The raw materials are mostly there (silica, aluminium) and the energy requirements to get smething to geostationary orbit around the earth are about 3% of a launch from earth. Sure, there's not enough volatiles to launch economicly using conventional rockets, but not having an atmosphere means most of your launch velocity can come from a linear acelerator.
Of course, this kind of thing would need serious investment, but you could use such a network to reder most earth based power generation obsolete, and you'd get a nice global death ray system thrown in for free.
Indeed, the thing with these 'contributory infringement' cases is the ratio of legal, non-infringing use of the technology vs infringing use. Going back to the famous Betamax case, the judge found that there were significant non-infringing uses (time shifting vs piracy) and therefore video recorders were deemed to be a legal technology. Now if you setup a search engine which specificly targets content that is infringin then you're more likely to be found guilty, also, if you target a type of technology where the majority of the content you're linking to is likely to be infringing then there's a pretty good chance you're on the hook.
Well technically with the amount of digital compression on modern media, those photos, videos and sound clips that people already send are merely representations of the original.
I won't hesitate to recommend the book 'Marking Time' by Duncan Steel - it's a great book about the history and evolution of calendars. The date of easter is a particularly interesting question and Duncan goes as far as to explain how the date of Easter was at the core of an English plan to attack the legitimacy of the Catholic church and how this plan was what triggered Britain's first attempts to colonize America, great stuff.
Funnily enough a friend and I were recently discussing the interesting geometric possibilities which would be possible when cooking in zero g, one of the recipies we came up with was the sperical pizza, where the dough gets inflated into a sphere (you need the air because the pizza dough would want to shrink) and the topping get layered around the outside, all of course being stick to the dough using the sticky marinara sauce. This could then be cooked in an oven with the 'inflation pipe' blowing hot air into the middle to cook the dough, and also acting to keep the 'space pizza' in the middle of the oven.
I feel some small grain of sympathy for Q-Trax having to deal with the record labels, but there are quite a few free, legal services that let you listen to any music you want, on demand, they all managed to get licenses figured out. It's one things to launch with limited content, it's another to arrange a million dollar launch party before the deals have been signed. At the time I equated the Q-Trax experience to Mr Wensleydale's cheese emporium in the famous monty python sketch. http://snm.imeem.com/blogs/2008/01/30/oF1HiZ3f/monty_python_vs_qtrax (slashdot won't let me post it since it ends up with too few characters per line....)
I always was under the impression that it had been the first portable mp3 player (well I guess technically my laptop was portable ad it could manage to play mp3, but you know what I mean) I read this article today and suddely felt a little less forgiving to my old player and the hoops I had to go through to get music from my linux box onto the player. Oh well
I remember it was one of the perks given to early employees at a dotcom called myplay which let users store their music collections online and access it from anywhere in the world, as long as you had an internet connection, it was of course another portable media player - the iPod which let people take their music collection (or at least a decent part of it) anywhere, regardless of interet connectivity.
Funnily enough I now work at imeem which lets users upload their music collections and share them with other users, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
At imeem.com we added h264 support earlier in the year - we pretty much just changed the codec when, but our old video bitrate was already > 768kbit/sec so we had plenty of room to up the resolution and support DVD resolutions.
of course, to get DVD resolution videos to display you need to upload dvd resolution in the first place.
OK while it lasts - here's the stage6 link - in awesome 1080p - http://www.stage6.com/Lion-Gate/video/2217528/Indiana-Jones-4-Full-HD-Trailer the video quality is better than what we have at imeem, but even on my office connection it sat there buffering for several minutes, and when it did start to play it only managed about 5fps. Those still frames do look mighty fine though.
It's all a compromise and we've tried to hit the sweet spot where people with moderately good connections (~1megabit) and computers built in the last few years will be able to instantly experience full screen video.
I'll tell the guy who wrote the player.
I've no doubt that there are presentation improvements that we can make, and will make when we get time.
Re:DivX lost the advantage when h264 came along
on
DivX Pulls Plug on Stage6
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"No. There aren't currently any major sites using H.264 encoded video to stream to a Flash front-end."
Sorry, completely wrong, because imeem.com has been doing this for a while now, I know because I was part of the team implementing this, feature. I pointed out the new Indiana Jones Trailer on imeem which is delivered at a resolution of 768x360 and 800kbit/sec, and when it's played full screen it looks pretty darn nice.
Re:DivX lost the advantage when h264 came along
on
DivX Pulls Plug on Stage6
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well it might be bad form to blow my own horn, but you did ask - imeem.com is doing h264 video compare the indiana jones trailer on imeem versus the same video on youtube (be sure to hit the full screen button for best effect, and make sure your flash player is a recent one).
imeem is better known as a place to upload and share mp3s, but the video support is pretty good too.
For a long time stage6 had better video than most other sites because they were one of the few not using flash as a video player. But now h264 video support is part of flash I see a load of sites doing high quality video that leaves stage6 looking kinda ho hum in comparison.
My mother in law says exactly the same thing about the classical selection, but if you just search for bach or beethoven then there's plenty to listen to.
Yes with imeem around the only thing that a paid subscription is offering is the ability to download the music to your windows media compatible player.
Of course we all know QTrax is going to provide that feature for free too;-)
This is my experience, but I did figure out how to listen to music from the major labels using the q-trax application 1) Once I'd got Q-Trax running I try going to the home page using the home button 2) I get repeated errors but eventually get the qtrax page up with a search box 3) Search for something I want to listen to 4) More failures, but if I was persistent yenough and got a load of track titles with info, ratings and download buttons 5) find something you like and hit the download button 6) again more errors, but eventually I get to a page with more detailed track info and no download link by now a good 20 minutes has passed and no music has been forthcoming 7) Open a new tab in the browser window 8) Type in 'http://www.imeem.com' and go to a site which actually has all the music I want to listen to (although I did need to have an imeem account)
If you don't have an imeem account but have a last.fm account you could always go there, but you'll have a smaller selection of tunes and a 3 stream limit, but even that beat the pants of Q-Trax right now
I mean there are advantages in terms of server load I'll give you that, but if you've licensed all the tunes then why not follow the imeem model and centralize everything on a website - no special p2p software needed just a flash player and a modern browser. P2P services were percieved to have some sort of limited deniability for a while because the content and sometimes the indexes did not exist on any of the developers servers, but there's no need to that here.
I mean downloading movies and tv shows via p2p is popular, but it's nothing compared to the amount of pirate movies and tv shows shared on youtube, stage6, veoh and all those other sites indexed by clones of tv-links - if you can get instant gratification most people will take the easy option. So for the same reason I see imeem.com remaining popular since you can find pretty much every record on there in cd quality, available for instant listening and of course licensed by the record labels.
Oh I see that the press release claims that they've signed on all 4 major labels, which it turns out is BS Warner Music Group hasn't signed on so users will have to do without Madonna when the site launches.
For me vinyl was always cool, but regardless of the arguments abount sound quality there's one feature that vinyl posesses for DJ's that's frequently overlooked - the user interface - the way you can control the music by dragging the record on the turntable, the way you can seek to the right point in the record just by dropping the needle in the right place - the way you can see the beats, the builds and the breakdowns on the media just by looking at the way the light reflects from the surface. That's why I still buy it, for performance purposes.
Now, there are many attempts to replicate the interface, either with the giant jog wheels on the CDJ's or vinyl control discs sending control signals to computers (Serato/MsPinky/Final Scratch) but while these bring advantages to the equation - mnamely being able to carry a larger selection in your record bag or laptop's disc - they still fall short of the pure vinyl experience in subtle ways.
Now I can listen to practically any track ever recorded, on demand and for free at sites like imeem.com when I love music I want the physical artifact and a vinyl version always gets more love from me.
Oh and vinyl is robust, I have 10 year old CD's that are turning brown and won't play, but I have 50 year old vinyl that still works just fine.
If you've got a decent camera and you're in the right place, at the right time, then you can potentially photgraph some meteors, and possibly collect useful data for meteor researchers. If a meteor trail is imaged from multiple ground locations then the trajectory can be reconstructed.
I snapped this image http://groups.imeem.com/iQrVatKB/photo/fIua32Y9X8/ with my Nikon D50 during the Aurigid shower last year and the data from this and other images was useful to Peter and his collaborators. So, take some time to snap some pictures if you're up for it, you never know it might be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
The raw materials are mostly there (silica, aluminium) and the energy requirements to get smething to geostationary orbit around the earth are about 3% of a launch from earth. Sure, there's not enough volatiles to launch economicly using conventional rockets, but not having an atmosphere means most of your launch velocity can come from a linear acelerator.
Of course, this kind of thing would need serious investment, but you could use such a network to reder most earth based power generation obsolete, and you'd get a nice global death ray system thrown in for free.
Konami introduced a few kids games for the PS2 played using a control mat on the floor, to get the mat you had to buy the frogger game which has quite a few fun mini games for 2-5 year olds.
http://www.amazon.com/Konami-Kids-Playground-Frogger-Jumpin/dp/B000P297HK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1212078756&sr=8-1
THere are some other 'edutainment' titles which are supposed to help with letters, numbers, shapes and colours, but I've only got the frogger game for my kids.
My 3 year old is pretty good at most the games but has lost interest since I got Rock Band. Turns out she's doing a pretty good job as a vocalist.
Indeed, the thing with these 'contributory infringement' cases is the ratio of legal, non-infringing use of the technology vs infringing use. Going back to the famous Betamax case, the judge found that there were significant non-infringing uses (time shifting vs piracy) and therefore video recorders were deemed to be a legal technology. Now if you setup a search engine which specificly targets content that is infringin then you're more likely to be found guilty, also, if you target a type of technology where the majority of the content you're linking to is likely to be infringing then there's a pretty good chance you're on the hook.
Well technically with the amount of digital compression on modern media, those photos, videos and sound clips that people already send are merely representations of the original.
We have flickr for sharing photos, youtube for sharing video, imeem for sharing music I should get in early and register youaroma.com
I won't hesitate to recommend the book 'Marking Time' by Duncan Steel - it's a great book about the history and evolution of calendars. The date of easter is a particularly interesting question and Duncan goes as far as to explain how the date of Easter was at the core of an English plan to attack the legitimacy of the Catholic church and how this plan was what triggered Britain's first attempts to colonize America, great stuff.
Wouldn't be the first time that a company put out a press release about mind control for consumer hardware at this time of year.
Funnily enough a friend and I were recently discussing the interesting geometric possibilities which would be possible when cooking in zero g, one of the recipies we came up with was the sperical pizza, where the dough gets inflated into a sphere (you need the air because the pizza dough would want to shrink) and the topping get layered around the outside, all of course being stick to the dough using the sticky marinara sauce.
This could then be cooked in an oven with the 'inflation pipe' blowing hot air into the middle to cook the dough, and also acting to keep the 'space pizza' in the middle of the oven.
The result, pizza with no crusts!
I feel some small grain of sympathy for Q-Trax having to deal with the record labels, but there are quite a few free, legal services that let you listen to any music you want, on demand, they all managed to get licenses figured out. It's one things to launch with limited content, it's another to arrange a million dollar launch party before the deals have been signed.
At the time I equated the Q-Trax experience to Mr Wensleydale's cheese emporium in the famous monty python sketch.
http://snm.imeem.com/blogs/2008/01/30/oF1HiZ3f/monty_python_vs_qtrax
(slashdot won't let me post it since it ends up with too few characters per line....)
I always was under the impression that it had been the first portable mp3 player (well I guess technically my laptop was portable ad it could manage to play mp3, but you know what I mean) I read this article today and suddely felt a little less forgiving to my old player and the hoops I had to go through to get music from my linux box onto the player. Oh well
I remember it was one of the perks given to early employees at a dotcom called myplay which let users store their music collections online and access it from anywhere in the world, as long as you had an internet connection, it was of course another portable media player - the iPod which let people take their music collection (or at least a decent part of it) anywhere, regardless of interet connectivity.
Funnily enough I now work at imeem which lets users upload their music collections and share them with other users, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
At imeem.com we added h264 support earlier in the year - we pretty much just changed the codec when, but our old video bitrate was already > 768kbit/sec so we had plenty of room to up the resolution and support DVD resolutions.
of course, to get DVD resolution videos to display you need to upload dvd resolution in the first place.
OK while it lasts - here's the stage6 link - in awesome 1080p -
http://www.stage6.com/Lion-Gate/video/2217528/Indiana-Jones-4-Full-HD-Trailer
the video quality is better than what we have at imeem, but even on my office connection it sat there buffering for several minutes, and when it did start to play it only managed about 5fps. Those still frames do look mighty fine though.
It's all a compromise and we've tried to hit the sweet spot where people with moderately good connections (~1megabit) and computers built in the last few years will be able to instantly experience full screen video.
I'll tell the guy who wrote the player. I've no doubt that there are presentation improvements that we can make, and will make when we get time.
"No. There aren't currently any major sites using H.264 encoded video to stream to a Flash front-end."
Sorry, completely wrong, because imeem.com has been doing this for a while now, I know because I was part of the team implementing this, feature. I pointed out the new Indiana Jones Trailer on imeem which is delivered at a resolution of 768x360 and 800kbit/sec, and when it's played full screen it looks pretty darn nice.
Well it might be bad form to blow my own horn, but you did ask - imeem.com is doing h264 video compare the indiana jones trailer on imeem versus the same video on youtube
(be sure to hit the full screen button for best effect, and make sure your flash player is a recent one).
imeem is better known as a place to upload and share mp3s, but the video support is pretty good too.
For a long time stage6 had better video than most other sites because they were one of the few not using flash as a video player. But now h264 video support is part of flash I see a load of sites doing high quality video that leaves stage6 looking kinda ho hum in comparison.
Ahhh great days great days.
If only more bands were like the KLF the music business would be a more interesting place.
My mother in law says exactly the same thing about the classical selection, but if you just search for bach or beethoven then there's plenty to listen to.
Well it turns out that if you use yahoo's player then you've got an active-X control that's being actively exploited by drive by downloaders
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/yahoo_jukebox_vuln/
So, right now realplayer is a preferable alternative.
Yes with imeem around the only thing that a paid subscription is offering is the ability to download the music to your windows media compatible player.
;-)
Of course we all know QTrax is going to provide that feature for free too
This is my experience, but I did figure out how to listen to music from the major labels using the q-trax application
1) Once I'd got Q-Trax running I try going to the home page using the home button
2) I get repeated errors but eventually get the qtrax page up with a search box
3) Search for something I want to listen to
4) More failures, but if I was persistent yenough and got a load of track titles with info, ratings and download buttons
5) find something you like and hit the download button
6) again more errors, but eventually I get to a page with more detailed track info and no download link
by now a good 20 minutes has passed and no music has been forthcoming
7) Open a new tab in the browser window
8) Type in 'http://www.imeem.com' and go to a site which actually has all the music I want to listen to (although I did need to have an imeem account)
If you don't have an imeem account but have a last.fm account you could always go there, but you'll have a smaller selection of tunes and a 3 stream limit, but even that beat the pants of Q-Trax right now
I mean there are advantages in terms of server load I'll give you that, but if you've licensed all the tunes then why not follow the imeem model and centralize everything on a website - no special p2p software needed just a flash player and a modern browser. P2P services were percieved to have some sort of limited deniability for a while because the content and sometimes the indexes did not exist on any of the developers servers, but there's no need to that here.
I mean downloading movies and tv shows via p2p is popular, but it's nothing compared to the amount of pirate movies and tv shows shared on youtube, stage6, veoh and all those other sites indexed by clones of tv-links - if you can get instant gratification most people will take the easy option. So for the same reason I see imeem.com remaining popular since you can find pretty much every record on there in cd quality, available for instant listening and of course licensed by the record labels.
Oh I see that the press release claims that they've signed on all 4 major labels, which it turns out is BS Warner Music Group hasn't signed on so users will have to do without Madonna when the site launches.
For me vinyl was always cool, but regardless of the arguments abount sound quality there's one feature that vinyl posesses for DJ's that's frequently overlooked - the user interface - the way you can control the music by dragging the record on the turntable, the way you can seek to the right point in the record just by dropping the needle in the right place - the way you can see the beats, the builds and the breakdowns on the media just by looking at the way the light reflects from the surface. That's why I still buy it, for performance purposes.
Now, there are many attempts to replicate the interface, either with the giant jog wheels on the CDJ's or vinyl control discs sending control signals to computers (Serato/MsPinky/Final Scratch) but while these bring advantages to the equation - mnamely being able to carry a larger selection in your record bag or laptop's disc - they still fall short of the pure vinyl experience in subtle ways.
Now I can listen to practically any track ever recorded, on demand and for free at sites like imeem.com when I love music I want the physical artifact and a vinyl version always gets more love from me.
Oh and vinyl is robust, I have 10 year old CD's that are turning brown and won't play, but I have 50 year old vinyl that still works just fine.
I snapped this image http://groups.imeem.com/iQrVatKB/photo/fIua32Y9X8/ with my Nikon D50 during the Aurigid shower last year and the data from this and other images was useful to Peter and his collaborators. So, take some time to snap some pictures if you're up for it, you never know it might be useful.
My company is in the top 50 sites in Thailand, and we're popular with teens....
I guess that means extra work for us, sorry kids, but I can't get home for christmas