I've seen it twice, the last time when I was playing with my new Airport Express WAP. Apparently something went wrong with the drivers, I probably shouldn't have used 0.0.0.0 as an IP address;-)
I use 5 XP machines (as well as a number of Linux servers) on a regular basis since XP came out and these events are very rare. I have never had a spontaneous reboot at all. I sometimes reboot when the system becomes sluggish or to clear up some error, but that doesn't happen that often either.
I'm no MS fan, but XP seems stable enough if you have your security & patches set up right and if you're running on decent hardware.
I'm no fan of people saying things like 'the truth hurts' in sigs either. It seems to suggest that everyone else is hiding from the facts except your enlightened self. As for me, these are my experiences, no more, no less.
I certainly would expect anyone giving out free plane tickets to Europe, Asia, Africa or any other exotic place would be mobbed similarly. I'm not one to pass up a free intercontinental flight myself, even if N. Korea would be handing them out.
But you're probably implying they'd want to immigrate. In poor countries you probably have a point. In western Europe (where I live) the few US haters that I know (there aren't that many) would definitely not be interested in a green card.
I wouldn't pass up on an opportunity to work and live in the US for a few years. I wish the western world would get together and make this kind of exchange (both ways) a lot easier, would be good for everyone. It would also promote a little more mutual understanding, which, reading this subthread, seems badly needed.
I love this product. It's an excellent idea to create a pocket sized Wifi access pont that I can just put in my laptop bag.
It's great when I visit companies or friends who have a LAN or cable router but no wireless. I get to pre-configure my network name and WEP/WPA settings, so I just plug the thing in the network and work on it wirelessly.
The audio part is unfortunately a prime example of why I don't love Apple. It would be great if they would ship this with an audio driver that could be used just like a regular audio interface so that you could play music or video soundtracks over Wifi.
But they didn't. They made this yet another link in their iPod/iTunes/IMTS media lock-in scheme. You are only to use it with iTunes.
Nevertheless, I immediately ordered one when it became available (3-4 weeks delivery) just for the access point functionality.
For music I have a portable iRiver H140 HD player and several Squeezebox network players.
- Normal USB harddisk that has actual MP3 files on it so you can easily hack up your own tools under any OS. You can also copy the tracks off it. - mp3, ogg, wma, asf support
My main gripe is that it's interface just isn't very good. I can't stand the idea of someone putting up a millions-of-dollars production line to create excellent hardware and then put ill thought out software on it.
If they'd hire me I'd make it two times better at the very least.
Biggest problem: The shuffle option always shuffles in the same way. What idiot thought of that gem?
IMHO 5000+ songs are just begging for a good shuffle!
That and their marketing which sucks compared to Apple. If they get their act together on that as well as on the software front they could really start competing.
Also, the iPod runs pretty long on one charge. I think the specs say 8 or 9 hours
Funny, that's one of the main reasons I didn't buy an iPod but went with the iRiver H140 which has double the battery life.
The other main reason is that the iRiver is accessible as a normal disk, no problems copying files from it. I hate it when Apple decides what I can and - most importantly - can't do with my files for some silly reason.
I agree with you on most points, except for the fact that the Squeezebox has to re-encode things like AAC on the fly... not my preference. Also, it cannot handle protected AACs from the iTMS. Kinda important for those of us who shop there from time to time and don't want to re-encode those files.:)
Not exactly, the Squeezebox does not re-encode (decode -> encode) these formats are decoded on-the-fly by the server software. The resulting uncompressed PCM data is sent over ethernet or Wifi to the SB device. (the SB can directly play uncompressed or lossless compressed audio data, wich makes it a pure digital path to your audio system)
The SliMP3 (the SB's predecessor) is only able to play MP3's so in that case the server *does* have to transcode AAC or OGG to MP3.
In both cases, however, decoding/transcoding is done by the server on the fly, so you don't have to 're-encode' your files manually (which would indeed suck).
You may have to get some 'illicit' software to run 'locked' AAC files, but IMHO that's a reason *not* to buy crippled audio, not a reason to look down on the SB. Buy iTMS files if you want to lock yourself into Apple stuff, but don't use that as an argument why Apple stuff is better.
OTOH, Apple's product sounds like a good priced competitor even if it doesn't have all the Squeezebox' features, it does provide WAP and printservices which the SB doesn't. I might just pick one up, I like the compact Wifi adapter idea. (in fact I've been waiting for it)
For audio I stick to my Squeezebox and SliMP3 which is the best you can get in distributed audio. It's not as cheap as I would like it to be, though. Maybe Apple's initiative will influence that...
Linux *is* getting hit, the Internet *is getting hit.
Our (linux) mailservers are being bombarded with ten of thousands of virusmails daily (double compared to 2 weeks ago) thanks to cable and DSL machines that are spewing virusmails as fast as they can.
Viruses may not target the infrastructure but they're certainly starting to affect it.
Why doesn't someone create an MP3 player that can function as a USB host and read its media files from an external USB device like this one (or a big old 3.5 disk or one of those tiny USB keys).
Then build it in to a car stereo head unit so that I can finally listen to my music collection wherever I go...
We've been doing this for 4 years at the Dutch university where I work (in fact I set up the system, not that much work to add to an already web-based system, actually). All students have the option to enter their GSM numbers on their personal webpages. About 2/3 of the registered students take advantage of this.
We send the messages thru a 3rd party Internet SMS provider for about 10 Eurocents a piece. It costs a few thousand dollars a year but the students are very happy with it because they receive their results as soon as the prof has graded their work.
We had an angry professor here because he was teaching a class to ~600 students when the results for an important exam were sent out. Of course, the students are required to switch of their phones, but some of them had used their vibra alerts and started to warn the others.
The prof had a very hard time getting the attention of his class again...
I'm not worried about politics being a part of art. I'm worried about art being judged along political criteria.
I'm not anti-MM, but the fact that this movie is elected as the best movie at a French film festival at this moment in time, smells a little like freedom fries to me. (maybe politics shouldn't have anthing to do with cuisine either;-)
First off, congratulations on being fortunate enough to live in the Netherlands. It is an admirable country.
When people say things like that I always get the distinct impression that they admire the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Before you start raving about how every disabled person is guaranteed an income, consider how 'good' it is that 1/8 of the total working population is now 'disabled', leaving the rest to pay the bill.
Before you start about our freedoms, consider the fact that a right wing politician was once convicted for saying that the country was 'full'. (We're talking about one of the most densely populated countries in the world, sound attractive? not!). And then there's that other right wing politician who got killed for saying the wrong things.
Taxes are huge and everything is overregulated. 1.30 Euro's per litre of gasoline sounds good?
But of course, you can smoke weed on a street corner without being jailed. Maybe that's what seems so admirable to you?
The grass is pretty much the same colour on both sides of the ocean. Or as the famous Dutch philosopher says: there's a disadvantage to every advantage...
In my travels through China I've used a lot of Internet Cafes. Often it was hard to find a seat because, they're so popular.
When I did, I often found that I was the only one 'using' the Internet. Everyone else was immersed in on line games (ok, they probably played over the Internet as well). Apart from the occasional chatter I was the only one using a browser.
Dell has clear instructions on taking their laptops apart (and putting back together again) on their website.
When I bought my current X300, I considered a 12" powerbook as well, but the 3 year warranty period on the Dell made the difference.
OTOH, when the hard disk died the on-site engineer that came to fix it was so clumsy that I had to do some of the taking apart myself (that included finding the howto's on the site).
It may help for a while until the spammers start harvesting public keys together with addresses. One of the reasons spam is so hard to fight is that many of us want to be able to receive mail from people we don't know. That means we need our e-mail addresses to be public, and in a GPG world we'd need our public keys to be public also. GPG can easily be integrated in spamming software...
Usenet would obviously be much preferable to spam for such purposes, that's why messages hidden in spam is such a silly subject. You'd have to be crazy to use spam for this.
But, then again, some people are crazy!
Some not-so-bright fellow in my country decided to extort a company by poisoning food (or something, I forgot). He had this great system devised for transferring the money (it involved sending out the data on a bank card's magnetic strip).
Not bad, since that way he would be able to withdraw the money from ATM's (quite a job considering the maximum) without having to physically receive the card (which would leave him open to arrest).
The moron instructed the company to use steganography to hide this data in a picture of a car. The company should post that picture on a second hand car site in Holland. Then the absolute nitwit used an anonymous proxy to access the data *from his home*!!!!!!!
The anonymous proxy people were easily convinced to let the police have his IP address and that was the end of it.
What he should have done is send them his public PGP key and let them post the encrypted data openly in a newsgroup (labeled as 'secret code for creating ransom bank pass' if necessary) in some popular nude binaries group.
Using steganography in this case is ridiculous.
Nobody can trace a usenet download (especially not in a popular nudies group).
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen it twice, the last time when I was playing with my new Airport Express WAP. Apparently something went wrong with the drivers, I probably shouldn't have used 0.0.0.0 as an IP address ;-)
I use 5 XP machines (as well as a number of Linux servers) on a regular basis since XP came out and these events are very rare. I have never had a spontaneous reboot at all. I sometimes reboot when the system becomes sluggish or to clear up some error, but that doesn't happen that often either.
I'm no MS fan, but XP seems stable enough if you have your security & patches set up right and if you're running on decent hardware.
I'm no fan of people saying things like 'the truth hurts' in sigs either. It seems to suggest that everyone else is hiding from the facts except your enlightened self. As for me, these are my experiences, no more, no less.
I certainly would expect anyone giving out free plane tickets to Europe, Asia, Africa or any other exotic place would be mobbed similarly. I'm not one to pass up a free intercontinental flight myself, even if N. Korea would be handing them out.
But you're probably implying they'd want to immigrate. In poor countries you probably have a point. In western Europe (where I live) the few US haters that I know (there aren't that many) would definitely not be interested in a green card.
I wouldn't pass up on an opportunity to work and live in the US for a few years. I wish the western world would get together and make this kind of exchange (both ways) a lot easier, would be good for everyone. It would also promote a little more mutual understanding, which, reading this subthread, seems badly needed.
Gee mr. policeman, someone must've hacked my PC and copied all my music files. I really didn't upload them myself...!
I'm sure Apple marketing would rather have it differently, but 'Airport' is not a generic name for Wireless Access Points.
This looks like a great device!
It may just turn out to be the first Apple I ever buy.
Another big advantage is that now PC clone makers will undoubtedly start making look-alikes, which is good for everyone...
For the Apple-lovers who think this is really news, have a look at this:
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/iopener.php
Still a good move from Apple!
I don't want to use iTunes to play my music.
;-)
I want to send other audio than just music to my AE.
Apple ties the AE to iTunes which limits its usefulness.
BTW: My brother in law who's a psychiatrist with a wife and kid, is a big Ogg fan
I love this product. It's an excellent idea to create a pocket sized Wifi access pont that I can just put in my laptop bag.
It's great when I visit companies or friends who have a LAN or cable router but no wireless. I get to pre-configure my network name and WEP/WPA settings, so I just plug the thing in the network and work on it wirelessly.
The audio part is unfortunately a prime example of why I don't love Apple. It would be great if they would ship this with an audio driver that could be used just like a regular audio interface so that you could play music or video soundtracks over Wifi.
But they didn't. They made this yet another link in their iPod/iTunes/IMTS media lock-in scheme. You are only to use it with iTunes.
Nevertheless, I immediately ordered one when it became available (3-4 weeks delivery) just for the access point functionality.
For music I have a portable iRiver H140 HD player and several Squeezebox network players.
No lock-in for me, thank you very much...
Anyone who thinks iPods should make the Slashdot frontpage a bit *less* mod this up, please...
You can flood the Apple pages as much as you want for all I care.
Any important iPod news (new models) is fine by me, but this stuff and the silly story about the Wifi text file is just too much...
I agree with your first two arguments.
I got myself an iRiver H140 this week.
It addresses your two arguments:
- Normal USB harddisk that has actual MP3 files on it so you can easily hack up your own tools under any OS. You can also copy the tracks off it.
- mp3, ogg, wma, asf support
My main gripe is that it's interface just isn't very good. I can't stand the idea of someone putting up a millions-of-dollars production line to create excellent hardware and then put ill thought out software on it.
If they'd hire me I'd make it two times better at the very least.
Biggest problem: The shuffle option always shuffles in the same way. What idiot thought of that gem?
IMHO 5000+ songs are just begging for a good shuffle!
That and their marketing which sucks compared to Apple. If they get their act together on that as well as on the software front they could really start competing.
And competition is good...
Also, the iPod runs pretty long on one charge. I think the specs say 8 or 9 hours
Funny, that's one of the main reasons I didn't buy an iPod but went with the iRiver H140 which has double the battery life.
The other main reason is that the iRiver is accessible as a normal disk, no problems copying files from it. I hate it when Apple decides what I can and - most importantly - can't do with my files for some silly reason.
I agree with you on most points, except for the fact that the Squeezebox has to re-encode things like AAC on the fly... not my preference. Also, it cannot handle protected AACs from the iTMS. Kinda important for those of us who shop there from time to time and don't want to re-encode those files. :)
Not exactly, the Squeezebox does not re-encode (decode -> encode) these formats are decoded on-the-fly by the server software. The resulting uncompressed PCM data is sent over ethernet or Wifi to the SB device. (the SB can directly play uncompressed or lossless compressed audio data, wich makes it a pure digital path to your audio system)
The SliMP3 (the SB's predecessor) is only able to play MP3's so in that case the server *does* have to transcode AAC or OGG to MP3.
In both cases, however, decoding/transcoding is done by the server on the fly, so you don't have to 're-encode' your files manually (which would indeed suck).
You may have to get some 'illicit' software to run 'locked' AAC files, but IMHO that's a reason *not* to buy crippled audio, not a reason to look down on the SB. Buy iTMS files if you want to lock yourself into Apple stuff, but don't use that as an argument why Apple stuff is better.
OTOH, Apple's product sounds like a good priced competitor even if it doesn't have all the Squeezebox' features, it does provide WAP and printservices which the SB doesn't. I might just pick one up, I like the compact Wifi adapter idea. (in fact I've been waiting for it)
For audio I stick to my Squeezebox and SliMP3 which is the best you can get in distributed audio. It's not as cheap as I would like it to be, though. Maybe Apple's initiative will influence that...
Linux *is* getting hit, the Internet *is getting hit.
Our (linux) mailservers are being bombarded with ten of thousands of virusmails daily (double compared to 2 weeks ago) thanks to cable and DSL machines that are spewing virusmails as fast as they can.
Viruses may not target the infrastructure but they're certainly starting to affect it.
Think of it as an Internet wide DDOS attack...
X.
O really, I think my intelligence is being insulted by having to remember something as unmemorable as 802.11b.
;-)
What idiot ever thought of using *that*?
(Not that Wireless-G is anything to write home about, I vote for Ultra-Wifi
Why doesn't someone create an MP3 player that can function as a USB host and read its media files from an external USB device like this one (or a big old 3.5 disk or one of those tiny USB keys).
Then build it in to a car stereo head unit so that I can finally listen to my music collection wherever I go...
We've been doing this for 4 years at the Dutch university where I work (in fact I set up the system, not that much work to add to an already web-based system, actually). All students have the option to enter their GSM numbers on their personal webpages. About 2/3 of the registered students take advantage of this.
We send the messages thru a 3rd party Internet SMS provider for about 10 Eurocents a piece. It costs a few thousand dollars a year but the students are very happy with it because they receive their results as soon as the prof has graded their work.
We had an angry professor here because he was teaching a class to ~600 students when the results for an important exam were sent out. Of course, the students are required to switch of their phones, but some of them had used their vibra alerts and started to warn the others.
The prof had a very hard time getting the attention of his class again...
X.
I'm not worried about politics being a part of art. I'm worried about art being judged along political criteria.
;-)
I'm not anti-MM, but the fact that this movie is elected as the best movie at a French film festival at this moment in time, smells a little like freedom fries to me. (maybe politics shouldn't have anthing to do with cuisine either
X.
I really hope that this is a good documentary, because I'd really hate it if the Cannes festival has become nothing more than a vehicle for politics.
First off, congratulations on being fortunate enough to live in the Netherlands. It is an admirable country.
When people say things like that I always get the distinct impression that they admire the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Before you start raving about how every disabled person is guaranteed an income, consider how 'good' it is that 1/8 of the total working population is now 'disabled', leaving the rest to pay the bill.
Before you start about our freedoms, consider the fact that a right wing politician was once convicted for saying that the country was 'full'. (We're talking about one of the most densely populated countries in the world, sound attractive? not!). And then there's that other right wing politician who got killed for saying the wrong things.
Taxes are huge and everything is overregulated. 1.30 Euro's per litre of gasoline sounds good?
But of course, you can smoke weed on a street corner without being jailed. Maybe that's what seems so admirable to you?
The grass is pretty much the same colour on both sides of the ocean. Or as the famous Dutch philosopher says: there's a disadvantage to every advantage...
X. (Dutch, but you guessed that)
In my travels through China I've used a lot of Internet Cafes. Often it was hard to find a seat because, they're so popular.
When I did, I often found that I was the only one 'using' the Internet. Everyone else was immersed in on line games (ok, they probably played over the Internet as well). Apart from the occasional chatter I was the only one using a browser.
Regards,
X.
Dell has clear instructions on taking their laptops apart (and putting back together again) on their website.
;-)
When I bought my current X300, I considered a 12" powerbook as well, but the 3 year warranty period on the Dell made the difference.
OTOH, when the hard disk died the on-site engineer that came to fix it was so clumsy that I had to do some of the taking apart myself (that included finding the howto's on the site).
So, what exactly am I trying to say here..?
Whoever's still using POP3 needs to get a clue. And the clue is IMAP....
It may help for a while until the spammers start harvesting public keys together with addresses. One of the reasons spam is so hard to fight is that many of us want to be able to receive mail from people we don't know. That means we need our e-mail addresses to be public, and in a GPG world we'd need our public keys to be public also. GPG can easily be integrated in spamming software...
X.
Thanks for a good laugh.
If I still had my modpoints I'd spend them on you!
Usenet would obviously be much preferable to spam for such purposes, that's why messages hidden in spam is such a silly subject. You'd have to be crazy to use spam for this.
But, then again, some people are crazy!
Some not-so-bright fellow in my country decided to extort a company by poisoning food (or something, I forgot). He had this great system devised for transferring the money (it involved sending out the data on a bank card's magnetic strip).
Not bad, since that way he would be able to withdraw the money from ATM's (quite a job considering the maximum) without having to physically receive the card (which would leave him open to arrest).
The moron instructed the company to use steganography to hide this data in a picture of a car. The company should post that picture on a second hand car site in Holland. Then the absolute nitwit used an anonymous proxy to access the data *from his home*!!!!!!!
The anonymous proxy people were easily convinced to let the police have his IP address and that was the end of it.
What he should have done is send them his public PGP key and let them post the encrypted data openly in a newsgroup (labeled as 'secret code for creating ransom bank pass' if necessary) in some popular nude binaries group.
Using steganography in this case is ridiculous.
Nobody can trace a usenet download (especially not in a popular nudies group).
X.
Great, now, if we can just prove it's being used by Al Qaeda to help the Jihad we may finally get some political support for getting rid of spammers!
X.