I don't know all that much about video CODECs, but doesn't Apple have a bit of a head start here, seeing as they have had a reliable package for a number of years, whereas you are talking about starting now. Plus, your idea just sounds like a power play to get the mighty corporation to do what the Unix community wants. The only advantage in your plan would be having a multiplatform version. Doesn't it sound like a lot of wasted work when Quicktime is already a perfectly good package, which is only deficient in that it isn't cross-platform?
Maybe you missed this (it was pretty subtle) but the apes in the original movie could talk. So obviously these futuristic apes are not genetically identical to today's apes which are not biologically capable of speech. Keeping that in mind, is it really so far fetched that these future-apes would have different eating habits and temperaments than today's apes?
if your local council is using public funds to enforce, or even just support, filtering in public access libraries then you're at least entitled to see what's being blocked.
That's not really the issue here. In fact, that's not the issue at all. If you want to see what the local government is using public funds to block, you should petition them to use software which publicly releases its blocking criteria. You should not bring this up with Mattel, as it's not really their problem. They have every right not to release their criteria publicly and not to give you the right (in the software license) to see it.
How can they claim privacy on something that is published and sold to the world at large? This is not like peaking into their windows or reading their mail. They sold (licensed) this software, it is no longer "private"
Looks like you answered you own question with the word "licensed". When you buy a license to use software, it's not the same as buying the rights to crack, hack, mangle, and destroy the software. That information was obviously meant to be private, otherwise it wouldn't have been encrypted.
This is a breach of corporate secrecy -- a busted trade secret. They failed to adaquately protect their trade secret, and now it has been revealed. There are no privacy issues involved here.
So if I don't adequately protect my house against surveilance (boarding up my windows, getting an Rf scanner for hidden bugs, etc.) and somebody spies on me, it's not a breach of my privacy? How about if someone bugs my corporate office? If I spy on you, is it your fault for not protecting yourself better?
Its "Rights Protection System" is rumored to already be in testing - and the rights that get protected are those of Mariah Carey and her label, needless to say, not yours or mine.
Speak for yourself. If you've never had an idea or done anything original, I guess intellectual property protection like this doesn't help you out much.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can see where Mattel is coming from. Decrypting their list, after all, is kind of an invasion of their corporate privacy. But what do they really expect to gain from the ISP's log files? Are they planning to try to track down every single copy? Since that would obviously be futile (especially after it has been Slashdotted twice) why do they want the ISP's logs?
While Slashdot headlines and articles are often less than grammatically perfect, I see nothing wrong with this one. "Broke" is a perfectly acceptable English adjective. It's somewhat informal - at least according to dictionary.com and the dictionaries on my bookshelf, but it's hardly "street-talk". What I do find questionable, however, is the use of two consecutive question marks. Can your question really be so important that one won't cover it?
CD's outsell every other form of media in existance.
So did records, once. For a brief period, 8 track tapes were at the top of the market too. And don't forget 5.25" disks. The point is, even though CDs are common pretty much universal, they are old technology and will be replaced.
There is no recordable DVD technology on the market today, and probably won't be for several years.
Really? I'm glad you told me. I'd better throw away all of my DVD-RAMs and accompanying drive since, according to you, none of those things exist.
CD's are *much* better than Flash Memory - I've never heard of an MP3 player that has ~600MB of Flash memory.
Don't be stupid. Would you have said 2 years ago that computers would never cycle faster than 500 mhz? Technology improves, so in a couple of years MP3 players will have 2GB of flash memory (or something new and better) and CDs will still be just like they are today.
Having the media should be built right into the player is too restrictive.
I'll try to interpret your lack of grammar; you think that having built-in media is restrictive. I completely agree. Hence the need for a slot for a memory card - already present on most MP3 players. The drawback to a card is that then you have the same problems as CDs: In ten years technology will have advanced but memory cards will be the same. The answer is to forget about creating a standard memory card (each new player would have its own, allowing technology to advance) and instead allow transfer through USB or even an IR port. All of this will be worked out in the future. What could be more convenient than bringing your MP3 player to a party, plugging it into the host's MP3 stereo and tranferring all of your songs to be played during the party?
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the Mambo X is a bad idea. Actually, I think it's an ingenious temporary solution to a bad legacy problem. But as any idiot knows, the best solution to legacy problems is not to have them at all. Throw out the old technology and usher in the new. Of course it will take a while for the world to change over, and there will be some awkward half-breeds (like the Mambo X) until everything gets sorted out, but things will be better in the long run without CDs.
The Mambo X is not the player of the future you make it out to be. It will not "own the entire market for portable MP3 music". While I'm sure it will sell a lot of units, CD technology is a dead end. Now that flashRAM is practical in large quantities, CDs will gradually be phased out of existence. For one thing, the technology is old. CDs have been around a while, and are by no means cutting-edge - especially when you realize that DVDs with the same dimensions and shape as CDs and virtually the same cost can hold 26 times as much data. And DVDs have been around a couple of years, so they're not really cutting edge either.
As time goes on, flashRAM and low-power hard disks will become cheaper and more effective until (very soon) 5GB MP3 players will be standard. And why carry a bulky pack of media in addition to your bulky media player, when you can have a pocket-sized player with the media built right in.
The Mambo X is a great idea, and will probably sell fine, but it will by no means own the MP3 player market. I have a 64MB player, and can't imagine going back to the days of carrying a bulky, battery eating CD player and walking carefully to avoid skipping. The Mambo X is just a hack to milk the last drops of usefulness from the rotting fruit of CDs. A good idea, but not the future.
You certainly are. There is more to the internet than the world wide web. MP3s are traded via a number of non-web methods, the most popular being Napster. Napster has no advertising and is simultaneously the dream of people who like getting things without paying and the nightmare of the music industry.
In case you haven't noticed the radio station may pay for rights to broadcast some things but in general they don't. If they do pay it gets put in the "promotion" side of the budget which means no roylaties for the artist.
And yet somehow a lot of songwriters and musicians get a substantial portion of their incomes from airplay royalties collected by ASCAP, BMI, and their affiliates worldwide.
If you could go to a website and download MP3s with banner ads which paid the record industry, would you? What would be the incentive to download seperate 56k stereo channels and watch advertising over just using Napster? Have you really thought this through?
You're right, it's free. Unless you're an Australian and you pay taxes. Which are used by the government to pay for ABC, which needs the money to pay the record industry for the songs they play. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make exactly, but my point was that the artist is getting paid for airplay one way or another, regardless of where the money comes from.
Two ways to look at this: First, you are paying to listen to the radio even if no one is making any money from it. I don't know how much your time is worth to you, but if I have to hear a 30 second advertisement to listen to a 4 minute song, that song cost me 30 seconds. Second, advertisers are not paying based solely on how many people their advertisement will reach. They are paying based on statistics they've gathered on how advertising will affect their sales. If only 1% of the people who hear an advertisement go out and buy from the advertiser as a result, the advertiser will take that into account when deciding whether or not to buy advertising time and at what price. In other words, if you ignore every advertisement you hear, you're right: you haven't paid the advertisers. On the other hand, they're still getting their money's worth, because they counted on you.
This argument has been beaten into the ground, but I will rehash it once more since you must not have heard it.
We can listen for free, and are (technologically, not legally - this is important to note for the mp3 issue) completely free to record that broadcast. Once I record it, I have no need to purchase the CD.
Most obviously, the quality of a recorded broadcast is not so great. A lot of people pay to get the (plainly noticable) quality. And even if you record it, you had to listen to it the first time to do so, meaning you heard the advertisements and the music industry got paid.
Slightly less obvious is the difference in control the music industry has over radio, as opposed to MP3. Since radio is a passive media (not on-demand, like MP3), it is the DJs who decide what is played, rather than the listeners. By getting the DJs to play only selected songs, often called "singles" from an album far more often than the other songs on the album, record companies can encourage people to buy the album to hear the rest of the songs. While they can do this with MP3s in a limited capacity by releasing and promoting certain MP3s, it is ultimately the consumers who decide which MP3s they will listen to. All it takes is for one person to buy the album and digitize it, and all the songs become instantly available to anyone, free of charge.
Didn't somebody in "Geeks in Space" say they were journalists? Maybe I'm mistaken. In any case, "News for Nerds" is not the same as "Biased Opinions for Nerds".
I realize you were being sarcastic to make a point, but nevertheless keep in mind that radio is not free (except for pirate radio). When you listen to the radio, you listen to advertisements. Advertisers pay radio stations to play their advertisements. And radio stations pay artists and record companies and organisations like ASCAP and BMI for the songs they play. With MP3, on the other hand, nobody gets paid.
Couldn't you guys just report things that happen rather than your opinions on them? Honestly, Michael, if you're going to comment on the article, do it in the thread rather than turning the headlines into a confusing sarcastic rant.
Before the lawsuit, who had heard of etoy? I know I hadn't. And was there any chance of such a poorly designed site being mentioned repeatedly in the news? Probably not. etoy.com recieved more publicity from this lawsuit than they could have ever hoped to recieve in any other way. And etoy.com was never even in competition with etoys.com, right? So what was really behind this lawsuit?
Yeah, thanks for repeating yourself, I didn't understand you the first time.
Evidently not. And from the rest of your reply I infer that you didn't understand it the second time either.
Trolling for Jesus (or even Scooby Do) I can cope with; trolling for MS is a bit too much. Go work for Mindcraft or something.
I do not 'troll' for anyone. As I said quite clearly in the second post, I don't use Windows. I don't like Windows. I was just pointing out for the shallow-minded folks that the apparent victory of Linux was somewhat hollow and that Linux still has a long ways to go to catch up in popularity with WinNT.
Say I've got a network with 2 of these cards, plus a humble Linksys 10Mb NE 2000 clone card. Would the gigabit cards talk to each other really fast, but slow down only when talking to the NE2000 clone? Or does the entire network run at 10Mb when the NE2000 is on it.
If you're using a cheap hub, the NE2000 will bring the whole network down to 10Mb. If you've got a brand new gigabit switch, the gigabit computers will talk at their speed to each other and at the slower speed to the NE2000.
If you don't want to spend the enormous amounts of capital required for a switch, you could add a cheap NE2000 card to one of the computers with a gigabit card, plug the NE2000 into the hub with the other 10Mb cards and plug the gigabit card directly into the gigabit card of the other gigabit computer, then turn it into a router. Then you'll get gigabit communication between the gigabit computers and 10Mb communication between the others.
Slashdot Mirror
You owe me a dollar. At least as far as you know.
I don't know all that much about video CODECs, but doesn't Apple have a bit of a head start here, seeing as they have had a reliable package for a number of years, whereas you are talking about starting now. Plus, your idea just sounds like a power play to get the mighty corporation to do what the Unix community wants. The only advantage in your plan would be having a multiplatform version. Doesn't it sound like a lot of wasted work when Quicktime is already a perfectly good package, which is only deficient in that it isn't cross-platform?
Maybe you missed this (it was pretty subtle) but the apes in the original movie could talk. So obviously these futuristic apes are not genetically identical to today's apes which are not biologically capable of speech. Keeping that in mind, is it really so far fetched that these future-apes would have different eating habits and temperaments than today's apes?
if your local council is using public funds to enforce, or even just support, filtering in public access libraries then you're at least entitled to see what's being blocked.
That's not really the issue here. In fact, that's not the issue at all. If you want to see what the local government is using public funds to block, you should petition them to use software which publicly releases its blocking criteria. You should not bring this up with Mattel, as it's not really their problem. They have every right not to release their criteria publicly and not to give you the right (in the software license) to see it.
How can they claim privacy on something that is published and sold to the world at large? This is not like peaking into their windows or reading their mail. They sold (licensed) this software, it is no longer "private"
Looks like you answered you own question with the word "licensed". When you buy a license to use software, it's not the same as buying the rights to crack, hack, mangle, and destroy the software. That information was obviously meant to be private, otherwise it wouldn't have been encrypted.
This is a breach of corporate secrecy -- a busted trade secret. They failed to adaquately protect their trade secret, and now it has been revealed. There are no privacy issues involved here.
So if I don't adequately protect my house against surveilance (boarding up my windows, getting an Rf scanner for hidden bugs, etc.) and somebody spies on me, it's not a breach of my privacy? How about if someone bugs my corporate office? If I spy on you, is it your fault for not protecting yourself better?
Its "Rights Protection System" is rumored to already be in testing - and the rights that get protected are those of Mariah Carey and her label, needless to say, not yours or mine.
Speak for yourself. If you've never had an idea or done anything original, I guess intellectual property protection like this doesn't help you out much.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can see where Mattel is coming from. Decrypting their list, after all, is kind of an invasion of their corporate privacy. But what do they really expect to gain from the ISP's log files? Are they planning to try to track down every single copy? Since that would obviously be futile (especially after it has been Slashdotted twice) why do they want the ISP's logs?
While Slashdot headlines and articles are often less than grammatically perfect, I see nothing wrong with this one. "Broke" is a perfectly acceptable English adjective. It's somewhat informal - at least according to dictionary.com and the dictionaries on my bookshelf, but it's hardly "street-talk".
What I do find questionable, however, is the use of two consecutive question marks. Can your question really be so important that one won't cover it?
CD's outsell every other form of media in existance.
So did records, once. For a brief period, 8 track tapes were at the top of the market too. And don't forget 5.25" disks. The point is, even though CDs are common pretty much universal, they are old technology and will be replaced.
There is no recordable DVD technology on the market today, and probably won't be for several years.
Really? I'm glad you told me. I'd better throw away all of my DVD-RAMs and accompanying drive since, according to you, none of those things exist.
CD's are *much* better than Flash Memory - I've never heard of an MP3 player that has ~600MB of Flash memory.
Don't be stupid. Would you have said 2 years ago that computers would never cycle faster than 500 mhz? Technology improves, so in a couple of years MP3 players will have 2GB of flash memory (or something new and better) and CDs will still be just like they are today.
Having the media should be built right into the player is too restrictive.
I'll try to interpret your lack of grammar; you think that having built-in media is restrictive. I completely agree. Hence the need for a slot for a memory card - already present on most MP3 players. The drawback to a card is that then you have the same problems as CDs: In ten years technology will have advanced but memory cards will be the same. The answer is to forget about creating a standard memory card (each new player would have its own, allowing technology to advance) and instead allow transfer through USB or even an IR port. All of this will be worked out in the future. What could be more convenient than bringing your MP3 player to a party, plugging it into the host's MP3 stereo and tranferring all of your songs to be played during the party?
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think the Mambo X is a bad idea. Actually, I think it's an ingenious temporary solution to a bad legacy problem. But as any idiot knows, the best solution to legacy problems is not to have them at all. Throw out the old technology and usher in the new. Of course it will take a while for the world to change over, and there will be some awkward half-breeds (like the Mambo X) until everything gets sorted out, but things will be better in the long run without CDs.
The Mambo X is not the player of the future you make it out to be. It will not "own the entire market for portable MP3 music". While I'm sure it will sell a lot of units, CD technology is a dead end. Now that flashRAM is practical in large quantities, CDs will gradually be phased out of existence. For one thing, the technology is old. CDs have been around a while, and are by no means cutting-edge - especially when you realize that DVDs with the same dimensions and shape as CDs and virtually the same cost can hold 26 times as much data. And DVDs have been around a couple of years, so they're not really cutting edge either.
As time goes on, flashRAM and low-power hard disks will become cheaper and more effective until (very soon) 5GB MP3 players will be standard. And why carry a bulky pack of media in addition to your bulky media player, when you can have a pocket-sized player with the media built right in.
The Mambo X is a great idea, and will probably sell fine, but it will by no means own the MP3 player market. I have a 64MB player, and can't imagine going back to the days of carrying a bulky, battery eating CD player and walking carefully to avoid skipping. The Mambo X is just a hack to milk the last drops of usefulness from the rotting fruit of CDs. A good idea, but not the future.
Maybe I'm missing something.
You certainly are. There is more to the internet than the world wide web. MP3s are traded via a number of non-web methods, the most popular being Napster. Napster has no advertising and is simultaneously the dream of people who like getting things without paying and the nightmare of the music industry.
In case you haven't noticed the radio station may pay for rights to broadcast some things but in general they don't. If they do pay it gets put in the "promotion" side of the budget which means no roylaties for the artist.
And yet somehow a lot of songwriters and musicians get a substantial portion of their incomes from airplay royalties collected by ASCAP, BMI, and their affiliates worldwide.
If you could go to a website and download MP3s with banner ads which paid the record industry, would you? What would be the incentive to download seperate 56k stereo channels and watch advertising over just using Napster? Have you really thought this through?
You're right, it's free. Unless you're an Australian and you pay taxes. Which are used by the government to pay for ABC, which needs the money to pay the record industry for the songs they play. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make exactly, but my point was that the artist is getting paid for airplay one way or another, regardless of where the money comes from.
Two ways to look at this:
First, you are paying to listen to the radio even if no one is making any money from it. I don't know how much your time is worth to you, but if I have to hear a 30 second advertisement to listen to a 4 minute song, that song cost me 30 seconds.
Second, advertisers are not paying based solely on how many people their advertisement will reach. They are paying based on statistics they've gathered on how advertising will affect their sales. If only 1% of the people who hear an advertisement go out and buy from the advertiser as a result, the advertiser will take that into account when deciding whether or not to buy advertising time and at what price. In other words, if you ignore every advertisement you hear, you're right: you haven't paid the advertisers. On the other hand, they're still getting their money's worth, because they counted on you.
This argument has been beaten into the ground, but I will rehash it once more since you must not have heard it.
We can listen for free, and are (technologically, not legally - this is important to note for the mp3 issue) completely free to record that broadcast. Once I record it, I have no need to purchase the CD.
Most obviously, the quality of a recorded broadcast is not so great. A lot of people pay to get the (plainly noticable) quality. And even if you record it, you had to listen to it the first time to do so, meaning you heard the advertisements and the music industry got paid.
Slightly less obvious is the difference in control the music industry has over radio, as opposed to MP3. Since radio is a passive media (not on-demand, like MP3), it is the DJs who decide what is played, rather than the listeners. By getting the DJs to play only selected songs, often called "singles" from an album far more often than the other songs on the album, record companies can encourage people to buy the album to hear the rest of the songs. While they can do this with MP3s in a limited capacity by releasing and promoting certain MP3s, it is ultimately the consumers who decide which MP3s they will listen to. All it takes is for one person to buy the album and digitize it, and all the songs become instantly available to anyone, free of charge.
Didn't somebody in "Geeks in Space" say they were journalists? Maybe I'm mistaken. In any case, "News for Nerds" is not the same as "Biased Opinions for Nerds".
I realize you were being sarcastic to make a point, but nevertheless keep in mind that radio is not free (except for pirate radio). When you listen to the radio, you listen to advertisements. Advertisers pay radio stations to play their advertisements. And radio stations pay artists and record companies and organisations like ASCAP and BMI for the songs they play. With MP3, on the other hand, nobody gets paid.
Couldn't you guys just report things that happen rather than your opinions on them? Honestly, Michael, if you're going to comment on the article, do it in the thread rather than turning the headlines into a confusing sarcastic rant.
Before the lawsuit, who had heard of etoy? I know I hadn't. And was there any chance of such a poorly designed site being mentioned repeatedly in the news? Probably not. etoy.com recieved more publicity from this lawsuit than they could have ever hoped to recieve in any other way. And etoy.com was never even in competition with etoys.com, right? So what was really behind this lawsuit?
God, even 'Blondie' has a better plot each day.
Hey, I like Blondie. That Dagwood, boy can he eat! And sleep! And Mr. Dithers sure is grouchy! It makes me laugh just thinking about it!
Yeah, thanks for repeating yourself, I didn't understand you the first time.
Evidently not. And from the rest of your reply I infer that you didn't understand it the second time either.
Trolling for Jesus (or even Scooby Do) I can cope with; trolling for MS is a bit too much. Go work for Mindcraft or something.
I do not 'troll' for anyone. As I said quite clearly in the second post, I don't use Windows. I don't like Windows. I was just pointing out for the shallow-minded folks that the apparent victory of Linux was somewhat hollow and that Linux still has a long ways to go to catch up in popularity with WinNT.
Say I've got a network with 2 of these cards, plus a humble Linksys 10Mb NE 2000 clone card. Would the gigabit cards talk to each other really fast, but slow down only when talking to the NE2000 clone? Or does the entire network run at 10Mb when the NE2000 is on it.
If you're using a cheap hub, the NE2000 will bring the whole network down to 10Mb. If you've got a brand new gigabit switch, the gigabit computers will talk at their speed to each other and at the slower speed to the NE2000.
If you don't want to spend the enormous amounts of capital required for a switch, you could add a cheap NE2000 card to one of the computers with a gigabit card, plug the NE2000 into the hub with the other 10Mb cards and plug the gigabit card directly into the gigabit card of the other gigabit computer, then turn it into a router. Then you'll get gigabit communication between the gigabit computers and 10Mb communication between the others.
Hey, that's funny! I'm not being sarcastic. Just wanted to congratulate whoever posted that and thank them for making me laugh.