Just in cas you're interested, my Palm III is vulnerable to several well known DoS attacks such as IP frag attacks like teardrop and netsea.
On a related note - I once demoes mp3 streaming from my palm III - by streaming low bitrate mp3 files to players (actually 16kbit, 11025kHz, mono mpeg 2.5 audio). one of these days I want to port the core of iceast to it.... but I think Ill have to wait until I get a faster connection to the palm - the cradle only supports a bandwidth of about 56kbit... not enough for many listeners.
Basically myplay goves you the online storage space for nothing, and the extra facilities (i.e. public playlists AKA icecast streams) are thrown into the service.
It;s interesting to look at the differences between my.mp3.com and it's competitor myplay.com.
my.mp3.com is basically requiring you to present evidence that you own a CD and then they are giving you mp3's of that CD so that yuou can play them.
Myplay.com instead lets you upload mp3's, so intead of 'beaming' your CD, you're ripping the CD (at whatever quality you like) and adding them to your myplay locaker.
Now - in the end the results are the same, but legally there's enough of a difference that mp3.com was breaking the law while myplay wasn't. If myplay were breaking the law then I presume that they'd have been taken to court first since they've been offering their locker service for a lot longer than my.mp3.com.
But then again - maybe I'm jsut defending them because I like the way I can put up tracks by obscure artists which mp3.com would never acquire (e.g. for vinyl only tracks). Or maybe it's they way they support linux and use software like icecast for streaming.....
or maybe it's because you can go there and listen to my current playlist. Downtempo, Leftfield and other words - go on - you know it deservers to be number 1.
Beleive it or not there is a point to coding things in shell script... speed of development.
My first version of mp3 server was written in less than an hour using bash and a few unix commands. Sox would record from the sound card, pipe the pcm audio to l3enc which would write an mp3 stream to a file. Meanwhile netcat would listen for connections and start 'tail -f mp3file' to send the 'live' data to the client.
Mp3 streaming in the days before winamp was even capable of recieving mp3 streams, never mind sending them to shoutcast.
I'ma amazed my dead activity meter page still gets more hits than anything else on my web pages (welll except for liveice now).
It was a silly use of image analysis to figure out just what was going on, I never quite got round to implementing an automatic Jenni-Alert for users.
Still this whole automatic download/image analysis did one thing original.... I remember SGI claiming a patent for a random numbver generator based on a camera pointed at a Lava Lamp.... well I used the jenni images for random number generation and occasionally - this featured a lava lamp.
So... anyone wanting to challenge this patent can talk to me for 'prior art';-)
What you relly want to do is use pipes, that's how I didi it originally, don't write the stuff to the FS (well unless you actually want to record it too)
GOG is fantaststic - but it's based on (relatively speaking) quite an old version of LAME - if you're going for streaming content at low bitrates then the improvements that LAME has made really show up.
Of course if you want to stream at 160kbit then you'll be hard pushed to tell the difference uless you look at 'top'.
I was doing this with some code I wrote over 2 and a half years ago (more than a yar before shoutcast). Ok... Been there moment covered - now onto the details.
Nowadays though, I'd suggest you use Icecast + Liveice - there are a few websites already doing this. But - as the author of Liveice I must admit that my documentation sucks, so if you have any problems then I'm always available for answers. Somtimes I even do hacks to order.
Liveice supports Soundcard Input, as well as multichannel mixing of mp3/wav/whatever. It can run as daemon and also supports almost every encoder available for linux. It also permits you to stream the same input at multiple bitrates - something which is probably essential if you're to cater for everyone. I've also got a plugin for xmms, but since there's no line in input plugin it's not so much use for live stuff just yet.
One major bit of advice I give to everyone - Get the latest version from my web page.
I'm terrible with CVS which is why most of my changes/improvements aren't in the tarballs/CVS on iceacst.org - one day when I have time to clean it up for a proper release.
(And while you're at it - why not listen to my latest selection of Scottish Music)
Ahhh Murphy's Law Strikes Again
on
G3 Solar Storm
·
· Score: 2
I was out last night around sunset to see the rare alignment of 4 planetary bodies (and a few satellites) before I returned to work until late, around 10pm the Observatory phone started rining off the hook.... All the public phoning in to report this event.
And as murphy's law would have it it had got cloudy in the meantime.. Two great events in teh sky and I can only see one of them.
Still, we have a reasonable chance of seeing some more over the coming year since the Aurora tend to lag behind solar maximum by a year or so.
Oh well - I hope this year's comet is greeted with better weather.
COmpetition? There is no competition!
on
1.4-1.6 GHz Alphas
·
· Score: 3
Even the 500Mhz alphas in our year old machines are still faster than the gigahertz athlons and PIII's which are grabbing the headlines.
Processor speed isn't just about the clock - The alpha's rock in every way
It's Ironic that a Game callded Fanal Fantasy spawned 7 sequels... and a 9th is coming..
It's almost enough to make me want to learn Japanese, since that was teh only way to play FFV for a long time. Then some rom hackers went and did an unnoficial translation.
FFVI (or FFIII) was one of the best games ever released - easily the best of teh series. I actually bought an NTSC super nintendo to play it because there were bugs when runnign it on my PAL unit. But they're jsut always such vast and sprawling events that it take smoths to find everything - I've still to complete the card queen quest in my current FFVIII game before I head off to face Adel in the Lunatic Pandora.
From what I heard there were up to 10 electropnic computers operating at Bletchly park.... plus of course all the mechanical crckers.
So the eniac wasn't even in the first 10 computers....
Even better - it makes IBM's assertion that there was a worldwide market for at most 5 computers even more ludicrous since twice that many had already been built.
I live in Armagh where there have been a couple of 'cultural' thefts recently - an Original Copy of 'Gullivers Travels' with handwritten notes by the author is probably the most famous. We're worried about this at the observatory where we have some really unique items - like the first anemometer, Earnshaw's first clock, and even the first copy fo the NGC catalogue.....
Still it's a shame that the really important historical artifacts related to the enigma were all destroyed in the name of secrecy. The Mechanical 'bombs' used for cracking and the collossus computers.... It's tragic that the UK had secretly built 10 electronic computers before the ENIAC grabbed headlines across the world, but they were all destroyed....
Heh this is an origin system.... lots of nice flashing lights though.... and Gigs of memory... the DS20 only has 1 gig - memoryis pretty critical in these calculations.
Ahhhh so you make the CPU's slow enough that the conytext switch looks fast..
Seriously - a couple of points (1) - I'ts pounds not dollars - yep - almost 400,000 dollars worth;-) (2) - The DS20 has and even faster memory bus -- I mean Waaayyyy faster - I've seen benchmarks for 8 processor alpha based Beowulfs and they're *still* faster than the SGI hardware.....
Of course... i've always thught of SGI as being nice graphics platforms... so got knows why we got a big cabinet with no graphics card...
The alpha is basically twice as fast as an Athlon at the same MHz, or 3 times faster than a PIII of the same clock speed. Thir pfloating point performance is still better than anythign else out there. I use them for Orbital com[putations and they fly.
We recently got a 250Grand 8 processor SGI number cruncher, for someone who wants to do MHD calculations, scarey big calculations. We did a benchmark on it on some of my code and found that 1 SGI CPU was 1/3rd of the speed of our 500Mhz DS20 CPU's..... we have a Dual processor DS20 which we acquired a year ago, for 20k, and this is 75% of the speed of our brand new 'Supercomputer'.......
Or at least I made the first server available to the public which would stream live mp3 to any number of listeners - over a year before Nullsoft grabbed all the glory with Shi^Houtcast;-)
Ok... hardly commercial quality - but it was good fun... and there is one thing about my original server that set it apart from anything else I've seen - The whole thing was implemented in abotu 15 lines of bourne shell.
Sometimes linux leads the way, sometimes it follows, but when it follows it does it better.
Viruses in various forms will propagate - there's loads of programmes which are vulnerable. But I don't see the huge problems with macro viruses occurring, there won't be any 'melissa'.
Trojans are already turning up here and there.
The trick is not to assume that something is more secure than windows, if you end up being copmplacent about security threats then you get what you deserve. You don't need to be paranoid either, and being paranoid doesn't mean spending money to support the anti-virus software industry. It just means making sure your code doesn't increase the risk to the whole.
So - if you spot a problem - then talk to the people who should deal with it.
JUst curious - I presume the special reader software will limit other programs from accessing it? Meaning that common access packages to help sight impared people won't be of any use.
This kind of content may soon be illegal in Northern Ireland where equal opportunities legislation is much more extensive.... Of course - that's if they can ever sort out thei little problem about not wanting to give up guns.
I've heard that the tellomere's on Dolly are much shorter than normal and likely to lead to a shorter lifespan. (I'm sure you know that Tellomere DNA is the junk at the end of the chromosomes which make them more robust to copying).
When I heard this an idea struck me - why not create pets by repeated cloning of an animal - so that the lifespan of the pet is short enough that pets can really be 'just for christmas'.
This idea gets better when you look at the meat industry - you can make you animals live just long enough to reach full size and then die. That way nobody has to kill them in the Slaughterhouse, they just hop onto the conveyor belt and pass away peacefully and naturally.
On all the forums and discussions on streaming media there seems to be a real (no pun intended) holy war going on between Real Server and Windows media services.
Real may be available for more platforms than WMP which is often given as a reason for providing content in that format. But Windows media services is free and that's a big problem for everyone who doesn't have Windows or Mac.
But - open source has an ace in this game - Icecast isn't the best technology - it's downright low tech - butif you're streaming audio then using icecast you can serve live content to WMP *and* Real player users as well as Xmms, winamp and all those other mp3 players.
And it's free (icecast is, shoutcast costs 300$).
So - remind all those people running windows media stations that ther is a 'better' solution out there. Better in that it offers a greater potential audience than either server.
Now... If only RP7 would download faster I wouldn't be saying things like this during the download...
Slashdot Mirror
Just in cas you're interested, my Palm III is vulnerable to several well known DoS attacks such as IP frag attacks like teardrop and netsea.
On a related note - I once demoes mp3 streaming from my palm III - by streaming low bitrate mp3 files to players (actually 16kbit, 11025kHz, mono mpeg 2.5 audio). one of these days I want to port the core of iceast to it.... but I think Ill have to wait until I get a faster connection to the palm - the cradle only supports a bandwidth of about 56kbit... not enough for many listeners.
How does myplay.com make it's money?
Advertising?
Wasn't there some article where it was suggested that the only viable media model in the future will be to sell advertising using the media.
So - is myplay.com an early adopter of this concept?
Basically myplay goves you the online storage space for nothing, and the extra facilities (i.e. public playlists AKA icecast streams) are thrown into the service.
....
Shame there's no official unix dropbox yet
my.mp3.com is basically requiring you to present evidence that you own a CD and then they are giving you mp3's of that CD so that yuou can play them.
Myplay.com instead lets you upload mp3's, so intead of 'beaming' your CD, you're ripping the CD (at whatever quality you like) and adding them to your myplay locaker.
Now - in the end the results are the same, but legally there's enough of a difference that mp3.com was breaking the law while myplay wasn't. If myplay were breaking the law then I presume that they'd have been taken to court first since they've been offering their locker service for a lot longer than my.mp3.com.
But then again - maybe I'm jsut defending them because I like the way I can put up tracks by obscure artists which mp3.com would never acquire (e.g. for vinyl only tracks). Or maybe it's they way they support linux and use software like icecast for streaming.....
or maybe it's because you can go there and listen to my current playlist. Downtempo, Leftfield and other words - go on - you know it deservers to be number 1.
Beleive it or not there is a point to coding things in shell script... speed of development.
My first version of mp3 server was written in less than an hour using bash and a few unix commands. Sox would record from the sound card, pipe the pcm audio to l3enc which would write an mp3 stream to a file. Meanwhile netcat would listen for connections and start 'tail -f mp3file' to send the 'live' data to the client.
Mp3 streaming in the days before winamp was even capable of recieving mp3 streams, never mind sending them to shoutcast.
I'ma amazed my dead activity meter page still gets more hits than anything else on my web pages (welll except for liveice now).
;-)
It was a silly use of image analysis to figure out just what was going on, I never quite got round to implementing an automatic Jenni-Alert for users.
Still this whole automatic download/image analysis did one thing original.... I remember SGI claiming a patent for a random numbver generator based on a camera pointed at a Lava Lamp.... well I used the jenni images for random number generation and occasionally - this featured a lava lamp.
So... anyone wanting to challenge this patent can talk to me for 'prior art'
Nuff Said
What you relly want to do is use pipes, that's how I didi it originally, don't write the stuff to the FS (well unless you actually want to record it too)
Blade encoder is responsible for a lot of bad mp3 press.
if you know anyone using it then stop them LAME is better.
Of course... you still find people doing stupid things with encoders like asting for 44.1 kHz stereo audio as 32kbit....
ewwweewwwweeessshhshhhshhhhs
GOG is fantaststic - but it's based on (relatively speaking) quite an old version of LAME - if you're going for streaming content at low bitrates then the improvements that LAME has made really show up.
Of course if you want to stream at 160kbit then you'll be hard pushed to tell the difference uless you look at 'top'.
At low bitrates the CPU usage is generally lower.
Nowadays though, I'd suggest you use Icecast + Liveice - there are a few websites already doing this. But - as the author of Liveice I must admit that my documentation sucks, so if you have any problems then I'm always available for answers. Somtimes I even do hacks to order.
Liveice supports Soundcard Input, as well as multichannel mixing of mp3/wav/whatever. It can run as daemon and also supports almost every encoder available for linux. It also permits you to stream the same input at multiple bitrates - something which is probably essential if you're to cater for everyone. I've also got a plugin for xmms, but since there's no line in input plugin it's not so much use for live stuff just yet.
One major bit of advice I give to everyone - Get the latest version from my web page.
I'm terrible with CVS which is why most of my changes/improvements aren't in the tarballs/CVS on iceacst.org - one day when I have time to clean it up for a proper release.
(And while you're at it - why not listen to my latest selection of Scottish Music)
I was out last night around sunset to see the rare alignment of 4 planetary bodies (and a few satellites) before I returned to work until late, around 10pm the Observatory phone started rining off the hook.... All the public phoning in to report this event.
And as murphy's law would have it it had got cloudy in the meantime.. Two great events in teh sky and I can only see one of them.
Still, we have a reasonable chance of seeing some more over the coming year since the Aurora tend to lag behind solar maximum by a year or so.
Oh well - I hope this year's comet is greeted with better weather.
Even the 500Mhz alphas in our year old machines are still faster than the gigahertz athlons and PIII's which are grabbing the headlines.
Processor speed isn't just about the clock - The alpha's rock in every way
Oh yes.... I saw this when I was in teh US in November.... Problem was - I had only enough money for one game... it was Either FF Anthology of FFVIII.
But - I'll be back, and I'll pick up the Anthology. Of course - It would be nice if they'd release it in the UK.
It's Ironic that a Game callded Fanal Fantasy spawned 7 sequels... and a 9th is coming..
It's almost enough to make me want to learn Japanese, since that was teh only way to play FFV for a long time. Then some rom hackers went and did an unnoficial translation.
FFVI (or FFIII) was one of the best games ever released - easily the best of teh series. I actually bought an NTSC super nintendo to play it because there were bugs when runnign it on my PAL unit. But they're jsut always such vast and sprawling events that it take smoths to find everything - I've still to complete the card queen quest in my current FFVIII game before I head off to face Adel in the Lunatic Pandora.
I can't Wait...
From what I heard there were up to 10 electropnic computers operating at Bletchly park.... plus of course all the mechanical crckers.
So the eniac wasn't even in the first 10 computers....
Even better - it makes IBM's assertion that there was a worldwide market for at most 5 computers even more ludicrous since twice that many had already been built.
You know - I've love one of these....
I live in Armagh where there have been a couple of 'cultural' thefts recently - an Original Copy of 'Gullivers Travels' with handwritten notes by the author is probably the most famous. We're worried about this at the observatory where we have some really unique items - like the first anemometer, Earnshaw's first clock, and even the first copy fo the NGC catalogue.....
Still it's a shame that the really important historical artifacts related to the enigma were all destroyed in the name of secrecy. The Mechanical 'bombs' used for cracking and the collossus computers.... It's tragic that the UK had secretly built 10 electronic computers before the ENIAC grabbed headlines across the world, but they were all destroyed....
So... who are the real cultural thieves?
Heh this is an origin system.... lots of nice flashing lights though .... and Gigs of memory... the DS20 only has 1 gig - memoryis pretty critical in these calculations.
Ahhhh so you make the CPU's slow enough that the conytext switch looks fast..
;-)
Seriously - a couple of points
(1) - I'ts pounds not dollars - yep - almost 400,000 dollars worth
(2) - The DS20 has and even faster memory bus -- I mean Waaayyyy faster - I've seen benchmarks for 8 processor alpha based Beowulfs and they're *still* faster than the SGI hardware.....
Of course... i've always thught of SGI as being nice graphics platforms... so got knows why we got a big cabinet with no graphics card...
The alpha is basically twice as fast as an Athlon at the same MHz, or 3 times faster than a PIII of the same clock speed. Thir pfloating point performance is still better than anythign else out there. I use them for Orbital com[putations and they fly.
We recently got a 250Grand 8 processor SGI number cruncher, for someone who wants to do MHD calculations, scarey big calculations. We did a benchmark on it on some of my code and found that 1 SGI CPU was 1/3rd of the speed of our 500Mhz DS20 CPU's..... we have a Dual processor DS20 which we acquired a year ago, for 20k, and this is 75% of the speed of our brand new 'Supercomputer'.......
They can't cancel each other out because the spin operators won't.
Or at least I made the first server available to the public which would stream live mp3 to any number of listeners - over a year before Nullsoft grabbed all the glory with Shi^Houtcast ;-)
Ok... hardly commercial quality - but it was good fun... and there is one thing about my original server that set it apart from anything else I've seen - The whole thing was implemented in abotu 15 lines of bourne shell.
Sometimes linux leads the way, sometimes it follows, but when it follows it does it better.
Viruses in various forms will propagate - there's loads of programmes which are vulnerable. But I don't see the huge problems with macro viruses occurring, there won't be any 'melissa'.
Trojans are already turning up here and there.
The trick is not to assume that something is more secure than windows, if you end up being copmplacent about security threats then you get what you deserve. You don't need to be paranoid either, and being paranoid doesn't mean spending money to support the anti-virus software industry. It just means making sure your code doesn't increase the risk to the whole.
So - if you spot a problem - then talk to the people who should deal with it.
JUst curious - I presume the special reader software will limit other programs from accessing it? Meaning that common access packages to help sight impared people won't be of any use.
This kind of content may soon be illegal in Northern Ireland where equal opportunities legislation is much more extensive.... Of course - that's if they can ever sort out thei little problem about not wanting to give up guns.
I've heard that the tellomere's on Dolly are much shorter than normal and likely to lead to a shorter lifespan. (I'm sure you know that Tellomere DNA is the junk at the end of the chromosomes which make them more robust to copying).
When I heard this an idea struck me - why not create pets by repeated cloning of an animal - so that the lifespan of the pet is short enough that pets can really be 'just for christmas'.
This idea gets better when you look at the meat industry - you can make you animals live just long enough to reach full size and then die. That way nobody has to kill them in the Slaughterhouse, they just hop onto the conveyor belt and pass away peacefully and naturally.
;-)
On all the forums and discussions on streaming media there seems to be a real (no pun intended) holy war going on between Real Server and Windows media services.
Real may be available for more platforms than WMP which is often given as a reason for providing content in that format. But Windows media services is free and that's a big problem for everyone who doesn't have Windows or Mac.
But - open source has an ace in this game - Icecast isn't the best technology - it's downright low tech - butif you're streaming audio then using icecast you can serve live content to WMP *and* Real player users as well as Xmms, winamp and all those other mp3 players.
And it's free (icecast is, shoutcast costs 300$).
So - remind all those people running windows media stations that ther is a 'better' solution out there. Better in that it offers a greater potential audience than either server.
Now... If only RP7 would download faster I wouldn't be saying things like this during the download...