WordPerfect may have improved this since the last time I used it; if so someone please correct me. But as far as I know, WordPerfect doesn't have anything that come come even close to MSWord's Equation Editor. If you're doing anything even remotely technical (even a research report for your Physics class), this is extremely useful, almost necessary. The only other software I've used that can compete with MSWord's equation editing is LyX (a LaTeX frontend), and that currently doesn't run natively in Windows (though it does run on Win32 if you have cygwin and the Win32 port of XFree86, which most people don't).
Which is why for me it's LyX in UNIX, and MSWord in Windows.
Basically the fluctuation causes a temporary dipole, which induces a complementary dipole in the neighboring atom, which causes the usual dipole-dipole attraction (but on a much weaker scale than when there are actual permanent dipoles, like with water).
Some additional explanation with some diagrams is available here.
Well someone else already explained why wav -> 128 -> 192 is worse than just wav -> 128, but wav -> mp3 -> ogg is even worse. The main reason is that 128 and 192 mp3s at least generally use similar encoding strategies (at least if you use the same encoder), so the degradation won't be *as* bad (most of the data you remove to get to 192 kbps was already removed to get to 128 kbps). But if you do wav -> mp3 -> ogg, your mp3 files end up with both the artifacts common in mp3 encoding and the artifacts common in ogg encoding. And since they almost certainly have different strategies on what frequencies to keep, you'll lose a bunch of frequencies as well.
The only exception to this would be if you're transcoding either to or from a very high-bitrate format, in which case it won't make nearly as much difference. For example, wav -> MPC -insane -> Ogg won't sound much worse than just wav -> Ogg. Or in your case, wav -> mp3 -> Ogg -q8 won't sound too bad either (but -q8 averages somewhere around 250 kbps, so will take up much more disk space than your mp3s)
As for Ogg being a better format than mp3, that's theoretically true, but currently not really practically true. The LAME mp3 encoder has been much better tuned than the Ogg encoder at high bitrates (higher than 160 kbps or so), which makes up for mp3 being an inherently worse format; as such, the consensus amongst most people who have done listening tests is that Ogg and MP3 are of approximately equal quality at similar bitrates (i.e. LAME --alt-preset standard, which averages around 190-200kbps, is about the same quality as Ogg -q6, which has a nominal bitrate of 192kbps).
Mozilla is my favorite AOL product. Sure, it's free software and has quite a few contributors, but the majority of the core programming team are AOL employees, so AOL is primarily to thank for its continued active development.
And whenever I'm in Windows I use Winamp, another fine AOL product.
These socialist paradises are becoming very unfriendly towards immigrants. It's nearly impossible, for example, for a non-ethnic-German immigrant to get German citizenship within their lifetime. It's becoming increasingly difficult to even get into any EU countries at all.
Re:How to get people to take Perl seriously
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 2
b) I know Java is simply a fad language and the overhead/infrastructure only serves to give do-nothing architect types jobs
Let me guess, you don't know any Java and have never programmed in it?
I personally don't use Java much, but I at least know enough not to make stupid statements like that one...
Sure, it sucks if someone fucks up my stock fund, but it's not nearly as bad as if someone shoots me in the head. Violent crime is what the police should be focusing most of their energies on.
It's impossible to do an exact bit-for-bit copy of a DVD to a DVD-R, because the blank DVD-R media has some bits in the header burned out. So most such copies won't play on most DVD players, at least without some modification (either a firmware hack, a modchip, or discovery of an easter-egg in the firmware).
Even when CD-R's weren't that easy to use, they at least weren't too difficult either, and worked. You could take an audio CD, copy it to another audio CD, and have it play in any standard CD player.
You can't do that with DVDs. You can't take a DVD, copy it to another DVD, and have it play in the vast majority of DVD players. It'll only work if you burn your own videos to DVD, or if you have a hacked player of some sort.
So in a way, the copy-protection thing is working. Sure, you can defeat it, but most people don't bother. They want a DVD that plays on their player, and it's hard to get a pirated one that does, so they just buy a legitimate copy.
Four years ago, a few people would buy CD-Rs for pirating audio cds and computer/playstation games. Since they were still quite expensive, they'd charge people they knew $5 to copy discs, thus helping to recoup some of their costs. Sort of like a community-owned CD-R drive, only one person actually controls it.
Nobody does that with DVD-R drives currently, because it's not really possible to copy a DVD to a DVD-R and have it play in standard DVD players. So very few people want them.
There are non-free channels that have no commercials -- HBO, etc. Only if you don't want them, you don't have to pay for them.
On the other hand, the BBC makes everyone who owns a TV with a receiver pay for it, even if they don't like the BBC and never watch it. Good way to make money, if you can get it, but not exactly a fair business model.
If you're a government, and can fund your programmes with taxes (that you can force all television-owners to pay even if they never watch your channel), it's not too hard to survive. But that's not exactly a "real" business model.
If you can prove that you don't watch any television channels, you do not have to pay. If you watch television channels, but never watch the BBC, you still have to pay for it. So it's illegal to watch TV without paying for the BBC, even if you hate the BBC and never watch it.
Note that he said 35 Gbytes/s. THat's 280 Gbps. Even 10GigE would be woefully inadequate. Hell even 100GigE would just barely cut it. You'd need terabit ethernet to do it properly.
For 35 Gbytes/sec (280 Gbit), you'd need 280 gigE interconnects, and that's assuming you can perfectly divide up the data amongst them in realtime with no performance hit.
I don't think "GeekPAC" is necessarily the best name one could've picked if you want to be taken seriously. What's wrong with something a little more professional, like say "TechPAC"?
While source code may be a gray area, distributing working binaries implementing a patented mechanism is a clear violation. So the easiest target would be the distros -- Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, etc. And really, this is all they'd need to go after. If the Linux kernel has major features that none of the major distributions are legally allowed to distribute, it will seriously impede things -- either the Linux kernel team will have to back out those features, or the distributions will have to back them out themselves, leading to every distribution having its own heavily-customized kernel, at the expense of lots of wasted development effort.
I personally run Enlightenment 16.5, and don't use either KDE or GNOME, but I still need to have all the KDE and GNOME libraries to run the apps I use. And the libraries (libgnome, libkde, etc.) constitute at least 70% or so of KDE and GNOME's size.
Sort of like someone complaining that smoking is bad for your health, and you replying "but I've been smoking for 45 years and haven't had any problems". Still doesn't mean smoking isn't bad.
A great deal of the useful apps these days are too tightly integrated with one of the major desktops to be useable without them. As a result, I have the vast majority of both KDE and GNOME installed, which seems to be a bit of a waste (I don't have either actual desktop environment, but I have pretty much all the libraries, due to various dependencies). I don't want to have to end up having 1gb of desktop environments.
Slashdot Mirror
WordPerfect may have improved this since the last time I used it; if so someone please correct me. But as far as I know, WordPerfect doesn't have anything that come come even close to MSWord's Equation Editor. If you're doing anything even remotely technical (even a research report for your Physics class), this is extremely useful, almost necessary. The only other software I've used that can compete with MSWord's equation editing is LyX (a LaTeX frontend), and that currently doesn't run natively in Windows (though it does run on Win32 if you have cygwin and the Win32 port of XFree86, which most people don't).
Which is why for me it's LyX in UNIX, and MSWord in Windows.
Basically the fluctuation causes a temporary dipole, which induces a complementary dipole in the neighboring atom, which causes the usual dipole-dipole attraction (but on a much weaker scale than when there are actual permanent dipoles, like with water).
Some additional explanation with some diagrams is available here.
Well someone else already explained why wav -> 128 -> 192 is worse than just wav -> 128, but wav -> mp3 -> ogg is even worse. The main reason is that 128 and 192 mp3s at least generally use similar encoding strategies (at least if you use the same encoder), so the degradation won't be *as* bad (most of the data you remove to get to 192 kbps was already removed to get to 128 kbps). But if you do wav -> mp3 -> ogg, your mp3 files end up with both the artifacts common in mp3 encoding and the artifacts common in ogg encoding. And since they almost certainly have different strategies on what frequencies to keep, you'll lose a bunch of frequencies as well.
The only exception to this would be if you're transcoding either to or from a very high-bitrate format, in which case it won't make nearly as much difference. For example, wav -> MPC -insane -> Ogg won't sound much worse than just wav -> Ogg. Or in your case, wav -> mp3 -> Ogg -q8 won't sound too bad either (but -q8 averages somewhere around 250 kbps, so will take up much more disk space than your mp3s)
As for Ogg being a better format than mp3, that's theoretically true, but currently not really practically true. The LAME mp3 encoder has been much better tuned than the Ogg encoder at high bitrates (higher than 160 kbps or so), which makes up for mp3 being an inherently worse format; as such, the consensus amongst most people who have done listening tests is that Ogg and MP3 are of approximately equal quality at similar bitrates (i.e. LAME --alt-preset standard, which averages around 190-200kbps, is about the same quality as Ogg -q6, which has a nominal bitrate of 192kbps).
Mozilla is my favorite AOL product. Sure, it's free software and has quite a few contributors, but the majority of the core programming team are AOL employees, so AOL is primarily to thank for its continued active development.
And whenever I'm in Windows I use Winamp, another fine AOL product.
These socialist paradises are becoming very unfriendly towards immigrants. It's nearly impossible, for example, for a non-ethnic-German immigrant to get German citizenship within their lifetime. It's becoming increasingly difficult to even get into any EU countries at all.
b) I know Java is simply a fad language and the overhead/infrastructure only serves to give do-nothing architect types jobs
Let me guess, you don't know any Java and have never programmed in it?
I personally don't use Java much, but I at least know enough not to make stupid statements like that one...
You should be using PHP anyway, not C++. =P
Sure, it sucks if someone fucks up my stock fund, but it's not nearly as bad as if someone shoots me in the head. Violent crime is what the police should be focusing most of their energies on.
It's impossible to do an exact bit-for-bit copy of a DVD to a DVD-R, because the blank DVD-R media has some bits in the header burned out. So most such copies won't play on most DVD players, at least without some modification (either a firmware hack, a modchip, or discovery of an easter-egg in the firmware).
Even when CD-R's weren't that easy to use, they at least weren't too difficult either, and worked. You could take an audio CD, copy it to another audio CD, and have it play in any standard CD player.
You can't do that with DVDs. You can't take a DVD, copy it to another DVD, and have it play in the vast majority of DVD players. It'll only work if you burn your own videos to DVD, or if you have a hacked player of some sort.
So in a way, the copy-protection thing is working. Sure, you can defeat it, but most people don't bother. They want a DVD that plays on their player, and it's hard to get a pirated one that does, so they just buy a legitimate copy.
Four years ago, a few people would buy CD-Rs for pirating audio cds and computer/playstation games. Since they were still quite expensive, they'd charge people they knew $5 to copy discs, thus helping to recoup some of their costs. Sort of like a community-owned CD-R drive, only one person actually controls it.
Nobody does that with DVD-R drives currently, because it's not really possible to copy a DVD to a DVD-R and have it play in standard DVD players. So very few people want them.
There are non-free channels that have no commercials -- HBO, etc. Only if you don't want them, you don't have to pay for them.
On the other hand, the BBC makes everyone who owns a TV with a receiver pay for it, even if they don't like the BBC and never watch it. Good way to make money, if you can get it, but not exactly a fair business model.
If you're a government, and can fund your programmes with taxes (that you can force all television-owners to pay even if they never watch your channel), it's not too hard to survive. But that's not exactly a "real" business model.
If you can prove that you don't watch any television channels, you do not have to pay. If you watch television channels, but never watch the BBC, you still have to pay for it. So it's illegal to watch TV without paying for the BBC, even if you hate the BBC and never watch it.
It's not entirely necessary for someone thoroughly familiar with technology to have a scraggly beard, pony-tail, and D&D tshirt.
He linked to the Emacs page, which is in fact the OS that RMS has produced. It just needs a kernel to bootstrap it. =P
Note that he said 35 Gbytes/s. THat's 280 Gbps. Even 10GigE would be woefully inadequate. Hell even 100GigE would just barely cut it. You'd need terabit ethernet to do it properly.
For 35 Gbytes/sec (280 Gbit), you'd need 280 gigE interconnects, and that's assuming you can perfectly divide up the data amongst them in realtime with no performance hit.
A Libertarian named Carole Ann Rand.
I don't think "GeekPAC" is necessarily the best name one could've picked if you want to be taken seriously. What's wrong with something a little more professional, like say "TechPAC"?
When the last time a Libertarian came even close to getting elected to Congress?
While source code may be a gray area, distributing working binaries implementing a patented mechanism is a clear violation. So the easiest target would be the distros -- Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, etc. And really, this is all they'd need to go after. If the Linux kernel has major features that none of the major distributions are legally allowed to distribute, it will seriously impede things -- either the Linux kernel team will have to back out those features, or the distributions will have to back them out themselves, leading to every distribution having its own heavily-customized kernel, at the expense of lots of wasted development effort.
I personally run Enlightenment 16.5, and don't use either KDE or GNOME, but I still need to have all the KDE and GNOME libraries to run the apps I use. And the libraries (libgnome, libkde, etc.) constitute at least 70% or so of KDE and GNOME's size.
Sort of like someone complaining that smoking is bad for your health, and you replying "but I've been smoking for 45 years and haven't had any problems". Still doesn't mean smoking isn't bad.
A great deal of the useful apps these days are too tightly integrated with one of the major desktops to be useable without them. As a result, I have the vast majority of both KDE and GNOME installed, which seems to be a bit of a waste (I don't have either actual desktop environment, but I have pretty much all the libraries, due to various dependencies). I don't want to have to end up having 1gb of desktop environments.