I think the original poster is referring to the poor quality of iTunes encoding (128kbps) vs. what he may choose to encode from CD when he talks about "hearing the differenct", not it being an effect of DRM.
I completely agree, by the way. I refuse to buy iTunes preferring to buy a CD and rip it the way I like, VBR with 192kbps which, while still lossy, is a good compromise between file size and audio quality.
Besides, I have an iPod now but who's to say that I will continue buying iPods? There's no way in hell I want to be locked into apple HW to listen to my tunes.
Looks like google is the one playing catch up to microsoft this time. Microsoft search has had this feature since it was in beta. And it even gets teh president in 1996 question correct.
Here's the text of the WSJ article cited by CNN. It actually has much better information and clarifies some points.
--
IBM Embraces Bold Method To Trap Spam
By CHARLES FORELLE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL March 22, 2005; Page B1
Warriors in the battle against junk e-mail are adopting a contentious tactic: Spam the spammers.
The most-common spam defense used to date -- software filters that attempt to identify and block out the unwanted messages -- hasn't stopped the flood of Viagra pitches, cut-rate mortgage offers, and solicitations for foolproof investment schemes swamping many inboxes. Some recent studies say 50% to 75% of e-mails carried over the Internet are spam.
An alternate approach -- counterattacking, in effect -- has been available for some time to users of open-source software, for which code is posted free of charge on the Internet. But adoption in corporate offices has been slow, partly because of fears of exposing companies to certain liabilities -- especially if a target is actually innocent of spamming.
But now the practice is going mainstream. International Business Machines Corp. is expected to unveil today its first major foray into the anti-spam market with a service, based on a new IBM technology called FairUCE, that uses a giant database to identify computers that are sending spam. One key feature: E-mails coming from a computer on the spam list are sent directly back to the machine, not just the e-mail account, that sent them. The more spam that comes out, the more vigorous the response.
"We're doing it to shut this guy down," says Stuart McIrvine, IBM's director of corporate security strategy. "Every time he tries to send, he gets slammed again."
The IBM move follows security giant Symantec Corp., which released a new product in January that uses a similar technology called "traffic shaping" to slow connections from suspected spam computers.
Trapping spammers is sometimes called "teergrubing," from the German word for "tar pit" -- as in, spammers get stuck. It is the equivalent of answering a telemarketer's phone call, "saying 'Hi, how are you,' and setting the phone down and seeing how long he'll talk before realizing there's no one on the other end," says Tom Liston, a computer-security expert.
Teergrubes exploit some convenient features of the Internet, which was designed to be a polite method of communication. Computers -- including e-mail servers -- that chat back and forth in the Internet's electronic protocol will courteously wait to see that their data has been received before sending more. Typically, such acknowledgments come in a matter of milliseconds. A computer set up to teergrube will languorously stretch its responses out to minutes -- effectively tying up the spamming machine and reducing its ability to pump out messages.
How to handle spam -- or, indeed, any other form of unwanted electronic traffic -- is a tricky issue in security circles. Gaining unauthorized entry to a remote system, even in order to stop it from harming yours, is generally illegal under anti-hacking laws. The aggressive new products from IBM and others don't violate those rules, but they can increase the amount of network traffic. Unnecessary traffic increases are generally frowned upon.
But proponents of aggressive antispam tactics say something needs to be done to choke off the supply; simply turning the other cheek and trying to discard spam as quickly as possible isn't enough. IBM says in a new report that in February 76% of all e-mails were spam, down from a summer 2004 peak of nearly 95%, but still well above levels at the same time last year.
"Yes, we are adding more traffic to the network, but it is in an effort to cut down the longer-term traffic," says IBM's Mr. McIrvine. Brian Czarny, vice president of marketing for MessageLabs Ltd., which uses the Symantec product, says traffic shaping doesn't constitute a potentially illegal "denial of service" attack because it is r
Forgot to add the following infomrative link from a Forbes article to the parent post:
http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/18/0318digitaldist ri bution.html
A relevant quote from the article: Film distribution is a huge and largely unseen component of the movie business. Currently, copies of movies are distributed in huge film cans by companies like Technicolor, a unit of Thomson Multimedia (nyse: TMS - news - people), or shipped around the country by studios using FedEx (nyse: FDX - news - people) or UPS (nyse: UPS - news - people). Technicolor processes about 3 billion feet of film each year and also oversees the process of shipping hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of a feature.
Producing, distributing and managing the huge inventory of print costs for an average feature film cost $3.7 million last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), accounting for about 12% of film marketing costs. With 482 films released last year, managing film prints was a $1.8 billion industry in the U.S. alone.
By converting to digital, the MPAA estimates it can cut that figure by 25%, or about $600,000 per feature, which for a big studio releasing 20 features a year could add up to $12 million in savings per year on U.S. releases
Let's not forget an important aspect to that $100,000 projector: who's going to pay for it?
The theator owners don't want to absorb the cost because the benefit they receive is somewhat minimal. The production/distribution companies received the greatest benefit do due reduced costs and increased efficiencies (anyone wanna guess how much a print of a movie costs to make and ship? Guess who pays for this?)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the original poster is referring to the poor quality of iTunes encoding (128kbps) vs. what he may choose to encode from CD when he talks about "hearing the differenct", not it being an effect of DRM.
I completely agree, by the way. I refuse to buy iTunes preferring to buy a CD and rip it the way I like, VBR with 192kbps which, while still lossy, is a good compromise between file size and audio quality.
Besides, I have an iPod now but who's to say that I will continue buying iPods? There's no way in hell I want to be locked into apple HW to listen to my tunes.
Looks like google is the one playing catch up to microsoft this time. Microsoft search has had this feature since it was in beta. And it even gets teh president in 1996 question correct.
+ united+states+in+1996&FORM=QBHP
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=president+of
Here's the text of the WSJ article cited by CNN. It actually has much better information and clarifies some points.
--
IBM Embraces Bold Method To Trap Spam
By CHARLES FORELLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 22, 2005; Page B1
Warriors in the battle against junk e-mail are adopting a contentious tactic: Spam the spammers.
The most-common spam defense used to date -- software filters that attempt to identify and block out the unwanted messages -- hasn't stopped the flood of Viagra pitches, cut-rate mortgage offers, and solicitations for foolproof investment schemes swamping many inboxes. Some recent studies say 50% to 75% of e-mails carried over the Internet are spam.
An alternate approach -- counterattacking, in effect -- has been available for some time to users of open-source software, for which code is posted free of charge on the Internet. But adoption in corporate offices has been slow, partly because of fears of exposing companies to certain liabilities -- especially if a target is actually innocent of spamming.
But now the practice is going mainstream. International Business Machines Corp. is expected to unveil today its first major foray into the anti-spam market with a service, based on a new IBM technology called FairUCE, that uses a giant database to identify computers that are sending spam. One key feature: E-mails coming from a computer on the spam list are sent directly back to the machine, not just the e-mail account, that sent them. The more spam that comes out, the more vigorous the response.
"We're doing it to shut this guy down," says Stuart McIrvine, IBM's director of corporate security strategy. "Every time he tries to send, he gets slammed again."
The IBM move follows security giant Symantec Corp., which released a new product in January that uses a similar technology called "traffic shaping" to slow connections from suspected spam computers.
Trapping spammers is sometimes called "teergrubing," from the German word for "tar pit" -- as in, spammers get stuck. It is the equivalent of answering a telemarketer's phone call, "saying 'Hi, how are you,' and setting the phone down and seeing how long he'll talk before realizing there's no one on the other end," says Tom Liston, a computer-security expert.
Teergrubes exploit some convenient features of the Internet, which was designed to be a polite method of communication. Computers -- including e-mail servers -- that chat back and forth in the Internet's electronic protocol will courteously wait to see that their data has been received before sending more. Typically, such acknowledgments come in a matter of milliseconds. A computer set up to teergrube will languorously stretch its responses out to minutes -- effectively tying up the spamming machine and reducing its ability to pump out messages.
How to handle spam -- or, indeed, any other form of unwanted electronic traffic -- is a tricky issue in security circles. Gaining unauthorized entry to a remote system, even in order to stop it from harming yours, is generally illegal under anti-hacking laws. The aggressive new products from IBM and others don't violate those rules, but they can increase the amount of network traffic. Unnecessary traffic increases are generally frowned upon.
But proponents of aggressive antispam tactics say something needs to be done to choke off the supply; simply turning the other cheek and trying to discard spam as quickly as possible isn't enough. IBM says in a new report that in February 76% of all e-mails were spam, down from a summer 2004 peak of nearly 95%, but still well above levels at the same time last year.
"Yes, we are adding more traffic to the network, but it is in an effort to cut down the longer-term traffic," says IBM's Mr. McIrvine. Brian Czarny, vice president of marketing for MessageLabs Ltd., which uses the Symantec product, says traffic shaping doesn't constitute a potentially illegal "denial of service" attack because it is r
Forgot to add the following infomrative link from a Forbes article to the parent post:
t ri bution.html
http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/18/0318digitaldis
A relevant quote from the article:
Film distribution is a huge and largely unseen component of the movie business. Currently, copies of movies are distributed in huge film cans by companies like Technicolor, a unit of Thomson Multimedia (nyse: TMS - news - people), or shipped around the country by studios using FedEx (nyse: FDX - news - people) or UPS (nyse: UPS - news - people). Technicolor processes about 3 billion feet of film each year and also oversees the process of shipping hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of a feature.
Producing, distributing and managing the huge inventory of print costs for an average feature film cost $3.7 million last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), accounting for about 12% of film marketing costs. With 482 films released last year, managing film prints was a $1.8 billion industry in the U.S. alone.
By converting to digital, the MPAA estimates it can cut that figure by 25%, or about $600,000 per feature, which for a big studio releasing 20 features a year could add up to $12 million in savings per year on U.S. releases
--
A smarter way to sell your home: LeapHomes.
Let's not forget an important aspect to that $100,000 projector: who's going to pay for it?
The theator owners don't want to absorb the cost because the benefit they receive is somewhat minimal. The production/distribution companies received the greatest benefit do due reduced costs and increased efficiencies (anyone wanna guess how much a print of a movie costs to make and ship? Guess who pays for this?)
--
A smarter way to sell your home: LeapHomes.