No that's the point of all of all of the alphas and betas. The release candidate is supposed to be "This is done, we just want people to test the final version before we release it".
I read a story a while ago about how copper is worth enough that telephone companies had their cables stolen all the time. The cost of constantly replacing your infrastructure could also affect costs..
However, please remember that a market overseen by the goverment tends irremediably to end up in an oligarchy
Fixed that for you.
Name one case where this happened without the assistance of the government. And by the "assistance" of the government I mean subsidies (railroads, ISPs), physical force (historical: using the government to put down unions), copyrights (RIAA), patents (Intel/AMD) and monopolies directly created by government policies (cell phone companies -- because of how the wireless spectrum is sold).
And don't take this to mean that some of these might be useful, some of them might be. My point is just that the monopoly-creating tendency isn't the free market.
If I understand him right, it seems that RMS doesn't have a problem with companies selling their software, he has a problem with companies that sell software and refuse to tell people how it works. Or maybe I'm just giving him too much credit.
I just looked it up to make sure I wasn't missing something, and Debian splits alsa up strangely so it's hard to say exactly which package is which, but Debian's ALSA packages have versions from 1.0.15 (released Oct 2007) to 1.0.17 (released June 2008), and ALSA current is entirely 1.0.21 except for ALSA-OSS which hasn't been updated since 1.0.17. So, Debian has no ALSA packages less than two versions off, and the majority are around 7 versions off. Sources: Debian Stable Package List and AlsaProject Homepage.
PS: Ubuntu, being released much more frequently, has managed to update to ALSA 1.0.18 (released Oct 2008).
You do realize that Ubuntu is Debian in fast mode right? I'm sure I needed drivers from 2003, Debian would be happy to provide them, but that doesn't really help me in this case.
Instead I just installed Arch and followed the simple instructions on their Wiki for Alsa and PulseAudio (add ~4 lines to an alsa config file) and everything works fine.
I just installed KDE on a laptop I've been testing Arch on, and it's actually working fairly well. I think its only major downside now is trying to be too much like Vista/7..
The analogy I can think of is a website with multiple kinds of images. You might have one image that's just black and white, so even with full antialiasing, an 8 color (3 bits per pixel) image is all you need. But then you also have something that's a simple screenshot of a window that needs 256 colors (8 bits per pixel). And then add one more image, something that needs full 24 bit color like a photo.
Your "constant bitrate" website would have to encode all of them at the same quality, so you could set it to 8 colors and use the least amount of space, but the other two images would look horrible. You could set it to 256 colors, but then the photo would still look bad, and you'd be wasting 5 bits per pixel on the 8 bit image. The only way to get good quality would be to make them all 24 bit images, wasting 21 bits per pixel on the first image and 16 on the second.
Other other hand, you could have a "variable bitrate" website, and just encode each image at the quality it needs, giving you the minimum needed to display each image perfectly.
When you look at the completed website, the "variable bitrate" website will look identical to the "constant bitrate" website, because they both have exactly the same colors. The colors that the "variable bitrate" website isn't using are colors that aren't in the image anyway.
To bring this back to the actual question, you can't hear the difference in bitrates because bitrates just tell you how much information is in that second, not what the information is. So 5 seconds of silence would have a low bitrate, while 5 seconds of classical music would have a higher bitrate (because encoding music takes more information than silence).
On a package based distro, if you install anything without a package, you pretty much break auto-updating. For me, keeping it up to date without having to check is more important than having the latest driver (since they never change anything big anyway).
VBR will actually produce a better file for the same bitrate, because it doesn't just lower the bitrate when needed, it also uses the "extra bits" from the simple sections to raise the bitrate when needed as well. The amount of difference will depend what bitrate you need, but it should always be better (except in a situation where it can never lower the bitrate, in which case it will produce a very similar file).
Not to mention that it's all bullshit anyway. They take a program that any competent person could do in 2 years and then dumb the classes down until it takes 4 years. Twice the time, twice the money. College is just about extracting money from people.
Mozilla isn't taking their word for it, YOU are taking Microsoft's word for it by installing the program. And before you say "but I didn't want to install it, it was installed by automatic updates", then why are you using Windows if you don't trust Microsoft?
And while that's not as obvious as being able to use the "disable" button, anyone looking up remove "ubuntu firefox modifications" will quickly find that all you need to do is type:
sudo aptitude purge ubufox
And this is just because normal users don't have permission to remove it. What do you want Firefox to do? Make it so users can disable extensions that administrators have installed?
Variable bitrate produces a file where the average is the given bitrate, but it changes the bitrate at any given point based on need. So for example, any parts of the song that are silence will be encoded at very low bitrates, and complicated parts will be encoded at higher bitrates. If you encode with a fixed bitrate, you're wasting space encoding simple parts and not encoding the complicated parts as high as you should.
So for your second question we should turn it around into "is 128 kbps VBR better than 192 kbps fixed?", and the answer is that it depends on the song, but you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway. A more interesting question is "is 128 kbps VBR better than 128 kpbs fixed" and the answer is yes, always.
Of course, unless you're some kind of audio god (and I mean, completely inhuman), you probably can't guess what bitrate you need anyway, which is where quality-based encoders come in. If you want to encode a file in ogg vorbis, you just say what quality you want, and it figures out what the average bitrate needs to be to encode it.
Exactly what problems do people have with Pulse anyway? The ONLY problems I ever have with sound on Linux are related to ALSA drivers not being updated yet (and that's Ubuntu's fault for its insane "Older is always stabler" policy).
All of the problems I ever have with PulseAudio are related to ALSA (lack of ALSA driver). I've never had a problem with Pulse itself. And some of the cool things PulseAudio does are nice, like software mixing and network sound (very useful for projects like CoLinux). And I realize other projects have done the same thing, but the exciting thing about PulseAudio is you don't need to know that it's there for your program to work.
NASA's requested 2010 budget is ~$20 billion. Whether or not that's a waste of money hardly matters since it's (comparatively) a very small amount.
I'm talking about things like the military budget of about a trillion dollars a year. Or social security, to protect people's "right" to not work (notice: I'm not claiming some people can't work, but social security exists so everyone can stop working because there's this idea that after a certain age, people deserve to mooch off of everyone else).
And the bailout is much worse than just spending $600 billion. It's paying $600 billion to the worst banks to keep them from being bought by banks that were well run.
One more thing. I speak as a current student, and the whole "education needs more money" argument, is completely bullshit. Know what happened at my schools? "Hey so we have a bunch of money and they say we have to spend it." So they bought smart boards and upgraded gyms and none of it matters because the problem is the system, not the lack of shiny things. Some schools could probably use more money, but just throwing money in the general direction of the problem isn't going to help at all.
Government balance sheets aren't "in the red" due to a lack of money, it's due to a lack of restraint. "Oh hey let's attack a country.. Oh hey let's attack another.. Let's give money to the banks with the stupidest management.. Let's give people money to not grow food.. Let's give people money to buy new cars.." and then when the budget problems come up "If this spending bill doesn't pass, we have no choice but to shut down libraries and fire departments!"
Sorry, it's hard to tell sometimes.. There's this law that I can't remember the name of, but it's something like "Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a true believer."
Slashdot Mirror
No that's the point of all of all of the alphas and betas. The release candidate is supposed to be "This is done, we just want people to test the final version before we release it".
I read a story a while ago about how copper is worth enough that telephone companies had their cables stolen all the time. The cost of constantly replacing your infrastructure could also affect costs..
However, please remember that a market overseen by the goverment tends irremediably to end up in an oligarchy
Fixed that for you.
Name one case where this happened without the assistance of the government. And by the "assistance" of the government I mean subsidies (railroads, ISPs), physical force (historical: using the government to put down unions), copyrights (RIAA), patents (Intel/AMD) and monopolies directly created by government policies (cell phone companies -- because of how the wireless spectrum is sold).
And don't take this to mean that some of these might be useful, some of them might be. My point is just that the monopoly-creating tendency isn't the free market.
If I understand him right, it seems that RMS doesn't have a problem with companies selling their software, he has a problem with companies that sell software and refuse to tell people how it works. Or maybe I'm just giving him too much credit.
And for some reason, I get the idea that most of us Linux users aren't hardcore gamers..
You could always have algae pools to make the oxygen, and then some plants to make the place look pretty. It's not one of the other..
I just looked it up to make sure I wasn't missing something, and Debian splits alsa up strangely so it's hard to say exactly which package is which, but Debian's ALSA packages have versions from 1.0.15 (released Oct 2007) to 1.0.17 (released June 2008), and ALSA current is entirely 1.0.21 except for ALSA-OSS which hasn't been updated since 1.0.17. So, Debian has no ALSA packages less than two versions off, and the majority are around 7 versions off. Sources: Debian Stable Package List and AlsaProject Homepage.
PS: Ubuntu, being released much more frequently, has managed to update to ALSA 1.0.18 (released Oct 2008).
You do realize that Ubuntu is Debian in fast mode right? I'm sure I needed drivers from 2003, Debian would be happy to provide them, but that doesn't really help me in this case.
Instead I just installed Arch and followed the simple instructions on their Wiki for Alsa and PulseAudio (add ~4 lines to an alsa config file) and everything works fine.
I just installed KDE on a laptop I've been testing Arch on, and it's actually working fairly well. I think its only major downside now is trying to be too much like Vista/7..
The analogy I can think of is a website with multiple kinds of images. You might have one image that's just black and white, so even with full antialiasing, an 8 color (3 bits per pixel) image is all you need. But then you also have something that's a simple screenshot of a window that needs 256 colors (8 bits per pixel). And then add one more image, something that needs full 24 bit color like a photo.
Your "constant bitrate" website would have to encode all of them at the same quality, so you could set it to 8 colors and use the least amount of space, but the other two images would look horrible. You could set it to 256 colors, but then the photo would still look bad, and you'd be wasting 5 bits per pixel on the 8 bit image. The only way to get good quality would be to make them all 24 bit images, wasting 21 bits per pixel on the first image and 16 on the second.
Other other hand, you could have a "variable bitrate" website, and just encode each image at the quality it needs, giving you the minimum needed to display each image perfectly.
When you look at the completed website, the "variable bitrate" website will look identical to the "constant bitrate" website, because they both have exactly the same colors. The colors that the "variable bitrate" website isn't using are colors that aren't in the image anyway.
To bring this back to the actual question, you can't hear the difference in bitrates because bitrates just tell you how much information is in that second, not what the information is. So 5 seconds of silence would have a low bitrate, while 5 seconds of classical music would have a higher bitrate (because encoding music takes more information than silence).
On a package based distro, if you install anything without a package, you pretty much break auto-updating. For me, keeping it up to date without having to check is more important than having the latest driver (since they never change anything big anyway).
VBR will actually produce a better file for the same bitrate, because it doesn't just lower the bitrate when needed, it also uses the "extra bits" from the simple sections to raise the bitrate when needed as well. The amount of difference will depend what bitrate you need, but it should always be better (except in a situation where it can never lower the bitrate, in which case it will produce a very similar file).
Not to mention that it's all bullshit anyway. They take a program that any competent person could do in 2 years and then dumb the classes down until it takes 4 years. Twice the time, twice the money. College is just about extracting money from people.
Mozilla isn't taking their word for it, YOU are taking Microsoft's word for it by installing the program. And before you say "but I didn't want to install it, it was installed by automatic updates", then why are you using Windows if you don't trust Microsoft?
And while that's not as obvious as being able to use the "disable" button, anyone looking up remove "ubuntu firefox modifications" will quickly find that all you need to do is type:
sudo aptitude purge ubufox
And this is just because normal users don't have permission to remove it. What do you want Firefox to do? Make it so users can disable extensions that administrators have installed?
Because the evil idiots in government are better than the evil idiots who run scary corporations! *ignore the fact that they are the same people*
Variable bitrate produces a file where the average is the given bitrate, but it changes the bitrate at any given point based on need. So for example, any parts of the song that are silence will be encoded at very low bitrates, and complicated parts will be encoded at higher bitrates. If you encode with a fixed bitrate, you're wasting space encoding simple parts and not encoding the complicated parts as high as you should.
So for your second question we should turn it around into "is 128 kbps VBR better than 192 kbps fixed?", and the answer is that it depends on the song, but you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway. A more interesting question is "is 128 kbps VBR better than 128 kpbs fixed" and the answer is yes, always.
Of course, unless you're some kind of audio god (and I mean, completely inhuman), you probably can't guess what bitrate you need anyway, which is where quality-based encoders come in. If you want to encode a file in ogg vorbis, you just say what quality you want, and it figures out what the average bitrate needs to be to encode it.
Exactly what problems do people have with Pulse anyway? The ONLY problems I ever have with sound on Linux are related to ALSA drivers not being updated yet (and that's Ubuntu's fault for its insane "Older is always stabler" policy).
All of the problems I ever have with PulseAudio are related to ALSA (lack of ALSA driver). I've never had a problem with Pulse itself. And some of the cool things PulseAudio does are nice, like software mixing and network sound (very useful for projects like CoLinux). And I realize other projects have done the same thing, but the exciting thing about PulseAudio is you don't need to know that it's there for your program to work.
NASA's requested 2010 budget is ~$20 billion. Whether or not that's a waste of money hardly matters since it's (comparatively) a very small amount.
I'm talking about things like the military budget of about a trillion dollars a year. Or social security, to protect people's "right" to not work (notice: I'm not claiming some people can't work, but social security exists so everyone can stop working because there's this idea that after a certain age, people deserve to mooch off of everyone else).
And the bailout is much worse than just spending $600 billion. It's paying $600 billion to the worst banks to keep them from being bought by banks that were well run.
One more thing. I speak as a current student, and the whole "education needs more money" argument, is completely bullshit. Know what happened at my schools? "Hey so we have a bunch of money and they say we have to spend it." So they bought smart boards and upgraded gyms and none of it matters because the problem is the system, not the lack of shiny things. Some schools could probably use more money, but just throwing money in the general direction of the problem isn't going to help at all.
Issue #15327: Government OS fails to load Constitution.inc. Error message is "But think of the children!"
Government balance sheets aren't "in the red" due to a lack of money, it's due to a lack of restraint. "Oh hey let's attack a country.. Oh hey let's attack another.. Let's give money to the banks with the stupidest management.. Let's give people money to not grow food.. Let's give people money to buy new cars.." and then when the budget problems come up "If this spending bill doesn't pass, we have no choice but to shut down libraries and fire departments!"
Sorry, it's hard to tell sometimes.. There's this law that I can't remember the name of, but it's something like "Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a true believer."
I consider flash vulnerabilities the fault of any browser that doesn't support the canvas, video and audio tags (requiring people to use flash).
Then that seems to be a problem with the current law in all cases, not a need for a new law for a specific case.