I've tried a lot of media player programs for Windows: WinAmp2, WinAmp3, Real, RealOne, Windows Media Player, Musicmatch Jukebox, and for iPod use, MMJ, Ephpod, XPlay.
Well your biggest mistake right there was not trying JRiver's Media Center. We were only talking about iTunes vs MC9 recently.
is it auto configuring like iTunes is (via rendesvous) or do you have to set anything up to get it all to work?
Servers/Clients autoconfig and Clients listen on a standard port. Clients have LAN Server discovery, but this assumes standard Server port. I config Server for a different port, to avoid any trivial exploits because I stream out past firewall through internet to work PC with no VPN. But if you completely firewall your LAN then I don't see a problem using OOTB config.
One thing that is missing that I would like is bandwidth throttling and on-the-fly lower-bitrate transcoding.
we rarely play music off the server, but end up streaming it to the server from either of our laptops.
Well, MC9 does peer-to-peer streams as well. Each Client can act as a Server for multiple downstream Clients.And of course, the each Server instance can be configured to use a different song library and/or port.
As for the $40, well, once I tested the configurability and the really, really, really cool Vis Studio IDE, I registered the shareware edition faster than any other software I can recollect. If the price is a sticking point, go with the earlier MJ8, which has a free edition with most of the functionality.
It is connected to the stereo and since it is pre-firewire is connected to a great big external drive via USB. we both have itunes running. my gf likes music i'd never allow on my laptop and i have music she will never want. she's in the back room writing an essay but using rendesvous has access to all the music on my mac, all the music on the stereo and her own music.
Interesting. I get all this with Media Center 9 on Windows, and I have different zones as well. I've tested it with up to 12 Clients, WAN and LAN, streaming various MPEG-4 selections from the Server. Oh, and there are a few iTunes Clients also on the network, using Windows MacFileSvcs.
Build quality - cannot say anything about it. I'd assume that it must be very well built to compete w/ iPod.
If iPod build quality is so superlative, then why is there a huge cottage industry in providing various kinds of skins and covers for the iPod? The external shell scratches too easily. Also, the positioning of the headphone jack is problematic and prone to wear and breakage.
iPods are smaller than many other disk-based MP3 players, but they achieve this compactness by sacrificing features and expandability. They cost around 50% more than equivalently featured audio-only harddisk-based players. They have no analog or digital line-in recording, no digital line-outs for hi-fidelity audio, no microphone facility, no FM radio reception or broadcast, no WiFi or Bluetooth capability, no memory card interface, and no easy way for users to replace or upgrade the device's batteries or hard drive. Unlike most of the new generation media players they also feature no MPEG 4 video playback or recording.
They have a weird, all-or-nothing metadata approach to storing music that forces you to use the moderately featured iTunes freeware to utilise the iPod to its fullest instead of being able to use some other better-featured media jukebox software. Their battery life is shorter than (AFAIK) all other disk-based HD MP3 players. I gather from the iPod usergroups that the new-gen iPods are getting between 5-8 hours of real-world playtime, and this is with new, fully conditioned batteries.
On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily. Well done to Apple for figuring that a large proportion of potential MP3 player buyers are not interested in advanced features, and will pay a significant premium for compactness and a simple, constrained interface.
In the 90s, AOL similarly spotted that they could capture a large proportion of online users by offering a simple, integrated system. I think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturers' offerings.
So the question is, how much will people pay for a convenience?
The issue is also, how much extra power will your "P4 Celeron" consume over its working lifespan, compared to the "presumably) low-energy consumption, low-power Mini-ITX box. Say your system costs an extra $5-$10 a month for 36 months. You've just helped your relatives spend a lot more on utility bills. If you don't need all the bells and whistles of a system, including floating point, 80W+ chips, and mondo gfx cards, going with a smaller cooler system for *file sharing* will save big bucks over the medium- to long-term.
Mike
That may be true, but driving the Lupo 3L in "Eco" mode is a bit like slow torture. Yes, a hybrid Lupo could probably get 130 mpg without breaking a sweat, but it's not a "solution" that appeals to a lot of people. I'd settle for a larger model 100 mpg with AC, CVT transmission, some good pickup, and seats that don't warp your spine. The Mercedes Smart Roadster would be a good place to start...
Whatever about the mileage improvements of a gasoline-electric vehicle, many posters have already pointed out that current clean-burning modern diesel cars already get 50-70 mpg. All the major manufacturers (yes even the American ones, though of course the Europeans are ahead in diesel technology) are bringing out diesel-electric hybrids over the next few years. This innovation should add around 50% to the mileage of typical diesel cars. Within 10 years we will see 100mpg diesel-electric hybrids.
Freedom of Capital vs Freedom of Labour
on
No Americans Need Apply
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I read constantly about stories like this, and the older thread about about how a secret memo shows that IBM are planning to move huge quantities of their best jobs out of the US and into India over the next few years.
The central issue for me that links these stories is not so much the relocation of manufacturing and productive jobs from the core of an empire to peripheral client states. This has happened before (Roman Empire, United Kingdom, and so on) and will happen again.
No, for me the real issue is one of freedom of movement for labour versus freedom of movement for capital. Because of their many advantages, corporations are "gaming" the international political system to produce labour arbitrage. They have lobbied hard for their right to move capital between countries at will. What we have now is globalization that serves corporations, not globalization that serves people.
This is the fundamental ideological underpinning of this discourse. Corporations and politicians have structured a political system that implicitly and irrevocably favours the movement of capital over labour. Why should this be so? Could it be different? These are questions that need to be addressed. Different political movements are examining them in different ways.
Meanwhile, for ordinary people who, for the most part, have no greater or more fundamental asset to offer than their labour, their options are a lot more restricted. US companies send jobs south into Mexico with minimal regulation because of NAFTA, but Mexican people are not equally free to move their bodies north into the US. This unequal treatment creates the exploitative arbitrage that the corporations milk for profits.
This also explains a fundamental difference between the USA, NAFTA, and the European Union project. I've noticed most Americans really don't "get" the EU because their expectations are constrained by NAFTA and the halting of the US expansion within North America.
At its core the EU project is very simple, but very powerful. It holds out the promise of regional improvement by granting freedom of access to a unified market for both capital and labour. As it expands, relentlessly it seems, it allows poorer countries to join, once they restructure their political, legal, and social systems to bring them into some degree of harmony with the EU consensus. In return for this social transformation, all the citizens of member countries can enjoy free and unfettered movement throughout all other EU countries (admittedly and annoyingly, several EU countries impose different temporary restrictions on some new member country citizens). In essence it's very similar to the freedom of movement that US citizens enjoy throughout all 50 States.
This is a powerful lure. For all the talk of "old Europe" and "new Europe", the former Soviet Bloc countries are not clamouring to create bilateral trade agreements with the US... they are fighting tooth and nail to join the EU, and so submit their trade relations with non-EU countries to the fiat of Brussels. This yearning for EU membership has produced and is producing massive social and political change across eastern Europe.
However, it seems that the US project has stalled at its current borders. I don't see the US engaged in a determined effort to expand south, to create a distributed American citizenship that would be a beacon for social progress and political aspirations throughout the Americas and the world. Immigration isn't any sort of answer: it's tedious, socially disruptive, and over-regulated. Try opening the floodgates, as the EU has done for its member countries, and within a few decades the improvements in both old and new member States will be enormous and unprecedented.
But that's a fantasy. People today in the poorer countries of Central America, so close to the US, nonetheless know explicitly that their relation to the US and the member States within can never be based on equality and access, but will instead be permanently structured as clientist an
I was disappointed to find nobody considered the weight of the bacteria within the clouds. Cloud condensation nuclei can be windblown dust, sea-salt, or exhaust from combustion... but a large fraction of the condensation nuclei are also bacteria. In a sense, bacteria create clouds to produce local energy differentials that will convey them enormous distances to a new locale, whereupon the clouds release the bacteria embedded in raindrops and the bacteria fall to the ground to find new food sources and begin multiplying again. In a very real sense, when you see fluffy white clouds, you are looking at the migratory reproductive organs or bacteria, and when it rains you are getting a bacterial bukkake.
iPod can be bought for 200 bucks refurbed (10 gig previous generation...10 GIG!) Why would I get this for 40 bucks less? Radio and Voice recording would be a welcome addition to future iPods though.
Try some prolonged, vigorous, shaking activity using any HD-based audio handheld and then get back to me.
The anthropic principle is a priori true until a meta-level of organisation or determination is proven to exist. You're right, it is defined to be true... and is always true within a rational weltanschauung. Only if you complexify your life and step outside the bounds of rationality, invoking vague metaphysical explanations, does this issue become muddy.
It impresses me that so many debates over anthropomorphism use violent analogies or parables. Maybe it's because it is impossible to reconcile the opposing viewpoints. The only successful strategies through history for deliberately changing world-views has been conversion or repression.
Refutation of Bishop Berkely
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to dogs. It's us. Only us.
It seems to me that all the desperate anti-anthropic people are frightened, at some deep existential level, by the undoubted, rational reality of there being no omnipotent Sky God watching over them. So ever-expanding universes, or universes where sudden phase changes in the structure of the dark energy destroy existing life, or universes with life-hostile substructural "laws" all make them feel too small, unloved, and insignificant against the vastness. Get used to it, we are cosmic dust. The simplest explanation is that there is no design, no Sky God, no plan, and no ordering. Sic transit gloria mundi.
European? No. Ignorant? Yes. CPUs, no matter the heat limitations, require a certain wattage to operate properly.
I think it is you, my friend, who is ignorant of the potential of reversible computing for reducing the Wattage. It is possible to keep current flowing but reduce the amount of energy lost per second (Watts) by recycling the computations. Of course, because the large chip vendors are so focussed on time-to-market and scaling speed, they are ignoring or de-emphasisizing the development of technolgoies that would reduce their power consumption. Auto companies generally ignore efficiency, unless forced to increase mileage through regulation. I wonder how long it will be before semiconductor companies are similarly regulated?
To see why this is so, consider a modern semiconductor circuit. Information is stored as 1's and 0's, with the 1's meaning a capacitor is storing a charge at some voltage. A 0 means the capacitor stores no electrons and sits at ground potential. To switch a bit from off to on today involves stuffing electrons into a capacitor until it is charged. To go the other way, from 1 to 0, requires grounding the capacitor. "The real dissipation comes from the fact that when you switch you normally throw away the energy that's sitting in the device capacitances. The charge is sitting there, and the energy is stored in there, and you normally throw that away. That's the easiest thing to do with it"... The amount of energy wasted per capacitor is minuscule, but discharges take place millions of times or more a second all over a chip. What's more, standard programming practice is to clear all registers and set them to a known state before beginning an algorithm. That, too, throws away information.
Phillipines is notorious for having Taliban sympathizers that have kidnapped and killed US tourist there.
Don't believe everything your leaders tell you.
Both the Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri have embraced Bush's crusade as the perfect cover for their brutal cleansing of separatist movements from resource-rich regions - Mindanao in the Philippines, Aceh in Indonesia... the soldiers were not the first to accuse the Philippine government of bombing its own people. Days before the mutiny, a coalition of church groups, lawyers and NGOs launched a "fact-finding mission" to investigate persistent rumours that the state was involved in the Davao explosions. It is also investigating the possible involvement of US intelligence agencies.
One of the best prognostications I read recently concerning some future PC developments concerned the development of storage:
He said the end is near; we only have a factor of 100 left in density-then the Seagate guys are out of ideas. So this 200-gig disk that you're holding will soon be 20 terabytes, and then the disk guys are out of ideas. The database guys are already out of ideas!
What do you do with a 200-gig disk drive? You treat a lot of it as tape. You use it for snapshots, write-anywhere file systems, log-structured file systems, or you just zone frequent stuff in one area and try to waste the other 190 GB in useful ways. Of course, we could put the Library of Congress holdings on it or 10,000 movies, or waste it in some other way... Not many of us know what to do with 1,000 20-terabyte drives-yet, that is what we have to design for in the next five to ten years... we have to convert from random disk access to sequential access patterns. Disks will give you 200 accesses per second, so if you read a few kilobytes in each access, you're in the megabyte-per-second realm, and it will take a year to read a 20-terabyte disk.
DP So disks are not random access any more?
JG That's one of the things that more or less everybody is gravitating toward. The idea of a log-structured file system is much more attractive. There are many other architectural changes that we'll have to consider in disks with huge capacity and limited bandwidth.
Instead of a generally impassable icy border between the vast coastlines of Russia & Canada, there will be open sea. Expect much smuggling, immigration, and possible clashes.
Possible diversion of the Gulf Stream could devastate agricutlure in Ireland and Britain, which currently benefit greatly from the warming effects of the Gulf Stream during winter. Their latitude is about the same as Newfoundland, but today they are not so buggeringly cold in Winter. THis could change dramatically.
It would give as much capacity as Intel who owns FABs in third world countries.
Next time you're visiting the Intel fabs in Ireland or Israel, why not loudly let some local people know your opinion of their countries as "third world"? Don't worry about healing your extensive injuries afterwards though, because both these countries have an amazing, free healthcare system that makes the US look, well, kind of "third-worldish".
In what universe is an iPod ever a good deal? For less than half the average iPod price you can get one of the older Archos MP3 only players with USB2 and beef it up to 80GB storage. And with the Rockbox, you've got maybe the best playlist manager around. Or for around an iPod price you can get one of the video ones. Either way, you've got recording, digital I/O, no DRM, and cross-platform USB visibility. Yes, even on Macs.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that is missing that I would like is bandwidth throttling and on-the-fly lower-bitrate transcoding.
As for the $40, well, once I tested the configurability and the really, really, really cool Vis Studio IDE, I registered the shareware edition faster than any other software I can recollect. If the price is a sticking point, go with the earlier MJ8, which has a free edition with most of the functionality.
Here's a really beefy MC9 rig (3+ TB, RAID-5, 5 zones, 75MB/s sustained stream).
iPods are smaller than many other disk-based MP3 players, but they achieve this compactness by sacrificing features and expandability. They cost around 50% more than equivalently featured audio-only harddisk-based players. They have no analog or digital line-in recording, no digital line-outs for hi-fidelity audio, no microphone facility, no FM radio reception or broadcast, no WiFi or Bluetooth capability, no memory card interface, and no easy way for users to replace or upgrade the device's batteries or hard drive. Unlike most of the new generation media players they also feature no MPEG 4 video playback or recording.
They have a weird, all-or-nothing metadata approach to storing music that forces you to use the moderately featured iTunes freeware to utilise the iPod to its fullest instead of being able to use some other better-featured media jukebox software. Their battery life is shorter than (AFAIK) all other disk-based HD MP3 players. I gather from the iPod usergroups that the new-gen iPods are getting between 5-8 hours of real-world playtime, and this is with new, fully conditioned batteries.
On the plus side, they do look cute, and fit in most pockets easily. Well done to Apple for figuring that a large proportion of potential MP3 player buyers are not interested in advanced features, and will pay a significant premium for compactness and a simple, constrained interface.
In the 90s, AOL similarly spotted that they could capture a large proportion of online users by offering a simple, integrated system. I think iPods are "training wheel" MP3 players for many people. It remains to be seen whether Apple can manage their new users' experience growth and release more compelling iPods using latest technologies so that these maturing users graduate to more fully-featured iPods and do not desert to other manufacturers' offerings.
Has both SPDIF and analog line in and out.
This has been around a while, I mentioned it on Slashdot over a month ago. But it's still a great interview.
That may be true, but driving the Lupo 3L in "Eco" mode is a bit like slow torture. Yes, a hybrid Lupo could probably get 130 mpg without breaking a sweat, but it's not a "solution" that appeals to a lot of people. I'd settle for a larger model 100 mpg with AC, CVT transmission, some good pickup, and seats that don't warp your spine. The Mercedes Smart Roadster would be a good place to start...
Whatever about the mileage improvements of a gasoline-electric vehicle, many posters have already pointed out that current clean-burning modern diesel cars already get 50-70 mpg. All the major manufacturers (yes even the American ones, though of course the Europeans are ahead in diesel technology) are bringing out diesel-electric hybrids over the next few years. This innovation should add around 50% to the mileage of typical diesel cars. Within 10 years we will see 100mpg diesel-electric hybrids.
I read constantly about stories like this, and the older thread about about how a secret memo shows that IBM are planning to move huge quantities of their best jobs out of the US and into India over the next few years.
The central issue for me that links these stories is not so much the relocation of manufacturing and productive jobs from the core of an empire to peripheral client states. This has happened before (Roman Empire, United Kingdom, and so on) and will happen again.
No, for me the real issue is one of freedom of movement for labour versus freedom of movement for capital. Because of their many advantages, corporations are "gaming" the international political system to produce labour arbitrage. They have lobbied hard for their right to move capital between countries at will. What we have now is globalization that serves corporations, not globalization that serves people.
This is the fundamental ideological underpinning of this discourse. Corporations and politicians have structured a political system that implicitly and irrevocably favours the movement of capital over labour. Why should this be so? Could it be different? These are questions that need to be addressed. Different political movements are examining them in different ways.
Meanwhile, for ordinary people who, for the most part, have no greater or more fundamental asset to offer than their labour, their options are a lot more restricted. US companies send jobs south into Mexico with minimal regulation because of NAFTA, but Mexican people are not equally free to move their bodies north into the US. This unequal treatment creates the exploitative arbitrage that the corporations milk for profits.
This also explains a fundamental difference between the USA, NAFTA, and the European Union project. I've noticed most Americans really don't "get" the EU because their expectations are constrained by NAFTA and the halting of the US expansion within North America.
At its core the EU project is very simple, but very powerful. It holds out the promise of regional improvement by granting freedom of access to a unified market for both capital and labour. As it expands, relentlessly it seems, it allows poorer countries to join, once they restructure their political, legal, and social systems to bring them into some degree of harmony with the EU consensus. In return for this social transformation, all the citizens of member countries can enjoy free and unfettered movement throughout all other EU countries (admittedly and annoyingly, several EU countries impose different temporary restrictions on some new member country citizens). In essence it's very similar to the freedom of movement that US citizens enjoy throughout all 50 States.
This is a powerful lure. For all the talk of "old Europe" and "new Europe", the former Soviet Bloc countries are not clamouring to create bilateral trade agreements with the US... they are fighting tooth and nail to join the EU, and so submit their trade relations with non-EU countries to the fiat of Brussels. This yearning for EU membership has produced and is producing massive social and political change across eastern Europe.
However, it seems that the US project has stalled at its current borders. I don't see the US engaged in a determined effort to expand south, to create a distributed American citizenship that would be a beacon for social progress and political aspirations throughout the Americas and the world. Immigration isn't any sort of answer: it's tedious, socially disruptive, and over-regulated. Try opening the floodgates, as the EU has done for its member countries, and within a few decades the improvements in both old and new member States will be enormous and unprecedented.
But that's a fantasy. People today in the poorer countries of Central America, so close to the US, nonetheless know explicitly that their relation to the US and the member States within can never be based on equality and access, but will instead be permanently structured as clientist an
I was disappointed to find nobody considered the weight of the bacteria within the clouds. Cloud condensation nuclei can be windblown dust, sea-salt, or exhaust from combustion... but a large fraction of the condensation nuclei are also bacteria. In a sense, bacteria create clouds to produce local energy differentials that will convey them enormous distances to a new locale, whereupon the clouds release the bacteria embedded in raindrops and the bacteria fall to the ground to find new food sources and begin multiplying again. In a very real sense, when you see fluffy white clouds, you are looking at the migratory reproductive organs or bacteria, and when it rains you are getting a bacterial bukkake.
It impresses me that so many debates over anthropomorphism use violent analogies or parables. Maybe it's because it is impossible to reconcile the opposing viewpoints. The only successful strategies through history for deliberately changing world-views has been conversion or repression.
It seems to me that all the desperate anti-anthropic people are frightened, at some deep existential level, by the undoubted, rational reality of there being no omnipotent Sky God watching over them. So ever-expanding universes, or universes where sudden phase changes in the structure of the dark energy destroy existing life, or universes with life-hostile substructural "laws" all make them feel too small, unloved, and insignificant against the vastness. Get used to it, we are cosmic dust. The simplest explanation is that there is no design, no Sky God, no plan, and no ordering. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Here are some links.
Two things I see immediately stemming from this:
Instead of a generally impassable icy border between the vast coastlines of Russia & Canada, there will be open sea. Expect much smuggling, immigration, and possible clashes.
Possible diversion of the Gulf Stream could devastate agricutlure in Ireland and Britain, which currently benefit greatly from the warming effects of the Gulf Stream during winter. Their latitude is about the same as Newfoundland, but today they are not so buggeringly cold in Winter. THis could change dramatically.
Where are the world's Fabs?