Because of the Transflash card slot, you can trivially copy the pictures & ringtones anyway.
Any way you look at it, it has the look and feel of a PHB decision. Its illogical, it doesn't protect any revenue stream, and causes the phone to be less useful for no good reason.
The real practical limitation of the lack of OBEX is that the phone can't exchange its internal phonebook over BT, so if you have a BT implementation in your car, you have to re-enter your phone book in the car.
As to the limitation its really dumb for one simple reason: The phone support data exchange via a memory card, so you can move ringtones, pictures, and even MP3's to the phone to be used as an MP3 player.
If Verizon is intentially crippling this phone, its only crippled for people who can't be bothered to copy the stuff via either USB or the memory card. I suppose that means impatient teens.
For the rest of us who want to take advantage of the advanced features, its stupid and insulting, since it doesn't do what they think it does, and it really limits the BT flexibility.
You can't test a program or system of any complexity with some code in, pronounce it "good", and then take out some of the code.
Its new code at that point. Which is perhaps why its left in. If they take it out, then they have to re-test and re-certify.
But fundamentally, it shows that Diebold is, at best, incapable of understanding what it takes to produce this kind of code. It sounds like a bunch of junior programmers coding under the "direction" of a mid-level programmer.
What I'm surprised at is the local government accepted binaries from the vendor without (a) having full access to the source code (b) a mechnism to ensure the source code they audit matches the binaries in the machine.
When you think about it, the whole thing reeks of a company looking to make a quick buck and local governments too stupid to understand that they lack the expertise to judge this kind of software and make an intelligent decision about deploying it.
Its not as good as the over-the-air stream; its fine for listening on a PC, but that's about it.
One signficant downside of the TCP Stream is that its only the music, none of the talk channels which probably comprise close to half of the offerings. This is disappointing, since having NFL streams in my house would be terrific.
Some of the streams are pretty good; the classical ones in particular.
But the "pop" ones vary from stream to stream and night to night. Its clear the Sirius guys are always tweaking the compression (as you'd expect), and there are days when I have to turn it off, it sounds that bad to me. The last week has been pretty good, but there are lots of little birdies that I hear regardless of time or date.
That's because of the way XM works. I've read that XM uses a pair of geosychronous satellites that cover much of North America. I think they're parked roughly over each coast.
By Contrast, Sirius uses 3 satellites that follow a figure 8 orbit over NA, and SA. There are always 2 satellites "active", and once a satellite is no longer able to be "seen" by NA, they shut it down, until it comes back north again. I think this takes roughly a day, but that's a guess.
This seems to me (and I am mostly assuredly not a lawyer), be saying that if you do something illegal involving their service, they will try to prosecute you.
That's true even if you've never owned an XM receiver, and even if they don't tell you that in "terms of service".
It hardly seems worth it; I have Sirius, and despite fanatics from both XM and Sirius, the sound is not even close to CD quality. Its better than FM in dynamic range, but inferior to FM because it suffers from a signficant amount of digital artifacts.
These are not important in a car, but don't stand up to any kind of critical listening.
Because its the lie that is repeated often enough and becomes the truth.
You float a statistic out there. Then another, then another, and pretty soon, get a couple of columnists to repeate it and its then accepted as "fact".
And of course, when Hollywood goes to the FCC and congress, they can let them know it is generally accepted that 1 in 4 people download movies illegally.
Congress will have to do something, of course, because its their job to make sure encumbent companies keep their shareholders happy. And they're all against evil pirates. Never mind that if they accept those "facts" it means half the people who voted for them are "pirates".
you can go to the Apple site and download trailers from upcoming big-time movie releases. My daughter does this all the time to see if a movie will be worth going to see.
Depending on the way they ask the question, this might have gotten her lumped in with people downloading movies, because she did technically download part of a movie.
The thing was that it was (a) Not the whole movie (b) entirely legal.
Now lets say 10% of all teens do this...Might that inflate the stats just a bit?
"It really looks like the TSA simply doesn't care whether innocent civilians are denied the ability to use the nation's airlines."
To be completely pragmatic, why do they care? Its not as if it costs them money to deny access to transportation. It costs the airlines and the people trying to travel.
Perhaps if people were unfairly not allowed to fly, and TSA would be forced to reinburse them real costs, then all of the sudden, they would be smarter about it.
But the way things are set up now, there's no penalty for denying *everyone* access to travel.
The author concludes by injecting a little personal opinion into the mix, arguing: "PC games will never go away, but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease."
This author concludes that the market will shrink even faster if nutty game developers insist on using obnoxious copy protection schemes just to (a) prove they're smarter than the crackers (b) show that if the choice comes down to their customer's aggravation and their own profits, then profits win every time.
Gee, do you think this attitude might force a lot of people to conclude that PC games are such a pain they might as well buy a console and play there?
"I have had to rip entire CD again because MS's DRM "decided" for me that songs I ripped from my own CD's were not legitimate"
If you had chosen to use MP3, a format not encumbered by DRM, this wouldn't have happened. You made a decision to use DRM's restricted music, and you got burned by it.
The real question is whether you learned from your experience and chose a format without DRM, or did you keep doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result?
True, but since they're using the same encoder, and one is a higher bit-rate, then I think it follows that Real is offering a higher-quality product than Apple in this case.
Understand, I'm not a Real fan; I refuse to load any of their software on my PC, but I don't think iTMS is the bee's knees, either.
"especially if your sound quality is not as good."
I thought I'd read that Real's DRM-laden music was actually 192kb/s AAC, which in theory would have significantly higher fidelity than the 128kb/s AAC that Apple uses.
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Because of the Transflash card slot, you can trivially copy the pictures & ringtones anyway.
Any way you look at it, it has the look and feel of a PHB decision. Its illogical, it doesn't protect any revenue stream, and causes the phone to be less useful for no good reason.
The real practical limitation of the lack of OBEX is that the phone can't exchange its internal phonebook over BT, so if you have a BT implementation in your car, you have to re-enter your phone book in the car.
As to the limitation its really dumb for one simple reason: The phone support data exchange via a memory card, so you can move ringtones, pictures, and even MP3's to the phone to be used as an MP3 player.
If Verizon is intentially crippling this phone, its only crippled for people who can't be bothered to copy the stuff via either USB or the memory card. I suppose that means impatient teens.
For the rest of us who want to take advantage of the advanced features, its stupid and insulting, since it doesn't do what they think it does, and it really limits the BT flexibility.
Its still a nice phone though.
All this proves is that proprietary is bad regardless if its MS or Apple.
They're suing them not over the format, they're suing because they're calling it Mr. Sinus Theatre 3000.
Seems to me that's pretty clear cut. Change the name!
If I can't exercise my fair-use rights with a new medium, I'm not interested.
Is because you keep an eye to make sure it isn't stealing your money, and the bank is watching to make sure it isn't stealing their money.
Who's watching the votes? Who's ensuring these machines are doing what they are supposed to do? That's really the question here.
You can't test a program or system of any complexity with some code in, pronounce it "good", and then take out some of the code.
Its new code at that point. Which is perhaps why its left in. If they take it out, then they have to re-test and re-certify.
But fundamentally, it shows that Diebold is, at best, incapable of understanding what it takes to produce this kind of code. It sounds like a bunch of junior programmers coding under the "direction" of a mid-level programmer.
What I'm surprised at is the local government accepted binaries from the vendor without (a) having full access to the source code (b) a mechnism to ensure the source code they audit matches the binaries in the machine.
When you think about it, the whole thing reeks of a company looking to make a quick buck and local governments too stupid to understand that they lack the expertise to judge this kind of software and make an intelligent decision about deploying it.
Its not as good as the over-the-air stream; its fine for listening on a PC, but that's about it.
One signficant downside of the TCP Stream is that its only the music, none of the talk channels which probably comprise close to half of the offerings. This is disappointing, since having NFL streams in my house would be terrific.
Some of the streams are pretty good; the classical ones in particular.
But the "pop" ones vary from stream to stream and night to night. Its clear the Sirius guys are always tweaking the compression (as you'd expect), and there are days when I have to turn it off, it sounds that bad to me. The last week has been pretty good, but there are lots of little birdies that I hear regardless of time or date.
If your boss tells you to do something illegal, they'll arrest him *and you*. When he skips bail, you'll be left holding the bag.
That's because of the way XM works. I've read that XM uses a pair of geosychronous satellites that cover much of North America. I think they're parked roughly over each coast.
By Contrast, Sirius uses 3 satellites that follow a figure 8 orbit over NA, and SA. There are always 2 satellites "active", and once a satellite is no longer able to be "seen" by NA, they shut it down, until it comes back north again. I think this takes roughly a day, but that's a guess.
They both use repeaters.
This seems to me (and I am mostly assuredly not a lawyer), be saying that if you do something illegal involving their service, they will try to prosecute you.
That's true even if you've never owned an XM receiver, and even if they don't tell you that in "terms of service".
It hardly seems worth it; I have Sirius, and despite fanatics from both XM and Sirius, the sound is not even close to CD quality. Its better than FM in dynamic range, but inferior to FM because it suffers from a signficant amount of digital artifacts.
These are not important in a car, but don't stand up to any kind of critical listening.
Its a tempest in a teapot.
Because its the lie that is repeated often enough and becomes the truth.
You float a statistic out there. Then another, then another, and pretty soon, get a couple of columnists to repeate it and its then accepted as "fact".
And of course, when Hollywood goes to the FCC and congress, they can let them know it is generally accepted that 1 in 4 people download movies illegally.
Congress will have to do something, of course, because its their job to make sure encumbent companies keep their shareholders happy. And they're all against evil pirates. Never mind that if they accept those "facts" it means half the people who voted for them are "pirates".
you can go to the Apple site and download trailers from upcoming big-time movie releases. My daughter does this all the time to see if a movie will be worth going to see.
Depending on the way they ask the question, this might have gotten her lumped in with people downloading movies, because she did technically download part of a movie.
The thing was that it was (a) Not the whole movie (b) entirely legal.
Now lets say 10% of all teens do this...Might that inflate the stats just a bit?
"Deciding if something is wrong or right should not depend on how it effects the economy"
Isn't the whole justification for copyrights that its good for the economy?
"It really looks like the TSA simply doesn't care whether innocent civilians are denied the ability to use the nation's airlines."
To be completely pragmatic, why do they care? Its not as if it costs them money to deny access to transportation. It costs the airlines and the people trying to travel.
Perhaps if people were unfairly not allowed to fly, and TSA would be forced to reinburse them real costs, then all of the sudden, they would be smarter about it.
But the way things are set up now, there's no penalty for denying *everyone* access to travel.
Look at a game console; its hardly cutting edge, but they manage to make pretty good games.
Maybe there's a model for success in there somewhere.
Gee, do you think this attitude might force a lot of people to conclude that PC games are such a pain they might as well buy a console and play there?
"I have had to rip entire CD again because MS's DRM "decided" for me that songs I ripped from my own CD's were not legitimate"
If you had chosen to use MP3, a format not encumbered by DRM, this wouldn't have happened. You made a decision to use DRM's restricted music, and you got burned by it.
The real question is whether you learned from your experience and chose a format without DRM, or did you keep doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result?
True, but since they're using the same encoder, and one is a higher bit-rate, then I think it follows that Real is offering a higher-quality product than Apple in this case.
Understand, I'm not a Real fan; I refuse to load any of their software on my PC, but I don't think iTMS is the bee's knees, either.
A Dell X30 with WiFi and Bluetooth can be purchased for $170 on sale, or about $250, full list.
So if this thing costs $130, and the T3 costs $300, that leave us with a price tag of $430.
Ahem.
"especially if your sound quality is not as good."
I thought I'd read that Real's DRM-laden music was actually 192kb/s AAC, which in theory would have significantly higher fidelity than the 128kb/s AAC that Apple uses.
Brooke Shields in her, er, prime. Makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about that movie.
If we find that in Iraq, I'll consider it a WMD.
Today's status quo is not good for consumers. Copyright terms are far too long.
I'd personally like to see a differentiation between corporate copyrights (short) to personal copyrights (longer, but shorter than present).
Its a sad day when just keeping the current unfavorable copyright laws are considered a "win" by the voters.