Until now there has been no way to purchase iTunes music under Linux. As such I haven't used the store.
Even if pymusique didn't bypass the DRM, I'm glad it exists so I can actually purchase music from within Linux.
In theory... I get "Login Failed" when I try to use pymusique so far. I'm going to attempt to use the Windows standalone build from my laptop to see if it's a general "pymusique is broken" problem or if it's a specific problem with my installation of the necessary libraries, etc.
It's cross-platform. The articles are bogus, there is a nice Python distribution and the software's site even has Debian packages.
I didn't care about the DRM much thanks to Hymn/JHymn, but I had been putting off signing up for iTMS because I didn't feel like rebooting to Windows to buy my music. (I don't even bother downloading MP3s via P2P due to lack of clients for for Linux for the more useful P2P networks. BitTorrent is the exception here, but it isn't suitable for music downloading.)
"In theory, I can buy a modern Inspiron and that bay will work on it, too"
Unfortunately not. The I8200 was the last of what Dell calls their "C series" laptops. They're now on the "D series". As far as I know, all machines within the D-series (Examples are I8500, I8600) are bay-compatible with each other, but not the old C-series. New drive carriers cost only around $10 though. Which reminds me I need to order one. Just got a new 80gig drive and I want to put the old drive into a bay.
Note that Dell doesn't change bay form factors often though. The "C series" covers 4-5 years worth of Dell laptops at the very least.
I've given up on getting the code to run in Octave. I just don't have the time. Going to try seeing if the student version of Matlab is sufficient for this.
I'm surprised Octave is missing such an important feature. I love it and use it all the time, but finding this limitation was a real disappointment for me.
Apparently, one of the critical differences between Octave and Matlab is that Octave apparently doesn't support multidimensional matrices/arrays with dimensions greater than 2.
Which means that the current code is completely incompatible with Octave, as it depends on Matlab's implementation of imread() which returns image data as a three-dimensional matrix.
Going to see if I can get it to work easily, but there's a good chance I won't be able to.:(
I know for a fact that the Dell Inspiron 8200 does not support booting from USB/1394 devices, and it's a P4-era device, from midway through the P4 era.
The Asus A7V8X (Still a current Asus product, and less than a year old.) also does not support USB boot. (Oddly, the A7V8X-X does support USB boot but doesn't support many of the other features that the A7V8X does.)
In the situations where someone might want a bootable iPod to service many machines (i.e. corporate), there are likely to be PLENTY of P3-era machines. At my last employer, 90% of the machines were still P3s. Not a single machine I encountered at work had USB/1394 boot capability. It's something that is rarely found on any pre-USB-2.0 motherboards, and USB2.0 didn't become common until the past year or two.
Bus-powered drives = bad idea. Bus-powered drives do not work with 1394 hosts with 4-pin connectors. They also don't work with motherboards whose USB or 1394 hosts whose USB ports might not be quite up to spec. External power is a pain in the ass, so a battery-powered drive with bus-powered capability like the iPod is perfect in this situation. (Original 1394-only iPods charged from the 1394 bus.)
A rescue setup on a bootable iPod will be very nice in the future (2-3 more years for all those old machines to get upgraded, most corporations have rather long upgrade cycles), for now LiveCDs are the way to go.
PCs that can boot from USB/1394 drives are still pretty rare.
Once they become more common, this does have the advantages over a LiveCD such as Knoppix in the fact that it's somewhat more convenient to carry around with you at all times (many people already do so.) Note the comments that it doesn't interfere with the device's music capabilities at all.
It's an obscene waste of money for someone who doesn't already have an iPod to buy it for these purposes, instead of just using a LiveCD. But if you already have an iPod for your music, this would be a nice thing to have around.
(Note: I don't have an iPod for my music, but most likely I could do a similar thing with Softick CardExport II on my Treo 600.)
Probably because the MS TCP/IP stack was playing "bad citizen" even when the backbone was in its infancy. Back then TOS wasn't needed. Now that it's needed, so many apps abuse it that it won't help in its current form.
Yup. I had an old Kyocera 6035. The only reason I upgraded to a Treo 600 recently is because the 6035's buttons and hinge were getting worn after 3+ years.
The new media features of the 600 (PalmOS 5) are kind of nice, but overall I consider the system to be a step back in all of the areas I consider most important in a phone and PDA:
Battery life Reliability Usability - Palm has obsoleted the old PQA system claiming that "web browsers are the future" - Well, for looking up small things quickly (such as what movies are playing nearby, the weather, and whether your flight is on time or not), PQAs on the old Verizon QNC CDMA data scheme (14.4 kbits/sec with high latency) were far, far faster than Blazer over even a direct serial PPP connection with broadband as its next hop. (115200 bps minimum, dedicated to the Palm device).
PalmOS was the undisputed king in those areas, and is still a long way ahead of any MS platform, but not nearly as far ahead as they used to be. It's sad that it's not because MS has progressed much, but it's because Palm has taken a step backward in areas that matter.
I miss my PQAs... I've hardly used any data features of any of my phones at all since Palm killed the gateway servers. Verizon would likely have managed to sell me their $25/month 5MB data plan if PQAs still worked, but Blazer and any other web browser are far less bandwidth efficient and far more difficult to use than PQAs were.
If your cable modem's queue supports packet prioritization, yes. Most of them don't since they're simple devices. (In the VoIP age, this might start changing.)
Set an upload cap on your BT client if you don't want it killing your connection, or replace your router with a Linux box that has more intelligent packet filtering. (Specifically, if you know your upstream cap, you can set up the Linux box to be the actual upstream bottleneck and not the cable modem, and when the router is the upstream bottleneck, it's a lot easier to prioritize packets effectively.)
Also some BT clients support automatic upstream detection. The way they do it is by measuring your latency to a few sites, if they see the latency spike, they throttle themselves back until latency goes down.
I believe the ToS bits have been ignored by most routers for a LONG time.
The reason being, IIRC, is that Microsoft decided not to play "good net citizen" and the Windows IP stack sets outgoing packets as 0x10 (or other similar "high priority" category) no matter what.
BitTorrent is written in Python. It runs on any platform that has Python.
The EXE and prepackaged OS X clients are merely clients that were compiled from the original Python. If you simply install Python and use the source distribution, you'll never need to worry about waiting for someone to deliver you a prepackaged compiled version.
And the change to filesystem methodology for Palms is a good thing WHY?
The old database-style techniques were far more efficient. When PalmOne moved to a filesystem-based architecture with the Treo 650, users found that N megs of RAM in the new device was equivalent to N/2 megs of RAM in the old device.
PalmOS has always been more efficient and far better than Windows Mobile for any embedded device. PalmOS devices have historically been more usable despite 1/10 the processing power of a WinCE device thanks to the fact that PalmOS was designed from the ground up for mobile devices, while WinCE and its bastard brethren are a horrendous hack.
Unfortunately, PalmOS 5.x is a step backwards. POS 5.x runs on significantly faster hardware than OS4, with practically no benefits in 95% of situations. It's still a hell of a lot better than any mobile version of Windows.
Numerous still-unfixed bugs in Word leave it almost wholly unsuitable for legal work. Look above for a link to case law where some legal team got screwed royally because Word fucked up something as simple as a word count.
WordPerfect has been dominant in legal markets for a long time, even moreso since Corel has in some ways been catering development specifically to the needs of lawyers.
The result is a program that may not be better for general use, but is superior for lawyers.
As mentioned earlier, lawyers tend to prefer WordPerfect for a number of reasons. The Justice Department has a lot of those.:)
OpenOffice may actually have proven to be totally unsuitable for the lawyers in the Justice Department, just as MS Office has proven to be wholly unsuitable.
In addition to historic precedent, Corel has been solidifying their niche market by catering towards lawyers. I think they are the only word processor developer that has actually marketed a version specifically catered towards lawyers, and I believe their general overall development is heavily influenced by the needs of one particular market which Corel is well-established in and wants to stay well-established in.
Unlike MS, Corel is maintaining a stranglehold on that particular market not by underhanded tactics, but by releasing a product that is clearly superior for that particular niche.
I would not be surprised if in addition to the fact that OO has only recently become viable in general, OO may be wholly unsuitable for lawyers just as MS Office still is.
As one of the other replies to your post mentioned, for streaming applications such as VOIP and streaming video, ACKs are not used at all and the protocol is designed to be somewhat tolerant of outright packet loss. (Usually some form of forward error correction that is capable of operating at the packet level instead of the link level.)
In situations where the packet loss on links is relatively high (e.g. wireless links), it would probably make sense to do node-to-node ACKs for data that needs to be sent reliably though. If the probability that a packet traverses a link is 0.9, the probability that a packet will traverse N hops is 0.9^N - Thus for networks with many hops (likely for mesh networks), node-to-node ACKs would be a Very Good Thing. (I think this is one reason why X.25 and AX.25, which is a modified version of X.25 meant specifically for amateur radio uses, use node-to-node ACKs.)
An HTTP cache at each node would be VERY interesting, although it could potentially increase latency significantly for new requests not in the cache system.
Plus VOIP can't be cached anyway. As time goes on, data on the Internet is becoming less and less cacheable.
The probability of a collision is relatively low, and we have the ability to track the larger pieces of space junk (and I believe the Shuttle DOES frequently move around in orbit to avoid known junk), but if a collision WERE to happen, it would be disastrous.
Since I bought my Roady and activated it, I've hardly listened to any MP3s.
For one, the enclosure for the hard drive most of my MP3s are on is not working and I haven't gotten around to replacing/fixing it (I'm pretty sure the HD itself is fine.) One of the reasons I've been lazy about replacing/fixing the HD is because I don't need the MP3s as much.
XM gives me a huge variety of music with an amazing selection, and exposes me to new music I'd NEVER have found on my own, and it's so damn convenient too. No need for a PC, just my tiny Walkman-size receiver and the antenna.:)
And XM has also completely replaced FM for me, except for when I'm too lazy to move my receiver/antenna into the car, in which case 92.3 K-Rock is still a decent station. (XM 48 Squizz is far, far better though.)
Look at the solid-state accelerometers and gyros used in state-of-the art automotives. (Subaru's Vehicle Dynamics Control, and the similar Volvo system they plug in their ads for the XC90, etc.)
Take a guess what those solid-state accelerometers and gyros were originally created for...
Slashdot Mirror
One word: Linux
Until now there has been no way to purchase iTunes music under Linux. As such I haven't used the store.
Even if pymusique didn't bypass the DRM, I'm glad it exists so I can actually purchase music from within Linux.
In theory... I get "Login Failed" when I try to use pymusique so far. I'm going to attempt to use the Windows standalone build from my laptop to see if it's a general "pymusique is broken" problem or if it's a specific problem with my installation of the necessary libraries, etc.
It's cross-platform. The articles are bogus, there is a nice Python distribution and the software's site even has Debian packages.
I didn't care about the DRM much thanks to Hymn/JHymn, but I had been putting off signing up for iTMS because I didn't feel like rebooting to Windows to buy my music. (I don't even bother downloading MP3s via P2P due to lack of clients for for Linux for the more useful P2P networks. BitTorrent is the exception here, but it isn't suitable for music downloading.)
Now I can buy music from Linux. YAY.
"In theory, I can buy a modern Inspiron and that bay will work on it, too"
Unfortunately not. The I8200 was the last of what Dell calls their "C series" laptops. They're now on the "D series". As far as I know, all machines within the D-series (Examples are I8500, I8600) are bay-compatible with each other, but not the old C-series. New drive carriers cost only around $10 though. Which reminds me I need to order one. Just got a new 80gig drive and I want to put the old drive into a bay.
Note that Dell doesn't change bay form factors often though. The "C series" covers 4-5 years worth of Dell laptops at the very least.
I've given up on getting the code to run in Octave. I just don't have the time. Going to try seeing if the student version of Matlab is sufficient for this.
I'm surprised Octave is missing such an important feature. I love it and use it all the time, but finding this limitation was a real disappointment for me.
Apparently, one of the critical differences between Octave and Matlab is that Octave apparently doesn't support multidimensional matrices/arrays with dimensions greater than 2.
:(
Which means that the current code is completely incompatible with Octave, as it depends on Matlab's implementation of imread() which returns image data as a three-dimensional matrix.
Going to see if I can get it to work easily, but there's a good chance I won't be able to.
Their fix was to disable exposure control in daylight.
The NightShot cameras have IR filters just like any decent camcorder, which are removed mechanically when you turn on NightShot mode.
KDDI in Japan uses CDMA2000, just as Sprint and Verizon do.
As to whether they use CDMA2000 on the same frequency bands, I don't know.
I know for a fact that the Dell Inspiron 8200 does not support booting from USB/1394 devices, and it's a P4-era device, from midway through the P4 era.
The Asus A7V8X (Still a current Asus product, and less than a year old.) also does not support USB boot. (Oddly, the A7V8X-X does support USB boot but doesn't support many of the other features that the A7V8X does.)
In the situations where someone might want a bootable iPod to service many machines (i.e. corporate), there are likely to be PLENTY of P3-era machines. At my last employer, 90% of the machines were still P3s. Not a single machine I encountered at work had USB/1394 boot capability. It's something that is rarely found on any pre-USB-2.0 motherboards, and USB2.0 didn't become common until the past year or two.
Bus-powered drives = bad idea. Bus-powered drives do not work with 1394 hosts with 4-pin connectors. They also don't work with motherboards whose USB or 1394 hosts whose USB ports might not be quite up to spec. External power is a pain in the ass, so a battery-powered drive with bus-powered capability like the iPod is perfect in this situation. (Original 1394-only iPods charged from the 1394 bus.)
A rescue setup on a bootable iPod will be very nice in the future (2-3 more years for all those old machines to get upgraded, most corporations have rather long upgrade cycles), for now LiveCDs are the way to go.
PCs that can boot from USB/1394 drives are still pretty rare.
Once they become more common, this does have the advantages over a LiveCD such as Knoppix in the fact that it's somewhat more convenient to carry around with you at all times (many people already do so.) Note the comments that it doesn't interfere with the device's music capabilities at all.
It's an obscene waste of money for someone who doesn't already have an iPod to buy it for these purposes, instead of just using a LiveCD. But if you already have an iPod for your music, this would be a nice thing to have around.
(Note: I don't have an iPod for my music, but most likely I could do a similar thing with Softick CardExport II on my Treo 600.)
Probably because the MS TCP/IP stack was playing "bad citizen" even when the backbone was in its infancy. Back then TOS wasn't needed. Now that it's needed, so many apps abuse it that it won't help in its current form.
Yup. I had an old Kyocera 6035. The only reason I upgraded to a Treo 600 recently is because the 6035's buttons and hinge were getting worn after 3+ years.
The new media features of the 600 (PalmOS 5) are kind of nice, but overall I consider the system to be a step back in all of the areas I consider most important in a phone and PDA:
Battery life
Reliability
Usability - Palm has obsoleted the old PQA system claiming that "web browsers are the future" - Well, for looking up small things quickly (such as what movies are playing nearby, the weather, and whether your flight is on time or not), PQAs on the old Verizon QNC CDMA data scheme (14.4 kbits/sec with high latency) were far, far faster than Blazer over even a direct serial PPP connection with broadband as its next hop. (115200 bps minimum, dedicated to the Palm device).
PalmOS was the undisputed king in those areas, and is still a long way ahead of any MS platform, but not nearly as far ahead as they used to be. It's sad that it's not because MS has progressed much, but it's because Palm has taken a step backward in areas that matter.
I miss my PQAs... I've hardly used any data features of any of my phones at all since Palm killed the gateway servers. Verizon would likely have managed to sell me their $25/month 5MB data plan if PQAs still worked, but Blazer and any other web browser are far less bandwidth efficient and far more difficult to use than PQAs were.
The new version might have global caps.
Almost all other BT clients already have them. BitTornado most definately has a global UL cap.
If your cable modem's queue supports packet prioritization, yes. Most of them don't since they're simple devices. (In the VoIP age, this might start changing.)
Set an upload cap on your BT client if you don't want it killing your connection, or replace your router with a Linux box that has more intelligent packet filtering. (Specifically, if you know your upstream cap, you can set up the Linux box to be the actual upstream bottleneck and not the cable modem, and when the router is the upstream bottleneck, it's a lot easier to prioritize packets effectively.)
Also some BT clients support automatic upstream detection. The way they do it is by measuring your latency to a few sites, if they see the latency spike, they throttle themselves back until latency goes down.
btlaunchmany*.py?
BitTornado has done the "all downloads in one window" thing for a long time.
I believe the ToS bits have been ignored by most routers for a LONG time.
The reason being, IIRC, is that Microsoft decided not to play "good net citizen" and the Windows IP stack sets outgoing packets as 0x10 (or other similar "high priority" category) no matter what.
BitTorrent is written in Python. It runs on any platform that has Python.
The EXE and prepackaged OS X clients are merely clients that were compiled from the original Python. If you simply install Python and use the source distribution, you'll never need to worry about waiting for someone to deliver you a prepackaged compiled version.
And the change to filesystem methodology for Palms is a good thing WHY?
The old database-style techniques were far more efficient. When PalmOne moved to a filesystem-based architecture with the Treo 650, users found that N megs of RAM in the new device was equivalent to N/2 megs of RAM in the old device.
PalmOS has always been more efficient and far better than Windows Mobile for any embedded device. PalmOS devices have historically been more usable despite 1/10 the processing power of a WinCE device thanks to the fact that PalmOS was designed from the ground up for mobile devices, while WinCE and its bastard brethren are a horrendous hack.
Unfortunately, PalmOS 5.x is a step backwards. POS 5.x runs on significantly faster hardware than OS4, with practically no benefits in 95% of situations. It's still a hell of a lot better than any mobile version of Windows.
Numerous still-unfixed bugs in Word leave it almost wholly unsuitable for legal work. Look above for a link to case law where some legal team got screwed royally because Word fucked up something as simple as a word count.
WordPerfect has been dominant in legal markets for a long time, even moreso since Corel has in some ways been catering development specifically to the needs of lawyers.
The result is a program that may not be better for general use, but is superior for lawyers.
Note that the DOJ has a shload of lawyers...
As mentioned earlier, lawyers tend to prefer WordPerfect for a number of reasons. The Justice Department has a lot of those. :)
OpenOffice may actually have proven to be totally unsuitable for the lawyers in the Justice Department, just as MS Office has proven to be wholly unsuitable.
In addition to historic precedent, Corel has been solidifying their niche market by catering towards lawyers. I think they are the only word processor developer that has actually marketed a version specifically catered towards lawyers, and I believe their general overall development is heavily influenced by the needs of one particular market which Corel is well-established in and wants to stay well-established in.
Unlike MS, Corel is maintaining a stranglehold on that particular market not by underhanded tactics, but by releasing a product that is clearly superior for that particular niche.
I would not be surprised if in addition to the fact that OO has only recently become viable in general, OO may be wholly unsuitable for lawyers just as MS Office still is.
As one of the other replies to your post mentioned, for streaming applications such as VOIP and streaming video, ACKs are not used at all and the protocol is designed to be somewhat tolerant of outright packet loss. (Usually some form of forward error correction that is capable of operating at the packet level instead of the link level.)
In situations where the packet loss on links is relatively high (e.g. wireless links), it would probably make sense to do node-to-node ACKs for data that needs to be sent reliably though. If the probability that a packet traverses a link is 0.9, the probability that a packet will traverse N hops is 0.9^N - Thus for networks with many hops (likely for mesh networks), node-to-node ACKs would be a Very Good Thing. (I think this is one reason why X.25 and AX.25, which is a modified version of X.25 meant specifically for amateur radio uses, use node-to-node ACKs.)
An HTTP cache at each node would be VERY interesting, although it could potentially increase latency significantly for new requests not in the cache system.
Plus VOIP can't be cached anyway. As time goes on, data on the Internet is becoming less and less cacheable.
Yeah, there's less debris up in geosync orbit.
The probability of a collision is relatively low, and we have the ability to track the larger pieces of space junk (and I believe the Shuttle DOES frequently move around in orbit to avoid known junk), but if a collision WERE to happen, it would be disastrous.
We just hope it never does happen...
Yeah, as an existing XM listener, the MyFI makes me drool.
Too expensive for me though. My Roady (not Roady2 even, the original Roady) is more than enough for me.
Since I bought my Roady and activated it, I've hardly listened to any MP3s.
:)
For one, the enclosure for the hard drive most of my MP3s are on is not working and I haven't gotten around to replacing/fixing it (I'm pretty sure the HD itself is fine.) One of the reasons I've been lazy about replacing/fixing the HD is because I don't need the MP3s as much.
XM gives me a huge variety of music with an amazing selection, and exposes me to new music I'd NEVER have found on my own, and it's so damn convenient too. No need for a PC, just my tiny Walkman-size receiver and the antenna.
And XM has also completely replaced FM for me, except for when I'm too lazy to move my receiver/antenna into the car, in which case 92.3 K-Rock is still a decent station. (XM 48 Squizz is far, far better though.)
Look at the solid-state accelerometers and gyros used in state-of-the art automotives. (Subaru's Vehicle Dynamics Control, and the similar Volvo system they plug in their ads for the XC90, etc.)
Take a guess what those solid-state accelerometers and gyros were originally created for...
Stuff like what you're talking about is apparently very common in Japan.