Posts by Gloddata

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

Re: Not a bad record. I'll give him some slack for being in the Apple camp for too long.

> It is well made stuff so decent second hand kit is available.

That used to be true. Maybe. Based on these experiences and experiences from other people Apple quality is at or slightly below the quality you would expect from a HP laptop.

I've owned/used several Macs. Used to administrate a large number of early OS X macs at a college. They were solid. Then I bought a Power G4 ibook, which failed due to bad solder joints on the GPU. Recently was required to use Mac for work and first one had keyboard issues. Newer one has been crashing because of the taskbar failing. Which has been solved because the trackbar is now failed completely. No more trackbar, no more crashing.

As of right now I have to say that my discount $254 Acer throw-around laptop has taken a huge amount of abuse and has carried on quite a bit more reliable then my powerbooks that have lived their entire life sitting protected on a corner of my desk.

The big advantage for things like Raspberry Pis is that except for the MicroSD they are pretty simple and distraction-free. If you don't need the capacity offered by a modern PC then they are perfectly fine.

GNOME Project retires OpenGL rendering library Clutter

> Things would be much simpler if the X server itself was written in OpenGL.

OpenGL has no facilities for managing displays, which is you know... kinda important for a display manager. Which is exactly the reason why nobody uses XGL anymore.

It was a dead end experiment and the developers knew it going in. The result was EGL.

The real solution to the the limitations of X windows (obsolete rendering model, extremely poor network performance, absolutely no security, etc ) is to modernize X and redesign it so that it will match the way that modern hardware works and has the ability to support multiple rendering protocols, like OpenGL, Vuclan, X11, DirectX, etc.. as first class citizens.

Which is why all the X developers stopped being X developers and started being Wayland developers.

The Xfree86 DDX, which is what most Linux users call "X Windows" at this point, is effectively abandonware. The only one that is getting any attention going forward is Xwayland.

Spotify to introduce lossless audio streaming: Better sound or inefficient gimmick?

Re: Analog kid in a digital world...

I always have found the obsession with vinyl formats hilarious. Not just because they are inferior to digital recordings in a technical sense, but because people somehow believe that they are more 'faithful' to the original when vinyl records use analog form of compression in order to get their long play times!

It's called 'RIAA Equalization Curve' and it is done to allow more audio to fit on a vinyl record. Which is fairly lossy, btw.

The problem is that low-frequency sounds have to move the needle a significantly further distance then high frequency sounds. If you go and look at a large subwoofer it needs to move much further and displace much more air to reproduce it's sounds then a little tweeter for the same volume. The same issue occurs on the surface of the record.

So the solution was to use a high-pass filter that effectively mutes the low-frequency sounds, which is then the audio format recorded to the surface of the vinyl record. This allows the lines on a record to be much closer together, prevents needles from being damaged or thrown from the surface of the record, helps to reduce the effect of small bits of dust on the surface, and allows the record to last longer.

Then when you play it back the low-frequency sounds need to be amplified (equalized) much more then the high frequency sounds to try to undo the high-pass filter.

With digital formats this isn't a issue. The only thing that is used for digital formats to work is to have a low-pass filter that filters out frequencies that no human can hear and no speaker can reproduce. Which allows much smaller files and 100% accurate frequency reproduction using Nyquist-Shannon mathematics.

Sure there is a sort of 'bounce back' effect if you try to reproduce sound that has a hard cut off at a high frequency. Which is why CD audio format uses 44.1Hz sampling rate, which is more then twice the frequency people can hear.

Re: I think this is more important

Bingo. If they can screw up CD audio then they can screw up HD.

If the master is very good and I am listening at home in a quiet room with my best headphones and best DAC then I can _BARELY_ tell the difference between 320kbs and CD-quality Flac. But it's only in certain tracks in certain areas were it's very quiet, etc. Any sort of air conditioning blowing or background noise going on and it's going to be impossible to tell the difference.

Lossless audio streaming is a 'why not' scenario. If you are on metered wifi networks then it's dumb, but if you are at home, then why not? It's a nice to have.

However the HD formats are pure 100% audiophile hucksterism. It's for the same market of people that buy Monster HDMI cables for 50 dollars, lust over nitrogen gas infused copper audio cables, and wear copper wristband bracelets with magnets to help with the RSI.

Having "high resoluiton" audio is nice for studio work you need to do a lot of manipulation of multiple tracks and do different audio mixes to get the best results. The real purpose to them is to makes a audio engineer's job easier.

But for a end user format it's a scam.

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

Re: Well......

> It's a poor mechanic that blames his tools.

A poor mechanic is a person who uses a worn out wrench that unless held at a perfect angle is guaranteed rounds off bolt heads.

If he was a good mechanic he would invest in tools that makes it easier to do his job correctly.

> It's a poor art critic that blames the artist's brush.

A true artist could produce a masterpiece with little more then a bowl of old mashed potatoes, some wire, and a magic marker.

That doesn't mean that is something he should be using.