Well... if we're doing the self-promotion bit, Sean... I'd better chime in, too.;)
AlienBBC (which is a Slimserver plugin) has a transcoder proxy server, which can request a RealAudio stream, and output an mp3 stream. Sounds just about exactly what is required. AlienBBC is available from: http://www.mrtickle.org/alienbbc.html
The bit you'll actually need is 'transcoder_proxy.pl'. Satisfy it's pre-requisities, and it's just a matter of having it runinng, and pointing your mp3-consuming device to: http://<address of server>:5123/RealAudio/<complete URL of RealAudio Stream>
IIRC, 6th form uniform was either a Blazer (in fetching purple and black stripes) or jacket (black, or herring-bone grey and black). Black or grey trousers, purple and black striped tie, brown or black shoes (no trainers, etc). Saturdays, of course, you were allowed to come in 'own clothes', providing they weren't too outrageous (as if saturday school wasn't outrageous enough *grin*).
Shorts were allowed in Summer, as were blue aretex short-sleeved shirts, I believe (for younger kids too). The fetching purple-and-black beanie style cap was pretty much optional.
Of course... it's never quite that simple. Monday afternoons were CCF (Combined Cadet Force), or Community Service days, so a good half of the 5th & 6th years could usually be seen strolling around the place in Army fatigues, RAF uniforms, or the oh-so-fetching Navy boy garb;)
I hear they even let girlies in the 6th form, nowadays. Wonders never cease.
Oh... those were the days... but it surprises the hell out of me that I'd hear the place mentioned on/.
As far as the UK and speed limits are concerned... it varies.
Motorways have a speed-limit of 70mph, and on a typical three lane motorway, the slow lane is probably doing around 70... the middle lane is doing about 80-85, and the fast lane is doing anything from 90-105 or so (assuming the traffic's running freelyish).
Of course... there are always exceptions... I've been on the M3, doing 100mph in the slow lane, being overtaken repeatedly;)
That being said, the UK hasn't historically seemed too bothered with speeding on the motorways. Whilst speed cameras march around A roads and below, they're almost totally absent from UK motorways (roadworks, and the infamous M25 notwithstanding).
The real problem with speeding, IMHO, is not on the fast dual-carriageways, but with people doing 45 in 30mph zones in town.
I'm assuming (having not seen the problem in question), that like a number of site I've seen today, people have really not been paying attention when they've been writing their perl code.
Specifically, and as Tom Christiansen states in his Y2k essay, the value for the year returned by the time functions is _NOT_ a two digit year... it merely _USED_ to be the case.... If you try to calcluate the year by "19".$year, you're going to be in trouble, but 1900+$year is entirely fine.
In keeping with the whole Y2k issue in general... fixing the base behaviour of the system (if necessary) is easy... fixing the behaviour of the cluefully-challenged coder, or (worse still) the end user, is a far tougher job.
Personally... as somebody who's just survived the whole roll-ever thing with nothing worse than a feeling that he shouldn't have hit the scotch _QUITE_ so hard, and a crashed MS Exchange server that he'll fix tomorrow, I'd just like to say that I feel pretty damned good about the whole damned thing. Now... if only I'd have been on paid overtime for posting comments at >5am the following day;)
Interestingly, I couldn't get it to work with IP Masquerading, either. Or rather, I could only connect one client through it, while subsequent ones failed to handshake (it appears the first client got all the handshake replies instead).
The full version of the game appears not to suffer from it, however, so I'm happy again;)
Hmmm. I'd have to vote for pretty much the entire guts of an Apple II on this one. I still remember times when you could look at the circuit diagram for a computer and actually _KNOW_ how all the bits worked.
In particular, the video circuitry was a work of art - IIRC correctly, it essentially consisted of two IC's and a transistor. One IC was simply a counter that generated the addresses of video memory to read, the second IC scrambled the addressing (dead sneaky - reading in the scrambled order ensured that all the DRAM chips got hit regularly enough so that their data didn't decay), and a discrete transistor to drive the output properly.
And of course, all the logic was standard TTL IC's, so you really could replace bits when it all stopped working.:)
We've been running a SCSI/IDE RAID system here for some months now. They're actually a pretty decent idea - the array presents itself as a Wide-SCSI device, but drives 6 IDE HDD's over 3 IDE Busses. There's 128Mb of cache in the box, too, so it feels pretty snappy (although I've got no hard figures on it's performance).
The real bonus, of course, is that it's dead cheap, compared to equivalent all-SCSI solutions.
I should probably say that we've only got it running on an NT file server at the moment, so I can't vouch for it's performance on a big scary mail server, but it's working well for us. Certainly, it seems to deal OK with everything we want from it (RAID-5, plus a hot-spare). It deals just fine with you disconnecting a drive while it's running, and simply gets on with re-building onto the hot spare (hardly a scientific measure of it's usefulness I know, but certainly handy for demonstrating to PHB's why they should like it *grin*).
Looks like it's mostly dog slow rather than dead, however... a coupla reloads dealt with it quite nicely.
Re:Car heater in the winter
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 1
As far as shock-resistance is concerned, I believe they've tried fairly hard to deal with it as an issue. The drives are on shock-absorbent mountings, and they cache tracks in memory before spinning-down the drives.
However, I'm not sure this is as big an issue as you might think - I've had an mp3 player bumping around in the back of my car for 6 months or so now, and I've only just lost one HDD (which, actually, I don't think was killed by shock, so much as a PSU that went nuts on me). That wasn't shock absorbed in any way at all, either.
Jules
Re:So do we really need this?
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 1
To me, at least, the best thing about the whole in-car mp3 player deal is that it's all hard-disc thrown. So, instant access to any of the tracks in the database, with no seek times or clunking of CD-changers. It makes random play across 2,500 or so tracks instant!
That being said, the Empeg works out pretty pricy, but since when was the first commercial product in a marketplace ever cheap? Admittedly, I use a player built out of (mostly) used PC parts, but it sure is a hell of a lot more boot space than an Empeg would!
I don't know about any of the others, but xaudio didn't support VBR in it's current 'release' versions, as of a coupla weeks ago.
However, they have a beta version of their SDK which contains the xaudio and rxaudio apps, which certainly _DO_ support it (as the mp3 player in the back of my car can attest). The apps themselves appear to be rock-solid stable, so all's well there. It's also free for non-commercial use.
The betas can be found at http://www.xaudio.com/sdk/beta - you'll need, however, the username and password which are on the bottom of the SDK license agreement, which is available from http://www.xaudio.com
Slashdot Mirror
Well... if we're doing the self-promotion bit, Sean... I'd better chime in, too. ;)
AlienBBC (which is a Slimserver plugin) has a transcoder proxy server, which can request a RealAudio stream, and output an mp3 stream. Sounds just about exactly what is required. AlienBBC is available from: http://www.mrtickle.org/alienbbc.html
The bit you'll actually need is 'transcoder_proxy.pl'. Satisfy it's pre-requisities, and it's just a matter of having it runinng, and pointing your mp3-consuming device to:
http://<address of server>:5123/RealAudio/<complete URL of RealAudio Stream>
That should be all that's required.
-- Jules
IIRC, 6th form uniform was either a Blazer (in fetching purple and black stripes) or jacket (black, or herring-bone grey and black). Black or grey trousers, purple and black striped tie, brown or black shoes (no trainers, etc). Saturdays, of course, you were allowed to come in 'own clothes', providing they weren't too outrageous (as if saturday school wasn't outrageous enough *grin*).
;)
/.
Shorts were allowed in Summer, as were blue aretex short-sleeved shirts, I believe (for younger kids too). The fetching purple-and-black beanie style cap was pretty much optional.
Of course... it's never quite that simple. Monday afternoons were CCF (Combined Cadet Force), or Community Service days, so a good half of the 5th & 6th years could usually be seen strolling around the place in Army fatigues, RAF uniforms, or the oh-so-fetching Navy boy garb
I hear they even let girlies in the 6th form, nowadays. Wonders never cease.
Oh... those were the days... but it surprises the hell out of me that I'd hear the place mentioned on
-- Jules
As far as the UK and speed limits are concerned... it varies.
;)
Motorways have a speed-limit of 70mph, and on a typical three lane motorway, the slow lane is probably doing around 70... the middle lane is doing about 80-85, and the fast lane is doing anything from 90-105 or so (assuming the traffic's running freelyish).
Of course... there are always exceptions... I've been on the M3, doing 100mph in the slow lane, being overtaken repeatedly
That being said, the UK hasn't historically seemed too bothered with speeding on the motorways. Whilst speed cameras march around A roads and below, they're almost totally absent from UK motorways (roadworks, and the infamous M25 notwithstanding).
The real problem with speeding, IMHO, is not on the fast dual-carriageways, but with people doing 45 in 30mph zones in town.
-- Jules
I'm assuming (having not seen the problem in question), that like a number of site I've seen today, people have really not been paying attention when they've been writing their perl code.
;)
Specifically, and as Tom Christiansen states in his Y2k essay, the value for the year returned by the time functions is _NOT_ a two digit year... it merely _USED_ to be the case.... If you try to calcluate the year by "19".$year, you're going to be in trouble, but 1900+$year is entirely fine.
In keeping with the whole Y2k issue in general... fixing the base behaviour of the system (if necessary) is easy... fixing the behaviour of the cluefully-challenged coder, or (worse still) the end user, is a far tougher job.
Personally... as somebody who's just survived the whole roll-ever thing with nothing worse than a feeling that he shouldn't have hit the scotch _QUITE_ so hard, and a crashed MS Exchange server that he'll fix tomorrow, I'd just like to say that I feel pretty damned good about the whole damned thing. Now... if only I'd have been on paid overtime for posting comments at >5am the following day
-- Jules
Interestingly, I couldn't get it to work with IP Masquerading, either. Or rather, I could only connect one client through it, while subsequent ones failed to handshake (it appears the first client got all the handshake replies instead).
;)
The full version of the game appears not to suffer from it, however, so I'm happy again
- Jules
Hmmm. I'd have to vote for pretty much the entire guts of an Apple II on this one. I still remember times when you could look at the circuit diagram for a computer and actually _KNOW_ how all the bits worked.
:)
In particular, the video circuitry was a work of art - IIRC correctly, it essentially consisted of two IC's and a transistor. One IC was simply a counter that generated the addresses of video memory to read, the second IC scrambled the addressing (dead sneaky - reading in the scrambled order ensured that all the DRAM chips got hit regularly enough so that their data didn't decay), and a discrete transistor to drive the output properly.
And of course, all the logic was standard TTL IC's, so you really could replace bits when it all stopped working.
-- Jules
We've been running a SCSI/IDE RAID system here for some months now. They're actually a pretty decent idea - the array presents itself as a Wide-SCSI device, but drives 6 IDE HDD's over 3 IDE Busses. There's 128Mb of cache in the box, too, so it feels pretty snappy (although I've got no hard figures on it's performance).
The real bonus, of course, is that it's dead cheap, compared to equivalent all-SCSI solutions.
I should probably say that we've only got it running on an NT file server at the moment, so I can't vouch for it's performance on a big scary mail server, but it's working well for us. Certainly, it seems to deal OK with everything we want from it (RAID-5, plus a hot-spare). It deals just fine with you disconnecting a drive while it's running, and simply gets on with re-building onto the hot spare (hardly a scientific measure of it's usefulness I know, but certainly handy for demonstrating to PHB's why they should like it *grin*).
Looks like it's mostly dog slow rather than dead, however... a coupla reloads dealt with it quite nicely.
As far as shock-resistance is concerned, I believe they've tried fairly hard to deal with it as an issue. The drives are on shock-absorbent mountings, and they cache tracks in memory before spinning-down the drives.
However, I'm not sure this is as big an issue as you might think - I've had an mp3 player bumping around in the back of my car for 6 months or so now, and I've only just lost one HDD (which, actually, I don't think was killed by shock, so much as a PSU that went nuts on me). That wasn't shock absorbed in any way at all, either.
Jules
To me, at least, the best thing about the whole in-car mp3 player deal is that it's all hard-disc thrown. So, instant access to any of the tracks in the database, with no seek times or clunking of CD-changers. It makes random play across 2,500 or so tracks instant!
That being said, the Empeg works out pretty pricy, but since when was the first commercial product in a marketplace ever cheap? Admittedly, I use a player built out of (mostly) used PC parts, but it sure is a hell of a lot more boot space than an Empeg would!
Jules
I don't know about any of the others, but xaudio didn't support VBR in it's current 'release' versions, as of a coupla weeks ago.
However, they have a beta version of their SDK which contains the xaudio and rxaudio apps, which certainly _DO_ support it (as the mp3 player in the back of my car can attest). The apps themselves appear to be rock-solid stable, so all's well there. It's also free for non-commercial use.
The betas can be found at http://www.xaudio.com/sdk/beta - you'll need, however, the username and password which are on the bottom of the SDK license agreement, which is available from http://www.xaudio.com
Jules