I don't know if you're trolling or what, but burning the music to CD doesn't degrade the quality. You lose quality if you burn to CD then re-rip to some lossy format.
Actually, you lose quality even if you re-rip to a lossless format, in some cases.
Ripping audio from a CD is not always an exact process. CDROM Drives were never really designed to rip audio. Admittedly, some CD Drives in recent years have been designed to be better at this, but the point is that single bit errors can still occur during the rip process unless the ripping software is designed to detect and correct for this sort of thing. And it's still not an exact science, what with the large numbers of CD drives on the market.
See, there is your problem. A decoder doesn't just drop the information the encoder leaves out, it puts back something close enough that most won't tell the difference.
Okay, so the guy you replied to didn't really know his stuff, but it's quite true nevertheless. Transcoding does cause extra quality loss.
Lossy encoding isn't just "removing the bits you can't hear". That's only a half truth, a sort of "dumbing it down" sort of thing.
Lossy encoding does indeed involve removing inaudible sound, but there's a lot more to it. Quantization noise is introduced (and that is additive), noise shaping is performed, temporal masking, a lot of different things are done to the sound.
Essentially what any lossy compression is doing is to consider the sound as an analog waveform, and then attempts, as best it can, to represent that waveform with some smaller amount of bits. The various techniques used to do this change that waveform in small, or even large, amounts. So when you use lossy encoding, you're taking the waveform, applying a bunch of transformations to it, and then producing a new waveform from that. Transcoding means you're applying a bunch of transformations to it again, which only makes it diverge further from the original source waveform. Furthermore, it's then represented in a more or less analog fashion. All those digital bits in an MP3 or AAC are indeed describing an analog waveform, but not using digital sampling methods anymore. Not entirely, anyway.
But the point is that when you do this multiple times, you're changing an already changed waveform. Quantization noise, in particular, is very additive, and after just a few transcodes, you can definitely hear the difference. It's not a matter of pointing to a study, it's a simple matter of saying "try it yourself and you'll see" because it's fairly blatent after just 3 or 4 transcodings.
Transcoding is not necessarily bad, but it is something you should avoid if possible, because repeatedly doing it will produce distortion you can hear.
Oh, and a decoder can't add back information that is not in the file. It's not frickin' magic, you know.
Others have already debunked your supposed lack of other online stores.
Sigh.. Once again this isn't about tying the iPod user into iTMS, it's about tying the iTMS users into iPod's. Their refusal to license FairPlay to other portable player manufacturers is what's up for debate here. If you use iTMS and want to move your stuff onto a portable player, you have to buy an iPod. No other device can play iTMS music.
And furthermore, other than indie labels or bands doing their own thing, please show me a music store selling MP3's.
I bet you can use a different MP3 player with Apple. Most MP3 players have one piece of software they use to communicate and update it. iPod's is iTunes. If you don't want to put up with iTunes, then you need to find a different MP3 player.
Huh? I'm not following you here. If you use iTMS, you have to use an iPod to play those songs (or play them on the computer). The iPod is the only player with support for iTMS music thanks to Apple's refusal to license FairPlay.
Fair enough. You could also use stuff from They Might Be Giant's online music store (which I highly recommend: http://www.tmbg.com ), since they're non-DRM'd. But the vast majority of music out there other than Indie or "bands doing their own thing" is through the major labels. And no major label sells un-DRM'd music.
yes, but there is probably much less money to be made on selling music at 99cents a pop compared to the profit margin of selling an ipod.
This is true, I grant you. However it's also a pretty thin argument, as several other music stores (all selling WMA) are in existance. Online music sales is fast becoming a booming industry.
plus, when apple sells an ipod, there is that (slight) chance that the customer might purchase a mac later on.
That's *real* thin.;)
the bottom line is that apple does not have a monopoly. that is the key factor in this doomed lawsuit.
No, in point of fact, that's not a factor at all in this lawsuit. Whether they have a monopoly or not is wholly irrelevant to the charges made against them. The charges are that they are engaging in unlawful business practices. Simple as that.
CD Players are not what we're talking about, and you know it. We're talking about digital music players and online music sales here.
If you don't like the restrictions on iTunes, don't use it. Use napster and the others. You have options. iTMS just happens to be the best, but it's not the only one.
Yes, fair enough, and I'm not suggesting differently. But again, competition is also not what we're talking about. We're talking about vendor lock-in.
If you have an iPod, iTMS is your only viable choice for online music purchasing. If you use iTMS, the iPod is your only viable choice for portable digital music players. Apple has taken steps on both the iPod and the iTMS to ensure this to be the case. On the iPod side, they disabled the chipsets native support for WMA. On the iTMS side, they sell with FairPlay, which they won't license out to anybody else.
These actions force you to use one if you have the other, unless you want to stick to using CD's for everything. And these actions are what make the basis for the lawsuit. Nothing else.
Increasing iTMS sales at the expense of iPod sales is not a viable business option for Apple.
I didn't say it wouldn't hurt. But it's quite possible that the alternative is indeed illegal.
If they can't make money on the music store without justifying it by increased iPod sales, then they need to close the thing now. Because several other music stores are coming into existance and they certainly are justifying it solely by the music sales. And most of them are underpricing iTMS as well.
And lets be realistic. The iPod was outselling all the competition by nearly double well before they opened the iTMS.
Not to be too retentive, but you shouldn't be able to play iTMS files on a normal MP3 player. They're AAC files.
Granted, but AAC support is not difficult for portable player companies to add. iRiver would love to, for example. They already support everything else.
What's impossible to add is the FairPlay DRM. Unless they license that from Apple, they can't play iTMS files. And Apple isn't licensing it to portable player makers, AFAIK.
Somebody said Motorola is adding iTMS support to a phone or something, but I've not seen that anywhere else yet.
What really got microsoft screwed was you couldn't remove their built in shit. You can with apple.
Oh really? What legal online music store works with the iPod other than iTMS? The answer is none of them. Apple has crippled the iPod's capabilities by disabling support for the WMA format (it has that support built into the PortalPlayer chipset it uses).
Don't like WMA? I don't blame you, I don't either. However the fact of the matter is that if you want to use iTMS with any portable other than an iPod, you can't because of the FairPlay DRM not being licensed to anybody else. And if you have an iPod, you can only use the iTMS and not any other music store because Apple won't add support for WMA files and allow other online stores to work.
You don't have a choice to switch to other stuff, there's no alternatives. Yes, you can buy CD's and rip/encode them, but that's neither here nor there and not what I'm talking about.
it is the consumer's choice to buy or not to buy from iTMS.
Agreed, and I'm the last person to say that the consumer shouldn't do a bit of research first. However that's irrelevant to the issue. The questions at hand are:
1. Are these two different markets (online music sales vs. sales of portable player devices)?
2. If 1 is yes, then is Apple unfairly using its stranglehold on one to dominate the other as well?
Because if the answers to both of these are yes, then we have laws in place against that sort of thing.
Nobody's saying Apple isn't being upfront about what it's selling, really. They're saying that the practices Apple is engaging in may be illegal.
iTMS was created to allow people with iPods to buy music online. It is a companion service.
This is what Apple says and it's the way they want the court to see it, but is it really true? Is Online Music Sales a wholly separate market from Portable Player Sales? Considering the number of people who complain that music from iTMS won't play on their non-iPod device, I'd say that the evidence is pretty heavy for considering them to be separate markets.
In which case the iTMS and iPod tie-in might be an example of vendor lock-in, which might indeed be illegal.
It is the licensing of Fairplay that is the problem if you decide you want to play music you've bought from iTMS on a non-iPod player.
Agreed. I had not heard of a Motorola iTMS compatible phone yet, but assuming this is true and they do start licensing Fairplay out to companies, then there's no more case.
Studies have proven (F.M. Scherer et al.) that if you don't have (a lot of) market power (to be determined by the court) you can actually get away with tie-in sales.
Somebody else posted that the iTunes Music Store does something like 80% of all online music sales. Not sure of the exact numbers myself, but you can find them if you're interested, I'm sure.
In any case, I think this is indeed vendor lock-in. For one thing, if you use an iPod, the only available online music store for you is iTMS. Music stores selling WMA files won't work (the iPod hardware actually does support WMA, but the software does not... it's a PortalPlayer chipset). If you use iTMS, the only portable it works on is the iPod (since Apple refuses to license FairPlay). It's a pretty clear case of lock-in and Jobs himself has said so on more than one occasion. They use iTMS to sell iPod's and iPod's really only work with music from iTMS or music you ripped from CD.
Yes, you can use CD's, in both directions, but that's somewhat beside the point.
People who use the iTunes Music Store basically have to have an iPod if they want to use it on a portable device. The music won't work on anything but an iPod (without cracking the DRM yourself).
Like I said in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue if they'd license the DRM to other music players and let them build iTMS support into their devices.
This isn't about tying-in the iPod to the iTunes Music Store. It's about tying the iTunes Music Store into the iPod.
They use monopolistic and unfair market practices by tying the use of the iTunes Music Store in to owning an iPod. Two different markets, really. One is online music sales, the other is portable music players. Both of these have competition in other fields, but tying them to each other such that using one means you almost have to have the other is indeed illegal.
This could be avoided entirely by Apple simply licensing their implementation of Fairplay to other portable music player manufacturers. They have thus far refused to do that.
I don't expect them to sell non-DRM'd music, and I don't expect them to sell anything other than AAC. But players like iRiver and the Zen and such would love to support the iTunes Music Store. Building in AAC support they can do on their own. Building in Fairplay and DRM support they must license from Apple. Either that or they have to go the Real Player route and DIY the thing. Which leaves them open to Apple breaking compatibility at any time.
AES is not yet proven resistant to known plaintext attacks. Several possible theories for AES have been advanced to make such an attack easier than brute force, although none have yet been implemented or shown to work in practice. Search google.
Seriously. I can't come up with another plausible reason for anybody to think this would work. Example:
The key to the spirit of compromise is an agreement that the AACS specification will allow consumers to move the data on an optical disc to the various devices they own, including video servers and portable video players, either directly or via a home network. In all the scenarios developed by the AACS alliance, that data would exist on the disc in encrypted form. It would stay encrypted when transferred to other devices and would be decrypted by those devices. The details of this portability have not been announced, but the technological underpinnings are expected to be included when the first version of the copy protection specification is released.
Now, understand that the encrypted content will be encrypted with a different key for each piece of content. This is just obvious and similar to how CSS works. The reason is so if you break one DVD, you don't break 'em all.
But this means that the key to decrypting the content must also be on the DVD itself. So that must be transferred to the portable device as well, in order for it to be playable.
So there's two ways this can work:
Method 1: Transfer the key along with the encrypted content in a plain form. In which case the attacker figures out where the key is, decrypts the content, creates an unencrypted version. Tada!
Method 2: The player key system whereby every company/player has a key and they are each used to encrypt a copy of the content key, which is placed on the disc. Thus this keyring must be transferred to the portable device and the portable device must itself have a player key to decrypt the content. I'm betting this is the method they're going for.
In which case the crack is simple: Compromise the player key. The player key must be embedded in the device somehow. In fact it'll have to be embedded in *every* device. All it takes is one hardware hacker to yank out a player key and voila, every disc up to that point can be decrypted.
So they invalidate the player key for future releases, breaking all existing hardware using that key. They could have done this with CSS, BTW, but they didn't for fairly obvious reasons.
In any case, this helps them not in the slightest. Because now you have a means by which to crack the rest of the player keys. Look, you get one player key. You have a disc with encrypted content for all player keys. You know the plaintext for what these are encrypting (the content key). Furthermore, every disc made that you can decrypt (probably a lot) gives you a new data set. How long do you think it'll take some bright boy to come up with a known plaintext attack on AES to retrieve these keys? It might be computationally intensive, but certainly it'll be less than a brute force attack.
And then what do they do when all keys are broken? They're straight fucked then.
The very idea itself is stupid. It's bound to fail in the same way CSS did. It'll just take a little more time, that's all.
So basically you get it for like $9.50 US. Now I admit that there's likely no deals in the US with that low of a monthly fee (except prepaid, maybe), but that cost seems significantly higher than it's really worth.
Simple example: my cell phone is roughly $40 US a month. I get 600 minutes a month with rollover (meaning the minutes add up and I can use them in later months instead), unlimited night/weekend use, no long distance or roaming fees of any kind, unlimited SMS, and basically unlimited everything else. No wireless internet because I found that to be really, really useless. No video, but why would I want video?
Now, I grant you that 500 minutes for $10 vs. 600 for $40 seems a bit of a weird comparison, but the thing is that I got the phone for free ($250 phone), the minutes rollover basically for as long as I have the account so I never have any form of shortages there (I've got enough minutes to talk a couple weeks straight without paying extra, had the account a long time, shifted to a lower usage one when the minutes were banked up enough). And I have no land line so that's saving me $25 a month.
Upshot is that for $15 more a month over a landline I can take my phone with me, anywhere in the US (never been anywhere out of coverage and I've pretty much been everywhere), and so forth.
So it's worth it to me. But those bells and whistles? They're not worth it. Hell, SMS messaging is almost useless as it is. I use it occassionally, maybe once of twice a year. But for the most part it's not worth it. Europe is just different, man. They embraced the bells and whistles. SMS messaging is big there. I've never even heard of MMS messaging, but I assume it's getting big. They're pushing video, wireless internet, all that stuff.
Over here in the US, few people really use all this crap. Yes, the bleeding edge do, but the majority of people complain about the actual voice functionality not working or being out of range or something. The coverage maps are usually the most important factor when buying a cell phone here. Text messaging is seen as a thing for kids to use, most people only use it for pager services or to have the latest sports scores delivered to them. They certainly don't use it for chatting.
They're still trying to get the US consumer to care about text messaging (witness the sidekick commercials, which is like a text messenger device with a mini keyboard). So it'll be a long, long time before they can get them to care about all the other bells and whistles.
>Why can't we simply extend that level of consideration to public forums?
Because non-real time text exchange is just not the same thing as being in front of a person. No matter how much you talk about it or what have you, it's just not the same.
People just don't have a good ability to conceptualize that those words on a screen were made by real, actual, living, breathing, human beings with feelings and all that. Unless it impacts them personally and then they feel it really big.
The internet is a world of overreaction and underreaction. Overreaction to what others say when it impacts you (because text lacks visual and emotional cues that all people use as a primary source of input during face to face communication) and underreaction to what they say to other people (because they think that things don't need to be said.. like this sentence is *obviously* meant jokingly and what have you). Once you realize that and come to terms with it, you'll find that the online world becomes a bit easier to cope with.
Also, lets say, for example, that I said something you took offense too. I don't know you. I'll likely never know you. Why should I concern myself with what you think? If you were friendly then you'd understand it in the way I meant it.
People tend to see others online as being just like them and their own circle of friends. Without referents, all people tend to imagine other people as similar to the ones they're around most often. "My friends wouldn't be offended by a joke about tsunami", sort of thing. The fact that other people exist and may be impacted or offended by the joke in question is known by the person making it, but they don't really grasp that fact on an emotional level. The two types of knowledge don't mesh well. And so they fail to see that people could be offended because jokes are made by the emotional level (except for puns, which explains why puns are not funny).
The short version of the state of iPodLinux: It does work, and shows a lot of potential, but it's not quite useful as the sole OS for your iPod yet.
A lot of development has been focused on the eye candy. Games, interface, that sort of thing.
What is really needed is some kernel and hardware hacker type guys who can get stuff working underneath all the interface and eye candy so as to make it actually useful for everyday use. Case in point: The iPod has a dual processor sort of thing. In the Apple firmware, the secondary processor is more or less devoted to audio decoding. That's not yet working on the iPodLinux kernel, instead the second processor is heavily underused and thus it's basically incapable of playing back high bitrate MP3s or AACs or things along those lines. Sorting that out would be a big step.
Looks and such are easy to program (hard to get right, but easy to actually do). Getting the thing to live up to its maximum potential is the hard part.
There's an easy to use installer for Mac and Windows. For Linux it's currently in the stage of "we assume you know what you're doing" sort of thing. Basically it's a simple as building a disk image with the right stuff and dd'ing it to the thing. I suggest reading the forums at the ipodlinux site.
Need a dropping weight for that.
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Pendulum wouldn't work without a weight of some sort attached to it to override the friction incurred from the motion of the machine. Same as an old grandfather clock, sort of thing. You gotta have that falling weight to keep the pendulum in motion or eventually the clock stops from friction losses.
But yeah, a pendulum hooked up to a gear with a dropping weight, same as in one of those old clocks, could provide back and forth horizontal motion. It could also act as a clock input if needed, and eliminate some design problems. It'd cause other problems though, I'm sure.
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I don't know if you're trolling or what, but burning the music to CD doesn't degrade the quality. You lose quality if you burn to CD then re-rip to some lossy format.
Actually, you lose quality even if you re-rip to a lossless format, in some cases.
Ripping audio from a CD is not always an exact process. CDROM Drives were never really designed to rip audio. Admittedly, some CD Drives in recent years have been designed to be better at this, but the point is that single bit errors can still occur during the rip process unless the ripping software is designed to detect and correct for this sort of thing. And it's still not an exact science, what with the large numbers of CD drives on the market.
See, there is your problem. A decoder doesn't just drop the information the encoder leaves out, it puts back something close enough that most won't tell the difference.
Okay, so the guy you replied to didn't really know his stuff, but it's quite true nevertheless. Transcoding does cause extra quality loss.
Lossy encoding isn't just "removing the bits you can't hear". That's only a half truth, a sort of "dumbing it down" sort of thing.
Lossy encoding does indeed involve removing inaudible sound, but there's a lot more to it. Quantization noise is introduced (and that is additive), noise shaping is performed, temporal masking, a lot of different things are done to the sound.
Essentially what any lossy compression is doing is to consider the sound as an analog waveform, and then attempts, as best it can, to represent that waveform with some smaller amount of bits. The various techniques used to do this change that waveform in small, or even large, amounts. So when you use lossy encoding, you're taking the waveform, applying a bunch of transformations to it, and then producing a new waveform from that. Transcoding means you're applying a bunch of transformations to it again, which only makes it diverge further from the original source waveform. Furthermore, it's then represented in a more or less analog fashion. All those digital bits in an MP3 or AAC are indeed describing an analog waveform, but not using digital sampling methods anymore. Not entirely, anyway.
But the point is that when you do this multiple times, you're changing an already changed waveform. Quantization noise, in particular, is very additive, and after just a few transcodes, you can definitely hear the difference. It's not a matter of pointing to a study, it's a simple matter of saying "try it yourself and you'll see" because it's fairly blatent after just 3 or 4 transcodings.
Transcoding is not necessarily bad, but it is something you should avoid if possible, because repeatedly doing it will produce distortion you can hear.
Oh, and a decoder can't add back information that is not in the file. It's not frickin' magic, you know.
Others have already debunked your supposed lack of other online stores.
Sigh.. Once again this isn't about tying the iPod user into iTMS, it's about tying the iTMS users into iPod's. Their refusal to license FairPlay to other portable player manufacturers is what's up for debate here. If you use iTMS and want to move your stuff onto a portable player, you have to buy an iPod. No other device can play iTMS music.
And furthermore, other than indie labels or bands doing their own thing, please show me a music store selling MP3's.
I bet you can use a different MP3 player with Apple. Most MP3 players have one piece of software they use to communicate and update it. iPod's is iTunes. If you don't want to put up with iTunes, then you need to find a different MP3 player.
Huh? I'm not following you here. If you use iTMS, you have to use an iPod to play those songs (or play them on the computer). The iPod is the only player with support for iTMS music thanks to Apple's refusal to license FairPlay.
So how is it Apple's fault that the other music stores don't use MP3?
Apple doesn't use MP3 either, so I fail to see where you're going with this.
I don't understand the link you're making in that if you have an ipod, you must use iTMS. It plays standard MP3s, yes?
Nearly no online music stores sell standard MP3's. Only indie type labels and such sell those, which is hardly much of the industry.
If you want to buy music online and you have an iPod, you're pretty much stuck with iTMS.
Fair enough. You could also use stuff from They Might Be Giant's online music store (which I highly recommend: http://www.tmbg.com ), since they're non-DRM'd. But the vast majority of music out there other than Indie or "bands doing their own thing" is through the major labels. And no major label sells un-DRM'd music.
yes, but there is probably much less money to be made on selling music at 99cents a pop compared to the profit margin of selling an ipod.
;)
This is true, I grant you. However it's also a pretty thin argument, as several other music stores (all selling WMA) are in existance. Online music sales is fast becoming a booming industry.
plus, when apple sells an ipod, there is that (slight) chance that the customer might purchase a mac later on.
That's *real* thin.
the bottom line is that apple does not have a monopoly. that is the key factor in this doomed lawsuit.
No, in point of fact, that's not a factor at all in this lawsuit. Whether they have a monopoly or not is wholly irrelevant to the charges made against them. The charges are that they are engaging in unlawful business practices. Simple as that.
CD Players are not what we're talking about, and you know it. We're talking about digital music players and online music sales here.
If you don't like the restrictions on iTunes, don't use it. Use napster and the others. You have options. iTMS just happens to be the best, but it's not the only one.
Yes, fair enough, and I'm not suggesting differently. But again, competition is also not what we're talking about. We're talking about vendor lock-in.
If you have an iPod, iTMS is your only viable choice for online music purchasing. If you use iTMS, the iPod is your only viable choice for portable digital music players. Apple has taken steps on both the iPod and the iTMS to ensure this to be the case. On the iPod side, they disabled the chipsets native support for WMA. On the iTMS side, they sell with FairPlay, which they won't license out to anybody else.
These actions force you to use one if you have the other, unless you want to stick to using CD's for everything. And these actions are what make the basis for the lawsuit. Nothing else.
Increasing iTMS sales at the expense of iPod sales is not a viable business option for Apple.
I didn't say it wouldn't hurt. But it's quite possible that the alternative is indeed illegal.
If they can't make money on the music store without justifying it by increased iPod sales, then they need to close the thing now. Because several other music stores are coming into existance and they certainly are justifying it solely by the music sales. And most of them are underpricing iTMS as well.
And lets be realistic. The iPod was outselling all the competition by nearly double well before they opened the iTMS.
Not to be too retentive, but you shouldn't be able to play iTMS files on a normal MP3 player. They're AAC files.
Granted, but AAC support is not difficult for portable player companies to add. iRiver would love to, for example. They already support everything else.
What's impossible to add is the FairPlay DRM. Unless they license that from Apple, they can't play iTMS files. And Apple isn't licensing it to portable player makers, AFAIK.
Somebody said Motorola is adding iTMS support to a phone or something, but I've not seen that anywhere else yet.
What really got microsoft screwed was you couldn't remove their built in shit. You can with apple.
Oh really? What legal online music store works with the iPod other than iTMS? The answer is none of them. Apple has crippled the iPod's capabilities by disabling support for the WMA format (it has that support built into the PortalPlayer chipset it uses).
Don't like WMA? I don't blame you, I don't either. However the fact of the matter is that if you want to use iTMS with any portable other than an iPod, you can't because of the FairPlay DRM not being licensed to anybody else. And if you have an iPod, you can only use the iTMS and not any other music store because Apple won't add support for WMA files and allow other online stores to work.
You don't have a choice to switch to other stuff, there's no alternatives. Yes, you can buy CD's and rip/encode them, but that's neither here nor there and not what I'm talking about.
it is the consumer's choice to buy or not to buy from iTMS.
Agreed, and I'm the last person to say that the consumer shouldn't do a bit of research first. However that's irrelevant to the issue. The questions at hand are:
1. Are these two different markets (online music sales vs. sales of portable player devices)?
2. If 1 is yes, then is Apple unfairly using its stranglehold on one to dominate the other as well?
Because if the answers to both of these are yes, then we have laws in place against that sort of thing.
Nobody's saying Apple isn't being upfront about what it's selling, really. They're saying that the practices Apple is engaging in may be illegal.
iTMS was created to allow people with iPods to buy music online. It is a companion service.
This is what Apple says and it's the way they want the court to see it, but is it really true? Is Online Music Sales a wholly separate market from Portable Player Sales? Considering the number of people who complain that music from iTMS won't play on their non-iPod device, I'd say that the evidence is pretty heavy for considering them to be separate markets.
In which case the iTMS and iPod tie-in might be an example of vendor lock-in, which might indeed be illegal.
It is the licensing of Fairplay that is the problem if you decide you want to play music you've bought from iTMS on a non-iPod player.
Agreed. I had not heard of a Motorola iTMS compatible phone yet, but assuming this is true and they do start licensing Fairplay out to companies, then there's no more case.
Studies have proven (F.M. Scherer et al.) that if you don't have (a lot of) market power (to be determined by the court) you can actually get away with tie-in sales.
Somebody else posted that the iTunes Music Store does something like 80% of all online music sales. Not sure of the exact numbers myself, but you can find them if you're interested, I'm sure.
In any case, I think this is indeed vendor lock-in. For one thing, if you use an iPod, the only available online music store for you is iTMS. Music stores selling WMA files won't work (the iPod hardware actually does support WMA, but the software does not... it's a PortalPlayer chipset). If you use iTMS, the only portable it works on is the iPod (since Apple refuses to license FairPlay). It's a pretty clear case of lock-in and Jobs himself has said so on more than one occasion. They use iTMS to sell iPod's and iPod's really only work with music from iTMS or music you ripped from CD.
Yes, you can use CD's, in both directions, but that's somewhat beside the point.
>I have an iPod. I don't use iTunes music store.
Then you're not WTF I'm talking about, are you?
People who use the iTunes Music Store basically have to have an iPod if they want to use it on a portable device. The music won't work on anything but an iPod (without cracking the DRM yourself).
Like I said in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue if they'd license the DRM to other music players and let them build iTMS support into their devices.
This isn't about tying-in the iPod to the iTunes Music Store. It's about tying the iTunes Music Store into the iPod.
They use monopolistic and unfair market practices by tying the use of the iTunes Music Store in to owning an iPod. Two different markets, really. One is online music sales, the other is portable music players. Both of these have competition in other fields, but tying them to each other such that using one means you almost have to have the other is indeed illegal.
This could be avoided entirely by Apple simply licensing their implementation of Fairplay to other portable music player manufacturers. They have thus far refused to do that.
I don't expect them to sell non-DRM'd music, and I don't expect them to sell anything other than AAC. But players like iRiver and the Zen and such would love to support the iTunes Music Store. Building in AAC support they can do on their own. Building in Fairplay and DRM support they must license from Apple. Either that or they have to go the Real Player route and DIY the thing. Which leaves them open to Apple breaking compatibility at any time.
AES is not yet proven resistant to known plaintext attacks. Several possible theories for AES have been advanced to make such an attack easier than brute force, although none have yet been implemented or shown to work in practice. Search google.
Depends on your plan. They don't have to. Mine don't. :)
Now, understand that the encrypted content will be encrypted with a different key for each piece of content. This is just obvious and similar to how CSS works. The reason is so if you break one DVD, you don't break 'em all.
But this means that the key to decrypting the content must also be on the DVD itself. So that must be transferred to the portable device as well, in order for it to be playable.
So there's two ways this can work:
Method 1: Transfer the key along with the encrypted content in a plain form. In which case the attacker figures out where the key is, decrypts the content, creates an unencrypted version. Tada!
Method 2: The player key system whereby every company/player has a key and they are each used to encrypt a copy of the content key, which is placed on the disc. Thus this keyring must be transferred to the portable device and the portable device must itself have a player key to decrypt the content. I'm betting this is the method they're going for.
In which case the crack is simple: Compromise the player key. The player key must be embedded in the device somehow. In fact it'll have to be embedded in *every* device. All it takes is one hardware hacker to yank out a player key and voila, every disc up to that point can be decrypted.
So they invalidate the player key for future releases, breaking all existing hardware using that key. They could have done this with CSS, BTW, but they didn't for fairly obvious reasons.
In any case, this helps them not in the slightest. Because now you have a means by which to crack the rest of the player keys. Look, you get one player key. You have a disc with encrypted content for all player keys. You know the plaintext for what these are encrypting (the content key). Furthermore, every disc made that you can decrypt (probably a lot) gives you a new data set. How long do you think it'll take some bright boy to come up with a known plaintext attack on AES to retrieve these keys? It might be computationally intensive, but certainly it'll be less than a brute force attack.
And then what do they do when all keys are broken? They're straight fucked then.
The very idea itself is stupid. It's bound to fail in the same way CSS did. It'll just take a little more time, that's all.
So basically you get it for like $9.50 US. Now I admit that there's likely no deals in the US with that low of a monthly fee (except prepaid, maybe), but that cost seems significantly higher than it's really worth.
Simple example: my cell phone is roughly $40 US a month. I get 600 minutes a month with rollover (meaning the minutes add up and I can use them in later months instead), unlimited night/weekend use, no long distance or roaming fees of any kind, unlimited SMS, and basically unlimited everything else. No wireless internet because I found that to be really, really useless. No video, but why would I want video?
Now, I grant you that 500 minutes for $10 vs. 600 for $40 seems a bit of a weird comparison, but the thing is that I got the phone for free ($250 phone), the minutes rollover basically for as long as I have the account so I never have any form of shortages there (I've got enough minutes to talk a couple weeks straight without paying extra, had the account a long time, shifted to a lower usage one when the minutes were banked up enough). And I have no land line so that's saving me $25 a month.
Upshot is that for $15 more a month over a landline I can take my phone with me, anywhere in the US (never been anywhere out of coverage and I've pretty much been everywhere), and so forth.
So it's worth it to me. But those bells and whistles? They're not worth it. Hell, SMS messaging is almost useless as it is. I use it occassionally, maybe once of twice a year. But for the most part it's not worth it. Europe is just different, man. They embraced the bells and whistles. SMS messaging is big there. I've never even heard of MMS messaging, but I assume it's getting big. They're pushing video, wireless internet, all that stuff.
Over here in the US, few people really use all this crap. Yes, the bleeding edge do, but the majority of people complain about the actual voice functionality not working or being out of range or something. The coverage maps are usually the most important factor when buying a cell phone here. Text messaging is seen as a thing for kids to use, most people only use it for pager services or to have the latest sports scores delivered to them. They certainly don't use it for chatting.
They're still trying to get the US consumer to care about text messaging (witness the sidekick commercials, which is like a text messenger device with a mini keyboard). So it'll be a long, long time before they can get them to care about all the other bells and whistles.
>Why can't we simply extend that level of consideration to public forums?
Because non-real time text exchange is just not the same thing as being in front of a person. No matter how much you talk about it or what have you, it's just not the same.
People just don't have a good ability to conceptualize that those words on a screen were made by real, actual, living, breathing, human beings with feelings and all that. Unless it impacts them personally and then they feel it really big.
The internet is a world of overreaction and underreaction. Overreaction to what others say when it impacts you (because text lacks visual and emotional cues that all people use as a primary source of input during face to face communication) and underreaction to what they say to other people (because they think that things don't need to be said.. like this sentence is *obviously* meant jokingly and what have you). Once you realize that and come to terms with it, you'll find that the online world becomes a bit easier to cope with.
Also, lets say, for example, that I said something you took offense too. I don't know you. I'll likely never know you. Why should I concern myself with what you think? If you were friendly then you'd understand it in the way I meant it.
People tend to see others online as being just like them and their own circle of friends. Without referents, all people tend to imagine other people as similar to the ones they're around most often. "My friends wouldn't be offended by a joke about tsunami", sort of thing. The fact that other people exist and may be impacted or offended by the joke in question is known by the person making it, but they don't really grasp that fact on an emotional level. The two types of knowledge don't mesh well. And so they fail to see that people could be offended because jokes are made by the emotional level (except for puns, which explains why puns are not funny).
The short version of the state of iPodLinux: It does work, and shows a lot of potential, but it's not quite useful as the sole OS for your iPod yet.
:)
A lot of development has been focused on the eye candy. Games, interface, that sort of thing.
What is really needed is some kernel and hardware hacker type guys who can get stuff working underneath all the interface and eye candy so as to make it actually useful for everyday use. Case in point: The iPod has a dual processor sort of thing. In the Apple firmware, the secondary processor is more or less devoted to audio decoding. That's not yet working on the iPodLinux kernel, instead the second processor is heavily underused and thus it's basically incapable of playing back high bitrate MP3s or AACs or things along those lines. Sorting that out would be a big step.
Looks and such are easy to program (hard to get right, but easy to actually do). Getting the thing to live up to its maximum potential is the hard part.
Help is gladly accepted, BTW.
There's an easy to use installer for Mac and Windows. For Linux it's currently in the stage of "we assume you know what you're doing" sort of thing. Basically it's a simple as building a disk image with the right stuff and dd'ing it to the thing. I suggest reading the forums at the ipodlinux site.
Pendulum wouldn't work without a weight of some sort attached to it to override the friction incurred from the motion of the machine. Same as an old grandfather clock, sort of thing. You gotta have that falling weight to keep the pendulum in motion or eventually the clock stops from friction losses.
But yeah, a pendulum hooked up to a gear with a dropping weight, same as in one of those old clocks, could provide back and forth horizontal motion. It could also act as a clock input if needed, and eliminate some design problems. It'd cause other problems though, I'm sure.