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User: Trixter

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Comments · 313

  1. This has got to be a sign of the apocalypse. on MP3.com Going Public · · Score: 1

    If a lame website can go from a "script-kiddie mentality" warez/filez/mp3z site to having $11 million in venture capital and the ability to go public in less than 18 months, then surely Armageddon must be upon us. This is so wrong.

    Geezus. Sites like that give legitimate projects a bad name.

  2. Exactly--Creative's first product was laughable on Creative Enters MP3 Player market · · Score: 1

    You are correct. Adlib should've been the real winner here--the Sound Blaster was the same Yamaha chipset with a DAC tacked on. If it weren't for the Adlib's popularity beforehand, the Sound Blaster wouldn't have taken off.

    Why? Because Creative's original idea of music for a PC was the Creative Music System, also sold under the name "Game Blaster" at Radio Shack. It was essentially four Tandy sound chips in stereo. Anyone who remembers their sound standards can easily tell you that Adlib's 2-operator FM was much better than the TI chip in the Tandy.

    Go visit http://www.oldskool.org/pc/sound/ if you want some audio examples.

  3. OpenCart on Ask Slashdot: Open Sourced Mall Software · · Score: 1

    A friend of mine is working on such a system called OpenCart. I have no idea how far along he is, but you're free to email him if you like.

  4. PDF is portable, doofus. on Hacking Barney · · Score: 1

    PDF = Portable Document Format. It's essentially Postscript with bytecodes and compressed. With a viewer for just about every platform (Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, Sparc, RS 6000, SGI, OS/2, etc.) and PDF-to-Postscript converters for everyone else, PDF a great way to distribute content if you want the layout, graphics, etc. to be perfectly preserved. It's cross-platform.

    If you don't care about layout, then yes, HTML is better.

  5. Why even use real audio? on Ask Slashdot: Can you Convert RealAudio to MP3? · · Score: 1

    Because at low bitrates, it encodes speech better than MP3. (Use the "Voice-only" 16Kbps setting to test this if you don't believe me.)

    MP3 kicks the ass of just about everything else, of course, but Real does a better job with modem-bitrate voice.

  6. What are you TALKING about??? on Ask Slashdot: Movie Players for Linux? · · Score: 1

    I'm not suggesting you reboot all the time, if that's what you thought I was talking about.
    As for qualifying statements regarding other Unix OSes, do I need to? I thought it was pretty much common knowledge.

    I've got an HP Netserver sitting right next to me; 6 4gig disks on a Mylex RAID controller and Solaris x86 is humming away. (Linux has no driver for it and never will; check the Mylex driver source in Linux, it only supports the newer hardware rev.)

    OpenBSD is so secure that it's the only OS that hackers can't break into, even the l0pht runs on OpenBSD.

    I've witnessed FreeBSD take a load average of 80 and keep on chugging; the same on Linux 2.2.1 starts dropping packets. ftp.cdrom.com runs on FreeBSD and takes 3000 simultaneous FTP connections averaging 20K/second.

    Like I said before: Linux's strength, in my opinion, is speed. It's very fast. But that doesn't make it the only Unix you should run, given your needs. I enjoy Linux--I'm using it right now--but it is not the holy grail of Unix OSes.

  7. Linux is completely unsuitable for MM editing. on Ask Slashdot: Movie Players for Linux? · · Score: 1

    Flame me all you want, but the only Unix-based platform that comes close to multimedia editing (I'm talking about traditional non-linear editing of digital video) is SGI, and I don't have the tens of thousands of dollars to buy both an SGI and a decent video/sound editing package. Windows, on the other hand, gets me Premiere (about $400), Sound Forge (another $400), and a CHEAP Zoran MJPEG chipset capture board (Zoran is totally standard hardware, and only about $200 for the Buz). $1000 gets me broadcast-quality editing, even though I only use it for creating Video CDs (MPEG-1).

    Linux is free and the tools are free, but there aren't any tools for this sort of thing under Linux.

    Sure, you can play MPEGs on Linux. But you can't create them. That's why I still use Windows for all of my multimedia needs.

    I wish that all you Linux advocates (the people who instantly think "Linux" whenever someone writes "Unix") could realize that Linux is not the holy grail of operating systems. I am a firm advocate of using the right tool for the right job--and Windows is currently the right tool for multimedia editing. Linux is the right OS for speed. FreeBSD is the right OS for stability under heavy loads. OpenBSD is the right OS for security. Solaris x86 is the right OS for hardware RAID support. And so on.

  8. Quit complaining, spend $20 and get 4 more megs on Is Red Hat becoming too powerful? · · Score: 1

    Where do you propose I find 4MB of (old) 30-pin SIMMs?

    And for the record, I don't care about a GUI. I want to turn the 30+ 386s here into something useful. DNS, FTP, HTTP servers are not impossible with 386s--hell, that's what they were 9 years ago...

  9. They help in some ways, but hurt in others. on Is Red Hat becoming too powerful? · · Score: 1

    Redhat has done some wonderful things in terms of contributing back to the *nix community, don't get me wrong--but I do fear that they will "Microsoft-ify" in a couple of years. By that, I mean that they will change the public's perception of what is allowable for an operating system to require, even if it's unreasonable. For example, their 5.x distributions have unreasonable system and/or installation requirements, which really hurts because I try to use Unix (FreeBSD, Linux, whatever) as an alternative to bloated OSes (like Windows NT) when you are trying to make use of perfectly good old hardware (386s, 486s) for DNS servers. But when Redhat 5.2 requires 8MB of RAM to install and 120MB minimum disk space for 5.2, what can I use?

    (I understand that it's 8MB to install and that you can prune that down to 4MB after you install. But that's little help when all you have is 4MB in the machine. FreeBSD is a little better, but 2.2.* still requires a bit more (5MB to install, 4MB afterwards to run)).

    I remember my original Slackware installing and running in 2MB. And this was before loadable kernel modules. So what am I missing? If Redhat becomes the dominant Linux distribution, and it eventually requires 16MB of RAM, and the other older distributions aren't available any more, how can I make use of perfectly good older machines with, say, 4MB of RAM and an 80MB disk?

    (As a footnote, I attempted an install on an 80MB disk with 5.1, and it insisted on installing over 80MB of stuff, even with most packages deselected and no kernel source. It was a trip to try to delete binaries and directory trees while the install was happening in an effort to get the install to work. :-)

  10. Truly end of an era on Prodigy "classic" to shut down due to Y2K problem · · Score: 1

    The classic Prodigy service was the web and Flash animation before the web and Flash even existed. Links that you could click, pictures drawn with vectors, even banner ads--they were all standard on Prodigy in 1990, using only a 1200 or 2400 baud modem, on any 286 or higher with EGA. It was truly amazing for its time.

    Of course, the web is the obvious migration for these people, but I'm still really sad to see it go.

  11. re: Advertising on Ask Slashdot: How can Free Web Service Recoup Costs? · · Score: 1

    Is your website still up? What kind of game reviews did you have? Please email me; I want to talk to you more about this, since this is part of what I want to offer...

  12. And you're ignorant. on Help save the Kosmic Free Music Foundation · · Score: 1

    We didn't shut down the archive because we couldn't make money from it--we shut it down because we didn't want to spend the time (6+ years, mind you) maintaining it any more.

    We never tried to make it a business.

    Please do some research before you open your big yaw.

  13. What people don't know... on Help save the Kosmic Free Music Foundation · · Score: 1

    ...Is that Dan (Maelcum) was originally called ModDan, wrote terrible music for AOL's online music forum in the early 90's, and came up with KLF because he liked to rip the *real* KLF's samples for his music.

    Sorry to burst your bubble, Dan... History sucks, don't it?