I also pre-ordered one and have been playing with it for a week or so. First off, you can turn it off by holding the Stop button down for 2-3 seconds.
I got mine not so much as a portable device, but as the first thing I'd found that could do timed recordings from radio. Thus, I'm plugging it in and leaving it next to the computer with the idea of burning programs to CD to listen at the car later.
There are two problems with this:
1. If the USB cable is plugged in, everything else is disabled, including recording. So make very sure you remember to unplug it after transferring files.
2. The recording quality is very low --- by default only 16Kbps. You can switch that to 32Kbps (using twice the space) by holding the EQ button down for a couple seconds (something you have to carefully read the table of button functions to find out), but even 32Kbps is barely good enough for decent speech. Don't expect to record real music with this.
3. Reception is worse than "so-so" in my book. While strong stations do come in fine, there's a local station run out of a high school that is the only classical station in Portland (KBPS) that I like. It comes in just fine on every other radio in the house and car, but this thing can't even pick up a hint of it (well, maybe a weak hint once in a while if you listen through the static enough). And that's with the antennae plugged in (which works through the earphone jack). I was hoping to record shows like Carl Haas and Shickele Mix off here, but with both the low recording quality and the fact that it can't pick up the station anyhow, I'm outta luck on that.
4. For some reason, probably relating to cpu performance I'm guessing, they record to a proprietary format, not mp3. The desktop application will convert to wav, and then you can mp3 that, but I imagine that only makes the sound worse (I haven't really tried it yet, only the wav conversion). The conversion to.wav blows the file size up about a factor of almost 20 (at least on the one I did it to: 14M -> 225M).
So, while it's an interesting toy, it's definitely V1.0. I may end up using it as a portable voice recorder, but I'm planning on recording some shows that are talk only like Science Friday and a local group's weekly local issues speech and Q&A show.
It would occur on the MAIL FROM command in SMTP. There's no reason I can think of to have the domain part be different from something on the same network as the SMTP server.
I believe that will show up in the From_ line, which defeats the purpose of trying to hide your identity, and it also requires changes on the sending side, which RMX is trying to avoid (I'm pretty sure most mail transports use the From: in the MAIL FROM by default, though I haven't actually tested it).
Unfortunately, no it wouldn't. A lot of people are multi-homed these days, and legitimately send mail with one domain from an ISP using another domain. A simple case would be someone who has a hotmail account for pseudo-anonymous matters and a real isp email account. They could very well wish to send from their browser's mail client using their hotmail address, while not actually using hotmail to send it (say conversing with a personal respondent they're not sure of yet). Or maybe you're at home and want to send mail on a work-related matter so that the reply goes to your office mail, without going to the hassle of connecting via VPN. Etc.
...I hope the law firms that file the suits, as well as the courts hearing them, actually have the technical expertise to make sure they're suing the right people. I periodically get complaints from people thinking I or one of my users sent spam, when it was clearly forged, and a friend is caught in the middle of a dispute where the "spammer" claims they only use an opt-in list and the recipient is clammering "death to the spammer or you're one of them".
I desparately want to see spammers nailed to the wall, but not at the expense of a lot of "collateral damage", and even having a suit filed against you can be a major hit before it even gets to court.
I had a Sparrow and loved it --- when it was working. It never felt in the slightest "tippy" with 700+ lbs of lead in the bottom of it, though apparently it's rather like an SUV in that you don't want to be running a slalom course in one.
The short wheelbase did make the steering very quick, and you really had to pay attention to it above about 60mph. I wouldn't drive it for any length of time over 65-70.
The motor whine never bothered me, but the brakes squealed to high heaven. It wasn't much of a problem on the highway, but was embarassing to drive in town. About the time I sold it, someone had found that a particular Kharman Ghia brake pad could be used to eliminate the squeal (caused because the only pads available for the brake system they used were very hard and designed for racing, as I recall --- the KG pads were softer, regular pads).
The electric part was the cool part, though the real range was only about 30 miles --- if you discharge lead acid batteries all the way, you dramatically shorten the life of them. Still, it's a commuter vehicle, not a cross country van. 80-90% of all driving fits in that range, and you "gas up" when you get home. If you can plug in at work, as I could (and a lot of people can), you've got that much more.
The thing that killed Corbin, IMHO, was that they wouldn't listen to anyone who told them where they were screwing up, resulting in an unreliable vehicle. They ended up taking most of them back for retrofitting. Even then, the final straw for me was that the thing was belt driven, and too many people had the belt break early on (around 3000 miles), including me, and it's not field replaceable --- you have to jack it up and basically remove the rear wheel.
If it had been reliable, I'd still have mine and Corbin would still be selling them as fast as they could make them.
Re:Legalese cut-n-paste contradictions strike agai
on
Ogg Now An RFC
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think "All Rights Reserved" can be considered one of the most overused catch phrases of the last 20 years.
Actually, according to copyright training I had a "well known large company" some years ago, that specific phrase is required in a couple of small countries. It probably is overused in the sense that people think it's required in more places than it actually is, but from what little I recall, trying to copyright something in a way that's valid all over is a rat's nest, Berne or no Berne.
I've been wanting this since Tivos became available! Radio Reader, Shickele Mix, Lights Out (a local station's relaxing music program), Prairie home companion, City Club (a local civics group's weekly talk), the list goes on. This will be great if implemented well. I hope so --- I've just ordered one;-) (though I would like to see a program guide go with it)
As I was re-reading the article, this line struck me:
They also hope to boost the speed at which the screen switches to a new "page" of text, from the current quarter of a second to at least 10 times as fast, so it can display video.
With that, the animated photo albums from Harry Potter would become a reality...
As Clarke always said about magic and technology...;-)
Although an amusing statement, I've also seen code that abused subroutines to the point of making it really hard to figure what the heck it was doing. Part of it (actually, probably a large part) was bad naming and bad structuring, but every guideline needs common sense applied to it.
I don't know if anyone's still around to see this post, but if anyone's interested, I put some video and stills from the 96 and 97 DaVinci Days in Corvallis up on a site that can handle slashdotting. There's also some video of a trebuchet slinging various items --- the arm of the trebuchet was the same one used to sling the piano in one of the Northern Exposure episodes. Given the state of online video back then, they're far from high-def, but some people may enjoy them...
...to piss off potential customers? I cannot imagine this doing anything positive for an advertiser. Then again, 90+% put up with IE, so maybe I just have too high regard for the masses.
Corvallis, OR has a KSR as part of their DaVinci Days celebration every year, though it's relatively recent, only about 15 years or so. I'd post links to pics, but right now they're on my home system on the back end of a 128K upload DSL line;-) The mud bog is particularly fun. One year, the Maltese Fulcrum, basically a human V-8 4WD that can go anywhere, albeit not very fast, ended up pulling out another racer who got stuck. If you get a chance, you should go --- they're a lot of fun. (oh, and the prize for which bribery is allowed is only one of the less valuable prizes;-) )
Some things never change: issues like this are so old hat, the predicted "death of the net" was a running joke even in the 80's. Though I have to admit, I haven't read USENET regularly in a number of years. Mostly because I've got too many other things going on, rather than issues with the newsgroups themselves though. When I do look, things look basically the same as they always have though.
I am now doing research on lead-acid battery desulfators.
At the risk of going off topic, this topic came up on the ev list . Apparently they help, but only partially, as I recall. They would probably like to hear your results when you get them...
When I looked into this, I was told that the issue is traffic --- if people aren't coming to your house, for one thing, no one would even know, save the postman. If you wanted to do it "right", I shouldn't think you'd have a problem getting permission or an exemption or whatever's needed, unless you've pissed someone off somehow.
So what would it take to file a class action suit on behalf of all users and ISPs? There have to be a large number of users who've missed important mail because it was buried in spam, or who've had to change the email address to get away from it, with the time lost to get everyone they care about switched. And as a small ISP, for the first time in 18 years, I'm in need of upgrading my system for performance reasons, because of the load spamassassin is putting on it dealing with all the f***ing spam it gets. Not to mention a domain that expired because the renewal notice got filtered and the time spent installing mechanisms to cope with it. I think I alone could argue for about $15K in actual damages, and I'm small potatoes. I just last night installed Active Spam Killer and I'm going to start migrating to it so that anyone who wants to send me mail that I don't know has to ask first. This is the world these assholes are making for us.
...is that it's yet another case of putting a law into place that everyone will ignore, with the result that it's another tool for the police to get someone they want, but don't have any real evidence against. That's not so bad when it's someone dangerous they're trying to put away, but all too often it's just someone somebody doesn't like for whatever reason, or lately, to make a show of "protecting the public".
I'm just waiting for them to put up another law requiring firewalls on broadband connections. Damned if you do and Damned if you don't.
That's why the Pittock Building in Portland, OR is one of the major telco central locations here --- it used to be a steam generation facility and there are pipes connecting it all over downtown that have been filled with cable for years now.
I'm probably going to have to upgrade my mailserver, which is getting overloaded by filtering all the spam coming in. It's money I *definitely* don't need to spend otherwise. Is there any way for a class action suit to sue a class of offenders?
Commutercars isn't planning on going bankrupt either. The point is, GM *could* build them profitably. It's only $10K to do a very nice conversion as it is, and that's at retail prices. If I'd done that instead of throwing my money away on the Sparrow, I'd still be happily driving electric today. I don't know what they've got against electrics, but profitability is a red herring and not it.
The problem with the Sparrow was not in the concept, but the implementation. The EV1 was a good implementation, and would have sold well if GM had let it. Now we have to wait for the Tango to sell well enough to well-heeled drivers so they can afford to bring the much less expensive Foxtrot to market. GM could have done this years ago if they wanted to.
Don't believe the nonsense they're trying to scam the public that "no one wants EVs". The people that have EV1s are trying their best to keep them, but GM won't let them. You couldn't buy them, only lease them, and you had to go through a qualification process to even do that. Not being in one of the select few cities, I couldn't even begin to hope for one, but I did try getting a Ford Ranger EV, and got the runaround. Someone else I know was very persistent, even trying out of state dealers, and finally gave up after 6+ months of trying hard to get one. Not everyone had these problems, but they did not make it easy, and then combined with no marketing, claim "no one wants EVs". BS!
The Corbin Sparrows was a 1-person freeway capable vehicle that had a 1-year backlog of orders until reliability problems caught up with it.
No one wants EVs? BS. They're great for commuting, which is hard on a gas engine. Use an EV to commute and your regular vehicle will probably last longer, not just from fewer miles travelled, but it'll probably last for more miles as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I also pre-ordered one and have been playing with it for a week or so. First off, you can turn it off by holding the Stop button down for 2-3 seconds.
.wav blows the file size up about a factor of almost 20 (at least on the one I did it to: 14M -> 225M).
I got mine not so much as a portable device, but as the first thing I'd found that could do timed recordings from radio. Thus, I'm plugging it in and leaving it next to the computer with the idea of burning programs to CD to listen at the car later.
There are two problems with this:
1. If the USB cable is plugged in, everything else is disabled, including recording. So make very sure you remember to unplug it after transferring files.
2. The recording quality is very low --- by default only 16Kbps. You can switch that to 32Kbps (using twice the space) by holding the EQ button down for a couple seconds (something you have to carefully read the table of button functions to find out), but even 32Kbps is barely good enough for decent speech. Don't expect to record real music with this.
3. Reception is worse than "so-so" in my book. While strong stations do come in fine, there's a local station run out of a high school that is the only classical station in Portland (KBPS) that I like. It comes in just fine on every other radio in the house and car, but this thing can't even pick up a hint of it (well, maybe a weak hint once in a while if you listen through the static enough). And that's with the antennae plugged in (which works through the earphone jack). I was hoping to record shows like Carl Haas and Shickele Mix off here, but with both the low recording quality and the fact that it can't pick up the station anyhow, I'm outta luck on that.
4. For some reason, probably relating to cpu performance I'm guessing, they record to a proprietary format, not mp3. The desktop application will convert to wav, and then you can mp3 that, but I imagine that only makes the sound worse (I haven't really tried it yet, only the wav conversion). The conversion to
So, while it's an interesting toy, it's definitely V1.0. I may end up using it as a portable voice recorder, but I'm planning on recording some shows that are talk only like Science Friday and a local group's weekly local issues speech and Q&A show.
I believe that will show up in the From_ line, which defeats the purpose of trying to hide your identity, and it also requires changes on the sending side, which RMX is trying to avoid (I'm pretty sure most mail transports use the From: in the MAIL FROM by default, though I haven't actually tested it).
Unfortunately, no it wouldn't. A lot of people are multi-homed these days, and legitimately send mail with one domain from an ISP using another domain. A simple case would be someone who has a hotmail account for pseudo-anonymous matters and a real isp email account. They could very well wish to send from their browser's mail client using their hotmail address, while not actually using hotmail to send it (say conversing with a personal respondent they're not sure of yet). Or maybe you're at home and want to send mail on a work-related matter so that the reply goes to your office mail, without going to the hassle of connecting via VPN. Etc.
...I hope the law firms that file the suits, as well as the courts hearing them, actually have the technical expertise to make sure they're suing the right people. I periodically get complaints from people thinking I or one of my users sent spam, when it was clearly forged, and a friend is caught in the middle of a dispute where the "spammer" claims they only use an opt-in list and the recipient is clammering "death to the spammer or you're one of them".
I desparately want to see spammers nailed to the wall, but not at the expense of a lot of "collateral damage", and even having a suit filed against you can be a major hit before it even gets to court.
The short wheelbase did make the steering very quick, and you really had to pay attention to it above about 60mph. I wouldn't drive it for any length of time over 65-70.
The motor whine never bothered me, but the brakes squealed to high heaven. It wasn't much of a problem on the highway, but was embarassing to drive in town. About the time I sold it, someone had found that a particular Kharman Ghia brake pad could be used to eliminate the squeal (caused because the only pads available for the brake system they used were very hard and designed for racing, as I recall --- the KG pads were softer, regular pads).
The electric part was the cool part, though the real range was only about 30 miles --- if you discharge lead acid batteries all the way, you dramatically shorten the life of them. Still, it's a commuter vehicle, not a cross country van. 80-90% of all driving fits in that range, and you "gas up" when you get home. If you can plug in at work, as I could (and a lot of people can), you've got that much more.
The thing that killed Corbin, IMHO, was that they wouldn't listen to anyone who told them where they were screwing up, resulting in an unreliable vehicle. They ended up taking most of them back for retrofitting. Even then, the final straw for me was that the thing was belt driven, and too many people had the belt break early on (around 3000 miles), including me, and it's not field replaceable --- you have to jack it up and basically remove the rear wheel.
If it had been reliable, I'd still have mine and Corbin would still be selling them as fast as they could make them.
Actually, according to copyright training I had a "well known large company" some years ago, that specific phrase is required in a couple of small countries. It probably is overused in the sense that people think it's required in more places than it actually is, but from what little I recall, trying to copyright something in a way that's valid all over is a rat's nest, Berne or no Berne.
I've been wanting this since Tivos became available! Radio Reader, Shickele Mix, Lights Out (a local station's relaxing music program), Prairie home companion, City Club (a local civics group's weekly talk), the list goes on. This will be great if implemented well. I hope so --- I've just ordered one ;-) (though I would like to see a program guide go with it)
Although an amusing statement, I've also seen code that abused subroutines to the point of making it really hard to figure what the heck it was doing. Part of it (actually, probably a large part) was bad naming and bad structuring, but every guideline needs common sense applied to it.
A good way to marginalize your business as you drive away all but the stupidest customers.
I don't know if anyone's still around to see this post, but if anyone's interested, I put some video and stills from the 96 and 97 DaVinci Days in Corvallis up on a site that can handle slashdotting. There's also some video of a trebuchet slinging various items --- the arm of the trebuchet was the same one used to sling the piano in one of the Northern Exposure episodes. Given the state of online video back then, they're far from high-def, but some people may enjoy them...
Personally, I think most of the interest around it is because the batteries are supposed to last 17 hours. Who cares about the camera...
...to piss off potential customers? I cannot imagine this doing anything positive for an advertiser. Then again, 90+% put up with IE, so maybe I just have too high regard for the masses.
Corvallis, OR has a KSR as part of their DaVinci Days celebration every year, though it's relatively recent, only about 15 years or so. I'd post links to pics, but right now they're on my home system on the back end of a 128K upload DSL line ;-) The mud bog is particularly fun. One year, the Maltese Fulcrum, basically a human V-8 4WD that can go anywhere, albeit not very fast, ended up pulling out another racer who got stuck. If you get a chance, you should go --- they're a lot of fun. (oh, and the prize for which bribery is allowed is only one of the less valuable prizes ;-) )
Some things never change: issues like this are so old hat, the predicted "death of the net" was a running joke even in the 80's. Though I have to admit, I haven't read USENET regularly in a number of years. Mostly because I've got too many other things going on, rather than issues with the newsgroups themselves though. When I do look, things look basically the same as they always have though.
At the risk of going off topic, this topic came up on the ev list . Apparently they help, but only partially, as I recall. They would probably like to hear your results when you get them...
When I looked into this, I was told that the issue is traffic --- if people aren't coming to your house, for one thing, no one would even know, save the postman. If you wanted to do it "right", I shouldn't think you'd have a problem getting permission or an exemption or whatever's needed, unless you've pissed someone off somehow.
So what would it take to file a class action suit on behalf of all users and ISPs? There have to be a large number of users who've missed important mail because it was buried in spam, or who've had to change the email address to get away from it, with the time lost to get everyone they care about switched. And as a small ISP, for the first time in 18 years, I'm in need of upgrading my system for performance reasons, because of the load spamassassin is putting on it dealing with all the f***ing spam it gets. Not to mention a domain that expired because the renewal notice got filtered and the time spent installing mechanisms to cope with it. I think I alone could argue for about $15K in actual damages, and I'm small potatoes. I just last night installed Active Spam Killer and I'm going to start migrating to it so that anyone who wants to send me mail that I don't know has to ask first. This is the world these assholes are making for us.
...is that it's yet another case of putting a law into place that everyone will ignore, with the result that it's another tool for the police to get someone they want, but don't have any real evidence against. That's not so bad when it's someone dangerous they're trying to put away, but all too often it's just someone somebody doesn't like for whatever reason, or lately, to make a show of "protecting the public".
I'm just waiting for them to put up another law requiring firewalls on broadband connections. Damned if you do and Damned if you don't.
That's why the Pittock Building in Portland, OR is one of the major telco central locations here --- it used to be a steam generation facility and there are pipes connecting it all over downtown that have been filled with cable for years now.
...if an advertiser want me to watch their ads, they ought to make their ads worth watching.
I'm probably going to have to upgrade my mailserver, which is getting overloaded by filtering all the spam coming in. It's money I *definitely* don't need to spend otherwise. Is there any way for a class action suit to sue a class of offenders?
Commutercars isn't planning on going bankrupt either. The point is, GM *could* build them profitably. It's only $10K to do a very nice conversion as it is, and that's at retail prices. If I'd done that instead of throwing my money away on the Sparrow, I'd still be happily driving electric today. I don't know what they've got against electrics, but profitability is a red herring and not it.
The problem with the Sparrow was not in the concept, but the implementation. The EV1 was a good implementation, and would have sold well if GM had let it. Now we have to wait for the Tango to sell well enough to well-heeled drivers so they can afford to bring the much less expensive Foxtrot to market. GM could have done this years ago if they wanted to.
Don't believe the nonsense they're trying to scam the public that "no one wants EVs". The people that have EV1s are trying their best to keep them, but GM won't let them. You couldn't buy them, only lease them, and you had to go through a qualification process to even do that. Not being in one of the select few cities, I couldn't even begin to hope for one, but I did try getting a Ford Ranger EV, and got the runaround. Someone else I know was very persistent, even trying out of state dealers, and finally gave up after 6+ months of trying hard to get one. Not everyone had these problems, but they did not make it easy, and then combined with no marketing, claim "no one wants EVs". BS!
The Corbin Sparrows was a 1-person freeway capable vehicle that had a 1-year backlog of orders until reliability problems caught up with it.
No one wants EVs? BS. They're great for commuting, which is hard on a gas engine. Use an EV to commute and your regular vehicle will probably last longer, not just from fewer miles travelled, but it'll probably last for more miles as well.