Janis Ian's got a nice article posted here ( http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.h tml ) where she very eloquently tells 'em to go shove it.
In particular, she points to the one clear experiment being conducted in this area: the Baen Free Library. If increased availability of illegal and free entertainment guts the industry, then surely increased availability of LEGAL, FREE, and PRODUCER-SANCTIONED entertainment would be its death-knell, no? Yet what happens every single time an author puts their work up on the Library? Sales jump.
So go to the Library ( http://www.baen.com/library/ ), find a good author, and buy a book. Support an author today.
Get a copy of BNL's Everything to Everyone, and go to a concert. Support a band today.
And please stop forcing me to compare the music industry to the printing industry. It's really not a good analogy.
If the availability of free music causes people to buy music, the studios shouldn't try to stop it because it's helping them.
If buying lots of music causes downloading lots of music, the studios shouldn't try to stop it because they'd be attacking their best customers.
If there's no causation either way, then the studios are wasting money trying to stop it since it has no bearing on their bottom line.
Any way you slice it, this suing of children and grandmothers is pointless, a PR disaster, and ultimately suicidal. Whether the campaign works, fails, or has no effect, the studios LOSE.
To notice what? That someone who happened to work for SCO released code into Linux completely separately from his work at SCO, and even went to the trouble of asking the SCO folk about it beforehand as a courtesy?
Nothing to see here folks, move on. This case will wend its way to court, IBM's crack lawyers will annihilate SCO's crack-smoking lawyers (many thanks to whoever it was who came up with that!), and then it will be over. This happens every day.
The cameras aren't the important part of the system. That's just what they're telling you. In fact, the cameras are really just empty camera housings like they have on buses and such.
The important part is the office secretary who's paid to notice people who squinch up their face to fool the cameras.
Probably. However, for a probe that large, it was really a necessity.
The reactor will be providing 10+ times as much power as a battery-operated probe. This means more power to instrumentation, allowing for active devices like laser rangers, radars, and the like. It also means more power for propulsion (I didn't notice any mention of propulsion in the article, but flying about in Jupiter's strong magnetosphere probably means a lot of fine tuning can be done magnetically). And perhaps most importantly it means more power to send homeward, ferrying those oh-so-important bits. All these sensors are going to generate a lot of data, and the probe needs to be able to send it back at the rate it is generated.
That's assuming a random password which is an indefensible assumption. I have one or two computer-generated random passwords that I've memorized, but the majority of my passwords are pseudorandom at best. Most people don't use long passwords, and in any event their information content is rather less than 6 bits per character.
I think 8 charaters long, at closer to 4 bits per character is a more reasonable assumption. Sure, it won't get *all* passwords, but it will get the vast majority.
I don't know why people are so pissed off about ATM fees. What, do you think the ATM fairy just drops them off all over the place for free?
No, I think the HR fairy drops them off all over the place. She says "Here you go! Tons cheaper than a real person. Enjoy!" and wanders off to do another good deed.
The effort is aimed mainly at camcorders, which account for 92 percent of all illegal copies of films that appear for sale over the Internet and are sold on street corners, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
Who do they think they're kidding? The professional duplicators work from the highest-quality originals they can get (be they original movie reels, DVDs, whatever). The amateurs might be sneaking a camcorder into a theater, but given how easy it is to get a good copy online, there's little point.
In short, I call shennanigans on this theory that there's an army of pirates armed not with swords but minicams, poised to destroy the industry.
Besides, copyright infringement is already illegal (that's the 'infringement' part). So what's the point of passing this new law? To produce the illusion of doing something, at the expense of everyone involved, as far as anyone can tell.
I couldn't find much about the network connection in the manuals on the Rio site.
How do you transfer files to the device over cat5? Does the Karma show up as an SMB share or something? Or is it necessary to use the java app? How fast is it? How's the interface?
Does it properly support ogg metadata?
Does it save your place in a playlist or directory while shut off (so I can listen to audiobooks on my commute)?
The problem is not the paucity of outlets, per se. The problem is the need for a lot of power in one place.
Along three linear feet of wall, I have plugged in: 4 computers, 1 monitor, one switch, one wireless access point, one battery backup (requires a 20A socket - adapted to use 2 15A sockets, which is OK since it's a 20A circuit behind them), one laser printer, and one lamp. That represents just under half the electrical devices in my room which need plugging in, and probably about 80% of the total power requirements.
This is the sort of problem that leads students to plug one power strip into another one (that, and their penchant for buying cheap extension cords), and overload circuits. Having four times as many outlets in the room would only help if there were more outlets within a few feet of what needs to be plugged in.
> Maybe if the music industry had a product worth paying for, people would buy it.
Well, they do have a product worth paying for. Just not worth paying what they want to charge.
Even at used-CD prices ($10/CD), music is way more expensive than video.
I just bought a season of babylon 5 (brand new, shipped, from Amazon) for $55. That's over 15 hours of video, on a half-dozen DVDs. I couldn't get that much music for that price. I couldn't even get that many CDs for that price.
The extended edition LotR:TTT is about $30 shipped or local. That's almost 4 hours of video for the main movie, plus hours and hours of bonus footage, for less than the price of the movie's worth of music.
I challenge anyone to come up with a valid reason why audio CDs cost so much more than video DVDs. So either DVDs are horribly underpriced (and I don't see movie studios going out of business right and left here), or CDs are horribly overpriced. The value/price of a CD is miniscule these days - it's amazing the recording industry is doing as well as they are.
I think if Apple were concerned, they would not allow burning to CD.
While the conversion from AAC to CDDA is not lossless*, it's pretty damn close. That allows anyone to make as many copies as they like. But why bother? The whole reason people started ripping and illegally copying CDs in the first place was: 1) CDs are damn inconvenient to play on a computer 2) They cost too much
Apple has solved both these problems. No CD to be inconvenienced by unless you really want one. And they're pretty cheap too. You may have noticed a certain pragmatism seeping into the industry here - Apple sells easily-copied music, because there's little reason to steal it and it costs way more than it's worth to stop the few that bother. Warner bros sells un-encrypted DVDs because there's little incentive to copy those, and it costs way more than it's worth to stop the few that bother.
In both cases, it's probably possible to stop 90% of illegal copying. It's just not economically feasable. Some companies still don't get it and are pursuing that dream (TCPA, WMP DRM, Palladium, etc.), but they're doomed to fail. New formats will *ONLY* be adopted if they offer clear advantages to the consumer. If DRM is tacked onto that as the price of admission, it will be broken. See DVDs as an example. Even licensed DVD player manufacturers are allowing users to slice right through the nastiness included on DVDs. The same will happen with future media formats.
So no, I don't expect you finding out about a way to capture raw AAC files will affect iTMS in any way. Apple knows the risks and has made their decision. Regarding foolish laws, none of this is important in the least. The legal fact is that copyright includes the concept of fair use - new laws should not infringe upon that. And as a practical matter, nobody (not even the RIAA) wants copyright rigorously enforced.
Consider popping a legally-purchased CD into a legally-purchased CD player to listen to some music. Legal, right? Nope. The CD player makes a copy of the music and puts it into a small cache for skip protection. You were not authorized to make that copy. But wait, you say - that's rediculous. You're implicitly allowed to make a copy necessary to listen to the music! Nope. Did you ever wonder why online broadcasters are subject to different fees than radio broadcasters? Because radio broadcasters "don't make a copy" whereas online broadcasting requires a copy, however temporarily, be made on the listener's computer, in order to listen to the music. How is that different from the copy made on a CD player? Both are buffers between source and destination. So, if both are the same circumstances, you should be able to do either none or both, yet that is not so. The RIAA does not want playing CDs to be illegal (obviously), yet they *DO* want to charge enormously more for online music distribution than for radio broadcasting. Just one example of the horrible mess that copyright law has become - not even the owners want their rights enforced.
* I don't actually know this to be true, but it stands to reason. The odds are very slight that AAC decoding produces output quantized precisely the same way CDDA expects it to be.
The announcement is pure marketing, hyping their 64-bit chips.
The reality is that old processors get replaced by new ones, and once high-end chips end up as low-end chips - nobody buys K6s anymore. AMD's just saying that they'll continue phasing out old processors, leaving only 64-bit-capable ones.
AMD's current lineup spans K7-era chips at the low to mid range and K8s at the top. In two years, they'll have K8s at the low to mid range and K9s (or whatever) at the top.
AMD has a competitive 32-bit chip, which will move down the product line just as their previous 32-bit chips have. That it does 64-bit too is an added bonus that will get carried along with it until all of AMD's chips are 64-bit capable. It's not some grand scheme, just the result of how the industry works.
Or would that violate the agreement between Apple (Computer) and Apple (Records)?
Apple (Computer) doesn't seem bothered by that prospect. A little history:
Apple (records) came first. Apple (Computer) tried to register a trademark or some such, and Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) (correctly) said that they're in different businesses, thus no namespace collision, thus no trademark problem. Apple (records) backed down, and said "stay out of our business, and you're in the clear."
Apple (Computer) put speakers in their computers. Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) paid 'em off.
Apple (Computer) made an iPod. Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) paid 'em off.
Apple (Computer) is now distributing music. Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) will no doubt send another few million their way.
Clearly Apple (Computer) has no problem periodically dishing out a little cash to grease the palms of commerce. Which isn't surprising - Steve's hardly the kind of guy to back down just because technically he isn't supposed to do it...
From the article: "He said the company was also exploring a civil suit based on damage to the company's reputation, since Halderman concluded that the technology was ineffective without knowing about future enhancements."
So 'future enhancements' make current technology effective? What kind of bullshit is that? That's like saying Windows is secure because it'll eventually be fixed, and there are millions of people whose computers got hit recently who know that's about as effective a security measure as the rhythm method.
> They're actually not being vicious bastards in this one...
Microsoft are *always* being vicious bastards. Here, they'll do the same thing they did with Java. They'll make changes to the browser to comply with the legal findings in such a way that the user is conspicuously shafted in terms of usability. Then, they'll argue that they shouldn't have to make such rediculous changes to their software and try to get the whole thing overturned. Because clearly, if the alternative to 'the way we were doing things' is this god-awful mess of confirmation windows, then their solution becomes the obvious one, and thus not suitable for patent.
> design a standard such that daemons can be stop/started/restarted with a standardized set of command line options.
You mean, like
/etc/rc.d/init.d/netatalk restart?
How much slower do you really think it is to run everything through bash or tcsh or whatever? A second or so extra, including the time to launch the shell in the first place?
Yeah, maybe on a 286 bash is a hog, but on any reasonably modern system it's negligable overhead.
The iPod is small enough (or thereabouts), lasts long enough (I'd imagine), has enough features, (though vorbis audio support would rock), and enough space (there abouts). What it doesn't have is enough convenience.
When introduced, ipod + itunes were dramatically more convenient than their brethren, and rightfully won in the marketplace. Now, they need to continue to evolve to maintain that lead.
Consider: palm pilots need to be charged / sync'd. Cellphones need to be charged and sometimes sync'd. Digital audio players need to be charged / sync'd. All of this introduces clutter and inconvenience; it's time to move forward. The ritual of coming home, plugging in all your gear, running some software, and then getting on with your evening has become familiar to many of us, but is no more reasonable a way to conduct business than using Office out of habit.
While the ipod has come a long way, it has a long way to go in terms of convenience. Bluetooth networking, in combination with magnetic induction chargers provides the technical foundation for another leap ahead in usability. Nobody will begrudge a company a bit of one-time-setup hassle such as plugging in an ipod to grab a few dozen gig of music. But consider the long-term convenience of having a device that you can toss in a corner and expect it to just do the right thing. Personal electronics should enhance and adapt to my lifestyle, not require me to adapt my lifestyle to my gadgets. Having to periodically be within a few feet of a power outlet and a firewire or USB jack is not the right way to interact with one's gear.
A PDA or cellphone or music player or whatever else comes along should be more aware of its surroundings. It should notice when it is in range of its home network and should download new music, new contacts, new appointments or avantgo info, whatever it needs. When it finds itself on a little charging mat, it should charge. When I pick it up in the middle of a transfer and walk away, it should deal with it seamlessly, without complaint or error.
Apple made the first leap; others have followed. It's time for them to move again.
> MP3 is freely available and is the defacto standard.
And sucks. It is a well-known and indisputable fact that mp3 is showing its age. Numerous codecs (vorbis, mp3 pro, wma, aac, realaudio, etc.) give better quality at the same bitrate and offer more features. For technical as well as psychoacoustic reasons, the ogg framework and the vorbis codec are far superior to mp3.
From a practical standpoint, mp3 no longer refers to mpeg2 audio layer 3-encoded media. In the popular consciousness it means "digital audio" and whether the "mp3" is really an mp3 or an aac or a vorbis file is immaterial, as long as it works. While the format is poorly represented in stand-alone media players, it is well supported by software players (at least under windows and linux - I don't know about the various macOS apps), and that support will trickle down to stand-alones, particularly in light of the recently-introduced fixed-point decoder.
Can someone explain to me why different compiler versions is a problem?
I assumed (perhaps naively) that the plugin architecture was something along the lines of Moz forwarding a chunk of data (a Shockwave file, Realaudio, whatever) to a plugin, and taking the output and putting it somewhere appropriate (screen,/dev/dsp, whatever).
So, can someone with more programming experience than I explain this to me?
Slashdot Mirror
:) It's not.
You can buy dramatically faster chips than that for $50.
That hardly seems to be the case though, does it?
h tml ) where she very eloquently tells 'em to go shove it.
Janis Ian's got a nice article posted here ( http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.
In particular, she points to the one clear experiment being conducted in this area: the Baen Free Library. If increased availability of illegal and free entertainment guts the industry, then surely increased availability of LEGAL, FREE, and PRODUCER-SANCTIONED entertainment would be its death-knell, no? Yet what happens every single time an author puts their work up on the Library? Sales jump.
So go to the Library ( http://www.baen.com/library/ ), find a good author, and buy a book. Support an author today.
Get a copy of BNL's Everything to Everyone, and go to a concert. Support a band today.
And please stop forcing me to compare the music industry to the printing industry. It's really not a good analogy.
True, but irrelevant. Consider:
If the availability of free music causes people to buy music, the studios shouldn't try to stop it because it's helping them.
If buying lots of music causes downloading lots of music, the studios shouldn't try to stop it because they'd be attacking their best customers.
If there's no causation either way, then the studios are wasting money trying to stop it since it has no bearing on their bottom line.
Any way you slice it, this suing of children and grandmothers is pointless, a PR disaster, and ultimately suicidal. Whether the campaign works, fails, or has no effect, the studios LOSE.
To notice what? That someone who happened to work for SCO released code into Linux completely separately from his work at SCO, and even went to the trouble of asking the SCO folk about it beforehand as a courtesy?
Nothing to see here folks, move on. This case will wend its way to court, IBM's crack lawyers will annihilate SCO's crack-smoking lawyers (many thanks to whoever it was who came up with that!), and then it will be over. This happens every day.
The cameras aren't the important part of the system. That's just what they're telling you. In fact, the cameras are really just empty camera housings like they have on buses and such.
The important part is the office secretary who's paid to notice people who squinch up their face to fool the cameras.
Probably. However, for a probe that large, it was really a necessity.
The reactor will be providing 10+ times as much power as a battery-operated probe. This means more power to instrumentation, allowing for active devices like laser rangers, radars, and the like. It also means more power for propulsion (I didn't notice any mention of propulsion in the article, but flying about in Jupiter's strong magnetosphere probably means a lot of fine tuning can be done magnetically). And perhaps most importantly it means more power to send homeward, ferrying those oh-so-important bits. All these sensors are going to generate a lot of data, and the probe needs to be able to send it back at the rate it is generated.
That's assuming a random password which is an indefensible assumption. I have one or two computer-generated random passwords that I've memorized, but the majority of my passwords are pseudorandom at best. Most people don't use long passwords, and in any event their information content is rather less than 6 bits per character.
I think 8 charaters long, at closer to 4 bits per character is a more reasonable assumption. Sure, it won't get *all* passwords, but it will get the vast majority.
I don't know why people are so pissed off about ATM fees. What, do you think the ATM fairy just drops them off all over the place for free?
No, I think the HR fairy drops them off all over the place. She says "Here you go! Tons cheaper than a real person. Enjoy!" and wanders off to do another good deed.
The effort is aimed mainly at camcorders, which account for 92 percent of all illegal copies of films that appear for sale over the Internet and are sold on street corners, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
Who do they think they're kidding? The professional duplicators work from the highest-quality originals they can get (be they original movie reels, DVDs, whatever). The amateurs might be sneaking a camcorder into a theater, but given how easy it is to get a good copy online, there's little point.
In short, I call shennanigans on this theory that there's an army of pirates armed not with swords but minicams, poised to destroy the industry.
Besides, copyright infringement is already illegal (that's the 'infringement' part). So what's the point of passing this new law? To produce the illusion of doing something, at the expense of everyone involved, as far as anyone can tell.
I couldn't find much about the network connection in the manuals on the Rio site.
How do you transfer files to the device over cat5? Does the Karma show up as an SMB share or something? Or is it necessary to use the java app? How fast is it? How's the interface?
Does it properly support ogg metadata?
Does it save your place in a playlist or directory while shut off (so I can listen to audiobooks on my commute)?
Anything else I'm forgetting to ask?
The problem is not the paucity of outlets, per se. The problem is the need for a lot of power in one place.
Along three linear feet of wall, I have plugged in:
4 computers, 1 monitor, one switch, one wireless access point, one battery backup (requires a 20A socket - adapted to use 2 15A sockets, which is OK since it's a 20A circuit behind them), one laser printer, and one lamp. That represents just under half the electrical devices in my room which need plugging in, and probably about 80% of the total power requirements.
This is the sort of problem that leads students to plug one power strip into another one (that, and their penchant for buying cheap extension cords), and overload circuits. Having four times as many outlets in the room would only help if there were more outlets within a few feet of what needs to be plugged in.
> Maybe if the music industry had a product worth paying for, people would buy it.
Well, they do have a product worth paying for. Just not worth paying what they want to charge.
Even at used-CD prices ($10/CD), music is way more expensive than video.
I just bought a season of babylon 5 (brand new, shipped, from Amazon) for $55. That's over 15 hours of video, on a half-dozen DVDs. I couldn't get that much music for that price. I couldn't even get that many CDs for that price.
The extended edition LotR:TTT is about $30 shipped or local. That's almost 4 hours of video for the main movie, plus hours and hours of bonus footage, for less than the price of the movie's worth of music.
I challenge anyone to come up with a valid reason why audio CDs cost so much more than video DVDs. So either DVDs are horribly underpriced (and I don't see movie studios going out of business right and left here), or CDs are horribly overpriced. The value/price of a CD is miniscule these days - it's amazing the recording industry is doing as well as they are.
Infrequently-used stuff naturally percolates to the bottom of any well-mannered pile.
> What does everyone else think?
I think if Apple were concerned, they would not allow burning to CD.
While the conversion from AAC to CDDA is not lossless*, it's pretty damn close. That allows anyone to make as many copies as they like. But why bother? The whole reason people started ripping and illegally copying CDs in the first place was:
1) CDs are damn inconvenient to play on a computer
2) They cost too much
Apple has solved both these problems. No CD to be inconvenienced by unless you really want one. And they're pretty cheap too. You may have noticed a certain pragmatism seeping into the industry here - Apple sells easily-copied music, because there's little reason to steal it and it costs way more than it's worth to stop the few that bother. Warner bros sells un-encrypted DVDs because there's little incentive to copy those, and it costs way more than it's worth to stop the few that bother.
In both cases, it's probably possible to stop 90% of illegal copying. It's just not economically feasable. Some companies still don't get it and are pursuing that dream (TCPA, WMP DRM, Palladium, etc.), but they're doomed to fail. New formats will *ONLY* be adopted if they offer clear advantages to the consumer. If DRM is tacked onto that as the price of admission, it will be broken. See DVDs as an example. Even licensed DVD player manufacturers are allowing users to slice right through the nastiness included on DVDs. The same will happen with future media formats.
So no, I don't expect you finding out about a way to capture raw AAC files will affect iTMS in any way. Apple knows the risks and has made their decision. Regarding foolish laws, none of this is important in the least. The legal fact is that copyright includes the concept of fair use - new laws should not infringe upon that. And as a practical matter, nobody (not even the RIAA) wants copyright rigorously enforced.
Consider popping a legally-purchased CD into a legally-purchased CD player to listen to some music. Legal, right? Nope. The CD player makes a copy of the music and puts it into a small cache for skip protection. You were not authorized to make that copy. But wait, you say - that's rediculous. You're implicitly allowed to make a copy necessary to listen to the music! Nope. Did you ever wonder why online broadcasters are subject to different fees than radio broadcasters? Because radio broadcasters "don't make a copy" whereas online broadcasting requires a copy, however temporarily, be made on the listener's computer, in order to listen to the music. How is that different from the copy made on a CD player? Both are buffers between source and destination. So, if both are the same circumstances, you should be able to do either none or both, yet that is not so. The RIAA does not want playing CDs to be illegal (obviously), yet they *DO* want to charge enormously more for online music distribution than for radio broadcasting. Just one example of the horrible mess that copyright law has become - not even the owners want their rights enforced.
* I don't actually know this to be true, but it stands to reason. The odds are very slight that AAC decoding produces output quantized precisely the same way CDDA expects it to be.
The announcement is pure marketing, hyping their 64-bit chips.
The reality is that old processors get replaced by new ones, and once high-end chips end up as low-end chips - nobody buys K6s anymore. AMD's just saying that they'll continue phasing out old processors, leaving only 64-bit-capable ones.
AMD's current lineup spans K7-era chips at the low to mid range and K8s at the top. In two years, they'll have K8s at the low to mid range and K9s (or whatever) at the top.
AMD has a competitive 32-bit chip, which will move down the product line just as their previous 32-bit chips have. That it does 64-bit too is an added bonus that will get carried along with it until all of AMD's chips are 64-bit capable. It's not some grand scheme, just the result of how the industry works.
Why does it make more sense to take readily-accessible data and spend hours and hours slicing it up into hard-to-manage chunks?
60CDs are:
1) more expensive
2) larger
3) slower
4) harder to use
than a 40G disk.
So what's the attraction again?
How many Libraries of Congress away is that?
Or would that violate the agreement between Apple (Computer) and Apple (Records)?
Apple (Computer) doesn't seem bothered by that prospect. A little history:
Apple (records) came first. Apple (Computer) tried to register a trademark or some such, and Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) (correctly) said that they're in different businesses, thus no namespace collision, thus no trademark problem. Apple (records) backed down, and said "stay out of our business, and you're in the clear."
Apple (Computer) put speakers in their computers. Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) paid 'em off.
Apple (Computer) made an iPod. Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) paid 'em off.
Apple (Computer) is now distributing music. Apple (records) sued. Apple (Computer) will no doubt send another few million their way.
Clearly Apple (Computer) has no problem periodically dishing out a little cash to grease the palms of commerce. Which isn't surprising - Steve's hardly the kind of guy to back down just because technically he isn't supposed to do it...
From the article:
"He said the company was also exploring a civil suit based on damage to the company's reputation, since Halderman concluded that the technology was ineffective without knowing about future enhancements."
So 'future enhancements' make current technology effective? What kind of bullshit is that? That's like saying Windows is secure because it'll eventually be fixed, and there are millions of people whose computers got hit recently who know that's about as effective a security measure as the rhythm method.
> They're actually not being vicious bastards in this one...
Microsoft are *always* being vicious bastards. Here, they'll do the same thing they did with Java. They'll make changes to the browser to comply with the legal findings in such a way that the user is conspicuously shafted in terms of usability. Then, they'll argue that they shouldn't have to make such rediculous changes to their software and try to get the whole thing overturned. Because clearly, if the alternative to 'the way we were doing things' is this god-awful mess of confirmation windows, then their solution becomes the obvious one, and thus not suitable for patent.
Step 1: At the end of every month, all above-average bandwidth users get capped to that month's average bandwidth.
Step 2: Repeat every month, and pretty soon nobody gets *any* bandwidth!
Step 3: Profit!!
*sigh*
You mean, like How much slower do you really think it is to run everything through bash or tcsh or whatever? A second or so extra, including the time to launch the shell in the first place?
Yeah, maybe on a 286 bash is a hog, but on any reasonably modern system it's negligable overhead.
No, no, no. Not for bulk copies. For updates.
The iPod is small enough (or thereabouts), lasts long enough (I'd imagine), has enough features, (though vorbis audio support would rock), and enough space (there abouts). What it doesn't have is enough convenience.
When introduced, ipod + itunes were dramatically more convenient than their brethren, and rightfully won in the marketplace. Now, they need to continue to evolve to maintain that lead.
Consider: palm pilots need to be charged / sync'd. Cellphones need to be charged and sometimes sync'd. Digital audio players need to be charged / sync'd. All of this introduces clutter and inconvenience; it's time to move forward. The ritual of coming home, plugging in all your gear, running some software, and then getting on with your evening has become familiar to many of us, but is no more reasonable a way to conduct business than using Office out of habit.
While the ipod has come a long way, it has a long way to go in terms of convenience. Bluetooth networking, in combination with magnetic induction chargers provides the technical foundation for another leap ahead in usability. Nobody will begrudge a company a bit of one-time-setup hassle such as plugging in an ipod to grab a few dozen gig of music. But consider the long-term convenience of having a device that you can toss in a corner and expect it to just do the right thing. Personal electronics should enhance and adapt to my lifestyle, not require me to adapt my lifestyle to my gadgets. Having to periodically be within a few feet of a power outlet and a firewire or USB jack is not the right way to interact with one's gear.
A PDA or cellphone or music player or whatever else comes along should be more aware of its surroundings. It should notice when it is in range of its home network and should download new music, new contacts, new appointments or avantgo info, whatever it needs. When it finds itself on a little charging mat, it should charge. When I pick it up in the middle of a transfer and walk away, it should deal with it seamlessly, without complaint or error.
Apple made the first leap; others have followed. It's time for them to move again.
> MP3 is freely available and is the defacto standard.
And sucks. It is a well-known and indisputable fact that mp3 is showing its age. Numerous codecs (vorbis, mp3 pro, wma, aac, realaudio, etc.) give better quality at the same bitrate and offer more features. For technical as well as psychoacoustic reasons, the ogg framework and the vorbis codec are far superior to mp3.
From a practical standpoint, mp3 no longer refers to mpeg2 audio layer 3-encoded media. In the popular consciousness it means "digital audio" and whether the "mp3" is really an mp3 or an aac or a vorbis file is immaterial, as long as it works. While the format is poorly represented in stand-alone media players, it is well supported by software players (at least under windows and linux - I don't know about the various macOS apps), and that support will trickle down to stand-alones, particularly in light of the recently-introduced fixed-point decoder.
Can someone explain to me why different compiler versions is a problem?
/dev/dsp, whatever).
I assumed (perhaps naively) that the plugin architecture was something along the lines of Moz forwarding a chunk of data (a Shockwave file, Realaudio, whatever) to a plugin, and taking the output and putting it somewhere appropriate (screen,
So, can someone with more programming experience than I explain this to me?