At the school that I went to, when Napter and then Kazaa became a problem (i.e. was eating up too much of the colleges upstream/downstream bandwidth), the network admins just applied some traffic shaping to it. They gave 4500 students 30kbps of bandwidth. That stopped 99% of the downloading.
These sorts of content filtering seem silly, as all it will do is speed up the transition to encrypted, hard to trace solutions.
"I'm sorry, the plug-in you tried to install is not compatible with this operating system's beleif that all programs must be made by Microsoft. Please try Sparkle instead."
On a serios note, how is this not anti-competitive? I guess Macromedia can look for a nice payout once this has been implemented.
Massive increase in visitors to bluejackQ What a day! By the second week, bluejackQ was averaging around 500 page views a day. I thought I was doing well in the third week when we saw 8,000 page views, but today the traffic increased to well over 115,000 page views!
I wonder why the hits went up? A post to slashdot?
Now, the Universal Media Disc looks extremely cool. Nice protective case like Mini Disks and 1.8gb of data. I'd love to have that in my laptop. It would be great for bringing dvd's with me on trips. I can deal with DVD to DivX so taht it fits on the 1.8 gb disk.
It could easily be the next floppy if the prices are low enough.
I want one.
Anyone know whether they will be (are already) available for the PC?
You could have 100 prelims where people run a 20-50 mile course and take the top 20 teams and have them run the whole 250 mile course. That way, you give every team a fair chance. If you can't make it through 50 miles faster/better than the others, how do they hope to make it through 250. In addition, they could choose to run the 250 mile course the next day, so as not to give additional unfair advantages to the better funded teams, who could rework/weak their cars between races. Have the cars impounded as they do in formula one racing.
I would think that sites like this would be to the advantage of the music industry. Don't bother going after the site, just go after all the links to illegal music that they have ever so nicely collected for you.
Yeah, it's probably possible to do. However, you'd be much better off creating an application that just read from N devices at a time and displayed them in the manner that you want to have them displayed.
Custom driver == expensive (either in time... or money or both)
it would use its vast computing ability to figure out every possible argument/situation and have compute every possible outcome for the next 100,000 moves.
It'd just be a big game of chess. The best humanity could hope for was a draw. Which would inevitably be not "beyond a shadow of a doubt."
Dial *67 before you dial the number, and your number will show up as 'blocked ID' (or similar) on the display on the other end.
However, IIRC this does not work when you're calling a 1-800 or other toll-free number. I guess the idea is that if you are footing the bill you should be allowed to block your number, and if you are paying for the toll-free line you should be able to see who is calling you - which makes sense.
So, just call from a pay phone... it's a 1-800 number.
. It's like somebody trying to buy a backhoe and you suggesting "Why not use a shovel? They're smaller." Because it doesn't do the same thing! If you want to record the exact soundwave produced by a singer on a high note, and play exactly that back into your ear, then lossless compression is your only choice.
No, using your analogy, it's like saying, "hey, I need to dig a hole in the garden to plant the seeds for my corn. I think that I'll use my backhoe." When the hole that you need to make could be just as easily made with a shovel, and in probably a much more effecient manner.
You have to use the right tool for the job. There is little need for playback of lossless audio if your sources aren't good enough to hear the difference. Particularly when they are grossly inadequate. "Hey, I'm listening to lossless audio while I jog." Whoopdido... who cares. Does losslessly encoded audio improve that experience? Probably not.
Now, lossless audio through a proper system (meaning a real sound card, none of this Creative resampling stuff). With a really good set of speakers and/or head phones. Now that can make a difference.
For really good sound cards, look at Lynx Studio, RME Audio, or M-Audio to name a few off the top of my head.
Pure digital is too big, Flac is 2 to 3 times smaller, and therefore this device fills an essential niche: it gets your Flac files to your receiver without requiring a compact disc
2 to 3 times smaller? Not really. 1.5-2 times smaller is more like it. Audio has too much information to compress more than that. You get about 55-65% compression. And most of that is due to the fact that left and right channels of audio tend to be relatively similar.
I'll give you that it would allow you to get your FLAC files to a receiver, just that you aren't really benefitting greatly from the files, as the devices analog output will not be as good as it needs to be.
I'm sorry, none of these portable plays have significantly good analog stages to make lossless output worth anything. Maybe one will come out with a good digital output, but that still will need to have an external DAC.
Plus, using a lossless format really hampers the amount of music that you can store on such a device.
20gb of MP3 = 15000+ hours of music (200+ CDs avg 50min/cd) 20gb of lossless = 4000 hours of music (80+ CDs avg 50min/cd)
Why not transcode your music from your lossless format to MP3/Ogg/AAC and use that on your portable? You can even do this in batch mode at night. The other advantage is that you can transcode the files to a much lower bit rate than you might ordinarily do, since you probably won't hear the difference between 128kbps, 160kbps and 190kbps+ files, when using your headphones or when plugged into a car. This has two major benefits.
First, it gives you an extra 10-40% more space.
Second, since you are loading smaller files into memory, the devices don't have to run their power hungry hard drives by a similar amount. This can increase the length of time that you can listen to your device between recharges.
I see these two benefits far out weighing having lossless playback on a device where you won't really hear the difference.
As for those people who will comment that they get their concert bootlegs as FLAC or SHNs, and they don't want to change them? Why not? MP3s are so small? You'll be able to carry 2-3 times as many concerts with you.
Heck, with a 40 gig iPod, you could keep your entire music library.
Go out and get 160-200gb hard drives. They are often well less than a dollar a gig. Then get some 4 or 8 bay firewire enclosures. Presto, tons of storage... cheap. The 4 bay enclosures cost on the order of $150... and make that $200 w/ removable trays for the drives.
If you don't need access to your data at all times, you could get away with one 4bay enclosure + removable trays for each drive, then pop in the drive you need.
I have put together a music system for my home stereo based on a computer and one of these. My 4x200gb drives give me 400gb's worth of redundant storage. The cheapest way for me to backup the data was to just get a second set of drives. Especially since my content doesn't change that frequently.
So it doesn't surprise me AT ALL, now that voice telephony is becoming a "marginal good" (i.e. "too cheap to meter", like electirc elevators without ticket-takers or coin slots) that Dartmouth should be the first institution to make it available to their people without an extra fee.
Yeah, pay $36,000 a year and we'll let you talk on the phone for free.
Yeah, the have a JetStream Starter plan, where your bandwidth is capped by the ISP, usually to 5-10 gigs. Much more reasonable than 500 megs, however, it's still extremely easy to bang over 5 gigs of traffic w/o downloading any MP3s or music.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just setup traffic shaping.
At the school that I went to, when Napter and then Kazaa became a problem (i.e. was eating up too much of the colleges upstream/downstream bandwidth), the network admins just applied some traffic shaping to it. They gave 4500 students 30kbps of bandwidth. That stopped 99% of the downloading.
These sorts of content filtering seem silly, as all it will do is speed up the transition to encrypted, hard to trace solutions.
I think 911-protection is keeping a lot of us from switching...
Just keep your existing land line connected. You won't have any regular service on it, but it will still give you 911.
On a big billboard outside of McDonalds:
Now hiring losers!!!
Britney Spears is a happy meal ...
All you can eat... under a buck.
How long before M$ breaks Macromedia Flash?
"I'm sorry, the plug-in you tried to install is not compatible with this operating system's beleif that all programs must be made by Microsoft. Please try Sparkle instead."
On a serios note, how is this not anti-competitive? I guess Macromedia can look for a nice payout once this has been implemented.
Why don't these companies start implementing Kerberos? Or something similar. My understanding is that no passwords are ever sent out over the network.
http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/
Massive increase in visitors to bluejackQ
What a day! By the second week, bluejackQ was averaging around 500 page views a day. I thought I was doing well in the third week when we saw 8,000 page views, but today the traffic increased to well over 115,000 page views!
I wonder why the hits went up? A post to slashdot?
Now, the Universal Media Disc looks extremely cool. Nice protective case like Mini Disks and 1.8gb of data. I'd love to have that in my laptop. It would be great for bringing dvd's with me on trips. I can deal with DVD to DivX so taht it fits on the 1.8 gb disk.
It could easily be the next floppy if the prices are low enough.
I want one.
Anyone know whether they will be (are already) available for the PC?
You could have 100 prelims where people run a 20-50 mile course and take the top 20 teams and have them run the whole 250 mile course. That way, you give every team a fair chance. If you can't make it through 50 miles faster/better than the others, how do they hope to make it through 250. In addition, they could choose to run the 250 mile course the next day, so as not to give additional unfair advantages to the better funded teams, who could rework/weak their cars between races. Have the cars impounded as they do in formula one racing.
I would think that sites like this would be to the advantage of the music industry. Don't bother going after the site, just go after all the links to illegal music that they have ever so nicely collected for you.
kiwi
I can speak from experience that the driver and service provided by this company are excellent.
kiwi
Yeah, it's probably possible to do. However, you'd be much better off creating an application that just read from N devices at a time and displayed them in the manner that you want to have them displayed.
Custom driver == expensive (either in time... or money or both)
I have found little software that does more to make a user's PC using experience unenjoyable than Gator.
What about bonzi buddy... I think that stupid little ape made computers at least as annoying, probably more so.
it would use its vast computing ability to figure out every possible argument/situation and have compute every possible outcome for the next 100,000 moves.
It'd just be a big game of chess. The best humanity could hope for was a draw. Which would inevitably be not "beyond a shadow of a doubt."
Have you tried jRiver MediaCenter? It won't have any problems with 300 albums. Give it a shot. You get a 30 day free trial.
... and people thought that the US moon mission was just a Hollywood stunt.
Dial *67 before you dial the number, and your number will show up as 'blocked ID' (or similar) on the display on the other end.
However, IIRC this does not work when you're calling a 1-800 or other toll-free number. I guess the idea is that if you are footing the bill you should be allowed to block your number, and if you are paying for the toll-free line you should be able to see who is calling you - which makes sense.
So, just call from a pay phone... it's a 1-800 number.
. It's like somebody trying to buy a backhoe and you suggesting "Why not use a shovel? They're smaller." Because it doesn't do the same thing! If you want to record the exact soundwave produced by a singer on a high note, and play exactly that back into your ear, then lossless compression is your only choice.
No, using your analogy, it's like saying, "hey, I need to dig a hole in the garden to plant the seeds for my corn. I think that I'll use my backhoe." When the hole that you need to make could be just as easily made with a shovel, and in probably a much more effecient manner.
You have to use the right tool for the job. There is little need for playback of lossless audio if your sources aren't good enough to hear the difference. Particularly when they are grossly inadequate. "Hey, I'm listening to lossless audio while I jog." Whoopdido... who cares. Does losslessly encoded audio improve that experience? Probably not.
Now, lossless audio through a proper system (meaning a real sound card, none of this Creative resampling stuff). With a really good set of speakers and/or head phones. Now that can make a difference.
For really good sound cards, look at Lynx Studio, RME Audio, or M-Audio to name a few off the top of my head.
Pure digital is too big, Flac is 2 to 3 times smaller, and therefore this device fills an essential niche: it gets your Flac files to your receiver without requiring a compact disc
2 to 3 times smaller? Not really. 1.5-2 times smaller is more like it. Audio has too much information to compress more than that. You get about 55-65% compression. And most of that is due to the fact that left and right channels of audio tend to be relatively similar.
I'll give you that it would allow you to get your FLAC files to a receiver, just that you aren't really benefitting greatly from the files, as the devices analog output will not be as good as it needs to be.
FLAC?!?!? WTF for?
I'm sorry, none of these portable plays have significantly good analog stages to make lossless output worth anything. Maybe one will come out with a good digital output, but that still will need to have an external DAC.
Plus, using a lossless format really hampers the amount of music that you can store on such a device.
20gb of MP3 = 15000+ hours of music (200+ CDs avg 50min/cd)
20gb of lossless = 4000 hours of music (80+ CDs avg 50min/cd)
Why not transcode your music from your lossless format to MP3/Ogg/AAC and use that on your portable? You can even do this in batch mode at night. The other advantage is that you can transcode the files to a much lower bit rate than you might ordinarily do, since you probably won't hear the difference between 128kbps, 160kbps and 190kbps+ files, when using your headphones or when plugged into a car. This has two major benefits.
First, it gives you an extra 10-40% more space.
Second, since you are loading smaller files into memory, the devices don't have to run their power hungry hard drives by a similar amount. This can increase the length of time that you can listen to your device between recharges.
I see these two benefits far out weighing having lossless playback on a device where you won't really hear the difference.
As for those people who will comment that they get their concert bootlegs as FLAC or SHNs, and they don't want to change them? Why not? MP3s are so small? You'll be able to carry 2-3 times as many concerts with you.
Heck, with a 40 gig iPod, you could keep your entire music library.
I've been able to find them with built in fans for about $15.
if you can build up your drives slowly, you can take advanage of rebate deals and pick up 200gb drives for $130 or so...
Go out and get 160-200gb hard drives. They are often well less than a dollar a gig. Then get some 4 or 8 bay firewire enclosures. Presto, tons of storage... cheap. The 4 bay enclosures cost on the order of $150... and make that $200 w/ removable trays for the drives.
If you don't need access to your data at all times, you could get away with one 4bay enclosure + removable trays for each drive, then pop in the drive you need.
I have put together a music system for my home stereo based on a computer and one of these. My 4x200gb drives give me 400gb's worth of redundant storage. The cheapest way for me to backup the data was to just get a second set of drives. Especially since my content doesn't change that frequently.
So it doesn't surprise me AT ALL, now that voice telephony is becoming a "marginal good" (i.e. "too cheap to meter", like electirc elevators without ticket-takers or coin slots) that Dartmouth should be the first institution to make it available to their people without an extra fee.
Yeah, pay $36,000 a year and we'll let you talk on the phone for free.
Yeah, the have a JetStream Starter plan, where your bandwidth is capped by the ISP, usually to 5-10 gigs. Much more reasonable than 500 megs, however, it's still extremely easy to bang over 5 gigs of traffic w/o downloading any MP3s or music.
[dark helmet]
So, I see that your hard disk is as BIG AS MINE! Now... let's see how well you handle it.
[/dark helmet]
With a little change it sounds even better...
[i]causing headaches both for Symantec and unsuspecting buyers[/i]
Damn!!! my $5 copy of Norton Antivirus 2008 isn't legit.
Wow! Who'da thunk.