Other UPnP servers include: - Microsoft Windows Media Connect (free) - Nero MediaHome (part of Nero 6, $70) - Musicmatch UPnP music server (?) - Allegro Media Server ($25)
(Note that I don't know whether they are really compatible with the Linksys device, but they should)
No, I haven't seen a DRM-protected radio stream (that cant be played by mplayer, xine and friends) yet. The formats may support it, but it's not used in the real world.
But the point is people don't do that. How far back do your electronic archives go? I'm a complete packrat, but even I don't have email from 10 years ago anymore (though I do remember when I made the decision to drop it).
I dont have any 10 year old paper letters either. I do have some paper documents that i want to keep, but as my storage for paper is limited, I rather throw paper away in the case of doubt. Recently I started scanning these documents though because I store backup CDs around in several places. So it's unlikely that I will lose digital data. But I do not have any backup photocopies of my papers, that would be too much trouble.
How can you know which paper is important in 1000 years? Historians would probably kill for many 2000 year old documents that people did not care about back then.
If you talk to archivists, it is not the hard copy information they worry about, it is the electronic information which is ephemeral.
This is because they grew up with paper, they took this job because they loved taking care of paper, and all this is going to change now. A large library used to keep dozens of people busy. If you want to store such a tiny amount of information today, you need a couple of hard drives and copy their content every year. Done. Archiving became as simple as that.
A current politician will leave much less. Someone born today who becomes a politician will probably leave nothing except what they want to be seen.
That's what projects like archive.org are for. The problem is rather that there is much more information than there used to be. But paper will never solve that. Where do you want to store the whole WWW printed out on paper?
Well, some paper documents survived. But that is a tiny fraction of the paper that has been created. The rest rotted, burned, whatever. Copying paper is hard. It is very difficult to make a backup of a 1000 page book and the deficiencies of paper made humanity lose an enormous amount of knowledge. That some paper survived does not prove that it is a good medium. It is a horrible medium.
Electronic media also needs some care, especially while it is so new. You probably need to convert it to a newer medium every few years, and you should keep multiple copies. You also should take care of using a format that can be read in the future, and not to use complicated proprietary formats. But you can archive a huge amount of data with a modest amount of work. A single harddrive can contain the content of a paper library, and be copied within a few minutes.
Is there a limit of how successful an open wiki system can be? Sooner or later, not only some simple minded lunatics will try to attack the wiki by breaking its content, but there may be distributed denial-of-service attacks from hacked systems (which makes banning-by-IP impossible) and more intelligent automated vandalism (e.g. inserting semi-random words or sentences in the texts). Do you think that a volunteer force can defeat this forever manually, or do you expect that wikipedia will be more restricted at one point? For instance, an Advogato-like trust network could be used to make sure that people are real, and a voting system for entries from unknown contributors.
I understand the Unix philosopy, appreciate tight code
Actually the Unix philosophy does not help conserving memory at all. Putting every tiny feature into its own executable command line program is a working component architecture, but it's also responsible for a huge "waste" of CPU time and memory. This is getting worse as those formerly small command line programs are getting more and more features. The original 'cp' may have been a simple way to copy a file. But GNU's 'cp' is a backup application of its own.
kdeinit starts KDE applications by forking and then loading them as shared libraries. Because kdeinit itself links to the kdelibs, it allows a much more effective sharing of kdelibs (and its dependencies) between the applications and avoids unneccessary initialization.
In other words, it reduces startup time and memory usage.
Sure seems like I should be getting more bang for my CPU buck though. What's been taking up all the space in software these days?
Features. There are thousands of (usually small) things that today's GUIs can do and the old ones didnt.
Tools to manage the features. The mental capacity of human beings did not improve since the age of the 386. In order to manage the increasing complexity they are using higher level languages, layer their software etc. This makes software less efficient.
Existing products already do this, though they have a PC requirement: in particluar, seeSlim Devices' offerings.
It has an integrated speaker, you do not need a remote control and I guess it can run with batteries. So it's a semi-portable device for the kitchen, the garden etc.
Isn't this just a severely crippled laptop with a WiFi card or built-in WiFi?
Don't know the hardware, but I would bet on some cheap ARM CPU with wireless chipset and something for audio.
Given these limitations, how much would you pay for something like this?
~200 EUR/USD probably
At what point does it make more sense to simply by a laptop with a WiFi card or built in WiFi?
Definitely not for the kitchen. It's exactly what I am currently looking for. Something with WLAN (so I don't need an ethernet cable), built-in speakers (it needs to be small, I dont want a full blown device in the kitchen) and easy to use. I don't want to boot a laptop or start an app when I want music in the kitchen. Turn the thing on, press on the button of the station and then I want to hear the music.
What part of "$900 million to resolve patent issues" is unclear?
The question whether Sun has transferred their rights to Microsoft. I don't think so. They just licensed the patents to Microsoft, so they can use them in.Net stuff. Just like Sun probably licensed them, at least partially, to all Java licensees.
Yes, Intel x86 can handle many of the tasks that only Unix machines used to be able to handle. I'd just tend to debate whether they're capable of doing these tasks as cost effectively, as reliably, and as efficiently.
Actually I'd be interested how many billions of Sun's yearly losses are related to Java, and how many billions are caused by creating and maintaining their own CPU architecture. I wouldnt be surprised if the last bit of 'cost-effectiveness' of the SPARC architecture would disappear immediately if Sun would charges enough to cover their real costs.
After cancelling the UltraSPARC V and having only a few 'mystery' CPU projects left, I expect Sun to make x64-64 the primary architecture for the low-end and medium range. Maybe not with this x86-64 generation, but when the next one appears.
My theory is that Sun is going to sell Java, probably to IBM. That's also a reason why Sun is will not open-source Java. Even if it is losing money, it's still a valuable asset. Sun owns the trademark, many Java-related patents and is the only company with the authority to prevent Java from being forked. Sun's threat is to sell Java to Microsoft. Not sure whether MS wants to buy it (they would certainly be willing to spend a lot of money to destroy it, but it would also annoy many people and renew the antitrust trouble). Losing Java would be so bad for IBM that they would be willing to spent a few billions to save it. Possibly together with other companies in the Java trap, like SAP.
>>If you want to know why the eagles didn't intervene until the end, read the books. >Still, I think you're the lowest slashdot-id-number troll I've seen on here, well done.
Thanks. Proud member of the Orkut Troll community.
I'd recommend to the New Line guys to release a new LOTR DVD every month, each one with 1 minute of additional extra footage. People would still buy them, and maybe it will provide enough incentive to create a fourth and fifth part. How sure can you be that the Saurus guy is *really* gone? And BTW if Gandalf has those cool eagles that he used to rescue Frodo at the end, why did he not use those f&*%^ birds to bring Frodo on that damn mountain and save at least one hour of my life that I wasted watching that crap?
Increasing the cost for the sender works only with real money. All the computing time or bandwidth approaches wont work. The reason is that are far too many too cheap ways to acquire non-monetary resources: hack computers (using trojans, worms, whatever) so they provide computing time, make people pay for porn with computing time etc... money will work, as long as the potential profit is lower than the cost for sending the mail
permission-based mail can't be a general solution. Just like anybody can look up you telephone number or send you paper mail, you also want that for email. (Not everybody of course, but many people).
>>First off, ugly old version of qt app. Is there another app for this in linux?>Are there other codecs available to install to make it sound better? Or maybe a different SIP host to smooth out things?>I've never tried but heard that skype one made by kazaa is amazing quality for windows only though.
AFAIK Skype does not use a standard protocol, but something based on Kazaa technology. If you have only one client and no need for interoperability, some problems just disappear...
1. Note that kphone is more a research project that end-user friendly software. It became much better in the last year though. 2. The user part is your number, e.g. "17556" (my number). The host part is "fwd.pulver.com". The outbound proxy is "fwdnat.pulver.com:5082" and the authentication username is "17556". If you are on a NAT, you should go to 'SIP Preferences'/'Socket' and set 'Stun server' to yes. 3. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol.
Is it USB's fault when a OS/distribution is so broken that it does not support USB keyboards (which I am using on Linux for 4 years)? It rather shows that you should avoid that distribution at any cost if you are not using very old hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Other UPnP servers include:
- Microsoft Windows Media Connect (free)
- Nero MediaHome (part of Nero 6, $70)
- Musicmatch UPnP music server (?)
- Allegro Media Server ($25)
(Note that I don't know whether they are really compatible with the Linksys device, but they should)
No, I haven't seen a DRM-protected radio stream (that cant be played by mplayer, xine and friends) yet. The formats may support it, but it's not used in the real world.
Does it have to be a Betamax-style failure? What about a Minidisk-style failure? Or a Memory-Stick-style failure? Or an Attrac3-style failure?
Sony spent the last 20 years creating redundant formats that nobody wants.
But the point is people don't do that. How far back do your electronic archives go? I'm a complete packrat, but even I don't have email from 10 years ago anymore (though I do remember when I made the decision to drop it).
I dont have any 10 year old paper letters either. I do have some paper documents that i want to keep, but as my storage for paper is limited, I rather throw paper away in the case of doubt. Recently I started scanning these documents though because I store backup CDs around in several places. So it's unlikely that I will lose digital data. But I do not have any backup photocopies of my papers, that would be too much trouble.
How can you know which paper is important in 1000 years? Historians would probably kill for many 2000 year old documents that people did not care about back then.
If you talk to archivists, it is not the hard copy information they worry about, it is the electronic information which is ephemeral.
This is because they grew up with paper, they took this job because they loved taking care of paper, and all this is going to change now. A large library used to keep dozens of people busy. If you want to store such a tiny amount of information today, you need a couple of hard drives and copy their content every year. Done. Archiving became as simple as that.
A current politician will leave much less. Someone born today who becomes a politician will probably leave nothing except what they want to be seen.
That's what projects like archive.org are for. The problem is rather that there is much more information than there used to be. But paper will never solve that. Where do you want to store the whole WWW printed out on paper?
Well, some paper documents survived. But that is a tiny fraction of the paper that has been created. The rest rotted, burned, whatever. Copying paper is hard. It is very difficult to make a backup of a 1000 page book and the deficiencies of paper made humanity lose an enormous amount of knowledge. That some paper survived does not prove that it is a good medium. It is a horrible medium.
Electronic media also needs some care, especially while it is so new. You probably need to convert it to a newer medium every few years, and you should keep multiple copies. You also should take care of using a format that can be read in the future, and not to use complicated proprietary formats. But you can archive a huge amount of data with a modest amount of work. A single harddrive can contain the content of a paper library, and be copied within a few minutes.
Is there a limit of how successful an open wiki system can be? Sooner or later, not only some simple minded lunatics will try to attack the wiki by breaking its content, but there may be distributed denial-of-service attacks from hacked systems (which makes banning-by-IP impossible) and more intelligent automated vandalism (e.g. inserting semi-random words or sentences in the texts).
Do you think that a volunteer force can defeat this forever manually, or do you expect that wikipedia will be more restricted at one point?
For instance, an Advogato-like trust network could be used to make sure that people are real, and a voting system for entries from unknown contributors.
Sure, you don't use it to start other applications :)
Either use an old distribution, or an embedded distribution.
I understand the Unix philosopy, appreciate tight code
Actually the Unix philosophy does not help conserving memory at all. Putting every tiny feature into its own executable command line program is a working component architecture, but it's also responsible for a huge "waste" of CPU time and memory.
This is getting worse as those formerly small command line programs are getting more and more features. The original 'cp' may have been a simple way to copy a file. But GNU's 'cp' is a backup application of its own.
what is kdeinit for?
kdeinit starts KDE applications by forking and then loading them as shared libraries. Because kdeinit itself links to the kdelibs, it allows a much more effective sharing of kdelibs (and its dependencies) between the applications and avoids unneccessary initialization.
In other words, it reduces startup time and memory usage.
It's a dupe, was posted on friday. Still one of the better cringely columns...
Existing products already do this, though they have a PC requirement: in particluar, seeSlim Devices' offerings.
It has an integrated speaker, you do not need a remote control and I guess it can run with batteries. So it's a semi-portable device for the kitchen, the garden etc.
Isn't this just a severely crippled laptop with a WiFi card or built-in WiFi?
Don't know the hardware, but I would bet on some cheap ARM CPU with wireless chipset and something for audio.
Given these limitations, how much would you pay for something like this?
~200 EUR/USD probably
At what point does it make more sense to simply by a laptop with a WiFi card or built in WiFi?
Definitely not for the kitchen. It's exactly what I am currently looking for. Something with WLAN (so I don't need an ethernet cable), built-in speakers (it needs to be small, I dont want a full blown device in the kitchen) and easy to use. I don't want to boot a laptop or start an app when I want music in the kitchen. Turn the thing on, press on the button of the station and then I want to hear the music.
Read the site: it has 6 buttons for your favorite stations. :)
Beside that, you do not use a Knob for internet radio, but URLs
What part of "$900 million to resolve patent issues" is unclear?
.Net stuff. Just like Sun probably licensed them, at least partially, to all Java licensees.
The question whether Sun has transferred their rights to Microsoft. I don't think so. They just licensed the patents to Microsoft, so they can use them in
Yes, Intel x86 can handle many of the tasks that only Unix machines used to be able to handle. I'd just tend to debate whether they're capable of doing these tasks as cost effectively, as reliably, and as efficiently.
Actually I'd be interested how many billions of Sun's yearly losses are related to Java, and how many billions are caused by creating and maintaining their own CPU architecture. I wouldnt be surprised if the last bit of 'cost-effectiveness' of the SPARC architecture would disappear immediately if Sun would charges enough to cover their real costs.
After cancelling the UltraSPARC V and having only a few 'mystery' CPU projects left, I expect Sun to make x64-64 the primary architecture for the low-end and medium range. Maybe not with this x86-64 generation, but when the next one appears.
My theory is that Sun is going to sell Java, probably to IBM. That's also a reason why Sun is will not
open-source Java. Even if it is losing money, it's still a valuable asset. Sun owns the trademark, many Java-related
patents and is the only company with the authority to prevent Java from being forked.
Sun's threat is to sell Java to Microsoft. Not sure whether MS wants to buy it (they would certainly be
willing to spend a lot of money to destroy it, but it would also annoy many people and renew the antitrust trouble). Losing Java would be so bad for IBM that they would be willing to spent a few billions to save
it. Possibly together with other companies in the Java trap, like SAP.
>>If you want to know why the eagles didn't intervene until the end, read the books. >Still, I think you're the lowest slashdot-id-number troll I've seen on here, well done.
Thanks. Proud member of the Orkut Troll community.
I'd recommend to the New Line guys to release a new LOTR DVD every month, each one with 1 minute of additional extra footage.
People would still buy them, and maybe it will provide enough incentive to create a fourth and fifth part. How sure can you be that the Saurus guy is *really* gone?
And BTW if Gandalf has those cool eagles that he used to rescue Frodo at the end, why did he not use those f&*%^ birds to bring Frodo on that damn mountain and save at least one hour of my life that I wasted watching that crap?
Ok, enough rant for today.
>>First off, ugly old version of qt app. Is there another app for this in linux?>Are there other codecs available to install to
make it sound better? Or maybe a different SIP host to smooth out things?>I've never tried but heard that skype one made by kazaa is amazing quality for windows only though.
AFAIK Skype does not use a standard protocol, but something based on Kazaa technology. If you have only one client and no need for interoperability, some problems just disappear...
1. Note that kphone is more a research project that end-user friendly software. It became much better in the last year though.
2. The user part is your number, e.g. "17556" (my number). The host part is "fwd.pulver.com". The outbound proxy is "fwdnat.pulver.com:5082" and the authentication username is "17556". If you are on a NAT, you should go to 'SIP Preferences'/'Socket' and set 'Stun server' to yes.
3. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol.
Is it USB's fault when a OS/distribution is so broken that it does not support USB keyboards (which I am using on Linux for 4 years)? It rather shows that you should avoid that distribution at any cost if you are not using very old hardware.