Plasma is good if you need to hang it on a wall, but others are catching up. InFocus was showing a 61" DLP rear-projection set that is thin enough to hang on a wall at CES, for example.
Go to BestBuy or CircuitCity or any electronics store, and count. There is at most one player that plays iTunes music: iPod. There will be several players from several different companies that play WMA.
In this case, Microsoft is right. Of all the DRM'ed music formats, Apple's verison of AAC offers the least choice to the consumer.
In Finland - and I think in many other European countries too - the copyright law does not know about derivative works; you can draw Donald Ducks here without paying any royalties for Disney, as long as the stories are your own.
Wrong. Finland adopted the Berne Convention, which includes pretty much the same rules about derivative works that US copyright law does.
AAC is open; you just have to pay licensing fees for it. In other words, third parties can make AAC encoders which yield different results (it looks like Apple's AAC encoder is the best at the moment), but they have to pay royalties. The same is not true of WMA
That's exactly the same as WMA: Windows Media Licensing. Well, not exactly the same, since WMA licensing costs less.
They promote an alternative to WMA in the AAC format, and it seems that incorporating WMA support into the iPod would only hurt iTunes Music Store, since many of its competitors sell WMA files
I don't think Apple will mind it all if someone buys an iPod in order to play WMA files from a non-iTunes music store. iTMS is a loss-leader for Apple, designed to sell iPods. They will probably be very happy for someone else to take the loss instead to sell iPods.:-)
So a closed source, proprietary format that defaults to a lower bitrate is superior?
As opposed to the proprietary AAC format? The only difference is whether you make your check out to Microsoft or Dolby. If you want a non-proprietary format, there is only one choice: Ogg Vorbis.
Hmmm...the author of the page cited in the story seems to allow two NAT users to communicate would require that the entire communication take place through a server, and that would use more bandwidth than he's got.
However, that's not correct. A server is only needed to tell each user the other's IP address. Once each side knows the other's IP address, there is a simply workaround for NAT.
Each sends a sacrificial UDP packet to the other. This serves to open up the sender's NAT to receiving UDP packets from the other side.
At that point, they can do peer to peer UDP.
Note that the server is only involved at the start, to tell each side the other's IP address.
Peer-to-peer filesharing, and burning copies of your buddy's CD collection could be legalized tomorrow if you can get the votes in Congress to repeal the copyright laws
Without a good proposal for some other way to address the problems that copyright law addresses, this has no chance.
It's just peace of mind for the consumer, that says that if I/you rip them off as an InstantSSL customer, InstantSSL will guarantee any fraudulant transaction up to the amount of your cert.
Hmmm...so if I'm going to try to get a fraudulent certificate out of InstantSSL, I can be nice and pay more to get a warranty to help the people I'm going to rip off with it?
I wonder how many scammers are nice and go for the more expensive certificate?
I was watching a show on the History Channel about counterfeiting, and they were interviewing one of the designers of United States bills. The graphical workstation he used? Photoshop on a Mac (black & white G4, it looked like).
I hope Adobe has a special version for the Treasury Department that doesn't have this restriction!
Apple's is comparing the size of the mini iPod to cell phones got me thinking...many cell phone plans now come with internet access that is unmetered. Right now, the data rates are low, but imagine in a a few years, when the standard cell phone includes internet access at 128 kbit/second or better.
Combine that with home broadband, and wouldn't it make sense to build the music player into the cell phone, and stream your MP3s from your home computer?
This gets rid of the hassle of having to sync the portable to your home collection. It gets rid of having to carry two devices. It gets rid of running out of space.
I agree, $250 for the new iPod is too much, considering a new 15GB Dell DJ is the same price
Why in Bob's name would anyone consider a Dell? You can get a 30 gig Creative Zen from Newegg for $270.
A 20 gig Neuros is $200, and plays Ogg.
Forgetting features, and just looking at gigs/dollar, the Dell is a horrible deal. It's not as bad as the 15 and 20 gig iPods, and not as good as the 40 gig iPod. The Dell is slightly better than the Rio Karma (but if we go back to considering features, the Karma blows the Dell away).
Considering the excellent value Dell provides for computers (I'll still take homebuilt over Dell any day--but I recognize their excellent value), their MP3 player was a massive disappointment.
With audio, Apple was able to come in to an existing market, and take it over by being smaller and by having reasonably good syncing/management software. They were able to be smaller by using a very expensive drive--apparently no one else realized people would pay such a premium for smallness.
Aside from size and integration with iTunes, the iPod was unremarkable technically.
If they try to do the same thing with video, they are going to run into a problem. The need for a decent screen size means they won't be able to come in smaller than the existing players, and most people don't have nearly as much video titles as audio titles, making management software far less critical. Many of the existing video players have excellent styling, having learned from Apple that people care about that.
Hmmm...the guy buys an unused domain that shows up in a game and puts porn there. Most of his visitors will be gamers who find the site in the game, and many of those will be underage.
A prosecutor looking to boost his "I'm tough on porn!" reputation could probably find some theory under which he could nail this guy.
Yes, I know net porn is generally legal, but in this case you've got porn that is especially likely to be found by underage people, and also probably less likely than normal to be found by people who are actually seeking porn.
The biggest annoyance I have between various toolkits is not visual appearance (although that is annoying), but the file open/save dialogs.
I find the KDE open/save dialogs vastly more useful than the GNOME ones, for example.
There are some people who feel the other way.
What is needed is a way to make it so that I always get KDE open/save dialogs, even when using GNOME apps, and so that the GNOME dialog fans always get GNOME dialogs, even when using KDE apps.
Choice is great, but this kind of thing should be the user's choice, and the current system makes it the programmer's choice, indirectly by which toolkit the programmer uses or which desktop environment the programmer writes for.
Oops...this was supposed to be in response to that person who talked about saying nice things about Hitler as an example of something you aren't supposed to do. I hit the wrong reply button.:-)
Hitler was probably very charming
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I was on a panel being considered for a jury, and the defense attorney asked us who, if we could have dinner with anyone that night, past or present, we would like to have dinner with.
I said "Adolf Hitler".
That got everyone's attention.:-)
I explained that here was a guy who committed huge crimes, that required the cooperation of thousands of people, and he almost got away with it. He must have been very charismatic or persuasive to get so far, and so would probably make a fascinating one-time dinner companion.
That wasn't the only controversial answer I gave on that panel. The prosecutor asked us what we would tell alien visitors who asked us to explain this "drug problem" they had heard of. I said that I would tell them how drugs like marijuana and LSD are fun, safe when used correctly, and much less harmful than the legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and that because we lie about drugs to kids, they learn not to trust us, so when we do tell the truth, about things like crack, they don't believe us. I also gave her a nice flame about how we waste the taxpayers money prosecuting small time drug dealers who aren't hurting anyone, when we let drunk drivers have a free murder before we do anything about them.
Since this was a small time drug dealer case, and I was dressed in hippy-mode, and the defense attorney looked like a hippy in "hippy wearing a suit" mode, and I had basically called the prosecutor a worthless waste of taxpayer dollars, I was pretty sure the prosecutor was going to use a peremptory challenge to remove me, but as they alternated using their 3 challenges each, it was the defense, on his third challenge, that removed me.
The above poster's journal entry is interesting. Anyone who moderated him up should go read it (summary: he calls you morons for moderating up his obvious troll).
The "425 2003 593" is simply a US court case reference number
That doesn't look anything like a court case reference. However, it does look like a journal reference with the parens misplaced...and gosh, what do we find at Nature 425 (1993) 593?
Why, the article he cites, with the quote you claim is made up.
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Plasma is good if you need to hang it on a wall, but others are catching up. InFocus was showing a 61" DLP rear-projection set that is thin enough to hang on a wall at CES, for example.
In this case, Microsoft is right. Of all the DRM'ed music formats, Apple's verison of AAC offers the least choice to the consumer.
See Chapter 1, Articles 1, 2, and 4. It sure looks to me like Finnish law, even without Berne, covers what would be called in the US derivative works.
Wrong. Finland adopted the Berne Convention, which includes pretty much the same rules about derivative works that US copyright law does.
Because iPod works as a USB or Firewire hard disk. Zen doesn't. To store files on Zen, you have to go through their special software.
That's exactly the same as WMA: Windows Media Licensing. Well, not exactly the same, since WMA licensing costs less.
I don't think Apple will mind it all if someone buys an iPod in order to play WMA files from a non-iTunes music store. iTMS is a loss-leader for Apple, designed to sell iPods. They will probably be very happy for someone else to take the loss instead to sell iPods. :-)
It never occured to you to just turn the DRM off?
As opposed to the proprietary AAC format? The only difference is whether you make your check out to Microsoft or Dolby. If you want a non-proprietary format, there is only one choice: Ogg Vorbis.
However, that's not correct. A server is only needed to tell each user the other's IP address. Once each side knows the other's IP address, there is a simply workaround for NAT.
Each sends a sacrificial UDP packet to the other. This serves to open up the sender's NAT to receiving UDP packets from the other side.
At that point, they can do peer to peer UDP.
Note that the server is only involved at the start, to tell each side the other's IP address.
Without a good proposal for some other way to address the problems that copyright law addresses, this has no chance.
Hmmm...so if I'm going to try to get a fraudulent certificate out of InstantSSL, I can be nice and pay more to get a warranty to help the people I'm going to rip off with it?
I wonder how many scammers are nice and go for the more expensive certificate?
Yeah, but I bet the designer will want to open the file containing the previous design for reference.
I hope Adobe has a special version for the Treasury Department that doesn't have this restriction!
Combine that with home broadband, and wouldn't it make sense to build the music player into the cell phone, and stream your MP3s from your home computer?
This gets rid of the hassle of having to sync the portable to your home collection. It gets rid of having to carry two devices. It gets rid of running out of space.
Why in Bob's name would anyone consider a Dell? You can get a 30 gig Creative Zen from Newegg for $270.
A 20 gig Neuros is $200, and plays Ogg.
Forgetting features, and just looking at gigs/dollar, the Dell is a horrible deal. It's not as bad as the 15 and 20 gig iPods, and not as good as the 40 gig iPod. The Dell is slightly better than the Rio Karma (but if we go back to considering features, the Karma blows the Dell away).
Considering the excellent value Dell provides for computers (I'll still take homebuilt over Dell any day--but I recognize their excellent value), their MP3 player was a massive disappointment.
Aside from size and integration with iTunes, the iPod was unremarkable technically.
If they try to do the same thing with video, they are going to run into a problem. The need for a decent screen size means they won't be able to come in smaller than the existing players, and most people don't have nearly as much video titles as audio titles, making management software far less critical. Many of the existing video players have excellent styling, having learned from Apple that people care about that.
A prosecutor looking to boost his "I'm tough on porn!" reputation could probably find some theory under which he could nail this guy.
Yes, I know net porn is generally legal, but in this case you've got porn that is especially likely to be found by underage people, and also probably less likely than normal to be found by people who are actually seeking porn.
I find the KDE open/save dialogs vastly more useful than the GNOME ones, for example.
There are some people who feel the other way.
What is needed is a way to make it so that I always get KDE open/save dialogs, even when using GNOME apps, and so that the GNOME dialog fans always get GNOME dialogs, even when using KDE apps.
Choice is great, but this kind of thing should be the user's choice, and the current system makes it the programmer's choice, indirectly by which toolkit the programmer uses or which desktop environment the programmer writes for.
Oops...this was supposed to be in response to that person who talked about saying nice things about Hitler as an example of something you aren't supposed to do. I hit the wrong reply button. :-)
I said "Adolf Hitler".
That got everyone's attention. :-)
I explained that here was a guy who committed huge crimes, that required the cooperation of thousands of people, and he almost got away with it. He must have been very charismatic or persuasive to get so far, and so would probably make a fascinating one-time dinner companion.
That wasn't the only controversial answer I gave on that panel. The prosecutor asked us what we would tell alien visitors who asked us to explain this "drug problem" they had heard of. I said that I would tell them how drugs like marijuana and LSD are fun, safe when used correctly, and much less harmful than the legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and that because we lie about drugs to kids, they learn not to trust us, so when we do tell the truth, about things like crack, they don't believe us. I also gave her a nice flame about how we waste the taxpayers money prosecuting small time drug dealers who aren't hurting anyone, when we let drunk drivers have a free murder before we do anything about them.
Since this was a small time drug dealer case, and I was dressed in hippy-mode, and the defense attorney looked like a hippy in "hippy wearing a suit" mode, and I had basically called the prosecutor a worthless waste of taxpayer dollars, I was pretty sure the prosecutor was going to use a peremptory challenge to remove me, but as they alternated using their 3 challenges each, it was the defense, on his third challenge, that removed me.
That's a temporary problem, since thermal depolymerization plants will be able to handle this kind of waste fine.
DRM can be used with Ogg. Oops. There goes your whole argument.
The above poster's journal entry is interesting. Anyone who moderated him up should go read it (summary: he calls you morons for moderating up his obvious troll).
That doesn't look anything like a court case reference. However, it does look like a journal reference with the parens misplaced...and gosh, what do we find at Nature 425 (1993) 593?
Why, the article he cites, with the quote you claim is made up.
Idiot.