and MediaCentral. MediaCentral is a new OS X media player app but it's awesome, easy to use, light on resources, and is great at playing back stored media. Runs great on a base Mini with 256 MB RAM.
Thanks for the link. I'd not seen this one before and it looks ideal for my own Mac mini TV box.
That's like saying Fox News is Fair because people watch it. Puhlease.
There's a big difference though, and it's often mentioned here; when I purchase a song via iTunes or any other online service, I'm not usually under any obligation to purchase the entire album.
Therefore, if on one of those $12 album, there were 3 songs I actually liked, I'd be paying an average of $4 per track rather than the $1 per track I would be paying if I purchased the tracks separately.
And I've already commented that I don't consider that to be a bonus. It seems to be a Slashdot meme; repeating back at somebody an argument that they've already said they disagree with. Are you whoring for karma points?
I think it's a foolish argument - paying for the privilege of hearing part of an album. It's like reading the first chapter of a book or watching the first scene of a movie. If you're so lukewarm to an artist that you only want to hear a single song off their album, then it's hardly worth getting even that one song.
Holy cow! That line up sucks! It reads like a Worst 52 Albums of all time list.
G3: Live in Tokyo was performed by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and John Petrucci. Arguably the greatest rock guitarists of all time. It's a great album. You might not know the names but you'd definitely know their songs; e.g. Surfing With The Alien by Joe Satriani. The G3 series has been awesome with appearances by Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen.
People will pay for safety, speed and quality. $1 is fair,
Since when is $1 fair? I think $1 is simply what the market will bear, slightly above what the media monsters are charging Apple, and the price point that maximises (or at least comes close to maximising) Apple's profits.
Let's go back to the idea of "fair". I recently bought a stack of new music. I paid $12 average per album and there are 15 songs per album. These are Australian prices and over here iTunes is $1.69 per song. Crunching the numbers and using the iTunes $1.69/$1 as the comparison ratio, I paid 47 USA cents per song for non-DRM non-lossy CDDA quality audio with a jewel case, album cover, paper inserts and delivered on a pressed disc. By the way, the $12 average per album included delivery to my doorstep (I bought them online) and the delivery time was overnight.
Yet you think it's "fair" to pay $1 for a lossy version of the same song, with no physical media, while you pay for the bandwidth required to download it, not to mention the monthly payments to your Internet provider? Give me a break! It's a ripoff. $1 is far from fair. It's significantly overpriced compared to the old model of music distribution. Considering the lower overheads of online delivery it should be significantly cheaper than 47 USA cents per song. I'm not going to pay double that for the "privilege" of hearing only some songs off an album and avoiding 1 sleep.
What I would like to see is not a 1TB harddrive, the size I can get today by buying two harddrives, but rather:
Speed: It is a real bottleneck, to wait for disk access. SCSI is expensive for the home user still.
I no longer care about the speed of disks. The speeds are adequate - even high quality video will stream just fine at 15Mbps and my machines never swap - but the problem I have is backups. My home directory alone, containing nothing more than mail and work related documents, is over 15GB. My tape backup unit is 10GB. A DVD backup is 4.7GB. They're all too small. I can "backup" to another hard disk (which is what I do) but that's not a reliable archive.
I want a 100GB recordable disc for under $1. It could read/write at 2MB/s (big B for bytes) and I'd be happy. An hour and a half for a backup is acceptable. It's the capacity that is lacking.
They give both sides a chance to talk about the issue,
They give "both" sides a chance. What happens when there are more than two sides? What happens when one of the sides is stupid and unworthy of equal airtime? What happens when they poorly represent one of the sides?
Don't fall for the trap of thinking "both" sides is "fair and balanced". The world can't be modelled by a single line between two extremes, with the truth lying somewhere in the middle.
If you want a media machine for the living room, I can really recommend a Mac Mini. It already has everything you need for multimedia. Get the bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse.
I have both - a Mac mini with Logitech bluetooth keyboard/mouse and a softmodded Xbox running XBMC - and the Xbox is better. Video playback is smoother. The XBMC interface is better suited for remote control (which I prefer over the keyboard/mouse). XBMC works with my programmable remote so it integrates nicely with the amplifier. XBMC supports more video/audio formats out of the box and supports all the common network stores (samba, daap, shoutcast). The audio output from the Xbox is definitely better (5.1 digital) and the video output - I'm using a PAL dongle on the mini - is much clearer from the Xbox. The XBMC startup time is on par with the mini time to wake from sleep. The XBMC interface is slick whereas the mini interface is a WIMP desktop, which doesn't really suit the hifi environment.
The mini is good but is more effort to maintain and the interface is more "general" which I consider to be a negative. However the mini is really useful as a TV terminal for web surfing, iTunes, photo manipulation, etc. Also the Xbox can be noisy - although with newer releases of XBMC the fan is dynamically controlled and mine often goes drops to 10%, which is basically silent.
I got both because they were cheap (both of them plus all the accessories for under $500USD) but if you were restricted to buying only one, I'd get the Xbox.
I'm sure we can lend them some expertise -- NZ's first geothermal plant was commissioned in the '50s...
(apparently, we get 18% of our primary energy from geothermal sources)
NZ has a different area of expertise. NZ has naturally occuring hot water springs. Tapping those is relatively easy. That's why NZ has had geothermal energy for so long. Iceland was in a similar fortunate position and they also have geothermal.
Australia is drier than Oscar Wilde's wit. There are no naturally occuring hot water springs. The technology being researched in Australia is Hot Dry Rock. The rocks are dry and you pump fluids down into the rocks. The water is forced through naturally occuring horizontal fissures in the rocks and collected by a second bore. This only works when there are insulating rocks above, below and around the fissures. Otherwise the fluid disperses and you never collect back enough water to make the system economical.
When it does work it's brilliant. The system powers itself and the only significant issue is dealing with scale buildup on the pipes. The energy output is enormous and the capital investment is modest. A single plant can power a small city with almost no pollution and no (as yet known) environmental impact.
I've ran the numbers for solar cells and windmill generators and can't see the overall savings. Taking into account the manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs, are these techniques better for the environment or any cheaper?
Wind turbines pay for their total life energy cost within the first 9 months. They repay their energy input many dozens of times within their lifetime. The materials are also highly recyclable. Offshore farms are practical in many countries and have minimal impact on the environment. The issues of mooring are already well understood, due to the efforts devoted to offshore oil rigs.
I think money will be better spent in more efficient storage of energy. Batteries, salts and event heat tanks all interest me. I'm not seeing any long term viability of anything but coal, gasoline and natural gas until the storage exceeds the unit per dollar ratio of the 3 gases mentioned.
Then the only thing I can say is that I'm glad you're not in charge.
Due diligence might have revealed that those same fresh vegetables and farming books you speak of were in the lolly bag all along (just under the yummy candy).
Further due diligence revealed that the vegetable seeds in the lolly bag, just under the tooth-rotting candy, were produced by Monsanto.
No, it seems like pragmatism. Linux can be tinkered with and this is especially important when there are special requirements for networking or language support. Linux means the people are not dependent on an American supplier and, even worse, a single supplier. Linux actually has more hardware support than MacOS X; perhaps not as comprehensive or easy to configure but in terms of sheer numbers of supported devices Linux far surpasses MacOS X. Linux comes with a royalty-free perpetual unlimited license which isn't something that Steve Jobs has the power to offer.
You perhaps forgot that Free Software isn't about price. MacOS X could come with free hardware and Free Software would still be better. I use Linux not for the cost but for a multitude of other much more important reasons and most of them are pragmatic.
This flu strain is apparently more dangerous than SARS, yet it has recieved nowhere near the amount of press that SARS did, and SARS primarily affected the elderly and people with poor immune systems (there were exceptions, though, back off).
What the press reports is typically unrelated to its importance or relevance. The media spent how many months on the OJ Simpson trial? Every man and his dog heard about Bill Clinton's sex life, yet I recall less than a week was given to Clinton's role in peace talks between Israel and Palestine. That vegetable lady got more TV time than the coverage devoted to every Nobel prize winner combined. Last night the local TV news had a 3 minute story about a barking dog, which is about as irrelevant as it gets.
There was a recent case in the US where a crazy white supremacist (Christian, just to make that clear) was collecting poison gas, explosives, firearms, with an intent to commit mass murder. He was arrested but did you even hear about it? I can't even find the link in Google news. It was on fark.com that somebody linked to the court transcripts. The media probably doesn't want to report that particular story because it spoils the illusion that terrorists are all "ahy-rabs". As if the IRA never existed.
So don't use the media as a litmus test for importance. The media is more about entertainment and swaying public opinion than it is about reporting relevant facts. This is why blogs are successfully challenging traditional news - not because blogs have all the facts (often they're completely wrong) but because the media isn't a good source of facts either.
Didn't Sony include the essential bits of the PS1 system in the PS2 in order to allow backwards compatibility?
Correct. The IOP (IO processor) on the PS2 normally handles input from the DVD, game controllers, USB, etc. However it's basically a souped up version of the PSX CPU with all the associated bits, so send it the right instructions and it detaches from the EE (main processors) and the system becomes a nearly 100% compatible PSX.
Sony could do this because the PSX CPU was 33MHz and had 2MB SDRAM and mere kilobytes of graphics memory. When the PS2 was being made the cost of each IOP must have been measured in tens of cents. The Xbox 360 is being released too soon after the Xbox; the 733MHz Celeron plus the NV25 GPU is still fairly expensive.
What "incentive to create" would Nintendo lose if someone did make clones of an old, obsolete system that stopped making them money over a decade ago?
If Consumer #2472843 [1] spends 100 Pepsi Credits on Nintendo Clone, then that's 100 fewer Pepsi Credits that consumer has readily available to spend on Nintendo New Product.
And not the copy-protected variety. When new albums come out they are typically priced at $29.99 or $34.99. If you wait 6 months they're $25. Wait another 6 months and they're $20. Eventually they're $10, sometimes even $5. There's still plenty of good music to choose from and there's no rationale to owning the disc when the music is less than a year old; the radio will be playing it to death anyway.
The benefit of disc is you can create mp3, ogg, atrac, whatever you damn well like, If you rip it first to ALAC or FLAC then you don't ever have to touch the disc again but you've got a reliable archive just in case you lose the digital rips.
The online purchasing of music doesn't appeal to me until it's FLAC, it's cheaper ($1.69 a song is pure robbery), and it has no DRM. For $8.99 I can get a 20-song disc delivered to my workplace within 24 hours, so paying $33.80 to get a crappier version with no cover art or disc really isn't attractive. Your priorities might vary but hey, this is Ask Slasdot, I'm telling you what I'd do. Stick with disc and don't give legitimacy to second-class crippled music formats.
All of that aside, we all need somebody to ridicule as yokels. It makes is feel better. Europe has Austria, Australia has New Zealand, and the US has Kansas.
Uhh, Australia doesn't ridicule the New Zealanders as if they were yokels. We reserve that honour for Queensland.
We call the New Zealanders sheep fuckers, especially after they beat us at Rugby.
Slashdot Mirror
Save yourself $60 and softmod it.
Thanks for the link. I'd not seen this one before and it looks ideal for my own Mac mini TV box.
Look at the pointy knees!
I'm saying you'd be better off spending your money on artists that you do like, rather than one-hit wonders that put out "crap" (your own words).
I don't. I tend to listen to the music rather than waste my time reading glossy magazines that tell me what I should be listening to.
That's like saying Fox News is Fair because people watch it. Puhlease.
And I've already commented that I don't consider that to be a bonus. It seems to be a Slashdot meme; repeating back at somebody an argument that they've already said they disagree with. Are you whoring for karma points?
I think it's a foolish argument - paying for the privilege of hearing part of an album. It's like reading the first chapter of a book or watching the first scene of a movie. If you're so lukewarm to an artist that you only want to hear a single song off their album, then it's hardly worth getting even that one song.
G3: Live in Tokyo was performed by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and John Petrucci. Arguably the greatest rock guitarists of all time. It's a great album. You might not know the names but you'd definitely know their songs; e.g. Surfing With The Alien by Joe Satriani. The G3 series has been awesome with appearances by Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen.
And Neil Diamond rocks.
Since when is $1 fair? I think $1 is simply what the market will bear, slightly above what the media monsters are charging Apple, and the price point that maximises (or at least comes close to maximising) Apple's profits.
Let's go back to the idea of "fair". I recently bought a stack of new music. I paid $12 average per album and there are 15 songs per album. These are Australian prices and over here iTunes is $1.69 per song. Crunching the numbers and using the iTunes $1.69/$1 as the comparison ratio, I paid 47 USA cents per song for non-DRM non-lossy CDDA quality audio with a jewel case, album cover, paper inserts and delivered on a pressed disc. By the way, the $12 average per album included delivery to my doorstep (I bought them online) and the delivery time was overnight.
Yet you think it's "fair" to pay $1 for a lossy version of the same song, with no physical media, while you pay for the bandwidth required to download it, not to mention the monthly payments to your Internet provider? Give me a break! It's a ripoff. $1 is far from fair. It's significantly overpriced compared to the old model of music distribution. Considering the lower overheads of online delivery it should be significantly cheaper than 47 USA cents per song. I'm not going to pay double that for the "privilege" of hearing only some songs off an album and avoiding 1 sleep.
I no longer care about the speed of disks. The speeds are adequate - even high quality video will stream just fine at 15Mbps and my machines never swap - but the problem I have is backups. My home directory alone, containing nothing more than mail and work related documents, is over 15GB. My tape backup unit is 10GB. A DVD backup is 4.7GB. They're all too small. I can "backup" to another hard disk (which is what I do) but that's not a reliable archive.
I want a 100GB recordable disc for under $1. It could read/write at 2MB/s (big B for bytes) and I'd be happy. An hour and a half for a backup is acceptable. It's the capacity that is lacking.
They give "both" sides a chance. What happens when there are more than two sides? What happens when one of the sides is stupid and unworthy of equal airtime? What happens when they poorly represent one of the sides?
Don't fall for the trap of thinking "both" sides is "fair and balanced". The world can't be modelled by a single line between two extremes, with the truth lying somewhere in the middle.
World: We want equal partnership in the Internet
USA: No, it's all ours
World: Ok, we want the US to follow UN directives and not invade countries at a whim
USA: No, can't tell me what to do, I'll invade whatever country I want
World: Ok, we want the US to honour free trade agreements, just like you expect us to
USA: No, I'll break free trade agreements whenever it suits me
World: Ok, we want the US to stop polluting our part of the world
USA: No, I don't give a crap about you, I'll shit on your lawn and piss on your door
World: You know, you really are a jerk
USA: Shutup or I'll beat you up
World: ...
Why do people keep linking to User Friendly. It is never funny.
You're right, that was bullshit. Change the "no" to "none in the arid areas they're using for this research" and it makes more sense.
I have both - a Mac mini with Logitech bluetooth keyboard/mouse and a softmodded Xbox running XBMC - and the Xbox is better. Video playback is smoother. The XBMC interface is better suited for remote control (which I prefer over the keyboard/mouse). XBMC works with my programmable remote so it integrates nicely with the amplifier. XBMC supports more video/audio formats out of the box and supports all the common network stores (samba, daap, shoutcast). The audio output from the Xbox is definitely better (5.1 digital) and the video output - I'm using a PAL dongle on the mini - is much clearer from the Xbox. The XBMC startup time is on par with the mini time to wake from sleep. The XBMC interface is slick whereas the mini interface is a WIMP desktop, which doesn't really suit the hifi environment.
The mini is good but is more effort to maintain and the interface is more "general" which I consider to be a negative. However the mini is really useful as a TV terminal for web surfing, iTunes, photo manipulation, etc. Also the Xbox can be noisy - although with newer releases of XBMC the fan is dynamically controlled and mine often goes drops to 10%, which is basically silent.
I got both because they were cheap (both of them plus all the accessories for under $500USD) but if you were restricted to buying only one, I'd get the Xbox.
Don't bother with a chip. Softmod your xbox and install XBMC.
NZ has a different area of expertise. NZ has naturally occuring hot water springs. Tapping those is relatively easy. That's why NZ has had geothermal energy for so long. Iceland was in a similar fortunate position and they also have geothermal.
Australia is drier than Oscar Wilde's wit. There are no naturally occuring hot water springs. The technology being researched in Australia is Hot Dry Rock. The rocks are dry and you pump fluids down into the rocks. The water is forced through naturally occuring horizontal fissures in the rocks and collected by a second bore. This only works when there are insulating rocks above, below and around the fissures. Otherwise the fluid disperses and you never collect back enough water to make the system economical.
When it does work it's brilliant. The system powers itself and the only significant issue is dealing with scale buildup on the pipes. The energy output is enormous and the capital investment is modest. A single plant can power a small city with almost no pollution and no (as yet known) environmental impact.
Wind turbines pay for their total life energy cost within the first 9 months. They repay their energy input many dozens of times within their lifetime. The materials are also highly recyclable. Offshore farms are practical in many countries and have minimal impact on the environment. The issues of mooring are already well understood, due to the efforts devoted to offshore oil rigs.
More info from Vestas. Remember the name.
Then the only thing I can say is that I'm glad you're not in charge.
Further due diligence revealed that the vegetable seeds in the lolly bag, just under the tooth-rotting candy, were produced by Monsanto.
No, it seems like pragmatism. Linux can be tinkered with and this is especially important when there are special requirements for networking or language support. Linux means the people are not dependent on an American supplier and, even worse, a single supplier. Linux actually has more hardware support than MacOS X; perhaps not as comprehensive or easy to configure but in terms of sheer numbers of supported devices Linux far surpasses MacOS X. Linux comes with a royalty-free perpetual unlimited license which isn't something that Steve Jobs has the power to offer.
You perhaps forgot that Free Software isn't about price. MacOS X could come with free hardware and Free Software would still be better. I use Linux not for the cost but for a multitude of other much more important reasons and most of them are pragmatic.
What the press reports is typically unrelated to its importance or relevance. The media spent how many months on the OJ Simpson trial? Every man and his dog heard about Bill Clinton's sex life, yet I recall less than a week was given to Clinton's role in peace talks between Israel and Palestine. That vegetable lady got more TV time than the coverage devoted to every Nobel prize winner combined. Last night the local TV news had a 3 minute story about a barking dog, which is about as irrelevant as it gets.
There was a recent case in the US where a crazy white supremacist (Christian, just to make that clear) was collecting poison gas, explosives, firearms, with an intent to commit mass murder. He was arrested but did you even hear about it? I can't even find the link in Google news. It was on fark.com that somebody linked to the court transcripts. The media probably doesn't want to report that particular story because it spoils the illusion that terrorists are all "ahy-rabs". As if the IRA never existed.
So don't use the media as a litmus test for importance. The media is more about entertainment and swaying public opinion than it is about reporting relevant facts. This is why blogs are successfully challenging traditional news - not because blogs have all the facts (often they're completely wrong) but because the media isn't a good source of facts either.
Correct. The IOP (IO processor) on the PS2 normally handles input from the DVD, game controllers, USB, etc. However it's basically a souped up version of the PSX CPU with all the associated bits, so send it the right instructions and it detaches from the EE (main processors) and the system becomes a nearly 100% compatible PSX.
Sony could do this because the PSX CPU was 33MHz and had 2MB SDRAM and mere kilobytes of graphics memory. When the PS2 was being made the cost of each IOP must have been measured in tens of cents. The Xbox 360 is being released too soon after the Xbox; the 733MHz Celeron plus the NV25 GPU is still fairly expensive.
If Consumer #2472843 [1] spends 100 Pepsi Credits on Nintendo Clone, then that's 100 fewer Pepsi Credits that consumer has readily available to spend on Nintendo New Product.
[1] I am not a number!
That's not true. Shear Research is alive and well.
And not the copy-protected variety. When new albums come out they are typically priced at $29.99 or $34.99. If you wait 6 months they're $25. Wait another 6 months and they're $20. Eventually they're $10, sometimes even $5. There's still plenty of good music to choose from and there's no rationale to owning the disc when the music is less than a year old; the radio will be playing it to death anyway.
The benefit of disc is you can create mp3, ogg, atrac, whatever you damn well like, If you rip it first to ALAC or FLAC then you don't ever have to touch the disc again but you've got a reliable archive just in case you lose the digital rips.
The online purchasing of music doesn't appeal to me until it's FLAC, it's cheaper ($1.69 a song is pure robbery), and it has no DRM. For $8.99 I can get a 20-song disc delivered to my workplace within 24 hours, so paying $33.80 to get a crappier version with no cover art or disc really isn't attractive. Your priorities might vary but hey, this is Ask Slasdot, I'm telling you what I'd do. Stick with disc and don't give legitimacy to second-class crippled music formats.
Uhh, Australia doesn't ridicule the New Zealanders as if they were yokels. We reserve that honour for Queensland.
We call the New Zealanders sheep fuckers, especially after they beat us at Rugby.