Not to mention that by adding the "copy protection" to the CD (in the form of bad TOC entries and ECC noise) means that the CD in question does not comply with the CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) specification, so they can't call it a CD and can't use the little CDDA logo.
An electronic document delivery system and methods of its use are provided. A document, preferably in a portable format, is forwarded to a remote server (e.g. using HTTP to "push" the document to the server). The server sends a generic notification of the document to an intended recipient, and the recipient can download the document from the server using local protocols. In preferred embodiments, the invention is used for the controlled delivery of portable documents from a sender to a large number of recipients, using a network of servers that route the documents and notifications in a store and forward manner, while providing routing and accounting information back to the sender.
Let's see here... we're sending documents to people over a computer network using a store and forward protocol. SMTP, anyone? WTF?
SMTP + POP3 covers this in spades.
When is the patent office going to realize that this is getting WAAAAAAAAY out of control?
Exactly.... I can write 250,000 simicolons pretty fast, too.
Not to mention that anyone who thinks that writing an open implementation of.NET will damage Microsoft in any way is kidding themselves. And let's face facts here: what's good for Microsoft is bad for Linux. Period.
Why not spend your time improving the threading implementation on Linux, for one thing? Java on Linux is one thing that has a chance in hell of defeating the Microsoft juggernaut. Ever done thread programming in C or C++? It sucks ass -- try it in Java and you'll see how clean a language *can* be if you think it out. Sure, Java's got some problems -- GUIs for one thing are a tad slow (though not bad on fast machines), but on the server, Java is king.
Look at what.NET and C# want to be, and you'll see Java staring back at you. And Java's got a 5 year head-start on.NET. It's *real* and has a proven track record. Why devote any time to infectious vaporware from Microsoft...
Anyway, this whole thing seems like a colossal waste of time to me.
And yes, this CD is "copy protected" -- there's a sticker on the back that says this:
This audio CD is protected against
unauthorized copying. It is designed
to play in standard audio CD players
and in computers running a
Windows (R) Operating System, however,
playback problems may be experienced.
If you experience playback problems,
return this disc for a refund.
I just went out and bought a copy of this disc at lunch, and am running it through cdparanoia (cdparanoia III v 9.7) right now. So-far, I've copied tracks 1 and 2.
So-far, lots of "+" (Unreported loss of streaming/other error in read) and at least one "!" (Errors are getting through stage 1 but corrected in stage2) on each track, but other than that, the wav files sound just fine. I can't hear anything odd.
What a bunch of idiots. I think I'll write them a letter and enclose a CDR copy of the CD just to thumb my nose at them.
If I'm not mistaken, this kind of "copy protection" does its job by making the CD incompatible with the CD digital audio spec (messing with the error correction codes, etc).
If that's the case, and it still carries the little "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo, then they are violating their agreement with licensing that logo.
Like I said, though, I really *do* use vim, mc and ant. And that's it. jode if you need to do some decompiling, and everything is great under Linux.
It's been called "The Bronze Age IDE" by my colleagues, but it's fast and stable. Run a couple windows in each virtual desktop and you can edit 20 files at once easily. Vim has everything I want in an editor -- color syntax hilighting, auto-indenting, quickie macros, horizontal and vertical split, block copy and indent, etc. And ten million other little features.
No matter what IDE you use, ant is by far the best Java-based build system. Everyone should be using it.
-nate
MC, VIM and ANT -- mutha fuckas!
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 1
Just use "mc" for directories, "vim" to edit text files, and a shell to run "ant" in. Everything is golden.
Simple is better.
-nate
They should outlaw pencils and paper, too
on
EU May Outlaw Cookies
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I mean, I could write some personal infomation
on that paper and slip it under your mousepad.
Then, later, I could update that piece of paper
with new information.
What's good about this:
- Someone, somewhere is taking privacy
seriously.
What's bad about this:
- It demonstrates a fundamental lack of
understanding about the modern world.
Overall, I say it's good. They are *thinking*
about privacy, which is more than the US
Government is doing (aside from thinking about
The RIAA is acting exactly like a cornered animal that knows its time has come. Unfortinately, this cornered animal has enough money to buy more than a few congressmen and senators.
Someone really, really needs to get a clue over at the old patent office. This and so very many other idiotic patents have slipped through the US patent office in the last few years.
There's TONS of prior art on this. I worked on a product for Proxicom in 1997 that let you fill out a fancy wizardy thing that built websites from your web browser.
Everyone has mentioned FrontPage97, etc, etc, etc. This really is criminal -- when you do a patent search, you're supposed to DO A PATENT SEARCH, which also includes A SEARCH FOR PRIOR ART.
And the patent office should ALSO DO A PRIOR ART SEARCH. What the hell?
I've been encoding my CD collection with RC2 of the Ogg encoder for the last month or two.
I encode at 350K for home, where I'm far pickier about quality. The PC I use has a SoundBlaster Live card with a digital I/O card. A digital signal is sent from the sound card to a Rotel RSP-985 decoder, where I listen with either a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones or a pair of B&W 604s2 main speakers by way of a Rotel 5 channel THX theater amplifier. All cables from the amp to the speakers are alpha silver Synergistic Research cables, and the digital interconnects are Siltech. It's not from RadioShack, and is does make a difference.
I can't tell the difference between 350K Ogg files and CDs (which I can listen to through signals coming from either a Rotel CD player or a Sony S7700 DVD player, both of which use the Rotel decoder to decode the audio). The important point in mentioning all this is that the Rotel decoder is doing D->A decoding for either direct from CD listening or Ogg listening. Even with the Sennheiser headphones I can't tell the difference at 350K. Ogg sounds fantistic.
At work I use 160K streams, because my laptop doesn't have anywhere near the disk space I have at home. I can occationally hear artifacts at 160K, but it still sounds damn good. Much better (IMHO) than a 160K MP3 (encoded with LAME) -- probably about the same quality as a 256K MP3.
There's other things to consider when deciding between Ogg and MP3. Here's some of my reasons for going with Ogg rather than MP3:
Patent-free format. MP3 is weighed down with all kinds of patent issues, which is unfortunate. If this weren't the case, I don't think Ogg would have been invented.
Ogg doesn't use ID3. This is a good thing, as ID3 is a huge hack (ever look at the ID3 spec? Bah.). Labeling is built into the Ogg format and is a much better way for tagging than MP3.
Ogg files are exactly the same length as the WAV files off a CD, which is not the case for MP3. This is important it you're going to later burn CDs from those Ogg files and want to have CDDB lookups work every time.
Ogg files can be sliced up without the need to re-encode. See the "vcut" utility that comes with RC2. This is pretty damn slick.
Multiple channels. This isn't such a big deal for CDs, but later you can do multi-channel files, which you won't ever be able to do in MP3.
The only bad thing about Ogg is that it has (at this point) limited support in DJ mixing software -- the XMMS crossfade plugin and the DBMix stuff for Linux is about all you have right now. You can't mix Ogg files using (as far as I know) any Windows DJ software. Hopefully that'll change, especially given that there's Windows decoding plugins available for free.
So, there you go. That's my $0.02 on the subject. Bottom line is that Ogg is an excellent format for digital audio, and has many advantages over MP3. If you're deciding between MP3 and Ogg, you should go with Ogg.
Multiple Inheritance is a bad idea. I can't think of a single case where it's actually needed. The whole "amphibious vehicle" scenario is crap... it's not a boat and a car, it's a boat sometimes and a car other times.
Operator overloading is not necessary. It's syntactic sugar that causes problems. Method calls are better.
Templates are the 7th circle of hell, and to my knowledge, still are not implemented correctly.
First off... Java on the client is a dumb idea. HTML is way better.
Second, Java is a MUCH better langage than C++.
Third, Java on the server is the best thing since sliced bread. J2EE may sound like hype, but it *WORKS* -- which would you rather have? Microsoft dominating the world with C# and.NET, or Sun with Java... at least Java for the server RUNS on Linux, and Java (contrary to what some people say) really is pretty open, especially compared to the M$ stuff.... it'll be a cold day in hell when C# and.NET run on Linux.
I've been using SFNB (Security First Network Bank -- http://www.sfnb.com) since 1997, and they are really, really good.
No problems using the site from Netscape for Linux. They reimburse ATM charges, show JPEG images of cancelled checks, and answer support email very promptly. The only annoying thing is that they have no branches except for Atlanta, so if you want to make a deposit (other than direct dep. or wire transfer) you have to mail it, but that's hardly been a problem.
-nate
I seem to notice a trend with your critiques of other people's work on the net. We (I count myself as one of the workers since I build commerce sites for a living) spend our time building these great portals (Amazon.com IS a great portal, and they happen to sell books, etc, too) only to have people like you say things like "yeah, it's nice, but I wish you hadn't done X or Y" and we just say "well, don't look at X or Y if you don't like them"
Go away. If you want to buy books, the books chunk of Amazon.com is still a great site. If you want music and DVDs, they are also a great site. Their toys and electronics are still in need of some work (it's been live for what, 4 days? Give it a little time).
I don't know where you get off pissing on Amazon.com because you think they used to be some super-shiny nice place where everyone was happy, and now simply because they sell PokeMon toys they are the personification of evil. What a freak you are.
You really miss the mark here, methinks. You seem to think that Amazon.com is evil because they are trying to provide their already great service to a wider audience of people. What a crock.
What is Amazon.com known for? I'd say the following: Great selection (still lacking in the toys and electronics, but you can't just stock 8,000,000 toys and gizmos overnight), Great service (they STILL have the best service by far of any online store), and a fast site (I can't stand waiting for pages to display). They still provide those qualities in spades, but now I don't have to deal with some idiot just out of Junior High at Best Buy when I'm looking at DVD players.
You really need to get off your high horse on this one, man. Amazon.com is just trying to expand their immensely good site and service to a wider audience, in an attempt to not get blown out of business by the Sonys and Barnes & Nobles of the world.
HTTP 1.1 supports request pipelining, so that the browser could (conceivably) make one big request for everything on a page, and the server would then start sending data as soon as it can. This is similar (possibly the same?) as "keepalive"
I think it takes 3 packets to setup a TCP connection (correct me if I'm wrong), and since you don't have to open a new socket for each request, you can save quite a few packets.
Also, I'm not sure, but I think that with pipelining, the browser only needs to send the request headers once for all the requests in a given pieline. If this is true, it could significantly cut down on traffic.
It's nice to see that "governing bodies" in cyberspace suffer from the same problems as governing bodies in meatspace... particularly insane slowness.
"Unlike JSPs it's Open Source" ?? What are you talking about?
JSP is a spec, not a product, and furthermore, JavaSoft/Sun has formed an alliance with the Apache people so that the default JSP implementation will be available under the Apache license...
If you're going to go commercial, I would recomend WebLogic from BEA Systems (formerly called Tengah from WebLogic). See weblogic.beasys.com.
Their product is really very nice, but a little expensive (like $10K). If you're doing enterprise Java work, it's great though. It supports (or plans to support in the near future) all the "enterprise" java APIs and services.
I wrote the protomatter stuff, and so I'm pretty biased. PAS (Protomatter Application Server) is a good tool if you're doing simple data-driven site with servlets or JSPs.
It's really designed to only work with Apache JServ, but *should* work with pretty much any web server that supports servlets (it is a servlet itself).
It's main features are: - Full-featured JDBC connection pools - Simple JNDI implementation - Startup/Shutdown classes - Hierarchical event trees - Cron-like scheduling - Robust logging
If that's what you need, then use it. It doesn't support EJBs (and probably never will). It's been used on several production sites, and seems to be quite nice (IMHO;-)
One caveat is that there is exactly one developer for it: me. I've recently taken a new job where I travel about 99% of the time, so I may not have much time to devote to it in the future, but what's there works and works well.
It's also worth noting that the connection pools and logging system are both easily usable outside of PAS, so you could just use those packages in some other app server.
Anyway, it's just kinda cool to see my stuff show up on slashdot;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... but there's no way either plan is going to get anywhere.
-nate
Not to mention that by adding the "copy protection" to the CD (in the form of bad TOC entries and ECC noise) means that the CD in question does not comply with the CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) specification, so they can't call it a CD and can't use the little CDDA logo.
Let's see here... we're sending documents to people over a computer network using a store and forward protocol. SMTP, anyone? WTF?
SMTP + POP3 covers this in spades.
When is the patent office going to realize that this is getting WAAAAAAAAY out of control?
-nate
Exactly.... I can write 250,000 simicolons pretty fast, too.
.NET will damage Microsoft in any way is kidding themselves. And let's face facts here: what's good for Microsoft is bad for Linux. Period.
.NET and C# want to be, and you'll see Java staring back at you. And Java's got a 5 year head-start on .NET. It's *real* and has a proven track record. Why devote any time to infectious vaporware from Microsoft...
Not to mention that anyone who thinks that writing an open implementation of
Why not spend your time improving the threading implementation on Linux, for one thing? Java on Linux is one thing that has a chance in hell of defeating the Microsoft juggernaut. Ever done thread programming in C or C++? It sucks ass -- try it in Java and you'll see how clean a language *can* be if you think it out. Sure, Java's got some problems -- GUIs for one thing are a tad slow (though not bad on fast machines), but on the server, Java is king.
Look at what
Anyway, this whole thing seems like a colossal waste of time to me.
see ya,
-nate
And yes, this CD is "copy protected" -- there's a sticker on the back that says this:
This audio CD is protected against
unauthorized copying. It is designed
to play in standard audio CD players
and in computers running a
Windows (R) Operating System, however,
playback problems may be experienced.
If you experience playback problems,
return this disc for a refund.
-nate
I just went out and bought a copy of this disc at lunch, and am running it through cdparanoia (cdparanoia III v 9.7) right now. So-far, I've copied tracks 1 and 2.
So-far, lots of "+" (Unreported loss of streaming/other error in read) and at least one "!" (Errors are getting through stage 1 but corrected in stage2) on each track, but other than that, the wav files sound just fine. I can't hear anything odd.
What a bunch of idiots. I think I'll write them a letter and enclose a CDR copy of the CD just to thumb my nose at them.
bah,
-nate
If I'm not mistaken, this kind of "copy protection" does its job by making the CD incompatible with the CD digital audio spec (messing with the error correction codes, etc).
If that's the case, and it still carries the little "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo, then they are violating their agreement with licensing that logo.
Fucking bastards.
-nate
Ahhh, google wins again:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games
Lots of LOTR games! Apple II, C64, Atari 400 and ST, Amiga, Acorn, etc...
-nate
Like I said, though, I really *do* use vim, mc and ant. And that's it. jode if you need to do some decompiling, and everything is great under Linux.
It's been called "The Bronze Age IDE" by my colleagues, but it's fast and stable. Run a couple windows in each virtual desktop and you can edit 20 files at once easily. Vim has everything I want in an editor -- color syntax hilighting, auto-indenting, quickie macros, horizontal and vertical split, block copy and indent, etc. And ten million other little features.
No matter what IDE you use, ant is by far the best Java-based build system. Everyone should be using it.
-nate
Just use "mc" for directories, "vim" to edit text files, and a shell to run "ant" in. Everything is golden.
Simple is better.
-nate
I mean, I could write some personal infomation
on that paper and slip it under your mousepad.
Then, later, I could update that piece of paper
with new information.
What's good about this:
- Someone, somewhere is taking privacy
seriously.
What's bad about this:
- It demonstrates a fundamental lack of
understanding about the modern world.
Overall, I say it's good. They are *thinking*
about privacy, which is more than the US
Government is doing (aside from thinking about
how to get rid of privacy).
-nate
Argh, this would be far cooler if you could plug in new codecs, like, say, Ogg.
-nate
The RIAA is acting exactly like a cornered animal that knows its time has come. Unfortinately, this cornered animal has enough money to buy more than a few congressmen and senators.
*joy*
-nate
Someone really, really needs to get a clue over at the old patent office. This and so very many other idiotic patents have slipped through the US patent office in the last few years.
There's TONS of prior art on this. I worked on a product for Proxicom in 1997 that let you fill out a fancy wizardy thing that built websites from your web browser.
Everyone has mentioned FrontPage97, etc, etc, etc. This really is criminal -- when you do a patent search, you're supposed to DO A PATENT SEARCH, which also includes A SEARCH FOR PRIOR ART.
And the patent office should ALSO DO A PRIOR ART SEARCH. What the hell?
-nate
The Ogg encoder always does VBR.
I encode at 350K for home, where I'm far pickier about quality. The PC I use has a SoundBlaster Live card with a digital I/O card. A digital signal is sent from the sound card to a Rotel RSP-985 decoder, where I listen with either a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones or a pair of B&W 604s2 main speakers by way of a Rotel 5 channel THX theater amplifier. All cables from the amp to the speakers are alpha silver Synergistic Research cables, and the digital interconnects are Siltech. It's not from RadioShack, and is does make a difference.
I can't tell the difference between 350K Ogg files and CDs (which I can listen to through signals coming from either a Rotel CD player or a Sony S7700 DVD player, both of which use the Rotel decoder to decode the audio). The important point in mentioning all this is that the Rotel decoder is doing D->A decoding for either direct from CD listening or Ogg listening. Even with the Sennheiser headphones I can't tell the difference at 350K. Ogg sounds fantistic.
At work I use 160K streams, because my laptop doesn't have anywhere near the disk space I have at home. I can occationally hear artifacts at 160K, but it still sounds damn good. Much better (IMHO) than a 160K MP3 (encoded with LAME) -- probably about the same quality as a 256K MP3.
There's other things to consider when deciding between Ogg and MP3. Here's some of my reasons for going with Ogg rather than MP3:
- Patent-free format. MP3 is weighed down with all kinds of patent issues, which is unfortunate. If this weren't the case, I don't think Ogg would have been invented.
- Ogg doesn't use ID3. This is a good thing, as ID3 is a huge hack (ever look at the ID3 spec? Bah.). Labeling is built into the Ogg format and is a much better way for tagging than MP3.
- Ogg files are exactly the same length as the WAV files off a CD, which is not the case for MP3. This is important it you're going to later burn CDs from those Ogg files and want to have CDDB lookups work every time.
- Ogg files can be sliced up without the need to re-encode. See the "vcut" utility that comes with RC2. This is pretty damn slick.
- Multiple channels. This isn't such a big deal for CDs, but later you can do multi-channel files, which you won't ever be able to do in MP3.
The only bad thing about Ogg is that it has (at this point) limited support in DJ mixing software -- the XMMS crossfade plugin and the DBMix stuff for Linux is about all you have right now. You can't mix Ogg files using (as far as I know) any Windows DJ software. Hopefully that'll change, especially given that there's Windows decoding plugins available for free.So, there you go. That's my $0.02 on the subject. Bottom line is that Ogg is an excellent format for digital audio, and has many advantages over MP3. If you're deciding between MP3 and Ogg, you should go with Ogg.
see ya,
-nate
I stick with my statement...
Multiple Inheritance is a bad idea. I can't think of a single case where it's actually needed. The whole "amphibious vehicle" scenario is crap... it's not a boat and a car, it's a boat sometimes and a car other times.
Operator overloading is not necessary. It's syntactic sugar that causes problems. Method calls are better.
Templates are the 7th circle of hell, and to my knowledge, still are not implemented correctly.
-nate
First off... Java on the client is a dumb idea. HTML is way better.
Second, Java is a MUCH better langage than C++.
Third, Java on the server is the best thing since sliced bread. J2EE may sound like hype, but it *WORKS* -- which would you rather have? Microsoft dominating the world with C# and
so there
-nate
I've been using SFNB (Security First Network Bank -- http://www.sfnb.com) since 1997, and they are really, really good. No problems using the site from Netscape for Linux. They reimburse ATM charges, show JPEG images of cancelled checks, and answer support email very promptly. The only annoying thing is that they have no branches except for Atlanta, so if you want to make a deposit (other than direct dep. or wire transfer) you have to mail it, but that's hardly been a problem. -nate
Wow, you really got me going on this one, Jon.
I seem to notice a trend with your critiques of other people's work on the net. We (I count myself as one of the workers since I build commerce sites for a living) spend our time building these great portals (Amazon.com IS a great portal, and they happen to sell books, etc, too) only to have people like you say things like "yeah, it's nice, but I wish you hadn't done X or Y" and we just say "well, don't look at X or Y if you don't like them"
Go away. If you want to buy books, the books chunk of Amazon.com is still a great site. If you want music and DVDs, they are also a great site. Their toys and electronics are still in need of some work (it's been live for what, 4 days? Give it a little time).
I don't know where you get off pissing on Amazon.com because you think they used to be some super-shiny nice place where everyone was happy, and now simply because they sell PokeMon toys they are the personification of evil. What a freak you are.
bah,
-nate
Jon,
You really miss the mark here, methinks. You seem to think that Amazon.com is evil because they are trying to provide their already great service to a wider audience of people. What a crock.
What is Amazon.com known for? I'd say the following: Great selection (still lacking in the toys and electronics, but you can't just stock 8,000,000 toys and gizmos overnight), Great service (they STILL have the best service by far of any online store), and a fast site (I can't stand waiting for pages to display). They still provide those qualities in spades, but now I don't have to deal with some idiot just out of Junior High at Best Buy when I'm looking at DVD players.
You really need to get off your high horse on this one, man. Amazon.com is just trying to expand their immensely good site and service to a wider audience, in an attempt to not get blown out of business by the Sonys and Barnes & Nobles of the world.
see ya,
-nate
HTTP 1.1 supports request pipelining, so that the browser could (conceivably) make one big request for everything on a page, and the server would then start sending data as soon as it can. This is similar (possibly the same?) as "keepalive"
I think it takes 3 packets to setup a TCP connection (correct me if I'm wrong), and since you don't have to open a new socket for each request, you can save quite a few packets.
Also, I'm not sure, but I think that with pipelining, the browser only needs to send the request headers once for all the requests in a given pieline. If this is true, it could significantly cut down on traffic.
It's nice to see that "governing bodies" in cyberspace suffer from the same problems as governing bodies in meatspace... particularly insane slowness.
-nate
"Unlike JSPs it's Open Source" ?? What are you talking about?
JSP is a spec, not a product, and furthermore, JavaSoft/Sun has formed an alliance with the Apache people so that the default JSP implementation will be available under the Apache license...
-nate
Their product is really very nice, but a little expensive (like $10K). If you're doing enterprise Java work, it's great though. It supports (or plans to support in the near future) all the "enterprise" java APIs and services.
-nate
Hey,
;-)
;-)
I wrote the protomatter stuff, and so I'm pretty biased. PAS (Protomatter Application Server) is a good tool if you're doing simple data-driven site with servlets or JSPs.
It's really designed to only work with Apache JServ, but *should* work with pretty much any web server that supports servlets (it is a servlet itself).
It's main features are:
- Full-featured JDBC connection pools
- Simple JNDI implementation
- Startup/Shutdown classes
- Hierarchical event trees
- Cron-like scheduling
- Robust logging
If that's what you need, then use it. It doesn't support EJBs (and probably never will). It's been used on several production sites, and seems to be quite nice (IMHO
One caveat is that there is exactly one developer for it: me. I've recently taken a new job where I travel about 99% of the time, so I may not have much time to devote to it in the future, but what's there works and works well.
It's also worth noting that the connection pools and logging system are both easily usable outside of PAS, so you could just use those packages in some other app server.
Anyway, it's just kinda cool to see my stuff show up on slashdot
see ya,
-nate