I got a $1000 200 CD-ROM jukebox with FireWire. A patched mtx on Linux will expose its control/transfer API, so I wrote a Perl program to extract with cdparanoia, lookup its metadata in FreeDB, and advance discs. The cheap jukebox offered only 2-3x read in DAE mode, so 200 CDs took about 90h, or 3 days. Including 30s per CD to strip the plastic jewelcases, load, then unload into big CD books, which I didn't want to spend two hours twice a week, it took about about 2 months to scan 3000 CDs, including a few hundred "rejects" that needed 1x rereads at the end. Storing the CDs to (lossless) FLAC means about 250MB per CD, these days at about $0.23:GB IDE, $60:250GB, or $0.06:CD. Stuff 4 of those into a $150 PIII/850MHz/512MB running Debian. There's no need for performance, because even serving 4 simultaneous songs at 176KBps each won't strain even a cheap system. And the few thousand CDs fit neatly on a shelf in a closet for archive. Including the storage books, we're talking under $500, plus the $1000 jukebox (which your friends can use when you're done).
The real question is the GUI for finding songs and playing back. I wrote a crude one that searches metadata for song, album and artist names. The real key to this whole enterprise will be a frontend that lets us navigate so many songs. Who's got one of those to make the whole journey worthwhile?
The day has arrived when a Russian/Chinese announcement of a Mars mission is believable, while the American president's announcement is mere political propaganda.
If AT&T weren't broken up, we'd pay even more for even less service. There wouldn't be redundant Internet backbone competition. By breaking up into Baby Bells, each with regional monopolies, they introduced competition into only long distance, which sees much lower prices with at least comparable service, but smaller regional monopolies with worse service. Now that we're close to a Verizon/AT&T duopoly under the sleepy eye of the FTC, service has dropped again. The only competition driving increased consumer value is on the Internet, which the duopoly threatens by attacking Net Neutrality with Net Doublecharge. Just in time to kill competition from VoIP and cablecos.
The FTC is a joke when regulating telcos. They, and the DoJ, always work to just take off the pressure, preserving monopoly just enough to come back when the fight is over. If we can preserve the Internet for VoIP and independent IPTV like YouTube and Google Video, then there is competition within geographies. And we can watch the market drive competition to find efficiencies within regulated service requirements.
Re:God living down to our expectations
on
Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 1
If you think digital voting machines are suffering from "intital problems until things get sorted out", then you're not even reading the article we're discussing. You're not even aware of the serious problems with machines that are being used to rig elections, that fail even when probably not rigged, that are expensive, worse than useless, and don't even meet the existing inadequate legal requirements.
You're dismissing all that as "nothing new", as if you know what you're talking about. I'm the tech advisor to the NYC City Council's Tech Committee, and I know plenty about these problems, even though NY still uses mechanical booths, because we have to "upgrade" soon. I'm not making any "assumptions".
You write about "erasers", as if erasers don't leave more tamper evidence than digital tabulations. You dismiss unmanageable complexity as a reason for regression, when it most certainly is.
I'm getting your point exactly. Your point is that you don't know anything about digital voting systems, though you pretend you do, or their comparative risk to paper/pencil/handcounts, but you think you have something to say to those of us who do. Even without reading the article the rest of us are discussing.
I guess you're pretty happy about "upgrading" voting machines to ones so buggy and rigged that no one trusts them except crooked vendors and government dupes. Because newer is always better, right? Why don't you RTFA before going on some weird rant about luddism, when dangerous technolust is the problem we're actually dealing with.
Enough of this crap with broken/complex/rigged election devices. Let's just go back to paper, pencil and handcounting. It's cheap, fairly reliable, and leaves lots of evidence when tampered. Let the news media rely on exit polls for immediate results (after polls close nationwide). They're more accurate than the official results, anyway.
I thought the world's largest medical experiment was the Drug War, including the alcohol and tobacco businesses. Nearly a total success, too, lasting well over a half millennium.
I don't know what makes you so sure there are other successes like this initial one. The WHO says
[Since 1987] more than 30 candidate vaccines have been tested in over 80 Phase I/II clinical trials, involving more than 10 000 healthy human volunteers. Two Phase III trials have been carried to completion and a third one is in progress.
In other words, only 2-3 have passed I/II to attempt III, possibly including the Chinese one we're discussing. So even just representing 33-50% of the successful initial tests is quite a triumph for a Chinese team without the funding and communications advantages of the others they mention. Which advantages will now be available to them. It really makes the US/multinational efforts look fat and ineffective.
That would make the creator limited, defined. Where did you get this idea about your shimmy creator? It's not a very good religion, compared with the breathtaking fantasies offered by competing religions. It's more like an "alien from another dimension created us as their pets" theory. I prefer the Great Green Arkleseizure.
Just in time for the gas to run out. They can't give me my flying car, but they can give the NSA an event log of my location to crossreference with my phonecalls.
My favorite theory is that some drunken fratboys in 1897 lost control of their belts one night while mocking someone. The resulting exposure, though at least as old as our monkey cousins, was called the "moon", referring to the various phases of the various states of ass in the long remembered institution.
I don't think OO is 100% compatible. Even in my own experience making the simplest bulleted/indented lists, when I open an MS Word doc in OO, change a few items' text, then save it as MS Word, I turn a 45KB.DOC into a 2MB.DOC . That makes it hard to pass around a group that's "tracking changes" on the Net.
In the context of deciding whether to publish downloadable copies of their music, you can't call The Beatles an "artist". The two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, don't own the publishing rights to their music, haven't for decades.
What you're saying is that "some lawyers still refuse music downloads". That should hardly be surprising to anyone.
Those brains weren't "designed", they got lucky enough to suit their changing environment enough to be naturally selected. As oceans start to change dramatically due to the Greenhouse (including coral reef extinction), we'll see just how smart humans are to survive with our own environment leaving us behind, while dolphins use their big brains to save their own skins.
Meanwhile remember that human brains evolved in response to the "Rift Valley" shift in Africa about 11 million years ago. West of the East African Rift the forest stayed mostly the same, evolving our primate cousins largely under competition pressure. East of the Rift, across the South Asian subcontinent, the forests rose up, cooled off, thinned out. Our ancestors evolved first to walk upright across resulting grasslands between small copses of trees. We managed to learn to use our freed up hands in the more varied, less protected environment. Using tools was the side effect that changed everything.
Who's to say that dolphins can't use their brains to cope with a changing environment better than humans will? We might face a future in which our descendants are fortunate to survive in dry undersea bubbles, dolphins feeding us pizza to watch us do tricks like light a cigarette and talk with each other.
MS is too busy getting their core Windows products (Vista) out late. And their introduction of a new product (they never just "port" a Windows product to a new architecture, even on Intel) is always a nearly useless trial balloon for their most insatiable addicts.
I'd love to see MS introduce a Linux MS Office. The competition would be good for OpenOffice. And an LMO would probably be quickly wrapped in Wine and an OO.o plugin. So we could buy MS doc compatibility for Linux by buying a LMO then wrapping it. Maybe even embedding LMO GUIs for zero retraining.
The resulting Linux "Office environment" would be so much better than the MS offering that we could see the MS plan backfire. Breaking the the OO.o/LMO barrier would make it easier for a Windows OO.o port to succeed, once the ignorance and taboo were gone.
But I think MS is just too busy. Certainly too busy to compete with OO.o. But I hope they aren't too busy to try.
Thanks for the compliment. I couldn't resist subclassing Homer Simpson. Maybe it's because I've exhausted your recommended "necessary means", and realized that what the kids really go for is snark.
No one else mentioned ibogaine in this discussion except in response to me. TrollMods are pretty weird to keep the decades of suppressing ibogaine going on Slashdot. But they're probably just Slashstalkers, addicted to TrollModding me. No cure for that except cold turkey from the Web.
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TrollMods think Bush will invade Mars for them, if only the antiscience liberals would get out of the way of their can-do Republican Congress.
I got a $1000 200 CD-ROM jukebox with FireWire. A patched mtx on Linux will expose its control/transfer API, so I wrote a Perl program to extract with cdparanoia, lookup its metadata in FreeDB, and advance discs. The cheap jukebox offered only 2-3x read in DAE mode, so 200 CDs took about 90h, or 3 days. Including 30s per CD to strip the plastic jewelcases, load, then unload into big CD books, which I didn't want to spend two hours twice a week, it took about about 2 months to scan 3000 CDs, including a few hundred "rejects" that needed 1x rereads at the end. Storing the CDs to (lossless) FLAC means about 250MB per CD, these days at about $0.23:GB IDE, $60:250GB, or $0.06:CD. Stuff 4 of those into a $150 PIII/850MHz/512MB running Debian. There's no need for performance, because even serving 4 simultaneous songs at 176KBps each won't strain even a cheap system. And the few thousand CDs fit neatly on a shelf in a closet for archive. Including the storage books, we're talking under $500, plus the $1000 jukebox (which your friends can use when you're done).
The real question is the GUI for finding songs and playing back. I wrote a crude one that searches metadata for song, album and artist names. The real key to this whole enterprise will be a frontend that lets us navigate so many songs. Who's got one of those to make the whole journey worthwhile?
Thank you for your Compassionate Conservatism(TM).
The day has arrived when a Russian/Chinese announcement of a Mars mission is believable, while the American president's announcement is mere political propaganda.
If AT&T weren't broken up, we'd pay even more for even less service. There wouldn't be redundant Internet backbone competition. By breaking up into Baby Bells, each with regional monopolies, they introduced competition into only long distance, which sees much lower prices with at least comparable service, but smaller regional monopolies with worse service. Now that we're close to a Verizon/AT&T duopoly under the sleepy eye of the FTC, service has dropped again. The only competition driving increased consumer value is on the Internet, which the duopoly threatens by attacking Net Neutrality with Net Doublecharge. Just in time to kill competition from VoIP and cablecos.
The FTC is a joke when regulating telcos. They, and the DoJ, always work to just take off the pressure, preserving monopoly just enough to come back when the fight is over. If we can preserve the Internet for VoIP and independent IPTV like YouTube and Google Video, then there is competition within geographies. And we can watch the market drive competition to find efficiencies within regulated service requirements.
The toothfairy gives me a whole dollar!
If you think digital voting machines are suffering from "intital problems until things get sorted out", then you're not even reading the article we're discussing. You're not even aware of the serious problems with machines that are being used to rig elections, that fail even when probably not rigged, that are expensive, worse than useless, and don't even meet the existing inadequate legal requirements.
You're dismissing all that as "nothing new", as if you know what you're talking about. I'm the tech advisor to the NYC City Council's Tech Committee, and I know plenty about these problems, even though NY still uses mechanical booths, because we have to "upgrade" soon. I'm not making any "assumptions".
You write about "erasers", as if erasers don't leave more tamper evidence than digital tabulations. You dismiss unmanageable complexity as a reason for regression, when it most certainly is.
I'm getting your point exactly. Your point is that you don't know anything about digital voting systems, though you pretend you do, or their comparative risk to paper/pencil/handcounts, but you think you have something to say to those of us who do. Even without reading the article the rest of us are discussing.
Yeah, because the FTC has so aggressively reined in the telcos when they've acted anticompetitively.
I guess you're pretty happy about "upgrading" voting machines to ones so buggy and rigged that no one trusts them except crooked vendors and government dupes. Because newer is always better, right? Why don't you RTFA before going on some weird rant about luddism, when dangerous technolust is the problem we're actually dealing with.
Enough of this crap with broken/complex/rigged election devices. Let's just go back to paper, pencil and handcounting. It's cheap, fairly reliable, and leaves lots of evidence when tampered. Let the news media rely on exit polls for immediate results (after polls close nationwide). They're more accurate than the official results, anyway.
Now that the z4 case is wrapped up, can we get that judge to take over the blatantly abusive SCO vs IBM case, and wind it up this weekend?
I thought the world's largest medical experiment was the Drug War, including the alcohol and tobacco businesses. Nearly a total success, too, lasting well over a half millennium.
I loved that scene in Soderbergh's Solaris where the intellectuals defend god from projected human limitations.
Another thing god doesn't do: live down to our expectations.
Or a Porno for Pyros song.
BTW, what's "If DocRuby || TMM did it, why can't I?" supposed to mean? What's "it"?
In other words, only 2-3 have passed I/II to attempt III, possibly including the Chinese one we're discussing. So even just representing 33-50% of the successful initial tests is quite a triumph for a Chinese team without the funding and communications advantages of the others they mention. Which advantages will now be available to them. It really makes the US/multinational efforts look fat and ineffective.
"never existed in the Creator"
That would make the creator limited, defined. Where did you get this idea about your shimmy creator? It's not a very good religion, compared with the breathtaking fantasies offered by competing religions. It's more like an "alien from another dimension created us as their pets" theory. I prefer the Great Green Arkleseizure.
Just in time for the gas to run out. They can't give me my flying car, but they can give the NSA an event log of my location to crossreference with my phonecalls.
My favorite theory is that some drunken fratboys in 1897 lost control of their belts one night while mocking someone. The resulting exposure, though at least as old as our monkey cousins, was called the "moon", referring to the various phases of the various states of ass in the long remembered institution.
I don't think OO is 100% compatible. Even in my own experience making the simplest bulleted/indented lists, when I open an MS Word doc in OO, change a few items' text, then save it as MS Word, I turn a 45KB .DOC into a 2MB .DOC . That makes it hard to pass around a group that's "tracking changes" on the Net.
In the context of deciding whether to publish downloadable copies of their music, you can't call The Beatles an "artist". The two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, don't own the publishing rights to their music, haven't for decades.
What you're saying is that "some lawyers still refuse music downloads". That should hardly be surprising to anyone.
Those brains weren't "designed", they got lucky enough to suit their changing environment enough to be naturally selected. As oceans start to change dramatically due to the Greenhouse (including coral reef extinction), we'll see just how smart humans are to survive with our own environment leaving us behind, while dolphins use their big brains to save their own skins.
Meanwhile remember that human brains evolved in response to the "Rift Valley" shift in Africa about 11 million years ago. West of the East African Rift the forest stayed mostly the same, evolving our primate cousins largely under competition pressure. East of the Rift, across the South Asian subcontinent, the forests rose up, cooled off, thinned out. Our ancestors evolved first to walk upright across resulting grasslands between small copses of trees. We managed to learn to use our freed up hands in the more varied, less protected environment. Using tools was the side effect that changed everything.
Who's to say that dolphins can't use their brains to cope with a changing environment better than humans will? We might face a future in which our descendants are fortunate to survive in dry undersea bubbles, dolphins feeding us pizza to watch us do tricks like light a cigarette and talk with each other.
MS is too busy getting their core Windows products (Vista) out late. And their introduction of a new product (they never just "port" a Windows product to a new architecture, even on Intel) is always a nearly useless trial balloon for their most insatiable addicts.
I'd love to see MS introduce a Linux MS Office. The competition would be good for OpenOffice. And an LMO would probably be quickly wrapped in Wine and an OO.o plugin. So we could buy MS doc compatibility for Linux by buying a LMO then wrapping it. Maybe even embedding LMO GUIs for zero retraining.
The resulting Linux "Office environment" would be so much better than the MS offering that we could see the MS plan backfire. Breaking the the OO.o/LMO barrier would make it easier for a Windows OO.o port to succeed, once the ignorance and taboo were gone.
But I think MS is just too busy. Certainly too busy to compete with OO.o. But I hope they aren't too busy to try.
Thanks for the compliment. I couldn't resist subclassing Homer Simpson. Maybe it's because I've exhausted your recommended "necessary means", and realized that what the kids really go for is snark.
Maybe it's funny because maybe it's true ;).
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No one else mentioned ibogaine in this discussion except in response to me. TrollMods are pretty weird to keep the decades of suppressing ibogaine going on Slashdot. But they're probably just Slashstalkers, addicted to TrollModding me. No cure for that except cold turkey from the Web.