The one thing the Ogg Vorbis folks have never figured out is that they're doomed to the desktop until they have an integer decoder. Everyone wants portability, but not even the most luxurious portable players (Rio/Empeg Car, iPod) will ever be able to support Ogg until there's an integer decoder. All of the portables either use a) hardware decoders, or b) ARM or similar chips with no FPUs.
Unless these guys do something more than say they'll "eventually get that sorted" they will never see the broad acceptance that will make Vorbis take off.
I've only seen one mention of it, but my all time favorite Z80 machine was the CP/M board for the Apple II. It was also the first product I'd ever used from a Washington-based company named Microsoft.
Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to the guy who was following Jerry Pournelle around the West Coast Computer Faire, one Bill Gates.
Oh? I couldn't find anything with a (R) on the e.Digital site, though they seemed to TM every other phrase. Handspring has TM's on Treo (and Handspring, interestingly).
So, uhh, neither is registered with USPTO. And I'd guess Handspring will win, based on a) earlier announcements, and b) more lawyers.
And I do think that for the purposes of trademark categories that PDA Phone == MP3 Player. The category is probably "Handheld Electronic Device" or even "Consumer Electronic Device"
And there is certainly potential for confusion. It's not precedent in the US, but remember the "Budweiser" ruling in the UK....
Not with the CPU's we're talking about. The Rio Receiver uses the Cirrus Maverick, which is a 74MHz ARM7 core. The iPod is similar. You just don't have enough horsepower to keep up with decoding a Vorbis stream in realtime if you have to emulate the FPU. If Iomega has Vorbis working, they must have an integer decoder, or a chip with an FPU.
I'd be happy if Iomega could just make Zip drives work, to be honest.
Last year, when I wanted to play music in my computer room, I took an old 486/DX120, installed a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, found a cheap 20gb HD, scrounged an old 36X CD player, installed SuSE Linux, and sat it in the corner.
Fine, you now have a box that has two fans, one HD, and one high-speed CD-ROM to make noise while you're trying to listen to music. Oh, and it probably draws ~100W.
As someone pointed out (while talking up the SliMP3), the Reciever doesn't even have a heatsink. And, with the exception of the sound coming from your speakers, it's silent.
Have you really listened to MP3? At higher bitrates (I'm using --dm-preset xtreme, works out to around 220kb/s for most music) it's really very good. I can't tell the difference between it and uncompressed.wav through the same DACs. I can tell the difference between good DACs and soundcards.
So, do you know any of the Vorbis developers? If you do, please let them know that they will never see support in embedded devices like this one (or any Audiotron/Rio/Nomad/iPod/whatever) until they have an integer-only decoder.
Last I looked, (which really was too long ago for me to be as strident as I was above...) there was no integer-only decoder. The ARM chips that everyone uses for these functions don't have FPUs. For most codecs, that's fine. For Vorbis, it isn't. (Wasn't? Here's hoping.)
What is the point in streaming full quality 256Kbps digitally across my house only to lose that quality in the last few feet due to a cheap-as-you-can-mass-produce DAC?
None. Which is why they used nice Burr-Brown DACs in the reciever. they also built in a 10Wx2 (RMS, not "peak") amplifier, which does an admirable job of driving decent bookshelf speakers.
I agree that SPDIF would have been nice, but it's more cost for a feature that few people will use. (Besides, I'd argue that the Burr-Brown DACs are better than what's on the other end of the TOSLink for 90% of their customers.)
Everyone's calling this the "Poor-man"'s Audiotron. I wonder about that, since the UI on my Gateway (admittedly running very old software) is horribly slow, to the point of being unusable. The Rio/Dell boxes I have are reasonably responsive, though not quite as quick as the empeg car. (Same software dev team, btw.)
Actually, it's not. It's different because the AHRA has allowed the RIAA to tax that blank tape. RIAA hates computers because computers are exempted from the AHRA...at least until they buy the SSSCA.
This isn't surprising. The RIAA crammed through a terribly nasty piece of legislation several years ago called the AHRA. This is what required the consumer electronics vendors to implement SCMS (the so-called "copyright" bit), and more or less killed DAT. It also created a tax on audio media.
Now the theory was that this tax was compensation for the copies of your music that you make. Any copies made on taxed media were presumed non-infringing. Now, RIAA hasn't kept that end of the bargain, but that shouldn't surprise you.
Why two kinds of CD-Rs? Simple. Computer have always been exempt from the AHRA, hence no required DRM (even something as feeble as SCMS) and no media tax. But the consumer CD-R burners are considered consumer electronics, and are thus subject to the AHRA. RIAA managed to lobby/browbeat/threaten the CD burner vendors into a standard for detecting taxed media and only burning to it. I think they'll play CD-Rs from a PC, but they won't burn to them.
If it were a personal player (which it is), I wouldn't need to worry about whether I put the new songs on it, as I run out of my house.
How fast do you run? I'd say you've got about 20 seconds before you're of of range...
While every one of your other points is quite good about the benefits of wireless, I just don't think that a personal player is the place for wireless. Heck, you've got to charge the thing anyway, this does charging and sync with one wire. Hang on... that's it:
Hey Taco! It is wireless...but to conserve battery, it doesn't work unless you plug in the charger! Yeah, that's the ticket.;)
Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit. And even DOCSIS was an improvement over the old GI proprietary system. (Telco return, was it?)
The Toshiba is also one of the best DOCSIS modems out there.
To give you an idea, though: Typical configurations of DOCSIS get 3Mbps upstream, and need 25dB SNR to do it. The technology that Shaw uses is 8Mbps symmetrical, and only needs 15dB to do it.
As to the upgrade, there are a bunch of ways to improve the plant, the easiest of which is to split the "nodes" (areas served by a single fiber-coax converter) into smaller ones. Lots more expensive equipment in the field, but not a lot of trenching to do it.
And one of the reasons why Shaw and Rogers are doing so well with cable modems is that they picked a technology that worked.
American cable operators were so obsessed with getting cable modems off their books and into retail that they waited years for DOCSIS, a standard that, in addition to being byzantine, has a crap physical layer, so it requires pristine cable plants. Pristine cable plants don't exist in the US, so the cable operators spent a fortune upgrading plant to make DOCSIS work.
Canada had no such obsession with retail, and Shaw and Rogers picked a proprietary system with a great physical layer, saved themselves a fortune on rebuilds, and deployed (sometimes years) earlier.
Yes, I did get my training decades ago, when "wireless" was all the rage:)
Sorry OM, that's not quite what I meant. I was referring to the last 5-10 years or so, "wireless" suddenly became a buzzword for really new radio stuff, like Wireless LANs and Wireless Phones (as opposed to cordless phones).
The interesting thing is that the coaxial "Balun", "Sleeve", "Dipole" (whatever) is shorter than a free space quarter wave. It has been trimmed 30% to account for the velocity factor in the teflon coax. But it is also air-spaced from the coax sheath, by about 1 coax radius. I am guessing that some engineer didn't quite get his/her calculations right on that one, but haven't bothered to chase it up yet...
I've noticed that, and they are indeed shorter than a quarter wave in practice. When I made them out of coax, I'd always just hook it up to a network analyser, and trim it until the dip in the SWR curve was at the right frequency.
73 de N6MOD
This really isn't an uncommon problem with switching power supplies. The company I worked for had this problem at least three times, and we always "solved" it by switching vendors. This seems to be the case with Apple, IBM, and Compaq, all of whom have hit this problem in the recent past.
I'm just wondering how they know that this new vendor's supplies are any better than the old ones. Remember that we're talking about a 0.003% failure rate here. What possible QA tests could you use to verify that the new supplies don't have the problem?
I agree with the masses that Replay is going to be spending a lot of time in court on this one. But remember who we're dealing with here.
SonicBlue recently bought Replay, and SonicBlue is new name of S3, who bought Diamond Multimedia.
Diamond, of course, is the originator of the Rio, and the Rio was at the center of the only major legal victory for the forces of sanity in recent years. The Copyright Mafioso (Rosen, Valenti, et al) will try to pervert the legal system and copyright law to their own ends, (and have done quite well with the DMCA) but if anyone's going to take a stand in the name of cool toys, it's going to be SonicBlue.
At the same time, the DoJ seems determined to turn Sklyarov into a martyr, no matter how bad the case may be. I think the stage is being set for some serious progress towards a restoration of Fair Use as it once was.
For my part, I preordered a Replay 4040. If SonicBlue wants to step up to the plate, I'll vote with my wallet.
I agree with most of the literate posters on this article, namedly that ripping out the 1GHz PIIIs and trying to maintain a pool of swap-meet machines isn't going to get you anything but fired.
But if you're a proponent of the application server model, there's an interesting strategy for transition.
Let's say you have an office full of 500MHz+ P2 or better machines running Windows. Keep them that way, and stop upgrading the desktop. Install some hi-po application servers, and deploy X terminal software.
Then, everyone gets to keep their standalone machines, but the real screaming application performance comes from running X against the server.
To do this right, you need a good, fast X terminal for windows. eXceed is good, but not cheap. Any suggestions for a [f|F]ree alternative?
The Rio/Dell Receiver (same hardware, different plastic) uses a Cirrus Maverick (ARM7 core with lots of integrated peripherals) at (IIRC) 75MHz.
So, it's not a dedicated MPEG chip like a lot of the players, and I'm pretty sure WMA support is/was on the roadmap. Vorbis is "just another codec", though there's no FPU, so you'd have to do an integer-only decoder. (That's the stumbling block for the SA1100-based empeg/Rio car, as well.)
If you folks really want Vorbis everywhere, it's going to take a good integer implementation of the decoder.
Slashdot Mirror
I admit that I haven't studied the details of the exploit, but you're implying that spoofing a malicious packet or packets won't work?
Sure, they shut off the easy way to launch an attack, but I can still send that same message from another host, can't I?
The one thing the Ogg Vorbis folks have never figured out is that they're doomed to the desktop until they have an integer decoder. Everyone wants portability, but not even the most luxurious portable players (Rio/Empeg Car, iPod) will ever be able to support Ogg until there's an integer decoder. All of the portables either use a) hardware decoders, or b) ARM or similar chips with no FPUs.
Unless these guys do something more than say they'll "eventually get that sorted" they will never see the broad acceptance that will make Vorbis take off.
It really is that simple.
The article is unfortunately a little light on details
That's the worst pun I've read in a long time.
Bravo!
I've only seen one mention of it, but my all time favorite Z80 machine was the CP/M board for the Apple II. It was also the first product I'd ever used from a Washington-based company named Microsoft.
Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to the guy who was following Jerry Pournelle around the West Coast Computer Faire, one Bill Gates.
Amazing what can happen in twenty-odd years.
Oh? I couldn't find anything with a (R) on the e.Digital site, though they seemed to TM every other phrase. Handspring has TM's on Treo (and Handspring, interestingly).
So, uhh, neither is registered with USPTO. And I'd guess Handspring will win, based on a) earlier announcements, and b) more lawyers.
And I do think that for the purposes of trademark categories that PDA Phone == MP3 Player. The category is probably "Handheld Electronic Device" or even "Consumer Electronic Device"
And there is certainly potential for confusion. It's not precedent in the US, but remember the "Budweiser" ruling in the UK....
Not with the CPU's we're talking about. The Rio Receiver uses the Cirrus Maverick, which is a 74MHz ARM7 core. The iPod is similar. You just don't have enough horsepower to keep up with decoding a Vorbis stream in realtime if you have to emulate the FPU. If Iomega has Vorbis working, they must have an integer decoder, or a chip with an FPU.
I'd be happy if Iomega could just make Zip drives work, to be honest.
Last year, when I wanted to play music in my computer room, I took an old 486/DX120, installed a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, found a cheap 20gb HD, scrounged an old 36X CD player, installed SuSE Linux, and sat it in the corner.
Fine, you now have a box that has two fans, one HD, and one high-speed CD-ROM to make noise while you're trying to listen to music. Oh, and it probably draws ~100W.
As someone pointed out (while talking up the SliMP3), the Reciever doesn't even have a heatsink. And, with the exception of the sound coming from your speakers, it's silent.
Oh, like MP3s/Ogg is really audiophile quality..
.wav through the same DACs. I can tell the difference between good DACs and soundcards.
Have you really listened to MP3? At higher bitrates (I'm using --dm-preset xtreme, works out to around 220kb/s for most music) it's really very good. I can't tell the difference between it and uncompressed
So, do you know any of the Vorbis developers? If you do, please let them know that they will never see support in embedded devices like this one (or any Audiotron/Rio/Nomad/iPod/whatever) until they have an integer-only decoder.
Last I looked, (which really was too long ago for me to be as strident as I was above...) there was no integer-only decoder. The ARM chips that everyone uses for these functions don't have FPUs. For most codecs, that's fine. For Vorbis, it isn't. (Wasn't? Here's hoping.)
What is the point in streaming full quality 256Kbps digitally across my house only to lose that quality in the last few feet due to a cheap-as-you-can-mass-produce DAC?
None. Which is why they used nice Burr-Brown DACs in the reciever. they also built in a 10Wx2 (RMS, not "peak") amplifier, which does an admirable job of driving decent bookshelf speakers.
I agree that SPDIF would have been nice, but it's more cost for a feature that few people will use. (Besides, I'd argue that the Burr-Brown DACs are better than what's on the other end of the TOSLink for 90% of their customers.)
Everyone's calling this the "Poor-man"'s Audiotron. I wonder about that, since the UI on my Gateway (admittedly running very old software) is horribly slow, to the point of being unusable. The Rio/Dell boxes I have are reasonably responsive, though not quite as quick as the empeg car. (Same software dev team, btw.)
I can't find a reference right now, but Edward Teller was quoted as saying something that paraphrases to:
Classifying documents only marks the good stuff. If you publish everything, we'll bury them in paper.
This falls in that category. By making something difficult to access, you flag it as valuable.
-Zandr
I value keyboard feedback, but I wonder if that's only because I actually have to press the keys.
That said, a rollable rubber pad will give me truly horrible feedback, and if I was happy with something like that, I'd just buy this.
The senseboard looks very cool, though it appears totally vaporous at the moment.
Actually, it's not. It's different because the AHRA has allowed the RIAA to tax that blank tape. RIAA hates computers because computers are exempted from the AHRA...at least until they buy the SSSCA.
This isn't surprising. The RIAA crammed through a terribly nasty piece of legislation several years ago called the AHRA. This is what required the consumer electronics vendors to implement SCMS (the so-called "copyright" bit), and more or less killed DAT. It also created a tax on audio media.
Now the theory was that this tax was compensation for the copies of your music that you make. Any copies made on taxed media were presumed non-infringing. Now, RIAA hasn't kept that end of the bargain, but that shouldn't surprise you.
Why two kinds of CD-Rs? Simple. Computer have always been exempt from the AHRA, hence no required DRM (even something as feeble as SCMS) and no media tax. But the consumer CD-R burners are considered consumer electronics, and are thus subject to the AHRA. RIAA managed to lobby/browbeat/threaten the CD burner vendors into a standard for detecting taxed media and only burning to it. I think they'll play CD-Rs from a PC, but they won't burn to them.
Hi Don!
;)
I was the TSE on the other end of the phone when you called to trace your van. I remember that call well.
Like you, I hope Aerie does something.... I got rather addicted to the notion of web access everywhere.
-Zandr
If it were a personal player (which it is), I wouldn't need to worry about whether I put the new songs on it, as I run out of my house.
;)
How fast do you run? I'd say you've got about 20 seconds before you're of of range...
While every one of your other points is quite good about the benefits of wireless, I just don't think that a personal player is the place for wireless. Heck, you've got to charge the thing anyway, this does charging and sync with one wire. Hang on... that's it:
Hey Taco! It is wireless...but to conserve battery, it doesn't work unless you plug in the charger! Yeah, that's the ticket.
-Z
Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit. And even DOCSIS was an improvement over the old GI proprietary system. (Telco return, was it?)
The Toshiba is also one of the best DOCSIS modems out there.
To give you an idea, though: Typical configurations of DOCSIS get 3Mbps upstream, and need 25dB SNR to do it. The technology that Shaw uses is 8Mbps symmetrical, and only needs 15dB to do it.
As to the upgrade, there are a bunch of ways to improve the plant, the easiest of which is to split the "nodes" (areas served by a single fiber-coax converter) into smaller ones. Lots more expensive equipment in the field, but not a lot of trenching to do it.
And one of the reasons why Shaw and Rogers are doing so well with cable modems is that they picked a technology that worked.
American cable operators were so obsessed with getting cable modems off their books and into retail that they waited years for DOCSIS, a standard that, in addition to being byzantine, has a crap physical layer, so it requires pristine cable plants. Pristine cable plants don't exist in the US, so the cable operators spent a fortune upgrading plant to make DOCSIS work.
Canada had no such obsession with retail, and Shaw and Rogers picked a proprietary system with a great physical layer, saved themselves a fortune on rebuilds, and deployed (sometimes years) earlier.
Yes, I did get my training decades ago, when "wireless" was all the rage :)
Sorry OM, that's not quite what I meant. I was referring to the last 5-10 years or so, "wireless" suddenly became a buzzword for really new radio stuff, like Wireless LANs and Wireless Phones (as opposed to cordless phones).
The interesting thing is that the coaxial "Balun", "Sleeve", "Dipole" (whatever) is shorter than a free space quarter wave. It has been trimmed 30% to account for the velocity factor in the teflon coax. But it is also air-spaced from the coax sheath, by about 1 coax radius. I am guessing that some engineer didn't quite get his/her calculations right on that one, but haven't bothered to chase it up yet...
I've noticed that, and they are indeed shorter than a quarter wave in practice. When I made them out of coax, I'd always just hook it up to a network analyser, and trim it until the dip in the SWR curve was at the right frequency.
73 de N6MOD
This really isn't an uncommon problem with switching power supplies. The company I worked for had this problem at least three times, and we always "solved" it by switching vendors. This seems to be the case with Apple, IBM, and Compaq, all of whom have hit this problem in the recent past.
I'm just wondering how they know that this new vendor's supplies are any better than the old ones. Remember that we're talking about a 0.003% failure rate here. What possible QA tests could you use to verify that the new supplies don't have the problem?
-Zandr
KE5FX de N6MOD...
;)
Yeah, calling that antenna design a "Coaxial Dipole" seems to be common in "wireless" (as opposed to "radio") circles.
On the other hand, you can make them simply by partially stripping the coax and pulling the braid back over the jacket.
73
I agree with the masses that Replay is going to be spending a lot of time in court on this one. But remember who we're dealing with here.
SonicBlue recently bought Replay, and SonicBlue is new name of S3, who bought Diamond Multimedia.
Diamond, of course, is the originator of the Rio, and the Rio was at the center of the only major legal victory for the forces of sanity in recent years. The Copyright Mafioso (Rosen, Valenti, et al) will try to pervert the legal system and copyright law to their own ends, (and have done quite well with the DMCA) but if anyone's going to take a stand in the name of cool toys, it's going to be SonicBlue.
At the same time, the DoJ seems determined to turn Sklyarov into a martyr, no matter how bad the case may be. I think the stage is being set for some serious progress towards a restoration of Fair Use as it once was.
For my part, I preordered a Replay 4040. If SonicBlue wants to step up to the plate, I'll vote with my wallet.
I agree with most of the literate posters on this article, namedly that ripping out the 1GHz PIIIs and trying to maintain a pool of swap-meet machines isn't going to get you anything but fired.
But if you're a proponent of the application server model, there's an interesting strategy for transition.
Let's say you have an office full of 500MHz+ P2 or better machines running Windows. Keep them that way, and stop upgrading the desktop. Install some hi-po application servers, and deploy X terminal software.
Then, everyone gets to keep their standalone machines, but the real screaming application performance comes from running X against the server.
To do this right, you need a good, fast X terminal for windows. eXceed is good, but not cheap. Any suggestions for a [f|F]ree alternative?
The Rio/Dell Receiver (same hardware, different plastic) uses a Cirrus Maverick (ARM7 core with lots of integrated peripherals) at (IIRC) 75MHz.
So, it's not a dedicated MPEG chip like a lot of the players, and I'm pretty sure WMA support is/was on the roadmap. Vorbis is "just another codec", though there's no FPU, so you'd have to do an integer-only decoder. (That's the stumbling block for the SA1100-based empeg/Rio car, as well.)
If you folks really want Vorbis everywhere, it's going to take a good integer implementation of the decoder.
Nope, it's 30min/disc. Remember that DVD-Video is VBR, play time varies.
I have a Pioneer. It records DVD-R at 2x. It takes 30 minutes.