I hate Photo Radar. I don't watch TV so I never found out about the one they installed on New York Ave in DC and I got a ticket for going 15 over the limit on my way back from the Dream Theater show at the 9:30 club a while back.
I hadn't seen any speed limit signs and everyone else was going 55... including the cop one lane over and a little bit in front of me.
I live in Maryland where the weather can go from 95F to -15F in one day and I didn't always take care of my CDs. The ones that have peeled are the ones that I left in a binder in the car overnight when it was below zero outside or in the car on a hot day.
Needless to say I keep my CDs in a binder on a shelf in my room that stays at around 73F all the time now (having a portable music player is a godsend). It's too dangerous for my to carry around a pair of binders with nearly three hundred discs between them...especially since a lot of the CDs I have are out of print now or from tiny bands no one has ever heard of in the US (e.g. Mirrored Mind, Basilisk, Gutrot,...).
I have to disagree that MP3 is good enough for anything but immediate playback. CD quality is good enough for long term storage but any lossy format is not. As soon as I can afford a 250G hard drive I'm going to re-rip my CDs one last time to Ogg FLAC so that I can replace them in the future if the discs should die. For me 160kbps Vorbis is good enough to not notice the distortion but I want a lossless copy so that I can re-encode my music in whatever new codec offers the best filespace to quality size in the future for my portable player / transfer over the net / storage on a laptop / wherever I can't use the FLACs.
CoB rock live (I saw them May 2 opening for Iced Earth; Evergrey rocks too).
And you're right that Devin rules; his music is some of my favorite (I'm not really a fan of Physicist or Infinity though; OM/AE/Terria are awesome though). I don't think you can beat SYL for anger content:) Devin's next album will be featuring Steve Vai on one track and Devin will be doing the vocals on the next Steve Vai album (it's weird when you realize that it's been ten years since Devin did vocals on Sex & Religion).
No. The aluminum on a CD is just sitting on the top of the polycarbonate unprotected. On a DVD there is a thin layer of polycarbonate there to protect it which is why they are far more durable. If you get a surface scratch on a CD you just killed the CD.
You can scratch the bottom all you want because that's just messing up the polycarbonate layer. But as soon as you rip the foil...
I'm glad that CM hasn't released any SACD stuff because I can't rip SACD. If I really must have a 5.1 mix of something I'd like it on a DVD as an mpeg2 with no video track and a PCM audio track for fairly easy ripping. CM doesn't seem to support copy protection; I had to wait almost a year for the US release of the Blind Guardian Live album because the European release was copy protected by the CM US release wasn't (hooray for CM!).
I mostly like the bands that have left CM for greener pastures like Iced Earth (I saw them May 2 and June 9, they rock live even though they played the same setlist...June 9 was the second or third show with the new drummer and he knew EVERYTHING but the Ripper still had the lyrics in front of him...).
Blind Guardian, Nightwish, Soilwork, Arch Enemy, Opeth, Meshuggah, Grave Digger, Hammerfall, Strapping Young Lad, Tiamat (only Wildhoney...the new stuff sucks), Helloween, In Flames, and Avantasia are the bands I have CDs of that were at least distributed in the US by Century Media/Century Black/Nuclear Blast (since they are all the same label...). I don't really like most of the newer stuff on CM because they've started to sign Hardcore bands like Hatebreed (WTF were they thinking). Most of the good bands have moved to SPV or only use CM for US distribution. SPV and InsideOut/Noise (IIRC they are both EMI imprints) are home to most good metal acts nowadays (Iced Earth, Kamelot, Symphony X, PlanetX, etc.).
Of the above bands I have the complete works of all of them except for Helloween (missing a few mid 90s albums), Soilwork (one left), and Tiamat (Wildhoney was their only really good release), Grave Digger (I really need to get more than Excalibur), and In Flames (I don't know if it's worth my money to get the new stuff).
Early CDs had problems with the foil peeling off. I still have problems with brand new CDs destroying themselves (I have ~270 discs and have had to repurchase five with two more that I recently noticed had pits in the foil...). I think it's the printing; I rip my CDs, put the cases on a rack, and then the disc in a binder that is stored away in a cool dry place. I've had the most problems with CDs from Century Media; they recently changed their printing methods and the newer discs don't seem to have any problems (so far).
That said, I still have the first CD I ever got when I was ten (1996) and it's been through a lot of abuse and still plays fine.
Guile 1.4 is old...1.6 has been out for a good year and a half now.
It has a debugger but it is disabled for speed purposes by default; running (debug-enable 'debug) turns it on. There's also an excellent Emacs interface that makes editing/debugging Guile code painless.
But not useless for a lot of people. The things rocks for bootlegging; get a room mic and run it into the line in. You get a nice lossless recording like with a DAT without all of the pain of having to swap tapes. Recording with a Neuros is much nicer than recording to a MiniDisc and getting a lossy ATRAC3 recording.
It can also broadcast over FM radio (which is great for the car
My car has a face-plate mounted miniplug for aux devices. I don't need a FM tuner. Furthermore, if I did, I would spend $20 and buy one, which would probably be better than the Neuros' built-in one. In any case, FM quality actually sucks, and weak FM broadcasting devices are useless in places like around Chicago, where there are more radio stations in-range than there are freuencies on the dial.
Guess what? I don't have a line in on the front of my head unit. Most people don't. If you have a line-in, it's probably on the back of the head unit. Not terribly useful when you just want to hop into your friend's car and listen to some music. I haven't seen too many portable boomboxes with line in's either. Even if you have line in, it's a pain to have to carry one more cable with you.
I live between Baltimore and DC so there aren't any open stations but the Neuros works fine in every car I've been in with it. It works without any interference at all in my car (I took the external attenna off; the only disadvantage is that I have to have the Neuros plugged into the cigarrette lighter to get any reception at all).
Yep, that looks like the only big advantage. From what I've read, it looks like you are still forced to use Neuros software to transfer Vorbis files onto the device for playback, such as Positron for Linux, or the Java NDBM. If I'm wrong, please correct me...
You still need a sync manager to update the database on the Neuros, but the db format is documented for everything and NSM is Open Source. NeurosDBM, Positron, and Sorune are all Free Software as well. You only need the sync manager to update the database; if you simply want to drop a file onto the Neuros to transport it somewhere you just have to copy it to the drive.
As for the multiple backpack idea: I was referring to a post where he implied that he wanted more than one player to take all of his music with him at once. A backpack system is perfect for that (well, at least until 200G laptop hard drives have been released).
The Neuros's only real problems are its size and lack of internationalization support. Both are fixable (1.8" hard drivers and firmware work). I still think the Neuros is the only player with the features that could kill the iPod if it were smaller.
Firmware 2.16 currently doesn't have gapless playback, but the "blip" in between tracks is around 1/10th of a second now. I think there is a hardware limitation because the Neuros only has 2M of RAM and Vorbis codetables are fairly large. I'm hoping the Neuros II has a slightly faster DSP and more RAM so true gapless can be supported...(there are other hardware changes e.g. 256M of flash instead of 64/128 and the FM Broadcast stuff is supposed to be better due to hardware changes)
There is still no internationlization support. It would be a nice thing to have but it isn't killing me to see "Queensr?che" instead of "Queensrÿche." If you have lots of music with extended Latin characters or non-Latin characters I can see that being a huge problem.
For you a Karma makes more sense. For me a Neuros makes more sense. Perhaps in a year it will be the best player for both of us.
Re:A bit of an off-shoot...
on
60GB iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Neuros beats the Karma in a lot of ways. I know this because I have a Neuros and my brother has a Karma. The Neuros can record from line-in (also has a cheap built-in mic which works for recording lectures) to either MP3 or WAV. It can also broadcast over FM radio (which is great for the car / anywhere someone has a radio but no decent music). It works as a normal HD (USB2 now even). The backpack system rocks too: A new 40G USB2 backpack will be running me $260 instead of $330 for a new player (I sort of dropped my 20G backpack one too many times...). With my now dead 20G backpack (gah, making fun of hardcore kids skanking and getting beat up at a death metal show is NOT a smart thing to do with an mp3 player in your hand) the battery backpack has become a lifesaver; even though I can only fit two or three albums on the 128M of flash (the new Neuros II due out in about two weeks has 256M of flash and looks cooler) it's still a lot nicer to carry the Neuros around than my two CD binders (270 discs now... that's too many to carry around safely).
The Karma, on the other hand, has better playlist management and a much better equalizer (parametric eqs are fun...but only if you know what you are doing). The visualizations are nice and all but are basically just useless (and battery draining) eye candy. I'd gladly take a Neuros over a Karma any day. If the Neuros would release 1.8" drive based backpacks...the iPod would be dead in a minute. Size is the only thing holding it back now that Firmware 2.x supports all of the things people have been asking for since the beginning.
And if you're looking for just a portable hard drive, you can always get a USB2 backpack from the Neuros store, a power adaptor, and a USB2 cable...all for around $300 total for a portable HD (the USB2 packpacks can operate as standalone hard drives without the head) that can operate on its built in battery for a while (which is great for quick transfers; at USB2 speed I've found that I can copy the entire drive in around 15 minutes and without needed the power cable at all). If you get the urge to listen to music it's only $100 more to get a head for your backpack.
And think about the guy who has 160G of music. Just grab a few 40G backpacks and swap between them; much cheaper than getting the same number of Karmas or iPods. 60G backpacks are supposed to be released sometime soonish too (and 1.8" HD backpacks...in December; they may or may not meet it...but the Neuros II is at least confirmed as shipping June 10 because several resellers have been preselling it).
A generational garbage collector does not always have to check every single live object. It allocates objects in different generations (e.g. a generation may be every 5M of memory allocated by the GC) and the newest generation is scanned first and older generations are only scanned if memory cannot be found in the nearer generations.
This (mostly) alleviates the problem with straining swap because the GC is mostly scanning recently allocated memory that is probably still resident.
In Baltimore tiny acts usually play Fletcher's, the Ottobar, or the Sidebar (I was just at the Sidebar Monday; $8 got me five hours of music). Tickets usually run around $10-$20. A bit farther away are the 9:30 Club and Jaxx. Jaxx is where most of the mid sized acts play and the 9:30 Club is where the more established bands play. E.g. Zao plays the Ottobar, Iced Earth plays at Jaxx, and Dream Theater plays at the 9:30 club. The 9:30 Club occasionally will have smaller acts like Opeth (well, I guess Opeth is getting popular now...I heard an exercept from "Windowpane" on a show on VH1 while I was eating dinner with the TV on).
Most of the shows I see have reasonable merchandise prices; usually about $20-$25 for a tshirt, $30-$35 for a long sleeve, and $40-$45 for a hoodie. I only buy tshirts so this works out well for me. Dream Theater... the tickets to the show on the last tour were $35 and tshirts were also $35, but the Dream Theater and Queensrÿche co-headlining tour last summer...EEP. $75 tickets (my Dad does some advertising for a few ClearChannel stations in New York and I was able to get tickets for free...) and shirts...$50 for a tshirt, $85 for a girl shirt...I didn't even bother looking at anything else. This is why I am afraid of a DT/Yes tour...DT alone is reasonable but when paired with another huge band things get out of hand.
At least metal bands still seem to have reasonable prices. For now.
Believe or it not it is possible to produce decent music cheaply. Equipment is another problem...a good eight track sound card (e.g. Midiman Delta 1010-LT) will run you around $250, more if you want something fancy (e.g. the Midiman Delta 1010 which has the connections in a rack mounted breakout box instead of the back of the computer--much easier to use). The cost of a reasonable workstation has gone down a lot--my Dual AthlonMP 2800+ machine cost around $2000 total (including all of the equipment I got to upgrade my old 500Mhz k6-2 that ended up in this box and my used 24" SGI Monitor).
The microphones are what kills me. I use my live sound stuff to record occasionally. An SM58 will run around $85 for vocals, an SM57 $75 or $80, and a set of drum mics...I have a cheap $140 set of Samson drum mics with a pair of weird overheads I got from a guy for $20 and it sounds OK but in reality they suck. A good set of Shure drum mics (for live sound) would cost around... $600. Add a second kick drum (grr, stupid Brent) or a fourth tom and you'll add another $200. It's cheaper to buy a cheap drum machine than to get mics for a real drum:)
Recording demo quality material is cheap and easy nowadays if everyone in the band has mics for live performances. Recording studio quality stuff is still expensive for a bunch of college kids making subs all day. Sure, maybe the guy with a good tech job and lots of money to waste can do it but the people actually making music all day can't. The important part is that it is a lot cheaper now to maybe record at home and trick your friend in the college music program majoring to be a mastering engineer to master your recordings cheaply and then get some CDs pressed with a small booklet to send to the labels.
There are still labels that accept new music. Even the big five do--InsideOut is an imprint of EMI and carries only progressive rock/metal bands like Symphony X and Transatlantic. Relapse Records consists entirely of Grindcore (well, most people wouldn't think of Grindcore as music...), SPV carries a lot of metal now; everything from Hair to Black to Progressive. Koch records also has quite a few excellent bands (e.g. Opeth).
Lastly, life is not all about records. It is easy to book a tour if you don't care where you will be playing or whom you will be playing with. Hell, I am planning on doing vocals for Recently Vacated Graves on a two week Canadian tour at the end of July. Look at the lyrics...there are a week worth of shows booked so far for three weeks worth of time spent contacting venues. Every band should tour a few times before they release a real record (that's how people get to know who you are when you don't have a huge marketing machine behind you).
The above is based on the experiences of several friends who are in bands which are mildly successful (successful enough to be on tours, one in Europe and to have actually gotten signed to real labels with DIY demos).
P.S. Are you planning on going to a show on the Dream Theater and Yes tour? I'm afraid of how much those tickets will cost.
The DAC in the iPod is fairly high quality. It is not unreasonable for someone to simply encode their CDs using Apple's lossless codec and put them on the iPod. With a 40G model around 60 albums (assuming an average size of 650M) could be stored losslessy in WAV; a few more using Apple's lossless encoder. It would be like turning your 40G iPod into a 5G iPod and swapping music around but such is life.
It becomes more realistic when you have 80G and 100G drives in your player; in a few months the Neuros is supposed to have 80G backpacks available (right now up to 40G are available and a few online stores are advertising the availability of the 80G model early) and you can order an 80G backpack right now from Cool4u2View. The Neuros doesn't support any lossless codecs except for WAV right now (although there is support for WMA I have never used it and do not know if it supports WMA lossless or even if WMA lossless is anything more than tagged WAV). 80G is still around 110 albums. The Neuros IIRC uses the same DAC as the iPod so the quality of the sound would be excellent.
For me -b 160kbps Vorbis files are good enough; I plan to re-encode my collection to FLAC when I get a larger HD for music (right now it is a poor little 20G that only has 4G free) as well as Vorbis (abcde makes it easy to encode to more than one format and put them in different directories) -q5 (for my Neuros).
So your last comment still applies to most people. Not everyone though.
The verb, to conjure, is referring to the concept of "students working." The students are being modified by the gerund[ive? I can't remember which one was the adjectival and which one was the noun form] "working" and the phrase "to get good grades from a computer." It is this concept that does the conjuring, hence the original sentence was correct and you are dumb.
Subversion is a CVS replacement. It is not and will never be as powerful as Bitkeeper. It does its job as a CVS replacememnt well.
The only Free SCM that can be compared with Bitkeeper is Arch. Arch should be able to replace Bitkeeper in the future if not already (it's been a while since I used Arch). It is Free Software and part of the GNU Project now too.
I haven't had a soft modem for years (I've been running GNU/Linux full time for about three years now) so I had no idea that the newer ones were actual hardware modems. I just knew to stay the hell away from PCI modems.
I don't see how it would require any extra hardware to emulate a serial port over PCI. It's all in the firmware.
I use deflate compression in software and have V.44 disabled via a dip switch on the back of my modem. I have a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ so doing this doesn't really have any disadvantage. Winmodem is a U.S. Robotics/3Com trademark and indeed refers to a specific brand of pure soft modem. I don't see why a proprietary driver would be needed; simply emulate a serial port in the hardware and expose this virtual faster-than-normal serial port to the software (with a new driver to deal with the ability to set higher speeds if needed).
USB hardware modems don't cost much and there is no way a 56k datalink will ever use 11Mbps so a real hardware modem is still an option.
I finally upgraded my dialup connection to cable today so it is a non-issue now.
Actually, your external modem (I'm assuming it's a serial model) is inferior, because it is unable to take full advantage of modem compression due to limited serial port speed. So, to answer your question, not only did I save a few bucks but I got a better modem to boot.
Really? Last time I checked line compression was done on the computer, not on the modem.
And proprietary does not mean commercial. Free also does not mean non-commercial. RedHat is a company who makes money off of Free Software. I have absolutely no problem with paying for Free Software. I do have a problem with even gratis proprietary software.
If you believe in the ideals of Free Software then accepting any proprietary software is a a set back.
I can program, yes. I have a bit of code in the scripting layer of GLAME, some code in Guile (I rewrote format to be reentrant and submitted a fix or two for the slib module), and I maintain Bobot++.
I am not especially amazing at programming but I can do what I have to to get around. Perhaps you should read the Philosophy of the Free Software Foundation in order to understand why I say the ability to use a hardware gadget is convinience and not freedom.
You do not gain freedom when you are able to use a piece of hardware you would otherwise be unable to use. Your life is made more convinient but you are now a slave to the author of the driver. Should the driver author decide to stop supporting you, well you are then SOL. The point of Free Software is that the software itself is free (liber if you know any Latin). The fact that the software is free limits the ability of any one person to use said software to exercise power over another person.
Winmodems suck too. I got my external 56K U.S. Robotics modem off of eBay for $30. Is saving a few bucks worth using an inferior soft modem and therefore non-free drivers?
I also do not speak for Open Source. I hate the Open Source movement. I am a member of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is about politics and not practicality. If a piece of software is non-free then it is not to be used. Doing so would be supporting proprietary software. Drivers are essential to the operation of any kernel (monolithic at least...L4 doesn't count). If the drivers are non-free you have infected the very base of your Free Software system.
We have come quite far. It is foolish to slip backwards to a time when we were slaves to proprietary vendors. Today it is a graphics card driver. Tommorow it is everything.
Slashdot Mirror
make-kpkg kernel_image && sudo dpkg -i ../kernel-image-2.6.7-mm1-smp-_123.Custom_k7.deb
And my two processors just beat all of your machines ;)
I hate Photo Radar. I don't watch TV so I never found out about the one they installed on New York Ave in DC and I got a ticket for going 15 over the limit on my way back from the Dream Theater show at the 9:30 club a while back.
I hadn't seen any speed limit signs and everyone else was going 55 ... including the cop one lane over and a little bit in front of me.
I live in Maryland where the weather can go from 95F to -15F in one day and I didn't always take care of my CDs. The ones that have peeled are the ones that I left in a binder in the car overnight when it was below zero outside or in the car on a hot day.
Needless to say I keep my CDs in a binder on a shelf in my room that stays at around 73F all the time now (having a portable music player is a godsend). It's too dangerous for my to carry around a pair of binders with nearly three hundred discs between them...especially since a lot of the CDs I have are out of print now or from tiny bands no one has ever heard of in the US (e.g. Mirrored Mind, Basilisk, Gutrot, ...).
I have to disagree that MP3 is good enough for anything but immediate playback. CD quality is good enough for long term storage but any lossy format is not. As soon as I can afford a 250G hard drive I'm going to re-rip my CDs one last time to Ogg FLAC so that I can replace them in the future if the discs should die. For me 160kbps Vorbis is good enough to not notice the distortion but I want a lossless copy so that I can re-encode my music in whatever new codec offers the best filespace to quality size in the future for my portable player / transfer over the net / storage on a laptop / wherever I can't use the FLACs.
CoB rock live (I saw them May 2 opening for Iced Earth; Evergrey rocks too).
And you're right that Devin rules; his music is some of my favorite (I'm not really a fan of Physicist or Infinity though; OM/AE/Terria are awesome though). I don't think you can beat SYL for anger content :) Devin's next album will be featuring Steve Vai on one track and Devin will be doing the vocals on the next Steve Vai album (it's weird when you realize that it's been ten years since Devin did vocals on Sex & Religion).
No. The aluminum on a CD is just sitting on the top of the polycarbonate unprotected. On a DVD there is a thin layer of polycarbonate there to protect it which is why they are far more durable. If you get a surface scratch on a CD you just killed the CD.
You can scratch the bottom all you want because that's just messing up the polycarbonate layer. But as soon as you rip the foil...
I'm glad that CM hasn't released any SACD stuff because I can't rip SACD. If I really must have a 5.1 mix of something I'd like it on a DVD as an mpeg2 with no video track and a PCM audio track for fairly easy ripping. CM doesn't seem to support copy protection; I had to wait almost a year for the US release of the Blind Guardian Live album because the European release was copy protected by the CM US release wasn't (hooray for CM!).
I mostly like the bands that have left CM for greener pastures like Iced Earth (I saw them May 2 and June 9, they rock live even though they played the same setlist...June 9 was the second or third show with the new drummer and he knew EVERYTHING but the Ripper still had the lyrics in front of him...).
Blind Guardian, Nightwish, Soilwork, Arch Enemy, Opeth, Meshuggah, Grave Digger, Hammerfall, Strapping Young Lad, Tiamat (only Wildhoney...the new stuff sucks), Helloween, In Flames, and Avantasia are the bands I have CDs of that were at least distributed in the US by Century Media/Century Black/Nuclear Blast (since they are all the same label...). I don't really like most of the newer stuff on CM because they've started to sign Hardcore bands like Hatebreed (WTF were they thinking). Most of the good bands have moved to SPV or only use CM for US distribution. SPV and InsideOut/Noise (IIRC they are both EMI imprints) are home to most good metal acts nowadays (Iced Earth, Kamelot, Symphony X, PlanetX, etc.).
Of the above bands I have the complete works of all of them except for Helloween (missing a few mid 90s albums), Soilwork (one left), and Tiamat (Wildhoney was their only really good release), Grave Digger (I really need to get more than Excalibur), and In Flames (I don't know if it's worth my money to get the new stuff).
Early CDs had problems with the foil peeling off. I still have problems with brand new CDs destroying themselves (I have ~270 discs and have had to repurchase five with two more that I recently noticed had pits in the foil...). I think it's the printing; I rip my CDs, put the cases on a rack, and then the disc in a binder that is stored away in a cool dry place. I've had the most problems with CDs from Century Media; they recently changed their printing methods and the newer discs don't seem to have any problems (so far).
That said, I still have the first CD I ever got when I was ten (1996) and it's been through a lot of abuse and still plays fine.
Guile 1.4 is old...1.6 has been out for a good year and a half now.
It has a debugger but it is disabled for speed purposes by default; running (debug-enable 'debug) turns it on. There's also an excellent Emacs interface that makes editing/debugging Guile code painless.
But not useless for a lot of people. The things rocks for bootlegging; get a room mic and run it into the line in. You get a nice lossless recording like with a DAT without all of the pain of having to swap tapes. Recording with a Neuros is much nicer than recording to a MiniDisc and getting a lossy ATRAC3 recording.
Guess what? I don't have a line in on the front of my head unit. Most people don't. If you have a line-in, it's probably on the back of the head unit. Not terribly useful when you just want to hop into your friend's car and listen to some music. I haven't seen too many portable boomboxes with line in's either. Even if you have line in, it's a pain to have to carry one more cable with you.
I live between Baltimore and DC so there aren't any open stations but the Neuros works fine in every car I've been in with it. It works without any interference at all in my car (I took the external attenna off; the only disadvantage is that I have to have the Neuros plugged into the cigarrette lighter to get any reception at all).
You still need a sync manager to update the database on the Neuros, but the db format is documented for everything and NSM is Open Source. NeurosDBM, Positron, and Sorune are all Free Software as well. You only need the sync manager to update the database; if you simply want to drop a file onto the Neuros to transport it somewhere you just have to copy it to the drive.
As for the multiple backpack idea: I was referring to a post where he implied that he wanted more than one player to take all of his music with him at once. A backpack system is perfect for that (well, at least until 200G laptop hard drives have been released).
The Neuros's only real problems are its size and lack of internationalization support. Both are fixable (1.8" hard drivers and firmware work). I still think the Neuros is the only player with the features that could kill the iPod if it were smaller.
Firmware 2.16 currently doesn't have gapless playback, but the "blip" in between tracks is around 1/10th of a second now. I think there is a hardware limitation because the Neuros only has 2M of RAM and Vorbis codetables are fairly large. I'm hoping the Neuros II has a slightly faster DSP and more RAM so true gapless can be supported...(there are other hardware changes e.g. 256M of flash instead of 64/128 and the FM Broadcast stuff is supposed to be better due to hardware changes)
There is still no internationlization support. It would be a nice thing to have but it isn't killing me to see "Queensr?che" instead of "Queensrÿche." If you have lots of music with extended Latin characters or non-Latin characters I can see that being a huge problem.
For you a Karma makes more sense. For me a Neuros makes more sense. Perhaps in a year it will be the best player for both of us.
The Neuros beats the Karma in a lot of ways. I know this because I have a Neuros and my brother has a Karma. The Neuros can record from line-in (also has a cheap built-in mic which works for recording lectures) to either MP3 or WAV. It can also broadcast over FM radio (which is great for the car / anywhere someone has a radio but no decent music). It works as a normal HD (USB2 now even). The backpack system rocks too: A new 40G USB2 backpack will be running me $260 instead of $330 for a new player (I sort of dropped my 20G backpack one too many times...). With my now dead 20G backpack (gah, making fun of hardcore kids skanking and getting beat up at a death metal show is NOT a smart thing to do with an mp3 player in your hand) the battery backpack has become a lifesaver; even though I can only fit two or three albums on the 128M of flash (the new Neuros II due out in about two weeks has 256M of flash and looks cooler) it's still a lot nicer to carry the Neuros around than my two CD binders (270 discs now ... that's too many to carry around safely).
The Karma, on the other hand, has better playlist management and a much better equalizer (parametric eqs are fun...but only if you know what you are doing). The visualizations are nice and all but are basically just useless (and battery draining) eye candy. I'd gladly take a Neuros over a Karma any day. If the Neuros would release 1.8" drive based backpacks...the iPod would be dead in a minute. Size is the only thing holding it back now that Firmware 2.x supports all of the things people have been asking for since the beginning.
And if you're looking for just a portable hard drive, you can always get a USB2 backpack from the Neuros store, a power adaptor, and a USB2 cable...all for around $300 total for a portable HD (the USB2 packpacks can operate as standalone hard drives without the head) that can operate on its built in battery for a while (which is great for quick transfers; at USB2 speed I've found that I can copy the entire drive in around 15 minutes and without needed the power cable at all). If you get the urge to listen to music it's only $100 more to get a head for your backpack.
And think about the guy who has 160G of music. Just grab a few 40G backpacks and swap between them; much cheaper than getting the same number of Karmas or iPods. 60G backpacks are supposed to be released sometime soonish too (and 1.8" HD backpacks...in December; they may or may not meet it...but the Neuros II is at least confirmed as shipping June 10 because several resellers have been preselling it).
A generational garbage collector does not always have to check every single live object. It allocates objects in different generations (e.g. a generation may be every 5M of memory allocated by the GC) and the newest generation is scanned first and older generations are only scanned if memory cannot be found in the nearer generations.
This (mostly) alleviates the problem with straining swap because the GC is mostly scanning recently allocated memory that is probably still resident.
In Baltimore tiny acts usually play Fletcher's, the Ottobar, or the Sidebar (I was just at the Sidebar Monday; $8 got me five hours of music). Tickets usually run around $10-$20. A bit farther away are the 9:30 Club and Jaxx. Jaxx is where most of the mid sized acts play and the 9:30 Club is where the more established bands play. E.g. Zao plays the Ottobar, Iced Earth plays at Jaxx, and Dream Theater plays at the 9:30 club. The 9:30 Club occasionally will have smaller acts like Opeth (well, I guess Opeth is getting popular now...I heard an exercept from "Windowpane" on a show on VH1 while I was eating dinner with the TV on).
Most of the shows I see have reasonable merchandise prices; usually about $20-$25 for a tshirt, $30-$35 for a long sleeve, and $40-$45 for a hoodie. I only buy tshirts so this works out well for me. Dream Theater ... the tickets to the show on the last tour were $35 and tshirts were also $35, but the Dream Theater and Queensrÿche co-headlining tour last summer...EEP. $75 tickets (my Dad does some advertising for a few ClearChannel stations in New York and I was able to get tickets for free...) and shirts...$50 for a tshirt, $85 for a girl shirt...I didn't even bother looking at anything else. This is why I am afraid of a DT/Yes tour...DT alone is reasonable but when paired with another huge band things get out of hand.
At least metal bands still seem to have reasonable prices. For now.
Lacuna Cool is cool but Nightwish is better :) I like Power Metal more than I like Black Metal though.
Evanescence is a mediocre version of Nightwish.
Or you can spend $1000 on getting microphones and $0 dollars for the software.
Believe or it not it is possible to produce decent music cheaply. Equipment is another problem...a good eight track sound card (e.g. Midiman Delta 1010-LT) will run you around $250, more if you want something fancy (e.g. the Midiman Delta 1010 which has the connections in a rack mounted breakout box instead of the back of the computer--much easier to use). The cost of a reasonable workstation has gone down a lot--my Dual AthlonMP 2800+ machine cost around $2000 total (including all of the equipment I got to upgrade my old 500Mhz k6-2 that ended up in this box and my used 24" SGI Monitor).
The microphones are what kills me. I use my live sound stuff to record occasionally. An SM58 will run around $85 for vocals, an SM57 $75 or $80, and a set of drum mics...I have a cheap $140 set of Samson drum mics with a pair of weird overheads I got from a guy for $20 and it sounds OK but in reality they suck. A good set of Shure drum mics (for live sound) would cost around ... $600. Add a second kick drum (grr, stupid Brent) or a fourth tom and you'll add another $200. It's cheaper to buy a cheap drum machine than to get mics for a real drum :)
Recording demo quality material is cheap and easy nowadays if everyone in the band has mics for live performances. Recording studio quality stuff is still expensive for a bunch of college kids making subs all day. Sure, maybe the guy with a good tech job and lots of money to waste can do it but the people actually making music all day can't. The important part is that it is a lot cheaper now to maybe record at home and trick your friend in the college music program majoring to be a mastering engineer to master your recordings cheaply and then get some CDs pressed with a small booklet to send to the labels.
There are still labels that accept new music. Even the big five do--InsideOut is an imprint of EMI and carries only progressive rock/metal bands like Symphony X and Transatlantic. Relapse Records consists entirely of Grindcore (well, most people wouldn't think of Grindcore as music...), SPV carries a lot of metal now; everything from Hair to Black to Progressive. Koch records also has quite a few excellent bands (e.g. Opeth).
Lastly, life is not all about records. It is easy to book a tour if you don't care where you will be playing or whom you will be playing with. Hell, I am planning on doing vocals for Recently Vacated Graves on a two week Canadian tour at the end of July. Look at the lyrics...there are a week worth of shows booked so far for three weeks worth of time spent contacting venues. Every band should tour a few times before they release a real record (that's how people get to know who you are when you don't have a huge marketing machine behind you).
The above is based on the experiences of several friends who are in bands which are mildly successful (successful enough to be on tours, one in Europe and to have actually gotten signed to real labels with DIY demos).
P.S. Are you planning on going to a show on the Dream Theater and Yes tour? I'm afraid of how much those tickets will cost.
The DAC in the iPod is fairly high quality. It is not unreasonable for someone to simply encode their CDs using Apple's lossless codec and put them on the iPod. With a 40G model around 60 albums (assuming an average size of 650M) could be stored losslessy in WAV; a few more using Apple's lossless encoder. It would be like turning your 40G iPod into a 5G iPod and swapping music around but such is life.
It becomes more realistic when you have 80G and 100G drives in your player; in a few months the Neuros is supposed to have 80G backpacks available (right now up to 40G are available and a few online stores are advertising the availability of the 80G model early) and you can order an 80G backpack right now from Cool4u2View. The Neuros doesn't support any lossless codecs except for WAV right now (although there is support for WMA I have never used it and do not know if it supports WMA lossless or even if WMA lossless is anything more than tagged WAV). 80G is still around 110 albums. The Neuros IIRC uses the same DAC as the iPod so the quality of the sound would be excellent.
For me -b 160kbps Vorbis files are good enough; I plan to re-encode my collection to FLAC when I get a larger HD for music (right now it is a poor little 20G that only has 4G free) as well as Vorbis (abcde makes it easy to encode to more than one format and put them in different directories) -q5 (for my Neuros).
So your last comment still applies to most people. Not everyone though.
The verb, to conjure, is referring to the concept of "students working." The students are being modified by the gerund[ive? I can't remember which one was the adjectival and which one was the noun form] "working" and the phrase "to get good grades from a computer." It is this concept that does the conjuring, hence the original sentence was correct and you are dumb.
QNX
So micro it hurts.
Also fast, small, secure, and hard realtime.
Subversion is a CVS replacement. It is not and will never be as powerful as Bitkeeper. It does its job as a CVS replacememnt well.
The only Free SCM that can be compared with Bitkeeper is Arch. Arch should be able to replace Bitkeeper in the future if not already (it's been a while since I used Arch). It is Free Software and part of the GNU Project now too.
I haven't had a soft modem for years (I've been running GNU/Linux full time for about three years now) so I had no idea that the newer ones were actual hardware modems. I just knew to stay the hell away from PCI modems.
I don't see how it would require any extra hardware to emulate a serial port over PCI. It's all in the firmware.
I use deflate compression in software and have V.44 disabled via a dip switch on the back of my modem. I have a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ so doing this doesn't really have any disadvantage. Winmodem is a U.S. Robotics/3Com trademark and indeed refers to a specific brand of pure soft modem. I don't see why a proprietary driver would be needed; simply emulate a serial port in the hardware and expose this virtual faster-than-normal serial port to the software (with a new driver to deal with the ability to set higher speeds if needed).
USB hardware modems don't cost much and there is no way a 56k datalink will ever use 11Mbps so a real hardware modem is still an option.
I finally upgraded my dialup connection to cable today so it is a non-issue now.
Actually, your external modem (I'm assuming it's a serial model) is inferior, because it is unable to take full advantage of modem compression due to limited serial port speed. So, to answer your question, not only did I save a few bucks but I got a better modem to boot.
Really? Last time I checked line compression was done on the computer, not on the modem.
And proprietary does not mean commercial. Free also does not mean non-commercial. RedHat is a company who makes money off of Free Software. I have absolutely no problem with paying for Free Software. I do have a problem with even gratis proprietary software.
If you believe in the ideals of Free Software then accepting any proprietary software is a a set back.
I can program, yes. I have a bit of code in the scripting layer of GLAME, some code in Guile (I rewrote format to be reentrant and submitted a fix or two for the slib module), and I maintain Bobot++.
I am not especially amazing at programming but I can do what I have to to get around. Perhaps you should read the Philosophy of the Free Software Foundation in order to understand why I say the ability to use a hardware gadget is convinience and not freedom.
You do not gain freedom when you are able to use a piece of hardware you would otherwise be unable to use. Your life is made more convinient but you are now a slave to the author of the driver. Should the driver author decide to stop supporting you, well you are then SOL. The point of Free Software is that the software itself is free (liber if you know any Latin). The fact that the software is free limits the ability of any one person to use said software to exercise power over another person.
Winmodems suck too. I got my external 56K U.S. Robotics modem off of eBay for $30. Is saving a few bucks worth using an inferior soft modem and therefore non-free drivers?
I also do not speak for Open Source. I hate the Open Source movement. I am a member of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is about politics and not practicality. If a piece of software is non-free then it is not to be used. Doing so would be supporting proprietary software. Drivers are essential to the operation of any kernel (monolithic at least...L4 doesn't count). If the drivers are non-free you have infected the very base of your Free Software system.
We have come quite far. It is foolish to slip backwards to a time when we were slaves to proprietary vendors. Today it is a graphics card driver. Tommorow it is everything.