OK, given reasonable, but not state-of-the-art equipment:
With most popular music, I notice very little difference between raw CD output, mp3 at a 128kb sampling rate and ogg.
If, however, I take a CD recording, say, of Sigiswald Kuijken and Gustav Leonhardt playing Bach's sonatas for violin and harpsichord (using period instruments, published by Harmonia Mundi - a fantastic recording) a lot of the "edginess", i.e. the almost subliminal higher frequencies are conspicuously absent in the encoded versions. Also, some of the "presence" and colour in the lower frequencies is lost.
It's hard to pin down exact differences between ogg and mp3, however. My subjective feeling is that ogg is slightly closer to the original, but I am willing to accept that my soundcard (ESS Solo-1) may not be optimal for strict evaluation.
I don't know if it's commonly done now (probably not, though), but when hardware resources were harder to come by, yes, this was quite common.
Needless to say, this kind of facility was never in the hands of COBOL programmers, for instance, but I wrote lots of self-modifying routines to link COBOL or FORTRAN programs run on diferent machines simultaneously. In those days, it was more or less expected that a decent sysprog should have no real difficulty with that.
Re:does *nix not allow self-modifying code?
on
OpenBSD 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you write in assembly code, you should still be able to by-pass the operating system, if you're clever enough. The days of the Real Programmer are pretty much done, however, and when memory is a lot cheaper than the programmer's time, there's not much advantage in writing self-mod code, no matter how cool it might be:-).
Last time I wrote this type of code was on Data General's AOS/VS (which pretty much dates it), and DG didn't approve of that kind of thing at all. It didn't stop my program from working, though.
Yeah, like that dumbass habit a lot of their printers have of spewing out full-colour test-pages whenever you're not expecting it. Like colour cartridges aren't expensive enough already:-)
I bought my lower-end HP Deskjet 930C because they were supposed to be well-supported under Linux. And they are, so I've no problem with that.
But I get through a fair amount of ink, and I have had varying mileage with refilling the cartridges. The latest ones, in fact, need a drill to get through the casing. That won't stop me trying, though, as cartridges cost ~$AU 70, which is a lot of money on a student budget.
Wrong? What is that? Surely the whole point is that there is no definitive right or wrong. If you were to canvass any group of Linux users (say here on/. for instance) and you would find that numbers of them like Blackbox, many like KDE and many like Gnome, while others are happy with emacs as the ultimate desktop environment. Are you saying any one of these groups is wrong? If so, then you should probably stick with Windows if you are content to be told what to use.
That aside, I can see where you are coming from with the dependency problem, and it looks very much as if you are playing with RedHat or Mandrake. I haven't run up against it for a while as I prefer Slackware, which has a very much more rudimentary and less fragile package system, which copes with compiled-from-source stuff more transparently.
While I stand by what I said about RH or mdk working out of the box, I never said they were easy to keep current:-)
I am definitely _NOT_ wrong about windows being tough to install at times, though. I have run up against some really nasty cases that have taken most of a day to get right, while some Linux distros are very intuitive and smooth to install.
For all the flamebaity tone of the parent post, the man has a point.
Redhat and Mandrake are fine for the newbie who wants everything with all the eye-candy to work out of the box - and given the hours I've had to put into Windows installs on occasion, I would venture to say they are easier to set up than Windows.
My preference is still Slackware, though. I've still got all the eye-candy, but there's none of that rpm or sysvinit stuff to get in the way.
The overabundance of choices scares the shit out of newbies, so taking the choices out of linux is a dumb idea...
Remind me not to use your distro when you release it. The whole point of open-source is to provide freedom of choice. Any distro that tells the user that he has to use StinkyFinger 0.0.1 exclusively in preference to Gnome or emacs is going to get a frosty reception.
If every Linux programmer were to jump in behind one product/desktop/programming language or whatever, Linux would quickly become as stagnant as microsoft.
I would be the first to agree that there are some rough edges, but over the last 5 years the "gap" in useability (as far as the newbie is concerned) between Linux and M$oft equivalents has narrowed or in many cases is non-existent.
You would probably notice the difference if you try the test with certain kinds of classical music...
Even then you would probably have to be selective. Rich orchestral works (say, Janacek, Mahler, Sibelius) won't show an obvious difference, but something more spare (e.g. Debussy string quartet or a good recording of baroque strings) will show a big difference that should be evident even on poorer quality equipment.
Quick disclaimer here: I don't use FreeBSD, but I have no quarrel with those who do...
But I find some of the arguments these guys have produced in support of their hostility towards Linux slightly disturbing. I am quite happy to believe them when they say that BSD is just as good as Linux for the desktop, but get a load of this:
in a seminar by the Australian Government. We supplied all delegates with a CD-ROM of OpenOffice for a number of platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and Microsoft. It proved to be easiest to install the FreeBSD version of OpenOffice. Linux required significantly more work.
This is just plain silly. What is so damn hard about./setup -net ? This kind of specious argument does nothing to convince me of the value of their product.
AOL might be chagrined to learn how little most Australians would care about their block. I've been blocking all AOL mail since 1998 on a whitelist basis. (I'm not with Large Puddle.) Guess how many AOL-ers have made it on to that whitelist?
Make up your mind. Never mind, I'll do it. The SARS virus is a coronavirus, a family that includes infectious bronchitis. Colds are typically caused by paramyxoviridae, which includes things like mumps, measles and pneumoviruses.
Pangloss Parity: No one will use a piece of consumer oriented open source software unless it looks and behaves exactly like some piece of Microsoft software
Except in the best of all possible worlds - since no-one else seems to have caught the reference...:-)
Maybe that is the answer... who knows, the question doesn't sem to make sense. OK, I'm not an expert on nanotech, but I'm getting there with biotech and last time I looked, the two didn't really have that much in common.
This is true - trouble is, Enlightenment seems to have lost its steam (April fool's pranks aside). Pity, though - I thought it was really cool back in '97 or '98.
There are more trees in the US now than there was 200 years ago
Come on, I always knew a lot of Americans were insular, but that has to be about the most ignorant statement I have seen (even on Slashdot, which is saying something) for a long time.
Am I right in assuming you are aware that there are other continents in this world? If not, I give up. However, if you are as educated as you claim, try taking a look at worldwide statistics for deforestation. I'm not talking about some piddly little "planted-for-political-kudos" little stand of trees the size of a tennis court in the US, I am talking about thousands of acres per day chopped down worldwide.
I know this thread is beginning to get a bit off-topic, but I think you might find there are a lot of bosses of large corporations (yes, in technology too) who get their secretaries to print off their email, as they don't have a clue how to do it themselves.
For the record, The originating IPs of 98% of the spam I get are traceable to the US. about 1.6% comes from.kr and.jp, while the remainder comes from stragglers like.ru. Funny,.ru used to send just under 10% of my spam, so maybe they've seen the light:-)
Slashdot Mirror
With most popular music, I notice very little difference between raw CD output, mp3 at a 128kb sampling rate and ogg.
If, however, I take a CD recording, say, of Sigiswald Kuijken and Gustav Leonhardt playing Bach's sonatas for violin and harpsichord (using period instruments, published by Harmonia Mundi - a fantastic recording) a lot of the "edginess", i.e. the almost subliminal higher frequencies are conspicuously absent in the encoded versions. Also, some of the "presence" and colour in the lower frequencies is lost.
It's hard to pin down exact differences between ogg and mp3, however. My subjective feeling is that ogg is slightly closer to the original, but I am willing to accept that my soundcard (ESS Solo-1) may not be optimal for strict evaluation.
Needless to say, this kind of facility was never in the hands of COBOL programmers, for instance, but I wrote lots of self-modifying routines to link COBOL or FORTRAN programs run on diferent machines simultaneously. In those days, it was more or less expected that a decent sysprog should have no real difficulty with that.
Last time I wrote this type of code was on Data General's AOS/VS (which pretty much dates it), and DG didn't approve of that kind of thing at all. It didn't stop my program from working, though.
Nice try. Slackware is God's chosen distro, as all right-thinking people will agree :-) but LFS is a lot more work.
Yeah, like that dumbass habit a lot of their printers have of spewing out full-colour test-pages whenever you're not expecting it. Like colour cartridges aren't expensive enough already :-)
I bought my lower-end HP Deskjet 930C because they were supposed to be well-supported under Linux. And they are, so I've no problem with that.
But I get through a fair amount of ink, and I have had varying mileage with refilling the cartridges. The latest ones, in fact, need a drill to get through the casing. That won't stop me trying, though, as cartridges cost ~$AU 70, which is a lot of money on a student budget.
Wrong? What is that? Surely the whole point is that there is no definitive right or wrong. If you were to canvass any group of Linux users (say here on /. for instance) and you would find that numbers of them like Blackbox, many like KDE and many like Gnome, while others are happy with emacs as the ultimate desktop environment. Are you saying any one of these groups is wrong? If so, then you should probably stick with Windows if you are content to be told what to use.
That aside, I can see where you are coming from with the dependency problem, and it looks very much as if you are playing with RedHat or Mandrake. I haven't run up against it for a while as I prefer Slackware, which has a very much more rudimentary and less fragile package system, which copes with compiled-from-source stuff more transparently.
While I stand by what I said about RH or mdk working out of the box, I never said they were easy to keep current :-)
I am definitely _NOT_ wrong about windows being tough to install at times, though. I have run up against some really nasty cases that have taken most of a day to get right, while some Linux distros are very intuitive and smooth to install.
Redhat and Mandrake are fine for the newbie who wants everything with all the eye-candy to work out of the box - and given the hours I've had to put into Windows installs on occasion, I would venture to say they are easier to set up than Windows.
My preference is still Slackware, though. I've still got all the eye-candy, but there's none of that rpm or sysvinit stuff to get in the way.
Remind me not to use your distro when you release it. The whole point of open-source is to provide freedom of choice. Any distro that tells the user that he has to use StinkyFinger 0.0.1 exclusively in preference to Gnome or emacs is going to get a frosty reception.
If every Linux programmer were to jump in behind one product/desktop/programming language or whatever, Linux would quickly become as stagnant as microsoft.
I would be the first to agree that there are some rough edges, but over the last 5 years the "gap" in useability (as far as the newbie is concerned) between Linux and M$oft equivalents has narrowed or in many cases is non-existent.
Even then you would probably have to be selective. Rich orchestral works (say, Janacek, Mahler, Sibelius) won't show an obvious difference, but something more spare (e.g. Debussy string quartet or a good recording of baroque strings) will show a big difference that should be evident even on poorer quality equipment.
But I find some of the arguments these guys have produced in support of their hostility towards Linux slightly disturbing. I am quite happy to believe them when they say that BSD is just as good as Linux for the desktop, but get a load of this:
in a seminar by the Australian Government. We supplied all delegates with a CD-ROM of OpenOffice for a number of platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and Microsoft. It proved to be easiest to install the FreeBSD version of OpenOffice. Linux required significantly more work.
This is just plain silly. What is so damn hard about ./setup -net ? This kind of specious argument does nothing to convince me of the value of their product.
AOL might be chagrined to learn how little most Australians would care about their block. I've been blocking all AOL mail since 1998 on a whitelist basis. (I'm not with Large Puddle.) Guess how many AOL-ers have made it on to that whitelist?
None. Not one.
Let's not forget the US agencies who are also hanging on to samples. Quibbling over who had them first is silly, it's a chicken and egg issue.
Make up your mind. Never mind, I'll do it. The SARS virus is a coronavirus, a family that includes infectious bronchitis. Colds are typically caused by paramyxoviridae, which includes things like mumps, measles and pneumoviruses.
What benighted fool came up with "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome"? Severe and acute mean the same thing.
OK, I might be being pedantic, but I expect better of people we're supposed to be able to trust with our health.
Except in the best of all possible worlds - since no-one else seems to have caught the reference... :-)
Don't you get ktired of keverything kbeginning with a kfucking K? :-)
Just as well, isn't it? :-)
Maybe.
Maybe that is the answer... who knows, the question doesn't sem to make sense. OK, I'm not an expert on nanotech, but I'm getting there with biotech and last time I looked, the two didn't really have that much in common.
This is true - trouble is, Enlightenment seems to have lost its steam (April fool's pranks aside). Pity, though - I thought it was really cool back in '97 or '98.
Come on, I always knew a lot of Americans were insular, but that has to be about the most ignorant statement I have seen (even on Slashdot, which is saying something) for a long time.
Am I right in assuming you are aware that there are other continents in this world? If not, I give up. However, if you are as educated as you claim, try taking a look at worldwide statistics for deforestation. I'm not talking about some piddly little "planted-for-political-kudos" little stand of trees the size of a tennis court in the US, I am talking about thousands of acres per day chopped down worldwide.
Sheesh.
I know this thread is beginning to get a bit off-topic, but I think you might find there are a lot of bosses of large corporations (yes, in technology too) who get their secretaries to print off their email, as they don't have a clue how to do it themselves.
For the record, The originating IPs of 98% of the spam I get are traceable to the US. about 1.6% comes from .kr and .jp, while the remainder comes from stragglers like .ru. Funny, .ru used to send just under 10% of my spam, so maybe they've seen the light :-)
Maybe one day. Who knows, maybe one day America will dismantle its "weapons of mass destruction". [/irony]