I have an uncanny ability to break computers, often in strange and untraceable ways. I also have a tendency to buy tower computers that are far too large for moving around with, and then end up moving them... again.
So, in addition to being through for the most part with CRTs (that is, I don't plan to buy any more), I think I'm also through with standard tower computers. I have one of shuttle's little shoebox-sized cases, and I like it a lot, but the noise draws me to fanless mini-ITX for the next go-round:) And at their power draw, I could have several going at once (squashing my DVDs to reasonable size, capturing Futurama reruns for later watching) and still be using only a fraction of the electricity sucked down by my previous setups, and generating less noise.
And with a decent video card, I could play Flightgear, probably even with one of the fanless varieties.
When I was small, my brother "forced" me to watch Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The quotes are there because in retrospect I shouldn't have been such a couch potato that it mattered what movie was stuck in the VCR, but Hey, at the time, it was heavy oppression:)
I like people being able to choose what / when / how they watch. It's true (trivially true) that compression as applied to movies / music does make them easier to copy in violation of copyright, but that's because they make *lots of things* easier. The fact that milk does not weight 20 pounds per cubic inch makes it easier for milk thieves to evade the sheriff. (Oh, well. Head 'em off at the pass...)
Also, I don't like to have more screens than necessary here in front of me -- I just ejected from my possession a borrowed TV/VCR thing because it was making my office even more crowded than it is anyhow. DiVX compression means I can watch Casablanca without another box of electronics in the room, sucking up electrons.
However, when I drive long distances (which I do pretty often), I like to listen to stories -- mysteries, or history books, or things like Bob Newhart comedy... sometimes even music.
Radio is often useless for this (it's all sports, religion, bad music...). The other reasons aside (things like GPS), my biggest reason for wanting a computer in the car is to have a portable audio library with me. When small CD players play Ogg files (soon), perhaps I'll let the other computer possibilities fade away.
I don't know if you drive / own a car or are otherwise ever on long trips where you enjoy listening to music or other things. If you *do* have (or have access to) a car, does it have a radio?
timothy
(Owlguy wrote: " Are you seperable from electronic devices? Or do you have some kind of fucked up symbiotic relationship where if you don't have your laptop with you at all times, you'll keel over and convulse?")
I have squashed into divx a few of my favorite movies for the same reason that I've squashed a lot of my CDs into ogg files: because it's easier to access them that way.
If I had an infinite hard drive and a large television, I might want a bit-for-bit copy; since I'm more likely to use a PC monitor to watch movies, and since even my largest hard drive would only hold a handful of movies at DVD-size, I compress. I've never downloaded warezed movies, nor do I put mine of a big anon. ftp site;)
But when I feel like watching a few minutes of "Barcelona," I can do it without putting the original disk in the drive. (Which I think is a good enough reason all by itself to compress, anyhow.)
to start with, I just put a little invertor in my car, under the front passenger seat. Good for charging laptops, and anything else which craves electric power. (I hate cig-lighter adapters, besides which I have too little incentive to bother replacing my current -- broken -- one.)
The basic reasons I'd like a small, low-power computer in my car:
- recording web cam output. I have a currently unused webcam I'd like to point out the front window. Ideally, I'd like to have ones in all directions...
- audio playback. Changing in-flight the discs of an 8-hour audiobook on CD is annoying. Choosing a playlist (of the same discs, converted to oggs) before starting to drive is much simpler.
- GPS display. Where am I, and why aren't I where I thought I was?
Those are the top 3; there are other reasons too (keep a wireless router there, and be able to multiplex connections when there's some truly ubiquitous wireless access to speak up; play games when stopped for whatever reason, have a microphone for recording oddball thoughts while driving; use it as an audio TiVO for recording Prairie Home Companion as I listen, etc).
The VIA boards look nice for this kind of application, both because they won't strain my invertor and because they're very small. (And the built-in ports simplify things...) A small case, the smallest LCD I can find, a little hard drive... Seems about all that's necessary.
" Laziness mostly. Plus I've never done it before, and I don't want to suggest something or try to impliment it on someone else's stuff when I've not done it myself before."
Suggestion: If your machine has a USB port, and you have (or know anyone who has and would be willing to lend to you) an external CD burner, that's a pretty painless way to try it out.
I don't know what distro you're using or what apps you have installed on the linux machine you mention, but I find that gnometoaster does a good job, and it finds and recognizes my (old, cheap, no-good, oh-well-it-works*) USB-connected HP CD-RW drive.
timothy
* Personal peeve: since HP makes a lot of Mac compatible products, I foolishly bought this drive a few years ago assuming there would be a Mac OS driver, so I could use it in the event I bought an iBook as well. Wrong. No Mac OS support at all. So "it works" but for me only with Linux.
"Oddly enough, I installed a linux machine for my fiancee (so she could put her website there and work on it remotely). Oddly enough, she uses it almost exclusively to play mahjong or puzzle bobble while her windows machine burns cds."
There are some really nice burning programs... Why not move the CD burner to the Linux machine?:) I burn CDs while playing Frozen Bubble on the same machine with no strain, and since my video card won't let me use FlightGear anyhow, no troubles;)
"You miss the point. Mozilla isn't meant to be an end-user browser, at least not in the long term."
I know that's their stated position, but it seems to me that's with a (perfectly fine) wink and a nudge. Mozilla makes a great, excellent, admirable daily web browser, whatever they say about it being an experimental bleeding edge wacky developers-only danger will robinson danger risk to the brain.
General, sweeping statement: Mozilla used to crash; now it doesn't:) Actually, I'm sure there are sites / code which make Mozilla crash, and maybe if I opened a hundred tabs it would die, but in my own day-to-day, all-day use, Mozilla releases have been solid for a while. I'm using a 1.3 build now, and it just works.
I like Phoenix as well, and it's obviously a bit trimmer, but with Mozilla, I get IRC (Chatzilla is now quite acceptable as a client), mail (ok, I check mail via a text terminal, but I *have* used Mozilla's, and find it a very nice way to do mail), and (!) calendar. The calendar works very nicely, btw. If not for the calendar, I might stick with Phoenix, since on a Linux box I'm happiest with XChat for irc, ssh-in-terminal for mail... but the calendar swings the balance, and I honestly find not much speed difference between Phoenix & Mozilla for most things on any of my machines (incl. 600MHz Athlon, which by my reckoning is not a "slow" computer, but Hey;))
When I friend of mine looked at the gnometoaster interface, he said "Ah, yeah -- that looks just like the [CWindows D burning program] interface."
Brackets there, because I can't remember the one he named, and it was one I'd never used. Since I have seen Nero's interface, I don't think it was that...
the point is, GnomeToaster is a nice application, and I think pretty friendly.
but like most of the other concerts I wanted to go to while in school, I was working that night:)
The first album is the one that made me like AB; I could never understand why they did not achieve the popularity that bands like PSB and Erasure (justly) achieved... at the summer education program I used to go to (and later worked for) we played Living in Oblivion at every dance, so it has sentimental value for me.
"Hope" is a great album -- I got it from a friend whose cousin had ordered several from (I think I remember correctly) Orangewerks. Since then, I've happened upon a few weird AB releases / singles; since you're more knowledgeable about the band than I am, you probably know (and have;)) the EP called -- I think -- "Dance," with remixes of Where is Love and Happiness, etc. "Worth" is just more depressing than I want in an album...
I really like (what I perceive at least about) Anything Box's attitude toward their fans, which is to say that they seem really friendly and appreciative toward the people who like their music. It's a refreshing attitude, for some reason;)
I'm going to finish my email to the band urging them to use Ogg Vorbis instead of (or in addition to) MP3; wonder what they'll say.
the idea of using one of these convertors in combination with a projector seems like the best way to watch television. However: what turns me off about projectors is the cost of replacing lamps.
Most lamps seem to have a rated life somewhat under 2000 hours (1500, 1700, 1800...) with some at or over 2000, but the longer life bulbs are generally both more expensive anyhow and only available for quite pricey projectors.
Now for *television* per se, I guess the per-hour cost is still OK. But what if I also want to use a projected image as my main monitor? (No, I have no tried this, but I have considered it -- haven't tried, because I don't have a projector of any sort;))
Are there any truly long-life bulbs? I wonder if ultra-high-output LEDs will ever be bright enough for that role, or if some other type of lamp will be long lasting enough that by the time it's worth replacing the bulb, it's also worth replacing the whole thing.
(For the cost of a bulb assembly right now, you can buy a small LCD panel that should last a lot longer... sure, it's different, but it's still an interesting comparison.)
At least, if you're not offended by entering WalMart;) -- some Walmarts (though not all, as I found out when I tried to buy one today) are carrying a Microtek brand 18" SXGA LCD monitor for just under $400. That's a decent price, though I do not know how the quality is....
Disclaimer: I do have one of the systems I'm about to mention, but I would like to build one;)
VIA bought Cyrix a while ago; though maybe there's not *that* much difference between getting bought and going out of business (from the point of view of the company that got bought, outside of the folks who ended up getting bonuses because of it;)), and though this article (http://accelenation.com/?ac.id.141.1) says that VIA pretty much put the Cyrix part "to sleep," the market niche that Cyrix had with the MediaGX (and I did have a tiny notebook based on that chip once; it was slow, but it did OK), VIA has now more than competently filled with the various EPIA mini-ITX boards, now with speeds up to 1GHz. (Which sounds like small potatoes, esp. considering that on a clock-for-clock basis they're supposed to be considerably slower than other x86 chips from AMD and Intel, but they do draw little power, and that's a good tradeoff for some situations...)
A kneejerk reaction against piracy is going to effect all of us (who don't pirate) in ways we can not even imagine atm.
Agreed. Canada (and other countries) are already exacting huge fees for blank CDs, on the basis (expressed more sweetly) that the purchasers are using them to illegally copy music anyhow. (And even though I disagree with their motives and means, there is a certain truth to it -- too bad that's the part that gets blown up and written into law.)
I recommend Henry Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson (fair warning, I have one more chapter to read; maybe he advocates baby-eating in the last few pages). It's old and definitely *not* specifically about Music Industry Industrial Policy, but it bears relevance;)
I realize that there's a lot of music out there online "for the taking" for which -- you're right -- most downloaders are never going to pay, whatever they say about it.
However, I'm actually convinced that a lot of people who would like to pay the artists (out of enlightened self-interest if not deep morals) *don't* ever buy the album not because they like being evil and naughty, but because *the physical medium* is actually more annoying than valuable, and downloads-for-money are still a novelty on both sides of the Music Industry (ack, what a term! I imagine hard hats on the music assembly line, turning out each manufactured instant hit... but that's another rant;)).
Illustration: I've been slowly burning my CDs to Ogg files for a while now -- I even have a pretty tall stack of CDs on my monitor right now just from the last 24 hours of ripping-with-grip -- because it's much more convenient to have the files on many fewer physical units, and because (for the tracks on my hard drive) then I can search by song title, etc. These are CDs that I've collected over the last 12-15 years, and as the collection gets heavier it gets less convenient.
Also, I think there is a slightly larger grey area than you seem to allow... downloading a warezed copy of The Complete Works of Roy Orbison (just to smugly know you hadn't paid for it) is one thing; slapping a few tracks together into a mix for a friend to let them sample your favorite artists seems something very different. Call me a moral relativist; I'd have to admit you were right. In a certain demographic (of which I am part), sending a mix tape of mushy and maudlin music is a standard part of wooing the opposite sex, at least between the ages of 12 and 18. If that's harmful to artists, I'm not sure what's good for them: I've certainly spent a lot of dollars on music that I wouldn't have cared about without tapes-in-the-mail from high-school friends.
My point is that there *is* some actual "sharing" that goes on in the online world just as there was before the Internet was a major social force. Wide-open directories of arbitrarily gathered music just to fill as many GB as possible, yuck, a different beast.
Aside, but related: Yes, it seems silly and transparent, just a built-in-excuse to say "well, if I own this album already (check), and could therefore potentially compress it for convenience play (check), then why not download from someone who has already done the compression work?" There's a very easy leap to say "Well, I obviously *could* buy the album at the record store down the street, and I intend to... later. If I like the downloaded tracks. A lot." OTOH, a lot of people *really are* in that situation. If I could pay someone a nickel a track (the recording company? the artist? anyone, my interest is in my side of the transaction much more than theirs;)) just to download albums I already own, rather than putting strain on my CD drive, I'd happily do that. I look forward to getting all my original CDs into cold storage, where they won't scratch, get left in the sun, or walk away never to be seen again.
Yes, you are correct, and I am embarrassed. How could I have forgotten "*WHO* *DOES* *NUMBER TWO* *WORK* *FOR?!*"
Thanks -- now I'll have to go to bed a shattered wreck, a shell that once might have been a man, a solitary figure curling into the nothingness that only smug misquoting can engender...
No -- I'm a little fatter than I'd like to be, but I'm certainly not *very* fat. In a baggy shirt, it's hard to tell that I'm not still skinny, in fact.
However, speaking of Ogg Vorbis, grip does a great job of ripping and squashing my CDs to Ogg files. Right now I'm on my 7th disk of the day, listening to some early Bob Marley in about 1/10th the storage space of the originals. Even q -1 is far better than I had expected, though I don't see a way to use quality settings (as opposed to bitrates) in grip.
The way I like files ripped with grip is like this:
platonic ideal: zero-padded tracknumber, underscore, trackname, underscore, bitrate, the letter "b", dot, ogg
example: 03_my_aim_is_true_128b.ogg
To achieve this: under grip/config/mp3/encoder, specify this as the "MP3 file format":
"~/ogg/%A/%d/%t_%n_%bb.ogg" (less the quotes -- those are just there to make clear what to type:)
Unless they decide to support this crazy upstart format in some other player -- WinAmp would be a good start, since a lot of people use WinAmp. Maybe if they put Ogg support in WinAmp, and if some games start to use it (showing that it's a useful, sustainable format for professional developers), and... hmmm, maybe some hardware players, too, or at least some handhelds / PDAs that can play this newfangled format. And maybe if people in the music industry take notice of it, that would help -- but that's asking a lot, eh?
If any of those things happen, I think Ogg Vorbis has a chance. But I guess it's toast for now.
Oh. Never mind. As Number One once said. "Ahem. That, also, has already happened."
"Hyundai makes everything from DRAMs to crappy cars."
Whoah! They certainly used to be crappy, in 1984 and probably (at least in the U.S.) in 1994... but I recently test-drove (well, as the passenger) a Hyundai Santa Fe (and on the whole, I think my expectations were neither insanely high nor terribly low), found the suspension nice, visibility above average for the class of sort-of-SUVs, the fit & finish well in line with the Japanese competitors at a far better price, and the warranty better than anyone else's. (To my knowledge, no one else offers a 10-year warranty...) The seats were comfy, and there were a pretty good assortment of creature comforts, storage spaces, etc.
I remember the first Hyundais in the U.S. (well, seeing them -- was too young to drive), and fully expected them to disappear from the U.S. market, they were so reviled. Hyundai did get its butt kicked by reviewers, justly so, for the Excel (that was the name, right?), but they did not take the Yugo tactic of secretly starting a nation-destroying civil war to distract the car-buying public from their crappiness, and instead built incrementally better cars.
About 10 years ago, I was in Korea for most of a summer, and found that the Hyundais there ranged far higher than the ones available in the U.S., and some of them were / are really quite luxurious. Not sure if the gap is still as great, having not been back there, but would be interested if anyone can address that. Also, since I've probably never been accused of having good taste, I think the Elantra 5-door car looks like a practical, cool-enough-for-me ride -- deceptively roomy, decent mileage, unobtrusive and hopefully not a theft target.
"This is an executive within Sony talking, mind you. Fucking amazing. Is there any centralized coordination? Isn't there a CEO of Sony corporate who keeps his divisions in line with the goals (i.e. bottom line interests) of the company as a whole?"
Probably not -- since no one *really* knows where the money is except Willie Sutton:)
Large companies are a lot like countries / societies... there are going to be common strains, but the larger and more diverse the company, the more likely it is you'll find contradictory directions and ideas. Think of how surprising it would be, actually, (well, to me, anyhow) if a very large corporation -- though I am not counting the Church of Scientology for right now* -- managed to instill in its employees a perfect conformity in purpose and beliefs, a perfectly machined set of values and opinions unshakeable except by a new edict from the top.
Any company's board of directors are going to argue with each other about the direction that the company should pursue, even if they all are agreed on certain overall goals (which in the case of a public corporation, had better in large portion be money, or there may be a stockholder lawsuit;)). Even if they don't *really* disagree with each other very much, they'll take up contrary positions and amplify them (and some guys will play peacemaker, however sincerely) just to jockey for position as the most dynamic, bold, forward-thinking member of the goddamn board around, that Johnson is just a golf-playing Yes man without a new idea or a really good Powerpoint presentation and certainly without a confident midwestern voice. Etc.
There's a quote I'm probably butchering from the first Hitchhiker's book, in which A. Dent says he feels "like a military academy. Bits of me keep passing out." Sony is the military academy -- organizational charts aside, true central direction is an illusion imposed by distance;)
At least...that's my two cents about it;)
timothy
*Boy, it's a good thing I excluded the Scientologists
"By contrast if they require an open standard as default, today they can use Word, and tommorow switch to wordPerfect, and next year Staroffice might win the bid for who supplies word processing software. Even better than can be a mixture."
My mixture of cynicism and optimism varies by the day, but simply getting the idea across to people there for any given task they do in life, there are (or should be) other ways to do it is the most important thing here. Inertia is probably just as strong a force as horniness, but far less useful IMO.
People who hit the dashboard with their knees anytime you mention however casually that there might be a document format other than Microsoft Word (TM) remind me of the hitchhiker in There's Something About Mary: "no, *seven minute abs!"
At greater length,
"No! No not six, I said seven. Nobody's coming up with Six, who works out in six minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel."
(And at even greater length -- see the whole exchange... sure, it's low-brow, but this movie does low-brow the right way.)
I like that they've broken up the components (network connection / tuner / storage), but I'd be more optimistic about actually gaining from commodity pricing of storage etc. more if:
- the storage format was non-proprietary and not crippled (can anyone even tell from these releases what storage format they're using?)
- there were some high-speed ports (firewire / USB2) that would work with currently available external hard drives. On sale, it's not unreasonable to find firewire external drives in the range of a dollar per gigabyte; considering that this comes with an 80 gig drive, that would be a good upgrade.Ethernet connection is nice -- but only if that actually allows access, and isn't just a friendly-looking port:)
- Better yet (though more unlikely) built in software for archiving via an external CD burner.
I picture instead that they'd like you to buy ever more boxes that say "Lancaster" on the side if you need more storage. I'd love to be wrong about that!:)
I've collected some thoughts not just on making a house that will last for a long time (though I think that's a great idea), but on households in general, at my angelfire site.
Always looking for new suggestions.
However, right now I don't live very much like the way I describe here, much to certain people's dissatisfaction...
The technology is there for people to broadcast Max Headroom-style (or maybe Gargoyle-style) 1st-person singular video accounts of things like -- for instance -- baseball games, complete with commentary, stats and mugshots gathered instantly from Google, overlaid local weather conditions scraped from the Weather Underground... (Why don't more notebooks have built-in video cameras? Seems an idea worth having other than as a novelty.) Right now, the effect (if done in near-real time on a middle-class budget) would be a lot like the old Quicktime postage stamp movies, since the Good Stuff in the way of cameras, mics, editing programs and the requisite computer platform would cost way too much to look professional, but look 3 and 10 years down the road...
However, it's a bit like buying a DVD (and finding no legal way at present -- someone correct me if that's no longer true -- to view its content on other than an annointed operating system (Mac OS or OS X, Windows... Solaris? Bueller?). Fine print (maybe a placard you walk past in line on the way into the ballpark, or on the ticket you buy) that says you can't even narrate over a cell phone to a friend what you're seeing from the stadium seats. No contract, though there is (arguably meaningful) consent: you could decide not to attend the game, or not to buy the DVD, etc. The music industry doesn't want you to rip your CDs and listen to them other than from the original media, Jamie Kellner doesn't want you skipping commercials, etc etc;)
What's worse than the present situation (where so many hidden and esoteric rules hold sway) is even worse to my mind: I forsee an increasing flood of fine-print, sir-don't-worry-about-these-technicalities, but BOY do we have some technicalities to go through before you can eat here / walk through the museum / sketch trees in the park / take note of the fine and copyrighted smells in our greenhouse. More formal "licenses" not just on software, but everywhere, minor Gotchas which don't just prohibit illegal for-profit exploitation of copyrighted works, but ever more of the *normal* things which common sense currently holds to be among the rights of customers... maybe soon DVDs really *will* carry a shrinkwrap license that says by purchasing you agree not to play the contained movie except on sanctioned equipment. [I'm not talking about re-selling unauthorized copies or arranging free local showings for admissions -- just *watching* them, say, on a computer running Debian.] CDs would carry licenses that say "This product may only legally be played three times before self-destructing. Attempts to prolong the life of the music it contains is a prosecutable offense under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Bummer about fair use, ha ha."
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I have an uncanny ability to break computers, often in strange and untraceable ways. I also have a tendency to buy tower computers that are far too large for moving around with, and then end up moving them ... again.
:) And at their power draw, I could have several going at once (squashing my DVDs to reasonable size, capturing Futurama reruns for later watching) and still be using only a fraction of the electricity sucked down by my previous setups, and generating less noise.
So, in addition to being through for the most part with CRTs (that is, I don't plan to buy any more), I think I'm also through with standard tower computers. I have one of shuttle's little shoebox-sized cases, and I like it a lot, but the noise draws me to fanless mini-ITX for the next go-round
And with a decent video card, I could play Flightgear, probably even with one of the fanless varieties.
timothy
That's true, too!
:)
...)
When I was small, my brother "forced" me to watch Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The quotes are there because in retrospect I shouldn't have been such a couch potato that it mattered what movie was stuck in the VCR, but Hey, at the time, it was heavy oppression
I like people being able to choose what / when / how they watch. It's true (trivially true) that compression as applied to movies / music does make them easier to copy in violation of copyright, but that's because they make *lots of things* easier. The fact that milk does not weight 20 pounds per cubic inch makes it easier for milk thieves to evade the sheriff. (Oh, well. Head 'em off at the pass
Also, I don't like to have more screens than necessary here in front of me -- I just ejected from my possession a borrowed TV/VCR thing because it was making my office even more crowded than it is anyhow. DiVX compression means I can watch Casablanca without another box of electronics in the room, sucking up electrons.
timothy
However, when I drive long distances (which I do pretty often), I like to listen to stories -- mysteries, or history books, or things like Bob Newhart comedy ... sometimes even music.
...). The other reasons aside (things like GPS), my biggest reason for wanting a computer in the car is to have a portable audio library with me. When small CD players play Ogg files (soon), perhaps I'll let the other computer possibilities fade away.
Radio is often useless for this (it's all sports, religion, bad music
I don't know if you drive / own a car or are otherwise ever on long trips where you enjoy listening to music or other things. If you *do* have (or have access to) a car, does it have a radio?
timothy
(Owlguy wrote: " Are you seperable from electronic devices? Or do you have some kind of fucked up symbiotic relationship where if you don't have your laptop with you at all times, you'll keel over and convulse?")
I have squashed into divx a few of my favorite movies for the same reason that I've squashed a lot of my CDs into ogg files: because it's easier to access them that way.
;)
If I had an infinite hard drive and a large television, I might want a bit-for-bit copy; since I'm more likely to use a PC monitor to watch movies, and since even my largest hard drive would only hold a handful of movies at DVD-size, I compress. I've never downloaded warezed movies, nor do I put mine of a big anon. ftp site
But when I feel like watching a few minutes of "Barcelona," I can do it without putting the original disk in the drive. (Which I think is a good enough reason all by itself to compress, anyhow.)
timothy
to start with, I just put a little invertor in my car, under the front passenger seat. Good for charging laptops, and anything else which craves electric power. (I hate cig-lighter adapters, besides which I have too little incentive to bother replacing my current -- broken -- one.)
...
...) A small case, the smallest LCD I can find, a little hard drive ... Seems about all that's necessary.
The basic reasons I'd like a small, low-power computer in my car:
- recording web cam output. I have a currently unused webcam I'd like to point out the front window. Ideally, I'd like to have ones in all directions
- audio playback. Changing in-flight the discs of an 8-hour audiobook on CD is annoying. Choosing a playlist (of the same discs, converted to oggs) before starting to drive is much simpler.
- GPS display. Where am I, and why aren't I where I thought I was?
Those are the top 3; there are other reasons too (keep a wireless router there, and be able to multiplex connections when there's some truly ubiquitous wireless access to speak up; play games when stopped for whatever reason, have a microphone for recording oddball thoughts while driving; use it as an audio TiVO for recording Prairie Home Companion as I listen, etc).
The VIA boards look nice for this kind of application, both because they won't strain my invertor and because they're very small. (And the built-in ports simplify things
timothy
" Laziness mostly. Plus I've never done it before, and I don't want to suggest something or try to impliment it on someone else's stuff when I've not done it myself before."
Suggestion: If your machine has a USB port, and you have (or know anyone who has and would be willing to lend to you) an external CD burner, that's a pretty painless way to try it out.
I don't know what distro you're using or what apps you have installed on the linux machine you mention, but I find that gnometoaster does a good job, and it finds and recognizes my (old, cheap, no-good, oh-well-it-works*) USB-connected HP CD-RW drive.
timothy
* Personal peeve: since HP makes a lot of Mac compatible products, I foolishly bought this drive a few years ago assuming there would be a Mac OS driver, so I could use it in the event I bought an iBook as well. Wrong. No Mac OS support at all. So "it works" but for me only with Linux.
"Oddly enough, I installed a linux machine for my fiancee (so she could put her website there and work on it remotely). Oddly enough, she uses it almost exclusively to play mahjong or puzzle bobble while her windows machine burns cds."
... Why not move the CD burner to the Linux machine? :) I burn CDs while playing Frozen Bubble on the same machine with no strain, and since my video card won't let me use FlightGear anyhow, no troubles ;)
There are some really nice burning programs
timothy
"You miss the point. Mozilla isn't meant to be an end-user browser, at least not in the long term."
:) Actually, I'm sure there are sites / code which make Mozilla crash, and maybe if I opened a hundred tabs it would die, but in my own day-to-day, all-day use, Mozilla releases have been solid for a while. I'm using a 1.3 build now, and it just works.
... but the calendar swings the balance, and I honestly find not much speed difference between Phoenix & Mozilla for most things on any of my machines (incl. 600MHz Athlon, which by my reckoning is not a "slow" computer, but Hey ;))
I know that's their stated position, but it seems to me that's with a (perfectly fine) wink and a nudge. Mozilla makes a great, excellent, admirable daily web browser, whatever they say about it being an experimental bleeding edge wacky developers-only danger will robinson danger risk to the brain.
General, sweeping statement: Mozilla used to crash; now it doesn't
I like Phoenix as well, and it's obviously a bit trimmer, but with Mozilla, I get IRC (Chatzilla is now quite acceptable as a client), mail (ok, I check mail via a text terminal, but I *have* used Mozilla's, and find it a very nice way to do mail), and (!) calendar. The calendar works very nicely, btw. If not for the calendar, I might stick with Phoenix, since on a Linux box I'm happiest with XChat for irc, ssh-in-terminal for mail
timothy
When I friend of mine looked at the gnometoaster interface, he said "Ah, yeah -- that looks just like the [CWindows D burning program] interface."
...
Brackets there, because I can't remember the one he named, and it was one I'd never used. Since I have seen Nero's interface, I don't think it was that
the point is, GnomeToaster is a nice application, and I think pretty friendly.
timothy
but like most of the other concerts I wanted to go to while in school, I was working that night :)
... at the summer education program I used to go to (and later worked for) we played Living in Oblivion at every dance, so it has sentimental value for me.
;)) the EP called -- I think -- "Dance," with remixes of Where is Love and Happiness, etc. "Worth" is just more depressing than I want in an album ...
;)
The first album is the one that made me like AB; I could never understand why they did not achieve the popularity that bands like PSB and Erasure (justly) achieved
"Hope" is a great album -- I got it from a friend whose cousin had ordered several from (I think I remember correctly) Orangewerks. Since then, I've happened upon a few weird AB releases / singles; since you're more knowledgeable about the band than I am, you probably know (and have
I really like (what I perceive at least about) Anything Box's attitude toward their fans, which is to say that they seem really friendly and appreciative toward the people who like their music. It's a refreshing attitude, for some reason
I'm going to finish my email to the band urging them to use Ogg Vorbis instead of (or in addition to) MP3; wonder what they'll say.
timothy
OK, guess I've been looking at the wrong projectors ;) Looking up that one now.
...
The piggy bank idea has actually run through my mind already as the best way to stretch out the bulb-life payments -- good system.
Now, if only human wants were no infinite, and I didn't also want a newer car, house, trip to Spain
timothy
the idea of using one of these convertors in combination with a projector seems like the best way to watch television. However: what turns me off about projectors is the cost of replacing lamps.
...) with some at or over 2000, but the longer life bulbs are generally both more expensive anyhow and only available for quite pricey projectors.
;))
... sure, it's different, but it's still an interesting comparison.)
Most lamps seem to have a rated life somewhat under 2000 hours (1500, 1700, 1800
Now for *television* per se, I guess the per-hour cost is still OK. But what if I also want to use a projected image as my main monitor? (No, I have no tried this, but I have considered it -- haven't tried, because I don't have a projector of any sort
Are there any truly long-life bulbs? I wonder if ultra-high-output LEDs will ever be bright enough for that role, or if some other type of lamp will be long lasting enough that by the time it's worth replacing the bulb, it's also worth replacing the whole thing.
(For the cost of a bulb assembly right now, you can buy a small LCD panel that should last a lot longer
timothy
At least, if you're not offended by entering WalMart ;) -- some Walmarts (though not all, as I found out when I tried to buy one today) are carrying a Microtek brand 18" SXGA LCD monitor for just under $400. That's a decent price, though I do not know how the quality is ....
timothy
Disclaimer: I do have one of the systems I'm about to mention, but I would like to build one ;)
...)
VIA bought Cyrix a while ago; though maybe there's not *that* much difference between getting bought and going out of business (from the point of view of the company that got bought, outside of the folks who ended up getting bonuses because of it;)), and though this article (http://accelenation.com/?ac.id.141.1) says that VIA pretty much put the Cyrix part "to sleep," the market niche that Cyrix had with the MediaGX (and I did have a tiny notebook based on that chip once; it was slow, but it did OK), VIA has now more than competently filled with the various EPIA mini-ITX boards, now with speeds up to 1GHz. (Which sounds like small potatoes, esp. considering that on a clock-for-clock basis they're supposed to be considerably slower than other x86 chips from AMD and Intel, but they do draw little power, and that's a good tradeoff for some situations
timothy
A kneejerk reaction against piracy is going to effect all of us (who don't pirate) in ways we can not even imagine atm.
;)
Agreed. Canada (and other countries) are already exacting huge fees for blank CDs, on the basis (expressed more sweetly) that the purchasers are using them to illegally copy music anyhow. (And even though I disagree with their motives and means, there is a certain truth to it -- too bad that's the part that gets blown up and written into law.)
I recommend Henry Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson (fair warning, I have one more chapter to read; maybe he advocates baby-eating in the last few pages). It's old and definitely *not* specifically about Music Industry Industrial Policy, but it bears relevance
timothy
However, I'm actually convinced that a lot of people who would like to pay the artists (out of enlightened self-interest if not deep morals) *don't* ever buy the album not because they like being evil and naughty, but because *the physical medium* is actually more annoying than valuable, and downloads-for-money are still a novelty on both sides of the Music Industry (ack, what a term! I imagine hard hats on the music assembly line, turning out each manufactured instant hit
Illustration: I've been slowly burning my CDs to Ogg files for a while now -- I even have a pretty tall stack of CDs on my monitor right now just from the last 24 hours of ripping-with-grip -- because it's much more convenient to have the files on many fewer physical units, and because (for the tracks on my hard drive) then I can search by song title, etc. These are CDs that I've collected over the last 12-15 years, and as the collection gets heavier it gets less convenient.
Also, I think there is a slightly larger grey area than you seem to allow
My point is that there *is* some actual "sharing" that goes on in the online world just as there was before the Internet was a major social force. Wide-open directories of arbitrarily gathered music just to fill as many GB as possible, yuck, a different beast.
Aside, but related: Yes, it seems silly and transparent, just a built-in-excuse to say "well, if I own this album already (check), and could therefore potentially compress it for convenience play (check), then why not download from someone who has already done the compression work?" There's a very easy leap to say "Well, I obviously *could* buy the album at the record store down the street, and I intend to
timothy
Yes, you are correct, and I am embarrassed. How could I have forgotten "*WHO* *DOES* *NUMBER TWO* *WORK* *FOR?!*"
...
Thanks -- now I'll have to go to bed a shattered wreck, a shell that once might have been a man, a solitary figure curling into the nothingness that only smug misquoting can engender
There's always tomorrow, though.
timothy
"You are very fat."
:)
No -- I'm a little fatter than I'd like to be, but I'm certainly not *very* fat. In a baggy shirt, it's hard to tell that I'm not still skinny, in fact.
However, speaking of Ogg Vorbis, grip does a great job of ripping and squashing my CDs to Ogg files. Right now I'm on my 7th disk of the day, listening to some early Bob Marley in about 1/10th the storage space of the originals. Even q -1 is far better than I had expected, though I don't see a way to use quality settings (as opposed to bitrates) in grip.
The way I like files ripped with grip is like this:
platonic ideal: zero-padded tracknumber, underscore, trackname, underscore, bitrate, the letter "b", dot, ogg
example: 03_my_aim_is_true_128b.ogg
To achieve this:
under grip/config/mp3/encoder, specify this as the "MP3 file format":
"~/ogg/%A/%d/%t_%n_%bb.ogg" (less the quotes -- those are just there to make clear what to type
timothy
True, without WMP support, Ogg has no chance.
... hmmm, maybe some hardware players, too, or at least some handhelds / PDAs that can play this newfangled format. And maybe if people in the music industry take notice of it, that would help -- but that's asking a lot, eh?
Unless they decide to support this crazy upstart format in some other player -- WinAmp would be a good start, since a lot of people use WinAmp. Maybe if they put Ogg support in WinAmp, and if some games start to use it (showing that it's a useful, sustainable format for professional developers), and
If any of those things happen, I think Ogg Vorbis has a chance. But I guess it's toast for now.
Oh. Never mind. As Number One once said. "Ahem. That, also, has already happened."
timothy
"Hyundai makes everything from DRAMs to crappy cars."
... but I recently test-drove (well, as the passenger) a Hyundai Santa Fe (and on the whole, I think my expectations were neither insanely high nor terribly low), found the suspension nice, visibility above average for the class of sort-of-SUVs, the fit & finish well in line with the Japanese competitors at a far better price, and the warranty better than anyone else's. (To my knowledge, no one else offers a 10-year warranty ...) The seats were comfy, and there were a pretty good assortment of creature comforts, storage spaces, etc.
Whoah! They certainly used to be crappy, in 1984 and probably (at least in the U.S.) in 1994
I remember the first Hyundais in the U.S. (well, seeing them -- was too young to drive), and fully expected them to disappear from the U.S. market, they were so reviled. Hyundai did get its butt kicked by reviewers, justly so, for the Excel (that was the name, right?), but they did not take the Yugo tactic of secretly starting a nation-destroying civil war to distract the car-buying public from their crappiness, and instead built incrementally better cars.
About 10 years ago, I was in Korea for most of a summer, and found that the Hyundais there ranged far higher than the ones available in the U.S., and some of them were / are really quite luxurious. Not sure if the gap is still as great, having not been back there, but would be interested if anyone can address that. Also, since I've probably never been accused of having good taste, I think the Elantra 5-door car looks like a practical, cool-enough-for-me ride -- deceptively roomy, decent mileage, unobtrusive and hopefully not a theft target.
timothy
"This is an executive within Sony talking, mind you. Fucking amazing. Is there any centralized coordination? Isn't there a CEO of Sony corporate who keeps his divisions in line with the goals (i.e. bottom line interests) of the company as a whole?"
:)
... there are going to be common strains, but the larger and more diverse the company, the more likely it is you'll find contradictory directions and ideas. Think of how surprising it would be, actually, (well, to me, anyhow) if a very large corporation -- though I am not counting the Church of Scientology for right now* -- managed to instill in its employees a perfect conformity in purpose and beliefs, a perfectly machined set of values and opinions unshakeable except by a new edict from the top.
;)). Even if they don't *really* disagree with each other very much, they'll take up contrary positions and amplify them (and some guys will play peacemaker, however sincerely) just to jockey for position as the most dynamic, bold, forward-thinking member of the goddamn board around, that Johnson is just a golf-playing Yes man without a new idea or a really good Powerpoint presentation and certainly without a confident midwestern voice. Etc.
;)
.. .that's my two cents about it ;)
Probably not -- since no one *really* knows where the money is except Willie Sutton
Large companies are a lot like countries / societies
Any company's board of directors are going to argue with each other about the direction that the company should pursue, even if they all are agreed on certain overall goals (which in the case of a public corporation, had better in large portion be money, or there may be a stockholder lawsuit
There's a quote I'm probably butchering from the first Hitchhiker's book, in which A. Dent says he feels "like a military academy. Bits of me keep passing out." Sony is the military academy -- organizational charts aside, true central direction is an illusion imposed by distance
At least
timothy
*Boy, it's a good thing I excluded the Scientologists
My mixture of cynicism and optimism varies by the day, but simply getting the idea across to people there for any given task they do in life, there are (or should be) other ways to do it is the most important thing here. Inertia is probably just as strong a force as horniness, but far less useful IMO.
People who hit the dashboard with their knees anytime you mention however casually that there might be a document format other than Microsoft Word (TM) remind me of the hitchhiker in There's Something About Mary: "no, *seven minute abs!"
At greater length,
(And at even greater length -- see the whole exchange
timothy
I like that they've broken up the components (network connection / tuner / storage), but I'd be more optimistic about actually gaining from commodity pricing of storage etc. more if:
:)
:)
- the storage format was non-proprietary and not crippled (can anyone even tell from these releases what storage format they're using?)
- there were some high-speed ports (firewire / USB2) that would work with currently available external hard drives. On sale, it's not unreasonable to find firewire external drives in the range of a dollar per gigabyte; considering that this comes with an 80 gig drive, that would be a good upgrade.Ethernet connection is nice -- but only if that actually allows access, and isn't just a friendly-looking port
- Better yet (though more unlikely) built in software for archiving via an external CD burner.
I picture instead that they'd like you to buy ever more boxes that say "Lancaster" on the side if you need more storage. I'd love to be wrong about that!
timothy
I've collected some thoughts not just on making a house that will last for a long time (though I think that's a great idea), but on households in general, at my angelfire site.
...
Always looking for new suggestions.
However, right now I don't live very much like the way I describe here, much to certain people's dissatisfaction
timothy
The technology is there for people to broadcast Max Headroom-style (or maybe Gargoyle-style) 1st-person singular video accounts of things like -- for instance -- baseball games, complete with commentary, stats and mugshots gathered instantly from Google, overlaid local weather conditions scraped from the Weather Underground ... (Why don't more notebooks have built-in video cameras? Seems an idea worth having other than as a novelty.) Right now, the effect (if done in near-real time on a middle-class budget) would be a lot like the old Quicktime postage stamp movies, since the Good Stuff in the way of cameras, mics, editing programs and the requisite computer platform would cost way too much to look professional, but look 3 and 10 years down the road ...
... Solaris? Bueller?). Fine print (maybe a placard you walk past in line on the way into the ballpark, or on the ticket you buy) that says you can't even narrate over a cell phone to a friend what you're seeing from the stadium seats. No contract, though there is (arguably meaningful) consent: you could decide not to attend the game, or not to buy the DVD, etc. The music industry doesn't want you to rip your CDs and listen to them other than from the original media, Jamie Kellner doesn't want you skipping commercials, etc etc ;)
... maybe soon DVDs really *will* carry a shrinkwrap license that says by purchasing you agree not to play the contained movie except on sanctioned equipment. [I'm not talking about re-selling unauthorized copies or arranging free local showings for admissions -- just *watching* them, say, on a computer running Debian.] CDs would carry licenses that say "This product may only legally be played three times before self-destructing. Attempts to prolong the life of the music it contains is a prosecutable offense under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Bummer about fair use, ha ha."
However, it's a bit like buying a DVD (and finding no legal way at present -- someone correct me if that's no longer true -- to view its content on other than an annointed operating system (Mac OS or OS X, Windows
What's worse than the present situation (where so many hidden and esoteric rules hold sway) is even worse to my mind: I forsee an increasing flood of fine-print, sir-don't-worry-about-these-technicalities, but BOY do we have some technicalities to go through before you can eat here / walk through the museum / sketch trees in the park / take note of the fine and copyrighted smells in our greenhouse. More formal "licenses" not just on software, but everywhere, minor Gotchas which don't just prohibit illegal for-profit exploitation of copyrighted works, but ever more of the *normal* things which common sense currently holds to be among the rights of customers
timothy