iPod support isn't built in, but there is a plugin for it (currently in beta, according to the MJ website -- see their player plugins page.) Free is nice, but unless it's free as in speech with source code I can fiddle, that's not a big concern for me -- I was happy to pay for MJ given how much I use it. The Apple Music Store is definitely slick, though. Hopefully MJ's developers will see fit to release a QuickTime plugin to play the iTunes files -- if they just launch the existing embedded QuickTime player (the same one Web browsers use) I can't imagine there'd be a licensing issue.
Meanwhile, it's possible to play AAC files without loss in MJ by converting them to raw PCM (burn to a CD-RW if need be) then compressing them with Monkey's Audio or FLAC. Not exactly compact or elegant, but converting from AAC to MP3/OGG probably results in files that don't sound so great. For me that's a bearable process as long as I don't start buying huge numbers of tracks.
Actually, I find that now that I'm using iRate Radio my inclination to purchase music is pretty low -- there's enough good stuff for free out there (legal, even) that unless I want a specific song, I'm happy to let iRate supply me with a steady stream of new music.
I agree that it has smart playlists, but they are limited in scope by the fact that they can only query the specific fields that Apple has predefined in the software. How would you do my "dinner, Latin, no lyrics" example with iTunes? It's about a ten-second operation in MJ, and after a couple hours playing with iTunes, I still can't see any way to do it there short of using a text field to keep lists of keywords.
If I were looking at iTunes as a WinAmp user, it would probably seem absolutely amazing. But although it's a pretty nice app and reasonably powerful, I'm not sure I'll be able to bring myself to switch over from Media Jukebox, which I've been using for the last couple of years, because its playlist management is a lot less powerful than I'm used to.
MJ has had the "make a playlist out of query parameters" feature for years, but takes it further: you can define custom fields in the database and search on them (though to be fair, iTunes already includes the things I used those custom fields for.) More importantly, its notion of (non-dynamic) playlists is much more flexible -- you can use a song's presence on a static playlist as a query parameter for a smartlist. I've come to think of playlists as a way of attaching attributes to songs. It's a much more flexible, nuanced way to represent things like genre, where multiple values can easily apply to a song.
How is that useful? Well, for example, I have a playlist of background music for dinner parties. If I'm serving Mexican food one night, I can whip up a quick smartlist that says, "Play all the songs on both the Dinner playlist and the Latin playlist." Or better, if I decide I only want instrumental pieces, "Play all the songs on both the Dinner playlist and the Latin playlist, except ones on the Has Lyrics playlist."
As far as I can tell, other than putting lists of keywords in the Comments field and doing string searches, there's no way to do flexible user-data-driven queries like that in iTunes. You can add a song to a playlist, but the playlist is a data sink -- you can't leverage it for anything else. (If I'm wrong about that, please clue me in!)
MJ also has a robust plugin interface for audio codecs, rip/burn capability, a built-in sound editor if you want to make a mix CD with fancy effects, ReplayGain support (same as iTunes' volume leveling), and supports downloading to a variety of portable MP3 players. The latest incarnation can also manage libraries of video files.
Other than the selection at the iTunes Store, I don't see a single thing iTunes gives me that I haven't already been enjoying for years with my existing software.
I used to have that problem when I had my firewall misconfigured. If you're behind a firewall make sure it's configured to forward incoming BitTorrent connections to whichever machine you're running the client on. (The BT website has more details.) As soon as I did that my transfer rates shot up nicely.
BT is no good for 30K GIFs or the like, but anything over a megabyte is much better off BTed than hosted on some overloaded central server and a set of possibly out-of-date mirrors. I almost always get over 100KB/s on my BT downloads well before they hit the 1MB mark.
Plus, it may well save the Mozilla Foundation some money on bandwidth charges, always a worthwhile thing.
Again we see the private sector doing what the government could not. However, it went from wholly independent funding to 70% government funding. That's government for you.
And you're saying you'd rather have seen... what, exactly? The government not funding the Smithsonian, leaving it with only 30% of its present funding? I for one am glad it's there and has the resources it does.
I refuse to see movies that are advertisements for other movies. When a feature-length picture ends in "to be continued", you should ask for your money back.
Okay, guess I'll skip seeing that "Empire Strikes Back" flick, then. Thanks for the warning. I'll stay home and read "The Fellowship of the Ring" instead, or maybe watch a couple episodes of "24."
Re:If you're in Washington DC, or the environs;
on
Urban Challenge
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The Internet? Universal postal service? Free education? Eradication of smallpox? Abolition of slavery? Going to space and landing on the moon? Weather satellites? Transcontinental highway systems? The banning of "whites-only" shops and restaurants and schools?
Nope, nothing valuable there, you're right. Because everyone knows that they don't let you apply for even the lowliest government job without passing the Power-Hungry Would-Be Dictator Test. All the altruists in the world are forced to sit in corporate boardrooms, while our most sinful megalomaniacs cackle with glee on the way to their jobs running county homeless shelters.
Yeah, it's so much more fun to twiddle my thumbs waiting for a multi-CD install to finish, hunt down the latest patch because the game shipped buggy (oops! they haven't fixed that bug yet, better wait for the next patch Real Soon Now), and get five minutes into it before it freezes because it needs a newer version of the video card driver I just updated a month ago.
Consoles have their benefits.
And I paid US$300 to get my PS2 on release day. Are you maybe talking Canadian or Australian dollars? Not sure what its launch price was in other countries.
We already separate men's and women's competition in most sports, due to the fact that the two sexes have (genetically determined) physical differences that would cause competition to be one-sided. So why not make it three categories: unmodified men, unmodified women, and modified humans? At that point I'd be fine with disqualifying gene-enhanced people from the first two categories.
But then the question is, what is "modified?" Is it a modification to use a measurement device to non-invasively select the one sperm out of a million that happens to have the right set of genes? That sperm might have been the lucky one in natural procreation. If that's not okay, do you disqualify athletes born to surrogate mothers who were artificially inseminated?
Personally, I think it'll be moot eventually, but not for several decades at least -- unless safe genetic testing/manipulation is somehow different from every other technology in history, it'll start out expensive and rare but will eventually become available to a wide cross-section of society, at which point a modified athlete will simply be one member of a society of modified people, and the question of an unfair advantage won't apply.
This has happened again and again over time. I can't be the only one here who remembers getting extra credit for neatness on my essays in school because I was the only kid in class with a word processor; if I went back to the same school now I'd probably have a hard time finding a kid who didn't have one.
Re:If you're in Washington DC, or the environs;
on
Urban Challenge
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· Score: 1
How does one find out more about it? I know someone who just moved to DC and would enjoy this kind of thing.
Media Jukebox has had dynamic query-based playlists (they call them "smartlists") for years. WinAmp has been blown out of the water by MJ for so long I doubt it's even damp any more.
Does a game system need 1 trillion ops/sec???? for game play?
Yes! Okay, not for Tetris, but many games try to render realistic-looking scenes and characters, a goal that's severely hampered by a lack of processing power.
And even leaving aside graphics, more CPU power means more capacity for advanced AI or more detailed, accurate simulation of real-world things like cars and planes and weapons.
Enabling two people to interact with a single computer isn't the problem. Enabling two people to interact effectively with each other is. VNC and speakerphones are fine if one person sits and silently watches over the other's shoulder until they see a typo. But effective pair programming, as I've observed it, is a much more interactive process with lots of "hang on, let's take a step back here" moments that seem to happen a lot more readily in person.
One problem with pair programming is that it's impossible to do fully if you let any member of your development staff telecommute, ever. At my current company, the fact that the developers can work from home a couple days a week if they choose is a big morale booster (some of the programmers live a long distance from the office and traffic can be nasty) but it makes it impossible to fully embrace XP since the telecommuters are working without partners and you end up with code that hasn't gone through the pair-programmed design and review process.
The middle ground is to pick our pair-programmed projects. Pieces of code that are likely to involve integration of lots of parts of our system benefit more from pair programming than relatively standalone modules. There are plenty of each on our to-do list, so there's always something for the stay-at-homers and the 9-to-5ers to do that suits their respective styles.
Hmm... my mom taught me not to taunt the people with the big lasers. Especially the big invisible lasers. Count yourself lucky she had a sense of humor.
Only if they have a small TV. I have yet to see a DivX movie that looks like anything but pixellated, artifact-strewn crap on my front-projection system. But I'm sure if I tried it on a 31-inch set, a lot of that would be less noticeable.
I believe my system was about $24,000 before rebates, give or take a thousand. Certainly without the rebates it would have been out of my price range. As the other reply noted, I think California has an unusually generous rebate program. (How long that will last as they scrounge for an extra $38 billion to close the state's budget deficit, who knows -- which is one reason I took the plunge when I did.)
A lot of the savings come from switching to time-of-use metering. I feed electricity back into the grid while I'm at work, and the summertime peak rate around here is nearly 4 times higher than the non-peak rate. So I'm buying cheap electrons and selling expensive electrons.
Out of curiosity, where do you live? I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area and had a 2.5kW system put on my roof late last year. After rebates it cost me about $14000, but based on my calculations, and my electricity bills so far, it should pay for itself in a little under 9 years.
If I lived in an area that got a lot less sun, or with cheaper electricity from the grid, it probably wouldn't have been economically justifiable.
Broadcast HDTV material is often shot without compression, because after it's shot it still needs to be edited and otherwise postprocessed. The picture would look like crap by the time it was finished if you had to uncompress and re-compress a bunch of times during postproduction. Compression doesn't happen until the end of the process.
If you're a paying Trillian customer, you can download the beta of their next major release, which works just fine with the Yahoo! Messenger network even after this change. I believe they've said they'll port the protocol change back to the free version as well. I'm running the beta and haven't noticed any disruption of service.
The difference is that Microsofts patches take forever to come out and introduce more holes than anything else.
Really? What holes were introduced by, say, the Blaster worm patch? Or any other patches you care to name?
Can't argue about the speed of patches, exactly, but I'd point out that MS almost always releases a patch before the bug in question is widely exploited -- the problem with the last few worms/viruses was more with unpatched systems than lack of responsiveness on MS's part. MS could come out with a patch within a nanosecond of an exploit's discovery and there would still be millions of people who wouldn't bother applying it. That's hardly a problem that's unique to Windows -- I bet you can still find lots of Apache installations out there with known security holes.
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Meanwhile, it's possible to play AAC files without loss in MJ by converting them to raw PCM (burn to a CD-RW if need be) then compressing them with Monkey's Audio or FLAC. Not exactly compact or elegant, but converting from AAC to MP3/OGG probably results in files that don't sound so great. For me that's a bearable process as long as I don't start buying huge numbers of tracks.
Actually, I find that now that I'm using iRate Radio my inclination to purchase music is pretty low -- there's enough good stuff for free out there (legal, even) that unless I want a specific song, I'm happy to let iRate supply me with a steady stream of new music.
I agree that it has smart playlists, but they are limited in scope by the fact that they can only query the specific fields that Apple has predefined in the software. How would you do my "dinner, Latin, no lyrics" example with iTunes? It's about a ten-second operation in MJ, and after a couple hours playing with iTunes, I still can't see any way to do it there short of using a text field to keep lists of keywords.
MJ has had the "make a playlist out of query parameters" feature for years, but takes it further: you can define custom fields in the database and search on them (though to be fair, iTunes already includes the things I used those custom fields for.) More importantly, its notion of (non-dynamic) playlists is much more flexible -- you can use a song's presence on a static playlist as a query parameter for a smartlist. I've come to think of playlists as a way of attaching attributes to songs. It's a much more flexible, nuanced way to represent things like genre, where multiple values can easily apply to a song.
How is that useful? Well, for example, I have a playlist of background music for dinner parties. If I'm serving Mexican food one night, I can whip up a quick smartlist that says, "Play all the songs on both the Dinner playlist and the Latin playlist." Or better, if I decide I only want instrumental pieces, "Play all the songs on both the Dinner playlist and the Latin playlist, except ones on the Has Lyrics playlist."
As far as I can tell, other than putting lists of keywords in the Comments field and doing string searches, there's no way to do flexible user-data-driven queries like that in iTunes. You can add a song to a playlist, but the playlist is a data sink -- you can't leverage it for anything else. (If I'm wrong about that, please clue me in!)
MJ also has a robust plugin interface for audio codecs, rip/burn capability, a built-in sound editor if you want to make a mix CD with fancy effects, ReplayGain support (same as iTunes' volume leveling), and supports downloading to a variety of portable MP3 players. The latest incarnation can also manage libraries of video files.
Other than the selection at the iTunes Store, I don't see a single thing iTunes gives me that I haven't already been enjoying for years with my existing software.
I used to have that problem when I had my firewall misconfigured. If you're behind a firewall make sure it's configured to forward incoming BitTorrent connections to whichever machine you're running the client on. (The BT website has more details.) As soon as I did that my transfer rates shot up nicely.
Plus, it may well save the Mozilla Foundation some money on bandwidth charges, always a worthwhile thing.
Mmm, yes, clearly the view is much nicer from a high horse than a basement. Even if one can't quite make out irony from such a lofty perch.
And you're saying you'd rather have seen... what, exactly? The government not funding the Smithsonian, leaving it with only 30% of its present funding? I for one am glad it's there and has the resources it does.
Okay, guess I'll skip seeing that "Empire Strikes Back" flick, then. Thanks for the warning. I'll stay home and read "The Fellowship of the Ring" instead, or maybe watch a couple episodes of "24."
Thanks! I'll let my friend know. Sounds like fun.
Nope, nothing valuable there, you're right. Because everyone knows that they don't let you apply for even the lowliest government job without passing the Power-Hungry Would-Be Dictator Test. All the altruists in the world are forced to sit in corporate boardrooms, while our most sinful megalomaniacs cackle with glee on the way to their jobs running county homeless shelters.
Consoles have their benefits.
And I paid US$300 to get my PS2 on release day. Are you maybe talking Canadian or Australian dollars? Not sure what its launch price was in other countries.
But then the question is, what is "modified?" Is it a modification to use a measurement device to non-invasively select the one sperm out of a million that happens to have the right set of genes? That sperm might have been the lucky one in natural procreation. If that's not okay, do you disqualify athletes born to surrogate mothers who were artificially inseminated?
Personally, I think it'll be moot eventually, but not for several decades at least -- unless safe genetic testing/manipulation is somehow different from every other technology in history, it'll start out expensive and rare but will eventually become available to a wide cross-section of society, at which point a modified athlete will simply be one member of a society of modified people, and the question of an unfair advantage won't apply.
This has happened again and again over time. I can't be the only one here who remembers getting extra credit for neatness on my essays in school because I was the only kid in class with a word processor; if I went back to the same school now I'd probably have a hard time finding a kid who didn't have one.
How does one find out more about it? I know someone who just moved to DC and would enjoy this kind of thing.
Media Jukebox has had dynamic query-based playlists (they call them "smartlists") for years. WinAmp has been blown out of the water by MJ for so long I doubt it's even damp any more.
Yes! Okay, not for Tetris, but many games try to render realistic-looking scenes and characters, a goal that's severely hampered by a lack of processing power.
And even leaving aside graphics, more CPU power means more capacity for advanced AI or more detailed, accurate simulation of real-world things like cars and planes and weapons.
Enabling two people to interact with a single computer isn't the problem. Enabling two people to interact effectively with each other is. VNC and speakerphones are fine if one person sits and silently watches over the other's shoulder until they see a typo. But effective pair programming, as I've observed it, is a much more interactive process with lots of "hang on, let's take a step back here" moments that seem to happen a lot more readily in person.
The middle ground is to pick our pair-programmed projects. Pieces of code that are likely to involve integration of lots of parts of our system benefit more from pair programming than relatively standalone modules. There are plenty of each on our to-do list, so there's always something for the stay-at-homers and the 9-to-5ers to do that suits their respective styles.
Hmm... my mom taught me not to taunt the people with the big lasers. Especially the big invisible lasers. Count yourself lucky she had a sense of humor.
Only if they have a small TV. I have yet to see a DivX movie that looks like anything but pixellated, artifact-strewn crap on my front-projection system. But I'm sure if I tried it on a 31-inch set, a lot of that would be less noticeable.
In Soviet Russia, Earth flies past asteroid!
A lot of the savings come from switching to time-of-use metering. I feed electricity back into the grid while I'm at work, and the summertime peak rate around here is nearly 4 times higher than the non-peak rate. So I'm buying cheap electrons and selling expensive electrons.
If I lived in an area that got a lot less sun, or with cheaper electricity from the grid, it probably wouldn't have been economically justifiable.
Broadcast HDTV material is often shot without compression, because after it's shot it still needs to be edited and otherwise postprocessed. The picture would look like crap by the time it was finished if you had to uncompress and re-compress a bunch of times during postproduction. Compression doesn't happen until the end of the process.
If you're a paying Trillian customer, you can download the beta of their next major release, which works just fine with the Yahoo! Messenger network even after this change. I believe they've said they'll port the protocol change back to the free version as well. I'm running the beta and haven't noticed any disruption of service.
Really? What holes were introduced by, say, the Blaster worm patch? Or any other patches you care to name?
Can't argue about the speed of patches, exactly, but I'd point out that MS almost always releases a patch before the bug in question is widely exploited -- the problem with the last few worms/viruses was more with unpatched systems than lack of responsiveness on MS's part. MS could come out with a patch within a nanosecond of an exploit's discovery and there would still be millions of people who wouldn't bother applying it. That's hardly a problem that's unique to Windows -- I bet you can still find lots of Apache installations out there with known security holes.