Now if only Quicktime could play in full-screen.:-)
It does! "Present Movie" (Ctrl + m on PC / Apple + m on Mac.) Choose "full screen" when the popup comes up. Ta da. Looks better than either Real or WinMedia.
There ya go.
ad
Re:This arguement needs to be put to rest
on
Apple Wants Your Input
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I say this argument *shouldn't* be put to rest for the simple reason that over the years I've been using macs (since 1985), I've seen them become more and more unstable with each subsequent hardware and OS release. When I bought an iMac DV almost two years ago it crashed on the very first startup. Out of the box. Then it would randomly crash while starting the most basic of applications. I was told by their so-called world class tech support personnel that this was an issue with the logic board on the iMac and that it was an extremely common problem. That's unacceptable. So I got that replaced: same problem. What it turned out to be was OS 9.0. When I paid the extra $199 to upgrade to 9.1 (since that was my only option, and that's Canadian $,) the startup crashes stopped but the random application crashes have not.
This has become more and more common with macs and frankly has caused me to turn 99% pc / windows / linux / what have ya. I am not the only one with these problems. When I add into that the fact that there hasn't been a port of HalfLife *ever*, nor the simultaneous release of things like sftp clients, ssh clients (that work, reliably), web browsers that don't take minutes at a time to launch or eat up most of my CPU, etc. why on earth would I ever stick with a mac again? Personally I prefer photoshop on a pc now. It kicks ass! It runs faster as far as I can tell (similar cpu speeds, more ram on the PC side.)
So I say: argue away. I agree that their product designs look great. Their core functionality though - OSX aside - leaves a ton to be desired.
The Japanese already have celphones which can take and send photos on this resolution. The idea here is not "print quality" images, it's fast, instantly portable, disposable snapshots which you can send right away to another cel user.
Just a thing I think a lot of north americans never keep in mind about the Japanese. There are reasons for low res images. If they make the feature low-res: there's very likely a reason for it.
On the other hand, their as yet not released in America next generation MD system appears to have a copy protection sensor of some sort. Anybody know anything about that, and is it a *bad thing*?
This would be what's called the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) which is built into all Sony digital recording products. It was put there to enforce the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
- I can digitally record something for personal use. - I cannot make another digital copy of that recording I just made. It stops with one recording (and disallows further digital copies.)
But really: how does that stop piracy? If I have a CD and a burner - something which was never termed a "recording device" in the first place - I can make one digital copy, and then fifty more, or thousands more, if I have no life and never leave my house.:)
If I form a band tomorrow and we decide to do our own versions of other people's songs in a *LIVE* setting, no problemo. If the ticket price is more than $8.00, the artists who wrote the songs automatically get royalties from our nifty performance. (Performance royalties.)
If we decide to make a recording of our versions of those songs - assuming these are serious "interpretations" of the artists' work - we do in fact have to get permission from each and every artist before doing so, but we don't have to pay a royalty fee, that is again covered by performance rights. (Since it's our performance of their work.)
If we decide to do a cover version which involves a sample of the artists' work, we need to get the artists' permission for both the recording of the song, the sample of the original work, and the nature of the sample's usage, *and* we have to pay for the sample use. Songwriter gets performance royalty automatically.
If, however, we decide to do parody versions - kinda like that political guy on PBS who's unbelievably lame, where he twists lyrics to his own topical means - we don't have to get permission, we don't have to pay for it, and we don't owe anyone royalties. This is because this particular case is the real reason that "fair use" came about. Parody. Make fun of. Etc.
Weird Al *is* a parody artist because he writes his own (jokey) lyrics and uses well-known music as the backdrop. He legally has no need to ask permission, except that the industry is such that it's just good practice to do so.
There's this thing called "Talent" and another thing called "consumer demand" which you might want to look into.
Just because somebody owns a great mixing / recording setup doesn't mean they have the first clue how to mix a single so that a radio station will play it. In fact most radio stations have very specific criteria for the exact type of mix they want, to keep the "flow" of their music programming going. (I'm not just talking about Pop radio either.)
Just because somebody gives their music away does not mean they are wildly talented or that the people who get that free music are suddenly going to go home and have this become their very favorite piece of music in the entire world. That is not how the world works. When was the last time you played a CD from a new / unknown artist which you received for free? How often do you play it? How successful has that band become?
The reason copyright exists is so that if you one day write a song which could become a million seller, you actually get paid for at least some portion of that million copies which was sold. That means you are able to continue to do whatever it is you do whether that means writing hit songs or working in a garage somewhere. One of the co-writers of Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True" still works at the same gas station to this day. He made millions but didn't turn it into a career. But the point is: some people who write music, for some of them that's all they can do to make a living. When you think of it that way: you really do need some form of copyright. Whether the existing system is appropriate or not in light of digital distribution is the real question.
"MusicNet did not suddenly appear full blown from the head of a fictitious entity."
I think that's actually semi-wrong: it *did* appear - suddenly to the consumer but far from suddenly to those in the industry who could stay awake enough to notice - from a consortium of huge monopolistic corporations who had been attempting to find a way to come up with a "legal" file sharing system in light of their creation of the DMCA. (Digital Millennium Copyright Act.) That and the Secure Music Digital Initiative (SDMI.) These sat around for months constantly being hailed by one suit or another from the industry as the "shining future" of music distribution. When MP3.com came along, they were a super easy target to go after, largely because the owner was so vocal about MP3's as the new standard for music delivery. And the thing is: he was right. But the labels / RIAA kept pooh-poohing him and others like him, saying that MP3 would fall by the wayside. They spent in the tens of millions of dollars building something like MusicNet and PressPlay, and initially they were competing technologies. Now they are pretty homogenous.
I noted a comment above that this is unimportant, because napster is dead, etc. Sort of like saying that murder is unimportant because the victim is dead and you can't bring the victim back.
Very true.
Am I the only one who can see a direct relationship between this and Columbia House / BMG Music Club? Those have been around for years and they should have been the model for what should have been a very natural assimilation of Napster. Only Napster was a much better service. In the current situation we're back to what consumers *didn't* want: lack of choice. The best thing about Napster is that I'd look for a song by an artist, and find numerous live versions or remixes of that song which I never even knew existed. How cool was that?! Do you think PressPlay or MusicNet will deliver those kinds of features? Think again.
Well see: the irony of this whole thing is that the RIAA was originally created as an organizing force so that the recording industry could remain stable and organized in the face of things like bootlegging, illegal pirate broadcasting, and proper representation of labels and their artists once they got bigger than a few dozen artists on one roster. The fact that it still exists today is laughable in the first place. The average age of most RIAA lobbyists and members who actually are a force of change is around 55 years. How many 55 year olds do you know that understand how quickly things can change from Napster to Morpheus? I don't know anyone that age who even knows what Morpheus *is*.
It sucks that this "old boy's club" is still seen as a real power in the industry. I say: bring on the new copyright era, if there is one. That or just do away with it. Find another way to make money for your art.
> It is not "legal" to make a copy of a copyrighted work-- be
> it analog music, digital music, a book, whatever-- "for a
> friend." I don't know where this myth got started (Audio
> Home Recording Act, maybe?), but it's wrong.
Yes, the home recording act. However, of course, everyone misquotes it. I will direct folks to the following URL which has a transcription of the entire act. (You can also find the entire act at the library of congress or the RIAA site)
The gist of it is this: It is okay to make a single copy of any recording for a friend / other person as long as that copy is what's called a "serial" copy, meaning that the new copy is not also copyable. The problem here is that the recording industry and their lawyers, when they came up with this law (1976) were referring to the likes of LP's and Cassettes so they put in all this lingo referring to digital recording methods.
And yet the computer industry, when they created CD-RW drives, were not asked to make any of the drive's capabilities "serially" compatible.
To date the only "serial" copy method which even exists in the public domain is the MiniDisc. Yeah. Exactly. What kinda percentage of the industry uses that to stay legal?
The Recording industry can come up with as many laws as they like: the fundamental flaw is and has always been the CD format. This is why only now we're seeing "uncopyable" CD's. How long does anyone expect that to remain unhacked?
> Note that there was no reason to use XML in the first place, other than some designers wanted to put it on their resumes. I kid you not.
This is honestly what I consider the majority of XML "developers" to be doing. It also doesn't help that many clients throw around the term "XML" as often as most people throw around the term "breakfast." They often just assume that since it's new, it must be something they absolutely must have. Drives me nuts.
> Producers often incorrectly mastered early CDs using recordings that had equalization adjustments for LPs.
You have hit the nail on the head.
If you listen to something recent - I don't care what it is, Destiny's Child, Nine Inch Nails, what have ya - check out the extreme deep bass that emanates from it. Try listening to it with your eq / tone controls flat on any stereo. Then play something from the 70's. The reality is: current mastering techniques for CD's produce *far* deeper bass than anything that regular analogue can produce. In fact most new hip-hip artists use bass so low that it has to be re-re-mastered for any vinyl pressing. In fact if you just threw that master to vinyl "as-is" you'd have a record that skipped like crazy.
I know many mastering engineers who used to feel the way a lot of people seem to feel on this discussion regarding vinyl, but they all agreed that the current leaps in recording technology and new recording and mastering techniques made all of those arguments obsolete.
The new thing these days is to master for club output (as opposed to home / portable / car stereos.) Means a whoe re-examination of the bass spectrum.
Count me in as one who is buying PS2 strictly for MGS2. However - MGS2 is also being ported to X-Box, which also is the only reason I'm at all interested in that.
Of course: I live in Canada. So all these prices being proposed? Practically double up here. A PS 2console is currently $599.99 at some places here. Rarely lower than that. So X-Box is officially a "luxury" item at $299 US (which converts to at least $699 by that math (it's not straight currency conversion)
Anyway. Still exciting. The only thing that makes me want to try GameCube is the X-Wing fighter demos. Holy.
- Your CD-ROM drive reads the catalogue number of the CD.
- If your computer is net-connected and has player software which can talk to CDDB, it looks up the catalog number for the CD.
- If an entry is there: it names all the songs for this playing session of the disc. It does this each and every time the disk is reloaded in your computer.
- If you rip a CD, it applies those names to the MP3 files it creates.
That's it. It doesn't send any info to CDDB / Gracenote about who you are and when you played / ripped a CD. It just uses flat text across a network to name files temporarily and save you the hassle. If you want to go back and re-tag all the MP3's you make with the artist name of "Ronald Reagan", you can do that. Same goes for naming your actual filenames. I know of many people who, when Metallica first piped up about all this, took everything by John Denver and named them with Metallica song titles. Loads of people started hunting for the new Metallica single at that time and I know of several who ended up with John Denver songs instead. So it's virtually meaningless for Napster / Gracenote to have an association.
That's just my $0.02.
Thanx for indulging me.
ad
P.S. Not like I need to say it but this also means that the current injunction against Napster is also pretty worthless. If I can post everything by Limp Bizkit with filenames like "1.mp3", "2.mp3", etc., then that gets around their current "blocking" of songs / artists. Now you know.
I can only wonder how many times 20-odd movies will last among a small group wihout someone getting annoyed by having to see the same one twice.:) It's not like they can just go get another.
Interesting concept though. I love that we're so far past the point of space occupancy being so foreign. I wonder how long before they ask for a DirecTV subscription...
ad
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only Quicktime could play in full-screen. :-)
It does! "Present Movie" (Ctrl + m on PC / Apple + m on Mac.) Choose "full screen" when the popup comes up. Ta da. Looks better than either Real or WinMedia.
There ya go.
ad
I say this argument *shouldn't* be put to rest for the simple reason that over the years I've been using macs (since 1985), I've seen them become more and more unstable with each subsequent hardware and OS release. When I bought an iMac DV almost two years ago it crashed on the very first startup. Out of the box. Then it would randomly crash while starting the most basic of applications. I was told by their so-called world class tech support personnel that this was an issue with the logic board on the iMac and that it was an extremely common problem. That's unacceptable. So I got that replaced: same problem. What it turned out to be was OS 9.0. When I paid the extra $199 to upgrade to 9.1 (since that was my only option, and that's Canadian $,) the startup crashes stopped but the random application crashes have not.
This has become more and more common with macs and frankly has caused me to turn 99% pc / windows / linux / what have ya. I am not the only one with these problems. When I add into that the fact that there hasn't been a port of HalfLife *ever*, nor the simultaneous release of things like sftp clients, ssh clients (that work, reliably), web browsers that don't take minutes at a time to launch or eat up most of my CPU, etc. why on earth would I ever stick with a mac again? Personally I prefer photoshop on a pc now. It kicks ass! It runs faster as far as I can tell (similar cpu speeds, more ram on the PC side.)
So I say: argue away. I agree that their product designs look great. Their core functionality though - OSX aside - leaves a ton to be desired.
ad
Keep this in mind though:
The Japanese already have celphones which can take and send photos on this resolution. The idea here is not "print quality" images, it's fast, instantly portable, disposable snapshots which you can send right away to another cel user.
Just a thing I think a lot of north americans never keep in mind about the Japanese. There are reasons for low res images. If they make the feature low-res: there's very likely a reason for it.
and the "Chinese" did not exist when mongoloid (proper usage) nomads crossed the bearing striats.
Actually: "mongoloid" means "resembling a mongol."
Proper usage would actually be "Mongol" (capitalized.) Mongoloid is merely the physical resemblance.
And it's "Bering Straits". Yeesh.
$0.02
On the other hand, their as yet not
:)
released in America next generation MD system appears to have a copy
protection sensor of some sort. Anybody know anything about that, and
is it a *bad thing*?
This would be what's called the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) which is built into all Sony digital recording products. It was put there to enforce the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
- I can digitally record something for personal use.
- I cannot make another digital copy of that recording I just made. It stops with one recording (and disallows further digital copies.)
But really: how does that stop piracy? If I have a CD and a burner - something which was never termed a "recording device" in the first place - I can make one digital copy, and then fifty more, or thousands more, if I have no life and never leave my house.
This is where copyright law gets sticky.
If I form a band tomorrow and we decide to do our own versions of other people's songs in a *LIVE* setting, no problemo. If the ticket price is more than $8.00, the artists who wrote the songs automatically get royalties from our nifty performance. (Performance royalties.)
If we decide to make a recording of our versions of those songs - assuming these are serious "interpretations" of the artists' work - we do in fact have to get permission from each and every artist before doing so, but we don't have to pay a royalty fee, that is again covered by performance rights. (Since it's our performance of their work.)
If we decide to do a cover version which involves a sample of the artists' work, we need to get the artists' permission for both the recording of the song, the sample of the original work, and the nature of the sample's usage, *and* we have to pay for the sample use. Songwriter gets performance royalty automatically.
If, however, we decide to do parody versions - kinda like that political guy on PBS who's unbelievably lame, where he twists lyrics to his own topical means - we don't have to get permission, we don't have to pay for it, and we don't owe anyone royalties. This is because this particular case is the real reason that "fair use" came about. Parody. Make fun of. Etc.
Weird Al *is* a parody artist because he writes his own (jokey) lyrics and uses well-known music as the backdrop. He legally has no need to ask permission, except that the industry is such that it's just good practice to do so.
$2 (CDN, which is almost $0.02US)
There's this thing called "Talent" and another thing called "consumer demand" which you might want to look into.
Just because somebody owns a great mixing / recording setup doesn't mean they have the first clue how to mix a single so that a radio station will play it. In fact most radio stations have very specific criteria for the exact type of mix they want, to keep the "flow" of their music programming going. (I'm not just talking about Pop radio either.)
Just because somebody gives their music away does not mean they are wildly talented or that the people who get that free music are suddenly going to go home and have this become their very favorite piece of music in the entire world. That is not how the world works. When was the last time you played a CD from a new / unknown artist which you received for free? How often do you play it? How successful has that band become?
The reason copyright exists is so that if you one day write a song which could become a million seller, you actually get paid for at least some portion of that million copies which was sold. That means you are able to continue to do whatever it is you do whether that means writing hit songs or working in a garage somewhere. One of the co-writers of Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True" still works at the same gas station to this day. He made millions but didn't turn it into a career. But the point is: some people who write music, for some of them that's all they can do to make a living. When you think of it that way: you really do need some form of copyright. Whether the existing system is appropriate or not in light of digital distribution is the real question.
"MusicNet did not suddenly appear full blown from the head of a fictitious entity."
I think that's actually semi-wrong: it *did* appear - suddenly to the consumer but far from suddenly to those in the industry who could stay awake enough to notice - from a consortium of huge monopolistic corporations who had been attempting to find a way to come up with a "legal" file sharing system in light of their creation of the DMCA. (Digital Millennium Copyright Act.) That and the Secure Music Digital Initiative (SDMI.) These sat around for months constantly being hailed by one suit or another from the industry as the "shining future" of music distribution. When MP3.com came along, they were a super easy target to go after, largely because the owner was so vocal about MP3's as the new standard for music delivery. And the thing is: he was right. But the labels / RIAA kept pooh-poohing him and others like him, saying that MP3 would fall by the wayside. They spent in the tens of millions of dollars building something like MusicNet and PressPlay, and initially they were competing technologies. Now they are pretty homogenous.
I noted a comment above that this is unimportant, because napster is dead, etc. Sort of like saying that murder is unimportant because the victim is dead and you can't bring the victim back.
Very true.
Am I the only one who can see a direct relationship between this and Columbia House / BMG Music Club? Those have been around for years and they should have been the model for what should have been a very natural assimilation of Napster. Only Napster was a much better service. In the current situation we're back to what consumers *didn't* want: lack of choice. The best thing about Napster is that I'd look for a song by an artist, and find numerous live versions or remixes of that song which I never even knew existed. How cool was that?! Do you think PressPlay or MusicNet will deliver those kinds of features? Think again.
Well see: the irony of this whole thing is that the RIAA was originally created as an organizing force so that the recording industry could remain stable and organized in the face of things like bootlegging, illegal pirate broadcasting, and proper representation of labels and their artists once they got bigger than a few dozen artists on one roster. The fact that it still exists today is laughable in the first place. The average age of most RIAA lobbyists and members who actually are a force of change is around 55 years. How many 55 year olds do you know that understand how quickly things can change from Napster to Morpheus? I don't know anyone that age who even knows what Morpheus *is*.
It sucks that this "old boy's club" is still seen as a real power in the industry. I say: bring on the new copyright era, if there is one. That or just do away with it. Find another way to make money for your art.
> It is not "legal" to make a copy of a copyrighted work-- be
> it analog music, digital music, a book, whatever-- "for a
> friend." I don't know where this myth got started (Audio
> Home Recording Act, maybe?), but it's wrong.
Yes, the home recording act. However, of course, everyone misquotes it. I will direct folks to the following URL which has a transcription of the entire act. (You can also find the entire act at the library of congress or the RIAA site)
The gist of it is this: It is okay to make a single copy of any recording for a friend / other person as long as that copy is what's called a "serial" copy, meaning that the new copy is not also copyable. The problem here is that the recording industry and their lawyers, when they came up with this law (1976) were referring to the likes of LP's and Cassettes so they put in all this lingo referring to digital recording methods.
And yet the computer industry, when they created CD-RW drives, were not asked to make any of the drive's capabilities "serially" compatible.
To date the only "serial" copy method which even exists in the public domain is the MiniDisc. Yeah. Exactly. What kinda percentage of the industry uses that to stay legal?
The Recording industry can come up with as many laws as they like: the fundamental flaw is and has always been the CD format. This is why only now we're seeing "uncopyable" CD's. How long does anyone expect that to remain unhacked?
$0.02
> Note that there was no reason to use XML in the first place, other than some designers wanted to put it on their resumes. I kid you not.
This is honestly what I consider the majority of XML "developers" to be doing. It also doesn't help that many clients throw around the term "XML" as often as most people throw around the term "breakfast." They often just assume that since it's new, it must be something they absolutely must have. Drives me nuts.
</rant>
> Producers often incorrectly mastered early CDs using recordings that had equalization adjustments for LPs.
You have hit the nail on the head.
If you listen to something recent - I don't care what it is, Destiny's Child, Nine Inch Nails, what have ya - check out the extreme deep bass that emanates from it. Try listening to it with your eq / tone controls flat on any stereo. Then play something from the 70's. The reality is: current mastering techniques for CD's produce *far* deeper bass than anything that regular analogue can produce. In fact most new hip-hip artists use bass so low that it has to be re-re-mastered for any vinyl pressing. In fact if you just threw that master to vinyl "as-is" you'd have a record that skipped like crazy.
I know many mastering engineers who used to feel the way a lot of people seem to feel on this discussion regarding vinyl, but they all agreed that the current leaps in recording technology and new recording and mastering techniques made all of those arguments obsolete.
The new thing these days is to master for club output (as opposed to home / portable / car stereos.) Means a whoe re-examination of the bass spectrum.
$0.02 (canadian)
ad
Count me in as one who is buying PS2 strictly for MGS2. However - MGS2 is also being ported to X-Box, which also is the only reason I'm at all interested in that.
Of course: I live in Canada. So all these prices being proposed? Practically double up here. A PS 2console is currently $599.99 at some places here. Rarely lower than that. So X-Box is officially a "luxury" item at $299 US (which converts to at least $699 by that math (it's not straight currency conversion)
Anyway. Still exciting. The only thing that makes me want to try GameCube is the X-Wing fighter demos. Holy.
Here's what CDDB does:
- Your CD-ROM drive reads the catalogue number of the CD.
- If your computer is net-connected and has player software which can talk to CDDB, it looks up the catalog number for the CD.
- If an entry is there: it names all the songs for this playing session of the disc. It does this each and every time the disk is reloaded in your computer.
- If you rip a CD, it applies those names to the MP3 files it creates.
That's it. It doesn't send any info to CDDB / Gracenote about who you are and when you played / ripped a CD. It just uses flat text across a network to name files temporarily and save you the hassle. If you want to go back and re-tag all the MP3's you make with the artist name of "Ronald Reagan", you can do that. Same goes for naming your actual filenames. I know of many people who, when Metallica first piped up about all this, took everything by John Denver and named them with Metallica song titles. Loads of people started hunting for the new Metallica single at that time and I know of several who ended up with John Denver songs instead. So it's virtually meaningless for Napster / Gracenote to have an association.
That's just my $0.02.
Thanx for indulging me.
ad
P.S. Not like I need to say it but this also means that the current injunction against Napster is also pretty worthless. If I can post everything by Limp Bizkit with filenames like "1.mp3", "2.mp3", etc., then that gets around their current "blocking" of songs / artists. Now you know.
I can only wonder how many times 20-odd movies will last among a small group wihout someone getting annoyed by having to see the same one twice. :) It's not like they can just go get another.
Interesting concept though. I love that we're so far past the point of space occupancy being so foreign. I wonder how long before they ask for a DirecTV subscription...
ad