The second problem is that people always talk louder on cell phones. I personally do not understand this, however, IDNHACP (I do not have a cell phone.)
To hear the difference, listen to a radio call-in program. On the local AM talk radio station where I am, it's always easy to tell who is on a cell and who's on a land line. Calls from cells are a lot more staticy.
Really, now. There's nothing stopping programs from using Apple's APIs to play DRMed songs from iTMS, just like programs can use MS's APIs to access encrypted WMAs.
The in-house codec They used from 2.50 -> 2.65 was called 'Nitrane'. And it wasn't fixed in 2.666, it was replaced. I remember hearing that it was replaced by Fraunhofer code, but I can't find any reference to Fraunhofer in the credits.
You appear to be assuming that I think that downloading copyrighted content is okay - I've made no such assertion. I've only asserted that stealing is not the right word for it.
Nope. In Help -> About iTunes, right after the Apple copyright notice, it says "MPEG Layer-3 audio coding technology licensed from Fraunhofer IIS and THOMSON multimedia."
Honestly, has anyone even consciously *used* Fraunhofer's codec in the last four years for personal MP3 encoding?
What, other than every single person who has made MP3s with iTunes or MusicMatch?
Cripes, man! Ever gone to a mainstream P2P network? LAME-encoded MP3s are the exceptions there, not the rule. I see far more Xing and FHG-encoded files on Kazaa and WinMX than LAME-encoded files.
This is not really a reply to the parent. This is meant to help explain why silicon is so tough to make optoelectronics with.
The electrons in materials have many different energies - in metals, the possible energies are so tightly spaced that you have what looks like a single continuous band of energy levels. With semiconductors, you have two effectively continuous bands with an energy gap between them. For silicon, for example, the gap is 1.1eV. The higher energy band is called the conduction band (CB) while the lower is called the valence band (VB).
When an electron in the CB falls into the VB (direct recombination), it loses energy which is emitted in the form of heat (phonons, aka lattice vibrations) or light (a photon). Electrons in the CB prefer to hang around in the lowest energy states of the CB, so that's where they usually fall from. The unoccupied states of the VB tend to be the highest energy states in that band, so that's where electrons fall to.
Now, the problem: momentum conservation. An electron can only directly fall from the CB to the VB and emit a photon if momentum is conserved, and photon momentum is negligible compared to that of the electron. So the momenta of the source and destination states must be pretty close, and for there to be an appreciable amount of direct recombination, the momenta of the CB's lowest-energy states must correspond to the VB's highest energy states, and this happens in direct bandgap semiconductors.
Si, unfortunately, is an indirect bandgap semiconductor. The preferred source and destination states don't line up on energy-momentum diagram.
Now, that doesn't mean it's impossible to get light out of silicon, just more difficult. You need what are called recombination centres, which are defects which the electrons can get trapped in (emitting phonons in the process and changing momentum) and from there drop to the VB (indirect recombination). For example, Al-doped SiC can be used to make blue LEDs, but their efficiency is measured in fractions of a percent.
III-V semiconductors are made of elements in the III and V groups in the periodic table, GaAs being the most well-known. They tend to be direct bandgap semiconductors, and so they are far more conducive to direct recombination and are easier to make optoelectronics out of.
However, if Apple wanted to undermine MS by distributing free (beer) software to encode AAC (aka Quicktime Pro for free)... they would be stuck with a per-unit charge
iTunes for Windows has a full-blown AAC encoder and is a free download.
but fails when you have many AVI's with the same 4 character ID.
Windows neither knows nor cares about how many other videos you have when one gets played. Sure, Windows may erroneously give a "no suitable codec found" or similar error when you try to open a corrupted file, but that has nothing to do with codec hell and everything to do with MS's AVI parser, which is very intolerant of corruption.
Extensions should be ignored by systems that don't understand them. I've used plenty of RockRidge discs on systems that only understand Joliet, and not had a problem. And It's possible to make an ISO with both RockRidge and Joliet data, so I don't see why adding HFS data should mess things up.
Gabe Newell of Valve has posted at halflife2.net on this issue. Since the halflife2.net servers are pretty slow right now, here's the text of the post:
Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.
Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.
ISO method: Release item. Wait until standard is commonly adopted, as with SCO method. When market has adopted standard, charge for using said standard.
Actually, that's the Unisys method. The ISO method is to rip off the Unisys method.
Slashdot Mirror
To hear the difference, listen to a radio call-in program. On the local AM talk radio station where I am, it's always easy to tell who is on a cell and who's on a land line. Calls from cells are a lot more staticy.
They did.
What's this then?
Really, now. There's nothing stopping programs from using Apple's APIs to play DRMed songs from iTMS, just like programs can use MS's APIs to access encrypted WMAs.
The in-house codec They used from 2.50 -> 2.65 was called 'Nitrane'. And it wasn't fixed in 2.666, it was replaced. I remember hearing that it was replaced by Fraunhofer code, but I can't find any reference to Fraunhofer in the credits.
That applies only if you're using the modern skin support. I use Winamp 5 with a Classic skin, and it's just as fast as 2.8x in my experience.
You appear to be assuming that I think that downloading copyrighted content is okay - I've made no such assertion. I've only asserted that stealing is not the right word for it.
Right. Because it hasn't been taken away. Nice to see you agree with me.
Their rights are being violated, not taken away. Huge difference.
Nope. In Help -> About iTunes, right after the Apple copyright notice, it says "MPEG Layer-3 audio coding technology licensed from Fraunhofer IIS and THOMSON multimedia."
What, other than every single person who has made MP3s with iTunes or MusicMatch?
Cripes, man! Ever gone to a mainstream P2P network? LAME-encoded MP3s are the exceptions there, not the rule. I see far more Xing and FHG-encoded files on Kazaa and WinMX than LAME-encoded files.
This is not really a reply to the parent. This is meant to help explain why silicon is so tough to make optoelectronics with.
The electrons in materials have many different energies - in metals, the possible energies are so tightly spaced that you have what looks like a single continuous band of energy levels. With semiconductors, you have two effectively continuous bands with an energy gap between them. For silicon, for example, the gap is 1.1eV. The higher energy band is called the conduction band (CB) while the lower is called the valence band (VB).
When an electron in the CB falls into the VB (direct recombination), it loses energy which is emitted in the form of heat (phonons, aka lattice vibrations) or light (a photon). Electrons in the CB prefer to hang around in the lowest energy states of the CB, so that's where they usually fall from. The unoccupied states of the VB tend to be the highest energy states in that band, so that's where electrons fall to.
Now, the problem: momentum conservation. An electron can only directly fall from the CB to the VB and emit a photon if momentum is conserved, and photon momentum is negligible compared to that of the electron. So the momenta of the source and destination states must be pretty close, and for there to be an appreciable amount of direct recombination, the momenta of the CB's lowest-energy states must correspond to the VB's highest energy states, and this happens in direct bandgap semiconductors.
Si, unfortunately, is an indirect bandgap semiconductor. The preferred source and destination states don't line up on energy-momentum diagram.
Now, that doesn't mean it's impossible to get light out of silicon, just more difficult. You need what are called recombination centres, which are defects which the electrons can get trapped in (emitting phonons in the process and changing momentum) and from there drop to the VB (indirect recombination). For example, Al-doped SiC can be used to make blue LEDs, but their efficiency is measured in fractions of a percent.
III-V semiconductors are made of elements in the III and V groups in the periodic table, GaAs being the most well-known. They tend to be direct bandgap semiconductors, and so they are far more conducive to direct recombination and are easier to make optoelectronics out of.
iTunes for Windows has a full-blown AAC encoder and is a free download.
WMA lossless cannot be decoded by regular WMA decoders. Microsoft doesn't even make an embedded WMA lossless decoder.
Informative my ass.
Where?
Winamp2 has had it longer than foobar's been around.
Windows neither knows nor cares about how many other videos you have when one gets played. Sure, Windows may erroneously give a "no suitable codec found" or similar error when you try to open a corrupted file, but that has nothing to do with codec hell and everything to do with MS's AVI parser, which is very intolerant of corruption.
Extensions should be ignored by systems that don't understand them. I've used plenty of RockRidge discs on systems that only understand Joliet, and not had a problem. And It's possible to make an ISO with both RockRidge and Joliet data, so I don't see why adding HFS data should mess things up.
The Verite was not an add-in. It was a standalone 2D/3D accelerator.
You must be using a non-official source. Official mirrors are still at RC3.
Actually, that's the Unisys method. The ISO method is to rip off the Unisys method.
Oh, you mean like with, say, modems, where 14.4kbps = 14,400bps, 28.8kbps = 28,800 bps, and so on?
Or Ethernet, where 10Mbps = 10,000,000bps, and 100Mbps = 100,000,000bps?
Easy. The RAM makers are using the wrong terms as well.