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Comment 1988 Era... (Score 1) 192

by Spock9999 (#65139361) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: Do You Remember Your High School's 'Computer Room'?
In 1987 and 1988, in my high school in western new york state area at the time, they had about six (6) Apple IIe computers, most with the floppy disk drives. I think one had an audio tape drive. And two had a dot-matrix printer. I also remember they had a 300 baud acoustic phone modem, the kind where you set the handset of an existing phone on the modem. I remember that because the baud rate was so low, and the modem sound was so loud, that you could yell into the microphone part during a modem transmission and it would not mess it up. And for some reason I remember the name of this disk copying program called disk muncher that we would copy games that had disk protection on them. The lady who ran it was super cool, we would skip out of gym and she'd let us go there and say it was legitimate. ok thanks.
Music

Libraries Are Launching Their Own Local Music Streaming Platforms (vice.com) 6

Posted by BeauHD from the localness-is-key dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The services are region-specific, and offer local artists non-exclusive licenses to make their albums available to the community. The concept originated in 2014 when Preston Austin and Kelly Hiser helped the Madison Public Library build the Yahara Music Library, an online library hosting music from local artists. By the time they completed their work on Yahara, they were confident they had a software prototype that other interested libraries could customize and deploy. "That became kind of the inspiration for building MUSICat," Austin told Motherboard, referring to the software platform he and Hiser created under a startup called Rabble.

Now, public libraries in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Fort Worth, and most recently New Orleans have launched their own community-oriented streaming services using MUSICat's open source software. Joshua Smith works at New Orleans Public Library and has been embedded in the city's rich music scene for over a decade. He oversaw the launch of Crescent City Sounds with help from a team of curators that represent local artists and business owners, music journalists and historians and more. "They helped me get the word out to the music community," Smith told Motherboard, noting that their community status helped spread the word that the library now accepts digital music submissions. Smith says that for this first round, the curators accepted albums from artists that were released in the last five years, and that while living within city limits wasn't necessarily a deal breaker, not gigging regularly in the area was. To be considered, applicants needed to submit at least one track from their album. [...] He says each selected artist received a $250 honorarium to license their music to the New Orleans Public Library for five years -- a far cry from the fractions-of-a-penny per stream paid to independent artists by platforms like Spotify. This honorarium and licensing agreement is roughly the standard for public libraries following Rabble's process model. Austin does insist that libraries using MUSICat meet the basic criteria of paying artists to license their work to their libraries. But for everything else, Austin notes that these pre-established models are guidelines, not guardrails.

One example of a public library that took MUSICat and ran with it is Capital City Records -- the music streaming platform of the Edmonton Public Library in Alberta, Canada. An early adopter of MUSICat, the library's collection has grown to amass over 200 local musicians. The project also created opportunities for the library to engage in spin-off projects like limited run of vinyl pressings and running library-focused music events throughout the city. While over 2,000 artists are featured on one of MUSICat's music platforms, Austin says the company wants to continue forming partnerships with libraries on the local level. So for music lovers looking to jump ship from Spotify, he has a clear message: "This is not Spotify for libraries," Austin said. "It's a little different. The localness is kind of key. I don't think we could, for example, use the same strategy on the same fee to license on aggregate collection, which was all the local music from all the libraries available on the music hat app, right, like something like that would need to, it would need to be about the local collections and take people to them and let them play that music in context."

Comment Technical ramifications... (Score 1) 302

I'm surprised there hasn't been much talk about the possible technical ramifications of permanent DST. I realize that most modern devices and systems (i.e. PCs, Windows, Linux, smartphones, etc.) will be able to have software updates to apply the permanent DST. But what about many other devices that may need more difficult and manual software/firmware updates? If they can be updated at all? I wonder how much of a nuisance this will cause if passed?

Comment Re:How Will the Electrical Power Grid be Upgraded? (Score 1) 294

by Spock9999 (#60540470) Attached to: California To Ban New Gas, Diesel Vehicle Sales By 2035
Actually a 220v charger will not charge in a couple of hours.

Most people do not realize the immense amount of power required to charge electric vehicles, or at least charge them faster.

Home 240v chargers are typically 7kw. They have a 22kw charger for homes, but you have to have 3-phase electrical which nearly no household has. So if we consider a 7kw charger, and a Tesla model S with 100kw battery, barring all the minute details, that works out to approximately 14.28hrs to fully charge it! And that's just one car. If you need multiple cars to be charged, you need multiple chargers, which is difficult due to the electricity needs.

Those Tesla super charging stations have 72kw, 150kw and 250kw connections. Those stations are connected to the grid via high power, commercial lines. Just ONE 72kw connection is DOUBLE the average entire household power (i.e. 240v x 150amp entrance = ~36kw).

So, electric cars being common are far off primarily just because infrastructure is not ready.

How can you compete with the current pull up to a gas station and basically equivalent to a full charge in 5 minutes?

Comment Re:Noise Cancelling? (Score 1) 98

by Spock9999 (#59355016) Attached to: Apple Unveils $250 AirPods Pro
Hi, sorry I think you have it backwards. Over the ear headphones with good drivers are MUCH MUCH better than any earbud. Bass is basically movement of air. Bigger drivers in over the ear headphones move air. Those little drivers in earbuds hardly move any air. Plus over the ear has better spatial characteristics and so forth.

Comment We'll see... (Score 1) 20

We'll see. AMD's GPU cards for servers and virtualization have been really gaining ground on Nvidia. And there's also a big difference: Nvidia not only charges for the card but also requires annual per-user licenses. AMD only charges for the card and has no per-user licensing. That will be attractive to enterprise and big-business clients.

Comment Change network settings to help with security... (Score 1) 118

by Spock9999 (#59043934) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Budget-Friendly Webcam Without a Cloud Service?
I have some Hikvision and Amcrest cams (I know there are security concerns), but what you can do is disconnect the internet when you first setup the camera as it will get DHCP IP address info. THEN, connect to the camera, change it to STATIC IP, and change the gateway and DNS settings to something non-existing like 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, whatever. Or blank if it let's you. Now it should be a good LAN only camera without any internet connectivity. Also browse around the rest of the settings, many Cams have 'cloud' or other 'service' features enabled by default, disable them. Ok thanks.

Comment Can they plant that many in one day? (Score 1) 174

There are 86,400 seconds in one day. So 350,000,000 / 86,400 = approx 4,050 trees planted EVERY SECOND. Given general knowledge of planting plants, even with hi-tech automated machinery, can this actually get accomplished in one day? And think of the area/acreage needed, etc. Just questioning the amount. What do you guys think? thanks.

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