"Iffy connection on the bay plug that was sending interference down the wire?"
Maybe. I know it was connected securely. What I don't know is if that can be the cause of a corrupt MBR.
It caused the BIOS to detect a 'Maxtor 5040TH" (not completely sure about the model#) as an 'Ixter 53HtH' and a 'Pioneer 106S' as something similarly garbled.
"The ONLY reason being that my poor ears AND my small compact flash cards think that 64K.wma files sound and fit better than.mp3's at 64K. Now I would love to try out OGG but my computer is still a little heavy to pick up and take jogging..."
You should be listening to ogg as your primary format and then transcoding to wma when transferring to your mp3 player. This is what I do... the Nomad II MG in my bag (yep, the original MG) is full of 80 kbit wma files.
Of course when players support OGG once and for all, we will be able to have high bitrate OGG on our hard drives and then use bitrate peeling to create still-excellent-sounding low bitrate OGGs to carry around with us.
"If I want to convert them into MP3's and cram them into an ipod or just have a couple of thousand songs randomly playing while I work on the computer, surely I don't have to pay for that song again just because I want a different media format."
Of course you are correct, but the music industry would beg to differ.
They have 1 ultimate goal in all this: They want to make us pay a fee every single time we play any 'licensed' (not bought, but licensed) content.
The intermediate step is that they want us to buy a copy of the CD for the car, one for at work, one for at home, etc. Once we are used to buying multiple copies, they will then try to make our lives 'easier' by offering some sort of 'pay for play' system where you just license the music/video/holorecording/etc and then money goes from your bank account to theirs whenever you hit play.
This implies, of course, that all the content that you access has to be linked to your ID on whatever system they use, plus your bank/CC payment information and your address, so they can profile you very easily and send you marketing pablum every day. Nice.
"Add into this that much of media innovation and format decisions are apparently driven by the porn production industry, and the reason for media without a tether to home base becomes more clear."
Some other factors included that Divx the players cost more than regular DVD players because they had to have a modem included, plus the 'pay for play' concept for something you physically buy was none-too-appealing.
"I was under the impression there was a newer format that was completely free, but also provided consistently better quality than both WMA and MP3."
Yes, and it is called Ogg Vorbis. It scares the sh~t out of the industry because it has no DRM and no legal restraints. The sound quality in the 1.0 release is amazing, especially at low bitrates.
"Although it is very likely that they would embed some sort of identification info on all CDs burned."
To avoid any chance of this (except per-track water marking) I never do a straight disc-to-disc copy.(*) I always rip the tracks to.wav and make a new compilation.
(*)This copy, of course, would be so I can play the CD in the car and keep the legitimately purchased original at home on the shelf.
I think that what's been proved now is that the United States Patent Office is 100% broken and needs a complete overhaul. There have been too many stupid and overly obvious patents that they have granted in the past couple of years and they have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they do not have the slightest clue about technology.
No, I had been using that cable for months before and months after and nothing bad happenned until I got that bay. Furthermore, I had corruption on more than one occasion, every time after I had played with that bay. As soon as I ditched it and went back to my old bay, everything was nice and cozy again and my DVD drive worked properly.
"It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music. The death of napster doesn't help."
A solution to this is to engage in online voice chat. My brother, who on the outside looks like one of the dryest, most boring people in the world actually got hooked on metal and especially Dreams of Sanity + Iron Maiden because of stuff he heard while using voice chat. But you'd never guess it by looking at him.
"While I feel somewhat* sorry for the person that lost all their music files, at least they (presumably) didn't pay for them, so really it's just an inconvenience to re-copy their cd's to their hard drive."
It's more than an inconvenience. I unexpectedly had some strange FAT corruption on my 'media storage drive' when I was playing around with a removable HDD drive bay. (The DVD-ROM on the same IDE channel was affected too... it was strange.) I had to re-rip almost my entire collection and because I had also lost my batch files to control oggenc.exe and do all the naming/tagging of files too, it turned out to be a major exercise in patience. (Of course now I have all that stuff properly saved to CD-Rw.) Even today, more than 2 months later, there are some CDs I have to re-rip.
Losing your mp3/ogg music collection, even when you have all the CDs, is NOT just an inconvenience. It is a very time consuming disaster.
"The RIAA can't be happy with how easy it is to 'mix, rip, burn.'"
I'm sure that they aren't, however 'rip' does imply the presence of a CD to begin with, so it's not suggested that you 'download, mix, burn' . Of course, I expect that plenty of iTunes users do this.
"Microsoft is not at fault for "harvesting" talent from the university systems around the world. The fact is: they do a better job at it than any other company, hands down."
I didn't say that they were at fault. As far as I can tell, this is a perfectly legitimate practice whose goal is to hire the employees which would, in the long run, give the most benefit to the company's stock value.
It's already Bill's waterloo, and has been for years. MSFT has, for a long time, harvested the top CS and ENGG people from waterloo to work for them. This is a 'formalisation' of that relationship which has existed for a long time. It's pretty common knowledge when you get to the end of high school in Ontario, if you're a computers/engineering type person (like I was) that this is the case. All your upper CS/physical science teachers know about it through their former students who went to UW.
One guy from my school who was almost graduated from Waterloo CS at the time I was almost graduated from high school was offered something like US$60k + US$10k stock options and a whole whackload of benefits by MSFT.
"You have a problem with this? Don't attend. Go to another school that doesn't require this. There are plenty that will do that."
Microsoft picked a good timing schedule for announcing this. The university admissions/offers cycle has just ended, so you can't easily rescind your acceptance of their offer of admission and switch to another university that also sent you an offer.
The way it works in Ontario, Canada is that the central university admissions group, the OUAC manages all admissions requests and communicates between the high schools and universities. If a university sends you an offer of admission, you reply to the OUAC before a deadline which is common among all universities. If you get another offer you like more (maybe with better scholarship $$) you send that one to the OUAC and it overrides the previous one. This is all nice and good as long as it is done before the deadline.
This deadline has already passed - I think it was about a month ago, so if someone got into Comp.Eng at Waterloo, they may just be kicking themselves now. (Note: I am not in this batch of applicants... I have been in a well respected Engineering program at a well respected Ontario University for some years now. My Engineering Faculty actually did a formal survey of all students regarding this very subject last year because a situation like this with an unnamed but controversial corporation has arisen.) I think the timing of the announcement shows that MSFT knows that there will be opposition for this among students, thus they announce it now when it's too late to change your mind.
One other thing to note is that not all universities send their offers of admission around the same time. For example, I got my offer from UofT a couple of months before the dealine, but Waterloo's came 2 days before. Waterloo doesn't give you much time to decide. Furthermore, they give priority to a very small number of students with elite marks. This one person I knew in high school who was an uber-intellect got her waterloo admission even before I got mine from UofT. (Note: The 'elite' mark status depends on the University. Waterloo's threshold is very, VERY high, somewhere above 96%. I believe I had 'elite mark status' from UofT with my 90+% average, thus getting me an early acceptance from them.)
Note: I am not nor was I ever a student of the University of Waterloo or the University of Toronto. I chose to accept at another University.
"If you look over the article, you will see that it specifically refers to E&CE which is in the Faculty of Engineering, unless things have changed drastically since I last set foot there. Computer Science still falls under the Faculty of Math, so the announcement doesn't seem to apply there."
Yes, CS still falls under math at waterloo. I am not a student there but I could have been -- I did get Engineering acceptance back when I was applying to universities. Alas, it was too expensive.
"It's starting a mini-cottage industry of small booksellers that don't care about the license and will buy and sell the used book no matter what, as opposed to the large campus store that needs to comply with the bookseller's corporate "licensing" terms."
I have tried dealing with these guys. They only gave me about ~10% of what I paid for the new book. I can easily get up to 90% of what I paid or even more that 100% if I bought the book used when you sell directly to other students.
I think that what's described in your post is the natural action of the market. The problem is the governments are 'stepping in' and are being paid (bribed) by the big companies to make stupid laws to prop up the corrupt business model. This seems to be happening in industries for music, movies, and now books. It makes me sick.
Re:Licensed Books are not New
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"First, can I attach a shrinkwap license to anything? It seems well accepted for software. But what about apples? Can I enforce a shrinkwrap agreement that says you won't sell the apple to somebody else?"
I think an apple is a bad example, because unlike a book, you can 'use' an apple only one time. Once it is consumed, you can't resell it to someone else. (At least not very easily.)
A book can be resold and 'consumed' again, thus bringing up 'questions' about the rules of reselling.
"I kid you not! This is just Dell trying to get back into our good graces. It is all a PR stunt - "Look we don't like M$ either!!!!" as they hand MS money under the table."
It's more than a PR stunt. Dell is using FreeDOS as a small doorstop so the door will remain ajar, allowing Linux or whatever other OS they choose to squeeze through in the future.
Dell does not think anyone will use FreeDOS. They just want to sent the prescedent that they have the ability to ship some other OS with their machines so that they can change this OS when production facilities, support people, developers, drivers, etc are ready.
If they shipped only windows and then 1 year from now tried to slip Linux in, MSFT would slay them on the spot. Instead, if they ship FreeDOS now, which MSFT knows is know thread, they can SWITCH to linux instead, continuing to do something which they had be doing for many months -- shipping an alternate OS with their PCs.
"Why not FreeDOS? It doesn't matter. It's just a token....It's pretty clear that Dell does not expect anybody (or much of anybody) to actuall install the included FreeDOS. The FreeDOS is just a maneuver to get around a loophole in Microsoft's licencing agreement. Now they can say, hey, we included an OS, we're abiding by their terms. What they're really doing is selling an OS-less PC, plus an extra CD that adds very little to their costs and might even be useful to a tiny fraction of their customers."
They're setting a prescedent. They're saying, "hey, we are not the whores of MSFT" so they ship FreeDOS. Once this prescedent is established, the door is ajar for Linux on their mainstream boxes 1 year from now (when their support people are trained, etc.) If they just rode it out and shipped with ONLY Windows in this period, then it would be much harder for them to get around the licensing after following MSFT's interpretation for so long.
"Adding a digit would add quite a few barcodes, but why not add a couple of digits just in case. Since they already have to rework some hardware and software, would it really be that difficult to take it up to 14 or 15 digits?"
Jeez, I would expect them to be smart enough to change to spec to allow 2^n-digit bar codes. Remember all the problems with hard disk cylinder limit addressing limitations?
"What if they can't afford to sell people what they want? Impasse, or business failure."
In that case, they fail.
Everyone gets terribly inconvenienced for a (potentially long) while. Then whoever was smart enough to see it coming and had laid plans from the beginning will build a new-age empire from grassroots.
"The more your Mac acts like a television device (think of TidBITS's April Fools spoof iTiVo coming true, or El Gato's new EyeTV) the more your Mac will be subject to regulations that are meant to control "only" digital television (DTV) devices."
I think that the movie industry , if it tries to 'relulate' or 'clamp down' on technology like this, will become hated and be shooting itself in the foot.
When the waves change direction, ride them. Propping up an obsolete business model with silly restrictions will only bring hatred and lost revenues.
The movie industry should sell what people want, and if they want to stream any movie from the last century instantaneously for $1.99, give it to them. This is better than downloading from illegal sources and dealing with misnamed, broken, poorly encoded content.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe. I know it was connected securely. What I don't know is if that can be the cause of a corrupt MBR.
It caused the BIOS to detect a 'Maxtor 5040TH" (not completely sure about the model#) as an 'Ixter 53HtH' and a 'Pioneer 106S' as something similarly garbled.
You should be listening to ogg as your primary format and then transcoding to wma when transferring to your mp3 player. This is what I do ... the Nomad II MG in my bag (yep, the original MG) is full of 80 kbit wma files.
Of course when players support OGG once and for all, we will be able to have high bitrate OGG on our hard drives and then use bitrate peeling to create still-excellent-sounding low bitrate OGGs to carry around with us.
Of course you are correct, but the music industry would beg to differ.
They have 1 ultimate goal in all this: They want to make us pay a fee every single time we play any 'licensed' (not bought, but licensed) content.
The intermediate step is that they want us to buy a copy of the CD for the car, one for at work, one for at home, etc. Once we are used to buying multiple copies, they will then try to make our lives 'easier' by offering some sort of 'pay for play' system where you just license the music/video/holorecording/etc and then money goes from your bank account to theirs whenever you hit play.
This implies, of course, that all the content that you access has to be linked to your ID on whatever system they use, plus your bank/CC payment information and your address, so they can profile you very easily and send you marketing pablum every day. Nice.
Some other factors included that Divx the players cost more than regular DVD players because they had to have a modem included, plus the 'pay for play' concept for something you physically buy was none-too-appealing.
Yes, and it is called Ogg Vorbis. It scares the sh~t out of the industry because it has no DRM and no legal restraints. The sound quality in the 1.0 release is amazing, especially at low bitrates.
To avoid any chance of this (except per-track water marking) I never do a straight disc-to-disc copy.(*) I always rip the tracks to .wav and make a new compilation.
(*)This copy, of course, would be so I can play the CD in the car and keep the legitimately purchased original at home on the shelf.
I think that what's been proved now is that the United States Patent Office is 100% broken and needs a complete overhaul. There have been too many stupid and overly obvious patents that they have granted in the past couple of years and they have proven beyond reasonable doubt that they do not have the slightest clue about technology.
No, I had been using that cable for months before and months after and nothing bad happenned until I got that bay. Furthermore, I had corruption on more than one occasion, every time after I had played with that bay. As soon as I ditched it and went back to my old bay, everything was nice and cozy again and my DVD drive worked properly.
A solution to this is to engage in online voice chat. My brother, who on the outside looks like one of the dryest, most boring people in the world actually got hooked on metal and especially Dreams of Sanity + Iron Maiden because of stuff he heard while using voice chat. But you'd never guess it by looking at him.
When in windows, the only answer to the question of which ripper to use is CdEx.
Besides, that Roxio stuff does strange sh~t to your ASPI layer.
It's more than an inconvenience. I unexpectedly had some strange FAT corruption on my 'media storage drive' when I was playing around with a removable HDD drive bay. (The DVD-ROM on the same IDE channel was affected too ... it was strange.) I had to re-rip almost my entire collection and because I had also lost my batch files to control oggenc.exe and do all the naming/tagging of files too, it turned out to be a major exercise in patience. (Of course now I have all that stuff properly saved to CD-Rw.) Even today, more than 2 months later, there are some CDs I have to re-rip.
Losing your mp3/ogg music collection, even when you have all the CDs, is NOT just an inconvenience. It is a very time consuming disaster.
The easy solution here for people who like WMP but dislike DRM is to use .ogg and and get the WMP plugin.
I'm sure that they aren't, however 'rip' does imply the presence of a CD to begin with, so it's not suggested that you 'download, mix, burn' . Of course, I expect that plenty of iTunes users do this.
I didn't say that they were at fault. As far as I can tell, this is a perfectly legitimate practice whose goal is to hire the employees which would, in the long run, give the most benefit to the company's stock value.
It's already Bill's waterloo, and has been for years. MSFT has, for a long time, harvested the top CS and ENGG people from waterloo to work for them. This is a 'formalisation' of that relationship which has existed for a long time. It's pretty common knowledge when you get to the end of high school in Ontario, if you're a computers/engineering type person (like I was) that this is the case. All your upper CS/physical science teachers know about it through their former students who went to UW.
One guy from my school who was almost graduated from Waterloo CS at the time I was almost graduated from high school was offered something like US$60k + US$10k stock options and a whole whackload of benefits by MSFT.
Microsoft picked a good timing schedule for announcing this. The university admissions/offers cycle has just ended, so you can't easily rescind your acceptance of their offer of admission and switch to another university that also sent you an offer.
The way it works in Ontario, Canada is that the central university admissions group, the OUAC manages all admissions requests and communicates between the high schools and universities. If a university sends you an offer of admission, you reply to the OUAC before a deadline which is common among all universities. If you get another offer you like more (maybe with better scholarship $$) you send that one to the OUAC and it overrides the previous one. This is all nice and good as long as it is done before the deadline.
This deadline has already passed - I think it was about a month ago, so if someone got into Comp.Eng at Waterloo, they may just be kicking themselves now. (Note: I am not in this batch of applicants ... I have been in a well respected Engineering program at a well respected Ontario University for some years now. My Engineering Faculty actually did a formal survey of all students regarding this very subject last year because a situation like this with an unnamed but controversial corporation has arisen.) I think the timing of the announcement shows that MSFT knows that there will be opposition for this among students, thus they announce it now when it's too late to change your mind.
One other thing to note is that not all universities send their offers of admission around the same time. For example, I got my offer from UofT a couple of months before the dealine, but Waterloo's came 2 days before. Waterloo doesn't give you much time to decide. Furthermore, they give priority to a very small number of students with elite marks. This one person I knew in high school who was an uber-intellect got her waterloo admission even before I got mine from UofT. (Note: The 'elite' mark status depends on the University. Waterloo's threshold is very, VERY high, somewhere above 96%. I believe I had 'elite mark status' from UofT with my 90+% average, thus getting me an early acceptance from them.)
Note: I am not nor was I ever a student of the University of Waterloo or the University of Toronto. I chose to accept at another University.
Yes, CS still falls under math at waterloo. I am not a student there but I could have been -- I did get Engineering acceptance back when I was applying to universities. Alas, it was too expensive.
I have tried dealing with these guys. They only gave me about ~10% of what I paid for the new book. I can easily get up to 90% of what I paid or even more that 100% if I bought the book used when you sell directly to other students.
I think that what's described in your post is the natural action of the market. The problem is the governments are 'stepping in' and are being paid (bribed) by the big companies to make stupid laws to prop up the corrupt business model. This seems to be happening in industries for music, movies, and now books. It makes me sick.
I think an apple is a bad example, because unlike a book, you can 'use' an apple only one time. Once it is consumed, you can't resell it to someone else. (At least not very easily.)
A book can be resold and 'consumed' again, thus bringing up 'questions' about the rules of reselling.
It's more than a PR stunt. Dell is using FreeDOS as a small doorstop so the door will remain ajar, allowing Linux or whatever other OS they choose to squeeze through in the future.
Dell does not think anyone will use FreeDOS. They just want to sent the prescedent that they have the ability to ship some other OS with their machines so that they can change this OS when production facilities, support people, developers, drivers, etc are ready.
If they shipped only windows and then 1 year from now tried to slip Linux in, MSFT would slay them on the spot. Instead, if they ship FreeDOS now, which MSFT knows is know thread, they can SWITCH to linux instead, continuing to do something which they had be doing for many months -- shipping an alternate OS with their PCs.
They're setting a prescedent. They're saying, "hey, we are not the whores of MSFT" so they ship FreeDOS. Once this prescedent is established, the door is ajar for Linux on their mainstream boxes 1 year from now (when their support people are trained, etc.) If they just rode it out and shipped with ONLY Windows in this period, then it would be much harder for them to get around the licensing after following MSFT's interpretation for so long.
Yeah, but "Big Lizard, like the one used in Mozilla" == Godzilla.
Jeez, I would expect them to be smart enough to change to spec to allow 2^n-digit bar codes. Remember all the problems with hard disk cylinder limit addressing limitations?
In that case, they fail.
Everyone gets terribly inconvenienced for a (potentially long) while. Then whoever was smart enough to see it coming and had laid plans from the beginning will build a new-age empire from grassroots.
I think that the movie industry , if it tries to 'relulate' or 'clamp down' on technology like this, will become hated and be shooting itself in the foot.
When the waves change direction, ride them. Propping up an obsolete business model with silly restrictions will only bring hatred and lost revenues.
The movie industry should sell what people want, and if they want to stream any movie from the last century instantaneously for $1.99, give it to them. This is better than downloading from illegal sources and dealing with misnamed, broken, poorly encoded content.