Launch.com has a pretty good "my station" feature. Basically, you go through and rate genres and individual artists on a 0(never play)-100(play often) scale. It will randomly play music for you, alternating between stuff you've recommended and stuff it thinks you might like. Although they do play more ads now than before yahoo bought them, their system does still work pretty well.
A slashdot article already talked about this opt-in email. basically, using such a system will kill email as we know it. If spammers force you to use an opt-in system, they've succeeded not in selling their products, but in destroying email.
Of course it does. And owning two copies gives you the right to upload one of them, to, say, a p2p sharing network while keeping the other for your own enjoyment.
And yet, amazingly, I still see tons of people using Netscape 7, having never heard of Mozilla. I even told one person about mozilla and phoenix, and after trying them, they decided to stick with netscape. Guess brand name does mean something after all.
For the BSD angle, you could set them loose with a FreeBSD mini install, and then let them build a system from the ground up using ports/packages. I found that to be a great introduction to how BSD and NIX systems work.
I also like to chew on things. Once I had a phone cord on my desk, not connected to anything. I started chewing on the connector, but it pinched my tongue. Looking at it, I couldn't figure out what had pinched me. So, of course, I just stuck it back in my mouth. This time, it pinched me a lot harder, and I hadn't done anything. This was about the time that I noticed the phone cord *was* in fact plugged into an active outlet. Oops.
(For those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, active phone cords carry electricity. When an active electrical wire touches something wet and conductive (such as a tongue) it causes a shock, which often feels a lot like being pinched)
As mentioned above, the article's poster was incorrect. The correct (currently) order of nt servers is: nt3, nt3.5, nt4, 2000,.NET, Blackcomb.
Longhorn was to come between.NET and blackcomb, but.net keeps getting pushed back (2003ish now) that it didn't make sense to target another release for 1-2 years later.
This site has done essentially this for years, though it's been getting far more commercialized (read: ads) since being bought by yahoo. You go through a list of genres and optionally artists, and rate them from 0-100, 0 being never play, and 100 being i love this band. Then, launch will play music for you (though you can't request a specific song for some legal RIAA reason), choosing from both stuff you've rated and stuff it thinks you'd like. Every song it plays has a little rate button next to it, so if you hear something you like, rate it hightly. If it chose something you don't like, rate it lower.
On many occasions, it's picked and played bands for me that I really like, but had just forgotten to rate.
Granted, it playes mostly known artists, but why couldn't something similar be done for free artists?
MIT's been doing this for years. Every student who registers is given a kerberos "identity" which they can use to generate a certificate for each computer/browser. This certificate is required to access any records etc, and is used by many classes to access videos of lectures, etc. even the most techno-illiterate students (at mit, but still) have no trouble using the system.
If canada is able to implement a similar system with the security that MIT has, it sounds like a great idea.
The biggest problem with a for-pay p2p service is the fact that it's p2p. Why would I pay someone else for the right to download music from you? It would make more sense for me to pay to download music from a distributor. Napster was never meant to be a pay service, and has no way to guarantee quality of anything. If I'm paying for it, I'd better be damn sure the quality is what I expect (i.e. better than a 128kbps that someone taped off the radio and then transferred to his computer by playing the tape near a microphone while sneezing in the background).
So, in other words, paying for a pure p2p system (ie napster) makes absolutely no sense.
Actually, freenet does exactly that. When you use freenet, you store someone else's data on your computer. However, it's encrypted so you never have any idea what you're storing. And you also don't have the only copy of it, so if you delete all your partial encrypted data, it doesn't cease to exist.
Re:Too late. The cat is out of the bag.
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 1
And, actually, mozart didn't have any copyright etc laws, and so protected his musical scores with his life. No one else (besides his dad, who was also his manager) was ever allowed to see them, for fear of them being copied.
Sorry for that, but I visited his childhood home last summer:-)
In about 4 hours, I'll be heading off to Boston to start my freshman year at MIT, generally considered to be a pretty good engineering school (I'm going to try to go into EECS).
We have a ton of general ed requirements. My 5's on both AP English tests earned me no credit, so I still have to take all the GE. Also, there is a PE requirement, as well as a swimming test. Yes, every graduate of MIT must be able to swit a certain distance.
There's some interesting information here about the engineering programs.
I just found the actual GE (mit calls them GIR) requirements: ( here ) you must take 6 science courses and 8 humanities, arts, and social sciences courses.
I guess my point is that some schools are already doing this to a point. Of course, MIT isn't fully endowed....
Bolo is perhaps the best mac game created. However, it generally requires a network and people to play against, but I think there are some bot versions availiable.
However, herin lies the fundamental difference between IA-64 (Itanium) and x86-64 (Opteron). The Itanium is a 64-bit chip, and is fundamentally different from x86. But it has an emulation layer that allows it to run x86 code if the need arises. The x86 code won't run as fast, since the chip isn't designed to run it.
x86-64, on the other hand, is like the 32-bit extentions to the 16-bit x86, which came with the 386. The chip is still a 32-bit x86 (or actually a 16-bit (8 maybe?), which is capable, but not optimized, to run 32 bit code, and now capable, but still not optimized, to run 64-bit code.
People constantly complain about the fact that x86 sucks - here's finally a chance to do something about it (ala the mac powerpc change) and everyone starts whining.
If you haven't guessed already, I vote for Itanium. If Intel, Microsoft, and the Linux people do it well, it *can* be a transparent transition, again like the mac powerpc switch. Joe-blow gets a shiny new Itanium dell, which lets him run the latest and greatest software, but he can still run dos 1.0 programs, albeit not quite a quickly as he did on his Pentium 7 (ITanium isn't quite on the desktop yet), but still plenty fast enough.
Actually, I'm willing to bet they release it for FreeBSD as well as windows. The MS source for the CLI,CLR (can't remember what the acro's mean) and other bits can compile itself for FreeBSD already here.
Wall-Mart is NOT censoring anything. They are simply saying "we won't sell your product unless you change this." That is perfectly legal, every company has the right to decide with whom they do business, based on whatever they want to (excluding race, gender, etc).
However, the fact that Wall-Mart is big enough to influence what others are selling, and to influence what the magazine's are printing seems illegal to me. I don't know enough about anti-trust laws, but it doesn't seem like Wall-Mart should be able to tell other companies what to do. To me, this seems like an improper use of Wall-Mart's huge market share.
So perhaps we now have a new 800-pound gorilla to contend with.
I have an old RCA Lyra that has no internal memory, just uses CF cards. Interestingly enough, the firmware doesn't support ANY media types at all. When you copy music to it, via Real Jukebox or WMP (it has plugins for both) it copies a small decoder program to the card as well. It takes it a little longer to start up as it has to load the decoder, and it only loads one decoder at a time, so playing a wma then an mp3 causes a delay, but it can theoretically play any format.
However, I've never tried playing ogg vorbis on it, so I don't know if a similar decoder exists or if it's possible to write one. I would assume that it shouldn't be too difficult to add support for that or for FLAC.
That's part of the point of this new disc. It has both a lower-quality cd layer (by lower-quality, I mean current cd-quality) and a high-quality layer (higher quality than is possible with a standard cd). Thus, if you want to, it will play in a standard cd player, and copy to mp3, at current cd-quality. However, if you want to use the higher audio quality, or special features such as lyrics or videos, you have to use the new layer, which might feature copy-protection.
So there is an added benefit for consumers, and if you don't think it's worth it, just continue using it as a standard cd.
Slashdot Mirror
Launch.com has a pretty good "my station" feature. Basically, you go through and rate genres and individual artists on a 0(never play)-100(play often) scale. It will randomly play music for you, alternating between stuff you've recommended and stuff it thinks you might like. Although they do play more ads now than before yahoo bought them, their system does still work pretty well.
A slashdot article already talked about this opt-in email. basically, using such a system will kill email as we know it. If spammers force you to use an opt-in system, they've succeeded not in selling their products, but in destroying email.
Actually, I believe they signed a contract stating that they had the right to include it.
Of course it does. And owning two copies gives you the right to upload one of them, to, say, a p2p sharing network while keeping the other for your own enjoyment.
They're working fine from Boston. Must just be an NYC thing.
And yet, amazingly, I still see tons of people using Netscape 7, having never heard of Mozilla. I even told one person about mozilla and phoenix, and after trying them, they decided to stick with netscape. Guess brand name does mean something after all.
For the BSD angle, you could set them loose with a FreeBSD mini install, and then let them build a system from the ground up using ports/packages. I found that to be a great introduction to how BSD and NIX systems work.
Somewhat related (but somewhat not),
I also like to chew on things. Once I had a phone cord on my desk, not connected to anything. I started chewing on the connector, but it pinched my tongue. Looking at it, I couldn't figure out what had pinched me. So, of course, I just stuck it back in my mouth. This time, it pinched me a lot harder, and I hadn't done anything. This was about the time that I noticed the phone cord *was* in fact plugged into an active outlet. Oops.
(For those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, active phone cords carry electricity. When an active electrical wire touches something wet and conductive (such as a tongue) it causes a shock, which often feels a lot like being pinched)
As mentioned above, the article's poster was incorrect. The correct (currently) order of nt servers is: nt3, nt3.5, nt4, 2000, .NET, Blackcomb.
.NET and blackcomb, but .net keeps getting pushed back (2003ish now) that it didn't make sense to target another release for 1-2 years later.
Longhorn was to come between
This site has done essentially this for years, though it's been getting far more commercialized (read: ads) since being bought by yahoo. You go through a list of genres and optionally artists, and rate them from 0-100, 0 being never play, and 100 being i love this band. Then, launch will play music for you (though you can't request a specific song for some legal RIAA reason), choosing from both stuff you've rated and stuff it thinks you'd like. Every song it plays has a little rate button next to it, so if you hear something you like, rate it hightly. If it chose something you don't like, rate it lower.
On many occasions, it's picked and played bands for me that I really like, but had just forgotten to rate.
Granted, it playes mostly known artists, but why couldn't something similar be done for free artists?
And actually, most of the things mentioned IE can already do, in some cases better than Moz.
"the real deal is if they put wince on a strongARM and use RDP + 802.11b to get to the x86 on your desk "
Check out mira.
MIT's been doing this for years. Every student who registers is given a kerberos "identity" which they can use to generate a certificate for each computer/browser. This certificate is required to access any records etc, and is used by many classes to access videos of lectures, etc. even the most techno-illiterate students (at mit, but still) have no trouble using the system.
If canada is able to implement a similar system with the security that MIT has, it sounds like a great idea.
The biggest problem with a for-pay p2p service is the fact that it's p2p. Why would I pay someone else for the right to download music from you? It would make more sense for me to pay to download music from a distributor. Napster was never meant to be a pay service, and has no way to guarantee quality of anything. If I'm paying for it, I'd better be damn sure the quality is what I expect (i.e. better than a 128kbps that someone taped off the radio and then transferred to his computer by playing the tape near a microphone while sneezing in the background).
So, in other words, paying for a pure p2p system (ie napster) makes absolutely no sense.
Actually, freenet does exactly that. When you use freenet, you store someone else's data on your computer. However, it's encrypted so you never have any idea what you're storing. And you also don't have the only copy of it, so if you delete all your partial encrypted data, it doesn't cease to exist.
And, actually, mozart didn't have any copyright etc laws, and so protected his musical scores with his life. No one else (besides his dad, who was also his manager) was ever allowed to see them, for fear of them being copied.
:-)
Sorry for that, but I visited his childhood home last summer
In about 4 hours, I'll be heading off to Boston to start my freshman year at MIT, generally considered to be a pretty good engineering school (I'm going to try to go into EECS).
We have a ton of general ed requirements. My 5's on both AP English tests earned me no credit, so I still have to take all the GE. Also, there is a PE requirement, as well as a swimming test. Yes, every graduate of MIT must be able to swit a certain distance.
There's some interesting information here about the engineering programs.
I just found the actual GE (mit calls them GIR) requirements: ( here )
you must take 6 science courses and 8 humanities, arts, and social sciences courses.
I guess my point is that some schools are already doing this to a point. Of course, MIT isn't fully endowed....
That's true. NeoNapster is a ripoff of Gnucleus, as is the new morpheus.
http://bishop.mc.duke.edu/bolo/
Bolo is perhaps the best mac game created. However, it generally requires a network and people to play against, but I think there are some bot versions availiable.
However, herin lies the fundamental difference between IA-64 (Itanium) and x86-64 (Opteron). The Itanium is a 64-bit chip, and is fundamentally different from x86. But it has an emulation layer that allows it to run x86 code if the need arises. The x86 code won't run as fast, since the chip isn't designed to run it.
x86-64, on the other hand, is like the 32-bit extentions to the 16-bit x86, which came with the 386. The chip is still a 32-bit x86 (or actually a 16-bit (8 maybe?), which is capable, but not optimized, to run 32 bit code, and now capable, but still not optimized, to run 64-bit code.
People constantly complain about the fact that x86 sucks - here's finally a chance to do something about it (ala the mac powerpc change) and everyone starts whining.
If you haven't guessed already, I vote for Itanium. If Intel, Microsoft, and the Linux people do it well, it *can* be a transparent transition, again like the mac powerpc switch. Joe-blow gets a shiny new Itanium dell, which lets him run the latest and greatest software, but he can still run dos 1.0 programs, albeit not quite a quickly as he did on his Pentium 7 (ITanium isn't quite on the desktop yet), but still plenty fast enough.
Actually, I'm willing to bet they release it for FreeBSD as well as windows. The MS source for the CLI,CLR (can't remember what the acro's mean) and other bits can compile itself for FreeBSD already here.
Wall-Mart is NOT censoring anything. They are simply saying "we won't sell your product unless you change this." That is perfectly legal, every company has the right to decide with whom they do business, based on whatever they want to (excluding race, gender, etc).
However, the fact that Wall-Mart is big enough to influence what others are selling, and to influence what the magazine's are printing seems illegal to me. I don't know enough about anti-trust laws, but it doesn't seem like Wall-Mart should be able to tell other companies what to do. To me, this seems like an improper use of Wall-Mart's huge market share.
So perhaps we now have a new 800-pound gorilla to contend with.
And the 17% who will try to make a beowulf cluster out of several suns.
I have an old RCA Lyra that has no internal memory, just uses CF cards. Interestingly enough, the firmware doesn't support ANY media types at all. When you copy music to it, via Real Jukebox or WMP (it has plugins for both) it copies a small decoder program to the card as well. It takes it a little longer to start up as it has to load the decoder, and it only loads one decoder at a time, so playing a wma then an mp3 causes a delay, but it can theoretically play any format.
However, I've never tried playing ogg vorbis on it, so I don't know if a similar decoder exists or if it's possible to write one. I would assume that it shouldn't be too difficult to add support for that or for FLAC.
That's part of the point of this new disc. It has both a lower-quality cd layer (by lower-quality, I mean current cd-quality) and a high-quality layer (higher quality than is possible with a standard cd). Thus, if you want to, it will play in a standard cd player, and copy to mp3, at current cd-quality. However, if you want to use the higher audio quality, or special features such as lyrics or videos, you have to use the new layer, which might feature copy-protection.
So there is an added benefit for consumers, and if you don't think it's worth it, just continue using it as a standard cd.