Yep, I use the BroadQ Qcast Tuner almost daily to play Ogg Vorbis files from my FreeBSD box. It also can serve files from Windows, OS X, and any *nix that has a JRE and X.
I use the BroadQ Qcast Tuner on my PS2 serving files off of a FreeBSD machine almost daily. With the Linux Binary Compatability stuff installed, you just install the JRE through the ports collection and it works. Really well, in fact.
Where did you find T-Cards for $5/ea? I've been looking for just a single one for the longest time, and they always seem to be at least $40/ea. So hard to find, in fact, that I'm working on designing and routing a 4-device FC backplane and just making them myself.
I made a Fibre Channel array like this last year. The only difference being that I used a MylexeXtremeRAID 3000 (eBay for $200), a 256MB Crucial DIMM for cache, and four SeagateST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM disks.
My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.
There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.
Standing Wave Experiment by Ryoki Ikeda
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 1
An interesting album to listen to with such a setup is Ryoji Ikeda's matrix for rooms. (review here).
From the review... Now, by turning your head and/or slowly moving around the room, the sounds do change, slightly... perhaps with a little more patience and better-developed neck muscles I could have learned to "play" a particular tune, but mostly only get a bit of an not-excitingly-noticeable up-down-up-down pitch shift, sort of.
There's no reason to use sftp for publically available files. This is for the exact same reason that you wouldn't use https. There's no need for encyption of something that is freely, publically available. Checksums, yes, encryption, no.
I personally would say go with http for the files, as it'll be much easier for people behind http proxies to download, it'll get cached more often by transparant proxies, and most browsers support browsing http directories FAR better than FTP directories.
Although slightly off topic, if you are interested in something like this for your PS2, check out the broadqQCast Tuner for PS2. It too plays MP3s, OGG Vorbis, DiVX/xvid, MPEG-1, etc. It doesn't require a mod chip, which is nice, but it does requre the ~$40 PS2 network adapter. The developers are also extremely active on the forum, making it simple to get help.
And no, I'm not a broadq employee, I'm just a really satisfied customer.
Take a look around at some off-lease computer equipment places. These displays have been around for a few years, and the Sony tube can be found in monitors that are branded otherwise. For example, I have an IBM P260 here that I picked up locally for $193 after tax. It's a 20" IBM flatscreen CRT that happens to have a Sony Trinitron tube. No different than a Sony-branded one except for the plastic case. Besides IBM, I know that HP and Sun also do this... So, check the off-lease places. The only one I can personally recommend is Second Wind PCs in Troy, Michigan, but they are all over.
I highly doubt you'd need five PCs. What you would need, though, is four MPEG2 hardware capture cards with built-on TV tuners. Remember, a MPEG2 isn't all that big... From rough estimates in my head, any modern DMA100 IDE disk should be able to handle the bandwidth of four MPEG2 streams. You also won't need that powerful of a CPU, either. I'd say that with a little bit of special capture software (that can address four different cards) that will do tuning and scheduling and a TV-out device (Composive, S-Video, and Component) with hardware MPEG2 decoding (or a fairly fast box), you'll have all you need. If they are combination capture / playback cards, you could technically have four outs, too. Might be nice for family time. Queue it up so capture takes priority on all cards but one, or...? The possibilities are endless.
But anyway, I personally would think that you would only need two or MAYBE 3 streams at once, but if you already have software to address more than one card, why stop with just two? As long as the hard drive and PCI bus can handle it, you're set.
Actually, if you take a look here: http://ed-thelen.org/ you can see that Nike Hercules were typically only conventionally tipped for training purposes (it was the Nike Ajax that was conventional-only) and most had Surface-to-Surface capabilities. Granted, their range would typically keep them within the continental US, but also all water ways, etc. But this is only for US-based missles. They were also deployed all over Europe, Korea, etc.
I take it that you either forget or don't know about the US government putting nuclear missle launch sites hidden in rather urban areas? In fact, from where I sit right now (Auburn Hills, MI, a fairly commercial area) there are old launch silos in the wooded parts of the campus of Oakland University, right next door. (See http://members.tripod.com/nikehercules/d-97.html for more information.
So while I believe you are correct in theory, in practice sometimes the public isn't quite aware.
10 digit dialing is a good thing. What needs to happen is a nation wide push to get everyone to use 10 digit dialing for everything. You could even tie it in with the so-called War on Terrorism or something to get Joe Sixpack to jump on it. This will eliminate all the problems of needing a 1- for some areas, not for others, area code for some inter-LATA calls, not for others, etc. After all, most people are used to it from their cell phones, so how much of a switch would it really be?
Easy solution... Just call up your phone company and tell them you want trunk hunting set up across the three lines that you have. In my experience this hasn't cost any extra, and it'll cause one number to roll over to the next phones if the first is busy.
Is this what you're looking to do? It works well and doesn't cost anything.
Yes, actually. Loss leading work VERY well. Or if the product is in stock, people tend to use the "Well, since I'm here and this was so cheap..." mentality. It's very hard for small buisnesses to compete with large stores which can afford to loss lead. When Best Buy (the bigggest example in this area) sells the latest pop-whatever disc for $8.99, the store loses a dollar or two. What typically happens next is someone buys another CD at full price, BB makes $3, for a net total of $1 (which is still better than nothing) and the customer is slightly more inclined to say that BB has the cheapest prices, and the customer will come back.
Or if nothing else it simply keeps the customers from going to a competitor for that one disc, slipping the knife ever so slightly further in.
- First off, this lawsuit is *NOT* about price fixing. It is about record labels enforcing a minimum advertised pricing (MAP). This is when the labels would say that stores can't advertise X cd for less than X price.
- Second, MAP isn't actually that bad of a thing from the perspective of small retailers. See, since this ruling, large stores like Best Buy will commonly advertise 'New CD X' at $8.99, far below their cost. This is done just to get people in the store. It's called loss leading, and something that only stores with deep pockets can do. Because of the price it's likely that all the discs are sold out, but the people are already there, so they are likely to purchase something. This hurts small retailers by drawing buisness from small retailers to the large stores. Small retailers can compete price wise on CDs when everything is normally priced, but there is no way a $1000/day store can compete with an extremely diversified $25,000/day.
Oh, and yes, I do work at a small, independant record store. And for point of reference, cost on new major label CDs typically varies between $11 and $15. CDs are typically marked up about 25%. Not very much, eh? Oh, and remember, it's the major labels primaraly, then the RIAA secondaraly that are screwing you. Not the retailer. Support independant labels and stores, lest you lose the ability to find non-mainstream music with much ease.
One thing I'm thinking of doing is purchasing one of those desks with the computer enclosure area, then turning that enclosure area into a giant vented muffler.
Basically, I'll build a small, stripped-down, completely open custom case that fits inside this enclosure, line the enclosure with THICK sound absorbtion material (doesn't matter how much it insulates), then built a muffler system on to the back. I may even have it vent down through two holes into my basement. This would help keep the basement warmer all while removing heat and noise from the CPU.
I'm sure at that point I'd start taking issue with noise from my monitor...
I can't see it being a problem if you were to duct the hot air from the computer into your home's cold air return. (Provided the house uses forced air heat.) After all, cold air returns typically aren't ducted and are just formed with the drywall/plaster and studs.
Then again, monitors give off plenty of heat on their own, so this may all be a moot point.
The Nokia Ringtone Composer (part of this package here for the 3360) allows you to compose ringtones and send them via IR. You can also import MIDI songs and play with them from there... I'm sure there are more tools on Nokia's site, but these are the only ones I have experience with. These are great, though. Ringtones, sync with Outlook, full phone backup, etc, all over IR.
I can sort of understand this. From my skimming of the article, it looks like the employees were offering their time in an official capacity while off hours. This is somewhat of a no-no, because then the employees are presenting themselves as representatives of their employer, during a time which they are not at work. This could potentially cause all sorts of problems for the company, since the employees won't be working within the offical support model framework that the company uses. (eg: Solution for X is Y, etc.)
This is akin to an employee offering up advice to people on the street corner, off hours, saying that it's the offical position of his employer. It would introduce all sorts of legal headaches if something gets broken, someone gets misinformed, etc.
I fail to see anything in this article that says that employees cannot offer tech support off hours, it just says that they can't do it and say it's the stance of their employer, as indicated by "As of December 31, BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity." So what's to keep someone from helping out without saying it's their company's line? Nothing.
The reason I did it is for greater speed, lower noise, and less heat in my office. Sure, I can pick up a 120GB IDE disk for 25% of the price, and that will give me all the storage I need. But it won't give me the raw speed that is absolutely wonderful when doing audio capture or editing, large image editing, etc. Anyway, anything that you need really large amounts of storage for are typically (unless you're doing video editing) things that you don't need high speed access for. That's why the large disk are in the file server. 100mb full duplex with disks on a DMA100 interface is more than I ever need for my large storage needs. Hell, it's pretty much as fast as a local disk. Samba is your friend.
Utilizing eBay and a few vendors that I dug around for, I was able to assemble a blazingly fast fibre channel RAID system for home for around $500. If you take a look at http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/fibrechannel you can see the assembly of the box. There are also benchmarks detailing the RAID 5 array bursting to >160MB/sec (image at http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/fc_benchmarks/aad).
The box is set up as follows:
o Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 ($200 via eBay) o Crucial 256MB DIMM for Cache (~$50 from Crucial) o 4 x Seagate ST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM drives ($9/ea on eBay) o Venus-brand 4-disk external enclosure (~$35 on eBay) o Custom made FC-AL backplane for disks (~$200 from a site I can't remember at this time) o 35m FC-AL cable (HSSDCDB9) (~$40 for two on eBay)
The best part? The box is located in my basement, so I have this incredibly fast disk disk access, with no noise and no extra heat inside my case. That also allows me to cool the case more efficiently. Sure, IDE RAID may be cheaper, but the performance, per-disk, coupled with the reduced noise in my office and the reduced heat in the case is a big plus. Also, I might eventually pick up a second backplane for another four disks and do RAID 0+1. Since each channel is capable of 100MB/sec (without caching), the use of a set created across two channels would be amazing.
A few years ago I lived in Alaska. Because of this, I'll still give my Alaska zip code whenever asked; 99901. Best Buy (or wherever) employees NEVER actually enter this zip code. They either get a confused look and enter the store's zip, or they ask me if that's real.
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Dick... Brown... Pull... Out...
Yep, I use the BroadQ Qcast Tuner almost daily to play Ogg Vorbis files from my FreeBSD box. It also can serve files from Windows, OS X, and any *nix that has a JRE and X.
I use the BroadQ Qcast Tuner on my PS2 serving files off of a FreeBSD machine almost daily. With the Linux Binary Compatability stuff installed, you just install the JRE through the ports collection and it works. Really well, in fact.
If you'd like the disk read, I've still got a few brand-new 5.25" floppy drives here. I could hook one up and pull the data off for you sometime.
Where did you find T-Cards for $5/ea? I've been looking for just a single one for the longest time, and they always seem to be at least $40/ea. So hard to find, in fact, that I'm working on designing and routing a 4-device FC backplane and just making them myself.
I made a Fibre Channel array like this last year. The only difference being that I used a Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 (eBay for $200), a 256MB Crucial DIMM for cache, and four Seagate ST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM disks.
My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.
There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.
An interesting album to listen to with such a setup is Ryoji Ikeda's matrix for rooms. (review here).
From the review...
Now, by turning your head and/or slowly moving around the room, the sounds do change, slightly... perhaps with a little more patience and better-developed neck muscles I could have learned to "play" a particular tune, but mostly only get a bit of an not-excitingly-noticeable up-down-up-down pitch shift, sort of.
There's no reason to use sftp for publically available files. This is for the exact same reason that you wouldn't use https. There's no need for encyption of something that is freely, publically available. Checksums, yes, encryption, no.
I personally would say go with http for the files, as it'll be much easier for people behind http proxies to download, it'll get cached more often by transparant proxies, and most browsers support browsing http directories FAR better than FTP directories.
Although slightly off topic, if you are interested in something like this for your PS2, check out the broadq QCast Tuner for PS2. It too plays MP3s, OGG Vorbis, DiVX/xvid, MPEG-1, etc. It doesn't require a mod chip, which is nice, but it does requre the ~$40 PS2 network adapter. The developers are also extremely active on the forum, making it simple to get help.
And no, I'm not a broadq employee, I'm just a really satisfied customer.
-Steve
Take a look around at some off-lease computer equipment places. These displays have been around for a few years, and the Sony tube can be found in monitors that are branded otherwise. For example, I have an IBM P260 here that I picked up locally for $193 after tax. It's a 20" IBM flatscreen CRT that happens to have a Sony Trinitron tube. No different than a Sony-branded one except for the plastic case. Besides IBM, I know that HP and Sun also do this... So, check the off-lease places. The only one I can personally recommend is Second Wind PCs in Troy, Michigan, but they are all over.
I highly doubt you'd need five PCs. What you would need, though, is four MPEG2 hardware capture cards with built-on TV tuners. Remember, a MPEG2 isn't all that big... From rough estimates in my head, any modern DMA100 IDE disk should be able to handle the bandwidth of four MPEG2 streams. You also won't need that powerful of a CPU, either. I'd say that with a little bit of special capture software (that can address four different cards) that will do tuning and scheduling and a TV-out device (Composive, S-Video, and Component) with hardware MPEG2 decoding (or a fairly fast box), you'll have all you need. If they are combination capture / playback cards, you could technically have four outs, too. Might be nice for family time. Queue it up so capture takes priority on all cards but one, or...? The possibilities are endless.
But anyway, I personally would think that you would only need two or MAYBE 3 streams at once, but if you already have software to address more than one card, why stop with just two? As long as the hard drive and PCI bus can handle it, you're set.
Actually, if you take a look here: http://ed-thelen.org/ you can see that Nike Hercules were typically only conventionally tipped for training purposes (it was the Nike Ajax that was conventional-only) and most had Surface-to-Surface capabilities. Granted, their range would typically keep them within the continental US, but also all water ways, etc. But this is only for US-based missles. They were also deployed all over Europe, Korea, etc.
I take it that you either forget or don't know about the US government putting nuclear missle launch sites hidden in rather urban areas? In fact, from where I sit right now (Auburn Hills, MI, a fairly commercial area) there are old launch silos in the wooded parts of the campus of Oakland University, right next door. (See http://members.tripod.com/nikehercules/d-97.html for more information.
So while I believe you are correct in theory, in practice sometimes the public isn't quite aware.
10 digit dialing is a good thing. What needs to happen is a nation wide push to get everyone to use 10 digit dialing for everything. You could even tie it in with the so-called War on Terrorism or something to get Joe Sixpack to jump on it. This will eliminate all the problems of needing a 1- for some areas, not for others, area code for some inter-LATA calls, not for others, etc. After all, most people are used to it from their cell phones, so how much of a switch would it really be?
Easy solution... Just call up your phone company and tell them you want trunk hunting set up across the three lines that you have. In my experience this hasn't cost any extra, and it'll cause one number to roll over to the next phones if the first is busy.
Is this what you're looking to do? It works well and doesn't cost anything.
Oh? It's not a gas guzzler? 12/17 (14 Average) sure looks like to me. That's just about the same as a Cadillac Esclade.
Yes, actually. Loss leading work VERY well. Or if the product is in stock, people tend to use the "Well, since I'm here and this was so cheap..." mentality. It's very hard for small buisnesses to compete with large stores which can afford to loss lead. When Best Buy (the bigggest example in this area) sells the latest pop-whatever disc for $8.99, the store loses a dollar or two. What typically happens next is someone buys another CD at full price, BB makes $3, for a net total of $1 (which is still better than nothing) and the customer is slightly more inclined to say that BB has the cheapest prices, and the customer will come back.
Or if nothing else it simply keeps the customers from going to a competitor for that one disc, slipping the knife ever so slightly further in.
A few points:
- First off, this lawsuit is *NOT* about price fixing. It is about record labels enforcing a minimum advertised pricing (MAP). This is when the labels would say that stores can't advertise X cd for less than X price.
- Second, MAP isn't actually that bad of a thing from the perspective of small retailers. See, since this ruling, large stores like Best Buy will commonly advertise 'New CD X' at $8.99, far below their cost. This is done just to get people in the store. It's called loss leading, and something that only stores with deep pockets can do. Because of the price it's likely that all the discs are sold out, but the people are already there, so they are likely to purchase something. This hurts small retailers by drawing buisness from small retailers to the large stores. Small retailers can compete price wise on CDs when everything is normally priced, but there is no way a $1000/day store can compete with an extremely diversified $25,000/day.
Oh, and yes, I do work at a small, independant record store. And for point of reference, cost on new major label CDs typically varies between $11 and $15. CDs are typically marked up about 25%. Not very much, eh? Oh, and remember, it's the major labels primaraly, then the RIAA secondaraly that are screwing you. Not the retailer. Support independant labels and stores, lest you lose the ability to find non-mainstream music with much ease.
One thing I'm thinking of doing is purchasing one of those desks with the computer enclosure area, then turning that enclosure area into a giant vented muffler.
Basically, I'll build a small, stripped-down, completely open custom case that fits inside this enclosure, line the enclosure with THICK sound absorbtion material (doesn't matter how much it insulates), then built a muffler system on to the back. I may even have it vent down through two holes into my basement. This would help keep the basement warmer all while removing heat and noise from the CPU.
I'm sure at that point I'd start taking issue with noise from my monitor...
I can't see it being a problem if you were to duct the hot air from the computer into your home's cold air return. (Provided the house uses forced air heat.) After all, cold air returns typically aren't ducted and are just formed with the drywall/plaster and studs.
Then again, monitors give off plenty of heat on their own, so this may all be a moot point.
The Nokia Ringtone Composer (part of this package here for the 3360) allows you to compose ringtones and send them via IR. You can also import MIDI songs and play with them from there... I'm sure there are more tools on Nokia's site, but these are the only ones I have experience with. These are great, though. Ringtones, sync with Outlook, full phone backup, etc, all over IR.
I can sort of understand this. From my skimming of the article, it looks like the employees were offering their time in an official capacity while off hours. This is somewhat of a no-no, because then the employees are presenting themselves as representatives of their employer, during a time which they are not at work. This could potentially cause all sorts of problems for the company, since the employees won't be working within the offical support model framework that the company uses. (eg: Solution for X is Y, etc.)
This is akin to an employee offering up advice to people on the street corner, off hours, saying that it's the offical position of his employer. It would introduce all sorts of legal headaches if something gets broken, someone gets misinformed, etc.
I fail to see anything in this article that says that employees cannot offer tech support off hours, it just says that they can't do it and say it's the stance of their employer, as indicated by "As of December 31, BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity." So what's to keep someone from helping out without saying it's their company's line? Nothing.
The reason I did it is for greater speed, lower noise, and less heat in my office. Sure, I can pick up a 120GB IDE disk for 25% of the price, and that will give me all the storage I need. But it won't give me the raw speed that is absolutely wonderful when doing audio capture or editing, large image editing, etc. Anyway, anything that you need really large amounts of storage for are typically (unless you're doing video editing) things that you don't need high speed access for. That's why the large disk are in the file server. 100mb full duplex with disks on a DMA100 interface is more than I ever need for my large storage needs. Hell, it's pretty much as fast as a local disk. Samba is your friend.
Utilizing eBay and a few vendors that I dug around for, I was able to assemble a blazingly fast fibre channel RAID system for home for around $500. If you take a look at http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/fibrechannel you can see the assembly of the box. There are also benchmarks detailing the RAID 5 array bursting to >160MB/sec (image at http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/fc_benchmarks/aad).
The box is set up as follows:
o Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 ($200 via eBay)
o Crucial 256MB DIMM for Cache (~$50 from Crucial)
o 4 x Seagate ST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM drives ($9/ea on eBay)
o Venus-brand 4-disk external enclosure (~$35 on eBay)
o Custom made FC-AL backplane for disks (~$200 from a site I can't remember at this time)
o 35m FC-AL cable (HSSDCDB9) (~$40 for two on eBay)
The best part? The box is located in my basement, so I have this incredibly fast disk disk access, with no noise and no extra heat inside my case. That also allows me to cool the case more efficiently. Sure, IDE RAID may be cheaper, but the performance, per-disk, coupled with the reduced noise in my office and the reduced heat in the case is a big plus. Also, I might eventually pick up a second backplane for another four disks and do RAID 0+1. Since each channel is capable of 100MB/sec (without caching), the use of a set created across two channels would be amazing.
A few years ago I lived in Alaska. Because of this, I'll still give my Alaska zip code whenever asked; 99901. Best Buy (or wherever) employees NEVER actually enter this zip code. They either get a confused look and enter the store's zip, or they ask me if that's real.
Go ahead... Use this one.