Re:am I the only one who does not get it?
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It has always bugged the hell out of me why you can only listen to their proprietary format with the IPod.
What format would that be? What they call "AAC" is just mpeg-4...
Oh, you mean proprietary encryption format! Who the hell cares what encryption format they use? Only very trusting people keep their music in a DRM-hobbled format.
There are tons of other media players out there that accept open standards (at least more open).
As far as I can tell, pretty much no media players accept more than a couple of open formats. Most of them actually discourage you from using open formats, forcing you to use Microsoft's or Sony's proprietary formats if you want decent compression and quality... I hope you're not referring to WMA or something like that as "open", are you?
As a musician, hearing that my music is a "disposable commodity" is pretty disheartening. You want your tunes to connect with people (no matter how few or how many) and stay with them their entire lives.
I've a short list of songs that always get on my iPod Shuffle, before I fill it up with randomness:
When Harpo Played his Harp - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers She blinded me with science - Thomas Dolby mr_moran - The Bosstones Bouncy - Ballyhoo Orchestra We Don't Go To Gods House Anymore - Chumbawamba Shell Account - Barcelona Banned from Argo (Live) - Leslie Fish Why Paddy's not at Work Today - Celtic Stone Poisoning Pigeons in the Park - Tom Lehrer Lonely Rolling Star - Katamari Damacy Hemingway - Blue Clocks Green Linus and Lucy - Jeff Wahl Low Spark of High Heeled Boys - Traffic
I found a lot of these through MP3 blogs like 3Hive. Great site. What do you have out there?
Wrong answer: You're stuck with iTunes, because it uses a proprietary format which isn't compatible to anything Apple doesn't want you to use.
Right answer: Since you're going to strip the DRM off any music you keep anyway, isn't it nice that iTunes makes that so easy and convenient?
DRM is evil. If you aren't burning the music you buy to audio CDs you're just asking for the fuckup fairy to turn your music collection into digital hash. And once you do that it doesn't matter what format it was originally... it'll play for sure on any player.
(yeh, there's a miniscule loss in fidelity that I've yet to be able to detect... if yuo cared about that you wouldn't be buying lossy-compressed music in the first place)
The movie industry is going down the tubes? How do you figure?
Don't ask me, ask the MPAA. They're the ones whinging about lower turnouts. I'm simply proposing the possibility that there might be some reason for them.
That includes Ender's Game, if crazy uncle Orson is listening in...
God.
I wish Card had never turned the wonderfully ambiguous short story Ender's War into the teen-wonder fantasy fulfilment novel Ender's Game. No, not the bundled Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, the original short story that Ender's Game was based on.
Halo had one of the best, most thought-out sci-fi stories I've seen in a long time!Interesting way of putting it. One of the best stories you've seen in a long while. I'd suggest reading instead of watching, because the best SF never seems to get made into TV or movies.
Try some Greg Egan, Iain Banks, Karl Schroeder, David Brin,...
I would strongly disagree with you both on the point that the movie industry making a movie about a video game is a bad thing...
I dodn't say that. I said that getting someone like Peter Jackson to direct a videogame like Halo instead of coming up with top-of-the-line material to go with a top-of-the-line talent is nuts.
Teams of writers have been making increasingly complex and intriguing story lines for video games, giving the newer games enough character to have interesting standalone storylines.
The thing is, you're comparing it with such a low standard... it doesn't take "teams of writers" to produce an interesting standalone storyline. Go to any bookstore, pick up any book... go ahead... and read it. Even if it's a potboiler it's likely got at least as good an "interesting standalone storyline" as Halo. Or any other videogame. If you try and get "teams of writers" to do the same thing, it'll be a miracle if you get anything better than pap, and you'll never get a first-class story out of it.
If they want to get people's imaginations going, they should go back to where the authors of Halo got their ideas from... Larry Niven, Iain Banks, and the rest. Get the stories BEFORE they've been committee-edited into pap.
Microwaves don't work with the door open, some copiers wont copy money, and nail guns dont fire unless they are pressed firmly against something.
And you're not allowed to cut those tags off mattresses.
If I want to jigger my microwave to work with the door open or my nailgun to work as a real gun, I can do it. If I NEED to do it, I have that option. DRM doesn't give you that option.
(as for the money matter... I classify THAT as DRM)
We can't take the code developed by thousands of programmers over 15 years, make it proprietary, and contribute nothing back.
How about taking code developed by thousands of programmers over 25 years, use it as the base of a proprietary operating system, and going out of your way to contribute back to the open source community even where you're not obliged to do so but the GPL?
This is why the movie industry is going down the tubes. They're making a movie about a bloody video game, one that's basically a bug-shoot from start to end. If this is the kind of thing that gets the big bucks for movie rights, then the industry's loss of imagination has doomed them.
Thin clients were tremendously viable alternatives for personal computers right up until the mid-90s. You could buy an X-Terminal from anyone, and use it with a huge variety of timeshared computer systems running UNIX as well as proprietary operating systems like VMS.
What happened?
First, companies that were using X11 (including, at long last, Sun) decided that they were going to push a *new* kind of "thin client" that would only work with their servers and was incompatible with everyone else's "thin clients".
Second, home computers grew up to the point where they were competitive with X-terminals on price. The X-terminals could have been built cheaper, but the companies making them held on to their high margins, and home computers took over the office desktop.
The X Consortium should have done everything they could to get free or cheap high quality X servers out for every home computer platform, with low-bandwidth proxies built in. They should have come out with a browser plug-in, so you could run high-quality kiosk applications on a server and display them in your browser using X11 and LBX. But the X cornsortium consisted primarily of the companies involved in the asshole moves described above, so actually promoting the technology they were formed to promote was beyond them.
As for bandwidth... today, you have more bandwidth available to use through a broadband connection than I had on the LAN between my Xerox X-terminal and our Alphaserver... it's a non-issue.
Does that make this the oldest software to be released under an "open-sourceish" license?
Hell no. Not even close.
There was a thriving free software community back in the '70s, with operating systems, compilers for C, Forth, Basic, Pascal, and other languages, editors, graphics systems... all released to the public domain or under BSD-style licences. Heck, there were already Berkeley Software Distribution tapes circulating when most of this code was being written, and those contained software under all kinds of licenses.
Let's see... just off the top of my head, thinking back a quarter of a century, I used Small C (1980), Fig-Forth (1978), Software Tools (1976),... the "Free Software Movement" was already in high gear years before Stallman decided *he* was going to invent it.
Something a few other people have mentioned, I believe, that is quite important to the idea of Mac's and virii is the number of Mac's in use
It's not near as important as Microsoft's astroturfers argue.
Back in 1997 when Microsoft opened up the Active Desktop/Content/whatever security hole, the infection rate I saw on Windows boxes went through the roof in a matter of months. This was not accompanied by anything like the same kind of increase in Windows installations... it was clearly caused by a specific action that Microsoft took, and one that they have yet to undo... and this has a much bigger effect on the prevalence of Windows viruses than the market share of the OS.
Do Mac users think they are immune to security problems
Many may, but in general... no more than Windows users, many of whom think that because they have antivirus software they don't need to worry about security.
Really, this is a straw man. It's like someone in California chiding someone in Darwin for not being prepared for an earthquake or mudslides.
I know how to series-wind an AC motor, but there's no reason why everyone who wants to vacuum their floor should have to.
No, but they should know that there's an electric motor in there, and if it starts to smell like burning hair they have a problem. They should be able to reseat the drive belt if it comes loose. They should at least know you need to empty the bag now and then. The kinds of things people don't know about the technology they use really are this basic.
I'm not sure I'm going to care that much about Vista for example. When it breaks it will do whatever it does to recover itself, or not, or I'll go out and buy another 350 dollar e Machine. Big whoop - how many hours of your time is it worth to mess with it?
If you know how to fix it, it's likely going to take fewer hours to fix it than to go out and buy a new one.
Windows Mobile worked well with Windows?
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
Windows Mobile/Pocket PC/whatever worked better with Outlook maybe, but PalmOS worked a whole lot better with Windows than WinCE ever did. The complete inability of ActiveSync to maintain a reliable backup of my Pocket PC is one major reason I returned to Palm. Finicky damn software.
Oh, and as for Jeff Hawkins... the best thing Palm could have done was keep him at arms length at Handspring, and do whatever it took to keep both Sony and Handspring happy as separate independent customers of the OS... regardless of what that did for their own handheld sales.
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It has always bugged the hell out of me why you can only listen to their proprietary format with the IPod.
What format would that be? What they call "AAC" is just mpeg-4...
Oh, you mean proprietary encryption format! Who the hell cares what encryption format they use? Only very trusting people keep their music in a DRM-hobbled format.
There are tons of other media players out there that accept open standards (at least more open).
As far as I can tell, pretty much no media players accept more than a couple of open formats. Most of them actually discourage you from using open formats, forcing you to use Microsoft's or Sony's proprietary formats if you want decent compression and quality... I hope you're not referring to WMA or something like that as "open", are you?
I've a short list of songs that always get on my iPod Shuffle, before I fill it up with randomness:I found a lot of these through MP3 blogs like 3Hive. Great site. What do you have out there?
I guess All Of MP3 is below their radar, but US$1.50 for an entire album is pretty damn cheap, even compared to Walmart.
It would be a great deal if it was legal for them to do business in most countries outise the former Soviet Union.
Wrong answer: You're stuck with iTunes, because it uses a proprietary format which isn't compatible to anything Apple doesn't want you to use.
Right answer: Since you're going to strip the DRM off any music you keep anyway, isn't it nice that iTunes makes that so easy and convenient?
DRM is evil. If you aren't burning the music you buy to audio CDs you're just asking for the fuckup fairy to turn your music collection into digital hash. And once you do that it doesn't matter what format it was originally... it'll play for sure on any player.
(yeh, there's a miniscule loss in fidelity that I've yet to be able to detect... if yuo cared about that you wouldn't be buying lossy-compressed music in the first place)
The movie industry is going down the tubes? How do you figure?
Don't ask me, ask the MPAA. They're the ones whinging about lower turnouts. I'm simply proposing the possibility that there might be some reason for them.
How does your renting it to me have anything to do with the rights of the US Treasury to control the printing and reproduction of money?
there's always the possibility that it could do something fantastic
They'd need to hire an actual writer to make that happen.
(Halo is NOT a Ringworld, it's more like Iain Banks' Orbitals)
That includes Ender's Game, if crazy uncle Orson is listening in...
God.
I wish Card had never turned the wonderfully ambiguous short story Ender's War into the teen-wonder fantasy fulfilment novel Ender's Game. No, not the bundled Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, the original short story that Ender's Game was based on.
Sigh.
Halo had one of the best, most thought-out sci-fi stories I've seen in a long time!Interesting way of putting it. One of the best stories you've seen in a long while. I'd suggest reading instead of watching, because the best SF never seems to get made into TV or movies.
...
Try some Greg Egan, Iain Banks, Karl Schroeder, David Brin,
I would strongly disagree with you both on the point that the movie industry making a movie about a video game is a bad thing...
I dodn't say that. I said that getting someone like Peter Jackson to direct a videogame like Halo instead of coming up with top-of-the-line material to go with a top-of-the-line talent is nuts.
Teams of writers have been making increasingly complex and intriguing story lines for video games, giving the newer games enough character to have interesting standalone storylines.
The thing is, you're comparing it with such a low standard... it doesn't take "teams of writers" to produce an interesting standalone storyline. Go to any bookstore, pick up any book... go ahead... and read it. Even if it's a potboiler it's likely got at least as good an "interesting standalone storyline" as Halo. Or any other videogame. If you try and get "teams of writers" to do the same thing, it'll be a miracle if you get anything better than pap, and you'll never get a first-class story out of it.
If they want to get people's imaginations going, they should go back to where the authors of Halo got their ideas from... Larry Niven, Iain Banks, and the rest. Get the stories BEFORE they've been committee-edited into pap.
We'll see how doomed they are when the game's fans all over the country pay money to see it.
Yeh, but the gamers would pay just as much if it was Alan Smithee directing.
Everyone's been getting it wrong.
It's not Windows Vista, it's Windows ViSter.
Microwaves don't work with the door open, some copiers wont copy money, and nail guns dont fire unless they are pressed firmly against something.
And you're not allowed to cut those tags off mattresses.
If I want to jigger my microwave to work with the door open or my nailgun to work as a real gun, I can do it. If I NEED to do it, I have that option. DRM doesn't give you that option.
(as for the money matter... I classify THAT as DRM)
Without the GPL, there probably would not be the free and open Linux we see today.
Right, nobody could possibly maintain a free and open source OS using anything but the GPL.
We can't take the code developed by thousands of programmers over 15 years, make it proprietary, and contribute nothing back.
How about taking code developed by thousands of programmers over 25 years, use it as the base of a proprietary operating system, and going out of your way to contribute back to the open source community even where you're not obliged to do so but the GPL?
Nah, nobody would do that.
Use Linux/BSD for what its meant to be used for, and what no other OS can match it at!
You're aware, of course, that BSD is not under the GPL. Right?
This is why the movie industry is going down the tubes. They're making a movie about a bloody video game, one that's basically a bug-shoot from start to end. If this is the kind of thing that gets the big bucks for movie rights, then the industry's loss of imagination has doomed them.
Thin clients were tremendously viable alternatives for personal computers right up until the mid-90s. You could buy an X-Terminal from anyone, and use it with a huge variety of timeshared computer systems running UNIX as well as proprietary operating systems like VMS.
What happened?
First, companies that were using X11 (including, at long last, Sun) decided that they were going to push a *new* kind of "thin client" that would only work with their servers and was incompatible with everyone else's "thin clients".
Second, home computers grew up to the point where they were competitive with X-terminals on price. The X-terminals could have been built cheaper, but the companies making them held on to their high margins, and home computers took over the office desktop.
The X Consortium should have done everything they could to get free or cheap high quality X servers out for every home computer platform, with low-bandwidth proxies built in. They should have come out with a browser plug-in, so you could run high-quality kiosk applications on a server and display them in your browser using X11 and LBX. But the X cornsortium consisted primarily of the companies involved in the asshole moves described above, so actually promoting the technology they were formed to promote was beyond them.
As for bandwidth... today, you have more bandwidth available to use through a broadband connection than I had on the LAN between my Xerox X-terminal and our Alphaserver... it's a non-issue.
Does that make this the oldest software to be released under an "open-sourceish" license?
... the "Free Software Movement" was already in high gear years before Stallman decided *he* was going to invent it.
Hell no. Not even close.
There was a thriving free software community back in the '70s, with operating systems, compilers for C, Forth, Basic, Pascal, and other languages, editors, graphics systems... all released to the public domain or under BSD-style licences. Heck, there were already Berkeley Software Distribution tapes circulating when most of this code was being written, and those contained software under all kinds of licenses.
Let's see... just off the top of my head, thinking back a quarter of a century, I used Small C (1980), Fig-Forth (1978), Software Tools (1976),
Something a few other people have mentioned, I believe, that is quite important to the idea of Mac's and virii is the number of Mac's in use
It's not near as important as Microsoft's astroturfers argue.
Back in 1997 when Microsoft opened up the Active Desktop/Content/whatever security hole, the infection rate I saw on Windows boxes went through the roof in a matter of months. This was not accompanied by anything like the same kind of increase in Windows installations... it was clearly caused by a specific action that Microsoft took, and one that they have yet to undo... and this has a much bigger effect on the prevalence of Windows viruses than the market share of the OS.
Do Mac users think they are immune to security problems
Many may, but in general... no more than Windows users, many of whom think that because they have antivirus software they don't need to worry about security.
Really, this is a straw man. It's like someone in California chiding someone in Darwin for not being prepared for an earthquake or mudslides.
Wow, search engine technology really is Rocket Science!
At least it's not Brain Surgery.
I know how to series-wind an AC motor, but there's no reason why everyone who wants to vacuum their floor should have to.
No, but they should know that there's an electric motor in there, and if it starts to smell like burning hair they have a problem. They should be able to reseat the drive belt if it comes loose. They should at least know you need to empty the bag now and then. The kinds of things people don't know about the technology they use really are this basic.
I don't really know how to make clothes
But could you sew a button back on? No? Really?
I'm not sure I'm going to care that much about Vista for example. When it breaks it will do whatever it does to recover itself, or not, or I'll go out and buy another 350 dollar e Machine. Big whoop - how many hours of your time is it worth to mess with it?
If you know how to fix it, it's likely going to take fewer hours to fix it than to go out and buy a new one.
Windows Mobile/Pocket PC/whatever worked better with Outlook maybe, but PalmOS worked a whole lot better with Windows than WinCE ever did. The complete inability of ActiveSync to maintain a reliable backup of my Pocket PC is one major reason I returned to Palm. Finicky damn software.
Oh, and as for Jeff Hawkins... the best thing Palm could have done was keep him at arms length at Handspring, and do whatever it took to keep both Sony and Handspring happy as separate independent customers of the OS... regardless of what that did for their own handheld sales.