There are a lot of posts here about hard drive and CD based MP3 players. Those seem to miss the point that this is a player for 8 mi. runs. A HD or CD player is going to be too big, too heavy, and too fragile for this use.
What I use for my longer runs, mountain biking, and snowboarding is a D-Link DMP-210. It's:
Cheap (about $70)
Takes 128MB smartmedia ($50) for a total of 160MB
Light (2.7oz with a Li AA battery)
Supplied earbuds work well for running
Sounds good on two of its four eq. presets, more than loud enough for me
USB
Downsides are:
MP3 only
Minimal display
No supplied armband
There are some other lightweight players out there, and I'd really recommend something under 3 ounces or you won't be able to stuff it in a shorts/jersey pocket without it bouncing around. Armband straps can help there.
Political pressure is one of the greatest forces working against space exploration right now. Pressure from the top (Capitol Hill) is what caused the faster-better-cheaper fiasco. Ever hear of the expression "too many cooks"? What we should really be doing as a republic is telling our elected officials that we want to do X (say establish a Mars base, or not get killed by an asteroid), and we're willing to pay Y dollars per year. Then stay the fsck out of NASAs way and let the engineers do their job.
Right now it's like we told a chef we want baked salmon risotto, then halfway through cooking we come in and say "Oh, can you make that into chicken fried-rice, and we're not paying for it."
-Ryan C.
I'll take the FCC over corporations any day
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Watching the current battle for HDTV adoption makes me think that the FCC is really trying (somewhat ineptly) to work for the public good.
Media companies aren't interested in giving higher quality content to the public, but they need to deal with the FCC to get at the public's airwaves. Even then, they're fighting tooth and nail to only deliver the same old crud (480i) and pass it off as the HDTV they promised congress. Oh, and by the way, they want to encrypt the content and control all receivers to eliminate that pesky "time shifting" thing that seems to be all the rage.
Deregulating the airwaves, even though it might be a good idea technically in the long run, would remove the only stick the republic has to hit corporations with. IMHO, information flow is too important to risk for the sake of maximizing profits.
The Creative PVR does this (recording the stream 24/7) by default unless it's in standby mode. You can set the buffer time, mine's set to 30 minutes. Since it's done in hardware and the disk drivers are UDMA, there's almost no load on the CPU, about 2% on my system.
Recording a show while watching another is no problem. In fact, that wouldn't take up much CPU either, except that the Creative card decodes MPEG-2 files in software.
One of these days I'll write an app. to redirect the output pins of the DirectShow filter for the Creative card to the input of the Hollywood+ player I have. Uh, yeah, one of these days....
Keyboard: Yahoo! RF Keyboard (good range, eats batteries, use rechargeable)
Mouse: Thumb joystick on Yahoo! Keyboard
TV: Panasonic Superflat 32"
Stereo: Kenwood (can't remember model, but has SPDIF inputs)
Speakers: Polk Audio bookshelf + Kenwood sub + cheapo rear speakers for 5.1 audio.
This isn't the only way to do it; it's just the parts I had left over from other projects. I'd definitely suggest focusing on quiet components, there's other/. threads for that....
I have one of these cards in a dedicated DVD/PVR/CD Audio/Web Audio/etc. computer outputing via S-Video to my living room TV and via SPDIF to my living room stereo system.
Works great, I rarely watch live TV any more, and for me the Creative card has been rock stable under Win2K SP2. I've also had no problems converting files to MPEG-4 formats, though I do have keep the input files under 2GB. YMMV
You're getting too hung up on the method of the copying. The fair use doctrine is more about how the copy is used.
In the following process, where do I distribute a copy of the work?
1- I buy Celine's new CD (yeah right)
Legal.
2- I make a backup copy to use in my car (personal use of a copy, perfectly legal)
Legal.
3- I lend my CD to a friend (no copying occured, I distributed the original)
Legal, under doctrine of first sale, no matter what the RIAA or a TOA says.
However, if you lend the CD, you cannot use your backup copy since that would change the purpose of that copy from backup to duplication and distribution of the work.
4- My friend makes a copy for his personal use (he didn't copy a copy, he copied the original. hence "for the private use of the person who makes the copy")
Illegal unless you have permanently given the copy to your friend and you own no copies. The person doing the actual copying does not change the intent of the copy.
...if they think this patent will stand up. All they claim is a particular hash from some information (track length, etc.). Not exactly innovative or in any way unobvious to a practitioner of the art.
If Roxio/freedb used any of the other bazillion hash mechanism out there they could sidestep this issue, but then older clients would need to be patched, and really, they shouldn't have to.
Gracenote's vaunted "Intellectual Property" boils down to a password to their servers that they have given out to everyone but now want to charge for. (Not the data, just the password!)
Actually, the stock Win/DOS drivers will still let you read/write up to 21 sectors and 83 tracks per side, that's 1.743MB.
You'll either need a special format utility or format it in some other OS like linux. superformat is another unix utility for this. Once formatted, Windows will happily use it at 1.743MB. By tweaking out the geometry using variable size sectors, you can get linux to use the disk all the way up to the rated 2.0MB. Warning: not all "HD" disks are actually rated to 2.0MB any more, don't try this with those old AOL disks.
Anti-trojan programs such as Zone Alarm are great to stop things like this. If a Word doc tried this, Zone Alarm would pop-up a box saying something to the effect of "MS Word is trying to access the Internet, OK/NO/NEVER/ALWAYS. Word has long ago gone into my list of apps too stupid to be trusted and can't get to the Internet.
Ryan Campbell
It loads the program out of a Flash ROM instead of a hard disk, and the routine is called from an interrupt hook instead of an OS kernel function, but those are the only fundemental differences.
A "Hardware" RAID would use its own processor. There is none on the FastTrak.
What FastTrak gives you is software RAID 0/1 for OS's that don't offer it. If you run Linux or NT, you're just as well off with the Ultra 66 controller and OS RAID functions.
Any differences in performance or reliability would be from the merits of the respective programs, not a hardware/software difference.
I have a Promise FastTrak myself, and I use it for my gaming system (Win 98), but in Win2K/Linux I get the same CPU utilization and transfer rates using two single channels and the OS raid 0.
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There are a lot of posts here about hard drive and CD based MP3 players. Those seem to miss the point that this is a player for 8 mi. runs. A HD or CD player is going to be too big, too heavy, and too fragile for this use.
What I use for my longer runs, mountain biking, and snowboarding is a D-Link DMP-210. It's:
Downsides are:
There are some other lightweight players out there, and I'd really recommend something under 3 ounces or you won't be able to stuff it in a shorts/jersey pocket without it bouncing around. Armband straps can help there.
-Ryan C.
Political pressure is one of the greatest forces working against space exploration right now. Pressure from the top (Capitol Hill) is what caused the faster-better-cheaper fiasco. Ever hear of the expression "too many cooks"? What we should really be doing as a republic is telling our elected officials that we want to do X (say establish a Mars base, or not get killed by an asteroid), and we're willing to pay Y dollars per year. Then stay the fsck out of NASAs way and let the engineers do their job.
Right now it's like we told a chef we want baked salmon risotto, then halfway through cooking we come in and say "Oh, can you make that into chicken fried-rice, and we're not paying for it."
-Ryan C.Watching the current battle for HDTV adoption makes me think that the FCC is really trying (somewhat ineptly) to work for the public good.
Media companies aren't interested in giving higher quality content to the public, but they need to deal with the FCC to get at the public's airwaves. Even then, they're fighting tooth and nail to only deliver the same old crud (480i) and pass it off as the HDTV they promised congress. Oh, and by the way, they want to encrypt the content and control all receivers to eliminate that pesky "time shifting" thing that seems to be all the rage.
Deregulating the airwaves, even though it might be a good idea technically in the long run, would remove the only stick the republic has to hit corporations with. IMHO, information flow is too important to risk for the sake of maximizing profits.
-Ryan C.
Recording a show while watching another is no problem. In fact, that wouldn't take up much CPU either, except that the Creative card decodes MPEG-2 files in software.
One of these days I'll write an app. to redirect the output pins of the DirectShow filter for the Creative card to the input of the Hollywood+ player I have. Uh, yeah, one of these days....
-Ryan C.
There's nothing too fancy about it:
OS: Win2K
Case: Mid-tower case that I replaced the PSU/case/processor fans with quieter (slower) versions and installed car sound batting.
Motherboard: Soyo SY-7VCA (Via 694x)
Processor: Celeron 666 overclocked to 900.
Memory: 128MB PC-100 (underclocked to PC-90)
Main Video: OEM TNT2 w/S-Video out
DVD Video: Hollywood+ DVD w/S-Video + SPDIF out
MPEG-2 card/tuner: Creative PVR
DVD Drive: Creative 5x
Hard Drives: WD Caviar 5400rpm 40GB and 80GB
Network: Orinoco 802.11b Silver (via Antec PCI PC-Card reader)
Keyboard: Yahoo! RF Keyboard (good range, eats batteries, use rechargeable)
Mouse: Thumb joystick on Yahoo! Keyboard
TV: Panasonic Superflat 32" Stereo: Kenwood (can't remember model, but has SPDIF inputs)
Speakers: Polk Audio bookshelf + Kenwood sub + cheapo rear speakers for 5.1 audio.
This isn't the only way to do it; it's just the parts I had left over from other projects. I'd definitely suggest focusing on quiet components, there's other /. threads for that....
-Ryan C.
Works great, I rarely watch live TV any more, and for me the Creative card has been rock stable under Win2K SP2. I've also had no problems converting files to MPEG-4 formats, though I do have keep the input files under 2GB. YMMV
-Ryan C.
You're getting too hung up on the method of the copying. The fair use doctrine is more about how the copy is used.
In the following process, where do I distribute a copy of the work?
1- I buy Celine's new CD (yeah right)
Legal.
2- I make a backup copy to use in my car (personal use of a copy, perfectly legal)
Legal.
3- I lend my CD to a friend (no copying occured, I distributed the original)
Legal, under doctrine of first sale, no matter what the RIAA or a TOA says.
However, if you lend the CD, you cannot use your backup copy since that would change the purpose of that copy from backup to duplication and distribution of the work.
4- My friend makes a copy for his personal use (he didn't copy a copy, he copied the original. hence "for the private use of the person who makes the copy")
Illegal unless you have permanently given the copy to your friend and you own no copies. The person doing the actual copying does not change the intent of the copy.
5- I get my original CD back.
Legal.
-Ryan C.
...if they think this patent will stand up. All they claim is a particular hash from some information (track length, etc.). Not exactly innovative or in any way unobvious to a practitioner of the art.
If Roxio/freedb used any of the other bazillion hash mechanism out there they could sidestep this issue, but then older clients would need to be patched, and really, they shouldn't have to.
Gracenote's vaunted "Intellectual Property" boils down to a password to their servers that they have given out to everyone but now want to charge for. (Not the data, just the password!)
Actually, the stock Win/DOS drivers will still let you read/write up to 21 sectors and 83 tracks per side, that's 1.743MB.
You'll either need a special format utility or format it in some other OS like linux. superformat is another unix utility for this. Once formatted, Windows will happily use it at 1.743MB. By tweaking out the geometry using variable size sectors, you can get linux to use the disk all the way up to the rated 2.0MB. Warning: not all "HD" disks are actually rated to 2.0MB any more, don't try this with those old AOL disks.
Anti-trojan programs such as Zone Alarm are great to stop things like this. If a Word doc tried this, Zone Alarm would pop-up a box saying something to the effect of "MS Word is trying to access the Internet, OK/NO/NEVER/ALWAYS. Word has long ago gone into my list of apps too stupid to be trusted and can't get to the Internet. Ryan Campbell
It loads the program out of a Flash ROM instead of a hard disk, and the routine is called from an interrupt hook instead of an OS kernel function, but those are the only fundemental differences.
A "Hardware" RAID would use its own processor. There is none on the FastTrak.
What FastTrak gives you is software RAID 0/1 for OS's that don't offer it. If you run Linux or NT, you're just as well off with the Ultra 66 controller and OS RAID functions.
Any differences in performance or reliability would be from the merits of the respective programs, not a hardware/software difference.
I have a Promise FastTrak myself, and I use it for my gaming system (Win 98), but in Win2K/Linux I get the same CPU utilization and transfer rates using two single channels and the OS raid 0.