Genuine question, what is "dynamic" music?
I don't think it is a proper term, but in this case I refer to music with large and very sudden variations between "quit" and "loud" passages. The real musical term "dynamics" is between eg. piano/forte, but I am more referring to an instruments individual attack (hitting the strings/drums/keys real hard). IMHO, this i something that neither mp3 or vorbis handles so well; they seem to take the edge of the attacks.
Audiophiles are hilarious.
Just because some audiophiles are rich boys that spend too much money on bling hardware doesn't mean that all sound-systems sound the same. There actually is a sound difference between a pair of $1 headphones and a $100 pair of Sennheiser HD-558.
It doesn't cost much to get decent sound these days, and it really improves the joy of listening to music.
ABX testing shows otherwise. Even when done with professional audio engineers.
Sure. I probably can't tell the difference either just by listening to a random segment of random music in an ABX test. I do can tell the difference when listening to the same well known album in FLAC and mp3. The FLAC files just are more dynamic; more punch and attack, while even HQ mp3's sounds slightly "dull" or muted. The more dynamic and "noisy" the music is, and the louder it is played, the larger the difference is.
Just downloaded a ABX test from here:
http://lacinato.com/cm/softwar...
If I can get it to work I will try to see if I can tell a difference with any confidence.
Nope, I use high quality VBR MP3 for my music because a) it sounds great, b) it's supported on everything and c) it takes a lot less storage space. FLAC is for idiots who think they have superhuman hearing.
VBR mp3's are very good, but it isn't FLAC. You don't need superhuman hearing to hear the difference, especially very dynamic music sounds better in FLAC. Hearing the difference becomes easier the better your audio equipment is.
Not having FLAC and mkv support for a media player is simply insane. Those who cares at all for sound quality uses FLAC, even my tiny mp3 player support FLAC.
That MS "boycotted" FLAC for years because it doesn't support DRM and isn't a MS-patent trap, just hurt their desire to control all media consumption on MS-platforms; they forgot a "boycott" works both ways, and that people just used software like VLC that actually supported what people wanted.
Citation needed, by all appearances EDF was still turning a profit in 2013. It looks like some of their foreign holdings outside of Europe are problematic for them, but that just goes to show their core business of selling nuclear power to Europeans is profitable enough to offset losses from other investments. Hardly a condemnation of the economics of nuclear power.
As the press release indicate, they have both a large debt and a negative cash flow something they want to improve in the 2014-2018 period (by massive price hikes).
Basically EDF are producing electricity above market prices and is selling below cost to consumers. In order not to collapse, they will have to rise prices:
http://www.thelocal.fr/2013070...
Here is their debt stated as 39bn Euros in 2013 and that the company is in trouble:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...
On top of that, the aging fleet of EDF nuclear reactors will soon have to be either replaced or rejuvenated, which will mean a huge need for cash, and is highly likely to mean even further price increases for consumers.
As for 'free market solutions' I hadn't realized that when we discussed emissions reductions that a solution must be rejected because it is or is not capitalist enough in nature.
Well, that was the premise for the Google engineers article. They wanted to make renewable energy at prices competitive with gas/coal, and found out it wasn't possible.
That nuclear power can't compete on price is also why the free market have rejected it.
Personally I think it is a market failure that cheap but CO2 polluting fossil fuels are allowed to be used, and that a national energy plan must have it as priority to drastically reduce CO2 output.
But they don't say anything like this:
The problem isn't cheap energy but man made global warming and climate change; the CO2 levels are now so massive that inventing a zero emission ultra cheap energy source, that globally replaced all other polluting energy sources in an instant, no longer is enough stop the global warming process going on for hundreds of years.
They didn't address the "what if everything changed in an instant" case in their article.
Yes they did. It is the core of their argument. to quote:
"While this energy revolution is taking place, another field needs to progress as well. As Hansen has shown, if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability.
Basically we have reached a point where even removing all CO2 produced by the energy sector isn't enough to stop the man made global warming and climate change.
Decades of doing nothing and being in denial will cost tax payers huge sums in the future.
Yes it is; the article says that basically nothing can compete with cheap fossil fuels like coal or natural gas at the moment.
Nuclear power certainly can't compete in a free energy market. It is a mature technology with massive research and funding going on the last 60 years, while wind and solar power have been neglected for decades as a serious research area. Danish wind turbines have increase their load efficiency by 50% since 2008 by tweaking hub height and blade length but without changing the generator or increase generator capacity. And there are more such efficiency and price gains to be made within the next decade, and unlike nuclear power plants, wind turbines is a nimble technology that can quickly be implemented in the field.
The bottom line is that wind and solar power are getting better and cheaper for every year, while nuclear power technology in the field have been stagnating for decades.
The electricity prices are low in France, not because nuclear power is cheap, but because they tax it less. It simply isn't economically feasible to build nuclear power plants that must operate on normal market mechanisms; it is too expensive. Gas and coal, and even oil prices makes it impossible.
The people of France and Europe are paying less for electricity generated with nuclear power. How else do I have to phrase that before you'll stop insisting it is impossible? It doesn't matter what kind market situations and various problems you can concoct about how challenging or impossible a task it is to accomplish. It has none the less been accomplished and won't cease to exist for all your insistences against it.
First, there is no real free market in France regarding electricity; almost everything is state owned, controlled and subsidized. Their national energy company, EDF, is bleeding money beyond belief, which are resulting in massive price hikes on electricity in France, with at least a 30% price increase of the next few years.
At the same time the French industry pays way more than their German counterparts, and despite further subsides this will probably be case in the future too.
My point is exactly, that nuclear power simply isn't economically feasible without massive state control, subsides, and by forcing the consumers to pay higher prices. The free market have simply rejected nuclear power as a worthwhile investment because other energy prices are lower.
You could argue that there is a free market failure that allows eg. coal to be used without its producers paying the massive costs of global climate change, and that state intervention is the only real choice in securing clean energy, and that energy price increases by going nuclear, is much cheaper than the absurd cost of climate change. But as a free market solution, nuclear power is a dying technology.
...Beside that, nuclear power also fail on price; it simply can't compete against cheaper energy sources, despite direct and indirect subsides. This is the main reason why very few new nuclear power plants are being build.
You bring to mind a quote.
Never let those who say a thing can't be done get in the way of those that are doing it.
France produces more than 50% of it's electricity through nuclear and has some of the lowest electricity prices in Europe. It even exports large volumes of electricity to it's neighbours.
The electricity prices are low in France, not because nuclear power is cheap, but because they tax it less. It simply isn't economically feasible to build nuclear power plants that must operate on normal market mechanisms; it is too expensive. Gas and coal, and even oil prices makes it impossible. That was the conclusion too for those Google engineers. And wind power and solar power increases in efficiency all the time and can produce electricity at lower prices than nuclear power.
The only way the nuclear power is ever going to be feasible again, is by strong government regulation, and direct subsides by forcing consumers to pay enough money that the nuclear power investors are happy.
According to those Google engineers, Nuclear power can't solve the problem either.
The problem isn't cheap energy but man made global warming and climate change; the CO2 levels are now so massive that inventing a zero emission ultra cheap energy source, that globally replaced all other polluting energy sources in an instant, no longer is enough stop the global warming process going on for hundreds of years.
You simply have to do much more than just making zero CO2 emission energy to stop the accelerating global climate change going on.
Beside that, nuclear power also fail on price; it simply can't compete against cheaper energy sources, despite direct and indirect subsides. This is the main reason why very few new nuclear power plants are being build.
I think most DD will be much more inclined to keep supporting non-systemd inits if they weren't called "jackass's", and their name and their distro weren't constantly attacked, and their mailings list trolled by people who want them to keep supporting SysVinit.
It is a failed strategy to think open source development is done by harassing developers and throwing tantrums on developer mailing lists and in bug trackers. Asking nicely and making an effort to help will bring much better results.
They want a process to handle things like shutdown, reboot and hibernate via a UI dialog. Previously, Consolekit was that process. But Consolekit was scuttled in favor of Logind. And Logind is dependent on Systemd running as pid1.
Btw, the guy that had the reins of Consolekit at the time of its closure was Poettering...
Yep. He and the ConsoleKit inventor gave the project to Canonical/Ubuntu under the lead of Martin Pitt. You can find the handover mail in the CK mail list archive (it is one of the last mails
Canonical however, decided not develop CK in the end but made "systemd-shim" instead; at first a fork, but later an attempt to clone systemd-logind. Martin Pitt leads that project now.
There are still a handful of paid developers that support non-systemd infrastructure like systemd-shim and CgManager, but they will stop in the end because all new distro development is going to be systemd only. Then what?
It absolutely is true for system utilities (like init). Vim is a text editor. It edits text. It does not edit graphics, init the system, act as a login daemon or multiplex your shell. But then, it's not a system utility. Look at awk, sed, grep, less, etc etc. Look at getty and login. Look at screen.
Exactly. But look at all the systemd "system utilities" like systemctl, journalctl, machinectl; they all work exactly like any other first class Linux system tools; they all only do one thing but do it well, they can be piped, they aren't chatty when successful (and actually care a lot about exit codes), aren't interactive etc, care about text output formatting (turn off legends etc) so they are perfectly scribtable.
The point is that all the systemd tools are doing everything expected by system tools according to "Unix philosophy".
Did you know that in Debian Wheezy there are TWO init systems that work at the same time? They weren't designed to do that but because they do things the Unix way, they don't 'mind' either.
I must say I can't see a reasonable use case for this. Sounds racy in all circumstances.
But here's a "funny" where systemd is most definitely wrong (yes, I have actually been giving it a chance, I just don't like what I see). I have a VM where I have yanked a virtual disk out from under btrfs. My fstab states that I want it to mount in degraded state if necessary (such as if a disk is missing). systemd *REFUSES* even though I explicitly commanded the action. How is that the Unix way? How is that supposed to help uptime? Thank the gods it's not a production box! Then I google as to why that might be and first post I find is some someone claiming IT'S A FEATURE! So there we are, the admin and owner of the box says just do it and damn the consequences and it refuses like a Windows box.
Take a look on these discussions;
http://www.spinics.net/lists/l...
http://lists.freedesktop.org/a...
Basically, systemd requires manual intervention to allow to boot btrfs arrays with both
Not a bad default really.
Anyway, in order to allow btrfs to automatically boot in degraded mode with missing disks, and doing it
Bringing up a degraded array as RW risk killing the whole array, so it is not something to be done just because a drive is late at appearing.
http://git.neil.brown.name/git...
Now, just to complete the picture, do you know what journalctl told me about what was failing and why? It said the mount timed out. THAT IS ALL. Is this the system I am supposed to trust in production? The one designed by people who KNOW what they're doing?
Isn't that all you need to know to find the error?
Also, use the "-x" with journalctl, it may give further info to generic error messages and even link to more info.
Anyway, systemd have excellent debugging facilities; try to turn on debugging ("kill -56 1" from the CLI, or by setting "MaxLevelKMsg=debug
MaxLevelConsole=debug" in "/etc/systemd/journald.conf" and restart (journald or the VM)
Digging in to it, I find the really sad part. It knows enough about btrfs to dig in to it and discover what physical drives go with the volume label. It wasn't even attempting the mount command fstab suggested (if it had, it would have succeeded). Surely after sitting in the penalty box for a minute and a half staring at the cylon, it could have given it a try?!? Or known a bit more about btrfs and seen that I intended a degraded mount? Or known less about btrfs and just done what fstab said to do?!?
It's a sick joke.
If you read the above discussions, you will find that there is no right solution for all; doing brute force attempts to mount missing drives or bring up raid arrays even though they may not be complete yet (a late drive will make the array degraded) have its own sets of problems, and differs whether it is a two drive or a 1024 drive array. Also, it is not up to either systemd or udev to know about complicated raid states; that should be handled by the raid array software/daemon who can probe internal logic and then inform init what to do (or rely on crude timers).
So this seems more like a RFE than any serious bug. Yes, I can see a use case for automatically booting degraded arrays, but it shouldn't be a default, but an explicit setting of the admin, since only the admin can evaluate risks and knows how much redundancy there is etc.
Actually, it would not. Why not a program that grabs the requested ports and other resources that require root, then drop privileges and pass them on to the daemon. It would drop right in to any sane init out there. It could even be used on a case by case basis. Launch apache with it but not postgres, etc.
I think we agree somewhat here; yes such a program could be used with any init, and just like systemd, used on a case to case basis.
My point was that the existing inertia prevented the making and adoption of such program. With systemd there is no longer any reason for not implementing such a helper program in conjunction other init systems and platforms.
In fact, I think the non-systemd platforms should clone as many of the easy implemented features of systemd as possible; that would help upstream projects a lot.
You seem pretty generous with OTHER PEOPLE's time. I'm fairly sure *BSD will never in a zillion years let systemd anywhere near their OS. They shouldn't! I'm also pretty sure a lot of daemon developers aren't going to sacrifice portability at the alter of systemd. If systemd wasn't such a tangle of dependencies, someone MIGHT implement limited bits of it in other OSes but if you hand them all or nothing, it's going to be nothing. Especially since systemd depends on a linux kernel only feature or 3.
I actually think that the BSD's will develop a systemd clone before the decade is over. Some groups have already started implementing small compatibility layers (systemBSD), others are experimenting with systemd code in order to reverse engineer it for BSD (Uselessd).
Really, over the next couple of years when people actually are starting to "get" systemd, the old ways of doing things with init-scripts etc, will seem very dated.
Appeal to authority isn't a very good argument. Many really experienced developers with a deep expert knowledge about various aspects of low level system design think the design of systemd is crap. Many others consider it too immature for primetime.
Lennart Poettering has demonstrated through his designs that he does NOT understand the "Unix philosophy". If he did, the new init system would raise little controversy and would play much nicer with others.
Appeal to authority is actually a good argument, if it wasn't then it was because heart surgeons knew nothing better about heart surgery than any random ordinary citizen. The CV's of many leading systemd developers is quite impressive.
Lennart Poettering is well aware of how Unix works and "Unix Philosophy". In fact it is sometimes a complaint against systemd that eg. that the systemd tools aren't chatty when successful ("systemctl start daemon" only provides feedback if there is a problem, just like "cp", "mv" etc), or in this case, the handling of a broken fstab.
That people use a rather cartoonish interpretation of what Unix Philosophy is to attack systemd, is another matter. That everything should be small single-function programs piped together with a text-only interface, simply isn't the case for the vast majority of Linux and Unix programs. It is a design ideal that no one really follows for anything remotely complicated. Even Vim isn't correctly designed by this cartoonish interpretation of Unix Philosophy.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
