Letting people drive 30MPH on the sidewalk is ridiculous! If it's a vehicle, it should be in the road, not on the sidewalk -- like bicycles are.
"Entirely new technology" my ass.
Yes, I could really use a debugger that runs backward for a problem I'm having recently. I wrote about it here last month:
Shaver pointed out
this message. Apparently Michael Chastain wrote the very program I'm looking for, back in 1995. Nobody cared, the kernel APIs kept changing underneath it, and it died on the vine.
[...] The replayer is the cool part. It takes control whenever the target process executes a system call, annuls the original system call, and overwrites the target process registers and address space with the values that I want to be in there.
[...] If I put memory-access rule checking in at replay time, I can do better than e-fence, on stock binaries with no recompilation. Hell, I can do better than Purify on stock binaries and without tangling with their object-code-insertion patents.
I have enough information available in the proxy ptrace filter to implement PTRACE_SINGLESTEP_BACKWARDS. How would you like to have that capability in gdb? "Execute backwards until this data watchpoint changes." Imagine a graphical debugger with a scrollbar for time, where the top is "beginning of execution" and the bottom is "end of execution."
Yay progress.
Ok, the rest of his message reads as a ``why does my genius go unappreciated'' whine, but still, I want this program! The code is still available, but I'm sure not feeling motivated to try and port it to run on a modern kernel (it doesn't even support ELF binaries...)
It looks like after this message was sent to the linux-kernel list in 1999, there was a whole lot of talk, then three years of zilch. I mailed to ask if any progress was ever made. The answer was no: nobody ever made it work on modern systems.
I can't imagine switching to MacOS X and then continuing to willingly inflict the X Windows Disaster on myself. I mean, wouldn't that be the whole point of switching?
But of course the only question that really matters is, does XScreenSaver work properly under OSXX11?
The SGI desktop is of course based on a heavily modified commercial X Server. And here I will stop for a second, get a big breath and say: 'wow'. I have never seen an X server being so fast, on a 5-year old machine (no matter if this is an SGI machine or not).
I'd kind of expect this given that IRIX comes as a bundle with the hardware. When you choose the hardware as well as the software you can of course optimize the drivers a lot, so you will get good speeds out of it. XFree has to deal with a lot of different hardware, and the driver manufacturers are sometimes less than helpful.
That's an interesting theory, but it is easily refuted with one word: Solaris.
Sun has all those advantaged you mentioned, and their X server has consistently been the biggest piece of garbage to bear the name.
The fact is, SGI's X server is just really, really good. Don't minimize their accomplishment by assigning credit to captive hardware: it's really high quality software, plain and simple. In 8+ years of using it, I saw an Xlib client bring down the server maybe twice. That's pretty much an hourly occurence with a Sun server, until you learn what not to do.
Of course, some of the credit goes to SGI's graphics hardware, which has always been great.
For example, it is still impossible to find a combination of hardware and software for Linux that will let you mix visuals of multiple depths on the same screen (e.g., having one window be 24 bit TrueColor, and two others be 8-bit PseudoColor with different simultaniously installed colormaps) while still having acceleration turned on. (I need to do this kind of thing to properly debug various xscreensaver configurations.)
Since I switched from my SGI O2 to a Linux machine, I've been solving this problem by having two monitors, one running in 24 bit and one in 8 bit, and it's hard enough even getting that to work without crashing at random every couple of days. Unless I turn off acceleration, which makes my dual-1600MHz vintage-2002 Linux box do graphics at half the speed as my 200MHz vintage-1996 SGI O2.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Perhaps you are aware of this invention called "books"? They've never seemed to need any of this shit.
The original point stands: smileys are only needed by poor writers. It is true that the world is full of poor writers. That doesn't change the fact that use of smileys indicates an abominable grasp of the written word.
may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...
"The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it
doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley
teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is
punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better
judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent." -- Jim Showalter
You're wrong. There is no icecast that can support multiple streams on the same port, some on MP3 and some in Ogg. That some people are streaming Ogg exclusively (with who-knows-what software) does not change the fact that there is no incremental upgrade path available at all.
Streaming is an important component of Vorbis. The format has been designed from the ground-up to be easily streamable. The designers of Vorbis are working alongside the creators of Icecast streaming media software to make Icecast Vorbis-compatible. We are also working on player support for streaming Ogg files. Streaming Ogg files from the web will be supported by the player plugins at the 1.0 Vorbis release.
That's all very noble, but I think what you meant to say was:
"Streaming is an important component of Vorbis's design, but the software does not yet exist to let you operate an internet radio station in Vorbis format with the same level of functionality you are used to from Icecast/Shoutcast. There is also not yet any upgrade path that will allow you to convert your MP3-based internet radio station to a Vorbis-based one without forcing all of your users to upgrade their players at the exact same time. We hope that such software will exist some day, but until that time, you'd best stick with MP3 for streaming."
I'm sure you weren't intentionally trying to be deceptive, so I thought I'd clarify.
Yeah, I remember those! I worked in that terminal room when I was in high school, and the C-LNZs were definitely the ones to get; they were so much faster. Then years later, I worked with Leonard at Lucid, and was shocked to discover that he was that very same LNZ. I'm sure I gushed at him about what an amazing hack those terminals were.
I had a professor which demonstrated the problem of this in a simple example. Suppose you are designing a robot which can climb and descend stairs. It must monitor sensors and adjust angles of its joints appropriately to go down (quite difficult, really). Now suppose the GC runs halfway through the middle of a step. All processing stops, gravity takes over, robot falls down.
Well, your professor was a very ignorant man who understands little or nothing about modern garbage collection techniques. Just because a system uses GC does not mean it can't make guarentees about latency.
I'm not claiming that Sun's implementation has a good, low-latency GC (it's been a while since I've used Java, so I don't know what they're up to these days) but I do know that the Java specification does not say much about such things. Which is as it should be: the desired GC behavior depends heavily on the platform on which the code is running.
Garbage collection gets a bad reputation due to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of crappy implementations out there in the world (e.g., Perl.)
Hence the reason java puts a clause in its license about no use in safety-critical applications.
Oh come on, they put that in because the company is run by lawyers and they wanted to cover their asses. That license clause doesn't mean "you can't use Java in a critical application", it just means "if you do, you can't blame us."
Ada is especially safe. It is, in fact, one of the
VERY few safety critical environments you will
find. It's very simple- A safety critical program
must never exit and give up control functionality
entirely, no matter what happens. There are many
things that you can do with C/C++/Java that will
cause a crash unrecoverable by the system.
Ada is designed to inherantly prevent a programmer
who follows the appropriate standards from writing
a program that can just crash and exit. As long as
every possible exception has a handler, an Ada
program can be written that will not crash.
In what way is Ada better than Java in this respect? I only know a little about Ada, so this is a serious question. My understanding is that Ada and Java have very similar safety goals (especially with respect to exceptions) so I'm curious about what you think Ada gets right and Java gets wrong.
It should be the case that the only way for a Java program to "crash" is if there is a bug in the runtime library or hardware interface: the same kinds of problems can of course affect Ada.
(I've got a lot of problems with Java, mind you, but I'd never say it was "too lenient"...)
a piece of software reencodes the 160/whatever kpbs mp3 into the desired streaming format. It works, but it's an ugly solution -- even if there isn't any extra quality loss due to double-encoding (I'm not informed enough on the details of the mp3 format to tell), the reencoding process is quite CPU intensive. Lower-end systems cannot manage it in realtime, and higher-end systems can only do one or two encodings at the same time, preventing a single system from effectively serving a stream at 160 and 128 and 64 and 32kps versions, let alone multiple streams at all those bitrates.
It's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I stream the same audio in six different resolutions (128k stereo,
96k stereo,
64k stereo,
48k mono,
32k mono, and
24k mono). The bottom 5 are downcoded versions of the 128k stream: there are five processes decoding the 128k stream, re-encoding them at a lower resolution, and feeding them back into Icecast. This is all happening on a ~700MHz Linux box (hardly state of the art these days!) which is also running a web server and various other services, and its load average stays steady at around 2.8.
So downcoding is intensive, but it works just fine on low end machines like the one I'm using (it was a beefy machine three years ago, but today it's about the slowest thing you can still buy...)
The Ogg software may (I haven't looked) make downcoding more convenient to do, but I doubt the CPU savings will actually matter to anyone. CPU is cheap. Wait - it just got cheaper. Wait - there it goes again.
I can't figure out why *anyone* still uses CBR except the shoutcast/icecast people, who need a constant bitrate for streaming.
Well, that's exactly why -- I ripped all of my CDs, and I only listen to the MP3 versions, but so that I can listen to my home CDs at work, without having to carry hard drives around with me, I listen to them via icecast. That would be impossible had I ripped them in VBR, which is why I didn't.
I suspect a lot of others had to make the same decision.
webcasters won't use it until icecast works
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There is currently no way for one Icecast daemon to serve both MP3 and Vorbis streams. You have to run two versions of the server, on two different ports. Aside from being inconvenient to administer, this also means you can't do total-bandwidth-usage new-connnection throttling: you have to assign half of your bandwidth to one server, and half to the other, instead of letting the usage determine it.
I'd like to start streaming Vorbis at DNA Lounge, but I won't do it if it has to be a "flag day" where I tell the users "today you have to stop using MP3 and start using Vorbis." The only way I (and, I suspect, just about everyone else) will start streaming Vorbis is if it is convenient to give people a choice of whether to listen to MP3 or Vorbis versions of the stream. As you can see on our audio page, we stream in many different bitrates, by having the "master" stream be downcoded into various lower resolution streams. Until I can do exactly that with Vorbis, there's no way I'll use it.
The way to encourage adoption of Vorbis is to make it be an option without shutting out existing MP3 users. As the number of Vorbis users grows, you can then think about phasing out support for MP3. But a flag day will never happen unless they give us a convenient upgrade path.
The new version of Icecast has been an even bigger vaporware disappointment than Vorbis has been (weren't the both targetted for release by the end of 2000?)
(Not to mention that the current releases of Icecast still have completely broken metadata streaming, and are (again) incompatible with Shoutcast's directory services.)
I hated Minority Report, and here's why:
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
SPOILER ALERT
First, the things about it that I thought were ok:
The notion of a heavily-observed society, where everyone is monitored every time they go out in public (and sometimes private) was interesting, and there were some cool (and creepy) ideas attached to that, like personalized billboards and the talking cereal box.
I liked the character of the doctor in the greenhouse. She was the only interesting character, for all of the two minutes she was in the movie.
The cars were kind of neat.
What I hated:
How many times did they have to wave in our face that the cars were LEXUS?
The chase scene happening to end in the LEXUS factory was really stupid. How easy do you think it would be to wander in to an operating factory, in the downtown of a major city? It seems to happen all the time in Hollywood!
They have retina scanners everywhere, but the unprotected conveyor belt doesn't have any motion sensors to shut down when there's something in the way that shouldn't be?
Wait, did I say "chase sequence on a conveyor belt"? Yes, I did. Wasn't I told that this was a serious exploration of privacy and determinism, and suddenly we're in a Tom and Jerry cartoon?
They assemble the car around him (I am so sure), and then just drop the car off at the exit of the factory, ready to drive away? Rather than automatically stacking the cars into a shipping container? Did they assemble every car around its own driver, because they all seem to have driven away by the time he exits the amusement park ride, excuse me, the factory. Please keep your hands inside the LEXUS until it is fully assembled, exit to your right.
Plucked eyeballs bounce. Not only do they bounce, they round corners and roll really well, despite the sticky goo and inch long piece of optic nerve sticking out the back. Sorry, did I say Tom and Jerry earlier? I meant Itchy and Scratchy.
That scene would have seemed hackneyed and forced even in a crap-fest like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (I loved the other Indy movies, but that one sucked and you know it.)
The rotting sandwich gag was just stupid, insulting, unbelievable, and completely out of place. Does having your eyes removed also remove your sense of smell, and sense of touch from your fingers?
It's as if you were watching North by Northwest and suddenly there was a guest appearance by the Three Stooges. You know, just to ``lighten things up.''
What was with the wooden balls, besides being a clumsy ``lottery'' gag?
Let me get this straight: they've got a society that retina scans you every time you enter a public building, even a store. Their network is to tightly centralized that the cops have the ability, on a moment's notice, to have these millions of cameras report back when they see a particular suspect. AND YET, they can't tell the system to, I don't know, stop opening doors for this person? Let him into an elevator but don't let him out?
Nobody, not even homicide cops, are lowjacked?
Even with all this central control, it never occurred to them, in all the years this system has existed, that it might be a good idea to cancel the security clearance of someone wanted for murder, instead of letting him walk into what appears to be the most tightly controlled room in the whole city? Dude: change the fucking locks.
And even though they have retina scanning down cold, we're to believe that it's still possible to sanitize a gun by giving it a quick wipe with a hanky. Because, you know, they wouldn't have any kind of DNA-profiling ability that could sniff out stray flecks of skin. That would be like science fiction or something.
We are then told that, off-camera, the killer managed to move the body and make it appear that the murder had taken place elsewhere. This would of course be easy, because, as the second murder that took place in the city in nine years, they're just not going to be paying very close attention to the crime scene. Surely they won't bother to notice notice any trivial details like, say, the puddle of blood being missing.
(In case you missed that idiotic moment in the movie -- they glossed over it really quickly -- just after Max von Sydow shoots the Fed in Sydow's office, someone exposits that Cruise just killed the Fed in his home.)
Cruise's ex-wife left him, and (we are told) moved out of their apartment in the city to a house in the country to get away from the memory of their dead son. And yet, she decorates a whole room in that house with her dead son's things, even to the extent of having a rusty tricycle sitting on the lawn outside.
And, as the capping insult, we are expected to believe that after these apparently-mostly-autistic psychics, who have spent at least the last (what did they say?) nine years of their lives, and very likely their entire lives before that, living on their backs in a vat of milk watching people die, really all they needed to live happily ever after was to sip herbal tea in a cottage in the woods? Oh, was it herbal tea? Or was it a commercial for General Foods International Coffees?
Everything that was good about Minority Report -- which was the approximately ten minutes of the movie they (obliquely) devoted to the details about how invasive the government was -- was handled better in Gattaca.
Everything else about Minority Report was complete crap, and Spielberg is a pandering, ham-handed clod.
People who are paranoid about getting GPSes in cellphones must not realize how small most cells are: if your cellphone is turned on, its location can already be determined to within a pretty small area: a quarter mile or less inside cities.
I read somewhere that, when the archive.org folks are asked to delete something from their archive, their response is, "I will gladly delete you from the historical record. Enjoy oblivion."
I sincerely hope that they don't ever really delete things, and that they ignore robots.txt as far as archiving goes. It's fine for them to not serve back your pages if you ask them not to. For a while. Say, until you are long dead.
But this information might be interesting to future generations, and frankly, any librarian or archivist owes more to those unborn people than they have any obligation to obey your transitory wishes.
"These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but they worry me sometimes.
For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow cottage cheesy guck from
their snouts, rather like cheese atop a microwaved pizza, and I have
this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs have been rummaging
through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again,
and their snouts are accessorized with, dare I say, yuppie liposuction
fat. How they manage to break into the California state regulation
coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags is beyond me. I guess the
doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both. This world. I tell you."
this will even effect your clubs webcast? all your streams are from you own place right? its not like your a 'radio' station.
Absolutely. It's all explained in my
summary of the rules.
In order to have music performed (live, and DJ) in my club, I already pay ASCAP/BMI/etc thousands of dollars a year. On top of that, I pay them more thousands per year to simulcast that on the internet. I don't recall where the breakdown is, but the total of the two comes to around $7,000 per year.
If these new rules go through, then I'm going to owe an additional $7,000 per
year, retroactive to when we started webcasting: and we've got just
about the smallest scale webcasting operation as anyone has. Currently I only allow between 15 and 20 simultanious listeners! Double that number, double the fee.
And that's not counting the approximately $16,000/year I'm already
paying just for bandwidth for these webcasts!
And I don't make a dime from my webcast. I don't sell banner ads, I don't have subscriptions, nothing like that. I do my internet simulcasts of what goes on inside the club because I think it's cool, no other reason. And it costs me a fucking fortune to do it. Now they say I should be paying twice as much, because of all the cash that's just rolling in.
Right.
Someone on IRC said, ``how do they expect the little guys to
survive?'' I replied, ``No Mister Bond, I expect you to die.''
They're trying to legislate webcasting out of existence, because it
stands in the way of their progress toward a completely pay-per-view
economy.
It's very hard to justify spending this money to give away these webcasts. I look at it as basically letting people into the club for free: if people want to physically come into the nightclub, we charge them admission, but if they want to come to the club via the net, we don't charge them to listen to our music. But it's incredibly expensive for us to do that, and now they're saying I'm not paying nearly enough for the right to let people listen for free.
I am trying to run a business here, and we could really use that cash to pay for things like rent, and plumbers. I'm always trying to find ways to increase my number of simultanious listeners by getting bandwidth cheaper, and these new rules will remove any incentive to do that: if I find a way to get another few MBps for free, it's just going to increase my RIAA bill. Why should I try?
I took the DNA Lounge webcast and archives down for the day, as well as the audio portion of the video webcast. Well actually I replaced it with a synthesized voice explaining why there's no music.
If you run your own webcast, I hope you'll do something similar, to help shake the listeners into action.
I've written up an explanation of how the webcasting rules currently work, and how they will work if the CARP crap goes through. The whole situation is fairly egregious, and shafts the small operator far more than it will affect the major corporations who are able to play in the same sandbox as the Big Five who control 90%+ of the global entertainment industry.
This is all about legislating the internet out of existence, to preserve their previous and now-obsolete business model.
Under the new rules, if a webcast had only a single listener -- the webcaster -- he would be expected to pay $184/year for streaming music to himself!
Don't suspect your neighbor -- report him!
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Easily enabled with a backdoor code that you can easily enter with your remote. I have it, and it works great. TiVo feels, and many people agree, that the three-step FF/RW functionality is easier to use than 30-second skips, especially for people with slow reflexes...
I have to say, I agree. I didn't think I would, but I do. I enabled the 30-second-skip feature via the easter egg (please don't ask me what it was because I don't remember -- but it's easy to find.) And I definitely find it easier to get past the commercials by just doing FFx3 than by doing a number of 30-second-skips. When I try to do it the 30 second way, I always seem to end up 20-30 seconds into the program, and then I have to scan back... With all the zipping back and forth, it ends up being easier to have just done the FF trick initially.
Slashdot Mirror
Letting people drive 30MPH on the sidewalk is ridiculous! If it's a vehicle, it should be in the road, not on the sidewalk -- like bicycles are. "Entirely new technology" my ass.
Yes, I could really use a debugger that runs backward for a problem I'm having recently. I wrote about it here last month:
I can't imagine switching to MacOS X and then continuing to willingly inflict the X Windows Disaster on myself. I mean, wouldn't that be the whole point of switching?
But of course the only question that really matters is, does XScreenSaver work properly under OSXX11?
That's an interesting theory, but it is easily refuted with one word: Solaris.
Sun has all those advantaged you mentioned, and their X server has consistently been the biggest piece of garbage to bear the name.
The fact is, SGI's X server is just really, really good. Don't minimize their accomplishment by assigning credit to captive hardware: it's really high quality software, plain and simple. In 8+ years of using it, I saw an Xlib client bring down the server maybe twice. That's pretty much an hourly occurence with a Sun server, until you learn what not to do.
Of course, some of the credit goes to SGI's graphics hardware, which has always been great.
For example, it is still impossible to find a combination of hardware and software for Linux that will let you mix visuals of multiple depths on the same screen (e.g., having one window be 24 bit TrueColor, and two others be 8-bit PseudoColor with different simultaniously installed colormaps) while still having acceleration turned on. (I need to do this kind of thing to properly debug various xscreensaver configurations.)
Since I switched from my SGI O2 to a Linux machine, I've been solving this problem by having two monitors, one running in 24 bit and one in 8 bit, and it's hard enough even getting that to work without crashing at random every couple of days. Unless I turn off acceleration, which makes my dual-1600MHz vintage-2002 Linux box do graphics at half the speed as my 200MHz vintage-1996 SGI O2.
SGI's X server rocks. I miss it dearly.
Yes, run it through my irc2html script.
Perhaps you are aware of this invention called "books"? They've never seemed to need any of this shit.
The original point stands: smileys are only needed by poor writers. It is true that the world is full of poor writers. That doesn't change the fact that use of smileys indicates an abominable grasp of the written word.
Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...
You're wrong. There is no icecast that can support multiple streams on the same port, some on MP3 and some in Ogg. That some people are streaming Ogg exclusively (with who-knows-what software) does not change the fact that there is no incremental upgrade path available at all.
Untrue. As I wrote to Monty last month (he didn't reply):
That's all very noble, but I think what you meant to say was:
I'm sure you weren't intentionally trying to be deceptive, so I thought I'd clarify.
Bye, Leonard. You'll be missed.
The link between heroin sales and the CIA is also very strong. So by buying smack, you're supporting the national defense!
Well, your professor was a very ignorant man who understands little or nothing about modern garbage collection techniques. Just because a system uses GC does not mean it can't make guarentees about latency.
I'm not claiming that Sun's implementation has a good, low-latency GC (it's been a while since I've used Java, so I don't know what they're up to these days) but I do know that the Java specification does not say much about such things. Which is as it should be: the desired GC behavior depends heavily on the platform on which the code is running.
Garbage collection gets a bad reputation due to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of crappy implementations out there in the world (e.g., Perl.)
Oh come on, they put that in because the company is run by lawyers and they wanted to cover their asses. That license clause doesn't mean "you can't use Java in a critical application", it just means "if you do, you can't blame us."
"Warning: coffee may be hot!"
In what way is Ada better than Java in this respect? I only know a little about Ada, so this is a serious question. My understanding is that Ada and Java have very similar safety goals (especially with respect to exceptions) so I'm curious about what you think Ada gets right and Java gets wrong.
It should be the case that the only way for a Java program to "crash" is if there is a bug in the runtime library or hardware interface: the same kinds of problems can of course affect Ada.
(I've got a lot of problems with Java, mind you, but I'd never say it was "too lenient"...)
It's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I stream the same audio in six different resolutions (128k stereo, 96k stereo, 64k stereo, 48k mono, 32k mono, and 24k mono). The bottom 5 are downcoded versions of the 128k stream: there are five processes decoding the 128k stream, re-encoding them at a lower resolution, and feeding them back into Icecast. This is all happening on a ~700MHz Linux box (hardly state of the art these days!) which is also running a web server and various other services, and its load average stays steady at around 2.8.
So downcoding is intensive, but it works just fine on low end machines like the one I'm using (it was a beefy machine three years ago, but today it's about the slowest thing you can still buy...)
The perl scripts I use for downcoding are here.
The Ogg software may (I haven't looked) make downcoding more convenient to do, but I doubt the CPU savings will actually matter to anyone. CPU is cheap. Wait - it just got cheaper. Wait - there it goes again.
Well, that's exactly why -- I ripped all of my CDs, and I only listen to the MP3 versions, but so that I can listen to my home CDs at work, without having to carry hard drives around with me, I listen to them via icecast. That would be impossible had I ripped them in VBR, which is why I didn't.
I suspect a lot of others had to make the same decision.
There is currently no way for one Icecast daemon to serve both MP3 and Vorbis streams. You have to run two versions of the server, on two different ports. Aside from being inconvenient to administer, this also means you can't do total-bandwidth-usage new-connnection throttling: you have to assign half of your bandwidth to one server, and half to the other, instead of letting the usage determine it.
I'd like to start streaming Vorbis at DNA Lounge, but I won't do it if it has to be a "flag day" where I tell the users "today you have to stop using MP3 and start using Vorbis." The only way I (and, I suspect, just about everyone else) will start streaming Vorbis is if it is convenient to give people a choice of whether to listen to MP3 or Vorbis versions of the stream. As you can see on our audio page, we stream in many different bitrates, by having the "master" stream be downcoded into various lower resolution streams. Until I can do exactly that with Vorbis, there's no way I'll use it.
The way to encourage adoption of Vorbis is to make it be an option without shutting out existing MP3 users. As the number of Vorbis users grows, you can then think about phasing out support for MP3. But a flag day will never happen unless they give us a convenient upgrade path.
The new version of Icecast has been an even bigger vaporware disappointment than Vorbis has been (weren't the both targetted for release by the end of 2000?)
(Not to mention that the current releases of Icecast still have completely broken metadata streaming, and are (again) incompatible with Shoutcast's directory services.)
Why does anyone care?
Let alone care enough to spend $200,000 on it?
SPOILER ALERT
First, the things about it that I thought were ok:
What I hated:
That scene would have seemed hackneyed and forced even in a crap-fest like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (I loved the other Indy movies, but that one sucked and you know it.)
It's as if you were watching North by Northwest and suddenly there was a guest appearance by the Three Stooges. You know, just to ``lighten things up.''
(In case you missed that idiotic moment in the movie -- they glossed over it really quickly -- just after Max von Sydow shoots the Fed in Sydow's office, someone exposits that Cruise just killed the Fed in his home.)
Everything that was good about Minority Report -- which was the approximately ten minutes of the movie they (obliquely) devoted to the details about how invasive the government was -- was handled better in Gattaca.
Everything else about Minority Report was complete crap, and Spielberg is a pandering, ham-handed clod.
People who are paranoid about getting GPSes in cellphones must not realize how small most cells are: if your cellphone is turned on, its location can already be determined to within a pretty small area: a quarter mile or less inside cities.
I sincerely hope that they don't ever really delete things, and that they ignore robots.txt as far as archiving goes. It's fine for them to not serve back your pages if you ask them not to. For a while. Say, until you are long dead.
But this information might be interesting to future generations, and frankly, any librarian or archivist owes more to those unborn people than they have any obligation to obey your transitory wishes.
Copyright laws change.
Oblivion is forever.
Absolutely. It's all explained in my summary of the rules.
In order to have music performed (live, and DJ) in my club, I already pay ASCAP/BMI/etc thousands of dollars a year. On top of that, I pay them more thousands per year to simulcast that on the internet. I don't recall where the breakdown is, but the total of the two comes to around $7,000 per year.
If these new rules go through, then I'm going to owe an additional $7,000 per year, retroactive to when we started webcasting: and we've got just about the smallest scale webcasting operation as anyone has. Currently I only allow between 15 and 20 simultanious listeners! Double that number, double the fee.
And that's not counting the approximately $16,000/year I'm already paying just for bandwidth for these webcasts!
And I don't make a dime from my webcast. I don't sell banner ads, I don't have subscriptions, nothing like that. I do my internet simulcasts of what goes on inside the club because I think it's cool, no other reason. And it costs me a fucking fortune to do it. Now they say I should be paying twice as much, because of all the cash that's just rolling in.
Right.
Someone on IRC said, ``how do they expect the little guys to survive?'' I replied, ``No Mister Bond, I expect you to die.'' They're trying to legislate webcasting out of existence, because it stands in the way of their progress toward a completely pay-per-view economy.
It's very hard to justify spending this money to give away these webcasts. I look at it as basically letting people into the club for free: if people want to physically come into the nightclub, we charge them admission, but if they want to come to the club via the net, we don't charge them to listen to our music. But it's incredibly expensive for us to do that, and now they're saying I'm not paying nearly enough for the right to let people listen for free.
I am trying to run a business here, and we could really use that cash to pay for things like rent, and plumbers. I'm always trying to find ways to increase my number of simultanious listeners by getting bandwidth cheaper, and these new rules will remove any incentive to do that: if I find a way to get another few MBps for free, it's just going to increase my RIAA bill. Why should I try?
I took the DNA Lounge webcast and archives down for the day, as well as the audio portion of the video webcast. Well actually I replaced it with a synthesized voice explaining why there's no music. If you run your own webcast, I hope you'll do something similar, to help shake the listeners into action.
I've written up an explanation of how the webcasting rules currently work, and how they will work if the CARP crap goes through. The whole situation is fairly egregious, and shafts the small operator far more than it will affect the major corporations who are able to play in the same sandbox as the Big Five who control 90%+ of the global entertainment industry.
This is all about legislating the internet out of existence, to preserve their previous and now-obsolete business model.
Under the new rules, if a webcast had only a single listener -- the webcaster -- he would be expected to pay $184/year for streaming music to himself!
Suspicion Breeds Confidence!
I have to say, I agree. I didn't think I would, but I do. I enabled the 30-second-skip feature via the easter egg (please don't ask me what it was because I don't remember -- but it's easy to find.) And I definitely find it easier to get past the commercials by just doing FFx3 than by doing a number of 30-second-skips. When I try to do it the 30 second way, I always seem to end up 20-30 seconds into the program, and then I have to scan back... With all the zipping back and forth, it ends up being easier to have just done the FF trick initially.