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Sony, Intel To Push Content Protection
prostoalex writes "Intel and Sony are trying to please the copyright-alerted content publishers and privacy-aware consumers by supporting and pushing Digital Transmission Content Protection standard. New technology allows the consumer to use the downloaded content, but not distribute it outside of their home. A PDF presentation from an Intel engineer is available on dtcp.com."
so what?
really... who cares?
Use BSD you pansies
Love, your daddy,
Trollburger
Trollburger
Public Drunkard.
The following are actual quotes I've read from audiophiles on the net. Enjoy.
"Pulling harmonics together from a jumbled auditory stream to form a coherent harmonic envelope."
"Image outlines were sharply focused in space with believable palpability."
"There was plenty of bass detail to behold."
"The music flows with gusto and verve. It squeezes instrumental images into incredibly palpable outlines."
"...more muscle and definition, and a heart that is pure gold."
"Most preamps when pushed hard change their sonic signature."
"Harmonic colors were somewhat on the dark side."
"By using the $450 gold plated RCA stereo jumper cables for all line-level connections, and the newly available $1200 gold plated XYZ speaker wires, we were able to achieve a distinct improvement in highs and the deepest rich bass lows I have ever heard. A massive improvement over ordinary old copper."
"These cables deliver big time! The sound is surprsingly smooth and spacious, with particularly sweet upper octaves."
"If you connect a ground to the chassis of your power amplifer and use 4 gauge wire connected to a bucket of salt water with a copper coil in it, your mids and highs will be the sweetest you have ever heard. Works with car audio systems too. Place the bucket in the trunk and reduce speed on corners and when braking, to avoid spillage."
"Special wooden resonator disks made in Asia from a special tree, only found in one area. Placing these under EACH of your components, at strategic locations will remove 'unwanted resonances', and DRAMATIC improval tonal quality. The difference is astounding. These disks of wood sell for around $100 to $400 EACH (depending on size)." (See the top of this web page!)
"somewhat fuzzy portrayal of image outlines."
"Harmonic textures ebbed and flowed with startling dynamic nuances and the sort of liquidity and purity one only comes to associate with world-class audio products."
"Harmonic textures are painted slightly gray in color."
"Spatial detail was painted with a fine brush that readily resolved massed voices and the air around individual instruments."
"Image outlines, however, are more precisely focused within the soundstage and in general the Accordance is capable of sketching out a convincing 3-D acoustic impression."
"It felt like I had crawled into a warm and inviting sonic womb."
"Not content with straight S.E.X. (the single-ended experimenter's kit), the Doctor introduces the "69" tapered pipe loudspeaker. Sounds like a recipe for a mind-blowing sonic orgasm."
"The impression of speed and control was strong."
"Bass lines were fleshed out with excellent definition."
"It is less lush sounding than..."
"...force feeding the listener an earful of detail; more accurately, a barrage of in-your-face zingers that becomes almost an instant irritant."
"Each tube brand seems to have a unique flavor of its own."
"Certain busy passages of music get congested."
"... sounds either euphonic or bright."
"The Equilibre ($8,475) - nominally a 60-watt stereo amp."
"It could well explain the sweet sounds that come from using passive preamps straight into the power amplifiers."
"...with an easy-to-drive impedance magnitude."
"Rendition of harmonic colors was suave and smooth, with a believable sugar coating."
"Exposure of low-level detail, even in complex passages, without leaving anything to the imagination."
"The mids are vivid in spades with wave after wave of honey-coated harmonic bliss."
"The midbass region is "fun"
"the upper mids are a bit more laid back than I would like."
"the low bottom end is not there..."
This is not an essay or a reasoned discourse so much as a list of aggravations and headaches I've had over the years with COM. I've come to believe that COM not only stinks, but has wasted more programmer time to less good purpose than any other API or technology I can think of. My dislike for this API knows no bounds.
1. COM was not a designed technology. That is, it was never thought out completely beforehand. Microsoft never intended COM to be as prevalent and deeply-embedded in Windows as it is today; it was intended to replace the horrible and unreliable DDE. It was needed to allow Microsoft's new Office suite interoperate more gracefully. Microsoft's developers, being the good dogmatists they are, adopted the then-cutting-edge concept of component software. That is, rather than having many monolithic pieces of software all doing different things, you'd simply write a bunch of objects which would expose interfaces you could plug into your own applications.
But COM was really only thought out as a way to link a few applications together: a spreadsheet (Excel), a word processor (Word), and e-mail (MAPI). It didn't then (and still doesn't) operate very gracefully with database applications, even Microsoft's own Access product.
Over time, Microsoft moved more and more low-level system work into COM objects. It was modern! It was high-tech! It made software more modular! But it also made software dependencies ferociously complex, and horrendously difficult to debug. You can't really flowchart a modern application's information flow if it is a COM application -- you can't tell what the I/O is doing at a given moment because you can't get a good picture of how many programs are holding instances to the COM object.
And then there's the worst and most glaring defect of COM: a bug in a low-level component means that all other programs that depend on that component will be buggy too. And if the component is a vedor-written one, it cannot be fixed except by the vendor.
Finally, because Microsoft kept the DLL (dynamically linked library) format for libraries and just shoehorned COM objects into them, we still have to deal with "DLL hell" -- one system DLL can overwrite another. In COM-land this problem is even worse, since the COM interfaces of two DLLs may look exactly the same, but may have different implementations depending on the DLL installed.
2. The Registry. A modern Windows system has to support literally thousands of discrete COM interfaces in order to function. How are all these interfaces to be tracked and managed, especially in networked environments? Some genius at Microsoft came up with the idea of a central, heirarchical registry of settings.
Now, this in itself isn't a bad idea. Where Microsoft went wrong was in making it the central repository for the entire operating system. Furthermore, they designed it as a binary database rather than plain-text. In practice, this means two things: if the Registry gets corrupted (a fairly common occurrence for a developer) it can keep your machine from even booting up, and it means you can't just use a text-editor to fix it. If you hose the Registry badly enough, a re-install is your only recourse. This is an unconscionable design decision, and in my view the very worst thing about COM.
Contrast this with most Unix systems, where system configuration files are kept separate from application configuration files, and nearly all configuration files are plain-text. Further, a faulty configuration file here or there will not prohibit the system from booting up (it may fail to work correctly, but it will usually boot). (The only exception to this that I can think of is to mess up a lilo.conf or grub.conf file.)
3. Security. Oh, we don't need to bring up the latest Blaster worm to belabor this point. All we have to do is look at the dependencies for any substantial COM program, and try to figure out where any possible buffer-overrun or elevated-privilege situation might come up. It's hopeless. COM is pervasive
And once again the funny-mod-kiss-of-death.
5 funny mods up + 1 overrated == -1 karma.
Well done, CmdrTaco. This beats even your old karma cap math</sour>
sigh