Assembly on a proccessor that runs 2.5GHz? Isn't that a bit like calculating the trajectory of every piece of dust in a desert in a five mile radius of a nuclear blast, by hand?
Asm is great to understand, which you already do, and it's essential for certain applications... modern x86 proccessors, however... you don't build modern jets with slide rules "Standard" measurement units... you get caught in the details and lose sight of the project.
While it's not strictly a programmer's calculator, the best thing I can think of in your field would be the TI-92. While the TI-89 is newer and in the traditional TI-form factor, the TI-92 has a full qwerty keyboard, large display, and is probably better for doing hexidecimal calculations. The TI-89 has a very sleek GUI and the button layout is excellent, but A-F require hitting the Alpha key.
I recently bought the TI-89 for Precalc through Trigonometry in college, and I've already fallen in love with it. The text buffer is useful, and after hitting return, by default, the previous formula returns to the input field. There you can type over it or edit it, and do iterative calculations as well. All around, there are handy features like that everywhere that never seem to get in the way.
The downside on the TI-92 is that it was discontinued. It has a slightly larger display than the TI-89, which I would have liked. The TI-89 is more powerful, but you're looking at around US$160 retail.
If Apple uses the APSL, then the source code could not be used in Linux.
I'm uncertain if Debian would accept any APSL submissions.
The issue to my mind is that Rendezvous needs popular adoption, and rapid acceptance would be best. If Apple has it in mind to emphasis Windows' network reliablity, then a GPL license would allow the technology to be integrated into Linux, and percolate into FreeBSD via ports. If Apple wants the most rapid adoption a source license can provide, the BSD license would be best, but then Microsoft would be free to embrace & extend.
This is why I root for the GPL in this case. Rendezvous is very cool technology, so Microsoft would either have to ignore it, attack its mindshare, impliment its own version, or bend knee to the GPL. Their own implimentation would be inferior for a time, and due to demand and early deployment, Microsoft would be unfairly judged as having an incompotent implimentation, rather than a primitive one. This would add pressure to move to non-Microsoft platforms. This is good for Apple, because non-Microsoft means Unix, and in many cases, that means MacOS X.
That's aside, however. I'm afraid that an APSL license would cause the source to stagnate except for the eyes of a few Wizards that learn from the implimentation and then develop their own (L)GPLed version.
I'd like to rub the tonal accuracy again. It's not so obvious if you listen to techno, but rock, gothic music, choir, solo guitar, etc. all sound MUCH better in Voribs.
I'm listening to an MP3 stream right now. (Limbik Frequencies at 128 Kbps, if you're curious.) I haven't heard a skip or a blip for at least three hours. So I don't see how Ogg could make it easier to stream audio over the Internet.
Technically not easier for you, the listener. For the home viewer, all we've got is improved audio quality. 64kbps Vorbis usually sounds as good as 128kbps MP3. Especially tonal quality. For the streamer, Ogg Vorbis streams can be downsampled to lower bitrates on the fly for negligable CPU cost. The lower bitrate samples sound exactly the same as if they were encoded at that bitrate. It's just a mater of dropping bits. The result is that your average Digital DJ with all his music ~176kbps can stream his music at a maximum bitrate of 64kbps, without re-encoding. The result is higher quality downsampled streams.
- Not Patented
I didn't have to pay anybody when I downloaded iTunes from apple.com. It's free. It encodes and plays. So this doesn't affect me, either. I know some people have strong opinions on patents and make decisions based on principle, but I'm just not one of 'em. If it doesn't affect me, I'm hard-pressed to care.
Pardon me for sounding ominous, but it will. Right now it's good buisness to allow everyone to go apeshit with frauf's technology. In the near future, these technologies will be going through various phases of lockdown. It is concievable that you may not be able to play your old MP3s, and especially not be able to create new ones, due to DRM. Ogg Vorbis keeps the formula for the digital paper in the hands of the composers and readers.
What is there about Ogg that I don't know yet that would make me say, ``Yeah, that's way better than MP3?'' Is it technically better, somehow? Can I squeeze that 15 GB music collection into 1 GB with no noticable loss of sound quality, or something?
A legitimate question!:D What the Vorbis codec can do for you is more accurate accoustic representation in less space. This isn't a 20:1 reduction, more like 256kbit->176kbits. Vorbis is able to represent tonal quality far better, and, unlike MP3, is able to literally carry a tune!:D By that I mean that Vorbis doesn't have the horrible warbling that MP3 does in delicate musical pieces.
If you listen to any delicate music, like classical, you will notice a severe improvement with violin and flute solos.
The Ogg container is very neat, being designed for streaming and VBR, and able to contain a whole mess of almost any sort of information. OGM (ogg that happens to contain video) is starting to suppliment AVI, because OGM do not suffer from the audio sync and seeking problems of AVI. As OGM are designed for streaming, you can view a partially downloaded OGM.
Vorbis is an open standard, unencumbered by patents from the developer. Vorbis still sounds decent at 64kbps; better than MP3 (even LAME) at this bitrate. Vorbis is released under a BSD-like license to promote acceptance, allowing anyone to take the code into their personal projects and not have to release source.
Re:Hopefully, R3mix.net will pick this up
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been using -q5.5 since RC2. This gives you CD quality, and an average bitrate of ~176kbps. I've got some Sennheisser HD580s, and I have yet to make an ogg at this quality that I can distinguish from the actual wav. I have found -q5.5 to be a worthy replacement for LAME VBR and CBR ~256kbps with optimal settings.
Is it still 256k? Is it 192k? Do you tell the VBR to go between 192 and 320? I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of ogg (yet), but I will convert as soon as I find some (or do some) good analysis between OGG and CD audio.
Bitrate is a measure of how uncompressed the audio is. You use higher bitrates in MP3 to mask shoddy compression and anomolies. Ogg Vorbis is able to represent the same audio sample more accurately with less information, yeilding a lower bitrate. With oggenc, you use a higher quality setting to pack more descriptive information about the sample, which produces a higher bitrate.
Vorbis is also natively VBR. Using fixed bitrates can yeild lower quality vorbis samples. For this reason, the bitrate description is often useless except as a comparsion of bandwidth consumption.
Why did this article spew off into a false treastise on Team Fortress?
It would have been far more on-topic if they had mentioned AliensTC, used the term "Total conversion", and brought up Foxing. They only vaguely alluded to the topics, perfering to talk about TF.
I don't like this article. It starts off discussing mods, then veers off into rewriting the history of Team Fortress. It then makes interjections about mod communities in between telling of this alternate history.
I think this article was designed to soften people up after all the spite that has been built up against Team Fortress 2.
Among the false histories: The omission of the announcement that TF2 would be released as a Quake2 mod. The fact that the core TF duo was by Valve before Half-Life was released. That TF Classic was released to calm the public as much as for fun, and about the time of the last projected release of TF2, then a commercial add-on.
I'm not sure what this article was intended to do.
What about typogrpahical characters, like Em Dash (U+2014), En Dash (U+2013), Horizontal Ellipsis (U+2026), and Minus (U+2212)?
I've been desiring a way to input these characters for a long time.
Are you aware that, according to insider information from Alias|Wavefront, Maya for Linux has lost more money for Alias than it has made? It cost more to port Maya to Linux than it has ever made back in sales.
You're going to have to back that up for me to believe you, I'm afraid. Alias|Wavefront have more than a few customers. Dreamworks has been busy replacing their aging SGI IRIX animation workstations with x86 Linux animation workstations, for instance.
As for the other items you mentioned, I reject your assertion that free software "kicks the hiney of its commercial counterparts." But that's an argument for another thread.
You reject three paragraphs of example and evidence without any counterclaim? You're better than Bush, Hollings, and Gates.:/
Same reason you can't have Photoshop for Linux, or Microsoft Office for Linux: because the vendor wouldn't make any money off of a version of their software for Linux.
Yet you can buy Maya for Linux, which costs just a hair more than Photoshop or Microsoft Office. You can buy Star Office, but most people don't, because OpenOffice is nearly the same quality with the definate promise of improvement. There's also Abiword. Gnumeric is a top-notch spreadsheet program that I've come to prefer to excel. There's more like this. There's really very little incentive to buy an office suite when you can get better for free.
In other fields, the Free alternatives tend to kick the hiney of their commercial counterparts. Let's try a few, okay? Pan, a newsreader based loosley on Agent. Pan is the only newsreader to score perfectly on the GNKSA Evaluations. Compared this to its commercial basis, Agent's score really sucks. Then there's Quanta for HTML editing. VIM is fine for most people, but if you need that Dreamweaver-like crap, Quanta does it without getting in your way. And it's REALLY good. Oh yes, it's Free with a capital "EFF."
This is a silly arguement to make against "Linux." This is Capitalism 101. Good products offered under better conditions succeed while inferior products do not. Maya is wonderful under Linux, and there is nothing else in its league available on a Unix-ish (OS X, Linux) platform.
Oh, yes. You can also buy numerous games, of course. Neverwinter Nights in particular will be releasing for all three major platforms in a single box. We'll see what this does for sales.
This is great. Quicktime should now be able to play XviD and DivX video. XviD especially. That's nice.
I was really hoping Apple would move more towards Free formats, however. AAC has good quality, but it's a nightmare of licensing restrictions. It looks like I'll still have to go to the QuickTime Components Project for Ogg Vorbis and exa-mozilla MNG support. All of my music is in Vorbis, and my movies convereted to OGM from AVI and MOV containers. OGM is a really nice container. No sync or seek problems at all. You can embed XML streams, for whatever purpose you'd like.
Even more importantly, QuickTime still doesn't have a lossless audio compression codec. Some FLAC would be nice. It really looks like FLAC might be moving closer to the Ogg project.
I mean, hey, unless Apple is going to make a car stereo system, this is probably the best component to plug into an OS X "digital hub." It does FLAC, with the new firmware.
Still, the ability to play XviD (valid MPEG-4 video) is a great step in the right direction. Kudos.
To date, I have only heard two reasons to use anything other than W3C and open standards. The first is always "I learned to do it Microsoft's way, it has cost me a lot of pain and effort and I do not want to go through that again." The second is more substantial, "those standards don't do what I need."
You can certainly convert, but it's a long ugly process that doesn't mean any additional revenue for the company, so it's a hard sell.
How about lower operating costs, fewer medical expenses for you (headaches, migranes, ulcers), and almost immessurably more modular and more standards compliant design? A more nimble design that can take any changes you want to make quickly and elegantly, instead of a six month jaunt through gehenna?
Then, you must consider if you really enjoy being tied to a platform because you've put so much effort into it for such fragile results. Consider the psychological game gone into this, binding you to an inferior platform through your blood, sweat, and time. You're tied to IIS because you've already spent for it. In the future, you'll have to spend more time, money, blood, and sweat, just to make up for the ground being lost to competitors using better implimentations.
I, personally, would probably break down and cry after going through all that effort and realizing it was so much wasted time and effort, that you could have done it SO much faster, with better tools, and had better results. I know most people become violent rather than facing the possibility, nevermind considering it.
I was given an m100 for Christmas, used and sold on Ebay. It isn't as precise as the Sony Clié but it is far from faulty.
Perhaps you're unknownlying a source of high energy bogons.
RMS does not write anything about discouraging developers from allowing UnitedLinux to use their software. He can't. The GPL does not allow that sort of restriction.
UnitedLinux can license seating as they like as a means of revenue. RMS is vocal about his experiences with this sort of licensing and is discouraging users from supporting this endevour under its current licensing.
RMS is a bleeding heart but he fails to be hypocritic.
Future–proof — While nothing is future–proof, Ogg Vorbis is future–resistant.
Acoustic quality is so much better than MP3. I really can not stand MP3 after hearing Vorbis. I've been tempted to buy an iPod, but I always come to one point that stops me dead–cold. The iPod doesn't play Ogg Vorbis yet.
"Vorbis" sounds cooler than "em-pee-three"
The format is Open. Like HTML, HTTP, XML, ASCII, the x86 architecture(mostly), screw drivers, and the recipe for a good peanutbutter and jelly sandwitch the specification for a leading audio codec belongs in the domain of public control and examination, where it will be improved overall for public interest rather than special interest.
As an Open codec and format, I can put faith into the fact that in thirty years my Oggs will be usable. With MP3, there is exists the chance that Fraufenhofer will put out a legal Jihad and attempt to excorcise mp3 encoders and decoders from the planet. If that happens, it will be a pain in the butt to find a decoder for Windows, let alone for any new operating system or platform that comes out.
Peeling. Instead of re–encoding, bits can be dropped off to reduce the date rate without quality loss greater than a fresh encoding at the new bit rate. This is great for streaming and great for keeping high-bitrate versions of songs on disc and then moving low-bitrate versions to, say, an iPod.
Channels. 255 of them.
Ogg Vorbis files can be edited in their encoded form.
When was the last time you tried it? As of 1.0rc2 OggVorbis uses about 1-4% of my P2-400. I suspect you have some other problem, but I don't want to be too much of an ass.
Re:the future is in wavelets!
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
Ogg Vorbis can (and will) support wavelets in the future. If Ogg Vorbis' acoustic quality so far is any guage — and you can tickle me pink if it isn't — then the acoustic gains will be something to gawk at.
Others have replied quite well, but I have a detail to add.
Microsoft is creating a new codec called "Corona" and sticking it in the WM8 file format. That means older players will not be able to play it - makes sense, right? After all, DirectX is like this - newer hardware does not function with older versions of DirectX.
Well.. this is just one of those things that makes me like open-ended specs better. Ogg Vorbis already supports 8, 16, 20, 24, and 32-bit in spec, though the reference decoder and encoder focus on 128kbit-16bit. It also supports up to 255 channels (as of 1.0rc2), and all that is needed is a common spec for what channel means what. This is all aside from my real point, however. Ogg Vorbis is designed so that older decoders will be able to decode newer oggs with features that the older codecs don't support. You can test this right this second. Go to www.xiph.org and grab an old decoder and a brand spanking new encoder.
It's such a well thought out design and compliments the feature so well I wonder why nobody(microsoft) ever thought of it before oh, wait
First, the next to last line that says "second star to the right" has a subtle meaning I don't like, aside from its silliness. What I mean is to set course to new things and especially fantasy. What I do not mean is to rehash old crap... if you're going to rehash something, rehash something good and do a bettr job.:)
Second, I'd like to see Arther C. Clark or Steven Hawking in the credits for writing.:)
...but it seems to be more for the show than for humanity.
This premiere was better in any one spot than my new favorite show Farscape. However, this premiere also had a pace and resolution of my all time most disgusted show; Voyager.
I swear to god, every last Voyager writer should be barred from ever writting for TV ever again.
There is one virtue of commitee writing in this case, and that is that the Voyager writers didn't get their hands into everything. You can taste what they didn't contaminate, because it doesn't stink. The ending was not something that escaped them. That is probably the greatest failure of this episode, and the one that really sticks with everyone that saw the show. How many people recall how it really ended? The last thing I remember is Archer talking with T'Pau like Janeway talks to 7of9, and then Archer going on the bridge to say something encouraging. The ready-room scene is the part that sticks, not the bridge scene.
Also, the theme song blows major ass. The video is rather disjointed from it, and while fitting, is pretty tacky. Overall, the intro says "one season, tops." Get rid of it. At the very least, do something I couldn't do in Flash 5.
I've seen people questioning how "hull plating" could fail. The answer is that the plating itself doesn't fail. What they have for "shields" is effectively a primitive combination of TNG's structural integrity field and TOS' defence screens. It's more integrity field, though. It is supposed to increase the armor strength of the hull beyond that of its physical properties. From the technobabble, you can assume they do this by putting a lot of energy into the plating to somehow strengthen the electro-magnetic properties of it. Think about how much harder it is to disrupt a stack of little metal blocks over if you magnetize them.
The blue girls on the planet seemed like something that could have been straight out of TOS. I didn't have a problem with the gel scenario itself - I doubt anyone sane did - but like most people I thought the camera work was extremely tacky.
T'Pau's make-up makes her look very elfin. I like the look, and though it detracts from the typical Vulcan make-up I find it a nice addition to the Vulcan species. Her wardrobe is pathetically 7of9. I'd be willing to bet that Vulcans usually wear those heavy robes to feel more comfortable in lower gravity enviornments. T'Pau's character must be feeling even more naked than her actress does. T'Pau herself is a moody bitch instead of a coldly logical creature with an alien alure. Commander Savok was my favorite Vulcan female. How many people realized exactly what she did on Genesis for Spock? I sure didn't until years later. It wasn't a shock, because it was logical. I don't want T'Pau to be a copy of Spock. I do want her to be a little less insulting by grace of class and more insulting by grace of logic.
While it was humorous, I was cringing badly at every Vulcan on the premiere. I think it was bad writing as much as bad editing as much as bad acting. Those were not Vulcans, those were people pretending to be Vulcans. They just didn't have ANY of the strength of will that comes from having found Kalimar. They were dirty little conspirators constatly feeling off guard with the irrational humans.
Of course, everyone probably figured out that the Vulcans were making sure humanity could stand on its own two feet by not giving too much information. That was something that was a little painful to see... nobody got that?
I like Hioshii. Nothing wrong there at all, just make sure she doesn't stay stagnant. Character development is vital to everyone.
Captain Archer isn't as passionate as he is irrational. This is supposed to be part of his character development, so I'm not critisizing it quite yet.
Enterprise NX-01 is a nice adaptation to the new ship we saw in First Contact in the battle against the Borg. It works. I know some people don't like it when old tech looks better than new tech, but the concept is more important to my mind, and that has remained intact.
What REALLY bothers me about this episode is that the "new" enemies are almost exactly the same as the ones found in Insurrection. God, I hated that movie. I refuse to add it to my Star Trek library, ever. The one saving grace of that entire movie was the cool nebulas, but as we all know, pretty graphics do not make sales after opening weekend.
The technobable was somewhere between TNG and Voyager. Technobable should not ever be technobable. In TNG it was always comprehendable. I had a bit of trouble trying to keep the technobable straight in my head. There was a lot of non-sense strewn about the few key words of realistic and theoretical science.
The plot was similar to the technobable. It just didn't hold together all the time. In that sense, it was a lot like Voyager. This episode didn't have to be two hours for the content it had in it, but if it was only one hour it would have been just like a Voyager episode. If that was the case, the two words left in people's minds would be "suck" and "boobies" and they would try to connect them in some way to make up for the lack of connections in the episode.
So far, I'm concerned that this series has taken bits and pieces from almost every single piece of Star Trek lore to create something new. The going line for this series has been "we've never done this before!" I hope they do go boldy go where no man has ever gone before, as TOS did. There is real promise here, but there is also the chance this will go the way of Voyager.
This premeire seems to be a sampler, and it is up to us to decide where we want to go with our main course. I say we set course for the second star to the right.
Lastly, I think Star Trek should once again get one or more advisors from NASA, MIT, maybe even slashdot (hah.) People with connections that can relay ideas back and forth between writers and experts in their fields.
This is really unfortunate. Loki does have problems, but that is no excuse for nerfing development. They may be trying to encourage a better fork, but I doubt it.
Q:
What are the canidates intentions for the United State's involvement in International Organization such as the World Trade Organization?
Background:
In recent past in Seatle, WA, there was a protest against the WTO and a myrad of issues. Not the least of which was the WTO's control over United States policy, and especially her laws. An example is the recently overturned clean air bill which forced quality control on trade goods with the united states. This law was overturned by the WTO's influence as it would prevent trade with WTO members of south african corporations who sell "dirty" oil and produce goods in highly polutant factories.
PS: "International" seems a little too benign for something like to WTO to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Assembly on a proccessor that runs 2.5GHz? Isn't that a bit like calculating the trajectory of every piece of dust in a desert in a five mile radius of a nuclear blast, by hand?
Asm is great to understand, which you already do, and it's essential for certain applications... modern x86 proccessors, however... you don't build modern jets with slide rules "Standard" measurement units... you get caught in the details and lose sight of the project.
While it's not strictly a programmer's calculator, the best thing I can think of in your field would be the TI-92. While the TI-89 is newer and in the traditional TI-form factor, the TI-92 has a full qwerty keyboard, large display, and is probably better for doing hexidecimal calculations. The TI-89 has a very sleek GUI and the button layout is excellent, but A-F require hitting the Alpha key.
I recently bought the TI-89 for Precalc through Trigonometry in college, and I've already fallen in love with it. The text buffer is useful, and after hitting return, by default, the previous formula returns to the input field. There you can type over it or edit it, and do iterative calculations as well. All around, there are handy features like that everywhere that never seem to get in the way.
The downside on the TI-92 is that it was discontinued. It has a slightly larger display than the TI-89, which I would have liked. The TI-89 is more powerful, but you're looking at around US$160 retail.
If Apple uses the APSL, then the source code could not be used in Linux. I'm uncertain if Debian would accept any APSL submissions.
The issue to my mind is that Rendezvous needs popular adoption, and rapid acceptance would be best. If Apple has it in mind to emphasis Windows' network reliablity, then a GPL license would allow the technology to be integrated into Linux, and percolate into FreeBSD via ports. If Apple wants the most rapid adoption a source license can provide, the BSD license would be best, but then Microsoft would be free to embrace & extend.
This is why I root for the GPL in this case. Rendezvous is very cool technology, so Microsoft would either have to ignore it, attack its mindshare, impliment its own version, or bend knee to the GPL. Their own implimentation would be inferior for a time, and due to demand and early deployment, Microsoft would be unfairly judged as having an incompotent implimentation, rather than a primitive one. This would add pressure to move to non-Microsoft platforms. This is good for Apple, because non-Microsoft means Unix, and in many cases, that means MacOS X.
That's aside, however. I'm afraid that an APSL license would cause the source to stagnate except for the eyes of a few Wizards that learn from the implimentation and then develop their own (L)GPLed version.
I think I'm rambling.
I'd like to rub the tonal accuracy again. It's not so obvious if you listen to techno, but rock, gothic music, choir, solo guitar, etc. all sound MUCH better in Voribs.
Technically not easier for you, the listener. For the home viewer, all we've got is improved audio quality. 64kbps Vorbis usually sounds as good as 128kbps MP3. Especially tonal quality. For the streamer, Ogg Vorbis streams can be downsampled to lower bitrates on the fly for negligable CPU cost. The lower bitrate samples sound exactly the same as if they were encoded at that bitrate. It's just a mater of dropping bits. The result is that your average Digital DJ with all his music ~176kbps can stream his music at a maximum bitrate of 64kbps, without re-encoding. The result is higher quality downsampled streams.
Pardon me for sounding ominous, but it will. Right now it's good buisness to allow everyone to go apeshit with frauf's technology. In the near future, these technologies will be going through various phases of lockdown. It is concievable that you may not be able to play your old MP3s, and especially not be able to create new ones, due to DRM. Ogg Vorbis keeps the formula for the digital paper in the hands of the composers and readers.If you listen to any delicate music, like classical, you will notice a severe improvement with violin and flute solos.
The Ogg container is very neat, being designed for streaming and VBR, and able to contain a whole mess of almost any sort of information. OGM (ogg that happens to contain video) is starting to suppliment AVI, because OGM do not suffer from the audio sync and seeking problems of AVI. As OGM are designed for streaming, you can view a partially downloaded OGM.
Vorbis is an open standard, unencumbered by patents from the developer. Vorbis still sounds decent at 64kbps; better than MP3 (even LAME) at this bitrate. Vorbis is released under a BSD-like license to promote acceptance, allowing anyone to take the code into their personal projects and not have to release source.
The FAQ answers better than I do, I think.
Why did this article spew off into a false treastise on Team Fortress?
It would have been far more on-topic if they had mentioned AliensTC, used the term "Total conversion", and brought up Foxing. They only vaguely alluded to the topics, perfering to talk about TF.
I don't like this article. It starts off discussing mods, then veers off into rewriting the history of Team Fortress. It then makes interjections about mod communities in between telling of this alternate history.
I think this article was designed to soften people up after all the spite that has been built up against Team Fortress 2.
Among the false histories: The omission of the announcement that TF2 would be released as a Quake2 mod. The fact that the core TF duo was by Valve before Half-Life was released. That TF Classic was released to calm the public as much as for fun, and about the time of the last projected release of TF2, then a commercial add-on.
I'm not sure what this article was intended to do.
What about typogrpahical characters, like Em Dash (U+2014), En Dash (U+2013), Horizontal Ellipsis (U+2026), and Minus (U+2212)? I've been desiring a way to input these characters for a long time.
You're going to have to back that up for me to believe you, I'm afraid. Alias|Wavefront have more than a few customers. Dreamworks has been busy replacing their aging SGI IRIX animation workstations with x86 Linux animation workstations, for instance.
You reject three paragraphs of example and evidence without any counterclaim? You're better than Bush, Hollings, and Gates. :/
Yet you can buy Maya for Linux, which costs just a hair more than Photoshop or Microsoft Office. You can buy Star Office, but most people don't, because OpenOffice is nearly the same quality with the definate promise of improvement. There's also Abiword. Gnumeric is a top-notch spreadsheet program that I've come to prefer to excel. There's more like this. There's really very little incentive to buy an office suite when you can get better for free.
In other fields, the Free alternatives tend to kick the hiney of their commercial counterparts. Let's try a few, okay? Pan, a newsreader based loosley on Agent. Pan is the only newsreader to score perfectly on the GNKSA Evaluations. Compared this to its commercial basis, Agent's score really sucks. Then there's Quanta for HTML editing. VIM is fine for most people, but if you need that Dreamweaver-like crap, Quanta does it without getting in your way. And it's REALLY good. Oh yes, it's Free with a capital "EFF."
This is a silly arguement to make against "Linux." This is Capitalism 101. Good products offered under better conditions succeed while inferior products do not. Maya is wonderful under Linux, and there is nothing else in its league available on a Unix-ish (OS X, Linux) platform.
Oh, yes. You can also buy numerous games, of course. Neverwinter Nights in particular will be releasing for all three major platforms in a single box. We'll see what this does for sales.
This is great. Quicktime should now be able to play XviD and DivX video. XviD especially. That's nice.
I was really hoping Apple would move more towards Free formats, however. AAC has good quality, but it's a nightmare of licensing restrictions. It looks like I'll still have to go to the QuickTime Components Project for Ogg Vorbis and exa-mozilla MNG support. All of my music is in Vorbis, and my movies convereted to OGM from AVI and MOV containers. OGM is a really nice container. No sync or seek problems at all. You can embed XML streams, for whatever purpose you'd like.
Even more importantly, QuickTime still doesn't have a lossless audio compression codec. Some FLAC would be nice. It really looks like FLAC might be moving closer to the Ogg project.
I mean, hey, unless Apple is going to make a car stereo system, this is probably the best component to plug into an OS X "digital hub." It does FLAC, with the new firmware.
Still, the ability to play XviD (valid MPEG-4 video) is a great step in the right direction. Kudos.
I sure hope those aren't PUBLIC sites!
To date, I have only heard two reasons to use anything other than W3C and open standards. The first is always "I learned to do it Microsoft's way, it has cost me a lot of pain and effort and I do not want to go through that again." The second is more substantial, "those standards don't do what I need."
How about lower operating costs, fewer medical expenses for you (headaches, migranes, ulcers), and almost immessurably more modular and more standards compliant design? A more nimble design that can take any changes you want to make quickly and elegantly, instead of a six month jaunt through gehenna?
Then, you must consider if you really enjoy being tied to a platform because you've put so much effort into it for such fragile results. Consider the psychological game gone into this, binding you to an inferior platform through your blood, sweat, and time. You're tied to IIS because you've already spent for it. In the future, you'll have to spend more time, money, blood, and sweat, just to make up for the ground being lost to competitors using better implimentations.
I, personally, would probably break down and cry after going through all that effort and realizing it was so much wasted time and effort, that you could have done it SO much faster, with better tools, and had better results. I know most people become violent rather than facing the possibility, nevermind considering it.
I was given an m100 for Christmas, used and sold on Ebay. It isn't as precise as the Sony Clié but it is far from faulty. Perhaps you're unknownlying a source of high energy bogons.
RMS does not write anything about discouraging developers from allowing UnitedLinux to use their software. He can't. The GPL does not allow that sort of restriction.
UnitedLinux can license seating as they like as a means of revenue. RMS is vocal about his experiences with this sort of licensing and is discouraging users from supporting this endevour under its current licensing.
RMS is a bleeding heart but he fails to be hypocritic.
Very scary It's been a long time since I've seen a such a lucid, logical, and straight-forward arguement from a politician. Can we import him?
When was the last time you tried it? As of 1.0rc2 OggVorbis uses about 1-4% of my P2-400. I suspect you have some other problem, but I don't want to be too much of an ass.
Ogg Vorbis can (and will) support wavelets in the future. If Ogg Vorbis' acoustic quality so far is any guage — and you can tickle me pink if it isn't — then the acoustic gains will be something to gawk at.
Others have replied quite well, but I have a detail to add.
Microsoft is creating a new codec called "Corona" and sticking it in the WM8 file format. That means older players will not be able to play it - makes sense, right? After all, DirectX is like this - newer hardware does not function with older versions of DirectX.
Well.. this is just one of those things that makes me like open-ended specs better. Ogg Vorbis already supports 8, 16, 20, 24, and 32-bit in spec, though the reference decoder and encoder focus on 128kbit-16bit. It also supports up to 255 channels (as of 1.0rc2), and all that is needed is a common spec for what channel means what. This is all aside from my real point, however. Ogg Vorbis is designed so that older decoders will be able to decode newer oggs with features that the older codecs don't support. You can test this right this second. Go to www.xiph.org and grab an old decoder and a brand spanking new encoder.
It's such a well thought out design and compliments the feature so well I wonder why nobody(microsoft) ever thought of it before oh, wait
A few little changes to my above post.
:)
:)
First, the next to last line that says "second star to the right" has a subtle meaning I don't like, aside from its silliness. What I mean is to set course to new things and especially fantasy. What I do not mean is to rehash old crap... if you're going to rehash something, rehash something good and do a bettr job.
Second, I'd like to see Arther C. Clark or Steven Hawking in the credits for writing.
...but it seems to be more for the show than for humanity.
This premiere was better in any one spot than my new favorite show Farscape. However, this premiere also had a pace and resolution of my all time most disgusted show; Voyager.
I swear to god, every last Voyager writer should be barred from ever writting for TV ever again.
There is one virtue of commitee writing in this case, and that is that the Voyager writers didn't get their hands into everything. You can taste what they didn't contaminate, because it doesn't stink. The ending was not something that escaped them. That is probably the greatest failure of this episode, and the one that really sticks with everyone that saw the show. How many people recall how it really ended? The last thing I remember is Archer talking with T'Pau like Janeway talks to 7of9, and then Archer going on the bridge to say something encouraging. The ready-room scene is the part that sticks, not the bridge scene.
Also, the theme song blows major ass. The video is rather disjointed from it, and while fitting, is pretty tacky. Overall, the intro says "one season, tops." Get rid of it. At the very least, do something I couldn't do in Flash 5.
I've seen people questioning how "hull plating" could fail. The answer is that the plating itself doesn't fail. What they have for "shields" is effectively a primitive combination of TNG's structural integrity field and TOS' defence screens. It's more integrity field, though. It is supposed to increase the armor strength of the hull beyond that of its physical properties. From the technobabble, you can assume they do this by putting a lot of energy into the plating to somehow strengthen the electro-magnetic properties of it. Think about how much harder it is to disrupt a stack of little metal blocks over if you magnetize them.
The blue girls on the planet seemed like something that could have been straight out of TOS. I didn't have a problem with the gel scenario itself - I doubt anyone sane did - but like most people I thought the camera work was extremely tacky.
T'Pau's make-up makes her look very elfin. I like the look, and though it detracts from the typical Vulcan make-up I find it a nice addition to the Vulcan species. Her wardrobe is pathetically 7of9. I'd be willing to bet that Vulcans usually wear those heavy robes to feel more comfortable in lower gravity enviornments. T'Pau's character must be feeling even more naked than her actress does. T'Pau herself is a moody bitch instead of a coldly logical creature with an alien alure. Commander Savok was my favorite Vulcan female. How many people realized exactly what she did on Genesis for Spock? I sure didn't until years later. It wasn't a shock, because it was logical. I don't want T'Pau to be a copy of Spock. I do want her to be a little less insulting by grace of class and more insulting by grace of logic.
While it was humorous, I was cringing badly at every Vulcan on the premiere. I think it was bad writing as much as bad editing as much as bad acting. Those were not Vulcans, those were people pretending to be Vulcans. They just didn't have ANY of the strength of will that comes from having found Kalimar. They were dirty little conspirators constatly feeling off guard with the irrational humans.
Of course, everyone probably figured out that the Vulcans were making sure humanity could stand on its own two feet by not giving too much information. That was something that was a little painful to see... nobody got that?
I like Hioshii. Nothing wrong there at all, just make sure she doesn't stay stagnant. Character development is vital to everyone.
Captain Archer isn't as passionate as he is irrational. This is supposed to be part of his character development, so I'm not critisizing it quite yet.
Enterprise NX-01 is a nice adaptation to the new ship we saw in First Contact in the battle against the Borg. It works. I know some people don't like it when old tech looks better than new tech, but the concept is more important to my mind, and that has remained intact.
What REALLY bothers me about this episode is that the "new" enemies are almost exactly the same as the ones found in Insurrection. God, I hated that movie. I refuse to add it to my Star Trek library, ever. The one saving grace of that entire movie was the cool nebulas, but as we all know, pretty graphics do not make sales after opening weekend.
The technobable was somewhere between TNG and Voyager. Technobable should not ever be technobable. In TNG it was always comprehendable. I had a bit of trouble trying to keep the technobable straight in my head. There was a lot of non-sense strewn about the few key words of realistic and theoretical science.
The plot was similar to the technobable. It just didn't hold together all the time. In that sense, it was a lot like Voyager. This episode didn't have to be two hours for the content it had in it, but if it was only one hour it would have been just like a Voyager episode. If that was the case, the two words left in people's minds would be "suck" and "boobies" and they would try to connect them in some way to make up for the lack of connections in the episode.
So far, I'm concerned that this series has taken bits and pieces from almost every single piece of Star Trek lore to create something new. The going line for this series has been "we've never done this before!" I hope they do go boldy go where no man has ever gone before, as TOS did. There is real promise here, but there is also the chance this will go the way of Voyager.
This premeire seems to be a sampler, and it is up to us to decide where we want to go with our main course. I say we set course for the second star to the right.
Lastly, I think Star Trek should once again get one or more advisors from NASA, MIT, maybe even slashdot (hah.) People with connections that can relay ideas back and forth between writers and experts in their fields.
This is really unfortunate. Loki does have problems, but that is no excuse for nerfing development. They may be trying to encourage a better fork, but I doubt it.
Q:
What are the canidates intentions for the United State's involvement in International Organization such as the World Trade Organization?
Background:
In recent past in Seatle, WA, there was a protest against the WTO and a myrad of issues. Not the least of which was the WTO's control over United States policy, and especially her laws. An example is the recently overturned clean air bill which forced quality control on trade goods with the united states. This law was overturned by the WTO's influence as it would prevent trade with WTO members of south african corporations who sell "dirty" oil and produce goods in highly polutant factories.
PS: "International" seems a little too benign for something like to WTO to me.