Getting rid of the analog port obsoletes all analog headphones released, ever. Drag.
But - allowing an outboard wired DAC is a Good Thing.
Right now, several popular phone models have DAC and analog output stages that are excellent but the presentation is completely marred by replay gain and digital volume control, among other processing.
If Apple puts a big fat "ZERO SUM" option somewhere in iOS that forces software out to be forwarded to the jack unimpeded, I would be completely on board. Death to the analog port.
Also much easier to legislate when the problem wouldn't be at current levels if not for the DTV transition.
Loud commercials are so incredibly obnoxious now due to digital audio compression, not because marketers just figured out loud gets attention.
"(The following message is wholly my own, and doesn't represent anything
from Oracle. While I'm an Oracle employee, I have no special privileged
information or insight beyond what is already common knowledge.)"
This could be a random guy stirring the pot. What do we have to actually think management might ditch opensolaris?
These guys flew for 78 minutes without speaking to ground controllers. The lives of the pilots themselves could have been in jeopardy as well as the lives of the passengers. I giggled when the thought first crossed my mind, but considering the pilots' shifting explanations, it is the reasoning to beat. What kind of passion would have caused that level of incompetence at your job? Detailing the aspects of how scheduling software works? I doubt it. Having sex? Absolutely.
If by fine distinction you mean completely in angst of all possible views of statistics, then yes we're less likely to use nuclear bombs against others.
a great new ISP feature.
"You can use any filesharing or P2P protocols you want, no packet shaping."
Maybe they even impose sensible caps. Hell, I'd sign on.
Exactly. FTFA:
Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance â" making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.
Slightly OT, but important.. Ubuntu does not include a version of Gnash that correctly views youtube videos. The only version of Gnash available is not from the main Ubuntu repository, and for whatever reason on my AMD64 box simply will not display Youtube videos.
Just including a recent functioning version of Gnash as part of the default install, and maybe popping up 'i can haz adobe flash plugin' only when Gnash is having trouble would have the user viewing youtube out-of-the-box (arguably one of the largest uses of flash for most average users currently).
I hear people here constantly say "Turn off Aero, it's slow!" and I'm left scratching my head.
Yes, disabling Aero will gain you a ballpark of an eight percent improvement in UI responsiveness. But when XP with Luna is s UI latency decrease of 80%, there's no comparison.
The same goes for XP. "Turn on the classic theme!" But 2000, right ouf of the gate, is orders of magnitude faster. Turning off Luna will net you nothing. You get, in effect, a Windows XP speed classic theme.
The problem is there has not been a properly mastered CD released for nearly a decade so most of you dont have a clue as to what a good one sounds like.
Thank you.
This point needs to be driven home. For people looking for high quality qudio, you only need to rewind back to when CDs were released - they were considered an audiophile's medium.
Has it really been ten years since a well-mastered CD was released? I know otherwise. However, my parents came to me shopping for new audio gear. I suggested they bring 20 CDs they knew well to a sit-down listening of what new loudspeakers were available, hoping that one of them would be a "good" recording. Their recordings include a lot of easy listening, jazz, and otherwise off-the-beaten-path music, so I had hope.
Not one of them weren't compressed and limited to the very extreme. Afterwards, looking through their collection of about 200 CDs, there were exactly *two* that respected good mastering - The Soundtrack to the Lion King, and Enya "The Memory of Trees". Two. From the 90's.
Even re-released recordings of *oldies* on CD (my parents being their 70's) were compressed to completely numbing levels.
Anyone thinking they can go to a record store and buy a high-quality product of anything "hip" or "popular" on CD are sorely mistaken.
It's directly relevant to compare how much adoption Vista has had in comparison to previous releases, especially when you consider Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop.
How many PC World readers (Joe gearhead) would consider a Linux desktop when they know their favorite game doesn't have a native Linux installer? Office? No bittorent version of Linux Photoshop?
Microsoft gets the desktops. It's relevant to compare how this new upgrade compares to the old. The monopoly hasn't changed.
Microsoft has a monopoly position in both OS and browser markets, the browser element being installed by default (and arguably not removable from) the OS.
The monopoly hasn't changed, but the uptake has - the spirit of the comparison is relevant.
Initiator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds creator of the Linux kernel, has, along with others like Richard Stallman, literally changed the world of software forever.
Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world's mission critical server infrastructures.
The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?
I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges.
APC: Writing an operating system kernel is a hard job. Why did you write Linux in the first place?
LT: Kernels may be hard, but partly because of that they are also interesting. I've always been more interested in "down to the hardware" details than in fluffy stuff like user interfaces etc, and an operating system kernel is about as down to the hardware as you can get without actually building it yourself (which I've also done - I was at a CPU company for seven years, after all). So I'm not into soldering irons etc, but I very much enjoy working at a low level, and thinking about how my software actually interacts with the CPU and other parts of the system. Besides, I really didn't realize how hard it would be. I really never expected to be still working on it 15+ years later;)
APC: What's the Linux Foundation?
LT: Heh. I just work here, you should ask some of the people who are actually involved in all the other things that LF does. It's basically the combination of OSDL ("Open Source Development Labs") and FSG ("Free Standards Group"), and is a vendor-neutral place for different organizations to discuss the issues they have, and trying to help Linux along. Part of what LF does is pay me to maintain the kernel.
APC: What are you doing with the kernel now? Are you working on it full time? What parts of it do you work on the most?
LT: I very much work on it full time, but I no longer really work on any particular "part"of it - I end up spending almost all my time on not writing kernel code myself, but on working with the flow of code and merging it all.
In fact, the biggest amount of actual source code I've written in the last two years is not in the kernel itself, but in the tool I use to just track the kernel development (called "git" - a source control management system).
So I still get to write code (and I send out suggested patches quite often - but usually they are along the lines of "so here's how we could handle this issue..." in order to prod others to actually do the final patch and testing). But what I do a lot more is go through other peoples changes and say "yes" or "no".
APC: The 2.6 series kernel has been around for a long time. Why?
LT: We used to have these big and painful development releases that took several years, and it worked reasonably well and people got very used to it ("2. is stable, 2. is development"), but it had serious downsides too.
In particular, the release cycles were so long that all the commercial vendors effectively had to back-port a fair amount of new code from the development kernels, and so development code ended up in the stable releases. Also, conversely, the vendors fixed problems in the stable versions, and sometimes the fixes were missed or weren't easy to then forward-port to the development series, because the two were just very far apart.
Basically, a multi-year development cycle simply doesn't work. It was reasonable and required for a while (we did some pretty radical changes there too), but with 2.6, the base kernel is in good
From what I understand [..]
the current HAL is closed source because the Atheros chipset has the technical capabilities to broadcast out of the legal range of spectrum allowed by the FCC and similar bodies. Wouldn't distributing OpenHal be illegal? I can search the Internet using Google with Firefox for instructions on how to do any number of illegal things. This apparent "ability to be illegal" has never precluded me from having Firefox (Iceweasel) in Debian.
That's a great idea, until it becomes obvious that viewing so many patents makes you an ineffective contributor to open source projects.
Not knowing the existance of a patent and inventing the same idea on your own is one thing. Knowing a patent exists and writing code that violates it is another.
The other side of that coin: actually trying to avoid patents would make you code one line of code a year. Your productivity would drop to something pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
I was with you on the outboard DAC.
Getting rid of the analog port obsoletes all analog headphones released, ever. Drag.
But - allowing an outboard wired DAC is a Good Thing.
Right now, several popular phone models have DAC and analog output stages that are excellent but the presentation is completely marred by replay gain and digital volume control, among other processing.
If Apple puts a big fat "ZERO SUM" option somewhere in iOS that forces software out to be forwarded to the jack unimpeded, I would be completely on board. Death to the analog port.
Two words. Fox News.
Also much easier to legislate when the problem wouldn't be at current levels if not for the DTV transition. Loud commercials are so incredibly obnoxious now due to digital audio compression, not because marketers just figured out loud gets attention.
"(The following message is wholly my own, and doesn't represent anything from Oracle. While I'm an Oracle employee, I have no special privileged information or insight beyond what is already common knowledge.)"
This could be a random guy stirring the pot. What do we have to actually think management might ditch opensolaris?
Glenn? Is that you?
These guys flew for 78 minutes without speaking to ground controllers. The lives of the pilots themselves could have been in jeopardy as well as the lives of the passengers. I giggled when the thought first crossed my mind, but considering the pilots' shifting explanations, it is the reasoning to beat. What kind of passion would have caused that level of incompetence at your job? Detailing the aspects of how scheduling software works? I doubt it. Having sex? Absolutely.
Or having another kind of raid. These guys were having sex with each other.
If by fine distinction you mean completely in angst of all possible views of statistics, then yes we're less likely to use nuclear bombs against others.
Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. Installing a browser plugin for the #2 browser used.. here's to the appropriate government agencies cluing in.
a great new ISP feature. "You can use any filesharing or P2P protocols you want, no packet shaping." Maybe they even impose sensible caps. Hell, I'd sign on.
Oh, you mean like, say, color film? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_motion_picture_film#How_modern_color_film_works
Just including a recent functioning version of Gnash as part of the default install, and maybe popping up 'i can haz adobe flash plugin' only when Gnash is having trouble would have the user viewing youtube out-of-the-box (arguably one of the largest uses of flash for most average users currently).
Thanks for noticing that.
I hear people here constantly say "Turn off Aero, it's slow!" and I'm left scratching my head.
Yes, disabling Aero will gain you a ballpark of an eight percent improvement in UI responsiveness. But when XP with Luna is s UI latency decrease of 80%, there's no comparison.
The same goes for XP. "Turn on the classic theme!" But 2000, right ouf of the gate, is orders of magnitude faster. Turning off Luna will net you nothing. You get, in effect, a Windows XP speed classic theme.
This point needs to be driven home. For people looking for high quality qudio, you only need to rewind back to when CDs were released - they were considered an audiophile's medium.
Has it really been ten years since a well-mastered CD was released? I know otherwise. However, my parents came to me shopping for new audio gear. I suggested they bring 20 CDs they knew well to a sit-down listening of what new loudspeakers were available, hoping that one of them would be a "good" recording. Their recordings include a lot of easy listening, jazz, and otherwise off-the-beaten-path music, so I had hope.
Not one of them weren't compressed and limited to the very extreme. Afterwards, looking through their collection of about 200 CDs, there were exactly *two* that respected good mastering - The Soundtrack to the Lion King, and Enya "The Memory of Trees". Two. From the 90's.
Even re-released recordings of *oldies* on CD (my parents being their 70's) were compressed to completely numbing levels.
Anyone thinking they can go to a record store and buy a high-quality product of anything "hip" or "popular" on CD are sorely mistaken.
It's a damn shame.
It's directly relevant to compare how much adoption Vista has had in comparison to previous releases, especially when you consider Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop.
How many PC World readers (Joe gearhead) would consider a Linux desktop when they know their favorite game doesn't have a native Linux installer? Office? No bittorent version of Linux Photoshop?
Microsoft gets the desktops. It's relevant to compare how this new upgrade compares to the old. The monopoly hasn't changed.
How does that change the analysis?
Microsoft has a monopoly position in both OS and browser markets, the browser element being installed by default (and arguably not removable from) the OS.
The monopoly hasn't changed, but the uptake has - the spirit of the comparison is relevant.
I can see it already.
"Where did media player go? OMGWTFBBQ!!!~~"
Wal-Mart isn't holding a gun to your head to stay.
Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux
;)
Initiator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds creator of the Linux kernel, has, along with others like Richard Stallman, literally changed the world of software forever.
Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world's mission critical server infrastructures.
The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?
I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges.
APC: Writing an operating system kernel is a hard job. Why did you write Linux in the first place?
LT: Kernels may be hard, but partly because of that they are also interesting. I've always been more interested in "down to the hardware" details than in fluffy stuff like user interfaces etc, and an operating system kernel is about as down to the hardware as you can get without actually building it yourself (which I've also done - I was at a CPU company for seven years, after all). So I'm not into soldering irons etc, but I very much enjoy working at a low level, and thinking about how my software actually interacts with the CPU and other parts of the system. Besides, I really didn't realize how hard it would be. I really never expected to be still working on it 15+ years later
APC: What's the Linux Foundation?
LT: Heh. I just work here, you should ask some of the people who are actually involved in all the other things that LF does. It's basically the combination of OSDL ("Open Source Development Labs") and FSG ("Free Standards Group"), and is a vendor-neutral place for different organizations to discuss the issues they have, and trying to help Linux along. Part of what LF does is pay me to maintain the kernel.
APC: What are you doing with the kernel now? Are you working on it full time? What parts of it do you work on the most?
LT: I very much work on it full time, but I no longer really work on any particular "part"of it - I end up spending almost all my time on not writing kernel code myself, but on working with the flow of code and merging it all.
In fact, the biggest amount of actual source code I've written in the last two years is not in the kernel itself, but in the tool I use to just track the kernel development (called "git" - a source control management system).
So I still get to write code (and I send out suggested patches quite often - but usually they are along the lines of "so here's how we could handle this issue..." in order to prod others to actually do the final patch and testing). But what I do a lot more is go through other peoples changes and say "yes" or "no".
APC: The 2.6 series kernel has been around for a long time. Why?
LT: We used to have these big and painful development releases that took several years, and it worked reasonably well and people got very used to it ("2. is stable, 2. is development"), but it had serious downsides too.
In particular, the release cycles were so long that all the commercial vendors effectively had to back-port a fair amount of new code from the development kernels, and so development code ended up in the stable releases. Also, conversely, the vendors fixed problems in the stable versions, and sometimes the fixes were missed or weren't easy to then forward-port to the development series, because the two were just very far apart.
Basically, a multi-year development cycle simply doesn't work. It was reasonable and required for a while (we did some pretty radical changes there too), but with 2.6, the base kernel is in good
TFA states the lake was five acres. In Oklahoma, that's a pond.
That's a great idea, until it becomes obvious that viewing so many patents makes you an ineffective contributor to open source projects.
Not knowing the existance of a patent and inventing the same idea on your own is one thing. Knowing a patent exists and writing code that violates it is another.
The other side of that coin: actually trying to avoid patents would make you code one line of code a year. Your productivity would drop to something pointless.
Here's one (of many) example of Linus' views on patents on LKML: http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/8/11/155
So why make the API available? Is it so they can go around telling people not to use it?
Except most Linux distro's don't create a root account for you to use for everyday browsing. How do you think IE6 in XP gets to looking like it does?