Then you need to buy your phones from someone other than your cellular provider. Motorola is happy to sell you their cool new phones at their Motostore, and the lockdown that the American carriers Verizon and Sprint are famous for is simply gone. My direct-from-Motorola phone is free to use Bluetooth to exchange pictures and music, it plays my MP3s via A2DP quite well, I have dropped in a couple of J2ME programs, Opera browses wherever I want and stores whatever bookmarks I choose, and I can drop in a SIM for AT&T or T-Mobile here, or from whoever I want when I'm overseas.
You may think you are paying more for the phone if you buy it without the phone company subsidy. (And you are initially, anyway.) But if you consider the $0.40 pay-per-use for MMS that Verizon charges just to get your pictures off your "free" phone as a part of the overall price, or $0.99 per song downloaded to your phone, you'll quickly have paid less for a completely unlocked phone. (A friend quoted me those figures from Verizon a couple of years ago, I don't know if Verizon is still that expensive or locked down today.) My phone is free of carrier restrictions, however, and I can use Bluetooth, a USB cable, or a micro-SD card to put media and files into and out of it all day long.
Best of all, my unaffiliated phone doesn't have that Cingular bug-splat logo squished across it anywhere!:-)
While I don't have all of the predictions made from 40 years ago to check their facts, I would bet this is one of the most accurate of all that were made. (That is, if this magazine article isn't an elaborate hoax.) But statistically speaking, if a thousand prognosticators made a thousand predictions, wouldn't you expect some to be better than others, and a few to be way, way better than others?
The nice thing about our vantage point here in the future is that we can cherry-pick the best predictions and say "See, this guy was a really smart futurist!" We need to also occasionally hold up the articles featuring nuclear airplanes, the television as a passing fad, simplified coal chutes, and technologically advanced buggy whips, and say to ourselves "yup, we're still not particularly clever about this prediction stuff."
And if you want a glimpse into his sci fi writing, check him out on Amazon. Judging that book by its cover, I'd also guess that he'd have predicted martians would have taken over by now.
If you stretch it a bit, he did even better than you gave him credit for:
> cities... covered by the new domes
This one didn't happen It kind of did in Minneapolis, but rather than dome the whole city at once we simply used habitrail tubes to interconnect buildings. Even when it's -20, I can drive to a parking ramp half a mile from work and get there without wearing a coat.
> Private cars are banned inside most city / Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public
Your basic Arcology idea, but not yet in practice. London has the congestion tax already (and I think New York is adding it soon) -- it effectively bans thousands of cars from the city, but not all -- and they still have the Underground. But it's certainly not "most" cities.
> With the U.S. population having soared to 350 million
Close, only 270 million Closer, it's actually over 303 million today.
>Electrostatic precipitators clean the air
Ionic Breeze anyone? The "Ionic Breeze" doesn't actually do anything at all according to Consumer Reports lab testing, but Honeywell has been making whole-house electrostatic precipitators for many years. And they were only about 5 years away from the article, we were using them in a machine shop I worked at in the mid 1970s -- one of my jobs was to clean them periodically.)
What I found most interesting about this article is how shopping in 2008 is actually BETTER than was imagined in 1968.
...
today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels.
And you can view products that don't work from companies that don't exist, get competing prices from vendors that never ship, read reviews from trolls and shills from every cave and mother's basement around the world, and you can pay by credit card to a hijacked site somewhere in Estonia.
"Better" is true relative to nothing at all, but caveat emptor applies far more today than it did in 1968.
Hmm...that's pretty much my experience with Amazon Prime's One-Click shopping. Is this prior art?"
"Prior art" implies that a blueprint exists for a practical implementation of the idea. I've seen patents with more vague descriptions than this. Hell, people are still trying to get patents on perpetual motion machines, and we know there are no blueprints for practical implementations of those.
If I were fighting Amazon's patent, I'd surely trot out this article.
So according to you it's not locked down and can do everything it says it can do? Let's look at this carefully. Just exactly what does it say it can do? I'll check the box, sitting here on my keyboard. And you're absolutely right, there is no mention of it not being locked down on this box. As a matter of fact, there is absolutely no functionality at all listed -- it doesn't even claim to be a music player! It merely says that it includes earphones, a USB 2.0 cable, and requires a Mac or PC. They could have included a nonfunctional metal and glass sculpture and as long as it included the cable and earphones it would have met their box's claims.
So, the non-existent claims on the box are clearly not going to solve anything. Apparently, the entire product is sold on nothing but high expectations. So, what would a reasonable person expect, and what did I expect? A music player, certainly, and probably one similar to their previous products. An awesome interface, surely. Good sound. Easy to understand. I think those are reasonable expectations.
So, what else might I expect? Well, my friends have owned iPods since the very first rotary dial model, and have used them as portable drives. The older ones were firewire drives, and the newer ones were USB drives. I've seen them carry arbitrary files from work to home and vice versa for many years. I've seen them plug them into several computers and unprotected music files copied from them and used. I certainly sense a pattern here, and it seems perfectly reasonable for me to expect the same behavior from their newest model that was available in every previous model they've ever sold.
So I buy the product, and for the most part I'm not disappointed; it is indeed a music player, the interface is great, and the sound is good, and it is indeed easy to use and understand. I bought a product based on nothing but a large set of expectations, none of which were listed on the box. I expected those features and they were present.
But strangely, it does not function like every other iPod in the history of iPods. It does not act like a removable media storage device. This upsets me. I learn from friends, both online and in real life, and also from an Apple salesman, that my device is specifically more crippled than every other iPod that came before it. I now feel betrayed by the purchase. So I make this observation and express disappointment, and have half a dozen people helpfully offer me suggestions that it can do exactly what I expect, if I just click this non-existent box or double-click this grayed-out and inaccessible song. I try their suggestions only to discover they're incorrect because they're basing their assistance on their experience with other iPods, not the current model. Apparently they, too, have the same expectations that I had when I purchased mine. In my world view, this confirms that my expectations are entirely realistic.
Yet according to you: 1) I am still somehow wrong about the lockdown, 2) I have no ability to figure out a simple interface, 3) I am silly, 4) I have unrealistic expectations, 5) I have a blame-others mindset, and 6) I am deserving of the abuse.
Y'know, your reply is substantially more offensive than his vulgar abusive reply. You seem to be filled with righteous indignation that silly idiots are not properly adoring your immaculately conceived product; and you are unable to change your mind based on factual evidence to the contrary. When you next get burned by an Apple product not doing what you expect of it, I hope you take the opportunity to truthfully evaluate what went wrong in your thinking, instead of what went wrong with the product.
It's easy to point to Manuel and blame him for cleaning toilets for $2.00/hr. After all, his skin is darker, and he don't talk 'murrican.
The real jerb problem in this country is not that Manuel is doing the $7.00/hr job for $2, but that our corporations have been shipping all our jerbs overseas, (both in manufacturing and services) and the corporations continue to pour U.S. dollars over the borders faster than Mexicans can climb back in. The large corporate interests must be pleased that all the focus on border security is masking their bigger role in collapsing our economy for their profit.
Thanks for the detailed description. I'll have her give it a try just to see if it works, (although she's already quite happy with the dock thing, so that money's already gone.)
Wow, it's almost like your posting is an exemplary match of the title of the article: "The Wrath of the Apple Tribe." In two paragraphs you call me 1) a dumbass, 2) a douchebag, 3) a Brawndo-drinker (whatever the hell Brawndo is, but it doesn't sound good), 4) someone who has given you shit for years, 5) too dumb to figure out a fucking iPod, and infer that I'm 6) an idiot and 7) can't be bothered to read.
That's seven (OK, maybe six minus the Brawndo thing) insults from a total stranger, all because I truthfully reported that Apple sold me a product that is locked down (and they totally offended me as a customer in the process.) That's the kind of defensive attack I'd expect from a Scientologist, not from a rational person. (By the way, my use of the term "cult" comes from the popular book "The Cult of Mac", which documents the rabid fanaticism that has sprung up around Apple.)
You seem to be in strong denial that your precious company is capable of selling a crippled product, and you would rather attack a critic than learn the facts. Perhaps you should reread TFA. Perhaps you should come over to my wife's workplace and show her how you can actually get the iPod to play music on her PC, as long as you can restrain yourself to calling her fewer than three vulgar names. Or perhaps you should grow some perspective on life, and mature for a while.
Then you likely tried it with an older iPod. (Thanks for that, by the way, I do appreciate the effort.) Try it again with an iPod touch running 1.1.4 or later. It's not that we didn't see the music in the iTunes on her work PC under the iPod -- we do see it. The problem is that the entire music listing is completely grayed out in iTunes, and she was unable to click or double-click any of them. No music played on her PC. It didn't work.
Thanks again for offering advice; I'd really like it if any of these suggestions worked for her. But it doesn't. None of them worked. As I have repeatedly pointed out to lots of people posting in this thread, it's really and truly locked down.
The only suggestion I would have had for her that I know would have worked without buying the speaker-thing would have been to connect a cable from her headphone-out jack to the to line-in jack on her PC, and then help her muddle through the utterly user-unfriendly Windows mixer control. The $100 was cheaper than that nightmare scenario.
There's a hidden folder named "iPod Control" on the iPod. Just copy the music folder out of that, and then into iTunes (or WMP or whatever) and it'll pull the song info from the ID3 tags.
Thanks for the advice, but it doesn't work. The iPod touch (version 1.1.4) does not present itself as a disk drive at all. There is no removable USB drive, and so no folder from which to copy the files. That's why I got mad about the lockdown. It should have worked, it used to work, and now Apple made it stop working.
No shit! Those people are surprisingly intolerant of criticism, especially from someone who is reporting the reactions of a "non-geek". What's funny is that I seriously do love the user interface -- that's an amazing way to present information. But boy, point out that Apple is a for-profit corporation completely kowtowing to the RIAA and suddenly the negative mods come out of the woodwork. Religion, hell, these are the Fundamental Creationists of the computer world.
Your last assertion is absolutely correct and true. "iTunes wouldn't let her copy the songs onto the PC and use them in any way she pleased."
She *did* install iTunes on the PC, and it still wouldn't let her copy or play her music. She couldn't "use them in any way she pleased." It was all locked down, nothing made sense to her, she was pissed off, and spent the next hour on the phone all pissed off and trying to get me to help figure out why it wouldn't just work. I really didn't enjoy that phone call.
If you want to talk to her while she's pissed off and trying to make a piece of hardware that's supposed to "just work" work, be my guest. Post your phone number and I'll have her give you a call. But as far as my experience with it went, it doesn't "just work" -- it locked her out.
I even asked my Apple buddy if he could help me, and he said (and I quote) "Think about it from Apple's perspective selling this to the music companies. They don't want you to be able to copy your music to another computer." So I thought about it. Fuck that, and fuck Apple.
I don't know why the Mac hating crowd needs to resort to 6+ year old marketing slogans
'Cuz I'm too drunk to remember their current slogan, whatever the hell it is. I know there's something folksy about the Macbook Air music, and U2 sings Vertigo for old iPods, and there's a funny "Hi, I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" commercial campaign, but no actual slogans that have sloshed their way to my addled forebrain.
If they had a good slogan now, I'm sure I would have made my joke about it instead. But I came up empty, like a manila envelope with nothing inside.
Oh, and I remember Ellen Feiss. She was kind of hot, in that grunge way. But nobody takes Ellen Feiss pills any more, they smoke Ellen Feiss blunts instead.:-)
Can you explain what you mean by "consumer lock down"?
My wife couldn't copy her music from her iPod to her work PC, so she ended up buying a $100 docking iHome thing from Target just so she could listen at work. It's sitting right next to her new PC with its shiny new unused stereo speakers.
After searching the web, I discovered that older iPod Touches (version 1.1.1 and earlier) used to present a USB mass storage device to a PC that didn't already have iTunes installed. That would have allowed her to simply drag and drop her music from the iPod to her PC and let her play it. But her new iPod doesn't permit that -- Apple deliberately crippled the machine she owns.
Now, I'm sure there are a bunch of Apple geeks out there that have some information or geekish knowledge that allows them to easily copy music from their iPods to other computers. Fine, you do that. But that shouldn't be an ordinary consumer's job to learn how to circumvent some company's crappy restriction. That's the whole Apple selling point, that things are easy to use. But as far as I'm concerned, the device should never have been crippled, and up until a few releases ago (according to the web), it wasn't.
And before anyone comments on AAC or the Apple DRM scheme, I know that every single song in this iPod is MP3 encoded because I personally ripped it directly from Compact Discs that she owns using Exact Audio Copy. She has bought nothing from the iTunes music store, and there is not a single byte of DRMd music in this iPod. This is purely a restriction added by Apple to prevent legally owned files from being transferred from her iPod to a computer that should be able to access it. That completely blows chunks, so to hell with Apple.
I'm pretty good friends with an Apple salesman. He loves their products and believes in the company. Both of those are prerequisites to being a successful salesman regardless of the products being sold, but Apple seems to make it easier than just about any other company. It's an amazing cult.
I personally have purchased only one Apple product -- I recently bought my wife an iPod touch. While I absolutely love the cool user interface experience, the consumer lock down is much worse than I imagined it would be (and I was expecting bad.) Overall I can only rate the thing "half-way above shit." I'll never buy anything else from them and I'm not going to recommend them to other people unless that changes drastically.
Remember to Dial Before You Dig, and after you dig, dial again to make sure you severed the cable.
Wow, I didn't know my phone installer posted on slashdot! Hi there, remember me? Green house, picket fence, you cut my cable the DAY OF THE SOPRANOS FINAL EPISODE!!! AAAAUUUGGGHH!!!
Well, I was kind of thinking about that. It is mathematically not impossible, because the transition from "uncompressed" to "recompressed the exact same way" is technically lossless.
JPEG works on 8x8 macroblocks, so I was thinking that a lookup table might work. MPEG-1 uses 16x16 macroblocks, and so would need a freakin' huge table. But then again MPEG-4 / H.264 uses variable sized blocks, so even that scheme is out.
Finally, a quick glance at the math tells me that if it is possible to reverse the compression, it'll have to be done by someone else!:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Bring a can of spray paint, just in case.
We even get turtles standing on the backs of other turtles. When the camera pans back, you can see that it's turtles all the way down!
You may think you are paying more for the phone if you buy it without the phone company subsidy. (And you are initially, anyway.) But if you consider the $0.40 pay-per-use for MMS that Verizon charges just to get your pictures off your "free" phone as a part of the overall price, or $0.99 per song downloaded to your phone, you'll quickly have paid less for a completely unlocked phone. (A friend quoted me those figures from Verizon a couple of years ago, I don't know if Verizon is still that expensive or locked down today.) My phone is free of carrier restrictions, however, and I can use Bluetooth, a USB cable, or a micro-SD card to put media and files into and out of it all day long.
Best of all, my unaffiliated phone doesn't have that Cingular bug-splat logo squished across it anywhere! :-)
While I don't have all of the predictions made from 40 years ago to check their facts, I would bet this is one of the most accurate of all that were made. (That is, if this magazine article isn't an elaborate hoax.) But statistically speaking, if a thousand prognosticators made a thousand predictions, wouldn't you expect some to be better than others, and a few to be way, way better than others?
The nice thing about our vantage point here in the future is that we can cherry-pick the best predictions and say "See, this guy was a really smart futurist!" We need to also occasionally hold up the articles featuring nuclear airplanes, the television as a passing fad, simplified coal chutes, and technologically advanced buggy whips, and say to ourselves "yup, we're still not particularly clever about this prediction stuff."
And if you want a glimpse into his sci fi writing, check him out on Amazon. Judging that book by its cover, I'd also guess that he'd have predicted martians would have taken over by now.
This one didn't happen It kind of did in Minneapolis, but rather than dome the whole city at once we simply used habitrail tubes to interconnect buildings. Even when it's -20, I can drive to a parking ramp half a mile from work and get there without wearing a coat. > Private cars are banned inside most city / Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public
Your basic Arcology idea, but not yet in practice. London has the congestion tax already (and I think New York is adding it soon) -- it effectively bans thousands of cars from the city, but not all -- and they still have the Underground. But it's certainly not "most" cities. > With the U.S. population having soared to 350 million
Close, only 270 million Closer, it's actually over 303 million today. >Electrostatic precipitators clean the air
Ionic Breeze anyone? The "Ionic Breeze" doesn't actually do anything at all according to Consumer Reports lab testing, but Honeywell has been making whole-house electrostatic precipitators for many years. And they were only about 5 years away from the article, we were using them in a machine shop I worked at in the mid 1970s -- one of my jobs was to clean them periodically.)
So I'd add 3 or 4 more points to your scorecard.
today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels.
And you can view products that don't work from companies that don't exist, get competing prices from vendors that never ship, read reviews from trolls and shills from every cave and mother's basement around the world, and you can pay by credit card to a hijacked site somewhere in Estonia.
"Better" is true relative to nothing at all, but caveat emptor applies far more today than it did in 1968.
If I were fighting Amazon's patent, I'd surely trot out this article.
Then I'll do just that. Thanks!
So, the non-existent claims on the box are clearly not going to solve anything. Apparently, the entire product is sold on nothing but high expectations. So, what would a reasonable person expect, and what did I expect? A music player, certainly, and probably one similar to their previous products. An awesome interface, surely. Good sound. Easy to understand. I think those are reasonable expectations.
So, what else might I expect? Well, my friends have owned iPods since the very first rotary dial model, and have used them as portable drives. The older ones were firewire drives, and the newer ones were USB drives. I've seen them carry arbitrary files from work to home and vice versa for many years. I've seen them plug them into several computers and unprotected music files copied from them and used. I certainly sense a pattern here, and it seems perfectly reasonable for me to expect the same behavior from their newest model that was available in every previous model they've ever sold.
So I buy the product, and for the most part I'm not disappointed; it is indeed a music player, the interface is great, and the sound is good, and it is indeed easy to use and understand. I bought a product based on nothing but a large set of expectations, none of which were listed on the box. I expected those features and they were present.
But strangely, it does not function like every other iPod in the history of iPods. It does not act like a removable media storage device. This upsets me. I learn from friends, both online and in real life, and also from an Apple salesman, that my device is specifically more crippled than every other iPod that came before it. I now feel betrayed by the purchase. So I make this observation and express disappointment, and have half a dozen people helpfully offer me suggestions that it can do exactly what I expect, if I just click this non-existent box or double-click this grayed-out and inaccessible song. I try their suggestions only to discover they're incorrect because they're basing their assistance on their experience with other iPods, not the current model. Apparently they, too, have the same expectations that I had when I purchased mine. In my world view, this confirms that my expectations are entirely realistic.
Yet according to you: 1) I am still somehow wrong about the lockdown, 2) I have no ability to figure out a simple interface, 3) I am silly, 4) I have unrealistic expectations, 5) I have a blame-others mindset, and 6) I am deserving of the abuse.
Y'know, your reply is substantially more offensive than his vulgar abusive reply. You seem to be filled with righteous indignation that silly idiots are not properly adoring your immaculately conceived product; and you are unable to change your mind based on factual evidence to the contrary. When you next get burned by an Apple product not doing what you expect of it, I hope you take the opportunity to truthfully evaluate what went wrong in your thinking, instead of what went wrong with the product.
It's easy to point to Manuel and blame him for cleaning toilets for $2.00/hr. After all, his skin is darker, and he don't talk 'murrican.
The real jerb problem in this country is not that Manuel is doing the $7.00/hr job for $2, but that our corporations have been shipping all our jerbs overseas, (both in manufacturing and services) and the corporations continue to pour U.S. dollars over the borders faster than Mexicans can climb back in. The large corporate interests must be pleased that all the focus on border security is masking their bigger role in collapsing our economy for their profit.
"Dey took our jerbs!"
Thanks for the detailed description. I'll have her give it a try just to see if it works, (although she's already quite happy with the dock thing, so that money's already gone.)
That's seven (OK, maybe six minus the Brawndo thing) insults from a total stranger, all because I truthfully reported that Apple sold me a product that is locked down (and they totally offended me as a customer in the process.) That's the kind of defensive attack I'd expect from a Scientologist, not from a rational person. (By the way, my use of the term "cult" comes from the popular book "The Cult of Mac", which documents the rabid fanaticism that has sprung up around Apple.)
You seem to be in strong denial that your precious company is capable of selling a crippled product, and you would rather attack a critic than learn the facts. Perhaps you should reread TFA. Perhaps you should come over to my wife's workplace and show her how you can actually get the iPod to play music on her PC, as long as you can restrain yourself to calling her fewer than three vulgar names. Or perhaps you should grow some perspective on life, and mature for a while.
Thanks again for offering advice; I'd really like it if any of these suggestions worked for her. But it doesn't. None of them worked. As I have repeatedly pointed out to lots of people posting in this thread, it's really and truly locked down.
The only suggestion I would have had for her that I know would have worked without buying the speaker-thing would have been to connect a cable from her headphone-out jack to the to line-in jack on her PC, and then help her muddle through the utterly user-unfriendly Windows mixer control. The $100 was cheaper than that nightmare scenario.
Thanks for the advice, but it doesn't work. The iPod touch (version 1.1.4) does not present itself as a disk drive at all. There is no removable USB drive, and so no folder from which to copy the files. That's why I got mad about the lockdown. It should have worked, it used to work, and now Apple made it stop working.
I hate the e.e. cummings method of refactoring, which is to run all your code through a lower-case filter. Never seems to help very much.
No shit! Those people are surprisingly intolerant of criticism, especially from someone who is reporting the reactions of a "non-geek". What's funny is that I seriously do love the user interface -- that's an amazing way to present information. But boy, point out that Apple is a for-profit corporation completely kowtowing to the RIAA and suddenly the negative mods come out of the woodwork. Religion, hell, these are the Fundamental Creationists of the computer world.
She *did* install iTunes on the PC, and it still wouldn't let her copy or play her music. She couldn't "use them in any way she pleased." It was all locked down, nothing made sense to her, she was pissed off, and spent the next hour on the phone all pissed off and trying to get me to help figure out why it wouldn't just work. I really didn't enjoy that phone call.
If you want to talk to her while she's pissed off and trying to make a piece of hardware that's supposed to "just work" work, be my guest. Post your phone number and I'll have her give you a call. But as far as my experience with it went, it doesn't "just work" -- it locked her out.
I even asked my Apple buddy if he could help me, and he said (and I quote) "Think about it from Apple's perspective selling this to the music companies. They don't want you to be able to copy your music to another computer." So I thought about it. Fuck that, and fuck Apple.
'Cuz I'm too drunk to remember their current slogan, whatever the hell it is. I know there's something folksy about the Macbook Air music, and U2 sings Vertigo for old iPods, and there's a funny "Hi, I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" commercial campaign, but no actual slogans that have sloshed their way to my addled forebrain.
If they had a good slogan now, I'm sure I would have made my joke about it instead. But I came up empty, like a manila envelope with nothing inside.
Oh, and I remember Ellen Feiss. She was kind of hot, in that grunge way. But nobody takes Ellen Feiss pills any more, they smoke Ellen Feiss blunts instead. :-)
See above.
My wife couldn't copy her music from her iPod to her work PC, so she ended up buying a $100 docking iHome thing from Target just so she could listen at work. It's sitting right next to her new PC with its shiny new unused stereo speakers.
After searching the web, I discovered that older iPod Touches (version 1.1.1 and earlier) used to present a USB mass storage device to a PC that didn't already have iTunes installed. That would have allowed her to simply drag and drop her music from the iPod to her PC and let her play it. But her new iPod doesn't permit that -- Apple deliberately crippled the machine she owns.
Now, I'm sure there are a bunch of Apple geeks out there that have some information or geekish knowledge that allows them to easily copy music from their iPods to other computers. Fine, you do that. But that shouldn't be an ordinary consumer's job to learn how to circumvent some company's crappy restriction. That's the whole Apple selling point, that things are easy to use. But as far as I'm concerned, the device should never have been crippled, and up until a few releases ago (according to the web), it wasn't.
And before anyone comments on AAC or the Apple DRM scheme, I know that every single song in this iPod is MP3 encoded because I personally ripped it directly from Compact Discs that she owns using Exact Audio Copy. She has bought nothing from the iTunes music store, and there is not a single byte of DRMd music in this iPod. This is purely a restriction added by Apple to prevent legally owned files from being transferred from her iPod to a computer that should be able to access it. That completely blows chunks, so to hell with Apple.
I personally have purchased only one Apple product -- I recently bought my wife an iPod touch. While I absolutely love the cool user interface experience, the consumer lock down is much worse than I imagined it would be (and I was expecting bad.) Overall I can only rate the thing "half-way above shit." I'll never buy anything else from them and I'm not going to recommend them to other people unless that changes drastically.
Ooo, someone forgot to take their "Think Different" pills this morning, didn't they?
Wow, I didn't know my phone installer posted on slashdot! Hi there, remember me? Green house, picket fence, you cut my cable the DAY OF THE SOPRANOS FINAL EPISODE!!! AAAAUUUGGGHH!!!
JPEG works on 8x8 macroblocks, so I was thinking that a lookup table might work. MPEG-1 uses 16x16 macroblocks, and so would need a freakin' huge table. But then again MPEG-4 / H.264 uses variable sized blocks, so even that scheme is out.
Finally, a quick glance at the math tells me that if it is possible to reverse the compression, it'll have to be done by someone else! :-(