You know most people here seem to be of the opinion that Napster was an obvious concept and anybody here couldhave come up with it. The Next step in everyone's misguided logid is that Shawn is therefore no smarter than the average slashdot reader..... then jealousy kicks in and people start calling him names for getting all the attention.
Well, at the start of 2002 I ended up out of a job and managed to get a position in Napster, long past the days when they were running the full service. There was the Beta test for the pay service running as well as a few potentially groundbreaking court cases. Turns out I was the last engineer Napster hired.
Anyway, I'd studied the napster setup in great detail and I pretty much had the same opinions - I figured that Shawn was an average geek who had got lucky. I didn't expect he'd much from him, hey, I'd spent 10 years in academia, I'd spent years 'saving the world from killer asteroids' (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm), and....
I'd wrote and released the first mp3 radio software and then watched Justin Frankel and winamp get all the credit for 'inventing' it a year and a half later. I went to napster expecting that Shawn wasn't anything special.
Boy was I wrong, he is a genuinely smart guy, yes he was also lucky - just like I'm a smart guy who wasn't so lucky. I think a lot of technical people underestimate him and sometimes this is working to his advantage.
So, lay off the assumption that luck == stupid - smart people get lucky all the time too.
If you really care about the music being offered then you'd manually do the track editing yourself. And if you care that much you should be paying for the stuff, or, if it's something truly unique then the extra effort that it takes to do the splitting manually is the price you have to pay. What happened to people loving music?
Of course I personally dislike many of those radio stations that just sequence a playlist on winamp and let it run. Gaps between tracks just doesn't make good radio, it's lazy on the part of the 'DJ'.
Yes there are better ways, depending on the metadata protocol (shoutcast has a really broken metadata system) and on the source streamer. I wrote code for it a long time ago, but it was just at odds with any notion that I was a music fan.
Lets face it - the roads in Vice City were just too damn flat, Hopefully they'll be taking some cues from San Francisco and providing us with lots of nice hills to let us relive the chases from Bullit.
Plus it'd be particularly satisfying for me to take out some aggro on those 3 wheeled DPT parking patrol vehicles.
NIce, but the crossfader on that mixer is too limp to be of any use to me. Maybe they'll make one which is more my style someday (I'm still using a Numark SM-1 mostly because the optical faders feel so nice)
I've played with more than a few VeeJays in my time, there seems to be a huge range in the effort that the video people put in - some of them try to sync stuff up to the music, others just plug up a DVD player and let whatever they have play - usually hentai porn. Really the audio needs to be syncrhonised to the music activity.
I've been messing around with video for a long time, but I'm still really a DJ at heart, I figure that a good audio video show needs at least 2 people with one DJ + One Video performer. The DJ needs a mixer which can send MIDI events from it's knobs and faders allwing the videographer to slave effects and synchronise them to what the DJ is doing. Problem is any mixer which sends midi events is just plain lousy for DJ'ing right now.
Anyway, I figured that most Promoters these days just don't listen to mix CD's for very long, so I've started to work on the video approach to complement my demo packs - here's a little one I'm working on right now.
http://www.radiodmz.com/radiodmz_trailer.avi (n eeds the XviD codec) 2 minutes of fast mixing and video effects - more of a commercial than a demo, but it's definately a step up from teh average video artist who plays Hentai porn over my DJ sets.....
This is a fantastic live CD, and it has a second angle which is basically trippy visuals to go along with the music - they look perfectly good with any decent uptempo music. Not so geeky though.
Being a DJ I'm working on making a Demo video to complement my usual demo CD's - early days yet - maybe I'll have something one day....
If we're talking about the roots then most of the tracks should be over 50 years old - you could legally post them in Europe.
Of course if it's one of those fake courses that skips over the real roots and plays more modern stuff then that doesn't work. Then again would you want to learn anything from a course that glossed over the real history?;-)
Every single one of those services tried the same deal that Apple got - everyone suggested sales at 1$/track - the record companies all said there was no way in hell they'd ever agree to that. So other angles were tried - subscription services and things - then of course Pressplay and Musicnet were created and we all said that nobody would go for it.
But it just makes all those long term asteroid orbit simulations a little harder now, since not only do you have to know the position and velocity accurately, you now have to know it's spin and it's thermal properties. It's a great example of how orbital mechanics can be considered chaotic on reasonable timescales.
Oh since I'm here - Oblibatory link to my map of the solar system showing all the near earth asteroids.....
I once had the good fortune to open for Kid 606 and Matmos (currently Bjork's support act) at a bar. Being a DJ I was using good old fashioned vinyl on Technics sl1200 turntables - now those are tough turntables and take a lot of punishment. but....
Matmos setup their laptops in the DJ both - a pair of Powerbooks they just laid them on top of the turntable platters. Anyway they DJ'd anyway in their own fashion until someone accidently hit the start button on the Turntable and the laptop crashed to the concrete floor.
And it kept playing without a glitch, they picked it up, checked the connections and then continued with their set.
Maybe not the toughest hardware, but a pretty spectacular demonstration of real world survivability.
Being a BSD user who's also a profesisonal DJ in the Bay area..... it might have been appropriate. Hey, I'd even put on my BSD daemon outfit I wore while performing for halloween
Back when I was writing papers about impact catastrophes we used to show this movie to people. But when we did the mathematics we protty much could rule out any chance that the flares seen in the vide are related. The energy released in a solar flare is so many orders of magnitude greater that you have to start invoking exotic physics to have a chance of relating them...
OK this was 5 years ago, maybe the laws of physics have changed.
I found it funny that at least one security organisation felt that the storms were a big enough threat to actually release an advisory on the CME. I used to be an astronomer, now I work in computer security - not exactly the most conventional career path.
Now, I just need to write a patch and a remote vulnerability detection for this bug.
A coronal mass ejection (CME) from Sunspot 484 erupted on the sun on October 22, 2003, at approximately 3:00 PM. A CME is a cloud of high-energy particles that is ejected from the sun''s outer edge. In this instance, the CME has sent nearly 10 billion tons of matter toward Earth at speeds nearing 1 million miles per hour. It is expected to impact Earth at midday on October 24, 2003, and create a significant geomagnetic storm that could affect communications equipment worldwide when it enters Earth''s magnetic field.
Geomagnetic activity associated with CMEs can dramatically disturb Earth''s magnetic field and disrupt electrical and communications systems that rely on radio waves as a transmission medium. Specifically, a CME can create voltage surges in electric power grids, disrupt radio communications and navigation systems, and negatively impact satellite operations.
Similar storms have caused telecommunications outages in the past. In 1997, such a storm shut down an AT&T Telstar 401 satellite that provided television broadcasts. The following year another storm disrupted a Galaxy IV satellite from PanAmSat that supported automated teller machines and airline tracking systems. A storm disabled a number of satellites in 2000, affecting the functionality of communications and navigation systems. Such storms are also known to impact mobile phone operations and may disrupt Wi-Fi functionality.
Most recently, Sunspot 484 emitted a solar flare on October 19, 2003, that temporarily disabled high frequency radio communications over the continental United States for more than two hours, greatly impairing airline and marine communications.
This CME was unexpected because the 11-year cycle of activity for sunspots supposedly peaked at the end of 2000. A second region of the sun is also active and could create more powerful eruptions during the next two weeks. Summary:
An unexpected coronal mass ejection on the sun has sent nearly 10 billion tons of matter hurtling toward Earth. It is expected to hit Earth at midday on October 24, 2003, and may result in a strong geomagnetic storm that could affect communications equipment.
CONSEQUENCE: EXPLOIT: THIRD_PARTY_REC: SRC : VIGILINX LANG : en POPULARITY : Urgency : 2 Credibility : 5 COMMENTS : Version : Original Release Alerthistory:
This is a TruSecure Activity Report.
SOLUTION : Warning: DATE_INSERT : 1066928506 STATUS : I
Amazingly enough there appears to be little discussion of the fact that the recent MSRPC fixes *still* leave the host vulnerable - that's after 2 previous patches. Still no word from Microsoft on a fix, but a DoS exploit has been around for over a week now.
The only thing that really is going to matter is the Napster brand - Apple had good branding and managed to start off well. Let's see if the Kitty has some more lives left in it.
In any other game the 'Law of averages' is a fallacy which will help you lose money if you believe in it - but in slots the machines are programmed to work with a certain win/lose percentage. I'd imagine any reactive behaviour would probably be illegal, but the gaming regulators may take a while to catch on.
Another part where they clearly ignore explanations offered in the movie.... "Our heroes have no problems walking or standing in an Earthlike way even though the gravity force would have been about a tenth of the gravity force on Earth."
It is explained that the suits are replete with devices to keep the astronauts on the ground, little rockets push them down, in fact the whole canyon jumping scene was built around this fact.
Sure, they could equally have pointed out how much fuel and energy would have been needed to maintain the downforce, and question how all that could fit into a space suit. But they didn't bother they just picked a standard bitch which turns up in other reviews and applied it without question.
Slashdot Mirror
You know most people here seem to be of the opinion that Napster was an obvious concept and anybody here couldhave come up with it. The Next step in everyone's misguided logid is that Shawn is therefore no smarter than the average slashdot reader..... then jealousy kicks in and people start calling him names for getting all the attention.
Well, at the start of 2002 I ended up out of a job and managed to get a position in Napster, long past the days when they were running the full service. There was the Beta test for the pay service running as well as a few potentially groundbreaking court cases. Turns out I was the last engineer Napster hired.
Anyway, I'd studied the napster setup in great detail and I pretty much had the same opinions - I figured that Shawn was an average geek who had got lucky. I didn't expect he'd much from him, hey, I'd spent 10 years in academia, I'd spent years 'saving the world from killer asteroids' (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm), and....
I'd wrote and released the first mp3 radio software and then watched Justin Frankel and winamp get all the credit for 'inventing' it a year and a half later. I went to napster expecting that Shawn wasn't anything special.
Boy was I wrong, he is a genuinely smart guy, yes he was also lucky - just like I'm a smart guy who wasn't so lucky. I think a lot of technical people underestimate him and sometimes this is working to his advantage.
So, lay off the assumption that luck == stupid - smart people get lucky all the time too.
If you really care about the music being offered then you'd manually do the track editing yourself. And if you care that much you should be paying for the stuff, or, if it's something truly unique then the extra effort that it takes to do the splitting manually is the price you have to pay. What happened to people loving music?
Of course I personally dislike many of those radio stations that just sequence a playlist on winamp and let it run. Gaps between tracks just doesn't make good radio, it's lazy on the part of the 'DJ'.
Yes there are better ways, depending on the metadata protocol (shoutcast has a really broken metadata system) and on the source streamer. I wrote code for it a long time ago, but it was just at odds with any notion that I was a music fan.
And shoutcast ....
;-)
I'd been doing live mp3 radio with mp3serv for over a year before Shoutcast appeared.
Still I like the guy.
Lets face it - the roads in Vice City were just too damn flat, Hopefully they'll be taking some cues from San Francisco and providing us with lots of nice hills to let us relive the chases from Bullit.
Plus it'd be particularly satisfying for me to take out some aggro on those 3 wheeled DPT parking patrol vehicles.
Ummm yeah.....
http://columbinepaintball.com/
NIce, but the crossfader on that mixer is too limp to be of any use to me. Maybe they'll make one which is more my style someday (I'm still using a Numark SM-1 mostly because the optical faders feel so nice)
I'm a DJ - I'm used to dancing badly in public!
I've played with more than a few VeeJays in my time, there seems to be a huge range in the effort that the video people put in - some of them try to sync stuff up to the music, others just plug up a DVD player and let whatever they have play - usually hentai porn. Really the audio needs to be syncrhonised to the music activity.
n eeds the XviD codec)
I've been messing around with video for a long time, but I'm still really a DJ at heart, I figure that a good audio video show needs at least 2 people with one DJ + One Video performer. The DJ needs a mixer which can send MIDI events from it's knobs and faders allwing the videographer to slave effects and synchronise them to what the DJ is doing. Problem is any mixer which sends midi events is just plain lousy for DJ'ing right now.
Anyway, I figured that most Promoters these days just don't listen to mix CD's for very long, so I've started to work on the video approach to complement my demo packs - here's a little one I'm working on right now.
http://www.radiodmz.com/radiodmz_trailer.avi
(
2 minutes of fast mixing and video effects - more of a commercial than a demo, but it's definately a step up from teh average video artist who plays Hentai porn over my DJ sets.....
I'm packing my record bag to go play a gig in 2 hours..... some of us have work to do tonight!
This is a fantastic live CD, and it has a second angle which is basically trippy visuals to go along with the music - they look perfectly good with any decent uptempo music. Not so geeky though.
Being a DJ I'm working on making a Demo video to complement my usual demo CD's - early days yet - maybe I'll have something one day....
Yes DJ's still use vinyl -
http://www.radiodmz.com/dmz/trailer_divx.avi
If we're talking about the roots then most of the tracks should be over 50 years old - you could legally post them in Europe.
;-)
Of course if it's one of those fake courses that skips over the real roots and plays more modern stuff then that doesn't work. Then again would you want to learn anything from a course that glossed over the real history?
Every single one of those services tried the same deal that Apple got - everyone suggested sales at 1$/track - the record companies all said there was no way in hell they'd ever agree to that. So other angles were tried - subscription services and things - then of course Pressplay and Musicnet were created and we all said that nobody would go for it.
Napster, Myplay, Listen, Musicbank, Mp3.com and every single other music dotcom went to the record companies for 5 years trying to get the same deal.
I mean the innovative work was all done 5 years ago, it was just a case of waiting for the music business to realise it.
But it just makes all those long term asteroid orbit simulations a little harder now, since not only do you have to know the position and velocity accurately, you now have to know it's spin and it's thermal properties. It's a great example of how orbital mechanics can be considered chaotic on reasonable timescales.
Oh since I'm here - Oblibatory link to my map of the solar system showing all the near earth asteroids.....
http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/
I once had the good fortune to open for Kid 606 and Matmos (currently Bjork's support act) at a bar. Being a DJ I was using good old fashioned vinyl on Technics sl1200 turntables - now those are tough turntables and take a lot of punishment. but....
Matmos setup their laptops in the DJ both - a pair of Powerbooks they just laid them on top of the turntable platters. Anyway they DJ'd anyway in their own fashion until someone accidently hit the start button on the Turntable and the laptop crashed to the concrete floor.
And it kept playing without a glitch, they picked it up, checked the connections and then continued with their set.
Maybe not the toughest hardware, but a pretty spectacular demonstration of real world survivability.
Being a BSD user who's also a profesisonal DJ in the Bay area..... it might have been appropriate.
Hey, I'd even put on my BSD daemon outfit I wore while performing for halloween
Then again I use linux too.
Back when I was writing papers about impact catastrophes we used to show this movie to people. But when we did the mathematics we protty much could rule out any chance that the flares seen in the vide are related. The energy released in a solar flare is so many orders of magnitude greater that you have to start invoking exotic physics to have a chance of relating them...
OK this was 5 years ago, maybe the laws of physics have changed.
I found it funny that at least one security organisation felt that the storms were a big enough threat to actually release an advisory on the CME. I used to be an astronomer, now I work in computer security - not exactly the most conventional career path.
:
:
:
: : : :
:
Now, I just need to write a patch and a remote vulnerability detection for this bug.
TYPE : Intelligence Bulletin
TITLE
TruSecure Activity Report: Geomagnetic Activity Warning
DATE_PUBLISHED : 1066935840
DATE_DISTRIB : 1066935840
SEVERITY : 2
DESCRIPTION
A coronal mass ejection (CME) from Sunspot 484 erupted on the sun on October 22, 2003, at approximately 3:00 PM. A CME is a cloud of high-energy particles that is ejected from the sun''s outer edge. In this instance, the CME has sent nearly 10 billion tons of matter toward Earth at speeds nearing 1 million miles per hour. It is expected to impact Earth at midday on October 24, 2003, and create a significant geomagnetic storm that could affect communications equipment worldwide when it enters Earth''s magnetic field.
Geomagnetic activity associated with CMEs can dramatically disturb Earth''s magnetic field and disrupt electrical and communications systems that rely on radio waves as a transmission medium. Specifically, a CME can create voltage surges in electric power grids, disrupt radio communications and navigation systems, and negatively impact satellite operations.
Similar storms have caused telecommunications outages in the past. In 1997, such a storm shut down an AT&T Telstar 401 satellite that provided television broadcasts. The following year another storm disrupted a Galaxy IV satellite from PanAmSat that supported automated teller machines and airline tracking systems. A storm disabled a number of satellites in 2000, affecting the functionality of communications and navigation systems. Such storms are also known to impact mobile phone operations and may disrupt Wi-Fi functionality.
Most recently, Sunspot 484 emitted a solar flare on October 19, 2003, that temporarily disabled high frequency radio communications over the continental United States for more than two hours, greatly impairing airline and marine communications.
This CME was unexpected because the 11-year cycle of activity for sunspots supposedly peaked at the end of 2000. A second region of the sun is also active and could create more powerful eruptions during the next two weeks.
Summary
An unexpected coronal mass ejection on the sun has sent nearly 10 billion tons of matter hurtling toward Earth. It is expected to hit Earth at midday on October 24, 2003, and may result in a strong geomagnetic storm that could affect communications equipment.
CONSEQUENCE
EXPLOIT
THIRD_PARTY_REC
SRC : VIGILINX
LANG : en
POPULARITY : Urgency : 2 Credibility : 5
COMMENTS : Version : Original Release
Alerthistory
This is a TruSecure Activity Report.
SOLUTION : Warning
DATE_INSERT : 1066928506
STATUS : I
Amazingly enough there appears to be little discussion of the fact that the recent MSRPC fixes *still* leave the host vulnerable - that's after 2 previous patches. Still no word from Microsoft on a fix, but a DoS exploit has been around for over a week now.
The only thing that really is going to matter is the Napster brand - Apple had good branding and managed to start off well. Let's see if the Kitty has some more lives left in it.
The original Napster 2.0 service had it's own DRM solution, of course only a few people ever saw it.
In any other game the 'Law of averages' is a fallacy which will help you lose money if you believe in it - but in slots the machines are programmed to work with a certain win/lose percentage. I'd imagine any reactive behaviour would probably be illegal, but the gaming regulators may take a while to catch on.
Indeed isn't D next to S on most keyboards.
Another part where they clearly ignore explanations offered in the movie....
"Our heroes have no problems walking or standing in an Earthlike way even though the gravity force would have been about a tenth of the gravity force on Earth."
It is explained that the suits are replete with devices to keep the astronauts on the ground, little rockets push them down, in fact the whole canyon jumping scene was built around this fact.
Sure, they could equally have pointed out how much fuel and energy would have been needed to maintain the downforce, and question how all that could fit into a space suit. But they didn't bother they just picked a standard bitch which turns up in other reviews and applied it without question.
Pay Attention folks!