I don't think it's that simple. You need a lot more infrastructure than just enclosures. You need somewhere to store the systems, power, cooling, someone to manage them, redundancy, especially if you're going to use IDE drives. And you've also got to contribute to the head office costs. It all adds up.
Rackspace isn't that expensive. Power, granted, is a bit of an issue, but most drives can be spun down (just sort by frequency of file touch; then there can be these drives in a back corner - maybe the armageddon closet, as in nobody's downloading the Bran Van 3000 track until the armageddon.) Cooling, you're right.
Someone to manage them? Pfah. RAID 5 pretty much manages itself. You need a monkey to swap the failed drive. Apple can afford both bananas and a pooper scooper. (Sure, you're right. Still.)
So, okay. Let's assume triple redundant drives; that pushes my bareassed guess up from $9k to $27k. Throw on another 3k/y for electricity and cooling, and that's *way* too high. (At least, in PA. You californians and your power grids.) That's $30k/y.
Where you get depreciation at all is beyond me; I suggest you ratify that. Where you get a depreciation of 1/3/y is so far beyond me that it's gone around the planet twice and is tapping on my back. Gross margins you don't need for a marketing ploy, and hosting music that nobody wants is a marketing ploy.
Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air. Adding to my $30k/y figure another $25k/y for some college dropout to live his dream job sitting in apple's music farm watching blinkenlights, you start looking at $55k a year; that's not even a quarter the cost of a single national TV spot, and I'm willing to wager that the bands they'd tack on in the process would do a hell of a lot better job of advertising.
"Thank you, this has been Angry Metal Fishnipple, goodnight! If you like our songs, go to iTunes!"
That's gonna get heard for a quarter the cost of a TV spot in every dingy bar across the nation forever more? And it's all the small music enthusiats which make a vocal point of hating record stores and TV spots that are gonna hear it? I can't imagine a better marketing move. I'd like to pretend that I'm surprised I didn't think of it first, but frankly, anyone that can sell Macs is some kind of marketing ultragenius anyway, so . . .
how the fuck did i get troll for this? all i did was point out that if an organized, hundred-plus year old industry full of hundreds of companies and thousands of experienced scouts can't do it, then a small computer company probably can't either.
Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune.
Er. What's so difficult about the phrase "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?"
Or did you not remember that hard drives get cheaper every twenty seconds? Many companies fail because they jump the gun, you know. Apple may well foot the bill just to sweeten the numbers on their catalog.
$114=160g. 9t=~$6500. +enclosure ~= $9-10k. Steve Jobs farts that kind of money. Bandwidth and electricity would be hella worse, but if the tracks are completely stagnant...
No one will buy music there if they have to wade through sludge to find a choice indie band.
Whereas I agree with you in sentiment, there's a problem. There is a whole industry whose job it is to find the new, good, cutting edge stuff and make it available to us at cost. The record industry has failed miserably, and all conspiracy theories aside, I don't think that's because they're not trying (considering as how if even one of them could pull it off, they'd be even filthy stinking richer.)
And now you want to give the seperation of wheat from chaff to people with the sense of taste to make the round translucent green line of personal doorstops?
"Hi, I'm a Macintosh, and I'm nonthreatening because I look edible. Won't you please write software for me?... that's okay, neither will anyone else, I don't hate you. Gumdrops don't hate."
can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?
Well, let's see. That other music service was making a big del about 100,000 more albums. My MP3 albums generally weigh in at around 85 meg; let's go for the worse side, and call them 90.
Pricewatch currently lists 160gig drives for $114, or about 1.40g/$ . Granted, Apple can almost certainly get them cheaper, what with its bulk of trade and so forth, but let's just say you were the one.;) If you want 100,000 albums, at 90 meg each, you're looking at 9,000,000 meg, or 9000 gig, or 9t.
That works out to about $6,500 for 100k albums, or rougly 35% of their current hold. Plus enclosures, that's probably in the neighborhood of a Hyundai.
Yes, I believe Apple can afford that. That's about what they charge for a printer, these days.
(Bandwidth is another issue, but if you're talking about things that are gonna just stagnate on the hard drives - Engelbert Humperdink, for example - then bandwidth is a nonissue.)
How the hell do you excpect someone with no computer skills to spot the difference between the add and a genuine warning?
Generally, windows messages don't flash blue and red; generally, they don't warn you that your internet connection might be too slow and could benefit from a purchased service; generally, they're not fixed on some position on a webpage, nor do they start at the top of a screen; generally a warning doesn't come up about a connection event when you're half an hour into surfing; generally, windows dialogs don't have blue borders; generally, they don't load slowly like a picture on the web; generally, they use good grammar and aren't particularly painfully obviously transparent.
I don't think they're stupid because they can't tell an ad (add is math) from a genuine error message. I think they're stupid because they can't tell an ad, period. It's kind of like the looking-down-trying-not-to-giggle you'd be doing if someone were genuinely frustrated at the lack of supermodels that were attracted by their new keg, or the surprisingly short distance one can get into the fucking serengeti with their new Honda Goesfarwithbigdick they can get, due to the lack of gas stations.
I mean, christ's sake, people. If you could quintodecaduple the speed of your internet connection, you could buy it at Circuit City, where you can go and complain to people which very well might not be highway robberymen.
Now pardon me. I have to go smoke some cigarettes and then effortlessly play cardiovascular (wheeze) sports while flirting with a dozen women who are hotter than any I've ever met in life, since I'm apparently the only man on earth with a pack of Marlboros.
(sigh)
In the meantime, in all seriousness, let's sue doubleclick. Just because they're taking advantage of the tremendously stupid doesn't mean that it's right.
As with everything like this, the powers-that-be (i.e., the telcos and ISPs) will drag their heels until they are either forced to change,
Except that there's been v6 connectivity for sale in almost every major city for years, now. Notably, Pair Networks has offered it since 1999. IIRC, and this might be wrong, Internet2 has been v6 since early on, maybe since day one.
or they are convinced it will increase profits
It will, as soon as the number of v4-only software and devices stops rising. Integration of IPv6 support into the RADs that all these software weenies use will help, though it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem: nobody's gonna provide v6 connectivity until there's something to do with it, and nobody's gonna support it due to the hassle and the fact that they don't know anyone that has it.
It would be nice if Internet2 would open some of its resources to the real, messy internet; that'd be the sort of kickstart that'd get the whole goddamn thing underway.
Expect the changeover to go extremely slowly.
That's why we're making another IP, instead of replacing it altogether with something new. In theory, it shouldn't much matter; NAT and some dedicated hackery should make the two sort of kind of interoperate a little bit.
Kinda. (grins)
Expect providers to try every trick in the book to milk their existing network for every last day they can possibly profit from it
Yeah. That's called "good business." Besides, the fiber and wire don't need to be replaced; just the routers, and in some cases the end connection equipment (DSL modems that only do PPPoE, for example.)
By the way, I hate alcatel.
The fact that the economy is in the toilet doesn't help either.
Um, yes it does. Labor costs are down. Material costs are down. Land costs are down. Telcos aren't hurting so badly that they can't keep up the constant hardware upgrades they're doing. The economy actually helps quite a bit. They do the work for cheap, make estimations based on current market usage, then the money comes back (like it always does,) usage goes through the roof when people have enough money to try to change the way we buy dog food ("the net is the future, man pass the bong, I'm gonna be rich",) telcos overearn predictions, foolish investors think they're a good investment, they get money, the ceos do something horrible and amoral, everyone gets horrified and starts asking for inquiries, all the money goes away, and so it goes.
Did I misunderstand what he said? 281,474,976,710,656 isn't that big a number, and that doesn't take into account the various blocked ranges that I'm sure I don't know about in IPv6, things along the lines of 127.0 and 192.168 and so forth...... though if that is what he meant, the word is "trillion." Kinda like the messenger, but not named after a Tricia.
VHS is much like vinyl record, in that it has much higher potential signal quality, but the media degrades with both use and time, and since it's passe it's rarely encoded at high quality anymore.
That said, if you want a clean source for making something like an MPEG4, you're better off with a brand new VHS tape, if it's well made.
It's an opensource codec, so it has no patent encumberments.
What? Being open source in no way guarantees against infringing patents.
I should have been more specific. You're right, but in a pain-in-the-ass sort of way. The reason the codec was deisgned, and the reason that it's been open from day one, is to ensure patent disentanglement. Everything was written clean from the ground up from new work without using existing methods.
I sure hope it sounds better than WMF, as WMF is ye olde Windows Meta File format used for vector clipart back in the day (and probably still is..):P
Ahahahahaha. Yr right. WMA is what I meant.
(On a side note, I notice a number of posts not long after mine which not only carry the same example format list but the same mistake. Things that make you go "hm.")
Not really. IBM's PPC PDA design, for example, has an FPGA for misc. functions like modems.
Yah, they also used to do that with their PCMCIA modems. Wave something or another, too lazy to check. That's a little different: IBM was producing those for a vareity of devices, all being sold at IBM scale, all fairly tiny devices. The part of the modem that's actually an FPGA is relatively small: it's just the encoder, the decoder, the modulator and the demodulator. The rest is still IC. That way, they can pick up new V standards without relying on software running on a general purpose CPU from flash.
On the other hand, this guy is talking about taking on whole new audio codecs. Modems don't change a bunch: they're tied to an analog carrier with certain characteristics that aren't expected to change. (That's why Big Blue stopped this tactic for a while - when we switched to 56k, we were really just taking a direct line to the multiplexer at the telco digitally, instead of having a d->a converter in the way like traditional; this implied a lot of new characteristics, and the old whateverwave modems couldn't be upgraded to match.)
A new audio codec could be tremendously larger and/or more complex than an older one. Granted, this is also a problem for GP CPUs; they're finite speed, and what's good enough for something like MP3 can't handle something like VQF; I expect this isn't a fluke. Later codecs will need more horsepower too. But the kind of near-identical situations you get with modems are seriously smaller problems than switching audio decompressors at the scale that these hashing monstrosities work.
Er. This seems to be based around the expectation that there's a desire to maintain integer use because it's faster. This is a dedicated chipset; it doesn't matter whether integer or floating point is faster, as they're going to clock it to whatever it needs to do the decoding.
In the meantime, it's the reconstruction that was floating point heavy, not the decoding, and the reason it was floating point was for sound quality. The Tremor library is a pure integer decoder and reconstructor. It's recently under a BSDish license. Yes, the old decoder was FP heavy, but not by necessity, by design choice.
Is Ogg clearer or cheaper or have smaller file sizes?
Yes to all three. The sound quality is better than VQF, MP3, AAC, or WMF for the size. It's an opensource codec, so it has no patent encumberments. The files tend to be smaller because people encode (usually) at the minimum size to catch a CD quality track. Moreover, you can thumb your nose at Frauenhoffer.
Do p2p for Ogg exist?
Peer to peer exists for arbitrary files; therefore, for any such question, yes. Hell, you can also share them over the web, on CDs, or with smoke signals.
However, in answer to what I expect the real question is, no, they're quite a bit more difficult to find than MP3s. MP3 is very entrenched, it's the one people that aren't activists know about, and it's the one that nobody wants to spend the time crosscoding from (both because it's time consuming/boring and because the crosscoding leaves you with a file with the errors of *both* formats, and it's a noticable downgrade; people should start from the CD again, but nobody wants to do that.)
To be honest, I believe this chip's strongest market is in players that can handle MP3, Ogg with vorbis, speex, etc, WMF, and so on. The question isn't whether you start over. It's whether you move on with legacy support.
And that's pretty much how we've always done it, right? I don't make MP3s anymore.
I'd no longer be able to share files with my peers
Wrong. It doesn't matter if they have one already. It matters if their player can use them. Almost all players can (Winamp, and... well, who really uses anything else?:D )
FPGAs are overkill. Just use a standard small processor and some good tight ASM in an EEPROM. (Yes, I know that's what you just said you wouldn't have to do. When you go check the price, speed, and work effort differences involved, you'll realize why FPGAs are generally relegated to testing chip designs.)
It works the same way all OSS does. Someone wants it and thinks it should be free. So they write it on their own free time and put it on the net. Somebody else goes "oh, good idea, let's make it do this too," and adds to it. Repeat until you have an audio format powerful enough that a company feels it's worth implementing in a chip.
Now, the company doesn't have to pay anyone, so it's much cheaper than developing MP3 chips. They're gonna make money by fabricating them and selling them to other companies which want Vorbis decoding (It's not ogg vorbis: ogg is the container format.) Or, at least, that's what the fab/design company is gambling on.
Then, the player manufacturer, who bought these chips, puts them in players and sells them to a public for some enormous amount of cash. I say enormous because MP3 CD players are $40 in Target now, and frankly a 10 gig hard drive isn't that many CDs (especially now that CaseLogic sells CD cases whose sides are speakers.) Okay, the 60 gig models still have some appeal, but when we get portable DVD MP3 players, it's *over.*
I mean, shit, then I'll be able to keep my whole audio collection on six discs. (RIAA notice: I still have all the CDs they came from, with the exception of a few which have suffered pets, so back off in preemption, you self appointed gestappo. Do something useful and constructive with your dollar, instead of making yourself the butt of "look what DirecTV/SCO is becoming" jokes. Assholes. Maybe find a musician that isn't paint by number.)
In the meantime, the parent was modded insightful? Interesting I could see (I don't think it is, but there's a sensible stance for it.) But what insight did s/he provide? Do you people pay attention when you moderate?
I'm gonna go back in my cave and grumble at the walls for a while. f'ing rock.
People have no business owning soldering irons, an electrical engineer has a good reason to own one, but anyone else caught with one has a germane bit of explaining to do.
This flies in the face of the point I was trying to make. The reason a crowbar is a bad metaphor is that it's got many legitimate purposes. So does a soldering iron. You've just provided another terrible choice of metaphor to make; the statement was explicitly pointing out that things like this are useless to say. So, in short, thanks for the fodder; you're making my point for me.
I know how to pick locks; I never intend to use it for any crime. If I accidentally lock myself out of somewhere I'm allowed to be in, I'll save myself a pretty good chunk of money.
This strikes me as a watered down version of the sarcastic response gun control advocates make to the suggestion that the average citizen has a right to own an assault rifle. Car theft tools you do, admittedly, have a rare occasion to use legitimately. However, this doesn't dissolve the case for catching someone with them when they don't have keys for any cars in the area. You're not making sensible arguments.
This is akin to saying, after a fashion, "Of course I have the right to own a cannister of Sarin Gas. I have no intents of doing anything illegal with it. Any government which takes Sarin Gas away from me is fascist."
Bullshit.
Yes, there are grey areas. Car thievery tools like slim jims exist in them. So do lock picking tools. In my opinion, assault rifles do not. Neither do biowarefare agents.
In the meantime, you're still making my point for me. This is exactly what I was saying that DirecTV has no right to do. That said, I was pointing out that the person I had originally replied to had made the same fallacious statement as you have: if you don't intend to do ill with it, you may own it. This hasn't been true in any major society that I can name since pre-roman times. I mean, christ's sake, you can't even have some simple martial weapons, like nunchaku, which are important for spiritual practices for a good many people. What the hell are you doing that's not theft with a goddamn DirecTV-specific decoder box?
It's not grounds for DirecTV to sue. I already said that, even though you seem to have missed it. That doesn't mean that you're in the right, though. I will personally mail you one dollar if you can even think of one good use for these things that isn't stealing TV. (This offer isn't open to other people; I can think of a few. I just don't think he can. And his argument sucks.)
I know how to solder and repair electronics. The soldering iron can also be used for installing mod chips or building satellite card programmers.// Tools are tools. They don't have to have a compelling legitimate use to untrained people to be legal.
Again, this was my original argument. You're not telling me anything new. Be sure to read the whole thing before you jump on it.
Anything else is facist.
You know, this is one of my pet peeves. People will use a word without having any clue what the hell it means, because they think they're getting some kind of point across. Granted, there are a lot of people out there who realize that what you mean is a state under stricture, but that's not what facism is. The problem is that when you jump on me, you think I'm doing the same things with my words. You don't know how to seperate connotation from denotation, and as a result you argue against what you expect me to be saying (what you figure I'm saying, what you'd like to argue against) rather than what I actually said.
In effect, you're doing nothing other than making noise, because you're arguing against smoke monkies in the dark. (This is my attempt to sound like someone that uses words at random. It didn't work very well. I'll work on that.)
If you have a legal use for such a product you shouldn't buy it from someone who is specifically advertising it as being illegal.
I don't care if things are 'advertised' as being illegal. If I buy a crowbar because someone says it can be used to break windows and steal cars, and I use it to tear down a wall I don't want in my house, is that illegal?
IANAL, which nobody seems to remember to mention anymore. 's pretty important; I could be blatantly misunderstanding something here, as it's clear that at least a quarter of the remainder of the discussion is.
This argument loses a lot of steam when you attempt to complete the metaphor. What legitimate purpose did these decoders serve? The argument might better be made using a device which is contextually generally for the Dark Side; a slim jim, electric lockpick, or tumbler breaking tools might be a better choice. The locksmith, the AAA guy, and the police officer have good reasons to have these things. The dude in the fake ninja getup in the industrial slums has a germane bit of explaining to do.
What I'm wondering is how DTV can sue for descramblers. Traditionally they've been legal, because once the end-user buys the device, it's theirs, and they may do with it as they please. Same as Mod Chips, flash cards for game platforms, VCRs / PVRs / tapedecks / DVD burners / CD burners, third party debuggers, etc. There's nothing wrong with it until you do something wrong with it.
Is the hardware leased? Is there some kind of end-user contract? Does one of the new laws (DMCA, SSSPCA, USPSKFC, whatever) change the way this is seen in court? Help me understand what they're actually accusing of, in specific, rather than topically.
I can very easily see the argument for a suit against the manufacturers of the item - priove black box reengineering, etc - but Compaq started a clone market with this sort of behavior. And besides, if Compaq *had* been in the wrong, since when would it be the user's fault for buying a device that at the time was legal?
Or, there's the TV Piracy suggestion. Two words: prove it. That's the only claim here that I understand, and it's not certain. You can't sue for maybe.
There are dozens of laws against using the legal system to cow the populace; more clueful slashdotters will bring them up (I've already seen barratry, extortion, and I'm expecting conspiracy or collusion or whatever they perenially accuse airlines of in price fixing soon...) It seems that, in the light that DirecTV has little actual wrongdoing in hand, there ought to be a class action or something similar in rebuttal.
Then again, apparently they've been overturned already, so I've obviously missed some serious detail. Guh?
Sustained use does drain batteries faster. (Just a battery fact!)
I think he meant "unless the longer the period of sustained use the greater the difference from idle." IE, that one two hour use block would be worse than four half hour blocks.
(FYI: it's actually 65,536 colour, as that's the excact number of bits.)
FWIW, the exact number of bits is actually 16. That said, "instead of true colour or high colour" is still iffy, as High Colo(u)r is 16 bit color. Natch.
The thing that irks me is that previous Palm high color devices have had screens where the frontlight wasn't able to really pump out enough light; you couldn't tell the difference between lots of the darker blues, and even some of the darker greens and greys.
Notably, I think it's amusing that PalmInfoCenter's own infopage has this wronger than the guy I'm replying to; they suggest the device supports 65k colors, when in fact it supports 64k. Also, the magnesium-in-rain jokes that have probably already been written belong here.
(Also, doesn't PalmOS support alpha blending native? NeXT used to call 24bpp+8bapp 32bit color; is that still considered legit?)
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Making fun of macs isn't an agenda. It's a holy calling. :D
In the meantime, since when does a post with a salient point and some sarcasm deserve a trolling? I smell metamoderation.
I don't think it's that simple. You need a lot more infrastructure than just enclosures. You need somewhere to store the systems, power, cooling, someone to manage them, redundancy, especially if you're going to use IDE drives. And you've also got to contribute to the head office costs. It all adds up.
Rackspace isn't that expensive. Power, granted, is a bit of an issue, but most drives can be spun down (just sort by frequency of file touch; then there can be these drives in a back corner - maybe the armageddon closet, as in nobody's downloading the Bran Van 3000 track until the armageddon.) Cooling, you're right.
Someone to manage them? Pfah. RAID 5 pretty much manages itself. You need a monkey to swap the failed drive. Apple can afford both bananas and a pooper scooper. (Sure, you're right. Still.)
So, okay. Let's assume triple redundant drives; that pushes my bareassed guess up from $9k to $27k. Throw on another 3k/y for electricity and cooling, and that's *way* too high. (At least, in PA. You californians and your power grids.) That's $30k/y.
Where you get depreciation at all is beyond me; I suggest you ratify that. Where you get a depreciation of 1/3/y is so far beyond me that it's gone around the planet twice and is tapping on my back. Gross margins you don't need for a marketing ploy, and hosting music that nobody wants is a marketing ploy.
Also, I notice that you've pulled the number 15% out of the thin air. Adding to my $30k/y figure another $25k/y for some college dropout to live his dream job sitting in apple's music farm watching blinkenlights, you start looking at $55k a year; that's not even a quarter the cost of a single national TV spot, and I'm willing to wager that the bands they'd tack on in the process would do a hell of a lot better job of advertising.
"Thank you, this has been Angry Metal Fishnipple, goodnight! If you like our songs, go to iTunes!"
That's gonna get heard for a quarter the cost of a TV spot in every dingy bar across the nation forever more? And it's all the small music enthusiats which make a vocal point of hating record stores and TV spots that are gonna hear it? I can't imagine a better marketing move. I'd like to pretend that I'm surprised I didn't think of it first, but frankly, anyone that can sell Macs is some kind of marketing ultragenius anyway, so . . .
how the fuck did i get troll for this? all i did was point out that if an organized, hundred-plus year old industry full of hundreds of companies and thousands of experienced scouts can't do it, then a small computer company probably can't either.
and then i made fun of the iMac.
Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune.
Er. What's so difficult about the phrase "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?"
Or did you not remember that hard drives get cheaper every twenty seconds? Many companies fail because they jump the gun, you know. Apple may well foot the bill just to sweeten the numbers on their catalog.
$114=160g. 9t=~$6500. +enclosure ~= $9-10k. Steve Jobs farts that kind of money. Bandwidth and electricity would be hella worse, but if the tracks are completely stagnant...
If it's only costing you 44 dollars to make a record, I don't want to hear it.
Gee, someone's angry at soundforge. Oh, by the way, $100,000 of recording and your garage band still sucks. Next time spend it on lessons.
No one will buy music there if they have to wade through sludge to find a choice indie band.
... that's okay, neither will anyone else, I don't hate you. Gumdrops don't hate."
Whereas I agree with you in sentiment, there's a problem. There is a whole industry whose job it is to find the new, good, cutting edge stuff and make it available to us at cost. The record industry has failed miserably, and all conspiracy theories aside, I don't think that's because they're not trying (considering as how if even one of them could pull it off, they'd be even filthy stinking richer.)
And now you want to give the seperation of wheat from chaff to people with the sense of taste to make the round translucent green line of personal doorstops?
"Hi, I'm a Macintosh, and I'm nonthreatening because I look edible. Won't you please write software for me?
(attempts not to vomit; fails.)
can Apple swallow the cost of thousands of albums sitting on their hard disks?
;) If you want 100,000 albums, at 90 meg each, you're looking at 9,000,000 meg, or 9000 gig, or 9t.
Well, let's see. That other music service was making a big del about 100,000 more albums. My MP3 albums generally weigh in at around 85 meg; let's go for the worse side, and call them 90.
Pricewatch currently lists 160gig drives for $114, or about 1.40g/$ . Granted, Apple can almost certainly get them cheaper, what with its bulk of trade and so forth, but let's just say you were the one.
That works out to about $6,500 for 100k albums, or rougly 35% of their current hold. Plus enclosures, that's probably in the neighborhood of a Hyundai.
Yes, I believe Apple can afford that. That's about what they charge for a printer, these days.
(Bandwidth is another issue, but if you're talking about things that are gonna just stagnate on the hard drives - Engelbert Humperdink, for example - then bandwidth is a nonissue.)
How the hell do you excpect someone with no computer skills to spot the difference between the add and a genuine warning?
Generally, windows messages don't flash blue and red; generally, they don't warn you that your internet connection might be too slow and could benefit from a purchased service; generally, they're not fixed on some position on a webpage, nor do they start at the top of a screen; generally a warning doesn't come up about a connection event when you're half an hour into surfing; generally, windows dialogs don't have blue borders; generally, they don't load slowly like a picture on the web; generally, they use good grammar and aren't particularly painfully obviously transparent.
I don't think they're stupid because they can't tell an ad (add is math) from a genuine error message. I think they're stupid because they can't tell an ad, period. It's kind of like the looking-down-trying-not-to-giggle you'd be doing if someone were genuinely frustrated at the lack of supermodels that were attracted by their new keg, or the surprisingly short distance one can get into the fucking serengeti with their new Honda Goesfarwithbigdick they can get, due to the lack of gas stations.
I mean, christ's sake, people. If you could quintodecaduple the speed of your internet connection, you could buy it at Circuit City, where you can go and complain to people which very well might not be highway robberymen.
Now pardon me. I have to go smoke some cigarettes and then effortlessly play cardiovascular (wheeze) sports while flirting with a dozen women who are hotter than any I've ever met in life, since I'm apparently the only man on earth with a pack of Marlboros.
(sigh)
In the meantime, in all seriousness, let's sue doubleclick. Just because they're taking advantage of the tremendously stupid doesn't mean that it's right.
As with everything like this, the powers-that-be (i.e., the telcos and ISPs) will drag their heels until they are either forced to change,
Except that there's been v6 connectivity for sale in almost every major city for years, now. Notably, Pair Networks has offered it since 1999. IIRC, and this might be wrong, Internet2 has been v6 since early on, maybe since day one.
or they are convinced it will increase profits
It will, as soon as the number of v4-only software and devices stops rising. Integration of IPv6 support into the RADs that all these software weenies use will help, though it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem: nobody's gonna provide v6 connectivity until there's something to do with it, and nobody's gonna support it due to the hassle and the fact that they don't know anyone that has it.
It would be nice if Internet2 would open some of its resources to the real, messy internet; that'd be the sort of kickstart that'd get the whole goddamn thing underway.
Expect the changeover to go extremely slowly.
That's why we're making another IP, instead of replacing it altogether with something new. In theory, it shouldn't much matter; NAT and some dedicated hackery should make the two sort of kind of interoperate a little bit.
Kinda. (grins)
Expect providers to try every trick in the book to milk their existing network for every last day they can possibly profit from it
Yeah. That's called "good business." Besides, the fiber and wire don't need to be replaced; just the routers, and in some cases the end connection equipment (DSL modems that only do PPPoE, for example.)
By the way, I hate alcatel.
The fact that the economy is in the toilet doesn't help either.
Um, yes it does. Labor costs are down. Material costs are down. Land costs are down. Telcos aren't hurting so badly that they can't keep up the constant hardware upgrades they're doing. The economy actually helps quite a bit. They do the work for cheap, make estimations based on current market usage, then the money comes back (like it always does,) usage goes through the roof when people have enough money to try to change the way we buy dog food ("the net is the future, man pass the bong, I'm gonna be rich",) telcos overearn predictions, foolish investors think they're a good investment, they get money, the ceos do something horrible and amoral, everyone gets horrified and starts asking for inquiries, all the money goes away, and so it goes.
Did I misunderstand what he said? 281,474,976,710,656 isn't that big a number, and that doesn't take into account the various blocked ranges that I'm sure I don't know about in IPv6, things along the lines of 127.0 and 192.168 and so forth... ... though if that is what he meant, the word is "trillion." Kinda like the messenger, but not named after a Tricia.
VHS is much like vinyl record, in that it has much higher potential signal quality, but the media degrades with both use and time, and since it's passe it's rarely encoded at high quality anymore.
That said, if you want a clean source for making something like an MPEG4, you're better off with a brand new VHS tape, if it's well made.
It's an opensource codec, so it has no patent encumberments.
What? Being open source in no way guarantees against infringing patents.
I should have been more specific. You're right, but in a pain-in-the-ass sort of way. The reason the codec was deisgned, and the reason that it's been open from day one, is to ensure patent disentanglement. Everything was written clean from the ground up from new work without using existing methods.
That legalese enough for you?
I sure hope it sounds better than WMF, as WMF is ye olde Windows Meta File format used for vector clipart back in the day (and probably still is..) :P
Ahahahahaha. Yr right. WMA is what I meant.
(On a side note, I notice a number of posts not long after mine which not only carry the same example format list but the same mistake. Things that make you go "hm.")
Not really. IBM's PPC PDA design, for example, has an FPGA for misc. functions like modems.
Yah, they also used to do that with their PCMCIA modems. Wave something or another, too lazy to check. That's a little different: IBM was producing those for a vareity of devices, all being sold at IBM scale, all fairly tiny devices. The part of the modem that's actually an FPGA is relatively small: it's just the encoder, the decoder, the modulator and the demodulator. The rest is still IC. That way, they can pick up new V standards without relying on software running on a general purpose CPU from flash.
On the other hand, this guy is talking about taking on whole new audio codecs. Modems don't change a bunch: they're tied to an analog carrier with certain characteristics that aren't expected to change. (That's why Big Blue stopped this tactic for a while - when we switched to 56k, we were really just taking a direct line to the multiplexer at the telco digitally, instead of having a d->a converter in the way like traditional; this implied a lot of new characteristics, and the old whateverwave modems couldn't be upgraded to match.)
A new audio codec could be tremendously larger and/or more complex than an older one. Granted, this is also a problem for GP CPUs; they're finite speed, and what's good enough for something like MP3 can't handle something like VQF; I expect this isn't a fluke. Later codecs will need more horsepower too. But the kind of near-identical situations you get with modems are seriously smaller problems than switching audio decompressors at the scale that these hashing monstrosities work.
Er. This seems to be based around the expectation that there's a desire to maintain integer use because it's faster. This is a dedicated chipset; it doesn't matter whether integer or floating point is faster, as they're going to clock it to whatever it needs to do the decoding.
In the meantime, it's the reconstruction that was floating point heavy, not the decoding, and the reason it was floating point was for sound quality. The Tremor library is a pure integer decoder and reconstructor. It's recently under a BSDish license. Yes, the old decoder was FP heavy, but not by necessity, by design choice.
Is Ogg clearer or cheaper or have smaller file sizes?
... well, who really uses anything else? :D )
Yes to all three. The sound quality is better than VQF, MP3, AAC, or WMF for the size. It's an opensource codec, so it has no patent encumberments. The files tend to be smaller because people encode (usually) at the minimum size to catch a CD quality track. Moreover, you can thumb your nose at Frauenhoffer.
Do p2p for Ogg exist?
Peer to peer exists for arbitrary files; therefore, for any such question, yes. Hell, you can also share them over the web, on CDs, or with smoke signals.
However, in answer to what I expect the real question is, no, they're quite a bit more difficult to find than MP3s. MP3 is very entrenched, it's the one people that aren't activists know about, and it's the one that nobody wants to spend the time crosscoding from (both because it's time consuming/boring and because the crosscoding leaves you with a file with the errors of *both* formats, and it's a noticable downgrade; people should start from the CD again, but nobody wants to do that.)
To be honest, I believe this chip's strongest market is in players that can handle MP3, Ogg with vorbis, speex, etc, WMF, and so on. The question isn't whether you start over. It's whether you move on with legacy support.
And that's pretty much how we've always done it, right? I don't make MP3s anymore.
I'd no longer be able to share files with my peers
Wrong. It doesn't matter if they have one already. It matters if their player can use them. Almost all players can (Winamp, and
FPGAs are overkill. Just use a standard small processor and some good tight ASM in an EEPROM. (Yes, I know that's what you just said you wouldn't have to do. When you go check the price, speed, and work effort differences involved, you'll realize why FPGAs are generally relegated to testing chip designs.)
For those of us who have actually had sex with a female biped (sorry, mares dont count), can you tell us "Ogg Vorbis" is what, exactly?
"Google it:" the RTFM of the new generation.
It works the same way all OSS does. Someone wants it and thinks it should be free. So they write it on their own free time and put it on the net. Somebody else goes "oh, good idea, let's make it do this too," and adds to it. Repeat until you have an audio format powerful enough that a company feels it's worth implementing in a chip.
Now, the company doesn't have to pay anyone, so it's much cheaper than developing MP3 chips. They're gonna make money by fabricating them and selling them to other companies which want Vorbis decoding (It's not ogg vorbis: ogg is the container format.) Or, at least, that's what the fab/design company is gambling on.
Then, the player manufacturer, who bought these chips, puts them in players and sells them to a public for some enormous amount of cash. I say enormous because MP3 CD players are $40 in Target now, and frankly a 10 gig hard drive isn't that many CDs (especially now that CaseLogic sells CD cases whose sides are speakers.) Okay, the 60 gig models still have some appeal, but when we get portable DVD MP3 players, it's *over.*
I mean, shit, then I'll be able to keep my whole audio collection on six discs. (RIAA notice: I still have all the CDs they came from, with the exception of a few which have suffered pets, so back off in preemption, you self appointed gestappo. Do something useful and constructive with your dollar, instead of making yourself the butt of "look what DirecTV/SCO is becoming" jokes. Assholes. Maybe find a musician that isn't paint by number.)
In the meantime, the parent was modded insightful? Interesting I could see (I don't think it is, but there's a sensible stance for it.) But what insight did s/he provide? Do you people pay attention when you moderate?
I'm gonna go back in my cave and grumble at the walls for a while. f'ing rock.
People have no business owning soldering irons, an electrical engineer has a good reason to own one, but anyone else caught with one has a germane bit of explaining to do.
// Tools are tools. They don't have to have a compelling legitimate use to untrained people to be legal.
This flies in the face of the point I was trying to make. The reason a crowbar is a bad metaphor is that it's got many legitimate purposes. So does a soldering iron. You've just provided another terrible choice of metaphor to make; the statement was explicitly pointing out that things like this are useless to say. So, in short, thanks for the fodder; you're making my point for me.
I know how to pick locks; I never intend to use it for any crime. If I accidentally lock myself out of somewhere I'm allowed to be in, I'll save myself a pretty good chunk of money.
This strikes me as a watered down version of the sarcastic response gun control advocates make to the suggestion that the average citizen has a right to own an assault rifle. Car theft tools you do, admittedly, have a rare occasion to use legitimately. However, this doesn't dissolve the case for catching someone with them when they don't have keys for any cars in the area. You're not making sensible arguments.
This is akin to saying, after a fashion, "Of course I have the right to own a cannister of Sarin Gas. I have no intents of doing anything illegal with it. Any government which takes Sarin Gas away from me is fascist."
Bullshit.
Yes, there are grey areas. Car thievery tools like slim jims exist in them. So do lock picking tools. In my opinion, assault rifles do not. Neither do biowarefare agents.
In the meantime, you're still making my point for me. This is exactly what I was saying that DirecTV has no right to do. That said, I was pointing out that the person I had originally replied to had made the same fallacious statement as you have: if you don't intend to do ill with it, you may own it. This hasn't been true in any major society that I can name since pre-roman times. I mean, christ's sake, you can't even have some simple martial weapons, like nunchaku, which are important for spiritual practices for a good many people. What the hell are you doing that's not theft with a goddamn DirecTV-specific decoder box?
It's not grounds for DirecTV to sue. I already said that, even though you seem to have missed it. That doesn't mean that you're in the right, though. I will personally mail you one dollar if you can even think of one good use for these things that isn't stealing TV. (This offer isn't open to other people; I can think of a few. I just don't think he can. And his argument sucks.)
I know how to solder and repair electronics. The soldering iron can also be used for installing mod chips or building satellite card programmers.
Again, this was my original argument. You're not telling me anything new. Be sure to read the whole thing before you jump on it.
Anything else is facist.
You know, this is one of my pet peeves. People will use a word without having any clue what the hell it means, because they think they're getting some kind of point across. Granted, there are a lot of people out there who realize that what you mean is a state under stricture, but that's not what facism is. The problem is that when you jump on me, you think I'm doing the same things with my words. You don't know how to seperate connotation from denotation, and as a result you argue against what you expect me to be saying (what you figure I'm saying, what you'd like to argue against) rather than what I actually said.
In effect, you're doing nothing other than making noise, because you're arguing against smoke monkies in the dark. (This is my attempt to sound like someone that uses words at random. It didn't work very well. I'll work on that.)
"Lazy argument is bad argument."
If you have a legal use for such a product you shouldn't buy it from someone who is specifically advertising it as being illegal.
I don't care if things are 'advertised' as being illegal. If I buy a crowbar because someone says it can be used to break windows and steal cars, and I use it to tear down a wall I don't want in my house, is that illegal?
IANAL, which nobody seems to remember to mention anymore. 's pretty important; I could be blatantly misunderstanding something here, as it's clear that at least a quarter of the remainder of the discussion is.
This argument loses a lot of steam when you attempt to complete the metaphor. What legitimate purpose did these decoders serve? The argument might better be made using a device which is contextually generally for the Dark Side; a slim jim, electric lockpick, or tumbler breaking tools might be a better choice. The locksmith, the AAA guy, and the police officer have good reasons to have these things. The dude in the fake ninja getup in the industrial slums has a germane bit of explaining to do.
What I'm wondering is how DTV can sue for descramblers. Traditionally they've been legal, because once the end-user buys the device, it's theirs, and they may do with it as they please. Same as Mod Chips, flash cards for game platforms, VCRs / PVRs / tapedecks / DVD burners / CD burners, third party debuggers, etc. There's nothing wrong with it until you do something wrong with it.
Is the hardware leased? Is there some kind of end-user contract? Does one of the new laws (DMCA, SSSPCA, USPSKFC, whatever) change the way this is seen in court? Help me understand what they're actually accusing of, in specific, rather than topically.
I can very easily see the argument for a suit against the manufacturers of the item - priove black box reengineering, etc - but Compaq started a clone market with this sort of behavior. And besides, if Compaq *had* been in the wrong, since when would it be the user's fault for buying a device that at the time was legal?
Or, there's the TV Piracy suggestion. Two words: prove it. That's the only claim here that I understand, and it's not certain. You can't sue for maybe.
There are dozens of laws against using the legal system to cow the populace; more clueful slashdotters will bring them up (I've already seen barratry, extortion, and I'm expecting conspiracy or collusion or whatever they perenially accuse airlines of in price fixing soon...) It seems that, in the light that DirecTV has little actual wrongdoing in hand, there ought to be a class action or something similar in rebuttal.
Then again, apparently they've been overturned already, so I've obviously missed some serious detail. Guh?
Y'know, TechSpot is hosing under the slashdotting, the article is incredibly skimpy on details, and only covers three drives.
n de x.html
OTOH, Tom's did a drive looky looky a few months ago with six drives; it's quite a bit better.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030207/i
Sustained use does drain batteries faster.
(Just a battery fact!)
I think he meant "unless the longer the period of sustained use the greater the difference from idle." IE, that one two hour use block would be worse than four half hour blocks.
it actually has 65,000 screens, each of which is visible in an alternate universe, a la quantum physics.
...
Waitwait. Screen is quantuum branching?
(breaks leg)
screen -d -r OtherHistory
waitwait. screen is quantuum branching?
(breaks leg)
(FYI: it's actually 65,536 colour, as that's the excact number of bits.)
FWIW, the exact number of bits is actually 16. That said, "instead of true colour or high colour" is still iffy, as High Colo(u)r is 16 bit color. Natch.
The thing that irks me is that previous Palm high color devices have had screens where the frontlight wasn't able to really pump out enough light; you couldn't tell the difference between lots of the darker blues, and even some of the darker greens and greys.
Notably, I think it's amusing that PalmInfoCenter's own infopage has this wronger than the guy I'm replying to; they suggest the device supports 65k colors, when in fact it supports 64k. Also, the magnesium-in-rain jokes that have probably already been written belong here.
(Also, doesn't PalmOS support alpha blending native? NeXT used to call 24bpp+8bapp 32bit color; is that still considered legit?)