Also a CS major at a major public university where CS is the 2nd largest major, I would like to inform you that I use Ogg, and I know several people who also use Ogg, and I reccomend Ogg to all of my tech-savvy friends.
Maybe it's a different major public university...
I do agree with you, but it's not hard for companies to simply add Ogg support to players that already support mp3 and/or WMA; iRiver, for example announced some time ago (it may have been recently, I have no idea) that they are adding Ogg support to several of their players, including both their hard disk players, their mp3/WMA-CD player, and some of their memory-based players.
I should also note that it's quite a bit easier than you think to add a new format. It simply involves adapting the decoder API and codec to the player, and storing it on the flash RAM on the device. No new chip printing is required in most cases, unless it's a cheap player with non-flashable decoder storage. There are limitations to the flash RAM storage though, and iRiver, for example, works around this by providing two sets of RAMs for different formats: MP3+WMA, or MP3+Ogg. Somehow I doubt there'd be any conflict -- anyone choosing Ogg would probably shun WMAs, and people using WMA wouldn't even know what Ogg is. It works, sort of, or at least until we have newer better players which support all the codecs in existence. Give it a few years...
And of course this begs the question, what were these plaques really for?
Aliens? I don't think so. People? Yes. Not people from the distant future (they would probably know what they look like) but people today.
It's publicity. The chances of any extraterrestrial being seeing that plaque on Mars are a billion to one, but people on earth? Just by putting that link there you got a few thousand people to look at it. It may be shallow to think that the plaque wasn't solely made for scientific purposes, but it's so scientifically flawed (Language (only english?), anatomy, everyone holding hands, etc.) that you have to think as shallowly as the designer, who probably was thinking something along the lines of, "No alien will ever see this." But then again, if he's wrong, they'll never understand it either... oh well.
...on my IBM ThinkPad -- if I press the conveniently placed middle mouse button, the trackpoint turns into a multi-directional scroller. I can 'tilt' it left and right to scroll horizontally, up and down for vertically.
Both for this and the above -- ICDSoft Is the host, and yes, it is $5 US per month, paid for in 12-month blocks for $60 each ($40 to renew after the first year, which is just an amazing deal).
Re:It's not easy being green...
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One problem: I don't think that extra glucose is a by-product of Algae's photosythesis... if I know nature, I'd bet the algae has just the right balance of glucose for it to survive and reproduce.
But I wouldn't put it beyond someone to genetically engineer an algae to produce extra glucose... or better yet, Hydrogen gas, which I believe is in development. <sarcasm> And, of course, nothing can go wrong with the gene splicing -- we know everything about genetic engineering these days. </sarcasm>
And on a minor sub note, how did the grandparent get modded Funny?
Check out the title bar...
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They host with someone in the Mega-iAdvantage building (it's a 24 story building dedicated to web hosting... something like 10,000 racks). It may be in HK, but it's $5 a month, and $4 a month after a year for insane features (PHP, MySQL, unlimited e-mails, SMTP, POP, subdomains, SSL, etc. etc.) and webspace (333MB) and bandwitdh (5GB)... if you don't mind the latency, it's decent for cheap.;-)
I hope the slashdotting of this site doesn't kill the whole building....
"To further protect the integrity of Open Source software and the Open Source community, Red Hat has established the Open Source Now Fund. The purpose of the fund will be to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license"
I think the SCO suit is great for Redhat, but even better for the community is this legal fund. I don't know if it's non-profit, or how it works exactly, but ideally it would (and should) be a fund to help take care of any OSS-movement threatening lawsuits or legal issues. This is something Open Source has never had before, and that large corporations have always had. This may give OSS the support it needs to grow without threats from any company out to stop it -- like SCO. The way they describe it, it seems like something meant to be a "legal department" for Open Source.
It may just be me, but I think that's the bigger picture here.
"cultural recycling"
"fighting to protect new forms of expression"
"attacks of the entertainment industry"
Sounds like something the entertainment industry might want to attack, and it was just genius of us to give them some publicity, don't you think?
I can just see the bust now... try using all those catchphrases on the Oakland police, and then the RIAA lawyers... But, then again, they'll probably get away with it...
"the Centrino package from Intel starts witha 1.2 GHz processor (low end), and that is a brand new product."
The Centrino (Pentium M) is not slow at 1.2 GHz, and definately not low-end in the laptop world. It performs more like a 2 GHz P4 processor because of architecture -- lower clock speed, shorter pipeline, more IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle). It's exactly the opposite of what Intel is doing with their desktop processors -- increasing the clock speed as much as possible while sacrificing IPC, just to get the "fastest" processor on the market. Well, a 1.6 GHz Pentium-M outperforms a 2.4GHz Pentium-4.
That said, you are very right about the heat problem, and that is actually one of the reasons Intel went with the lower clock speeds on the Pentium-M -- a higher clock generally translates to more heat and more voltage, so it's less ideal for a mobile (or small form factor) solution. It all boils down to making sacrifices for size.
Slashdot Mirror
Also a CS major at a major public university where CS is the 2nd largest major, I would like to inform you that I use Ogg, and I know several people who also use Ogg, and I reccomend Ogg to all of my tech-savvy friends.
Maybe it's a different major public university...
I do agree with you, but it's not hard for companies to simply add Ogg support to players that already support mp3 and/or WMA; iRiver, for example announced some time ago (it may have been recently, I have no idea) that they are adding Ogg support to several of their players, including both their hard disk players, their mp3/WMA-CD player, and some of their memory-based players.
I should also note that it's quite a bit easier than you think to add a new format. It simply involves adapting the decoder API and codec to the player, and storing it on the flash RAM on the device. No new chip printing is required in most cases, unless it's a cheap player with non-flashable decoder storage. There are limitations to the flash RAM storage though, and iRiver, for example, works around this by providing two sets of RAMs for different formats: MP3+WMA, or MP3+Ogg. Somehow I doubt there'd be any conflict -- anyone choosing Ogg would probably shun WMAs, and people using WMA wouldn't even know what Ogg is. It works, sort of, or at least until we have newer better players which support all the codecs in existence. Give it a few years...
And of course this begs the question, what were these plaques really for?
Aliens? I don't think so. People? Yes. Not people from the distant future (they would probably know what they look like) but people today.
It's publicity. The chances of any extraterrestrial being seeing that plaque on Mars are a billion to one, but people on earth? Just by putting that link there you got a few thousand people to look at it. It may be shallow to think that the plaque wasn't solely made for scientific purposes, but it's so scientifically flawed (Language (only english?), anatomy, everyone holding hands, etc.) that you have to think as shallowly as the designer, who probably was thinking something along the lines of, "No alien will ever see this." But then again, if he's wrong, they'll never understand it either... oh well.
...on my IBM ThinkPad -- if I press the conveniently placed middle mouse button, the trackpoint turns into a multi-directional scroller. I can 'tilt' it left and right to scroll horizontally, up and down for vertically.
*Fill in*...
... *back*
... *back*
... *submit* ... *back* *submit* *back* *submit* *back* *submit* *back*...
*submit*
Hmmm... form is still filled in...
*submit*
There's got to be a better way...
*View->Source*
Heh heh heh heh heh...
Both for this and the above -- ICDSoft Is the host, and yes, it is $5 US per month, paid for in 12-month blocks for $60 each ($40 to renew after the first year, which is just an amazing deal).
One problem: I don't think that extra glucose is a by-product of Algae's photosythesis... if I know nature, I'd bet the algae has just the right balance of glucose for it to survive and reproduce.
But I wouldn't put it beyond someone to genetically engineer an algae to produce extra glucose... or better yet, Hydrogen gas, which I believe is in development. <sarcasm> And, of course, nothing can go wrong with the gene splicing -- we know everything about genetic engineering these days. </sarcasm>
And on a minor sub note, how did the grandparent get modded Funny?
"Slashdot | Powered by Blood"
'Nuff said.
They host with someone in the Mega-iAdvantage building (it's a 24 story building dedicated to web hosting... something like 10,000 racks). It may be in HK, but it's $5 a month, and $4 a month after a year for insane features (PHP, MySQL, unlimited e-mails, SMTP, POP, subdomains, SSL, etc. etc.) and webspace (333MB) and bandwitdh (5GB)... if you don't mind the latency, it's decent for cheap. ;-)
I hope the slashdotting of this site doesn't kill the whole building....
My mod: 5, Informative, Interesting + Very Cool.
/. ....
I Learn something new every day on
"To further protect the integrity of Open Source software and the Open Source community, Red Hat has established the Open Source Now Fund. The purpose of the fund will be to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies developing software under the GPL license"
I think the SCO suit is great for Redhat, but even better for the community is this legal fund. I don't know if it's non-profit, or how it works exactly, but ideally it would (and should) be a fund to help take care of any OSS-movement threatening lawsuits or legal issues. This is something Open Source has never had before, and that large corporations have always had. This may give OSS the support it needs to grow without threats from any company out to stop it -- like SCO. The way they describe it, it seems like something meant to be a "legal department" for Open Source.
It may just be me, but I think that's the bigger picture here.
Correction: It is unworthy to be viewed in Firebird :-)
"cultural recycling"
"fighting to protect new forms of expression"
"attacks of the entertainment industry"
Sounds like something the entertainment industry might want to attack, and it was just genius of us to give them some publicity, don't you think?
I can just see the bust now... try using all those catchphrases on the Oakland police, and then the RIAA lawyers... But, then again, they'll probably get away with it...
"the Centrino package from Intel starts witha 1.2 GHz processor (low end), and that is a brand new product."
The Centrino (Pentium M) is not slow at 1.2 GHz, and definately not low-end in the laptop world. It performs more like a 2 GHz P4 processor because of architecture -- lower clock speed, shorter pipeline, more IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle). It's exactly the opposite of what Intel is doing with their desktop processors -- increasing the clock speed as much as possible while sacrificing IPC, just to get the "fastest" processor on the market. Well, a 1.6 GHz Pentium-M outperforms a 2.4GHz Pentium-4.
That said, you are very right about the heat problem, and that is actually one of the reasons Intel went with the lower clock speeds on the Pentium-M -- a higher clock generally translates to more heat and more voltage, so it's less ideal for a mobile (or small form factor) solution. It all boils down to making sacrifices for size.