If you burn and then rip to ALP (or FLAC or even WAVE), you'll have an audio stream which is identical to the 128kbit AAC with the exception of jitter (which hardly anyone notices, especially with low bitrate files). Re-encoding in AAC won't be a noticable decrease in quality.
The Minitar AP is hardly the first AP for such an issue to surface. My Linksys WRT54G wireless router is also Linux based, which has been great as it has given birth to some interesting firmware and OS variations.
The concern for drivers isn't as big as you would think. Why spend AU$60 or 70 bucks on a realtek wireless card when for AU$80 (in our recent Melbourne Wireless bulk buy) you can have a complete, standalone, managed network device. Around our community wireless group, these devices are very popular for their possibility of expanding their functionality to include routing and fault tolerence technologies at a fraction of the cost of a commercial solution which we neither want or can afford. This is also helpful as we can implement peer-to-peer IBSS mode which is better suited for point to point links. Additionally, it allows us to build a wireless node for $80 an interface (excluding antenna and cabling) simply by pkugging in an extra device into a switch or hub.
I believe the common issue with releasing wireless drivers for open sourced OS's is that the cards can be reprogrammed to use wireless channels which may violate their telecommunications (eg, austel, FCC) certification by operating in frequency ranges of which they are not permitted.
I think that due to the cost of APs. vs using a PC as an AP these days, especially in running costs, that the protection of infrastructure-mode AP capabilities is really pointless anyway.
HVAC is too expensive! So we went for swampies.
on
DIY HVAC
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· Score: 3, Informative
Over the past few years, we've had to replace our 20 year old central heating system (as our old one died) and recently, we've had cooling installed in the house.
Originally, we investigated the possibility of going for an HVAC reverse-cycle capable system but the running costs, along with the prohibitive installation costs were from Mars, or something. They wanted "only" AU$3000 for install of the three phase, plus it was about ten grand for the system and installation.
Installing split-system wall units was also an idea, however, cold air doesn't easily move throughout the house due to airflow being restricted so you'd realistically want units in every room. All of a sudden, Carrier's centrally airconditioned system doesn't look too bad.
In the end, we went with two evaporative coolers from a company called Brivis (Australian). These units are self-cleaning and self-maintained, too, so we don't have to dash up on the roof every six months. Our heating system is also from the same company and was the most efficient on the market when we had it installed.
Now, the nifty thing is that our wall controllers have backlight LCD displays and use RS232 (or 422 - I can't remember but I know that it was standard) for communication, so it should be easy to, say, hook one up to a PC if I really wanted to, although these AU$200 wall controllers have been installed in factory environments with 12 coolers in them. On one controller.
And because the installers of the cooling were slack (we should be able to have both coolers AND the heater on the ONE controller) and didn't want to run cables under the house, they installed seperate controllers for each cooler. So I've got one to play with if I felt like running some cables.
So how is it? Cheap to run, but be warned that evaporative coolers are better when you start them in the morning before it gets hot - the ideas is to cool the air by moving a lot of it. Windows need to be kept open to allow the airflow to occur or else things get very humid. And on a reasonable day, I've had the coolers bring the temperature from 38C down to a comfortable 21C.
But as other people have observed, these coolers become ineffective on humid days - we had a day with 80% relative humidity where the temp came down from 40C to about 32C - still a change, but it was still hellishly humid inside.
I'd love real HVAC cooling. It's dry, quiet and I can keep all the doors and windows closed, however it costs a fortune to install and a fortune to run.
Also, most HVAC systems had zoning as a feature. Heck, my heating has zoning built-in. I don't see what all the fuss is about.
According to the PDF specification sheet from Sony, not only can the Hi-MD walkman be used as a 1GB storage devices for files, but it seems to support the USB mass storage specification, using a FAT filesystem similar to that of those popular USB flash keys.
So yes, and this includes standard MD media formatted in the Hi-MD format (300MB), however, this only applies to Hi-MD units.
* iPods have poor battery life compared to the NetMD and Hi-MD units (8 hours spec-sheet vs. about 30) * iPods can't record - only accept uploads. * iPods are HDD-based, so less resilient. * NetMD players are smaller and lighter than even the iPod mini so I would expect the trend to continue with the similar sized Hi-MD walkman. * The Hi-MD walkman is the first to support PCM recording - while the iPod can play back PCM wave files, the Hi-MD walkman can also record them in realtime, effectively a pro-sumer solution to the bulky and expensive DAT format.
This is primarily a portable music format - and people aren't buying CD players anymore because they want portability. That's why I bought my MD walkman back at the beginning of 2000 and a NetMD unit when they were released.
If they want lots of music, they could simply purchase Sony's own D-NE710 (no link because Sony's website appears to use session ID information) which supports ATRAC3 and MP3(!) files simply recorded to a CD or CDRW disc. I would expect some Taiwanese company will release a similar system based around DVD media, if they haven't already.
As 48Kbps is specified as a codec sampling rate of ATRAC3plus, I would think that this would be what it is referring to.
According to the PDF specification sheet, the actual data transfer rate of the Hi-MD discs is (a maximum of?) 9.83Mbit/sec, so appraching that of USB 1.1 flash devices.
These new Hi-MD players support native PCM equal-to-CD-quality recording. Goodbye DAT, hello Minidisc - while DAT offers 48KHz sampling, it is nowhere as small and resilient as the minidisc format which was originally developed for portability as a key design requirement. Plus, battery life on the DAT walkmans rarely exceeds 4 hours in ideal situations.
And if you use the mic input (the specs explicitly mention mic-in so this may not apply to line-in), you can upload your PCM recording at high speed to a PC and master it straight onto a CD.
If it's a first-generation copy, the SCMS bit isn't set on the media it is recorded to (eg, DAT or MD). If you're going to a second digital source and expect to make copies from *that* (i.e. MD -> DAT -> CD) then you're out of luck. Note that no portable unit has digital output (except I believe the original MZ-1 portable recorder released in 1993 which had shocking audio encoding).
However, an easy solution would be to run the digital in to a Creative SB Live Platinum or Audigy Platinum card (you need the digital I/O -or- grab a hoontech third-party optical I/O bracket), disable all internal sounds and analog processing and just run the digital out to your target. Bingo, it strips the SCMS bits like a charm:)
You can perform uploads of tracks recorded onto the MD via the microphone, however, no mention of whether line-in works the same way (so it's great for bootlegs, but not quite there yet for production or those who are lucky to get soundboard recordings).
NetMD never stored the information as an encrypted format (which is strange that Sony think otherwise) - it was simply marked as 'protected'. When transferring a song in short play using the standard ATRAC codec, the transfer between the PC and the device was encrypted (but decrypted at the device's end), however, LP2 and LP4 tracks using ATRAC3 were transferred natively.
I do believe Hi-MD will be handled in a more modern way (another challenge for DMCA rebels, anyone?)
Sonicstage is lame. I've used RealOne and you can delete tracks without checking them in again, so if you lose the original file, it simply goes about its merry way. You can also use NetMD simple burner to do this (also note that NetMD simple burner creates tracks which aren't marked as PROTECTED).
Secondly, as the specification sheets specify the editability of tracks on the run, and given that this unit (unlike the previous NetMD units) is essentially marketed as an MP3 player, I'm hoping that this protected track issue is a thing of the past as there is a recording section of every Hi-MD disc reserved for storing DRM data, i.e. "this track is protected, don't allow it to be uploaded".
And lastly, when you 'check-in' a song, you're not transferring it back - you're only deleting it from the minidisc and allowing it to be transferred to another one. The OpenMG/NetMD system only allows three (3) checkouts per song. After that, you need to check it in from a disc before you can transfer it to another. Or rename/copy the file:)
The Hi-MD format not only supports a high-bitrate modern codec (ATRAC3plus 256Kbit/sec) to offer 7 hours and 55 minutes recording on a disc, but we now see the support for standard PCM recording! This will be a BIG HIT with the audiophiles who are dissatisfied with carrying around a DAT walkman with poor battery life and large size who can now replace these items with a tiny Hi-MD unit.
The bootleggers will go ape over this, especially given that it supports audio uploading from anything recorded with the microphone input! Too bad for those who use pre-amps and line-in, however.
The new Hi-MD players support USB file storage!
on
New Sony Minidisc Players
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· Score: 3, Informative
For some reason, Slashdot editors neglected to include the fact that you can use this to store data as well as music now (I was the 'Another reader' referred to in that post with the real links).
The unit can be used with either the 300MB (standard MD media) or 1GB (the new Hi-MD format) disks and draws power from USB so that the music player becomes a portable USB storage device. No idea whether it supports the USB mass storage standard or whether it has its own whacky way of doing things, but it's something that should have been possible from the start.
Any music stored on the device will be visible but protected and the device won't play standard music files if they're simply transferred to the data area. You still need to use SonicStage (the Sony equiv of iTunes) to transfer your files, although there are a few thirty party tools around (such as RealOne) which use the same drivers but sport a much nicer (and stable) interface.
Needless to say, a 1GB disk should be plenty for keeping documents and such around, perhaps even a bootable linux distro such as Knoppix can be adapted for this, assuming it supports standard USB mass-stroage. Now that'd be cool:)
DDoS attacks are a fact of life on the Internet for some people. SCO should just sit down, shut up and accept what has happened. Hell, were they even PAYING per megabyte for traffic received? Probably not.
The host of the IRC server I run, however, was. In Australia, bandwidth is pretty much per megabyte everywhere, especially in the corporate sector.
We were hit with a DDoS attack a few months ago which was considerably bigger than SCO's little attack. Try figured up around the ability to saturate an entire 100Mbit/sec Fast Ethernet port. The main effect was not the traffic, it was the router simply overloading (A 7206 with an NPE-200 I believe) from the sheer amount of traffic flows created from the DDoS. It was a synflood attack, of sorts.
This particular attack came from a network of trojan clonebots. These were distributed by exploiting the recent RPC DCOM flaws in Windows. Upon infection, the client starts and connects to an IRC server as specified by a 'free' dynamic DNS host, pointing to the IRC server of the attacker's choice. They join a pre-determined channel, where the attacker can join and issue commands to about five thousand bots at once. These include synflood, infect, send files from users' PCs etc.
We were not the only IRC server hit. Several thousand dollars of bandwidth flowed past the router before the upstream placed a block on it. Unfortunately, an ACL on the router probably wouldn't help terribly much, as the router itself was suffering, not the IRC server being attacked.
SCO, being a company with many enemies, should have anticpiated such an attack and adjusted their configurations accordingly.
You don't keed to be Kreskin to look into Linux's future. Even a child knows that Linux is dying. All major marketing surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim.
Due to the troubles of Linux, abysmal sales and so on, SuSE went out of business and was taken over by Novell who sell another troubled OS. Now RedHat is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
The numbers continue to decline for Novell but Linux may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for Linux continues in a head spinning downward spiral. In truth, for all practical purposes Linux is already dead. It is a dead man walking. It's a fact: Linux is dying.
Alongside the AGDC, there was an event called the AGDC LANfest.
It was interesting to see the reaction of the developers as they walked through the LANning area, the main response being "What on earth is this?". Maybe that's why some games have rather lame LAN netcode. As for sleeping arrangements, there wasn't any sleeping permitted in the venue. Some of the LAN admins got no sleep at all (I just woke up from a 13 hour sleep).
The cocktail party was cool - all over 18 attendees of the LAN event could attend, too, and enjoy the merits of free beer and mingle with the developers.
I did have a look at the nVidia stand, in fact, I saw the tweaktown guys pass through while I was there, taking their snaps. Yes, the GeforceFX takes up two slots and the fan isn't exactly quiet either.
The LANfest is our last event before the Big Day In.
Sun only allow payment via VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. Most people who would make use of the Solaris 9 OS would be students or hobbyists such as myself. I don't have a credit card so I have no way of downloading this software as a result - cheque and postal money orders are available if I spend over US$195.
I wouldn't expect many students to download this one as a result, so we'll have less people with experience with Solaris 9 once they graduate. Guess what? They'll all use Linux.
Also, downloading this OS with an Australian broadband download cap is prohibitive, too, which would add extra costs as well.
Dell offer the C/Dock II docking station which includes full PCI capability. Although you need a Latitude notebook (or an Inspiron flashed with the Latitude bios - The 8200 is the same system board as the Latitude C840 although the Latitude is marketed towards businesses), it goes to show that the capability is there if you really need it, say, for audio or SCSI. The C/dock II includes SCSI as well.
The Dell Inspiron 8000, 8100 and 8200 have interchangable parts. You can get the M9000 graphics module and stick it on a P3 850 Inspiron 8000, for example. Dell spare parts don't sell their parts for much, either.
I bought the Inspiron 8200 about five months ago when the P4-M 2GHz processor first made it to market - it's a 2Ghz machine with 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD, 15" 1600x1200 screen, two batteries, geforce4go 440 64MB, 24x10x24x/8x combo drive and integrated 802.11b Orinoco wireless (they call it a Dell TrueMobile 1150).
I take it everywhere, especially to LANs. It's a heavyweight machine, around 4KG with both batteries inserted. But it's essentially a desktop machine - I use it as my desktop machine for everything including games.
It was a logical choice for me as I run large LAN events such as the Shafted Big Day In and attend LAN events on a weekly basis. It's really, really handy to pick up the unit and head off to a LAN, no lugging large PCs/monitors around which simply aren't designed for it.
It's fast, even at 1600x1200. Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Halflife (and its mods) run smooth (and I would guess the R9000 would outperform it based on the benchmarks at Tom's Hardware Guide vs. the Geforce4Go 440). UT2003 is a little more demanding without the vertex and pixel shaders of the R9000 so I usually stick to 1024x768 - quite acceptable.
The screen is a nice size. I've decided that anything bigger than a 17" CRT is too big for gaming as your eyes have to move across large areas of the screen too frequently, so in a notebook, a 15" screen is about as big as you would want. The image scaling, as I run my Windows desktop at 1152x864, is very decent and readable on the Geforce4Go 440 although I have read that the R9000 does a FAR better job. Those who are sensitive to high frame rates and refresh rates on CRT screens may find the LCD a bit annoying - it's not the blur effect that one would expect - the Dell UltraSharp(R)(TM)(C) screen has a 9ms rise/16ms fall response time, so as the screen is only statically updated at 60Hz (vs. the 120hz of my 17" display at home), you notice the difference in frames a lot more than a CRT - remember with a CRT, it blurs a lot more so you don't see the frame transitions. So you don't get blur, but it's like watching a movie. Most people don't notice it, in fact, only one other has to my knowledge
It runs Linux. The nVidia drivers work like a charm. It plays games under Linux. I haven't tried FreeBSD yet with the nVidia drivers. While the nVidia site says that the mobile chips are not supported, they are - this is purely a "support" issue, not a driver compatibility one. Oh, and I run at 1600x1200 under Linux - X on a notebook with generous desktop realestate is just way too nice.
For audio, me being a bit of an audio buff, is Dell's major letdown here. They use the Crystal Semiconductor CS4205 AC'97 system which is hardly nice. I do use headphones but the lack of accelerated audio really gives some games a good 5%-10% framerate penalty, even more if the game is badly coded (eg, Battlefield 1942). You don't get directsound 3D or any funky multichannel audio. You do get SPDIF digital out so you can run it to your receiver or 5.1 channel speaker system and do AC-3/DTS passthrough when playing DVDs.
Battery life is nice, realistically, I get around 4.5 hours off a pair of batteries compared to the spec-sheet times of 1.5 hours for Toshiba's equiv model at the time (the Satellite 5100, the current being the 5200 claiming 3 hours but could be a result of a second battery as they added this ability in the 5200). My reasons for going Dell were based on battery life and support more than anything else.
So in short, a great machine that offers pretty much all the basic features of a desktop machine and is an excellent choice for LANners.
Ever been involved with a company who has exhibited at such a trade show? It gets expensive. Thousands upon thousands of dollars and that's for a *small* booth.
I don't have exact figures, there doesn't seem to be anything on the website. I do know that for the big IT trade show in Melbourne last year (they cancelled it this year due to lack of attendance because nobody was exhibiting because it costs so much and they don't get return on investment), the Linux Users of Victoria had a free booth along with the Melbourne PC user group.
I noticed that Dell offer an external fold-up keyboard with this device, making it as useful as a lightweight notebook if you're like me and prefer typing than writing. It seems to be the first portable PocketPC device with such an option (I've seen the keyboards for the Palms and they work really well especially when taking notes).
THe missing feature? No PCMCIA slot so I can't throw a Cisco wireless card in there and do a site survey easily. I'd be restricted to the cards in the CF form factor where there are not as many options/features.
But it's got a good price. Hell, US$200 seems damn sweet for me. Beats the pants off a secondhand Compaq 206mhz unit for the price.
We saw this with the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). Designed as a cheaper and more mainstream alternative to DAT (digital audio tape), it used a compression scheme comparable to the older ATRAC compression routines use in the older MD units but was priced way too high to gain market share.
MD has taken off. Many of my friends have MD players. I've bought two in the last few years, the most recent is the NetMD MZ-N1 (bought it upon release, OpenMG, the software used to transfer audio via USB SUCKS).
Interestingly enough, I like to be able to transfer my completely legal CDs to MiniDisc (it's also better quality than MP3 and ATRAC is almost perfect now). I just chose the MD platform as it was small and not solid state storage based. Oh, and hard drive MP3 players suck up too much battery and didn't sound as good.
Slashdot Mirror
If you burn and then rip to ALP (or FLAC or even WAVE), you'll have an audio stream which is identical to the 128kbit AAC with the exception of jitter (which hardly anyone notices, especially with low bitrate files). Re-encoding in AAC won't be a noticable decrease in quality.
The Minitar AP is hardly the first AP for such an issue to surface. My Linksys WRT54G wireless router is also Linux based, which has been great as it has given birth to some interesting firmware and OS variations.
The concern for drivers isn't as big as you would think. Why spend AU$60 or 70 bucks on a realtek wireless card when for AU$80 (in our recent Melbourne Wireless bulk buy) you can have a complete, standalone, managed network device. Around our community wireless group, these devices are very popular for their possibility of expanding their functionality to include routing and fault tolerence technologies at a fraction of the cost of a commercial solution which we neither want or can afford. This is also helpful as we can implement peer-to-peer IBSS mode which is better suited for point to point links. Additionally, it allows us to build a wireless node for $80 an interface (excluding antenna and cabling) simply by pkugging in an extra device into a switch or hub.
I believe the common issue with releasing wireless drivers for open sourced OS's is that the cards can be reprogrammed to use wireless channels which may violate their telecommunications (eg, austel, FCC) certification by operating in frequency ranges of which they are not permitted.
I think that due to the cost of APs. vs using a PC as an AP these days, especially in running costs, that the protection of infrastructure-mode AP capabilities is really pointless anyway.
Over the past few years, we've had to replace our 20 year old central heating system (as our old one died) and recently, we've had cooling installed in the house.
Originally, we investigated the possibility of going for an HVAC reverse-cycle capable system but the running costs, along with the prohibitive installation costs were from Mars, or something. They wanted "only" AU$3000 for install of the three phase, plus it was about ten grand for the system and installation.
Installing split-system wall units was also an idea, however, cold air doesn't easily move throughout the house due to airflow being restricted so you'd realistically want units in every room. All of a sudden, Carrier's centrally airconditioned system doesn't look too bad.
In the end, we went with two evaporative coolers from a company called Brivis (Australian). These units are self-cleaning and self-maintained, too, so we don't have to dash up on the roof every six months. Our heating system is also from the same company and was the most efficient on the market when we had it installed.
Now, the nifty thing is that our wall controllers have backlight LCD displays and use RS232 (or 422 - I can't remember but I know that it was standard) for communication, so it should be easy to, say, hook one up to a PC if I really wanted to, although these AU$200 wall controllers have been installed in factory environments with 12 coolers in them. On one controller.
And because the installers of the cooling were slack (we should be able to have both coolers AND the heater on the ONE controller) and didn't want to run cables under the house, they installed seperate controllers for each cooler. So I've got one to play with if I felt like running some cables.
So how is it? Cheap to run, but be warned that evaporative coolers are better when you start them in the morning before it gets hot - the ideas is to cool the air by moving a lot of it. Windows need to be kept open to allow the airflow to occur or else things get very humid. And on a reasonable day, I've had the coolers bring the temperature from 38C down to a comfortable 21C.
But as other people have observed, these coolers become ineffective on humid days - we had a day with 80% relative humidity where the temp came down from 40C to about 32C - still a change, but it was still hellishly humid inside.
I'd love real HVAC cooling. It's dry, quiet and I can keep all the doors and windows closed, however it costs a fortune to install and a fortune to run.
Also, most HVAC systems had zoning as a feature. Heck, my heating has zoning built-in. I don't see what all the fuss is about.
According to the PDF specification sheet from Sony, not only can the Hi-MD walkman be used as a 1GB storage devices for files, but it seems to support the USB mass storage specification, using a FAT filesystem similar to that of those popular USB flash keys.
So yes, and this includes standard MD media formatted in the Hi-MD format (300MB), however, this only applies to Hi-MD units.
Quite a lot:
* iPods have poor battery life compared to the NetMD and Hi-MD units (8 hours spec-sheet vs. about 30)
* iPods can't record - only accept uploads.
* iPods are HDD-based, so less resilient.
* NetMD players are smaller and lighter than even the iPod mini so I would expect the trend to continue with the similar sized Hi-MD walkman.
* The Hi-MD walkman is the first to support PCM recording - while the iPod can play back PCM wave files, the Hi-MD walkman can also record them in realtime, effectively a pro-sumer solution to the bulky and expensive DAT format.
Because very few pockets can hold a CD player.
This is primarily a portable music format - and people aren't buying CD players anymore because they want portability. That's why I bought my MD walkman back at the beginning of 2000 and a NetMD unit when they were released.
If they want lots of music, they could simply purchase Sony's own D-NE710 (no link because Sony's website appears to use session ID information) which supports ATRAC3 and MP3(!) files simply recorded to a CD or CDRW disc. I would expect some Taiwanese company will release a similar system based around DVD media, if they haven't already.
As 48Kbps is specified as a codec sampling rate of ATRAC3plus, I would think that this would be what it is referring to.
According to the PDF specification sheet, the actual data transfer rate of the Hi-MD discs is (a maximum of?) 9.83Mbit/sec, so appraching that of USB 1.1 flash devices.
Yep, you heard right.
:)
These new Hi-MD players support native PCM equal-to-CD-quality recording. Goodbye DAT, hello Minidisc - while DAT offers 48KHz sampling, it is nowhere as small and resilient as the minidisc format which was originally developed for portability as a key design requirement. Plus, battery life on the DAT walkmans rarely exceeds 4 hours in ideal situations.
And if you use the mic input (the specs explicitly mention mic-in so this may not apply to line-in), you can upload your PCM recording at high speed to a PC and master it straight onto a CD.
The Hi-MD is a bootleggers dream
If it's a first-generation copy, the SCMS bit isn't set on the media it is recorded to (eg, DAT or MD). If you're going to a second digital source and expect to make copies from *that* (i.e. MD -> DAT -> CD) then you're out of luck. Note that no portable unit has digital output (except I believe the original MZ-1 portable recorder released in 1993 which had shocking audio encoding).
:)
However, an easy solution would be to run the digital in to a Creative SB Live Platinum or Audigy Platinum card (you need the digital I/O -or- grab a hoontech third-party optical I/O bracket), disable all internal sounds and analog processing and just run the digital out to your target. Bingo, it strips the SCMS bits like a charm
You can perform uploads of tracks recorded onto the MD via the microphone, however, no mention of whether line-in works the same way (so it's great for bootlegs, but not quite there yet for production or those who are lucky to get soundboard recordings).
NetMD never stored the information as an encrypted format (which is strange that Sony think otherwise) - it was simply marked as 'protected'. When transferring a song in short play using the standard ATRAC codec, the transfer between the PC and the device was encrypted (but decrypted at the device's end), however, LP2 and LP4 tracks using ATRAC3 were transferred natively.
I do believe Hi-MD will be handled in a more modern way (another challenge for DMCA rebels, anyone?)
A few clarifications.
:)
Sonicstage is lame. I've used RealOne and you can delete tracks without checking them in again, so if you lose the original file, it simply goes about its merry way. You can also use NetMD simple burner to do this (also note that NetMD simple burner creates tracks which aren't marked as PROTECTED).
Secondly, as the specification sheets specify the editability of tracks on the run, and given that this unit (unlike the previous NetMD units) is essentially marketed as an MP3 player, I'm hoping that this protected track issue is a thing of the past as there is a recording section of every Hi-MD disc reserved for storing DRM data, i.e. "this track is protected, don't allow it to be uploaded".
And lastly, when you 'check-in' a song, you're not transferring it back - you're only deleting it from the minidisc and allowing it to be transferred to another one. The OpenMG/NetMD system only allows three (3) checkouts per song. After that, you need to check it in from a disc before you can transfer it to another. Or rename/copy the file
The Hi-MD format not only supports a high-bitrate modern codec (ATRAC3plus 256Kbit/sec) to offer 7 hours and 55 minutes recording on a disc, but we now see the support for standard PCM recording! This will be a BIG HIT with the audiophiles who are dissatisfied with carrying around a DAT walkman with poor battery life and large size who can now replace these items with a tiny Hi-MD unit.
The bootleggers will go ape over this, especially given that it supports audio uploading from anything recorded with the microphone input! Too bad for those who use pre-amps and line-in, however.
For some reason, Slashdot editors neglected to include the fact that you can use this to store data as well as music now (I was the 'Another reader' referred to in that post with the real links).
:)
The unit can be used with either the 300MB (standard MD media) or 1GB (the new Hi-MD format) disks and draws power from USB so that the music player becomes a portable USB storage device. No idea whether it supports the USB mass storage standard or whether it has its own whacky way of doing things, but it's something that should have been possible from the start.
Any music stored on the device will be visible but protected and the device won't play standard music files if they're simply transferred to the data area. You still need to use SonicStage (the Sony equiv of iTunes) to transfer your files, although there are a few thirty party tools around (such as RealOne) which use the same drivers but sport a much nicer (and stable) interface.
Needless to say, a 1GB disk should be plenty for keeping documents and such around, perhaps even a bootable linux distro such as Knoppix can be adapted for this, assuming it supports standard USB mass-stroage. Now that'd be cool
DDoS attacks are a fact of life on the Internet for some people. SCO should just sit down, shut up and accept what has happened. Hell, were they even PAYING per megabyte for traffic received? Probably not.
The host of the IRC server I run, however, was. In Australia, bandwidth is pretty much per megabyte everywhere, especially in the corporate sector.
We were hit with a DDoS attack a few months ago which was considerably bigger than SCO's little attack. Try figured up around the ability to saturate an entire 100Mbit/sec Fast Ethernet port. The main effect was not the traffic, it was the router simply overloading (A 7206 with an NPE-200 I believe) from the sheer amount of traffic flows created from the DDoS. It was a synflood attack, of sorts.
This particular attack came from a network of trojan clonebots. These were distributed by exploiting the recent RPC DCOM flaws in Windows. Upon infection, the client starts and connects to an IRC server as specified by a 'free' dynamic DNS host, pointing to the IRC server of the attacker's choice. They join a pre-determined channel, where the attacker can join and issue commands to about five thousand bots at once. These include synflood, infect, send files from users' PCs etc.
We were not the only IRC server hit. Several thousand dollars of bandwidth flowed past the router before the upstream placed a block on it. Unfortunately, an ACL on the router probably wouldn't help terribly much, as the router itself was suffering, not the IRC server being attacked.
SCO, being a company with many enemies, should have anticpiated such an attack and adjusted their configurations accordingly.
You don't keed to be Kreskin to look into Linux's future. Even a child knows that Linux is dying. All major marketing surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim.
Due to the troubles of Linux, abysmal sales and so on, SuSE went out of business and was taken over by Novell who sell another troubled OS. Now RedHat is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
The numbers continue to decline for Novell but Linux may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for Linux continues in a head spinning downward spiral. In truth, for all practical purposes Linux is already dead. It is a dead man walking. It's a fact: Linux is dying.
(sorry, but it just fit so well!)
Alongside the AGDC, there was an event called the AGDC LANfest.
It was interesting to see the reaction of the developers as they walked through the LANning area, the main response being "What on earth is this?". Maybe that's why some games have rather lame LAN netcode. As for sleeping arrangements, there wasn't any sleeping permitted in the venue. Some of the LAN admins got no sleep at all (I just woke up from a 13 hour sleep).
The cocktail party was cool - all over 18 attendees of the LAN event could attend, too, and enjoy the merits of free beer and mingle with the developers.
I did have a look at the nVidia stand, in fact, I saw the tweaktown guys pass through while I was there, taking their snaps. Yes, the GeforceFX takes up two slots and the fan isn't exactly quiet either.
The LANfest is our last event before the Big Day In.
Sun only allow payment via VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. Most people who would make use of the Solaris 9 OS would be students or hobbyists such as myself. I don't have a credit card so I have no way of downloading this software as a result - cheque and postal money orders are available if I spend over US$195.
I wouldn't expect many students to download this one as a result, so we'll have less people with experience with Solaris 9 once they graduate. Guess what? They'll all use Linux.
Also, downloading this OS with an Australian broadband download cap is prohibitive, too, which would add extra costs as well.
Good work, Sun!
Dell offer the C/Dock II docking station which includes full PCI capability. Although you need a Latitude notebook (or an Inspiron flashed with the Latitude bios - The 8200 is the same system board as the Latitude C840 although the Latitude is marketed towards businesses), it goes to show that the capability is there if you really need it, say, for audio or SCSI. The C/dock II includes SCSI as well.
The Dell Inspiron 8000, 8100 and 8200 have interchangable parts. You can get the M9000 graphics module and stick it on a P3 850 Inspiron 8000, for example. Dell spare parts don't sell their parts for much, either.
Fantastic.
I bought the Inspiron 8200 about five months ago when the P4-M 2GHz processor first made it to market - it's a 2Ghz machine with 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD, 15" 1600x1200 screen, two batteries, geforce4go 440 64MB, 24x10x24x/8x combo drive and integrated 802.11b Orinoco wireless (they call it a Dell TrueMobile 1150).
I take it everywhere, especially to LANs. It's a heavyweight machine, around 4KG with both batteries inserted. But it's essentially a desktop machine - I use it as my desktop machine for everything including games.
It was a logical choice for me as I run large LAN events such as the Shafted Big Day In and attend LAN events on a weekly basis. It's really, really handy to pick up the unit and head off to a LAN, no lugging large PCs/monitors around which simply aren't designed for it.
It's fast, even at 1600x1200. Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Halflife (and its mods) run smooth (and I would guess the R9000 would outperform it based on the benchmarks at Tom's Hardware Guide vs. the Geforce4Go 440). UT2003 is a little more demanding without the vertex and pixel shaders of the R9000 so I usually stick to 1024x768 - quite acceptable.
The screen is a nice size. I've decided that anything bigger than a 17" CRT is too big for gaming as your eyes have to move across large areas of the screen too frequently, so in a notebook, a 15" screen is about as big as you would want. The image scaling, as I run my Windows desktop at 1152x864, is very decent and readable on the Geforce4Go 440 although I have read that the R9000 does a FAR better job. Those who are sensitive to high frame rates and refresh rates on CRT screens may find the LCD a bit annoying - it's not the blur effect that one would expect - the Dell UltraSharp(R)(TM)(C) screen has a 9ms rise/16ms fall response time, so as the screen is only statically updated at 60Hz (vs. the 120hz of my 17" display at home), you notice the difference in frames a lot more than a CRT - remember with a CRT, it blurs a lot more so you don't see the frame transitions. So you don't get blur, but it's like watching a movie. Most people don't notice it, in fact, only one other has to my knowledge
It runs Linux. The nVidia drivers work like a charm. It plays games under Linux. I haven't tried FreeBSD yet with the nVidia drivers. While the nVidia site says that the mobile chips are not supported, they are - this is purely a "support" issue, not a driver compatibility one. Oh, and I run at 1600x1200 under Linux - X on a notebook with generous desktop realestate is just way too nice.
For audio, me being a bit of an audio buff, is Dell's major letdown here. They use the Crystal Semiconductor CS4205 AC'97 system which is hardly nice. I do use headphones but the lack of accelerated audio really gives some games a good 5%-10% framerate penalty, even more if the game is badly coded (eg, Battlefield 1942). You don't get directsound 3D or any funky multichannel audio. You do get SPDIF digital out so you can run it to your receiver or 5.1 channel speaker system and do AC-3/DTS passthrough when playing DVDs.
Battery life is nice, realistically, I get around 4.5 hours off a pair of batteries compared to the spec-sheet times of 1.5 hours for Toshiba's equiv model at the time (the Satellite 5100, the current being the 5200 claiming 3 hours but could be a result of a second battery as they added this ability in the 5200). My reasons for going Dell were based on battery life and support more than anything else.
So in short, a great machine that offers pretty much all the basic features of a desktop machine and is an excellent choice for LANners.
ATI have released updated mobile drivers for their Radeon series under Linux which fixes the bugs which prevented UT2003 to run.
Can't remember where I read this.
Ever been involved with a company who has exhibited at such a trade show? It gets expensive. Thousands upon thousands of dollars and that's for a *small* booth.
I don't have exact figures, there doesn't seem to be anything on the website. I do know that for the big IT trade show in Melbourne last year (they cancelled it this year due to lack of attendance because nobody was exhibiting because it costs so much and they don't get return on investment), the Linux Users of Victoria had a free booth along with the Melbourne PC user group.
Is this visible from the land down under?
I noticed that Dell offer an external fold-up keyboard with this device, making it as useful as a lightweight notebook if you're like me and prefer typing than writing. It seems to be the first portable PocketPC device with such an option (I've seen the keyboards for the Palms and they work really well especially when taking notes).
THe missing feature? No PCMCIA slot so I can't throw a Cisco wireless card in there and do a site survey easily. I'd be restricted to the cards in the CF form factor where there are not as many options/features.
But it's got a good price. Hell, US$200 seems damn sweet for me. Beats the pants off a secondhand Compaq 206mhz unit for the price.
We saw this with the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). Designed as a cheaper and more mainstream alternative to DAT (digital audio tape), it used a compression scheme comparable to the older ATRAC compression routines use in the older MD units but was priced way too high to gain market share.
MD has taken off. Many of my friends have MD players. I've bought two in the last few years, the most recent is the NetMD MZ-N1 (bought it upon release, OpenMG, the software used to transfer audio via USB SUCKS).
Interestingly enough, I like to be able to transfer my completely legal CDs to MiniDisc (it's also better quality than MP3 and ATRAC is almost perfect now). I just chose the MD platform as it was small and not solid state storage based. Oh, and hard drive MP3 players suck up too much battery and didn't sound as good.