While it's possible you have animators who can detect 16ms of latency, the average human eye cannot distinguish 16ms visual delays.
I have this panel. When i move the mouse, it moves on the screen. The jackhole who posted the original question probably has some other issue that he was too lazy to properly diagnose, and is attributing it to a perfectly good monitor.
Apple bears no responsibility to make sure the iPod runs corrupt MP3s
MP3 is a different story from M4A. There is a large amount of preexisting content for MP3, with a lot of errors in creation; specific tools that didn't write out frame headers properly, or content that has a corrupt frame every few frames etc. I can assure you that Apple spent significant time making sure these still play, within reason. If something plays in winamp, people expect it to play everywhere, and winamp has set the bar pretty high.
But you are right about M4A/M4P, and apple has done the "right" thing by saying they cannot guarantee that harmony tracks will continue to work on the iPod. As contrary to "open and free" as it may seem, letting everyone reverse engineer the formats and create their content will just turn M4A/M4P into another MP3 like mess, but with DRM this time. Fun.
Nope, Apple has a legit concern here. Right now if they want to change the DRM scheme they use to make it more secure, they can do it without much hassle; they own the end-to-end solution. They just update iTunes, IMS, and the iPod firmware, and implement something to convert the older DRM.
If they have to monitor content Real is creating, they are in a more difficult situation; what if Real fucked up their implementation, and the content they generate works well enough but is not within spec? Now apple has to check their conversion process with multiple versions of real's format, which may or may not be proper M4P.
Seriously, Real fucked up bigtime by not licensing.
Incorrect. You are assuming Real tried to license fairplay and pursue a legal route of providing DRM'd content on the iPod, when there is no evidence of that at the moment.
You make a great point here; it's unfortunate people don't understand exactly what the lock-in is.
The lock-in applies to the DRM encryption. The music industry will not let music stores move content around without encryption, so nobody besides Apple had an end-to-end solution for getting content from a music store to the iPod, since nobody else had the DRM encryption scheme worked out.
The shame here is i seriously doubt Real tried to license the DRM scheme, fairplay. In fact i'm relatively certain they didn't, and went straight for reverse engineering work DVD-Jon had already done.
3000:1, they are transformatting the content to apple's.m4a and setting the extention to.rm, so people *think* they have realaudio content on their ipod. This would mean they have figured out the DRM scheme apple uses.
No doubt they could invent an anti-hepatitis/herpes/etc virus too.
But here's what i've always been curious about - what they invented a STD that made your penis longer, or one that made your breasts larger (depending on gender). This really could be the wave of the future - certain people becoming sexually appealing due to designer viruses they carry.
You really haven't paid attention to the portable music player space have you? When apple came out with the iPod, there were other products on the market that were less expensive, well advertised. Rio was doing relatively well in the space, and creative was up and coming.
Apple DESTROYED them. DE-STROYED. It is not even an issue shopping around, either. I was given a 20gb ipod at work recently, and just opening the box and using the device was incredible. Everything about that product is well done. If I had $300 to spend on a portable music player, even after looking at all the products, i would get an ipod. Hands down, no questions. They went to extreme effort to make every detail of that product work perfectly.
Yep. It's an awesome customer retention policy too.
Re:WM and Real - Just Say No
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Real's Reality
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· Score: 1
You do realize that 99% of MPEG-4 is just quicktime? They used the quicktime standards (available on the apple dev site) and cleaned things up a bit. The structure is exactly the same, just a few conventions and fields changed.
I'm glad someone else has something positive to say.
4 years ago i was getting 3 calls a day due to dice and monster; last summer i was laid off and posted a resume again. Sure, things slowed down a bit, and it took a month or two and a professionally written resume, but i got a job offer with a 12% raise at a good company a block from my house. And even now, i'm being courted by a much larger company and will likely be offered a much larger raise, solely after they found my resume on monster.
Job boards are like advertising, for people that have something marketable they work well.
Hi Jonathan. I used to work with eCos a bit (danc at fullplaymedia/iobjects), and i seem to remember having this discussion with you in the past.
I understand the point of the exception, and the reasoning behind it. I more than agree with it too. The reason i made the "gpl imconpatible" comment is that the exception basically undermines one of the main provisions of the GPL regarding redistribution. I dont know if you follow linux stuff at all, but even recently Linus stated that kernel modules built specifically for linux, and even applications including linux specific headers, would have to be GPL'd because they linked in or used portions of the kernel and fell under the GPL's distribution clause.
Making an exception to this clause basically makes your license not like the GPL.:) That has always been my view. I seem to remember there being some other wordage since eCos links statically instead of dynamically (as with the above libraries) but i'm not sure about this.
Regardless of the licensing here, i can see how redhat releasing the copyrights would benefit everyone here. Hopefully things continue to go well for you and for eCosCentric
No, i am looking at the big picture. I led a team of engineers building a home jukebox (think rio central, only affordable) using eCos. We had CD ripping, mp3 encoding, wma/ogg/mp3 playback, network streaming via UPnP, etc. We had 16MB of ram on board and 80k lines of code, and what we found out is as you expand your hardware and expand your codebase, you really need features like memory protection, and schedulers with feedback. With eCos memory protection was only available on a select number of processors, and there was no multi-level queue + feedback scheduler.
Your example might be true if software was stagnant, and all you ever did was one function (play a video). In that case, sure, just get the faster processor and leave the software alone. However, in my post i was pointing out that hardware was expanding, software was following it, and continuing to build larger applications on a limited OS was eventually futile.
This is incorrect. It was originally published under some license from cygnus, which i dont recall; then when redhat purchased cygnus it was RHPL.
The last time i checked, they had transitioned to a modified GPL. In fact i dont think the license is GPL compatable, since the modification they made allows companies to opt out of open-sourcing code they link against eCos, basically avoiding the corporation-unfriendly aspect of the GPL.
My last company used eCos to build handheld and stereo component MP3 players, so that's my experience with it. In the handheld space it was great; small footprint (i built 40K ram/200K rom mp3+wma players with it), low overhead, minimal MMU requirements. The problem, with that space at least, is that the entire segment has shifted to faster processors with better MMUs, bigger hard drives, and generally larger requirements, which warrants using Linux. Even the eCos team was aware of this, as they started adding support for CPUs with memory protection and implementing more advanced OS features, basically scaling eCos up to...a trimmed down Linux.
It was very good and extremely competitive at the time though; i think the issue is just that this time has passed.
Development by redhat stopped in 2002, when they did a round of layoffs. Basically the entire ecos dev group (which all came from the cygnus buyout) got dropped, and the majority of them went to form eCosCentric.
Redhat has continued to host the eCos project, just like they do for gcc and gdb, and the eCosCentric team has been writing updates as far as i know.
Bridges burn faster than you can build them. I know what you mean about business practices, and it's totally valid, but the problem is that regaining trust in a company like this is just going to take time. Time to establish a new track record of quality and concern for customer privacy. Time to prove, by demonstration not by words, that the company has changed its approach towards end users.
In the interim, it is worth your time to be critical and skeptical, but in the long run dont rule out the possibility that a company can change.
Real donates a significant amount to charity, and has matching programs for employee donations, in addition to grant programs, food drives, blood drives, etc etc. They are borderline fanatical about it.
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While it's possible you have animators who can detect 16ms of latency, the average human eye cannot distinguish 16ms visual delays.
I have this panel. When i move the mouse, it moves on the screen. The jackhole who posted the original question probably has some other issue that he was too lazy to properly diagnose, and is attributing it to a perfectly good monitor.
Apple bears no responsibility to make sure the iPod runs corrupt MP3s
MP3 is a different story from M4A. There is a large amount of preexisting content for MP3, with a lot of errors in creation; specific tools that didn't write out frame headers properly, or content that has a corrupt frame every few frames etc. I can assure you that Apple spent significant time making sure these still play, within reason. If something plays in winamp, people expect it to play everywhere, and winamp has set the bar pretty high.
But you are right about M4A/M4P, and apple has done the "right" thing by saying they cannot guarantee that harmony tracks will continue to work on the iPod. As contrary to "open and free" as it may seem, letting everyone reverse engineer the formats and create their content will just turn M4A/M4P into another MP3 like mess, but with DRM this time. Fun.
Nope, Apple has a legit concern here. Right now if they want to change the DRM scheme they use to make it more secure, they can do it without much hassle; they own the end-to-end solution. They just update iTunes, IMS, and the iPod firmware, and implement something to convert the older DRM.
If they have to monitor content Real is creating, they are in a more difficult situation; what if Real fucked up their implementation, and the content they generate works well enough but is not within spec? Now apple has to check their conversion process with multiple versions of real's format, which may or may not be proper M4P.
Seriously, Real fucked up bigtime by not licensing.
Incorrect. You are assuming Real tried to license fairplay and pursue a legal route of providing DRM'd content on the iPod, when there is no evidence of that at the moment.
You make a great point here; it's unfortunate people don't understand exactly what the lock-in is.
The lock-in applies to the DRM encryption. The music industry will not let music stores move content around without encryption, so nobody besides Apple had an end-to-end solution for getting content from a music store to the iPod, since nobody else had the DRM encryption scheme worked out.
The shame here is i seriously doubt Real tried to license the DRM scheme, fairplay. In fact i'm relatively certain they didn't, and went straight for reverse engineering work DVD-Jon had already done.
Sorry, in my original comment, that should have been ".m4p". Real has had the ability to create M4A for a while.
3000:1, they are transformatting the content to apple's .m4a and setting the extention to .rm, so people *think* they have realaudio content on their ipod. This would mean they have figured out the DRM scheme apple uses.
Notice the "embedded" tag.
This kind of product is designed for PDAs, where most products are going to 300-400mhz processors.
No doubt they could invent an anti-hepatitis/herpes/etc virus too.
But here's what i've always been curious about - what they invented a STD that made your penis longer, or one that made your breasts larger (depending on gender). This really could be the wave of the future - certain people becoming sexually appealing due to designer viruses they carry.
You've never tried setting up mythtv, have you?
The keyword here is "was". As that changed so did market share.
You really haven't paid attention to the portable music player space have you? When apple came out with the iPod, there were other products on the market that were less expensive, well advertised. Rio was doing relatively well in the space, and creative was up and coming.
Apple DESTROYED them. DE-STROYED. It is not even an issue shopping around, either. I was given a 20gb ipod at work recently, and just opening the box and using the device was incredible. Everything about that product is well done. If I had $300 to spend on a portable music player, even after looking at all the products, i would get an ipod. Hands down, no questions. They went to extreme effort to make every detail of that product work perfectly.
Except the battery.
Yep. It's an awesome customer retention policy too.
You do realize that 99% of MPEG-4 is just quicktime? They used the quicktime standards (available on the apple dev site) and cleaned things up a bit. The structure is exactly the same, just a few conventions and fields changed.
I'm glad someone else has something positive to say.
4 years ago i was getting 3 calls a day due to dice and monster; last summer i was laid off and posted a resume again. Sure, things slowed down a bit, and it took a month or two and a professionally written resume, but i got a job offer with a 12% raise at a good company a block from my house. And even now, i'm being courted by a much larger company and will likely be offered a much larger raise, solely after they found my resume on monster.
Job boards are like advertising, for people that have something marketable they work well.
She's dork hot. Nice rack, but for me she's a two bagger - one for my johnny and one for her head
Hi Jonathan. I used to work with eCos a bit (danc at fullplaymedia/iobjects), and i seem to remember having this discussion with you in the past.
:) That has always been my view. I seem to remember there being some other wordage since eCos links statically instead of dynamically (as with the above libraries) but i'm not sure about this.
I understand the point of the exception, and the reasoning behind it. I more than agree with it too. The reason i made the "gpl imconpatible" comment is that the exception basically undermines one of the main provisions of the GPL regarding redistribution. I dont know if you follow linux stuff at all, but even recently Linus stated that kernel modules built specifically for linux, and even applications including linux specific headers, would have to be GPL'd because they linked in or used portions of the kernel and fell under the GPL's distribution clause.
Making an exception to this clause basically makes your license not like the GPL.
Regardless of the licensing here, i can see how redhat releasing the copyrights would benefit everyone here. Hopefully things continue to go well for you and for eCosCentric
No, i am looking at the big picture. I led a team of engineers building a home jukebox (think rio central, only affordable) using eCos. We had CD ripping, mp3 encoding, wma/ogg/mp3 playback, network streaming via UPnP, etc. We had 16MB of ram on board and 80k lines of code, and what we found out is as you expand your hardware and expand your codebase, you really need features like memory protection, and schedulers with feedback. With eCos memory protection was only available on a select number of processors, and there was no multi-level queue + feedback scheduler.
Your example might be true if software was stagnant, and all you ever did was one function (play a video). In that case, sure, just get the faster processor and leave the software alone. However, in my post i was pointing out that hardware was expanding, software was following it, and continuing to build larger applications on a limited OS was eventually futile.
This is incorrect. It was originally published under some license from cygnus, which i dont recall; then when redhat purchased cygnus it was RHPL.
The last time i checked, they had transitioned to a modified GPL. In fact i dont think the license is GPL compatable, since the modification they made allows companies to opt out of open-sourcing code they link against eCos, basically avoiding the corporation-unfriendly aspect of the GPL.
My last company used eCos to build handheld and stereo component MP3 players, so that's my experience with it. In the handheld space it was great; small footprint (i built 40K ram/200K rom mp3+wma players with it), low overhead, minimal MMU requirements. The problem, with that space at least, is that the entire segment has shifted to faster processors with better MMUs, bigger hard drives, and generally larger requirements, which warrants using Linux. Even the eCos team was aware of this, as they started adding support for CPUs with memory protection and implementing more advanced OS features, basically scaling eCos up to...a trimmed down Linux.
It was very good and extremely competitive at the time though; i think the issue is just that this time has passed.
Development by redhat stopped in 2002, when they did a round of layoffs. Basically the entire ecos dev group (which all came from the cygnus buyout) got dropped, and the majority of them went to form eCosCentric.
Redhat has continued to host the eCos project, just like they do for gcc and gdb, and the eCosCentric team has been writing updates as far as i know.
This is not a property of the codec, it is a property of the A/D converter which takes the analog signal and creates the digital one.
Good try though.
Bridges burn faster than you can build them. I know what you mean about business practices, and it's totally valid, but the problem is that regaining trust in a company like this is just going to take time. Time to establish a new track record of quality and concern for customer privacy. Time to prove, by demonstration not by words, that the company has changed its approach towards end users.
In the interim, it is worth your time to be critical and skeptical, but in the long run dont rule out the possibility that a company can change.
That was actually xing, prior to real buying them out. Good try though.
Real donates a significant amount to charity, and has matching programs for employee donations, in addition to grant programs, food drives, blood drives, etc etc. They are borderline fanatical about it.