I can't play any of them on my Linux desktop, some of them seem interesting. Except number 9 and number 3. 20% - not to be sniffed at. And that's without WINE.
...if we should trust someone to give design interface advice who spreads their article over four pages. You think the web site was designed by the same person as wrote the article?
STBs usually put out a composite video signal, so the analogue TV you're converting had better have a composite input.
All DVB set-top boxes I have ever seen have put out a composite video signal and SCART RGB signal.
It is usually the SCART RGB signal that people are actually using even though they might not be aware of that. (The selection between the RGB signal and the composite signal, both of which are simultaneously available on the SCART connector, will usually happen automatically in favor of the RGB signal.)
The same principle also applies to European DVD players.
This is mostly true, but composite is the lowest common denominator. Not all SCART outputs contain an RGB signal, and not all SCART inputs accept an RGB signal. Pretty much every SCART input and output will contain/accept composite though.
The Sony TV I just sold, for example, had two SCART inputs -- only one of which could handle an RGB signal. When I bought my DVD player, I shopped around for one which supported RGB because it gives a better picture. Many players on the market didn't have one.
Across Europe, new TVs will all have a SCART input, older TVs may have phono inputs for audio and composite video. Really old TVs will only have an RF input, and those are the ones that are hardest to hook up to a STB.
Ending analogue transmissions isn't intended as a punitive or repressive measure, it's meant to save a laughably small amount of money by ending a service that wasn't really used much anymore. No. It's meant to turn a frequency range that can be allocated in exchange for a certain amount of money, into a frequency range that can be allocated in exchange for a significantly larger amount of money. You can fit more digital TV channels into the same bandwidth than you can analogue channels.
...as long as you don't know what the artifacts of overly-compressed digital video look like. If you do, it can look absolutely awful.
Good digital is far better than good analog. Bad analog is infinitely preferable (to me) than bad digital.
Like any other artefacts, you get used to them and learn to ignore them. Just as you learned to look past film grain and scratches at the cinema, the crackle and low frequency range of AM radio, the background hiss of FM, and the snowy effect of a bad analogue TV signal, you learn to look past digital TV's artefacts.
In a previous house, I had digital TV but a peculiarity in the wiring meant that every time the central heating thermostat clicked on or off, there would be significant RF interference hitting the TV signal. This would manifest itself as a nasty digital buzz in the sound, and big random pixels which would take until the next key frame to disappear. At first it was intolerable. Before long, we barely noticed it: guests couldn't understand how we put up with it.
Of course, better fidelity is always better. But you can live with lo-fi up to a point, and sometimes the tradeoffs are worth it.
Actually to get the most out of digital you really do need a widescreen set with stereo speakers - so many people will feel a need to upgrade, despite it not being a requirement. Otherwise what is the point - don't say more choice, because at least in the UK only about 2 of the 30 or so channels added to the 'traditional' line-up are actually worth watching. But we're not talking about getting the most out of it. We're talking about getting through an analogue switch-off without losing what you've already got. Come switch off time, the POINT you ask for is getting any sort of TV at all.
Even so, I'd argue that even if you stuck with 4:3 SD and a built in mono speaker, a Freeview box is worth it for:
- FilmFour
- Some of E4 and More4
- Some of BBC3
- BBC4
- BBC News 24
OTOH, it is true that DTV provides a strong incentive to upgrade your TV. Just wait til FTA terrestrial HD comes along...
Well, I know of two cable guys who would disagree with that statement. They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods. And by the time 2009 comes around these television sets will be even cheaper, assuming people dont just get adapters. I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set. Ah, the good old "poor folks often have expensive gadgets therefore their benefits must be excessive" claim again.
You've just got to think laterally to spot the flaws:
- you don't know how that equipment's being paid for. Is it rented? Is it on an exploitative finance deal?
- if you don't work, and sit at home all day, a TV is a good investment
Digital Set Top Boxes are already cheap and small - you can even get one that's built into the form factor of a SCART plug (that's the European standard AV connector).
Just buying a STB and hooking it up isn't enough for everyone - depending on coverage for your area you might need to spend money on your aerial. Maybe coverage is more even in The Netherlands, what with its relative flatness.
STBs usually put out a composite video signal, so the analogue TV you're converting had better have a composite input. There are TVs still in use which only have an RF input. I don't know of any STBs that contain an analogue RFmodulator. If there's a market for them, it'll happen. RF modulation is cheap and easy -- I must have half a dozen inline modulators from 16 bit consoles lying around in boxes here.
I'll be really interested to see how the analogue switch off goes here in the UK -- a phased switch off beginning in 2008 -- my guess is that those stubborn enough to have resisted digital by the time their analogue transmitter is decomissioned will stand a good chance of being given a free/subsidised STB and aeriel upgrade.
Personally I think it is absolutely fine that everybody pays a fixed proportion of their income. e.g. 20%, 30% 40%, whatever.
It's slightly more complex than that because (in the UK at least) there are income tax bands. i.e. if your income goes over a certain threshold, you pay 50% on that money instead of 40% -- or whatever.
Personally I've always felt that banding introduces artificial thresholds and that with the cheapness of calculating nowadays, there should be some sort of equasion which results in a smooth curve, increasing in steepness as income increases (I want to say exponential, but I know some maths geek will step in and explain why that can't be done).
There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company. It is not, and we all know it, but can we prove it?
We all know it, do we?
I don't know it. I'm a developer, and I absolutely believe that open plan and physical proximity is the way to do.
Telecommuting is all very convenient, but there's no substitute for sitting or standing face-to-face with someone, seeing their expression, their body language. A physical whiteboard is a far better communication tool than a screen-sharing application.
I'll tell anyone willing to listen that I am *at least* twice as productive when working in a team of 3-8 people all of whom are within hollering distance, than working with the same people over phone/IM/email.
My employer wanted us all to become home workers, but we successfully argued this point and persuaded them to rent us an office.
I'm serious, support is something you definetely can sell. Its a renewable resource!
(I am a free software zealot: this is me playing devil's advocate)
The problem is, if you've got some closed source software written in-house, then you're pretty much the only company that can support it. You can monopolize that market.
If you free the source, you lose that.
- companies with in-house geeks might decide they can self-support if they have the code
- other companies might offer competing support contracts, since they can now see the code
You have a head start of course: you've been supporting it for years, you've got the developers who designed the thing, you've gt structures in place, you've got an existing userbase. But you would be losing one of the factors that keeps customers coming to you for support.
There is a flip side to this.
Depending on the nature of the product, open-sourcing might greatly increase the userbase and make the support market big enough for everone to have a slice. For instance, if there's a plethora of closed source widget-counting applications. Your product Widget Auditor Pro has 5% of the market, and since the only way to use it is to buy a license including support, 5% of users effectively pay you for support.
By freeing the source at the right time (and having a solid product... and managing the community effectively... and by lucking out...) Open Widget Auditor (formerly Widget Auditor Pro) has the potential to become the de-facto standard in widget-counting software. Now 60% of the market uses it. If half of those users (30%) are using other companies for support, and a quarter (15%) are self-supporting, that still leaves you with 15% of the market: three times the support contracts you had with your closed source product.
But all this still depends on the nature of the product, the nature of the market, and your ability to promote an open source application.
I'm pretty sure this is astroturf. Just like for movies, publishers pay people to form queues and get on the TV news.
Anyone who really wants a PS3 that badly would have pre-ordered.
I'm getting a Wii on Euro launch day, and I fully expect to queue for no more than 5 minutes, wave my preorder receipt at the attendant, and walk out with a Wii.
I'm not sure whether it's (or should be) patentable, but Flickr Intestingness is definitely a novel and, er, interesting concept. It's widely misunderstood even by hardcore Flickr-ites.
As far as I understand, an "Interestingness" score is derived from hits, referrers, tags, pool membership, comments and where comments come from, "favourite" tags and other things. The weighting is constantly being tweaked, and Interestingness changes over time because (for example, and hypothetically) a recent comment is more valuable than an old comment.
A number of great photographers get upset because they take high quality photographs which get lower Interestingness scores than pictures they perceive as having less merit. But Interesting is not about quality or merit. That's why it's not called "quality" or "merit". It's called "interestingness", meaning "cool stuff you might not have seen before".
That's why (again, for example and hypothetically) the tags "cat" or "baby" or "flower" are likely to have a negative impact on Interestingness. You can take the greatest baby picture ever, it's still not going to be interesting to most people, because Flickr is flooded with baby pictures.
In summary - it's cool, it's clever, it's more than just tagging, and it's novel.
I'd rather it wasn't patented but, hey, that's life.
This seems rather silly when iTunes already has the US covered for downloadable content, it's as if companies don't want our money in Europe and the rest of the world. I'd gladly pay to download movies or TV shows such as Lost however they simply don't seem to be available in a legitimate form here.
The problem (as always) is licensing. Since you started it, let's use Lost as an example. Sky TV pays ABC serious money to be the exclusive UK broadcaster of Lost. If Europeans could download it, that license would be devalued.
Quite why broadcasters still think it's a good idea to stagger release/broadcast dates wordwide, I don't know. You're practically forcing European fans to download from P2P, if they want to discuss the newest episode with Americans on forums.
The longer this goes on, the more people will get used to P2P. Once you've jumped the moral and technical hurdles (install a bittorrent client; learn to source.torrents; find a convenient way to output AVIs to your TV) it's going to be awfully difficult to go back to paying money.
There's tons of Open Source out there that you/could/ use, and there's tons of commercial libraries out there after your dollars.
But for commercial software, you've got to convince your PHB that it's worth the money (and I rarely see a commercial library that/I/ think is worth the money, let alone can sell to a PHB.... and for Open Source, you need your employer to OK its use. Now this may be OK in smaller companies, but in the large companies I've worked for it's a hurdle. Mainstream stuff like OpenSSL, Perl, Hibernate etc. are fine (because someone else has gone through the process before you), but anything else has to go through a heavyweight approvals process that's often more work than writing the damn thing yourself.
There are two main reasons for this:
- people are concerned about using code of unknown quality
- people are absolutely terrified of IP law: accidentally incorporating GPL code in something they don't want to GPL; relying on software that apparently has an acceptable licence only for it to turn out to be someone else's original work.
That, to me, is the big barrier to re-use on a massive scale.
The anti-virus companies *ARE* responsible for all the viruses that are made!
I have long believed this to be to be more or less the case.
Maybe not all viruses, and maybe not all anti-virus companies, but to stoke up the AV market by chucking a few thousand dollars to some shady programmers in return for them writing virii seems too obvious and idea for it not to happen.
Grind. See WoW, EQ, and BF2142 as perfect examples of why grind sucks.
I've basically given up on all RPGs because of grind. However, I've come to believe there's a large chunk of people out there who actively enjoy the countless random battles in (for example) Final Fantasy.
I don't mind that there are games for people who like that kind of thing. I can let them get on with it.
I haven't played Bully, so I'm speculating wildly here, but here's my assumption:
There's a "kiss" button combination, so if you stand in front of a girl and press it, you grab her and you kiss.
Now, what happens if you stand in front of a boy and press the same buttons?
It seems to me that if anything different happens, the developers have to explain why they're discriminating against homosexuality. The only fair and balanced thing to do is for the engine to treat boys and girls alike.
The only remaining question is how the NPCs you try to kiss react. My guess, and the way I'd design it (not that I have any qualifications to design games) is that some female NPCs will fight you off and tell you to piss off, some female NPCs will be happy to kiss you, some male NPCs won't take kindly to it at all, while others will enjoy it.
My neighbour's bought the game, so I expect I'll give it a try in a couple of weeks when he gets bored of it:)
there may also be a finite number of melodies that any human ear would consider music
You could quantify this, to some extent.
Let's say a 3.5 minute pop song consists of two verses, a chorus, another verse, middle eight, a solo, the chorus again. Assume all are the same length, so the chorus is 30 seconds long. That's reasonable. How many 30 second choruses can exist?
CD quality audio is 16 bits at 44.1kHz. (2^16) * 44,100 * 30 = 86,704,128,000 choruses (double that if you consider that CDs are stereo).
However, you can discern a piece of music using far less information. Random Googling suggests that 8 bits at 11,025 Hz is good enough. (2^8) * 11,025 * 30 = 84,672,000
But, most of those 30 second samples won't sound like music.
Let's try another shot, and just count the number of possible melodies. To make it simple, we'll assume that all melodies consist entirely of quavers or quaver-length rests. Surely you can approximate any tune, played in staccatto, using this system? At a fairly typical 120bpm, our 30 seconds gives us 60 beats, or 120 quavers. Let's restrict the songwriter to three octaves or 36 notes. That's 37 including the rests.
120 * 37 = 4,400
Great, there are only 4,400 tunes in the world (and most of those are unlistenable). What's the point of copyright?
Well, of course, it's a lot more complicated than that. The same sequence of notes played to a different set of chords will take on a completely different feeling. You have variety of tempo and instrumentation, and of course there's lyrics to consider.
The true number of tunes in the world will be somewhere between 4,400 and 84,672,000 !
Still, it's kinda tempting to generate all 4,400 melodies as MIDI files, publish them somehow (e.g. to a Web site), wait a couple of years, pick an international hit song, find the file most closely resembling it and try to convince a judge that it's a rip off of the "song" you "wrote".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, Warning Forever is great.
Ray Hound will be great too, when it's finished. When it has sound, and a high score table...
(snip)
Trees are renewable. Trees are just a particularly slow form of solar power. If solar isn't renewable, then neither are trees.
...if we should trust someone to give design interface advice who spreads their article over four pages. You think the web site was designed by the same person as wrote the article?What the world needs is fewer programming language books.
I didn't want to get all Lynn Truss on the lad, but hey, if he can be picky about typography, I can be picky about grammar.
Azureus can display the location of your peers on a world map.
That's Open Source -- so look at their source.
All DVB set-top boxes I have ever seen have put out a composite video signal and SCART RGB signal.
It is usually the SCART RGB signal that people are actually using even though they might not be aware of that. (The selection between the RGB signal and the composite signal, both of which are simultaneously available on the SCART connector, will usually happen automatically in favor of the RGB signal.)
The same principle also applies to European DVD players.
This is mostly true, but composite is the lowest common denominator. Not all SCART outputs contain an RGB signal, and not all SCART inputs accept an RGB signal. Pretty much every SCART input and output will contain/accept composite though.The Sony TV I just sold, for example, had two SCART inputs -- only one of which could handle an RGB signal. When I bought my DVD player, I shopped around for one which supported RGB because it gives a better picture. Many players on the market didn't have one.
Across Europe, new TVs will all have a SCART input, older TVs may have phono inputs for audio and composite video. Really old TVs will only have an RF input, and those are the ones that are hardest to hook up to a STB.
...as long as you don't know what the artifacts of overly-compressed digital video look like. If you do, it can look absolutely awful.Good digital is far better than good analog. Bad analog is infinitely preferable (to me) than bad digital.
Like any other artefacts, you get used to them and learn to ignore them. Just as you learned to look past film grain and scratches at the cinema, the crackle and low frequency range of AM radio, the background hiss of FM, and the snowy effect of a bad analogue TV signal, you learn to look past digital TV's artefacts.In a previous house, I had digital TV but a peculiarity in the wiring meant that every time the central heating thermostat clicked on or off, there would be significant RF interference hitting the TV signal. This would manifest itself as a nasty digital buzz in the sound, and big random pixels which would take until the next key frame to disappear. At first it was intolerable. Before long, we barely noticed it: guests couldn't understand how we put up with it.
Of course, better fidelity is always better. But you can live with lo-fi up to a point, and sometimes the tradeoffs are worth it.
Even so, I'd argue that even if you stuck with 4:3 SD and a built in mono speaker, a Freeview box is worth it for:
- FilmFour
- Some of E4 and More4
- Some of BBC3
- BBC4
- BBC News 24
OTOH, it is true that DTV provides a strong incentive to upgrade your TV. Just wait til FTA terrestrial HD comes along...
You've just got to think laterally to spot the flaws:
- you don't know how that equipment's being paid for. Is it rented? Is it on an exploitative finance deal?
- if you don't work, and sit at home all day, a TV is a good investment
From my UK experience:
Digital Set Top Boxes are already cheap and small - you can even get one that's built into the form factor of a SCART plug (that's the European standard AV connector).
Just buying a STB and hooking it up isn't enough for everyone - depending on coverage for your area you might need to spend money on your aerial. Maybe coverage is more even in The Netherlands, what with its relative flatness.
STBs usually put out a composite video signal, so the analogue TV you're converting had better have a composite input. There are TVs still in use which only have an RF input. I don't know of any STBs that contain an analogue RFmodulator. If there's a market for them, it'll happen. RF modulation is cheap and easy -- I must have half a dozen inline modulators from 16 bit consoles lying around in boxes here.
I'll be really interested to see how the analogue switch off goes here in the UK -- a phased switch off beginning in 2008 -- my guess is that those stubborn enough to have resisted digital by the time their analogue transmitter is decomissioned will stand a good chance of being given a free/subsidised STB and aeriel upgrade.
Personally I think it is absolutely fine that everybody pays a fixed proportion of their income. e.g. 20%, 30% 40%, whatever.
It's slightly more complex than that because (in the UK at least) there are income tax bands. i.e. if your income goes over a certain threshold, you pay 50% on that money instead of 40% -- or whatever.
Personally I've always felt that banding introduces artificial thresholds and that with the cheapness of calculating nowadays, there should be some sort of equasion which results in a smooth curve, increasing in steepness as income increases (I want to say exponential, but I know some maths geek will step in and explain why that can't be done).
There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company. It is not, and we all know it, but can we prove it?
We all know it, do we?
I don't know it. I'm a developer, and I absolutely believe that open plan and physical proximity is the way to do.
Telecommuting is all very convenient, but there's no substitute for sitting or standing face-to-face with someone, seeing their expression, their body language. A physical whiteboard is a far better communication tool than a screen-sharing application.
I'll tell anyone willing to listen that I am *at least* twice as productive when working in a team of 3-8 people all of whom are within hollering distance, than working with the same people over phone/IM/email.
My employer wanted us all to become home workers, but we successfully argued this point and persuaded them to rent us an office.
I'm serious, support is something you definetely can sell. Its a renewable resource!
(I am a free software zealot: this is me playing devil's advocate)
The problem is, if you've got some closed source software written in-house, then you're pretty much the only company that can support it. You can monopolize that market.
If you free the source, you lose that.
- companies with in-house geeks might decide they can self-support if they have the code
- other companies might offer competing support contracts, since they can now see the code
You have a head start of course: you've been supporting it for years, you've got the developers who designed the thing, you've gt structures in place, you've got an existing userbase. But you would be losing one of the factors that keeps customers coming to you for support.
There is a flip side to this.
Depending on the nature of the product, open-sourcing might greatly increase the userbase and make the support market big enough for everone to have a slice. For instance, if there's a plethora of closed source widget-counting applications. Your product Widget Auditor Pro has 5% of the market, and since the only way to use it is to buy a license including support, 5% of users effectively pay you for support.
By freeing the source at the right time (and having a solid product... and managing the community effectively... and by lucking out...) Open Widget Auditor (formerly Widget Auditor Pro) has the potential to become the de-facto standard in widget-counting software. Now 60% of the market uses it. If half of those users (30%) are using other companies for support, and a quarter (15%) are self-supporting, that still leaves you with 15% of the market: three times the support contracts you had with your closed source product.
But all this still depends on the nature of the product, the nature of the market, and your ability to promote an open source application.
I'm pretty sure this is astroturf. Just like for movies, publishers pay people to form queues and get on the TV news.
Anyone who really wants a PS3 that badly would have pre-ordered.
I'm getting a Wii on Euro launch day, and I fully expect to queue for no more than 5 minutes, wave my preorder receipt at the attendant, and walk out with a Wii.
I'm not sure whether it's (or should be) patentable, but Flickr Intestingness is definitely a novel and, er, interesting concept. It's widely misunderstood even by hardcore Flickr-ites.
As far as I understand, an "Interestingness" score is derived from hits, referrers, tags, pool membership, comments and where comments come from, "favourite" tags and other things. The weighting is constantly being tweaked, and Interestingness changes over time because (for example, and hypothetically) a recent comment is more valuable than an old comment.
A number of great photographers get upset because they take high quality photographs which get lower Interestingness scores than pictures they perceive as having less merit. But Interesting is not about quality or merit. That's why it's not called "quality" or "merit". It's called "interestingness", meaning "cool stuff you might not have seen before".
That's why (again, for example and hypothetically) the tags "cat" or "baby" or "flower" are likely to have a negative impact on Interestingness. You can take the greatest baby picture ever, it's still not going to be interesting to most people, because Flickr is flooded with baby pictures.
In summary - it's cool, it's clever, it's more than just tagging, and it's novel.
I'd rather it wasn't patented but, hey, that's life.
This seems rather silly when iTunes already has the US covered for downloadable content, it's as if companies don't want our money in Europe and the rest of the world. I'd gladly pay to download movies or TV shows such as Lost however they simply don't seem to be available in a legitimate form here.
.torrents; find a convenient way to output AVIs to your TV) it's going to be awfully difficult to go back to paying money.
The problem (as always) is licensing. Since you started it, let's use Lost as an example. Sky TV pays ABC serious money to be the exclusive UK broadcaster of Lost. If Europeans could download it, that license would be devalued.
Quite why broadcasters still think it's a good idea to stagger release/broadcast dates wordwide, I don't know. You're practically forcing European fans to download from P2P, if they want to discuss the newest episode with Americans on forums.
The longer this goes on, the more people will get used to P2P. Once you've jumped the moral and technical hurdles (install a bittorrent client; learn to source
Not like me to link to YouTube in a /. post, but in this case it's irresistable:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DoClztvNHw
There's tons of Open Source out there that you /could/ use, and there's tons of commercial libraries out there after your dollars.
/I/ think is worth the money, let alone can sell to a PHB. ... and for Open Source, you need your employer to OK its use. Now this may be OK in smaller companies, but in the large companies I've worked for it's a hurdle. Mainstream stuff like OpenSSL, Perl, Hibernate etc. are fine (because someone else has gone through the process before you), but anything else has to go through a heavyweight approvals process that's often more work than writing the damn thing yourself.
But for commercial software, you've got to convince your PHB that it's worth the money (and I rarely see a commercial library that
There are two main reasons for this:
- people are concerned about using code of unknown quality
- people are absolutely terrified of IP law: accidentally incorporating GPL code in something they don't want to GPL; relying on software that apparently has an acceptable licence only for it to turn out to be someone else's original work.
That, to me, is the big barrier to re-use on a massive scale.
You would be surprised. My kids (aged 14 and 13) are really into Pink Floyd, it seems to be all the rage at their school.
We're all doomed. Wasn't punk supposed to have rescued us from this fate in 1977?
The anti-virus companies *ARE* responsible for all the viruses that are made!
I have long believed this to be to be more or less the case.
Maybe not all viruses, and maybe not all anti-virus companies, but to stoke up the AV market by chucking a few thousand dollars to some shady programmers in return for them writing virii seems too obvious and idea for it not to happen.
Grind. See WoW, EQ, and BF2142 as perfect examples of why grind sucks.
I've basically given up on all RPGs because of grind.
However, I've come to believe there's a large chunk of people out there who actively enjoy the countless random battles in (for example) Final Fantasy.
I don't mind that there are games for people who like that kind of thing. I can let them get on with it.
I haven't played Bully, so I'm speculating wildly here, but here's my assumption:
:)
There's a "kiss" button combination, so if you stand in front of a girl and press it, you grab her and you kiss.
Now, what happens if you stand in front of a boy and press the same buttons?
It seems to me that if anything different happens, the developers have to explain why they're discriminating against homosexuality. The only fair and balanced thing to do is for the engine to treat boys and girls alike.
The only remaining question is how the NPCs you try to kiss react. My guess, and the way I'd design it (not that I have any qualifications to design games) is that some female NPCs will fight you off and tell you to piss off, some female NPCs will be happy to kiss you, some male NPCs won't take kindly to it at all, while others will enjoy it.
My neighbour's bought the game, so I expect I'll give it a try in a couple of weeks when he gets bored of it
there may also be a finite number of melodies that any human ear would consider music
You could quantify this, to some extent.
Let's say a 3.5 minute pop song consists of two verses, a chorus, another verse, middle eight, a solo, the chorus again. Assume all are the same length, so the chorus is 30 seconds long. That's reasonable. How many 30 second choruses can exist?
CD quality audio is 16 bits at 44.1kHz. (2^16) * 44,100 * 30 = 86,704,128,000 choruses (double that if you consider that CDs are stereo).
However, you can discern a piece of music using far less information. Random Googling suggests that 8 bits at 11,025 Hz is good enough.
(2^8) * 11,025 * 30 = 84,672,000
But, most of those 30 second samples won't sound like music.
Let's try another shot, and just count the number of possible melodies. To make it simple, we'll assume that all melodies consist entirely of quavers or quaver-length rests. Surely you can approximate any tune, played in staccatto, using this system? At a fairly typical 120bpm, our 30 seconds gives us 60 beats, or 120 quavers. Let's restrict the songwriter to three octaves or 36 notes. That's 37 including the rests.
120 * 37 = 4,400
Great, there are only 4,400 tunes in the world (and most of those are unlistenable). What's the point of copyright?
Well, of course, it's a lot more complicated than that. The same sequence of notes played to a different set of chords will take on a completely different feeling. You have variety of tempo and instrumentation, and of course there's lyrics to consider.
The true number of tunes in the world will be somewhere between 4,400 and 84,672,000 !
Still, it's kinda tempting to generate all 4,400 melodies as MIDI files, publish them somehow (e.g. to a Web site), wait a couple of years, pick an international hit song, find the file most closely resembling it and try to convince a judge that it's a rip off of the "song" you "wrote".