Yeah, what about Lame? How else would you encode your mp3's?
Seriously, this device is far from lame in my eyes. 5GB is plenty of storage. I have like 20GB of mp3's anyway, not like they're really going to fit on anything out there. And uh... I never really need more that 5GB at a time, ya know.
The recharging via Firewire is cool too. The size is a plus... the Nomad is too big for me to carry around. And being able to use it as a portable harddrive is cool, too... burning CD's to ferry files back and forth is a pain. I'm gonna buy one if it works with other OS's.
Re:A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else
on
Apple releases iPod
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· Score: 2
It's not limited to Apple users... you can get firewire ports on any type of computer, you know. It would be in Apple's best interests to release drivers to make this thing work with other OS's, unless they want to reduce the market for this thing by like 99%.
I left my PS2 on for a week to see if it would crash due to overheating or anything, but it never did. Granted, the game was paused, so the CPU(s) and drive weren't doing much. However, the USB Logitech force-feedback wheel for GT3 on the PS2 is notoriously buggy due to poor drivers or whatever... sometimes the wheel just stops responding.
I've never had an actual *crash* from my Dreamcast or my PS2... or any other console for that matter, aside from freezes due to scratched disks or worn-out CDROM drives.
However, I've heard of the Turok game for N64 being buggy, with lockups and even partial memory/stack dumps being printed to the screen (I've read about it online, plus witnessed a 7-year old kid telling an EB clerk about the problem at the store). Apparently there were like 2,3 or 4 revisions of the game released (not sequels, just revisions trying to fix the bugs), though I could be wrong, since I've never even played the game.
Re:How Much Bandwidth Stylesheets Can Save You...
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
Yeah, seriously. If a web site was your livelyhood, wouldn't you have that code and your boxes tweaked out to like the Nth friggin' degree? That's why I look at the HTML produced by Slash and I'm like, "uh....???"
Now, I don't claim to know anything about tweaking out Apache, PHP, MySQL, or anything else, maybe they're got them humming, I dunno. I'm only commenting on the small piece I'm qualified to comment on.:)
How Much Bandwidth Stylesheets Can Save You...
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Bitching about bandwidth costs? Then please look into stylesheets; you could easily save 35% in bandwidth costs. As the above poster noted, stylesheets are the way to go.
I love Slashdot, and I'm willing to pay for it because I know it costs money to run a website and ads aren't cutting it these days. However, they're basically throwing away the bandwidth they would like us to pay for. The HTML produced by Slash is crap, frankly.
I used HTML Tidy to automatically convert the page to stylesheets as opposed to old-fasioned obsolete HTML formatting tags. The old version of the page was ~230K. The new version of the page, using stylesheets, was ~160K. That's a ~43% bandwith savings, right there, with little effort. If you include images, there's still a 35% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, have the Slash crew explored Apache's on-the-fly zip compression abilities (it's a separate module, I don't know the name)? It eats CPU power, obviously, but HTML can be compressed by 90% or more when zipped. The cost of more web boxen would be more than paid for by the bandwidth savings, I'd wager... especially if Slashdot is getting free hosting from it's parent company.
Bottom line: I'll pay for Slashdot's content, but not for lazy Slashdot coding. If you want us to pay for bandwidth, show us you're using it as efficiently as possible. Because you're not right now. You're like a guy begging for food with a sandwich sticking out of his pocket... I just DON'T wanna hear it. And yes, I know there's other costs associated with running the website besides bandwidth, and the ad market is shit right now.
"I think the linux missed out on exploiting a weakness in Windows - gaming"
I don't think gaming is Windows' weakness. That's more like its strength, considering how 99% of computer games are coded for Windows, and even cross-platform games are almost always released for Windows first... plus Windows has all the great hardware support you need for gaming.
Windows games are actually quite stable too, when they're coded right. True, they're not coded right very often, but that's the game developers' fault, not the OS. Crap code is crap code that will crash no matter what OS you're running it on.
Let me just sum up 95% of the posts on this topic, in case anyone doesn't have time to read them. Everytime a new OS is announced, posts follow this distribution!
25% will be licensing arguments
40% of posts will ask, "why do we need another OS?"
10% of posts will say, "why not?"
10% of posts will say, "it doesn't matter, because making your own OS is cool and if you were a true hacker you'd understand"
5% will say, "because Linux is too bloated now"
5% will say, "I hope it has [insert cool feature here] like [AmigaOS, BeOS, AtheOS or some other OS the poster is name-dropping to sound 31337]
On a similar note... last year, I wanted a bigger TV set, but didn't have the money. So I just moved my couch closer to the TV... yes, I know it's sad. But it has nearly the same effect as getting a bigger set.:)
"Ogg sounds better, but I can't go to walmart and buy a portable Ogg player."
My thoughts exactly. I'm as generally as happy with OGG at 128 or 160 as I am with MP3 at 192, but then I wouldn't be able to use my music in a car-based MP3 player...
You: What else could this possibly add to any software mp3 player?
Taco: "It won't stick out visually. And there aren't whirring fans to add more noise to your listening environment... I doubt it would be worth placing one in a room where you already have a desktop PC to play songs directly on, but any room where you don't want a computer, have a stereo, and want access to your MP3s, this is simply a great way to do it"
You:Do you _really_ think mp3s sound nearly as good as a good CD player?
Taco: The audio fidelity is really great, if by "Great" you really mean you want to show how bad MP3 encoding butchers audio. This is no criticism of the Audiotron, but you'll definitely here how MP3s just don't sound as good as the source CDs. I'll definitely be ripping CDs at a higher bit-rate.
I think your questions, for the most part, were answered already. You might want to check this link out before you ask any more. Moderators, too... I'm not sure why this comment was modded "+3, Insightful".
See my other comment on this thread. Although the SPEC suite consists of "real applications", the SPEC benchmark is specifically designed to test the processor, and the processor alone (although I'm sure it stresses the cache and main memory bandwidth somewhat as well... kind of hard to avoid this and still accomplish anything meaningful).
"Real world" computing emcompasses many many aspects beside pure, isolated CPU performance. That's why I don't consider SPEC a "real world" benchmark. Unless you do nothing but run Prime95 all day.
If you look at benchmarks that more accurately model real-world applications such as graphics applications, games, and office applications, you'll see the AthlonXP 1800 beating the P4 2ghz in the majority of them.
But, hey, if you do nothing but compile kernals all day, then by all means use SPEC and SPEC alone, and pay special attention to the GCC portion of the SPEC suite... looks like a P4 might be right for you, if you can afford the huge price premium of a P4 system over an Athlon system.
I guess the root problem here is the term "real world". Not everyone's "real world" is the same....
"SPEC benchmarks are all legitimate, real world applications (or do you consider gcc to be a toy benchmark?). Where are you getting your information from?"
Check out the Anandtech review of the new Athlons referenced in the Slashdot article, or the HardOCP review, or the Tom's Hardware review.
There you'll see the AthlonXP1800 beating or matching the P4 2GHZ in the majority of real-world benchmarks. When I say "real-world" benchmarks, I mean games, office applications, and graphics apps that are what the majority of people use 99%. As seen in SPEC's own FAQ, "Typically, the best measure of a system is your own application with your own workload".
SPEC benchmarks are designed to be purely CPU intensive, although I'm sure they stress the memory subsystem somewhat as well. Unlike "real-world benchmarks", they're designed specifically to stress the rest of the system as little as possible. This makes SPEC benchmarks valuable in the sense that you can compare one CPU to another more-or-less directly, but this has the downside of not making SPEC results directly relevant to day-to-day computing tasks.
Talking about SPEC benchmarks is sort of like talking about the "potential" that athletes had before they entered the big leagues. It's interesting, but doesn't really matter. What matters is how they actually perform in real situations.
"The 'proper' way to compare processors would be to use the SPEC benchmarks"
No, the SPEC benchmarks are a pretty awful way of comparing processor performance. Those synthetic benchmarks are often not equivalent to real-world performance.
The "proper" way to compare CPU's is to be an educated consumer and check out real-world benchmarks the accurately reflect the kind of software you use.
I don't mind AMD using the "XP" equivalent rating, as long as they stay realistic/humble and use the XP-rating to EDUCATE, not OVERHYPE. So far, they're calling their 1.53ghz model an 1800. I'd say that's pretty humble/realistic, since it beats the P4 2.0ghz in the majority of benchmarks.
Mind you, it's a pretty bad game machine in most respects. While many gamers have learned to live with them, very few actually enjoy the controller, which is the second-worst gaming controller ever, IMO
I agree with you that the BBA has to be cheaply replaced in order for this thing to live on, I totally disagree with you on the controller. I like it, and everyone I know likes it was well. In fact I've never really seen the controller being bashed anywhere, online, IRL, etc. Based on 2+ years of Dreamcast gaming and Dreamcast-related reading, I think I can say the DC controller-haters are in the minority.
And they're way better than the PS2 controllers. I have to contort my thumb at a right angle just to use the analog sticks... with the DC, my thumb can rest naturally on the d-pad or the analog stick.
Also, aside from your critique of the controller and the BBA problems, you then go on to say it's a pretty darn good system over all. And you didn't even mention the DC's reputed ease of programming, quite possibly its biggest strength from a hacker's standpoint.
So aside from the controller "problem" (most people don't consider it a problem, and you can buy replacements you know) that leaves the BBA as the only real flaw. So I don't get the "pretty bad game machine in most respects". Don't be dissing my beloved Dreamcast.
The review seems to hold the MacOS up as a shining example of how file-typing should be handled. I haven't really used the MacOS, but if you read this great article at ArsTechnica you'll see how the MacOS uses metadata associated with a file to determine the type of file it is, and therefore the program that should be used to open it.
On the MacOS, although the implementation seems cleaner (metadata vs. file name extension) the same issues of applications fighting over file types can arise in OS X, since an application can "claim" file types. The older Mac OS's seem to have opened a file based on the software that created it, which has its own set of problems. (Just because I created a JPG in Photshop doesn't mean I want spend 90 seconds firing up Photoshop every time I want to see it)
Keep in mind I have almost no Mac experience, please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm just trying to check out the authors claim that the Mac offers a better way of filetype/application binding, and after looking into the way Macs do things, I'm pretty unconvinced. I think I actually prefer Windows' "Open With..." right-click option to create the associate itself, although I don't like the way applications can repeatedly reclaim file types without asking the user. So how do other OS's do it?
I know it doesn't answer your gripe directly, since you're looking for a streaming MP3 player, but there are several MP3 players available for the Dreamcast that will happily play a burned CD full of MP3's for you.
There's the Blaze MP3 player, which is commercial, plus some free ones. Head over to DC Copy World (although they seem to be down at the moment?), to find out about the free ones, just google search for the Blaze...
...for small purchases. For small purchases, especially those with tiny profit margins like fast food and vending, using ATM cards is not practical because the transaction fees charged by the banks/credit card companies are larger than the profit the proprieter would have made on the transaction.
There's a couple possible solutions to this. One is to change the pricing scheme of the fees charged by the banks/CC companies, but I'm not really sure what motivation they'd have to do is such a thing.
The other solution, and one that a lot of companies are trying (disclaimer: I work for one) is to offer their own cashless payment system with low/non-existant transaction fees, and gain profit through other means such as selling marketing data and/or making interest from the money stored in users' accounts.
This has to be the first post containing this phrase that hasn't been modded up! (yet Of course, I'm sure I'll get modded down for this for making fun of the moderators! That's pretty much the one thing that will get you modded down every time...
But if they have no money, then why would somebody sue them? Only an idiot is going to sue a company with no money. What the hell could you gain? Probably not enough to pay your own damn lawyers. So not only is it morally wrong to file a lawsuit against a small, penniless company... it's also fiscally stupid as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what about Lame? How else would you encode your mp3's?
Seriously, this device is far from lame in my eyes. 5GB is plenty of storage. I have like 20GB of mp3's anyway, not like they're really going to fit on anything out there. And uh... I never really need more that 5GB at a time, ya know.
The recharging via Firewire is cool too. The size is a plus... the Nomad is too big for me to carry around. And being able to use it as a portable harddrive is cool, too... burning CD's to ferry files back and forth is a pain. I'm gonna buy one if it works with other OS's.
It's not limited to Apple users... you can get firewire ports on any type of computer, you know. It would be in Apple's best interests to release drivers to make this thing work with other OS's, unless they want to reduce the market for this thing by like 99%.
I left my PS2 on for a week to see if it would crash due to overheating or anything, but it never did. Granted, the game was paused, so the CPU(s) and drive weren't doing much. However, the USB Logitech force-feedback wheel for GT3 on the PS2 is notoriously buggy due to poor drivers or whatever... sometimes the wheel just stops responding.
I've never had an actual *crash* from my Dreamcast or my PS2... or any other console for that matter, aside from freezes due to scratched disks or worn-out CDROM drives.
However, I've heard of the Turok game for N64 being buggy, with lockups and even partial memory/stack dumps being printed to the screen (I've read about it online, plus witnessed a 7-year old kid telling an EB clerk about the problem at the store). Apparently there were like 2,3 or 4 revisions of the game released (not sequels, just revisions trying to fix the bugs), though I could be wrong, since I've never even played the game.
Yeah, seriously. If a web site was your livelyhood, wouldn't you have that code and your boxes tweaked out to like the Nth friggin' degree? That's why I look at the HTML produced by Slash and I'm like, "uh....???"
:)
Now, I don't claim to know anything about tweaking out Apache, PHP, MySQL, or anything else, maybe they're got them humming, I dunno. I'm only commenting on the small piece I'm qualified to comment on.
Bitching about bandwidth costs? Then please look into stylesheets; you could easily save 35% in bandwidth costs. As the above poster noted, stylesheets are the way to go.
I love Slashdot, and I'm willing to pay for it because I know it costs money to run a website and ads aren't cutting it these days. However, they're basically throwing away the bandwidth they would like us to pay for. The HTML produced by Slash is crap, frankly.
I used HTML Tidy to automatically convert the page to stylesheets as opposed to old-fasioned obsolete HTML formatting tags. The old version of the page was ~230K. The new version of the page, using stylesheets, was ~160K. That's a ~43% bandwith savings, right there, with little effort. If you include images, there's still a 35% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, have the Slash crew explored Apache's on-the-fly zip compression abilities (it's a separate module, I don't know the name)? It eats CPU power, obviously, but HTML can be compressed by 90% or more when zipped. The cost of more web boxen would be more than paid for by the bandwidth savings, I'd wager... especially if Slashdot is getting free hosting from it's parent company.
Bottom line: I'll pay for Slashdot's content, but not for lazy Slashdot coding. If you want us to pay for bandwidth, show us you're using it as efficiently as possible. Because you're not right now. You're like a guy begging for food with a sandwich sticking out of his pocket... I just DON'T wanna hear it. And yes, I know there's other costs associated with running the website besides bandwidth, and the ad market is shit right now.
"I think the linux missed out on exploiting a weakness in Windows - gaming"
I don't think gaming is Windows' weakness. That's more like its strength, considering how 99% of computer games are coded for Windows, and even cross-platform games are almost always released for Windows first... plus Windows has all the great hardware support you need for gaming.
Windows games are actually quite stable too, when they're coded right. True, they're not coded right very often, but that's the game developers' fault, not the OS. Crap code is crap code that will crash no matter what OS you're running it on.
as usual, this is very USA-centric
Yeah, funny that, huh? All the stories posted with a little U.S. flag as their icon seem to be that way.
"Next to penis enlargement, TV enlargement is the next thing on the average man's mind"
Oooh! That gives me an idea. Maybe I could have my girlfriend just sit closer to my penis!
On a similar note... last year, I wanted a bigger TV set, but didn't have the money. So I just moved my couch closer to the TV... yes, I know it's sad. But it has nearly the same effect as getting a bigger set. :)
Use it then dammit and stop using mp3.
That's exactly why I haven't bought any digital music players yet. I'm waiting for them to support things other than mp3.
Just USING Ogg doesn't help it. Buying products that support it, though... that helps it (and stops the mp3 stranglehold).
"Ogg sounds better, but I can't go to walmart and buy a portable Ogg player."
My thoughts exactly. I'm as generally as happy with OGG at 128 or 160 as I am with MP3 at 192, but then I wouldn't be able to use my music in a car-based MP3 player...
You: What else could this possibly add to any software mp3 player?
Taco: "It won't stick out visually. And there aren't whirring fans to add more noise to your listening environment... I doubt it would be worth placing one in a room where you already have a desktop PC to play songs directly on, but any room where you don't want a computer, have a stereo, and want access to your MP3s, this is simply a great way to do it"
You:Do you _really_ think mp3s sound nearly as good as a good CD player?
Taco: The audio fidelity is really great, if by "Great" you really mean you want to show how bad MP3 encoding butchers audio. This is no criticism of the Audiotron, but you'll definitely here how MP3s just don't sound as good as the source CDs. I'll definitely be ripping CDs at a higher bit-rate.
I think your questions, for the most part, were answered already. You might want to check this link out before you ask any more. Moderators, too... I'm not sure why this comment was modded "+3, Insightful".
See my other comment on this thread. Although the SPEC suite consists of "real applications", the SPEC benchmark is specifically designed to test the processor, and the processor alone (although I'm sure it stresses the cache and main memory bandwidth somewhat as well... kind of hard to avoid this and still accomplish anything meaningful).
"Real world" computing emcompasses many many aspects beside pure, isolated CPU performance. That's why I don't consider SPEC a "real world" benchmark. Unless you do nothing but run Prime95 all day.
If you look at benchmarks that more accurately model real-world applications such as graphics applications, games, and office applications, you'll see the AthlonXP 1800 beating the P4 2ghz in the majority of them.
But, hey, if you do nothing but compile kernals all day, then by all means use SPEC and SPEC alone, and pay special attention to the GCC portion of the SPEC suite... looks like a P4 might be right for you, if you can afford the huge price premium of a P4 system over an Athlon system.
I guess the root problem here is the term "real world". Not everyone's "real world" is the same....
"SPEC benchmarks are all legitimate, real world applications (or do you consider gcc to be a toy benchmark?). Where are you getting your information from?"
Check out the Anandtech review of the new Athlons referenced in the Slashdot article, or the HardOCP review, or the Tom's Hardware review.
There you'll see the AthlonXP1800 beating or matching the P4 2GHZ in the majority of real-world benchmarks. When I say "real-world" benchmarks, I mean games, office applications, and graphics apps that are what the majority of people use 99%. As seen in SPEC's own FAQ, "Typically, the best measure of a system is your own application with your own workload".
SPEC benchmarks are designed to be purely CPU intensive, although I'm sure they stress the memory subsystem somewhat as well. Unlike "real-world benchmarks", they're designed specifically to stress the rest of the system as little as possible. This makes SPEC benchmarks valuable in the sense that you can compare one CPU to another more-or-less directly, but this has the downside of not making SPEC results directly relevant to day-to-day computing tasks.
Talking about SPEC benchmarks is sort of like talking about the "potential" that athletes had before they entered the big leagues. It's interesting, but doesn't really matter. What matters is how they actually perform in real situations.
"The 'proper' way to compare processors would be to use the SPEC benchmarks"
No, the SPEC benchmarks are a pretty awful way of comparing processor performance. Those synthetic benchmarks are often not equivalent to real-world performance.
The "proper" way to compare CPU's is to be an educated consumer and check out real-world benchmarks the accurately reflect the kind of software you use.
I don't mind AMD using the "XP" equivalent rating, as long as they stay realistic/humble and use the XP-rating to EDUCATE, not OVERHYPE. So far, they're calling their 1.53ghz model an 1800. I'd say that's pretty humble/realistic, since it beats the P4 2.0ghz in the majority of benchmarks.
...was keeping AOL users ON Windows? Now they can spread....
Mind you, it's a pretty bad game machine in most respects. While many gamers have learned to live with them, very few actually enjoy the controller, which is the second-worst gaming controller ever, IMO
I agree with you that the BBA has to be cheaply replaced in order for this thing to live on, I totally disagree with you on the controller. I like it, and everyone I know likes it was well. In fact I've never really seen the controller being bashed anywhere, online, IRL, etc. Based on 2+ years of Dreamcast gaming and Dreamcast-related reading, I think I can say the DC controller-haters are in the minority.
And they're way better than the PS2 controllers. I have to contort my thumb at a right angle just to use the analog sticks... with the DC, my thumb can rest naturally on the d-pad or the analog stick.
Also, aside from your critique of the controller and the BBA problems, you then go on to say it's a pretty darn good system over all. And you didn't even mention the DC's reputed ease of programming, quite possibly its biggest strength from a hacker's standpoint.
So aside from the controller "problem" (most people don't consider it a problem, and you can buy replacements you know) that leaves the BBA as the only real flaw. So I don't get the "pretty bad game machine in most respects". Don't be dissing my beloved Dreamcast.
The review seems to hold the MacOS up as a shining example of how file-typing should be handled. I haven't really used the MacOS, but if you read this great article at ArsTechnica you'll see how the MacOS uses metadata associated with a file to determine the type of file it is, and therefore the program that should be used to open it.
On the MacOS, although the implementation seems cleaner (metadata vs. file name extension) the same issues of applications fighting over file types can arise in OS X, since an application can "claim" file types. The older Mac OS's seem to have opened a file based on the software that created it, which has its own set of problems. (Just because I created a JPG in Photshop doesn't mean I want spend 90 seconds firing up Photoshop every time I want to see it)
Keep in mind I have almost no Mac experience, please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm just trying to check out the authors claim that the Mac offers a better way of filetype/application binding, and after looking into the way Macs do things, I'm pretty unconvinced. I think I actually prefer Windows' "Open With..." right-click option to create the associate itself, although I don't like the way applications can repeatedly reclaim file types without asking the user. So how do other OS's do it?
I know it doesn't answer your gripe directly, since you're looking for a streaming MP3 player, but there are several MP3 players available for the Dreamcast that will happily play a burned CD full of MP3's for you.
There's the Blaze MP3 player, which is commercial, plus some free ones. Head over to DC Copy World (although they seem to be down at the moment?), to find out about the free ones, just google search for the Blaze...
This morning at about 10:00 UT, a major explosion occured on the Sun
God damned terrorists!
...for small purchases. For small purchases, especially those with tiny profit margins like fast food and vending, using ATM cards is not practical because the transaction fees charged by the banks/credit card companies are larger than the profit the proprieter would have made on the transaction.
There's a couple possible solutions to this. One is to change the pricing scheme of the fees charged by the banks/CC companies, but I'm not really sure what motivation they'd have to do is such a thing.
The other solution, and one that a lot of companies are trying (disclaimer: I work for one) is to offer their own cashless payment system with low/non-existant transaction fees, and gain profit through other means such as selling marketing data and/or making interest from the money stored in users' accounts.
I'm sure I will get modded down, but...
This has to be the first post containing this phrase that hasn't been modded up! (yet Of course, I'm sure I'll get modded down for this for making fun of the moderators! That's pretty much the one thing that will get you modded down every time...
But if they have no money, then why would somebody sue them? Only an idiot is going to sue a company with no money. What the hell could you gain? Probably not enough to pay your own damn lawyers. So not only is it morally wrong to file a lawsuit against a small, penniless company... it's also fiscally stupid as well.