While imeem is an awesome site for finding and listening to music you're missing the point, there isn't any easy way to find only non-RIAA music, for a while it was but now imeem has signed deals with most of the major record labels you can listen to RIAA and non-RIAA music with equal painlessness. So while it's an awesome site it's not, strictly speaking, the answer to the question.
These services are pretty useful for sneaking links past automated link censorship systems. The example I most commonly encounter is users who want to embed content on their myspace pages from sites like imeem.com, which is apparently such a threat to the myspace monopoly that you can't even mention the text 'imeem.com' on myspace. So people use it to make the imeem media players work on myspace (of course they have to use a service other than TinyURL because that's also banned by myspace for this reason). Now that's a pretty tame example, there are probably more important sites where the links get censored for information control reasons, so at least against one type of automated censorship the short URL services help strengthen the interner.
imeem.com does all that, and it's also 100% legal. It's got any kind of music you care to name, available to listen to instantly.
Re:Grabbing my copy before it gets slashdotted
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
WEll now it loads by 48bpp images without warning me that it's converting them to 24bpp images... and it converts them anyway. so a step back if anything in this department.
Grabbing my copy before it gets slashdotted
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I do hope they've added support for colour depths greater than 8 bits....
You know youtube posts all its; stuff in even tinier than hell 320x240 resolution at a partly 300kbit encoding bandwidth.
Even though almosteveryothersite uses better video quality people are still stuck on youtube. Hell I see people attaching music to a single image so they can upload it to youtube and share their favourite tracks - all that effort when there's sites like imeem.com that let you post and share the mp3's, and do it legally.
So, viacom has added one more media site to the mix.
I think Sony's 'optimistic' estimate is closer to 2teraflops with the GPU, but all the computing clusters are locked out of the GPU by the hypervisor so they only have access to the Cell Processor.
(Microsoft estimates that the combined theoretical perfomance of the 360 exceeds 1 teraflop - so sony had to top that in their PR and the only obvious number bigger than 1 is of course 2)
Just over a decade ago the fastest computers in the world were barely breaking the teraflop mark, today in theory the XB0x and Ps3 with their multitude of cpu cores and finely tuned graphics cards can top that. So 8 Ps3's - if you believe sony's hype could clock in a >10teraflops if the hardware was well utilised.
I had a freiend who wrote a book 'Nemesis' which was a spy thriller involving a killer asteroid - it was published in the UK 1998, and back then he was talking about 'the teraflop box' as being the fastest computer in the world, unfortunaly it took 8 years to get the book released in the US and by that time a lot of the computer jargon had dated significantly, and you could get a teraflop box in the form of a turbocharged graphics card or cutting edge games console.
You might have missed out on imeem.com or at least ignored them ever since they changed from being a client/IM based p2p network to being a social media site about 2 years ago. But for the last 6 months they've been using automated content filtering for the music that people are posting to the site. Some of the people who register their content are have deals with imeem which allows the free sharing of their music - labels like Warners, Sony, BMG, Nettwerk, Beggars etc etc, and of course there are a few labels who have their tracks reduced to 30 second samples.
It should be noted that imeem announced all its big deals after turning its system on so presumably the content identification system helped make those media deals possible.
OH and I take issue with your assertion that deep sky astrophotography is impossible for under $1000, I have a $500 setup which I've been using for deep sky images for a few years now. Sure if I had the money I would upgrade the mount and take better pictures, but I've yet to run out of things to image from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland. It's not for the faint of heart - my maximum exposure time is 30-60 seconds, beyond that both the tracking and light pollution become a problem. But I've thoroughly enjoyed my imaging exploits with my 100mm Orion scope.
"Aperture is king. Aperture wins. You can never get enough aperture" Absolutely, but if you want to take photgraphs then you need to spend some money on the mount, too mauch aperture on too little mount leads to a non-functional imagins setup.
80mm Apochromatic Refractor on SkyView Pro Mount There you got $800, of course you need to add $50 for a tracking drive. Now I defy you to look in Orion's catalogue and show me a reflector plus mount which is suitable for astrophotography. Reflectors tend to be undermounted and therefor not great for photographic use, you can get a 6" or 8" reflector on the same mount for less money but they aren't stable enough. And the heavier mounts are completely out of the price range.
Re: (parabolic mirror, single fold; fewer surfaces for distortion/abbaration)
You do know that adding optical surfaces is needed to *correct* distortions and aberrations? That's the basis for many cassegrain designs which use refractive corrector plates and then a pair of mirrors to produce flatter images. Or, if you've ever user a short F-Ratio large aperture dobsonian then you'll know that smart owners will have spent time and money installing a Paracorr - which corrects the coma introduced by a simple optical surface by using a few corrector lenses.
Reflectors are definitly the cheapest way to go in terms of aperture, but, if you want to take long exposure images then you need the scope to be small enough for the mount to handle and for any reasonably priced mount the Apochromatic refractor becomes the design of choice.
I've found that the tracking on the ETX scopes is hopeless when you try to hang a camera off them, it'll be fine for snapping the moon but that's about it. Even if the tracking were up to the task you'd also need to add an equatorial wedge to stop field rotation getting introduced by the mount.
Oh you are more than a littel harsh with refractors..... I use mine for imaging and the tube (sans mount) costs $200 from Orion's catalogue. Sure you get less aperture for your money, but you also have to deal with fewer alignment issues and it has a lot less coma than reflectors (unless you want to spend $$$ on a paracorr).
I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.
If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion
BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).
The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.
Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.
I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.
Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration. Orion Nebula Andromeda M51 The Moon Jupiter M13
THere's several pieces of software which do som parts of this - Registax is what I use, but amateurs usually only have enough aperture to make this work for bright objects like planets. You can take a good quality webcam (the top of the line Phillips webcams are the best bang for yout buck), record some video of a planet through a telescope and then pick out the least distorted images before adding them together to create the final image. Now, the trick is getting the best measurement of which images are undistorted, and getting enough light in each frame while keeping the esposure time short enough to beat the atmosphere.
Look at the planetary images here for my attempts at this technique.
Well projectplaylist is a shameless rip off of imeem.com except that it hasn't managed to sign any deals with major labels, so it's even less interesting than deezer.com
I've always been a Queen fan, the most educated rock band in the world, Brian a bit of a hero for me.
I started my astronomy PhD in 1995 at Armagh Observatory, but I also wasted a lot of time hacking on multimedia software for linux building mp3 dj'ing and streaming software.... so I found myself with some job offers in California at internet music companies including Napster, myplay.com and right now imeem.com (which has evolved into youtube for music and video).
I still hope that one day I might find the time between work and family to resume some original research, at the end of next month I'm helping collect data on a meteor shower so there are still tenuous links to the world of research.
Slashdot Mirror
While imeem is an awesome site for finding and listening to music you're missing the point, there isn't any easy way to find only non-RIAA music, for a while it was but now imeem has signed deals with most of the major record labels you can listen to RIAA and non-RIAA music with equal painlessness. So while it's an awesome site it's not, strictly speaking, the answer to the question.
The Bachelors Of Science - Drum n Bass from San Francisco
The Hot Toddies - Oakland Girl band who have a great song about HTML
The Eclectic Method - not really a band - VJ's from the UK who do lots of video remixes.
Ten Digit Army - Solo guitar + vocals with extra electronic goodness - awesome stuff
These services are pretty useful for sneaking links past automated link censorship systems. The example I most commonly encounter is users who want to embed content on their myspace pages from sites like imeem.com, which is apparently such a threat to the myspace monopoly that you can't even mention the text 'imeem.com' on myspace. So people use it to make the imeem media players work on myspace (of course they have to use a service other than TinyURL because that's also banned by myspace for this reason). Now that's a pretty tame example, there are probably more important sites where the links get censored for information control reasons, so at least against one type of automated censorship the short URL services help strengthen the interner.
Who brought the Popstation into this world
http://groups.imeem.com/PhwrOdIK/video/q92O96zd/popstation_review/
There does seem to be more than expected modding down of critical posts or discussion of competitors who do the same thing as napster but for free....
We need the equivalent of the wikiscanner so we can see what organization the mod activity is coming from.
imeem.com does all that, and it's also 100% legal. It's got any kind of music you care to name, available to listen to instantly.
WEll now it loads by 48bpp images without warning me that it's converting them to 24bpp images... and it converts them anyway. so a step back if anything in this department.
I do hope they've added support for colour depths greater than 8 bits....
Back before edison and all those other people figured out how to record music the musicians had to play music live.
You know youtube posts all its; stuff in even tinier than hell 320x240 resolution at a partly 300kbit encoding bandwidth.
Even though almost every other site uses better video quality people are still stuck on youtube. Hell I see people attaching music to a single image so they can upload it to youtube and share their favourite tracks - all that effort when there's sites like imeem.com that let you post and share the mp3's, and do it legally.
So, viacom has added one more media site to the mix.
I think Sony's 'optimistic' estimate is closer to 2teraflops with the GPU, but all the computing clusters are locked out of the GPU by the hypervisor so they only have access to the Cell Processor.
(Microsoft estimates that the combined theoretical perfomance of the 360 exceeds 1 teraflop - so sony had to top that in their PR and the only obvious number bigger than 1 is of course 2)
Just over a decade ago the fastest computers in the world were barely breaking the teraflop mark, today in theory the XB0x and Ps3 with their multitude of cpu cores and finely tuned graphics cards can top that. So 8 Ps3's - if you believe sony's hype could clock in a >10teraflops if the hardware was well utilised.
I had a freiend who wrote a book 'Nemesis' which was a spy thriller involving a killer asteroid - it was published in the UK 1998, and back then he was talking about 'the teraflop box' as being the fastest computer in the world, unfortunaly it took 8 years to get the book released in the US and by that time a lot of the computer jargon had dated significantly, and you could get a teraflop box in the form of a turbocharged graphics card or cutting edge games console.
You might have missed out on imeem.com or at least ignored them ever since they changed from being a client/IM based p2p network to being a social media site about 2 years ago. But for the last 6 months they've been using automated content filtering for the music that people are posting to the site. Some of the people who register their content are have deals with imeem which allows the free sharing of their music - labels like Warners, Sony, BMG, Nettwerk, Beggars etc etc, and of course there are a few labels who have their tracks reduced to 30 second samples.
It should be noted that imeem announced all its big deals after turning its system on so presumably the content identification system helped make those media deals possible.
OH and I take issue with your assertion that deep sky astrophotography is impossible for under $1000, I have a $500 setup which I've been using for deep sky images for a few years now. Sure if I had the money I would upgrade the mount and take better pictures, but I've yet to run out of things to image from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland. It's not for the faint of heart - my maximum exposure time is 30-60 seconds, beyond that both the tracking and light pollution become a problem. But I've thoroughly enjoyed my imaging exploits with my 100mm Orion scope.
"Aperture is king. Aperture wins. You can never get enough aperture"
Absolutely, but if you want to take photgraphs then you need to spend some money on the mount, too mauch aperture on too little mount leads to a non-functional imagins setup.
80mm Apochromatic Refractor on SkyView Pro Mount There you got $800, of course you need to add $50 for a tracking drive. Now I defy you to look in Orion's catalogue and show me a reflector plus mount which is suitable for astrophotography. Reflectors tend to be undermounted and therefor not great for photographic use, you can get a 6" or 8" reflector on the same mount for less money but they aren't stable enough. And the heavier mounts are completely out of the price range.
Re: (parabolic mirror, single fold; fewer surfaces for distortion/abbaration)
You do know that adding optical surfaces is needed to *correct* distortions and aberrations? That's the basis for many cassegrain designs which use refractive corrector plates and then a pair of mirrors to produce flatter images. Or, if you've ever user a short F-Ratio large aperture dobsonian then you'll know that smart owners will have spent time and money installing a Paracorr - which corrects the coma introduced by a simple optical surface by using a few corrector lenses.
Reflectors are definitly the cheapest way to go in terms of aperture, but, if you want to take long exposure images then you need the scope to be small enough for the mount to handle and for any reasonably priced mount the Apochromatic refractor becomes the design of choice.
I've found that the tracking on the ETX scopes is hopeless when you try to hang a camera off them, it'll be fine for snapping the moon but that's about it. Even if the tracking were up to the task you'd also need to add an equatorial wedge to stop field rotation getting introduced by the mount.
Oh you are more than a littel harsh with refractors..... I use mine for imaging and the tube (sans mount) costs $200 from Orion's catalogue. Sure you get less aperture for your money, but you also have to deal with fewer alignment issues and it has a lot less coma than reflectors (unless you want to spend $$$ on a paracorr).
I pretty much started out with exactly the same goals as yourself, I wanted half decent aperture and the possibility of astrophotography. the $1000 budget isn't so ridiculous if you already own a ddigital SLR, hen instead of paying $$$ for a ccd you can just mount your SLR at prime focus.
If it wasn't for the 'interested in photography' part then I'd just recommend an 8" (or larger) dobsonian, a large newtonian reflector on a simple mount, for under $1000 you can get up to 12" of aperture which is more than enough to let you see galaxies and nebula under dark skies
Anttlers Optics has a great in house brand, but you can also look at Celestron and Orion
BUt, for photography you need a steady, equatorial mount with a drive on the RA axis, which means you need to shrink the size of the scope to make it stable enough. I'd recommend Orion's 80mm Refractor on their Skyview Pro Mount, that'll sneak you in under your $1000 mark. The 80ED is an apochromatic scope which means they use special glass to eliminate Chromatic aberration, and because it's a refractor it produces nice high contrast images. The focal length is 600mm which is about as high magnification you can go before the limitations of the mount start to show up. For the mount you need to get singe axis drive ($50) to make it track, and preferably a polar alignment scope so you can get the thing aligned enough to take images of greater than 30 seconds (which is the longest exposure time on many digital SLRs).
The great thing about the mount is that you can upgrade it with computerised object location or even GOTO capabilities later when you want. It's also sturdy enough to hold larger scopes if you don't need to take photos. You can drop an 8" reflector on there, or a 9.5" Cassegrain.
Now, this setup will not let you photograph planets, they're too small, if you want to image planets you need to spend some more money on a barlow lens, and a camera which is smaller and faster than the SLR - I use a converted phillips webcam, but you can save time and just buy a $100 camera that'll just work.
I should stress that this is an antry level photography system, the optics are pretty damn good, but the tracking is barely adequate, but it'll give you enough experiece to let you have fun. People will tell you it's a waste of time to even think about astrophotography on that budget, but I'm having loads of fun - even from my ridiculously light polluted back yard in Oakland.
Here's some of my images with my setup - same mount, same focal length, but it's a 100mm non-ED refractor which means more Chromatic aberration.
Orion Nebula
Andromeda
M51
The Moon
Jupiter
M13
THere's several pieces of software which do som parts of this - Registax is what I use, but amateurs usually only have enough aperture to make this work for bright objects like planets. You can take a good quality webcam (the top of the line Phillips webcams are the best bang for yout buck), record some video of a planet through a telescope and then pick out the least distorted images before adding them together to create the final image. Now, the trick is getting the best measurement of which images are undistorted, and getting enough light in each frame while keeping the esposure time short enough to beat the atmosphere.
Look at the planetary images here for my attempts at this technique.
Well projectplaylist is a shameless rip off of imeem.com except that it hasn't managed to sign any deals with major labels, so it's even less interesting than deezer.com
I find a small irony in the fact that the video is posted on youtube, a site which stretches and squeezes video to fit into a 4:3 aspect ratio
I've always been a Queen fan, the most educated rock band in the world, Brian a bit of a hero for me.
I started my astronomy PhD in 1995 at Armagh Observatory, but I also wasted a lot of time hacking on multimedia software for linux building mp3 dj'ing and streaming software.... so I found myself with some job offers in California at internet music companies including Napster, myplay.com and right now imeem.com (which has evolved into youtube for music and video).
I still hope that one day I might find the time between work and family to resume some original research, at the end of next month I'm helping collect data on a meteor shower so there are still tenuous links to the world of research.
Played that game to death it was a worthy Miyamoto Game