If quality is of any importance to you then you don't want to convert from MP3 to Vorbis, as they're both lossy with their compression and you're very likely to start losing important data going from one to the other. It's the same with any lossy formats, any data type.
You'd be better off keeping the MP3s you have and just doing new ones with Vorbis, unless you really do have enough time to re-rip them.
Perhaps you should use an interpreted language, if that's how you debug your code. If you want to avoid the recompile in these situations then use your brain for those extra 2 to 5 minutes and try to solve the problem properly, rather than experimenting.
Also, reading/. and k5 whilst "waiting" for it to compile is a waste of your own resources. Again, why not spend it looking at code, letting it sink in, reading documentation? You seem to be spending too much time context-switching here, perhaps even specifically so that you can bum around when you should be thinking instead.
This isn't at all intended as a flame. I obviously read news sites and the like "in between" patches of work as well, but I admit to myself the damage it does to my work-rate and level of concentration. I don't blame it on the slow speed of my CPU, just my laziness!
You thought that all Slashdot readers were "grown up enough"? Blimey. You can't be a regular.
I'd also suggest that, proof-reading links aside, it's your own fault for reading Slashdot at a client's site. No wonder your boss isn't giving you any billable hours if you spent them reading and posting to a news site.
I loaf around at work by reading Slashdot though, so I'm hardly holier-than-though.:-)
The monolith in 2001 actually extended in many dimensions, with ratios of increasing integer squares into each one. Normal humans could only see the first three, 1:4:9.
Mir may not be the fanciest craft under the sun, but it's kept going and stayed in service far longer than it's original mandate - almost fifteen years. Those Ruskies have always gone for reliability over anything else, from weapons of war to space stations, and it's put them in good stead. It may be lower-tech than something the USA could dream up, but it'll be guaranteed to work when you need it to.
Given the budgetry constraints the USSR and now Russia have been under I have to take my hat off to them. Their work is an example to others.
The difference between being able to afford a solution and not being able to is actually hugely important. There's nothing inherently bad about cost effectiveness, especially when the "ideal" solution is so expensive that it's not an option at all.
So Linux might not be the best there is, but for a lot of applications it's good enough. The interesting point about this story is that Big Business is learning to shop around for what they need, rather than what OS vendors tell them they need.
cd/usr/src
tar Ixfv/usr/src/linux-2.2.14.tar.bz2
./linux/scripts/patch-kernel
That patch-kernel script is pretty handy, being able to add patches automatically without you even needing to decompress them. That one command will unpack and install all incremental patches it finds in the/usr/src directory (that are of a newer version than your current linux tree).
If you do the maths you'll see that petahertz processors aren't that far away - you certainly won't need to freeze yourself whilst waiting for them.
1 petahertz = 1,000,000 gigahertz
1,000,000 = 20 doublings (2^20)
Assume speed doubling every 18 months
1.5 years * 20 doublings = 30 years
There are loads of other assumptions in there about the nature of computing, even that we'll stick to computers with clocks, but it's a back-of-the-envelope figure at least.
Do the maths for "several hundred years" yourself!
I don't see why price should be counted as a benchmark for being a supercomputer. I've got an old C64 that someone is welcome to buy for $2 million if they think it'll help them simulate weather patterns, but that price would only make the buyers "foolish" rather than the computer "super".
More pointedly, with the current rise of ultra-networked commodity PCs being used for certain types of problems, should they be less qualified as a supercomputer because they cost a tenth of Big Iron? I see the price of the system as being a common symptom, not a cause, of typical supercomputers, and one for which a cure exists.
A parallel for the Brave Gnu World would be to ask what Enterprise-class software is. Ten years ago a good answer would've included "costs a bloody fortune and comes with a team of people to maintain it", simply because that was a common factor in all the software at the time. Recent changes in the software market have made cost secondary to function.
In a hypothetic world, if you were sold that car at a vastly reduced cost on the assumption that they'd make money back on a petrol-usage tax, then they're going to lose a lot of money for everyone that converts to electric.
Whether it's right or wrong depends on the contract you signed when you bought the car in the first place, and whether the lawyers had thought about people hacking it.
The difficulty would be in getting hold of these two near-identical tracks. They'd have to be encoded from the exact same ripped source to be of use in this sort of attack, and done so with the same options as each other, or else the noise in the ripping process would invalidate the method.
You'll have a hell of a job finding data like that, unless you work for SDMI.
If the log files can't be tampered with, does that include log rotation? If you can rotate them then so can a cracker, and if you can't then you'd better make sure you've got plenty of disk space...
Do you need to put other mechanisms in place to cope with this?
The most effective method will probably be traffic shaping, reducing the maximum bandwidth available to the services in question.
If you're using Linux on your servers then look into the Quality of Service (QoS) options in recent kernels. If not, you can get routers which have this sort of thing built-in.
The US Olympic Committee is probably just as corrupt as the rest of them, and you've got to take into account that a lot of the big-name sponsors are American as well.
The Olympics is just too much greed and too much hype these days, and the World Cup isn't far off either. But what can be done to bring them back to how they used to be, before the corporations took over? Even if more and more of us switch off the telly they'll just think they need to advertise more, in a vicious circle.
One thing I like very much about Debian packages is that you can unpack them on any Unix box in the world, using standard tools like ar and tar -.deb files are simply ar archives, and the source.deb files contain pristine source and a separate Debian patch set rather than mixing it all up.
It's that sort of attention to detail that makes me use Debian, but in all honesty I haven't looked recently to see if you can do the same with RPMs.
That's if you're trying to blast something into space using rockets. How about using a "space elevator" as detailed in a million-and-one sci-fi books, such as the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy?
The concept is that you have a gigantic cable with one end fixed to a point on Earth, the other having a massive weight on it, somewhere outside of our atmosphere. Anything you need to get into space is simply pulled up the cable. It'd be a pretty big engineering project for sure, and don't ask me what effect it would have on tides or what would happen if the cable broke, but it'd be safe and cheap (on fuel) once it's there.
Whilst it's true that TPM was a kids film, I'd disagree when you imply that the first trilogy was as well. Although the old stuff may still appeal to children it's got much more adult scripting, acting and plotline.
If you watch them and set aside your nostalgia for a while you'll see that the films are actually good in themselves, individually. I'm afraid that TPM didn't work for me at all.
The shoes would work in low gravity, sure, but if gravity's pointing anywhere other than through your feet you'll find it hard to climb.
It'd be good for non-slip shower mats though!
Re:"Designed from the ground up for..."
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 2
I seem to recall that Linux wasn't initially designed to be portable either. Although it might be a royal pain doing the first port it's still infinitely better than trying to design the "perfect" portable OS and never getting it out of the door.
It's almost a fact of program design that you'll go through at least one major reworking during the lifecycle anyway, where you throw out the old cruft and do it properly. I think it's better to get code out of the door to start with, on the platform you're most comfortable with, and then if someone really wants to port it they'll contribute later on.
Although it might only be of relevance to 0.02% of Slashdot readers, that doesn't mean the rest of us aren't interested in it, that we don't care. Speaking for myself I love to hear about new ports, especially the way-out-where ones to machine like the S/390.
Aside from the coolness factor, projects like this go to show how far Linux is advancing and being accepted out in the Real World. These are hugely serious machines, used for mission-critical data that directly affects our lives (financial records, medical data and so on), and if Linux is making inroads there it's proof that it's not just a toy OS any more.
As someone else has mentioned, someone has already start a port for Debian. The May 9th edition of the Debian weekly newsletter gives the following link:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/15/mail#2
Quite a good paragraph from it says...
"I've found many friends of Debian within IBM. Debian is seen here as a well respected, high quality distribution. A debian-s390 distribution also seems to fit well with the idea that IBM just doesn't want to be in the distribution business."
There's a mailing list at debian-s390@lists.debian.org and a site at http://pax.gt.owl.de/~higson/debian-s390/ if you're interested.
If you use the preview pane then Outlook does, in fact, "launch" attachments like JPEGs and VB scripts, so all you have to do it click once on the email itself to run this virus. Very user friendly, very virus friendly.
Slashdot Mirror
Spooky, given the Slashdot quote at the bottom of the page...
"It is your destiny. - Darth Vader"
How do you feel, knowing that your future holds such destruction and terror?
If quality is of any importance to you then you don't want to convert from MP3 to Vorbis, as they're both lossy with their compression and you're very likely to start losing important data going from one to the other. It's the same with any lossy formats, any data type.
You'd be better off keeping the MP3s you have and just doing new ones with Vorbis, unless you really do have enough time to re-rip them.
Perhaps you should use an interpreted language, if that's how you debug your code. If you want to avoid the recompile in these situations then use your brain for those extra 2 to 5 minutes and try to solve the problem properly, rather than experimenting.
/. and k5 whilst "waiting" for it to compile is a waste of your own resources. Again, why not spend it looking at code, letting it sink in, reading documentation? You seem to be spending too much time context-switching here, perhaps even specifically so that you can bum around when you should be thinking instead.
Also, reading
This isn't at all intended as a flame. I obviously read news sites and the like "in between" patches of work as well, but I admit to myself the damage it does to my work-rate and level of concentration. I don't blame it on the slow speed of my CPU, just my laziness!
The article was one sentence long. It said:
... to build the world's first commercial train to float on magnetic fields."
"...China has signed a deal
If you're going to take weasly pot-shots at people then at least have some basis for argument.
Rob
You thought that all Slashdot readers were "grown up enough"? Blimey. You can't be a regular.
:-)
I'd also suggest that, proof-reading links aside, it's your own fault for reading Slashdot at a client's site. No wonder your boss isn't giving you any billable hours if you spent them reading and posting to a news site.
I loaf around at work by reading Slashdot though, so I'm hardly holier-than-though.
The monolith in 2001 actually extended in many dimensions, with ratios of increasing integer squares into each one. Normal humans could only see the first three, 1:4:9.
Mir may not be the fanciest craft under the sun, but it's kept going and stayed in service far longer than it's original mandate - almost fifteen years. Those Ruskies have always gone for reliability over anything else, from weapons of war to space stations, and it's put them in good stead. It may be lower-tech than something the USA could dream up, but it'll be guaranteed to work when you need it to.
Given the budgetry constraints the USSR and now Russia have been under I have to take my hat off to them. Their work is an example to others.
The difference between being able to afford a solution and not being able to is actually hugely important. There's nothing inherently bad about cost effectiveness, especially when the "ideal" solution is so expensive that it's not an option at all.
So Linux might not be the best there is, but for a lot of applications it's good enough. The interesting point about this story is that Big Business is learning to shop around for what they need, rather than what OS vendors tell them they need.
Even better, try this:
/usr/src
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14.tar.bz2
/usr/src directory (that are of a newer version than your current linux tree).
cd
tar Ixfv
./linux/scripts/patch-kernel
That patch-kernel script is pretty handy, being able to add patches automatically without you even needing to decompress them. That one command will unpack and install all incremental patches it finds in the
Try it, you might like it!
If you do the maths you'll see that petahertz processors aren't that far away - you certainly won't need to freeze yourself whilst waiting for them.
1 petahertz = 1,000,000 gigahertz
1,000,000 = 20 doublings (2^20)
Assume speed doubling every 18 months
1.5 years * 20 doublings = 30 years
There are loads of other assumptions in there about the nature of computing, even that we'll stick to computers with clocks, but it's a back-of-the-envelope figure at least.
Do the maths for "several hundred years" yourself!
There's nothing to say that memorabilia can't be propaganda, in the hands of the wrong person. It's all about how the owner perceives and uses it.
It's like the difference between someone who enjoys and collects weapons as a hobby and someone who's stockpiling them for The Revolution.
I don't see why price should be counted as a benchmark for being a supercomputer. I've got an old C64 that someone is welcome to buy for $2 million if they think it'll help them simulate weather patterns, but that price would only make the buyers "foolish" rather than the computer "super".
More pointedly, with the current rise of ultra-networked commodity PCs being used for certain types of problems, should they be less qualified as a supercomputer because they cost a tenth of Big Iron? I see the price of the system as being a common symptom, not a cause, of typical supercomputers, and one for which a cure exists.
A parallel for the Brave Gnu World would be to ask what Enterprise-class software is. Ten years ago a good answer would've included "costs a bloody fortune and comes with a team of people to maintain it", simply because that was a common factor in all the software at the time. Recent changes in the software market have made cost secondary to function.
In a hypothetic world, if you were sold that car at a vastly reduced cost on the assumption that they'd make money back on a petrol-usage tax, then they're going to lose a lot of money for everyone that converts to electric.
Whether it's right or wrong depends on the contract you signed when you bought the car in the first place, and whether the lawyers had thought about people hacking it.
The difficulty would be in getting hold of these two near-identical tracks. They'd have to be encoded from the exact same ripped source to be of use in this sort of attack, and done so with the same options as each other, or else the noise in the ripping process would invalidate the method.
You'll have a hell of a job finding data like that, unless you work for SDMI.
If the log files can't be tampered with, does that include log rotation? If you can rotate them then so can a cracker, and if you can't then you'd better make sure you've got plenty of disk space...
Do you need to put other mechanisms in place to cope with this?
The most effective method will probably be traffic shaping, reducing the maximum bandwidth available to the services in question.
If you're using Linux on your servers then look into the Quality of Service (QoS) options in recent kernels. If not, you can get routers which have this sort of thing built-in.
The US Olympic Committee is probably just as corrupt as the rest of them, and you've got to take into account that a lot of the big-name sponsors are American as well.
The Olympics is just too much greed and too much hype these days, and the World Cup isn't far off either. But what can be done to bring them back to how they used to be, before the corporations took over? Even if more and more of us switch off the telly they'll just think they need to advertise more, in a vicious circle.
Bah. Now where's my desert island?
One thing I like very much about Debian packages is that you can unpack them on any Unix box in the world, using standard tools like ar and tar - .deb files are simply ar archives, and the source .deb files contain pristine source and a separate Debian patch set rather than mixing it all up.
It's that sort of attention to detail that makes me use Debian, but in all honesty I haven't looked recently to see if you can do the same with RPMs.
That's if you're trying to blast something into space using rockets. How about using a "space elevator" as detailed in a million-and-one sci-fi books, such as the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy?
The concept is that you have a gigantic cable with one end fixed to a point on Earth, the other having a massive weight on it, somewhere outside of our atmosphere. Anything you need to get into space is simply pulled up the cable. It'd be a pretty big engineering project for sure, and don't ask me what effect it would have on tides or what would happen if the cable broke, but it'd be safe and cheap (on fuel) once it's there.
That'd still be a few years off though...
Whilst it's true that TPM was a kids film, I'd disagree when you imply that the first trilogy was as well. Although the old stuff may still appeal to children it's got much more adult scripting, acting and plotline.
If you watch them and set aside your nostalgia for a while you'll see that the films are actually good in themselves, individually. I'm afraid that TPM didn't work for me at all.
The shoes would work in low gravity, sure, but if gravity's pointing anywhere other than through your feet you'll find it hard to climb.
It'd be good for non-slip shower mats though!
I seem to recall that Linux wasn't initially designed to be portable either. Although it might be a royal pain doing the first port it's still infinitely better than trying to design the "perfect" portable OS and never getting it out of the door.
It's almost a fact of program design that you'll go through at least one major reworking during the lifecycle anyway, where you throw out the old cruft and do it properly. I think it's better to get code out of the door to start with, on the platform you're most comfortable with, and then if someone really wants to port it they'll contribute later on.
Although it might only be of relevance to 0.02% of Slashdot readers, that doesn't mean the rest of us aren't interested in it, that we don't care. Speaking for myself I love to hear about new ports, especially the way-out-where ones to machine like the S/390.
Aside from the coolness factor, projects like this go to show how far Linux is advancing and being accepted out in the Real World. These are hugely serious machines, used for mission-critical data that directly affects our lives (financial records, medical data and so on), and if Linux is making inroads there it's proof that it's not just a toy OS any more.
As someone else has mentioned, someone has already start a port for Debian. The May 9th edition of the Debian weekly newsletter gives the following link:
2
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/15/mail#
Quite a good paragraph from it says...
"I've found many friends of Debian within IBM. Debian is seen here as a well respected, high quality distribution. A debian-s390 distribution also seems to fit well with the idea that IBM just doesn't want to be in the distribution business."
There's a mailing list at debian-s390@lists.debian.org and a site at http://pax.gt.owl.de/~higson/debian-s390/ if you're interested.
Debian just gets better and better!
If you use the preview pane then Outlook does, in fact, "launch" attachments like JPEGs and VB scripts, so all you have to do it click once on the email itself to run this virus. Very user friendly, very virus friendly.