[vorbis-dev] Parallelism

[Timothy Wayper]

>  > I disagree (and we may well have to agree to disagree).
>
>Agreed. Now, go ahead and write the code.

Gregory, generally, with any Open Source effort, talking to the other 
developers before you rip into the code is a good idea. Jeff's 
original questions are not inappropriate for this list, and neither 
is the resulting discussion.

>I don't see the reason to expend this much effort (i.e. the
>discussion) over something that less then %0.001 of the user base will be
>able to use (how many mass vorbis encoders have a MPI cluster?)

This is not even true now, and in 5 years time even more machines 
will have multiple CPUs. Almost every variety of Unix, and BeOS, 
WinNT, and even MacOS now have support for multiple CPU's, and for 
good reason.

>Does it follow that an economy car should be equip with a turbine engine?

As I'm sure you're aware, this has been investigated by several 
companies, including Rover and Chrysler. The general problem is that 
the high temperature exhaust of a turbine engine tends to burn plants 
growing by the side of the road, and that the turbine exhibits 
relatively long power up times, making the cars seem sluggish as that 
take off from the lights.

>Remember that Vorbis supports different block sizes. With all the windowing
>concerns, a fast cluster version would be considerably harder to write and
>maintain then you seem to believe.

This is the first valid point you have made, but I still think it is 
not unreasonable to investigate the possibility.

>  > If you look at my previous posts (and one was a reply to you), I
>  > volunteered to look into this as well as contribute code (I was actually
>  > diving in vorbis code when your post arrived).  The whole point of an
>  > active development community is to discuss and talk about these things;
>  > why stifle creativity?
>
>I don't intend to stifle it, just pointing out my perspective.

This doesn't seem to match up with this quote from your earlier reply:

>  Until then the discussion should stop.

Cheers,
Tim W.

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