Real is better. Apple caps its downloads at 128Kbit/s and limits to a single device, Real offers higher-quality 192 Kbit/s, and cross-platform transcoding interoperability. Real also offers subscription plans, which Apple does not (or cannot, due to current technology limitations).
another organizer will need to beat iTunes by being more comprehensive, useful, intuitive and stable
Yes, there is one. Media Center. Can do on-demand transcoding between pretty much every format for different destinations, be they devices or streams. Can also intelligently downsample bandwidth to throttle for narrow client pipes. Also does ASIO and multi-zone. Amazing software.
Is there a program that allows an easy conversion of multiple files (ideally from a playlist or similar) from FLAC to MP3 for portable devices or burning?
Media Center. Can do on-demand transcoding of formats for different destinations, be they devices or streams. Can also intelligently downsample bandwidth to throttle for narrow client pipes. Amazing software.
So *that's* what it was. My Dad worked as a coder for ICL (a PERQ reseller) in the 1970s and 1980s. Every so often he'd bring back these huge machines in the boot of the car and set them up at home. Early in the 1970s I was blown away when he coded a few early games on VDU machines - this was years before Apple/Atari/Commodore machines became common.
I remember in his office, being put playing with these weird paper white screen machines. Sometime around 1981 or so. That was why, when I saw a Mac a few years later, I remember thinking "why is this a big deal? didn't they do that years ago?" I just thought the paper white screens had, you know, gone out of fashion and that green and black screens were the new hotness.
we would all be running 6502 clones instead of x86 clones.
In a way, we do. The ARM/XScale chip at the heart of the majority of instant-on, low-power PDAs, mp3 players (incl iPods), mobiles phones, etc, is basically a 32-bit descendent of the 6502.
For me to hear you say that engineers don't need to communicate clearly is, frankly, scary.
Why don't you point out where I said that? Communication is a two-way process. It requires comprehension as well. I said "past a certain point". Implicit in my argument is that people are able to communicate in such a way as to obtain a passing grade in a college-level language composition class. With that skill, any reasonably able person should be able to learn to communicate effectively the systematics of their project as it grows in complexity. That is why I said that process, and process documents, and training convincing engineers to use process communication document templates, are more critical and more useful than spending time sending engineers to technical writing classes, or seminars.
The disasters you describe did not stem from a lack of language composition skills and probably could not have been avoided no matter how many skilled technical writers could have been deployed. They stemmed from classic structural problems and chokepoints within the organizations. The information was well composed and available, but its gamut, dissemination, and flow within the management hierarchy was impeded, and in many cases stifled, by political and personality issues. That is what is used in communication studies when you talk about "discourse": the power politics of communication. Who is saying what to whom, and why. All the well-structured sentences and beautifully coherent essays in the world can't prevail against emplaced, willfully ignorant managers with conflicting agendas. As an example, I refer you to the USian head of state, George W Bush. A woefully bad communicator against whose policies many, many well-reasoned arguments have been advanced, but have proved ultimately futile. It's all about creating a Reality Based Community, and that is done in deeds, not in words.
Nice, but not what I am talking about
on
Basics of RAID
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· Score: 1
a decent case is a much better option...
That's a pretty nice case, but firstly it's not available yet, secondly it's a PC case, awaiting a motherboard, power supply, RAM, and so on, and thirdly, a cheap firewire 4-bay JOB enclosure costs around $70, all in, power and fans, and you're good to go.
The annual power consumption difference between running an enclosure or rack of disks and a whole intelligent CPU storage node is substantial: on the order of ~$100 annually. Not to mention it's also more of a PITA to support, with many more parts liable to failure or corruption. When I want to complexify my life by setting up intelligent nodes, rather than just slaving drive boxes, I usually go with a good Antec fileserver case.
Windows RAID Over Firewire - Registry Setting
on
Basics of RAID
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For those who have run out of internal space in their boxes, and who don't have external SATA or expensive hardware boxes, you can run RAID over Firewire.
The problem, however, is that out of the box Windows refuses to "promote" an external disk to dynamic, which is required on all post-NT4 rigs for RAID.
Couple that with a cheap 4-bay firewire JBOD box and any spare old enclosures and you are set!
I run 2TB in various RAID configs on my Windows server (main and near-line storage). Have done so since 2002. No problems with the external boxes. The support for external firewire RAID is a little gnarly in Windows 2000 - volume must be mounted as a named virtual directory and cannot be mounted as a letter drive. Later Windows give you both options.
It is not wasted effort to learn to communicate effectively in spoken and written English
But how much effort might be required to raise the standards of written communication within people whose time might be better spent doing what it is that they do best? My point is that the effort might be too much, and too distracting, and ultimately futile because the tech writer is still going to have to rewrite it all anyway. There's a reason why "division of labour" works so well in a large enterprise.
I think it's a bit of a wasted effort for engineers to try to learn to communicate in English past a certain level. A college freshman scientific writing/essay course should be sufficient. Unless, of course, they are career changers and *want* to move into technical documentation. Usually, though, the tendency is to move in the other direction.
Your time and their time is much better spent formulating some good process documents, so you can get busy herding them into producing functional specs, and getting them to review and to sign off on engineering requirement documents, and so on.
After all, nobody expects the tech writers to seriously produce good code, or the tech support people to go out there and do the marketing.
Archos had pocket video players 3 years ago in 2001. The first one, the MMJB, had a form factor that sucked and a screen that was lambasted as too small. Then Apple brings out the photo ipod that basically copies the 3-year-old Archos design with a similar sucky tiny screen.
Archos learned from their mistake and abandoned their form factor to utilize most of the front surface. Unless it wants to repeat the shuffle debacle, Apple will have to innovate around the clickwheel to maximize the real estate on the device. Maybe put the wheel on the reverse side, or use an edge jogger? Or use a touch-sensitive software wheel?
Basically, Apple isn;t interested in giving peope cool toys - it's interested in selling product. So until it could get "proper" DRM'd video ready to sell, it saw no reason to give people video. And because it has little interest in providing people with tools to make their own content, I suspect that the Apple video ipod's recording facilities will be non-existent or incredibly crappy, just like the audio ipod.
The open-source mp3 player OS Rockbox includes a "Talking Menu" option that will read back commands, playlists, and song/file information. It's very useful for blind users, as well as sighted hands-free/driving use.
No built in support for turning MP3 to bookmarkable AAC's
Rockbox implements unlimited user-configurable bookmarks with plain simple mp3s on Archos and iRiver. It's not that difficult and doesn't require AAC. You just need to append a meta-file with timestamps or byte offsets. And be able to take control of your device's firmware/OS for playback, of course. Maybe ipodlinux can do the same for iPods?
Rockbox is a couple of years further along than ipodlinux, and the iRiver port from the Archos is proceeding nicely. I think the two projects have a friendlyrivalry.
Biosphere 2 demonstrated convincingly that even with a massive infrastructure, hundreds of millions of dollars, and access to convenient and widespread inputs and manicured, primed soil, that creating and maintaining an artificial, productive, self-sustaining biosphere is a herculean task with no easy solution. And they propose to erect something similar on Mars, a terrifically hostile environment with no escape route? Good luck! NASA's Biomass Production Chamber has not fared especially well, and the USSR's BIOS experimental results are acceptable only as long as you are willing to eat algal slime.
Gates is right - in the end mobile communication devices will swallow the portable music niche, just as they have swallowed the PDA niche and are currently engulfing the photo niche. The advent of cheap annual/monthly subs like Yahoo's just-launched service, coupled with cross-platform availability (your car, your phone, your home, your work PC) means it will be inevitable. But they won;t all be running Windows!
No question about it, Media Center is a great solution. Federates all media (audio, video, photo) across multiple directories or file systems. Can play back any format either simply, by playback Zone, or using streaming (with optional on-demand transcoding/re-encoding) across LAN or WAN. Tagging system is open-ended, there are dynamic SmartLists, and there's a progammable API with expressions for querying the database and spitting back results. You can also use HTGML and Flash to make your own "Now Playing" screens.
I've never really understood why fundies are so eager to get ID or creationism "taught" as fact. Like, if they believe that the world is run by God, or gods, or the big pink fluffy bunny who lives in their shoes, then why isn't their faith in that belief strong enough to sustain them? Why must they seek to dictate their beliefs on others as inflexible ideologies? The only answer that makes sense is that their faith is paper-thin, not very strong at all, and requires constant reassurance and peer-support. That's a pretty poor sort of faith.
Slashdot Mirror
make something better than the other guy
Real is better. Apple caps its downloads at 128Kbit/s and limits to a single device, Real offers higher-quality 192 Kbit/s, and cross-platform transcoding interoperability. Real also offers subscription plans, which Apple does not (or cannot, due to current technology limitations).
another organizer will need to beat iTunes by being more comprehensive, useful, intuitive and stable
Yes, there is one. Media Center. Can do on-demand transcoding between pretty much every format for different destinations, be they devices or streams. Can also intelligently downsample bandwidth to throttle for narrow client pipes. Also does ASIO and multi-zone. Amazing software.
Is there a program that allows an easy conversion of multiple files (ideally from a playlist or similar) from FLAC to MP3 for portable devices or burning?
Media Center. Can do on-demand transcoding of formats for different destinations, be they devices or streams. Can also intelligently downsample bandwidth to throttle for narrow client pipes. Amazing software.
The PERQ
So *that's* what it was. My Dad worked as a coder for ICL (a PERQ reseller) in the 1970s and 1980s. Every so often he'd bring back these huge machines in the boot of the car and set them up at home. Early in the 1970s I was blown away when he coded a few early games on VDU machines - this was years before Apple/Atari/Commodore machines became common.
I remember in his office, being put playing with these weird paper white screen machines. Sometime around 1981 or so. That was why, when I saw a Mac a few years later, I remember thinking "why is this a big deal? didn't they do that years ago?" I just thought the paper white screens had, you know, gone out of fashion and that green and black screens were the new hotness.
we would all be running 6502 clones instead of x86 clones.
In a way, we do. The ARM/XScale chip at the heart of the majority of instant-on, low-power PDAs, mp3 players (incl iPods), mobiles phones, etc, is basically a 32-bit descendent of the 6502.
Who do you think invented all of ipods anyways.
HP did. Well, specifically Compaq.
For me to hear you say that engineers don't need to communicate clearly is, frankly, scary.
Why don't you point out where I said that? Communication is a two-way process. It requires comprehension as well. I said "past a certain point". Implicit in my argument is that people are able to communicate in such a way as to obtain a passing grade in a college-level language composition class. With that skill, any reasonably able person should be able to learn to communicate effectively the systematics of their project as it grows in complexity. That is why I said that process, and process documents, and training convincing engineers to use process communication document templates, are more critical and more useful than spending time sending engineers to technical writing classes, or seminars.
The disasters you describe did not stem from a lack of language composition skills and probably could not have been avoided no matter how many skilled technical writers could have been deployed. They stemmed from classic structural problems and chokepoints within the organizations. The information was well composed and available, but its gamut, dissemination, and flow within the management hierarchy was impeded, and in many cases stifled, by political and personality issues. That is what is used in communication studies when you talk about "discourse": the power politics of communication. Who is saying what to whom, and why. All the well-structured sentences and beautifully coherent essays in the world can't prevail against emplaced, willfully ignorant managers with conflicting agendas. As an example, I refer you to the USian head of state, George W Bush. A woefully bad communicator against whose policies many, many well-reasoned arguments have been advanced, but have proved ultimately futile. It's all about creating a Reality Based Community, and that is done in deeds, not in words.
a decent case is a much better option...
That's a pretty nice case, but firstly it's not available yet, secondly it's a PC case, awaiting a motherboard, power supply, RAM, and so on, and thirdly, a cheap firewire 4-bay JOB enclosure costs around $70, all in, power and fans, and you're good to go.
The annual power consumption difference between running an enclosure or rack of disks and a whole intelligent CPU storage node is substantial: on the order of ~$100 annually. Not to mention it's also more of a PITA to support, with many more parts liable to failure or corruption. When I want to complexify my life by setting up intelligent nodes, rather than just slaving drive boxes, I usually go with a good Antec fileserver case.
For those who have run out of internal space in their boxes, and who don't have external SATA or expensive hardware boxes, you can run RAID over Firewire.
.
The problem, however, is that out of the box Windows refuses to "promote" an external disk to dynamic, which is required on all post-NT4 rigs for RAID.
The solution is to add a semi-documented Registry flag, EnableDynamicConversionFor1394
HOW TO: Convert an IEEE 1394 Disk Drive to a Dynamic Disk Drive in Windows XP
Couple that with a cheap 4-bay firewire JBOD box and any spare old enclosures and you are set!
I run 2TB in various RAID configs on my Windows server (main and near-line storage). Have done so since 2002. No problems with the external boxes. The support for external firewire RAID is a little gnarly in Windows 2000 - volume must be mounted as a named virtual directory and cannot be mounted as a letter drive. Later Windows give you both options.
It is not wasted effort to learn to communicate effectively in spoken and written English
But how much effort might be required to raise the standards of written communication within people whose time might be better spent doing what it is that they do best? My point is that the effort might be too much, and too distracting, and ultimately futile because the tech writer is still going to have to rewrite it all anyway. There's a reason why "division of labour" works so well in a large enterprise.
Are you familiar with the story of the King's Horse and the man who promised he could get it to sing?
I think it's a bit of a wasted effort for engineers to try to learn to communicate in English past a certain level. A college freshman scientific writing/essay course should be sufficient. Unless, of course, they are career changers and *want* to move into technical documentation. Usually, though, the tendency is to move in the other direction.
Your time and their time is much better spent formulating some good process documents, so you can get busy herding them into producing functional specs, and getting them to review and to sign off on engineering requirement documents, and so on.
After all, nobody expects the tech writers to seriously produce good code, or the tech support people to go out there and do the marketing.
'd be more interested in a hacked version of this new ipod that can play ANY video I want
It already exists, it's been around for 3 years, and it's called an Archos. DRM-free.
Archos had pocket video players 3 years ago in 2001. The first one, the MMJB, had a form factor that sucked and a screen that was lambasted as too small. Then Apple brings out the photo ipod that basically copies the 3-year-old Archos design with a similar sucky tiny screen.
Archos learned from their mistake and abandoned their form factor to utilize most of the front surface. Unless it wants to repeat the shuffle debacle, Apple will have to innovate around the clickwheel to maximize the real estate on the device. Maybe put the wheel on the reverse side, or use an edge jogger? Or use a touch-sensitive software wheel?
Basically, Apple isn;t interested in giving peope cool toys - it's interested in selling product. So until it could get "proper" DRM'd video ready to sell, it saw no reason to give people video. And because it has little interest in providing people with tools to make their own content, I suspect that the Apple video ipod's recording facilities will be non-existent or incredibly crappy, just like the audio ipod.
which , I may add, was well before any speculation/rumors on the part of C|Net or the WSJ
But Dvorak called this years before you. Does that make him God?
The open-source mp3 player OS Rockbox includes a "Talking Menu" option that will read back commands, playlists, and song/file information. It's very useful for blind users, as well as sighted hands-free/driving use.
No built in support for turning MP3 to bookmarkable AAC's
Rockbox implements unlimited user-configurable bookmarks with plain simple mp3s on Archos and iRiver. It's not that difficult and doesn't require AAC. You just need to append a meta-file with timestamps or byte offsets. And be able to take control of your device's firmware/OS for playback, of course. Maybe ipodlinux can do the same for iPods?
Rockbox is a couple of years further along than ipodlinux, and the iRiver port from the Archos is proceeding nicely. I think the two projects have a friendly rivalry.
Biosphere 2 demonstrated convincingly that even with a massive infrastructure, hundreds of millions of dollars, and access to convenient and widespread inputs and manicured, primed soil, that creating and maintaining an artificial, productive, self-sustaining biosphere is a herculean task with no easy solution. And they propose to erect something similar on Mars, a terrifically hostile environment with no escape route? Good luck! NASA's Biomass Production Chamber has not fared especially well, and the USSR's BIOS experimental results are acceptable only as long as you are willing to eat algal slime.
the performance gain was enormous over the LC's that they replaced.
That says a lot more about the terrible performance of the LC than anything else. "Low Cost" my arse.
Apple's original, flim-flam video explaining why Intel CPUs sucked arse. And the (deleted) web page at Apple explaining, in more details, why Intel CPUs sucked arse.
Father Ted is third, beating out Fawlty Towers. All is well with the world of algorithmic sitcom ratings.
Gates is right - in the end mobile communication devices will swallow the portable music niche, just as they have swallowed the PDA niche and are currently engulfing the photo niche. The advent of cheap annual/monthly subs like Yahoo's just-launched service, coupled with cross-platform availability (your car, your phone, your home, your work PC) means it will be inevitable. But they won;t all be running Windows!
No question about it, Media Center is a great solution. Federates all media (audio, video, photo) across multiple directories or file systems. Can play back any format either simply, by playback Zone, or using streaming (with optional on-demand transcoding/re-encoding) across LAN or WAN. Tagging system is open-ended, there are dynamic SmartLists, and there's a progammable API with expressions for querying the database and spitting back results. You can also use HTGML and Flash to make your own "Now Playing" screens.
I've never really understood why fundies are so eager to get ID or creationism "taught" as fact. Like, if they believe that the world is run by God, or gods, or the big pink fluffy bunny who lives in their shoes, then why isn't their faith in that belief strong enough to sustain them? Why must they seek to dictate their beliefs on others as inflexible ideologies? The only answer that makes sense is that their faith is paper-thin, not very strong at all, and requires constant reassurance and peer-support. That's a pretty poor sort of faith.
it's God that drove evolution to man and gave him the soul
This is just de Chardin's orthogenetic noosphere theory, decked out in new clothes. The current "Singularity" fad is this daydream in shiny, dayglo rags. The idea that evolution has a "direction" or "goal" (ie, a teleological linear progression) is hard to reconcile with the evidence.