Your comment is a bunch of crap. I don't want to start a flame war but there is a huge difference.
Disclaimer: I'm not an audiophile. I probably hear better than the average person - I've played an instrument for almost my entire life and sing every day. Serious choral stuff, not along with the radio. But I'm no audiophile. Also, I don't want to get into the vinyl/CD debate - that one is way over my level of comprehension.
I'll be honest: if you put on the latest pop/rock/rap song with the bass turned up and the trebel turned down, you won't hear a difference between an mp3 at any decent quality over a CD. If you're listning to music of any kind of bad quality headphones or speakers, you won't notice much difference.
However, the better your system and the more intricate the music, the more evident the difference between an mp3 and CD become. This becomes especially true of instrumental music. I recently recieved an Edgar Meyer recording of several of the Bach suites. I first played it in my girlfriend's car's stero - it sounded nice, but not as full and rich as I had originally expected.
I got it home and popped it into my dad's system (another disclaimer: he's an audiophile. Not the wanna-be type you alluded to. Or seem to be pretending to be.)
Wow.
The sound was rich, full. I could hear his breaths as he poured his heart into a crescendo. I was impressed.
The breathing is not important. It can get distracting. But it's just one of those things you'd probably lose when you encode it into a 128 "CD-quality" mp3. It's just not. Overtones that make the music beautiful are just done away with. Overtones make instrumental music beautiful. Brief physics: when a note sounds, it sets off other vibrations at higher and lower frequencies. Richer and fuller sounds are directly related to the ability to do produce these. I once knew a horn player who made out a chart of how sharp/flat to play each note in a bunch of common chords to make them sound the most full and in tune. His ensembles sounded a cut above.
And it's not just me that can hear it: she was suitably impressed. My little sister, even on the Christmas music she incessently is playing, can hear a difference on speakers.
I sort of got off there, but the comparison between speaker quality (not to mention cable quality, player quality, and god knows what else) and compression is valid. Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean it's there. It is. If you played a 128 mp3 and a CD-quality piece of instrumental work on a good system, even your average I-played-piano-when-my-mom-dragged-me-to-lessons-a nd-now-just-like-to-hear-the-symphony would know the difference.
Fat/grease-free food is fine. But when you want some really good food...
I'm humor-impaired and can't tell if giany is kidding or just being anti-US, so I'll ditch the humor. Being US-centric is not good, but being a jerk to those who are is worse.
In France there are Algerian terrorists. So much so that a local group of students decided to avoid Paris on their tour of France. They have had a huge problem with these guys.
In England/Ireland you have the IRA. They might not have destroyed big buildings, but since when is big-building-destruction the qualification for terrorist? Isn't bombing subways terrorism? I seem to remember hearing a while ago about terrorism in London. Long time ago, though, don't keep up with British news. Oh - ever heard the U2 song Sunday Bloody Sunday? You should.
In Spain you have some group with an acronym that I can't remember off the top of my head. They're a Basque separationalist group. They leave bombs outside of banks, in dance clubs, near government agencies. They're not 'time to time', they happen fairly frequently. They're 'localized' to about 1/4th of the country.
Germany, in case if you were off somewhere in the few days following the 11th, made several arrests. Seems like a bunch of terrorists related to the attacks were hiding out in there.
Gee, that seems to be the major European countries. Pretty terrorist-free. Mmm hmm.
[quote]
In Europe people DO use their brain in the right way and in Europe people DO care for their own business, so in the Europe, there are NO terrorist attacks.
[/quote]
So we Americans use our brain in the wrong way, we don't care about our business? I'd say we care a little too much for our business and not enough for everyone else's, which is the problem. US = uneducated about the rest of the world is pretty common. Well, it's not really that we're uneducated, we just don't keep up with current events in other countries.
As I see in my upper-left hand corner, Slashdot bills itself as 'News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.'
->linux kernel = news for nerds of the linux type
->to nerds of the linux type, linux kernel = stuff that matters
->nerds of the linux type = majority of slashdot
I personally would like to hear about stuff like Xine and MPlayer and how that enables the world to break free of all things proprietary. Not saying I don't.
However, linux is one thing among others that binds this community together. It's stuff that matters. So what if a new kernel comes out every couple of weeks? If nothing else, it adds another news item that provides banner impressions that keeps/. afloat, and I'm for Jon Katz stories if they do that.
So I was at lunch with my friends today and another guy and I were talking about random linux stuff and servers and whatnot when one of our Windows-gaming friends popped in and said something to the effect of "I'll switch to Linux when I can game on it because it's just not worth the time and effort to switch back and forth for gaming and work."
XBill aside, he's right - although he's not a typical buy-a-computer-from-Wal-Mart guy, he primarily games. No coding skills, aside from HTML and TI-Basic.
Wine and WineX (or Transgaming or whaterver it happens to be) bridge this gap. He wouldn't hesitate to switch full time but just doesn't have the time/space/will to install a redundant word processor/ICQ/mail client. Most people don't. Not many average consumers are going to "try both systems separately" because life's busy and the PC is a way to increase productivity.
While I agree with Loki - it'd be nice if the games were linux-native and true written-for-Linux stuff would be so much better in terms of speed and stability - the fact of reality is that as long as I can't play the latest game with my friends I'm going to keep Windows on my system, and as long as Windows is on my system I'm more likely to use things like Word (which, like it or not, currently is a superior word processor to Star/K/Gnomeoffice - if it fixes my subjunctive when I'm writing in Spanish, it stays).
We shouldn't _have_ to load multiple operating systems. Someone on the recent REBOL thread used the Ferarri v. 85 Volvo Wagon analogie - it's just not valid in the case of an operating system. I should be able to word process, game, IM, e-mail, and research on the same platform. Windows lets me do that now.
I use Linux for everything but gaming now (which actually increases my productivity). Wine(X) eleminates this. It's a crucial step. Wine isn't overrated. You can get a large segment of the Windows world by simply offering them gaming.
They do have some challenges. Changing APIs will suck. But hell, AIM did, and now for a bigger challenge!
http://www.mandrakestore.com/en/storemdkinc-8.1.ph p
Mandrake 8.1 is (will be?) available on DVD-ROM as well - it's $60 USD - $50 for the DVD, $10 for shipping/handling/contribution to Open Source (that's novel) - and that's instead of 7 CD's.
If Mandrake releases the Gaming Edition with that WineX wrapper on DVD, that would be really good. You could fit more than the Sims on that:)
On our home network we used to use WinProxy (Windows 98 can be incredibly stable), but found that software - at least all the windows ones we tried - restricted internet gaming.
Went out and got a Linksys DSL/Cable Router (http://linksys.com/products/group.asp?grid=5). This has worked incredibly well. One computer can be made a DeMilitarized Zone (DMZ) and has almost no firewall - internet games work great. Althuogh it can act as a DHCP server, you can assign static IPs and forward ports to certain IPs. It's avalible in several port versions (4 and 8 are the ones i remember) and as a switch, too, if my memory serves me right. We've had no problems with it - more than I can say with proxy software (of course, we didn't have an old machine to put BSD on as someone else has already commented).
You can also get wireless versions - we decided to hook up another wireless reciever - and even a print server built in. As I remember, it ran about $100 USD. I highly reccomend it.
I looked through that list and, man - they missed quite a bit. So here you have it, from the gaming gods of PC Gamer (if you must look at their website that is a shadow of its former self after being swallowed by IGN, a despicable Gen-whatever site, go to www.pcgamer.com)
--
(as reported by the venerable PC Gamer magaizine, October 2000, not restricted to this year, although quite a few were. Not all of the text is reproduced, just choice quotes:)
10. Curse You, Red Baron - "A half-hearted attempt at budget software from our sardonic 'friends' at Sierra"
9. Evel Knievel 3D Stunt Game - "I don't know what's more incredible - the fact that Evel can still walk... or that HeadGames can ship utter crap like this"
8. Test Drive 8 - "the series fell from grace even quicker than MC Hammer"
7. Beatdown - "...and AI code that's suffered from one too many malt liquor forties"
6. Mode - "Also known as Annoying Performance Artist Interactive"
5. Nations - "as far as I know, this is the only time the phrase 'wet fart of a game' has been used in PC Gamer's history [in a review]"
4. Swamp Buggy Racing - "catering to a demographic that does not actually own computers"
3. Extreme Paintbrawl - "As it stands, Paintbrawl's lead designer confessed that the game shipped without any AI" - that is not a joke, it actually happened...
2. Extreme Watersports (not what you're thinking) - "not even the programmers' mothers would buy this"
1. Skydive - "It's as if Satan himself got his hands on a DirectX SDK, and decided to share the incomparablepain and suffering of the inferno with the PC gaming market"
Well, there you have it. Be careful, though - just as you shouldn't post without reading the article, don't bash Dakitana without playing it. It's a really sucky game but is not as bad as most ignoramuses think it is.
The movie 'The Thirteenth Floor' dealt with this topic. I don't remember when it came out - a year or two ago - but it was lost in the Matrix's wake (they're only similar superficially).
I've just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for summer reading. Sorta intresting - in one chapter, Huck lies to his aunt, explaining why he was late. He says that a boiler blew on the steamship he was travling on. When his aunt asks if anyone was hurt, he says "No one, just a black man." She sighs, relieved that no one was hurt.
Apply that to this story as you will. Some parallels you might use would be music artists as black people and PhD's as whites...
This is a great idea, but how secure is it going to be? I remember hearing about empty packets being sent back to both distributed.net and seti@home. If people are being paid for this, there is all the more reason to be worried about this - look at the fraud with AllAdvantage (don't use linux and doubt it's avalible for the platform 'cept through WINE - for those out of the know, many people have anti-idlers so they keep on racking up the cash overnight and not looking at the banners).
And this isn't just a relatively meaningless deal like distributed.net/seti - honestly, when compared to people's lives, how much does that matter?
>>>If the Mercedes could be produced for free, and your theft didn't prevent anyone else from buying one, I would have very little problem with your theft... If you copy AutoCAd and play with it, but could never afford to buy your own copy, AutoCAD hasn't lost a cent. Where is the loss?
Yeah, but if I jacked a Mercedes, does that make it OK because I was never going to buy one anyways?
>>>It used to be common for office workers to install Microsoft Office at home so they could work at home nights and weekends. No doubt they also wrote letters and recipies and resumes. Is there theft in any of this?
Yes, there is theft in an employee installing MS Office on his home computer without a license. But since there is never any repercussion, no one cares.
>>>Here are counter examples. Suppose you are handing out coupons on a street corner. Suppose someone grabs one before you have a chance to give it out? Suppose someone takes two? Is either of those theft?
Not really applicable, because coupons are free to begin with.
>>>Suppose a store sale says "2 per customer" -- is it theft to go back several times and buy two each time?
Yeah... unless it says per visit. It's known as the honor code.
>>>How about contests "No purchase necessary" -- what if you enter a dozen times?
As in buying a bottle of Coke to look under the cap? Bring in the next, equally pathetic argument...
>>>How about radio contests -- "12th caller wins!" -- is it theft to use a fast redial button? Is it theft to have your computer redial even faster?
Man, I thought they couldn't get worse... since it's free and has no application to the arguement you were trying to make, I'll just leave it as good luck.
You can't defend Napster. If I design a tool to jack Mercedes, give it away for free, and then tell people to only use it on their Mercedes... yeah, right.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment is a bunch of crap. I don't want to start a flame war but there is a huge difference.
a nd-now-just-like-to-hear-the-symphony would know the difference.
Disclaimer: I'm not an audiophile. I probably hear better than the average person - I've played an instrument for almost my entire life and sing every day. Serious choral stuff, not along with the radio. But I'm no audiophile. Also, I don't want to get into the vinyl/CD debate - that one is way over my level of comprehension.
I'll be honest: if you put on the latest pop/rock/rap song with the bass turned up and the trebel turned down, you won't hear a difference between an mp3 at any decent quality over a CD. If you're listning to music of any kind of bad quality headphones or speakers, you won't notice much difference.
However, the better your system and the more intricate the music, the more evident the difference between an mp3 and CD become. This becomes especially true of instrumental music. I recently recieved an Edgar Meyer recording of several of the Bach suites. I first played it in my girlfriend's car's stero - it sounded nice, but not as full and rich as I had originally expected.
I got it home and popped it into my dad's system (another disclaimer: he's an audiophile. Not the wanna-be type you alluded to. Or seem to be pretending to be.)
Wow.
The sound was rich, full. I could hear his breaths as he poured his heart into a crescendo. I was impressed.
The breathing is not important. It can get distracting. But it's just one of those things you'd probably lose when you encode it into a 128 "CD-quality" mp3. It's just not. Overtones that make the music beautiful are just done away with. Overtones make instrumental music beautiful. Brief physics: when a note sounds, it sets off other vibrations at higher and lower frequencies. Richer and fuller sounds are directly related to the ability to do produce these. I once knew a horn player who made out a chart of how sharp/flat to play each note in a bunch of common chords to make them sound the most full and in tune. His ensembles sounded a cut above.
And it's not just me that can hear it: she was suitably impressed. My little sister, even on the Christmas music she incessently is playing, can hear a difference on speakers.
I sort of got off there, but the comparison between speaker quality (not to mention cable quality, player quality, and god knows what else) and compression is valid. Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean it's there. It is. If you played a 128 mp3 and a CD-quality piece of instrumental work on a good system, even your average I-played-piano-when-my-mom-dragged-me-to-lessons-
Fat/grease-free food is fine. But when you want some really good food...
I'm humor-impaired and can't tell if giany is kidding or just being anti-US, so I'll ditch the humor. Being US-centric is not good, but being a jerk to those who are is worse.
In France there are Algerian terrorists. So much so that a local group of students decided to avoid Paris on their tour of France. They have had a huge problem with these guys.
In England/Ireland you have the IRA. They might not have destroyed big buildings, but since when is big-building-destruction the qualification for terrorist? Isn't bombing subways terrorism? I seem to remember hearing a while ago about terrorism in London. Long time ago, though, don't keep up with British news. Oh - ever heard the U2 song Sunday Bloody Sunday? You should.
In Spain you have some group with an acronym that I can't remember off the top of my head. They're a Basque separationalist group. They leave bombs outside of banks, in dance clubs, near government agencies. They're not 'time to time', they happen fairly frequently. They're 'localized' to about 1/4th of the country.
Germany, in case if you were off somewhere in the few days following the 11th, made several arrests. Seems like a bunch of terrorists related to the attacks were hiding out in there.
Gee, that seems to be the major European countries. Pretty terrorist-free. Mmm hmm.
[quote]
In Europe people DO use their brain in the right way and in Europe people DO care for their own business, so in the Europe, there are NO terrorist attacks.
[/quote]
So we Americans use our brain in the wrong way, we don't care about our business? I'd say we care a little too much for our business and not enough for everyone else's, which is the problem. US = uneducated about the rest of the world is pretty common. Well, it's not really that we're uneducated, we just don't keep up with current events in other countries.
As I see in my upper-left hand corner, Slashdot bills itself as 'News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.'
/. afloat, and I'm for Jon Katz stories if they do that.
->linux kernel = news for nerds of the linux type
->to nerds of the linux type, linux kernel = stuff that matters
->nerds of the linux type = majority of slashdot
I personally would like to hear about stuff like Xine and MPlayer and how that enables the world to break free of all things proprietary. Not saying I don't.
However, linux is one thing among others that binds this community together. It's stuff that matters. So what if a new kernel comes out every couple of weeks? If nothing else, it adds another news item that provides banner impressions that keeps
Quick Story:
So I was at lunch with my friends today and another guy and I were talking about random linux stuff and servers and whatnot when one of our Windows-gaming friends popped in and said something to the effect of "I'll switch to Linux when I can game on it because it's just not worth the time and effort to switch back and forth for gaming and work."
XBill aside, he's right - although he's not a typical buy-a-computer-from-Wal-Mart guy, he primarily games. No coding skills, aside from HTML and TI-Basic.
Wine and WineX (or Transgaming or whaterver it happens to be) bridge this gap. He wouldn't hesitate to switch full time but just doesn't have the time/space/will to install a redundant word processor/ICQ/mail client. Most people don't. Not many average consumers are going to "try both systems separately" because life's busy and the PC is a way to increase productivity.
While I agree with Loki - it'd be nice if the games were linux-native and true written-for-Linux stuff would be so much better in terms of speed and stability - the fact of reality is that as long as I can't play the latest game with my friends I'm going to keep Windows on my system, and as long as Windows is on my system I'm more likely to use things like Word (which, like it or not, currently is a superior word processor to Star/K/Gnomeoffice - if it fixes my subjunctive when I'm writing in Spanish, it stays).
We shouldn't _have_ to load multiple operating systems. Someone on the recent REBOL thread used the Ferarri v. 85 Volvo Wagon analogie - it's just not valid in the case of an operating system. I should be able to word process, game, IM, e-mail, and research on the same platform. Windows lets me do that now.
I use Linux for everything but gaming now (which actually increases my productivity). Wine(X) eleminates this. It's a crucial step. Wine isn't overrated. You can get a large segment of the Windows world by simply offering them gaming.
They do have some challenges. Changing APIs will suck. But hell, AIM did, and now for a bigger challenge!
http://www.mandrakestore.com/en/storemdkinc-8.1.ph p
:)
Mandrake 8.1 is (will be?) available on DVD-ROM as well - it's $60 USD - $50 for the DVD, $10 for shipping/handling/contribution to Open Source (that's novel) - and that's instead of 7 CD's.
If Mandrake releases the Gaming Edition with that WineX wrapper on DVD, that would be really good. You could fit more than the Sims on that
I'm secular.
Great word - has a connotation that avoids religious reference and has people going, 'so is that athiest or what?' Always fun to confuse the unwary.
On our home network we used to use WinProxy (Windows 98 can be incredibly stable), but found that software - at least all the windows ones we tried - restricted internet gaming.
Went out and got a Linksys DSL/Cable Router (http://linksys.com/products/group.asp?grid=5). This has worked incredibly well. One computer can be made a DeMilitarized Zone (DMZ) and has almost no firewall - internet games work great. Althuogh it can act as a DHCP server, you can assign static IPs and forward ports to certain IPs. It's avalible in several port versions (4 and 8 are the ones i remember) and as a switch, too, if my memory serves me right. We've had no problems with it - more than I can say with proxy software (of course, we didn't have an old machine to put BSD on as someone else has already commented).
You can also get wireless versions - we decided to hook up another wireless reciever - and even a print server built in. As I remember, it ran about $100 USD. I highly reccomend it.
You forgot "Don't Be A Phantom Menace While Drinking Your Juice In the Hood"
I looked through that list and, man - they missed quite a bit. So here you have it, from the gaming gods of PC Gamer (if you must look at their website that is a shadow of its former self after being swallowed by IGN, a despicable Gen-whatever site, go to www.pcgamer.com)
:)
--
(as reported by the venerable PC Gamer magaizine, October 2000, not restricted to this year, although quite a few were. Not all of the text is reproduced, just choice quotes
10. Curse You, Red Baron - "A half-hearted attempt at budget software from our sardonic 'friends' at Sierra"
9. Evel Knievel 3D Stunt Game - "I don't know what's more incredible - the fact that Evel can still walk... or that HeadGames can ship utter crap like this"
8. Test Drive 8 - "the series fell from grace even quicker than MC Hammer"
7. Beatdown - "...and AI code that's suffered from one too many malt liquor forties"
6. Mode - "Also known as Annoying Performance Artist Interactive"
5. Nations - "as far as I know, this is the only time the phrase 'wet fart of a game' has been used in PC Gamer's history [in a review]"
4. Swamp Buggy Racing - "catering to a demographic that does not actually own computers"
3. Extreme Paintbrawl - "As it stands, Paintbrawl's lead designer confessed that the game shipped without any AI" - that is not a joke, it actually happened...
2. Extreme Watersports (not what you're thinking) - "not even the programmers' mothers would buy this"
1. Skydive - "It's as if Satan himself got his hands on a DirectX SDK, and decided to share the incomparablepain and suffering of the inferno with the PC gaming market"
Well, there you have it. Be careful, though - just as you shouldn't post without reading the article, don't bash Dakitana without playing it. It's a really sucky game but is not as bad as most ignoramuses think it is.
Did I just defend Dakitana? Oh my...
The movie 'The Thirteenth Floor' dealt with this topic. I don't remember when it came out - a year or two ago - but it was lost in the Matrix's wake (they're only similar superficially).
I've just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for summer reading. Sorta intresting - in one chapter, Huck lies to his aunt, explaining why he was late. He says that a boiler blew on the steamship he was travling on. When his aunt asks if anyone was hurt, he says "No one, just a black man." She sighs, relieved that no one was hurt.
Apply that to this story as you will. Some parallels you might use would be music artists as black people and PhD's as whites...
This is a great idea, but how secure is it going to be? I remember hearing about empty packets being sent back to both distributed.net and seti@home. If people are being paid for this, there is all the more reason to be worried about this - look at the fraud with AllAdvantage (don't use linux and doubt it's avalible for the platform 'cept through WINE - for those out of the know, many people have anti-idlers so they keep on racking up the cash overnight and not looking at the banners).
And this isn't just a relatively meaningless deal like distributed.net/seti - honestly, when compared to people's lives, how much does that matter?
Anyone have any comments?
>>>If the Mercedes could be produced for free, and your theft didn't prevent anyone else from buying one, I would have very little problem with your theft... If you copy AutoCAd and play with it, but could never afford to buy your own copy, AutoCAD hasn't lost a cent. Where is the loss?
Yeah, but if I jacked a Mercedes, does that make it OK because I was never going to buy one anyways?
>>>It used to be common for office workers to install Microsoft Office at home so they could work at home nights and weekends. No doubt they also wrote letters and recipies and resumes. Is there theft in any of this?
Yes, there is theft in an employee installing MS Office on his home computer without a license. But since there is never any repercussion, no one cares.
>>>Here are counter examples. Suppose you are handing out coupons on a street corner. Suppose someone grabs one before you have a chance to give it out? Suppose someone takes two? Is either of those theft?
Not really applicable, because coupons are free to begin with.
>>>Suppose a store sale says "2 per customer" -- is it theft to go back several times and buy two each time?
Yeah... unless it says per visit. It's known as the honor code.
>>>How about contests "No purchase necessary" -- what if you enter a dozen times?
As in buying a bottle of Coke to look under the cap? Bring in the next, equally pathetic argument...
>>>How about radio contests -- "12th caller wins!" -- is it theft to use a fast redial button? Is it theft to have your computer redial even faster?
Man, I thought they couldn't get worse... since it's free and has no application to the arguement you were trying to make, I'll just leave it as good luck.
You can't defend Napster. If I design a tool to jack Mercedes, give it away for free, and then tell people to only use it on their Mercedes... yeah, right.