I frequently get sent word documents by various people, being a unix user I of course send back the usual note about proprietory formats etc etc..
But I've found is more effective to also go int othe file with a text editor and extract bits of text which they've deleted, along iwth other information the user may no t want me to see.
Recently I received such a message from someone which handled PR for my particular section of the NI govt. There was some really dodgy info in there, and afdter returning it to the sender, the govt department got sent aplaintext policy document about not using MS Word or anything more complicated that.pdf for sending out messages.
People should go looking at these files - there's a lot of info out there to be had
Nemesis by Bill Napier is a novel on this subject... and it's pretty damn good (Even mentions linux). Bill Napier was talking about killer asteroids a long time before anyone else - you should read his books.
Delivering a dose of harsh reality to the world for the last 2 years;-)
The important thing about the asteroid threat is that it's one of the few dangers to the human races that (a) Can Kill us All (b) We Understand (c) We have a remote chance of avoiding using modern technology
But Fundamental to this all is the fact that we need to get as much wartning as possible - that's why we should be spending more money on telescopes and serach programs.
In fact - we're so underfunded that I've been seduced away from my job of 'saving the world' to go and work at myplay.com.....
So you know which Music serivce provider to blame when armageddon comes calling.
Funny.... The rules do man that powerful players can crush others with impunity... but those that newbie bash tend to be vilified and hounded by others....
There ae a lot of planets out there - make too many enemies and you're in real trouble.
Planetarion is basically an online, realtime strategy game...
When I say realtime, I mean that it takes ohous for things to happen - 8 hous to fly acoss the galaxy to attack someone.
This game is teh kind of thing that suit's wap technology - in fact having a mobile phone client would enhance the game somewhat.... Imagine getting an automatic phone alert when an attack fleet is on the way....
Imagine leaving an impotant meeting because your planet means more to you than business!
I love Monte-Carlo simulations - it's the only way to do research;-)
And it nicely adapts to implementation across Beowulf clusters.
Now you know why we asteroid Catastrophists talk in probablilities all the time - we just play games with dropping random asteoids onto the Earth and call it work.
(1) It came first - mp3.com ripped of their design (2) You can put any mp3 up there - taken from any source... there's a lot of cool vinyl stuff which I couldn't stick on mp3.com (3) They Support Unix (4) You can do 'Dj mixes' or just go and listen to mine.
At least that's what I thought when i read the name at first...
a Bit Like E-Music, which makes me think of music that you have to take E to like. After enough MDMA most people would dance to a car alarm and enjoy it.
Damn So much for staying on topic.
But seriously, How many people feel that their programming would benefit from an IDE to help them keep track of variables and function names. I grwew up with assembly language and can't get my head around these environments which can end up second guessing the user. If I can't keep te whole of a project in my head I tend to get bored with it. That's the way i've always been...
Personally - I wish I didn't need to write makefiles.
As an astornomer who does these kind of calculations I shuld point out that this system is not just specialised to solve one type of problem - The N body problems where N is very big - e.g. our galaxy has about 100, billion stars in it - fully specifying their position and velocity would require 4.8 terabytes of memory. We're still a long way away from that... but getting closer. Oh and that's neglectign things like molecular clouds and suchlike which have appreciable mass but aren't stars
I have a cluster of alphas crunching away solar system models - Grape6 couldn't actually do this very well since it's designed for a certain N body algorithm which doesn't suit small N... Instead I use a syplectic integrator which takes advantage of a number of known factors in the problem.
So - we still need bigger and faster machines, but we also need more general machines...
Anyway... I want one of these to model EKO formation in the solar system
Here's me trying to complete my Astronomy PhD while working for a silicon valley internet music company...
Don't ask me how an astronomer ends up coding Icecast and Liveice, it just sort of happened. The best thing about this isn't the money, it's the fact the myplay.winamp.com is based on icecast - this is a week after nullsoft banned icecast servers from shoutcast.com.
Yeah... and I'm sure the RIAA would lok favourably on me giving out my username and password so that the mozilla developers can see just how nasty the myplay setup can be. And another problem is that you can't really link to the problem pages inside the site. Gurrr
I guess part of the problem is that they give you 3gb of disk space and some of the problems only occur after you've filled that up with a reasonable number of tracks - that can take a long time. (unless - like me you wrote a perl script to do it for you;-)
There are some other problems with the site - mostly javascript, e.g. saving the state of a playlist doesn't work.
One victory for mozilla is the playlist editing screen which works much better than the either IE or Netscape - Congrats to the team on that one. Now if only I can save the state afterwards.....
I'm looking at bugzilla - have you any suggestions on how to do handle the main report?
Rendering a full locker is a test that I keep throwing at it, they give you gigs of free disk space for mp3's, but, a web browser isn't a particularly well optomised interface for working with it.
Trying to display all my tracks basically means rendering a *huge* table - 1000+ rows with gifs and links on every one.
Netscape needs abotu 256megs of memory and takes 10 minutes to do it - this is one of the reasons I'm waiting for mozilla to be able to do it (IE handles it perfectly - shame on us).
Mozilla used to be able to do it. - but the latest build dies:-( Maybe it's just because I keep adding stuff to my collection and the test is getting harder - oh well.
I can imagine some people here saying that the myplay locker design is stupid because it renders everything in one big table (well - the default is only 15 items). But you have to keep in mind that the browser from the evil empire handles it perfectly well - so shouldn't we be able to do a bit better. Arrrgghhh it's so tempting to take a look at this code myself.... as if I have any spare time...
(Why don't you go listen to some of my stuff while you're here - go on - you know that a slashdotter should be number 1.;-)
He was at the planetarium talking to the public - so as a 'staff member' I took a few mins to chat with him. His opinion of Apollo 13 is that it's a big budget documentary - they got far more right in that film than they got wrong.
And it's a bloody good film.
Edgar was the backup LM pilot for apollo 13 - so he was one of the people on the ground doing simulations to try and figure out how to get them back.
But - Gene Kranz is one of the heroes of the century - he commanded a team of thousands and had the real power to make the missions work.
Re:Rip off artists....
on
An MP3 Update
·
· Score: 2
So how many CD's have you bought from mp3.com?
The average mp3.com artists has sold one cd....
Seriously though - the cd's on demand business was seen elsewhere before mp3.com.
I guess the one original thing they did do was the ability to listen to a CD you've bought while it's in transit.
Maybe I just don't like the way that Michael Robertson put journalists on the mp3.com spam list whenver they mail him... Desperate or what?
I'm not surprised that mp3.com lost in court - their whole site is built on copied material and beam it was just the one which was easiest to take to court. mp3.com's entire business is based around pirating other people's work and making it their own....
mp3.com more or less got the unsigned/low profile artists from the internet underground music archive.
my.mp3.com looks exactly like myplay.com - I'm just waiting for mp3.com to copy the 'Publish A Playlist' functionality into my.mp3.com - I can see it coming. (at least
They even stole the 'Anywhere, Anytime' line from myplay.....
Or how about this http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/78/penny_framsta d.html Penny Framstad - offer a track called "Even Angels Fall". While at myplay.com one of the free tracks they offer is the *Original* version (http://www.myplay.com/mp/promo/free_music.jsp?act =artist&tid=634033) - even their artsts copy mp3.com's competitors.
;-)
So... can anyone point out what mp3.com has done which makes them the hero in so many slashdotter's eyes? They're like microsoft, rushing out copies of other people's technology and trying to make that the standard by being the biggest.
LAME is so good it's now the default encoder with liveice. In fact - this reminds me that I need to go and update the web pages;-)
Mark, Gabriel and Takehiro are clever people - they seem to have made the bulk of the changes. OTOH people like me seem to have spent the time finding audio samples which don't encode well and complaining.
It's also pretty good at low bitrates - try these icecast servers - http://abv-icy1.myplay.com:8000 http://abv-icy1.myplay.com:8010 http://abv-icy1.myplay.com:8020
Slashdot Mirror
I frequently get sent word documents by various people, being a unix user I of course send back the usual note about proprietory formats etc etc..
.pdf for sending out messages.
But I've found is more effective to also go int othe file with a text editor and extract bits of text which they've deleted, along iwth other information the user may no t want me to see.
Recently I received such a message from someone which handled PR for my particular section of the NI govt. There was some really dodgy info in there, and afdter returning it to the sender, the govt department got sent aplaintext policy document about not using MS Word or anything more complicated that
People should go looking at these files - there's a lot of info out there to be had
Nemesis by Bill Napier is a novel on this subject... and it's pretty damn good (Even mentions linux). Bill Napier was talking about killer asteroids a long time before anyone else - you should read his books.
Http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html
;-)
Delivering a dose of harsh reality to the world for the last 2 years
The important thing about the asteroid threat is that it's one of the few dangers to the human races that
(a) Can Kill us All
(b) We Understand
(c) We have a remote chance of avoiding using modern technology
But Fundamental to this all is the fact that we need to get as much wartning as possible - that's why we should be spending more money on telescopes and serach programs.
In fact - we're so underfunded that I've been seduced away from my job of 'saving the world' to go and work at myplay.com.....
So you know which Music serivce provider to blame when armageddon comes calling.
Funny.... The rules do man that powerful players can crush others with impunity... but those that newbie bash tend to be vilified and hounded by others....
There ae a lot of planets out there - make too many enemies and you're in real trouble.
Planetarion is basically an online, realtime strategy game...
When I say realtime, I mean that it takes ohous for things to happen - 8 hous to fly acoss the galaxy to attack someone.
This game is teh kind of thing that suit's wap technology - in fact having a mobile phone client would enhance the game somewhat.... Imagine getting an automatic phone alert when an attack fleet is on the way....
Imagine leaving an impotant meeting because your planet means more to you than business!
(www.planetarion.com BTW)
I love Monte-Carlo simulations - it's the only way to do research ;-)
And it nicely adapts to implementation across Beowulf clusters.
Now you know why we asteroid Catastrophists talk in probablilities all the time - we just play games with dropping random asteoids onto the Earth and call it work.
(1) It came first - mp3.com ripped of their design
(2) You can put any mp3 up there - taken from any source... there's a lot of cool vinyl stuff which I couldn't stick on mp3.com
(3) They Support Unix
(4) You can do 'Dj mixes' or just go and listen to mine.
Indeed - the beta version of their mp3 encoder for linux was in nice non-obfuscated form with all the symbols left in.
Reverse engineering of their encoder would be trivial.
It's a shame that Lame is so much better, and free.
(And I'll kill anyone who suggest blade is better in response to this - get it through your head)
:-)
Indeed - But in my case it's a transitoin from Orbital mechanics to Mp3 music....
Not quite as easy
Ahh yes I ubnderstand what you mean....
.c file.
But what I was meaning is that I've a terrible habit of working much more quickly when all the code is in a single
Sometimes it takes a bit longer to compile... but then again I don't recompile very often
At least that's what I thought when i read the name at first...
a Bit Like E-Music, which makes me think of music that you have to take E to like. After enough MDMA most people would dance to a car alarm and enjoy it.
Damn So much for staying on topic.
But seriously, How many people feel that their programming would benefit from an IDE to help them keep track of variables and function names. I grwew up with assembly language and can't get my head around these environments which can end up second guessing the user. If I can't keep te whole of a project in my head I tend to get bored with it. That's the way i've always been...
Personally - I wish I didn't need to write makefiles.
;-)
As an astornomer who does these kind of calculations I shuld point out that this system is not just specialised to solve one type of problem - The N body problems where N is very big - e.g. our galaxy has about 100, billion stars in it - fully specifying their position and velocity would require 4.8 terabytes of memory. We're still a long way away from that... but getting closer. Oh and that's neglectign things like molecular clouds and suchlike which have appreciable mass but aren't stars
I have a cluster of alphas crunching away solar system models - Grape6 couldn't actually do this very well since it's designed for a certain N body algorithm which doesn't suit small N... Instead I use a syplectic integrator which takes advantage of a number of known factors in the problem.
So - we still need bigger and faster machines, but we also need more general machines...
Anyway... I want one of these to model EKO formation in the solar system
Here's me trying to complete my Astronomy PhD while working for a silicon valley internet music company...
Don't ask me how an astronomer ends up coding Icecast and Liveice, it just sort of happened. The best thing about this isn't the money, it's the fact the myplay.winamp.com is based on icecast - this is a week after nullsoft banned icecast servers from shoutcast.com.
;-)
Go on - I'm sure you know somewhere reasonably cheap that suits a Linux hacker like myself.
POssibly - I did manage to load the whole locker a gfew minutes ago, and I began trying to do things...
Then it froze after I switched desktops and came back...
Only 72 megs needed to render 2000+ entries.
(BTW - thanks to whoever listened to that URL - I'm back at number 1)
Myplay locker (p2 of 555) [clr.gif]
.... 5/6ths of the beast
[sml_conr.gif] [clr.gif]
[not_play.gif] Problems playing?
[dotline_grey.gif]
555
Kate Bush
[dead_info.gif] Hounds Of Love
6:13 rock MP3 128K Edit
[ ]
[sml_play.gif] Hounds Of Love
I wonder if it'll work on Quark
Possibly - will check that...
;-)
And remove all those Britney Spears tracks before send in the report
a 2.5 meg web page..... lovely...
Yeah... and I'm sure the RIAA would lok favourably on me giving out my username and password so that the mozilla developers can see just how nasty the myplay setup can be. And another problem is that you can't really link to the problem pages inside the site. Gurrr
;-)
I guess part of the problem is that they give you 3gb of disk space and some of the problems only occur after you've filled that up with a reasonable number of tracks - that can take a long time. (unless - like me you wrote a perl script to do it for you
There are some other problems with the site - mostly javascript, e.g. saving the state of a playlist doesn't work.
One victory for mozilla is the playlist editing screen which works much better than the either IE or Netscape - Congrats to the team on that one. Now if only I can save the state afterwards.....
I'm looking at bugzilla - have you any suggestions on how to do handle the main report?
Is it not a bit non-specific to point out that rendering big tables sucks?
I mean I'd presume they knew that...
Although, this is the first version for a long time that has actually crashed during that test.
Trying to display all my tracks basically means rendering a *huge* table - 1000+ rows with gifs and links on every one.
Netscape needs abotu 256megs of memory and takes 10 minutes to do it - this is one of the reasons I'm waiting for mozilla to be able to do it (IE handles it perfectly - shame on us).
Mozilla used to be able to do it. - but the latest build dies :-( Maybe it's just because I keep adding stuff to my collection and the test is getting harder - oh well.
I can imagine some people here saying that the myplay locker design is stupid because it renders everything in one big table (well - the default is only 15 items). But you have to keep in mind that the browser from the evil empire handles it perfectly well - so shouldn't we be able to do a bit better. Arrrgghhh it's so tempting to take a look at this code myself.... as if I have any spare time...
(Why don't you go listen to some of my stuff while you're here - go on - you know that a slashdotter should be number 1. ;-)
He was at the planetarium talking to the public - so as a 'staff member' I took a few mins to chat with him. His opinion of Apollo 13 is that it's a big budget documentary - they got far more right in that film than they got wrong.
And it's a bloody good film.
Edgar was the backup LM pilot for apollo 13 - so he was one of the people on the ground doing simulations to try and figure out how to get them back.
But - Gene Kranz is one of the heroes of the century - he commanded a team of thousands and had the real power to make the missions work.
So how many CD's have you bought from mp3.com?
The average mp3.com artists has sold one cd....
Seriously though - the cd's on demand business was seen elsewhere before mp3.com.
I guess the one original thing they did do was the ability to listen to a CD you've bought while it's in transit.
Maybe I just don't like the way that Michael Robertson put journalists on the mp3.com spam list whenver they mail him... Desperate or what?
I'm not surprised that mp3.com lost in court - their whole site is built on copied material and beam it was just the one which was easiest to take to court. mp3.com's entire business is based around pirating other people's work and making it their own....
a d.html t =artist&tid=634033) - even their artsts copy mp3.com's competitors.
mp3.com more or less got the unsigned/low profile artists from the internet underground music archive.
my.mp3.com looks exactly like myplay.com - I'm just waiting for mp3.com to copy the 'Publish A Playlist' functionality into my.mp3.com - I can see it coming. (at least
They even stole the 'Anywhere, Anytime' line from myplay.....
Or how about this
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/78/penny_framst
Penny Framstad - offer a track called "Even Angels Fall". While at myplay.com one of the free tracks they offer is the *Original* version (http://www.myplay.com/mp/promo/free_music.jsp?ac
;-)
So... can anyone point out what mp3.com has done which makes them the hero in so many slashdotter's eyes? They're like microsoft, rushing out copies of other people's technology and trying to make that the standard by being the biggest.
LAME is so good it's now the default encoder with liveice. In fact - this reminds me that I need to go and update the web pages ;-)
Mark, Gabriel and Takehiro are clever people - they seem to have made the bulk of the changes. OTOH people like me seem to have spent the time finding audio samples which don't encode well and complaining.
It's also pretty good at low bitrates - try these icecast servers -
http://abv-icy1.myplay.com:8000
http://abv-icy1.myplay.com:8010
http://abv-icy1.myplay.com:8020
they run LAME 24 hours a day.
It may be fast - but it's based on a really old version of LAME, and for some unknown reason they desicded to change half the command line options....
;-)
I'm not impressed