"Only cards with a supported Midi synthesizer will not need a software synth"
.. so the Sound Blaster Midi synthesizer(as opposed to wavetable synthesis), which has been present on all sound blaster cards since day dot, will be useless under Linux in favour of software emulation?
Did I read this correctly?
..we will finally be able to play DooM etc with realtime hardware MIDI music, and not some Timidity-style emulator?
Sound support for linux has always appeared to be several years behind the times. Anything beyond playing straight-through wavs and oggs on the wave device seems to go straight into the too-hard basket.
"Indeed, ogg is just a container format - but think of how confusing that would be! If you show anyone a "*.ogg" file today, they assume it's Vorbis-coded audio. (Assuming they have any clue what it is at all, of course.) With your proposal, it could be any sort of multimedia file."
"No, you don't need a counterweight. If the cable is long enough so that the center of mass is in geostationary orbit it will just hang there by itself."
Hmm, a blue-green planet weighing billions of tonnes on one end of the line, no counter-weight on the other end.
Where did you say the centre of mass had to be again?
This is a transparent attempt by the gaming industry to bring media attention to another poorly-selling product.
Whenever an article appears about "concern over product X", unless the concern is valid (which in this case it certainly is not, since anyone playing games for 7 hours straight forfeits all health and safety boundaries) then product X gets free advertising. Good publicity, bad publicity, it's still publicity.
And guess what, it worked! We're all talking about them here, and they are in the front of a lot of peoples' minds now.
Take for example the case of IBM's "Peace Love and Linux" spraypainting campaign. If they weren't caught and taken to court over it, then one city would know about the campaign. Now the world knows about it.
"Maybe we need "Open Source Money Pools" where you can vote what kind of game you want. I'm sure that'll happen."
We have these now. check out Transgaming's way of doing it. I disagree with the philosiphy of encouraging game developers to keep writing for Windows and DirectX, but the business model (pay a $5 subscription fee, and vote for what game you want wineX to support next) is IMO most excellent for opensource development.
Closed-source software is rapidly going the way of the dodo, but people still need to get paid for their efforts...
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.
I reckon it would be a great idea, RH certainly has the capital, and there is the demand, just not much in the way of interested game companies or a distribution system.
We must still be cautious. In giving big players like Red Hat more market, we would run the risk of going back to the days of monolothic corporations, a la microsoft.
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Undaunted, the inventor says that once powered-up, his device can run indefinitely -- or at least until the parts wear out
"Isn't that what a (non rechargable) battery does?"
No, a non-rechargeable battery will run until the chemical reactions inside the battery stop and the battery stops producing current. This is nearly always before any part of the device being powered wears out.
Well, unless you believe those lying lithium battery advertisements.:)
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I would be more interesting in reliability, as well as raw performance.
What is the MTBF of these units, and how many errors per billion calculations are encountered?
Run some cpu-hogging rendering benchmark (eg povray) over a *long* period of time and do a bitwise comparison of the final images.
Time how long it takes each to crash when running Linux Quake3 benchmarks.
I'm sure someone can come up with better reliability test than these, but it's a start...
I can't believe people are still making hardware for such a license-ridden not to mention obsolete format. I guess just because it's a household name like "VHS" or "Windows".
If I want a lossy audio format similar to what I would have gotten with mp3, I would have to choose the most excellent Ogg Vorbis.
For high-end applications, I would have a look at FLAC.
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Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
"But let me restate my example, If you were to by the LOTR DVD, would you consider that distribution format lossy?"
Of course it is lossy. While it is *perceived* to be of similar quality as the original, upon close inspection it quite clearly *isn't*. Artifacts such as banding and ugly squares of uniform colour are par for the course with this type of compression.
No amount of filtering or tidying up at the client end can correct this, as the information simply isn't there. It has been discarded by the *lossy* process of MPEG-2 encoding.
.
.
We need to start writing letters to hardware vendors. As an example, here is one that has been sent to modem.support@conexant.com:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I have been considering the purchase of a quantity of modems with your chips in them, but have to date been unable to locate any drivers for them.
The only drivers I have found have been for Microsoft operating systems, which is useless in our business environment which runs a combination of Linux and Digital Unix machines.
If no drivers have been made available, could you please direct me to the specifications so we can look at developing the drivers ourselves?
I cannot purchase this hardware unless drivers can be made available. I am certain this is also the case for thousands of other would-be buyers of conexant products. This is a very large potential customer base.
kind regards,
This is the only way we will get manufacturers to listen to us, by making htem realise that they are missing out on market share.
"The latest version of the controversial MPlayer program for Linux supports Quicktime.mov files with the latest codecs."
...
"According to formats page, Sorenson Quicktime is still not gonna happen any time soon."
Dude, Sorenson is *the* format for.mov files.
Distribution of Quicktime media has become such that if your player doesn't do Sorenson, it is misleading to say that it does Quicktime, as nearly all QT media (movie trailers anyone?) is in Sorenson format.
The article should read "MPlayer now supports older Quicktime formats", but it does *NOT* support Quicktime. Neither do I:)
We all know that nobody has any good reason to encode in such horrible closed formats anymore, but poeple still do it. Maybe what we need is a good sorenson2divx command-tool.
While others on this site will be content to sit on their hands saying "it ain't gonna happen", I'm helping make it happen: All free media (movies, music, etc) distributed by myself and associates are only done so with open formats. (ie divX, ogg vorbis, png)
.
.
"The useless Y chromosome, I'm told, is what makes males inferior."
Sigh. Another example of social engineering gone mad.
Move along with the rest of the herd now, that's it, case more stones at males, worship women.
What's that? A non-man-basher? Where? Kill him!
(/sarcasm)
Please think for yourself, and don't believe the PC bullshit that is pushed on us today.
I agree.
Aside from the initial negative impact it would have on the current oil-centric economic infrastructure of the western world, it would be a huge benefit to be able to produce dead-dinosaur-free engines.
Then we could tell the relatively few arabs that actually benefit from fossil fuel sales to go drink their oil.
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Slashdot Mirror
So why flamebait? This is a real issue for us "nerds", not all of whom use windows.
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Cool, I can see my house!
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"All who dont sign up to Transgaming dont want games"
... or want native games
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"Only cards with a supported Midi synthesizer will not need a software synth"
.. so the Sound Blaster Midi synthesizer(as opposed to wavetable synthesis), which has been present on all sound blaster cards since day dot, will be useless under Linux in favour of software emulation?
Did I read this correctly?
.
.
..we will finally be able to play DooM etc with realtime hardware MIDI music, and not some Timidity-style emulator?
Sound support for linux has always appeared to be several years behind the times. Anything beyond playing straight-through wavs and oggs on the wave device seems to go straight into the too-hard basket.
.
.
I must convey my warmest congratulations to you both!
So when's the big day?
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...or will it be windows-only?
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"Indeed, ogg is just a container format - but think of how confusing that would be! If you show anyone a "*.ogg" file today, they assume it's Vorbis-coded audio. (Assuming they have any clue what it is at all, of course.) With your proposal, it could be any sort of multimedia file."
Can you say Amiga IFF?
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"No, you don't need a counterweight. If the cable is long enough so that the center of mass is in geostationary orbit it will just hang there by itself."
Hmm, a blue-green planet weighing billions of tonnes on one end of the line, no counter-weight on the other end.
Where did you say the centre of mass had to be again?
.
.
This is a transparent attempt by the gaming industry to bring media attention to another poorly-selling product.
Whenever an article appears about "concern over product X", unless the concern is valid (which in this case it certainly is not, since anyone playing games for 7 hours straight forfeits all health and safety boundaries) then product X gets free advertising. Good publicity, bad publicity, it's still publicity.
And guess what, it worked! We're all talking about them here, and they are in the front of a lot of peoples' minds now.
Take for example the case of IBM's "Peace Love and Linux" spraypainting campaign. If they weren't caught and taken to court over it, then one city would know about the campaign. Now the world knows about it.
This is Marketing for the '00s
.
.
"Maybe we need "Open Source Money Pools" where you can vote what kind of game you want. I'm sure that'll happen."
We have these now. check out Transgaming's way of doing it. I disagree with the philosiphy of encouraging game developers to keep writing for Windows and DirectX, but the business model (pay a $5 subscription fee, and vote for what game you want wineX to support next) is IMO most excellent for opensource development.
Closed-source software is rapidly going the way of the dodo, but people still need to get paid for their efforts...
.
.
I second that.
I reckon it would be a great idea, RH certainly has the capital, and there is the demand, just not much in the way of interested game companies or a distribution system.
We must still be cautious. In giving big players like Red Hat more market, we would run the risk of going back to the days of monolothic corporations, a la microsoft.
.
.
.
Undaunted, the inventor says that once powered-up, his device can run indefinitely -- or at least until the parts wear out
:)
"Isn't that what a (non rechargable) battery does?"
No, a non-rechargeable battery will run until the chemical reactions inside the battery stop and the battery stops producing current. This is nearly always before any part of the device being powered wears out.
Well, unless you believe those lying lithium battery advertisements.
.
.
.
I would be more interesting in reliability, as well as raw performance.
What is the MTBF of these units, and how many errors per billion calculations are encountered?
Run some cpu-hogging rendering benchmark (eg povray) over a *long* period of time and do a bitwise comparison of the final images.
Time how long it takes each to crash when running Linux Quake3 benchmarks.
I'm sure someone can come up with better reliability test than these, but it's a start...
mp3 isn't even an option.
I can't believe people are still making hardware for such a license-ridden not to mention obsolete format. I guess just because it's a household name like "VHS" or "Windows".
If I want a lossy audio format similar to what I would have gotten with mp3, I would have to choose the most excellent Ogg Vorbis.
For high-end applications, I would have a look at FLAC.
.
.
"But let me restate my example, If you were to by the LOTR DVD, would you consider that distribution format lossy?"
Of course it is lossy. While it is *perceived* to be of similar quality as the original, upon close inspection it quite clearly *isn't*. Artifacts such as banding and ugly squares of uniform colour are par for the course with this type of compression.
No amount of filtering or tidying up at the client end can correct this, as the information simply isn't there. It has been discarded by the *lossy* process of MPEG-2 encoding.
.
.
We need to start writing letters to hardware vendors. As an example, here is one that has been sent to modem.support@conexant.com:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I have been considering the purchase of a quantity of modems with your chips in them, but have to date been unable to locate any drivers for them.
The only drivers I have found have been for Microsoft operating systems, which is useless in our business environment which runs a combination of Linux and Digital Unix machines.
If no drivers have been made available, could you please direct me to the specifications so we can look at developing the drivers ourselves?
I cannot purchase this hardware unless drivers can be made available. I am certain this is also the case for thousands of other would-be buyers of conexant products. This is a very large potential customer base.
kind regards,
This is the only way we will get manufacturers to listen to us, by making htem realise that they are missing out on market share.
FWIW, I encode all my audio data in ogg vorbis format
.
.
"The latest version of the controversial MPlayer program for Linux supports Quicktime .mov files with the latest codecs."
.mov files.
:)
...
"According to formats page, Sorenson Quicktime is still not gonna happen any time soon."
Dude, Sorenson is *the* format for
Distribution of Quicktime media has become such that if your player doesn't do Sorenson, it is misleading to say that it does Quicktime, as nearly all QT media (movie trailers anyone?) is in Sorenson format.
The article should read "MPlayer now supports older Quicktime formats", but it does *NOT* support Quicktime. Neither do I
We all know that nobody has any good reason to encode in such horrible closed formats anymore, but poeple still do it. Maybe what we need is a good sorenson2divx command-tool.
While others on this site will be content to sit on their hands saying "it ain't gonna happen", I'm helping make it happen: All free media (movies, music, etc) distributed by myself and associates are only done so with open formats. (ie divX, ogg vorbis, png)
.
.
What's the point in us geeks wanting for players that will only play in a proprietary format?
Every time you encode an mp3, you legally owe the Fraunhofer institute money. Every time you produce an mp3 decoder, you owe Fraunhofer lots of money.
I'd much rather see players supporting open standards, such as ogg vorbis.
(flame suit on)
They sound better anyway
"The useless Y chromosome, I'm told, is what makes males inferior."
Sigh. Another example of social engineering gone mad.
Move along with the rest of the herd now, that's it, case more stones at males, worship women.
What's that? A non-man-basher? Where? Kill him!
(/sarcasm)
Please think for yourself, and don't believe the PC bullshit that is pushed on us today.
How would you mount such a device under a linux system?
Would it appear as a FAT file system, like the USB digital cameras?
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My apologies - you had said that IE is *one of* the best browsers out there.
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.
IE? Standards compliant?
I guess you've never tried Mozilla
Please don't say IE is the best if you've only tried the abomination that is Time Warner/AOL/Netscape/Mirabilis/Whoever Navigator
I agree.
Aside from the initial negative impact it would have on the current oil-centric economic infrastructure of the western world, it would be a huge benefit to be able to produce dead-dinosaur-free engines.
Then we could tell the relatively few arabs that actually benefit from fossil fuel sales to go drink their oil.
.
.