Pizzashare - <AUTHOR> http://www.pizzashare.com/ <comment><USER2> when I first saw the name I thought 'cool!'- I was thinking that this is a site that poor college kids can use to get together and split the price of a whole pizza or two (for more variety and meeting new ppl - along with a tool showing what everyone owes for the pizzas including tip)... I was a bit disappointed when this wasn't the case.

I may be missing something but I just don't see the point of this web app (as a super focused yelp) when the yelps of world already have tons of data and tons of users for this very thing

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never liked sites that start the user off on a crowded country-wide Google Maps view. It seems like such a clumsy way to display data. One, I don't want or need to find every pizza place in the US, so why show it to me? and 2. it's overwhelming and a pain in the ass to have to zoom into my location.

Google Maps embeds are fine as a way to put things on a map for searches inside a specific, narrowly defined location. But they're not so good as the first thing you'd see.

I'd ditch the giant US map and redesign to put more emphasis on the zip/city search box -- maybe get a fix on the user's location by IP and automatically pop up popular pizza places nearby.

Also, a bug: I was able to share my favorite pizza place over and over again ... so really easy to game the system.

</comment><comment><USER4> I gave this site a try and added pizza places that I like in Toronto, ON.

\- I was disappointed that I couldn't add any comments, notes or tags (you could even display badges for top picks in categories like "cheap", "organic", "fast", "high end" on your map). It would have been cool to link to the boingboing.net article referencing Massimo pizza or to recommend my favorite types of pizza at each place.

\- I had issues where the green marker pins would be placed in the wrong spot if I: shared a restaurant, typed in the name of another restaurant, and clicked OK. This happened twice (FF 3.0.6 on WinXP).

\- I like the look and feel design of the site but I partially agree with some other posters here who ask what distinguishes your site from the mass market players like yelp. Being pizza-only makes using your site really easy to use, but I'm not sure if that's enough. My random brainstormed thought: Could you make recommending and searching for great pizza places into a game that's fun enough to pique the interest of a first time visitor?

</comment><comment><USER5> Took a quick look. Seems like this suffers from the chicken/egg social network problem. The more users there are, the better the data/app will be. However, users won't use the app until the data/app returns better results.

Example: I put in 92602 (Irvine in OC). Only two pizza stores popped up-both chains (Little Caesars & Round Table) and both >8 mi from the middle of 92602. As a user, this is an immediate turn off because the app isn't helping me find great pizza places. It is only showing me pizza places that I know about-ones that are far from me to boot. I know for a fact that there is a Round Table Pizza that is much closer than the one mapped.

To combat this, you might want to load up some data programmatically so that you have a baseline (scraping PizzaHut.com or Dominoes.com would be a start). Users can then add to your base data set as well as vote up ("share") places that already exist.

<comment><USER6> I thought the point was to share _favorite_ pizza places, don't chains just add noise? If anybody's favorite pizza place is Pizza Hut or Dominoes, I feel extremely sorry for them.

<comment><USER5> I feel the same way, but users are already sharing chains as their favorites, so I thought it would make for a better user experience. Since users are already sharing these chains, the fact that these stores are being added shouldn't signal their quality, the votes should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I. Love. Pizza.

And I love mom and pop pizza shops and am against the chain onces. In that sense, I really like the concept of this website but it doesn't deliver on usability.

If I do a quick search in Los Angeles, only Mulberry St. Pizza pops us. If I do it again, Pizzeria Mozza pops up. What is with the inconsistency? What do all the colors mean? Why won't my added location pop up when I search for it? Once all these bugs are fixed and there is a larger user base then all the pizza lovers of the world would think your website is awesome. It is different from Yelp and I like that because it is not cluttered. In any case, I would say to continue working on it and in the end it will pay off somewhat.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hmm. I thought everybody got this out of their system in 2005. You know, Google Maps API comes out and everybody writes that little test application where you can put pins in the map and store locations in a database. Dozens of sites that look exactly like this this went live over a 3 week period. Some of them inexplicably even got funded.

But it's 2009 now. It's a bit hard to get excited about this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for the insight guys, this has only been up for two weeks and I really appreciate the feedback. There are definitely some bugs on here and you are right about me taking off those pizza chains(dominos, pizza hut etc...) I want to incorporate a lot of these suggestions into the beta version which should be coming out in a month or two, but it will be more a less a total makeover.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't seem to get it to add either of my favorite pizza places in Cambridge, MA 01238 ('Cambridge 1' and 'The Upper Crust'). Am I doing something wrong?

Their URLs are <http://cambridge1.us/> and <http://www.theuppercrustpizzeria.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Not really a fan of the popup for the zipcode. Maybe do a geolocate for the ip and match that way

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting concept. I wonder: are the circle sizes proportional to the total number of shares country-wide, or are they proportional to the number of shares within some shorter distance?

</comment><comment><USER13> There seems to be an escaping issue. Around the SF Bay Area, there's a pizza place called "Mary's Pizza Shack" that on mouse hover only says "Mary."

<comment><USER14> So get into their machine via SQL injection and fix the code. Jeez! This Web 2.0 where users are expected to contribute!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. Talk about a really, really, long tail here.

</comment><comment><USER16> What does this do that Yelp doesn't?

</comment><comment><USER17> Grimaldi's is for tourists.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why US only?

</comment><comment><USER19> dig the color scheme and look.</comment>


CVE-2019-9169 GNU C library buffer over-read via case-insensitive regex match - <AUTHOR> https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-9169 <comment><AUTHOR> 2009: In the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) before 2.28, parse_reg_exp in posix/regcomp.c misparses alternatives, which allows attackers to cause a denial of service (assertion failure and application exit) or trigger an incorrect result by attempting a regular-expression match. [https://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-5155](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-5155)

2018: In the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) through 2.29, check_dst_limits_calc_pos_1 in posix/regexec.c has Uncontrolled Recursion, as demonstrated by '(\227|)(\\\1\\\1|t1|\\\\\2537)+' in grep. [https://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2018-2079...](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2018-20796)</comment>


Dear Adobe... top 100 complaints about Adobe software - <AUTHOR> http://www.dearadobe.com/top_rated.php <comment><USER2> I use Adobe software in production every day. Part of me feels comfort reading other peoples "gripes".

At the same time, as a developer, I also sympathize with the development teams at Adobe. I'm sure many of the people on their respective teams take a lot of pride in the programs they send to market, and undoubtedly they fight many battles with upper-management that they end up losing. "Faster? Who cares about faster, add more features!" the man in the suit says. I speculate that much of the blame for the unreasonable bloat in Adobe applications over the last 5-6 years can be pointed to the people writing the checks. After Effects hit rock bottom on version 7, and only recently with the release of CS3 have things started to look a bit better. After Adobe acquired Macromedia, I'm sure there was a lot of merging they attempted, which so far hasn't been very pretty. Perhaps after another version or two, Adobe will wrangle everything together and start releasing quality software again.

Here is a blog post from the Photoshop Product Manager about the dearadobe.com site: <http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/08/dear_adobe.html>

<comment><USER3> His blog post is nice, he answers thoroughly to most comments there, but this guy seems to be just a lightning rod. There are still no answers why their software is bloated, overpriced, and over-overpriced abroad, why Bridge is such an incredibly annoying and useless (and obligatory) piece of crap, why Reader's performance is even worse than just _reasonably bad_ , why inconsistency in GUI between apps, why silent Opera installation, etc etc etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Foxit > Adobe reader.

Why? Because its faster. 'nuff said.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, Foxit's font rendering isn't nearly as good at small sizes (at least on Windows)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TL;DR: updater sucks, acrobat sucks, prices are too high, focus on stability and performance not bloat, standardize, international customers don't enjoy rape.

</comment><comment><USER7> summary, stop adding features and make your software fast (oh, and cheap)

<comment><USER4> To be fair, reader is their only unbearably slow software (seeing as it takes a while to start even on a fast computer). Photoshop/Dreamweaver have had better startup times, for me at least.

<comment><USER8> Try Illustrator and Photoshop on a Mac. I have better things to do with my life than wait.

<comment><USER9> I had that problem until I bought cs3. Cs2 isn't for intel macs; it uses Rosetta which is why it's slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just "100"? I can think of 100 just as a former user Reader and Flash Player.

<comment><USER10> There's actually several thousand in their site, but that page only lists the top 100. Unfortunately, their page is also chock full of redundant gripes.

Reader annoyed me to no end, but what I discovered (on a Mac) is that there was (almost) nothing that actually required it. The PDF-ness of OS X meant that Preview was darn near good enough for everything, and faster than a jackrabbit.</comment></comment>


The Rest Is Advertising – Confessions of a Sponsored Content Writer - <AUTHOR> http://thebaffler.com/salvos/rest-advertising <comment><USER3> I studied Journalism and trained as a Journalist a lifetime ago (1999-2002), before the internet really (technical term looming) fucked everything up. Thing is, even back then we were studying the impact of the 'Janus view of the Press' \- this concept that any and every news publication was a two-headed beast, seeking to find the balance between great, objective journalism ... and money to keep the lights on.

Back then is was more philosophical than existential - we debated whether it was morally acceptable for a writer to take into consideration the size of a company's ad account when covering them in a story; now that the focused channel of broadcast media has been fragmented, so advertisers no longer pay a premium for access to readers and viewers of the nightly news, every journalist has to be mindful of their commercial impact (though this still needn't impact their writing choices) because they may be out of a job next week.

 _Plus ça change_ and all that. I'd like to see more debates around how to fund the new model (now that we've discovered it was the channel, not the content, that people actually valued for a couple of hundred years), not all this hand-wringing about the impact of money on objectivity because that's an old, boring conversation. Ultimately, advertising has been funding journalism for a long, long time. I wish it wasn't so, but I also wish it rained doughnuts.

<comment><USER4> Is it necessary to debate about funding models for journalism? Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this.

You can debate about government intervention, if capitalism does not incentivize as people want. Maybe the government should pay for some of the journalism? Maybe we need more control and oversight for "high-quality" journalism?

<comment><USER3> I think as the 'Fourth Estate' there's a definite need for Journalism to stay well away from government funding, control and oversight - while I would contend almost all journalists are capable of setting aside any biases such a funding model might create, 'Journalism must be done fairly, and it must be seen to be done fairly' and being dependent on the government makes it hard for a populace to believe it's objectively investigating the government.

But you encounter the same issue if you suggest, say, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ought to fund "high-quality" journalism. (When was the last time the WashPo ran a scathing attack on Amazon?) Even some kind of group model - part government, part philanthropist, part donors will always create a perception of bias.

I'm mixed on your point about Capitalism. Yes, 'the market' will deliver what the people want, but not always what they need ('in the public interest' v 'of interest to the public'). A government example might work here - <USER2> taxpayers in one state willingly contribute money to a road project in another? I suspect not - taxes aren't voluntary for just that reason. Longform investigative journalism, I feel, would similarly not be funded by sufficient people. And I think that would usher in a new era of corruption in most capitalist nations.

<comment><USER5> > Longform investigative journalism, I feel, would similarly not be funded by > sufficient people. And I think that would usher in a new era of corruption > in most capitalist nations.

is that how you feel about the BBC?

<comment><USER3> That's a great point. I don't have much feeling about the BBC (I've spent most of life in Australia), but my 'go to' thought when discussing the impact of Media on revealing corruption is _The Moonlight State_ , which ultimately brought down the State Government of my home state Queensland ... and was created by the ABC.

Indeed, one could argue that a commercial provider wouldn't have invested in longform (I really meant long-term as much as length) as much, but state- sponsored broadcasters had the time and space. So I don't think it could be the _only_ journalism, but you make an excellent point about it having a special place (especially when protected by legislation from becoming the DPRK Mouthpiece).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have recently found that I can't trust most of the things written on the internet anymore. Every piece of writing is suspect and that's incredibly tiring. It just seems that PR-media-marketing juggernaut is always on the look for things that are perceived as trustworthy and trying its best to simulate them. Hope that at least HN will remain unpopular enough so that we will still be able to have real discussions here in the future ;)

<comment><USER7> I hope that wink is a realization that sponsored content (in the form of "Show HN" and the linkbait submitted by heavily interested parties) has already arrived.

<comment><USER6> At least there is a tradition of stating your affiliations and monetary interests up front. But still, good point. Recent bitcoin debacle is a good example - with both parties accusing each other of staging a FUD-spreading campaign in social media and on discussion sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've said it before: There is no value in proper journalism because there's too damn much of it in the market. I think the subscriber model will work much better once 70% of these companies have died off and the remainder can get back to real journalism. If the better ones have to survive the storm by taking on sponsored content, that's what has to happen.

At one time we had tons of newspapers for every moderately large city, and now all of those papers are now online and expect to make money covering all the world's news like they did before. The problem with that is none of them are geographically limited anymore, they distribute everywhere, which probably sounded awesome to them until they realized all their old competitors and a couple million more they had never heard of were all doing the same thing and eating their lunch.

The problem with news online right now is there is just way too much of it, there is demand, but when you can get more or less the same information on 5,000 different sites, who the hell cares what your particular site has to offer? Add to it some blocking users of adblock or switching to a subscriber only model, and you have a clear reason why these companies can't make money.

<comment><USER9> That makes a lot of sense. It follows, then, that the way forward is to hyperlocalize, either geographically or in a particular subject matter. And come to think of it, I _would_ find much greater value in a detailed news site about my city, or even my particular _section_ of my city.

<comment><USER10> It has been tried (though you could argue not well.) I feel like it was either Yahoo or AOL who tried hyperlocal news and it did not gain traction.

However, you could argue that this lack of traction was due to the climate of the users and what they were interested in at the time, they also (if I remember correctly) were actively paying local "reporters" who had a specific local beat.

<comment><USER9> That's not authentic and not really what I want. There is zero chance that a single reporter reporting to a mothership in another city could generate better content than a local paper. After thinking about it, what I want already exists in limited ways. Some examples for my city:

clatl.com

atlanta.eater.com

atlanta.curbed.com

In addition to these, I think a small monthly paper devoted solely to investigative journalism in a particular city or town would generate enough paying subscribers to be viable, but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER11> They exist but they're largely labors of love that probably depend on certain demographics. The chains with local stringers for smaller city papers are terrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Bah. I hardly read sponsored content. It's often marked and I find myself enjoying the piece less and instead hunting like an eagle for every clear indication of propaganda and attempted influence.

The author's main point I believe is correct: money in journalism is wildly misallocated, from overpaid mega-writers and editors, to inconsequential coverage. Things that can't hold forever won't, and that will allow new and necessary questions to be asked about journalism in this new era.

Every market goes through a rough patch and a transformation. If you think the quality of journalism is _only_ going to get worse, and the path for journalism is _only_ in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history.

<comment><USER12> _If you think the quality of journalism is only going to get worse, and the path for journalism is only in sponsored content, you need to spend less time with dystopian scifi and more time with history._

Okay, but how can it change? Where will the money come from?

I'm on the side of the dystopians (is that a word?) until someone can answer those questions for me. But I'm a techie, not a student of history, and I honestly don't know.

<comment><USER13> > Okay, but how can it change?

I'm pretty sure this is a "yellow journalism period" on the internet but it will get worse before it gets better since the common man needs to completely lose faith in these rags like they did with tabloids.

Clickbait is alot like the tabloids and yellow journalism of print media, honestly.

> Where will the money come from?

Subscriptions most likely. It'll be newspapers written to favor the desires/biases of the upper middle class who would consider dropping $100/year for such a thing.

<comment><USER14> When in history did newspapers ever survive on subscriptions?

I've seen and read about papers that survived on ads, and papers financed by causes. Never seen any successful paper on any other format.

Yes, the Internet makes new things possible, but how can you be that sure?

<comment><USER4> Yes, ads and causes seem to be the two big sources of money. I cannot think of a third one.

We agree that ads are dead. That logically leaves us with causes.

The problem with causes are that they are inherently biased. However, there are usually sources for each side. Maybe we should embrace the bias? Instead of looking for objectivity and an ideal of journalism, we could try to balance biases.

Google started with Page Rank, which tries to calculate authority (and thus implicitly objectivity) into a single number. Maybe AI technology can identify all relevant causes for each topic, balance bias, and present a wealth of opinions and the facts they agree on? Sure, the "balance bias" step is the problematic one, because here a gatekeepers occurs.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash In the 30s, business opposition to FDR and the New Deal programs ushered forth a wave of propaganda inciting distrust in government control of the economy while promoting the ability of American industry to raise living standards.

As a result, the Roosevelt Administration countered with a series of public service films informing the public of subversive private propaganda and demonstrating ways to detect hidden or covert biases.

At first I laughed when I heard about this. I couldn't imagine anyone putting that much effort into analyzing news. But using AI? You might be on to something...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is the future. At this point it's impossible to un-do disruptiveness of banner ads. One reason that People block banners is due to how disruptive and gaudy they are.

Native ads camouflage among real content for a few reasons.

1) people like the how articles are presented on the rest of the website, so these ads are not disruptive

2) Many people don't notice the 'advertorial' or 'sponsored content' disclaimers. This reduced the 'bounce rate' of people that view this advertising there fore higher engagement

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the future if everything has to be free. Since you can't make money by creating content for readers, you have to instead create content for advertisers and propagandists.

<comment><USER17> There is plenty of content that will always be free and free of advertising. That's content made by people who either care about a subject or that are otherwise given the feeling that they contribute to something larger than themselves (wikipedia for instance, plenty of blogs, courses and so on).

The problem is that newspapers evolved in lock-step with the advertising industry and that they had carved out an - in retrospect - extremely fragile position based on a balance that they thought was stable. Unfortunately for many quality news publications it turned out that wasn't the only stable state, the other one is the state in which they are simply gone, maybe a few with hopefully benevolent wealthy sponsors would endure. This was an unforeseen consequence of reducing the value of printing presses to near zero.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital)

Pretty much predicted this, the only thing it got wrong was the timetable, it took a little bit longer.

So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.

<comment><USER18> The problem is that the content that's "free and free of advertising" probably won't be very good, or very well researched, or independent.

High quality content often depends on access (which can be hard or impossible to get even if you're a real journalist), a lot of time, and quite a lot of input from support staff (editors, subeditors, researchers, picture editors etc).

 _> So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak._

Agreed.

<comment><USER19> If by content you mean specifically news and product reviews, that's certainly possible. If by content you mean "long-form writing on a specific subject", then you're quite wrong and the parent is right.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) [http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/](http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/)

High quality content comes from two sources, similar to high quality software. It either comes from an organization which makes and sells high quality content to make money (the new York times::Microsoft) or it comes from individual contributors who create it out of passion for the subject (wikipedia::FSF)

<comment><USER18> People will produce "long-form writing on a specific subject" but usually only if they have an axe to grind. They are not necessarily independent and their work is not necessarily subject to the editorial checks and balances that you get from a properly set up news organisation like, for example, the New York Times.

You're moving from a situation where stuff is _mostly_ trustworthy to mostly untrustworthy.

Free software is not a good analogy. It works _regardless_ of the social and political opinions of the people who write it. I don't think it would have as many users if this were not the case ;-)

<comment><USER20> _Free software is not a good analogy. It works regardless of the social and political opinions of the people who write it._

This is completely false: every act of writing or releasing Free software is a political act. That's the point of doing it, of giving your labour away. Free software only exists because of the social and political opinions of its authors.

<comment><USER21> "Everything is political" is fine in theory but, the reality is that Rails or Node.js or Bash or Linux works equally well for dictatorship filtering the internet and the dissident speaking out despite it.

Software is a tool. The idea that hammer is imbued with the political views of the person who crafted it is a bit of romantic mysticism. The political actor is the person using the software.

To put it another way, if my software cared what my political opinions were, it wouldn't be used. One of the greatest freedoms afforded me by Free Software is freedom from others' political opinions on how to use said software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since the spamvertorials mentioned were published in The Atlantic, it reminded me of something in one of PG's essays earlier this year:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html)

" _The Refragmentation_ " January 2016

>" _But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall. [9] There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as if it had been a book. I 'm sure I still have it somewhere. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college._"

</comment><comment><USER23> Can't wait 'til adblockers start blocking sponsored content.

<comment><USER24> New plan: Block any article that mentions a company or trademark. :p

<comment><USER18> So that eliminates almost all the financial stories, all the hardware and software reviews, and all the sports coverage, just for starters ;-)

<comment><USER25> If you think about it, this is not a gigantic loss, if you are interested in insights and not news.

<comment><USER18> Where do you think insights come from? Are they generated spontaneously out of thin air in the absence of facts?

<comment><USER25> Of course insights are generated by facts.

But what I am interested in is the insights, not necessary the facts that led to them being created (as long as I trust the author who converted facts into insights).

So I am happy to read an article about the evolution of (random example) people's savings and investing behaviour. I don't necessarily need name dropping of the fintech unicorns who are involved with making it happen.

<comment><USER18> This is like wanting a history of movies that doesn't mention any movies.

You're welcome to try it (1). That's a good way to prove yourself wrong ;-)

(1) I've done quite a bit of it myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is just another of the long list of things that you can only trust if you pay for it. You are the product not the client of most media you consume.

If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust.

Nothing it trust-worthy any more. Newspapers are selling their reputations in a fire sale. Buzzfeed actually makes money by ignoring any idea of objectiveness or the separation between editorial and advertising.

<comment><USER26> > If you want news, you have to not only pay for it but, pay for independent > 3rd parties to vet it so that over time you have media that you can trust.

General skepticism, independent vetting, and referencing multiple sources are good ideas.

Among the problems with sponsored content/native ads/advertorial is that people rail against it as if all the other editorial is completely devoid of any bias, point of view or financial consideration. It's sleight of hand and misdirection, in part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ad blockers block most native ads because they get loaded dynamically and have trackers associated with them to provide accurate billing and accountability to advertisers. So that part of the article is at least wrong. Every native ad that I'm aware of loads almost exactly like a banner ad.

Most people don't particularly want or need objective news. If they want it straight, they can pay premium prices for it through outlets like Consumer Reports or from specialty newsletters. When they don't want it, they pay by renting part of their attention to advertisers, marketers, and salespeople.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder what will happen to journalism when AI becomes so strong that it can recognize ads and remove or mask them, even when the advertisements are placed inline in the running text.

<comment><USER29> Why stop there? What'll happen to journalism when AI is so strong it can write articles entirely, eliminating the need for any writers at all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I went to the Atlantic to read some sponsored content, only to discover that uBlock Origin filters it out for me.</comment>


Microsoft giving away 100GB free OneDrive storage for 1 year - <AUTHOR> https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus <comment><USER2> "Ooops. Something went wrong. Try again?"

Nah.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry! Something went wrong. Please try again.</comment>


Re: Princeton University's Admissions of Racism - <AUTHOR> https://www.scribd.com/document/476441457/Princeton-Letter-09-15-2020#download&from_embed <comment><USER2> Princeton may respond that they admitted not to individual racism but to systemic racism. This either means that they have nobody to list on the demanded spreadsheet of victims, or that they must list almost every POC that applied for a job or admission, accepted or not. If they do believe that systemic racism is not enough to have violated their terms of federal of funding then they don't believe that such racism amounts to much and it discounts their confession.

Since the whole problem may go poof after the election I'd expect them to wait out the clock.

But that could put the Biden administration in a tight spot. Do they give Princeton a pass for admitted racism, of any sort? Their Princeton alumni donors have deep pockets but their anti-racist supporters have great numbers.

I wonder if justices and alumni Sotomayor and Kagan would feel the need to recuse themselves if this case reached them.

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is deliberate policy from the Whitehouse then I think it's an own goal. They are ceding to the vision of their opponents in order for some short term pwnage.

<comment><USER4> How so? I think it's more than fair to ask an "opponent" to practice what they preach. If Princeton believes that Princeton is systematically racist, then it seems logical that they should be systematically defunded. Taking Princeton's admission of guilt at face value means just that and nothing more, certainly nothing like accepting all of the claims of Critical Race Theory.</comment></comment>


RIM CEO calls a halt to BBC Click interview - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9456798.stm

<comment><USER2> Wow he's smug. He shouldn't be doing any promotion.

It's a weird issue, why is it only Blackberry? Everything does something or other securely, even my dumbphone has an entire list of CAs, and as far as I know can be used in those countries.</comment>


Android Studio 2.0 – Beta - <AUTHOR> http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/02/android-studio-20-beta.html <comment><USER2> The new emulator is noteworthy.</comment>


Ask HN: Reasonable accommodation in Shenzhen or Hong Kong? - <AUTHOR>

Hey.
Could you tell me about reasonably priced hotels or furnished/serviced apartments in Shenzhen or Hong Kong?
I heard that in Shenzhen/OCT, the rent might be around $120, which seems kind of.. outrageously low. Is this far from reality?
I'd be open to any suggestions on where to stay in China (or Hong Kong). Most of all, I'm concerned with being comfortable and safety.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I can't give you specifics or tell you about the surrounding area but I can tell you that Hong Kong island is expensive. I've got two friends living there, both in small apartments, and they pay US $1800 and $2300 / month respectively.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard that there might be cheap apartments in Tai Po, and even saw it on the map, but I have no clue how long it takes to get to civilization from there.

Anyway.. Are your friends wealthy, or just.. silly, for paying that kind of rents? :p

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I don't really know what's going on outside of HK island.

I can think of plenty of cities where you'll pay 2k a month for rent. Hong Kong might be a bit skewed upward vs salaries and quality of life though. If I'm going to pay 2k for rent I'd rather live in a Western city (food, music, space, etc).

Why China? If you're looking for low cost of living you can't beat Vietnam at the moment. If you want something a little more civilized you can check out Bangkok (where I live). Bangkok rent's are less than half of Hong Kong's and it is a great mix of Western and Asian cultures. If you're looking for work though HK's salaries are better for foreigners. (I've either contracted internationally or run my own business here so the lower salaries are a boon.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I've been hanging out in Chiang Mai for most of the last six months. In February I went to Vietnam, Hanoi, but it was uncomfortable (and surprisingly expensive!) so I came back.

Any idea about good places in China, by the way?

I've been living off of contract work for the past three years, and worked remotely since September, but now I need to find a new gig. But yeah, you wouldn't want to work for a third-world salary.

<comment><USER2> Hey, I missed this. If you check this again shoot me an email: matthew [at] ramenshoppe [.] com.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is the avg.song length(≈3min)related to the recording capacity of vinyl? - <AUTHOR> Nowadays I would guess an average popular song length is about 3 minutes long.<p>The question is:<p>- Is this somehow related due to the fact that the first vinyl/grammophone records had a limited capacity?<p>- Or is this somehow differently related, e.g. a singer's voice degrades if one sings longer than 3 minutes,or the attention span for a listener is degrading? <comment><USER2> As far as I know, 3 minutes is the standard time slot for radio play, and a song that's longer than that will be more difficult for DJs to schedule and thus will get less air time. Thus, musicians try to fit their songs into that time slot to maximize royalty revenues.

This doesn't seem to come from any physical constraints of old media, since a 7-inch 45 RPM record (the standard "single") had a recording capacity of about 5 minutes per side.[1]

Billy Joel, in his song "The Entertainer" (1974), has the following lines: [2]

        I am the entertainer
        I come to do my show
        You've heard my latest record
        It's been on the radio
        Ah, it took me years to write it
        They were the best years of my life
        It was a beautiful song
        But it ran too long
        If you're gonna have a hit
        You gotta make it fit
        So they cut it down to 3:05

Wikipedia says that this "references the shortening of Joel's song, 'Piano Man', from 5 minutes and 38 seconds to 3 minutes and 5 seconds to fit a radio slot".[3]

[1] [http://history-of-rock.com/record_formats.htm](http://history-of- rock.com/record_formats.htm)

[2] [http://www.metrolyrics.com/entertainer-lyrics-billy- joel.htm...](http://www.metrolyrics.com/entertainer-lyrics-billy-joel.html)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entertainer_(song)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entertainer_\(song\))

<comment><USER3> _" since a 7-inch 45 RPM record (the standard "single") had a recording capacity of about 5 minutes per side.[1]"_

[1] also says:

 _" Since the grooves are so spaced out and the records spin so fast, a standard 10-inch 78 can't hold more than about 3 minutes of music per side"_

=> That 3 minute norm may predate the popularity of the 45 RPM single.</comment></comment>


Civic hackers and activism - <AUTHOR> http://adityasahay.com/post/2595993303/civic-hackers-and-activism <comment><USER2> Depending on where you live, there have been a number of similar projects that the author dreams of.

Some organizations doing this:

<http://SunlightFoundation.com/> (USA), <http://mysociety.org/> (UK), <http://cee.mysociety.org/> (Central and Eastern Europe).</comment>


Free calling in Gmail extended through 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/free-calling-in-gmail-extended-through.html

<comment><USER2> I, for one, think this is awesome. Thanks Google!

I'm usually using SkypeOut, but it's great to know that I have a free backup plan always available wherever I have access to a microphone.

<comment><USER3> I actually cancelled my Skype subscription and use this instead. I just wish Google Voice had tighter integration with the Gmail interface.

<comment><USER2> I'd probably cancel skypeout too if we didn't use Skype to IM and run chatrooms at my (virtual) workplace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This service is enormously convenient. I think I would be happy to pay one or two cents per minute of calling time. But I wonder what their long-term pricing idea for this would be.

<comment><USER5> Dunno, but this tells me the option isn't gaining users as fast as they need for sustainability. And most people they're targeting already get free US calling through mobile networks. I'd bet this is the loss leader to building a base of people who pay for international calling.

<comment><USER6> Free US calling through mobile networks?

haha, thats a bunch of words that do not belong in a sentence together.

<comment><USER5> Rephrase; for most of their targeted audience the marginal cost of mobile to mobile calls inside the US is already $0.

Marginal cost is what matters, and in this case many US calls are already near free for the segment that would be most likely to adopt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In recent month it feels more and more like a choke-hold from google. I can't help it, and it drives me to alternatives like bing, ff or skype.

It feels like google is preparing a big move in 2011. It wants more data ... it always does. Gmail does not cut it anymore, and for that reason they push voice to get some numbers for a social grid. I guess they learned with buzz that your email address-book has little to do with your social space, and people don't email their friends, they post status-updates, twitter something or send two lines via fb. So they buy themselfs into your phone habits.

I can't believe how often I see chrome ads while surfing the web. It's the only browser that does so, trying to build momentum for something.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fight, and it will help to make the skype(-ui) not look like crap for another 5 years.

I guess what I'm looking for is some _innovation_ , not just another sales channel for something. Cheap is good, but sometimes it's just not enough.

<comment><USER8> I read your incoherent rant several times and I still can't figure out what you're going on about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that the free calls are only for US-based users. They don't want to give too much away, and maybe Google figures the US-based folks will get their friends and family abroad hooked on the service and then they'll be willing to pony up real dough in the future.

<comment><USER10> The free calls are to the USA. I get free calls to the USA from Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use Google Voice, and I use it mainly for international calls. Cheaper than most other services, and I like how easy it is to use. So Google is already making money off me :P

</comment><comment><USER12> I hate Skype for Linux, but SkypeOut has been far more reliable for me so far than Google's Call Phone feature.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use this feature almost every day, it's really great for me. My girlfriend and I also have only one one cell phone between us at the moment, and we use it to call eachother.</comment>


iPod Product Timeline - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1216477318434050048 <comment><USER2> Amazing to think that the original iPod could have gone from pitch to shipping in under a year. Today, the next iPhone is almost certainly in the late stages of engineering validation in January – and while there are many differences between the iPod and the iPhone, the biggest is definitely scale.

Apple shipped 125,000 iPods in 2001. Today, they ship that many iPhones _every six hours,_ or about 200 million per year. ([https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple- ipho...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales- since-3rd-quarter-2007/))

</comment><comment><USER3> I miss the 6-month iPod release cycle: every September there would be a new full size iPod, and every February there'd be a new Mini or Nano.

Is there anyone else from the old iPodLinux community here? I was actively moderating the forums in 2005, and fixing countless iPods for friends at school/church. These days it seems like everybody's moved to Rockbox. I'm still using a 5.5G with a Kingspec SSD, and lots more gadgets fitted into the space where the HDD used to be.

My favourite story from the iPodLinux days was cracking the 4G firmware. leachbj could only make the piezo work, but nilss then used that to dump the binary by making click noises in a soundproof box, and successfully reverse- engineered the rest of the firmware from that.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newsci...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7085#.XhuoMuIzb6c)

<comment><USER4> That's an amazing story!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They did some acquisitions, too. Like "Pixo" for the OS software

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo)

So you sort of need to include Pixo's timeline to get the real picture of the start-to-end-time

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like a huge omission to jump from

>May (2nd week) Hired the first employee on the team

immediately to

>Oct (4th week) Launched iPod to the world

</comment><comment><USER7> The "fast project page" this links to is pretty interesting: [https://patrickcollison.com/fast](https://patrickcollison.com/fast)

> The Empire State Building. Construction was started and finished in 410 > days.

> Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks.

> Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self- > hosting 4 days later.

Inspiring.

<comment><USER6> But also sobering:

>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days. "The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started," said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

<comment><USER8> > The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost > $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

'the "highway" was not usable by general vehicles until 1943. Even then there were many steep grades, a poor surface, switchbacks to gain and descend hills ...' ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction)) plus bridges which were temporary, impassable sections in 1943 when stuff started to melt, etc, etc ,etc.

A war-time dirt-road constructed by the army and only traversable by stuff that could probably go off-road anyway is not really the same as building something in an existing city which has to support regular bus traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand the comments about it being a revolutionary product. Do americans really not know about all the other cheap mp3 players that came before the ipod?

<comment><USER10> The answer is a question: Do you know of a successful mp3 product that came after iPod and took its market?

<comment><USER11> Aka an iPhone though they don't really play flat files the same way. Only kind of a bummer in hindsight with nearly omnipresent data.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which podcast goes straight to the top of your list when it comes out? - <AUTHOR> I think we all have that one podcast that we like so much that whenever an episode comes out, it goes straight to the front of your queue. You can't wait to listen to it.
Could be about anything, doesn't have to be tech/startups related.
Had some amazing podcast recommendations from HN over the years, and I thought this could be a good way to discover even more. I know if someone here likes a podcast that much, it must be good.
Please do try to stick to that single one. I'm asking in this format purposefully to avoid long lists of recommendations that I'll never get round to reviewing. I want to really hone in on the truly special ones that stand out clearly from the rest. <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. For me it's Techzing[0] - it's a general tech/startups discussion that also follows the lives of the hosts. Any given episode is a mix of topics, so you never quite know what cool stuff is going to come up and that's one part of the appeal - the other part is I've been listening for a few years so am also really interested in the updates on the personal stories of the hosts - they get up to pretty interesting stuff so as soon as an episode lands I'm keen to know what they've been up to.

I'd say this one takes a while to get into but would definitely recommend starting a few episodes back and seeing how you like it - you will probably thank me!

[0] [https://techzinglive.com](https://techzinglive.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> Behind the Bastards: [https://www.behindthebastards.com/](https://www.behindthebastards.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm going to ignore your last line, only because my top priority podcasts are all very short (5 minute) news briefs.

SANS Internet Stormcast

Linux Headlines

NPR News Now

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfectly acceptable because it follows the purpose if not the letter of the request :-) Will check them all out

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reply All: [https://gimletmedia.com/reply-all/](https://gimletmedia.com/reply- all/)

"'A podcast about the internet' that is actually an unfailingly original exploration of modern life and how to survive it." – The Guardian

</comment><comment><USER5> Darknet Diaries every time.

</comment><comment><USER6> EconTalk w/ Russ Roberts

</comment><comment><USER7> Joe Rogan Experience</comment>


New York Review of Books Editor Is Out Amid Uproar Over #MeToo Essay - <AUTHOR> https://nyti.ms/2NnviSV <comment><USER2> Trial by social media apparently overrules the opinion of the actual justice system. The courts acquitted the author of the essay, but the editor paid the price for publishing it. Not only has the messenger been shot, the credibility of an old media house has decreased. Ironically, the news is published on NYT - an org that had the guts to ignore social media lynch mobs while hiring Sarah Jeong. The editor of the New York Review of Books is much less visible and controversial - pity that this happened. Must've been an easy target for a trigger happy boss.</comment>


2m amateur radio band endangered? - <AUTHOR> https://www.f4fxl.org/2m-amateur-radio-band-endangered/ <comment><USER2> As a ham operator this seriously disappoints me. The way it sounds the 2m ham band was targeted because it is world wide. Taking it is the easy way out for the producers.

The 2m band is the most prolific uhf/vhf band. Next would be 70cm band but if you get a single band radio it's most likely 2m. There is a lot of equipment out there that would need to be replaced by people and clubs without a lot of financing. The repeaters serve immensely important roles.

For instance around me in Texas most of the storm spotters for NWS (skywarn) use 2m bands. Not having the repeaters may mean the difference between people being dead or alive when a tornado come through. I can't over state the importance of these repeaters. But if forced to replace them there will not be enough funds to get the new equipment, antennas, etc.

I do however have hope the ITU has the foresight to protect the band.

Edit: oh and I forgot to mention iirc the ISS uses 2m as their backup communication. It's used at least a few times a month. That's how prolific the band is.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are millions of 2m transceivers, some of which have appreciable power output. Attempting to operate drones on this band would be seriously stupid, even if other uses (which are historically solidly entrenched) would be banned.

Forgive the pun but I don't think this will fly.

Here is a better article:

[http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2019/june/france- proposes-1...](http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2019/june/france- proposes-144-146-mhz-for-aeronautical-mobile-service.htm)

And without an irritating ad-blocker detector, if you want your stuff to be read don't block it with this sort of nonsense.

<comment><USER4> It would be a shame if, in the event this passes, all those transmitters were to squeal across the spectrum in a coordinated fashion and render the spectrum basically unusable... hehehe.

<comment><USER5> That'd cost a lot of hams their operating licences...

Though there is precedent for it -- from back in the days of the "Russian woodpecker", an OTH RADAR system. Some used to key up and play various sounds at it...

<comment><USER4> So, I pray, go we all: [http://www.arrl.org/news/view/radio-amateur-to-lose- license-...](http://www.arrl.org/news/view/radio-amateur-to-lose-license-as- part-of-enforcement-case-settlement)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Serious bad news - not just for amateur radio operators, but for community emergency response groups, local event coordination (bike races, marathons), and any number of regional Red Cross response teams.

Thales, the French military aerospace company, seems to be behind this band- grab. They're apparently looking to use the 2-meter band to control drones and unmanned aircraft.

<comment><USER4> This is outrageous.

The good news is that there is enough 2m equipment out there that there could actually be a feasible mass radio protest and intentionally render the band unusable. There is no way in hell the FCC or similar authorities abroad could ever actually track down all the equipment or have the manpower to deal with violations. They cannot even stop robocalls in the US.

<comment><USER7> I certainly wouldn't encourage or participate in such a "protest" and I hope that no one I know would either.

It would be extemely detrimental if we lost the 2M band but this is not the right way to "protest" it.

Fortunately, I don't think this constitutes a real threat to the worldwide amateur 2M band. A "reassignment" of 144-146 MHz worldwide, as described here, is simply not going to happen -- not for this purpose, at least.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. _IF_ they actually re-assign the frequency and use it for communicating with unmanned aircraft then disturbing the comms could have unintended consequences, and the response to such an incident would undoubtedly be just as disproportionate.

<comment><USER9> Any such unintended consequences would simply be their own fault, people did not agree they could use that wavelength.

<comment><USER8> Really? If international accord is reached and that band is re-assigned for other purposes, and HAM operators protest by screwing with un-mannen aircraft and something bad happens, do you seriously think "I never agreed to stop using this frequency" will be accepted as an excuse?

I'm not a HAM operator, but I agree that it does seem like a really bad idea to re-assign a band frequently used for stuff like emergency communications. Still, if someone caused a plane to fall down just to make a point then I would assign the blame to that person and not the operator of the plane.

<comment><USER9> The operator of the plane was unwise to use a band that is already in use, international accord does not dictate the reality of the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a ham and the only radio I own is in the 2m band. I don't use it much day to day, but usually join in at least one disaster drill a year and help out with ham support for a local bike ride in an area with little cell service.

If I get kicked out of the 2m band, I doubt I'll move to a 70cm radio, why spend the money (including helping the local ham club replace their repeater) if there's no guarantee I can stay there.

The USA gets what is essentially free disaster communications in return for a few MHz of bandwidth. Seems like a small price to pay.

</comment><comment><USER11> Assuming this is legit that's a BFD for the ham community.

144-146Mhz is probably the most active band given the low cost of equipment and high utility due to not being dependent on the solar cycle.

<comment><USER12> Seriously. 2m is the bread-and-butter of local ham communication. It's used as widely as the 11m CB radio band, and for similar purposes. Back when I had a car I had a 70cm/2m dual-band magnetic antenna on my roof that I would use regularly, as do many others.

It would also be insane to attempt to re-allocate this band for any other purpose, given how many millions of transmitters on this band already exist out there. The _average_ car-mounted transceiver puts out 50 W. Many base stations run at hundreds of Watts, and are attached to quite excellent antennas (e.g. my parents have an 18 foot antenna on a mast at the top of their house, with a total base elevation of around 40 feet).

Good luck taking over the band. None of these drones can put out a tiny fraction of the power that the existing users of the band are already emitting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Someone over on another forum that sounds like "read it" mentioned that this is likely a non-starter. There are more than a few satellites that operate in this band that cannot be moved to another frequency.

Never mind the fact that there would then suddenly be thousands of radios that could transmit on air band frequencies now in the hands of folks who ain't too happy.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure HN is fine with direct linking reddit discussions as long as its constructive

<comment><USER15> Yep. There have been entire posts who linked to reddit posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow that would be a huge loss, I think the last reallocation was the 1.25m band. This would affect things world wide so it's not a surprise why Thales group would want to scoop it up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This would totally suck. I just recently got my transverter ([http://transverters-store.com/](http://transverters-store.com/)) working and am trying to get my antenna in the air. Personally, I don't see this happening if the ARRL and the other radio societies get involved.

<comment><USER17> Can radio societies compete against Thales, the French military aerospace company?

<comment><USER3> Sure they can. It's _just_ France.

This is akin to shutting down the 27 MHz band for some other purpose, it isn't going to happen unless there is a very good reason for it and no single commercial entity should be able to monopolize a chunk of the spectrum for worldwide use if it is already in use.

<comment><USER4> It's also not even the nation state of France. France has many hams who are likely upset, too. It is a sketchy defense electronics company that has pitiable revenue. I suspect the French people/the rest of the world would see this an unjustifiable corporate power play and act of oppression if hams get the word out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> valiant-comma One interesting bit of trivia (I always wondered about but finally read-up on): Early on, amateur radio bands were allocated in a manner that ensured (in all but one case) harmonics would bleed into another, higher amateur band, rather than into a frequency used for another purpose. Changes in the late 1920's dispensed with this[1], but we do still see rough multiples in many cases (160/80/40/20/10 meter, 60/30/15 meter, etc.).

[1] [http://w2pa.net/HRH/family-harmonics/](http://w2pa.net/HRH/family- harmonics/)

<comment><USER18> This is the final motivation why the ham vhf band is safe. The proposal by the french company was simply out of context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Already many other ham bands are under-serviced by available hardware because the allocations aren't uniform worldwide.

Fortunately the popularity of 2m means the backlash here will be swift and forceful, if 2m can't be preserve for amateur use then no band can.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't read it because there's a modal bitching about my ad blocker which I can't close. Way to go.

<comment><USER21> The notification goes away if you click anywhere in the background where the page is dimmed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thales don't care about you.

</comment><comment><USER23> >Adblocker detected! Please consider reading this notice.

Tab closed.

<comment><USER24> Ads and anti adblockers seem especially out of place on a .org site, perhaps because the TLD was " _originally intended for non-profit organizations or organizations of a non-commercial character_ "[0] (though such provisions were never enforced and now apparently completely absent).

Speaking of adblocker blockers, Nano Defender[1] is quite effective at blocking them.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org)

[1] [https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/](https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/)

<comment><USER25> Non-profits still need money to operate. I don't think there's anything inherently contradictory about a nonprofit using ads for funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone explain to me why it makes sense to dedicate 3Mhz of useful spectrum worldwide to an esoteric group of amateur radio enthusiasts in an era where we have the Internet?

I understand it may be an active community, but it's tiny. Why should this valuable spectrum be set aside for this purpose?

Just go on IRC.

<comment><USER27> Not so tiny. There are about 3/4 million amateur radio licensees in the U.S. Japan has over a million.

<comment><USER10> Is that three quarters of a million (i.e. 750,000) or 3 or 4 million?

<comment><USER27> Sorry about the ambiguity. It's 750,000

[http://www.arrl.org/news/us-amateur-radio-population- grows-s...](http://www.arrl.org/news/us-amateur-radio-population-grows- slightly-in-2018)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instant Reaction to Paul Ryan at the RNC (via Google Consumer Surveys) - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=aj5x3nhprnuvm&question=7&filter&rw=1y=aj5x3nhprnuvm&question=7&filter&rw=1

<comment><USER2> So, this is the first I've heard of Google Surveys. Here is Google's information on them: <http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/how>

From what I was able to gather, they only ask a participant a single question in exchange to be able to access some premium content. Because it's just one question, they don't ask you demographic information. That what those "inferred age/gender" things are. Google gives a best guess as to what your demographics are based on other information they've collected about you.

The fact that its google's guess about demographics + only data from people actively seeking to avoid paying for premium content biases the results somewhat. I'm not entirely clear what the premium content is, but if the content consistently appeals to one type of person over another, it would definitely be a source of bias. Google's guess about your demographics probably just increases the error a little bit, but I'd be surprised if it consistently skewed the results in one direction or another.

So, not a perfect scientific survey, but miles above most web based surveys out there.

But intellectual concerns about accuracy aside, my initial emotional reaction is one of terror at google's apparent omniscience. I mean, I already knew they know a lot about us, but this is pretty visceral reminder, complete with very pretty charts.

The use that's presented here is fine. Data in aggregate is fine. But there are questions that advertisers could ask that would be much more valuable to them if they knew who answered which question what way. Google could make a ton of money passing on the emails of people who answered questions in a way that makes clear that they'd be likely potential customers. They'd make more money selling other information along side the emails. Information about things like political leanings, sexual orientation, health concerns, if not already in google's database couldn't be too far away. Target already has a system for determining if a woman is pregnant: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.html?pagewanted=all)

Can google resist the temptation of selling that oh so valuable information? I really hope so.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff. At first glance, it certainly seems to match up with the fairly standard post-convention bump -- usually about 4%.

For a really impressive data dig, check out this recent Nate Silver article: [http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/measurin...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/measuring- a-convention-bounce/)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's pretty cool that this data can be so easily collected and shared. Some results:

\- Gender: Women were less impressed by Ryan's speech

\- Age: the 35-44 and 65+ segments really liked Ryan's speech; 18-34 were unimpressed.

\- Geography: slightly better response in the South and West

\- Urban density: Rural areas reacted much more positively than urban/suburban areas.

\- Income: the poorest respondents (0-25K) actively disliked the speech, 75K-100K were unimpressed, and 25K-50K liked it.

Most of these results are not statistically significant according to the error bars, but the trends largely agree with my intuition. This kind of information would be well worth $20 (if it was $0.10 per response).

</comment><comment><USER5> The survey asks the same wrong question as everyone else does: "What do you think other people's reaction to X will be?"

If it doesn't specifically ask the person of their own opinion, it's not going to be a useful survey.

 _However_ , we would not know about the shortcoming of the survey, if Google did not provide the exact phrase of the question, which I think is a huge advantage over many other surveys.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't really know or care about the relevance of these results, and I don't know why it's at all relevant to Hacker News, but damn, Google consumer surveys look really nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> High prices: General population: $0.10 per response, Demographic targeting: $0.50 per response.</comment>


Running a/UX on a Macintosh SE/30 - <AUTHOR> http://www.datormuseum.se/macintosh-se-30 <comment><USER2> Title has a typo: 'a' should be capitalized 'A'.

Ah, this is near and dear to me. My first Unix was A/UX on an SE/30\. My second Unix was A/UX on a Quadra 950. From which I naturally ran a warez site and irc bot. Gopher/Veronica/Archie were still in their heyday then, and Eudora was the GUI mail client of choice.

From there I "graduated" to IRIX and did real work. Molecular simulations and visualizations. A huge step up from the Mac hardware ...

<comment><USER3> In the late 80s, Virginia Tech's CS department mandated A/UX on a Mac 2, making us incompatible with every other computer on campus. It was great having a real Unix, but since networking wasn't a big thing yet, it was still pretty isolated. (The campus had a computerized phone system that could have been adapted to networking, but it wasn't set up for it, and in fact hampered even dial-up networking because of the nonstandard phone jacks.) CS assignments were submitted on floppy disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Apple Workgroup Server 95" is a Mac model, not a rebranding of the OS as the author claims.

I mention this because, per Apple sales literature[1], the version of A/UX that shipped with that machine was "highly tuned", presumably for the 68040-based Workgroup Server 95 — basically a Quadra 950 — and this may be why he initially had trouble installing what his screenshots suggest was a copy of A/UX 3.0.1 from the Workgroup Server software bundle on an SE/30, which is a 68030 machine with a considerably older architecture.

While I'm not at all familiar with A/UX, it's certainly true that, historically, it was not unusual for bundled copies of Mac OS to be at least somewhat model-specific.

In other words, when resurrecting older Mac models, use retail OS media when possible. The obvious "impossible" case is when you want to install an OS that shipped before the model in question, as retail media will often lack necessary hardware support that would have been slipstreamed into bundled copies.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/WorkgroupServer95](https://archive.org/details/WorkgroupServer95)

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember running A/UX on a Mac IIsi. It was a quirky UNIX, based on SysV r3. I remember the first thing out of the box was to compile GCC with the included non-ANSI C compiler. Then you could actually start compiling everything else, like Emacs, LaTeX, Ghostscript, GNU binutils, etc.

The best part is that you could run a lot of productivity Mac software such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I used it during my last two years in college and was really sad when it was discontinued.

</comment><comment><USER6> I loved A/UX... it was a fun OS, and porting various software to it was a great way to learn things. It also got me seriously involved in the Free Software and Open Source movements with my work on jagubox.

</comment><comment><USER7> I used one of these for years. I bought it with 8GB of RAM, and never knew bigger modules could be used. I used an 80G disk drive.

As I recall, it took a couple of hours to compile Gcc the normal way (i.e. 3 times over).

<comment><USER8> MB, it was megabytes ;-)

<comment><USER7> It is hard to type MB anymore, because I have caught myself doing it and fixed it so many times.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Google Cast for audio - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/01/introducing-google-cast-for-audio.html <comment><USER3> > Google Cast Ready speakers come with Cast technology built-in, so you don't > have to buy any additional equipment.

Except for, you know, the entirely new speaker(s).

I love this idea, but I want a simple, small dongle, like the chromecast, that outputs audio only rather than HDMI. I already have a speaker/amp in my living room that has a mini-stereo in. I simply want a way to connect a chromecast to it.

<comment><USER4> I use this HDMI audio extractor to turn a Chromecast into what you describe: [http://www.amazon.com/J-Tech-Digital-Premium-Extractor- Conve...](http://www.amazon.com/J-Tech-Digital-Premium-Extractor- Converter/dp/B00BIQER0E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420478005&sr=8-1&keywords=hdmi+audio+extractor)

<comment><USER5> Here's a slightly cheaper way to do the same thing: [http://liliputing.com/2014/02/10-adapter-turns-chromecast- in...](http://liliputing.com/2014/02/10-adapter-turns-chromecast-into-cheap- sonos-competitor.html)

<comment><USER6> I can confirm that that little device no longer works. The old models worked without the VGA portion needing to be plugged in, however the new models shipping from China don't work unless the VGA unit is plugged into something, which basically defeats the purpose.

I am now using this: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DMZOUVK/ref=oh_aui_detai...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DMZOUVK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) which is working great.

<comment><USER7> When I first got my Chromecast, I was beyond frustrated that the music always cut out (even though watching videos was fine). One day, I was determined to get to the bottom of it, and realized that my roommate's Yamaha RX-V571 will reset the HDMI connection every two seconds if it can't handshake the video. He has an HDMI->VGA adaptor and a VGA projector plugged into the same receiver. So, whenever I want to listen to music in our living room, I have to turn his projector on for two seconds. It's beyond stupid, but at least it works.

<comment><USER8> That's odd, my slightly older Yamaha (RX-V367) works fine with the chromecast as an HDMI device with no tv hooked up. Wonder why the newer model doesn't like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't want to cast from the _cloud_. Just make the device able to receive any media from my LAN!!

it's nice that the dongle can stream from the web, but it's way more useful to make the device aware of upnp/dlna devices over my local network.

Because of this I've moved to raspberry which

      - exposes itself over the network as a upnp device
      - plays remote media in the main TV
      - acts as a nas, it can stream to kids' room
      - downloads media via torrents (that I can remotely control)

Plus it's a fully Linux environment that I can fine tune as desired

<comment><USER5> > I don't want to cast from the cloud.

It certainly helps battery life for your mobile device to step aside as soon as playback has started. When casting video it doesn't matter even if I turn the device off.

<comment><USER10> You know, UPnP has media renderers, servers and control software as three separate matters. This is already a solved problem.

And, well, I had controlled mpd running on my desktop machine (that has the speakers connected) and streaming from my NAS from my N900, like, 5 years ago. Replace desktop with something like rPI and the tech is here.

<comment><USER11> UPnP and DLNA are a disaster of incompatibility and terrible usability. I've tried to use various UPnP/DLNA audio streaming hardware for almost 10 years and they have all had terrible issues. Most required the device controlling streaming to always be on, which is terrible for battery life and plain broken on tablets, etc. that go to sleep. Some only worked with Windows 7 media player's 'play to' command. I had to go through crazy setups like running multiple different UPnP services (bubble UPnP) just to make virtual UPnP devices that fixed bugs in my real UPnP devices, and even then things would mysteriously stop working.

Stay very, very far away from UPnP/DLNA. It's borderline false advertising IMHO to claim it streams music.

<comment><USER12> if you're using android, i suggest you try bubbleupnp [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp). It doesn't seem to have the problems you describe, and it's also very happy to send stuff to a chromecast instead of a DLNA renderer. I could see how it's possible that your renderer is the cause of the problems, and that can be harder to replace since it's probably embedded in your TV (I've only used chromecast and samsung TVs).

I've actually had little to no trouble with DLNA overall, using among other things the ReadyDLNA server for a sparc readynas and rygel on ubuntu. i suppose it only takes one bad implementation among the components in your setup to ruin the whole experience, but i've been pleasantly surprised over the years how well it seems to work.

bubble doesn't have the best UI, but it's not bad, and there are other apps that are prettier (allcast comes to mind). in the past i would have totally agreed that most upnp controllers i had used had TERRIBLE usability, but most of those were embedded in A/V equipment (TVs, receivers), and what A/V equipment have you ever used with a good UI?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note the lack of spotify support. It's turning into a bit of a showdown between players like google cast and spotify connect.

There will definitely be a small market in building devices which can serve as bridges between the standards.

<comment><USER14> It's disappointing that we are in the situation where we have several competing protocols for streaming audio - Google Cast, AirPlay, Spotify Connect, UPnP/DLNA.

As a society we are capable of making software and hardware that interoperate among manufacturers - email and HTTP are good examples. We could be a far more technologically advanced world if capitalism didn't encourage companies to create competing closed-source protocols that only benefit the companies themselves, to the detriment of everyone else.

<comment><USER15> Yes but if everyone agreed on a standard I could see us all complaining that "we could be far more technologically advanced world if we didn't force everyone to use the same standard and there was more room for innovation and competition".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice. I'm right now sitting in front of a schematics of a nice modern modular stereo hi-fi amplifier that I'm building. I made sure to leave plenty of internal interconnects for BTO radio modules, so that I could accomodate for Bluetooth, DAB, UPnP rendering, TI CC8520 or whatever wireless standard would be coming my way later down the line.

Seems that I can now plan to add a Google Cast radio module that can be _integrated_ into the device. I don't even have to change my design it seems, I don't even have to put all my money on this horse, and I can still do without this gadget at first and get the basic device to market as quickly as possible.

Neat.

<comment><USER17> This sounds really neat--any information on your product you can share?

<comment><USER16> Will do! I'm finishing up the design right now, and I plan to go DIY first anyways in order to get some quick feedback, circumvent expensive EMI certification, and to sell some units before having to go into case manufacturing. As soon as the prototype shows it's working at the quality level I hope it will, we'll start marketing it, and I'll make sure to drop you a note right then!

<comment><USER18> This is really cool! I've looked far and wide for got a good stereo amplifier that is customizable, but such things don't seem to exist! Please let us know more!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Google Cast is designed to give you more freedom while listening to music."

I sense some irony in this statement.

<comment><USER19> It almost makes AirPlay open by comparison. At least that lets you stream your local music collection rather than restricting you to approved cloud music services.

<comment><USER20> > At least that lets you stream your local music collection

What makes you assume that Google Cast wouldn't? You can stream your local video collection to a Chromecast.

In fact, how is it restricted at all? If it works like a Chromecast does, the SDK is open and anyone can write receiver apps to run on it. How much more open do you need it to be?

<comment><USER21> Not natively though, you have to use Plex or play the video in Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, it seems like this will take a while to come out and I didn't see any word on pricing.

A good alternative to this is a Beep. Beep sells devices that plug into any speakers audio jack to let you stream music from your phone. What's better is that it also syncs up multiple units so you can have your music in sync across your house.

We've used them in our office a few times and love them. [https://www.thisisbeep.com](https://www.thisisbeep.com)

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's been officially announced yet, but at least one of the reports on the new Google Cast stuff, and a dev who claims to work on one of the partner apps commenting on reddit, suggest that the audio cast stuff will synced audio across multiple devices.

This would be a killer feature if true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love my Chromecasts. I have two of them in our house, and we don't have a television subscription, we just use a mixture of Plex, Netflix, and streams for sports. We're saving a bunch of money every year now, and it works great.

But damn, the lack of a desktop sdk/api for chromecast is just infuriating. I get it, Google believes in Mobile and Web only, but you'd think if they're shooting for market domination, they wouldn't ignore an entire market segment in terms of developer options.

<comment><USER25> Pretty off-topic, but what sports streams do you use? I'd love to ditch cable, but can't seem to find good replacements for sports.

<comment><USER24> Been using the links posted here for NFL: [http://www.reddit.com/r/nflstreams](http://www.reddit.com/r/nflstreams)

There are sidebar links for other sports too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Will we finally get gapless playback in the Chromecast's native music player? I've tried to use my Chromecast for music, but the gaps between tracks are just complete deal breakers for many albums. I had just assumed audio was not a priority for google.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chromecast is just a web browser - so I imagine that's due to the client (which each service has their own, I think). Not sure what exactly they're doing for audio casting, but I imagine it's dependent on the service to implement properly

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I created an iOS App that allows you to stream audio directly from one device to another. It works great if you have an old iPod touch available. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-stream- free/id91402690...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-stream- free/id914026908?ls=1&mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't like the way Google Cast always needs to connect to a service before playing any media. This could be a little bit annoying with audio. Its okay for me to wait a couple seconds to connect for watching a movie. But let's say you wanna switch from Google Music to Spotify, it's always gonna take some time.

<comment><USER9> And have you tried to use it without internet access? It completely refuse to work.

My ISP had some problem that let 200 families without service for a week. Although I have my local network fully working, the dongle refused to boot

<comment><USER29> You are aware that the chromecast is really nothing more then a web browser in a stick? It has no storage for any thing other then the firmware to run the device.

<comment><USER30> A local network is more than capable of serving up the chromecast app. It's a restriction they've added to the device that it won't load it from a local network.

<comment><USER31> I think "restriction" is a poor choice: it's more like an architectural decision - that is exactly how they designed it.

I could equally say your computer is more than capable of running a self- hosted version of GMail, but "it's a restriction [Google] added" for them to run it on their servers.

<comment><USER30> I run a Plex media server on my laptop, which is already serving up content to my local network over http. It would be very simple for them to host their Chromecast app on the same local server and for the cast button to send that URL.

The Chromecast checks the URLs against a whitelist. Presumably as a security measure, which is a perfectly valid reason, but it's still a "restriction".

To allow people to run a self-hosted GMail, huge changes would need to be made to the code. To allow me to serve my own Chromecast apps, it would need to remove a whitelist check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Totally unrelated but I have to know this! Somebody posted an article many months back that talked about DIY audio system that gives run for money to Bose, Beats and likes. It was open source design by an anon electrical engineer. Anyone knows what was it?

</comment><comment><USER33> I use an Airport Express as an AirPlay receiver, which is connected to a line input on my Sonos setup. Nice thing is that Sonos can switch to that input automatically when it senses a signal.

I've also used Shairport[0] on a Raspberry Pi as an AirPlay receiver - <USER2> worked great, I just wanted to keep tinkering with the Pi so I switched to the Airport Express, which I already owned.

[0]: [https://github.com/hendrikw82/shairport](https://github.com/hendrikw82/shairport)

Edit: I see someone else already said that, whoops. FWIW, I didn't have any major audio quality issues in the brief time the Pi was used for AirPlay.

<comment><USER34> Thing is if you have a Sonos already, then you have had music casting from Google for a while. It's not the same protocol, but the Google Play Music app has been able to "cast" to Sonos for at least some months, maybe a year or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Google Cast Ready speakers pull content directly from the cloud, so you'll > get the best audio quality and can freely multi-task on your phone, tablet, > or laptop, all without straining the battery

Is it that much of a battery strain to connect to a radio in the house, and usually in the same room? The device that'll be doing it is designed to connect to cell towers up dozens of miles away [1], after all...

1\. [http://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower- cellphone-...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/far-can-cell-tower-cellphone- pick-up-signal-32124.html)

<comment><USER5> It's about letting your mobile device sleep rather than to constantly be (semi)-awake to push audio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Bluetooth speakers: Unbelievable but they also stream sound which is only locally on mobile phone. Why do all Googlers think that everybody in the whole world has good wifi everywhere?

<comment><USER37> BT Speakers typically use A2DP, which sounds horrid. Recompressing already compressed audio is not a path towards goodness.

That said, reading up on A2DP, it seems that A2DP supports higher quality audio streams, but I have yet to see anyone advertise such in their products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So Google has decided to compete with Airplay. Although I guess this is better, because I'm assuming it will work with any router, and not just special ones sold by Apple.

<comment><USER39> Is that what you meant to say? AirPlay isn't restricted to special Apple routers either.

<comment><USER40> That is true, but I also believe there are some lower level "nice to haves" they enable on their routers to make sure Bonjour/mDNS works properly for airplay. If not intentionally, I do know that some routers (Actiontec / FiOS comes to mind) that have particular difficulty with providing reliable Airplay connections.

<comment><USER40> I'll bite, can someone help me understand the downvotes? Actiontec routers (among others I'm sure) may not work well with Bonjour out of the box: [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=actiontec%20bonjour)

Airports generally don't need attention for airplay, and that probably leads a lot of people to the impression that you need an Apple router.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41>
      >"Google Cast streams your music directly from the cloud instead of from your phone, so you won't lose any sound quality."

Huh??? This is almost _never_ the case in my opinion, especially when using popular cloud services for music playback. Pretty sure I just had to nerf a high quality .WAV file to a .WMV 20 minutes ago before I could even upload it to google music.

<comment><USER42> .wav is not a music format. It's meant for pure sound clips and doesn't even have the capability of adding metadata like artist and song name. If you care about sound quality then just use FLAC.

The streaming quality from Google Music is top notch, it just seems that you had a problem getting the music into the service due to an antiquated format.

<comment><USER43> The problem is with this part of the statement: "Google Cast Ready speakers pull content directly from the cloud, so you'll get the best audio quality" Pulling content from the cloud doesn't not mean you'll get "the best" audio quality.

<comment><USER42> Streaming over the internet will yield better quality than a Bluetooth stream which compresses the music. The bits that hit the speaker are as high quality as the source material.

<comment><USER43> Right, that would then be "better than bluetooth", not "the best technology". In particular, the network induces latency and buffering problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Surprised no one mentioned Mopidy[0] in the thread. From their github:

Mopidy is an extensible music server that plays music from local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Play Music, and more. You edit the playlist from any phone, tablet, or computer using a range of MPD and web clients.

[0]:[https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy](https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy)

</comment><comment> tek-cyb-org Ive been doing google cast audio. It's called, Chromecast+hdmi analog audio extractor=free youtube music to home audio system. :)

</comment><comment><USER45> I own a Chromecast and like all about it except it's ability to play oyur own content. I understand why they forbid it, but for the same reasons I'm using it much mroe rarely than I would otherwise. Additionally this could have easily been an addition to the original Chromecast via a simple extractor.

<comment><USER26> There are actually many apps that allow you to play local content now. It was pretty bad for a while before they released the SDK though.

The two I use are Videostream for Google Chrome, and BubbleUPnP for Android.

<comment><USER9> Have you seen which permissions those kind of apps require?

I don't want to allow these apps to read my history, share my contacts, or expose the current running apps just to cast some media ..

<comment><USER46> [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp&hl=en)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videostrea...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videostream.Mobile&hl=en)

Which permissions do you take issue with? I don't see anything like what you claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Here is a list of all music apps supported: [https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chrome/devices/chromecast/...](https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chrome/devices/chromecast/apps.html?utm_source=chromecast.com#?category=music)

I wish Spotify would integrate..

</comment><comment><USER48> No Spotify? Wow. I don't even recognize half the music services it supports. As someone else said on this thread, I am happy with 320kbps music streaming on Spotify + it's remote control features + the recent hardware support for Spotify Connect.

</comment><comment><USER49> Might be nicer than wrestling with my Vizio soundbar to connect via Bluetooth. Takes multiple attempts to make it connect to any of my devices (laptop, phone, or tablet), then sound drops and gets flaky frequently when I stream music.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is it just me or has anyone else been waiting for multi-room audio, I don't understand why I can't 'cast' to two locations at once?

Seems like they'd take the Sonos market pretty easily if/when implemented

<comment><USER51> As a recent Sonos convert, I really think that they are going to be hard to catch in terms of nailing so many aspects of the user experience. Not least of which is how good the hardware (esp the Play:1 speakers) sound and look. I Have to admit how surprised I was to learn that the same company that made those janky wall controller systems a decade ago is now the second largest _speaker_ company in the world.

<comment><USER50> My only issue is the price, the only thing it gives over any other implementation is the multi room aspect, as soon as a company like Google bakes it in to their already established platform I don't see them selling many units

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I was going to by one out of excitement, but then I realised it is only available this spring. I might not buy it anymore, since the hype I had at this exact moment will be gone...

</comment><comment><USER53> Any support for multi-room audio? (or multiple remote speakers?) Sonos seem to be the only ones with a handle on this, and even then it's not particularly low latency...

<comment><USER54> If you use SonosNet rather than your standard wifi network, it has much better latency.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And their minisite: [http://www.google.com/castaudio/](http://www.google.com/castaudio/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Why is there not a dongle for this. This should have been the first step and part of the announcement.

</comment><comment><USER56> Is the protocol documented somewhere? Would be great to see a software implementation of that.

</comment><comment><USER57> It'd be nice if I could turn my old Squeezebox Boom into a client for this thing.

</comment><comment><USER58> So, when will Chrome Cast finally support Bluetooth audio? That's what I want.

</comment><comment><USER12> well, i guess that means miracast is done for.

<comment><USER37> Miracast is such a POS, I am saddened by exactly how horrible it is.

I have a Miracast setup with over a second latency for video. When it works at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Darn, I just bought a bunch of Sonos gear...

</comment><comment><USER59> A full 10 years after AirTunes. Yay.

</comment><comment><USER60> [http://www.google.com/castaudio/](http://www.google.com/castaudio/) gives a 404...

<comment><USER22> I just checked and it's working fine for me.

<comment><USER60> yes, now it works for me too.</comment></comment></comment>


A Solar City Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/solar-city-story

<comment><AUTHOR> Very smart biz dev strategy to contact Tesla motor customers.

<comment><USER2> Probably Elon Musk's idea considering he contributed to the founding of both companies.</comment></comment>