I HAVE a nano 3G, and as of a month ago Amarok did not work with it. It looks like it's working, but then you try the Ipod out by itself and there's nothing on it. I've had it since February, hardly cracked in two days.
I also just looked up the article, it's a thesis for a student working towards a Bachelor's degree and it mentions Nothing about the name hashing technique with respect to power savings. It does state that the Ipod does a "lazy delete" which "may be used to save power", but absolutely no claim either way about hashing itself saving power. I guess you figure I wouldn't look it up?
The point is, that your average joe doesn't have a clue how to pull songs from an ipod, so the name hashing technique "protects" the music from a large percentage of the population.
Of course the Touch uses the Iphone firmware, and it's even more locked down. This shows a definite progression to stronger DRM:
1: Simple file hash renaming technique 2: Simple encryption (broken shortly after) 3: Tougher encryption (3G nano, not broken yet, but probably soon) Also add encryption so you have to buy expensive apple cables to get video out to your TV screen. 4: Lock out access to the filesystem entirely.
Rubbish. The hashing would not even save the most trivial amount of power, and may actually cost a minute amount more, since the Song Name now absolutely has to come from inside the file instead of from the filesystem, meaning every "directory listing" on an ipod has to open up every file, parse the id3 tags and cache the results for display instead of simply showing the filename.
This is simply a lame way of satisfying the RIAA that Ipods are not used for piracy.
The 3G nanos have built in encryption and have yet to be hacked by any of those programs, and the Ipod Touch doesn't even offer disk mode anymore, most likely to keep the hackers out.
Have you actually Looked at bill C61? The ONLY people it protects are the ones who work at the large media corporations. Nothing in it to make sure all the cash they would rake in is presented to the actual artists who own the music. Insane things about forcing libraries to make sure everyone destroys their photocopies of library reference material after 30 days, making it a little expensive for someone working on a PHD (2 year task) to keep their notes around while they study.. Bill C61 is NOT about protecting artists, it's about protecting big media companies from the US. The largest independent record company in Canada was against it, and were not even consulted.
In the US the DMCA is used to squelch free speech, stop competition, and again to support big media conglomerates, and does nothing to protect artists themselves. Go look up how much of the lawsuit money the RIAA have handed back to artists. The RIAA are keeping it to fund the lawyers war chest. Michael Geist has many good articles about the expected results of C61. Protecting artists from piracy might be the catchphrase, but it is not at all the goal of Bill C61.
Interesting, I wondered how the conformal coating would affect the impedance.
Having used some impedance calculators that care how thick the solder mask layer was, I assumed that conformal coating would also have to be accounted for.
Knowing that, I wonder if a "potting" material could be found with the same ballpark permittivity as air to avoid the impedance problem?
The characteristic impedance of the surface traces will change.
The surface traces were designed with the assumption that there is air above the traces.
Loading up a bunch of gunk will change the impedance, and could screw up your signal integrity. PCI Express or Gig Ethernet could fail for example.
Google stripline vs microstrip and signal integrity of high speed differential traces.
I'd be curious how the conformal coating people manage this too, I'd assume the copper trace widths would have to be designed knowing the board was going to be conformal coated.
The Xerox people were forced by management to let Apple, Sun, Microsoft etc come in and see full demos without any non disclosures, probably little or no patent protection. In short Xerox management gave away the farm.
Xerox could easily have been the Microsoft success story but stayed firmly entrenched in the expensive printer/copier business.
Probably not fair to blame the engineers who invented mice/windowing/network printing/fileshareing etc. for the complete lack of brains in Xerox management.
I'm reading William Gibson's newest novel, and the main theme is
"There is a cold civil war in America".
I agree the NeoCons are detrimental to world peace, but I suspect it's the usual government screw ups that prevented 9/11 from being discovered in time to put a stop to it.
What happens more often than not is that some scientist will report on an interesting theory he/she is working on, and the media report it like it's a done deal. Non scientifically minded people prefer bold confident answers. There are no answers like that in science.
Most particle physicists propose mathematical models to explain how certain measurements come out the way that they do, then hope a shred of evidence comes out of the next experiment to prove OR DISPROVE the model. It's just as interesting to a good scientist if the evidence Disproves a model. Any scientist who lets their ego overrule evidence (my theory is so brilliant it must be true!) is not being scientific.
It's a bit much to say all these scientists make up particles and "claim they're real" without any physical evidence.
"There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives."
This is a Good Thing! (tm)
Some majority of music players are Ipods (no?), which won't work with any Microsoft tools (comments here seem to imply Microsoft Sync works with Ipods? Even the newest DRM infested 3G nano?)
and if Apple got into this business, then your car would Only support an Ipod..
And Sony would insist on their memory stick, and and..
This is just crying out for a public open standard.
The best word processor I've ever used. Too bad it's an Adobe backwater product. It (was?) very easy to use, templates actually work, and it kicks MS Word's butt big time. (It has extensive math support)..
In Germany they introduced a Government funded program to guarantee a fixed reasonable rate (of buying power from individuals) for the next 20 years.
Solar power installations have exploded there - with a 20 year price guarantee, large companies can invest in solar in bulk. They apparently go door to door and offer homeowners free electricity (for the use of the rooftop) as long as they can sell the excess into the grid.
I don't doubt it (that the X.org code is a huge ugly beast).
The point is, if you don't like it, you can write your own. The few brave souls who spend their time hacking in the X11 jungle deserve medals, not insults and rants from whiners who refuse to help.
These people are taking on this mess, and are trying to fix it in their spare time.
Quite seriously, if you have a better idea, and are willing to give it up for free, by all means do so!
I for one, appreciate their efforts, even if the product itself is far from perfect.
Sketchup is a good example of how easy a 3D modeling tool should be. You can make complex and precise 3D models in it quite easily, with very little learning time.
Dismissing it as a toy is a rather weak argument. In fact, calling it a toy is far from the insult you intended, it's actually a lot of fun to use, because it is so easy. Calling it a toy is a compliment.
Consider the modeling tool subset of Blender that is available in Sketchup. The Sketchup tools are far easier to learn than the Blender equivalents.
If the free sketchup version offered model export as a feature, I think a lot of people would use it as the modeler for their pet rendering projects.
No question: Blender offers a powerful tool set, and from the many comments here - once you learn the interface, it can do many cool things, and I think that's fantastic in an open source free project.
In rebuttal, do you really think that photoshop users are a majority of the desktop market? Or even more specifically power users of photoshop?
Adobe's photoshop online is here now. No you're not going to use it to edit a 20 megapixel magazine shot, but that's a tiny fraction of the market.
Yes power users will require the heavy lifting to be run directly on the local OS, but power users of heavy lift apps are a small minority of the PC business.
Same argument for gaming, what percentage of the market are the power users with the maxed out PC running the latest monster video card, as compared to the number of people playing on a $300 dedicated game machine, and even more so, playing ultra light weight games like scrabulous on facebook?
Moore's law is also directly relevant to my viewpoint, it directly affects the speed of network devices (10 gige over copper is here due to the current size of the transistor, allowing even more complicated physical layer electronic tricks to get the performance).
Moore's law also has sped up interpreted languages like java/javascript/flash to the point where applications can compete with C or C++ apps running directly on the OS - yes, lightweight applications, but that's what a large percentage of the PC world is running.
And yes, I am confusing client and server, but on purpose. Google's spread sheet runs in javascript in the web browser, and links back to google's server for file management, and links into online services (IE cells can be live internet data). It's really running on both client and server, as do the dozens of cute little facebook apps.
In five years no one will give a rats ass what local OS is running under the web browser that connects you to your office app server, or remote app server.
Microsoft knows this, and thus killed Netscape to prevent anyone from going AWOL from the windows platform. It almost worked, but darn these other new kids on the block with cloud computing, javascript, flash, ODF, html, php, ruby, apache - this is where all the action is in software these days, not in adding even more unwanted bells and whistles to an already overblown Office Suite.
So next up is Silverlight and Yahoo's install base could have forcibly spread Silverlight for them.
With this deal/no deal, they either get Yahoo's install base, or give them a body check to the stock price if the deal doesn't go down, a win win situation for MS.
Sure, google apps and the like are a bit sluggish now, but they are actually usable. Give one more cycle of moore's law and these sorts of networked apps will be entirely usable for almost all business applications.
Oh rubbish: (They are in it to make themselfs look good (Just like the rest of the human race)). You have a sad life if you truly believe all humans are so selfish.
Scientists are human, and are as fallible as any other group of humans.
Science itself is a tool that makes predictions about the natural world, using the scientific method. Nothing more or less. It's open to anyone to challenge any science being done, but only by using the scientific method and publishing your results. IE making stuff up by pretending the bible should be taken literally doesn't count, or saying that "God told me so" also doesn't count.
Intelligent design - show us the science SUPPORTING it and real scientists might get interested.
All the intelligent designers state "I can't imagine how anything so complicated could be accomplished without an intelligent designer". A lack of imagination doesn't prove their point.
They also latch on to any bit of uncertainty in evolution as if they found the holy grail and shout - "See - this part of evolution is wrong, so it all must be wrong! Haha!"
A mountain of truly scientific evidence is there to support evolution. None what so ever to support intelligent design.
What's really at work here is a power struggle between the religious extremists and a modern education for the control of the minds and money of the fundamentalist Christian population.
Keep em in the dark, uneducated and afraid, and you own their wallets and their hearts. That's what intelligent design is really all about.
While I would love it if the media apps on Linux were in the same class as the tools you mention (The free ones are at the "just barely usable" state IMHO), I disagree that these are the main issues.
The big ticket items on the windows empire are:
Office Business Apps Games Multimedia authoring
Open source and linux have come a very long way in providing office and business apps (Open office is more than good enough for me).
Gaming is far behind windows and probably the Mac as well. Now that NVidia and ATI are actually starting to supply drivers for 3D capable cards, perhaps things will change, but only if the big game companies can make money selling games into the linux market.
An open source equivalent of DirectX, and a way to make money selling games are some of the missing links.
Actually aren't you forgetting the registry? That monolithic single point of failure for the entire OS that the most poorly written app gets to play with when you install it? I wonder if it still bloats up on Vista?
IF MS went back to INI files, they'd probably fix a large percentage of windows crashes, and certainly lengthen the mean time between reinstalling windows to clean up the sludge..
They aren't afraid of either. The big danger is Google. I mean realistically, the only thing people need windows for is to run MS Office, and games. The other main application is the web. The rest is noise floor.
The thing with office, is that office 97 is good enough for 95% of the market. Now that other free open source alternatives are at least as good as office 97, the cracks in the MS Dam are starting to show (and why Microsoft went over the top to destroy ISO's credibility with the OOXML vs ODF hijinx).
Another front is IT support. If/when somebody (google or others) offers a free office that is good enough, and runs on anybody's reasonably compliant web browser, then they won't care if their home PC dies in a fiery death of viruses, because all their data and apps are running somewhere else on someone's professionally administered server farm.
The web is the new OS, that's what google have been building towards, and what Microsoft are afraid of. Who will give a rats ass what OS your standard web browser is running on?
Now if someone would put together a "Windows XP Live DVD" with active X installed, and a windows game installer, then you could run your windows gaming with the benefits of a standalone game machine (just boot it and run it - it's a clean windows install every time with no viruses and bloating registry, and random configuration changes when you weren't looking ), then it wouldn't matter what OS you normally use, you can always boot your favourite PC game from DVD. This will free the Gamers from the tyranny of the OS monopoly. Virtual machine installs of windows are damn close to this now, but have licensing issues with Microsoft, who are not happy about making it so easy to chose the right OS for the task at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
I HAVE a nano 3G, and as of a month ago Amarok did not work with it. It looks like it's working, but then you try the Ipod out by itself and there's nothing on it.
I've had it since February, hardly cracked in two days.
I also just looked up the article, it's a thesis for a student working towards a Bachelor's degree and it mentions Nothing about the name hashing technique with respect to power savings.
It does state that the Ipod does a "lazy delete" which "may be used to save power", but absolutely no claim either way about hashing itself saving power. I guess you figure I wouldn't look it up?
The point is, that your average joe doesn't have a clue how to pull songs from an ipod, so the name hashing technique "protects" the music from a large percentage of the population.
Of course the Touch uses the Iphone firmware, and it's even more locked down. This shows a definite progression to stronger DRM:
1: Simple file hash renaming technique
2: Simple encryption (broken shortly after)
3: Tougher encryption (3G nano, not broken yet, but probably soon)
Also add encryption so you have to buy expensive apple cables to get video out to your TV screen.
4: Lock out access to the filesystem entirely.
Notice a trend?
Rubbish. The hashing would not even save the most trivial amount of power, and may actually cost a minute amount more, since the Song Name now absolutely has to come from inside the file instead of from the filesystem, meaning every "directory listing" on an ipod has to open up every file, parse the id3 tags and cache the results for display instead of simply showing the filename.
This is simply a lame way of satisfying the RIAA that Ipods are not used for piracy.
The 3G nanos have built in encryption and have yet to be hacked by any of those programs, and the Ipod Touch doesn't even offer disk mode anymore, most likely to keep the hackers out.
It's most definitely about apple DRM.
Have you actually Looked at bill C61?
The ONLY people it protects are the ones who work at the large media corporations.
Nothing in it to make sure all the cash they would rake in is presented to the actual artists who own the music.
Insane things about forcing libraries to make sure everyone destroys their photocopies of library reference material after 30 days, making it a little expensive for someone working on a PHD (2 year task) to keep their notes around while they study..
Bill C61 is NOT about protecting artists, it's about protecting big media companies from the US.
The largest independent record company in Canada was against it, and were not even consulted.
In the US the DMCA is used to squelch free speech,
stop competition, and again to support big media conglomerates, and does nothing to protect artists themselves.
Go look up how much of the lawsuit money the RIAA have handed back to artists. The RIAA are keeping it to fund the lawyers war chest.
Michael Geist has many good articles about the expected results of C61. Protecting artists from piracy might be the catchphrase, but it is not at all the goal of Bill C61.
Polar Instruments has one, with a time limited trial:
http://www.polarinstruments.com/calc.htm
We've been building PCI Express and 1 Gig Ethernet (via SGMII, another 2.5 gig hz differential scheme) so had to take a look at it.
The crunch was getting 100 ohm differential over flex cable without paying a fortune for the cable..
Cheers,
Gord Wait
Interesting, I wondered how the conformal coating would affect the impedance.
Having used some impedance calculators that care how thick the solder mask layer was, I assumed that conformal coating would also have to be accounted for.
Knowing that, I wonder if a "potting" material could be found with the same ballpark permittivity as air to avoid the impedance problem?
The characteristic impedance of the surface traces will change.
The surface traces were designed with the assumption that there is air above the traces.
Loading up a bunch of gunk will change the impedance, and could screw up your signal integrity. PCI Express or Gig Ethernet could fail for example.
Google stripline vs microstrip and signal integrity of high speed differential traces.
I'd be curious how the conformal coating people manage this too, I'd assume the copper trace widths would have to be designed knowing the board was going to be conformal coated.
The Xerox people were forced by management to let Apple, Sun, Microsoft etc come in and see full demos without any non disclosures, probably little or no patent protection.
In short Xerox management gave away the farm.
Xerox could easily have been the Microsoft success story but stayed firmly entrenched in the expensive printer/copier business.
Probably not fair to blame the engineers who invented mice/windowing/network printing/fileshareing etc. for the complete lack of brains in Xerox management.
I'm reading William Gibson's newest novel,
and the main theme is
"There is a cold civil war in America".
I agree the NeoCons are detrimental to world peace, but I suspect it's the usual government screw ups that prevented 9/11 from being discovered in time to put a stop to it.
What happens more often than not is that some scientist will report on an interesting theory he/she is working on, and the media report it like it's a done deal. Non scientifically minded people prefer bold confident answers. There are no answers like that in science.
Most particle physicists propose mathematical models to explain how certain measurements come out the way that they do, then hope a shred of evidence comes out of the next experiment to prove OR DISPROVE the model. It's just as interesting to a good scientist if the evidence Disproves a model. Any scientist who lets their ego overrule evidence (my theory is so brilliant it must be true!) is not being scientific.
It's a bit much to say all these scientists make up particles and "claim they're real" without any physical evidence.
"There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives."
This is a Good Thing! (tm)
Some majority of music players are Ipods (no?), which won't work with any Microsoft tools (comments here seem to imply Microsoft Sync works with Ipods? Even the newest DRM infested 3G nano?)
and if Apple got into this business, then your car would Only support an Ipod..
And Sony would insist on their memory stick,
and and..
This is just crying out for a public open standard.
Agreed!
The best word processor I've ever used. Too bad it's an Adobe backwater product. It (was?) very easy to use, templates actually work, and it kicks MS Word's butt big time.
(It has extensive math support)..
In Germany they introduced a Government funded program to guarantee a fixed reasonable rate (of buying power from individuals) for the next 20 years.
Solar power installations have exploded there - with a 20 year price guarantee, large companies can invest in solar in bulk. They apparently go door to door and offer homeowners free electricity (for the use of the rooftop) as long as they can sell the excess into the grid.
Check out chapter 4 here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/program.html
I don't doubt it (that the X.org code is a huge ugly beast).
The point is, if you don't like it, you can write your own. The few brave souls who spend their time hacking in the X11 jungle deserve medals, not insults and rants from whiners who refuse to help.
These people are taking on this mess, and are trying to fix it in their spare time.
Quite seriously, if you have a better idea, and are willing to give it up for free, by all means do so!
I for one, appreciate their efforts, even if the product itself is far from perfect.
Sketchup is a good example of how easy a 3D modeling tool should be. You can make complex and precise 3D models in it quite easily, with very little learning time.
Dismissing it as a toy is a rather weak argument.
In fact, calling it a toy is far from the insult you intended, it's actually a lot of fun to use, because it is so easy. Calling it a toy is a compliment.
Consider the modeling tool subset of Blender that is available in Sketchup. The Sketchup tools are far easier to learn than the Blender equivalents.
If the free sketchup version offered model export as a feature, I think a lot of people would use it as the modeler for their pet rendering projects.
No question: Blender offers a powerful tool set, and from the many comments here - once you learn the interface, it can do many cool things,
and I think that's fantastic in an open source free project.
Easy to learn and intuitive? No.
Download Google Sketchup, and you can pick up its basic 3D modelling in an hour. It's by far the easiest 3D modeller I've ever played around with.
In rebuttal, do you really think that photoshop users are a majority of the desktop market?
Or even more specifically power users of photoshop?
Adobe's photoshop online is here now. No you're not going to use it to edit a 20 megapixel magazine shot, but that's a tiny fraction of the market.
Yes power users will require the heavy lifting to be run directly on the local OS, but power users of heavy lift apps are a small minority of the PC business.
Same argument for gaming, what percentage of the market are the power users with the maxed out PC running the latest monster video card, as compared to the number of people playing on a $300 dedicated game machine, and even more so, playing ultra light weight games like scrabulous on facebook?
Moore's law is also directly relevant to my viewpoint, it directly affects the speed of network devices (10 gige over copper is here due to the current size of the transistor, allowing even more complicated physical layer electronic tricks to get the performance).
Moore's law also has sped up interpreted languages like java/javascript/flash to the point where applications can compete with C or C++ apps running directly on the OS - yes, lightweight applications, but that's what a large percentage of the PC world is running.
And yes, I am confusing client and server, but on purpose. Google's spread sheet runs in javascript in the web browser, and links back to google's server for file management, and links into online services (IE cells can be live internet data).
It's really running on both client and server, as do the dozens of cute little facebook apps.
The internet is the OS.
In five years no one will give a rats ass what local OS is running under the web browser that connects you to your office app server, or remote app server.
Microsoft knows this, and thus killed Netscape to prevent anyone from going AWOL from the windows platform. It almost worked, but darn these other new kids on the block with cloud computing, javascript, flash, ODF, html, php, ruby, apache - this is where all the action is in software these days, not in adding even more unwanted bells and whistles to an already overblown Office Suite.
So next up is Silverlight and Yahoo's install base could have forcibly spread Silverlight for them.
With this deal/no deal, they either get Yahoo's install base, or give them a body check to the stock price if the deal doesn't go down, a win win situation for MS.
Sure, google apps and the like are a bit sluggish now, but they are actually usable. Give one more cycle of moore's law and these sorts of networked apps will be entirely usable for almost all business applications.
Does any user care what OS is running Facebook?
Check out the article on Scientific American:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know
If it's true that Ben Stein faked major parts of the show, but people take it as truth, then that is harmful.
It comes down to which camp you trust for accurate and reliable information - the truth - no less.
Oh rubbish: (They are in it to make themselfs look good (Just like the rest of the human race)).
You have a sad life if you truly believe all humans are so selfish.
Scientists are human, and are as fallible as any other group of humans.
Science itself is a tool that makes predictions about the natural world, using the scientific method. Nothing more or less. It's open to anyone to challenge any science being done, but only by using the scientific method and publishing your results.
IE making stuff up by pretending the bible should be taken literally doesn't count, or saying that "God told me so" also doesn't count.
Intelligent design - show us the science SUPPORTING it and real scientists might get interested.
All the intelligent designers state "I can't imagine how anything so complicated could be accomplished without an intelligent designer". A lack of imagination doesn't prove their point.
They also latch on to any bit of uncertainty in evolution as if they found the holy grail and shout - "See - this part of evolution is wrong, so it all must be wrong! Haha!"
A mountain of truly scientific evidence is there to support evolution. None what so ever to support intelligent design.
What's really at work here is a power struggle between the religious extremists and a modern education for the control of the minds and money of the fundamentalist Christian population.
Keep em in the dark, uneducated and afraid, and you own their wallets and their hearts. That's what intelligent design is really all about.
Damn, you beat me to it.
While I would love it if the media apps on Linux were in the same class as the tools you mention (The free ones are at the "just barely usable" state IMHO),
I disagree that these are the main issues.
The big ticket items on the windows empire are:
Office
Business Apps
Games
Multimedia authoring
Open source and linux have come a very long way in providing office and business apps (Open office is more than good enough for me).
Gaming is far behind windows and probably the Mac as well. Now that NVidia and ATI are actually starting to supply drivers for 3D capable cards, perhaps things will change, but only if the big game companies can make money selling games into the linux market.
An open source equivalent of DirectX, and a way to make money selling games are some of the missing links.
Actually aren't you forgetting the registry? That monolithic single point of failure for the entire OS that the most poorly written app gets to play with when you install it?
I wonder if it still bloats up on Vista?
IF MS went back to INI files, they'd probably fix a large percentage of windows crashes, and certainly lengthen the mean time between reinstalling windows to clean up the sludge..
They aren't afraid of either. The big danger is Google.
I mean realistically, the only thing people need windows for is to run MS Office, and games.
The other main application is the web.
The rest is noise floor.
The thing with office, is that office 97 is good enough for 95% of the market.
Now that other free open source alternatives are at least as good as office 97, the cracks in the MS Dam are starting to show (and why Microsoft went over the top to destroy ISO's credibility with the OOXML vs ODF hijinx).
Another front is IT support.
If/when somebody (google or others) offers a free office that is good enough, and runs on anybody's reasonably compliant web browser, then they won't care if their home PC dies in a fiery death of viruses, because all their data and apps are running somewhere else on someone's professionally administered server farm.
The web is the new OS, that's what google have been building towards, and what Microsoft are afraid of. Who will give a rats ass what OS your standard web browser is running on?
Now if someone would put together a "Windows XP Live DVD" with active X installed, and a windows game installer, then you could run your windows gaming with the benefits of a standalone game machine (just boot it and run it - it's a clean windows install every time with no viruses and bloating registry, and random configuration changes when you weren't looking ), then it wouldn't matter what OS you normally use, you can always boot your favourite PC game from DVD.
This will free the Gamers from the tyranny of the OS monopoly. Virtual machine installs of windows are damn close to this now, but have licensing issues with Microsoft, who are not happy about making it so easy to chose the right OS for the task at hand.
Doh! Sorry, I had the wrong reality distortion field turned on! :)
Just a sec... Ah, that's better!
How is the crashing of an unstable operating system EVER the users fault?
You must work for IT support..