Aside from that though, I WANT Safeway to track my purchases. I want them to see what I buy.
Exactly. Some of the items I purchase are occasionally hard to find, and/or low volume. If their tracking my purchase helps keep those items in stock and on the shelf in sufficient quantities for my needs, I'm all for it. It saves me from making several stops at different stores to get all the items I want.
I do have some concerns about what they might do with the personal information they collect. But the information I gave them on the form to apply for the card was essentially the same information they could obtain when I pay by check or credit.
I realize that I could pay by cash and be completely anonymous, but I average $700/month between the grocery store and Sam's, and I don't intend to carry around or store that much cash, and I don't want to make additional stops repeatedly going to the bank or ATM machine to pull out more cash. I've got little enough free time as it is.
When I signed up for the cards, I knew exactly what information I was giving them, and it was all stuff they could obtain by other means without much creativity.
I use RedHat, and religiously buy a new box with every release so they get money and it stays on retail shelves. I know I don't _have_ to...
Arandir replied:
This is called "donation". It's an act of charity. Charity as a business model is silly.
Call it what you will. I _like_ the ability to download a copy and try it out first, and if I like it, then send the creators what I consider a fair amount money to encourage their continued efforts.
The best information distribution would be if there was a way to send a message to every phone in the country - to make them all ring at the same time...
Emphasis mine.
and I suddenly thought: That would probably make the ring generators grunt a little. I wonder what the total ringer equivalency of all the phones in the U.S is?
Unfortunately, the box(es) Joe Sixpack buys probably won't ever say "Permission Denied", it just won't work sometimes, and Joe S. will just think he messed up the settings somehow. Just like when my mom tries to tape something with her VCR and it either doesn't record, comes on at the wrong time, or tapes the wrong channel.
I'm running 2.0.39 on a 486-100 w/16MB RAM. It is running headless as a NAT/Firewall. I've secured and tested the system. It just runs. I don't have to do anything to it except check the logs, and keep up with security patches. Since there aren't a lot of those for the few services I run, it doesn't require much maintainence.
The system normally experiences 150+ day uptimes, limited by the battery capacity of the UPS, hardware maintainance, or a kernel upgrade. The current uptime is 45 days. I had to oil an irritatingly noisy fan.:p The previous downtime was due to a failed underground power cable in the neighborhood. I had no power for about 6 hours.
The installation has outlasted the previous motherboard (a 386SX-16), and the original 120MB
disk drive (I wanted more proxy cache space:) ).
When it fails, I _might_ consider upgrading to the 2.2.x series. It doesn't provide any additional _must have_ features for my needs.
I suspect that the content producers are smart enough to either not initially use the copy protection or only use it sparingly until the price of the hardware drops significantly and the installed base of equipment is huge. At that point, they suddenly make nearly everything copy protected and you're screwed.
IANAL, but from what I could read from the article, it seemed to say that if they copy protect the music, they break the standard and cannot use the LOGO. It seems to me that they might just quietly drop the use of the CD logo, not call themselves CD-DA compatible, and maybe just label the disks as 'Playable in Audio Players' or some such nonsense.
I've used Gramophile to post process for clicks and pops, and I heartily recommend it. The last time I used it, it had maybe 6 different algorithms for impulse noise identification and elimination. It is just a matter of finding the one that gives good results with your recordings. Be careful though, as some methods can be too agressive with the supression. Also be careful with how you set the sensitivity for impulse noise reduction. If you make it too sensitive, then it begins to massacre the audio on musical transients. Play around with the filter types and paramaters, listen to the results, and Gramophile will do a very good job. Gramophile can also be used to split album sides into tracks at the silence if desired, I haven't used that feature.
If you can find or buy the album on CD (used) it's worth the effort. It can take a LOT of work to clean-up a recording from vinyl, especially if the record hasn't been taken care of, and the purchase price of the CD, even if you have to get it new, can easily be worth it.
I used to do that type of thing too, although I used old TVs. I started with black and white, and migrated to color later. I used a separate amplifier to drive the deflection coils in the TV. Having a separate amp both isolated it from my stereo, and allowed adjustment of the level, balance and tone controls for best display, independant of the stereo volume level. I used an AGC circuit to compress the audio levels slightly so that when the audio level was adjusted to give nice patterns at high levels, the quieter passages didn't collapse to an indistinguishable dot. Color was the best addition. Through a separate board, I split the audio into low (below 300Hz), mid (300 to ~4KHz) and high (above 4KHz) bands. I ran each of the three signals through an attenuator and hacked them into the red, green, and blue low level video inputs respectively. I was doing this this way back before computers were fast enough (Pre IBM PC days) when TVs were made with mostly discrete components, and that you could easily get to the individual circuits to make the necessary modifications. Computers got fast enough to do the same type thing in software about the time the Pentium 100's came out. Today, with Gigahertz processors and fast video cards, it could make for a nice OpenGL project.;-)
Sorry about this beinbg a long post, but I've done something similar to what I think you're asking about. I've set up an old Pentium 200 w/Linux 2.2.19, 128MB RAM, Ensoniq sound card, and 120GB of dedicated music storage, with... (enters command)
...mmm, alot of songs (900+ albums, yes I own all the CDs), organized by alphabetically by Artist/Album/Song. I use Edna(v0.3?) as the music web server to serve the music (hacked slightly to support.ogg files) on a 10/100Mb house LAN. Edna will allow selection of individual songs, pick from existing playlists, or dynamically generate a 'play all songs' playlist that works from the selected level down. Any user at a client computer on the LAN can use their preferred browser to stream whatever music (album/playlist/song) they want to their local desktop. Windows clients currently are using Winamp, Linux clients are using XMMS, but any client with support for streaming mp3 and ogg files should work.
For MP3s I use ID3V2 tags because they work with streaming. The tags on the.ogg files seem to stream just fine. I use EasyTag to manage the ID3 tags on the MP3s. Of the TAG utilities I tried, I liked it the best for managing large numbers of MP3 files. I haven't yet found a comparable utility for managing OGG TAGs. On the server itself, I use Konqueror pointed at the local Edna web server to pick playlists handled by XMMS via an Ensoniq sound card to the main stereo system. MP3s are encoded at a relatively high quality using LAME 3.89 in VBR mode with an average bit rate running about 190Kb/s. I'm currently re-encoding the music from the original sources into the ogg/Vorbis" format, using an average bit rate of 192Kb/s. I use GRIP to rip my CDs with (with full paranoia), and normalize to even out the volume variations of songs so that playlists with songs taken from different albums aren't at radically different volumes. There is a volume normalizing plugin for XMMS that adjusts the level in real time, but I didn't like the way it worked. The volume level of the next song was significantly different (louder) than the previous song, it could take a half second or so to adjust itself. Pre-normalizing (with conservative values) seems to work much better. The music currently occupies about 70GB of disk space.
BTW, my music server is what I use to rip/encode all of the new music, run setiathome, and function as a SAMBA file server/domain controller. It will do all that while streaming music to several clients as well as play through the local sound card without skipping. I discovered that if I used XMMS to read the MP3/OGG files directly from disk (on the server), I had problems with skipping when the server was heavily loaded, even with the XMMS buffers set to very high values, but clients on the LAN would never skip. Streaming to XMMS on the server solved that problem without resorting to the low latency patches for the kernel. On the Linux clients I setting my browser to launch xmms with the -e option which causes new songs or playlists selected with the browser to be appended to the current xmms playlist.;-)
I believe (and I know someone will correct me if I'm wrong) that the MP3 file format supports a 'no copy' BIT. If that bit is set in some of your MP3s, and you have software that can ignore it, that may invoke the DMCA by your having a tool that can bypass the 'protection'.
From the message posted on Sourceforge Here("http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum _id=110712" for the paranoid), it appears that someone IS demanding 'compensation' for 'damages' caused by their software.
Re:Sun does not respect nor fully support Linux
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 1
"In a home environment, the likelihood of such an attack being mounted is probably negligible, given the cost of the attack
versus the typical value of the stolen data."
The data on the network might not be of much value, but the access to a broadband Cable or DSL connection, possibly as launching point for a DOS attack might be worth it to somebody.
Slashdot Mirror
Fifteen or twenty-five years ago there was an often repeated mantra:
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM
The slightly more modern version of this -
Nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle
has now been documented to be wrong!
I'm still waiting for the:
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
to be documented as being wrong. =)
Doesn't everyone?
You could also interpret it to mean that the maintainer of the page hasn't seen a need to revise it because Bill hasn't changed...
Aside from that though, I WANT Safeway to track my purchases. I want them to see what I buy.
Exactly. Some of the items I purchase are occasionally hard to find, and/or low volume. If their tracking my purchase helps keep those items in stock and on the shelf in sufficient quantities for my needs, I'm all for it. It saves me from making several stops at different stores to get all the items I want.
I do have some concerns about what they might do with the personal information they collect. But the information I gave them on the form to apply for the card was essentially the same information they could obtain when I pay by check or credit.
I realize that I could pay by cash and be completely anonymous, but I average $700/month between the grocery store and Sam's, and I don't intend to carry around or store that much cash, and I don't want to make additional stops repeatedly going to the bank or ATM machine to pull out more cash. I've got little enough free time as it is.
When I signed up for the cards, I knew exactly what information I was giving them, and it was all stuff they could obtain by other means without much creativity.
Omnifarious said:
;-)
I use RedHat, and religiously buy a new box with every release so they get money and it stays on retail shelves. I know I don't _have_ to...
Arandir replied:
This is called "donation". It's an act of charity. Charity as a business model is silly.
Call it what you will. I _like_ the ability to download a copy and try it out first, and if I like it, then send the creators what I consider a fair amount money to encourage their continued efforts.
Now if I could only get music the same way...
send money to the creators
You're off by 3600 seconds...
:-P
70mph is: 70*5280=369600 feet per HOUR.
which is: 102.67 feet per second.
or: 0.10267 feet in 1/1000th second.
Orangle?
Did I miss the announcement of a new flavor?
The 10% tithe is a suggested level of giving. It is NOT a requirement. You can be a member and participate all you want without giving a cent.
Emphasis mine.
and I suddenly thought: That would probably make the ring generators grunt a little. I wonder what the total ringer equivalency of all the phones in the U.S is?
The "loop" option is not needed for the fstab mntops field.
I've used this (under Slackware) since the 2.0.x
kernel days, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't require the loopback filesystem.
Unfortunately, the box(es) Joe Sixpack buys probably won't ever say "Permission Denied", it
just won't work sometimes, and Joe S. will just think he messed up the settings somehow. Just like when my mom tries to tape something with her VCR and it either doesn't record, comes on at the wrong time, or tapes the wrong channel.
I'm running 2.0.39 on a 486-100 w/16MB RAM. It is running headless as a NAT/Firewall. I've secured and tested the system. It just runs. I don't have to do anything to it except check the logs, and keep up with security patches. Since there aren't a lot of those for the few services I run, it doesn't require much maintainence.
:) ).
The system normally experiences 150+ day uptimes, limited by the battery capacity of the UPS, hardware maintainance, or a kernel upgrade. The current uptime is 45 days. I had to oil an irritatingly noisy fan.:p The previous downtime was due to a failed underground power cable in the neighborhood. I had no power for about 6 hours.
The installation has outlasted the previous motherboard (a 386SX-16), and the original 120MB
disk drive (I wanted more proxy cache space
When it fails, I _might_ consider upgrading to the 2.2.x series. It doesn't provide any additional _must have_ features for my needs.
My mother's birthday is 2/17. I found out after I was married, that my father-in-law's birthday is also 2/17, and my daughter's birthday is 2/17.
That's weird.
The content producers will probably let you watch them tape delayed on pay per view the next day.
I suspect that the content producers are smart enough to either not initially use the copy protection or only use it sparingly until the price of the hardware drops significantly and the installed base of equipment is huge. At that point, they suddenly make nearly everything copy protected and you're screwed.
IANAL, but from what I could read from the article, it seemed to say that if they copy protect the music, they break the standard and cannot use the LOGO. It seems to me that they might just quietly drop the use of the CD logo, not call themselves CD-DA compatible, and maybe just label the disks as 'Playable in Audio Players' or some such nonsense.
I've used Gramophile to post process for clicks and pops, and I heartily recommend it. The last time I used it, it had maybe 6 different algorithms for impulse noise identification and elimination. It is just a matter of finding the one that gives good results with your recordings. Be careful though, as some methods can be too agressive with the supression. Also be careful with how you set the sensitivity for impulse noise reduction. If you make it too sensitive, then it begins to massacre the audio on musical transients. Play around with the filter types and paramaters, listen to the results, and Gramophile will do a very good job. Gramophile can also be used to split album sides into tracks at the silence if desired, I haven't used that feature.
If you can find or buy the album on CD (used) it's worth the effort. It can take a LOT of work to clean-up a recording from vinyl, especially if the record hasn't been taken care of, and the purchase price of the CD, even if you have to get it new, can easily be worth it.
It's just a variation of another analogy (paraphrased):
"It's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CDs, but the latency is a bitch."
I used to do that type of thing too, although I used old TVs. I started with black and white, and migrated to color later. ;-)
I used a separate amplifier to drive the deflection coils in the TV. Having a separate amp both isolated it from my stereo, and allowed adjustment of the level, balance and tone controls for best display, independant of the stereo volume level. I used an AGC circuit to compress the audio levels slightly so that when the audio level was adjusted to give nice patterns at high levels, the quieter passages didn't collapse to an indistinguishable dot.
Color was the best addition. Through a separate board, I split the audio into low (below 300Hz), mid (300 to ~4KHz) and high (above 4KHz) bands. I ran each of the three signals through an attenuator and hacked them into the red, green, and blue low level video inputs respectively. I was doing this this way back before computers were fast enough (Pre IBM PC days) when TVs were made with mostly discrete components, and that you could easily get to the individual circuits to make the necessary modifications. Computers got fast enough to do the same type thing in software about the time the Pentium 100's came out. Today, with Gigahertz processors and fast video cards, it could make for a nice OpenGL project.
Later.
wings
Sorry about this beinbg a long post, but I've done something similar to what I think you're asking about. I've set up an old Pentium 200 w/Linux 2.2.19, 128MB RAM, Ensoniq sound card, and 120GB of dedicated music storage, with...
.ogg files) on a 10/100Mb house LAN. Edna will allow selection of individual songs, pick from existing playlists, or dynamically generate a 'play all songs' playlist that works from the selected level down. .ogg files seem to stream just fine. I use EasyTag to manage the ID3 tags on the MP3s. Of the TAG utilities I tried, I liked it the best for managing large numbers of MP3 files. I haven't yet found a comparable utility for managing OGG TAGs.
;-)
(enters command)
thorin:/music$ find . -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' | wc -l
12648
thorin:/music$
...mmm, alot of songs (900+ albums, yes I own all the CDs), organized by alphabetically by Artist/Album/Song. I use Edna(v0.3?) as the music web server to serve the music (hacked slightly to support
Any user at a client computer on the LAN can use their preferred browser to stream whatever music (album/playlist/song) they want to their local desktop. Windows clients currently are using Winamp, Linux clients are using XMMS, but any client with support for streaming mp3 and ogg files should work.
For MP3s I use ID3V2 tags because they work with streaming. The tags on the
On the server itself, I use Konqueror pointed at the local Edna web server to pick playlists handled by XMMS via an Ensoniq sound card to the main stereo system. MP3s are encoded at a relatively high quality using LAME 3.89 in VBR mode with an average bit rate running about 190Kb/s. I'm currently re-encoding the music from the original sources into the ogg/Vorbis" format, using an average bit rate of 192Kb/s. I use GRIP to rip my CDs with (with full paranoia), and normalize to even out the volume variations of songs so that playlists with songs taken from different albums aren't at radically different volumes. There is a volume normalizing plugin for XMMS that adjusts the level in real time, but I didn't like the way it worked. The volume level of the next song was significantly different (louder) than the previous song, it could take a half second or so to adjust itself. Pre-normalizing (with conservative values) seems to work much better. The music currently occupies about 70GB of disk space.
BTW, my music server is what I use to rip/encode all of the new music, run setiathome, and function as a SAMBA file server/domain controller. It will do all that while streaming music to several clients as well as play through the local sound card without skipping. I discovered that if I used XMMS to read the MP3/OGG files directly from disk (on the server), I had problems with skipping when the server was heavily loaded, even with the XMMS buffers set to very high values, but clients on the LAN would never skip. Streaming to XMMS on the server solved that problem without resorting to the low latency patches for the kernel. On the Linux clients I setting my browser to launch xmms with the -e option which causes new songs or playlists selected with the browser to be appended to the current xmms playlist.
I believe (and I know someone will correct me if I'm wrong) that the MP3 file format supports a 'no copy' BIT. If that bit is set in some of your MP3s, and you have software that can ignore it, that may invoke the DMCA by your having a tool that can bypass the 'protection'.
From the message posted on Sourceforge Here("http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum _id=110712" for the paranoid), it appears that someone IS demanding 'compensation' for 'damages' caused by their software.
Regarding Linux running on more than 4 processors, it does actually run with more than 4, and more than 16. Slashdot ran this article awhile back: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/27/1825242.shtm l about a 31 processor Alpha EV67 machine. The reader comments also had a link
to this document http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/BogoMips-1.html #ss1.3 about the highest known BogoMips values.
"In a home environment, the likelihood of such an attack being mounted is probably negligible, given the cost of the attack versus the typical value of the stolen data."
The data on the network might not be of much value, but the access to a broadband Cable or DSL connection, possibly as launching point for a DOS attack might be worth it to somebody.
Gives new meaning to the phrase "catching a virus."
wings