>Yeah but cd3o's software only runs on winxp or 2000.
Not quite. Someone has written a Linux server for the cd3o. They've also added on Ogg Vorbis support.
It isn't controllable from a web browser on another computer, but I believe you could access the Windows PC remotely and control the server that way. There might be other methods outlined in the Support forum. It's not of any interest to me - I only own one computer. I was going to build a separate media PC for streaming audio, but the cd3o eliminated that need. I just added a couple of 160GB drives to my Windows PC, and kept the PC (and its noisy fans) in my bedroom, far from the living room stereo.
>cd3o is $199 now with special pricing, looks like it was >240 or 250 without it.
They've been selling it at the price for months now. It might as well be the list price.
I'm not sure how you're "freeing up" your Windows box by tossing a huge drive in your Linux box. I'd rather have the giant drive in a Windows system - they're more likely to need that kind of storage, and Windows seems to still have better media management tools than Linux.
Also, the cd3o is designed to function without a display. I have one - love it - and wouldn't trade it for any of the display-based units out there today.
>The SLIMP3 was first. The cd3o beat Slim Devices to >market with wireless and digital out, but that is it.
Actually, they beat them to market with several features:
* Wireless * Uncompressed streams (the SLIMP3 was MP3-only) * Voice guide * Support for tagged uncompressed files * Support for Windows Media Audio
>If you like the cd3o's remote better, guess what, >you could probably modify the SLIMP3/Squeezebox >code to be able to use it.
Guess what - if I'm paying $300 for a device that does the same thing as a $200 gadget, I'd expect it to be superior in every way (including the remote).
>That is the power of open source. Missing features >can be added by whoever wants to take the time to >implement them.
cd3o has also released documentation regarding the control protocol for their media receiver, although obviously since they support WMA they can't release all of their source. But I'm not buying any gadget based on the promise of what it *might* be able to do tomorrow (assuming the company survives until tomorrow).
Looks like they're finally catching up to where cd3o has already been for the past year - a wireless media receiver that can play uncompressed streams. I like the fact the Squeezebox can apparently transcode to uncompressed PCM from other formats (like.ogg) on the fly - cd3o doesn't support that feature yet - but it also costs $100 more than the cd3o.
Worse, it apparently doesn't support any kind of tagging for.WAV files or other uncompressed files. The cd3o supports MusicMatch's.WAV tagging abilities, allowing you to seamlessly integrate both compressed and uncompressed files into your library. And the cd3o also sports a better remote and their "voice guide", which eliminates the need for any kind of physical display. The Squeezebox has a nice little display, but the keyword here is little. There's no way you'd be able to read that from across a large room without a telescope, and managing playlists on it would be impossible.
As it stands, I'd still give the edge to cd3o, provided they get their act together concerning the ability to transcode other formats to uncompressed PCM for streaming to the receiver. But it is nice to see their design approach being validated by their competitors.
I recently purchased Seasonic's 300 watt Super Tornado (they should have called it "Silent Tornado") power supply, and it's *very* quiet. It uses a 120mm fan mounted on the interior surface of the power supply instead of the traditional 80mm fan mounted at the back of the PC. That alone helps to slash the amount of noise the fan makes, but the power supply is also the most efficient you can buy, which means it generates less waste heat than any other power supply its size. So not only will it cut the noise, it'll also cut your power bill.
The power supply also comes with a nifty set of cable-management goodies - wire wraps and ties. Cost about $60, should pay for itself with a couple of years of use. A few people reported problems with an early run of this unit - the fan received so little voltage when the case temp and power requirements were low it would sometimes squeal or chatter - but Seasonic quickly fixed it. Shouldn't be an issue now - mine doesn't suffer from the problem, but then I've got two hard drives, two CD ROMs, 512mb of RAM and an Athlon, so the system is probably always drawing enough power to keep the fan spinning faster than the minimum speed.
The PSU fan isn't the only culprit in system noise, though. Although it's traditionally been parked right at the edge of the case, where the sound can most easily bleed into the room, the CPU fan is probably the #1 offender. I picked up one of these Cooler Master squirrel cage fan coolers recently from newegg.com and I'm pretty happy with it. It makes a LOT less noise than a traditional fan, given the amount of air it moves, and it's not outrageously heavy like some of the giant heat-sink coolers out there. Makes about half as much noise as my old CPU cooler and keeps the chip just as cool with the fan cranked to about half speed. Curiously, running it full blast doesn't make the chip substantially cooler, but it does generate a lot more noise - I think the limiting factor is the relatively small aluminum heat sink (the copper model they sell might be a better option for hotter chips, but my Athlon XP 1800 isn't that bad). Another benefit is that the noise generated by this cooler is lower in frequency than the noise generated by other coolers - less a whine than a whirr, with a bit of rumble too (the cooler does cause a bit of low-pitched vibration in the case).
I also purchased Samsung's new 160GB SpinPoint drives, and they're effectively pretty damn silent. No whine, no noticeable spin noise, no seek noise audible from where I sit (at least, not over the other sounds emanating from the case). About the only issue I have with them - or had with them - is a bit of vibration that setup a buzzing in a removable drive bay I've got in my system. I pretty much solved that by putting vinyl grommets in the mounting holes of the drive bay.
The silentpcreview website is the best one I've found on the web for reviewing quiet hardware and practical modding ideas. You may want to read through some of their articles and the forums. Interesting stuff.
How much were VCR's when they frst came out? $1000. Today, $50. Calculators? $120. Today? Mostly free.
Yeah, but this Yamaha gadget *isn't* the first of its kind. People have been streaming audio using a PC or Mac as a server for several years now. Apple already has a PORTABLE music server that better-leverages the power of the average home PC. Yamaha's simply selling a dedicated, stripped-down, undersized (80GB is a joke) audio server for a whopping $2200. It's a rip-off.
For $2200, you could buy one of those new desk lamp iMacs and a 300 gigabyte external Firewire hard drive, and rip a sizeable CD library *uncompressed* to your drive, using the iMac as your "dedicated" audio server. And the iMac has its own silent LCD display - you don't have to use a noisy, power-sucking television as your display. There are wireless USB remotes available as well, and most Mac media rippers/players are simple to use. In fact, they look simpler than Yamaha's solution, yet they have greater flexibility. For example, an iMac CD burner won't force you to use the more expensive "audio" CD's, the way Yamaha's audio "server" does.
Of course, if you already have a PC, devices like the cd3o make even more sense, at 1/10th the price of Yamaha's gadget.
Dedicated *storage* devices like this aren't going to make it in the marketplace - too many disparate interfaces to use, too much proprietary crap, too difficult to update the software to keep up with changing standards, and too much media is starting to flow into the home through the PC (mp3's, Divx video, and now iTunes purchases). Home media libraries are exploding in size - 80GB isn't going to cut it. The future belongs to simple client devices that harness the growing storage and processing power of the average desktop PC, making it easy to access your media in other locations in (and out) of your home. The iPod is a good example of the "out of your home" variety, a client when connected to your PC, a server when you're on the go. The cd3o, SliMP3 and AudioTron are good examples of the "around your home" variety. I'm sure a Tivo-like device is coming soon for video too, now that home wireless bandwidth is sufficient to support compressed a/v streams. Yamaha is *way* behind the curve on this one.
I have one too - we're talking about it in the "What A Rip-Off" thread. The cd3o gadget does most of what Yamaha's "solution" accomplishes for about 1/10th the cost, leveraging the processing power of (and the hard drive space available in) your own PC. It's a much cooler solution, as the PC makes it much easier to manage your library and all that tag information - a daunting task when you have hundreds of CD's containing thousands of songs. Most PC CD-ROM and RW drives can also rip discs a lot faster than Yamaha's "server". For two-grand plus, you'd think they'd at least include a 56x CD-ROM drive and a bigger hard drive! 80GB? That won't even hold 160 uncompressed CD's. I've got 2 160GB drives in my PC, one full of.WAV and.MP3 files, and the other sporting an additional 30GB worth.
And my library isn't even all that large - maybe 350 discs, tops. I know people who own more than 2,000 CD's. I also deleted tracks that I hate and compressed tracks I don't particularly care for, or that feature sub-standard fidelity to begin with. If I'd been more of a purist, I'd probably have an additional 30-60GB of audio to deal with.
Oh, and while the cd3o client currently only runs on Windows, the player itself runs Linux.
The unit itself runs Linux too, although the PC clients are still Windoze only. I'm surprised/. hasn't given them more coverage. The project isn't open source - they used some commercial libraries for their playlist management, and the WMA stuff obviously isn't open source - but it's not a black box, either. You can write stuff to talk to it yourself and pass data. My wishlist for the device includes:
* Improved reliability. In my Windows XP setup, sometimes the box locks for no apparent reason. Could be an issue with my wireless router - most users aren't reporting this problem, FWIW. I've taken to putting my cd3o on the switched outlet of my receiver, so it power cycles whenever I turn the stereo off. That seems to have pretty much eliminated the problem, though I have to wait a minute before playing any audio for the cd3o to boot and connect to my PC.
* Support for lossless compression formats. It does support WAV files - thank goodness, and unlike some other players (SliMP3, which transcodes WAVs to MP3 before transmission) - but it doesn't support FLAC or the Meridian Lossless Compression standard utilized by DVD-Audio and available in the latest version of Windows Media Player. MLP is the one thing that could get me to switch to Microsoft's WMA format (though I'd prefer FLAC). I know 50% compression doesn't sound like much, but I've got over 200 *gigabytes* of audio filling up my hard drives, and if I could knock that back down to 120 gigs or so I'd be a happy camper.
* An improved Windows client for library / playlist management. The one cd3o provides right now works, but it's not terribly powerful.
* An improved voice guide with a volume control. Because right now, the voice is still kind of annoying, and it's sometimes too loud.
* Support for volume leveling of music. MusicMatch Jukebox - cd3o's recommended ripper/tagger - tags WAV and MP3 files with volume leveling information. It would be nice if the cd3o could make use of it. (MM Jukebox is greatly improved over earlier versions, FWIW. It still isn't perfect, but for a commercial product it isn't awful and it makes managing music metadata a lot simpler.)
I can tell you that once you've used a device like this you'll never want to go back to fiddling with discs. Set your entire library on random and let it rip - it's like having your own radio station. Devices like these are going to kill broadcast radio as we know it.
And I haven't even fiddled with creating custom playlists yet, or cleaning up my music metadata so that I can play songs by genre or year, for example. The metadata cleanup is going to be a HUGE issue - it could literally take weeks of work to get a large library into order. I've also got to find some way to backup all this crap . . .
The voice is annoying, but the next software release is supposed to allow you to change it. They use the standard Windows voice synth doo-dad, which I'm assuming will continue to get better over time. Truth be told, my favorite "playlist" is my entire music collection, switched to random mode, so I don't utilize their voice guide all that often anyway. In random mode all kinds of nifty stuff crops up that I'd forgotten about, and some of the transitions are inspired.
A small display - like you'd find on a CD player - is useless for managing a giant music library from across the room. cd3o's voice guide is far more practical. That's one reason why I bypassed devices like Turtle Beach's AudioTron and the SliMP3 - you can't read their small fixed displays from the other side of the room without a telescope. A unit with a fixed display would either need a huge LCD screen of its own (costly and difficult to fit into your average stereo cabinet) or an external display it could utilize (meaning you'd have to leave your television on in order to play music - a noisy, power-sucking inconvenience).
The only way I could see a display-based interface working is if the display were fitted to an iPod-like remote with a jog wheel and a few buttons. But a remote like that would probably cost $50 just by itself, even mass-produced. After all, it would need to stay in constant two-way wireless contact with the computer in order to know what's in the library.
Actually, I should have said "audio" server instead of "MP3 server" in my earlier post, as the cd3o supports MP3, Windows Media Audio and plain vanilla WAV files. It also "reads" MusicMatch tags on WAV files, so you can finally provide the kind of metadata for WAVs that MP3 and WMA files have enjoyed.
Why would anyone with a PC buy one of these spendy Yamaha units when they could buy something like this for $200 and use their computer as a massive MP3 server? It's wireless, supports playlists, and doesn't even require a display (which is a huge plus - who wants to hear the whine of a television set while they're trying to listen to music?).
>If you visit rural area and swap there you have serious >chances to run into dying set that could hold only half >of the normal amount...
Huh? Why would batteries out there be any worse than batteries in the city? The same state agencies would regulate them, in the same way gas stations are regulated today. They'd be getting the same supply of batteries as every other service station in the country, so there's certainly no reason for their batteries to be any worse than anyone else's. And it would be trivial to put a system into place to track all batteries in use, their condition at last charge, who purchased them, how many recharges they have left before being decommissioned/recycled, etc.
>That's not simple at all. Besides weight problem already mentioned, >the problem I see is that batteries degrade. When a driver swaps his >discharged battery for a charged battery, the service station has no >way to tell what condition the driver's batteries are in.
And how many drivers carry some kind of kit with them today to test the quality of the gasoline they're getting at a service station? This strikes me as a non-issue - the same kind of regulations and enforcement that ensure drivers aren't buying watered down gasoline today would have to be put into place to ensure batteries were properly conditioned and in good working order before being handed over to customers.
>The service center could be getting a worthless (unchargeable) battery >while he's giving you a brand new one for the cost of the charge in the >battery. Heck the drivers could exchange new batteries for old ones >on the black market for a healthy profit while all the service centers >are going out of business.
Again, this strikes me as a non-issue. If we can make printer cartridges that self-destruct, we should be able to make batteries with enough internal smarts to monitor and report their own condition, their immediate history, whether or not that customer was authorized to trade in that battery (or had absconded with some batteries he purchased earlier) and to refuse to be charged by non-authorized parties. Since drivers would constantly be exchanging new batteries for old ones instead of recharging the vehicles themselves, there would be a constant mix of newer and older batteries in use in the market. Nobody would hold on to batteries or charge them themselves. The batteries themselves would be designed to make that virtually impossible, and anyhow, the service stations' chargers would be far superior to anything most consumers could afford to purchase themselves.
>Us push-button Americans aren't going to be getting out of our >cars to lug packs and packs of heavy batteries around.
As I noted in my post, the mechanism for pulling batteries out and swapping them with fresh models would have to be counterweighted in some way. I'm thinking about something that would look like a giant-sized version of a dentist's x-ray machine. Of course, there are other options as well - the batteries could drop out the bottom of the car onto a hydraulic platform, be carried underground, and replaced by another set that came up using the same hydraulic lift.
>You'd have to give up your entire trunk just to store the >batteries in an accessible place.
Maybe. But you might be able to make up for it by placing cargo space at the front of the car. Or mount the batteries beneath the car the way gas tanks are today, and swap using an automated hydraulic system. Really, none of these problems are insurmountable. They simply require rethinking the overall design of the car, not necessarily giving up functionality or convenience. Electric cars are fundamentally different from gasoline-powered cars, and come with their own unique design requirements. But I don't think those requirements are any "better" or "worse" - only different.
There's a fairly simple solution to that problem, and it's the same one we use for portable electronics - when the batteries are dead, swap them out for a new set. It would require standardized battery designs and altering the general layout of cars slightly. Essentially a hatch to the battery compartment would be placed somewhere on the car - probably at the rear of the trunk in most sedan-style vehicles - that would pop open to reveal several perhaps circular bays, each containing cylindrical battery (think giant AA battery). You'd slide in some kind of counterweighted gadget - like a giant socket wrench - twist it to unlock the battery from its bay and lock it into the changer, then pull it out and swap it for a fresh battery. The bigger the car, the more cells it would take. There might even be a couple different sizes of cells (but not too many). You wouldn't "own" the batteries, and they wouldn't be a permanent part of your car. The batteries would belong to whoever runs the service stations - you'd just be buying the energy, and perhaps paying a large deposit on the batteries which would be refunded (or transferred) when you swapped 'em for a new set.
Storage of all those batteries would take up a lot of space, but it could be placed beneath the "battery stations" in the same way gas tanks are placed beneath gas stations, with dumbwaiter-like devices used to ferry batteries back and forth. And the fixed stations could afford to employ far more efficient, faster, heavier (and hence more costly) chargers than you could ever shoehorn into a car.
Battery technology isn't there yet, but thanks to advances in the computer and portable electronics industries, it's not outrageous to imagine a time when batteries will become efficient enough to make such a system possible.
I have to admit I'm less-than-impressed by the new BTX standard. Allowing for larger CPU heatsinks is a solid advance, but the ATX standard could have been modified to require that kind of offset without necessitating the switch to new case designs. Placing the CPU closer to an air intake is another plus, but again I see no reason why the ATX standard couldn't have been modified to allow for this as well.
I'm also less-than-impressed by the way the cooling solution has been implemented. Utilizing two small fans - one pushing air into the case in the front, for cooling the CPU, and another in the power supply sucking air out of the case, as has been traditionally done in PCs - strikes me as a bit goofy. You're going to get a relatively narrow channel of cool air flowing into the PC, most of it passing over the CPU and picking up a lot of heat. I don't see any cooling directed at the hard drives, which are a major source of heat these days in most cases. Given the diagrams displayed so far, the drives and the expansion cards all seem to be sitting in an area of dead air outside the channel formed by the relatively large CPU intake fan and the surrounding ductwork.
From a noise perspective BTX also doesn't look like much of an improvement. You'll still have 2 fans, as you do in many conventional case designs, and both of them are located on the outer edge of the PC, meaning their noise is going to blast directly into the room. The fans are slightly larger (90mm it looks like) than conventional PC and CPU cooling fans, so they'll be able to rev a little lower, but the improvement certainly won't be dramatic.
If they were going to go to the trouble of making this design almost completely incompatible with ATX, they should have gone all the way and produced something a little more revolutionary. For starters, they should have moved the fans deeper inside the case, where their noise would be less likely to enter the room, and increased the size of the fans to at least 120mm (or utilized squirrel cage fans). One possibility would be to mount an efficient 120mm fan on the interior face of the power supply, as Seasonic has done recently on its "Tornado" line of power supplies. Using such a large fan to exhaust hot air through the power supply could also generate a powerful flow of fresh air into the case, while its position on the inner edge of the power supply would help suppress the transmission of sound into the room. Careful placement of vent holes on the front of the case as well as the incorporation of plastic duct work such as that specified for the BTX "cooling module" could then be utilized to ensure the CPU, hard drives, RAM and expansion cards were all guaranteed an adequate supply of cool fresh air.
And all of this could be accomplished with only minor revisions to the existing ATX standard, while components designed around this standard (such as the new Seasonic-style power supplies) would benefit owners of older computers and cases as well.
Hyper-commercial and poorly designed
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CNET News.com Turns 7
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I used to frequent CNet every day back around 1999, and I found them to be a timely, valuable resource. But something happened in early 2001, and they began to go downhill rapidly. The site design became cluttered and severely commercialized, to the point where it became difficult to get a page to load properly - even over a DSL connection - because of all the junk slapped on it.
The sluggish performance and cluttered pages would be worth trudging through if there were some solid content behind them. Their hardware and software reviews were once top notch, but now I can find better elsewhere - Tom's Hardware, for example, or a slew of specialized sites (silentpcreview, for example, or mini-itx). Even the amateur reviews at Epinions or Amazon are more informative (taken in aggregate).
My first mouse came with my old Atari 520ST back in '86. I believe Atari was the first company to ship mice with little Teflon pads on the bottom, instead of plastic stumps like the Mac's mouse had. Atari's mouse felt a lot smoother than more expensive models from other manufacturers as a result, although I never thought it looked as nice as the Mac's mouse, and the buttons felt a bit cheap. Had two of 'em though, which was another advantage over the Mac's.
Today most computer mice come with little Teflon pads on the bottom.
How on earth did this post get modded up to "informative"???? Practically everything in it is either partially or wholly inaccurate.
>This is the prime error Atari made. Back >in the day, they let everyone make carts >for the system.
Eh? The VCS was one of the first home gaming system with interchangeable games. I don't think anyone had given the slightest consideration at that point to locking down the system so that only the manufacturer could produce games for it. Atari didn't, "let everyone make carts for the system." The VCS came out in '77, and didn't have a huge hit until 1980, when Atari licensed Space Invaders. That was the same year the 1st 3rd party developer came online - Activision.
Check out this site for a capsule history of the VCS.
>The console remained on the market too long. >Atari sat on its ass until sometime around late 83-84.
Huh? The 5200 came out in early-mid 1982. It was a huge improvement on the VCS, being based on Atari's line of 8-bit computers. Probably its only major failing - and this helped killed the system in the market - were the large, non-centering joysticks that were difficult to use in many games (Pac-Man being a fine example) and prone to failure.
Again, check out the same site for a capsule history of the 5200.
>Tramiel's bumbling. Jack Tramiel proved in 1983 that >he was the worst manager in recorded history. He took >a company that controlled 95% of its market and flushed >it down the crapper. In 1983, Atari lost over 500 million >dollars (and the whole industry at the time was only worth >about (3 billion at best). At some points Atari was losing >millions of dollars a day.
How could you be MORE wrong??? Warner Communications unloaded Atari on Jack Tramiel *because* it was losing $500 million and they had no idea how to stop the bleeding. Tramiel didn't even arrive at Atari until July of 1984, after he'd lost a fight with the board of directors at Commodore and left the company he'd started. It's a little hard to blame him for Atari's losing $500 million in 1983 . ..
Actually, maybe you CAN pin the blame on him, since a lot of Atari's home videogame and computer sales were probably being lost to a little personal computer Tramiel's Commodore made. Perhaps you've heard of it. It was called the Commodore 64.
Again, here's yet another site, this one detailing the history of Atari's 8-bit computers, that brings up Tramiel's role in all of this (and some of the stuff he really did probably do wrong at Atari).
There are several other factual errors in your post, but I don't have the time this morning to correct the remainder. If Atari had made as many mistakes as your post did, they'd have gone out of business in the mid-'70s and we'd have never heard from them again.
The machines doing the monitoring wouldn't even need to be running a Microsoft operating system in order to be taken offline by a worm that exploits one of the NUMEROUS security holes in Windows. The non-Microsoft machines - or monitoring devices they rely upon - could be knocked offline by the flood of packets generated by compromised Windows boxes on the same network.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the big news to come out of the whole incident, and it's apparently being suppressed by the mainstream media - the MS Blaster Worm could have caused the blackout. Here's what the article has to say on the subject, referencing problems with an earlier worm at a nuclear plant:
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The Slammer worm penetrated the plant's internal network and lodged in an unpatched Windows server. The worm's scanning slowed the internal network to a crawl, eventually crashing the plant's Safety Parameter Display System, according to reports.
While legacy control systems are often UNIX-based ("Control-Alt-Delete scares power plant operators," Ahern said) and thus immune to MS worms and virii, their 10-megabit networking technologies can easily be overwhelmed. "Even the load from leading intrusion detection and monitoring systems can create a denial of service and shut these plants down," Ahern said.
Even though DOE and other sources ruled out cyber attack as a cause for this month's blackouts, Ahern said that control systems are so wide open that no one has the data to credibly make that determination.
----
How long is it going to take for our corporate clowns and the government it bought & paid for to realize that Microsoft Windows is a collection of security holes with a pretty front end? Is it going to take something even MORE spectacular - nuclear meltdowns, planes falling out of the sky, chemical plants belching toxic clouds - before the pinheads in power wake up to the danger Windows represents?
Windows is a proven threat to every other system and device on the Internet or connected to anything on the Internet - even devices which themselves don't run Windows. The government should be mandating that Microsoft institute a crash program to close ALL of the known security holes and obvious vulnerabilities in Windows, and to do so immediately. Close all those damn ports already, and kill all the useless services and the ability to run code from the fucking e-mail program. It's not like M$ doesn't have a few billion to burn mailing patch CDs out to all of its customers.
>And of course this is just as true (if not more so) with >the modern atheistic regimes. I would wager that Stalin's >terror famine and various purges and show trials killed >far more people (both in terms of percentage of population >and in absolute numbers) than the inquisition and certainly >far, far more than the Salem witch trials.
There's no evidence that these horrible "atheist" regimes of modern times are proportionally worse than their theistic counterparts, as this page demonstrates.
As for nitpicking the totals killed by the Inquisition (at least 32,000 - some place the number as high as 350,000) and the Salem witch trials, that rather seems to be missing the point. Those are only two out of thousands of examples of instances where the pious slaughtered those of another religion - or even members of their own religion - for some loonie religious cause. And that doesn't even take into consideration the Christian and Moslem slave trade out of Africa, which slaughtered at least 40 million over the centuries in which the trade operated, perhaps as many as 120 million. That latter figure would give the religious a healthy lead on the atheists in absolute numbers, not even taking into account the massive increase in global population that had taken place by the 20th century.
Of course, the Mongols make everybody look like amateurs. They slaughtered 40 million in the 13th century, putting them on par with Mao and WWII. That's pretty impressive, given that the global population at the time was under 500 million. China's population dropped from 115 million to 85 million between 1200 and 1300 as a result of their "efforts."
As the author of the site referenced above concludes:
"In a way, it's rather disheartening to realize that we can't smugly blame the brutality of the [20th] century on the Communists, or the imperialists, or the Moslem fundamentalists, or the godless. Every major category of human has done it's share to boost the body count, so replacing, say, Moslem rulers with Christian rulers, or white rulers with black rulers, is not going to change it at all."
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>Yeah but cd3o's software only runs on winxp or 2000.
Not quite. Someone has written a Linux server for the cd3o. They've also added on Ogg Vorbis support.
It isn't controllable from a web browser on another computer, but I believe you could access the Windows PC remotely and control the server that way. There might be other methods outlined in the Support forum. It's not of any interest to me - I only own one computer. I was going to build a separate media PC for streaming audio, but the cd3o eliminated that need. I just added a couple of 160GB drives to my Windows PC, and kept the PC (and its noisy fans) in my bedroom, far from the living room stereo.
>cd3o is $199 now with special pricing, looks like it was
>240 or 250 without it.
They've been selling it at the price for months now. It might as well be the list price.
I'm not sure how you're "freeing up" your Windows box by tossing a huge drive in your Linux box. I'd rather have the giant drive in a Windows system - they're more likely to need that kind of storage, and Windows seems to still have better media management tools than Linux.
The cd3o media receiver itself runs Linux, BTW.
Also, the cd3o is designed to function without a display. I have one - love it - and wouldn't trade it for any of the display-based units out there today.
I believe someone has written a Linux server for the cd3o. Check out their support message board.
>The SLIMP3 was first. The cd3o beat Slim Devices to
>market with wireless and digital out, but that is it.
Actually, they beat them to market with several features:
* Wireless
* Uncompressed streams (the SLIMP3 was MP3-only)
* Voice guide
* Support for tagged uncompressed files
* Support for Windows Media Audio
>If you like the cd3o's remote better, guess what,
>you could probably modify the SLIMP3/Squeezebox
>code to be able to use it.
Guess what - if I'm paying $300 for a device that does the same thing as a $200 gadget, I'd expect it to be superior in every way (including the remote).
>That is the power of open source. Missing features
>can be added by whoever wants to take the time to
>implement them.
cd3o has also released documentation regarding the control protocol for their media receiver, although obviously since they support WMA they can't release all of their source. But I'm not buying any gadget based on the promise of what it *might* be able to do tomorrow (assuming the company survives until tomorrow).
Looks like they're finally catching up to where cd3o has already been for the past year - a wireless media receiver that can play uncompressed streams. I like the fact the Squeezebox can apparently transcode to uncompressed PCM from other formats (like .ogg) on the fly - cd3o doesn't support that feature yet - but it also costs $100 more than the cd3o.
.WAV files or other uncompressed files. The cd3o supports MusicMatch's .WAV tagging abilities, allowing you to seamlessly integrate both compressed and uncompressed files into your library. And the cd3o also sports a better remote and their "voice guide", which eliminates the need for any kind of physical display. The Squeezebox has a nice little display, but the keyword here is little. There's no way you'd be able to read that from across a large room without a telescope, and managing playlists on it would be impossible.
Worse, it apparently doesn't support any kind of tagging for
As it stands, I'd still give the edge to cd3o, provided they get their act together concerning the ability to transcode other formats to uncompressed PCM for streaming to the receiver. But it is nice to see their design approach being validated by their competitors.
I recently purchased Seasonic's 300 watt Super Tornado (they should have called it "Silent Tornado") power supply, and it's *very* quiet. It uses a 120mm fan mounted on the interior surface of the power supply instead of the traditional 80mm fan mounted at the back of the PC. That alone helps to slash the amount of noise the fan makes, but the power supply is also the most efficient you can buy, which means it generates less waste heat than any other power supply its size. So not only will it cut the noise, it'll also cut your power bill.
The power supply also comes with a nifty set of cable-management goodies - wire wraps and ties. Cost about $60, should pay for itself with a couple of years of use. A few people reported problems with an early run of this unit - the fan received so little voltage when the case temp and power requirements were low it would sometimes squeal or chatter - but Seasonic quickly fixed it. Shouldn't be an issue now - mine doesn't suffer from the problem, but then I've got two hard drives, two CD ROMs, 512mb of RAM and an Athlon, so the system is probably always drawing enough power to keep the fan spinning faster than the minimum speed.
The PSU fan isn't the only culprit in system noise, though. Although it's traditionally been parked right at the edge of the case, where the sound can most easily bleed into the room, the CPU fan is probably the #1 offender. I picked up one of these Cooler Master squirrel cage fan coolers recently from newegg.com and I'm pretty happy with it. It makes a LOT less noise than a traditional fan, given the amount of air it moves, and it's not outrageously heavy like some of the giant heat-sink coolers out there. Makes about half as much noise as my old CPU cooler and keeps the chip just as cool with the fan cranked to about half speed. Curiously, running it full blast doesn't make the chip substantially cooler, but it does generate a lot more noise - I think the limiting factor is the relatively small aluminum heat sink (the copper model they sell might be a better option for hotter chips, but my Athlon XP 1800 isn't that bad). Another benefit is that the noise generated by this cooler is lower in frequency than the noise generated by other coolers - less a whine than a whirr, with a bit of rumble too (the cooler does cause a bit of low-pitched vibration in the case).
I also purchased Samsung's new 160GB SpinPoint drives, and they're effectively pretty damn silent. No whine, no noticeable spin noise, no seek noise audible from where I sit (at least, not over the other sounds emanating from the case). About the only issue I have with them - or had with them - is a bit of vibration that setup a buzzing in a removable drive bay I've got in my system. I pretty much solved that by putting vinyl grommets in the mounting holes of the drive bay.
The silentpcreview website is the best one I've found on the web for reviewing quiet hardware and practical modding ideas. You may want to read through some of their articles and the forums. Interesting stuff.
Does this mean a networked version of M*U*L*E would finally become possible? Sweet!
How much were VCR's when they frst came out? $1000. Today, $50.
Calculators? $120. Today? Mostly free.
Yeah, but this Yamaha gadget *isn't* the first of its kind. People have been streaming audio using a PC or Mac as a server for several years now. Apple already has a PORTABLE music server that better-leverages the power of the average home PC. Yamaha's simply selling a dedicated, stripped-down, undersized (80GB is a joke) audio server for a whopping $2200. It's a rip-off.
For $2200, you could buy one of those new desk lamp iMacs and a 300 gigabyte external Firewire hard drive, and rip a sizeable CD library *uncompressed* to your drive, using the iMac as your "dedicated" audio server. And the iMac has its own silent LCD display - you don't have to use a noisy, power-sucking television as your display. There are wireless USB remotes available as well, and most Mac media rippers/players are simple to use. In fact, they look simpler than Yamaha's solution, yet they have greater flexibility. For example, an iMac CD burner won't force you to use the more expensive "audio" CD's, the way Yamaha's audio "server" does.
Of course, if you already have a PC, devices like the cd3o make even more sense, at 1/10th the price of Yamaha's gadget.
Dedicated *storage* devices like this aren't going to make it in the marketplace - too many disparate interfaces to use, too much proprietary crap, too difficult to update the software to keep up with changing standards, and too much media is starting to flow into the home through the PC (mp3's, Divx video, and now iTunes purchases). Home media libraries are exploding in size - 80GB isn't going to cut it. The future belongs to simple client devices that harness the growing storage and processing power of the average desktop PC, making it easy to access your media in other locations in (and out) of your home. The iPod is a good example of the "out of your home" variety, a client when connected to your PC, a server when you're on the go. The cd3o, SliMP3 and AudioTron are good examples of the "around your home" variety. I'm sure a Tivo-like device is coming soon for video too, now that home wireless bandwidth is sufficient to support compressed a/v streams. Yamaha is *way* behind the curve on this one.
I have one too - we're talking about it in the "What A Rip-Off" thread. The cd3o gadget does most of what Yamaha's "solution" accomplishes for about 1/10th the cost, leveraging the processing power of (and the hard drive space available in) your own PC. It's a much cooler solution, as the PC makes it much easier to manage your library and all that tag information - a daunting task when you have hundreds of CD's containing thousands of songs. Most PC CD-ROM and RW drives can also rip discs a lot faster than Yamaha's "server". For two-grand plus, you'd think they'd at least include a 56x CD-ROM drive and a bigger hard drive! 80GB? That won't even hold 160 uncompressed CD's. I've got 2 160GB drives in my PC, one full of .WAV and .MP3 files, and the other sporting an additional 30GB worth.
And my library isn't even all that large - maybe 350 discs, tops. I know people who own more than 2,000 CD's. I also deleted tracks that I hate and compressed tracks I don't particularly care for, or that feature sub-standard fidelity to begin with. If I'd been more of a purist, I'd probably have an additional 30-60GB of audio to deal with.
Oh, and while the cd3o client currently only runs on Windows, the player itself runs Linux.
The unit itself runs Linux too, although the PC clients are still Windoze only. I'm surprised /. hasn't given them more coverage. The project isn't open source - they used some commercial libraries for their playlist management, and the WMA stuff obviously isn't open source - but it's not a black box, either. You can write stuff to talk to it yourself and pass data. My wishlist for the device includes:
* Improved reliability. In my Windows XP setup, sometimes the box locks for no apparent reason. Could be an issue with my wireless router - most users aren't reporting this problem, FWIW. I've taken to putting my cd3o on the switched outlet of my receiver, so it power cycles whenever I turn the stereo off. That seems to have pretty much eliminated the problem, though I have to wait a minute before playing any audio for the cd3o to boot and connect to my PC.
* Support for lossless compression formats. It does support WAV files - thank goodness, and unlike some other players (SliMP3, which transcodes WAVs to MP3 before transmission) - but it doesn't support FLAC or the Meridian Lossless Compression standard utilized by DVD-Audio and available in the latest version of Windows Media Player. MLP is the one thing that could get me to switch to Microsoft's WMA format (though I'd prefer FLAC). I know 50% compression doesn't sound like much, but I've got over 200 *gigabytes* of audio filling up my hard drives, and if I could knock that back down to 120 gigs or so I'd be a happy camper.
* An improved Windows client for library / playlist management. The one cd3o provides right now works, but it's not terribly powerful.
* An improved voice guide with a volume control. Because right now, the voice is still kind of annoying, and it's sometimes too loud.
* Support for volume leveling of music. MusicMatch Jukebox - cd3o's recommended ripper/tagger - tags WAV and MP3 files with volume leveling information. It would be nice if the cd3o could make use of it. (MM Jukebox is greatly improved over earlier versions, FWIW. It still isn't perfect, but for a commercial product it isn't awful and it makes managing music metadata a lot simpler.)
I can tell you that once you've used a device like this you'll never want to go back to fiddling with discs. Set your entire library on random and let it rip - it's like having your own radio station. Devices like these are going to kill broadcast radio as we know it.
And I haven't even fiddled with creating custom playlists yet, or cleaning up my music metadata so that I can play songs by genre or year, for example. The metadata cleanup is going to be a HUGE issue - it could literally take weeks of work to get a large library into order. I've also got to find some way to backup all this crap . . .
The voice is annoying, but the next software release is supposed to allow you to change it. They use the standard Windows voice synth doo-dad, which I'm assuming will continue to get better over time. Truth be told, my favorite "playlist" is my entire music collection, switched to random mode, so I don't utilize their voice guide all that often anyway. In random mode all kinds of nifty stuff crops up that I'd forgotten about, and some of the transitions are inspired.
A small display - like you'd find on a CD player - is useless for managing a giant music library from across the room. cd3o's voice guide is far more practical. That's one reason why I bypassed devices like Turtle Beach's AudioTron and the SliMP3 - you can't read their small fixed displays from the other side of the room without a telescope. A unit with a fixed display would either need a huge LCD screen of its own (costly and difficult to fit into your average stereo cabinet) or an external display it could utilize (meaning you'd have to leave your television on in order to play music - a noisy, power-sucking inconvenience).
The only way I could see a display-based interface working is if the display were fitted to an iPod-like remote with a jog wheel and a few buttons. But a remote like that would probably cost $50 just by itself, even mass-produced. After all, it would need to stay in constant two-way wireless contact with the computer in order to know what's in the library.
Actually, I should have said "audio" server instead of "MP3 server" in my earlier post, as the cd3o supports MP3, Windows Media Audio and plain vanilla WAV files. It also "reads" MusicMatch tags on WAV files, so you can finally provide the kind of metadata for WAVs that MP3 and WMA files have enjoyed.
Why would anyone with a PC buy one of these spendy Yamaha units when they could buy something like this for $200 and use their computer as a massive MP3 server? It's wireless, supports playlists, and doesn't even require a display (which is a huge plus - who wants to hear the whine of a television set while they're trying to listen to music?).
At least now I (and many like me) won't have to pay any money just to dabble with Maya.
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So, Tony was pimpin' her out, eh? Figures. Beer-brewing freak. You can take the boy out of the Mafia . .
I'd be careful "dabbling" with Maya, though. When she turns herself into one of these and rips your gonads off, you'll think "personal use".
>If you visit rural area and swap there you have serious
>chances to run into dying set that could hold only half
>of the normal amount...
Huh? Why would batteries out there be any worse than batteries in the city? The same state agencies would regulate them, in the same way gas stations are regulated today. They'd be getting the same supply of batteries as every other service station in the country, so there's certainly no reason for their batteries to be any worse than anyone else's. And it would be trivial to put a system into place to track all batteries in use, their condition at last charge, who purchased them, how many recharges they have left before being decommissioned/recycled, etc.
>That's not simple at all. Besides weight problem already mentioned,
>the problem I see is that batteries degrade. When a driver swaps his
>discharged battery for a charged battery, the service station has no
>way to tell what condition the driver's batteries are in.
And how many drivers carry some kind of kit with them today to test the quality of the gasoline they're getting at a service station? This strikes me as a non-issue - the same kind of regulations and enforcement that ensure drivers aren't buying watered down gasoline today would have to be put into place to ensure batteries were properly conditioned and in good working order before being handed over to customers.
>The service center could be getting a worthless (unchargeable) battery
>while he's giving you a brand new one for the cost of the charge in the
>battery. Heck the drivers could exchange new batteries for old ones
>on the black market for a healthy profit while all the service centers
>are going out of business.
Again, this strikes me as a non-issue. If we can make printer cartridges that self-destruct, we should be able to make batteries with enough internal smarts to monitor and report their own condition, their immediate history, whether or not that customer was authorized to trade in that battery (or had absconded with some batteries he purchased earlier) and to refuse to be charged by non-authorized parties. Since drivers would constantly be exchanging new batteries for old ones instead of recharging the vehicles themselves, there would be a constant mix of newer and older batteries in use in the market. Nobody would hold on to batteries or charge them themselves. The batteries themselves would be designed to make that virtually impossible, and anyhow, the service stations' chargers would be far superior to anything most consumers could afford to purchase themselves.
>Us push-button Americans aren't going to be getting out of our
>cars to lug packs and packs of heavy batteries around.
As I noted in my post, the mechanism for pulling batteries out and swapping them with fresh models would have to be counterweighted in some way. I'm thinking about something that would look like a giant-sized version of a dentist's x-ray machine. Of course, there are other options as well - the batteries could drop out the bottom of the car onto a hydraulic platform, be carried underground, and replaced by another set that came up using the same hydraulic lift.
>You'd have to give up your entire trunk just to store the
>batteries in an accessible place.
Maybe. But you might be able to make up for it by placing cargo space at the front of the car. Or mount the batteries beneath the car the way gas tanks are today, and swap using an automated hydraulic system. Really, none of these problems are insurmountable. They simply require rethinking the overall design of the car, not necessarily giving up functionality or convenience. Electric cars are fundamentally different from gasoline-powered cars, and come with their own unique design requirements. But I don't think those requirements are any "better" or "worse" - only different.
>1) Lengthy refuelling time
There's a fairly simple solution to that problem, and it's the same one we use for portable electronics - when the batteries are dead, swap them out for a new set. It would require standardized battery designs and altering the general layout of cars slightly. Essentially a hatch to the battery compartment would be placed somewhere on the car - probably at the rear of the trunk in most sedan-style vehicles - that would pop open to reveal several perhaps circular bays, each containing cylindrical battery (think giant AA battery). You'd slide in some kind of counterweighted gadget - like a giant socket wrench - twist it to unlock the battery from its bay and lock it into the changer, then pull it out and swap it for a fresh battery. The bigger the car, the more cells it would take. There might even be a couple different sizes of cells (but not too many). You wouldn't "own" the batteries, and they wouldn't be a permanent part of your car. The batteries would belong to whoever runs the service stations - you'd just be buying the energy, and perhaps paying a large deposit on the batteries which would be refunded (or transferred) when you swapped 'em for a new set.
Storage of all those batteries would take up a lot of space, but it could be placed beneath the "battery stations" in the same way gas tanks are placed beneath gas stations, with dumbwaiter-like devices used to ferry batteries back and forth. And the fixed stations could afford to employ far more efficient, faster, heavier (and hence more costly) chargers than you could ever shoehorn into a car.
Battery technology isn't there yet, but thanks to advances in the computer and portable electronics industries, it's not outrageous to imagine a time when batteries will become efficient enough to make such a system possible.
All -
I have to admit I'm less-than-impressed by the new BTX standard. Allowing for larger CPU heatsinks is a solid advance, but the ATX standard could have been modified to require that kind of offset without necessitating the switch to new case designs. Placing the CPU closer to an air intake is another plus, but again I see no reason why the ATX standard couldn't have been modified to allow for this as well.
I'm also less-than-impressed by the way the cooling solution has been implemented. Utilizing two small fans - one pushing air into the case in the front, for cooling the CPU, and another in the power supply sucking air out of the case, as has been traditionally done in PCs - strikes me as a bit goofy. You're going to get a relatively narrow channel of cool air flowing into the PC, most of it passing over the CPU and picking up a lot of heat. I don't see any cooling directed at the hard drives, which are a major source of heat these days in most cases. Given the diagrams displayed so far, the drives and the expansion cards all seem to be sitting in an area of dead air outside the channel formed by the relatively large CPU intake fan and the surrounding ductwork.
From a noise perspective BTX also doesn't look like much of an improvement. You'll still have 2 fans, as you do in many conventional case designs, and both of them are located on the outer edge of the PC, meaning their noise is going to blast directly into the room. The fans are slightly larger (90mm it looks like) than conventional PC and CPU cooling fans, so they'll be able to rev a little lower, but the improvement certainly won't be dramatic.
If they were going to go to the trouble of making this design almost completely incompatible with ATX, they should have gone all the way and produced something a little more revolutionary. For starters, they should have moved the fans deeper inside the case, where their noise would be less likely to enter the room, and increased the size of the fans to at least 120mm (or utilized squirrel cage fans). One possibility would be to mount an efficient 120mm fan on the interior face of the power supply, as Seasonic has done recently on its "Tornado" line of power supplies. Using such a large fan to exhaust hot air through the power supply could also generate a powerful flow of fresh air into the case, while its position on the inner edge of the power supply would help suppress the transmission of sound into the room. Careful placement of vent holes on the front of the case as well as the incorporation of plastic duct work such as that specified for the BTX "cooling module" could then be utilized to ensure the CPU, hard drives, RAM and expansion cards were all guaranteed an adequate supply of cool fresh air.
And all of this could be accomplished with only minor revisions to the existing ATX standard, while components designed around this standard (such as the new Seasonic-style power supplies) would benefit owners of older computers and cases as well.
I used to frequent CNet every day back around 1999, and I found them to be a timely, valuable resource. But something happened in early 2001, and they began to go downhill rapidly. The site design became cluttered and severely commercialized, to the point where it became difficult to get a page to load properly - even over a DSL connection - because of all the junk slapped on it.
The sluggish performance and cluttered pages would be worth trudging through if there were some solid content behind them. Their hardware and software reviews were once top notch, but now I can find better elsewhere - Tom's Hardware, for example, or a slew of specialized sites (silentpcreview, for example, or mini-itx). Even the amateur reviews at Epinions or Amazon are more informative (taken in aggregate).
Frankly, I'm amazed CNet has lasted this long.
My first mouse came with my old Atari 520ST back in '86. I believe Atari was the first company to ship mice with little Teflon pads on the bottom, instead of plastic stumps like the Mac's mouse had. Atari's mouse felt a lot smoother than more expensive models from other manufacturers as a result, although I never thought it looked as nice as the Mac's mouse, and the buttons felt a bit cheap. Had two of 'em though, which was another advantage over the Mac's.
Today most computer mice come with little Teflon pads on the bottom.
How on earth did this post get modded up to "informative"???? Practically everything in it is either partially or wholly inaccurate.
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>This is the prime error Atari made. Back
>in the day, they let everyone make carts
>for the system.
Eh? The VCS was one of the first home gaming system with interchangeable games. I don't think anyone had given the slightest consideration at that point to locking down the system so that only the manufacturer could produce games for it. Atari didn't, "let everyone make carts for the system." The VCS came out in '77, and didn't have a huge hit until 1980, when Atari licensed Space Invaders. That was the same year the 1st 3rd party developer came online - Activision.
Check out this site for a capsule history of the VCS.
>The console remained on the market too long.
>Atari sat on its ass until sometime around late 83-84.
Huh? The 5200 came out in early-mid 1982. It was a huge improvement on the VCS, being based on Atari's line of 8-bit computers. Probably its only major failing - and this helped killed the system in the market - were the large, non-centering joysticks that were difficult to use in many games (Pac-Man being a fine example) and prone to failure.
Again, check out the same site for a capsule history of the 5200.
>Tramiel's bumbling. Jack Tramiel proved in 1983 that
>he was the worst manager in recorded history. He took
>a company that controlled 95% of its market and flushed
>it down the crapper. In 1983, Atari lost over 500 million
>dollars (and the whole industry at the time was only worth
>about (3 billion at best). At some points Atari was losing
>millions of dollars a day.
How could you be MORE wrong??? Warner Communications unloaded Atari on Jack Tramiel *because* it was losing $500 million and they had no idea how to stop the bleeding. Tramiel didn't even arrive at Atari until July of 1984, after he'd lost a fight with the board of directors at Commodore and left the company he'd started. It's a little hard to blame him for Atari's losing $500 million in 1983 . .
Actually, maybe you CAN pin the blame on him, since a lot of Atari's home videogame and computer sales were probably being lost to a little personal computer Tramiel's Commodore made. Perhaps you've heard of it. It was called the Commodore 64.
Again, here's yet another site, this one detailing the history of Atari's 8-bit computers, that brings up Tramiel's role in all of this (and some of the stuff he really did probably do wrong at Atari).
There are several other factual errors in your post, but I don't have the time this morning to correct the remainder. If Atari had made as many mistakes as your post did, they'd have gone out of business in the mid-'70s and we'd have never heard from them again.
The machines doing the monitoring wouldn't even need to be running a Microsoft operating system in order to be taken offline by a worm that exploits one of the NUMEROUS security holes in Windows. The non-Microsoft machines - or monitoring devices they rely upon - could be knocked offline by the flood of packets generated by compromised Windows boxes on the same network.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the big news to come out of the whole incident, and it's apparently being suppressed by the mainstream media - the MS Blaster Worm could have caused the blackout. Here's what the article has to say on the subject, referencing problems with an earlier worm at a nuclear plant:
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The Slammer worm penetrated the plant's internal network and lodged in an unpatched Windows server. The worm's scanning slowed the internal network to a crawl, eventually crashing the plant's Safety Parameter Display System, according to reports.
While legacy control systems are often UNIX-based ("Control-Alt-Delete scares power plant operators," Ahern said) and thus immune to MS worms and virii, their 10-megabit networking technologies can easily be overwhelmed. "Even the load from leading intrusion detection and monitoring systems can create a denial of service and shut these plants down," Ahern said.
Even though DOE and other sources ruled out cyber attack as a cause for this month's blackouts, Ahern said that control systems are so wide open that no one has the data to credibly make that determination.
----
How long is it going to take for our corporate clowns and the government it bought & paid for to realize that Microsoft Windows is a collection of security holes with a pretty front end? Is it going to take something even MORE spectacular - nuclear meltdowns, planes falling out of the sky, chemical plants belching toxic clouds - before the pinheads in power wake up to the danger Windows represents?
Windows is a proven threat to every other system and device on the Internet or connected to anything on the Internet - even devices which themselves don't run Windows. The government should be mandating that Microsoft institute a crash program to close ALL of the known security holes and obvious vulnerabilities in Windows, and to do so immediately. Close all those damn ports already, and kill all the useless services and the ability to run code from the fucking e-mail program. It's not like M$ doesn't have a few billion to burn mailing patch CDs out to all of its customers.
>And of course this is just as true (if not more so) with
>the modern atheistic regimes. I would wager that Stalin's
>terror famine and various purges and show trials killed
>far more people (both in terms of percentage of population
>and in absolute numbers) than the inquisition and certainly
>far, far more than the Salem witch trials.
There's no evidence that these horrible "atheist" regimes of modern times are proportionally worse than their theistic counterparts, as this page demonstrates.
As for nitpicking the totals killed by the Inquisition (at least 32,000 - some place the number as high as 350,000) and the Salem witch trials, that rather seems to be missing the point. Those are only two out of thousands of examples of instances where the pious slaughtered those of another religion - or even members of their own religion - for some loonie religious cause. And that doesn't even take into consideration the Christian and Moslem slave trade out of Africa, which slaughtered at least 40 million over the centuries in which the trade operated, perhaps as many as 120 million. That latter figure would give the religious a healthy lead on the atheists in absolute numbers, not even taking into account the massive increase in global population that had taken place by the 20th century.
Of course, the Mongols make everybody look like amateurs. They slaughtered 40 million in the 13th century, putting them on par with Mao and WWII. That's pretty impressive, given that the global population at the time was under 500 million. China's population dropped from 115 million to 85 million between 1200 and 1300 as a result of their "efforts."
As the author of the site referenced above concludes:
"In a way, it's rather disheartening to realize that we can't smugly blame the brutality of the [20th] century on the Communists, or the imperialists, or the Moslem fundamentalists, or the godless. Every major category of human has done it's share to boost the body count, so replacing, say, Moslem rulers with Christian rulers, or white rulers with black rulers, is not going to change it at all."