Despite what Vonage says, the system works fine with multiple phones. I hooked it up to the phone distribution panel in my basement (making sure to unhook the line coming from the outside---/that/ could cause problems), and now every phone in my house uses the one Vonage/Cisco box. It works just like before---multiple people in the house can be on the same call just by picking up other phones.
Even if you don't have a distribution panel, you can hook up multiple phones to Vonage simply by getting a phone splitter, available at any WalMart, KMart, Radio Shack, or similar.
I recently acquired the QCast tuner, thinking it would serve a similar purpose as my SliMP3 player, but with a lot more features. Unfortunately, the SliMP3 kicks QCast's ass in terms of usability.
Granted, these two devices don't really compete feature-for-feature. Slimp3 is only for mp3's, while QCast can handle mp3, ogg, slideshows, videos, etc. But their client/server model is very similar: each relies on a server on another machine to expose media content to the client across a network. Since I had already set this up for my SliMP3 device, I thought the QCast would be a nice addition to my stable of devices that allow access to my growing media collection.
The SliMP3 is used in a room that only has an amp and speakers but no TV, so it works quite well for queuing up and listening to my music colleciton.
I put the QCast in with my main home entertainment setup, which contains my DirecTivo, thinking that it would serve the same purpose as the SliMP3, but now using my TV as the initial UI to setup a playlist.
My biggest complaint is that the QCast server does nothing to abstract information about the media on your system. It just exposes the file system to the playstation, and then you navigate it with the playstation. This forces you to keep your media collection in a maintainable hierarchy at the filesystem level. Although I'm usually pretty good about this, I really appreciate the SliMP3's ability to build up its own internal db using the tag information in the files.
On the QCast, since you can't listen to music and build up the playlist at the same time (a HUGE drawback), you're forced to create the playlist in its entirety and then set it in motion. With the SliMP3, I am able to add and remove music from a playlist as it's playing, which I take advantage of frequently.
Another drawback to the QCast is that it has its own playlist representation, using XML files. There are utilities that can convert between m3u or pls to this format, but it's a big hassle, especially compared to the ease-of-use of the SliMP3.
The final insult to this is that there seems to a problem with some users getting the software to boot consistently on the PS2. It usually takes me several reboots before the PS2 will load the QCast software.
My one hope is that the QCast is under continued development, and as another post mentions, there will be a major software upgrade "real soon now." I'm hoping some of these usability concerns will be addressed with that release.
Openwave (merger between phone.com and software.com) reimburses $7500/yr for relevant training in which you get a "B" or better. It's up to you to find the class you want to take and to get it approved, but my understanding is that most anything reasonable is given the go-ahead. "there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"
One of the best, well-thought-out postings I've ever seen on/., and some lemming moderator rates it as flamebait. I guess I shouldn't expect much better, but it is still saddening...
"there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"
Actually, the story I read (long ago, so I don't remember the source, so treat it as folklore...) was that his motives were as you described, but that he bought the domain from someone else, and didn't actually register it himself. The guy who had originally registered mp3.com had registered it not for mp3's (he knew little to nothing about them) but because that was his login at his university or work or somesuch (his initials being mp). He was thus surprised that someone was willing to pay him for his domain name, and he sold it for not that much money.
Again, the part about Michael not knowing much about mp3's other than that it was highly searched for on the internet is what I read, too.
I was running it on a single PII 266 w/256M, and before it crashed, it was very smoothe, including the audio. I'm no gaming fanatic, so maybe the framerates would've been considered low for someone else, but it seemed quite acceptable to me. I didn't get around to doing the timetest to find out the actual framerates because I didn't want to have to reboot again!
Anyway, I was quite impressed nevertheless. I do realize this is an alpha product, and I wasn't terribly surprised it crashed. I was just hoping to find out if others were having similar problems so that I could determine if the problem was on my end or not.
I downloaded it last night and played the first demo in the list. It was/very/ pretty and the music was pretty cool, too. About 8-10 min into it, it just stopped, my computer totally hung. No keyboard response, no mouse, nothing. I rebooted and tried again, this time selecting the free flight. My machine hung before I got a chance to even start flying.
Mandrake 7.0, Voodoo 2, latest drivers from 3dfx. Anyone have better luck or similar experiences?
No one is changing any standard. The berlin people are working on a project they feel is useful and (probably) fun. More power to them. If it turns out to be a bust, it has done no one no harm. If it turns out to be awesome, revolutionary, and better than beer, so much the better. No one is forcing anyone to use berlin, so I can't see how people can complain about others developing it. Its not like MS forcing Internet Exploere onto Win98 users. In the end, the "market forces" of the linux community will determine if berlin will be a viable replacement for X or not. In the meantime, I intend to enjoy watching it develop.
First, the fact that the above post was moderated as flamebait (at least at the time of this posting) is ridiculous. The questions Zurk asks and the points [s]he raises seem reasonable enough.
As to the question "why not simply stick with X?", the berlin FAQ has this to say:
Why not just use X?
X-windows, although flexible, is very hard to write for, and not particularly easy to extend or maintain. Berlin is based on very easy APIs for low-level drawing, and should provide the ideal environment for easy, powerful extension. Furthermore, since the inter-component communication in Berlin is marshalled by a corba ORB, OO component technology will be with us from the beginning, enhancing the likelihood of code reuse and "glue-language" visual programming environments. Finally, by starting over again with hardware acceleration on every drawing function and modern programming techniques like multithreading and message queues, we hope to achieve a much faster, more advanced, and smaller implementation than X.
Note that I don't actually use or develop berlin. I just find the project interesting and would like to see reasonable discussions about it.
The cause of Alzheimers is currently not fully known. Spin off research from the human genome project at Washington University has shown there is a genetic component to Alzheimers. Even if prions are partially respoonsible, gene therapy may yet be aplicable. Some diseases caused by viruses can be affected by gene therapy. Prions are just a protein form/version of viruses. "there once was a big guy named lou
I doubt that MS can claim a copyright on Wizards if AOL can't lay claim to "buddy list", "IM", and "You've Got Mail." They certainly can't prevent someone from using the concept. If MS tries to raise a fuss, they can just call them something different, such as Gnome's Druids. -scott "there once was a big guy named lou
I find it interesting that one of the rewards for donating a box to this endeavor is a lifetime e-mail address with them, yet the director is accessed via a hotmail account. Maybe they'll make him donate a box, too, if he wants a teraflop alias.
Releasing the pre/sequels a few months apart: a break from tradition, maybe, but (if memory serves me) not unprecedented. Didn't the "Back To The Future" sequels get released in the same year? Granted, they weren't much to speak of, but I do believe much hoopla was made about their release dates' proximities. "there once was a big guy named lou
ESR seems to neglect the classic argument for open-sourcing the drivers---the users will make them better. From personal experience, I have noticed that device drivers (especially new ones for new products like video cards released by the company that made the product) tend to be buggy as hell and can cause frequent crashing of a Windows machine. (Alex St. John has ranted about this many times in his "Maximum PC" opinion pieces.) By opening the driver source to your users, a company could get fixes to these problems much more quickly than keeping them closed. This seems to me to be an even more convincing argument than the "some-kid-will-disassemble-them-eventually-anyway" one. "there once was a big guy named lou
I've been having problems getting rvplayer to work on my linux box. I keep getting "****audio: write error: 64 bytes errno:" type errors. I went searching for help on dejanews, and I read a post that said this problem is due to a bug that rvplayer has on linux 2.2.* machines---that realnetworks exploited a bug in the linux 2.0.* kernels that has been closed in the 2.2.* series. Has anyone had similar problems, or (better yet) has anyone gotten it to work on current kernels?
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Mr. Turner should give them some credit. Hijacking the obesity epidemic is no small feat. That sumbitch weighs a ton.
Are you still investing in geoduck futures? And when can we expect geoducks to play a prominent or supporting role in one of you novels?
Despite what Vonage says, the system works fine with multiple phones. I hooked it up to the phone distribution panel in my basement (making sure to unhook the line coming from the outside---/that/ could cause problems), and now every phone in my house uses the one Vonage/Cisco box. It works just like before---multiple people in the house can be on the same call just by picking up other phones.
Even if you don't have a distribution panel, you can hook up multiple phones to Vonage simply by getting a phone splitter, available at any WalMart, KMart, Radio Shack, or similar.
I recently acquired the QCast tuner, thinking it would serve a similar purpose as my SliMP3 player, but with a lot more features. Unfortunately, the SliMP3 kicks QCast's ass in terms of usability.
Granted, these two devices don't really compete feature-for-feature. Slimp3 is only for mp3's, while QCast can handle mp3, ogg, slideshows, videos, etc. But their client/server model is very similar: each relies on a server on another machine to expose media content to the client across a network. Since I had already set this up for my SliMP3 device, I thought the QCast would be a nice addition to my stable of devices that allow access to my growing media collection.
The SliMP3 is used in a room that only has an amp and speakers but no TV, so it works quite well for queuing up and listening to my music colleciton.
I put the QCast in with my main home entertainment setup, which contains my DirecTivo, thinking that it would serve the same purpose as the SliMP3, but now using my TV as the initial UI to setup a playlist.
My biggest complaint is that the QCast server does nothing to abstract information about the media on your system. It just exposes the file system to the playstation, and then you navigate it with the playstation. This forces you to keep your media collection in a maintainable hierarchy at the filesystem level. Although I'm usually pretty good about this, I really appreciate the SliMP3's ability to build up its own internal db using the tag information in the files.
On the QCast, since you can't listen to music and build up the playlist at the same time (a HUGE drawback), you're forced to create the playlist in its entirety and then set it in motion. With the SliMP3, I am able to add and remove music from a playlist as it's playing, which I take advantage of frequently.
Another drawback to the QCast is that it has its own playlist representation, using XML files. There are utilities that can convert between m3u or pls to this format, but it's a big hassle, especially compared to the ease-of-use of the SliMP3.
The final insult to this is that there seems to a problem with some users getting the software to boot consistently on the PS2. It usually takes me several reboots before the PS2 will load the QCast software.
My one hope is that the QCast is under continued development, and as another post mentions, there will be a major software upgrade "real soon now." I'm hoping some of these usability concerns will be addressed with that release.
-Scott
Openwave (merger between phone.com and software.com) reimburses $7500/yr for relevant training in which you get a "B" or better. It's up to you to find the class you want to take and to get it approved, but my understanding is that most anything reasonable is given the go-ahead.
"there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/2q00/espresso/espre sso-1.html
"there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"
One of the best, well-thought-out postings I've ever seen on /., and some lemming moderator rates it as flamebait. I guess I shouldn't expect much better, but it is still saddening...
"there once was a big guy named lou
whose limericks would end at line two"
Again, the part about Michael not knowing much about mp3's other than that it was highly searched for on the internet is what I read, too.
-Scott
"there once was a big guy named lou
Anyway, I was quite impressed nevertheless. I do realize this is an alpha product, and I wasn't terribly surprised it crashed. I was just hoping to find out if others were having similar problems so that I could determine if the problem was on my end or not.
Thanks for the reply.
-Scott
"there once was a big guy named lou
Mandrake 7.0, Voodoo 2, latest drivers from 3dfx. Anyone have better luck or similar experiences?
-Scott
"there once was a big guy named lou
The Myth of QWERTY discussed in April
"there once was a big guy named lou
-Scott
"there once was a big guy named lou
As to the question "why not simply stick with X?", the berlin FAQ has this to say:
Note that I don't actually use or develop berlin. I just find the project interesting and would like to see reasonable discussions about it.
-Scott
"there once was a big guy named lou
The cause of Alzheimers is currently not fully known. Spin off research from the human genome project at Washington University has shown there is a genetic component to Alzheimers. Even if prions are partially respoonsible, gene therapy may yet be aplicable. Some diseases caused by viruses can be affected by gene therapy. Prions are just a protein form/version of viruses.
"there once was a big guy named lou
mp3.com
"there once was a big guy named lou
I doubt that MS can claim a copyright on Wizards if AOL can't lay claim to "buddy list", "IM", and "You've Got Mail." They certainly can't prevent someone from using the concept. If MS tries to raise a fuss, they can just call them something different, such as Gnome's Druids. -scott
"there once was a big guy named lou
-eldamitri
"there once was a big guy named lou
Rule #61 of comedy: mentioning France automatically makes it funnier.
At least that's what I've been told.
-eldamitri
"there once was a big guy named lou
Releasing the pre/sequels a few months apart: a break from tradition, maybe, but (if memory serves me) not unprecedented. Didn't the "Back To The Future" sequels get released in the same year? Granted, they weren't much to speak of, but I do believe much hoopla was made about their release dates' proximities.
"there once was a big guy named lou
ESR seems to neglect the classic argument for open-sourcing the drivers---the users will make them better. From personal experience, I have noticed that device drivers (especially new ones for new products like video cards released by the company that made the product) tend to be buggy as hell and can cause frequent crashing of a Windows machine. (Alex St. John has ranted about this many times in his "Maximum PC" opinion pieces.) By opening the driver source to your users, a company could get fixes to these problems much more quickly than keeping them closed. This seems to me to be an even more convincing argument than the "some-kid-will-disassemble-them-eventually-anyway" one.
"there once was a big guy named lou
I've been having problems getting rvplayer to work on my linux box. I keep getting "****audio: write error: 64 bytes errno:" type errors. I went searching for help on dejanews, and I read a post that said this problem is due to a bug that rvplayer has on linux 2.2.* machines---that realnetworks exploited a bug in the linux 2.0.* kernels that has been closed in the 2.2.*
series. Has anyone had similar problems, or (better yet) has anyone gotten it to work on current kernels?
Thanks,
-eldamitri