Dreamcast may be "underpowered" in your opinion, but don't discount it quite yet!
Planetweb 3.0 for SEGA Dreamcast will offer java support. The current "2.0" release offers support for SWF compliant up to Flash 3.0 features as well as MP3 support. Version 3 will also add the ability to play streamed MP3 and use the SEGA Ethernet adaptor, and probably some other cool things. I think 2.0 also supports the Dreamcast mouse when it is released. Most of the hardware releases will coincide with the release of Quake 3 Arena for Dreamcast.
Also, doesnt the PS2 have USB ports? Kind of makes the "two controller ports" a non-issue.. plus the fact that like the original PS, they could easily develop a multitap adaptor to add more ports.
Also, when (if) the Dreamcast zip drive is (ever) released, it adds USB to the Dreamcast. The hardware already exists, someone just has to start creating enough games that use the drive before it's viable to start mass production and selling the thing. The DC's Maple bus (controller port protocols) probably are only good up to 1mb/s which isnt really good for mass storage, video, etc. even though the Maple standard allows for 1, 2, 4, and 12mb operating modes (may be a little off on the exact numbers though)
Generally only as often as the "Security Warning" screen that comes up when your cert is not signed by a trusted CA pops up.
If you went to bn.com to buy a book and you got a message telling you that the certificate was self-signed, do you think you'd think twice about whether or not you are really truly using bn.com?
When are people going to grow up and realize that all architectures deliver or can be made to deliver basically the same sort of general performance and that any OS is going to shine in some particular area at some particular point in time?
IT managers really get my goat.. Lessay the entire development staff has a UNIX background and wants to develop a web application on PHP and Oracle. IT decides that NT is "better" than linux because ASP can serve pages a little faster than Apache can dish out PHP3 so then what do they have? Ground zero. Development staff that can't work with the tools. Same thing on the flip side... Try to make flashheads/Adobe GoLive! style designers work with Linux webservers. Give it up. Buy NT.
NT4 and Linux 2.2 kernels offered basically the same thing packaged two different ways. Windows 2000 rocks. Linux 2.4 rocks. Why is it a fight? I like 2000 on my desktop; Linux on my servers.
Why doesnt someone start a Linux Marketing Fund to buy advertising and pay PR people to dish out the same shit for Linux that everyone else is dishing out for their junk? Why does Linux always have to remain on the devensive? It could have the hell marketed out of it if someone wants to fund it.
Yes. You could; but they probably wouldn't let you.
You would have to first, start a business to do this. Secondly, you would have to report your playlists to ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. Thirdly, you would have to send them your company's financials along with the coming year's budget and plans for growth. Lastly, you have to make sure that the music you are "broadcasting" is licensed under ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. Things like bootlegs, concert recordings, etc. are not, and they will nail you for "broadcasting" that kind of stuff if you're not licensed for it. Lastly, you would actually have to make it available as a public broadcast as per the terms of your contracts with the licensors.
All in all, trying to do somehting like this would be pretty cool, but it would probably get you into a legal mess that you wouldn't want to be in.
Webcaster on the other hand have a very low entrance fee, but the cost of broadcasting raises as the listener base increases. For instance I have a 768K DSL line, and I am streaming out a 128Kbps stream. Now each listener will suck approx 14K/sec of bandwidth (once you add TCP header etc..). so that means that means that I can support a total of about 50-52 listeners before my connection maxes out. My DSL connection cost me $140 a month. That means I spent roughhly $2.69 per listener, per month.
Who taught you math? You can support 6 listeners with no TCP or UDP overhead and assuming you have SDSL. 5 will max you out completely well with ADSL. You got KB and Kb mixed up. Plus you divided 128 by 10 not 8. A 14KB/s stream is only good for 96Kbps MP3. If you really have a 7 MEGABIT DSL line for $140 please put me in touch with your provider!
Ok that is over a quarter-million dollars a month, so why dont you tell me how traditional media has a higher profit/listener ratio?
I didn't. I said Internet radio has a higher profit per listener. It has to.
There are also better ways to scale to multiple users than your linear model using MBONE and multicast routing. But yes, it's still more expensive.
Bar owners - yes absolutely. They owe royalties on music that they play on their jukeboxes, in their DJ booths, and for covers that live bands play. They can't just go to the store and buy a CD for private use and then play it publicly -- the same way you couldn't open a movie theater and play copies of films you bought at WalMart (even if you didnt charge for it!). Bar owners are the absolute worst to whine about laws they don't know about and raise a stink about it. But a camp fire shakedown?- hmm seems the urban legend filter is kicking in there. Unless of course it was something like the popular Cowboy Breakfast things in TX ranches, where you will have 100-200 people out to your "campfire" and have a band playing country music or something. They owe ASCAP too.
I hate dealing with these people as much as anybody, but your statement about ASCAP is totally off base. If you report properly to ASCAP about your music, they make sure that the funds get to the proper artists.
Well it is sort of valid in my opinion because the two are very different mediums. In broadcast radio, stations make money through traditional revenue (advertising on air) and non-traditional revenue (promotions, merchandising, etc.) The problem is really that schedule fees for ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC have been heavily weighted against the traditional revenue -- of which webcasters generally have little to none because they use banner ads! Plus the fact that webcasting *is* different from regular broadcasts. It can be much higer quality, much more "on-demand," and have a higher profit/listener radio than traditional broadcasters. They need a new model.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are changing policies to reflect the new medium, but because of the 'small pebbles' sort of problem in dealing with webcasters, they don't exactly have the facilities to deal with them effectively. (It took us 5 months to get BMI to notice us!)
I would be greatful for a better (or at least effective) method of licensing webcasters. I don't really care who does it either. Let RIAA create and spin off some entity that licenses webcasts like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC do. Heck, they could even handle bulk licensing with these three big licensers and sell small license packages to webcasters just to sort of streamline the whole process.
The point is that the current system doesn't fit webcasting. That's all. At least someone's finally talking about it and not just denying that internet-only radio stations do exist and are thriving without traditional revenue models.
The problem here is that the jukebox systems are in place to feed content between songs which is much harder to do with a traditional stream. The net effect is generally the equivalent of a continuous stream, and IMHO should be licensed appropriately. (Pay-per-listen would be a different ball game though!)
For webcasters, the licensing is normally all-inclusive. One fee. It doesnt matter how many times you play a particular song as long as you're licensed to play it.
I run the technical operations for a larger webcast company (one that produces our own music stations). For a very long time now, we have been paying ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC fees just like traditional broadcast stations.
I'm sorry for all the shoutcast people out there, but legally, if you run a radio station for profit or not, be it Internet or Broadcast, you have to either pay royalties through ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC or you can alternatively negotiate with *EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST WHOSE RECORDINGS YOU PLAY*.. in practice you have to really do both, as many independant bands are not signed or covered under ASCAP BMI or SESAC licensing.
Another thing I should mention is that these fees are NOT EVEN EXPENSIVE for small stations (read: stations with little to no profit) We're talking like 100 bucks per year, for Christ's sake!
The most bizzare thing about paying these royalties is that as long as the songs we play are covered under the licenses, we can obtain the music via any source and broadcast it legally. We usually get our music via promotional lists directly from record companies, but if we wanted to, we could LEGALLY download and broadcast music from Napster users! I know of many regular broadcast stations in the midwest that are gaining an extra day or two (mailing lead time) by downloading music from Napster so that they can play the songs one or two days ahead of competing stations.
Or should we say it is *a* differential GPS. DGPS is a standard system that does not come close to the 8" or so accuracy of the Lans system. (The best i've ever seen with DGPS even since SA was turned off has been 3ft.)
Basically the lans system used DGPS data (diference in actual vs reported position from each bird) plus clock error data plus a higher density of differential stations. Of course this required expensive atomic clocks at each differential station and a very complicated (though not terribly expensive) reciever, but it certainly wasnt DGPS. And YES the US did try to supress installations of that system in this country as it took gps out of government control (e.g. if you lost satellite reception entirely, you could still possibly deduce your position from land-based recievers alone) where with DGPS you still had to have satellite communications.
The site doesn't discuss how the case was actually manufactured other than to say something about the "computerized router" that he used.
Does anyone have any information on small computerized milling machines that are inexpensive enough to obtain for hobby use? The ability to work with plastic and aluminum would be a big plus... Something I could use to repackage things like my mouse or keyboard shell or create wild tape dispensers... etc.
Oh yeah the "community" has never trashed TiVo. What the fuck ever. Slashdot posts front page stories about TiVo invading your privacy with targeted advertising without even mentioning the fact that your viewing database never leaves *YOUR TiVo*!!!!! This is like, the cornerstone of the TiVo privacy policy.
We used to get pissed off only when companies tried to sell software. Now we get pissed off when they don't give us the hardware for free too! Wake up, people. Arent tech industry workers and geeks supposed to have the largest disposable income of any other demographic in the history of the world?
How come we seem to respect each other so well but often forget that companies like DC are full of our own? Think about what they are trying to do - integrate print and the web - I very much enjoy reading Wired now that it is full of barcodes. I can easily get more info than the printed page can hold. Sure they could just publish a long url that i'd have to type in, but scannning a barcode is soo much easier. I mean... a bunch of geeks started DC to do something cool. We've got all of these people finding all kinds of legal loopholes screaming IANAL the whole fucking time -- you think the geeks at DC are lawyers? But instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to HELP THEM FIX THE LEGAL PROBLEM as you undoubtadely would help someone writing a free software application, you just trash them, point your finger, sic the post office on them.
Guess what guys?
When you put DC out of business you will go back to paying minimum of about 100 bucks for a barcode scanner that will scan as well as the CC (cheaper ones will not even scan through the plastic of a CD case or on reflective surfaces like soda cans) and, oh yeah, you will no longer get nice barcodes on articles in magazines. Publishers will stop promoting/creating the "extra" content.
Sometimes it's good to support a good idea because it is a good idea; not because you're pissed off that you didn't think of it or that someone is trying to make money off of it.
You know something? Assume the following happened and imagine the "community response."
Imagine that someone produces a tool that somehow modified VXD and WDM drivers intended for Windows so that they could drive all that hardware on Linux. Do you think people are really going to say:
"Well... since the Microsoft license agreement to driver developers licenses drivers only for use with the Windows kernel we can't use this tool."
Or do you think that they would just say "Fuck the man mirror it with your copy of DeCSS?"
Funny how the "opensource/freedom of information" mob feels no remorse in flagrantly violating choice laws yet comes crying back with this "oh please save us IP law" when they so much as get brushed against by a large company.
Why should anyone care if I can load linux drivers into my Solaris, BSDi, Win32, MacOS kernel? Oooh you're going to lose your precious market share? What happened to producing the best work you could?
Of course I was running Rhapsody Alpha 1 for X86 almost three years ago before Apple discontinued the project. Even had the little apple menu and 3-pane finder on my Pentium there.
Seeing as Darwin is based on NeXT/OpenSTEP which was used on *BOTH PPC AND X86* there really wasnt a lot of legwork involved in making Darwin work on X86 (especially since apple did it three years ago anyway)... i would have guessed that a bunch of macheads would do it though -- even though there's really nothing special about the Darwin kernel compared to any other variety of BSD that runs on X86.
I will continue saying this until people remember it!!!!
As for the "chancesof OS/X on X86," Mac OS/X was originally based on NeXT/OpenSTEP and called Rhapsody. Apple made alpha releases of Rhapsody for x86 and PPC both. The kernel used to run on X86 just fine until Apple scrapped X86 development for Rhapsody and focused entirely on the PPC platform. Then they moved to the current Darwin kernel and a litte more of the X86 code went missing.
It is.AVI because it contains the AVI content header that describes the video and audio format(s) in the file. If the codec guys would write in a reliable method of describing the audio track information in a DiVX compressed file (which it currently lacks and thus relies on the AVI header) then we could have standalone.DVX or.DIVX files. Sure you could just change the extention, but it's still an AVI file! When you rename it to.DIVX and feed it to Media Player it will *STILL RECOGNIZE IT AS AN AVI*!!!
MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 all provide standalone header spaces for audio information; however, MP3 audio (what DiVX uses) isn't technically an allowed format in MPEG-4 (Instead it should use MPEG2 audio (whatever layer you want including layer 3); thus the codec itself is one big flawed piece of junk because it in fact *DOES* rely on the AVI header to store type information.
I agree with you that it should get its own file type, but this won't happen until a good open implementation of DiVX comes along that isn't just a hacked MS MPEG4/MP3 knock off. Something that people can start writing compressors and decompressors on their own, maybe?
Heck with all this work being put into DiVX these days I'm constantly amazed that few people seem to realize that in the same time it takes to clone DiVX, they could write a true MPEG-4 implementation that would be every bit as good and more useful in the long run than a hacked codec.
Speaking of MPEG1/L3 (MP3) compression in WAV files, I do have to say that there is actually a very good use for that. I have over 40 GB of MP3 compressed WAV files running broadcast radio stations. The broadcast software we use 1) only supports WAV files and MP3 compressing them (vs. the old MPEG2 compression we used to use) saves me disk space and processor cycles. It also provides me with room to put a TON of meta-information (standard in the format header) in the file that ID3 and even ID3v2 do not provide.
Incidentally, I do have a tool for my MP3 compressed wav's that will directly convert a MP3 to an MP3 compressed WAV and vice-versa by writing the correct format headers and footers onto the MP3 file. But again, something like this could not be done for DiVX as it relies on the AVI format to describe its internals.
You arent paying for the ads, you fucking dumbass. They are paying for you. How much do you think your cable bill would be if there were no ads on TV? I'd bet that if you expected the same amount of programming as is currently aired, everyone owning a television would be required to pay around $500 per month for their television. BTW you can arrive at this number yourself by taking the gross value of the television industry and dividing it by the number of television subscribers.
TiVo, Replay, and all the other PTV software available for the PC are as close as you get to paying someone to allow you not to see ads. Besides, who do you think a company that you paid to ensure that you don't see ads has to pay compensation to? Yep. the advertisers. You might as well be buying the fucking products.
Also, yes, they are working on figuring out mediafs but not necessarily to 'rip video from the tivo.' more like.. how do I *INSERT* an mp3 into mediafs and allow the TiVo to play it? Besides, what good is ripping video out of the TiVo when it's already ripped from the television *by the TiVo* automatically? Just put hundreds of gigs of storage on the TiVo and save all the stuff you want on the TiVo indefinately. If you want to pirate video from television for *ahem* illegal redistribution, you'll probably want to take out the adverts and do some other things - and for that you should really be working in MJPEG instead of MPEG anyway so TiVo data is pretty useless in that regard.
Yes. Some people are working on adding an ethernet interface to the TiVo and some others are working on reverse engineering the internal data format of the TiVo's mediafs --
The real kicker is that if you want to do this, there is already tons and tons of digital VCR software for your computer that does TiVo-like things (recording your shows each time they air; downloading program-guide info, etc) and some of the software saves the video in a useful format (mpeg1 or mpeg2) that can be hardware compressed and decoded. Since most people have insanely large harddrives these days (20+ GB with most of it free) the tuner card/video encoder can be a lot less investment than a $399 TiVo and the $200 subscription.
If the TiVo people are as good as I think they probably are, the MPEG chips in the TiVo units probably have some sort of on-the-fly crypto scheme built into them to further protect the media data.
Bottom line is that hacking the mediafs to extract video data isn't really practical because there are better/faster/cheaper ways to pirate TV.
Only it is *your personal database*. TiVo is very clear about this. Your reciever records data based on your viewing habits based on a ruleset from TiVo. The TiVo does not send this data upstream to TiVo at any time. It's an entirely push and filter medium.
In other words, if your TiVo unit itself knows that you watch a lot of golf, and it recieves an ad-targeting rule from TiVo during its daily call that says essentially "if your viewer watches a lot of golf, buffer up some Maxfli ads that will be run for 5 minutes at 2:50AM on PAXSAT and insert them into the next 10 golf programs" - The key here is that *EVERY* tivo recieves the same ruleset and does something different with it depending on what you do with your TiVo.
To say that the TiVo data could possibly be used against an accused in a criminal case is true -- if the police come to your house, confiscate your TiVo, and find some way to extract the viewing data. It's no more incriminating than any magazines you leave lying around or the items currently in your browser history. Plus, like a browser history, you can reset the TiVo database any time you wish.
1) IP based virtual hosting is tremendously more manageable than name based hosting - Primarily because DNS takes 1 TTL (however long) to change over in the event of a problem that requires a workaround where one must move a website from one IP to another. If you can move the IP, instant change.
2) IP based virtual hosting prevents unnecessary headaches for administrators of medium size sites that must endure access problems to named hosts due to misconfigured client proxies, firewalls, DNS servers, or web browsers. Also extremely old browsers - THEY ARE OUT THERE PEOPLE - even if their numbers are very very few.
3) DNS is introduced as another point of failure in the entire system. Without proper DNS resolution there would be absolutely *NO WAY* for a website to be accessed if it were on a named host even if you knew the IP. (at least without a bunch of fiddling around) The other problem to consider is what site could potentially be brought up using the IP number of your named host? Your hosting provider's site? Someone else's site maybe? Someone else's PORN site?? -- THis poses a tremendous problem for businesses who cannot afford dedicated server solutions. Pretty much every virtual server on servint.net's network is porn. Imagine if you had a legitimate business site on one of these named virtual hosts and DNS broke, so you accessed the site by IP and got a PORN site! Bad karma!
Try it - see if your favorite website is name vhosted. nslookup the IP and use it as the URL! You'll be shocked.
Welcome back to the consumer notion that the web *IS* the Internet.
If that were the case and the only protocol running on the Internet that would require something like virtual hosting was HTTP, then we'd be all set.
For those of you who don't understand what this is all about, think of HTTP like this:
1) Your machine connects to an IP
2) Your machine then tells the IP what webserver it wants to be talking to *BY NAME*
3) Webserver fires back the appropriate content
If every single protocol on the planet had the client identify the server *BY NAME* this wouldn't be a big deal; however, they don't. Very few protocols do this.
Mail delivery does. POP3 and IMAP don't; though. Neither does FTP. Any protocol that requires reverse lookups to return a specific hostname is problematic if you are attempting to have one ip with many names (e.g. ident) Oh, and as many have mentioned SSL certs are tied to IP *AND* NAME so they have to be vhosted by IP.
The only current ways around this seem to be passing the server name with the user name. There are virtual ftp servers, virtual POP3 servers, etc. that allow for this. E.g. the user bob trying to access the mail server mail.foo.com to recieve his email would pass the username as bob:mail.foo.com. Or when logging into a virtual ftp server, the username would be bob:ftp.foo.com.
For most users this is a terrible inconvienience and anyone who works tech support at a large virtual hosting provider, I'm sure would agree. It's a tech support nightmare. For the majority of lusers out there, logging into 'mail.foo.com' as 'bob' makes life a helluva lot easier than logging into 'mail.foo.com' as 'bob:mail.foo.com' to check mail for the address 'bob@foo.com'.. "Why do I have to do that?" Bob says... Then you have to talk him through setting his Reply-To: header and that's a pain. Let's let the ARIN people do 20K tech support calls about this and see how they like it.
Perhaps providers of the world could go back on ARIN calling this move 'anti-competitive.' For most providers, it probably removes the ability to market a certain service - IP based virtual hosting - a step in between virtual hosting and dedicated server services that is ideal for midsize hosting accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
Dreamcast may be "underpowered" in your opinion, but don't discount it quite yet!
Planetweb 3.0 for SEGA Dreamcast will offer java support. The current "2.0" release offers support for SWF compliant up to Flash 3.0 features as well as MP3 support. Version 3 will also add the ability to play streamed MP3 and use the SEGA Ethernet adaptor, and probably some other cool things. I think 2.0 also supports the Dreamcast mouse when it is released. Most of the hardware releases will coincide with the release of Quake 3 Arena for Dreamcast.
Also, doesnt the PS2 have USB ports? Kind of makes the "two controller ports" a non-issue.. plus the fact that like the original PS, they could easily develop a multitap adaptor to add more ports.
Also, when (if) the Dreamcast zip drive is (ever) released, it adds USB to the Dreamcast. The hardware already exists, someone just has to start creating enough games that use the drive before it's viable to start mass production and selling the thing. The DC's Maple bus (controller port protocols) probably are only good up to 1mb/s which isnt really good for mass storage, video, etc. even though the Maple standard allows for 1, 2, 4, and 12mb operating modes (may be a little off on the exact numbers though)
~GoRK
Generally only as often as the "Security Warning" screen that comes up when your cert is not signed by a trusted CA pops up.
If you went to bn.com to buy a book and you got a message telling you that the certificate was self-signed, do you think you'd think twice about whether or not you are really truly using bn.com?
~GoRK
Most vcr's these days pick up the time from the subcode on TV channels. People are still pretty stupid in general.
~GoRK
These have been theorized for a long time and they were first observed years ago. Slashdot has even run stories on this before. It's not a shocker.
When are people going to grow up and realize that all architectures deliver or can be made to deliver basically the same sort of general performance and that any OS is going to shine in some particular area at some particular point in time?
IT managers really get my goat.. Lessay the entire development staff has a UNIX background and wants to develop a web application on PHP and Oracle. IT decides that NT is "better" than linux because ASP can serve pages a little faster than Apache can dish out PHP3 so then what do they have? Ground zero. Development staff that can't work with the tools. Same thing on the flip side... Try to make flashheads/Adobe GoLive! style designers work with Linux webservers. Give it up. Buy NT.
NT4 and Linux 2.2 kernels offered basically the same thing packaged two different ways. Windows 2000 rocks. Linux 2.4 rocks. Why is it a fight? I like 2000 on my desktop; Linux on my servers.
Why doesnt someone start a Linux Marketing Fund to buy advertising and pay PR people to dish out the same shit for Linux that everyone else is dishing out for their junk? Why does Linux always have to remain on the devensive? It could have the hell marketed out of it if someone wants to fund it.
Where are your priorities anwyay?
~GoRK
That would be pretty much what the RIAA is trying to facilitate here. You did read the article, didn't you?
Yes. You could; but they probably wouldn't let you.
You would have to first, start a business to do this. Secondly, you would have to report your playlists to ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. Thirdly, you would have to send them your company's financials along with the coming year's budget and plans for growth. Lastly, you have to make sure that the music you are "broadcasting" is licensed under ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. Things like bootlegs, concert recordings, etc. are not, and they will nail you for "broadcasting" that kind of stuff if you're not licensed for it. Lastly, you would actually have to make it available as a public broadcast as per the terms of your contracts with the licensors.
All in all, trying to do somehting like this would be pretty cool, but it would probably get you into a legal mess that you wouldn't want to be in.
~GoRK
Webcaster on the other hand have a very low entrance fee, but the cost of broadcasting raises as the listener base increases. For instance I have a 768K DSL line, and I am streaming out a 128Kbps stream. Now each listener will suck approx 14K/sec of bandwidth (once you add TCP header etc..). so that means that means that I can support a total of about 50-52 listeners before my connection maxes out. My DSL connection cost me $140 a month. That means I spent roughhly $2.69 per listener, per month.
Who taught you math? You can support 6 listeners with no TCP or UDP overhead and assuming you have SDSL. 5 will max you out completely well with ADSL. You got KB and Kb mixed up. Plus you divided 128 by 10 not 8. A 14KB/s stream is only good for 96Kbps MP3. If you really have a 7 MEGABIT DSL line for $140 please put me in touch with your provider!
Ok that is over a quarter-million dollars a month, so why dont you tell me how traditional media has a higher profit/listener ratio?
I didn't. I said Internet radio has a higher profit per listener. It has to.
There are also better ways to scale to multiple users than your linear model using MBONE and multicast routing. But yes, it's still more expensive.
~GoRK
Bar owners - yes absolutely. They owe royalties on music that they play on their jukeboxes, in their DJ booths, and for covers that live bands play. They can't just go to the store and buy a CD for private use and then play it publicly -- the same way you couldn't open a movie theater and play copies of films you bought at WalMart (even if you didnt charge for it!). Bar owners are the absolute worst to whine about laws they don't know about and raise a stink about it. But a camp fire shakedown?- hmm seems the urban legend filter is kicking in there. Unless of course it was something like the popular Cowboy Breakfast things in TX ranches, where you will have 100-200 people out to your "campfire" and have a band playing country music or something. They owe ASCAP too.
I hate dealing with these people as much as anybody, but your statement about ASCAP is totally off base. If you report properly to ASCAP about your music, they make sure that the funds get to the proper artists.
~GoRK
Well it is sort of valid in my opinion because the two are very different mediums. In broadcast radio, stations make money through traditional revenue (advertising on air) and non-traditional revenue (promotions, merchandising, etc.) The problem is really that schedule fees for ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC have been heavily weighted against the traditional revenue -- of which webcasters generally have little to none because they use banner ads! Plus the fact that webcasting *is* different from regular broadcasts. It can be much higer quality, much more "on-demand," and have a higher profit/listener radio than traditional broadcasters. They need a new model.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are changing policies to reflect the new medium, but because of the 'small pebbles' sort of problem in dealing with webcasters, they don't exactly have the facilities to deal with them effectively. (It took us 5 months to get BMI to notice us!)
I would be greatful for a better (or at least effective) method of licensing webcasters. I don't really care who does it either. Let RIAA create and spin off some entity that licenses webcasts like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC do. Heck, they could even handle bulk licensing with these three big licensers and sell small license packages to webcasters just to sort of streamline the whole process.
The point is that the current system doesn't fit webcasting. That's all. At least someone's finally talking about it and not just denying that internet-only radio stations do exist and are thriving without traditional revenue models.
~GoRK
The problem here is that the jukebox systems are in place to feed content between songs which is much harder to do with a traditional stream. The net effect is generally the equivalent of a continuous stream, and IMHO should be licensed appropriately. (Pay-per-listen would be a different ball game though!)
For webcasters, the licensing is normally all-inclusive. One fee. It doesnt matter how many times you play a particular song as long as you're licensed to play it.
I run the technical operations for a larger webcast company (one that produces our own music stations). For a very long time now, we have been paying ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC fees just like traditional broadcast stations.
I'm sorry for all the shoutcast people out there, but legally, if you run a radio station for profit or not, be it Internet or Broadcast, you have to either pay royalties through ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC or you can alternatively negotiate with *EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST WHOSE RECORDINGS YOU PLAY*.. in practice you have to really do both, as many independant bands are not signed or covered under ASCAP BMI or SESAC licensing.
Another thing I should mention is that these fees are NOT EVEN EXPENSIVE for small stations (read: stations with little to no profit) We're talking like 100 bucks per year, for Christ's sake!
The most bizzare thing about paying these royalties is that as long as the songs we play are covered under the licenses, we can obtain the music via any source and broadcast it legally. We usually get our music via promotional lists directly from record companies, but if we wanted to, we could LEGALLY download and broadcast music from Napster users! I know of many regular broadcast stations in the midwest that are gaining an extra day or two (mailing lead time) by downloading music from Napster so that they can play the songs one or two days ahead of competing stations.
What a twisted mess this all is, isn't it?!?
~GoRK
Or should we say it is *a* differential GPS. DGPS is a standard system that does not come close to the 8" or so accuracy of the Lans system. (The best i've ever seen with DGPS even since SA was turned off has been 3ft.)
Basically the lans system used DGPS data (diference in actual vs reported position from each bird) plus clock error data plus a higher density of differential stations. Of course this required expensive atomic clocks at each differential station and a very complicated (though not terribly expensive) reciever, but it certainly wasnt DGPS. And YES the US did try to supress installations of that system in this country as it took gps out of government control (e.g. if you lost satellite reception entirely, you could still possibly deduce your position from land-based recievers alone) where with DGPS you still had to have satellite communications.
~GoRK
The site doesn't discuss how the case was actually manufactured other than to say something about the "computerized router" that he used.
Does anyone have any information on small computerized milling machines that are inexpensive enough to obtain for hobby use? The ability to work with plastic and aluminum would be a big plus... Something I could use to repackage things like my mouse or keyboard shell or create wild tape dispensers... etc.
~GoRK
Oh yeah the "community" has never trashed TiVo. What the fuck ever. Slashdot posts front page stories about TiVo invading your privacy with targeted advertising without even mentioning the fact that your viewing database never leaves *YOUR TiVo*!!!!! This is like, the cornerstone of the TiVo privacy policy.
We used to get pissed off only when companies tried to sell software. Now we get pissed off when they don't give us the hardware for free too! Wake up, people. Arent tech industry workers and geeks supposed to have the largest disposable income of any other demographic in the history of the world?
How come we seem to respect each other so well but often forget that companies like DC are full of our own? Think about what they are trying to do - integrate print and the web - I very much enjoy reading Wired now that it is full of barcodes. I can easily get more info than the printed page can hold. Sure they could just publish a long url that i'd have to type in, but scannning a barcode is soo much easier. I mean... a bunch of geeks started DC to do something cool. We've got all of these people finding all kinds of legal loopholes screaming IANAL the whole fucking time -- you think the geeks at DC are lawyers? But instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to HELP THEM FIX THE LEGAL PROBLEM as you undoubtadely would help someone writing a free software application, you just trash them, point your finger, sic the post office on them.
Guess what guys?
When you put DC out of business you will go back to paying minimum of about 100 bucks for a barcode scanner that will scan as well as the CC (cheaper ones will not even scan through the plastic of a CD case or on reflective surfaces like soda cans) and, oh yeah, you will no longer get nice barcodes on articles in magazines. Publishers will stop promoting/creating the "extra" content.
Sometimes it's good to support a good idea because it is a good idea; not because you're pissed off that you didn't think of it or that someone is trying to make money off of it.
~GoRK
You know something? Assume the following happened and imagine the "community response."
Imagine that someone produces a tool that somehow modified VXD and WDM drivers intended for Windows so that they could drive all that hardware on Linux. Do you think people are really going to say:
"Well... since the Microsoft license agreement to driver developers licenses drivers only for use with the Windows kernel we can't use this tool."
Or do you think that they would just say "Fuck the man mirror it with your copy of DeCSS?"
Funny how the "opensource/freedom of information" mob feels no remorse in flagrantly violating choice laws yet comes crying back with this "oh please save us IP law" when they so much as get brushed against by a large company.
Why should anyone care if I can load linux drivers into my Solaris, BSDi, Win32, MacOS kernel? Oooh you're going to lose your precious market share? What happened to producing the best work you could?
~GoRK
Of course I was running Rhapsody Alpha 1 for X86 almost three years ago before Apple discontinued the project. Even had the little apple menu and 3-pane finder on my Pentium there.
Seeing as Darwin is based on NeXT/OpenSTEP which was used on *BOTH PPC AND X86* there really wasnt a lot of legwork involved in making Darwin work on X86 (especially since apple did it three years ago anyway)... i would have guessed that a bunch of macheads would do it though -- even though there's really nothing special about the Darwin kernel compared to any other variety of BSD that runs on X86.
~GoRK
I will continue saying this until people remember it!!!!
As for the "chancesof OS/X on X86," Mac OS/X was originally based on NeXT/OpenSTEP and called Rhapsody. Apple made alpha releases of Rhapsody for x86 and PPC both. The kernel used to run on X86 just fine until Apple scrapped X86 development for Rhapsody and focused entirely on the PPC platform. Then they moved to the current Darwin kernel and a litte more of the X86 code went missing.
~GoRK
File extentions are pretty unnecessary with a good magic file anyway.
It is .AVI because it contains the AVI content header that describes the video and audio format(s) in the file. If the codec guys would write in a reliable method of describing the audio track information in a DiVX compressed file (which it currently lacks and thus relies on the AVI header) then we could have standalone .DVX or .DIVX files. Sure you could just change the extention, but it's still an AVI file! When you rename it to .DIVX and feed it to Media Player it will *STILL RECOGNIZE IT AS AN AVI*!!!
MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 all provide standalone header spaces for audio information; however, MP3 audio (what DiVX uses) isn't technically an allowed format in MPEG-4 (Instead it should use MPEG2 audio (whatever layer you want including layer 3); thus the codec itself is one big flawed piece of junk because it in fact *DOES* rely on the AVI header to store type information.
I agree with you that it should get its own file type, but this won't happen until a good open implementation of DiVX comes along that isn't just a hacked MS MPEG4/MP3 knock off. Something that people can start writing compressors and decompressors on their own, maybe?
Heck with all this work being put into DiVX these days I'm constantly amazed that few people seem to realize that in the same time it takes to clone DiVX, they could write a true MPEG-4 implementation that would be every bit as good and more useful in the long run than a hacked codec.
Speaking of MPEG1/L3 (MP3) compression in WAV files, I do have to say that there is actually a very good use for that. I have over 40 GB of MP3 compressed WAV files running broadcast radio stations. The broadcast software we use 1) only supports WAV files and MP3 compressing them (vs. the old MPEG2 compression we used to use) saves me disk space and processor cycles. It also provides me with room to put a TON of meta-information (standard in the format header) in the file that ID3 and even ID3v2 do not provide.
Incidentally, I do have a tool for my MP3 compressed wav's that will directly convert a MP3 to an MP3 compressed WAV and vice-versa by writing the correct format headers and footers onto the MP3 file. But again, something like this could not be done for DiVX as it relies on the AVI format to describe its internals.
~GoRK
You arent paying for the ads, you fucking dumbass. They are paying for you. How much do you think your cable bill would be if there were no ads on TV? I'd bet that if you expected the same amount of programming as is currently aired, everyone owning a television would be required to pay around $500 per month for their television. BTW you can arrive at this number yourself by taking the gross value of the television industry and dividing it by the number of television subscribers.
.. how do I *INSERT* an mp3 into mediafs and allow the TiVo to play it? Besides, what good is ripping video out of the TiVo when it's already ripped from the television *by the TiVo* automatically? Just put hundreds of gigs of storage on the TiVo and save all the stuff you want on the TiVo indefinately. If you want to pirate video from television for *ahem* illegal redistribution, you'll probably want to take out the adverts and do some other things - and for that you should really be working in MJPEG instead of MPEG anyway so TiVo data is pretty useless in that regard.
TiVo, Replay, and all the other PTV software available for the PC are as close as you get to paying someone to allow you not to see ads. Besides, who do you think a company that you paid to ensure that you don't see ads has to pay compensation to? Yep. the advertisers. You might as well be buying the fucking products.
Also, yes, they are working on figuring out mediafs but not necessarily to 'rip video from the tivo.' more like
~GoRK
> Has anyone done anything on this?
Yes. Some people are working on adding an ethernet interface to the TiVo and some others are working on reverse engineering the internal data format of the TiVo's mediafs --
The real kicker is that if you want to do this, there is already tons and tons of digital VCR software for your computer that does TiVo-like things (recording your shows each time they air; downloading program-guide info, etc) and some of the software saves the video in a useful format (mpeg1 or mpeg2) that can be hardware compressed and decoded. Since most people have insanely large harddrives these days (20+ GB with most of it free) the tuner card/video encoder can be a lot less investment than a $399 TiVo and the $200 subscription.
If the TiVo people are as good as I think they probably are, the MPEG chips in the TiVo units probably have some sort of on-the-fly crypto scheme built into them to further protect the media data.
Bottom line is that hacking the mediafs to extract video data isn't really practical because there are better/faster/cheaper ways to pirate TV.
~GoRK
Only it is *your personal database*. TiVo is very clear about this. Your reciever records data based on your viewing habits based on a ruleset from TiVo. The TiVo does not send this data upstream to TiVo at any time. It's an entirely push and filter medium.
In other words, if your TiVo unit itself knows that you watch a lot of golf, and it recieves an ad-targeting rule from TiVo during its daily call that says essentially "if your viewer watches a lot of golf, buffer up some Maxfli ads that will be run for 5 minutes at 2:50AM on PAXSAT and insert them into the next 10 golf programs" - The key here is that *EVERY* tivo recieves the same ruleset and does something different with it depending on what you do with your TiVo.
To say that the TiVo data could possibly be used against an accused in a criminal case is true -- if the police come to your house, confiscate your TiVo, and find some way to extract the viewing data. It's no more incriminating than any magazines you leave lying around or the items currently in your browser history. Plus, like a browser history, you can reset the TiVo database any time you wish.
~GoRK
1) IP based virtual hosting is tremendously more manageable than name based hosting - Primarily because DNS takes 1 TTL (however long) to change over in the event of a problem that requires a workaround where one must move a website from one IP to another. If you can move the IP, instant change.
2) IP based virtual hosting prevents unnecessary headaches for administrators of medium size sites that must endure access problems to named hosts due to misconfigured client proxies, firewalls, DNS servers, or web browsers. Also extremely old browsers - THEY ARE OUT THERE PEOPLE - even if their numbers are very very few.
3) DNS is introduced as another point of failure in the entire system. Without proper DNS resolution there would be absolutely *NO WAY* for a website to be accessed if it were on a named host even if you knew the IP. (at least without a bunch of fiddling around) The other problem to consider is what site could potentially be brought up using the IP number of your named host? Your hosting provider's site? Someone else's site maybe? Someone else's PORN site?? -- THis poses a tremendous problem for businesses who cannot afford dedicated server solutions. Pretty much every virtual server on servint.net's network is porn. Imagine if you had a legitimate business site on one of these named virtual hosts and DNS broke, so you accessed the site by IP and got a PORN site! Bad karma!
Try it - see if your favorite website is name vhosted. nslookup the IP and use it as the URL! You'll be shocked.
~GoRK
Welcome back to the consumer notion that the web *IS* the Internet.
.. "Why do I have to do that?" Bob says... Then you have to talk him through setting his Reply-To: header and that's a pain. Let's let the ARIN people do 20K tech support calls about this and see how they like it.
If that were the case and the only protocol running on the Internet that would require something like virtual hosting was HTTP, then we'd be all set.
For those of you who don't understand what this is all about, think of HTTP like this:
1) Your machine connects to an IP
2) Your machine then tells the IP what webserver it wants to be talking to *BY NAME*
3) Webserver fires back the appropriate content
If every single protocol on the planet had the client identify the server *BY NAME* this wouldn't be a big deal; however, they don't. Very few protocols do this.
Mail delivery does. POP3 and IMAP don't; though. Neither does FTP. Any protocol that requires reverse lookups to return a specific hostname is problematic if you are attempting to have one ip with many names (e.g. ident) Oh, and as many have mentioned SSL certs are tied to IP *AND* NAME so they have to be vhosted by IP.
The only current ways around this seem to be passing the server name with the user name. There are virtual ftp servers, virtual POP3 servers, etc. that allow for this. E.g. the user bob trying to access the mail server mail.foo.com to recieve his email would pass the username as bob:mail.foo.com. Or when logging into a virtual ftp server, the username would be bob:ftp.foo.com.
For most users this is a terrible inconvienience and anyone who works tech support at a large virtual hosting provider, I'm sure would agree. It's a tech support nightmare. For the majority of lusers out there, logging into 'mail.foo.com' as 'bob' makes life a helluva lot easier than logging into 'mail.foo.com' as 'bob:mail.foo.com' to check mail for the address 'bob@foo.com'
Perhaps providers of the world could go back on ARIN calling this move 'anti-competitive.' For most providers, it probably removes the ability to market a certain service - IP based virtual hosting - a step in between virtual hosting and dedicated server services that is ideal for midsize hosting accounts.
Grrrrr.......
~GoRK