What any new codec needs is a unique selling point, something that give users a reason to change. Is the freedom to make 'legal' encoders without paying enough? Time will tell, but there are a few things this system might do that MP3 has problems with.
How about going after the Digital DJ market? DJs need the ability to imitate 2 vinyl decks by playing back TWO reasonably sized files at decent quality, while mixing with a fader. MP3 and Ogg should manage this (although load balancing MP3 players isn't as foolproof as you might think), but what MP3 has problems with (and therefore ogg might have an advantage) is pitch shifting to allow the matching of different beats, like DJ oriented record players do, and beat independent time stretching to allow the matching of tunes that are out of key while keeping the beats - something you can't to with vinyl! This seems to present a lot of difficulties for MP3's way of coding, I wonder how ogg will fare at the task?
Building a working DJ player with just those features could be the killer app that makes people switch to.ogg, but add some things from the digial DJ's wishlist, like automatic beat/bpm detection so you always mix in 'on the beat' and accurate keying points and looping (so you can cut accurately into the 3rd chorus and then loop the middle 8 repeatedly etc.) and I guarantee you'll have a winner. Getting.ogg known as the 'format the professionals use' would be reason alone for lots of people to switch from MP3. Is there provision in the.ogg format for BPM and keying points?
If not, is it too late to add them? I'd be sorry to see such an opportunity missed...
I hope that I live to see the day that the internet gains self awareness, because it might look at all the spam mail about US only offers available forUS dollars only via a US only 0800 number and realise it's a waste of time routing them to a.uk domain. Much simpler than tryin to educate spammers imho.
I'm not worried about my privacy because of escalon, the FBI, MI5 etc.
I'm hiding from direct marketing, targeted banner ads and spam spam spam spam, a very real 'big brother' industry who clearly are actively interested in profiling me as accurately as possible.
Oh, drifting a little off topic, It's good to see one of my favourite authors awarded the ultimate accolade of being recognisable by just half his name.
the rest of the world won't take what happens with a couple of amateurs as any prediction as to what the results would be with professionals.
I'm intruiged... are potentially confusing US laws not 'pinned down' by case law as they are in the UK? Shouldn't a Judge be able to declare 'the law means this' regardless of the legal abilities of either party?
...there is no real underlying "case or controversy."
I'd hate to see how worked up slahdotters would be if there actually WAS a controversy!;-)
In Yahoo!'s case, they appear to be involved in the transaction if they take a cut, like E-bay does. If... Yahoo!'s auction site is a free service... it may have common carrier status.
So, Yahoo could councievably get the lawyers off their backs by (get this) sending the pirates money back!?!?
Simply return the auction fees for any illegal products and they could escape liability AND stick 2 fingers up to Nintendo/Sega? This can't be right, but it seems like the logical conclusion of what you are saying.
1) without lawyers, the outcome would hardly be persuasive
ahh, (AFAIK, IANAL etc) this is different in UK law (where I live). Nice way for US lawyers to maintain a monopoly on test cases! OK, =who's first to sue the entire US legal profession for this one?
2) & 3)
That's why I specified 2 people, I to write the sw, I to violate the glp on it, pay damages to the first, and have them returned!
4)
Again, (AFAIK, IANAL etc.... can we default slashdot comments to IANAL yet?) this isn't the case in UK law.
Mr Lessig writes as if the Internet and any broadband access to it is owned, situated in and controlled entirely by Americans, under US law.
It isn't, and that's quite possibly the strongest force for common sense legislation.
Maybe he should approach this by ensuring US Govt. sees a visible loss of compeitiveness & profit to the US economy from the lack of ISP choice over broadband?
If his arguments were phrased to start with "The UK, Germany and Japan will have an economic advantage over us if they have end-to-end and we don't, because..." I'm sure the legislators will listen up!
...then why don't a couple of you write some GPLed code, break the licence and go to court about it (agreeing to return any damages and not use lawyers) to test the damn thing?
What about if consumers paid a very small fee (say.l cent per song played) every time they played a song? (Katz quoting Stoba)
No chance! Simply patch a digital recorder across the speaker cables and you defeat whatever protection methods you could come up with for this.
Sadly, Mr Katz (seemingly in a hurry to retro-invent mp3.com) omitted to mention digital radio (just about taking off here in the UK despite the high initial hardware costs, thanks to a push from the BBC), which renders most the 'what if' stuff in the article obsolete. It's a digital system where per-play royalites are already in force, but at the radio station's end, with no real barriers to copying the output. It's here, now.
So, who's going to be first to sue them for restraint of trade, slander, libel (or whatever the US equivalent is - IANAL or an American for that matter) for falsely claiming their mirror contains offensive material when it doesn't?
M$ gets paid every time a Dreamcast gets sold. M$ does not get paid every time a PSX2 gets sold.
M$ therefore gets more console market share if sales of PSX2 are damaged.
M$ also gets more market share if PC owners decide to wait before buying a console because sometheing better is around the corner.
So, within days of the launch of PSX2, M$ announce something that seems to have been 'designed' by taking all the PSX2 specs and adding 50% to them.
To avoid being sued, the press release practically has the word "vapourware" oozing out of every pore.
Well, what's the chances of X-box ever shipping? Given that M$ have next to zero experience in the field of consoles, but a world class record in the dirty tricks dept, pretty damn close to zero IMHO.
They seem to have moved them to a 'members only' Hardware Guide section (the slashdot effect?) - not being that desperate to hand my details to all & sundry just to see what I saw for free when the first/. story linked there, I declined their offer of membership.
Can anyone tell me what exactly the region coding system on Japanese PSX2s is? Can they be set to to other regions a limited number of times, or are they fixed permantly for region 2?
Does anyone with a TOOL and who knows where the AC button is want to fill me in? Could this 'reload from utilities' feature provide for 'pirate' region free DVD drivers to be substituted?
- Andy R.
(oh, well done to all slashdotters! 58 comments so far in this thread, and no-one's used the 'L' word! Your fixation may yet be curable!)
Some people might say that porting high profile games to Linux will damage it's reputation as a "serious" OS. What is your response to this?
- Andy R.
To M or not to M, that is the question
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 1
...This novel could have been published in the black and white cover of a "mainstream" Ian Banks novel and would still haveretained much of its value. However, as a work by Iain M. Banks...
AFAIK Mr. Banks is now carrying out his oft expressed plan of releasing ALL his books as Iain M. Banks, regardless of content.
I wish him good luck dragging his middle initial out of the SF ghetto;-)
So all the Spammer does is set up a company, get it to do 1 political poll (ie who of the 3 of us in this office votes republican?) then they can spam without paying?
The 'hack' of the shareholder's meeting got enough coverage in the Media that you (and I) remember it, for next to no investment on the behalf of the protesters, which is EXACTLY what the article suggested! All the negative press coverage probably knocked a few million off thier share price too...
That's a good idea, Mr Advertiser...To buy the necessary one share, how about two cents from everyone on slashdot? As well as providing a neat understandable-by-journalists name to get media coverage, this would get round any potential problems with profits (too small to take) and people wouldn't have much reason to get all worked up when the collective decides to harass some company they are fond of.
- Andy "I'm in London so it's $0.02+$15.00 currency fees for me, dammit" R.
rasilon says "IMHO these tools should be announced, because I get to test my systems and harden them against them."
This would normally be my stance too, but in this case, the program does DDoS not DoS, and the extra D (for Distributed) means it relies on third party computers to do it's dirty work. I'd have a hard time justifiying taking over other people's machines wihtout their permission just to test my own security.
The hi-tech music industry has pretty much standardised on the 19" rackmount format for synthesisers, samplers etc. so your best bet might be to look in the specialist music press for rackmount PC boxes. I'm not in the US so I can't give you the relevant title, but in the UK it would probably be "sound-on-sound". You'll also find this field to be a good source of the racks themselves, and even 19" rack-sized flightcases (should you need a bit of portability).
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, who's going to tell them they are looking down the wrong end of the telescope?
- Andy R.
How about going after the Digital DJ market? DJs need the ability to imitate 2 vinyl decks by playing back TWO reasonably sized files at decent quality, while mixing with a fader. MP3 and Ogg should manage this (although load balancing MP3 players isn't as foolproof as you might think), but what MP3 has problems with (and therefore ogg might have an advantage) is pitch shifting to allow the matching of different beats, like DJ oriented record players do, and beat independent time stretching to allow the matching of tunes that are out of key while keeping the beats - something you can't to with vinyl! This seems to present a lot of difficulties for MP3's way of coding, I wonder how ogg will fare at the task?
Building a working DJ player with just those features could be the killer app that makes people switch to .ogg, but add some things from the digial DJ's wishlist, like automatic beat/bpm detection so you always mix in 'on the beat' and accurate keying points and looping (so you can cut accurately into the 3rd chorus and then loop the middle 8 repeatedly etc.) and I guarantee you'll have a winner. Getting .ogg known as the 'format the professionals use' would be reason alone for lots of people to switch from MP3. Is there provision in the .ogg format for BPM and keying points?
If not, is it too late to add them? I'd be sorry to see such an opportunity missed...
- Andy R.
I hope that I live to see the day that the internet gains self awareness, because it might look at all the spam mail about US only offers available forUS dollars only via a US only 0800 number and realise it's a waste of time routing them to a .uk domain. Much simpler than tryin to educate spammers imho.
- Andy R.
I'm hiding from direct marketing, targeted banner ads and spam spam spam spam, a very real 'big brother' industry who clearly are actively interested in profiling me as accurately as possible.
Oh, drifting a little off topic, It's good to see one of my favourite authors awarded the ultimate accolade of being recognisable by just half his name.
- Andy R.
- Andy R.
I'm intruiged... are potentially confusing US laws not 'pinned down' by case law as they are in the UK? Shouldn't a Judge be able to declare 'the law means this' regardless of the legal abilities of either party?
I'd hate to see how worked up slahdotters would be if there actually WAS a controversy! ;-)
- Andy R.
So, Yahoo could councievably get the lawyers off their backs by (get this) sending the pirates money back!?!?
Simply return the auction fees for any illegal products and they could escape liability AND stick 2 fingers up to Nintendo/Sega? This can't be right, but it seems like the logical conclusion of what you are saying.
- Andy R.
ahh, (AFAIK, IANAL etc) this is different in UK law (where I live). Nice way for US lawyers to maintain a monopoly on test cases! OK, =who's first to sue the entire US legal profession for this one?
2) & 3)
That's why I specified 2 people, I to write the sw, I to violate the glp on it, pay damages to the first, and have them returned!
4)
Again, (AFAIK, IANAL etc.... can we default slashdot comments to IANAL yet?) this isn't the case in UK law.
I guess that answers my question then!
- Andy R.
It isn't, and that's quite possibly the strongest force for common sense legislation.
Maybe he should approach this by ensuring US Govt. sees a visible loss of compeitiveness & profit to the US economy from the lack of ISP choice over broadband?
If his arguments were phrased to start with "The UK, Germany and Japan will have an economic advantage over us if they have end-to-end and we don't, because..." I'm sure the legislators will listen up!
- Andy R.
- Andy R.
No chance! Simply patch a digital recorder across the speaker cables and you defeat whatever protection methods you could come up with for this.
Sadly, Mr Katz (seemingly in a hurry to retro-invent mp3.com) omitted to mention digital radio (just about taking off here in the UK despite the high initial hardware costs, thanks to a push from the BBC), which renders most the 'what if' stuff in the article obsolete. It's a digital system where per-play royalites are already in force, but at the radio station's end, with no real barriers to copying the output. It's here, now.
- Andy R.
So, who's going to be first to sue them for restraint of trade, slander, libel (or whatever the US equivalent is - IANAL or an American for that matter) for falsely claiming their mirror contains offensive material when it doesn't?
Class action suit time?
- Andy R.
Indeed... so, lets speculate....
M$ gets paid every time a Dreamcast gets sold.
M$ does not get paid every time a PSX2 gets sold.
M$ therefore gets more console market share if sales of PSX2 are damaged.
M$ also gets more market share if PC owners decide to wait before buying a console because sometheing better is around the corner.
So, within days of the launch of PSX2, M$ announce something that seems to have been 'designed' by taking all the PSX2 specs and adding 50% to them.
To avoid being sued, the press release practically has the word "vapourware" oozing out of every pore.
Well, what's the chances of X-box ever shipping? Given that M$ have next to zero experience in the field of consoles, but a world class record in the dirty tricks dept, pretty damn close to zero IMHO.
- Andy R.
They seem to have moved them to a 'members only' Hardware Guide section (the slashdot effect?) - not being that desperate to hand my details to all & sundry just to see what I saw for free when the first /. story linked there, I declined their offer of membership.
Can anyone tell me what exactly the region coding system on Japanese PSX2s is? Can they be set to to other regions a limited number of times, or are they fixed permantly for region 2?
Does anyone with a TOOL and who knows where the AC button is want to fill me in? Could this 'reload from utilities' feature provide for 'pirate' region free DVD drivers to be substituted?
- Andy R.
(oh, well done to all slashdotters! 58 comments so far in this thread, and no-one's used the 'L' word! Your fixation may yet be curable!)
- Andy R.
AFAIK Mr. Banks is now carrying out his oft expressed plan of releasing ALL his books as Iain M. Banks, regardless of content.
I wish him good luck dragging his middle initial out of the SF ghetto ;-)
- Andy R.
Round of applause for the legislators anyone?
- Andy R
Your post is living proof that it DOES work!
The 'hack' of the shareholder's meeting got enough coverage in the Media that you (and I) remember it, for next to no investment on the behalf of the protesters, which is EXACTLY what the article suggested! All the negative press coverage probably knocked a few million off thier share price too...
- Andy R.
- Andy "I'm in London so it's $0.02+$15.00 currency fees for me, dammit" R.
This would normally be my stance too, but in this case, the program does DDoS not DoS, and the extra D (for Distributed) means it relies on third party computers to do it's dirty work. I'd have a hard time justifiying taking over other people's machines wihtout their permission just to test my own security.
- Andy R.
Y2K - only 47 and a half years to go!
Maybe Connectix can be stopped implementing compatibility with FFVIII, as that's got a lot more FMV than game? :-)
- Andy R
- Andy R
obligatory unfunny sig.: Y2K - only 47 and a half years to go!
Make it PCI card shaped.
If I was in the PC graphics card/soundcard industry, I'd be scared, very scared.
...and as a Mac user, It would be a dream come true - the extra graphics horespower might just be enough to run Aqua at a useable speed ;-)
- Andy R
Try "Sony has ANNOUNCED no plans to offer either". There is a BIG difference
- Andy R.
The hi-tech music industry has pretty much standardised on the 19" rackmount format for synthesisers, samplers etc. so your best bet might be to look in the specialist music press for rackmount PC boxes. I'm not in the US so I can't give you the relevant title, but in the UK it would probably be "sound-on-sound". You'll also find this field to be a good source of the racks themselves, and even 19" rack-sized flightcases (should you need a bit of portability).