And what if he was just curious? He's supposed to live under FBI surveillance until they decide he's not a threat? With PATRIOT he loses all of his privacy...
Problem a) The default USE flags and CFLAGS are very similar to the options chosen by most binary distribution maintainers: compile in most of what anyone will likely use, and optimize for the lowest common denominator.
Problem b) genkernel will get you a kernel that is strikingly similar to the binary kernels distributed by most distributions.
How are these problems exactly? The difference is that the option is there at all for you to easily build things to your specifications, not that you *have* to to get a working system.
I'd argue that the most dificult and problematic part of the Gentoo install is not the actually installation at all, but the configuration to get a working system. Editing/etc/modules.d/kernel-2.x can be problematic if you don't have any idea what modules you need, and IIRC the install docs doesn't recommend installing hotplug or similar. Then there's getting X working, which I'm sure is quite a chore for someone who knows nothing about X (though I haven't read Gentoo's documentation of this process...if it's anywhere near as good as the install documentation, it shouldn't be too bad at all).
Once that is accomplished, however, the system is no more difficult (perhaps easier) for a new user to maintain.
WTF is even MIT going to do with an entire class A?!? Couldn't these addresses be better used elsewhere; and doesn't ARIN have rules about IP usage being 80% or something?
I find it very hard to believe that MIT is using even 1/10th of these addresses.
On a good day, it's even simpler in Linux. Just fire up CUPS on the client and it will automatically discover other printers on the network, and add them to the local system if you have rights to print to them.
The parent confirms my suspicion that people either have no idea that 4-way is what you do when a traffic signal is broken, or have no idea how to execute a 4 way stop with more than 4 lanes of traffic.
However, the same argument applies to new versions of MS Office as well. The UI is changed significantly enough that retraining is required in many cases, and this is definitely something MS wants you to do.
www.uniserve.com Last I checked, the service is only availiable in Vancouver and surrounding areas, though that might have changed.
I'm an ex-employee, and I can warn you that nearly everyone in the Aldergrove office has been laid off in the past 18 months or so, and everything but administration has been moved to an ISP they merged with in Victoria. Stinks of upcoming chapter 11, but so far there is no competition that I've found. I'm a bit hesitant to recommend them though, I kinda got shafted by them;)
Be sure that you insist on a bridged connection, the sales person probably will have no idea what you're talking about, but insist. AFAIK they still offer new accounts on it, but it's never been advertised clearly. I think they're still putting people on PPPoE unless they specifically request otherwise. The bridged network has lower contention, is much simpler (they just give you network parameters to input, not even any DHCP). Besides, PPPoE just sucks.
One more warning: I only get about 1.2mbit throughput. No idea why, I know the network is fast, and my sync is good, I'm happy enough with 150K/s. Upstream also nearly reaches the 512kbit.
Too lazy to dig out my bill, but I believe the base rate is the same, plus $5 for the static IP (they force this on you if you're on the bridged network, there are no dynamics).
I use an independent DSL provider [Uniserve, if anyone is wondering], but I have experience with the two big guys around here as well.
On Shaw, I was hounded for weeks by their 'abuse' team, and eventually dropped their service because of it. Even after I cut back on the bandwidth usage, they were bitching about me running a DNS server (WTF?!?). Their policy is 'cut the user offline on a friday night at 5pm so they can't get ahold of us until Monday, and ask questions later'.
Telus I've never really had a problem with, other than their reluctance to sell static addresses, and their shitty customer support. I've exceeded their caps in both directions, run servers on their service...never once got a call from them.
DSL is definitely slower than cable around here though. Shaw connections are rocket fast for downloads, but latency is a bit unstable. DSL is far better for gaming, especially an indy provider...my remote gateway pings about 11-15ms, I've found CS servers where I get consistent 20ms latency). Telus is usually around 25-30ms to the gateway.
I've found both Shaw and Telus to be rather unstable, especially Telus in the past year or two (since they started running a transparent proxy for HTTP requests). It seems the proxy server just dies once in a while for up to an hour, then comes back (everything works, except for www). Annoying.
Their ATM network is rock solid though, so if you can find a non-Telus provider that leases ATM channels, you'll probably get better reliability and more flexibility from your ISP. The only downtime I've had in the past 8 months or so is from power outages, and I get a static IP:D
My opinion isn't based solely on bitrate. It's based more on the fact that MP3 has *50% more* bits than AAC in your comparison. A 50% increase is nothing to scoff at. AAC is a good codec, but there's no way in hell it can make up a defecit that big.
Your logic is even more flawed. You're saying this: 'because AAC is better at the same bitrate, it must be better when the opposition has a lot more bits to work with (and a huge advantage) too.' Also, comparing the MP3 to the AAC is irrelevant as you're not comparing them to a control source, it's just whichever sounds better to you that you pick, not which is more faithful to the original. Pick some clips, get LAME and encode them with --alt-preset standard, they'll probably come out around 192kbit. If not, try --preset 192. Compare these with ABX (so it's blind) to the original.wav. If you get a statistically relevant result with the MP3 but not the AAC, maybe you have something to say.
People have claimed time and time again that 128kbit is 'cd quality,' but it always turns out to be rather sub-par. You can only lose so much data before it starts getting noticable, no matter how good your compression algorithm. I think 128kbit is pretty close to that boundary. Every codec I've tested, I've been able to ABX fairly easily at 128kbit. Bumping that up to 160kbit makes most non-flawed codecs pretty transparent, at least to me. Above that, they are almost all transparent to the casual listener, which is why I continue to use MP3 as it's the best supported.
Huh? Are you saying that because AAC sounds better, using VBR at the same bitrate as a CBR MP3, it will sound better when the MP3 has 50% more bits to throw at the encoding? I highly doubt it. If the MP3 is VBR, I *really* doubt it.
Media Player Classic with QT Alternative (and Real Alternative if you need it) should be able to do that without a problem. Then you can get rid of QT too:P
I'd plug ffdshow rather than the (proprietary and inferior) DivX and (inferior) XviD decoders. It will play most mpeg4 content, including DivX and XviD and has a whole pile of postprocessing features (that greatly reduce artifacts) as well as some other filters (noise is really cool, makes it feel much more like a film). Not to mention the fact that it's opensource.
If you didn't know about it, I suggest you try it out. I use everything you mentioned, except ffdshow instead of the other codecs. It'll also let you select whether to use ffdshow or the original decoder in it's options page.
Yeah, except that unlike a whaletail, you actually get a real performance increase.
Personally, I'd rather have a stable 2.2GHz CPU than a stable 1.83GHz CPU for the same price (my 2500+). No extra cooling,.1v overvoltage, and ~58C temps under load. It's solid, I haven't had any lockups or other problems.
I don't understand the aversion to overclocking. I've got an old Celeron 633 that's been powering my server for about 3 years now 24/7 and it's still going strong. The CPU cost me $75 at the time I bought it. If it dies, I'll just replace it. Who cares that a $75 part lasted 4 years instead of 10, replacing it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of purchasing a comparable performing CPU at the outset, and you'll definitely get a better performing replacement than you would've had if you spent the extra cash in the beginning.
By the time you're in any danger of causing real damage (like after 4-5 years of continuous use), you're going to want a new CPU anyways, so what's the problem?
Not exactly, it checks that the MX for the addresse's domain will accept mail for that address.
Unfortunately, due to spam, many mail servers now silently accept mail, and send a bounce message once it's been recieved, rather than rejecting it at the MAIL FROM phase.
And there are others that hardly get any spam at all. None of my address (save the Hotmail that I let lapse a few months ago) gets more than a handful of spams a month, and until fairly recently, they were all caught by SpamAssasin and dumped my spam folder.
I think that overall, the media's statistics are probably fairly accurate...though considering the number of people using Hotmail, they might be a bit optimistic...when I removed the exclusive spam block on that account for a few days because my DSL was down, I got over 80 spams a day, and I hadn't used the account...for anything in well over two years.
And, believe it or not, they piss off the on-shore techs while they're at it. They'd lie to customers about 'talking to a supervisor' or whatnot, and transfer them to our call-centre...which is (obviously) strictly forbidden by HP policy, and strictly enforced at the call centres here in North America. Not to mention not documenting calls properly, phoning about previous calls and trying to dump callers on us...it never stopped. I'm sure we were just as vocal as the customers were, and everyone on up the chain of command knew it.
Thank god I got out of that job, and not because of the off-shore people. It was just awful...
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And what if he was just curious? He's supposed to live under FBI surveillance until they decide he's not a threat? With PATRIOT he loses all of his privacy...
Problem a) The default USE flags and CFLAGS are very similar to the options chosen by most binary distribution maintainers: compile in most of what anyone will likely use, and optimize for the lowest common denominator.
/etc/modules.d/kernel-2.x can be problematic if you don't have any idea what modules you need, and IIRC the install docs doesn't recommend installing hotplug or similar. Then there's getting X working, which I'm sure is quite a chore for someone who knows nothing about X (though I haven't read Gentoo's documentation of this process...if it's anywhere near as good as the install documentation, it shouldn't be too bad at all).
Problem b) genkernel will get you a kernel that is strikingly similar to the binary kernels distributed by most distributions.
How are these problems exactly? The difference is that the option is there at all for you to easily build things to your specifications, not that you *have* to to get a working system.
I'd argue that the most dificult and problematic part of the Gentoo install is not the actually installation at all, but the configuration to get a working system. Editing
Once that is accomplished, however, the system is no more difficult (perhaps easier) for a new user to maintain.
WTF is even MIT going to do with an entire class A?!? Couldn't these addresses be better used elsewhere; and doesn't ARIN have rules about IP usage being 80% or something?
I find it very hard to believe that MIT is using even 1/10th of these addresses.
How late is RH getting on the bandwagon? APT is what? 5 years old now?
Except that you can't even install any third-party themes without applying an unofficial, unsupported patch to a system library.
Most users won't have the knowledge (or their IS staff will forbid it) to do this.
On a good day, it's even simpler in Linux. Just fire up CUPS on the client and it will automatically discover other printers on the network, and add them to the local system if you have rights to print to them.
Indeed, because only most people do.
The parent confirms my suspicion that people either have no idea that 4-way is what you do when a traffic signal is broken, or have no idea how to execute a 4 way stop with more than 4 lanes of traffic.
Never seen backports.org eh?
gVim?
It's even GTK2 now.
However, the same argument applies to new versions of MS Office as well. The UI is changed significantly enough that retraining is required in many cases, and this is definitely something MS wants you to do.
Just a nitpick, the 1.833GHz (166x11) AthlonXP is the 2500+, not the 2600+.
You can create self-signed certs just as easily with Microsoft's certificate managment tools.
Users are conditioned to click Yes/OK to *any* dialog box that gets in their way, without reading it.
www.uniserve.com Last I checked, the service is only availiable in Vancouver and surrounding areas, though that might have changed.
;)
I'm an ex-employee, and I can warn you that nearly everyone in the Aldergrove office has been laid off in the past 18 months or so, and everything but administration has been moved to an ISP they merged with in Victoria. Stinks of upcoming chapter 11, but so far there is no competition that I've found. I'm a bit hesitant to recommend them though, I kinda got shafted by them
Be sure that you insist on a bridged connection, the sales person probably will have no idea what you're talking about, but insist. AFAIK they still offer new accounts on it, but it's never been advertised clearly. I think they're still putting people on PPPoE unless they specifically request otherwise. The bridged network has lower contention, is much simpler (they just give you network parameters to input, not even any DHCP). Besides, PPPoE just sucks.
One more warning: I only get about 1.2mbit throughput. No idea why, I know the network is fast, and my sync is good, I'm happy enough with 150K/s. Upstream also nearly reaches the 512kbit.
Too lazy to dig out my bill, but I believe the base rate is the same, plus $5 for the static IP (they force this on you if you're on the bridged network, there are no dynamics).
I use an independent DSL provider [Uniserve, if anyone is wondering], but I have experience with the two big guys around here as well.
:D
On Shaw, I was hounded for weeks by their 'abuse' team, and eventually dropped their service because of it. Even after I cut back on the bandwidth usage, they were bitching about me running a DNS server (WTF?!?). Their policy is 'cut the user offline on a friday night at 5pm so they can't get ahold of us until Monday, and ask questions later'.
Telus I've never really had a problem with, other than their reluctance to sell static addresses, and their shitty customer support. I've exceeded their caps in both directions, run servers on their service...never once got a call from them.
DSL is definitely slower than cable around here though. Shaw connections are rocket fast for downloads, but latency is a bit unstable. DSL is far better for gaming, especially an indy provider...my remote gateway pings about 11-15ms, I've found CS servers where I get consistent 20ms latency). Telus is usually around 25-30ms to the gateway.
I've found both Shaw and Telus to be rather unstable, especially Telus in the past year or two (since they started running a transparent proxy for HTTP requests). It seems the proxy server just dies once in a while for up to an hour, then comes back (everything works, except for www). Annoying.
Their ATM network is rock solid though, so if you can find a non-Telus provider that leases ATM channels, you'll probably get better reliability and more flexibility from your ISP. The only downtime I've had in the past 8 months or so is from power outages, and I get a static IP
Why not use something more appropriate, like FlashBlock?
Lossless != Uncompressed
My opinion isn't based solely on bitrate. It's based more on the fact that MP3 has *50% more* bits than AAC in your comparison. A 50% increase is nothing to scoff at. AAC is a good codec, but there's no way in hell it can make up a defecit that big.
.wav. If you get a statistically relevant result with the MP3 but not the AAC, maybe you have something to say.
Your logic is even more flawed. You're saying this: 'because AAC is better at the same bitrate, it must be better when the opposition has a lot more bits to work with (and a huge advantage) too.' Also, comparing the MP3 to the AAC is irrelevant as you're not comparing them to a control source, it's just whichever sounds better to you that you pick, not which is more faithful to the original. Pick some clips, get LAME and encode them with --alt-preset standard, they'll probably come out around 192kbit. If not, try --preset 192. Compare these with ABX (so it's blind) to the original
People have claimed time and time again that 128kbit is 'cd quality,' but it always turns out to be rather sub-par. You can only lose so much data before it starts getting noticable, no matter how good your compression algorithm. I think 128kbit is pretty close to that boundary. Every codec I've tested, I've been able to ABX fairly easily at 128kbit. Bumping that up to 160kbit makes most non-flawed codecs pretty transparent, at least to me. Above that, they are almost all transparent to the casual listener, which is why I continue to use MP3 as it's the best supported.
Huh? Are you saying that because AAC sounds better, using VBR at the same bitrate as a CBR MP3, it will sound better when the MP3 has 50% more bits to throw at the encoding? I highly doubt it. If the MP3 is VBR, I *really* doubt it.
I believe you're mistaken. As far as I know, libavcodec was written from scratch (and was working before any xvid code was even released, IIRC).
However you use it though, it's great software, well worth downloading.
Media Player Classic with QT Alternative (and Real Alternative if you need it) should be able to do that without a problem. Then you can get rid of QT too :P
I'd plug ffdshow rather than the (proprietary and inferior) DivX and (inferior) XviD decoders. It will play most mpeg4 content, including DivX and XviD and has a whole pile of postprocessing features (that greatly reduce artifacts) as well as some other filters (noise is really cool, makes it feel much more like a film). Not to mention the fact that it's opensource.
If you didn't know about it, I suggest you try it out. I use everything you mentioned, except ffdshow instead of the other codecs. It'll also let you select whether to use ffdshow or the original decoder in it's options page.
http://ffdshow.sf.net/
Yeah, except that unlike a whaletail, you actually get a real performance increase.
.1v overvoltage, and ~58C temps under load. It's solid, I haven't had any lockups or other problems.
Personally, I'd rather have a stable 2.2GHz CPU than a stable 1.83GHz CPU for the same price (my 2500+). No extra cooling,
I don't understand the aversion to overclocking. I've got an old Celeron 633 that's been powering my server for about 3 years now 24/7 and it's still going strong. The CPU cost me $75 at the time I bought it. If it dies, I'll just replace it. Who cares that a $75 part lasted 4 years instead of 10, replacing it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of purchasing a comparable performing CPU at the outset, and you'll definitely get a better performing replacement than you would've had if you spent the extra cash in the beginning.
By the time you're in any danger of causing real damage (like after 4-5 years of continuous use), you're going to want a new CPU anyways, so what's the problem?
Not exactly, it checks that the MX for the addresse's domain will accept mail for that address.
Unfortunately, due to spam, many mail servers now silently accept mail, and send a bounce message once it's been recieved, rather than rejecting it at the MAIL FROM phase.
And there are others that hardly get any spam at all. None of my address (save the Hotmail that I let lapse a few months ago) gets more than a handful of spams a month, and until fairly recently, they were all caught by SpamAssasin and dumped my spam folder.
I think that overall, the media's statistics are probably fairly accurate...though considering the number of people using Hotmail, they might be a bit optimistic...when I removed the exclusive spam block on that account for a few days because my DSL was down, I got over 80 spams a day, and I hadn't used the account...for anything in well over two years.
And, believe it or not, they piss off the on-shore techs while they're at it. They'd lie to customers about 'talking to a supervisor' or whatnot, and transfer them to our call-centre...which is (obviously) strictly forbidden by HP policy, and strictly enforced at the call centres here in North America. Not to mention not documenting calls properly, phoning about previous calls and trying to dump callers on us...it never stopped. I'm sure we were just as vocal as the customers were, and everyone on up the chain of command knew it.
Thank god I got out of that job, and not because of the off-shore people. It was just awful...