ProTools TDM, the full version of the software, comes FREE with the appropriate DigiDesign hardware. ProTools LE, the light version of the software that does host-based auto processing, comes FREE with the appropriate hardware. ProTools FREE, which only works with 2 in/2 out on-board hardware (and is limited to 8 tracks) is just free for download (no purchase required).
At any rate, more than 50% of DigiDesign sales (and their primary focus) is Macintosh systems, which is what most studios use anyways. At any rate, ProTools 6 runs on XP just fine, thanks.
As for the rest of your bulls**t about running plugins on the CPU... it's barely worth commenting on, but I will.
The TDM system is scalable.. if you run out of room on your CPU, what are you going to do? Buy a faster CPU? When you have a 3 ghz P4 in your machine and are trying to add one more AmpFarm (oh wait, Line 6 AmpFarm probably doesn't run on your CPU) plugin to your mix and you can't... you're kind of f**cked, aren't you? Start mixing down and rendering out (and thus locking your mix, which sucks, but hey). The Logic folks have noticed how bad this problem is, as you can "temproarily render" your tracks when you run out of power now. Cool, but limiting.
Of course, had you gone the less troublesome route and used TDM, you could just buy another farm card and slap it in.
Any argument that says that the CPU is good enough for higher end audio work is laughable... and clearly being issued by someone who hasn't had to work with EQ's, amp simulators, chorus and a decent sounding reverb across 3 or 4 dozen tracks of 24 bit audio. Hell, I was recording my band on 8 tracks and ran out of CPU power.
With TDM, you're CPU power (and thus, the part of the equation that you can only wait for moores law as far as scalability goes) isn't an issue.
Alas, most people are just going to record in their garages with a pair of microphones and a drum machine, so we're really splitting hairs at this point anyways, I guess.
I was clear that you get the software -with- the hardware... and the typical OSS-geek retaliation of "proprietary lock-in" is, as usual, short-sighted.
Most studios care about 2 things, in this order:
1) Audio quality 2) Ease of use
They could give two s**ts about having to diddle with parameters and run a compiler in order to get their studio running, just to save some money. Given what most large studios charge per hour, the investment in "proprietary" gear doesn't sway them, as they get an ROI on that investment rather quickly anyways.
ProTools on a PowerMac is basically a turn-key solution that doesn't require any kernel tweaking or compilation of device drivers in order to setup. This is the ONLY point that matters to most studio engineers.
No amount of "Oh, but you're locked in and it costs a lot of money" whining will sway them on that.
Until Linux and it's competitive offerings are -as- turn-key as Apple/Windows (and for the average USER, not someone who knows what the command "ls" does), they will remain the minority.
OH, and Logic Audio, for example, has released their OS X version with support for TDM today... the "no matter if you like another interface" argument is misinformed.
The ProTools Core Cards (which contain DSPS themselves anyways) are also multi-channel I/O cards that allow connection to external AD/DA convertor boxes.
Linux cluster? This is just never going to happen. Ping a box over a quiet ethernet LAN and you'll see 1-2ms of latency. Add in the processing time for the sample you're routing, and you're looking at like 4-10 ms of latency.
This is just NOT good enough for recording sound... not even close. The TDM hardware is unmatched because of the completely in-card path of the sound being processed. All the actual ProTools software does is give feedback to the user and allow the user to tell the ProTools cards what do with the sound they are processing... it doesn't actually do any of the lifting.
I guess MySQL is a small, unsucessful project then... designed on Solaris from the ground up.
Mind, MySQL is so heavily multithreaded it has to be... LinuxThreads are just -not- Solaris Threads.
The ProTools software is FREE. $0. No money spent.
The $14,000 you spend on ProTools hardware is for the very powerful (and very much worth the money) DSP cards that make ProTools -the- premier audio recording application among serious studios. I know that some people are going to respond with some justification as to why the MOTU 828 or the HammerFall is better then DigiDesign, and that's fine... we all have our preferences... but the DSP's offerred in addition to the audio interface in the ProTools TDM systems make them so much more powerful then CPU bound rigs for large projects.
To compare what you get for $14,000 from DigiDesign to what you get for nothing in the OSS world is a very invalid, and very misinformed. There is simply no comparison between what you get.
And don't even get me started on the rest of your examples. GIMP is cool, but Photoshop it ain't... Film Gimp is -really- cool, but it's not even close to Shake.
Being part of the open source world, I'm so happy about the efforts and advances we're making in various places... but let's not get our heads stuck in the famous "reality distortion field"... there is a VERY LONG way to go before the projects discussed in this comment rival their commercially available conterparts.
This should be given an off-topic rating. Do you hear that whizzing around your head? That was THE POINT flying past you and you MISSING it completely.
Yeppers, AltiVec is Motorola's implementation of VMX, the vector extensions developed jointly by AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola).
If IBM in fact licensed Altivec from Motorola, it becomes clear that Apple is -the- customer that IBM intends to be the primary user of this chip. There would be no other reason for them to ensure such close compatibility, IMHO.
AMD makes a lot of stuff, and the Apple/AMD relationship may still come to pass in the form of nForce 3 or HyperTransport, both of which are AMD technologies and both of which would work wonderfully with a pair of PPC 970's at the helm.
Just because AMD may be involved doesn't mean that the Athlon (or any other AMD CPU) is too.
I'm creating a pseudo TCP/IP stack for a wireless application, so I've read that lovely document from motorola.
-unfortunately-, this document is largely useful for TCP/IP stack implementations, and not in actual user-land code.
So.. if Apple studied this document and built the principals it teaches into the TCP/IP stack of their Mach kernel, all applications would benefit from it. Conversely, there isn't much you can patch in Apache (no pun intended) to add noticeably performance boosts via Altivec. *sigh*
As a side, the most fascinating part of the Altivec/TCP-IP PDF you mention is the paralell checksum routines Motorola discusses. Very interesting stuff indeed.
That we should have continued to fight Japan by conventional weapons and allow thousands and thousands of American soldiers (many of whom were innocent young men) die?
This was my point.
Why bother fighting with conventional weapons and risk the lives of BOTH American and Japanese SOLDIERS when you can just drop the A-Bomb (or two) on a bunch of Japanese CIVILIANS instead? The woman, children and elderly who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and continue to die from radiation related sickness) had no right to defend and protect themselves I guess.
Better them then a bunch of American soldiers, right?
To try to get rid of the Islamic radicals who took over the government in Iran. Y'see, Islamic-radical types are bad news.
Oh, so aiding one "Islamic radical" to remove another (just like the U.S. aided to Taliban to overthrow what eventually became the Northern Alliance) is OK then?
Like I said, people love to criticize without ever giving credit. The A-Bombs ended WWII, and the occupation turned Japan into a first-world democracy.
I'm sure that gives much comfort to the memory of the thousands who died in the process? Typical... if saving thousands of American lives comes at the cost of thousands of "non-Americans", then it's surely justified... along with a justification of "Look, eventually they were off on the right foot so it all worked out in the end... and they're no longer a threat to us!"... kinda like Iraq.
Agent Orange was a defolient. Anyone care to criticize the infant mortality rate of Communist and other third-world nations? How many hundreds of millions of babies have died from the U.S. not defending a country?
You so heavily missed the point I choose not to comment.
Britian was on its last legs before the U.S. joined the war. The French underground was not a fighting force; it was mostly an intelligence force. I doubt that Canada was a decisive factor. I think that you need to consider how the war would have ended without any American involvement. Europe would have been owned either by Hitler or Stalin.
Nobody suggests that Canada was a decisive factor. Nobody suggests that the French were a fighting force. Nobody debates the the addition of US troops to fight the Nazi menace were decisive. The point that you have so clearly missed is that all the other ally countries were in their on DAY ONE in aid. When Canada decidied against going to Iraq, the US government (and in turn, the bulk of the US population) cried us down from the height of morality for it, and the US ambassador to Canada actually went on record, saying that (par) "America is always there for it's friends on day one. Shame on you Canada!"
I agree that it's a sad, sad world out there beyond our comfy chairs. But, hey, you can always have fun punching your favorite punching bag.
Hey, if there was a better punching bag, I'd punch at it too. My own government is hardly made up of saints... I spoiled my last vote on the grounds that the current Liberal governement in Canada largely seems corrupt, and there are definately more oppressive regimes in the world then the Americans.
Nobody debates this. Nobody denies that US contribution to what we consider "the western ideal" has been invaluable. What people HATE is the self-righteousness FUD that your government spews, smearing everyone else in the process.
People HATE when the only nation to ever -really- use WMD's invades another nation for supposedly having WMD's (oh wait, it was liberation you invaded for, right? Since there haven't been any real WMD's the story had to change in a hurry).
People HATE when one sovereign, western nation makes threats against another for having bad border policy... totally forgetting that the majority of those involved in (for example) the 9/11 incident came directly into the United States using American visa's.
Sort out what you're debating over before you start using the "favorite punching bag" rhetoric.
Let's not forget that it was the US who funded and trained Iraq's soldiers during the war against Iran.
Oh, and what about DROPPING THE GOD DAMN A-BOMBS ON JAPAN? The country who first unleashed the nuclear menace are now the ones who are responsible enough to protect us from it? PLEASE.
Let's not forget the use of agent orange in Vietnam, a decision that still yields deformed births and poisoned natural resources to this day.
Or how "Old" Europe (which is what you call Germany, for some reason) was battled against by Britain and the French Underground (along with countless other allies, such as CANADA) for 2 full years before the Americans graced us with their own contribution. Just because France fell under the might of the German army quickly doesn't mean the French citizens fell with them. Without the French Underground, the war effort would have never advanced as quickly as it did.
I can go on and on. If the U.S. is the sole source of "freedom" on this planet, then it's a sad, sad world we live in.
I hate to be the voice of reason here, but for all the talent in the geek/OSS community, there is just as much talent that can be bought on the open market by the good folks at RIAA, who's pockets run deep.
You think you'll actually be able to sniff some questionable packets that resolve back to "hacker.p2p-must-die.riaa.org"?
They may be a lumbering giant, but they're not retarded.
Re:AAC is pretty weak, no marketing can change tha
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OK man, you really do have to READ the reports you are referencing first. To quote:
"Ogg Vorbis files were found to be the closest to the reference file by 25% of online testers (as compared to the uncompressed wave file, which was correctly identified as closest to the reference file by 41% of testers)."
This says two things... firstly, that 3000 people didn't actually say "Ogg at 64kbps and CD is identical". It means that of the test group, only 750 people actually thought so. Compare that to the 1500 that weren't deaf and/or retarded and managed to notice the WAV file.
Also, the test itself is completely skewed and clearly biased.
To quote:
"Note that Ogg Vorbis is a variable bitrate format. You can tell it to create files with a certain average bitrate, though. In the test, c't made sure that the different codecs created files of about the same size to give no format an advantage. "
This is a major problem with the test itself. Any VBR file is going to yield better results then it's CBR counterparts when using the same "base bit rate". The fact that they "tried to create files of the same size" demonstrates total misunderstanding of the concept of CBR vs. VBR and nullifies the their "ogg is better" conclusion. I'm not saying OGG isn't a great encoding scheme... but it's not CD-quality-at-64-kbps-great like you've tried to assert.
Let's remember... DivX has been out for a while too. It's an open source format and it yields arguably better results then straight MPEG4, Sorenson, or WMV.
But who cares?
Look around the web... count the content you see in QuickTime, REAL and Windows Media formats compared to DivX (not counting the kids pirating framesync'd films). Count the number of MP3's (and soon, AAC files) compared to OGG.
The point is, DivX is nice, but like OGG, it's an obscure also-ran in the world of codecs and in 5 years, nobody will remember it except we, the geeks.
It doesn't matter how good you think Ogg/DivX/Linux/FreeBSD are... I love them too, but at the end of the day, money talks and geeks rarely have money.
That's why MP3 (and AAC for Mac Users)/MPEG-4/Windows will remain the maintstay. Quality means nothing... if quality were all that we cared about, Microsoft wouldn't have ever sold a copy of Windows and we'd all own DAT machines and beta VCR's.
Re:AAC is pretty weak, no marketing can change tha
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Umm, as a musician and music lover, I can say with certainty that if you couldn't distinguish a 64kbps OGG from an original recording, then you have no credibility and shouldn't be making bold statements like "AAC is very weak".
That said, the fact the the "expert test" yielded better results for AAC isn't surprising.
AAC, at least the encoder that ships with QuickTime 6.2 (and iTunes 4 by connection) does a very good job. Ripping from a source disc or even down converting from a 320kbps MP3 into 128kbps AAC yielded a very listenable file in my opinion... more then enough to please me in a decent pair of headphones or through my car stereo.
Well, live and let live, so I'm not gonna call you down directly (I think that Nazism calls you down on it's own, but I digress)... but I find it amusing that a self proclaimed, card carrying nazi is calling down the US government.
Excuse me... I was just busy making sweet love to my Canadian Passport.
Yanks, ya better get used to the phrase "zeig-heil"... because your government is leading you down the path from "worlds greatest democracy" to "world most paranoid fascist state".
Bush needs to be taken out to pasture... years of work towards a state where the world was -largely- at peace, all undone by an baseball team owning oil tycoon.
bash-2.03$ uname -a ; prtconf | more SunOS largo 5.8 Generic_108528-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u Memory size: 10240 Megabytes
bash-2.03$ psrinfo 0 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:03 1 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 4 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 5 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 8 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 9 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 10 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 11 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 12 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07 13 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
Oh, I'm sorry.
Just reading through the previous responses and it seemed to me like people were complaining. I haven't used GL on Linux since, oh, the Rage Pro was a new card.:)
Now this is bloody amusing.
I love when clueless twits bitch about the PPC and how Apple is doomed if they don't move to X86. Just because you want a proper UNIX that actually provides a UNIX AE -and- REAL applications doesn't mean that Apple is doomed because they don't happen to cater do you and your friends.
Ask a PowerBook G4 owner if the G4 in their machine is a slow, uncompetitve processor and they'll bitch slap you. Speed is totally relative and often completely subjective.
I could care less that the Linux nerd next door can play UT2k3 on his nasty beige box at 3 times the frame rate that I can. When I explain to that kid that I can write altivec optimized code and crack RC4 at about the same speed as his machine (at 3x the MHZ rating), his clueless attempt to act like he comprehends a word of what I'm saying only reminds me that the only people who feel that PPC should be removed in favor of intel are people who really have no clue what the point of the Macintosh is, or more importantly, what the strengths and weeknesses of the PPC architecture really are.
Apple isn't going out of business anytime soon... no sooner then Microsoft, and no sooner the intel. Get used to it!
In the meantime, STFU about the PPC, because you're clearly quote clueless.
Plenty of us are more then happy with it, and WE'RE the ones using the products... not the ones who are just posting to/. and fronting like we have even a remote idea of what we're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you don't need to use command line to run linux audio apps.. wasn't what I was trying to say.
At any rate, I give up.
I don't understand you're last comment.... are you suggesting that Linux audio apps draw clientele?
OMFG...
.. if you run out of room on your CPU, what are you going to do? Buy a faster CPU? When you have a 3 ghz P4 in your machine and are trying to add one more AmpFarm (oh wait, Line 6 AmpFarm probably doesn't run on your CPU) plugin to your mix and you can't... you're kind of f**cked, aren't you? Start mixing down and rendering out (and thus locking your mix, which sucks, but hey). The Logic folks have noticed how bad this problem is, as you can "temproarily render" your tracks when you run out of power now. Cool, but limiting.
ProTools TDM, the full version of the software, comes FREE with the appropriate DigiDesign hardware. ProTools LE, the light version of the software that does host-based auto processing, comes FREE with the appropriate hardware. ProTools FREE, which only works with 2 in/2 out on-board hardware (and is limited to 8 tracks) is just free for download (no purchase required).
At any rate, more than 50% of DigiDesign sales (and their primary focus) is Macintosh systems, which is what most studios use anyways. At any rate, ProTools 6 runs on XP just fine, thanks.
As for the rest of your bulls**t about running plugins on the CPU... it's barely worth commenting on, but I will.
The TDM system is scalable
Of course, had you gone the less troublesome route and used TDM, you could just buy another farm card and slap it in.
Any argument that says that the CPU is good enough for higher end audio work is laughable... and clearly being issued by someone who hasn't had to work with EQ's, amp simulators, chorus and a decent sounding reverb across 3 or 4 dozen tracks of 24 bit audio. Hell, I was recording my band on 8 tracks and ran out of CPU power.
With TDM, you're CPU power (and thus, the part of the equation that you can only wait for moores law as far as scalability goes) isn't an issue.
Alas, most people are just going to record in their garages with a pair of microphones and a drum machine, so we're really splitting hairs at this point anyways, I guess.
Dude, you missed my point.
:)
I was clear that you get the software -with- the hardware... and the typical OSS-geek retaliation of "proprietary lock-in" is, as usual, short-sighted.
Most studios care about 2 things, in this order:
1) Audio quality
2) Ease of use
They could give two s**ts about having to diddle with parameters and run a compiler in order to get their studio running, just to save some money. Given what most large studios charge per hour, the investment in "proprietary" gear doesn't sway them, as they get an ROI on that investment rather quickly anyways.
ProTools on a PowerMac is basically a turn-key solution that doesn't require any kernel tweaking or compilation of device drivers in order to setup. This is the ONLY point that matters to most studio engineers.
No amount of "Oh, but you're locked in and it costs a lot of money" whining will sway them on that.
Until Linux and it's competitive offerings are -as- turn-key as Apple/Windows (and for the average USER, not someone who knows what the command "ls" does), they will remain the minority.
OH, and Logic Audio, for example, has released their OS X version with support for TDM today... the "no matter if you like another interface" argument is misinformed.
But here's looking to the future.
The ProTools Core Cards (which contain DSPS themselves anyways) are also multi-channel I/O cards that allow connection to external AD/DA convertor boxes.
Linux cluster? This is just never going to happen. Ping a box over a quiet ethernet LAN and you'll see 1-2ms of latency. Add in the processing time for the sample you're routing, and you're looking at like 4-10 ms of latency.
This is just NOT good enough for recording sound... not even close. The TDM hardware is unmatched because of the completely in-card path of the sound being processed. All the actual ProTools software does is give feedback to the user and allow the user to tell the ProTools cards what do with the sound they are processing... it doesn't actually do any of the lifting.
I guess MySQL is a small, unsucessful project then... designed on Solaris from the ground up. Mind, MySQL is so heavily multithreaded it has to be... LinuxThreads are just -not- Solaris Threads.
This is just ridiculous.
The ProTools software is FREE.
$0. No money spent.
The $14,000 you spend on ProTools hardware is for the very powerful (and very much worth the money) DSP cards that make ProTools -the- premier audio recording application among serious studios. I know that some people are going to respond with some justification as to why the MOTU 828 or the HammerFall is better then DigiDesign, and that's fine... we all have our preferences... but the DSP's offerred in addition to the audio interface in the ProTools TDM systems make them so much more powerful then CPU bound rigs for large projects.
To compare what you get for $14,000 from DigiDesign to what you get for nothing in the OSS world is a very invalid, and very misinformed. There is simply no comparison between what you get.
And don't even get me started on the rest of your examples. GIMP is cool, but Photoshop it ain't... Film Gimp is -really- cool, but it's not even close to Shake.
Being part of the open source world, I'm so happy about the efforts and advances we're making in various places... but let's not get our heads stuck in the famous "reality distortion field"... there is a VERY LONG way to go before the projects discussed in this comment rival their commercially available conterparts.
This should be given an off-topic rating. Do you hear that whizzing around your head? That was THE POINT flying past you and you MISSING it completely.
10.2.5 on a 17" PowerBook (1 Ghz) with 1 GB of DDR 333 memory.
:)
This machine owns me.
Bring on the 970, because for most people, the G4's are already fast enough.
Yeppers, AltiVec is Motorola's implementation of VMX, the vector extensions developed jointly by AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola).
If IBM in fact licensed Altivec from Motorola, it becomes clear that Apple is -the- customer that IBM intends to be the primary user of this chip. There would be no other reason for them to ensure such close compatibility, IMHO.
Now Now...
AMD makes a lot of stuff, and the Apple/AMD relationship may still come to pass in the form of nForce 3 or HyperTransport, both of which are AMD technologies and both of which would work wonderfully with a pair of PPC 970's at the helm.
Just because AMD may be involved doesn't mean that the Athlon (or any other AMD CPU) is too.
I'm creating a pseudo TCP/IP stack for a wireless application, so I've read that lovely document from motorola.
-unfortunately-, this document is largely useful for TCP/IP stack implementations, and not in actual user-land code.
So.. if Apple studied this document and built the principals it teaches into the TCP/IP stack of their Mach kernel, all applications would benefit from it. Conversely, there isn't much you can patch in Apache (no pun intended) to add noticeably performance boosts via Altivec. *sigh*
As a side, the most fascinating part of the Altivec/TCP-IP PDF you mention is the paralell checksum routines Motorola discusses. Very interesting stuff indeed.
That we should have continued to fight Japan by conventional weapons and allow thousands and thousands of American soldiers (many of whom were innocent young men) die?
This was my point.
Why bother fighting with conventional weapons and risk the lives of BOTH American and Japanese SOLDIERS when you can just drop the A-Bomb (or two) on a bunch of Japanese CIVILIANS instead? The woman, children and elderly who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and continue to die from radiation related sickness) had no right to defend and protect themselves I guess.
Better them then a bunch of American soldiers, right?
To try to get rid of the Islamic radicals who took over the government in Iran. Y'see, Islamic-radical types are bad news.
Oh, so aiding one "Islamic radical" to remove another (just like the U.S. aided to Taliban to overthrow what eventually became the Northern Alliance) is OK then?
Like I said, people love to criticize without ever giving credit. The A-Bombs ended WWII, and the occupation turned Japan into a first-world democracy.
I'm sure that gives much comfort to the memory of the thousands who died in the process? Typical... if saving thousands of American lives comes at the cost of thousands of "non-Americans", then it's surely justified... along with a justification of "Look, eventually they were off on the right foot so it all worked out in the end... and they're no longer a threat to us!"... kinda like Iraq.
Agent Orange was a defolient. Anyone care to criticize the infant mortality rate of Communist and other third-world nations? How many hundreds of millions of babies have died from the U.S. not defending a country?
You so heavily missed the point I choose not to comment.
Britian was on its last legs before the U.S. joined the war. The French underground was not a fighting force; it was mostly an intelligence force. I doubt that Canada was a decisive factor. I think that you need to consider how the war would have ended without any American involvement. Europe would have been owned either by Hitler or Stalin.
Nobody suggests that Canada was a decisive factor. Nobody suggests that the French were a fighting force. Nobody debates the the addition of US troops to fight the Nazi menace were decisive. The point that you have so clearly missed is that all the other ally countries were in their on DAY ONE in aid. When Canada decidied against going to Iraq, the US government (and in turn, the bulk of the US population) cried us down from the height of morality for it, and the US ambassador to Canada actually went on record, saying that (par) "America is always there for it's friends on day one. Shame on you Canada!"
I agree that it's a sad, sad world out there beyond our comfy chairs. But, hey, you can always have fun punching your favorite punching bag.
Hey, if there was a better punching bag, I'd punch at it too. My own government is hardly made up of saints... I spoiled my last vote on the grounds that the current Liberal governement in Canada largely seems corrupt, and there are definately more oppressive regimes in the world then the Americans.
Nobody debates this. Nobody denies that US contribution to what we consider "the western ideal" has been invaluable. What people HATE is the self-righteousness FUD that your government spews, smearing everyone else in the process.
People HATE when the only nation to ever -really- use WMD's invades another nation for supposedly having WMD's (oh wait, it was liberation you invaded for, right? Since there haven't been any real WMD's the story had to change in a hurry).
People HATE when one sovereign, western nation makes threats against another for having bad border policy... totally forgetting that the majority of those involved in (for example) the 9/11 incident came directly into the United States using American visa's.
Sort out what you're debating over before you start using the "favorite punching bag" rhetoric.
Let's not forget that it was the US who funded and trained Iraq's soldiers during the war against Iran.
Oh, and what about DROPPING THE GOD DAMN A-BOMBS ON JAPAN? The country who first unleashed the nuclear menace are now the ones who are responsible enough to protect us from it? PLEASE.
Let's not forget the use of agent orange in Vietnam, a decision that still yields deformed births and poisoned natural resources to this day.
Or how "Old" Europe (which is what you call Germany, for some reason) was battled against by Britain and the French Underground (along with countless other allies, such as CANADA) for 2 full years before the Americans graced us with their own contribution. Just because France fell under the might of the German army quickly doesn't mean the French citizens fell with them. Without the French Underground, the war effort would have never advanced as quickly as it did.
I can go on and on. If the U.S. is the sole source of "freedom" on this planet, then it's a sad, sad world we live in.
I hate to be the voice of reason here, but for all the talent in the geek/OSS community, there is just as much talent that can be bought on the open market by the good folks at RIAA, who's pockets run deep.
You think you'll actually be able to sniff some questionable packets that resolve back to "hacker.p2p-must-die.riaa.org"?
They may be a lumbering giant, but they're not retarded.
OK man, you really do have to READ the reports you are referencing first. To quote:
"Ogg Vorbis files were found to be the closest to the reference file by 25% of online testers (as compared to the uncompressed wave file, which was correctly identified as closest to the reference file by 41% of testers)."
This says two things... firstly, that 3000 people didn't actually say "Ogg at 64kbps and CD is identical". It means that of the test group, only 750 people actually thought so. Compare that to the 1500 that weren't deaf and/or retarded and managed to notice the WAV file.
Also, the test itself is completely skewed and clearly biased.
To quote:
"Note that Ogg Vorbis is a variable bitrate format. You can tell it to create files with a certain average bitrate, though. In the test, c't made sure that the different codecs created files of about the same size to give no format an advantage. "
This is a major problem with the test itself. Any VBR file is going to yield better results then it's CBR counterparts when using the same "base bit rate". The fact that they "tried to create files of the same size" demonstrates total misunderstanding of the concept of CBR vs. VBR and nullifies the their "ogg is better" conclusion. I'm not saying OGG isn't a great encoding scheme... but it's not CD-quality-at-64-kbps-great like you've tried to assert.
Let's remember... DivX has been out for a while too. It's an open source format and it yields arguably better results then straight MPEG4, Sorenson, or WMV. But who cares? Look around the web ... count the content you see in QuickTime, REAL and Windows Media formats compared to DivX (not counting the kids pirating framesync'd films). Count the number of MP3's (and soon, AAC files) compared to OGG.
The point is, DivX is nice, but like OGG, it's an obscure also-ran in the world of codecs and in 5 years, nobody will remember it except we, the geeks.
It doesn't matter how good you think Ogg/DivX/Linux/FreeBSD are ... I love them too, but at the end of the day, money talks and geeks rarely have money.
That's why MP3 (and AAC for Mac Users)/MPEG-4/Windows will remain the maintstay. Quality means nothing... if quality were all that we cared about, Microsoft wouldn't have ever sold a copy of Windows and we'd all own DAT machines and beta VCR's.
Umm, as a musician and music lover, I can say with certainty that if you couldn't distinguish a 64kbps OGG from an original recording, then you have no credibility and shouldn't be making bold statements like "AAC is very weak".
That said, the fact the the "expert test" yielded better results for AAC isn't surprising.
AAC, at least the encoder that ships with QuickTime 6.2 (and iTunes 4 by connection) does a very good job. Ripping from a source disc or even down converting from a 320kbps MP3 into 128kbps AAC yielded a very listenable file in my opinion... more then enough to please me in a decent pair of headphones or through my car stereo.
Did you actually READ the "beer drinking" article?
The very last line, paraphrased, is "Theo was careful to point out that the group paid for it's own beer."
Everything I read about/from Theo suggests he is a class act. If anyone is throwing dung here, it's you my friend.
Well, live and let live, so I'm not gonna call you down directly (I think that Nazism calls you down on it's own, but I digress)... but I find it amusing that a self proclaimed, card carrying nazi is calling down the US government.
.. bless my home and native land.
Says a whole pant-load about the US government.
Either way
Excuse me... I was just busy making sweet love to my Canadian Passport.
... because your government is leading you down the path from "worlds greatest democracy" to "world most paranoid fascist state".
Yanks, ya better get used to the phrase "zeig-heil"
Bush needs to be taken out to pasture... years of work towards a state where the world was -largely- at peace, all undone by an baseball team owning oil tycoon.
For your own sake... save yourselves.
I know. I wasn't knocking FreeBSD, just IA32 in general. :)
Dylan
We've had this system for a couple years:
:)
bash-2.03$ uname -a ; prtconf | more
SunOS largo 5.8 Generic_108528-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u
Memory size: 10240 Megabytes
bash-2.03$ psrinfo
0 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:03
1 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
4 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
5 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
8 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
9 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
10 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
11 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
12 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
13 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
Look ma.. no PAE.
Oh, I'm sorry. Just reading through the previous responses and it seemed to me like people were complaining. I haven't used GL on Linux since, oh, the Rage Pro was a new card. :)
Now this is bloody amusing. I love when clueless twits bitch about the PPC and how Apple is doomed if they don't move to X86. Just because you want a proper UNIX that actually provides a UNIX AE -and- REAL applications doesn't mean that Apple is doomed because they don't happen to cater do you and your friends. Ask a PowerBook G4 owner if the G4 in their machine is a slow, uncompetitve processor and they'll bitch slap you. Speed is totally relative and often completely subjective. I could care less that the Linux nerd next door can play UT2k3 on his nasty beige box at 3 times the frame rate that I can. When I explain to that kid that I can write altivec optimized code and crack RC4 at about the same speed as his machine (at 3x the MHZ rating), his clueless attempt to act like he comprehends a word of what I'm saying only reminds me that the only people who feel that PPC should be removed in favor of intel are people who really have no clue what the point of the Macintosh is, or more importantly, what the strengths and weeknesses of the PPC architecture really are. Apple isn't going out of business anytime soon... no sooner then Microsoft, and no sooner the intel. Get used to it! In the meantime, STFU about the PPC, because you're clearly quote clueless. Plenty of us are more then happy with it, and WE'RE the ones using the products... not the ones who are just posting to /. and fronting like we have even a remote idea of what we're talking about.