I would call most club DJs (which this article seems to be about) performers, but not musicians. It's tough to properly express the distinction (seems to largely be a battle of semantics), but I'd separate it by saying that DJs are using something already fully constructed, while musicians are working with far more basic building blocks, in general. Essentially any track a DJ plays can stand on its own as a piece of music, but this already constructed thing is the building block a DJ works with. Musicians are working on the basis of notes, which are then formed into chords, and those chords into an entire song, but at a basic level their tools are atomized. Artistry comes in when more atomized pieces are used, for example, playing over a track with a synthesizer, or creating musical notes via highly skilled scratching.
I'm a vinyl/laptop DJ myself, and I've had similar discussions to this one emerge from time to time. Speaking of which, the effect this would have on DJs who use Final Scratch or Serato Scratch Live will be interesting to see should it actually be enforced...how do these rules apply if you're playing club-licensed vinyls with your own digital vinyl rips, and mixing the two together?
Compared to the people who are willing to cool their CPUs with liquid nitrogen for five minutes and risk cracking the core, hyper-accelerated chip creep, shorting from rapid condensation, and a number of other potential issues, just to turn out a few extra 3dmarks (thankfully, Futuremark's killed off that crowd with ridiculous releases time and time again) or gain a few more MHz than the next hardcore overclocker down the line...paying near double the price for a 2-5% increase in performance (on a good day) seems downright reasonable.
In my case, I've only bought Corsair for their high-performance EEC memory for a critical server; hardcore memory at average (rated) speeds is rock-solid, and their tech support department and RMA policies are the best you can get without a $10k+ support contract.
Why not try another language? Spanish is played out for titles of just about anything. How about one of the following:
German - Ansicht (German is truly a glorious language. You can sound angry when saying just about anything. Imagine sounding angry every time you mentioned the name of MS' latest POS).
French - Vue (It's short, which is cool, but it does share the name of a car. If Microsoft Made Cars, anyone?)
Italian - Vista (Pronounced the same, but you have to gesture wildly with your arms when you say it)
Greek - (Mind the Unicode; The operating system formerly known as Windows...)
Heh, yes, you do forget. The fine for spitting, littering, and not cleaning up after your dogs is a fixed HK$1500 (~US$192, ~EUR$150). Basically, it's public nuisance stuff. Smoking-in-prohibited-places fines are worse, up to HK$5000. HK$50,000 isn't really pocket change, unless you've got $100mil++ sitting in the bank. And jail time is no fun for anyone.
I'm a BT user in Hong Kong, and I've stuck to private sites for anything that's had ligigation filed against people who up/downed it for a long time. They're faster than public sites, and at the ones I frequent, you get pure scene releases, including repacks and propers. Now we just need more people using I2P/Tor (included with the latest betas of Azureus) for true anonymous BT usage and we should see better speeds overall and no more snooping on what data gets sent.
It really is a shame...with a month or two of good QA and pure bugfixing, Arcanum and Bloodlines could have been true masterpieces, and ToEE probably would have been much better. Then Troika could still be alive, and hopefully they'd have enough money laying around to do what Valve's done and cover their own development for their own dream project. Bloodlines is the most fun I've had with a game in recent memory, and it's still quite enjoyable even the third time around. The different clans make for different gameplay experiences and dialogue, and of course the varying endings are a nice touch. And Arcanum is one of a tiny number of games set in a pre-Victorian steampunk setting...the ancient magic vs. encroaching technology conflict served to spice up a number of aspects of the game, and I'd absolutely love to see more games in a similar setting.
The next iteration of the Unreal engine is specifically designed to take advantage of multiprocessor (and thus, multicore) setups, have a look at the latest press release.
If only there were a way to copy them all to one format so you wouldn't have these problems...
XviD + AC3. Easy enough to do with Auto Gordian Knot, and even at good quality (bits per pixel-frame of ~0.24) the file sizes aren't bad. Of course, this is much more convenient if you're running a HTPC rig, but even putting it back on a DVD isn't an amazing feat. Saving off full-resolution HD is also viable, as most TV shows broadcast in HD will have a 700MB release. And when you get your Blu-Ray-RW (god, that's awkward), you can burn your TV shows in all their glory.
The problem with homogenous interfaces over a number of apps is that, sometimes, it just doesn't work. This doesn't mean that the design should be completely bereft of logic or sanity, but that depending on what you're trying to accomplish, a particular interface, set of tools, or style of control might suit you better.
For example, Avid Xpress uses three distinct UI schemes/toolsets for cutting, editing, and effects/compositing; even Premiere has different easily-switchable sets of tools. Essentially, different interfaces are better suited to different tasks. Without someone who's both artistically talented and experienced with human interface design, it could end up being a lot of work that annoys old users, involves a lot of effort on the dev's part, and results in very little gain (assuming it actually makes things better at all).
While it may be a bit difficult to get all the truly fun bits on network TV, I'd love to see a series made out of the New Frontier books. The characters are varied, the setting is by and large parts of space we haven't seen before, there's still cameos from people we know, and it's really genuinely funny. My largest fear would be the mangling of the series to fit into episodic form, but I'm sure if they nabbed Peter David as a consulting writer, they'd manage to do pretty well.
What the devs are going for (with the blessing/assistance of the Wachowskis, whatever that's worth post-Revolutions), is a continuation of the story. There's a truce between the Machines and Zion, and new redpills are being extracted at a steady rate. The Merovingian and other Exiles are still walking a line between the two, but with the other sides wounded, they're about equal in power inside the Matrix. The story continues with regular events, and the results of those events determine the next step in the story. It's far from freeform, but it's not based on PvE boss battles, more actor characters leading their faction.
The problem with the game at the moment is it hasn't differentiated itself from most other MMOs out there, outside of a few small areas (fully swappable skills are one of those). Money is called information (or i$) but doesn't function any differently; you get XP from mob hunting, dungeons (exile hangouts), and randomly-generated missions; there's a number of 'uber' items that most players of a certain level will be wearing. They've been very supportive of the community, though, so hopefully that'll continue through the launch and beyond, and they'll have enough development time before release to make it stand out.
I used to love ZDTV back when that was its title. It was great, you felt like you were really interacting with the people (the on-air email checkers were cool, and I got a mention or two there over the years). However, now they're at the point that they're firing the replacements for the replacements for the replacements, and the original cast is that much better by comparison. The criteria for being a host initially was pretty much (a) don't look like a troll (b) know the subject matter. Their personalities fit the type of show the host was doing, simply because it's what you'd expect from someone in the field. More of a discussion between friends than a 'Hey, listen to us, we're cool and on TV. Buuuuy stuuuuuf.'
One of these days, someone will come out with a proper tech-junkie network. What just might work is a web-based subscription service, with different shows/segments sponsored by different websites (the/. Nerd News in Review, the HardOCP hardware update, the Gizmodo tech report, the BluesNews gaming guide, Tom's Hardware guide to buying everything, the Register tech-news-in-Europe update, etc). Make it into an hourlong show weekly, crediting all the content sources appropriately, but including videos of game demos, applications in use, and of course the hosts. With talent and a little sponsorship, something like this could really take off and show people not only how to run a techie TV show but how the internet is a viable way to distribute TV shows, beyond what BTEFNet's already proved;).
The following is a description of intellectual property theft
A spends two years and a tidy sum getting an AA degree in culinary arts. He spends years working as a short-order cook, then works his way up until his restaurant is popular and people who come in actually know his name, and a new sandwich is his unique and top-selling item. One night, B breaks in to the restaurant and steals the recipe, and sets up shop in a seedier part of town, and sells the sandwiches for a pittance, flaunting it all the while.
You, my good sir, are a moron. While there's no shortage of semi-talented pop-princess corporate-manufactured bands, there's probably a hell of a lot more who are smaller, and struggling, and who are cutting it close if they expect to live off their work. And you're going to say that all their work is honestly and truly worth NOTHING to you, since that's what you're willing to pay for it? The reason that you want to download it at all is that the people responsible for producing it have talent, creativity, and the wherewithal to actually get something done. Copyright and intellecual property laws, while subject to abuses like anything else, are primarily in place to protect the rights of the creative and ingenious people that our country relies on.
There's two really simple solutions: keep the original MiniDV tape OR use your video editing software to print-to-tape all the rough-cut and final D1-format video you've got, so you don't have to keep editing around worthless clips. It's actually not a bad way to do things, because you can put that tape directly in your (very portable) camera and hook it up via S-video/RCA and watch it on any external display you'd like, with excellent quality and not even the minor compression artifacts you'd see on a DVD. Then you can take the money you would have spent on a new half-TB drive and drop another gig of RAM in your video editing box.
That's another reason why BT works so well, but also why Bram commented that you have to be stupid to pirate stuff with it: it's very open about what's going on with everyone's clients. I can see the client, IP, download speed, and completion of every peer I'm connected to, and the tracker has more info and more optimizations. The few minor attempts to cheat the system were quickly snuffed out by the fact that every other client listened to the tracker, which said 'Screw this guy, he's not uploading and thus not helping the swarm'. By giving priority to those who are uploading the most, the overall bandwidth and pieces available for downloading increases more quickly than a laissez-faire approach. That, and the focus on keeping a few files going faster rather than having a massive library, makes it far superior (in terms of actually getting your data some time this month) to networks like Edonkey/Overnet.
Personally, I love Bloglines, which comes with a nifty Firefox extension to let you know when your blogs (and any RSS feeds) have been updated. I think the website-with-client method is one of the best options; you can still get quick notification of new stuff, but it reduces the bandwidth taken by the feed (the server gets it once and then sends it on to however-many-thousand-people are subscribed; 21,865 subscribers in/.'s case). It's also got a decent recommendation system, and overall it makes checking up on a broad variety of news sites much, much easier.
Ehh, no, normal folk don't. Many, many people each year climb Mount Rainier (in Washington state), which is 14,410 feet high, and my uncle's said none of his clients have ever needed supplemental air. He's a professional mountain guide with over 300 climbs of Rainier alone. Everest Base Camp, where climbers go to acclimatize, is at about 17,060 feet, and needing oxygen there is exceptionally rare; if you need it there, there's no way you're going to make it higher up on the mountain. So, at 13,760 feet, the air may be thin but there's no need for pressurized quarters or anything like that.
From talking to sloncek and the other ops (I am, or was, a long-time SN site moderator and IRC chanop), it doesn't appear that it has anything to do with eXeem. It's that the site is taking up massive amounts of time and effort to keep running, and even with all that they put into it, it's been far from stable. With the recent raids on similar sites, they've felt that it's not worth it to continue struggling with the site, with the constant risk of getting busted (they've got nowhere near enough money to fight a legal battle, even if they're legally fine). eXeem didn't factor into their decision to shut it down, as it's a long ways from being ready. It's a shame to see it go, though...without such a great site, I doubt the BT community would be anywhere near its current massive popularity.
Re:rsync can resume BitTorrent downloads
on
BitTorrent Guide
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· Score: 3, Interesting
...although BitTorrent can resume any sequentially-downloaded file that matches the Torrent (IE the ISO of some distro that cut off halfway through); it'll check for any bad pieces and start you off (pretty much) right where you left off. You can use it for files that you have completed but that may have corrupt bits, too...it'll replace them with the correct bits from a working seed. (I've done both on occasion.)
Slashdot Mirror
I would call most club DJs (which this article seems to be about) performers, but not musicians. It's tough to properly express the distinction (seems to largely be a battle of semantics), but I'd separate it by saying that DJs are using something already fully constructed, while musicians are working with far more basic building blocks, in general. Essentially any track a DJ plays can stand on its own as a piece of music, but this already constructed thing is the building block a DJ works with. Musicians are working on the basis of notes, which are then formed into chords, and those chords into an entire song, but at a basic level their tools are atomized. Artistry comes in when more atomized pieces are used, for example, playing over a track with a synthesizer, or creating musical notes via highly skilled scratching. I'm a vinyl/laptop DJ myself, and I've had similar discussions to this one emerge from time to time. Speaking of which, the effect this would have on DJs who use Final Scratch or Serato Scratch Live will be interesting to see should it actually be enforced...how do these rules apply if you're playing club-licensed vinyls with your own digital vinyl rips, and mixing the two together?
Compared to the people who are willing to cool their CPUs with liquid nitrogen for five minutes and risk cracking the core, hyper-accelerated chip creep, shorting from rapid condensation, and a number of other potential issues, just to turn out a few extra 3dmarks (thankfully, Futuremark's killed off that crowd with ridiculous releases time and time again) or gain a few more MHz than the next hardcore overclocker down the line...paying near double the price for a 2-5% increase in performance (on a good day) seems downright reasonable. In my case, I've only bought Corsair for their high-performance EEC memory for a critical server; hardcore memory at average (rated) speeds is rock-solid, and their tech support department and RMA policies are the best you can get without a $10k+ support contract.
Why not try another language? Spanish is played out for titles of just about anything. How about one of the following:
German - Ansicht (German is truly a glorious language. You can sound angry when saying just about anything. Imagine sounding angry every time you mentioned the name of MS' latest POS).
French - Vue (It's short, which is cool, but it does share the name of a car. If Microsoft Made Cars, anyone?)
Italian - Vista (Pronounced the same, but you have to gesture wildly with your arms when you say it)
Greek - (Mind the Unicode; The operating system formerly known as Windows...)
Heh, yes, you do forget. The fine for spitting, littering, and not cleaning up after your dogs is a fixed HK$1500 (~US$192, ~EUR$150). Basically, it's public nuisance stuff. Smoking-in-prohibited-places fines are worse, up to HK$5000. HK$50,000 isn't really pocket change, unless you've got $100mil++ sitting in the bank. And jail time is no fun for anyone. I'm a BT user in Hong Kong, and I've stuck to private sites for anything that's had ligigation filed against people who up/downed it for a long time. They're faster than public sites, and at the ones I frequent, you get pure scene releases, including repacks and propers. Now we just need more people using I2P/Tor (included with the latest betas of Azureus) for true anonymous BT usage and we should see better speeds overall and no more snooping on what data gets sent.
If all else fails, I'm sure someone can claim prior art. "Well, occasionally, between playing things, I don't play things."
It really is a shame...with a month or two of good QA and pure bugfixing, Arcanum and Bloodlines could have been true masterpieces, and ToEE probably would have been much better. Then Troika could still be alive, and hopefully they'd have enough money laying around to do what Valve's done and cover their own development for their own dream project. Bloodlines is the most fun I've had with a game in recent memory, and it's still quite enjoyable even the third time around. The different clans make for different gameplay experiences and dialogue, and of course the varying endings are a nice touch. And Arcanum is one of a tiny number of games set in a pre-Victorian steampunk setting...the ancient magic vs. encroaching technology conflict served to spice up a number of aspects of the game, and I'd absolutely love to see more games in a similar setting.
The next iteration of the Unreal engine is specifically designed to take advantage of multiprocessor (and thus, multicore) setups, have a look at the latest press release.
When you do finally scrape up the cash, remember that you'll find it right next to the Holy Grail.
If only there were a way to copy them all to one format so you wouldn't have these problems...
XviD + AC3. Easy enough to do with Auto Gordian Knot, and even at good quality (bits per pixel-frame of ~0.24) the file sizes aren't bad. Of course, this is much more convenient if you're running a HTPC rig, but even putting it back on a DVD isn't an amazing feat. Saving off full-resolution HD is also viable, as most TV shows broadcast in HD will have a 700MB release. And when you get your Blu-Ray-RW (god, that's awkward), you can burn your TV shows in all their glory.
The problem with homogenous interfaces over a number of apps is that, sometimes, it just doesn't work. This doesn't mean that the design should be completely bereft of logic or sanity, but that depending on what you're trying to accomplish, a particular interface, set of tools, or style of control might suit you better.
For example, Avid Xpress uses three distinct UI schemes/toolsets for cutting, editing, and effects/compositing; even Premiere has different easily-switchable sets of tools. Essentially, different interfaces are better suited to different tasks. Without someone who's both artistically talented and experienced with human interface design, it could end up being a lot of work that annoys old users, involves a lot of effort on the dev's part, and results in very little gain (assuming it actually makes things better at all).
While it may be a bit difficult to get all the truly fun bits on network TV, I'd love to see a series made out of the New Frontier books. The characters are varied, the setting is by and large parts of space we haven't seen before, there's still cameos from people we know, and it's really genuinely funny. My largest fear would be the mangling of the series to fit into episodic form, but I'm sure if they nabbed Peter David as a consulting writer, they'd manage to do pretty well.
What the devs are going for (with the blessing/assistance of the Wachowskis, whatever that's worth post-Revolutions), is a continuation of the story. There's a truce between the Machines and Zion, and new redpills are being extracted at a steady rate. The Merovingian and other Exiles are still walking a line between the two, but with the other sides wounded, they're about equal in power inside the Matrix. The story continues with regular events, and the results of those events determine the next step in the story. It's far from freeform, but it's not based on PvE boss battles, more actor characters leading their faction.
The problem with the game at the moment is it hasn't differentiated itself from most other MMOs out there, outside of a few small areas (fully swappable skills are one of those). Money is called information (or i$) but doesn't function any differently; you get XP from mob hunting, dungeons (exile hangouts), and randomly-generated missions; there's a number of 'uber' items that most players of a certain level will be wearing. They've been very supportive of the community, though, so hopefully that'll continue through the launch and beyond, and they'll have enough development time before release to make it stand out.
I used to love ZDTV back when that was its title. It was great, you felt like you were really interacting with the people (the on-air email checkers were cool, and I got a mention or two there over the years). However, now they're at the point that they're firing the replacements for the replacements for the replacements, and the original cast is that much better by comparison. The criteria for being a host initially was pretty much (a) don't look like a troll (b) know the subject matter. Their personalities fit the type of show the host was doing, simply because it's what you'd expect from someone in the field. More of a discussion between friends than a 'Hey, listen to us, we're cool and on TV. Buuuuy stuuuuuf.' One of these days, someone will come out with a proper tech-junkie network. What just might work is a web-based subscription service, with different shows/segments sponsored by different websites (the /. Nerd News in Review, the HardOCP hardware update, the Gizmodo tech report, the BluesNews gaming guide, Tom's Hardware guide to buying everything, the Register tech-news-in-Europe update, etc). Make it into an hourlong show weekly, crediting all the content sources appropriately, but including videos of game demos, applications in use, and of course the hosts. With talent and a little sponsorship, something like this could really take off and show people not only how to run a techie TV show but how the internet is a viable way to distribute TV shows, beyond what BTEFNet's already proved ;).
It's all well and good until your streaming copy of Blondes, Brunettes, and My Head (and your 'Me' time) get interrupted by an unlucky squirrel.
The following is a description of intellectual property theft A spends two years and a tidy sum getting an AA degree in culinary arts. He spends years working as a short-order cook, then works his way up until his restaurant is popular and people who come in actually know his name, and a new sandwich is his unique and top-selling item. One night, B breaks in to the restaurant and steals the recipe, and sets up shop in a seedier part of town, and sells the sandwiches for a pittance, flaunting it all the while.
You, my good sir, are a moron. While there's no shortage of semi-talented pop-princess corporate-manufactured bands, there's probably a hell of a lot more who are smaller, and struggling, and who are cutting it close if they expect to live off their work. And you're going to say that all their work is honestly and truly worth NOTHING to you, since that's what you're willing to pay for it? The reason that you want to download it at all is that the people responsible for producing it have talent, creativity, and the wherewithal to actually get something done. Copyright and intellecual property laws, while subject to abuses like anything else, are primarily in place to protect the rights of the creative and ingenious people that our country relies on.
There's two really simple solutions: keep the original MiniDV tape OR use your video editing software to print-to-tape all the rough-cut and final D1-format video you've got, so you don't have to keep editing around worthless clips. It's actually not a bad way to do things, because you can put that tape directly in your (very portable) camera and hook it up via S-video/RCA and watch it on any external display you'd like, with excellent quality and not even the minor compression artifacts you'd see on a DVD. Then you can take the money you would have spent on a new half-TB drive and drop another gig of RAM in your video editing box.
That's another reason why BT works so well, but also why Bram commented that you have to be stupid to pirate stuff with it: it's very open about what's going on with everyone's clients. I can see the client, IP, download speed, and completion of every peer I'm connected to, and the tracker has more info and more optimizations. The few minor attempts to cheat the system were quickly snuffed out by the fact that every other client listened to the tracker, which said 'Screw this guy, he's not uploading and thus not helping the swarm'. By giving priority to those who are uploading the most, the overall bandwidth and pieces available for downloading increases more quickly than a laissez-faire approach. That, and the focus on keeping a few files going faster rather than having a massive library, makes it far superior (in terms of actually getting your data some time this month) to networks like Edonkey/Overnet.
I've got one thing to say. You can have DVD REGION FREE when you PRY IT from my COLD DEAD HD! *goes back to watching stuff on his HTPC*
Personally, I love Bloglines, which comes with a nifty Firefox extension to let you know when your blogs (and any RSS feeds) have been updated. I think the website-with-client method is one of the best options; you can still get quick notification of new stuff, but it reduces the bandwidth taken by the feed (the server gets it once and then sends it on to however-many-thousand-people are subscribed; 21,865 subscribers in /.'s case). It's also got a decent recommendation system, and overall it makes checking up on a broad variety of news sites much, much easier.
Ehh, no, normal folk don't. Many, many people each year climb Mount Rainier (in Washington state), which is 14,410 feet high, and my uncle's said none of his clients have ever needed supplemental air. He's a professional mountain guide with over 300 climbs of Rainier alone. Everest Base Camp, where climbers go to acclimatize, is at about 17,060 feet, and needing oxygen there is exceptionally rare; if you need it there, there's no way you're going to make it higher up on the mountain. So, at 13,760 feet, the air may be thin but there's no need for pressurized quarters or anything like that.
From talking to sloncek and the other ops (I am, or was, a long-time SN site moderator and IRC chanop), it doesn't appear that it has anything to do with eXeem. It's that the site is taking up massive amounts of time and effort to keep running, and even with all that they put into it, it's been far from stable. With the recent raids on similar sites, they've felt that it's not worth it to continue struggling with the site, with the constant risk of getting busted (they've got nowhere near enough money to fight a legal battle, even if they're legally fine). eXeem didn't factor into their decision to shut it down, as it's a long ways from being ready. It's a shame to see it go, though...without such a great site, I doubt the BT community would be anywhere near its current massive popularity.
...although BitTorrent can resume any sequentially-downloaded file that matches the Torrent (IE the ISO of some distro that cut off halfway through); it'll check for any bad pieces and start you off (pretty much) right where you left off. You can use it for files that you have completed but that may have corrupt bits, too...it'll replace them with the correct bits from a working seed. (I've done both on occasion.)