This brings up an issue I have with simulation games such as The Sims. It does, of course, apply to other games as well, and to many other situations where the viewer or player must distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Nevertheless: simulation games convey a certain impression of verisimilitude. As you play them, you cannot avoid gaining skill in dealing with the simulated universe, and learning "lessons."
To the extent that the player preceives the game as authentically realistic, these "lessons" may sneak in past the barriers we've built against other forms of propaganda
Some are of these lessons are semi-political. And some, it seems, may be product placements.
For example, in SimCity, as I recall, the citizens clamor for a sports stadium and it is very important to the success of your city that you build one (at the right time, of course).
Did the creators of the game base this on actual data about the economic effects of sports stadiums on cities? (Unlikely). Or were they just building in a plausible and entertaining set of game rules? (Probably). Or... were they carrying water for some group that was trying to get a stadium built? (No, I don't really think so--but the possibility exists). Similarly, is the behavior of SimCity residents with respect to tax rates an authentic simulation, artistic guesswork--or a political agenda?
Of course these problems exist with all games, and to some extent it's an issue of developing antibodies against the newer games. There's no real danger that I will speculate in Atlantic City properties just Monopoly has given me the illusion that I understand how to do it.
Boy, does that bring back memories. In the fifties computers were invariable referred to as "electronic brains" or "giant brains" and at regular intervals from the fifties through, maybe the seventies it was announced that computers that "rivalled the brain" in processing power had just been built.
About the time Hubert Dreyfus published "Artificial Intelligence and Alchemy" everyone started to get a little more restrained about this.
Of course, estimates of the brain's processing power have been made periodically, notably by Nicolas Rashevsky , but since all such estimates are based on the assumption that we understand how the brain works, and since we don't, in fact, understand how the brain works, they should be regarded as very suspect.
Apple infuriated many of its customers by initiating a $100-per-year fee for iTools, rechristened.Mac. Supposedly Apple a) only expected 10% retention, and b) claims it has been a great success.
Many Mac users mistakenly, but IMHO very understandably believed that Apple had promised the service would be free forever. At the time a lot of people reviewed QuickTime files of Steve Jobs' keynote, but "free forever" never showed up--I think myself it was a conflation of "it's the only email address you'll ever need" (translation: it has forwarding capability) and "it's free" (for an unspecified period of time).
I suspect it's too early to tell. I'm inclined to be skeptical of Apple's claims of success. For one thing, a number of late moves sound like desperation measures (they extended the "deadline" for signing up, cut the price for the first year to $50 for existing users, and sweetened the pot with various offers such as free photo prints).
However, many.Mac users appear to be disappointed by the quality of the service. Various lapses (slow response, downtime, etc.) that were tolerated when the service was free are not when the service is paid for.
And I think this is the Achilles heel of many "let's start charging 'em" schemes.
The real test will be, not how many iTools subscribers convert to.Mac, but how many.Mac subscribers renew at the end of the first year.
Re:Some PG books ARE copyrighted...
on
Just One Page a Day
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...Not many, but there are some Project Gutenberg books that are copyrighted and distributed with the author's permission.
Also, Project Gutenberg of Australia publishes a number of works that are out of copyright in Australia, but still under copyright in the U.S. It is a copyright infringement for readers in the U. S. to download these works, which include, among others, Hervey Allen's _Anthony Adverse_(1933), F. Scott Fitzgerald's _The Great Gadsby_ (1944), Khalil Gibran's _The Prophet_ (1923), D. H. Lawrence's _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ (1928), all of George Orwell's novels, most of Virginia Woolf's, etc. etc.
Not exactly "the latest Stephen King" but a lot newer than Dickens.
Dan Gillmor is on record as saying that "Apple stands firm against [the] entertainment cartel...It's not -- at least so far -- moving toward an anti-customer embrace with Hollywood's movie studios and the other members of the powerful entertainment cartel. Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn't announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy."
To which I say, "well, this region nonsense sure sounds like a restriction to me."
I'd love to believe Apple is a good guy, but I'm not sure the evidence supports it...
To do Gillmor justice, he qualified his statement in a response to my query in this Slashdot interview, in which he said (in part):
"To answer directly: I don't think Apple has an anti-DRM strategy, though, even if I wish they'd go for it. I do think Apple has a generally pro-customer stance, which is a heck of a lot better than some other companies out there. Perhaps the company is looking for some balance in a situation where the sides are turning the issue into a binary question, i.e., total control or total anarchy. Example of balance: Apple doesn't enable iPod users to copy to other disks (not directly), but it hasn't done anything as far as I know to stop the third parties who make it easy to do so.
Gateway's campaign was terrific. But Gateway is part of the Wintel ecosystem, and there's no question that Microsoft is moving fast toward a Hollywood-friendly regime that's overtly pro-DRM. When Gateway starts selling nicely configured Linux boxes and promoting them in terms of customer choice and digital freedom, I'll be even more impressed."
"Propaganda" is from the Latin, and simply means "that which ought to be propagated." Calling something "propaganda" means "the reason this is being published is because some authority wants this information to be out there."
It does NOT mean "untrue." It means "self-serving."
1) Take ho-hum commodity Wintel laptop 2) Add knockoff of Apple's industrial design ? 3) Profit!
He protests too much, methinks...
on
Ebay vs. Musician
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If you read his story, it seems to me that he got angry at eBay, stopped focussing on how to sell his CD on eBay, and started focussing on protesting.
It should have been clear that any listing that mentioned CD-R or CD-RW was going to get tagged. It should have been clear that this was being done by a dumb automated process. It should have been clear that eBay does NOT have the staff to spend very much time researching the actual status of every listed item. Maybe this is wrong, maybe this is right, but it should have been pretty clear what was going on.
What he should have tried was continuing to sell his CD's on eBay, but simply avoiding any red-flag terms in the listing.
It's obvious at this point that he wants eBay to accept listings _in which he calls them CD-R's_.
In other words, it's no longer a genuine effort to see whether independent musicians can use eBay to earn a living selling their recordings; it's become a crusade to change eBay's policies about listing CD-R's
Well, that's fine if that's what he wants to do. Personally, if it were me, I'd try to see whether there was some reasonable, hypocritical way to list my CD's in a way that was honest and didn't misrepresent them in any way material to buyers, but which would pass eBay's automated filters.
If the automated filters don't catch the listings, it's unlikely that eBay would cause him any problems UNLESS there actually was a COMPLAINT from the likes of Vivendi--and that wouldn't be likely to happen if the situation is as he represents it to be.
Apparently the pen recognizes absolute position on the paper by recognizing x-y coordinate information encoded in the dot pattern.
Well, is every page in the special notebook unique? And is each NOTEBOOK unique?
Suppose you are keeping lists on pages 10, 18, and 26 of a notebook. You add an entry on page 10, flip to page 18, add an entry, flip to page 26, add an entry and download. Now what? Do you see the complete list on page 10 as it appears on the paper? Or do you see a series of separate one-line images?
Suppose you write a note on page 3 of notebook A and then write another note on page 3 of notebook B, when you download them do you see both notes superimposed on page 3 of "the" notebook?
I don't know about anything else, but the attempt to shift everything from a "purchase" to "rental" model bothers me enormously.
I don't mind in the least paying $300 or $400 for a nifty gadget.
I have VERY HIGH SALES RESISTANCE to anything that carries a "monthly" fee for anything. My nifty gadgets OFTEN last for, say, 100 months (a bit over 8 years) and I am quite capable of multiplying a monthly fee by 100.
When I buy a $20,000 car, I'm quite agreeable to considering a $300 or $500 add-on.
But a MONTHLY fee? Forget about it.
Give-away-the-razor-and-make-money-on-the-blades is one thing. Sure, inkjet consumables are a ripoff, but at least the thing doesn't eat money when I'm not using it. But if someone tried to sell me a printer for $150, plus $20 per ink cartridge, PLUS $5.99 PER MONTH, I would behave badly.
Perhaps I'm not the only consumer who can multiply by 100 in my head.
"introducing" the NeXT? (He'd "introduced" it previously on West Coast but I guess he figured nobody on the East Coast would know that). Very impressive presentation, very impressive demonstration, concluded with a violinist playing a duet with the NeXT box.
This would have been in, maybe 1990?
Funniest part was his announcement--if I recall the exact language, "We regret that due to the arrangements that have been made, nobody will be allowed to enter or leave the hall during the presentation." It was, of course, Jobs that had made those arrangements.
I've attended every MacWorld held in Boston, and I generally DON'T attend the keynotes. After all, the actual information in them is usually covered more than adequately by Macintouch, etc. And you can see it in streaming Quicktime...
I go looking for weird stuff, checking out all the funny little companies that are in the "low-rent" district parts of the exhibit hall.
I'm not that interested in hearing a demo dolly give a canned presentation of what Adobe marketing thinks are the ten most spiffiest new features in Illustrator, or whatever.
I do check out the Apple exhibit, but, really, what are you going to see there that you can't see in any Apple store? Apple's presence is important, but it's not make-or-break.
Re:What about Apple LCDs?
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"The first manufacturer to go to an all-LCD lineup?"
Something I've been ranting about for years: It's not just that power supplies are rated in "music watts." It's also that basic engineering apparently went out the window when micros came in--and has never come back.
Why isn't every board and component clearly marked with its power consumption?
Why isn't every system clearly marked with the amount of power available to devices on the bus (power supply minus consumption of preinstalled components?)
Why isn't there some kind of built-in INDICATOR that WARNS you when the drain is approaching the power supply capability?
None of this is rocket science. It requires fourth grade arithmetic, a multimeter, and a little honesty.
On minicomputers, the power supply was sized for the worst-case set of boards that could be installed in it. That's probably too much to expect from PC vendors, but at the very least there should be an easy way to TELL.
"This is a real good power supply and it should be OK unless you put in an awful lot of boards that take a lot of power" just isn't the way to do things.
We expect this stuff to be clearly marked on our light bulbs, our vacuum cleaners, and our fuse boxes. Why shouldn't we expect it in our computers?
I continue to feel that attention should be paid to how these things interact with home audio CD recorders, and not just because I happen to own one.
Under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, blank media for home audio CD recorders includes a fee which is distributed to publishers and artists in exchange for the right to copy the CD. Home audio recorders are restricted from writing to ordinary blank CD-R media; the media must have the encoding that identifies them as a "Music CD-R" thus verifying that the fee has been paid, and they also incorporate a "serial copy control system" which makes it difficult for people to create huge numbers of copies by making copies for three friends who each make copies for three friends, etc.
Copy-protection schemes have to corrupt the data enough to prevent access by standard computer software. HOWEVER, they must not corrupt it so much that home audio CD recorders fail, or they are (probably) violating the AHRA.
In practice, Universal Music evaded answering any questions I asked them about this issue; however, when I sent them a copy of "The Fast and the Furious" which my home audio CD recorder refused to copy, they sent me a replacement which did! I believe their strategy is "avoid public discussion by taking care of any individuals who complain, on a case-by-case basis."
7.5 was bad, real bad, and 7.5.1, 7.5.2, 7.5.3, "buster", "son of buster," etc. were not much better.
8 and 9 have been OK.
My own experience is that stability differences between unprotected memory/cooperative multitasking systems and protected memory/preemptive multitasking systems are MUCH LESS than they ought to be. I won't go quite to far as to call protect memory/preemptive multitasking "snake oil," but software quality, third-party attention to detail, and SQA are obviously a much bigger factor than the kind of technology used.
My experience is also that anyone who claims BIG differences in stability between Macs and Windows systems is grinding an axe.
Actually, when the Mac first came out, I thought its instability compared to a PC running MS-DOS might kill it. But, fortunately, Windows came out and equalized the situation.
Let's define "crash" to mean "any situation which leads you decide to reboot the machine." That's to get away from silly language games ("Oh, that wasn't a CRASH, it was a "kernet panic.") ("Oh, yes I see that when you click on a window it take fifteen seconds to bring it to the top, but NT is STILL RUNNING). By that definition:
On a "sweet" system--one with a fast processor, lots of memory, and reasonably good luck about the combination of software, hardware, drivers, etc. I find that OS 9 and Windows 98 can be fairly stable--let's say "several" crashes a week. OS X and Win 2K are better, but not THAT much better. In my personal experience they crash several times per month. Now please don't get on my case about "that's not NT's fault, you must have some bad third-party driver." This is my actual experience USING the system.
The only situation in which I see a HUGE difference is doing software development, where I commit lots of gross errors all the time. In THAT specialized situation, yes, OS X or NT is a godsend, and OS 7-8-9 or WIndows 95-98 are a pain.
The only possibility that makes sense to me is that Apple wants to cut back to one U.S. MacWorld per year--to cut costs; to reduce the product release straitjacketing forced by the desire to make trade show announcements; to ensure that there's plenty to announce and always a GOOD "one more thing," etc.
And they seized on this as an excuse.
Still seems mystifying and lame, though.
I bought my first Mac in February 1984 (OK, I was a late adopter) and have attended EVERY Boston MacWorld. Why does Steve want to break my heart?
What do you mean by "from the same masters?" I've been astonished by differences in quality between older and more recent CDs made from the same original analog master tapes.
Are you saying that you know for a fact that the CD and SACD layers were digitized from _identical analog signals?_
Arma virumque cano Trojae qui primis ab oris Littora, uh, uh saevae memorem Junonis ab orem Multa quoque et bello passus dum conderet urbam Uh, inferetque deos latio genus unde latinam Um, um, Albanique patres atque alte moenea Roma...
Or something like that.
And there you have it. Everything I got out of four years of Latin. Everything.
1) would love to read about a test where an IDENTICAL signal source was recorded in CD and SACD and compared, BLIND, by ordinary consumers. Is the difference really audible?
2) More to the point, is there any way to STOP CD publishers from deliberately introducing degradation into the CD track in order to make the SACD sound better by comparison? Not that they would ever do such a thing, of course... but I'd like to see at least a truth-in-advertising disclosure if they did.
Slashdot Mirror
This brings up an issue I have with simulation games such as The Sims. It does, of course, apply to other games as well, and to many other situations where the viewer or player must distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Nevertheless: simulation games convey a certain impression of verisimilitude. As you play them, you cannot avoid gaining skill in dealing with the simulated universe, and learning "lessons."
To the extent that the player preceives the game as authentically realistic, these "lessons" may sneak in past the barriers we've built against other forms of propaganda
Some are of these lessons are semi-political. And some, it seems, may be product placements.
For example, in SimCity, as I recall, the citizens clamor for a sports stadium and it is very important to the success of your city that you build one (at the right time, of course).
Did the creators of the game base this on actual data about the economic effects of sports stadiums on cities? (Unlikely). Or were they just building in a plausible and entertaining set of game rules? (Probably). Or... were they carrying water for some group that was trying to get a stadium built? (No, I don't really think so--but the possibility exists). Similarly, is the behavior of SimCity residents with respect to tax rates an authentic simulation, artistic guesswork--or a political agenda?
Of course these problems exist with all games, and to some extent it's an issue of developing antibodies against the newer games. There's no real danger that I will speculate in Atlantic City properties just Monopoly has given me the illusion that I understand how to do it.
Still...
Boy, does that bring back memories. In the fifties computers were invariable referred to as "electronic brains" or "giant brains" and at regular intervals from the fifties through, maybe the seventies it was announced that computers that "rivalled the brain" in processing power had just been built.
About the time Hubert Dreyfus published "Artificial Intelligence and Alchemy" everyone started to get a little more restrained about this.
Of course, estimates of the brain's processing power have been made periodically, notably by Nicolas Rashevsky , but since all such estimates are based on the assumption that we understand how the brain works, and since we don't, in fact, understand how the brain works, they should be regarded as very suspect.
I (and my family) really thought you were good in "The Defenders." Any plans to revive it?
Apple infuriated many of its customers by initiating a $100-per-year fee for iTools, rechristened .Mac. Supposedly Apple a) only expected 10% retention, and b) claims it has been a great success.
.Mac users appear to be disappointed by the quality of the service. Various lapses (slow response, downtime, etc.) that were tolerated when the service was free are not when the service is paid for.
.Mac, but how many .Mac subscribers renew at the end of the first year.
Many Mac users mistakenly, but IMHO very understandably believed that Apple had promised the service would be free forever. At the time a lot of people reviewed QuickTime files of Steve Jobs' keynote, but "free forever" never showed up--I think myself it was a conflation of "it's the only email address you'll ever need" (translation: it has forwarding capability) and "it's free" (for an unspecified period of time).
I suspect it's too early to tell. I'm inclined to be skeptical of Apple's claims of success. For one thing, a number of late moves sound like desperation measures (they extended the "deadline" for signing up, cut the price for the first year to $50 for existing users, and sweetened the pot with various offers such as free photo prints).
However, many
And I think this is the Achilles heel of many "let's start charging 'em" schemes.
The real test will be, not how many iTools subscribers convert to
Where can I get those blank checks?
...trees really DO cause pollution!
Now, about ketchup being a vegetable...
...Not many, but there are some Project Gutenberg books that are copyrighted and distributed with the author's permission.
Also, Project Gutenberg of Australia publishes a number of works that are out of copyright in Australia, but still under copyright in the U.S. It is a copyright infringement for readers in the U. S. to download these works, which include, among others, Hervey Allen's _Anthony Adverse_(1933), F. Scott Fitzgerald's _The Great Gadsby_ (1944), Khalil Gibran's _The Prophet_ (1923), D. H. Lawrence's _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ (1928), all of George Orwell's novels, most of Virginia Woolf's, etc. etc.
Not exactly "the latest Stephen King" but a lot newer than Dickens.
Dan Gillmor is on record as saying that "Apple stands firm against [the] entertainment cartel...It's not -- at least so far -- moving toward an anti-customer embrace with Hollywood's movie studios and the other members of the powerful entertainment cartel. Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn't announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy."
To which I say, "well, this region nonsense sure sounds like a restriction to me."
I'd love to believe Apple is a good guy, but I'm not sure the evidence supports it...
To do Gillmor justice, he qualified his statement in a response to my query in this Slashdot interview, in which he said (in part):
"To answer directly: I don't think Apple has an anti-DRM strategy, though, even if I wish they'd go for it. I do think Apple has a generally pro-customer stance, which is a heck of a lot better than some other companies out there. Perhaps the company is looking for some balance in a situation where the sides are turning the issue into a binary question, i.e., total control or total anarchy. Example of balance: Apple doesn't enable iPod users to copy to other disks (not directly), but it hasn't done anything as far as I know to stop the third parties who make it easy to do so.
Gateway's campaign was terrific. But Gateway is part of the Wintel ecosystem, and there's no question that Microsoft is moving fast toward a Hollywood-friendly regime that's overtly pro-DRM. When Gateway starts selling nicely configured Linux boxes and promoting them in terms of customer choice and digital freedom, I'll be even more impressed."
"Propaganda" is from the Latin, and simply means "that which ought to be propagated." Calling something "propaganda" means "the reason this is being published is because some authority wants this information to be out there."
It does NOT mean "untrue." It means "self-serving."
1) Take ho-hum commodity Wintel laptop
2) Add knockoff of Apple's industrial design
?
3) Profit!
If you read his story, it seems to me that he got angry at eBay, stopped focussing on how to sell his CD on eBay, and started focussing on protesting.
It should have been clear that any listing that mentioned CD-R or CD-RW was going to get tagged. It should have been clear that this was being done by a dumb automated process. It should have been clear that eBay does NOT have the staff to spend very much time researching the actual status of every listed item. Maybe this is wrong, maybe this is right, but it should have been pretty clear what was going on.
What he should have tried was continuing to sell his CD's on eBay, but simply avoiding any red-flag terms in the listing.
It's obvious at this point that he wants eBay to accept listings _in which he calls them CD-R's_.
In other words, it's no longer a genuine effort to see whether independent musicians can use eBay to earn a living selling their recordings; it's become a crusade to change eBay's policies about listing CD-R's
Well, that's fine if that's what he wants to do. Personally, if it were me, I'd try to see whether there was some reasonable, hypocritical way to list my CD's in a way that was honest and didn't misrepresent them in any way material to buyers, but which would pass eBay's automated filters.
If the automated filters don't catch the listings, it's unlikely that eBay would cause him any problems UNLESS there actually was a COMPLAINT from the likes of Vivendi--and that wouldn't be likely to happen if the situation is as he represents it to be.
Apparently the pen recognizes absolute position on the paper by recognizing x-y coordinate information encoded in the dot pattern.
Well, is every page in the special notebook unique? And is each NOTEBOOK unique?
Suppose you are keeping lists on pages 10, 18, and 26 of a notebook. You add an entry on page 10, flip to page 18, add an entry, flip to page 26, add an entry and download. Now what? Do you see the complete list on page 10 as it appears on the paper? Or do you see a series of separate one-line images?
Suppose you write a note on page 3 of notebook A and then write another note on page 3 of notebook B, when you download them do you see both notes superimposed on page 3 of "the" notebook?
I don't know about anything else, but the attempt to shift everything from a "purchase" to "rental" model bothers me enormously.
s is one thing. Sure, inkjet consumables are a ripoff, but at least the thing doesn't eat money when I'm not using it. But if someone tried to sell me a printer for $150, plus $20 per ink cartridge, PLUS $5.99 PER MONTH, I would behave badly.
I don't mind in the least paying $300 or $400 for a nifty gadget.
I have VERY HIGH SALES RESISTANCE to anything that carries a "monthly" fee for anything. My nifty gadgets OFTEN last for, say, 100 months (a bit over 8 years) and I am quite capable of multiplying a monthly fee by 100.
When I buy a $20,000 car, I'm quite agreeable to considering a $300 or $500 add-on.
But a MONTHLY fee? Forget about it.
Give-away-the-razor-and-make-money-on-the-blade
Perhaps I'm not the only consumer who can multiply by 100 in my head.
"introducing" the NeXT? (He'd "introduced" it previously on West Coast but I guess he figured nobody on the East Coast would know that). Very impressive presentation, very impressive demonstration, concluded with a violinist playing a duet with the NeXT box.
This would have been in, maybe 1990?
Funniest part was his announcement--if I recall the exact language, "We regret that due to the arrangements that have been made, nobody will be allowed to enter or leave the hall during the presentation." It was, of course, Jobs that had made those arrangements.
I agree that it's a minus if Apple isn't there.
I've attended every MacWorld held in Boston, and I generally DON'T attend the keynotes. After all, the actual information in them is usually covered more than adequately by Macintouch, etc. And you can see it in streaming Quicktime...
I go looking for weird stuff, checking out all the funny little companies that are in the "low-rent" district parts of the exhibit hall.
I'm not that interested in hearing a demo dolly give a canned presentation of what Adobe marketing thinks are the ten most spiffiest new features in Illustrator, or whatever.
I do check out the Apple exhibit, but, really, what are you going to see there that you can't see in any Apple store? Apple's presence is important, but it's not make-or-break.
"The first manufacturer to go to an all-LCD lineup?"
What's that thing in the eMac?
A fifty-pound, vacuum-filled, beam-addressable LCD?
(I guess "CRT" is just an Apple trademark for Color Raster Technology).
Something I've been ranting about for years: It's not just that power supplies are rated in "music watts." It's also that basic engineering apparently went out the window when micros came in--and has never come back.
Why isn't every board and component clearly marked with its power consumption?
Why isn't every system clearly marked with the amount of power available to devices on the bus (power supply minus consumption of preinstalled components?)
Why isn't there some kind of built-in INDICATOR that WARNS you when the drain is approaching the power supply capability?
None of this is rocket science. It requires fourth grade arithmetic, a multimeter, and a little honesty.
On minicomputers, the power supply was sized for the worst-case set of boards that could be installed in it. That's probably too much to expect from PC vendors, but at the very least there should be an easy way to TELL.
"This is a real good power supply and it should be OK unless you put in an awful lot of boards that take a lot of power" just isn't the way to do things.
We expect this stuff to be clearly marked on our light bulbs, our vacuum cleaners, and our fuse boxes. Why shouldn't we expect it in our computers?
Surely Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-6 had it in 1963?
Or is this modern "asynchronous" logical some totally different concept?
I continue to feel that attention should be paid to how these things interact with home audio CD recorders, and not just because I happen to own one.
Under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, blank media for home audio CD recorders includes a fee which is distributed to publishers and artists in exchange for the right to copy the CD. Home audio recorders are restricted from writing to ordinary blank CD-R media; the media must have the encoding that identifies them as a "Music CD-R" thus verifying that the fee has been paid, and they also incorporate a "serial copy control system" which makes it difficult for people to create huge numbers of copies by making copies for three friends who each make copies for three friends, etc.
Copy-protection schemes have to corrupt the data enough to prevent access by standard computer software. HOWEVER, they must not corrupt it so much that home audio CD recorders fail, or they are (probably) violating the AHRA.
In practice, Universal Music evaded answering any questions I asked them about this issue; however, when I sent them a copy of "The Fast and the Furious" which my home audio CD recorder refused to copy, they sent me a replacement which did! I believe their strategy is "avoid public discussion by taking care of any individuals who complain, on a case-by-case basis."
7.1 was OK.
7.5 was bad, real bad, and 7.5.1, 7.5.2, 7.5.3, "buster", "son of buster," etc. were not much better.
8 and 9 have been OK.
My own experience is that stability differences between unprotected memory/cooperative multitasking systems and protected memory/preemptive multitasking systems are MUCH LESS than they ought to be. I won't go quite to far as to call protect memory/preemptive multitasking "snake oil," but software quality, third-party attention to detail, and SQA are obviously a much bigger factor than the kind of technology used.
My experience is also that anyone who claims BIG differences in stability between Macs and Windows systems is grinding an axe.
Actually, when the Mac first came out, I thought its instability compared to a PC running MS-DOS might kill it. But, fortunately, Windows came out and equalized the situation.
Let's define "crash" to mean "any situation which leads you decide to reboot the machine." That's to get away from silly language games ("Oh, that wasn't a CRASH, it was a "kernet panic.") ("Oh, yes I see that when you click on a window it take fifteen seconds to bring it to the top, but NT is STILL RUNNING). By that definition:
On a "sweet" system--one with a fast processor, lots of memory, and reasonably good luck about the combination of software, hardware, drivers, etc. I find that OS 9 and Windows 98 can be fairly stable--let's say "several" crashes a week. OS X and Win 2K are better, but not THAT much better. In my personal experience they crash several times per month. Now please don't get on my case about "that's not NT's fault, you must have some bad third-party driver." This is my actual experience USING the system.
The only situation in which I see a HUGE difference is doing software development, where I commit lots of gross errors all the time. In THAT specialized situation, yes, OS X or NT is a godsend, and OS 7-8-9 or WIndows 95-98 are a pain.
The only possibility that makes sense to me is that Apple wants to cut back to one U.S. MacWorld per year--to cut costs; to reduce the product release straitjacketing forced by the desire to make trade show announcements; to ensure that there's plenty to announce and always a GOOD "one more thing," etc.
And they seized on this as an excuse.
Still seems mystifying and lame, though.
I bought my first Mac in February 1984 (OK, I was a late adopter) and have attended EVERY Boston MacWorld. Why does Steve want to break my heart?
What do you mean by "from the same masters?" I've been astonished by differences in quality between older and more recent CDs made from the same original analog master tapes.
Are you saying that you know for a fact that the CD and SACD layers were digitized from _identical analog signals?_
... take the ablative.
Arma virumque cano
Trojae qui primis ab oris
Littora, uh, uh saevae memorem Junonis ab orem
Multa quoque et bello passus dum conderet urbam
Uh, inferetque deos latio genus unde latinam
Um, um,
Albanique patres atque alte moenea Roma...
Or something like that.
And there you have it. Everything I got out of four years of Latin. Everything.
This fine 1962-vintage baby sported a high-speed paper-tape punch that arose straight out of the desktop through a trapdoor.
For only $60,000 you got a full 8K of memory--and that's 8K WORDS, not bytes, folks--and a blazingly fast 0.00016 GHz clock.
The console had a numeric display that actually projected numeric octal digits onto a groundglass.
They were often used in conjunction with CDC-1604 computers, but were fully capable computers in their own right.
Plus, they were fully functional desks.
1) would love to read about a test where an IDENTICAL signal source was recorded in CD and SACD and compared, BLIND, by ordinary consumers. Is the difference really audible?
2) More to the point, is there any way to STOP CD publishers from deliberately introducing degradation into the CD track in order to make the SACD sound better by comparison? Not that they would ever do such a thing, of course... but I'd like to see at least a truth-in-advertising disclosure if they did.