>I wouldn't pay 5$ for a 128kbps mp3 album when I could down 192kbps VBR for free.
This kind of reasoning just kills me. I don't know what SkunkPussy's deeper thoughts are on the issue, but I have had arguments with people that have espoused similar "I wouldn't pay $x when I can get better quality for free from questionable/patently illegal methods." My favorite part of those arguments is when I say, "But if you extrapolate this out, and no one is buying the content, i.e when theoretically only one person has to get the disc and share it with the whole world for free, then much of the content will stop getting made because the artists can't afford to make it and/or the distributors can't afford to distribute it." They generally respond with, "Well, that content is crap anyway. Who cares if they stop making it." Then why are you currently downloading the crap content at 192kbps VBR?
Here's my thought: how about just doing without something if you're not willing to pay for it? We have no human right to corporately produced entertainment. You are already sort of "voting with your wallet" by downloading it for free instead of buying it, but why not "vote" in an more holistic way but not consuming this content at all if you think the pricing is crappy?
On topic: I say good for EMI, but I agree with the quality thing. I ripped my library at 256K VBR to play it at home and remotely through SlimServer and to play it in portable settings like the car and the gym. My portable media devices are a Treo 650 with a 2GB sim card and a laptop dual-booting to Windows XP and Linux. So yeah, I'd love to be able to buy individual tracks that are not tied to a specific platform since I have a multi-platform need. However, if they only offer it at 128K, I just won't buy that offering. I'll either not buy it all or buy the CD and rip it at my preferred portable setting.
Paying copyright holders for the sale of something that may or may not be used to copy their music has precedent: the blank media tax? However, thus far it has been determined that MP3 players are excluded from that "tax". From the entry:
17 USC 1008 bars copyright infringement action and 17 USC 1003 provides for a royalty of 3% of the initial transfer price. The royalty rate in Section 1004 was established by the Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998. This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or "burn" music from the computer to CD. A similar royalty applies to stand-alone CD recorders, but not to CD burners used with computers.
Thanks to a precedent established in a 1998 lawsuit involving the Rio PMP300 player, MP3 players are deemed "computer peripherals" and are not subject to a royalty of this type in the U.S.
Just wanted to add my deepest, strongest seconding of your wish that Logitech keeps the SlimServer OSS project going. I do not own a Squeezebox, can't afford it, but I've used SlimServer for years, streaming music from home to my laptop at work and also to PCs around the house, including one hooked to my stereo. I LOVE this software, especially with the improvements they've made over the years. I'll be heartbroken if it's gone.
On the other hand, maybe Logitech will finally come out with a cheap, displayless version of squeezebox with a nice friendly $50 price tag. Or a $150 version that does my music the way it does now but also does video...like the upcoming Apple iTV but even cheaper, and using SlimServer instead of iTunes as the backend.
>I could use a blog client that crossposted to several sites - but that's a messy unintegrated solution that just clutters up the net with dupes..
I think you're spot on in saying that, and the dupe aspect is probably very important, but I see what I guess I would call a a multi-presence problem. If you're using blogs to keep in touch with folks, and said folks are spread across a variety of services (myspace/lj/blogger/vox, etc.), it seems like there's two solutions. One is to cross-post all over the place. The other would be to pick a "main blog" (or maybe you've got a couple blogs with different focal points), and have your friends and family subscribe to it via aggregation if your main service is not their main service. I think that's a great idea, and that's how I read my friends' blogs and see family photos from photo-sharing sites and stuff.
The trouble comes when you want to respond to them. Then you've (usually) got to sign up for an account on their blog service so you can post a non-anonymous response. Of course you could drop them an e-mail, but comment discussion to a post is sometimes the best stuff. And now you have a presence on that blog service, even though you're not posting to it. So people discover you there and add you as a friend or a neighbor or what have you, but you're not posting there, you're posting on your main service.
Maybe that's not a big deal, but it seems like a problem to me. How do you you keep from having dupes all over the place yet get your thoughts/messages/interesting links/cat photos to all the people that want to see them, while giving them the chance to discuss them without having a dozen accounts (some like Vox that might not even be available to them at present!)
You can buy a movie for $20... movies are longer, more content filled (more costly to make), and are on more expensive discs [DVDs > CDs]... so why the fudge are they the same price? Oh yeah, because the music industry is an oligopoly and they like to rip people off
Apples and Oranges: movies, while usually costing more to make, are (generally) released to theaters before they are released to DVD. By the time they are released to DVD, they may have already be in the black, and DVD revenues are pure profit. (may I direct you to Kevin Smith's blog wherein he discusses that exact scenario with Clerks II). Even if it doesn't break even at the box office, the bottom line is there's still a release cycle where SOME income is made before the portable consumer media is released. A music CD doesn't have that benefit: generally, the sale of the new disc is the revenue and all of the money to recoup the expenses of its production come from that sale. Apples and Oranges to movies.
With that said, I'm with you on the artist and T-shirt thing. Several smaller bands I've seen make the appeal that their merch sales are "how they eat" while they're on tour. Buying merch at the table at the gig is certainly very direct artist support much of the time!
I don't direct this at MrSquirrel particularly, but those with MrSquirrel's attitude in general. Given the statement "If this $20 CD were only $5, I could justify buying it instead of getting it without paying for it," does it follow that "If this $15,000 car were only $1,000, I could justify buying it instead of getting it without paying for it." Or, "If this $1.79 loaf of bread were only $.50, I could justify buying it instead of getting it without paying for it." Or to be less tangible, "If the artist only charged $1000 instead of $100,000 to use their song in my movie or commercial, I could justify buying the licensing rights but instead will use it without paying for it." I recognize that argument by analogy has its pitfalls, but don't these phrases all fundamentally say, "this is too expensive, so I'm just going to take it without paying for it."
I think DRM stinks as much or more than anybody, and vehemently hate the DMCA as it supresses free speech and other civil liberties. Plus, our copyright system is broken and fair use is under attack. Music has become a commodity both to the labels and the listeners. Loads of problems. But how about just not having something that you can't afford? Why is it OK to take something for sale without paying for it? Is downloading music for free from P2P a form of civil disobedience or protest or something? Bah.
To the music DVD issue: I don't know if I'll buy one. I like the DualDisc because I can play it in my regular CD player and access enhanced home theater content there. I love Hybrid SACD like Dark Side of the Moon and the Rolling Stones catalog because it has fewer compatibility issues than DualDisc. I also am happy to pay an extra $4 or $5 for a package like the Flaming Lips surround edition of The Soft Bulletin: a double-disc package containing the album on a plain CD and another disc that's a DVD/DVD Audio with the (fantastic) surround mix + video bonuses. I'll send my message to the labels by continuing to purchase those formats and not buying a DVD-only platter.
I am almost irrationally sad about this. Microsoft is clearly getting a couple of deeply gifted people. But I consider several of the Sysinternals utilities, especially Process Monitor, essential for good Windows Health. Tuning performance or squashing spyware of friends' PCs or what have you, they write great stuff. Plus their web site is a great, independent resource to learn about some of these internal issues.
I suppose a very optimistic person would assume that functions like seing what processes spawned other processes, have files open, have sockets open, etc., will now be available in future Windows versions. I guess I must be cynical, because I'm feeling a sense of loss and sadness. Thanks for the great stuff, Sysinternals.
Re:Total Revolution - flame on
on
Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If that's the ONLY strike against the Wii, then why is he a sucker to want to buy it? Perhaps he simply doesn't care about HD. I know that I, personally, will likely not have an HDTV for the next several years...
Similarly, my family isn't planning on getting a Wii or any other home console during this round because each of us now has a Nintendo DS (the wife and I bought one when the Lite came out). We moved from playing multiplayer Mariokart on the TV where we each had our own section of the screen to playing multiplayer Mariokart where we all have our own handheld console.
I understand we're not getting the near photorealistic graphics that a modern console or good PC could deliver, nor the game depth that a disk- (vs. cartridge-) based game sometimes delivers. However, the DS delivers everything that our family DOES want out of a console, and is portable to boot. Once the web browser is released it'll have even more portable utility.
This may be redundant, but I have to chime in and say how well de.licio.us delivers bookmark syncing for my needs. I do mix both work and home, professional and play bookmarks in my de.licio.us profile, and let them mix or not mix as appropriate through the tags I apply to them.
I'll definitely check out Google's offering, but I agree with other posters that there's some history that shouldn't be shared, and de.licio.us already meets my bookmarking needs in spades, including keeping "fun" bookmarks out of work..
I am a huge fan of the MusicIP MusicMagicMixer application discussed in the pitchforkmedia article. MusicIP does a fantastic job of helping me navigate my own collection since I ripped it into a couple hundred gigs of files. Coupled with SlimServer, I feel like I have the best of everything: Offline, I use MusicIP to create mixes from my own collection and transfer them to my portable player or make a CD. Online, I can stream my own collection with SlimServer playing MusicIP mixes, and when I want to discover new stuff I drop over to Pandora or Last.FM. I was excited to read about something that would have the intelligence to group Heartbreaker with Living Loving Maid, though, which MusicMagicMixer cannot do. That's righteous. But I'd want to be able to turn it off...sometimes it's fun to have Heartbreaker cut into something else. Imagine it being TOO intelligent. It's one thing to have Overture always lead into Temples of Syrinx...it's another to have it always play both discs from The Wall any time it picks Another Brick In The Wall part 2.
I agree with the extremetech article about Launchcast, too. Before Pandora and Last.FM, it is where I went online to discover new music. While I still like their ratings system the best of all and feel it is the most intuitive (rate the song and/or the artist and/or the album to shape your station), I think the other services implement moods much better and generally have a more positive user experience.
I am going to buy a DS Lite for myself. I frequently borrow my son's now, and having two in the house will allow us to do the local area multiplayer built into most of our favorite games. I think Nintendo is going to have some significant market success on this one, especially if lots of families have similar plans, where there's already a DS in the house and they'll use the Lite as a reason to get a second one, not to upgrade and get rid of the old one but to have more than one in the house.
On another note, I wonder if they'll continue to manufacture the current Nintendo DS and offer it at a lower price than the Lite, or if they'll discontinue the current DS? Look at the GBA -> SP -> Micro release cycle...they did stop making the GBA but it looks like the SP and Micro might both be manufactured, with the SP at $79 and the Micro at $99.
Bought with my lawn-mowing earnings for $80 at Musicland. My uncle gave me his 16K RAM pack that Christmas, as his TS/1000 melted somehow. Grandpa gave me an old black and white TV to use as a monitor, as the TS/1000 had NTSC out.
Only bought one commercial application for it: a cassette of Chess, which took about 10 minutes to load, and heaven forbid you pushed the keyboard too hard, because that would jostle the RAM pack and you'd lose your game, getting a...well, a WHITE screen of death.
>This makes it a lot easier to create playlists that have similar music.... I also think that there is no ideal third-party solution for this problem.
Not to make an ad for the thing, but I have had great success with the MusicMagicMixer. It sidesteps the whole genre thing to extent by employing psychoacoustic analysis to make playlists.
I have to agree. I love the SlimServer, but I don't have a Sqeezebox and instead use it to stream my collection to my desk at work, and to plug my laptop into my stereo at home. Don't get me wrong, I think the Squeezebox is a beautiful piece of engineering, and I do covet the digital output. But I'm not enough of an audiophile to consider it mandatory, and for $300 what me and my family are looking for is something to fully bridge the content on our home computer network and home theater. I want a device that will play our digital music collection through the stereo but also play visual media from our computers, like slideshows of our photos and.AVI and.MPG files, plus do visualizations like those found in WMP/iTunes/Winamp. PrismQ and DLink products and Hauppauge have products that do some or all of that stuff.
How about a "headless" Squeezebox, one without the flourescent display that instead did all the display through a video output? Losing the display would lower the price, too. Maybe even better, keep the same price-point AND keep the high-end pedigree of the SqueezeBox line offering not only composite and SVideo output but by including COMPONENT video output with Faroudja upconversion. THAT'S what I want to buy, from SlimDevices, rather than the DLink and such mentioned above. When can I place my order?
Remember that SlimServer has a web interface, and in the web interface you can see and control every stream. So even if you can't see the display and/or the remote control won't reach all the way to the squeezebox, you can use a web browser (wireless laptop, maybe?) in the living room to control what's playing. Even the volume. You already have in iBook upstairs, so I think your problem is solved!
I have my SlimServer running on a PII 450 using FreeBSD 6, and I've been pleased with the performance overall. The only times I've been disappointed is when appending extremely large playlists; sometimes the currently playing song will stutter. However, with the 6.2 release of SlimServer, even that has gotten much better. As someone else noted, playlist creation/editing really is the achilles heel of Slimserver with a large collection, but they're always improving it. They offer integration with the MusicMagicMixer, which alleviates those problems (for a price, as the MusicMagicMixer requires registration).
If it's true, it still doesn't address my point, which is to let users connect to non-proprietary and/or free servers. It looks like they don't even actually offer multiplayer for free.
How to articulate this? How about, "Hey, game makers! You want more online gamers? Then don't make us pay subscriptions to special-purpose servers and instead let people host their own games for free." I mean, that was part of why Quake pwned the world, right? You could set up your own servers with unique maps and rules and stuff. And sure, you could, optionally, pay somebody like Gamespy for their aggregation of all the servers they knew about for all the games they knew about. None of this XBox Live nonsense.
Of course the difficulty of this is that it reduces the number of revenue streams for the game maker. But that's addressed at least somewhat in TFA with the idea of contextual ads and such. And don't forget partnership deals like Ninteno announced with McDonald's: I believe that Nintendo will have their own special servers for their DS games, but they don't charge you to use them and I assume pay for them at least in part through their McDonald's hotspot partnership.
Product placement could be a big deal. I mean, they have done things like that before, like in Crazy Taxi where you can go to Tower Records but not FYE, and to KFC but not McDonald's. If you're connected online, those kind of things could rotate and even be location-specific. When you're playing Mario Kart on your DS, connected online, why not have track-side billboards change to a sponsor's logo? They'll know your location so why not, if they know that you're standing in a McDonald's in Chatanooga, TN at 5th and Main in the Central Time Zone at 6:30 PM, say 'WATCH THE SIMPSONS TONIGHT ON FOX 8:00 PM' or even say, 'NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK AVAILABLE AT THE STORE UP THE STREET'?
I mean, isn't that the kind of thing that Google is talking about? Why not have adsense be intelligently delivered, in a non-intrusive, context-sensitive fashion to your game? Then those folks setting up their own servers could even benefit the same way they do if they serve their own web pages with adsense. (the TFA notes an understanding that many in-game ads would not be clickable but rather more like a pay per eyeball model)
The article is wholly speculative; the article they linked to is more informative and fact-based.
With that said, I'm conflicted: if Apple really crippled it on purpose that's really shitty of them. But if that's what happened, is Motorola so daft that they didn't realize that's what was going o? They didn't have to accept Apple's terms.
Frankly, I'd be delighted if my phone had 512MB of RAM, 1/8" stereo headphone jack and a USB connection that would show up as a drive (much like my old Creative Muvo). I would choose a DRM-less MP3 phone like that over other phones the next time I get a phone, and if the price was good I'd even consider upgrading straight away. They could have a good music-playing phone without iTunes (and TFA indicates they already do in Europe...they should have put it out in the US!)
It is highly unlikely that you'll need 100 columns in a normalized database. In a data warehouse, where your fact tables are denormalized to increase access speed, it is not terribly uncommon to see > 100 columnn tables.
I just recently installed FreeBSD 5.4 and have been delighted with it...except that if I have a lot of read/write network traffic to the box I get a "Discard Oversize Frame" error that I haven't been able to resolve. I'm upgrading to 6.0 and have my fingers crossed that the problem will somehow magically get better. If not, I guess it's time to hit the mailing lists again.
What about the folks that have both? It would be interesting to ask why people USE Linux rather than only ask why they SWITCHED to Linux and/or OSS Operating Systems.
I came to Linux/Open Source because I had a specific need: I wanted to cheaply build a box to store and stream my music collection, both in-house and remotely. The "cheap" requirement was most easily met by not buying new hardware or software. After trying a variety of solutions I arrived at FreeBSD and SlimServer, which meant that I didn't have to purchase an OS or new and/or fast hardware to run it on. But I haven't "switched" at all. I still do most of my day-to-day computing on Windows XP.
The same questions can be asked of Archos. I don't think they were the first to release portable MP3 players, or even portable hard-disk players. Nonetheless, they had a multi-gigabyte HD MP3 device back in 2001 that even recorded to 256K VBR MP3. They had a portable video player even before Creative. Their prices weren't even outrageous.
So why don't they have a bigger piece of the market? I think the answers are the same as the PDA question: marketing, brand recognition, style, and even timing. They were ahead of their time, offering multi-gigabyte when people weren't even buying sub-100 MB in big quantities. Apple delivered something people were looking for right when they realized they were looking for it, and indeed Apple's marketing made people realize that they WERE looking for it.
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>I wouldn't pay 5$ for a 128kbps mp3 album when I could down 192kbps VBR for free.
This kind of reasoning just kills me. I don't know what SkunkPussy's deeper thoughts are on the issue, but I have had arguments with people that have espoused similar "I wouldn't pay $x when I can get better quality for free from questionable/patently illegal methods." My favorite part of those arguments is when I say, "But if you extrapolate this out, and no one is buying the content, i.e when theoretically only one person has to get the disc and share it with the whole world for free, then much of the content will stop getting made because the artists can't afford to make it and/or the distributors can't afford to distribute it." They generally respond with, "Well, that content is crap anyway. Who cares if they stop making it." Then why are you currently downloading the crap content at 192kbps VBR?
Here's my thought: how about just doing without something if you're not willing to pay for it? We have no human right to corporately produced entertainment. You are already sort of "voting with your wallet" by downloading it for free instead of buying it, but why not "vote" in an more holistic way but not consuming this content at all if you think the pricing is crappy?
On topic: I say good for EMI, but I agree with the quality thing. I ripped my library at 256K VBR to play it at home and remotely through SlimServer and to play it in portable settings like the car and the gym. My portable media devices are a Treo 650 with a 2GB sim card and a laptop dual-booting to Windows XP and Linux. So yeah, I'd love to be able to buy individual tracks that are not tied to a specific platform since I have a multi-platform need. However, if they only offer it at 128K, I just won't buy that offering. I'll either not buy it all or buy the CD and rip it at my preferred portable setting.
Looks like MS is turning that tide.
Just wanted to add my deepest, strongest seconding of your wish that Logitech keeps the SlimServer OSS project going. I do not own a Squeezebox, can't afford it, but I've used SlimServer for years, streaming music from home to my laptop at work and also to PCs around the house, including one hooked to my stereo. I LOVE this software, especially with the improvements they've made over the years. I'll be heartbroken if it's gone.
On the other hand, maybe Logitech will finally come out with a cheap, displayless version of squeezebox with a nice friendly $50 price tag. Or a $150 version that does my music the way it does now but also does video...like the upcoming Apple iTV but even cheaper, and using SlimServer instead of iTunes as the backend.
>I could use a blog client that crossposted to several sites - but that's a messy unintegrated solution that just clutters up the net with dupes..
I think you're spot on in saying that, and the dupe aspect is probably very important, but I see what I guess I would call a a multi-presence problem. If you're using blogs to keep in touch with folks, and said folks are spread across a variety of services (myspace/lj/blogger/vox, etc.), it seems like there's two solutions. One is to cross-post all over the place. The other would be to pick a "main blog" (or maybe you've got a couple blogs with different focal points), and have your friends and family subscribe to it via aggregation if your main service is not their main service. I think that's a great idea, and that's how I read my friends' blogs and see family photos from photo-sharing sites and stuff.
The trouble comes when you want to respond to them. Then you've (usually) got to sign up for an account on their blog service so you can post a non-anonymous response. Of course you could drop them an e-mail, but comment discussion to a post is sometimes the best stuff. And now you have a presence on that blog service, even though you're not posting to it. So people discover you there and add you as a friend or a neighbor or what have you, but you're not posting there, you're posting on your main service.
Maybe that's not a big deal, but it seems like a problem to me. How do you you keep from having dupes all over the place yet get your thoughts/messages/interesting links/cat photos to all the people that want to see them, while giving them the chance to discuss them without having a dozen accounts (some like Vox that might not even be available to them at present!)
You can buy a movie for $20... movies are longer, more content filled (more costly to make), and are on more expensive discs [DVDs > CDs]... so why the fudge are they the same price? Oh yeah, because the music industry is an oligopoly and they like to rip people off
Apples and Oranges: movies, while usually costing more to make, are (generally) released to theaters before they are released to DVD. By the time they are released to DVD, they may have already be in the black, and DVD revenues are pure profit. (may I direct you to Kevin Smith's blog wherein he discusses that exact scenario with Clerks II). Even if it doesn't break even at the box office, the bottom line is there's still a release cycle where SOME income is made before the portable consumer media is released. A music CD doesn't have that benefit: generally, the sale of the new disc is the revenue and all of the money to recoup the expenses of its production come from that sale. Apples and Oranges to movies.
With that said, I'm with you on the artist and T-shirt thing. Several smaller bands I've seen make the appeal that their merch sales are "how they eat" while they're on tour. Buying merch at the table at the gig is certainly very direct artist support much of the time!
I don't direct this at MrSquirrel particularly, but those with MrSquirrel's attitude in general. Given the statement "If this $20 CD were only $5, I could justify buying it instead of getting it without paying for it," does it follow that "If this $15,000 car were only $1,000, I could justify buying it instead of getting it without paying for it." Or, "If this $1.79 loaf of bread were only $.50, I could justify buying it instead of getting it without paying for it." Or to be less tangible, "If the artist only charged $1000 instead of $100,000 to use their song in my movie or commercial, I could justify buying the licensing rights but instead will use it without paying for it." I recognize that argument by analogy has its pitfalls, but don't these phrases all fundamentally say, "this is too expensive, so I'm just going to take it without paying for it."
I think DRM stinks as much or more than anybody, and vehemently hate the DMCA as it supresses free speech and other civil liberties. Plus, our copyright system is broken and fair use is under attack. Music has become a commodity both to the labels and the listeners. Loads of problems. But how about just not having something that you can't afford? Why is it OK to take something for sale without paying for it? Is downloading music for free from P2P a form of civil disobedience or protest or something? Bah.
To the music DVD issue: I don't know if I'll buy one. I like the DualDisc because I can play it in my regular CD player and access enhanced home theater content there. I love Hybrid SACD like Dark Side of the Moon and the Rolling Stones catalog because it has fewer compatibility issues than DualDisc. I also am happy to pay an extra $4 or $5 for a package like the Flaming Lips surround edition of The Soft Bulletin: a double-disc package containing the album on a plain CD and another disc that's a DVD/DVD Audio with the (fantastic) surround mix + video bonuses. I'll send my message to the labels by continuing to purchase those formats and not buying a DVD-only platter.
I am almost irrationally sad about this. Microsoft is clearly getting a couple of deeply gifted people. But I consider several of the Sysinternals utilities, especially Process Monitor, essential for good Windows Health. Tuning performance or squashing spyware of friends' PCs or what have you, they write great stuff. Plus their web site is a great, independent resource to learn about some of these internal issues.
I suppose a very optimistic person would assume that functions like seing what processes spawned other processes, have files open, have sockets open, etc., will now be available in future Windows versions. I guess I must be cynical, because I'm feeling a sense of loss and sadness. Thanks for the great stuff, Sysinternals.
If that's the ONLY strike against the Wii, then why is he a sucker to want to buy it? Perhaps he simply doesn't care about HD. I know that I, personally, will likely not have an HDTV for the next several years...
Similarly, my family isn't planning on getting a Wii or any other home console during this round because each of us now has a Nintendo DS (the wife and I bought one when the Lite came out). We moved from playing multiplayer Mariokart on the TV where we each had our own section of the screen to playing multiplayer Mariokart where we all have our own handheld console.
I understand we're not getting the near photorealistic graphics that a modern console or good PC could deliver, nor the game depth that a disk- (vs. cartridge-) based game sometimes delivers. However, the DS delivers everything that our family DOES want out of a console, and is portable to boot. Once the web browser is released it'll have even more portable utility.
This may be redundant, but I have to chime in and say how well de.licio.us delivers bookmark syncing for my needs. I do mix both work and home, professional and play bookmarks in my de.licio.us profile, and let them mix or not mix as appropriate through the tags I apply to them.
I'll definitely check out Google's offering, but I agree with other posters that there's some history that shouldn't be shared, and de.licio.us already meets my bookmarking needs in spades, including keeping "fun" bookmarks out of work..
I am a huge fan of the MusicIP MusicMagicMixer application discussed in the pitchforkmedia article. MusicIP does a fantastic job of helping me navigate my own collection since I ripped it into a couple hundred gigs of files. Coupled with SlimServer, I feel like I have the best of everything: Offline, I use MusicIP to create mixes from my own collection and transfer them to my portable player or make a CD. Online, I can stream my own collection with SlimServer playing MusicIP mixes, and when I want to discover new stuff I drop over to Pandora or Last.FM. I was excited to read about something that would have the intelligence to group Heartbreaker with Living Loving Maid, though, which MusicMagicMixer cannot do. That's righteous. But I'd want to be able to turn it off...sometimes it's fun to have Heartbreaker cut into something else. Imagine it being TOO intelligent. It's one thing to have Overture always lead into Temples of Syrinx...it's another to have it always play both discs from The Wall any time it picks Another Brick In The Wall part 2. I agree with the extremetech article about Launchcast, too. Before Pandora and Last.FM, it is where I went online to discover new music. While I still like their ratings system the best of all and feel it is the most intuitive (rate the song and/or the artist and/or the album to shape your station), I think the other services implement moods much better and generally have a more positive user experience.
I am going to buy a DS Lite for myself. I frequently borrow my son's now, and having two in the house will allow us to do the local area multiplayer built into most of our favorite games. I think Nintendo is going to have some significant market success on this one, especially if lots of families have similar plans, where there's already a DS in the house and they'll use the Lite as a reason to get a second one, not to upgrade and get rid of the old one but to have more than one in the house.
On another note, I wonder if they'll continue to manufacture the current Nintendo DS and offer it at a lower price than the Lite, or if they'll discontinue the current DS? Look at the GBA -> SP -> Micro release cycle...they did stop making the GBA but it looks like the SP and Micro might both be manufactured, with the SP at $79 and the Micro at $99.
Bought with my lawn-mowing earnings for $80 at Musicland. My uncle gave me his 16K RAM pack that Christmas, as his TS/1000 melted somehow. Grandpa gave me an old black and white TV to use as a monitor, as the TS/1000 had NTSC out.
Only bought one commercial application for it: a cassette of Chess, which took about 10 minutes to load, and heaven forbid you pushed the keyboard too hard, because that would jostle the RAM pack and you'd lose your game, getting a...well, a WHITE screen of death.
I LOVE MusicBrainz, but it assists in fixing the artist/title/album tags, and renames your files with that information if you wish.
It specifically does NOT support genre
It might support genre in some form at a later date (see the MusicBrainz Tomorrow section)
>This makes it a lot easier to create playlists that have similar music....
I also think that there is no ideal third-party solution for this problem.
Not to make an ad for the thing, but I have had great success with the MusicMagicMixer. It sidesteps the whole genre thing to extent by employing psychoacoustic analysis to make playlists.
Research shows DC Comics' Character Two-Face to be 50% twistedly amused, 50% maniacally evil.
I have to agree. I love the SlimServer, but I don't have a Sqeezebox and instead use it to stream my collection to my desk at work, and to plug my laptop into my stereo at home. Don't get me wrong, I think the Squeezebox is a beautiful piece of engineering, and I do covet the digital output. But I'm not enough of an audiophile to consider it mandatory, and for $300 what me and my family are looking for is something to fully bridge the content on our home computer network and home theater. I want a device that will play our digital music collection through the stereo but also play visual media from our computers, like slideshows of our photos and .AVI and .MPG files, plus do visualizations like those found in WMP/iTunes/Winamp. PrismQ and DLink products and Hauppauge have products that do some or all of that stuff.
How about a "headless" Squeezebox, one without the flourescent display that instead did all the display through a video output? Losing the display would lower the price, too. Maybe even better, keep the same price-point AND keep the high-end pedigree of the SqueezeBox line offering not only composite and SVideo output but by including COMPONENT video output with Faroudja upconversion. THAT'S what I want to buy, from SlimDevices, rather than the DLink and such mentioned above. When can I place my order?
Remember that SlimServer has a web interface, and in the web interface you can see and control every stream. So even if you can't see the display and/or the remote control won't reach all the way to the squeezebox, you can use a web browser (wireless laptop, maybe?) in the living room to control what's playing. Even the volume. You already have in iBook upstairs, so I think your problem is solved!
I have my SlimServer running on a PII 450 using FreeBSD 6, and I've been pleased with the performance overall. The only times I've been disappointed is when appending extremely large playlists; sometimes the currently playing song will stutter. However, with the 6.2 release of SlimServer, even that has gotten much better. As someone else noted, playlist creation/editing really is the achilles heel of Slimserver with a large collection, but they're always improving it. They offer integration with the MusicMagicMixer, which alleviates those problems (for a price, as the MusicMagicMixer requires registration).
No, I didn't! Is there any information on that? I can't find any, even for the Xbox 360 at the Gold level.
If it's true, it still doesn't address my point, which is to let users connect to non-proprietary and/or free servers. It looks like they don't even actually offer multiplayer for free.
How to articulate this? How about, "Hey, game makers! You want more online gamers? Then don't make us pay subscriptions to special-purpose servers and instead let people host their own games for free." I mean, that was part of why Quake pwned the world, right? You could set up your own servers with unique maps and rules and stuff. And sure, you could, optionally, pay somebody like Gamespy for their aggregation of all the servers they knew about for all the games they knew about. None of this XBox Live nonsense.
Of course the difficulty of this is that it reduces the number of revenue streams for the game maker. But that's addressed at least somewhat in TFA with the idea of contextual ads and such. And don't forget partnership deals like Ninteno announced with McDonald's: I believe that Nintendo will have their own special servers for their DS games, but they don't charge you to use them and I assume pay for them at least in part through their McDonald's hotspot partnership.
Product placement could be a big deal. I mean, they have done things like that before, like in Crazy Taxi where you can go to Tower Records but not FYE, and to KFC but not McDonald's. If you're connected online, those kind of things could rotate and even be location-specific. When you're playing Mario Kart on your DS, connected online, why not have track-side billboards change to a sponsor's logo? They'll know your location so why not, if they know that you're standing in a McDonald's in Chatanooga, TN at 5th and Main in the Central Time Zone at 6:30 PM, say 'WATCH THE SIMPSONS TONIGHT ON FOX 8:00 PM' or even say, 'NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK AVAILABLE AT THE STORE UP THE STREET'?
I mean, isn't that the kind of thing that Google is talking about? Why not have adsense be intelligently delivered, in a non-intrusive, context-sensitive fashion to your game? Then those folks setting up their own servers could even benefit the same way they do if they serve their own web pages with adsense. (the TFA notes an understanding that many in-game ads would not be clickable but rather more like a pay per eyeball model)
The article is wholly speculative; the article they linked to is more informative and fact-based.
With that said, I'm conflicted: if Apple really crippled it on purpose that's really shitty of them. But if that's what happened, is Motorola so daft that they didn't realize that's what was going o? They didn't have to accept Apple's terms.
Frankly, I'd be delighted if my phone had 512MB of RAM, 1/8" stereo headphone jack and a USB connection that would show up as a drive (much like my old Creative Muvo). I would choose a DRM-less MP3 phone like that over other phones the next time I get a phone, and if the price was good I'd even consider upgrading straight away. They could have a good music-playing phone without iTunes (and TFA indicates they already do in Europe...they should have put it out in the US!)
>You DON'T need 100 columns, ever.
It is highly unlikely that you'll need 100 columns in a normalized database. In a data warehouse, where your fact tables are denormalized to increase access speed, it is not terribly uncommon to see > 100 columnn tables.
I just recently installed FreeBSD 5.4 and have been delighted with it...except that if I have a lot of read/write network traffic to the box I get a "Discard Oversize Frame" error that I haven't been able to resolve. I'm upgrading to 6.0 and have my fingers crossed that the problem will somehow magically get better. If not, I guess it's time to hit the mailing lists again.
What about the folks that have both? It would be interesting to ask why people USE Linux rather than only ask why they SWITCHED to Linux and/or OSS Operating Systems.
I came to Linux/Open Source because I had a specific need: I wanted to cheaply build a box to store and stream my music collection, both in-house and remotely. The "cheap" requirement was most easily met by not buying new hardware or software. After trying a variety of solutions I arrived at FreeBSD and SlimServer, which meant that I didn't have to purchase an OS or new and/or fast hardware to run it on. But I haven't "switched" at all. I still do most of my day-to-day computing on Windows XP.
The same questions can be asked of Archos. I don't think they were the first to release portable MP3 players, or even portable hard-disk players. Nonetheless, they had a multi-gigabyte HD MP3 device back in 2001 that even recorded to 256K VBR MP3. They had a portable video player even before Creative. Their prices weren't even outrageous.
So why don't they have a bigger piece of the market? I think the answers are the same as the PDA question: marketing, brand recognition, style, and even timing. They were ahead of their time, offering multi-gigabyte when people weren't even buying sub-100 MB in big quantities. Apple delivered something people were looking for right when they realized they were looking for it, and indeed Apple's marketing made people realize that they WERE looking for it.