The new Beatles CD is only 78 minutes
on
99 Minute CDs?
·
· Score: 1
There are 27 tracks on the new Beatles CD with an average length of less than 3 minutes. The whole thing is under 78 minutes - so nothing new there.
As for the music industry going for something that has compatibility problems, I strongly doubt it. If even a small fraction of customers return their discs, then the cost will be enormous.
If you have been reading Slashdot for a while you might remember this story about a copy protection scheme that BMG trialled in Germany. Compatability problems put an end to it.
I just looked at the driver you referred to.
It IS binary only. The single source file exists only to enable the kernel version number to be linked into the module. Here's the comment from that file:
"For the definition of __module_kernel_version[] so that the modem driver can be compatible with various Linux kernel versions."
The world wide web consortium (w3c) has anointed
the xml basd svg (scalable vector graphics) format.
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
Adobe are supporting SVG.
They have a browser plugin to view svg graphics for windows and mac. (Mozilla also supports svg)
Adobe's drawing products have svg output.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/
Some other links:
http://www.blackdirt.com/graphics/svg/
It sound like they compiled with gcc using the
-march=i686 switch instead of the -cpu=i686 switch. The former switch allows the compiler to use optimisations that wont work on older architectures. The latter option still optimises for the given archicture, but doesn't break backwards compatiblity, therefore it makes more sense for a publicly released binary.
Note that an AMD K6 is compatible with the intel Pentium instruction set and not the Pentium Pro instruction set (as used by PII's and Celerons)
I you are compiling for yourself on an AMD K6
try the -march=k6 switch.
Those that are interested in the architecure dependent optimisations for the i386 family, see:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc_2.html#SEC33
See, we got our explicitly-spelled-out right to bear arms from the fact that an oppressive government (Britain) was denying the Colonies the same rights Englishmen had, and was trying to restrict gun ownership and importation as one measure to keep the Colonies under their thumb.
Ironic that a country that was so oppressed by the British is one of the few in the world that still uses their system of weights and measures.
I would like to see a paperback book sized screen with the same 200 dpi technology. Then a portable device for reading e-texts might suddenly be a killer app. As it is, reading from any current screen technology for a length of time causes me far more eyestrain. Put this density of screen in one of those transmeta prototype web pads and you have a killer combination in my opinion.
When the current agreement was made almost all of the Australia U.S. traffic was generated by Australians. Thus Australians footed the entire cost. That made sense then, but times have changed and a significant proportion of the traffic between Australia and the U.S. (about 30% of the total according to the article) is generated by Americans. The new agreement should reflect this. The U.S. carriers would not have agreed to pay more than their fair share, rather the agreements reflect the current situation.
You don't *need* to compile the kernel to update the kernel. Most distributions come with a number of precompiled kernels which suit a almost all desktop users. These can be installed by the distributions package manager. Typically these kernels have a large number of modules precompiled. The kernel only loads the modules that you use. You can download updated kernel binary packages from your distributinon's ftp mirror.
Many people like to recompile the kernel. Some of these have special needs or want to try experimental features. Others just want to do it for the geek factor. Chopping out unused features can gain you a few k of ram or a bit more effiecieny and a great deal of personal satisfaction. Compiling the kernel is not much more difficult than installing a binary. The main problem is the vast array of options. The help in menuconfig gives some clue, but there is a large potential for leaving out a vital feature. I once left out support for virtual consoles - and I couldn't see anything when I booted. Of course I probably could have telnetted into the box, but I didn't realise that at the time. Luckily I always keep the stock kernel as an option in lilo, so backtracking is easy.
To read the above message you need to use the ROT-13 algorithm. Simply replace each character with the one 13 characters distant in the alphabet. For example a n, b o, m z. Then change the spacing and remove the obviously padding characters.
The test encoder uses a variable bit rate with a minimum rate of 128 kb/s and and a maximum of 160 kb/s. The author probably did not appreciate that. The vorbis library supports a wide range of encoding options, includeing constant bit rate. The fully featured command line front end to the library is not finished yet.
CHM isn't portable, but I still think that we need an open CHM like format. A simple standard archive format for a group of html pages and their associated graphics files. I sometimes save a web page as mht in IE. This format is designed for mailing web pages. It shouldn't be too hard to make other browsers support it since is merely tacks the images onto the end of the file in base64 format. However I would still like to see an open binary format that included compression and support for multiple pages. PDF is overkill for many cases and it's a bitch to read on screen.
Telstra was formerly Telecom Australia, the government monopoly telco. Now it is 49% privately owned and has competition in a deregulated market. This has happened in recent years. While there is plenty of competition in the mobile phone and long distance area, Telstra is still the only company to provide ISDN and cable modem access. Thus consumers in Australia have no choice other than Telstra if they want faster than modem internet access at home.
I agree. I would really like a Yamaha RP-U100. It's an audio reciever (amplifier + radio) that has USB input. It's software controllable and also has the ability to mix sources. Having the DAC in an external component is probably the best solution for sound quality.
Do a google.com search for RP-U100 for some reviews.
According to an article that appeared in the Melbourne Age IT section a few weeks ago, it's not being restored to working condition. It is being placed on display at Scienceworks Museum, hence the current publicity.
The article stated that it was at most the fifth computer (electronic with stored programs)in the world and the oldest surviving.
No. There will be separate windows, linux and mac boxes which contain only the binary for their respective machine. These different packages should be released almost simultaneously. Id have always promised to release the binaries on the net at a later date so that if you will eventually be able to play on any architecutre eventually. However this latest comment is warning that the net binaries won't be out till after christmas, therefore make sure you buy your preffered version to play straight away. The delay provides incentive to consumers to buy their preffered platform package rather than the one which is most readily available in the shops.
Look at the processors used. Sharky uses a PIII overclocked at 800 MHz. Tom uses a PIII at 550 MHz. Gamespot uses an Athlon at 700 MHz and a Celeron at 500 MHz.
The benchmarks for teh ATI have a greater dependency on the CPU speed because the CPU has to do more work i.e. it does T&L rather than the graphics chip.
Using Gamespot's figures for Q3A at 32 bpp, 1024x768, the GeForce give about 41 fps for both the Athlon 700 and the Celeron 500. However the Rage gives about 48 fps for the Athlon 700 and about 29 fps for the Celeron 500.
If you are thinking about buying one of these cards, it only makes sense to look at the benchmarks for the applications that you will be using running on processors close in speed to those you will be using.
The old Quake 2 bugginess myth rears it's ugly head again. Most games are buggy because of their tight development schedules. Quake 2 was less buggy than most games. Quake 2 was primarily a single player game. It did is admirably well out of the box. There was a slew of patches in the first few weeks of release mainly because of people crashing multi-player internet servers. This had never happened on a large scale before. The deathmatch maps and ctf were only added in later releases. (3.13 if I remember correctly). Furthermore most of the changes were related to optimization and tweaking the game behaviour. There were very few critical bugs.
With GPL there is no 'steal' only 'share'. I'm sick and tired of reading that linux-mandrake have stolen from Redhat. GPL is an invitation to share, with the condition that the sharing goes both ways. Claiming that Redhat's works has been stolen is show a complete lack of understanding of the GPL. If Redhat didn't want threir work to be shared with others they wouldn't have released it under the GPL. Since Mandrake's innovations are also GPL'd Redhat is free to share them also.
>I don't want a harddrive in my car. >A CD/DVD drive is a safer and cheaper solution.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen. The designer of the empeg said that he had considered a cdrom drive during the design of the empeg. He ruled it out because car cd components don't have data capability (so they can't read CDROM) and CDROM components aren't engineered ruggedly enough for in car usage. The are rather flimsy designs suitable only for stable desktop use.
>And, Morpheus WAS saved, but it WAS not without a >cost. How does this contradict abagail's contention that the movies message was "ultra-violence will solve every problem."?
Check out grip. It's a graphical program that can be used to rip and encode mp3's. It has cdparanoia built in, but it can also act as a front end to the command line version of cdparanoia and cdda2wav. There are options available to make cdparanoia work faster. With grip I disabled "extra paranoia" and it ripped much faster.
I rip, then encode. I find that it works much better that way. The ripping is fast and the encoding works well as a background task.
If you don't want a graphical tool, several perl scripts can be found on freshmeat.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 27 tracks on the new Beatles CD with an average length of less than 3 minutes. The whole thing is under 78 minutes - so nothing new there.
As for the music industry going for something that has compatibility problems, I strongly doubt it. If even a small fraction of customers return their discs, then the cost will be enormous.
If you have been reading Slashdot for a while you might remember this story about a copy protection scheme that BMG trialled in Germany. Compatability problems put an end to it.
I just looked at the driver you referred to.
It IS binary only. The single source file exists only to enable the kernel version number to be linked into the module. Here's the comment from that file:
"For the definition of __module_kernel_version[] so that the modem driver can be compatible with various Linux kernel versions."
Chris
The world wide web consortium (w3c) has anointed
the xml basd svg (scalable vector graphics) format.
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
Adobe are supporting SVG.
They have a browser plugin to view svg graphics for windows and mac. (Mozilla also supports svg)
Adobe's drawing products have svg output.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/
Some other links:
http://www.blackdirt.com/graphics/svg/
http://sis.cmis.csiro.au/svg/index.html
It sound like they compiled with gcc using the
-march=i686 switch instead of the -cpu=i686 switch. The former switch allows the compiler to use optimisations that wont work on older architectures. The latter option still optimises for the given archicture, but doesn't break backwards compatiblity, therefore it makes more sense for a publicly released binary.
Note that an AMD K6 is compatible with the intel Pentium instruction set and not the Pentium Pro instruction set (as used by PII's and Celerons)
I you are compiling for yourself on an AMD K6
try the -march=k6 switch.
Those that are interested in the architecure dependent optimisations for the i386 family, see:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc_2.html#SEC33
Chris
Have you tried Opera? It is much better faster on a Pentium 100 than Netscape or IE and it should work decently on a 486.
See, we got our explicitly-spelled-out right to bear arms from the fact that an oppressive government (Britain) was denying the Colonies the same rights Englishmen had, and was trying to restrict gun ownership and importation as one measure to keep the Colonies under their thumb.
Ironic that a country that was so oppressed by the British is one of the few in the world that still uses their system of weights and measures.
> Some times I just want to kill the fuckers who > slap a K on the front of a decent broadly
> usable app and turn it into a KDE widget.
Ha ha ha,that's really funny
I case you don't know Matthias Ettrich is the author of both LyX and KLyX and the founder of the KDE project.
I would like to see a paperback book sized screen with the same 200 dpi technology. Then a portable device for reading e-texts might suddenly be a killer app. As it is, reading from any current screen technology for a length of time causes me far more eyestrain. Put this density of screen in one of those transmeta prototype web pads and you have a killer combination in my opinion.
Chris
When the current agreement was made almost all of the Australia U.S. traffic was generated by Australians. Thus Australians footed the entire cost. That made sense then, but times have changed and a significant proportion of the traffic between Australia and the U.S. (about 30% of the total according to the article) is generated by Americans. The new agreement should reflect this. The U.S. carriers would not have agreed to pay more than their fair share, rather the agreements reflect the current situation.
Chris
You don't *need* to compile the kernel to update the kernel. Most distributions come with a number of precompiled kernels which suit a almost all desktop users. These can be installed by the distributions package manager. Typically these kernels have a large number of modules precompiled. The kernel only loads the modules that you use. You can download updated kernel binary packages from your distributinon's ftp mirror.
Many people like to recompile the kernel. Some of these have special needs or want to try experimental features. Others just want to do it for the geek factor. Chopping out unused features can gain you a few k of ram or a bit more effiecieny and a great deal of personal satisfaction.
Compiling the kernel is not much more difficult than installing a binary. The main problem is the vast array of options. The help in menuconfig gives some clue, but there is a large potential for leaving out a vital feature. I once left out support for virtual consoles - and I couldn't see anything when I booted. Of course I probably could have telnetted into the box, but I didn't realise that at the time. Luckily I always keep the stock kernel as an option in lilo, so backtracking is easy.
Chris
To read the above message you need to use
the ROT-13 algorithm. Simply replace each character with the one 13 characters distant in the alphabet. For example a n, b o, m z. Then change the spacing and remove the obviously padding characters.
To save you time I have done it for you:
"I am the walRUS"
The test encoder uses a variable bit rate with a minimum rate of 128 kb/s and and a maximum of 160 kb/s. The author probably did not appreciate that.
The vorbis library supports a wide range of encoding options, includeing constant bit rate. The fully featured command line front end to the library is not finished yet.
CHM isn't portable, but I still think that we need an open CHM like format. A simple standard archive format for a group of html pages and their associated graphics files. I sometimes save a web page as mht in IE. This format is designed for mailing web pages. It shouldn't be too hard to make other browsers support it since is merely tacks the images onto the end of the file in base64 format. However I would still like to see an open binary format that included compression and support for multiple pages.
PDF is overkill for many cases and it's a bitch to read on screen.
Then what did this mean: ..."
"Granted, he can't cherry-pick ideas from the GPL stuff he seeded and use them in his closed stuff
Telstra was formerly Telecom Australia, the government monopoly telco. Now it is 49% privately owned and has competition in a deregulated market. This has happened in recent years. While there is plenty of competition in the mobile phone and long distance area, Telstra is still the only company to provide ISDN and cable modem access. Thus consumers in Australia have no choice other than Telstra if they want faster than modem internet access at home.
Chris
I agree. I would really like a Yamaha RP-U100.
It's an audio reciever (amplifier + radio) that has USB input. It's software controllable and also has the ability to mix sources. Having the DAC in an external component is probably the best solution for sound quality.
Do a google.com search for RP-U100 for some reviews.
Chris Wise
According to an article that appeared in the Melbourne Age IT section a few weeks ago, it's not being restored to working condition. It is being placed on display at Scienceworks Museum, hence the current publicity.
The article stated that it was at most the fifth computer (electronic with stored programs)in the world and the oldest surviving.
Chris
No. There will be separate windows, linux and mac boxes which contain only the binary for their respective machine. These different packages should be released almost simultaneously. Id have always promised to release the binaries on the net at a later date so that if you will eventually be able to play on any architecutre eventually. However this latest comment is warning that the net binaries won't be out till after christmas, therefore make sure you buy your preffered version to play straight away.
The delay provides incentive to consumers to buy their preffered platform package rather than the one which is most readily available in the shops.
Chris Wise
Look at the processors used.
Sharky uses a PIII overclocked at 800 MHz.
Tom uses a PIII at 550 MHz.
Gamespot uses an Athlon at 700 MHz
and a Celeron at 500 MHz.
The benchmarks for teh ATI have a greater dependency on the CPU speed because the CPU has to do more work i.e. it does T&L rather than the graphics chip.
Using Gamespot's figures for Q3A at 32 bpp, 1024x768, the GeForce give about 41 fps for both
the Athlon 700 and the Celeron 500. However the Rage gives about 48 fps for the Athlon 700 and about 29 fps for the Celeron 500.
If you are thinking about buying one of these cards, it only makes sense to look at the benchmarks for the applications that you will be using running on processors close in speed to those you will be using.
Chris Wise
The old Quake 2 bugginess myth rears it's ugly head again. Most games are buggy because of their tight development schedules. Quake 2 was less buggy than most games. Quake 2 was primarily a single player game. It did is admirably well out of the box. There was a slew of patches in the first few weeks of release mainly because of people crashing multi-player internet servers.
This had never happened on a large scale before.
The deathmatch maps and ctf were only added in later releases. (3.13 if I remember correctly).
Furthermore most of the changes were related to optimization and tweaking the game behaviour. There were very few critical bugs.
Carmack did make a $10000 donation to the mesa project which was used to pay a programmer to work
on the project.
For details see the news section of www.mesa3d.org
Also on the measa site it says:
"Please do not refer to the library as MesaGL (for legal reasons). It's just Mesa or The Mesa 3-D graphics library. "
With GPL there is no 'steal' only 'share'.
I'm sick and tired of reading that linux-mandrake
have stolen from Redhat.
GPL is an invitation to share, with the condition that the sharing goes both ways.
Claiming that Redhat's works has been stolen is show a complete lack of understanding of the GPL. If Redhat didn't want threir work to be shared with others they wouldn't have released it under the GPL. Since Mandrake's innovations are also GPL'd Redhat is free to share them also.
>I don't want a harddrive in my car.
>A CD/DVD drive is a safer and cheaper solution.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen.
The designer of the empeg said that he had considered a cdrom drive during the design of the empeg. He ruled it out because car cd components don't have data capability (so they can't read CDROM) and CDROM components aren't engineered ruggedly enough for in car usage. The are rather flimsy designs suitable only for stable desktop use.
>And, Morpheus WAS saved, but it WAS not without a >cost.
How does this contradict abagail's contention that the movies message was "ultra-violence will solve every problem."?
Chris
Check out grip. It's a graphical program that can be used to rip and encode mp3's. It has cdparanoia built in, but it can also act as a front end to the command line version of cdparanoia and cdda2wav. There are options available to make cdparanoia work faster. With grip I disabled "extra paranoia" and it ripped much faster.
I rip, then encode. I find that it works much better that way. The ripping is fast and the encoding works well as a background task.
If you don't want a graphical tool, several perl scripts can be found on freshmeat.
Chris