Well the OP was talking about why *he* would want to use it; he wasn't necessarily saying that it would take over the world.
BTW why do you assume that the only thing MP3s are useful for is ripping CDs? Sure, that probably makes up the majority of its use, but there are a lot of people who use it for other things. You only have to go as far as mp3.com to see that.
Oops, that was my fault (though I blame it on my brain). Without even thinking, I shortened Vorbis to.vob. The group making Vorbis is called Ogg, and I believe the actual extension is.ogg.
Most people (I assume) are using players like Sonique to play their music. With someone like me, who has music of many different formats of music, if you were to ask me at any given time if the music that was playing was MP3, MP2, XM, IT, MOD, S3M, or (in the future) this Vorbis deal, unless I recognised the song, I probably couldn't tell you (without looking). Sonique plays them all just fine.
Once people learn that.vob == music in the same way.mp3 == music, all they'll have to keep in their pretty little heads is that if they double-click it, sounds come from their speakers.
Huh? The interesting part is the algorithm, not the file format. It would take all of five seconds (literally) to get it to do 320kbit/s or 320Mbit/s or 320Tbit/s. IINM, the reason it doesn't do high bitrates right now is because the authors have only written one implementation of the algorithm, and it was designed for low bitrates. Though it's been a couple months since I last read this story on/., so I can't remember everything properly.
Anyway, the file format doesn't really matter, since it's not released yet anyway.
Re:Open Source is the ultimate intermediate format
on
Is The x86 Obsolete?
·
· Score: 1
You overgeneralise. Differing integer sizes has been a common problem for C programmers over the years, but it doesn't take much badgering to get them to use the sizeof operator (getting them to use CHAR_BIT takes a bit more badgering for some reason). However, especially when dealing with I/O, binary representations (e.g. endianness, how signed integers are stored, how floating-point numbers are stored), programmers still make a lot of assumptions. This is harder to overcome, mainly because there are no hard and fast rules, and so the programmer has to actually think.
I could go on. Just a few other silly assumptions C coders make: assuming an ASCII character set, passing NULL or a pointer to non-void unadorned to a function out of scope or without prototype (or even worse, passing 0), doing other stupid things wrt NULL (calloc()ing an array of pointers, for example), getting overly familiar with their implementation of va_list (which causes problems for platforms which, for example, push arguments in the opposite order), etc.
Of course, as you've said, none of these are shortcomings of the C language.
Indeed. The OP seems to have overlooked that one of the most common reasons for not using Macs (I would say right behind price and shitty OS, though that will change soon) is that Apple shows a lot of contempt for old hardware. Of course the true Mac zealots have embraced and encouraged the upgrade cycle for some reason, but normal people (you know, the kind who actually pay for things with money, and generally avoid wasting money) are (understandably) a bit apprehensive about it.
Uhh braniac, Berlin is a 2D windowing system. For some reason (my guess is boredom, or, more likely, to test out how the primitives would anti-alias), they included an operation to rotate windows, big deal. Once they take that out (or I guess they could leave it in; I'm sure it doesn't take up too much code), it's a really decent windowing system.
Well, maybe right now, but you have to look to the future. Once Natalie Portman has been open-sourced, businesses will come in droves in order to do legitimate (well, mostly illegitimate, but there's bound to be some legitimate) business.
BTW anyone know what licence Natalie Portman will be released under? Since there's only one of her (for the time being), this should be decided very carefully. Personally I'd vote for her being released into the public domain, but there are many consequences to consider.
You're forgetting that, sooner or later, the movie is going to have to be viewed by a pair of eyes and a pair of ears (with some appropriate substitutions and/or absences for people without eyes and/or ears). If it has to be displayed on my screen, then you can bet that it'll be a piece of cake to redirect to a file.
True, $30 isn't much, but it's not as nice as free. It's like if you were to go to Costco, and they had fuzzy peach slices on for $30 a bag, but they were giving away licorice for free. If I was only strong enough to carry home one back of candy, I'd probably go for the licorice, even though I'd prefer to have the fuzzy peach slices.
So it's the same thing, I'd say. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to pay $30 when there's a perfectly valid alternative available gratis.
Nonetheless, I'm sure playing the movie (though I would have chosen a different movie personally) would give everyone in the court a much needed break from the proceedings. Lawyers can be so thoughtless sometimes.
There hasn't been a single "Gnome is better than KDE" or vice versa post yet. Are you on crack or something? Or maybe just, dare I say it, karma whoring?
Yes, they COULD do that. Or maybe the lynx people (or maybe even you!) could change lynx to do that for you?
Re:I'm not saying Mozilla is taking forever...
on
Mozilla M16 Released
·
· Score: 1
Because Microsoft software is not free in any sense of the word. If you want a free product to improve, then help out. If you can't help out, then, oh shit I don't know, you might try PAYING MONEY?
A good toolkit will not fix the problems with X. The network protocol is complex and convoluted (just take a look at fonts and colourmaps, for example). You can use the Win32 toolkit or even DirectX on top of X (and many people do, such as Corel), but that doesn't make X any better. Theprotocol sucks ass. It's slow, it's illogical, and it's obvious that it was a quick hack.
Actually, XGGI, XFBCon and XNest can all be run as luser. Mind you (with the exception of XGGI if you have KGICon installed), obviously none of them will take advantage of the hardware.
If Napster doesn't lose in the legal arena, it'll lose pretty quickly in the real world.
Think about it: they have no money, they have no income, and they pride their entire business on centralising and controlling their users. It's no surprise that Napster is technically inferior to every other mass filesystem out there; quite frankly, 90% of freshman CS students would come up with something better if asked. The only thing Napster provides, again, is the control they have over their users, and this is obviously a benefit for them, not the users.
I'd like to think that the Napster folks would be immune to the pressure of venture capital, but (judging from their technology), they've always been about business since the beginning, so that seems unlikely. So if they don't get shut down in court, my guess is that they're going to be introducing something in the near future to make money. With all their aforementioned technical savvy, this will undoubtedly make Napster worse than it already is.
So anyway, I foresee Napster dying within the next two years, either by law or by pissing off their users (or, conversely, not keeping their grass green enough).
Yeh I think it's pretty obvious that the Berlin team doesn't have a lot of artists;). Berlin will be nicely toolkit-independent, though, so you can be sure that once someone with an eye for toolkit art gets interested in the project, there will be a nice looking alternative.
Actually, GGI does have some hardware support if you take the time to try and install KGIcon. It's similar to fbcon, but directly supports some of the GGI API. I could be wrong.
What you've listed are the vices of XFree86, not X11 per se. In other words, you could find an X server implementation and/or X library implementation that would solve those problems you listed.
Berlin goes far beyond that. It fixes many of the problems of the X wire protocol itself. These changes are given in great detail on their site and have been repeated by a lot of people in this article, so I'm not going to spend a great deal talking about them. Basically many of the fundemental problems in X (2-colour fonts, no alpha channel, horrible with low bandwidth (I used to run some X programs over a 10K/s link, so I should know), brain-damaged pseudo-OO fucked-up C library (believe it or not, there are ways of making OO usable in C)).
Many of the problems of X can be summed up in one simple exercise: write a program using only Xlib (or using raw sockets if you prefer) that creates a window will minimal functionality (i.e. a "quit" button) that displays the message "Hello World!" How many lines of code did it take? How many times did you cringe? Exactly.
Now Berlin is using CORBA for *everything*, and it's yet-to-be-seen whether this will be practical (i.e. not too slow). I was running 0.1.5 (I would be running 0.2.0, but I haven't got my hands on the latest CVS version of libArt yet) and it looked promising.
In Canadian law, at least, you have to have a reason to appeal. I don't know American law very well, but it seems (inferring from the Wired article) that that's also the case in the US. So what grounds are they using for the appeal?
Slashdot Mirror
Well the OP was talking about why *he* would want to use it; he wasn't necessarily saying that it would take over the world.
BTW why do you assume that the only thing MP3s are useful for is ripping CDs? Sure, that probably makes up the majority of its use, but there are a lot of people who use it for other things. You only have to go as far as mp3.com to see that.
Oops, that was my fault (though I blame it on my brain). Without even thinking, I shortened Vorbis to .vob. The group making Vorbis is called Ogg, and I believe the actual extension is .ogg.
Most people (I assume) are using players like Sonique to play their music. With someone like me, who has music of many different formats of music, if you were to ask me at any given time if the music that was playing was MP3, MP2, XM, IT, MOD, S3M, or (in the future) this Vorbis deal, unless I recognised the song, I probably couldn't tell you (without looking). Sonique plays them all just fine.
.vob == music in the same way .mp3 == music, all they'll have to keep in their pretty little heads is that if they double-click it, sounds come from their speakers.
Once people learn that
Huh? The interesting part is the algorithm, not the file format. It would take all of five seconds (literally) to get it to do 320kbit/s or 320Mbit/s or 320Tbit/s. IINM, the reason it doesn't do high bitrates right now is because the authors have only written one implementation of the algorithm, and it was designed for low bitrates. Though it's been a couple months since I last read this story on /., so I can't remember everything properly.
Anyway, the file format doesn't really matter, since it's not released yet anyway.
You overgeneralise. Differing integer sizes has been a common problem for C programmers over the years, but it doesn't take much badgering to get them to use the sizeof operator (getting them to use CHAR_BIT takes a bit more badgering for some reason). However, especially when dealing with I/O, binary representations (e.g. endianness, how signed integers are stored, how floating-point numbers are stored), programmers still make a lot of assumptions. This is harder to overcome, mainly because there are no hard and fast rules, and so the programmer has to actually think.
I could go on. Just a few other silly assumptions C coders make: assuming an ASCII character set, passing NULL or a pointer to non-void unadorned to a function out of scope or without prototype (or even worse, passing 0), doing other stupid things wrt NULL (calloc()ing an array of pointers, for example), getting overly familiar with their implementation of va_list (which causes problems for platforms which, for example, push arguments in the opposite order), etc.
Of course, as you've said, none of these are shortcomings of the C language.
Indeed. The OP seems to have overlooked that one of the most common reasons for not using Macs (I would say right behind price and shitty OS, though that will change soon) is that Apple shows a lot of contempt for old hardware. Of course the true Mac zealots have embraced and encouraged the upgrade cycle for some reason, but normal people (you know, the kind who actually pay for things with money, and generally avoid wasting money) are (understandably) a bit apprehensive about it.
Uhh braniac, Berlin is a 2D windowing system. For some reason (my guess is boredom, or, more likely, to test out how the primitives would anti-alias), they included an operation to rotate windows, big deal. Once they take that out (or I guess they could leave it in; I'm sure it doesn't take up too much code), it's a really decent windowing system.
Well, maybe right now, but you have to look to the future. Once Natalie Portman has been open-sourced, businesses will come in droves in order to do legitimate (well, mostly illegitimate, but there's bound to be some legitimate) business.
BTW anyone know what licence Natalie Portman will be released under? Since there's only one of her (for the time being), this should be decided very carefully. Personally I'd vote for her being released into the public domain, but there are many consequences to consider.
Uh a little negative, are we? Is God amazing? Sure. Does that mean that I want to arbitrarily decide that he shouldn't exist? Huh?!
Are the salaries of basketball players amazing? Sure. Does that mean that I want to set them myself arbitrarily? Huh?!
Clue: your logic is, well, non-existent.
You're forgetting that, sooner or later, the movie is going to have to be viewed by a pair of eyes and a pair of ears (with some appropriate substitutions and/or absences for people without eyes and/or ears). If it has to be displayed on my screen, then you can bet that it'll be a piece of cake to redirect to a file.
True, $30 isn't much, but it's not as nice as free. It's like if you were to go to Costco, and they had fuzzy peach slices on for $30 a bag, but they were giving away licorice for free. If I was only strong enough to carry home one back of candy, I'd probably go for the licorice, even though I'd prefer to have the fuzzy peach slices.
So it's the same thing, I'd say. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to pay $30 when there's a perfectly valid alternative available gratis.
I thought you brits used the million->milliard->billion system instead of the million->billion->trillion system?
Nonetheless, I'm sure playing the movie (though I would have chosen a different movie personally) would give everyone in the court a much needed break from the proceedings. Lawyers can be so thoughtless sometimes.
There hasn't been a single "Gnome is better than KDE" or vice versa post yet. Are you on crack or something? Or maybe just, dare I say it, karma whoring?
In fact, there are many many pre-existing X servers for Windows.
Yes, they COULD do that. Or maybe the lynx people (or maybe even you!) could change lynx to do that for you?
Because Microsoft software is not free in any sense of the word. If you want a free product to improve, then help out. If you can't help out, then, oh shit I don't know, you might try PAYING MONEY?
A good toolkit will not fix the problems with X. The network protocol is complex and convoluted (just take a look at fonts and colourmaps, for example). You can use the Win32 toolkit or even DirectX on top of X (and many people do, such as Corel), but that doesn't make X any better. Theprotocol sucks ass. It's slow, it's illogical, and it's obvious that it was a quick hack.
Actually, XGGI, XFBCon and XNest can all be run as luser. Mind you (with the exception of XGGI if you have KGICon installed), obviously none of them will take advantage of the hardware.
Good. I've been looking for something to do with my 9000/340.
If Napster doesn't lose in the legal arena, it'll lose pretty quickly in the real world.
Think about it: they have no money, they have no income, and they pride their entire business on centralising and controlling their users. It's no surprise that Napster is technically inferior to every other mass filesystem out there; quite frankly, 90% of freshman CS students would come up with something better if asked. The only thing Napster provides, again, is the control they have over their users, and this is obviously a benefit for them, not the users.
I'd like to think that the Napster folks would be immune to the pressure of venture capital, but (judging from their technology), they've always been about business since the beginning, so that seems unlikely. So if they don't get shut down in court, my guess is that they're going to be introducing something in the near future to make money. With all their aforementioned technical savvy, this will undoubtedly make Napster worse than it already is.
So anyway, I foresee Napster dying within the next two years, either by law or by pissing off their users (or, conversely, not keeping their grass green enough).
Yeh I think it's pretty obvious that the Berlin team doesn't have a lot of artists ;). Berlin will be nicely toolkit-independent, though, so you can be sure that once someone with an eye for toolkit art gets interested in the project, there will be a nice looking alternative.
Actually, GGI does have some hardware support if you take the time to try and install KGIcon. It's similar to fbcon, but directly supports some of the GGI API. I could be wrong.
What you've listed are the vices of XFree86, not X11 per se. In other words, you could find an X server implementation and/or X library implementation that would solve those problems you listed.
Berlin goes far beyond that. It fixes many of the problems of the X wire protocol itself. These changes are given in great detail on their site and have been repeated by a lot of people in this article, so I'm not going to spend a great deal talking about them. Basically many of the fundemental problems in X (2-colour fonts, no alpha channel, horrible with low bandwidth (I used to run some X programs over a 10K/s link, so I should know), brain-damaged pseudo-OO fucked-up C library (believe it or not, there are ways of making OO usable in C)).
Many of the problems of X can be summed up in one simple exercise: write a program using only Xlib (or using raw sockets if you prefer) that creates a window will minimal functionality (i.e. a "quit" button) that displays the message "Hello World!" How many lines of code did it take? How many times did you cringe? Exactly.
Now Berlin is using CORBA for *everything*, and it's yet-to-be-seen whether this will be practical (i.e. not too slow). I was running 0.1.5 (I would be running 0.2.0, but I haven't got my hands on the latest CVS version of libArt yet) and it looked promising.
In Canadian law, at least, you have to have a reason to appeal. I don't know American law very well, but it seems (inferring from the Wired article) that that's also the case in the US. So what grounds are they using for the appeal?