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The Who's Reunion Concert to be Webcast Live!
KuRL writes "Entertainment Weekly is reporting (yeah, that's the right link, it's at the bottom of the page) that the one and only Who will reunite to play Vegas on October 29th. What? Not 'news for nerds' you complain? Well, the concert, entitled 'iBash '99' will be kick off the launch of Pixelon, and will be 'webcast' live." Caveats: most of Pixelon's content requires a Windows-only Netscape plug-in to view. I bummed my wife's (Windows) PC to try it - and it crashed repeatedly. And downloading a 30 second "preview" clip took over three minutes on my cable modem. It would take forever via dialup. I don't think the CmdrTaco/Pete Townshend online singalong we've all been looking forward to is going to happen quite yet. Oh, well.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
...has gotten really cool in the last year or so.
It's pretty easy to find *any* kind of music streaming over the 'Net. Not many people use it yet, maybe ~5,000 at one time, but as bandwidth grows (and it will like mad in the next few years) this will be an option to more and more people.
Stuff like the Phishcast will spring up and more people will listen to live music, or canned, from their favorite band all the time. Phishcast does streaming 128 (and 64,32) bit MP3s of shows as recent as last week. I get to follow the band from my desktop in Colorado, it's fun.
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.. it's getting popular so be gentle.. :-)
Phishcast
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It's substantially faster, but I'll agree with you that it's just as unstable.
So the thing that I'm really griping about is just the blanket dismissal of Windows due to a crash of unspecified scope. :^)
Point well taken. But there's something to be said (or unsaid?) that not many people would question his statement. There's a common belief that windows crashes alot and for no apparent reason. Is this still true? I don't know, I haven't used windows in a long time due to the aforementioned qualities.
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I'd guess not. There are standards-based (RTSP and RTP/RTCP) servers available (PRISS, Darwin, and ELSA, for example - see streamingserver.org for more info), and clients in the works for Linux (I hope Sun is working on a RTSP layer for JMF; likewise, I hope Apple is porting Quicktime Client too). I'd bet that in a year's time, streaming multimedia will be the norm for all platforms, and companies like pixelon will stand out from the background noise only if they have something more than a window-only, single-media-source solution.
Now, the only time I've ever *looked* at a windows box and had it BSOD was when it was running the 'Flying Windows' screensaver. :^)
It's a logical fallacy to assume that simply because another person never has problems with said product YOU will not have problems with said product. It's like if I took my brother's truck up to the store and drove it back without having any problems. Now he goes out and drives it to work. The engine explodes. But it worked fine for me, so this can't happen! Or not. Different variables - for one he was on the freeway. I wasn't. For two he drives alot faster than me. And for three, somebody left the oil cap off from last week, and since I didn't get the engine hot enough to blow all that out of the engine on my short run to the store, nothing happened... but once drove it, it ran out of oil, and the engine seized up.
"Assumption is the mother of all f-ck ups" -- Bruce Willis, Diehard 3.
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Did anyone take a look at what Pixelon has done?
It's pretty impressive to me anyhow -
you can take a look at it here and bypass the shockwave intro (which is quite annoying)
http://209.79.16.5/ricochet/teasergallery.htm
With the increase in bandwidth, that complaint about it taking 3 minutes on cable is going away soon. (Note: I have ADSL and it took me 20 seconds to d/l it - in Canada).
Keeping that in mind, what else out there provides high quality video? I just watched a video on broadcast.com, and it was anything but smooth.
Given, it isn't providing real-time streaming video yet, but the promise to do so is there : isn't that what the live broadcast is all about?
It's really something worth looking at.
__ who needs a tv anymore!
They are also playing two shows in Chicago at the House of Blues. They are fund raisers for a local charity, but $300/ticket is bit too steep for me. Too bad I would have liked to see them again.
While we are on music it you get the chance to see Elvis Costello on his current tour, by all means GO! We went Friday night and he played for over 2.5 hours, almost 40 different songs.
Rob, please - don't sing! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T DO IT! YOU'RE TOO YOUNG!!!!!!
=)
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I read the article, and really, (no offense) but if the authors themselves didn't think enough of it to get a full-page, or even half-page article instead of the blurb that it got, I can't help asking, is it really that important??
Anyway, in an attempt to get more information on the matter, (prepared with my Winbox up here at work, and I do like the WHO.) I went to pixelon.com, which appears to have no more information about it. All I got was a bombardment of Flash animation, and a big commercial before I got fed up with them.
As a side note, how smart is it to market for the "highest end" of technology users. I mean, it was lagging pretty good on the T1 here at work, and I was really disappointed in the way I was _forced_ to view what I considered to be a very small window in FULL SCREEN! How smart is that? I for one think it's stupid to FORCE someone into viewing a window full screen that could easily fit into a 320 screen. Oh well, just my theory.
The opinions represented here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of myself. No information above warranted to be true, or even make any sense. -i9mm-
Every anti-MS (not necessarily Pro-SS) reader on /., had this mantra about their "trying time with Windows instability" as if they'd hopped up on a 15 foot unicycle and tried riding it for the first time. According to far too many of them, a Linux user can simply turn their head to look at a Windows screen, and it will BSOD. I use a Win98 machine at work. I regularly push it beyond its limits, and I know Win98 in general sucks rocks, but it takes about 60 hours of work time, or triple that if you count SETI@home time. If you'll notice, Roblimo is clearly pandering to those folks -- he didn't even specify what crashed. Could it have simply been the crappy plugin for Netscape, or maybe Netscape itself? Commercial Netscape sure isn't a shining example of well written code on any operating system, is it now? Aren't these webcast things just *lame*? I don't think unicast traffic for these things is ever going to work, even with regional mirror sites. I'd sooner pay $30 for something I really want to see on pay-per-view and actually be able to see it rather than try to watch it on the Internet. Do people just like the novelty, or do they consider "net congestion, buffering..." part of the wonderful Internet experience?
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E2 IN2 IE?