I just wish this thing had a PCMCIA slot and could support IEEE 802.11. Streaming the MP3s from my main desk machine to my stereo is definitely the solution i'm most interested in, but there's no way i'm going to pull an ethernet cable all the way across the house for this.
I typically NFS-mount my MP3 partition over the wireless network on my laptop, then use the laptop to stream music, but i'm looking for a permanent stereo component to do this. Guess i'll have to build my own.
Results may vary, I guess, but I'm not experiencing this at all. Even though most of the bay area former customerse have been switched already (i was switched sometime yesterday), my bandwidth has not been affected at all. I still have about 2 to 4 Mbps in download, and 128kbps in upload.
Even better, the latency is now considerably better. I use to have ping times of about 200ms from work to my home firewall/router, not it averages at 50ms!
One wonders how valuable those assets really were considering it took AT&T about 5 days to switch most of their @Home customers to their own network...
I'm pretty sure i'm not the only person who'd be willing to buy MP3s.
I would buy a LOT from emusic *IF*
- they sold MP3s of decent quality (128 kpbs ? Hahaha, i don't think so.)
- they sold MP3s of ANYONE EVEN REMOTELY FAMOUS. Gee, I'm hip, i bought some more 'They Might Be Giants' mp3s.... I know it's not their fault, it's the crazy label monopoly.
Since the security update to counter the GiFT open-source client, Kazaa relies on a central server to validate the initial connection of a client.
It's not just about getting some initial supernode addresses, the initial server connection provides the encryption key needed to talk to other supernodes. Without that key, you can't connect to another supernode. So in effect, the network completely depends on the central server.
Hopefully, this is all a moot point, the excellent people of the Gift project are working on an opensource version of Kazaa (OpenFT) that will make everybody happy.
It is true aviplay is not an easy-to-install RPM, and requires recent versions of several libraries, such as SDL 1.1.3 and Qt 2.3. It does not require XFree 4.x, unless you want high-quality DivX playback, but for sound playback it's not required.
A really nice application of aviplay is the ability to rip WMA to wav and mp3files, thanks to the vsound tool (though recompressing a WMA to MP3 hurts the sound quality considerably).
Actually, you can play wma files under Linux using the avifile tool. avifile is a brilliant piece of software engineering that works directly with the Windows DLL (a-la-Wine). It will play back DivX avi and most Windows Media Player formats.
Having said this, it will only work for x86 Linux, and still leaves a lot of people stranded with their systems. It's definitely another way to strengthen Microsoft's monopoly. Really disgusting.
I know this isn't the right place to ask this, but oh well, i'd be really surprised to be the only one with this problem.
I installed the RH 7 0.9.4 RPMs on my pretty standard RedHat 7.1 box. But when I launch mozilla, nothing happens. It forks 4 mozilla-bin processes, then absolutely nothing happens, no windows pop up, and the CPU stays at 0% load.
I believe the main reason the EFF took the case is because the system was being abused blatantly by companies to fire unwanted bad-attitude employees :
The company would sue and force the web forum to disclose the identity of the offending posters. As soon as they obtained the information, the lawsuit would be dropped and the employee fired. Apparently, this has happened several times, hence major privacy and free-speach concerns.
So, this is a pretty important victory, and it's always nice for the EFF to score a win. Remember to donate to the EFF.
This can only work for a NEW media, like they did for DVD.
They can't do this for CDs because there already are millions of DAE-supporting CD-ROM drives out there. No hardware maker would ever agree to removing the DAE feature because
1) they don't have to, legally
2) it would dramatically reduce their market share! The word will spread, people will specifically ask for CD-ROM that have DAE.
So basically, it's too late. If the RIAA comes up with a new media format, OTOH, watch out!
Most likely, they'll start pushing Audio DVDs, because makers are legally tied to the (million dollar) DVD license and have to swallow all specs pushed down their throats. Also, lots of DVD players don't read CD-Rs.
Okay, i took a little time to setup Java support with Mozilla 0.9 and came up with this page.
I downloaded j2re 1.3 for Linux, and installed the RPM. Setting up the symbolic link in/usr/mozilla/plugins/ to the netscape 6 java plugin was all it took (note it HAS to be a symbolic link). So it's working very well! For example, the Yahoo baseball Java game channel works fine.
Overall, Mozilla 0.9 seems to be as functional as Netscape 4.7. Very impressive!
Not out of the box. I'm somewhat impatient and don't feel like googling the web for instructions on how to set it up.
* RealPlayer plugin runs: dunno, I don't use Real. I've heard people say it runs right now, though.
The RealPlayer plugin doens't work, though it's less of an issue than the ShockWave plugin, which works just fine (just watched some CampChaos cartoons on 0.9).
So any famous artist on the pro-napster side would be a good choice in your case. Notice the pro-napster list is about twice as long as the anti-napster list, though i suspect some bias there:-)
Remember, WE are the ones who elected these
people, and WE are the ones who will decide if
they are re-elected, so they have a great incentive to heed our demands.
I don't think you understand. It's not who elects them, it's who funds them.
I've also played in several bands, and what you say is mostly true.
Nonetheless, the costs of recording/mixing is greatly exagerated by the recording industry. I know many bands who have recorded an entire CD for something in the order of $1000 to $2000, paid by the musicians themselves out of pocket money. And the resulting quality is excellent.
Of course some artists have egos so large they can only tolerate recording studios with private golf courses and outdoors heated olympic swimming pools. Well fuck'em.
The CD cost is all lawyer and manager fees, operation costs, the rest of the money goes into an account that says "Britney Spears Marketing Funds" or something similar. I just happen to not like paying for those things, which is why i rarely buy CDs.
That's absolutely impossible, simply because there is no such thing as an MP3 header. You can pad an MP3 file wit zeroes (or useful info such as an ID3v1 or ID3v2 tag) both at the beginning or at the end of the file, without breaking the players. MP3 was designed to be streamable, and players will ignore data until it sees a frame marker (a small bit pattern).
I'm not saying that Napster isn't cool and fun. And I'm not saying that the RIAA isn't a bunch of assholes. But honestly, did you really
think that Napster had a workable business model?
Well, many CEOs would *kill* to have the brand name and user base that Napster has. Just that single fact, and the fact a lot of napster users are ready to pay for the service, makes it very feasable to build a sustainable business model. There are technical issues of course, but from the marketing standpoint it's rock solid.
Your opinion on the people using Napster seems pretty short-sighted to me. I personally consider Napster as the most fantastic tool ever created for promoting music and musical culture in general. I'm a lot more into new styles of music than i was a couple of years ago, in particular i go to a lot more concerts now. I thank Napster for that.
Actually, emusic in itself is a great idea. I was excited when I heard about them for the first time. I can see two reasons why emusic is not working out :
1. Because of the outrageous copyright transfers from the artist to the record companies, the recording industry has complete legal control (read: stranglehold) over the distribution. Therefore emusic cannot sign any major artists, and can only sell music from less popular artists.
2. Last i checked, they only sell music as 128kbs mp3s. There's now way i'm going to pay money for anything under 192.
That's too bad, because if emusic sold the entire music catalog at good quality, i'd buy all my music from them. They'd be even better if one could download the booklets as pdf and print them at home.
Slashdot Mirror
Can they pay the 100 millions in VA/Linux shares ?
DZM
I had no idea baseball players could write...
DZM
I just wish this thing had a PCMCIA slot and could support IEEE 802.11. Streaming the MP3s from my main desk machine to my stereo is definitely the solution i'm most interested in, but there's no way i'm going to pull an ethernet cable all the way across the house for this.
I typically NFS-mount my MP3 partition over the wireless network on my laptop, then use the laptop to stream music, but i'm looking for a permanent stereo component to do this. Guess i'll have to build my own.
DZM
Results may vary, I guess, but I'm not experiencing this at all. Even though most of the bay area former customerse have been switched already (i was switched sometime yesterday), my bandwidth has not been affected at all. I still have about 2 to 4 Mbps in download, and 128kbps in upload.
Even better, the latency is now considerably better. I use to have ping times of about 200ms from work to my home firewall/router, not it averages at 50ms!
DZM
One wonders how valuable those assets really were considering it took AT&T about 5 days to switch most of their @Home customers to their own network...
DMZ
I'm pretty sure i'm not the only person who'd be willing to buy MP3s.
I would buy a LOT from emusic *IF*
- they sold MP3s of decent quality (128 kpbs ? Hahaha, i don't think so.)
- they sold MP3s of ANYONE EVEN REMOTELY FAMOUS. Gee, I'm hip, i bought some more 'They Might Be Giants' mp3s.... I know it's not their fault, it's the crazy label monopoly.
DMZ
This is absolutely not true anymore.
Since the security update to counter the GiFT open-source client, Kazaa relies on a central server to validate the initial connection of a client.
It's not just about getting some initial supernode addresses, the initial server connection provides the encryption key needed to talk to other supernodes. Without that key, you can't connect to another supernode. So in effect, the network completely depends on the central server.
Hopefully, this is all a moot point, the excellent people of the Gift project are working on an opensource version of Kazaa (OpenFT) that will make everybody happy.
DZM
We don't like to use the V word. We prever "Anti Windows Devices"...
DMZ
I forgot to mention the project page of avifile can be found here on SourceForge.
A really nice application of aviplay is the ability to rip WMA to wav and mp3files, thanks to the vsound tool (though recompressing a WMA to MP3 hurts the sound quality considerably).
DZM
And another format that I can't play back
Actually, you can play wma files under Linux using the avifile tool. avifile is a brilliant piece of software engineering that works directly with the Windows DLL (a-la-Wine). It will play back DivX avi and most Windows Media Player formats.
Having said this, it will only work for x86 Linux, and still leaves a lot of people stranded with their systems. It's definitely another way to strengthen Microsoft's monopoly. Really disgusting.
DZM
I know this isn't the right place to ask this, but oh well, i'd be really surprised to be the only one with this problem.
I installed the RH 7 0.9.4 RPMs on my pretty standard RedHat 7.1 box. But when I launch mozilla, nothing happens. It forks 4 mozilla-bin processes, then absolutely nothing happens, no windows pop up, and the CPU stays at 0% load.
Hmm, no mozilla for you, come back one year!
DMZ
Belgian on-line media is also covering the events :
Le Soir (in french)
La Libre Belgique
De Standaard (in dutch).
Also in french :
Le Monde
-DZM
The company would sue and force the web forum to disclose the identity of the offending posters. As soon as they obtained the information, the lawsuit would be dropped and the employee fired. Apparently, this has happened several times, hence major privacy and free-speach concerns.
So, this is a pretty important victory, and it's always nice for the EFF to score a win. Remember to donate to the EFF.
They can't do this for CDs because there already are millions of DAE-supporting CD-ROM drives out there. No hardware maker would ever agree to removing the DAE feature because
1) they don't have to, legally
2) it would dramatically reduce their market share! The word will spread, people will specifically ask for CD-ROM that have DAE.
So basically, it's too late. If the RIAA comes up with a new media format, OTOH, watch out!
Most likely, they'll start pushing Audio DVDs, because makers are legally tied to the (million dollar) DVD license and have to swallow all specs pushed down their throats. Also, lots of DVD players don't read CD-Rs.
Computer self vaccination!
I downloaded j2re 1.3 for Linux, and installed the RPM. Setting up the symbolic link in /usr/mozilla/plugins/ to the netscape 6 java plugin was all it took (note it HAS to be a symbolic link). So it's working very well! For example, the Yahoo baseball Java game channel works fine.
Overall, Mozilla 0.9 seems to be as functional as Netscape 4.7. Very impressive!
Not out of the box. I'm somewhat impatient and don't feel like googling the web for instructions on how to set it up.
* RealPlayer plugin runs: dunno, I don't use Real. I've heard people say it runs right now, though.
The RealPlayer plugin doens't work, though it's less of an issue than the ShockWave plugin, which works just fine (just watched some CampChaos cartoons on 0.9).
-ZeMenace
BUT
Could somebody point me to an alternative that
Well, speak up people, i can't hear a thing.
The only alternative i have right now is IE under VMware, which is somewhat heavyweight. I admit i have never tried IE under Wine.
So any famous artist on the pro-napster side would be a good choice in your case. Notice the pro-napster list is about twice as long as the anti-napster list, though i suspect some bias there :-)
I don't think you understand. It's not who elects them, it's who funds them.
Nonetheless, the costs of recording/mixing is greatly exagerated by the recording industry. I know many bands who have recorded an entire CD for something in the order of $1000 to $2000, paid by the musicians themselves out of pocket money. And the resulting quality is excellent.
Of course some artists have egos so large they can only tolerate recording studios with private golf courses and outdoors heated olympic swimming pools. Well fuck'em.
The CD cost is all lawyer and manager fees, operation costs, the rest of the money goes into an account that says "Britney Spears Marketing Funds" or something similar. I just happen to not like paying for those things, which is why i rarely buy CDs.
-DZM
Well, many CEOs would *kill* to have the brand name and user base that Napster has. Just that single fact, and the fact a lot of napster users are ready to pay for the service, makes it very feasable to build a sustainable business model. There are technical issues of course, but from the marketing standpoint it's rock solid.
Your opinion on the people using Napster seems pretty short-sighted to me. I personally consider Napster as the most fantastic tool ever created for promoting music and musical culture in general. I'm a lot more into new styles of music than i was a couple of years ago, in particular i go to a lot more concerts now. I thank Napster for that.
1. Because of the outrageous copyright transfers from the artist to the record companies, the recording industry has complete legal control (read: stranglehold) over the distribution. Therefore emusic cannot sign any major artists, and can only sell music from less popular artists.
2. Last i checked, they only sell music as 128kbs mp3s. There's now way i'm going to pay money for anything under 192.
That's too bad, because if emusic sold the entire music catalog at good quality, i'd buy all my music from them. They'd be even better if one could download the booklets as pdf and print them at home.