I live in Switzerland that has a real democracy where the people make the decisions. The politicians do the leg work and attempt to best advise the people. I am firmly convinced that this is the best way to manage a modern economy!
this is not a democracy, this is mob rule. democracy is one person, one vote, to elect a *ruling party* who then govern the country. under a democratic system, they do not need to consult the populace for every decision they need to take.
i do applaud switzerland's stance on several things, including this, however in some circumstances switzerland's system works well because of its stance and circumstances. the problem with making major decisions by referendum is that the populace is largely ignorant, irresponsible and easily swayed. it's putting an enormous amount of power in the hands of the media. if we had such a system over here, i'm sure we'd have david beckham as king of england and we'd have declared war on france.
perhaps that is an extreme example, but my point is that some decisions NEED to be taken from an informed position, and that is what experts are for. if your experts are out of touch, then replace them with better ones. they are there to advise and should be in the best position to do so.
we do not need a system where everything is decided by the masses. internet polls already show how neurotic that can get.
hey, "moron", if you knew much about this, you'd know that doesn't completely solve the problem. there are still instances when the system will invoke IE instead of netscape, and it takes a registry fix. as a long-time Opera user, I am more than aware of this.
and also, KDE does not make it near-impossible (especially for the regular user) to have some other browser as the default. Or set it back to the default any time you install some dumb patch from windows update!
had IE simply been on the windows boxes, and not as insidious as Microsoft made it, then it wouldnt have been an issue.
I got my paws on a friend's new 12" powerbook yesterday. holy crapola, those things are gorgeous. as an owner of a relatively cool pc laptop from a couple of years ago (800Mhz, 384M ram, 20G HD, DVD-R/CD-RW, 15" screen) this thing impressed the hell out of me.
the attention to detail is astonishing, for instance, the clasp which connects the screen to the body when it's closed, gets recessed when the laptop is opened, only emerging again when the screen is almost shut. the keyboard is exemplary, and the screen doesn't feel small, being an incredibly sharp 1024x768.
oh, and did i forget to mention, it has a dvd-writer, 640M of ram, 40G harddrive, 54Mbps wireless, and weighs 4 and a half pounds!
and of course we all know about OS X.
apple is really doing something right, i think next time i get round to upgrading my machines, i'll be supporting the company myself.
as soon as the 64bit processors come out, and as long as it can run doom3, that is;)
i dont know what crack they smoke where you work, but...
Track widths do not vary with CDs so you can stuff more on. Hence there is no such "narrow track width" problem with CD. however, this *does* apply to vinyl, and is one of the main culprits of poor vinyl quality over the last 15 years. I've not heard of any "thin allyplate" problems with CDs, however using thin, low quality material has been a problem for sound quality for vinyl. some believe this was intentional on the labels' part to get people to switch formats.
also, having worked in the music business myself, i'm happy to say that i've never encountered an instance where the producers don't get a test pressing.
methinks your record exec may not be the only cokehead.;)
The most important thing in my eyes about an OS is about how visible it is - how much it gets in the way. it shouldn't get in the way, at all. in fact, a GOOD OS would be one that users don't even know about. working on a computer, for a user, is about the applications. about getting work done.
picture a typical work environment. people who generate media on computers. you have some graphics people - they work on graphics and animation. they will want to use say photoshop, director, premiere, etc. there are some sound people. they use soundforge, logic, cubase, reaktor, absynth, and so on. the programmers will use.. well, whatever suite they want to. there are more (and better) development environments for win32 than there are for linux, though this is a slightly closer call. however gimp and similar linux versions of apps - they are fine for playing around. but they are not near professional grade. and what about the project manager, he will want to use microsoft project. because that's the best program of its kind.
open source is in some ways a detractor here. apps wont be released for linux until companies are safer in the knowledge of market share, and that their market will have the right attitude toward their products. it can't be that hard to port them - how easily were apps ported to Mac OS X?
people will go to a platform with the best apps. you can get all sorts of stuff for free OSes, but it doesn't mean they're good enough for professional use. even non-professional use - tux racer may be cute and stuff, but it oesn't compare to anything good released on pc for the last 3 years.
you, as a slashdotter, may think this doesn't apply to you, because you like configuring your machine, tinkering with settings, and so forth. but you're not a user. you're acting like a system administrator. and the way to get linux into the mainstream is not to make everyone want to administrate their own machines, but to make linux easy enough for someone to use it and not have it get in the way.
whether this is a good thing or not is another question entirely. it may be bad to "dilute" linux to the lowest common denominator, if that affects its power.
fwiw, i would garotte anyone who advised using windows on a server environment, having had more than enough nightmares with that already myself too;)
I guess the one thing i forgot to mention is that over here (in the UK), almost all net access calls are on metered lines, ie you pay per minute of connection. it's like this with all calls. some ISPs offer freephone number services, but you usually get disconnected every 2 hours to stop people hogging them too much. so broadband actually cost *less* for me than dialup as i wasnt spending $100 a month in phone costs.
over here, you can get cheap cable or DSL from something like $40 a month. how cheap is your dialup that it can be significantly less than that?
i agree cf the email transfer, however, webpages see a huge boost. hitting a 100K page takes 20 seconds on a 5k dialup link, 2 seconds on a 50K/s broadband one. and try hitting some of the bad pages, and do more than one thing at once!
i'm a developer too, often working with remote machines. running a couple of SSHs and having to move code around would be tremendously slow on dialup, i figure. thats the problem with broadband, you can't go back. you get your kazaa going in the background, stuff just appears, and doesn't impact your perceived bandwidth in the meantime. plus, having to download 39M of JDK last night would have been unpleasant, had i not got it at 176k/s (2M dsl)
you'd also find more uses if you had the bandwidth... i download a lot of game demos to try out, avis of old amiga demos, host some stuff on my box (mostly development betas), all things i couldnt do on a dialup.
but yeah, if you're happy, you're happy, which is my original point. you just dont need the extra features... yet.;)
How long has broadband been available for in the US? 2 years? 3 years? i think this figure of 70% is misleading. the remaining dialup users (in areas of broadband availability, of course) are those who dont need or want broadband. their use of the net is low enough that they can get away with a low-cost dialup just to check their email and surf the web once a day. they probably wouldnt want broadband if it was even just $5 more a month than dialup.
in these 2-3 years, all the dialup users who had the need for broadband have moved over. there will always be a niche market for those who have minimal internet use, and dialup provides that service. i think what would be more interesting is to observe the rate of subscribers to dialup vs broadband over these last three years.
Fross
Re:It makes sense to go for a samller HD
on
New MP3 Portables
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· Score: 2
if you're a regular guy with regular jeans and a regular american size behind, would you really risk sitting on $400 worth of delicate electronics?
there are many other options. belt clip is the most sensible and most obvious, jacket pocket and shirt pocket next. i have a pjb100 which is much larger than the archos, and it works fine for me hooked on my belt.
The PJB-100 addresses these issues. it handles gapless playback - not only does it not give you the ludicrous 3-5 second spinup delay, it doesn't even give you the 0.1s delay all other mp3 players give when playing precached mp3s back to back - it allows you to encode a whole album as one big track with separate "pointers" into it for the track points, so to the user it still looks like an album made of X tracks. they are also still manipulatable so you can delete a track in the middle of an album, or move it to the end etc.
it does this by encoding a cd with its own software, or a third party utility for it can take an mp3 and a cue file and upload a gapless album for you. Exact Audio Copy will give you the cue file and the album as a whole track, but you can of course make your own cue files if for instance you have a recording of a book you want to upload. it has an open source SDK so there are a lot of nifty third party utilities out for it, including for linux, of course.
the pjb-100 is rock-solid and really good, i've had mine for over 2 years. it is of course old - it's only USB1.0, but takes 2.5" HDs so capacity goes up to 60 gigs. there are rumours of a PJB-300 meant to come out toward the end of this year, but it's not materialised yet and the featureset is unknown, it may not even be as good as the pjb-100! we shall see.
i almost forgot a link. you can get a lot more info on the pjb-100 here.
The PJB100 was the first harddrive mp3 player to market (with 4G drive!), and is still going strong now. In fact, many of the original models now have up to 40G drives, and are still going themselves!
it has a open-source linux SDK and many tools (linux, win32, mac os and OSX). 10-12 hours battery life - i use it 10 hours a day, every day. it recharges in under 3 hours. the firmware hasn't been upgraded in a year, but it's stable and mature. it has a gorgeous large screen. and built-in games! it also supports gapless encoding (either directly or with exact audio copy's audio image/cue file ripping), which is great for live recordings, dance or classical.
it's also pretty large compared to the others (about the size of a not-so-modern cassette walkman), although it comes with belt buckle etc, i'd stick it in a bag on my back instead for jogging etc. also, usb is much slower than firewire, but this unit is almost 3 years old. you can buy them from thinkgeek, mp3factorydirect.com or many other providers, in up to 40G sizes, though 60G is just around the corner! (the drives just got released in japan last month)
if you're looking to upgrade an existing PJB, you need a 9.5mm high 2.5" laptop harddrive. the best are the toshiba GAS/GAP units, which give the best performance as the PJB is able to use a sneaky way to conserve power between reads.
also on the horizon is the PJB-300, though this will just be issued by the same marketing company, not manufactured by the same people (which was compaq, in this case). no details have been released yet, though the company has been taking ideas from the PJB100's userlist, so it should hopefully be better than the pjb100!
are there protections in place to stop companies obtaining this information? insurance companies, for instance. or how about, your prospective employer does a search on this information. sees, for instance, that you are HIV positive. and denies you the job on this ground.
The problem is that any _new_ system of this type is exactly that, new, and it is better to be vigilant when this sort of thing comes along. Who makes the rules? What is their motive?
If done well, it can be a good system. if done badly, it can be a huge threat to personal freedom, and perhaps unwilling and uncontrollable discolsure of sensitive information.
I think I'm in a position a lot of people are in - I'm a back-end coder, who doesn't specialise in databases. Usually working in a team, there will be some database specialist, and I'll lead the team designing the engine that uses it, and someone else will lead the front-end. So I know some about databases, but I'm not an expert.
I also use databases for some of my own stuff. I've found mySQL to cover everything I need to do. On a rare occasion, I have to push the boundaries a little, but that's not impossible with a little design tweaking.
So my question is, I would like to learn more about these extra features - I know what most of them are and do, but I don't have the database structure knowledge to know what situations they should be used in, and more specifically, how to design databases to begin with to take advantage of them.
Online resources would be preferred, I don't want to spend $50 on a book I won't use THAT much, but they will certainly be considered.
Thanks, glad it sounds good so far. When you get through the whole thing, drop me a line (here or email) and let me know what you think.
I wasn't aware of tech noir, it looks very cool - friend of mine runs/ran Monochrome, again in Sweden. but hey, who says a visit and a gig isn't out of the question? That would be amazing:>
Getting back on topic, a lot of the early mixes are ones that couldn't be done on vinyl. the intro with all the attendees samples, of course, and then say the mix from Solitary to Until the end of the world (2nd to 3rd tracks) - takes a chunk from later on in Until to overlay over the transition - have a close listen, you'll see what I mean. As well of course as the film sample laid over the top of it.
ObAbstract - i've been DJing for over 10 years, headlining festivals with up to thousands of people, and been a long time fan and admirer of really good DJs. I learned on vinyl, but have been encompassing more advanced media in recent years.
The move onto solid state media is a good, and inevitable one. The demands on a DJ are higher than ever before, and more tools are needed for the job. Some tricks *need* preparation to be performed, if for instance you want to cut out a middle chunk of a song, or want to overlay a track with a large number of samples very close together - these simply aren't possible on a traditional dual-turntable setup.
Some very big DJs have access to vinyl-pressing facilities, so can play around with tracks and then have them available to play from a 12" - but hardly anyone can afford that. So there have to be other solutions.
There will always be people arguing that one approach is better than the other, that one needs more skill than the other. This is ridiculous - both approaches can take time and skill, to become adept enough to create a good set with the tools you have. Vinyl is (for now at least) the most tactile "interface" for playing with music, though many other dj-quality units (such as CD players) compensate for their lack of interactivity with some neat tools, such as automatic BPM counters, instant dropping, better pitch or indeed fixed-pitch tempo controls, and frame by frame shifting. These already show some benefits over vinyl in some situations. Harddrive or solid-state solutions provide further benefits, such as instant accessibility, visual wave representations (it's really nice to be given an on-screen reminder that the track goes into a break in 15 seconds time), and so forth.
The real benefit is that both approaches have their strong points, as well as limitations, so people benefit from even more variation, tricks and fun stuff in their sets. The best solution would be to have all the equipment available, but this would require all the skills across the board to use properly.
If you're interested, I've been using a laptop/mp3 player live to augment DJ sets for years now. I ususally use the mp3 player for sample queuing, the laptop for processing or playing preprocessed tracks, or queueing large numbers of samples - you want to get 15 samples right in a minute, it'll be VERY tough with a regular mp3 player. And impossible on vinyl. Add these to 2 CD players (sometimes more) and sometimes a turntable, and you have what I usually use.
I have some sets available for download, that hopefully can withstand a slashdotting;) And if you're into vinyl-based DJs can show you the different sorts of tricks that can be achieved with these mediums.
There are a bunch of mirrors for the sets available here, around the US and Europe.
This in a very interesting and inspired use of technologies, that is giving some great results. However, one thing that is not bing taken into account here is that video is shot over time - subsequent frames of a scene represent a change in a scene according to how things progress over time. Thus for anything other than a static scene (which is not of too much use) this can cause problems.
Take for instance the example on the main page of this (if it's not slashdotted already), the two swimmers standing ready to dive in. In a real-orld situation, by the time the first picture of th swimmer on the left was taken, the one on the right may have already dived in - when it comes to take that one's picture, he would be already swimming away. Hence if these images were composited, it would look like one dived in while the other was still on the blocks.
Possibly of artistic interest, but otherwise a bit of an annoyance in what is definitely a very cool use of technology. It's interesting that after 100 years or so, we could be back at the point where someone says "hold still for a few seconds, i'm going to take a picture".
Sigh. You reveal just how little you get when you say "if you ARE after a good vampire-centric series." Buffy is not a Vampire Centric series. If you're watching it with that mindset, and expecting a really great show about vampires, you might as well watch Hamlet and get disappointed because he's not kicking the shit out of a vampire. You're expecting the wrong thing.
You've sort of proved my point. though buffy features vampires et al, it isn't a vampire-centric series. it's just "yet another tv series" doing the exact same things with the same sorts of characters. the only difference is this "branding".
The characters are not one dimensional. You are trolling. Good day.
They are shallow characters with no further motivations, personal thoughts or misconceptions than is immediately apparent and rammed home (repeatedly) on the surface. if you think the characters are sophisticated, you need to broaden your horizons a bit.
Incidentally, were the show complete and utter shit, it would be worth watching for nothing more than Alyson Hannigan's wonderful visage. Mmm, Willow.
I think we've found the level here. heh.
Anyway, Buffy is a good show, and maybe you'll "Get It" one day =]
This is the attitude problem i don't understand from $scifishow fans. They think that if other people don't like it, that they don't "get it", that they obviously are not capable of seeing to the "higher level" that the program operates on. it's obvious that the program operates on a very low, common denominator level, to generate mass appeal.
To each their own, i've not said buffy is _bad_ per se, it's just not as good as some other stuff out there. I don't want to waste my time dissing a program to people who obviously like it, what I'm saying is, if you like it, you may like this other stuff _more_.
Go check out Ultraviolet. You will be pleasantly surprised and hopefully get something really good out of it. And then you can go back to watching Buffy.:)
I'm sure this'll get modded down as a troll just because I'm not praising buffy, but well, got karma to burn in order to make a point...
Is Buffy really what passes for good TV nowadays in the US? I'm in the situation of being exposed to it through my girlfriend and her friends, who enjoy it, and I really just can't get into it, as much as I try and want to.
I find it ludicrous that so many people here seem so enthralled with it - the show has little depth, the characters are one-dimensional, the situations often too... silly to be believable. the plots are predictable and simplistic, and thoroughly unstimulating. compare to xena, hercules or anything like that. it's similar - and they were pap too. for people who call themselves geeks, i would have thought more brain massaging was in order.
it's light entertainment, that sometimes should be laughed at because some of it is so bad. just like star trek, for instance, should. not that this is a bad thing, it's just bizarre to take it that seriously. the acting's just as bad, too!:)
if you ARE after a good vampire-centric series, you cannot go wrong with Ultraviolet [world-productions.com] (warning, audio on the frontpage!) that actually has a plot (several, wheels within wheels), characters with more than one motivational factor, great acting and directing, much more tension and drama, and overall just a different class.
if you DO like stuff like Buffy, i urge you to check it out and be blown away. The DVD's available in the US (Amazon.com and others), so you have no excuse.
mp3 codecs are written/available with integer-based decoding, whereas ogg requires floating point operation.
hence portable mp3 players, with the eye on cost and efficiency, usually only have integer-based chippery for decoding. (excuse the vague terms, running out of my technical arena here...) and hence can't run Ogg.
i know there are "wrapper layers" to allow floating point operation on integer-based platforms, but these have not caught on, maybe they require even more horsepower that these chips can't supply? again, there's no reason for them to use more powerful chips than needed to support mp3...
personally i'd love to see ogg support, i think it's a great codec. but to the rest of those in this thread saying "mp3 sucks, ogg rocks!" - it's all subjective. high bitrate mp3s (256-320kbps) sound as good as the source. no question. ogg probably does at lower bitrates (192?). but they can both perform to as high quality as the human ear needs, it's just a matter of efficiency.
although there's always something coming a few months away;)
the PJB300 (next generation of the PJB100, the first ever harddrive-based mp3 player) should be out during 3rd quarter of this year. its featurelist is unreleased, but the first one has:
40G harddrive (60G soon!) smaller than nomad jukebox 12 hour battery life open source SDK (and good linux support)
and that came out 2.5 years ago!
so there's a fair amount of clamouring over what the new one will do. suffice to say it should (and will have to) kick the ipod's ass.
the main point of CS/RtCW/tribes2/MoH:AA on PC is the multiplayer aspect. the singleplayer game is almost irrelevant. as such the consoles cannot capture the spirit of those games, at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Switzerland that has a real democracy where the people make the decisions. The politicians do the leg work and attempt to best advise the people. I am firmly convinced that this is the best way to manage a modern economy!
this is not a democracy, this is mob rule. democracy is one person, one vote, to elect a *ruling party* who then govern the country. under a democratic system, they do not need to consult the populace for every decision they need to take.
i do applaud switzerland's stance on several things, including this, however in some circumstances switzerland's system works well because of its stance and circumstances. the problem with making major decisions by referendum is that the populace is largely ignorant, irresponsible and easily swayed. it's putting an enormous amount of power in the hands of the media. if we had such a system over here, i'm sure we'd have david beckham as king of england and we'd have declared war on france.
perhaps that is an extreme example, but my point is that some decisions NEED to be taken from an informed position, and that is what experts are for. if your experts are out of touch, then replace them with better ones. they are there to advise and should be in the best position to do so.
we do not need a system where everything is decided by the masses. internet polls already show how neurotic that can get.
hey, "moron", if you knew much about this, you'd know that doesn't completely solve the problem. there are still instances when the system will invoke IE instead of netscape, and it takes a registry fix. as a long-time Opera user, I am more than aware of this.
go back to your oatmeal.
and also, KDE does not make it near-impossible (especially for the regular user) to have some other browser as the default. Or set it back to the default any time you install some dumb patch from windows update!
had IE simply been on the windows boxes, and not as insidious as Microsoft made it, then it wouldnt have been an issue.
that all sounds fantastic, and i'm definitely going to check it out, but i have a question... how does someone listen to 75 albums a day??
a colleague of mine used to work in a canning factory.
you want to know why the spam fills the can, and there is no "juice" that falls out when you open it?
because they cook it in the can.
the ingredients go in, they seal it, then they cook it.
mmm mmm good. D:
the iMac? pah.
;)
I got my paws on a friend's new 12" powerbook yesterday. holy crapola, those things are gorgeous. as an owner of a relatively cool pc laptop from a couple of years ago (800Mhz, 384M ram, 20G HD, DVD-R/CD-RW, 15" screen) this thing impressed the hell out of me.
the attention to detail is astonishing, for instance, the clasp which connects the screen to the body when it's closed, gets recessed when the laptop is opened, only emerging again when the screen is almost shut. the keyboard is exemplary, and the screen doesn't feel small, being an incredibly sharp 1024x768.
oh, and did i forget to mention, it has a dvd-writer, 640M of ram, 40G harddrive, 54Mbps wireless, and weighs 4 and a half pounds!
and of course we all know about OS X.
apple is really doing something right, i think next time i get round to upgrading my machines, i'll be supporting the company myself.
as soon as the 64bit processors come out, and as long as it can run doom3, that is
i dont know what crack they smoke where you work, but...
;)
Track widths do not vary with CDs so you can stuff more on. Hence there is no such "narrow track width" problem with CD. however, this *does* apply to vinyl, and is one of the main culprits of poor vinyl quality over the last 15 years.
I've not heard of any "thin allyplate" problems with CDs, however using thin, low quality material has been a problem for sound quality for vinyl. some believe this was intentional on the labels' part to get people to switch formats.
also, having worked in the music business myself, i'm happy to say that i've never encountered an instance where the producers don't get a test pressing.
methinks your record exec may not be the only cokehead.
fross
The most important thing in my eyes about an OS is about how visible it is - how much it gets in the way. it shouldn't get in the way, at all. in fact, a GOOD OS would be one that users don't even know about. working on a computer, for a user, is about the applications. about getting work done.
;)
picture a typical work environment. people who generate media on computers. you have some graphics people - they work on graphics and animation. they will want to use say photoshop, director, premiere, etc. there are some sound people. they use soundforge, logic, cubase, reaktor, absynth, and so on. the programmers will use.. well, whatever suite they want to. there are more (and better) development environments for win32 than there are for linux, though this is a slightly closer call. however gimp and similar linux versions of apps - they are fine for playing around. but they are not near professional grade. and what about the project manager, he will want to use microsoft project. because that's the best program of its kind.
open source is in some ways a detractor here. apps wont be released for linux until companies are safer in the knowledge of market share, and that their market will have the right attitude toward their products. it can't be that hard to port them - how easily were apps ported to Mac OS X?
people will go to a platform with the best apps. you can get all sorts of stuff for free OSes, but it doesn't mean they're good enough for professional use. even non-professional use - tux racer may be cute and stuff, but it oesn't compare to anything good released on pc for the last 3 years.
you, as a slashdotter, may think this doesn't apply to you, because you like configuring your machine, tinkering with settings, and so forth. but you're not a user. you're acting like a system administrator. and the way to get linux into the mainstream is not to make everyone want to administrate their own machines, but to make linux easy enough for someone to use it and not have it get in the way.
whether this is a good thing or not is another question entirely. it may be bad to "dilute" linux to the lowest common denominator, if that affects its power.
fwiw, i would garotte anyone who advised using windows on a server environment, having had more than enough nightmares with that already myself too
fross
I guess the one thing i forgot to mention is that over here (in the UK), almost all net access calls are on metered lines, ie you pay per minute of connection. it's like this with all calls. some ISPs offer freephone number services, but you usually get disconnected every 2 hours to stop people hogging them too much. so broadband actually cost *less* for me than dialup as i wasnt spending $100 a month in phone costs.
;)
over here, you can get cheap cable or DSL from something like $40 a month. how cheap is your dialup that it can be significantly less than that?
i agree cf the email transfer, however, webpages see a huge boost. hitting a 100K page takes 20 seconds on a 5k dialup link, 2 seconds on a 50K/s broadband one. and try hitting some of the bad pages, and do more than one thing at once!
i'm a developer too, often working with remote machines. running a couple of SSHs and having to move code around would be tremendously slow on dialup, i figure. thats the problem with broadband, you can't go back. you get your kazaa going in the background, stuff just appears, and doesn't impact your perceived bandwidth in the meantime. plus, having to download 39M of JDK last night would have been unpleasant, had i not got it at 176k/s (2M dsl)
you'd also find more uses if you had the bandwidth... i download a lot of game demos to try out, avis of old amiga demos, host some stuff on my box (mostly development betas), all things i couldnt do on a dialup.
but yeah, if you're happy, you're happy, which is my original point. you just dont need the extra features... yet.
fross
How long has broadband been available for in the US? 2 years? 3 years? i think this figure of 70% is misleading. the remaining dialup users (in areas of broadband availability, of course) are those who dont need or want broadband. their use of the net is low enough that they can get away with a low-cost dialup just to check their email and surf the web once a day. they probably wouldnt want broadband if it was even just $5 more a month than dialup.
in these 2-3 years, all the dialup users who had the need for broadband have moved over. there will always be a niche market for those who have minimal internet use, and dialup provides that service. i think what would be more interesting is to observe the rate of subscribers to dialup vs broadband over these last three years.
Fross
if you're a regular guy with regular jeans and a regular american size behind, would you really risk sitting on $400 worth of delicate electronics?
there are many other options. belt clip is the most sensible and most obvious, jacket pocket and shirt pocket next. i have a pjb100 which is much larger than the archos, and it works fine for me hooked on my belt.
The PJB-100 addresses these issues. it handles gapless playback - not only does it not give you the ludicrous 3-5 second spinup delay, it doesn't even give you the 0.1s delay all other mp3 players give when playing precached mp3s back to back - it allows you to encode a whole album as one big track with separate "pointers" into it for the track points, so to the user it still looks like an album made of X tracks. they are also still manipulatable so you can delete a track in the middle of an album, or move it to the end etc.
it does this by encoding a cd with its own software, or a third party utility for it can take an mp3 and a cue file and upload a gapless album for you. Exact Audio Copy will give you the cue file and the album as a whole track, but you can of course make your own cue files if for instance you have a recording of a book you want to upload. it has an open source SDK so there are a lot of nifty third party utilities out for it, including for linux, of course.
the pjb-100 is rock-solid and really good, i've had mine for over 2 years. it is of course old - it's only USB1.0, but takes 2.5" HDs so capacity goes up to 60 gigs. there are rumours of a PJB-300 meant to come out toward the end of this year, but it's not materialised yet and the featureset is unknown, it may not even be as good as the pjb-100! we shall see.
i almost forgot a link. you can get a lot more info on the pjb-100 here.
David
indeed they are.
between the GAS and GAP, one is slightly quieter than the other, i do not remember which. whichever has the ball bearings.
fwiw these drives should work in the archos afaik, too.
fross
The PJB100 was the first harddrive mp3 player to market (with 4G drive!), and is still going strong now. In fact, many of the original models now have up to 40G drives, and are still going themselves!
it has a open-source linux SDK and many tools (linux, win32, mac os and OSX). 10-12 hours battery life - i use it 10 hours a day, every day. it recharges in under 3 hours. the firmware hasn't been upgraded in a year, but it's stable and mature. it has a gorgeous large screen. and built-in games! it also supports gapless encoding (either directly or with exact audio copy's audio image/cue file ripping), which is great for live recordings, dance or classical.
it's also pretty large compared to the others (about the size of a not-so-modern cassette walkman), although it comes with belt buckle etc, i'd stick it in a bag on my back instead for jogging etc. also, usb is much slower than firewire, but this unit is almost 3 years old. you can buy them from thinkgeek, mp3factorydirect.com or many other providers, in up to 40G sizes, though 60G is just around the corner! (the drives just got released in japan last month)
if you're looking to upgrade an existing PJB, you need a 9.5mm high 2.5" laptop harddrive. the best are the toshiba GAS/GAP units, which give the best performance as the PJB is able to use a sneaky way to conserve power between reads.
also on the horizon is the PJB-300, though this will just be issued by the same marketing company, not manufactured by the same people (which was compaq, in this case).
no details have been released yet, though the company has been taking ideas from the PJB100's userlist, so it should hopefully be better than the pjb100!
hope this helps,
fross
so your health records are linked to it too?
are there protections in place to stop companies obtaining this information? insurance companies, for instance. or how about, your prospective employer does a search on this information. sees, for instance, that you are HIV positive. and denies you the job on this ground.
The problem is that any _new_ system of this type is exactly that, new, and it is better to be vigilant when this sort of thing comes along. Who makes the rules? What is their motive?
If done well, it can be a good system. if done badly, it can be a huge threat to personal freedom, and perhaps unwilling and uncontrollable discolsure of sensitive information.
david
I think I'm in a position a lot of people are in - I'm a back-end coder, who doesn't specialise in databases. Usually working in a team, there will be some database specialist, and I'll lead the team designing the engine that uses it, and someone else will lead the front-end. So I know some about databases, but I'm not an expert.
I also use databases for some of my own stuff. I've found mySQL to cover everything I need to do. On a rare occasion, I have to push the boundaries a little, but that's not impossible with a little design tweaking.
So my question is, I would like to learn more about these extra features - I know what most of them are and do, but I don't have the database structure knowledge to know what situations they should be used in, and more specifically, how to design databases to begin with to take advantage of them.
Online resources would be preferred, I don't want to spend $50 on a book I won't use THAT much, but they will certainly be considered.
Thanks,
Fross
Thanks, glad it sounds good so far. When you get through the whole thing, drop me a line (here or email) and let me know what you think.
:>
I wasn't aware of tech noir, it looks very cool - friend of mine runs/ran Monochrome, again in Sweden. but hey, who says a visit and a gig isn't out of the question? That would be amazing
Getting back on topic, a lot of the early mixes are ones that couldn't be done on vinyl. the intro with all the attendees samples, of course, and then say the mix from Solitary to Until the end of the world (2nd to 3rd tracks) - takes a chunk from later on in Until to overlay over the transition - have a close listen, you'll see what I mean. As well of course as the film sample laid over the top of it.
Fross
ObAbstract - i've been DJing for over 10 years, headlining festivals with up to thousands of people, and been a long time fan and admirer of really good DJs. I learned on vinyl, but have been encompassing more advanced media in recent years.
;) And if you're into vinyl-based DJs can show you the different sorts of tricks that can be achieved with these mediums.
The move onto solid state media is a good, and inevitable one. The demands on a DJ are higher than ever before, and more tools are needed for the job. Some tricks *need* preparation to be performed, if for instance you want to cut out a middle chunk of a song, or want to overlay a track with a large number of samples very close together - these simply aren't possible on a traditional dual-turntable setup.
Some very big DJs have access to vinyl-pressing facilities, so can play around with tracks and then have them available to play from a 12" - but hardly anyone can afford that. So there have to be other solutions.
There will always be people arguing that one approach is better than the other, that one needs more skill than the other. This is ridiculous - both approaches can take time and skill, to become adept enough to create a good set with the tools you have. Vinyl is (for now at least) the most tactile "interface" for playing with music, though many other dj-quality units (such as CD players) compensate for their lack of interactivity with some neat tools, such as automatic BPM counters, instant dropping, better pitch or indeed fixed-pitch tempo controls, and frame by frame shifting. These already show some benefits over vinyl in some situations. Harddrive or solid-state solutions provide further benefits, such as instant accessibility, visual wave representations (it's really nice to be given an on-screen reminder that the track goes into a break in 15 seconds time), and so forth.
The real benefit is that both approaches have their strong points, as well as limitations, so people benefit from even more variation, tricks and fun stuff in their sets. The best solution would be to have all the equipment available, but this would require all the skills across the board to use properly.
If you're interested, I've been using a laptop/mp3 player live to augment DJ sets for years now. I ususally use the mp3 player for sample queuing, the laptop for processing or playing preprocessed tracks, or queueing large numbers of samples - you want to get 15 samples right in a minute, it'll be VERY tough with a regular mp3 player. And impossible on vinyl. Add these to 2 CD players (sometimes more) and sometimes a turntable, and you have what I usually use.
I have some sets available for download, that hopefully can withstand a slashdotting
There are a bunch of mirrors for the sets available here, around the US and Europe.
Fross
This in a very interesting and inspired use of technologies, that is giving some great results. However, one thing that is not bing taken into account here is that video is shot over time - subsequent frames of a scene represent a change in a scene according to how things progress over time. Thus for anything other than a static scene (which is not of too much use) this can cause problems.
Take for instance the example on the main page of this (if it's not slashdotted already), the two swimmers standing ready to dive in. In a real-orld situation, by the time the first picture of th swimmer on the left was taken, the one on the right may have already dived in - when it comes to take that one's picture, he would be already swimming away. Hence if these images were composited, it would look like one dived in while the other was still on the blocks.
Possibly of artistic interest, but otherwise a bit of an annoyance in what is definitely a very cool use of technology. It's interesting that after 100 years or so, we could be back at the point where someone says "hold still for a few seconds, i'm going to take a picture".
Fross
Sigh. You reveal just how little you get when you say "if you ARE after a good vampire-centric series." Buffy is not a Vampire Centric series. If you're watching it with that mindset, and expecting a really great show about vampires, you might as well watch Hamlet and get disappointed because he's not kicking the shit out of a vampire. You're expecting the wrong thing.
:)
You've sort of proved my point. though buffy features vampires et al, it isn't a vampire-centric series. it's just "yet another tv series" doing the exact same things with the same sorts of characters. the only difference is this "branding".
The characters are not one dimensional. You are trolling. Good day.
They are shallow characters with no further motivations, personal thoughts or misconceptions than is immediately apparent and rammed home (repeatedly) on the surface. if you think the characters are sophisticated, you need to broaden your horizons a bit.
Incidentally, were the show complete and utter shit, it would be worth watching for nothing more than Alyson Hannigan's wonderful visage. Mmm, Willow.
I think we've found the level here. heh.
Anyway, Buffy is a good show, and maybe you'll "Get It" one day =]
This is the attitude problem i don't understand from $scifishow fans. They think that if other people don't like it, that they don't "get it", that they obviously are not capable of seeing to the "higher level" that the program operates on. it's obvious that the program operates on a very low, common denominator level, to generate mass appeal.
To each their own, i've not said buffy is _bad_ per se, it's just not as good as some other stuff out there. I don't want to waste my time dissing a program to people who obviously like it, what I'm saying is, if you like it, you may like this other stuff _more_.
Go check out Ultraviolet. You will be pleasantly surprised and hopefully get something really good out of it. And then you can go back to watching Buffy.
I'm sure this'll get modded down as a troll just because I'm not praising buffy, but well, got karma to burn in order to make a point...
:)
Is Buffy really what passes for good TV nowadays in the US? I'm in the situation of being exposed to it through my girlfriend and her friends, who enjoy it, and I really just can't get into it, as much as I try and want to.
I find it ludicrous that so many people here seem so enthralled with it - the show has little depth, the characters are one-dimensional, the situations often too... silly to be believable. the plots are predictable and simplistic, and thoroughly unstimulating. compare to xena, hercules or anything like that. it's similar - and they were pap too. for people who call themselves geeks, i would have thought more brain massaging was in order.
it's light entertainment, that sometimes should be laughed at because some of it is so bad. just like star trek, for instance, should. not that this is a bad thing, it's just bizarre to take it that seriously. the acting's just as bad, too!
if you ARE after a good vampire-centric series, you cannot go wrong with Ultraviolet [world-productions.com] (warning, audio on the frontpage!) that actually has a plot (several, wheels within wheels), characters with more than one motivational factor, great acting and directing, much more tension and drama, and overall just a different class.
if you DO like stuff like Buffy, i urge you to check it out and be blown away. The DVD's available in the US (Amazon.com and others), so you have no excuse.
Fross
mp3 codecs are written/available with integer-based decoding, whereas ogg requires floating point operation.
hence portable mp3 players, with the eye on cost and efficiency, usually only have integer-based chippery for decoding. (excuse the vague terms, running out of my technical arena here...) and hence can't run Ogg.
i know there are "wrapper layers" to allow floating point operation on integer-based platforms, but these have not caught on, maybe they require even more horsepower that these chips can't supply? again, there's no reason for them to use more powerful chips than needed to support mp3...
personally i'd love to see ogg support, i think it's a great codec. but to the rest of those in this thread saying "mp3 sucks, ogg rocks!" - it's all subjective. high bitrate mp3s (256-320kbps) sound as good as the source. no question. ogg probably does at lower bitrates (192?). but they can both perform to as high quality as the human ear needs, it's just a matter of efficiency.
Fross
although there's always something coming a few months away ;)
the PJB300 (next generation of the PJB100, the first ever harddrive-based mp3 player) should be out during 3rd quarter of this year. its featurelist is unreleased, but the first one has:
40G harddrive (60G soon!)
smaller than nomad jukebox
12 hour battery life
open source SDK (and good linux support)
and that came out 2.5 years ago!
so there's a fair amount of clamouring over what the new one will do. suffice to say it should (and will have to) kick the ipod's ass.
fross
the main point of CS/RtCW/tribes2/MoH:AA on PC is the multiplayer aspect. the singleplayer game is almost irrelevant. as such the consoles cannot capture the spirit of those games, at the moment.
He became a project manager because, although he wasn't technical, he gave great face.
Is this some euphenism for oral sex I'm not familiar with?