Why do you use LAME when Apple's AAC recently beat it out in a blind test?
I use 160 Kbps AACs on the iPods. I use LAME to generate -alt-preset standard MP3s for listening on a networked TiVo, which (grrr) doesn't support AAC yet. It's annoying, the TiVo folks keep saying that they're working on AAC but never give a target date.
Success provides feedom to make other choices
on
60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 1
You're funny, to be making so many assumptions on so little information. And sad, too, to be so jealously fixated on wealth.
Working at building my company for 7 years, culminating with Red Hat eventually buying it, allows me to take joy in flight, travel, technical diving, music, friends, and family. If you can not understand the aesthetic and profound qualities of those experiences and really think that they are only meaningful for status, I'd suggest that it is not I who lack dimension.
Professionally, I'm not working in the technology field any more - I'm working to provide care for the elderly and dying for a salary that's under the poverty line. Financial success has allowed me to make that choice without sacrificing my own quality of life. Sometime in the next couple of years I'll probably return to technology in one way or another, because that's my natural aptitude and I usually enjoy it.
But hey, that's only one dimension of my life.
And, to help improve your information to noise ratio, a 1969 Piper Cherokee 180D is basically the VW microbus of the air - if I were chasing status, I'd have dumped all of my money into a new Beechcraft, a microjet, or something else equally silly. I just love to fly.
Well, as I mentioned, iTunes doesn't support it for playback and my infrastructure is all Mac-based - I want to have both support from Apple and the open source community, I want it all. I know, I and my employees were heretics after being acquired by Red Hat because we were interested in all Unixes, just like the folks in the Apache group were.
On the plus side, the ALE stuff is supposedly identical to an upcoming MPEG standard encoding, so hopefully open source tools will appear for it.
The iPod dual boot stuff sounds really interesting though... can you give me some URLs? (SingTFW gives me Windows/Linux dual booting pages that mention iPods). I presume by dual boot, you mean that the iPod can switch back and forth between Linux and its original OS? Maybe now I can finally get Tetris on my iPod!
With that amount of music why don't you just put a computer in your plane? Won't have to worry about harddrive space then.
Funny you should ask...
That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.
On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.
Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.
On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.
Well, there's always the control tower to listen to, if you can be bothered...
Well, talking to ATC covers about 5 minutes out of a 10 hour trip (a Cherokee such as mine averages in the 100-150 mph ground speed range, depending upon the winds and the altitude)... add another 15 minutes if you include talking to approach and departure control and getting flight following service.
But I'm answering your Troll to pass on this bit of info, in case anybody out there finds it interesting:
most decent audio jacks on an airplane cockpit are designed to cut the music out when a transmission is received through the aviation radios or the intercom.
Well, the 1500 CDs were collected over 19 years (my first CD was Boston's Boston in 1985. That's less than 2 a week, and I rarely spend more than $10/CD. In high school, I would skip lunch and spend the lunch money on music.
So yeah, on average I spend less than $20/week on CDs.
Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car.
Well, with all due respect you don't have a very pricy car then - you'll probably spend more on gas this year. It takes about 900 GB, which costs about $1000, or about $.66 per CD. Worth it, I think, for being able to be totally random access in bulk.
I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving.
Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.
It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.
Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.
My music collection is about 1500 CDs... I ripped them to AIFFs in iTunes and compress to other formats as necessary, as codecs (esp. Lame and Quicktime) improve (I use iTunes-Lame for MP3 compression). This translates to about 160 GB of 160 Kbps AACs. So this is big news for me - I'll be able to fit everything on 3 iPods instead of 4.
I'll be really psyched when 80 GBs are available, and then (dream dream) it'll take a 160 GB iPod to make me really, really happy.
This might not seem like a big deal, but when I'm travelling, especially when I'm flying my Cherokee 180-D across country, I won't be able to anticipate what I'll really want to listen to - and I invariably want to hear something that I didn't bring along.
And if you think iPods are expensive, you should price avionics on an airplane. Or really just about anything on an airplane.
I've got an integrated DVD-R/TiVo unit with a 300 GB harddrive (an easily performed hack, or you can get PTV Upgrade to do it). Works very well, uses the TiVo desktop software to gateway pictures from my Mac's iPhoto database and mp3s from my Mac's iTunes database. The network interface is attached through a USB port on the back of the DVD-R/TiVo unit, and a number of wired and wireless adapters are supported.
My one gripe is that the TiVo doesn't support AAC files yet. TiVo keeps promising that they are working on it, but do not provide a delivery date estimate. This has been the case for over a year.
Other than that gripe, it works great. My only real gripe is that if you transfer a show over the network to this TiVo from another TiVo using the Home Media Option, the TiVo won't burn it to a DVD-R... their notion of DRM.
Oh yeah... and of course, being a TiVo it runs Linux, so all sorts of hacks are available for it.
I current have a setup with a couple of Powermac G4 Cubes and a Vaio on a Gefen KVM connected to a 23" cinema display LCD and a Kennsignton wireless mouse.
Works great, they support ADC by providing ADC-to-DVI cables and the main box is DVI/USB/audio.
I have one major complaint - the switch they provides (ie, the UI) is via an IR remote control. Unfortunately it's hideously simple - my TiVo remote is constantly swtiching the KVM if I don't block it. And that's the only UI to the KVM. Otherwise, it's great.
The FAA regulates all airspace from ground up to 60,000 ft. ("Flight Level 600").
This airspace is broken up into different airspaces depending upon a number of details, including the presence and type of airports, common routes of air traffic, and terrain. At the upper end, "Class A" airspace is only used by aircraft flying IFR ("Instrument Flight Rules") under air traffic control.
Rob Machado, a popular aviation educator and humorist, likes to relate a story (which I will paraphrase here). The ATC was contacted by an aircraft requesting clearance for FL 750. ATC replied thinking that it was a joke, "OK, if you can get that high." The aircraft responded, "Roger, descending to FL 750." The aircraft in question was a US military SR-71 Blackbird.
I can't wait for formal rules for a new suborbital class of airspace - it'll mean that we're that much closes to casual space flight.
The link for Airport Management Tools doesn't work for me - I get Apple's version of 404.
Right now the Airport Management Tools can be downloaded from the Airport Support Page. Look down the right column until you get to the section, Resources.
This is insane. What is the GPL about if not the freedom for an individual or business to make changes to the kernel and distribute those changes? If Linus wanted to maintain a single point of control, which is what this guy is indirectly advocating, he would have used a different license.
This is a very dangerous attitude from a company that is supposed to be steeped in the GPL. "Work it our way or don't work it" is not an attitude that helps the open source movement. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" should be the theme.
Sounds to me like SuSe is upset that they will have to either duplicate this work or use Red Hat's work in order to stay competitive.
AD&D is very different from third edition (d20) D&D. AD&D abounds with rules exceptions, separate tables for exceptional circumstances, and ambiguous areas where it isn't clear which excpetional table to apply.
In d20 (and 3ed D&D), Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook (don't ask about "Skippy the Wonder Sage") made it into a smooth, self-balancing system - where AD&D was an accumulation of strange special cases, d20 / 3ed D&D is a thing of beauty, making clear unambiguous implementation straightforward and natural. You can almost run it without referring rule books once you understand the underlying mechanics. It's just that intuitive.
Unfortunately they couldn't let well enough alone (or rather, wanted to sell more books), and started overtweaking everything after Tweet and Cook left. That led to the abomination, v3.5.
Knights of the Old Republic used essentially the same rules as D&D, the d20 game, Star Wars Roleplaying Game. I've played the RPG, it works well as a table top game.
I think that KotOR makes it pretty obvious that a great game *can* be based directly on a table-top RPG. But a crappy game is a crappy game, no matter what property they license to go under it.
However, the great-grandparent of this particular post was making a universal quantification...;o)
No. You would do well to learn the difference between an absolute blanket statement and a mere generalization. Unless the words "every" or "all" are used, you can be pretty sure that exceptions exist. Conversational english is not well suited to rigorous literal analysis.
Besides, read the actual statement, speaking of a Slashdotter. You can be absolutely certain that if a Slashdotter were a professional musician, they wouldn't be in the Megastar label-owning money-raking class.
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I were a professional musician, and my alleged "fans" would only pay fifty cents for their favourite track
Here's the thing. If you were a professional musicians you wouldn't be seeing anywhere close to $.50 per track on the albums that your fans were paying $15 for.
The really alluring thing about on-line music sales is that it offers the opportunity for a much, much larger portion of the music sales proceeds to go back to the artist - I can assure you that any musician would be absolutely thrilled to see even $.25 per track.
Well, that's technically impossible. Homesteading is a specific activity, I.E. taking land granted by the goverment and earning the right to buy the land (or to be granted it outright) by proving and developing the land.
Actually, no. You're right only about one sense of the word. In the more general english sense [see definition 1 of homestead and the transitive definition of homesteading], it also refers to any sort of permanent settling of a home.
Did you think that they invented the word homestead when they started granting land? No, it came from the older english meaning.
I wish there were a (-1, Illiterate) moderation option.
Historically, much of the United States' expansion was preceded by individuals homesteading land before the government had legal sovereignty of that land.
Look at the history of the westward expansion of the US, especially the way in which the Texas became a state (the land was first "colonized" by US-friendly ranchers against Mexican sovereignty), and also the annexing of Hawaii (preceded by American sugar and pineapple interests in the kingdom).
The fact is that governments will happily allow their citizens to go out and be productive elsewhere, and then step in to rule over (and tax!) the new enterprise.
The place this will really get tricky is concern over terrorism. Look at the damage done by a few pathetic subsonic jets that were hijacked, loafing along at several hundred knots.
Now imagine the damage that can be done by a suborbital (or orbital!) craft flying into a nuclear power plant.
I would have no problem with Fairplay if I could register all of my 5 macs (at two households and one workplace (incl one laptop)) to play the music I bought. As is, it's a royal pain in the ass. Especially when one of the registered macs is taken off line and is not deregistered (is there any good answer to that problem?).
Slashdot Mirror
You're funny, to be making so many assumptions on so little information. And sad, too, to be so jealously fixated on wealth.
Working at building my company for 7 years, culminating with Red Hat eventually buying it, allows me to take joy in flight, travel, technical diving, music, friends, and family. If you can not understand the aesthetic and profound qualities of those experiences and really think that they are only meaningful for status, I'd suggest that it is not I who lack dimension.
Professionally, I'm not working in the technology field any more - I'm working to provide care for the elderly and dying for a salary that's under the poverty line. Financial success has allowed me to make that choice without sacrificing my own quality of life. Sometime in the next couple of years I'll probably return to technology in one way or another, because that's my natural aptitude and I usually enjoy it.
But hey, that's only one dimension of my life.
And, to help improve your information to noise ratio, a 1969 Piper Cherokee 180D is basically the VW microbus of the air - if I were chasing status, I'd have dumped all of my money into a new Beechcraft, a microjet, or something else equally silly. I just love to fly.
Well, as I mentioned, iTunes doesn't support it for playback and my infrastructure is all Mac-based - I want to have both support from Apple and the open source community, I want it all. I know, I and my employees were heretics after being acquired by Red Hat because we were interested in all Unixes, just like the folks in the Apache group were.
On the plus side, the ALE stuff is supposedly identical to an upcoming MPEG standard encoding, so hopefully open source tools will appear for it.
The iPod dual boot stuff sounds really interesting though... can you give me some URLs? (SingTFW gives me Windows/Linux dual booting pages that mention iPods). I presume by dual boot, you mean that the iPod can switch back and forth between Linux and its original OS? Maybe now I can finally get Tetris on my iPod!
That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.
On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.
Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.
On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.
But I'm answering your Troll to pass on this bit of info, in case anybody out there finds it interesting: most decent audio jacks on an airplane cockpit are designed to cut the music out when a transmission is received through the aviation radios or the intercom.
Well, the 1500 CDs were collected over 19 years (my first CD was Boston's Boston in 1985. That's less than 2 a week, and I rarely spend more than $10/CD. In high school, I would skip lunch and spend the lunch money on music.
So yeah, on average I spend less than $20/week on CDs.
I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving. It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.
Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.
Thanks. I can afford it because Red Hat bought my company in 2000.
Twit.
My music collection is about 1500 CDs... I ripped them to AIFFs in iTunes and compress to other formats as necessary, as codecs (esp. Lame and Quicktime) improve (I use iTunes-Lame for MP3 compression). This translates to about 160 GB of 160 Kbps AACs. So this is big news for me - I'll be able to fit everything on 3 iPods instead of 4.
I'll be really psyched when 80 GBs are available, and then (dream dream) it'll take a 160 GB iPod to make me really, really happy.
This might not seem like a big deal, but when I'm travelling, especially when I'm flying my Cherokee 180-D across country, I won't be able to anticipate what I'll really want to listen to - and I invariably want to hear something that I didn't bring along.
And if you think iPods are expensive, you should price avionics on an airplane. Or really just about anything on an airplane.
I've got an integrated DVD-R/TiVo unit with a 300 GB harddrive (an easily performed hack, or you can get PTV Upgrade to do it). Works very well, uses the TiVo desktop software to gateway pictures from my Mac's iPhoto database and mp3s from my Mac's iTunes database. The network interface is attached through a USB port on the back of the DVD-R/TiVo unit, and a number of wired and wireless adapters are supported.
My one gripe is that the TiVo doesn't support AAC files yet. TiVo keeps promising that they are working on it, but do not provide a delivery date estimate. This has been the case for over a year.
Other than that gripe, it works great. My only real gripe is that if you transfer a show over the network to this TiVo from another TiVo using the Home Media Option, the TiVo won't burn it to a DVD-R... their notion of DRM.
Oh yeah... and of course, being a TiVo it runs Linux, so all sorts of hacks are available for it.
I current have a setup with a couple of Powermac G4 Cubes and a Vaio on a Gefen KVM connected to a 23" cinema display LCD and a Kennsignton wireless mouse.
Works great, they support ADC by providing ADC-to-DVI cables and the main box is DVI/USB/audio.
I have one major complaint - the switch they provides (ie, the UI) is via an IR remote control. Unfortunately it's hideously simple - my TiVo remote is constantly swtiching the KVM if I don't block it. And that's the only UI to the KVM. Otherwise, it's great.
The FAA regulates all airspace from ground up to 60,000 ft. ("Flight Level 600").
This airspace is broken up into different airspaces depending upon a number of details, including the presence and type of airports, common routes of air traffic, and terrain. At the upper end, "Class A" airspace is only used by aircraft flying IFR ("Instrument Flight Rules") under air traffic control.
Rob Machado, a popular aviation educator and humorist, likes to relate a story (which I will paraphrase here). The ATC was contacted by an aircraft requesting clearance for FL 750. ATC replied thinking that it was a joke, "OK, if you can get that high." The aircraft responded, "Roger, descending to FL 750." The aircraft in question was a US military SR-71 Blackbird.
I can't wait for formal rules for a new suborbital class of airspace - it'll mean that we're that much closes to casual space flight.
The link for Airport Management Tools doesn't work for me - I get Apple's version of 404.
Right now the Airport Management Tools can be downloaded from the Airport Support Page. Look down the right column until you get to the section, Resources.
This is insane. What is the GPL about if not the freedom for an individual or business to make changes to the kernel and distribute those changes? If Linus wanted to maintain a single point of control, which is what this guy is indirectly advocating, he would have used a different license.
This is a very dangerous attitude from a company that is supposed to be steeped in the GPL. "Work it our way or don't work it" is not an attitude that helps the open source movement. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" should be the theme.
Sounds to me like SuSe is upset that they will have to either duplicate this work or use Red Hat's work in order to stay competitive.
AD&D is very different from third edition (d20) D&D. AD&D abounds with rules exceptions, separate tables for exceptional circumstances, and ambiguous areas where it isn't clear which excpetional table to apply.
In d20 (and 3ed D&D), Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook (don't ask about "Skippy the Wonder Sage") made it into a smooth, self-balancing system - where AD&D was an accumulation of strange special cases, d20 / 3ed D&D is a thing of beauty, making clear unambiguous implementation straightforward and natural. You can almost run it without referring rule books once you understand the underlying mechanics. It's just that intuitive.
Unfortunately they couldn't let well enough alone (or rather, wanted to sell more books), and started overtweaking everything after Tweet and Cook left. That led to the abomination, v3.5.
Knights of the Old Republic used essentially the same rules as D&D, the d20 game, Star Wars Roleplaying Game. I've played the RPG, it works well as a table top game.
I think that KotOR makes it pretty obvious that a great game *can* be based directly on a table-top RPG. But a crappy game is a crappy game, no matter what property they license to go under it.
Besides, read the actual statement, speaking of a Slashdotter. You can be absolutely certain that if a Slashdotter were a professional musician, they wouldn't be in the Megastar label-owning money-raking class.
The really alluring thing about on-line music sales is that it offers the opportunity for a much, much larger portion of the music sales proceeds to go back to the artist - I can assure you that any musician would be absolutely thrilled to see even $.25 per track.
Did you think that they invented the word homestead when they started granting land? No, it came from the older english meaning.
I wish there were a (-1, Illiterate) moderation option.
Historically, much of the United States' expansion was preceded by individuals homesteading land before the government had legal sovereignty of that land.
Look at the history of the westward expansion of the US, especially the way in which the Texas became a state (the land was first "colonized" by US-friendly ranchers against Mexican sovereignty), and also the annexing of Hawaii (preceded by American sugar and pineapple interests in the kingdom).
The fact is that governments will happily allow their citizens to go out and be productive elsewhere, and then step in to rule over (and tax!) the new enterprise.
The place this will really get tricky is concern over terrorism. Look at the damage done by a few pathetic subsonic jets that were hijacked, loafing along at several hundred knots.
Now imagine the damage that can be done by a suborbital (or orbital!) craft flying into a nuclear power plant.
Or more than three macs owned by the same person.
I would have no problem with Fairplay if I could register all of my 5 macs (at two households and one workplace (incl one laptop)) to play the music I bought. As is, it's a royal pain in the ass. Especially when one of the registered macs is taken off line and is not deregistered (is there any good answer to that problem?).
Try again, monkey boy. Your source agrees that ellipse [definition 2] can be used synonymously with ellipsis.
Oh, I love that one. "I can criticise other people's grammar, but I'm immune because I'm special ."
Even the dyslexic can use a spell checker, sport, and you'd be wise to do so - especially when you're attacking somebody else's writing.