The quaility of the speaker on this thing is pretty bad, the recording to a chip limits the number of things you can say. Since the motors can be triggered by switching them on, then letting them reset (they have springs that do that), or as the page states:
"A little investigation with an oscilloscope revealed that the control of the Bass' head/tail/mouth is extremely simple: energize the corresponding motor, and the head turns out, the tail extends, or the mouth opens. De-energize the motor, and the corresponding body part returns (by a spring) to it's "rest" state. We've got binary actuators here folks. And it was clear that we could tie in to the gate inputs of the motor drivers with some simple diode-or circuitry."
So you can access the motors directly from an outside source via cable leading into the fish.
Then rig up a conection to a printer port (much easier than serial stuff) for the fish cable.
Then write a winamp plugin (or something like that) that takes the frequency output (like other plugins do), and use that to send on/off signals to the printer port->cable->fish. You could have loud bass be the trigger on for the tail, loud treble will switch on the mouth motor, etc. Then hook up the soundcard to a stereo. That way, you have good sound and a talking fish that can be used with any audio file. The plugin part could be done in hardware if you are good with electronics, and then used with a radio or other audio source.
Perl really doesn't NEED a IDE, but this thingy might make a good editor since I use pico/vi for editing my scripts and most of my bugs are syntax related.
It has editable syntax coloring and checking, or as they say:
"...a powerful "Early Warning System" that checks the syntax in Perl and Python code. Syntax errors are immediately flagged, which saves time otherwise wasted compiling. This feature even detects incorrect indentations in Python. "
"
Sounds downright usefull for checking the picky syntax of Python. It even has a debugger, which is always nice. It sounds alot like the Visual Studio IDE, which I kind of like despite a few bugs. A friend of mine is learning Perl, and sometimes gets tripped up with unmatched brackets,
I guess this "block folding" feature may help.
A future release will have a "Regular Expression Debugger", which would be very nice for Perl, since it's one of the places where new Perl users get stuck at with complex reg-exps. Hell, even Perl experts miss a \s now and then.:)
"...greatly reducing the size of NT roaming profiles to be copied to and fro (while IE+Outlook will store dozens of MB's of webcache and mail in the actual profile..."
The web chache shouldn't be be copied around. The NT server we have at work took forever to login/logout because of this excess. It can be fixed using the policy editor on the NT server.
in your NTconfig.pol:
under "Windows NT Users Profiles",
check "exclude dirs in roaming profile"
fill in the stuff you don't what to be copied in the text box (Temporary Internet Files;Temp for example)
Makes things run alot smoother.
Also, Netscape deleted my home directory on our NT server once. It somehow got confused that my home dir was the cache, and so deleted it. The odd this is that it didn't do that with a any normal NT workstation, but only did with a NT workstation that had AFS installed. Wierd.
Never really trusted Netscape browsers since. The way Netscape handles multiple profiles can be pretty buggy too.
You know, there is so much bull here, I'm starting to think this is some kind of prank. The begining parts of "The Lost Worlds of 2001" (I think that's the title) show some of the early ideas that Clarke and Kubrick had for the film, some of which are pretty goofy. So I guess Clarke has a pretty good sense of humor. If not him, someone else is pulling our legs. If this guy Saram is such a famous crook, why would Clarke have anything to do with him?
Having something shot by concert staff does not mean the result is going to be watchable. I have a bootleg Wall concert by Pink Floyd from 1980. The video quality is rather good despite it's age, and doesn't have the degraded quaility found in nth generation dubs. The problem is that you really can't see anything during some parts. Most of the stage is very dark, and I guess that video camera technology was limited back then. Most of the time, all you see are fuzzy blobs. And this was made professionally, as you can tell when the lights are bright enough.
You can add harmonycentral.com is the list of OLGA 'mirrors'. Basicly, it seems that they, activeguitar, etc. just link to the renagade OLGA sites. Before I started working, I downloaded like crazy from OLGA, and submitted a few tabs myself. A good part of the Ween section is my doing.
The place that used to work as a lab manager, the U of Maryland-College Park, used two of the main ideas here on our NT systems.
Zip drives are on every machine. They are also on the Macs and some of the newer Sun boxes. The only thing holding people back is the cost of zip disks, being as how college students are cheap. They rather spend that kind of money on a $7.00 case of beer. Also, I've seen zip disks fail due to physical damage, but there is nohting you can really do about that. As far as physical media goes, it seems the best way so far.
There is also an AFS client that runs on all of our NT systems (Gina I think). It just maps a drive to your home space on your university account, which makes it much more automatic and simpler to use then FTP. Different drives are used for Home, Pub, Mail, etc. because some people are confused about changing directories. Suns use your university account, so that isn't a big deal. Most Sun users seems to be a bit more in-the-know. Macs have the Zip drives, but they also have ftp clients installed (Fetch is my personal fave). But it does have its problems. Most people don't know that these drives exist, or just ignore them because they never seen a Drive X: or drive W: before. Also, there are brief times when the network is overloaded. But there aren't really any space concerns, as each student gets around 25 megs per account. Note that your account also holds your NT profile as well as your Netscape settings for both the NT and the Unix systems, but 25 megs is plenty for the average user. Also, there used to be a few bugs with the AFS client we used, like the networked drives not showing up on some logons, etc. Most of them have been fixed as of now. And there are rare cases of the network being overloaded, but it is rare.
And yes, we have floppy drives. And our lab managers have lost-and-found boxes full of some of the abused floppies you will ever see. Bent in half, metal gates missing, overused AOL floppies that are used to store that "20 page paper". In my day, I showed people how to use the network drives AND their old-school floppies. They have a "copy" that they can hold in their hands, and a backup that can be gotten easily.
"Anybody who pays $99.95 for these is -- excuse me -- a fucking moron."
If it wasn't for morons, Ebay would not exist.:)
Thank god for Goodwill and Value Village, it's where I get most of my clothes. Got a SGI/Cray T-shirt there for $1.00.
And now, as a service to the Bored Slashdot Reader...
The best thing to do at a Goodwill is this:
1. go to a goodwill
2. look for some used answering machines
3. take the tapes out
4. take them to the checkout, the chasier will just make up some price
5. most people NEVER erase the tape before giving it to goodwill, so now you can go home and listen to peoples messages.
It's alot more fun than it sounds. Sometimes you get some downright surreal stuff. Sometimes you get a whole conversation, because the machine didn't stop recording when someone picked up the phone. I have one where some old guy is talking to his buddy about how his wife and her friends are eating all the damn food. The next message was from his doctor about his colon operation apointment. Nutty, Man....
The easy BASIC of the TI99/4a got me into computers. You could do text to speech with the speech synth and the Terminal Emulator 2 cartrage. You went into "BASIC" (which the TE2 cart modified in some way) and do something like the following:
10 open #1,(some link to the speech synth, forgot what it was)
20 print #1,"Hello! blah blah blah"
How more easy can you get? you could modify the speech by doing something like this (not sure of the syntax):
30 print #1,"\\50 40"
The first was the pitch, and the second was the rate the tone would drop as it spoke. You out really high/low values and get crazy disorted voices out of it. Good for making prank phone calls.:)
I even had the PE box (extra 32k,disk drive,rs-232,cool blinking lights), but the stupid extra thick cable always kept falling out of the bus port. The Extended basic cart let you do hardware based sprites, which looked way cooler than moving a character block by block.
Games? Parsec, of course. Remember trying to re-fuel by hitting '3' and steering in the narrow tunnel? Had most of the Atarisoft games, Tunnels of Doom, some infocom games (HHGG, still have the "Don't Panic" button), and other stuff. I used TI-Writer to do all my high school papers, and had to send escape codes directly to the printer to do underlining (good thing TI-Writer supported that trick). Even had TI-LOGO, that let me play with simple recursion. Of course, by the time I got all this stuff, it was dirt cheap.
Something I saw in OMNI magazine many years ago that let you move heavy furniture around a room. It didn't use sound. The floor was made from some kind of flexable plastic, and there were a rather complex series of mechanics under it. They would raise and lower in sequence, so the effect was like a lump popping up that pushed something aside a little, and then another lump pops up, etc. I'm guessing that you would need rather smooth objects, or furniture that had wheels on the bottom for this method to work.
Nah, it started long before that. Remember when Coleco had "shortage problems" with the Cabbage Patch dolls? Other popular toys had the same effects, driven by the increadible force of kids whining for stuff. But hey, at least I got a complete set of He-man figures out of the deal:)
Most jobs are rarely fun. That's why we say "I work at Company X..." rather than "I play at Company X...". Next time you talk to your boss, tell them "I'm having a great, super-nutty fun time!" and see how they react.
It's basicly just a 127-in-1 game rom, built-in controller and Atari compatable hardware in one small handheld unit. The big difference (and downside) is that you still have to hook it up to a TV. It allows standard joysticks to be pluged in, so it may be nice to put it in your backpack and carry it to your friend's house if he has a projection TV:)
Another big problem is the price: $99.95
That's way too much. You can get the real thing at a Goodwill with some games for well under $10, unless the guy who prices things is a total loon and thinks it could be valueable. Then the prices for a single cart could go up to $5 EACH. It's true, once I saw a copy of DOS on 5.25 disks for the low, low price of $20 (!?!?!?!).
Even though a handheld VCS is cool, the cost of making one is too much (except as a hobby project), considering the VCS can be found at garage sales in the "Please help us get rid of this!" pile.
This has already been done in some small cases. I have copies of some "blooper" type tracks that all have ads for Creative Labs products tacked at the begining. Try looking for them, I bet they are still floating around. Why? Some people with high speed connections don't always check what they download. Messed up dowloads are saved in a seperate dir, and I think Napster by default shares this dir (It searches the whole drive for mp3 files when you first install it). That's why you sometimes see things like 'incomplete/songname.mp3' when you do searches. If people are careless (or can't find better copies) and grab incomplete mp3s, the stuff stays in cirulation longer.
And I was wondering, what kind of mp3 encoder does a good job on low bitrates? The one used by Geeks in Space sounds o.k. and the size is not bad. The best one I could find was something called Electric Cosmo Suite (for Windows only). It has a mode called Dual Mono that seems to cut the size of a file in half compared to other encoders. Most encoders seem to create files (low bitrate and in mono) that seem way too big, dispite futzing around with options and saving the starting WAV file in 44100 or 22050 khz, the latter some encoders choke on.
I expect whatever is being used is a Linux based encoder, but what Windows encoders do a good job making small-but-mostly-listenable-mono files?
I have a copy of Streambox VCR 1.0 at home. It's a Beta version, and it's been cracked, so that should tell you something about it's stablity. The reason for using this instead of just recording from the audio output is the way the data is delivered to my system. All it takes is a little line noise or server snafu and you will wind up with a recording that has a bunch of blank spaces. Not very fun. Streambox VCR saves the stream to a file, and can also resume it if their is a connection problem. Not very useful for live stuff, but nice for other things like radio show arcives that are deleted every few months. It also tells you some stats and info, etc. It's a really usefull tool for people who have flaky connections. Works with audio and video, but you sometimes have to muck around to find exactly where the audio/video stream is coming from, as it is sometimes bundled up in some java filler.
You can still get it from some warez sites, if you are into that kinda thing.
"Its not something to make pretty pictures with. I don't even think it has much in the way of anything but the most rudimenary graphics capability."
The first time I heard of Cray was from an old copy of ENTER Magazine (A off-shoot of 3-2-1 Contact). The article went into detail about how a cray was used to do some of the CG effects in the film "The Last Starfighter" (I think). At least that's what I remembered, it had to do something with a Cray. Then again, this isn't the Wall Street Journal we are talking about here. If so, I guess they could have hooked it up to a video projection/film camera type deal, where the output would have been captured one frame at a time to film, or maybe a smaller system in between somewhere to handle the rendering. I guess I have to rumage through my parents house sometime soon and find that issue, unless any of you packrats have the same one....
I think Survival Research Laboratories has been doing this kind of stuff longer than anyone( since 1979), except that they do only shows (kinda like a circus). They even have videos for sale. The last time I heard of one of their shows, you had to sign a waiver to see the show in case you got injured by pieces of flying metal or something.
Napster isn't just the latest crap on the radio. Lately people have been putting up some rather obscure stuff. I downloaded some tracks by a band called Camel (Heard of 'em?, didn't think so...), and while listening, I heard some faint noise in the background. Vinyl scratches! This was copied from a out-of-print album! This shows quite a bit of dedication on someone's part, that he/she liked this music so much, they took the time to copy it and share it. Why? They must have known it was rather rare. So it's a numbers game. If enough people use Napster, there is a better chance someone will have something you like, even if it's rare.
If Napster was just a bunch of greedy bastards, you couldn't download anything because nobody whould be SHARING anything. Some people have to look at their music collection, figure that someone may like this stuff, and serve it up.
"Bootleg recordings are of course quite different from ripped CDs, but the issues are still quite similar. At the time of this earlier discussion (when I remember it, anyway,) there were mostly tapes and some CDs being distributed in pretty small quantities."
Just about all bootleg stuff is made in small batches. Only the real hardcore fans tend to buy the stuff, and the fly-by-night producers who make the bootlegs can't waste money pressing too many. These CDs are also quite expensive ($25 at least). Most of the bootleg stuff floating around on Napster were ripped from (or CDRs of) these rare, expensive CDs. And that is my main use of Napster, to get these hard-to-get (and some cases out of print) bootlegs. The bands on these haven't seen a dime when they were released, and ripping/uploading them won't make any difference. The people who made the CDs have stopped. Try finding a copy of a bootleg Pink Floyd show from the Swinging Pig label. If you can, you'll be paying an arm and a leg. The only people who profit from these rarites are sellers (who tend to be rather on the con-artist side) who drive the price way up, EVEN FOR CDRs OF THESE CDS!!!
Now by using Napster, I can hear all of these for nothing. The bands lose nothing (unless they release the material, which rarely happens) because they never got a dime from the release in the first place. And it is possible for artists to make money from bootleg CDs. A while back (when he was still alive), Frank Zappa put out a collection of shows that were being bootleged, and made his CDs cost less than half of the bootleg version. He "beat the boots".
Slashdot Mirror
The quaility of the speaker on this thing is pretty bad, the recording to a chip limits the number of things you can say. Since the motors can be triggered by switching them on, then letting them reset (they have springs that do that), or as the page states:
"A little investigation with an oscilloscope revealed that the control of the Bass' head/tail/mouth is extremely simple: energize the corresponding motor, and the head turns out, the tail extends, or the mouth opens. De-energize the motor, and the corresponding body part returns (by a spring) to it's "rest" state. We've got binary actuators here folks. And it was clear that we could tie in to the gate inputs of the motor drivers with some simple diode-or circuitry."
So you can access the motors directly from an outside source via cable leading into the fish.
Then rig up a conection to a printer port (much easier than serial stuff) for the fish cable.
Then write a winamp plugin (or something like that) that takes the frequency output (like other plugins do), and use that to send on/off signals to the printer port->cable->fish. You could have loud bass be the trigger on for the tail, loud treble will switch on the mouth motor, etc. Then hook up the soundcard to a stereo. That way, you have good sound and a talking fish that can be used with any audio file. The plugin part could be done in hardware if you are good with electronics, and then used with a radio or other audio source.
Good Idea, Eh?
Perl really doesn't NEED a IDE, but this thingy might make a good editor since I use pico/vi for editing my scripts and most of my bugs are syntax related.
:)
It has editable syntax coloring and checking, or as they say:
"...a powerful "Early Warning System" that checks the syntax in Perl and Python code. Syntax errors are immediately flagged, which saves time otherwise wasted compiling. This feature even detects incorrect indentations in Python. "
"
Sounds downright usefull for checking the picky syntax of Python. It even has a debugger, which is always nice. It sounds alot like the Visual Studio IDE, which I kind of like despite a few bugs. A friend of mine is learning Perl, and sometimes gets tripped up with unmatched brackets,
I guess this "block folding" feature may help.
A future release will have a "Regular Expression Debugger", which would be very nice for Perl, since it's one of the places where new Perl users get stuck at with complex reg-exps. Hell, even Perl experts miss a \s now and then.
"...greatly reducing the size of NT roaming profiles to be copied to and fro (while IE+Outlook will store dozens of MB's of webcache and mail in the actual profile..."
The web chache shouldn't be be copied around. The NT server we have at work took forever to login/logout because of this excess. It can be fixed using the policy editor on the NT server.
in your NTconfig.pol:
under "Windows NT Users Profiles",
check "exclude dirs in roaming profile"
fill in the stuff you don't what to be copied in the text box (Temporary Internet Files;Temp for example)
Makes things run alot smoother.
Also, Netscape deleted my home directory on our NT server once. It somehow got confused that my home dir was the cache, and so deleted it. The odd this is that it didn't do that with a any normal NT workstation, but only did with a NT workstation that had AFS installed. Wierd.
Never really trusted Netscape browsers since. The way Netscape handles multiple profiles can be pretty buggy too.
You know, there is so much bull here, I'm starting to think this is some kind of prank. The begining parts of "The Lost Worlds of 2001" (I think that's the title) show some of the early ideas that Clarke and Kubrick had for the film, some of which are pretty goofy. So I guess Clarke has a pretty good sense of humor. If not him, someone else is pulling our legs. If this guy Saram is such a famous crook, why would Clarke have anything to do with him?
Having something shot by concert staff does not mean the result is going to be watchable. I have a bootleg Wall concert by Pink Floyd from 1980. The video quality is rather good despite it's age, and doesn't have the degraded quaility found in nth generation dubs. The problem is that you really can't see anything during some parts. Most of the stage is very dark, and I guess that video camera technology was limited back then. Most of the time, all you see are fuzzy blobs. And this was made professionally, as you can tell when the lights are bright enough.
You can add harmonycentral.com is the list of OLGA 'mirrors'. Basicly, it seems that they, activeguitar, etc. just link to the renagade OLGA sites. Before I started working, I downloaded like crazy from OLGA, and submitted a few tabs myself. A good part of the Ween section is my doing.
Ah, the Kill-Them-All-and-Let-God-Sort-Them-Out plan. Not a bad idea.
Wouldn't you?
Yep. We are all doped out, strung out, tripping, shooting up, drooling all over ourselves, lying in our own vomit, and having an all-around good time.
:)
AND we're beating you in the drug war! Now isn't THAT a humbling thought.
The place that used to work as a lab manager, the U of Maryland-College Park, used two of the main ideas here on our NT systems.
Zip drives are on every machine. They are also on the Macs and some of the newer Sun boxes. The only thing holding people back is the cost of zip disks, being as how college students are cheap. They rather spend that kind of money on a $7.00 case of beer. Also, I've seen zip disks fail due to physical damage, but there is nohting you can really do about that. As far as physical media goes, it seems the best way so far.
There is also an AFS client that runs on all of our NT systems (Gina I think). It just maps a drive to your home space on your university account, which makes it much more automatic and simpler to use then FTP. Different drives are used for Home, Pub, Mail, etc. because some people are confused about changing directories. Suns use your university account, so that isn't a big deal. Most Sun users seems to be a bit more in-the-know. Macs have the Zip drives, but they also have ftp clients installed (Fetch is my personal fave). But it does have its problems. Most people don't know that these drives exist, or just ignore them because they never seen a Drive X: or drive W: before. Also, there are brief times when the network is overloaded. But there aren't really any space concerns, as each student gets around 25 megs per account. Note that your account also holds your NT profile as well as your Netscape settings for both the NT and the Unix systems, but 25 megs is plenty for the average user. Also, there used to be a few bugs with the AFS client we used, like the networked drives not showing up on some logons, etc. Most of them have been fixed as of now. And there are rare cases of the network being overloaded, but it is rare.
And yes, we have floppy drives. And our lab managers have lost-and-found boxes full of some of the abused floppies you will ever see. Bent in half, metal gates missing, overused AOL floppies that are used to store that "20 page paper". In my day, I showed people how to use the network drives AND their old-school floppies. They have a "copy" that they can hold in their hands, and a backup that can be gotten easily.
"A $90 version of the clock you're talking about should be available at the Store of Knowledge in your local mega-mall."
t ion=1&category=15
$90!!!! Jeez, you can get simpler one for $30 at sciplus.com. It doesn't seem to have all the features, but it still looks rather cool.
Here's the address:
http://sciplus.com/category.cfm?subsection=1&sc
If that don't work, just look under toys->desk toys. They have lots of fun and cheap junk that other "science toys" places overcharge for.
"Anybody who pays $99.95 for these is -- excuse me -- a fucking moron."
:)
If it wasn't for morons, Ebay would not exist.
Thank god for Goodwill and Value Village, it's where I get most of my clothes. Got a SGI/Cray T-shirt there for $1.00.
And now, as a service to the Bored Slashdot Reader...
The best thing to do at a Goodwill is this:
1. go to a goodwill
2. look for some used answering machines
3. take the tapes out
4. take them to the checkout, the chasier will just make up some price
5. most people NEVER erase the tape before giving it to goodwill, so now you can go home and listen to peoples messages.
It's alot more fun than it sounds. Sometimes you get some downright surreal stuff. Sometimes you get a whole conversation, because the machine didn't stop recording when someone picked up the phone. I have one where some old guy is talking to his buddy about how his wife and her friends are eating all the damn food. The next message was from his doctor about his colon operation apointment. Nutty, Man....
The easy BASIC of the TI99/4a got me into computers. You could do text to speech with the speech synth and the Terminal Emulator 2 cartrage. You went into "BASIC" (which the TE2 cart modified in some way) and do something like the following:
:)
10 open #1,(some link to the speech synth, forgot what it was)
20 print #1,"Hello! blah blah blah"
How more easy can you get? you could modify the speech by doing something like this (not sure of the syntax):
30 print #1,"\\50 40"
The first was the pitch, and the second was the rate the tone would drop as it spoke. You out really high/low values and get crazy disorted voices out of it. Good for making prank phone calls.
I even had the PE box (extra 32k,disk drive,rs-232,cool blinking lights), but the stupid extra thick cable always kept falling out of the bus port. The Extended basic cart let you do hardware based sprites, which looked way cooler than moving a character block by block.
Games? Parsec, of course. Remember trying to re-fuel by hitting '3' and steering in the narrow tunnel? Had most of the Atarisoft games, Tunnels of Doom, some infocom games (HHGG, still have the "Don't Panic" button), and other stuff. I used TI-Writer to do all my high school papers, and had to send escape codes directly to the printer to do underlining (good thing TI-Writer supported that trick). Even had TI-LOGO, that let me play with simple recursion. Of course, by the time I got all this stuff, it was dirt cheap.
Something I saw in OMNI magazine many years ago that let you move heavy furniture around a room. It didn't use sound. The floor was made from some kind of flexable plastic, and there were a rather complex series of mechanics under it. They would raise and lower in sequence, so the effect was like a lump popping up that pushed something aside a little, and then another lump pops up, etc. I'm guessing that you would need rather smooth objects, or furniture that had wheels on the bottom for this method to work.
Nah, it started long before that. Remember when Coleco had "shortage problems" with the Cabbage Patch dolls? Other popular toys had the same effects, driven by the increadible force of kids whining for stuff. But hey, at least I got a complete set of He-man figures out of the deal :)
Most jobs are rarely fun. That's why we say "I work at Company X..." rather than "I play at Company X...". Next time you talk to your boss, tell them "I'm having a great, super-nutty fun time!" and see how they react.
I've seen this javascript effect before at:
http://drooldonkey.org
still, it's very cool. The only problem is that this effect runs slow on Celerons. Damn cheap floating point....
This device reminds me of the TV Boy:
B oy.html
:)
http://www.atari2600.com/catalog/Specials/GamTV
It's basicly just a 127-in-1 game rom, built-in controller and Atari compatable hardware in one small handheld unit. The big difference (and downside) is that you still have to hook it up to a TV. It allows standard joysticks to be pluged in, so it may be nice to put it in your backpack and carry it to your friend's house if he has a projection TV
Another big problem is the price: $99.95
That's way too much. You can get the real thing at a Goodwill with some games for well under $10, unless the guy who prices things is a total loon and thinks it could be valueable. Then the prices for a single cart could go up to $5 EACH. It's true, once I saw a copy of DOS on 5.25 disks for the low, low price of $20 (!?!?!?!).
Even though a handheld VCS is cool, the cost of making one is too much (except as a hobby project), considering the VCS can be found at garage sales in the "Please help us get rid of this!" pile.
This has already been done in some small cases. I have copies of some "blooper" type tracks that all have ads for Creative Labs products tacked at the begining. Try looking for them, I bet they are still floating around. Why? Some people with high speed connections don't always check what they download. Messed up dowloads are saved in a seperate dir, and I think Napster by default shares this dir (It searches the whole drive for mp3 files when you first install it). That's why you sometimes see things like 'incomplete/songname.mp3' when you do searches. If people are careless (or can't find better copies) and grab incomplete mp3s, the stuff stays in cirulation longer.
And I was wondering, what kind of mp3 encoder does a good job on low bitrates? The one used by Geeks in Space sounds o.k. and the size is not bad. The best one I could find was something called Electric Cosmo Suite (for Windows only). It has a mode called Dual Mono that seems to cut the size of a file in half compared to other encoders. Most encoders seem to create files (low bitrate and in mono) that seem way too big, dispite futzing around with options and saving the starting WAV file in 44100 or 22050 khz, the latter some encoders choke on.
I expect whatever is being used is a Linux based encoder, but what Windows encoders do a good job making small-but-mostly-listenable-mono files?
I have a copy of Streambox VCR 1.0 at home. It's a Beta version, and it's been cracked, so that should tell you something about it's stablity. The reason for using this instead of just recording from the audio output is the way the data is delivered to my system. All it takes is a little line noise or server snafu and you will wind up with a recording that has a bunch of blank spaces. Not very fun. Streambox VCR saves the stream to a file, and can also resume it if their is a connection problem. Not very useful for live stuff, but nice for other things like radio show arcives that are deleted every few months. It also tells you some stats and info, etc. It's a really usefull tool for people who have flaky connections. Works with audio and video, but you sometimes have to muck around to find exactly where the audio/video stream is coming from, as it is sometimes bundled up in some java filler.
You can still get it from some warez sites, if you are into that kinda thing.
"Its not something to make pretty pictures with. I don't even think it has much in the way of anything but the most rudimenary graphics capability."
The first time I heard of Cray was from an old copy of ENTER Magazine (A off-shoot of 3-2-1 Contact). The article went into detail about how a cray was used to do some of the CG effects in the film "The Last Starfighter" (I think). At least that's what I remembered, it had to do something with a Cray. Then again, this isn't the Wall Street Journal we are talking about here. If so, I guess they could have hooked it up to a video projection/film camera type deal, where the output would have been captured one frame at a time to film, or maybe a smaller system in between somewhere to handle the rendering. I guess I have to rumage through my parents house sometime soon and find that issue, unless any of you packrats have the same one....
I think Survival Research Laboratories has been doing this kind of stuff longer than anyone( since 1979), except that they do only shows (kinda like a circus). They even have videos for sale. The last time I heard of one of their shows, you had to sign a waiver to see the show in case you got injured by pieces of flying metal or something.
Check it out at:
www.srl.org
You can look at a Realvideo clip of this show at:
http://tvparty.com/vault60.html
It's quite funny and stuff.
Napster isn't just the latest crap on the radio. Lately people have been putting up some rather obscure stuff. I downloaded some tracks by a band called Camel (Heard of 'em?, didn't think so...), and while listening, I heard some faint noise in the background. Vinyl scratches! This was copied from a out-of-print album! This shows quite a bit of dedication on someone's part, that he/she liked this music so much, they took the time to copy it and share it. Why? They must have known it was rather rare. So it's a numbers game. If enough people use Napster, there is a better chance someone will have something you like, even if it's rare.
If Napster was just a bunch of greedy bastards, you couldn't download anything because nobody whould be SHARING anything. Some people have to look at their music collection, figure that someone may like this stuff, and serve it up.
"Bootleg recordings are of course quite different from ripped CDs, but the issues are still quite similar. At the time of this earlier discussion (when I remember it, anyway,) there were mostly tapes and some CDs being distributed in pretty small quantities."
Just about all bootleg stuff is made in small batches. Only the real hardcore fans tend to buy the stuff, and the fly-by-night producers who make the bootlegs can't waste money pressing too many. These CDs are also quite expensive ($25 at least). Most of the bootleg stuff floating around on Napster were ripped from (or CDRs of) these rare, expensive CDs. And that is my main use of Napster, to get these hard-to-get (and some cases out of print) bootlegs. The bands on these haven't seen a dime when they were released, and ripping/uploading them won't make any difference. The people who made the CDs have stopped. Try finding a copy of a bootleg Pink Floyd show from the Swinging Pig label. If you can, you'll be paying an arm and a leg. The only people who profit from these rarites are sellers (who tend to be rather on the con-artist side) who drive the price way up, EVEN FOR CDRs OF THESE CDS!!!
Now by using Napster, I can hear all of these for nothing. The bands lose nothing (unless they release the material, which rarely happens) because they never got a dime from the release in the first place. And it is possible for artists to make money from bootleg CDs. A while back (when he was still alive), Frank Zappa put out a collection of shows that were being bootleged, and made his CDs cost less than half of the bootleg version. He "beat the boots".