June 3 1997 is the timestamp on my first challenge-response filter....
-joseph
Larry on Illegal Immigration, other Non-SF Topics
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 1
Larry,
On one of your panels at ConJose, you started to comment on the flow of folks northward into the US from Mexico. I got the impression you thought we should do something about it. Would you care to finish that thought?
Whenever I look at a UPS I see the "worst fire hazard in the house". I buy and use them anyway.
The closest we came was a [non APC] model that we discovered smoking in our household "server room" one evening. Was very hot and producing lots of that bad burning electronics smell. Its replacement went into a metal tray.
If you are super concerned about fire hazards in your home, honestly, I suggest you skip the UPS. Or else put it in something that would contain it if it started to melt/smoke/burn. Co-lo is good.
I would recommend LASIK for overall lifestyle improvement but not just to see a computer monitor better.
If you can't see what you're doing when you get out of bed in the morning (5 diopters is borderline for that) then LASIK will help you. My SO was about 8 diopters and it made a big difference.
The downsides aren't all that bad but there are tradeoffs. I have a 3-4 diopter correction and I have the option to work on a laptop without my glasses or contacts on. Also my vision corrects to 20/15-17. I would not expect such a good result from LASIK. My expectations would be more like 20/40 which would probably be significantly worse in dim light and better in bright light. If you can focus sharply in the dark now, you will probably lose that after LASIK.
I would not expect serious adverse health consequences from LASIK but they are possible.
I think that all in all LASIK will probably make it harder for you to stare at a CRT all day, but it may greatly improve other aspects of your life. Think about it carefully beforehand.
You might consider corrective optics that undercorrect your eyesight, specifically for working near CRTs. Being undercorrected by.5 diopter doesn't significantly worsen your distance vision, except at night, and it makes focusing close much more comfortable. Some people cannot attain sharp focus at night anyway, so what does it matter?
Actually, I say working near CRTs... one of the best things you can do is work in front of an LCD monitor instead. Makes a huge difference eyestrain-wise.
-joseph
Why is Damian your "partner in crime" for Perl 6
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
Can you explain why Damian Conway is apparently "second in command" for Perl 6?
Because I've never bleepin' heard of it, that's why.
So, I have this Linux box back from when I was teaching a fair amount of Perl DBI, that runs an Oracle instance, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Sybase (all at once). Next in line was a DB2 RPM. I never even installed that one.
Before I make some suggestions I should say that as a longtime Civ II and Civ I player I am tremendously impressed with the latest (1.13) release. Bravo, it is great! It lacks a little "Microprose polish" but play-wise it is terrific. The previous versions didn't really cut it for me but the current one is just fine. (Now, how about alpha centauri, spaceward ho, and/or masters of orion.)
If you like Nethack you should try Angband, or perhaps just (u)moria. Or from another Cygnus old-timer (umoria was from Jim Wilson), try xconq (Stan Shebs). Although umoria is ancient it has the advantage that it doesn't take incredibly long to play, which unfortunately vanilla angband does.
You can finish a game of nethack in a few hours or a few days (depending on your determination and experience level) but vanilla angband can take, gee, hundreds of hours (during any of which you can suffer an insta-death from hitting a key one too many times). It's still enjoyable but in a more serious and perverse way than nethack.
If you just need a good game to take care of a couple hours of the twitchies on an airplane, I recommend kshisen, which is a thoroughly addictive timed mah-jong-like game.
(1) It *is* vastly easier to set up and administer MySQL than Oracle, and somewhat easier than PostgreSQL. I've brought up several basic Oracle 8.x installs in the past couple of years and it's an experience I just can't recommend.
(2) People who get all excited about views in production environments haven't had Oracle CBO choke on a view query. Heck, I took the load on our 12-cpu prod server to 29 (normally it's 10-15) with a series of view based queries executed one at a time the other day. The reality of views is that they suck hard, no matter what the concept may be.
(3) Referential integrity constraints and cascaded deletes are good. Triggers, I will pass thank you.
(4) MySQL is at least openly headed toward ANSI SQL. Even though Oracle 9 apparently (I am still stuck with 8.x) now groks ANSI OUTER JOIN, there's a lot non-ANSI left. ANSI SQL is nice although still more of a concept than a reality.
(5) It would be nice if MySQL had something like SQL*PLUS but... some day I guess.
Toast was such a cool piece of software when it was "young" and when the CD ROM burner we had at home was a 4x Yamaha that cost $3500. I met one of the developers at WWDC (all the way from Europe) back in the mid-90s. He bragged about how the next release would have "drag and drop" and I admit, it was moderately exciting to hear.
Now it's just another crappy piece of commodity consumerware with requirements developed by a banal brew of marketroids and lawyers.
I just wish there were as many John Norman books available in used bookstores as there are Piers Anthony books. (Anyone want to sell me a copy of Imaginative Sex?)
I have one observation about Piers Anthony "pedophilia," which is that adults, at least in US culture, feel out of place *any* time they encounter adolescent sexuality, no matter what its basis or origin. But there is a wide gap, and a not very difficult gap to find, between plain old adolescent ("childish" if you will) sexuality in all its many, many, many forms, and the exploitation or abuse of adolescent sexuality.
Heck, I find LotR has all sorts of homoerotic allusions, and don't even get me started on Grimms Fairy Tales. But these are just places the mind normally goes.
Complaining about a partially nude figure on the cover of a book with "Panties" in its name is just... well... . Can we be grown up for a minute, and appreciate the irony in it?
I'm not sure anyone on/. is old enough to remember, but Piers Anthony used to write rather lofty science fiction. Perhaps the most polished of the pre-Xanth phase was the Orn-Omnivore-0X trilogy but there were many other notable works (Macroscope, Var the Stick, etc.). He also had a wacky story in Again, Dangerous Visions--imagine a barn full of women being milked. (Got milk?) At one point he would have been considered a "serious" science fiction writer.
Early Piers Anthony used to be very difficult to find, but nowadays it is being regurgitated in significant quantities at used bookstores.
My question is: What prompted Piers to mostly stop writing Heinlein-esque SF and take up fantasy instead? It has to be more than "just the money" because fantasy wasn't the dominant genre in the late 1970s, and even successful SF/Fantasy writers don't really do it for the money anyway.
... that a runtime environment where "Hello World" will require, let's say, several GB of disk, a few hundred MB of RAM, continuous online updating (also requiring continuous hardware updating), and hundreds of old and newly-arriving security holes and exploits, is going to "take over the world."
Granted, it's going to be popular for a while. But isn't what's popular *always* sucky?
DVD-RAM works fine for me (as a filesystem)
on
DVD-R/W In Unix?
·
· Score: 1
I have a 4.7/9.2 GB SCSI DVD-RAM that works fine as a plain old filesystem.../dev/scd0 mounts rw on/mnt/dvdram as an ext2.
(Last time I checked, mkreiserfs refused to make a filesystem on this device. Wonder why? Haven't tried under 2.4.17 though.)
I am using 2.4.17. There have been a number of DVD patches to 2.4 so use the latest version. On an earlier kernel, for example, the reported media size was off by a factor of two.:-)
I use it for backup and storage mostly. No idea about whether it has any utility for writing something a DVD reader can use.
The cost of the media is coming down. $20-25 a pop for the 9.4 GB (double-sided) media if you look around.
I'm happy with it! Beats the heck out of tape if what you want to save will fit on a 4.7 GB side.
I have a 128MB MPC-206e. Aside from the ridiculous cost of the upgrade to 192MB (which I hope to get *some* day) it is ideal for me. 2.1 lbs with the standard battery. It goes into one of the pockets of an Eagle Creek "guide bag" and is just perfect.
I have a couple Casio accessories--the large battery and the external CD. You must have the external CD to install Linux. Which I did. I replaced the 20gb internal drive with a 30gb one, and it dual boots RH 7.1 and Winbloze. With reiserfs no less--now THAT was a pain to bootstrap. (The 20gb drive still lives in an external enclosure in case I need some extra space/backup.) I also have a Digital Relay... I can burn CDs on battery power! From Winbloze and Linux!
The machine will play mp3s for me while I type from one coast of the US to another, or from Dulles to Heathrow. On one battery.
Very cool. Exactly what I wanted to replace my pb2400. May Crusoe live long and prosper.
Ideally you would have installed conduit, and on an unlimited budget, strung combo cable (twisted pair and fiber) through it.
However, plain old twisted pair is extremely versatile. Having more than one cat 5 cable is not a bad idea. Did you know that twisted pair makes an excellent medium for line-level audio distribution? Just put balancing transformers on either end... no need for coax!
I may occasionally derive some personal satisfaction from doing things the hard way. Making my own puff pastry for example. Or brewing my own beer. But at the age of 35 I've long since abandoned the idea that it's worthwhile or even *moral* to ask other people to jump through the same hoops that I do. To the vast majority of people, computers are tools, not a hobby. Do you see anyone drilling holes with a handheld auger nowadays? When you're 20 years old and full of youth and energy and ideas and silliness, teaching your mom how to dial from a command line may seem like a good idea. But I assure you, you'll eventually get over that.
On the whole the specs of LPs are crap compared to CDs. But LPs do have some advantages. Frequency response, for example. An LP can encode 40kHz audio. In fact that bandwidth was used for a quadraphonic LP encoding scheme, where the additional channels were heterodyned into the inaudible 20kHz+ band before being cut onto vinyl.
An all-analog chain can also satisfy certain people in ways that conventional digital systems cannot. I knew a guy who could hear 20kHz while in his 20s (his whole family could, apparently, but as far as I know they didn't have any dog genes in them...). 44.1 kHz DA with most content being rolled off around 18kHz (in the equipment of the day... it's better now) just didn't do it for him.
But in the world 99.9 percent of us experience, vinyl is crap compared to CD.
Use EAC and rip in "disk at once" mode. You will get a single.wav file and also a cue file.
Then you can do what you like with that. You can use tools to chop up the big.wav file. Or there are plugins for playing files described by cue files as though they were single tracks.
Most or all of this is also possible on linux, although I don't think the state of the art is as advanced. I'm not sure what the most recent versions of cdrdao and/or cdparanoia are capable of doing. There are some incompatibilities between cdrdao cue files and EAC cue files, but nothing a perl script couldn't fix.
There really is nothing superior to EAC for careful, error-free ripping. Be nice if it worked on linux some day.
When using a tool like FLAC, you get out exactly the same bytestream that you put in. As far as the existence of the signal in the digital domain is concerned, it is completely lossless. Lossless audio compression tools exploit the (limited, but definitely useful) predictability of digitized audio signals to achieve, on average, a reduction in size to about 60 percent of the original. No further significant (re)compression is possible. The amount of compression also depends on the signal. Thrash and other music with a lot of high frequency energy compresses less (to.7 or even.8 of its original size) than, say, harmonically simple chamber music (which can be less than.5 of its original size).
The lossless compression techniques that I am aware of use specially designed polynomials and/or other functions to "track" the signal for short blocks. The parameters of these functions require many fewer bytes than the original signal. Of course they do not track the signal precisely, so the compressor must also store an "error" stream of small offsets. However, if the signal was well predicted, these error offsets are small and can be compressed quite effectively with Hamming trees and the like.
It turns out that this data, which is sufficient to describe the original input precisely, is generally smaller than the original input.
So while you may rightfully claim that audio captured in the digital domain is not "lossless," at least not when the audio was subjected to ADC on its way into the digital system, it is not accurate to say that when you losslessly compress a signal you are "throwing something away." What lossless compression is doing is encoding the predictability of a signal in a more compact way than a PCM stream allows. The original stream can be completely and exactly recovered from the losslessly compressed stream.
Actually, I have been running a Seagate 15k rpm 18gb drive in the machine sitting at my feet for at least a couple months, in a quiet room, and the drive doesn't make a significant amount of noise. Nor is it particularly hot or even more than slightly warm (I do have a case fan blowing air over the drive though). My old 1st gen 10k rpm Cheetah was *not* quiet and it wound up having a heat sink stuck on top, but it didn't die on me either.
But it is unfair to characterize high spindle speed drives as "noisy" nowadays, because my present experience provides at least this one counterexample.
It would be silly to use a 15k rpm drive, though, because 18gb at 15k rpm costs you what 100gb do at a lower speed. I have that drive in there for the benefit of Oracle and mysql.
This machine also has two 60gb 7200 rpm IBM (ATA) drives in it, and that's where I keep my audio files.
Slashdot Mirror
June 3 1997 is the timestamp on my first challenge-response filter ....
-joseph
Larry,
On one of your panels at ConJose, you started to comment on the flow of folks northward into the US from Mexico. I got the impression you thought we should do something about it. Would you care to finish that thought?
Whenever I look at a UPS I see the "worst fire hazard in the house". I buy and use them anyway.
The closest we came was a [non APC] model that we discovered smoking in our household "server room" one evening. Was very hot and producing lots of that bad burning electronics smell. Its replacement went into a metal tray.
If you are super concerned about fire hazards in your home, honestly, I suggest you skip the UPS. Or else put it in something that would contain it if it started to melt/smoke/burn. Co-lo is good.
-joseph
I would recommend LASIK for overall lifestyle improvement but not just to see a computer monitor better.
.5 diopter doesn't significantly worsen your distance vision, except at night, and it makes focusing close much more comfortable. Some people cannot attain sharp focus at night anyway, so what does it matter?
... one of the best things you can do is work in front of an LCD monitor instead. Makes a huge difference eyestrain-wise.
If you can't see what you're doing when you get out of bed in the morning (5 diopters is borderline for that) then LASIK will help you. My SO was about 8 diopters and it made a big difference.
The downsides aren't all that bad but there are tradeoffs. I have a 3-4 diopter correction and I have the option to work on a laptop without my glasses or contacts on. Also my vision corrects to 20/15-17. I would not expect such a good result from LASIK. My expectations would be more like 20/40 which would probably be significantly worse in dim light and better in bright light. If you can focus sharply in the dark now, you will probably lose that after LASIK.
I would not expect serious adverse health consequences from LASIK but they are possible.
I think that all in all LASIK will probably make it harder for you to stare at a CRT all day, but it may greatly improve other aspects of your life. Think about it carefully beforehand.
You might consider corrective optics that undercorrect your eyesight, specifically for working near CRTs. Being undercorrected by
Actually, I say working near CRTs
-joseph
Can you explain why Damian Conway is apparently "second in command" for Perl 6?
Because I've never bleepin' heard of it, that's why.
So, I have this Linux box back from when I was teaching a fair amount of Perl DBI, that runs an Oracle instance, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Sybase (all at once). Next in line was a DB2 RPM. I never even installed that one.
-joseph
Before I make some suggestions I should say that as a longtime Civ II and Civ I player I am tremendously impressed with the latest (1.13) release. Bravo, it is great! It lacks a little "Microprose polish" but play-wise it is terrific. The previous versions didn't really cut it for me but the current one is just fine. (Now, how about alpha centauri, spaceward ho, and/or masters of orion.)
If you like Nethack you should try Angband, or perhaps just (u)moria. Or from another Cygnus old-timer (umoria was from Jim Wilson), try xconq (Stan Shebs). Although umoria is ancient it has the advantage that it doesn't take incredibly long to play, which unfortunately vanilla angband does.
You can finish a game of nethack in a few hours or a few days (depending on your determination and experience level) but vanilla angband can take, gee, hundreds of hours (during any of which you can suffer an insta-death from hitting a key one too many times). It's still enjoyable but in a more serious and perverse way than nethack.
If you just need a good game to take care of a couple hours of the twitchies on an airplane, I recommend kshisen, which is a thoroughly addictive timed mah-jong-like game.
-joseph
More notes.
... some day I guess.
(1) It *is* vastly easier to set up and administer MySQL than Oracle, and somewhat easier than PostgreSQL. I've brought up several basic Oracle 8.x installs in the past couple of years and it's an experience I just can't recommend.
(2) People who get all excited about views in production environments haven't had Oracle CBO choke on a view query. Heck, I took the load on our 12-cpu prod server to 29 (normally it's 10-15) with a series of view based queries executed one at a time the other day. The reality of views is that they suck hard, no matter what the concept may be.
(3) Referential integrity constraints and cascaded deletes are good. Triggers, I will pass thank you.
(4) MySQL is at least openly headed toward ANSI SQL. Even though Oracle 9 apparently (I am still stuck with 8.x) now groks ANSI OUTER JOIN, there's a lot non-ANSI left. ANSI SQL is nice although still more of a concept than a reality.
(5) It would be nice if MySQL had something like SQL*PLUS but
putty is a nobrainer to install and use and now does tunneling.
:-)
ssh under cygwin is also fine.
It's not really a difficult problem, unless you are looking for a good product that you actually have to pay for.
Toast was such a cool piece of software when it was "young" and when the CD ROM burner we had at home was a 4x Yamaha that cost $3500. I met one of the developers at WWDC (all the way from Europe) back in the mid-90s. He bragged about how the next release would have "drag and drop" and I admit, it was moderately exciting to hear.
Now it's just another crappy piece of commodity consumerware with requirements developed by a banal brew of marketroids and lawyers.
At least I still have cdrecord and cdrdao.
I just wish there were as many John Norman books available in used bookstores as there are Piers Anthony books. (Anyone want to sell me a copy of Imaginative Sex?)
... well ... . Can we be grown up for a minute, and appreciate the irony in it?
I have one observation about Piers Anthony "pedophilia," which is that adults, at least in US culture, feel out of place *any* time they encounter adolescent sexuality, no matter what its basis or origin. But there is a wide gap, and a not very difficult gap to find, between plain old adolescent ("childish" if you will) sexuality in all its many, many, many forms, and the exploitation or abuse of adolescent sexuality.
Heck, I find LotR has all sorts of homoerotic allusions, and don't even get me started on Grimms Fairy Tales. But these are just places the mind normally goes.
Complaining about a partially nude figure on the cover of a book with "Panties" in its name is just
I'm not sure anyone on /. is old enough to remember, but Piers Anthony used to write rather lofty science fiction. Perhaps the most polished of the pre-Xanth phase was the Orn-Omnivore-0X trilogy but there were many other notable works (Macroscope, Var the Stick, etc.). He also had a wacky story in Again, Dangerous Visions--imagine a barn full of women being milked. (Got milk?) At one point he would have been considered a "serious" science fiction writer.
Early Piers Anthony used to be very difficult to find, but nowadays it is being regurgitated in significant quantities at used bookstores.
My question is: What prompted Piers to mostly stop writing Heinlein-esque SF and take up fantasy instead? It has to be more than "just the money" because fantasy wasn't the dominant genre in the late 1970s, and even successful SF/Fantasy writers don't really do it for the money anyway.
http://www.mitre.org
... that a runtime environment where "Hello World" will require, let's say, several GB of disk, a few hundred MB of RAM, continuous online updating (also requiring continuous hardware updating), and hundreds of old and newly-arriving security holes and exploits, is going to "take over the world."
Granted, it's going to be popular for a while. But isn't what's popular *always* sucky?
Also featuring stinking fast floating point.
I could have sworn you missed one.
I have a 4.7/9.2 GB SCSI DVD-RAM that works fine as a plain old filesystem ... /dev/scd0 mounts rw on /mnt/dvdram as an ext2.
:-)
(Last time I checked, mkreiserfs refused to make a filesystem on this device. Wonder why? Haven't tried under 2.4.17 though.)
I am using 2.4.17. There have been a number of DVD patches to 2.4 so use the latest version. On an earlier kernel, for example, the reported media size was off by a factor of two.
I use it for backup and storage mostly. No idea about whether it has any utility for writing something a DVD reader can use. The cost of the media is coming down. $20-25 a pop for the 9.4 GB (double-sided) media if you look around. I'm happy with it! Beats the heck out of tape if what you want to save will fit on a 4.7 GB side.
Joseph N. Hall
I have a 128MB MPC-206e. Aside from the ridiculous cost of the upgrade to 192MB (which I hope to get *some* day) it is ideal for me. 2.1 lbs with the standard battery. It goes into one of the pockets of an Eagle Creek "guide bag" and is just perfect.
... I can burn CDs on battery power! From Winbloze and Linux!
I have a couple Casio accessories--the large battery and the external CD. You must have the external CD to install Linux. Which I did. I replaced the 20gb internal drive with a 30gb one, and it dual boots RH 7.1 and Winbloze. With reiserfs no less--now THAT was a pain to bootstrap. (The 20gb drive still lives in an external enclosure in case I need some extra space/backup.) I also have a Digital Relay
The machine will play mp3s for me while I type from one coast of the US to another, or from Dulles to Heathrow. On one battery.
Very cool. Exactly what I wanted to replace my pb2400. May Crusoe live long and prosper.
-Joseph Nathan Hall
Ideally you would have installed conduit, and on an unlimited budget, strung combo cable (twisted pair and fiber) through it.
... no need for coax!
However, plain old twisted pair is extremely versatile. Having more than one cat 5 cable is not a bad idea. Did you know that twisted pair makes an excellent medium for line-level audio distribution? Just put balancing transformers on either end
-Joseph N. Hall
... to some people, anyway.
But not to me.
I may occasionally derive some personal satisfaction from doing things the hard way. Making my own puff pastry for example. Or brewing my own beer. But at the age of 35 I've long since abandoned the idea that it's worthwhile or even *moral* to ask other people to jump through the same hoops that I do. To the vast majority of people, computers are tools, not a hobby. Do you see anyone drilling holes with a handheld auger nowadays? When you're 20 years old and full of youth and energy and ideas and silliness, teaching your mom how to dial from a command line may seem like a good idea. But I assure you, you'll eventually get over that.
Joseph N. Hall
On the whole the specs of LPs are crap compared to CDs. But LPs do have some advantages. Frequency response, for example. An LP can encode 40kHz audio. In fact that bandwidth was used for a quadraphonic LP encoding scheme, where the additional channels were heterodyned into the inaudible 20kHz+ band before being cut onto vinyl.
... it's better now) just didn't do it for him.
An all-analog chain can also satisfy certain people in ways that conventional digital systems cannot. I knew a guy who could hear 20kHz while in his 20s (his whole family could, apparently, but as far as I know they didn't have any dog genes in them...). 44.1 kHz DA with most content being rolled off around 18kHz (in the equipment of the day
But in the world 99.9 percent of us experience, vinyl is crap compared to CD.
-joseph
Use EAC and rip in "disk at once" mode. You will get a single .wav file and also a cue file.
.wav file. Or there are plugins for playing files described by cue files as though they were single tracks.
Then you can do what you like with that. You can use tools to chop up the big
Most or all of this is also possible on linux, although I don't think the state of the art is as advanced. I'm not sure what the most recent versions of cdrdao and/or cdparanoia are capable of doing. There are some incompatibilities between cdrdao cue files and EAC cue files, but nothing a perl script couldn't fix.
There really is nothing superior to EAC for careful, error-free ripping. Be nice if it worked on linux some day.
-joseph
When using a tool like FLAC, you get out exactly the same bytestream that you put in. As far as the existence of the signal in the digital domain is concerned, it is completely lossless. Lossless audio compression tools exploit the (limited, but definitely useful) predictability of digitized audio signals to achieve, on average, a reduction in size to about 60 percent of the original. No further significant (re)compression is possible. The amount of compression also depends on the signal. Thrash and other music with a lot of high frequency energy compresses less (to .7 or even .8 of its original size) than, say, harmonically simple chamber music (which can be less than .5 of its original size).
The lossless compression techniques that I am aware of use specially designed polynomials and/or other functions to "track" the signal for short blocks. The parameters of these functions require many fewer bytes than the original signal. Of course they do not track the signal precisely, so the compressor must also store an "error" stream of small offsets. However, if the signal was well predicted, these error offsets are small and can be compressed quite effectively with Hamming trees and the like. It turns out that this data, which is sufficient to describe the original input precisely, is generally smaller than the original input.
So while you may rightfully claim that audio captured in the digital domain is not "lossless," at least not when the audio was subjected to ADC on its way into the digital system, it is not accurate to say that when you losslessly compress a signal you are "throwing something away." What lossless compression is doing is encoding the predictability of a signal in a more compact way than a PCM stream allows. The original stream can be completely and exactly recovered from the losslessly compressed stream.
Actually, I have been running a Seagate 15k rpm 18gb drive in the machine sitting at my feet for at least a couple months, in a quiet room, and the drive doesn't make a significant amount of noise. Nor is it particularly hot or even more than slightly warm (I do have a case fan blowing air over the drive though). My old 1st gen 10k rpm Cheetah was *not* quiet and it wound up having a heat sink stuck on top, but it didn't die on me either. But it is unfair to characterize high spindle speed drives as "noisy" nowadays, because my present experience provides at least this one counterexample.
It would be silly to use a 15k rpm drive, though, because 18gb at 15k rpm costs you what 100gb do at a lower speed. I have that drive in there for the benefit of Oracle and mysql.
This machine also has two 60gb 7200 rpm IBM (ATA) drives in it, and that's where I keep my audio files.
-joseph
... although I will probably go back and re-rip them as entire discs early next year.
.wav files with FLAC, which usually results in file sizes about .6 the original. My average CD seems to be about 250MB after that.
I may also do the re-ripping with EAC, which seems more reliable than the linux alternatives, even cdparanoia.
I encode the
I have a DVD-RAM that uses the two-sided 9.1 GB media for offline storage. Not a bad deal. I can put 30+ CDs on one, and it costs only about $25.
Meanwhile I can also archive high quality mp3s on CDR.
2000+ songs is a decent playlist. I actually have closer to 600 CDs but haven't got round to ripping them all yet.