Shoutcast still has more going for it than any radio format except satellite (which has a narrow edge when it comes to brand-name programming, due to the big broadcasters' tendency to rely on RealAudio and WMA). And even satellite doesn't have things like Radio Free Klezmer (on Live365, but it's the same deal).
Get your amateur radio license and read the ARRL handbook cover to cover, and then come back and explain to us exactly how that is supposed to work.
Like it or not there has to be frequency police out there. The EM spectrum is a limited resource -- consider that the twenty MHz allocated to the FM broadcast band would be swamped by three TV channels, and then consider that the entire AM band is about 1.2 MHz wide. There simply isn't the room to "return the airwaves to the public" -- the FCC is having enough trouble with what it's currently licensing.
If you want to see the end result, get yourself a CB and monitor for a while (assuming you're in the US). It's absolute bedlam -- the Friendly Candy Company almost completely gave up on enforcement long ago except for the odd token action against people selling illegal equipment. It's very hard for a legal operator in some areas when rednecks with more batteries than common sense are putting out as much RF as some small commercial radio stations. Would you really want to see the airwaves ruled by political/religious extremists with megawatt transmitters and ongoing signal wars?
Hm... you mean like podcast over WiFi or WiMax? Wow, it's so crazy it might work...
I have an idea. How about we use a transmitter more powerful than a WiFi transmitter so the station can reach a wider audience. And forget all that digital crap -- you can get better range and simpler equipment if you use analog. Maybe you can even pay people to play the music so you don't have to get your programming on a volunteer basis.
I refer to Yoda saying "No, there is another." Lucas had something up his sleeve. What exactly only he knew at the time, but he was hinting at something.
Not that bad an idea -- there isn't enough NaF put in at the waterworks to be toxic to begin with, and the benefits do outweigh the risks. At the end of the day it's exactly like putting iodine in salt.
Another point about having an FM radio built in is that there's almost never an AM radio built in as well (AM doesn't get along very well with computer equipment, something I don't have to tell many slashdotters about). I like listening to music as well, but sometimes I need a traffic report or a weather report. Those are hard to come by on FM dials except during rush hour. Personally I think they're overrated.
I think the shuffle makes sense to an extent -- you can set up your playlist beforehand without having to deal with a tiny screen, and the shuffle thing is a side benefit of sorts. The problem comes when you want to change something on the fly -- that you can't do with a shuffle.
When I saw it, I thought "meh", and I've been drinking the Apple koolaid for a long time.
Actually Quartz is a new beast -- Apple created it for obscure legal reasons having something to do with PostScript licensing, which was something they didn't have to deal with going to PDF as their imaging model. And Quartz isn't the entire windowing system either -- it's more like QuickDraw or Xt, a basic toolkit for rendering graphics and logging screen input. There's a separate window manager (more or less Aqua, but that's only barely true), and then two separate implementations of the Aqua widget sets that are part of Cocoa (the successor to OpenStep) and Carbon (the OS X reimplementation of the original Mac API, sort of).
Microkernel Linux was already done, by Apple, as a prelude to MacOS X (I think they did it mostly to understand the Mach technology). It was an interesting idea, and at the time it was the only freeware OS that'll run on a NuBus Power Mac, but after it got off the ground it was superseded by LinuxPPC, which was ultimately backported to the NuBus machines. It exists now only as a curiosity, and it's so far behind the times that it's really only worth it as an academic exercise.
If you want non-American music, a lot of overseas public broadcasting conglomerates have web feeds (BBC especially, which has an insane number of radio feeds available for web consumption, including somewhere around 15-20 national and regional stations and World Service in 43 languages). I was listening to Raidio Teilfis Eireann just the other night as a matter of fact; thinking of setting up a rebroadcaster when I move.
Podcasting? That's how a lot of people are doing it now. It's not as good as live media, but really the only outlets the Average Joe has are pirate/Part 15 broadcasting (limited range) and webcasting (tethering your listeners to a computer).
All things being equal, maybe analog is slightly better. But you're assuming perfect conditions, which simply don't exist. Analog gives you tape hiss, nonlinearities in the sound, frequency rolloff, and other lovely things. For reproduction purposes, it's not optimal, but people tend to prefer some analog in the process because it's what they're used to. Record production is not just about recording sound, it's about creating sound.
In the reproduction domain, you can manipulate a digital medium to have whatever you need in terms of frequency response and sampling rate. For most people, what you're dealing with is uncompressed PCM audio at a 44.1KHz sampling rate, which is more than enough to cover the audibility range of the human ear (Nyquist sampling theorem and all that). You do lose something with MP3 or AAC or Vorbis -- they're lossy formats. But raw PCM digital is as close as you can get to perfect 2.0 audio reproduction; it's actually higher fidelity than a lot of analog recording equipment.
DJs are something of a special case though -- their art almost requires vinyl. There's a very good reason vinyl is no longer mainstream, but it happens to excel at that one particular application, which is why it probably won't die out completely any time soon.
The CD frequency response is about as perfect as it can get. There is no particular need for a person who claims to care about sound to invest in analog playback equipment unless the "analog sound" is what they want.
A lot of audiophiles confuse the issue, and evidently don't seem to know the difference between production and playback. Tube amps and vintage recording equipment do not provide high fidelity -- they don't have the frequency response. What they do provide is a specific sound to the musician and the record producer. Trying to duplicate that effect on the other end is a matter of personal taste and has nothing to do with high fidelity.
Escape Velocity is an incredible game, but it's a completely different genre -- a combination of space trader and action game. I love the game, but I can't afford my shareware fees, so I'm constantly being attacked by that annoying parrot.
I'm sure some of the first LAN parties ever were done on the Mac, actually (discounting minicomputer dungeon crawls like NetHack that is). While I don't think the Mac networking system was anything to take great pride in, it worked pretty well for what it was, and it was something that no other platform had at the time.
And a lot of those old b&w Mac games were pretty incredible, networked or not. Spectre is still one of my favorite FPSes of all time, and I rather wish someone would reimplement it. Crystal Quest, Scarab of Ra, Pinball Construction Set... and that's long before games like Myst came along. We Mac folk, once upon a dime, did damn well without color. Damn well.
Not to mention the writer has the N64 and the GameCube badly confused -- the N64 was a MIPS system based heavily on SGI technology, while the GameCube is based on a later-generation PowerPC chip and an ATI chipset (not Radeon-related though -- they bought it from someone else). Not to mention the 603e was a hella sweet chip, and an IBM part to boot.
Based on that alone, plus the spurious "future performance of the '060" argument (Apple had planned to go to the '060 but dumped it because the PowerPC seemed to have more headroom), I distrust this viewpoint. In any case, the Pentium Pro looked like a nonstarter when it first shipped, but the P6 architecture is still alive and kicking, powering some seriously heavy duty laptops, and rumored to be the core of the next generation of Intel x86 chips.
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Shoutcast still has more going for it than any radio format except satellite (which has a narrow edge when it comes to brand-name programming, due to the big broadcasters' tendency to rely on RealAudio and WMA). And even satellite doesn't have things like Radio Free Klezmer (on Live365, but it's the same deal).
Get your amateur radio license and read the ARRL handbook cover to cover, and then come back and explain to us exactly how that is supposed to work.
Like it or not there has to be frequency police out there. The EM spectrum is a limited resource -- consider that the twenty MHz allocated to the FM broadcast band would be swamped by three TV channels, and then consider that the entire AM band is about 1.2 MHz wide. There simply isn't the room to "return the airwaves to the public" -- the FCC is having enough trouble with what it's currently licensing.
If you want to see the end result, get yourself a CB and monitor for a while (assuming you're in the US). It's absolute bedlam -- the Friendly Candy Company almost completely gave up on enforcement long ago except for the odd token action against people selling illegal equipment. It's very hard for a legal operator in some areas when rednecks with more batteries than common sense are putting out as much RF as some small commercial radio stations. Would you really want to see the airwaves ruled by political/religious extremists with megawatt transmitters and ongoing signal wars?
Hm... you mean like podcast over WiFi or WiMax? Wow, it's so crazy it might work...
I have an idea. How about we use a transmitter more powerful than a WiFi transmitter so the station can reach a wider audience. And forget all that digital crap -- you can get better range and simpler equipment if you use analog. Maybe you can even pay people to play the music so you don't have to get your programming on a volunteer basis.
What?
I refer to Yoda saying "No, there is another." Lucas had something up his sleeve. What exactly only he knew at the time, but he was hinting at something.
Actually, there are hints in Empire that he was at least considering something like it.
I use Pico. Emacs is my therapist.
He wrote the original Emacs as a macro package for the hellaciously evil TECO editor.
Somebody has to, and the Government has a rather large stake in the scientific process anyway, defense and public health particularly.
Not that bad an idea -- there isn't enough NaF put in at the waterworks to be toxic to begin with, and the benefits do outweigh the risks. At the end of the day it's exactly like putting iodine in salt.
Another point about having an FM radio built in is that there's almost never an AM radio built in as well (AM doesn't get along very well with computer equipment, something I don't have to tell many slashdotters about). I like listening to music as well, but sometimes I need a traffic report or a weather report. Those are hard to come by on FM dials except during rush hour. Personally I think they're overrated.
I think the shuffle makes sense to an extent -- you can set up your playlist beforehand without having to deal with a tiny screen, and the shuffle thing is a side benefit of sorts. The problem comes when you want to change something on the fly -- that you can't do with a shuffle.
When I saw it, I thought "meh", and I've been drinking the Apple koolaid for a long time.
I think Mafiosi would refer to it as a "bust-out" scheme.
Actually Quartz is a new beast -- Apple created it for obscure legal reasons having something to do with PostScript licensing, which was something they didn't have to deal with going to PDF as their imaging model. And Quartz isn't the entire windowing system either -- it's more like QuickDraw or Xt, a basic toolkit for rendering graphics and logging screen input. There's a separate window manager (more or less Aqua, but that's only barely true), and then two separate implementations of the Aqua widget sets that are part of Cocoa (the successor to OpenStep) and Carbon (the OS X reimplementation of the original Mac API, sort of).
Microkernel Linux was already done, by Apple, as a prelude to MacOS X (I think they did it mostly to understand the Mach technology). It was an interesting idea, and at the time it was the only freeware OS that'll run on a NuBus Power Mac, but after it got off the ground it was superseded by LinuxPPC, which was ultimately backported to the NuBus machines. It exists now only as a curiosity, and it's so far behind the times that it's really only worth it as an academic exercise.
If you want non-American music, a lot of overseas public broadcasting conglomerates have web feeds (BBC especially, which has an insane number of radio feeds available for web consumption, including somewhere around 15-20 national and regional stations and World Service in 43 languages). I was listening to Raidio Teilfis Eireann just the other night as a matter of fact; thinking of setting up a rebroadcaster when I move.
Podcasting? That's how a lot of people are doing it now. It's not as good as live media, but really the only outlets the Average Joe has are pirate/Part 15 broadcasting (limited range) and webcasting (tethering your listeners to a computer).
All things being equal, maybe analog is slightly better. But you're assuming perfect conditions, which simply don't exist. Analog gives you tape hiss, nonlinearities in the sound, frequency rolloff, and other lovely things. For reproduction purposes, it's not optimal, but people tend to prefer some analog in the process because it's what they're used to. Record production is not just about recording sound, it's about creating sound.
In the reproduction domain, you can manipulate a digital medium to have whatever you need in terms of frequency response and sampling rate. For most people, what you're dealing with is uncompressed PCM audio at a 44.1KHz sampling rate, which is more than enough to cover the audibility range of the human ear (Nyquist sampling theorem and all that). You do lose something with MP3 or AAC or Vorbis -- they're lossy formats. But raw PCM digital is as close as you can get to perfect 2.0 audio reproduction; it's actually higher fidelity than a lot of analog recording equipment.
DJs are something of a special case though -- their art almost requires vinyl. There's a very good reason vinyl is no longer mainstream, but it happens to excel at that one particular application, which is why it probably won't die out completely any time soon.
The CD frequency response is about as perfect as it can get. There is no particular need for a person who claims to care about sound to invest in analog playback equipment unless the "analog sound" is what they want.
A lot of audiophiles confuse the issue, and evidently don't seem to know the difference between production and playback. Tube amps and vintage recording equipment do not provide high fidelity -- they don't have the frequency response. What they do provide is a specific sound to the musician and the record producer. Trying to duplicate that effect on the other end is a matter of personal taste and has nothing to do with high fidelity.
I hear porn over SSTV is not uncommon. Not particularly intelligent either, but not uncommon.
Also, it's just a restatement of Schopenhauer's maxim about truth, which isn't strictly true (not all truth is "violently opposed").
Escape Velocity is an incredible game, but it's a completely different genre -- a combination of space trader and action game. I love the game, but I can't afford my shareware fees, so I'm constantly being attacked by that annoying parrot.
I'm sure some of the first LAN parties ever were done on the Mac, actually (discounting minicomputer dungeon crawls like NetHack that is). While I don't think the Mac networking system was anything to take great pride in, it worked pretty well for what it was, and it was something that no other platform had at the time.
And a lot of those old b&w Mac games were pretty incredible, networked or not. Spectre is still one of my favorite FPSes of all time, and I rather wish someone would reimplement it. Crystal Quest, Scarab of Ra, Pinball Construction Set... and that's long before games like Myst came along. We Mac folk, once upon a dime, did damn well without color. Damn well.
"vaguely official"? Are you sure your glasses prescription is correct? Yes it's obviously written by Sollog, but it in no way looks even professional.
Not to mention the writer has the N64 and the GameCube badly confused -- the N64 was a MIPS system based heavily on SGI technology, while the GameCube is based on a later-generation PowerPC chip and an ATI chipset (not Radeon-related though -- they bought it from someone else). Not to mention the 603e was a hella sweet chip, and an IBM part to boot.
Based on that alone, plus the spurious "future performance of the '060" argument (Apple had planned to go to the '060 but dumped it because the PowerPC seemed to have more headroom), I distrust this viewpoint. In any case, the Pentium Pro looked like a nonstarter when it first shipped, but the P6 architecture is still alive and kicking, powering some seriously heavy duty laptops, and rumored to be the core of the next generation of Intel x86 chips.