I have been using the Roland (Edirol) UA-30 with similar features (optical/coax/analog in/out, plus a 2-channel mixer, jacks for guitar & microphone & headphone with a volume dial) for a couple of years. Powered by the USB connector, it needs nothing extra & is very light. I use it with the 7-pin Datman adapter cables from Core Sound to transcribe DAT tapes.
They recently reissued it as the Edirol UA-3 and added a more upscale 1/3 rack desktop model, the UA-5.
There have also been a stream of no-brand import USB sound devices from Taiwan over the last couple of years, but finding one when you needed it could be difficult.
Based on past performance, Creative's product will probably be less than perfect, but it'll be nice to have another option.
For the person who asked about Firewire - Stereo audio bitrates are fine for USB, you just need to have a little buffering in the device. I think the reason nobody's bother to put a 1394 chipset in an external sound box is that if you have Firewire you probably already have decent sound. This may change, or with USB 2.0 it may not.
It does rather blow one's mind that Richard Stenger, paid by CNN for "Sci-Tech" reporting, would look at a bunch of proposals and papers referring to the FAR side of the moon, and still write "DARK side."
Anyway, CNN may not be very good at commenting on this stuff, but Slashdot isn't either. These postings are weird! (That one about the meteors is so embarrassing that I was hoping I could meta-moderate it, but all I got was junk about Quake parties...)
You should read the proposal. I'm not sure/. readers know what they are actually talking about building. It's like a bunch of Pathfinders with radio antennas on them, plus a control module. The big "dish" is done with baseline interferometry, like the VLA in New Mexico.
We absolutely have the tech to get these things up there, red herrings about the Saturn V notwithstanding. This is a run of the mill planetary probe... with a lot more trips, but each one only takes a few days or weeks, depending on the boost method used.
One thing we don't have is a TDRS-type relay satellite to communicate with the farside. We could park one at the Lagrangian libration zones L-4 or L-5 - diagram here - depending on which crater was chosen, or we could low-orbit a fleet of them and play relay games.
A farside radio observatory is a reasonable proposal and the researchers discussing it have already thought through most of the casual objections raised here, so I hope it's given further study.
In a peer-to-peer Net, partially effective copy protection on popular mass media is analogous to partially effective antibiotics in the universe of disease: it breeds resistant strains and makes the problem worse.
Even if only a minority of users have the hardware and software needed to rip a popular CD, that will be enough to "seed" the file-sharing pool, so that the rest of the listeners can grab, share, and finish the job.
Nevertheless, the major labels will probably go for it. This will create another market paradox: small-time, up-and-coming independent musicians with absolutely NO interest in making their music "hard to get" will be competing in the file pool with big-budget acts whose label is desperately trying to make THEIR music as hard to get as possible. Independent music will be helped, and the surprisingly marginal profitability of many labels will be hit hard.
One thing I do like about these "software music wars" is that eventually somebody will get smart at, say, Universal, and realize that they could install a protected CD player that REFUSES TO PLAY RIVAL COMPANIES' CD's. Or better yet, that makes them sound tinny or low-fi without announcing it. Then the rival strikes back, and Universal counterstrikes, and oooooooh!! i like it!!!
Learn to use Google whydontcha
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 1
You guys love Google so much, why not form a proper query for "flying on mars."
...and it would be a lot faster and better than the commercialized original. Don't worry about this faux corporate takeover. (In reality there was always a corporate core, only the identities have changed.)
What matters about the Net is the information metaphor, not its first-cut instantiation. Companies and lawyers (and Slashdot) are obsessing over DNS, hyperlinks and other things that will be bonus trivia answers in 20 years.
When we need the OtherNet we will have it running in a month. Until then, keep learning and diversifying.
If you want the HP DVD+RW drive as an external, get a Firewire external chassis like the ones from http://www.apdrives.com . I have not specifically tested the HP drive in one of these, but everything else I've tried works great.
I think people have gotten confused somewhere along the line here. I had a Webring back in the days of webring.org and it worked fine. Then Yahoo bought it, I had to make a couple of login changes, but it kept working fine. Now they've sold it to Webring.com ( http://dir.webring.com ) and I was notified by email that I could migrate my ring by clicking a link. I did so, it migrated, and now it lives on the new Webring.com and works fine.
Webrings are not inherently rocket science, it is just nice to have a common clearinghouse. I wish the new maintainers the best of luck.
It's time for the real scoop. Which of these titles is NOT under consideration?
Episode III: Jedi Kids
Episode III: Darth Takes a Holiday
Episode III: For A Few Clones More
Episode III: A Tatooine Christmas
Episode III: Click Here To Purchase Title
Surveys like this (as opposed to scientific studies) are junk, because they can't control for the subjects telling them what they want to hear (how dumb would you have to be to use Napster regularly and tell some survey caller "no i don't buy anything anymore"!). They also can't control for the most basic variable of all, viz., are Napster users ALREADY predisposed to buy more music, whether they learned how to download or not? Many would guess that's a yes, and the question becomes whether one of those predisposed people ends up buying more or less music after getting on Napster. I have seen surveys that at least tried to go after this crucial question, but the Aussie one doesn't come near it.
Even if it could be proved that the unauthorized copying and downloading of copyrighted music helped sales, the question at the end of the day is whether the authors and publishers of creative works ought to have the right to decide for THEMSELVES how they wish to help sales. Napster defenders are basically saying screw you, this probably helps you, and hey by the way if it doesn't actually help you, screw you anyway, we're taking what we want.
I started programming in the 1970's when software was closed and proprietary and things were a lot like what Microsoft probably thinks it wants today. Let me tell you, software was in a TERRIBLE state back then. It was a standing joke among programmers and systems designers how inept the in-house programmers at shops like IBM and DEC could be, on the rare occasions when people who ponied up 5-6 figures for "source licences" (usually readable printouts on microfiche!) had the chance to check what they were doing. Not to mention that the languages were painful and "human factors" consisted of remember which side of the fanfold printout sheet your answer tended to appear on, or what the PF2 key did on each of a dozen different screen forms.
All of this was swept away, blown away, and utterly transcended by the academic-centered and openly developed software revolution of the 1980's, which continued into the 1990's. Software had to adapt to the reality that "little people" could out-program the big houses in a few weeks or months of spare time work.
The GNU project and its open-source peers have been the engine that drives honest software development for years. Without them, those applications on the $1,200 PC would be about five times crappier than they are.
Open source and the GPL are not "destroying" commercial intellectual property - they are making it earn its keep, by setting the "bar" of functionality at a level where commercialware is forced to add real value or risk being ignored.
There is a role for both open source and commercial software. Neither community should waste oxygen trying to claim that the other is evil.
Sometimes a router that is supposed (in the eyes of the rest of the network) to be handling a particular bit of traffic has been rebooted or is reloading its tables for some reason, and keeps punting to a peer, which disagrees and punts it back, ad infinitum. This is not good news, but it's far from unheard of, and if the tables were large, it can take a couple of minutes before things clear up.
This has nothing to do with the @home problem, which I understood was a blackhole issue.
As for getting top network admins' notice, sometimes the best way is to talk to YOUR isp's network support dept, as high as you can escalate it, and ask them to call over to the network desk of the company in question. Network geeks tend to respect each other and cooperate more easily then they do with "mere users," however aggrieved or righteous their cause.
The lesson is that any successful virtual community needs to be *about* something.
The WELL, like its early equivalents in other cities (Panix, the World etc) began as a dialup service/ISP that hosted a virtual community. This allowed it to simply be 'about itself' because all its members shared the experience of being subscribers, and in many cases neighbors. Even then, it was heavily subdivided into topical discussion areas, and most denizens only participated in a few of them.
With the advent of universal location-independent Internet access, the appeal of a general purpose "who's up for pizza this Thursday" virtual community begins to dim. If commentators want to romanticize this and imply it was somehow a better use of the Net than, say, a community focused on private electricity generation or the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nields, they're just wrong.
I think that there are GENUINELY interesting questions to be asked about virtual communities, to help us understand how to make the best ones possible as they constantly arise and collapse. "Why didn't they succeed" and "Why didn't the Well catch on" are not the most interesting questions.
You have a responsibility to quote other journalists' work with the same clear accuracy that you would want them to exercise when quoting you. If you found the Daily Breeze lifting paragraphs from an article of yours, without visible attribution, and simply including a link to Slashdot somewhere in the article, you'd be livid.
It's also a bit low-rent to rant about "User 240151" and imply, as sometimes happens around here, that anonymous posters are some kind of lower order. Privacy is a right. Words should speak for themselves. That will be all.:)
Timothy wrote: "I wonder what happens to those royalty deals, though, if the company goes Rambust..."
I haven't seen the agreements, but you can write a deal that says anything you want, so there could be language dealing specifically with Rambus going out of business.
If Rambus did go under, its assets (desks, gumball machines etc) would be liquidated or sold off to other companies. Those assets include the patents we're talking about. Someone else (like, oh, say, Intel) would pay for them and own them, and start collecting the royalties.
Please reread Matusushita's comment above. This whole thing is premature. From the project status page at http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/p ioneer/PNStat.html :
The latest Pioneer activity was on September 10, when DSS 63 tracked the spacecraft. The station was not able to acquire the downlink. However, there was a report of two momentary receiver glitches at the Pioneer 10 frequency. This report was encouraging, since it means that the spacecraft signal is there, but it is still off Earth point. The Earth look angle (ELA) is estimated to be over 1.4 degrees. The downlink signal strength drops off rapidly after 1.0 degree. The Earth is just starting to go back towards the PN 10 spin axis. As the year continues, the Earth will be closer in alignment with the spacecraft pointing and the tracking stations should be able to regain lock. We anticipate this to be about the middle of December. Our latest calculation of the ephemeris yields: Right Ascension = 76.27 degrees, Declination = 25.91 degrees.
One, and they don't do this yet but it wouldn't surprise me, is to mask all email addresses with an eBay resident proxy (kind of like joey@my-deja.com) which then forwards the mail to the member's real back email... but lets them monitor whatever they want to monitor. This lets them control everything. If a buyer wanted to encourage backchannel contacts they could make their real email visible somewhere, but in that case you presume the buyer isn't worried about fraud or likely to complain about it.
The second thing they can do and probably are doing is simply responding to customer complaints. If ten of us lose an auction and we're all contacted afterwards by the seller saying "guess what, i found an extra one after all" then the chances are pretty high that someone will rat on the seller. If the practice violates an enforceable seller agreement, game over.
While it can be argued that what people do offline is their own business, eBay would certainly not escape liability for "bringing together" fraudulent sellers and their victims, so they have a legitimate interest in policing this behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been using the Roland (Edirol) UA-30 with similar features (optical/coax/analog in/out, plus a 2-channel mixer, jacks for guitar & microphone & headphone with a volume dial) for a couple of years. Powered by the USB connector, it needs nothing extra & is very light. I use it with the 7-pin Datman adapter cables from Core Sound to transcribe DAT tapes.
They recently reissued it as the Edirol UA-3 and added a more upscale 1/3 rack desktop model, the UA-5.
There have also been a stream of no-brand import USB sound devices from Taiwan over the last couple of years, but finding one when you needed it could be difficult.
Based on past performance, Creative's product will probably be less than perfect, but it'll be nice to have another option.
For the person who asked about Firewire - Stereo audio bitrates are fine for USB, you just need to have a little buffering in the device. I think the reason nobody's bother to put a 1394 chipset in an external sound box is that if you have Firewire you probably already have decent sound. This may change, or with USB 2.0 it may not.
It does rather blow one's mind that Richard Stenger, paid by CNN for "Sci-Tech" reporting, would look at a bunch of proposals and papers referring to the FAR side of the moon, and still write "DARK side."
/. readers know what they are actually talking about building. It's like a bunch of Pathfinders with radio antennas on them, plus a control module. The big "dish" is done with baseline interferometry, like the VLA in New Mexico.
Anyway, CNN may not be very good at commenting on this stuff, but Slashdot isn't either. These postings are weird! (That one about the meteors is so embarrassing that I was hoping I could meta-moderate it, but all I got was junk about Quake parties...)
You should read the proposal. I'm not sure
We absolutely have the tech to get these things up there, red herrings about the Saturn V notwithstanding. This is a run of the mill planetary probe... with a lot more trips, but each one only takes a few days or weeks, depending on the boost method used.
One thing we don't have is a TDRS-type relay satellite to communicate with the farside. We could park one at the Lagrangian libration zones L-4 or L-5 - diagram here - depending on which crater was chosen, or we could low-orbit a fleet of them and play relay games.
A farside radio observatory is a reasonable proposal and the researchers discussing it have already thought through most of the casual objections raised here, so I hope it's given further study.
In a peer-to-peer Net, partially effective copy protection on popular mass media is analogous to partially effective antibiotics in the universe of disease: it breeds resistant strains and makes the problem worse.
Even if only a minority of users have the hardware and software needed to rip a popular CD, that will be enough to "seed" the file-sharing pool, so that the rest of the listeners can grab, share, and finish the job.
Nevertheless, the major labels will probably go for it. This will create another market paradox: small-time, up-and-coming independent musicians with absolutely NO interest in making their music "hard to get" will be competing in the file pool with big-budget acts whose label is desperately trying to make THEIR music as hard to get as possible. Independent music will be helped, and the surprisingly marginal profitability of many labels will be hit hard.
One thing I do like about these "software music wars" is that eventually somebody will get smart at, say, Universal, and realize that they could install a protected CD player that REFUSES TO PLAY RIVAL COMPANIES' CD's. Or better yet, that makes them sound tinny or low-fi without announcing it. Then the rival strikes back, and Universal counterstrikes, and oooooooh!! i like it!!!
You guys love Google so much, why not form a proper query for "flying on mars."
...and it would be a lot faster and better than the commercialized original. Don't worry about this faux corporate takeover. (In reality there was always a corporate core, only the identities have changed.)
What matters about the Net is the information metaphor, not its first-cut instantiation. Companies and lawyers (and Slashdot) are obsessing over DNS, hyperlinks and other things that will be bonus trivia answers in 20 years.
When we need the OtherNet we will have it running in a month. Until then, keep learning and diversifying.
If you want the HP DVD+RW drive as an external, get a Firewire external chassis like the ones from http://www.apdrives.com . I have not specifically tested the HP drive in one of these, but everything else I've tried works great.
I think people have gotten confused somewhere along the line here. I had a Webring back in the days of webring.org and it worked fine. Then Yahoo bought it, I had to make a couple of login changes, but it kept working fine. Now they've sold it to Webring.com ( http://dir.webring.com ) and I was notified by email that I could migrate my ring by clicking a link. I did so, it migrated, and now it lives on the new Webring.com and works fine.
Webrings are not inherently rocket science, it is just nice to have a common clearinghouse. I wish the new maintainers the best of luck.
It's time for the real scoop. Which of these titles is NOT under consideration?
Episode III: Jedi Kids
Episode III: Darth Takes a Holiday
Episode III: For A Few Clones More
Episode III: A Tatooine Christmas
Episode III: Click Here To Purchase Title
Surveys like this (as opposed to scientific studies) are junk, because they can't control for the subjects telling them what they want to hear (how dumb would you have to be to use Napster regularly and tell some survey caller "no i don't buy anything anymore"!). They also can't control for the most basic variable of all, viz., are Napster users ALREADY predisposed to buy more music, whether they learned how to download or not? Many would guess that's a yes, and the question becomes whether one of those predisposed people ends up buying more or less music after getting on Napster. I have seen surveys that at least tried to go after this crucial question, but the Aussie one doesn't come near it.
Even if it could be proved that the unauthorized copying and downloading of copyrighted music helped sales, the question at the end of the day is whether the authors and publishers of creative works ought to have the right to decide for THEMSELVES how they wish to help sales. Napster defenders are basically saying screw you, this probably helps you, and hey by the way if it doesn't actually help you, screw you anyway, we're taking what we want.
I started programming in the 1970's when software was closed and proprietary and things were a lot like what Microsoft probably thinks it wants today. Let me tell you, software was in a TERRIBLE state back then. It was a standing joke among programmers and systems designers how inept the in-house programmers at shops like IBM and DEC could be, on the rare occasions when people who ponied up 5-6 figures for "source licences" (usually readable printouts on microfiche!) had the chance to check what they were doing. Not to mention that the languages were painful and "human factors" consisted of remember which side of the fanfold printout sheet your answer tended to appear on, or what the PF2 key did on each of a dozen different screen forms.
All of this was swept away, blown away, and utterly transcended by the academic-centered and openly developed software revolution of the 1980's, which continued into the 1990's. Software had to adapt to the reality that "little people" could out-program the big houses in a few weeks or months of spare time work.
The GNU project and its open-source peers have been the engine that drives honest software development for years. Without them, those applications on the $1,200 PC would be about five times crappier than they are.
Open source and the GPL are not "destroying" commercial intellectual property - they are making it earn its keep, by setting the "bar" of functionality at a level where commercialware is forced to add real value or risk being ignored.
There is a role for both open source and commercial software. Neither community should waste oxygen trying to claim that the other is evil.
Sometimes a router that is supposed (in the eyes of the rest of the network) to be handling a particular bit of traffic has been rebooted or is reloading its tables for some reason, and keeps punting to a peer, which disagrees and punts it back, ad infinitum. This is not good news, but it's far from unheard of, and if the tables were large, it can take a couple of minutes before things clear up.
This has nothing to do with the @home problem, which I understood was a blackhole issue.
As for getting top network admins' notice, sometimes the best way is to talk to YOUR isp's network support dept, as high as you can escalate it, and ask them to call over to the network desk of the company in question. Network geeks tend to respect each other and cooperate more easily then they do with "mere users," however aggrieved or righteous their cause.
The lesson is that any successful virtual community needs to be *about* something.
The WELL, like its early equivalents in other cities (Panix, the World etc) began as a dialup service/ISP that hosted a virtual community. This allowed it to simply be 'about itself' because all its members shared the experience of being subscribers, and in many cases neighbors. Even then, it was heavily subdivided into topical discussion areas, and most denizens only participated in a few of them.
With the advent of universal location-independent Internet access, the appeal of a general purpose "who's up for pizza this Thursday" virtual community begins to dim. If commentators want to romanticize this and imply it was somehow a better use of the Net than, say, a community focused on private electricity generation or the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nields, they're just wrong.
I think that there are GENUINELY interesting questions to be asked about virtual communities, to help us understand how to make the best ones possible as they constantly arise and collapse. "Why didn't they succeed" and "Why didn't the Well catch on" are not the most interesting questions.
You have a responsibility to quote other journalists' work with the same clear accuracy that you would want them to exercise when quoting you. If you found the Daily Breeze lifting paragraphs from an article of yours, without visible attribution, and simply including a link to Slashdot somewhere in the article, you'd be livid.
:)
It's also a bit low-rent to rant about "User 240151" and imply, as sometimes happens around here, that anonymous posters are some kind of lower order. Privacy is a right. Words should speak for themselves. That will be all.
Timothy wrote: "I wonder what happens to those royalty deals, though, if the company goes Rambust ..."
I haven't seen the agreements, but you can write a deal that says anything you want, so there could be language dealing specifically with Rambus going out of business.
If Rambus did go under, its assets (desks, gumball machines etc) would be liquidated or sold off to other companies. Those assets include the patents we're talking about. Someone else (like, oh, say, Intel) would pay for them and own them, and start collecting the royalties.
Please reread Matusushita's comment above. This whole thing is premature. From the project status page at http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/p ioneer/PNStat.html :
The latest Pioneer activity was on September 10, when DSS 63 tracked the spacecraft. The station was not able to acquire the downlink. However, there was a report of two momentary receiver glitches at the Pioneer 10 frequency. This report was encouraging, since it means that the spacecraft signal is there, but it is still off Earth point. The Earth look angle (ELA) is estimated to be over 1.4 degrees. The downlink signal strength drops off rapidly after 1.0 degree. The Earth is just starting to go back towards the PN 10 spin axis. As the year continues, the Earth will be closer in alignment with the spacecraft pointing and the tracking stations should be able to regain lock. We anticipate this to be about the middle of December. Our latest calculation of the ephemeris yields: Right Ascension = 76.27 degrees, Declination = 25.91 degrees.
There are a couple of ways they could know.
One, and they don't do this yet but it wouldn't surprise me, is to mask all email addresses with an eBay resident proxy (kind of like joey@my-deja.com) which then forwards the mail to the member's real back email... but lets them monitor whatever they want to monitor. This lets them control everything. If a buyer wanted to encourage backchannel contacts they could make their real email visible somewhere, but in that case you presume the buyer isn't worried about fraud or likely to complain about it.
The second thing they can do and probably are doing is simply responding to customer complaints. If ten of us lose an auction and we're all contacted afterwards by the seller saying "guess what, i found an extra one after all" then the chances are pretty high that someone will rat on the seller. If the practice violates an enforceable seller agreement, game over.
While it can be argued that what people do offline is their own business, eBay would certainly not escape liability for "bringing together" fraudulent sellers and their victims, so they have a legitimate interest in policing this behavior.