George Clinton was also a member of Funkadelic, which was related to/part of Parliament. The band Funkadelic was a bit more rock/guitar styled than Parliment. If you have the time, check out the album "Maggot Brain". The title track is basicly one long solo by Eddie Hazel and worth the price of the CD alone. It's a shame that the some of the production on that album is rather sub-par. The echo box they used sounds rather metallic and cheezy. Hopefully it will be re-mastered someday.
It been already done... and here's how to find it.
on
Embedding Ads In MP3s?
·
· Score: 1
As for placing ads in MP3 files, I already have some annoying examples on my hard drive.
1. Run Napster 2. Do a search of "bloopers" or "outtakes" 3. Download some of them
Both of which have ads for Creative lab's Nomad MP3 player
2.Bloopers & Outtakes - Where's The Beef (Clara Pelter).mp3 has a ad for something called siteblazer.com (sp?)
All are located at the first few seconds of the file. I could take them out easily, but the idea that such an annoying ad would get me to buy a Nomad just amuses me for some reason.
I know this may be a bit off topic, but the first thing I thought of when I saw the name "Publius" where the postings to alt.music.pink-floyd a few years back. For those of you who don't know about that:
http://www.tapscott.com/~robp/enigma.html
A hoax, maybe, but there are a few odd sound cues in the "Division Bell" album ("the cave" snd the odd counting during "Lost for words"). And during "Another Brick in the Wall pt.2" (from a ealier album) there are sound effects near the end of the song of kids yelling. At 3.47, one kids yells something that sounds like "Enigggggma!". It's wacky, man....
Or more importantly, what kind of antenna are you using? Even the best shortwave receiver is useless unless you have a good antenna. I used to use a Radio Shack model with a sort of dipole in the backyard. It's hard to rig up something like that when living in a apartment. The easiest stations to pick up are these Spanish music stations, where the Dj always has a echo box hooked up to the mic. I even have a ton of issues of the Monitoring Times at my parents house.
"2) I download a lot of bootlegs from newsgroups. These aren't being sold anywhere, and if they are the RIAA/Artist isn't seeing any of the cash anyway. A lot of the bands that I download (Dave Matthews, for instance) actually support bootlegs as long as they're not being sold."
This is how I got into MP3's in the first place. There was this band called Pink Floyd that I really like, and I knew that there are TONS of bootleg cds of them (see http://www.pf-roio.de/). I had no idea on how to buy them, and the people who did sell them priced them at around $25-30 (even for a CDR) a cd, where always based outside of the US(which drove up the price due to price conversion), and seemed shady at best. I seen more complants about bootleg dealers ripping people off than I care to say. But there were all these rare, UNRELEASED tracks that I wanted to listen to, but had no means to. Then I got a little program called Winplay3, and tested it out on a few small test files. "Big deal", I thought, "It takes forever to encode or download these things, and there is nothing online I want anyway". Keep in mind I was using a P60 with a 28.8 modem and a bad phone line.
Then I found this wonderfull site (which as long closed down) that had all of these rare Pink Floyd tracks in MP3! Never released studio outtakes! WHOO! I soon filled up my hard drive with them.
Then I thought if I was ripping off anybody. The band/record company hasn't released this stuff, and I guess never will. The only PF bootleg that has been released legit was "Is there anybody out there", a live recording of the 1980 Wall concerts (and yes, I bought it and erased the mp3 I had). You can't lose money on something you are not selling. The people who made the bootlegs (Swinging Pig, etc.) have mostly shut down, and aren't making any more cds. So they are out of the game, and the few people putting out bootleg CDs are just re-releasing older boots under new names, so their cost is just CD making and simple packaging. This means if they are charging $20 for just copying CDs in limited numbers + shipping, they are making a good profit. The only people who I am ripping off are those shady boot dealers. Well, some dealers are rather nice, but the boot market is full of cheats and rip-off artists (as in, you don't get a CD you paid for).
This is where Mp3 shines. You can trade all of these hard to find recordings that the record companies don't seem to care about easier than joining a tape tree or sending tons of cash overseas and hoping not to get ripped off.
And now Napster as made this even easier, just last week I got some recordings of the Doors live that have never been released.
Alright, this question regards Windows, but all this talk about speech rec got me thinking. A while ago, MS came out with a system called Agent, which was intended as a text-to-speech/speech rec system represented by a cute animated figure on the desktop. I have to admit that it sounds cool. I downloaded the basic engine and the text-to-speech bits. The characters (the default is a genie) can be fully downloaded or downloaded as a web page downloads. There is/was an example that used a talking parrot sitting on a page, which loaded quite fast, even for my 56k dialup. The small text-to-speech engine was rather impressive for a free download, much better than my old hardware speech synth for my TI-994A. Even an VB idiot like myself could use the API to use text-to-speech in VB script to make a really bad talking clock.
Right now, I'm looking for the speech rec engine to see how well it works. Using the damn search engine comes up with developer info about the product.
Why has Microsoft "forgot" this rather impressive bit of software? I know it's really just eye-candy, but you can't have too many toys to play with.:)
This site reminds me of a film called "Zed & Two Noughts" by Peter Greenaway. Part of the film involves filming of decaying animals.
mo' info at: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0090366
And some of the hi-res pics on stinkymeat are begging to be made into wallpaper. It could help people who eat in front of their computers at work lose weight, or maybe part of a really cool/sick prank.
I always use cheap NiCads from Radio Shack. If you use them properly, they can last for over a year, or longer. The trick is to make sure that they are *competely* dead before charging. You can do this by putting them in a small cheap flashlight and leaving it on for a few hours, or some simple closed circut made from a battery holder and a some wire should work.
The only problem is that they don't last as long (get a extra set), and when you use them in a walkman, they cut out quickly instead of gradually loosing power.
They talked about the quality of encoders, what encoder do they use? I'm guessing the FreakinHover one (or whatever the german name is), I think they can afford it.:)
Ever notice that some encoders can't do low bit-rate mp3s?
Yeah, but we (The Yarists) didn't have a radio station. So we did the world's worst "tape tree". We made tapes full of stupid humor and bullsh*t, made copies on cheap Rite-Aid C-60's and left them in the school bathrooms at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. It went o.k., but most of the tapes where smashed up by the local jocks. Oh well, another waste of youth.
O.k., time for the plug:
I still have the original tapes, and i'm putting them up as low bit-rate mp3s at:
www.wam.umd.edu/~sydb/yarpage.html
Or you can use the address in my sig., which is the same damn address as above. Hopefully someone will find this somewhat amusing.
David Lynch's version pales in comparison to the never-filmed Alexandro Jodorowsky version. The guy is a visual genius. If any of you have seen El Topo or The Holy Mountain, you know what I'm talking about. The mind boggles on what the film would have been like. More info is here:
http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dune.html
Some highlights:
1.Story boards by Jean Giraud (AKA Moebius) and Giger 2.Music by Pink Floyd 3.Dali stars as the Emperor 4. FX by Dan O'Bannon
"Why don't they just sell you the game for $10 and let you be happy?"
In what format? If you mean selling a burned roms for use in a actual Genesis, I doubt they could do it for $10 a game. The cost of making roms is rather steep, and making a small batch of games that only a few people will buy will drive up the cost. If you remember the NeoGeo system, one of the reasons the games cost so much was that the games needed alot of space (about 10 Megs in some cases) that had to be burned into roms. Sega has none of these games in stock any more, and new copies would have to be made.
If you mean downloaded roms, where would you store them? The dreamcast has no hard drive. And having to download the same rom that you bought over and over would be rather annoying, unless you had good bandwidth.
There was a game by Apogee called Rise of the Triad that had a lot of weird power ups. One of which was called Shroom Mode, which made the colors cycle and your point of view zoom all over the place. It was basicly a Doom clone, but it was rather well done and had a wicked sense of humor.
Re:Energy from Giant Spliffs
on
Quickies Rock!
·
· Score: 1
"Cannabis fuel?"
The Cannabis plant puts out alot of heat when it is burned, so I guess it could make a good fuel source. There was something on TV that showed the DEA buring tons of pot in a large metal tank. The odd thing is that they had to spray the top of the tank with water/ice so the tank won't melt.
Re:OBJECTION - the windows and MacOS channels
on
Quickies Rock!
·
· Score: 2
The local cable for Baltimore has one of those classified ad channels (mostly just badly rendered images with muzak), which runs on some version of windows. One night, there was a blank screen with a error message saying, "Error: CDROM not available". I guess someone forgot to change the CD for that night.
The Univerity of Maryland College Park also had a cable channel that just showed a Mac desktop (don't know what version), with nothing moving, no changes or mouse movments, 24 hours a day, for a couple of months. Once in a while I would go to the library to watch it for no reason. I'm guessing it was some project that was never finished.
There's also a bar near here that uses WIN95 to operate the cash register, using a touch screen. Of course, it got BSOD, so the manager had to come down, hit the reset button and leave. Twice.
"Granted it takes more bandwidth, but it's impossible to shut down in this way."
That's big understatement. Gnutella takes quite a bit of bandwidth compared to Napster. I am guessing this is due to all the searches whizzing around the network while you are tying to download, combined with the fact that eariler versions had a bug that made these searches suck up even more bandwidth. And alot of people still use the old buggy clients.
If you use a 56k dialup, here's what I do.
1. Use Gnutella around school hours (in the morning), less traffic - the kids are in school or the college students are still hung over:)
2. Keep less connections alive, which makes searches slower, but downloads speed up a half notch. It sems to work o.k. for me...
3. Use version.56
4. See #3
Even with all this, the download speed is hit or miss. The highest speed I ever got was 3.1 k/s, but most of the time it's around.2 k/s. It's the kind of thing you have to leave running overnight.
Well, I was just joking about the pirate radio concept. I was, of course, thinking along more of the lines of low power transmitters (i.e. a bit more than a Mr. Microphone), which the FCC won't care about because, well, it won't go futher than your home but still has plenty enough power. If no-one complains about interference, the FCC/local fuzz won't know or care about it.
If you really want to know about what you can/can't do:
The section you might want (the Doc is rather long) is "Section 15.231 Periodic operation in the band 40.66 - 40.70 MHz and above 70 MHz.", which is around page 65. The terms listed here are much more drastic and picky than I thought they would be. Like:
"Except as shown in paragraph (e) of this Section, the intentional radiator is restricted to the transmission of a control signal such as those used with alarm systems, door openers, remote switches, etc. Radio control of toys is not permitted. Continuous transmissions, such as voice or video, and data transmissions are not permitted."
Then again, there are exceptions to this rule if the power is low, if you care to read the through the legalise. Funny how the AM regulations are much simpler and flexable.
"Cost of a 486 with a cheap NIC, SoundBlaster 16, some RCA cables and a 50 foot Cat 5: $80.00"
It sounds like the Audiotron is the part that hooks up to the stereo system, and the MP3 files are sent from PC -> Audiotron that's connected to stereo. If you hook up the PC to the stereo, you can do the above cheaper and just use a old terminal (a WYSE or something) with a very long cable hooked to the PC that send your song selection that way. You might want to write a little script to make things easier, but a good terminal can be had for $5 to $10 in surplus shops. The only drawback is that you wind up with more cables.
Unless you get two of these things, you might be better off with a good FM transmitter. Just make sure there's a spot of your FM dial that's blank. You can build one yourself or get a cheap one. All Electronics has a little battery powered one that has a jack for plugging into your sound card for about $15, and runs on AAAs. If you have multiple boxes that can handle MP3 or some other format, and have enough empty space on the dial, you can have a transmitter for each, and select a "stream" by tuning the dial. And since all of the stuff would be under one roof, the signal should be plenty strong.
Then again, maybe copper wire could produce better sound than radio waves?
Hey, what the hell. Boost up the signal and make your own pirate station!:) Well, as long as you use a good filter to kill harmonics, which is the way most pirates get busted. The harmonics from the signal bleed over police/fire channels, which doesn't make them too happy. Then the FCC looks for ya....
It's cheaper and more flexable. You supply your own motors and other bits instead of using the overpriced Lego motors and bits. I guess you could rig your own stuff to the Mindstorms control unit (I don't own one), but then why would you bother using Mindstorms in the first place?
The reason to use the Mindstroms system is that it's easier to use, even though the Basic Stamp uses a Basic-ish language. It uses Lego blocks for construction, which is a bit limiting.
With a roll-your-own setup, you can do fun things like welding frames,drilling holes, and using nice metal parts instead of plastic to build a framework/holder for your machine. Also, a Stamp can be used for simple non-robotic things, I think the costlier models have more I/O lines than a Mindstrom system. The BS2-IC has 16 I/O and costs $49.00 from allelectronics.com. Yeah, this is the second time I mentioned them in a post, but I happen to read their catalog quite often.
Really, this seems pretty cheap. I always wanted a Stamp to mess around with, but the cost of them drove me away. Places like allelectronics.com sell the basic Stamp kit for $109, which has the chip, carrier board, software, etc. And that price seems to be the cheapest I've seen. I would get this just for the Stamp stuff. The other parts would come in handy, though.
Alright, I'm not an expert on video hardware. I always assumed that the amount of memory a card had was related to it's max resolution (800x600, etc), at least that's the way old cards were. I got into an argument with some guys in my office about weither a card with a ton of memory (say 64 mb) would increase the preformance of non-realtime rendering (say Bryce or something). I keep thinking how would video memory improve something like that. I know you can cache textures in vid memory, but what else is it good for?
And as for this card, I think the most impressive feature is that HDTV hardware. I'm guessing that it will act like a super-tuner-card or some such. Now you can watch PBS in super high rez.:)
And for the record, I'm using a 4meg ATI card right now (Rage Pro 3D or something), and it seems to handle Quake 2 just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
George Clinton was also a member of Funkadelic, which was related to/part of Parliament. The band Funkadelic was a bit more rock/guitar styled than Parliment. If you have the time, check out the album "Maggot Brain". The title track is basicly one long solo by Eddie Hazel and worth the price of the CD alone. It's a shame that the some of the production on that album is rather sub-par. The echo box they used sounds rather metallic and cheezy. Hopefully it will be re-mastered someday.
As for placing ads in MP3 files, I already have some annoying examples on my hard drive.
T NEY_SINGING_WAY_OUT_OF_TUNE.mp3
O T_BLOOPER.mp3
1. Run Napster
2. Do a search of "bloopers" or "outtakes"
3. Download some of them
I have:
1.BLOOPERS,_OUT-TAKES_and_SCREW-UPS-LINDA_McCAR
and
BLOOPERS,_OUT-TAKES_and_SCREW-UPS-SEBASTIAN_CAB
Both of which have ads for Creative lab's Nomad MP3 player
2.Bloopers & Outtakes - Where's The Beef (Clara Pelter).mp3
has a ad for something called siteblazer.com (sp?)
All are located at the first few seconds of the file. I could take them out easily, but the idea that such an annoying ad would get me to buy a Nomad just amuses me for some reason.
I know this may be a bit off topic, but the first thing I thought of when I saw the name "Publius" where the postings to alt.music.pink-floyd a few years back. For those of you who don't know about that:
http://www.tapscott.com/~robp/enigma.html
A hoax, maybe, but there are a few odd sound cues in the "Division Bell" album ("the cave" snd the odd counting during "Lost for words"). And during "Another Brick in the Wall pt.2" (from a ealier album) there are sound effects near the end of the song of kids yelling. At 3.47, one kids yells something that sounds like "Enigggggma!". It's wacky, man....
Or more importantly, what kind of antenna are you using? Even the best shortwave receiver is useless unless you have a good antenna. I used to use a Radio Shack model with a sort of dipole in the backyard. It's hard to rig up something like that when living in a apartment. The easiest stations to pick up are these Spanish music stations, where the Dj always has a echo box hooked up to the mic. I even have a ton of issues of the Monitoring Times at my parents house.
"2) I download a lot of bootlegs from newsgroups. These aren't being sold anywhere, and if they are the RIAA/Artist isn't seeing any of the cash anyway. A lot of the bands that I download (Dave Matthews, for instance) actually support bootlegs as long as they're not being sold."
This is how I got into MP3's in the first place. There was this band called Pink Floyd that I really like, and I knew that there are TONS of bootleg cds of them (see http://www.pf-roio.de/). I had no idea on how to buy them, and the people who did sell them priced them at around $25-30 (even for a CDR) a cd, where always based outside of the US(which drove up the price due to price conversion), and seemed shady at best. I seen more complants about bootleg dealers ripping people off than I care to say. But there were all these rare, UNRELEASED tracks that I wanted to listen to, but had no means to. Then I got a little program called Winplay3, and tested it out on a few small test files. "Big deal", I thought, "It takes forever to encode or download these things, and there is nothing online I want anyway". Keep in mind I was using a P60 with a 28.8 modem and a bad phone line.
Then I found this wonderfull site (which as long closed down) that had all of these rare Pink Floyd tracks in MP3! Never released studio outtakes! WHOO! I soon filled up my hard drive with them.
Then I thought if I was ripping off anybody. The band/record company hasn't released this stuff, and I guess never will. The only PF bootleg that has been released legit was "Is there anybody out there", a live recording of the 1980 Wall concerts (and yes, I bought it and erased the mp3 I had). You can't lose money on something you are not selling. The people who made the bootlegs (Swinging Pig, etc.) have mostly shut down, and aren't making any more cds. So they are out of the game, and the few people putting out bootleg CDs are just re-releasing older boots under new names, so their cost is just CD making and simple packaging. This means if they are charging $20 for just copying CDs in limited numbers + shipping, they are making a good profit. The only people who I am ripping off are those shady boot dealers. Well, some dealers are rather nice, but the boot market is full of cheats and rip-off artists (as in, you don't get a CD you paid for).
This is where Mp3 shines. You can trade all of these hard to find recordings that the record companies don't seem to care about easier than joining a tape tree or sending tons of cash overseas and hoping not to get ripped off.
And now Napster as made this even easier, just last week I got some recordings of the Doors live that have never been released.
Alright, this question regards Windows, but all this talk about speech rec got me thinking. A while ago, MS came out with a system called Agent, which was intended as a text-to-speech/speech rec system represented by a cute animated figure on the desktop. I have to admit that it sounds cool. I downloaded the basic engine and the text-to-speech bits. The characters (the default is a genie) can be fully downloaded or downloaded as a web page downloads. There is/was an example that used a talking parrot sitting on a page, which loaded quite fast, even for my 56k dialup. The small text-to-speech engine was rather impressive for a free download, much better than my old hardware speech synth for my TI-994A. Even an VB idiot like myself could use the API to use text-to-speech in VB script to make a really bad talking clock.
:)
Right now, I'm looking for the speech rec engine to see how well it works. Using the damn search engine comes up with developer info about the product.
Why has Microsoft "forgot" this rather impressive bit of software? I know it's really just eye-candy, but you can't have too many toys to play with.
This site reminds me of a film called "Zed & Two Noughts" by Peter Greenaway. Part of the film involves filming of decaying animals.
mo' info at: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0090366
And some of the hi-res pics on stinkymeat are begging to be made into wallpaper. It could help people who eat in front of their computers at work lose weight, or maybe part of a really cool/sick prank.
I always use cheap NiCads from Radio Shack. If you use them properly, they can last for over a year, or longer. The trick is to make sure that they are *competely* dead before charging. You can do this by putting them in a small cheap flashlight and leaving it on for a few hours, or some simple closed circut made from a battery holder and a some wire should work.
The only problem is that they don't last as long (get a extra set), and when you use them in a walkman, they cut out quickly instead of gradually loosing power.
Whoa! I used to have this one printed out on green and white fan-fold and hung on the door at my dorm, along with parts of the file legalhighs.txt
They talked about the quality of encoders, what encoder do they use? I'm guessing the FreakinHover one (or whatever the german name is), I think they can afford it. :)
Ever notice that some encoders can't do low bit-rate mp3s?
Yeah, but we (The Yarists) didn't have a radio station. So we did the world's worst "tape tree". We made tapes full of stupid humor and bullsh*t, made copies on cheap Rite-Aid C-60's and left them in the school bathrooms at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. It went o.k., but most of the tapes where smashed up by the local jocks. Oh well, another waste of youth.
O.k., time for the plug:
I still have the original tapes, and i'm putting them up as low bit-rate mp3s at:
www.wam.umd.edu/~sydb/yarpage.html
Or you can use the address in my sig., which is the same damn address as above. Hopefully someone will find this somewhat amusing.
David Lynch's version pales in comparison to the never-filmed Alexandro Jodorowsky version. The guy is a visual genius. If any of you have seen El Topo or The Holy Mountain, you know what I'm talking about. The mind boggles on what the film would have been like. More info is here:
http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dune.html
Some highlights:
1.Story boards by Jean Giraud (AKA Moebius) and Giger
2.Music by Pink Floyd
3.Dali stars as the Emperor
4. FX by Dan O'Bannon
". I'll stick to my 8 track tapes and LP records thanks."
Get with the times, man. The new format is gonna be the Pocket Rocker!
(For those of you who don't remember, that was a goofy mini-cassette device that was around in the 80's)
"Why don't they just sell you the game for $10 and let you be happy?"
In what format? If you mean selling a burned roms for use in a actual Genesis, I doubt they could do it for $10 a game. The cost of making roms is rather steep, and making a small batch of games that only a few people will buy will drive up the cost. If you remember the NeoGeo system, one of the reasons the games cost so much was that the games needed alot of space (about 10 Megs in some cases) that had to be burned into roms. Sega has none of these games in stock any more, and new copies would have to be made.
If you mean downloaded roms, where would you store them? The dreamcast has no hard drive. And having to download the same rom that you bought over and over would be rather annoying, unless you had good bandwidth.
Some more info on the Gameline is here:
g ameline.html
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Lair/9260/
A bit of trivia: The company that made the service, Control Video Corporation, became AOL.
There was a game by Apogee called Rise of the Triad that had a lot of weird power ups. One of which was called Shroom Mode, which made the colors cycle and your point of view zoom all over the place. It was basicly a Doom clone, but it was rather well done and had a wicked sense of humor.
"Cannabis fuel?"
The Cannabis plant puts out alot of heat when it is burned, so I guess it could make a good fuel source. There was something on TV that showed the DEA buring tons of pot in a large metal tank. The odd thing is that they had to spray the top of the tank with water/ice so the tank won't melt.
The local cable for Baltimore has one of those classified ad channels (mostly just badly rendered images with muzak), which runs on some version of windows. One night, there was a blank screen with a error message saying, "Error: CDROM not available". I guess someone forgot to change the CD for that night.
The Univerity of Maryland College Park also had a cable channel that just showed a Mac desktop (don't know what version), with nothing moving, no changes or mouse movments, 24 hours a day, for a couple of months. Once in a while I would go to the library to watch it for no reason. I'm guessing it was some project that was never finished.
There's also a bar near here that uses WIN95 to operate the cash register, using a touch screen. Of course, it got BSOD, so the manager had to come down, hit the reset button and leave. Twice.
"Granted it takes more bandwidth, but it's impossible to shut down in this way."
:)
.56
.2 k/s. It's the kind of thing you have to leave running overnight.
That's big understatement. Gnutella takes quite a bit of bandwidth compared to Napster. I am guessing this is due to all the searches whizzing around the network while you are tying to download, combined with the fact that eariler versions had a bug that made these searches suck up even more bandwidth. And alot of people still use the old buggy clients.
If you use a 56k dialup, here's what I do.
1. Use Gnutella around school hours (in the morning), less traffic - the kids are in school or the college students are still hung over
2. Keep less connections alive, which makes searches slower, but downloads speed up a half notch. It sems to work o.k. for me...
3. Use version
4. See #3
Even with all this, the download speed is hit or miss. The highest speed I ever got was 3.1 k/s, but most of the time it's around
Anybody else have suggestions?
Well, I was just joking about the pirate radio concept. I was, of course, thinking along more of the lines of low power transmitters (i.e. a bit more than a Mr. Microphone), which the FCC won't care about because, well, it won't go futher than your home but still has plenty enough power. If no-one complains about interference, the FCC/local fuzz won't know or care about it.
- mar99.pdf
If you really want to know about what you can/can't do:
http://www.fcc.gov/oet/info/rules/part15/part15
The section you might want (the Doc is rather long) is "Section 15.231 Periodic operation in the band 40.66 - 40.70 MHz and above 70
MHz.", which is around page 65. The terms listed here are much more drastic and picky than I thought they would be. Like:
"Except as shown in paragraph (e) of this Section, the intentional
radiator is restricted to the transmission of a control signal such as those used with alarm systems,
door openers, remote switches, etc. Radio control of toys is not permitted. Continuous transmissions,
such as voice or video, and data transmissions are not permitted."
Then again, there are exceptions to this rule if the power is low, if you care to read the through the legalise. Funny how the AM regulations are much simpler and flexable.
"Cost of a 486 with a cheap NIC, SoundBlaster 16, some RCA cables and a 50 foot Cat 5: $80.00"
It sounds like the Audiotron is the part that hooks up to the stereo system, and the MP3 files are sent from PC -> Audiotron that's connected to stereo. If you hook up the PC to the stereo, you can do the above cheaper and just use a old terminal (a WYSE or something) with a very long cable hooked to the PC that send your song selection that way. You might want to write a little script to make things easier, but a good terminal can be had for $5 to $10 in surplus shops. The only drawback is that you wind up with more cables.
Unless you get two of these things, you might be better off with a good FM transmitter. Just make sure there's a spot of your FM dial that's blank. You can build one yourself or get a cheap one. All Electronics has a little battery powered one that has a jack for plugging into your sound card for about $15, and runs on AAAs. If you have multiple boxes that can handle MP3 or some other format, and have enough empty space on the dial, you can have a transmitter for each, and select a "stream" by tuning the dial. And since all of the stuff would be under one roof, the signal should be plenty strong.
:) Well, as long as you use a good filter to kill harmonics, which is the way most pirates get busted. The harmonics from the signal bleed over police/fire channels, which doesn't make them too happy. Then the FCC looks for ya....
Then again, maybe copper wire could produce better sound than radio waves?
Hey, what the hell. Boost up the signal and make your own pirate station!
"How is this different from Mindstorms?"
It's cheaper and more flexable. You supply your own motors and other bits instead of using the overpriced Lego motors and bits. I guess you could rig your own stuff to the Mindstorms control unit (I don't own one), but then why would you bother using Mindstorms in the first place?
The reason to use the Mindstroms system is that it's easier to use, even though the Basic Stamp uses a Basic-ish language. It uses Lego blocks for construction, which is a bit limiting.
With a roll-your-own setup, you can do fun things like welding frames,drilling holes, and using nice metal parts instead of plastic to build a framework/holder for your machine. Also, a Stamp
can be used for simple non-robotic things, I think the costlier models have more I/O lines than a Mindstrom system. The BS2-IC has 16 I/O and costs $49.00 from allelectronics.com. Yeah, this is the second time I mentioned them in a post, but I happen to read their catalog quite often.
Really, this seems pretty cheap. I always wanted a Stamp to mess around with, but the cost of them drove me away. Places like allelectronics.com sell the basic Stamp kit for $109, which has the chip, carrier board, software, etc. And that price seems to be the cheapest I've seen. I would get this just for the Stamp stuff. The other parts would come in handy, though.
How do they sell these so cheap?
Alright, I'm not an expert on video hardware. I always assumed that the amount of memory a card had was related to it's max resolution (800x600, etc), at least that's the way old cards were. I got into an argument with some guys in my office about weither a card with a ton of memory (say 64 mb) would increase the preformance of non-realtime rendering (say Bryce or something). I keep thinking how would video memory improve something like that. I know you can cache textures in vid memory, but what else is it good for?
And as for this card, I think the most impressive feature is that HDTV hardware. I'm guessing that it will act like a super-tuner-card or some such. Now you can watch PBS in super high rez.
And for the record, I'm using a 4meg ATI card right now (Rage Pro 3D or something), and it seems to handle Quake 2 just fine.