way to fight an unconstitutional law is to break it. If you go to court, and the law is truly unconstitutional you can take your case up through the system until the power of judicial review is used to get the law off the books. It is quite plain and obvious that new copyright laws are unconstitutional and unjust in many ways. And breaking these laws doesn't hurt anybody. Therefore I don't care what laws they make, I will not follow them. At the very worst I can become a martyr for the cause. (only I wont die). I suggest we all stop moaning and groaning and repeating ourselves over and over again. When obviously innocent people start getting locked up then, and only then will there be a public outcry. Remember we've taken advantage of every right the constitution gives us, except for the right of revolution. The fundamentals of our US government are sound and have lasted through time. We're going to have to have a revolution sometime, or technology will get ahead of the law and everything will fall apart.
I would say yes save the show. However, I dont' like that show. It's too much like Star Trek, which I hate. I mean, I'm a geek just like the rest of you, but this is one area of geekdom I just don't get. When I watch Star Trek I just can't help but feel I'm watching an afternoon soap opera, except everyone is wearing an alien costume or a space ship uniform. Changing the setting doesn't make a show any better. I don't watch scifi channel anymore anyway. Wait... I don't watch TV anymore really. Go ahead and cancel all the shows you want.
yes they mayor, the network was town-wide. So the mayor had the same Novell login screen as we did.
The full time IT major is there to teach teachers and students, provide tech support, fix things immediately, provide technical help in other areas of computing. Advising them on purchases is just one of many tasks.
read my other reply above.
Schools need to teach computing as part of their curriculum because almost every company, even the gas station, has computers. Computers are the way we do business. Even working fast food you have to use the computer. At the grocery store the checkout lines are all computers. Computer skills I would say are just as if not more valuable than science and social studies. Math and English are far more useful and frequently used. However, I encounter computers many more times a day than I encounter political science, biology, geography, chemistry, etc. Most people in this society need computer skills and the public schools should provide that necessary education.
Yes, I know schools aren't flush with cash. I said that! you are like the third person who repeated what I said back to me as if you were saying somethign new! I said that schools probably can't afford it, but the benefits of having an IT guy at school are great, and that problems like this wont be solved until IT guys work for cheap or schools save up some dough.
You make a good point. People don't need to know how a computer works, just like they don't need to know how a car works. However, I have found from personal experience that people who are taught "what to click on" have a great deal of trouble when they seem somethign they've never seen before. They don't think about what the things they click on mean. They simply memorize a procedure, and when that procedure changes slightly they have a great deal of trouble. A car has FAR fewer use cases than a personal computer. I don't need to know the full details of rack and pinion steering to make a left. But I need to know that when I turn the steering wheel left the tires turn left. In computers people learn that when you see this click on this. If they come to a "strange turn" they are lost. They don't realize turning the steering wheel left makes tires move. They just know that at certain times they are supposed to turn it left. Get it?
Basically people who know how a computer works, just basics. A hard drive is the place where information is store permanently, this is how you partition it. When people connect this knowledge with the C:\ D:\ they see in Windows it's much easier for them to figure out the meaning of their clicks.
When I was in high school I knew more about computers than anyone else in the building. I knew more than the net admins too. Their security consisted of removing icons from desktop and start menu. By pressing F3 getting find files and folders, then right clicking to get windows explorer, I was able to run nwadmin.exe and change anything. I was really tempted to change the mayor's password.
Anyway there is only one way to get quality tech education in high school/middle school. You have to hire a professional. I wont go into detail about how completely awesome that would be. If my high school had a full time employee who knew more about computers than anyone else there it would have been great. I wouldn't have to deal with stupid teachers thinking I'm "hackign the schools network" when I'm installing Macromedia flash player. The problem is that no non-university will pay a salary as good as what you could get working for a real IT firm. Even college professors work "real" jobs in the summer because they make so much more money that way. A big problem is that attitude that you just have to have the computers in the school and everythign else will follow. I see these public schools with labs and labs full of too-powerful computers that are only used for MS-Office. I ask why they have GForce2s, they don't know they're never ever going to run any application that has a scrath of OpenGL or Direct3D in it. If they spent that money more wisely they could have hired a pro to work for them full time, maybe even teach, and help them make better buying decisions. But they didn't hire a person before buying, so now they can't afford to hire anyone. I don't think they can afford a real IT salary anyway. At least not a public school. But if they did you can expect the face of computer education to change greatly.
I'm seeing a freshman year of high school class required for all students in which they learn how a computer works (what are the parts, what do they do) and how to build one and set it up. BIOS OS. Windows, Linux, Mac. Once you know that much, everything else falls into place, unless you are a techie. The problem is people just learn "click, click, type, click".
So, this is to all you schools out there. Hire people like us, we will help you! You just have to pay us what we're worth.
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mp3 is not free and ogg is. However, mp3 doesn't cost me anything. I use winamp and cdex. That's really all i need to fit all my mp3 needs, encoding, decoding, playing. All for free. So even though it's not technically free I don't care.
Also from an audio quality standpoint ogg does have higher quality audio at lower bitrates. Which allows you to save hard drive space and retain audio quality. But you know what? I don't care about hard drive space. I've got a 40 gigabyte drive I fill up with videos and mp3s. If I need something to be high quality I'll encode it with 128-320 VBR0 quality = best. Even better I'll just make a 320kbps mp3.
And for you crazy audiophiles. I can tell the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a CD. It's very apparent that a lot of sound is missing. But my ears are good, and a 320kbps mp3 might as well be a CD. If you can tell the difference between the highest quality mp3 and the higest quality ogg, you deserve a medal, because you have better ears than any other human being on earth.
So unless you are a dog, bird, or superman with super hearing. Who cares if you use ogg or mp3? It all depends on whether your disk space/quality preference. I personally couldn't care less. A high bitrate mp3 is small enough. At least it's smaller than a 40MB wav.
So stop the ogg/mp3 wars. It's personal preference, give it up.
is a great idea. It means you have one name and one password and you don't have to bother remembering different log-ons for every different website and computer you use. However, it does provide one big problem. Someone who is trying to crack you now only has to figure out one name and password to have everything.
currently I have seperate password for online banking and my credit card and my computer and a random ftp server. If I have a single log-on someone who cracks the ftp server now has access to my bank account and credit card. Joy!
Green Lantern? what crap! seriously. Marvel has always been the company with the best heroes. Spiderman, the hulk, x-men, etc. But marvel villains were all crap. Except for Doctor Doom, Thanos, Magneto, and Mister Sinister. Look! I can count the good marvel villains on one hand! DC however, have very few good heroes Batman, Superman, that's about it. However, all of the DC villains totally rock the house.
I don't think the comic book industry is doing as well as it once was. I mean didn't marvel almost go bankrupt a few years back? Now it seems as if they aren't really competing anymore. I mean they both have Heroclix http://www.wizkidsgames.com
Both companies should merge and pit the marvel heroes against the dc villains. it would be like the second coming of the golden age of comics.
ph33r |\/|y L33t |-|0|\/|3\/\/0rxz 5||11z!!!11!!
the license on software like WS_FTP or Sygate's firewalls is great. They have fully functional versions of their software available for free to home users that will continue working forever. But if a business user wants to use their software they have to shell out the cash. Keep in mind these aren't open source, but that really doesn't make a difference in this case. I really wish more software was like this.
The forums at Tom's Hardware or anandtech are some of the best places to get answers to tech questions. Especially if its a question about which hardware to buy.
Another good way to go is to find a slashdot user who will probably have your answer, and check their journal/e-mail.
And of course usenet is great. And you can use google for that too!
There was another alien vs predator. It was a side scrolling beat 'em up game for the SNES. Much in the style of final fight and streets of rage. It was actually pretty crappy. There might have been an even earlier AvsP, but I don't remember it.
Does anyone remember the game with the cavemen for the Jaguar? I always wanted to play it, but I don't know the name.
So can someone explain to me why they didn't open the door? I mean seriously. If there is a big secret that nobody knows wouldn't you want to find out immediately? How can you possibly resist opening the door? What kind of idiot finds a new door and doesn't open it? I mean isn't that what video games teach us, open every door as soon as you find it!
And don't they have sonar? They should use it to "see" what is behind the door. Whether it's an empty room or a treasure hoarde with a curse I doubt anything bad can come of opening a door. That is I don't believe in the supernatural. I'm sure the archaelogists don't either.
We already determined in a previous slashdot article that gaming pushes computer tech forward. Since the minimum requirements for most games are still a 500mhz cpu with a 32MB AGP video card, nobody has a need to upgrade their pcs except for the most bleeding edge gamers, and other power users who do video encoding or AutoCAD type applications.
I remember back in the day Virtual On came out for PC and the minimum sysreq were higher than any available pc on the market, unless you had 5 grand. When the minimum amount of power required to use new software goes above the power of most people's pcs then they'll start buying faster CPUs.
Heck, even the people who are already buying faster CPUs don't buy the fastest processor available. The money:speed ratio makes it so much more worth it to buy the second or third fastest AMD, even though the fastest P4 is the best you can get.
Keeping up on patches is one thing. A very important thing. More important however is correctly configuring everything. Microsoft has a handy program called baseline that is free and automatically checks out your windows system for mis-configurations that cause security holes. For example having guest accounts or mis-configured sharing on certaint folders.
I know a lot of you people like to bash windows as being insecure or unstable. But I can't tell you how many times people have come to me and showed me problems with windows boxen that were simply misconfigurations. My win2k box (that I'm using right now) might be old and slow, but it's a rock. Configuration is key. Especially all the hidden options in deep down dialog boxes.
Nothing, not even the best linux, is secure out of the box.
you haven't met mine, or my roomates, or the ones that are in the labs at school, or any of my friends...
error in that logic. People who use linux are too cheap to buy an operating system, they aren't going to pay for software. They will always seek out the free/open source alternative. Star Office now costs money, so a lot of people switch to Open Office. There is a group of wealthy/affluent/well off linux users who would pay for it. But how many people bought quake 3 for linux? I bet there are more people running quake 3 with wine than bought the linux version. And both version are the same game.
Linux users are a unique market in that they are a group of people who disliked the mainstream product, and rather than buy a different one, they made their own, and they share it with the world at no cost. No matter what you try to sell them, someone isn't going to like it and will make their own and share it. There is only one way to break into this market. Say a company like Adobe gives away illustrator/photoshop for free for linux. And charges for the windows version. For home users only (not businesses). And let's say these version were just as good if not better than the windows/mac versions. I guarantee a decrease in use of the gimp over a period of months. The gimp is good, just photoshop is better, its the best in fact.
The next step is to wait until people switch away from windows just to use the free and maybe better version of photoshop in linux. At this point release a new version with lots and lots of new features and upgrades, and charge 50$ for it. Not 500$. No home users will ever pay 500$ for software, they will just pirate it.
Now you have people at home using linux and and photoshop and adobe making money off of them. The same people will become used to linux/photohsop at home they will switch away from windows at work. Now all the companies will switch to linux/photoshop (even though photoshop for a busniness costs 500$) because its a better version of a program that is important to their business, and their employees are more proficient with the linux version. Even at 500$ photoshop/linux is cheaper than photoshop/windows.
Photoshop is just an example. And this is just one possible scenario. But I see it as a very easy way to get more linux users and better software for linux. As well as bringing much needed revenue into the open source community.
for me. All of the office suites today have too many features, most of them useless to me. They come with too many thigns also. I just want a word processor and a Pagemaker/Publisher type program. That's it. I do use OpenOffice, but only because its free and compatible with other things. One good thing I can say about it is that it saved me from Star Office 6.
When SO6 was Beta and free I was using it. I wrote some important documents in it. Then the beta expired and I couldn't read the documents in anything I had. So I got OpenOffice and I was able to read my important files.
Does anyone know about a lite word processor/pagemaker for win2k that has more features than wordpad (i.e: spellcheck, autocomplete, etc) but none of the useless features of other offices (the stuff that makes OpenOffice take forever to start up)??
Just as mandrake 9 is about to come out they go and update mozilla again. Since they're on RC2 I doubt they are going to hold back for the new Mozilla. It's times like this I'm glad that Mozilla installs in linux the same way it installs in windows. Graphically and easily, as everythign should.
I first used Mozilla two years ago, when it was slow and crummy. I must say that since 1.0 there really is no significant difference between using Mozilla or IE, except for the pop-up blocking in Mozilla. I'm sure the newer version will be that much better. Keep it up.
the author of the article is a lawyer. However evil some of them are, they are the kind of people we need on our side. Good to see that they aren't all idiots.
of being reminded of 9/11. Yes it was horrible. Yes lets hope it never happens again. But let's not remind every single person of it every single day. I don't think a day has gone by in the last year where someone or something hasn't mentioned 9/11. Even those days where I almsot got by somebody would say something like "in this post 9/11 world..."
I just want everyone to give it up already. You don't see me talking about the holocaust every day. Because everythign is so different in "this post holocaust world"
the new 320 gigabyte harddrives previously mentioned. And you divide 50000 (50TB) gigs by 320. you get an approximate cost of having 50TB by multiplying that by 350$ the appoximate cost of the drive. However, with that much data a RAID is certaintly in order. So multiply the number of drives by 1.5 or 1.75 to get the number of drives needed for a RAID. Then multiply that by 350. This comes out to a little over 80000 dollars. The only cost left is the cost of all the raid controllers (expensive) and networking all the drives together. So for the raw storage of 50 terabytes it costs about $80,000. If you were to buy ultrafast scsi drives instead of the 320GB drives the price will be multiplied by about 3 since a 100MB super fast scsi drive is also about 300$ with 1/3 of the space. So that brings it to $240,000. Add to that the cost of labor and all the other hardware and I don't see how it could come out to more than 1 million dollars. I'm not an expert, but just doing the math it seems that more than that is too much.
only because that's what I have. I don't use any of the MSN stuff that goes along with it. I do use some of the on-phone yahoo stuff however.
Your best bet is to go with Sprint. Sprint is by far the best wireless provider in the country. If you really want whatever feature is provided by getting a passport then either get one, or leave Verizon.
What different specific pieces of software and/or hardware do you use to create music for video games? Do you have an actual recording studio with actual instruments, or do you use a program like Reason or other synthesizers? Do you also create sound effects for video games or just the background music?
this is probably not going to get seen as there are already a ton of posts and as we know on slashdot only early intelligent posts get recognition.
Anyway, yes ogg vorbis IS free and open. And yes ogg vorbis sounds much better at low bitrates. That's really all ogg has in its favor. The way I see it, who gives a crap about file size anymore? I have many many gigs of hard drive space. If I really care about high audio quality I make variable bitrate mp3s or 320kbps mp3s. If you're that much of an audiophile to tell me that you can hear a difference what are you doing using ogg OR mp3? They are both lossy! You need super cds to get the perfect audio quality you desire.
Since most of us are not audiophiles (I hope) then it only matters whether or not you care about hard drive space or audio quality more. I personally care about both. But hard drive space and bandwith are so plentiful that I'm going to get a high bitrate mp3 for any song I care about. Even better I'll use the lame encoders great vbr encoding. After 192kpbs I can't hear a difference, can you?
I have a personal moral code, as I'm sure most people do. My code amounts to the fact that I will not do anything that hurts someone else or myself. If you aren't hurting anybody, then its not wrong to do.
Laws are neither good nor bad. Some apply to moral situations and some do not. For me, if a law is not enforced, it does not exist. For example if there is a stop sign in the middle of nowhere at night and there is no cop, then I can run the stop sign. As long as nobody is hurt. I broke the law, but I didn't hurt anyone and I didn't get hurt.
Here's where copyright gets in. I could care less what laws the government tries to pass. They can't enforce them on me. As we all do I'm sure, I have a rather large collection of mp3s. It's technically illegal, yes. But nobody is ever going to come and take me to jail for it. It's an unenforced law, so I refuse to obey it, since nobody is hurt.
As for unjust/unconstitutional laws I publicly disobey them on purpose, as we should all. The best way to fight an unconstitutional law is to break it. If you go to court, and the law is truly unconstitutional you can take your case up through the system until the power of judicial review is used to get the law off the books.
It is quite plain and obvious that new copyright laws are unconstitutional and unjust in many ways. And breaking these laws doesn't hurt anybody. Therefore I don't care what laws they make, I will not follow them. At the very worst I can become a martyr for the cause. (only I wont die).
I suggest we all stop moaning and groaning and repeating ourselves over and over again. When obviously innocent people start getting locked up then, and only then will there be a public outcry.
Remember we've taken advantage of every right the constitution gives us, except for the right of revolution. The fundamentals of our US government are sound and have lasted through time. We're going to have to have a revolution sometime, or technology will get ahead of the law and everything will fall apart.
Feel free to call me a nut.
I would say yes save the show. However, I dont' like that show. It's too much like Star Trek, which I hate. I mean, I'm a geek just like the rest of you, but this is one area of geekdom I just don't get. When I watch Star Trek I just can't help but feel I'm watching an afternoon soap opera, except everyone is wearing an alien costume or a space ship uniform. Changing the setting doesn't make a show any better. I don't watch scifi channel anymore anyway. Wait... I don't watch TV anymore really. Go ahead and cancel all the shows you want.
yes they mayor, the network was town-wide. So the mayor had the same Novell login screen as we did.
The full time IT major is there to teach teachers and students, provide tech support, fix things immediately, provide technical help in other areas of computing. Advising them on purchases is just one of many tasks.
read my other reply above.
Schools need to teach computing as part of their curriculum because almost every company, even the gas station, has computers. Computers are the way we do business. Even working fast food you have to use the computer. At the grocery store the checkout lines are all computers. Computer skills I would say are just as if not more valuable than science and social studies. Math and English are far more useful and frequently used. However, I encounter computers many more times a day than I encounter political science, biology, geography, chemistry, etc. Most people in this society need computer skills and the public schools should provide that necessary education.
Yes, I know schools aren't flush with cash. I said that! you are like the third person who repeated what I said back to me as if you were saying somethign new! I said that schools probably can't afford it, but the benefits of having an IT guy at school are great, and that problems like this wont be solved until IT guys work for cheap or schools save up some dough.
You make a good point. People don't need to know how a computer works, just like they don't need to know how a car works.
However, I have found from personal experience that people who are taught "what to click on" have a great deal of trouble when they seem somethign they've never seen before. They don't think about what the things they click on mean. They simply memorize a procedure, and when that procedure changes slightly they have a great deal of trouble.
A car has FAR fewer use cases than a personal computer. I don't need to know the full details of rack and pinion steering to make a left. But I need to know that when I turn the steering wheel left the tires turn left. In computers people learn that when you see this click on this. If they come to a "strange turn" they are lost. They don't realize turning the steering wheel left makes tires move. They just know that at certain times they are supposed to turn it left. Get it?
Basically people who know how a computer works, just basics. A hard drive is the place where information is store permanently, this is how you partition it. When people connect this knowledge with the C:\ D:\ they see in Windows it's much easier for them to figure out the meaning of their clicks.
When I was in high school I knew more about computers than anyone else in the building. I knew more than the net admins too. Their security consisted of removing icons from desktop and start menu. By pressing F3 getting find files and folders, then right clicking to get windows explorer, I was able to run nwadmin.exe and change anything. I was really tempted to change the mayor's password.
Anyway there is only one way to get quality tech education in high school/middle school. You have to hire a professional. I wont go into detail about how completely awesome that would be. If my high school had a full time employee who knew more about computers than anyone else there it would have been great. I wouldn't have to deal with stupid teachers thinking I'm "hackign the schools network" when I'm installing Macromedia flash player.
The problem is that no non-university will pay a salary as good as what you could get working for a real IT firm. Even college professors work "real" jobs in the summer because they make so much more money that way.
A big problem is that attitude that you just have to have the computers in the school and everythign else will follow. I see these public schools with labs and labs full of too-powerful computers that are only used for MS-Office. I ask why they have GForce2s, they don't know they're never ever going to run any application that has a scrath of OpenGL or Direct3D in it. If they spent that money more wisely they could have hired a pro to work for them full time, maybe even teach, and help them make better buying decisions. But they didn't hire a person before buying, so now they can't afford to hire anyone.
I don't think they can afford a real IT salary anyway. At least not a public school. But if they did you can expect the face of computer education to change greatly.
I'm seeing a freshman year of high school class required for all students in which they learn how a computer works (what are the parts, what do they do) and how to build one and set it up. BIOS OS. Windows, Linux, Mac. Once you know that much, everything else falls into place, unless you are a techie. The problem is people just learn "click, click, type, click".
So, this is to all you schools out there. Hire people like us, we will help you! You just have to pay us what we're worth.