;3kw amp for home would be quite overkill(you'd be fucking deaf if you played at max in a dorm room and had the speakers to handle it), i'd imagine your neighbours might have their say about it too.
No, you'd be FUCKING DEAD.
That much power would put you quite a bit over the pain threshold (you'd have to drive something like 4 15" or 18" woofers and an equal number of 1" or 2" horns to use that much power continuously). So much over the pain threshold that you'd end up DEAD because of all the vibration.
Naturally I am exaggerating a little (not about being over the pain threshold). My puny little PA cabs with their 1" Horns and 15" woofers connected to an RMX1850HD power amp (320W peak into an 8Ohm load when both channels are being driven over the entire signal bandwidth [before someone says "no! it is a 360W amp!" because it only does 360W at 1kHz when one channel is being driven...]) do fine in a mid-sized room (50x50 feet) for a nice sized crowd (100 people). And most of them come out of the show nearly deaf (it suuuucks when the mixing board has to go RIGHT UNDERNEATH one of the cabs).
I think you are wrong. If you had ever tried to self-release a CD (like I have), you'd soon realize that it is expensive as hell to do so.
Want to record? Well, you need something to record with. A 16-track hard disk record will run you about a thousand. About the same to get an RME Hammerfall Lite used and a pair of eight channel Analog to Digital Converters (still around $800 just to do eight tracks at a time, which is more than enough). Then you need software which is expensive as hell. Or you can go down the Free Software route and use Ardour (which is entirely reasonable for a demo, EP, or first album). So then you need equipment to record with. Mics run about $90 a piece for SM58s ($85 if you know the pro-audio guy at the local shop) and $80 for SM57s ($75...). Then you need cables, stands, monitor speakers, etc.
So now you've just spent about $4000 (assuming $0 for software costs) on a rig that can be used to record at most a five piece drum kit. Of course, you can rent this system...and if you have a live sound PA the equipment you need overlaps very nicely (out of the $4500 in live sound stuff I have about $3700 worth of it [basically everything except for my PA cabs and monitors] can be used in a recording rig). Or you can just go and get a pro to do your recording at around $30 an hour (and that is on the low side). You'll probably end up spending a good fifty or sixty hours in the studio to lay down the tracks for a four or five song EP (assuming four minute song length).
Going down the paying-something-else-to-do-it route is cheaper in the short term (but having all of that equipment is more fun). Recording turns out to expensive, but getting cds pressed costs about the same. If you want a run of 1000 discs with one color printing on the disc and a two color single page booklet with two color inserts in the jewel case you are looking at around $1300. Anything less and the per-disc price becomes a bit...obscene. And I left out the money you have to spend on getting the artwork ready for press (even if you do the artwork yourself you still need to pay a print shop to pre-press it, and they charge an arm and a leg for their services).
Then comes the promo for the album...in the end, it costs a lot of money and only established bands that play fairly often to decently sized audiences can afford to do it without killing the members financially (because, quite honestly, if you are in a band that is self-publishing an album you more than likely still have a day job and that job is going to be low paying but allow you flexible hours so you can tour and whatnot).
Or you can go the cheapass route and record stuff in your friend's basement on his computer (in all the glory of two-tracks-at-a-time) and then get someone to burn you a few hundred discs, print a sheet of labels, photocopy said label sheet onto more label sheets at Kinkos, and then do the same for the booklet pages. Then you have your friends stay up all night in someone's room cutting out the booklets and stapling them together and building your jewel cases...ahh, good memories. Personally, I'd do that with a four or five track EP-length album to get the money up to press a short run of seven inch records and then use the money from the seven inches to get a real album recorded.
Then again, I'm used to being a part of the Hardcore Punk scene where one normally releases a split 7" record with another band (usually with the first run on some colored vinyl to make people want to buy it) before going on to record your own 7" and then an album or demo depending on how well the 7" did. I'll probably be looking at doing the same thing again in a month or so...
Um...where's the Ogg-decoding hardware? If you know of a chip or a core that can handle Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, it would be feasible to build it into a device like the Squeezebox. Otherwise, you'd need to add a CPU (one that's considerably more powerful than whatever microcontroller they're currently using) and appropriate firmware.
Well, I was using a little portable player today that support Vorbis. All it has is a little 120Mhz 16-bit fixed point TI-DSP...(the Neuros, which is looking like a semi-bad choice now except it does play Vorbis fine...if you use the 1.40A firmware that isn't supported [there are releases with Vorbis support beyond this, but they skip when playing over MyFi which I can't deal with] but now I have digressed too far). A 16-bit fixed point DSP isn't going to cost much more than a dedicated MPEG Audio decoding chip, and is far more flexible.
Actually, my situation is fairly similar. Except that it wasn't I who did the discovering before and now it is. Mostly because all of my friends stopped working when we started college and I didn't. So now I'm the only one with any money to blow on cds. I've been buying all of the stuff that my friend Mike gave me a few years back lately because I really liked it and haven't listened to that stuff in a long time (I just got all of The Dillinger Escape Plan's and Strapping Young Lad's stuff yesterday). There is also my friend Ray who has lent me an album or two (ack, I just realized that the Walls of Jericho album he lent me two years ago is still sitting on top of my computer where I laid it the day he let me borrow it!) and has recommended a lot of bands to me (he listens to Grindcore and stuff, Mike used to listen to Death Metal and now listens to Melodic Power Metal [wtf?]). And there is Brent, who told me about Iced Earth (he is a bit obsessed with them), which led to me discovering Blind Guardian (my favorite band of all time! Hooray for Brent). My High School days of sharing music with my friends were great.
Mike and I still exchange music a lot, which tends to result in my deleting the stuff because it sucks:). I do let my jobless friend Greg copy my music...I just got fifteen albums so I'm going to his house Monday. He gets to copy them off of my slow USB 1.1 Neuros which means I get to talk to his cute sister for a while...(the only real reason I am going there:-P ). I just got an email from Century Media that they are knocking 20% off of all their cd prices tonight...so I'm going to finish out my Iced Earth collection and grab some other stuff from them now.
Right, let's not forget that I found 99% of my (quite large) cd collection on the internet first, and then went out to buy the cd's.
And it's not just me, many other people do it the same way..
They use P2P, download music from friends, etc.. and when they like it: they buy the cd's!
Same here. Before I had a job, I downloaded a few songs here and there and just grabbed copies of my friends music. Now I spend an obscene amount of money on cds every year (I went from twenty albums a year ago to one hundred and thirty now with two on pre-order and three on the way from the Netherlands and I'm about to order ten more and...). I love it how I now own all but one studio album (three if you count their live albums and their covers album) of Iced Earth because my friend Brent gave me a list of songs to download by them. Oh, and I did I mention how anti-filesharing Jon Schaeffer is (Iced Earth is Jon Schaeffer; it is his little pet project and there is a very high turnover rate for all the members except for him)?
And you know what? I don't blame him. I didn't know he was until I actually purchased an Iced earth album (the two disc first pressing edition of Horrow Show with the Iron Maiden cover and interview on the second disc) where he says something about it in the interview on the second disc. I don't know anyone else who downloads music and then purchases it. Not a single person. So I think that you and I are a rare breed, in that we actually purchase music. I buy music because I like having a rack full of albums with liner notes and artwork and a disc with a lossless copy of the song on it. I also happen to listen to a lot of music that you just can't find on mainstream file sharing networks (the three albums being ordered from the Netherlands). A lot of my albums are out of print so I have to pay a fairly large amount to get them used. But I buy them because I love having that rack full of music.
How many people really care about having the plastic cd case in front of them when all they really want to do is listen to the music? How many people care if there is a bit of distortion in the music they listen to?
Re: 20 dB boost. The Neuros does have this, but I didn't notice it. If you start to record, you can hit the control stick up to add a 20dB boost, and back down to go back to 0 dB boost.
The Neuros with firmware 1.40 (I'm using 1.40A, which is 1.40 with the fully optimized Vorbis decoder which rocks because now I can listen to my 160kbps ABR Vorbis files without clicks over MyFi [in 1.40, they skipped to the point of being unlistenable over MyFi, but only skipped in really complicated sections of songs through the headphone out]...but I'm getting a bit off topic now). Anyway, support for recording to wav files was added in firmware 1.40, with the option of recording 8kHz/8-bit, or 44.1kHz/16-bit or 48kHz/16-bit. 48kHz/16-bit is DAT quality, and the Neuros has a line-in jack so you should be able to hook up most external mics to it (at least with a preamp because it doesn't have a +20dB signal boost; of course I assume that bootleggers don't use crappy unpowered mics that have a maximum signal level of -20 dB instead of 0 dB).
The only problem with recording is that the unit's built in mic picks up a low pitched "hum," which I assume is electrical noise and the noise of the hard drive spinning when it needs to dump the recorded data from where it caches it (I'm not sure if it just caches in RAM or if it writes to the built in flash and then copies over the hd; I think it writes to flash because the hd only spun up once every ten minutes or so when I was recording for about an hour in 44.1kHz/16-bit mode).
The recording stuff has a nice level stereo level meter but no editing tools (yet), so it isn't quite as nice to use as many recorders, but Digital Innovations seems to be responsive to user requests for features (Ogg Vorbis support, scheduled radio recording, equalization, etc.) so maybe there will be a few simple editing tools added eventually (I'm thinking stuff like being able to hit one of the present buttons to make a mark and then hitting the menu button to do something like delete everything between markers or normalize it, etc.). Still, it works great for just recording stuff and then copying it to a computer for editing.
OS X is really a bad example of a micro kernel OS because it is a single server BSD system running on top of Mach. Mach is a really old Microkernel and stuff like "drivers not being able to crash the kernel" aren't true with it because the drivers are compiled into the kernel (or loaded into the same address space as modules, depending on which implementation of Mach one uses). Yes, Apple's Mach uses userspace USB and Firewire drivers through the usage of different libraries, but Linux can do that to with libusb and the raw firewire library.
Now, QNX. The Microkernel used in QNX is a very nice one. QNX is a great example of a high performance, multi-server, Microkernel system. Drivers are in userspace, each 'kernel' component executes as its own server, and the entire thing is fast and real-time to boot. I think that QNX disproves the whole "Monolithic Kernel Operating Systems are faster than Microkernel Operating Systems" argument.
There is also plan9 which is a multi-server Microkernel based OS. I don't know if BeOS is multi-server or single server, mostly because I've never used BeOS before. You also have the Hurd which, although it uses Mach (for now), is still a multi-server OS. The Hurd needs a lot of work and there is no longer any work being done on it except for the L4 port (and, as I found out last night, a few people working on getting the Hurd to work with OSF Mach + OsKit and therefore the PPC and other archs).
And about the whole "being able to replace large portions of the kernel without a reboot stuff," that is only semi-true. You can't replace the root file system translator without rebooting. Or the task or memory server. Or the authentication server. On the other hand, you can replace any file system translator that is not required for the system to find the new file system translator, the network stack, and many other things. But the fact still remains that a lot of stuff still requires a reboot. But it is still nice that the number of things that require a reboot to change is minimized. There is also the nifty feature of the Hurd (and probably other multi-server OSs) where one can start a "subhurd" which is much like an instance of UML Linux. Except that one doesn't need to patch the kernel. The only thing you can't do is touch hardware that you don't have the permission to touch (same thing for UML Linux).
I know this guy (strddwolf for whatever). The machine that KeenSpace is on (or at least was a while ago) is a very tiny machine that can't handle huge amounts of traffic. He is not a dickhead for trying to make it so that the tiny machine that KeenSpace has to use can be more responsive to people actually using KeenSpace.
Ardour has 24-bit audio support (assuming that you can capture it) and uses standard LADSPA plugins. Basically every single Free Software audio application uses LADSPA. Midi editing is a bit weak in Ardour (well, it doesn't exist but it is possible for it to generate MTC or bind controls to MIDI control surfaces, which makes editing much nicer), but the unreleased version of Rosegarden in CVS is a huge improvement over the current release. If libsndfile supports a file format, most applications can use it (since basically everyone uses libsndfile).
The UI of things like Ardour, on the other hand, aren't up to par with the Windows equivalent. Stuff like rosegarden may have be up to par, but I've never really used much Windows audio software (or Windows software in general since I haven't had a copy at home for about three years now). I've done some low quality recordings with my SBLive on my 500Mhz k6-2 and everything runs in real time (Linux 2.4.21 + preempt + lowlatency patches, Linux 2.6.0testN already has these in the main tree). The only part the really sucks when recording a three man band through a two channel sound card is recording the drums...I am now trying to get enough money to by an RME Hammerfall DSP and all of the associated A/D converter stuff (oh, and a machine that can handle 32 24-bit/96kHz streams). When your car just died and you had to use the money you were going to spend on building a decent DAW, life sucks.
Indeed. I ordered mine Sunday and it got here today (Five minutes after I rolled out of bed even). Then I went to the Neuros site...wow, Ogg Vorbis firmware was released this morning. A quick mounting of my neuros and firmware upgrade later, and I'm syncing all of my music to it. I (heart) Digital Innovations. I could have saved $50 if I had waited until today, but oh well. $50 isn't really all that much really. It is nice that they will be giving everyone a free upgrade to the USB 2.0 backpack when it is released (I got the 128MB + 20GB player with the car kit and stuff).
Install bochs, boot the Hurd from a disk image, and compile all your software using the crosshurd compiler in Debian. There is your GNU/Linux based cross development environment. It is what most of the developers use (either that or using a network or serial connection to a second Hurd box). Using bochs is supposed to be nice because you can do stuff like attach gdb to a virtual serial port and debug stuff that might take down the entire system.
It would be interesting to see if Steve Baker had anything to do with that because he said a few things a long time ago on the Indrema games mailing list about something eerily similar (as in, I jumped out of my skin when I saw the ad for them on tv).
My son has been on to me to write a Pokemon type of game. I've also
aquired one of those CueCat barcode readers and I was thinking about
using bar-codes to provide a random-ish number into a widget that would
use some kind of 'genetics' to generate an entirely new monster without
human intervention.
....
The idea would be that you'd have to search your food cupboards, CD collections,
etc to find that perfect bar code that would generate a killer monster...but
the underlying (and hopefully, well disguised) Rock-Paper-Scissor paradigm
would ensure that there could never, ever be an undefeatable monster...
although it might take days of randomly scanning cans of soup to find
just the exact 'Rock-critter' you need to beat the 'Scissor-monster'
that's been savaging your collection of 'Paper-beasts'.
That message was posted on December 8th, 2000 (therefore predating the game as far as I know).
Alsa now has a client named dmix that you can use to do software mixing. I don't know how to use it, but it is included in Alsa 0.9.0 (not the RC8+) and I believe that all you have to do is tell Alsa to use it and then it mixes any streams above what your hardware supports in software.
What they need is free, open-source (read: adaptable) voiceware, so that people who are already on disability don't have to pay for it...
Speex is a speech compression codec, not dictation or recognition software. CMU has a few speech projects that include a speech recognizer and text to speech engine. It isn't part of Xiph's mission to even touch speech regonition.
While this is a good idea, I still think that new users should get some sort of introduction to the open source and its ideals.
I think you mean the Free Software movement and not Open Source. Open Source is the non-political form of Free Software. The main part of the Open Source movement is that it is technically superior. There is no argument for freedom. If you want ideals, you want Free Software. The FSF had a button that summed it up well "What's the point of Open Source with the FREEDOM?"
Re:Linux kernel did not need GCC/GNU/RMS
on
Linus Is A Hero
·
· Score: 2
The Hurd works. The Hurd now has pthreads and can run almost all of the software that Debian has. You can install Debian GNU/Hurd NOW. And it works. The next cd images should have GNOME and KDE too. The Hurd is a bit slow, but that should be fixed when l4hurd is ready (Hurd on L4, which is much faster than Mach). The Hurd is quite mature and stable and only has a few show stoppers left (fs size limit is the main one). Most of the recent critical bugs have been in GNUMach not in the Hurd. This is because Mach is generally agreed to suck which is why the Hurd is being ported to L4 (a decent microkernel).
To clarify: the Hurd running on GNUMach 1.x isn't very stable. But that is because GNUMach is unstable, not the Hurd. The Hurd (being a set of daemons and translators) doesn't have too many crash bugs. If any parts of the Hurd has a crash bug it isn't really terribly severe because the server can always be restarted. But when the kernel has a crash bug, oops. It will be nice when GNU finally releases GNU 1.0 (the GNU project will be releasing its own distribution of the GNU OS when it is ready, just like other OS vendors).
Wine -> Implements Win32 API on Linux, all code run directly on hardware - requires x86 machine to run it on. Due to the Win32 API being badly documented, tends to have compatibility problems.
Actually, you only need an x86 to run Win32 binaries with WINE. If you recompile the application using libwine it is a native binary and can therefore run on whatever architecture you want (stuff like endianess issues aside). Add yes, libewine does run on more than the x86.
Wierd, I use the preempt, low latency, and ALSA 0.9.0rc[forgot, I think four] on my 2.4.19 kernel. My uptime is now 87 days, that doesn't seem unstable at all.
What? I played Vorbis files fine on my Pentium 166! While doing other things! My 66Mhz 7100 could decode Soreson 1 video...there is no way that a 200Mhz PPC can't decode Vorbis. Maybe you are confusing processor power with the multitasking problems of the classic Mac OS (I bet that the program "on top" never yielded control to the mp3 playing program).
Berlin no longer exists; it is now Fresco. And it works, although not terribly well. You can't use it for day to day stuff, but it has a lot of stuff that would be difficult to add in X. My only problem with Fresco is that it forces you to use their one toolkit (uniformity or something). Maybe one day it will replace X, but for now X is better (just like GNU/Linux is better than pure GNU using the Hurd).
He wanted to name it "Lignux"? Ugh, no. I'll skip it.
Remember the 'G' is silent so it would have been pronounced the same way as 'Linux'.
Which, from looking at HURD, Stallman's folks can't do very well.
The Hurd isn't a kernel; gnumach is. Gnumach does suck, and a few of the Hurd developers are porting the Hurd to L4. I think the Hurd would have gotten more attention if Linux hadn't come along. But anyway, that doesn't really matter. The Hurd works. Gnumach 2 will be released soon, and the Hurd will finally have support for things like large file systems. Eventually the Hurd will be ported to L4, but right now development on l4hurd is stuck because a new version of L4 is going to be released in February, and the Hurd developers would have to sign an NDA and not release their code until february (this is what wolfgang told me).
Slashdot Mirror
No, you'd be FUCKING DEAD.
That much power would put you quite a bit over the pain threshold (you'd have to drive something like 4 15" or 18" woofers and an equal number of 1" or 2" horns to use that much power continuously). So much over the pain threshold that you'd end up DEAD because of all the vibration.
Naturally I am exaggerating a little (not about being over the pain threshold). My puny little PA cabs with their 1" Horns and 15" woofers connected to an RMX1850HD power amp (320W peak into an 8Ohm load when both channels are being driven over the entire signal bandwidth [before someone says "no! it is a 360W amp!" because it only does 360W at 1kHz when one channel is being driven...]) do fine in a mid-sized room (50x50 feet) for a nice sized crowd (100 people). And most of them come out of the show nearly deaf (it suuuucks when the mixing board has to go RIGHT UNDERNEATH one of the cabs).
I think you are wrong. If you had ever tried to self-release a CD (like I have), you'd soon realize that it is expensive as hell to do so.
Want to record? Well, you need something to record with. A 16-track hard disk record will run you about a thousand. About the same to get an RME Hammerfall Lite used and a pair of eight channel Analog to Digital Converters (still around $800 just to do eight tracks at a time, which is more than enough). Then you need software which is expensive as hell. Or you can go down the Free Software route and use Ardour (which is entirely reasonable for a demo, EP, or first album). So then you need equipment to record with. Mics run about $90 a piece for SM58s ($85 if you know the pro-audio guy at the local shop) and $80 for SM57s ($75...). Then you need cables, stands, monitor speakers, etc.
So now you've just spent about $4000 (assuming $0 for software costs) on a rig that can be used to record at most a five piece drum kit. Of course, you can rent this system...and if you have a live sound PA the equipment you need overlaps very nicely (out of the $4500 in live sound stuff I have about $3700 worth of it [basically everything except for my PA cabs and monitors] can be used in a recording rig). Or you can just go and get a pro to do your recording at around $30 an hour (and that is on the low side). You'll probably end up spending a good fifty or sixty hours in the studio to lay down the tracks for a four or five song EP (assuming four minute song length).
Going down the paying-something-else-to-do-it route is cheaper in the short term (but having all of that equipment is more fun). Recording turns out to expensive, but getting cds pressed costs about the same. If you want a run of 1000 discs with one color printing on the disc and a two color single page booklet with two color inserts in the jewel case you are looking at around $1300. Anything less and the per-disc price becomes a bit...obscene. And I left out the money you have to spend on getting the artwork ready for press (even if you do the artwork yourself you still need to pay a print shop to pre-press it, and they charge an arm and a leg for their services).
Then comes the promo for the album...in the end, it costs a lot of money and only established bands that play fairly often to decently sized audiences can afford to do it without killing the members financially (because, quite honestly, if you are in a band that is self-publishing an album you more than likely still have a day job and that job is going to be low paying but allow you flexible hours so you can tour and whatnot).
Or you can go the cheapass route and record stuff in your friend's basement on his computer (in all the glory of two-tracks-at-a-time) and then get someone to burn you a few hundred discs, print a sheet of labels, photocopy said label sheet onto more label sheets at Kinkos, and then do the same for the booklet pages. Then you have your friends stay up all night in someone's room cutting out the booklets and stapling them together and building your jewel cases...ahh, good memories. Personally, I'd do that with a four or five track EP-length album to get the money up to press a short run of seven inch records and then use the money from the seven inches to get a real album recorded.
Then again, I'm used to being a part of the Hardcore Punk scene where one normally releases a split 7" record with another band (usually with the first run on some colored vinyl to make people want to buy it) before going on to record your own 7" and then an album or demo depending on how well the 7" did. I'll probably be looking at doing the same thing again in a month or so...
Well, I was using a little portable player today that support Vorbis. All it has is a little 120Mhz 16-bit fixed point TI-DSP...(the Neuros, which is looking like a semi-bad choice now except it does play Vorbis fine...if you use the 1.40A firmware that isn't supported [there are releases with Vorbis support beyond this, but they skip when playing over MyFi which I can't deal with] but now I have digressed too far). A 16-bit fixed point DSP isn't going to cost much more than a dedicated MPEG Audio decoding chip, and is far more flexible.
Actually, my situation is fairly similar. Except that it wasn't I who did the discovering before and now it is. Mostly because all of my friends stopped working when we started college and I didn't. So now I'm the only one with any money to blow on cds. I've been buying all of the stuff that my friend Mike gave me a few years back lately because I really liked it and haven't listened to that stuff in a long time (I just got all of The Dillinger Escape Plan's and Strapping Young Lad's stuff yesterday). There is also my friend Ray who has lent me an album or two (ack, I just realized that the Walls of Jericho album he lent me two years ago is still sitting on top of my computer where I laid it the day he let me borrow it!) and has recommended a lot of bands to me (he listens to Grindcore and stuff, Mike used to listen to Death Metal and now listens to Melodic Power Metal [wtf?]). And there is Brent, who told me about Iced Earth (he is a bit obsessed with them), which led to me discovering Blind Guardian (my favorite band of all time! Hooray for Brent). My High School days of sharing music with my friends were great.
Mike and I still exchange music a lot, which tends to result in my deleting the stuff because it sucks :). I do let my jobless friend Greg copy my music...I just got fifteen albums so I'm going to his house Monday. He gets to copy them off of my slow USB 1.1 Neuros which means I get to talk to his cute sister for a while...(the only real reason I am going there :-P ). I just got an email from Century Media that they are knocking 20% off of all their cd prices tonight...so I'm going to finish out my Iced Earth collection and grab some other stuff from them now.
All because I am a music addict.
Same here. Before I had a job, I downloaded a few songs here and there and just grabbed copies of my friends music. Now I spend an obscene amount of money on cds every year (I went from twenty albums a year ago to one hundred and thirty now with two on pre-order and three on the way from the Netherlands and I'm about to order ten more and ...). I love it how I now own all but one studio album (three if you count their live albums and their covers album) of Iced Earth because my friend Brent gave me a list of songs to download by them. Oh, and I did I mention how anti-filesharing Jon Schaeffer is (Iced Earth is Jon Schaeffer; it is his little pet project and there is a very high turnover rate for all the members except for him)?
And you know what? I don't blame him. I didn't know he was until I actually purchased an Iced earth album (the two disc first pressing edition of Horrow Show with the Iron Maiden cover and interview on the second disc) where he says something about it in the interview on the second disc. I don't know anyone else who downloads music and then purchases it. Not a single person. So I think that you and I are a rare breed, in that we actually purchase music. I buy music because I like having a rack full of albums with liner notes and artwork and a disc with a lossless copy of the song on it. I also happen to listen to a lot of music that you just can't find on mainstream file sharing networks (the three albums being ordered from the Netherlands). A lot of my albums are out of print so I have to pay a fairly large amount to get them used. But I buy them because I love having that rack full of music.
How many people really care about having the plastic cd case in front of them when all they really want to do is listen to the music? How many people care if there is a bit of distortion in the music they listen to?
Not many.
Re: 20 dB boost. The Neuros does have this, but I didn't notice it. If you start to record, you can hit the control stick up to add a 20dB boost, and back down to go back to 0 dB boost.
The Neuros with firmware 1.40 (I'm using 1.40A, which is 1.40 with the fully optimized Vorbis decoder which rocks because now I can listen to my 160kbps ABR Vorbis files without clicks over MyFi [in 1.40, they skipped to the point of being unlistenable over MyFi, but only skipped in really complicated sections of songs through the headphone out]...but I'm getting a bit off topic now). Anyway, support for recording to wav files was added in firmware 1.40, with the option of recording 8kHz/8-bit, or 44.1kHz/16-bit or 48kHz/16-bit. 48kHz/16-bit is DAT quality, and the Neuros has a line-in jack so you should be able to hook up most external mics to it (at least with a preamp because it doesn't have a +20dB signal boost; of course I assume that bootleggers don't use crappy unpowered mics that have a maximum signal level of -20 dB instead of 0 dB).
The only problem with recording is that the unit's built in mic picks up a low pitched "hum," which I assume is electrical noise and the noise of the hard drive spinning when it needs to dump the recorded data from where it caches it (I'm not sure if it just caches in RAM or if it writes to the built in flash and then copies over the hd; I think it writes to flash because the hd only spun up once every ten minutes or so when I was recording for about an hour in 44.1kHz/16-bit mode).
The recording stuff has a nice level stereo level meter but no editing tools (yet), so it isn't quite as nice to use as many recorders, but Digital Innovations seems to be responsive to user requests for features (Ogg Vorbis support, scheduled radio recording, equalization, etc.) so maybe there will be a few simple editing tools added eventually (I'm thinking stuff like being able to hit one of the present buttons to make a mark and then hitting the menu button to do something like delete everything between markers or normalize it, etc.). Still, it works great for just recording stuff and then copying it to a computer for editing.
OS X is really a bad example of a micro kernel OS because it is a single server BSD system running on top of Mach. Mach is a really old Microkernel and stuff like "drivers not being able to crash the kernel" aren't true with it because the drivers are compiled into the kernel (or loaded into the same address space as modules, depending on which implementation of Mach one uses). Yes, Apple's Mach uses userspace USB and Firewire drivers through the usage of different libraries, but Linux can do that to with libusb and the raw firewire library.
Now, QNX. The Microkernel used in QNX is a very nice one. QNX is a great example of a high performance, multi-server, Microkernel system. Drivers are in userspace, each 'kernel' component executes as its own server, and the entire thing is fast and real-time to boot. I think that QNX disproves the whole "Monolithic Kernel Operating Systems are faster than Microkernel Operating Systems" argument.
There is also plan9 which is a multi-server Microkernel based OS. I don't know if BeOS is multi-server or single server, mostly because I've never used BeOS before. You also have the Hurd which, although it uses Mach (for now), is still a multi-server OS. The Hurd needs a lot of work and there is no longer any work being done on it except for the L4 port (and, as I found out last night, a few people working on getting the Hurd to work with OSF Mach + OsKit and therefore the PPC and other archs).
And about the whole "being able to replace large portions of the kernel without a reboot stuff," that is only semi-true. You can't replace the root file system translator without rebooting. Or the task or memory server. Or the authentication server. On the other hand, you can replace any file system translator that is not required for the system to find the new file system translator, the network stack, and many other things. But the fact still remains that a lot of stuff still requires a reboot. But it is still nice that the number of things that require a reboot to change is minimized. There is also the nifty feature of the Hurd (and probably other multi-server OSs) where one can start a "subhurd" which is much like an instance of UML Linux. Except that one doesn't need to patch the kernel. The only thing you can't do is touch hardware that you don't have the permission to touch (same thing for UML Linux).
I know this guy (strddwolf for whatever). The machine that KeenSpace is on (or at least was a while ago) is a very tiny machine that can't handle huge amounts of traffic. He is not a dickhead for trying to make it so that the tiny machine that KeenSpace has to use can be more responsive to people actually using KeenSpace.
Ardour has 24-bit audio support (assuming that you can capture it) and uses standard LADSPA plugins. Basically every single Free Software audio application uses LADSPA. Midi editing is a bit weak in Ardour (well, it doesn't exist but it is possible for it to generate MTC or bind controls to MIDI control surfaces, which makes editing much nicer), but the unreleased version of Rosegarden in CVS is a huge improvement over the current release. If libsndfile supports a file format, most applications can use it (since basically everyone uses libsndfile).
The UI of things like Ardour, on the other hand, aren't up to par with the Windows equivalent. Stuff like rosegarden may have be up to par, but I've never really used much Windows audio software (or Windows software in general since I haven't had a copy at home for about three years now). I've done some low quality recordings with my SBLive on my 500Mhz k6-2 and everything runs in real time (Linux 2.4.21 + preempt + lowlatency patches, Linux 2.6.0testN already has these in the main tree). The only part the really sucks when recording a three man band through a two channel sound card is recording the drums...I am now trying to get enough money to by an RME Hammerfall DSP and all of the associated A/D converter stuff (oh, and a machine that can handle 32 24-bit/96kHz streams). When your car just died and you had to use the money you were going to spend on building a decent DAW, life sucks.
What about Cinelerra? I am afraid to even try and get that running on my 500Mhz k6-2, or else I'd try and see if it really was a decent app.
Indeed. I ordered mine Sunday and it got here today (Five minutes after I rolled out of bed even). Then I went to the Neuros site...wow, Ogg Vorbis firmware was released this morning. A quick mounting of my neuros and firmware upgrade later, and I'm syncing all of my music to it. I (heart) Digital Innovations. I could have saved $50 if I had waited until today, but oh well. $50 isn't really all that much really. It is nice that they will be giving everyone a free upgrade to the USB 2.0 backpack when it is released (I got the 128MB + 20GB player with the car kit and stuff).
Install bochs, boot the Hurd from a disk image, and compile all your software using the crosshurd compiler in Debian. There is your GNU/Linux based cross development environment. It is what most of the developers use (either that or using a network or serial connection to a second Hurd box). Using bochs is supposed to be nice because you can do stuff like attach gdb to a virtual serial port and debug stuff that might take down the entire system.
It would be interesting to see if Steve Baker had anything to do with that because he said a few things a long time ago on the Indrema games mailing list about something eerily similar (as in, I jumped out of my skin when I saw the ad for them on tv).
That message was posted on December 8th, 2000 (therefore predating the game as far as I know).
Alsa now has a client named dmix that you can use to do software mixing. I don't know how to use it, but it is included in Alsa 0.9.0 (not the RC8+) and I believe that all you have to do is tell Alsa to use it and then it mixes any streams above what your hardware supports in software.
What they need is free, open-source (read: adaptable) voiceware, so that people who are already on disability don't have to pay for it...
Speex is a speech compression codec, not dictation or recognition software. CMU has a few speech projects that include a speech recognizer and text to speech engine. It isn't part of Xiph's mission to even touch speech regonition.
While this is a good idea, I still think that new users should get some sort of introduction to the open source and its ideals.
I think you mean the Free Software movement and not Open Source. Open Source is the non-political form of Free Software. The main part of the Open Source movement is that it is technically superior. There is no argument for freedom. If you want ideals, you want Free Software. The FSF had a button that summed it up well "What's the point of Open Source with the FREEDOM?"
The Hurd works. The Hurd now has pthreads and can run almost all of the software that Debian has. You can install Debian GNU/Hurd NOW. And it works. The next cd images should have GNOME and KDE too. The Hurd is a bit slow, but that should be fixed when l4hurd is ready (Hurd on L4, which is much faster than Mach). The Hurd is quite mature and stable and only has a few show stoppers left (fs size limit is the main one). Most of the recent critical bugs have been in GNUMach not in the Hurd. This is because Mach is generally agreed to suck which is why the Hurd is being ported to L4 (a decent microkernel).
To clarify: the Hurd running on GNUMach 1.x isn't very stable. But that is because GNUMach is unstable, not the Hurd. The Hurd (being a set of daemons and translators) doesn't have too many crash bugs. If any parts of the Hurd has a crash bug it isn't really terribly severe because the server can always be restarted. But when the kernel has a crash bug, oops. It will be nice when GNU finally releases GNU 1.0 (the GNU project will be releasing its own distribution of the GNU OS when it is ready, just like other OS vendors).
Wine -> Implements Win32 API on Linux, all code run directly on hardware - requires x86 machine to run it on. Due to the Win32 API being badly documented, tends to have compatibility problems.
Actually, you only need an x86 to run Win32 binaries with WINE. If you recompile the application using libwine it is a native binary and can therefore run on whatever architecture you want (stuff like endianess issues aside). Add yes, libewine does run on more than the x86.
Wierd, I use the preempt, low latency, and ALSA 0.9.0rc[forgot, I think four] on my 2.4.19 kernel. My uptime is now 87 days, that doesn't seem unstable at all.
What? I played Vorbis files fine on my Pentium 166! While doing other things! My 66Mhz 7100 could decode Soreson 1 video...there is no way that a 200Mhz PPC can't decode Vorbis. Maybe you are confusing processor power with the multitasking problems of the classic Mac OS (I bet that the program "on top" never yielded control to the mp3 playing program).
erm, I meant www2.fresco.org, not www.fresco.org. Oops.
Berlin no longer exists; it is now Fresco. And it works, although not terribly well. You can't use it for day to day stuff, but it has a lot of stuff that would be difficult to add in X. My only problem with Fresco is that it forces you to use their one toolkit (uniformity or something). Maybe one day it will replace X, but for now X is better (just like GNU/Linux is better than pure GNU using the Hurd).
He wanted to name it "Lignux"? Ugh, no. I'll skip it.
Remember the 'G' is silent so it would have been pronounced the same way as 'Linux'.
Which, from looking at HURD, Stallman's folks can't do very well.
The Hurd isn't a kernel; gnumach is. Gnumach does suck, and a few of the Hurd developers are porting the Hurd to L4. I think the Hurd would have gotten more attention if Linux hadn't come along. But anyway, that doesn't really matter. The Hurd works. Gnumach 2 will be released soon, and the Hurd will finally have support for things like large file systems. Eventually the Hurd will be ported to L4, but right now development on l4hurd is stuck because a new version of L4 is going to be released in February, and the Hurd developers would have to sign an NDA and not release their code until february (this is what wolfgang told me).
I meant if you replaced all of the Sun tools with GNU ones, not just some. So your system is just a Solaris system with a few GNU tools.