On that note, I just bought a Dell Inspiron 3500 which came with a 3c575 (actually a "3CCFE575BT-D") and I spent all day yesterday tracking down a very strange bug with it in Win98. If there's other activity on the LAN, then it works fine, but if the LAN is completely quiet (which isn't unheard of since I'm on an apartment LAN with only a few PC's), I can't ping or connect to anything.
I'm tempted to just wipe 98 and install Linux, but I'd lose too many cool features, like the hot swappable device bay, the special Synaptics touchpad features, and most of all, the hardware DVD player. I know it's not a defective card because I tried my roommate's 3c575 (which works fine on his Dell Inspiron 3200) and I have the same problem. So either the recent drivers are buggy or they're not quite compatible with 98 "SE".
I sent a tech support request to Dell, and I hear they have very good tech support on their laptops, so I hope I can get this resolved. But either way, I just wish I could bill Microsoft for the time I wasted on this stupid bug!
Isn't that the truth? I'm 22 and in a similar situation with my GF (we were both virgins until our 20's too). She come over the other night to study French with me, and my roommate commented that "it's good to see you two doing something other than fucking." Gee, thanks...:)
Thanks for posting that link to the Salon article.. very relevant. I just read that article the other day and it's good to see the other side of the story escaping the hypocritical "double standard" that the rest of the media is under.
The one comment I'd add is: enough about American Pie! What about "Coming Soon?" As the Salon article points out, this sounds like a great movie about the female side of the equation, and a movie I'd really like to see. I know I'm not the only 20-something straight guy who doesn't feel threatened by female sexuality, right? My g/f and I really enjoyed American Pie and I'd love to see Coming Soon with her, but because the hypocritical MPAA keeps trying to give it an NC-17, it probably won't be "Coming Soon" to theaters.. and that really sucks!
Hmm, what a long strange trip this has been. I got "the letter", then was denied when I filled out the qualification application. Yesterday, I called E*Trade's phone number and talked to a broker who reentered my application: this time, I got approved. I placed an indication of interest to buy 700 shares.
So today my coworkers told me E*Trade was opening their IPO doors, and sure enough, they were. I logged into my account, went to the IPO page, and my old indication of interest was gone! It said I still needed to fill out the application. So I went back to step 1, and conveniently, all of the fields were already filled out with the values I gave the broker over the phone. I crossed my fingers and clicked submit and I got approved (thank God!). Then I clicked through to step 2 and step 3 and resubmitted my order for 700 shares.
Better safe than sorry, I thought, but that's still pretty weird... Of course, now I'm wondering if, by reentering my order, I just got bumped from the "privileged contributor" echelon to the same priority as Joe Random E*Trader. Or if my old indication of interest is still hiding in the system somewhere. Either way, I'll be glad when this whole thing is over!
Yep, every other ISP has the same rules as AOL in terms of working with law enforcement. But here's a way to protect yourself: Freedom.
I was there to see these guys announce their second beta at DEFCON and the software looks really sweet. In a nutshell, it allows you to create cryptographically secure pseudonyms that are mathematically impossible to trace to you. All packets you send are encrypted multiple times through five different servers in different countries, none of which know anything but the server before and the server after. When your packets leave this "cloud", they can come out in any country you choose: Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, wherever. REALLY controversial stuff, and very very cool!
The best part is that their client is about as easy to use as the AOL client and handles everything automatically, including a built-in "cookie jar" feature to capture all Web cookies and assign them to the appropriate pseudonym (so nobody can deduce connections between nyms through cookies) and an email service that works with your existing POP clients.
Unfortunately, the first version is only for Windows 95/98, but even that is part of their great business plan: get it out to that 95% of the computer community first, where it can do the most damage, then make the Linux/Mac/whatever versions later. At least we have VMware and Virtual PC to run it on other platforms in the meantime.
My only fear is that, even though Zero Knowledge Systems is in Canada, the US will somehow be able to shut these guys down as soon as they figure out what's going on.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with ZKS in any way other than that I know the guy who drew their icons.:)
I remember reading that the performance of Beowulf clusters is made possible by chaining together multiple 100Mbit NIC's, the exact configuration that the Linux benchmarks performed so poorly with.
Has anyone tried this in a web server environment? Maybe this isn't the best long-term solution, but for now, it should kick ass! Perhaps c't could be convinced to try a retest?
It seems a little harsh, but he has some good points. If Slashdot is to be a fair forum, we need to let people express their opinions, if they're relevant to the topic. And this one seems quite relevant to me.
Yes, but not having the source (at least to the kernel) might have reduced the amount of hardware support BeOS has. That's the biggest reason I'd like to see them release the source to the kernel and drivers, even under a very restrictive license that didn't qualify as "Open Source." They might not appease the give-me-GPL-or-give-me-death fanatics, but at least people wouldn't be able to gripe as much about no driver support.
To their credit, Be tries their best to be helpful to people who want to write drivers, but I can't help but think that it would be easier for both the driver writers and Be if third parties could just look at the source when they don't know what's going on, rather than have to pester someone at Be to give them answers.
A small correction: the generic VESA driver is only 640x480 at 16 color grayscale. It's also very slow. But it is usable enough to let you boot into BeOS, download, and install the real driver for your video card (assuming one is available and isn't included with BeOS itself). It's definitely not good enough for daily use.
Go to a rock concert or a loud club. You just lost some of your ability to hear higher pitched sounds. Now go once or twice a week... pretty soon your upper range is gone. Little kids can hear so much more than "grown-ups."
That's why responsible people wear earplugs when going to concerts.:P
I agree! I just finished conducting a pretty extensive double-blind listening test of several different MP3 encoders and the "mpegaudio" MP2 encoder (I wrote a perl script to play the original followed by an encoded version, without telling me which encoder/bitrate, then I ranked it from 1 to 10).
Summary: 160kbps and 192kbps have noticable artifacts if you have a good ear and good headphones. Even at 256kbps, BladeEnc has some slight artifacts. Use MP2 or MP3Enc V3.0 (V3.1 is just as good but takes 2-1/2 times as long to encode) for best results. Yes, you have to pay for MP3Enc... if you don't like that, use MP2 instead.
Curiously, tracks 5 and 6 of Fat Boy Slim's "You've Come a Long Way Baby" have some *really* noticable artifacts with any MP3 encoder at any bitrate. MP2 handles these tracks just fine. For music with strange phase-shifted vocoder effects or really "dirty" drum loops, like Fat Boy Slim, MP2 might be the only way to encode it reasonably.
BTW, the *only* disadvantage I've found to MP2 is that the EQ settings on x11amp don't work with MP2's (or WAV files for that matter). Everything else, including ID3 tags, work fine with MP2.
Why do people keep thinking that Be needs to wait for specs to be publically released before adding support?! They're not releasing source code, so they can easily sign NDA's to get what they need.
The real problem is that Be doesn't have enough engineers to get all of the drivers written as fast as they need to. I'm not complaining: I certainly don't know how to write a 3D graphics driver, but it would be nice if Be could manage to hire more of the people who could.
I'm actually crazy enough to want to try this, but I've been having a hard time synching myself up to it. I'm going to try again this weekend. Wish me luck!:)
Hmm, too bad each successive release of BeOS has been much slower on the BeBox than the previous. Of course it would be stupid for Be to waste engineering resources on speeding up BeOS for a funky hardware architecture that only a few thousand people own, but still... If BeOS was open sourced, I'm sure there'd be a few dozen BeBox owners hacking on making it faster.
This points out a big problem with not having source code in terms of "typecasting users". If Be is the only company with the ability to improve BeOS itself, and since Be, as a small company, doesn't have the ability to improve it in every way, then they are forced to typecast their users into a few basic categories, simply to focus on what to improve next. These basic categories would hopefully encompass most BeOS users, but would certainly leave out large subcommunities.
Whereas if BeOS were open sourced, individual communities of users, no matter how far from the mainstream (such as the BeBox owners) would have the freedom to improve BeOS in ways that might only benefit them, and Be would never commit to doing themselves. You might even see other companies providing customized versions of BeOS, and a market of different BeOS flavors, like the different Linux distributions.
Yes, I'm also curious about this. Did they have to write a lot of their own USB handling code? Also, will it be possible to transfer songs from my home Linux box to the EMPEG using USB?
Red Delicious The only alternative band to make this list, Red Delicious has an amazing female vocalist and catchy tunes
It's no surprise that electronic music is the most popular genre on MP3.com, simply because I think it's a lot easier to make good electronic music than to make good guitar rock or pop. In particular, my biggest turn-off is hearing an otherwise good song marred by off-key vocals, which is far too easy to do. There are some exceptions to the rule, for example Red Delicious.
There are even some amusing (both tasteless and geek) humor tracks listed. Here are some you might enjoy if you aren't easily offended:
Fresh Drippin' Okay, these guys are a little obsessed with semen, but who isn't?:) Check out "Cum Commercial" and "Anti-Drug Commercial" for a representative sample..
Test of Time How could you not like a band who writes songs like "I Crashed Windows NT" and "The AOL Song"?
So, not all music on mp3.com sucks, just most of it..
I agree. Even 192kbps is good enough for ripping most of the songs I have on CD (the exception being techno songs that purposefully contain a lot of noisy samples, like some EBN or Fat Boy Slim tracks).
As I pointed out in another post, it's too bad that MP3.com seems to press their DAM CD's from the exact same 128kbps MP3 files that you can already download from their site. I'll still buy CD's of the bands I really like so I can listen to the music in the car (of course I could just as easily burn CD-R's of my favorites..) but mostly to encourage the artists. I would be much more willing to buy CD's, of course, if MP3.com allowed artists to upload their original WAV files (or MP3's at higher bitrates) for the DAM CD's.
I'm certainly an audiophile (I'd rather have my MP3's at 192 or 256kbps, since I agree that the typical 128kbps bitrate that MP3.com and everyone else uses suppresses a lot of the high frequencies), but I think it's GOOD ENOUGH.
Unfortunately, I was under the impression that if you ordered the CD, you'd get the music at full CD quality, which you could then MP3 encode at whatever bitrate you want. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this is simply not the case. MP3.com seems to burn their DAM CD's from the exact same MP3 files that you can download, which is really unfortunate, because it means that you aren't getting any additional audio quality from buying the CD (although in same cases you'll get songs that you can't download online, as some artists put some of their songs only on the CD).
As soon as MP3.com starts burning DAM CD's from original sources, I'll be a lot happier. In the meantime, I'll still buy DAM CD's of artists that I like (e.g. Squishy, Red Delicious) to encourage them to keep making music!
Yes, sproingies looks really cool, but on my 16MB TNT2 (Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor), I can't run it in full-screen mode (it's *extremely* flickery). Has anyone else seen this problem? -Jake
Let's not forget that Linux won't be the only OS able to take advantage of this code release. Free/Net/OpenBSD will be able to add XFS support too.
I'd love to be able to run XFS on our apartment FreeBSD fileserver/firewall, as well as my Linux desktops. I am really looking forward to playing with this! Thank you SGI!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm tempted to just wipe 98 and install Linux, but I'd lose too many cool features, like the hot swappable device bay, the special Synaptics touchpad features, and most of all, the hardware DVD player. I know it's not a defective card because I tried my roommate's 3c575 (which works fine on his Dell Inspiron 3200) and I have the same problem. So either the recent drivers are buggy or they're not quite compatible with 98 "SE".
I sent a tech support request to Dell, and I hear they have very good tech support on their laptops, so I hope I can get this resolved. But either way, I just wish I could bill Microsoft for the time I wasted on this stupid bug!
Isn't that the truth? I'm 22 and in a similar situation with my GF (we were both virgins until our 20's too). She come over the other night to study French with me, and my roommate commented that "it's good to see you two doing something other than fucking." Gee, thanks... :)
The one comment I'd add is: enough about American Pie! What about "Coming Soon?" As the Salon article points out, this sounds like a great movie about the female side of the equation, and a movie I'd really like to see. I know I'm not the only 20-something straight guy who doesn't feel threatened by female sexuality, right? My g/f and I really enjoyed American Pie and I'd love to see Coming Soon with her, but because the hypocritical MPAA keeps trying to give it an NC-17, it probably won't be "Coming Soon" to theaters.. and that really sucks!
So today my coworkers told me E*Trade was opening their IPO doors, and sure enough, they were. I logged into my account, went to the IPO page, and my old indication of interest was gone! It said I still needed to fill out the application. So I went back to step 1, and conveniently, all of the fields were already filled out with the values I gave the broker over the phone. I crossed my fingers and clicked submit and I got approved (thank God!). Then I clicked through to step 2 and step 3 and resubmitted my order for 700 shares.
Better safe than sorry, I thought, but that's still pretty weird... Of course, now I'm wondering if, by reentering my order, I just got bumped from the "privileged contributor" echelon to the same priority as Joe Random E*Trader. Or if my old indication of interest is still hiding in the system somewhere. Either way, I'll be glad when this whole thing is over!
I was there to see these guys announce their second beta at DEFCON and the software looks really sweet. In a nutshell, it allows you to create cryptographically secure pseudonyms that are mathematically impossible to trace to you. All packets you send are encrypted multiple times through five different servers in different countries, none of which know anything but the server before and the server after. When your packets leave this "cloud", they can come out in any country you choose: Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, wherever. REALLY controversial stuff, and very very cool!
The best part is that their client is about as easy to use as the AOL client and handles everything automatically, including a built-in "cookie jar" feature to capture all Web cookies and assign them to the appropriate pseudonym (so nobody can deduce connections between nyms through cookies) and an email service that works with your existing POP clients.
Unfortunately, the first version is only for Windows 95/98, but even that is part of their great business plan: get it out to that 95% of the computer community first, where it can do the most damage, then make the Linux/Mac/whatever versions later. At least we have VMware and Virtual PC to run it on other platforms in the meantime.
My only fear is that, even though Zero Knowledge Systems is in Canada, the US will somehow be able to shut these guys down as soon as they figure out what's going on.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with ZKS in any way other than that I know the guy who drew their icons. :)
Can you imagine the sort of movie those guys would like? (shudder...)
Looking at www.beowulf.org, I see that they do use special software to achieve high performance with multiple NICs. In particular, Beowulf Ethernet Channel Bonding.
Has anyone tried this in a web server environment? Maybe this isn't the best long-term solution, but for now, it should kick ass! Perhaps c't could be convinced to try a retest?
It seems a little harsh, but he has some good points. If Slashdot is to be a fair forum, we need to let people express their opinions, if they're relevant to the topic. And this one seems quite relevant to me.
To their credit, Be tries their best to be helpful to people who want to write drivers, but I can't help but think that it would be easier for both the driver writers and Be if third parties could just look at the source when they don't know what's going on, rather than have to pester someone at Be to give them answers.
A small correction: the generic VESA driver is only 640x480 at 16 color grayscale. It's also very slow. But it is usable enough to let you boot into BeOS, download, and install the real driver for your video card (assuming one is available and isn't included with BeOS itself). It's definitely not good enough for daily use.
Summary: 160kbps and 192kbps have noticable artifacts if you have a good ear and good headphones. Even at 256kbps, BladeEnc has some slight artifacts. Use MP2 or MP3Enc V3.0 (V3.1 is just as good but takes 2-1/2 times as long to encode) for best results. Yes, you have to pay for MP3Enc... if you don't like that, use MP2 instead.
Curiously, tracks 5 and 6 of Fat Boy Slim's "You've Come a Long Way Baby" have some *really* noticable artifacts with any MP3 encoder at any bitrate. MP2 handles these tracks just fine. For music with strange phase-shifted vocoder effects or really "dirty" drum loops, like Fat Boy Slim, MP2 might be the only way to encode it reasonably.
BTW, the *only* disadvantage I've found to MP2 is that the EQ settings on x11amp don't work with MP2's (or WAV files for that matter). Everything else, including ID3 tags, work fine with MP2.
Considering the high performance of BeOS, it would be great if we could run Linux as a guest and BeOS as the server. :)
The real problem is that Be doesn't have enough engineers to get all of the drivers written as fast as they need to. I'm not complaining: I certainly don't know how to write a 3D graphics driver, but it would be nice if Be could manage to hire more of the people who could.
I'm actually crazy enough to want to try this, but I've been having a hard time synching myself up to it. I'm going to try again this weekend. Wish me luck! :)
Yeah, who needs Adam West anyway, when we have William Shatner?
This points out a big problem with not having source code in terms of "typecasting users". If Be is the only company with the ability to improve BeOS itself, and since Be, as a small company, doesn't have the ability to improve it in every way, then they are forced to typecast their users into a few basic categories, simply to focus on what to improve next. These basic categories would hopefully encompass most BeOS users, but would certainly leave out large subcommunities.
Whereas if BeOS were open sourced, individual communities of users, no matter how far from the mainstream (such as the BeBox owners) would have the freedom to improve BeOS in ways that might only benefit them, and Be would never commit to doing themselves. You might even see other companies providing customized versions of BeOS, and a market of different BeOS flavors, like the different Linux distributions.
Yes, I'm also curious about this. Did they have to write a lot of their own USB handling code? Also, will it be possible to transfer songs from my home Linux box to the EMPEG using USB?
Go for it! There are lots of classical artists on MP3.com right now...
I like your list! Here are some other great bands I've found through mp3.com:
It's no surprise that electronic music is the most popular genre on MP3.com, simply because I think it's a lot easier to make good electronic music than to make good guitar rock or pop. In particular, my biggest turn-off is hearing an otherwise good song marred by off-key vocals, which is far too easy to do. There are some exceptions to the rule, for example Red Delicious.
There are even some amusing (both tasteless and geek) humor tracks listed. Here are some you might enjoy if you aren't easily offended:
So, not all music on mp3.com sucks, just most of it..
As I pointed out in another post, it's too bad that MP3.com seems to press their DAM CD's from the exact same 128kbps MP3 files that you can already download from their site. I'll still buy CD's of the bands I really like so I can listen to the music in the car (of course I could just as easily burn CD-R's of my favorites..) but mostly to encourage the artists. I would be much more willing to buy CD's, of course, if MP3.com allowed artists to upload their original WAV files (or MP3's at higher bitrates) for the DAM CD's.
Unfortunately, I was under the impression that if you ordered the CD, you'd get the music at full CD quality, which you could then MP3 encode at whatever bitrate you want. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this is simply not the case. MP3.com seems to burn their DAM CD's from the exact same MP3 files that you can download, which is really unfortunate, because it means that you aren't getting any additional audio quality from buying the CD (although in same cases you'll get songs that you can't download online, as some artists put some of their songs only on the CD).
As soon as MP3.com starts burning DAM CD's from original sources, I'll be a lot happier. In the meantime, I'll still buy DAM CD's of artists that I like (e.g. Squishy, Red Delicious) to encourage them to keep making music!
Yep, several of us also noticed this and remarked about it in other posts on this topic.
Yes, sproingies looks really cool, but on my 16MB TNT2 (Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor), I can't run it in full-screen mode (it's *extremely* flickery). Has anyone else seen this problem? -Jake
I'd love to be able to run XFS on our apartment FreeBSD fileserver/firewall, as well as my Linux desktops. I am really looking forward to playing with this! Thank you SGI!