Yup, M$ wins this one...
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
No, really! Windows Media kicks the hell out of any other lossy encoding format this side of ATRAC (Sony's MiniDisc codec). 128Kb/s WMA *smokes* MP3's encoded under 200Kb/s. Score one for the Evil Empire.
On FreeBSD, Real Men(tm) do:
cd/usr/ports/genre/cool_proggie
make && make install
Why mess around with precompiled binaries when you've got a beautiful source fetch script + makefile sitting there begging to be used? If it's compiled on *your* box, you can bet it will run on *your* box!
You'd have to both read the posting pretty carefully *and* know some history behind the FreeBSD distro to figure out what's going on here. Looking at the posts on this artcle, it's clear that a lot of people think this is the very first time you could get FreeBSD on CD.
Hell, I had a subscription to the Walnut Creek CD's back in the 2.2.x days -- I think I still have 2.2.6 hanging around here someplace.
Well, this is supposed to be the point of Bluetooth, if the Bluetooth SIG can ever figure out how the damn things are supposed to work. Given that they just adopted a basic printing profile on December 31st, they have a long way to go.
http://www.google.com/search?q=wireless+rs232 gets about 24,000 hits, but most of the commercial solutions are oriented towards scientific data-logging applications and other deep pocket uses. One source is Parallax, makers of the Basic Stamp. They have something that might work here -- look at the RF products section. Personally, I would homebrew it with a bare PIC microcontroller, but the 'Stamps are a lot easier for the hobbyist to deal with.
ALL of Kubrick's films, not to mention a whole bunch of other worthy movies, belong ahead of this clunker.
After all the prerelease hype about how true to the book the movie was going to be, I was pissed at how much violence they did to the story. Crouching Saruman, Hidden Gandalf indeed! And WTF is up with Orcs running up stone pillars like so many cockroaches? Here's a partial list:
- Arwen: Warrior Princess. 'Nuff said.
- Aragorn draws his FULL LENGTH sword?!?!?
- Big argument at the Council of Elrond. Never happened.
- Merry and Pippin setting off Gandalf's fireworks. In Harry Potter (a fine movie adaptation of a book), maybe, but here it is gratuitous comic relief.
- The cave troll troll never was never part of the fight in Moria (Frodo stabbed him with Sting and he ran away), yet they devoted a whole fight scene to it.
- Saruman bringing down an avalanche from Caradhras? Umm, no.
- Shadowfax seems to have gone to the glue factory.
- In the book, Gollum doesn't get mentioned until the Fellowship is on the river. He never says "gollum", either.
- Neither Boromir nor any of the other characters (with one major exception MUCH later) touches the Ring.
- Saruman is represented as being completely under Sauron's thumb, which wasn't the case at all.
- Elendil and Isildur look like refugees from a Seattle grunge band. Actually, that whole intro was completely unnecessary and lame. Jackson wasted all the suspense potential of the first half of the book in favor of a big crowd-pleasing CGI fight scene. Bah.
- Saruman shows Gandalf the Palantir before he imprisons him??????? Whaaaaat????
I could provide more examples, but I type slowly and I walked out an hour before it ended...
Look, omitting Tom Bombadil is OK -- that episode doesn't really advance the story too much, and there is a limited amount of time to tell the story. What Peter Jackson did amounts to rewriting the book and trying to win over everyone by saying he took a purist's approach. Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining, Mr. Jackson.
I will allow that Ian McKellam (sp?) RULES as Gandalf, and that the sets are really cool. Still, if you want to see a movie that does justice to the book it came from, go see Harry Potter or rent the miniseries version of Dune.
This is the way *I* do it when I'm on the road. Here's what I use:
Kyocera 2035 CDMA cell phone
"Data cable" for above
HP Jornada 525 pocket pc --or--
Teeny little Fujitsu notebook
I get 14.4K with the Kyocera's CDMA modem, which is surprisingly useful for a lot of tasks. The real advantage is that coverage is really good (with Verizon, anyway), as opposed to the limited coverage of GPRS. I can grab my email while sitting in an airport restaurant in Grand Rapids, MI, and check weather maps while out on a motorcycle ride in the mountains east of San Diego. Hell, I use my cell phone with the Jornada to synch up to AvantGo when I'm at home to avoid having to wait for my notebook to boot and connect to my ISP. (Advice: Free nights and weekends is *killer* for this kind of activity -- 'net connections chew up LOTS of airtime.) If you're on the road, you really want to do as much work as you can offline and upload the results in a batch.
This kind of stuff has a very high geek-chic factor: lots of people gawk at me when they see me connect a little handheld (or notebook, rarely) to my cell phone.
Seems like this will post to the wrong part of the thread again -- I dunno if this is an Opera problem or a/. bug.
If it's a BSD license and you just want to see your superior code out in the big wide world, you win the grand prize! Your code lives on and is doing Useful Things! Maybe their implentation is better, but you can be proud of getting something off the ground. Chances are that's not the case, though -- I doubt many corporations have developers who are as bright and motivated as the people that start and maintain these labors of love. BigCorp would probably rather pay the original developer to extend the tool.
If it's a GPL'ish kind of thing, sic some law-boys on their butts (on a contingency basis, so the bigger the target, the better). Furthermore, send a news release to every rabidly pro-GPL site you can find and watch the offender get DDoS'd, h4x0r3d, spammed, and immolated in the court of public opinion. Just because you're not BigCorp doesn't mean that you are powerless.
Yes, and if the company taking the code is big enough, they can push their derived implementation on the market. For example by making a nice tool to generate files which use
the (slightly modified) codec, and giving the tool give away for free. Then they make the changes a "trade secret" making sure *your* player can't play the files using their derived format.
That's a risk, yes, but how often does it really happen? I will grant that the old BSD license was actually better in some ways since it required acknowledgement of the original authors of the code -- not a terrible onerous requirement. Still, if the company in question is, say, a certain large evil empire(tm) (or even a malignant barony), do you really think the GPL is going to prevent them from grabbing whatever code they feel like grabbing?
I'm sure it happens all the time, but it's kind of a karma thing: $DIETY will eventually make them pay for their sins.
I can give a good example of how some businesses look at this sort of thing, and why: I found some source code on the net for a really useful piece of microcontroller code that would save a lot of development time in a project my company is working on. The "free" license spelled out in the source is restricted to "personal use" -- use in a commercial product is subject to a $.25/copy royalty. We modified the code to suit our purposes and could have just gone ahead and used it without saying a word. Instead, I contacted the author and let him know what we were going to do and actually paid him nearly a kilobuck more to do a code review of our modifications.
Why?
It's the right thing to do. Yes, there are a lot of people who feel this is a good guide for doing business and value the ability to look at themselves in the mirror with a clear conscience every morning.
It's the responsible thing to do. As a manager, I have a serious responsibility to the company I work for to not break the law or expose the company to lawsuits, however slight the likelihood of fallout may be.
It's the smart thing to do. If I tell my engineers to go ahead and rip off code, I'm probably also telling them that it's OK to rip off lots of other things. It's bad for morale, too, and morale is THE most valuable thing in any business; you don't do things to hurt it if you can possibly help it. Nothing is worse than an apathetic, demoralized developer -- their pr0n collections go up, their output goes down, and the source begins to resemble a roach motel.
It's just good business all the way around.
If they want they can throw a patent in, too. However even with just a trade secret they can lock you out effectively, thanks to the DMCA.
IIRC the Kerberos protocol had similar problems at one point. What's the problem with LGPL? The code you write remains yours, you don't have to give it to anyone, and if you really want to change the codec, then you have to publish your changes.
Well, they have to publish their methods in a patent, so it would be pretty easy to figure out it it's a derivative work and show prior art. No DMCA sillines required.
Seems like a damn fair deal. This BSD approach is nice and kind, but if you have to compete with Microsoft, that approach is doomed to failure.
Umm, yeah. BSD is dead. Has been for a long time. I've read about it several times over the past few years, so it must be true. Oddly, the URL at the top of this post still works. Maybe they prepaid their Web hosting service and it's just running on autopilot...
Sure, someone can take the source and do things to it without feeding it back to the community, but they then run the risk of making their implementation incompatible with everything else. They also bear the burden of maintaining their own fork of the code. Speaking as someone who is considering using flac for internal use in a commercial setting, I can tell you that these are powerful disincentives to doing silly things with the code.
The (L)GPL's virus-like qualities make it a hard sell to the PHB's... even PHB's like me that believe in free software.
Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site."([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)
Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...
That's interesting -- my Sony DVD player (current model, not an old one) sez "no disc" when I load a CDR. My Harman-Kardon CD player is perfectly happy with them.
Don't buy HK CD players, btw -- they have serious quality control problems reoported by users on the 'net, and mine acts really strange most of the time.
With apologies to the Eagles... if you don't get it, you didn't need to know anyway.
Well, it depends on what you mean -- data transmitted, or data received?
In the first case, a previous poster cited the old saw "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." The transmission rate of a Country Squire is stupendous, but how fast can it be received? Tape drives manage from under 500KB/sec on up...
Now consider the case of printed books. I'd hazard a guess that the average Tom Clancy potboiler contains something like a megabyte of information. Again, the transmission rate is very high (someone hands you the book), but the reception rate is very low (you have to read it) -- in my case, I manage about 350bits/second (550wpm, 5.5 letters/word, 7bit ASCII).
Now think about television. Uncompressed NTSC video has a transmission rate of around 25MB/sec. This works out to about 45GB for an episode of I Love Lucy, including commercials. Cynics will argue that the actual useful data rate is an inverse square of the amount watched.
I guess it all depends on what you're transmitting, and to what or whom. In most cases, I'd say that above a ceratin transmission rate it doesn't matter -- the process is cpu-bound anyway (whether by grey matter or otherwise)
San Diego Technical Books was selling the Bill/Borg T-shirts a year or two ago -- I had to have one! Great shirt, but most people don't know what the hell Bill is wearing.:)
This is yet another example of the old rule from the original Dungeons & Dragons: The Angry Villager Rule, which was no doubt inspired by the Frankenstein monster's demise at the hands of a mob of P.O.'d serfs. "Global Village" is a much-abused buzzphrase/metaphor, but we are beginning to see the truth in it. How does this relate to D&D? Under the rule it didn't matter how powerful your characters were, the villagers always win.
/. is certainly a village, and plenty of its residents are definitely angry. The fate of nations could hang on how Rob chooses to use such awesome power....
(Congratulations to Theo de Raadt, btw; I for one was happy to help pound that Web server into oblivion.)
Note to Rob: More Lloyd Wood articles!
on
Assorted Katz Hype
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· Score: 1
This guy can write. If he can make an inherently boring subject like this interesting, imagine what he can do with "Stuff that matters"...
Katz may be right -- this may be the next Golden Age of history. If it is, I'd like to know who our Kant is. Or our Jefferson, our Voltaire, our Nietzche. The depth of thought in this Brave New Pasture goes no further than "don't step in the warm ones".
Huxley and Orwell were optimists. Welcome to the Brave New Banner Ad -- watch your step as you wend your way to MiniNet and its Room 101 of consumer hell.
It's the same old herd in a more efficient digital pasture.
Slashdot Mirror
No, really! Windows Media kicks the hell out of any other lossy encoding format this side of ATRAC (Sony's MiniDisc codec). 128Kb/s WMA *smokes* MP3's encoded under 200Kb/s. Score one for the Evil Empire.
On FreeBSD, Real Men(tm) do:
/usr/ports/genre/cool_proggie
cd
make && make install
Why mess around with precompiled binaries when you've got a beautiful source fetch script + makefile sitting there begging to be used? If it's compiled on *your* box, you can bet it will run on *your* box!
You'd have to both read the posting pretty carefully *and* know some history behind the FreeBSD distro to figure out what's going on here. Looking at the posts on this artcle, it's clear that a lot of people think this is the very first time you could get FreeBSD on CD.
Hell, I had a subscription to the Walnut Creek CD's back in the 2.2.x days -- I think I still have 2.2.6 hanging around here someplace.
Well, this is supposed to be the point of Bluetooth, if the Bluetooth SIG can ever figure out how the damn things are supposed to work. Given that they just adopted a basic printing profile on December 31st, they have a long way to go.
http://www.google.com/search?q=wireless+rs232 gets about 24,000 hits, but most of the commercial solutions are oriented towards scientific data-logging applications and other deep pocket uses. One source is Parallax, makers of the Basic Stamp. They have something that might work here -- look at the RF products section. Personally, I would homebrew it with a bare PIC microcontroller, but the 'Stamps are a lot easier for the hobbyist to deal with.
ALL of Kubrick's films, not to mention a whole bunch of other worthy movies, belong ahead of this clunker.
After all the prerelease hype about how true to the book the movie was going to be, I was pissed at how much violence they did to the story. Crouching Saruman, Hidden Gandalf indeed! And WTF is up with Orcs running up stone pillars like so many cockroaches? Here's a partial list:
- Arwen: Warrior Princess. 'Nuff said.
- Aragorn draws his FULL LENGTH sword?!?!?
- Big argument at the Council of Elrond. Never happened.
- Merry and Pippin setting off Gandalf's fireworks. In Harry Potter (a fine movie adaptation of a book), maybe, but here it is gratuitous comic relief.
- The cave troll troll never was never part of the fight in Moria (Frodo stabbed him with Sting and he ran away), yet they devoted a whole fight scene to it.
- Saruman bringing down an avalanche from Caradhras? Umm, no.
- Shadowfax seems to have gone to the glue factory.
- In the book, Gollum doesn't get mentioned until the Fellowship is on the river. He never says "gollum", either.
- Neither Boromir nor any of the other characters (with one major exception MUCH later) touches the Ring.
- Saruman is represented as being completely under Sauron's thumb, which wasn't the case at all.
- Elendil and Isildur look like refugees from a Seattle grunge band. Actually, that whole intro was completely unnecessary and lame. Jackson wasted all the suspense potential of the first half of the book in favor of a big crowd-pleasing CGI fight scene. Bah.
- Saruman shows Gandalf the Palantir before he imprisons him??????? Whaaaaat????
I could provide more examples, but I type slowly and I walked out an hour before it ended...
Look, omitting Tom Bombadil is OK -- that episode doesn't really advance the story too much, and there is a limited amount of time to tell the story. What Peter Jackson did amounts to rewriting the book and trying to win over everyone by saying he took a purist's approach. Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining, Mr. Jackson.
I will allow that Ian McKellam (sp?) RULES as Gandalf, and that the sets are really cool. Still, if you want to see a movie that does justice to the book it came from, go see Harry Potter or rent the miniseries version of Dune.
I get 14.4K with the Kyocera's CDMA modem, which is surprisingly useful for a lot of tasks. The real advantage is that coverage is really good (with Verizon, anyway), as opposed to the limited coverage of GPRS. I can grab my email while sitting in an airport restaurant in Grand Rapids, MI, and check weather maps while out on a motorcycle ride in the mountains east of San Diego. Hell, I use my cell phone with the Jornada to synch up to AvantGo when I'm at home to avoid having to wait for my notebook to boot and connect to my ISP. (Advice: Free nights and weekends is *killer* for this kind of activity -- 'net connections chew up LOTS of airtime.) If you're on the road, you really want to do as much work as you can offline and upload the results in a batch.
This kind of stuff has a very high geek-chic factor: lots of people gawk at me when they see me connect a little handheld (or notebook, rarely) to my cell phone.
You're right -- he was the fake SAS guy in Ronin with Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno. He ruled in that movie, I thought.
FWIW, I walked out of FOTR 45 minutes before it ended. I guess I'm too much of a purist...
Oops, just kidding. :)
/. bug.
Seems like this will post to the wrong part of the thread again -- I dunno if this is an Opera problem or a
If it's a BSD license and you just want to see your superior code out in the big wide world, you win the grand prize! Your code lives on and is doing Useful Things! Maybe their implentation is better, but you can be proud of getting something off the ground. Chances are that's not the case, though -- I doubt many corporations have developers who are as bright and motivated as the people that start and maintain these labors of love. BigCorp would probably rather pay the original developer to extend the tool.
If it's a GPL'ish kind of thing, sic some law-boys on their butts (on a contingency basis, so the bigger the target, the better). Furthermore, send a news release to every rabidly pro-GPL site you can find and watch the offender get DDoS'd, h4x0r3d, spammed, and immolated in the court of public opinion. Just because you're not BigCorp doesn't mean that you are powerless.
That's a risk, yes, but how often does it really happen? I will grant that the old BSD license was actually better in some ways since it required acknowledgement of the original authors of the code -- not a terrible onerous requirement. Still, if the company in question is, say, a certain large evil empire(tm) (or even a malignant barony), do you really think the GPL is going to prevent them from grabbing whatever code they feel like grabbing?
I'm sure it happens all the time, but it's kind of a karma thing: $DIETY will eventually make them pay for their sins.
I can give a good example of how some businesses look at this sort of thing, and why: I found some source code on the net for a really useful piece of microcontroller code that would save a lot of development time in a project my company is working on. The "free" license spelled out in the source is restricted to "personal use" -- use in a commercial product is subject to a $.25/copy royalty. We modified the code to suit our purposes and could have just gone ahead and used it without saying a word. Instead, I contacted the author and let him know what we were going to do and actually paid him nearly a kilobuck more to do a code review of our modifications.
Why?
- It's the right thing to do. Yes, there are a lot of people who feel this is a good guide for doing business and value the ability to look at themselves in the mirror with a clear conscience every morning.
- It's the responsible thing to do. As a manager, I have a serious responsibility to the company I work for to not break the law or expose the company to lawsuits, however slight the likelihood of fallout may be.
- It's the smart thing to do. If I tell my engineers to go ahead and rip off code, I'm probably also telling them that it's OK to rip off lots of other things. It's bad for morale, too, and morale is THE most valuable thing in any business; you don't do things to hurt it if you can possibly help it. Nothing is worse than an apathetic, demoralized developer -- their pr0n collections go up, their output goes down, and the source begins to resemble a roach motel.
It's just good business all the way around.If they want they can throw a patent in, too. However even with just a trade secret they can lock you out effectively, thanks to the DMCA. IIRC the Kerberos protocol had similar problems at one point. What's the problem with LGPL? The code you write remains yours, you don't have to give it to anyone, and if you really want to change the codec, then you have to publish your changes.
Well, they have to publish their methods in a patent, so it would be pretty easy to figure out it it's a derivative work and show prior art. No DMCA sillines required.
Seems like a damn fair deal. This BSD approach is nice and kind, but if you have to compete with Microsoft, that approach is doomed to failure.
Umm, yeah. BSD is dead. Has been for a long time. I've read about it several times over the past few years, so it must be true. Oddly, the URL at the top of this post still works. Maybe they prepaid their Web hosting service and it's just running on autopilot...
It meets every definition of "free" that matters.
... even PHB's like me that believe in free software.
Sure, someone can take the source and do things to it without feeding it back to the community, but they then run the risk of making their implementation incompatible with everything else. They also bear the burden of maintaining their own fork of the code. Speaking as someone who is considering using flac for internal use in a commercial setting, I can tell you that these are powerful disincentives to doing silly things with the code.
The (L)GPL's virus-like qualities make it a hard sell to the PHB's
... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.
Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)
Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...
'nuff said.
Yeah, I should RTFComments more closely before posting.
That's interesting -- my Sony DVD player (current model, not an old one) sez "no disc" when I load a CDR. My Harman-Kardon CD player is perfectly happy with them.
Don't buy HK CD players, btw -- they have serious quality control problems reoported by users on the 'net, and mine acts really strange most of the time.
I mean, girls LOVE Monty Python quotes.
If he keeps it up, he may get lucky!
I wish I had thought of this. Note to moderators: give this one a +1, and bump my inane post down into AC-land...
With apologies to the Eagles... if you don't get it, you didn't need to know anyway.
Well, it depends on what you mean -- data transmitted, or data received?
In the first case, a previous poster cited the old saw "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." The transmission rate of a Country Squire is stupendous, but how fast can it be received? Tape drives manage from under 500KB/sec on up...
Now consider the case of printed books. I'd hazard a guess that the average Tom Clancy potboiler contains something like a megabyte of information. Again, the transmission rate is very high (someone hands you the book), but the reception rate is very low (you have to read it) -- in my case, I manage about 350bits/second (550wpm, 5.5 letters/word, 7bit ASCII).
Now think about television. Uncompressed NTSC video has a transmission rate of around 25MB/sec. This works out to about 45GB for an episode of I Love Lucy, including commercials. Cynics will argue that the actual useful data rate is an inverse square of the amount watched.
I guess it all depends on what you're transmitting, and to what or whom. In most cases, I'd say that above a ceratin transmission rate it doesn't matter -- the process is cpu-bound anyway (whether by grey matter or otherwise)
San Diego Technical Books was selling the Bill/Borg T-shirts a year or two ago -- I had to have one! Great shirt, but most people don't know what the hell Bill is wearing. :)
This is yet another example of the old rule from the original Dungeons & Dragons: The Angry Villager Rule, which was no doubt inspired by the Frankenstein monster's demise at the hands of a mob of P.O.'d serfs. "Global Village" is a much-abused buzzphrase/metaphor, but we are beginning to see the truth in it. How does this relate to D&D? Under the rule it didn't matter how powerful your characters were, the villagers always win.
/. is certainly a village, and plenty of its residents are definitely angry. The fate of nations could hang on how Rob chooses to use such awesome power....
(Congratulations to Theo de Raadt, btw; I for one was happy to help pound that Web server into oblivion.)
This guy can write. If he can make an inherently boring subject like this interesting, imagine what he can do with "Stuff that matters"...
Katz may be right -- this may be the next Golden Age of history. If it is, I'd like to know who our Kant is. Or our Jefferson, our Voltaire, our Nietzche. The depth of thought in this Brave New Pasture goes no further than "don't step in the warm ones".
Huxley and Orwell were optimists. Welcome to the Brave New Banner Ad -- watch your step as you wend your way to MiniNet and its Room 101 of consumer hell.
It's the same old herd in a more efficient digital pasture.