If you mean that the iTunes software only supports AAC, then you're wrong. It supports wav, MP3, AAC, and probably a few others.
If you mean iTunes music store only supports AAC, then you're right. On the flip side, the Dell store only supplies files in the proprietary WMA format.
Checking on the licensing FAQ for MPEG4-AAC, it would appear that fees are charged for sales of encoders/decoders. No word in there on what happens with freely available ones.
As for the DRM being proprietary, well, what did you expect? Do you really think the RIAA is going to allow someone to distrubte digital copies of their product without making sure there's strict controls on who can use them and how they can do so?
The WMA files you get from the Dell DJ music store are going to have DRM in them too, and you better believe that it's going to be proprietary.
Playlist for everything? You've got to be kidding me. Just to prove a point, let's dig out my iPod and take a look, shall we?
Starting from the root menu screen: Browse -> Genres -> Genre Name -> Artist Name -> Album Name
Well wadda ya know, there's all the tracks for that album, and in the proper order too.
As long as you've bothered to provide your MP3s with ID3 tags then you're fine. iTunes, XPlay, and all the other iPod software out there just read the tags and creates the iTunes DB entries using that info.
I don't know anything about this, so this is just conjecture:
It's possible that Musicmatch is used to build a database of the songs, therefore allowing for fast access.
Actually, that's quite likely. Therefore you would only be able to add songs through a mechanism that creates and updates said database.
While it's possible that it doesn't do this, that doesn't seem likely for performance reasons. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to wait while the hardware searches through the HD for every available song and then reads the ID3 tags off them.
I enjoy it. Among other things, it lets me block people using empty user agents and empty host header fields, which tend to mainly be people trying to perform a variety of exploits on my server.
I have a Mac IIcx under my desk which I don't use. One day I may hook it back up. Maybe run Linux on it or System 7?
The IIcx was a 68030, wasn't it? In that case a word of advice on Linux: expect it to be slow. (Even worse if you don't have the 68882. Did the IIcx come with it? I can't remember.)
Additionally, unless you've upgraded the HD then you're probably going to find that there's not enough room to install most of the m68k distros on it, especially given that you need to keep a MacOS partition to boot from. NetBSD has a bit smaller footprint than many of the Linux distros, so you may want to give that a try instead.
(I have a IIci I've fiddled with Linux on, so I speak from experience here.)
The one's he's talking about probably used an early version of Apple's implementation of OpenFirmware, which wasn't all that great from what I recall, but still wouldn't have had a boot ROM.
I'm not even sure if any of the PPC Macs had boot ROMs to tell the truth. I know they were gone by the time that Apple decided to go with PCI slots instead of NuBus and PDS ones.
No, yaboot is for New World PowerMacs only. (i.e. G3s and higher that came in cases that weren't beige.)
Old World PowerMacs used (I believe) BootX to load from within MacOS (Although I personally use quik to bypass loading MacOS altogether, but that didn't come about until much later.)
How new is your Mac? Or conversely, how old is your Mac?
BeOS PPC was lagging behind the x86 version by the end of it's life so that the only drivers for PPC machines that were included tended to be older than the x86 ones.
If someone would write support for processors that are newer than the 604e along with drivers for the logic boards then you'd be fine. But no one seems interested in doing that so you're SOL.
I'd say that one line was more than just one line. When reading the article I couldn't help but get two things out of it: 1) Japanese companies are producing games for Japanese gamers (Well duh!) 2) Japanese game companies are somehow less innovative than their Western counterparts.
We both agree on the latter, so I won't go into it again. But I find it odd that he in the paragraph before he mentions the Tokyo Game Show he makes a reference to EA's Madden series.
Just a hint to the author over on GameSpy, if anywhere in the article you are going to bring up one side being more innovative than the other then you definitely don't want to be bringing up sports games for any reason at all.
However, blaming it on a lack of variation in Japanese games seems a little unfounded... New and groundbreaking concepts are pretty damn rare in both markets.
It would seem someone else remembers all the C&C & Warcraft clones from back in the mid 90s. (Along with all the Quake wannabes that plagued the industry at the same time.) And before that there were all the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat clones that we put up with for years in the arcades. Hell, if you want to go all way bacl the beginning then look at all the Pong clones that appeared shortly after its release.
Or, for those who don't remember/care about those, how about all the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater clones and variations that we had a few years ago?
"Nothing-new-here" is the way that many video game companies make money, by riding along on the success of someone else who took risks with a new concept. Saying that the Japanese game market is less innovative than the N.American/European game market shows a profound disregard for the history and habits of the latter.
What next? Will people sue that their 56k modems are not 56kilobytes/second? Or that their DSL line is 1.5Mbits and not bytes?
Well, seeing as it's actually 56 kilobits a second... (I know, it was just a typo.)
Actually, I can't wait until these people find out that their 1.5Mb/s DSL is only 1.5 * 1000 ^ 2 bits per second. Or that their 2 GHz processor is only 2 * 1000 ^ 3 Hz.
I'm really torn on this one, RAM uses 1024bytes = 1 kB because it's easier to make them using sizes that are equivalent to 2 ^ x. The naming scheme isn't correct scientificaly, but it's the easiest way of doing it and it's easy to see where the confusion comes in. On the other hand, every other industry has used 1000 bytes = 1 kB since inception, it's not really the fault of the manufacturers that both the people who code the operating systems and the users can't keep track of a widely used international naming standard.
I've never seen Mission to Mars, so I can't comment. (I'm also happy to say that I've only ever seen one Battlestar Galactica episode, and that was enough.)
Philip K. Dick was a popular choice for Hollywood films though, Total Recall was very loosely based around a short story called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" and he also provided the inspiration for Blade Runner (among others).
Although the only major connection between the movie and the book (called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") is that the characters have the same names.
There's actually a Philip K. Dick story like that. Earth has been overmined, etc, and the environment is in a state of ruin. Humans send astronauts to Mars in the hopes of finding it habitable so that they can move their entire civilisation there.
Once there it's discovered that an ancient race destroyed Mars and moved their entire civilisation to a new planet they had found, a veritable Eden, where the technology failed and they reverted back to a Stone Age civilisation. Unfortunately the astronauts can't find where this planet is, as all the equipment seems to have malfunctioned and is locked on Earth. (Well, all except one, who realises the significance of this fact, thereby giving the story its point.)
Can't remember the name of it or which collection it's in. Anyone?
You're confusing his use of catholicism with the Roman Catholic church.
Ok, catholicism can and, in current usage, usually does refer to the Roman Catholic church. But the original word came from the Greek katholikos, meaning universal. As such it refers to the ancient undivided Christian church, one that predates all the petty feuds, splits, and schisms that have sprung up over the centuries.
I'm assuming that that is what the original poster was refering to, not the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Catholic churches.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
I'm trying so very hard, but failing to find an interview from years ago (Late 70s? Early 80s? Maybe even the early 90s, but I believe it was earlier.) that was done with a major author (whose name escapes me, which is probably why I can't find it) in which he railed against the differences between 'Sci Fi' and 'Science Fiction'.
Now, his definition of Sci Fi was what fits your comment of 'shoot-em-ups in space' -- what Phillip K. Dick termed space adventures and havewhat others called space operas. This author's definition of science fiction fell somewhere between the 'hard' science fiction (but encompassed it) and the space operas that he felt was discrediting the genre.
Wish I could find it, it was a good interview. I know Spider Robinson did an article for the Globe and Mail in the late 90s on the same subject, but I can't even find that now.
Didn't use GEOS for the papers, but I was typing all my school papers and essays on an old Commodore until well into the mid 90s. I believe I was using Paperclip III to do it.
I can't say I ever used GEOS for much at all. Played around with the paint program a bit. May have used the word processing software, but most of the time I couldn't be bothered to boot that just to load the word processor.
Agreed. I think they'll just drive piracy up. When Jo Schmo gets home and finds that he can't play against his friends because he picked up his copy at Wal-Mart rather than at EB or the like I doubt he'll be willing to go out and spend money on another copy of the game just to be able to get multiplayer.
I noticed there's no listing of price (obviously, since it's at the discretion of the retailer), but I'm just wondering how much of a difference in price we'll see between the two.
Actually, if you look at Apple's G5 Performance page you'll see that those are the numbers for the dual 2GHz G5.
Given that, I'm still inclined to take the comparison with an entire shaker of salt. I mean, if he's suspiscious of Apple's numbers but not suspiscious of numbers obtained from another processor manufacturer than I don't know what to say other than 'Mr. White, your bias is showing.'
I'm waiting until they hit the market so that the comparisons are done by people who actually got to test the machines themselves, not some guy who knew what he wanted the data to say before he even began writing. Until then, all I'll say is that it looks like nice hardware. But faster or better? Who knows.
Besides the fact that you obviously have a thing with Sun...
Version 1.2 of the Java platform is based on the 2nd version of the Java language, hence Java 2.
The name change from SunOS to Solaris also denoted a significant change in the system. SunOS is a BSD-style system, while Solaris is a SysV-style system. (There's slightly more to it too, but I'm not that well versed in it, I'll let someone else handle it)
In both cases there is no corresponding system with the same name and version number already in existence when they changed the numbering scheme, which means that your analogy is completely and utterly false.
Now, if they were to release Solaris 10 and bump the version number on Solaris 9 up to 10 and call it Solaris 10 Lite or something, then yes, you might have a point.
The contact info isn't anywhere on the Gates Foundation page, but according to this page (206) 709-3100 is in fact a number for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, here we go:
If you mean that the iTunes software only supports AAC, then you're wrong. It supports wav, MP3, AAC, and probably a few others.
If you mean iTunes music store only supports AAC, then you're right.
On the flip side, the Dell store only supplies files in the proprietary WMA format.
Checking on the licensing FAQ for MPEG4-AAC, it would appear that fees are charged for sales of encoders/decoders. No word in there on what happens with freely available ones.
As for the DRM being proprietary, well, what did you expect? Do you really think the RIAA is going to allow someone to distrubte digital copies of their product without making sure there's strict controls on who can use them and how they can do so?
The WMA files you get from the Dell DJ music store are going to have DRM in them too, and you better believe that it's going to be proprietary.
Playlist for everything? You've got to be kidding me.
Just to prove a point, let's dig out my iPod and take a look, shall we?
Starting from the root menu screen:
Browse -> Genres -> Genre Name -> Artist Name -> Album Name
Well wadda ya know, there's all the tracks for that album, and in the proper order too.
As long as you've bothered to provide your MP3s with ID3 tags then you're fine.
iTunes, XPlay, and all the other iPod software out there just read the tags and creates the iTunes DB entries using that info.
I don't know anything about this, so this is just conjecture:
It's possible that Musicmatch is used to build a database of the songs, therefore allowing for fast access.
Actually, that's quite likely. Therefore you would only be able to add songs through a mechanism that creates and updates said database.
While it's possible that it doesn't do this, that doesn't seem likely for performance reasons. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to wait while the hardware searches through the HD for every available song and then reads the ID3 tags off them.
I use 1.6, haven't upgraded to 1.7 yet.
I enjoy it. Among other things, it lets me block people using empty user agents and empty host header fields, which tend to mainly be people trying to perform a variety of exploits on my server.
I have a Mac IIcx under my desk which I don't use. One day I may hook it back up. Maybe run Linux on it or System 7?
The IIcx was a 68030, wasn't it? In that case a word of advice on Linux: expect it to be slow. (Even worse if you don't have the 68882. Did the IIcx come with it? I can't remember.)
Additionally, unless you've upgraded the HD then you're probably going to find that there's not enough room to install most of the m68k distros on it, especially given that you need to keep a MacOS partition to boot from. NetBSD has a bit smaller footprint than many of the Linux distros, so you may want to give that a try instead.
(I have a IIci I've fiddled with Linux on, so I speak from experience here.)
The one's he's talking about probably used an early version of Apple's implementation of OpenFirmware, which wasn't all that great from what I recall, but still wouldn't have had a boot ROM.
I'm not even sure if any of the PPC Macs had boot ROMs to tell the truth. I know they were gone by the time that Apple decided to go with PCI slots instead of NuBus and PDS ones.
No, yaboot is for New World PowerMacs only. (i.e. G3s and higher that came in cases that weren't beige.)
Old World PowerMacs used (I believe) BootX to load from within MacOS (Although I personally use quik to bypass loading MacOS altogether, but that didn't come about until much later.)
How new is your Mac? Or conversely, how old is your Mac?
BeOS PPC was lagging behind the x86 version by the end of it's life so that the only drivers for PPC machines that were included tended to be older than the x86 ones.
If someone would write support for processors that are newer than the 604e along with drivers for the logic boards then you'd be fine. But no one seems interested in doing that so you're SOL.
I'd say that one line was more than just one line. When reading the article I couldn't help but get two things out of it:
1) Japanese companies are producing games for Japanese gamers (Well duh!)
2) Japanese game companies are somehow less innovative than their Western counterparts.
We both agree on the latter, so I won't go into it again. But I find it odd that he in the paragraph before he mentions the Tokyo Game Show he makes a reference to EA's Madden series.
Just a hint to the author over on GameSpy, if anywhere in the article you are going to bring up one side being more innovative than the other then you definitely don't want to be bringing up sports games for any reason at all.
However, blaming it on a lack of variation in Japanese games seems a little unfounded... New and groundbreaking concepts are pretty damn rare in both markets.
It would seem someone else remembers all the C&C & Warcraft clones from back in the mid 90s. (Along with all the Quake wannabes that plagued the industry at the same time.) And before that there were all the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat clones that we put up with for years in the arcades.
Hell, if you want to go all way bacl the beginning then look at all the Pong clones that appeared shortly after its release.
Or, for those who don't remember/care about those, how about all the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater clones and variations that we had a few years ago?
"Nothing-new-here" is the way that many video game companies make money, by riding along on the success of someone else who took risks with a new concept. Saying that the Japanese game market is less innovative than the N.American/European game market shows a profound disregard for the history and habits of the latter.
Max v3 is not the same as yellowTab.
yellowTab is a commercial venture designed to produce the next BeOS. (I don't know what they used as a basis for the code.)
BeOS Max Edition is a free (as in beer) project done by BeOS fans that is based on the old BeOS R5 Personal Edition.
What next? Will people sue that their 56k modems are not 56kilobytes/second? Or that their DSL line is 1.5Mbits and not bytes?
Well, seeing as it's actually 56 kilobits a second... (I know, it was just a typo.)
Actually, I can't wait until these people find out that their 1.5Mb/s DSL is only 1.5 * 1000 ^ 2 bits per second. Or that their 2 GHz processor is only 2 * 1000 ^ 3 Hz.
I'm really torn on this one, RAM uses 1024bytes = 1 kB because it's easier to make them using sizes that are equivalent to 2 ^ x. The naming scheme isn't correct scientificaly, but it's the easiest way of doing it and it's easy to see where the confusion comes in.
On the other hand, every other industry has used 1000 bytes = 1 kB since inception, it's not really the fault of the manufacturers that both the people who code the operating systems and the users can't keep track of a widely used international naming standard.
I've never seen Mission to Mars, so I can't comment. (I'm also happy to say that I've only ever seen one Battlestar Galactica episode, and that was enough.)
Philip K. Dick was a popular choice for Hollywood films though, Total Recall was very loosely based around a short story called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" and he also provided the inspiration for Blade Runner (among others).
Although the only major connection between the movie and the book (called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") is that the characters have the same names.
There's actually a Philip K. Dick story like that.
Earth has been overmined, etc, and the environment is in a state of ruin. Humans send astronauts to Mars in the hopes of finding it habitable so that they can move their entire civilisation there.
Once there it's discovered that an ancient race destroyed Mars and moved their entire civilisation to a new planet they had found, a veritable Eden, where the technology failed and they reverted back to a Stone Age civilisation.
Unfortunately the astronauts can't find where this planet is, as all the equipment seems to have malfunctioned and is locked on Earth. (Well, all except one, who realises the significance of this fact, thereby giving the story its point.)
Can't remember the name of it or which collection it's in. Anyone?
Oops. Spoke a bit too soon.
It seems there's two versions of that article, that one and the one Newsweek actually published.
Here's the other
That's not it, although I do enjoy that piece you linked to (aside from the Galaxative, I'm hoping that was a typo...)
This is the article I was thinking of, it's not quite what I remembered, but I still enjoy it.
That sounds about right (actually, I'm almost positive it was him). For some reason I can never never remember his name.
It's not a usage that's very common, despite being the first definition that Webster gives.
I'd assume most Protestants would probably find it fairly insulting, I've never tried using it to see what would happen though.
You're confusing his use of catholicism with the Roman Catholic church.
Ok, catholicism can and, in current usage, usually does refer to the Roman Catholic church. But the original word came from the Greek katholikos, meaning universal. As such it refers to the ancient undivided Christian church, one that predates all the petty feuds, splits, and schisms that have sprung up over the centuries.
I'm assuming that that is what the original poster was refering to, not the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Catholic churches.
1) It is not as though "hard" science-fiction has always had mass appeal. It has always had a specialized genre feeling. What passes for science fiction movies today are generally no more than shoot-em-up's in space. More like futuristic action. This is what appeals to the movie-going audience. "Hard" science fiction is too "hard" (must think...hurts brain) and is probably not profitable.
I'm trying so very hard, but failing to find an interview from years ago (Late 70s? Early 80s? Maybe even the early 90s, but I believe it was earlier.) that was done with a major author (whose name escapes me, which is probably why I can't find it) in which he railed against the differences between 'Sci Fi' and 'Science Fiction'.
Now, his definition of Sci Fi was what fits your comment of 'shoot-em-ups in space' -- what Phillip K. Dick termed space adventures and havewhat others called space operas. This author's definition of science fiction fell somewhere between the 'hard' science fiction (but encompassed it) and the space operas that he felt was discrediting the genre.
Wish I could find it, it was a good interview. I know Spider Robinson did an article for the Globe and Mail in the late 90s on the same subject, but I can't even find that now.
Didn't use GEOS for the papers, but I was typing all my school papers and essays on an old Commodore until well into the mid 90s. I believe I was using Paperclip III to do it.
I can't say I ever used GEOS for much at all. Played around with the paint program a bit. May have used the word processing software, but most of the time I couldn't be bothered to boot that just to load the word processor.
Agreed.
I think they'll just drive piracy up. When Jo Schmo gets home and finds that he can't play against his friends because he picked up his copy at Wal-Mart rather than at EB or the like I doubt he'll be willing to go out and spend money on another copy of the game just to be able to get multiplayer.
I noticed there's no listing of price (obviously, since it's at the discretion of the retailer), but I'm just wondering how much of a difference in price we'll see between the two.
Actually, if you look at Apple's G5 Performance page you'll see that those are the numbers for the dual 2GHz G5.
Given that, I'm still inclined to take the comparison with an entire shaker of salt. I mean, if he's suspiscious of Apple's numbers but not suspiscious of numbers obtained from another processor manufacturer than I don't know what to say other than 'Mr. White, your bias is showing.'
I'm waiting until they hit the market so that the comparisons are done by people who actually got to test the machines themselves, not some guy who knew what he wanted the data to say before he even began writing. Until then, all I'll say is that it looks like nice hardware. But faster or better? Who knows.
Besides the fact that you obviously have a thing with Sun...
Version 1.2 of the Java platform is based on the 2nd version of the Java language, hence Java 2.
The name change from SunOS to Solaris also denoted a significant change in the system. SunOS is a BSD-style system, while Solaris is a SysV-style system. (There's slightly more to it too, but I'm not that well versed in it, I'll let someone else handle it)
In both cases there is no corresponding system with the same name and version number already in existence when they changed the numbering scheme, which means that your analogy is completely and utterly false.
Now, if they were to release Solaris 10 and bump the version number on Solaris 9 up to 10 and call it Solaris 10 Lite or something, then yes, you might have a point.
Right, I was wrong.
The contact info isn't anywhere on the Gates Foundation page, but according to this page (206) 709-3100 is in fact a number for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Mods, feel free to mod my previous post down.