From PRNewswire: Wasabi Systems, the world’s leading
commercial provider of embedded BSD operating systems, today announced the
hiring of John Smithmyer, previously BSD Products Global Sales Manager for
Wind River Systems.

– By Jeff Field –

Last July, I reviewed the original RioVolt MP3 CD player, and found it to be fairly good for playing MP3s on CD, and excellent for Linux compatibility. Nearly six months later, I’ve got my hands on the new RioVolt SP250 MP3/CD player, and find myself impressed again with its performance.
The unit
On the surface, the SP250 (Web site) resembles the other RioVolt models, one notable exception: the exterior is black rather than silver, which I like better, but this is just personal preference because scratches and scuff marks do not show up as easily on the black surface, and I tend to be somewhat rough on CD players.

With a couple exceptions, the changes from the older RioVolt (now marketed as the RioVolt SP100) are minor — it still plays the same files, can still have its firmware upgraded, and can read the same discs, and where there are technical differences, they are subtle problems I observed with the original version of the Rio. I am happy to report them fixed in the latest model.

Before I go into the small changes that make this a much better player than the previous models, I should cover the biggest difference — the inclusion of an FM tuner. When you have 10 to 20 hours of audio per disc, I don’t know why you would need an FM tuner, but it is an interesting addition. I didn’t buy the new unit for the FM tuner, but it functions well, allowing you to have preset stations as well as scan the stations. Reception is fine; I never had a problem with stations that I found, although radio seems antiquated in the face of several discs full of MP3s.

The remote control has been redone, much to my delight. It fits in my hand much better and is much easier to operate than the round remote that came with the SP100. The RioVolt SP250 also comes with the ability to recharge batteries while plugged into the included AC adapter, a welcome improvement from the SP100. It ships with a pair of rechargable AA batteries, which for me lasted about 11 hours, instead of the advertised 15-hour battery life. That’s the same sort of battery behavior I found with the SP100. Also, the skip protection buffer has been increased from two minutes to eight, a significant increase, which I will cover in more detail later.

In the box
As for accessories, there are again some small, yet significant, differences between the SP100 and the SP250. First, the leather case that comes with the SP250 uses a “clip” rather than a belt loop, allowing you to use the clip on clothes that do not include any sort of belt, especially useful for any sort of athletic activity. Also, the case allows better access to the buttons than the one included with the SP100, which is more of a pouch than a case. The new case stores the player rather than protecting it while allowing access, and as an added bonus it has a strap so you can wear it around your neck, useful for jogging or activities where the clip may not be an option.

Unlike the SP100, the included headphones now come in two styles — earbud types that go into your ear, and perhaps the most uncomfortable pair of wrap-around headphones I have ever used. My suggestion: If you don’t like the earbuds, invest in some decent headphones for the unit, because the wrap-around set included belongs in a museum of medieval torture devices more than a CD player box.

As mentioned above, also included are the pair of rechargeable AA batteries and the AC adapter, as well as software for Mac and Windows, which I would assume has something to do with ripping and/or burning CDs, I wouldn’t know. The manual included is somewhat of a joke, one of the discs has a PDF manual that is slightly better, but for the most part, the player is very intuitive, so the documentation problem wasn’t much of an issue.

Playback and skip protection
Playback quality is the same as on the SP100. The main, and perhaps best, difference in playback is that SonicBlue decided to forego the stupid dancing man that occupied a third of the LCD on the SP100 and instead uses the screen much more efficiently. Rather than the dancing man, the track/time, and the track name on the SP100, you get the track number, time, play mode (random, repeat, etc.), hold icon, battery level, folder/artist name, track name, file type (MP3, WMA or CD audio at this point), the sampling and bit rates, as well as a level meter for the left and right channels. This is a huge improvement over the SP100. This is what the first Rio display should have been.

As for skip protection, the SP250 claims to have eight minutes of skip protection when using MP3 CDs, but this is only partially accurate. the skip protection on a Rio with an MP3 CD loaded buffers eight minutes worth of music (eight minutes is probably eight minutes of 128kbps music, your mileage may vary), and then the CD stops spinning. Once it gets close to the end of the buffer, the CD spins back up, eight minutes more is read, and the CD spins back down. This method works great in most situations, except anywhere there is continuous rapid jolting of the player, in which case you may need to pause what you are doing for a few seconds to let the buffer catch up.

Linux compatibility
As with the SP100, you couldn’t ask for a more Linux-compatible MP3 player. Simply burn a standard CD full of MP3s and folders, and you are done. No operating system or driver incompatibilities to worry about. It’s simple, and the media is cheap. Firmware upgrading is just as compatible, only requiring that you burn a file to a CD-RW (or CD-R if you feel like wasting one on a use-once one-megabyte file) and insert it into the player.

Conclusion
At first, the SP250 seems a tough call over the SP100 or the SP90, but in the end I am glad I have the SP250 instead of a lower model. The display is clearly superior, and far more useful. The little things, like the case and rechargeable batteries, add to the attraction of the SP250. If you are going to purchase an MP3-CD player, then make the better investment and get the SP250. The price of the SP250 is roughly $150 on Pricewatch and MySimon.

Anonymous Reader writes, “Well, RedHat CCVS is officially discontinued. Anyone looking for another solution should check out Main Street Softworks at www.mcve.com.”
A link to the story is here:
BusinessWire press release.

Anonymous Reader writes, “RCA used the Computer electronics Show (CES) to unveil their latest MP3 portable, a 10GB jukebox player that has the special distinction of being the first MP3PRO player to hit the market. Called the RCA LYRA Personal Jukebox, the unit is actually mp3PRO-ready, shipping now while it waits for a free firmware upgrade that will make it mp3PRO-capable sometime in early spring. Selling for $299, the player is compatible with Windows and Mac OS X systems.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/rcajukebox .html“

ComputerUser: “A new and more dangerous version of a remote-control virus that targets computers running the Linux operating system
may be in the wild, but security experts do not expect the malicious code to spread widely.

According to preliminary analyses, the virus appears to be a “smarter” variant of the Remote Shell Trojan (RST), discovered
last September, that infects programs written for Linux, an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “KernelTrap points out that the new 2.5.2-pre10 kernel includes Ingo Molnar’s new scheduler. In releasing his latest update, Ingo comments, “now that Linus has put the -D2 patch into the 2.5.2-pre10 kernel, the 2.5.2-pre10-E1 patch has become quite small.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Chrooting All Services in Linux,” “Snort-Setup for
Statistics HOWTO,” “Non-stop authentication with Linux clusters,” and “Building a Linux Firewall.”

Cristian Draghici writes: “eFone implements a mail to sms bi-directional gateway.
It runs on top of Sendmail, available for RedHat Linux as a RPM package.

eFone converts incoming mail to SMSes and incoming SMSes into outgoing mail, turning the mobile into a email terminal.
It can use several GSM devices including Siemens M20, Siemens M1, Nokia 6210, Nokia 7110, Ericsson GM22, Falcom A20.
A high volume interface to CMG’s SMSC is also available.

It also offers WebMail, POP3 and Wap interfaces.
For more details and a 5 user free license, check out eFone International’s web page at www.efone.com.

“

David Bucknell writes: “Schoolforge, a global coalition of online groups dedicated to promoting open resources in education, announced its formation today. The online project is located at http://www.schoolforge.net.

In November of 2001, members of the online groups SEUL/edu
(http://www.seul.org/edu), Open Source Schools
(http://www.opensourceschools.org), the K-12 Linux in Schools project
(http://www.k12os.org), and the Open Source Educational Foundation
(http://www.osef.org) decided to develop a central organization to
provide help for educators seeking the advantages of open resources
and open source/free software. Composed of more than 30 open-resource-focused educational organizations on five continents, the all-volunteer Schoolforge project hopes to harness the collective strengths of educators by enabling them to share technical and pedagogical expertise far beyond their localities.

“For too long,” said SEUL/edu leader and Schoolforge spokesman Doug Loss, “our many projects suffered from isolation and low visibility. Our lack of a unified organization often meant that our efforts as educators and as technologists were duplicative. Isolated, we could neither build on our colleagues’ successes, nor learn from their failures.”

Schoolforge is intended to help its member organizations to:

• introduce open resources, including free/open source software, to primary and secondary educational settings;
• help educators use and develop open resources, including free curricula and free software;
• foster local and global volunteer support networks to implement free/open source educational solutions; and
• provide open forums for educators to share information with colleagues, and with corporate and governmental educational stakeholders.

Schoolforge member organizations are made of volunteers, teachers and technologists in elementary and high schools around the world who are committed to harnessing the Internet and open resources to help teachers teach and help students learn. Contributions to open resource projects are free and open to anyone who desires to use them, and can never be withdrawn from public use.

Schoolforge’s member groups are delivering the power of open resources to primary and secondary educators. While some Sourceforge groups are focused on bringing open source and free software resources to schools in need of low- or zero-cost alternatives to proprietary software, other member organizations have broader goals: “When we use the term
‘open resources,’ we mean a lot more than free software,” said David Bucknell, Open Source Schools Project head and Schoolforge co-spokesman. “Open resources are educational tools made by educators, for educators, sharing the experience they’ve gained in both the classroom and the lab. That can include everything from folk wisdom to lesson plans, and from software to documentation.”

Visitors to Schoolforge will find links to SEUL/edu’s successful case studies from around the world (http://richtech.ca/seul/casedex.html), and Open Source Schools’ how-tos, reviews, and informative essays (http://opensourceschools.org). Links are also provided to projects dedicated to free and open source educational and administrative software (http://richtech.ca/seul/), and free curriculum and free science instructional texts (http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/). A list of
all current members, and information for organizations interested in joining, can be found at http://www.schoolforge.net/membership.php.

“We’re hoping to put behind us the day when computers were used to teach students how to use branded computer products, and to lock hapless school districts into a never-ending treadmill of hardware and software spending,” Loss said. “We don’t want another teacher ever to have to learn a proprietary interface, only to have his or her experience rendered useless with the next product upgrade or business failure. Open resources promise to make technology a powerful tool for
education, not the other way around.”

CONTACTS:

Doug Loss
dloss@seul.org
(570) 326-3987 (US)

or
David Bucknell
david@iteachnet.org
66-2 583-5874 (Thailand)
US Fax: 775-244-0803

or
Harry McGregor
schoolforge@osef.org.
(520) 661-7875 (US)”

Slashdot: “Craig Maloney writes with this review of The Linux Cookbook, a hope-inspiring entrant in
the still too-small category of generalized, readable references for non-programmers, as
well as the even-smaller category of books with a complete free version online. Craig’s
found some flaws as well as bright spots, but it still sounds like a good book to check out
for users who aren’t sure which FM to R, no matter what their level of experience.”