1) less information / music: I've heard up to 180MB on the little ones. Still not *that* different from a MD, but a slightly larger difference than you say...
2) difficulty of recording: It sounds like it's really easy with the particular setup Rambo has. However, for people who use their PC as the everything-media station (and don't have such an MD rig;)) that's sort of beside the point. For the purposes of this discussion, in deciding between these formats it seems a safer bet that someone has a PC (and has or could cheaply buy a CD-R or CD-RW drive) than a MD recorder, esp. an integrated setup with CD and MD. Someone who has and is happy with MD, though, can continue to be happy without problem though!:)
3) That MD will not play in CD-MP3 players... ok, there's a tautology here, true, but (so far, and in the short-term future anyhow) there are a lot more drives in the world that take CDs... any "modern" computer, for a convenient definition of modern will probably have one. And there are several MP3 CD-playing car decks as well. Yes, there are some MD decks for cars, but Boy are they expensive so far! Sony pretty much ensured the format would be unappealing to a lot of people with the expensive, hard-to-find* media...
4) Expense: again, depends on what the baseline is. If someone has a computer made in the last 3 years, it probably has the oomph to make CD-Rs, CD-R drives start in the 50s of dollars right now... but the real cost is the media anyhow.
5) Bandwidth control: you can use very narrow bitdepths if you want / need to with MP3 / ogg -- I'd like to have audio books that last a long time without changing disks, don't need much fidelity for that. The choices on MD may be better than they used to be, but not nearly as rich as with the others... and while it's only tangentially related to bandwidth control, the ability to put many more than 2 channels of audio is part of the.ogg idea, while with MD it's much more limited.
timothy
*In NYC, LA or Chicago, easy to find. In small-town America, even middle-sized-town America, you're probably looking at mail order. And your friend down the block won't have a player, unless you're the two guys in town with players...
qon wrote: "The [Sony Mavica [he] just bought] also has USB connectivity, and can function as a 8cm CD-RW drive (!) -- a beautiful feature I'd love to see adopted on the Philips MP3 player."
That would be great!
In the hopes that the following companies have AI engines scanning Slashdot for cool-product ideas, I want to alert...
Samsung? -- c'mon, more Korean 'tronics are always good!
Sony? -- you already have the darn drive, now just start putting it in more devices!
Iomega? -- you're *so close* with the pocketZip, but so very far away... admit your mistake, and switch to 8cm CD-R/W instead of those idiotic things
Aiwa? break in, break in!
Pioneer? People love the DVD slot-drives. Followup. Capitalize on your reputation for decent affordable audio stuff, and all the image advertising you've already invested in!
Apple? You have smart designers, at least some of whom would like to have their names inscribed on the inside of a nice-looking miniCD MP3/ogg player! And people would like some apple peripherals!
psychalgia (mental pain?) wrote: " i bought a mess of those for a marketing campaign. The unfortuanate thing is that they dont make stickers for them yet, so i just use them for when im in a hurry and want like 5 songs, or a real small bunch of data. They work great in everything but my old 2x cd writer. The only problem here is that I wanted an MP3 player because it is skip resistant...plus now were back to size restraints due to physical media. Unless it's really cheap, I'm just not interested..."
a) what's "a mess" in number terms? Do you have a lot of these to get rid of to a willing buyer?:) I like those little disks, too bad they cost 2X (at least) what full-size ones are commonly available for.
b) re: skip resistance... well, some of the full-size CD-R MP3 players I've seen which also play conventional CDs (probably all of them) have a memory buffer with longer times for the MP3 playing part than the regular CD. Which makes sense... I doubt that skip resistance will be quite as much of an issue as you make it sound, but I'm letting myself be optimistic about it:)
if a device has flashable firmware (like some current MP3 players do, including the iomega Hip Zip which is the only one I know of to handle.ogg at the moment), why not? There have been seemingly acceptable.ogg players for quite a few months; when the playing software is better, an update could be flashed in...
Besides, it's a hypothetical. *If* it played ogg, I would try to preorder. It doesn't yet, but that's the hypothetical part!:)
What he said!;) xeno just summed up a lot of the things I like the small CDs for.
The thing I like best about the new Sony cameras (using small CD-Rs) is that they ought toencourage more people to include drives in their portable devices for them, and even better, for CD-RW. I'd like to see 3" CD-RWs at a dollar apiece -- I'd sure pay 10 bucks for 1.8GB of convenient storage in 180MB chunks!
Kudos to stu72 for pointing out one of the worst and most prevalent linguistic crimes going -- the reduction of (most) human behavior to "consumption."
I like to tell people who call me a "consumer" "No, I'm a customer. A catfish is a consumer."
Custom, customer, and customization... they have good implications about the involvement / volition of the involved parties. Consumer and consumption sound to me like "here are the corpses to feed to these beetles. By morning, they'll be white and clean."
DankNinja wrote: "MP3 at least logically represents what the file is".
Well.. only in that MP3 is the name of the specification. The name itself doesn't do anything especially logical to the data it contains;) And an.ogg file just as logically represents what the file is -- say, sound encoded in a certain format.
DN: "OggVorbis sounds like a kiddie cartoon character and is not quite a weildy are very marketable name"
Well, do what Monty suggests elsewhere, and just say "ogg." (Though I disagree with you about the sound, don't see the giant problem with "Ogg Vorbis" anyhow. Some people don't like the name Harry Belefonte probably, either. Oh well. ) Like Brian says, "there's no pleasing some people."
DN: "And like LP,CD, and DVD it is an acronym that can somewhat relate what the format is."
Well, unless they've switched again, DVD now officially stands for... Nada. It's just three letters together, one of the several pseudo-acronyms which now litter our cultural landscape. (It has stood for Digital Video Disk and the silly and awkward Digital Versatile Disk, but as I understand it, companies rebelled and it ended up just "deeveedee.") How many people know what LP stands for? How many kids under the age of 18 would know instantly what "ellpee" even means?
incredibly intuitive, springs-to-infant's-tongue "emm pee three"?!:) Or "double-u emm eh"?
I dunno, that sounds like something the kids in the old Life cereal commercial would say in refusing the tasty cereal because of the name, until the smarter (?) little one ate some first.
If you really don't want to use it because of the name, you could a) never use it b) pretend that it has a different name or b) start a competing project to bring patent-free music compression to the masses...
I just think it's pretty cool that they didn't go with some marketing-centric psuedo-scientific, Brand-Nu Pefect World name involving "cyber" or UglyMixedCaps or ending in "Pro," "Plus" or "Extreme." Remember, Ogg Vorbis, with funny / interesting literary references available to those who seek, could have been named "NRJ-CYBER/MusicProPlus Extreme II (lite)" They made the name, it's their decision:)
It's like cute penguins in Linux distros, or shucking uncomfortably hot suits in a climate that mocks them. What's the point of forgoing pleasure in one's everyday activity, even (or especially) when doing something as cool as this? What's the gain?
Nastard wrote (excerpted from above, I hope fairly:) ): "why should we expect any reasonably large government office to be swayed by this? If this were for servers, sure. The admins should have the experience to make a transition pretty smooth. But offices?...I've seen these people first hand. They aren't the most computer-literate bunch... Not to say that they couldn't navigate KDE or Gnome, but why spend the time and money?... it would cost too much to make the transition."
One day, they're going to be shifting to other software. Whatever they're using now will have a major version upgrade say, or they switch from one proprietary vendor's word processor to another...
If they're going to switch anyhow, why not break the cycle? One of the other comments in response to yours (below) points out how little even "trained" users often know about the software they use already.
Even if they need to use proprietary software in some forms, they should know that is a liability when the vendor goes under, raises price past budget allotments, discovers huge security hole, etc etc. So for those things which Open Source software *can* do, it should, as part of their obligation to spend my money well.
And what I "expect" from a government agency is different from what I think they *ought* to do. After all, they have the play money already, and every incentive to slightly *overspend* rather than (even) slightly underspend. Budgets don't grow if they're not all used, and every single government program has employees who would like it to have a larger budget.
I think the real reasons more businesses haven't yet switched to Free operating systems are really a lot more complicated than "is it easy?" although that's part of it.
a) Current applications -- check out other responses in this thread. A lot of people have businesses that are tightly tied to Microsoft Windows and even to Microsoft Office (which some apps rely on as the printing system for generating reports, say).
b) Inertia -- "this has always worked before, and I don't like change" may not be on any corporate mission statement, but that goes to show you how much those worthless pieces of dreck really mean. Mission statements --BBLLEEEAAHHHHCCCHH. But it's true (I assert) that inertia is as great a force affecting human behavior as greed or even horniness is. Change involves risk and effort, invites attention to the changer... we get used to things. I'm used to getting fish sandwiches at McDonalds -- I know there are better things to eat in the world, better uses for my food dollar, etc, but often, quick, easy, imperfect wins out. Knowing better alternatives is only enough when the perceived benefit it great enough to overcome the additional effort to obtain them... in the case of Largo FL, that effort was clearly worth it! If it's not for a particular business, then...... it's not. I tend to think that people in my employ (government) promoting my general welfar have a greater obligation if not demonstrated ability to steward my money, and thus to damn well *perceive* that additional benefit with all their heart and all their might.
c) Ineffables -- which I think mostly are really sub-reasons for b). Many people have come to believe that certain multiple-key combinations are somehow intuitive, because evidently they were born with fingers poking at odd angles or something. So if someone says "Well, this system does basically the same thing your old one did, but in a slightly different fashion..." the listener hears only "DIFFERENT, THEREFORE BAD." The vague feeling of normalcy one gets from booting up a commerical operating system with a famous name, like buying a car with a known name, is one that a lot of business buyers seem to find valuable.
since he says... "I thought that the ability to change music "on the road" would give the HipZip an advantage over other MP3 players -- I wonder what the sales figures are for the various MP3 players are?"
According to the iomega page on that device (http://www.iomega.com/hipzip/index.html), they use these disks, http://www.iomega.com/pocketzip/pocketzip_disks.ht ml, which I think are the same things that were called Clik! before.
OTOH, Minidisk has a lot of the same problems;) -- hard to find, few providers anyhow. They so seem more reliable though, from what I've heard, but I've never had enough of a compound of interest and money to get one.
MP3 rippers have improved markedly over the past few years; while I'm sure that improvement will continue, I bet Ogg encoders will keep improving as well.
Real-time / near-real-time encoding strikes me as being not-so-bad (though faster ripping would of course be nice) for the simple reason that that's the speed we listen at:) So I can encode oggs of, say, the soundtrack to The Harder They Come (http://www.cddb.com/xm/cd/reggae/b5df09f28d3b8753 f1da3e21c1a4607f.html) while I listen to it on CD, and next time around, it's done.
That is, of course, assuming one can listen and rip at the same time, which I could be off-base on... I've not been ripping any more since most of my CDs are elsewhere at the moment.
Even if not, it's something I can set up to rip overnight, so I'm not *that* worried about slower encoding, trusting partly in the increasing speed of computers:)
Unfortunately, this is hard to avoid. A lot of people email me (and the other editors) answers / reactions to various stories as if we were the ones who submitted them. (Ask Slashdots, particularly.)
Unless we've messed up the formatting for a particular story, though, reader-submitted text is always quoted and italic (except, say, for features...), and the plaintext is ours. Titles are our responsibility / fault, although many of them are the same words as the submitters'.
To be clear -- that "descending" title was my fault, and you can point anyone who complains to you about it to this comment;)
I did offer $20 on the computer in the "dept" line, but mine would be a straight bet, not 2-to-1. And that's not $20 for all takers, or I would be risking too much of my future earnings:)
Dongles are awful. Any card with dongles doesn't even cross my list. I do own one card with a dongle, but it (seriously) was found in a trashcan in Brooklyn, and I keep it as much as a momento / trophy as for its intended purpose. (It does work though, even if it's only a 10Mbps card.)
Both D-Link and Linksys make dongle-free ethernet / modem combos that take up only the top one of two stacked PCMCIA slots -- this is the other reason that I'm keeping the scavenged cheapo one, because it fits into the bottom slot, so a laptop can be used as relay point for connection sharing that way, even with one of them being a dongle-free protuberance model. No, I've never done it, but it sounds vaguely MacGyverlike.
I like the Linksys one better -- the D-Link *has* worked with Linus (Mandrake 7.1, 7.2), but sometimes seemed to stop working randomly. The Linksys' ethernet port works well.
Strangely, I have the same priorities, different outcome.
The best laptop keyboard I have ever used (and it's something I check on every laptop I can, short of grabbing strangers' machines and randomly poking out familiar lyrics) is an IBM, on the 600E ThinkPad. Other IBMs I've used (from earliest Thinkpads to the current ones... never touched one of those CE-running Z50s though) have been similarly good.
I am considering buying a 600E for that very reason -- so I can type more comfortably than I can on my work machine, an HP Omnibook which is otherwise not bad. (The trackpoint stopped working, so I'm down to the %$#@ trackpad -- but it's otherwise survived my klutziness pretty well)
I guess the point is -- find what's comfortable, but it might not be what's comfortable to anyone else in the world:)
Think of a big wooden stamp with all zeros written across it, each zero wet with red ink, slowly arcing toward a big piece of ricepaper, propelled by a large, unseen hand, ready to impress those Ohs in a clean straight line across the paper...
Descending! Descending! I guess not everyone pictures that exactly the same way;)
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Rapidly *increasing* seemed wrong when about to hit so many zeros...
An X-terminal is for (*nearly*) everything a user would want to do -- not access to accelerated video, say -- equivalent to sitting in front of the machine.
I wonder how close Win XP's remote capabilities are to this. Of course, if you'd finished the sentence you'd snipped, the answer would be a lot different too;)
Good luck hooking up with Sklyarov. If I were in San Francisco with a Russian person, I'd like to take him or her to The Stinking Rose (a place I've eaten near but not at), but the choices of eating venue are so amazing that's only one good choice out of thousands...
a) wow, a G4 can rip 200 CDs in 12 hours? That's pretty impressive!:) How long do Ogg rips take on the same machine by way of comparison?
b) What is Audion? Is that a software player on your Mac, or is that a hardware player?
If it's software, then if any of your other favorite players have plug-in systems, I bet they'll soon be playing Ogg as well as MP3... My dad has a windows / Intel (of course) machine on a cable modem, when I was down visiting there, I found an Ogg-ripping program (name I forget)found it easy enough to set up and rip with. Since that's not something I've done with MP3s on that or any other machine, I can't really compare the speed, but I'll admit it was pretty slow. (Maybe 40-50 seconds per minute of audio?)
No matter whether they call it "Zip-Mini," "PocketZip," "Clik!," "Clikka-clikka-clikka-whirrrzzzghbbbb" or anything else, those little disks are a) hard to come by except in large urban areas b) have the trustworthy heritage of lasting storage we've come to expect from Iomega(r) Zip(tm) brand storage. That is to say, little to none;)
If iomega would offer a CD-R/CD-RW based hardware player that played ogg for under $175 (I'm fudging, I wanted to say $150), I'd buy it. Even if it didn't have upgradeable firmware, or the addition of a SM or CF slot as well, I'd buy it. With those things, I'd be willing to pay more;)
Iomega, does some young buck in your hardware engineering, or Imagineering or whatever department, read these words?! Please, hand that man a whiteboard and a budget!
I thought the name was pretty bad for a while, too. However, nearly any word can sound good or bad depending on conditioning, and I must have been conditioning myself pretty well, because it no longer sounds bad or even all that strange in my own head. Funny, yes, but the good kind of funny, not the relationship-is-about-to-end funny.
"MP3" is just three syllables -- "emm pee three" -- that wouldn't mean anything if they didn't also mean "More Phree 3ntertainment";)
"ogg" sounds funny at first, Yes, but not more or less meaningful than "emm pee three" unless you believe that most MP3 users are just using it as an abbreviation for "Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer three." I secretly do not believe that most users know that it stands for anything. And why should they? Unless they've reverted to "Digital Versatile Disc," even DVD (another otherwise meaningless term) has officially dropped its meaning, to just be 3 cool letters.
Maybe we should say "Oh Gee Gee" instead of "ahgg.";) That might win the day!
Look at the Etherboot project: http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/
Even a low-end Pentium makes a fine X-terminal. With Linux, each user can have his own pretty desktop.
You might also want to see the story that ran on dot.kde.org about the city of Largo, FL converting to a system of clients running X+KDE, all served from a hefty machine in the background: http://dot.kde.org/995949998/
Unless Windows now allows similar remote operation, serving many thin clients from a single copy of no-usage-restrictions server (dunno, maybe it does and I am just unaware of it), it's perfectly possible to run Linux on the machines you say would run like crap.
I know -- that's not what you said, at least not exactly:) That would be running it, not "installing." But if the argument is about "Monopoly money" and what OS runs how well on what hardware, that has to be said...
my programming skills are of the "not escaping paper bag" variety, though I'm trying to improve them. So I've not contributed any code (worthwhile or not) to any open-source projects, though I'd like to one day.
I file bug reports though (and seen a lot get fixed -- yay!), have helped in small ways with documentation, etc -- little things that I hope will make certain projects seem more attractive and accessable. Most open source projects are still badly documented and frustrating, even more so than the badly-documented and frustrating proprietary stuff. (Most software is bad, most hardware is bad, computers are bad bad bad!)
The point to me about code being open is not that *everyone* has to fix or modify it -- no one would expect that! It's that anyone with the time and inclination can do so, for fun, or to sell (under GPL, BSD, or a lot of other licenses), or for particular in-house applications.
Lots of people can rally for open source for the advantages it means they derive for it even if they're not contributing to it. For instance, the lack of restrictions on use -- I advocate Linux for public schools, which tend to do a poor job stewarding tax money, and with upcoming Windows subscription models, will probably do even worse.
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To Rambo's (valid) points:
...
;)) that's sort of beside the point. For the purposes of this discussion, in deciding between these formats it seems a safer bet that someone has a PC (and has or could cheaply buy a CD-R or CD-RW drive) than a MD recorder, esp. an integrated setup with CD and MD. Someone who has and is happy with MD, though, can continue to be happy without problem though! :)
... ok, there's a tautology here, true, but (so far, and in the short-term future anyhow) there are a lot more drives in the world that take CDs ... any "modern" computer, for a convenient definition of modern will probably have one. And there are several MP3 CD-playing car decks as well. Yes, there are some MD decks for cars, but Boy are they expensive so far! Sony pretty much ensured the format would be unappealing to a lot of people with the expensive, hard-to-find* media ...
... but the real cost is the media anyhow.
... and while it's only tangentially related to bandwidth control, the ability to put many more than 2 channels of audio is part of the .ogg idea, while with MD it's much more limited.
...
1) less information / music: I've heard up to 180MB on the little ones. Still not *that* different from a MD, but a slightly larger difference than you say
2) difficulty of recording: It sounds like it's really easy with the particular setup Rambo has. However, for people who use their PC as the everything-media station (and don't have such an MD rig
3) That MD will not play in CD-MP3 players
4) Expense: again, depends on what the baseline is. If someone has a computer made in the last 3 years, it probably has the oomph to make CD-Rs, CD-R drives start in the 50s of dollars right now
5) Bandwidth control: you can use very narrow bitdepths if you want / need to with MP3 / ogg -- I'd like to have audio books that last a long time without changing disks, don't need much fidelity for that. The choices on MD may be better than they used to be, but not nearly as rich as with the others
timothy
*In NYC, LA or Chicago, easy to find. In small-town America, even middle-sized-town America, you're probably looking at mail order. And your friend down the block won't have a player, unless you're the two guys in town with players
qon wrote: "The [Sony Mavica [he] just bought] also has USB connectivity, and can function as a 8cm CD-RW drive (!) -- a beautiful feature I'd love to see adopted on the Philips MP3 player."
...
... admit your mistake, and switch to 8cm CD-R/W instead of those idiotic things
That would be great!
In the hopes that the following companies have AI engines scanning Slashdot for cool-product ideas, I want to alert
Samsung? -- c'mon, more Korean 'tronics are always good!
Sony? -- you already have the darn drive, now just start putting it in more devices!
Iomega? -- you're *so close* with the pocketZip, but so very far away
Aiwa? break in, break in!
Pioneer? People love the DVD slot-drives. Followup. Capitalize on your reputation for decent affordable audio stuff, and all the image advertising you've already invested in!
Apple? You have smart designers, at least some of whom would like to have their names inscribed on the inside of a nice-looking miniCD MP3/ogg player! And people would like some apple peripherals!
Unknown brands? Break in, please!
timothy
psychalgia (mental pain?) wrote: " i bought a mess of those for a marketing campaign. The unfortuanate thing is that they dont make stickers for them yet, so i just use them for when im in a hurry and want like 5 songs, or a real small bunch of data. They work great in everything but my old 2x cd writer. The only problem here is that I wanted an MP3 player because it is skip resistant...plus now were back to size restraints due to physical media. Unless it's really cheap, I'm just not interested ..."
:) I like those little disks, too bad they cost 2X (at least) what full-size ones are commonly available for.
... well, some of the full-size CD-R MP3 players I've seen which also play conventional CDs (probably all of them) have a memory buffer with longer times for the MP3 playing part than the regular CD. Which makes sense ... I doubt that skip resistance will be quite as much of an issue as you make it sound, but I'm letting myself be optimistic about it :)
a) what's "a mess" in number terms? Do you have a lot of these to get rid of to a willing buyer?
b) re: skip resistance
timothy
"If I only had a brain ..."
.ogg, this would be fine with me :)
Actually, since I really don't have MP3s, and I have been ripping a few of my favorite disks to
timothy
if a device has flashable firmware (like some current MP3 players do, including the iomega Hip Zip which is the only one I know of to handle .ogg at the moment), why not? There have been seemingly acceptable .ogg players for quite a few months; when the playing software is better, an update could be flashed in ...
:)
Besides, it's a hypothetical. *If* it played ogg, I would try to preorder. It doesn't yet, but that's the hypothetical part!
timothy
What he said! ;) xeno just summed up a lot of the things I like the small CDs for.
The thing I like best about the new Sony cameras (using small CD-Rs) is that they ought toencourage more people to include drives in their portable devices for them, and even better, for CD-RW. I'd like to see 3" CD-RWs at a dollar apiece -- I'd sure pay 10 bucks for 1.8GB of convenient storage in 180MB chunks!
timothy
Kudos to stu72 for pointing out one of the worst and most prevalent linguistic crimes going -- the reduction of (most) human behavior to "consumption."
... they have good implications about the involvement / volition of the involved parties. Consumer and consumption sound to me like "here are the corpses to feed to these beetles. By morning, they'll be white and clean."
I like to tell people who call me a "consumer" "No, I'm a customer. A catfish is a consumer."
Custom, customer, and customization
Glad I'm not the only one annoyed by that word.
timothy
DankNinja wrote: "MP3 at least logically represents what the file is".
.. only in that MP3 is the name of the specification. The name itself doesn't do anything especially logical to the data it contains ;) And an .ogg file just as logically represents what the file is -- say, sound encoded in a certain format.
... Nada. It's just three letters together, one of the several pseudo-acronyms which now litter our cultural landscape. (It has stood for Digital Video Disk and the silly and awkward Digital Versatile Disk, but as I understand it, companies rebelled and it ended up just "deeveedee.") How many people know what LP stands for? How many kids under the age of 18 would know instantly what "ellpee" even means?
Well
DN: "OggVorbis sounds like a kiddie cartoon character and is not quite a weildy are very marketable name"
Well, do what Monty suggests elsewhere, and just say "ogg." (Though I disagree with you about the sound, don't see the giant problem with "Ogg Vorbis" anyhow. Some people don't like the name Harry Belefonte probably, either. Oh well. ) Like Brian says, "there's no pleasing some people."
DN: "And like LP,CD, and DVD it is an acronym that can somewhat relate what the format is."
Well, unless they've switched again, DVD now officially stands for
timothy
incredibly intuitive, springs-to-infant's-tongue "emm pee three"?! :) Or "double-u emm eh"?
...
:)
I dunno, that sounds like something the kids in the old Life cereal commercial would say in refusing the tasty cereal because of the name, until the smarter (?) little one ate some first.
If you really don't want to use it because of the name, you could a) never use it b) pretend that it has a different name or b) start a competing project to bring patent-free music compression to the masses
I just think it's pretty cool that they didn't go with some marketing-centric psuedo-scientific, Brand-Nu Pefect World name involving "cyber" or UglyMixedCaps or ending in "Pro," "Plus" or "Extreme." Remember, Ogg Vorbis, with funny / interesting literary references available to those who seek, could have been named "NRJ-CYBER/MusicProPlus Extreme II (lite)" They made the name, it's their decision
It's like cute penguins in Linux distros, or shucking uncomfortably hot suits in a climate that mocks them. What's the point of forgoing pleasure in one's everyday activity, even (or especially) when doing something as cool as this? What's the gain?
timothy
Nastard wrote (excerpted from above, I hope fairly :) ): "why should we expect any reasonably large government office to be swayed by this? If this were for servers, sure. The admins should have the experience to make a transition pretty smooth. But offices? ...I've seen these people first hand. They aren't the most computer-literate bunch ... Not to say that they couldn't navigate KDE or Gnome, but why spend the time and money? ... it would cost too much to make the transition."
...
One day, they're going to be shifting to other software. Whatever they're using now will have a major version upgrade say, or they switch from one proprietary vendor's word processor to another
If they're going to switch anyhow, why not break the cycle? One of the other comments in response to yours (below) points out how little even "trained" users often know about the software they use already.
Even if they need to use proprietary software in some forms, they should know that is a liability when the vendor goes under, raises price past budget allotments, discovers huge security hole, etc etc. So for those things which Open Source software *can* do, it should, as part of their obligation to spend my money well.
And what I "expect" from a government agency is different from what I think they *ought* to do. After all, they have the play money already, and every incentive to slightly *overspend* rather than (even) slightly underspend. Budgets don't grow if they're not all used, and every single government program has employees who would like it to have a larger budget.
timothy
I think the real reasons more businesses haven't yet switched to Free operating systems are really a lot more complicated than "is it easy?" although that's part of it.
... we get used to things. I'm used to getting fish sandwiches at McDonalds -- I know there are better things to eat in the world, better uses for my food dollar, etc, but often, quick, easy, imperfect wins out. Knowing better alternatives is only enough when the perceived benefit it great enough to overcome the additional effort to obtain them ... in the case of Largo FL, that effort was clearly worth it! If it's not for a particular business, then ... ... it's not. I tend to think that people in my employ (government) promoting my general welfar have a greater obligation if not demonstrated ability to steward my money, and thus to damn well *perceive* that additional benefit with all their heart and all their might.
..." the listener hears only "DIFFERENT, THEREFORE BAD." The vague feeling of normalcy one gets from booting up a commerical operating system with a famous name, like buying a car with a known name, is one that a lot of business buyers seem to find valuable.
a) Current applications -- check out other responses in this thread. A lot of people have businesses that are tightly tied to Microsoft Windows and even to Microsoft Office (which some apps rely on as the printing system for generating reports, say).
b) Inertia -- "this has always worked before, and I don't like change" may not be on any corporate mission statement, but that goes to show you how much those worthless pieces of dreck really mean. Mission statements --BBLLEEEAAHHHHCCCHH. But it's true (I assert) that inertia is as great a force affecting human behavior as greed or even horniness is. Change involves risk and effort, invites attention to the changer
c) Ineffables -- which I think mostly are really sub-reasons for b). Many people have come to believe that certain multiple-key combinations are somehow intuitive, because evidently they were born with fingers poking at odd angles or something. So if someone says "Well, this system does basically the same thing your old one did, but in a slightly different fashion
Rationality is complicated.
timothy
since he says ... "I thought that the ability to change music "on the road" would give the HipZip an advantage over other MP3 players -- I wonder what the sales figures are for the various MP3 players are?"
t ml, which I think are the same things that were called Clik! before.
;) -- hard to find, few providers anyhow. They so seem more reliable though, from what I've heard, but I've never had enough of a compound of interest and money to get one.
According to the iomega page on that device (http://www.iomega.com/hipzip/index.html), they use these disks, http://www.iomega.com/pocketzip/pocketzip_disks.h
OTOH, Minidisk has a lot of the same problems
timothy
MP3 rippers have improved markedly over the past few years; while I'm sure that improvement will continue, I bet Ogg encoders will keep improving as well.
:) So I can encode oggs of, say, the soundtrack to The Harder They Come (http://www.cddb.com/xm/cd/reggae/b5df09f28d3b8753 f1da3e21c1a4607f.html) while I listen to it on CD, and next time around, it's done.
... I've not been ripping any more since most of my CDs are elsewhere at the moment.
:)
Real-time / near-real-time encoding strikes me as being not-so-bad (though faster ripping would of course be nice) for the simple reason that that's the speed we listen at
That is, of course, assuming one can listen and rip at the same time, which I could be off-base on
Even if not, it's something I can set up to rip overnight, so I'm not *that* worried about slower encoding, trusting partly in the increasing speed of computers
timothy
Unfortunately, this is hard to avoid. A lot of people email me (and the other editors) answers / reactions to various stories as if we were the ones who submitted them. (Ask Slashdots, particularly.)
...), and the plaintext is ours. Titles are our responsibility / fault, although many of them are the same words as the submitters'.
;)
Unless we've messed up the formatting for a particular story, though, reader-submitted text is always quoted and italic (except, say, for features
To be clear -- that "descending" title was my fault, and you can point anyone who complains to you about it to this comment
timothy
dev null ziggy offered two-to-one, not me :)
:)
I did offer $20 on the computer in the "dept" line, but mine would be a straight bet, not 2-to-1. And that's not $20 for all takers, or I would be risking too much of my future earnings
timothy
Dongles are awful. Any card with dongles doesn't even cross my list. I do own one card with a dongle, but it (seriously) was found in a trashcan in Brooklyn, and I keep it as much as a momento / trophy as for its intended purpose. (It does work though, even if it's only a 10Mbps card.)
Both D-Link and Linksys make dongle-free ethernet / modem combos that take up only the top one of two stacked PCMCIA slots -- this is the other reason that I'm keeping the scavenged cheapo one, because it fits into the bottom slot, so a laptop can be used as relay point for connection sharing that way, even with one of them being a dongle-free protuberance model. No, I've never done it, but it sounds vaguely MacGyverlike.
I like the Linksys one better -- the D-Link *has* worked with Linus (Mandrake 7.1, 7.2), but sometimes seemed to stop working randomly. The Linksys' ethernet port works well.
timothy
Strangely, I have the same priorities, different outcome.
... never touched one of those CE-running Z50s though) have been similarly good.
:)
The best laptop keyboard I have ever used (and it's something I check on every laptop I can, short of grabbing strangers' machines and randomly poking out familiar lyrics) is an IBM, on the 600E ThinkPad. Other IBMs I've used (from earliest Thinkpads to the current ones
I am considering buying a 600E for that very reason -- so I can type more comfortably than I can on my work machine, an HP Omnibook which is otherwise not bad. (The trackpoint stopped working, so I'm down to the %$#@ trackpad -- but it's otherwise survived my klutziness pretty well)
I guess the point is -- find what's comfortable, but it might not be what's comfortable to anyone else in the world
timothy
Think of a big wooden stamp with all zeros written across it, each zero wet with red ink, slowly arcing toward a big piece of ricepaper, propelled by a large, unseen hand, ready to impress those Ohs in a clean straight line across the paper ...
;)
...
Descending! Descending! I guess not everyone pictures that exactly the same way
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Rapidly *increasing* seemed wrong when about to hit so many zeros
cheers,
timothy
p.s. Happy teaching / new home.
An X-terminal is for (*nearly*) everything a user would want to do -- not access to accelerated video, say -- equivalent to sitting in front of the machine.
;)
I wonder how close Win XP's remote capabilities are to this. Of course, if you'd finished the sentence you'd snipped, the answer would be a lot different too
timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/06/048208
...
:)
Good luck hooking up with Sklyarov. If I were in San Francisco with a Russian person, I'd like to take him or her to The Stinking Rose (a place I've eaten near but not at), but the choices of eating venue are so amazing that's only one good choice out of thousands
timothy
a) wow, a G4 can rip 200 CDs in 12 hours? That's pretty impressive! :) How long do Ogg rips take on the same machine by way of comparison?
... My dad has a windows / Intel (of course) machine on a cable modem, when I was down visiting there, I found an Ogg-ripping program (name I forget)found it easy enough to set up and rip with. Since that's not something I've done with MP3s on that or any other machine, I can't really compare the speed, but I'll admit it was pretty slow. (Maybe 40-50 seconds per minute of audio?)
b) What is Audion? Is that a software player on your Mac, or is that a hardware player?
If it's software, then if any of your other favorite players have plug-in systems, I bet they'll soon be playing Ogg as well as MP3
timothy
No matter whether they call it "Zip-Mini," "PocketZip," "Clik!," "Clikka-clikka-clikka-whirrrzzzghbbbb" or anything else, those little disks are a) hard to come by except in large urban areas b) have the trustworthy heritage of lasting storage we've come to expect from Iomega(r) Zip(tm) brand storage. That is to say, little to none ;)
;)
If iomega would offer a CD-R/CD-RW based hardware player that played ogg for under $175 (I'm fudging, I wanted to say $150), I'd buy it. Even if it didn't have upgradeable firmware, or the addition of a SM or CF slot as well, I'd buy it. With those things, I'd be willing to pay more
Iomega, does some young buck in your hardware engineering, or Imagineering or whatever department, read these words?! Please, hand that man a whiteboard and a budget!
timothy
I thought the name was pretty bad for a while, too. However, nearly any word can sound good or bad depending on conditioning, and I must have been conditioning myself pretty well, because it no longer sounds bad or even all that strange in my own head. Funny, yes, but the good kind of funny, not the relationship-is-about-to-end funny.
;)
;) That might win the day!
"MP3" is just three syllables -- "emm pee three" -- that wouldn't mean anything if they didn't also mean "More Phree 3ntertainment"
"ogg" sounds funny at first, Yes, but not more or less meaningful than "emm pee three" unless you believe that most MP3 users are just using it as an abbreviation for "Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer three." I secretly do not believe that most users know that it stands for anything. And why should they? Unless they've reverted to "Digital Versatile Disc," even DVD (another otherwise meaningless term) has officially dropped its meaning, to just be 3 cool letters.
Maybe we should say "Oh Gee Gee" instead of "ahgg."
timothy
Look at the Etherboot project: http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/
:) That would be running it, not "installing." But if the argument is about "Monopoly money" and what OS runs how well on what hardware, that has to be said ...
Even a low-end Pentium makes a fine X-terminal. With Linux, each user can have his own pretty desktop.
You might also want to see the story that ran on dot.kde.org about the city of Largo, FL converting to a system of clients running X+KDE, all served from a hefty machine in the background: http://dot.kde.org/995949998/
Unless Windows now allows similar remote operation, serving many thin clients from a single copy of no-usage-restrictions server (dunno, maybe it does and I am just unaware of it), it's perfectly possible to run Linux on the machines you say would run like crap.
I know -- that's not what you said, at least not exactly
timothy
my programming skills are of the "not escaping paper bag" variety, though I'm trying to improve them. So I've not contributed any code (worthwhile or not) to any open-source projects, though I'd like to one day.
...
I file bug reports though (and seen a lot get fixed -- yay!), have helped in small ways with documentation, etc -- little things that I hope will make certain projects seem more attractive and accessable. Most open source projects are still badly documented and frustrating, even more so than the badly-documented and frustrating proprietary stuff. (Most software is bad, most hardware is bad, computers are bad bad bad!)
The point to me about code being open is not that *everyone* has to fix or modify it -- no one would expect that! It's that anyone with the time and inclination can do so, for fun, or to sell (under GPL, BSD, or a lot of other licenses), or for particular in-house applications.
Lots of people can rally for open source for the advantages it means they derive for it even if they're not contributing to it. For instance, the lack of restrictions on use -- I advocate Linux for public schools, which tend to do a poor job stewarding tax money, and with upcoming Windows subscription models, will probably do even worse.
Eh, before I blather more
End.
timothy