Ehem, the grandparent was about being THERE, in the concert hall or in the middle of the battle of Midway:), instead of reproducing the sounds on speakers.
Why do you use stable? I mean, really? You can just go with testing, it's a lot more stable and consistent than your typical distrib (Red Hat/Mandrake/Suse) and it is fairly up-to-date. [ Disclaimer: I use unstable on my machines, but it has not really caused any problems ]
Because Debian supports more architectures, has more packages, has more developers and generally, it is a more mature distro. Also, Gentoo's "compile your own" philosophy is not that great when you have to care for lots of computers.
"The odds on such a system not playing back the audio tracks and instead playing back the WMA content may be quite high!"
Well, I guess you are overly optimistic. As this comes from Sony, it will be most probably some kind of ATRAC, not WMA, with their propierarty DRM, so it WILL NOT play on anything other than SONY sanctioned stuff. Your DVD player probably just can not play these discs.
It is not fair mostly because it screws the people who actually pay for the stuff and in no way hinders the others. If you don't believe me, just make a search on Kazaa for any of the "copy-protected" releases. See? It's there for anyone to take. But those miserable customers who actually paid for these discs, have to find out that it does not play on their CDman/car CD/DVD player/computer and they can not transfer the music to their shiny new iPods. This "new system" does next to nothing to change that: the audio part is still not standards-compliant, so it won't play in a large nnumber of devices and the compressed files won't play on anything but Sony's players (so no iPod) and on Windows with Sony's player software - and I guess it is something that's not what the people really want.
In contrast, any happy Kazaa user can download the music in mp3 (that plays in his iPod), can burn it to a CD (that plays in his CD players) and carry on merrily.
Yeah, I guess people are asking for discs that can not be played on their existing gear and compressed files that also can not be played on their existing gear. One has to wonder what kind of crack do they smoke when come up with such statements.
ps: is it just me, or everyone receives the Thinkgeek anti-RIAA T-shirt ads for this article?:)
Yeah, I guess the world would be a much more lovely place if we could figure out how to make the effects of MDMA permament. A research toward that would be the real pursuit of happines.
There is error detection/correction code on audio CDs (for details see this page, for example) and PC CD drives are able to access the "raw" data on the CD, ie you can get all the stuff with error detection/correction data and you can compute if there's an error. And while it is possible that an error goes undetected despite all this, it is extremely unlikely.
Well, as even you have said, audio CDs are bitaccurate, just easily damaged - although not AS easily as you state, I could get music without errors from my CDs except one (and that one was really badly scratched, even audio CD players choked on it:) ). The differences that you may experience may come from the fact that positioning on an audio CD is fuzzy business, your rips may differ in a few bytes in length due to this - but if you correct this, then the tracks from different ripping sessions should be identical to the last bit.
"While you wouldn't call any of Tartakovsky's works beautiful when compared to Disney"
I would call many of the scenes/episodes of Samurai Jack beautiful any day, no need to compare it to generic Disney stuff. Tartakosky may be minimalistic, but this minimalism can be very beatiful.
[ Warning: I am from Europe, not the USA ] Well, I just can not see any LPs in the stores around here (although they must be available SOMEWHERE, since my DJing friends can get them), but a quick look at the RIAA's website says that in 2002 they have sold 803.3 million CDs and 1.7 million LPs (that's 0.2% of the CDs). I could not find any numbers regarding that what percentage of the new releases comes out on vinyl, but a quick check on Sony Music's web store gave me the impression that about 10-15% of their stuff comes out on vinyl.
When you are speaking about frequencies in the Nyquist theorem-context (and in most other audiotechnial contexts), we are speaking about sine waves. As you probably know, all waveforms can be described as a sum of sine waves (each having double the frequency as the previous) using Fourier-transformation. So, what it means is that if you have a 20 kHz square wave, to your ears it will be the same as a 20 kHz sine wave (especially since most people can not hear anything about 14-16 kHz) since the next harmonics is at 40 kHz that is clearly out of the range of the human ear.
As for the voltages: the 16 bit resolution is big enough that the differences between two steps are below the threshold human ear (yes, our senses also have a resolution).
To sum it all up: while you are right that there is information lost when audio is converted to the CD format, it is information that can not be heard by humans anyway. Unless you are considering an upgrade to bat ears, there's no reason to worry about the CD format's limitation.
Well, there are still people that prefer vinyl, but that does not help the fact that vinyl is nearly extinct. I guess CDs are headed to the same fate although it will take a decade (and by that time probably most of the on-line music will be in a lossless 24/96 format).
Sorry to break it to you, but vinyl is also not lossless. There is still a margin of error in the production (and you can not go below the size of the vinyl (or whatever LPs are actually made of) molecule anyway). And if you take into consideration that you CAN NOT get back EXACTLY from vinyl what was written to it, while with a CD this is perfectly possible, you should doubly reconsider your statement.
Why suing college students for music downloading is right
It is, because it explicitly says the downloading is illegal. It is NOT. In fact, no one has been sued because of downloading. Downloading is legal. RIAA sues people because of uploading (i.e. distibution - because that is what copyright regulates). I think they are spreading misinformation purposefully (as this article is coming from a law expert) and I guess we should counter this FUD as much as possible.
"VNC is so bad that recommending it is not a solution but the introduction of crap."
[ Disclaimer: I have used Xvnc for a long time (because an in-house application required 8 bit colordepth) and the Win version only for a short time after that when I had to use a Win and a Linux machine at the same time (finally synergy came to the rescuse) ]
Well, I find your position a little bit extreme - at least if one considers Xvnc only. The Windows version is glitchy (or you could say horrible - I had the impression that it takes screenshots of the windows and transmits that) but Xvnc is very different - it gives you a completely working X server so no graphical glitches. There IS a lot of overhead - but in my experience that caused no real problems.
"The only solution in this case is to extend X to allow one to move an application from one display to another."
Well, this would be the ideal solution, but in the meantime we can use something less ideal, can't we?
You sould have bothered to read my post and its parent. The guy's problem is caused by the fact that in Xfree86, the x server itself and the renderer is coupled, and, with X, you can not move a window from a server to another. VNC offers a solution, since it decouples the server and the renderer and it allows a server to be accessed by multiple renderers. Of course, if there was a way to do it with X protocol instead of VNC's, that would be better - but I am not aware of any such solution.
What about using Xvnc? You specify the vncserver as the X server (running on any of your machines) for your applications, and you run a fullscreen xvncviewer on the machine you are sitting in front of to access the vncserver. It may not be a perfect solution, but it works.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is bad for you how? Just let them compete!
(And I really don't think that half-dozen online music services could be called "many".)
Ehem, the grandparent was about being THERE, in the concert hall or in the middle of the battle of Midway :), instead of reproducing the sounds on speakers.
Why do you use stable? I mean, really?
You can just go with testing, it's a lot more stable and consistent than your typical distrib (Red Hat/Mandrake/Suse) and it is fairly up-to-date.
[ Disclaimer: I use unstable on my machines, but it has not really caused any problems ]
Because Debian supports more architectures, has more packages, has more developers and generally, it is a more mature distro.
Also, Gentoo's "compile your own" philosophy is not that great when you have to care for lots of computers.
"The odds on such a system not playing back the audio tracks and instead playing back the WMA content may be quite high!"
Well, I guess you are overly optimistic.
As this comes from Sony, it will be most probably some kind of ATRAC, not WMA, with their propierarty DRM, so it WILL NOT play on anything other than SONY sanctioned stuff.
Your DVD player probably just can not play these discs.
It is not fair mostly because it screws the people who actually pay for the stuff and in no way hinders the others.
If you don't believe me, just make a search on Kazaa for any of the "copy-protected" releases. See? It's there for anyone to take.
But those miserable customers who actually paid for these discs, have to find out that it does not play on their CDman/car CD/DVD player/computer and they can not transfer the music to their shiny new iPods.
This "new system" does next to nothing to change that: the audio part is still not standards-compliant, so it won't play in a large nnumber of devices and the compressed files won't play on anything but Sony's players (so no iPod) and on Windows with Sony's player software - and I guess it is something that's not what the people really want.
In contrast, any happy Kazaa user can download the music in mp3 (that plays in his iPod), can burn it to a CD (that plays in his CD players) and carry on merrily.
It is hilarious because it is so bald-faced lie. Just like the Iraq information minister.
Yeah, I guess people are asking for discs that can not be played on their existing gear and compressed files that also can not be played on their existing gear.
:)
One has to wonder what kind of crack do they smoke when come up with such statements.
ps: is it just me, or everyone receives the Thinkgeek anti-RIAA T-shirt ads for this article?
Yeah, I guess the world would be a much more lovely place if we could figure out how to make the effects of MDMA permament. A research toward that would be the real pursuit of happines.
There is error detection/correction code on audio CDs (for details see this page, for example) and PC CD drives are able to access the "raw" data on the CD, ie you can get all the stuff with error detection/correction data and you can compute if there's an error. And while it is possible that an error goes undetected despite all this, it is extremely unlikely.
Yeah, that was my first thought too :)
Well, as even you have said, audio CDs are bitaccurate, just easily damaged - although not AS easily as you state, I could get music without errors from my CDs except one (and that one was really badly scratched, even audio CD players choked on it :) ).
The differences that you may experience may come from the fact that positioning on an audio CD is fuzzy business, your rips may differ in a few bytes in length due to this - but if you correct this, then the tracks from different ripping sessions should be identical to the last bit.
"While you wouldn't call any of Tartakovsky's works beautiful when compared to Disney"
I would call many of the scenes/episodes of Samurai Jack beautiful any day, no need to compare it to generic Disney stuff.
Tartakosky may be minimalistic, but this minimalism can be very beatiful.
[ Warning: I am from Europe, not the USA ]
Well, I just can not see any LPs in the stores around here (although they must be available SOMEWHERE, since my DJing friends can get them), but a quick look at the RIAA's website says that in 2002 they have sold 803.3 million CDs and 1.7 million LPs (that's 0.2% of the CDs).
I could not find any numbers regarding that what percentage of the new releases comes out on vinyl, but a quick check on Sony Music's web store gave me the impression that about 10-15% of their stuff comes out on vinyl.
When you are speaking about frequencies in the Nyquist theorem-context (and in most other audiotechnial contexts), we are speaking about sine waves. As you probably know, all waveforms can be described as a sum of sine waves (each having double the frequency as the previous) using Fourier-transformation. So, what it means is that if you have a 20 kHz square wave, to your ears it will be the same as a 20 kHz sine wave (especially since most people can not hear anything about 14-16 kHz) since the next harmonics is at 40 kHz that is clearly out of the range of the human ear.
As for the voltages: the 16 bit resolution is big enough that the differences between two steps are below the threshold human ear (yes, our senses also have a resolution).
To sum it all up: while you are right that there is information lost when audio is converted to the CD format, it is information that can not be heard by humans anyway. Unless you are considering an upgrade to bat ears, there's no reason to worry about the CD format's limitation.
Well, there are still people that prefer vinyl, but that does not help the fact that vinyl is nearly extinct.
I guess CDs are headed to the same fate although it will take a decade (and by that time probably most of the on-line music will be in a lossless 24/96 format).
Sorry to break it to you, but vinyl is also not lossless. There is still a margin of error in the production (and you can not go below the size of the vinyl (or whatever LPs are actually made of) molecule anyway).
And if you take into consideration that you CAN NOT get back EXACTLY from vinyl what was written to it, while with a CD this is perfectly possible, you should doubly reconsider your statement.
Could you please point to something to back up your statements?
Parent is right and it is important (as it gets to the heart of the statement.
Mod him up!
It is, because it explicitly says the downloading is illegal. It is NOT. In fact, no one has been sued because of downloading.
Downloading is legal.
RIAA sues people because of uploading (i.e. distibution - because that is what copyright regulates).
I think they are spreading misinformation purposefully (as this article is coming from a law expert) and I guess we should counter this FUD as much as possible.
"VNC is so bad that recommending it is not a
solution but the introduction of crap."
[ Disclaimer: I have used Xvnc for a long time (because an in-house application required 8 bit colordepth) and the Win version only for a short time after that when I had to use a Win and a Linux machine at the same time (finally synergy came to the rescuse) ]
Well, I find your position a little bit extreme - at least if one considers Xvnc only. The Windows version is glitchy (or you could say horrible - I had the impression that it takes screenshots of the windows and transmits that) but Xvnc is very different - it gives you a completely working X server so no graphical glitches.
There IS a lot of overhead - but in my experience that caused no real problems.
"The only solution in this case is to extend X to
allow one to move an application from one
display to another."
Well, this would be the ideal solution, but in the meantime we can use something less ideal, can't we?
You sould have bothered to read my post and its parent.
The guy's problem is caused by the fact that in Xfree86, the x server itself and the renderer is coupled, and, with X, you can not move a window from a server to another.
VNC offers a solution, since it decouples the server and the renderer and it allows a server to be accessed by multiple renderers.
Of course, if there was a way to do it with X protocol instead of VNC's, that would be better - but I am not aware of any such solution.
What about using Xvnc?
You specify the vncserver as the X server (running on any of your machines) for your applications, and you run a fullscreen xvncviewer on the machine you are sitting in front of to access the vncserver.
It may not be a perfect solution, but it works.
Even xterm can use non-bitmapped fonts. You can type something likeand there you go.
"Linux (which also doesn't have a WMA 9 port). "
:)
www.mplayerhq.hu:
"WMV9/WMA9 is also supported now - 2002.12.04."
Note the date