On an average body of music though, they will average out to be the same. Many of the samples chosen were picked because they are difficult to encode and a good VBR codec will increase bitrates on those samples. On easy to encode samples or quiet passages a VBR codec will have _lower_ bitrates. This isn't unfair - it's just that VBR has an advantage because it can be more efficient (which makes it inherently better unless you are doing something like streaming that can't handle the fluxuations.)
If you had actually read some of the background info, you would know that the settings chosen for each encoder were ones that averaged 128kbps over a wide range of music (bitrate tests were performed beforehand to determine these settings). If you were to encode a large, varied collection of music with all of these encoders at these settings, the average bitrate would be quite close to 128kbps.
It would be profoundly moronic to tune each encoder's settings so that they got 128kbps over only this specific set of 18 30-second samples, or worse, to tune it so that it got exactly 128kbps on each sample. Likewise, there is no logical or mathematical basis to adjust the scores based on the average bitrate over that set of samples.
Yes you are right, that is the benefit of joint-stereo and they are (in theory) equivalent. On some sections (were there , it turns out to not be an advantage, so a smart encoder uses a mix of joint stereo and full L/R frames. This is what Lame does.
In practice, it also lets you can also quantize channels differently (whether they're left/right or mid/side) to improve compression/quality so in a lossy codec so the two versions aren't guaranteed to be bit-for-bit identical. In a really crappy/bugged encoder, doing this badly can damage a file audibly, but that's true of many things in crappy encoders. Lame uses joint-stereo correctly and doesn't damage the audio. The result is that joint-stereo in Lame produces smaller files and/or better quality.
Ok, first of all, while the test was DISCUSSED on HydrogenAudio, and most of the participants are HA regulars, Roberto Amorim did all the hard work of organizing the test and compiling the results, dealing with complaints, etc. To not give him credit is not very nice.
Second, there was a 128kbps test a month or two ago (which for some reason got repeatedly rejected when submitted to slashdot). You can see it here. Unfortunately, the results there aren't quite as interesting (it was mostly a big tie). Unfortunately, tests at higher bitrates are difficult because detecting problems at, say, 160kbps often requires well trained ears and good audio equipment.
Third, it's a good idea when commenting on an article to actually read it and click around on a few links to actually have an idea what you are talking about. Many/.ers seem to be only half-literate (can write but not read). There is a hilarious number of denegrating comments here by people who know nothing about either statistics or psychoacoustic audio compression. ABC/HR type methodology is the standard for comparing the relative quality of audio sources. Also, a great deal of effort went in to assuring that the best settings for the best encoders for each codec were used for the test. A little reading of the pre-test discussions would reveal this. Further, HydrogenAudio is not a club of audiofools who spend zillions of dollars on fancy speaker cable without any science to back it up. It is an objectivist forum. Anyone who makes statements without backing them up (with something like ABC/HR or ABX results) gets flamed HARSHLY. Some of the regluars have PhDs on various audio topics. They know what the fuck they're doing.
Fourth, just because you don't have a use for 64k audio, doesn't mean the results are meaningless. Lots of people have small-capacity players, and some codecs can tolerate that bitrate for very casual listening (such as in the car). Lots of streaming audio sources are at this bitrate or lower. Satellite radio is at 64k or lower. Also, it's not a good idea to try to extend these results to other bitrates. MPC for example, isn't even worth considering at 64kbps, but at bitrates over about 140kbps, it will beat the pants off of anything else.
Finally, for those who want to know more, or want their audio collections to sound best, read the FAQs at HA. Many codecs have a preset where they are transparent for the vast majority of samples; usually a VBR setting that averages somewhere between 160 and 200kbps (such as lame --preset standard, mppenc --standard, oggenc around -q5 or -q6).
You've done an excellent job of summing up your complete ignorance of the subject. There are whole fields of statistics devoted to gathering meaningful information from subjective tests.
The benchmark for the quality of an audio file is how good it sounds relative to the original. Nothing else matters because audio is meant to be LISTENED to, not looked at, or calculated. The only completely objective thing you can say is if you can or cannot tell an encoded audio file from the original. Obviously, at bitrates this low, no codec is going to have transparent results. The only data you can gather are subjective opinions on which one sounds best (again, in comparision to the original). With sound methodology (such as this blind test), you CAN indeed get meaningful information.
That was a pretty serious consternation at the time, but it was a pretty exceptional situation.
The reason for the problem was because gcc >=3.1 broke ABI compatibility with gcc = 2.9x (for C++ at least IIRC). That means apps many compiled with gcc 3.x wouldn't work with shared libraries compiled with 2.9x and vice versa. That makes upgrading gcc then recompiling all those apps _in place_ extremely hairy.
That doesn't even get into the list of apps that didn't compile with gcc 3 because they relied on some incompatable feature that got dropped.
Now, the gcc folks say the C++ ABI now conforms to some sort of standard so they don't plan on breaking it again (we can hope.) The solution at the time was a bit ad hoc and certainly less than graceful, but it was probably a one-time situation. Even if it wasn't, there have been some improvements in portage that should prevent or reduce the problems with that sort of change. You can have multiple versions of gcc installed (it uses SLOTs now, though there are some other complexities behind the scenes to make that work). I've got both 3.2.3 and 3.3 out of the unstable branch installed right now, and I can toggle back and forth (with gcc-config) for things that don't yet work with 3.3.
As a side note, I think the jokes about compile times have finally outlived both their humor value and relavence. You can use GRP to install almost as quickly as other distros. The really long compiles (OO, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Xfree, gcc) get updated pretty infrequently, and unless you've got a dog of a computer, most other updates only take a few minutes. On the long compiles, they can be done overnight or in the background. Your mp3s won't skip because xmms and its dependancies are one of the few things that actually benefit in a significant way from higher optimizations.
You might want to look at UPX (there's an ebuild for it). It'll give you smaller executable sizes than -Os. Also, you'll still be able to use -O3 so you get the speed enhancements that entails. However, since UPX decompresses on program load (more quickly than loading the uncompressed executable), you don't get the in memory savings of -Os.
Also, on average, -Os apps will be faster than -O1, but slower than -O2.
If I'm getting this right, they voted by to reverse the decision to not disallow consolidation. Or did they vote to overturn the reversal of the decision to not disallow consolidation? The president might veto, which would overturn the vote to reverse the decision to not disallow consolidation. Or (if I have it backwards), it would reverse the overturning of the reversal of the decision to not disallow consolidation. The vote passed by a large margin which, of course, leads to the question of a veto override, which would reverse...
I think there needs to be a rule in politics against obfuscation by double negatives.
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong (this is Slashdot, after all), but a lot of these are considered "stress tests" for encoders. That is, they usually cause audible artifacting in the compressed version, even at high bitrates.
Yes, that is basically correct. A larger group of samples could be used, but only at the expense of exhausting listeners and getting less reliable results. It is a waste of time, for the purposes of testing the transparency of psychoacoustic codecs at this bitrate, to include piano music because it is one of the easiest instruments to encode. By comparison, harphsichords, metal and electronic music are known to cause problems for many codecs.
For those not familar with Hydrogenaudio, they are very much an objectivist forum and make a very concerted effort to be as scientific as possible with respect to psychoacoustic audio compression. The most popular lossy format there is actually something most slashdotters have never heard of (mpc) because it achieves transparency at the lowest bitrates most of the time (according to blind ABX testing).
They're getting ready to run another codec showdown shortly at 128kbps ABR. The test will include vorbis, mpc, aac, mp3 (lame), wma (not sure if it'll be pro or standard, there is a significant difference in both quality and compatibility) and atrac3 (used by realaudio and sony minidiscs).
See above point. I challenge anyone with regular ( ie I can walk down to the local computer store and buy one because it's in production and regular use now ) hardware to tell me what problem they've had with any 2.4 kernel.
You'd better qualify that a bit more. There have been some 2.4 revisions (usually short lived) that have had substantial breakage with some ordinary hardware. Most distros have a extra q&a process or have a significantly patched kernel, so these versions don't get to most users. Just the list of USB devices that have underwent some sort of problem during the 2.4 series would take days to recite. My Sandisk USB compactflash reader was broken in 2.4.19 and 2.4.20.
Oh, and don't forget, you can still go to the store and buy a Winmodem.
I've read some examples of 'my sis motherboard craps out when I do this' or 'my oh-so-cheap raid controller doesn't like it when the kernel does this'. These are drivers people! They can't be considered a core part of the kernel.
Well, they're in the kernel source tree, they link to the kernel, they run in kernel-space, they touch the hardware directly, the kernel can't boot without some of them, etc. But no, they're not part of the kernel.
Don't get me wrong, though overall I think 2.4 has been in very nice shape overall for a while now. But just because you haven't had trouble with earlier incarnations doesn't mean other people haven't, and it doesn't always mean they have crappy hardware. Why do you assume anyone using Linux can afford to replace every piece of hardware that isn't supported well?
On a more positive note, last night I got a call from my dad. Without any supervision, he installed SuSe and got it working WITHOUT destroying his Windows partition. I wouldn't have expected him to get through installing Windows, let alone surivive partitioning and installation of Linux. The day before he had called me and told me that he had purchased SuSe at the store because he was pissed at Windows. He couldn't boot off the CD (because his BIOS wasn't configured to). In shock (and a twinge of terror) I told him to hold off until the weekend or something so I could help him out. Well, he wasn't that patient, and it turns out he didn't need my help after all (though he is going to need my Courier I'm not using because he has a Winmodem). I'm talking about somebody who thinks their whole computer is their "hard drive" and that he has a "Western Digital" modem. He said, and I quote, "I can see why people like this Linux thing. It's really user friendly."
We used to say (in parody) "don't floppy that copy" in reference to putting any important data on floppy because floppies are so unreliable.
It is interesting how many things in the video turned out to be downright false: 1) Piracy will end all software development. 2) The only motivating factor in software development is profit. 3) Every pirated copy represents a lost sale. 4) Oregon trail ran on a Mac LC.
This is a powerful group of companies that actually "get it". They genuinely understand that agreeing to give away their improvements isn't a concession - it means getting back ten-fold in return. Furthermore, they have committed to improving Linux in specific, important ways. On top of all that, they'll be using Linux and making it more visible while at the same time improving the quality and interoperability of their products. It's a win/win/win/win/win situation. K-rad.
There's some good stuff listed there, and some sad failures too.
I remember hearing about Shoemaker-Levy 9 and thinking "oh, that's gonna be so frickin' cool." When the time came, I was watching TV, and one of the NASA people was handling a press conference. Someone asked a question about what we should expect to see. Her answer was along the lines of "well, a lot of predictions have been made; some simulations suggest could see quite a spectacular plume, but it could be more subdued, me might not get to see much..." Before she got a chance to finish, an astronomer came out with a couple of bottles of champagne grinning from ear to ear. When the first pictures started showing up, my hair stood on end.
[OTRANT] It makes me sad that so few people can appreciate magic moments like this in science. Instead they turn to pseudoscientific herbal bullshit about holistic medicine, astrology, dowsing, planet X, moon hoaxes, remote psyhic viewing or past-life regression. There are a lot of good people out there working hard to bring real knowledge about the universe to all of humanity. Nothing good has ever come from a snake-oil salesman. [/OTRANT]
Looks like these fish only glow under ultraviolet light. If you want a pet that glows now, you can get a rat (or better, a same sex pair - they get lonely). They have a chemical called porphyrin in their mucous and saliva which glows under a black light, and they get it in their fur while grooming. Also, their urine (which they sometimes also get in their fur) glows.
Rets, dispite their reputation, actually make outstanding pets. Domesticated rats are generally very friendly, clean and surprisingly intelligent (it only takes as little as 15 minutes and a handful of cherrios to teach a rat its name). They don't smell as bad as mice, adn they aren't as neurotic as hamsters or gerbils. If raised around people (who aren't mean to them), they tend to want to join in the way a dog does. Also, selective breeding has resulted in many color and pattern varieties as well "rex" coats, hairless, tailless, dwarf and "dumbo" variaties.
Man, look at all the USB fixes in there! There must be 10 lockup bugfixes in USB-storage alone. I wonder what "fix usb-storage horkage" means...
Oh, and for those of you wanting a preview of some of the stuff in 2.6 but are afraid to try 2.5, I highly recommend the jiffies, preempt and low latency patches - the performance increase is tasty (don't forget to set your jiffies to something like 500 or 1000).
The writing is excellent for one. The dialogue is clever, witty and actually sounds like it's suppose to be spoken by teenagers. The characters (not just the human ones) are well developed and realistic (aside from the obvious vampire/demon elements, which is just the vehicle for the show). The writers are exceptionally creative at coming up with new ideas for the show and new challenges for the characters. How many shows could pull off an episode like "Hush" (an excellent episode with almost no dialogue because some monsters stole the town's voices), or "Once More, With Feeling" (the musical).
The Buffy universe is self-consistant (compared to, for example, Star Trek). The writers don't waste time trying to scientifically explain all the fantasy stuff. That's something annoying that happens all the time in other shows/movies and only serves to show how badly the writers misunderstand the applicative sciences. In Buffy, the magic is just magic. When they make up "rules" that govern the Buffy universe, they rarely break them, and rarely come up with new arbitrary ones to explain away things. A few times when I thought they had, I went back to look at older episodes and found out I was wrong. (An example: when Willow can't ressurect Tara, Osirus (sp?) say's it's because she wasn't killed by mystical forces, which I thought was a stupid new rule, but it turns out it was explained way back at the beginning of the season).
The show rewards the loyal by having interesting story-arcs that stretch over more than just a few episodes - many last a whole season, some even longer. The current "big bad", The First Evil, was introduced early in the third season (almost 5 years ago), and was intentionally left unresolved then (cleary Whedon was planning on The First being the final baddie of the series).
Compared to most Sci-fi series/.ers are familiar with (again using ST for the example,) Buffy more consistantly delivers a high-quality episode every week. Sure, the first season (and to a lesser degree, the second) spent a lot of time engaged in cheesy horror stuff, and the quality of the story has dropped off in the past two seasons, but it's Shakespeare compared to Voyager or Enterprise.
To those not familiar with the show, you might think it's just a cheesy horror series, but to the contrary, like any really good show, it's actually about the people in the show, not the "stuff". I challenge anyone who doesn't "get" the show to watch "The Body" (one of many episodes that just blew me away) and not tell me it's some of the best television they've ever seen.
The best part of the show is how it never takes itself too seriously (how can it?) It can deftly jump from deadly serious to hilarious, and it's always natural. The show freely makes fun of the fact that many of the demonic elements are silly and don't make sense, or the fact that all the students manage to block out the memory of being chased around the school by Hyena people. Characters will discuss how to confront the upcoming apocolypse and in the same breath, complain about the shortage of jelly donuts.
Actually, in the last paragraph I lied. The best part of the show is Willow (sigh). She's so adorable it HURTS. She's geeky, cute, lesbian, has purdy red hair and when she gets pushed too far and needs to kick ass, she doesn't screw around. She's the one who flutters the hearts of fanboys everywhere. (Sarah Michelle Who?) I'm ashamed to admit it, but I had to do a little dance when she flayed Warren.
Thinking about Willow makes me... Umm... I gotta go...
The fact is that the motive of the cracker is unknown. A non-malicious hacker would have informed the company that they were vulnerable without breaking into the system. At a minimum, the accounts comprimised will have to be shut down and account numbers re-issued for all the affected cards. It is certainly not an insubstantial cost for the number of comprimised cards.
Neither Dvorak nor Qwerty is likely optimal for modern computing. I propose setting up a distributed computing effort for finding the best possible keyboard layout.
Get a group of a few dozen computer users that do a fair amount of typing. Perhaps have multiple groups which would correspond to different usage patterns (secretarial, data entry, programming) and different languages, which would each get their own layout in the end. Ideally, the sample groups would have users of both Qwerty and Dvorak layouts.
Install programs on the volunteer's computers to collect some statistical information. This would include the frequency of all the possible two-key combinations (i.e. 'sh' occurs a lot more often than 'zb'). Also, it would collect timing information for various key combinations (the average number of milliseconds between each possible pair of keystrokes).
The distributed program would generate all the possible keyboard layouts (perhaps culling some obviously inferior ones), distribute them in blocks to volunteer machines, and compute a "score" for each layout based on the inter-key timing information and the commonality of key-pairs in the sample workload.
I've been to Sudbury mines. It's a spooky place. Miners many decades ago were careless in their smelting practices, and as a result, most plant life in the Sudbury crater was exterminated by toxic fumes. Today, it's still best described as a "moonscape" with blackened rocks and few trees able to grow. It's not hard to imagine the way it looked when life first began to return, years after the impact.
But for me, the sleeping Yellowstone caldera ranks much higher on the heebee-jeebees scale, when it comes to ELEs.
Sure IT people have problems. Some are their fault, many are the fault of management or marketdroids or someone else. But when it comes right down to it, it is impossible to design software that is easy to use by all who need to use it. It's that simple.
Let's start with a real world example. Many people drive cars. Most consider cars easy to use. They go as far as to compare them to software and say "it should be simple, just like turning a key and it goes!"
Cars are NOT easy to use. You have to take many classes to learn how to use them and log many hours of driving before you're even allowed to use them unsupervised. It takes years to get proficient at it (inexperienced drivers get in lots of accidents). They aren't a "turnkey solution", they require a very complicated set of actions to get it from one place to another, and the actions vary significantly each time depending on conditions, traffic etc. But since people do it every day, and are willing to learn, and practice and work hard in order to have the priveledge, they THINK it's easy.
Cars only are good for one task really - driving from place to place. On the other hand, computers perform HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of tasks. Most of the time, those tasks require the exact same steps each time you do them. But people are unwilling to set aside time to learn, and just complain. They ask for changes, but won't articulate what they'd like it to be like. They just want it to be "better" or "easier" or "more like [some invalid analogy]".
No matter how easy you make the software, people will still be unwilling to learn it, and will remain confused because of their own stubbornness. An example to prove my point:
We recently installed some new shipping software. We had to because it needed to interface properly with the company doing the shipping. It isn't the greatest software in the world, but there weren't a significant number of end-user changes, and all of them were good changes, mostly small ones. Of course, right away we get a call from an employee who is utterly confused. They were so confused in fact, that they shut down the computer and were afraid to turn it back on.
They had entered some orders, and with each a dialog appears asking for shipping information. There is a certain checkbox that they check for almost every order. After entering several orders, a dialog box popped up that says roughly "I see that you've checked [that checkbox] for the last four orders. Would you like me to check it automatically in the future to save you time?" It had two buttons, "yes" and "no".
Now, I would argue, that the course of action in this situation should be COMPLETELY intuitive, and any idiot should be able to decide which they'd prefer. But apparently that's not the case. This is almost an exact transcript of the conversation. No, I'm not joking.
Employee: "It came up with this box, I've never seen it before!"
IT: "I'll take a look at it." [brings it up on the computer] "Oh, it's just asking you if you want it to automatically check that box for you in the future."
Employee: "But it's never come up with that before! Why is it coming up with it now? What should I do?"
IT: "Well, it's probably part of the new software. It sees that you always check that check box and wants to save you time."
Employee: "But it's never come up before! I don't know what to do."
IT: "Well, do you want it to check that box for you automatically when you enter orders?"
Employee: "I don't know. I don't want to do the wrong thing."
IT: "It will just check the box automatically. If you have an order that doesn't need that, you can uncheck it."
Employee: "So which should I click."
IT: "It DOESN'T MATTER. WHAT DO YOU WANT IT TO DO?"
Employee: "I'm not very computer-literate."
IT: "Just click yes."
Employee: "Ooookaaay. I just don't know. It's never come up with that before."
IT: "Yes, you mentioned that."
You can see that the person didn't even want to try to learn what the thing does. They went as far as refusing to let the English language of the box into their brain for fear of being contaminated with thought. It goes way beyond being unwilling to learn complicated instructions or cryptic commands. They were unwilling to not be a robot. If a task involving computers requires any sort of independant thought, logical processing or even READING of direct, onscreen instructions, many users are completely unable to accept the idea of them performing the task themselves.
Google for "telescope buying faq" and search for the FAQs relating to the sci.astro.amateur.
Astrophotography is the sport of masochists. Seriously, if you want to get started in amateur astronomy, don't try to squeeze astrophotography into your first setup unless you have a ton of money to blow. It's expensive and surprisingly difficult.
The first and most important rule of buying a telescope is to NEVER, under any circumstances, buy a telescope from a department store. Never. Never ever. Never ever do that. Never buy a telescope that advertises 400x magnification or some other rediculous value. Also, never buy the telescopes you see advertised on the shopping channel. The guy on their makes complete and utter lies about the capability of the telescopes they sell.
By far, the most important spec on a telescope is aperature. The bigger the aperature, the more light it gathers, and the more you can see. Also, because of the laws of physics, the maximum useful magnification of a telescope is limited by the aperature. Also, for most deep sky objects (nebulae, star clusters, galaxies), you use your lower magnification eyepieces.
The best first telescope is often a pair of binoculars (7x50 or 10x50 are excellent). You'd be shocked what you can see with a pair of binoculars (many, if not the majority of the Messier objects are visible, and the four brightest moons of Jupiter are easily spotted). For an actually telescope, a Dobsonian (a newtownian reflector mounted on a low to the ground, very stable, easy to use azimuth mount) is a easy to use, inexpensive choice. You get the absolute most aperature for your buck (meaning you can see the most things, and see them sharply), and it won't cheat you out of actually learning the sky the way an automated computerized telescope can. I'm a big fan of Orion's XT series (I have an XT8 8" dobsonian myself).
Be sure not to get a telescope that is too big. Yeah, you may have a bunch of cash to blow on a monster scope, but a scope bigger than 8" or so (or even that big) can be a huge pain, and time consuming to set up. If you don't feel like hauling the thing out, you won't use it. On some nights, I end up taking out my binoculars because conditions aren't really good enough to justify the workout.
If governments find spam unacceptable, and resort to spam filtering, and then find that unacceptable because of false positives, the next recourse is spam legislation. Therefore, false positives are good.
Is this the first time the guy has looked at processor specs or seen a pinout diagram or bitfield description? He seemed to get awfully excited about the word "reserved" and imagined some sort of super-computer hidden inside a magic bit. It means "reserved for future use" i.e. "it doesn't do anything yet so don't twaddle it or you will break something years from now when we find a use for it."
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On an average body of music though, they will average out to be the same. Many of the samples chosen were picked because they are difficult to encode and a good VBR codec will increase bitrates on those samples. On easy to encode samples or quiet passages a VBR codec will have _lower_ bitrates. This isn't unfair - it's just that VBR has an advantage because it can be more efficient (which makes it inherently better unless you are doing something like streaming that can't handle the fluxuations.)
If you had actually read some of the background info, you would know that the settings chosen for each encoder were ones that averaged 128kbps over a wide range of music (bitrate tests were performed beforehand to determine these settings). If you were to encode a large, varied collection of music with all of these encoders at these settings, the average bitrate would be quite close to 128kbps.
It would be profoundly moronic to tune each encoder's settings so that they got 128kbps over only this specific set of 18 30-second samples, or worse, to tune it so that it got exactly 128kbps on each sample. Likewise, there is no logical or mathematical basis to adjust the scores based on the average bitrate over that set of samples.
Yes you are right, that is the benefit of joint-stereo and they are (in theory) equivalent. On some sections (were there , it turns out to not be an advantage, so a smart encoder uses a mix of joint stereo and full L/R frames. This is what Lame does.
In practice, it also lets you can also quantize channels differently (whether they're left/right or mid/side) to improve compression/quality so in a lossy codec so the two versions aren't guaranteed to be bit-for-bit identical. In a really crappy/bugged encoder, doing this badly can damage a file audibly, but that's true of many things in crappy encoders. Lame uses joint-stereo correctly and doesn't damage the audio. The result is that joint-stereo in Lame produces smaller files and/or better quality.
Ok, first of all, while the test was DISCUSSED on HydrogenAudio, and most of the participants are HA regulars, Roberto Amorim did all the hard work of organizing the test and compiling the results, dealing with complaints, etc. To not give him credit is not very nice.
/.ers seem to be only half-literate (can write but not read). There is a hilarious number of denegrating comments here by people who know nothing about either statistics or psychoacoustic audio compression. ABC/HR type methodology is the standard for comparing the relative quality of audio sources. Also, a great deal of effort went in to assuring that the best settings for the best encoders for each codec were used for the test. A little reading of the pre-test discussions would reveal this. Further, HydrogenAudio is not a club of audiofools who spend zillions of dollars on fancy speaker cable without any science to back it up. It is an objectivist forum. Anyone who makes statements without backing them up (with something like ABC/HR or ABX results) gets flamed HARSHLY. Some of the regluars have PhDs on various audio topics. They know what the fuck they're doing.
Second, there was a 128kbps test a month or two ago (which for some reason got repeatedly rejected when submitted to slashdot). You can see it here. Unfortunately, the results there aren't quite as interesting (it was mostly a big tie). Unfortunately, tests at higher bitrates are difficult because detecting problems at, say, 160kbps often requires well trained ears and good audio equipment.
Third, it's a good idea when commenting on an article to actually read it and click around on a few links to actually have an idea what you are talking about. Many
Fourth, just because you don't have a use for 64k audio, doesn't mean the results are meaningless. Lots of people have small-capacity players, and some codecs can tolerate that bitrate for very casual listening (such as in the car). Lots of streaming audio sources are at this bitrate or lower. Satellite radio is at 64k or lower. Also, it's not a good idea to try to extend these results to other bitrates. MPC for example, isn't even worth considering at 64kbps, but at bitrates over about 140kbps, it will beat the pants off of anything else.
Finally, for those who want to know more, or want their audio collections to sound best, read the FAQs at HA. Many codecs have a preset where they are transparent for the vast majority of samples; usually a VBR setting that averages somewhere between 160 and 200kbps (such as lame --preset standard, mppenc --standard, oggenc around -q5 or -q6).
You've done an excellent job of summing up your complete ignorance of the subject. There are whole fields of statistics devoted to gathering meaningful information from subjective tests.
The benchmark for the quality of an audio file is how good it sounds relative to the original. Nothing else matters because audio is meant to be LISTENED to, not looked at, or calculated. The only completely objective thing you can say is if you can or cannot tell an encoded audio file from the original. Obviously, at bitrates this low, no codec is going to have transparent results. The only data you can gather are subjective opinions on which one sounds best (again, in comparision to the original). With sound methodology (such as this blind test), you CAN indeed get meaningful information.
That was a pretty serious consternation at the time, but it was a pretty exceptional situation.
The reason for the problem was because gcc >=3.1 broke ABI compatibility with gcc = 2.9x (for C++ at least IIRC). That means apps many compiled with gcc 3.x wouldn't work with shared libraries compiled with 2.9x and vice versa. That makes upgrading gcc then recompiling all those apps _in place_ extremely hairy.
That doesn't even get into the list of apps that didn't compile with gcc 3 because they relied on some incompatable feature that got dropped.
Now, the gcc folks say the C++ ABI now conforms to some sort of standard so they don't plan on breaking it again (we can hope.) The solution at the time was a bit ad hoc and certainly less than graceful, but it was probably a one-time situation. Even if it wasn't, there have been some improvements in portage that should prevent or reduce the problems with that sort of change. You can have multiple versions of gcc installed (it uses SLOTs now, though there are some other complexities behind the scenes to make that work). I've got both 3.2.3 and 3.3 out of the unstable branch installed right now, and I can toggle back and forth (with gcc-config) for things that don't yet work with 3.3.
As a side note, I think the jokes about compile times have finally outlived both their humor value and relavence. You can use GRP to install almost as quickly as other distros. The really long compiles (OO, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Xfree, gcc) get updated pretty infrequently, and unless you've got a dog of a computer, most other updates only take a few minutes. On the long compiles, they can be done overnight or in the background. Your mp3s won't skip because xmms and its dependancies are one of the few things that actually benefit in a significant way from higher optimizations.
You might want to look at UPX (there's an ebuild for it). It'll give you smaller executable sizes than -Os. Also, you'll still be able to use -O3 so you get the speed enhancements that entails. However, since UPX decompresses on program load (more quickly than loading the uncompressed executable), you don't get the in memory savings of -Os.
Also, on average, -Os apps will be faster than -O1, but slower than -O2.
If I'm getting this right, they voted by to reverse the decision to not disallow consolidation. Or did they vote to overturn the reversal of the decision to not disallow consolidation? The president might veto, which would overturn the vote to reverse the decision to not disallow consolidation. Or (if I have it backwards), it would reverse the overturning of the reversal of the decision to not disallow consolidation. The vote passed by a large margin which, of course, leads to the question of a veto override, which would reverse...
I think there needs to be a rule in politics against obfuscation by double negatives.
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong (this is Slashdot, after all), but a lot of these are considered "stress tests" for encoders. That is, they usually cause audible artifacting in the compressed version, even at high bitrates.
Yes, that is basically correct. A larger group of samples could be used, but only at the expense of exhausting listeners and getting less reliable results. It is a waste of time, for the purposes of testing the transparency of psychoacoustic codecs at this bitrate, to include piano music because it is one of the easiest instruments to encode. By comparison, harphsichords, metal and electronic music are known to cause problems for many codecs.
For those not familar with Hydrogenaudio, they are very much an objectivist forum and make a very concerted effort to be as scientific as possible with respect to psychoacoustic audio compression. The most popular lossy format there is actually something most slashdotters have never heard of (mpc) because it achieves transparency at the lowest bitrates most of the time (according to blind ABX testing).
They're getting ready to run another codec showdown shortly at 128kbps ABR. The test will include vorbis, mpc, aac, mp3 (lame), wma (not sure if it'll be pro or standard, there is a significant difference in both quality and compatibility) and atrac3 (used by realaudio and sony minidiscs).
Oh, I should also mention, his Winmodem wasn't working under Windows, which is the thing that drove him to install Linux.
You'd better qualify that a bit more. There have been some 2.4 revisions (usually short lived) that have had substantial breakage with some ordinary hardware. Most distros have a extra q&a process or have a significantly patched kernel, so these versions don't get to most users. Just the list of USB devices that have underwent some sort of problem during the 2.4 series would take days to recite. My Sandisk USB compactflash reader was broken in 2.4.19 and 2.4.20.
Oh, and don't forget, you can still go to the store and buy a Winmodem.
I've read some examples of 'my sis motherboard craps out when I do this' or 'my oh-so-cheap raid controller doesn't like it when the kernel does this'. These are drivers people! They can't be considered a core part of the kernel.
Well, they're in the kernel source tree, they link to the kernel, they run in kernel-space, they touch the hardware directly, the kernel can't boot without some of them, etc. But no, they're not part of the kernel.
Don't get me wrong, though overall I think 2.4 has been in very nice shape overall for a while now. But just because you haven't had trouble with earlier incarnations doesn't mean other people haven't, and it doesn't always mean they have crappy hardware. Why do you assume anyone using Linux can afford to replace every piece of hardware that isn't supported well?
On a more positive note, last night I got a call from my dad. Without any supervision, he installed SuSe and got it working WITHOUT destroying his Windows partition. I wouldn't have expected him to get through installing Windows, let alone surivive partitioning and installation of Linux. The day before he had called me and told me that he had purchased SuSe at the store because he was pissed at Windows. He couldn't boot off the CD (because his BIOS wasn't configured to). In shock (and a twinge of terror) I told him to hold off until the weekend or something so I could help him out. Well, he wasn't that patient, and it turns out he didn't need my help after all (though he is going to need my Courier I'm not using because he has a Winmodem). I'm talking about somebody who thinks their whole computer is their "hard drive" and that he has a "Western Digital" modem. He said, and I quote, "I can see why people like this Linux thing. It's really user friendly."
We used to say (in parody) "don't floppy that copy" in reference to putting any important data on floppy because floppies are so unreliable.
It is interesting how many things in the video turned out to be downright false:
1) Piracy will end all software development.
2) The only motivating factor in software development is profit.
3) Every pirated copy represents a lost sale.
4) Oregon trail ran on a Mac LC.
This is a powerful group of companies that actually "get it". They genuinely understand that agreeing to give away their improvements isn't a concession - it means getting back ten-fold in return. Furthermore, they have committed to improving Linux in specific, important ways. On top of all that, they'll be using Linux and making it more visible while at the same time improving the quality and interoperability of their products. It's a win/win/win/win/win situation. K-rad.
There's some good stuff listed there, and some sad failures too.
I remember hearing about Shoemaker-Levy 9 and thinking "oh, that's gonna be so frickin' cool." When the time came, I was watching TV, and one of the NASA people was handling a press conference. Someone asked a question about what we should expect to see. Her answer was along the lines of "well, a lot of predictions have been made; some simulations suggest could see quite a spectacular plume, but it could be more subdued, me might not get to see much..." Before she got a chance to finish, an astronomer came out with a couple of bottles of champagne grinning from ear to ear. When the first pictures started showing up, my hair stood on end.
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It makes me sad that so few people can appreciate magic moments like this in science. Instead they turn to pseudoscientific herbal bullshit about holistic medicine, astrology, dowsing, planet X, moon hoaxes, remote psyhic viewing or past-life regression. There are a lot of good people out there working hard to bring real knowledge about the universe to all of humanity. Nothing good has ever come from a snake-oil salesman.
[/OTRANT]
Looks like these fish only glow under ultraviolet light. If you want a pet that glows now, you can get a rat (or better, a same sex pair - they get lonely). They have a chemical called porphyrin in their mucous and saliva which glows under a black light, and they get it in their fur while grooming. Also, their urine (which they sometimes also get in their fur) glows.
Rets, dispite their reputation, actually make outstanding pets. Domesticated rats are generally very friendly, clean and surprisingly intelligent (it only takes as little as 15 minutes and a handful of cherrios to teach a rat its name). They don't smell as bad as mice, adn they aren't as neurotic as hamsters or gerbils. If raised around people (who aren't mean to them), they tend to want to join in the way a dog does. Also, selective breeding has resulted in many color and pattern varieties as well "rex" coats, hairless, tailless, dwarf and "dumbo" variaties.
Man, look at all the USB fixes in there! There must be 10 lockup bugfixes in USB-storage alone. I wonder what "fix usb-storage horkage" means...
Oh, and for those of you wanting a preview of some of the stuff in 2.6 but are afraid to try 2.5, I highly recommend the jiffies, preempt and low latency patches - the performance increase is tasty (don't forget to set your jiffies to something like 500 or 1000).
The writing is excellent for one. The dialogue is clever, witty and actually sounds like it's suppose to be spoken by teenagers. The characters (not just the human ones) are well developed and realistic (aside from the obvious vampire/demon elements, which is just the vehicle for the show). The writers are exceptionally creative at coming up with new ideas for the show and new challenges for the characters. How many shows could pull off an episode like "Hush" (an excellent episode with almost no dialogue because some monsters stole the town's voices), or "Once More, With Feeling" (the musical).
/.ers are familiar with (again using ST for the example,) Buffy more consistantly delivers a high-quality episode every week. Sure, the first season (and to a lesser degree, the second) spent a lot of time engaged in cheesy horror stuff, and the quality of the story has dropped off in the past two seasons, but it's Shakespeare compared to Voyager or Enterprise.
The Buffy universe is self-consistant (compared to, for example, Star Trek). The writers don't waste time trying to scientifically explain all the fantasy stuff. That's something annoying that happens all the time in other shows/movies and only serves to show how badly the writers misunderstand the applicative sciences. In Buffy, the magic is just magic. When they make up "rules" that govern the Buffy universe, they rarely break them, and rarely come up with new arbitrary ones to explain away things. A few times when I thought they had, I went back to look at older episodes and found out I was wrong. (An example: when Willow can't ressurect Tara, Osirus (sp?) say's it's because she wasn't killed by mystical forces, which I thought was a stupid new rule, but it turns out it was explained way back at the beginning of the season).
The show rewards the loyal by having interesting story-arcs that stretch over more than just a few episodes - many last a whole season, some even longer. The current "big bad", The First Evil, was introduced early in the third season (almost 5 years ago), and was intentionally left unresolved then (cleary Whedon was planning on The First being the final baddie of the series).
Compared to most Sci-fi series
To those not familiar with the show, you might think it's just a cheesy horror series, but to the contrary, like any really good show, it's actually about the people in the show, not the "stuff". I challenge anyone who doesn't "get" the show to watch "The Body" (one of many episodes that just blew me away) and not tell me it's some of the best television they've ever seen.
The best part of the show is how it never takes itself too seriously (how can it?) It can deftly jump from deadly serious to hilarious, and it's always natural. The show freely makes fun of the fact that many of the demonic elements are silly and don't make sense, or the fact that all the students manage to block out the memory of being chased around the school by Hyena people. Characters will discuss how to confront the upcoming apocolypse and in the same breath, complain about the shortage of jelly donuts.
Actually, in the last paragraph I lied. The best part of the show is Willow (sigh). She's so adorable it HURTS. She's geeky, cute, lesbian, has purdy red hair and when she gets pushed too far and needs to kick ass, she doesn't screw around. She's the one who flutters the hearts of fanboys everywhere. (Sarah Michelle Who?) I'm ashamed to admit it, but I had to do a little dance when she flayed Warren.
Thinking about Willow makes me... Umm... I gotta go...
The fact is that the motive of the cracker is unknown. A non-malicious hacker would have informed the company that they were vulnerable without breaking into the system. At a minimum, the accounts comprimised will have to be shut down and account numbers re-issued for all the affected cards. It is certainly not an insubstantial cost for the number of comprimised cards.
Neither Dvorak nor Qwerty is likely optimal for modern computing. I propose setting up a distributed computing effort for finding the best possible keyboard layout.
Get a group of a few dozen computer users that do a fair amount of typing. Perhaps have multiple groups which would correspond to different usage patterns (secretarial, data entry, programming) and different languages, which would each get their own layout in the end. Ideally, the sample groups would have users of both Qwerty and Dvorak layouts.
Install programs on the volunteer's computers to collect some statistical information. This would include the frequency of all the possible two-key combinations (i.e. 'sh' occurs a lot more often than 'zb'). Also, it would collect timing information for various key combinations (the average number of milliseconds between each possible pair of keystrokes).
The distributed program would generate all the possible keyboard layouts (perhaps culling some obviously inferior ones), distribute them in blocks to volunteer machines, and compute a "score" for each layout based on the inter-key timing information and the commonality of key-pairs in the sample workload.
But for me, the sleeping Yellowstone caldera ranks much higher on the heebee-jeebees scale, when it comes to ELEs.
Sure IT people have problems. Some are their fault, many are the fault of management or marketdroids or someone else. But when it comes right down to it, it is impossible to design software that is easy to use by all who need to use it. It's that simple.
Let's start with a real world example. Many people drive cars. Most consider cars easy to use. They go as far as to compare them to software and say "it should be simple, just like turning a key and it goes!"
Cars are NOT easy to use. You have to take many classes to learn how to use them and log many hours of driving before you're even allowed to use them unsupervised. It takes years to get proficient at it (inexperienced drivers get in lots of accidents). They aren't a "turnkey solution", they require a very complicated set of actions to get it from one place to another, and the actions vary significantly each time depending on conditions, traffic etc. But since people do it every day, and are willing to learn, and practice and work hard in order to have the priveledge, they THINK it's easy.
Cars only are good for one task really - driving from place to place. On the other hand, computers perform HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of tasks. Most of the time, those tasks require the exact same steps each time you do them. But people are unwilling to set aside time to learn, and just complain. They ask for changes, but won't articulate what they'd like it to be like. They just want it to be "better" or "easier" or "more like [some invalid analogy]".
No matter how easy you make the software, people will still be unwilling to learn it, and will remain confused because of their own stubbornness. An example to prove my point:
We recently installed some new shipping software. We had to because it needed to interface properly with the company doing the shipping. It isn't the greatest software in the world, but there weren't a significant number of end-user changes, and all of them were good changes, mostly small ones. Of course, right away we get a call from an employee who is utterly confused. They were so confused in fact, that they shut down the computer and were afraid to turn it back on.
They had entered some orders, and with each a dialog appears asking for shipping information. There is a certain checkbox that they check for almost every order. After entering several orders, a dialog box popped up that says roughly "I see that you've checked [that checkbox] for the last four orders. Would you like me to check it automatically in the future to save you time?" It had two buttons, "yes" and "no".
Now, I would argue, that the course of action in this situation should be COMPLETELY intuitive, and any idiot should be able to decide which they'd prefer. But apparently that's not the case. This is almost an exact transcript of the conversation. No, I'm not joking.
Employee: "It came up with this box, I've never seen it before!"
IT: "I'll take a look at it." [brings it up on the computer] "Oh, it's just asking you if you want it to automatically check that box for you in the future."
Employee: "But it's never come up with that before! Why is it coming up with it now? What should I do?"
IT: "Well, it's probably part of the new software. It sees that you always check that check box and wants to save you time."
Employee: "But it's never come up before! I don't know what to do."
IT: "Well, do you want it to check that box for you automatically when you enter orders?"
Employee: "I don't know. I don't want to do the wrong thing."
IT: "It will just check the box automatically. If you have an order that doesn't need that, you can uncheck it."
Employee: "So which should I click."
IT: "It DOESN'T MATTER. WHAT DO YOU WANT IT TO DO?"
Employee: "I'm not very computer-literate."
IT: "Just click yes."
Employee: "Ooookaaay. I just don't know. It's never come up with that before."
IT: "Yes, you mentioned that."
You can see that the person didn't even want to try to learn what the thing does. They went as far as refusing to let the English language of the box into their brain for fear of being contaminated with thought. It goes way beyond being unwilling to learn complicated instructions or cryptic commands. They were unwilling to not be a robot. If a task involving computers requires any sort of independant thought, logical processing or even READING of direct, onscreen instructions, many users are completely unable to accept the idea of them performing the task themselves.
Google for "telescope buying faq" and search for the FAQs relating to the sci.astro.amateur.
Astrophotography is the sport of masochists. Seriously, if you want to get started in amateur astronomy, don't try to squeeze astrophotography into your first setup unless you have a ton of money to blow. It's expensive and surprisingly difficult.
The first and most important rule of buying a telescope is to NEVER, under any circumstances, buy a telescope from a department store. Never. Never ever. Never ever do that. Never buy a telescope that advertises 400x magnification or some other rediculous value. Also, never buy the telescopes you see advertised on the shopping channel. The guy on their makes complete and utter lies about the capability of the telescopes they sell.
By far, the most important spec on a telescope is aperature. The bigger the aperature, the more light it gathers, and the more you can see. Also, because of the laws of physics, the maximum useful magnification of a telescope is limited by the aperature. Also, for most deep sky objects (nebulae, star clusters, galaxies), you use your lower magnification eyepieces.
The best first telescope is often a pair of binoculars (7x50 or 10x50 are excellent). You'd be shocked what you can see with a pair of binoculars (many, if not the majority of the Messier objects are visible, and the four brightest moons of Jupiter are easily spotted). For an actually telescope, a Dobsonian (a newtownian reflector mounted on a low to the ground, very stable, easy to use azimuth mount) is a easy to use, inexpensive choice. You get the absolute most aperature for your buck (meaning you can see the most things, and see them sharply), and it won't cheat you out of actually learning the sky the way an automated computerized telescope can. I'm a big fan of Orion's XT series (I have an XT8 8" dobsonian myself).
Be sure not to get a telescope that is too big. Yeah, you may have a bunch of cash to blow on a monster scope, but a scope bigger than 8" or so (or even that big) can be a huge pain, and time consuming to set up. If you don't feel like hauling the thing out, you won't use it. On some nights, I end up taking out my binoculars because conditions aren't really good enough to justify the workout.
If governments find spam unacceptable, and resort to spam filtering, and then find that unacceptable because of false positives, the next recourse is spam legislation. Therefore, false positives are good.
Dr Beasley told AAP it was important the community was made aware of this new risk factor for developing fatally potential blood clots.
Fatally potential? I think they've got their adjectives and adverbs up mixed.
Is this the first time the guy has looked at processor specs or seen a pinout diagram or bitfield description? He seemed to get awfully excited about the word "reserved" and imagined some sort of super-computer hidden inside a magic bit. It means "reserved for future use" i.e. "it doesn't do anything yet so don't twaddle it or you will break something years from now when we find a use for it."