"Even easier, if you have a digital output on your CD player you can just hook it up to a digital input on a soundcard. No loss of quality at all."
I was under the impression that there is a "copy bit" of some kind in the digital stream that prevents direct digital copying, am I mistaken ? do soundcards with digital inputs ignore it ?
The RIAA should just sell CDs with large padlocks on them, that would be a 100% efficient copy protection scheme.
Seriously though, I fail to understand the whole concept of copy protected CD : if I were to buy one of these CD at the price they're sold and I couldn't MP3 it directly with cdparanoia, I'd just play it on my standalone CD deck, digitize the audio and MP3 the captured data. In fact, I'd do that just because the RIAA doesn't want me to. The only thing I would lose is a little quality (not much, my deck is a good one), a little time to split the audio block into its original tracks, and no time at all renaming the tracks to what's written on the CD cover (which I always do/have to do anyway). The most time-consuming task of course would be to split the tracks at the right position, but I'm sure a small C program can help me do that in less than 5 minutes. Then after I'm done, say after 10 minutes of manual work, and 1 hour MP3ing everything and burning the files onto a CD, I store my original CD in a corner and enjoy the convenience of my MP3s anyway : it's a one-off job, and it really is worth doing, so at the end of the day, the RIAA's brain-dead schemes will just end up annoying the crap out of everybody and not prevent any copying at all.
"With the parties back at the bargaining table, Bear Stearns analyst Raymond Lee Katz predicts that AT&T could slightly raise its bid to "a sum that will not be more than $400 million."
Well, if their bid fails, I volunteer to help AT&T get rid of the slight $93M difference.
These guys have a strange concept of the value of money I reckon...
Drake's Equation is the famous set of fudge-factors that would tell us whether we were likely to find other life forms, if only we knew what the values of the variables were: N = R * fs * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L
fc is the fraction of intelligent species that develop the ability and desire to communicate with other civilizations : after the aliens realize the voice of the UN secretary general of the time on the Voyager probe recording was a fucking Nazi, probably 0.
"The only way to fight this very disturbing trend is to grow up and stop hacking."
Translation :
"The only way to fight gags is to shut up"
Bzzt, wrong answer. What do you think hacking is for ? fun of course, but more importantly, learning (something today's generation of videogame-numbed kids are not doing anymore) : if I hadn't reverse-engineered my ZX81 when I was a kid, I wouldn't know a tenth of what I need to know to be a (hopefully) successful engineer. If someone hadn't carefully analyzed the original 8088 processor, they would never have discovered that interrupts need to be disabled when modifying the stack segment register, and we'd have had PCs that crash at random for no reasons for a long longer.
I believe you mistake hacking with craking/phreaking/pirating, like the majority of people today.
"We don't need new versions of nmap and SATAN every week. We don't need any more 'sploits published on BUGTRAQ"
Yes we do, so you know that Windows XP tries to connect to MSN silently each time you boot, and so you can upgrade wu-ftpd before some sucker hacks your box.
"his strong views on the purity of free software are needed more than ever"
Okay, so take the example of the Linux kernel : it started as a project from a brilliant programmer geek for brilliant programmer geeks : RMS' message isn't very useful here (because of the small specialized audience) but I admit that it might be.
Then, Linux grew bigger and started to show-up on company radars (namely Novell) : when Linux was at that point, RMS was key to keeping it from being taken over by rapacious companies. Linus also said many times that the GPL was a natural choice. So I say bravo RMS : directly or indirectly, he kept Linux independent, and he still does.
Now, Linux has reached a critical mass : companies have vested interests in it, too many people have given time and effort to make it better, or simply to use it in solutions, it's not going to be adulterated by business thugs anymore. Nobody is going to take it over today. Does it need RMS' unbudgeable attitude to keep it safe ? heck no. What Linux needs now is $$$, and a steering committee able to make balanced decisions for the good of geeks as well as suits. At this point, RMS just drives businesses away, and even Linus admits that he steers clears of him for similar reasons (it's written in his book, quite bluntly).
I'm a programmer, I maintain open-source projects, and because I used to be a hot-headed teenage geek long ago, I still feel a pang of disgust in my stomack when I hear or read about businesses doing this or that with the information that wants to be free. But I'm old(er) now, and what my head tells me differs from what my stomack does : at some point in every major OSS project, businesses have to bring in cash to keep the ball going. It might feel disgusting, but it's the truth. RMS' head thinks the exact same way his stomack does, and that's stupid.
"We need the FSF as much as we always have, as a voice pointing out why the "viral" clause in the GPL is so important, and why the BSD license gives developers more freedom but doesn't necessarily transfer it to the end users"
You're 100% right, we need the FSF. But there is a major difference between the FSF and RMS : they acknowledge the importance of the business world, even if they don't often shout it out loud, and they strive to work with them *and* keep the spirit of the GPL intact, which is why they drafted the GPL 3.0 that Stallman hates so much, and why they try to distance themselves from Stallman.
RMS has acted as a intolerant stubborn donkey for so long with regard to software that he isn't taken seriously anymore. Even the FSF are getting really tired of him now.
Don't get me wrong, his strong opinions *were* the right attitude when free software was something of a novelty, when the business world was taking the few free software people for lunatics. But that was years ago. Now the world at large at least takes free software seriously, and Stallman has become as useful as a fire hydrant in the middle of a bike trail.
The GPS system is controlled by the military (especially its precision) : until recently, the service was provided for free for civilian purposes with a low precision (I think it was 5 meters, or something like that). Today, the resolution is maximum, but they could decided to turn it back down, or stop civilian service altogether.
The more I read about the guy, the more I like him. I admit, I didn't like Westley Crusher, and each time I saw Wil appear on TV or say something as himself, I had this dislike of his character come back in my mind. It's sad isn't it, mixing the actor with the character. But now having read what he had to say, and looked at his website, I reckon he's really smart, and I believe he has a real good chance of getting his career out of the "child star" trap : not many child actors can, just look at how many times Mcaulay Culkin has appeared in movies or shows recently...
So, what M$ proposes as a remedy for their monopoly is to install more M$ software on new machines, and worse, on machines destined to kids, which will naturally swear by M$ products later. Then of course M$'ll make the lucky schools pay to get support for their donated OSes !
That sounds exactly like a convicted arsonist who proposes to make up for his deeds by distributing matches in the schoolyard, then sets up an extinguisher manufacture. As much as I hate M$, I have to say I admire them and their attorneys for having the guts to even think about proposing a deal like that, that's classic Microsoft. If the DOJ goes for that, it sure won't be their finest hour...
"As a real audiophile, who's primary interest is music, not equipment, my advice is always: listen, listen, listen."
Point taken for the "real" audiophile;-) The problem I have with the Joe Bob "audiophile" is that he doesn't really know jack about music.
I guess the question is, what are you trying to achieve ? if you try to obtain the purest, most accurate reproduction of a musical artwork, the best thing is to sit at the concert, then the next best thing is to have audio equipment like yours, then things go down from there. But is this really the point ?
My interest is the pleasure I derive from listening to music, not the fidelity of the reproduction. I personally have a huge collection of everything from vinyls to CDs, including tapes, 8-tracks and cassettes. When I play an 8-track, I enjoy the music, but I enjoy it less because the sound isn't as rich as with a CD. When I play a CD, I enjoy myself and no reproduction defect (usually) takes some of the pleasure away. Well, when I MP3d my entire collection of CDs (128kbs), I sometime could tell there was a slight sound reproduction difference, but it wasn't worse, just different, and I derive the exact same pleasure from listening to the MP3s than from listening to the original CDs. And believe me, I'm not talking about Shitty Street Boyz, I'm referring to complex works like Ligeti or Xenakis (stuff I'm into).
The question you should ask yourself is : does listening to 96KHz 24-bit music honestly enhance your listening *pleasure* that much compared to listening to the same artwork at the standard 44.1KHz 16 bits ? I'm sure the fidelity is enhanced with your equipment, but is your listening pleasure enhanced by the same factor ? I've never listened 96KHz 24-bit music myself, but I guess conceptually it's the same question of enhanced pleasure between my 44.1KHz CDs and my 128kbps MP3.
If you honestly think listening to music from your high-end audio equipment is better than from standard good equipment, not because you know it's 96Khz 24 bits but because you get more of that nondescript feeling if your guts when you listen to it, then you're one of the lucky few with a very above-average hearing, and I'll consider myself one of the lucky few music lovers who have frugal technical needs.
"My disappointment with the quality of compressed digital music formats [blah]"
That's classic snobbism from self-declared "audiophiles". The truth is, 99% of people won't be able to hear a difference between a well-encoded 128kbp MP3 and the original CD. Of the remaining 1%, 99% won't be able to tell the difference anymore if the MP3 is encoded at or above 256kbps. And that's even with top-of-the-line amplifiers and speakers. It's the same kind of people who claimed years ago that vinyls were so much better sounding than CDs, when the truth is that the dynamics and S/N ratio of a good vinyl will never match that of a bad CD, and the only difference between a vinyl and a CD is the audio on the vinyl is compressed.
Those who really can tell a difference whatever the encoding are golden ears used as sonar officers in nuclear submarines, and professional audio testers in their anechoic chambers working for Kenwood, Denon and the likes. Is the poster one of these people ? not bloody likely.
"RAM and human memory have always inhabited entirely separate worlds, but the boundary between them is now blurring. Hardware and wetware may have more in common than you think."
Oh dear, I hope it won't run Windows, people would fall into a coma every 2 days...
If you replace <meta="keywords" content="mickey mouse"> by <meta="nonwords" content="bestiality mouse-fucking zoophilia kinky....>, you might draw more Disney lovers and less perverts to your site, but I suspect your HTML file will grow quite a lot bigger...
If your processor doesn't have a clock, how can you boast it runs at xxxx MHz ? how can you double the external clock, put a divider inside the CPU, and pretend your processor is twice as fast as your rivals' ?
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that there is a "copy bit" of some kind in the digital stream that prevents direct digital copying, am I mistaken ? do soundcards with digital inputs ignore it ?
Seriously though, I fail to understand the whole concept of copy protected CD : if I were to buy one of these CD at the price they're sold and I couldn't MP3 it directly with cdparanoia, I'd just play it on my standalone CD deck, digitize the audio and MP3 the captured data. In fact, I'd do that just because the RIAA doesn't want me to. The only thing I would lose is a little quality (not much, my deck is a good one), a little time to split the audio block into its original tracks, and no time at all renaming the tracks to what's written on the CD cover (which I always do/have to do anyway). The most time-consuming task of course would be to split the tracks at the right position, but I'm sure a small C program can help me do that in less than 5 minutes. Then after I'm done, say after 10 minutes of manual work, and 1 hour MP3ing everything and burning the files onto a CD, I store my original CD in a corner and enjoy the convenience of my MP3s anyway : it's a one-off job, and it really is worth doing, so at the end of the day, the RIAA's brain-dead schemes will just end up annoying the crap out of everybody and not prevent any copying at all.
Well, if their bid fails, I volunteer to help AT&T get rid of the slight $93M difference. ...
These guys have a strange concept of the value of money I reckon
fc is the fraction of intelligent species that develop the ability and desire to communicate with other civilizations : after the aliens realize the voice of the UN secretary general of the time on the Voyager probe recording was a fucking Nazi, probably 0.
Therefore, N=0.
Ahem ...
0x01011010=16846864
01011010b=90
What do they teach in touch-typing classes these days ;-)
In ascii, Z=90, J=74, so Z^J=16, and 16^18=2. Mixing ascii chars, integers with logical and binary operators is a classic trick to obfuscate C.
Translation :
"The only way to fight gags is to shut up"
Bzzt, wrong answer. What do you think hacking is for ? fun of course, but more importantly, learning (something today's generation of videogame-numbed kids are not doing anymore) : if I hadn't reverse-engineered my ZX81 when I was a kid, I wouldn't know a tenth of what I need to know to be a (hopefully) successful engineer. If someone hadn't carefully analyzed the original 8088 processor, they would never have discovered that interrupts need to be disabled when modifying the stack segment register, and we'd have had PCs that crash at random for no reasons for a long longer.
I believe you mistake hacking with craking/phreaking/pirating, like the majority of people today.
"We don't need new versions of nmap and SATAN every week. We don't need any more 'sploits published on BUGTRAQ"
Yes we do, so you know that Windows XP tries to connect to MSN silently each time you boot, and so you can upgrade wu-ftpd before some sucker hacks your box.
Okay, so take the example of the Linux kernel : it started as a project from a brilliant programmer geek for brilliant programmer geeks : RMS' message isn't very useful here (because of the small specialized audience) but I admit that it might be.
Then, Linux grew bigger and started to show-up on company radars (namely Novell) : when Linux was at that point, RMS was key to keeping it from being taken over by rapacious companies. Linus also said many times that the GPL was a natural choice. So I say bravo RMS : directly or indirectly, he kept Linux independent, and he still does.
Now, Linux has reached a critical mass : companies have vested interests in it, too many people have given time and effort to make it better, or simply to use it in solutions, it's not going to be adulterated by business thugs anymore. Nobody is going to take it over today. Does it need RMS' unbudgeable attitude to keep it safe ? heck no. What Linux needs now is $$$, and a steering committee able to make balanced decisions for the good of geeks as well as suits. At this point, RMS just drives businesses away, and even Linus admits that he steers clears of him for similar reasons (it's written in his book, quite bluntly).
I'm a programmer, I maintain open-source projects, and because I used to be a hot-headed teenage geek long ago, I still feel a pang of disgust in my stomack when I hear or read about businesses doing this or that with the information that wants to be free. But I'm old(er) now, and what my head tells me differs from what my stomack does : at some point in every major OSS project, businesses have to bring in cash to keep the ball going. It might feel disgusting, but it's the truth. RMS' head thinks the exact same way his stomack does, and that's stupid.
"We need the FSF as much as we always have, as a voice pointing out why the "viral" clause in the GPL is so important, and why the BSD license gives developers more freedom but doesn't necessarily transfer it to the end users"
You're 100% right, we need the FSF. But there is a major difference between the FSF and RMS : they acknowledge the importance of the business world, even if they don't often shout it out loud, and they strive to work with them *and* keep the spirit of the GPL intact, which is why they drafted the GPL 3.0 that Stallman hates so much, and why they try to distance themselves from Stallman.
RMS has acted as a intolerant stubborn donkey for so long with regard to software that he isn't taken seriously anymore. Even the FSF are getting really tired of him now.
Don't get me wrong, his strong opinions *were* the right attitude when free software was something of a novelty, when the business world was taking the few free software people for lunatics. But that was years ago. Now the world at large at least takes free software seriously, and Stallman has become as useful as a fire hydrant in the middle of a bike trail.
One /. reader at Nasa close with his computer close to the antennas saw this earlier post and tried out the program.
The GPS system is controlled by the military (especially its precision) : until recently, the service was provided for free for civilian purposes with a low precision (I think it was 5 meters, or something like that). Today, the resolution is maximum, but they could decided to turn it back down, or stop civilian service altogether.
Hmm, I haven't seen the show yet unfortunately. I was making an un-educated guess :)
It didn't, it said "wil lost"
Wil Wheaton (ST:TNG)
LeVar Burton (ST:TNG)
Robert Picardo (ST:VOY)
Denise Crosby (ST:TNG)
Roxann Dawson (ST:VOY)
John DeLancie (ST:TNG,DS9,VOY)
William Shatner (ST:TOS)
Armin Shimerman (ST:DS9)
Can you guess the first contestant to be voted out ? (hint: his center of gravity has been shifting forward for years)
Way to go Wil, you deserve success !
That sounds exactly like a convicted arsonist who proposes to make up for his deeds by distributing matches in the schoolyard, then sets up an extinguisher manufacture. As much as I hate M$, I have to say I admire them and their attorneys for having the guts to even think about proposing a deal like that, that's classic Microsoft. If the DOJ goes for that, it sure won't be their finest hour ...
Point taken for the "real" audiophile ;-) The problem I have with the Joe Bob "audiophile" is that he doesn't really know jack about music.
I guess the question is, what are you trying to achieve ? if you try to obtain the purest, most accurate reproduction of a musical artwork, the best thing is to sit at the concert, then the next best thing is to have audio equipment like yours, then things go down from there. But is this really the point ?
My interest is the pleasure I derive from listening to music, not the fidelity of the reproduction. I personally have a huge collection of everything from vinyls to CDs, including tapes, 8-tracks and cassettes. When I play an 8-track, I enjoy the music, but I enjoy it less because the sound isn't as rich as with a CD. When I play a CD, I enjoy myself and no reproduction defect (usually) takes some of the pleasure away. Well, when I MP3d my entire collection of CDs (128kbs), I sometime could tell there was a slight sound reproduction difference, but it wasn't worse, just different, and I derive the exact same pleasure from listening to the MP3s than from listening to the original CDs. And believe me, I'm not talking about Shitty Street Boyz, I'm referring to complex works like Ligeti or Xenakis (stuff I'm into).
The question you should ask yourself is : does listening to 96KHz 24-bit music honestly enhance your listening *pleasure* that much compared to listening to the same artwork at the standard 44.1KHz 16 bits ? I'm sure the fidelity is enhanced with your equipment, but is your listening pleasure enhanced by the same factor ? I've never listened 96KHz 24-bit music myself, but I guess conceptually it's the same question of enhanced pleasure between my 44.1KHz CDs and my 128kbps MP3.
If you honestly think listening to music from your high-end audio equipment is better than from standard good equipment, not because you know it's 96Khz 24 bits but because you get more of that nondescript feeling if your guts when you listen to it, then you're one of the lucky few with a very above-average hearing, and I'll consider myself one of the lucky few music lovers who have frugal technical needs.
That's classic snobbism from self-declared "audiophiles". The truth is, 99% of people won't be able to hear a difference between a well-encoded 128kbp MP3 and the original CD. Of the remaining 1%, 99% won't be able to tell the difference anymore if the MP3 is encoded at or above 256kbps. And that's even with top-of-the-line amplifiers and speakers. It's the same kind of people who claimed years ago that vinyls were so much better sounding than CDs, when the truth is that the dynamics and S/N ratio of a good vinyl will never match that of a bad CD, and the only difference between a vinyl and a CD is the audio on the vinyl is compressed.
Those who really can tell a difference whatever the encoding are golden ears used as sonar officers in nuclear submarines, and professional audio testers in their anechoic chambers working for Kenwood, Denon and the likes. Is the poster one of these people ? not bloody likely.
Oh dear, I hope it won't run Windows, people would fall into a coma every 2 days ...
into a small cylinder, put it in your mouth, light it up and watch your cigarette consumption drop. Sure beats nicorette.
1.) Please remove this article at once. It is a filthy assortment of random lies
Agreed, JonKatz is full of crap.
and is an embarrassment to the /. community and the reputation of this site.
"reputation" of /. ? :-)
2.) Please strongly consider firing Jon Katz for his lack of journalistic integrity. Better yet, decide via a Slashdot poll.
Naah, it won't work, they'll end up firing CowboyNeal.
3.) A major improvement to Slashcode would be a system by which readers can moderate the posting of articles on the main page.
That'd be pretty good, it'd be a useful tell-JonKatz-what-you-think feature, and it would help weed out inept AskSlashdots too.
If you replace <meta="keywords" content="mickey mouse"> by <meta="nonwords" content="bestiality mouse-fucking zoophilia kinky ....>, you might draw more Disney lovers and less perverts to your site, but I suspect your HTML file will grow quite a lot bigger ...
That link is already /.ed to death : how's that for spamming the messenger ?
So, is Apple going to go after the Photoshop or Gimp people ? that would really make them look like an ass ...
This is gonna be bad for business I tell you ...