Slashdot Mirror

So yet another usenet portal bites the dust. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as the number of major usenet sites that are looking for peers. Last week I got a message from my best feed saying that that they are closing down their own nntp server becuase they only have a few customers that use it and thouse tend to like the alt.sex.binarys.isoimages and wares groups. Now most isps aren't running their own news servers anymore and just farm it out to someone that just takes care of it. So much for distributed news. Thouse ISPs that do run news tend to just have one usenet feed from a backbone provider that is only running news because some sysadmin somewhere decied they needed it for their own use.

I've been running usenet (or netnews) servers since 1987 and I'm thinking that usenet as it was is slowly going away. I remember back in the days were spam didn't have a name. before it was invaded by C&S and sciencultology. when sept was when all the newbies showed up. Them where the days :-) Too bad the modern net isn't based on lots of people tring to help each other for the common good.

So if anyone needs a news peer that only will carry about 600 groups email me

Go to Peter's GPS Archive's Garmin Protocol Page

Any program from 1998 will work fine with the newer units. The NEMA protocol is quite old and the documented parts of the Garmin protocol is the same as it several years ago.

There is some old (1995) sample source on my webpage at
http://web.abnormal.com/~thogard/gps/

Have you looked at a top 40 chart lately? How many of thouse bands are any good vs how many of them are made by members of RIAA? How many more times are we going to be forced to listen to beach boy's untalented offspring if we listen to the radio? Has Madona's kid been signed yet? When is the single going to hit? Some record exec in Oz is building the next spice girls. You can even pre-order their new album -- no thanks, I will listen to them first and then decide if I like the music. I can make decision like that on my own and I don't need someone else help.

I put up mp3's of local bands and so far I've had some mixed attitudes from the bands. Some love people all over the world downloading their songs while others are very protective of their music and others would like to sell their CD's but are not in a position to do so. How do you sell a AU$15 cd to someone 1/2 a world away. E-commerce is helping that but by the time the CD gets there its cost has doubled and there is a fair amount of loss. I've got mp3s from 4 groups and a few thousand downloads of most tracks and the bands do get positve feedback. Within a day of putting on the second bands work, they got their first international order. Another band got a gig overseas in part becuase of the MP3s. None of these bands will hit the US top 40 but they play good stuff and you can listen to it now and if you like it you can try to find some arrangement to get a CD. Its like buying a CD after a gig out of the band van except the nets now in between.

This has been on my projects list for years...

What has happened:
1) Gcc makes code for the beast
2) its well documented. (and it runs a mips CPU)
3) its got a damn fast coprocessor (that no one is using in any game)
4) bung makes a device that lets you copy code to its "rom" image. A guy in .ru has a design to roll your own roms.
5) www.dextrose.com exists

What needs to happen:
1) someone needs to build a decent memory card for the silly thing. It uses rambus. hint take a Pelican expansion pack (it uses 2 2mb devices) and replace its rdram with ones out of Nintendos rampack and fix the heat problem)
2) a decent HOWTO to build gcc for this thing.
3) undo the nintendo lawsuit against Bung who makes a device to run your own code on the box.
4) write a network driver to talk over the controller ports
5) someone with more time and a bit of interest
should check out a simple page with some notes about coding on the N64

Keep in mind that at upto 200m instructions per sec the thing isn't a slow box for its price.

Think the B-word and a room full of N64's...

I may have details on how to do this on my rio review web page soon.

In a more topical comment...
I just got my PMP300 limited edition and with 96M For the first time I've run out of stuff before I've run out of memory. Time to go collect more stuff. Am I the only one who goes bands to rip the sutff? I find most bands will give you a CD for putting their stuff on the net.

-tim

I've had my sites Y2K Complacency Statement up for a few months now...

-tim
http://web.abnormal.com

I've had my sites Y2K Complacency Statement up for a few months now...

-tim
http://web.abnormal.com

The only kind of security I want on my rio
is a good lock it up tight and kill the microcode
type of pin number. Why won't companies that make
portable electronics add this kind of feature?

They should have read my review of their 1st rio
before designing a new one....

This is the same reason I bought the Rio as well but I too will buy a different MP3 player as soon as I can since the Rio just isn't quite ready for prime time yet. The case is the worst design I have seen in portable electronics because they missed the bit about having a solid case. For what its worth, my rio's battery cover broke (at a pub while letting a band hear how their tunes sound on the net). Even though the rio is somewhat of a disappointment, it is in many ways one of the coolest toys I've got and I think that it is important to buy new types of toys to help promote development of risky things like these.