Just FYI, that licensing cost is most likely a developer per-seat cost with some redistribution allowed.
As far as per-user stuff, it's likely that most people use QNX in one form or another every day without knowing it. From cable boxes to ATMs, traffic lights, etc.
QNX is put in places where failure cannot happen. At all.
Do these audiobooks have the same 'feature' as iTunes / Audible.com audio books, whereas if you stop playing them and go to listen to something else, they start up where you left off?
If so, can I ask how you make files do that? I'd love to set a number of DJ mixes / live sets to do this, but I haven't had much luck in figuring out how.
Actually, I've got a NeoGeo as well. And you're right, it *is* built like a tank. I need to do a bit of work on mine still, but it generally works fine.
I made it.:) It's juts 3/4" MDF like the rest of the cabinet is... I actually made the whole thing from scratch, cloning a Data East cabinet and adding 3" - 4" to it.
If anyone is interested, here are a bunch of photos I took of my MAME cabinet when I built it back in the summer of 2000. The pictures are kinda crappy, and were all taken at my parents house, but they show a full stand-up MAME machine, with a cabinet made competely from scratch. The cabinet was patterned off of a Data East Robocop / Bad Dudes cabinet, but made a bit deeper to accomidate my monitor.
Just FYI, the particular pair of Sennheisers I have fit very comfortably with glasses on. It's possible that some other models of theirs don't, but these are just perfect.
I probably would have gone with another brand, but I found these on clearance (for some reason) for something like $32. Extra dirt cheap for *great* headphones.
I'd love a pair like those Sony's, though. Match them with a nice tube amp... Mmm...
Get a pair of rather nice, open-back, full ear headphones. The set I use with my iPod are Sennheiser HD 590's (purchased at The Great Indoors for ~$30, down from ~$70). They sound absolutely amazing, but because they aren't sealed you can still hear the phone, people talking directly to you, etc.
Earbuds are nice and cheap, but they block out too much sound. You need to ensure that the headphones are really comfortable and have a nice long cord, though, since you'll probably want to move around your desk a bit and be wearing them for hours on end. Also, if you are running the sound out of your desktop or notebook and it's kinda crappy (bad S/N ratio, interferance, etc) look into a Griffin Technologies iMic. As they are just a standard USB audio device, they work without drivers on Macs or PCs and sound excellent.
I personally find it extremely rude when coworkers insist on playing music out loud (headphones solve this) or having conference calls on speakerphone (that's what headsets are for). Hopefully if more people start using a more personal listening device, the workplace will be calmer for everyone.
Oh, and if your local library doesn't have any of the books you desire, ask them to do an Inter-Library Loan. It might take a few days to get the book you want, but it's possible to have things transfered in from all over the country as needed. In fact, you can find almost any piece you want this way, in-print or not.
How about hitting up your local library and getting a book from there? Not all learning needs to be done on a computer, and libraries are the ideal place to get books.:)
Actually, I think you have the last bit slightly backwards. The MVS (the arcade NeoGeo) carts were new, they were a few hundred dollars a piece, as opposed to the AES (home version) carts which were around a hundred. The pinout difference was to keep arcade ops from putting AES carts in MVS machines. For the most part, SNK (like most other arcade game vendors) sold the game systems and carts for a set price, then the operators made money off the plays. That's why they cost so much.
The reason you see so many adapters these days for playing MVS games in AES devices is because MVS games are (with few exceptions) a few dollars to a few tens of dollars on eBay, while actual AES carts are worth much more.
Luckily I found a full stand-up MVS locally, so I snagged that for $500. A few hundred later and I've got a 30-some title of MVS games. And there's something about playing at a stand-up machine that is just great.
I happen to have a Pentuim II 450 development sample CPU. That means no multiplier lock. It's been running at 500mhz since 1998 without any problems. It's probably been powered off for a total of about 6 months in this time. I'm about to put it in a new colocation facility, (technically) overclocked to 500mhz, and I fully expect it run stable, as it has. For years.
This might be a little off-topic, but the ZyXEL ZyAIR B-4000 has come in handy for a number of small wireless POPs I've talked to. Basically, it's a self-contained AP / billing / access control system that's available for ~$700. There's a Tom's Hardware review here detailing a bit about how it works. In short, you program the buttons on the front for whatever time/price you want, and the receipt printer spits out a serialized receipt containing a password which will allow the user's machine to access the network for X period of time. Nice and simple for non-techies to operate.
I'd imagine that if you did a $5/day or/week this way, the price would remain cheap, the hardware would be reliable, and easy for anyone working the coffee shop to use.
I think you might want to take a look at the Stereophile Review of the iPod. If you read the article, what is actually (between the lines) reviewed is the DAC of the iPod, which is incredible. I'll attest to this*. Sure, MP3 generally sounds like ass, as to lower bitrate AAC files, but that's a product of lossy compression, not the player itself. iPods themselves sound absolutely wonderful, especially if you use the line out (often from the dock) into your stereo.
*At home I have my iPod dock in the living room hooked to a mid-range NAD receiver and some Gekko speakers. It just sounds amazing.
Sorry. I guess I took a while to reply... I didn't do any direct Vorbis-AAC comparisons, but both sounded better than MP3 to me. The MP3s I was using were created with iTunes as 192kbps VBR. My biggest problem with MP3 has been the tendancy to distort high end stuff and almost sound sloshy and watery.
I'd been using Ogg Vorbis for about two years, but I really wanted an iPod. Going back to MP3 seemed like a step down, but switching to AAC is much nicer.
I just can't wait for ~5 years to pass so I can rip everything to a straight PCM bitstream, be it AIFF, WAV, AU, or whatnot. It would be real nice to see something like FLAC, or a non-lossy compression, but I don't know if Apple will add that anytime soon (yes, I know you can do it with plugins...), and I don't want to use all my drive space for that. Yet. Maybe once I can get 1TB disks off the shelf.
Price it at, or less than, US$1k, and they'll sell a boatload. I know I'd buy one. Make it a widescreen (1920 x 1200) at that price, and they'll fly out the door into the hands of designers and developers both.
MusicMatch is such garbage that I had a very, very hard time getting it to see my iPod. Once I did, I had a hard time getting any of my personal music in it. I too had the problem with my iPod being 'full' with only a few songs in it...
Then I found EphPod. This piece of software kept me using my iPod under Windows for a few months. After that I got a used PowerMac G4 Cube, switched to iTunes, and never looked back.
With iTunes for Windows I think that Apple finally has a complete system in place for users to rip and sync music properly. Not the MusicMatch hack...
3. AAC support. Okay, Ogg Vorbis is more Stalmanist, blah blah blah, but AAC at 128 sounds as good or better, at least to me, as VBR MP3 while taking up less space on the HD.
Psst. Not to be rude, but at 128kbps MP3 and AAC will take the same amount of space for the same length track. AAC will sound markedly better.
I personally used to be a huge Ogg Vorbis fan, then I got an iPod and went back to MP3s for convience. Having acquired a G5 earlier this month, I decided to try reripping parts of my collection to AAC, just as a test. And there is a difference.
I have my iPod running line in to my car stereo, and with 192kbps MP3s (using Apple's encoder, which is very good), they'd occasionally sound flat, somewhat muffled, and just generally not as good as the in-dash stereo. Switching to same-bitrate AACs, everything sounds a bit brighter, almost indistinguishable from audio CDs in the player itself.
I've seen the same results in my living room as well, where I have a second dock running line out straight into the stereo.
Regarding the parent post, though, I think that the big seller with the iPod is the interface. It works night and day better than the competition, and the menuing system is very, very similar to the 'Browse' layout in iTunes.
Apple is big on design and style. Combine this, with a product that works very well and is priced reasonably, and you've got a winner....and it's been proven.
Does anyone know of a similar sized board with multiple ethernet ports? It'd be rather nice to have an all-in-one tiny router/firewall. Something with perhaps four eithernet ports and maybe a way to add 802.11b/g? Google has turned up nothing thus far...
I'd personally just be worried about the noise. Unfortunately, an impeller spinning that fast is just going to be noisy.:( What about a larger, slow-moving fan? After all, you shouldn't have to worry much about dust...
Seeing as the BTX spec calls for a specific channel to the front of the case to allow air for cooling the CPU, I can already see the air conditioner + dryer vent hose into front of case mods. Also, the part of the spec which calls for a method to mount a device through the motherboard to the chassis, sort of like the original P4 heatsinks, is wonderful. It should be so much easier to design high performance, low noise coolers now.
Actually, no you don't. If you take a look at Microsoft's site here, you can download a free version of Microsoft Outlook 2001 designed for connecting to Exchange servers only (read: no non-MS mail servers). It's not completely like Outlook for Windows, but it'll at least get Mac users talking to their company's Exchange mail servers.
At those prices you are only talking about the CD media itself. These prices do not include jewel cases, liner notes, shrink wrap, spine labels, shipping, etc. While each may be a few cents, after a while they add up so that the production cost for a finished, physical CD is much closer to $1 - $3.
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Just FYI, that licensing cost is most likely a developer per-seat cost with some redistribution allowed.
As far as per-user stuff, it's likely that most people use QNX in one form or another every day without knowing it. From cable boxes to ATMs, traffic lights, etc.
QNX is put in places where failure cannot happen. At all.
I'll give this a try once I'm back home at my Mac... Going MP3 -> AAC is trivial, so hopefully this is all there is to it.
Do these audiobooks have the same 'feature' as iTunes / Audible.com audio books, whereas if you stop playing them and go to listen to something else, they start up where you left off?
If so, can I ask how you make files do that? I'd love to set a number of DJ mixes / live sets to do this, but I haven't had much luck in figuring out how.
Thanks!
Actually, I've got a NeoGeo as well. And you're right, it *is* built like a tank. I need to do a bit of work on mine still, but it generally works fine.
7 2
http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/condo_basement/DCP_05
That shot's down in the basement of the MAME cabinet and the NeoGeo right near each other.
I made it. :) It's juts 3/4" MDF like the rest of the cabinet is... I actually made the whole thing from scratch, cloning a Data East cabinet and adding 3" - 4" to it.
If anyone is interested, here are a bunch of photos I took of my MAME cabinet when I built it back in the summer of 2000. The pictures are kinda crappy, and were all taken at my parents house, but they show a full stand-up MAME machine, with a cabinet made competely from scratch. The cabinet was patterned off of a Data East Robocop / Bad Dudes cabinet, but made a bit deeper to accomidate my monitor.
Just FYI, the particular pair of Sennheisers I have fit very comfortably with glasses on. It's possible that some other models of theirs don't, but these are just perfect.
I probably would have gone with another brand, but I found these on clearance (for some reason) for something like $32. Extra dirt cheap for *great* headphones.
I'd love a pair like those Sony's, though. Match them with a nice tube amp... Mmm...
Get a pair of rather nice, open-back, full ear headphones. The set I use with my iPod are Sennheiser HD 590's (purchased at The Great Indoors for ~$30, down from ~$70). They sound absolutely amazing, but because they aren't sealed you can still hear the phone, people talking directly to you, etc.
Earbuds are nice and cheap, but they block out too much sound. You need to ensure that the headphones are really comfortable and have a nice long cord, though, since you'll probably want to move around your desk a bit and be wearing them for hours on end. Also, if you are running the sound out of your desktop or notebook and it's kinda crappy (bad S/N ratio, interferance, etc) look into a Griffin Technologies iMic. As they are just a standard USB audio device, they work without drivers on Macs or PCs and sound excellent.
I personally find it extremely rude when coworkers insist on playing music out loud (headphones solve this) or having conference calls on speakerphone (that's what headsets are for). Hopefully if more people start using a more personal listening device, the workplace will be calmer for everyone.
Oh, and if your local library doesn't have any of the books you desire, ask them to do an Inter-Library Loan. It might take a few days to get the book you want, but it's possible to have things transfered in from all over the country as needed. In fact, you can find almost any piece you want this way, in-print or not.
How about hitting up your local library and getting a book from there? Not all learning needs to be done on a computer, and libraries are the ideal place to get books. :)
Heh. I've actually made a stand-up MAME cabinet, too.
7 2.
Pictures at http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/arcade. There's a picture of both game systems at http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/condo_basement/DCP_05
Actually, I think you have the last bit slightly backwards. The MVS (the arcade NeoGeo) carts were new, they were a few hundred dollars a piece, as opposed to the AES (home version) carts which were around a hundred. The pinout difference was to keep arcade ops from putting AES carts in MVS machines. For the most part, SNK (like most other arcade game vendors) sold the game systems and carts for a set price, then the operators made money off the plays. That's why they cost so much.
The reason you see so many adapters these days for playing MVS games in AES devices is because MVS games are (with few exceptions) a few dollars to a few tens of dollars on eBay, while actual AES carts are worth much more.
Luckily I found a full stand-up MVS locally, so I snagged that for $500. A few hundred later and I've got a 30-some title of MVS games. And there's something about playing at a stand-up machine that is just great.
I happen to have a Pentuim II 450 development sample CPU. That means no multiplier lock. It's been running at 500mhz since 1998 without any problems. It's probably been powered off for a total of about 6 months in this time. I'm about to put it in a new colocation facility, (technically) overclocked to 500mhz, and I fully expect it run stable, as it has. For years.
The best way I've found is to taper off your caffeine usage to maybe half a cup of coffee per day, then just stop.
Yes, it sucks. Yes, you'll get headaches for four to five days. And yes, you may end up with some weird flu-like symptoms after about a week.
But, after all the feeling-like-crap for a while, you'll be over it. You just have to deal with it.
This might be a little off-topic, but the ZyXEL ZyAIR B-4000 has come in handy for a number of small wireless POPs I've talked to. Basically, it's a self-contained AP / billing / access control system that's available for ~$700. There's a Tom's Hardware review here detailing a bit about how it works. In short, you program the buttons on the front for whatever time/price you want, and the receipt printer spits out a serialized receipt containing a password which will allow the user's machine to access the network for X period of time. Nice and simple for non-techies to operate.
/week this way, the price would remain cheap, the hardware would be reliable, and easy for anyone working the coffee shop to use.
I'd imagine that if you did a $5/day or
I think you might want to take a look at the Stereophile Review of the iPod. If you read the article, what is actually (between the lines) reviewed is the DAC of the iPod, which is incredible. I'll attest to this*. Sure, MP3 generally sounds like ass, as to lower bitrate AAC files, but that's a product of lossy compression, not the player itself. iPods themselves sound absolutely wonderful, especially if you use the line out (often from the dock) into your stereo.
*At home I have my iPod dock in the living room hooked to a mid-range NAD receiver and some Gekko speakers. It just sounds amazing.
Sorry. I guess I took a while to reply... I didn't do any direct Vorbis-AAC comparisons, but both sounded better than MP3 to me. The MP3s I was using were created with iTunes as 192kbps VBR. My biggest problem with MP3 has been the tendancy to distort high end stuff and almost sound sloshy and watery.
I'd been using Ogg Vorbis for about two years, but I really wanted an iPod. Going back to MP3 seemed like a step down, but switching to AAC is much nicer.
I just can't wait for ~5 years to pass so I can rip everything to a straight PCM bitstream, be it AIFF, WAV, AU, or whatnot. It would be real nice to see something like FLAC, or a non-lossy compression, but I don't know if Apple will add that anytime soon (yes, I know you can do it with plugins...), and I don't want to use all my drive space for that. Yet. Maybe once I can get 1TB disks off the shelf.
Price it at, or less than, US$1k, and they'll sell a boatload. I know I'd buy one. Make it a widescreen (1920 x 1200) at that price, and they'll fly out the door into the hands of designers and developers both.
Hell, I'd buy one without question.
I purchased a 30GB iPod back in May.
And almost returned it.
MusicMatch is such garbage that I had a very, very hard time getting it to see my iPod. Once I did, I had a hard time getting any of my personal music in it. I too had the problem with my iPod being 'full' with only a few songs in it...
Then I found EphPod. This piece of software kept me using my iPod under Windows for a few months. After that I got a used PowerMac G4 Cube, switched to iTunes, and never looked back.
With iTunes for Windows I think that Apple finally has a complete system in place for users to rip and sync music properly. Not the MusicMatch hack...
This is a good thing, in my opinion.
3. AAC support. Okay, Ogg Vorbis is more Stalmanist, blah blah blah, but AAC at 128 sounds as good or better, at least to me, as VBR MP3 while taking up less space on the HD.
...and it's been proven.
Psst. Not to be rude, but at 128kbps MP3 and AAC will take the same amount of space for the same length track. AAC will sound markedly better.
I personally used to be a huge Ogg Vorbis fan, then I got an iPod and went back to MP3s for convience. Having acquired a G5 earlier this month, I decided to try reripping parts of my collection to AAC, just as a test. And there is a difference.
I have my iPod running line in to my car stereo, and with 192kbps MP3s (using Apple's encoder, which is very good), they'd occasionally sound flat, somewhat muffled, and just generally not as good as the in-dash stereo. Switching to same-bitrate AACs, everything sounds a bit brighter, almost indistinguishable from audio CDs in the player itself.
I've seen the same results in my living room as well, where I have a second dock running line out straight into the stereo.
Regarding the parent post, though, I think that the big seller with the iPod is the interface. It works night and day better than the competition, and the menuing system is very, very similar to the 'Browse' layout in iTunes.
Apple is big on design and style. Combine this, with a product that works very well and is priced reasonably, and you've got a winner.
Does anyone know of a similar sized board with multiple ethernet ports? It'd be rather nice to have an all-in-one tiny router/firewall. Something with perhaps four eithernet ports and maybe a way to add 802.11b/g? Google has turned up nothing thus far...
I'd personally just be worried about the noise. Unfortunately, an impeller spinning that fast is just going to be noisy. :( What about a larger, slow-moving fan? After all, you shouldn't have to worry much about dust...
Seeing as the BTX spec calls for a specific channel to the front of the case to allow air for cooling the CPU, I can already see the air conditioner + dryer vent hose into front of case mods. Also, the part of the spec which calls for a method to mount a device through the motherboard to the chassis, sort of like the original P4 heatsinks, is wonderful. It should be so much easier to design high performance, low noise coolers now.
Actually, no you don't. If you take a look at Microsoft's site here, you can download a free version of Microsoft Outlook 2001 designed for connecting to Exchange servers only (read: no non-MS mail servers). It's not completely like Outlook for Windows, but it'll at least get Mac users talking to their company's Exchange mail servers.
At those prices you are only talking about the CD media itself. These prices do not include jewel cases, liner notes, shrink wrap, spine labels, shipping, etc. While each may be a few cents, after a while they add up so that the production cost for a finished, physical CD is much closer to $1 - $3.