It may take 5-10 years, but storage capacity keeps growing. When you have multi-terabyte hard drives and portables with gigabytes of RAM compressing audio won't be an issue. The 44/16 660 MB CD is unlikely to change unless humans suddenly evolve better hearing. The 96/24 format on DVD is wasted on most people. Right now putting 600+ MB of wav file on your hard drive for every hour of music is unthinkable. Once you spend $300-400 on the new 1TB drive are you really going to worry that it only holds 1700+ hours of uncompressed, unencoded wav files? Are you going to mp3 them so that you can fit 17,000 hours on that drive?
Re:If you can't say anything constructive...
on
The KDE Future
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· Score: 1
Gee, my post gets scored as flamebait and people accuse me of whining. Did anybody actually read my post? Or are you just looking at the subject line?
I explained a particular behavior of MS Windows/Internet Explorer that I consider to be a poor idea and I note that the article in question seems to be describing an atempt to replicate that behavior in KDE.
Where I work we encourage people to speak up when they see a questionable decision being made. Slashdot seems to be succumbing to political correctness. If the article is about KDE then anyone who doesn't think KDE is perfect and all the KDE design decisions are without flaw is accused of whining and posting flamebait.
What's the point of posting an article for discussion if political correctness requires everyone to either agree with the article or post nothing.
PS. I didn't say anything about changing icons, so I don't know where you pulled that from.
Re:I guess KDE is ok if you really want MS Windows
on
The KDE Future
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· Score: 1
I definitely prefer a GUI to a purely command line text only screen, and I don't want to have to remember that xls means Excel. I want Excel to launch automatically if I click on an Excel file in IE. The thing that I think is a bad idea is when I'm browsing a web site and I click on a link to an Excel file suddenly my browser morphs. It isn't quite IE and it isn't quite Excel.
To give a specific example: Yesterday I needed some information from another organization. I loaded their intranet page in IE and clicked on a link to a MS Word document. After 3-5 minutes IE had morphed into a IE-Word combo with the 99 page document displayed. I pressed Ctrl-F which in Word would have brought up the Word find dialog box. Instead it brought up the "Find Files" dialog box which searches the hard drive. I had to go back to the web page, right click and "save as" the Word document, then load the Word document from my hard drive to search for the text I needed.
It sounds like KDE views this as their goal. Since Microsoft has already achieved it why is KDE trying to do it? They ought to have some goals beyond just mimicing Microsoft.
Slashdot is the only site I access on a regular basis that goes down often enough for me to notice. Occasionally Excite displays a "standard" page rather than my customized page, but at least the site stays up. Slashdot does have far more outages than most sites so it really isn't useful as an example of the stability of Linux. It really doesn't matter whether it's the fault of Linux or the network or routers since Rob rarely explains what the problem is.
Take today for example. Slashdot was inaccesible for at least 4 hours and the lack of posts sugests that it wasn't just me who couldn't reach it. Is there anything posted to explain the problem or even admit that there was a problem? No. Let's just ignore it and pretend that this Linux based site didn't have a 4 hour outage.
Did anyone else see the plutonium story?
on
Star Wars Widows
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· Score: 0
There was a story after this Star Wars story about some kids building a reactor and producing plutonium. It linked to a NYT story about President Clinton. When I came back to/. the story was gone and Star Wars was back at the top of the list.
I don't think the opinion of Netwinders has changed. The general consensus has always been that they're a pretty neat little machine that isn't worth the price except as a novelty. When it first came out the Netwinder was a bit underpowered and a bit overpriced. Since then the power and price of the Netwinder have remained unchanged while the power of PCs has increased and the price of PCs has decreased. Now the company is changing its "image" and offering the same product at the same price (actually I'm just assuming that, prices weren't readily apparent on the new website).
The Netwinder also lacks the video RAM to be a serious contenter as an X-terminal replacement. With only two megs you're forced to choose between high resolution or high color depth.
I have no probs with using Plug 'n' Pray ISA cards under 2.2.x.. my SBAWE64 works fine including midi.. a simple run of 'isapnpconfig' (or is it isapnptool.. can't remember atm) works wonders.
It's sort of ironic that you "can't remember atm" since if it were truly "Plug 'n' Play" you wouldn't have to remember.
Can anyone sum up the differences between egcs and gcc and explain why they haven't been combined up until now? I believe egcs is Enhanced GNU Compiler Suite and I think it's the C++ version of gcc. At least I usually see it mentioned in association with C++ programs although I've never used egcs.
Does gcc do things that egcs doesn't, or is it just inertia that keeps people using gcc? In theory you don't need a C compiler, right? A C++ compiler ought to be able to compile all your C source code.
I just looked around on the web for the A110 and I also came across the A120 which appears to have the same feature list and a lower price (at least Price Scan found lower prices on the A120). Panasonic's own web site only mentions the A110 even though the A120 would presumably be a newer model. Does anyone know the difference between these two?
In response to another comment, I didn't think you had to spend $10,000+ on home theatre. I was just saying that the difference between high end DVD players won't be visible on a 27" TV and non-surround stereo so I don't want to waste my money on a player that's "too good". It's hard to tell which DVD players are cheap because they're junk and which are cheap simply because they lack the high end quality (which would be wasted on my equipment anyway).
Some day I'll buy an LCD projector to get movies filling an entire wall, and I'll buy a high end surround sound audio system and install it in a room specifically designed for its shape and acoustic properties. When I do that I'll buy the best DVD (or other format) player available; until then I'd hate to spend money on a player that has the best quality if I can get a less expensive player with no noticable difference on my equipment.
GB is one of many movies I'd buy on DVD if I had a player. Does anyone have any players they'd recommend? My problem is that I only have a 27 inch TV and a non-surround sound stereo, so I don't want to waste money on a high end DVD player.
I don't want a cheap (as in quality) player, but I want an inexpensive player suited to my relatively inexpensive audio and video equipment.
Any suggestions, or at least pointers to info that's not aimed at people who spend $10,000+ on AV equipment?
In NT4 if you right click on any file or directory and select properties then the security tab and the auditing button you get an auditing dialog box. It appears that you can specify any user(s) or group(s) of users and any action like read, write, execute, delete, etc. Presumably this gives you an extremely high level of surveilance over who's doing what to which files.
A year or two ago I wanted to monitor access to a file on MP-RAS (NCR Unix). I needed to know who was reading the file and when. I was told by everyone I asked that it couldn't be done on Unix but it would be easy on a mainframe. (That advice didn't help much since I wasn't on a mainframe)
So, if I wanted to put surveillance on any old file on my Linux box to get a log of who read that file, could I do it? If someone just reads a file without modifying it (using more, for example) does that get logged somewhere?
I don't have references, so feel free to flame if you must. I seem to remember reading somewhere that while DVD provides better resolution than VHS and sufficient quality for today's TVs it doesn't fully utilize the capabilities of HDTV. Is this true?
Will there be a new format in a few years that looks great on an HDTV set and makes DVDs look like old VHS tapes?
An enhanced DVD format would of course require you to buy a new player, but if future players are going to provide better quality wouldn't it be better to buy DIVX disks at $4.50 each rather than buying DVDs at $15-20 each and replacing them in 5 years with enhanced DVDs for another $15-20 each?
What is the resolution of HDTV anyway? Prices on LCD projectors have been dropping rapidly and so has the size and weight, resolution and brightness are increasing. Within 5-10 years I expect to have a ceiling mounted LCD projector that can display a picture the full height of a wall (i.e. at least 8-10 feet high maybe higher depending on the room) and with some ridiculous number of pixels. Do I really want to build a collection based on DVDs? I bet if I get the projector I've described I'll be replacing all my disks.
If there are distinctive typos in the original CDDB that get duplicated in the FreeCDDB it won't prove anything. Anybody can download from CDDB and anybody can upload to FreeCDDB. Unless FreeCDDB is doing some extremely detailed logs it will be impossible to determine which person, out of all the internet connected people on the planet, downloaded a CD entry from CDDB and uploaded it to FreeCDDB. At most FreeCDDB could be forced to remove the entry with the typos (which they'd want to do anyway)
I've often heard people say this, but never understood it. People spend vast sums of money on audio equipment and then complain about things sounding awful or unlistenable. If something sounds fine on a several hundred dollar stereo I'd expect any more expensive stereo to sound at least as good.
I realize that the sound is only as good as the source, but given the same source a more expensive piece of equipment shouldn't sound worse than a less expensive piece.
I think I'll set myself a hard limit on stereo system cost and never buy anything of higher quality (price). Audiophilia seems to be a bit like a drug addiction, the more you spend the more you need to get your fix.
For the same reason the idea of TV tuners in PCs never really took off, MP3s playing through PCs for mainstream users will never take off. And I don't know a single person with a stereo component that plays them. No one wants to fire up their PC and sit in that room to listen to music or watch TV. I know a dozen people who've bought Toshiba or other "name" PC's with TV tuners, radios, etc... and none of them ever use them. These are virtually computer illiterate users. (ie, most of the general public) On top of that, you've got the audiophiles -- people who tend to spend a lot of $$$ on audio-related hardware. No true audiophile would want to listen to anything on MP3. On anything but lousy headphones or low end computer speakers or stereo equipment they just sound lousy. (And that comment isn't flame bait -- people may disagree, but most people don't have even reasonable quality audio equipment...)
My Soundblaster 16 (that I originally bought for a 486) sounds OK with cheap computer speakers and lousy through my stereo, but does this have to be the case? I thought about buying a new sound card but I was completely bewildered by the vast array of options. There must be a card out there that makes MP3s sound great at an adequate bit rate. With all the MP3 fans reading slashdot there must be at least a few of you who really know sound cards.
If I knew which sound card to buy I bet I could stick an old headless K6 box next to the stereo and have it sound fine at most volume levels. I might still use the CDs at high volume and I might want to buy an extra quiet power supply.
Sorry, shouldn't have used angle brackets. Why do the contents of angle brackets get deleted when I post as Plain Old Text? Aren't brackets text?
My MP3 directory looks like ~/mp3/(artist)/(album)/(song title).mp3 complete with embedded spaces. I have a little script that does a "find ~/mp3/ -name *.mp3" and greps for whatever argument I pass to the script, then it overwrites my standard GQMpeg playlist with whatever it finds. I also have a script that just adds to the playlist. If I know the artist, album, or song title I can generate a playlist in seconds.
Eventually I plan to enhance this by associating other attributes with my MP3s. Does anyone know of a command line program that can read the ID3 tag in an mp3 and output something parseable?
My MP3 directory looks like ~/mp3///.mp3 complete with embedded spaces. I have a little script that does a "find ~/mp3/ -name *.mp3" and greps for whatever argument I pass to the script, then it overwrites my standard GQMpeg playlist with whatever it finds. I also have a script that just adds to the playlist. If I know the artist, album, or song title I can generate a playlist in seconds.
Eventually I plan to enhance this by associating other attributes with my MP3s. Does anyone know of a command line program that can read the ID3 tag in an mp3 and output something parseable?
Who didn't know that erased data could be recovered? Back in the days of DOS the Norton Utilities had a program called Diskwipe that would iterate over either your entire disk or just the unused parts. It was configurable to do as many passes as you specified and could write zeros, a user specified pattern, or random data. The manual clearly explained that a single pass was not adequate to guard against extreme recovery methods.
Half a meg for the company phone/address database, half a meg for a novel or two, a meg or two for email, half a meg for a couple of databases and spreadsheets, a quarter meg for Datebk3 (Ok, that last one is an application not data).
The GPL doesn't require him to distribute the code at large. He only has to provide the code to the people to whom he distributes the embedded system.
What if I want to use a piece?
on
GNOME-steaders
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· Score: 1
If I want to use piece of their code in my program, say ~100 lines of code, do I have to distribute their entire multimegabyte source and have an install script delete all but the ~100 lines I need to use?
The way I understand it the QPL only lets me enhance their (potentially commercial) product, it does not allow me to reuse their code in an independent and unrelated program that happens to require a small piece of functionallity that they developed.
Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code. If it's one of these formats where the player is free but you have to pay for the encoder then I'll stick with my free MP3 encoder. I've got plenty of HD space.
Slashdot Mirror
It may take 5-10 years, but storage capacity keeps growing. When you have multi-terabyte hard drives and portables with gigabytes of RAM compressing audio won't be an issue. The 44/16 660 MB CD is unlikely to change unless humans suddenly evolve better hearing. The 96/24 format on DVD is wasted on most people. Right now putting 600+ MB of wav file on your hard drive for every hour of music is unthinkable. Once you spend $300-400 on the new 1TB drive are you really going to worry that it only holds 1700+ hours of uncompressed, unencoded wav files? Are you going to mp3 them so that you can fit 17,000 hours on that drive?
Gee, my post gets scored as flamebait and people accuse me of whining. Did anybody actually read my post? Or are you just looking at the subject line?
I explained a particular behavior of MS Windows/Internet Explorer that I consider to be a poor idea and I note that the article in question seems to be describing an atempt to replicate that behavior in KDE.
Where I work we encourage people to speak up when they see a questionable decision being made. Slashdot seems to be succumbing to political correctness. If the article is about KDE then anyone who doesn't think KDE is perfect and all the KDE design decisions are without flaw is accused of whining and posting flamebait.
What's the point of posting an article for discussion if political correctness requires everyone to either agree with the article or post nothing.
PS. I didn't say anything about changing icons, so I don't know where you pulled that from.
I definitely prefer a GUI to a purely command line text only screen, and I don't want to have to remember that xls means Excel. I want Excel to launch automatically if I click on an Excel file in IE. The thing that I think is a bad idea is when I'm browsing a web site and I click on a link to an Excel file suddenly my browser morphs. It isn't quite IE and it isn't quite Excel.
To give a specific example: Yesterday I needed some information from another organization. I loaded their intranet page in IE and clicked on a link to a MS Word document. After 3-5 minutes IE had morphed into a IE-Word combo with the 99 page document displayed. I pressed Ctrl-F which in Word would have brought up the Word find dialog box. Instead it brought up the "Find Files" dialog box which searches the hard drive. I had to go back to the web page, right click and "save as" the Word document, then load the Word document from my hard drive to search for the text I needed.
It sounds like KDE views this as their goal. Since Microsoft has already achieved it why is KDE trying to do it? They ought to have some goals beyond just mimicing Microsoft.
Slashdot is the only site I access on a regular basis that goes down often enough for me to notice. Occasionally Excite displays a "standard" page rather than my customized page, but at least the site stays up. Slashdot does have far more outages than most sites so it really isn't useful as an example of the stability of Linux. It really doesn't matter whether it's the fault of Linux or the network or routers since Rob rarely explains what the problem is.
Take today for example. Slashdot was inaccesible for at least 4 hours and the lack of posts sugests that it wasn't just me who couldn't reach it. Is there anything posted to explain the problem or even admit that there was a problem? No. Let's just ignore it and pretend that this Linux based site didn't have a 4 hour outage.
There was a story after this Star Wars story about some kids building a reactor and producing plutonium. It linked to a NYT story about President Clinton. When I came back to /. the story was gone and Star Wars was back at the top of the list.
I don't think the opinion of Netwinders has changed. The general consensus has always been that they're a pretty neat little machine that isn't worth the price except as a novelty. When it first came out the Netwinder was a bit underpowered and a bit overpriced. Since then the power and price of the Netwinder have remained unchanged while the power of PCs has increased and the price of PCs has decreased. Now the company is changing its "image" and offering the same product at the same price (actually I'm just assuming that, prices weren't readily apparent on the new website).
The Netwinder also lacks the video RAM to be a serious contenter as an X-terminal replacement. With only two megs you're forced to choose between high resolution or high color depth.
Ugh! If the most recent version of Windows you have is 3.1, buying Windows 98 is pricey. Cheaper to buy a VCR.
It's sort of ironic that you "can't remember atm" since if it were truly "Plug 'n' Play" you wouldn't have to remember.
Can anyone sum up the differences between egcs and gcc and explain why they haven't been combined up until now? I believe egcs is Enhanced GNU Compiler Suite and I think it's the C++ version of gcc. At least I usually see it mentioned in association with C++ programs although I've never used egcs.
Does gcc do things that egcs doesn't, or is it just inertia that keeps people using gcc? In theory you don't need a C compiler, right? A C++ compiler ought to be able to compile all your C source code.
I just looked around on the web for the A110 and I also came across the A120 which appears to have the same feature list and a lower price (at least Price Scan found lower prices on the A120). Panasonic's own web site only mentions the A110 even though the A120 would presumably be a newer model. Does anyone know the difference between these two?
In response to another comment, I didn't think you had to spend $10,000+ on home theatre. I was just saying that the difference between high end DVD players won't be visible on a 27" TV and non-surround stereo so I don't want to waste my money on a player that's "too good". It's hard to tell which DVD players are cheap because they're junk and which are cheap simply because they lack the high end quality (which would be wasted on my equipment anyway).
Some day I'll buy an LCD projector to get movies filling an entire wall, and I'll buy a high end surround sound audio system and install it in a room specifically designed for its shape and acoustic properties. When I do that I'll buy the best DVD (or other format) player available; until then I'd hate to spend money on a player that has the best quality if I can get a less expensive player with no noticable difference on my equipment.
GB is one of many movies I'd buy on DVD if I had a player. Does anyone have any players they'd recommend? My problem is that I only have a 27 inch TV and a non-surround sound stereo, so I don't want to waste money on a high end DVD player.
I don't want a cheap (as in quality) player, but I want an inexpensive player suited to my relatively inexpensive audio and video equipment.
Any suggestions, or at least pointers to info that's not aimed at people who spend $10,000+ on AV equipment?
This must be a reporter in training or an intern.
In NT4 if you right click on any file or directory and select properties then the security tab and the auditing button you get an auditing dialog box. It appears that you can specify any user(s) or group(s) of users and any action like read, write, execute, delete, etc. Presumably this gives you an extremely high level of surveilance over who's doing what to which files.
A year or two ago I wanted to monitor access to a file on MP-RAS (NCR Unix). I needed to know who was reading the file and when. I was told by everyone I asked that it couldn't be done on Unix but it would be easy on a mainframe. (That advice didn't help much since I wasn't on a mainframe)
So, if I wanted to put surveillance on any old file on my Linux box to get a log of who read that file, could I do it? If someone just reads a file without modifying it (using more, for example) does that get logged somewhere?
I don't have references, so feel free to flame if you must. I seem to remember reading somewhere that while DVD provides better resolution than VHS and sufficient quality for today's TVs it doesn't fully utilize the capabilities of HDTV. Is this true?
Will there be a new format in a few years that looks great on an HDTV set and makes DVDs look like old VHS tapes?
An enhanced DVD format would of course require you to buy a new player, but if future players are going to provide better quality wouldn't it be better to buy DIVX disks at $4.50 each rather than buying DVDs at $15-20 each and replacing them in 5 years with enhanced DVDs for another $15-20 each?
What is the resolution of HDTV anyway? Prices on LCD projectors have been dropping rapidly and so has the size and weight, resolution and brightness are increasing. Within 5-10 years I expect to have a ceiling mounted LCD projector that can display a picture the full height of a wall (i.e. at least 8-10 feet high maybe higher depending on the room) and with some ridiculous number of pixels. Do I really want to build a collection based on DVDs? I bet if I get the projector I've described I'll be replacing all my disks.
If there are distinctive typos in the original CDDB that get duplicated in the FreeCDDB it won't prove anything. Anybody can download from CDDB and anybody can upload to FreeCDDB. Unless FreeCDDB is doing some extremely detailed logs it will be impossible to determine which person, out of all the internet connected people on the planet, downloaded a CD entry from CDDB and uploaded it to FreeCDDB. At most FreeCDDB could be forced to remove the entry with the typos (which they'd want to do anyway)
I've often heard people say this, but never understood it. People spend vast sums of money on audio equipment and then complain about things sounding awful or unlistenable. If something sounds fine on a several hundred dollar stereo I'd expect any more expensive stereo to sound at least as good.
I realize that the sound is only as good as the source, but given the same source a more expensive piece of equipment shouldn't sound worse than a less expensive piece.
I think I'll set myself a hard limit on stereo system cost and never buy anything of higher quality (price). Audiophilia seems to be a bit like a drug addiction, the more you spend the more you need to get your fix.
My Soundblaster 16 (that I originally bought for a 486) sounds OK with cheap computer speakers and lousy through my stereo, but does this have to be the case? I thought about buying a new sound card but I was completely bewildered by the vast array of options. There must be a card out there that makes MP3s sound great at an adequate bit rate. With all the MP3 fans reading slashdot there must be at least a few of you who really know sound cards.
If I knew which sound card to buy I bet I could stick an old headless K6 box next to the stereo and have it sound fine at most volume levels. I might still use the CDs at high volume and I might want to buy an extra quiet power supply.
Sorry, shouldn't have used angle brackets. Why do the contents of angle brackets get deleted when I post as Plain Old Text? Aren't brackets text?
My MP3 directory looks like ~/mp3/(artist)/(album)/(song title).mp3 complete with embedded spaces. I have a little script that does a "find ~/mp3/ -name *.mp3" and greps for whatever argument I pass to the script, then it overwrites my standard GQMpeg playlist with whatever it finds. I also have a script that just adds to the playlist. If I know the artist, album, or song title I can generate a playlist in seconds.
Eventually I plan to enhance this by associating other attributes with my MP3s. Does anyone know of a command line program that can read the ID3 tag in an mp3 and output something parseable?
My MP3 directory looks like ~/mp3///.mp3 complete with embedded spaces. I have a little script that does a "find ~/mp3/ -name *.mp3" and greps for whatever argument I pass to the script, then it overwrites my standard GQMpeg playlist with whatever it finds. I also have a script that just adds to the playlist. If I know the artist, album, or song title I can generate a playlist in seconds.
Eventually I plan to enhance this by associating other attributes with my MP3s. Does anyone know of a command line program that can read the ID3 tag in an mp3 and output something parseable?
Who didn't know that erased data could be recovered? Back in the days of DOS the Norton Utilities had a program called Diskwipe that would iterate over either your entire disk or just the unused parts. It was configurable to do as many passes as you specified and could write zeros, a user specified pattern, or random data. The manual clearly explained that a single pass was not adequate to guard against extreme recovery methods.
Half a meg for the company phone/address database, half a meg for a novel or two, a meg or two for email, half a meg for a couple of databases and spreadsheets, a quarter meg for Datebk3 (Ok, that last one is an application not data).
The GPL doesn't require him to distribute the code at large. He only has to provide the code to the people to whom he distributes the embedded system.
If I want to use piece of their code in my program, say ~100 lines of code, do I have to distribute their entire multimegabyte source and have an install script delete all but the ~100 lines I need to use?
The way I understand it the QPL only lets me enhance their (potentially commercial) product, it does not allow me to reuse their code in an independent and unrelated program that happens to require a small piece of functionallity that they developed.
>>Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code.
>No. In fact they are both proprietary and you must pay for use of either (ie. no free encoder or decoder).
Oops! Then I guess it's MS Audio 4.0 that's dead as far as I'm concerned.
Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code. If it's one of these formats where the player is free but you have to pay for the encoder then I'll stick with my free MP3 encoder. I've got plenty of HD space.