Whenever an article like this is posted, when someone is going above and beyond a 128kbit mp3 to try and offer improved sound quality, a few individuals will always say that it's stupid because no one can really hear the difference and will go on to demean all those that say they can.
Any way you cut it, although Apple's iTunes store is a step in the right direction, you're buying an inferior product from that which you could purchase in a store. A lot of people spend a lot of time mastering and remastering audio to sound its best, and a lot of that work is just thrown out the window with an mp3. Not that this is a crime against humanity and that mp3s are bad, but I would rather not purchase for the same price a product that is by definition inferior.
Now, if I go buy a Phish concert, I can burn it to a CD and have as good a copy as I'm going to get. If I want to convert it to mp3 for my portable player, I can do that. If I want to convert it to a high-VBR ogg for my computer, I can do that. It's flexible. If I got the mp3, well, I'm stuck. I don't have those options.
You might not want to use your smart-phone-thingie to _move_ your mp3s around, but if you're around the house or at a job in a situation where you'd want music, why not stream it? It's like combining the walkie-talkies and cell phones, and like putting a contact list on your mp3 player.
To who? We're talking Microsoft, here - how many _billion_ in the bank? Spit up among how many people? Plus, the money isn't automatically split up among all residents; each resident must apply and ostesibly prove that they bought the Microsoft product in North Carolina. Do you keep reciepts from back to 1995? Some companies might, but I barely have my Win95 floppies.
The article says that half of the unclaimed money will be donated to schools in the form of "computer technology" - any guesses on who's computer technology?
I wouldn't call this much of a win for the residents of North Carolina - looks nice on the surface, but that's about it.
I've been using XD2 since Tuesday and, to be honest, there's not much more to it over Redhat. The fonts are much better, the menus are better-organized (although picking up programs is a bit hit-and-miss as some Redhat wouldn't recognize Ximian does, and the other way around), everything just looks better, and the software is more 'up2date'.
That's not to say I'll be switching back to plain Redhat anytime soon - I really like XD2. It's just not a huge leap. Think the difference between RH8 and RH9.
Baysan filtering would be low on Ximian's priority list. Evolution is designed as an Outlook replacement. It's main features aside from e-mail, like calendaring and contact management and optional Exchange integration, reflect that it isn't targeted toward the home user but rather towards the corporate desktop. It makes more sense to do the spam filtering on the server side in the corporate setting - that way, if the user is roaming or using web access or whatever else the filters and forwarding still work and are not dependent on the e-mail client.
I'd like to add to this - there's been a recent thread on gentoo-dev on the subject of portage (the Gentoo package manager) under OS X. Currently, it doesn't work. It's about to. Summary of events:
8:02 P.M.: E-mail from user with details on how he tried to compile portage and was hung up on a few issues.
9:25 P.M.: Head developer replies and says he'll do the port.
5:07 P.M. the next day: Head developer updates his status to "should be done today."
That kind of response, interest, and feedback really makes the community great, no matter how many compile-time-fomit-everything jokes there are floating about.
Re:Did they ever move anything? And shake it?
on
3DO Files For Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
3DO was the maker of many bad games, but they also made the incredible Heroes of Might & Magic series of games. If you haven't played them, you should pick up II or III - III is even available for Linux - because they were an incredible combination of RPG and turn-based strategy that was, and still is, as addictive as Civilization. Honestly.
I want Ogg support because I've already encoded my library in Ogg and I don't want to convert each song to mp3 when I want to jog with it. That's like saying that since tape players are already in most cars, why bother asking for a CD player when you can just rerecord all of your CDs onto tapes? I mean, it's not like going to work that extra bit of audio quality is going to make a difference, right?
Re:the dark side of gentoo...
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
>I've been a user of gentoo for some time now
These are all misperceptions. To answer you point by point:
1) Yes, sometimes services that are configured improperly die but the start-stop-daemon still thinks that it is "on". That's easy to fix - run `/etc/init.d/service zap` and the service will be reset to the "off" position.
2) gcc is not a python script - if you doubt me, do a "file `which gcc`" - it's a regular old compiled program. Distributed by the GNU foundation.
Emerge, the gentoo package manager, _is_ a python script. Yes, it's called when you compile something through emerge. But it doesn't add signifigant overhead because the part about compiling is really just emerge saying, "Make!". Nothing different than you saying "Make!" from the command line.
3) For individual scripts, no, there is not yet a tool in mainstream use to check options in ebuild scripts. I've seen some in the pipe, but they're slated for later release in the gentoolkit package. But you're missing the point of these options, called "USE flags", if you read each and every script and edit your global options before telling the emerge script to start.
You can edit global USE flags manually in your/etc/make.conf (there's a up-to-date list of them on the Gentoo website) or by a bash script called UFED. They're pretty intuitive - for example, if you wanted X support for applications, you'd pass "X" into your USE list. If you wanted support for GPM, the console-based mouse driver, you'd pass that into your USE flags and all packages that could take advantage of GPM would.
It's designed to be a mostly static thing - no one in their right mind goes through and checks each one. For those big packages like GNOME and KDE, yeah, go ahead and see what each does, but otherwise, don't sweat it.
Not in the least. It's much more difficult to write a good essay then pick one of five answers.
AP (Advanced Placement) exams have a free response section on all tests. For the math APs the free response is pretty objective - you get a point for this setup, a point for that answer, or a point for this explanation, but all of that is still graded by hand. Most other exams, at least those in English, have three essays that make up more than half of the total score.
For example, in both the US and European History exams, there are two essays dealing with two different time periods and an essay on several provided documents. For the English Literature exam, there is an essay on poetry analysis, prose analysis, and an "open question" where the student provides a work he has read to answer the topic.
All AP free responses are graded on a scale of 1-9, the higher the better. Every summer, hundreds of teachers get together in a large gym or similar structure and sit down to grade them. The graders are given examples of each type of essay and grade until they grade as the College Board wants them to - usually only takes a day. Then they're turned loose on the real ones. The process takes 1-2 weeks.
In terms of quality control, random essays are taken out and re-graded. Scores on essays are correlated to scores on the multiple choice sections. All in all, the graders I know say it is frighteningly consistent. By the end of the day their brains are numb, but scores are still consistent.
It works, and has worked well, since the 1970's. I'm just suprised that the SAT's haven't gone to an essay sooner.
Check the above link for some of the gentoo-user mailing list archives - discussion started a few minutes after the newsletter went out. Common consensus is that it's April Fools - killing the package management system that makes Gentoo unique and requiring X is just too big a step to make without any discussion on the gentoo-dev list.
Kurt did a really good job on this one if Slashdot bit!
Honestly, GRUB is not hard to configure. There are plenty of examples out there - I just did a google search for 'grub example redhat' and the first link that came up was an offical Red Hat walkthrough, including setting up multiple kernels and Windows partitions.
Red Hat auto-configures GRUB anyhow; I don't see what the griping is about.
Canada is not participating in the attack against Iraq and therefore any news reported out of Canada will be unbiased.
Sorry, but there's no such thing as 'unbiased' news. Everyone has their slant and their agenda, and no matter how fairly they treat the subject matter bias will always be there. One must read multiple news sources from around the world, ones that don't just copy Reuters, and decide for himself what's going on. Hear all sides of the argument and form a conclusion on what's really going on.
No one's going to spoonfeed this to you - do it yourself.
American news sucks - incomplete and mostly domestic. When you go to the BBC News, click the 'outside UK' option, and you'll get great world coverage without any news of the Midwestern family that heroically rescued their cat amidst a thunderstorm.
For my meager and small perl programs, I've switched from vim to jEdit. Just a really nice program. Syntax highlighting is very good but not quite up to par with vim. Little things are still missing, like coloring newlines/tabs differently than text. Bracket auto-completion/auto-formatting that highlights which bracket is being closed lets me work more efficiently. There's a nifty collapsable blocks setting that will 'minimize' a block, enabling me to get a better overview of what is happening.
jEdit also has a plugin-architecture with quite a library of plugins, including a mini-console, CVS integration, save over FTP, and a slew of Java-centric ones that look as though they would be useful.
In short, jEdit isn't an IDE but it will help you out in terms of "CVS integration, code style enforcement, and automation of repetitive build tasks." And it's not just for Java.
They're in the public domain. Just like I can sell you a copy of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or any other public domain work, I can sell you a fully indexed searchable database of legal access.
They're making money on a free product by providing support - that's not a bad thing.
Last I checked, the Advanced Server had a lifecycle of 12-18 months - that's a year to a year and a half. And that's when they release new ones, not when they stop supporting old ones.
There was a comment at the Newsforge article which I think said the same thing - French bankruptcy is killer. I'm pretty sure there were several refutations about that, including one at Slashdot:
Quote: --- Under French bankruptcy law these penalties [getting out of E-education contracts] would be voided and the remaining company (the company that sells a Linux distribution) would be viable. ---
See Kyle Sallee's comparison of source and binary distros at http://sorcerer.wox.org/docs/distro/distro2.html - source distros aren't just about those extra seconds.
They're about true dependency resolution - if you can configure the make file, chances are you won't hit any snags when running the program, unlike certain other binary package format I know.
They're about being up-to-date - what good is that security patch that came out 20 minutes after the bugtraq article if it takes your distro a week to release a binary?
They're about program selection - someone has to compile it, and like before, if no one has compiled it for your arch and your distro to your liking, you've got to do it or sit there on your heels and wait. Grab the latest version, test it out, submit a bug report, and participate in open source!
They're about learning - if you've never installed a distro from source, it's an enlightening process that is instructive. Forget Mandrake's Control Center that will configure your X server; forget about Debian's ncurses menu that lets you select modules to add to a precompiled kernel; forget SuSE's YaST that auto-generates your/etc/fstab. Do it yourself! It's the natural thing for a geek to do - take it apart and put it back together.
They're about knowing what your system is running - unneccesary open ports are security holes waiting to happen. Do you really need telnetd running? Fingerd? Apache? Webmin? No? Don't compile them! Saves you time, space, and makes you more secure. The less extra stuff on your computer, the better. The latest versions of Mandrake and SuSE come on DVDs!!!! I probably have a 800MB of downloaded source between a server and a desktop; nothing compared to a full 9GB DVD or 7-CD set. I don't download what I don't use.
Source distro's aren't for every purpose. No corporate desktop needs Slackware. But for the geeks among us, they are a dream come true.
Check out other distro's forums and mailinglists. Sorcerer, Gentoo, and many others of these squeeze-everything-out-of-the-compile distros have great resources for this type of question. The Gentoo forums (https://forums.gentoo.org/) have quite a bit of talk about this sort of thing, but are more geared toward the portage system. However, threads about -fomit-frame-pointer and -funroll-loops can be enlightening - do they really give a speed boost, or do they just take up more disk space? Search away:)
I have seen a thread about optimizing the kernel on the Gentoo forums (guess which distro I spend time with?), but these seem to be much more hassle than they're worth in the long run in terms of segfaults and crashes and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever an article like this is posted, when someone is going above and beyond a 128kbit mp3 to try and offer improved sound quality, a few individuals will always say that it's stupid because no one can really hear the difference and will go on to demean all those that say they can.
Any way you cut it, although Apple's iTunes store is a step in the right direction, you're buying an inferior product from that which you could purchase in a store. A lot of people spend a lot of time mastering and remastering audio to sound its best, and a lot of that work is just thrown out the window with an mp3. Not that this is a crime against humanity and that mp3s are bad, but I would rather not purchase for the same price a product that is by definition inferior.
Now, if I go buy a Phish concert, I can burn it to a CD and have as good a copy as I'm going to get. If I want to convert it to mp3 for my portable player, I can do that. If I want to convert it to a high-VBR ogg for my computer, I can do that. It's flexible. If I got the mp3, well, I'm stuck. I don't have those options.
Isn't consumer freedom good today?
You might not want to use your smart-phone-thingie to _move_ your mp3s around, but if you're around the house or at a job in a situation where you'd want music, why not stream it? It's like combining the walkie-talkies and cell phones, and like putting a contact list on your mp3 player.
> $89 million is not exactly peanuts.
To who? We're talking Microsoft, here - how many _billion_ in the bank? Spit up among how many people? Plus, the money isn't automatically split up among all residents; each resident must apply and ostesibly prove that they bought the Microsoft product in North Carolina. Do you keep reciepts from back to 1995? Some companies might, but I barely have my Win95 floppies.
The article says that half of the unclaimed money will be donated to schools in the form of "computer technology" - any guesses on who's computer technology?
I wouldn't call this much of a win for the residents of North Carolina - looks nice on the surface, but that's about it.
I've been using XD2 since Tuesday and, to be honest, there's not much more to it over Redhat. The fonts are much better, the menus are better-organized (although picking up programs is a bit hit-and-miss as some Redhat wouldn't recognize Ximian does, and the other way around), everything just looks better, and the software is more 'up2date'.
That's not to say I'll be switching back to plain Redhat anytime soon - I really like XD2. It's just not a huge leap. Think the difference between RH8 and RH9.
Baysan filtering would be low on Ximian's priority list. Evolution is designed as an Outlook replacement. It's main features aside from e-mail, like calendaring and contact management and optional Exchange integration, reflect that it isn't targeted toward the home user but rather towards the corporate desktop. It makes more sense to do the spam filtering on the server side in the corporate setting - that way, if the user is roaming or using web access or whatever else the filters and forwarding still work and are not dependent on the e-mail client.
I'd like to add to this - there's been a recent thread on gentoo-dev on the subject of portage (the Gentoo package manager) under OS X. Currently, it doesn't work. It's about to. Summary of events:
8:02 P.M.: E-mail from user with details on how he tried to compile portage and was hung up on a few issues.
9:25 P.M.: Head developer replies and says he'll do the port.
5:07 P.M. the next day: Head developer updates his status to "should be done today."
That kind of response, interest, and feedback really makes the community great, no matter how many compile-time-fomit-everything jokes there are floating about.
3DO was the maker of many bad games, but they also made the incredible Heroes of Might & Magic series of games. If you haven't played them, you should pick up II or III - III is even available for Linux - because they were an incredible combination of RPG and turn-based strategy that was, and still is, as addictive as Civilization. Honestly.
I want Ogg support because I've already encoded my library in Ogg and I don't want to convert each song to mp3 when I want to jog with it. That's like saying that since tape players are already in most cars, why bother asking for a CD player when you can just rerecord all of your CDs onto tapes? I mean, it's not like going to work that extra bit of audio quality is going to make a difference, right?
>I've been a user of gentoo for some time now
/etc/make.conf (there's a up-to-date list of them on the Gentoo website) or by a bash script called UFED. They're pretty intuitive - for example, if you wanted X support for applications, you'd pass "X" into your USE list. If you wanted support for GPM, the console-based mouse driver, you'd pass that into your USE flags and all packages that could take advantage of GPM would.
These are all misperceptions. To answer you point by point:
1) Yes, sometimes services that are configured improperly die but the start-stop-daemon still thinks that it is "on". That's easy to fix - run `/etc/init.d/service zap` and the service will be reset to the "off" position.
2) gcc is not a python script - if you doubt me, do a "file `which gcc`" - it's a regular old compiled program. Distributed by the GNU foundation.
Emerge, the gentoo package manager, _is_ a python script. Yes, it's called when you compile something through emerge. But it doesn't add signifigant overhead because the part about compiling is really just emerge saying, "Make!". Nothing different than you saying "Make!" from the command line.
3) For individual scripts, no, there is not yet a tool in mainstream use to check options in ebuild scripts. I've seen some in the pipe, but they're slated for later release in the gentoolkit package. But you're missing the point of these options, called "USE flags", if you read each and every script and edit your global options before telling the emerge script to start.
You can edit global USE flags manually in your
It's designed to be a mostly static thing - no one in their right mind goes through and checks each one. For those big packages like GNOME and KDE, yeah, go ahead and see what each does, but otherwise, don't sweat it.
Not in the least. It's much more difficult to write a good essay then pick one of five answers.
AP (Advanced Placement) exams have a free response section on all tests. For the math APs the free response is pretty objective - you get a point for this setup, a point for that answer, or a point for this explanation, but all of that is still graded by hand. Most other exams, at least those in English, have three essays that make up more than half of the total score.
For example, in both the US and European History exams, there are two essays dealing with two different time periods and an essay on several provided documents. For the English Literature exam, there is an essay on poetry analysis, prose analysis, and an "open question" where the student provides a work he has read to answer the topic.
All AP free responses are graded on a scale of 1-9, the higher the better. Every summer, hundreds of teachers get together in a large gym or similar structure and sit down to grade them. The graders are given examples of each type of essay and grade until they grade as the College Board wants them to - usually only takes a day. Then they're turned loose on the real ones. The process takes 1-2 weeks.
In terms of quality control, random essays are taken out and re-graded. Scores on essays are correlated to scores on the multiple choice sections. All in all, the graders I know say it is frighteningly consistent. By the end of the day their brains are numb, but scores are still consistent.
It works, and has worked well, since the 1970's. I'm just suprised that the SAT's haven't gone to an essay sooner.
MySQL 4 does have a RAM cache which greatly speeds things up. MySQL 3 didn't.
Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
Donkey: They both smell?
Shrek: NO! They have LAYERS. There's more to us underneath. So, ogres are like onions.
Donkey: Yeah, but nobody LIKES onions!
Check out the Gentoo Hardened project - there's a mailing list and a still-under-development hardened-sources package.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gentoo-user&r=1&w= 2
Check the above link for some of the gentoo-user mailing list archives - discussion started a few minutes after the newsletter went out. Common consensus is that it's April Fools - killing the package management system that makes Gentoo unique and requiring X is just too big a step to make without any discussion on the gentoo-dev list. Kurt did a really good job on this one if Slashdot bit!
Honestly, GRUB is not hard to configure. There are plenty of examples out there - I just did a google search for 'grub example redhat' and the first link that came up was an offical Red Hat walkthrough, including setting up multiple kernels and Windows partitions.
Red Hat auto-configures GRUB anyhow; I don't see what the griping is about.
Canada is not participating in the attack against Iraq and therefore any news reported out of Canada will be unbiased.
Sorry, but there's no such thing as 'unbiased' news. Everyone has their slant and their agenda, and no matter how fairly they treat the subject matter bias will always be there. One must read multiple news sources from around the world, ones that don't just copy Reuters, and decide for himself what's going on. Hear all sides of the argument and form a conclusion on what's really going on.
No one's going to spoonfeed this to you - do it yourself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
American news sucks - incomplete and mostly domestic. When you go to the BBC News, click the 'outside UK' option, and you'll get great world coverage without any news of the Midwestern family that heroically rescued their cat amidst a thunderstorm.
For my meager and small perl programs, I've switched from vim to jEdit. Just a really nice program. Syntax highlighting is very good but not quite up to par with vim. Little things are still missing, like coloring newlines/tabs differently than text. Bracket auto-completion/auto-formatting that highlights which bracket is being closed lets me work more efficiently. There's a nifty collapsable blocks setting that will 'minimize' a block, enabling me to get a better overview of what is happening.
jEdit also has a plugin-architecture with quite a library of plugins, including a mini-console, CVS integration, save over FTP, and a slew of Java-centric ones that look as though they would be useful.
In short, jEdit isn't an IDE but it will help you out in terms of "CVS integration, code style enforcement, and automation of repetitive build tasks." And it's not just for Java.
Yeah, but there's no MicrosoftAssassin :)
Aren't those also copyrighted works?
They're in the public domain. Just like I can sell you a copy of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or any other public domain work, I can sell you a fully indexed searchable database of legal access.
They're making money on a free product by providing support - that's not a bad thing.
Last I checked, the Advanced Server had a lifecycle of 12-18 months - that's a year to a year and a half. And that's when they release new ones, not when they stop supporting old ones.
There was a comment at the Newsforge article which I think said the same thing - French bankruptcy is killer. I'm pretty sure there were several refutations about that, including one at Slashdot:
0 88 920
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50817&cid=5
Quote:
---
Under French bankruptcy law these penalties [getting out of E-education contracts] would be voided and the remaining company (the company that sells a Linux distribution) would be viable.
---
Things are probably not as bad as they seem.
See Kyle Sallee's comparison of source and binary distros at http://sorcerer.wox.org/docs/distro/distro2.html - source distros aren't just about those extra seconds.
/etc/fstab. Do it yourself! It's the natural thing for a geek to do - take it apart and put it back together.
They're about true dependency resolution - if you can configure the make file, chances are you won't hit any snags when running the program, unlike certain other binary package format I know.
They're about being up-to-date - what good is that security patch that came out 20 minutes after the bugtraq article if it takes your distro a week to release a binary?
They're about program selection - someone has to compile it, and like before, if no one has compiled it for your arch and your distro to your liking, you've got to do it or sit there on your heels and wait. Grab the latest version, test it out, submit a bug report, and participate in open source!
They're about learning - if you've never installed a distro from source, it's an enlightening process that is instructive. Forget Mandrake's Control Center that will configure your X server; forget about Debian's ncurses menu that lets you select modules to add to a precompiled kernel; forget SuSE's YaST that auto-generates your
They're about knowing what your system is running - unneccesary open ports are security holes waiting to happen. Do you really need telnetd running? Fingerd? Apache? Webmin? No? Don't compile them! Saves you time, space, and makes you more secure. The less extra stuff on your computer, the better. The latest versions of Mandrake and SuSE come on DVDs!!!! I probably have a 800MB of downloaded source between a server and a desktop; nothing compared to a full 9GB DVD or 7-CD set. I don't download what I don't use.
Source distro's aren't for every purpose. No corporate desktop needs Slackware. But for the geeks among us, they are a dream come true.
Check out other distro's forums and mailinglists. Sorcerer, Gentoo, and many others of these squeeze-everything-out-of-the-compile distros have great resources for this type of question. The Gentoo forums (https://forums.gentoo.org/) have quite a bit of talk about this sort of thing, but are more geared toward the portage system. However, threads about -fomit-frame-pointer and -funroll-loops can be enlightening - do they really give a speed boost, or do they just take up more disk space? Search away :)
I have seen a thread about optimizing the kernel on the Gentoo forums (guess which distro I spend time with?), but these seem to be much more hassle than they're worth in the long run in terms of segfaults and crashes and the like.
I think someone just pulled a fast one with the slashdot queue - maybe they'll read links from now on, or at least check to see what they are first.