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Slashback: Drives, Pods, OEMs
Drive-n to strong drink and harsh words. Kenneth Yu writes: "You might recall the overwhelming response to a recent 'Ask Slashdot' regarding the abnormally high failure rates of IBM 75GXP Hard drives, and the pulling of all 75GXP from Pair Networks' Servers. A class action lawsuit has been filed by Michael Granido, Jr., on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated. You can view the complaint in PDF format at http://www.sheller.com/IBM_complaint.pdf. This story was initially reported by Tech Report (http://www.tech-report.com)."
Apropos that, jriskin writes: "Storagereview.com has its new reliability database up and running. I have no affiliation with the site, but it only benifits the community to have as many people contribute as possible. The database is a listing of hard drives and whether or not they have failed, when they were purchased, etc. So get over there and put in all your HD data!" Things like this could help eliminate the anecdotal-only nature of many of hardware complaints, especially if people who are happy with their hardware bother to report it.
Falling far from a tree has nothing to do with it. Majik writes "A quick correction - the iPod has *10* gigs of storage, not 5 (or 6 like the Nomad). And with the Firewire interface you can move an entire CD in under a minute. Although I admit I was hoping for more out of the product announcement, it's still pretty darn cool ... "
On the other hand, jchristopher writes: "Love it or hate it, Apple's new iPod digital music player is here. Yesterday, many people commented that "at least it has no copy protection" and praised Apple's attitude toward digital music. Unfortunately, this may not be the case - according to this New York Times article, the iPod does indeed have copy protection - MP3 files copied to the iPod from one Mac to the iPod CAN'T be offloaded onto a different computer. Ouch!" That means (at least without further hacking) it can't be used as a transfer medium between the G3 and work and the iMac kept hidden in your darkest closet, which is sort of a shame considering that it has all the right things built in to be even better than the several portable firewire drives on the market.
Unorginal Equipment Makers. An Anonymous Coward writes: "This is a follow-up on a previous story posted to Slashdot about Microsoft's anti-competitive OEM contracts." It's a report by German journalist Erik Möller (hi, Erik!), who too an extremely thorough look at the details of OEM bundling deals, and what they mean to customers. Möller's conclusion: "No operating system will ever be able to compete with Microsoft Windows on the desktop market as long as OEMs cannot legally install it besides Windows without losing their license."
'Technical meaures' covers a pretty broad swath. Robotech_Master writes "The RIAA has responded to the 'license to virus' story, calling it a false Internet rumor and explaining their side of the story." So the RIAA officially does not want a license to hack, at least on paper.
the following is copy and pasted from macintouch.com/ipod.html.
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A lot of people are making the mistake that the iPOD is only and MP3 player.
First and foremost it is a 5 gig firewire drive with 32 megs of static ram, and input as well as output devices (scroll wheel, screen, etc...not sure if the definition of a computer has changed in the last day... but this thing is a lot better than the powermac i owned years ago).
Ok, very simply it is a slave device. Portable Open Database. You know it will have a calendar, clock and whatever apps apple ads or I myself when i understand the OS... aka palm sync. It will also contain a few games... i still use my original game boy and the screen is not much bigger. Everyone thinks this is only a music device... but this is what everyone needs and doesn't even know it.
Ever since Apple took away our floppy drives. I can now take my excel files, photos, mp3 files, cad files, i can even put OSX on it and boot my mac from it!!!!....or any frickin thing I want in my pocket!!!! Just imagine the possibilities... when I am outdoors with my digital camera i can store files on it or when i am in a conference room I can record my voice on the disk.
Why would Apple put such a large screen on there, why would Apple not once place the words music or mp3 player on the device... why is the file system capabilities of this thing so amazing... no one quite understands what this is... remember all those easter eggs that weren't allowed in 9.1 or X...well they are all in this baby... this is iPod, this is our portable little slave device that everyone will want when they realize what it can do...
I tried to enter my hard drives into their reliability database, but they don't accept any drives older than 1998. How can you get any reliability information on a drive so new?
None of my drives are that new. I wanted to enter my CDC 94171-307 in the database, it is the drive I have been the happiest with, it has given me no problems in the 9 years I have had it, and it was used when I acquired it.
I tried to stay out of this, but the iPod bashing seems to continue.
- go-through-this-web-wizard and "we think you dropped it". Worse if you're outside the US. Sign me up for some iPod Applecare - after two dead Rios and two dead NJB's, I could use some warranty love.
a gain Creative Playcenter and you'll see what I mean.
Seems to be a lot of talk about the iPod being dead-in-the-water (or nearly so) as an MP3 player. I, as a NJB owner and occasional Apple owner (my G3 has been powered up twice in the past year), find the iPod quite appealing, and would gladly exchange my NJB plus two hundred dollars for one. Here's why the iPod will, IMHO, kick the NJB's butt.
#1 - Size. The NJB is exactly the wrong size, as are all the other HD-based MP3 players I've seen. Too big to be really carry-in-on-you portable, too small to hold a useable display or enough buttons to properly save/name playlists, manage files, explore your collection etc.
#2 - Data storage. The NJB didn't used to do this, and even now barely does.
#3 - Speed. USB. Slow. Firewire. Fast. Swapping out even a 6GB NJB MP3 library takes a LONG, LONG time, like many hours. Assuming the software doesn't time out on you, which, ten firmwares later, it still does. Often.
#4 - Reliability. PB5300s be damned, Apple makes decent stuff. I'm on my second NJB, and its starting to die too. Creative puts a *90-day* warranty on the things, they're so flaky. Really.
#5 - Battery life. The NJB gets 2 hours IME from a set of NiMH AAs. There are also issues with overheating, failure to charge, and improper charge status reporting on the units. What good is 1000 hours of music if you can only enjoy it two hours at a time? Many NJB owners are resorting to $50-$70 ratpacks worth of bulky NiMH D-cells to get to the 10hr battery life the iPod advertizes as standard. Bring on the lithium polymer.
#6 - Support. 1-800-SOS-APPL vs. we-wont-even-give-you-a-number-to-call-unless-you
#7 - Output level. Based on the Reg's comment about the iPod sounding good, and based on the fact that NJB owners everywhere are opening up their units (voiding their 90 day warranty) to try to solder in a reasonable output level.
#8 - Aesthetics. 'nuff said.
#9 - Price. The iPod is cheaper ($400USD) than the NJB was when I bought my first one at $759CAD ($499USD), less than a year ago. If this 1.8" drive format is standardized, then bigger drives should be able to be shoehorned in, as NJB owners have been doing.
#10 - Drive letter (or the mac version, mount-it-on-the-desktop) support. Try using cheeseball banner-ads-galore gotta-use-it-to-load-the-device-whoops-i-crashed-
#11 - Boot times. Even with the latest firmware, its still 20+ seconds from powering the unit up to getting a sound out of it. For those with bigger HDs, older firmware, or less-than-perfect ID3 tags, startup times of two minutes or more are the norm. I can't imagine the iPod would be worse than THAT.
#12 - Proprietary file system with no repair / diagnosis options. There's no way to do a "real" format on an NJB. As in one that actually looks for bad sectors. One bad sector on your fragile fujitsu 2.5" HD? Count on lockups, freezeups, and untold general annoyances. There's no defrag, either.
There's plenty more, but I think the point is made. 'nuff of the pooh-poohing. As soon as someone can get this thing to accept MP3s from a PeeCee running Windoze and/or Linux, it will be the next big thing. (and save the archos jukebox praise, unless you've actually used one - or at least fondled a dead one).
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
First of all, mp3 decoding is done through basically synthesising waves according to the (lossy) information being used, and outputting them as 16 bit 44.1K audio in the vast majority of cases.
mp3 audio is inherently lower quality than 16/44 (some other formats like WMA or 'mp3pro' are even more blatantly inaccurate, making up data out of the blue) and so, to my knowledge, the most common approach has been to just cast the resulting sample values to an int or something, which is the same as truncation of the value. This results in quantization distortion, and since it's just lousy mp3, who cares?
However, it is possible to decode mp3 to 24-bit resolution and up- and this is where it appears Apple's approach to these things gets interesting. My own experience with this started when I got iTunes running on a MacOS 8.6 system- before then, there was no chance of running iTunes, and I'd been using other means of playing mp3s, like SoundApp, which remains a nifty program but didn't prepare me for what I was going to hear from iTunes.
Briefly, I do audio mastering work, and have very high resolution audio gear coming off my Mac- and here's the deal- I started playing tunes off iTunes, and was very startled to hear them playing with a depth and dimensionality that I was totally unaccustomed to. The sound was more 3D than 2D, despite the mp3 sources. Why?
For a possible answer you might look here, at some tests done with 24-bit mp3 decoding libraries, and consider Apple's background in pro audio. Put simply, it's my suspicion that iTunes is decoding to 24 bit or 32-bit floating point, and dithering the result to 16 bits for the sound output DACs. This is a substantially more sophisticated approach than the usual 'mp3 is cheesy anyway' direct truncation, and it yields considerably better sound. I can't get direct confirmation of this by citing iTunes source, as iTunes is closed source- so I linked to a 24 bit decoder review page to drive home the point that this technology is out there and in use.
What does this have to do with iPod? Easy- what iTunes can do in software, iPod can do in embedded hardware. I think it would be a good idea to analyze the performance of iPod compared to other mp3 playing portables- and see whether iPod is pioneering high-resolution mp3 decoding and dithering in a portable. This can be measured: the noise floor will be different and up to 20 db lower compared to simple truncation! It is also likely to sound distinctly different as well- high-quality headphones might make this equally obvious.
Just thought I'd raise the issue, since the Register has apparently commented that it sounds nice, and I've had similar observations about iTunes... the _character_ of the improvement in sound is very much resolution domain stuff, and Winamp users can apparently get an example of this type of sound through a 24-bit MAD mp3 library plugin. If my hunch is correct, Apple are already routinely doing this in their products to get a more 'high-end' sound, including iPod- and it may be a first in mp3 portables. More research (by someone who _can_ just run out and buy a Nomad and an iPod and start measuring them ;) ) is indicated :)
Q. What audio formats does iPod support?
A. iPod supports most of the popular audio formats, includin MP3 (from 32Kbps to 320Kbps), MP3 Variable Bit Rate (VBR), AIFF, and WAV. Upgradable firmware enables support for future audio formats.
I read somewhere that