You're going down for being off-topic, but I'll try and save you --
How different would the US be if Reagan hadn't been in office? The communists wouldn't have bankrupted themselves in the arms race, and Russia would still be locked and closed. The Russian Internet would be incompatible with and detached from our own. The end result? Fewer Russian porn sites meaning less banner cashflow, cutting the value of the adware included with most closed source MP3 swapping software. If it weren't for Reagan, the iPod might well have been AAC-only.
Fuck. That wasn't very good. Now they're going to moderate us both down.
why in the world would anyone choose to get 75% performance with a negligable increase in sound quality (from headphones)?
It's not really a linear scale from worse to better. Setting aside the dogmatic choices a lot of the free software people make, the compression artifacts and failures of the MPEG layer 3 and vorbis CODECs is fairly different.
Even at higher bitrates, mp3 (or its encoders) tend to have a lot of difficulty producing tuned white noise, especially in harmony with better-formed sounds. A breathy voice or a flute can be murder to reproduce. There's also a kind of "glistening" that happens when it tries to represent overtones near the high end of the encoding frequency.
On the other hand, vorbis seems to more often fail with balances of the frequency range, making some components of sounds louder and others softer than the original, especially with the earlier encoders. Sometimes this merely gives you a too-tuned and prounounced bass range while bands in higher frequencies become too soft. At other times, more complex instruments can lose their character altogether. Steel guitar strings lose the harsher-defined overtones and sound more like nylon, for example.
Personal preference determines which kind of loss people will choose. Some even pick specific formats to best represent specific styles of music.
The iPod doesn't rely on its CPU to do the decoding for its mpeg formats. The bulk of that is done by a special coprocessor. Whether this is to cut power use or because the slower clock and coprocessor are cheaper than a faster general purpose CPU, I don't know.
Memory isn't a problem. The full of the iPod's memory is directly addressable, and there are even projects (including iPod Linux) which do Ogg (vorbis, really) decoding, however only at low bitrates. The CPU speed is the strangling factor here. If someone wants to do some hard work, they might be able to raise the bitrate a bit, but owing to people generally relying on VBR encodes, it's going to be difficult to fully enable people's libraries, even when they think they have mostly low-bitrate tunes.
The more important question: What do they have to gain?
That's the $10,000 question, really. And the answer is -- not much.
mp3 is supported because nobody would buy a device that didn't work with their current song library, and the majority of peoples' libraries are in mp3 format. Going forward, Apple would prefer to achieve as large a share as possible with their proprietary audio format (yes, I know the CODEC itself is open, but not the encryption wrapper).
The two adapters in the article are only for the MS keyboards and mice that shipped with a USB plug and adapter together. Since they weren't bagged together, a lot of companies split off the adapters and the mice, selling them on their own. The MS units use a pin to sense if it's a USB or PS2 port, and the mouse or keyboard itself has the logic for both.
I say don't bother to lock it down. They're on vacation -- let them
use it however they like. And without physically securing the thing,
there's not much you can do about some bored kid's hostile pranks for
the next guest. What I'd do is to get one of those cheap $30 IDE
removable hard drive kits and a second drive, then use Norton Ghost or
even a Linux install with a script using "dd" to make an image of the
normal drive's install on the removable drive.
If you make the removable drive have boot priority, you can even
make it an automated process, where the vacationers or the rental
agent are told they can restore the computer to "fresh state"
themselves by sliding the drive in, turning the key, powering up,
waiting for it to do the copy, then shutting down, unlocking the drive
bay, and putting the drive away again.
Aside from that, set up Windows update to install automatically,
use a DSL/cable router box that blocks pretty much everything inbound,
and hope for the best.
If the bitrate-tuned branches get merged back into the main encoder library, there won't be much reason to go with MPC.
If MPC default encoder remains superior to the Vorbis default encoder, this could be the beginning of the end.
The UNIX culture tends to like a single authoritative library for this sort of thing. If you have to use a non-standard library for better Vorbis encoding, it's going to lose interest.
There's one sure-fire way to make game developers instill morals in video games: pay for games with morals. Demand games with morals.
Don't try to control developers. Make a market for us, and we'll be more than happy to fill it. Beg the Veggie Tales folks for a game if that floats your boat, or get a huge petition going for a game based on a movie, book, or whatever that you feel strongly parallels the values you'd like to teach.
Game companies exist in a fiercely competitive space. To keep people employed and to keep shareholders happy, there's not much room for skipping past whatever the most marketable material may be.
They are relatively random, easy to remember (you can kind of pronounce all of them), and best of all, nobody has guessed a single one of them yet. I've been using these for years, and you should too!
Take a minute to think about the character of most of those banners (sex sex sex) and think about how public you think that court battle would go.
More likely is that the banner advertiser just refuses to pay and lets the spammer try and take him and one of his disposable shadow companies to court.
You'll find that a lot of the spammers present a load of banners on the unsubscribe page. There are still banner advertisers willing to pay per impression instead of per click, believe it or not, and this is one way of getting those in everybody's face.
For what it's worth, I read an article similar to this one about a year ago. I clicked all the opt out links in my Yahoo account and continued to discard spam unread in my self-run account. I'm only one guy, which makes this statistically insignificant (and thus, it would be highly irresponsible to do something like writing an article about it!), but I can definitely confirm that the Yahoo spam skyrocketed while my other account stayed the same.
"I don't know about you, but I don't always take a look at my status bar before I click on a link."
That's not really enough. A page can have a redirect to another page, or even have a tiny subframe that loads that "url" to execute a command to wipe out data.
One concealed tinyurl link on Slash or an Apple forum, or a tiny frame with a redirect to:
<a href=help:runscript=/bin/rm%20-Rf%20%2f>
is enough to run "rm -Rf/". Wiping out all user data with half a line of html isn't a big deal?
All companies have their own share of browser bugs, but this one's a doozy, so don't play it down. Prudence says you should exercise the utmost caution or use Mozilla until there's a fix.
Reread the second paragraph of the Plex86 page you linked to -- plex86
virtualizes like VMWare. It's not an emulator. bochs and plex86 were
started by the same developer, and virtualization versus emulation is
the difference between the two projects.
Go to the plex86 page you
linked to and download source. That's an excellent place to
start. Apart from that, boning up on the difference between user and
kernel modes and getting your hands on the free Intel developers' docs
on the Intel website are about as good as it gets for this kind of
learning.
Check out the PDA reviewed earlier today. It's a Linux PDA, and has a 640x480 screen. If you turn on subpixel antialiasing and have a view at that resolution, you couldn't want anything else.
Plus you'll have a lot more control over font sizes, orientation, etc with Linux. Even simply using a web browser would make for excellent reading at that resolution, and you could whip up some scripts to format whatever texts you like for HTML in no time at all.
(Posted via proxy -- I wish Slashdot would unban my home IP subnet. When will Slashdot be done beta testing their IP subnet-based karma system? Not all of us work at VA and have our own subnet.)
Be careful of the Belkin Omniview series if you're mixing PC and Mac. A good number of USB keyboards don't work properly through the Omniview, and you may find yourself forced to change keyboards. I couldn't use the Pfuca Happy Hacker Keyboard, an iMac keyboard, or the MS wireless keyboard. I ended up having to buy an actual MS Natural Keyboard before I could type properly. Belkin acknowledges the problem and says there is no planned fix.
The keyboard is also virtualized, and the virtual keyboard has very course control over keyboard repeat settings. If you've become used to specific timings, you'll deal with some frustration.
The mouse is virtualized as well. If you have a fancy mouse with tilt and a bunch of extra buttons, some of those features will be lost. It pretty much emulates a three button mouse with a scroll wheel and internet forward/back buttons. I read some forum problems where others' Logitech mice didn't work at all, but I didn't face any mouse problems myself.
Lastly, if you're using the 2.6 kernel, you definitely need to jump into the documentation and make sure you're using the new USB devices. If you're running the old keyboard-specific USB driver instead of the generic HID driver, keyboard detection will be erratic with most KVM switches.
I've got that very unit (the Dr. Bott) and it includes cables for four systems.
I'm switching to a notebook for my second system, so I don't need it anymore. I'd gladly work out a deal with you if you're interested. (You don't have an email address listed here, or I'd have written directly.)
I used TaxAct last year. It's free for Federal, though you want to purchase State. Split the cost with a couple friends if you like -- there's no protection, and one of their engineers actually suggested this (or said he thought many did it) off the record.
It was very easy to use and about as enjoyable as software can get before telling you that you owe a couple hundred bucks to someone. There wasn't any ambiguity -- it explains every step concisely, and even gives some tax saving tips for the coming year when you're through.
I was done in about ten minutes, and didn't feel anything had been unclear or "weird." The interface impressed me enough that I sent some feedback about it. (Least Painful Windows App Ever)
I'm looking forward to using Tax Act again this year; it promises to import last year's data so I should pretty much just have to punch in my W2, some money earned on the side, and then be done with it.
Well, in this case he (me) is very much against Windows. Unfortunately, I make my living doing things which need Windows boxes, so I have Windows and Linux at work, and Linux and Mac OS at home.
Either way, I don't see what my being {pro|anti}-{windows|linux} has to do with the merit of a post. The posts stand on their own, and I think folks will do better to reply to posts instead of replying to vague guesses as to posters' intentions, you bunch of touchy schoolgirls.:-)
Dude. (a) I didn't post it here, some anonymous coward copied my entry, and (b) wtf? You're going to hack my LiveJournal because I said "Linux Hippies?" Get a grip, tough guy.
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How different would the US be if Reagan hadn't been in office? The communists wouldn't have bankrupted themselves in the arms race, and Russia would still be locked and closed. The Russian Internet would be incompatible with and detached from our own. The end result? Fewer Russian porn sites meaning less banner cashflow, cutting the value of the adware included with most closed source MP3 swapping software. If it weren't for Reagan, the iPod might well have been AAC-only.
Fuck. That wasn't very good. Now they're going to moderate us both down.
Even at higher bitrates, mp3 (or its encoders) tend to have a lot of difficulty producing tuned white noise, especially in harmony with better-formed sounds. A breathy voice or a flute can be murder to reproduce. There's also a kind of "glistening" that happens when it tries to represent overtones near the high end of the encoding frequency.
On the other hand, vorbis seems to more often fail with balances of the frequency range, making some components of sounds louder and others softer than the original, especially with the earlier encoders. Sometimes this merely gives you a too-tuned and prounounced bass range while bands in higher frequencies become too soft. At other times, more complex instruments can lose their character altogether. Steel guitar strings lose the harsher-defined overtones and sound more like nylon, for example.
Personal preference determines which kind of loss people will choose. Some even pick specific formats to best represent specific styles of music.
Memory isn't a problem. The full of the iPod's memory is directly addressable, and there are even projects (including iPod Linux) which do Ogg (vorbis, really) decoding, however only at low bitrates. The CPU speed is the strangling factor here. If someone wants to do some hard work, they might be able to raise the bitrate a bit, but owing to people generally relying on VBR encodes, it's going to be difficult to fully enable people's libraries, even when they think they have mostly low-bitrate tunes.
mp3 is supported because nobody would buy a device that didn't work with their current song library, and the majority of peoples' libraries are in mp3 format. Going forward, Apple would prefer to achieve as large a share as possible with their proprietary audio format (yes, I know the CODEC itself is open, but not the encryption wrapper).
The two adapters in the article are only for the MS keyboards and mice that shipped with a USB plug and adapter together. Since they weren't bagged together, a lot of companies split off the adapters and the mice, selling them on their own. The MS units use a pin to sense if it's a USB or PS2 port, and the mouse or keyboard itself has the logic for both.
Hey, if they want that coming out of their deposit at the leaser's choice of price, it's all good.
If you make the removable drive have boot priority, you can even make it an automated process, where the vacationers or the rental agent are told they can restore the computer to "fresh state" themselves by sliding the drive in, turning the key, powering up, waiting for it to do the copy, then shutting down, unlocking the drive bay, and putting the drive away again.
Aside from that, set up Windows update to install automatically, use a DSL/cable router box that blocks pretty much everything inbound, and hope for the best.
If MPC default encoder remains superior to the Vorbis default encoder, this could be the beginning of the end.
The UNIX culture tends to like a single authoritative library for this sort of thing. If you have to use a non-standard library for better Vorbis encoding, it's going to lose interest.
We're terribly sorry about all this.
-- The Scientists
Don't try to control developers. Make a market for us, and we'll be more than happy to fill it. Beg the Veggie Tales folks for a game if that floats your boat, or get a huge petition going for a game based on a movie, book, or whatever that you feel strongly parallels the values you'd like to teach.
Game companies exist in a fiercely competitive space. To keep people employed and to keep shareholders happy, there's not much room for skipping past whatever the most marketable material may be.
More likely is that the banner advertiser just refuses to pay and lets the spammer try and take him and one of his disposable shadow companies to court.
For what it's worth, I read an article similar to this one about a year ago. I clicked all the opt out links in my Yahoo account and continued to discard spam unread in my self-run account. I'm only one guy, which makes this statistically insignificant (and thus, it would be highly irresponsible to do something like writing an article about it!), but I can definitely confirm that the Yahoo spam skyrocketed while my other account stayed the same.
That's not really enough. A page can have a redirect to another page, or even have a tiny subframe that loads that "url" to execute a command to wipe out data.
One concealed tinyurl link on Slash or an Apple forum, or a tiny frame with a redirect to:
is enough to run "rm -RfAll companies have their own share of browser bugs, but this one's a doozy, so don't play it down. Prudence says you should exercise the utmost caution or use Mozilla until there's a fix.
"help:runscript=..."
No double-decode, unicode obfuscation, or CMD.EXE parms. Even the exploits are user-friendly!
Dual heads = SETI for TeamSlashdot *and* TeamARS!
Go to the plex86 page you linked to and download source. That's an excellent place to start. Apart from that, boning up on the difference between user and kernel modes and getting your hands on the free Intel developers' docs on the Intel website are about as good as it gets for this kind of learning.
Plus you'll have a lot more control over font sizes, orientation, etc with Linux. Even simply using a web browser would make for excellent reading at that resolution, and you could whip up some scripts to format whatever texts you like for HTML in no time at all.
(Posted via proxy -- I wish Slashdot would unban my home IP subnet. When will Slashdot be done beta testing their IP subnet-based karma system? Not all of us work at VA and have our own subnet.)
The keyboard is also virtualized, and the virtual keyboard has very course control over keyboard repeat settings. If you've become used to specific timings, you'll deal with some frustration.
The mouse is virtualized as well. If you have a fancy mouse with tilt and a bunch of extra buttons, some of those features will be lost. It pretty much emulates a three button mouse with a scroll wheel and internet forward/back buttons. I read some forum problems where others' Logitech mice didn't work at all, but I didn't face any mouse problems myself.
Lastly, if you're using the 2.6 kernel, you definitely need to jump into the documentation and make sure you're using the new USB devices. If you're running the old keyboard-specific USB driver instead of the generic HID driver, keyboard detection will be erratic with most KVM switches.
I'm switching to a notebook for my second system, so I don't need it anymore. I'd gladly work out a deal with you if you're interested. (You don't have an email address listed here, or I'd have written directly.)
It was very easy to use and about as enjoyable as software can get before telling you that you owe a couple hundred bucks to someone. There wasn't any ambiguity -- it explains every step concisely, and even gives some tax saving tips for the coming year when you're through.
I was done in about ten minutes, and didn't feel anything had been unclear or "weird." The interface impressed me enough that I sent some feedback about it. (Least Painful Windows App Ever)
I'm looking forward to using Tax Act again this year; it promises to import last year's data so I should pretty much just have to punch in my W2, some money earned on the side, and then be done with it.
btw -- Anyone tried it with Wine?
Either way, I don't see what my being {pro|anti}-{windows|linux} has to do with the merit of a post. The posts stand on their own, and I think folks will do better to reply to posts instead of replying to vague guesses as to posters' intentions, you bunch of touchy schoolgirls. :-)
Dude. (a) I didn't post it here, some anonymous coward copied my entry, and (b) wtf? You're going to hack my LiveJournal because I said "Linux Hippies?" Get a grip, tough guy.
I'm thinking MS could save a whole lot of time if they'd just get rid of the network and user input drivers!