Except GE's former CEO Jack Welch (some say the best that ever was) rose from the engineer ranks with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering. And Roberto Goizueta was also Chemical Engineering (makes you wonder, eh?) for the Coca Cola Company.
As with everything however, you can't be JUST an engineer or JUST a business major. Perhaps business school types should be required to take more engineering courses and vice versa, eh?
ESR says in Cathedral and the Bazaar, if you are a company who's primary business it writing and selling software, then GPL isn't going to be your bag. That's ANY software. You may write software an give it away hoping to sell some other service on top... in which case your company's primary product wouldn't be software would it?
However, if your company sells widgets and you maintain an in house software development team to manage your process/accounting software, then you are the perfect candidate for GPL. Outsource your software to the world and get more code review, more features, and more man hours spent on the product at a lower price... then you can dedicate yourself to what you do best, making widgets instead of overhead (software development).
Other GUI and cool software maintained strictly as software under the GPL is done for fun not profit.
Quick follow up. Metal spikes (track shoes) would help on concrete some but not on grass (remember running tracks are NOT concrete, they are usually some kind of rubberised asphalt and the spikes are short). Soccer or football cleats would help on grass but would be a disaster on concrete.
You'd have to bring a different pair of shoes for every possible situation... besides, if you are protesting nike's labor practices in Southeast Asia, then you're sure as hell not gonna buy more shoes *G*.
Try running around in cleats (plastic, metal or otherwise) in an urban environment on concrete... you'd be better off trying your luck with the goo.
So you're a smart bastard and you bring a change of shoes with you... hehe, I'd love to see that, guy sprayed with goo, police closing in.. hold on a sec, lemme change my shoes here... oops, (starts sliding away from his packpack) plop! aaahhh, my mp3 player full of warez!
Anyway, I applaud anything non-lethal that can be used to control OUT of control crowds and rioters. It is a Good Thing(TM) to have options contrary to shooting or beating people when they are out of control.
This is humane and shows the great lengths we go to to try NOT to hurt/kill those among us would would destroy our property or create mayhem and in many cases cause the deaths of innocents (trampling, beating etc.).
Mundie's new title at MS should be CET (Chief Executive Troll). This is classic old school trolling at its best. Geez, didn't you people read Usenet before 1993?
After reading this article, I reflect that my three year old daughter was flagged. She does NOT have a beard. I am an Army Reserve Captain and fit the Topgun Iceman profile (big white guy with a short military haircut and demeanor). We all got flagged and searched (carry ons emptied, patted down again etc.)
Although I understand people's concerns, Europe for all their supposed laws about privacy and information continues to be the most racist place in the world. I can't tell you how many (serveral) times coming through customs in Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland, I sailed through with nary a glance but the Latin American's behind and in front of me were interogated (who are you visiting, why are you here, who are you with, where are you staying).
In Bilbao, Spain, I was watching their local television news program where they were patting themselves on the back because they didn't have the same race problems as the US. "We have no such problems in Bilbao," The anchorwoman beamed, "We are proud of the six black families that live here in our city and consider them equals."
YOU COUNTED THEM?! And you know where they live, don't you? That's an indictment of the first degree. You can see that immigrants are not fleeing worlds of oppression and landing in Bilbao Spain that's for sure... doesn't that tell you something?
I've lived all over the world, and although the US is certainly not the utopia people think it is, we really are the best place to come if you are different or oppressed. Millions of immigrants can't be wrong *G*.
Why I Compressed 700+ CD's to Ogg Vorbis
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I posted to a Ask Slashdot a while back, and got some good feedback. The result was the following essay Hope it sheds some light on the subject.
*Generation* of power (as in either you or a machine is moving some mass a distance in an amount of time) is perfectly acceptable because it is NOT energy/time, but work/time... kinda the same thing, (Both joule/sec) but does not imply potential... If you expend a joule per second to hold a block still in the air, yer not doing any work (no matter what weight lifters tell you) only force acting over a distance divided by time is work.
This post brought to you by Halliday and Resnick *G*.
We manage a LOT of servers and when we went gold with our new appliance, we decided on the 2.4.8 kernel (because it fixed a bunch of smbfs bugs that would slow down smb transfers to a few bytes/sec). Well, we started getting heavily loaded machines going offline. I'd arrive on site and not even be able to log in on the console. Hard drive light would be on steady and it was just thrashing itself to death.
Problem was, there machines, although supporting a lot of users, weren't supporting them simultaneously. It seemed that they would creep up to their limit of memory and once they arrived at the edge, the kernel couldn't figure out what to release, even though the machine only had one or two users at the time. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. So we're throw more RAM in the sucker, and wonder why the hell this never happened on the 2.2 kernels. I'd mutter that it probably had something to do with the VM, but since I'm not on the kernel mailing list and I hadn't heard any grumblings on any linux based news sites, I figured the problem was us. Well well well! This is a HUGE bug and I'm surprised that it was not addressed more publicly.
My desktop does this too from time to time. Swaps itself to death on a 2.4.8 kernel as well. Open staroffice 6.0 beta, gimp, and bunch of other random things and it eventually goes unstable. Never happened with the 2.2 series.
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses. But the GPL makes huge sense for companies for whom software is overhead (stuff that doesn't directly bring in money).
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system. It helps you be more efficient, but it also costs you a lot of money to develop and maintain. Companies are starting to outsource their applications to the world, and are finding out that it's cheaper, and other's who are interested contribute back. In the end they get better software.
Competition? It's not an issue, because again, they compete selling widgets, not writing software. Many company owners are realizing that software development was taking them away from their core competency and are looking to GPL.
Now, say I'm a company that has done some deep wizardry in speech recognition. We wrote it. It works and people are going to pay us big bucks for it. It would follow that said software would NOT be a good candidate for the GPL.
Just re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It spells it all out plain and simple. GPL: good for a lot of things - Still room for pay-license software.
Geez, normally a post like that gets modded down as a troll (nothing new is said, declares something as fact which is only opinion, and seeks only to sensationalize).
The beauty of open source/free software is that it never ever ever ever backslides. Projects, once they exist, always exist as long as SOMEBODY has the source code. KDE and Gnome are in a sense still just beginning, they will create the shoulders upon which we will stand, not next year but in 10 years. It's gonna sound corny, but it is only through open source that we will advance humanity. Instead of platforms rising and falling with the whims of corporations or profit motives, we have a platform upon which we can depend for more than just the current standard of 3 year upgrade cycles. Our data, our work, our intellectual property is separate and distinct from the application or OS.
What Russ Mitchell fails to recognize is that the free software movement isn't about a mistake in a spellchecker, or any other small userability issue. These things are details, very small details that ALWAYS get fixed if you report them. In fact, that's one of my problems with free software projects. Once I get around to submitting a patch or work around, the problem has been fixed by someone else. Very annoying.
Anway, the MOST important thing that he doesn't mention is open document formats. I've got college papers locked into MS Works format from 1990, that I can't open because of planned obsolesence. Lo and behold, there's a piece of third party software that you can buy that will allow you to open these formats. Microsoft abandons formats as matter of ROUTINE. This isn't ENOUGH to move over, or embrace Linux?
These days, I really only shake my head and smile at articles like Russ's. He just don't get it do he?
I like THIS case. It'll fit a normal micro ATX MB and you're not confined to special low profile cards, or limited expansion slots. And it looks a helluva lot better than that shit above.
I don't think 1.0 is artificial in this case. The Mozilla devel team has posted very much in advance a specific roadmap... it's not like everybody else... hmmm, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, oh what the hell let's call the next 2.0. (ahem cough cough KDE) Mozilla has proceeded in an extremely ordered and thorough manner with a specfic and detailed roadmap. I think this 1.0 will be what 1.0 are supposed to be, stable, mature, and a platform to build on if you are a developer without it changing out from under you because of a whim.
I give the Mozilla team muchos kudos for sticking to their guns and applying rigor in a age where rigor is sorely lacking.
Turns Blue When You Pee in Swimming Pool
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 1
It's unbelievable. There should be an inert substance that is spread throughout our atmosphere that whenever someone makes a hypocritical statement a big blue cloud appears around them. Holy shit, it boogles the mind.
I had a football coach that used to tell us, God doesn't win football games. It also follows that he doesn't make people lose them either. When will christian wackos pull their little blue aura heads outa their asses? The God in which I believe has only one thing to say... please take care of each other down there.
The Puerto Rican government is married to Microsoft. I work for a Linux company here and we have such difficulty fighting the culture of colonialism. EVERYTHING from the States is better and everything from anywhere else is crap. Yet because of the recent nationalistic surge with the navy bombing of Vieques you'd think the current Pro autonomous government (Partido Popular Democrático) would be trying to extricate itself from its dependence on Microsoft... well, THAT tune hasn't changed.
Puerto Rico is a relatively poor island that could use some common sense and to stop dumping its money into MS's coffers. I'd prefer more decent roads, clean water, and less than pathetic public education to paying MS more dinero.
I was downloading vorbis RC2 and all of a sudden the site went to a crawl... Hmm, wonder if they posted the release on Slashdot? Sure enough.
Doh! You guys could have at least let me finish my download *G*
Posting with Netscape 6.1 (love it)
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 1
No doubt about it, 6.0 sucked. We all agree. However, I must say I'm very impressed with 6.1. I've been using the nightlies for about two years now (laugh all you want, those were the lean years. In my day we had to walk backwards, uphill in the snow... but I digress).
0.9.3 nightlies in a word "ROCK". This is THE fastest browser, period. It blows the doors off IE on complex tables, and general page renders. To see what I'm talking about hit cnet.com where they have those flash ads in the articles. They are pretty intensive on the CPU when you're page scrolling. You'll see them bounce around a bit. Netscape/mozilla has no problems with them now.
I am suitabley impressed with Netscape 6.1. I'll have to wait to see, however, if there are any showstoppers that'll chase me back to IE.
Really all these exercises are just research into whether or not chess is a sophisticated version of Tic Tac Toe. As long as human's beat computers in chess the jury is out... on the game of chess not humanity.
As long as we think that chess==life then we're going to be upsetting ourselves needlessly. Computers outdo humans everyday in a wide variety of ways, but they still can't feed themselves, fix themselves, or reproduce without our help. Hell, they still need humans to actually move the chess pieces. Bah! that's not the chess I grew up with.
No, you took your hand off, that's a move. No I didn't, I was just testing. Cheater!!!! Mom!!!!
SBAWE64 is a 64 bit DAC. When it came out it was one of the nicest sounding DAC's available... it's perhaps 4 years old now, but I have never heard a click, pop, fan, disk drive even during the quiestest moments... and I'm so anal, I'd have noticed it *G*.
It's just a trade off on the type of music. JS helps with pop/rock that doesn't have much stereo seperation to begin with. MP3's psychoacoustic (ie lossy based on human hearing) method of coupling the channels loses stereo separation. If it's pop/rock, no big deal. If it's classical, folk, etc, then your mp3's sound really dead. Perhaps the added quality overall of the 160 mp3 wasn't enough to overshadow the loss of separation. If the music wasn't very difficult to encode for the codec, then you'll notice the loss of stereo much more than any artifacts.
Ogg will soon include lossless channel coupling in its encoder. This will mean the best of both worlds, smaller file size/better quality at same bitrate, without loss of stereo separation according to the OGG Vorbis mailing list.
I'm no super
audiophile with a golden ear, but I do have a better than your
average PC speakers connected to sound card setup. I have a 12 year
old Pioneer Amp/Receiver and 12 Year old Acoustic Research speakers
with subwoofer (since replaced the drivers), and a Soundblaster 64AWE
with gold coated analog outputs to the receiver. Whole thing, minus
PC and soundcard, cost $1000 back in 1989.
What I notice is
that at the office on some cheap ALTEC PC speakers with subwoofer,
NONE of the differences show through. Pretty much all CODEC's from
the various years sound the same... pretty good, artifacts seem to
magically go away... and hey that's not bad for the office.
But for home,
it's got to be ogg and a non PC dedicated system sound system.
First piece I
encoded to OGG was a rendition of Igor Stravinky's Ballet
Petrouska... full ballet mind you, none of this condensed suite
business *G*. I marveled at how airy it sounded and how percussive
the base was, thumping, rumbling tightly on my subwoofer.
No, this was
different, the high end was definitely there... but something else
too, "stereo separation." Now this is something new. Mp3
makes some of its best gains through the use of cleverly comparing
left and right channels and optimizing where they are very similar.
Good in theory, but what you end up with is a lost stereo separation.
It's cool for rock/pop, but classical absolutely needs stereo
separation. In fact, encode some classical music (any classical
music) in mp3 and then in ogg. You'll never go back.
You COULD put it
in stereo encoding mode, but then mp3 doesn't shine at relatively low
bitrates
You might also
say that ogg has to do extra work in each channel individually and
how the hell could it possibly sound better. It's got to consider
each channel independently, encode them AND it sounds better than the
industry standard at the same bitrate? She can bring home the bacon
and fry it up in a pan?
Can this truly be
the case?
Hell yes.
I don't
understand the deep wizardry of OGG, nor its team's fanatical
devotion to one thing: quality and duty. Two! Two things, quality,
duty and a ruthless efficiency. Three! Three things, quality, duty
and a ruthless efficiency and quality. Bah, I'll come in again.
One thing is
clear: OGG's codec is next generation. Mp3 is definitely suffering
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Great for 1996, but
there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is an inferior codec
RIGHT NOW. Mp3's tradeoffs and optimizations where great for 1996,
but there was room for improvement. Nothing but OGG has stepped up to
fill the void.
If that wasn't
the case, I wouldn't have encoded 700+ CDs into this format, occupying
around 40 gigabytes of space. Took me a couple of months, but now
that it's done, I breathe a sigh of relief (as I create a disk mirror
for backup) that it is now forever free and libre...
Slashdot Mirror
Except GE's former CEO Jack Welch (some say the best that ever was) rose from the engineer ranks with an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering. And Roberto Goizueta was also Chemical Engineering (makes you wonder, eh?) for the Coca Cola Company.
As with everything however, you can't be JUST an engineer or JUST a business major. Perhaps business school types should be required to take more engineering courses and vice versa, eh?
ESR says in Cathedral and the Bazaar, if you are a company who's primary business it writing and selling software, then GPL isn't going to be your bag. That's ANY software. You may write software an give it away hoping to sell some other service on top... in which case your company's primary product wouldn't be software would it?
However, if your company sells widgets and you maintain an in house software development team to manage your process/accounting software, then you are the perfect candidate for GPL. Outsource your software to the world and get more code review, more features, and more man hours spent on the product at a lower price... then you can dedicate yourself to what you do best, making widgets instead of overhead (software development).
Other GUI and cool software maintained strictly as software under the GPL is done for fun not profit.
It isn't rocket science.
Quick follow up. Metal spikes (track shoes) would help on concrete some but not on grass (remember running tracks are NOT concrete, they are usually some kind of rubberised asphalt and the spikes are short). Soccer or football cleats would help on grass but would be a disaster on concrete.
You'd have to bring a different pair of shoes for every possible situation... besides, if you are protesting nike's labor practices in Southeast Asia, then you're sure as hell not gonna buy more shoes *G*.
Try running around in cleats (plastic, metal or otherwise) in an urban environment on concrete... you'd be better off trying your luck with the goo.
So you're a smart bastard and you bring a change of shoes with you... hehe, I'd love to see that, guy sprayed with goo, police closing in.. hold on a sec, lemme change my shoes here... oops, (starts sliding away from his packpack) plop! aaahhh, my mp3 player full of warez!
Anyway, I applaud anything non-lethal that can be used to control OUT of control crowds and rioters. It is a Good Thing(TM) to have options contrary to shooting or beating people when they are out of control.
This is humane and shows the great lengths we go to to try NOT to hurt/kill those among us would would destroy our property or create mayhem and in many cases cause the deaths of innocents (trampling, beating etc.).
Mundie's new title at MS should be CET (Chief Executive Troll). This is classic old school trolling at its best. Geez, didn't you people read Usenet before 1993?
After reading this article, I reflect that my three year old daughter was flagged. She does NOT have a beard. I am an Army Reserve Captain and fit the Topgun Iceman profile (big white guy with a short military haircut and demeanor). We all got flagged and searched (carry ons emptied, patted down again etc.)
Although I understand people's concerns, Europe for all their supposed laws about privacy and information continues to be the most racist place in the world. I can't tell you how many (serveral) times coming through customs in Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland, I sailed through with nary a glance but the Latin American's behind and in front of me were interogated (who are you visiting, why are you here, who are you with, where are you staying).
In Bilbao, Spain, I was watching their local television news program where they were patting themselves on the back because they didn't have the same race problems as the US. "We have no such problems in Bilbao," The anchorwoman beamed, "We are proud of the six black families that live here in our city and consider them equals."
YOU COUNTED THEM?! And you know where they live, don't you? That's an indictment of the first degree. You can see that immigrants are not fleeing worlds of oppression and landing in Bilbao Spain that's for sure... doesn't that tell you something?
I've lived all over the world, and although the US is certainly not the utopia people think it is, we really are the best place to come if you are different or oppressed. Millions of immigrants can't be wrong *G*.
I posted to a Ask Slashdot a while back, and got some good feedback. The result was the following essay
Hope it sheds some light on the subject.
only force acting over a distance divided by time is work....err _power_ (this stuff is complicated)
*Generation* of power (as in either you or a machine is moving some mass a distance in an amount of time) is perfectly acceptable because it is NOT energy/time, but work/time ... kinda the same thing, (Both joule/sec) but does not imply potential... If you expend a joule per second to hold a block still in the air, yer not doing any work (no matter what weight lifters tell you) only force acting over a distance divided by time is work.
This post brought to you by Halliday and Resnick *G*.
We manage a LOT of servers and when we went gold with our new appliance, we decided on the 2.4.8 kernel (because it fixed a bunch of smbfs bugs that would slow down smb transfers to a few bytes/sec). Well, we started getting heavily loaded machines going offline. I'd arrive on site and not even be able to log in on the console. Hard drive light would be on steady and it was just thrashing itself to death.
Problem was, there machines, although supporting a lot of users, weren't supporting them simultaneously. It seemed that they would creep up to their limit of memory and once they arrived at the edge, the kernel couldn't figure out what to release, even though the machine only had one or two users at the time. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. So we're throw more RAM in the sucker, and wonder why the hell this never happened on the 2.2 kernels. I'd mutter that it probably had something to do with the VM, but since I'm not on the kernel mailing list and I hadn't heard any grumblings on any linux based news sites, I figured the problem was us. Well well well! This is a HUGE bug and I'm surprised that it was not addressed more publicly.
My desktop does this too from time to time. Swaps itself to death on a 2.4.8 kernel as well. Open staroffice 6.0 beta, gimp, and bunch of other random things and it eventually goes unstable. Never happened with the 2.2 series.
A compilin' I will go, a compilin' I will go!
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses. But the GPL makes huge sense for companies for whom software is overhead (stuff that doesn't directly bring in money).
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system. It helps you be more efficient, but it also costs you a lot of money to develop and maintain. Companies are starting to outsource their applications to the world, and are finding out that it's cheaper, and other's who are interested contribute back. In the end they get better software.
Competition? It's not an issue, because again, they compete selling widgets, not writing software. Many company owners are realizing that software development was taking them away from their core competency and are looking to GPL.
Now, say I'm a company that has done some deep wizardry in speech recognition. We wrote it. It works and people are going to pay us big bucks for it. It would follow that said software would NOT be a good candidate for the GPL.
Just re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It spells it all out plain and simple. GPL: good for a lot of things - Still room for pay-license software.
Geez, normally a post like that gets modded down as a troll (nothing new is said, declares something as fact which is only opinion, and seeks only to sensationalize).
The beauty of open source/free software is that it never ever ever ever backslides. Projects, once they exist, always exist as long as SOMEBODY has the source code. KDE and Gnome are in a sense still just beginning, they will create the shoulders upon which we will stand, not next year but in 10 years. It's gonna sound corny, but it is only through open source that we will advance humanity. Instead of platforms rising and falling with the whims of corporations or profit motives, we have a platform upon which we can depend for more than just the current standard of 3 year upgrade cycles. Our data, our work, our intellectual property is separate and distinct from the application or OS.
What Russ Mitchell fails to recognize is that the free software movement isn't about a mistake in a spellchecker, or any other small userability issue. These things are details, very small details that ALWAYS get fixed if you report them. In fact, that's one of my problems with free software projects. Once I get around to submitting a patch or work around, the problem has been fixed by someone else. Very annoying.
Anway, the MOST important thing that he doesn't mention is open document formats. I've got college papers locked into MS Works format from 1990, that I can't open because of planned obsolesence. Lo and behold, there's a piece of third party software that you can buy that will allow you to open these formats. Microsoft abandons formats as matter of ROUTINE. This isn't ENOUGH to move over, or embrace Linux?
These days, I really only shake my head and smile at articles like Russ's. He just don't get it do he?
I like THIS case. It'll fit a normal micro ATX MB and you're not confined to special low profile cards, or limited expansion slots. And it looks a helluva lot better than that shit above.
The Smallest
I don't think 1.0 is artificial in this case. The Mozilla devel team has posted very much in advance a specific roadmap... it's not like everybody else... hmmm, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, oh what the hell let's call the next 2.0. (ahem cough cough KDE) Mozilla has proceeded in an extremely ordered and thorough manner with a specfic and detailed roadmap. I think this 1.0 will be what 1.0 are supposed to be, stable, mature, and a platform to build on if you are a developer without it changing out from under you because of a whim.
I give the Mozilla team muchos kudos for sticking to their guns and applying rigor in a age where rigor is sorely lacking.
It's unbelievable. There should be an inert substance that is spread throughout our atmosphere that whenever someone makes a hypocritical statement a big blue cloud appears around them. Holy shit, it boogles the mind.
I had a football coach that used to tell us, God doesn't win football games. It also follows that he doesn't make people lose them either. When will christian wackos pull their little blue aura heads outa their asses? The God in which I believe has only one thing to say... please take care of each other down there.
I read this a while back and found it to be really effective. Simple google search for "effective use of email" brought it right back up.
A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email
The Puerto Rican government is married to Microsoft. I work for a Linux company here and we have such difficulty fighting the culture of colonialism. EVERYTHING from the States is better and everything from anywhere else is crap. Yet because of the recent nationalistic surge with the navy bombing of Vieques you'd think the current Pro autonomous government (Partido Popular Democrático) would be trying to extricate itself from its dependence on Microsoft... well, THAT tune hasn't changed.
Puerto Rico is a relatively poor island that could use some common sense and to stop dumping its money into MS's coffers. I'd prefer more decent roads, clean water, and less than pathetic public education to paying MS more dinero.
I was downloading vorbis RC2 and all of a sudden the site went to a crawl... Hmm, wonder if they posted the release on Slashdot? Sure enough.
Doh! You guys could have at least let me finish my download *G*
No doubt about it, 6.0 sucked. We all agree. However, I must say I'm very impressed with 6.1. I've been using the nightlies for about two years now (laugh all you want, those were the lean years. In my day we had to walk backwards, uphill in the snow... but I digress).
0.9.3 nightlies in a word "ROCK". This is THE fastest browser, period. It blows the doors off IE on complex tables, and general page renders. To see what I'm talking about hit cnet.com where they have those flash ads in the articles. They are pretty intensive on the CPU when you're page scrolling. You'll see them bounce around a bit. Netscape/mozilla has no problems with them now.
I am suitabley impressed with Netscape 6.1. I'll have to wait to see, however, if there are any showstoppers that'll chase me back to IE.
So far so good though.
Really all these exercises are just research into whether or not chess is a sophisticated version of Tic Tac Toe. As long as human's beat computers in chess the jury is out... on the game of chess not humanity.
As long as we think that chess==life then we're going to be upsetting ourselves needlessly. Computers outdo humans everyday in a wide variety of ways, but they still can't feed themselves, fix themselves, or reproduce without our help. Hell, they still need humans to actually move the chess pieces. Bah! that's not the chess I grew up with.
No, you took your hand off, that's a move. No I didn't, I was just testing. Cheater!!!! Mom!!!!
Oops, my bad *sheepish grin* Still sounds Good Enough(TM) to me.
16 bit ISA bus != 16 bit DAC *G*
SBAWE64 is a 64 bit DAC. When it came out it was one of the nicest sounding DAC's available... it's perhaps 4 years old now, but I have never heard a click, pop, fan, disk drive even during the quiestest moments... and I'm so anal, I'd have noticed it *G*.
It's just a trade off on the type of music. JS helps with pop/rock that doesn't have much stereo seperation to begin with. MP3's psychoacoustic (ie lossy based on human hearing) method of coupling the channels loses stereo separation. If it's pop/rock, no big deal. If it's classical, folk, etc, then your mp3's sound really dead. Perhaps the added quality overall of the 160 mp3 wasn't enough to overshadow the loss of separation. If the music wasn't very difficult to encode for the codec, then you'll notice the loss of stereo much more than any artifacts.
Ogg will soon include lossless channel coupling in its encoder. This will mean the best of both worlds, smaller file size/better quality at same bitrate, without loss of stereo separation according to the OGG Vorbis mailing list.
I'm no super audiophile with a golden ear, but I do have a better than your average PC speakers connected to sound card setup. I have a 12 year old Pioneer Amp/Receiver and 12 Year old Acoustic Research speakers with subwoofer (since replaced the drivers), and a Soundblaster 64AWE with gold coated analog outputs to the receiver. Whole thing, minus PC and soundcard, cost $1000 back in 1989.
What I notice is that at the office on some cheap ALTEC PC speakers with subwoofer, NONE of the differences show through. Pretty much all CODEC's from the various years sound the same... pretty good, artifacts seem to magically go away... and hey that's not bad for the office.
But for home, it's got to be ogg and a non PC dedicated system sound system.
First piece I encoded to OGG was a rendition of Igor Stravinky's Ballet Petrouska... full ballet mind you, none of this condensed suite business *G*. I marveled at how airy it sounded and how percussive the base was, thumping, rumbling tightly on my subwoofer.
No, this was different, the high end was definitely there... but something else too, "stereo separation." Now this is something new. Mp3 makes some of its best gains through the use of cleverly comparing left and right channels and optimizing where they are very similar. Good in theory, but what you end up with is a lost stereo separation. It's cool for rock/pop, but classical absolutely needs stereo separation. In fact, encode some classical music (any classical music) in mp3 and then in ogg. You'll never go back.
You COULD put it in stereo encoding mode, but then mp3 doesn't shine at relatively low bitrates
You might also say that ogg has to do extra work in each channel individually and how the hell could it possibly sound better. It's got to consider each channel independently, encode them AND it sounds better than the industry standard at the same bitrate? She can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan?
Can this truly be the case?
Hell yes.
I don't understand the deep wizardry of OGG, nor its team's fanatical devotion to one thing: quality and duty. Two! Two things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency. Three! Three things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency and quality. Bah, I'll come in again.
One thing is clear: OGG's codec is next generation. Mp3 is definitely suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Great for 1996, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is an inferior codec RIGHT NOW. Mp3's tradeoffs and optimizations where great for 1996, but there was room for improvement. Nothing but OGG has stepped up to fill the void.
If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have encoded 700+ CDs into this format, occupying around 40 gigabytes of space. Took me a couple of months, but now that it's done, I breathe a sigh of relief (as I create a disk mirror for backup) that it is now forever free and libre...
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