Piracy issues aside, P2P networks are full of fakes, poor quality rips and garbage. For me, it's WORTH the $0.99 to know I can transfer the song right to my portable MP3 player without having to worry if it's going to break out with goose honking halfway through the song.
With PlayFair, I can quickly convert my purchased songs to play on non-Apple MP3 players. It's still all about saving time.
PlayFair allows you to strip the annoying DRM from the M4P files while preserving the metadata. Those of you saying "burn and re-rip" are missing the point. Time is a finite resourse and PlayFair makes the converting process MUCH quicker, so you can spend time enjoying your music instead of messing with it.
You can then use a utility like the free dBpowerAMP with an AAC plug-in to convert to LAME MP3, WMA or even OGG, while still preserving the metadata. The last step is to use an MP3/WMA/OGG tag utility program to use the metadata to rename the file to something more meaningful than ITMS's default "[track] [title].m4a"
I've converted over 151 protected iTunes tracks this way so I could play them on my MuVo2. With the WinAmp AAC plugin, I can also play my iTunes purchases on my old laptop that still runs Windows 98. Thank you PlayFair!
Except that Microsoft didn't make up the name "windows" it pre-dates Microsoft Windows.
And taurus pre-dates the Ford Taurus. The fact is, Microsoft uses "Windows" as a trademark as it relates to computer operating systems because at the time no one else called their operating system "Windows".
Making a soundalike name is like what cheap Taiwanese knock-off companies do... There's a relevent Simpsons quote here somewhere, but I'm too lazy to dig it up. Suffice to say, you can venture into a local dollar store and probably see a few products with blatent-attempt-to-trick-the-customer names.
If you want to compete with an established brand, you come up with your own name for a product, then you make that name mean something. Coke vs Pepsi, AMD vs Intel, Ford vs Chevorlet, Energizer vs Duracell, etc. have you noticed a trend yet?
Here's a trick I learned from all the noisy (usually metalic and exhaust sounds) Honda Civics driving around town... If you don't feel like fixing the source of the noise, drown it out with head-splitting bass!
I'm sure the engineers at NASA will have no trouble designing a high-powered space space station stereo system with plenty of earth-shattering-kaboom bass. After you've got that bitchin' system, you can focus on more important things - like installing a nice spoiler or some spinner solar panels. Even when you're in orbit, your ride must be pimp.
...but what would the fees be? Out of the reach of the small indie shops, or reasonable?
Poor talentless underdogs, my heart bleeds. If they can't afford DRM, they either shouldn't use it or they should start sucking less so they actually turn a profit. The iPod plays DRM-FREE MP3 files just fine.
Then again, why bother with DRM at all? My Dell Jukebox cost me less per GB, has a longer battery life, doesn't have any DRM, at least none that I'm aware of,
So it can play WMA but has no DRM support? That's like Satanism without the evil, it's totally pointless.
I don't get my sexuality questioned every time someone sees me use it.
Haven't had that problem... Considering the iPod has the majority of the portable audio marketshare, I highly doubt it comes into play as a factor in determining someone's sexuality. Now buying a pink mini and loading it with Ricky Martin's complete discography probably wouldn't help your case, but I digress.
Everyone bitched about how piracy was the only option since the RIAA didn't want to allow tracks to be sold online. You've been able to buy individual tracks music online now. It's not like you have to buy albums full of filler tracks anymore. Either stop listening to major label music or pay the $0.99 per track. If this was a story about GPL violations, my how the tables would be turned.
Also, everyone bitched how the RIAA was attacking the P2P networks themselves instead of the users participating in the unauthorized distribution of the copyrighted materials. The RIAA is doing exactly what everyone suggested - going after the pirates.
As for the argument that your chances of getting caught are pretty slim - yea, it's just like speeding on the highway when you're keeping up with traffic. You're still breaking the law. Just don't be surprised if in the future there's cameras along the highway that take a picture of your licence plate, and later in the mail each and every one of you get a ticket. That's what happens when you pay more attention to the methods of enforcement than the laws. Likewise, if you keep ignoring the copyright laws, eventually there will be better ways for the RIAA to catch more people and it won't be a matter of enforcement anymore.
I like the show except for the fact that Kevin and Dan keep using those stupid(as in idiotic) gangsta/hip-hop/arrest me please mannerisms and slang. Along with the drinking of 40oz bottles of malt liquor. I think it makes them look ridiculous. It diminishes the fact that these are two guys with some pretty amazing technical skills. If I want to see that kind of garbage, I'll watch some of the losers on MTV with the chains and gold teeth.
-Rob
Comp-u-thugs in the hizzouce, yo... Word up.
Actually, they're exactly how I'd picture script kiddies to be. Spoiled rotten preppy guys, destroying hardware they have plenty of money to pay for and so bored with their lives they try to act tough online to make up for the fact they're pussies in real life. Office Space is funny, watching The Broken is like getting trolled.
Last time I checked Rio "invented" the mp3 player (Oct 1998, 32MB PMP300)
Well, you should have checked more accurately... The Eiger Labs MPMan was the first portable MP3 player.
I don't have a clue who made the first hard-drive based MP3 player because until Apple came out with the iPod, hard drive players were massive barely-portable beasties.
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO.
Well, IMHO there is a reason:
Singles.
While I agree with you that if you want an album, purchasing it in its physical form and getting the uncompressed audio is the best way to go. However, if you don't want an entire album of filler to get one or two good songs, buying individual tracks online is really the only option. I've purhased over 130 songs from iTunes so far and absolutely 0 complete albums.
Of course, you could have meant piracy is a good substitute for online music stores... While I don't really give a rat's ass if the RIAA doesn't get my $0.99 per track, the quality of singles on P2P networks is really questionable as of late. I'd rather pay $0.99 for a song I know is a good quality encoding that will download quickly, than download several copies of the same song (usually with incorrect/misspelled or nonexistant ID3 metadata) to later listen to each copy and determine which isn't fucked up in some way.
"OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours"
I was under the impression that LCD displays have an indefinite lifespan if the CCFT is accessable for replacement. The average CCFT bulb costs less than $13 from JKL Lamps and is a pretty inexpensive way to keep an LCD monitor going.
Seriously. I really wish when I was a kid instead of my parents putting me in situations that just made me feel more embarassed, (Karate... BAH!!!) they would have just asked me what I wanted to do.
Truth be told, his point of frustration is probably that he's looking for more friends that have similar interests and coming up short. I never understood why so many parents and teachers look at geekiness as a deficiency, rather than admit the world is mostly full of boring dolts. Usually when a geeky child/teen is complaining he wishes he had more friends, he means more friends he CAN RELATE TO, not more braindead acquaintances. Unfortunately, as a parent or teacher, you're not an all-powerful deity able to grant his wish by creating other geeky youth for him to socialize with. Keep in mind, your trivial superficial social skills don't mean anything to geeks, so admit your advice would be inappropriate.
The answer I wish I was told when I was younger:
You can either learn to accept the fact you're interested in things that will not lead to a grand social life, or you can choose to do things you may find uninteresting to be more socially accepted. Somewhere in the middle, there's a balence. Any choice is correct, it's up to you to decide.
Somewhere buried in the bowels of eBay's user agreement, it says you have to be 18 to sign up for an account. I personally think this kid is a sleazeball, he'd fit in perfect at the RIAA. He has no problem with taking what someone else created and claiming it's his own, then cashing out when the cards are in his favor.
What was it that Wil Wheaton said about kids that let fame go to their heads? I forget, but I'm sure it will happen to this brat - the real world has ways of deflating a bloated ego.
SCO brought it on themselves, they behaved immature and childish and now they're getting an immature and childish retaliation. Someone needs to take both SCO and the virus author out of the playground and give them a good spanking.
Other than in video games, I am currently transcoding a Babylon 5 video from MPEG-2 to DivX (using Xvid) on my laptop. It is an Athlon64 3200+--the fastest laptop processor money can buy (well, strictly for video transcoding, the highest end Pentium IVs are actually slightly faster) and it takes about 6 hours for a 2hr movie, 3 hours for an episode. If I had a 20GHz Athlon64 it would still take forever.
One question, why does it take so long for your rig to convert MPEG2 to Xvid? I have an Athlon XP2000+ system running WinXP and using FlaskMPEG 0.6preview2 and the latest Xvid binaries from Nic, I get an average of 22FPS encoding rate. Considering film is 23.976FPS, I am getting almost realtime encoding speeds. Even doing a two-pass encode and adding the time it takes to do the audio afterwards (usually about 20mins per hour) would only make a 2 hour movie take a little over 5 hours or so.
Not trying to flame, just curious why your encoding speeds are so slow...
There are still many tasks for which there isn't enough computing power for. Factoring large prime numbers, encoding/editing video, rendering 3D graphics, applying audio filters, etc...
Every time a newer/faster/better CPU comes out, someone says it is not needed for the majority of computing users. While that may be true currently, who would want to tolerate using a 386SX/16 today just because current 32-bit X86 proccessors are really just souped up 386s?
If you're happy with your old processor, keep using it. No one is going to take it away from you. Chances are, you'll start to see the benefit from more powerful processors and applications that take advantage of what they can do and you'll upgrade just as you probably have in the past. You're not still using an abacus are you?
AOL has rate limiting implemented server-side. Try to send too many e-mails at one time and your AOL account gets nuked AUTOMATICALLY by a script. If you're getting spam with @aol.com as the origin, it's forged. This is EXACTLY why AOL is implenting SPF - they're probably sick of being associated with spam they are NOT The origin of!
The radio stations in my town (Orlando, FL) call pretty much all their promotional CD giveaways "Win it before you can burn it" or a similar reference to downloading music online. One of the rock stations even played a promo for awhile that basically poked fun at "little Billy" for downloading music off the internet and while they didn't say it directly, prison rape was implied with a soap dropping reference. If this promo was run as a Slashdot post, it would have been modded down as troll.
Let's face it, while an ad during the Superbowl seems like a big deal to us geeks, people ALREADY know about teens being busted by the RIAA. While the buzz has definitly gotten around to non-techie people, people just aren't getting worked up over this enough to actually do anything about it.
As much as it's considered taboo to say "downloading music is stealing" on Slashdot, that's what many people who do not download music see it as - teens getting sued by the RIAA for stealing music. It really doesn't tug on your heartstrings when that's what you see it as. You gotta remember, the average person who doesn't use P2P services probably does not understand the chances for the wrong people getting accused by the RIAA. They don't realize the RIAA is basically extorting people for absurd amounts of money to settle or face civil prosecution and all the costs associated with it. They don't realize the RIAA is abusing its monopoly and rips off its artists. All people see are teens stealing music.
I see something much more sinister in the Pepsi commercial. I see the RIAA getting its way for $1 a track. I see once insubordinate teens that have been "shown the light" by becoming corporate whores and bowing to the RIAA's will. It only took Apple 20 years to be associated with a superbowl commercial totally opposite of their 1984 vision. This time, big brother wins.
From the article (Yes, I actually RTFA), this guy mentions he had to use a DC to DC power supply instead of an inverter.
The second idea was an inverter and the original 220V power supply. This almost worked. "Almost" because there was a 50Hz noise on the audio output of the computer, that I could not manage to eliminate. Fortunately the third idea - the 12V ATX power supply did work perfectly.
Way back in the day when the Diamond Rio was a rumor and MP3-CD players didn't exist, I had a computer in my car to play MP3s. I'm surprised this guy didn't search more for the solution to using an inverter - it's really quite simple.
You first have to make sure the inverter's ground prong on the outlet is actually grounded. A lot of cheap inverters don't connect it to anything so ground "floats". Open up the inverter and connect ground to the incoming 12v NEGATIVE line.
The next thing you need to do is make sure the computers's power supply and motherboard are also grounded to the vehicle frame. If you've got the system in a metal case, it's a simple matter of running a wire from a screw on the case to screw or bolt on a metal portion of the vehicle's body.
Even with all this grounding, you'll still probably get a bit of hum from a ground loop due to poor conductivity along the vehicle's body. Radio Shack sells an inexpensive (about $10 or so) ground loop isolator that will work perfect to get rid of the rest of the noise.
See, you don't have to buy an expensive dc to dc power supply afterall.
You probably had a Pentium class machine at the time, because if you didn't, the MP3s would skip while you played them. While you probably had realtime playback if you were lucky, encoding MP3s with L3enc took forever.
Chances are, you still had some computers running Windows 3.1 (hey, Windows 95 wasn't used by everyone back in '96) so you used WinPlay3 to listen to your MP3s.
You probably did not have broadband back then, so you had to pick and choose your MP3s carefully. alt.binaries.sounds.music and search engines like oth.net (amazingly, still around!) were places to find MP3s. If you happened to have access to AOL back then, you could use AOL's "download later" feature with FTP sites so that the file would first download through AOL's fat pipe and be temporarally stored on AOL's server, so your download would continue even if the FTP site went down. Of course, if you had an ISP that gave you shitloads of shell space, you were lucky too.
Now my history is a little fuzzy, but I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them. So what to do with all these damn MP3s? Well, you kept them on your hard drive, or put them on Zip disks. Want to listen to songs you downloaded away from your computer? You recorded them via an analog connection from your soundcard to minidisc or cassette tape. Hi-Bias (chrome/metal) tapes really didn't sound that bad. I think I still have some cassettes with some oldschool MP3s on them.
I still remember the day I brought over my external Zip drive to a friend's house to show him MP3s. Yup, in true geek fashion he got really excited about being able to listen to near-CD quality audio that took forever to rip, forever to download and forever to record to tape. His father, wasn't impressed and shrugged it off as pointless. I wonder what he thinks about it today.
I still have the first MP3s I downloaded... Leeched it from the alt.binaries.sounds.music group and I'm sorry to say, it was the Macarena by Los Del Rio. I think I can forgive the 16-year-old version of me for that one.
I'll bet FedEx would hate me if I tried to ship several cubic meters of this stuff, since they charge by weight.
You haven't done much freight shipping, have you? You'll be billed out the ass for a little thing called "dimensional weight" - which in layman's terms means "ha ha, we charge you a fortune for trying to ship a massive empty balsa wood crate".
The way it works is, if something takes up too much space - you get charged for the space no matter how light the item you're shipping is. A 200LBS engine, for example, will cost MUCH less to ship than 200LBS of pre-inflated mega fun balls (so why are those things so cheap anyway?).
Considering the mass to density ratio of aerogel, if large chunks could be produced cheaply, it would still be the MOST EXPENSIVE STUFF TO SHIP on the planet. I doubt it's anything to worry about anyway... Doesn't look like this stuff is getting cheap anytime soon.
Now on the other hand, if you need to get your porn fix portably, most digital cameras with removable storage will work as portable JPG viewers.
Seriously though, this really isn't news - AOL has had parental controls for as long as I can remember, and offering content filters as an optional service isn't censorship. Yea, it sucks if you have parents that try to restrict and control every aspect of your life, but finding ways around your parents restrictions (and the experiences learned when you get caught) is half the fun of growing up.
Course, my current cell phone gets such awful reception, it sure SEEMS like my calls and text messages are being censored... Maybe it's tin-foil hat time afterall.
Slashdot Mirror
Piracy issues aside, P2P networks are full of fakes, poor quality rips and garbage. For me, it's WORTH the $0.99 to know I can transfer the song right to my portable MP3 player without having to worry if it's going to break out with goose honking halfway through the song.
With PlayFair, I can quickly convert my purchased songs to play on non-Apple MP3 players. It's still all about saving time.
It takes forever, and you lose all the metadata!
PlayFair allows you to strip the annoying DRM from the M4P files while preserving the metadata. Those of you saying "burn and re-rip" are missing the point. Time is a finite resourse and PlayFair makes the converting process MUCH quicker, so you can spend time enjoying your music instead of messing with it.
You can then use a utility like the free dBpowerAMP with an AAC plug-in to convert to LAME MP3, WMA or even OGG, while still preserving the metadata. The last step is to use an MP3/WMA/OGG tag utility program to use the metadata to rename the file to something more meaningful than ITMS's default "[track] [title].m4a"
I've converted over 151 protected iTunes tracks this way so I could play them on my MuVo2. With the WinAmp AAC plugin, I can also play my iTunes purchases on my old laptop that still runs Windows 98. Thank you PlayFair!
Except that Microsoft didn't make up the name "windows" it pre-dates Microsoft Windows.
And taurus pre-dates the Ford Taurus. The fact is, Microsoft uses "Windows" as a trademark as it relates to computer operating systems because at the time no one else called their operating system "Windows".
Making a soundalike name is like what cheap Taiwanese knock-off companies do... There's a relevent Simpsons quote here somewhere, but I'm too lazy to dig it up. Suffice to say, you can venture into a local dollar store and probably see a few products with blatent-attempt-to-trick-the-customer names.
If you want to compete with an established brand, you come up with your own name for a product, then you make that name mean something. Coke vs Pepsi, AMD vs Intel, Ford vs Chevorlet, Energizer vs Duracell, etc. have you noticed a trend yet?
Here's a trick I learned from all the noisy (usually metalic and exhaust sounds) Honda Civics driving around town... If you don't feel like fixing the source of the noise, drown it out with head-splitting bass!
I'm sure the engineers at NASA will have no trouble designing a high-powered space space station stereo system with plenty of earth-shattering-kaboom bass. After you've got that bitchin' system, you can focus on more important things - like installing a nice spoiler or some spinner solar panels. Even when you're in orbit, your ride must be pimp.
...but what would the fees be? Out of the reach of the small indie shops, or reasonable?
Poor talentless underdogs, my heart bleeds. If they can't afford DRM, they either shouldn't use it or they should start sucking less so they actually turn a profit. The iPod plays DRM-FREE MP3 files just fine.
Then again, why bother with DRM at all? My Dell Jukebox cost me less per GB, has a longer battery life, doesn't have any DRM, at least none that I'm aware of,
So it can play WMA but has no DRM support? That's like Satanism without the evil, it's totally pointless.
I don't get my sexuality questioned every time someone sees me use it.
Haven't had that problem... Considering the iPod has the majority of the portable audio marketshare, I highly doubt it comes into play as a factor in determining someone's sexuality. Now buying a pink mini and loading it with Ricky Martin's complete discography probably wouldn't help your case, but I digress.
Everyone bitched about how piracy was the only option since the RIAA didn't want to allow tracks to be sold online. You've been able to buy individual tracks music online now. It's not like you have to buy albums full of filler tracks anymore. Either stop listening to major label music or pay the $0.99 per track. If this was a story about GPL violations, my how the tables would be turned.
Also, everyone bitched how the RIAA was attacking the P2P networks themselves instead of the users participating in the unauthorized distribution of the copyrighted materials. The RIAA is doing exactly what everyone suggested - going after the pirates.
As for the argument that your chances of getting caught are pretty slim - yea, it's just like speeding on the highway when you're keeping up with traffic. You're still breaking the law. Just don't be surprised if in the future there's cameras along the highway that take a picture of your licence plate, and later in the mail each and every one of you get a ticket. That's what happens when you pay more attention to the methods of enforcement than the laws. Likewise, if you keep ignoring the copyright laws, eventually there will be better ways for the RIAA to catch more people and it won't be a matter of enforcement anymore.
I like the show except for the fact that Kevin and Dan keep using those stupid(as in idiotic) gangsta/hip-hop/arrest me please mannerisms and slang. Along with the drinking of 40oz bottles of malt liquor. I think it makes them look ridiculous. It diminishes the fact that these are two guys with some pretty amazing technical skills. If I want to see that kind of garbage, I'll watch some of the losers on MTV with the chains and gold teeth.
-Rob
Comp-u-thugs in the hizzouce, yo... Word up.
Actually, they're exactly how I'd picture script kiddies to be. Spoiled rotten preppy guys, destroying hardware they have plenty of money to pay for and so bored with their lives they try to act tough online to make up for the fact they're pussies in real life. Office Space is funny, watching The Broken is like getting trolled.
Last time I checked Rio "invented" the mp3 player (Oct 1998, 32MB PMP300)
Well, you should have checked more accurately... The Eiger Labs MPMan was the first portable MP3 player.
I don't have a clue who made the first hard-drive based MP3 player because until Apple came out with the iPod, hard drive players were massive barely-portable beasties.
Anyone else see the title and think "Rob Limo's gonna have his own olympics?"
No. Who's Rob Limo?
I cant believe its gonna miss! Now i cant throw my wicked end-of-the-world orgy-party! *sigh*
Wouldn't it suck if the world was really going to end and no girls showed up to your orgy-party? Order your REALDOLLS today while there's still time!
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO.
Well, IMHO there is a reason:
Singles.
While I agree with you that if you want an album, purchasing it in its physical form and getting the uncompressed audio is the best way to go.
However, if you don't want an entire album of filler to get one or two good songs, buying individual tracks online is really the only option. I've purhased over 130 songs from iTunes so far and absolutely 0 complete albums.
Of course, you could have meant piracy is a good substitute for online music stores... While I don't really give a rat's ass if the RIAA doesn't get my $0.99 per track, the quality of singles on P2P networks is really questionable as of late. I'd rather pay $0.99 for a song I know is a good quality encoding that will download quickly, than download several copies of the same song (usually with incorrect/misspelled or nonexistant ID3 metadata) to later listen to each copy and determine which isn't fucked up in some way.
"OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours"
I was under the impression that LCD displays have an indefinite lifespan if the CCFT is accessable for replacement. The average CCFT bulb costs less than $13 from JKL Lamps and is a pretty inexpensive way to keep an LCD monitor going.
Seriously. I really wish when I was a kid instead of my parents putting me in situations that just made me feel more embarassed, (Karate... BAH!!!) they would have just asked me what I wanted to do.
Truth be told, his point of frustration is probably that he's looking for more friends that have similar interests and coming up short. I never understood why so many parents and teachers look at geekiness as a deficiency, rather than admit the world is mostly full of boring dolts. Usually when a geeky child/teen is complaining he wishes he had more friends, he means more friends he CAN RELATE TO, not more braindead acquaintances. Unfortunately, as a parent or teacher, you're not an all-powerful deity able to grant his wish by creating other geeky youth for him to socialize with. Keep in mind, your trivial superficial social skills don't mean anything to geeks, so admit your advice would be inappropriate.
The answer I wish I was told when I was younger:
You can either learn to accept the fact you're interested in things that will not lead to a grand social life, or you can choose to do things you may find uninteresting to be more socially accepted. Somewhere in the middle, there's a balence. Any choice is correct, it's up to you to decide.
Somewhere buried in the bowels of eBay's user agreement, it says you have to be 18 to sign up for an account. I personally think this kid is a sleazeball, he'd fit in perfect at the RIAA. He has no problem with taking what someone else created and claiming it's his own, then cashing out when the cards are in his favor.
What was it that Wil Wheaton said about kids that let fame go to their heads? I forget, but I'm sure it will happen to this brat - the real world has ways of deflating a bloated ego.
But I'd take a Linksys over a hacked Mars Rover anyday... Billions cheaper, ya know.
SCO brought it on themselves, they behaved immature and childish and now they're getting an immature and childish retaliation. Someone needs to take both SCO and the virus author out of the playground and give them a good spanking.
Other than in video games, I am currently transcoding a Babylon 5 video from MPEG-2 to DivX (using Xvid) on my laptop. It is an Athlon64 3200+--the fastest laptop processor money can buy (well, strictly for video transcoding, the highest end Pentium IVs are actually slightly faster) and it takes about 6 hours for a 2hr movie, 3 hours for an episode. If I had a 20GHz Athlon64 it would still take forever.
One question, why does it take so long for your rig to convert MPEG2 to Xvid? I have an Athlon XP2000+ system running WinXP and using FlaskMPEG 0.6preview2 and the latest Xvid binaries from Nic, I get an average of 22FPS encoding rate. Considering film is 23.976FPS, I am getting almost realtime encoding speeds. Even doing a two-pass encode and adding the time it takes to do the audio afterwards (usually about 20mins per hour) would only make a 2 hour movie take a little over 5 hours or so.
Not trying to flame, just curious why your encoding speeds are so slow...
There are still many tasks for which there isn't enough computing power for. Factoring large prime numbers, encoding/editing video, rendering 3D graphics, applying audio filters, etc...
Every time a newer/faster/better CPU comes out, someone says it is not needed for the majority of computing users. While that may be true currently, who would want to tolerate using a 386SX/16 today just because current 32-bit X86 proccessors are really just souped up 386s?
If you're happy with your old processor, keep using it. No one is going to take it away from you. Chances are, you'll start to see the benefit from more powerful processors and applications that take advantage of what they can do and you'll upgrade just as you probably have in the past. You're not still using an abacus are you?
AOL has rate limiting implemented server-side. Try to send too many e-mails at one time and your AOL account gets nuked AUTOMATICALLY by a script. If you're getting spam with @aol.com as the origin, it's forged. This is EXACTLY why AOL is implenting SPF - they're probably sick of being associated with spam they are NOT The origin of!
Red planet gets probe
hopefully finds ocean proof
U.S. eats free shrimp
The radio stations in my town (Orlando, FL) call pretty much all their promotional CD giveaways "Win it before you can burn it" or a similar reference to downloading music online. One of the rock stations even played a promo for awhile that basically poked fun at "little Billy" for downloading music off the internet and while they didn't say it directly, prison rape was implied with a soap dropping reference. If this promo was run as a Slashdot post, it would have been modded down as troll.
Let's face it, while an ad during the Superbowl seems like a big deal to us geeks, people ALREADY know about teens being busted by the RIAA. While the buzz has definitly gotten around to non-techie people, people just aren't getting worked up over this enough to actually do anything about it.
As much as it's considered taboo to say "downloading music is stealing" on Slashdot, that's what many people who do not download music see it as - teens getting sued by the RIAA for stealing music. It really doesn't tug on your heartstrings when that's what you see it as. You gotta remember, the average person who doesn't use P2P services probably does not understand the chances for the wrong people getting accused by the RIAA. They don't realize the RIAA is basically extorting people for absurd amounts of money to settle or face civil prosecution and all the costs associated with it. They don't realize the RIAA is abusing its monopoly and rips off its artists. All people see are teens stealing music.
I see something much more sinister in the Pepsi commercial. I see the RIAA getting its way for $1 a track. I see once insubordinate teens that have been "shown the light" by becoming corporate whores and bowing to the RIAA's will. It only took Apple 20 years to be associated with a superbowl commercial totally opposite of their 1984 vision. This time, big brother wins.
It's a good thing I drink coke.
From the article (Yes, I actually RTFA), this guy mentions he had to use a DC to DC power supply instead of an inverter.
The second idea was an inverter and the original 220V power supply. This almost worked. "Almost" because there was a 50Hz noise on the audio output of the computer, that I could not manage to eliminate. Fortunately the third idea - the 12V ATX power supply did work perfectly.
Way back in the day when the Diamond Rio was a rumor and MP3-CD players didn't exist, I had a computer in my car to play MP3s. I'm surprised this guy didn't search more for the solution to using an inverter - it's really quite simple.
You first have to make sure the inverter's ground prong on the outlet is actually grounded. A lot of cheap inverters don't connect it to anything so ground "floats". Open up the inverter and connect ground to the incoming 12v NEGATIVE line.
The next thing you need to do is make sure the computers's power supply and motherboard are also grounded to the vehicle frame. If you've got the system in a metal case, it's a simple matter of running a wire from a screw on the case to screw or bolt on a metal portion of the vehicle's body.
Even with all this grounding, you'll still probably get a bit of hum from a ground loop due to poor conductivity along the vehicle's body. Radio Shack sells an inexpensive (about $10 or so) ground loop isolator that will work perfect to get rid of the rest of the noise.
See, you don't have to buy an expensive dc to dc power supply afterall.
Let's go back to '96...
You ripped CDs with Christoph Schmelnik's Digital Audio Copy (DAC) for DOS because well, ripping under Windows 95 just didn't work.
You probably had a Pentium class machine at the time, because if you didn't, the MP3s would skip while you played them. While you probably had realtime playback if you were lucky, encoding MP3s with L3enc took forever.
Chances are, you still had some computers running Windows 3.1 (hey, Windows 95 wasn't used by everyone back in '96) so you used WinPlay3 to listen to your MP3s.
You probably did not have broadband back then, so you had to pick and choose your MP3s carefully. alt.binaries.sounds.music and search engines like oth.net (amazingly, still around!) were places to find MP3s. If you happened to have access to AOL back then, you could use AOL's "download later" feature with FTP sites so that the file would first download through AOL's fat pipe and be temporarally stored on AOL's server, so your download would continue even if the FTP site went down. Of course, if you had an ISP that gave you shitloads of shell space, you were lucky too.
Now my history is a little fuzzy, but I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them. So what to do with all these damn MP3s? Well, you kept them on your hard drive, or put them on Zip disks. Want to listen to songs you downloaded away from your computer? You recorded them via an analog connection from your soundcard to minidisc or cassette tape. Hi-Bias (chrome/metal) tapes really didn't sound that bad. I think I still have some cassettes with some oldschool MP3s on them.
I still remember the day I brought over my external Zip drive to a friend's house to show him MP3s. Yup, in true geek fashion he got really excited about being able to listen to near-CD quality audio that took forever to rip, forever to download and forever to record to tape. His father, wasn't impressed and shrugged it off as pointless. I wonder what he thinks about it today.
I still have the first MP3s I downloaded... Leeched it from the alt.binaries.sounds.music group and I'm sorry to say, it was the Macarena by Los Del Rio. I think I can forgive the 16-year-old version of me for that one.
I'll bet FedEx would hate me if I tried to ship several cubic meters of this stuff, since they charge by weight.
You haven't done much freight shipping, have you? You'll be billed out the ass for a little thing called "dimensional weight" - which in layman's terms means "ha ha, we charge you a fortune for trying to ship a massive empty balsa wood crate".
The way it works is, if something takes up too much space - you get charged for the space no matter how light the item you're shipping is. A 200LBS engine, for example, will cost MUCH less to ship than 200LBS of pre-inflated mega fun balls (so why are those things so cheap anyway?).
Considering the mass to density ratio of aerogel, if large chunks could be produced cheaply, it would still be the MOST EXPENSIVE STUFF TO SHIP on the planet. I doubt it's anything to worry about anyway... Doesn't look like this stuff is getting cheap anytime soon.
Now on the other hand, if you need to get your porn fix portably, most digital cameras with removable storage will work as portable JPG viewers.
Seriously though, this really isn't news - AOL has had parental controls for as long as I can remember, and offering content filters as an optional service isn't censorship. Yea, it sucks if you have parents that try to restrict and control every aspect of your life, but finding ways around your parents restrictions (and the experiences learned when you get caught) is half the fun of growing up.
Course, my current cell phone gets such awful reception, it sure SEEMS like my calls and text messages are being censored... Maybe it's tin-foil hat time afterall.