ahhh....the centris 660av. shortest life-span of any apple, only on the market for 61 days before being bumped to 33mhz and renamed the quadra 660av.
code name cyclone, i believe. the 840av (fastest 680x0 mac ever with a 40mhz 68040 and an at&t dsp chip for a/v and telephony) was codenamed tempest. or the other way around. i don't remember exactly.
i still have my 660av. useful for basic audio work--the dsp allows it to do fairly sophisticated stuff with older, dsp-enhanced software.
overall, these machines are a relic of the old, "bad" apple: released with a flashy new feature (the dsp), promoted to developers, and then tossed out, forgotten forever, as soon as the ppc machines showed up to the party.
anyway, the point is, don't look for any *nix distro to understand the dsp, or work well with it. apple's own os barely got the thing integrated (the geoport telecom adapter? yeah, right. never connected above 1200. ever.) keep the thing as a relic and look for a more standard dinosaur to do the grunt work.
the same thing is happening to minidisc, albeit a little bit slower. minidisc would be the killer app of mp3, but since sony controls it, it flounders in relative obscurity, while almost-but-not-quite players like the rio prosper. if there was a way to sock an MD in a drive and put mp3s on it faster than realtime, sony and the rest of the md manufacturers would make a killing in both md-data drives and portable players. even if you had to convert from mp3 to atrac3 (the MD native audio format), the added step would not be enough to deter most consumers (witness the memory stick walkman, which requires a conversion to atrac, and thus sdmi-compliance).
but a long time ago, sony agreed to the rest of the industry that it would keep the md-data and the md-audio specs from ever getting in bed with one another, and that sealed the deal right then and there. we could've been all been playing atrac files off MD drives in 1996, in full compliance with SDMI, but the industry stifled this step forward until it virtually killed the format.
this time around, the major mp3 players, except for aol-nullsoft, are not in the riaa--creative, samsung, diamond, napster. it's not when the riaa said to sony, "this is what we're doing, hold to policy." the riaa has to go through the courts first to deal with these "renegade" companies, and i think the courts will decide that the only thing the riaa is responsible for is the content, not the media.
recording industry association of america. they make recordings. why does the format matter? worry about making more recordings.
but if i had an "mpaa-legal" option to choose from every time out, be it when i was dl'ing a movie or buying a player, i would take that option, not only to avoid trouble, but because i know that the "official" version of most things probably is of better quality than some random bootleg.
now if the mpaa and the manufacturers concentrate on putting dvd everywhere, then all of sudden you've got a situation where not only is something like deCSS not an issue, but the mpaa is actively promoting efforts like it--why should they spend the money and time on porting the ~500 lines of code it takes to watch a dvd when they should be rightfully be using those resources to release their back catalogs in dvd form?
most people, and maybe not the slashdot folk, or your average college student, but most people like to stay on the right side of paying for media--witness the price-gouging that takes place at nearly every movie theater, or the fact that $17.99 cd's still fly off shelves. if the mpaa were to allow a format that admittedly is as powerful as dvd to really establish itself, it would make a lot more profit, and still control things like release dates, and market placement--just not where i watch the thing: be it pc, 61" projetion tv, or my dreamcast plugged into a watchman.
i just don't understand why this industry is so blind to the enormous profits it stands to make, when they're usually so in tune with the flow of money.
what the movie companies are totally failing to realize is that most people aren't going to start watching movies on ther pc's. most people want to kick back on their overstuffed couch, put their feet up, pop a can o' miller and watch a flick on the >19" boob tube, not sit in an office chair and watch a so-crystal-clear-it's sterile movie on their 17' monitor. there's something to be said for the fuzzy overwarm color tones of a good vcr/dvd console player plugged into a regular tv, and i don't think the average consumer has enough time, energy, or patience to rig up a scan converter or start burning VCD's of pirated movies, no matter how much bandwidth they have (where greater bandwidth= more rampant piracy). besides, last i checked, a program like astarte's m,pack for turning mpegs into burnable vcd streams cost $695. the people who pay $695 so they can watch a crappy handycam rendition of the matrix at vcd quality--the mpaa isn't going to ever stop them.
what the mpaa needs to focus on is having dvd permeate the media universe: removal of region codes so that consumers can purchase and playback dvd's anywhere, sanctioned playback software for every platform, dvd-roms that serves a purpose other than slick self-promotion, etc, etc. allowing dvd to be more widespread will make it the consumer's first choice in media, sidestepping piracy concerns. after all, it's going to be a while before the price of burning a dvd comes down to casual pricay levels, a la cd-r.
i don't think a pay-per-song distribution model would ever fly, much like pay-per-view tv is kind of a niche market--it's there, it's marketed, but no one really uses it as much as blockbuster.
a much better model, IMHO, would be for the riaa to buy napster, purge the usernames, and re-open it as a monthly subscription service--$20/mo for, oh, say, 200MB of mp3's a month, with a 50c surcharge for every MB over that limit. i would buy into this scheme, i know plenty of others who would as well, and everybody gets paid. new artists using napster to release music would likely benefit, as the napster mk2 audience is far more hard-core about music--enough so to pay a monthly fee for access to it. additionally, if you were smart and more sonically tolerant, you could stretch that 200MB by choosing lower bitrate mp3's.
on a side note, i think the napster case will mark a watershed moment in tech history--when internet politics become important. everybody i know, from my cheerleader friends who still don't know what i mean when i say "minimize that window" to my CS prof, is interested in napster. they use it--what's more, they'll pay to use it. hell, i have friends at school who bought computers to use napster. the riaa is blowing this opportunity and creating nothing but bad pr.
what about the nearly 100% of people who buy guns to shoot other things, including people? that hasn't really dented the gun market, has it?
seriously, i don't understand how we can constitionally protect the rights of a person to possess something that can do _nothing_ but damage, but at the same time discourage the sharing of creative media. even britney makes ya bop, lowest common denominator be damned, and allowing people to share that feeling--and chat about in realtime from across the country--is not a bad thing.
i wonder if marilyn hall patel would issue an injunction against smith & wesson if some widow was suing the them for making handguns.
actually, the first iteration of the "armani" g3's, the wallstreet/mainstreet models, got _very_ hot on the bottom--enough so that several companies marketed lap desks specifically to dissipate the heat build-up. the later models--both of which share the revised thinner case design--had the cooling systems redesigned and no longer suffer from the hot-bottom problem.
by the way, all powerbooks since the 3400 (with the exception of the 2400 and 1400) contain cooling fans. they're keyed to a certain temperature--you can hear them come on if you use a g3 for a while in a quiet area. so fanless heat dissipation worries about a g4 powerbook are probably a non-issue. the cooling method currently in place is effective and unobtrusive, which is all that matters to stevie.
i think a fundamental point here is that aol markets itself like a little club for 8-year old boys--you're only allowed in the treehouse if you pay the tax. the more recent tv spots, for example, all feature a variety of "everyday americans" who all say things like "all my friends use aol--it's like we're all there together."
so it's fine and dandy if imunified wants to create a large competing body, but asking AOL to join is asking them to give up their primary product--access to the aol network. if you can download yahoo messenger and talk to aim folk for free, what's making you go to the aol website and looking at all the banners and 50 free hours! pop-ups? if you breathe wrong on aim, you get sent to an aol sign-up page.
having a large subscriber base is not monopolistic. this seems a little like us news & world report and time demanding access to newsweek's mailing lists so they can offer "a wider range of services."
"This thing looks really slick, emulating the Windows CE user interface quite closely." wait a minute.....two months ago, pocket pc comes out, and/. is up in arms about the overwrought interface, and how a pda doesn't need all the features of a desktop and when os X comes out, the mac will ROOL 4EVER!
oh wait. wrong topic.
anyway, so how come when samsung finally shows off the YOPY, its fundamental winCE-ness is regarded as slick? i mean, how many of us would call KDE 2.0 or whatever slick if it "closely emulated" win2K? here's hoping samsung doesn't encounter a backlash of people not understanding that the YOPY is not a CE device, and deriding it as a poor imitation. kinda like CE and windows itself, when you think about it.
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ahhh....the centris 660av. shortest life-span of any apple, only on the market for 61 days before being bumped to 33mhz and renamed the quadra 660av.
code name cyclone, i believe. the 840av (fastest 680x0 mac ever with a 40mhz 68040 and an at&t dsp chip for a/v and telephony) was codenamed tempest. or the other way around. i don't remember exactly.
i still have my 660av. useful for basic audio work--the dsp allows it to do fairly sophisticated stuff with older, dsp-enhanced software.
overall, these machines are a relic of the old, "bad" apple: released with a flashy new feature (the dsp), promoted to developers, and then tossed out, forgotten forever, as soon as the ppc machines showed up to the party.
anyway, the point is, don't look for any *nix distro to understand the dsp, or work well with it. apple's own os barely got the thing integrated (the geoport telecom adapter? yeah, right. never connected above 1200. ever.) keep the thing as a relic and look for a more standard dinosaur to do the grunt work.
the same thing is happening to minidisc, albeit a little bit slower. minidisc would be the killer app of mp3, but since sony controls it, it flounders in relative obscurity, while almost-but-not-quite players like the rio prosper. if there was a way to sock an MD in a drive and put mp3s on it faster than realtime, sony and the rest of the md manufacturers would make a killing in both md-data drives and portable players. even if you had to convert from mp3 to atrac3 (the MD native audio format), the added step would not be enough to deter most consumers (witness the memory stick walkman, which requires a conversion to atrac, and thus sdmi-compliance).
but a long time ago, sony agreed to the rest of the industry that it would keep the md-data and the md-audio specs from ever getting in bed with one another, and that sealed the deal right then and there. we could've been all been playing atrac files off MD drives in 1996, in full compliance with SDMI, but the industry stifled this step forward until it virtually killed the format.
this time around, the major mp3 players, except for aol-nullsoft, are not in the riaa--creative, samsung, diamond, napster. it's not when the riaa said to sony, "this is what we're doing, hold to policy." the riaa has to go through the courts first to deal with these "renegade" companies, and i think the courts will decide that the only thing the riaa is responsible for is the content, not the media.
recording industry association of america. they make recordings. why does the format matter? worry about making more recordings.
but if i had an "mpaa-legal" option to choose from every time out, be it when i was dl'ing a movie or buying a player, i would take that option, not only to avoid trouble, but because i know that the "official" version of most things probably is of better quality than some random bootleg.
now if the mpaa and the manufacturers concentrate on putting dvd everywhere, then all of sudden you've got a situation where not only is something like deCSS not an issue, but the mpaa is actively promoting efforts like it--why should they spend the money and time on porting the ~500 lines of code it takes to watch a dvd when they should be rightfully be using those resources to release their back catalogs in dvd form?
most people, and maybe not the slashdot folk, or your average college student, but most people like to stay on the right side of paying for media--witness the price-gouging that takes place at nearly every movie theater, or the fact that $17.99 cd's still fly off shelves. if the mpaa were to allow a format that admittedly is as powerful as dvd to really establish itself, it would make a lot more profit, and still control things like release dates, and market placement--just not where i watch the thing: be it pc, 61" projetion tv, or my dreamcast plugged into a watchman.
i just don't understand why this industry is so blind to the enormous profits it stands to make, when they're usually so in tune with the flow of money.
what the movie companies are totally failing to realize is that most people aren't going to start watching movies on ther pc's. most people want to kick back on their overstuffed couch, put their feet up, pop a can o' miller and watch a flick on the >19" boob tube, not sit in an office chair and watch a so-crystal-clear-it's sterile movie on their 17' monitor. there's something to be said for the fuzzy overwarm color tones of a good vcr/dvd console player plugged into a regular tv, and i don't think the average consumer has enough time, energy, or patience to rig up a scan converter or start burning VCD's of pirated movies, no matter how much bandwidth they have (where greater bandwidth= more rampant piracy). besides, last i checked, a program like astarte's m,pack for turning mpegs into burnable vcd streams cost $695. the people who pay $695 so they can watch a crappy handycam rendition of the matrix at vcd quality--the mpaa isn't going to ever stop them.
what the mpaa needs to focus on is having dvd permeate the media universe: removal of region codes so that consumers can purchase and playback dvd's anywhere, sanctioned playback software for every platform, dvd-roms that serves a purpose other than slick self-promotion, etc, etc. allowing dvd to be more widespread will make it the consumer's first choice in media, sidestepping piracy concerns. after all, it's going to be a while before the price of burning a dvd comes down to casual pricay levels, a la cd-r.
i don't think a pay-per-song distribution model would ever fly, much like pay-per-view tv is kind of a niche market--it's there, it's marketed, but no one really uses it as much as blockbuster.
a much better model, IMHO, would be for the riaa to buy napster, purge the usernames, and re-open it as a monthly subscription service--$20/mo for, oh, say, 200MB of mp3's a month, with a 50c surcharge for every MB over that limit. i would buy into this scheme, i know plenty of others who would as well, and everybody gets paid. new artists using napster to release music would likely benefit, as the napster mk2 audience is far more hard-core about music--enough so to pay a monthly fee for access to it. additionally, if you were smart and more sonically tolerant, you could stretch that 200MB by choosing lower bitrate mp3's.
on a side note, i think the napster case will mark a watershed moment in tech history--when internet politics become important. everybody i know, from my cheerleader friends who still don't know what i mean when i say "minimize that window" to my CS prof, is interested in napster. they use it--what's more, they'll pay to use it. hell, i have friends at school who bought computers to use napster. the riaa is blowing this opportunity and creating nothing but bad pr.
and i thought they knew how to work the media.
what about the nearly 100% of people who buy guns to shoot other things, including people? that hasn't really dented the gun market, has it?
seriously, i don't understand how we can constitionally protect the rights of a person to possess something that can do _nothing_ but damage, but at the same time discourage the sharing of creative media. even britney makes ya bop, lowest common denominator be damned, and allowing people to share that feeling--and chat about in realtime from across the country--is not a bad thing.
i wonder if marilyn hall patel would issue an injunction against smith & wesson if some widow was suing the them for making handguns.
actually, the first iteration of the "armani" g3's, the wallstreet/mainstreet models, got _very_ hot on the bottom--enough so that several companies marketed lap desks specifically to dissipate the heat build-up. the later models--both of which share the revised thinner case design--had the cooling systems redesigned and no longer suffer from the hot-bottom problem.
by the way, all powerbooks since the 3400 (with the exception of the 2400 and 1400) contain cooling fans. they're keyed to a certain temperature--you can hear them come on if you use a g3 for a while in a quiet area. so fanless heat dissipation worries about a g4 powerbook are probably a non-issue. the cooling method currently in place is effective and unobtrusive, which is all that matters to stevie.
i think a fundamental point here is that aol markets itself like a little club for 8-year old boys--you're only allowed in the treehouse if you pay the tax. the more recent tv spots, for example, all feature a variety of "everyday americans" who all say things like "all my friends use aol--it's like we're all there together."
so it's fine and dandy if imunified wants to create a large competing body, but asking AOL to join is asking them to give up their primary product--access to the aol network. if you can download yahoo messenger and talk to aim folk for free, what's making you go to the aol website and looking at all the banners and 50 free hours! pop-ups? if you breathe wrong on aim, you get sent to an aol sign-up page.
having a large subscriber base is not monopolistic. this seems a little like us news & world report and time demanding access to newsweek's mailing lists so they can offer "a wider range of services."
"This thing looks really slick, emulating the Windows CE user interface quite closely." wait a minute.....two months ago, pocket pc comes out, and /. is up in arms about the overwrought interface, and how a pda doesn't need all the features of a desktop and when os X comes out, the mac will ROOL 4EVER!
oh wait. wrong topic.
anyway, so how come when samsung finally shows off the YOPY, its fundamental winCE-ness is regarded as slick? i mean, how many of us would call KDE 2.0 or whatever slick if it "closely emulated" win2K?
here's hoping samsung doesn't encounter a backlash of people not understanding that the YOPY is not a CE device, and deriding it as a poor imitation. kinda like CE and windows itself, when you think about it.