That's per song per listener, so multiply that by the number of listeners. Also, if you hear a second's worth of the song and then decide you don't like it or you lose your connection, the webcaster still gets charged as if you heard the whole song...and the webcaster is going to have to keep track of when and who listens and what they listen to--i.e. do RIAA's market research for them at their own expense. Also, come October, all webcasters get billed for the past four years, and have to pay up all at once.
Anyone care to bet on whether, once the per-listener/per-song fees are finally in and all the appeals over, the RIAA will fire up scads of tasks to suck down webcast streams and run the meter up as high as they can?
(For that matter, over in the Unintended Consequences Dept., look for changes to webcasting software to force the streams to start on song boundaries and do something--maybe pop-up windows à la NetZero--to make sure there's a human at the other end actually listening. Once the per-listener/per-song fees are in place, webcasters will really not like you if you forget and leave XMMS running while you're on your two-week trip to Australia...)
X...can ask the monitor for the ModeLine info and negotiate a mode compatible with the card and the monitor automatically.
OK...that's cool, and perhaps things such as the RH installation X configuration churns out the ModeLine info just for completeness's sake or to simplify the code that writes the configuration file, but...given that that's the case, and that I will presumably never bother with a monitor that doesn't do DDC again, what's the least I can get away with putting in the configuration file to minimize changes when I do change monitors?
While it is unfortunate that the smaller webcasters we have come to enjoy are going under, it will make more room in terms of bandwidth for the larger stations (the ones better able to afford the type of resources necessary to provide a reasonable listening experience.)
To borrow a paraphrase from the Good Doctor (Asimov), that is much like unto the excrement of the male bovine. The larger stations that can afford the fees (and are those insane record keeping requirements still in place?) will be the ones that churn out the same mind-numbing bilge that commercial radio already provides.
You get exactly what you want, e.g. stuff that you can be sure works and plays well with Linux. You can be sure you're not cutting corners with case or cooling.
You can be sure that you're not paying the Microsoft Tax.
There is a certain amount of satisfaction from doing it yourself, even if all you're doing is hooking together a few major subsystems.
Con:
If something goes wrong, the buck will be passed--it was the other guy's component, or you screwed up when you put it together. You have to be sure that the components work and play well with one another, and you can't just take it to someone, look pitiful, and say "fix it" when something goes wrong. (If you are the "that's a hardware problem" type, this may well be important to you.)
There is at least one anxiety-inducing step in putting together one's own system, namely installing the heat sink and fan on the CPU. I have so far always wimped out and asked someone with more experience to do that...just be sure you know what you're doing and what precautions to take.
The prospect of "fewer regulations" is not a uniformly "good thing." There may be regulations that [are|seem to be] overzealous and overbearing, but many regulations are designed to protect you.
Well...when you go to the store to buy an iron or a hair dryer, is it the government that protects you? No...but the Underwriters Laboratories approval tag is almost certainly on the appliance you buy. UL is not a governmental body.
But either way, I'm of the mind that if you're developing client- or server-side Java software, it's pretty easy to document what version(s) of Sun's JVM you support, as well as exactly how to get them. Then someone goes, takes five minutes, and downloads them. End of story.
Well...unless, of course, you're on a dialup line, in which case it takes a lot longer. The more inconvenient MS can make it to use Java, the better for MS.
Well, yes, just as in the 50s and 60s there were people who wanted laws against murder enforced but didn't think much of laws imposing, say, segregation. I don't think the implication of hypocrisy is valid.
...I wonder how MS is going to retaliate? (Also, a few times I've pestered the local brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart about whether they sell computers without an OS--"Gee, walmart.com has them..."--and I'll probably ask them about these, too. Will Wal-Mart ever sell these in the brick-and-mortar stores?)
Re:A Recommendation to Submitters
on
IMSAI Series Two
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Please reread the subtitle of/.: News for Nerds. The vast majority of the target audience does know about the S-100 bus, first designed for the Altair and common to most of the 8080/Z80 CP/M microcomputers of the late 70s and early 80s, and about the IMSAI, one of those computers. (Besides, the linked site has the background information; one need only follow the link.)
It would have to become very popular indeed to be able to pull off an "engulf and extinguish" (the best I could do for a phrase with assonance à la "embrace and extend")--MS and IE still has the advantage of being preloaded on nearly every retail computer, and were Mozilla to try it, MS would, I am sure, suddenly add a lot of new non-standard features, and have the ability to encourage them to appear in new web sites (e.g. making sure that their web page editor emits them, requiring them of others to get some sort of MS stamp of approval, or even flat out paying people to make their web sites use IE-specific features). Mozilla would end up on a perpetual catchup treadmill of a sort that even IBM had to give up on (vide the win32s.dll scam MS pulled on them to break compatibility with OS/2).
Light dimmers using varacs have been around for a long time, and they generate huge amounts of RFI--as an SWLer I hate them with a passion. Does anyone know whether the hash they emit extends up into the band used for WiFi?
What perturbs me about this article comes later, when they talk about the notion of converting so that you need a digital cable box to watch anything. Digital cable is truly loathesome:
Think back to the days before "cable ready" TVs and VCRs; those days are back with digital cable. Oh, you just bought a fancy picture-in-picture set? Too bad; it doesn't work and play well with digital cable.
Digital cable brings you the joys of horrid, lossy compressed video and audio--that's one of the main points, giving you as lousy audio and video as you will put up with in order to be able to cram as many home shopping and pay-per-view channels in as possible.
Friend, I agree for the most part with your comments, but whenever I hear a BBC newsreader say something about/Muh-NAG-yoo-uh Nick-uh-RAG-yoo-uh/ or/JAG-yoo-ar/ automobiles, or refer to/Don JOO-un/, I can only (1) wish that I could listen to a blackboard being scratched instead, and (2) conclude that Americans inherited their fine disregard for pronunciation of borrowed words from England along with other linguistic and legal concepts.
English spelling is a lost cause in any case; if we tried to make it phonetic, whose phonetics would we choose? (Ah, well; what do you expect with hundreds of years of backwards compatibility?)
...we compare the very latest Rambus RAM against previous generation DDR (isn't DDR333 available now?), find one benchmark in which the Rambus RAM runs about 4% faster, and say that Rambus "excels." What's wrong with this picture?
...then people are going to get a lot more perturbed with pop-{up, under, etc.} ads and spam very quickly, because those will be running the meter for things they don't want. (To be sure, the effect is probably minimal compared with the bandwidth I'm eating by listening to Internet radio, but it's having the gratuitous bandwidth usage imposed on you that will be the irritant.)
Speaking of webcasters, I can't help thinking that RIAA would be very happy if metered billing by ISPs went through. A 30Kbytes/sec. feed would be 1.8 Mbyte/min., so a gigabyte in maybe seven hours of listening. You wouldn't even need the insane royalty and record-keeping requirements CARP wanted to impose to kill webcasting, if all the listeners suddenly decide they can't afford to stay tuned in for very long. Then everyone can go back to being force-fed the latest clone band and obediently buying CDs they way they're supposed to...
While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, the second quote is not from George Washington; it dates from a later time--I think it was when US vessels were being hassled by the Barbary pirates. (Ah...it was in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, during the Adams administration.)
...because I'm heavily reminded of Marc Siegler's nifty SF novel Earthweb. I commend it to everyone's attention for its depiction of the functioning of "idea futures" markets. (Contrary to an earlier troller, a very capitalistic idea.)
First, our right to speech is granted (i.e., it is not presumed) by the Constitution...
Eh? I commend the Declaration of Independence to your attention. Government, in the view of the founders, does not grant rights; you have rights by virtue of being human. Governments are established to protect those rights that you already have.
Even more ironic: Eratosthenes was hassled by his fellows, nicknamed "Beta" because he wasn't the best at anything. Now we honor Eratosthenes for his prime sieve and for calculating the circumference of the earth, among other things...and we just know his fellows because they were jerks. Pace Larry Niven, sometimes there is justice.
Well...I grabbed SOT Office for Linux in RPM format.rpm -i did its thing, but: running the setup program cheerfully copied 250+ megabytes of stuff per run. Also, anything in SOT Office but the setup program gives me the splash screen and then goes away when I try to run it. (Admittedly I'm using RH Skipjack Beta 2, so it's not clear whose fault this is.) It's going to have to make my coffee for me and shine my shoes in the morning to be worth a quarter of a gigabyte per user...
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That's per song per listener, so multiply that by the number of listeners. Also, if you hear a second's worth of the song and then decide you don't like it or you lose your connection, the webcaster still gets charged as if you heard the whole song...and the webcaster is going to have to keep track of when and who listens and what they listen to--i.e. do RIAA's market research for them at their own expense. Also, come October, all webcasters get billed for the past four years, and have to pay up all at once.
Anyone care to bet on whether, once the per-listener/per-song fees are finally in and all the appeals over, the RIAA will fire up scads of tasks to suck down webcast streams and run the meter up as high as they can?
(For that matter, over in the Unintended Consequences Dept., look for changes to webcasting software to force the streams to start on song boundaries and do something--maybe pop-up windows à la NetZero--to make sure there's a human at the other end actually listening. Once the per-listener/per-song fees are in place, webcasters will really not like you if you forget and leave XMMS running while you're on your two-week trip to Australia...)
X...can ask the monitor for the ModeLine info and negotiate a mode compatible with the card and the monitor automatically.
OK...that's cool, and perhaps things such as the RH installation X configuration churns out the ModeLine info just for completeness's sake or to simplify the code that writes the configuration file, but...given that that's the case, and that I will presumably never bother with a monitor that doesn't do DDC again, what's the least I can get away with putting in the configuration file to minimize changes when I do change monitors?
To borrow a paraphrase from the Good Doctor (Asimov), that is much like unto the excrement of the male bovine. The larger stations that can afford the fees (and are those insane record keeping requirements still in place?) will be the ones that churn out the same mind-numbing bilge that commercial radio already provides.
Sigh. It was great while it lasted...
- You get exactly what you want, e.g. stuff that you can be sure works and plays well with Linux. You can be sure you're not cutting corners with case or cooling.
- You can be sure that you're not paying the Microsoft Tax.
- There is a certain amount of satisfaction from doing it yourself, even if all you're doing is hooking together a few major subsystems.
Con:Well...when you go to the store to buy an iron or a hair dryer, is it the government that protects you? No...but the Underwriters Laboratories approval tag is almost certainly on the appliance you buy. UL is not a governmental body.
(Apologies to Martina McBride.)
Well...unless, of course, you're on a dialup line, in which case it takes a lot longer. The more inconvenient MS can make it to use Java, the better for MS.
Well, yes, just as in the 50s and 60s there were people who wanted laws against murder enforced but didn't think much of laws imposing, say, segregation. I don't think the implication of hypocrisy is valid.
...I wonder how MS is going to retaliate? (Also, a few times I've pestered the local brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart about whether they sell computers without an OS--"Gee, walmart.com has them..."--and I'll probably ask them about these, too. Will Wal-Mart ever sell these in the brick-and-mortar stores?)
Please reread the subtitle of /.: News for Nerds. The vast majority of the target audience does know about the S-100 bus, first designed for the Altair and common to most of the 8080/Z80 CP/M microcomputers of the late 70s and early 80s, and about the IMSAI, one of those computers. (Besides, the linked site has the background information; one need only follow the link.)
It would have to become very popular indeed to be able to pull off an "engulf and extinguish" (the best I could do for a phrase with assonance à la "embrace and extend")--MS and IE still has the advantage of being preloaded on nearly every retail computer, and were Mozilla to try it, MS would, I am sure, suddenly add a lot of new non-standard features, and have the ability to encourage them to appear in new web sites (e.g. making sure that their web page editor emits them, requiring them of others to get some sort of MS stamp of approval, or even flat out paying people to make their web sites use IE-specific features). Mozilla would end up on a perpetual catchup treadmill of a sort that even IBM had to give up on (vide the win32s.dll scam MS pulled on them to break compatibility with OS/2).
I see that they're offering it for a kilobuck...remember when that was the price of a 64K Ithaca Intersystems S100 bus RAM card kit?
Light dimmers using varacs have been around for a long time, and they generate huge amounts of RFI--as an SWLer I hate them with a passion. Does anyone know whether the hash they emit extends up into the band used for WiFi?
What perturbs me about this article comes later, when they talk about the notion of converting so that you need a digital cable box to watch anything. Digital cable is truly loathesome:
Friend, I agree for the most part with your comments, but whenever I hear a BBC newsreader say something about /Muh-NAG-yoo-uh Nick-uh-RAG-yoo-uh/ or /JAG-yoo-ar/ automobiles, or refer to /Don JOO-un/, I can only (1) wish that I could listen to a blackboard being scratched instead, and (2) conclude that Americans inherited their fine disregard for pronunciation of borrowed words from England along with other linguistic and legal concepts.
English spelling is a lost cause in any case; if we tried to make it phonetic, whose phonetics would we choose? (Ah, well; what do you expect with hundreds of years of backwards compatibility?)
...we compare the very latest Rambus RAM against previous generation DDR (isn't DDR333 available now?), find one benchmark in which the Rambus RAM runs about 4% faster, and say that Rambus "excels." What's wrong with this picture?
Speaking of webcasters, I can't help thinking that RIAA would be very happy if metered billing by ISPs went through. A 30Kbytes/sec. feed would be 1.8 Mbyte/min., so a gigabyte in maybe seven hours of listening. You wouldn't even need the insane royalty and record-keeping requirements CARP wanted to impose to kill webcasting, if all the listeners suddenly decide they can't afford to stay tuned in for very long. Then everyone can go back to being force-fed the latest clone band and obediently buying CDs they way they're supposed to...
While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, the second quote is not from George Washington; it dates from a later time--I think it was when US vessels were being hassled by the Barbary pirates. (Ah...it was in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, during the Adams administration.)
...because I'm heavily reminded of Marc Siegler's nifty SF novel Earthweb . I commend it to everyone's attention for its depiction of the functioning of "idea futures" markets. (Contrary to an earlier troller, a very capitalistic idea.)
Eh? I commend the Declaration of Independence to your attention. Government, in the view of the founders, does not grant rights; you have rights by virtue of being human. Governments are established to protect those rights that you already have.
Eh? I'm using RC1 under RH 7.3, and it handles FindYourSpot.com without complaint or hang.
Do you actually have a known defect list for another large piece of software as a basis for comparison?
Even more ironic: Eratosthenes was hassled by his fellows, nicknamed "Beta" because he wasn't the best at anything. Now we honor Eratosthenes for his prime sieve and for calculating the circumference of the earth, among other things...and we just know his fellows because they were jerks. Pace Larry Niven, sometimes there is justice.
Well...I grabbed SOT Office for Linux in RPM format.rpm -i did its thing, but: running the setup program cheerfully copied 250+ megabytes of stuff per run. Also, anything in SOT Office but the setup program gives me the splash screen and then goes away when I try to run it. (Admittedly I'm using RH Skipjack Beta 2, so it's not clear whose fault this is.) It's going to have to make my coffee for me and shine my shoes in the morning to be worth a quarter of a gigabyte per user...