It depends what you are looking for. The Arcam brings almost the best audio and video performance you can get from any machine - there are probably a few DVD players that can beat it and a few CD Players that can beat it but they are most likely to be in the Thousands of pounds range.
I'm looking at the Diva 88 as a replacement for a first generation Pioneer which will probably go into the office - I'll then partner it with the matching Dolby Digital receiver and - if they ever release it - the matching DAB receiver.
It should all go really well with the Silver Thomson TiVo:o)
And what's this about a mediocre TV? You're watching DVDs - you need a large screen (32" +) Widescreen set - Anything else isn't worth pumping DVDs through.
Personally I want a unit per function - I can double up receiver with amp and CD with DVD but I've done the PC for playing Videos, CDs, MP3 and DVDs in the past and they are just too damn ugly and too noisy. Plus if one aspect of it goes - your entire entertainment system is gone while you're waiting. All the kit I have is designed for the job and quiet.
Arcam's Diva range includes a DVD player which includes one of the Best CD playing DVD players - and as a bonus it also plays MP3s from the CDs. It's DVD playback is stunning too.
Information on the players is available here and the unit can be made multi region with a few keypresses on the remote.
It retails a around 800 Pounds Sterling and should be available in the US later - it's specs definately support US standards for power and component outputs.
More of a dig at Bicrosoft for putting the back button on the Backspace key but this Infero VM doesn't seem to capture the Backspace key so hitting backspace to edit a command line or value takes you back to the previous page.
I don't know enough about IE plugin design but is it possible to capture the Backspace event?
Funnily enough this is a subject I know a fair bit about - see the URL above:o)
The fact that NTL and Telewest are dumping their DSL plans is not as big a set back for DSL as many people would claim since these providers were never looking at providing DSL themselves - they were looking at providing Internet connectivity over BT's DSL package.
For reasons unbeknown to anyone but themselves BT have created a service which restricts the customer and the ISP by forcing the ISP to use BT's solution all the way. BT provide and own and configure the customer router and modem, BT own and run the local line and the DSL access ontop of it, BT own and run an ATM network which carries the DSL traffic, BT own and run the lines into the ISP's network and BT own and run the Radius servers usedfor authenticating DSL users. The ISP has no access to any of this and the customer has no direct contact with BT should there be a problem.
This has caused fun for people experiencing problems, they guy sitting opposite me went without service for 7 days because the ISP didn't contact BT quick enough and then there was limited contact between BT and the ISP. Personally I was a triallist for 6 months without hitches- when BT came to swap out the service for the full launch kit they left me with a non-functioning install and finally took it all away after 1 month's pissing around and then telling me that the line was too long and too noisy to support DSL - even though it had been running perfectly for 6 months prior!
BT's DSL is a shambles and you will see Telewest and NTL offering DSL services later - once the local loop has been unbundled and the telcos have their own network in place for the full stretch.
I'm currently waiting for a Cable modem install and will probably stick with that for a fair while to come;o)
I used to use IRC fairly extensively and servers would regularly go missing creating a fractured and fragmented network - response times were laughable - 2 or 3 minutes between someone sending a message and the recipient getting it was not uncommon. Now I find ICQ a much better way of contacting the people I want to chat with - they all have ICQ numbers and I have much more flexibility - even if the software is pig ugly and eats memory faster than Outlook.
I hope that these guys are not planning on layering this service over existing networks becuase they're going to have to make sure that sys admins can't identify the clients to K-line their users. Adding Napster and Gnutella amounts of traffic to already busy IRC networks is just asking for disaster - I know of a few ISPs that would like a good reason to remove their IRC servers.
Personally I think that file sharing en-messe needs dedicated protocols and servers - or at the very least extensions to existing protocols and dedicated servers.
The big issue with this is that ICANN just "decided" to levy a tax on the registrars of country specific domains. ICANN have had no control or input into these domains as they were organised BI (Before ICANN) yet they are asking for millions of dollars from all the country specific registrars - regardless of size.
ICANN's recent attempt to invoice the ccTLD Registries had been met with a firm declaration that there was no contractual relationship between the two sides and that there should be no tax on Domain Names. However, as a gesture of goodwill, a donation of USD $100, 000 had been sent from Nominet, together with a letter making it clear that banking the cheque would imply ICANN's acceptance of the fact that it was not in payment for any specific services or any contractual obligations.
Reproduction crippling can be a good thing.
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 2
Personally I buy organic products when I can - where can is defined as the product not being stupidly overpriced. In most countries organic food must be GM free and as far as I can see it crippling plants so that they can't reproduce can be a good thing.
I'd like to believe that in future more and more food will be available organically but this is unlikely to be the case if GM strains of crops are allowed to spread their seeds naturally - if organic crops get contaminated it will cripple the organic farmers!
I know that there is more risk from the pollen than the seed but I believe that if the scientists working on these products can stop the plants from re-producing they should find a way to make GM pollen inert so it poses no danger to organic crops.
It was interesting to see the diagram of a network fragmenting - just as interesting to see their solution. But I'm left wondering how many sys admins are going to implement a reflector server for a service that easily enables the exchange of files without knowledge of the legal status.
Sure I'd probably run it up and leave it going on a cable line for a while but will this affect the benefits that the reflector would bring to other users and how much is it likely to detract from my network usage?
As far as I can tell taxes are levied on things that make a third party richer. We pay tax on service in restaurants, we pay tax on petrol, we pay tax on computer. All these things made money for the restaurant, the oil companies and AMD respectively so they get taxed.
Until now I don't think there has ever been a tax levied on something that someone didn't make money on. Sure - If I bought a copy of Red Hat 7.0 and paid £50 for it then I'd expect some of that £50 to be tax for the book, the box, the time spent packing it, the CD - but not the software since it has no value to Red Hat.
Next thing you know they'll be taxing chocolate and candy higher than water because "you enjoyed the candy more"!
I'm not too sure about this. Remeber that "in the home" is not necessarily the same as "in the home of a slashdot reader". With the P4 Itel will have faster sounding chips - and a lot of people - especially when buying things to impress children or workmates who may be as equally uninformed will go for the faster sounding chip. It's the educated and people who buy from sepcialist vendors who end up buying the Athlon and Duron chips.
The only way I can see for Interl to be dead in the home is if PC vendors stop using Intel chips in the home environment - and let's face it, if that happens Intel will just make it financially more acceptable for those vendors to turn back to Intel.
I've tried getting exim going and the documentation is a pig.
Sendmail is not as hard to understand if you start from scratch and compile yourself. I have a box here which precesses 3700 emails in just under 20 minutes, each one is to a distinct address and each mail is unique so there is no change of concurrency speeding things up.
Use the m4 macros to build the config files and it's actually quite easy. That's using 8.11.0.
In the UK Nominet are in charge of the.uk name space. They do have a public whois server, whois.nic.uk, but it does not divulge personal contact details. It does however tell you who the domain is registered for and which ISP/Name broker is currently in charge of the name.
The WHOIS data publically available looks as follows:-
WHOIS database last updated at 04:10:01 16-Nov-2000
All companies who wish to administer and register domains apply to become members of Nominet, with membership you get a , this can be looked up and tell you who is technically responsible for the domain. Each domain registered is tagged with this and this allows me, with the correct PGP signature, to change any of the details on the domain.
It's up to the registering company to decide how their customers specify changes and many have automated systems of their own. And if you're wondering wether this would work for large domain spaces like.com,.org and.net then the answer is almost definately a yes -.uk is the largest country specific domain space - thanks to Nominet fees being just £5 (Thats $7.20) for two years. Some companies charge this and nothing else and many ISPs give domain names away simply for using their dial-up service.
I had a play with this on my PC at home the other night and I have to say that the text entry options blow the Palm away. Keyboards, userdefinable keyboards, pick strip (Which sounds ruder than it is) and handwriting recognition all worked great - and that was with me using a mouse.
What I'd really like to see though is an installer package either for Unix based or Windows based systems which removes CE from the sexy little iPaq and replaces it with Linux and QT Embedded - when someone does this and can demo it to me I will buy the iPaq and install this combination. Must have decent sync tools to at least let me browse the file system on the iPaq from the desktop machine btw.
I doin't know how much this will retail at but if it and the media are going for todays prices then it's still not worth pirating DVDs at DVD quality to DVD material as it costs twice as much as the £12.99 copy of 2001 I bought the other day.
Of course the MPAA should be getting frightened about DIVX and the new DVD to CD-R Video devices being launched.
In the UK they tried to become one of the largest ISPs by relying on their brand-name and providing content - they then offered the service free when that was seen to be the thing to do. Not long after they've decided to pull out of the dial-up market and handed all of the dial up customers to NTL (Who were providing the network anyway) and now they concentrate on the portal and content market. IT looks like something similar has happened with their US venture.
AFS is a dying (maybe dead) file system that never actually had a lot of life in the first place. Just because a formerly proprietary only company releases the code to one of their creations doesn't mean that the community should rejoice.
Can't you see past the "release" of the product forwards to the benefits that this can have.
AFS may well be a dead file system but there is no doubt that in it's open source state it will prove an invaluable teaching tool - not only for people that are interested in seeing how a file system works but also for people interested in seeing how IBM have written the code.
Yes it is a good bit of publicity for Big Blue but let's not let disdain for the motives of IBM's marketing department blind us to the other oportunities that their actions have presented.
802.11(whatever) was designed as a replacement for the ethernet wires that connect two PCs.
Bluetooth was designed to replace the parallel, serial, IrDA and other short range low power links between devices.
Note devices. One use for Bluetooth that the mobile phone makers Ericsson are touting is a cordless Bluetooh headset for your mobile phone, removing the transmitter from your brain and allowing easier movement etc. Another is Palm to phone connectivity, no more lining your Palm V's IrDA port up with that of your Nokia 7110 phone
One of the great ideas - although wether it would ever take off or not is another matter is micro lans which allow broadcast environmental information to be displayed on compatible devices. Imagine walking into an airport and instead of looking up at the TV screens you look down at your Palm organiser which shows you where your plane is boarding and that it's 5 minutes late. It knows the flight number because you told it and when you arrived at the airport you entered their Microlan and your Palm interroageted their systems.
All this would be possible with 802.11 but the hardware necessary and the power drain of a Medium ot long range protocol would make it bulky or impractacle(sp?).
Now I'm not dissing Jon for the sake of it but just what was the article about Nerd wise? I couldn't find a technology bias in it, neither could I find any International slant to it. The rest of the world is not worried about how many US citizens vote but they are worried about the outcome and the policies of the candidates.
IF this were editorial on how President Elect Gore (OK that's a bit of optimism there I know) is going to affect the Internet or technology companies then this would make sense - but it's an internal politics debate much more suited to the news pages of a domestic news site.
Even if the product you are creating is initially only for yourself you should sit down and work out what you want - effectively gathering requirements from yourself.
After all - how the hell can you start a project with anyone in mind if you have no idea what the project is going to acheive.
These guys are launching a ton of applications onto the market which they claim are totally closed source but who is checking this?
Does anyone have access to the source code to truly check that they're not reusing someone else's licensed code and breaking the license agreements at the same time? I don't want to poo-poo the idea of closed cource off-the-shelf linux apps but I'd like to know that my money is going to the true developers of those apps and that the company offering them is not riding on the backs of open source developers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm looking at the Diva 88 as a replacement for a first generation Pioneer which will probably go into the office - I'll then partner it with the matching Dolby Digital receiver and - if they ever release it - the matching DAB receiver. It should all go really well with the Silver Thomson TiVo :o)
And what's this about a mediocre TV? You're watching DVDs - you need a large screen (32" +) Widescreen set - Anything else isn't worth pumping DVDs through. Personally I want a unit per function - I can double up receiver with amp and CD with DVD but I've done the PC for playing Videos, CDs, MP3 and DVDs in the past and they are just too damn ugly and too noisy. Plus if one aspect of it goes - your entire entertainment system is gone while you're waiting. All the kit I have is designed for the job and quiet.
Information on the players is available here and the unit can be made multi region with a few keypresses on the remote.
It retails a around 800 Pounds Sterling and should be available in the US later - it's specs definately support US standards for power and component outputs.
I don't know enough about IE plugin design but is it possible to capture the Backspace event?
BT's provision of ADSL over an ISDN line is to remove the ISDN line and replace it with POTS.
The fact that NTL and Telewest are dumping their DSL plans is not as big a set back for DSL as many people would claim since these providers were never looking at providing DSL themselves - they were looking at providing Internet connectivity over BT's DSL package.
For reasons unbeknown to anyone but themselves BT have created a service which restricts the customer and the ISP by forcing the ISP to use BT's solution all the way. BT provide and own and configure the customer router and modem, BT own and run the local line and the DSL access ontop of it, BT own and run an ATM network which carries the DSL traffic, BT own and run the lines into the ISP's network and BT own and run the Radius servers usedfor authenticating DSL users.
The ISP has no access to any of this and the customer has no direct contact with BT should there be a problem.
This has caused fun for people experiencing problems, they guy sitting opposite me went without service for 7 days because the ISP didn't contact BT quick enough and then there was limited contact between BT and the ISP. Personally I was a triallist for 6 months without hitches- when BT came to swap out the service for the full launch kit they left me with a non-functioning install and finally took it all away after 1 month's pissing around and then telling me that the line was too long and too noisy to support DSL - even though it had been running perfectly for 6 months prior!
BT's DSL is a shambles and you will see Telewest and NTL offering DSL services later - once the local loop has been unbundled and the telcos have their own network in place for the full stretch.
I'm currently waiting for a Cable modem install and will probably stick with that for a fair while to come ;o)
I hope that these guys are not planning on layering this service over existing networks becuase they're going to have to make sure that sys admins can't identify the clients to K-line their users. Adding Napster and Gnutella amounts of traffic to already busy IRC networks is just asking for disaster - I know of a few ISPs that would like a good reason to remove their IRC servers.
Personally I think that file sharing en-messe needs dedicated protocols and servers - or at the very least extensions to existing protocols and dedicated servers.
Fromm Nominet's 2000 AGM notes.
I'd like to believe that in future more and more food will be available organically but this is unlikely to be the case if GM strains of crops are allowed to spread their seeds naturally - if organic crops get contaminated it will cripple the organic farmers!
I know that there is more risk from the pollen than the seed but I believe that if the scientists working on these products can stop the plants from re-producing they should find a way to make GM pollen inert so it poses no danger to organic crops.
IS there anything that these tongan's won't sell?
Sure I'd probably run it up and leave it going on a cable line for a while but will this affect the benefits that the reflector would bring to other users and how much is it likely to detract from my network usage?
Until now I don't think there has ever been a tax levied on something that someone didn't make money on. Sure - If I bought a copy of Red Hat 7.0 and paid £50 for it then I'd expect some of that £50 to be tax for the book, the box, the time spent packing it, the CD - but not the software since it has no value to Red Hat.
Next thing you know they'll be taxing chocolate and candy higher than water because "you enjoyed the candy more"!
Price watch lists vendors for the P4 1.5Ghz unit here and some claim to have stock. Prices range from $1097 to $1198.
I'm not too sure about this. Remeber that "in the home" is not necessarily the same as "in the home of a slashdot reader". With the P4 Itel will have faster sounding chips - and a lot of people - especially when buying things to impress children or workmates who may be as equally uninformed will go for the faster sounding chip. It's the educated and people who buy from sepcialist vendors who end up buying the Athlon and Duron chips.
The only way I can see for Interl to be dead in the home is if PC vendors stop using Intel chips in the home environment - and let's face it, if that happens Intel will just make it financially more acceptable for those vendors to turn back to Intel.
Sendmail is not as hard to understand if you start from scratch and compile yourself. I have a box here which precesses 3700 emails in just under 20 minutes, each one is to a distinct address and each mail is unique so there is no change of concurrency speeding things up.
Use the m4 macros to build the config files and it's actually quite easy. That's using 8.11.0.
The WHOIS data publically available looks as follows:-
All companies who wish to administer and register domains apply to become members of Nominet, with membership you get a , this can be looked up and tell you who is technically responsible for the domain. Each domain registered is tagged with this and this allows me, with the correct PGP signature, to change any of the details on the domain.
It's up to the registering company to decide how their customers specify changes and many have automated systems of their own. And if you're wondering wether this would work for large domain spaces like .com, .org and .net then the answer is almost definately a yes - .uk is the largest country specific domain space - thanks to Nominet fees being just £5 (Thats $7.20) for two years. Some companies charge this and nothing else and many ISPs give domain names away simply for using their dial-up service.
What I'd really like to see though is an installer package either for Unix based or Windows based systems which removes CE from the sexy little iPaq and replaces it with Linux and QT Embedded - when someone does this and can demo it to me I will buy the iPaq and install this combination. Must have decent sync tools to at least let me browse the file system on the iPaq from the desktop machine btw.
Sorry - meant 2010 - but yes I have 2001 but I think it was R1.
Of course the MPAA should be getting frightened about DIVX and the new DVD to CD-R Video devices being launched.
In the UK they tried to become one of the largest ISPs by relying on their brand-name and providing content - they then offered the service free when that was seen to be the thing to do. Not long after they've decided to pull out of the dial-up market and handed all of the dial up customers to NTL (Who were providing the network anyway) and now they concentrate on the portal and content market. IT looks like something similar has happened with their US venture.
Can't you see past the "release" of the product forwards to the benefits that this can have.
AFS may well be a dead file system but there is no doubt that in it's open source state it will prove an invaluable teaching tool - not only for people that are interested in seeing how a file system works but also for people interested in seeing how IBM have written the code.
Yes it is a good bit of publicity for Big Blue but let's not let disdain for the motives of IBM's marketing department blind us to the other oportunities that their actions have presented.
802.11(whatever) was designed as a replacement for the ethernet wires that connect two PCs.
Bluetooth was designed to replace the parallel, serial, IrDA and other short range low power links between devices.
Note devices. One use for Bluetooth that the mobile phone makers Ericsson are touting is a cordless Bluetooh headset for your mobile phone, removing the transmitter from your brain and allowing easier movement etc. Another is Palm to phone connectivity, no more lining your Palm V's IrDA port up with that of your Nokia 7110 phone
One of the great ideas - although wether it would ever take off or not is another matter is micro lans which allow broadcast environmental information to be displayed on compatible devices. Imagine walking into an airport and instead of looking up at the TV screens you look down at your Palm organiser which shows you where your plane is boarding and that it's 5 minutes late. It knows the flight number because you told it and when you arrived at the airport you entered their Microlan and your Palm interroageted their systems.
All this would be possible with 802.11 but the hardware necessary and the power drain of a Medium ot long range protocol would make it bulky or impractacle(sp?).
IF this were editorial on how President Elect Gore (OK that's a bit of optimism there I know) is going to affect the Internet or technology companies then this would make sense - but it's an internal politics debate much more suited to the news pages of a domestic news site.
Since the DMOZ server has been flakey today.
Even if the product you are creating is initially only for yourself you should sit down and work out what you want - effectively gathering requirements from yourself.
After all - how the hell can you start a project with anyone in mind if you have no idea what the project is going to acheive.
Does anyone have access to the source code to truly check that they're not reusing someone else's licensed code and breaking the license agreements at the same time? I don't want to poo-poo the idea of closed cource off-the-shelf linux apps but I'd like to know that my money is going to the true developers of those apps and that the company offering them is not riding on the backs of open source developers.