I think it's dubious to argue that a requirement I include descriptive ALT tags for images and make pages that are navigable without using image maps (not requiring pages to be without image maps, just giving an alternate form of navigation), if (and only if) I wish to do business with the government, somehow affects my ability to speak freely and openly.
If you make a product that's of no interest to any disabled person, that doesn't mean a disabled person might not be browsing your site as part of their job function. (Suppose they're a purchaser for an agency.)
People should keep in mind that HTML 4.0 requires those alt tags for just these reasons, and has several other required features which make pages more accessible to the disabled. A page that's strictly HTML 4.0 compliant (or compliant with a future successor, more than likely) is likely to pass a "disability test" without modification.
Last but not least, I think a pure "free market rah rah rah" attitude would be that any customer is free to set whatever requirements to do business with them that they want, and there's no reason that shouldn't extend to government agencies as customers just like it does to private groups. If you think it's just too much to comply with the requests of a potential customer, you're free to not do it, and they're free to go to someone who doesn't feel that way.
, they'll be on to something. A text-only installation program just isn't going to be that dramatic a hardship for most folks. If nobody can address them, though, Linux isn't going to stay on most users' desktops as a replacement for Windows.
Magnepans aren't electrostatic, they're planar magnetic, and don't require the extra power supply that electrostatic speakers do. (And they're definitely not made of styrofoam; I'm not sure what the "poly-planar" speaker Bruce talks of was.) Planar magnetic speakers work with a diaphragm suspended between two magnets; either the diaphram itself is conducive, or there are conducive strips connected to it.
As someone else pointed out, the frequency response on these flat panel speakers isn't that impressive. The satellite speakers only go down to 300 Hz, and the subwoofer only to 70 Hz, meaning that it's not going to have much better response than my (subwooferless) Roland monitor speakers. (Ugly and not magnetically shielded, but they sound great, and they were about $80 for the pair.) Also, subwoofers rely on the principle that you can't localize low-frequency sound, but "low frequency" means "under 100 Hz." A crossover frequency of 300 Hz is silly.
Quadrophonic, incidentally, isn't really the predecessor of Dolby Surround except in a spiritual sense. The quad LP formats used distinct tracks for front, side left, side right, and rear, with the idea that the speakers would be 90 degrees apart from one another. Analog home theatre sound really just uses the two standard front left and front right tracks, and mathematically encodes a limited-frequency rear 'effects' channel and center dialogue channel. (Dolby Digital makes all of the channels full frequency separate tracks, separates the rear effects channel into left rear and right rear and adds a limited-frequency separate subwoofer channel.)
MS contracted with Apple to develop the apps that are now known as MS office. Under contract, MS couldn't use the proprietary info given to them by Apple in a competing product (read OS). MS gained a great deal of knowledge about windowing environments and put that knowledge to use in their windows product. Apple was furious but MS had found a loophole in the contract and exploited it.
Apple had nothing to do with Microsoft Office. Excel and Word were Windows rewrites of Microsoft's own Multiplan and (surprise) Word, respectively.
Apple did sue Microsoft over the Windows 3.0 interface, which was the first (relatively) usable one. Nobody would mistake the Windows 1.x and 2.x UI for a Mac. Apple lost the case, essentially on the grounds that the judge didn't believe anyone would mistake the 3.x UI for a Mac, either. Once you get beyond the basic concepts of windows, icons and pointing devices, there simply wasn't much similar--for instance, Windows managed "program groups," not real directories, and file manipulation required File Manager.
Before Windows 1.0 there was a product called GEOS (IIRC). GEOS worked, Windows didn't. MS created a Smoke and Mirrors demo of Windows. It was a single application that gave the appearance of several applications running simultaneously under a Windows environment. It looked real slick during the press demo, and MS said just wait till we get all the kinks worked out and it'll be better than GEOS. They didn't even have a product. The public took the bait and waited for the product instead of buynig a working GEOS product. Microsoft took the trust of the press/public and exploited it.
This is, well, wrong. GEOS was a graphic interface which predated Windows, all right--on the Commodore 64/128. The PC version was called GeoWorks, and it was a complete rewrite, very slick and efficient, a Motif-like look (but configurable) and able to run on an XT at (for the time) blinding speed--faster than a 386 running Windows 3.1. But the fact was that there were 386s running Windows 3.1 at the time: GeoWorks wasn't released until well after Windows had taken off. The company's idea was to make something like Windows that could run on "lower end" PCs that Windows either couldn't function on or couldn't function on well.
Unfortunately, Windows had taken off by that time. GeoWorks got rave reviews and sold reasonably well for a while, but as people upgraded to faster 386s and beyond, they wanted the hundreds of Windows applications available to them, not the dozens--maybe--of GeoWorks apps.
GeoWorks mutated into "GeoWorks Ensemble," a complete baby Office-like app with GeoWorks, until it went off the market. GeoWorks, the company, then sold their PC software line to New Deal, which sold a revamped version of it (and may still). GeoWorks then brought back the GEOS name for the embedded systems market, and it's technically competing with WinCE. You do see it in some PDAs, and also in the Nokia 9000.
The quality of any digital encoding system depends on the bits of the sample, the sample frequency, and the compression degredation (i.e., is it "lossy" or not). The Nyquist algorithm states that the highest frequency you can represent digitally is half that of your sampling frequency; CDs sample at 44.1 KHz, so their highest representable frequency is about 22 KHz. The highest sampling frequency defined for MPEG audio encoding is 48 Khz, so its highest representable frequency is 24 Khz. Thus, we're talking about a 2,000 Hz difference at a frequency range above that of human hearing--recording those frequencies is theoretically important for "high fidelity" reproduction to capture high-order harmonics, but that extra blit between 44.1 KHz and 48 KHz is close to neglible--it's the difference between CD and DAT, not CD and studio master tape. And, MP3s are lossy. There will be a measurable loss in signal fidelity between an MP3 and a DAT or CD.
MP3 is the death of commercial music.... people didn't KNOW that the better form of music (metal) existed.
And this is related to MP3 in what fashion? The people who've pointed out that radio is still the main source for finding new artists are correct. You might be introduced to new bands or styles by friends, but the majority of people don't download new songs unheard any more than they buy new albums unheard. (Yes, I know there are exceptions, but a lot of us don't have T1 or greater speed at home.)
Statistically speaking "teenyboppers" do not somehow mystically graduate to metal. Older audiences tend to either stay with what they know (hence the rise of '70s stations and the increasing popularity of '80s nostalgia shows) or discover less commercial artists like Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Grey Eye Glances.
$15 or so dollars is NOT too much to pay for a CD, especially when most real artists currently only sell a few thousand copies of their work....Real artists actually have to spend time making and crafting their work. They cannot simply make money off tee-shirts and concerts....Support your artists (they have to eat), or some day all "music" will be randomly generated samples by a computer.
The amount of money the artist gets when I buy a new CD at Sensuous Sound for $11 is equal to the amount of money the artist gets when I buy it on sale at Camelot for $14, at Virgin for $16 or full list for $18. This is not a good argument. It also doesn't apply to MP3s if you accept the premise that they allow people to just buy the "one or two good songs" off an album--in that case, the royalty to the artist will be appreciably less. (And, of course, the consumer will miss other songs that might actually be just as good, and with current MP3 technology they're getting subtly but audibly inferior sound quality to CDs.)
While I'm not sure why this is showing up in Amazon, when you go that page click on the name "Bill Gates" (don't be afraid, go on and do it), and you'll see there's another listing at the real $30 list price. You'll also see listings for a paperback edition AND for a "paperback display" at Amazon's special discount price of $288. It seems reasonable to assume that this $504 price is for a hardcover display set (the cardboard racks that bookstores put up).
Either that, or this is for the special 25-user license edition.
It's interesting that someone brought up the BeOS version. I've been running BeOS R4 and Windows 95 for a while, but last weekend, after a particularly irritating session with Windows I ripped it off my PC and put Red Hat 5.1 on instead. (This has led to a whole set of entertaining experiences I won't go into--just say that while I can appreciate how far Linux has come since the last time I ran it [I never upgraded past kernel 1.2.8 in that incarnation], I can see how far it has to go to challenge even BeOS, let alone MacOS or Windows, in ease of use for non-hackers.)
I'm very interested in SDD for BeOS, but remain dubious of it for Linux. From a philosophical standpoint, adding a proprietary set of display drivers to a proprietary operating system isn't that big a deal (although I hope Be strikes a deal with Scitech to simply bundle SDD with the OS); the landscape changes when one of the operating system's main attractions is an open source tree. On a practical level, Be needs more driver support than Linux does, and licensing a hundred or so in one fell swoop from Scitech would go a long way toward silencing the folks who are critical of BeOS/x86 for having poor hardware support after being out a full eleven months.;)
Just a reminder, this "trend" was the de facto standard of development prior to the stricter licensing of *nix systems in the early-mid 80s.
There's always been a Unix community which did a lot of "open source projects" before the term was coined. Outside of that, though, I think you had two separate communities--mainframes and micros. Microcomputers were pretty much using a closed source model from the get-go. Mainframes, from what (admittedly little) I've seen, have a different culture than either of what we're now calling "open source" and "closed source." Development environments and tools are usually quite proprietary on them. Applications are either closed source and commercial, or bought with source licenses--you get the advantage of being able to screw around with the source and modify it, but it's not redistributable.
If I go with the NT solution, I must purchase the software and along with it, hire someone who can make it work. If I choose the open source solution, I pay a minimal amount (compared to the NT solution) and I don't have to hire someone who has the MCSE added to his resume.
True, but if you're a business that doesn't have programmers (or programmers who have spare time) on staff, you may still need to hire someone who can make it work and maintain it. If you're a tiny business or just one end user who isn't interested in programming, there's little value in having the source. Half the non-programmers are going to drop out before they figure out to compile the source at all. The first time one of the braver ones types "make" and the Makefile stops with an error (and that will happen sometime) the chances are he'll decide the occasional blue screen of death isn't that annoying after all.
You see this in the BeOS crowd right now (what there is of it). There are people of the hacker mentality, then some of the sufficiently strict open source mindset that they don't want to even go near "yet another proprietary OS." But an increasing number of BeOS "newcomers" will be perfectly happy if they never have to open up a bash terminal window. They don't want to know how to run gcc, they want to know when there will be a Photoshop clone and how much it'll cost. And if you gave them the source code to the GIMP and asked them to join the BeOS porting effort, they'd strangle you with your mouse cord.
Reaching those people is (at least to some) the real hurdle for open source software. I'm not convinced they are reachable, though, and that's not really a slight to them. Linux hackers are the descendants in some ways of the old micro hackers on Apple IIs and TRS-80s, where it was de rigeur that you knew how to program. It's like owning a car and immediately going out, buying the Chilton manual and learning how to do the maintenance yourself. That's a great thing, but a lot of people would rather pay to have someone else do it. They don't care how the car works; they just want to be able to drive it.
The Open Source trend is important, but I'm not convinced it's quite as profound as Mr. Perens and others seem to believe it is. There is a class of users now for whom the "openness" of the source is the primary consideration when selecting software, and this class effectively didn't exist before Linux 2.0. (Obviously the concepts were there before Linux, and Linux did have many users, including myself, in the pre-2.0 days, but it wasn't a force the "mainstream world" felt a desire to pay attention to.) But it's definitely premature to predict that it will ultimately lead to the death of "closed source" software. Software exists primarily because people have a use for it; open source software exists primarily because its users have a use for the code. But to many people, "open source" just means "free," in the "free beer" sense. This group will talk the talk--usually quite loudly and with much vitriol--but they really don't use that source. And this group is growing a lot more rapidly now that Linux is cool because it's not Microsoft. Whatever this is, a political movement ain't it.
When we try to talk a "right to open source," we're really reaching. There's no right to phone service (there wasn't even when AT&T was a government-supported monopoly), so we can't use that comparison. There are "consumers' bills of rights," but they're not rights, per se; at best they're legal protections, saying less that a consumer has a right to 'X' than saying that a producer doesn't have the right to do 'X' to a consumer. (When you pay for goods or services, the producer has a responsibility to deliver them to you, for instance.) As long as a consumer knows what he's supposed to get and he gets it, the producer has fulfilled the contract. Software companies may choose to release products as open source, and consumers may choose to use them; if consumers don't want proprietary software they have the "right" not to buy it. At best they'll have a right to know whether or not a product they're purchasing is open source. (If they're not purchasing it, and not signing anything, it may be open to question whether or not there's an enforceable contract there at all, as no financial transaction has taken place.)
It's remarkable that an article that's a personal reflection from someone who likes Linux, has been using it a while and is buying a new computer to re-install it is attracting essentially nothing but flames. What was it? That she dared to write that people in the business world have to have Microsoft Office compatibility? Even worse, she admitted she's--gasp--acclimated to Word's keystroke commands.
The horrors! The fact that she finds any value in being in sync with the majority of computer users negates anything else she might have to say, doesn't it? If it's not All Linux, All The Time, to hell with it. There's no hardship in using Linux if you're a real hacker.
Right.
Judith Lewis should be commended, not flamed, for writing a funny article that encapsulates the dilemma most users are intimately familiar with when they're trying to use a computer platform that's outside the mainstream. This kind of reaction makes me question just how serious the Linux community is about "capturing the desktop"--people who think that gvim and LaTeX together can replace Microsoft Word for the average office worker, journalist or humanities academic don't really understand what those people do. Insulting them isn't going to lead to a greater understanding of Linux on their part--it's going to lead to a dismissal of it based less on technology than on the coldness of the users. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that for every one person turned onto Linux by Slashdot there's several more turned off by the apparent attitude.
(And, just so flamers have the proper weapons loaded, I use gvim on a regular basis and prepare a quarterly newsletter in LaTeX. I am not "dissing" text editors by saying they're not word processors any more than I'm "dissing" my word processor of choice, Nota Bene, by not writing C++ in it.)
Check the W3C site--Microsoft is one of the authors of the XML format. They may not be leading the charge, but they're not being dragged "kicking and screaming" toward it at all. This doesn't necessarily mean it'll support it in a way which is easy for non-Microsoft programs to interpret, but let's be clear: Microsoft is doing this because they want to be "buzzword compliant." The actual demand for XML in the target market for Microsoft Office (primarily business offices with general secretarial needs and some basic statistical modeling in Excel) is nearly non-existent.
It should also be noted that while Office 2000 should support XML, Microsoft has suggested that XML will not be its native file format. The "problem" of people using Word as the de facto file format for exchanging documents will still be around.
State-of-the-art for 1996
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I think the Pios One is a way cool idea, but it's a way cool idea that I have serious doubts will go anywhere. The PowerPC is effectively a dead-end for future BeOS and p.OS (an AmigaDOS workalike) use.
Yes, that leaves PPC Linux, and yes, you can obviously sell boxes that are "Linux only." But the economic argument is still weak, and it's weak for the same reason that it's weak for people to make non-Macintosh BeOS PPC boxes. As elegant as the architecture may be, one of the "Ming Specials" specced out on Be's web pages is better on a price-to-performance basis -- and it'd be better for Linux, too.
By going with PPC specifically to run either of those "alternative" operating systems, your primary benefit is intangible, and that only if you believe you need to strike a blow against the evil Intel empire. Most of the best arguments for the Macintosh platform over the PC platform aren't related to speed, they're related to ease-of-use; those arguments are irrelevant when you're not using MacOS. (BeOS is almost as easy to use as MacOS, but it's almost as easy to use on PC hardware, too. If you're using Linux, ease-of-use probably isn't the argument that's floating your boat anyway.)
Productive accepts GIMP plugins; it doesn't use GIMP code. There may be legitimate questions over whether this is kosher under GPL (since GIMP plugins are standalone programs, my understanding is that it is, whether or not it's appreciated), but make sure you're asking the right question--Productive itself != GIMP. And I'll stand by my assertion that there are more 'advanced' graphics creation applications for BeOS now than there are for Linux. (By 'advanced,' I mean to exclude programs like 'Sketchpad' on BeOS and 'Xfig' on Linux. Nobody try and defend Xfig as a powerful program, either. Its ability to export TeX figures is cool, but beyond that it sucks rocks.)
Because, as shocking as this may be to some, the average artist doesn't care whether or not his graphic development workstation can also be a robust multiuser network server.
Because despite your implication to the contrary, more graphics applications have been delivered or announced in the last year for BeOS than for Linux. In addition to Unix ports like POV-Ray and netpbm, there's Gobe Productive, ArtPaint, Becasso, DTPicView, ImageElements, Anime, Boo, Natural Paint, BeREND, BackLight, and the in-development Cinema4D, Tave Mozart and a replacement for BeStudio.
See,the shocking truth is that it's possible for someone to actually--hang on to your mouse, now--want to run BeOs *for the applications!*
So why consider porting GIMP to BeOS? Because some BeOS users might find it nice to have a free, open source program out there as an alternative to some of the commercial programs.
My understanding is that Nuendo does do everything Cubase does. Since all I really know about Nuendo is what I've read, I certainly wouldn't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure it does MIDI sequencing as well. It was designed to do soundtrack syncing also.
I'm impressed. You have the worldly, seen-it-all-at-21 hipster patter right on the mark, even down to that 'sexual climax as metaphor' thing. You don't CARE about other people's experiences. Anyone worth their silicon knows how to run every OS on pure instinct, just like you do, you manly hacker god. And YOU know better than using any commercial software, ever. Only lusers use commercial software. When "Space Invaders" first hit arcades, you were screaming "Free the Source" at Taito. Hell, you were born with the Dragon Book stuffed up your ass, weren't you? You don't even need FREE software! You wrote the browser you're using. You wrote the OS! YOU WROTE IT ALL! And you'd share if only people were WORTHY! Yes, you're definitely a part of whatever culture you think Slashdot represents. Or you're a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Hard to tell these days, you know.
This is only laughable if you're still in college
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It's easy to deride this as 'socialist propaganda' when you're not likely to be affected by it. The pseudo-libertarians need to get over the idea that anytime a progressive mentions phrases like 'unequal distribution of wealth' we're secretly wishing for government thugs to come and take all the money from the rich and give it to us. The simple fact is that if your economic system is designed to move money toward the top, you DO end up with a class structure, and the division between the top and the bottom WILL get more pronounced. You don't need to be a "socialist" to see this, folks, you just need to do the math.
On this specific topic, it's easy to make fun of it if you're 20 or 21. When you're 31, it's not so funny. If you're 40, it could really be terrifying. This "ageism" phenomena has been reported pretty widely by the mainstream media, who are, on the whole, not screaming flower children. (Believing that the news divisions of General Electric, Westinghouse and Disney are markedly anti-corporate requires the aid of some pretty serious hallucinogens.) This is not something Jon Katz is just making up--and it's something that should probably concern this audience. The question shouldn't be "is he right" or "is Slashdot the right place for this," but "what can we do to change this?"
Rage 128 better than TNT in some respects
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The ATI Rage 128 outperforms the TNT in 32-bit color mode, which could be important in some of the Mac's 'media' strongholds. It also has a very good MPEG-2 decoder (the best in a 2D/3D combo chip, according to Tom's Hardware), has the RGB out necessary for flat LCD monitors and can handle DTV. Look at Tom's Hardware forum for more information about this. The TNT is better in some respects, but the Rage 128 definitely wasn't a bad choice.
Perhaps YOU went temporarily blind... or didn't read Connectix' press release, which states at the bottom that the product is not licensed.
To those comparing this to open-source projects trying to do the same thing: like most things, it's a tradeoff. Connectix' product isn't going to be free in any sense of the word "free", and it's only going to run on G3 Macs. On the other hand, a commercial company has the ability to throw programmers at a project full-time, something very few open source projects have the luxury of. CVGS is almost certainly going to be substantially better than PSEmu is now. PSEmu may eventually catch up (all open source projects do if people keep plugging at them), but that has no bearing on Mac owners.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's dubious to argue that a requirement I include descriptive ALT tags for images and make pages that are navigable without using image maps (not requiring pages to be without image maps, just giving an alternate form of navigation), if (and only if) I wish to do business with the government, somehow affects my ability to speak freely and openly.
If you make a product that's of no interest to any disabled person, that doesn't mean a disabled person might not be browsing your site as part of their job function. (Suppose they're a purchaser for an agency.)
People should keep in mind that HTML 4.0 requires those alt tags for just these reasons, and has several other required features which make pages more accessible to the disabled. A page that's strictly HTML 4.0 compliant (or compliant with a future successor, more than likely) is likely to pass a "disability test" without modification.
Last but not least, I think a pure "free market rah rah rah" attitude would be that any customer is free to set whatever requirements to do business with them that they want, and there's no reason that shouldn't extend to government agencies as customers just like it does to private groups. If you think it's just too much to comply with the requests of a potential customer, you're free to not do it, and they're free to go to someone who doesn't feel that way.
, they'll be on to something. A text-only installation program just isn't going to be that dramatic a hardship for most folks. If nobody can address them, though, Linux isn't going to stay on most users' desktops as a replacement for Windows.
Magnepans aren't electrostatic, they're planar magnetic, and don't require the extra power supply that electrostatic speakers do. (And they're definitely not made of styrofoam; I'm not sure what the "poly-planar" speaker Bruce talks of was.) Planar magnetic speakers work with a diaphragm suspended between two magnets; either the diaphram itself is conducive, or there are conducive strips connected to it.
As someone else pointed out, the frequency response on these flat panel speakers isn't that impressive. The satellite speakers only go down to 300 Hz, and the subwoofer only to 70 Hz, meaning that it's not going to have much better response than my (subwooferless) Roland monitor speakers. (Ugly and not magnetically shielded, but they sound great, and they were about $80 for the pair.) Also, subwoofers rely on the principle that you can't localize low-frequency sound, but "low frequency" means "under 100 Hz." A crossover frequency of 300 Hz is silly.
Quadrophonic, incidentally, isn't really the predecessor of Dolby Surround except in a spiritual sense. The quad LP formats used distinct tracks for front, side left, side right, and rear, with the idea that the speakers would be 90 degrees apart from one another. Analog home theatre sound really just uses the two standard front left and front right tracks, and mathematically encodes a limited-frequency rear 'effects' channel and center dialogue channel. (Dolby Digital makes all of the channels full frequency separate tracks, separates the rear effects channel into left rear and right rear and adds a limited-frequency separate subwoofer channel.)
I'm sure you'll correct me if I get one wrong.
Well, since you invited... :)
MS contracted with Apple to develop the apps that are now known as MS office. Under contract, MS couldn't use the proprietary info given to them by Apple in a competing product (read OS). MS gained a great deal of knowledge about windowing environments and put that knowledge to use in their windows product. Apple was furious but MS had found a loophole in the contract and exploited it.
Apple had nothing to do with Microsoft Office. Excel and Word were Windows rewrites of Microsoft's own Multiplan and (surprise) Word, respectively.
Apple did sue Microsoft over the Windows 3.0 interface, which was the first (relatively) usable one. Nobody would mistake the Windows 1.x and 2.x UI for a Mac. Apple lost the case, essentially on the grounds that the judge didn't believe anyone would mistake the 3.x UI for a Mac, either. Once you get beyond the basic concepts of windows, icons and pointing devices, there simply wasn't much similar--for instance, Windows managed "program groups," not real directories, and file manipulation required File Manager.
Before Windows 1.0 there was a product called GEOS (IIRC). GEOS worked, Windows didn't. MS created a Smoke and Mirrors demo of Windows. It was a single application that gave the appearance of several applications running simultaneously under a Windows environment. It looked real slick during the press demo, and MS said just wait till we get all the kinks worked out and it'll be better than GEOS. They didn't even have a product. The public took the bait and waited for the product instead of buynig a working GEOS product. Microsoft took the trust of the press/public and exploited it.
This is, well, wrong. GEOS was a graphic interface which predated Windows, all right--on the Commodore 64/128. The PC version was called GeoWorks, and it was a complete rewrite, very slick and efficient, a Motif-like look (but configurable) and able to run on an XT at (for the time) blinding speed--faster than a 386 running Windows 3.1. But the fact was that there were 386s running Windows 3.1 at the time: GeoWorks wasn't released until well after Windows had taken off. The company's idea was to make something like Windows that could run on "lower end" PCs that Windows either couldn't function on or couldn't function on well.
Unfortunately, Windows had taken off by that time. GeoWorks got rave reviews and sold reasonably well for a while, but as people upgraded to faster 386s and beyond, they wanted the hundreds of Windows applications available to them, not the dozens--maybe--of GeoWorks apps.
GeoWorks mutated into "GeoWorks Ensemble," a complete baby Office-like app with GeoWorks, until it went off the market. GeoWorks, the company, then sold their PC software line to New Deal, which sold a revamped version of it (and may still). GeoWorks then brought back the GEOS name for the embedded systems market, and it's technically competing with WinCE. You do see it in some PDAs, and also in the Nokia 9000.
The quality of any digital encoding system depends on the bits of the sample, the sample frequency, and the compression degredation (i.e., is it "lossy" or not). The Nyquist algorithm states that the highest frequency you can represent digitally is half that of your sampling frequency; CDs sample at 44.1 KHz, so their highest representable frequency is about 22 KHz. The highest sampling frequency defined for MPEG audio encoding is 48 Khz, so its highest representable frequency is 24 Khz. Thus, we're talking about a 2,000 Hz difference at a frequency range above that of human hearing--recording those frequencies is theoretically important for "high fidelity" reproduction to capture high-order harmonics, but that extra blit between 44.1 KHz and 48 KHz is close to neglible--it's the difference between CD and DAT, not CD and studio master tape. And, MP3s are lossy. There will be a measurable loss in signal fidelity between an MP3 and a DAT or CD.
MP3 is the death of commercial music.... people didn't KNOW that the better form of music (metal) existed.
And this is related to MP3 in what fashion? The people who've pointed out that radio is still the main source for finding new artists are correct. You might be introduced to new bands or styles by friends, but the majority of people don't download new songs unheard any more than they buy new albums unheard. (Yes, I know there are exceptions, but a lot of us don't have T1 or greater speed at home.)
Statistically speaking "teenyboppers" do not somehow mystically graduate to metal. Older audiences tend to either stay with what they know (hence the rise of '70s stations and the increasing popularity of '80s nostalgia shows) or discover less commercial artists like Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Grey Eye Glances.
$15 or so dollars is NOT too much to pay for a CD, especially when most real artists currently only sell a few thousand copies of their work....Real artists actually have to spend time making and crafting their work. They cannot simply make money off tee-shirts and concerts....Support your artists (they have to eat), or some day all "music" will be randomly generated samples by a computer.
The amount of money the artist gets when I buy a new CD at Sensuous Sound for $11 is equal to the amount of money the artist gets when I buy it on sale at Camelot for $14, at Virgin for $16 or full list for $18. This is not a good argument. It also doesn't apply to MP3s if you accept the premise that they allow people to just buy the "one or two good songs" off an album--in that case, the royalty to the artist will be appreciably less. (And, of course, the consumer will miss other songs that might actually be just as good, and with current MP3 technology they're getting subtly but audibly inferior sound quality to CDs.)
While I'm not sure why this is showing up in Amazon, when you go that page click on the name "Bill Gates" (don't be afraid, go on and do it), and you'll see there's another listing at the real $30 list price. You'll also see listings for a paperback edition AND for a "paperback display" at Amazon's special discount price of $288. It seems reasonable to assume that this $504 price is for a hardcover display set (the cardboard racks that bookstores put up).
Either that, or this is for the special 25-user license edition.
It's interesting that someone brought up the BeOS version. I've been running BeOS R4 and Windows 95 for a while, but last weekend, after a particularly irritating session with Windows I ripped it off my PC and put Red Hat 5.1 on instead. (This has led to a whole set of entertaining experiences I won't go into--just say that while I can appreciate how far Linux has come since the last time I ran it [I never upgraded past kernel 1.2.8 in that incarnation], I can see how far it has to go to challenge even BeOS, let alone MacOS or Windows, in ease of use for non-hackers.)
;)
I'm very interested in SDD for BeOS, but remain dubious of it for Linux. From a philosophical standpoint, adding a proprietary set of display drivers to a proprietary operating system isn't that big a deal (although I hope Be strikes a deal with Scitech to simply bundle SDD with the OS); the landscape changes when one of the operating system's main attractions is an open source tree. On a practical level, Be needs more driver support than Linux does, and licensing a hundred or so in one fell swoop from Scitech would go a long way toward silencing the folks who are critical of BeOS/x86 for having poor hardware support after being out a full eleven months.
Just a reminder, this "trend" was the de facto standard of development prior to the stricter licensing of *nix systems in the early-mid 80s.
There's always been a Unix community which did a lot of "open source projects" before the term was coined. Outside of that, though, I think you had two separate communities--mainframes and micros. Microcomputers were pretty much using a closed source model from the get-go. Mainframes, from what (admittedly little) I've seen, have a different culture than either of what we're now calling "open source" and "closed source." Development environments and tools are usually quite proprietary on them. Applications are either closed source and commercial, or bought with source licenses--you get the advantage of being able to screw around with the source and modify it, but it's not redistributable.
If I go with the NT solution, I must purchase the software and along with it, hire someone who can make it work. If I choose the open source solution, I pay a minimal amount (compared to the NT solution) and I don't have to hire someone who has the MCSE added to his resume.
True, but if you're a business that doesn't have programmers (or programmers who have spare time) on staff, you may still need to hire someone who can make it work and maintain it. If you're a tiny business or just one end user who isn't interested in programming, there's little value in having the source. Half the non-programmers are going to drop out before they figure out to compile the source at all. The first time one of the braver ones types "make" and the Makefile stops with an error (and that will happen sometime) the chances are he'll decide the occasional blue screen of death isn't that annoying after all.
You see this in the BeOS crowd right now (what there is of it). There are people of the hacker mentality, then some of the sufficiently strict open source mindset that they don't want to even go near "yet another proprietary OS." But an increasing number of BeOS "newcomers" will be perfectly happy if they never have to open up a bash terminal window. They don't want to know how to run gcc, they want to know when there will be a Photoshop clone and how much it'll cost. And if you gave them the source code to the GIMP and asked them to join the BeOS porting effort, they'd strangle you with your mouse cord.
Reaching those people is (at least to some) the real hurdle for open source software. I'm not convinced they are reachable, though, and that's not really a slight to them. Linux hackers are the descendants in some ways of the old micro hackers on Apple IIs and TRS-80s, where it was de rigeur that you knew how to program. It's like owning a car and immediately going out, buying the Chilton manual and learning how to do the maintenance yourself. That's a great thing, but a lot of people would rather pay to have someone else do it. They don't care how the car works; they just want to be able to drive it.
The Open Source trend is important, but I'm not convinced it's quite as profound as Mr. Perens and others seem to believe it is. There is a class of users now for whom the "openness" of the source is the primary consideration when selecting software, and this class effectively didn't exist before Linux 2.0. (Obviously the concepts were there before Linux, and Linux did have many users, including myself, in the pre-2.0 days, but it wasn't a force the "mainstream world" felt a desire to pay attention to.) But it's definitely premature to predict that it will ultimately lead to the death of "closed source" software. Software exists primarily because people have a use for it; open source software exists primarily because its users have a use for the code. But to many people, "open source" just means "free," in the "free beer" sense. This group will talk the talk--usually quite loudly and with much vitriol--but they really don't use that source. And this group is growing a lot more rapidly now that Linux is cool because it's not Microsoft. Whatever this is, a political movement ain't it.
When we try to talk a "right to open source," we're really reaching. There's no right to phone service (there wasn't even when AT&T was a government-supported monopoly), so we can't use that comparison. There are "consumers' bills of rights," but they're not rights, per se; at best they're legal protections, saying less that a consumer has a right to 'X' than saying that a producer doesn't have the right to do 'X' to a consumer. (When you pay for goods or services, the producer has a responsibility to deliver them to you, for instance.) As long as a consumer knows what he's supposed to get and he gets it, the producer has fulfilled the contract. Software companies may choose to release products as open source, and consumers may choose to use them; if consumers don't want proprietary software they have the "right" not to buy it. At best they'll have a right to know whether or not a product they're purchasing is open source. (If they're not purchasing it, and not signing anything, it may be open to question whether or not there's an enforceable contract there at all, as no financial transaction has taken place.)
It's remarkable that an article that's a personal reflection from someone who likes Linux, has been using it a while and is buying a new computer to re-install it is attracting essentially nothing but flames. What was it? That she dared to write that people in the business world have to have Microsoft Office compatibility? Even worse, she admitted she's--gasp--acclimated to Word's keystroke commands.
The horrors! The fact that she finds any value in being in sync with the majority of computer users negates anything else she might have to say, doesn't it? If it's not All Linux, All The Time, to hell with it. There's no hardship in using Linux if you're a real hacker.
Right.
Judith Lewis should be commended, not flamed, for writing a funny article that encapsulates the dilemma most users are intimately familiar with when they're trying to use a computer platform that's outside the mainstream. This kind of reaction makes me question just how serious the Linux community is about "capturing the desktop"--people who think that gvim and LaTeX together can replace Microsoft Word for the average office worker, journalist or humanities academic don't really understand what those people do. Insulting them isn't going to lead to a greater understanding of Linux on their part--it's going to lead to a dismissal of it based less on technology than on the coldness of the users. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that for every one person turned onto Linux by Slashdot there's several more turned off by the apparent attitude.
(And, just so flamers have the proper weapons loaded, I use gvim on a regular basis and prepare a quarterly newsletter in LaTeX. I am not "dissing" text editors by saying they're not word processors any more than I'm "dissing" my word processor of choice, Nota Bene, by not writing C++ in it.)
Check the W3C site--Microsoft is one of the authors of the XML format. They may not be leading the charge, but they're not being dragged "kicking and screaming" toward it at all. This doesn't necessarily mean it'll support it in a way which is easy for non-Microsoft programs to interpret, but let's be clear: Microsoft is doing this because they want to be "buzzword compliant." The actual demand for XML in the target market for Microsoft Office (primarily business offices with general secretarial needs and some basic statistical modeling in Excel) is nearly non-existent.
It should also be noted that while Office 2000 should support XML, Microsoft has suggested that XML will not be its native file format. The "problem" of people using Word as the de facto file format for exchanging documents will still be around.
I think the Pios One is a way cool idea, but it's a way cool idea that I have serious doubts will go anywhere. The PowerPC is effectively a dead-end for future BeOS and p.OS (an AmigaDOS workalike) use.
Yes, that leaves PPC Linux, and yes, you can obviously sell boxes that are "Linux only." But the economic argument is still weak, and it's weak for the same reason that it's weak for people to make non-Macintosh BeOS PPC boxes. As elegant as the architecture may be, one of the "Ming Specials" specced out on Be's web pages is better on a price-to-performance basis -- and it'd be better for Linux, too.
By going with PPC specifically to run either of those "alternative" operating systems, your primary benefit is intangible, and that only if you believe you need to strike a blow against the evil Intel empire. Most of the best arguments for the Macintosh platform over the PC platform aren't related to speed, they're related to ease-of-use; those arguments are irrelevant when you're not using MacOS. (BeOS is almost as easy to use as MacOS, but it's almost as easy to use on PC hardware, too. If you're using Linux, ease-of-use probably isn't the argument that's floating your boat anyway.)
Productive accepts GIMP plugins; it doesn't use GIMP code. There may be legitimate questions over whether this is kosher under GPL (since GIMP plugins are standalone programs, my understanding is that it is, whether or not it's appreciated), but make sure you're asking the right question--Productive itself != GIMP. And I'll stand by my assertion that there are more 'advanced' graphics creation applications for BeOS now than there are for Linux. (By 'advanced,' I mean to exclude programs like 'Sketchpad' on BeOS and 'Xfig' on Linux. Nobody try and defend Xfig as a powerful program, either. Its ability to export TeX figures is cool, but beyond that it sucks rocks.)
Because, as shocking as this may be to some, the average artist doesn't care whether or not his graphic development workstation can also be a robust multiuser network server.
Because despite your implication to the contrary, more graphics applications have been delivered or announced in the last year for BeOS than for Linux. In addition to Unix ports like POV-Ray and netpbm, there's Gobe Productive, ArtPaint, Becasso, DTPicView, ImageElements, Anime, Boo, Natural Paint, BeREND, BackLight, and the in-development Cinema4D, Tave Mozart and a replacement for BeStudio.
See,the shocking truth is that it's possible for someone to actually--hang on to your mouse, now--want to run BeOs *for the applications!*
So why consider porting GIMP to BeOS? Because some BeOS users might find it nice to have a free, open source program out there as an alternative to some of the commercial programs.
My understanding is that Nuendo does do everything Cubase does. Since all I really know about Nuendo is what I've read, I certainly wouldn't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure it does MIDI sequencing as well. It was designed to do soundtrack syncing also.
Steinberg's higher-end system, "Nuendo," is in the process of being ported to BeOS. It's downward-compatible with Cubase VST.
No Rebirth that I've heard of, but there are software synths--check out ObjektSynth (www.objektsynth.com), and also look for Rack747.
I'm impressed. You have the worldly, seen-it-all-at-21 hipster patter right on the mark, even down to that 'sexual climax as metaphor' thing. You don't CARE about other people's experiences. Anyone worth their silicon knows how to run every OS on pure instinct, just like you do, you manly hacker god. And YOU know better than using any commercial software, ever. Only lusers use commercial software. When "Space Invaders" first hit arcades, you were screaming "Free the Source" at Taito. Hell, you were born with the Dragon Book stuffed up your ass, weren't you? You don't even need FREE software! You wrote the browser you're using. You wrote the OS! YOU WROTE IT ALL! And you'd share if only people were WORTHY! Yes, you're definitely a part of whatever culture you think Slashdot represents. Or you're a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Hard to tell these days, you know.
It's easy to deride this as 'socialist propaganda' when you're not likely to be affected by it. The pseudo-libertarians need to get over the idea that anytime a progressive mentions phrases like 'unequal distribution of wealth' we're secretly wishing for government thugs to come and take all the money from the rich and give it to us. The simple fact is that if your economic system is designed to move money toward the top, you DO end up with a class structure, and the division between the top and the bottom WILL get more pronounced. You don't need to be a "socialist" to see this, folks, you just need to do the math.
On this specific topic, it's easy to make fun of it if you're 20 or 21. When you're 31, it's not so funny. If you're 40, it could really be terrifying. This "ageism" phenomena has been reported pretty widely by the mainstream media, who are, on the whole, not screaming flower children. (Believing that the news divisions of General Electric, Westinghouse and Disney are markedly anti-corporate requires the aid of some pretty serious hallucinogens.) This is not something Jon Katz is just making up--and it's something that should probably concern this audience. The question shouldn't be "is he right" or "is Slashdot the right place for this," but "what can we do to change this?"
The ATI Rage 128 outperforms the TNT in 32-bit color mode, which could be important in some of the Mac's 'media' strongholds. It also has a very good MPEG-2 decoder (the best in a 2D/3D combo chip, according to Tom's Hardware), has the RGB out necessary for flat LCD monitors and can handle DTV. Look at Tom's Hardware forum for more information about this. The TNT is better in some respects, but the Rage 128 definitely wasn't a bad choice.
Perhaps YOU went temporarily blind... or didn't read Connectix' press release, which states at the bottom that the product is not licensed.
To those comparing this to open-source projects trying to do the same thing: like most things, it's a tradeoff. Connectix' product isn't going to be free in any sense of the word "free", and it's only going to run on G3 Macs. On the other hand, a commercial company has the ability to throw programmers at a project full-time, something very few open source projects have the luxury of. CVGS is almost certainly going to be substantially better than PSEmu is now. PSEmu may eventually catch up (all open source projects do if people keep plugging at them), but that has no bearing on Mac owners.