found an OGG vs. MP3 vs. WMA vs. RA comparison
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While googling for the name of a magazine I haven't picked up in years in order to refer to it in my previous posting, I ran into this comaprison of OGG vs. MP3 vs. WMA vs. RA. I thought it seemed relevant an might be interesting to some of you guys.
That ignorance is reinforced by blind tests with processes similar to the ones you describe above. (Check out Stereophile magazine for examples)
Then again, there are also factions within the audiophile community who believe that blind tests are bunk. (I don't remember if it was The Sensible Sound or The Absolute Sound that was a big proponent of this point of view - it might even have been both).
I am not an audiophile, at least not a true or dedicated one. I of course like to get the best sound I can when listening to music, but the main reason that I've read these magazines is that I used to sell fairly high end home audio equipment.
It just happens that earlier today someone on another board recommended Cyberonic as a DSL ISP and I was considering switching over from my current SBC DSL. I decided not to switch over due to their Terms of Service. A few tidbits:
PLEASE READ THIS AGREEMENT CAREFULLY BEFORE ACCESSING THE SERVICE. BY ACCESSING THE SERVICE, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS BELOW. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, YOU MAY NOT ACCESS OR USE THE SERVICE.
Nice. I wonder if they actually send the agreement to customers or just expect them to find it on the website themselves like I did.
Prohibited Uses
(I've snipped out major parts of this and the following sections, I'm only including the bits I find most interesting)
User may not:
restrict or inhibit any other user from using and enjoying the Internet;
post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, profane, or otherwise objectionable information of any kind, including without limitation any transmissions constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law, including without limitation the U.S. export control laws and regulations;
post or transmit any information or software which contains a virus, cancel bots, Trojan Horse, worm or other harmful component;
Interestingly, this section doesn't seem to say anything about intent. It seems to me that having an infected computer that sends out virusses is a violation of the TOS.
CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC reserves the right to monitor any User's transmissions when deemed necessary for providing proper service and/or to protect the rights and property of CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
Not sure that's a right I really want them to reserve...
Unless required by court order, subpoena or other legal request, or upon the advice of counsel, and unless User notifies CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC to the contrary by calling 508/753-4545, CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC may publish User's name and other consumer information in one or more directories which may be accessed by other Internet users. In addition, unless User notifies CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC to the contrary as provided above, CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC may make such information available to third parties from time to time.
...especially considering their attitude toward customer privacy. They don't even bother to specify what sorts of things might justify sharing information with thrid parties - or what kinds of third parties they might decide to sell^H^H^Hhare the info with. And you need to get a court order to stop them?!?
CYBERONIC INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS, INC may modify this Agreement from time to time by placing an updated Agreement at http://www.cyberonic.com/legal-notes.html, and User's continued use of the Service following such modification to the Agreement shall be deemed to be User's acceptance of any such modification. It is User's responsibility to check this online area regularly to determine whether this Agreement has been modified. If User does not agree to any modification of this Agreement, User must immediately stop using the Service.
As if the rest wasn't good enough, the agreement can change at any time and the only way to find out is to check their web site.
Let me know if those links are good, this is my first time posting this type of link anywhere. If they're bad I'll correct them if I can figure out how.
Scorchers (So underappreciated that it's unlikely you'll be able to find it to see it, but find it if you can - it's great. Angelica Huston, Jennifer Tilly, James Earl Jones and other greats as well as a couple of amazing unknowns work together beautifully in this hilarious film about sex)
Requiem for a Heavyweight (Jackie Gleason as the manager of a washed up boxer, with an appearance by Muhammad Ali playing Cassius Clay, the boxer who wiped said boxer out)
Sullivan's Travels (The film that "O Brother Where Art thou gets its name from)
The Hustler (Not sure this qualifies as underappreciated, as it got plenty of appreciation in its day, but my general experience is that most people my age (mid 30s) and younger miss out on a lot of the older great films. BTW, the book is even better.
...But I think most people have missed the point a bit. Seems that what most are listing are cult classics that are highly appreciated especially among geek crowds such as you find here on Slashdot. Now, perhaps many of you people don't live in regions where geeks are commonplace (I do, I'm in the SF Bay Area - you can't walk down the street without hearing someone complaining about how they can't get a job since ***.com laid them off around here) so maybe my perspective is a bit off compared to what many of you see in your daily lives. But then again, this is Slashdot, and it seems to me that the answers given would be much more interesting if they were designed to help our fellow geeks to discover somethig great that they may not have known about rather than just listing things that 90% of slashdotters can go "Hey yeah, that's a great one, I've seen it a dozen times!"
With that in mind I'll try to make my little list things that I suspect most Slashdotters haven't seen (no guarantees, I am a geek too):
Big Night (Make sure you have food in the house when you watch this one)
A Life Less Ordinary (Basically, it's a comedy in which Ewan McGregor kidnaps Cameron Diaz, but as a special bonus you get Holly Hunter as an angel wearing Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots are made for Walking" outfit)
SFW (Can't think of how to tell you about this one without ruining it 0 just watch it, it's good)
If you've seen them, good for you, I hope you enjoyed them as much as me. If not, cheek 'em out - these are great flicks every one.
I guess what' I'm trying to ask is will speed vary according to which link I use? And is my upload more effective (shared with more people with one link than another? Or do they all somehow go into the same bandwidth pool?
"Once you've seen the flexibility of the Mac's desktop environment (it does work the way your brain works) you'll want to hunt down both the M$ Windows and GNOME/KDE desktop developers and give them a good kicking."
No, it works the your brain works. I have used Macs. I've worked with them from time to time since the first Macs in 1984 up to and including the current OS X powered ones. There never has been a Mac OS that worked anywhere near as intuitively for me as other operating systems such as Linux, Windows or (in the case of the first Macs) good old AppleDOS.
Mac users like to go on about how intuitive the system is, but the fact is it's just the system that works for you indvidually. For me, it's a giant time waster as I search through layers of seemingly randomly named menus for ways to do things I could do in other OSes with a few clicks or a quick command or two.
Just what are we comparing this to? Isn't Kasparov one of the top players in the world, if not the very top? I've read in some articles that he's considered by some to be the best player ever.
This and the next story are both showing zero comments and they've been up for awhile. This post is partly just to test whether a post can even be made.
I'd like to believe you're right, but it seems to me that if only one or two or even a few countries hold out against the DMCA, that these countries will face trade pressure as the article points out Australia is facing - only worse, since in this hypothetical future scenario we're talking about the majority of countries having already given in to DMCA pressure.
"Buy Advanced Server and you are supported for 3 years. It should be plenty affordable for "big corporate/enterprise accounts" and because you have to pay for it, more credible in some corporate minds."
That does answer some of what I asked about, but seems to only address the server end of things. Isn't RedHat attempting to move into corp (and other) desktops?
And I do agree about the credibility of a product with a price tag - I didn't at all mean to imply that the pricing would scare off corporate buyers. In fact, if the plan was to make it necessary to pay the price of the OS each year in order to continue to receive support and updates, I would never have posted my question. I personally probably wouldn't go for it*(note below) but I would understand it as a (probably) sensible business decision.
Also, for servers, even 3 years is probably short to some admins - remember that there are still many servers out there running RedHat 6.2 or FreeBSD boxes that have been updating via cvs for easily more than 3 years.
*Yes I'm one of the "freeloaders" earlier posters complained about, but please note: I'm not demanding that RedHat provide a free download, just taking what is offered. Interestingly, companies like RedHat have never seemed to mind people doing this - why do some slashdotters have such bugs up their butt about it?
Isn't RedHat trying to woo big corporate/enterprise accounts? From what I know of the corp/enterprise attitude (admittedly not a lot), they don't wnat to have to upgrade the whole OS on a yearly basis in order to stay up to date.
I do realize that the packages themselves will very likely be upgraded and that any admin can go get them and apply the updates himself, but isn't up2date and its associated collection of updates in one easy to find place one of the biggest selling points?
How is RedHat not shooting itself in the foot on this one? Someone please explain it to me, I'd really like to know.
" Perhaps this is just a consequence of the fact that computer scientists have studied chess substantially more than they have studied go."
It's very likely true that there has been less time in man hours spent developing Go playing programs than Chess playing, but there has been a very significant amount of time spent on the problem by some very intelligent people who are both good Go players and good programmers. So I would say that it is unlikely that this is the root of the difference. After all, Backgammon and Checkers have both also had significantly less time dedicated to developing programs that play and the programs out there play at championship level. Go is just a harder game to program. Its style of play doesn't lend itself well to linear lookahead or databases of board positions (or, in the case of backgammon, statistical prediction of dice) as the other games mentioned above do.
"I also don't understand why people think that because a computer program can play better than you means that you should stop playing. These games are deterministic and finite -- there is a mathematically perfect play whether or not somebody has calculated it. It really makes no difference to me as a chess player that a machine can trounce me any more than it does that Kasparov could trounce me."
Agreed. The games are still fun and still have something to teach me.
I liked Diablo2 too. I played the hell out of it for a couple months.
But I do have some complaints, the biggest one is that it was too damned short, to the point where I would call it a design flaw. Why is it that the best and most interesting skills don't appear until level 30 when most people will have finished the game by then? Yes I know about Nightmare and Hell modes, but that gets repetitive pretty quickly. Properly done, there would have been enough new and different areas that one would naturally get to explore the world/their characters up through around level 50-60. Plenty of other RPG style games do it - look at the Might & Magic series for example. You shouldn't have to play the same area until you're playing a new character.
That was a game design decision, not an inability to program. Blizzard intentionally made the game that way - It's part of what made WC3 a new and different game rather than a me-too RTS like the C&C sequels.
And I'll add another: While I defintiely enjoyed the ones already listed, Good Omens (cowrttien with Terry Pratchett) is the best I've seen from him. I think the two authors work together beautifully - Gaiman has the ideas/concepts and Pratchett is a master of putting the words together wittily.
The first page you linked doesn't link to the Windows client - it links to completedir which is for serving up files only (although the dfirections it gives give the impression that it's linking to the client - if you are or know the maintainer of that page, you may want to change it/let them know).
"In my present set of requirements (token ring + NAT + Apache+SSL+J2EE+SAMBA+Qmail), it now feels like I should head for Solaris from RedHat."
It's been my understanding that Qmail and Solaris are not generally the best combination due largely to Qmail's tendency to fork often and Solaris's sluggishness with forking processes. Have you had experience that runs counter to this information?
Think about it. This is not an opposing viewpoint, it's deliberately worded to provoke. And it's outright silly: The students will have to relearn in order to use IE after learning on Mozilla?
Take a look at the user's posting history and see that he consistently trolls similarly.
Follow his personal link. I haven't done this, but I have a feeling I can guess what you'll find there. Hint: The name of the picture is yhbt.jpg - what do you think "yhbt" stands for?
I'm all for opposing viewpoints and will mod up people who speak intelligently supporting opposing views to my own, but just because someone posting something negative about Linux got modded down doesn't mean the mod was being unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
While googling for the name of a magazine I haven't picked up in years in order to refer to it in my previous posting, I ran into this comaprison of OGG vs. MP3 vs. WMA vs. RA. I thought it seemed relevant an might be interesting to some of you guys.
But....
That ignorance is reinforced by blind tests with processes similar to the ones you describe above. (Check out Stereophile magazine for examples)
Then again, there are also factions within the audiophile community who believe that blind tests are bunk. (I don't remember if it was The Sensible Sound or The Absolute Sound that was a big proponent of this point of view - it might even have been both).
I am not an audiophile, at least not a true or dedicated one. I of course like to get the best sound I can when listening to music, but the main reason that I've read these magazines is that I used to sell fairly high end home audio equipment.
Nice. I wonder if they actually send the agreement to customers or just expect them to find it on the website themselves like I did.
Interestingly, this section doesn't seem to say anything about intent. It seems to me that having an infected computer that sends out virusses is a violation of the TOS.
Not sure that's a right I really want them to reserve...
As if the rest wasn't good enough, the agreement can change at any time and the only way to find out is to check their web site.
This is an important request. We need RedHat's MD5 sums to be able to properly verify the isos.
I've put BitTorrent as well as the redhat9.torrent file onto the Gnutella2 network via Shareaza.
R EXAKVK.QA52MAAYOCT5CVSQFCUD24AVT3Y7EBF2VPIBYRA&dn= redhat9.torrent
5 WJ6LZM.6LYARQMT3E6TDRYPZUUU4FQZJTYK7H7E5AFSUWY&dn= bittorrent-3.2.1.exe
As soon as I finish downloading the isos (In ~8 hours according to the BT client) I'll put them up too.
Here's the URIs if anyone's interested:
magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:KPKJPITE2FDTIJ776V3542BRE
magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:WWPHGP7VAWBZMXAY5FDEVSWER
Let me know if those links are good, this is my first time posting this type of link anywhere. If they're bad I'll correct them if I can figure out how.
With that in mind I'll try to make my little list things that I suspect most Slashdotters haven't seen (no guarantees, I am a geek too):
If you've seen them, good for you, I hope you enjoyed them as much as me. If not, cheek 'em out - these are great flicks every one.
I guess what' I'm trying to ask is will speed vary according to which link I use? And is my upload more effective (shared with more people with one link than another? Or do they all somehow go into the same bandwidth pool?
"Once you've seen the flexibility of the Mac's desktop environment (it does work the way your brain works) you'll want to hunt down both the M$ Windows and GNOME/KDE desktop developers and give them a good kicking."
No, it works the your brain works. I have used Macs. I've worked with them from time to time since the first Macs in 1984 up to and including the current OS X powered ones. There never has been a Mac OS that worked anywhere near as intuitively for me as other operating systems such as Linux, Windows or (in the case of the first Macs) good old AppleDOS.
Mac users like to go on about how intuitive the system is, but the fact is it's just the system that works for you indvidually. For me, it's a giant time waster as I search through layers of seemingly randomly named menus for ways to do things I could do in other OSes with a few clicks or a quick command or two.
Absolutely ;)
"While the quality of play was not outstanding"
Just what are we comparing this to? Isn't Kasparov one of the top players in the world, if not the very top? I've read in some articles that he's considered by some to be the best player ever.
This and the next story are both showing zero comments and they've been up for awhile. This post is partly just to test whether a post can even be made.
I dunno...
I'd like to believe you're right, but it seems to me that if only one or two or even a few countries hold out against the DMCA, that these countries will face trade pressure as the article points out Australia is facing - only worse, since in this hypothetical future scenario we're talking about the majority of countries having already given in to DMCA pressure.
"Buy Advanced Server and you are supported for 3 years. It should be plenty affordable for "big corporate/enterprise accounts" and because you have to pay for it, more credible in some corporate minds."
That does answer some of what I asked about, but seems to only address the server end of things. Isn't RedHat attempting to move into corp (and other) desktops?
And I do agree about the credibility of a product with a price tag - I didn't at all mean to imply that the pricing would scare off corporate buyers. In fact, if the plan was to make it necessary to pay the price of the OS each year in order to continue to receive support and updates, I would never have posted my question. I personally probably wouldn't go for it*(note below) but I would understand it as a (probably) sensible business decision.
Also, for servers, even 3 years is probably short to some admins - remember that there are still many servers out there running RedHat 6.2 or FreeBSD boxes that have been updating via cvs for easily more than 3 years.
*Yes I'm one of the "freeloaders" earlier posters complained about, but please note: I'm not demanding that RedHat provide a free download, just taking what is offered. Interestingly, companies like RedHat have never seemed to mind people doing this - why do some slashdotters have such bugs up their butt about it?
But it seems like a really stupid move to me.
Isn't RedHat trying to woo big corporate/enterprise accounts? From what I know of the corp/enterprise attitude (admittedly not a lot), they don't wnat to have to upgrade the whole OS on a yearly basis in order to stay up to date.
I do realize that the packages themselves will very likely be upgraded and that any admin can go get them and apply the updates himself, but isn't up2date and its associated collection of updates in one easy to find place one of the biggest selling points?
How is RedHat not shooting itself in the foot on this one? Someone please explain it to me, I'd really like to know.
" Perhaps this is just a consequence of the fact that computer scientists have studied chess substantially more than they have studied go."
It's very likely true that there has been less time in man hours spent developing Go playing programs than Chess playing, but there has been a very significant amount of time spent on the problem by some very intelligent people who are both good Go players and good programmers. So I would say that it is unlikely that this is the root of the difference. After all, Backgammon and Checkers have both also had significantly less time dedicated to developing programs that play and the programs out there play at championship level. Go is just a harder game to program. Its style of play doesn't lend itself well to linear lookahead or databases of board positions (or, in the case of backgammon, statistical prediction of dice) as the other games mentioned above do.
"I also don't understand why people think that because a computer program can play better than you means that you should stop playing. These games are deterministic and finite -- there is a mathematically perfect play whether or not somebody has calculated it. It really makes no difference to me as a chess player that a machine can trounce me any more than it does that Kasparov could trounce me."
Agreed. The games are still fun and still have something to teach me.
I liked Diablo2 too. I played the hell out of it for a couple months.
But I do have some complaints, the biggest one is that it was too damned short, to the point where I would call it a design flaw. Why is it that the best and most interesting skills don't appear until level 30 when most people will have finished the game by then? Yes I know about Nightmare and Hell modes, but that gets repetitive pretty quickly. Properly done, there would have been enough new and different areas that one would naturally get to explore the world/their characters up through around level 50-60. Plenty of other RPG style games do it - look at the Might & Magic series for example. You shouldn't have to play the same area until you're playing a new character.
That was a game design decision, not an inability to program. Blizzard intentionally made the game that way - It's part of what made WC3 a new and different game rather than a me-too RTS like the C&C sequels.
And I'll add another: While I defintiely enjoyed the ones already listed, Good Omens (cowrttien with Terry Pratchett) is the best I've seen from him. I think the two authors work together beautifully - Gaiman has the ideas/concepts and Pratchett is a master of putting the words together wittily.
The first page you linked doesn't link to the Windows client - it links to completedir which is for serving up files only (although the dfirections it gives give the impression that it's linking to the client - if you are or know the maintainer of that page, you may want to change it/let them know).
You can get the Windows clients from here.
"In my present set of requirements (token ring + NAT + Apache+SSL+J2EE+SAMBA+Qmail), it now feels like I should head for Solaris from RedHat."
It's been my understanding that Qmail and Solaris are not generally the best combination due largely to Qmail's tendency to fork often and Solaris's sluggishness with forking processes. Have you had experience that runs counter to this information?
A joke right? It's the same guy.
And BTW, his non-SF stuff is far superior.
Think about it. This is not an opposing viewpoint, it's deliberately worded to provoke. And it's outright silly: The students will have to relearn in order to use IE after learning on Mozilla?
Take a look at the user's posting history and see that he consistently trolls similarly.
Follow his personal link. I haven't done this, but I have a feeling I can guess what you'll find there. Hint: The name of the picture is yhbt.jpg - what do you think "yhbt" stands for?
I'm all for opposing viewpoints and will mod up people who speak intelligently supporting opposing views to my own, but just because someone posting something negative about Linux got modded down doesn't mean the mod was being unfair.
But we've got enough already.
"Prosecuted"
Microsoft gets persecuted all the time, right here on Slashdot.