> I assure you, they'll want to charge even MORE for this type of disc as the new feature is that it plays > in both regular DVD and HD-DVD players!
I dunno about that. They are currently in a very tricky situation. VHS was ripe for replacing, as soon as players dropped under $150 VHS quickly disappeared from retail shelves. Because face it, anybody who can't spring for a DVD player at $150, considering the plain benefits (quality, durability and shelf space savings) just wasn't the sort who bought much prerecorded media anyway. Even worse DVD sales are bigger than VHS ever was, most especially the creation of the huge market for TV shows on DVD, so stores many devote more space to DVD than they ever did to VHS.
The HD formats have a much harder battle, DVD is 'good enough' for anyone without a pretty good HD monitor and the players won't cross the 'impulse purchase' or Xmas gift line for a couple of years. So how do you break the chicken & the egg problem here? You can't get people to buy players unless they see movies. Even worse, the consumer electronics companies just might have created a monster here. What if people start holding off on major DVD purchases (box sets of long running TV shows for example) awaiting HD to sort itself out and get cheap? Dual format might be the only way out, if so you can bet the studios will do whatever it takes to keep the money rolling in.
But it is strictly a transitional technology, let BD/HD player penetration cross the half mark and the DVD layer will start disappearing. And of course A list movies won't soon go that route, they will want to be able to devote two layers to DVD on a DVD version and two layers to a HD version. At least at initial release. Of course stores won't keep both forever so eventually a single layer DVD + dual layer HD will be the only version stocked.... after all over time anybody who really cares about picture quality will be moving to an HD format.
Of course if they can bring the cost of production down low enough they might just do dual mode discs forever, because after all, just how many cars now have builtin DVD systems? Replacing DVD now would be like getting rid of audio CDs.
And of course establishing the precedent that any new format has to be backwards compatible. Bad idea longterm.
Obviously. But thats ok, I'm only a clueful layman myself.
> but as I recall, the only reason that DeCSS occured was because some idiot company made a player > where the stream of data that contained the encryption/decryption key was, in itself, not encrypted.
Close. Xing released a player where they didn't bother to obfuscate the player key. Just made it a little easier. At any rate, once the real crypto weenies saw the code they saw through to fundamental flaws so bad current Free players don't even use that Xing key anymore, they simply break the crypto. But had Xing not screwed up it would have just forced someone to hook up a debugger and go looking a bit. In much the same way as copy protection is removed from PC games within days of release, if not before a new game actually hits the street.
> Look at all of the other cryptographically signed things that people use on a regular basis, like the PSP > or the X360 or the PS2 -- those keys are sent around inside the unit all the time and people have the code > that sends the specific crypto keys, but they still can't crack it because it essentially is still a brute > force crack.
Different problem. The player (or game console) doesn't possess the signing key. But it must have the player key. The problem I am talking about would be more akin to making a clone Xbox play official games instead of signing a new game to make it play on existing consoles. So yes, getting the signing key isn't likely without ninjas on a nocturnal mission, but to playback legally obtained content that isn't required. Any player must have a method to decode the media, otherwise it is sorta pointless. Disassemble any software player and the secret will be revealed.
> Also, the keys are encrypted using AES -- I'm not sure if it's 128, 192, or 256-bit keys that their using, > but even 128 bit keys would take a top of the line computer *years* to crack. Not very effective.
Who cares. The player software has all of the decryption keys so you don't need to attack the cypher, just rip the keys out of a Windows PE executable along with the protocol to knock the secret knock on the drive.
>..but just because playback is going to be enabled on WindowsXP doesn't mean that the 'matter of time' is > any longer or shorter.
Yes it does. PC hardware has no hardware protection, unlike embedded systems. PC hardware and Windows in specific is fairly well understood and many underground groups already possess the required skills to unobfuscate a windows executable.
> Because playback of HD-quality video utilizing BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP and cracking > the DRM of BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP are exactly the same thing.
Essentially, yes. Standard PC hardware lacks any sort of real hardware protection like TPCM is going to add eventually. If Windows XP can execute the player a debugger can watch everything that happens and/or a virtualized copy of Windows can log every byte passing in or out of every port, memory location and processor register.
The attackers have the encrypted content, the decryption key and all of the algorithms, just obscured a bit. Add time and a few motivated attackers and hilarity will ensue. Yet another crypto scheme created by people who just don't understand and are going to be shocked by just how fast the cracks appear.
>That doesn't make it legal. It'll be real interesting if companies ever decide to crack down on everyone > who is breaking the DMCA.
Not happening. They understand how badly they would get burned in court should they try. I'd represent myself even. All I'd have to do is let em bloviate till they run out of hot air then take five minutes before a jury to explain the situation.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, now that those idiots have wasted a week of your life let me sum this whole thing up in a few short words without any technical, legal or other jargon. I must confess. I did indeed play a DVD I bought in our local friendly neighborhood Walmart in a DVD drive, that even those retards never contended I didn't buy, on a computer I have free and clear title to. If you can find anything wrong in that you should send me to jail. Otherwise you should return a unanamious not guilty verdict so that these guys will get the point and not go looking for a way to get a retrial and put another dozen people through something this boring, pointless and stupid."
Might even go for the visual aid of having my computer sitting there, and then take a DVD out of the case and start it playing. If any DVDCCA lawyer thinks they can find a normal person who will see a crime in doing that they are criminally insane, about to go postal and wipe out a shopping center crazy.
Then spend the remainder of the five minutes giving em the Fully Informed Jury lesson. An hour later I'm looking for a shark of my own to do the countersuit on contingency. He/she/it could even have 90%, on the grounds that I don't want their money I only want to make stupidity a little more painful.
What the DMCA does is prevent RedHat from shipping mplayer, even years fron now after the MPEG2 patents expire.
> That was the grandparent post's whole point. If (in a magical fantasy land) the formats didn't get > cracked, no one would buy in, and the formats would rot, which would be a good thing.
Why would it be a good thing?
Fact: DVD is near the end of its life for a high quality movie format. Disney titles for the kids? Another ten years, just like VHS is still clinging to life if that niche. A format to drive a 50" HD monitor? No.
Fact: Any new format will have all the DRM the industry thinks it can get away with.
Fact: The original plan was for Vista to be a TPCM only horror, and for HD content to only be playable on PCs with TPCM (ie. Vista and OS X on Intel). Hollywood had banked everything on that and was betrayed. (Nobody ever wins in a 'partnership' with Microsoft.)
Fact: If either/both of these new formats catch on they will be good enough to last 10-20 years, like DVD's eventual lifespan will probably end up and about like VHS's reign.
Fact: If both fail, by the time Hollywood is ready to try again we might not be lucky enough to get something so crackable.
Fact: If Hollywood has TPCM it is possible they might actually design something that can't be cracked. Or at least not cracked effortlessly, as DVDs are now. Microsoft's failure with Vista is our opportunity, we should seize it.
> Ther's a LOT more going on with these formats than just playing back a single moderate data rate file!
Nice features to have, but most of us will only be watching the movie. One HD video stream and one audio, either decoded ijn software or passed out on an optical plug. And do the math on the movie itself. Assume a dual layer BD-ROM (by the time a crack appears these will actually be shipping in quantity) with a single movie. That gives you 50GB of data for a two hour movie. Compare to a DVD with 9.6GB for a two hour movie. I make it out to a maximum 5 fold increase in raw bitrate spread over 12 times the pixels with the audio datarate remaining constant. If you try uncompressed audio you can kiss the video quality goodbye.
Now tell me again about the picture in picture and multiple 7.1 audio tracks? Forget the PiP, the bits aren't there to support it except for a couple of special features on the second bonus features disc nobody watches more than once anyway. About like the multiple angle feature of DVDs now. And nobody is going to be mixing the multiple audio tracks on their players with HD anymore than they do now on DVDs with commentary tracks. All of that is premixed during mastering.
No, just about any machine built this year has more than enough power for HD if you don't need to one core burning up doing decryption and reencryption. So what is about to happen is the Free players will work on far more machines than the official versions. People are going to notice, especially when they realise battery life will be a lot longer if they download mplayer.
> Personally I hope that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD _never_ get cracked, or at least if they do it's never ported to Windows in an easy to > use fashion. It's hard to think of any other way to get the formats dropped faster.
You mean like DVD was dropped? Nope, once they commit billions to pushing a format that have to follow through. At least once it hits a critical mass. If the crack doesn't appear until after millions of players are fielded and thousands of titles are released they are stuck.
Since Vista dropped the requirement for TPCM we have all known the next gen DVD formats were going to get cracked. As soon as a software based player is available it is toast. And I'll tell ya something else. Mplayer won't need a dual core CPU and a 256MB video card for playback either.
Regular DVDs could be played back with a 1X DVD drive, a Pentium 90 and a video card with hardware scaling and color space conversion (i.e. xv support). A little back of the envelope math tells me a fast single core Intel or AMD cpu is more than enough. If your video card can do scaled video and colorspace on 1920x1080 windows you should be in the ballpark. If you have XvMC support you should be golden. HD video isn't THAT many more bits or pixels per second, despite what the marketing would have you believe.
Besides, I still don't understand your thinking. If it isn't cracked I ain't buying in. Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon make it usable. So if this stuff ain't cracked it can all rot in hell for all I care.
> I'm sure a lot of people don't want anyone to know who they voted for in that election.
Why not? The state Republican Party was passing out bumper stickers with "This time vote for the crook." on em. Duke certainly wasn't welcome in Republican ranks. Just a fluke of our crazy open primary system allowed the asshat to slide into the runoff.
Fortunately I wasn't in the state for that election cycle, instead I had a choice almost as easy to make, W over Ann Richards across the border in TX.
> If so hes no longer acting solely in the game would and the laws of the land may apply, he will certainly have a lot of tax to pay.
Just like any other income, including gaming winnings. If you win at poker you are supposed to count it as income, even if played in an area where the game itself is illegal. Point is the game world has its rules and the real one has a different set, the two really can't be considered to intersect except on some fairly rigid boundry lines, i.e. you pay real world dollars to be admitted. In one world the guy is scamming the crap out of people. But viewed from here it is only a matter of someone outplaying the other subscribers. Remember, it is role playing, just like it is OK to take on teh role of a powerful wizard or fighter, being a thief is a permissable game role in every MMOG I have heard of. Most even allow players to assume the role of characters who, by their very definition, must be evil. Yet people are getting their panties all in a twist because someone actually does something 'naughty?'
Those who don't understand history...... There was a reason Gary Gygax intentionally designed D&D to encourage players to be Good or at least neutral, and not evil. Too bad the morons designing MMOGs are too young to have read the original DMG or old Dragon magazines articles on the subject and therefore understand why designing a game world where it pays to be evil tends to lead to a crappy campaign and unhappy players. Back in teh day it was a instant touchstone to decide if you wanted to play in a group. As soon as they started talking about their Anti-Palidins and vampire characters you knew their DM was an idiot and the players had almost certainly never played in a well run campaign.
> If he remains in the game world, hes going to be in big trouble, the number of suckers will run out and he will have a lot of angry investors on his tail.
Which is exactly as it should be. Actions in the game world have consequences in that world.
> anyone who doesnt play a MMOG is instantly biased in their response.
Not really. I don't play but know enough Evercrack heads and played enough D&D to know the reality in a MMOG.
> virtual money can be transferred into real money for all of these games.
So? Anyone with enough skill at any 'game' can, if motivated, find a way to translate that skill into cash. If enough people do it this becomes regularized, see professional sports. You hippies need to quit it with this "The Internet is a new thing that changes all the rules." crap and realize it doesn't. Same shit different day. The tech changes but people don't and in the end it is all about the people. People got rich in meat space off of skills that had no obvious way to make a profit, now they are doing in online, nothing to see here, move along.
If a game is going to be successful it must account for that, to find a way to allow 'pros' (those who will find a way to make a living from playing) to be in the game alongside the semi-pros (those only looking to pay their fees and perhaps derive a hobby income) and the pure amateurs with everyone walking away happy. See pool or poker for some ideas on how to make it work. Again, these are problems going back centuries, not some new net thing.
> taking their money away or their equipment has a huge impact on that player.
Exactly. Because of the unreal way they allow death to be nothing more than a momentary bother, cash and gear become what is important, thus what all the effort is expended on acquiring. Again, quit stating the obvious. If physical objects (coins and gear) are what the point of the game is, why is it wrong for a rational person to decide that getting this stuff from players is easier than grinding for it? At most it points up a flaw in the game design.
Listen up folks, it is a GAME WORLD. Nothing you do there should subject you to any sort of sanction in the real one. The whole point is to be able to do things you can't do in reality. After all, in the real world you can't kill people, heck you can't even kill most things. In most games though you wade hip deep in gore. If the game system doesn't provide a 'fix' then exploiting it is just good play according to the rules of the game world. Playing for hundreds of hours doing the grind is only one path to success, it is perfectly fair to play smarter, instead of harder. To realize that the in game obstacles might be hard but the stupidity of players is a constant and can be exploited a lot easier. And some people like the interraction with real people more than the challenges placed by the designers.
Running a Ponzi scheme depends on a steady supply of idiots, something no rule in a game is likely to dry up the supply of. Face it, they should be legal in the REAL world so long as the financials are fully disclosed. It is the fraud (like the US Social Security system) that makes any real world Ponzi scheme immoral. Run it out in the open and any person with a few brain cells still functioning would instantly see it for the scam it is and as for the others... it is immoral to let a sucker keep his money after all.
> Believe it or not, some Slashdot users might even be using Browzar thinking they are safe.
Then they deserve what they get. Anybody who didn't see 'scumware' written all over this the first time it made slashdot isn't cynical enough to survive out in the real world anyway.
Rule 1. No company gives out a free download for Windows that isn't scumware when it first ships or silently turns into scumware the second the company is expected to show a profit. Zero. Even Netscape turned into scumware before it's sad end. If you don't get source, don't trust it, especially if there isn't an upfront charge. Don't trust it even if you pay either. Source availibility is no 100% promise but at least you get a chance.
Rule 2. To a company you are either eyballs to stuff ads in front of, a unique ID to track (and sell) browsing/shopping/purchasing habits for or something to eventually monitize into recurring revenue stream. Nobody just wants to SELL you anything anymore and no company is 'giving' anything away, it is a loss leader, a trojan horse or a 'the first hit is free' free trial.
A hundred years ago you could have been excused for speaking something so horrific on the grounds that the jury was still out. History has now rendered its verdict. All of the fad philosophies of the late 19th and early 20th century were fatally flawed. It wasn't just that there were implemented poorly, the wrong people were in charge, the revolution wasn't hijacked. Communism, Socialism, National Socialism, Fascism, all were similar far more than they differed. All were based on the idea that an annoited 'wise' few were capable to and therefore would make all of the decisions and use the power of the modern nationstate to enforce their edicts at gunpoint. All four resulted in millions of corpses in mass graves each and every time any people anywhere tried to implement them. No, shut the fuck up you idiots in the back row, EVERY TIME.
> It is just another idea that tries to create a perfect world.
And gave us Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Valdimir Lenin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro.... need I continue? NO admirable figures headed up a communist state or similar state. The weakened version, socialism, has left Europe an enfeebled ghost of its former self and is on course to lead to the total loss of Western Civilization. Fascism and National Socialism proved so virulent it required WWII to purge it and even today just speaking their names causes all right thinking people to shudder in memory of the horrors.
> a) tell other people what's good and what's not good (tell as in force them to...)
But isn't that the core idea that underlies all four philosiphical systems you seem to admire? That a small elite, (wise and educated beyond the mere mortals they rule over) will make all decisions, for the people's 'own good.' So why is it good when a cabal of communists decide what is best for the people but so totally wrong when Western corporations try to export market proven products.
Hey, I agree with installing the penguin over spanding scarce export dollars, but lets be clear about these guys motivations, k?
>..if anyone suggests PERL thank them for their suggestion and get away from them as fast as possible...
I'll agree, but not for the reason I suspect you think Perl is contraindicated. I'd avoid it as a first language because it assumes three things that aren't true for a K-12 crowd.
1. Perl assumes you understand regexes. Nothing else in perl makes much sense without that base.
2. Perl assumes you speak UNIX. Too many perl idioms simply make no sense otherwise but are natural and beautiful if one IS a *NIX literate sort.
3. Perl really assumes that it isn't one's first language. If you can't even write a shell script yet, Perl isn't for you.
I do think it would be an interesting experiment to teach kids UNIX, then Bash scripting and move on to Tcl/Tk and/or Perl. But it would have to be part of an integrated computer science effort and not just a class.
From such a base any other language would be easy to grasp and any other platform, while a big step down in usability, would be easy to master. And out in the real world, scripting is a very useful skill even for those who don't make programming a career, unlike Scheme. Tcl/Tk gives complex GUI apps in a very cross platform environment it is a good useful language. Scheme on the other hand is this year's Pascal, i.e. a learning language rarely seen in the wild. And lets face it, anyone who can master Perl is forced to UNDERSTAND the basic programming concepts in a way no Pascal or Java weenie ever will.
> If you don't want to abide by the terms of the agreement, then don't listen to the music, don't watch > the video, and don't play with the software.
Sorry, wrong answer. The media companies do not have the right to impose any terms of sale they want. If they expect me to abide by any terms different than a SALE then we need a contract before any money has changed hands. Any funny business with DRM/DVDCCA/etc is just bullcrap that I have zero problems with removing. I bought the damned movie, I'll watch it wherever I please on whatever player I want. Exactly like I will buy a book and read it wherever I feel like it. And if I want to disassemble a program (i.e. READ it) I'll do that too.
> How freaking self-centered does a person have to be to believe that their rights to pirate music are > more relevant than the rights of the people who actually own the music?
And here is where your thinking went horribly wrong. They don't "own" the music. There is no concept in (US at least) the law which allows anyone to "own" music, movies, stories, programs, etc. Under our system of government, (the tatters remaining of the US Constitution) the Federal Government has the option to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" Note that this is not 'intellectual property' because Property rights do not exist "for limites Times". And nothing in that clause allows a media company or software house to impose whatever terms of sale they like, and do it after the sale besides!
A media company owns the COPYRIGHT on a work. It grants (for a limited time, not 99 years dammit!) a government monopoly on reproduction and public performance. Find me where the Constituition grants the government the power to give the media companies the ability to dictate other terms to buyers? Hint: it doesn't. Therefore the only laws regulating your purchase of Microsoft Office at Office Max are Copyright law (you can't post it on Bittorrent, give out copies to your whole company, etc) and the Uniform Commercial Code. Since you bought a copy any EULA attempting to set terms in violation of the UCC can and should be ignored. Especially any attempt to disclaim any warranties and all responsibility for product liability.
> "Bloat" is - and always has been - just a term used by computing elitists (ie: geeks) to describe features they personally have no interest in.
No, you have only identified one source of bloat. And while it IS an important source there is another bigger one.
One problem is the 'legacy' problem. Take a good look at glibc. In the beginning was a humble C library, and life was good. Then threads became popular, yet C was designed before threads and had features that were most assuredly unthread safe. So it gained new thread safe versions of many functions while retaining the originals for backwards compatibility. That wasn't so hard right? That was the only logical course of action in fact since breaking all existing programs was never a realistic option. Of course C predated other important things also, like i18n. So again it was extended. But of course some programs needed i18n and threads and others didn't. So both sets of code had to be touched. So now some calls come in four flavors, regular, threadsafe, i18n and i18n+threadsafe. And of course a fully functional system has the current Glibc and one or more older versions around to support older binaries. Hell, it wasn't all that long ago that it was common to see an entire set of libraries to support a.out executables as well as the current elf standard.
And this is on Linux, the more sane popular OS. Microsoft's problems are even worse because a decade ago they planned far more poorly and now must keep an even larger universe of legacy code running. On a Microsoft machine you have to still support DOS, Win16, the NT 3.x version of Win32, the Win9x version of Win32, the Win2K version of Win32, the WinXP version of Win32 and now the Vista reimagined version of Win32 plus the new APIs being added. And the next version must support all of that plus the new features they will have to add to make people upgrade.
Another is the increasing amoung of code needed just to get to a desktop and launch an app. Find the minimum package set to get Firefox to launch on a Fedora Core (or Debian, Suse, etc) machine. Plot that MB count backwards through time. That is bloat. Yes some of those features are very nice, but we are continually increasing the 'minimum' set. To understand the system one must have a passing knowledge with everything in that minimal set because tracking problems can lead you into any of that stuff.
Hey, maybe you blew out your hearing in your mispent youth but I still have most of mine remaining. Play a 128Kbps.mp3 in some $50 headphones (note I said HEADPHONES, not earbuds) and if you can't tell the difference you have some serious hearing loss. Same for playback on a better than average amp & speakers. (Not talking audiophiles and their thousand dollar speaker cables, just off the rack midrange Sony stuff hooked up with regular 16gauge Radio Shack wire.) On the other hand I can tolerate most anything at work, what with the crappy little Altec Lansing speakers and a pair of noisy racks of servers in the room I doubt I could reliably spot a 96Kbps file.
And please reread what I wrote about roadtrip music. Yes I could settle for lower quality but transcoding is an annoyance I'd rather not deal with.
As for your math, mine goes something like this. Fifty hours of FLAC needs about 32GB. 8G will hold enough FLAC for day to day wandering about and the hassle of transcoding is acceptable for a long trip. So 8GB is at the low limit of 'big enough.' A hard drive based player is just too fragile though so flash is where I want to go.
> flac ?.. try selling that idea to your pointy haired boss.
It is called lossless encoding. Some of us have more diverse tastes in music than just marginal talent/sluts like Britney Spears and the primitive ravings of some two cent rap 'artist.'.WAV is right out on any flash based device likely to ship this decade. In case you are so cocooned in Steve's World (tm) to know it, Flac isn't just a Linux thing ya know. Everyone who cares about audio quality is using either Flac or Shorten for their primary copy of a track and plugins for both formats are available for all major desktop platforms. Having to transcode every time would be a major PITA. Yes I'd do it for a roadtrip mix to get more tracks but for most use I'd like to be able to just dump a couple of albums of flacs and be able to really enjoy my music.
Then again, people like me couldn't give a rat's ass about AAC support at any quality. I don't have a single file in that format and aren't even sure if I could play one on my desktop, my xmms certainly doesn't have the plugin installed. Almost certain I couldn't encode one. As for the iTunes store, not only would I never buy DRM, I wouldn't buy lossy encodings at the prices they ask even if they were unencumbered.
So tell me again why I care? For that matter tell me why ANYONE who does not already own an iPod or use iTunes should care? If a player supports it, fine. If it doesn't, fine by me. Flac or Ogg support on the other hand would be a major point in a product's favor from my position since I do have a fair number of files in Flac currently and Ogg does sound better than mp3 at most bitrates.
I'm a geek. I tried one mp3 player long ago, the Rio PMP100? (it was the original parallel port version). It sucked. (If I have to enumerate the many ways it sucked you can be thankful you didn't own one.)
After getting that foolishness out of my system I haven't seen anything yet that tempted me. I learned from my misadventure and swore not to buy a half assed solution again. Here is what I currently want out a replacement for my rapidly aging Minidisk player:
1. Able to run rockbox well. It is the only hope of futureproofing and of getting a good feature set. Plus the UI won't suck ass. From my examination of what is out there Apple has the UI fairly solved but almost all of the others suck. Rockbox, as Free Software will continue to improve long after any vendor abandons their half finished firmware to move on to a newer model. Someone at Sandisk seems to be trying to help on this front. (see earlier stories here and at LWN)
2. It needs to have enough storage to put enough stuff for a long roadtrip. 8GB is about the bottom limit so this unit passes that test. I hate low bitrates. HATE em. I can readily hear artifacts in 128Kbps yet I want enough space for 50 or so hours. Granted, if i had enough software flexibility I could go low for roadtrip mixes, road noise will cover up a lot
3. Wide codec support. With the factory firmware it fails. All I see is MP3 and some useless DRM shit. No flac, shn or ogg/vorbis. It isn't clear whether Rockbox will be able to solve this problem, have to see if the hardware has enough cpu. I hate the idea of being forced to transcode, although as desktop CPU speeds continue to crank this is less of a problem as time goes by.
4. User replacable battery. This is the one that knocks the iPod out of consideration. Glad to see Sandisk gets this right. I don't have the cash to replace my consumer electronics every 12-18 months.
5. Color screens and video are useless wastes of money weight and battery life at the form factor of a flash based device. But I know I lost that argument. Sigh.... end users!
> Just create the devices, let's say five of them. Take them with you. Plug in normal devices. > Let them run uninterrupted for weeks. Keep watch while they're running.
Exactly. Hell, just demonstrate more usable energy come out of a black box than could be supplied by an equal volume/mass of gasoline + generator and you could attract investors as long as they could stuff a meter up it's bum and make sure it wasn't a radiothermic generator. Because even if it weren't 'free energy' there would still be a pretty good chance of it being something commercially viable, at least for some extreme segment of the market.
But these perpetual motion con artists never do that, for fairly obvious reasons.
Is it now the policy of slashdot to give headline coverage to every crackpot perpetual motion machine? It might have been mildly amusing had it been filed under humor, but as news? Even the snarky wisecrack from the editor doesn't make up for the misfiling.
But even as humor it should not have been posted since there was a similar one only a week or so ago and I really doubt anyone has a new joke to make about these assclowns that didn't get used then.
Listen up you primitive screwheads at/., there is no "Free Energy", no Free lunch, no tooth fairy and there ain't ever going to be flying cars. (We will eventually solve the tech for a flying car but the liability is insoluble.)
> You cannot rely on the hardcore to really drive sales anymore. the casual are more significant - and 600 is not casual.
Been guilty of that thinking myself. But lately I have been pondering thus: Nobody has been able to manufacture enough units to satisfy initial demand on a new console. That being the case for the PS3 I suspect it won't matter what price they sell it for, there will probably be enough fanbois, California (where the cost of living is such that $500-$600 isn't much) IT geeks, spoiled yuppie kids who will get one for Xmas regardless of whether mom has to scrounge one from Ebay for $1000, etc. to sell out the initial inventory for Xmas '06.
It is '07 where things get interesting. Once they reap all of the 'gotta have it at any price' sales and get production ramped up to churn out machines by the freighter load they have to sell em to regular folk. To sell the sort of mass quantities that can keep the factories humming and sustain developer interest that price does have to drop, and fairly fast. Can they do it?
> Unless I'm very wrong, brute-forcing can be pretty easily averted by simply using a long enough password. Last I checked, 8 chars is secure.
Wrong. 500 characters wouldn't secure a piece of crap like that. It is software only encryption, written by people who almost certainly don't understand the concept, and sold to people who don't understand that putting a flash drive in some random PC at an Internet cafe is unsafe.
Don't you people understand what that means? Odds are the password gets XORed with something lame and stored on the flash drive. Only a matter of time before somebody gets around to disassembling the crapware Win32 executable and writing a point and shoot password extraction program. Yes they COULD have done the crypto right but we know they didn't... or should know by now. After all they need a back way in themselves so they can unlock drives when somebody forgets their password and whines long enough on the support lines or when some LEO is looking for kiddie porn.
> So... that translates to you not paying for software.
Try reading, it is fundamental.:)
I gave one example where I'd pay, if I were a professional photographer I'd probably have to buy Photoshop.... assuming it got certified for Crossover Office or got a native port. But for my photo manipulation needs The GIMP is already more than I need.
I have paid for software for Linux, just not very often. I don't use emulation very much but I paid for VMWare when I could get it at a trade show for $100. I paid to upgrade for $39. When they decided the next hit was going to be full retail ($299) I declined and have now found Qemu. Yes Vmware is better (at emulating i386 on i386) but qemu won't lock me in again.
> Well, that right there eliminates 99% of commercial software.
Exactly. Most commercial software isn't worth making an exception for because it isn't exceptional. Spreadsheets are a thirty year old concept now, you'd have to really do something great in the implementation to make one worth paying for.
> > If it is going to process content I create it MUST write that in an open format, I won't be locked to a single vendor's whims.
> So you'll never buy a Linux program to burn a CD, or create a Flash movie, either.
I'm running the 64bit Firefox so I don't even have a Flash plugin so I really doubt I'd be creating any Flash content... at least until a Free player exists. Yet another reason to prefer Free, the closed shop still hasn't bothered making a 64 bit version for Windows (as of a while back when I bothered to look) so I'm not holding my breath for a Linux one. I had 3D support from XFree long before ATI bothered with a 64bit driver. And with the variety of Free CD burning programs out there I don't see a need to pay for one. DVD authoring is a window of opportunity but I'd bet a Free one shows up before any of the nimrods at the closed shops figure it out and port one over.
> Look, if you're not willing to buy commercial software just say so. Don't give commercial vendors impossible rules that > they have to somehow follow.
No, I'm just saying that in a world when a modern distro has 2000+ packages ready to install for free that if you want me to pay a commercial vendor is going to have to wow me. Show me a good reason to part with real cash money instead of taking the Mrs. out for an evening, putting that money into the Roth, etc. They don't have some inherent "right" to my business, they have to earn it. Just like the people who get my hardware business, by DVD purchases, etc.
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> I assure you, they'll want to charge even MORE for this type of disc as the new feature is that it plays
> in both regular DVD and HD-DVD players!
I dunno about that. They are currently in a very tricky situation. VHS was ripe for replacing, as soon as players dropped under $150 VHS quickly disappeared from retail shelves. Because face it, anybody who can't spring for a DVD player at $150, considering the plain benefits (quality, durability and shelf space savings) just wasn't the sort who bought much prerecorded media anyway. Even worse DVD sales are bigger than VHS ever was, most especially the creation of the huge market for TV shows on DVD, so stores many devote more space to DVD than they ever did to VHS.
The HD formats have a much harder battle, DVD is 'good enough' for anyone without a pretty good HD monitor and the players won't cross the 'impulse purchase' or Xmas gift line for a couple of years. So how do you break the chicken & the egg problem here? You can't get people to buy players unless they see movies. Even worse, the consumer electronics companies just might have created a monster here. What if people start holding off on major DVD purchases (box sets of long running TV shows for example) awaiting HD to sort itself out and get cheap? Dual format might be the only way out, if so you can bet the studios will do whatever it takes to keep the money rolling in.
But it is strictly a transitional technology, let BD/HD player penetration cross the half mark and the DVD layer will start disappearing. And of course A list movies won't soon go that route, they will want to be able to devote two layers to DVD on a DVD version and two layers to a HD version. At least at initial release. Of course stores won't keep both forever so eventually a single layer DVD + dual layer HD will be the only version stocked.... after all over time anybody who really cares about picture quality will be moving to an HD format.
Of course if they can bring the cost of production down low enough they might just do dual mode discs forever,
because after all, just how many cars now have builtin DVD systems? Replacing DVD now would be like getting rid of audio CDs.
And of course establishing the precedent that any new format has to be backwards compatible. Bad idea longterm.
> Now, I'm not a crypto expert
..but just because playback is going to be enabled on WindowsXP doesn't mean that the 'matter of time' is
Obviously. But thats ok, I'm only a clueful layman myself.
> but as I recall, the only reason that DeCSS occured was because some idiot company made a player
> where the stream of data that contained the encryption/decryption key was, in itself, not encrypted.
Close. Xing released a player where they didn't bother to obfuscate the player key. Just made it a little easier. At any rate, once the real crypto weenies saw the code they saw through to fundamental flaws so bad current Free players don't even use that Xing key anymore, they simply break the crypto. But had Xing not screwed up it would have just forced someone to hook up a debugger and go looking a bit. In much the same way as copy protection is removed from PC games within days of release, if not before a new game actually hits the street.
> Look at all of the other cryptographically signed things that people use on a regular basis, like the PSP
> or the X360 or the PS2 -- those keys are sent around inside the unit all the time and people have the code
> that sends the specific crypto keys, but they still can't crack it because it essentially is still a brute
> force crack.
Different problem. The player (or game console) doesn't possess the signing key. But it must have the player key. The problem I am talking about would be more akin to making a clone Xbox play official games instead of signing a new game to make it play on existing consoles. So yes, getting the signing key isn't likely without ninjas on a nocturnal mission, but to playback legally obtained content that isn't required. Any player must have a method to decode the media, otherwise it is sorta pointless. Disassemble any software player and the secret will be revealed.
> Also, the keys are encrypted using AES -- I'm not sure if it's 128, 192, or 256-bit keys that their using,
> but even 128 bit keys would take a top of the line computer *years* to crack. Not very effective.
Who cares. The player software has all of the decryption keys so you don't need to attack the cypher, just rip the keys out of a Windows PE executable along with the protocol to knock the secret knock on the drive.
>
> any longer or shorter.
Yes it does. PC hardware has no hardware protection, unlike embedded systems. PC hardware and Windows in specific is fairly well understood and many underground groups already possess the required skills to unobfuscate a windows executable.
> Because playback of HD-quality video utilizing BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP and cracking
> the DRM of BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP are exactly the same thing.
Essentially, yes. Standard PC hardware lacks any sort of real hardware protection like TPCM is going to add eventually. If Windows XP can execute the player a debugger can watch everything that happens and/or a virtualized copy of Windows can log every byte passing in or out of every port, memory location and processor register.
The attackers have the encrypted content, the decryption key and all of the algorithms, just obscured a bit. Add time and a few motivated attackers and hilarity will ensue. Yet another crypto scheme created by people who just don't understand and are going to be shocked by just how fast the cracks appear.
> Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon make it usable.
>That doesn't make it legal. It'll be real interesting if companies ever decide to crack down on everyone
> who is breaking the DMCA.
Not happening. They understand how badly they would get burned in court should they try. I'd represent myself even. All I'd have to do is let em bloviate till they run out of hot air then take five minutes before a jury to explain the situation.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, now that those idiots have wasted a week of your life let me sum this whole thing up in a few short words without any technical, legal or other jargon. I must confess. I did indeed play a DVD I bought in our local friendly neighborhood Walmart in a DVD drive, that even those retards never contended I didn't buy, on a computer I have free and clear title to. If you can find anything wrong in that you should send me to jail. Otherwise you should return a unanamious not guilty verdict so that these guys will get the point and not go looking for a way to get a retrial and put another dozen people through something this boring, pointless and stupid."
Might even go for the visual aid of having my computer sitting there, and then take a DVD out of the case and start it playing. If any DVDCCA lawyer thinks they can find a normal person who will see a crime in doing that they are criminally insane, about to go postal and wipe out a shopping center crazy.
Then spend the remainder of the five minutes giving em the Fully Informed Jury lesson. An hour later I'm looking for a shark of my own to do the countersuit on contingency. He/she/it could even have 90%, on the grounds that I don't want their money I only want to make stupidity a little more painful.
What the DMCA does is prevent RedHat from shipping mplayer, even years fron now after the MPEG2 patents expire.
> That was the grandparent post's whole point. If (in a magical fantasy land) the formats didn't get
> cracked, no one would buy in, and the formats would rot, which would be a good thing.
Why would it be a good thing?
Fact: DVD is near the end of its life for a high quality movie format. Disney titles for the kids? Another ten years, just like VHS is still clinging to life if that niche. A format to drive a 50" HD monitor? No.
Fact: Any new format will have all the DRM the industry thinks it can get away with.
Fact: The original plan was for Vista to be a TPCM only horror, and for HD content to only be playable on PCs with TPCM (ie. Vista and OS X on Intel). Hollywood had banked everything on that and was betrayed. (Nobody ever wins in a 'partnership' with Microsoft.)
Fact: If either/both of these new formats catch on they will be good enough to last 10-20 years, like DVD's eventual lifespan will probably end up and about like VHS's reign.
Fact: If both fail, by the time Hollywood is ready to try again we might not be lucky enough to get something so crackable.
Fact: If Hollywood has TPCM it is possible they might actually design something that can't be cracked. Or at least not cracked effortlessly, as DVDs are now. Microsoft's failure with Vista is our opportunity, we should seize it.
> Ther's a LOT more going on with these formats than just playing back a single moderate data rate file!
Nice features to have, but most of us will only be watching the movie. One HD video stream and one audio, either decoded ijn software or passed out on an optical plug. And do the math on the movie itself. Assume a dual layer BD-ROM (by the time a crack appears these will actually be shipping in quantity) with a single movie. That gives you 50GB of data for a two hour movie. Compare to a DVD with 9.6GB for a two hour movie. I make it out to a maximum 5 fold increase in raw bitrate spread over 12 times the pixels with the audio datarate remaining constant. If you try uncompressed audio you can kiss the video quality goodbye.
Now tell me again about the picture in picture and multiple 7.1 audio tracks? Forget the PiP, the bits aren't there to support it except for a couple of special features on the second bonus features disc nobody watches more than once anyway. About like the multiple angle feature of DVDs now. And nobody is going to be mixing the multiple audio tracks on their players with HD anymore than they do now on DVDs with commentary tracks. All of that is premixed during mastering.
No, just about any machine built this year has more than enough power for HD if you don't need to one core burning up doing decryption and reencryption. So what is about to happen is the Free players will work on far more machines than the official versions. People are going to notice, especially when they realise battery life will be a lot longer if they download mplayer.
> Personally I hope that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD _never_ get cracked, or at least if they do it's never ported to Windows in an easy to
> use fashion. It's hard to think of any other way to get the formats dropped faster.
You mean like DVD was dropped? Nope, once they commit billions to pushing a format that have to follow through. At least once it hits a critical mass. If the crack doesn't appear until after millions of players are fielded and thousands of titles are released they are stuck.
Since Vista dropped the requirement for TPCM we have all known the next gen DVD formats were going to get cracked. As soon as a software based player is available it is toast. And I'll tell ya something else. Mplayer won't need a dual core CPU and a 256MB video card for playback either.
Regular DVDs could be played back with a 1X DVD drive, a Pentium 90 and a video card with hardware scaling and color space conversion (i.e. xv support). A little back of the envelope math tells me a fast single core Intel or AMD cpu is more than enough. If your video card can do scaled video and colorspace on 1920x1080 windows you should be in the ballpark. If you have XvMC support you should be golden. HD video isn't THAT many more bits or pixels per second, despite what the marketing would have you believe.
Besides, I still don't understand your thinking. If it isn't cracked I ain't buying in. Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon make it usable. So if this stuff ain't cracked it can all rot in hell for all I care.
> I'm sure a lot of people don't want anyone to know who they voted for in that election.
Why not? The state Republican Party was passing out bumper stickers with "This time vote for the crook." on em. Duke certainly wasn't welcome in Republican ranks. Just a fluke of our crazy open primary system allowed the asshat to slide into the runoff.
Fortunately I wasn't in the state for that election cycle, instead I had a choice almost as easy to make, W over Ann Richards across the border in TX.
> If so hes no longer acting solely in the game would and the laws of the land may apply, he will certainly have a lot of tax to pay.
Just like any other income, including gaming winnings. If you win at poker you are supposed to count it as income, even if played in an area where the game itself is illegal. Point is the game world has its rules and the real one has a different set, the two really can't be considered to intersect except on some fairly rigid boundry lines, i.e. you pay real world dollars to be admitted. In one world the guy is scamming the crap out of people. But viewed from here it is only a matter of someone outplaying the other subscribers. Remember, it is role playing, just like it is OK to take on teh role of a powerful wizard or fighter, being a thief is a permissable game role in every MMOG I have heard of. Most even allow players to assume the role of characters who, by their very definition, must be evil. Yet people are getting their panties all in a twist because someone actually does something 'naughty?'
Those who don't understand history...... There was a reason Gary Gygax intentionally designed D&D to encourage players to be Good or at least neutral, and not evil. Too bad the morons designing MMOGs are too young to have read the original DMG or old Dragon magazines articles on the subject and therefore understand why designing a game world where it pays to be evil tends to lead to a crappy campaign and unhappy players. Back in teh day it was a instant touchstone to decide if you wanted to play in a group. As soon as they started talking about their Anti-Palidins and vampire characters you knew their DM was an idiot and the players had almost certainly never played in a well run campaign.
> If he remains in the game world, hes going to be in big trouble, the number of suckers will run out and he will have a lot of angry investors on his tail.
Which is exactly as it should be. Actions in the game world have consequences in that world.
> anyone who doesnt play a MMOG is instantly biased in their response.
Not really. I don't play but know enough Evercrack heads and played enough D&D to know the reality in a MMOG.
> virtual money can be transferred into real money for all of these games.
So? Anyone with enough skill at any 'game' can, if motivated, find a way to translate that skill into cash. If enough people do it this becomes regularized, see professional sports. You hippies need to quit it with this "The Internet is a new thing that changes all the rules." crap and realize it doesn't. Same shit different day. The tech changes but people don't and in the end it is all about the people. People got rich in meat space off of skills that had no obvious way to make a profit, now they are doing in online, nothing to see here, move along.
If a game is going to be successful it must account for that, to find a way to allow 'pros' (those who will find a way to make a living from playing) to be in the game alongside the semi-pros (those only looking to pay their fees and perhaps derive a hobby income) and the pure amateurs with everyone walking away happy. See pool or poker for some ideas on how to make it work. Again, these are problems going back centuries, not some new net thing.
> taking their money away or their equipment has a huge impact on that player.
Exactly. Because of the unreal way they allow death to be nothing more than a momentary bother, cash and gear become what is important, thus what all the effort is expended on acquiring. Again, quit stating the obvious. If physical objects (coins and gear) are what the point of the game is, why is it wrong for a rational person to decide that getting this stuff from players is easier than grinding for it? At most it points up a flaw in the game design.
Listen up folks, it is a GAME WORLD. Nothing you do there should subject you to any sort of sanction in the real one. The whole point is to be able to do things you can't do in reality. After all, in the real world you can't kill people, heck you can't even kill most things. In most games though you wade hip deep in gore. If the game system doesn't provide a 'fix' then exploiting it is just good play according to the rules of the game world.
Playing for hundreds of hours doing the grind is only one path to success, it is perfectly fair to play smarter, instead of harder. To realize that the in game obstacles might be hard but the stupidity of players is a constant and can be exploited a lot easier. And some people like the interraction with real people more than the challenges placed by the designers.
Running a Ponzi scheme depends on a steady supply of idiots, something no rule in a game is likely to dry up the supply of. Face it, they should be legal in the REAL world so long as the financials are fully disclosed. It is the fraud (like the US Social Security system) that makes any real world Ponzi scheme immoral. Run it out in the open and any person with a few brain cells still functioning would instantly see it for the scam it is and as for the others... it is immoral to let a sucker keep his money after all.
> Believe it or not, some Slashdot users might even be using Browzar thinking they are safe.
Then they deserve what they get. Anybody who didn't see 'scumware' written all over this the first time it made slashdot isn't cynical enough to survive out in the real world anyway.
Rule 1. No company gives out a free download for Windows that isn't scumware when it first ships or silently turns into scumware the second the company is expected to show a profit. Zero. Even Netscape turned into scumware before it's sad end. If you don't get source, don't trust it, especially if there isn't an upfront charge. Don't trust it even if you pay either. Source availibility is no 100% promise but at least you get a chance.
Rule 2. To a company you are either eyballs to stuff ads in front of, a unique ID to track (and sell) browsing/shopping/purchasing habits for or something to eventually monitize into recurring revenue stream. Nobody just wants to SELL you anything anymore and no company is 'giving' anything away, it is a loss leader, a trojan horse or a 'the first hit is free' free trial.
> And exactly why is being a communist bad?
A hundred years ago you could have been excused for speaking something so horrific on the grounds that the jury was still out. History has now rendered its verdict. All of the fad philosophies of the late 19th and early 20th century were fatally flawed. It wasn't just that there were implemented poorly, the wrong people were in charge, the revolution wasn't hijacked. Communism, Socialism, National Socialism, Fascism, all were similar far more than they differed. All were based on the idea that an annoited 'wise' few were capable to and therefore would make all of the decisions and use the power of the modern nationstate to enforce their edicts at gunpoint. All four resulted in millions of corpses in mass graves each and every time any people anywhere tried to implement them. No, shut the fuck up you idiots in the back row, EVERY TIME.
> It is just another idea that tries to create a perfect world.
And gave us Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Valdimir Lenin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro.... need I continue? NO admirable figures headed up a communist state or similar state. The weakened version, socialism, has left Europe an enfeebled ghost of its former self and is on course to lead to the total loss of Western Civilization. Fascism and National Socialism proved so virulent it required WWII to purge it and even today just speaking their names causes all right thinking people to shudder in memory of the horrors.
> a) tell other people what's good and what's not good (tell as in force them to...)
But isn't that the core idea that underlies all four philosiphical systems you seem to admire? That a small elite, (wise and educated beyond the mere mortals they rule over) will make all decisions, for the people's 'own good.' So why is it good when a cabal of communists decide what is best for the people but so totally wrong when Western corporations try to export market proven products.
Hey, I agree with installing the penguin over spanding scarce export dollars, but lets be clear about these guys motivations, k?
> ..if anyone suggests PERL thank them for their suggestion and get away from them as fast as possible...
I'll agree, but not for the reason I suspect you think Perl is contraindicated. I'd avoid it as a first language because it assumes three things that aren't true for a K-12 crowd.
1. Perl assumes you understand regexes. Nothing else in perl makes much sense without that base.
2. Perl assumes you speak UNIX. Too many perl idioms simply make no sense otherwise but are natural and beautiful if one IS a *NIX literate sort.
3. Perl really assumes that it isn't one's first language. If you can't even write a shell script yet, Perl isn't for you.
I do think it would be an interesting experiment to teach kids UNIX, then Bash scripting and move on to Tcl/Tk and/or Perl. But it would have to be part of an integrated computer science effort and not just a class.
From such a base any other language would be easy to grasp and any other platform, while a big step down in usability, would be easy to master. And out in the real world, scripting is a very useful skill even for those who don't make programming a career, unlike Scheme. Tcl/Tk gives complex GUI apps in a very cross platform environment it is a good useful language. Scheme on the other hand is this year's Pascal, i.e. a learning language rarely seen in the wild. And lets face it, anyone who can master Perl is forced to UNDERSTAND the basic programming concepts in a way no Pascal or Java weenie ever will.
> If you don't want to abide by the terms of the agreement, then don't listen to the music, don't watch
> the video, and don't play with the software.
Sorry, wrong answer. The media companies do not have the right to impose any terms of sale they want. If they expect me to abide by any terms different than a SALE then we need a contract before any money has changed hands. Any funny business with DRM/DVDCCA/etc is just bullcrap that I have zero problems with removing. I bought the damned movie, I'll watch it wherever I please on whatever player I want. Exactly like I will buy a book and read it wherever I feel like it. And if I want to disassemble a program (i.e. READ it) I'll do that too.
> How freaking self-centered does a person have to be to believe that their rights to pirate music are
> more relevant than the rights of the people who actually own the music?
And here is where your thinking went horribly wrong. They don't "own" the music. There is no concept in (US at least) the law which allows anyone to "own" music, movies, stories, programs, etc. Under our system of government, (the tatters remaining of the US Constitution) the Federal Government has the option to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" Note that this is not 'intellectual property' because Property rights do not exist "for limites Times". And nothing in that clause allows a media company or software house to impose whatever terms of sale they like, and do it after the sale besides!
A media company owns the COPYRIGHT on a work. It grants (for a limited time, not 99 years dammit!) a government monopoly on reproduction and public performance. Find me where the Constituition grants the government the power to give the media companies the ability to dictate other terms to buyers? Hint: it doesn't. Therefore the only laws regulating your purchase of Microsoft Office at Office Max are Copyright law (you can't post it on Bittorrent, give out copies to your whole company, etc) and the Uniform Commercial Code. Since you bought a copy any EULA attempting to set terms in violation of the UCC can and should be ignored. Especially any attempt to disclaim any warranties and all responsibility for product liability.
> "Bloat" is - and always has been - just a term used by computing elitists (ie: geeks) to describe features they personally have no interest in.
No, you have only identified one source of bloat. And while it IS an important source there is another bigger one.
One problem is the 'legacy' problem. Take a good look at glibc. In the beginning was a humble C library, and life was good. Then threads became popular, yet C was designed before threads and had features that were most assuredly unthread safe. So it gained new thread safe versions of many functions while retaining the originals for backwards compatibility. That wasn't so hard right? That was the only logical course of action in fact since breaking all existing programs was never a realistic option. Of course C predated other important things also, like i18n. So again it was extended. But of course some programs needed i18n and threads and others didn't. So both sets of code had to be touched. So now some calls come in four flavors, regular, threadsafe, i18n and i18n+threadsafe. And of course a fully functional system has the current Glibc and one or more older versions around to support older binaries. Hell, it wasn't all that long ago that it was common to see an entire set of libraries to support a.out executables as well as the current elf standard.
And this is on Linux, the more sane popular OS. Microsoft's problems are even worse because a decade ago they planned far more poorly and now must keep an even larger universe of legacy code running. On a Microsoft machine you have to still support DOS, Win16, the NT 3.x version of Win32, the Win9x version of Win32, the Win2K version of Win32, the WinXP version of Win32 and now the Vista reimagined version of Win32 plus the new APIs being added. And the next version must support all of that plus the new features they will have to add to make people upgrade.
Another is the increasing amoung of code needed just to get to a desktop and launch an app. Find the minimum package set to get Firefox to launch on a Fedora Core (or Debian, Suse, etc) machine. Plot that MB count backwards through time. That is bloat. Yes some of those features are very nice, but we are continually increasing the 'minimum' set. To understand the system one must have a passing knowledge with everything in that minimal set because tracking problems can lead you into any of that stuff.
> " I can readily hear artifacts in 128Kbps "
.mp3 in some $50 headphones (note I said HEADPHONES, not earbuds) and if you can't tell the difference you have some serious hearing loss. Same for playback on a better than average amp & speakers. (Not talking audiophiles and their thousand dollar speaker cables, just off the rack midrange Sony stuff hooked up with regular 16gauge Radio Shack wire.) On the other hand I can tolerate most anything at work, what with the crappy little Altec Lansing speakers and a pair of noisy racks of servers in the room I doubt I could reliably spot a 96Kbps file.
> well, hello there superman.
Hey, maybe you blew out your hearing in your mispent youth but I still have most of mine remaining. Play a 128Kbps
And please reread what I wrote about roadtrip music. Yes I could settle for lower quality but transcoding is an annoyance I'd rather not deal with.
As for your math, mine goes something like this. Fifty hours of FLAC needs about 32GB. 8G will hold enough FLAC for day to day wandering about and the hassle of transcoding is acceptable for a long trip. So 8GB is at the low limit of 'big enough.' A hard drive based player is just too fragile though so flash is where I want to go.
> flac ?.. try selling that idea to your pointy haired boss.
.WAV is right out on any flash based device likely to ship this decade. In case you are so cocooned in Steve's World (tm) to know it, Flac isn't just a Linux thing ya know. Everyone who cares about audio quality is using either Flac or Shorten for their primary copy of a track and plugins for both formats are available for all major desktop platforms. Having to transcode every time would be a major PITA. Yes I'd do it for a roadtrip mix to get more tracks but for most use I'd like to be able to just dump a couple of albums of flacs and be able to really enjoy my music.
It is called lossless encoding. Some of us have more diverse tastes in music than just marginal talent/sluts like Britney Spears and the primitive ravings of some two cent rap 'artist.'
> Does it have an AAC codec to beat the ipod?
Then again, people like me couldn't give a rat's ass about AAC support at any quality. I don't have a single file in that format and aren't even sure if I could play one on my desktop, my xmms certainly doesn't have the plugin installed. Almost certain I couldn't encode one. As for the iTunes store, not only would I never buy DRM, I wouldn't buy lossy encodings at the prices they ask even if they were unencumbered.
So tell me again why I care? For that matter tell me why ANYONE who does not already own an iPod or use iTunes should care? If a player supports it, fine. If it doesn't, fine by me. Flac or Ogg support on the other hand would be a major point in a product's favor from my position since I do have a fair number of files in Flac currently and Ogg does sound better than mp3 at most bitrates.
I'm a geek. I tried one mp3 player long ago, the Rio PMP100? (it was the original parallel port version). It sucked. (If I have to enumerate the many ways it sucked you can be thankful you didn't own one.)
After getting that foolishness out of my system I haven't seen anything yet that tempted me. I learned from my misadventure and swore not to buy a half assed solution again. Here is what I currently want out a replacement for my rapidly aging Minidisk player:
1. Able to run rockbox well. It is the only hope of futureproofing and of getting a good feature set. Plus the UI won't suck ass. From my examination of what is out there Apple has the UI fairly solved but almost all of the others suck. Rockbox, as Free Software will continue to improve long after any vendor abandons their half finished firmware to move on to a newer model. Someone at Sandisk seems to be trying to help on this front. (see earlier stories here and at LWN)
2. It needs to have enough storage to put enough stuff for a long roadtrip. 8GB is about the bottom limit so this unit passes that test. I hate low bitrates. HATE em. I can readily hear artifacts in 128Kbps yet I want enough space for 50 or so hours. Granted, if i had enough software flexibility I could go low for roadtrip mixes, road noise will cover up a lot
3. Wide codec support. With the factory firmware it fails. All I see is MP3 and some useless DRM shit. No flac, shn or ogg/vorbis. It isn't clear whether Rockbox will be able to solve this problem, have to see if the hardware has enough cpu. I hate the idea of being forced to transcode, although as desktop CPU speeds continue to crank this is less of a problem as time goes by.
4. User replacable battery. This is the one that knocks the iPod out of consideration. Glad to see Sandisk gets this right. I don't have the cash to replace my consumer electronics every 12-18 months.
5. Color screens and video are useless wastes of money weight and battery life at the form factor of a flash based device. But I know I lost that argument. Sigh.... end users!
> Just create the devices, let's say five of them. Take them with you. Plug in normal devices.
> Let them run uninterrupted for weeks. Keep watch while they're running.
Exactly. Hell, just demonstrate more usable energy come out of a black box than could be supplied by an equal volume/mass of gasoline + generator and you could attract investors as long as they could stuff a meter up it's bum and make sure it wasn't a radiothermic generator. Because even if it weren't 'free energy' there would still be a pretty good chance of it being something commercially viable, at least for some extreme segment of the market.
But these perpetual motion con artists never do that, for fairly obvious reasons.
Is it now the policy of slashdot to give headline coverage to every crackpot perpetual motion machine? It might have been mildly amusing had it been filed under humor, but as news? Even the snarky wisecrack from the editor doesn't make up for the misfiling.
/., there is no "Free Energy", no Free lunch, no tooth fairy and there ain't ever going to be flying cars. (We will eventually solve the tech for a flying car but the liability is insoluble.)
But even as humor it should not have been posted since there was a similar one only a week or so ago and I really doubt anyone has a new joke to make about these assclowns that didn't get used then.
Listen up you primitive screwheads at
> You cannot rely on the hardcore to really drive sales anymore. the casual are more significant - and 600 is not casual.
Been guilty of that thinking myself. But lately I have been pondering thus: Nobody has been able to manufacture enough units to satisfy initial demand on a new console. That being the case for the PS3 I suspect it won't matter what price they sell it for, there will probably be enough fanbois, California (where the cost of living is such that $500-$600 isn't much) IT geeks, spoiled yuppie kids who will get one for Xmas regardless of whether mom has to scrounge one from Ebay for $1000, etc. to sell out the initial inventory for Xmas '06.
It is '07 where things get interesting. Once they reap all of the 'gotta have it at any price' sales and get production ramped up to churn out machines by the freighter load they have to sell em to regular folk. To sell the sort of mass quantities that can keep the factories humming and sustain developer interest that price does have to drop, and fairly fast. Can they do it?
> Unless I'm very wrong, brute-forcing can be pretty easily averted by simply using a long enough password. Last I checked, 8 chars is secure.
Wrong. 500 characters wouldn't secure a piece of crap like that. It is software only encryption, written by people who almost certainly don't understand the concept, and sold to people who don't understand that putting a flash drive in some random PC at an Internet cafe is unsafe.
Don't you people understand what that means? Odds are the password gets XORed with something lame and stored on the flash drive. Only a matter of time before somebody gets around to disassembling the crapware Win32 executable and writing a point and shoot password extraction program. Yes they COULD have done the crypto right but we know they didn't... or should know by now. After all they need a back way in themselves so they can unlock drives when somebody forgets their password and whines long enough on the support lines or when some LEO is looking for kiddie porn.
> So... that translates to you not paying for software.
:)
Try reading, it is fundamental.
I gave one example where I'd pay, if I were a professional photographer I'd probably have to buy Photoshop.... assuming it got certified for Crossover Office or got a native port. But for my photo manipulation needs The GIMP is already more than I need.
I have paid for software for Linux, just not very often. I don't use emulation very much but I paid for VMWare when I could get it at a trade show for $100. I paid to upgrade for $39. When they decided the next hit was going to be full retail ($299) I declined and have now found Qemu. Yes Vmware is better (at emulating i386 on i386) but qemu won't lock me in again.
> Well, that right there eliminates 99% of commercial software.
Exactly. Most commercial software isn't worth making an exception for because it isn't exceptional. Spreadsheets are a thirty year old concept now, you'd have to really do something great in the implementation to make one worth paying for.
> > If it is going to process content I create it MUST write that in an open format, I won't be locked to a single vendor's whims.
> So you'll never buy a Linux program to burn a CD, or create a Flash movie, either.
I'm running the 64bit Firefox so I don't even have a Flash plugin so I really doubt I'd be creating any Flash content... at least until a Free player exists. Yet another reason to prefer Free, the closed shop still hasn't bothered making a 64 bit version for Windows (as of a while back when I bothered to look) so I'm not holding my breath for a Linux one. I had 3D support from XFree long before ATI bothered with a 64bit driver. And with the variety of Free CD burning programs out there I don't see a need to pay for one. DVD authoring is a window of opportunity but I'd bet a Free one shows up before any of the nimrods at the closed shops figure it out and port one over.
> Look, if you're not willing to buy commercial software just say so. Don't give commercial vendors impossible rules that
> they have to somehow follow.
No, I'm just saying that in a world when a modern distro has 2000+ packages ready to install for free that if you want me to pay a commercial vendor is going to have to wow me. Show me a good reason to part with real cash money instead of taking the Mrs. out for an evening, putting that money into the Roth, etc. They don't have some inherent "right" to my business, they have to earn it. Just like the people who get my hardware business, by DVD purchases, etc.