> Apple does want to position QT in the PC market.
That's probably true. They need to update it a bit though... Did you know it can't open files with names longer than ~60 chars (I think that's 64 - ".mov") Kinda puts a cramp in naming your files with anything approaching an intelligent naming scheme.
Now we can finally start another Jakarta templating project that does almost exactly the same thing, but not quite, but our description of the project will claim our version is superior, with a name that has nothing to do with what the project does. How about "Project Platypus" ?
Project Platypus Overview: "Similar to Velocity, but with some important differences: Mainly, we've added several reptilian characteristics which include using the same opening for reproduction and eliminating waste products, the ability to lay eggs, cervical ribs, and local ascorbic acid synthesis in the kidney. Also, Project Platypus can swim."
Does anyone use 64 bit processors for embedded applications? My iToaster does, but it mainly uses it as a heating element. This thing is approximately twice as good as my old-fashioned 32-bit toaster, except it uses twice as much toast as before.
"As a result, the focus on digital licensing has switched to scattered music publishers and songwriters, which typically receive between 7 and 8 cents for each physical copy of a song sold."
~12 songs per CD, means around $1/cd. Which is the actual royalty rate per CD, btw.
My personal 'hacking' story was a typing class back in junior high. We had PS/2's booting from floppy, 'networked' through a ABCD printer switch (read: no network).
I remember modifying the autoexec so it changed the DOS prompt> to "Virus>". At the end of the class, the floppies all went back to a central box, so the floppy went to a different student's machine the next day.
Well, needless to say, all hell broke loose the next day. The student asked "What's this virus prompt?" and then the poor teacher freaked out. He started ripping plugs from the wall, disconnecting the printer switches (just in case it could spread over the parallel port), ejecting floppies... It's was pandemonium. Poor guy.
Looking back, I can see the situation from his point of view, and I feel a bit bad. These days, I probably would have gotten suspended just like this poor kid, and with a bit more reason, I pretty much pulled the DOS equivilent of yelling fire in a theatre.
But it seems a suspension is way over the top. Every kid goes through their "Hey look what I can do" phase of learning, and I'm glad I had the chance to act out a little without dire consequences. I used all the resources I had available to me [I have other stories;-) ], and probably got a better education than most... I certainly had a better time learning than most.
Apparently, the poster didn't actually read the article... It doesn't mention the Diebold memos about how easy it is to modify results. The article gives the reader the idea that those opposed to electronic voting machine are all technophobes that don't 'get' how great these new machines are.
In my opinion, this article does nothing to help. Not that it matters. My state managed to count its votes correctly back in 2000, and they agreed with the majority of the nation. Touchscreens aren't what Florida needs. They need better-trained officials, and apparently a better graphic designers... And better voters, judging by their electoral votes back in 2000... Just kidding.
Man, I love computers. But they sure are a pain in the butt.
> OK, this Linksys has only been out for like a few > weeks or something, and they've got a linux distro > for it... Yet my Toastmaster 5000xdr Quad-port > (with FG-200R bagel attachment) STILL isn't > supported!
OK, to reply to those that say I should roll my own distro for my Toastmaster, I have been working on a little something. Currently, there is no support for the bagel attachment, and it has some trouble with the more exotic breads (ie, non-white bread). And it occasionally pops them out at dangerous velocities. And you have to first separate the bread and crust using my 'decrust.sh' script, and reassemble them after toasting using 'recrust.sh'.
But otherwise, it's coming along nicely. I did have ONE little bug where instead of ordering more bread, it ordered an industrial bread-machine and hired a staff of 12 to run it. They all seemed so disappointed when I told them they were only hired because of a bug. But I'm sure they get that a lot.
So check it out, gnutoast.org... I think it's the future of toasting, possibly even the future of grilling too.
OK, this Linksys has only been out for like a few weeks or something, and they've got a linux distro for it... Yet my Toastmaster 5000xdr Quad-port (with FG-200R bagel attachment) STILL isn't supported!
I mean, the linksys probably works fine out-of-box... But my Toastmaster STILL can't check with my Mr.Refrigeration Model XII to see if I'm out of butter and order more online. Sheesh, technology SUCKS!
I believe what they are referring to is a system that takes a sample of a song (let's say 30 seconds) and generates a 'hash' based on that... The thing about this system is that it is a loose hash, meaning that changing one bit does NOT necessarily change the hash. It is a sonic fingerprint (Not in the digital watermark sense), so that in theory if you had a direct CD-ripped wave, and an analog rip from a cassette as a wave (for instance), you could match the two files, even though they are FAR from bit-for-bit exact.
This is what they mean when they say hash. NOT md5. Obviously MD5 could not track an mp3, since changing even one character in the ID3 tag would change the whole hash.
So they probably have an automated downloader that then generates a fingerprint from the downloaded file and compares it to a db of fingerprints to determine if the song is copyrighted. I'd bet that's all.
The individual sound files for iTunes are encoded by the various record labels, not by Apple, and so could be encoded by any one of the encoders. Apple receives raw.aac files, then puts them into a DRM'ed quicktime wrapper.
In general, I believe most iTunes music is actually NOT encoded directly with the Quicktime encoder, because Quicktime for Windows didn't handle AAC encoding at the time of the launch (Only Mac Quicktime did), and most of the record labels actually use Windows for their conversions.
Of course, for the period of 4/1/2002 to 3/31/2003, Sony shipped 22,520,000 PS2's. That's in addition to the previous year's 18,070,000 units. They've shipped well over 51,000,000 PS2's since launch.
And over that same 4/1/2002 to 3/31/2003 (1 year) timespan, they shipped 7,400,000 PSOne's.
> When did "CD quality" become the standard for excellent sound quality. And why?
If you really want to know, CD quality (44.1KHz, 16bit) is the defacto standard because A) It was the first digital format that consumers adopted, and was clearly superior to analog, and
B) Because 44KHz is the lowest sampling frequency that does not produce audible artifacts from sampling the CD's target 20-20KHz bandwidth (with a 2KHz buffer for noise filter clamping) as the noise introduced by quantization is above the range of (most) human hearing and can be safely filtered.
Now, one can debate bit depths, because it is likely that 16bit vs. 24 bit might be audible to some people, but sampling rate is pretty much a non-starter. You really don't need higher than 44KHz for playback. You won't hear a difference.
During actual (studio) mixing, you want to keep the bitrate and sample rate higher... While I think 'cd quality' is good enough, continuous requantization at the minimum levels CAN produce audible artifacts. So 96KHz/24bit actually has a place at the mixing stage. You don't need it for playback though.
So, CD quality is the standard because anything 'better' requires more storage, with no audible results, and the technology of the CD at the time very handily held 74 minutes of audio at that rate, enough to fit a normal-sized album. There was some science involved with the initial selection of the sampling rate, and the bit depth just came about from the fact that 16 bits is an even byte-depth, and the minimum required so that no one complained about quanitization anomalies.
I think you are exactly right, Microsoft has definate higher aspirations, even with this iteration of the xbox... I know for a fact that Microsoft has been sending free xbox hardware to music publishers, with the hope that deals for content distribution can be formed. How do I know? Because I have a free xbox sitting next to me right now. And I work for a music company.
So it seems pretty clear that Microsoft's "We're focused on gaming" stance is just a front. That's alright, I also know that my company isn't likely to distribute music on the xbox... More likely the PS2. Strange how that works, isn't it?
TiVo provides opt-out on this (ANONYMOUS) data logging... Although I wish the service was opt-in to start.
But again, read ANONYMOUS. And what if it isn't? Well then we'll have a class action lawsuit and we'll all make some money and in the process shut down a company that would buy/sell such data.
I don't think the DMCA actually covers this... These CD's aren't encrypted, which is a prerequisite of the circumvention clause. So it would be completely legal.
I'm not a musician, but currently CD sales pay my salary. I work for a large music company, one with many subsidiary record labels and a huge catalog, and I'm right in the middle of the copy-protection war... But it's going on inside the company.
There are some in my company that would agree with those idiotic quotes, about all people being pirates, MP3's are stealing, etc. But most people understand that the old enforced-scarcity model is no longer sustainable, and that a new model must be sought. While I think the investment in anti-rip CD's is a waste, it is essentially the left hand of the industry... The right hand is doing something completely different, and it's cooking up something good.
For instance, my personal mp3 collection is about 300 albums. Great. But in the very near future, I'll have streaming access to tens of thousands of albums... For a monthly fee. But I think I can deal with that. I pay $9.95 a month for my Tivo, $40 for cable... It's a cost I can bear, especially if I don't need to shell out for physical CD's anymore. I don't really need the CD's, as once they're ripped, they go into storage anyway. (And if it bothers you that you wouldn't have offline access, you'll be able to download files to wherever, and burn CD's)
I'm thinking this post is getting a bit off-topic, so I'll come back. The point I'm trying to make is that these anti-rip CD's are not the direction the labels really want to go. It's admittedly a sidetrack. Better things are coming, and there are people on the inside that have some idea of what the heck fair-use is, and whose checkbook pays their salaries. And we're listening.
Re:Maybe MS will write the software...
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 1
If it's a blue laser, does this mean it'd be a BLOD?
Would the user interface have a twitching nuclear warhead to give you advice?
-Jason
Yeah, so my MSMouse says it requires 40MB to install. So?
My first computer was a Commodore 64. I wrote programs in BASIC. The programs started getting bigger. Harder to manage everything in my head (remember lines like GOSUB 3510?)
So I went to "SuperTurtle BASIC" (From an old Compute! magazine) which gave symbolic jump labels (GOSUB CalcPercent) and some nice graphics commands. But the programs got bigger, harder to manage.
Then I got a PC, and learned C. Now I had functions, scope, types, pointers... These were things that I knew I needed, before I even knew that a language existed that supported them. I'd been approximating them with my previous languages, just to keep myself organized. But then my programs got bigger, and eventually got hard to manage.
And then I learned Java and C++ (yes, just about simultaneously... I'm not sure which was first). OO was something I knew I needed... Again, I'd been approximating OO techniques with C, just to stay organized.
So OO isn't some magic bullet, of course... It helps those that already think in OO write those thoughts down in an efficient manner. Those people already try to write code in a maintainable manner. They already try to document code for themselves and others.
So OO doesn't do anything unless it's in the right hands. And with so many programmers now entering the field with an OO language as their FIRST language, I think there might be a problem... If you've never seen the hell of tracing GOTO statements all over the place on a C64, what makes you think differently? What makes you want to name your variables so you can tell its function and type by its name, if you've never had to find a bug with adding a STRING "0" to an INTEGER 0?
These aren't OO problems, but they're a way of thinking that OO kiddies never had to tackle, and I think it may be the reason OO has gotten this bad rep lately... I've met an awful lot of programmers that can't think OO, even though their only language is Java, for example.
So my suggestion is that with the economy slowing down, go out and pick up a C64 or Apple IIe and start from the beginning... Then when the wireless boom hits, you'll actually understand the technology from a more fundamental level... Plus you'll get to play a lot of Dig Dug in the process!
Slashdot Mirror
It needs a huge wing.
> Apple does want to position QT in the PC market.
That's probably true. They need to update it a bit though... Did you know it can't open files with names longer than ~60 chars (I think that's 64 - ".mov") Kinda puts a cramp in naming your files with anything approaching an intelligent naming scheme.
Just a pet peeve of mine.
When you open a new iPod, it has a sticker that says "Don't Steal Music."
Now we can finally start another Jakarta templating project that does almost exactly the same thing, but not quite, but our description of the project will claim our version is superior, with a name that has nothing to do with what the project does. How about "Project Platypus" ?
Project Platypus Overview:
"Similar to Velocity, but with some important differences: Mainly, we've added several reptilian characteristics which include using the same opening for reproduction and eliminating waste products, the ability to lay eggs, cervical ribs, and local ascorbic acid synthesis in the kidney. Also, Project Platypus can swim."
Does anyone use 64 bit processors for embedded applications?
My iToaster does, but it mainly uses it as a heating element. This thing is approximately twice as good as my old-fashioned 32-bit toaster, except it uses twice as much toast as before.
"As a result, the focus on digital licensing has switched to scattered music publishers and songwriters, which typically receive between 7 and 8 cents for each physical copy of a song sold."
~12 songs per CD, means around $1/cd. Which is the actual royalty rate per CD, btw.
My personal 'hacking' story was a typing class back in junior high. We had PS/2's booting from floppy, 'networked' through a ABCD printer switch (read: no network).
;-) ], and probably got a better education than most... I certainly had a better time learning than most.
I remember modifying the autoexec so it changed the DOS prompt> to "Virus>". At the end of the class, the floppies all went back to a central box, so the floppy went to a different student's machine the next day.
Well, needless to say, all hell broke loose the next day. The student asked "What's this virus prompt?" and then the poor teacher freaked out. He started ripping plugs from the wall, disconnecting the printer switches (just in case it could spread over the parallel port), ejecting floppies... It's was pandemonium. Poor guy.
Looking back, I can see the situation from his point of view, and I feel a bit bad. These days, I probably would have gotten suspended just like this poor kid, and with a bit more reason, I pretty much pulled the DOS equivilent of yelling fire in a theatre.
But it seems a suspension is way over the top. Every kid goes through their "Hey look what I can do" phase of learning, and I'm glad I had the chance to act out a little without dire consequences. I used all the resources I had available to me [I have other stories
Other than that, I know some guys that would rather choke on a blue pill that size than go Windows.
Good news then: It's a suppository.
Apparently, the poster didn't actually read the article... It doesn't mention the Diebold memos about how easy it is to modify results. The article gives the reader the idea that those opposed to electronic voting machine are all technophobes that don't 'get' how great these new machines are.
In my opinion, this article does nothing to help. Not that it matters. My state managed to count its votes correctly back in 2000, and they agreed with the majority of the nation. Touchscreens aren't what Florida needs. They need better-trained officials, and apparently a better graphic designers... And better voters, judging by their electoral votes back in 2000... Just kidding.
Man, I love computers. But they sure are a pain in the butt.
> OK, this Linksys has only been out for like a few
> weeks or something, and they've got a linux distro
> for it... Yet my Toastmaster 5000xdr Quad-port
> (with FG-200R bagel attachment) STILL isn't
> supported!
OK, to reply to those that say I should roll my own distro for my Toastmaster, I have been working on a little something. Currently, there is no support for the bagel attachment, and it has some trouble with the more exotic breads (ie, non-white bread). And it occasionally pops them out at dangerous velocities. And you have to first separate the bread and crust using my 'decrust.sh' script, and reassemble them after toasting using 'recrust.sh'.
But otherwise, it's coming along nicely. I did have ONE little bug where instead of ordering more bread, it ordered an industrial bread-machine and hired a staff of 12 to run it. They all seemed so disappointed when I told them they were only hired because of a bug. But I'm sure they get that a lot.
So check it out, gnutoast.org... I think it's the future of toasting, possibly even the future of grilling too.
OK, this Linksys has only been out for like a few weeks or something, and they've got a linux distro for it... Yet my Toastmaster 5000xdr Quad-port (with FG-200R bagel attachment) STILL isn't supported!
I mean, the linksys probably works fine out-of-box... But my Toastmaster STILL can't check with my Mr.Refrigeration Model XII to see if I'm out of butter and order more online. Sheesh, technology SUCKS!
I believe what they are referring to is a system that takes a sample of a song (let's say 30 seconds) and generates a 'hash' based on that... The thing about this system is that it is a loose hash, meaning that changing one bit does NOT necessarily change the hash. It is a sonic fingerprint (Not in the digital watermark sense), so that in theory if you had a direct CD-ripped wave, and an analog rip from a cassette as a wave (for instance), you could match the two files, even though they are FAR from bit-for-bit exact.
This is what they mean when they say hash. NOT md5. Obviously MD5 could not track an mp3, since changing even one character in the ID3 tag would change the whole hash.
So they probably have an automated downloader that then generates a fingerprint from the downloaded file and compares it to a db of fingerprints to determine if the song is copyrighted. I'd bet that's all.
Shouldn't the "Removal Tool" link point to a Linux ISO download site or something? I mean, this is slashdot... :-)
The individual sound files for iTunes are encoded by the various record labels, not by Apple, and so could be encoded by any one of the encoders. Apple receives raw .aac files, then puts them into a DRM'ed quicktime wrapper.
In general, I believe most iTunes music is actually NOT encoded directly with the Quicktime encoder, because Quicktime for Windows didn't handle AAC encoding at the time of the launch (Only Mac Quicktime did), and most of the record labels actually use Windows for their conversions.
Of course, for the period of 4/1/2002 to 3/31/2003, Sony shipped 22,520,000 PS2's. That's in addition to the previous year's 18,070,000 units. They've shipped well over 51,000,000 PS2's since launch.
;-)
And over that same 4/1/2002 to 3/31/2003 (1 year) timespan, they shipped 7,400,000 PSOne's.
Yay for XBox, long live the Playstation!
> When did "CD quality" become the standard for excellent sound quality. And why?
If you really want to know, CD quality (44.1KHz, 16bit) is the defacto standard because
A) It was the first digital format that consumers adopted, and was clearly superior to analog, and
B) Because 44KHz is the lowest sampling frequency that does not produce audible artifacts from sampling the CD's target 20-20KHz bandwidth (with a 2KHz buffer for noise filter clamping) as the noise introduced by quantization is above the range of (most) human hearing and can be safely filtered.
Now, one can debate bit depths, because it is likely that 16bit vs. 24 bit might be audible to some people, but sampling rate is pretty much a non-starter. You really don't need higher than 44KHz for playback. You won't hear a difference.
During actual (studio) mixing, you want to keep the bitrate and sample rate higher... While I think 'cd quality' is good enough, continuous requantization at the minimum levels CAN produce audible artifacts. So 96KHz/24bit actually has a place at the mixing stage. You don't need it for playback though.
So, CD quality is the standard because anything 'better' requires more storage, with no audible results, and the technology of the CD at the time very handily held 74 minutes of audio at that rate, enough to fit a normal-sized album. There was some science involved with the initial selection of the sampling rate, and the bit depth just came about from the fact that 16 bits is an even byte-depth, and the minimum required so that no one complained about quanitization anomalies.
> And finally, 0.999999... is not 1.0000000.... really it's not, though in practice, well...
.999999... DOES eqal 1.0:
See if my math holds up...
x = 0.999
10x = 9.999
10x - x = 9.999 - x
9x = 9.999 - 0.999
9x = 9
x = 1
Going back to the starting equation:
1 = 0.99999
This is exactly the idea I've been trying to convey for so long...
I issue a challenge to all of you kiddies to hack me as I type this on my
trusty Kaypro 2. CP/M is a rock! Bring it on!
Of course, Tivo does have the 30-second skip feature. You just have to enable it. On the remote, hit:
Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select
Mr. Tivo's bell will ring three times, and now the skip forward button skips forward 30 seconds at a time.
Enjoy.
I think you are exactly right, Microsoft has definate higher aspirations, even with this iteration of the xbox... I know for a fact that Microsoft has been sending free xbox hardware to music publishers, with the hope that deals for content distribution can be formed. How do I know? Because I have a free xbox sitting next to me right now. And I work for a music company.
So it seems pretty clear that Microsoft's "We're focused on gaming" stance is just a front. That's alright, I also know that my company isn't likely to distribute music on the xbox... More likely the PS2. Strange how that works, isn't it?
TiVo provides opt-out on this (ANONYMOUS) data logging... Although I wish the service was opt-in to start.
But again, read ANONYMOUS. And what if it isn't? Well then we'll have a class action lawsuit and we'll all make some money and in the process shut down a company that would buy/sell such data.
I don't think the DMCA actually covers this... These CD's aren't encrypted, which is a prerequisite of the circumvention clause. So it would be completely legal.
I'm not a musician, but currently CD sales pay my salary. I work for a large music company, one with many subsidiary record labels and a huge catalog, and I'm right in the middle of the copy-protection war... But it's going on inside the company.
There are some in my company that would agree with those idiotic quotes, about all people being pirates, MP3's are stealing, etc. But most people understand that the old enforced-scarcity model is no longer sustainable, and that a new model must be sought. While I think the investment in anti-rip CD's is a waste, it is essentially the left hand of the industry... The right hand is doing something completely different, and it's cooking up something good.
For instance, my personal mp3 collection is about 300 albums. Great. But in the very near future, I'll have streaming access to tens of thousands of albums... For a monthly fee. But I think I can deal with that. I pay $9.95 a month for my Tivo, $40 for cable... It's a cost I can bear, especially if I don't need to shell out for physical CD's anymore. I don't really need the CD's, as once they're ripped, they go into storage anyway. (And if it bothers you that you wouldn't have offline access, you'll be able to download files to wherever, and burn CD's)
I'm thinking this post is getting a bit off-topic, so I'll come back. The point I'm trying to make is that these anti-rip CD's are not the direction the labels really want to go. It's admittedly a sidetrack. Better things are coming, and there are people on the inside that have some idea of what the heck fair-use is, and whose checkbook pays their salaries. And we're listening.
If it's a blue laser, does this mean it'd be a BLOD?
Would the user interface have a twitching nuclear warhead to give you advice?
-Jason
Yeah, so my MSMouse says it requires 40MB to install. So?
I'll try to make a long story short:
My first computer was a Commodore 64. I wrote programs in BASIC. The programs started getting bigger. Harder to manage everything in my head (remember lines like GOSUB 3510?)
So I went to "SuperTurtle BASIC" (From an old Compute! magazine) which gave symbolic jump labels (GOSUB CalcPercent) and some nice graphics commands. But the programs got bigger, harder to manage.
Then I got a PC, and learned C. Now I had functions, scope, types, pointers... These were things that I knew I needed, before I even knew that a language existed that supported them. I'd been approximating them with my previous languages, just to keep myself organized. But then my programs got bigger, and eventually got hard to manage.
And then I learned Java and C++ (yes, just about simultaneously... I'm not sure which was first). OO was something I knew I needed... Again, I'd been approximating OO techniques with C, just to stay organized.
So OO isn't some magic bullet, of course... It helps those that already think in OO write those thoughts down in an efficient manner. Those people already try to write code in a maintainable manner. They already try to document code for themselves and others.
So OO doesn't do anything unless it's in the right hands. And with so many programmers now entering the field with an OO language as their FIRST language, I think there might be a problem... If you've never seen the hell of tracing GOTO statements all over the place on a C64, what makes you think differently? What makes you want to name your variables so you can tell its function and type by its name, if you've never had to find a bug with adding a STRING "0" to an INTEGER 0?
These aren't OO problems, but they're a way of thinking that OO kiddies never had to tackle, and I think it may be the reason OO has gotten this bad rep lately... I've met an awful lot of programmers that can't think OO, even though their only language is Java, for example.
So my suggestion is that with the economy slowing down, go out and pick up a C64 or Apple IIe and start from the beginning... Then when the wireless boom hits, you'll actually understand the technology from a more fundamental level... Plus you'll get to play a lot of Dig Dug in the process!
-Jason