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it....said the worker peon to the self-made billionaire

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but have you tried going to broadcast.com lately? Oh, that's right, you can't, it's just another link to yahoo at this point. Mark is rich because he was lucky enough to sell at the right time when everyone was buying miracle cures, not because he created a viable business model.

In my eyes, that makes him rich, and lucky, but not any sort of authority...

nope, two streams are in windows media format. Though I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

here's the link

http://webevents.broadcast.com/compaq/PressAnnounc ement

For those of us who are into hearing sales geeks talk.

[Note the space typo in the link is a slash problem/bug. I can see it spelled correctly in the comment box.]

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Dear Compaq HPS customer,

Please see the attached note from Compaq's Area Director for North Atlantic. I will follow-up during the week to see if you have further questions.

URL for customers for Monday's webcast.

The following URL has been provided to us by Corporate for you to communicate to selected customers who would like to participate. The time of the webcast is Monday, June 25 at 9:00am Eastern time.

URL http://webevents.broadcast.com/compaq/PressAnnounc ement

To view the ceremony, go ... If you're too lazy to register, then just use the e-mail addy test@test.com

The transcript follows. The only thing that I've edited out is a couple of uhms and ahs.

Sean:

Hi I'm Sean Fanning. Thank you for being a part of the Napster community and thanks for taking the time to tune in tonight.

When I had the idea of building an internet community to help music fans find MP3s, I didn't think that it would be embroilled in a legal battle, but we are and, as you know, the recording industry has filed a suit to shut napster down -- to shut you down.

Today there was an important hearing in court and the judge ruled against us. We will keep fighting for napster and for your right to share music over the internet.

Hank Berry, Napster's CEO is here to tell you what happened today.

Hank?

Thanks Sean.

As you know, the recording industry has sued Napster in order to shut napster and its users down. Today, in federal court, the Judge issued an order that basically would have the effect of shutting down the Napster service as it currently exists.

We'll be appealing the judges rullings to the Court of appeals and will ask the court of appeals tomorrow morning to stay the judge's order during that appeal process. If we do not get a stay, then we'll have until Midnight Friday to comply with the Judge's order.

Although we strongly and firmly disagree with the judge's decision, we respect and understand the basis for it and we plan to comply.

The judge's rulling, essentially, is this -- that one-to-one non-commercial file sharing violates the law. We'll fight this in a variety of ways to keep the Napster community growing and strong. We'll keep you informed and we will ask for your help. Please check our website for updates and what you can do. We intend to see this through in every venue and in every court. We believe in Napster and we believe in you. We thank you for your support. We've had a lot of great emails and I'd just like to answer a couple of questions and then we'll sign off.

Uhm, the one question that seems to be coming up alot is 'what can I do to help?' What I'd ask you to do is just keep looking at the web site and keep cheking the Napster application. In the next hours we're going to be working, burning the midnight oil tonight. We'll have some ideas about things that you can do and I'll appreciate if you can keep, unh, checking the website and checking the Napster application.

So, thanks for being part of the community. We all really appreciate it, and.. and we hope to be able to keep it alive. So, hang in there with us.

Thank you

this is the official announcement from napster headquarters. Let's hope they fight the good fight.

keep the music flowing.
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I recently download the new Yahoo! Player Beta. It's free (beer), looks nice, uses CDDB and skins, and hasn't crashed for me yet. Does anyone know if the Yahoo Player is a "real app" or is it just a skin for the WMP or RealPlayer??

http://www.broadcast.com/video/ ListenPages/ma/3471/ for an online version of the movie (RealPlayer G2 and Windows Media Player only).

Being a roleplayer I find the movie (and the book it was based on) lousy from a factual point of view, but it's amusing none the less.

Adam

http://www.broadcast.com/video/ ListenPages/ma/3471/ is a Realvideo and MS Streaming video of Mazes and Monsters, in full. The video quality is tiny, but the sound is okay.

I just wish you could download the darned thing, and not just stream it.

Adam

The URL to send feedback is here .

Quicktime, quite frankly blowz head. It doesn't even use the video features of today's advanced video cards, like hardware colorspace conversion, secondary surface rendering with overlay and backend hardware scaling. Drag the Quicktime window out to three times its original postage stamp size and it slows to a crawl.

Until recently Real Player was the same, badly lagging in support of advanced features. It also sometimes inexplicably falls back to non-filtered, non-acceleration video when windows overlay it. It's clunky, and I don't have confidence in it.

Windows Media Player on the other hand is unobtrusive and just does what you ask it to do: play the fucking video and shaddup. It also makes use of any multimedia acceleration features your DirectDraw driver can support, including video filtering, scaling, and color space conversion. All without ads. And I've run it for six hours at a time watching streaming MPEG4 NASA TV at 300k and had no problems.

WMP is multimedia done right. It works awesome for me and the video quality is better than Real. Catch a 300k Real stream from pseudo.com, and then check out the 300k MPEG4 NASA TV stream from broadcast.com.

I hate to admit it, but M$ has done good with their media player and they deserve to win. Quicktime would be my first choice if they supported the advanced multimedia features of modern video cards. Quicktime looks pretty good (when played at its original size and there's not much motion [wtf is upwith those interlace artifacts in progressive video on QT4??]), but I've not been able to compare it to one of the Windows Media codecs at high bitrates.

In summary: Real Player truly sux, Quicktime sucks somewhat less, but Media Player is all I ever wanted feature wise.

RealAudio and RealVideo streams on Yahoo! and broadcast.com will probably not be missed that much. Even though RealNetworks was getting pretty good at supporting high-bandwidth connections, Windows Media just seemed to run a little better on my system. It loaded faster, and didn't seem as bloated as RealPlayer.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not pro-Microsoft. In fact, I really don't like them at all! It's just that they may have won this time on the RealAudio/RealVideo vs. Windows Media imbroglio. Sometimes I do prefer Windows Media over RealPlayer, and I don't see the entire situation as a total loss for everyone, except those who don't have Windows Media Player.

It's kind of sad to see this, but it's not that bad, in the big scheme of things. There's always mpegs and MP3 audio...

LOL! I have the 300kbps NASA TV stream running here at work. They were printing the "morning mail" on Discovery. They have a laptop apparently running Windows, hooked up to a Thermal Impact printer. They apparently have a pretty nice setup, nicer than I would have expected. They can do colour or black and white print-outs, they have MS Office, etc.

They get daily messages sent up from Mission Control with data and instructions, checklist changes, etc for the upcoming day's activities. I wonder if it's a standard email system with a TCP/IP stack on the laptop, or if it's some shuttle specific protocol?

Well anyway, they apparently had a paper jam in the printer this morning. I had a good chuckle as I listened to the conversation between CAPCOM Chris Hadfield and John Grunsfeld in orbit as he fixed it. He was opening documents in MS Word and printing out single pages, describing garble characters, pagination problems, etc. It was neat to hear them talking about this stuff that a lot of us have dealt with in luser support. They were talking about computer stuff in Astronaut terminology.

http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/i ndex.htm

They're the only site I've seen with updates posted minutes after important developments or press conferences.

Very nice.

Also, for high bandwidth video (300kbps) of NASA TV see:

http://www.broadcast.com/events/nasa

You can also watch a NASA tv feed at broadcast.com. The have a 300k stream, which is cool. (MediaPlayer format, though)

Here's the broadcast.com link: http://www.broadcast.com/events/n asa/marslanding/

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Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Meet Oracle's Database Challenge, Providing Equivalent Speed, Lower Cost, Higher Value for Customers

and if you want to see the machine and watch them click the buttons then go here

M$ does show the physical machine that they ran the demo on and they provide the basic details about it's setup.

it's way typical for a TPC-D benchmark. a generic HP LXr 8000 with 4, 400 MHz Xeons and whit a ton (2.3 TB) of RAID arrays.

M$ claims to have loaded the vanilla TPC-D 1TB database and ran query #5. they quoted an average response time of 1.1 seconds.

they also ran some other queries against the same database to show off some other features.