No, it means it can playback a sequence of uncompressed frames. It has no capability of taking a video file in a given codec, decoding and displaying it. That's playing video.
The QuickTime on TFA plays at 30fps.
No, its a 15 FPS video.
The photos on the iPod Photo change at the same rate as the QuickTime video.
No, they don't. They change at the rate they are driven by the scroll wheel - neither you nor I have any evidence at all as to how fast they are actually changing and whether frames are being dropped, and the only good way to prove it would be to export a video where each frame consisted of the frame number, then try to play it synchronously while capturing it with a high-speed camera to tell us exactly which frames are expressing and which are not.
That's it, end of story. It doesn't have to play DV video for 2+ hours, it just has to play back stored images with sound. iTunes already transcodes jpegs, why not, if it can't play back raw AVI/MOV/MPG files (that even a 386 can, and cell phones for that matter), transcode them as well to.podav files if it has to?
No, it doesn't have to. Because that feature is worthless.
Why not transcode raw AVI, MOV, and MPG? Because there's no such thing as a raw AVI, MOV, or MPG file? They're wrappers (well, MPEG is not a wrapper technically, but MPG can refer to several different video formats in my experience.) Is that MOV file an MPEG-4 video file? Is it a Sorenson coded file? How about that AVI? Is it ISO MPEG-4? Cinepak? Some DivX variant? Is it Indeo encoded? Is the MPEG an MPEG1, 2 or 4? Are we going to support all of these? Only one of them? How do we deal with people complaining if we only support one of them? Who's going to add the transcoding functions into iTunes? How much do we have to pay them to do it? Who's going to buy it as a result of that feature being added? And most importantly, why should we bother?
"Sony's battery is smaller than the iPod's and it can only run (an lcd, tape drive, record head, optics system, video processor and DV encoder) for 2 hours!"
Sony's battery is smaller than the iPods, and it can only run the LCD, viewfinder, optics and electronics for around 2 hours. If you add in the encoder, tape drive, and record head, it will usually run for significantly less. The iPod's battery will run electronics, a grayscale LCD, and a hard drive (which sucks a large portion of the juice) for 8 hours. Note: that hard drive, when its reading, consumes roughly 1.4 W; this is about 5 times my estimate for average iPod power draw. Now, to play video, we wouldn't need anything like continuous read; however, that average power draw of 0.3W would likely go up. The factor by which it would go up can be calculated as follows (assuming its just flipbooking JPEGs):
MP3 data rate of 128 kbps produces our 8 hour runtime estimate. A 220x176 (native screen resolution) JPEG requires roughly 10k on average. Minimum video FPS would be 15; less is just not acceptable, even for crappy digicam movies (which shoot, usually, at 15 fps). So our minimum data rate for a movie would be 150 kbps. We'd need 2.2 times as much hard drive access for a video as for music, AT A MINIMUM (1x for the sound, 1.2x for the video). Add to this the additional power required for the brighter LED being on all the time (note: Apple rates the iPod Photo for slideshow + music for only 5 hours battery, as opposed to 15 hours for just music). You're probably looking at 3-4 hours, maybe less, for playing video. Which, for playing 15 second digicam movies is totally meaningless, but for playing anything anyone would actually care about, is meaningful.
The insults were just returning what you'd begun; mostly, they were to point out that our argument is between two people, one of whom (you) is not listening to the other (me). If you don't want to pay attention to the pretty obvious difficulties, that's fine. But ignoring the very real (and far more important, to Apple) financial issues, is what makes you intellectually bereft.
TFA appears that the iPod Photo can work as a flipbook at some undetermined framerate. This does not equate to 'can play video'.
Also, you are morally bankrupt and intellectually bereft, you smell like hamsters, and your father was a rodent with no incisors, because that's pretty much where this argument is headed.
My technology objections relate to the EXISTING iPods. Yes, Apple can redesign it to add full-on video capabilities. They probably shouldn't; like I said, additional sales from video are unlikely to match the redesign costs, especially when you account for the price differential needed to do video properly.
the current iPod Photo can show pictures faster than a standard video file while decoding an AAC.
Where do you see evidence that the iPod Photo can do video frame rates? From the description of video quality, it sounds like its pretty crappy, which would suggest that the Photo is dropping frames when you scroll to catch up, accounting for the fact that it probably isn't designed to do 30 FPS. From looking at the video the Engadget guys did (and this is a bad way to judge, since the frames aren't synchronized) I might buy 15 FPS, but I'd bet that it really only hits 5-10 FPS.
Sony's smallest pack is only used because it weighs 1.6 oz and it comes with the cameras; the 2 hour estimate there is like Apple's 10+ hour claim (i.e. pretty much a lie.) Also, think about this - Sony's power consumption is largely from the LCD and tape. Playing a video is going to suck power from the iPod far more rapidly (Sony's consumption: 2.6W, for the smallest camera w/ viewfinder and LCD active. iPod's drain, back-estimated, assuming 8 hours run, is 0.3W. Want to know how much power that LCD takes all on its own, on the Sony? About 0.3W.) I know a lot of people who use Sony cams; almost all of them have significantly larger (usually 2000+ mAh) battery packs, because that 680 mAh pack is worthless in practice when you need the camera for more than an hour or so of *standby* time, with infrequent recording. Think of it like the 'starter' ink cartridges that come in a lot of printers - good enough to make it work, but not really enough to work with.
People have them, people want to use them. The iPod Photo (or iPod AV) would be a good place to show them.
Who? I've seen ONE person use it, ever. And that was because they were playing around with their new camera. They said "ooh, movies!" and took a stupid movie. And you know what? They never used it again. I don't see a huge demand for it; I don't see people sticking them on their MPEG-4 capable cellphones, even when the cellphone is capable of taking the movie in the first place and there's no hassle dealing with format conversion like there would be getting it onto an iPod Photo. I just don't see a market for the feature.
And for the record, I thought the iPod Photo was a stupid idea; I have no desire to show photos on an iPod, my photos don't generally look all that good on a 2" screen without their full color gamut. However, I would like it if my current (non-Photo) iPod could show album art, and I'd probably buy a Photo if I was shopping for one now.
Adding video capability to the iPod Photo would be a very simple thing. Just have it play silly little mpeg/avi/mov's that digicams take.
Adding really crappy video capability, with some hacked-up import tool to convert those videos to an appropriate format (lots of screen shots), would be sort of easy, once you accounted for dealing with the umpteen million different video formats on the PC (MPEG at what resolution? Frame rate? Encoding? Etc.). Either Apple gets the fun of saying "Most of your videos won't work", or they get to write a user-friendly transcoding tool. Easier said than done.
But no, Steve Jobs says you don't want to watch a whole movie on an iPod, plus there are no movies you can legally put on an iPod, so they won't even let you watch your little digicam flics.
There are plenty of movies I can legally put on an iPod; anything I made, I can legally put on an iPod. Or were you referring to 'legally buy from Steve Jobs'? Here's a thought - which came first, the iPod or the iTMS? (Hint: iPod. By about a year and a half. iTMS was likely not an integral part of the iPod strategy; rather, as
No problem. Not everyone is obsessive enough to learn intricate details of American broadcast/copyright law, especially if (as I'm assuming?) you're not American. I worked in the US radio industry is the only reason I have all that stuff right at hand.
The DMCA makes illegal acts and technology designed to circumvent *systems that are used to technologically protect copyright*. Not any old system. The DMCA would not be used on someone who cut the line of a security system protecting a CD store (protected works, non-technological protection/circumvention). Nor could it be used (well, by language... court interpretation has been somewhat misguided) on someone cracking an encryption system used on a bank vault lock (technological protection/circumvention, non-protected work). The language you're looking for is "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." The Title referred to is Title 17, which deals exclusively with copyright - broadcast regulation is under Title 47.
The DMCA might not contradict the prosecutors, but that's a meaningless statement - the Anti-Sedition Act wouldn't contradict someone prosecuting me for mail fraud, but neither would it apply.
The DMCA applies to cases involving copyright; pirate radio prosecution involves FCC licensing of the airwaves. The two are (in the general case) not related.
Who said DV? Who said some high CPU codec? Battery has *nothing* to do with their decision on playing video. It is probably one of four reasons for not playing DVD quality video (the other three being screen size, not having a video store, and wanting to be able to criticize the players that *do* play video).
How large is the battery for a Sony DV Camera which runs a tape drive, a write head, an LCD, optics, *and* a DV *encoder* compared to the iPod battery?
The reason I suggested DV is because it is relatively light in terms of compute-intensiveness; it takes up a lot of space as a trade. Since the iPod has plenty of space but not much compute, DV would be ideal.
Digression - you CANNOT directly relate compute-intensity on a CPU to power consumption of a codec ASIC. It doesn't work like that - some very compute-intensive algorithms work extremely efficiently in ASIC form, while others don't (a lot of this is parallelization - ASICs tend to do better on parallelizable algorithms, or on algorithms that require a lot of hardwired bitshifting, while serial algorithms tend to run as well on high-speed general purpose CPUs). As a result, your example (the Sony DV cam) is totally meaningless - the encoder is practically free power-wise (but not cost-wise, which is probably why Apple doesn't put video codec chips onto iPods). As to who said high-CPU codec - well, pretty much everyone. People seem to want to stick MPEG-4s on there. MPEG-4 is not a particularly efficient codec, compute-wise, and as a result would require a dedicated codec, which would suck juice (I believe it would suck juice, I haven't looked at the math for MPEG-4 enough to know how efficiently it could be placed into logic - I do know it is compute-intensive).
Next, the smallest available battery pack for a Sony DVcam that I could find is a 680 mAh pack. My iPod's battery is a 850 mAh pack. That 680 mAh pack? It'll run the smallest, most efficient Sony miniDV camera for 2 hours, max, if you're lucky. Most DVcam battery packs (the ones that actually advertise being usable for multiple hours of continuous recording) are in the 2000+ mAh range; Sony even sells a 6800 mAh battery. Conclusion - significantly larger than the iPod's battery.
If the "they" you are referring to are the little video clips (and not Apple), I disagree with that as being a valid reason. They are dumpy, but fun. They are also less stupid than the games Apple has added to the iPod.
Apple is just afraid of putting any video onto the iPod. I can understand their reasoning, but I disagree it very much--it helps Apple by actively *not* helping me (the consumer).
They are dumpy, but I wouldn't call them fun. The games are at least usable to kill time on the bus for me; how many times can you watch a 15 second video of your friend punching himself in the face? It's one thing to have them on a digicam, where its basically a bit of extra software on top of the core function of the device - hey, it takes pictures? Why not make it take a whole bunch of crappy pictures real fast and make a crappy movie out of it? But adding that to the iPod would require adding on to the core function of the device, and I'm afraid I see neither the desire nor the need.
Sorry, but I have to go with Apple here - there isn't really a good reason to add video to the iPod. The extra cost would drive away more customers than the feature would attract.
Battery has nothing to do with it. If the iPod Photo can play photo slideshows and AAC, then it can do video.
No. There are these little chips, called coprocessors. It is quite possible that the iPod has a chip designed to do AAC coprocessing. Thus, it may not have the horsepower to playback compressed video. If anyone is storing DV on their iPod Photo and then getting upset they can't watch it on the screen, well, tough luck.
What I don't understand is why not play those stupid little 15s videos you can take with every digicam?
Would you care to explain this? Most pirate radio stations do not violate the DMCA, except possibly in incidental ways (cracked iTMS music being used or something like that.)
Now, if you were talking *internet* radio, you might be right, depending on format. But most *real* pirate radio stations are violating various FCC regulations, not the DMCA.
Berne Convention == Western-style copyright law. I had no idea what copyright regime prevails in Bangladesh; can you blame me for believing it might not necessarily be a Berne signatory?
It could just be a bad translation; the GPL does seem to be dependent on US/Western-style copyright law for it to be effective. And while the GPL is not a company, that could just be bad translation or a journalist being thrown off by something said and then poorly translated.
But probably they're just both clueless, you're right.
Do I need to repeat I DO NOT THINK THERE WAS SIGNIFICANT ELECTION FRAUD THIS CYCLE? I do think most Bush voters belong to the category I call "plain fucking dumb", but I don't think there was an artifical addition to this category; I just think a lot of my country is straight up dimwitted.
What I pointed out is that if you're going to falsify one vote on a ballot, you might as well falsify them all in your favor, and as a result you can't use matching presidential and congressional election results as evidence against fraud.
If you're going to commit fraud, there's no use doing it half-heartedly.
I don't think that fraud is the reason Bush one (I think the reason Bush won is that 51% of my country are completely fucking despicable, especially the citizens of 11 states including my home state) but pointing to corresponding gains in House and Senate is not exactly good evidence against the possibility of fraud.
Note: while their electronic components aisles will *not* be stocked regularly, the odds of finding a component there are still better than pretty much anywhere local. If you can't wait for Newark or Mouser to deliver it, then Fry's isn't a bad place to check, just in case. And I give my Fry's a ton of credit for having a large stock of ammonium persulfate (used to etch PCBs) for a better price than I could find online.
a) Bullshit your bullshit. Damn near no one I know has an extra battery, AND WE ARE ENGINEERS WORKING FOR A CELLPHONE COMPANY. When we go camping, we leave the damn phones off, which means a single battery is plenty. I know a lot of people who own 24-port managed switches; this does not mean its a normal thing, it means my friends are a bit weird. Similarly, most people don't seem to buy extra batteries (based on what friends who work in cellphone stores/Best Buy type stores tell me).
b) My cellphone batteries last, on average, about 2 years before deteriorating, with heavy daily use (cell-only user, no landline). My iPod battery, a little over a year in, is fine; I fully expect to see the same lifetime out of it.
Yes and no. It pissed me off because it was a dumb move. It was legal (and appropriate!) for Real to make their DRM compatible with the iPod. It was legal (but *dumb*) for Apple to change the DRM in future versions to break Real. The threats were stupid, but I've heard worse and I didn't really believe them anyway - they're just the sort of letters lawyers generate in their sleep, as some sort of natural process - normal people sweat and shit, lawyers write torts and C&Ds.
It pissed me off, but it had nothing to do with the iPod itself. It might have furthered my resolve to have nothing to do with iTMS, but a) I already own an iPod and b) I don't buy music online, and probably never will - I like record stores, and used CD shopping, and having physical things, so I give not one shit about online shops being compatible or not. I care a lot about U/I and form factor, and the iPod is still the clear winner on both of those to me.
I was with you until you got to a mackie mixer... why, oh why, would you do that to your sound? (I don't like Mackie's pre-amps, I will note.)
But yeah, a nice portable HDD with MD equivalent features would be great - I use my MD for similar things, mostly to record my own shows.
I'd check Marantz and HHB's offerings (I'm too lazy to do it right this second) - they've always made good portable recording gear, though not usually aimed at being covert.
Most people aren't going to bother buying a second removable battery, and few will keep it charged if they do... which eliminates your whole point.
It's like cellphones. Most people don't buy an extra battery for their phone, even though it is removable/exchangeable, because the battery life on 1 is good enough 99.9% of the time, and the other 0.1% of the time they just deal with it. Unless you like the phone enough to want to keep it after the battery decays, in which case you buy a replacement battery.
Easily exchangeable is not the same as replaceable.
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From the article, jackass.
The frame rate of the movie we downloaded was 15 frames per second, we'll export the same in QuickTime.
15 FPS. Not 30.
Next.
*Nice* troll.
(Is 'unochs' really Dutch for 'tree-based'?)
That's *exactly* what 'can play video means'.
.podav files if it has to?
No, it means it can playback a sequence of uncompressed frames. It has no capability of taking a video file in a given codec, decoding and displaying it. That's playing video.
The QuickTime on TFA plays at 30fps.
No, its a 15 FPS video.
The photos on the iPod Photo change at the same rate as the QuickTime video.
No, they don't. They change at the rate they are driven by the scroll wheel - neither you nor I have any evidence at all as to how fast they are actually changing and whether frames are being dropped, and the only good way to prove it would be to export a video where each frame consisted of the frame number, then try to play it synchronously while capturing it with a high-speed camera to tell us exactly which frames are expressing and which are not.
That's it, end of story. It doesn't have to play DV video for 2+ hours, it just has to play back stored images with sound. iTunes already transcodes jpegs, why not, if it can't play back raw AVI/MOV/MPG files (that even a 386 can, and cell phones for that matter), transcode them as well to
No, it doesn't have to. Because that feature is worthless.
Why not transcode raw AVI, MOV, and MPG? Because there's no such thing as a raw AVI, MOV, or MPG file? They're wrappers (well, MPEG is not a wrapper technically, but MPG can refer to several different video formats in my experience.) Is that MOV file an MPEG-4 video file? Is it a Sorenson coded file? How about that AVI? Is it ISO MPEG-4? Cinepak? Some DivX variant? Is it Indeo encoded? Is the MPEG an MPEG1, 2 or 4? Are we going to support all of these? Only one of them? How do we deal with people complaining if we only support one of them? Who's going to add the transcoding functions into iTunes? How much do we have to pay them to do it? Who's going to buy it as a result of that feature being added? And most importantly, why should we bother?
"Sony's battery is smaller than the iPod's and it can only run (an lcd, tape drive, record head, optics system, video processor and DV encoder) for 2 hours!"
Sony's battery is smaller than the iPods, and it can only run the LCD, viewfinder, optics and electronics for around 2 hours. If you add in the encoder, tape drive, and record head, it will usually run for significantly less. The iPod's battery will run electronics, a grayscale LCD, and a hard drive (which sucks a large portion of the juice) for 8 hours. Note: that hard drive, when its reading, consumes roughly 1.4 W; this is about 5 times my estimate for average iPod power draw. Now, to play video, we wouldn't need anything like continuous read; however, that average power draw of 0.3W would likely go up. The factor by which it would go up can be calculated as follows (assuming its just flipbooking JPEGs):
MP3 data rate of 128 kbps produces our 8 hour runtime estimate. A 220x176 (native screen resolution) JPEG requires roughly 10k on average. Minimum video FPS would be 15; less is just not acceptable, even for crappy digicam movies (which shoot, usually, at 15 fps). So our minimum data rate for a movie would be 150 kbps. We'd need 2.2 times as much hard drive access for a video as for music, AT A MINIMUM (1x for the sound, 1.2x for the video). Add to this the additional power required for the brighter LED being on all the time (note: Apple rates the iPod Photo for slideshow + music for only 5 hours battery, as opposed to 15 hours for just music). You're probably looking at 3-4 hours, maybe less, for playing video. Which, for playing 15 second digicam movies is totally meaningless, but for playing anything anyone would actually care about, is meaningful.
The insults were just returning what you'd begun; mostly, they were to point out that our argument is between two people, one of whom (you) is not listening to the other (me). If you don't want to pay attention to the pretty obvious difficulties, that's fine. But ignoring the very real (and far more important, to Apple) financial issues, is what makes you intellectually bereft.
Which is a nice way of saying "obtuse moron".
TFA appears that the iPod Photo can work as a flipbook at some undetermined framerate. This does not equate to 'can play video'.
Also, you are morally bankrupt and intellectually bereft, you smell like hamsters, and your father was a rodent with no incisors, because that's pretty much where this argument is headed.
My technology objections relate to the EXISTING iPods. Yes, Apple can redesign it to add full-on video capabilities. They probably shouldn't; like I said, additional sales from video are unlikely to match the redesign costs, especially when you account for the price differential needed to do video properly.
the current iPod Photo can show pictures faster than a standard video file while decoding an AAC.
Where do you see evidence that the iPod Photo can do video frame rates? From the description of video quality, it sounds like its pretty crappy, which would suggest that the Photo is dropping frames when you scroll to catch up, accounting for the fact that it probably isn't designed to do 30 FPS. From looking at the video the Engadget guys did (and this is a bad way to judge, since the frames aren't synchronized) I might buy 15 FPS, but I'd bet that it really only hits 5-10 FPS.
Sony's smallest pack is only used because it weighs 1.6 oz and it comes with the cameras; the 2 hour estimate there is like Apple's 10+ hour claim (i.e. pretty much a lie.) Also, think about this - Sony's power consumption is largely from the LCD and tape. Playing a video is going to suck power from the iPod far more rapidly (Sony's consumption: 2.6W, for the smallest camera w/ viewfinder and LCD active. iPod's drain, back-estimated, assuming 8 hours run, is 0.3W. Want to know how much power that LCD takes all on its own, on the Sony? About 0.3W.) I know a lot of people who use Sony cams; almost all of them have significantly larger (usually 2000+ mAh) battery packs, because that 680 mAh pack is worthless in practice when you need the camera for more than an hour or so of *standby* time, with infrequent recording. Think of it like the 'starter' ink cartridges that come in a lot of printers - good enough to make it work, but not really enough to work with.
People have them, people want to use them. The iPod Photo (or iPod AV) would be a good place to show them.
Who? I've seen ONE person use it, ever. And that was because they were playing around with their new camera. They said "ooh, movies!" and took a stupid movie. And you know what? They never used it again. I don't see a huge demand for it; I don't see people sticking them on their MPEG-4 capable cellphones, even when the cellphone is capable of taking the movie in the first place and there's no hassle dealing with format conversion like there would be getting it onto an iPod Photo. I just don't see a market for the feature.
And for the record, I thought the iPod Photo was a stupid idea; I have no desire to show photos on an iPod, my photos don't generally look all that good on a 2" screen without their full color gamut. However, I would like it if my current (non-Photo) iPod could show album art, and I'd probably buy a Photo if I was shopping for one now.
Adding video capability to the iPod Photo would be a very simple thing. Just have it play silly little mpeg/avi/mov's that digicams take.
Adding really crappy video capability, with some hacked-up import tool to convert those videos to an appropriate format (lots of screen shots), would be sort of easy, once you accounted for dealing with the umpteen million different video formats on the PC (MPEG at what resolution? Frame rate? Encoding? Etc.). Either Apple gets the fun of saying "Most of your videos won't work", or they get to write a user-friendly transcoding tool. Easier said than done.
But no, Steve Jobs says you don't want to watch a whole movie on an iPod, plus there are no movies you can legally put on an iPod, so they won't even let you watch your little digicam flics.
There are plenty of movies I can legally put on an iPod; anything I made, I can legally put on an iPod. Or were you referring to 'legally buy from Steve Jobs'? Here's a thought - which came first, the iPod or the iTMS? (Hint: iPod. By about a year and a half. iTMS was likely not an integral part of the iPod strategy; rather, as
No problem. Not everyone is obsessive enough to learn intricate details of American broadcast/copyright law, especially if (as I'm assuming?) you're not American. I worked in the US radio industry is the only reason I have all that stuff right at hand.
The DMCA makes illegal acts and technology designed to circumvent *systems that are used to technologically protect copyright*. Not any old system. The DMCA would not be used on someone who cut the line of a security system protecting a CD store (protected works, non-technological protection/circumvention). Nor could it be used (well, by language... court interpretation has been somewhat misguided) on someone cracking an encryption system used on a bank vault lock (technological protection/circumvention, non-protected work). The language you're looking for is "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." The Title referred to is Title 17, which deals exclusively with copyright - broadcast regulation is under Title 47.
The DMCA might not contradict the prosecutors, but that's a meaningless statement - the Anti-Sedition Act wouldn't contradict someone prosecuting me for mail fraud, but neither would it apply.
The DMCA applies to cases involving copyright; pirate radio prosecution involves FCC licensing of the airwaves. The two are (in the general case) not related.
Yes, but 'left of center' in a NYT sort of way, and right of center in a 'WSJ news - not the editorials' sort of way.
We're not talking about the equivalent of the National Review or MIM Notes here.
Who said DV? Who said some high CPU codec? Battery has *nothing* to do with their decision on playing video. It is probably one of four reasons for not playing DVD quality video (the other three being screen size, not having a video store, and wanting to be able to criticize the players that *do* play video).
How large is the battery for a Sony DV Camera which runs a tape drive, a write head, an LCD, optics, *and* a DV *encoder* compared to the iPod battery?
The reason I suggested DV is because it is relatively light in terms of compute-intensiveness; it takes up a lot of space as a trade. Since the iPod has plenty of space but not much compute, DV would be ideal.
Digression - you CANNOT directly relate compute-intensity on a CPU to power consumption of a codec ASIC. It doesn't work like that - some very compute-intensive algorithms work extremely efficiently in ASIC form, while others don't (a lot of this is parallelization - ASICs tend to do better on parallelizable algorithms, or on algorithms that require a lot of hardwired bitshifting, while serial algorithms tend to run as well on high-speed general purpose CPUs). As a result, your example (the Sony DV cam) is totally meaningless - the encoder is practically free power-wise (but not cost-wise, which is probably why Apple doesn't put video codec chips onto iPods). As to who said high-CPU codec - well, pretty much everyone. People seem to want to stick MPEG-4s on there. MPEG-4 is not a particularly efficient codec, compute-wise, and as a result would require a dedicated codec, which would suck juice (I believe it would suck juice, I haven't looked at the math for MPEG-4 enough to know how efficiently it could be placed into logic - I do know it is compute-intensive).
Next, the smallest available battery pack for a Sony DVcam that I could find is a 680 mAh pack. My iPod's battery is a 850 mAh pack. That 680 mAh pack? It'll run the smallest, most efficient Sony miniDV camera for 2 hours, max, if you're lucky. Most DVcam battery packs (the ones that actually advertise being usable for multiple hours of continuous recording) are in the 2000+ mAh range; Sony even sells a 6800 mAh battery. Conclusion - significantly larger than the iPod's battery.
If the "they" you are referring to are the little video clips (and not Apple), I disagree with that as being a valid reason. They are dumpy, but fun. They are also less stupid than the games Apple has added to the iPod.
Apple is just afraid of putting any video onto the iPod. I can understand their reasoning, but I disagree it very much--it helps Apple by actively *not* helping me (the consumer).
They are dumpy, but I wouldn't call them fun. The games are at least usable to kill time on the bus for me; how many times can you watch a 15 second video of your friend punching himself in the face? It's one thing to have them on a digicam, where its basically a bit of extra software on top of the core function of the device - hey, it takes pictures? Why not make it take a whole bunch of crappy pictures real fast and make a crappy movie out of it? But adding that to the iPod would require adding on to the core function of the device, and I'm afraid I see neither the desire nor the need.
Sorry, but I have to go with Apple here - there isn't really a good reason to add video to the iPod. The extra cost would drive away more customers than the feature would attract.
Battery has nothing to do with it. If the iPod Photo can play photo slideshows and AAC, then it can do video.
No. There are these little chips, called coprocessors. It is quite possible that the iPod has a chip designed to do AAC coprocessing. Thus, it may not have the horsepower to playback compressed video. If anyone is storing DV on their iPod Photo and then getting upset they can't watch it on the screen, well, tough luck.
What I don't understand is why not play those stupid little 15s videos you can take with every digicam?
Because they are stupid. F'real.
All pirate radio stations violate the DMCA.
Would you care to explain this? Most pirate radio stations do not violate the DMCA, except possibly in incidental ways (cracked iTMS music being used or something like that.)
Now, if you were talking *internet* radio, you might be right, depending on format. But most *real* pirate radio stations are violating various FCC regulations, not the DMCA.
It is possible to 'loose' your credibility or funding, using 'loose' in a similar sense to 'let loose the dogs'.
College, however, is still not a proper noun, and the correct verb for grandparent's sentence would certainly be 'lose'.
I wish I had enough funding to be able to 'loose' it, though. These days, I don't even have enough to be able to lose it.
Ha'aretz is a fairly centrist viewpoint, defining center in terms of Israeli politics.
Berne Convention == Western-style copyright law. I had no idea what copyright regime prevails in Bangladesh; can you blame me for believing it might not necessarily be a Berne signatory?
You *do* know some mail clients download headers only, right?
State Farm, eh?
It could just be a bad translation; the GPL does seem to be dependent on US/Western-style copyright law for it to be effective. And while the GPL is not a company, that could just be bad translation or a journalist being thrown off by something said and then poorly translated.
But probably they're just both clueless, you're right.
Do I need to repeat I DO NOT THINK THERE WAS SIGNIFICANT ELECTION FRAUD THIS CYCLE? I do think most Bush voters belong to the category I call "plain fucking dumb", but I don't think there was an artifical addition to this category; I just think a lot of my country is straight up dimwitted.
What I pointed out is that if you're going to falsify one vote on a ballot, you might as well falsify them all in your favor, and as a result you can't use matching presidential and congressional election results as evidence against fraud.
If you're going to commit fraud, there's no use doing it half-heartedly.
I don't think that fraud is the reason Bush one (I think the reason Bush won is that 51% of my country are completely fucking despicable, especially the citizens of 11 states including my home state) but pointing to corresponding gains in House and Senate is not exactly good evidence against the possibility of fraud.
You, maybe.
I, not believing in your little cult, am under no such obligation.
(Don't assume.)
Note: while their electronic components aisles will *not* be stocked regularly, the odds of finding a component there are still better than pretty much anywhere local. If you can't wait for Newark or Mouser to deliver it, then Fry's isn't a bad place to check, just in case. And I give my Fry's a ton of credit for having a large stock of ammonium persulfate (used to etch PCBs) for a better price than I could find online.
a) Bullshit your bullshit. Damn near no one I know has an extra battery, AND WE ARE ENGINEERS WORKING FOR A CELLPHONE COMPANY. When we go camping, we leave the damn phones off, which means a single battery is plenty. I know a lot of people who own 24-port managed switches; this does not mean its a normal thing, it means my friends are a bit weird. Similarly, most people don't seem to buy extra batteries (based on what friends who work in cellphone stores/Best Buy type stores tell me).
b) My cellphone batteries last, on average, about 2 years before deteriorating, with heavy daily use (cell-only user, no landline). My iPod battery, a little over a year in, is fine; I fully expect to see the same lifetime out of it.
Yes and no. It pissed me off because it was a dumb move. It was legal (and appropriate!) for Real to make their DRM compatible with the iPod. It was legal (but *dumb*) for Apple to change the DRM in future versions to break Real. The threats were stupid, but I've heard worse and I didn't really believe them anyway - they're just the sort of letters lawyers generate in their sleep, as some sort of natural process - normal people sweat and shit, lawyers write torts and C&Ds.
It pissed me off, but it had nothing to do with the iPod itself. It might have furthered my resolve to have nothing to do with iTMS, but a) I already own an iPod and b) I don't buy music online, and probably never will - I like record stores, and used CD shopping, and having physical things, so I give not one shit about online shops being compatible or not. I care a lot about U/I and form factor, and the iPod is still the clear winner on both of those to me.
I was with you until you got to a mackie mixer... why, oh why, would you do that to your sound? (I don't like Mackie's pre-amps, I will note.)
But yeah, a nice portable HDD with MD equivalent features would be great - I use my MD for similar things, mostly to record my own shows.
I'd check Marantz and HHB's offerings (I'm too lazy to do it right this second) - they've always made good portable recording gear, though not usually aimed at being covert.
Most people aren't going to bother buying a second removable battery, and few will keep it charged if they do... which eliminates your whole point.
It's like cellphones. Most people don't buy an extra battery for their phone, even though it is removable/exchangeable, because the battery life on 1 is good enough 99.9% of the time, and the other 0.1% of the time they just deal with it. Unless you like the phone enough to want to keep it after the battery decays, in which case you buy a replacement battery.
Easily exchangeable is not the same as replaceable.