You'll need every bit you can get after taking this step. What exactly do you hope to accomplish with your childish bullying, mass capitulation to your preposterous demands?
Linux users: give SCO the united finger. They deserve worse, but we don't have to stoop to their lowly depths.
The original listing is gone but check out a mirror.
==
Web Developer
So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the "correction". Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of "Unclean! Unclean!" is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile. There's a good chance you listen to either Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus or elaborate Paul Oakenfold remixes, with a bit of bootlegged Chemical Brothers thrown in for good measure. Maybe you find yourself missing the ashtray completely, and your ESC through F3 keys are thoroughly clogged up with burned, cancerous grey flakes. For better or for worse, you're familiar with such repugnant images as goatse.cx and know what STFU means. In all probability your beverage of choice is Jolt/Columbian Cola, and you have the weeping stomach ulcers to prove it. You give copies of Photoshop 7.0 to your friends, thereby depriving a fat CEO somewhere of a heated driveway. You have a world-crushing collection of MP3s. Your author of choice: Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. You have every volume of Gaiman's Sandman series, though you decided after Volume III that it`s all a bit of a wank. Sometimes, you pretend you are in The Matrix. Your half-elf mage/rogue is at Level 9, and has actually worked out how to put a Bag of Holding within another Bag of Holding without imploding Ravenloft. You can pronounce "Urotsukidoji" without hurting yourself, and can rocket-jump better than anyone you know. You have a bit of an attitude when it comes to Windows XP, and you like to recompile kernels.
Your spine looks like a u-bend.
Others may call you freakish. We call you lovely. And in reward for your loveliness, we would like to offer you this mildly exciting opportunity, if your idea of excitement is a RAM upgrade:
This is a fun little two week contract for a reasonably experienced Web Developer with plenty of HTML (well, duh), JavaScript and ASP know-how. Ideally you will also be fluent in the, and I quote, "uploading of ASP pages from a SAP business connector". I said that out loud and Shub-Niggurath appeared and attempted to devour my soul through some impressive shambling and ominous tentacle-writhing, so I won't investigate it any further.
But anyway, that's the deal. Either you like it or you don't, and we're not about to tell you either way. It's a two week contract for a company here in the city, and will probably be paying about $25 per hour, commensurate with experience. So apply now (or don't), or call Gary Fernandes for more information.
Please contact Gary Fernandes quoting reference number SK/GFWD on: phone (03) 9629 6788 fax (03) 9629 5788 Email: Please click the 'Apply Now' button below.
The parent post is not a troll. While Mozilla Firebird is noticeably slicker than the browser from the Mozilla suite, Thunderbird has still a bit of ways to go before it bacomes usable for the general populace. I've been using Thunderbird 0.2a [2003-08-07] and there's a noticeable lag even when typing up an e-mail. Plus it uses about 35 MB while Mozilla Mail is much more usable and takes up ~20 MB.
However, Thunderbird holds a lot of promise for the future. It would also help if any developers with some free time on their hands joined the dev team as there's only one person at the helm.
These are testing times for Linux and its myriad distributions. As ludicrous as SCO's allegations are, the cynic in me wouldn't be all that surprised if events turned in their favour. Even more so if Microsoft turns out to be the Master behind the SCO Puppet. But I digress...
This is the time to cast aside our petty squabbles about how distro A beats distro B, or how Distro C sucks balls. Forget the small things.
Band up, my fellow mates and face this challenge strong, and as one. Our very future depends on it.
The CFA provides the CompactFlash Specification as a free download from the CFA web site. The CompactFlash and CF(logo) trademarks are licensed at no charge and no royalty to CFA members. This has encouraged industry to quickly adopt the CF form factor into as many new devices as possible.
Application for membership requires the applicant to read, understand, and agree to fully support and abide by, all of the principles, policies and procedures as set forth in the SD Card Association's By-laws, Antitrust Guidelines and Intellectual Property Policy.
[plenty of PDF links from there, but as I understand the fees vary from USD1000 to USD4500 per year. Note the bit about intellectual property - a minefield when infractions occur.]
HP is a member of both groups.
Finally, the CFA homepage has an announcement about the new CF Spec v2.0 which doubles the data transfer rate to 16 MB/sec. Couldn't find any performance figures for SD cards but I doubt it's anywhere close.
For a consumer or producer, it's clear that unless you require an ultra-tiny form factor or DRM, CF is the winner by far.
The real issue is that SD seems to be the favoured choice of memory storage/extension in new hardware, despite higher costs to both producers and end users.
Consider that the CF spec is an open one and involves paying no encryption license fees to an organisation like SDMI: it makes me wonder whether the execs are casually treated by SDMI reps to lavish holidays at exotic destinations in exchange for securing the slot for SD.
The "Secure" in SD secures the data from you, using cryptography and Palladium-like hardware to protect decryption/authentication keys. However, they also come with a switch on the side [like 1.44 MB floppies] that write-protects the contents, which is what the manufacturers would rather have you notice.
Other than that, SD loses out to CF in every aspect. I bought a 512 MB CF card the other day and paid AUD 213, while the SD equivalent was around AUD 600, IIRC.
it was a scarce time on the internet. osm surfed from one link to the next in search of something, anything, of interest. the porn was cheap and raunchy. there was no gnutella yet, so mp3s were difficult to obtain. there was no quake iii for linux, so games were boring. day after day, week after week, osm searched the internet in vain.
too lazy to move, he toileted in the cat-box. he picked fleas off of the cats for sustenance. he showered by sticking his head out the window when it rained and he drank from the rainwater he collected in a rusted pale. yes, it was a wretched, barren existence.
it was a typical evening. osm had just showered, thanks to a particularly severe thunderstorm. he even had the luxury of a nice wind afterward, which he used to blow dry his hair. having found nothing on the internet, osm decided to go to sleep early. he shut off the monitor and fell asleep.
usually, osm slept until two or three in the afternoon. but something woke him early on this particular morning. in his sleep, osm felt something compelling him to life. slowly, he left his dreams and floated into the real world. he felt a presence behind him. he swung his chair around.
osm was shocked by the astonishing object. a giant, black statue of natalie portman stood behind him. it was as though it was watching over him. osm sank out of his chair, terrified, and crawled over to the statue. he touched its unnaturally smooth surface, pulling his hand back quickly. he did this several times, before he had the courage to run his hand along the smooth teen leg. he put his face to the statue and licked it with his tongue. he smelled the object and put his ear to it, listening for anything familiar.
several days passed and osm had grown comfortable with the graceful figure of natalie portman watching over him. one night, he loaded up netscape and began browsing the internet. suddenly, a thought entered his mind. he looked at the statue, knowing that it had planted the thought. osm pointed his cursor at the "location" box in netscape. he typed in the string: "http://slashdot.org" and hit enter. osm's life changed forever.
three days later, the natalie portman statue was gone.
the geek compound
rob malda sat in his office, strumming his guitar in an attempt to relax. the pressures of the constant battle with the trolls, the hardware failures, the slash bugs and the threats from microsoft had weighed heavily upon his shoulders for several months now.
rob's phone started beeping loudly. startled, he dropped his guitar. he looked at the phone, debating himself as to whether he should answer. he hesitated before picking up the receiver, "yeah."
"rob, this is jeff. meet me in the hallway, immediately, you're not going to believe this!"
rob hung up the phone and rubbed his temple before pulling himself out of the chair, "What now?!"
rob left his office and walked down the hall. jeff appeared from the corner, "rob, we were cleaning out some old junk from the storage closet... you're not going to believe what we found buried in there!"
rob picked up his pace as jeff led him to the closet. jeff opened the door. rob's jaw dropped. the tall, black statue of natalie portman peered out over them. rob reached out to touch the statue, "what the hell?"
suddenly, the statue began emitting a piercing shriek. rob slammed the door shut, barely muffling the sound, "where the hell did that come from?"
jeff shook his head, "there's only one person who can solve this mystery..."
rob shuddered, "goddamnit. i hate that guy!"
the portman mission
hemos and rob determined that the transmission from the statue was aimed at albany, new york. they bought a winnebago and modified it with the latest in technology. the new vehicle was renamed the geekebago and osm was hired to travel in it to
forgive this off-topic post but after eighteen months, one of the funniest and talented/. trolls, osm has returned with a masterpiece. Please check it out.
forgive this off-topic post but after eighteen months, one of the funniest and talented/. trolls, osm, has returned with a masterpiece. Please check it out.
The key here is to change Buffer-ahead on track change to something higher than 0 ms. This means that as the end of a song approaches, Winamp starts to decode the next song so it can seamlessly play it as soon as the first song is finished. If it's set to 0ms, then it can't do this and there *will* be a gap between tracks - I, and many others, can certainly hear them.
Since this is getting rather off-topic, I'll end the thread here but I suggest you check out Hydrogen Audio, a very good site for almost anything high-quality audio. Just remember to use the search and find out what you can before you ask any questions to avoid getting flamed.
The following settings will reveal any gaps if they exist.
Go to preferences -> plugins -> output.
If you're using Win95/98/Me:
Double-click WaveOut [out_wave.dll]
Change Prebuffer and Buffer-ahead on track change to 500 ms
If you're using WinNT/2000/XP:
Double-click DirectSound [out_ds.dll]
Select Buffering tab
Change Prebuffer on start/seek/underrun and Buffer-ahead on track change to 500 ms
Select Fading tab. Make sure fades on start, first start and end of song are disabled
Click OK. Return to the main Winamp window.
Now play back your MP3 files and see if they're gapless. They won't be. However, Vorbis and MPC files will be gapless.
You could argue there's no point in doing so when your current plugin works just fine. Fair enough, but for me it removes parts of songs where it shouldn't and that's unacceptable for me.
WAV and FLAC should play gapless by design: again, the flaw is in the MP3 spec. Different encoders add varying amounts of delay over which one has no control over. However, a decoder which is aware of these gaps can properly compensate for them.
The way your plugin works is by buffering the next track and trimming off any silence. It does not take into account whether that silence was there in the original.
For MP3 encoding, I use LAME 3.90.3 which has no flaws AFAIK.
and not 100% perfect. On many occasions I can still hear a pop/blip/silence between tracks such as in Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime, where the tracks flow from one to another.
Vorbis and MPC have no such probs. Check them out yourself and see what I mean.
No, I don't give a shit about printable stuff as of now. Could change in the future.
However - one thing about MP3. When you're converting concerts [or anything else where the tracks are seamless] MP3 does not cut it*. Why? Because the MP3 specification does not allow gapless playback.
Stick to Ogg Vorbis or MPC instead, which are natively gapless [not to mention of higher quality.] The former is patent-free, royalty-free and more flexible than MP3. Plus Winamp has native support.
* There is a proposal that aims to calculate gaps from MP3/AAC/MP4 and remove them, but this isn't implemented in any player/decoder yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll need every bit you can get after taking this step. What exactly do you hope to accomplish with your childish bullying, mass capitulation to your preposterous demands?
Linux users: give SCO the united finger. They deserve worse, but we don't have to stoop to their lowly depths.
That is all I have to say.
The original listing is gone but check out a mirror.
==
Web Developer
So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the "correction". Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of "Unclean! Unclean!" is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile. There's a good chance you listen to either Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus or elaborate Paul Oakenfold remixes, with a bit of bootlegged Chemical Brothers thrown in for good measure. Maybe you find yourself missing the ashtray completely, and your ESC through F3 keys are thoroughly clogged up with burned, cancerous grey flakes. For better or for worse, you're familiar with such repugnant images as goatse.cx and know what STFU means. In all probability your beverage of choice is Jolt/Columbian Cola, and you have the weeping stomach ulcers to prove it. You give copies of Photoshop 7.0 to your friends, thereby depriving a fat CEO somewhere of a heated driveway. You have a world-crushing collection of MP3s. Your author of choice: Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. You have every volume of Gaiman's Sandman series, though you decided after Volume III that it`s all a bit of a wank. Sometimes, you pretend you are in The Matrix. Your half-elf mage/rogue is at Level 9, and has actually worked out how to put a Bag of Holding within another Bag of Holding without imploding Ravenloft. You can pronounce "Urotsukidoji" without hurting yourself, and can rocket-jump better than anyone you know. You have a bit of an attitude when it comes to Windows XP, and you like to recompile kernels.
Your spine looks like a u-bend.
Others may call you freakish. We call you lovely. And in reward for your loveliness, we would like to offer you this mildly exciting opportunity, if your idea of excitement is a RAM upgrade:
This is a fun little two week contract for a reasonably experienced Web Developer with plenty of HTML (well, duh), JavaScript and ASP know-how. Ideally you will also be fluent in the, and I quote, "uploading of ASP pages from a SAP business connector". I said that out loud and Shub-Niggurath appeared and attempted to devour my soul through some impressive shambling and ominous tentacle-writhing, so I won't investigate it any further.
But anyway, that's the deal. Either you like it or you don't, and we're not about to tell you either way. It's a two week contract for a company here in the city, and will probably be paying about $25 per hour, commensurate with experience. So apply now (or don't), or call Gary Fernandes for more information.
Please contact Gary Fernandes quoting reference number SK/GFWD on:
phone (03) 9629 6788 fax (03) 9629 5788
Email: Please click the 'Apply Now' button below.
you need an editor.
The parent post is not a troll. While Mozilla Firebird is noticeably slicker than the browser from the Mozilla suite, Thunderbird has still a bit of ways to go before it bacomes usable for the general populace. I've been using Thunderbird 0.2a [2003-08-07] and there's a noticeable lag even when typing up an e-mail. Plus it uses about 35 MB while Mozilla Mail is much more usable and takes up ~20 MB.
However, Thunderbird holds a lot of promise for the future. It would also help if any developers with some free time on their hands joined the dev team as there's only one person at the helm.
RMS is trekking in Africa.
These are testing times for Linux and its myriad distributions. As ludicrous as SCO's allegations are, the cynic in me wouldn't be all that surprised if events turned in their favour. Even more so if Microsoft turns out to be the Master behind the SCO Puppet. But I digress...
This is the time to cast aside our petty squabbles about how distro A beats distro B, or how Distro C sucks balls. Forget the small things.
Band up, my fellow mates and face this challenge strong, and as one. Our very future depends on it.
gets a bandwidth transplant.
CompactFlash Licensing [from CFA info]
Totally free in every sense.
SecureDigital Licensing [from Joining SDA]
[plenty of PDF links from there, but as I understand the fees vary from USD1000 to USD4500 per year. Note the bit about intellectual property - a minefield when infractions occur.]
HP is a member of both groups.
Finally, the CFA homepage has an announcement about the new CF Spec v2.0 which doubles the data transfer rate to 16 MB/sec. Couldn't find any performance figures for SD cards but I doubt it's anywhere close.
For a consumer or producer, it's clear that unless you require an ultra-tiny form factor or DRM, CF is the winner by far.
The real issue is that SD seems to be the favoured choice of memory storage/extension in new hardware, despite higher costs to both producers and end users.
Consider that the CF spec is an open one and involves paying no encryption license fees to an organisation like SDMI: it makes me wonder whether the execs are casually treated by SDMI reps to lavish holidays at exotic destinations in exchange for securing the slot for SD.
The "Secure" in SD secures the data from you, using cryptography and Palladium-like hardware to protect decryption/authentication keys. However, they also come with a switch on the side [like 1.44 MB floppies] that write-protects the contents, which is what the manufacturers would rather have you notice.
Other than that, SD loses out to CF in every aspect. I bought a 512 MB CF card the other day and paid AUD 213, while the SD equivalent was around AUD 600, IIRC.
I'll be much happier when they add a CF slot [even better if it replaces the SD slot.]
Original link.
2001: A SLASHDOT ODYSSEY
the dawn of osm
it was a scarce time on the internet. osm surfed from one link to the next in search of something, anything, of interest. the porn was cheap and raunchy. there was no gnutella yet, so mp3s were difficult to obtain. there was no quake iii for linux, so games were boring. day after day, week after week, osm searched the internet in vain.
too lazy to move, he toileted in the cat-box. he picked fleas off of the cats for sustenance. he showered by sticking his head out the window when it rained and he drank from the rainwater he collected in a rusted pale. yes, it was a wretched, barren existence.
it was a typical evening. osm had just showered, thanks to a particularly severe thunderstorm. he even had the luxury of a nice wind afterward, which he used to blow dry his hair. having found nothing on the internet, osm decided to go to sleep early. he shut off the monitor and fell asleep.
usually, osm slept until two or three in the afternoon. but something woke him early on this particular morning. in his sleep, osm felt something compelling him to life. slowly, he left his dreams and floated into the real world. he felt a presence behind him. he swung his chair around.
osm was shocked by the astonishing object. a giant, black statue of natalie portman stood behind him. it was as though it was watching over him. osm sank out of his chair, terrified, and crawled over to the statue. he touched its unnaturally smooth surface, pulling his hand back quickly. he did this several times, before he had the courage to run his hand along the smooth teen leg. he put his face to the statue and licked it with his tongue. he smelled the object and put his ear to it, listening for anything familiar.
several days passed and osm had grown comfortable with the graceful figure of natalie portman watching over him. one night, he loaded up netscape and began browsing the internet. suddenly, a thought entered his mind. he looked at the statue, knowing that it had planted the thought. osm pointed his cursor at the "location" box in netscape. he typed in the string: "http://slashdot.org" and hit enter. osm's life changed forever.
three days later, the natalie portman statue was gone.
the geek compound
rob malda sat in his office, strumming his guitar in an attempt to relax. the pressures of the constant battle with the trolls, the hardware failures, the slash bugs and the threats from microsoft had weighed heavily upon his shoulders for several months now.
rob's phone started beeping loudly. startled, he dropped his guitar. he looked at the phone, debating himself as to whether he should answer. he hesitated before picking up the receiver, "yeah."
"rob, this is jeff. meet me in the hallway, immediately, you're not going to believe this!"
rob hung up the phone and rubbed his temple before pulling himself out of the chair, "What now?!"
rob left his office and walked down the hall. jeff appeared from the corner, "rob, we were cleaning out some old junk from the storage closet... you're not going to believe what we found buried in there!"
rob picked up his pace as jeff led him to the closet. jeff opened the door. rob's jaw dropped. the tall, black statue of natalie portman peered out over them. rob reached out to touch the statue, "what the hell?"
suddenly, the statue began emitting a piercing shriek. rob slammed the door shut, barely muffling the sound, "where the hell did that come from?"
jeff shook his head, "there's only one person who can solve this mystery..."
rob shuddered, "goddamnit. i hate that guy!"
the portman mission
hemos and rob determined that the transmission from the statue was aimed at albany, new york. they bought a winnebago and modified it with the latest in technology. the new vehicle was renamed the geekebago and osm was hired to travel in it to
Hi all,
/. trolls, osm has returned with a masterpiece. Please check it out.
forgive this off-topic post but after eighteen months, one of the funniest and talented
Sacrificing my karma for a worthy cause,
CD
Hi all,
/. trolls, osm, has returned with a masterpiece. Please check it out.
forgive this off-topic post but after eighteen months, one of the funniest and talented
Sacrificing my karma for a worthy cause,
CD
What happens now?
The key here is to change Buffer-ahead on track change to something higher than 0 ms. This means that as the end of a song approaches, Winamp starts to decode the next song so it can seamlessly play it as soon as the first song is finished. If it's set to 0ms, then it can't do this and there *will* be a gap between tracks - I, and many others, can certainly hear them.
Since this is getting rather off-topic, I'll end the thread here but I suggest you check out Hydrogen Audio, a very good site for almost anything high-quality audio. Just remember to use the search and find out what you can before you ask any questions to avoid getting flamed.
Cheers.
Now play back your MP3 files and see if they're gapless. They won't be. However, Vorbis and MPC files will be gapless.
You could argue there's no point in doing so when your current plugin works just fine. Fair enough, but for me it removes parts of songs where it shouldn't and that's unacceptable for me.
Hope this helps.
WAV and FLAC should play gapless by design: again, the flaw is in the MP3 spec. Different encoders add varying amounts of delay over which one has no control over. However, a decoder which is aware of these gaps can properly compensate for them.
The way your plugin works is by buffering the next track and trimming off any silence. It does not take into account whether that silence was there in the original.
For MP3 encoding, I use LAME 3.90.3 which has no flaws AFAIK.
and not 100% perfect. On many occasions I can still hear a pop/blip/silence between tracks such as in Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime, where the tracks flow from one to another.
Vorbis and MPC have no such probs. Check them out yourself and see what I mean.
No, I don't give a shit about printable stuff as of now. Could change in the future.
However - one thing about MP3. When you're converting concerts [or anything else where the tracks are seamless] MP3 does not cut it*. Why? Because the MP3 specification does not allow gapless playback.
Stick to Ogg Vorbis or MPC instead, which are natively gapless [not to mention of higher quality.] The former is patent-free, royalty-free and more flexible than MP3. Plus Winamp has native support.
* There is a proposal that aims to calculate gaps from MP3/AAC/MP4 and remove them, but this isn't implemented in any player/decoder yet.
*barf*
we always knew that.
[on my fourth beer now]
All credit goes to Cascade Premium Lager, inspired by the title.
As soon as I saw this article, I popped into the local liquor shop and got me a six-pack of...
BEER!
Now it all makes sense.
He doesn't have to worry. After all, in Soviet Russia the jobs find you.