How much will you wager that this addon device is just a few months away? I mean, all they have to do is build a CCD camera that fits on top of the thing much like the camera that went onto the gameboy. It has a serial connection on the top as well as power and such. The headphone jack can be used as a line input for sound as well, if you wanted to record a sound clip along with the photo.
This is an addon that you can virtually guarantee will be created.
And if you want to roll your own, then look no further than here: http://otto.homedns.org:8888/iTunes/iPodDB.zip
It's a set of c++ classes that implement the binary format of the iTunesDB. It's not optimized, it's a bit slow, and it's a memory hog from hell, but it's also very instructive in making a DIY project if you want.
It's written for Windows and the foo_pod plugin for Foobar 2000, but it should be easy to port over to Linux or what have you.
I wrote it mainly to get something going with regards to development for the iPod, and Aero picked it up to develop the foo_pod plugin with, along with greatly helping me flesh it out and support everything. I can say, without any doubt, that it supports more of the iPod functionality and capability than anything else on Windows, with the exception of iTunes (and it beats iTunes in some minor respects).
Probably not totally useful to use as is (although it does work perfectly), but as a reference code, it's wonderful. By organizing the various atoms in the iTunesDB file into separate classes and so on, it builds a copy of the tree structure in memory using objects, which makes it easy to figure out how the file is laid out and how to use it properly, if you want to do so. Supports all known fields in the iTunesDB, supports OTGPlaylists, EQSettings, PlayCounts file, everything.
Just thought I'd throw a plug in for it. It's BSD licensed, so go nuts. The more software that supports my iPod, the happier it makes me.:)
And check out the foo_pod plugin for Foobar 2000. Excellent tool. Beats iTunes up down and sideways.
The iPod will read files anywhere. But in order for it to know about those files, a database must be created on the iPod telling it all this information. Contrary to the sibling's post, this database is *not* XML, but a binary format that has been pretty well documented at this point.
So you can't simply put the music on and expect it to find it, because it won't. You need a program to write that database. There's a lot of software out there to do this.
Really? I thought they had to have some kind of anyi-piracy thing so you couldn't give your mp3s away to people when you plugged into their PC. I guess I spoke without knowing on that part...
Yes, but it's not particularly effective or anything.
Basically, the iTunes software only supports putting music onto the iPod, not taking it back off onto the computer.
But the iPod interfaces to the computer as a standard mass storage device, no drivers needed. A service gets installed with iTunes that will recognize when the iPod device appears (you plug it in) and it will give iTunes a kick to cause it to autosynchronize and such, and then it will unmount the iPod afterwards, but that service and iTunes isn't actually necessary to see the iPod as a mass storage device.
The main protections are: 1. Hidden directory for all the music/config files (attrib +H, sort of thing) 2. Music gets sorted into 20-50 randomly chosen directories, with no obvious ordering mechanism. This is actually done for technical reasons relating to the FAT file system, but it makes it more difficult to find a particular song, sort of thing. However, it doesn't rename the tunes, so a simple filename search is effective. Or copy the whole mess over and sort it out using any mass MP3 renamer/organizer.
I forget the name of it, but it's that one where the boy-being meets the girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason. Great tune, man.
Uh.... this is an additional piece of hardware. You also need a Media Center PC.
Yes, you do need a Media Center PC. I'll give you that. However this XBox Extenders is wholly software:
From http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/eva luation/devices/xboxextenderkit.mspx:
Media Center Extender for Xbox is a packaged software product from Microsoft that runs as an Xbox game. With a wired or wireless connection to the Media Center PC, the Xbox console now allows you to enjoy the digital entertainment media from the PC when and how you want.
Basically, they took the Xbox Media Center functionality, rewrote or fixed it up to work only with Media Center 2005's protocols, and are selling it with a remote. Making a standard non-hacked XBox into a Remote Media Playback device to work with the Media Center PC.
They're hitting this on all fronts. Note that they have stopped requiring Win XP/MCE to be bundled with PC's, and are selling it separately now. You can buy a Retail copy of MCE 2005. Then you can use this XBox software and/or individual set top boxes to wire the whole house up to use one MCE PC as the server for all the storage and such. It holds everything: Music, movies, pictures, and then it's all available throughout the home on one interface, with various types of boxes. Kid has an xbox in his room, you have a set top box in yours, main room has the PC running MCE, everything is wireless G, everybody can watch different things.
It's a good setup if they can make it work. People have been wanting this sort of thing out of Tivo and such for years, and Microsoft looks to have mostly beat them all to the punch.
Denison has two versions of the iceLink system.. Version 2 information can be found at www.denison.com. It mainly supports foreign cars, but has more advanced capabilities.
The older iceLink 1.1 can be found at www.denisonusa.com. It'll support many other types of cars, with less capability.
A much wider range of support can be found in the iPod2Car adapter, available from www.ipod2car.com. It's similar to the iceLink 1.1 box, but supports more car types. Even very much older rides without more advanced in-car networking protocols and such.
I appreciate that the parent poster was joking but it is worth pointing out that if the Apple store starts to jack up the prices, there is nowhere else you can legimately purchase the AAC files that they sell.
Off the top of my head: -Magnatune -Real's Music store (yes, it sells AAC at 192kbps) -Allofmp3.com (dubious legality aside)
AAC is by far a more open format than WMA. Anybody could setup a music store to sell AAC files. Now, doing it with DRM and supporting the iPod or iTunes is a different story, I grant you. But Real did it and following their lead might be a good approach.
You can decode the digital stream, resample the digital audio with a smaller aplitude, and then recode it, all that without loss of digital quality.
No, you can't. You'll have rounding error. Not to mention that you're lowering the dynamic range of the sample and making it sound flat and muddy.
More important, cable boxes do have to decode the lossy stream, and encode it as plain audio,
No, they don't. My cable box is more than capable of outputing a DD5.1 stream to my Amp. No decoding in the cable box necessary or desirable. If you want decoded audio, the analog outputs are right there.
I refuse to believe that consumer people are happy to program a remote control.
Let's be clear. By "program" a remote control, you mean to look up a code in a book and type it into their remote. I mean, it's not extremely complex or anything here. EVERY remote with volume controls supports this. My DVD's player remote supports programming the volume and channel buttons to work with my TV or cable box or both. My cable box remote supports the volume control on my amp or TV, and also supports controling my VCR and DVD player. My TV remote supports basically everything in the AV rack.
I've programmed a universal remote with my own custom setup, and I admit that this is more than normal non-geeks would do, but everybody is capable of setting a couple of remotes by reading the book. This is generally a one time event when they buy the equipment. Even my 4 year old DVD player had this programmability in it. It's easy. Consumers are idiots, but they are NOT stupid.
Consumer-ready means "no config required".
There is no such thing. People have different preferences, different setups, different configs. Even plugging in wiring is "config" and there will always be configuration required. It's a fact of life.
And you're also totally out of touch with what "consumer" equipment is. I consider anything that you can buy at, say, "Best Buy" to be consumer level equipment. Professional grade equipment is found at higher end, professional grade stores.
Moron alert! This is what happens when lay people try to discuss technology. They know just enough to sound ridiculously stupid to those folks who really know what's going on.
I understand perfectly well what's going on, thank you very much. I stand by my original statement.
For example, if the encoded 16-bit words of a signal were 888, 2222, 1000 then equally scaling these three words up by doubling them would "increase volume" but not change the "frequency" of the original signal (I know the purists out there will hate this explanation since it doesn't quite work out like this). So a digital volume control need not have any sort of analog signal/power amplifier, but rather simply needs to do some "simple" math.
Oh really? And what happens when your linear transformation exceeds the values of the 16-bit word? You get peak clipping, that's what. Remember, you're LIMITED to 16 bits there.. You can't go above it.
So, essentially, you can't allow the user to go higher than 100%. Well, since a lot of music is normalized or already at the limits of the 16 bit range, this means your volume control only goes DOWN, doesn't it? You can't actually RAISE the volume with it or anything.
But maybe you want to play a game of trick the user, yeah? You can automatically lower the volume on everything you pipe out the digital audio output, and that way the use can "raise" the volume all the way back to the actual original volume, and thus be happy and think he's done something. Well, that's fine, if you don't mind the loss of dynamic range and making everything sound really muddy *by default*. And anyway, it'll sound just fine if he pumps up the volume ALL THE WAY.
Digital volume is possible, it just sucks. That's why most all audio devices don't support it. I grant you that some do, now that I have read some other responses. Those products I'll simply have to remember to avoid.
So iTunes/Airport must reduce or increase the amplitude bits encoded in the digital signal being sent to my receiver by applying some kind of mathematical transformation. I know this because the signal is digital all the way into my receiver, but still I can control the volume from my pc.
Yeah, it's scaling the PCM waveform data by some percentage based on whatever volume level you set. I know it's possible, I'm just saying that it sucks.
FWIW, it works great...
No, it doesn't. It fucking sucks.
First off, you cannot increase the volume of most signals this way without clipping the waveform because they already have peaks at the upper end of the range (they're normalized). That causes peak data to be lost and sounds terrible, like spikes of static bursts in the middle of the music.
If you build the thing so that it can "raise" the volume, then what that means is that the default volume on the device is actually lowering the volume of the waveform by some amount.. so you can later "raise" it without getting that clipping. But this scaling down of the waveform causes a loss of dynamic range, making the audio more muted and kinda annoying to listen to.
The short of it is that digital volume control freakin' sucks when you're limited to modifying the waveform directly, which is all a digital output will let you actually do. Analog volume control is so much the way to go. Keep the signal steady, change the amplification. Not the other way around.
Some consumer devices, such as the Roku Soundbridge, do actually have volume control for their digital audio output. Whether you consider these computers is a judgement call.
I would consider these computers for the most part, as they're doing processing of the data already, in decoding it from MP3 to analog or PCM waveform data. Anyway, they could be adjusting the global gain levels in the audio stream before decoding for all of that matter (although they're probably not, I grant you).
Changing the volume of a PCM waveform by scaling the waveform data is a totally shitty way to adjust volume. If the devices have a way to disable that, then that's what I would use.
I don't own a stand alone DVD box, my computer is my media box. My VCR _remote_control_ does have a volume control, that controls the tv volume, _with_no_ configuration, transparently. In fact, if it didn't work out of the box, it would have seem too clumsy to me.
Lemme guess, same brand TV and VCR? Of course it worked out of the box. Most people, however, don't necessarily stick to brand name. However programming a remote is something most people DO know how to do. They've been doing it with universal remotes for frickin' years. Look up the brand in the book, hold a key down, type in a code from the book, see if it works. Not all that difficult here....but consumer stuff should not require consumer knowledge, because consumers don't enjoy learning stuff.
I realize consumers are idiots. That's not the point. The point is that what you ask for, the cable box controlling the digital audio volume, is TECHNICALLY IMPOSSIBLE because that violates the whole fucking point of having digital audio in the first place.
The point of having digital audio is to get the best possible sound. If the source, the cable box, is doing the decoding and changing the freakin' data, then it's no longer the best possible sound. The Amp adjusts the volume using an analog control. The cable box sends the digital audio to the Amp. This is not rocket science and this is not required learning and this is not that difficult to understand.
You plug one cable between your stereo amp and your cable box and it just works. Simple. Easy. It really, truly, can't get any easier than that.
I don't want to hear all that technical gibberish about encoding and decoding audio.
I don't give a SHIT what you want to hear. I was explaining WHY it is the way it is. If you want to make it simple and easy then it is simple and easy: Plug the digital audio into the receiver box, program the remote by typing a code, done. Simple. Easy. Any consumer can do it. Any consumer that can't do it is a moron who probably doesn't know how to wipe his ass properly either.
Consumer stuff doesn't work that way, it just works.
Hah! You, sir, obviously are a fool who buys all in one integrated systems from Radio Shack or something like that. Fine. Enjoy your overly expensive shitty hardware.:-P
The part about XMMS was just about explaining that digital volume control is something that can be done, even when you have to decode audio.
Yes, except that I don't WANT my cable box to decode my audio. That's the WHOLE FUCKING POINT. If my cable box is decoding my audio, then I've LOST AUDIO QUALITY. Do you understand? Do you comprehend WHY we have digital outputs and inputs in the first place? I want that signal to stay digital all the way to the amp. Why? Because that's what sounds the best! I don't want some 25cent chip in the cable box fucking with the audio stream, I want the cable box to pass the stream to the expensive well designed dedicated decoding hardware in the amplifier. That's why I use the digital output in the first place. That's the only REASON to use a digital output.
If you want the cable box to decode your sound and fuck it all up, then by all means use the analog outputs. That's exactly what they do. And yes, most cable boxes have a volume control on them. But putting volume control on the digital output of the cable box is not only missing the point, it's RUINING the digital output by subjecting it to a D2A and A2D conversion. Get it?
XMMS doesn't enter into this because XMMS is not a signal source, and is not a valid comparison to a cable box or a satellite decoder or a DVD player or any of those things.
>You know, I hear this a lot, even from people with the same debit card I carry. I often hear it after I tell a cashier to treat it as a credit card, from someone who's looking at me like I'm a fool who's just parted with his money.
Yeah, people think that putting in their PIN is somehow better. I don't understand why.
A dual debit/credit card (basically an ATM card with a Visa/MC logo on it) can be used in one of those ways:
Debit/ATM = You type in a PIN, the money comes out of the account instantly, no signing anything. -Pros: It talks over the ATM network and will get rejected if you lack funds in your account. -Cons: Bank treats it like any other ATM transaction, and can charge you for using an "outside" ATM possibly. Also the merchant can tack on fees if they want. Can't overdraw your account, as the funds check is real time.
Credit = You sign a piece of paper (sometimes.. it's not always needed any more), it works like any other credit card. -Pros: No extra fees can be tacked on to your purchase. Not by the bank, not by the merchant. A percentage may go to a credit company, but that's not costing you anything extra. -Cons: You have to sign a piece of paper (maybe). The funds are not instantly removed from your account (can take a day or two, as it goes through a credit clearinghouse like all credit transactions). You may find that your bank is stupid and treats the account in a double jeopardy situation (all credit transactions consist of one transaction to verify the money is there and reserve it, and another to actually do the charge.. banks tend to not remove the reserved charges immediately, meaning that though the funds got removed, the same amount of funds may not be available for a few days after the actual transaction happens.. double the money is not available, in other words.. This won't cause any extra charges though, just unavailable funds). Also since credit goes through a third party, the credit check isn't entirely real time, and you can overdraw your account without getting a rejection in some cases.
Basically, assuming you have lots of funds available in the account and don't mind signing a piece of paper, credit is the better choice. No extra charges are possible that way. If you need a real time check of the account or just don't want to sign anything, and don't mind possible extra charges, ATM/Debit is the way to go.
Your standalone DVD player, does it have a volume control? How about the VCR? It outputs audio, where's the volume control on it?
Why in the hell would you expect a cable box to have an audio control? Especially on the digital output? A digital output is to output a digital signal to the amplifier/decoder in the stereo or TV. That's the whole point of having the digital signal there, either using coax or the fiber connection. You don't have a volume control on the cable box because the digital signal isn't being DECODED in the cable box, it's being decoded in the amplifier, into DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 or something like that.
Your computer is doing the audio processing all in the PC. Your cable box is not. The point of digital audio lines on consumer level devices is to preserve the undecoded raw digital signal all the way to the amp. That means you can't have a volume control on the source.
"can't control the digital audio volume via remote"
Of course you can't. Digital audio doesn't HAVE a volume adjustment. It's just the audio signal, not a signal with an analog amplifier behind it.
NO digital audio source has a volume control. That's not what it is. If you have a device, like a DVD player, that has a digital audio output, then you program your remote to control your amplifier's audio volume. In his case, he could have done some kind of learning mode trick on his cable box remote to let it change the volume on his stereo system, because that's what he'd be plugging the digital audio into anyway, one would hope.
I agree that disabling those outputs is stupid, and I agree that HDTV over Cable is shit for quality in most places. But let's face facts: consumers are quite often too ignorant to install a proper home theater setup themselves. If he didn't even know that digital audio doesn't *have* a volume on it, then can we really expect him to understand how to correct picture and signal issues?
You can only make things so simple. At some point, you have to expect the user to learn WTF they are doing. I admit that home theater is ripe for simplification, but digital audio ain't ever going to have a volume control and that is that.
Rubbish. Sure the hydrogen may be an efficient way to store the power, but how are you going to extract it? With a ~25% efficient internal combustion engine? You simply don't have that much energy to waste. Store it in a battery and use ~90% efficient electric motors to drive the wheels. Hell, I bet it will even weigh less than the electrolyser, IC engine, hydrogen tank and water tank that it replaces. Less pollution, too, because you won't be creating NOx from the high compression engine.
While I agree that you're not going to get as much power out of converting to hydrogen to motion as you could with a nice, clean, efficent electric motor and some batteries, the question isn't quite that simple. You need to consider the total system.
Batteries are heavy. Yes, a battery has a much higher storage density, so you can carry a lot more power around with you, but is the total system more efficent than the hydrogen method? While the answer is probably "yes", I'd like to see it considered as a whole.
-With this hydrogen combustion method, you can't store as much power, but you don't have as much weight to haul around all the time. -With the simpler solar panels charging batteries to drive a motor setup, you have a lot more weight due to the batteries which is going to reduce your mileage as well.
Which is better considered as a whole? That's the question you need to examine.
Break it in one minute with IE, no less.
on
Breaking Google's DRM
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· Score: 3, Informative
IE. Default settings. No proxy, no modifications. Nothing particularly special about it.
-Load up the book in the browser. -Click the View menu, select Source. -Search for "div class=browse" -Immediately before that, you'll find something like this in a CSS style: { background-image:url(http://print.google.com/print ?blablahblah");bunch of other stuff;} -Take that URL, copy and paste it into a new browser window and voila, you have the full size image. Save As or Print on this image works fine. No problems at all.
Seriously, this is trivial to break.
What's not trivial is getting an entire book. How to figure out how to get every page is the tough part. Getting the image itself is a cakewalk. It's just Javascript tricks to break right-clicking and CSS tricks to break direct printing from that window. Saving gets broken because of the tricky CSS using the IMG as a background image. The browser doesn't think to save the image, is all.
The tracker has all the information needed to determine throughput, just not a priori. The tracker can experiment with different node routes and decide which ones it thinks are optimal, based on reported throughputs from receivers. (Prioritized alongside other considerations like how reliably a given node has been participating.)
I would agree that it could be done, if you assume that the tracker has more or less total control of the network interconnections. BT doesn't have this. It can tell the client to connect to some subset of the connections, if and when the client asks for them, but it can't tell the client to disconnect from any connections the client already knows about. In other words, I don't think the tracker has enough capability to manage the network flow efficently.
A fully connected network, for example, would be a bad idea. There's too much overhead involved. And no matter what the tracker does, this is the eventual end state of the network. I've seen it happen. When I'm connected to around 1000 nodes, my speed drops off sharply. Disconnecting and reconnecting is often my only recourse. Big networks have this tendancy to collapse under the overhead. Not that it couldn't be reworked to be better, I grant you, just that it's not doing this sort of thing right now.:)
I think it may be right that BT right now may not be sophisticated enough to mitigate throughput snarls for an arbitrarily large network, but to reframe the issue: could BT become sophisticated enough to do so with relatively minor logic changes in the tracker, without the large conceptual transition to a broadcast architecture? I think it's possible. A clever engine modeling speculations about throughput, verifying and discarding hypotheses with feedback information from participating nodes, might just do the trick.
Here we agree, except that I don't think tracker changes alone are enough to do it. I think that it's necessary for the tracker to have total control over who the nodes are connected to in order to be able to achieve this level of quality. Furthermore, given that you can't trust the nodes (since anybody can write one), this is not possible to achieve, since it is not in any given nodes best interest to listen to the tracker when he tells it to disconnect from another node. As a node, the more connections I have, the more data I can potentially receive. The overhead is an issue, granted, but that can be managed with simple limits and such.
I agree that BT could be made better, but when you talk about scaling to every PC.. well.. I think that it's possible that it could scale that big, but it certainly can't right now.:)
By your convention, all current internal combusion vehicles are solar powered.
And he'd be correct too. All of the power we use in any form is ultimately solar powered, with the exception being nuclear fission/fusion. And the elements we use for those once came out of stars too, you know.
In this particular case, however, it's generating it's own fuel. Therefore you can consider it to be like a closed system with only one energy input: solar power via the solar panels. Considered that way, this truck is solar powered.
Now, if you yank off the electrolysis bits and put them in a fueling station somewhere, then it's not a solar powered truck anymore. It's a system that gets its power from the hydrogen you pump into the tank.
Almost energy we use ultimately comes from the sun. It's just a question of what part of the total system you are talking about. I don't think that it's unreasonable to include the electrolysis device as part of the system of "this truck" because a) it's hauling the thing around with it and b) they expressly designed it to be part of the truck in the first place.
Therefore this truck is solar powered, because "this truck" includes the electrolysis equipment.
The tracker can be more efficent, but in order to reach anywhere near that kind of real efficency, it would need more information than it actually has.
Firstly, it can only make educated guesses at the available bandwidth of the nodes. Nodes will lie/cheat/steal in order to get more packets, and you can't trust the clients. They're greedy.
Secondly, it doesn't really know the network topology. Again, you're only able to make educated guesses. If my neighbor and me are on the same torrent, then ideally the tracker would be able to tell us about each other, we'd connect, and share at very high speeds, being that we're both close to each other and on the same subnet and such. That case might be easy to recognize, sometimes, not so easy other times. Without full knowledge of the whole network, it's impossible to do perfectly in any case.
Third, even with the most efficent possible tracker, the grandparent is right. You have X users downloading, and they all are downloading Y bits of data. All data transfer is point to point, meaning that X*Y bits of data must be sent out for everybody to get the complete file. For every byte downloaded, there's a byte uploaded. You can make that fast by maximizing your throughput and managing it all into small sub-networks, but it still doesn't scale to everybody in the world.
A multicast setup does scale, even if it is a pain in the ass to do right now. One byte sent out from the source gets duplicated for each branch in the routing tree, and all users receive it. Upload rate is constant. If you ignore new users joining and old users leaving, traffic along each branch in the tree is only one copy of the stream, all the way until it reaches the endpoints (the viewers).
The problem with multicast is that it's confusing as hell because it requires cooperation of all the routers to handle the multicast traffic appropriately. But for any single source to many receivers, it's easily the most efficent way to do things.
And let's not forget that while torrent trackers *could* be more efficent, they are quite simply not that efficent. The torrent network is often highly connected instead of sparsely connected. Especially on larger files. A sparser network would be more optimal (read as: faster) in extremely large torrents, but it is rarely the case currently.
If the purpose of the theft was to sell it to a collector, then it was sold before they ever stole the thing in the first place. Some rich mofo hired them to take it, simple as that.
If it was not sold, then it was stolen in order to ransom it back to the insurance company.
When you're dealing with extremely rare items like this, it's always one of these two, if indeed money is the motivating factor at all.
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How much will you wager that this addon device is just a few months away? I mean, all they have to do is build a CCD camera that fits on top of the thing much like the camera that went onto the gameboy. It has a serial connection on the top as well as power and such. The headphone jack can be used as a line input for sound as well, if you wanted to record a sound clip along with the photo.
This is an addon that you can virtually guarantee will be created.
1/3 = 0.333333...
:-)
2/3 = 0.666666...
3/3 = 0.999999...
Yet we are always told that 3/3 = 1
Try subtracting 0.9999999..... from 1.
1 - 0.999999... = ???
If you can come up with any other answer than 0, then I'll think you're onto something.
And if you want to roll your own, then look no further than here: http://otto.homedns.org:8888/iTunes/iPodDB.zip
:)
It's a set of c++ classes that implement the binary format of the iTunesDB. It's not optimized, it's a bit slow, and it's a memory hog from hell, but it's also very instructive in making a DIY project if you want.
It's written for Windows and the foo_pod plugin for Foobar 2000, but it should be easy to port over to Linux or what have you.
I wrote it mainly to get something going with regards to development for the iPod, and Aero picked it up to develop the foo_pod plugin with, along with greatly helping me flesh it out and support everything. I can say, without any doubt, that it supports more of the iPod functionality and capability than anything else on Windows, with the exception of iTunes (and it beats iTunes in some minor respects).
Probably not totally useful to use as is (although it does work perfectly), but as a reference code, it's wonderful. By organizing the various atoms in the iTunesDB file into separate classes and so on, it builds a copy of the tree structure in memory using objects, which makes it easy to figure out how the file is laid out and how to use it properly, if you want to do so. Supports all known fields in the iTunesDB, supports OTGPlaylists, EQSettings, PlayCounts file, everything.
Just thought I'd throw a plug in for it. It's BSD licensed, so go nuts. The more software that supports my iPod, the happier it makes me.
And check out the foo_pod plugin for Foobar 2000. Excellent tool. Beats iTunes up down and sideways.
The iPod will read files anywhere. But in order for it to know about those files, a database must be created on the iPod telling it all this information. Contrary to the sibling's post, this database is *not* XML, but a binary format that has been pretty well documented at this point.
So you can't simply put the music on and expect it to find it, because it won't. You need a program to write that database. There's a lot of software out there to do this.
Really? I thought they had to have some kind of anyi-piracy thing so you couldn't give your mp3s away to people when you plugged into their PC. I guess I spoke without knowing on that part...
Yes, but it's not particularly effective or anything.
Basically, the iTunes software only supports putting music onto the iPod, not taking it back off onto the computer.
But the iPod interfaces to the computer as a standard mass storage device, no drivers needed. A service gets installed with iTunes that will recognize when the iPod device appears (you plug it in) and it will give iTunes a kick to cause it to autosynchronize and such, and then it will unmount the iPod afterwards, but that service and iTunes isn't actually necessary to see the iPod as a mass storage device.
The main protections are:
1. Hidden directory for all the music/config files (attrib +H, sort of thing)
2. Music gets sorted into 20-50 randomly chosen directories, with no obvious ordering mechanism. This is actually done for technical reasons relating to the FAT file system, but it makes it more difficult to find a particular song, sort of thing. However, it doesn't rename the tunes, so a simple filename search is effective. Or copy the whole mess over and sort it out using any mass MP3 renamer/organizer.
Beyond that, it has no real protection at all.
I forget the name of it, but it's that one where the boy-being meets the girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason. Great tune, man.
Uh.... this is an additional piece of hardware. You also need a Media Center PC.
a luation/devices/xboxextenderkit.mspx :
Yes, you do need a Media Center PC. I'll give you that. However this XBox Extenders is wholly software:
From http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/ev
Media Center Extender for Xbox is a packaged software product from Microsoft that runs as an Xbox game. With a wired or wireless connection to the Media Center PC, the Xbox console now allows you to enjoy the digital entertainment media from the PC when and how you want.
Basically, they took the Xbox Media Center functionality, rewrote or fixed it up to work only with Media Center 2005's protocols, and are selling it with a remote. Making a standard non-hacked XBox into a Remote Media Playback device to work with the Media Center PC.
They're hitting this on all fronts. Note that they have stopped requiring Win XP/MCE to be bundled with PC's, and are selling it separately now. You can buy a Retail copy of MCE 2005. Then you can use this XBox software and/or individual set top boxes to wire the whole house up to use one MCE PC as the server for all the storage and such. It holds everything: Music, movies, pictures, and then it's all available throughout the home on one interface, with various types of boxes. Kid has an xbox in his room, you have a set top box in yours, main room has the PC running MCE, everything is wireless G, everybody can watch different things.
It's a good setup if they can make it work. People have been wanting this sort of thing out of Tivo and such for years, and Microsoft looks to have mostly beat them all to the punch.
Denison has two versions of the iceLink system.. Version 2 information can be found at www.denison.com. It mainly supports foreign cars, but has more advanced capabilities.
The older iceLink 1.1 can be found at www.denisonusa.com. It'll support many other types of cars, with less capability.
A much wider range of support can be found in the iPod2Car adapter, available from www.ipod2car.com. It's similar to the iceLink 1.1 box, but supports more car types. Even very much older rides without more advanced in-car networking protocols and such.
I appreciate that the parent poster was joking but it is worth pointing out that if the Apple store starts to jack up the prices, there is nowhere else you can legimately purchase the AAC files that they sell.
Off the top of my head:
-Magnatune
-Real's Music store (yes, it sells AAC at 192kbps)
-Allofmp3.com (dubious legality aside)
AAC is by far a more open format than WMA. Anybody could setup a music store to sell AAC files. Now, doing it with DRM and supporting the iPod or iTunes is a different story, I grant you. But Real did it and following their lead might be a good approach.
You can decode the digital stream, resample the digital audio with a smaller aplitude, and then recode it, all that without loss of digital quality.
No, you can't. You'll have rounding error. Not to mention that you're lowering the dynamic range of the sample and making it sound flat and muddy.
More important, cable boxes do have to decode the lossy stream, and encode it as plain audio,
No, they don't. My cable box is more than capable of outputing a DD5.1 stream to my Amp. No decoding in the cable box necessary or desirable. If you want decoded audio, the analog outputs are right there.
I refuse to believe that consumer people are happy to program a remote control.
Let's be clear. By "program" a remote control, you mean to look up a code in a book and type it into their remote. I mean, it's not extremely complex or anything here. EVERY remote with volume controls supports this. My DVD's player remote supports programming the volume and channel buttons to work with my TV or cable box or both. My cable box remote supports the volume control on my amp or TV, and also supports controling my VCR and DVD player. My TV remote supports basically everything in the AV rack.
I've programmed a universal remote with my own custom setup, and I admit that this is more than normal non-geeks would do, but everybody is capable of setting a couple of remotes by reading the book. This is generally a one time event when they buy the equipment. Even my 4 year old DVD player had this programmability in it. It's easy. Consumers are idiots, but they are NOT stupid.
Consumer-ready means "no config required".
There is no such thing. People have different preferences, different setups, different configs. Even plugging in wiring is "config" and there will always be configuration required. It's a fact of life.
And you're also totally out of touch with what "consumer" equipment is. I consider anything that you can buy at, say, "Best Buy" to be consumer level equipment. Professional grade equipment is found at higher end, professional grade stores.
Moron alert! This is what happens when lay people try to discuss technology. They know just enough to sound ridiculously stupid to those folks who really know what's going on.
I understand perfectly well what's going on, thank you very much. I stand by my original statement.
For example, if the encoded 16-bit words of a signal were 888, 2222, 1000 then equally scaling these three words up by doubling them would "increase volume" but not change the "frequency" of the original signal (I know the purists out there will hate this explanation since it doesn't quite work out like this). So a digital volume control need not have any sort of analog signal/power amplifier, but rather simply needs to do some "simple" math.
Oh really? And what happens when your linear transformation exceeds the values of the 16-bit word? You get peak clipping, that's what. Remember, you're LIMITED to 16 bits there.. You can't go above it.
So, essentially, you can't allow the user to go higher than 100%. Well, since a lot of music is normalized or already at the limits of the 16 bit range, this means your volume control only goes DOWN, doesn't it? You can't actually RAISE the volume with it or anything.
But maybe you want to play a game of trick the user, yeah? You can automatically lower the volume on everything you pipe out the digital audio output, and that way the use can "raise" the volume all the way back to the actual original volume, and thus be happy and think he's done something. Well, that's fine, if you don't mind the loss of dynamic range and making everything sound really muddy *by default*. And anyway, it'll sound just fine if he pumps up the volume ALL THE WAY.
Digital volume is possible, it just sucks. That's why most all audio devices don't support it. I grant you that some do, now that I have read some other responses. Those products I'll simply have to remember to avoid.
So iTunes/Airport must reduce or increase the amplitude bits encoded in the digital signal being sent to my receiver by applying some kind of mathematical transformation. I know this because the signal is digital all the way into my receiver, but still I can control the volume from my pc.
Yeah, it's scaling the PCM waveform data by some percentage based on whatever volume level you set. I know it's possible, I'm just saying that it sucks.
FWIW, it works great...
No, it doesn't. It fucking sucks.
First off, you cannot increase the volume of most signals this way without clipping the waveform because they already have peaks at the upper end of the range (they're normalized). That causes peak data to be lost and sounds terrible, like spikes of static bursts in the middle of the music.
If you build the thing so that it can "raise" the volume, then what that means is that the default volume on the device is actually lowering the volume of the waveform by some amount.. so you can later "raise" it without getting that clipping. But this scaling down of the waveform causes a loss of dynamic range, making the audio more muted and kinda annoying to listen to.
The short of it is that digital volume control freakin' sucks when you're limited to modifying the waveform directly, which is all a digital output will let you actually do. Analog volume control is so much the way to go. Keep the signal steady, change the amplification. Not the other way around.
Some consumer devices, such as the Roku Soundbridge, do actually have volume control for their digital audio output. Whether you consider these computers is a judgement call.
I would consider these computers for the most part, as they're doing processing of the data already, in decoding it from MP3 to analog or PCM waveform data. Anyway, they could be adjusting the global gain levels in the audio stream before decoding for all of that matter (although they're probably not, I grant you).
Changing the volume of a PCM waveform by scaling the waveform data is a totally shitty way to adjust volume. If the devices have a way to disable that, then that's what I would use.
I don't own a stand alone DVD box, my computer is my media box. My VCR _remote_control_ does have a volume control, that controls the tv volume, _with_no_ configuration, transparently. In fact, if it didn't work out of the box, it would have seem too clumsy to me.
...but consumer stuff should not require consumer knowledge, because consumers don't enjoy learning stuff.
:-P
Lemme guess, same brand TV and VCR? Of course it worked out of the box. Most people, however, don't necessarily stick to brand name. However programming a remote is something most people DO know how to do. They've been doing it with universal remotes for frickin' years. Look up the brand in the book, hold a key down, type in a code from the book, see if it works. Not all that difficult here.
I realize consumers are idiots. That's not the point. The point is that what you ask for, the cable box controlling the digital audio volume, is TECHNICALLY IMPOSSIBLE because that violates the whole fucking point of having digital audio in the first place.
The point of having digital audio is to get the best possible sound. If the source, the cable box, is doing the decoding and changing the freakin' data, then it's no longer the best possible sound. The Amp adjusts the volume using an analog control. The cable box sends the digital audio to the Amp. This is not rocket science and this is not required learning and this is not that difficult to understand.
You plug one cable between your stereo amp and your cable box and it just works. Simple. Easy. It really, truly, can't get any easier than that.
I don't want to hear all that technical gibberish about encoding and decoding audio.
I don't give a SHIT what you want to hear. I was explaining WHY it is the way it is. If you want to make it simple and easy then it is simple and easy: Plug the digital audio into the receiver box, program the remote by typing a code, done. Simple. Easy. Any consumer can do it. Any consumer that can't do it is a moron who probably doesn't know how to wipe his ass properly either.
Consumer stuff doesn't work that way, it just works.
Hah! You, sir, obviously are a fool who buys all in one integrated systems from Radio Shack or something like that. Fine. Enjoy your overly expensive shitty hardware.
The part about XMMS was just about explaining that digital volume control is something that can be done, even when you have to decode audio.
Yes, except that I don't WANT my cable box to decode my audio. That's the WHOLE FUCKING POINT. If my cable box is decoding my audio, then I've LOST AUDIO QUALITY. Do you understand? Do you comprehend WHY we have digital outputs and inputs in the first place? I want that signal to stay digital all the way to the amp. Why? Because that's what sounds the best! I don't want some 25cent chip in the cable box fucking with the audio stream, I want the cable box to pass the stream to the expensive well designed dedicated decoding hardware in the amplifier. That's why I use the digital output in the first place. That's the only REASON to use a digital output.
If you want the cable box to decode your sound and fuck it all up, then by all means use the analog outputs. That's exactly what they do. And yes, most cable boxes have a volume control on them. But putting volume control on the digital output of the cable box is not only missing the point, it's RUINING the digital output by subjecting it to a D2A and A2D conversion. Get it?
XMMS doesn't enter into this because XMMS is not a signal source, and is not a valid comparison to a cable box or a satellite decoder or a DVD player or any of those things.
The actual name of the bank he's talking about is "Fifth Third Bank" and it's a pretty good sized bank, in 7 or 8 states, I think.
>You know, I hear this a lot, even from people with the same debit card I carry. I often hear it after I tell a cashier to treat it as a credit card, from someone who's looking at me like I'm a fool who's just parted with his money.
Yeah, people think that putting in their PIN is somehow better. I don't understand why.
A dual debit/credit card (basically an ATM card with a Visa/MC logo on it) can be used in one of those ways:
Debit/ATM = You type in a PIN, the money comes out of the account instantly, no signing anything.
-Pros: It talks over the ATM network and will get rejected if you lack funds in your account.
-Cons: Bank treats it like any other ATM transaction, and can charge you for using an "outside" ATM possibly. Also the merchant can tack on fees if they want. Can't overdraw your account, as the funds check is real time.
Credit = You sign a piece of paper (sometimes.. it's not always needed any more), it works like any other credit card.
-Pros: No extra fees can be tacked on to your purchase. Not by the bank, not by the merchant. A percentage may go to a credit company, but that's not costing you anything extra.
-Cons: You have to sign a piece of paper (maybe). The funds are not instantly removed from your account (can take a day or two, as it goes through a credit clearinghouse like all credit transactions). You may find that your bank is stupid and treats the account in a double jeopardy situation (all credit transactions consist of one transaction to verify the money is there and reserve it, and another to actually do the charge.. banks tend to not remove the reserved charges immediately, meaning that though the funds got removed, the same amount of funds may not be available for a few days after the actual transaction happens.. double the money is not available, in other words.. This won't cause any extra charges though, just unavailable funds). Also since credit goes through a third party, the credit check isn't entirely real time, and you can overdraw your account without getting a rejection in some cases.
Basically, assuming you have lots of funds available in the account and don't mind signing a piece of paper, credit is the better choice. No extra charges are possible that way. If you need a real time check of the account or just don't want to sign anything, and don't mind possible extra charges, ATM/Debit is the way to go.
Did I sound like I was talking about computers?
Your standalone DVD player, does it have a volume control? How about the VCR? It outputs audio, where's the volume control on it?
Why in the hell would you expect a cable box to have an audio control? Especially on the digital output? A digital output is to output a digital signal to the amplifier/decoder in the stereo or TV. That's the whole point of having the digital signal there, either using coax or the fiber connection. You don't have a volume control on the cable box because the digital signal isn't being DECODED in the cable box, it's being decoded in the amplifier, into DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 or something like that.
Your computer is doing the audio processing all in the PC. Your cable box is not. The point of digital audio lines on consumer level devices is to preserve the undecoded raw digital signal all the way to the amp. That means you can't have a volume control on the source.
"can't control the digital audio volume via remote"
Of course you can't. Digital audio doesn't HAVE a volume adjustment. It's just the audio signal, not a signal with an analog amplifier behind it.
NO digital audio source has a volume control. That's not what it is. If you have a device, like a DVD player, that has a digital audio output, then you program your remote to control your amplifier's audio volume. In his case, he could have done some kind of learning mode trick on his cable box remote to let it change the volume on his stereo system, because that's what he'd be plugging the digital audio into anyway, one would hope.
I agree that disabling those outputs is stupid, and I agree that HDTV over Cable is shit for quality in most places. But let's face facts: consumers are quite often too ignorant to install a proper home theater setup themselves. If he didn't even know that digital audio doesn't *have* a volume on it, then can we really expect him to understand how to correct picture and signal issues?
You can only make things so simple. At some point, you have to expect the user to learn WTF they are doing. I admit that home theater is ripe for simplification, but digital audio ain't ever going to have a volume control and that is that.
Rubbish. Sure the hydrogen may be an efficient way to store the power, but how are you going to extract it? With a ~25% efficient internal combustion engine? You simply don't have that much energy to waste. Store it in a battery and use ~90% efficient electric motors to drive the wheels. Hell, I bet it will even weigh less than the electrolyser, IC engine, hydrogen tank and water tank that it replaces. Less pollution, too, because you won't be creating NOx from the high compression engine.
While I agree that you're not going to get as much power out of converting to hydrogen to motion as you could with a nice, clean, efficent electric motor and some batteries, the question isn't quite that simple. You need to consider the total system.
Batteries are heavy. Yes, a battery has a much higher storage density, so you can carry a lot more power around with you, but is the total system more efficent than the hydrogen method? While the answer is probably "yes", I'd like to see it considered as a whole.
-With this hydrogen combustion method, you can't store as much power, but you don't have as much weight to haul around all the time.
-With the simpler solar panels charging batteries to drive a motor setup, you have a lot more weight due to the batteries which is going to reduce your mileage as well.
Which is better considered as a whole? That's the question you need to examine.
IE. Default settings. No proxy, no modifications. Nothing particularly special about it.
t ?blablahblah");bunch of other stuff;}
-Load up the book in the browser.
-Click the View menu, select Source.
-Search for "div class=browse"
-Immediately before that, you'll find something like this in a CSS style:
{ background-image:url(http://print.google.com/prin
-Take that URL, copy and paste it into a new browser window and voila, you have the full size image. Save As or Print on this image works fine. No problems at all.
Seriously, this is trivial to break.
What's not trivial is getting an entire book. How to figure out how to get every page is the tough part. Getting the image itself is a cakewalk. It's just Javascript tricks to break right-clicking and CSS tricks to break direct printing from that window. Saving gets broken because of the tricky CSS using the IMG as a background image. The browser doesn't think to save the image, is all.
The tracker has all the information needed to determine throughput, just not a priori. The tracker can experiment with different node routes and decide which ones it thinks are optimal, based on reported throughputs from receivers. (Prioritized alongside other considerations like how reliably a given node has been participating.)
:)
:)
I would agree that it could be done, if you assume that the tracker has more or less total control of the network interconnections. BT doesn't have this. It can tell the client to connect to some subset of the connections, if and when the client asks for them, but it can't tell the client to disconnect from any connections the client already knows about. In other words, I don't think the tracker has enough capability to manage the network flow efficently.
A fully connected network, for example, would be a bad idea. There's too much overhead involved. And no matter what the tracker does, this is the eventual end state of the network. I've seen it happen. When I'm connected to around 1000 nodes, my speed drops off sharply. Disconnecting and reconnecting is often my only recourse. Big networks have this tendancy to collapse under the overhead. Not that it couldn't be reworked to be better, I grant you, just that it's not doing this sort of thing right now.
I think it may be right that BT right now may not be sophisticated enough to mitigate throughput snarls for an arbitrarily large network, but to reframe the issue: could BT become sophisticated enough to do so with relatively minor logic changes in the tracker, without the large conceptual transition to a broadcast architecture? I think it's possible. A clever engine modeling speculations about throughput, verifying and discarding hypotheses with feedback information from participating nodes, might just do the trick.
Here we agree, except that I don't think tracker changes alone are enough to do it. I think that it's necessary for the tracker to have total control over who the nodes are connected to in order to be able to achieve this level of quality. Furthermore, given that you can't trust the nodes (since anybody can write one), this is not possible to achieve, since it is not in any given nodes best interest to listen to the tracker when he tells it to disconnect from another node. As a node, the more connections I have, the more data I can potentially receive. The overhead is an issue, granted, but that can be managed with simple limits and such.
I agree that BT could be made better, but when you talk about scaling to every PC.. well.. I think that it's possible that it could scale that big, but it certainly can't right now.
By your convention, all current internal combusion vehicles are solar powered.
And he'd be correct too. All of the power we use in any form is ultimately solar powered, with the exception being nuclear fission/fusion. And the elements we use for those once came out of stars too, you know.
In this particular case, however, it's generating it's own fuel. Therefore you can consider it to be like a closed system with only one energy input: solar power via the solar panels. Considered that way, this truck is solar powered.
Now, if you yank off the electrolysis bits and put them in a fueling station somewhere, then it's not a solar powered truck anymore. It's a system that gets its power from the hydrogen you pump into the tank.
Almost energy we use ultimately comes from the sun. It's just a question of what part of the total system you are talking about. I don't think that it's unreasonable to include the electrolysis device as part of the system of "this truck" because a) it's hauling the thing around with it and b) they expressly designed it to be part of the truck in the first place.
Therefore this truck is solar powered, because "this truck" includes the electrolysis equipment.
The tracker can be more efficent, but in order to reach anywhere near that kind of real efficency, it would need more information than it actually has.
Firstly, it can only make educated guesses at the available bandwidth of the nodes. Nodes will lie/cheat/steal in order to get more packets, and you can't trust the clients. They're greedy.
Secondly, it doesn't really know the network topology. Again, you're only able to make educated guesses. If my neighbor and me are on the same torrent, then ideally the tracker would be able to tell us about each other, we'd connect, and share at very high speeds, being that we're both close to each other and on the same subnet and such. That case might be easy to recognize, sometimes, not so easy other times. Without full knowledge of the whole network, it's impossible to do perfectly in any case.
Third, even with the most efficent possible tracker, the grandparent is right. You have X users downloading, and they all are downloading Y bits of data. All data transfer is point to point, meaning that X*Y bits of data must be sent out for everybody to get the complete file. For every byte downloaded, there's a byte uploaded. You can make that fast by maximizing your throughput and managing it all into small sub-networks, but it still doesn't scale to everybody in the world.
A multicast setup does scale, even if it is a pain in the ass to do right now. One byte sent out from the source gets duplicated for each branch in the routing tree, and all users receive it. Upload rate is constant. If you ignore new users joining and old users leaving, traffic along each branch in the tree is only one copy of the stream, all the way until it reaches the endpoints (the viewers).
The problem with multicast is that it's confusing as hell because it requires cooperation of all the routers to handle the multicast traffic appropriately. But for any single source to many receivers, it's easily the most efficent way to do things.
And let's not forget that while torrent trackers *could* be more efficent, they are quite simply not that efficent. The torrent network is often highly connected instead of sparsely connected. Especially on larger files. A sparser network would be more optimal (read as: faster) in extremely large torrents, but it is rarely the case currently.
I just looked at mine, and the version claims to be 1.0.21.0. No -1 error, no obvious automatic update, nothing.
So I just now right-clicked it, selected exit, and then restarted it. Voila. Blue icon, version claims to be 1.0.23.0.
It's clear that it *does* have an automatic update function, and no, it does not have an option anywhere to turn that off.
If the purpose of the theft was to sell it to a collector, then it was sold before they ever stole the thing in the first place. Some rich mofo hired them to take it, simple as that.
If it was not sold, then it was stolen in order to ransom it back to the insurance company.
When you're dealing with extremely rare items like this, it's always one of these two, if indeed money is the motivating factor at all.