I'd also recomment the (shareware!) Exile series. CRPG-style, "Western", where the game is very nonlinear. The Fallout series is also worth a look.
I tend to also favor nonlinear ("Western") RPGs. I've always felt that if you're going to just want a movie, for the love of God, watch the move. Higher budget, and you don't have to do a bunch of work (build up, build up, build up) to watch little snippits of said low-budget movie.
Now, a Western RPG lets you explore, do what you want.
As an interesting aside, I think the reason they use the terms "Western" and "Eastern", and the fact that I use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" is because the Japanese love little closed, non-modifiable, single purpose consumer devices. Consumer electronics are huge in Japan. Computers, in the full-blown sense that we use them, are much bigger in the US. The consumer devices guide you along a path that the manufacturer chose, and the general-purpose computers let you do what you want, find your own way. This closely mirrors the way the Western and Eastern RPGs operate.
White noise (or stuff that sounds white to you, generally) is just random data. Random data is *hard* to compress (note: I didn't say impossible. If and only if we're doing lossy compression, it would be theoretically possible to say "insert five seconds of random data here" in some sort of compression scheme. Nobody that I know of does, since it's generally not that useful.)
In any case, existing widely-used audio compression schemes do not do well with random data. Someone hammering on cymbals tends to do a pretty good job of approximating white noise. Classical music doesn't have much of this -- metal does.
A flute solo is going to compress pretty nicely. Simple waveform, same waveform for a long period of time.
In general, the more complex the music, the more instruments, and the more whitish noise, the worse the music will compress.
file trading should not be considered copyright infringement, it's fair use
File trading networks in and of themselves are certainly not in the legally wrong, and attempts to eliminate them on legal grounds are pretty likely to fail.
On the other hand, actually copying the files is certainly not fair use. Fair use is a specific legal term used to refer to the legal exceptions to applying a copyright. Descriptive use, such as in a review, is fair use. Parodies are fair use. File copying is not fair use, whether you would like it to be or not.
Wow, cool. A lawyer *and* someone that doesn't print the "this is not legal advice" disclaimer.
I always wondered what the necessity of that was -- if you're a home decorator, you don't have to say "this is not professional advice" after each sentence to avoid liability.
Java uses a lot of memory. Each object, no matter how small, needs to have associated type information, GC information, probably permissions, etc, etc, etc.
Nobody runs out and buys a CD, considering all CDs for potential purchase equally. They tend to consider listening to a band that they've heard and liked before. Why? Because they hope that the *new* music will have the same characteristics that make them like it. I don't buy a Sisters of Mercy CD because I like the band name. I buy it because I liked other *similar* CDs by the band.
If you're releasing classical and then jazz CDs, customers have no reason to consider your CDs over any indie artist.
You're thinking of traditional, lossless, general-purpose data compression. In data, it's pretty frequent that you see patterns of exactly the same value, so general-purpose data compression algorithms are designed to deal with this. But we aren't using Huffman or something similar here, and the optimal input is not all zeros. We're working with MP3. The best compression you'd get with an MP3 would probably be a sine wave, since it's very simple once you run it through a Fourier transform.
Clipping probably actually makes the audio compress slightly worse.
It's a pretty good bet that FLAC doesn't compress clipped audio all that well either.
From a user's point of view, here's what's important WRT Java.
* Java still uses a lot more memory and cycles than C/Pascal/C++/etc. Generally, if there's a Java program and a C equivalent, you want to use the C equivalent.
* The IBM JDK is the fastest current way to run Java on Linux.
* Eclipse is the free Java IDE that everyone loves.
* No, the Freenet people still haven't made a C version.
The sort of person that is considered a Christian now is generally (in the United States) someone who goes to church more for a feel-good theraputic effect. They won't go to too much trouble for Christianity. It's nothing like the influence of Christianity six hundred years ago. Few people are converting to Christianity, and a lot of people (every year, a good chunk of each new generation) are leave Christianity.
Yes it was a tragedy that Tyndale was captured by the Roman Catholic Church and put to death because he had the audacity to suggest that laymen should be able to read the Bible without the help of a priest.
Martin Luther almost suffered the same fate for the same reason.
Having it freeware is awfully nice, but it'd be even neater if he decided to open source it so that it could be ported to Linux and other operating systems.
John Calhoun (author of Glider PRO) used to use a nude as his logo back in his Soft Dorthy Software days.
Wait, so, you refuse to use Macs (which are perfectly capable of running Linux and other open-source operating systems) not because you don't like the hardware, but because you have a philosophical objection to being only able to buy them from Apple?
Yup. Well, for pragmatic reasons -- there isn't much reason to buy a more expensive Mac when you're just going to run Linux on it, especially when x86 has wider binary support and better debugging WRT endianness in even open source software.
What would be the point of running NetBSD?
I probably wouldn't, on an x86 machine.
What would it take for Darwin to become just as suitable as Linux is?
The same degree of software support and market acceptance. The same degree of performance. The knowledge that it will be actively developed and supported for a long, long time.
What's the point of running KDE instead of Gnome? What's the point of using emacs instead of vim?
More people use KDE, GNOME, emacs, or vim than use Darwin (not OS X, just Darwin).
1) You have to be kidding. You can use attack software on *any* OS. Linux is no weaker (and actually a bit stronger in that it has some semblance of local security) than Windows here.
2) If you sieze machine and reimage them to fit with some policy you're following, your ass would be heading out of town from mass user complaints at any company I've been at. You are IT. You are present to help workers get their damn work done, not to push some random personal agenda. If you wipe an entire system and kill that employee's work, you are a serious impediment to getting work done. I simply am amazed at the total lack of regard for the employee, and lack of perspective you've displayed. You could disconnect the thing from the network. You could ask the user to move his files to another machine so that you can reformat it, though I think you're already pushing the limits. But when you simply grab a machine and reformat it, you're in a position where you are a liability to your company. When the developer tells his boss that IT wiped out his work, his boss tells his boss, and his boss tells his VP, I guarantee that your boss will not cover for you.
You want him having direct access to the 'net without a proxy?
WTF does this have to do with what OS you're running?
I doubt it, especially not after that email where he asked questions about what type of traffic you monitor and how you do audits.
This is ridiculously paranoid. I've seen the occasional IT type who considers the users he is supporting his enemies, but this is beyond belief.
What if he's okay but his box ended up getting owned because he downloaded bad BitchX source?
What if the same damn thing happened because he downloaded a Word file to his Windows box? Which of the two happens in far greater numbers?
That would mean another three day stint of no sleep doing emergency penetration tests, mirroring HD images, finding the exploits, sitting in meetings and explaining what all was affected hoping you didn't miss something critical.
You've worked in an 8,000 unit shop and you honestly believe you have zero penetrations? And your setup is such that you need to spend three days and nights mirroring HD images *after* an attack?
This brings productivity for the money-making sides of the company to a crawl while sysadmins and security folks work to get things safe again
And again, WTF does the OS have to do with this?
Likely, there will be a news source online with details of how the exploit took place, but completely wrong and now the public and shareholders are going to wonder if credit card numbers were stolen, your ability to properly maintain infrastructure, etc. Then your stock price falls $2/share.
Ridiculous. This is a theoretically possible but completely impractical story of what might happen in an attack.
Sorry to ramble, I just wanted to stress the importance of IT policy and the headaches that can happen when the policy is too lax.
Amazing. God, I'm glad the IT people that support me have different views.
(All those workstations came with an OS you paid for anyway).
The infamous sunk cost fallacy. Which they teach you to avoid in Business 101.
I also think this treatment of unapproved OS's is very common due to thoughts and situations like the one above.
It's not. That kind of behavior from IT would generate serious user complaints where I work. Matter of fact, IT is trying to quickly adapt to support people that want to use Linux here, and has compiled resources for them. That's what I consider doing a good, solid job. Helping the users instead of attacking them.
Macs have been a better deal pricewise than PCs since 1995.
I'm not sure what factors you're using in your calculation of "better deal". They certainly aren't the obvious cheaper per MFLOP or cheaper per byte of RAM or hard drive space. They aren't cheaper from a standpoint of number of folks you can serve on a webserver. You may have some metric that supports this, but I think that it's nonobvious enough that you need to expressly cite it for a claim like the one you made.
Its time to stop modding up "insightful" every troll who comes along and whines about Macs being "expensive".
You consider it trolling to complain about spending a lot of money?
IT just isn't true, and its a sure sign the person has never used a Mac.
Well, have it your way. I certainly can't prove it to you.
And the point to Darwin, since you're ignorant of what it is
I'm ignorant as to what additions from base BSD are in it, yes. I haven't been following Apple for years.
is that it has Apples new IO system, IOKit, and quite a variety of other stuff that is Apple written, and does not exist in BSD or Linux OSes (unless its migrated there.)
Hmm. This certainly is something, though I'm not sure many folks would choose an OS simply because they like the API for driver development.
There's more to OSX than "eye candy".... if you were a Mac developer as you claim, you'd know that.
I never developed on OS X. I gave up on Apple well before. Eye candy *is* the single most notable feature of OS X. When I left, Apple was still debating whether the BSD sockets interface was a good idea or not and whether Display Postscript should go in.
He started out with some obviously bogus tactics to make you feel like you were putting one over on him. Car salesmanship, real estate, etc, any sales of high-margin items is a fine art.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also recomment the (shareware!) Exile series. CRPG-style, "Western", where the game is very nonlinear. The Fallout series is also worth a look.
I tend to also favor nonlinear ("Western") RPGs. I've always felt that if you're going to just want a movie, for the love of God, watch the move. Higher budget, and you don't have to do a bunch of work (build up, build up, build up) to watch little snippits of said low-budget movie.
Now, a Western RPG lets you explore, do what you want.
As an interesting aside, I think the reason they use the terms "Western" and "Eastern", and the fact that I use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" is because the Japanese love little closed, non-modifiable, single purpose consumer devices. Consumer electronics are huge in Japan. Computers, in the full-blown sense that we use them, are much bigger in the US. The consumer devices guide you along a path that the manufacturer chose, and the general-purpose computers let you do what you want, find your own way. This closely mirrors the way the Western and Eastern RPGs operate.
So? If I run out and use Darwin *alone*, I can't use Aqua.
Pretty close.
White noise (or stuff that sounds white to you, generally) is just random data. Random data is *hard* to compress (note: I didn't say impossible. If and only if we're doing lossy compression, it would be theoretically possible to say "insert five seconds of random data here" in some sort of compression scheme. Nobody that I know of does, since it's generally not that useful.)
In any case, existing widely-used audio compression schemes do not do well with random data. Someone hammering on cymbals tends to do a pretty good job of approximating white noise. Classical music doesn't have much of this -- metal does.
A flute solo is going to compress pretty nicely. Simple waveform, same waveform for a long period of time.
In general, the more complex the music, the more instruments, and the more whitish noise, the worse the music will compress.
This may be the most useful analysis in the entire thread.
I prefer to have slightly more of a macroeconomic bent, but it's certainly insightful.
file trading should not be considered copyright infringement, it's fair use
File trading networks in and of themselves are certainly not in the legally wrong, and attempts to eliminate them on legal grounds are pretty likely to fail.
On the other hand, actually copying the files is certainly not fair use. Fair use is a specific legal term used to refer to the legal exceptions to applying a copyright. Descriptive use, such as in a review, is fair use. Parodies are fair use. File copying is not fair use, whether you would like it to be or not.
Wow, cool. A lawyer *and* someone that doesn't print the "this is not legal advice" disclaimer.
I always wondered what the necessity of that was -- if you're a home decorator, you don't have to say "this is not professional advice" after each sentence to avoid liability.
Java uses a lot of memory. Each object, no matter how small, needs to have associated type information, GC information, probably permissions, etc, etc, etc.
If performance is an issue, why would anyone *use* J2EE *or* .NET?
Who wants more of the same?
Presumably, their customers.
Nobody runs out and buys a CD, considering all CDs for potential purchase equally. They tend to consider listening to a band that they've heard and liked before. Why? Because they hope that the *new* music will have the same characteristics that make them like it. I don't buy a Sisters of Mercy CD because I like the band name. I buy it because I liked other *similar* CDs by the band.
If you're releasing classical and then jazz CDs, customers have no reason to consider your CDs over any indie artist.
It doesn't work that way.
You're thinking of traditional, lossless, general-purpose data compression. In data, it's pretty frequent that you see patterns of exactly the same value, so general-purpose data compression algorithms are designed to deal with this. But we aren't using Huffman or something similar here, and the optimal input is not all zeros. We're working with MP3. The best compression you'd get with an MP3 would probably be a sine wave, since it's very simple once you run it through a Fourier transform.
Clipping probably actually makes the audio compress slightly worse.
It's a pretty good bet that FLAC doesn't compress clipped audio all that well either.
1 is a theoretical advantage that has never managed to pull a VM-based language up to speed.
2 is true, though I argue that it's more because the languages are bounds-checked than because they run in a VM.
From a user's point of view, here's what's important WRT Java.
* Java still uses a lot more memory and cycles than C/Pascal/C++/etc. Generally, if there's a Java program and a C equivalent, you want to use the C equivalent.
* The IBM JDK is the fastest current way to run Java on Linux.
* Eclipse is the free Java IDE that everyone loves.
* No, the Freenet people still haven't made a C version.
The sort of person that is considered a Christian now is generally (in the United States) someone who goes to church more for a feel-good theraputic effect. They won't go to too much trouble for Christianity. It's nothing like the influence of Christianity six hundred years ago. Few people are converting to Christianity, and a lot of people (every year, a good chunk of each new generation) are leave Christianity.
Yes it was a tragedy that Tyndale was captured by the Roman Catholic Church and put to death because he had the audacity to suggest that laymen should be able to read the Bible without the help of a priest.
Martin Luther almost suffered the same fate for the same reason.
Neal Stephenson, for one...
Christianity started going away in the Renaissance. Not much left of it by now.
I hope not, or you'd likely make an English mistake.
Sadly, I doubt the courts will apply any punitive measures, even when SCO loses.
SCO would be the plaintiff, who is not at risk of having punitive measures applied.
Having it freeware is awfully nice, but it'd be even neater if he decided to open source it so that it could be ported to Linux and other operating systems.
John Calhoun (author of Glider PRO) used to use a nude as his logo back in his Soft Dorthy Software days.
Speaking of which, does anyone know whether anyone's hacked SCO since their announcements?
Wait, so, you refuse to use Macs (which are perfectly capable of running Linux and other open-source operating systems) not because you don't like the hardware, but because you have a philosophical objection to being only able to buy them from Apple?
Yup. Well, for pragmatic reasons -- there isn't much reason to buy a more expensive Mac when you're just going to run Linux on it, especially when x86 has wider binary support and better debugging WRT endianness in even open source software.
What would be the point of running NetBSD?
I probably wouldn't, on an x86 machine.
What would it take for Darwin to become just as suitable as Linux is?
The same degree of software support and market acceptance. The same degree of performance. The knowledge that it will be actively developed and supported for a long, long time.
What's the point of running KDE instead of Gnome? What's the point of using emacs instead of vim?
More people use KDE, GNOME, emacs, or vim than use Darwin (not OS X, just Darwin).
1) You have to be kidding. You can use attack software on *any* OS. Linux is no weaker (and actually a bit stronger in that it has some semblance of local security) than Windows here.
2) If you sieze machine and reimage them to fit with some policy you're following, your ass would be heading out of town from mass user complaints at any company I've been at. You are IT. You are present to help workers get their damn work done, not to push some random personal agenda. If you wipe an entire system and kill that employee's work, you are a serious impediment to getting work done. I simply am amazed at the total lack of regard for the employee, and lack of perspective you've displayed. You could disconnect the thing from the network. You could ask the user to move his files to another machine so that you can reformat it, though I think you're already pushing the limits. But when you simply grab a machine and reformat it, you're in a position where you are a liability to your company. When the developer tells his boss that IT wiped out his work, his boss tells his boss, and his boss tells his VP, I guarantee that your boss will not cover for you.
You want him having direct access to the 'net without a proxy?
WTF does this have to do with what OS you're running?
I doubt it, especially not after that email where he asked questions about what type of traffic you monitor and how you do audits.
This is ridiculously paranoid. I've seen the occasional IT type who considers the users he is supporting his enemies, but this is beyond belief.
What if he's okay but his box ended up getting owned because he downloaded bad BitchX source?
What if the same damn thing happened because he downloaded a Word file to his Windows box? Which of the two happens in far greater numbers?
That would mean another three day stint of no sleep doing emergency penetration tests, mirroring HD images, finding the exploits, sitting in meetings and explaining what all was affected hoping you didn't miss something critical.
You've worked in an 8,000 unit shop and you honestly believe you have zero penetrations? And your setup is such that you need to spend three days and nights mirroring HD images *after* an attack?
This brings productivity for the money-making sides of the company to a crawl while sysadmins and security folks work to get things safe again
And again, WTF does the OS have to do with this?
Likely, there will be a news source online with details of how the exploit took place, but completely wrong and now the public and shareholders are going to wonder if credit card numbers were stolen, your ability to properly maintain infrastructure, etc. Then your stock price falls $2/share.
Ridiculous. This is a theoretically possible but completely impractical story of what might happen in an attack.
Sorry to ramble, I just wanted to stress the importance of IT policy and the headaches that can happen when the policy is too lax.
Amazing. God, I'm glad the IT people that support me have different views.
(All those workstations came with an OS you paid for anyway).
The infamous sunk cost fallacy. Which they teach you to avoid in Business 101.
I also think this treatment of unapproved OS's is very common due to thoughts and situations like the one above.
It's not. That kind of behavior from IT would generate serious user complaints where I work. Matter of fact, IT is trying to quickly adapt to support people that want to use Linux here, and has compiled resources for them. That's what I consider doing a good, solid job. Helping the users instead of attacking them.
Macs have been a better deal pricewise than PCs since 1995.
I'm not sure what factors you're using in your calculation of "better deal". They certainly aren't the obvious cheaper per MFLOP or cheaper per byte of RAM or hard drive space. They aren't cheaper from a standpoint of number of folks you can serve on a webserver. You may have some metric that supports this, but I think that it's nonobvious enough that you need to expressly cite it for a claim like the one you made.
Its time to stop modding up "insightful" every troll who comes along and whines about Macs being "expensive".
You consider it trolling to complain about spending a lot of money?
IT just isn't true, and its a sure sign the person has never used a Mac.
Well, have it your way. I certainly can't prove it to you.
And the point to Darwin, since you're ignorant of what it is
I'm ignorant as to what additions from base BSD are in it, yes. I haven't been following Apple for years.
is that it has Apples new IO system, IOKit, and quite a variety of other stuff that is Apple written, and does not exist in BSD or Linux OSes (unless its migrated there.)
Hmm. This certainly is something, though I'm not sure many folks would choose an OS simply because they like the API for driver development.
There's more to OSX than "eye candy".... if you were a Mac developer as you claim, you'd know that.
I never developed on OS X. I gave up on Apple well before. Eye candy *is* the single most notable feature of OS X. When I left, Apple was still debating whether the BSD sockets interface was a good idea or not and whether Display Postscript should go in.
You can't run OS X applications on Darwin alone. You need OS X.
There's a lot of "security researcher"s out there. :-)
He started out with some obviously bogus tactics to make you feel like you were putting one over on him. Car salesmanship, real estate, etc, any sales of high-margin items is a fine art.