the mp3 format has been extended and changed so much, and had stuff added and removed (vbr, abr, and tagging.... tagging shouldnt have even been there, since mp3 is a datastream not a container), over time. its hardly the same format now. something to understand about the mpeg series, they are defined in terms of what a decoder must be able to decode so new methods of analysing the audio and deciding what is worth including and with what precision do not change the format.
If you have the time and inclination to read through the published litriture on a subject especially a more controversial one you can pick sources to support practically anything you wan't whether or not it is truthfull.
also in many cases the actual authoritive sources are difficult or expensive to access (is anyone really going to bother buying a book or making an inter-library loan just to check out a wikipedia reference?) this means you can make up references and the chances of anyone checking them are minimal.
not that it is nessacery to go to those lengths in most cases because except for the very small range of subjects where authorive information is freely availible wikipedia generally relies on the knowlage of its editors and if someone pushes for citations just cites websites that are no more authoritive than wikipedia is.
1) It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers. is it really cheaper to have all your internal e-mail (must be quite a large volume if people are readilly hitting the limits on 250meg boxes) flying on and off campus several times.
also have they considered the potential cost of losing internal e-mail service if they lose thier internet connection?
i suspect this works in the same way as speeding fines. you can either pay on the spot or go to court but if you go to court and lose you will get fined FAR FAR more than you would pay on the fixed penalty notice.
AIUI, No, you can learn to drive and pass your test in an automatic car, but then you're not licensed to drive a manual-gear-box vehicle. while the gp was exagerating slightly by saying everyone learing to drive on an auto here is damn rare because as you say taking your test on an automatic gearbox means you can only drive vehircles with automatic gearboxes. Given that automatic gearboxes are by far the exception here and are generally belived to be less fuel efficiant thats a pretty nasty restriction to live with.
The only people i've heared of doing their tests on autos are those who tried on manuals and failed repeatedly finally trying the auto test out of desperation to get a license at all.
no there are slightly better (yes lots of codec authors make claims of same quality at half the bitrate but afaict theese are widely regarded as bullshit) alternatives with far worse hardware and software support.
just as png has not killed gif and rar/bzip2/7zip have not killed zip it seems unlikely to me that mp3 will die any time soon.
also patents do expire, this means that old (greater than one patent lifetime) formats have a distinct advantage patent wise as the format itself would be prior-art that could be used against any patent claims. MP3 isn't quite that old yet but when it is that will become a powerfull reason to use it over newer alternatives.
both debian and ubuntu have version numbers as well as the codenames.
debians reason for using codenames was that they got burnt in the past by a CD vendor who shipped a development version of what was supposed to become 1.0 as debian 1.0. So they have gone for codenames during development and only marking a release with a version number at a very late stage.
with ubuntu the versioning is release date based so they don't even know what the version number will be until they know if they will release on time.
why is it illegal for microsoft to include office in windows yet it's ok for linux to include openoffice with it? the rules are different for those with a monopoly or near monopoly than for ordinary buisnesses.
presumablly they only make the crapware money on the boxes aimed at home users though. The crapware makers must know as well as we do that most corps are just going to image straight over whatever is shipped on the box (they still need the oem windows license because most if not all ms volume licenses for windows are upgrade/downgrade only and while the install media doesn't enforce it most corps at least in the west try to avoid piracy).
i agree to some extent on the hardware support but mostly its only a problem for wireless (though there is ndiswrapper for theese) and modems neither of which are common in corporate desktop boxes (3D graphics often needs binary drivers but the two major graphics card manufacturers do a pretty good job of keeping them compatible with the latest kernels).
Was there a fundamental difference between a 386DX and a 486DX Intels use of the terms DX and SX is a bit confusing
386SX-16 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit 386DX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit 486SX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit 486DX-32 bit external bus, internal floating point unit
there were also some other fairly major architectural changes between 386 and 486 at least according to wikipedia.
Europeans should not be taxed by a US seller, but they are responsible for customs and duties which is roughly equivalent to the VAT/GST and such that Europeans pay for domestic purchases. but i belive there is an exception to duty and vat for low value items sent through the postal service.
In any case, you should need a very, *very* good reason to upgrade glibc on any machine. It's not the sort of thing you should capriciously do because the new version is more numerically advanced. when did you last actually use linux?
if you are running a distro with decent stable releases the glibc package should remain much the same for the life of the release but you still have to download what updates there are to get security fixes, timezone fixes etc.
if you are running something like debian testing you have to upgrade glibc whenever a new version comes if you want to be able to upgrade anything else.
of course manually upgrading glibc to a version that doesn't go with your distro is generally a very bad idea.
there is a lot to be said for making a lot of core utilities static (doing rpm alone would be silly imo, you'd want at least coreutils and your shell static as well) and i belive some of the BSDs do go down this route (or at least did in the past, i'm sure i remembered some heated discussions somewhere about the pros and cons of having a/lib vs making all tools important enough to be outside/usr static).
There are also disadvantages to this though. I belive there are some things that modern linux distros have like the ability to resolve domains by methods other than dns that simply won't work for static binaries) and i know it will make those core utilities take up more memory.
and if you can get into a system from outside (for example a boot cd) then fixing a missing library (which should be a pretty rare event anyway unless you use force options recklessly).
P.S. one thing i do like about debian in this regard is that dpkg has seperate force options, so to remove a shared library depended on by dpkg force-depends alone will not be enough you will need to specify force-remove-essential as well (there is a force-all but i've never seen anyone advise using it).
Don't the majority of internet end-users use a form of modem to connect? You don't see too many eth connections these days. If you mean dial-up then yeah it's a fair point but getting a few CD's sent out every now and then would probably save you time and money. yeah i was a bit vauge there, i should probablly have said 56K dialup or worse.
technically even an ethernet adaptor could be considered a form of modem but generally i take modem without any qualifications as meaning dial-up modem.
also even among those with fast connections some have pretty low traffic caps and high per-gigabyte charges for going over them.
Come on, you can get an IDE hdd for buttons these days. Hell, I'd even give you a few I've got lying around for free. If you're using something pre-IDE era I strongly suggest you shell out £50 or so to get a 'usable' pc from eBay or a local seller. a modern desktop linux install already runs into multiple gigabytes, i dread to think what affect giving every app private copies of libraries would have on that.
and there are still the ram and cpu cache issues to consider.
P.S. i think that anyone who uses force options and in doing so gets into a mess they can't get out of has only themselves to blame, if something refuses to upgrade due to dependancy issues then just leave it until its fixed and/or check forums and mailing lists for advice. Really i think he just wanted to use that as an excuse to get the rest of his rant out.
Bandwidth is cheap for some people yes, others are stuck on the end of modems or worse
diskspace is cheap true for those running on modern desktops not at all true for those stuck with old hardware
but using private copies of libraries also impinges on ram (which is NOT cheap) and cpu cache (which is not cheap). Furthermore it creates a huge degree of extra work and bandwidth use whenever there is a security fix, not a good thing when you want it rolled out asap.
using private copies of libraries is tollerable for seperately distributed end-user apps of which a user is only likely to install a few but it would be totally unreasonable to build a whole distro this way.
that is indeed true, hence there are several choices with computers.
1: put up with an internet covered in shitware where a dronemaster can knock almost any site off the internet (this is the status quo). 2: restructure the internet to stop that happening (possible but difficult and has other nasty ramifications) 3: force people to learn before we let them on the net (this is what we do with driving, we force people to learn to drive and pass a test in it before we let them on the road). 4: force people to live with very locked down machines for all thier internet use.
Can you really use a standard hammer in outer space? Won't our poor astronauts be flung back, courtesy of Newton Airlines? the hammer is a much smaller mas than the astronout but yes hitting something will push them away and they will need to have some way to counter that (i'm guessing the ISS has handholds or something for this)
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the mp3 format has been extended and changed so much, and had stuff added and removed (vbr, abr, and tagging.... tagging shouldnt have even been there, since mp3 is a datastream not a container), over time. its hardly the same format now.
something to understand about the mpeg series, they are defined in terms of what a decoder must be able to decode so new methods of analysing the audio and deciding what is worth including and with what precision do not change the format.
If you have the time and inclination to read through the published litriture on a subject especially a more controversial one you can pick sources to support practically anything you wan't whether or not it is truthfull.
also in many cases the actual authoritive sources are difficult or expensive to access (is anyone really going to bother buying a book or making an inter-library loan just to check out a wikipedia reference?) this means you can make up references and the chances of anyone checking them are minimal.
not that it is nessacery to go to those lengths in most cases because except for the very small range of subjects where authorive information is freely availible wikipedia generally relies on the knowlage of its editors and if someone pushes for citations just cites websites that are no more authoritive than wikipedia is.
1) It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers.
is it really cheaper to have all your internal e-mail (must be quite a large volume if people are readilly hitting the limits on 250meg boxes) flying on and off campus several times.
also have they considered the potential cost of losing internal e-mail service if they lose thier internet connection?
i suspect this works in the same way as speeding fines. you can either pay on the spot or go to court but if you go to court and lose you will get fined FAR FAR more than you would pay on the fixed penalty notice.
iirc forumula 1 is semi-automatic, the driver chooses when to change gear but the actual mechanics of the change are handled automatically.
AIUI, No, you can learn to drive and pass your test in an automatic car, but then you're not licensed to drive a manual-gear-box vehicle.
while the gp was exagerating slightly by saying everyone learing to drive on an auto here is damn rare because as you say taking your test on an automatic gearbox means you can only drive vehircles with automatic gearboxes. Given that automatic gearboxes are by far the exception here and are generally belived to be less fuel efficiant thats a pretty nasty restriction to live with.
The only people i've heared of doing their tests on autos are those who tried on manuals and failed repeatedly finally trying the auto test out of desperation to get a license at all.
i'm pretty sure I read it was one release in four that was meant to be lts not one in three
no there are slightly better (yes lots of codec authors make claims of same quality at half the bitrate but afaict theese are widely regarded as bullshit) alternatives with far worse hardware and software support.
just as png has not killed gif and rar/bzip2/7zip have not killed zip it seems unlikely to me that mp3 will die any time soon.
also patents do expire, this means that old (greater than one patent lifetime) formats have a distinct advantage patent wise as the format itself would be prior-art that could be used against any patent claims. MP3 isn't quite that old yet but when it is that will become a powerfull reason to use it over newer alternatives.
both debian and ubuntu have version numbers as well as the codenames.
debians reason for using codenames was that they got burnt in the past by a CD vendor who shipped a development version of what was supposed to become 1.0 as debian 1.0. So they have gone for codenames during development and only marking a release with a version number at a very late stage.
with ubuntu the versioning is release date based so they don't even know what the version number will be until they know if they will release on time.
why is it illegal for microsoft to include office in windows yet it's ok for linux to include openoffice with it?
the rules are different for those with a monopoly or near monopoly than for ordinary buisnesses.
presumablly they only make the crapware money on the boxes aimed at home users though. The crapware makers must know as well as we do that most corps are just going to image straight over whatever is shipped on the box (they still need the oem windows license because most if not all ms volume licenses for windows are upgrade/downgrade only and while the install media doesn't enforce it most corps at least in the west try to avoid piracy).
i agree to some extent on the hardware support but mostly its only a problem for wireless (though there is ndiswrapper for theese) and modems neither of which are common in corporate desktop boxes (3D graphics often needs binary drivers but the two major graphics card manufacturers do a pretty good job of keeping them compatible with the latest kernels).
"a death is a tragedy, 10 million deaths is a statistic" -- command and conquer red alert
Was there a fundamental difference between a 386DX and a 486DX
Intels use of the terms DX and SX is a bit confusing
386SX-16 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
386DX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
486SX-32 bit external bus, no internal floating point unit
486DX-32 bit external bus, internal floating point unit
there were also some other fairly major architectural changes between 386 and 486 at least according to wikipedia.
Europeans should not be taxed by a US seller, but they are responsible for customs and duties which is roughly equivalent to the VAT/GST and such that Europeans pay for domestic purchases.
but i belive there is an exception to duty and vat for low value items sent through the postal service.
its broken if you define broken as "broken if you use features that no other supported format offers"
thats hardly a reason not to use it though.
In any case, you should need a very, *very* good reason to upgrade glibc on any machine. It's not the sort of thing you should capriciously do because the new version is more numerically advanced.
when did you last actually use linux?
if you are running a distro with decent stable releases the glibc package should remain much the same for the life of the release but you still have to download what updates there are to get security fixes, timezone fixes etc.
if you are running something like debian testing you have to upgrade glibc whenever a new version comes if you want to be able to upgrade anything else.
of course manually upgrading glibc to a version that doesn't go with your distro is generally a very bad idea.
there is a lot to be said for making a lot of core utilities static (doing rpm alone would be silly imo, you'd want at least coreutils and your shell static as well) and i belive some of the BSDs do go down this route (or at least did in the past, i'm sure i remembered some heated discussions somewhere about the pros and cons of having a /lib vs making all tools important enough to be outside /usr static).
There are also disadvantages to this though. I belive there are some things that modern linux distros have like the ability to resolve domains by methods other than dns that simply won't work for static binaries) and i know it will make those core utilities take up more memory.
and if you can get into a system from outside (for example a boot cd) then fixing a missing library (which should be a pretty rare event anyway unless you use force options recklessly).
P.S. one thing i do like about debian in this regard is that dpkg has seperate force options, so to remove a shared library depended on by dpkg force-depends alone will not be enough you will need to specify force-remove-essential as well (there is a force-all but i've never seen anyone advise using it).
Don't the majority of internet end-users use a form of modem to connect? You don't see too many eth connections these days. If you mean dial-up then yeah it's a fair point but getting a few CD's sent out every now and then would probably save you time and money.
yeah i was a bit vauge there, i should probablly have said 56K dialup or worse.
technically even an ethernet adaptor could be considered a form of modem but generally i take modem without any qualifications as meaning dial-up modem.
also even among those with fast connections some have pretty low traffic caps and high per-gigabyte charges for going over them.
Come on, you can get an IDE hdd for buttons these days. Hell, I'd even give you a few I've got lying around for free. If you're using something pre-IDE era I strongly suggest you shell out £50 or so to get a 'usable' pc from eBay or a local seller.
a modern desktop linux install already runs into multiple gigabytes, i dread to think what affect giving every app private copies of libraries would have on that.
and there are still the ram and cpu cache issues to consider.
P.S. i think that anyone who uses force options and in doing so gets into a mess they can't get out of has only themselves to blame, if something refuses to upgrade due to dependancy issues then just leave it until its fixed and/or check forums and mailing lists for advice. Really i think he just wanted to use that as an excuse to get the rest of his rant out.
The "rhythm method" counts as birth control.
but given that you aren't consuming any drugs how does the fda know you are using it?
yeah and iirc the checkuser logs also have a limited life
Bandwidth is cheap
for some people yes, others are stuck on the end of modems or worse
diskspace is cheap
true for those running on modern desktops not at all true for those stuck with old hardware
but using private copies of libraries also impinges on ram (which is NOT cheap) and cpu cache (which is not cheap). Furthermore it creates a huge degree of extra work and bandwidth use whenever there is a security fix, not a good thing when you want it rolled out asap.
using private copies of libraries is tollerable for seperately distributed end-user apps of which a user is only likely to install a few but it would be totally unreasonable to build a whole distro this way.
The gfdl only requires attibution of material so if the material is no longer there its history doesn't have to be either.
even if the material is there i don't think full development history of it is required, thats just the easiest way for a wiki to provide attibution.
and btw i've heared it works on 2K if you edit the installer file to make it let you.
that is indeed true, hence there are several choices with computers.
1: put up with an internet covered in shitware where a dronemaster can knock almost any site off the internet (this is the status quo).
2: restructure the internet to stop that happening (possible but difficult and has other nasty ramifications)
3: force people to learn before we let them on the net (this is what we do with driving, we force people to learn to drive and pass a test in it before we let them on the road).
4: force people to live with very locked down machines for all thier internet use.
Can you really use a standard hammer in outer space? Won't our poor astronauts be flung back, courtesy of Newton Airlines?
the hammer is a much smaller mas than the astronout but yes hitting something will push them away and they will need to have some way to counter that (i'm guessing the ISS has handholds or something for this)