He did not, as he did not have access to a JPEG2000 encoder.
I agree - it is an improvement, just not a very large one. A reasonable question, in this day of 40G hard drives and fat-pipe DSL and cable modems, is whether we care about a 10% reduction in bandwidth for the same quality level.
In the spirit of fun, here are my predictions. Take with a grain of salt, of course.
e-commerce
The development of e-commerce will continue in full force. However, today's piddly little oracle-backed web sites will look remarkably primitive by the standards of 2010. When you place an order, the back-end will automatically negotiate with a worldwide network of fulfillment centers and choose one with the optimum combination of availability, shipping cost, and delivery time. The majority of delivery trucks on the road will be carrying out Internet-placed orders. By 2010, GPS transponders will start allowing the network to dispatch delivery trucks in real-time, based on the current location of the truck and the planned route.
This evolution, I feel, is very likely to happen. The economic incentives are there. Whoever masters it will be able to provide better service at lower cost.
This type of technology has the potential to enable a large number of small providers. However, over the next few years, there will be a strong trend towards consolidation and megamergers, to try to bring down the transaction costs.
media
The Internet will be the primary distribution channel for most people to listen to music. In addition, a significant minority will be using it for high-quality movies. In fact, the agility of the Internet will be what finally brings HDTV movies into your home. This will require a pretty big pipe. High-tech people will be eagerly awaiting widespread deployment of gigabit fiber to the home. Actual transfer rates will be more like 10Mbps, but this will be plenty adequate for downloading your favorite HDTV movie overnight.
rights management and freedom
The current intellectual property wars will rage on unabated for the next 10 years. People will slowly start to get the clue that tightening up the IP laws benefits corporations at the expense of people. Nonetheless, the corporations will continue to put up a strong fight due to their political power, PR, and money.
Ironically, overly tight enforcement of intellectual property will finally spur the deployment of technological solutions to privacy. Being able to pirate music and movies in peace will finally provide a large number of people with a good reason to be securely pseudonymous on the net. Thus, we will see the realization of the cypherpunks holy grail as discussed over the last 10 years. Freedom is a harbinger of this direction.
The majority of people will prefer to avoid the hassle of piracy and just pay out to the media corporations. However, these corporations will finally start getting the message that they're actually competing against "illegal" distribution of intellectual property, and start providing attractively priced products designed to appeal to the "swing" demographic of young, technologically savvy males.
http, html
The Web will continue to suck, although arduous progress will be made. Around 2005, a proposal will come forward that integrates consistenly rendered typographic quality text, graphics, and good internationalization, while being able to print at full graphic arts quality. This protocol will also be a decent UI for interactive content. The inner format will be nicely structured so that it can be effectively searched, spoken aloud, etc.
Of course, all the technology to do this has been around for a while. It's just that the vendor cabal making up the W3C won't be able to agree on any of it.
conclusion
I have no idea whether any of these predictions will bear out. However, I predict with great confidence that the next 10 years are not going to be boring. May we live in interesting times!
This is a bug in your browser, triggered whenever it's looking at files in an FTP directory dated in the future, a relatively common occurrence when looking at fresh files in from a different timezone.
Advogato is running a fabulous rebuttal to Meyer's rant. It's worth a read, as it contains many interesting ideas, and is written by none other than the inestimable xiphmont of Vorbis fame.
mod_virgule, the engine behind Advogato, is written as an Apache C module, a fairly unusual choice for server-side scripting. My experiences with it have been very positive, as have been the other sites that use it (Skolos, a discussion forum for sexuality issues; Jabber.org, the Jabber developer's website; and a couple of others in the works). Advogato has been slashdotted several times now, and the load meter barely moves. That's one of the really nice consequences of programming in C:)
There are a few reasons why mod_virgule was a more pleasant programming experience than your usual CGI script in C. First, Apache's pool mechanism lets you use memory without having to worry about freeing it. It's almost as convenient as using a garbage collected programming language. Second, the Apache module API contains a lot of functions for regexps, tables, lists, and so on. These are the most important features of Perl that are lacking from raw C. It's nice to be able to write code in C that has a bit of a Perl "feel".
Finally, mod_virgule uses XML extensively in the backend, using Daniel Veillard's excellent libxml for parsing and handling. The use of XML makes the code for the site a lot cleaner.
So, I suggest that you not reject C out of hand just because it has a reputation for being more difficult or time-consuming to program than your more popular interpreted scripting languages. For what I was trying to do in mod_virgule, it turned out to be an excellent choice.
Right. Actually, I liked the Postrel article, for the reasons you described. My harsh critique applies to the "Simple Economics of Open Source" paper referenced in the article. This was written as an academic paper, presumably for consumption primarily by other economists. As such, I believe they have a responsibility to get their facts right, as well as to seek deeper understanding of the real issues. So I don't think this is just nitpicking.
The paper referred to in this story, "The Simple Economics of Open Source", has many serious flaws. For one, it contains some basic mistakes. It confuses the roles of the GPL and the DFSG, suggesting that the DFSG is itself a license, and one more liberal than the GPL at that. It states that the GPL is losing ground now, as many developers are moving to the DFSG. These statements go beyond merely wrong to the point of fundamental misunderstanding.
They also downplay the successes of the Mozilla project, at one point claiming that it's only had a dozen or so outside contributions. This will come as surprising news to anyone familiar with actual Mozilla development.
I had a lot of problems with the paper at a deeper level, as well. The actual content of the paper is largely a restatement of esr's "ego-boo" theory in economics terms. To the basic concept of professional reputation, they add the economic value of the credential from the educational experience. This is a step in the right direction, as learning is a very important and generally underreported reason for working on open source, but still to my mind focusses too much on the "signalling" and not enough on the thirst for knowledge and understanding.
But the single greatest failing of the paper is that it doesn't recognize that work on free software is fundamentally different than work on proprietary software. It's not hard to see how outsiders can miss this, as after all the end-user fruits of free software development can be compared head-to-head against proprietary counterparts (Linux kernel against NT kernel, Gcc against MSVC, Apache against IIE or other proprietary servers, Gimp against Photoshop). However, the other "work products" of free software development are just as important, if not more so. These include the understanding of the software and the communication of this understanding to the rest of the community. It is here that Samba differs so dramatically from Microsoft's own implementations of SMB, or that wv differs from whatever wad of code Microsoft uses to parse their own formats.
You also see the differences in the grand cooperative vision shared by so many free software developers. Free software is working towards everything working with everything else (although this is of course a fantastically difficult problem, so we're not quite there yet). Proprietary software often sacrifices this goal for the sake of short-term business incentives.
The paper asks (and attempts to answer) the question, "why do people work on free software, when it's possible to get paid for working on proprietary software?" I believe it might be interesting to consider the following analogous questions:
Why do people play musical instruments (non-professionally) when it's possible to get all the music you want from your Tower Records store, at a cost much lower than the opportunity cost of the time spent?
Why do people work as scientists, when it's possible to work as an engineer in the corresponding field, often at a much higher pay?
Why do people teach, or write, when it's possible to simply practice the field?
In summary, I consider the questions raised by the paper interesting, but the framework in which they're posed has problems, and the actual analysis presented suffers from both factual errors and lack of detailed understanding of the free software process and community.
Incidentally, I was all set to post an extended version of this critique to Advogato as part of a series of articles on the economics of software (previous articles have covered software complexity and risk homeostasis), but no interest was shown.
I just wanted to send heartfelt kudos to Jon for having the meeting, and writing this story. Even if he hasn't persuaded Pinkerton to scrap the WAVE program, he has performed a valuable service by bringing it to the attention of a much wider audience than would otherwise know about it.
["The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost." -- Bennet Cerf]
I'm surprised that you are so manaical about your analog equipment, but are basically satisfied with BladeEnc. To me, BladeEnc at 128k distorts the music enough to detract from my listening enjoyment, and I can even hear the artifacts at 256k.
If you're going to be doing MP3 encoding at 128kbps, use LAME. LAME is without a doubt the best free MP3 coder in existence. The differences between LAME and BladeEnc at 128kbps are striking, and it's pretty close to Fraunhofer's quality.
I can hear distortion in 128kbps MP3's generated by LAME (and Fraunhofer, too, for that matter), but only if I listen. It's perfectly adequate for everyday listening. So I usually encode at 160kbps, at which point I cannot hear the difference. 160kbps also gets past the >16kHz cutoff of 128kbps MP3. (and here you are bitching about the loss of sound quality from the CD's 44.1kHz sampling rate!)
Based on listening to the CVS version a couple of weeks ago, I fully expect that the production version of Vorbis at 128k will be indistinguishable from CD's, perhaps with a few minor exceptions of difficult-to-compress passages.
And to address the main point of your posting, by all means get out there and push for Vorbis to be supported in all the cool places where MP3 is now. There are no compelling reasons not to, except for inertia. And the reasons to are, to me anyway, compelling. It simply sounds better, and it's totally free. If people are going to go around buying gold-plated speaker cables, you'd think being given a significantly better codec would be even more effective:)
I sent an email to Roblimo immediately after posting the interview. I have no idea what's going on inside Slashdot these days, but from the outside, it looks pretty fucked. A typical story makes it to/. days after it first breaks, whether on Advogato or one of the other free software news sites.
Incidentally, I generally check Slashdot, Lwn, and Kuro5hin at least once a day, and post links when appropriate.
ObOnTopic: I tried the CVS Vorbis encoder two weeks ago on a set of files, including some music that MP3 did a relatively poor job on, and was very impressed by the overall quality at 128kbps (64kbps/channel). I'm looking forward to the release of the new psychoacoustic model, as that promises to make Vorbis dramatically better than MP3 for comparable bitrates.
That said, a great many people either can't hear the difference or don't care. How else can you explain the fact that so many people use BladeEnc or one of the barely-modified ISO coders when LAME is so much better?
I did some listening tests with the CVS version about two weeks ago, and compared it carefully against LAME and Fraunhofer's coder, respectively the best free and proprietary MP3 coders out there.
I listened to some regular music, plus the samples at the LAME website designed to stress MP3 coders to the max.
Basically, Vorbis blew the pants off MP3, with one exception - there are occasional artifacts audible in only one channel (Vorbis, at present, simply encodes each channel separately). Since these artifacts are way off center in the stereo field, they are particularly annoying. Monty claims that these artifacts are fixed in the new psychoacoustic module, and you know what? I believe him.
Keep in mind also that today's MP3 coders have years of tuning and tweaking behind them (Fraunhofer's coder of a few years ago did not sound that great, actually pretty far behind where LAME is now).
I encourage people not to just accept information that's spoon-fed them. It only takes a few hours to set up a simple listening test. Check out the code from CVS, put on your 'phones, and put it through its paces.
Advogato carried the interview with Monty a full week ago. I sent mail to roblimo, with whom I had been in correspondence. What's happened to Slashdot's speed lately?
I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.
Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.
Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.
I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.
Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.
Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.
A more serious followup. While the tone of this comment was flip, the content was actually serious.
The basic cause of the backspace problem is a different ASCII code for the key in DEC terminals (where it's 0x7F) and others such as Sun systems (where it's 0x08). Unix is configurable (using the stty command) to deal with either, so that it didn't really matter too much.
A modern Unix-like[1] system is a blend of many different threads of development, with both Sun and DEC well represented. So, the Linux console follows the DEC convention, while the xterm's in most distributions follow Sun (Debian is the major exception here).
So, in a system with the backspace problem, you have many factors coming together:
A mixture of traditions from many different branches of Unix development
A chain of concern for backward compatibility reaching back to the days of the VT-100
Configurability to make it work most of the time
And, no from-the-ground-up reconsideration of the system, during which the backspace problem would certainly be fixed.
If that doesn't define Unix, I'm not sure what does.
[1] Yes, I know it's an "abuse of the trademark." The Open Group can stuff it.
You know it's Unix when the backspace key often performs an action other than deleting the character to the left of the cursor.
When (actually if) this problem is fixed, the system will have changed so much from Unix that it probably wouldn't be recognizable to Thompson and Kernighan.
Lots more reports at Advogato
on
GUADEC Reports
·
· Score: 3
For some more informal reports, have a look through some diary entries at Advogato, including mine.
The press release doesn't mention licenses at all. The only reasonable thing to conclude is that it probably won't be free software.
I believe it is now time for a fully free (GPL, perhaps) windowing system that fixes the major problems with X. Such a beast would:
Be based on a sophisticated imaging model with transparency and antialiasing
Have fonts that didn't suck
Be simple and small
Have hooks for adding hardware acceleration
Work with the realtime capabilities in the OS
A lot of the infrastructure that we need already exists. Libart provides the imaging model. FreeType can take care of the fonts. I've seen some early results from FreeType 2, and I have reason to believe it will be juicy. We can certainly make use of all the wisdom learned from mature systems such as X, as well as newer systems such as Berlin and Microwindows.
This idea, I think, is gathering momentum. If you're interested in contributing to the project, let me know and I can hook you up with some of the other people who are working in a similar direction.
Aficionados of silly patents will rejoice in finding this patent, kneepad and all, in the patent database, just with a slightly different number. It's US Patent 5,993,336.
Also, for those who have browser troubles on the around.com version of the story, there's a stripped down version linked from Advogato.
This is basically a problem in your browser. The ls command used by ftp servers has a policy of giving a year if and only if the file is more than x months old. I believe x is 6 for most FTP servers.
Your client, trying to be helpful, attempts to reconstruct the year by assigning a year in the last 12 months if the year is not given. This works well. Most of the time.
The analomous case is when the timezones differ so that the file looks like it's in the future to the client.
Fixing this is not hard, and I did forward it to the Mozilla team.
Moral of the story? Getting times and dates right is hard.
Well, my experience was atypical. My server was more than powerful enough, being a dual Celeron 400 with 256M, but the pipe in was a measly 128k upload DSL. This caused major problems. Even when I turned off the httpd, the bandwidth of denying incoming requests (at 1.5Mbps) was enough to saturate my uplink. The Linux network implementation isn't happy about this kind of asymmetry. I had to/etc/rc.d/init.d network restart twice.
Oh yes, and the page being served was dynamically generated from an XML database. Even so, at the peak of the slashdotting, load never went over 1. That is what happens when the web server is in C rather than some hoggish scripting language.
In wake of all the goofy megamergers lately (of which VA's purchase of Andover is one of the most notable), it's refreshing in a way to see one that makes business sense.
People are learning that PKI's are primarily not about security and public keys, but mostly about dealing with the question of who owns the name. Once you've got that figured out, making a digitally signed certificate to prove it is relatively easy.
One of the big problems that VeriSign faced is that, even though they issued the certificates, they really had no control over the ownership of the name. Now they do.
It's extremely easy to imagine a "domain gold" service that includes both the domain name and the SSL certificate.
There's another possibility which may be even more intriguing. DNS security is rolling out at a very slow pace, and generally only provides protection against passive attacks. What you need to fix this are the root certificates for the TLD's, plus have them issue certificates for the actual domain names. I asked the DNSSEC people when they thought this would happen and they rolled their eyes. VeriNic would be in a position to just do it, though.
I think the main question is whether they smile upon DNSSEC or would prefer to push the X.509-based solutions (such as SSL) that make up their business now.
Certainly all very interesting, although I am worried as much as anyone about the concentration of power it places in the hands of one company.
I read the page too, and while it definitely shows that Squid is a viable option, I didn't see it blowing the doors off the competition either. The Microbits pizza box delivered nearly the same performance at significantly less cost, and some of the higher end offerings were able to deliver considerably greater price/performance. The IBM 3500M10, for example, was able to deliver almost double the peak throughput at only a slightly greater cost.
These results are surprising to me - I would have thought that the use of commodity hardware and no-cost software would have created a compelling price advantage. What happened?
If there's something I'm missing, could someone please spell it out for me?
Bjarne mentions the poor education of C++ programmers frequently in this interview. I can't help but think, is this poor education a direct result of the complexity of the language?
I think that it's a much shorter learning curve to learn the C language fairly well than C++. I think this has helped in the Gnome project, although I'm sure there are people who feel differently.
That said, many of the historical reasons for disliking C++ are becoming obsolete. In particular, the language seems to be settling down standards-wise, and there are now decent implementation to be had, both free and non. I've only used C++ sparingly in my own work so far, but I look forward to expanding my use of the language.
Advogato did a quick move to Berkeley's xcf, thanks to the help of Manish Singh. It ought to be able to handle the load the next time it gets slashdotted. Now we just have to come up with some more cool content:)
The site is back up now, but slow. There are two problems; one expected, one not. The expected problem is that Advogato only has a 128kbit/s upload (on an ADSL). Thus, it's gotta be really slow to the outside world.
Second, the network has gone down twice. I have no idea why. The NIC is a Tulip something-or-other. In both cases,/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart brought it back up.
The Advogato server code (mod_virgule) is handling the load fairly nicely. The load average is hovering around 0.65, and memory usage is quite reasonable. This is in spite of the fact that all pages are being rendered dynamically from XML.
It would be interesting to try to host the site on a really high bandwidth line.
Slashdot Mirror
He did not, as he did not have access to a JPEG2000 encoder.
I agree - it is an improvement, just not a very large one. A reasonable question, in this day of 40G hard drives and fat-pipe DSL and cable modems, is whether we care about a 10% reduction in bandwidth for the same quality level.
In the spirit of fun, here are my predictions. Take with a grain of salt, of course.
e-commerce
The development of e-commerce will continue in full force. However, today's piddly little oracle-backed web sites will look remarkably primitive by the standards of 2010. When you place an order, the back-end will automatically negotiate with a worldwide network of fulfillment centers and choose one with the optimum combination of availability, shipping cost, and delivery time. The majority of delivery trucks on the road will be carrying out Internet-placed orders. By 2010, GPS transponders will start allowing the network to dispatch delivery trucks in real-time, based on the current location of the truck and the planned route.
This evolution, I feel, is very likely to happen. The economic incentives are there. Whoever masters it will be able to provide better service at lower cost.
This type of technology has the potential to enable a large number of small providers. However, over the next few years, there will be a strong trend towards consolidation and megamergers, to try to bring down the transaction costs.
media
The Internet will be the primary distribution channel for most people to listen to music. In addition, a significant minority will be using it for high-quality movies. In fact, the agility of the Internet will be what finally brings HDTV movies into your home. This will require a pretty big pipe. High-tech people will be eagerly awaiting widespread deployment of gigabit fiber to the home. Actual transfer rates will be more like 10Mbps, but this will be plenty adequate for downloading your favorite HDTV movie overnight.
rights management and freedom
The current intellectual property wars will rage on unabated for the next 10 years. People will slowly start to get the clue that tightening up the IP laws benefits corporations at the expense of people. Nonetheless, the corporations will continue to put up a strong fight due to their political power, PR, and money.
Ironically, overly tight enforcement of intellectual property will finally spur the deployment of technological solutions to privacy. Being able to pirate music and movies in peace will finally provide a large number of people with a good reason to be securely pseudonymous on the net. Thus, we will see the realization of the cypherpunks holy grail as discussed over the last 10 years. Freedom is a harbinger of this direction.
The majority of people will prefer to avoid the hassle of piracy and just pay out to the media corporations. However, these corporations will finally start getting the message that they're actually competing against "illegal" distribution of intellectual property, and start providing attractively priced products designed to appeal to the "swing" demographic of young, technologically savvy males.
http, html
The Web will continue to suck, although arduous progress will be made. Around 2005, a proposal will come forward that integrates consistenly rendered typographic quality text, graphics, and good internationalization, while being able to print at full graphic arts quality. This protocol will also be a decent UI for interactive content. The inner format will be nicely structured so that it can be effectively searched, spoken aloud, etc.
Of course, all the technology to do this has been around for a while. It's just that the vendor cabal making up the W3C won't be able to agree on any of it.
conclusion
I have no idea whether any of these predictions will bear out. However, I predict with great confidence that the next 10 years are not going to be boring. May we live in interesting times!
This is a bug in your browser, triggered whenever it's looking at files in an FTP directory dated in the future, a relatively common occurrence when looking at fresh files in from a different timezone.
Advogato is running a fabulous rebuttal to Meyer's rant. It's worth a read, as it contains many interesting ideas, and is written by none other than the inestimable xiphmont of Vorbis fame.
mod_virgule, the engine behind Advogato, is written as an Apache C module, a fairly unusual choice for server-side scripting. My experiences with it have been very positive, as have been the other sites that use it (Skolos, a discussion forum for sexuality issues; Jabber.org, the Jabber developer's website; and a couple of others in the works). Advogato has been slashdotted several times now, and the load meter barely moves. That's one of the really nice consequences of programming in C :)
There are a few reasons why mod_virgule was a more pleasant programming experience than your usual CGI script in C. First, Apache's pool mechanism lets you use memory without having to worry about freeing it. It's almost as convenient as using a garbage collected programming language. Second, the Apache module API contains a lot of functions for regexps, tables, lists, and so on. These are the most important features of Perl that are lacking from raw C. It's nice to be able to write code in C that has a bit of a Perl "feel".
Finally, mod_virgule uses XML extensively in the backend, using Daniel Veillard's excellent libxml for parsing and handling. The use of XML makes the code for the site a lot cleaner.
So, I suggest that you not reject C out of hand just because it has a reputation for being more difficult or time-consuming to program than your more popular interpreted scripting languages. For what I was trying to do in mod_virgule, it turned out to be an excellent choice.
Right. Actually, I liked the Postrel article, for the reasons you described. My harsh critique applies to the "Simple Economics of Open Source" paper referenced in the article. This was written as an academic paper, presumably for consumption primarily by other economists. As such, I believe they have a responsibility to get their facts right, as well as to seek deeper understanding of the real issues. So I don't think this is just nitpicking.
They also downplay the successes of the Mozilla project, at one point claiming that it's only had a dozen or so outside contributions. This will come as surprising news to anyone familiar with actual Mozilla development.
I had a lot of problems with the paper at a deeper level, as well. The actual content of the paper is largely a restatement of esr's "ego-boo" theory in economics terms. To the basic concept of professional reputation, they add the economic value of the credential from the educational experience. This is a step in the right direction, as learning is a very important and generally underreported reason for working on open source, but still to my mind focusses too much on the "signalling" and not enough on the thirst for knowledge and understanding.
But the single greatest failing of the paper is that it doesn't recognize that work on free software is fundamentally different than work on proprietary software. It's not hard to see how outsiders can miss this, as after all the end-user fruits of free software development can be compared head-to-head against proprietary counterparts (Linux kernel against NT kernel, Gcc against MSVC, Apache against IIE or other proprietary servers, Gimp against Photoshop). However, the other "work products" of free software development are just as important, if not more so. These include the understanding of the software and the communication of this understanding to the rest of the community. It is here that Samba differs so dramatically from Microsoft's own implementations of SMB, or that wv differs from whatever wad of code Microsoft uses to parse their own formats.
You also see the differences in the grand cooperative vision shared by so many free software developers. Free software is working towards everything working with everything else (although this is of course a fantastically difficult problem, so we're not quite there yet). Proprietary software often sacrifices this goal for the sake of short-term business incentives.
The paper asks (and attempts to answer) the question, "why do people work on free software, when it's possible to get paid for working on proprietary software?" I believe it might be interesting to consider the following analogous questions:
In summary, I consider the questions raised by the paper interesting, but the framework in which they're posed has problems, and the actual analysis presented suffers from both factual errors and lack of detailed understanding of the free software process and community.
Incidentally, I was all set to post an extended version of this critique to Advogato as part of a series of articles on the economics of software (previous articles have covered software complexity and risk homeostasis), but no interest was shown.
I just wanted to send heartfelt kudos to Jon for having the meeting, and writing this story. Even if he hasn't persuaded Pinkerton to scrap the WAVE program, he has performed a valuable service by bringing it to the attention of a much wider audience than would otherwise know about it.
["The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost." -- Bennet Cerf]
:)
I'm surprised that you are so manaical about your analog equipment, but are basically satisfied with BladeEnc. To me, BladeEnc at 128k distorts the music enough to detract from my listening enjoyment, and I can even hear the artifacts at 256k.
If you're going to be doing MP3 encoding at 128kbps, use LAME. LAME is without a doubt the best free MP3 coder in existence. The differences between LAME and BladeEnc at 128kbps are striking, and it's pretty close to Fraunhofer's quality.
I can hear distortion in 128kbps MP3's generated by LAME (and Fraunhofer, too, for that matter), but only if I listen. It's perfectly adequate for everyday listening. So I usually encode at 160kbps, at which point I cannot hear the difference. 160kbps also gets past the >16kHz cutoff of 128kbps MP3. (and here you are bitching about the loss of sound quality from the CD's 44.1kHz sampling rate!)
Based on listening to the CVS version a couple of weeks ago, I fully expect that the production version of Vorbis at 128k will be indistinguishable from CD's, perhaps with a few minor exceptions of difficult-to-compress passages.
And to address the main point of your posting, by all means get out there and push for Vorbis to be supported in all the cool places where MP3 is now. There are no compelling reasons not to, except for inertia. And the reasons to are, to me anyway, compelling. It simply sounds better, and it's totally free. If people are going to go around buying gold-plated speaker cables, you'd think being given a significantly better codec would be even more effective
Thanks for the props.
/. days after it first breaks, whether on Advogato or one of the other free software news sites.
I sent an email to Roblimo immediately after posting the interview. I have no idea what's going on inside Slashdot these days, but from the outside, it looks pretty fucked. A typical story makes it to
Incidentally, I generally check Slashdot, Lwn, and Kuro5hin at least once a day, and post links when appropriate.
ObOnTopic: I tried the CVS Vorbis encoder two weeks ago on a set of files, including some music that MP3 did a relatively poor job on, and was very impressed by the overall quality at 128kbps (64kbps/channel). I'm looking forward to the release of the new psychoacoustic model, as that promises to make Vorbis dramatically better than MP3 for comparable bitrates.
That said, a great many people either can't hear the difference or don't care. How else can you explain the fact that so many people use BladeEnc or one of the barely-modified ISO coders when LAME is so much better?
I did some listening tests with the CVS version about two weeks ago, and compared it carefully against LAME and Fraunhofer's coder, respectively the best free and proprietary MP3 coders out there.
I listened to some regular music, plus the samples at the LAME website designed to stress MP3 coders to the max.
Basically, Vorbis blew the pants off MP3, with one exception - there are occasional artifacts audible in only one channel (Vorbis, at present, simply encodes each channel separately). Since these artifacts are way off center in the stereo field, they are particularly annoying. Monty claims that these artifacts are fixed in the new psychoacoustic module, and you know what? I believe him.
Keep in mind also that today's MP3 coders have years of tuning and tweaking behind them (Fraunhofer's coder of a few years ago did not sound that great, actually pretty far behind where LAME is now).
I encourage people not to just accept information that's spoon-fed them. It only takes a few hours to set up a simple listening test. Check out the code from CVS, put on your 'phones, and put it through its paces.
Advogato carried the interview with Monty a full week ago. I sent mail to roblimo, with whom I had been in correspondence. What's happened to Slashdot's speed lately?
I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.
Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.
Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.
I know this is offtopic, but Slashdot readers have a right to know, and they're sure as hell not going to post it on the front page.
Maybe some of you have heard about the legal battle brewing between Andover.net (slashdot's corporate parent) and Advogato. Well, today the shit hit the fan - Andover filed an injunction to shut the site down. The full story is on PRNewswire. I'm pissed and I'm going to fight this, but I don't have the resources for a protracted legal battle.
Thanks to everybody who's sent me letters of support.
[ hot grits | hot news ]
The basic cause of the backspace problem is a different ASCII code for the key in DEC terminals (where it's 0x7F) and others such as Sun systems (where it's 0x08). Unix is configurable (using the stty command) to deal with either, so that it didn't really matter too much.
A modern Unix-like[1] system is a blend of many different threads of development, with both Sun and DEC well represented. So, the Linux console follows the DEC convention, while the xterm's in most distributions follow Sun (Debian is the major exception here).
So, in a system with the backspace problem, you have many factors coming together:
And, no from-the-ground-up reconsideration of the system, during which the backspace problem would certainly be fixed.
If that doesn't define Unix, I'm not sure what does.
[1] Yes, I know it's an "abuse of the trademark." The Open Group can stuff it.
You know it's Unix when the backspace key often performs an action other than deleting the character to the left of the cursor.
When (actually if) this problem is fixed, the system will have changed so much from Unix that it probably wouldn't be recognizable to Thompson and Kernighan.
For some more informal reports, have a look through some diary entries at Advogato, including mine.
I believe it is now time for a fully free (GPL, perhaps) windowing system that fixes the major problems with X. Such a beast would:
A lot of the infrastructure that we need already exists. Libart provides the imaging model. FreeType can take care of the fonts. I've seen some early results from FreeType 2, and I have reason to believe it will be juicy. We can certainly make use of all the wisdom learned from mature systems such as X, as well as newer systems such as Berlin and Microwindows.
This idea, I think, is gathering momentum. If you're interested in contributing to the project, let me know and I can hook you up with some of the other people who are working in a similar direction.
Aficionados of silly patents will rejoice in finding this patent, kneepad and all, in the patent database, just with a slightly different number. It's US Patent 5,993,336.
Also, for those who have browser troubles on the around.com version of the story, there's a stripped down version linked from Advogato.
This is basically a problem in your browser. The ls command used by ftp servers has a policy of giving a year if and only if the file is more than x months old. I believe x is 6 for most FTP servers.
Your client, trying to be helpful, attempts to reconstruct the year by assigning a year in the last 12 months if the year is not given. This works well. Most of the time.
The analomous case is when the timezones differ so that the file looks like it's in the future to the client.
Fixing this is not hard, and I did forward it to the Mozilla team.
Moral of the story? Getting times and dates right is hard.
Well, my experience was atypical. My server was more than powerful enough, being a dual Celeron 400 with 256M, but the pipe in was a measly 128k upload DSL. This caused major problems. Even when I turned off the httpd, the bandwidth of denying incoming requests (at 1.5Mbps) was enough to saturate my uplink. The Linux network implementation isn't happy about this kind of asymmetry. I had to /etc/rc.d/init.d network restart twice.
Oh yes, and the page being served was dynamically generated from an XML database. Even so, at the peak of the slashdotting, load never went over 1. That is what happens when the web server is in C rather than some hoggish scripting language.
In wake of all the goofy megamergers lately (of which VA's purchase of Andover is one of the most notable), it's refreshing in a way to see one that makes business sense.
People are learning that PKI's are primarily not about security and public keys, but mostly about dealing with the question of who owns the name. Once you've got that figured out, making a digitally signed certificate to prove it is relatively easy.
One of the big problems that VeriSign faced is that, even though they issued the certificates, they really had no control over the ownership of the name. Now they do.
It's extremely easy to imagine a "domain gold" service that includes both the domain name and the SSL certificate.
There's another possibility which may be even more intriguing. DNS security is rolling out at a very slow pace, and generally only provides protection against passive attacks. What you need to fix this are the root certificates for the TLD's, plus have them issue certificates for the actual domain names. I asked the DNSSEC people when they thought this would happen and they rolled their eyes. VeriNic would be in a position to just do it, though.
I think the main question is whether they smile upon DNSSEC or would prefer to push the X.509-based solutions (such as SSL) that make up their business now.
Certainly all very interesting, although I am worried as much as anyone about the concentration of power it places in the hands of one company.
I read the page too, and while it definitely shows that Squid is a viable option, I didn't see it blowing the doors off the competition either. The Microbits pizza box delivered nearly the same performance at significantly less cost, and some of the higher end offerings were able to deliver considerably greater price/performance. The IBM 3500M10, for example, was able to deliver almost double the peak throughput at only a slightly greater cost.
These results are surprising to me - I would have thought that the use of commodity hardware and no-cost software would have created a compelling price advantage. What happened?
If there's something I'm missing, could someone please spell it out for me?
Bjarne mentions the poor education of C++ programmers frequently in this interview. I can't help but think, is this poor education a direct result of the complexity of the language?
I think that it's a much shorter learning curve to learn the C language fairly well than C++. I think this has helped in the Gnome project, although I'm sure there are people who feel differently.
That said, many of the historical reasons for disliking C++ are becoming obsolete. In particular, the language seems to be settling down standards-wise, and there are now decent implementation to be had, both free and non. I've only used C++ sparingly in my own work so far, but I look forward to expanding my use of the language.
Advogato did a quick move to Berkeley's xcf, thanks to the help of Manish Singh. It ought to be able to handle the load the next time it gets slashdotted. Now we just have to come up with some more cool content :)
The site is back up now, but slow. There are two problems; one expected, one not. The expected problem is that Advogato only has a 128kbit/s upload (on an ADSL). Thus, it's gotta be really slow to the outside world.
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart brought it back up.
Second, the network has gone down twice. I have no idea why. The NIC is a Tulip something-or-other. In both cases,
The Advogato server code (mod_virgule) is handling the load fairly nicely. The load average is hovering around 0.65, and memory usage is quite reasonable. This is in spite of the fact that all pages are being rendered dynamically from XML.
It would be interesting to try to host the site on a really high bandwidth line.