"So you use a general-purpose decoder in order to play any filetype. Which works fine, except your battery life must take the shaft."
Not really. iPods have *two* general purpose CPU's on-board, and you don't think Apple use them for playback, they're just there for the hell of it? Most of the battery life reduction appears to come from the lack of specs for performing frequency scaling and such, but the loss is more on the order of 30%, not the 1000%+ you get from your comparison.
"I don't understand how only ogg could propery do gapless playback."
Wait.. is this "God" of yours threatening me? Demanding belief under pain of burning tormented undeath for all eternity? Isn't that a bit rude? Especially when all his supposed messages mentioning this look *just* like all the the other crazy rantings of misguided people under the influence of hideous memetic diseases.
Knowing a bit about what you're doing is fairly important with ports, especially when dealing with complex upgrades like Gnome; dependency tracking's a lot less anal than apt/dpkg. This is good when you've got something installed from outside ports, and works nicely when you just want to pick and choose a few things to update (say, after running portaudit or tracking an interesting update on FreshPorts/commitlogs).
Geeky FreeBSD users need a desktop too, and now we have three variants to choose from; FreeBSD, PC BSD and DesktopBSD. YMMV; just because it's aimed at desktops doesn't mean it's aimed at yours or your mother's.
Both have a long history of supporting FreeBSD, yes. As far back as 2002 (about as long as my commit logs go) I see Sponsored/Submitted by: Yahoo! and Apple, in addition to DARPA, Sophos/ActiveState, McAfee, LSI, Isilon, Dell, The Weather Channel, Advanis, Vernier Networks, even Google via SoC.
It's not as if it makes bad business sense; you use something, you need something adding to it, why not pay someone to do it now and let others use, test and support it instead of the hassle of maintaining your own private branch? The costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the alternatives.
Indoctrinating children is one of religion's specialities, after all. It's a large part of bypassing people's critical thinking skills; getting to them before they develop.
* Bitter because both the primary schools I went to were built right next to churches, which we were forced to attend; confession, communion, confirmation, etc. That's not helping others:/
Opera used to only support blocking all popups (or forcing them to the background). The far more powerful event aware blocking didn't appear until version 6 iirc.
Depends on the card. A second 7800GTX will set me back £350; £450 if I need a new motherboard too. An X2 4400+ by comparison will cost a mere £300, and will provide me with benefits outside the odd game, and won't screw up multi-monitor quite so badly;)
Don't forget the ever-deserving http://www.magnatune.com/. Mmm, FLAC (which play fine on an iPod with Rockbox, along with MusePack, Vorbis, WavPack, etc)
I have an SATA optical drive, and Starforce is indeed almost like no protection at all; it quite happily verifies mounted DVD images as legitimate physical disks. In fact it seems significantly more reliable there than with a legitimate disk in a real drive, presumably because the scary barely working hacks they use work better on an emulated drive...
Go ahead; grab a torrent of Gal Civ II. When you're ready to buy it, do so from the website, install Stardock's little management tool, and it will happily go ahead and upgrade your "pirate" install to the latest version with your legitimate activation key, no fuss.
Personally I almost bought it purely for this enlightened attitude but it's also a really good game so..:)
The current engine's something like a decade old, so it's hardly surprising. Ruby 2 is supposed to greatly improve support for Unicode, along with just about everything else.
"There's something wrong, somehow, about the notion that a "mature" framework requires the absolute bleeding edge version, such that 1.8.4 works and 1.8.2 doesn't."
Rails only hit 1.0 a few months ago, makes sense that they'll want people to run it with a Ruby release at least as recent, if only so people don't get bitten by security issues or bugs Rails exposes in earlier versions. FWIW I run Rails fine on an oldish Ruby 1.8.2 out of FreeBSD ports; I dare say Apple don't maintain their Ruby release as well.
"Is Ruby "stable"? That is, is it still under intensive development or are we looking at minor upgrades to fix bugs and such in the implementation?"
Both. 1.8 has been around for a few years and is still only on it's 4th major release. 1.9/2.0 are in heavy development and come with significant internal changes. You can be sure that by release Rails will be well tested with them:)
"1. Sound subsystem improvements (if you like to listen to songs once a while on your server , use it as a dedicated server cum audio only media center )"
Audio only? mplayer works fine on my FreeBSD workstation.
Other generally notable changes:
New dhclient with privsep imported from OpenBSD. I'm sure other OS's would appreciate ports.
Variant symlinks; again, being able to have context-sensitive symlinks isn't a feature only of interest to a few BSD users. What uses can you think of for variable interpolation in symlinks that can be set per-process, per-user or per-system?
New FreeSBIE prereleases for testing/playing, which is good to know even (or especially) if you haven't used FreeBSD before.
phkmalloc replaced with jemalloc in CURRENT, which is several hundred times faster in some cases. It should be noted this is uncovering a significant number of memory alignment and pointer truncation bugs in third party software. Even emacs and X.org have been found to have memory alignment and/or 64bit pointer truncation issues.
"we went from a LSI MegaRAID 320-1 + 4-drive SCSI RAID config to an Areca 1170 + 1GB RAM + 24-drive SATA RAID. Every aspect of performance is up by big amounts -- throughput, latency, multi-user access."
What's that, a cheap SCSI card and 4 platters is slower than an expensive SATA card with gobs of cache and 6x as many disks on $unspecified_workload? Truely shocking;)
Slashdot Mirror
Rockbox is a working solution for playing Vorbis, MusePack, FLAC, WavPack, etc on the Nano, provided you're happy using daily builds.
"So you use a general-purpose decoder in order to play any filetype. Which works fine, except your battery life must take the shaft."
Not really. iPods have *two* general purpose CPU's on-board, and you don't think Apple use them for playback, they're just there for the hell of it? Most of the battery life reduction appears to come from the lack of specs for performing frequency scaling and such, but the loss is more on the order of 30%, not the 1000%+ you get from your comparison.
"I don't understand how only ogg could propery do gapless playback."
Kindly teach yourself. k tnx.
"It'd be adding in another chip that maybe 1% of the userbase would make use of."
Rockbox seems to get by playing Ogg/MusePack/FLAC/WavPack on my Nano just fine without any extra hardware.
"The second thing I'd like to do is disable those stupid XP security warnings the poster talks about."
Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Services, set Security Center to Disabled.
For those annoying focus stealing reboot reminders, stop the Automatic Updates service from the same place when rebooting isn't desirable.
Wait.. is this "God" of yours threatening me? Demanding belief under pain of burning tormented undeath for all eternity? Isn't that a bit rude? Especially when all his supposed messages mentioning this look *just* like all the the other crazy rantings of misguided people under the influence of hideous memetic diseases.
Your God isn't worth the paper he's written on.
Knowing a bit about what you're doing is fairly important with ports, especially when dealing with complex upgrades like Gnome; dependency tracking's a lot less anal than apt/dpkg. This is good when you've got something installed from outside ports, and works nicely when you just want to pick and choose a few things to update (say, after running portaudit or tracking an interesting update on FreshPorts/commit logs).
Geeky FreeBSD users need a desktop too, and now we have three variants to choose from; FreeBSD, PC BSD and DesktopBSD. YMMV; just because it's aimed at desktops doesn't mean it's aimed at yours or your mother's.
"Does Yahoo pay for FreeBSD, does Apple?"
Both have a long history of supporting FreeBSD, yes. As far back as 2002 (about as long as my commit logs go) I see Sponsored/Submitted by: Yahoo! and Apple, in addition to DARPA, Sophos/ActiveState, McAfee, LSI, Isilon, Dell, The Weather Channel, Advanis, Vernier Networks, even Google via SoC.
It's not as if it makes bad business sense; you use something, you need something adding to it, why not pay someone to do it now and let others use, test and support it instead of the hassle of maintaining your own private branch? The costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the alternatives.
Indoctrinating children is one of religion's specialities, after all. It's a large part of bypassing people's critical thinking skills; getting to them before they develop.
:/
* Bitter because both the primary schools I went to were built right next to churches, which we were forced to attend; confession, communion, confirmation, etc. That's not helping others
"U320 means 320Mbps/8 = 20MBps"
Er, no, U320 means 320MBps, or about 2.5Gbps. 320Mbps is SCSI-2 Wide (16 bit) or SCSI-3 Narrow (8 bit), which were standard about 15 years ago.
Go get some coffee.
Runing IE7 Beta 2 Preview next to IE6.
Opera used to only support blocking all popups (or forcing them to the background). The far more powerful event aware blocking didn't appear until version 6 iirc.
"I hope they one day manage to make flash as durable as DRAM, but still retain the non-volatile nature."
To hell with flash, we want MRAM.
Depends on the card. A second 7800GTX will set me back £350; £450 if I need a new motherboard too. An X2 4400+ by comparison will cost a mere £300, and will provide me with benefits outside the odd game, and won't screw up multi-monitor quite so badly ;)
"SLI motherboards are rather more common than dual-processor motherboards"
(Almost) all S939 motherboards support dual core CPU's, so that's questionable.
s/look/are/
Don't forget the ever-deserving http://www.magnatune.com/. Mmm, FLAC (which play fine on an iPod with Rockbox, along with MusePack, Vorbis, WavPack, etc)
I have an SATA optical drive, and Starforce is indeed almost like no protection at all; it quite happily verifies mounted DVD images as legitimate physical disks. In fact it seems significantly more reliable there than with a legitimate disk in a real drive, presumably because the scary barely working hacks they use work better on an emulated drive...
Go ahead; grab a torrent of Gal Civ II. When you're ready to buy it, do so from the website, install Stardock's little management tool, and it will happily go ahead and upgrade your "pirate" install to the latest version with your legitimate activation key, no fuss.
:)
Personally I almost bought it purely for this enlightened attitude but it's also a really good game so..
The current engine's something like a decade old, so it's hardly surprising. Ruby 2 is supposed to greatly improve support for Unicode, along with just about everything else.
Dummynet would probably be a good start.
"There's something wrong, somehow, about the notion that a "mature" framework requires the absolute bleeding edge version, such that 1.8.4 works and 1.8.2 doesn't."
:)
Rails only hit 1.0 a few months ago, makes sense that they'll want people to run it with a Ruby release at least as recent, if only so people don't get bitten by security issues or bugs Rails exposes in earlier versions. FWIW I run Rails fine on an oldish Ruby 1.8.2 out of FreeBSD ports; I dare say Apple don't maintain their Ruby release as well.
"Is Ruby "stable"? That is, is it still under intensive development or are we looking at minor upgrades to fix bugs and such in the implementation?"
Both. 1.8 has been around for a few years and is still only on it's 4th major release. 1.9/2.0 are in heavy development and come with significant internal changes. You can be sure that by release Rails will be well tested with them
"Now, if someone could just tell me why my ears get tingly on the inside when I get really hungry, that'd be helpful."
That'll be the brain parasites eating your brain because your blood sugar level's too low to sustain them.
"1. Sound subsystem improvements (if you like to listen to songs once a while on your server , use it as a dedicated server cum audio only media center )"
Audio only? mplayer works fine on my FreeBSD workstation.
Other generally notable changes:
New dhclient with privsep imported from OpenBSD. I'm sure other OS's would appreciate ports.
Variant symlinks; again, being able to have context-sensitive symlinks isn't a feature only of interest to a few BSD users. What uses can you think of for variable interpolation in symlinks that can be set per-process, per-user or per-system?
New FreeSBIE prereleases for testing/playing, which is good to know even (or especially) if you haven't used FreeBSD before.
phkmalloc replaced with jemalloc in CURRENT, which is several hundred times faster in some cases. It should be noted this is uncovering a significant number of memory alignment and pointer truncation bugs in third party software. Even emacs and X.org have been found to have memory alignment and/or 64bit pointer truncation issues.
"we went from a LSI MegaRAID 320-1 + 4-drive SCSI RAID config to an Areca 1170 + 1GB RAM + 24-drive SATA RAID. Every aspect of performance is up by big amounts -- throughput, latency, multi-user access."
;)
What's that, a cheap SCSI card and 4 platters is slower than an expensive SATA card with gobs of cache and 6x as many disks on $unspecified_workload? Truely shocking